LiHo - Books by Linda Howard

Books by Linda Howard

After the Night

All The Queen's Men

Dying To Please

Loving Evangeline

Mackenzie’s

1 - Mackenzie’s Mountain

2 - Mackenzie's Mission

3 - Mackenzie's Pleasure

4 - Mackenzie's Magic

Mr. Perfect

Midnight Rainbow

Diamond Bay

White Lies

Stangers in the Night

Lake of Dreams

Blue Moon

White Out

After the Night

Synopsis

FAITH DEVLON: A poor, outcast child in Prescott, Louisiana, she’d always adored the town’s golden boy from afar. But he called her white trash that sultry Southern night when his rich, respected father disappeared, along with her pretty Mom. Now Faith wanted to hate Gray Rouillard…not to feel a powerful surge of desire. But she couldn’t quench her passion, any more than she could hide the truth about the past she had waited so long to unravel.

GRAY ROUILLARD: Even when he raised hell, he did it with style. Reckless, charming, and backed by Rouillard money, Gray controlled the town of Prescott – and Devlin was a name he never wanted to hear again. But when he gazed at Faith Devlin, all he saw was a swirl of tangled, sheets and her silken flesh beneath him. To care for her was impossible, unthinkable…because Gray Rouillard planned to use all his power to ruin her.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10.020

Copyright © 1995 by Linda Howington

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10.020

ISBN: 0-671-79.936-3

First Pocket Books printing December 1995

10.987.654.321

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Stepback photo by Franco Accornero Printed in the U.S.A.

One

It was a good day for dreaming. It was late in the afternoon, the sun throwing long shadows when it could manage to break through the thick woods, but for the most part the translucent golden light was tangled in the tops of the trees, leaving the forest floor mysteriously shadowed. The hot, humid summer air was redolent with the pink sweetness of honeysuckle nectar, all mingled with the rich, brown odor of the earth and rotting vegetation as well as the crisp green scent of the leaves. Odors had color for Faith Devlin, and since she’d been a little girl she had entertained herself by coldring the smells around her.

Most of the colors were obvious, drawn from the way something looked. Of course the earth smelled brown; of course that fresh, tangy scent of leaves would be green in her mind. Grapefruit smelled bright yellow; she’d never eaten one, but once had picked up one in the grocery store and hesitantly sniffed its skin, and the scent had exploded on her taste buds, sour and sweet all at the same time.

The smell of things was easy to color in her mind; the color scent of people was more difficult, because people were never just one thing, but different colors mixed together. Colors didn’t mean the same in people smells that they did in thing smells. Her mother, Renee, had a dark, spicy red scent, with a few sworls of black and yellow, but the spicy red almost crowded out all the other colors. Yellow was good in things, but not in people; neither was green, or at least some shades of it. Her father, Amos, was a sickening mixture of green, purple, yellow, and black. That one was real easy, because from a very early age she had associated him with vomit. Drink and puke, drink and puke, that’s all Pa did. Well, and pee. He peed a lot.

The best smell in the world, Faith thought as she meandered through the woods, staring up at the captured sunlight and holding her secret happiness cradled deep in her chest, was Gray Rouillard. Faith lived for the glimpses of him she got in town, and if she was close enough to hear the deep, dark rumble of his voice, she trembled with joy. Today she’d gotten close enough to smell him, and he had actually touched her! She was still giddy from the experience.

She had gone into the drugstore in Prescott with Jodie, her older sister, because Jodie had stolen a couple of bucks from Renee’s purse and wanted to buy some fingernail polish. Jodie’s smell was orange and yellow, a pale imitation of Renee’s scent. They had been coming out of the drugstore, the precious hot pink polish carefully tucked into Jodie’s bra so Renee wouldn’t see it. Jodie had been wearing a bra for almost three years now, and she was only thirteen, a fact she used to taunt Faith whenever she thought about it, because Faith was eleven and still didn’t have any boobs. Lately Faith’s flat, childish little nipples had begun to swell, though, and she was in an agony of embarrassment that someone would notice them. She had been intensely conscious of them poking out under the thin, purple LSU T-shirt she wore, but when they almost collided with Gray on the sidewalk as he was going into the drugstore and they were coming out, Faith forgot about the flimsiness of her shirt.

"Nice shirt," Gray had said, amusement dancing in his dark eyes, and patted her on the shoulder. Gray was home for the summer from college. He played football for LSU, a starting linebacker in his freshman year. He was nineteen, six foot three and still growing, and weighed a hard-packed two hundred thirty pounds. Faith knew because she’d read all that in the sports page of the local newspaper. She knew he ran a 4.6 forty, and had great lateral speed, whatever that was. She also knew that he was beautiful, not in a pretty way, but in the same wild, powerful way that his father’s prize stallion, Maximillian, was beautiful. His French Creole ancestry was obvious in his dark coloring, and in the clear, strong bones of his face. His thick black hair hung down to his shoulders, making him look like a medieval warrior accidentally set down in the present time. Faith read every romance about medieval knights and their fair ladies that she could get her hands on, so she knew a knight when she saw one.

Her shoulder had tingled where Gray touched it, and her swelling nipples throbbed, making her blush and duck her head. Her senses were whirling dizzily with his scent, a rich, indefinable blend that she couldn’t describe, warm and musky, with an even deeper red than Renee’s, full of tantalizing colors in deep, luxurious hues.

Jodie thrust out her round breasts, covered by a sleeveless, hot pink blouse. She had left the top two buttons undone. "What about my shirt?" she asked, pouting a little to make her lips stick out more too, as she had seen Renee do thousands of times.

"Wrong color," Gray had said, his voice going hard and contempt leaking into the tone. Faith knew why. It was because Renee was sleeping with his father, Guy. She’d heard the way others talked about Renee, knew what "whore" meant.

He had brushed past them then, pushing open the door and disappearing into the drugstore. Jodie stared after him for a few seconds, then turned her greedy eyes on Faith. "Let me have your shirt," she said.

"It’s too little for you," Faith replied, and was fiercely glad that it was. Gray had liked her shirt, had touched it, and she wasn’t about to give it up.

Jodie had scowled at the obvious truth. Faith was small and skinny, but even her narrow shoulders strained at the seams of the two-year-old T-shirt.

"I’ll get my own," she’d declared.

She would, too, Faith thought now as she gazed dreamily up at the flickering patterns made by the sun in the trees. But Jodie wouldn’t have the one Gray had touched; Faith had taken it off as soon as she’d gotten home, carefully folded it, and hidden it under her mattress. The only way anyone would find it there would be if they stripped the bed to wash the sheets, and since Faith was the only one who did that, the shirt would be safe, and she could sleep on it every night.

Gray. The violence of her emotions scared her, but she couldn’t control them. All she had to do was see him and her heart would begin pounding so hard in her skinny chest that it hurt her ribs, and she felt hot and shivery all at the same time. Gray was like a god in the small town of Prescott, Louisiana; he was wild as a buck, she’d heard people say, but he was backed by the Rouillard money, and even as a young boy he’d had a hard, reckless charm that made feminine hearts flutter. The Rouillards had spawned their share of rascals and renegades, and Gray had early shown the potential to be the wildest of the lot. But he was a Rouillard, and even when he raised hell, he did it with style.

For all that, he’d never been unkind to Faith, the way some of the people in town had. His sister, Monica, had once spat in their direction when Faith and Jodie had met her on the sidewalk. Faith was glad that Monica was in New Orleans at some fancy private girls’ school, and wasn’t home very often even during the summer, because she was visiting with friends. On the other hand, Faith’s heart had bled for months when Gray had gone oif to LSU; Baton Rouge wasn’t that far away, but during football season he didn’t get much time off, and came home only on the holidays. Whenever she knew he was home, Faith tried to hang around town where she might catch a glimpse of him, strolling with the indolent grace of a big cat, so tall and strong and dangerously exciting.

Now that it was summer, he spent a lot of time at the lake, which was one of the reasons for Faith’s afternoon expedition through the woods. The lake was a private one, over two thousand acres, and totally contained by Rouillard land. It was long and irregularly shaped, with several curves in it; broad and fairly shallow in some places, narrow and deep in others. The big, white Rouillard mansion was to the east of it, the Devlin shack on the west, but neither was actually on the lakeshore. The only house on the lake was the Rouillard summerhouse, a white, one-story house with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a screened-in porch that totally encircled it. Down from the summerhouse was a boathouse and a pier, and a brick barbecue pit had been built there. Sometimes, during the summer, Gray and his friends would gather there for a rowdy afternoon of swimming and boating, and Faith would slip along the edge of the woods so she could watch him to her heart’s content.

Maybe he’d be there today, she thought, aching with the sweet yearning that filled her every time she thought about him. It would be wonderful to see him twice in one day.

She was barefoot, and her threadbare shorts left her skinny legs unprotected from scratches and snakes, but Faith was as at home in the woods as the other shy creatures; she wasn’t worried about the snakes, and disregarded the scratches. Her long, dark red hair tended to hang untidily in her eyes and annoy her, so she had pulled it back and secured it with a rubber band. She slipped like a wraith through the trees, her big cat eyes dreamy as she pictured Gray in her mind. Maybe he’d be there; maybe one day he’d see her hiding in the bushes, or peeking out from behind a tree, and he’d hold his hand out to her and say, "Why don’t you come out from there and have some fun with us?" She lost herself in the delicious daydream of being part of that group of laughing, roughhousing, suntanned kids, of being one of those curvy girls in a brief bikini.

Even before she got to the edge of the clearing where the summerhouse was, she could see the silver gleam of Gray’s Corvette parked in front of it, and her heart began the familiar violent pounding. He was here! She slid cautiously behind the shelter of a big tree trunk, but after a moment she realized that she couldn’t hear anything. There were no splashing sounds, no yells or shrieks or giggles.

Maybe he was fishing from the pier, or maybe he’d taken the boat out. Faith moved closer, angling for a view of the pier, but the wooden length was empty. He wasn’t there. Disappointment filled her. If he’d taken the boat out, there was no telling how long he’d be gone, and she couldn’t stay there waiting for him. She had stolen this time for herself, but she had to get back soon and start cooking supper, and take care of Scottie.

She was turning to go when a muted sound reached her ears and she stopped, head cocked to try to locate it. She left the edge of the woods and took a few steps into the clearing, closer to the house, and now she could hear a murmur of voices, too low and indistinct for her to understand. Instantly her heart swelled again; he was here, after all. But he was inside the house; it would be difficult to catch a glimpse of him from the woods. If she went closer, though, she could hear him, and that was all she required.

Faith had the knack of small, wild things for silence. Her bare feet didn’t make a sound as she crept closer to the house, trying to stay out of a direct line to any of the windows. The murmur of voices seemed to be coming from the back of the house, where the bedrooms were located.

She reached the porch and squatted by the steps, her head cocked again as she tried to catch the words, but she couldn’t quite understand them. It was Gray’s voice, though; the deep tones were unmistakable, at least to her. Then she heard a gasp, and a kind of moan, in a much lighter voice.

Irresistibly drawn by curiosity and the lodestone of Gray’s voice, Faith eased out of her squatting position and cautiously tugged at the handle of the screen door. It was unlatched. She eased it open barely enough for a cat to slip through, and wriggled her own lithe, skinny body inside, then just as silently let the door close. Going down on hands and knees, she crawled across the plank porch to the open window of one of the bedrooms, from which the voices seemed to be coming.

She heard another gasp. "Gray," said the other voice, a girl’s voice, strained and shaking.

"Shhh, shhh," Gray murmured, the sound low and barely reaching Faith. He said something else, but the words didn’t make any sense to her. They slid past her ears without triggering any understanding. Then he said, "Mon ch&re," and the tumblers clicked into place. He was speaking French, she realized, and as soon as she did so, the words became clear, as if it had taken that small understanding for the sounds to find the needed rhythm in her brain. Though the Devlins were neither Cajun nor Creole, Faith understood most of what he was saying. The majority of the people in the parish spoke and understood French, in varying degrees.

It sounded as if he were trying to coax a scared dog to him, Faith thought. His voice was warm and crooning, the words scattered with reassurances and endearments. When the girl spoke again, her voice was still strained, but now there was a drugged undertone to it.

Curious, Faith eased to the side and carefully moved her head so that one eye peeked around the frame of the open window. What she saw froze her to the spot.

Gray and the girl were both naked on the bed, which was positioned with the headboard under the window on the adjoining wall. Neither of them was likely to see her, which was a stroke of fortune, because Faith couldn’t have moved then even if they had both looked straight at her.

Gray was lying with his back to her, his left arm positioned under the girl’s tousled blond head. He was leaning over her in a way that made Faith catch her breath, for there was something both protective and predatory in him. He was kissing her, long kisses that left the room in silence except for their deep sighs, and his right arm – it looked as if – he was – he shifted his position, and Faith could clearly see that his right hand was between the girl’s naked thighs, right there on her kitty cat.

Faith felt dizzy, and she realized that her chest hurt from holding her breath. Carefully she let it out, and rested her cheek against the white wood. She knew what they were doing. She was eleven, and she wasn’t a little girl anymore even if her breasts hadn’t started to grow yet. Several years ago she had heard Renee and Pa carrying on in their bedroom, and her oldest brother, Russ, had leeringly and graphically explained what was going on. She had seen dogs doing it, too, and heard cats screeching while they did it.

The girl cried out, and Faith peeked again. Gray was on top of her now, still gently murmuring in French, cajoling, soothing. He told her how pretty she was, how much he wanted her, how hot and delicious she was. And as he talked, he was adjusting his position, reaching between their bodies with his right hand while he remained propped on his left arm. Because of the angle, Faith couldn’t see what he was doing, but she knew anyway. With a shock, she recognized the girl. Lindsey Partain; her father was a lawyer in Prescott.

"Gray!" Lindsey cried, her voice tight with strain. "My God! I can’t – "

Gray’s muscular buttocks tightened, and the girl arched beneath him, crying out again. But she was clinging to him, and the cry was one of intense pleasure. Her long legs lifted, one twining around his hip, the other hooking around his leg.

He began moving slowly, his muscled young body rippling with power. The scene was raw and disturbing, but there was also a beauty to it that kept Faith riveted. Gray was so big and strong, his darkly tanned body graceful and intensely masculine, while Lindsey was slim and shapely, delicately feminine in his grasp. He seemed to be taking such care of her, and she was enjoying it so much, her slim hands clinging to his back, her head arched back and her hips lifting in time with his slow rhythm.

Faith stared at them, her eyes burning. She wasn’t jealous. Gray was so far above her, and she was so young, that she had never thought of him in a romantic, possessive sense. Gray was the shining center of her universe, to be worshiped from afar, and she was giddily happy with the occasional glimpse of him. Today, when he had actually spoken to her, and touched her shirt, had been paradise. She couldn’t imagine herself in Lindsey’s place, lying naked in his arms, or even imagine what it felt like.

Gray’s movements were getting faster, and the girl was crying out again as she strained up to him, her teeth clenched as if she were in pain, but instinctively Faith knew that she wasn’t. Gray was hammering at her now, his own head thrown back, long black hair damp at the temples and the ends sticking to his sweaty shoulders. He tensed and shuddered, and a raw, deep sound burst from his throat.

Faith’s heart was hammering, and her greenish cat eyes were huge as she ducked away from the window, slipping through the screen door and off the porch as silently as she had arrived. So that was what it was like. She had actually seen Gray doing it. Without his clothes, he was even more beautiful than she had imagined. He hadn’t made disgusting snorting pig noises the way Pa did, whenever he was sober enough to talk Renee into the bedroom, which wasn’t very often for the past couple of years.

If Gray’s father, Guy, was as beautiful doing it as Gray was, Faith thought fiercely, she didn’t blame Renee for choosing him over Pa.

She gained the safety of the woods and slipped silently through the trees. It was late, and she’d likely get a belting from Pa when she got home, for not being there to start his supper and look after Scottie, the way she was supposed to do, but it would be worth it. She had seen Gray.

Exhausted, elated, shaking and breathing hard in the aftermath of orgasm, Gray lifted his head from the curve of Lindsey’s neck and shoulder. She was still gasping herself, her eyes closed. He had spent the better part of the afternoon seducing her, but it had been worth the effort. That long, slow buildup had made the sex even better than he’d expected.

A flash of color, a tiny movement in his peripheral vision, caught his attention and he turned his head toward the open window and the woods beyond the porch. He caught only a glimpse of a small, frail figure topped by dark red hair, but that was enough for him to identify the youngest Devlin girl.

What was the kid doing wandering around the woods this far from their shack? Gray didn’t say anything to Lindsey, because she would panic if she thought someone might have seen her sneaking into the summerhouse with him, even if that someone was just one of the trashy Devlins. She was engaged to Dewayne Mouton, and she wouldn’t take kindly to anything screwing that up, even her own screwing. The Moutons weren’t as rich as the Rouillards – no one in this part of Louisiana was – but Lindsey knew she could handle Dewayne in a way she could never hope to do with Gray.

Gray was the bigger catch, but he wouldn’t be a very comfortable husband, and Lindsey was shrewd enough to know she didn’t have a chance with him anyway.

"What is it?" she murmured now, stroking his shoulder.

"Nothing." He turned his head and kissed her, hard, then disengaged their bodies and sat up on the edge of the bed. "I just noticed how late it is."

Lindsey took a look out the window at the lengthening shadows, and sat up with a squeal. "My God, I’m supposed to have dinner with the Moutons tonight! I’ll never be able to get ready on time!" She scrambled from the bed and began grabbing up her scattered articles of clothing.

Gray dressed in a more leisurely fashion, but his mind was still on the Devlin kid. Had she seen them, and if she had, would she say anything? She was a strange little kid, shyer than her older sister, who was already showing signs of being as big a slut as their mother. But the younger one had wise old eyes in that thin kid’s face, eyes that reminded him of a cat’s eyes, hazel green with flecks of gold in them so that sometimes they were green and sometimes looked yellowish. He got the feeling that she didn’t miss much. She would know that her mother was his father’s piece on the side, that the Devlins lived rent-free in that shack so Renee would be handy whenever Guy Rouillard wanted her. The kid wouldn’t risk getting on the bad side of any Rouillard.

Poor little skinny kid, with the fey eyes. She’d been born into trash and wouldn’t have the chance to ever get out of it, assuming she even wanted to. Amos Devlin was a mean drunk, and the two older boys, Russ and Nicky, were lazy, thieving bullies, as mean as their father and showing signs of turning into drunks as well. Her mother, Renee, liked the booze too, but she hadn’t let it get the upper hand on her the way it had on Amos. She was lush and beautiful, despite having borne five children, with the dark red hair that only her youngest daughter had inherited, as well as the green eyes and creamy, delicate skin. Renee wasn’t mean, like Amos, but she wasn’t much of a mother to those kids, either. All Renee cared about was getting screwed. The joke in the parish was that her heels were so round, she had been used as the pattern for Weebles. Unlike Weebles, however, Renee would stay down, as long as there was a man ready to crawl on top of her. She exuded sex, raunchy sex, drawing men to her like dogs to a bitch in heat.

Jodie, the oldest girl, was pure jailbait, already on the lookout for any hard cock she could get. She had Renee’s single-mindedness when it came to sex, and he very much doubted that she was still a virgin, though she was only in junior high. She kept offering it to him, but Gray wasn’t the least bit tempted. He’d rather screw a snake than Jodie Devlin.

The youngest Devlin boy was retarded. Gray had only seen him once or twice, and each time he had been clinging to the youngest girl’s legs – what was her name, damn it? Something he’d thought a minute ago had reminded him of it. Fay? Fay with the fey eyes? No, it was something else, but like that – Faith. That was it. Funny name for a Devlin, since neither Amos nor Renee was the least bit religious.

With a family like that, the kid was doomed. In another couple of years, she’d be following in her mother’s and sister’s footsteps, because she wouldn’t know any better. And even if she did know better, all the boys would come sniffing around her anyway, just because her name was Devlin, and she wouldn’t hold out for long.

The whole parish knew that his father was screwing Renee, had been for years. As much as Gray loved his mother, he figured he couldn’t blame Guy for going elsewhere; God knows, his mother didn’t. Noelle was the least physical person Gray had ever seen. At thirty-nine, she was still as cool and lovely as a Madonna, unfailingly composed and remote. She didn’t like to be touched, even by her children. The wonder was that she’d even had children. Of course Guy wasn’t faithful, had never been, much to Noelle’s relief. Guy Rouillard was hot-blooded and lusty, and he’d found his way into a lot of beds before settling, more or less, on Renee Devlin, But Guy was always gently courteous and protective with Noelle, and Gray knew he would never leave her, especially not for a cheap slut like Renee.

The only person upset by the arrangement, apparently, was his sister, Monica. Starved by Noelle’s emotional distance, Monica doted on her father, and was fiercely jealous of Renee, both on behalf of her mother and because Guy spent so much time with Renee. It was a lot calmer around the house now that Monica had gone away to school and become involved with her friends there.

"Gray, hurry," Lindsey begged frantically.

He shoved his arms into his shirtsleeves, but disdained to button the garment, leaving it hanging open. "I’m ready." He kissed her, and patted her butt. "Don’t get your feathers ruffled, chérie. All you have to do is change clothes. The rest of you looks beautiful just as you are."

She smiled, pleased by the compliment, and calmed down. "When can we do this again?" she asked as they left the summerhouse.

Gray laughed aloud. It had taken him most of the summer to get into her pants, but now she didn’t want to waste any more time. Perversely, now that he’d had her, much of his ruthless determination had faded. "I don’t know," he said lazily. "I have to report back to school soon, for football practice."

To her credit, she didn’t pout. Instead she tossed her head so the wind lifted her hair as the Corvette streaked down the private road toward the highway, and smiled at him. "Any time." She was a year older than he was, and had her own share of confidence.

The Corvette skidded into the highway, the tires grabbing asphalt. Lindsey laughed as Gray handled the powerful car with ease. "I’ll have you home in five minutes," he promised. He didn’t want anything to interfere with her engagement to Dewayne, either.

He thought of skinny little Faith Devlin, and wondered if she’d made it safely home. She shouldn’t be wandering around alone in the woods like that. She could get hurt, or lost. Worse, though this was private land, the lake drew the local high school boys like a magnet, and Gray had no illusions about teenage boys when they were in a pack. If they ran across Faith, they might not stop to think about how young she was, only that she was a Devlin. Little Red wouldn’t have a chance against the wolves.

Someone needed to keep a closer eye on the kid.

Two

Three Years Later

"Faith," Renee said fretfully, "make Scottie stop. He’s driving me crazy with that whining."

Faith put aside the potatoes she was peeling, wiped her hands, and went to the screen door, where Scottie was slapping at the screen and making the little snuffling sounds that meant he wanted to go outside. He was never allowed to go out by himself, because he didn’t understand what "stay in the yard" meant, and he would wander off and get lost. There was a latch high on the screen, where he couldn’t reach it, that was always kept fastened to prevent him from going out by himself. Faith was busy with supper, though likely only she and Scottie would be here to eat it, and couldn’t go out with him right now.

She pulled his hands away from the screen and said, "Do you want to play ball, Scottie? Where’s the ball?" Easily distracted, he trotted off in search of his dogchewed red ball, but Faith knew that wouldn’t occupy him for long. With a sigh, she went back to the potatoes.

Renee drifted out of her bedroom. She was dressed fit to kill tonight, Faith noted, in a tight, short red dress that showed off her long, shapely legs and somehow didn’t clash with her hair. Renee had great legs; she had great everything, and she knew it. Her thick red hair was brushed into a cloud, and her musky perfume clung to her in a deep, rich red scent. "How do I look?" she asked, whirling on her red high heels as she attached cheap rhinestone earrings to her earlobes.

"Beautiful," Faith said, knowing it was what Renee expected, and it was nothing less than the truth. Renee was as amoral as a cat, but she was also a startlingly beautiful woman, with a perfectly formed, slightly exotic face.

"Well, I’m off." She bent to brush a careless kiss over the top of Faith’s head.

"Have fun, Mama."

"I will." She gave a husky laugh. "Oh, I will." She unlatched the screen and left the shack, long legs flashing.

Faith got up to latch the door again, and stood watching Renee get into her flashy little sports car and drive off. Her mother loved that car. She had driven up in it one day without a word of explanation about how she had gotten it, not that there was much doubt in anyone’s mind. Guy Rouillard had bought it for her.

Seeing her at the door, Scottie returned and began making his "go outside" noise again. "I can’t take you outside," Faith explained, endlessly patient though he didn’t understand much. "I have to cook supper. Would you rather have fried potatoes or mashed ones?" It was a rhetorical question, because mashed potatoes were much easier for him to eat. She smoothed his dark hair and returned once again to the table and the bowl of potatoes.

Lately, Scottie wasn’t as energetic as usual, and more and more his lips took on a blue tinge when he played. His heart was failing, just like the doctors had said would likely happen. There wouldn’t be a miracle heart transplant for Scottie, even had the Devlins been able to afford it. The few available children’s hearts were too precious to be wasted on a little boy who would never be able to dress himself, or read, or manage more than a few garbled words no matter how long he lived. "Severely retarded" was how he was categorized. Though a hard little lump formed in Faith’s chest at the thought of Scottie dying, she wasn’t bitter that nothing would be done about his failing health. A new heart wouldn’t help Scottie, not in any way that mattered. The doctors hadn’t expected him to live this long, and she would just take care of him for whatever time he had left.

For a while, she had wondered if he was Guy Rouillard’s son, and felt furious on his behalf that he wasn’t taken to live in the big white house, where he would have the best of care, and his few years would be happy. Because Scottie was retarded, she thought, Guy was happy to keep him out of sight.

The truth was, Scottie could just as easily be Pa’s son, and it was impossible to tell. Scottie didn’t look like either man; he simply looked like himself. He was six years old now, a placid little boy who was pleased by the smallest things, and whose security was rooted in his fourteen-year-old sister. Faith had taken care of him from the day Renee had brought him home from the hospital, protected him from Pa’s drunken rages, kept Russ and Nicky from teasing him unmercifully. Renee and Jodie mostly ignored him, which was okay with Scottie.

Jodie had asked Faith to "double date" with her that night, and shrugged when Faith refused because someone had to stay home and take care of Scottie. She wouldn’t have gone out with Jodie anyway; their ideas of fun were radically different. Jodie thought having fun was sneaking some illegal booze, since she was only sixteen, getting drunk, and having sex with the boy or group of boys who were hanging around her that night.

Everything in Faith shuddered in revulsion at the thought. She had seen Jodie come in, stinking of beer and sex, her clothes torn and stained, giggling at how much "fun" she had had. It never seemed to bother her that those same boys wouldn’t speak to her if they met her in public.

It bothered Faith. Her soul burned with humiliation at the contempt in people’s eyes whenever they looked at her, at anyone in her family. The trashy Devlins, that’s what they were called. Drunks and whores, the whole bunch.

But I’m not like that! The silent cry sometimes welled up in Faith, but she always held it in. Why couldn’t folks see beneath the name? She didn’t paint herself up and wear too short, too tight clothes like Renee and Jodie. She didn’t drink, didn’t hang around rough joints trying to pick up anything in pants. Her clothes were cheap and ill made, but she kept them clean. She never missed a day of school, if she could help it, and she had good grades. She hungered for respectability, wanted to be able to walk into a store and not have the clerks watch her like a hawk, because she was one of those trashy Devlins and everyone knew they’d steal you blind. She didn’t want people to make comments behind their hands whenever they saw her.

It didn’t help that she resembled Renee far more than did Jodie. Faith had the same thick, dark red hair, as vibrant as a flame, the same porcelain-grained skin, the same high cheekbones and exotic green eyes. Her face wasn’t perfectly proportioned like Renee’s; her face was thinner, her jaw more square, her mouth as wide but not as full. Renee was voluptuous; Faith was both taller and leaner, her body more delicately made. Her breasts had finally grown, firm and pert, but Jodie, at the same age, had been wearing a bra cup two sizes bigger.

Because she looked like Renee, people seemed to expect Faith to act like her, too, acd then never looked beyond their own expectations. She was tarred with the same brush that had painted the rest of the family.

"But I’ll get out someday, Scottie," she said softly. "See if I don’t."

He didn’t react to the words, just kept patting the screen.

As always, when she needed to cheer herself, she thought of Gray. Her painful feelings for him hadn’t lessened in the three years since she had seen him making love to Lindsey Partain, but rather had intensified as she had matured. The awestruck joy with which she had watched him at eleven had grown and changed, as she had grown and changed. When she dreamed of him now, physical feelings mingled sharply with the romantic ones, and with her upbringing the details were far sharper and more explicit than other fourteen-year-old girls could have been expected to know.

Her dreams weren’t colored just by her own surroundings; that day at the summerhouse when she had seen Gray with Lindsey Partain – Lindsey Mouton now – had given her a great deal of knowledge about his body. She hadn’t actually seen his genitals, because at first his back had been turned to her, and then when he had gotten on top, their legs had blocked her view. It didn’t much matter, though, because she knew what one looked like. Not only had she taken care of Scottie all of his life, but Pa and Russ and Nicky, when they were drunk, were just as likely as not to pull it out of their pants and take a pee off the front step as they were to use the toilet.

But Faith knew enough details about Gray’s body to heat her dreams. She knew how muscled those long legs were, and that black hair grew on them. She knew that his buttocks were small and round and tight, and that he had adorable twin dimples just above them. She knew that his shoulders were broad and powerful, that his back was long, with the groove of his spine deeply indented between the thick layers of muscle. There had been a light dusting of black hair on his wide chest.

She knew that he made love in French, his deep voice soft and dark and crooning.

She had followed his career at LSU with secret pride. He had just been graduated with a double major in finance and business administration, with an eye toward taking over the Rouillard holdings someday. As good as he had been at football, he hadn’t wanted a career in the pros, and instead had come home to begin helping Guy. She would be able to catch glimpses of him year round now, rather than just during the summer and holidays.

Unfortunately, Monica was home for good, too, and was as spiteful as ever. Everyone else was merely contemptuous; Monica actively hated anyone with the name of Devlin. Faith couldn’t blame her, though, and sometimes even sympathized with her. No one had ever said that Guy Rouillard wasn’t a good father; he loved both of his children, and they loved him. How did Monica feel, hearing people talk about Guy’s long-standing arrangement with Renee, knowing that he was openly unfaithful to her mother?

When she was younger, Faith had daydreamed that Guy was her father too; Amos was nowhere in the picture. Guy was tall and dark and exciting, his lean face so much like Gray’s that, no matter what, she couldn’t hate him. He had always been kind to her, to all Renee’s kids, but he had sometimes gone out of his way to speak to Faith and had once or twice bought her a small treat. It was probably because she looked like Renee, Faith thought. If Guy had been her father, then Gray would be her brother, and she would be able to worship him up close, live in the same house with him. Those daydreams had always made her feel guilty about Pa, and then she would try to be extra nice to him to make up for it. Lately, however, she was fiercely glad that Guy wasn’t her father, because now she didn’t want Gray to be her brother.

She wanted to marry him.

This most private of her daydreams was so shocking that sometimes it startled her, that she would dare to even dream so high. A Rouillard, marry a Devlin? A Devlin set foot in that hundred-year-old mansion? All the Rouillard ancestors would rise up from their graves to drive out the intruder. The parish would be aghast.

But still she dreamed. She dreamed of being dressed in white, of walking down the wide aisle of the church with Gray waiting for her at the altar, turning to watch her with those heavy-lidded dark eyes, the expression in them hot and wanting, and just for her. She dreamed of him sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her over the threshold – not at Rouillard House, she couldn’t imagine that, but somewhere else that was theirs alone, maybe a honeymoon cottage – to a big bed that awaited them. She imagined lying under him, her legs around him as she had seen Lindsey’s, imagined him moving, heard his seductive voice whispering French love words in her ear. She knew what men and women did together, knew where he would put his thing, even though she couldn’t imagine how it would feel. Jodie said that it felt wonderful, the best thing in the world…

Scottie gave a sharp cry, jerking Faith from her daydream. She dropped the potato she had been dicing and jumped to her feet, because Scottie didn’t cry unless he was hurt. He was still standing at the screen, holding his finger. Faith picked him up and carried him to the table, where she sat down with him on her lap and examined his hand. There was a small, deep scratch on the tip of his index finger; probably he had raked his hand across a hole in the screen, and the torn wire had dug into his skin. A single drop of blood had welled in the tiny wound.

"There, there, it’s all right," she soothed, hugging him and wiping away his tears. "I’ll put a Band-Aid on it and it’ll get well. You like Band-Aids."

He did. Whenever he had a scrape that needed bandaging, she ended up plastering the things over his arms and legs, because he would keep nudging her until all the Band-Aids in the box had been used. She had learned to take most of the bandage strips out of the box and hide them, so that only two or three were there for him to see.

She washed his finger and got the box down from the top shelf, where it was kept to keep him out of it. His round little face was glowing with delight and anticipation as he held out his stubby finger. Making a big production out of it, Faith applied the bandage to the wound.

He leaned forward and peered into the open box, then grunted as he held out his other hand.

"Is that one hurt, too? Poor hand!" She kissed the grubby little paw and applied a bandage to the back of it.

He leaned over and looked into the box again, and grinned as he held up his right leg.

"My goodness! You’re hurt all over!" she exclaimed, and bandaged his knee.

He checked the box again, but it was now empty. Satisfied, he trotted back to the door, and Faith returned to fixing supper.

With the long summer days, it was just twilight at eight-thirty, but by eight that evening Scottie was already tired and nodding off. Faith gave him a bath and put him to bed, her heart squeezing painfully as she stroked his hair. He was such a sweet little boy, oblivious to the health problems that would keep him from living to adulthood.

At nine-thirty she heard Amos driving up, his old truck clanking and backfiring. She went to unlatch the screen and let him in. The stink of whiskey came in with him, a purulent, greenish yellow stench.

He stumbled over the threshold, and righted himself.

"Where’s your ma?" he growled, in the ugly mean tone he always used when he was drinking, which was most of the time.

"She went out a couple of hours ago."

He lurched toward the table, the uneven floor making his steps that much more perilous. "Damn bitch," he muttered. "Ain’t never here. Always out shakin’ her ass at her fancy rich boyfriend. Ain’t never here to fix my supper. How’s a man supposed to eat?" he suddenly roared, hitting the table with his fist.

"Supper’s ready, Pa," Faith said quietly, hoping the uproar didn’t wake Scottie. "I’ll fix you a plate."

"Don’t want anything to eat," he said, as she had expected. When he was drinking, he never wanted food, just more booze.

"Is there anythin’ in this damn house to drink?" He staggered to his feet and began opening cabinet doors, slamming them when they didn’t reveal what he wanted.

Faith moved quickly. "There’s a bottle in the boys’ bedroom. I’ll get it." She didn’t want Amos stumbling around in there, cussing and probably puking, and waking Scottie. She darted into the dark little room and blindly searched under Nick’s cot until her hand brushed against cool glass. Dragging the bottle out, she carried it back into the kitchen. It was only about one quarter full, but anything would pacify Pa. She twisted the cap off and handed the bottle to Amos.

"Here, Pa."

"Good girl," he said, brightening as he tipped the bottle to his mouth. "You’re a good girl, Faith, not a whore like your ma and sister."

"Don’t talk like that about them," she protested, unable to listen. Knowing it was one thing, but talking about it was another. It wasn’t as if Pa had any room to throw stones.

"I’ll say what I damn well please!" Amos flared. "Don’t sass me, girl, or I’ll belt you one."

"I wasn’t sassing you, Pa." She kept her voice calm, but prudently moved out of reach. If he couldn’t reach her, he couldn’t hit her. He was likely to throw something, but she was quick and his missiles seldom struck her.

"Fine kids she gave me," he sneered. "Russ and Nick are the only two I can stomach. Jodie’s a whore like her ma, you’re a prissy smart-ass, and the last one’s a goddamn idiot."

Keeping her head turned away so he couldn’t see the tears that burned her eyes, Faith sat down on the ragged, sagging couch and began folding the laundry she’d done that day. It would never do to let Amos see that he’d hurt her. If he ever scented blood, he moved in for the kill, and the drunker he was, the more vicious he became. The best thing to do was ignore him. Like all drunks, he was easily distracted, and she figured he’d soon be passed out anyway.

She didn’t know why it hurt. She had long since ceased to have any feelings for Amos, not even fear. There was certainly nothing there to love, the man he had been long since destroyed in countless bottles of whiskey. If he had ever shown any promise, it had been gone by the time she’d been born, but somehow she thought he had always been pretty much as he was now. He was simply the type of person who always blamed others for his problems rather than doing something to correct them.

Sometimes, when he was sober, Faith thought she could see why Renee had once been attracted to him. Amos was a little over average height, with a wiry body that had never gone to fat. His hair was still dark, if thinning on top, and he could even be called a good-looking man – when he was sober. Drunk, as he was now, unshaven and with his hair mussed and hanging in dirty strings, his eyes red and rheumy with alcohol, his face bloated, there was nothing the least attractive about him. His clothes were dirty and stained, and he stank to high heaven. Judging by the sourness of his smell, he had already puked at least once, and the stains on the front of his pants meant that he hadn’t been as careful as he should have been when he’d peed.

He finished off the bottle in silence, then belched loudly. "Gotta piss," he announced, staggering to his feet and heading toward the front door.

Faith’s movements were measured, her hands never faltering as she listened to the stream of urine spattering in front of the step, for everyone else who came in that night to tramp into the house. She would mop the floor first thing In the morning.

Amos weaved back into the house. He hadn’t zipped his pants, she noticed, but at least his sex wasn’t exposed.

"Goin’ to bed," he said, making his way toward the back room. Faith watched him stumble and right himself by bracing his hand on the doorframe. He didn’t undress, but fell across the bed as he was. When Renee came home and found Amos lying across the bed in his filthy clothes, she would raise hell and wake everyone in the house.

Within minutes, Amos’s heavy snoring was echoing through the cramped shack.

Faith immediately got up and went into the lean-to that had been built onto the back of the shack, which she shared with Jodie. Only Amos and Renee had an honest-to-goodness bed; all the rest of them had cots. She turned on the light, the single bare bulb glaring, and quickly changed into her nightgown. Then she pulled her book out from under the mattress. Now that Scottie was in bed and Amos passed out drunk, she would likely have a couple of peaceful hours before anyone else came home. Amos was always the first one home, but then he always got started first.

She had learned not to hesitate when an opportunity for enjoyment presented itself, but to seize each moment. There were too few of them in her life for her to allow any to pass untasted. She loved books, and read anything that came to hand. There was something magical in the way words could be strung together and a whole new world fashioned by the arrangement. While reading she could leave this crowded shack far behind, and go to worlds filled with excitement and beauty and love. When she was reading, she was someone else in her mind, someone worthwhile, rather than one of the trashy Devlins.

She had learned not to read in front of Pa or the boys, though. The least they did was make fun of her. Any one of them, in one of their meaner moods, was likely to snatch the book from her and throw it in the fire, or into the toilet, and laugh uproariously as if her frantic efforts to save it were the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Renee would grumble about her wasting her time reading instead of doing her chores, but she wouldn’t do anything to the book. Jodie made fun of her sometimes, but in a careless, impatient way. She couldn’t understand for the life of her why Faith would rather stick her nose in a book than go out to have some fun.

These precious moments alone, when she could read in peace, were the highlight of Faith’s day, unless she had happened to see Gray. Sometimes she thought that if she couldn’t read, just for a few minutes, she would go crazy and start screaming, and not be able to stop. But no matter what Pa did, no matter what she overheard someone say about her family, no matter what Russ and Nicky had been up to or how weak Scottie seemed, if she could open a book, she would lose herself in the pages.

Tonight she had more than a few minutes free for reading, for losing herself in the pages of Rebecca. She settled on her cot and pulled out the candle that she kept under her bed. She lit the candle, positioned it just so, balanced on a crate to the right of the cot, and scooted so that her back was braced against the wall. The light from the candle, small as it was, was enough to offset the back glare of the light bulb and allow her to read without straining her eyes too much. One of these days, she promised herself, she would get a lamp. She imagined it, a real reading lamp that gave off soft, bright light. And she would have one of those wedge-shaped pillows to lean against.

One of these days.

It was almost midnight when she gave up the battle against her heavy eyelids. She hated to stop reading, not wanting to waste any of this time to herself, but she was so sleepy, she couldn’t make sense of the words any longer, and wasting the words seemed a lot worse than wasting the time. Sighing, she got up and returned the book to its hiding place, then turned out the light. She crawled between the threadbare sheets, the frame of the cot squeaking under her weight, and blew out the candle.

Perversely, in the sudden darkness, sleep wouldn’t come. She shifted restlessly on the thin cot, drifting in a half daydream, half doze, reliving the strained, shadowed romance in the book she’d been reading. She knew instantly when Russ and Nicky drove up, close to one o’clock. They staggered into the house, making no effort to be quiet, laughing uproariously at something their drinking buddies had done that night. Both of them were still underage, but a little thing like a law had never gotten in the way whenever a Devlin wanted to do something. The boys couldn’t go to roadhouses, but there were plenty of other ways they could get booze, and they knew them all. Sometimes they stole it, sometimes they paid other people to buy it for them, in which case they had stolen the money. Neither of them had a job, part-time or otherwise, because no one would hire them. It was well known the Devlin boys would steal you blind.

"OF Poss," Nicky was giggling. "Boooooom!"

It was enough to send Russ into drunken whoops. From the incoherent fragments she heard, evidently "Or Poss," whoever that was, had been scared by something that had made a loud booming noise. The boys seemed to think it was hilarious, but they probably wouldn’t remember it in the morning.

They woke Scottie, and she heard him grunting, but he didn’t cry, so she remained in bed. She wouldn’t have liked traipsing into the boys’ bedroom in her nightgown – in fact, she would have gone cold with dread – but she would have done it if they’d scared Scottie and made him cry. But Nicky said, "Shaddup and go back to sleep," and Scottie was quiet again. After a few minutes, they were all asleep, the chorus of snores rising and falling in the darkness.

Half an hour later, Jodie came home. She was quiet, or at least tried to be, tiptoeing through the shack with her shoes in hand. The stench of beer and sex came with her, all yellow and red and brown in a noxious swirl. She didn’t bother to undress but flopped down on her cot and heaved a deep sigh, almost like a purr.

"You awake, Faithie?" she asked after a moment, her voice slurred.

"Yeah."

"Thought you were. You should’ve come with me. Had fun, lots of fun." The last sentence was deep with sensuality. "You don’t know what you’re missin’, Faithie."

"Then I don’t miss it, do I?" Faith whispered, and Jodie giggled.

Faith dozed lightly, listening for Renee’s car so she would know everyone was safely home. Twice she came awake with a start, wondering if Renee had managed to come in without waking her, and got up to look out the window to see if her car was there. It wasn’t.

Renee didn’t come home at all that night.

Three

"Daddy didn’t come home last night."

Monica’s face was tight with misery as she stood at the window of the dining room. Gray continued eating his breakfast; there wasn’t much that could curb his appetite. So that was why Monica was up so early, since she usually didn’t crawl out of bed until ten or later. What did she do, wait up until Guy came home? He wondered with a sigh what Monica thought he could do about their father’s hours; send him to bed without supper? He couldn’t remember when Guy hadn’t had women on the side, though Renee Devlin had certainly had a lot more staying power than the rest of them.

His mother, Noelle, didn’t care where Guy spent his nights, so long as it wasn’t with her, and simply pretended that her husband’s affairs didn’t exist. Because Noelle didn’t care, Gray didn’t either. It would have been different if Noelle had been distressed, but that was far from the case. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Guy; Gray supposed she did, in her fashion. But Noelle intensely disliked sex, disliked being touched, even casually. For Guy to have a mistress was the best solution all around. He didn’t mistreat Noelle, and though he never bothered to hide his affairs, her position as his wife was safe. It was a very Old World arrangement that his parents had, and one that Gray knew he wouldn’t like at all when he finally decided to get married, but it suited both of them fine.

Monica hadn’t ever been able to see that, however. She was painfully protective of Noelle, relating to her in a way that Gray never could, imagining that Noelle was humiliated and hurt by Guy’s affairs. At the same time, Monica adored Guy, and was never happier than when he was paying attention to her. She had a picture in her mind of how families should be, close-knit and loving, always supporting each other, with the parents devoted to each other, and she had been trying her entire life to make her own family match that picture.

"Does Mother know?" he asked calmly, and refrained from asking if Monica really thought Noelle would care even if she did know. He sometimes felt sorry for Monica, but he also loved her, and didn’t deliberately try to hurt her.

Monica shook her head. "She isn’t up yet."

"Then why worry about it? By the time she gets up, when he comes in she’ll just think he’s already gone somewhere this morning."

"But he’s been out with her!" Monica whirled to face him, her dark eyes swimming with tears. "That Devlin woman."

"You don’t know that. He could have gotten into an all-night poker game." Guy did love to play poker, but Gray doubted that cards had anything to do with his absence. If he knew his father, and he knew him very well, Guy had far more likely spent the night with Renee Devlin, or some other woman who caught his eye. Renee was a fool if she thought Guy was any more faithful to her than he was to his wife.

"You think so?" Monica asked, eager to believe any excuse other than the most likely one.

Gray shrugged. "It’s possible." It was also possible a meteor would strike the house that day, but not very likely. He drank the last of his coffee and pushed back his chair. "When he comes in, tell him I’ve gone to Baton Rouge to look over that property we were talking about. I’ll be back by three, at the latest." Because she still looked so forlorn, he put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her. Somehow Monica had been born without the decisiveness and arrogant self-assurance of the rest of the family. Even Noelle, as remote as she was, always knew exactly what she wanted and how to go about getting it. Monica always seemed so helpless against the forceful personalities of everyone else in the family.

She buried her dark head in his shoulder for a moment, just as she had when she’d been a little girl and gone running to her big brother whenever something had gone wrong and Guy hadn’t been available to put-things to rights again. Though he was only two years older, he had always been protective of her, knowing even as a child that she lacked his own inner toughness.

"What do I do if he has been out with that slut?" she asked, her voice muffled against his shoulder.

Gray tried to stifle his impatience, but some of it leaked through in his voice. "You don’t do anything. It’s none of your business."

She drew back, stung, and stared reproachfully at him. "How can you say that? I’m worried about him!"

"I know you are." He managed to soften his tone. "But it’s a waste of time, and he wouldn’t thank you for it."

"You always take his side, because you’re just like him!" The tears were slowly dripping down her cheeks now, and she turned away. "I bet the property in Baton Rouge happens to have two legs and big boobs. Well, have fun!"

"I will," he said ironically. He really was going to see some property; afterwards was a different story. He was a strong, healthy young man, with a sex drive that had shown no signs of slacking off since his middle teens. It was a persistent burning in his guts, a hungry ache in his balls. He was lucky enough to be able to get women to ease that hunger, and cynical enough to realize that his family’s money added to his sexual success.

He didn’t care what the woman’s reason was, whether she came to him because she liked him and enjoyed his body, or whether she had her eye on the Rouillard bank account. Reasons didn’t matter, because all he wanted was a soft, warm body beneath him, taking his surging lust and giving him temporary ease. He’d never loved a woman yet, but he definitely loved sex, loved everything about it: the smells, the sensations, the sounds. He was particularly entranced by his favorite moment, the instant of penetration when he felt the small resistance of the woman’s body to his pressure, then the acceptance, the sensation of being taken in and enveloped with hot, tight, wet flesh. God, that was wonderful! He was always extremely careful to protect against unwanted pregnancies, wearing a rubber even if the woman said she was on birth control pills, because women had been known to lie about things like that and a smart man didn’t take chances.

He didn’t know for certain, but he suspected Monica was still virgin. Though she was far more emotional than Noelle, there was still something of their mother in her, some deep remoteness that so far hadn’t let any man get too close. She was an awkward mix of their parents’ natures, receiving some of Noelle’s cool distance without any of her self-assurance, and some of Guy’s emotionalism without his intense sexuality. Gray, on the other hand, had his father’s sexuality tempered with Noelle’s control. As much as he wanted sex, he wasn’t a slave to his cock the way Guy was. He knew when, and how, to say no. Thank God, he seemed to have better sense picking his women than Guy did, too.

He tugged on a strand of Monica’s dark hair. "I’ll call Alex and see if he knows where Dad is." Alexander Chelette, a lawyer in Prescott, was Guy’s best friend.

Her lips trembled, but she smiled through her tears. "He’ll go find Daddy and tell him to come home."

Gray snorted. It was a wonder how Monica had reached the age of twenty and learned absolutely nothing about men. "I wouldn’t bet on that, but maybe he can ease your mind." He intended to tell Monica that Guy was in a poker game, even if Alex knew the number of the motel room in which Guy was screwing the morning away.

He went into the study from which Guy handled the myriad Rouillard financial interests, and where Gray was learning how to handle them. Gray was fascinated by the intricacies of business and finance, so much so that he had willingly bypassed a chance to play pro football in favor of plunging headlong into the business world. It hadn’t been that much of a sacrifice for him; he knew he was good enough to play pro, because he had been scouted, but he knew he wasn’t star material. Had he given his life to football, he would have played eight years or so, if he’d been lucky enough to escape injury, and made a good but not spectacular salary. What it came down to, in the end, was that, as much as he loved football, he loved business more. This was a game that he could play much longer than he could football, make a hell of a lot more money, and was just as dog-eat-dog.

Though Guy would have burst his buttons with pride if his son had gone into pro football, Gray thought he’d been somehow relieved when Gray had chosen to come home instead. In the few months since Gray had gotten his degree, Guy had been happily cramming his head full of business knowledge, stuff that couldn’t be gotten from a textbook.

Gray ran his fingers over the polished wood of the big desk. An eight-by-ten photograph of Noelle was positioned on one corner, surrounded by smaller photos of himself and Monica at various stages of growth, like a queen with her subjects gathered around her. Most people would have thought of a mother with her children gathered about her knee, but Noelle wasn’t in the least motherly. The morning sunlight was falling across the photograph, picking up details that usually went unnoticed, and Gray paused to look at the still image of his mother’s face.

She was a beautiful woman, in a totally different way from Renee Devlin’s beauty. Renee was the sun, bold and hot and bright, while Noelle was the moon, cool and remote. She had thick, sleek, dark hair which she wore in a sophisticated twist, and lovely blue eyes which neither of her children had inherited. She wasn’t French Creole, but plain old American; some folks in the parish had wondered if Guy Rouillard wasn’t marrying beneath himself. But she had turned out to be more queenly than any Creole born to the role could have been, and those old doubts had long since been forgotten. The only reminder was his own name, Grayson, which was her family name, but as it had long since been shortened to Gray, most people thought it had been chosen because of its similarity to his father’s name.

Guy’s appointment book was open on the desk. As Gray hitched one hip onto the desk and reached for the telephone, he ran his eye down the appointments listed for that day. Guy had an appointment with William Grady, the banker, at ten. For the first time, Gray felt a twinge of uneasiness. No matter what, Guy had never let his women get in the way of business, and he would never go to a business meeting unshaven, and without a fresh change of clothes.

Quickly he dialed Alex Chelette’s number, and his secretary answered on the first ring. "Chelette and Anderson, Attorneys at Law."

"Good morning, Andrea. Is Alex in yet?"

"Of course," she replied with good humor, having immediately recognized Gray’s distinctive deep voice, like smoky velvet. "You know how he is. It would take an earthquake to keep him from coming through the door on the dot of nine. Hold on and I’ll get him."

He heard the click as he was put on hold, but he knew Andrea too well to think that she was buzzing Alex on the intercom. He’d been in the office often enough, as both child and man, to know that the only time she used the intercom was when a stranger was in the office. Most of the time, she simply turned around in her chair and raised her voice, since the open door of Alex’s office was right behind her.

Gray smiled as he remembered Guy roaring with laughter as he told how Alex had once tried to get Andrea to behave more formally, as was proper for a law office. Poor easygoing Alex hadn’t stood a chance against his secretary. Affronted, she had turned so cold, the office had frosted over. Instead of the usual "Alex," she had started calling him "Mr. Chelette" whenever she had to address him, the intercom was always used, and their easy camaraderie had gone out the window. When he stopped by her desk to try to chat, she got up and went to the rest room. All of the small details that she had once handled as a matter of course, taking a good deal of work off his shoulders, were now dumped on Alex’s desk for him to do. He found himself coming in earlier and staying later, while Andrea suddenly developed a very precise time schedule. There was no question of replacing her; legal secretaries weren’t easy to come by in Prescott.

Within two weeks, Alex had abjectly surrendered, and Andrea had been yelling through his office door ever since.

The line clicked again as Alex picked up. His lazy, good-natured drawl came over the line. "Good mornin’, Gray. You’re out and about early today."

"Not so early." He had always kept earlier hours than Guy, but most people assumed like father, like son. "I’m going to Baton Rouge to look at some property. Alex, do you know where Dad is?"

There was a small silence on the other end of the line. "No, I don’t." Another cautious little pause. "Is something wrong?"

"He didn’t come home last night, and he has an appointment with Bill Grady at ten."

"Damn," Alex said softly, but Gray could hear the alarm in the word. "Oh, God. I didn’t think he’d – goddamn it!"

"Alex." Gray’s voice was as hard and sharp as polished steel, slicing through the wire. "What’s going on?"

"I swear, Gray, I didn’t think he’d do it," Alex said miserably. "Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just overslept."

"Do what?" ‘

"He mentioned it a couple of times, but only when he’d been drinking. I swear, I never thought he was serious. God, how could he be?"

The plastic of the receiver cracked under Gray’s grip. "Serious about what?"

"About leaving your mother." Alex audibly swallowed, the gulping sound plain. "And running away with Renee Devlin."

Very gently, Gray replaced the receiver in its cradle. He stood motionless for several seconds, staring down at the instrument. It couldn’t – Guy wouldn’t have done that. Why should he? Why run away with Renee when he could and did screw her whenever he wanted? Alex had to be wrong. Guy would never have left his children or the business – but he had been relieved when Gray had chosen to turn down pro football, and had given Gray a crash course in running everything.

For a blessed little while Gray was numb with disbelief, but he was too much of a realist for it to last long. The numbness began to fade, and pure rage rushed in to fill the void. He moved like a snake striking, snatching the phone from the desk and hurling it through the window, shattering glass and bringing several sets of footsteps rushing down the hall to the study.

Everyone slept late except Faith and Scottie, and she left the shack as soon as she had fed Scottie his breakfast, taking him down to the creek so he could splash in the shallow water and try to catch the darting crawfish. He never did, but he loved to try. It was a gorgeous morning, with the sunlight slanting bright and golden through the trees, dappling the water. The smells were fresh and sharp, full of good, clean colors that wiped out the sour miasma of alcohol lingering in her nostrils, exuded from the four people she had left sleeping off the effects of the night.

Expecting Scottie to keep his clothes dry was like expecting the sun to rise in the west. When they reached the creek, she pulled off his shorts and shirt, and let him plunge into the water wearing only his diaper. She had brought a dry one to put on him when they left. She carefully hung the discarded garments on limbs, then stepped into the creek to wade and keep an eye on him. If a snake slithered toward him, he wouldn’t know to be alarmed. She wasn’t afraid of them either, but she was definitely cautious.

She let him play for a couple of hours, then had to pick him up and carry him out of the water, with him kicking and protesting every inch of the way. "You can’t stay in the water," she explained. "Look, your toes are wrinkled like a prune." She sat down on the ground and changed his diaper, then "dressed him. It was a difficult job, with him still squirming and trying to escape back into the water.

"Let’s look for squirrels," she said. "Can you see any squirrels?"

Distracted, he immediately looked upward, his eyes rounded with excitement as he searched the trees for a squirrel. Faith took his stubby hand in hers and slowly led him through the woods, taking a meandering path back to the shack. Maybe by the time they got back, Renee would be home.

Though her mother had stayed out all night before, it always made Faith uneasy. She kept it in the back of her mind, but she lived with the constant fear that Renee would leave one night and never come home. Faith knew, with bitter realism, that if Renee met some man who had a bit of money and promised her pretty things, she would be gone like a shot. Probably the only thing that kept her in Prescott anyway was Guy Rouillard, and what he could give her. If Guy ever dumped her, Renee wouldn’t hang around any longer than it took her to pack her clothes.

Scottie managed to spot two squirrels, one jumping along a tree limb and another climbing a tree, so he was happy to go where Faith led him. When they came in sight of the shack, however, he realized that they were going home and began to make grunting noises of disapproval as he pulled back, trying to tug his hand from her grip.

"Scottie, stop it," Faith said, as she dragged him out of the woods into the rutted dirt road leading up to the shack. "I can’t play with you anymore right now, I’ve got to do the wash. But I promise I’ll play cars with you when I get – "

She heard the low, rumbling sound of a car engine behind her, getting louder as it got closer, and her first, relieved thought as she turned was Mama’s home. But it wasn’t Renee’s flashy red car that came into sight around the curve. It was a black Corvette convertible, one bought to replace the silver one Gray had driven since high school. Faith stopped in her tracks, forgetting all about Scottie and Renee as her heart stopped, then began pounding against her rib cage with a force that almost made her sick. Gray was coming here!

She was so stunned with joy that she barely remembered to pull Scottie out of the road to stand in the weeds on the side. Gray, her heart sang. A fine trembling began in her knees and worked its way up her slender body at the thought of actually speaking to him again, even if it was just to mumble a hello.

Her gaze locked on him, drinking in the details as he drove closer. Though he was sitting behind the wheel and she couldn’t see that much of him, she thought that he seemed leaner than he’d been while he was playing football, and his hair was a little longer. His eyes were the same, though, dark as sin and just as tempting. They flashed over her as the Corvette bumped past where she and Scottie were standing, and he curtly nodded his head.

Scottie squirmed and tugged at his hand, fascinated by the pretty car. He loved Renee’s car, and Faith had to watch to keep him away from it, because it made Renee mad if he patted it and left his dirty little handprints behind.

"All right," Faith whispered, still dazed. "We’ll go see the pretty car." They stepped back into the road and followed the Corvette, which had now stopped in front of the shack. Gray slid up from behind the wheel and swung one long leg over the door, then the other, stepping out of the low-slung car as if it were a child’s vehicle. Going up the two rickety steps, he jerked open the screen door and went inside.

He didn’t knock, Faith thought. Something’s wrong. He didn’t knock.

She speeded up, hurrying Scottie so that his short legs pumped and he gave a squawk of protest. She thought of his heart, and terror squeezed her insides. She skidded to a stop, and swiftly stooped down to pick him up. "I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to make you run." Her back arched from the strain of carrying him, but she ignored it and hurried her steps again. Small rocks rolled unnoticed under her bare feet, and little clouds of dust flew up with every thud of her heels. Scottie’s weight seemed to drag at her, keeping her from reaching the shack. Blood roared in her ears, and a sense of dread swelled in her chest until she almost choked.

She heard some dim, faraway roar that she recognized as Pa’s vo’ice, underlaid by Gray’s deeper, more thunderous tones. Panting, she pumped her thin legs even harder, and finally reached the shack. The screen door squeaked as she jerked it open and hurled herself inside, only to skid to a stop, blinking in an effort to adjust her eyes to the dimness. Unintelligible shouts and curses swirled around her, making her feel as if she were caught in some nightmare tunnel.

She gulped in air as she let Scottie slip to the floor. Scared by the shouting, he latched on to her legs and buried his face against her.

As her vision adjusted and the roaring in her ears subsided, the shouts began to make sense, and she wished they hadn’t.

Gray had hauled Amos out of bed and was dragging him into the kitchen. Amos was yelling and swearing, grabbing at the doorframe in an effort to halt Gray’s momentum. He was no match for the young man’s enraged strength, however, and could only scramble for balance as Gray shoved him toward the center of the room.

"Where’s Renee?" Gray barked, looming threateningly over Amos, who shrank back.

Amos’s rheumy eyes darted around the room, as if looking for his wife. "Not here," he mumbled.

"I can see she isn’t here, you stupid bastard! I want to know where in hell she is!"

Amos weaved back and forth on his bare feet, and suddenly belched. He was bare-chested, his pants still gaping open. His uncombed hair stood out in all directions, he was unshaven, his eyes bloodshot, and his breath foul with sleep and drink. In contrast, Gray towered over him, six feet four of lean, steely muscle, his black hair neatly brushed back, his white shirt spotless and his slacks hand-tailored to fit him.

"You ain’t got no call to be shovin’ me around, I don’t care who your daddy is," Amos complained. Despite his bluster, he cowered back every time Gray moved.

Russ and Nicky had crowded out of their bedroom, but they made no move to back their father. Facing down a raging Gray Rouillard wasn’t their style; attacking anyone who could cause them trouble wasn’t their style.

"Do you know where Renee is?" Gray asked again, his voice icy.

Amos hitched one shoulder. "Must’ve gone out," he mumbled sullenly.

"When?"

"Whaddaya mean, when? I was in bed. How in hell would I know what time she left?"

"Did she come home last night?"

"Course she did! Gawddammit, what’re you sayin’?"

Amos yelled, the slur in his words testimony to the alcohol still in his blood.

"I’m saying your whore of a wife has left!" Gray yelled back, his dark face twisted with rage, his neck corded.

Pure terror sliced through Faith, and her vision blurred again. "No," she gasped.

Gray heard her, and his head snapped around. His dark eyes were glittering with fury as they raked over her. "You look sober, at least. Do you know where Renee is? Did she come home last night?"

Numbly Faith shook her head. Black disaster loomed in front of her, and her nostrils were filled with the sharp, yellow, acrid smell of fear… her own.

His upper lip curled, showing strong white teeth in a snarl. "I didn’t think so. She’s run away with my father."

Faith shook her head again, and then couldn’t seem to stop it from wagging. No. The word reverberated through her brain. God, please, no.

"You’re lyin’!" Amos yelled, tottering toward the rickety table and sagging into one of the chairs. "Renee wouldn’t leave me and our kids. She loves me. Your whore-hoppin’ pa’s out with some new piece he’s found – "

Gray lunged forward like a snake striking. His fist connected with Amos’s jaw, knuckles smashing against bone, and both Amos and the chair crashed to the floor. The chair splintered into kindling beneath him.

With a terrified wail, Scottie burrowed his face harder against Faith’s hip. She was too frozen to even put a comforting arm around his shoulders, and he began to cry.

Amos groggily scrambled up from the floor, and staggered to put the table between him and Gray. "Why’d you hit me?" he whined, holding his jaw. "I ain’t done nothin’ to you. Whatever Renee and your pa done, it ain’t my fault!"

"What’s all the yellin’ about?" came Jodie’s deliberately sultry voice, the one she put on whenever she was trying to entice a man. Faith looked toward the entrance to the lean-to, and her eyes widened with horror. Jodie posed against the doorframe, her uncombed reddish blond hair tossed back over her bare shoulders. She wore only a pair of red lace panties, and demurely held the matching lace camisole so that it barely covered her breasts. She blinked at Gray with wide-eyed innocence so blatantly false that Faith cringed inside.

Gray’s expression tightened with disgust as he glanced at her; his mouth curled and he deliberately turned his back. "I want you gone by nightfall," he said to Amos, his voice steely. "You stink up our land, and I’m tired of smelling you."

"Leave?" Amos croaked. "You high-and-mighty bastard, you can’t make us leave. There’re laws – "

"You don’t pay rent," Gray said, a cold, deadly smile twisting his lips. "Eviction laws don’t apply to trespassers. Get out." He turned and started toward the door.

"Wait!" Amos cried. His panicked gaze darted around the room as if looking for inspiration. He licked his lips. "Don’t be so hasty. Maybe… maybe they just took a little trip. They’ll come back. Yeah, that’s right. Renee’ll be back, she didn’t have no reason to leave."

Gray gave a harsh bark of laughter, his contemptuous gaze moving around the room, taking in the mean interior of the shack. Someone, probably the youngest girl, had made an effort to keep it clean, but it was like trying to hold back the tide. Amos and the two boys, who were younger editions of their father, sullenly watched him. The older girl still lounged in the doorway trying to show him as much of her tits as she could without actually dropping that scrap of cloth. The little boy with Down’s syndrome was clinging to the younger girl’s legs and bawling. The girl was standing as if turned to stone, staring at him with huge, blank green eyes. Her dark red hair hung untidily around her shoulders, and her bare feet were dirty.

Standing so close to him, Faith could read his expression, and she cringed inside as his gaze swept over the shack and its inhabitants, finally settling on her. He catalogued her life, her family, herself, and found it all worthless.

"No reason to leave?" he sneered. "My God, as far as I can tell, she doesn’t have a reason to come back!"

In the silence that followed, he stepped around Faith and shoved the screen door open. It banged against the side of the shack, then slammed shut. The Corvette’s engine roared to life, and a moment later Gray was gone. Faith stood frozen in the middle of the floor, with Scottie still clinging to her legs and crying. Her mind felt numb. She knew she needed to do something, but what? Gray had said they had to leave, and the enormity of it stunned her. Leave? Where would they go? She couldn’t make her mind start working. All she could do was lift her hand, which felt as heavy as lead, and smooth Scottie’s hair while saying, "It’s all right, it’s all right," even though she knew it was a lie. Mama was gone, and it would never be all right again.

Four

Gray managed to make it almost half a mile before the shaking became so hard that he had to stop the car. He leaned his head on the steering wheel and closed his eyes, trying to fight off the waves of panic. God, what was he going to do? He had never before been as scared as he was now.

Bewildered pain filled him, and he felt like a child who runs to hide his face in his mother’s lap, much as that Devlin kid had tried to hide against his sister’s skinny legs. But he couldn’t go to Noelle; even when he had been a child, she’d pulled away from clinging little hands, and he’d learned to go to his father for reassurance. Even had Noelle been more affectionate, he couldn’t look to her for support, because she would be looking to him for the same thing. Taking care of his mother and sister was his responsibility now.

Why had Guy done it? How could he have left? His father’s absence, his betrayal, made Gray feel as if his heart had been torn out. Guy had had Renee anyway; what had she offered that tempted him into turning his back on his children, his business, his heritage? Gray had always been close to his father, had grown up surrounded by his love, had always felt his support like a solid rock at his back, but now that loving, reassuring presence was gone, and with it the foundation of his life.

He was terrified. He was only twenty-two, and the problems looming over him looked like unscalable mountains. Noelle and Monica still didn’t know; somehow he had to find the strength to tell them. He had to be a rock for them, and he had to put aside his own pain and concentrate on holding the family finances together, or they stood to lose everything. This wasn’t the same situation it would have been if Guy had died, for Gray would have inherited the shares, the money, and the control. As it was now, Guy still owned everything, and he was gone. The Rouillard fortune could come tumbling down around their ears, with wary investors jumping ship and various boards of directors seizing power. Gray would have to fight like a son of a bitch to keep even half of what they now had.

He, Monica, and Noelle had some assets hi their own names, but it wouldn’t be enough. Guy had been giving Gray a crash course in managing it all, but hadn’t given him the power to do so, unless he’d left a letter giving Gray his proxy. Desperate hope reared its head. Any such letter, if it existed, would be in the desk in the study.

Failing that, he’d have to call Alex and get his help in laying out a strategy. Alex was a damn smart man and a good corporate lawyer; he could have had a much more lucrative practice somewhere else, but he was backed by his own family money and hadn’t felt the need to leave Prescott. He had handled all of Guy’s business, as well as being his best friend, so he knew as much or more about the legal situation as did Gray.

God knows, Gray thought bleakly, he’d need all the help he could get. If there wasn’t a letter of proxy, he’d be lucky to keep a roof over them.

When he raised his head from the steering wheel, he had regained his self-control, the pain pushed to the background and steely determination taking its place. By God, his mother and sister would have a hard enough time dealing with this as it was; he’d be damned if he let them lose their home, too.

He put the car into gear and drove away, leaving the last remnants of his boyhood behind on the rutted dirt track.

He went first into Prescott, to Alex’s office. He would have to move fast to salvage anything. Andrea broke into a smile when he came in, something women often did at the sight of him. Color heightened a little on her round, pleasant face. She was forty-five, old enough to be his mother, but age had nothing to do with her instinctive female reaction to his tall, muscular presence.

Gray automatically returned the smile, but his mind was racing with plans. "Is anyone with Alex? I need to see him."

"No, he’s alone. Go on in, hon."

Gray walked past her desk and into Alex’s office, firmly closing the door behind him. Alex looked up from the well-ordered mountain of files on his desk, and got to his feet. His good-looking face was taut with worry. "Did you find him?"

Gray shook his head. "Renee Devlin’s gone, too."

"Oh, God." Alex collapsed back into his chair and shut his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I can’t believe it. I didn’t think he was serious. My God, why would he be? He was – " He stopped and opened his eyes, flushing a little.

"Fucking her anyway," Gray finished bluntly. He walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down on the main street. Prescott was a small town, only about fifteen thousand citizens, but today traffic hummed around the courthouse square. Soon everyone down there would know that Guy Rouillard had left his wife and children and run off with the Devlin whore.

"Does your mama know?" Alex’s voice was strained.

Gray shook his head. "Not yet. I’ll tell her and Monica when I go home." The original shock and pain had gone, leaving behind a ruthless willpower and a certain remoteness, as if he were standing at a distance watching himself go through the motions. Some of that distance leaked into his tone, making him sound cool and steady. "Did Dad leave a letter of proxy with you?"

Until then, evidently, Alex had thought only of the personal ramifications of Guy’s defection. Now the legal aspects dawned on him, and his eyes widened with horror. "Shit," he said, lapsing into unusual vulgarity. "No, he didn’t. If he had, I’d have known he was serious about leaving and tried to stop him."

"There may be a letter in the desk at home. He may call in a day or so. If so, there’s no problem with the financial side of things. But if there isn’t a letter, and he doesn’t call… I can’t afford to wait. I’ll have to liquidate as much as I can, before news of this gets around and stock prices drop like a rock."

"He’ll call," Alex said feebly. "He has to. He can’t just walk away from this kind of financial obligation. A fortune is involved!"

Gray shrugged, his face a careful blank. "He walked away from his family. I can’t afford to assume that the business means more to him." He paused. "I don’t think he’ll come back or call. I think he meant to walk away from everything and never come back. He’s been teaching me as much as he could, and now I know why. If he had meant to stay in charge of everything, he wouldn’t have done that."

"Then there should be a letter of proxy," Alex said insistently. "Guy was too sharp of a businessman not to have taken care of that."

"Maybe, but I have Mother and Monica to think about. I can’t wait. I have to liquidate now, and get as much money as I can, so I’ll have something to work with and rebuild. If I don’t, and he doesn’t make arrangements, we won’t have a pot to piss in."

Alex swallowed, but he nodded. "Okay. I’ll start doing what I can to shore up your legal position, but I have to tell you, unless Guy gets back in touch or left a letter of proxy, it’s a mess. Everything is tied up unless Noelle divorces him and the court awards her half of his assets, but that will take time."

"I have to plan for the worst," Gray said. "I’ll go home and look for a letter, but don’t wait until you hear from me to get started. If there isn’t a letter, I’ll call the broker immediately and start selling. Either way, I’ll let you know. Keep it quiet until I call."

Alex got to his feet. "I won’t even let Andrea know." He shoved his hands through his dark hair, an indication of his worry, because Alex wasn’t given to nervous gestures. His gray eyes were dark with misery. "I’m sorry, Gray. I feel like this is my fault. I should have done something."

Gray shook his head. "Don’t blame yourself. Like you said, who would have thought he was serious? No, the only people I blame are Dad and Renee Devlin." He gave a wintry smile. "I can’t imagine anything she had being good enough to make him walk out on his family, but evidently it was." He paused, lost for a moment in the grimness of his thoughts, then shook himself and headed toward the door. "I’ll call you when I find out something."

After he had gone, Alex sank back into his chair, his movements stiff and feeble. He barely managed to control his expression when Andrea popped into the office, alive with curiosity. "What’s going on with Gray?"

"Nothing much. A personal matter he wanted to talk over with me."

She was disappointed that he didn’t confide in her. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"No, everything will be all right." He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. "Why don’t you go on to lunch, and bring me back a sandwich or something. I’m waiting for a call, so I can’t leave."

"Okay. What do you want?"

He waved his hand. "Anything. You know what I like. Surprise me."

She rambled around in the outer office for a few minutes, cutting off the computer he’d bought the year before, storing the disks, collecting her purse. After she’d gone, Alex waited a few minutes before going into the other room and locking the door. Then he sat down in her chair and turned on the computer, and swiftly began typing. "Damn you, Guy," he whispered. "You son of a bitch."

Gray parked the Corvette in front of the five wide steps leading up to the covered porch and double front doors, though Noelle frowned on that and preferred that the family’s cars be properly protected and out of sight in the attached garage behind. The front drive was for visitors, who shouldn’t be able to tell which family members were at home by the vehicles parked in front. That way, one felt no obligation to admit to being there, and thus forced to receive unwanted guests. Some of Noelle’s notions were positively Victorian; usually he indulged her, but today he had more important things on his mind, and was in a hurry.

He leaped up the steps with two strides, and pushed open the door. Monica had probably been watching from her bedroom window, because she was hurrying down the stairs, anxiety twisting her face. "Daddy still hasn’t come home!" she hissed, glancing toward the breakfast parlor, where Noelle was evidently lingering over a late breakfast. "Why did you break the window in his study, then light out of here like a cat with its tail on fire? And why did you park in front? Mother won’t like that."

Guy didn’t answer, but strode rapidly down the hall to the study, his bootheels thudding on the parquet floor. Monica rushed after him, and slipped into the study as he began examining, one by one, the papers on Guy’s desk.

"I don’t believe Alex told the truth about the poker game," she said, her lips trembling a little. "Call him again, Gray. Make him tell you where Daddy is."

"In a minute," Gray murmured, not sparing her a glance. None of the papers on top of the desk was a letter of proxy. He began opening drawers.

"Gray!" Her voice rose sharply. "Surely finding Daddy’s more important than looking through his desk!"

He stopped, took a deep breath, and straightened. "Monica, honey, sit down over there and hush," he said in a kind tone that nevertheless was underlaid with steel. "I have to look for a very important paper that Dad may have left here. I’ll be with you in a minute."

She opened her mouth to say something else, but he gave her a look that changed her mind. Silently, vague surprise on her face, she sat down, and Gray returned to his search.

Five minutes later, he sat back with the taste of defeat bitter in his mouth. There was no letter. It didn’t make sense. Why would Guy have gone to so much trouble to teach him everything, then leave without providing the proxies? As Alex had said, Guy was too smart not to have thought of it. If he intended to stay in charge himself, why had he bothered to give Gray such intense instruction? Maybe he had intended to turn over the reins to Gray, then changed his mind. That was the only other explanation there could be. In that case, they would be hearing from him again, within a few days at the most, because his financial dealings were too complicated to leave for longer than that.

But, as he’d told Alex, he couldn’t afford to assume things would be taken care of. He couldn’t imagine Guy not taking care of business, but until this morning he hadn’t been able to imagine Guy leaving them for Renee Devlin, either. The impossible had happened, so how could he blindly trust in anything else he had always assumed to be true of his father? Responsibility for his mother and sister weighed heavily on his shoulders. He couldn’t risk their welfare.

He reached for the telephone, but it wasn’t there. Dimly he remembered throwing it earlier, and glanced at the window that was now boarded over, awaiting new panes. He got up and walked out into the hallway, to the phone on the table at the foot of the stairs. Monica trailed after him, still silent but plainly resenting the restriction.

He called Alex first. Alex answered the phone on the first ring. "No letter," Gray said briefly. "See what you can do about getting power of attorney for me, or anything else that will shore up my position." Power of attorney was a long shot, but maybe a few strings could be pulled.

"I’ve already started," Alex said quietly.

Next Gray called his broker. His instructions were brief, and explicit. If worst came to worst, he would need every bit of ready cash he could scrape together.

Now for the hardest part. Monica was staring at him, her big, dark eyes filled with alarm. "Something’s wrong, isn’t it?" she asked.

He mentally braced himself, then took Monica’s hand in his. "Let’s go talk to Mother," he said.

She started to ask something else, but he shook his head. "I can only say it once," he said, his voice rough.

Noelle was enjoying her last cup of tea as she read the society section of the New Orleans newspaper. Prescott had its own small weekly paper, in which she was regularly mentioned, but being in the New Orleans paper was what really counted. Her name was listed there often enough to make her the envy of the rest of the parish society. She was dressed in her favorite white, with her sleek dark hair pulled back into a French twist. Her makeup was minimal but perfect, her jewelry expensive but understated. There was nothing gaudy or frivolous about Noelle, not one bow or ruffle or jarring bit of color, just clean, classic lines. Even her nails never wore anything but clear polish.

She looked up as Gray and Monica entered the breakfast parlor, and her gaze flicked briefly to their clasped hands. She didn’t comment on it, though, for that would express personal interest, and perhaps invite the same. "Good morning, Gray," she greeted him, her voice perfectly composed as always. Noelle could violently hate someone, but the person would never be able to tell by her voice; it never revealed warmth, affection, anger, or any other emotion. Such a display would be common, and Noelle allowed nothing about herself to sink to that low standard. "Shall I call for another pot of tea?"

"No, thank you, Mother. I need to talk to you and Monica; something serious has happened." He felt Monica’s hand tremble in his, and squeezed it reassuringly.

Noelle put aside the newspaper. "Should we be more private?" she asked, concerned that one of the servants would overhear them discussing a personal matter.

"There’s no need." Gray pulled out a chair for Monica, then stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder. Noelle would be upset because of the social nuances, the embarrassment of it, but Monica’s pain would be worse. "I don’t know of any way to make this easier. He didn’t leave a note or anything like that, but Dad seems to have left town with Renee Devlin. They’re both gone."

Noelle’s slender hand fluttered toward her throat. Monica was motionless, not even breathing.

"I’m sure he wouldn’t take a woman like that on a business trip," Noelle said with calm certainty. "Think how it would look."

"Mother – " Gray cut himself off, stifling his impatience. "He isn’t on a business trip. Dad and Renee Devlin have run away together. He won’t be coming back."

Monica gave a thin cry, and pressed both hands to her mouth to cut off the sound. Noelle’s face lost its color, but her movements were precise as she placed her teacup in the center of the saucer. "I’m sure you’re mistaken, dear. Your father wouldn’t risk his social position for – "

"For God’s sake, Mother!" Gray snapped, his tenuous control on his patience snapping like a thread. "Dad doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his social position. You’re the one it’s important to, not him!"

"Grayson, it isn’t necessary to be vulgar."

He ground his teeth together. It was typical of her to ignore something she found unpleasant and focus on the trivial. "Dad’s gone," he said, deliberately emphasizing the words. "He’s left you for Renee. They’ve run away together, and he won’t be coming back. No one else knows it yet, but it’ll probably be all over the parish by tomorrow morning."

Her eyes widened at that last sentence, and horror filled them as she realized the humiliation of her position. "No," she whispered. "He couldn’t do that to me."

"He did. It’s done."

Blindly she got to her feet, shaking her head. "He – he’s really gone?" she asked in a faint murmur. "He left me for that… that – " Unable to finish, she walked quickly from the room, almost as if she were fleeing.

As soon as Noelle was gone, as soon as she was no longer there to frown at unseemly displays, Monica wilted onto the table, falling forward to bury her face against her arm. Harsh sobs tore up from her throat and shook her slim body. Almost as angry at Noelle as he was at Guy, Gray knelt beside his sister and put his arms around her.

"It’s going to be tough," he said, "but we’ll get through this. I’m going to be really busy the next few days, getting our finances under control, but I’ll be here if you need me." He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that financial disaster was looming. "I know it hurts now, but we’ll make it all right."

"I hate him," Monica sobbed, her voice muffled. "He left us for that… that whore! I hope he doesn’t come back. I hate him, I never want to see him again!" Abruptly she tore away from him, overturning her chair as she shoved it back from the table. She was still sobbing as she ran from the parlor, and he heard the harsh, gulping sounds continue all the way up the stairs. A moment later the slam of her bedroom door echoed through the house.

Gray wanted to bury his own face in his hands. He wanted to punch something, preferably his father’s nose. He wanted to roar his rage to the heavens. The situation was bad enough as it was; why did Noelle have to make it worse by being concerned only with what her friends would say? For once, why couldn’t she give some support to her daughter? Couldn’t she see how much Monica needed her now? But she had never been there for them, so why should that change now? Unlike Guy, Noelle was at least constant.

He needed a drink, a stiff one. He left the breakfast parlor and went back to the study, to the bottle of Scotch that Guy always kept in the liquor cabinet behind his desk. Oriane, their longtime housekeeper, was going up the stairs with an armload of towels, and she gave him a curious look. Not being deaf, of course, she had heard some of the uproar. The speculation between Oriane, her husband, Garron, who took care of the grounds, and Delfina, the cook, would be rampant. They would have to be told, of course, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it right then. Maybe after he had that drink of Scotch.

He opened the cabinet and took out the bottle, and splashed a couple of inches of the amber liquid into a glass. The smoky, biting flavor was sharp on his tongue as he took the first sip, then threw the rest of it back with a neat, stiff motion of his wrist. He needed the sedative effect, not the taste. He had just poured himself a second drink when a shrill scream from upstairs pierced the air, followed by Oriane shrieking his name, over and over.

Monica. As soon as he heard Oriane scream, Gray knew. Dread congealed in his chest as he bolted from the study and took the stairs three at a time, his long, powerful legs propelling him upward. Oriane rushed down the hall toward him, her eyes wide with panic. "She’s cut herself, bad! Ohmigod, ohmigod, there’s blood all over the place – "

Gray pushed past her and ran into Monica’s bedroom. She wasn’t there, but the door to her bathroom was open, and he threw himself toward it, only to stop, frozen, in the doorway.

Monica had decorated her bedroom and bath herself, in delicate pinks and pearly whites that looked absurdly little-girlish. Normally Gray was reminded of cotton candy, but now the pink ceramic tile on the bathroom floor was covered with dark red splotches. Monica sat calmly on the fuzzy pink toilet lid, her big, dark eyes empty as she stared out the window. Her hands were neatly folded on her lap. Blood pulsed from the deep gashes she had made in both wrists, soaking her lap, running down her legs to pool on the floor.

"I’m sorry for the commotion," she said in an eerily remote little voice. "I didn’t expect Oriane to bring up clean towels."

"Jesus," he groaned, and snatched up the towels Oriane had dropped. He went down on one knee beside Monica and grabbed her left wrist. "Damn it, Monica, I ought to tan your ass!" He wrapped one towel around her wrist, then tied another one around it as tightly as he could.

"Just leave me alone," she whispered, trying to tug her arm away from him, but she was already frighteningly weak. "Shut up!" he barked, taking her right wrist and repeating the procedure. "Goddamn it, how could you do something this stupid?" This, on top of everything else he had gone through that day, was almost more than he could bear. Fear and rage mingled in his chest and swelled until he thought he would choke. "Did you stop to think about anyone but yourself? Did you think that maybe I could use your help, that this is as hard on everyone else as it is on you?" He ground the words out between clenched teeth as he snatched her up against his chest and ran, past Noelle, who was simply standing in the hallway with a dazed expression on her bloodless face, down the stairs, and past Oriane and Delfina clutching each other in the foyer.

"Call the clinic and let Dr. Bogarde know we’re on the way," he ordered as he carried Monica out the front door and down the steps, to the Corvette parked there. "I’ll get blood in your car," Monica protested feebly. "I told you to shut up," he snapped. "Don’t talk unless you have something sensible to say." Probably he was supposed to be more sensitive with someone who had just attempted suicide, but this was his sister, and he was damned if he would let her take her own life. He was in a towering rage, the fury just barely controlled. It seemed as if his life had gone to hell in just the past few hours, and he was fed up with the people he loved doing stupid things.

He didn’t bother opening the door of the Corvette, but simply leaned over and deposited her in the seat, then vaulted over her into the driver’s seat. He started the engine, let out the clutch, and left rubber on the driveway as he pushed the powerful motor to the limit. Monica slumped weakly against the passenger door, her eyes closed. He shot her a panicked glance, but didn’t risk taking the time to stop. She was deathly white, and there was a faint bluish tinge forming around her mouth. Blood was already seeping through the towels, the bright red garish against the white fabric. He had seen the cuts; they hadn’t been shallow slices, gestures made more to frighten and gain attention than seriously threaten a life. No, Monica had been very serious about the attempt. His sister might die because his father couldn’t resist chasing after that redheaded Devlin whore.

He made the fifteen-mile trip to the clinic in just under ten minutes. The parking lot was full, but he pulled around to the back door of the one-story brick building and blew the horn, then leaped out to lift Monica into his arms again. She was totally limp, her head lolling against his shoulder, and hot tears seared his eyelids.

The back door opened and Dr. Bogarde rushed out, followed by both his nurses. "Put her in the first room on the right," he said, and Gray turned sideways to get her through the doorway. Sadie Lee Fanchier, the senior nurse, held the door to the examining room open and he carried Monica inside, then gently deposited her on the narrow table, the sheet-covered vinyl creaking as it took her weight.

Sadie Lee was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around Monica’s arm even as Dr. Bogarde was untying Gray’s first-aid efforts. Quickly she pumped it up, then listened through the stethoscope pressed to the inside of Monica’s elbow. "Seventy-five over forty."

"Start an IV," Dr. Bogarde ordered. "Glucose." The other nurse, Kitty, moved to follow his instructions.

Dr. Bogarde kept his eyes on Monica’s wrists as he worked. "She needs blood," he said. "Fast. We have to get her to the hospital in Baton Rouge, because I can’t do it here. She’ll need a vascular specialist to repair her veins, too. I can stabilize her, Gray, but I can’t do any more than that."

Kitty hung the clear bag of glucose on the metal rack and deftly inserted the IV needle in Monica’s arm. "We don’t have time to get an ambulance here," the doctor continued. "We’ll take her ourselves, in my car. You okay to drive?" he asked Gray, shooting him a sharp glance.

"Yes." The answer was flat, unequivocal.

Dr. Bogarde tightly taped Monica’s wrists. "Okay, that’s got the bleeding stopped. Kitty, I need a couple of blankets. Put one over the backseat of my car, and tuck the other one over Monica. Gray, pick her up again, and be careful of that IV line. Sadie Lee, call the hospital and let ‘em know we’re on the way, and then give a call to the sheriffs department so they can clear the roads a mite."

Gently Gray lifted his sister. Dr. Bogarde took the glucose bag in one hand and his medical bag in the other, and trotted at Gray’s side as he carried Monica out to the doctor’s four-door Chrysler. The doctor climbed in first, then helped Gray carefully maneuver Monica onto the backseat. Dr. Bogarde hooked the glucose bag on the garment hanger over the side window, and took up a position on his knees on the floorboard.

"Don’t go slamming us around," he instructed as Gray squeezed his long frame under the steering wheel. Dr. Bogarde was barely five foot five, so the seat was so close to the steering wheel that Gray’s chest was brushing it. He couldn’t let the seat back, though, with Dr. Bogarde on the back floorboard. "Keep it at a steady speed and we’ll make better time. And put on the emergency lights."

Gray had a violent thought about backseat drivers, but he kept it to himself. Following orders, he left the clinic more sedately than he had arrived, though his instincts were screaming at him to push the gas pedal to the floorboard and keep it there. Only the knowledge that the roomy sedan, built more for comfort than road handling, would likely straighten out a curve if he pushed it the way he did the Corvette kept him at a reasonable speed.

"How’d this happen?" Dr. Bogarde asked.

Gray glanced at him in the rearview mirror. The doctor was a small, dapper man with shrewd blue eyes. Despite his name, he was neither Creole nor Cajun; he had to be in his mid-fifties, with graying, sandy blond hair. Gray had known him all of his life. Noelle had never gone to him, preferring an urbane physician in New Orleans, but everyone else in the family had been to see him with everything from childhood cuts to influenza to the broken arm Gray had received in spring practice when he was fifteen.

Gray didn’t want to tell him everything, preferring to keep the details quiet for a while longer until his broker had had time to sell and Alex had done his legal maneuvers, but it wouldn’t be possible to completely stifle the news. He gave Dr. Bogarde the central fact, the only one that mattered. "Dad and Mother have separated. Monica…" He hesitated.

Dr. Bogarde sighed. "I see." Everyone in the parish knew how Monica doted on Guy.

Gray concentrated on his driving. The Chrysler’s suspension evened out the bumpy roads, and the tires sang on the pavement. The sense of unreality he’d experienced earlier returned. The sun poured hotly through the window, burning his jean-clad leg, and the tall pines flashed by. The sky overhead was a deep, pure blue. It was high summer, and everything was as familiar as his own face. That was what was strange. How could it all be so unchanged, when his world had crashed around him today?

Behind him, Dr. Bogarde checked Monica’s pulse and blood pressure again. "Gray," he said quietly. "You’d better go faster."

Five

It was ten-thirty that night when Gray and Dr. Bogarde left the hospital in Baton Rouge. Gray’s eyes burned with fatigue, and he was numb from the emotional roller coaster he’d been on all day long. Monica had finally been stabilized and undergone surgery, and was sleeping peacefully, under sedation. She had gone into cardiac arrest soon after arriving at the hospital, but the emergency room team had gotten her heartbeat back almost immediately. She had been given four units of blood prior to surgery, and another two units in surgery. The doctor who had done the repair work thought there was no permanent damage in her right wrist, but she had severed a couple of tendons in her left wrist and might not regain full mobility there.

All that mattered to Gray was that she was going to live. She had awakened briefly when she was transferred from recovery to the private room he’d gotten for her, and had groggily murmured, "I’m sorry, Gray," when she had seen him. He didn’t know if she’d meant she was sorry she’d tried to kill herself, sorry that she hadn’t succeeded, or sorry that she had caused him so much worry. He chose to believe she meant the first possibility, because he couldn’t handle the thought that she might try again.

"I’ll drive," Dr. Bogarde said, reaching up to slap him on the shoulder. "You look like hell."

"I feel like hell," Gray rumbled. "I need a cup of coffee." He was just as glad to let Doc drive. His brain felt like a wasteland; it probably wouldn’t be safe for him to do the driving, and it was the doc’s car. His knees would still be sticking up under his chin, but at least he’d have room to breathe.

"I can manage that. There’s a McDonald’s a few blocks from here."

Gray folded and inserted himself, and thanked God that the Chrysler had a padded dashboard. If it hadn’t, his shins would have been black and blue.

Fifteen minutes later, with a large polystyrene cup of coffee gently steaming in his hand, he watched the streetlights of Baton Rouge slide past. Some of the happiest years of his life had been spent here, at LSU. He had prowled all over this city, a wild, energetic, perpetually homy kid on the hunt for action, and there was plenty of it. No one knew how to have more fun than a Cajun, and Baton Rouge was full of coon-asses. His four years here had been a ball.

It hadn’t been that long ago that he’d come home for good, only a couple of months, but it felt like a lifetime. This nightmarish, unending day had forever sealed away that high-spirited kid, leaving a definite line of demarcation between the two parts of his life. Gray had been growing up gradually, like most people, but today the full weight of adult responsibility had been dumped on his shoulders. They were broad enough to carry the load, so he’d braced himself and done what had to be done. If the man who emerged from the wreckage was grimmer and more ruthless than he’d been when he’d gotten out of bed that morning – well, if that was the price of survival, he’d gladly pay it.

More problems awaited him at home. Under these circumstances, most mothers would have had to be pried from their child’s bedside with a crowbar, but not Noelle. He hadn’t even been able to get her to the telephone. He’d talked instead to Oriane, who told him that Miss Noelle had locked herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out. At his instruction, Oriane had relayed the information that Monica would be all right, shouting it through the locked door. At least he had no fears that Noelle would try the same stunt Monica had pulled. He knew his mother too well; she was too self-centered to harm herself.

Despite the coffee, he dozed on the way home, and woke only when Dr. Bogarde stopped the car at the rear of the clinic. He’d left the top down on the Corvette, having more important things on his mind, so dew had collected on the seats. He’d have a wet ass on the drive home, and he was almost grateful. Maybe it would keep him awake.

"Will you be able to sleep tonight?" Dr. Bogarde asked. "I can give you something if you think you’ll need it."

Gray gave a short bark of laughter. "My problem will be staying awake until I get home."

"In that case, maybe you’d better sleep here at the clinic."

"Thanks, Doc, but if the hospital needs me, they’ll call me at home."

"All right. Be careful, then."

"I will." Gray swung his leg over the door of the ‘Vette and slid into the seat. Yep. A definite wet ass. The cool moisture made him shiver.

He left the top down, letting the air slap him in the face. The night smells were clear and sweet, fresher than when heated by the sun. As he left Prescott behind, the rural darkness closed in around him, soothing and protective.

One oasis of light disturbed the darkness, though. Jimmy Jo’s, the local roadhouse, was still booming. The gravel parking lot was crowded with cars and pickup trucks, the neon sign blinked in endless welcome, and the walls were thudding with the force of the music. As Gray neared, the black Corvette slicing through the night, a battered pickup shot out of the parking lot into his path, tires screeching as they grabbed for traction.

Gray stomped the brake pedal, bringing the ‘Vette to a sliding halt. The truck skidded sideways, almost overturned, then righted itself. His headlights caught the faces of the occupants, roaring with laughter as the one on the passenger side, waving a bottle of beer in his hand, leaned out and shouted something at Gray.

Gray froze. He couldn’t understand what had been shouted, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the occupants were Russ and Nicky Devlin, and that they were headed in the same direction he’d been going, toward Rouillard land.

The bastards hadn’t left. They were still on his property.

The rage built slowly. It was cold, but it was powerful. Oddly detached, he felt it come, starting at his feet and working up, as if transmuting the very cells of his body. It reached his abdomen and tightened the muscles, then filled his chest before spreading upward to explode in his brain. It was almost a relief, banishing the fatigue and mental fog, leaving his thought processes cool and precise even as all systems kicked into overdrive.

He turned the Corvette around and headed back toward Prescott. Sheriff Deese wouldn’t like being woken up this time of night, but Gray was a Rouillard, and the sheriff would do as he asked. Hell, he’d even enjoy it. Getting rid of the Devlins would cut the crime rate of the parish in half.

Faith hadn’t been able to relax all day. She had been almost sick with a sense of disaster and loss, unable to eat. Scottie, sensing her mood, had been whiny and fearful, continually clutching at her legs and getting in her way as she mechanically tried to do her chores.

After Gray had left that morning, Faith had numbly started packing, but Amos had slapped her on the side of the head and yelled at her not to be stupid. Renee might’ve gone off for a couple of days, but she’d be back, and old man Rouillard wouldn’t let that young son of a bitch run them out of their home.

Even in her misery, Faith wondered why Pa called Guy an old man, when he was a year younger than Pa.

After a while, Amos had gotten into his truck and gone in search of a drink. As soon as he was out of sight, Jodie darted into the bedroom and began going through Renee’s closet.

Faith followed her sister, and watched in bewilderment as she began tossing garments onto the bed. "What are you doing?"

"Mama won’t need these anymore," Jodie blithely replied. "Guy will buy her all new stuff. Why do you think she didn’t carry this with her? I can sure use it, though. She never would let me borrow any of her clothes." This last was said with a tinge of bitterness. She held up a tight yellow dress with sequins around the neckline. It had been oddly striking on Renee, with her dark red hair, but clashed horribly with Jodie’s carroty locks. "I had a hot date with Lane Foster last week and wanted to wear this, but she wouldn’t let me," she said resentfully. "I had to wear my old blue dress, and he’d seen it before."

"Don’t take Mama’s clothes," Faith protested, her eyes filling with tears.

Jodie gave her an exasperated look. "Why not? She won’t be needin’ them."

"Pa said she’ll come back."

Jodie hooted with laughter. "Pa don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Gray was right. Why on earth would she come back? Nan, even if Guy chickens out and goes running home to that ice cube he’s married to, Mama will get enough from him to keep herself real pretty for a long time."

"Then we’ll have to leave," Faith said, and a salty tear trickled down her cheek to puddle at the corner of her mouth. "We should be packing."

Jodie patted her on the shoulder. "Baby sister, you’re too innocent for your own good. Gray was mad as hell, but like as not, he won’t do anything. He was just shootin’ off his mouth. I think I’ll go see him, and maybe get the same kind of arrangement his pa had with Mama." She licked her lips, and a hungry look came over her face. "I’ve always wanted to find out if what he has in his britches is as big as I’ve heard it is."

Faith jerked away, jealousy slicing through her misery. Jodie didn’t have the sense to see that a snowball would have a better chance at surviving a Fourth of July picnic on the equator than she had of attracting Gray, but oh, how Faith envied her the gumption to try. She tried to imagine how powerful it would feel, to have the self-confidence to walk up to a man and be certain he found her attractive. Even when Gray turned Jodie down, it wouldn’t put a dent in her ego, because there were too many other boys and men panting after her. It would just make Gray more of a challenge to her.

But Faith had seen the cold contempt in his eyes that morning when he had surveyed the shack and its inhabitants, and shame had shriveled her soul. She had wanted to say, "I’m not like that," wanted him to look at her with admiration. But she was like that, as far as he was concerned, because she lived in this squalor.

Humming happily, Jodie took Renee’s gaudy rainbow of clothes into the back room, to try them on and put darts in the bodice, because Renee’s breasts were larger.

Barely choking back sobs, Faith grabbed Scottie by the hand and took him outside to play. She sat on a stump with her face buried in her hands while he pushed his little cars around in the dirt. Normally he would be happy doing that all day, but after about an hour he came over to her and curled up by her legs, and was soon asleep. She smoothed his hair, terrified by the faint blue tinge of his lips.

She rocked back and forth on the stump, her eyes stark with misery as she stared at nothing. Mama was gone, and Scottie was dying. There was no telling how much longer he could last, but she didn’t think it would be more than a year. As bad as things had been, at least there had been a kind of security, because things were the same day after day and she knew what to expect. Now everything had come apart, and she was terrified. She had learned how to get along, how to manage Pa and the boys, but nothing was going according to plan now and she was helpless. She hated the feeling, hated it with a ferocity that made her stomach knot.

Damn Mama, she thought rebelliously. And damn Guy Rouillard. All they had thought about was themselves, not their families, nor about the turmoil they would leave behind.

She hadn’t felt like a child in a long time. Responsibility had been pushed onto her frail shoulders at an early age, giving her eyes a solemn maturity that jarred with her youth, but now she acutely felt her lack of years. She was too young to do anything. She couldn’t take Scottie and leave, because she was too young to work and support them. She was too young even to live by herself, according to law. She was helpless, her life controlled totally by the whim of the adults around her.

She couldn’t even run away, because she couldn’t leave Scottie. No one else would look after him, and he was almost as helpless as an infant. She had to stay.

So she sat on the stump as the afternoon hours slid away, too miserable to go inside and do any of her regular chores. She felt as if she were on a guillotine, waiting for the blade to fall, and as evening approached the tension grew and stretched until every nerve ending felt raw and exposed, until she felt like screaming to shatter the waiting stillness. Scottie had awakened from his nap and played close by her legs, as if afraid to get too far from her.

But evening came, and the blade didn’t fall. Scottie was hungry, pulling at her, wanting to go in. Reluctantly Faith got up from the stump and took him inside just as Russ and Nicky left to go about their nightly carousing. Jodie dressed in the yellow dress she had coveted, and left too.

Maybe Jodie was right, Faith thought. Maybe Gray had just been blowing off steam, and hadn’t meant what he’d said. Maybe Guy had gotten in touch with his family sometime during the day, and somehow defused the situation. He could have changed his mind about leaving, and denied having Renee with him. Anything was possible.

No matter what, though, she didn’t expect Renee to come back. And without Renee, even if Guy did return to his family, there wouldn’t be any reason for him to let them stay on in the shack. It wasn’t much, but it was a roof over their heads, and it was free. No, it was no use hoping; she had to use her common sense. One way or another, maybe not right away but pretty soon, they were going to have to leave. If she knew Pa, though, he wouldn’t make a move to get out until he was forced. He would milk every free hour he could from the Rouillards.

She fed Scottie and bathed him, then put him to bed. For the second night in a row she had blessed privacy, and she hurried to take her own bath and put on her nightgown. But when she pulled out her precious book, she couldn’t concentrate enough to read. The scene that morning with Gray continually replayed itself in her mind, like film on a mental tape that just kept running. Every time she thought of that look of contempt in his eyes, pain expanded in her chest until she could barely breathe. She rolled over and buried her face in her pillow, fighting the hot tears. She loved him so, and he despised her, because she was a Devlin.

She dozed, exhausted by the restless night before and the trauma of the day. Always a light sleeper, as alert as a cat, she awakened and mentally checked the roll every time a member of the family came home. Pa came home first. He was drunk, of course, having gotten such an early start on the process, but for once he didn’t bellow for a supper that he wouldn’t eat anyway. Faith listened to his progress as he stumbled and lurched toward his bedroom. Moments later came the familiar, labored snoring.

Jodie came home about eleven, sullen and pouting. Her evening must not have gone as she had planned, Faith thought, but she lay quietly on her cot and didn’t ask. Jodie took off the yellow dress, wadded it up, and threw it into a corner. Then she flounced onto her own cot and turned her back.

It was an early night for everyone. The boys rolled in not long after, laughing and raising a ruckus, waking Scottie as usual. Faith didn’t get up, and soon things quieted down again.

They were all home, all except for Mama. Faith cried silently, wiping her tears with the thin sheet, and soon dozed again.

A huge crash brought her upright in the cot, confused and terrified. A bright light flashed in her eyes, blinding her, and a rough hand hauled her out of the cot. Faith screamed and tried to tear away from the painful grip on her arm, tried to dig in her heels and brace herself, but whoever it was jerked her off her feet as if she weighed no more than a child, and literally dragged her through the shack. Over her own terrified screams she could hear Scottie’s shrieks, hear Pa and the boys cussing and yelling, hear Jodie sobbing.

There was a semicircle of piercingly bright lights arranged out on the dirt yard, and Faith had a blurred impression of a lot of people, moving back and forth. The man holding her kicked open the screen door and shoved her outside. She tripped over the rickety steps and sprawled on her face in the dirt, her nightgown riding high on her legs. Rocks and grit skinned the hide from her knees and palms, and scraped a raw place on her forehead.

"Here," someone said. "Take the kid." Scottie was roughly deposited beside her. He was screaming hysterically, his round blue eyes blank and terrified. Faith scrambled to a sitting position, shoving her nightgown down over her legs, and gathered him into her arms.

Things were flying through the air, crashing and thudding all around her. She saw Amos, clinging to the doorframe as two men in brown uniforms bodily hauled him out of the house. Deputies, she thought, dazed. What were deputies doing out here, unless Pa or the boys had been caught stealing something? As she watched, one of the deputies cracked Amos’s fingers with his flashlight. Amos cried out and released the frame, and they tossed him into the yard. A chair came sailing out the door, and Faith ducked to the side. It hit the ground right where she had been, and splintered. Half crawling, with Scottie’s arms locked around her neck and dragging her down, she struggled toward the shelter of Pa’s old truck, where she huddled against the front tire.

Stunned, she stared at the nightmare scene, trying to make sense of it. Things were being tossed out windows, clothes and pots and dishes flying. The dishes were plastic, and made a huge clatter as they landed. A drawer of flatware was emptied out a window, the cheap stainless steel flashing in the lights of the patrol cars.

"Clean it out," she heard a deep voice growl. "I don’t want anything left inside."

Gray! The recognition of that beloved voice froze her, crouched there on the ground with Scottie clutched protectively to her. She found him almost immediately, his tall, powerful form standing with arms crossed over his chest, next to the sheriff.

"You ain’t got no call to do this to us!" Amos was bawling, trying to grab Gray by the arm. Gray shook him off with no more effort than if he’d been a pesky little dog. "You can’t throw us out in the middle of the night! What about my children, my poor little retarded boy? Ain’t you got no feelin’ at all, treatin’ a helpless child like that?"

"I told you to be out by nightfall, and I meant it," Gray snapped. "Gather up what you want to take with you, because in half an hour I’m setting fire to whatever is left."

"My clothes!" Jodie yelped, leaping out from between the safety of two cars. She began darting around the wreckage, grabbing up garments and discarding them when they proved to be someone else’s, draping her own over one shoulder.

Faith struggled to her feet with Scottie still clinging to her, desperation giving her strength. Their possessions were probably trash to Gray, but it was all they had. She managed to pry Scottie’s hands loose long enough for her to bend down and scoop up an armful of tangled clothes, which she tossed into the back of Amos’s truck. She didn’t know what belonged to whom, but it didn’t matter. She had to save as much as she could.

Scottie latched around her leg like a tick, determined to hang on. Hampered by him, Faith grabbed Amos’s arm and shook him. "Don’t just stand there!" she yelled urgently. "Help me get our things in the truck!"

He shoved her away, sending her sprawling. "Don’t tell me what to do, you stupid little bitch!"

She bounced up, not even feeling the extra bruises and scrapes, anesthetized by urgency. The boys were even drunker than Amos, staggering around and cussing. The deputies had finished emptying the shack now and were standing around, watching the show.

“Jodie, help me!" She clutched at Jodie as her sister stormed past, crying because she couldn’t find her clothes. "Grab what you can, as fast as you can. We’ll sort it out later. Gather all the clothes, and that way you know yours wiil be there." It was the only argument she could think of to gain Jodie’s cooperation.

The two girls began darting swiftly around the yard, gathering up every item they came to. Faith worked harder than she ever had in her life, her slender body bending and weaving, moving so fast that Scottie couldn’t keep up with her. He followed in her path, sobbing hoarsely, his pudgy little hands clutching at her whenever she came within reach.

Her mind was numb. She didn’t let herself think, couldn’t think. She moved automatically, cutting her hand on a broken bowl and not even noticing. One of the deputies did, though, and gruffly said, "Here, girl, you’re bleeding," and tied his handkerchief around her hand. She thanked him without knowing what she said.

She was too innocent, and too dazed, to realize how the lights of the cars shone through the thin fabric of her nightgown, silhouetting her youthful body, her slim thighs and high, graceful breasts. She bent and lifted, each change of position outlining a different part of her body, pulling the fabric tight across her breast and showing the small peak of her nipple, the next time revealing the round curve of her buttock. She was only fourteen, but in the stark, artificial light, with her long, thick hair flowing over her shoulders like dark flame, with the shadows catching the angle of her high cheekbones and darkening her eyes, her age wasn’t apparent.

What was apparent was her uncanny resemblance to Renee Devlin, a woman who had only to walk across a room to bring most men to some degree of arousal. Renee’s sensuality was sultry and vibrant, beckoning like a neon sign to male instincts. When the men looked at Faith, it wasn’t her whom they were seeing, but her mother.

Gray stood silently, watching the proceedings. The rage was still there, still cold and consuming, undiluted. Disgust filled him as the Devlins, father and sons, staggered around, cussing and making wild threats. With the sheriff and his deputies there, though, they weren’t going to do anything more than shoot off their mouths, so Gray ignored them. Amos had had a close call when he’d pushed the youngest girl down; Gray’s fists balled, but she had jumped up, apparently unhurt, and he had restrained himself.

The two girls were rushing around, valiantly trying to gather up the most necessary items. The male Devlins took out their vicious, stupid frustrations on the girls, snatching things from their arms and throwing the items to the ground, loudly proclaiming that no goddamn body was going to throw them out of their house, not to waste time picking things up because they weren’t goin’ nowhere, goddamn it. The oldest girl, Jodie, pleaded with them to help, but their drunken boasting drowned out her useless efforts.

The younger girl didn’t waste her time trying to reason with them, just moved silently back and forth, trying to bring order to chaos despite the clinging hands of the little boy. Despite himself, Gray found his gaze continually seeking her out, and himself unwillingly fascinated by the graceful, feminine outline of her body beneath that almost transparent nightgown. Her very silence drew attention to her, and when he glanced sharply around, he noticed that most of the deputies were watching her, too.

There was an odd maturity to her, and a trick of the lights gave him the strange feeling that he was looking at Renee rather than her daughter. The whore had taken his father from him, driven his mother into mental withdrawal, and nearly cost his sister her life, and here she was again, tempting men in her daughter’s flesh.

Jodie was more voluptuous, but she was noisy and cheap. Faith’s long, dark red hair swirled over the pearly sheen of her shoulders, bared by the straps of that nightgown. She looked older than he knew she was, not quite real, an incarnation of her mother drifting silently through the night, every move like a carnal dance.

Unwillingly, Gray felt his shaft stir and thicken, and he was disgusted with himself. He looked around at the deputies and saw his response mirrored in their eyes, an animal heat that they should be ashamed of having for a girl that young.

God, he was no better than his father. Give him a whiff of a Devlin woman and he was like a wild buck in rut, hard and ready. Monica had nearly died today because of Renee Devlin, and here he was watching Renee’s daughter with his cock twitching in his britches.

She walked toward him, carrying a pile of clothes. No, not toward him, but toward the truck behind him. Her green cat eyes flickered at him, the expression in them hooded and mysterious. His pulse leaped, and the look of her broke his tenuous hold on his temper. The events of the day piled up on him and he lashed out with devastating fierceness, wanting the Devlins to suffer as he had suffered.

"You’re trash," he said in a deep, harsh voice as the girl drew even with him. She halted, frozen to the spot, with the kid still clinging to her legs. She didn’t look at Gray, just stared straight ahead, and the stark, pure outline of her face enraged him even more. "Your whole family is trash. Your mother is a whore and your father is a thieving drunk. Get out of this parish and don’t ever come back."

Six

Twelve years later, Faith Devlin Hardy returned to Prescott, Louisiana.

Curiosity had been her companion on the drive up from Baton Rouge, and she hadn’t thought much beyond her reason for going back. Nothing about the road was familiar, because when she had lived in Prescott she’d seldom ventured farther than the small town, so no memories rose to link the past with the present, the girl with the woman.

But when she passed the Prescott city limit sign, when houses became closer together, forming actual streets and neighborhoods, when the tall pine and hardwood forests gave way to service stations and convenience stores, she felt an aching tension begin to grow in her. It increased when sheTeached the town square, with the redbrick courthouse looking exactly as it had in her memory. Cars still parked at angles all around the square, and park benches were still situated one to each side, for the old men to gather there on hot summer days, sheltering beneath the dense shade of the immense oak trees that grew on the square.

Some things had changed, of course. Some of the buildings were newer, while a few of the older ones were no longer there. Flower beds had been added to each corner of the courthouse square, no doubt by the enterprising Ladies’ Club, and pansies nodded their purple funny faces to passersby.

For the most part, though, things were the same, and the small differences only made the familiar stand out. The ache in her chest swelled until she could barely breathe, and her hands shook on the steering wheel. A piercing sense of sweetness went through her. Home.

It was so sharp that she had to stop the car, easing it into a parking slot in front of the courthouse. Her heart was pounding wildly, and she took deep breaths to steady herself. She hadn’t expected this, hadn’t expected the tug of roots she thought had been severed a dozen years before. It shook her, it exhilarated her. She had been led here by nothing more than puzzlement, wanting to know for certain what had happened after the Devlins had been forcibly escorted out of the parish, but this burgeoning sense of belonging pushed curiosity aside.

But she didn’t belong here, she told herself. Even when she had lived here, she had never really belonged, only been tolerated. Whenever she had gone into any store in town, she had been watched like a hawk, because everyone knew a Devlin would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. That wasn’t acceptance.

Knowing that, however, had no effect on her heart. Her instincts, her senses, recognized this as home. The rich, colorful scents that were like nowhere else on earth, the sights that had been imprinted on her brain from birth, the subtle influences of latitude and longitude that were recognized by every cell in her body, said that this was home. She had been born here, grown up here. Her memories of Prescott were bitter, but still it pulled at her with invisible strings she hadn’t even known existed. She hadn’t wanted this. She had wanted only to satisfy her curiosity, gain a sense of closure, so she could completely let go of the past and build her future.

It hadn’t been easy, coming back. Gray Rouillard’s words still burned in her memory as if it had been yesterday he’d said them rather than twelve years before. Sometimes she went for days without thinking of him, but the pain was always there – under control, but there, a permanent companion. Coming back made the memories more immediate, and she heard his voice echoing in her mind: You’re trash.

She drew in a deep, shaking breath, and inhaled the sweet green scent so bound up in memories of her childhood. Steadying herself, she made a more leisurely examination of the square, familiarizing herself once again with what had once been as well known as her own hand.

Some of the old businesses lining the square had been spruced up; the hardware store had a rock and cedar front now, and rustic double doors. A McDonald’s occupied the space where the Dairy Dip had been. A new bank had been built, and she’d bet money that it belonged to the Rouillards.

People walked by, glancing curiously at her as small-town people did at strangers, but no one recognized her. She hadn’t expected them to; twelve years had changed her from child into woman, and she had changed herself from helpless to capable, from poor to prosperous. In her tailored creamy business suit, with her heavy red hair tucked into a sophisticated twist and her eyes protected by sunglasses, there was nothing about her to remind people of Renee Devlin.

It was ironic, Faith supposed; Renee had been guilty as sin of most of the charges laid at her door, but she had been innocent of the one that had finally gotten the Devlins run out of town. She hadn’t run away with Guy Rouillard.

It was curiosity about exactly what Guy had done that had brought Faith back to Prescott after all these years. Had he been shacked up with a new girlfriend, and turned up a day or so later astonished at the uproar he’d caused? Had he been on a drinking spree, or maybe even a marathon poker game? Faith wanted to know. She wanted to come face-to-face with him, look him in the eye, and tell him what his irresponsibility had cost her.

She stared sightlessly at the courthouse square, memories washing over her. Her family had splintered after that dreadful night. They had driven as far as Baton Rouge before stopping for the night, sleeping in their vehicles. Amos had been alone in his truck, Russ and Nicky in their truck, with Jodie following in her old rattletrap of a car.

Faith and Scottie had been in the car with Jodie, Scottie asleep on Faith’s lap.

Looking back, most of what she remembered was terror and shame. Certain memories were frozen, crystal-clear in her mind: the blinding lights of the patrol cars, that moment of sheer terror when she had been dragged out of bed and pushed through the door onto the ground, Scottie’s shrieks. Sometimes she could even feel the way his hands had clung to her, feel the terrified pressure of his little body against her legs. The most acute memory, though, the one that echoed in her mind with painful clarity, was Gray looking at her with that paralyzing contempt.

She remembered desperately trying to gather their pitiful possessions. She remembered the long drive through the darkness; it hadn’t been that long, but had seemed to take forever, each second expanded so that a minute took an hour to pass. She didn’t remember sleeping, even after they got to Baton Rouge; she had sat stiffly, staring with burning eyes into nothing, cradling Scottie’s warm weight on her lap. Barely after dawn, a cop had run them off from the city park where they had stopped, and the shabby little caravan had started out again. They made it to Beaumont, Texas, before stopping again. Amos rented a motel room in the worst part of town, and the six of them crowded into it. At least it was a roof over their heads.

A week later, they got up one morning to find Amos gone, just as Renee had left, though Amos did at least take his clothes. Nicky and Russ handled the crisis by spending the meager remains of their cash on beer, and getting roaring drunk. Not long after that, Russ left, too.

Nicky tried. To his credit, he tried. He was only eighteen, but when suddenly faced with the care of his three younger siblings, he took what odd jobs he could. Jodie helped out by working at fast-food restaurants, but even with her help, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t long before the social workers came around, and Jodie, Faith, and Scottie were taken into the custody of the state. Nicky made a few noises of protest, but Faith could tell that he was mostly relieved. She never saw him again. Adoption wasn’t an option; Jodie and Faith were too old, and no one wanted Scottie. The best they could hope for was to be in the same foster home, where Faith could take care of Scottie. The best wasn’t what they got, but the alternative was workable, at least for Faith. Jodie went to one foster home, while Faith and Scottie went to another. All of Scottie’s care fell on her shoulders, but since she had been taking care of him since his birth anyway, that wasn’t a burden to her. That had been the condition under which they had been able to stay together, so she worked hard to fulfill her promise.

Jodie didn’t stay long at any one foster home, but was moved twice. Faith counted herself lucky in her foster home; the Greshams hadn’t had much, but they had been willing to share what they did have with foster kids. For the first time in her life, Faith saw how respectable people lived, and she soaked up the life like a sponge. It was an unfailing delight to her to come home from school to a clean house, to the smells of supper cooking. Her clothes, though inexpensive, were neat and as stylish as the Greshams could afford on the money they were given for her upkeep. At school, no one called her "a trashy Devlin." She learned what it was like to live in a house where the adults loved and respected each other, and her hungry heart reveled in the wonder of it.

Scottie was petted, and they bought new toys for him, though it wasn’t long before he began failing drastically. For Faith, the kindness that surrounded Scottie for the short time left of his life had been worth everything. For a little while, he had been happy. That first Christmas after Renee left had made him delirious with joy. He had sat for hours, too tired to play but content to stare at the twinkling lights on the Christmas tree. He had died in January, easing away in his sleep. Faith had known that the time was near and had started spending the nights in a chair by his bed. Something, perhaps the change in his breathing, had awakened her. So she took his stubby little hand in hers, and held it while his indrawn breaths came further and further apart, and finally, gently, ceased altogether. She had continued to hold his hand until she felt the growing coolness of his flesh, and only then did she wake the Greshams.

She had spent almost four full years with the kindly Greshams, Jodie finished high school, got married right away, and left for the bright lights of Houston. Faith was totally alone, all of her real family gone. She concentrated on school, ignoring the boys who continually pestered her for dates. She had been too numb, too traumatized by the upheaval in her life, to throw herself into the giddy teenage social whirl. The Greshams had shown her how good stability and respectability could be, how sweet, and that was what she wanted for herself. To that end, she focused all of her energy on building something out of the ashes to which her life had been reduced. After endless hours of study, she made valedictorian, and won a scholarship to a small college. Leaving the Greshams wasn’t easy, but with the state no longer paying for her upkeep, she had to move on. She worked two part-time jobs to support herself while going to school, but Faith didn’t mind hard work, having known little else for most of her life.

Her senior year in college, she fell in love with a graduate student, Kyle Hardy. They dated for six months, and got married the week after Faith was graduated. For a short while she had been almost dizzy with happiness, certain that dreams did come true, after all. The dream hadn’t lasted long, not even as long as her brief marriage. Faith had envisioned settling down, furnishing a cute little apartment, and saving for the future, which included kids, a nice house, and two cars. It hadn’t worked out that way. Despite the responsibilities of his new job, Kyle had continued to enjoy the heavy-drinking, freewheeling life he had enjoyed as a student. It had gotten the best of him one night, coming home from a bar, when his car went off a bridge. No other cars were involved, which was a blessing; when an autopsy was performed, it was found that his blood alcohol level was twice what was legal.

At twenty-two, Faith was alone again. She grieved, then doggedly rebuilt her life. She had a degree in business administration and money from the small life insurance policy Kyle had had, as well as that provided by his job. She moved to Dallas and got a job in a small travel agency; two years later, the agency belonged to her. It had already expanded to a branch in Houston; Faith took a leap of faith and spent her capital to open another branch, this time in New Orleans. To her joy, the business grew steadily.

She had achieved financial stability, and it was as wonderful as she had always imagined it would be, but she was aware of an aching emptiness in her life. She needed emotional solid ground, too. She didn’t want to become romantically involved with anyone; the two men she had dared to love, Gray Rouillard and Kyle Hardy, had both taught her how dangerous that was. But she still had family out there, somewhere, and she wanted to find them.

Vaguely she had recalled that her grandmother on Renee’s side had lived around Shreveport; Faith could remember seeing her only once in her life, and when the social services in Texas had tried to contact her grandmother, they hadn’t been able to find her. But the social services were overworked and understaffed, and had given up after a desultory search. Faith had more time, and more determination. She began calling around, and thankfully there weren’t that many Armsteads in the Shreveport area. She finally reached someone, a cousin on her grandfather Armstead’s side, who knew that Jeanette Armstead had moved to Jackson, Mississippi, about ten or twelve years ago, right after that oldest daughter of hers had turned up again.

Faith had been stunned. Her mother, Renee, had been the oldest daughter. But Renee had run away with Guy Rouillard; what had happened that she had sought out her mother? Was Guy still with her, or had he returned to the bosom of his family? A lot of years lay between the present and that horrible night in Prescott. For all she knew, Guy might have spent them very happily with his family, while her own family had been torn apart, destroyed.

Faith had called Information, gotten her grandmother’s number, and called. To her surprise, Renee had answered the phone. Even after all those years, she still remembered her mother’s voice. Startled, excited, she had identified herself. Their conversation had been awkward at first, but finally Faith got up the nerve to ask Renee what had happened with Guy Rouillard.

"What about him?" Renee had said, sounding bored. "Jodie told me that wild tale about me and him runnin’ off, but it was news to me. I got fed up with bein’ Amos’s punching bag and living like dirt, and God knows Guy Rouillard wasn’t goin’ to do nothing about it, so I just left, went up to Shreveport and moved in with Mama. Your aunt Wilma lives here in Jackson, so about a month after that, we moved here, too. I ain’t seen Guy Rouillard."

Faith had had trouble absorbing everything at once, there were so many thoughts flying in her head. Jodie had obviously found their mother, but neither of them had made any effort to get in touch with Faith. Renee could have gotten her two youngest children out of foster care, but she had been content to leave them where they were. She hadn’t even asked about Scottie, Faith noticed.

Then there was the mystery of Guy Rouillard. Maybe he hadn’t left with Renee, but he had left, at least temporarily, and by his leaving had set in motion the events that had shaped her life. Puzzled and intrigued, Faith decided to find out for certain what had happened. At the age of fourteen, she had literally been thrown out into the night like a piece of trash, and she had lived with that pain ever since. She needed to know the end of the story. She wanted to close out her past, so she could get on with hef future.

So here she sat, parked on the courthouse square in Prescott, swamped by memories and wasting time. It shouldn’t be very difficult to find out where Guy Rouillard had been for what was probably only that one day, that one crucial day that had totally altered her life.

Her first order of business, she supposed, was to find somewhere to stay for the night. She had flown into Baton Rouge that morning, conducted the business she had, then rented a car and driven to Prescott. It was late afternoon, and she was tired. It wouldn’t take long to find out what she wanted to know, but she didn’t want to make the drive back to Baton Rouge if she could get a motel room in Prescott.

There had been a motel twelve years ago, but it had been slightly seedy even then and might not still be there. It had been on the east side of town, on the road leading to 1-55.

She rolled down the car window and called to a woman walking down the sidewalk. "Excuse me. Is there a motel in town?"

The woman stopped, and came over to the side of the car. She was in her mid-forties and looked vaguely familiar, but Faith couldn’t place her. "Yes, there is," the woman replied, and turned to point. "Go to the corner of the square and turn right. It’s about a mile and a half that way."

It sounded like the same motel. Faith smiled. "Thank you."

"You’re welcome." The woman smiled and nodded, and returned to the sidewalk.

Faith reversed out of the parking space and maneuvered the small rental car into the leisurely traffic. Prescott didn’t bustle now any more than it had twelve years ago. In two minutes she reached the motel. It was in the same place, but it wasn’t the same motel. This one looked new, no more than a couple of years old, and much more substantial. It was still only one story, though this one was built in a U around a center courtyard where a fountain bubbled and flowers grew. It lacked a pool, which she didn’t mind. The fountain was much more charming.

The desk clerk was a man in his fifties, and his name tag read "Reuben." Memory stirred, and a last name surfaced to go with the first. Reuben Odell. One of his daughters had been in Faith’s class. He chatted as he took her credit card imprint, glancing curiously at the name, but nothing about "Faith D. Hardy" rang a bell in his memory. Faith wasn’t a common name, but probably he hadn’t even known her first name back then, so of course, he wouldn’t recognize it now.

"I’ll give you number twelve," he said, taking the key from its compartment. "It’s at the back of the courtyard, farther away from the road so the traflic won’t bother you."

‘‘Thank you." Faith smiled, and removed her sunglasses to sign the credit card slip. He blinked at her smile, his own expression growing fractionally warmer.

She parked the car at the rear of the courtyard, in front of number twelve. When she unlocked the door, she was pleasantly surprised. The room was larger than most motel rooms, with a love seat and coffee table close to the door, and a king-size bed beyond that. The dresser was long, with the television on one end, and a desk area on the end closest to the bathroom. The clothes rack was adequate, the vanity in the dressing area boasted two basins and was large enough for two people to get ready without continually bumping into each other. She looked into the bathroom, expecting the standard tub, but instead there was a sizeable shower stall with sliding doors. Since she never took a tub bath, she was pleased by the extra room to bathe. All in all, the little motel was a cut above the norm.

She unpacked her toiletries and the single change of clothes she’d brought, then plotted her course of action. There shouldn’t be much problem in finding out what she wanted to know, as long as no one recognized her as a Devlin. Small towns could have notoriously long memories, and the town of Prescott had belonged to the Rouillards heart and soul, as well as most of its brick.

The easiest and most anonymous way, probably, was to go to the library and look through the old newspapers. The Rouillards had constantly been in the news, so if Guy Rouillard had returned from his little jaunt and resumed business as usual, she wouldn’t have to check many editions before his name would crop up.

She checked her watch and saw that she probably wouldn’t have more than an hour to do what she’d come to do; from what she remembered about the small library, it closed about six p.m. during the summer, and in a town the size of Prescott, that wasn’t likely to change. She was hungry, but first things first; food could wait, the library wouldn’t.

It was odd how selective memory could be; she had never been to the motel when she had lived here, and had often gone to the library, whenever she’d gotten the chance, but she had remembered the motel’s location while she drew a blank on the library. She fished the small phone book out of the dresser and looked up the address, and after a moment remembered the library’s location. Grabbing her purse and keys, she went out to the car and drove back to downtown Prescott. Before, the library had been located behind the post office, but when she got there she was dismayed to find the building gone.

She looked around, and heaved a sigh of relief. A prominent sign in front of the new building next door to the post office proclaimed it the Prescott Library. The builders had disdained the sleekness of modern architecture and instead used an antebellum style, a redbrick two-story with four white columns out front, and shutters on the six-foot windows. There were plenty of parking spaces, probably more than needed, for only three cars were parked in the lot. Faith brought the total to four, parking in front and hurrying to the double doors. The sign posted on the left-hand door told her that she’d been right about the hours the library was open: nine a.m. to six p.m.

The librarian was a small, plump, chatty woman who wasn’t in the least familiar to Faith. She went up to the desk and asked where the old newspaper files were.

"Right over here," the woman said, coming out from behind the counter. "Everything’s on microfiche now, of course. Are you looking for any particular dates? I’ll show you how the microfiches are filed, and how to work the scanner."

"I’d appreciate that, thanks," said Faith. "I want to start about ten years ago, but I may have to go a little further back."

"That’s no problem. It would have been until a couple of years ago, but Mr. Rouillard insisted that everything be put on microfiche when we moved into this building. I declare, the system here was positively antiquated; it’s so much easier now."

"Mr. Rouillard?" asked Faith, keeping her tone casual despite the way her heart jumped. So Guy had come back.

"Gray Rouillard," said the librarian. "The family practically owns this town – the whole parish, come to that – but he’.s just as nice as he can be." She paused. "Are you from around here?"

"A long time ago," Faith replied. "My family moved away when I was a child. I thought I’d check the old obituaries for some of my parents’ cousins. We lost track of them through the years, but I’ve started working on a family tree and got curious about what happened to them." For a spur-of-the-moment explanation, it wasn’t bad. People trying to trace their family trees always made up the bulk of those using the microfiche machines, at least in her experience. From what she had gathered, listening to them talk and exchange tales of extended detective work that finally unearthed the whereabouts of Great-great-aunt Ruby on Mother’s side of the family, the quest could become addictive.

She had hit the right tone, for the librarian beamed. "Good luck, dear, I hope you find them. I’m Carlene DuBois. Call me if you need any help. We do close at six, though, and that’s less than an hour."

"It shouldn’t take long," said Faith, while searching her memory for a DuBois family in the parish. None came to mind, so perhaps they had moved to the area after the Devlin family had left so ignominiously.

Once she was alone, she quickly began scrolling through the files, scanning page after page of the Prescott Weekly, beginning from the date they had been escorted from the parish. She found several mentions of Gray, and though she tried to ignore them, she found that she couldn’t. Though that long-ago night had cured her of her infatuation for him, she had never been able to forget him; his image had lingered in her memory like a sore tooth, to be worried occasionally.

Helplessly giving in to the probing of that mental tongue, she scrolled back to the places where she had seen Gray’s name. The Weekly would never print anything derogatory or scandalous about the Rouillards – that was left to the Baton Rouge and New Orleans newspapers – but the normal comings and goings of the family were all duly reported to the inquiring minds that wanted to know, which was most of the parish. The first two tiny articles were mere mentions that Gray had attended such and such function. The third article was in the business section, and, stunned, Faith read it through twice before the words really sank in.

No one else would have seen anything alarming or even unusual in the sentence. "… Grayson Rouillard, who has taken financial control of the family enterprises, voted against the measure to…"

Taken control of the family enterprises. Why would he have done that? Guy would still have been in charge, for after all, everything had belonged to him. Faith glanced at the date of the newspaper. August fifth, not quite three weeks after Renee had left. What had happened?

She switched off the microfiche machine and sat back in the chair, staring at the blank screen. She had come back to Prescott only to tie off some loose ends in her life, to see that things had gone on as before. No one would have missed the Devlins; their absence would have been noted with relief, and then forgotten, but Faith had never been able to forget. She had thought that, once she had seen Prescott again, seen how no one had missed them, or even remembered them, she would be able to forget about the town in return. If she ran into Guy Rouillard, so much the better. She had never blamed Gray for what he’d done; she’d seen the pain in his face, heard it in his voice. But Guy… yes, she blamed him, and Renee. Even if they hadn’t run away together, Renee had walked out on her children, and Guy’s irresponsibility had caused a lot of suffering.

But Gray had taken over the family business. Instead of tying up all the old loose ends, she had found another one: Why had Gray taken charge?

She got up and went in search of Carlene DuBois. The front desk was empty, and the rest of the library appeared to be, too. "Mrs. DuBois?" she called, the sound absorbed and flattened by the rows of books. Carlene heard her, however, for there was the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the tile.

"Right here," said Carlene cheerfully, emerging from the back of the reference book section. "Did you find what you needed?"

"Yes, I did, thank you. I noticed something else that puzzjed me, though. It was just a little article, but it said that Gray Rouillard had taken over control of the family businesses. This was twelve years ago, and it seemed strange, because Gray had to have been only in his early twenties – "

"My, yes. You must have left before the big scandal, or maybe you were too young to pay much attention to that sort of thing. We moved to town, oh, eleven years ago, and it was still a hot topic of conversation then, I can tell you."

"What scandal?" Faith tensed, her puzzlement turning into alarm. Something wasn’t right.

"Why, when Guy Rouillard ran off with his mistress. I don’t know who she was, but everyone says she was nothing but trash. He must have absolutely lost his mind, is all I can say, to walk off from his family and fortune the way he did."

"He never came back?" Faith couldn’t hide her shock, but Carlene saw nothing wrong with that reaction.

"No one’s seen hide nor hair of him since then. When he left, he stayed gone. Some say his wife was enough to drive any man away, but I can’t say for sure myself, because I’ve never met her. Folks say she hasn’t left the house since the day he walked out. He never even bothered to get in touch with his own children again."

Faith was staggered. Guy Rouillard had adored his kids; regardless of his feelings for his wife, there had never been any doubt about how much he had loved Gray and Monica.

"I suppose Mrs. Rouillard divorced him?" she asked, but Carlene shook her head.

"Never has. Reckon she didn’t want him to be able to marry again, if he was so inclined. Anyway, as young as Mr. Gray was, he stepped into his father’s shoes and things carried on just as if Mr. Rouillard was still here. Probably better, from what folks say."

"I was too young to remember much about him," Faith lied. "I do remember that he was a sort of local hero, playing football at LSU, things like that."

"Well, honey, let me tell you, things haven’t changed much," Carlene said, and fanned herself with her hand. "Lordy, that man rates a ten on my scale, I can tell you. He makes my heart flutter, and me ten years older than he is and about to be a grandmother besides!" She blushed, but gave a surprisingly bawdy laugh. "It might be those bedroom eyes, or maybe it’s the hair. Or it could be that tight little butt!" She sighed dreamily. "He’s a scoundrel, all right, but who cares?"

"Does he know you’re sweet on him?" Faith teased.

"Honey, every woman in town is sweet on him, and yes, he knows it, the devil." Carlene gave her lusty laugh again. "My husband teases me about getting his ear pierced so he can compete."

Gray had a pierced ear? Faith found herself caught in imagination, and shook herself free. What she had learned was startling, and she needed to be alone so she could think things through.

She glanced at her watch. "It’s almost closing time, so I’d better clear out. Thanks for your help, Mrs. DuBois. It was nice meeting you."

"You, too." Carlene paused. "I’m sorry, I don’t believe I caught your name."

Because it hadn’t been thrown, but Faith saw no reason not to tell her. "I’m Faith Hardy," she said.

"Well, nice to meet you, Faith. That’s such a pretty, old-fashioned name. You don’t hear it much anymore."

"No, I suppose you don’t." Faith glanced at her watch again. "Good-bye. Thanks again for your help."

"Any time."

Faith drove back to the motel, stopping by McDonald’s for a sandwich. She didn’t particularly like fast food, but didn’t want to go to a restaurant where she might be recognized, so she made do. She ate half the sandwich and tossed the rest of it in the trash, too disturbed to have much of an appetite.

Guy Rouillard had disappeared. But if he hadn’t run away with Renee, what had happened to him?

Faith lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, trying to sort things out. Guy wouldn’t have walked away from his home, his family, his wealth, without a reason. Everyone had thought Renee was that reason, but Faith knew it wasn’t so. And even if he had simply gotten fed up with his marriage, why hadn’t he just gotten a divorce? The Rouillards were Catholic, but divorce wasn’t a problem unless he wanted to remarry. But he had never seemed to be an unhappy man; why should he be? His world had been the way he wanted it. She couldn’t think of any reason why he would have left so abruptly, without word, and never tried to contact his family.

Unless he was dead.

The possibility – no, the probability – was stunning. Faith felt almost sick at the idea as she considered and rejected scenarios. He might have simply gone away for a couple of days and suddenly gotten sick, or maybe had an accident, but if either of those possibilities had been the case, he would have been found, identified, his family notified. That hadn’t happened. Guy Rouillard had disappeared, on the same night her mother had run away.

Dear God, had Renee killed him? Faith sat up and distractedly ran her hands through her hair. She couldn’t dismiss the thought, even though she couldn’t see her mother doing such a thing. Renee had the morals of an alley cat, but she wasn’t, never had been, a violent person.

Amos, then? Faith could better envision that. If he’d thought he could get away with it, Amos had been capable of anything. But she remembered that night well; Amos had staggered home around nine, already falling down drunk and swearing at her because Renee wasn’t at home. Both Russ and Nicky, also drunk, had come home after that. Could one of them have killed Guy Rouillard, or perhaps even both of them? But nothing had seemed out of the ordinary, and Faith would have sworn they had been as surprised as she when Renee didn’t come home. More than that, they simply hadn’t cared thai their mother was sleeping with Guy; neither had Amos, for that matter.

Who else was possible? Maybe Mrs. Rouillard. Maybe Noelle had killed her husband because she was tired of his unfaithfulness, though from all reports he had been sleeping around since the beginning of their marriage, and she had never seemed to care, had even been grateful. His affair with Renee had been going on for years; why should she suddenly object to it? No, Faith doubted Noelle had cared enough even to scold him, much less go to the trouble of murder.

That left one person: Gray.

Forcefully she rejected that thought. No, not Gray. She remembered his face as it had been when he had come to the shack that morning, and as he had been that awful night. She remembered his fury, his implacable hatred. Gray had thought his father had run away with her mother, and he’d been in a rage.

But Gray had had the most to gain from his father’s death. With Guy gone, he had taken over the reins to the Rouillard fortune, and made himself even wealthier, from what the librarian had said. He had been groomed from the day of his birth to one day step into his father’s shoes; had he gotten tired of waiting, and put Guy out of the way?

Faith’s thoughts darted around like a squirrel in a cage, banging against the bars. The door rattled under the force of several heavy blows and she jumped, startled and not a little alarmed. Why would anyone be at her door? No one knew where she was, so there couldn’t be a message from her office. She got up and went to the door, but didn’t open it. There wasn’t a peephole, either, she noticed. "Who is it?"

"Gray Rouillard."

Her heart almost stopped beating. It had been twelve years since she had heard that deep, smoky voice, but she went weak at the sound of it, excitement mingled with fear. He had hurt her worse than anyone else in her life, but still he had the power to electrify every cell in her body with nothing but his voice. Just hearing him again made her feel like the child she had been at fourteen, all shivery and agitated at his nearness. And always, always, was that ugly counterweight pulling her in the opposite direction, the stark memory of him saying, You’re trash. She had never been able to find any balance where Gray was concerned, had never been able to forget him, dream and nightmare combined.

The timing of his arrival made her skin prickle. Had she conjured him up with her thoughts? She stood there for so long that the door rattled again under the impact of his fist.

"Open up." In his tone was the iron authority of someone who expected to be obeyed, immediately, and intended to see that he was.

Cautiously she unchained the door and opened it, and looked up at the man she hadn’t seen for a dozen years. It didn’t matter. No matter how long it had been, she would have recognized him. He stood there in the doorway, disdaining to come in, and the impact of his physical presence took her breath.

He was bigger than she remembered, but then six four always seemed taller when you were looking up at it. His waist and hips were still lean, but he was heavier through the chest and shoulders, having achieved the hard solidity of manhood. And he was definitely a man, all hint of boyhood long gone. His face was leaner, stronger, more harsh, with grooves bracketing his mouth and lines of maturity at the corners of his eyes. She stared up into the face of a pirate, and knew why Carlene DuBois had gotten the shivers at the mere mention of his name. His black hair was longer than she had ever seen it before, pulled back from his face and secured at the nape of his neck. A tiny diamond winked in his left earlobe. At twenty-two, he had been impressive. At thirty-four, he was dangerous, a pirate in nature as well as appearance. Looking at him made her feel hot and shivery all at once, her heart suddenly pounding so hard, she wondered that he couldn’t hear it. She recognized the symptoms, and hated her sickness. God, was she doomed to spend her entire life going weak at the sight or sound of Gray Rouillard? Why couldn’t she get beyond that leftover childhood reaction?

Above the thin blade of his nose, his sinfully dark eyes were still cold and implacable.

The sensual line of his mouth twisted as he looked down at her. "Faith Devlin," he said. "Reuben was right; you look just like your mother."

But if he had changed, so had she. Faith had won her confidence the hard way. She gave him a cool little smile and said, "Thank you."

"It wasn’t a compliment. I don’t know why you’re here, and it doesn’t matter. This motel belongs to me. You aren’t welcome. You have half an hour to get packed and get out." He gave her a wolfish smile that wasn’t really a smile. "Or do I have to call the sheriff again to get rid of you?"

The memory of that night lay between them, so strong that it was almost tangible. For a moment she saw again the lights, felt the confused terror, but she refused to let him throw her into a state of panic. Instead she gave a graceful shrug and turned away from him, strolling into the small dressing area, where she efficiently swept her few toiletries into her overnight case and took her single change of clothes from the rack. Acutely aware of those dark eyes boring a hole through her, Faith folded the clothes over her arm, slipped on her shoes, picked up her purse, and sauntered past him without ever changing her calm expression.

As she drove away from the motel, on her way back to Baton Rouge, he was still standing in the open door staring after her.

Faith Devlin! How about that for a blast from the past? Gray stood watching her taillights until they disappeared from view. When Reuben had called to tell him that a woman who was the spitting image of Renee Devlin had checked into the motel, and that she had registered as Faith D. Hardy, he’d had no doubt about her identity. So one of the Devlin spawn had finally worked up the nerve to come back to Prescott! He wasn’t surprised that it was Faith. She had always had more backbone than the rest of the bunch put together. Which didn’t mean he’d been inclined to let her stay.

He turned back into the lighted room that she had abandoned with so little fuss. Without any fuss, damn it. If he’d wanted a fight, she hadn’t obliged him. She hadn’t even asked for a refund on her credit card. Without so much as a flicker of an eyelash, she had gathered up her stuff and left. It hadn’t taken a minute; hell, he doubted it had taken her thirty seconds.

She was gone, and except for the wrinkled bedspread, the room was as pristine as if she’d never been there, but her presence still lingered. There was a sweet, faintly spicy scent in the air that overrode the staleness endemic to all motel rooms, and his blood stirred in instinctive reaction to it. It was the smell of woman, universal in some ways, exclusive to her in others. He stepped farther into the room, drawn by that elusive scent, his nostrils flaring like a stallion’s.

F.aith Devlin. Just hearing her name had brought back that night and he had seen her again in his mind, silent and willowy, with that dark-fire hair tumbling over her shoulders and her slender body silhouetted inside her thin nightgown, weaving a sensual spell over the deputies and himself. She had been only a kid then, for God’s sake, but she had had her mother’s sultry aura even then.

When she had opened the door to this room and he had seen her again, he had been stunned. She looked so much like Renee that he’d wanted to throttle her, but at the same time there was no mistaking her for her mother. Faith was a little taller, still more slender than voluptuous, though she had filled out nicely in the twelve years since he’d last seen her. Her coloring was the same as Renee’s: the dark red mane, the slumberous gold-flecked green eyes, the translucent skin. What had infuriated him, though, was her eifort-less sensuality, and his own unwilling reaction to it. It wasn’t anything she had said or done, or even what she’d been wearing, which had been a stylish business suit. A Devlin wearing a suit, by God! No, it had been something intrinsic in her nature, something Renee had also possessed. The older daughter – he couldn’t remember her name – hadn’t had that potent allure. She had been easy and cheap, not sexy. Faith was sexy. Not overtly so, as Renee had been, but just as potent. He had looked into those cat eyes and thought of the bed just behind her, thought of tangled sheets and hot flesh, of having her naked beneath him and feeling her thighs clasp his hips just as he found the soft opening between her legs and pushed deep inside…

Gray broke out in a sweat and swore aloud in the empty room. Damn, he was as bad as his father! Give him a whiff, and he was ready to forget everything else in his rush to screw a Devlin woman. No, not every Devlin woman, he mentally amended. Thank God for that, at least. He had seen Renee’s potent appeal but found it resistible, and the idea of sharing a woman with his father repellent. Nothing about the older girl had been attractive to him. Faith, though… If she were anyone but a Devlin, he wouldn’t rest until he had her in bed and settled down to a long, hard ride.

But she was a Devlin, and just the mention of that name made him furious. His family had been wrecked because of Renee, and he could never forgive or forget that. Forgetting was impossible, when he lived every day with the results of Guy’s desertion. His mother had withdrawn until she was just a shell of her former self. She hadn’t left her bedroom for over two years, and even now refused to venture from the house except for doctors’ appointments in New Orleans, on those rare occasions when she was ill. Gray had lost his father, and to all intents and purposes had also lost his mother.

Noelle was a silent, sad ghost of a woman who spent most of her time in her room. Only Alex Chelette could coax her into a little smile and bring a hint of life to her blue eyes. Gray had realized some time ago that Alex had fallen in love with his mother, but it was a hopeless cause. Not only was Noelle oblivious to his devotion, she wouldn’t have done anything about it if she had been aware of it. She was married to Guy Rouillard, and that was that. Divorce was unthinkable. Gray sometimes wondered if Noelle was still clinging to the hope that Guy would come back. He himself had long ago accepted that he would never see his father again. If Guy had intended to come back, he wouldn’t have sent that letter of proxy which Gray had received two days after his disappearence. It had been mailed in Baton Rouge the day he left; the language had been terse and to the point, with nothing personal included. He hadn’t even signed it "Love, Dad," but limited himself to a businesslike "Sincerely, Guy A. Rouillard." When he had read that, Gray had known that Guy was gone from his life forever, and his eyes had burned with tears for the first and only time.

He didn’t know what he would have done without Alex those first desperate months when he had been scrambling to solidify his position with the stockholders and various boards of directors. Alex had guided him through the rocky shoals, fought with him for every advantage, done whatever he could to help with Noelle and Monica. Alex had grieved, too, for the loss of his best friend. Guy and Alex had grown up together, been as close as brothers. He had been stunned that Guy would actually turn his back on his family for the sake of Renee Devlin, and had left without even saying good-bye.

In some ways, Monica was stronger now than she had been before. She wasn’t as emotionally needy, so dependent on others. She had quietly apologized to Gray for her suicide attempt, and assured him that she would never do something that stupid again. But if she was stronger, she was also more remote, as if that paroxysm of pain and grief had burned out her excess of emotion, leaving her calm but also distant. She had interested herself in his work and gradually became an excellent assistant, one on whom he could rely with every faith in her judgment and ability, but she was almost as reclusive as Noelle. Monica did go out into the community; she was particular about her appearance and got her hair styled regularly, and made an effort to dress well. She hadn’t dated for years, though. At first Gray thought she was embarrassed by her suicide attempt, and would relax as the scars faded. She hadn’t, though, and eventually he had realized that it wasn’t embarrassment that had kept her at home. Monica simply wasn’t interested in socializing with anyone. She would do it at a business function, but on a personal level she refused all invitations, and steadfastly turned aside his suggestions that she reenter the dating scene. All he could do to bolster her confidence was show her how he trusted her in their work, and pay her a good salary so she would have a tangible proof of her worth, and a sense of independence.

Last year, though, the new sheriff, Michael McFane, had somehow talked her into going out with him. Monica had been seeing him fairly regularly since then. Gray had been so relieved, he could have cried. Maybe, just maybe, Monica had a shot at a normal life, after all.

No, he would never forget what the Devlins had done to his family. And with luck, he would never see Faith Devlin again.

Thank you. Those had been the only words she’d uttered, other than to ask who was at the door. She had been cool and enigmatic, watching him as if faintly amused, her poise unshaken by his threat. It hadn’t been a threat, though, but a promise. He would have had her escorted out of the parish for a second time if she hadn’t left on her own. And he would have had to call the sheriff, because if he had touched her himself, he would have lost control, and he had known it.

She was a woman now, not the kid he remembered. She had always been different from the rest of the Devlins, a fey woodland creature who had grown up to be as much of a temptation as her mother. Some poor fool had evidently thought so, because the fact that her last name was now Hardy meant that she was married, though she hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring. He had noticed her hands, slim, elegant, well kept, and been cynically amused by the absence of a wedding band. Renee hadn’t worn one, either; it had cramped her style. Evidently her daughter felt the same way, at least when she was traveling sans the unknown Mr. Hardy.

She had looked prosperous, so, like a cat, she had landed on her feet. Gray wasn’t surprised. It had always been a particular talent of the Devlin women that they could always find someone to support them. Her husband must be a good provider, the poor sap. He wondered how often she left her husband at home while she rambled.

And he wondered why she had come back to Prescott. There was nothing for her here, no family, no friends. The Devlins hadn’t had friends, only victims. She had to have known she wouldn’t be welcomed back with open arms. Probably she had thought she could slip in without anyone being the wiser, but folks around here had long memories, and her resemblance to her mother was too marked. Reuben had recognized her as soon as she’d taken off her sunglasses.

Well, it didn’t make any difference. He had rid the parish of the Devlin vermin for the second time, and with a hell of a lot less trouble than it had been twelve years ago. He just wished she hadn’t come back at all, hadn’t revived the potent memory of his unwilling response to her, hadn’t replaced his image of her as a young girl with the image of her as she was now, a woman. He wished he had never heard her soft, cool voice saying, "Thank you."

Faith drove steadily along the dark road, not letting herself stop even though her insides were shaking like jelly. She refused to let her reaction get the best of her. She had learned the hard way what Gray Rouillard thought of her, dealt with the shock and pain years ago. She would not let him hurt her again, or get the best of her. She hadn’t had any choice but to leave the motel, because she had seen the ruthless determination in his eyes and known he hadn’t been bluffing about having her thrown out. Why should he balk at that, when he hadn’t balked at having her entire family removed? Her calm acquiescence didn’t mean, however, that he had won.

The threat of the sheriff hadn’t frightened her. What had her both scared and angry was the intensity of her reaction to Gray. Even after all those years, after what he had done to her family, she was as helpless as a Pavlovian dog to stop her response to him. It was infuriating. She hadn’t rebuilt her life just to let him reduce her to the status of trash, to be gotten rid of as soon as possible.

The day had long passed when she could be intimidated. The quiet, vulnerable child she had been had died one hot summer night twelve years ago. Faith was still a fairly quiet person, but she had learned how to survive, how to use her own steely will and determination to get what she wanted out of life. She had even become confident enough to indulge in her redheaded temper from time to time. If he had wanted to get rid of her, Gray had made a mistake in forcing the issue. He would soon learn that what looked like a retreat just meant she was adjusting her position for attack from another angle.

She couldn’t let him run her off again. Not only was it a matter of honor, she still hadn’t found out what had happened to Guy. She couldn’t forget about it, couldn’t let it go.

A plan began to form in her agile mind, and a smile touched her lips as she drove. Gray would find himself outflanked before he knew it. She was going to move to Prescott, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop it, because she would be ensconced before he knew it. It was past time she faced all of her old ghosts, cemented her own self-respect. She would prove herself to the town that had looked down on her, and then she could forget about the past.

And she wanted to prove to Gray that he had been wrong about her from the beginning. She wanted that so fiercely that she could taste it, the victory sweet in her mouth. Because she had loved him so intensely as a child, because he had been the stern, ruthless judge and executioner, so to speak, on the night when he had run them out of the parish, he had assumed far too much importance in her mind. It shouldn’t be that way, she should have been able to forget him, but the fact was there: She wouldn’t/*?*?/ like anything other than trash until Gray was forced to admit that she was a decent, moral, successful person.

She didn’t just want to find out what had happened to Guy. Maybe it had begun as that, or maybe she had hidden the truth from herself, but now she knew.

She wanted to go home.

Seven

"Yes, that’s right. I want everything handled in the agency’s name. Thank you, Mr. Bible. I knew I could count on you." Faith’s smile was warm in her voice, something Mr. Bible must have heard, because his reply made her laugh aloud. "You’d better be careful," she teased. "Remember, I know your wife."

She hung up the phone and her assistant, Margot Stanley, gave her a rueful look. "Was that old goat flirting with you?" Margot asked.

"Of course," Faith said good-naturedly. "He always does. It gives him a thrill if he thinks he’s being wicked, but he’s actually a sweet old guy."

Margot snorted. "Sweet? Harley Bible’s as sweet as a rattlesnake. Let’s face it, you have a way with men."

Faith restrained herself from an unladylike snort. If Margot had seen Gray run her out of town – again – she wouldn’t think Faith had such a "way" with men. "I’m just nice to him, is all. It’s nothing special. And he can’t be as bad as you say he is, or he wouldn’t still be in business."

"He’s still in business because the old fart is a smart businessman," Margot said. "He has an evil genius for sniffing out prime property right before it becomes prime, and buying it up for a song. Damn him, people only go to him because he has the land they want."

Faith grinned. "Like you said, a smart businessman. He’s always been as nice as he can be to me."

She might have restrained herself from snorting, but Margot had no such inhibition. "I’ve never seen a man who wasn ‘t nice to you. How many times have you been stopped for speeding?"

"All total?"

"Just this past year will do."

"Ummm… four times, I think. But that’s unusual; it’s just that I’ve been traveling so much this past year."

"Uh-huh. And how many times have you gotten a ticket?"

"None," Faith admitted, rolling her eyes. "That’s just coincidence. Not once have I tried to talk my way out of it."

"You don’t have to, and that’s my point. The cop walks up to your car, you hand him your license and say, ‘I’m sorry, I know I was flying,’ and he ends up handing your license back and telling you to slow down, because he’d hate to see your pretty face all cut up in an accident."

Faith burst out laughing, because Margot had been in the car with her when she had been stopped that time. The Texas state trooper in question had been a burly gentleman of the old school, with a thick gray mustache and a drawl as slow as molasses. "That’s the only time a cop has said anything about my ‘pretty face,’ quote and unquote."

"But they were all thinking it. Admit it. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket?"

"Well, no." She controlled her amusement. Margot had gotten two speeding tickets within the past six months, and now was having to stick strictly to the speed limit, to her great resentment, because a third ticket would result in the temporary loss of her driver’s license.

"You can bet neither one of the cops who stopped me said anything about slowing down before I got my pretty face all cut up," Margot muttered. "No sirree, they were pure business. ‘Let me see your license, ma’am. You were doing sixty-five in a fifty-five zone, ma’am. Your court date will be such and such, or you can mail in your fine by such and such date and waive your right to a court appearance.’" She sounded so disgusted that Faith had to turn away to keep from laughing in her face. Margot didn’t see anything funny about her two speeding tickets.

"I’d never had a ticket before in my life," Margot continued, scowling. Faith had heard it many times before, so that she could almost say the words in unison with her friend. "I’ve been driving for half my life without so much as a parking ticket, and then all of a sudden the damn things seem to be coming out of the woodwork."

"You make it sound as if you could paper your walls with them."

"Don’t laugh. Two tickets are pretty damn serious, and a third one is a catastrophe. I’ll be poking along at fifty-five for two years. Do you know how much this throws off a schedule? I have to get up earlier and leave earlier, everywhere I go, because it takes me so long to get there!" She sounded so aggrieved that Faith gave up the struggle and began giggling helplessly.

Margot was a joy. She was thirty-six, divorced, and had absolutely no intention of staying that way. Faith didn’t know what she would have done without her. When she had finally scraped up enough money to buy the agency, she had known how to handle the customer part of the business, but despite her college degree in administration, there was a great deal of difference between textbooks and real life. Margot had been assistant to J. B. Holladay, the previous owner of Holladay Travel, and had been glad to handle the same duties for Faith. Her experience had been invaluable. She had kept Faith from making some serious mistakes in financial matters.

More than that, Margot had become a friend. She was a tall, lean woman with bleached blond hair and a dramatic flair for clothes. She made no bones about being in search of a new husband – "Men are a lot of trouble, honey, but they do have their good points, one big one in particular" – and was so good-natured about it that she had no trouble getting dates. Her social life would have exhausted the strongest debutante. For her to claim that Faith had a way with men, when Faith seldom went out with anyone and she herself was seldom at home, was pushing it a bit, in Faith’s opinion.

"Don’t laugh," Margot warned. "You’re going to be stopped by a female cop one of these days, and that’s when your luck will run out."

"That’s all it is, luck."

"Sure it is." Margot abandoned that subject and gave her a curious look. "Now, what’s this about a house in Godforsaken Louisiana?"

"Prescott," Faith corrected, smiling. "It’s a little town north of Baton Rouge, almost at the Mississippi state line."

Margot snorted again. "That’s what I said. Godforsaken."

"It’s my hometown. I was born there."

"You don’t say. And you actually admit that out loud?" Margot asked with all the incredulity of a true Dallas native.

"I’m going home," Faith said softly. "I want to live there." It wasn’t a step she took lightly; she was going back with the full knowledge that the Rouillards would do everything they could to cause trouble for her. She was deliberately placing herself once more in proximity with Gray, and the danger of it made her lie awake at nights. Besides trying to find out what had happened to his father, all those years ago, she had a lot of ghosts to face, and Gray was the biggest one. He had tormented her, in one way or another, for most of her life, and she was still caught in the helpless childhood whirl of emotions where he was concerned. In her mind he was omnipotent, bigger than life, with the power to either destroy her or exalt her, and her last meeting with him had done nothing to dilute that impres-siqn. She needed to see him as a normal man, meet him on equal footing as an adult, rather than a vulnerable, terrified young girl. She didn’t want him to have this power over her; she wanted to get over him, once and for all.

"It was that trip to Baton Rouge that did it, wasn’t it? You got that close and just couldn’t stand it." Margot didn’t know about what had happened twelve years ago, didn’t know anything about Faith’s childhood other than she’d been in foster care and was very fond of her foster parents. Faith had never talked about her past or her family.

"I guess it’s true about roots."

Margot leaned back in her chair. "Are you going to sell the agency, or what?"

Startled, Faith stared at her. "Of course not!"

There was a subtle relaxation of Margot’s expression, and abruptly Faith realized how alarming her decision could be for her employees. "Everything will go on just like before, with two minor exceptions," she said.

"How minor?" Margot asked suspiciously.

"Well, for starters, I’m going to be living in Prescott. When Mr. Bible finds a house for me, I’m going to put in a fax machine, a computer, and a photocopier, so I’ll be as in touch, electronically speaking, as I am now."

"Okay, that’s one. What’s the other?"

"You’re going to be in charge of all the offices. A district manager, you might say, except there’s only one district and you’re the only manager. You don’t mind traveling, do you?" Faith asked, suddenly anxious. She had forgotten to consider that when making her plans.

Margot’s eyebrows arched in disbelief. "Me, mind traveling? Honey, are you out of your ever-lovin’ mind? I love to travel. You might say it expands my hunting area, and God knows I’ve already given most of the prime bucks around here their chance for a life of excitement. It’s their hard luck if some lucky guy somewhere else takes me out of circulation. Besides, it’s never a hardship to go to New Orleans."

"And Houston and Baton Rouge."

"Cowboys in Houston, Cajuns in Baton Rouge. Yum, yum," said Margot, licking her lips. "I’ll have to come back to Dallas to rest."

Her plan fell smoothly into place, but then Faith went to a lot of trouble to make certain it did. She took a great deal of satisfaction in her efforts; she had been helpless at fourteen, but now she had resources of her own, and four years in the business community had given her a lot of contacts.

With Mr. Bible’s help, she quickly located and settled on a small house for sale. It wasn’t in Prescott, but was situated a couple of miles outside the town limits, on the edge of Rouillard land. Buying it put a sizable dent in her savings, but she paid for it in full, so Gray wouldn’t be able to pull any strings with a mortgage holder and cause her any trouble. She knew enough now to foresee what steps he might take to make things rough for her, and counteract them. It gave her great pleasure to know she was outflanking him, and he wouldn’t know anything about it until it was too late to stop her.

Very quietly, handling everything through the agency so her name didn’t appear anywhere that it might cause an alert, she got the utilities turned on, the house cleaned, and gleefully shipped her furniture to her new home. Only a month after Gray had run her out of town for the second time, Faith pulled her car into the driveway of her house and .looked at it with extreme satisfaction.

She hadn’t bought a pig in a poke. Mr. Bible had arranged for her to look at photos of the house, both inside and out. The house was small, only five rooms, and had been built back in the fifties, but it had been remodeled and modernized with an eye toward selling it. The previous owner had done a good job; the new front porch went all the way across the front, and there was a porch swing at one end to lure the new inhabitants out to enjoy the good weather. Ceiling fans at each end of the porch guaranteed that the heat would seldom become too uncomfortable. Each room inside also had a ceiling fan.

Both bedrooms were the same size, so she had chosen the back one for herself and converted the front one into a home office. There was only one bath, but she was only one person, so she didn’t expect to have a problem with that. The living room and dining room were pleasant, but the best thing about the house was the kitchen. Evidently it had been remodeled several years before, because she couldn’t imagine anyone spending the money to customize a kitchen when a more standard approach would have made the house just as saleable and cost a lot less. Someone had loved to cook. There was a six-eye cooktop, and built-in microwave and conventional ovens. Floor-to-ceiling cupboards all along one wall provided enough storage space for a year’s worth of food, if she so chose. Instead of a work island, a six-foot butcher-block table occupied the middle of the room, providing plenty of work space for any culinary adventures. Faith wasn’t that enthralled with cooking herself, but she liked the room. She was, in fact, thrilled with the entire house. It was the first place she had ever lived that belonged to her; apartments didn’t count, because she had rented those. This house was hers. She had a real home.

She was fizzing with internal delight when she drove into Prescott to stock up on groceries, and take care of two necessary errands. Her first stop was the courthouse, where she bought a Louisiana tag for her car and applied for her Louisiana driver’s license. Next was the grocery store. It was a subtle pleasure to shop without thought of cost in the same store where the owner had once followed her around every time she came in, eyeing every move she made to make certain she didn’t slip something into her pocket and walk out without paying for it. Morgan had been his name, she remembered, Ed Morgan. His youngest son had been in Jodie’s class.

Leisurely she selected fruit and produce, putting each selection in a plastic bag and twisting a green tie around the bag to close it. A gray-haired man in a stained apron came out of the stockroom carrying a crate of bananas, which he began arranging on an almost empty display shelf. He glanced at her, then looked back, his eyes widening in disbelief.

Though his hair was a great deal thinner and what was left had changed color, Faith had no trouble recognizing the man about whom she had just been thinking. "Hello, Mr. Morgan," she said pleasantly as she wheeled her buggy past him. "How are you?"

"R-Renee," he sputtered, and something in the way he said her mother’s name made Faith freeze inside, and look at him with new eyes. God, not him, too! Well, why not? Guy Rouillard hadn’t always been available, and Renee wasn’t the type of woman to deny herself.

Her smile faded, and her voice cooled. "No, not Renee. I’m Faith, the youngest daughter." She was incensed on behalf of her childhood self, constantly humiliated by being treated like a thief, when all the while the man who had made such a production of following her around in the store had been part of the pack of hounds baying after her mother.

She pushed the buggy on down the aisle. It wasn’t a large store, so she heard the flurry of voices as he hurried to tell his wife who she was. Not long afterward, she became aware that she had picked up a shadow. She didn’t recognize the teenage boy, also wearing a long, stained apron, who blushed uncomfortably when she glanced at him, but it was obvious he’d been told to make certain everything went into the buggy and not her purse.

Her temper flared, but she held it in tight control and didn’t allow herself to be hurried. When she had gotten everything on her list, she wheeled the buggy to the checkout counter and began unloading it.

Mrs. Morgan had been operating the cash register when Faith had entered the store, but Mr. Morgan had taken over the duty and his wife was watching intently from the small office cubicle. He eyed the groceries she was unloading. "You’d better have the money to pay for all this," he said unpleasantly. "I’m real careful who I take a check from."

"I always pay cash," Faith retorted coolly. "I’m careful who I let see the number of my checking account."

It was a moment before he realized he had been insulted in kind, and he flushed darkly. "Watch your mouth. I don’t have to take that kind of lip in my own store, especially from the likes of you."

"Really." She gave him a smile and kept her voice low. "You weren’t that particular when it came to my mother, were you?"

The flush faded as abruptly as it had come, leaving him pale and sweating, and he cast a swift glance toward his wife. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Fine. See that the subject never comes up again." She pulled out her wallet and stood waiting. He began pulling the items down the counter, punching in prices as he went. Faith watched each price as he rang it up, and stopped him once. "Those apples are a dollar twenty-nine a pound, not a dollar sixty-nine."

He flushed again, furious that she had caught him in an error. At least, she assumed it was an error, rather than deliberate cheating. She would make certain she checked every item on the sales receipt before leaving the store. Let him get a taste of what it was like to be automatically assumed dishonest. Once she would have backed down, humiliated to the core, but those days were long past.

When he rang up the total, she opened her wallet and pulled out six twenty-dollar bills. Normally her grocery bill was less than half that, but she had let herself run out of a lot of things rather than going to the trouble of moving them, so she had to restock. She saw him eyeing the cash left in her wallet, and knew the story would fly around town that Faith Devlin had come back, and was flashing a roll that would choke a horse. No one would think she had come by it honestly.

She couldn’t tell herself that she didn’t care what the townspeople thought; she always had. That was one of the reasons she’d come back, to prove to them, and herself, that not all Devlins were trash. She knew in her mind that she was respectable, but she didn’t know it in her heart yet, and wouldn’t until the folks in her hometown accepted her. She couldn’t divorce herself from Prescott; this town had helped shape who she was as a person, and her roots went deep. But wanting acceptance from the people here didn’t mean she would let anyone insult her and get away with it. As a child she had been quietly obstinate about going her own way, but in the twelve years since she had lived here, she had grown up and learned how to stand up for herself.

The same boy who had followed her in the store carried the bags out to her car. He was about sixteen, she guessed; his joints still had the looseness of childhood, and his feet and hands were too big for the rest of him. "Are you related to the Morgans?" she asked as they walked across the parking lot, with him pushing the buggy.

He blushed at being personally addressed. "Uh, yeah. They’re my grandparents."

"What’s your name?"

"Jason."

"I’m Faith Hardy. I used to live here, and I’ve just moved back." She stopped at her car and unlocked the trunk. Like most teenage boys, he was interested in anything with four wheels on it, and gave it a good look. She had bought a solid, reliable sedan rather than a sports car; the sedan was better for business, and it took a certain type of attitude to drive around in a sports car anyway, an attitude Faith had never had. She had always been older than her years, and stability, dependability, were far more important to her than speed and flashy looks. But the car, a dark, sophisticated European green, was less than a year old and had a certain style to it, for all its reliability.

"Nice car," Jason felt moved to comment as he transferred the groceries from the buggy to the trunk.

"Thanks." She tipped him, and he looked at the dollar in surprise. By that, she could deduce that either tipping wasn’t the norm in Prescott, or people usually carried out their own groceries and he had been pressed into duty so he could see if she kept the inside of her car clean, or something like that. She suspected the latter; the nosiness of smalltown people knew no bounds.

A small, white Cadillac wheeled into the parking lot as Faith was unlocking her car door, and abruptly braked as it came even with her. She glanced up and saw a woman staring at her, dumbstruck. It took a moment before she recognized Monica Rouillard, or whatever her name was now. The two women faced each other, and Faith remembered how Monica had always gone out of her way to be nasty to the Devlins, unlike Gray, who had pretty much treated them normally until Guy had disappeared. Despite herself, Faith felt a flash of pity; if her suspicions were right, their father was dead, and they had gone all these years without knowing what had happened to him. The Devlins had suffered because of Guy’s actions, but the Rouillards had suffered, too.

Even in the shadows of the car, Faith could see how pale and strained Monica looked as she stared at her. This was one confrontation that would be best postponed; though she intended to stand her ground, there was no need to flaunt her presence in the Rouillards’ faces. Turning away, she got into her car and started the engine. Monica was blocking her so she couldn’t back out, but the space in front of her was empty, so there was no need. She simply drove out through the empty parking slot, leaving Monica still sitting there staring after her.

When she got home, she found several faxes waiting for her, all from Margot. She put up the groceries before settling down in the office to take care of whatever problems had cropped up. She enjoyed the travel industry; it wasn’t without its share of headaches and crises, but for the most part, by the very nature of the business, the customers were upbeat and excited. The agency’s job was to make sure their vacation tours were properly booked, with reliable accommodations. They gently steered vacationers away from inappropriate tour packages; for instance, a family with small children probably wouldn’t be all that pleased with a cruise on a party ship geared more toward adult pleasures. Her employees knew how to handle things like that; most of the problems that came Faith’s way were of a different nature. There was a payroll to meet, tax forms to complete, an unending parade of paper. Faith had decided that she would still handle the payroll, with the pertinent information faxed to her from the four office locations every Monday morning. She would do the paperwork, prepare the checks, and Express Mail them on Wednesday morning. It was a workable solution, and the convenience of working at home delighted her.

The biggest inconvenience was still doing her banking in Dallas, both business and personal, but she had decided against transferring her funds to Prescott or even Baton Rouge; the Rouillard influence had long arms. She hadn’t checked to see if the family owned the new bank in town, because it hadn’t really mattered; whether they owned it or not, Gray would have a lot of pull. There were rules and laws in banking, but in this part of the state the Rouillards were a law unto themselves. The balance in her accounts, even copies of her canceled checks, would be easy for Gray to get. She had no doubt that he could also cause trouble for her by delaying credit for checks deposited until the last possible minute, and bouncing her own checks if he could. No, it was best to keep her account in Dallas. Gravel crunched in the driveway and she looked out the window to see a sleek, gunmetal gray Jaguar come to a stop. Resigned, she let the curtain fall back into place and pushed her chair away from the desk. She didn’t have to see who got out of the car to know who had come calling, just as she knew this wasn’t the Welcome Wagon.

Going into the living room, she opened the door as she heard footsteps on the porch. "Hello, Gray. Please come in. I see you’ve given up your ‘Vettes."

Surprise flickered in his eyes as he stepped over the threshold, immediately overwhelming her with his size. He hadn’t expected her to calmly invite him inside, the rabbit offering the hospitality of its burrow to the wolf. "I’m slower in a lot of things than I used to be," he drawled.

It was on the tip of her tongue to say, "Better, too, I suppose," but she bit the words back. She doubted that Gray Rouillard would be making suggestive remarks to her, of all people, and if she took it as such, he would think it was just what he might have expected from a Devlin. There was no room for normal flirtatious byplay between the two of them.

The weather was hot this late spring day, and Gray was dressed in a loose, white cotton shirt that was open at the throat, and khaki linen trousers. Curly black chest hair was visible in the open vee of the shirt, and Faith forced herself to look away, conscious of a sudden difficulty in breathing. He brought with him the fresh, earthy scent of clean sweat and the animal muskiness of man. She never had been able to decide what color his scent was, she thought dazedly, inhaling his rich, subtle odor. His physical impact made her senses reel, just as it always had. Nothing had changed. It hadn’t been the unexpectedness of seeing him the last time that had so shaken her; the old reactions were still there, still potent, undimmed by time and maturity. She looked at him with hidden, helpless rage. God, this man had all but ground her into the dirt, and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again; what was wrong with her that she couldn’t see him without feeling that hot, automatic tingle of excitement?

He stood too close to her, just inside the door, staring down at her with narrowed dark eyes. She moved away to give herself breathing space. He was physically too imposing, ten inches taller and with that lean, hard athlete’s body.

She would have to go on tiptoe to kiss even the hollow of his tanned, muscular throat. The aberrant thought shocked her, shook her, and instinctively she guarded her expression. She could never let him know that she was even remotely attracted to him; it would give him a weapon of devastating power to use against her.

"This is a surprise," she said lightly, though it wasn’t. "Have a seat. Would you like a cup of coflee, or maybe iced tea?"

"Skip the pleasantries," he said, moving toward her, and she heard the cold anger in his smoky voice. "What are you doing here?"

"I live here," she replied, arching her brows in mock surprise. She hadn’t expected the confrontation to come quite so soon; he was more efficient than she had expected. She moved away from him again, desperate to keep a safe distance between them. His gaze sharpened, then gleamed with satisfaction, and with a chill she knew he had realized that his closeness made her nervous. She halted, determined not to let him know that he could intimidate her that way, and turned to squarely face him. She lifted her chin, the expression in her green eyes cool and unruffled. It took a lot of effort, but she managed it.

"You won’t for long. You’ve wasted your time and effort in coming back."

With gentle amusement she said, "Even you could have problems throwing me out of my own house."

His gaze sharpened as he glanced around the neat, cozy living room. "I bought it," she enlarged. "It isn’t financed, it’s mine free and clear."

He gave a harsh crack of laughter, startling her. "You must have divorced Mr. Hardy and taken him to the cleaners. Did you get everything he had?"

Faith stiffened. "As a matter of fact, I did. But I didn’t divorce him."

"What did you do, snare yourself an old geezer who kicked off after a year or two? Did he have heirs you gypped out of their inheritance?"

Color fled her cheeks, leaving her as pale as a statue. "No, I snared myself a healthy young man of twenty-three, who died in a car accident before we’d been married a year."

His mouth tightened. "I’m sorry," he said gruffly. "I shouldn’t have said that."

"No, you shouldn’t have, but I’ve never noticed that concern for other’s feelings has ever worried a Rouillard."

He gave a snort of derision. "A Devlin should be careful about throwing rocks in that particular glass house."

"I’ve never harmed anyone," she said with a bitter little smile. "I just got caught between the lines when the battle started."

"All innocence, hmmm? You were pretty young when all that happened, but I have a real good memory, and you were sashaying around in front of me and all those deputies, wearing your little thin nightgown that we could see through. Like mother, like daughter, I’d say."

Faith’s eyes widened, full of outrage and horrified embarrassment, and color flooded back into her face. She took two quick steps forward and jabbed him in the chest with her forefinger. "Don’t you dare throw that in my face!" she said, choking with rage. "I was dragged out of my bed in the middle of the night, and tossed into the yard like a piece of trash. Don’t say it," she warned sharply, when he opened his mouth to retort that trash was exactly what she’d been, and jabbed him in the chest again. "Everything we owned was dumped out, my little brother was hysterical and wouldn’t turn loose of me. What was I supposed to do, take time out to find some of my own clothes and retire into the woods to change? Why didn’t you so-called decent men turn your backs, if you were seeing a little too much?"

He looked down into her furious face, his expression strangely arrested, then his eyes became more heavy-lidded and intent. He took hold of her hand, moving it away from his chest. He didn’t release her, but kept her fingers folded against his hard, calloused palm. "You’ve got a little redheaded temper there, haven’t you?" he asked with amusement.

His touch shocked her with a hot twinge of electricity. She tried to jerk her hand free, but he merely tightened his grip, effortlessly restraining her. "Now, don’t get all in a pucker," he said lazily. "Maybe you thought I’d stand here and let you poke holes in me with your fingernail, but I have to be in a different mood to enjoy that."

Faith glared up at him. She could humiliate herself by giving in to the useless urge to struggle, or she could wait until he decided to release her. Her instincts were to struggle away from the disturbing heat of his touch, the surprising roughness of his palm, but she forced herself to stand still, sensing that he would enjoy watching her try to free herself. Then the sensual undertone of his comment registered, and her eyes widened as shock rippled through her. There was no mistaking his meaning this time.

"Smart girl," he said, his gaze sliding down to her breasts. He took his time, examining the shape of them beneath her silk, mint green shirt. She caught her breath, his gaze like an actual touch that made her breasts tingle. "You don’t want to start a tussle with me that you can’t win – or do you? Your mama probably taught you that a man gets hard real quick when a woman starts wiggling against him. Did you come back thinking you might step into your mother’s shoes? Do you want to be my whore, the way she was my dad’s?"

Swift fury glittered in her eyes, and she swung her free hand with all her strength. Quick as a rattlesnake his other hand lashed out, blocking the blow and capturing that hand, too. He gave a low whistle at the force she had put into the swing. "Temper, temper," he chided, looking as if he were enjoying her anger. "Were you trying to knock my teeth out?"

"Yes!" she flared, gritting her teeth together and forgetting her determination to deny him the pleasure of a struggle. She jerked her hands, trying to twist free, and succeeded only in bruising her wrists. "Get out! Get out of my house."

He laughed down at her, easily reducing her to a standstill as he brought her hard against him. "What are you going to do, throw me out?"

She froze, alarmed to find that his reaction to a struggle was exactly what he’d said it would be. There was no mistaking the ridge pressed against her belly. She struck out with the only weapon left to her, her tongue. "If you’ll let go of me, you Neanderthal, what I’ll do is put ice on my wrists to stop them from turning black and blue!" she hotly retorted.

He looked down at his long fingers encircling her slender wrists, loosening his grip and scowling at the dark red marks that quickly formed. "I didn’t mean to hurt you," he said, surprising her. He immediately released her. "You have skin like a baby."

She drew back, massaging her wrists and steadfastly refusing to look at the front of his trousers. That, too, could be ignored. "My guess is you didn’t care if you hurt me. Now, get out."

"In a minute. I have a few things to say." • She gave him a cold look. "Then for God’s sake, say them and leave."

Danger glittered in those dark eyes, and before she knew it, he was right in front of her again, almost playfully pinching her chin. "You’re a ballsy little babe, aren’t you? Maybe too ballsy for your own good. Don’t take me on in a fight, sweet thing, because you’ll get hurt. The best thing you can do is pack up your stuff and get out of here, just as fast as you moved in; I’ll buy the house from you, for what you gave for it, so you won’t be out anything. You aren’t welcome here, and I don’t want my mother and sister hurt by seeing you parading around as if nothing ever happened, bringing up that old scandal again and getting everybody upset. If you stay, if you force my hand, I can make things rough for you here, and you’ll wind up getting hurt. You won’t be able to get a job, and you’ll find out damn fast that you don’t have any friends here."

She jerked her chin away from him. "What will you do, burn me out?" she goaded. "I’m not a helpless fourteen-year-old anymore, and you’ll find that it isn’t as easy to bully me now. I’m here, and I’m staying."

"We’ll see about that, won’t we?" His hooded gaze dropped to her breasts again, and suddenly he grinned. "You’re right about one thing: You’re not fourteen anymore."

He walked out then, leaving Faith staring after him, her fists clenched with impotent anger, and panic clenching her stomach. She didn’t want him to notice her as a woman, didn’t want him to turn that hot, hooded gaze on her, because she wasn’t certain of her ability to resist him. She felt sick at the thought of being like her mother, of being what he had taunted her with being, a whore for a Rouillard.

"Was it Renee?" Monica asked quietly, though she was drawn so tight that the tension was almost visible. She had called Gray from Morgan’s grocery store, more upset than he had heard her in years, since the day he’d had to tell her that their father had left them for Renee Devlin, in fact. Monica had come a long way since then, but the haunted look in her eyes told Gray that the pain was still too close to the surface for her to be objective about it.

"No, but it was definitely a Devlin." He poured himself a finger of Scotch and tossed it back, then poured another finger, feeling that he needed it after another encounter with Faith Devlin. Faith Devlin Hardy, that is. A widow. A young, lovely, red-haired widow with so much fire in her that he’d wanted to check his hands for singe marks after touching her. He had disconcerted her a couple of times, but for the most part she exhibited a maddeningly cool confidence. She hadn’t been the least bit worried by his threats, though she had to know he wasn’t bluffing.

They were in the study, enjoying a before-dinner drink, at least Gray was. Alex was coming to dinner, and Noelle would be down soon, so Gray and Monica had gone into the study to have a few minutes of privacy for their discussion.

Monica looked blank. "It wasn’t Renee? It looked just like her, as if she hadn’t aged at all. She even looked younger. Oh – I see." Comprehension dawned. "It was one of the girls, wasn’t it?"

"The youngest one. Faith. She always looked more like Renee than any of the others."

"What’s she doing here?"

"She says she’s come back to stay."

Horror filled Monica’s dark eyes. "She can’t! Mother couldn’t bear it! Alex has gotten her to come out of her shell a little, but if she hears any of the Devlins are back in town, there’s no telling how far it will set her back. You’ll have to get rid of her again, Gray."

Wryly he considered his Scotch, and finished it with one gulp. The whole town knew the story about him running the Devlin family out of the parish. It wasn’t something he was particularly proud of, but neither did he regret it, and the incident had become enshrined as a sort of local legend. Monica hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen the ugliness; she knew only the results, not the process. She didn’t have the memory seared into her brain. It was always with him: Faith’s terror, the little boy’s hysterical shrieks and pitiful attempts to cling to her, her desperate struggle to gather up their belongings… and the potent, uncomfortable lust with which the men had watched her, the night shadows Concealing her youth and revealing only her resemblance to her mother.

With a sharp little pang he realized that that night was a link between them, him and Faith, a bond forged by a common memory that couldn’t be broken short of death. He had never really known her, and twelve years lay between then and now, and yet… he hadn’t thought of her or treated her as a stranger. It was as if they had resumed an acquaintance of long standing. They weren’t strangers; there was that night between them.

"Getting rid of her may be harder this time," he said abruptly. "She’s bought the Cleburne place, and as she pointed out to me, I can’t kick her off her own property."

"If she’s buying it, there has to be some way to interfere with the mortgage – "

"I didn’t say she’s buying it, I said she’s bought it. There’s a difference."

Monica frowned. "Where would a Devlin get that kind of money?"

"Probably life insurance. She’s a widow. Her last name is Hardy now."

"How convenient for her," Monica said sarcastically.

"No, from what I gather, it wasn’t," Gray said, seeing in his mind how pale Faith had gone when he had said much the same thing. He heard the doorbell ring, and Alex’s voice as Oriane opened the door to him. Discussion time was over. He patted Monica’s shoulder as they moved to the door. "I’ll do what I can to make her leave, but it isn’t a foregone conclusion. She isn’t a typical Devlin."

No, not typical in any way. Even when she’d been a teenager, looking at her had been enough to get him hard. That hadn’t changed. But she was also a more capable opponent than any of the rest of her family ever could have been. She was poised and intelligent, and seemed to have pulled herself, by whatever means, out of the gutters where her family had always lived. He respected her for that, but it didn’t make any difference; she had to go. Monica was worried about what her presence would do to Noelle, but he was worried about what it would do to Monica as well.

They went out into the foyer as Noelle came gracefully down the stairs to greet Alex, offering her cheek for his kiss, allowing him to tuck her hand into the crook of his arm, small touches that she had seldom allowed her husband. Alex’s devotion had been good for Noelle, soothing a bit the pain of her shattered self-confidence, but Gray wasn’t so sure it had been good for Alex. His wife had died fifteen years before and he should have remarried; he’d been only forty-one at the time of her death. Perhaps he would have, in time, but then Guy had left, and Alex, good friend that he was, had devoted himself to helping the Rouillards through the crisis. Even after receiving the letter of proxy, it had taken Gray a good two years to consolidate his position, and Alex had been right there, sitting up through all-night strategy sessions, becoming a sort of surrogate father to Monica, gradually cajoling Noelle out of her total depression. He had fallen painfully in love with Noelle, a fact to which she seemed oblivious.

He should have seen it coming, Gray thought, watching his mother. She was still incredibly lovely, in a cool, classic way that would appeal to Alex’s romanticism. Her dark hair was only lightly grayed, and it was remarkably becoming. Her skin was still smooth and unwrinkled, though somehow there was no mistaking her age. There was no youth in her, no lightness of spirit, and sadness always lurked in the depths of her blue eyes. Looking at his mother, at Monica, at Alex, Gray savagely damned his father for what he had done.

As Alex seated Noelle, he said to Gray, "I heard a curious rumor today, about one of the Devlins." Monica froze, her anxious gaze darting to Noelle, who had gone still and pale. Alex didn’t see Gray’s sharp, warning motion. "I ran into Ed Morgan, and it seems one of the girls has moved back to town."

Alex straightened, his eyes levelly meeting Gray’s, and Gray realized that Alex had chosen not to see his warning. He had deliberately brought up the subject, forcing Noelle to confront it. He had done that a few times before, talking about Guy when Noelle recoiled from any mention of her husband. Perhaps it was the right thing to do; God knows, Alex had been able to get more response from Noelle than either Gray or Monica had ever managed.

Noelle’s hand fluttered toward her throat. "Moved… back?"

"It’s the youngest daughter, Faith," Gray said, keeping his voice calm. "She’s bought the old Cleburne place and moved into it."

"No." Noelle turned her agonized gaze on her son. "I can’t – I can’t bear it."

"Of course you can," Alex said comfortably, taking his seat. "You don’t go out or talk to any of the townspeople, so you’ll never see her or know anything about her. There’s no reason for you to be upset."

Gray leaned back in his chair, controlling a slight smile. He and Monica tended to handle Noelle with kid gloves; he couldn’t help it, even when she frustrated the hell out of him. Alex had no such compunction. He was relentless in his efforts to completely pry her out of her shell and back into society. Probably he was right to bring the subject into the open, and Gray’s and Monica’s inclinations were too protective.

Noelle shook her head, still looking at Gray. "I don’t want her here," she said, openly pleading. "People will talk… it will all be rehashed again, and I can’t bear it."

"You won’t know anything about it," Alex said.

She shuddered. "I don’t have to hear it to know it’s going on."

No, she probably didn’t. Anyone who had ever lived in a small town would know all too well how gossip was recycled, and nothing was ever forgotten.

"Please," she said to Gray, blue eyes haunted. "Make her leave."

Gray sipped his wine, carefully expressionless. He was getting damn tired of the way people thought he could wave a magic wand and make people disappear. Short of kidnapping or murder, all he could do was make things as uncomfortable for Faith as possible. He had no legal ground this time, no charge of trespass, no family of drunks and thieves the sheriff had been glad to escort out of his parish. What he had was one young woman, stubbornly determined to stand her ground.

"It won’t be easy," he said.

"But you have so much influence… with the sheriff, the bank – "

"She hasn’t opened an account at the bank, and the sheriff can’t do anything unless she breaks a law. So far, she hasn’t." She wouldn’t be opening an account at his bank, either, he realized. She was too smart. She had known exactly what she would be facing when she moved back to Prescott, otherwise she wouldn’t have bought the Cleburne place outright. She had taken steps to limit what moves he could make against her. He had to respect her as an opponent, for her foresight. She had definitely made things more difficult for him. He would check around, use his sources to try to verify that she had indeed paid for the house rather than financing it, but he suspected she had been telling the truth.

"There must be something," Noelle said desperately.

Gray arched his brows. "I draw the line at murder," he drawled.

"Gray!" Shocked, she stared at him. "I wasn’t suggesting anything of the sort!"

"Then we may have to get used to the idea of her living here. I can make things damned inconvenient for her, but that’s about it. And I don’t want anyone getting any bright ideas about having her physically harassed," he said, giving both Monica and Noelle a hard look, just in case the thought had occurred to either of them. It wasn’t likely, but he didn’t intend to take the chance. "If we can get rid of her my way, fine, but I won’t have her hurt." He didn’t question this odd protectiveness on behalf of a Devlin. Faith had had enough pain and fear in her life, he thought, remembering the terrified girl caught in the glare of a semicircle of headlights.

"As if we’d do anything like that," Monica said, insulted.

"I didn’t think you would, but I didn’t want to leave the matter open to question."

Delfina brought in the first course, a creamy cucumber soup, and by mutual consent the subject was dropped, to Gray’s amusement. There wasn’t anything going on in the house that Oriane and Delfina didn’t know almost as soon as it happened, but Noelle and Monica both adhered to the old stricture against personal conversation in front of the servants. He doubted that anyone who worked for them considered him or herself a "servant," especially Delfina. She had worked there for as long as he could remember, and had whacked his hands with a wooden spoon whenever she’d caught him trying to sneak one of the petit fours she baked for Noelle’s luncheons.

Monica began telling Alex about an interesting documentary she’d seen on television. Gray glanced at Noelle to make a comment, and stilled when he saw the tears gliding silently down her cheeks. She was calmly eating her soup, the spoon dipping and lifting in graceful rhythm, and all the while she was crying.

Alex joined Gray in the study after dinner, and they discussed business for half an hour before Gray said wryly, "Monica and I had decided not to tell Mother about Faith."

Alex grimaced. "I figured as much. I know it isn’t my place to butt in – " Gray snorted, bringing a quick grin to Alex’s face before he resumed. "But she can’t keep hiding from the world forever."

"Can’t she? She’s been giving it a damn good try for the past twelve years."

"If she won’t go to the world, I’ve decided to bring the world to her. Maybe she’ll see that, if she can’t escape it, she might as well join it."

"Good luck," Gray said, and meant it.

Alex gave him a curious look. "Are you really going to make Faith leave?"

Gray leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the desk, lounging like a sleepy panther, relaxed but still dangerous. "I’m damn sure going to try, but I told Mother the truth. Legally, there isn’t a lot I can do."

"Why not leave the girl alone?" Alex asked, and sighed. "I’d say she’s had a rough enough life as it is, without folks deliberately trying to make trouble for her."

"Have you seen her?"

"No, why?"

"She looks enough like Renee to be her twin," Gray said. "Just being a Devlin is bad enough, but looking the way she does…" He shook his head. "She’s going to stir up a lot of memories, and not just in my family. Renee Devlin got around."

"I still say give her a chance," Alex argued. "If she’s trying to make something of herself, it would be a shame to stand in her way."

Gray shook his head. "I have to think of Mother and Monica. They’re more important to me than a little piece of white trash trying to make good."

Alex regarded him with disappointment. Gray was a hard man and a dangerous enemy, but he’d always been fair. Guy’s disappearance had thrust him headlong into a situation wherein responsibility for the family’s financial, as well as emotional, well-being had been dumped on his young shoulders. Gray had been a cheerful, happy-go-lucky hell-raiser until then, but overnight he had changed into a much harder, more ruthless man. His sense of humor still bordered on the bawdy and outrageous, when he indulged in humor, but for the most part he was far more serious. Gray was a man who knew the extent of his power, and didn’t shrink from using it. If Guy had been respected in the financial community, Gray was regarded with the awe and caution one would afford a marauder.

"You’re too protective," Alex finally said. "Noelle and Monica won’t collapse if Faith Devlin lives in Prescott. They won’t like it, but they’ll learn to live with it."

Gray shrugged. Maybe – hell, probably – he was too protective, but Alex wasn’t the one who had watched Monica nearly bleed to death, or seen how total Noelle’s emotional collapse had been. By the time Alex had become involved in cajoling Noelle out of her room, at least she’d been talking again, and feeding herself.

"I give up," Alex said, shaking his head. "You’ll do whatever you want, anyway. But think about it, and maybe cut the girl some slack."

Later that night, sitting alone in the study with his feet still propped on the desk in his usual position, while he read a financial report on some stocks he’d bought, Gray found it difficult to concentrate. It wasn’t the Scotch; he had poured himself a drink when he had begun doing paperwork, over two hours before, and most of the liquor was still in the glass. The fact was, he couldn’t get the problem of Faith Devlin out of his mind. Noelle’s silent tears had reached him in a way nothing she could have said would have. If Faith didn’t deserve to be hurt again, neither did his mother or sister. They had been innocent victims too, and Monica had almost died. He couldn’t forget that, and he couldn’t see them upset without trying to do something about it.

And it was a fact that if Faith Hardy stayed in Prescott, Noelle and Monica would be even more hurt and upset than they were now.

Gray stared broodingly at the level of Scotch in the glass. Maybe if he drank it, he could forget how warm and vital Faith had felt under his hands, how that sweet, spicy scent of hers had gone straight to his head and made him dizzy with lust. Maybe if he drank the whole goddamn bottle, he could forget about the urge to plunge his hands into the fire of her hair to see if it burned him, or the hunger to taste the wide, full bloom of her lips. He thought of her skin, so fine-grained and translucent that he marked her with the lightest touch; her breasts, high and round, the peaks of her nipples discernible even beneath her bra. She had it, the same indefinable quality Renee had possessed, an effortless sensuality that drew men to her like a lodestone. Faith wasn’t as blatant about it as Renee had been; she had toned it down with better clothes, but the quality had merely been refined, not diluted. What Faith Hardy looked like was a classy lady who loved a long, hard ride in bed, and damn if he didn’t want to give it to her.

If she didn’t leave, it was likely that the residents of Prescott were going to be shocked out of their small-town minds, and Noelle ten times more upset than she was now, by the spectacle of another Rouillard man having a hot and heavy aiFair with a Devlin woman.

Eight

Ed Morgan made a point of meeting Faith at the door as she entered the grocery store. "Sorry," he said, not looking the least bit regretful. "I don’t have anything you need."

Faith stopped, and gave him a cool look. "You don’t know what I need," she pointed out.

"Doesn’t matter." He folded his arms and smirked at her. "Guess you’ll have to shop somewhere else."

Faith controlled her temper. She detected the fine hand of Gray Rouillard in this, and getting into an argument with Mr. Morgan wouldn’t accomplish anything except possibly getting her arrested for causing a public disturbance, which would suit Gray just fine.

He had kept his word about making it difficult for her to live-in the parish. Not ten minutes earlier, the attendant at the service station where she stopped had gleefully told her that they were out of gas, and she’d have to go elsewhere. At the tune, the man at the next pump had been filling his car.

If Gray thought this would send her packing, he had seriously underestimated his opponent. She could sue these people for refusing service, but that wouldn’t make her very popular in town. She intended to live here, so she discarded that option. Besides, the real battle was between her and Gray; everyone else was secondary.

She shrugged as she turned to leave. "Fine. If you can do without my money, I can do without your groceries."

"All the other stores in town are in the same predicament," he called after her, gloating. "Fresh out of whatever it is you want."

Faith contemplated giving him the finger, but resisted the urge; he might take it as an invitation. She walked calmly back to her car. Obviously she’d have to do her shopping and buy her gasoline somewhere else, but it was only an inconvenience, not an insurmountable problem.

Inconvenient in the short term, that is; long term, she would have to do something about it. And in the very shprt term, she was mad as hell.

There was a pay phone on the corner. Faith stalked past her car and down to the open kiosk. This one had a phone book in it, swinging from a stiff metal cord. It would be just like the Rouillards to have an unlisted number, she silently fumed as she opened the thin little book and flipped through the pages until she reached the Rs. But no, there it was. She dug a quarter out of her purse and fed it into the slot, then punched in the number.

A woman’s voice answered on the second ring. "Rouillard residence."

"Gray Rouillard^ please," Faith said in her most businesslike tone.

"May I say who is calling?"

"Mrs. Hardy," she replied.

"Just a moment."

No more than ten seconds later, the line clicked and Gray’s velvety dark voice purred, "Is this the Mrs. Hardy?"

She could hear the mocking amusement in his voice, and her hand clenched around the receiver so hard, it was a wonder the plastic didn’t crack. "It is."

"Well, well. I’ll bet you didn’t think you’d be asking for favors so soon, did you, sweetheart? What can I do for you today?" He didn’t even try to disguise the satisfaction in his tone.

"Not a damn thing," she said coldly. "I just wanted you to know your childish little tricks won’t work. I’ll have my groceries shipped in from Dallas before I’ll give you the satisfaction of seeing me leave!" She slammed down the receiver before he could reply, and marched to her car. She hadn’t really accomplished anything, other than blowing off some steam and letting him know that she realized who was behind this latest development, and that it wasn’t going to work. It was satisfying anyway.

At Rouillard House, Gray chuckled as he sat back in his chair. He’d been right about her redheaded temper. He’d have liked to see her just now, with those green eyes snapping fire. Maybe his maneuver had made her dig in her heels rather than prompting her to go to a friendlier locale, but one thing for certain, it had gotten a reaction! Then his eyes sharpened. Dallas, huh? Maybe he should do some checking there.

Faith allowed herself to stew for a minute, then put her anger aside as a waste of energy. She refused to let this town, and Gray Rouillard, get the best of her. She would change their opinions of her if it took twenty years! The key to changing their minds, she realized, was proving that Guy Rouillard hadn’t run off with her mother. For whatever reason he had left, it couldn’t be blamed on her family. Taking that into consideration, she had far more reason to hold a grudge than did the Rouillards or anyone else in the parish.

Knowing that Guy hadn’t been with Renee and proving it, however, were two different things. Perhaps if she could get Renee to talk to Gray, he would at least be curious enough to start searching for his father. Maybe he already had, and Mrs. DuBois at the library simply didn’t know the result of the search. If Guy was alive, though, there would be a traceable paper record somewhere.

She drove to New Roads, where she filled up the car and bought the few groceries she had needed. So much for Gray’s effort to starve her out, she thought with satisfaction when she returned home and carried in the bag. She hadn’t even had to go that much farther afield.

After she had put up the groceries, she went into her office and called her grandmother Armstead in Jackson. As before, Renee answered the phone.

"Mama, this is Faith."

"Faith! Hi, honey," Renee said in her lazy, sultry voice. "How’re you doin’, baby? I didn’t expect to hear from you again so soon."

"I’m fine, Mama. I’ve moved back to Prescott."

There was a moment of silence on the line. "Why’d you do that? From what Jodie told me, them folks didn’t treat you right."

"It was home," Faith said simply, knowing Renee wouldn’t understand. "But that isn’t why I called. Mama, everyone here still thinks you ran off with Guy Rouillard."

"Well, I told you that isn’t so, didn’t I? It’s no skin off my nose what they think."

"It’s causing me a little bit of trouble, though. Mama, if I can get Gray Rouillard to call you, would you talk to him and tell him that you didn’t run away with his father?"

Renee gave an uneasy laugh. "Gray wouldn’t believe a word I said. Guy was easy to get along with, but Gray… No, I don’t want to talk to him."

"Please, Mama. If he doesn’t believe you, that’s up to him, but – "

"I said no," Renee interrupted sharply. "I’m not going to talk to him, and you’re just wastin’ your breath. I don’t give a shit what those bastards in Prescott think." She slammed down the receiver, and Faith winced at the crash in her ear.

She hung up the phone, frowning in thought. For whatever reason, Renee was nervous about talking to Gray, and that meant Faith didn’t have much chance of changing her mind. Renee had never been one to go out of her way for anyone, even in a matter as simple as a telephone call.

Well, if Renee wouldn’t talk to Gray, then Faith had to find some other way to convince him, and the best way to do that was find out what had really happened to Guy.

How did you go about finding out if someone who had disappeared twelve years ago was alive or dead? Faith wondered. She wasn’t a detective, didn’t know the procedures to follow to gain access to the records that would normally be examined if you were looking for someone. The thing to do, she supposed, was to hire a real private detective, one who would know those things. It would be expensive, though, and she didn’t have much extra money after spending her ready cash on the house.

Where to find a detective? There wasn’t any such animal in Prescott, but she supposed they could be found in any moderate-sized town; Baton Rouge was a city of almost a quarter million people, but it was also a little too close to Gray’s sphere of influence. New Orleans would probably be safer. Maybe she was being paranoid about Gray’s power, but she would rather be paranoid than caught unawares. A man who would try to stop a woman from buying groceries was diabolical! Her mouth quirked at the thought, and she allowed herself a tiny smile. On a more serious note, she had a healthy respect for the lengths to which he would go to follow through on his promises, and his warnings.

She would find a good detective and hire him to search credit card and bank records, things like that. If Guy was alive, surely he would have used some of his vast financial assets to support himself; she couldn’t see him washing dishes at minimum wage. Perhaps it would be possible to find out if he had filed an income tax return. Surely any decent detective would be able to do that in a short amount of time, maybe a week, so the cost should be manageable.

What if the detective did find a paper trail? If Guy had used a credit card, Gray would have known about it, seen the charge on the monthly statement. Had Gray known where his father was all these years, and not said anything? The possibility was intriguing… and infuriating. If Gray had found Guy, wouldn’t he have contacted him? And if he had done that, then he would know that Guy hadn’t left with Renee. It followed, then, that for whatever reason, Gray had never tried to find his father, otherwise he would know there was no reason for this vendetta against her.

She couldn’t forget what she considered the most likely scenario: Guy was dead. She could see him leaving, though divorce would have been a more logical step, but she couldn’t see him never contacting his kids again, or walking away from the Rouillard money. That just wasn’t human nature. She had to give the private detective a chance to find Guy, but she didn’t think he’d succeed. After that, she would start asking questions around town; she didn’t know what she could discover, but the answer to the puzzle was there, if she could just figure out how to put the pieces together. Someone had to know what had happened that night. The truth was there, waiting for someone to find it. She pulled out a sheet of paper, paused for a moment, and unwillingly wrote her mother’s name at the top. It was asking too much of coincidence for Renee to have left the same night Guy had disappeared and not know anything about it. Maybe they really had run away together, and something had happened to Guy afterward, something that Renee didn’t want known. Though the only circumstances under which Faith could imagine Renee stirring herself to violence would be to protect herself, she had to put Renee’s name at the top of the list.

Beside Renee’s name, because he had the motive, she wrote "Gray" in block letters. She looked at the two names. One of them, possibly both of them, knew what had happened to Guy. She would bet her socks on it. Nausea roiled in her stomach. Between murder suspects, which did she choose as the most likely: her mother, or the man she had always loved?

Stricken, Faith stared bitterly at the paper. Self-knowledge was seldom sweet. She must be the biggest fool alive, for no matter how Gray had wrecked her life or tried to make things impossible for her, no matter that she thought he might be involved in his father’s death, she couldn’t run from, destroy, or even ignore that bone-deep, compelling attraction to him, like metal shavings to a magnet. Just the sight of him made her go weak inside, and when he touched her she felt the electricity of it in every cell of her body. He had never touched her except in anger; v;hat would it be like if he came to her as a lover, with pleasure his intention? She couldn’t imagine it. Her blood would boil, her heart stop.

What would she do if she found that Gray had indeed killed his father, or had him killed? The thought caused a sharp pain in her chest, and she barely stifled a moan. She would have to do the same thing she would do if it were anyone else. She couldn’t live with herself otherwise. And she would grieve for the rest of her life.

There were other suspects, though less likely. She listed them under the two top names. Noelle. Amos. Perhaps Monica. Thinking laterally, the list widened to the other men Renee had slipped around and slept with, as well as Guy’s other women. For two people infatuated with each other, they had been remarkably unfaithful. Ed Morgan had to go on that list, and Faith wrote his name down with pleasure. She racked her brain, trying to think of more names, but twelve years was a long time and most of the men had been eminently forgettable. Maybe town gossip could supply them, as well as some of Guy’s conquests. From his reputation, he had cut quite a swath through southeastern Louisiana. Probably she could list quite a few of Prescott’s society ladies, which would also make their husbands legitimate candidates for the list. Wryly she tossed down the pen. The way this list was going, she might as well take a phone book and start at the A’s.

"You don’t look like a private detective."

Francis P. Pleasant looked like a prosperous, conservative businessman. There were no ashtrays in his office; it was neat, and his light gray suit fit well. He had sad, dark eyes, but the expression in them lightened and warmed as he smiled at her. "Did you think I would have a bottle of bourbon on my desktop, and a cigarette with an inch-long ash dangling from my mouth?"

"Something like that." She returned his smile. "Or that you’d be wearing a Hawaiian shirt."

He laughed aloud at that. "Not my style. My wife always picked out my clothes – " He stopped, and the sadness returned to his eyes as he glanced at a photograph on his desk.

Faith followed his gaze. The frame was set at an angle to her, but she could still see that it was a picture of a pretty middle-aged woman, her expression so cheerful that it invited smiles. She must have died, for that sadness to be in his eyes. "Is that your wife?" she asked gently.

He managed another smile, but it was strained. "Yes, it is. I lost her a few months ago."

"I’m so sorry." She had just met him, but her sympathy was genuine.

"It was a sudden illness," he said, his voice a little jerky. "I have a bad heart; we both thought I would be the first to go. We were prepared for that. We were saving as much money as we could, for the time when I wouldn’t be able to work. Then she got sick, just a cold, we thought, but forty-eight hours later she was dead from viral pneumonia. By the time she realized she was really sick, that it wasn’t just a cold, it was too late."

Tears swam in his eyes, and Faith reached across the desk to put her hand on his. He turned his hand to squeeze her fingers, then blinked in bewilderment.

"I’m sorry," he apologized, blushing. He took out his handkerchief and blotted his eyes. "I don’t know what came over me. You’re a client, we’ve just met, and here I am crying on your shoulder."

"I’ve lost people I loved, too," she said, thinking of Scottie and Kyle. "Sometimes it helps to talk about it."

"Yes, it does, but that was still inappropriate of me. My only excuse is that there’s something very warm about you, my dear." He realized that he had added an endearment, and blushed again. "Well! Perhaps I’d better ask what has brought you here."

"A man disappeared twelve years ago," she said. "I’d like you to find out if he’s still alive."

He picked up a pen and rapidly scrawled something on a legal pad. "Your father? An old boyfriend?"

"Nothing like that. He was my mother’s lover." Mr. Pleasant glanced up at her, but didn’t appear startled. Probably in his business he had received requests far more bizarre than hers. Thinking that he would have a better chance of finding something if he knew all the details and circumstances, rather than just the bare facts of Guy’s name, age, and description, she related everything that had happened twelve years ago, and why she wanted to find out if Guy was still alive. "I have to tell you," she said, "I think he’s dead. Maybe my imagination is running away with me, but I think someone killed him."

Mr. Pleasant carefully placed the pen on the legal pad, positioning it between the blue lines. "You do realize, Mrs. Hardy, that, considering what you’ve told me, your mother is likely involved. For her to have left the same night… well, you understand how that looks."

"Yes, I understand. I can’t think, though, that she would have killed him herself. My mother," Faith said with a faint smile, "would never kill the goose that laid the golden egg."

"But you do think that she knows what happened."

Faith nodded. "I’ve tried to get her to talk about it, but she won’t."

"I assume there’s no evidence to bring to the attention of the sheriff?"

"None. I don’t want you to find out if Guy was murdered, Mr. Pleasant, I just want you to find out, if you can, whether or not he’s alive. There is a remote possibility that he simply walked away from everything."

"Very remote," he said dryly. "Though I have to admit that stranger things have happened. If there’s a paper trail, though, I’ll find it. If he had been running from the law, he would have changed his name, but there was no reason for him to disguise his identity. It should be fairly easy to find out if he’s ever surfaced."

"Thank you, Mr. Pleasant." She took out a business card and gave it to him. "Here’s my number. Call me when you know something."

She left his office feeling pleased with her selection. She had contacted him first by phone, discussed his fee, and made an appointment. Then she had checked his references, and been well satisfied with the answers. Mr. Pleasant had been highly recommended by her business contacts, described as both honest and competent, the kind of person one instinctively trusted. If Guy was alive, Mr. Pleasant would find him.

She glanced at her watch. She had left Prescott early that morning and driven down to New Orleans for her appointment with Mr. Pleasant, which hadn’t taken as long as she had anticipated. Margot was in town, and Faith had made a lunch date with her at the Court of Two Sisters. She had plenty of time to get there, so she drove back to her hotel and left the car, then set out on foot to do some window-shopping along the way.

It was steaming hot as she walked along the narrow streets of the French Quarter, and she crossed over to the shady side. She visited New Orleans frequently, because of the agency office here, but she had never really taken the time to explore this old district. Horse-drawn carriages moved slowly through the streets, with the driver and guide pointing out attractions to the tourists in the carriage. Most people, though, depended on their own feet to take them through the Quarter. Later, the main attraction would be the bars and clubs; this early in the day, shopping was the goal, and the myriad of boutiques, antiques shops, and specialty stores gave plenty of choice and opportunity to people who wanted to spend their money.

She went into a lingerie shop and bought a peach silk nightgown that looked like something one of the Hollywood movie queens would have worn back in the forties and fifties. After wearing almost nothing but hand-me-downs for the first fourteen years of her life, she felt sinfully self-indulgent about new clothes now. She could never bring herself to go on shopping binges now that she had a bit of cash, but every so often she allowed herself a luxury purchase: lace underwear, a sumptuous nightgown, a really good pair of shoes. Those small indulgences made her feel as if the bad times were truly in the past.

When she reached the restaurant, Margot was waiting for her inside. The tall blonde jumped up and hugged her enthusiastically, though it had been only a little over a week since Faith had left Dallas. "It’s so good to see you! Well, are you settling down okay in your little burg? / don’t think I’ll ever settle down again! My first business trip, and it’s to New Orleans. Isn’t this a great place? I hope you don’t mind sitting in the courtyard rather than inside. I know it’s hot, but how often do you get to eat lunch in a courtyard in New Orleans?"

Faith smiled at the barrage of words. Yes, Margot was definitely excited by her new job. "Well, let’s see. I’m twenty-six, and this is the first time I’ve eaten lunch or anything else in a courtyard, so I’d say it doesn’t happen too often."

"Honey, I can give you ten years, so it’s even rarer than you think, and I intend to enjoy every minute." They took their seats at one of the tables in the courtyard. Actually, it wasn’t uncomfortably hot; there were umbrellas, and trees to give shade. Margot eyed the bag in Faith’s hand. "I see you’ve been shopping. What did you buy?"

"A nightgown. I would show it to you, but I don’t want to drag it out here in the middle of the restaurant."

Margot’s eyes twinkled. "That kind of nightgown, huh?"

"Let’s just say it isn’t a Mother Hubbard," Faith replied delicately, and they laughed. A smiling waiter poured water for them, the light tinkle of the ice cubes making her suddenly aware of her thirst, and how hot she had become on the walk to the restaurant. She glanced around at the other diners as she sipped the cold water, and looked straight at Gray Rouillard.

Her heart gave that immediate, betraying little jump. He was sitting, with another man whose back was to her, two tables over from her and Margot. His dark eyes gleamed as he lifted his glass of wine to her in a silent toast. She lifted the water glass in a return salute, inclining her head in a mock gracious nod.

"Do you know someone here?" Margot asked, turning in her seat. Gray smiled at her. Margot smiled in return, a rather weak effort, then turned back to Faith with a poleaxed expression on her face. "Holy cow," she said in a dazed voice.

Faith understood perfectly. The flamboyance of New Orleans suited Gray. He was wearing a lightweight, Italian-cut suit, and a pale blue shirt that flattered the olive tones of his skin. His thick black hair was brushed back from his face and secured with a bronze clasp at the nape of his neck. The tiny diamond stud glittered in his left earlobe. With the breadth of his linebacker’s shoulders and the feline grace with which he lounged at the small table, he drew the eye of every woman in the courtyard. He wasn’t pretty-boy handsome; his French ancestors had bequeathed him a thin, high-bridged Gallic nose, slightly too long, and a heavy beard that left him with a five-o’clock shadow even at lunchtime. His jaw looked as solid as a rock. No, there was nothing pretty about Gray. What he was, was striking, and dangerously exciting, with his bold, dark eyes and the lazy, sensual curve of his mouth. He looked like a man who was adventurous and confident, both in bed and out.

"Who is he?" Margot breathed. "And do you know him, or are you flirting with a stranger?"

"I’m not flirting," Faith said, startled, and deliberately turned her gaze to the other side of the courtyard, away from Gray.

Margot laughed. "Honey, that little toast you gave him said, ‘Come and get me, big boy, if you think you’re man enough.’ Do you think a pirate like that is going to ignore the challenge?"

Faith’s eyes widened. "It did not! He raised his wineglass to me, so I did the same with my water glass. Why would he think anything about it when he started it?"

"Have you looked in the mirror lately?" Margot asked, sneaking another look over her shoulder at Gray, and a smile spread across her face.

Faith made a dismissive gesture. "That has nothing to do with it. He wouldn’t – "

"He is," Margot said with satisfaction, and Faith couldn’t control a little jump as she looked around and saw Gray almost upon them, "Ladies," he drawled, lifting Faith’s hand from the table and bowing over it with an Old World gesture that seemed entirely natural to him. Her startled eyes met his, and she saw deviltry, as well as something hot and dangerous, in those dark depths before he shielded them as he touched his lips to her fingers. His lips were soft and warm, very warm. Her heart banged painfully against her ribs and she tried to withdraw her hand, but his grip tightened and she felt the tip of his tongue probe delicately into the sensitive hollow between her last two fingers. Startled, she jumped again, and his awareness of that betraying little movement was in his eyes as he straightened and finally released her hand. He turned to Margot, bending low over the hand she had extended with a dazed expression, but Faith noticed that he didn’t kiss Margot’s fingers. It didn’t matter. Margot couldn’t have looked more bedazzled if he had presented her with diamonds. Wondering if that same weak, yielding expression was on her face, Faith quickly looked down to disguise it, though of course it was too late. Gray was too experienced to miss any of the nuances. Her fingers tingled, and the skin between her fingers throbbed where his tongue had touched. The tiny damp spot felt both hot and cold, and she clenched her hand to dispel the sensation. Her face was burning. His action had been a subtle parody of sex, a mock penetration that her body recognized, and responded to with a pooling of heat in her lower body, a growing moistness. She could feel her nipples tighten and thrust against the lace of her bra. Damn him!

"Gray Rouillard," he was murmuring to Margot. "Faith and I are old acquaintances."

At least he hadn’t lied and said they were friends, Faith thought, watching tautly as Margot introduced herself, and, to her horror, asked Gray to join them. Too late, she gave Margot a warning nudge with her foot.

"Thank you," Gray said, smiling down at Margot with such charm that she didn’t react at all to Faith’s kick. "But I’m here on business, and I have to get back to my own table. I just wanted to come over and speak to Faith for a moment. Have you known each other long?"

"Four years," Margot replied, and proudly added, "I’m her district manager."

Faith nudged her ankle again, harder this time, and when Margot gave her a surprised look, she glared a warning.

"Really," Gray said, sounding interested. His gaze was sharper. "What business are you in?"

Finally having gotten the message, Margot gave Faith a swift, questioning glance.

"Nothing on your scale," Faith said, smiling at him so coolly that he shrugged, realizing he wasn’t going to gain any more information.

She exhaled with relief, but tensed again when he squatted by the table, a gracefully masculine action that brought his face more on a level with hers. It was more difficult to hide her expression now than when he had been standing. This close, she could see the bottomless black pupils of his eyes, the glitter in them as he looked at her. "I wish I’d known you were coming to New Orleans, sweetheart. We could have driven down together."

If he thought she would dissemble in front of Margot, he had sadly mistaken her. If he thought his charm had turned her brain into mush, he was wrong there, too. How she would like to rub his nose in the fact that she was a successful businesswoman, but the past week had made her wary of giving him any information about herself. Respectability wouldn’t make any difference to either him or the town of Prescott; until – and if – she could prove that her mother hadn’t run away with his father, nothing would change his attitude. Lifting her chin, a sure sign of temper, she said, "I’d rather have walked all the way than get in a car with you."

Margot made a choking sound, but Faith didn’t spare a look for her, she kept her gaze locked with Gray’s, the battle visually joined. He grinned with a buccaneer’s reckless enjoyment of a fight.

"But we could have had a lot of fun, and shared… expenses."

"I’m sorry you’re having money problems," she said sweetly. "Perhaps your business associate will put you up if you can’t afford your own hotel room."

"I don’t have to worry about hotel expenses." The grin broadened. "I own the hotel."

Damn, she thought. She’d have to find out which one he owned, and make sure she didn’t book any tour groups into it.

"Why don’t we have dinner together tonight?" he suggested. "We have a lot to talk about."

"I can’t imagine what. Thank you, but no." She was driving back to Prescott this afternoon, but she would much rather he think she was refusing the invitation purely because she didn’t want his company.

"It would be to your advantage," he said, and the dangerous look was back in his eyes.

"I doubt that anything a Rouillard suggested would be to my advantage."

"You haven’t listened to my… suggestions yet."

"I don’t intend to, either. Go back to your table and leave me alone."

"I’d planned on doing the first." He stood and trailed a long forefinger down her cheek. "There’s no way in hell I’ll do the last." He nodded to Margot and strolled back to his own table.

Margot blinked, her eyes owlish. "Shouldn’t I check him for wounds? You really had the knife out for him. What on earth has that dark-eyed piece of work done to make you so mad at him?"

Faith took refuge in her water glass again, sipping from it until she had her expression under control. When she lowered it, she said, "It goes back a long way. He’s a Hatfield and I’m a McCoy."

"A family feud? C’mon."

"He’s trying to run me out of Prescott," Faith said baldly. "If he found out about the travel agency, it’s possible he could cause trouble by ruining some of the tours we arrange. That would hurt our reputation, and we’d lose money. You heard him: He owns a hotel here. Not only is he filthy rich, so he has the money to bribe people to do what he wants, but he has contacts in the business. I wouldn’t put anything past him."

"Wow. This sounds serious. What started this feud, and has there ever been actual bloodshed?"

"I don’t know." Faith fiddled with her silverware, not wanting to mention her suspicion that Guy had been killed. "My mother used to be his father’s mistress. Needless to say, his family hates anyone with the name of Devlin." That would do for an explanation; she couldn’t go into the full tale, couldn’t trot out her memories of that night even for a sympathetic audience.

"What did you say is the name of this town?" Margot demanded. "Prescott? Are you sure it isn’t Peyton Place?"

They both laughed, and the waiter approached then to ask their preference for lunch. They both chose the buffet, and went inside to make their selections. Faith was acutely aware of a dark gaze following her every move, and wished Margot hadn’t been so set on eating in the courtyard. She would much rather have been shielded from his view. Who could have guessed that he would be in New Orleans today, though, or that in a city of this size they would immediately run into each other? True, the Court of Two Sisters was a popular restaurant, but New Orleans was larded with popular restaurants.

Gray and his business associate left the restaurant not long after Faith and Margot returned to the table with their loaded plates. He paused beside Faith. "I do want to talk to you," he said. "Come to my suite tonight at six. I’m at the Beauville Courtyard."

She hid her dismay. The Beauville was a lovely, mid-size hotel with a great atmosphere, built around an open courtyard. She had booked tour groups and vacationers in there many times. If Gray owned it, she would have to find another lovely, mid-size hotel with a great atmosphere, because she didn’t dare use his again. In answer to his command, for that was what it was, she shook her head. "No. I won’t be there."

His eyes gleamed. "Then take your chances," he said, and walked away.

"Take your chances?" Margot echoed indignantly, staring at his broad back. "What the hell did he mean by that? Was he threatening you?"

"Probably," Faith said, lifting a bite of pasta salad to her mouth. She closed her eyes in delight. "Mmmm, taste this. It’s wonderful."

"Are you out of your mind? How can you eat when Mr. Macho just threatened to… do something, I guess." Frustrated, Margot picked up her fork and tasted the pasta salad. She paused. "This is good. You’re right, worrying about him can wait until after we eat." Faith chuckled. "I’m used to his threats."

"Does he ever carry through with them?"

"Always. One thing about Gray, he means what he says, and he isn’t shy about throwing his weight around."

Margot’s fork clattered to the table. "Then what are you going to do?"

"Nothing. After all, he didn’t actually threaten anything specific."

"That means you have to be on your guard against everything."

"I am anyway, where he’s concerned." Pain pierced her at her own words, and she looked down at her plate to hide it. How wonderful it would be to feel safe and relaxed with Gray, to feel she could trust that all his ruthless determination, his vital intensity, would be used in defense of her rather than against her. Did Noelle and Monica know how lucky they were, to have someone like him standing ready to go to battle on their behalf? She loved him, but he was her enemy. She could never let herself forget that, not let wishful thinking cloud her common sense.

Deliberately she steered the conversation into safer waters, namely the few problems that had developed with her in Prescott rather than on the scene in Dallas. She was relieved that the problems were few, and relatively minor. Some difficulties had been expected, but Margot was a good business manager and got on well with the travel agents in the other offices. The only real difference was that now Margot was the one traveling around, instead of Faith, though there would be times when Faith’s presence was required. For the most part, everything had worked out. They decided that, since Faith was so close to Baton Rouge and New Orleans anyway, she would continue overseeing those offices, because it would be foolish for Margot to fly or drive all that way. Margot was a little disappointed, because she was entranced with New Orleans, but she was also extremely practical, and the change was her suggestion. There would be times when it wouldn’t be convenient for Faith to get to either city, so she would content herself with the occasional visit.

After lunch, they parted company outside the restaurant, for Margot’s hotel was in the opposite direction from where Faith had left her car. It was even hotter now than it had been before, the mugginess making the air feel thick, hard to breathe. The smell of the river was stronger, and black clouds were looming on the horizon, promising a spring thunderstorm that would temporarily relieve the heat, then turn the streets into a steam bath. Faith speeded up her steps, wanting to be on her way home before the storm broke.

As she drew even with a recessed doorway that led into a darkened, deserted shop, a strong hand seized her arm from behind and dragged her into the doorway. Mugged! she thought, and anger flashed through her, red-hot and reckless. She had struggled too hard for what she had to give it up without protest, the way the police advised. Instead she jabbed her elbow backward, slamming it into a hard belly and eliciting a very satisfactory grunt from her assailant. She turned, her fist drawn back, and belatedly opened her mouth to yell for help. She had a blurred impression of height and wide shoulders, then she was jerked hard against him and her voice was muffled against an expensive, oatmeal-colored Italian suit.

"God Almighty," Gray said, amusement rich in his deep voice. "You little redheaded wildcat, if you’re as wild as this in bed, it must be a hell of a ride."

Shock at his comment mingled with relief at his identity, and neither diluted her anger. Breathing hard, she shoved at his chest, freeing herself. "Damn you! I thought I was being mugged!"

His eyebrows drew together. "And you started slinging that sharp little elbow?" he asked in disbelief, rubbing his stomach. "What if I hadbeen a mugger, and had a knife or a gun? Don’t you know you’re supposed to give up your purse rather than chance getting hurt?"

"Like hell," she snapped, pushing her hair out of her face.

His face cleared, and he laughed. "No, I guess you wouldn’t." He reached out and tucked a fiery strand behind her ear. "Attack first and think about it later, hm?"

She jerked her head away from his touch. "Why did you grab me like that?"

"I’ve been following you since you left the restaurant, and thought this would be as good a place as any for our little chat. You really should pay more attention to who’s behind you."

"Skip the lecture, if you don’t mind." She glanced at the sky. "I want to get to my car before that storm gets here." "We can go to my hotel – or yours – if you don’t want to talk here."

"No. I’m not going anywhere with you." Especially to a hotel room. He kept making those sexually loaded remarks, alarming her. She didn’t trust his motives, and she didn’t trust herself to resist him. All in all, it was best to stay as far away from him as she could.

"Then here it is." Gray looked down at her, standing so close to her in the narrow space of the doorway that her breasts were almost brushing his suit. When he had jerked her against him to muffle her scream, he had felt them, firm and round and luscious. He wanted to see them, wanted to touch them, taste them. He was so physically aware of her that he felt as if he were standing in the middle of an electrical field, with the air snapping and sizzling around them, sparks flying. Fighting with her was more exhilarating than making love to other women. Maybe as a young girl she had been as shy as a fawn, but she had grown into a woman who wasn’t afraid of anger, hers or anyone else’s.

"I’ll buy the house from you," he said abruptly, reminding himself why he had wanted to talk to her. "I’ll give you double what you paid for it."

Her green eyes narrowed, making them look even more catlike. "That isn’t a good business decision," she said, her tone light, but with temper still seething just below the surface.

He shrugged. "I can afford it. Can you afford to turn it down?"

"Yes," she said, and smiled.

The satisfaction in that smile almost made him laugh again. So she had made something of herself, had she? More than had been obvious at first; if she had a district manager, then obviously she had other employees, in several locations. He felt unwilling pride at what she had accomplished swell in his chest. He knew in intimate detail how little she had possessed when he’d had the Devlins thrown out, because he had watched her frantically picking her things up out of the dirt. Most people had a backup system of friends and relatives, pooled resources; Faith had had nothing, making her accomplishments all the more remarkable. If she’d had his assets, Gray thought, she might own the whole state by now. It wouldn’t be easy to get rid of a woman with that kind of grit.

Lust coiled and tightened in his guts. He’d never been attracted to weak, helpless women who needed protecting; he had enough of that with his family. There was nothing weak about Faith.

He studied her face, seeing both the resemblance to Renee and the differences. Her mouth was wider, more mobile, her lips red and lush and as velvety as rose petals. Her skin was perfect, with a porcelain texture that would show the imprint of a touch, a kiss. He thought of marking her with his mouth, kissing his way down her body until he reached the soft folds between her legs, folds that protected places even more tender. The image brought him to full, painful erection. Standing this close to her, he could smell the sweet, delicious scent of her skin, and he wondered if that sweetness would be more intense between her legs. He had always loved the way women smelled, but Faith’s scent was so enticing that every muscle in his body tightened with need, making it difficult for him to think of anything else.

He knew he shouldn’t do it, even as he reached for her. The last thing he wanted was to follow his father’s example; he still couldn’t think of his father’s leaving without feeling the hurt and anger, the betrayal, as fresh as if it had just happened. He didn’t want to hurt Noelle and Monica, didn’t want to revive that old scandal.

There were a hundred reasons, all of them good, why he shouldn’t want Faith Devlin in his arms, but in that instant none of them mattered a rat’s ass. His hands closed on her waist, and the feel of her, warm and soft, so vibrant that his palms tingled where he touched her, went to his head like a potent wine. He saw her eyes widen, the black pupils expanding until only a thin rim of green remained. Her hands lifted and flattened against his chest, the placement  covering his own nipples, and a shiver of response rippled his skin. Inexorably, his gaze fastened on her mouth, he drew her closer until her slim body rested against him. He felt her legs tangle with his, her firm breasts push against his stomach, saw those soft, full lips part as she drew in a startled breath. Then he lifted her on tiptoe and bent his head, and fed that particular hunger.

Her lips felt like rose petals, too, soft and velvety. He slanted his head and increased the pressure of his mouth, forcing them to open, a flower blooming at his command. Blood thundered through his veins and he pulled her tighter, sliding his arms around her and holding her welded to his body, letting her feel the swollen ridge of his erection against the softness of her belly. He felt her shudder, felt the convulsive movement of her hips, arching into him, and fierce male triumph flooded him. Her arms slid upward over his shoulders, to twine around his neck, and her teeth parted to allow him deeper access. A low growl sounded deep in his throat, and he took it, plundering her mouth with his tongue. Her taste was sweet and hot, flavored with the strong coffee she had drunk with her dessert. Her tongue curled around his in heated welcome, then she sucked daintily, holding him within her mouth.

He drove her backward, forcing her against the locked and boarded door. Dimly he could hear the voices of the people passing on the sidewalk behind them, hear the sullen rumble of thunder, but they meant nothing. She was live fire in his arms, not struggling against his kiss, not just accepting it, but responding wildly to his touch. Her lips trembled and clung and caressed. He wanted more, wanted everything. Deliberately he cupped her buttocks and lifted her, drawing her hips inward so that his erection was nestled in the soft notch of her legs. He rubbed her back and forth against him, groaning aloud at the exquisite pressure.

Rain pattered on the street, signaling the arrival of the storm, and there was a scurry of movement as people darted for cover. A clap of thunder made him lift his head and look around, a little irritated by this intrusion into the sensual haze that clouded his mind.

Whether it was the thunder or his own reaction to it that broke the spell on Faith, she suddenly stiffened in his arms and began shoving against him. He caught a glimpse of her furious face and quickly set her on her feet, releasing her and stepping back before she began screaming bloody murder.

She wriggled past him, onto the sidewalk, where the rain immediately soaked her, and turned to face him. Her eyes were yellowish with turbulence. "Don’t touch me again," she said, her voice rough and low. Then she turned and began walking as fast as she could, her head lowered against the rain that swept down the narrow street like a gray curtain. He started after her, intending to drag her to shelter, but forced himself to stop and step back into the doorway. She would fight him like a wildcat if he went after her now. He watched her until she turned the corner two blocks down, and disappeared from sight. She was almost running by then… escaping. From him.

For now.

Nine

Faith was dripping wet and shaking with both cold and reaction when she reached her car. Her hands trembled as she tried to fit the key into the lock, and it took her several tries before she succeeded. Crawling in, she collapsed against the steering wheel, pressing her forehead hard against the cold vinyl. Idiot! she thought violently. Fool!

She had to have been insane to give in to the craving to kiss him. Now he knew; she couldn’t hide it from him any longer. For the sake of a few moments of pleasure, she had let him see her weakness, and now he knew that she wanted him. Humiliation burned in her face, ate like acid at her insides. She knew his nature very well, having firsthand experience of his ruthlessness. He was a predator, and the first hint of weakness would draw him straight in for the kill.

He wouldn’t rest now until he’d had her; the occasional suggestive remark would become full-fledged attempts at seduction, and what had just happened proved that she couldn’t trust her common sense to resist him. Where he was concerned, she didn’t have any common sense. Horror filled her at the thought of being casually used and discarded, as if she were a sexual Kleenex. He thought of her as her mother’s clone, a slut willing to spread her legs for anyone who had the equipment – and from what she’d felt, he had more than his share – while she ached for him, her childhood infatuation having changed into a very adult yearning. She wanted nothing more than to be loved by him, to be free to open the floodgates on her own dammed-up reservoir of love; he would turn that dream into a bitter nightmare, using her weakness for him as a means to hurt her, reduce her to being, after all, another Devlin whore for a Rouillard to use.

As much as she wanted to stay in Prescott, she would rather leave than live with that humiliation, to see contempt in his eyes when he looked at her, as she had seen it once before. His words echoed in her mind, a refrain that she had heard many times over the years: You’re trash. The phrase was branded on her subconscious, surfacing every so often to taunt her.

No. She couldn’t live through that again. But for a few minutes, she had been in heaven. His arms had been around her and she had been free to touch him, to stroke his shoulders, thrust her fingers into the thick, silky tail of hair gathered at the nape of his neck. What would he look like with his hair loose, hanging to his shoulders? Or damp with sweat, and swinging forward as he bent over her, his face tight with passion –

She moaned, aching with a sweet pain that only he could ease. She had never been promiscuous; she had been a virgin when she’d married Kyle, and he was the only man with whom she’d ever made love. Her chastity, however, reflected her horror of being like Renee, with all the ugly association of being the town whore, rather than a lack of interest in the act itself. She loved making love, loved the feel of a man inside her, loved the scents and sounds, the tangled sweatiness. As her grief at Kyle’s death had eased, her hunger for sexual contact had grown, intensified by her own restraint. She simply couldn’t bring herself to have sex purely for the physical release, and after Kyle’s death she hadn’t wanted emotional involvement, either. She had gone four years without being held, without being kissed, until Gray had taken her in his arms and briefly opened the door to paradise.

There was a hot earthiness in him that fanned the banked coals of her own sexual fire. He had been as hard as a rock, and blatant about it. He had wanted her to feel him, had deliberately pulled her into him, lifted her to push the hard ridge of his erection against her mound. They had been on a public street, in daylight, but that hadn’t stopped him. Even though this was New Orleans, where such things might not be all that unusual, she had never before done anything like that. She had always gone out of her way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Respectability, responsibility, were too important to her for her to allow herself to be publicly fondled, yet that was exactly what she had done.

When he touched her, she forgot everything else but the hot joy of being in his arms. Despairing, she wondered if she would have stopped him even if he had done more, or if she would have let herself be taken there in the street like the lowest of whores, oblivious to decency, modesty, even legality. Her face burned at the thought of being arrested for public lewdness, or whatever it was called. Acute stupidity would be a better term.

It would never have happened with anyone but Gray. With no one else would she have lost herself so completely. She sat motionless in the car, watching the rain beat down in sheets beyond the concrete pillars of the public parking garage, and let appalled realization seep into her mind. Perhaps she had always sensed the truth, but pushed it away. She couldn’t hide from the full reach of reality any longer. She had loved Kyle, enjoyed sleeping with him, but it was as if only half of her had been involved. There had always been this other part of herself that was set aside, and belonged, irrevocably, to Gray. She had cheated Kyle; perhaps he had never known, and granted, their marriage had been in trouble because of his drinking, but still she should never have married him without loving him wholeheartedly. In the back of her mind had always been the thought that she would remarry someday, but now she knew that she couldn’t; she couldn’t cheat another man. There was only one man whom she could love completely, heart and soul and body, nothing held back, and that was Gray Rouillard. And he was the one man to whom she didn’t dare give herself, because he would destroy her.

When the rain stopped, Gray walked back to his hotel and went up to his suite, where he made one phone call, to Dallas. "Truman, look something up for me. You have a city directory, don’t you? See if there’s a Faith Hardy listed in it."

He crossed his legs at the ankle, his feet propped on the coffee table, and waited while his friend and business associate thumbed through the massive volume. A moment later the Texas accent twanged in his ear. "I got two Faith Hardys, and about ten other Hardys with the first initial F."

"Any of them F. D. Hardy?"

"Ah… no. There’s an F. C. and an F. G. but not an F. D."

"Occupations?"

"Let’s see. One’s a schoolteacher, one’s retired…" Truman ran down the list of occupations. None fit the meager facts Gray had on Faith. Dallas might not be the right city, after all, but it was more likely that Faith had declined to be listed in the city directory.

"Okay, that’s a dead end, I think. Look up Margot Stanley, M-a-r-g-o-t."

Truman snorted. "Are you sure it isn’t M-a-r-g-a-u-x? Isn’t that the way the ‘in’ people spell it these days?"

"Look up both spellings."

There was the sound of more pages being turned, and Truman humming. He paused. "There’s a shit pot full of Stanleys."

"Any Margots, of either the American or ‘in’ variety?"

"Yeah, here’s an American-variety Margot."

"Where does she work?"

"Holladay Travel. Spelled with two I’s and an a."

"Cross-reference that, and see if it lists the owner." More humming. "Bingo," Truman said. "The owner is F. D. Hardy." "Thanks," Gray said, amused at how easy it had been, after all. "Any time."

Gray hung up the phone and considered what he had just discovered. Faith owned a travel agency. Good for her, he thought, inexplicably pleased. On a hunch, he dragged the New Orleans phone directory out of the desk and looked through the yellow pages. There it was, in a discreet, tasteful ad: "Holladay Travel – Put the Holiday Back in Your Vacation, and Leave the Worry to Us."

So she had at least two offices, and probably more, which explained how she had been able to pay cash for her house. He grinned as he remembered the satisfied little smile on her face when she had thrown his offer to buy the house back in his face. But if she was this prosperous, why did she want to keep it such a secret? Why wasn’t she broadcasting it all over Prescott, to show everyone that a Devlin could crawl out of the trash heap, after all? Why had she so obviously interrupted Margot and kept her from giving out any more information than she had already let slip?

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Faith was afraid he would do something to sabotage her business. Not only did he carry a lot of weight in Louisiana and beyond, but he had just told her that he owned a hotel, in a city that made its living from tourists. It would be easy for him to cause trouble for her agency, and she evidently expected him to do exactly that. Her opinion of him wasn’t very high, he thought wryly.

Hell, why should it be? On a steamy summer night, twelve years ago, he had ground her into the dirt. After that night, she probably thought of him as the devil incarnate.

Only an hour before, he had scared her by unceremoniously grabbing her from behind, though Little Red had seemed more furious than frightened; she had come out swinging, those green eyes narrowed and determined. Then he had all but mauled her on a public street, gripping her ass, lifting her up and grinding his cock against her mound. No wonder she had run from him, when he had finally turned her loose.

Except… she hadn’t protested. Instead she had been so hot and sweet that he felt dizzy remembering her in his arms, plastered against his body. She had been taut and trembling with desire, vibrating with it. Her response had broadsided him, knocked him so crazy that he still hadn’t recovered. For a moment he had been blind with lust, insensible to everything else but the driving need to be inside her. If that clap of thunder hadn’t startled him, he might have tried to take her right there, standing in the doorway, with people walking past no more than two feet away. He couldn’t remember ever before being so wild for a woman that nothing else mattered, but Faith had reduced him to that level with only a kiss.

Just a kiss, sweet and spicy at the same time, so hot it had seared him. Her tongue, curling against his in love play. The unreserved sensuality in the way she had sucked on his tongue. The press of her body, eager and instinctive. She wanted him, as fiercely as he wanted her.

Memory re-created the resilient fullness of her buttocks in his hands, and he clenched them into fists to contain the tingling of his palms. It was worse than he had thought, this gnawing lust to have her. He wasn’t accustomed to denying himself any of his sexual appetites, but the barriers between them were both solid and maddening. There was his mother, who had so totally withdrawn when faced with the humiliation of her husband leaving her for the town whore. Monica, her wrists slashed and her blood pooling at her feet; her white face was another image that never left him. There were his own feelings, the rage and pain at being abandoned by his father. The barriers weren’t all on his side, either; the memory of that night lay between him and Faith, a mental Berlin Wall, stark and shattering. Too much pain, too many reasons.

Their bodies didn’t give a damn.

That was it in a nutshell. He wasn’t a Don Juan, but it was a fact that getting sex had always been easy for him. Nothing in his considerable experience, however, had prepared him for this… fever. They couldn’t look at each other without feeling its heat. And when they touched, it was like an inferno.

Restlessly he paced the floor, trying to find some way around the barriers. She couldn’t stay in Prescott; that was asking too much of his family. No, he couldn’t let up on making life as miserable as possible for her there, not that he had been able, or willing, to do much anyway. He had inconvenienced her, period. He couldn’t bring himself to really persecute her. She didn’t deserve it; she had been a victim, too. She had worked hard to make something of her life, and had succeeded. If it weren’t for his family, hell, he’d welcome her with open arms. An open fly, too, he thought wryly, and felt the twinge of arousal in his groin.

But he couldn’t make his family go away, couldn’t change the way they felt, so Faith had to go. Maybe not far. Maybe he could convince her to move to Baton Rouge, or even any of the small towns around Prescott. Just somewhere out of the parish, but close enough that they could see each other. She had made a strategic mistake in letting him see how much she wanted him, because he could use that as a means of convincing her to move. We can’t be together here. Move, and we’ll see each other as often as possible. She wouldn’t like it; she’d probably tell him to go to hell, at first. But the fever was there, burning in her the same way it was burning in him. If he used every opportunity to fan the flames, she would eventually see things his way, assuming they didn’t both go up in smoke in the meantime.

She could keep the house in Prescott, if selling it made her feel as if she was giving up too much. He’d buy her another house, anywhere she wanted.

He was faced with two facts. She had to leave Prescott, and he had to have her. Whatever it took, he had to have her.

"I agree with you," Mr. Pleasant said, sipping from the glass of iced tea Faith had given him. "I think Guy Rouillard is dead, and has been for twelve years."

He was dressed today in a pale blue seersucker suit; it would have been tacky if it hadn’t fit so well, if his white shirt hadn’t been so pristine, his tie so impeccable. On Mr. Pleasant, a seersucker suit looked natty. Some of the sadness was gone from his dark eyes, replaced by the sparkle of interest.

They sat in the air conditioned coolness of her living room. Faith had been surprised when he’d called her; it had been only two days since she had hired him. But here he was, with a notepad balanced on his knee.

"There’s been no trace of him since the night he vanished," he said. "No credit card purchases, no bank withdrawals, no Social Security taxes paid in or tax return filed. Mr. Rouillard wasn’t a criminal, so there was no need for him to change his name or disappear so completely. Logically, then, he’s dead."

Faith drew a deep breath. "That’s what I thought. I wanted to make certain, though, before I begin asking questions."

"You do realize that, if he was murdered, your questions could make someone very anxious." He took another sip of his tea. "The situation could be dangerous for you, my dear. Perhaps it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie."

"I’ve thought of the possibility of danger," she admitted. "But considering my mother’s involvement with him and the fact that everyone thinks they ran away together, no one would be surprised at my interest. My gall, maybe, but not my interest."

He chuckled. "It depends on the nature of the questions, I suppose. If you came right out and said you thought Mr. Rouillard had been killed, that would attract a lot of attention." He sobered, and his tone softened. "My advice is to forget about it. The murder, if there was one, is twelve years old. Time covers a lot of tracks, and you have no evidence to tell you where to begin looking. You aren’t likely to find anything, but you may put yourself in danger."

"Not even try to find out what happened?" she asked softly. "Let a murderer go unpunished?"

"Ah. You’re thinking about justice. It’s a wonderful concept, if you have the means to accomplish it. Sometimes, though, justice has to be weighed against other considerations, and reality gets in the way. Probably Mr. Rouillard was murdered. Probably your mother is involved, in knowledge if not in deed. Could you handle that? What if his death was an accident, but she was brought up on murder charges? Gray Rouillard is a powerful man; do you think he’d let his father’s death go unpunished? The worst scenario, of course, is if his death wasn’t an accident. In that case, my dear, you would definitely be in danger yourself." She sighed. "My reasons for wanting to find out what happened to him aren’t entirely altruistic. In fact, they’re mostly selfish. I want to live here; this is home, this is where I grew up. But I won’t be accepted here as long as everyone thinks Guy ran away with my mother. The Rouillards don’t want me here; Gray is making things difficult for me. I can’t buy my groceries in Prescott, I can’t fill up my car. Unless I can prove Mama didn’t have anything to do with Guy’s disappearance, I’ll never have a friend here."

"And what if you prove she killed him?" Mr. Pleasant softly asked.

Faith bit her lip, and rolled the cold, damp glass between her hands. "That’s a chance I’ll have to take." The words were low, almost inaudible. "I know that, if she’s guilty, I won’t be able to live here. But knowing what really happened, no matter how bad, won’t be as bad as not knowing. Maybe I won’t find out anything, but I’m going to try."

He sighed. "I thought you’d say that. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a few questions around town, just out of curiosity. Folks might tell me things that they wouldn’t tell you."

That was true. Now that her identity was known, most people would clam up around her rather than defy Gray. Still, Mr. Pleasant had already completed the job for which she’d hired him. "I can’t afford any further investigation," she said honestly.

He waved his hand in dismissal. "This is for my own curiosity. I’ve always loved a good mystery."

She eyed him doubtfully. "Has that ever kept you from charging your regular fees?"

"Well, no," he admitted, and laughed. "But I don’t need the money, and I’d like to know what happened to Mr. Rouillard. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to work with my heart the way it is. Probably not long, so I’m only going to spend my time on cases that interest me. As for money… well, let’s just say I don’t have much need for it now."

With his wife dead, he meant. He suddenly busied himself with flipping through his notes, and she knew he was once again fighting tears. She allowed him the dignity of pretense and asked if he would like more iced tea.

"No, thank you. It was delicious, just the thing on a hot day." He stood, smoothing the crisp seersucker into place. "I’ll let you know if I get any interesting answers. Is there a motel in town?"

She gave him the directions to the motel as she walked out on the porch with him. "Have supper with me tonight," she invited on impulse, disliking the thought of him eating alone, making do with a fast-food sandwich.

He blushed, the color extending all the way into his thinning hair. "I’d be delighted."

"Would you mind if we ate at six? I prefer eating early."

"So do I, Mrs. Hardy. Six o’clock, then." He was smiling as he walked jauntily to his car. Faith watched him drive away, then returned to the paperwork she had abandoned at his arrival. She looked forward to supper; she had developed a definite soft spot for Mr. Pleasant.

He arrived promptly at six, as she had known he would, and they sat down to a light meal of tender grilled pork chops, saffron rice, and fresh green beans. He kept looking around, absorbing the little details – the starched linen napkins, the fragrant centerpiece of tiny wild roses, the aromas of home-cooked food – and she knew that he had missed this since his wife had died. They lingered over dessert, a lemon sorbet with just the right amount of tartness. Talking with him was easy; he was very old-fashioned, and she found that comforting. Consideration of any sort had been in such short supply during her formative years that she doubly appreciated it now.

It was almost eight when a single hard knock rattled her front door. Faith stiffened; she didn’t have to open the door to know who was standing on her porch.

"Is something wrong?" Mr. Pleasant asked, too astute to miss her change of expression.

"I think you’re about to meet Gray Rouillard," she said, getting to her feet and crossing to the door. As usual, her heart was beating too fast and too hard at the prospect of seeing him, talking to him. In over fifteen years, that hadn’t changed; she might as well be eleven again, big-eyed with hero worship. It was twilight, the long spring days reluctant to give up their glow. He was silhouetted against the pale opal of the sky, a tall, broad-shouldered, faceless figure. "I hope Fm not interrupting you," he said, but there was a hard undertone to his rumbling voice that told her he didn’t give a damn if he was or not.

"If you were, I wouldn’t have answered the door," she replied as she let him in. She couldn’t erase the challenge of her own tone, though she tried to moderate it for Mr. Pleasant’s sake.

Gray’s smile was nothing more than a baring of teeth as he turned to Mr. Pleasant, who had politely risen from his seat at Gray’s entrance. The room suddenly seemed too small, filled and dominated by Gray’s vital masculine presence, all six feet four of it. He was wearing a white shirt, black jeans, and low-heeled boots, and looked more like a pirate than ever. His teeth flashed as white as the tiny diamond in his ear.

"We’ve already finished dinner," Faith said smoothly, recovering her control. "Mr. Pleasant, this is Gray Rouillard, a neighbor. Gray, Francis Pleasant, from New Orleans."

Gray held out his hand, and Mr. Pleasant’s smaller hand was swallowed by his grip. "A friend or a business associate?" he asked, as if he had a right to the information.

Mr. Pleasant’s eyes twinkled, and he thoughtfully pursed his mouth as he retrieved his hand. "Why, both, I believe. And you? A friend as well as a neighbor?"

"No," Faith said.

Gray shot her a hard, quick look. "Not exactly," he said.

Mr. Pleasant’s eyes twinkled even more. "I see." He took Faith’s hand in his and lifted it to his mouth for a courtly kiss, then bestowed another one on her cheek. "I must be going, my dear; my old bones want to rest. My hours resemble an infant’s these days. It was a lovely dinner. Thank you for inviting me."

"It was my pleasure," she said, patting his hand and kissing his cheek, too.

"I’ll call," he promised as he went out the door. As she had that morning, Faith waited in the doorway until he was in his car, and waved as he reversed out of the driveway.

Fighting down her dread, she closed the door and turned to face Gray, who had silently approached until he stood only a foot behind her. His eyes were black with temper. "Who the hell is he?" he growled. "Your sugar daddy? Did you mix business with pleasure in New Orleans, or is it all business to you?"

"None of your business," she said flatly, mocking him with her repetition of the word. She glared up at him, fighting the tiny red flare of rage and not completely succeeding. Mr. Pleasant was forty years older than she, but of course, Gray’s first thought was that she was sleeping with him.

He moved one step closer, erasing the small distance between them. "By God, it is my business, and has been for the past two days."

Hot color ran into Faith’s cheeks at the reference to what had happened between them in New Orleans. "That didn’t mean anything," she began, her voice gruff with embarrassment, but he gripped her shoulders and gave her a single shake.

"The hell it didn’t. Maybe you need to refresh your memory." He bent his head and, too late, she put up her hands to try to hold him away. Her palms flattened against his chest as his mouth covered hers, and immediately she was engulfed in heat. His heat. Her own. Dizziness roared in her ears. She swayed against him, her lips parting to mold more precisely to the demanding pressure of his, to admit the hot probe of his tongue. All the rich blues and golds and burgundies of his scent swirled around her, inside her, possessing her. His heartbeat thudded, strong and heavy, beneath her right palm. She felt the hard, immediate swell of his erection against her belly, and her hips moved automatically, seeking.

He lifted his head and moved back, putting a few inches between them. He was breathing hard, his eyes fierce with arousal, his lips red and moist and a little swollen from that hard kiss. His fingers moved on her shoulders, massaging, caressing. "Don’t deny what happened."

"Nothing happened." She uttered the lie with a defiance that hid her desperation. He knew it was a lie, she saw the anger in his face, but she said it anyway. She knew what he was doing. In New Orleans she had made the mistake of giving him an inch, and now he was trying to take full advantage of it and gain a mile. Perhaps he had come here tonight thinking she would be easy for him; he could take her to bed, then cajole her into leaving town. For him, he would say. So they could be together without upsetting his mother. Her blatant lie served notice that she didn’t intend to let him have his way. She wrenched away from him, sliding sideways to prevent him from pinning her against the door. "It was just a kiss – "

"Yeah, and King Kong was just a monkey. Goddammit, stand still," he said irritably, reaching out to grab her, this time holding her arms. "You make me dizzy with that damn two-step. I’m not going to throw you down and crawl on top of you – not just yet, anyway."

Her eyes flared with panic. "You can bet your sweet bottom dollar, you’re not!" she shouted, once again trying to jerk away. "Tonight, or any other time!"

"Would you stop that?" he snapped. "You’re going to bruise yourself." With a quick movement he whirled her around and folded his arms about her, crossing them under her breasts and holding her wrists manacled. Just that quickly, that easily, she was subdued and surrounded, his muscled body hard and warm against her back. Temptation rose, strong and immediate, urging her to relax her neck and let her head fall backward onto his chest, let her body soften and mold itself against his, let herself inhale the rich, musky scent of his skin and grow intoxicated on it. She shuddered as hunger surged within her, and knew that if she gave him the smallest response now, she would be lost. It wouldn’t take five minutes for him to have her flat on the bed.

"You see?" he asked, his voice softening to a velvety punas he felt her tremble. His warm breath stirred her hair. "All I have to do is touch you. It’s the same for me, Faith. I don’t like this worth a damn, but by God, I want you, and we’re going to do something about it."

She closed her eyes, still shaking with the effort of resisting him, and gave a sharp little shake of her head. "No."

"No, what?" He nuzzled his cheek against the top of her head. "No, you don’t want me, or no, we aren’t going to do something about it? Which one are you lying about now?"

"I won’t let you," she said, not letting him distract her. She opened her eyes and stared straight ahead, focusing on one of the lamps in an effort to ignore the feel of his arms around her. "I won’t let you treat me like dirt again."

He stilled, even his breath halting for a moment. Then he let it out with a quiet sigh. "It’s always between us, isn’t it?" There was no need to be more specific; the memory of that night was almost tangible. He paused. "Baby, I know about Holladay Travel, that you’ve worked for everything you have. I know you’re not like your mother."

Oh, God. He knew about her agency. She fought a lurch of panic, and instead concentrated on his last statement. "Sure you do," she said bitterly. "You think so highly of my character that you just accused me of having a sugar daddy. My God, I invited a lonely old man to have dinner with me, so of course I’m crawling into bed with him!" Infuriated, she tried once again to wrench free.

His arms tightened until she could barely breathe. "I told you to stop that," he warned. "You’ll be black and blue."

"If I am, it’ll be your fault, not mine! You’re the one doing the manhandling!" She kicked backward, catching his shin with her heel, but she was wearing soft-soled slippers and he was wearing boots; he grunted, but she knew she hadn’t hurt him. She twisted her body, trying to turn around so she could do more damage.

"You… little… wildcat," he said, panting with the effort of controlling her. "Damn it, would you be still! I was jealous," he admitted baldly.

For a moment, she was too stunned to react. She stood motionless in the circle of his arms, wariness at battle with a dizzying spurt of elation. Jealous! He couldn’t be jealous unless he cared – no. She couldn’t let herself fall into that trap. She didn’t dare believe him. She had witnessed his seduction technique before; she remembered how he had soothed Lindsey Partain, complimenting her, telling her how much he wanted her, needed her. He was adept at getting what he wanted. While she had no doubt that he wanted her physically, with the evidence so prominent, she knew that nothing else had changed. He still wanted her to leave, and would use her weakness for him to convince her to go.

"Do you honestly expect me to believe you?" she finally asked, weariness in every word.

He nudged his hips forward. "Do you deny this?"

She forced herself to shrug. "What’s there to deny? You have a hard-on. Big deal. That doesn’t mean anything."

A chuckle vibrated in his chest. "It’s a good thing I have a healthy ego, or you’d give me an inferiority complex."

She wished he wouldn’t laugh. She didn’t want him to have a sense of humor. She wanted him to be mean-spirited and small-minded, so she could despise him. Instead he was bold and audacious, with a disarming laugh. He was ruthless, but he wasn’t mean.

He bent his head to nuzzle her ear, his warm breath tickling the sensitive whorls. "There doesn’t have to be a problem," he murmured. "We can be together – not here, but there’s a workable solution."

Faith stiffened again. "I’ll just bet there is. And it involves my leaving town, doesn’t it?"

His tongue flicked out, lazily playing with her earlobe before he caught it between his teeth and sensuously nipped at it. "You wouldn’t have to go far," he cajoled. "You don’t even have to sell this house. I’ll buy another house for you, a bigger one, if you want – "

Rage engulfed her, red-hot and seething. She wrenched free of his slackened embrace and spun to face him, her face white and her eyes burning. "Shut up! You can’t stop thinking that I’m for sale, can you? The only change is that you’ve moved me up into a higher price bracket! I don’t want your damn house, but I do want you out of mine. Right now!"

His eyes narrowed, and he didn’t move an inch. "I wasn’t thinking about buying you. I was trying to make things as easy as possible for you."

"Nice try, but I know too much about you. I’ve seen you in action, remember?" The memory of that night was bitter in her tone, and flashed starkly between them. She had that other memory, too, one he didn’t know about: the time she had watched him with Lindsey Partain. She’d seen him in action, all right.

He was silent a moment, his dark gaze moving over her. "That won’t happen again," he said gently.

"No, it won’t," she agreed, lifting her chin. "I won’t let you ever treat me that way again."

"You wouldn’t have much choice, if I decided to do it," he said, that dangerous glitter coming into his eyes. He chucked her under the chin. "Remember that, baby. I can play a lot rougher than I have so far." She jerked her head away. "So can I." His gaze slid down her body, the expression in his eyes changing into something slow and heated. "I’ll bet you can. You almost tempt me to find out how rough you can be, just for the fun of it. But this discussion has gone way off course. We aren’t in a war, baby. We can have a nice arrangement, and enjoy ourselves without hurting my family, if you’ll only agree to it."

"No," she said.

"That must be your favorite word. I’m getting damn tired of hearing it."

"Then stay away." She sighed, weary of the battle, and shook her head. "I don’t want to hurt your family. That isn’t why I came back. This is my home; I don’t want to cause any trouble, I just want to live here. If I have to fight you to do that, then I will."

"The battle lines are drawn, then." He shrugged. "It’s up to you, how much trouble you want to put up with to live here. I won’t back down; you’re still going to be unwelcome in town. If you change your mind, though, all you have to do is call me. I’ll take care of you, no questions asked, and no gloating."

"I won’t call."

"Maybe you won’t, but maybe you will. Think about what we could have together."

"What? A couple of quickies every week? Lying about where you are, because you don’t want your family to know? Thanks, but no thanks." He reached out and cupped her cheek, and this time she didn’t pull away. His touch was gentle as his thumb rubbed her lower lip, probing the inner softness. "There’s more to it than just the fucking," he said softly. "Though God knows I want that so much I hurt."

Because she wanted so desperately to believe him, she didn’t dare. She had to fight tears as she shook her head. "Please leave."

"All right, I’ll go. But think about it." He turned toward the door, then stopped. "About your company – "

Instantly she was alarmed, and tensed for another battle. "If you dare do anything to hurt my business – "

He gave her an impatient look. "Hush. I’m not going to do a thing. I just wanted you to know how proud I am of you. I’m glad you’ve accomplished as much as you have. In fact, I told my manager at the hotel to give special consideration to any groups booked by your agency."

Proud of her? Faith stood silently as he left, and the tears she had successfully held back began to trickle down her cheeks. Did she dare believe him in this? She couldn’t, she realized. She would keep to her original decision not to book any more groups into his hotel.

But the tears still fell. He’d said he was proud of her.

Ten

Monica took her time in the bathroom, needing the privacy to get herself back. It was always slightly alarming, that loss of self, of personhood. Michael didn’t seem to feel it; he was always content, a little drowsy, when he moved off of her. She could hear the squeak of the bed now as he moved, probably to put out his cigarette. He didn’t smoke much, he was trying to quit, but after sex was one of the times when he found cigarettes harder to resist. Today his hand had been shaking a little as he flicked his lighter, making the tiny flame dance.

That telltale reaction made her feel soft inside, and she stayed in the bathroom longer than usual so he wouldn’t see. It was bad enough that he knew how wild she went when he was inside her, moaning, clutching at him with wet hands, her hips moving. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t make them stay still. And she was wet down there, too; she heard the embarrassing slurping sounds when he moved in and out of her. She wasn’t embarrassed then, all she could think of was the fever building inside her, but afterward she felt the shame.

It wasn’t that way with Alex. With Alex she could restrain herself; he seemed to prefer it that way, and she knew why. He was pretending she was Mama.

She didn’t want to do it with Alex, but at the same time, she did. She couldn’t say that he forced her, not even to make herself feel better about what she did. She loved Alex, but – he was almost like a father to her. He couldn’t take Daddy’s place, no one could do that, but Alex had been Daddy’s best friend, and he had been so hurt when Daddy had left like that. Quietly he had given them all a shoulder to lean on, or to cry on, as the case may be. Sometimes, in those first awful days, she had been able to pretend a little bit that he was her father, that nothing had changed.

But the pretense hadn’t held up for long. The horrible shock of that day had forever changed something inside her, and she had accepted that things would never be perfect. Daddy wasn’t coming back; he’d preferred living with that slut rather than living with his own family. He didn’t love Mama and never had.

Alex loved Mama, though. Poor Alex. She couldn’t remember when she had first realized how he felt, when she had seen the devotion and sadness in his eyes; it had been several years after Daddy had left, though. It was about the time he had first coaxed Mama to eat dinner with them. He could do more with Mama than either she or Gray could; maybe it was the gentle, devoted courtesy with which he treated her. God knows Daddy had never been like that with her. He had been polite, and gentle, but you could tell he was just going through the motions and didn’t really care. Alex cared.

She remembered the night it had first happened. Gray had been in New Orleans on business. Mama had come down for dinner, but despite Alex’s cajoling, had been more depressed than usual and had really made an effort just to eat with them. She had gone back to her room almost immediately, despite his pleas. When he had turned back to face Monica, she had seen the desolation in his eyes, and impulsively reached out to put her hand on his arm, wanting to comfort him.

It had been a chilly winter night. There was a fire in the parlor, so they had gone in there, and she had set herself to easing that look from his eyes. They had sat on the sofa in front of the fire, talking quietly of many things while he sipped an after-dinner brandy, his favorite. The house was quiet, the room dim, with only one lamp on. The fire had softly snapped. And in the firelight, she must have looked like Mama. She had worn her dark hair in a twist that night, and she always dressed in the conservative, classic style Mama preferred. For all those reasons, the brandy, the solitude, the darkened room, his own disappointment, her resemblance to Mama – it had happened.

A kiss had become two, then more. His hands were in her hair, and he was groaning. Monica remembered how her heart had pounded, in fear and an almost painful sympathy. He had touched her breasts, almost reverentially, but only through her clothes. And he had pushed up her skirt only enough to bare the essential part, as if he didn’t want to violate her modesty more than was necessary. She had a confused memory of naked flesh, unseen but felt, as he pressed himself to her, then a sharp sting of pain and the quick pumps into her. Unfaded by time, however, was the memory of how his voice had broken as he murmured, "Noelle," in her ear.

He didn’t seem to know he’d been the first. In his mind, she’d been Mama.

And in her mind, God help her, he’d been Daddy. It was so sick that she was still disgusted at herself. She’d never had any sexual feelings for Daddy; hadn’t had any at all, until Michael. But in the tumult of emotion that night, she’d thought, Maybe he won’t leave, if I give him what Mama won’t. So she had taken her mother’s place, offering herself sexually as a bribe to keep Daddy at home. Poor Alex… poor her. Both of them surrogates for something neither one could ever have. Freud would have had a field day with her.

But that night had been the first of many, over the past seven years. Though not that many, come to think of it. Michael had probably had her more often in just a year than Alex had in seven. Alex had been so ashamed, so apologetic. But he had come to her again, helplessly needing the pretense that Noelle would ever lie in his arms, and Monica had let him have the ease that he needed. He never approached her when Gray was home, only when he was out of town on business.

The last time had been just two days ago, when Gray had been in New Orleans. She had gone to Alex’s office that night, as she usually did, and he had done it to her on the sofa there. It never took long. He never undressed her, or himself. Seven years he’d been doing it to her, and she’d never seen him naked, had actually only seen his thing a few times. He was still apologetic about his need, as if she really were Mama, and thought the process was nasty. So he finished as fast as he could, and Monica cleaned herself and went home.

It wasn’t like that with Michael. She still didn’t know what had attracted him to her, or how she had actually allowed things to progress so far. He’d grown up in Prescott, so she’d known him, to put a name to his face, to speak to, all of her life. He was five years older than Gray, and already a deputy with the sheriffs department when she had finished high school. He’d married his high school sweetheart and had two little boys. They’d been like Ward and June Cleaver, and then she’d up and left him, right out of the blue. She had moved to Bogalusa and remarried a couple of years later. His sons were seventeen and eighteen now, and he had a good relationship with them.

Michael had a good relationship with everyone, she thought, a smile curving her mouth. That was why he’d been elected sheriff when Sheriff Deese had finally retired three years ago. He was a true good old boy, disdaining suits in favor of a uniform, and wing tips in favor of boots. He was a lanky six feet, with sandy hair and friendly blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles across his nose. Opie, all grown up.

One day, a year ago, she’d been in town and decided to eat lunch at the courthouse grill, which made the best hamburgers in town. Mama would have been horrified at such a plebeian taste, but Monica loved hamburgers and treated herself occasionally. She’d been sitting at the little table when Michael had come in, gotten his own hamburger, and was on his way back to a booth when he suddenly paused by her table and asked if he could join her. Startled, she’d said yes.

At first she’d been stiff, but Michael could tease the starch out of a shirt. Soon they’d been laughing and talking as easily as if they were best friends. She’d had another moment of stunned awkwardness when he’d asked her to have dinner with him; she was acutely aware that Mama wouldn’t approve. There was nothing upper-crust about Michael McFane. But she had agreed, and to her surprise, he had cooked dinner himself, grilling steaks in his backyard. He lived now on the small farm where he’d grown up, with the closest neighbor a mile down the road, and Monica had felt relaxed by the quiet solitude of his rural home.

Relaxed enough, after they’d eaten and danced to country tunes on the radio, moving slowly around his small living room, to let him take her into his bedroom. She hadn’t planned to let him, hadn’t even considered that he’d try. But he’d started kissing her, and his kisses were warm and slow, and for the first time in her life she felt the curl of desire deep in her body. Alarmed by what was happening, and the speed of it, she had nevertheless stood in his bedroom and let him unzip her dress, then unhook her bra and remove it. No one had ever seen her bare breasts, but all of a sudden Michael had not only seen them, but was busy sucking on them. The drawing pressure of his mouth had made her go wild, and they had tumbled to the bed. Not for him a discreet pumping, with trousers barely lowered. Soon they were both naked, locked together on the cotton sheets, and that curl of desire had exploded into a wantonness that still alarmed her.

No lady would act in such a manner, but then Monica had always known she wasn’t a lady. Mama was a lady; Monica had been trying all her life to be like Mama, so Mama would love her, but she’d always fallen short. Mama would be horrified and disgusted if she knew her daughter spent several hours a week in bed with Michael McFane – the sheriff, of all people! – screwing like a rabbit.

Sometimes Monica felt resentful of the strictures that had been drummed into her from the cradle. Gray hadn’t been subjected to, and confined by, all the things that ladies didn’t do. It was as if Mama had written Gray off as a lost cause from the moment of his birth; he was a male, therefore she expected him to act like an animal. Because she was a lady, she had ignored the sexual escapades of both father and son; such things were of no interest to her, and she expected her daughter not to be interested in them, either.

It hadn’t worked that way, though Monica had tried. She had tried really hard, for the first twenty-five years of her life. Even after Mama had withdrawn from them, after Daddy left, Monica had kept trying, hoping that, if she was good enough, Mama wouldn’t feel so bad about Daddy being gone.

But she had always hungered for more. Mama had always been so reserved and cool, perfect, untouchable. Daddy had been warm and loving; he had hugged her, tussled with her despite Mama’s disapproval of such rowdiness with her daughter. Gray was even more physical than Daddy; he had always burned with an inner fire that Monica had recognized at an early age.

She remembered once, when Gray had been home from college, they had lingered around the dinner table, talking. Gray had been lounging in his chair with that big-cat grace of his, laughing as he described a prank some of the football players had pulled on one of the coaches, and there had been… she couldn’t quite describe it… a sort of sensual wildness in the tilt of his head, the motion of his hand as he picked up his glass. She had glanced at Mama and found her staring at Gray with an expression of revulsion on her face, as if he were a disgusting animal. He had been an animal, of course, a healthy, rambunctious teenage boy, blazing with the testosterone pumping into his body. But there was nothing repulsive about him, and Monica had felt resentful of that disapproval, on his behalf.

Gray was a wonderful brother, she didn’t know what she would have done without him, in those awful days after Daddy left. She had been so ashamed of her own attempted suicide that she had sworn then she would never again be that weak, that much of a burden to Gray. It had been a struggle, but she’d kept that promise to herself. She had only to look at the thin, silvery lines on her wrists to forcibly remind herself of the price of weakness.

Seeing Faith Devlin in the parking lot at the grocery store had shocked her so much that, for the first time in a long while, she’d fallen into the old habit of running to Gray, expecting him to take care of her problems. She was disgusted with herself for falling to pieces the way she had, but when she had seen that dark red hair, such a rich color that it was almost wine-colored, her heart had almost stopped. For a wild, dizzying moment, she had thought, Daddy’s back! because if Renee was here, then surely Daddy was, too.

But Daddy was nowhere in sight. There was only Renee, looking even younger than when she had left, which was pure injustice. Someone as wicked and trashy as Renee Devlin should wear her sins on her face, so everyone would know. But the face staring back at Monica had been as exquisitely complexioned as ever, without a wrinkle in sight. The same slumberous green eyes, the wide, soft, sensual mouth – nothing had changed. And for a moment, Monica had been again the hurt, helpless girl she’d been before, and she had gone running to Gray.

Only it hadn’t been Renee; the woman in the parking lot was Faith Devlin, and Gray had been oddly reluctant to use all his influence against her. Monica couldn’t recall much about Faith, just a vague memory of a skinny little girl with her mother’s hair, but that didn’t matter. What wasn’t vague was the twist of pain at seeing her, the rush of memories, the old sense of betrayal and abandonment. She had been afraid to go to town since then, afraid she would see Faith again and feel the sting of salt in the reopened wound.

"Monica?" came Michael’s lazy voice. "You go to sleep in there, honey?"

"No, I was just primping," Monica called, and ran the water in the basin to give credence to her lie. Her reflection looked back at her. Not bad, for thirty-two. Sleek dark hair, not as black as Gray’s, but not a silver strand in sight. Her face was fine-boned, like Mama’s, but she had the Rouillard dark eyes. Not overweight, and her breasts were firm.

Michael was still sprawled naked on the bed when she left the bathroom, and a slow smile lit his face as he held out his hand to her. "Come snuggle," he invited, and her heart turned over. She crawled back into bed, and into the warmth of his encircling arm. He sighed with contentment as he settled her against him, and his big hand moved to squeeze one resilient breast. "I think we should get married," he said.

Her heart didn’t just turn over this time, it almost stopped. She stared up at him, eyes round with both panic and astonishment. "M-Marry?" she stuttered, then crammed both hands against her mouth to hold back the hysterical giggle that bubbled up. "Michael and Monica McFane?" The giggle erupted anyway.

He grinned. "So it sounds like we’re twins. I can live with it if you can." He thumbed her nipple, enjoying the way it peaked at his touch. "But if we have a kid, its name will start with anything but an M."

Marriage. Kids. Oh, God. Somehow she had never envisioned that he might want to marry her. She had never even thought of marriage in connection with herself. Her life had gone into deep freeze twelve years ago, and she had never expected it to change.

But nothing is static. Even rock changed, ground down by time and the elements. Alex hadn’t disrupted the even rhythm of her life, but Michael had blazed through like a comet.

Alex. Oh, God.

"I know I don’t have much to offer you," Michael was saying. "This house sure ain’t nothing like what you’re used to, but I’ll fix it up any way you want; you just tell me what to do and I’ll do it."

Another shock. She had lived her entire thirty-two years at Rouillard House. She tried to imagine living anywhere else, and couldn’t. Twelve years ago the entire foundation of her life had crumbled, and since then she hadn’t dealt well with any change, even a relatively minor one such as getting a new car. Gray had finally forced her to give up the one she had been driving since she was nineteen, just as, five years ago, he had forced her to redo her bedroom. She had been heartily sick of the little-girl decor for years, but the thought of changing it had made her feel even worse. It had been a relief when Gray had brought a decorator in one day while she had a dentist appointment, and returned to find the wallpaper already stripped off and the carpet removed. Still, she had cried for three days. So little of her former life had remained the way it was before Daddy left, and it hurt to give up anything else. After she stopped crying, and the decorator was finished, she loved the room; it was the transition that was so wrenching.

"Honey?" Michael said now, hesitation creeping into his voice. "I’m sorry, I guess I thought – "

Fiercely she put her hand against his mouth. "Don’t you dare put yourself down to me," she said, low and violent, aching inside that he would think for a minute that she would consider herself too good for him. The reverse was true; Michael was too good for her. Only two days ago she had lain on the leather sofa in Alex’s office and let him screw her. Ugly word. Ugly process. It had nothing in common with Michael’s lovemaking. She had felt nothing, except pity, and relief when it was over.

If Michael knew about Alex, he wouldn’t want her any longer. How could he? For the past year he had thought she was his alone, and all the while she had been letting an old family friend screw her, just as she had for the six years before.

She hadn’t felt any guilt at all, on Alex’s behalf, when Michael had become her lover. She didn’t feel any connection with Alex; how could she? It wasn’t even her he was doing it to, but her mother. But she was eaten alive with guilt when she went to Alex, because it was such a betrayal of Michael. She would have to tell Alex that it had to stop, but the old terror was still there, buried deep. If she stopped letting him do it, would he leave? Would it matter if he did? She wasn’t a hurt, confused girl any longer, she didn’t need Daddy – or his stand-in.

But what would happen to Mama if Alex stopped coming to the house? He loved Mama, but could he bear to see her, so lost to him, if he didn’t have the release of pretending that he was making love to her?

"I love you," she said now to Michael, and tears trickled from her eyes. "I just – I never thought you’d want to marry me."

"Silly." He wiped the wetness from her cheeks, and a crooked smile lit his grown-up Opie face. "It took me a year to work up the nerve, is all."

She managed a smile of her own. "I hope it doesn’t take me that long to work up the nerve to say yes."

"That scary, huh?" he asked, and laughed.

"Any… any change is hard for me." She swallowed, terrified at the prospect, and of telling Mama about Michael. Gray knew about him, of course; it was no secret that they were seeing each other, but no one suspected they’d been sleeping together for a year. But since Mama never went to town anymore, and didn’t have any friends over to visit, she knew nothing about what went on these days. She wouldn’t like it on two counts. One, she wouldn’t like the idea of Monica marrying anyone, because that would mean her pristine daughter would be subjected to a man’s disgusting touch. Two, she especially wouldn’t like it if that man were Michael McFane. The McFanes had never been anything but poor farmers, certainly not in the same social stratum as the Graysons and the Rouillards. The fact that Michael was the sheriff wouldn’t raise him any in her estimation; he was just a public servant earning a nice but unspectacular salary.

And she would have to tell Alex.

"It’ll be all right," Michael said comfortingly. "I’ll get started on fixing up the house. It should be finished in, say, six months. That’ll give you enough time to get used to the idea, won’t it?"

She looked up into his beloved face and said, "Yes." Yes to it all. Her heart was pounding wildly. She would manage. She would tell Mama, and face that chilly disapproval. She would tell Alex that she couldn’t meet him again. It would hurt him, but he would understand. He wouldn’t abandon Mama; it was silly of her even to think it. She had to look at things as an adult, not a scared girl. Alex hadn’t remained a friend because she’d allowed him to stick his thing in her; he was Gray’s legal representative, and a friend even before she’d been born. Probably he had just gotten into the habit of using her. Maybe he’d be glad of an excuse to stop, maybe he felt as guilty about it as she did.

She had to make things as right as possible. Not even one little thing could be wrong, or it would all unravel. A normal, happy life loomed before her like the golden ring on a carousel, and she could grab it if she could just manage to do everything right. The last time, Renee Devlin had wrecked her dream.

Her thoughts jolted. Even as Michael was hugging her exuberantly, a face swam before her eyes: sleepy green eyes, a sensuous mouth that drove men wild. Renee was still there, in the form of her daughter.

Faith had to go. Mama would be much happier if Faith left town. She might even approve of Monica, if she were the one to make Faith leave. And if Michael were involved, too…

Her hands pushed at his bare shoulders. "There’s a problem."

He released her, sighing with disappointment. The reason for his disappointment twitched in his lap. "What?"

"It’s Mama."

He sighed again. "You don’t think she’ll like the idea of you marryin’ me?"

"She won’t like the idea of me marrying anyone," Monica said bluntly. "You don’t know – she’ll be so upset."

He looked startled. "For God’s sake, why?"

Monica bit her lip, uncomfortable with airing their family laundry. "Because that means I’d be sleeping with you."

"Of course you’d – oh." Now he looked uncomfortable. He was probably recalling all the old gossip about the arrangement Mama and Daddy had had. "I guess she doesn’t like things like that."

"She hates the very idea. And with Faith Devlin back in town, she’s already upset." Cautiously Monica nudged him in the direction she wanted him to go. "If Faith left again, it would put Mama in a lot better mood, but I don’t know how to manage that. Gray is trying to make her leave, but he says there isn’t much he can do, not like before."

To her surprise, Michael went still, and a grim look darkened his face.

"I know how he feels. I wouldn’t want to do anything to put that girl out of another home, either."

Monica drew back, uneasy that he had responded directly opposite to the way she had wanted. She had expected him to understand immediately. "She’s a Devlin! I can’t look at her without feeling sick – "

"She didn’t do anything," Michael pointed out in a reasonable tone that set her teeth on edge. "We had trouble with all the other Devlins, but not her."

"She looks just like her mother. Mama nearly went to pieces when she found out one of the Devlins had come back here to live."

"There’s no law that says she can’t live where she wants."

Because he seemed to have trouble grasping the point, Monica decided to be blunt. "You could do something about it, though, couldn’t you? Gray isn’t doing much, but you could think of some way to make her leave."

But Michael shook his head, and disappointment knotted her stomach. "I was there the last time," he said soberly, a distant and somber look darkening the blue of his eyes. "When we ran them out of that shack they lived in. For the rest of the Devlins, I didn’t care, it was nice to get rid of them, but Faith and that little boy – well, they suffered. I’ll never forget the look that was on her face, and I bet Gray still thinks about it, too. That’s probably why he’s taking it easy on her this time. God knows I couldn’t do something like that to her again."

"But if Mama – " Monica stopped herself. He wasn’t going to do it. He couldn’t understand, not really, because he didn’t live with Mama, didn’t know how that cold disapproval could slice to the bone. She controlled her dismay, and smiled at him. "Never mind. I’ll handle Mama, somehow."

But how? She had never yet managed to handle Mama, to shrug off those hurtful things she said the way Gray did. Gray loved Mama, she knew, but he ignored her a lot of the time. Monica still felt like an anxious little girl, trying so desperately to live up to the standards Mama set, and always falling short.

She would have to do it. She couldn’t lose Michael. She would tell Alex she couldn’t meet him anymore, and somehow – somehow – she would get rid of Faith Devlin, and make Mama so happy, she wouldn’t mind if Monica got married.

Eleven

Faith hung up the phone, a puzzled frown on her face. That was the sixth time she’d called Mr. Pleasant and not gotten an answer. He didn’t have a secretary; Mrs. Pleasant had filled that role, and he hadn’t had the heart to replace her when she had died. Mr. Pleasant had checked out of the motel; rather, the key had been left on the nightstand in the room, and his things were gone. The room had been paid for in advance, so there was nothing unusual in that. She had done it herself, more than once.

What was unusual was that he hadn’t called her, and he’d said that he would. She couldn’t believe he had forgotten. He would have called if something wasn’t wrong. Given the state of his health, she was afraid he was in a hospital somewhere and was too ill to call. He could even be dying, and she wouldn’t know about it. The thought of dying alone made her chest hurt. Someone should at least be there to hold his hand, as she had held Scottie’s.

Other than being worried about him, she didn’t know what, if anything, he had found or whom he had questioned. She would have to continue on her own, without the benefit of whatever answers he had gotten.

She didn’t have a clear idea of how to go about it, what clues to look for, even what questions to ask – assuming anyone would talk to her. The only ones who were likely to answer her questions would be any newcomers, and they wouldn’t be in a position to know anything. The old-timers would know, but they would heed Gray’s edict against having anything to do with her.

A thought came to her, and she grinned with anticipation. There was one person, at least, who would talk to her – unwillingly, but he would talk.

She dragged a brush through her hair and twisted the heavy mass into a top-knot, securing it with a few pins and leaving tendrils loose around her face and at the nape of her neck. That was the limit of her grooming; a few minutes after having made up her mind, she was on her way to Prescott, to Morgan’s Grocery.

As she had expected, Mrs. Morgan spotted her the moment she entered the door. Faith ignored her and wandered toward the dairy section, which was at the back of the store, safely away from Mrs. Morgan’s sharp ears. It wasn’t long before Ed came hot-footing it down the aisles, his beefy face florid with both indignation and exertion. "Maybe you didn’t understand too good," he said, huffing to a stop in front of her. "Get on out of my store. You can’t buy your groceries here."

Faith stood her ground and gave him a cool smile. "I didn’t come here to buy anything. I want to ask you a few questions."

"If you don’t leave, I’m goin’ to call the sheriff," he said, but an uneasy expression crossed his face.

His mention of the sheriff made her stomach clench, probably the reaction he had hoped to get. Her spine stiffened, and she forced herself to ignore the threat. "If you answer my questions," she said quietly, "I’ll be gone in a few minutes. If you don’t, your wife may learn more than you want her to know." When it came to threats, she could make a few of her own.

He paled, and cast an anxious look toward the front of the store. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Fine. My questions don’t concern my mother. I want to know about Guy Rouillard."

He blinked, surprised by the turn. "About Guy?" he repeated.

"Who else was he seeing that summer?" she asked. "I know my mother wasn’t the only one. Do you remember any of the gossip?"

"Why do you want to know about all that? It don’t matter who else he was seeing, because it was Renee he ran away with, not any of the others."

She glanced at her watch. "I figure you have about two minutes before your wife comes back here to see what’s going on."

He glared at her, but said reluctantly, "I heard he was seeing Andrea Wallice, Alex Chelette’s secretary. Alex was Guy’s best friend. Don’t know that it’s true, though, because she didn’t seem tore up when Guy left. There was a waitress out at Jimmy Jo’s, I can’t remember her name, but Guy saw her a few times. She’s not there anymore. Heard tell he had a thing going with Yolanda Foster, too. Guy got around. I can’t remember who all he was messin’ around with, or when, exactly."

Yolanda Foster. That must be the ex-mayor’s wife. Their son, Lane, had been one of that group of boys who hung around Jodie when they wanted a good time, but wouldn’t speak to her if they met her in public.

"Was that common knowledge?" she asked. "Were there any jealous husbands around?"

He shrugged, and glanced again toward the front of the store. "Maybe the mayor knew, but Guy donated a lot of money to his campaigns, so I doubt Lowell Foster would have kicked up very much if he’d known Yolanda was… uh, collecting donations." He smirked, and Faith thought how much she disliked him.

"Thanks for the information," she said, and turned to go.

"You won’t come here again?" he asked anxiously.

She paused and gave him a considering look. "Maybe not," she said. "Call me if you think of any more names." Then she walked briskly from the store, not even glancing at Mrs. Morgan on the way out.

Two names, plus the possibility of the unknown waitress. It was a beginning. What intrigued her, though, was the mention of Guy’s best friend, Alex Chelette. He would likely have the answers to most of her questions.

The Chelettes were one of the old, monied families in the parish – not on a level with the Rouillards, but then neither was anyone else. She knew the name, but couldn’t dredge up any memories of them as people. She had been only fourteen when she’d left, and more withdrawn than most, keeping to herself as much as possible. She had paid attention only to those who had direct contact with her family, and as far as she could remember, she had never met any of the Chelettes. Alex was still likely to be around, though; the case of Guy Rouillard aside, old money tended to remain in one place.

She walked down to the pay phone at the end of the parking lot and looked up the Chelettes. The residence was listed as "Alexander Chelette, atty." Below it was the number for "Chelette and Anderson, Attorneys at Law."

Thinking that now was as good a time as any, she fed in a quarter and dialed the law office. A musical voice answered on the second ring.

Faith said, "My name is Faith Hardy. Could Mr. Chelette see me today?"

There was a tiny pause that told Faith her name had been recognized, then the musical voice said, "He’s in court all morning, but he can see you this afternoon at one-thirty, if that’s convenient."

"It is. Thank you." As she hung up, Faith wondered if the musical voice belonged to Andrea Wallice, who had been Mr. Chelette’s secretary when it had all happened, or if this was a different one.

She had almost three hours to kill, unless she wanted to drive home and come back later. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that the slice of toast she’d eaten at six-thirty had long since vanished. She wondered if she would be served in any of the restaurants in town, or if Gray’s influence had extended there, too. She shrugged. No time like the present for finding out.

There was a small cafe on the square. She had never been in it, she thought as she parked almost directly in front of the door. She had never eaten out until she had gone to live with the Greshams, and they had introduced her to the wonders of restaurants. The thought of them made her smile as she entered the cool, darkened cafe, and she made a mental note to call them that night. She tried to stay in touch, calling them at least once a month, and it had been almost that long since they last spoke.

Customers seated themselves, so Faith chose the booth at the rear of the cafe. A pleasant-faced young woman, short and round, bustled up with a menu. "What will you have to drink?"

"Sweet tea." That the tea would be iced was a given, unless hot tea was specifically requested. The usual choices were merely between sweet and unsweetened.

The waitress darted off to get the tea, and Faith glanced down the selections on the plastic menu. She had just decided on the chicken salad when someone paused beside the booth. "Aren’t you Faith Devlin?"

Faith tensed, wondering if she would be asked to leave. She looked up at the woman standing there. "Yes, I am." The woman looked vaguely familiar, brown eyes, brown hair, and a square-jawed, dimple-cheeked face. She was smallish, about five foot three, and had the perkiness of a cheerleader.

"I thought so. It’s been a while, but it’s hard to forget hair that color." The woman smiled. "I’m Halley Bruce – Johnson, now. I was in your class at school."

"Of course!" As soon as she heard the name, the face clicked in her memory. "I remember you. How are you?" Halley had never been her friend – she hadn’t had any friends – but neither had Halley taken part in any of the cruel-teasing Faith had endured. She had been civil, at least.

The expression in her eyes now, however, was downright friendly. "Will you join me?" Faith invited.

"Just for a minute," Halley said, slipping into the booth opposite Faith. The waitress returned with Faith’s tea, and took the order for her chicken salad. When they were alone again, Halley smiled wryly. "My husband’s folks own this place, and I run it for them. I’m expecting a delivery any minute now, and I’ll have to check it in."

Since Gray already knew about the agency, there was no point in not talking about it, so Faith said, "I’m playing hooky. I have a travel agency in Dallas, and I really should have told my manager where I’d be, but I forgot to call before I left the house."

Social and financial positions established, they smiled at each other as equals. Faith felt a warm rush of pleasure. Even after she had gone to live with the Greshams and attended high school, she hadn’t had any girlfriends; she had still been too wary and withdrawn, too traumatized, to form any friendships. It wasn’t until she had started college that she had made any friends at all, and the casual acceptance of her dorm mates had been a revelation to her. Shy at first, she had quickly bloomed, joyfully participating in the female rituals that had been closed to her as a girl: the all-night gab sessions, the teasing and laughter, the swapping of clothes and makeup, the frenzy of getting ready in the mornings, sharing the bathroom mirror with her roommate. For the first time she had participated in the endless analysis of the murky mystery of men – rather, she had listened, smiling a little at their naivete. Though at that point many of her dorm mates had already had sex and Faith had still been virgin, she had felt infinitely older, more experienced. They still viewed men through the rosy lenses of romance, while she had no such illusion.

But female friendship had remained a special joy to her, and she looked at Halley Johnson with the hope of finding that trembling within her.

"Where did you move to, when you left?" Halley asked, with a casual note that glossed over the circumstances under which Faith had left Prescott.

"Beaumont, Texas. Then I moved to Austin when I started college, and Dallas afterward."

Halley sighed. "I’ve never lived anywhere but here, don’t guess I ever will. I used to think about traveling, but then Joel and I got married, and the kids came. We have two," she said, brightening. "A boy and a girl. With one of each, it seemed like a good time to stop. How about you?"

"I’m a widow," Faith said, her eyes darkening with the shadow of sadness that she always felt when she thought about Kyle, dying so young and so needlessly. "I married right out of college, and he died in a car wreck within the year. No kids."

"That’s rough." There was genuine sympathy in Halley’s voice. "I’m so sorry. I can only imagine what it would be like to lose Joel. He drives me crazy sometimes, but he’s my rock, always there when I need him." She was silent a moment, then the smile came back to her face. "What brings you back to Prescott? I can imagine someone leaving Prescott to move to Dallas, but not vice versa."

"It’s home. I wanted to come back."

"Well, I don’t want to be nosy or rude, but I would have thought Prescott would be the last place you’d want to live. After what happened, I mean."

Faith gave her a quick look, but couldn’t see any malice in Halley’s expression, only a certain watchfulness, as if she hadn’t quite made up her mind about Faith.

"It hasn’t been a bowl of cherries," she replied, and decided she could be as frank as the other woman. "I don’t know if you’ve heard or not, but Gray Rouillard won’t like it if he finds out you’ve served me. I gather he’s put out the word to all the merchants that he doesn’t want them doing business with me."

"Oh, I’ve heard," Halley said, and grinned, some of the watchfulness fading. "But I like to make up my own mind about people."

"I don’t want to cause trouble for you."

"You won’t. Gray isn’t vindictive." She paused. "I can see where you might not agree with me. Granted, I wouldn’t want him for an enemy, but he won’t turn mean just because you ate some chicken salad in here."

"Everyone else in town seems to take him seriously."

"He has a lot of influence," Halley agreed.

"But not with you?"

"I didn’t say that. It’s just that I remember you from school. You weren’t like the others. If it had been Jodie, now – she wouldn’t be sitting here waiting for her chicken salad. You’re welcome any time, though."

"Thanks, but let me know if there’s a problem."

"I’m not worried about it." Halley smiled as the waitress set the plate of chicken salad on the table. "If he’d meant to be a hard-ass about it, he’d have said so. One thing about Gray, you don’t have to second-guess him. He says what he means, and means what he says."

Alex Chelette’s secretary was still Andrea Wallice, according to the nameplate on her desk. The woman sitting behind the desk was comfortably fiftyish, her face wearing every one of the years, her gray hair styled in a short, neat bob. Looking at her, trying to subtract a dozen years, Faith still couldn’t imagine her as the type of woman Guy Rouillard would pursue. His taste had run toward the flamboyant, not this tidy woman with the openly curious gaze.

"You look like your mother," Andrea finally said, her head tilting a bit to one side as she studied Faith’s face. "A few differences, but for the most part you could be her, especially in your coloring."

"Did you know her?" Faith asked.

"Only by sight." She gestured to the sofa. "Have a seat. Alex hasn’t come back from lunch yet."

Just as Faith sat down, the door opened and a slim, good-looking man entered. He was wearing a suit, an oddity in Prescott, unless one happened to be an attorney who had been at the courthouse all morning. He glanced toward Faith and visibly started, then relaxed, and a smile touched his mouth. "You must be Faith. God knows, you couldn’t be anyone else, unless Renee discovered the Fountain of Youth."

"That’s what I thought," Andrea said, turning to him, and for a moment the expression in her eyes was unguarded. Faith quickly looked down. From what she had just seen, she very much doubted that Andrea had ever been involved with Guy, because she was very much in love with her boss. She wondered if Mr. Chelette knew, and just as quickly decided that he didn’t. There was no hint of awareness on his part.

"Come in," he invited, ushering Faith into his office ahead of him, and closing the door. "I know we must seem rude, discussing you that way. I’m sorry. It’s just that the resemblance is so pronounced, and yet, on second glance, the differences are obvious."

"Everyone seems to have that reaction when they see me for the first time," she admitted, and smiled at him. It was very easy to smile at Alex Chelette. He was the type of man whom age refined; always slim, he would pare down even more with the passing years. His dark hair had grayed at the sides, and there were lines at the corners of his gray eyes, but he easily looked to be in his mid-forties, rather than his fifties. His scent was light green, as fresh as newly cut grass.

"Sit down, please," he said, and settled into his own chair. "What can I do for you today?"

Faith seated herself on the leather sofa. "Actually, I came on personal reasons, and I realize now I shouldn’t have taken up your work time – "

He shook his head, smiling. "It’s my pleasure. Now, tell me what’s bothering you. Is it Gray? I tried to get him to leave you alone, but he’s very protective of his mother and sister, and he doesn’t want them upset."

"I understand Gray’s position very well," Faith said dryly. "That isn’t why I’m here."

"Oh?"

"I wanted to ask you some questions about Guy Rouillard. You were his best friend, weren’t you?"

He gave her a faint smile. "I thought so. We grew up together."

Should she tell him that Guy hadn’t, after all, left with Renee? She toyed with the idea, then discarded it. As friendly as he seemed, she couldn’t forget that he was an old family friend of the Rouillards. She had to assume that anything she told him would go straight to Gray.

"I’m curious about him," she finally said. "That night wrecked my family, just as it did Gray’s. What was he like? I know he wasn’t faithful to my mother any more than he was to his wife, so why would he all of a sudden walk away from everything, his family, his business, to be with her?"

"I don’t think you really want me to answer that," he replied wryly. "To put it as politely as I can, Renee was a fascinating woman, at least to men. Physically she was… well, Guy was very responsive to Renee’s sensuality."

"But he was already having an affair with her. There wasn’t any reason for them to leave."

Alex shrugged, a very Gallic gesture. "I’ve never understood it myself."

"Why didn’t he just get a divorce?"

"Again, I don’t have an answer for that. Perhaps because of his religion; Guy wasn’t a regular at mass, but he felt more strongly about religion than you might have expected. Perhaps he thought it would be easier on Noelle if he didn’t divorce her, if he just handed everything over to Gray and left. I simply don’t know."

"Hand everything over to Gray?" Faith repeated. "What do you mean?"

"I’m sorry," he said gently. "I can’t divulge details of my clients’ business dealings."

"No, of course not." Quickly she backtracked. "Do you remember anything else about that summer? Who else Guy was seeing?"

He looked startled. "Why would you want to know?"

"Like I said, I have an interest in the man. Because of him, I haven’t seen my mother since that day. Was he likeable? Did he have any honor, or was he just a tomcat?"

He stared at her for a moment, and pain crept into his eyes. "Guy was the most likeable man in the world," he finally said. "I loved him like a brother. He was always laughing, teasing, but if I needed him for anything, he was there like a shot. His marriage to Noelle was a disappointment to him, but still I was surprised when he left, because he was so close to Gray and Monica. He was a terrible husband, but a wonderful father." He looked down at his hands. "It’s been twelve years," he said softly. "And I still miss him."

"Did he ever call?" she asked. "Or get in touch with his family in any way?"

He shook his head. "Not to my knowledge."

"Who else was he seeing that summer, besides Yolanda Foster?"

Once again, her question startled him. His eyebrows rose, and rebuke was in his voice when he spoke. "None of that matters. As I keep telling Gray, it’s in the past; let it go. There was a lot of pain that summer, and keeping it alive doesn’t do anyone any good."

"I can’t let it go, when no one else in the parish will. No matter how successful I am, or respectable, some people here still think of me as trash." Her voice trembled a little on the last word. She hadn’t meant to let her control waver, and she was both embarrassed and irritated that it had. Sometimes, though, the pain leaked through.

Alex must have heard it, because his expression changed, and suddenly he left his chair to come sit beside her and take one of her hands in both of his. "I know it’s been difficult for you," he said gently. "They’ll change their minds, when they get to know you better. And Gray will eventually relent. As I said, he reacted the way he did because he’s so protective of his family, but basically he’s a very fair man."

"And ruthless," Faith added.

A rueful smile touched his face. "That, too. But not unkind. Take my word for it. If there’s anything I can do to change his mind, I promise you I’ll do it."

"Thank you," Faith said. That wasn’t why she’d come to see him, but he was too conscientious to divulge personal details about his clients and friends. The visit wasn’t a total waste, however, she felt she could safely mark Andrea Wallice off her list.

She took her leave, and drove home pondering the scraps of information she’d gotten that day. If Guy had been murdered, Lowell or Yolanda Foster seemed to be the most likely suspects. She wondered how she could contrive a meeting with either of them. And she wondered where Mr. Pleasant was, and if he was all right.

"I met Faith today," Alex said that night as he and Gray were-going over some papers. He picked up his brandy and keenly eyed the younger man over the rim of the glass. "The resemblance is eerie, at first glance, but by the second look there’s no way of mistaking her for Renee. Odd, isn’t it, the way Renee was more beautiful, but Faith is more attractive?"

Gray glanced up, wry awareness in his dark eyes as he caught the expression in Alex’s gray ones. "Yes, I’ve noticed how attractive she is, if that’s what you’re asking. Where did you meet her?" He picked up his own glass, filled with his favorite Scotch, and savored the smoky bite of it on his tongue.

"At my office. She came to ask me about Guy."

Gray almost choked. He set his glass down with a force that made the whisky slosh dangerously close to the rim. "She what? What in hell did she want to know about Dad?" The thought of Faith asking anything about his father made him bitterly angry. It was a knee-jerk reaction; for a moment she wasn’t Faith, the person, but a Devlin, with all the connotations elicited by the name. He himself wanted her with a fierce need that both alarmed and disgusted him, even though he knew he was going to ease that need if possible, but he didn’t want anything about her touching his family. He didn’t want Monica or Noelle exposed to her, and he sure as hell didn’t want her asking about his father. Guy was gone. His absence, his betrayal, was a wound that remained perilously close to the surface, and bled at the slightest scratch.

"She wanted to know what he was like, had he ever gotten in touch, if he’d been seeing anyone else that summer."

Furious, Gray half rose from his chair, intending to go to her house right now and have it out with her. Alex stopped him with a hand on his arm. "She has a right to know," he said mildly. "Or at least to be curious."

"I’ll be goddamned if she does!" Gray snapped.

"She hasn’t seen her mother since then, either."

Gray froze, then sank back into the chair. Alex was right, damn it. It rankled, but he had to admit the truth. At least he’d been a grown man, if inexperienced in business, when his father had left; Faith had been only fourteen, as helpless and vulnerable as a child. He didn’t know anything about her life between then and now, except that she was a widow and now owned a successful travel agency, but he’d bet his last red cent it hadn’t been pleasant. Living with Amos Devlin and those two hoodlum boys, as well as her slut of a sister, couldn’t have been easy. It wouldn’t have been easy before, but at least Renee had been there.

"Let up on her, Gray," Alex said softly. "She deserves better than the reception she’s getting from some people, and part of it’s your fault."

Gray picked up the glass and swirled the whiskey, looking down into the amber depths. "I can’t," he said gruffly. He got up and carried his drink to the window, where he stood staring at his reflection in the glass, and the darkness beyond. He took another sip of fortification. "She has to go, before I do something that really hurts Monica and Mother."

"Such as?" Alex asked, puzzled.

"Let’s just say that, where Faith is concerned, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is my family, and the hard place – " he looked around with a sort of angry amusement in his eyes " – is in my pants."

Appalled, Alex stared at him. "My God."

"It must be genetic." That was the only explanation for it, he thought grimly. He had inherited his father’s cock. Put a Devlin woman in front of it, and it got hard. No, not just any Devlin woman; two of them had left him cold. But Faith… Nothing about him was cold if she was anywhere within a country mile.

"You can’t do that to your mother," Alex whispered. "The humiliation would kill her."

"Hell, I know that! That’s why I want Faith to leave, before I do something stupid." He turned to face Alex, that angry amusement still burning in his eyes. "The attraction isn’t all on my side, damn it. It’d be easier if it was. I went to her house the other night to put a proposition to hen If she didn’t want to leave the area, I’d buy a house for her in any town close by, as long as it wasn’t in this parish. That way we could see each other without hurting anyone. There was an old man there, having dinner with her, and I was so jealous, I accused her of having a sugar daddy." He shook his head, and laughed softly at himself. "Can you believe it? The old guy looked as frail as a toothpick, but he was all dressed up like something out of the fifties, and all I could think was that he was trying to get her in bed."

"What old guy?" Alex asked, plainly curious. "Anyone I know?"

"He was from New Orleans. His last name was Pleasant. I was so mad, I don’t remember if she told me his first name. He said he was a business associate."

"Was he?"

Gray shrugged. "Probably. Faith owns a travel agency, and she has a branch in New Orleans."

"She owns it?"

"She’s done pretty good for herself, hasn’t she?" There it was again, that damn little twinge of pride. "She started out in Dallas. I don’t know how many branch offices she has, but I have someone gathering information on her. I expect to have a report any day."

"Are you going to try to ruin her business if she doesn’t leave?" Alex asked, but less sharply than Gray had expected.

"No. For one thing, I’m not that big of a bastard. For another, if I did, I could kiss my chances with her goodbye." His mouth twisted in a wry smile. "Decide for yourself which reason is the most important."

Alex didn’t smile in return. "This is a hell of a situation. If you’re bound and determined to have her – "

"I am," Gray said, and tossed back the last of the whiskey.

" – then she can’t live here. Noelle would be devastated."

"I’m worried more about Monica than I am Mother."

Alex blinked, as if he hadn’t considered Monica. He probably hadn’t; all of his attention was focused on Noelle. He knew about Monica’s suicide attempt, of course; it hadn’t been possible to keep it quiet, not with all the commotion at Dr. Bogarde’s office. Monica didn’t try to hide the scars, anyway. She was too proud to let herself take the cowardly route of long sleeves or wide bracelets.

"Monica is a lot stronger than she was then," Alex finally said. "But Noelle doesn’t have anything to fall back on. I thought at the beginning, and still do, that she should face up to facts and get on with her life, but if she found out you were having an affair with Faith – no. She couldn’t stand it. She might try suicide herself."

Gray shook his head, amazed that Alex could have known Noelle all these years and still not realized that she was too self-centered to harm herself. The myopia of love allowed him to see only her cool, perfect, unattainable beauty. It was that romantic streak in him, a strange characteristic for a lawyer.

"She has to go," Alex said regretfully.

Twelve

The fax machine was humming, so Faith didn’t hear the car turn in to the driveway. When the knock rattled the front door, she leaned over to look out the window. She couldn’t see who was standing on the porch, but she could see the gray Jaguar parked behind her car, and she sighed as she went, coffee cup in hand, into the living room to answer the door. It was barely eight-thirty, too early to have to deal with Gray Rouillard.

The first thing she noticed when she opened the door was that he was in a towering rage.

The only other time she had seen him like this was the day he’d come to the shack to tell them Renee had left, and again that night, when he’d had them thrown out. As she looked up into the cold ruthlessness of those dark eyes, the memory of that night flashed in her mind, the stark images reducing her in an instant to the terrified girl she’d been then. Her blood chilled, and she fell back a step as he came inside, letting the screen door slam behind him.

She jumped at the sound. Her eyes, green and unblinking, were fastened on his face as if she didn’t dare look away.

"What the hell do you think you’re doing?" he asked very softly, the velvety sound as chilling as a sword sliding against another blade. He advanced another step, so that he loomed over her, and Faith retreated again. The coffee cup shook in her hand.

For every step he took forward, she took one back, a slow dance that ended when she bumped into the wall, her shoulder blades pressing hard against the Sheetrock as if she could force her way through it. His arms shot out before she could slide sideways, his palms flattening against the wall on either side of her shoulders, imprisoning her within the cage of his arms and body. He leaned down slightly; the top two buttons of his white shirt were open, revealing a wedge of warm olive skin decorated with curly black hair. His pulse throbbed visibly in the hollow at the base of his strong throat, right in front of her eyes. Faith fastened her gaze on that rhythmic movement, desperately seeking to steady herself. She was not fourteen. He could not throw her out of her own house.

"Well?" he asked, still in that dangerous, purring tone.

His thick wrists were squeezing her shoulders, bared by her sleeveless blouse; his skin was hot against hers. His wide shoulders and broad chest were like a wall in front of her, and his rich, musky male scent made her nostrils flare in automatic delight. Still clasping the coffee cup, holding it like a shield between them, she swallowed and managed to say, "What are you talking about?"

He leaned closer, so close that his stomach brushed against her fingers. "I’m talking about all those questions you’ve been asking. Alex told me last night you’d been to his office. Talking to Alex is one thing, he’ll keep his mouth shut, but guess who I saw this morning. Ed Morgan." Despite the calmness of his tone, she could see the cold fury flickering in his eyes. If he’d been having a roaring fit, she wouldn’t have been half as nervous. In this mood, he was capable of anything, but oddly enough, she didn’t fear him physically. No, if Gray harmed her, the damage would be to her emotions.

"I’m only going to tell you once." He said the words very precisely, leaning down even closer, until his nose was almost touching hers. "Don’t ask any more questions about my father. Your nosiness will only stir up gossip, and hurt my family again. If that happens, Faith, I will run you out of the parish again, by any means necessary. You can take that to the bank. So keep it in mind: I don’t want your pretty mouth even shaping my father’s name."

Wide green eyes stared into chilly dark ones, only a couple of inches apart. Her chin tilted upward, and her mouth, which he thought was pretty, parted as she deliberately tugged on the tiger’s tail, and uttered two words: "Guy Rouillard."

She saw his pupils widen in disbelief, then the chill in his eyes was swallowed by pure fire. Maybe it hadn’t been prudent to provoke him, but watching the result was fascinating. He seemed to expand with fury, dark color running into his face, and if his long hair hadn’t been pulled back and secured, she rather thought it would have lifted from his head.

She had a split second in which to enjoy the entertainment. Then he moved with the blurring speed she had seen before, his hands leaving the wall to clasp hard around her upper arms, and he gave her a teeth-rattling shake. Her grip loosened on the forgotten cup in her hands, and she felt it slip. With a cry she tried to juggle it, but he was too close, and all she could do was knock the falling cup toward herself, rather than let the steaming liquid burn him. The coffee soaked into her thin skirt, plastering it to her right thigh, and splattered over their feet. She cried out again, this time in pain. The cup hit the floor with a crash, breaking off the handle but otherwise remaining intact. Gray jumped back, automatically releasing her, and frantically she pulled the wet fabric away from her stinging thigh.

His dark gaze swept down her, and he said, "Shit," in a rough tone. He grabbed her, pulling her against him, and his hands worked briefly at the back of her waist. Her skirt loosened and dropped to her feet. He lifted her out of the circle of fabric, swinging her up in his arms, and dizzily she clutched his shoulders as the room whirled around her.

"What are you doing?" she cried in alarm as he rapidly carried her into the kitchen. She was confused by the shock of pain, and he was moving too fast for her to get her bearings. Beneath all that, she was acutely aware of her bare legs draped over his arm, and that she was dressed in only her panties and blouse.

He hooked his foot around a chair leg and pulled the chair away from the table, then carefully set her in it. Turning to the sink, he pulled off several paper towels, folded them into a pad, and wet them under the cold water. The pad was still dripping when he plopped it over her reddened, stinging thigh. She jumped at the chill. Trickles of water ran down her thigh, into the seat of the chair, and soaked into her panties.

"I forgot about the coffee," he muttered. Truth to tell, he hadn’t even noticed it until he’d seen it spilling down her leg. "I’m sorry, Faith. Do you have any tea?" Before she could answer, he was already opening the refrigerator door, and taking out the pitcher of tea that was almost de rigueur in southern kitchens.

He opened and closed cabinet drawers until he found her clean towels. Taking one out, he dropped it into the pitcher of tea, then removed it and carefully squeezed out most of the excess liquid. She watched in bemusement as he took away the pad of paper towels, tossing it into the sink with a sodden plop, and replaced it with the tea-soaked towel. If the water had been cold, the tea was icy. Faith drew in a hissing breath as it, too, ran down her leg to pool beneath her bottom.

"Does it hurt?" Gray asked, going down on his knee beside the chair to smooth the towel over her thigh. His voice was tight with anxiety.

"No," she said bluntly. "It’s cold, and you’re soaking my rear end."

His face was level with hers. At her words, she saw the worry leave his eyes, and the tension ease from his shoulders. He grasped the back of the chair with his left hand, and with wry, faint humor asked, "Did I overreact?"

She pursed her lips. "A tad."

"Your thigh is red. I know you’re burned."

"Only a little. It stings a bit, is all. I doubt it’ll blister." She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to hide the laughter she could feel bubbling in her chest. "I appreciate your concern, but it certainly didn’t warrant having half my clothes stripped off."

He looked down at her bare legs, and the white cotton underwear barely visible beneath the hem of her blouse. A tremor ran through him. He put his right hand on her uninjured thigh, smoothing his palm over the firm, cool resilience of her flesh, entranced by the silky texture. "I’ve wanted to get your panties wet for a long time," he murmured. "But not with tea."

Her laughter disappeared as if it had never existed. Tension stretched between them, almost palpable in its thickness. Her insides clenched at his words, heat pooling in her loins, her breasts tightening. She felt the dampening of desire, and the admission You have trembled on her lips. She bit it back, knowing that voicing the telltale response would cross a boundary over which she didn’t dare pass. Sexual tension emanated from him like a force field, hot and urgent. It would take only that confession, and he would be on her.

She ached with the need to touch him, to press herself against that big, steely body and open her own body to him. Only the instinct for self-preservation kept her silent, and still.

He leaned imperceptibly closer, inhaling her spicy sweet scent. His blood throbbed through his veins, pulsing, swelling. Silently they watched each other, like two adversaries coming face-to-face in a dusty street. He wanted to pull down her panties and bury his face in her lap, the impulse so strong that he shuddered with the effort of resisting it, and wondered what she would do if he gave in. Would she be frightened, would she push him away… or would her legs fall open, and her hands clench in his hair?

His hand flexed on her thigh, his fingers pressing into the silky flesh that had warmed beneath his touch. He saw her pupils dilate, then her lashes droop heavily as she drew in a deep, slow breath that made him acutely aware of her breasts. He shifted his hand a little, and rubbed his thumb back and forth, each sweep moving higher, probing deeper into the cleft of her clenched thighs. He wanted to touch her.

He forgot about Monica, about Guy, about everything but the slow, hot movement of his thumb, closer and closer to the exquisitely tender flesh between her legs, so flimsily protected by the thin layer of cotton. He would slide his thumb under the elastic of the leg opening, and find the furrow of her tightly closed folds. Then he would drag his thumb upward, opening her as he went, until he found the tiny bud at the top of her sex.

If she let him touch her, she’d be his. He’d have her then.

His thumb brushed elastic. And she moved, her hand clamping down over his and tugging it away from her thigh. "No," she whispered.

Frustration roared through him like a brush fire. A sound very much like a growl rumbled in his throat as physical instincts fought for supremacy over thought. His brain won, but barely. He was sweating, shaking with the need to have her. His erection strained painfully against the restriction of his pants.

"No," she said again, as if the original refusal needed reinforcing, and perhaps it did.

Slowly he turned his hand, so that his fingers meshed with hers. "Then hold my hand for a minute."

She did, clinging tightly to him, feeling his fingers twitch and flex as if reaching for something. His other hand was clamped around the slat of the chairback, his knuckles white from the pressure.

After a moment of unknown duration, time suspended as their gazes locked and lust shimmered between them, the terrible tension in him began to fade. He winced and shifted position, stretching his leg out. He freed his hand to reach down and make an adjustment, the furrow between his brows smoothing out as he made himself more comfortable.

She cleared her throat, uncertain what to say, if anything.

He rose stiffly to his feet. The thick ridge in his pants was unmistakable, but he was in control now. He plucked the hand towel from its rack and draped it over her thighs, removing temptation from sight, if not proximity.

After a minute he said in a quiet voice, "Are you certain you’re not hurt?"

"Yes." She too spoke quietly, as if a too loud noise would shatter their control and send them tumbling over the precipice she had barely managed to avoid. The hunger hadn’t been one-sided. "It’s a minor burn. I probably won’t even feel it tomorrow." The stinging had completely vanished, soothed away by the cold, wet tea.

"All right." He looked down at her, and lifted his hand as if he would smooth her hair, but then let it fall back to his side. He couldn’t safely allow himself to touch her just yet. "Now, tell me why you’ve been asking all those questions about Dad."

She looked up at him, the dark fire of her hair spilling down her back. She wanted to tell him what she suspected, that his father was dead, but found that the words stuck in her throat. She couldn’t do it. She had to believe he knew nothing about it, that he had nothing to do with his father’s death, because she loved him and it would break her heart otherwise. And because she loved him, she couldn’t bring herself to hurt him. She had deliberately tilted the falling coffee cup towards herself to keep him from suffering a minor scald; how could she now tell him that the father he loved was probably dead, murdered?

So instead she told him what was both the truth in substance and a lie in intent, murmuring, "He was my past, too. I can barely remember when he wasn’t there, but I never really knew him. He was always kind when he saw me, which wasn’t often, but then I lost my mother because of him. Do you think I’m not curious about the kind of person he was? That I shouldn’t try to fill in the gaps, to make sense of what happened?"

"Good luck," he growled. "I thought I knew him better than anyone else on earth, and I still can’t make sense of it." He paused. "If you have any more questions about him, ask me, because I meant what I said. I don’t want to get rough with you, Faith, but I’ll do what’s necessary to protect my family. Remember that."

Since he’d offered… But, no, it was hardly the time to prolong this encounter by firing questions at him, with her sitting there half-naked, and Gray a sexual powder keg, primed and ready to explode. So she merely looked at him in silence, and after a moment his mouth quirked with a smile. "I’m not hearing any promises, am I? Think about it, baby. Don’t make it any tougher on yourself than it has to be. Just keep quiet, and behave yourself."

"Like a good little girl?"

"Like a smart woman," he corrected. Again his hand moved toward her, and again the movement was aborted. She could sense that he wanted to stay, wanted to continue what he had begun, but she had refused him and he was forcing himself to accept her decision – for now. Every time they met, the battle would be joined again, and the temptation to give in would be just that much stronger for having been denied.

"I’m going to go," he said.

"All right."

He didn’t move. Then: "I don’t want to."

"Do it anyway."

He chuckled. "You’re a hard woman, Faith Devlin."

"Hardy."

"I didn’t know him. He isn’t real to me. Did you love him?"

"Yes." But not the way I love you. Never like that.

His dark eyes glittered, and this time he did touch her, his hand cupping her cheek. "You’ll always be a Devlin to me, with that red hair and your witch’s eyes." He bent, and moved his mouth warmly against hers in a brief kiss. Then he was gone, and when the door closed behind him, Faith sagged back in the chair with relief.

She felt as if a storm had entered the room and tossed her around. Her heart was still pounding, and her muscles felt like spaghetti noodles. Those few moments had been among the most erotic of her life, and all he had done was touch her leg. If he had actually made love to her, she would have totally lost control of herself. She was frightened by the intensity of the desire he could arouse with a look, a brief touch, even the delicious muskiness of his male scent.

You’ll always be a Devlin to me.

Not the greatest of recommendations. She could only suppose that he meant he’d never be able to forget her background, her heritage, that nothing she did would ever change his mind about her.

And I’ll always love you, she whispered to him in her mind. Always.

Just a touch on her leg, and he’d been almost ready to come, Gray thought wryly. God, if he ever actually got inside her, his heart would probably explode from the strain.

His hands were shaking as he drove, a common reaction if he spent more than a minute in Faith’s company. It would be easier if she didn’t respond to him the way she did; she might hold herself still, she might be able to say no, but that hot, languorous look was still in her eyes. He knew all the signs. Her breathing deepened, her breasts rising round and full, her nipples peaking. Though he hadn’t kissed her until that light peck on the lips as he was leaving, because he couldn’t resist the urge any longer, her mouth had been red and swollen. A delicate flush had glowed under her translucent skin.

He wanted her. He had to make her leave. He wanted her. The opposing needs were driving him crazy.

She hadn’t agreed to stop asking questions. She hadn’t argued with him, but he was beginning to realize that her silence masked a streak of stubbornness as wide as the Grand Canyon. She might not fight, but she definitely resisted. As a girl, Faith had too often been beaten down by life, when she had been helpless to make her own decisions. Now that she could decide her own course, she let very little sway her from it. That single-mindedness was probably the main reason why, at the young age of twenty-six, she owned her own business.

Given that, it wasn’t likely he would be able to convince her to leave. And since he sure as hell couldn’t trust his own good sense to keep him away from her, he foresaw some rocky days ahead.

Monica’s hands were shaking as she opened the door to Alex’s office and smiled at Andrea. She managed to keep her voice steady and cheerful, though, as she said, "I hope he’s in. I was in town, and thought of something I wanted to ask him."

"It’s your lucky day," Andrea said, smiling. She had known Monica since babyhood. "He came in about five minutes ago. He’s washing up, but he’ll be out in a minute. Go on in and have a seat."

Washing up, of course, was a polite way of saying he was in the bathroom. It was what Mama would say, Monica thought, if she alluded to a bathroom at all. In thirty-two years, she couldn’t remember her mother in any way acknowledging the real function of a toilet. Physical reality had to be hidden if possible, and ignored if not. Try as she might, Monica couldn’t imagine her mother having sex, though she and Gray were proof that it had happened at least twice. And as for visiting an obstetrician, and the indignity of having a baby – the wonder was that Mama hadn’t locked Daddy out of the bedroom after Gray was born, rather than go through that again.

Monica avoided the leather sofa and walked over to the window, to look out at the courthouse square. The fresh blooms of spring were rapidly giving way to the lush, heavy foliage of full summer. Time moved relentlessly onward, the earth and plants going through their cycles oblivious to the puny humans who were so caught up in their own grandeur that they thought they affected everything.

Alex entered the room, smiling as he saw her. "What brings you here today?" He’d had dinner with them the night before, so any business would have been discussed then.

Monica looked at that lean, good-looking face, the kind gray eyes, and her throat went dry. She had been trying for a week to work up enough courage to talk to him. She had actually made it as far as his office, but now her voice had failed her.

He frowned at the misery in her dark eyes. "What is it, dear?" he asked softly, closing the door and coming over to take her hand.

She sucked in a deep breath. Sometimes she thought she was crazy, that those times with Alex existed only in her imagination. There was never any hint of it in his eyes, or his manner, when they were together during normal times. He was just Alex, as he had always been, a sturdy shoulder to lean on, quietly stepping in to take on as much of the weight as he could, until she and Gray had been able to manage. It really was as if those furtive moments existed between two other people, between Daddy and Mama, coming together in borrowed flesh.

This was Alex, she reminded herself. He wouldn’t leave. His love and support didn’t depend on whether or not she slept with him. She had been a convenience for him, that was all, an outlet for his pent-up emotions.

That was what logic told her. Emotionally, however, she was terrified. One father had already left her, his love for her not strong enough to hold him against the lure of screwing Renee Devlin. She couldn’t bear it if she lost Alex, too.

But then there was Michael. Sweet, sexy Michael. If she didn’t seize her chance now, she might lose him forever, and of the choice between the two men, there was no choice at all. Michael was her heart, the very blood moving through her body.

"Monica?" Alex prodded, gray eyes darkening with worry.

She gulped. She had to tell him. She closed her eyes and blurted it out. "I’m going to marry Michael McFane."

There was silence for a moment, and she squeezed her eyes tighter, waiting with dread. But the seconds ticked past, and still Alex didn’t say anything, and finally the stress became so acute that she couldn’t stand it any longer and opened her eyes.

He was smiling at her, fond exasperation on his face. "Congratulations," he said, then chuckled. "What did you expect me to say?"

Stunned, she stared at him. "I – I don’t know."

"I’m happy for you, dear. Neither you nor Gray have shown any inclination to get married, and I’ve worried about that. The sheriff is a good, steady man."

She wet her lips. "Mama won’t like it."

He paused, considering that for a moment. "Probably not, but don’t let that stop you. You deserve happiness, Monica."

"I don’t want to upset her."

"There are some things she needs to face, and some things she shouldn’t have to. In this case, marry Michael, and be as happy as possible. Believe me, this won’t upset her half as much as hearing about Faith Devlin."

Faith Devlin? Monica blinked. "What about her?" Since Mama already knew the woman had moved back to Pres-cott, Alex’s statement didn’t make sense.

"Gray hasn’t told you?" He seemed surprised.

"Evidently not. Told me what?"

He sighed. "She’s been asking questions around town – about Guy. Personal questions. If she isn’t stopped, she’ll stir everything up again, and that will hurt Noelle far more than your marriage."

Monica felt as if she’d been slapped. Faith Devlin was asking around town about her father? The very thought outraged her. Wasn’t it enough that her slut of a mother had taken her daddy away, and she’d never seen him again? Her face flushed with anger. "What sort of questions has she been asking? My God, what business is it of hers?"

"Personal questions, what sort of person he was, things like that. She came here yesterday, because she’d heard I was Guy’s best friend. Talking to me is one thing, but Gray found out this morning that she’d been pestering Ed Morgan with questions, too."

"She’s been asking Ed Morgan about Daddy?" Monica cried. "The man’s the biggest gossip in town!"

"Gray took care of it," Alex said soothingly, and patted her hand. "You know Gray. He had Ed stuttering and back-stepping within ten seconds."

Gray in a temper was a fearsome sight, with those dark eyes turning so cold and deadly. She couldn’t imagine Ed Morgan withstanding him for even ten seconds. The notion entertained her for a brief moment, but then was pushed aside by her indignation at Faith Devlin’s gall.

"I understand her curiosity," Alex said, "but as I told Gray, it could be disastrous for your mother to find out."

"Well, / don’t understand her curiosity!" Monica cried. God, it took so little to bring it all back, the sense of loss, and of being lost, and the suffocating pain. Hatred swelled within her. She pulled her hand free, and turned away. "Gray shut up Ed Morgan, but what’s he doing about her?"

"I don’t know." He shook his head. "I know you don’t agree, but when she first moved back, I was all for leaving her alone. What happened wasn’t her fault, and she deserves the right to live where she wants. That was something Noelle should have faced, and made the best of. This is different. This is deliberate, and it’s something that is her fault."

"Gray will take care of it," Monica said. "He has to."

"I don’t know if he can."

"Of course he can! There are a lot of things he could do."

"Then let me put it another way. I don’t think he can be that drastic with Faith, considering how he feels about her. Wake up, Monica!" he admonished. "Pay attention to your brother. He’s attracted to her. Nothing about this is easy for him."

Monica felt the blood drain out of her face, leaving it stiff. Gray was… attracted to that woman? No. God couldn’t be that cruel. He wouldn’t make her live through that nightmare again.

Unable to say anything else, she warded off Alex with an outstretched hand, unable to cope with the sympathy she could see in his eyes. Hurriedly she left his office, and it wasn’t until she reached the street that she realized she hadn’t told him she couldn’t be with him anymore.

It would kill Mama if Gray took up with Renee Devlin’s daughter. The gossip would be so vicious, she would never be able to lift her head again. Monica gave a bitter little laugh. And to think she’d been worried what Mama would think about Michael McFane!

Thirteen

Mr. Pleasant’s office was located on the top floor of a two-story building. Faith climbed the stairs, hoping against hope that she would find him there, that his telephone had been out of service, that he would be all right. A malfunctioning telephone wasn’t much of a possibility, because if he hadn’t been able to call out, he would have known about it and simply gone to another phone. Surely, too, he would have noticed if there were no incoming calls. Maybe he’d taken another case, and forgotten about her.

She doubted Francis P. Pleasant ever forgot anything.

His office was the first door on the left. The upper half of the door was glass, but the interior blinds had been closed, preventing her from seeing inside. The day she had met him, the blinds had been open. She tried to open the door and found it locked. Not really expecting a response, she knocked, and put her ear against the glass. The room beyond was silent.

There was a mail slot in the door. Faith pushed the little flap open, and angled her head to look inside. Her view was extremely limited, but she could see the mail, quite a lot of it, scattered across the floor.

He wasn’t here, and the amount of his mail indicated that he hadn’t been here in several days.

Growing more worried by the minute, Faith walked down the hall to the next door. According to the lettering on the door, she was at the law office of Houston H. Manges. She could hear the clatter of a typewriter and voices, so she opened the door and entered.

Houston H. Manges’s environs were small and cramped, with file cabinets crammed into every available space. She was in the reception area, populated by a tiny white-haired woman and three rubber plants, one of which had reached gargantuan size. The room beyond, which she could see through the open door, was about the same size, with floor-to-ceiling books. A heavyset man lounged behind a battered desk, and he was talking to a client who sat in one of the two cracked imitation leather chairs positioned in front of the desk. All that was visible of the client was the back of his head.

The tiny woman looked up and smiled in question, but made no move to close the door and give her employer and his client any privacy. Faith gave a mental shrug and approached.

"I’m a client of Mr. Pleasant, next door," she said. "I’ve been trying to reach him for several days and can’t seem to locate him. Do you happen to have any idea where he is?"

"Why, no," the tiny woman said. "He left about a week ago to go to this little town up close to Mississippi, I don’t remember the name. Perkins, something like that. I assumed he was still there."

"No, he left there the next day. He has a bad heart, and I’m worried about him."

"Oh, dear." The small face took on a distressed look. "I never thought about his heart. I knew, of course. His wife, Virginia – we used to have lunch together, it was so sad when she died – told me about his trouble. It was really bad, she said. I never thought to check on him." She reached immediately for the phone index, and flipped through it until she came to the Ps. "I’ll try his home phone. It’s unlisted, you know. He didn’t like business intruding on his private life."

Faith knew. She had called information, trying to get the number. It was her lack of success that had spurred her to drive down and try to find him.

After a minute the little lady hung up the phone. "There’s no answer. Oh, dear. I am worried now. It isn’t like Francis not to let someone know where he is."

"I’m going to call all the hospitals," Faith said decisively. "May I borrow your telephone?"

"Of course, honey. We have two lines, so people will still be able to get through. If a call comes in, though, I’ll need you to hang up so I can answer it."

Thanking God for southern hospitality, Faith accepted the New Orleans directory and flipped to the listing of hospitals. There were more than she had expected. Starting at the top, she began dialing.

Thirty minutes and three interruptions for incoming calls later, she hung up in defeat. Mr. Pleasant wasn’t a patient in any of the local hospitals. If he had taken ill while driving back from Prescott, he could be in a hospital somewhere else, but where?

Or something could have happened to him. It was a possibility she didn’t want to consider, but one she had to accept. If Guy Rouillard had been murdered, and Mr. Pleasant had been asking questions that made someone uncomfortable… She felt sick at the thought. If anything had happened to that sweet old man, it would be her fault for involving him. It wasn’t as if she’d had anything to go on, other than Renee’s statement that Guy hadn’t been with her at all, that she hadn’t seen him since that night twelve years ago.

Most people wouldn’t have suspected murder. Most people wouldn’t now be afraid that poor Mr. Pleasant had somehow run afoul of the same person who had killed Guy. But neither had most people been dragged out of their home in the middle of the night and thrown into the dirt; until Renee and Guy had disappeared, Faith’s life had been predictable, if a bit grim. But that night her trust in the comforting ordinariness of life had been shattered, and she had never regained that sense of security, of obliviousness to things that just didn’t happen to normal people. It was as if a curtain had been torn aside, and after that night she was acutely aware of all the dangers and what-ifs. Bad things were not only possible; in her experience, there was a damn good chance they would happen. She had held Scottie’s hand as he died, she had identified Kyle’s body in a morgue… Yes, bad things happened.

"What are you going to do?" the little secretary asked, automatically accepting that Faith would do something.

"File a missing person’s report," Faith said, because it was the only thing she could think to do. Mr. Pleasant had disappeared as suddenly and thoroughly as Guy Rouillard had; he had been asking questions about Guy. Coincidence? Not likely, but neither did she have any evidence that would warrant a criminal investigation. The best she could do was file a missing person’s report. At least that would trigger an investigation of some sort.

She asked directions to police headquarters, and managed to find it with only two wrong turns. A desk sergeant directed her to the proper office, and soon she was seated in a straight-back chair reciting what information she had to a tired detective in a tired suit, who nevertheless managed to seem interested.

"You called the motel where he’d been staying, and he’d checked out?" Detective Ambrose asked, his world-weary eyes warming a bit when he looked at her.

"The clerk didn’t actually see Mr. Pleasant. He said the key was left on the nightstand, and Mr. Pleasant’s things were gone."

"Had the room been paid for in advance?"

Faith nodded.

"Nothing unusual in that, then. Let’s see. No one has seen him since he left Prescott, the mail is piling up at his office, there’s no answer at his home, and he has a bum ticker." The detective shook his head. "I’ll go by his house and see what I can find, but…" He hesitated, sympathy in his expression.

But probably the old guy’s heart failed, was what he was thinking. Faith hunched her shoulders in misery. She would hate it if Mr. Pleasant had died, and she hadn’t been there to hold his hand or even attend his funeral. She had checked only the current admissions at the hospitals, not whether he’d been a patient any time in the past week. But he’d known about his heart, had been prepared, had even been waiting to join his wife; she would grieve, but there would be a sense of lightness if he’d gone that way. The real nightmare would be if the detective couldn’t find him. Then she would fear the worst, and have no way of knowing for certain.

She extracted a business card from her purse and handed it across the desk. "Please call me if you find anything," she said. "I didn’t know him very well, but I liked him a lot. He was a sweet old man." To her horror, she realized she was referring to him in the past tense, and flinched.

The detective took the card, and rubbed his fingers along the thin edges. "There’s something I’d like to know, Mrs. Hardy. What was he investigating for you?"

She’d known he would ask, and told him the truth. "Twelve years ago, my mother ran away with her lover. I wanted Mr. Pleasant to find them, if he could."

"And did he?"

She shook her head. "He hadn’t the last time I talked to him."

"Which was…?"

"I had dinner with him, the night before he left the motel."

"Did anyone see him after that?"

"I don’t know." It was easy to see the direction of this line of questioning. At least the detective was taking her seriously.

"Did he seem all right when he left?"

"He seemed fine. I had some unexpected company, and Mr. Pleasant left right after dinner."

"So you weren’t the only one to see him?"

She gave him a faint smile. "No."

"Who was your visitor?"

"A neighbor, Gray Rouillard. He came to see about buying my house." It was amazing how far the bare facts could be from what had really happened. She was becoming an expert at exposing the tip while keeping the rest of the iceberg of truth submerged.

"Gray Rouillard," Detective Ambrose repeated, tired eyes lighting with recognition. "Would that be the same Rouillard who played football for LSU, oh, ten or so years ago?"

"Almost thirteen years," she said. "Yes, he’s the same man."

"The Rouillards are big stuff in this part of the state. Well, well. So you’re selling your house to him?"

"No. He asked to buy it, but I don’t want to sell."

"Are you on good terms with him?"

"Not exactly."

"Oh." He seemed disappointed. Faith stared at him a moment, then her mouth curved in a tiny smile. This was the South, after all. Pro football had made some inroads, but college football still reigned supreme.

"No, I don’t have any influence with him to get tickets to the games," she said.

He shrugged, and a responding smile twitched his lips. "It was worth a try." He clicked his pen and rose to his feet, indicating that he had no more questions to ask. "I’ll see what I can find out about Mr. Pleasant. Will you be in town awhile longer, or are you going home now?"

"I’m going home. My only reason for driving down was to see if I could find him." Gratefully she stood up from the straight-back chair, and refrained from stretching.

He put his hand on her arm, the touch light. "You know my first check will be of the obituaries," he said gently.

Faith bit her lip, and nodded.

His hand made two brief pats. "I’ll let you know."

She cried during most of the drive back to Prescott. She had cried very little in the past twelve years, some tears shed for Kyle and more for Scottie, but the thought of losing Mr. Pleasant made her ache inside. She hadn’t had much room for optimism in her life, and she expected the worst.

Detective Ambrose was on the ball. When she checked the answering machine immediately on arriving home, there was a message from him: "I’ve checked Mr. Pleasant’s residence, and there’s no sign of him. The mail has piled up there, too, and the neighbors haven’t seen him." A pause. "He hasn’t been listed in the obits, either. I’ll keep checking, and get back to you."

He wasn’t there. The thought echoed around and around in her mind. No one had seen him since he’d left Prescott. Assuming he had ever left.

Pure rage began to build, and push aside the grief. Her mother and Guy had created a tangle, twelve years ago, that was still wreaking destruction. Faith had to absolve Renee of any involvement in Mr. Pleasant’s disappearance, since her mother hadn’t known the man existed, but she was still part and parcel of the root cause.

For Faith, deed followed closely on the heels of thought. Furiously she picked up the telephone and dialed her grandmother’s number.

She was thwarted, however, by the endless ringing on the other end. No one was home.

She called four more times before she got an answer, and her grandmother’s cracked voice called Renee to the phone. "Who is it?" she heard Renee ask in the background. "That girl of yourn, the youngest one."

"I don’t want to talk to her. Tell her I’m not here." Faith’s hand tightened on the receiver, and her eyes ‘narrowed. She heard her grandmother fumbling with the phone again. She didn’t wait for the parroted excuse. "Tell Mama that if she doesn’t talk to me, I’m going to the sheriff." It was a bluff, at least at this point, but a calculated one. Renee’s response to it would tell her a lot. If her mother didn’t have anything to hide, the bluff wouldn’t work. If she did –

There was a pause as the message was relayed, then more fumbling with the telephone. "What on earth are you talkin’ about, Faithie? What’s the sheriff got to do with anything?" The tone was too bright, too cheerful. "I’m talking about Guy Rouillard. Mama – " "Would you quit harping about Guy Rouillard? I told you, I ain’t seen him."

Faith suppressed the nausea roiling in her stomach, and made her voice more soothing. "I know, Mama. I believe you. But I think something happened to him that night, after you left." Don’t let Mama think she was suspected of anything, or she’d close up tighter than a miser’s purse. "I don’t know nothing about that, and if you’re as smart  as you think you are, missy, you’ll stop pokin’ your nose into other folks’ business."

"Where did you meet him that night, Mama?" Faith asked, ignoring the motherly advice.

"I don’t know why you’re so worried about him," Renee said sullenly. "If he’d done what he should, I’d’ve been taken care of. You kids, too," she added as an afterthought. "But he kept puttin’ it off, waiting until Gray was out of school – well, it don’t make no difference now."

"Did you go to the motel? Or did you meet him somewhere else?"

Renee drew in a seething breath. "You’re like a bulldog when you get something on your mind, did you know that? You always were the most stubborn of my kids, so bound and determined to have your way that you’d do what you wanted, even knowin’ your Pa would slap you for it. We met at the summerhouse, where we usually went, if you just have to know! Go nosing around there, and you’ll find out in a hurry that Gray ain’t nearly as easygoin’ as Guy was!"

Faith winced as Renee slammed down the phone, then drew a deep, shaky breath as she replaced her own receiver. Whatever had happened that night, Renee knew about it. Only her own self-interest could stir her to do something she didn’t want to do, so she had a reason for not wanting Faith to talk to the sheriff. Getting her to admit it, however, would take some doing.

It had to be the summerhouse, of course, Faith thought with resignation. Why couldn’t Guy and Renee have rendezvoused at a motel, in keeping with the American tradition? Faith’s memories of the summerhouse were bittersweet, like everything else connected with Gray Rouillard. She didn’t want to see it again, for doing so would remind her too vividly of the child she had been, of the long hours she had spent lurking at the edge of the woods, hoping for a glimpse of Gray. She had lain on her belly in the pine needles and contentedly watched him and his friends swimming in the lake, listened to their boisterous Shouts of laughter, and woven fancy daydreams of one day joining in their fun. Silly dreams. Silly child.

There, too, she had watched Gray making love to Lindsey Partain. Her stomach tightened now as she thought of it, and her hands curled with an impotent mixture of anger and jealousy. At the time, she had merely thought how beautiful he was. Now, however, she was a woman, with a woman’s needs and desires, and she didn’t want even to think of him making love to another woman, much less see it.

That had been fifteen long years ago, but she could still call up his image in her mind as if it had been yesterday. She could hear his deep, smoky voice murmuring French love words and husky reassurances, see his powerful young body moving between Lindsey’s spread legs.

Damn him. Why had he kissed her, that day in New Orleans? It was one thing to dream of his kisses, and another to know exactly how he tasted, how soft his lips were, how it felt to be in his arms and feel his erection thrusting insistently against her stomach. It was unfair of him to feed her hunger, and then try to use it against her. But then, everything about Gray was unfair. Why couldn’t bis hair have thinned over the years, rather than remaining that thick, vibrant mane? Why couldn’t he have put on weight, developed a beer belly and worn his pants slung low under it, rather than honing down to such lean muscularity, even more finely tuned than during his football days? And even if he hadn’t changed, why couldn’t she have, altering enough so that he no longer affected her so violently, or her heart would beat normally in his presence?

Instead, in that respect, she was still the adoring girl who had spent hours, weeks, months of her childhood lying on her belly in the woods, her eyes straining for a glimpse of her hero. Not even finding out that her hero could be a ruthless bastard when he wanted had been able to shake that painful fixation.

She didn’t want to go back to the summerhouse, to the scene of her youthful foolishness. What could she possibly find there, after twelve years? Nothing.

But no one else had looked at it with her eyes. No one had suspected that Guy Rouillard might have spent the last hours of his life there.

Faith growled at herself. She was tired and hungry, after the long drive to New Orleans and back, as well as exhausted by worry over Mr. Pleasant. She didn’t want to go to the summerhouse, but she had just given herself a convincing argument on why it was necessary. And if she was going, she should do it now, while the afternoon sun was still strong.

She grabbed her keys and stalked out of the house.

The best way to get there, she supposed, was the way she had gone when she’d been eleven. There was a road from the Rouillard house to the lake, but she could hardly take that route. From her younger days of roaming and spying, however, she knew the Rouillard land as well as she knew her own face. She drove to a secluded spot close to the old shack where she had grown up, but when she reached the last curve before the shack would come into view, she stopped the car and sat for a moment, hands gripping the steering wheel. She couldn’t bring herself to drive around the curve. The shack had probably fallen in by now, but that wouldn’t ease her memories. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to relive the memories of that night.

Pain was a lump in the middle of her chest, obstructing her breathing, making her eyes burn. She didn’t cry. She had cried for Mr. Pleasant, for Scottie, for Kyle. She hadn’t cried for herself since the night Renee had left.

Well, delaying wouldn’t accomplish anything except putting off dinner, and she was already starving. She got out of the car and locked the doors, and dropped the keys into her skirt pocket. Brush grew thickly along the sides of the road, now little more than a track as the vegetation gradually reclaimed the land. She had to pick her way around some briar bushes, but once into the woods, it was fairly easy to walk. She picked up a stick, in case she came across a snake, but she wasn’t at all afraid. She had grown up in these woods, played in them, hidden in them when Amos had been drunk and slinging his fists at anyone who got in his way.

The familiar scents washed over her, fresh and powerful with spring, and she stopped for a moment to absorb them. Her eyes closed so she could concentrate. There was the rich brown scent of the earth, the fresh verdant of leaves, the spicy golden scent of pine sap. She inhaled that last with a little shiver of recognition. Gray’s scent contained a hint of that golden spice. She would love to have him naked and at her disposal, so she could explore all the shadings of his scent. She would absolutely wallow on him, drunk with delight –

Her eyes popped open. The telltale wanning of her body told her where that particular fantasy had been going. It was coming back here that had done it; in her mind, the smells of the forest were inextricably linked with Gray: the hope of seeing him, the fizzing joy of seeing him.

Resolutely she walked on. If she didn’t get him out of her mind, she’d find herself lying on her stomach in the pine needles at the edge of the woods, completely reverted to childhood.

The walk to the lake wasn’t a long one, about twenty minutes. The forest had changed, of course; time didn’t stand still with trees any more than it did with people. She had to pick her way around obstacles that hadn’t been there before, and old landmarks were missing, but still she knew her way with the accuracy of a homing pigeon.

She approached the summerhouse from the angle she always had, from the back and right side. From there she could see the dock, and a corner of the boathouse. Once she had prayed to see a Corvette parked in front, but now she was just as glad not to see a Jaguar there. It would have been too ironic for Gray to appear. Thank God he had business concerns now, and didn’t have the luxury of spending long, lazy days swimming and fishing.

Time had laid its hand on the summerhouse, too. It wasn’t dilapidated, Gray had kept it up, but an air of disuse had fallen over it. Things that had regular human use wore a certain sheen of accomplishment, a sheen that the summerhouse no longer possessed. There was a subtle reverse of order. Before, the grass had always been neatly manicured, and though the yard wasn’t overgrown with weeds now, it still showed a certain roughness that said it had been over a week since the grass had been cut. On the other hand, the summerhouse had always been littered with the flotsam of human habitation, and now it was too neat, without the activity that had kept it cluttered and alive.

She went up the back steps, the same steps where she had crouched to listen to Gray making love to Lindsey Partain. The screen door to the porch wasn’t latched, and creaked a little as she opened it. The sound made her smile, so woven was it into the days of her childhood.

For all the difficulties, she hadn’t had a horrible childhood. Much of it had been downright enjoyable, rich with fantasy, especially the long hours spent exploring the woods. She had waded in creeks, caught crawdads with her bare hands, marveled at the delicate tracery of a leaf held up to the sun. She had never had a bicycle, but she’d had fresh air and blue skies, the anticipation of turning over a rotting log to see how many insects and worms it hid. She had eaten wild berries straight off the bush, found the occasional arrowhead, and painstakingly constructed her own bow and arrow from a green limb, old fishing line, and sharpened sticks. The joys of all those things had created a reserve of strength for her to draw on when times were bad.

The boards of the porch creaked beneath her feet as she crossed to the back door. In the old days, there had been several rocking chairs scattered about the porch, for the enjoyment of fine summer nights. All swimming and fishing paraphernalia was supposed to have been kept in the boathouse, but somehow bits of it had always been lying about on the porch: an inner tube that needed patching, a fishing rod, an assortment of lures, hooks, and floats. Now, however, the porch was empty, no longer a place for rowdy teenagers and rendezvousing adults.

She walked to the window where she had watched Gray and Lindsey making love; the room was empty now, the hardwood floors bare and coated with a light layer of dust. She stood for a moment, remembering that long-ago summer day, gilded with the magic of childhood.

Turning away, she tried the back door, and was surprised when the knob twisted easily in her hand. She had never been inside the summerhouse. The closest she had ever been was on the porch, that one time. She stepped into the kitchen, looking around with interest. Once there had been a refrigerator and stove, for empty spaces and the electrical connections marked where they had stood. She opened the cabinet doors and drawers, but they were all empty. Each sound echoed through the bare rooms.

Everything was clean enough, without the smell of mice, though it had obviously been a couple of weeks since the last cleaning. As she wandered into the other rooms, she saw that none of the light fixtures sported so much as a single light bulb. There was a small closet in each of the two bedrooms, and she looked in both of them. Nothing, not even a single clothes hanger. The summerhouse was completely empty.

Which one of the bedrooms had Renee and Guy used? It didn’t matter; there was nothing to be found here, no interesting nooks or crannies where a body could have been hidden. There was absolutely nothing suspicious about the house. Any evidence had long since been swept away, mopped up, or painted over. She wondered that there wasn’t any sign of vagrants, considering the house was unlocked, but since it was in the middle of Rouillard land, she supposed there weren’t many passersby.

There was still the boathouse to check, though she didn’t really expect to find anything. She had come only to satisfy herself that she had done everything possible to find out what had happened to Guy, and Mr. Pleasant. Leaving by the front door, she walked down to the dock. Both the dock and boathouse were set at an angle to the house, slightly to the left, positioned on the curve of a small slough. Since she had been here last, twelve years ago, vegetation had been allowed to grow over the banks. Young willow trees, growing in clumps along the lake’s edge, had matured to provide much more shade and cover than she remembered. Once there had been an almost unobstructed view of the lake, except for the boathouse, but now saplings and bushes had taken advantage of the subtle neglect to sink their roots into the rich soil.

The dock had been kept in good repair, though, and she walked out to the end. It was a calm day, with an almost imperceptible breeze making faint ripples in the water, which lapped against the dock pilings with wet, rhythmic slaps. It was one of those hot, lazy days that made her want to lie on her back on the dock, and stare up at the fat white clouds floating across a deep blue sky. Birds were calling in the trees, and somewhere a fish jumped, a quiet splash that didn’t disturb the peace. Over to the left, a red and white float bobbed happily on the little ripples – She stiffened, her eyes widening with dread as she slowly turned. A fishing float meant someone was fishing, someone who had been hidden from her view by the angle of the boathouse. Like a felon approaching the gallows, her gaze followed the fishing line as it arced gracefully up from the float, across the water, to where it was threaded through the eyes of a fishing rod. A fishing rod that was held by Gray Rouillard, standing shirtless on the bank on the other side of the boathouse, watching her with narrowed dark eyes.

For an instant they stared at each other across the small expanse of water. Faith’s thoughts darted about in panic, trying to think of a good reason for her presence, but her normally nimble mind was blank with shock. She had thought herself totally alone, and then to turn and see Gray, of all people – a shirtless Gray, at that. It wasn’t fair. She needed all her wits about her when dealing with him; she couldn’t afford to be distracted by that bare expanse of chest, and his long hair hanging loose to his shoulders.

He began reeling in the float with quick, deliberate movements. Choosing caution over valor, Faith bolted up the dock, her feet thudding on the planks. He threw down the fishing rod and sprinted around the boathouse. Panting, she reached for more speed; if she could just get to the edge of the woods ahead of him, he wouldn’t be able to catch her. She was smaller, slimmer, and would be able to dodge between trees he would have to go around. But as fast as she was, he still had the speed of a linebacker. She saw him out of the corner of her eye, too close, and gaining ground with each long stride. He beat her by a split second, his big body suddenly blocking her way off the dock. She tried to stop, but she was already on him, and her shoes weren’t made for traction. She slammed into his chest, the impact knocking her breath out with a whoq/J He grunted and staggered back a few steps, his arms coming up just in time to catch her against his chest and prevent her from falling on her face.

He caught his balance, and gave a muffled laugh as his arms tightened around her, holding her off the ground. "That’s a pretty good hit, for a lightweight. Nice speed, too. Where’re you going in such a hurry, Red? And what the hell are you doing here in the first place?"

She fought for her breath, sucking in desperate drafts to fill her aching lungs. God, he was as hard as a rock! She had probably bruised herself, barreling into him that way. After a short while she managed to say, "Reminiscing," and pushed against his bare shoulders in a hint that he should set her on her feet.

He snorted, and ignored the hint. "You’re trespassing. You’ll have to think of a better reason than that."

"Nosy," she offered breathlessly, still finding oxygen in somewhat short supply. The tightness of his arms was interfering with her efforts to take deep breaths. She squirmed against him, then immediately stopped. The friction of his bare skin against her was too distracting, too dangerous.

"That I can believe," he muttered. "What are you up to now?" He decided to let her down, loosening his grip so that she slid against his body. Faith’s cheeks flushed as she stepped away from him, and the color wasn’t just from the deep breaths she was taking. He was wearing only a pair of glove-soft jeans and scuffed boots, and she stared in helpless fascination at his naked torso. His shoulders were a good two feet wide, and heavy with muscle, a powerful layering that continued in plates across his chest. Curly black hair grew there, almost completely hiding his tiny, flat nipples, and arrowing down the middle of his abdomen to where it grew straight and downy around his shallow navel, which was exposed by sinfully low-riding jeans. A light sheen of sweat gleamed on his skin, making him glisten like a warm-toned statue with carved muscle and sinew.

"How did you get here?" she blurted, not answering his question. "I didn’t see a car."

"Horseback." He jerked his head toward the field on the other side of the slough. "He’s over there, eating his head off."

"Maximillian?" she asked, remembering the name of the prize stallion Guy had owned.

"One of his sons." Gray frowned down at her. "How do you know about Maximillian? And how did you get here?"

"I imagine most of the people in the parish know you have horses." As she spoke, she edged sideways.

He reached out and clamped one hand on her arm. "Hold it. Yeah, a lot of people know we have horses, but not many would know the name of our breeding stallion. You’ve been asking questions about us again, haven’t you?" His hand tightened. "Who have you been talking to now? Tell me, damn it!" He emphasized the demand with a slight shake.

"No one," she flared. "I remembered the name from before."

"How would you have known it back then? Renee didn’t balk at much, but I doubt she went home and regaled her family with details of her lover’s life."

Faith closed her lips tightly together. She had known the stallion’s name because she had been like a sponge, absorbing every little snippet of conversation she overhead, if it pertained to Gray. She wasn’t about to admit such a thing to him, though. "I remembered it from before," she finally repeated.

He didn’t believe her, and his face darkened.

"I haven’t been talking to anyone!" she cried, trying to tug away from him. "I remembered the horse’s name, that’s all." Why did every encounter with him seem to involve playing tug-of-war with one or both of her arms?

He surveyed her upturned face with narrowed eyes. "All righf, I’ll give you that one. Now tell me why you’re poking around my summerhouse, and how you got here. I know damn good and well you don’t have a horse."

That, at least, seemed safe enough to tell him. "I walked," she said. "Through the woods."

Pointedly he looked down at her feet. "You’re not dressed for hiking through the woods."

That was true enough. She hadn’t taken the time to change clothes, so she was still wearing the midcalf skirt, hosiery, and dress flats that she’d worn to New Orleans. She had grown up roaming barefoot through those woods, so she certainly hadn’t worried about wearing flats. Shrugging to show her indifference, she said, "I didn’t think about it." Quickly she added, "I’m sorry I trespassed. I’ll leave – "

"Whoa." He drew her to a standstill again. "You’ll leave when I say you can leave, and not before. I’m still waiting for an answer to my other question."

Thankfully her brain was working again. "I was just curious," she said. "They used to meet here, so… I wanted to see it." There was no need to elaborate on who "they" were.

To her dismay, his eyes grew cold. "Don’t give me that. You’ve been here before, because I’ve seen you."

Shocked, she stared at him. "When?"

"When you were a kid. You slipped around through the woods like a little ghost, but you forgot to cover your head." He tugged on a strand of hair, then smoothed it behind her ear. "It was like watching a flame bob through the trees."

He had known she was there. For an appalled, heart-stopping moment she wondered if he had guessed he was the attraction that had drawn her like a moth. Bitterly she remembered all her childish fantasies, that one day he would look up and see her, and ask her to join their fun. He’d seen her, all right, but no invitation had been issued. The surprise would have been if he had asked her to join them. The eight-year age diiference between twenty-six and thirty-four was almost nonexistent, but an enormous gulf between eleven and nineteen. Even if she hadn’t been too young, she was a Devlin, forever locked outside his circle.

"I’m going to ask you one more time," he said softly, when she remained silent. A chill ran down her spine at the steel in his tone. "What are you doing here?"

"I told you." She lifted her chin and met his gaze. "Nosing around."

"The next question is: Why? You’ve been doing a lot of nosing around since you moved back here. What are you up to, Faith? I warned you about stirring up old gossip and upsetting my family, and I meant every word of it."

She had already given him the only answer she could, and he hadn’t believed it. She could tell him the entire truth, or she could lie. In the end, she chose to do neither, but stood silently in his grasp.

His jaw flexed with anger, and his hand tightened on her arm. Faith winced, and his gaze dropped to the livid marks where his fingers bit into her soft skin. He cursed and relaxed his grip, and like a shot she tore away from him, sprinting for the safety of the woods. Within two steps she knew it was a mistake, but emotion rather than logic had the upper hand. He reacted like the predator he was, springing after her. She was barely halfway across the grass when the impact of his heavy body knocked her off her feet, a tiger bringing down a gazelle. He fell with her, holding her tight against his chest and twisting his body so that he took the brunt of the fall, with her on top of him. Her vision was filled with a confusing tumble of grass, trees, and sky as he rolled, deftly placing her beneath him.

Oh, God. The surge of primal recognition shocked her body into stillness, as if she didn’t dare move in that first shattering moment of delight. Being in his arms was one thing; lying sprawled beneath him was quite another. His considerable weight pressed her into the grass, releasing the sweet green fragrance of the crushed blades to mingle with the heady masculine scent of his sweaty skin. The fall had rucked her skirt up to midthigh, and one of his legs rode high between hers, so that her thighs clasped the muscular column. Instinctively she had clung to him as they were falling, and now her fingers were digging hard into his bare back, feeling the slick heat of his flesh. Their position was that of lovemaking, and her body responded with mindless intensity. Her senses blurred, overloaded in that first explosion of sexual signals.

"Are you all right?" he muttered, raising his head.

Faith swallowed, words sticking in her throat. Her insides were clenching, urging her to lift against him in blind, searing need. She resisted the urge, turning her head to the side so she couldn’t see if it was mirrored in his dark eyes.

"Faith?" His tone was more insistent, demanding an answer.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Look at me." He lifted himself to his elbows, removing most of his weight so that she breathed easier, but he was still far too close, his face mere inches from hers.

Temptation shimmered between them, made all the more potent by the times she had resisted it. It took so little to bring desire into full flame, a kiss, a touch, like a spark to dry straw. Each time it was more difficult to resist him, and only the strength of her aversion to casual sex, to being a moral replica of her mother, had enabled her to hold him at bay. But each contact with him eroded her willpower, wearing it down bit by bit so that each refusal took more effort.

His breath wafted over her lips, the subtle touch making them part as if she would inhale his essence. His head lowered, his mouth moving toward hers.

Desperately she wedged her arms between them, bracing her hands against his chest. The curls of hair tickled her palms, and she felt the hard nubs of his nipples against the heels of her hands. Hidden beneath blouse and bra, her own nipples had peaked.

He paused, hovering over her. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple and curved along his jaw. His nipples felt like tiny spikes, burning into her hands. She wanted to touch them, to put her mouth over them and feel them with her tongue, taste the saltiness of his skin, feel him stiffen and shudder from excitement.

Temptation gnawed at her, sharp and insistent. He inhaled, his chest expanding beneath her palms, and the sand castle of her resistance crumbled beneath the wave of pleasure. Letting out her breath on a soft sigh, she turned her hands, moving them so that her thumbs brushed over his nipples, once, twice, again. The delight of it made her feel dizzy.

His pupils dilated, the black centers flaring until they all but eclipsed the dark irises. His head fell forward between his arms, his long black hair curtaining their faces, and his breath hissed between his teeth. Having given in, she couldn’t make herself stop touching him. She explored the hard planes of his chest, returning time and again to the hard little peaks that had lured her so far into dangerous territory. She couldn’t touch him enough, couldn’t sate her hunger for the feel of him.

Then he drew her hands away from his body, and his eyes were fierce as he looked down at her. "Turnabout’s fair play," he said, and put his hand on her breast.

She arched beneath him, crying out at the hot lash of pleasure. Her breasts strained into his touch, so taut and sensitive that the hot weight of his hand was almost unbearable, and yet the cessation of contact would be torture. Even through her clothes, the rasp of his thumbs made her nipples burn and throb.

He lowered his head and kissed her, the pressure hard and ravaging, while he tugged her blouse loose from the waistband of her skirt. When it was free, he thrust his hand beneath the cloth, burrowing under her bra to close his fingers on the satiny mound of her bare breast. "You know what I want," he said roughly, moving more fully onto her and pushing his muscular legs between hers to make a place for himself.

She knew. She wanted it too, so fiercely that the need almost obliterated all other considerations. His callused fingers plucked at her nipple, rolling it between finger and thumb. She wanted his mouth there, sucking strongly. She wanted him to take her, here on the grass with the hot sun burning down on their bare bodies. She wanted him, forever.

"Tell me," he said. "Tell me why." The words were muffled against her throat as he trailed kisses down to her collarbone.

She blinked, staring up at the clouds in confusion. Then the meaning of the words washed over her like a dash of ice water. He wanted her – the thick ridge of proof pushed against her loins – but while she had been lost in the fog of desire, his brain had been clear, still working, still trying to get answers.

With a hiss of rage she erupted, shoving against him, kicking. He rolled off of her and sat up, looking like a half-naked savage with his hair tangled around his face and his dark eyes narrowed with dangerous lust.

"You bastard!" she spat, so angry she was quivering. She surged to her knees, hands clenched into fists as she fought the urge to hurl herself at him. Now wasn’t the time to challenge him physically, not with his entire big body taut with the need to mate. Control, his and hers, was stretched to a hairsbreadth; the least pressure would snap it. He waited, poised to meet her attack, and she saw the sexual anticipation hot in his eyes. For a long moment they faced each other, until gradually she forced herself to relax. There was nothing to be gained in this confrontation.

There was nothing to be said, either. Perhaps she hadn’t exactly started the fire, but she had certainly fanned the flames by caressing his nipples the way she had. If things had gone beyond what she wanted, she had only herself to blame.

At last she got to her feet, moving stiffly. Her skirt was torn, her panty hose shredded down one leg. She turned away, only to find herself caught again, this time by a handful of skirt. "I’ll take you back," he said. "Let me get the horse."

"Thank you, but I’d rather walk," she replied, the words as stiff as her body.

"I didn’t ask what you wanted. I said I’ll take you back. You shouldn’t be wandering around in the woods by yourself." Not trusting her to remain there if he released her, he began dragging her along in his wake.

"I wandered around them by myself for over half my life," she growled.

"Maybe so, but you aren’t doing it now." He slanted a brief, hard glance her way. "It’s my land, and I make the rules."

He kept his fist twisted in her skirt, so she was obliged to keep step with him or have her clothes torn off. They walked past the boathouse and around the slough, a distance of about a hundred yards, to where Gray had hobbled the stallion so he could graze. At his whistle, the big, dark brown animal began moving toward him. To her dismay, there was no saddle anywhere in evidence.

"You rode him bareback?" she asked uneasily.

His dark eyes glinted. "I won’t let you fall."

She didn’t know a lot about horses, having never been on one, but she did know that stallions were fractious animals, difficult to control. She tried to back away as the horse ambled closer, but Gray’s grip on her skirt kept her at his side.

"Don’t be afraid. He’s the sweetest-tempered stallion I’ve ever seen, or I wouldn’t be riding him without a saddle." The horse came within reach and he caught the halter, crooning praise into the pricked ears.

"I’ve never been on a horse," she admitted, staring up at the big head as it lowered. Velvety lips whuffled at her arm, scooped-out nostrils flaring as he caught her scent. Hesitantly she put out her hand and stroked above his nose.

"Then your first ride will be on a Thoroughbred," Gray said, and lifted her onto the broad back. She clutched at the thick mane, alarmed by the height at which she found herself, while the living platform beneath her moved restlessly.

Gray gathered the reins, then caught two handfuls of mane and swung up behind her. The stallion skittered beneath the extra weight, making Faith catch her breath, but Gray’s touch, and the sound of his voice, soothed him immediately.

"Where did you leave your car?" he asked.

"On the last curve before you get to the shack," she replied, and those were the only words spoken during the ride. Gray guided the horse through the trees, avoiding low-hanging limbs, walking him around obstacles. Faith held on, acutely aware of Gray’s bare chest against her back, and of the way her buttocks were nestled against his crotch. His muscular thighs hugged her hips, and she felt them clenching and relaxing as he guided the horse. They reached the road far too quickly, but in another sense the journey had taken a small eternity.

He reined in beside her car and swung to the ground, then reached up to catch her under the arms and lift her down. Suddenly alarmed that she might have lost her keys in the scuffle, she patted her skirt pocket, and heard the reassuring rattle. She didn’t want to look at him, so she took out the keys and turned to unlock the car.

"Faith."

She hesitated, then turned the key in the lock and opened the door. He stepped forward, and the expression in his eyes made her grateful for the car door between them.

"Stay off my property," he said evenly. "If I catch you on Rouillard land again, I’m going to give you the fucking you’ve been asking for."

Fourteen

The next day, Faith found the note inside her car, lying on the driver’s seat. She saw the folded piece of paper and picked it up, wondering what she had dropped. She unfolded it, and saw the block letters:

DON’T ASK ANY MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT GUY ROUILLARD SHUT UP IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU

She leaned against the car, a light breeze fluttering the paper in her hands. She didn’t lock her car at home, so she didn’t have to wonder how the note had gotten in there. She stared at the paper, reading it again and wondering if she had been threatened, or if the writer had simply used a familiar phrase. Shut up if you know what’s good for you. She had heard variations of it a hundred times, with only the command changing. The note might or might not be a threat; likely it was more of a warning. Someone didn’t like her asking questions about Guy.

Gray hadn’t left the note. It wasn’t his style, for one thing; he had delivered his threats in person, and spelled them out. The last one still had her rattled. Who else would have been disturbed by her questions? There were two possibilities: someone with something to hide, or someone who thought to curry Gray’s favor.

She had been on her way to town for yet another fact-finding mission, this time to try having a word with Yolanda Foster, so there was a certain irony to the timing of the note’s appearance. After a moment’s consideration, she decided that she was still going to try. If the writer wanted her to take the threat seriously, he or she would have to be more specific.

First, though, she carried the note inside and locked it in the desk, being careful not to handle the paper more than necessary. In itself, this wasn’t something that warranted calling the sheriff, but if she received another, she wanted to be able to present both of them to him for evidence. She wasn’t eager to see the sheriff in any case. She had a stark memory of him standing beside his patrol car, beefy arms folded as he approvingly watched his deputies empty the shack of the Devlins’ belongings. Sheriff Deese was thoroughly in Gray’s hip pocket; the question was whether or not he would do anything even if she received a death threat.

The note properly stored, she drove to town. Lying in bed last night, unable to sleep, she had planned her strategy. She wouldn’t call Mrs. Foster; that would give her a chance to refuse a meeting. It would be best to take her by surprise, face-to-face, and slip in a few questions before Yolanda got over being startled. She didn’t know where the Fosters lived, however, and the address in the phone book had been unfamiliar to her.

Her first stop was the library. To her disappointment, the chatty Carlene DuBois wasn’t behind the desk; instead it was manned – or girled – by a frothy little blonde who barely looked old enough to be out of high school. She was chewing gum as she leafed through a rock music fanzine. What had happened to the stereotypical librarian with her hair pulled back in a bun and reading glasses perched on a thin nose? The gum-chewing rock fan wasn’t an improvement.

Realistically, Faith knew, she herself was probably no more than four or five years older than the little librarian. Mentally and emotionally, however, she wasn’t even in the same generation. She had never been young in the way this girl still was, and she didn’t think it was a bad thing. She’d had responsibilities from an early age; she could remember cooking when the iron frying pan had been too heavy for her to lift, and she’d had to stand on a chair to stir a pot of beans. She had swept with a broom that was almost twice as tall as herself. Then she’d had Scottie to care for, the greatest responsibility of all. But when she had finished high school, she’d been prepared for life, unlike kids who had never taken care of anything and had no idea how to cope. Those "kids" were still running back to their parents for help when they were twenty-five.

The girl looked up from her magazine to pull her bubble-gum pink lips into what passed for a professional smile. Her eyes were so heavily lined with black that they looked like almonds in a pit of coal dust. "May I help you?"

The tone was competent, Faith thought with relief. Maybe the girl was just stuck in makeup limbo. "Do you have maps of both the town and parish?"

"Sure." She led Faith to a table on which a large globe stood. "Here are all the maps and atlases. They’re updated yearly, so if it’s an older map you need, you’ll have to go to the archives."

"No, I need a current map."

"Here you go, then." The girl pulled out an enormous book, easily three by two feet, but she handled it easily as she placed it on the table. "We have to seal the maps in plastic and put them in the book," she explained. "If we don’t, they get stolen."

Faith smiled as the girl left her. The solution made sense to her. It was one thing to fold a map and put it in your pocket; spiriting out a huge, plastic-encased sheet would take some ingenuity.

She didn’t know if the Fosters lived in town or out in the parish, but she looked first in the town map, running her finger down the list of streets printed on the back. Bingo. Noting the coordinates, she flipped the page and quickly located Meadowlark Drive, in a subdivision that hadn’t existed when she had lived here before. With a name like Meadowlark Drive, she should have known. Land developers were an unimaginative bunch. After memorizing how to get there, she replaced the map book and left. The librarian was engrossed in her magazine again, and didn’t look up as Faith passed the desk.

Prescott being the size it was, finding Meadowlark Drive took less than five minutes. The subdivision included acreage, rather than just lots, so the houses were fewer and farther apart than normal. There probably weren’t many people in Prescott who could afford to build there, either, as the houses looked to be in the two-hundred-thousand range. In the Northeast and along the West Coast, they would have been worth a cool million, easy.

The Foster house was designed to look like a Mediterranean villa, nestled comfortably amid huge oaks draped with Spanish moss. Faith parked in the driveway and walked up the brown brick pathway to the double front doors. The button for the door bell was disguised amid some scrolls, then discreetly lit so people could find it. She pressed it, and heard the chimes echo through the house.

After a moment there was the rapid tapping of heels on a tiled floor, and the right half of the door was pulled open to reveal a very pretty middle-aged woman, stylishly clad in slim taupe pants and a white tunic. Her short, ash brown hair was a tumble of curls, swept to one side, and she wore gold hoop earrings. Startled recognition flashed in the dark blue eyes.

"Hello, I’m Faith Hardy," Faith said, hurrying to correct the woman’s horrified assumption that she was Renee. "Are you Mrs. Foster?"

Yolanda Foster nodded, evidently struck speechless. She continued to stare.

"I’d like to talk to you, if it’s convenient." To tilt the answer in her favor, Faith took a step forward. Yolanda fell back, in an involuntary gesture of admittance.

"I really don’t have much time," Yolanda said, her tone apologetic rather than impatient. "I’m having lunch with a friend."

That was believable, unless Yolanda always dressed at home as if she were the nineties version of June Cleaver. "Ten minutes," Faith promised.

Looking puzzled, Yolanda led her into a spacious living room, and they sat down. "I don’t mean to stare, but you are Renee Devlin’s daughter, aren’t you? I heard you were in town, and the resemblance – well, I’m sure you’ve been told it’s startling."

Unlike a lot of people, there was no censure in Yolanda’s tone, and Faith found herself unexpectedly liking the woman. "Several people have mentioned it," she said dryly, earning a chuckle from her hostess that made her like her even more. Liking her, however, didn’t deflect Faith from her course. "I want to ask you some questions about Guy Rouillard, if I may."

The blusher-pinkened cheeks paled a bit. "About Guy?" Her hands fluttered a bit, then she clasped them in her lap. "Why ask me?"

Faith paused. "Are you alone?" she finally asked, not wanting to cause the woman any trouble if someone should overhear their conversation. "Why, yes. Lowell is in New York this week." That was fortuitous in one way, and not in another, because depending on her conversation with Yolanda, she might want to talk to Lowell, too. She took a deep breath and went right to the heart of the matter. "Were you having an affair with Guy that summer before he left?"

The blue eyes darkened with distress, and the cheeks paled even more. Yolanda stared at her, the seconds ticking away in silence. Faith waited for a denial, but instead Yolanda gave a curiously gentle sigh. "How did you find out?"

"I asked questions." She didn’t say that it had evidently been common knowledge, for Ed Morgan to know about it. If Yolanda wanted to think she had been discreet, let her have.that dubious comfort.

"That was the only time I was ever unfaithful to Lowell." The older woman looked away, and her fingers plucked nervously at her slacks.

"I’m sure it was," Faith said, because Yolanda seemed to need to be believed. "From what I’ve heard about Guy Rouillard, he was an expert at seduction."

An unwilling, rueful little smile touched Yolanda’s lips. "He was, but I can’t blame it on him. I was determined to sleep with him before I ever approached him." Her fingers continued their nervous little movements, now smoothing the upholstered arm of the chair. "I found out Lowell was carrying on with his secretary, and had been for years. I pitched a fit, let me tell you. I threatened him with all sorts of things if he didn’t stop, immediately, and divorce was the only one of them that wasn’t physically damaging. He begged me not to leave him, swore that she didn’t mean anything to him, it was just the sex, and he’d never do it again – you know, that kind of bull. But I caught him, not three weeks later. It’s so silly, the little things that give them away. When he undressed one night, his shorts were on wrong side out, the label visible in the back. The only way he could have gotten them turned wrong would be if he’d had them off."

She shook her head, as if she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been more careful. The words were spilling out of her now, as if she had held them inside for twelve years. "I didn’t say anything to him. But the next day I called Guy and asked him to meet me at the summerhouse on their lake. Lowell and I, and some other friends, had been there for barbecues and picnics, so I knew the place."

The summerhouse again! Faith thought wryly. Between father and son, the sheets in those two bedrooms must have stayed hot. "Why did you pick Guy?" she asked.

Yolanda gave her a surprised look. "Well, I’d hardly have picked anyone repulsive, would I?" she asked reasonably. "If I was going to have an affair, I at least wanted it to be with someone who knew what he was doing, and from Guy’s reputation, I thought he likely filled the bill. Then, too, Guy was safe. I intended to tell Lowell what I’d done, because what good is revenge if no one knows about it, and Guy was powerful enough that Lowell couldn’t do anything to him, if Lowell found out his identity. I intended to keep that secret, at least.

"So I met Guy at the summerhouse, and told him what I wanted. He was very sweet, very reasonable. He tried to talk me out of it, if you can imagine! Talk about a wound to the ego!" Yolanda smiled, her eyes misty with memory as they met Faith’s. "Here was a man who tomcatted all over the state, and he turned me down. I had always considered myself attractive, but evidently he didn’t. I almost cried. I did tear up a little bit, and Guy was frantic. He was so sweet, a real woman’s man. Tears turned him to mush. He started patting my shoulder, explaining that he really thought I was pretty and he’d love to take me to bed, but I had asked for all the wrong reasons, and Lowell was his friend – he went on and on."

"But you finally convinced him?"

"What I said was, ‘If it isn’t you, it’ll be someone else.’ He just looked at me with those dark eyes that made you feel like you could drown in them, and I could tell he was wondering who I would pick next. He was worried about me, thinking I’d be down at Jimmy Jo’s, looking that crowd over for candidates. Then he took my hand, put it on his crotch, and he was ready. He said, ‘I’m it,’ and took me to the bedroom." She shivered a little, her gaze unfocused as she looked back in time. She fell silent, and Faith waited patiently for her to sort through her memories.

"Can you imagine," Yolanda finally said, her voice soft, "what it’s like to be married for twenty years, to love your husband and be perfectly satisfied in bed – and then find out that you had no idea what passion could be? Guy was… God, I can’t tell you what Guy was like as a lover. He made me scream, he made me feel and do things I didn’t – I only meant it to be that one time. But we stayed there the whole afternoon, making love.

"I didn’t tell Lowell. Telling him would have ended my revenge, and I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t stop seeing Guy. We met at least once a week, if I could manage it. Then he left." She glanced at Faith, as if gauging the effect of her next sentence. "With your mother. When I heard, I cried for a week. And then I told Lowell.

"He was furious, of course. He ranted and raved, and threatened to divorce me. I sat there and watched him, not arguing or anything, and that made him even madder. Then I said, ‘You should always make sure your shorts are right side out before you put them back on,’ and he stopped dead, staring at me with his mouth open. He knew that I’d caught him again. I got up and left the room. He followed me about half an hour later, and he was crying. We made up," she said, briskly now. "And as far as I know, he’s never been unfaithful again."

"Did you ever hear from Guy?"

Slowly Yolanda shook her head. "I hoped, at first, but… no, he never wrote, or called." Her lips trembled, and she looked at Faith with anguish stark on her face. "My God," she whispered, "I loved him so."

Another dead end, Faith thought as she drove home. According to Yolanda, her husband hadn’t known about her affair with Guy until after Guy had already disappeared, which put Lowell in the clear. Yolanda had been too open, too oblivious to even the possibility that Guy had been killed, or that there was the slightest reason why she shouldn’t unburden herself to Faith. Instead she had wound up clinging to Faith’s hands while she wept for a man whom she hadn’t seen in twelve years, but with whom she had shared a summer of passion.

She had finally recovered her poise, flustered and embarrassed. "My goodness, look at the time – I’m going to be late. I can’t imagine – I mean, you’re a stranger – crying all over you this way, carrying on – oh, my." This last as she fully realized just what she had been saying to this stranger. She had stared at Faith with horrified dismay.

Feeling compelled to comfort Yolanda, Faith had touched her shoulder and said, "You needed to talk about it. I understand, and I swear I’ll keep your confidence."

After a few strained seconds, Yolanda had relaxed. "I believe you. I don’t know why, but I do."

So now Faith was left with no suspects or leads, not that she’d had anything concrete to begin with. All she had was questions, and her questions were annoying someone. The proof of that was in the note she’d found that morning. Whether the note was indicative of a guilty conscience, she didn’t know.

Nor did she know what else to do, except keep asking questions. Sooner or later, someone would be stung to respond.

If she could keep busy enough, maybe she wouldn’t think about Gray.

The theory was proving difficult to put into practice. She had avoided thinking about him, purposefully pushing him from her mind after she had left him the afternoon before. She had ignored the unfulfilled ache in her body, and refused to think about what had almost happened between them. But for all her will, her subconscious had betrayed her, admitting him into her dreams so that she had awakened in the early morning to find herself reaching for him. The dream had been so vivid that she had cried out, in longing and disappointment.

She had no more resistance to him; she might as well admit it. If he hadn’t said what he had, she’d have given in to him there on the grass. Her morals and standards were useless when he took her in his arms, paper tigers that were vanquished by his first kiss.

As she eliminated each person from her list of suspects, the tower of motive leaned more and more toward Gray. Logically, she could see it. Emotionally, the idea met with total rejection. Not Gray. Not Gray! She couldn’t believe it; she wouldn’t believe it. The man she knew was capable of going to extraordinary lengths to protect those he loved, but cold-blooded murder wasn’t one of them.

Her mother knew who the killer was. Faith was as certain of that as she’d ever been of anything. Getting Renee to admit it, however, would take some doing, for that would mean trouble for herself. Renee wasn’t likely to act against her own self-interest, certainly not for such an abstract notion as justice. Faith knew her mother well; if she pushed too hard, Renee would run, partly from fear, but the biggest reason would be to avoid trouble for herself. After wringing the information about the summerhouse from her, Faith knew she would have to wait awhile before calling again.

The box was delivered the next day.

She returned home from a grocery-shopping expedition to the neighboring parish, and after carrying the groceries in and putting them away, went out to the mailbox to collect the day’s mail. When she opened the lid of the oversized box, there was the usual assortment of bills, magazines, and sales papers lying there, with a box deposited on top of them. Curiously she picked it up; she hadn’t ordered anything, but the weight of the box was intriguing. The flaps had been sealed with shipping tape, and her name and address were scrawled across the top.

She carried everything in and placed it on the kitchen table. Taking a knife from the cabinet drawer, she slit the tape down the seam of the flap and opened the two halves, then parted the froth of tissue paper that had been used for packing. After one horrified glance, she turned and vomited into the sink.

The cat wasn’t just dead, it had been mutilated. It was wrapped in plastic, probably to keep the smell from alerting anyone before the box was opened.

Faith didn’t think, she reacted instinctively. When the violent retching had stopped, she reached out blindly for the telephone.

She closed her eyes as the deep, smoky voice spoke in her ear, and she held on to the receiver as if it were a lifeline. "G-Gray," she stammered, then fell silent as her mind went blank. What could she say to him? Help, I’m scared, and I need you? She had no claim on him. Their relationship was a volatile mixture of enmity and desire, and any weakness on her part would only give him another weapon. But she was both sickened and abruptly terrified, and he was the only person she could think of to call for help.

"Faith?" Something of her terror must have been evident in the one word she’d spoken, because his voice became very calm. "What is it?"

Turning her back on the obscenity on the table, she fought to regain control of her voice, but still it emerged as only a whisper. "There’s a… cat here," she managed to say. "A cat? Are you afraid of cats?" She shook her head, then realized he couldn’t see her over the phone. Her silence must have made him think the answer was yes, though, because he said soothingly, "Just throw something at it; it’ll scat."

She shook her head again, more violently this time. "No." She took a deep breath. "Help."

"All right." Evidently deciding she was too terrified of cats to deal with it on her own, he assumed a brisk and reassuring tone. "I’ll be right there. Just sit someplace where you can’t see it, and I’ll take care of it when I get there."

He hung up, and Faith took his advice. She couldn’t bear to be in the house with the thing, so she went outside on the porch and sat motionless in the swing, waiting numbly for him to arrive.

He was there in less than fifteen minutes, but those fifteen minutes seemed like an eternity. His tall form unfolded from the Jaguar, and he strolled up to the porch with his graceful, loose-hipped gait and a faint smile of masculine condescension on his lips, the hero arrived to save the helpless little woman from the ferocious beast. Faith didn’t take umbrage; he could think what he liked, if he would just get rid of that thing in her kitchen. She stared up at him, her face so bloodless that his smile faded.

"You’re really frightened, aren’t you?" he asked gently, hunkering down in front of her and taking one of her hands in his. Her fingers were icy, despite the steamy heat of the day. "Where is it?"

"In the kitchen," she said, through stiff lips. "On the table."

With a comforting pat to her hand, he stood and opened the screen door. Faith listened to his footsteps moving through the living room and into the kitchen.

"Goddamn fucking son of a bitch!" She heard the vicious curse, followed by a string of others. Then the back door slammed. She put her hands over her face. Oh, God, she should have warned him, she shouldn’t have given him the same shock she had received, but she simply hadn’t been able to say the right words.

A few minutes later he came around to the front of the house, and remounted the steps to the porch. His jaw was set, and his dark eyes were colder than she had ever seen them before, but this time his rage wasn’t turned on her.

"It’s all right," he said, still in that gentle tone. "I got rid of it. Come inside, baby." Putting his arm around her, he urged her up from the swing and into the house. He directed her toward the kitchen; she stiffened and tried to pull back, but he was having none of it. "It’s okay," he reassured her, and forced her into a chair. "You look a little shocky. What do you have to drink around here?"

"There’s tea and orange juice in the refrigerator," she said, her voice faint.

"I meant the alcoholic variety. Do you have any wine?"

She shook her head. "I don’t drink alcohol."

Despite the fury in his eyes, he gave her a little grin.

"Puritan," he said mildly. "Okay, orange juice it is." He took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with orange juice, then thrust it into her hand. "Drink it. All of it, while I make a call."

She sipped obediently, more because it gave her something to concentrate on than because she wanted it. Gray opened the phone book, ran his finger down the first page, then punched in the number. "Sheriff McFane, please."

Faith lifted her head, suddenly more alert. Gray stared down at her, his expression daring her to protest. "Mike, this is Gray. Could you come out to Faith Hardy’s house? Yeah, it’s the old Cleburne place. She just got a real ugly surprise in her mail. A dead cat… Yeah, there’s one of those, too." He hung up, and Faith cleared her throat. "One of what, too?"

"A threatening letter. Didn’t you see it?"

She shook her head. "No. All I saw was the cat." A shudder rippled through her body, making the glass tremble in her hand. He began opening and closing doors. "What are you looking for?" she asked.

"The coffee. After the sugar to counteract shock, you need a shot of caffeine."

"I keep it in the refrigerator. Top shelf."

He got out the canister, and she directed him to the filters. He made coffee rather competently, for a rich man who probably never did it at home, she thought, and felt a ghost of amusement flicker inside.

Once the coffee was in the process of making, he drew up another chair and sat facing her, so close that their legs touched, his on the outside of hers, warmly clasping. He didn’t ask her what had happened, knowing she would soon be going through that with the sheriff, and she was grateful for his tact. He just sat there, lending her his heat and the comfort of his nearness, those dark eyes sharp on her face as if he were debating pouring the orange juice down her, if she didn’t drink it as fast as he thought she should.

To forestall just such an action, she took a healthy swallow of juice, and actually felt a slight lessening of tension in his muscles. "Don’t you dare," she muttered. "I’m trying my best not to throw up again."

The grimness of his expression was lightened briefly by amusement. "How did you know what I was thinking?"

"The way you were staring at the glass, and then at me." She took another swallow. "I thought Deese was the sheriff."

"He retired." Gray had the fleeting thought that her memory of Sheriff Deese wouldn’t be a pleasant one, and wondered if that was why she had looked at him with such alarm when he’d asked for the sheriff. "You’ll like Michael McFane. How’s that for a good Irish name? He’s young for the job, still interested in keeping up with new techniques." Mike had also been at the shack that night, Gray remembered, but Faith wouldn’t know that, probably wouldn’t recognize him. In her shock, the deputies would have been faceless uniformed figures. Only he and the sheriff, standing off to the side, would have been locked in her memory.

The puzzling contradiction formed in his mind. She had been.obviously reluctant to meet Sheriff Deese, but she had never revealed any such uneasiness in her dealings with himself. She’d been bold, provoking, maddening, frustrating, but she’d never shown the least hesitation about being in his company.

Nor was hesitation something that had troubled him. Why else, when he’d gotten her call, he thought to remove a pesky cat from the premises, had he promptly canceled a business meeting and driven here as fast as possible, with Monica’s enraged protests still ringing in his ears? Faith had called him for help, and no matter how minor he thought the problem, he would help her if he could. As it turned out, the problem hadn’t been minor at all, and all his protective instincts had been outraged. He intended to find out who had done such a disgusting thing, and someone would catch hell. His fists ached with the need to pound them into the culprit’s face.

"Why didn’t you think I’d done it?" he asked softly, his attention locked on her face to catch every flicker of expression. "I’ve been trying to get you to leave town, so logically I should have been the person you’d suspect first." She was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking, the movement making the sleek bell of her hair swing about her face. "You wouldn’t do something like that," she said with absolute conviction. "Any more than you would have left me the first note."

He paused, distracted from the pleasure of her trust in him. "Note?" Sternness laced that one word.

"Yesterday. When I went out, there was a note in the front seat of the car."

"Did you report it?"

She shook her head again. "It wasn’t a specific threat."

"What did it say?"

The look she gave him now was slightly uneasy, and he wondered why. "To quote: Shut up if you know what’s good for you."

The coffee was ready. He got up and poured a cup for both of them. "How do you drink yours?" he asked absently, his thoughts still on the note and the package, which this time had been accompanied by a more specific threat. The wings of cold, black fury beat upward within him, barely controlled. "Black."

He gave her the cup, and sat down again in his original position, close enough to touch. She was more adept than anyone else at reading his face, and something in his expression must have alarmed her, because she launched into one of those deflecting maneuvers of hers, "I used to drink coffee with loads of sugar, but Mr. Gresham is diabetic. He said that it was easier to give up everything sweet than to fool with artificial sweeteners, so there wasn’t anything in the house to use. They would have bought it for me if I’d asked, but I didn’t want to impose – "

If she’d meant to distract him, he thought irritably, she’d succeeded. Even recognizing the maneuver didn’t blunt its effectiveness, because she used such interesting bait. "Who’s Mr. Gresham?" he asked, breaking into the flow of words. He felt the burn of jealousy, wondering if she was telling him about some guy she’d lived with before moving back to Prescott.

The slumberous green eyes blinked at him. "The Greshams were my foster parents."

A foster home. God. A cold fist clenched his stomach. He had imagined her life as continuing in much the same vein as before. Realistically, a good foster home would have been far preferable to the way she’d been living, but it was never easy for kids to lose their families, no matter how rotten, and be deposited with strangers. Finding a good home was a crapshoot, at best. A lot of kids were abused in foster homes, and for a young girl who looked like Faith…

The crunch of gravel signaled Mike’s arrival. "Stay here," Gray growled, and went out the back door. He beckoned to Mike as the other man’s lanky form unfolded from the patrol car, and walked around to the back of the house where he had left the box.

Mike joined him, his freckled face tightening with disgust as he looked down at the carcass. "I see a lot of sick things in this job," he said conversationally, squatting by the box, "but some things still turn my stomach. Why in hell would someone do this to a helpless animal? Have you handled the box much?"

"Just to carry it out. I was careful to touch only the front left corner, and the back right. I don’t know how much Faith handled it before she opened it. I used a pen to open the flaps wider," he added. "There’s a message on one of them."

Mike used the same technique, taking a ballpoint from his pocket. He pursed his lips as he read the message, printed in block letters, with a felt-tip marker, on the cardboard:

GET OUT OF PRESCOTT OR YOU’LL BE JUST LIKE THE CAT

"I’ll carry it in, see if we can get any fingerprints. The plastic would be our best bet, since it hasn’t been disturbed." He glanced toward the house. "Is she okay?"

"She was pretty shaky when I got here, but she’s settled down now."

"Okay." Still using the pen, Mike closed the flaps and stared down at the box for a few seconds, then grunted.

Gray looked down, too, and saw what he had missed the first time. "Shit. There’s no postage mark. It was on top of her other mail, so I thought it had been mailed, too."

"Nope. Someone hand-delivered it. Let’s go see if she heard anything, or saw a car."

They entered the kitchen, and Gray saw that Faith was still sitting where he had left her, sipping her coffee. She glanced up, outwardly calm now, but he suspected her control was hanging by no more than a few thin threads.

She immediately got to her feet, looking at Mike. "Ma’am." He touched his fingers to his hat. "I’m Michael McFane, the sheriff here. Do you feel like answering a few questions?"

"Of course," she said. "Would you like some coffee?"

"Please."

"Sugar or cream?"

"Sugar."

That social nicety taken care of, Faith returned to her chair. Gray stood beside her, propped against the enormous table. Mike took up his position by the sink, his feet crossed at the ankles.

"Where did you find the box?" Mike asked.

"In the mailbox."

"There’s no postage mark on it. It wasn’t mailed, so I’m assuming someone put it in the box after your mail was delivered. No one’s supposed to use the box except the postal service, so the carrier probably would have taken it out. Did you hear the mail run, or see another car pass by?"

She shook her head. "I wasn’t here. I’d been grocery shopping. I came home, put up the groceries, then went out to get the mail."

"Is anyone mad at you? Someone who might give you a dead cat to get even?"

Another shake of the head.

"She found a note in her car yesterday," Gray interjected.

"What kind of note? What did it say?"

"To shut up if I knew what was good for me," Faith replied.

"Did you keep it?"

She sighed, gave Gray a wary glance, and went to get the note. She came back holding the sheet of paper by one corner. "Put it on the counter," Mike said. "I don’t want to handle it."

She obeyed, and Gray moved beside Mike to read it. It was printed in the same block letters than adorned the cardboard box. Don’t ask any more questions about Guy Rouillard shut up if you know what’s good for you. Gray flashed her an irritated glance, understanding now that wary look she’d given him.

"All right," he growled. "What have you been up to now?"

"You know as much about it as I do," she replied, with a smoothness that he was beginning to think hid as much as it revealed.

"Well, now." Mike scratched his jaw. "What does your daddy have to do with this, Gray?"

"Little Miss Nosy has been asking questions about him all over town." He scowled at her.

"Why would that aggravate someone so much that they’d send her a note like this, and leave a dead cat in the mailbox?"

"It aggravated the hell out of me," Gray said frankly. "I don’t want Monica or Mother upset by having all the old gossip stirred up again. I don’t know who it would piss off this much."

The sheriff was silent, blue eyes hooded as he thought. "On the surface," he finally drawled, "you’re the most likely suspect, Gray." Faith started an immediate protest, but he waved her to silence. "Guess you knew that, too, what with the note and all," he said to her. "So that makes me wonder why you called him, rather than the sheriff’s department."

"I knew he didn’t leave the note, or the box."

"It’s no secret that you weren’t happy when she moved back," Michael said, looking at Gray.

"No, I wasn’t. I’m still not." Gray’s hard mouth curved into a humorless smile. "But threatening notes and dead cats aren’t my style. I fight my battles out in the open."

"Hell, I know that. I just wondered why Mrs. Hardy called you for help."

Gray snorted. "Figure it out."

"Reckon I already have."

"Then stop being an asshole."

The sheriff didn’t take umbrage, just grinned. An instant later, he was all business again. "I need for both of you to come down to the courthouse so we can get your fingerprints, and check the box and note for any sets that don’t match. You’ll need to give us a statement, too, Mrs. Hardy."

"All right. I’ll get my keys." Faith stood, and Gray caught her arm.

"I’ll drive you."

"There’s no need in your coming all the way back here – "

"I said I’ll drive you." Implacably he looked down at her, forcing his will on her. She looked irritated, but made no further protest, and the sheriff grinned again.

Gray hustled her out and deposited her in the luxurious leather seat of the Jaguar. "You don’t have to drive me," she said grumpily, as she buckled the seat belt.

"Sure I do, if I want to talk to you."

"What’s there to say?"

He started the car and reversed out of the driveway, following Sheriff McFane’s patrol car down the road. "Obviously some nutcase has it in for you. You’ll be a lot safer somewhere away from Prescott."

She averted her head, staring stonily out the window. "It didn’t take long for you to come up with that angle," she retorted.

"You stubborn little witch, can’t you get it through that red head of yours that you might be in danger?"

Fifteen

Faith was boiling mad by the time she left the courthouse, though she had kept her temper mostly under control. Gray had badgered her all the way to town about moving out of Prescott, and to her fury, Sheriff McFane had agreed that she might not be entirely safe, living alone as she did, and with no close neighbors. Faith had pointed out that if she left, the harassment would stop, they’d never find who did it, and the guilty party would be pleased as punch that his tactics had worked. She wasn’t inclined to give him the satisfaction.

Sheriff McFane had allowed that her logic was impeccable, and her bravery was commendable, but her common sense was a mite off. She could get hurt.

She had agreed with him in that assessment, and stubbornly refused to budge an inch. Now that she had gotten over the shakes, she was seeing cause and effect. The dead cat meant that, somehow, she had gotten close to finding out what had really happened to Guy, and if she left now, she would never know for certain. The sheriff and Gray thought someone was harassing her; she knew that it was far more serious than that. She had to fight the temptation to tell them what she thought was behind the cat and the notes; if word got out that she was suggesting Guy had been murdered, it would warn the guilty party, making him or her even more difficult to catch. So she kept silent, and the frustration of it made her irritable.

She could ignore Sheriff McFane’s arguments that she leave; Gray’s went straight to her heart. His cajoling suggestions had long since deteriorated to forceful demands by the time they left the courthouse for the drive back to her house.

"For the last time, no!" she shouted, for at least the fifth time, as they got into the car. Heads swiveled in their direction.

"Shit," Gray muttered. For a man who wanted to avoid gossip, he’d been pretty blatant today. His Jaguar wasn’t a car that was easily overlooked, and Faith was a woman who turned heads. A lot of people would have noted that he had driven her into town, gone with her into the courthouse, and then left with her, not to mention the fact that she was yelling at him. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. Given the same set of circumstances he’d been faced with today, he’d do the same thing again.

Faith jammed the two ends of the seat belt buckle together. "I know you didn’t have anything to do with the cat, or either of the notes," she said, anger seething in her voice. "But you aren’t above using it to your own advantage, are you? You’ve wanted me gone from day one, and it sticks in your craw that you can’t make me do what you want."

He gave her a hooded, dangerous look as he negotiated the traffic in the square. "Don’t believe that for a minute," he said quietly. "I could have you gone in half an hour if I wanted. I decided against it."

"Really?" she drawled, infusing the word with disbelief. "Why pull your punches?"

"For two reasons. One is that you didn’t deserve what happened twelve years ago, and I wasn’t inclined to treat you that way again." He took his gaze from the street long enough to sweep it down her body, lingering briefly on her breasts and thighs. "You know what the second reason is."

The truth of that simmered between them, just below boiling point. He wanted her. She had known that… oh, almost from the first, certainly since that incendiary kiss in New Orleans. But he wanted her on his terms; he wanted to set her up in a little house somewhere away from Prescott, completely out of the parish, so his liaison with her wouldn’t upset his family. Those circumstances would be perfect for him, because he would be accomplishing both his goals with one fell swoop.

"I won’t let you hide me away as if I’m something shameful," she said, her eyes hot and bitter as she stared fixedly out the windshield. "If you can’t associate with me out in the open, then stay the hell away from me."

He slammed his fist against the steering wheel. "Goddamn it, Faith! That cat wasn’t from the Welcome Wagon. I’m thinking of your safety! Yes, it would please the hell out of me if you moved to another town. My mother drives me crazy, but that doesn’t mean I want to hurt her. Am I supposed to apologize for loving her, despite everything? You know how to roll with the punches, but she doesn’t. I’m a greedy bastard; I want to do what’s best for her, and have you, too. If you moved, we could have a damn satisfying relationship, and I wouldn’t have to worry that some maniac is stalking you!"

"Then don’t. Let me do the worrying."

He made a sound of muffled anger and frustration. "You won’t budge an inch, will you?"

Again, she had to fight the urge to tell him that she had reasons for staying right where she was, reasons that went beyond their personal entanglement. The mood he was in, he wouldn’t believe her anyway.

They were out of town now, and there was very little traffic on the road. Soon he turned off on the secondary road that led to her house. She had never really noticed before how isolated her house was, at least not from the viewpoint of her own vulnerability. She had enjoyed the peace and quiet, the sense of space. Damn the unknown, unseen enemy, for destroying her pleasure in at last coming home.

She didn’t speak again until he turned in to her driveway. It was late afternoon, and the setting sun bathed the little house in a golden glow. In only a short while she had settled in here, surrounded by her own things, her own walls, covered by her own roof. Leave here? She couldn’t imagine it.

"Answer something for me," she said, one hand on the door handle. "I don’t want to have an affair with you, no matter where I live. Does that lessen your concern for my safety?"

He stopped her, wrapping his fingers around her wrist and holding her in the car. His eyes were black with anger, but he didn’t answer the insulting question, merely replied to the statement. "I can change your mind," he said softly. "We both know it."

She opened the door and he let her go, content that he’d had the last word. He often did, she thought. He had a knack for pushing the conversation further than she wanted it to go, so that her only recourse was silence.

She was aware of him sitting in the driveway, watching until she was safely in the house. He was right, damn him. He could change her mind, with little or no effort. Her statement had been a bluff, but not a lie. She didn’t want to have an affair with him, but that didn’t mean she would be able to resist him. If he had insisted on coming in with her now, after one kiss she would probably let him lead her straight into the bedroom. Afterward was when the regret would begin.

"Gray, what in hell were you thinking of?" Alex asked irritably. "Driving around town with her, arguing with her in front of the courthouse. My God, half the town saw you, and the other half heard about it within the hour."

Monica’s head came up, and she turned stricken eyes on Gray. He felt like throttling Alex for bringing up the subject in front of her.

"I was trying to convince her to leave," he replied shortly, and even without looking directly at her, he could see the tension ease in Monica’s body. "Someone’s playing nasty tricks on her. Today a dead cat was left in her mailbox."

"A dead cat?" Alex made a face. "That’s disgusting. But why was she in your car?"

"She called me when she found it – "

"Why call you?" Monica demanded resentfully.

"Because." Gray knew his answer was blunt and uncommunicative, but he didn’t care. "I called Mike, and he came out to her house. He wanted both of us to go to the courthouse for fingerprinting – " Monica gave a sharp cry " – and Faith was still shaky, so I drove her there."

"Why did you have to be fingerprinted?" Monica asked, incensed. "Did she accuse you of doing it?"

"No, but I handled the box. If Mike didn’t know which fingerprints were ours, he couldn’t tell if there were any belonging to the son of a bitch who left the box."

Monica chewed on her lip. "Did he find anything?"

"I don’t know. When she was finished filing a report, I drove her home."

"Is she going to move?" Alex asked.

"Hell, no." Gray shoved an agitated hand through his hair. "She turned stubborn about it." Turned stubborn, nothing. She’d been born stubborn. He pushed away from the desk and got to his feet. "I’m going out."

"Now?" Monica asked, startled. "Where?"

"Just out." He was as restless and fractious as a stallion who could scent a mare in season, but couldn’t get to her. His blood was throbbing through his veins, urging him to action, any action. He felt as if there should be a violent thunderstorm brewing, but the weather was calm, and the lack of thunder frustrated him. "I don’t know what time I’ll be back. We’ll get to those papers tomorrow, Alex."

Baffled, worried, Monica watched him stalk out of the room. She chewed her lip some more. It sounded as if Gray was getting increasingly involved with the Devlin woman. She couldn’t understand how he could do it, after all the misery her family had caused. And Michael had been out to her house! Monica didn’t want him anywhere around Faith Devlin; those Devlin women were like spiders, spinning sticky little webs that trapped the men unwary enough to wander into their vicinity.

Alex shook his head, his own eyes worried. "I’ll go say good night to your mother," he said, and went upstairs. Noelle had retired to her own sitting room not long after dinner, pleading fatigue, but the truth was that she was simply more comfortable upstairs.

He stayed up there for half an hour. Monica was still sitting in the study when she heard him coming down the stairs, his step slower than when he had gone up. He came to the door and paused, looking at her. Monica’s head came up and she stared at him, stricken. His hand went to the light switch. Monica froze in dread, her breath clogging in her lungs, as he turned out the light.

"My dear," he said, and she knew the words were spoken to the woman upstairs.

Faith prowled the house, unable to interest herself in either reading or television. Despite her insistence on staying, she was more disturbed than she wanted to admit. She had to force herself to go into the kitchen, the memory of that box on the table was so strong. It was a relief to see the table bare, to find that the association faded as she made herself a skimpy meal. Skimpy or not, she could only eat half of it.

She called Renee again. She knew it was too soon, but some faint, long-buried instinct made her reach out to Mama, not so much in search of comfort but because there was a link between them beyond kinship: the Rouillard men.

To her relief, Renee answered. If her grandmother had answered, Faith knew that Renee never would have come to the phone.

"Mama," she said, and was disconcerted to hear her voice shake a little. "I need help."

There was silence on the other end of the line, then Renee said warily, "What’s wrong?" Motherly concern wasn’t a natural response for her.

"Someone left a dead cat in my mailbox, and I’ve gotten a couple of threatening notes, telling me to stop asking questions or I’ll end up like the cat. I don’t know who’s doing it – "

"What kind of questions?"

Faith hesitated, afraid Renee would hang up on her. "About Guy," she admitted.

"Damn it, Faith!" Renee yelled. "I told you not to be nosing around, but would you listen? No, you have to stir shit up, and now the stink’s gettin’ too bad for you. You’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t shut up!"

"Someone killed Guy, didn’t they? You know who did it. That’s why you left."

Renee’s breathing sounded over the line, harsh and rapid. "Stay out of it," she begged. "I can’t tell, I promised never to tell. He has my bracelet. He said he’d blame the killing on me if I ever told, he said he’d put the bracelet where it would look like Guy and me had had a fight, and I’d killed him."

After the weeks of suspicion, of sifting through old rumors and continually coming to dead ends, to suddenly hear the truth was startling. It took Faith a moment to recover from the shock, to absorb it.

"You loved Guy," she said, her own conviction ringing in her voice. "You couldn’t have killed him."

Renee began to cry. It wasn’t noisy sobs, designed to gain sympathy. Her tears were betrayed by the sudden thickness in her voice. "He’s the only man I ever did love," she said, and Faith knew that whether or not Renee really had loved Guy, she believed she had, and that was enough.

"What happened, Mama?"

"I can’t tell – "

"Mama, please." Desperately Faith searched her mind for a reason that would mean something to Renee. It would take a lot to overcome her mother’s basic self-interest, and in this case, Faith couldn’t really blame her for looking out after number one. The only thing that had ever been greater than Renee’s self-absorption had been her greed… "Mama, as far as everyone is concerned, Guy is still alive somewhere. He hasn’t been declared dead, so that means his will hasn’t been read."

Renee sniffed, but the word "will" caught her interest. "So what?"

"So if he left anything to you, it would be in his will. You could have had a lot of money coming to you all these years."

"He always said he’d take care of me." A whining note of self-pity entered Renee’s voice. She took a deep breath, as if to calm herself, and Faith could almost hear the decision being made.

"We met at the summerhouse, as usual," Renee said. "We’d already… you know. Done it. Anyway, we were lyin’ in the dark talkin’ when he drove up. We didn’t know who it was, and Guy jumped up and grabbed his pants, afraid it might be one of his kids. He didn’t never worry about his wife none, because he knew she wouldn’t care.

"They went out to the boathouse to talk. I could hear them yellin’, so I put on my clothes and went down there. Guy opened the door and came out just as I got there. He stopped and looked back, and I’ll never forget, he said, ‘I’ve made up my mind.’ That’s when he was shot, right in the head. He fell on the grass, there in front of the boathouse. I was on my knees beside him, yellin’ and cryin’, but he was dead when he hit the ground. He never even twitched."

"Was it Gray?" Faith asked, agony in her tone. It couldn’t be. Not Gray. But she had to ask. "Did Gray kill his daddy?"

"Gray?" A startled note sounded through the tears. "No, not Gray. He wasn’t there."

Not Gray. Thank you, God. Not Gray. No matter how she had told herself that he couldn’t have done it, there must have been a hidden reservoir of doubt, because she felt a sudden relief, a lightening of spirit.

"Mama – Mama, no one would believe you shot Guy. Why didn’t you go to the sheriff?"

"Are you kiddin’?" Renee gave a sharp laugh, which ended in a sob. "People in that town would believe anything about me. Most of ‘em would’ve been glad to see me arrested even if they knew for certain I was innocent. Besides, he had it all figured out – "

"But you didn’t even have a gun!"

"He was goin’ to kill me, too! He said he’d put the gun in my mouth and make me pull the trigger, his hand over mine, if I didn’t promise to leave and never come back, and never say nothing about it to anybody. He’s strong, Faithie, strong enough to do it. I tried to fight him and he hit me, I couldn’t get away – "

"Why didn’t he kill you, then?" Faith asked, trying to make sense of why a murderer would deliberately let a witness go.

Renee couldn’t answer for a moment, she was crying too hard. Finally she gulped, and regained shaky control of her voice. "He – he didn’t mean to kill Guy, he was just so damn mad, he said. He didn’t want to have to kill me too. He told me to go away, and he t-took my bracelet. He said if I ever came back, he could make it look like I’d killed Guy, and I’d get the death sentence. He can do it, you don’t know him!" Her voice rose shrilly on the last sentence, and she dissolved once more into wrenching sobs.

Faith felt her own eyes burning. For the first time, she felt pity for her mother. Poor Renee, without education, influence, or friends, with all her wild living and lack of responsibility, had been a prime target for anyone who wanted to make her a scapegoat. She had seen the one man she cared for, the man she was depending on to make her life easy, shot to death, and then been threatened with having his death blamed on her. No, the killer had gauged her well; there was no way Renee would have gone to the sheriff. She would have believed everything he said, probably with good reason.

"It’s all right, Mama," she said gently. "It’s all right."

"You – you won’t say anything? This has to be our secret, or he’ll have me arrested, I know he will – "

"I won’t let anyone arrest you, I promise. Do you know what he did with the body?"

Renee hiccuped, caught by surprise. "His body?" she asked vaguely. "I guess he must have buried it somewhere."

That was possible, but would the killer have wasted time digging a grave, a grave that might be noticed, with the lake right there? Weight the body, and the problem of disposal was solved.

"What kind of gun did he use? Did you see it?"

"I don’t know anything about guns. It was a pistol, is all I can tell you."

"Was it a revolver, like the ones used in Westerns, with the round chamber that the bullets fit into, or was it the kind with the clip in the handle?"

"Clip in the handle," Renee said after a moment’s thought.

An automatic. That meant the shell casing had been ejected, somewhere inside the boathouse. The killer had had a body to dispose of, and a witness to terrify into fleeing. Had he thought about the casing, gone back to pick it up?

What were the chances that a shell casing would still be there after twelve years? Almost none. But the place had fallen into disuse after Guy’s disappearance, so it was likely only the minimum upkeep had gone into the boathouse. The casing could have landed in the boat, or even in the water, to be lost forever.

It could also have landed in a corner, or behind something. Stranger things had happened.

"Don’t say anything," Renee begged. "Please don’t say anything. You never should have moved back there, Faithie; now he’s after you too. Leave before you get hurt, you don’t know him – "

"I might. Who is he, Mama? Maybe I can do something – "

Renee hung up the phone, the connection breaking in the middle of a sob. Faith slowly replaced her own receiver. She had learned so much tonight, and still not enough. The most important thing was that Gray was innocent. The most frustrating thing was that she still had no idea who was guilty.

The killer was a "he." That eliminated Andrea Wallice and Yolanda Foster, even if Faith hadn’t already decided they likely weren’t guilty. Supposedly Lowell Foster hadn’t known about his wife’s affair with Guy until afterward, but the way gossip moved through the town like fat through a goose, it was possible some self-righteous busybody had taken it upon himself to enlighten the wronged husband. Never mind that the wronged husband had been screwing around with his secretary; that was different. So Lowell had to remain on her list.

Who would have been arguing with Guy that night, and why? A business associate, upset at some financial wheeling and dealing? The way Guy got around, an enraged husband was more likely. Who else had he been sleeping with that summer?

Faith couldn’t find the answer to those questions tonight. She could, however, see for herself whether or not a stray shell casing was still lying overlooked in the boathouse.

She glanced at the clock. It was nine-thirty. If she was going to do it, night would be the best time, with much less chance of running into Gray and a much better chance of avoiding him if she did.

Faith wasn’t one to tarry once she’d made a decision, though this time she paused long enough to put on sturdier shoes. She grabbed a flashlight on her way out the door.

She started to drive right to the summerhouse, on the private road, but changed her mind at the last minute. Someone might see her turn onto the road and notify the Rouillards, which she definitely didn’t want. And if the god of misfortune smiled on her twice, and someone was at the summerhouse, she didn’t want her headlights to give advance warning.

So she drove instead to the same place she had parked before, even though it meant walking a mile through the woods at night. It wasn’t a problem for her. She had never been afraid of the dark, or of snakes and the other denizens of the forest, though she did pick up a stick to be on the safe side, if she did come upon a snake before the shy creature could slide away.

The woods at night were noisy, filled with rustles as the nocturnal animals went about their business. Possums and raccoons clambered in the trees, owls hooted, frogs croaked, insects zinged, night birds called, and crickets chirped frenetically. The breeze added its own whisper to the cacophony, the pine trees swaying gently. Faith took her time, making certain she didn’t wander off track; when she came to the little creek, in exactly the same place she had always crossed, she smiled at the accuracy of her old instincts. She paused to shine the light around the creek to make certain no water moccasins were enjoying a swim, then stepped onto the flat rock in the middle of the water and from there onto the other bank. From here, it was only a couple of hundred yards to the summerhouse.

Five minutes later she stopped at the edge of the clearing, taking stock before she left the cover of the trees. The house was dark and silent. She listened, but heard only the normal night sounds. The lake murmured, slapping against the dock pilings, its glassy surface rippling occasionally with a breeze and disturbing the reflection of the three-quarter moon. Night-feeding fish added their own ripples and the occasional quiet splash to the subtle commotion.

Faith walked down the slight slope to the house, her steps soundless.

She didn’t know what she would do if the boathouse was locked, which, of course, it probably was, though the house had been open the other day when she’d been here. But Gray had also been here; he could have unlocked the house, gone inside to make certain nothing had been vandalized.

If she were a truly adventurous type, she thought wryly, she could swim under the wall of the boathouse and come up in the boat slip. To hell with locked doors.

Not bloody likely.

Nighttime underwater swimming wasn’t her cup of tea. The thought of stripping down to her underwear and sliding beneath the surface of that dark water was enough to make her shiver. If the boathouse had been closed all these years, it was probably inhabited by mice, snakes, squirrels, maybe a raccoon or two, all of which would be startled by a visitor suddenly popping up from the water. No, she would much rather give any boathouse occupants sufficient warning to skedaddle, by jiggling door locks or maybe breaking windows, if the boathouse had a window. She had never noticed.

The boathouse loomed over the shiny black water, the white walls ghostly in the moonlight. As Faith crossed the graveled drive, she flicked the flashlight beam across the front of the wide doors, and stifled a groan of disappointment. A thick, shiny padlock was looped through both hasps, securing the doors with stainless steel. She might have jimmied or broken a normal door lock, but she couldn’t do anything with that big padlock. Her only recourse now was a window.

There wasn’t one on the side facing the dock, only smooth blank wall. She walked around to the other side, and stared with mixed feelings at the window that sat like a black eye in a pale face. The good news was that it was a window, with breakable glass. The bad news was that solid ground ended about a foot shy of being directly underneath it. The window was also high enough that it would be difficult for her to hoist herself through; not impossible, not if she set her mind to it, but definitely difficult.

A very warm, very solid hand closed over her bare arm and whirled her around, bringing her against a hard, muscled body. "I told you what I’d do if I caught you here again," Gray said softly.

Sixteen

He carried her onto the porch, where the screens would protect them from the mosquitoes and other biting insects. Frightened almost out of her wits by his abrupt appearance, a panic that wasn’t much relieved by recognition, Faith could do no more than cling to his shoulders as he lifted her in his arms and carried her swiftly across the grass, to the house.

She was submerged almost at once by & dark tide of desire, sucking her below the level of reason or will. Protest wasn’t an option; the needs of her body, so long suppressed, surged to the forefront and pushed thought aside. She was shaking by the time he released her legs and let her body slide down, all along the front of his, the sweet friction almost painfully arousing. It was time. Dear God, it was past time. She wanted him with a blind, ferocious need that could no longer be delayed, and she clung to him, her body pliant, willing.

He backed her up against one of the square columns supporting the porch, pinning her against the wood. Despite the bright moonlight, it was dark there on the porch, dark and warm, scented with the perfumes of summer and his own hot, musky smell. His breathing was fast and urgent as he leaned heavily against her, pushing himself into the yielding softness of her body. He thrust his fingers into her hair, holding her skull cradled between his big, powerful hands, holding her head still for the deep thrust of his tongue into her mouth. He was fully aroused, his erection as hard as marble, straining against her belly.

Faith whimpered into his mouth, squirming hungrily against him, trying to lift herself enough so that she could cradle that thick ridge in the yielding notch between her legs. She was aching and empty, so empty, growing moist with the need to have him there.

His shirt was hanging open. The flesh where her fingernails dug into his shoulders was covered by cloth, but his chest was bare. She could feel his skin, slick with sweat, and the roughness of curly hair. Her breasts grew taut, her nipples rising hard and tight, throbbing with the need to be touched.

He tore his mouth away from hers, gasping for air, his chest working like bellows with each breath. Faith licked her bruised lips, tasting him on them, and tugged on the back of his neck to bring him back down to her. He obliged at once, his mouth hard and biting, the primal force of it exciting her beyond what she had ever known before.

He cupped both of her breasts, roughly kneading them, and the relief was so acute that she made a small keening sound of both pleasure and want, but in only seconds that wasn’t enough. He knew her need, or perhaps his own was the same, for he jerked at the front of her blouse and sent buttons flying, the small popping sounds loud in the bubble of silence that surrounded them. With one hand he released the front clasp of her bra and shoved the cups aside, baring the firm rise of her breasts to his hungry, demanding mouth. He wrapped one arm under her bottom and lifted her, his open mouth sliding down her chest, a damp path marking where his lips had been. A taut nipple popped into his mouth and he sucked hard at it, making her breast prickle with a sharp sensation that had her arching against him as if to throw him off. He responded by holding her tighter, gripping her bottom and grinding his erection into the soft notch between her legs. The blatant sexuality of his movements let loose the firestorm of her response, and helplessly she felt herself sliding down the dark, slippery tunnel toward climax.

She fought it; she didn’t want this wild fever to end so soon. She shrank back against the wood, trying to pull her hips away from that hard ridge. She couldn’t; his arm around her bottom kept her molded to him, allowing her so little movement that she couldn’t even close her legs. A heavy coil tightened in her loins, the tension pulling tighter and tighter –

He set her on her feet again and jerked at her skirt, pulling it to her waist. Faith leaned weakly against the column, her senses whirling with the speed and violence with which this was happening. Dimly she thought of that time she had watched him making love, so slowly and tenderly, his smoky voice soothing and cajoling, crooning love words. She had thought it would be like that, but instead she was caught like Dorothy in a whirlwind, being hurled dizzily into uncharted territory. They were going at each other like animals, unable to slow down or inject any tenderness into the act, and she didn’t care. The urgency was too strong, too immediate.

He wound his left hand in her skirt, holding it up and to the side, while with his right one he stripped her panties down. The night air washed over her naked buttocks, making her feel excruciatingly exposed, and she quivered in his grasp. He forced the panties down to her knees, then lifted one booted foot and set his toe in the crotch of the garment, pushing it down the rest of the way. She heard fabric separate with a faint sibilant protest, then the cloth fell around her feet and he lifted her out of the ruins of her underwear.

He braced her against the column, pulling her thighs wide and pushing himself between them. Faith’s head fell back; she heard her own panting breath as she waited in agonized anticipation for the hard thrust that would fill her emptiness, ease the deep ache of desire. His hand worked frenziedly between their bodies, fumbling with his belt, tearing at the fastening of his jeans, and the brush of his knuckles against her moist, yearning flesh was enough to make her cry out with longing. He managed to open the zipper and his straining flesh sprang free, pushing upward into the folds between her legs.

"I want to fuck you," he muttered indistinctly, the sound low and harsh as he hoisted her a bit, adjusting her position. "Let me in. Now." His hand was still between their bodies, his fingers moving with sure knowledge over her slick flesh. He found her soft, damp opening and sank one finger deep into her, drawing the moisture out to prepare her for his entry. Faith shuddered, her arms wrapping tight around his head as that long finger rasped exquisitely sensitive tissues and set off subterranean explosions of pleasure. Her inner muscles eagerly clasped the intruding finger, tightening, subtly caressing, and Gray swore with savage arousal. Unable to wait any longer, he withdrew his finger and guided the broad head of his penis into place.

Faith went still, frozen by the enormous pressure between her legs as he began pushing into her. The fever of desire faded, banished by alarm. In a flash of clarity she remembered Lindsey Partain’s startled, panicked cry at his entry, and now she knew why. Then all thoughts fled, her mind focused only on the massively thick shaft that each short, powerful thrust of his hips forced deeper into her body. He grunted at the difficulty of penetration, his entire body taut and straining.

She writhed in his arms like a worm caught on a fishing hook, sharp little cries of distress breaking from her throat. Gray stopped, sweat dripping off his face to trace tiny paths down the slope of her bare breasts. Desperately he fought for control, the effort tearing at his guts.

"Shhh, shhh," he whispered, his lips pressed against the delicate curve of her jaw. The sound was a mere rustle of reassurance, wafted away in the night breeze. "It’s all right, baby. You can handle it. Just be still now, and let me get it in. I won’t hurt you, I’ll be real slow and easy." As he spoke he began rocking his hips back and forth, slight movements that coaxed her taut muscles to relax, allowing the next forward rock to slide him deeper into the hot, wet, incredibly tight clasp of her. She moaned, shuddering in his arms. He felt her body arch convulsively, in an instinctive effort to accept and adjust to him; he tried to control the movement, but he was too late. The sharp, twisting movement impaled her on his rigid shaft, seating him to the hilt, and the hot gloving of her body made him feel as if his entire body was exploding.

Shock reverberated through her. She sagged weakly in his arms, her head falling back like a daisy on a broken stem. His hard-won control splintered. His hips jackhammered, driving in and out of her. She hung there, supported only by his driving body and the wooden column at her back. For a measureless length of time her senses narrowed to the thudding of her heart and the hard pounding of his body into hers, relentlessly battering. She clenched her hands on his shirt, twisting fistfuls of the fabric as she tried to endure, tossed helplessly about in the violent upheaval of his lust.

Then he stopped, a growl rough in his throat, as her physical and mental withdrawal registered through the demanding throb of his body. "No," he said with furious frustration. "I won’t let you pull back from me. Come for me, baby. Let me feel it."

Faith tried to speak, to say anything. I can’t do it, she thought, but no words would form on her lips. Climax, which had shimmered so maddeningly near a short while ago, now seemed totally out of reach. She felt painfully stretched, impaled, beyond pleasure.

But he adjusted his position, hooking his arms under her thighs and holding them wider apart, the weight of his torso pinning her to the column. She felt herself open completely, unable to either control or react to his thrusts. He briefly freed one hand, reaching down to find the small sexual bud at the top of her sex, using his finger and thumb to open the protective fold and expose it. He adjusted his position again, moving deep into her so that he pressed hard against the little nub, and then he began again to thrust.

Lightning speared through her body, gathering between her legs. She had no defense against the rush of sensation, ruthlessly intensified with every inward thrust. He had known exactly what he was doing, inexorably forcing her toward orgasm. In seconds she was moaning with the return of desire; in less than a minute the fury was upon her, and she screamed with the force of her release, her body arching and shuddering in his restraining arms. It went on and on, so strong that she knew nothing else, reduced to a completely physical being.

Her spasms had barely slowed when his began, and he bucked heavily under the lash of it, his head thrown back and his neck corded as he shook and pulsed. A deep, harsh groan rumbled up from his chest, repeated again and again in rhythm with his pumping hips.

The aftermath was silent, punctuated only by the rapid harshness of their breathing and the occasional, involuntary little moan or grunt as laggard nerve endings twitched in the remnants of pleasure. Faith was dazed, her head drooping forward to lie against his shoulder. He sagged heavily in her arms, the column supporting them both. Where naked flesh touched, sweat glued them together. Their clothes were damp and twisted. She felt as numb as if she had just been through a battle.

His breathing slowed and he gathered himself, as if every movement was an effort. His heart was thudding against her breast, each beat slow and heavy. He withdrew carefully from her body, holding her steady when she tensed, for even with the slickness of his climax easing the way, her swollen tissues released him with almost as much difficulty as she had accepted him.

Gray was stunned, rocked to the foundation by the intensity of what had just occurred. That wasn’t sex. He’d had sex before, more times than he could count. Sex was a pleasure, sometimes gentle, sometimes raunchy; an appetite, persistent but easily satisfied. What he’d just had with Faith was as powerful and unstoppable as an avalanche, a fire that left him scorched and already needing to feel the flame again. He could feel her lithe, tender body trembling in his arms, and he wanted to lie down with her, comfort her, and then thrust himself deep into her again. He wanted it with a violence that twisted in his guts. Because he didn’t trust himself not to do it, he let his arms drop from around her.

Shaken, only one thought came to his mind. "My God," he said, his voice still harsh from his wrenching climax. "If fucking Renee was like that, I understand why Dad couldn’t stay away from her."

Faith froze, the delicious heat of their mating turning cold under the bite of his words. She didn’t respond to his insulting crudeness, though it had been effective. If he had set out to make her feel cheap, he had succeeded admirably. Humiliation and misery pooled in her stomach, forcing her to clench her teeth against a sudden rise of nausea. She had felt as if her heart were leaving her body, but to him it had been – what? A measure of revenge? Renee was beyond his reach, so take it out on her daughter?

She didn’t look at him as she fumbled her clothing back into order. Her bra was twisted, but she finally managed to secure the clasp. There were no buttons left on her blouse, so she tied the shirttail into a knot at her waist. She bent to pick up her panties, intending to put them on, but they were ripped beyond wearing. Color burned in her face, but thankfully the darkness hid that bloom of shame from him.

Silently she slipped the ruined, flimsy underwear into the pocket of her skirt and turned away, walking with as much dignity as possible, under the circumstances. It wasn’t much. How could a woman have any dignity when she had just been taken, standing up, with all the grace and tenderness of a sailor just off a six-month cruise nailing a whore in an alley? Her legs trembled like noodles, her loins ached from the battering, and, even worse, his semen was wet between her thighs.

She opened the screen door and wobbled down the steps. The flashlight lay where she had dropped it, the beam illuminating blades of grass and the darting insects attracted by the light. She retrieved it, and collided with him as she straightened. He moved like a ghost, she thought; she hadn’t heard him leave the porch. She stepped around him, and he caught her arm, dragging her to a halt.

"Where the hell do you think you’re going?"

"Back to my car."

He snorted. "If I wouldn’t let you walk back alone during the daytime, you can sure as hell bet you won’t do it at night."

She could feel an angry tension in him, but she was too exhausted and sick to worry about it. Gently she disengaged her arm, still not looking at him. "I grew up roaming these woods. I don’t need an escort."

"Get in the car," he said, that soft, steely edge in his voice that said he’d made his decision and wasn’t going to change it. "I’ll take you back."

Car? Bewildered, Faith looked around. Until now, she hadn’t had time to wonder how he’d gotten to the summer-house. She saw the Jaguar now, parked by the side of the house rather than in the drive. As always, she had approached from the other side, so she hadn’t seen it. What evil genie had prompted him to park there, instead of in the drive? If she had seen the car, she never would have left the safety of the woods.

He was propelling her toward the car, and Faith didn’t waste her time arguing. She simply wanted to get away from him, and the fastest way to do that was to give in and get it over with.

He opened the car door and urged her inside with a hand on the small of her back. Faith sat down, sighing shakily at the relief of being off her trembling legs. He walked around and slid under the steering wheel, his powerful hands sure and competent as he started the motor and put the transmission into gear. "Are you parked the same place you were before?" he asked, that muted anger humming through his tone.

"Yes," she murmured, then lapsed into silence. Maintaining that silence seemed to be both the safest and easiest thing to do, so she concentrated on staring at the dark trees sliding past the car window.

The road looped around the lake, entered the highway, and then he had to take another turn onto the rutted track that had once led to her home. Getting there didn’t take much less time than if she had walked, but for all the tension, she was grateful she hadn’t had to put her shaky limbs to the test. She probably would have stumbled over every root and rock in her path.

The Jaguar purred around a curve and her car came into view. She felt for her keys, and her searching fingers patted an empty pocket. Panic twisted her stomach. "I’ve lost my keys," she said thinly. Of course she had. Her skirt had practically been over her head. It would have been a miracle if the keys had stayed in her pocket.

"Here." A small, jangling heap landed in her lap. "I picked them up."

Her cold hand closed over the keys as Gray stopped the Jaguar beside her car, and she had her door open before he could let out the clutch and turn off the ignition. She stumbled out, ignoring his demand to wait, and frantically sorted through the keys in her hand, looking for the one to open the car door. She found it, and turned it in the lock. Gray was out of the car, coming around the front of it toward her. She jerked open the door and slid inside.

He said, "Faith," but she jammed the key into the ignition and started the engine, then pulled the gear lever down and started moving with the door still open. She leaned out and slammed it, wrenching it away from Gray’s hands, and left him standing as she reversed too rapidly down the track until she reached a spot wide enough for her to turn around.

Gray stood in the middle of the road, watching her headlights veer crazily as she maneuvered the car, followed by the red dots of her taillights disappearing. His hands were knotted into fists, tight with the effort it took not to get in his car and chase her down. She was too shaky, drawn so tight, any more pressure could make her shatter. If he chased her, she was likely to drive headlong into a tree.

He turned back to the car, cursing viciously under his breath. If he could reach his own ass, he’d have kicked it. God, of all the stupid, boneheaded, downright cruel things to say! The irony of it wasn’t lost on him. He had smooth-talked more women than he could remember, and none of them had meant a hill of beans to him. But with Faith, who tied his guts in knots, he managed to say exactly the worst thing possible. She had immediately withdrawn into herself, all of that wonderful fire reduced to ash, her face as smooth and blank as a doll’s. He had seen that expression once before, on another night he’d never forget, and he hoped to God he never saw it again.

The tumultuous events of the day had left him more than a little shaken himself. First there was finding that damn mangled cat on Faith’s table, then the frustration of trying to convince her that she could be in danger, damn it, and it would be in her own best interest if she moved away from Prescott. Telling her that was like talking to a fence post, except the fence post at least wouldn’t argue back. She just got that stubborn look, her chin went in the air, and she dug those dainty heels in deeper than the Grand Canyon. Then Alex had gotten huffy about Faith being in the car with him, as if she were contaminated somehow, damn it, and Monica had looked as if he’d slapped her in the face with a fish.

He’d driven out to the lake for complete solitude, and he’d been sitting on the porch with his back against the wall, watching the moonlight on the water and sorting through the day’s irritants, when Faith had drifted by, as silently as a ghost. He’d stared, not trusting his eyes, fighting the surge of fury that she’d evidently walked through the woods at night, because she sure as hell hadn’t driven there. She’d headed straight to the boathouse, the beam of her flashlight flickering over it. What in hell was she looking for? This was twice he’d caught her prowling around.

And then the lust had hit him, washing away everything else. He’d warned her, and the fact that she was here meant she was willing to pay the price.

He wanted to believe he could have stopped if she’d said no, but he was glad he hadn’t been put to the test. She hadn’t said no, she hadn’t said anything. Instead she had squirmed against him as if she were trying to get inside his skin, and the top of his head had damn near come off. She had been sweet and hot, her body arching into his touch, her mouth tender and wild. At that moment, nothing and no one could have kept him off of her, and he was still shaking from the results.

He had called her a Puritan, and been right on target. He shook his head, still trying to come to grips with what he’d learned about her tonight. Faith Devlin Hardy, the daughter of a drunk and a whore, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and didn’t screw around. He’d had virgins who weren’t as tight. She had probably been a virgin when she’d married, and Gray was abruptly certain that he was the only man she’d been with since her husband had died. For all the searing sensuality with which she responded to him, she was a bit of a prude. Not judgmental of others, but certainly holding herself to strict standards.

It was because of her parents, of course. Growing up the way she had, Faith was determined that she would never be like them.

That was fine with him, as long as she didn’t try to retrench and keep herself from him. He had a feeling that was exactly what she would do, and no way in hell was he going to let her get away with it.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about him.

Faith woke early from a restless sleep, her eyes heavy, feeling as tired as when she had gone to bed. She had shut thoughts of Gray from her mind last night, ignoring the lingering throb from his use of her body, even blanking him out while she showered away the evidence of that use. But for all her will, her subconscious had betrayed her, admitting him into her dreams so that she had awakened to find herself reaching for him, her flesh trembling with eager need.

For four years, the needs of her body had been so firmly repressed as to be nonexistent, but she had no control where Gray was concerned. She might as well admit it. Last night he had ruthlessly aroused her, forcing her to a completion that had eluded her, and now her body wanted more. It didn’t seem to matter that she was sore and stiff, or that he had battered her mind with hurtful words; physically, she wanted him. She wanted more of that violent, shattering pleasure. She hadn’t known it could be like that, and the discovery left her both stunned and humiliated.

He had treated her like a whore. He had seduced Lindsey Partain with patience and tender care, and Faith had seen it, so she knew the difference. He had murmured French love words to Lindsey, and raw Anglo-Saxon sex words to herself. Evidently only his social equals rated consideration. Her soul writhed with shame, but her body was already craving more of that rough treatment. Maybe he’d been right in the way he’d treated her. Maybe her heritage had only been dormant all these years, and was now coming to life.

He wouldn’t leave her alone. She knew that as well as she knew her own name. He had tried to get her to move away from Prescott so they could be together, but perhaps the opposite tack would be more effective. She would try, but she wouldn’t be able to avoid him completely, and she didn’t know how many more encounters with him her self-esteem could take.

She still had to find out who had killed Guy. Not so much for herself now, but for Gray. Guy’s family deserved to know that he hadn’t run out on them. She hadn’t been able to get into the boathouse, and she needed to do that. She needed to check with Detective Ambrose and see if he had found Mr. Pleasant. She needed to ask more questions, prod a killer into action, for only if he moved would she be able to see him.

Seventeen

The telephone drove her crazy that day. Faith thought about unplugging the damn thing, but reminded herself that she still had a business to run. She didn’t have a separate line for the fax, so the phone had to stay in operation. She did let the answering machine screen her calls. Unfortunately, most of them were from Gray.

His tone in the first message had been both exasperated and soothing. "I wanted to see you today, but I had to go to New Orleans first thing this morning. I’m there now, and it looks like I won’t get back until late tonight." Well, that was a relief, she thought. Now she wouldn’t be on edge, afraid he would show up on her front porch at any moment.

The message continued, his voice sliding into a deeper, more intimate tone. "We need to talk, baby. Do you want me to come by tonight when I get home? I’ll call you back later."

"No!" Faith shouted at the phone as he hung up and the answering machine clicked oif.

It was about half an hour later when realization dawned on her. Gray was in New Orleans. She wasn’t anxious to return to the summerhouse, but at least if she went now, she knew she would be safe from detection. This might be the best chance she’d ever get, and she wouldn’t even have to walk through the woods.

If she broke out the window, Gray would immediately suspect she had done it, since he had caught her slipping around the boathouse the night before. Besides, climbing through the window would be difficult without a ladder, and she didn’t own one. But it wasn’t night now, and she was a good swimmer. What had been unthinkable the night before was very doable under a bright morning sun.

The phone was ringing when she left the house with her supplies in hand. Not normally prepared for this kind of adventure, she made do. She had changed into her old swimsuit, and covered it with slacks and a blouse. In a bag she carried two towels and her flashlight, which she might need for searching dark corners. The flashlight wasn’t waterproof, so she had sealed it in a Ziploc plastic bag. For her safety, she also carried the longest butcher knife from the kitchen. She didn’t know what use she would have for it – she hoped she wouldn’t be close enough to an angry snake that she had to stab it – but carrying it made her feel better, so she did.

She was almost gleeful as she drove out to the summer-house. Twice before she had tried to search the place, and twice Gray had caught her. The third time was the charm.

When she reached the lake, she resolutely refused to look at the summerhouse, but she couldn’t entirely escape the memories of what had transpired there on the porch. How could she, when she felt the soreness between her legs with each step she took? But she also felt a faint throb of desire, and she hated herself for it.

Hurriedly she undressed, and beat on the door to the boathouse to roust any inhabitants. She didn’t hear any scurrying, or the plop of anything into the water, so perhaps the place was clear. Nevertheless, she beat on the door again, and rattled the chain for good measure. Satisfied that she had done all she could in that regard, she walked out onto the dock until she was even with the garage door that sealed the boathouse on the lake side.

Gray and Monica and their friends had swum here often during the summers; Faith had sneaked into the water for a swim on more than one occasion herself, but never when anyone else was present. She wasn’t afraid of being in the water alone, and she knew how deep it was around the dock. Clutching the plastic-enclosed flashlight in one hand, she entered the water with a shallow dive, and surfaced with a gasp at the coldness. By July and August, the water would be pleasantly warm, but this was the end of May and it still held some of the winter chill. She swam briefly back and forth, acclimatizing herself to both the water and the activity, and in a moment the temperature felt much better.

It would be dark under the boathouse. Fumbling through the plastic, she switched on the flashlight, then didn’t give herself any more time to think. Taking a deep breath, she dove beneath the edge of the door.

Visiblity was poor, even with the flashlight, and beneath the boathouse it was almost stygian. Above her was a rectangle of light, thankfully unoccupied by a boat, which would have made climbing out more difficult. Faith kicked for the light, and her head popped out of the water almost before she realized she had broken the surface. She reached out and grasped the edge of the boat slip to steady herself, and placed the flashlight on a solid surface. Only then did she brush her hair out of her face so she could clearly see her surroundings.

The interior of the boathouse was dim and mostly empty. She hauled herself out of the water and stood dripping, looking around and letting her eyes grow accustomed to the dimness. Once the boathouse had been littered with air mattresses and inner tubes, with life jackets festooned on wall hooks. The ski boat had rocked gently against the padded edges of the slip, and cases of marine oil had been stacked in one corner. All of that was gone. The boathouse had been emptied and cleaned; all it held now was a lawn mower, of the push variety, a yard rake, and a worn broom. There was no chance a single shell casing would have remained in place for twelve years.

Knowing it was useless, she looked anyway. She shone the flashlight into every corner, got down on her hands and knees and looked from that angle. Nothing, Well, it had been a long shot anyway, she consoled herself. She had tried, and had enjoyed a nice morning swim.

She dove back into the water and under the door, surfacing into bright sunlight. This time there were no surprises waiting for her. Uneventfully she climbed onto the dock and stripped off the wet swimsuit, then toweled dry and dressed, having also had the foresight to bring along dry underwear. Except for her wet hair, she looked perfectly normal as she drove back to her house.

The answering machine held two more messages from Gray.

"Where are you, baby? Are you sleeping late, and have the phone turned off? I’ll call back."

She buried her face in her hands. The machine beeped, and played another message. "You can’t put it off forever. You have to talk to me sooner or later. Pick up the phone, baby."

She went to shower the lake water out of her hair. She heard the phone ringing even with the water running, and tried to ignore the sensation of being hounded. It wasn’t easy. The calls continued all day long, each message becoming more and more irritated. He stopped cajoling, and started demanding.

"Faith, damn it, pick up the phone! If you think I’m going to let you ignore me – " He hung up without finishing the threat.

In between calls from Gray, she placed one to New Orleans, but Detective Ambrose wasn’t available. She left a message for him, and waited for him to return her call.

It was late afternoon before he did so. She snatched up the receiver as soon as she heard the detective’s voice. "This is Faith Hardy, Detective. Have you found Mr. Pleasant yet?"

"Nothing, Mrs. Hardy. I’m sorry. His car hasn’t been found, either." His voice gentled. "Frankly, it doesn’t look good. He doesn’t fit the profile of someone who would disappear voluntarily; he had nothing to run from, and nothing to run to. He could have lost control of his car, had a heart attack, gone to sleep… If the car left the road and went into a bayou or river…" He let the sentence trail off, but Faith didn’t need it spelled out. He thought a fisherman would eventually find Mr. Pleasant.

"Will you let me know?" she whispered, blinking back tears.

"Yes, ma’am, just as soon as I hear anything."

He wouldn’t hear anything, though. Faith replaced the receiver in its cradle. Guy Rouillard had been murdered. It wasn’t just a theory now; her mother had witnessed it. Mr. Pleasant had been asking pointed questions about Guy’s disappearance. Would the murderer just have sat tight, figuring there was no evidence to be found, or would the fact that Mr. Pleasant was an investigator make him nervous? Nervous enough to commit another murder, perhaps?

That sweet little man was dead, and it was her fault.

No sooner had the thought registered than she rejected it. No, it wasn’t her fault, it was the fault of the murderer. She wasn’t willing to absolve him of one iota of blame.

Finding proof of Guy’s murder would be extremely difficult, after twelve years. Mr. Pleasant had been missing less than two weeks. It would be smarter to concentrate on finding Mr. Pleasant. The evidence wouldn’t be destroyed by time.

If she had killed someone, where would she hide the body? In Guy’s case, the most likely answer was the lake. At the time of the murder, the boat had been right there. What would have been easier than to take him out to the deepest part of the lake, weight his body, and push him overboard? Such a convenient means had been lacking in Mr. Pleasant’s case. For one thing, he probably hadn’t been at the lake, and for another, there was no boat. So where would the killer try to dispose of the body?

Someplace where he wasn’t likely to be seen. There were plenty of woods around for a hasty burial. Every so often, hunters would stumble across a body that had lain hidden for months, even years. But the killer had already successfully concealed one murder, so wouldn’t he be likely to use the same method to dispose of a second body? If she thought so, and she did, then the Rouillard private lake was the place to search.

She couldn’t do it by herself. She was willing to tackle almost any job, but she had sense enough to know when she needed help. The lake would need to be dragged. That required boats, people, equipment. The sheriff could order it done, but she would have to convince him there was cause, and that the lake was the place to look. She couldn’t do that without telling what she knew about Guy.

And she couldn’t tell what she knew about Guy without first telling Gray. She couldn’t let him find out from someone else, couldn’t let his family be dragged into this mess without warning. Despite the hurt that still compressed her chest, despite the fact that she was too ashamed of herself to face him, she would somehow have to bring herself to tell him his father had been murdered, and she didn’t know if she could do it.

Right on cue, the telephone rang. Faith closed her eyes.

"Goddamn it, Faith!" The muted fury in his voice came through loud and clear. "If you don’t pick up the phone and tell me you’re all right, I’m calling Mike McFane to come out there – "

She grabbed the receiver. "I’m all right!" she yelled, and slammed it back down. The persistence of the man!

The phone rang again, after just enough time for him to have redialed the number. "All right," he said when the machine answered, his voice under control now, though the anger still seethed in every word. "I shouldn’t have said what I did. I was an asshole, and I’m sorry."

"I’m sorry you’re an asshole, too," Faith muttered at the phone.

"You can kick my ass or slap my face tomorrow, whichever you want," he continued. "But don’t think you’re going to avoid me forever, because I’m not about to let it happen."

The line clicked as he hung up, and she sent up a hopeful prayer that he would stop calling now.

The phone rang again. She groaned. The machine picked up.

"I didn’t wear a rubber last night," he calmly informed her.

"I noticed," she said sarcastically.

"I’d bet my ass you aren’t using any kind of birth control, either," he said. "Think about it." The line clicked off again.

"You fiend!" Faith shrieked, her face turning red with rage. Think about it! How was she supposed to think about anything else, now that he’d so kindly brought the matter to her attention?

She stomped around the house, angry at both Gray and herself. They had no excuse; they weren’t irresponsible teenagers, operating on hormones instead of brains – but that was exactly how they had acted. How could they have been so careless? She should have thought of the possibility of pregnancy before, but she had been so upset and miserable that consequences hadn’t occurred to her.

Well, they were occurring now, with a vengeance. As if she didn’t already have enough to worry about!

She was so panicked that it was half an hour before she thought to consult the calendar and count days. When she did, she sagged with relief. Her period was due to start in a week, and she had always been very regular. Nothing was certain, but the odds were on her side.

The next morning there was another note. Faith had been careful to keep her car locked since the first one, so this one was secured under the windshield wiper. She noticed it when she glanced out the window, and went out to investigate. When she saw what it was, she didn’t touch it. She didn’t want to know what it said. It had evidently been there all night, because the paper was wet with dew, the ink smeared.

She hadn’t heard anything last night, even though she had slept restlessly once again. At least it was just a note, rather than another mutilated animal.

She was still in her pajamas, having just finished breakfast. Leaving the note where it was, she returned to the house. Within fifteen minutes she had dressed, put on her makeup, brushed her hair, and was on the way out the door.

She unlocked the car door and dropped her purse into the seat. Being careful not to tear the soggy paper, she lifted the windshield wiper and retrieved the note, holding one corner between thumb and forefinger. Then she got in the car and drove straight to the courthouse.

She parked in front of the square and, holding the note exactly the way she had before, marched up the three long, shallow steps. There was an information desk stationed just inside the doors, and she paused to ask a blue-haired little woman exactly where the sheriffs office was located.

"Just down this hall, dear, and to the left." The little woman pointed to her own left, and Faith obediently turned.

The smell of the courthouse was surprisingly pleasant, settling her jangled nerves a bit. It was composed of paper and ink, cleaning compounds, the ever-changing mix of people, and the cool gray scent of the marble floors and halls. The courthouse had been built fifty or sixty years before, when buildings had individual character. It had, of course, been "updated" several times over the years, with fluorescent lights replacing the original incandescent ones, so the clerks could have headaches to go along with the cheaper lighting costs. Window air-conditioning units were attached like barnacles to the building, growing randomly from office windows. In some places, though, particularly the hallways, ceiling fans still whirled lazily through the workday, keeping the air moving and fresh.

She reached the end of the hallway and turned left, to find another hallway stretching before her. Five doors down she came to an open set of double doors, with sher depar stenciled on the left half and iff’s tment on the right, so that they made whole words only if the doors were closed. Inside was a long room with a high counter running the length of it; behind the counter were several desks, the dispatch radio, and two offices, one of which was slightly bigger than the other. The biggest office had Sheriff McFane’s name on the door, which was half-open, but Faith couldn’t see into the office from where she was standing. Photographs of past sheriffs hung on the wall, the extent of the parish’s efforts at decoration. It wasn’t a cheerful effect.

A middle-aged woman in a brown deputy’s uniform looked up as Faith approached the counter. "What can I do for you?"

"I want to speak with Sheriff McFane, please."

The deputy peered over her reading glasses at Faith, obviously recognizing her from her visit the day before yesterday. All she said, though, was, "What’s your name?"

"Faith Hardy."

"Let me see."

She went into Sheriff McFane’s office with only a perfunctory knock, and Faith heard the murmur of voices. The deputy came out, said, "Come through there," and indicated a half door at the end of the counter. She hit a buzzer located under the counter, and the door clicked open.

Sheriff McFane came to the door of his office to greet her. "Good morning, Mrs. Hardy. How’re you doin’ today?"

For answer, Faith held up the note. "I got another one."

The good humor faded from his face, and he was instantly serious. "I don’t like this at all," he murmured, plucking an evidence envelope from a desk and holding it open for Faith to drop in the note. She released it with the air of one disposing of smelly trash. "What does it say?"

"I haven’t read it. It was under my windshield wiper this morning when I got up. I’ve only touched one corner, so I wouldn’t smear any fingerprints, assuming any are left. The paper’s wet," she explained.

"Dew. That means it had been on your windshield for several hours. Actually, we have several good prints already, from the other note and the box. The problem is, we won’t be able to find a match unless the note writer has been fingerprinted before." He ushered her into his office and dumped the note out onto his desk blotter.

"Since you haven’t read it yet, let’s see what it says." He opened the lap drawer of his desk and pawed through the contents, finally coming up with eyebrow tweezers. Using the tweezers and the tip of a pen, he carefully unfolded the damp paper. Faith angled her head to read the block letters:

YOU’RE NOT WANTED HERE LEAVE BEFORE YOU GET HURT

"Same person," Sheriff McFane said. "No punctuation."

"A deliberate signature?"

"Maybe, but could be it’s just a departure from his usual style, sort of camouflage." He frowned at her. "Mrs. Hardy  – Faith – Gray and I both told you the other day, living out there all by yourself could be dangerous."

"I’m not going to move," she said, repeating a sentence she must have said twenty times when she had been here to fill out the report on the dead cat.

"Then how about getting yourself a dog? It doesn’t have to be a guard dog, just one that will set up a racket if it hears anything outside."

Surprised, she stared at him. A dog. She’d never had a pet of any kind, so that option simply hadn’t occurred to her. "Why, I think I will. Thank you, Sheriff. That’s a good idea."

"Good. Get one as soon as possible. Stop by the pound and pick out a young, healthy one. A half-grown youngster would be good, still young enough to take to you real quick, but old enough that it can bark, not just make puppy yaps." He looked down at the note on his desk. "About all I can do right now is have my deputies drive by your house a couple of times each shift. We just don’t have much to go on."

"And a few notes and a dead cat aren’t exactly the crime of the century."

He gave her a quick grin, full of Huckleberry Finn charm. "Can’t even get ‘im for cruelty to animals. If it makes you feel any better, the cat wasn’t tortured. It was a road kill. Somebody just scooped it up, is all. It makes me feel a little better about the danger of the situation. A real psycho would have enjoyed killing a cat."

It did make her feel better. The memory of that mangled little corpse had made her feel sick every time it came to mind. The cat was still just as dead, but at least if it had been hit by a car, it had probably died instantly. She couldn’t bear to think that it had suffered.

She left the sheriffs department and retraced her path. Halfway down the long corridor, she saw a tall, powerfully built man with long, dark hair stop to speak to the little blue-haired lady.

Faith’s heart almost stopped. Without missing a step she whipped around to go back toward the sheriffs department, panicked at the thought of facing him again after the rawness of their last meeting. It was a purely instinctive reaction; her mind knew she needed to talk to him, but her body fled.

She heard the low rumble of his voice, recognizable anywhere, and speeded her steps. As she reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner, she glanced back and saw him striding rapidly toward her, his long legs shrinking the distance between them at an alarming rate. His dark eyes were locked on her.

She whisked around the corner, and the women’s rest room was right there, on the left. She saw the sign and darted inside, then pushed the door closed and stood with one hand pressed to her chest in an effort to calm the thudding of her heart. She glanced around. She was alone in the tiny, two-stall facility, and she waited, frozen, for the sound of his footsteps passing by.

The door swung abruptly inward, forcing her to jump back to avoid being hit. Gray filled the doorway, big and muscular and threatening, a dark scowl on his face. His eyes glittered like black ice.

Faith tried to back away, but she bumped against the wash-area counter. There was very little room for maneuvering in the tiny rest room. "You can’t come in here!"

He stepped forward and shut the door. "Are you sure about that?"

She took a deep breath, reaching for calmness. "Someone will come in."

"Maybe." He moved closer, so close that only inches separated them and she had to tilt her head back to see him. "Maybe not. You chose the place, I didn’t,"

"I didn’t choose anything," she snapped. "I was trying to avoid you – "

"I noticed," he said dryly. "What are you doing here?"

There was no reason not to tell him. "I found another note on my car this morning. I brought it to Sheriff McFane."

His scowl grew darker. "Damn it, Faith – "

"He told me to get a dog," she said, interrupting the sermon. "I was just on my way to the pound."

"That’s a good idea. Don’t bother with the pound, though; I’ll get one for you. Why didn’t you answer the phone yesterday?"

"I didn’t want to talk to you." She glared up at him. "I’ll get my own dog, thank you. And I’m not pregnant."

His dark brows arched. "How do you know? Did you start your period?"

"No, but it isn’t the right time of the month."

He snorted. "Honey, I’m Catholic. I know a lot of kids who got their start at the wrong time of the month."

"Maybe you do, but you can take my word on this." As she spoke, she tried to slide sideways.

Gray put his hands on her waist, trapping her. "For God’s sake, stand still," he said irritably. "You’re always trying to run away. What do you think I’m going to do to you?"

"The same thing you did the last time I saw you," she retorted, then blushed. As much as she had dreaded meeting him again, now that it had happened, she felt the usual rush of excitement. No matter what, she could never be matter-of-fact about being with him, whether in battle or anything else. Gray wasn’t a man who elicited boredom in the people around him. He was too big, too vital, too overwhelmingly male and sexual. Even as a child she had responded to his presence, and now that she was a woman, the effect he had on her was painfully magnified. She would try not to let him know it, but she couldn’t lie to herself. Already her body was tightening, growing warm and moist with response. It was instinctive, and totally separate from the dictates of her mind.

His brows lowered over those midnight eyes, which began to glitter. "You liked it," he said softly, dangerously. "Don’t try to pretend you weren’t willing. I felt every little ripple, baby."

Faith felt the color intensify in her cheeks, and not just from embarrassment. If only he hadn’t touched her, if only he weren’t so close that she could smell him, hot and musky and deliciously male. "No," she said just as softly. "I wasn’t saying that." She paused, gathering herself for the lie of her life. "I just don’t want to do it again. It was a mistake, and – "

"You’re lying." His gaze was on her breasts. Slowly his eyes lifted, and his expression changed again, tightening with lust. "Your nipples are puckered," he whispered, "and I haven’t even kissed you yet."

Her breath caught. She didn’t have to look down to see if he was telling the truth; she could feel the heavy tightness of her breasts, feel her nipples rasping against the lace that covered them. Warmth was gathering in her body, seeping down to pool in her loins. She stared helplessly at him.

Color darkened his high cheekbones, and his breathing deepened. "Faith," he murmured.

The tension was like a cord between them, thrumming with awareness. She felt as if the cord were being reeled in, inexorably pulling them together. Panicked, she flattened her hands on his chest and pushed, with a total lack of results. "We can’t," she said weakly. "Not here, for God’s sake!"

He wasn’t listening. His eyes were fastened on her mouth. He said, "What?" in an absent tone as his hands tightened on her waist and pulled her against him. She moaned aloud at the feel of his hard, vital body pressed all along her. He bent his head to kiss her, and she automatically lifted her mouth. His lips were soft, his mouth hot. Response thrilled through her, as irresistible as the tide, and her hands stopped pushing against him to clench fistfuls of his shirt. He urged her even closer, and slanted his head to deepen the kiss, his tongue thrusting into her mouth. She made a little "hmmm" of delight and sucked at it, curling her own tongue upward to stroke his.

He shuddered as if struck, and cupped her buttocks to lift her hard against his thick erection. The heat of desire exploded into a wildfire, melding them together. He tore his mouth free and groaned, "Jesus," as he jerked up her skirt and roughly shoved her panties down her thighs.

The sink counter was cold against her bare buttocks, and she blinked at the shock, surfacing a bit from the dark tide. "Wait," she blurted.

"I can’t." His voice was rough, shaky. He gripped her hips with one arm as he bent to strip her panties completely off. Before she could react, he straightened and hoisted her onto the counter. Pushing her thighs apart, he moved between them, then began jerking frenziedly at the zipper of his fly. He grunted as he freed his erection, and then guided himself to her. Faith dug her nails into his heavy shoulders as she felt the heat of his naked flesh pressing against her soft folds, burrowing between them, searching for the opening to her body. He found it, and she moaned at the pressure as that heavy invasion began. He pushed into her, stretching her almost unbearably. She was still a little sore from the first time, and he felt even more massive than before.

Then he was in her to the hilt, and he paused, resting his damp forehead against hers. "God, you’re tight as a fist," he gasped. She was trembling violently, and he gathered her closer, stroking her back, comforting her. After a moment he moved experimentally, restrained little thrusts that set oif spasms of painfully intense pleasure and made both of them shudder wildly.

"Just putting it in you makes me ready to come." His voice was thick, his breath warm in her ear. He thrust a little harder, a little faster. She felt the thick ridge of his penis head moving back and forth inside her, and her inner muscles clamped down in frantic pleasure. She moaned again, digging her nails into him in an effort to control that wild rush. He cursed, the words low and shaky with delight. Putting his hand on her bare bottom, he pulled her to the edge of the counter, positioning her so that every thrust ground him against her exposed, straining little sexual nub. It was what he had done before, and she had no more defense against it than she’d had the first time.

He began thrusting heavily into her, pounding toward orgasm. She felt on fire, arching helplessly to meet his hips, the ecstatic tension in her loins coiling violently, out of control, her body taken over by and intent on this swelling, ungovernable pleasure.

The door creaked as it began to open.

Gray moved like lightning, slapping his left palm against the door and slamming it shut before it had opened more than a fraction of an inch. "Hey!" a woman squawked indignantly from the other side.

"This one’s occupied," he said hoarsely, not missing a beat with his plunging hips. "Go somewhere else." Faith couldn’t say anything. Her eyes widened with alarm, but all she could do was look helplessly up at him.

Gray’s lips drew back over his teeth and his head dropped forward as he began hammering faster. His face was flushed, satisfaction only a few moments away.

Faith shuddered wildly as the coil of tension suddenly released and the fierce, pulsing flood of sensation swept through her. Shivering and pushing hard against him, she buried her face against his chest and bit his shirt to muffle her gasping cries.

He kept his hand flat against the door, gripping her bottom with his right hand to anchor himself. He shoved hard into her, twice, three times, again, then bucked violently. His head fell back and a harsh, guttural cry rumbled up from his chest.

There was an insistent banging on the door. "What are you doing in there?" the woman said in shrill, grating tones. "That’s the lady’s room! You aren’t supposed to be in there!"

Slowly Gray’s head came up. The expression in his eyes was indescribable, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. He took a deep breath, and exploded. "Goddamn it, woman!" he roared with furious indignation. "Can’t you tell I’m busy?"

Faith dissolved into laughter.

Eighteen

Faith had never been more embarrassed in her life. When she got home, she dashed into the house and locked all the doors, as if that would do any good. She had no clear memory of the drive home, but she could recall in excruciating detail every step she had made through the courthouse, with her face flaming and her thighs sticking together, and every curious look had made her want to cringe. She hadn’t, though; she had walked out with her chin in the air and an "I dare you to say anything" look on her face. The bluff must have worked, because no one had stopped her.

She had jumped off the counter as soon as Gray released her, and locked herself in one of the stalls. Uncontrollable giggles shook her as she tried to tidy herself. The arrival of her panties, tossed over the top of the stall, sent her into absolute whoops. "Would you shut up?" she heard Gray mutter fiercely, and she all but collapsed in hysterics. He said something else, but she didn’t understand him, and a moment later the door squeaked as he left. It swung open immediately, and a pair of navy pumps took up residence in the stall next to Faith. The owner of the pumps was also the owner of the shrill voice, and she was extremely indignant.

"I ought to tell the sheriff," she said huffily, loud enough that Faith could hear her over the sound of her own giggles.

"Carryin’ on in the ladies’ rest room! No telling who might have walked in, maybe a mother with her little kids, and just imagine children seein’ something like that. It’s sinful and disgusting, the way people don’t have no shame anymore – "

The tirade was delivered to the accompaniment of a steady stream of urine splashing into the toilet bowl. Evidently part of the lady’s wrath was due to the fact that she had been in desperate need of a bathroom. Trying to control her giggles, Faith took advantage of the woman’s preoccupation and dashed out of the stall. Once in the hallway, she tried to assume a normal air, and walked quickly to her car. Gray hadn’t been anywhere in sight, but then she hadn’t exactly looked for him. Probably he’d ducked into the men’s room.

Faith sank down in a kitchen chair and covered her face with her hands, groaning with mortification. What was wrong with her, that she couldn’t manage to say no to him even in a public place? The courthouse rest room! Even Renee had used more discretion than that.

The telephone rang, but she didn’t move to answer it. The machine in the office picked up, and she heard Gray’s deep voice, but was too far away to understand what he was saying. He hung up, and a few minutes later the phone rang again. This time, however, Faith recognized Margot’s voice. She knew she should pick up, but she didn’t. She simply couldn’t carry on a normal conversation; her nerves were still jangling, and she was physically shaking from the aftereffects of an adrenaline rush. She didn’t understand how risk junkies got addicted, because the crash was making her sick.

When she thought her knees would support her, she got up and headed for the bathroom. What she needed right now, more than anything, was a shower.

Gray shook his head in disbelief at himself as he drove to Faith’s house. He was sure she was there, even though she hadn’t answered the phone. He couldn’t believe what they’d done, or the force of the attraction that had made it irresistible. He hadn’t done anything that stupid even as a teenager, and God knows he’d been wild as a buck.

He snorted with suppressed laughter. That damned old biddy! Faith had jumped up and hidden in a stall, laughing like a maniac, and he’d been left there with one hand on the door to keep it shut, and his pants down around his knees. Quickly he’d shifted position, moving to stand with his back against the door while he pulled up his pants. Faith’s panties had been lying on the floor, so he’d scooped them up and tossed them over the stall, and she’d shrieked all the louder despite his order to be quiet. The old bitch outside wasn’t going away; she kept beating on the door, getting louder and louder. Between her and Faith, he was almost deafened.

Finally he told Faith he’d meet her out front, but he wasn’t certain she’d heard him, the way she was whooping hysterically. There was nothing to do but brazen it out. After glancing down to make certain everything was zipped and fastened, he opened the door and stepped out, glaring down at a plump, red-faced woman who was all but squirming with indignation. She sputtered furiously at him, but Gray cut her off". "The men’s room was full," he snapped. "What did you expect me to do, piss in the hallway?" Then he stalked into the men’s room, which was right next door, and leaned against the wall until his shoulders stopped shaking with silent laughter, because the old biddy had snapped right back, "Then what did you piss in, the sink?"

Oh, Jesus. He began laughing helplessly again. He knew the old biddy, at least by sight. She worked in the tax assessor’s office. The tale that he’d been fooling around with some hussy in the women’s rest room would be all over the courthouse by lunch, and all over the town by tomorrow morning.

His grin faded. Faith would be mortified.

She probably was anyway. She hadn’t waited for him out front, but had probably driven home with all possible speed, and barricaded herself in the house. His little Puritan would be sick with embarrassment.

He sighed with relief when he saw her car in the driveway. He pulled in, but didn’t stop behind her car. Instead he steered his car around to the backyard, and circled behind the open tool shed where she kept her lawn mower. Honeysuckle vines grew over the shed and part of the way up a steel cable bracing a power pole, forming a nice screen to hide the car. He nosed the Jaguar forward until the hood was just touching the honeysuckle, then got out, checking in both directions. The road wasn’t visible in either direction, so that meant the car wasn’t visible from the road. He felt like an idiot, but he hoped Faith appreciated the concern for her reputation.

He went to the kitchen door and rapped on it, waiting impatiently. She didn’t open it, and he knocked again. "Faith, open the door."

Faith halted on the other side of the door, her hand hovering at the curtain. She had just been about to twitch it aside and see who was pounding on her kitchen door. She had almost jumped out of her skin at the sounds of a car pulling into her driveway and behind the house. She was relieved that it was Gray, but of all the people she didn’t think she could face right now, he headed the list.

"Go away," she said.

The doorknob rattled. "Faith." Her name was spoken softly, calmly. "Open the door, baby."

"Why?"

"We have things to talk over."

Undoubtedly, but she didn’t want to do it. She wanted to be a coward about the whole thing, and hide until she was over the embarrassment. "Maybe tomorrow," she hedged.

"Now." There it was, that gentle, inflexible note that said her door would be kicked open within the next ten seconds if she didn’t open it herself. Helpless and resentful, she unlocked the door.

He stepped inside and immediately turned the lock again, his gaze never leaving her. She had just gotten out of the shower, and hadn’t had time to dress before she heard the car pulling in. She had grabbed her thin robe from the back of the bathroom door, and put it on. There was nothing seductive about the robe; it was plain, white cotton, belted at the waist. But she was acutely aware that, beneath it, she was damp and bare. She clutched the lapels together over her breasts. "What do you want to talk about?"

An incredibly gentle smile spread over his face as he looked down at her. "Later," he said, and swept her up in his arms.

Two hours later, they lay sweaty and exhausted amid the tangled sheets on her bed. The noon sun forced its way through the closed slats of the blinds, throwing thin lines of white across the floor. A gentle breeze from the ceiling fan wafted across her bare flesh, raising tiny goose bumps. Her body was so acutely sensitive that she imagined she could feel each fine, downy hair lifting at the slight chill. Her heart was beating in slow, heavy thumps, her veins and arteries pulsing with each beat. Gray lay sprawled on his back, his eyes closed and his chest heaving, while she was curled against his side with her head pillowed on his shoulder.

It was a long time before she felt as if she could move. Her limbs were heavy and limp, utterly boneless. In those two hours he had taken her three times, with as much ferocity as if the time in the courthouse hadn’t happened. And as demanding and immediate as his hunger had been, her response had matched it. She had clung to him, her nails digging into his back, her hips lifting eagerly to meet each thrust, and it seemed as if her fire had only fed his own. She didn’t know how^many times she had reached satisfaction; this last time had felt like one long swell that crested, then refused to subside, so that she had been awash in sensation, drunk with pleasure.

As his breathing slowed, Gray stirred beside her and tried to lift his head, only to let it fall back with a groan. "Oh, God. I can’t move."

"Then don’t," she muttered, opening her eyes a slit.

A couple of minutes later, he tried again. With a great deal of effort he raised his head and slowly surveyed the tangle of their nude bodies lying amid the wreckage of the bed. His gaze settled on his penis, lying soft on his thighs. "You damn fool," he barked. "This time, stay down!"

The whimsy startled her, and she began giggling helplessly. She buried her face against his shoulder, her entire body shaking.

Gray let his head drop back to the pillow, and cuddled her closer. "Easy for you to laugh," he grumbled. "The damn thing’s trying to kill me. It never has had much stopping sense, but this is ridiculous. It must think I’m still sixteen."

"It can’t think," she pointed out, her giggles increasing.

"You’re telling me. You can reason with something that thinks." Her giggles escalated even more, and he tickled her in revenge. "Stop laughing," he ordered, though a smile teased his mouth. "Do you know what it’s like to have a prominent body part that won’t listen to either common sense or orders?"

"Well, no, but I know what it’s like to be in the vicinity of one."

He chuckled and lazily rubbed his hand across his chest. "Do you know why men name their cocks?"

"No, why?" she asked, trying to stifle her laughter.

"So most of the major decisions in their lives won’t be made by a total stranger."

They shook with laughter, and Faith grabbed a corner of the sheet to dry her eyes. She had never seen this playful, bawdy side of Gray before, and she was charmed down to her toes.

He heaved himself up on his elbow, holding her head cradled in the crook of his arm as he smiled down at her. "It’s all your fault, anyway," he told her, smoothing a tangle of dark red hair away from her face. His hand continued in a slow stroke down her throat, over the delicate sweep of her collarbone, to close over her breast.

"Mine?" she asked indignantly.

"Sure." Gently he cupped her breast, lifting it. He lightly rasped the pad of his thumb over the puffy pink swell of her nipple, and watched in fascination as it immediately puckered and turned red. "Your nipples are like raspberries," he marveled, and leaned down to take that particular raspberry into his mouth, circling it with his tongjie, rolling it back and forth.

Faith quivered in his arms, alarmed by the immediate swell of desire. She didn’t think she could stand it again. "I can’t," she moaned, but he noticed that her other nipple had also puckered.

He drew back and admired his work, the red nipple glistening wetly. "That’s good," he said absently, "because I sure as hell can’t." Faith’s breasts were pale, with the sheen of satin, and her skin so translucent and fine that the blue tracery of veins seemed just under the surface. They were firm and full and upright, and he couldn’t keep his hands off of them. Hell, he couldn’t keep his hands off of her, period. "Just think how pretty these will be, when they’re full of milk."

She slapped his shoulder. "I told you, I’m not pregnant!"

"You don’t know that," he teased.

"Yes, I do know that."

"Your timing could be off."

"My timing is never off"

"This once it could be."

She glared at him, then returned to what he’d said before. "How is it my fault?"

"It must be," he said reasonably. "Every time you’re near, I get hard."

"I’m not doing anything. It has to be your fault."

"You’re breathing. Evidently that’s enough." He collapsed back on the bed and pulled her so she was lying half on him. His free hand smoothed over her slender back, and down to stroke the round curves of her bottom. "Part of it’s the way you smell, like honey and cinnamon, all sweet and spicy at the same time."

Her head lifted and she stared at him, startled. "I’ve always loved the way you smell," she confessed. "Even when I was a little kid. I thought you were the best smell in the world, but I’ve never been able to exactly describe it."

"So you’ve had a crush on me since you were little?" he asked, pleased.

To hide her expression, she tucked her head back into its resting place in the hollow of his shoulder, and inhaled the delicious male scent she had just mentioned. "No," she said softly. "It wasn’t a crush."

He grunted and settled himself more comfortably, pulling her thigh up to ride across his hips. She felt his penis twitch warningly against the soft inside of her leg, then subside. "I used to worry about you," he murmured, his voice becoming sleepy. "Running around alone in the woods the way you did."

She was silent a moment. "How often did you see me?"

"A couple of times."

"I saw you," she said, gathering her courage.

"In the woods?"

"At the summerhouse. With Lindsey Partain. I watched through the window."

His eyes shot open. "Why, you little sneak!" he said, and swatted her bottom, hard. "I guess you got an eyeful."

"I sure did," she agreed, rubbing her bottom indignantly. She retaliated by twisting her fingers in his chest hair and pulling.

He yelped and rubbed his chest. "Ouch!"

"Revenge is sweet," she said. "And prompt."

"I’ll remember that," he said ruefully, squinting down at his chest. "Damn, there’s a bald patch there."

"There is not."

She rubbed her cheek against him, her eyes closing as she luxuriated in the feel of him, so warm and solid and vital. She had been in paradise from the moment he carried her to bed. Lying here like this with him, so relaxed, all hostility gone and desire thoroughly sated, was more than she had ever dared hope for in her life. None of their problems were solved and the hostility would undoubtedly return, but for right now, this moment, she was happy.

So happy, in fact, that there was only a little hurt mixed in with the curiosity when she said, "You made love to Lindsey in French."

His eyes had closed drowsily, but they popped open again. "What?"

"I heard you. You made love to her in French. Lots of love words and compliments."

Gray was too experienced not to notice how she felt about that, and immediately discerned the reason. He gave her a disbelieving look, then put his head back on the pillow and shouted with laughter. Faith’s lower lip trembled and she tried to turn away, but his arms tightened and he held her right where she was.

"Oh, Jesus," he said, wheezing with the effort it took to control himself. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "You little innocent. I’m fluent in French, but it isn’t my first language." It was plain by the mortified expression in those green eyes that she didn’t understand, so he explained. "Baby, if I can still think clearly enough to speak French, then I’m not totally involved in what I’m doing. It may sound pretty, but it doesn’t mean anything. Men are different from women; the more excited we are, the more like cavemen we sound. I could barely speak English with you, much less French. As I remember, my vocabulary deteriorated to a few short, explicit words, ‘fuck’ being the most prominent."

To his amazement, she blushed, and he smiled at this further evidence of her charming prudery. "Go to sleep," he said gently. "Lindsey didn’t even rate a replay."

God only knew why she found that reassuring, but she did. She went to sleep as easily as a child, exhausted by the events of the morning, and woke to make love again. He was more leisurely this time, and, with a positively wicked gleam in his dark eyes, whispered French love words to her. Then he had to grab her hands to protect his chest hairs, roaring with laughter at her indignation. That was how they passed the afternoon, sleeping, making love, and murmuring drowsily to each other afterward. If the lovemaking was wildly exciting, it was in the pillow talk that a deeper kind of intimacy was forged, a quiet sharing of secrets and thoughts, a linking together of their pasts.

"Tell me about the foster home you were in," he said once, and was relieved when she smiled.

"The Greshams. They gave me the first real home I’d ever known. I still keep in touch with them."

"How did you wind up in a foster home?"

"Pa took off not long after… after that night," she said, faltering a little. "Russ, my oldest brother, wasn’t far behind him. Nicky tried to earn enough to feed us, I’ll say that for him, but he was relieved when the social services people found us. We were in Beaumont at the time. Jodie was put in one foster home, and Scottie and I in another. It wasn’t easy to find someone who would take Scottie, too, but the Greshams agreed if I would take care of him. As if I would leave him behind," she said softly.

"What happened to him?"

"He died the next January. At least he was happy, the last six months of his life. After we moved in, the Greshams were wonderful to him. They bought him toys, played with him. He had so much fun at Christmas, but he faded fast after that. I sat up with him," she said in a quiet voice, her eyes liquid with tears as she stared down the years. "I held his hand while he died." She brushed her hand across her eyes. "I used to wonder if Guy was his father."

He’d never thought of that. He stared at her, disturbed both by the idea that his father might have sired other children, and by the horrifying thought that he might have thrown his little brother out into the dirt.

Faith groped for his hand. "I don’t think he was," she said, compelled to comfort him. "Your father wouldn’t have left one of his children to live the way we did. If Scottie had been his, he’d have taken care of him. There’s no telling who Scottie’s daddy was; I doubt it was Pa."

Gray blinked, his own eyes shiny with tears. "Yes," he said hoarsely. "He’d have taken care of him."

Later, he asked, "What happened to the rest of your family?"

"I don’t know. I think Jodie’s living around Jackson, but I haven’t seen her since she turned eighteen. I don’t have any idea what happened to Pa and the boys." She carefully didn’t mention Renee.

So her family, such as it was, had been shattered by his actions. He held her tight, as if he could shield her from the pain of the past.

"I hated Dad, for a while," he admitted. "God, when I found out he’d left – he was our rock, not Mother. It hurt so much, I couldn’t stand it."

Faith bit her lip, thinking of what she had to tell him, and soon.

"Monica tried to kill herself," he said abruptly. "She cut her wrists right after I told her Dad was gone. She almost bled to death before I could get her to a hospital. When I came to the shack that night, I’d just left the hospital in Baton Rouge."

He was trying to explain his rage, she realized, why he’d done what he had. She kissed his shoulder, forgiveness in the gesture. Actually, she had forgiven him long ago, understanding the pain and sense of betrayal he must have been feeling.

He stared up at the ceiling fan. "Mother withdrew completely. She stopped talking, even stopped feeding herself. She didn’t come out of her room for two years. She’s the most self-centered person I’ve ever known," he said with brutal honesty, "but I don’t ever want to see her that way again."

And that was why he was so adamant that neither Monica nor his mother be upset by anything Faith said or did. She had experienced some of his overprotectiveness herself. In some ways, he was like a feudal lord in Prescott, his influence touching almost every aspect of parish life, and like a feudal lord, he took his responsibilities seriously.

He rolled on top of her, entering her with a gentle insistence that nevertheless made her catch her breath, for she was sore from all the other times. He braced himself on his elbows and cradled her head in his hands. "That night is a link between us," he whispered. "Ugly as it was, we share the memories. And it wasn’t all ugly. I wanted you that night, Faith." He began moving slowly inside her, his eyes darkening with the slow build of passion. "You were only fourteen, but I wanted you. And when I saw you again, in the motel, it was as if the twelve years apart didn’t exist, because I still wanted you."

Then he began to smile. "Do you want me to say it in French?" he asked.

When she woke the next time, she lay quietly and watched him sleeping. His black lashes were dark smudges on his cheekbones, and black beard stubbled his lower jaw. His lips were softly parted as he slept, his powerful body relaxed. The beauty of him shook her. With his long hair tousled around his shoulders, he looked like a pirate taking his rest in a lady’s bed after a long day of ship-boardings and sword fights. The tiny diamond in his left ear didn’t do anything to detract from the image.

She was too sore to possibly make love again, she thought, but still his body drew her. He was wonderfully made, all long bones and hard muscle. One arm dangled off the side of the bed, but his other hand lay relaxed on his chest. He had big hands, his fingers lean and well shaped, but his little finger was as thick as her thumb. She thought of those hands on her body and shivered with delight.

She leaned over him, delicately inhaling the warm scent of his skin, rising off him on waves of heat. This was Gray. The realization stunned her anew. He was actually here. She could touch him, kiss him, do all the things she had spent most of her life only dreaming about.

His flesh drew her like a lodestone, making her breath come a little faster, and her skin flush. There were no restraints on her natural sensuality now, and the freedom to touch him, and be touched by him, was intoxicating. She laid her hand on his thigh, feeling hard muscle under the roughness of hair, then slipped her fingertips, in a dreamy, sensual sampling, down to where the flesh was smooth and hairless, trailing her fingertips across it. His scrotum hung low, his testicles like two small eggs in their soft sac. She turned her hand and cupped it, feeling it cool and heavy in her palm. He stirred restlessly, his legs falling apart, but he didn’t wake. He was a wonderfully male animal, and, for the moment at least, totally hers.

She leaned over him even closer, letting the tips of her breasts drag through the crisp, curly hair on his chest, and sucked in a quick breath at the sharp tingle of sensation that drew her nipples erect.

His eyelids fluttered and opened. "Ummm," he said, a low hum of pleasure, and automatically reached up to circle her with his arms.

She nuzzled her face against his throat and slid all the way onto him, her entire body squirming sinuously as she rubbed herself over him, feline in her enjoyment. "You feel so good," she whispered, nipping his earlobe, then licking it. "All three of the H factors."

"What are the H factors?" he asked. "Or do I want to know?"

"Hot, hard, and hairy."

He chuckled, and stretched languidly beneath her. It was a startling sensation, like being on a lumpy raft tossed about by the ocean. She hung on to his shoulders to keep from falling off.

His hair brushed her fingers, and when he had settled, she thrust her hand into the black mass of it. It was thick and silky, with just a hint of curl. Most women would have killed to have hair like that. "Why do you wear your hair long?" she asked, picking up another strand and pulling it around to tickle his nose with the end of it. "And why the earring? That’s pretty dashing for a man who sits on several corporate boards."

He obligingly made a face, then began to laugh. "Promise not to tell?"

"Promise – unless you say someone scared you with a picture of Sinead O’Connor; I’d have to tell that."

His white teeth flashed as he gave her a faintly embarrassed grin. "It’s almost as bad. I’m afraid of hair clippers." She was so astonished that she slipped off his chest. "Hair clippers?" she echoed. This six foot four, over-two-hundred-pound pirate was afraid of hair clippers?

"I don’t like the noise," he explained, turning onto his side and curling one arm under his head. His eyes were smiling. "Gives me the willies. I can remember when I was four or five years old, howling my head off as Dad tried to hold me still for old Herbert Dumas to give me a haircut. Evidently holding me down made Dad feel like a traitor, so he started trying to bribe me to be good, but I just couldn’t do it. I’d hear that first bzzz and nearly jump out of my skin. By the time I was ten, we had negotiated our way to scissor cuts. The older I get, the further apart the hair trims are. As for the earring – " He laughed out loud. "It’s sort of camouflage. Wearing the earring makes it look as if my hair is long on purpose. A style, rather than a phobia."

"Who trims your hair?" she asked, too fascinated to laugh. She was still trying to deal with the image of a grown man avoiding barbershops the way some people avoided the dentist.

"Sometimes I do. Sometimes I’ll get it trimmed when I’m in New Orleans. There’s a salon there with a standing rule not to turn on any hair clippers while I’m there. Why? Do you want to take over the job?" He laid his hand on the side of her neck, his thumb brushing her earlobe. He was smiling, but she sensed he was serious.

"You’d trust me to cut your hair?"

"Of course. Wouldn’t you trust me to cut yours?"

Her reply was swift. "Not in this lifetime. But I’d let you shave my legs."

"It’s a deal!" was his reply, just as swift, as he grabbed for her.

It was almost twilight the next time he stirred awake, and groaned as he rubbed his hand over his face. "I’m starving," he announced in a rumbling voice. "Damn, I need to call home and let someone know where I am."

Faith rolled onto her back, cautiously stretching. Though she had spent most of the day in bed, she was as tired as if she had been up all night. Being in bed with Gray Rouiliard was not restful. It was a lot of fun, it was wonderfully exciting, but restful, it wasn’t.

Now that he had mentioned it, she realized how hungry she was. The idea of lunch hadn’t occurred to either of them, and breakfast had been many hours ago. Food was just what she needed.

He sat up on the side of the bed, giving her a wonderful view of his buttocks. She reached out and stroked them as he picked up the phone, and he tossed a quick grin over his shoulder. "Feel free," he invited, punching in his own number.

His back was just as marvelous as his front, she thought dreamily. Thick with muscle, bisected by the deep groove of his spine, tapering from those wide shoulders down to a taut waist.

"Hi," he said into the phone. "Tell Delfina I won’t be home for dinner."

Faith heard the indistinct murmur of a voice, evidently asking where he was, because he calmly replied, "I’m at Faith’s house."

The voice was still indistinct, but considerably more agitated. She watched his back muscles tense and immediately felt uncomfortable, as if she was eavesdropping. She had to get away, she thought distractedly. She couldn’t bear to listen to him make an excuse for his presence here. She sat up and swung her legs off the bed, wincing at the unexpected stiffness of her back and legs.

"Monie," Gray said patiently, and sighed. "We have to talk. I’ll be home in the morning – no, not before. In the morning. If anything important comes up, call me here."

Slowly Faith stood up, straightening with difficulty. Every muscle in her body seemed to be protesting. Her legs were ridiculously weak, her thigh muscles trembling. She desperately wanted to leave the room, but nothing was cooperating. She took one hobbling step, wincing with pain, then another.

"I said, we’ll talk tomorrow." His voice was firm. He looked over his shoulder at Faith, started to glance away, then his attention focused on her like a laser beam. " ‘Bye," he said absently to Monica, hanging up and cutting her off in midprotest. Then he was on his feet, coming around the end of the bed to where Faith wobbled.

"Poor baby," he crooned. "Muscles sore?"

She scowled at him.

"I know just the thing," he promised, stripping the top sheet from the bed and snaking it out.

"So do I. A hot shower."

"Later." He wrapped the sheet around her and picked her up. "Just be quiet and enjoy."

"Enjoy what?"

"Being quiet, what else?" he replied maddeningly, and she couldn’t even hit him, because her arms were wrapped up in the sheet.

She found out soon enough. He carried her into the kitchen and carefully laid her on the table, unwrapping the sheet to spread it out beneath her. "I had some great ideas about this table the first time I saw it," he said, with more than a little satisfaction.

Startled, she said, "What are you doing?" She had been naked in his arms for hours, but somehow, lying naked on top of her kitchen table made her feel unbearably exposed, as if she were a human sacrifice lying on a stone altar.

"Massage," he said. "Stay there." He left the room, leaving her lying there. The hard surface was uncomfortable, but the promise of a massage kept her in place. He returned to the kitchen with a bottle of baby oil and a washcloth in his hands. "On your stomach," he ordered. He turned on the hot water in the sink and let it run until steam began to rise, then filled a bowl and dropped the bottle of oil into it.

Stiffly she obeyed. He hadn’t turned on any lights and the kitchen was deeply shadowed, twilight only a few moments away. The air conditioning was on, and though she had been perfectly comfortable in the bedroom, the cold of the table seeped through the sheet and chilled her. She shivered, wishing he would hurry.

"Close your eyes and relax," he said quietly. "Go to sleep if you want."

Her sore muscles were adjusting to the hardness of the table, allowing her to relax fractionally. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sounds of what he was doing. She could hear water splashing, and sighed in anticipation of feeling that warm oil being rubbed into her skin.

His voice was low and soothing, little more than a murmur. "I’m going to wash you, so you’ll be more comfortable," he said, just before she felt a wet, very warm washcloth between her legs. The heat felt wonderful on her sore, swollen flesh. He was incredibly gentle, but just as thorough as he cleaned away the evidence of his lovemaking. He took the cloth away, and she heard water running again. "It’s going to be cold this time," he warned, and the cold pad of the washcloth was pressed between her legs. He repeated the compress several times, soothing the ache. Then he reached for the oil.

He began at her shoulders, his powerful fingers digging deep into her muscles. She automatically tightened in resistance, then relaxed as the strength and tension seemed to flow out of her. The heated oil made his hands slide over her skin, leaving it slick and fragrant. He worked down each arm, even massaging her hands, and between her fingers. And everywhere his hands went, they left behind loosened tendons, limp muscles, and total contentment. Faith purred her pleasure as he returned to her back, starting at her waist and moving his hands upward in long, powerful sweeps that compressed her rib cage and made her groan aloud with each stroke. He relentlessly searched out every stiff muscle, and kneaded it until it was pliant beneath his hands.

Her legs were next. He kneaded her hamstring muscles, her calves, her Achilles tendons, the bottoms of her feet. He rotated her ankles back and forth, pressing his thumbs hard into her arches, and a startlingly sexual pleasure made her toes curl.

"Oh!" she said involuntarily.

"Like that, do you?" he asked, his voice soft and muted in the growing darkness of the room. He did it again, and she moaned in response.

He moved back up her legs, spreading them apart and massaging the stretched, sore tendons on the upper insides of her thighs. Her moan this time was of pain, and she gripped the sides of the table. He murmured reassuringly, moving his attention to her buttocks. She relaxed again, closing her eyes. She was feeling pleasantly warm now, and not just from the oil; his stroking hands were having another effect entirely. Desire was curling lazily, heating her blood, totally without urgency.

"On your back, now," he said, and helped her to roll over. He looked with interest at her peaked nipples, and smiled. His big, oil-slick hands covered her breasts, gentle there, smoothing the oil into nipples sore from vigorous sucking and the rasp of his stubbled face. "Your skin’s as delicate as a baby’s," he observed. "I’ll need to shave twice a day." Faith didn’t reply, too caught up in what he was doing. By the time he was finished with her stomach and thighs, she was in an agony of anticipation, her body arching under his hands. The room was almost completely dark now, the lavender shadows of twilight giving way to the night. He paused to turn on the light over the sink, isolating them in a small glow.

The sore muscles on the insides of her thighs received more attention, and this time he didn’t relent until her groans had turned to purrs. His oily fingers slipped higher then, gently stroking and probing, and she shook with delight.

"Gray." Her voice was smoky, drugged with desire. She reached out for him. "Please."

"No, baby, you’re too sore for another round," he whispered. "I’ll take care of you."

He dragged her to the end of the table, sheet and all, the fabric slipping easily over the smooth surface. "What –?" Faith began, then fell back with a moan as he draped her thighs over his shoulders. Gently he opened the swollen folds between her legs, and she felt his warm breath wash over her. She barely had time to catch her breath before his tongue delved into her painfully sensitive flesh with a lightning bolt of sheer sensation that made her cry out. He was very tender, and very thorough, reducing her to quivering, screaming ecstasy within minutes.

Afterward, he carried her into the bathroom. She stood sleepily in the shower with him, her arms around his waist and her head on his chest. A lot of the soreness was gone, but now her muscles felt like mush.

When the hot water began to go, he lifted his cheek from the top of her head. "Food," he murmured.

Reluctantly she released him and let him turn off the water. She sleeked her wet hair back from her face, and looked up at him with diamonds of water clinging to her lashes. He seemed so ruthless and strong, but he was very human, with desires and fears and quirks, and she loved him all the more deeply for those qualities. Just for a while, though, she would have wished he were more impervious, because she couldn’t put off much longer telling him about his father.

The least she could do was feed him first.

He wolfed down two ham and tomato sandwiches, then took his time on the third while she polished off one. Afterward, they remade the bed with fresh sheets, and he flopped down with a sigh of exhaustion. The sprawl of his arms and legs took up most of the room, but she crawled into one of the niches and burrowed her damp head into its accustomed place on his shoulder. She put her arms around him, holding him tight as if she could shield him from the pain. "I have to tell you something," she said quietly.

Nineteen

Monica cried for a long time after Gray hung up, her arms folded on top of his desk and her head resting on them. Hot, salty tears dripped onto the polished surface and she rubbed them away with her sleeve, not wanting to mar the finish of his desk. She had never felt more lost and confused, even when Daddy had left.

Nothing was working out right. She hadn’t managed to tell Alex she wouldn’t let him screw her anymore; when he had come down from Mama’s room the other night and stood in the doorway, staring at her, her heart had stopped. She had tried to get the words out, but her throat had been too dry, and then he had been bending over her and it was too late. She squirmed with shame every time she thought about it. How could she have let him touch her? She was going to marry Michael. She felt dirty, felt as if she were dirtying him by going into his arms after having been with Alex. And she still hadn’t told Gray that Michael had asked her to marry him, much less telling Mama that she was even dating him. She had been so careful to keep her life under control after the stupid stunt with her wrists, but now it all seemed to be spiraling away again.

Gray was with Faith Devlin. Another man she loved and depended on had been seduced away by one of those whores. How could he do that, Gray, of all people? Monica rocked back and forth, hugging herself and moaning with pain as tears streamed down her cheeks. He was spending the night with her, uncaring of what people might say, of the gossip that would eventually reach Mama no matter how hard they tried to keep it from her. Family hadn’t mattered to Daddy when he was in bed with Renee Devlin, and now it looked as if Gray was following in his footsteps with Renee’s daughter. Just give them sex, and they didn’t care who they hurt.

Monica sobbed until her eyes were sore and almost swollen together, until her chest ached with the effort of breathing. Then, finally, a sort of terrible calm came over her.

She opened Gray’s desk drawer and stared at the revolver he kept there. The Devlin bitch hadn’t paid any attention to the warnings Monica had given her, so it was time to stop being subtle. In her furious hurt, it didn’t matter that Gray was with Faith; it might do him good to be shaken up, she thought, reaching for the pistol. This time, she was ridding the parish of a Devlin.

"What is it?" Gray asked, stretching to turn off the lamp. In the sudden darkness, he cradled Faith against him. "You sound serious."

"I am." She blinked back the sudden burn of tears. "I’ve put off telling you this because I – I can’t bear to hurt you. And I – I want you to know something else, first." She gasped for breath, and seized her courage with both hands. "I love you," she said in a low voice, aching with tenderness. "I’ve always loved you, even when I was a little girl. I lived for glimpses of you, and the chance to hear your voice. Nothing has ever changed that, not what happened that night, not the twelve years when I was gone."

His arms tightened and his lips parted, but she laid her fingers on his mouth, stopping the words. "No, don’t say anything," she begged. "Let me finish." If she didn’t get it all said in a hurry, she might lose her nerve.

"Gray, your father didn’t run away with Mama." She felt his body tense, and she hugged him closer. "I know where Mama is, and he isn’t with her. He never was. He’s dead," she said as gently as possible. The hot tears leaked out of her eyes to slowly trickle down her cheeks. "Someone killed him that night. Mama saw who did it, and was scared he’d kill her too, so she ran."

"Stop it," Gray said harshly. He pulled her arms away from him and gave her a hard little shake. "I don’t know if this is your lie or Renee’s, but I got a letter from him that was postmarked the next day, in Baton Rouge. If he was killed the night before, then a dead man wrote it."

"A letter?" she asked, stunned. Of all the things she’d thought he might say, this wasn’t one of the possibilities. "From your father? Are you sure?"

"Of course I’m sure."

"It was in his handwriting?"

"It was typed," he said, his annoyance rapidly escalating into anger. He sat up and swung his legs out of bed. "The signature was his, though."

Faith flung herself at him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders to hold him, though she was well aware he could have shaken her off as if she were no more than a pesky mosquito. Desperately she said, "What did the letter say?"

"What does it matter, goddamn it?" He caught her wrists, trying to free himself without hurting her. She clung all the harder, pressing her body against him.

"It matters!" She was weeping now, her tears hot and wet on his back.

He muttered another curse, but sat still. Despite how furious he was with her for even bringing up the subject, much less trying to convince him of such a ridiculous lie, she was crying, and he had to fight the urge to drag her around onto his lap and comfort her. Roughly he said, "It was a letter of proxy. Just that, no explanation. Without it, we likely would have lost almost everything we owned."

His chest expanded as he took a deep breath. "If it hadn’t been for that letter, I’d have tried to find him. But he didn’t even say he was sorry, didn’t say good-bye. It was as if he was taking care of a minor detail he’d forgotten."

"Maybe someone else wrote it," Faith said, aching with the pain he must have felt then. "Maybe the murderer did.

Gray, I swear, Mama said she saw him get shot! They were out at the summerhouse that night when someone drove up. She said that Guy and the other man went into the boat-house and she heard them arguing – "

He erupted off the bed, breaking free of her grasp. He whirled around to catch her arms and pin her to the mattress. "That’s why you were sneaking around the place," he said incredulously, and reached out to turn on the lamp so he could see her face. He glared down at her, his eyes burning like coals. He shook her again. "You little witch! That’s why you’ve been asking all those questions about Dad! You think he was murdered and you’ve been trying to find out who killed him!"

He had seldom in his life been more furious; his hands shook with the effort of controlling himself. He didn’t believe his father had been murdered, but it was obvious that Faith did, and the foolhardy woman had been trying to find a murderer all by herself. If there really had been a murder, she would have been putting herself at enormous risk. He was torn between snatching her up in his arms to kiss her and turning her over his knee. Both choices held enormous attraction.

While he was still trying to decide, she said, "I knew I likely wouldn’t find anything, but I searched the boathouse for a shell casing – "

"Wait a minute." He rubbed his hand over his face, trying to get a handle on this latest confession. "When did you search the boathouse?"

"Yesterday morning."

"It’s kept padlocked. Have you added breaking and entering to your repertoire?"

"I swam underneath the door and came up in the boat slip."

Gray closed his eyes and counted to ten. Then he did it again. His hands twitched, and he balled them into fists. Finally he opened his eyes, staring down at her in appalled disbelief. Foolhardy wasn’t the word for her. She was too intrepid for her own safety, much less his sanity. The net beneath the boathouse, designed to keep out unwelcome guests of the reptile variety, had come loose over the years and he hadn’t had it repaired, but it was still there. She could so easily have become entangled in it and drowned. He would have lost her forever. Clammy sweat formed on his brow.

"I didn’t find anything," she said, eyeing him uneasily. "But I’m making someone nervous. Why do you think I got those threatening notes?"

It was like being punched in the stomach. He hung there, his mind reeling. Then his knees sagged, and he sat down heavily on the bed. "My God," he said blankly, as horrified realization began to form.

"I hired a private detective," she said, reaching for him again, desperately needing to touch him. She pressed close, and this time his arms came up to wrap around her, hauling her against his chest. "Mr. Pleasant. He searched credit card records, Social Security records, tax files – there was no trace of Guy after that night. Gray, there was no reason for Guy to walk away from you and Monica, or from all that money! He wouldn’t have left you for Mama; why should he? It didn’t make sense that he would disappear like that, unless he was dead. Mr. Pleasant thought he must be, too, and he was going to ask some questions in town." A sob rose in her chest. "Now he’s disappeared, too, and I’m afraid the same person killed him!"

"Oh, God," Gray said, his voice tight. "Faith – don’t say anything else. Be quiet for a minute. Please."

She pressed her face into his chest and obeyed. Despite everything, his arms were around her, and she began to hope. He rocked her gently back and forth, comforting himself as well as her.

"Alex sent the letter," he finally said, his voice muffled in her hair. "I should have guessed. He was the only other person who knew Dad hadn’t left a letter of proxy, and he knew what a mess we were in without it, if Dad didn’t come back, so he didn’t take the chance. He was almost as upset as I was, and he said the same thing you did: What reason did Dad have for running away with Renee? He already had her, and Mother turned a blind eye to his affairs, so he wouldn’t have… He’s dead. He’s really dead." He choked, and his chest heaved beneath her cheek.

Faith held him tight, guiding him down onto the bed. He clutched at her, his hands desperate. "Turn… turn off the light," he said, and she did, understanding how a strong man could need darkness for his tears.

He shook in her arms, his wet face buried against her breasts as harsh sobs tore up from his chest. She cried with him, stroking his head, his back and shoulders, not speaking but offering him the comfort of her body, of not being alone. Without the intimacy of the day they had just passed binding them together, she doubted he would have allowed her to see him so vulnerable. But they were linked, as he had said, their lives inextricably woven together by the past, and cemented by the long hours of intense pleasure.

Something he had said jarred, but the significance of it escaped her. She pushed it aside, for the moment intent only on holding him.

Gradually he calmed, but his desperate grip on her didn’t relax. She smoothed his hair back from his damp face, her fingers gentle.

"All these years," he said in a hushed, choked voice. "I’ve hated him, and cursed him… and missed him… and all the time he’s been dead."

Something else needed to be said, something hurtful. "Have the lake dragged," she suggested, and felt him flinch. He had swum in that lake, fished in it.

There were other things to talk about, decisions to make, but his head was heavy on her breast and she sensed his utter exhaustion. Her own fatigue, mental and physical, was dragging her down. "Go to sleep," she whispered, stroking his temple. "We’ll talk in the morning."

She must have dozed, but for all her tiredness, something kept dragging her back to semiconsciousness. She shifted restlessly, feeling Gray’s heavy weight against her. What was it he had said? Something about the letter of proxy…

His body was like a furnace, pouring off heat in waves. Sweat dewed her body, despite the efforts of the ceiling fan. She didn’t open her eyes, but her brow furrowed as she tried to bring the thought into focus. The letter of proxy… Why would Alex have sent a bogus letter of proxy so quickly, when no reasonable person would expect Guy to completely walk away from his family and business? Surely he had expected Guy to get in touch…

Unless he had known that it was impossible.

Alex.

Her eyes flew open, and she stared in confusion at the strange red glow that suffused the room. The heat was more intense, and the air was acrid, burning her eyes and nose. Realization exploded in her head.

"Gray!" She screamed his name, shaking him hard. "Get up! The house is on fire!"

Monica stopped the car where she had both times before, pulling off the road onto a pasture access, out of sight of the house. She wore dark clothes and soft-soled dark shoes, for moving quietly without being seen. It was so easy to sneak up to the house on foot, leave her messages, and depart undetected. Leaving the package had required more planning, since it had been daylight, but Faith had simplified things by not being at home. It had just been a matter of slipping the package into the mailbox and driving away.

She got out of the car, pistol in hand, and stepped into the dark road. There wasn’t much traffic on this road even during the daytime, and if a car did come along, she would be able to both see and hear it in plenty of time to hide. In the meantime, the road was the easiest walking, and left no footprints.

There was a strange reddish glow in the night sky, just visible above the trees. Monica stared at it, puzzled. It was a few seconds before she realized what it was, and her eyes widened with alarm. The house was on fire, and Gray was there! Her throat closing on a moan of terror, she began to run.

Gray rolled off the bed and dragged her with him, down onto the floor where it was easier to breathe, though the acrid smoke still burned her throat and lungs with every breath. He grabbed her robe from the chair and thrust it at her. "Crawl into the hall, then put this on," he ordered, "and some shoes." He snagged his pants and shoes, jerking them on with three fast motions. "I’ll be right behind you."

She obeyed, glancing back several times to make certain he was there. Coughing violently, she pulled the robe around her.

Once in the hallway, they could see flames licking outside the bathroom window, too. Gray ignored it, crawling into the bathroom and snatching towels from the rack. By some miracle, there was still water pressure, and he soaked the towels in the sink. He was coughing and gagging as he tossed one sodden towel at her. "Put it over your face," he said hoarsely.

She did, holding the dripping material over her mouth and nose with one hand and crawling as best she could. The towel helped, and she breathed a bit easier.

The fire seemed to surround them, the wicked orange flames dancing every way they turned. The thick smoke filling the house reflected the glow, so that it seemed to come from all directions. How could it have spread so fast, so completely engulfing the house? The cackle of licking flame had become a roar as it grew stronger, consuming more and more of her home. The heat seared her skin, and sparks showered down like thousands of tiny glowing knives, pricking where they landed. The boards beneath her hands felt as if they were breathing, growing hotter and hotter, and she knew that soon the floor would combust. If they weren’t out before then, they would die.

Gray could feel the same thing. Faith wasn’t moving fast enough; her robe tangled around her legs, slowing her. Roughly he shouldered her aside so he could move in front of her. He gripped the collar of her robe and used it to pull her along, all but dragging her, forcing her to a faster pace. He could feel the floor getting hotter and hotter beneath them, and knew they had only a minute at most to get out, or it would be too late. He strained his eyes to see through the swirling smoke, and the relative darkness at the front of the house gave him a glimmer of hope. "The front door!" he roared, trying to make himself heard above the din of the inferno. "It isn’t burning yet!"

Her house was so small, but the front door seemed so far away. Faith’s lungs ached and burned, desperately pumping for air, but the fire was consuming all of the precious oxygen. Her sight dimmed, and she felt the world sliding sideways. The wood floor scraped her knees as Gray dragged her, and the pain roused her to greater effort. Gathering herself, she forced her muscles to keep moving as she silently repeated a litany of desperation: Don’t stop, don’t stop, if you stop Gray will too, don’t stop. Terror for his safety, above all, kept her moving.

Abruptly he staggered to his feet and hauled her upright, holding her clasped tightly to him. She stared dimly up at his beloved, smoke-blackened face. "Get ready!" he bellowed, and used his towel to cover the heated doorknob as he jerked the door open.

He ducked as flames licked in with a deep, whooshing sound, then just as quickly subsided. Picking Faith up, he tucked her under his arm as if she were a football, and ran through the burning portal.

His speed carried them off the porch, and they pitched into the empty darkness. Gray twisted in midair, trying to put his body between Faith and the ground, but he only partially succeeded and they sprawled on the grass with a bone-jarring impact. He heard her soft, gasping cry, but they were still dangerously close to the house and he couldn’t take the time to see if she was injured. He caught her under the arms and began pulling her. "Move! Get away from the house!"

"No," someone said hoarsely, with horror in the tone. The crackle and roar of the flames almost drowned out the words. "Gray, what are you doing here?"

Gray straightened slowly, pulling Faith up with him and automatically tucking her behind him. They were caught between two dangers, the fire at the back and the rifle in the hands of the man who had been his honorary uncle, and lifelong friend and advisor.

"No," Alex moaned, his eyes white-edged with panic. He shook his head in denial of Gray’s presence. "I thought she was alone! I swear, Gray, I would never have put you in danger – "

The heat on Gray’s naked back was intense, scorching his skin. Deliberately he moved forward, never taking his eyes away from Alex but desperate to get Faith away from that heat. He stopped as fits of coughing racked him. He could hear Faith coughing and gasping, and he kept a hard grasp on her arm, forcing her to stay shielded behind him.

Several ugly suspicions were crowding his mind, and all of them made him sick. When he could talk, he straightened and wiped his streaming eyes with a grimy hand. "You’re the one who’s been sending those notes, aren’t you?" he rasped, his voice so raw as to be almost unrecognizable. "And the cat – "

"No," Alex denied, his voice filled with ludicrous indignation, under the circumstances. "I wouldn’t do something like that."

"But you would set fire to a house and try to kill an innocent woman?" Gray asked coldly, the harshness of his voice making the words even more jarring.

"I hoped she would leave," Alex replied in a frighteningly reasonable tone. "But nothing you did made her leave, and neither did the notes. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t let her keep asking questions, and upsetting Noelle."

Gray gave a rasping crack of laughter. "You didn’t care whether or not Mother was upset," he snapped. "You were afraid she’d find out what happened to Dad!"

"That’s not true!" Alex said furiously. "I’ve always loved her! You know that!"

"Did you love her so much that you shot my father so you could have her?"

Gray bellowed the accusation at him, so infuriated by the danger to Faith and the realization that Alex had killed his father that it was all he could do to keep from leaping at Alex and strangling him with his bare hands. The only thing that held him back was the knowledge that, if he failed, Faith would die.

They still stood dangerously close to the burning house, the hellish light enveloping them in a red circle beyond which nothing else existed. Alex’s face twisted with pain. "I didn’t mean to!" he screamed. "I just wanted to stop him – he was going to divorce Noelle! The humiliation would have killed her! I tried to make him see reason, but he was determined. My God, how could any man prefer that slut over your mother? I think he was crazy, he had to be."

The irony of Alex calling Guy crazy wasn’t lost on Gray. Then, to his horror, Faith wrenched loose from his grasp and stepped out from the protection of his body. "So you shot him," she said, her own voice so raspy, he could barely hear her over the roar of the hungry flames. "And told my mother that you’d say she’d done it if she ever said anything. There wasn’t any doubt who would be believed in this town, was there?"

Alex glared at her with such hatred and fury that the rifle trembled in his hands, and Gray reached out to pull her close. He wasn’t afraid for himself; Alex’s horror at having endangered him had been genuine. But Faith – oh, God, even now, Alex still intended to kill her. Gray could see it written plainly in his eyes.

"I didn’t mind your moving back," Alex told her. "You didn’t have anything to do with what happened. But you wouldn’t keep your mouth shut, you kept asking questions, and you hired that old bastard to stick his nose into things – "

"Did you kill him, too?" she interrupted, her face twisting with rage. "Did you?"

"I had to, you stupid bitch!" Alex howled, beside himself with fury. "He got too close… he asked me if Noelle had had any affairs… She wasn’t like that – "

"Did you dump his body in the lake, the way you did Guy’s?" Faith spat, her entire body quivering. But it wasn’t fear Gray felt running through her, it was absolute fury, a mirror of his own, and he had a sudden nightmare vision of her going for Alex herself. There wasn’t much Faith wouldn’t dare, when she had made up her mind to do it. She had deliberately tried to stir up a killer and bring him out into the open, even though she’d known she was putting herself at risk.

Her plan had worked like a dream, he thought viciously. Now if he could just keep her from getting killed. Holding her with bruising force, he jerked her behind him again, trusting that Alex wouldn’t shoot through him to get to her.

She immediately began twisting, fighting to get away from him.

Alex stared at them as they struggled, Faith trying to get away from Gray so he wouldn’t be hurt, and Gray desperately trying to hold her close for the same reason. Alex’s handsome face twisted. "Let her go! She isn’t worth it, Gray. I’ll take care of her, and everything can go on the way it was. She’s only a Devlin; no one will care. She’s ruined everything! Guy was my best friend, damn it! I loved him! But he was dead… I had to do something."

"You could have turned yourself in," Gray pointed out, trying to keep a reasonable tone in his voice as he finally wrapped his arms around Faith and crushed her in his embrace. If he could lull Alex, then get close enough to knock the barrel of the rifle upward… He was much stronger than the older man, he could subdue him. "If it was an accident, you wouldn’t have – "

"Oh, please. I am a lawyer, Gray. The charge would have been involuntary manslaughter, not murder, but I still would have done time." Alex shook his head. "Noelle would never have spoken to me again… she wouldn’t associate with someone who had been in jail. I’m sorry, but it has to be this way." Lifting the rifle, Alex sighted along the barrel, and Gray knew he was going to fire.

He shoved Faith away, and charged Alex. He saw the rifle barrel track to the side, following Faith, and he plowed into Alex with more force than he had ever used playing football. The sharp crack of rifle fire split the night, and the hot casing hit his cheek as it ejected. He caught the rifle, shoving it upward as they hit the ground, but the impact broke his grip. With surprising speed Alex rolled away, springing to his feet and grabbing the rifle again. Gray got to his feet and began advancing on Alex. He didn’t dare glance at where Faith lay, couldn’t bear to see… The thought of losing her clawed at his gut with unbearable pain. Terror and rage combined in his chest, and Alex’s death was written on his stark features as he moved forward.

"Don’t," he pleaded, backing away a few steps. "Gray, don’t make me shoot you, too – "

"You bastard!"

The shriek came out of nowhere. Blinded by the fierce glare of the fire, Gray couldn’t see anything at first. Then Monica materialized out of the night, dressed head to toe in dark clothing that had cut down her visibility. His sister’s face was dead white, her dark eyes wild.

"You bastard!" she shrieked again, advancing on Alex like a Fury. The firelight gleamed on the barrel of the revolver in her hand. "All these years… you’ve been screwing me… pretending I was Mama… and you killed my father!"

Maybe Alex saw her intention to fire in Monica’s eyes. Maybe he was simply startled by her appearance, her screaming attack. For whatever reason, he swung the rifle around toward her. Gray leaped for him again, a roar of protest on his lips, knowing he couldn’t reach him in time any more than he’d been able to a moment before.

Monica closed her eyes and fired.

Twenty

"The bastard," Monica kept whispering in a drained, lifeless voice. "The bastard."

Faith sat in a county patrol car with Monica, holding her when she cried, letting her talk as she would. The door on her side of the car had been left open, while the one on Monica’s side had been closed; a subtle splitting of hairs on the part of the parish law enforcement. Monica didn’t seem to care that the door beside her didn’t have any inside handles. She was in shock, shivering occasionally despite the heat of the night, added to that from the fire, and Sheriff McFane himself had carefully spread a blanket over her.

Faith stared out the open door, feeling more than a little numb herself. It had all happened so quickly… The house was gutted, a total loss. Alex had poured gasoline all around the house and tossed a match to it, intending that she be trapped inside with no clear way out. Had she somehow managed to get out, he had been waiting with a rifle. It would have been assumed that she’d been killed by whoever had been sending her the notes, and since he was innocent of that, he’d felt safe. But Gray had hidden his car behind the shed, and in the darkness Alex hadn’t seen it. When Gray had come stumbling out of the burning house, Alex’s careful plans had been shattered. He had been shocked by Gray’s presence – Gray, whom he loved like a son. All they could do now was guess what Alex would have done, faced with that dilemma.

Her car, sitting so close to the house, was also a total loss. Without the key to crank the engine and pull it away, she had watched as a section of wall fell on it and set it afire. Gray’s Jaguar had been pulled away from the shed and now sat safely on the side of the road. The shed still stood, though. She stared at it through the smoke. Maybe she could sleep there, she thought with ghoulish humor.

Her small yard swarmed with people. The sheriff and his deputies, the volunteer firefighters, the fire medics, the coroner, the sightseers. God knows what so many people had been doing out that time of night, but an inordinate number of them had evidently followed all the flashing lights.

She watched Gray’s tall body, silhouetted against the dying blaze. He was talking to Sheriff McFane, a few yards away from Alex Chelette’s covered body. He was shirtless, his long hair flying around his bare shoulders, and even from here she could hear him coughing.

Her own throat felt like fire, and she could feel the stinging of several burns, on her hands and arms, her back, her legs. It hurt to cough, which didn’t stop her lungs from periodically trying to clear themselves, but all in all she felt lucky to be alive and in relatively good health.

"I’m sorry," Monica said abruptly. She was staring straight ahead. "I sent the notes… I just wanted to scare you into leaving. I never would have – I’m sorry."

Stunned, Faith sat back, then immediately straightened her sore back away from the seat. She started to say, "That’s all right," then changed her mind. It wasn’t all right. She had been frightened, and sickened. She had known there was a killer out there. Monica hadn’t known, but that didn’t excuse her. She hadn’t killed the cat, but that didn’t excuse her either. So Faith said nothing, leaving Monica to find her own absolution.

Faith watched as a medic approached Gray and tried to get him to sit down, tried to put an oxygen mask on him.

Gray shook him off, gesturing angrily, and pointed him toward Faith.

"I’m going to tell them," Monica said, still in that expressionless voice. "Gray and Michael. About the notes, and the cat. I won’t be arrested for shooting Alex… but I don’t deserve to go unpunished."

Faith didn’t have time to respond. The medic brought his equipment over to the patrol car, and squatted in the open door. His penlight flashed in her eyes, making her blink. He took her pulse, checked the burns on her hands and arms, tried to put the oxygen mask on her. She pulled away. "Tell him," she said, indicating Gray, "that I will when he does."

The medic stared at her, then gave a little grin. "Yes, ma’am," he said, and jauntily returned to his first reluctant patient.

Faith watched as he repeated what she’d said to Gray. Gray wheeled around to glare at her. She shrugged. Annoyed and frustrated, he grabbed the oxygen mask and with ill grace clapped it over his nose and mouth. He immediately began coughing again.

Because she had promised, she had to submit to treatment when it came her turn again. The medics agreed that her lung function was good, meaning that her smoke inhalation wasn’t critical. Her burns were mostly first-degree, with a few second-degree blisters on her back, and they wanted her to see Dr. Bogarde. Gray was in much the same shape. Both of them were extremely lucky.

Except he had lost a friend, and she had lost every possession except the robe on her back and the shoes on her feet. And an open shed, a lawn mower, and two rakes, she reminded herself. She had insurance on both the house and car, but it would take time to replace everything. Her tired mind began trying to catalogue all the things she would have to do: have her credit cards replaced, get new checks, buy new clothes, get a car, find a place to live, have her mail rerouted to somewhere.

So many things to do, and she was so tired that she felt incapable of accomplishing a single one. At least nothing was irreplaceable, except for the few photographs she’d had of Kyle. There were no other family mementos.

Alex’s body was eventually taken away. Monica stared at it being loaded in the hearse, for transport to the parish morgue. Because he had died by violent means, there would be an autopsy. "For seven years he used me," she whispered. "He pretended I was Mama." She shuddered. "How do I tell Michael?" she asked bleakly.

"Who’s Michael?"

Monica gave her a puzzled look. "The sheriff. Michael McFane. He’s asked me to marry him."

Faith sighed. The tangle just kept getting worse. "You don’t," she said, and touched Monica’s arm. "Put it behind you. Don’t hurt Michael by telling him. It won’t make you hurt any less, and it’ll give Alex just one more victim. Pick up from here and go on."

Monica didn’t reply, to either agree or disagree, but Faith hoped she took her advice. She had picked herself up enough times to know the value of going on.

Eventually both she and Gray were taken to Dr. Bogarde’s clinic and put in separate examining rooms. The dapper little doctor checked Gray first; Faith could hear them talking through the thin walls. Then he came bustling into the tiny room where she sat uncomfortably on the table. He cleaned and dressed her burns and checked her breathing, then gazed at her with a sympathetic eye.

"Do you have a place to sleep?"

Faith gave him a rueful smile and shook her head.

"Then why don’t you stay here? You look out on your feet. There’s a rollaway bed that we use sometimes, and you’re welcome to it. I can give you a set of scrubs to wear – don’t tell, but I sneaked them from the hospital in Baton Rouge." His eyes twinkled at her. "A few hours’ sleep will do wonders for you. My nurses get here at eight-thirty, and then you can call your insurance agent, buy clothes, handle all those things. Trust me, you’ll feel a lot more capable after you’ve had some sleep."

"Thank you," she said sincerely, accepting his offer. The difficulties of being virtually naked, without transportation, cash, or credit cards, were almost more than she could deal with at the moment. In the morning she could have Margot wire her some money, and she would begin the process of picking herself up again, but for tonight she simply couldn’t cope.

Dr. Bogarde left, and in a few minutes Gray came in. His torso and face were still streaked with black smoke, but the doctor had cleaned some patches and applied bandages, giving him the look of a large calico cat. Figuring she looked much the same, and not wanting to look in a mirror to verify it, she smiled at him.

His tired face moved into an answering smile. "Dr. Bogarde said you’re okay, but I wanted to see for myself."

"I’m fine, just tired."

He nodded, then simply put his arms around her and folded her against him, sighing deeply as he absorbed her nearness. Until he had seen that she was okay, merely stunned from her fall when he’d shoved her, he had lived in a hell of fear. The events of the night were still catching up with him; part of him felt numb, while another part was still aching with almost inexpressible grief. It didn’t matter that his father had been dead for twelve years; he had just learned of his death, so the pain was fresh. If anything had happened to Faith, too –

"Come home with me," he said, pressing his lips to her temple and smelling the smoke in her hair. He didn’t care.

Shocked, she drew back and stared at him. "I can’t do that," she blurted.

"Why not?"

"Your mother… No."

"Leave Mother to me," he said. "She won’t like it – "

"That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one!" Faith shook her head. "You can’t spring me on her at a time like this. Everything that’s happened tonight will be enough of a shock at one time. Dr. Bogarde offered to let me sleep here tonight, and I accepted."

"Forget it," he growled. He hated to admit she was right, but he could see that she wasn’t going to budge. "If you won’t come home with me, then I’ll take you to the motel."

"I don’t have any money or credit card – "

He set her away from him, and temper sparked in his dark eyes. "Damn it, Faith, did you think I’d charge you for the room?"

"I’m sorry," she apologized. "I’m used to paying my way, so I just didn’t think." A motel room would be more comfortable, and more private.

He sighed, and reached out to cup her cheek. The anger died out of his eyes. It was amazing how flowers could grow in the damnedest places, but the Devlin weed patch had sprouted quite a wildflower in Faith. "Come on," he said, helping her down from the examination table. "Let’s tell Dr. Bogarde you’re going with me."

Ten minutes later, he drove up to the motel office and wearily unfolded his long length from the Jaguar. There was still a lot to be done this hellish night. Uncaring how he looked, he went inside and got a key, returning in less than a minute to escort her to room number eleven. He unlocked the door, turned on the light, and stepped aside to let her enter. Tiredly Faith moved past him, and looked longingly at the bed. She would love to just lie down and sleep, but couldn’t bear the thought of getting the sheets filthy with soot.

Gray followed her inside, closed the door, and pulled her to him. She laid her head on his chest, shutting her eyes as she reveled in the feel of him, so hard and strong and vital. Death had been so close…

His fingers gently encircled one of her wrists, and he lifted her sooty fingers to his lips, then folded his hand around hers. "We start dragging the lake tomorrow," he said abruptly.

She rubbed her cheek against his hand, aching for him. "I’m sorry," she said gently.

He took a deep breath. "There’s a lot to be done. I don’t know when I’ll have a free minute."

"I understand. I have a’ lot to do myself. All of the insurance claims, things like that." It would have been nice if they could have leaned on each other during the coming ordeals, but necessity was pulling them in different directions. Because the dragging of the lake would be done under law enforcement authority, access to the process would be limited; she knew that without having to have it explained.

Gray would be there, but no other civilians not directly involved in the dragging operation would be allowed.

"I don’t want to leave you," he murmured, and indeed he seemed incapable of making himself move, despite everything else that had to be done before this long night was over.

"You have to. My problems are mostly paperwork and shopping; I can take care of them. You have more serious problems."

He tilted her head up with his fingers, dark eyes boring into hers. "We’ll talk when this is over," he said, the promise somehow sounding ominous. He kissed her, the pressure of his mouth warm and hard. "Call if you need me."

"All right."

He kissed her again, and she sensed his reluctance. She stroked his hair in comfort. "I don’t want to go," he confessed, resting his forehead against hers. "Twelve years ago I had to tell Mother that Dad had left her for another woman. Now I have to tell her that he was murdered, instead. The hell of it is, I know this won’t upset her as much as the first did."

"You’re not responsible for what she feels or doesn’t feel," Faith replied, touching her thumb to his lower lip. "You and Monica loved him, so he won’t be unmourned."

"Monica." Gray’s mouth tightened, and his eyes turned flinty. "She confessed what she did, about the notes and the cat. Michael’s all torn up about it. She broke several laws with that little caper."

"Let things settle down before you do anything," Faith advised. "Family’s family, after all. You don’t want to do anything rash and cause a breach. Remember, she’s been through a lot, too." Her own family was scattered to the four winds, and her life was littered with loss, so she knew what she was saying. She saw the swift acknowledgment of that reflected in Gray’s eyes.

A huge yawn overtook her, and her head dropped against his shoulder. "That’s my last piece of advice for the night," she said, and yawned again.

He kissed her forehead and eased her away from him. He had to force himself to leave her, but he knew if he didn’t do it now, he’d collapse on the bed with her. "Get some sleep, baby. Call if you need me."

She had one friend in town, Faith realized over the next few days. Whether Halley Johnson had learned from town gossip where Faith was staying and volunteered her own services, or Gray had called her and asked her to help, Faith didn’t know and didn’t ask. Halley knocked on the motel room door at ten o’clock the next morning, and put herself at Faith’s service.

Faith had already called Margot and arranged for money to be wired to her, but she still needed some means of getting to the bank to get the money. She also needed, quite desperately, to do some shopping, and she didn’t know if any of the stores in town would sell anything to her. The situation between herself and Gray had altered drastically, but no one in town knew it.

"First things first," Halley announced, when Faith said she had to go to the bank. She looked Faith over with a critical eye as she carefully walked out to get into Halley’s car. The burns weren’t all that uncomfortable, but Faith felt as if she’d been hit by a truck, probably the result of the two bone-jarring collisions she’d had with the ground. "I’ll take you to my house," Halley said. "Feel free to use my makeup, do your hair, pamper yourself a little. And while you’re doing that, if you’ll tell me your sizes, I’ll do some quick shopping for you. Nothing fancy," she said, holding up her hand when Faith opened her mouth to protest. "Just underwear, a pair of slacks and a shirt, so you can get out of that robe. You can pay me back when you pick up your money."

With it put to her like that, Faith couldn’t refuse. "Thanks," she said, smiling at Halley. "I was wondering if I’d be able to buy clothes in town."

"You will," Halley said with complete assurance, "or I’ll call Gray Rouillard myself, and tell him to straighten out his mess. Besides, the whole town’s buzzing with the news that his daddy didn’t really run off with your mama, that you figured he’d been killed and came back to town to try to prove it. We’re all just flabbergasted about Mr. Chelette. Imagine getting in an argument with his best friend and accidentally killing him, and trying to hide it all of these years! It must have driven him crazy, for him to burn down your house like that. Is it true he tried to shoot you, too, and Monica Rouillard managed to shoot first?"

"Something like that," Faith said faintly, wondering what the official version was. She didn’t want to contradict whatever was being told. As far as she knew, only she, Gray, and Monica knew about Monica’s unwilling seven-year affair with Alex.

Halley dropped her at her house, and Faith enjoyed another long, soaking shower, shampooing her hair twice with strawberry-scented shampoo before the stench of smoke was completely gone. She took Halley at her word and indulged in moisturizer from head to foot, after which she began to feel almost human again. She used a minimal amount of makeup, just enough to put a bit of color in her face, and blow-dried her hair. By the time she was finished, Halley was back with her packages, which blessedly included a new toothbrush.

The clothes were simple, cotton panties and bra, and a lightweight knit pants and tunic outfit. Just having underwear again was wonderful. She had been acutely aware of being naked beneath the robe and scrubs. Halley had a good eye for color; the knit outfit she’d selected was a flattering pale pink. A carroty redhead couldn’t have worn the color, but Faith’s hair was a dark, almost wine-colored red, and the knowledge that she looked good in the pink perked up her spirits.

Halley stayed with her most of the day, driving her where she needed to go: the bank, first and foremost. Having a thousand dollars in cash did wonders for her sense of security, and the first thing she did was reimburse Halley for her clothes. Next visit was to the insurance office, which thankfully was one-stop shopping, because the same company insured both house and car. Faith had recovered enough to be amused by the sympathetic, almost deferential treatment she received in the insurance office; the line between celebrity and notoriety was a very thin one, but evidently she was now on the celebrity side.

As the morning wore on, she was grateful for her new status. Because she was totally without identification, the insurance agent had to step in and verify everything before she could get replacement credit cards, credit card companies not being inclined to blithely send out cards to everyone who called. New cards were being expressed to her in care of the insurance agent, and would be there the next day. The insurance company also took care of a rental car for her, and one would be there that afternoon.

Next was shopping, and Faith needed so much that her mind boggled at the enormity of it. Even when she’d been run out of the parish, she hadn’t lost all her possessions, meager as they’d been. This time she was starting from scratch, but this time she also had resources.

Emcient Halley suggested they make a list, and that helped Faith get her thoughts organized. Suitcase, purse, wallet; shampoo, soap, deodorant, toothpaste, tampons; makeup and perfume; razor, brush, comb, hair dryer, travel iron; underwear, hosiery, shoes, clothing. "My God," Faith said, staring at the list, which kept getting longer and longer. "This will cost a fortune."

"Only because you’re buying it all at one time. Everything on there is something you would have bought anyway, eventually. What would you leave off, anyway? The makeup?"

"Get real," Faith said, and they laughed. It was her first laugh of the day, and it felt good.

They descended on the local Wal-Mart, and filled two carts. Even keeping her purchases to a minimum of the necessities, she was accumulating major stuff. None of the shoes fit, however, which meant another stop. Halley was so cheerful about the entire process, though, that Faith found herself enjoying the expedition. She had never participated in that rite of American girlhood, shopping with friends, and this was a new experience for her.

Halley unwittingly echoed her thoughts. "Wow, this is fun! I haven’t done this in a coon’s age. We need to do it again – under different circumstances, of course."

The total tally put a sizeable dent in her cash fund. That accomplished, Faith realized she was exhausted, and an observant Halley drove her back to the motel.

Gray called her that night, and he sounded as exhausted as she still felt. "How are you, baby?" he asked. "Did you get everything done today?"

"I’m fine," she said. "Functional, at least." She had taken a two-hour nap, but it hadn’t helped much. "The insurance company is handling the details with the rental car and credit card companies, so everything is working out. Halley took me shopping, so I have clothes now."

"Damn."

She ignored that comment, but a smile flirted with her mouth. "How do you feel?"

"As if I’m three days older than dirt."

She hesitated, not certain if she wanted to hear the answer to her next question. "Have you found anything yet?"

"Not yet." His voice was strained.

"How’s Monica?"

He sighed. "I don’t know. She just sits with her head down. She and Mike will have to work this out themselves; I can’t run interference for her on this."

"Take care of yourself," she said, tenderness vibrant in her tone.

"You, too," he said softly.

As soon as he hung up, Faith called Renee. She felt guilty for not having thought of it sooner, knowing how upset Renee had been.

Her grandmother answered the phone. When Faith asked for Renee, the old woman said in a fretful voice, "Guess she’s gone. Took her clothes and lit out, night before last. I ain’t heard from her."

Faith’s heart sank. Renee had probably panicked after confessing what had happened at the summerhouse, and now she was running again, for no reason.

"If you hear from her, Granny, there’s something I want you to tell her. It’s important. The man who killed Guy Rouillard is dead. She doesn’t have to be afraid anymore."

Her grandmother was silent a moment. "So that’s why she was so jumpy," she finally said. "Well, maybe she’ll call. She left some stuff, so she might come back for it. I’ll tell her, if she does."

Mr. Pleasant’s car was pulled from the lake the next afternoon. Mr. Pleasant was in it.

Probably on Gray’s orders, a deputy came to the motel to tell Faith. The young man was uncomfortable and respectful, twisting his hat in his hands. He couldn’t say how Mr. Pleasant had died, but the body was being taken to the parish morgue, where he would lie in the same room with his killer. Faith had to bite back an instinctive protest, knowing it would be useless.

After the deputy left, she sat down on the bed and had a good cry, then called Detective Ambrose. Poor Mr. Pleasant didn’t have any remaining family, but the detective promised to find out what he could about any arrangements Mr. Pleasant might have made for his own funeral, given the state of his health. There was red tape to go through, of course, since his death was a homicide, but with his killer already dead, gathering forensic evidence for a trial wasn’t an issue.

Guy Rouillard’s Cadillac was found the next morning, not far from where Mr. Pleasant’s car had been found. The long skeleton in the backseat was the only earthly remains of Gray’s father. Alex Chelette’s method of disposal had been simple: put them in their cars, prop a brick on the accelerator, and put the car in gear. Sheriff McFane was the one who had thought about finding the cars, and there were only three places on the lake where the water was deep enough to hide a car, and it was possible to get a car there. With their search locations narrowed down, it hadn’t taken them long to find the bodies.

Faith didn’t get to talk to Gray, but information flew around the town, and she knew he was ruthlessly using his influence to get Guy’s remains released as soon as possible, for a funeral twelve years delayed. Noelle Rouillard appeared in town for the first time since her husband’s disappearance, looking tragic and unbelievably beautiful in a black dress. Gray’s cynical assessment of his mother’s reaction had been on target; being a widow was far preferable to being abandoned. Now that everyone knew her husband had not left her for the town whore, she could hold her head up again.

The funeral was held four days after Guy’s remains were found. Though she knew people would whisper about her presence, Faith bought a black dress and attended the service, sitting on a back pew beside Halley and her family. Gray didn’t see her there at the church, but later, after the funeral procession had transported Guy’s body to the burial site, his dark gaze was drawn by the sunlight on her flaming hair.

He was standing with a supporting arm around Monica. Sheriff McFane was on her other side, so Faith supposed the engagement was still on. Noelle was bearing up with the sympathetic support of all her old friends, the ones she had refused to see for a dozen years. Faith was some ten yards away, separated from him by a group of people, but their eyes met and she knew he was thinking about what she had said. Guy was sincerely mourned by his children; what Noelle felt didn’t matter.

She stared at him, drinking him in with her eyes. He looked tired, but composed. His mane of hair was pulled back and secured at the back of his neck, and he wore a beautifully fitted, double-breasted black Italian suit. Sweat gleamed on his forehead in the noonday heat.

She made no move to go to him, and he didn’t gesture her closer. What was between them was private, not for public display at his father’s funeral. He knew he had her support, for he had cried out his grief in her arms. It was enough that she was there.

It was as they were leaving the grave site that Faith saw Yolanda Foster, standing by herself; Lowell was nowhere in evidence. Yolanda had been crying, but now her eyes were dry as she stared at the grave, an open look of heartbreak on her face. Then she gathered herself and turned away, and Faith felt all the pieces of the puzzle click into place.

It had never made sense that Guy would leave everything for Renee, not after all the years they’d been having an affair. Alex had said that Guy had been planning to divorce Noelle, and that had made more sense, but abruptly Faith knew that it wasn’t Renee Guy had been planning to marry. After all his years of tomcatting around, Guy Rouillard had fallen in love that summer, with the mayor’s wife. He had protected Yolanda’s reputation, not even telling his best friend about her. Gossip about them had leaked out, or Ed Morgan wouldn’t have known, but their affair hadn’t been common knowledge. It was even possible Renee had told Ed that Guy was seeing the mayor’s wife.

Yolanda and Guy had made secret plans. And now, after all these years, she knew that her lover hadn’t deserted her. Guy was sincerely mourned by someone other than his children, after all.

It was late that night before all of the sympathizers ran out of excuses to stay any longer, and Gray had a private moment with his family. He sipped his Scotch as he studied Noelle, who was infinitely more cheerful now after burying her husband than she had been during the twelve years he’d been missing. He needed Faith, he thought. He wanted to be with her. Seeing her at the cemetery had made the hunger even sharper. Sexual hunger, emotional hunger, mental hunger. He simply wanted her, in all the ways possible. He remembered the way his heart had swelled in his chest when she’d told him she loved him, remembered the moment of blinding joy. Like a fool, he hadn’t yet told her that he loved her, too, but that was an oversight he intended to rectify as soon as they could be alone.

Right now, he had something to say to his mother and sister.

"I’m getting married," he said calmly.

Two startled pairs of eyes looked back at him. He saw Monica’s dismay, saw it quickly change to acceptance, and she gave him a tiny nod.

"Really, dear?" Noelle murmured. "I’m sorry, I haven’t been keeping current with your social life. Is it someone from New Orleans?"

"No, it’s Faith Devlin."

Calmly Noelle set her glass of wine aside. "Your joke is in extremely bad taste, Grayson."

"It isn’t a joke. I’m marrying her as soon as it can be arranged."

"I forbid it!" she snapped.

"You can’t forbid anything, Mother."

Though he said it calmly, Noelle reacted as if he’d slapped her. She rose to her feet, holding herself as erect as a queen. "We’ll see about that. Your father may have associated with trash, but at least he never brought it home and expected me to associate with it!"

"That’s enough," he said, his tone soft and dangerous.

"On the contrary, if you lower yourself to marry that slut, you’ll find it’s just beginning. I’ll make her life here so miserable – "

"No, you won’t," he interrupted, slamming his glass down so that the Scotch sloshed over the rim. "Let me make your position plain, Mother. I know what’s in Dad’s will. He left you enough money to keep you in style, but he left everything else to Monica and me. If you behave yourself, and treat my wife with every courtesy, you may continue to live here. But make no mistake, the first time you upset her, I’ll escort you out the door myself. Is that clear?"

Noelle shrank back, her face pale, her eyes livid as she stared at her son. "Monica," she said, her voice abruptly frail. "Help me to my room, darling. Men are so uncivilized…"

"Put a sock in it, Mother," Monica said tiredly.

"I beg your pardon." The words were freezing.

Monica visibly braced herself. She was as pale as Noelle, but she didn’t back down. "I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But Gray deserves to be happy. If you don’t want to come to his wedding, fine, but I’ll be there with bells on. And while we’re on the subject, I’m getting married, too. To Michael McFane."

"Who?" Noelle asked, her face blank.

"The sheriff."

Disdain curled Noelle’s lip. "The sheriff! Really, dear, he’s – "

"Perfect for me," Monica finished firmly. She looked both scared and exhilarated at finally having stood up to Noelle. "If you want to come to my wedding, I’ll be pleased, but you can’t stop me from marrying him. And, Mother – I think you’ll be happier if you move to New Orleans."

"Good idea," Gray said, and winked at his sister.

The next morning, Faith drove down to New Orleans for Mr. Pleasant’s funeral. She had hoped Gray would call her, but understood why he hadn’t. She had pestered Sheriff McFane mercilessly about doing what he could to get Mr. Pleasant’s body released, and he had told her that Gray was embroiled in the process of having Guy’s will probated, using his influence to hurry the process. The legal difficulties of a forged letter of proxy, under which he had been governing their financial holdings all these years, were mostly negated since Guy’s will had left everything to Gray and Monica anyway, but there were still problems to handle.

Margot flew down to New Orleans to be with Faith, somehow discerning over the telephone that she was more upset about Mr. Pleasant than she had let on. The brief funeral service was attended by only a handful of people: some neighbors, herself and Margot, the little blue-haired lady from Houston H. Manges’s law office. To her surprise, Detective Ambrose came by, wearing what looked like the same fatigued suit. He patted Faith’s hand, as if she were Mr. Pleasant’s family, and all the while his cynical cop’s eyes never left Margot’s face.

Too tired to drive home, Faith got a hotel room for the night. Margot decided to stay overnight too – no surprise there – and went out with Detective Ambrose.

"I don’t sleep with men on the first date," Margot said the next morning, chattering nervously. "I mean, I just don’t. It’s too dangerous, and tacky besides." She couldn’t sit still as they ate their breakfast at the room service cart in Faith’s room; she fidgeted with her napkin, her silverware, her clothes. Her gaze flitted around the hotel room; hers was connecting, and virtually identical, but she seemed to find everything of immense interest. "I may be old-fashioned, but I think sex should wait at least until there’s a commitment, and waiting until marriage would be even better. Women risk too much by sleeping with men who aren’t their husbands – "

"So was he any good?" Faith interrupted, sipping her coffee.

Margot clapped her hand to her chest and rolled her eyes dramatically. "Oh my Gawd, was he!" She jumped up and began to pace the room. "I couldn’t believe what was happening, I just don’t do that, but that man had made up his mind and it was like being on a roller coaster, there was just no way to get off. Well, that’s not exactly what I mean. About getting off, that is, because I did – " She stopped and turned dark red. Faith almost choked on her coffee, she was laughing so hard.

"He wants to see me tonight, but I told him I have a flight back to Dallas, and he should call me at home if he wants to see me again." Margot looked anxious. "Do you think there’s any way I can slow this down and get back on the right track?"

"Maybe," Faith said, but she had seen Margot in love before, and doubted anything could slow her down.

They spent the morning shopping, replenishing Faith’s wardrobe from the chic New Orleans boutiques. She left the city about two o’clock, giving Margot both the privacy and time for another meeting with Detective Ambrose.

She arrived back at the motel, her temporary home, at four. Reuben waved to her, and came out to help her carry in her purchases. Then, hungry from the exertion, she drove downtown to Halley’s cafe.

She chatted with Halley for a while, then ordered the chicken salad sandwich that had become her usual supper. She was sitting in a booth with her back to the door, and her sandwich had just been placed in front of her, when she heard the door crash open behind her, and an abrupt silence fell over the cafe.

Startled, she looked up and found an enraged Gray Rouillard towering over her. Reuben must have called him, she thought absently. His black hair was loose, tangled around his shoulders. "Where the hell," he barked, "have you been?"

"New Orleans," she replied in a mild tone, though she was acutely aware of the breathless interest of everyone in the cafe.

"Would it be asking too much of you to let me know where you’re going to be?" he snapped.

"I went to Mr. Pleasant’s funeral," she said.

He slid into the booth opposite her, some of the fury fading from his face. Beneath the table, his long legs clasped hers, and he reached across to take both her hands in his. "I was scared sh – spitless," he confessed, quickly adjusting his first word choice to something more socially acceptable. "You hadn’t checked out, but Reuben saw you put a suitcase in the car. I even had him open your room to see if any of your things were still there."

"I wouldn’t have left town without telling you," she said, secretly amused that he thought she might have left town at all.

"You’d better not," he muttered. His hands tightened on hers. "Look," he began, and stopped. "Ah, hell, I know this isn’t the best place to do it, but I’ve still got tons of paperwork to wade through and I don’t know how long it’ll be before I see daylight. Will you marry me?"

He had succeeded in surprising her. He had gone beyond surprising her. She sat back, stunned into speechlessness. Gray wanted to marry her? She hadn’t dared let herself even think of it. With their tangled pasts… the thorny situation with his mother and sister… well, it just hadn’t seemed to be an option.

Evidently he took her reaction as rejection, and his dark brows drew together. Being Gray, he immediately took ruthless measures to get what he wanted. "You have to marry me," he said, loudly enough that everyone in the cafe could hear him. "That’s my baby girl you’re carrying. She’ll need a daddy, and you need a husband."

Faith gasped, her eyes rounding with horror. "You fiend," she shrieked, scrambling out of the booth. She wasn’t pregnant and she knew it, her period having arrived right on time, three days before. She had a confused, dizzying impression of a room full of avid faces, staring at her, and Gray wore a ruthlessly satisfied look on his face as he smiled at her, enjoying her sputtering, incoherent fury. Maybe he saw something in her eyes, a split second of warning, but it wasn’t enough. Her hand shot out for her glass of iced tea and she dashed it full in his face. "I am not pregnant!" she yelled.

Gray climbed out of the booth, wiping tea from his eyes with Faith’s napkin. "Maybe not now, but if you want to be, we’d better get married."

"Marry him," Halley advised, leaning over the counter. She was grinning hugely. "And make his life hell. He deserves it, after this stunt."

"Yeah," he said positively. "I deserve it."

Faith stared up at him. "But – what about your mother?" she asked helplessly.

He shrugged. "What about her?" Faith opened her mouth to yell at him again, and he grinned, holding up his hand. "I told her and Monica that I intended to marry you. Mother went into her acute disapproval syndrome, but Monica told her, literally, to put a sock in it. Funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Well, except for one." His eyes glittered at her, outrageously reminding her of the courthouse. "Monica gives us her best wishes; she and Michael are getting married next week. She strongly suggested to Mother that she move to New Orleans, which she’s always liked better than Prescott, anyway. So, baby, I’m going to be rattling around in that big house all by myself, and I need my own personal redhead to keep me company."

He meant it. Faith swallowed, once again unable to speak. Gray’s head tilted as he smiled down at her, dark eyes full of desire and tenderness. "There’s something else I’ve been meaning to tell you," he murmured. "I love you, baby. I should have told you sooner, but things started happening."

She thought of hitting him. She thought of snatching someone else’s tea to toss in his face. Instead she said, "Yes." He held out his arms, and she walked into them, to the accompanying spatter of applause from the cafe patrons.

All The Queen's Men

Copyright © 1999 by Linda Howard

PART ONE

Chapter One

1994, Iran

It was cold in the rough little hut. Despite the blankets hung over the one window and the ill-fitting door, to block the escape of any telltale light, frigid air still seeped through. Niema Burdock blew on her fingers to warm them, her breath fogging slightly in the one dim battery-operated light that was all Tucker, the team leader, allowed.

Her husband, Dallas, seemed perfectly comfortable in his T-shirt as he calmly packed the Semtex blocks into secure sections of his web gear. Niema watched him, trying to hide her anxiety. It wasn't the explosive she worried about; plastique was so stable soldiers in Vietnam had burned it as fuel. But Dallas and Sayyed had to plant the explosives in the manufacturing facility, and that was the most dangerous part of a job that was already hair-raising enough. Though her husband was as matter-of-fact about it as he would be about crossing the street, Niema wasn't that blase about the job. The radio detonator wasn't state-of-the art; far from it. This was deliberate, a precaution in case any of their equipment fell into the wrong hands. Nothing they were using could be traced to the United States, which was why Dallas was using Semtex instead of C-4. But because their equipment wasn't the best available, Niema had gone to great pains to make sure it was reliable. It was her husband's finger, after all, that would be on the switch.

Dallas caught her gaze on him and winked at her, his strong face relaxing from its normal impassiveness into a warm smile that he reserved only for her. "Hey," he said mildly, "I'm good at this. Don't worry."

So much for trying to hide her anxiety. The other three men turned to look at her. Not wanting them to think she couldn't handle the stress of the job, she shrugged. "So sue me. I'm new at this wife business. I thought I was supposed to worry."

Sayyed laughed as he packed his own gear. "Heck of a way to spend your honeymoon." He was a native Iranian who was now an American citizen, a tough, wiry man in his late forties. He spoke English with a Midwestern accent, the result of both hard work and almost thirty years in the United States. "Personally, I'd have picked Hawaii for my wedding trip. At least it would be warm there."

"Or Australia," Hadi said wistfully. "It's summer there now." Hadi Santana was of Arabic and Mexican heritage, but an American by birth. He had grown up in the heat of southern Arizona and didn't like the cold Iranian mountains in mid-winter any better than did Niema. He would stand guard while Dallas and Sayyed planted the charges and was occupying himself by checking and rechecking his rifle and ammunition.

"We spent two weeks in Aruba after we got married," Dallas said. "Great place." He winked at Niema again, and she had to smile. Unless Dallas had been to Aruba another time, he hadn't seen much of it during their honeymoon, three months before. They had spent the entire two weeks lost in each other's company, making love, sleeping late. Bliss.

Tucker didn't join in the conversation, but his cool, dark eyes lingered on Niema as if assessing her; wondering if he had made a mistake including her on the team. She wasn't as experienced as the others, but neither was she a novice. Not only that, she could put a bug on a telephone line with her eyes closed. If Tucker had any doubts about her ability, she wished he would just come out and say so.

But if Tucker had doubts about her, then turnabout was fair play, she thought wryly, because she sure as hell wasn't certain about him. Not that he'd said or done anything wrong; the uneasiness that kept her on edge around him was instinctive, without any concrete reason. She wished he was one of the three men going into the plant, rather than remaining behind with her. The thought of spending the hours alone with him wasn't nearly as nerve-racking as knowing Dallas would be in danger, but she didn't need the added tension when her nerves already felt stretched and raw.

Tucker originally had planned to go in, but Dallas was the one who had argued against it. "Look, boss," he had said in that calm way of his. "It isn't that you can't do the job, because you're as good as I am, but it isn't necessary that you take the risk. If you had to, that would be different, but you don't." An indecipherable look had flashed between the two men, and Tucker had given a brief nod.

Dallas and Tucker had known each other before Tucker put this team together, had worked together before. The only thing that reassured Niema about the team leader was that her husband trusted and respected him, and Dallas Burdock was no one's pushover-to the contrary, in fact. Dallas was one of the toughest, most dangerous men she had ever met. She had thought he was the most dangerous, until she met Tucker.

That in itself was scary, because Dallas was something else. Until five months ago, she hadn't really believed men like him existed. Now, she knew differently. Her throat tightened as she watched her husband, his dark head bent as he once again focused all his attention on his supplies and equipment. Just like that, he could tune out everything but the job; his power of concentration was awesome. She had seen that level of concentration in only one other man: Tucker.

She felt a sudden little ping of disbelief, almost a suspension of reality, that she was actually married, especially to a man like Dallas. She had known him for just five months, loved him for almost as long, and in so many ways he was still a stranger to her. They were slowly learning each other, settling down into the routine of marriage-well, as routine as it could get, given their jobs as contract agents for various concerns, principally the CIA.

Dallas was calm and steady and capable. Once she would have described those characteristics as desirable, if you were the domestic suburban type, but basically unexciting. Not now. There was nothing staid about Dallas. Need a cat out of a tree? Dallas could climb that tree as if he were a cat. Need the plumbing fixed? Dallas could fix it. Need to be dragged out of the surf? He was a superior swimmer. Need someone to make a difficult shot? He was an expert marksman. Need to blow up a building in Iran? Dallas was your man.

So it took some doing to be tougher and more dangerous than Dallas, but Tucker ... somehow was. She didn't know why she was so certain. It wasn't Tucker's physical appearance; he was tall and lean, but not as muscular as Dallas. He wasn't edgy; if anything, he was even more low-key than Dallas. But there was something in his eyes, in his characteristic stillness, that told her Tucker was lethal.

She kept her doubts about the team leader to herself. She wanted to trust Dallas's opinion of Tucker because she trusted her husband so much. Besides, she was the one who had really wanted to take this job, while Dallas had been leaning toward a diving trip to Australia. Maybe she was just letting the tension of the situation get to her. They were, after all, on a job that would get them all killed if they were discovered, but success was even more important than escaping detection.

The small facility buried deep in these cold mountains was manufacturing a biological agent scheduled to be shipped to a terrorist base in Sudan. An air strike would be the fastest, most efficient way to destroy it, but that would also trigger an international crisis and destroy the delicate balance of the Middle East along with the factory. A full-scale war wasn't what anyone wanted.

With an air strike ruled out, the plant had to be destroyed from the ground, and that meant the explosives had to be hand-placed, as well as powerful. Dallas wasn't relying just on Semtex to do the job; there were fuels and accelerants in the factory that he planned to use to make certain the plant didn't just go boom, but that it burned to the ground.

They had been in Iran five days, traveling openly, boldly. She had worn the traditional Muslim robes, with only her eyes revealed, and sometimes they had been veiled, too. She didn't speak Farsi-she had studied French, Spanish, and Russian, but not Farsi-but that didn't matter because, as a woman, she wasn't expected to speak. Sayyed was a native, but from what she could tell, Tucker was as fluent as Sayyed, Dallas nearly so, and Hadi less than Dallas. She was sometimes amused by the fact that all five of them were dark-eyed and dark-haired, and she wondered if her coloring hadn't played nearly as large a part in her having been chosen to be a team member as had her skill with electronics.

"Ready." Dallas hooked the radio transmitter to his web gear and shouldered the knapsack of plastique. He and Sayyed had identical gear. Niema had practically assembled the transmitters from spare parts, because the transmitters they had acquired had all been damaged in some way. She had cannibalized them and built two she had tested and retested, until she was certain they wouldn't fail. She had also tapped into the factory's phone lines, a dead-easy job because their equipment was of early-seventies vintage. They hadn't gotten much information from that, but enough to know their intel was accurate, and the small facility had developed a supply of anthrax for terrorists in Sudan. Anthrax wasn't exotic, but it was sure as hell effective.

Sayyed had slipped into the facility the night before and reconnoitered, returning to draw a rough floor plan showing where the testing and incubation was done, as well as the storage facility, where he and Dallas would concentrate most of their explosives. As soon as the factory blew, Tucker and Niema would destroy their equipment-not that much of it was worth anything-and be ready to move as soon as the three men returned. They would split up and each make their own way out of the country, rendezvousing in Paris to debrief. Niema, of course, would be traveling with Dallas.

Tucker extinguished the light, and the three men slipped silently out the door and into the darkness. Niema immediately wished she had at least hugged Dallas, or kissed him good luck, no matter what the other three thought. She felt colder without his bracing presence.

After making certain the blankets were in place, Tucker switched on the light again, then began swiftly packing the things they would take with them. There wasn't much; a few provisions, a change of clothes, some money; nothing that would arouse suspicion if they were stopped. Niema moved to help him, and in silence they divided the provisions into five equal packs.

Then there was nothing to do but wait. She moved over to the radio and checked the settings, though she had checked them before; there was nothing coming over the single speaker because the men weren't talking. She sat down in front of the radio and hugged herself against the cold.

Nothing about this job had been a picnic, but the waiting was the worst. It always had been, but now that Dallas was in danger, the anxiety was magnified tenfold. It gnawed at her, that internal demon. She checked her cheap wristwatch; only fifteen minutes had lapsed. They hadn't had time to reach the facility yet.

A thin blanket settled over her shoulders. Startled, she looked up at Tucker, who stood beside her. "You were shivering," he said in explanation of his unusual act and moved away again.

"Thanks." She pulled the blanket around her, uncomfortable with the gesture, considerate though it was. She wished she could ignore her uneasiness about Tucker, or at least figure out why she was so wary of him. She had tried to hide her wariness and concentrate only on the job, but Tucker was no one's fool; he knew she was uncomfortable with him. Sometimes she felt as if they were in a silent battle no one else knew about, those rare times when their gazes would accidentally meet and distrust would be plain in hers, a slightly mocking awareness in his.

He never put a foot wrong, though, never did anything that would bring their discord into the open. His relationship with all three of the other men was both easy and professional. With her, he was unfailingly polite and impersonal, and even that was a measure of his professionalism. Tucker respected Dallas and certainly wasn't going to disrupt the team or endanger the job by openly antagonizing his wife. That should have reassured Niema on a couple of levels-but it didn't.

Until he put the blanket around her shoulders, there hadn't been a word spoken between them since the others left. She wished it had remained that way; keeping Tucker at a distance, she thought, was the safest place for him.

He sat down, as relaxed and graceful as a cat. He seemed impervious to the cold, comfortable in a black T-shirt and fatigue pants. Dallas had the same sort of internal furnace, because he seldom felt the cold either. What was it about men like them that made them bum so much hotter than the rest of the human race? Maybe it was their physical conditioning, but she herself was in very good shape and she had been cold the entire time they had been in Iran. She didn't wish they were cold, too, just that the damn anthrax facility had been built in the warm desert, instead of these chilly mountains.

"You're afraid of me."

The comment, coming out of the blue, startled her more than it had when he put the blanket around her, but not enough that she lost her composure. His voice had been calm, as if he were discussing the weather. She gave him a cool look. "Wary," she corrected. If he thought she would hasten to deny her uneasiness, the way most people would do when cornered, he was mistaken. As Dallas had learned, to his amusement more often than not, there wasn't much that could make Niema back down.

Tucker leaned his dark head back against the cold stone wall and drew one leg up, draping his arm loosely over his knee. Unreadable brown eyes studied her. "Wary, then," he conceded. "Why?"

She shrugged. "Feminine intuition?"

He began to laugh. Laughter wasn't something she had associated with Tucker, but he did it easily, his dark head tilted back against the wall. The sound was genuinely amused, as if he couldn't help himself.

Niema watched him, one eyebrow tilted as she waited for him to stop. She didn't feel the least impulse to join in his laughter, or even to smile. Nothing about this situation was funny. They were deep in Iran on a job that could get them all killed, and oh, by the way, she didn't trust the team leader one inch, ha ha ha. Yeah, right.

"Jesus," he groaned, wiping his eyes. "All this because of feminine intuition?" A shade of incredulousness colored his tone.

Niema gave him a stony look. "You make it sound as if I've been attacking you left and right."

"Not overtly, at least." He paused, a smile still curving his mouth. "Dallas and I have worked together before, you know. What does he say about your suspicions?"

He was utterly relaxed as he waited for her answer, as if he already knew what Dallas would have said- if she had mentioned her feelings to him, that is. She hadn't uttered a word of misgiving to him, though. For one thing, she had nothing concrete to offer, and she wasn't about to stir up trouble without proof other than her feminine intuition. She didn't discount her uneasiness, but Dallas was a man who dealt in hard realities, who had learned to disconnect his emotions so he could function in the dangerous field he had chosen. Moreover, he obviously liked, trusted, and respected Tucker.

"I haven't talked to him about it."

"No? Why not?"

She shrugged. Other than not having proof, her main reason for not talking to Dallas about Tucker was that her husband hadn't been wild about her coming on this job anyway, and she didn't want to give him an opportunity to say I told you so. She was good at what she did, but she didn't have the field experience the others had, so she was reluctant to cause trouble. And, she admitted, even had she known she wouldn't be comfortable with Tucker, she would have come anyway. Something primitive in her thrilled to the tension, the danger, the utter importance of what she did. She had never wanted a nine-to-five; she wanted adventure, she wanted to work on the front line. She wasn't going to do anything to jeopardize a job she had worked hard to attain.

"Why not?" Tucker said again, and a hint of steel underlay the easiness of his tone. He wanted an answer, and she suspected he usually got what he wanted.

Oddly, though, she wasn't intimidated. Part of her even relished this little showdown, getting their animosity out into the open and going one-on-one with Tucker.

"What difference does it make?" She returned his cool look with one of her own. "Regardless of my suspicions about you, I'm doing my job and keeping my mouth shut. My reasons aren't any of your business. But I'd bet the farm your real name isn't Darren Tucker."

He grinned suddenly, surprising her. "Dallas said you were stubborn. Not much of a reverse gear, was the way he put it," he said, settling his shoulders more comfortably against the wall.

Because Niema had heard Dallas mutter something very close to that, after one of the few times they had gone head to head about something, she found herself smiling, too.

In that more relaxed atmosphere he said, "What makes you think my name isn't Tucker?"

"I don't know. Darrell Tucker is a good-old-boy Texas name, and every so often I hear a little bit of Texas in your accent, so the accent and the name fit- but you don't, somehow."

"I've traveled a bit since I left home," he drawled.

She clapped her hands twice in mocking applause. "That was very well done. A homey piece of phrasing, the accent a little heavier."

"But you don't buy it."

"I bet you're very good with a lot of accents."

Amused, he said, "Okay, you aren't going to believe me. That's fine. I don't have any way of proving who I am. But believe me in this: My priorities are getting that building blown and all of us safely home."

"How can you get us home? We're splitting up, remember?"

"By doing all my preliminary work right, by anticipating as many problems as I can and taking steps to counteract them."

"You can't anticipate everything, though."

"I try. That's why my hair is going gray, I sit up nights worrying."

His hair was as dark as her own, without a silver thread showing. His sense of humor was wry, tending toward the ironic; she wished he hadn't shown it to her, wished he had maintained the silence between them. Why hadn't he? Why now, of all times, had he suddenly breached the armed truce?

"We're in."

She whirled to the radio set as the whispered words came plainly through the speaker. Incredulously she checked the time; thirty minutes had passed since she had last looked. She had been so focused on her confrontation with Tucker that she had forgotten to fret.

Like a flash, she knew: That was why he had done it. He had distracted her, using the one subject he knew she wouldn't be able to ignore.

Tucker was already at the radio, slipping on a Motorola headset. "Any problems?"

"Negative."

That was all, just three whispered words, but they were in her husband's voice and Niema knew that for now, at least, he was all right. She leaned back and focused on her breathing, in, out, keeping the rhythm regular.

There was nothing Tucker could do now to distract her, short of physical violence, so he left her alone. She checked the radio settings, though she knew they were right. She wished she had checked the radio detonator one more time, just to be certain. No-she knew it was working perfectly. And Dallas knew what he was doing.

"Has Dallas ever told you about his training?"

She flicked an impatient glance at Tucker. "I don't need distracting. Thanks for doing it before, but not now, please."

A faint quirk of his brows betrayed his surprise. "So you figured it out," he said easily, and she immediately wondered if distracting her had indeed been his intention. Tucker was so damn elusive that even when you thought you had him read, it was possible you were reading only what he intended you to read. "But this is more in the way of reassurance. Do you know about his training?"

"That he took BUD/S? Yes." BUD/S was Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training: extensive, and so grueling only a tiny percentage of men who tried actually completed the course.

"But has he told you what that training entailed?"

"No, not in detail."

"Then take my word for it, Dallas can do things no ordinary man would ever dream of doing."

"I know. And-thanks. But he's still human, and plans can go wrong-"

"He knows that. They all do. They're prepared."

"Why didn't he want you to go in?"

There was an infinitesimal pause, so brief she wasn't certain she had heard it. "Despite what he said, Dallas doesn't think I'm as good as he is," Tucker said with wry humor.

She didn't believe him. For one thing, Dallas respected him too much. For another, that tiny pause before he spoke told her he had been weighing his response, and his answer wasn't one that had required any weighing.

Whoever he was, whatever he was hiding, Niema accepted that she wasn't going to get any straight answers from him. He was probably one of those paranoid spooks everyone read about, who saw spies and enemies everywhere, and, if you asked him if it was supposed to rain the next day, would wonder what you were planning that required bad weather.

Sayyed's voice whispered over the radio. "Trouble. Activity in the warehouse. Looks like they're getting ready to make a shipment."

Tucker swore, his attention immediately focused on the situation. It was imperative the warehoused store of bacteria be completely destroyed before a shipment was made. The warehouse was usually deserted at night, with guards posted outside, but now there was activity that prevented Sayyed from planting his charges.

"How many?" Tucker asked.

"I make it. . . eight. . . no, nine. I took cover behind some barrels, but I can't move around any."

They couldn't let that shipment leave the warehouse.

"Dallas." Tucker spoke the name quietly into his headset.

"I'm on the way, Boss. My charges are set."

Niema's nails dug into her palms. Dallas was going to Sayyed's aid, but they would still be badly outnumbered, and by moving, Dallas was risking exposure. She reached for the second headset; she didn't know what she was going to say to her husband, but she didn't have the chance. Tucker's hand shot out; he jerked the plug out of the radio set and tossed the headset aside, his dark gaze cool and hard as he met her stunned look.

She found herself on her feet, her shoulders braced, hands knotted into fists. "He's my husband," she said fiercely.

Tucker put his hand over the tiny microphone. "And he doesn't need the distraction of hearing you now." He added deliberately, "If you try anything, I'll tie and gag you."

She wasn't without some training herself, and Dallas, once he realized he couldn't convince her to play it safe and sit home like a good little wife, had been teaching her how to fight in ways her self-defense class had never covered. Still, her level of expertise in no way matched his, or Tucker's. The only way she could take him, she thought, was to catch him totally by surprise, from behind.

But he was right. Damn it, he was right. She didn't dare say anything that could break Dallas's concentration.

She held up her hands in a brief gesture of surrender and moved three steps away. The hut was so small she couldn't go much farther anyway. She sat down on a pack of provisions and tried to beat down the suffocating waves of anxiety.

The minutes crawled by. She knew Dallas was creeping toward the warehouse section, using every bit of cover available to him, trying not to take chances. She also knew that every passing second put the terrorists that much closer to leaving with the shipment of bacteria. Dallas would be balancing caution with expediency.

Tucker spoke into the headset. "Sayyed. Report."

"I can't budge an inch. The truck is almost loaded."

"Two minutes," Dallas said.

Two minutes. Niema closed her eyes. Cold sweat trickled down her back. Please, she found herself praying. Please. She couldn't form any words other than that.

Two minutes could be a lifetime. Time itself could be strangely elastic, stretching until every second was ponderous, until the second hand on her watch seemed almost motionless.

"I'm in position."

The words almost broke her control. She bit her lip until the taste of blood filled her mouth.

"How does it look?"

"Sayyed's got his ass in a crack, all right. Hey, buddy, how many charges did you get set?"

"One."

"Shit."

One wasn't enough. Niema had listened to them, knew how many charges Dallas estimated it would take to completely destroy the facility.

"Hadi?"

"In position. Can't help you much."

"Start pulling back." Dallas's voice was even. "Sayyed, arm all the charges."

There was another silence, then Sayyed's, "Done."

"Get ready. Throw the pack under the truck, then run tike hell. I'll lay down covering fire. I'm gonna give us Jive seconds to get outta here before I hit the button."

"Damn. Maybe you should make it six," Sayyed said.

"Ready." Dallas was still utterly calm. "Go!"

Chapter Two

The staccato thunder of gunfire blasted from the radio speaker. Niema jerked as if some of the bullets had hit her, her hands pressed hard to her mouth to hold back the scream that clogged her throat. Tucker swung around to face her, as if he didn't trust her to keep silent. He needn't have worried; she was frozen in place. There was an animal-like sound, cut short. "Son of a bitch! Sayyed bought it." "Pull out," Tucker said, but there was a renewed burst of gunfire that drowned out his words.

And from the tinny speaker came a sound that made the hair on Niema's neck stand on end, a kind of hollowed-out grunt, underlaid by gunfire and a thudding sound.

"Ah . . . shit." The words were strained, thin; she could barely recognize Dallas's voice.

"Hadi!" Tucker barked. "Dallas is down. Get him-"

"No." The word came on an exhalation, long and deep.

"Hang on, buddy, I can be there-" Urgency was plain in Hadi's voice.

"Save yourself. . . the trouble. I'm gut shot."

The world went gray around her. Niema fought back the shock, fought back the sensation of her entire body falling apart as the bottom dropped out of her stomach and her lungs seized, unable to pump. Gut shot. Even if he had been in the States, with a trauma unit nearby, the injury was critical. Here in these cold, isolated mountains, with safety and cutting-edge medical help days away, it was a death sentence. She knew this; her mind knew it. But she rejected it anyway, recoiling from the knowledge.

There were more shots, very close. Dallas was still shooting, still holding them off.

"Boss ..." The whisper floated around the hut.

"I'm here." Tucker was still facing Niema, his gaze locked on her.

"Is . . . Can Niema hear?"

Dallas had to be going into shock, or he would never have asked, would have realized she could hear everything. She had wired the switch open.

Tucker's gaze never wavered from her. "No," he said.

More shots. The sound of Dallas's breathing, shallow and quick. "Good. I. . . I've still got the detonator. Can't let them leave with . . . that shit."

"No," Tucker said again. "You can't." His voice was almost gentle.

"Take . . . take care of her."

Tucker's face was a mask, his gaze locked on her face. "I will." He paused, and said, "Do it."

The explosion shook the hut, sending dirt cascading down from the cracks in the ceiling, rattling the door on its frame. The blast wave hadn't passed before Tucker was moving, ripping the headset from his ears and tossing it down. He picked up a hammer and began methodically destroying the radio; even though it was old and obsolete, it was functional, and their plan was to leave nothing that could be used. Reducing the radio to rubble took half a minute.

That done, he pulled Niema away from the packs of provisions and swiftly began repacking them, redistributing what they would carry. She stood numbly in the middle of the hut, unable to move, her brain frozen with shock. She was aware of pain; there was a great, clawing pain in her chest, as if her heart were exploding, and even that was somehow felt as if from a distance.

Tucker thrust a heavy coat at her. Niema stared at it, unable to comprehend what he wanted her to do with it. Silently he bundled her into it, putting her arms into the sleeves as if she were a toddler, zipping it up, tucking her hair under the collar as an extra buffer for her neck. He tugged gloves on her hands, and put a warm fur hat on her head.

He pulled a heavy sweater on over his head, then shrugged into his own coat. As he was pulling on his gloves, a low whistle sounded outside the hut, and he extinguished the light. Hadi slid in the door, and Tucker turned the light on again.

Even in the weakness of the single light, Hadi's face was drawn and white. He looked immediately at Niema. "God-" he began, only to be silenced by a quick motion from Tucker.

"Not now. We have to move." He shoved one of the consolidated packs into Hadi's arms, and slung the other two onto his own shoulders. He picked up a rifle, took Niema's arm, and led her into the night.

Their transportation, an old Renault, had died on them the first night, and all of Tucker's mechanical expertise could not repair a broken axle. Hadi glanced worriedly at Niema. She hadn't faltered during the two days they had been moving; she was like a robot, keeping pace with them no matter how hard Tucker pushed them. She spoke when they asked her a direct question; she ate when Tucker gave her food, drank when he gave her water. What she hadn't done was sleep. She would lie down when he told her to, but she hadn't slept, and her eyes were swollen with fatigue. Both men knew she couldn't go on much longer.

"What are you going to do?" Hadi asked Tucker, keeping his voice low. "Do we split up as originally planned, or stay together? You may need help getting her out."

"We split up," Tucker said. "It's safer that way. A woman traveling with two men would attract more attention than a man and his wife."

They were traveling northwest, through Iran's most populated area, but that was the only way to get to Turkey, and safety. Iraq was due west, Afghanistan and Pakistan were to the east, the splinter nations left by the breakup of the Soviet Union to the northeast, the Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf to the south, through very inhospitable desert. Turkey was their only feasible destination. From here on out, Niema would have to wear the traditional Muslim chador.

They had traveled at night at first, the better to avoid detection if there was any pursuit, though it was possible Sayyed and Dallas were thought to be the only saboteurs. It was even possible, Tucker thought, that no word of intruders had gotten out. The facility had been remote, with only one phone line going in. Dallas could well have pushed the button before anyone got to the phone, assuming any of the workers thought to make a call anyway.

The building was charred rubble. Tucker himself had reconnoitered, leaving Niema under Hadi's worried and watchful eye. As always, Dallas had been thorough; what the plastique hadn't destroyed, the fire had.

That was the one time Niema had spoken without first being asked something. When Tucker returned she stared at him, her dark eyes fathomless, haunted, somehow hopeful. "Did you find him?" she asked.

Startled, keeping it hidden, he said, "No."

"But-his body . . ."

She wasn't clinging to an irrational hope that Dallas was still alive. She wanted his body for burial.

"Niema . . . there's nothing left." He said it as gently as he could, knowing there was nothing he could do to cushion the blow but trying anyway. She had been a trooper all through the job, but now she looked so damn fragile.

Nothing left. He saw the words hit her, saw her reel with the shock. She hadn't asked anything since, not even for water. His own stamina was so great he could go for long periods before he was aware of thirst, so he couldn't rely on his own needs to remind him of hers. He set a time limit: Every two hours, he made her drink. Every four, he made her eat. Not that there was any making to it; she accepted whatever he gave her, without protest.

Now it was time for them to split up, as planned, but instead of Niema going with Dallas she would now be staying with him, while Hadi made his own way out of the country.

Tomorrow they would be in Tehran, where they would blend in with the population. Tucker would then make secure contact and, if there was no trouble, acquire transportation. Another day after that, and they would be just across the border from Turkey. He would abandon the vehicle and they would walk across during the night, in a remote location he had already scouted. Hadi would cross over at another point.

Hadi scratched his beard. Neither of them had shaved for two weeks, so they were decidedly scruffy. "Maybe I could scrounge around tomorrow when we get to Tehran, find a pharmacy, buy some sleeping pills or something. She's got to sleep."

They had stopped for a brief rest, sheltered by the lone remaining wall of a small mud house that had long since been abandoned. Niema sat a little way off to the side, alone in a way that went far beyond the slight distance between her and them. She didn't fidget. She just sat. Maybe if she cried, Tucker thought. Maybe if she let some of it out, exhausted herself, she would be able to sleep. But she hadn't cried; the shock had gone too deep, and she hadn't yet recovered from that enough for tears. The time for crying would come later.

He considered Hadi's suggestion, but didn't like the idea of drugging her, in case they had to move fast. Still.. . "Maybe," he said, and left it at that.

They had rested long enough. Tucker stood, signaling that the break was over. Niema stood too, and Hadi moved forward to help her over some loose, unbaked mud bricks. She didn't need the help, but Hadi had become as protective of her as a mother hen.

He stepped on a loose board. It tilted up and dislodged some of the bricks just as Niema stepped on them, shifting them out from under her feet. She staggered off balance, slipped, and landed on her right shoulder in the rubble.

She didn't cry out, her training not to make any unnecessary noise still holding. Hadi swore softly, apologizing as he helped her to her feet. "Damn, I'm sorry! Are you all right?"

She nodded, brushing at her clothes, her shoulder. Tucker saw the slight frown knit her brows as she brushed her shoulder again, and even that much expression was so alien to her face these past two days that he knew immediately something was wrong.

"You're hurt." He was beside her before he stopped speaking, pulling her away from the rubble.

"Did you jam your shoulder?" Hadi asked, frowning with concern.

"No." She sounded puzzled, no more, but she twisted her neck to look at the back of her shoulder. Tucker turned her around. There was a small tear in her shirt, and blood was welling from it.

"You must have fallen on something sharp," he said, and thought maybe the damage had been done by a shard of brick, but then he saw the rusty nail protruding about an inch out of a rotten board.

"It was a nail. Good thing you had a tetanus booster." He efficiently unbuttoned her shirt as he spoke. She wasn't wearing a bra, so he only undid the first few buttons, then pulled the shirt off the injured shoulder.

The puncture wound was purplish and already swelling, sullenly oozing blood. The nail had gone in high and right of her shoulder blade, in the fleshy part just beside her arm. He pressed on it to make the blood run more freely. Hadi had already opened their meager first-aid kit and extracted some gauze pads, which he used to mop up the blood as it ran down.

Niema stood motionless, letting them tend to the wound, which Tucker supposed was minor in relation to the concern both he and Hadi were showing. Any wound or injury that caused a delay was dangerous, because it would force them to stay in Iran even longer, so their concern was based in logic; but the biggest part of it, Tucker admitted, was the male instinct to protect the female. Not only was she the only woman with them, but she was already wounded, emotionally if not physically. Add in the fact that she was a lovely young woman who had quickly endeared herself to the team with her guts and wit, and of course they were jumping to protect her.

Mentally, he knew all the reasons, instinctive as well as personal. On a gut level, he knew he would move mountains to prevent anything from adding to the load of pain she already carried. He had promised Dallas he would take care of her, and no matter what it cost, he would keep that promise.

Sunlight gleamed on her bare shoulder, turning her skin to pearl. She had a pale complexion, despite the darkness of her hair and eyes. The elegant slant of her collarbone was exposed, and even as he applied an antibiotic ointment to the wound, Tucker couldn't help admiring the graceful structure of her body. She was remarkably feminine, despite her rough clothing and the fact that she wore no makeup, her hair wasn't combed, and all of them really, really needed a bath. She looked so female and elegant, he had constantly been surprised by her toughness.

"She looks like someone you want to put on a pedestal and keep from ever getting dirty or hurt," Dallas had said, before Tucker had ever met Niema, when he was putting the team together. "But she'd kick you in the teeth if you tried." He'd said it with intense male satisfaction, because she was his, and Tucker had shaken his head in wonder at seeing Dallas Burdock so obviously, unabashedly in love.

Tucker plastered a large adhesive bandage over the wound, then drew her shirt back up onto her shoulder. He would have buttoned the garment for her but she did it herself, her head bent over the task, her fingers slow.

Her reaction time was way off, dulled by shock and fatigue. If anything happened that necessitated quick action, he didn't think she could function. She had to get some sleep, he thought, one way or another.

He motioned for Hadi to step aside with him. "I'm not going to push her any further. According to the map, there's a small village about fifteen miles north of here. Think you can liberate some wheels for us?"

"Is the Pope Catholic?"

"Don't take any chances. We can't risk any pursuit. Wait until late at night, if necessary."

Hadi nodded his assent.

"If you aren't back by dawn, we'll move on."

Hadi nodded again. "Don't worry about me. If I don't make it back, just get her out."

"I plan to."

Hadi took some food and water with him and soon was out of sight. Niema didn't ask where he was going; she simply sat down and stared emptily at nothing. No, not emptily, Tucker thought. That would be easier to bear than the bottomless well of suffering reflected in her eyes.

The day wore on. He spent the time constructing a meager shelter for them, something to block the sun during the day and the wind at night. As they worked their way out of the mountains, the temperature had risen, but the nights were still damn cold. They ate, or at least he did; Niema refused more than a couple of bites. She drank a good bit of water, though, more than usual.

By nightfall, her cheeks were a little flushed. Tucker felt her face and wasn't surprised to find it hot. "You're feverish," he told her. "From the nail." The fever wasn't especially high, so he wasn't worried on that account, but her body didn't need this fresh assault.

He ate by flashlight. The fever robbed her of what little appetite she had, and she didn't eat anything that night; again, she drank a lot of water. "Try to get some sleep," he said, and obediently she lay down on the blanket he had spread out for her, but he watched her breathing for a while and knew she didn't sleep. She was lying there staring into the shadows, aching for the husband who wasn't there and never would be again.

Tucker stared at her back. She and Dallas had been circumspect in their behavior, refraining from public displays of affection, but at night they had slept next to each other, with Dallas spooned protectively around her and his big arm draped around her waist. She had slept like a baby then, utterly secure.

Perhaps she couldn't sleep now because she was alone and could feel the chill on her back. It was a simple thing, the kind of routine married couples seemed to develop so easily: the comfort of human warmth in the night, the sound of a loved one's breathing. Perhaps it was the trust, the intimacy, that meant so much. Intimacy didn't come easily to Tucker, trust even less so, but he knew it had existed between Niema and Dallas. Dallas's death had left her bereft, and she no longer found comfort in the night.

Tucker sighed inwardly. The sigh was for himself, because he knew what he had to do, and knew the cost.

He got a bottle of water and silently went to her, lying down behind her on the blanket and placing the water nearby. "Shhh," he murmured when she stiffened. "Just go to sleep." He curved his body around her, giving her his heat, his strength. Pulling a second blanket over them to keep out the cold, he anchored her to him with his arm around her waist.

He could feel the fever inside her; the heat emanating from her body wrapping around them both like a third blanket. Still, she shivered a little, and he pulled her closer. She lay on her uninjured left shoulder and held her right arm very still so as not to jar it.

"The fever's fighting the infection," he said, keeping his voice low and soothing. "There's aspirin in the first-aid kit, if you get too uncomfortable, but unless the fever gets a lot higher I suggest letting it do its job."

"Yes." Her voice was thin with fatigue, listless.

He stroked her hair, his touch gentle and tried to think of some way to occupy her mind. Maybe if she could just stop thinking she could sleep. "I saw a solar eclipse once. I was in South America." He didn't get any more specific than that. "The weather was so hot the air felt sticky. Cold showers didn't do any good; I was sweaty again as soon as I got toweled off. Everyone wore as little clothing as possible."

He didn't know if she was listening; he didn't much care. He kept that soothing, gently monotonous tone, his voice just barely above a whisper. If he could bore her to sleep, so much the better.

"It had been on the radio that there would be a solar eclipse that day, but the heat was so miserable no one much cared. It was just a little village, not the type to attract any eclipse chasers. I had forgotten about it myself. It was a sunny day, so bright the light hurt my eyes, and I was wearing sunglasses. The eclipse slipped up on me. The sun was still shining, the sky was blue, but all of a sudden it was as if a cloud had passed over

the sun. The birds all stopped singing, and the village pets hid.

"One of the villagers looked up and said, 'Look at the sun,' and I remembered about the eclipse. I told them not to stare, that it would blind them if they looked too long. The light was eerie, if you can imagine dark sunshine. The sky turned a really deep shade of blue, and the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees. It kept getting darker and darker, but the sky was still blue. Finally the sun was completely covered, and the solar halo around the moon was . . . spectacular. On the ground we were in a strange, deep twilight, and everything was quiet, but overhead the sky glowed. The twilight lasted for a couple of minutes, and during that time the entire village stood still. Men, women, and children; none of them moved, or spoke.

"Then the light began to come back, and the birds started singing again. The chickens came off roost, and the dogs barked. The moon moved on, and it was as hot as it had been before, but no one bitched about the weather anymore." Two days later everyone in that little village was dead-massacred-but he kept that to himself.

He waited. Her breathing was too shallow for sleep, but at least she wasn't as stiff as she had been before. If she relaxed, her body might take over and let itself sleep.

Next he told her about a dog he'd had when he was a kid. There was no dog, but she didn't know that. The dog he made up was a Heinz 57, with a long,

skinny body like a dachshund and a curly coat like a poodle. "Ugly little bastard," he said comfortably. "What was his name?"

Her voice startled him. It was low, almost hesitant. Something painful grabbed his chest and squeezed. "She," he said. "I named her Fifi, because I thought that was what poodles were named."

He told her tale after tale of Fifi's exploits. She'd been an amazing dog. She could climb trees, open most doors by herself, and her favorite meal had been-God, what was some kid's cereal?-Fruit Loops. Fifi slept with the cat, hid shoes under the couch, and once really did eat his homework.

Tucker embroidered on the fictional Fifi for half an hour, keeping his voice to a melodic rhythm, pausing every so often to check Niema's breathing. It got slower, deeper, until finally she slept.

He let himself sleep, but lightly. A part of him remained alert, listening for Hadi's return, or for any suspicious sound. He woke completely several times, to check on Niema and make certain her fever wasn't getting higher. She was still too warm, but he was satisfied there was nothing critical about the fever, just her body healing itself. Still, to be on the safe side, he roused her enough each time that she could drink a little water. As he had suspected, once she let herself go to sleep nature got the upper hand, and though he woke her easily enough she went right back to sleep the moment she closed her eyes.

The hours passed and Hadi didn't return. Tucker was patient. People slept soundest in the hours before dawn, and Hadi would probably wait until then. Still, every time he woke from his doze, Tucker checked his watch and considered his options. The longer he let Niema sleep, the stronger she would be and the faster she would be able to travel. He couldn't, however, afford to wait too long.

At five o'clock he turned on the flashlight and drank some of the water himself, then gently roused Niema. She drank the water he held to her mouth, then snuggled against him and sighed drowsily. "Time to get up," he murmured.

She kept her eyes closed. "Not yet." She turned to face him, and slipped her arm around his neck. "Mmm." She nestled closer, pressing her face into his chest.

She thought he was Dallas. She was still drowsy, her mind dulled by the hard sleep, and perhaps she had been dreaming about him. She was accustomed to waking in her husband's arms, to cuddling even if they didn't make love, and given the short time they had been married Tucker bet there hadn't been many mornings when Dallas hadn't made love to her.

He should shake her completely awake, get her fed, check her shoulder, and have her ready to move whether or not Hadi returned. He knew exactly what he should do, but for once in his life Tucker ignored the job. He tightened his arms around her and held her, just for a moment, something in him desperately hungry for the feel of her hugging him in return.

No, not him. It was Dallas she was holding, her husband she was dreaming about.

It cost him more than he wanted, but he took a deep breath and eased away from her. "Niema, wake up," he said softly. "You're dreaming."

Slumberous dark eyes opened, as black as night in the dim glow of the flashlight. He saw the dawning of awareness, the flare of shock in her eyes, followed by horror. She pulled away from him, her lips trembling. "I-" she began, but no other words came.

The sob burst out of her as if it tore from her chest. She rolled away from him and lay on the blanket, her entire body heaving. She made a long, low, keening sound, chopped by the convulsive sobs that ripped out of her throat. The dam of her control, once breached, collapsed entirely. She cried until she gagged, until her throat closed and no more sound came out. She cried until he thought surely the spasm of grief had to ease, but it didn't. She was still weeping when he heard the sound of a vehicle approaching in the dark, cold dawn, and he stepped out to meet Hadi.

PART TWO

Chapter Three

1999, Atlanta, Georgia

Delta Flight 183, Atlanta to London, was full. The first-class passengers had already boarded and made themselves comfortable, choice of reading material or drink, or both, in hand. The flight attendants had taken coats and hung them in the closet, chatted with those passengers inclined to be friendly, checked with the cockpit to see if the guys up there needed anything.

Congressman Donald Brookes and his wife, Elaine, were taking a vacation, the first in so long Elaine could scarcely believe Donald had agreed to the downtime. He had regularly put in eighteen to twenty hours a day on the job since first being elected fifteen years before. Even after all this time in government, there was a thread of idealism in him that insisted he give the taxpayers their money's worth, and more. She had gotten accustomed to going to bed alone, but she always woke when he came to bed, and they would hold hands and talk In the early days they hadn't been on anyone's A list, so she had spent a lot of evenings alone with the kids.

Things had changed somewhat. Donald was chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, and now they were A list; as often as not they were at some function somewhere, but at least they were together.

Oh, there had been times when they had gone back home to Illinois, when Congress was in recess, but though the pace slowed then, Donald had used that time to catch up with his constituency. They hadn't been on a real vacation since he was first elected.

Elaine looked forward to days of sleeping late, ordering room service, and leisurely exploring London. Five days in London, then a short hop to Paris for another five days, then Rome and Florence. It was her dream vacation.

Two rows behind them, Garvin Whittaker was already absorbed in the papers from his briefcase. He was CEO of a cutting-edge software firm that had exploded in value over the past seven years, edging toward fifty billion. Not in Microsoft's league, but then, what was? When his current projects hit the market, Garvin figured the firm would double in value within five years. At least, he hoped it would; he dreamed it would. He was biding his time, building his market and strength, taking care not to tread on any giant toes. But when he judged the time was right, he would unveil the operating system he had developed, a system so streamlined and simplified- and so bug free-it would leave everything else out there in the dust.

In the first row was a UN delegate from Germany, holding his icy drink against his head and hoping his headache would abate enough that he would be able to sleep on the long flight. In seat 2F was a World Bank official, her brow puckered as she studied the Wall Street Journal. Growing up, she had always dreamed of being something romantic, like a brain surgeon or a movie star, but she had learned that money was the most powerful kick available, far more potent than any drug. She traveled all over the world; she had dined in Paris, bought clothes in Hong Kong, skied in Switzerland. Life was good, and she intended to make it even better.

A career diplomat was in seat 4D. He had been ambassador to France in the Bush years, but since was relegated to more minor roles. He was newly married, to a Chicago socialite whose family's wealth provided considerable clout; he expected to be ambassador again soon, and not to any Podunk country no one could find on a map.

In the coach section, Charles Lansky wiped sweat from his brow and tried not to think of the impending takeoff. He didn't mind flying, once the plane was airborne, but he was sick with fear during takeoff and landing. After a brief stopover in London, he was flying on to Frankfurt, which meant two takeoffs and two landings. Only a vitally important meeting could have induced him to endure so much.

College students on a tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland crowded onto the plane, each of them carrying the ubiquitous backpack packed with essentials: a bottle of Evian, a portable CD player, a collection of fave CDs, makeup if the student was female, a handheld computer game if male; perhaps an item or two of clothing. They were tanned, healthy, as alike as Teddy Roosevelt's teeth but still young enough to be convinced they were unique.

The usual assortment of business people and holiday-goers filed in, milled around, eventually took their seats. One young lady anxiously clasped an overnight bag on her lap, until the flight attendant told her it needed to be stowed and offered to find a place in the overhead bins for the bag. The young lady shook her head and managed to stuff the bag under the seat in front of her, though it was a tight fit and she then had nowhere to put her feet. Her complexion was pasty, and she was sweating despite the air pouring out of the overhead vents.

Finally the giant L-1011 pushed away from the gate and taxied out to get in line for takeoff. Seventeen other aircraft were ahead of them, inching toward the runway One of the pilots came on the intercom occasionally to give the passengers updates on their expected takeoff time. Most of the first-class passengers had already removed their shoes and put on the black travel socks provided in the gift bag Delta gave each first-class passenger on overseas flights. Magazines were thumbed through, books were hauled out, a few people already snored.

Finally it was Flight 183's turn. The big engines roared and the plane gathered speed and it rolled down the runway, faster and faster, until finally lift exceeded drag and they were airborne. There was some mechanical rumbling as the wheels lifted and folded and tucked into the belly of the aircraft. Flight 183 arrowed into the blue sky, steadily gaining altitude for the flight pattern that would take them up the east coast until, somewhere near New York, they would swing out over the Atlantic.

Thirty-three minutes into the flight, over the mountains of western North Carolina, Flight 183 disintegrated into a fiery ball that spewed flaming pieces of fuselage upward in a slow-motion arc, before the trajectory peaked and the pieces fell back to earth.

Chapter Four

Washington, D.C.

The two men sat companionably at a nineteenth-century walnut desk; the wood shone with a velvety sheen, and the top was inlaid with rose Italian marble. A handsome chessboard, topped with hand-carved pieces, was between them. The library in which they sat was masculine, comfortable, slightly shabby; not because Franklin Vinay couldn't afford to spruce it up, but because he liked it the way it was. Mrs. Vinay had refurbished it the year before she died, and he found comfort among these things she had chosen for him.

She had also found the chess set at an estate sale in New Hampshire. Dodie had loved estate sales, Frank remembered fondly. She had kept the gift of enjoyment her entire life, finding pleasure in many small things. She had been gone ten years, and not a day passed that he didn't think of her, sometimes with lingering sorrow but more often with a smile, because they were good memories.

As always, he and John had flipped a coin to see who made the opening move. Frank drew white and had opened aggressively, if conventionally, by moving the pawn in front of his king two spaces forward. Sometimes he preferred the more popular moves, because sometimes doing the expected could be the most unexpected thing to do.

Frank knew he was a very good chess player. That said, it was difficult for him to best John at the game. The younger man was as analytical as a computer, as patient as Job, and, when the time was right, as aggressive as George Patton ever dreamed of being. In chess, as well as in his chosen field, that made John Medina a dangerous opponent.

Kaiser, an enormous German shepherd, snoozed contentedly at their feet, occasionally emitting puppylike yelps incongruous with his size as he chased rabbits in his dreams. Kaiser's peacefulness was reassuring.

The house had been swept for eavesdropping devices that morning and again that night when Frank arrived home. Electronic noise prevented their conversation from being picked up by a parabolic mike, should anyone try to eavesdrop using that method. The security system was state of the art, the door locks the strongest available, the windows protected by steel bars.

The house, which from the outside looked like the ordinary house of a moderately prosperous man, was a fortress. Even so, both men knew fortresses could be breached. Frank's 9mm was in his desk drawer. John's weapon was in his belt holster, tucked into the small of his back. Frank's position as deputy director of operations, CIA, made him a valuable commodity in the espionage community; for that reason, very few people knew where he lived. His name wasn't on any deed or any utility record. Any calls to or from his private number were routed through several switching stations that made them untraceable.

For all that, Frank thought wryly, if any hostile government was given the choice between snatching him or snatching John Medina, he would be the one left behind.

John studied the board, idly stroking the rook while. he pondered his next move. Making his decision, he lifted his fingers off the rook and moved his queen's bishop. "How are my friends in New Orleans?"

Frank wasn't surprised by the question. Months, even a year or more, might go by without seeing John, but when he did, John always asked certain questions. "They're doing well. They have a baby now, a little boy born last month. And Detective Chastain is no longer with the NOPD, or a detective; he's a lieutenant with the state."

"And Karen?"

"Working in a trauma unit, or she was until the baby was born. She's taken a leave of absence, for at least a year, I think, maybe longer."

"I don't expect she'll have any trouble returning to her job when she's ready," John said, his tone mild, but Frank knew him well enough to read the request-or perhaps it was an order-underneath the tone. While he was formally John's superior, in truth John was pretty much autonomous.

"Not at all," Frank said, and it was a promise.

A couple of years before, both Karen's father and John's father had been murdered in a plot to cover up Senator Stephen Lake's hired killing of his own brother in Vietnam. In the process of uncovering the plot, John had become an admirer of both the plucky Karen and her tough-as-nails husband. Though they never knew his name, since then he had made a point of smoothing certain obstacles out of their way.

"And Mrs. Burdock?"

That question too was expected. "Niema's fine. She's developed a new surveillance device that's almost impossible to detect. The NSA has borrowed her for a couple of projects, too."

John looked interested. "An undetectable bug? When will it be available?"

"Soon. It piggybacks off existing wiring, but without causing a drop in power. Electronic sweeps can't find it."

"How did she manage that?" John nudged a pawn onto another square.

Frank scowled at the board. Such a small move, but it had moved the game in a different direction. "Something to do with frequency modulation. If I understood it, I could get a real job."

John laughed. He was a surprisingly open man, during those rare times when he could relax with people he could trust, and who knew who he was. If he liked you, then you were never in doubt of his friendship, perhaps because the majority of his life was spent in danger, in deep shadows, answering to different names and wearing different faces. He treasured what was real, and what was reliable.

"Has she remarried yet?"

"Niema? No." The pawn's position had him worried, and he continued frowning at the board, only half his attention on his answer. "She doesn't see anyone on a regular basis. She dates occasionally, but that's all."

"It's been five years."

Something in John's tone alerted Frank. He looked up to see the younger man frowning slightly, as if he were unhappy to learn that Niema Burdock was still single.

"Does she seem happy?"

"Happy?" Startled by the question, Frank leaned back, the chess game forgotten. "She's busy. She likes her work, she's very well paid, she has a nice home, drives a new car. I can take care of those things, but I can't direct or know her emotions." Of all the people for whom John was an anonymous guardian angel,

Niema Burdock was the one he followed the closest. Since he brought her out of Iran after her husband was killed, he had taken an almost personal interest in her well-being.

In a flash of intuition, a leap of reasoning that had made Frank Vinay so good at his job, he said, "You want her yourself." He seldom blurted out his thoughts in such an unguarded way, but he was, abruptly, as certain of this as he had ever been of anything. He felt faintly embarrassed at making such an observation.

John glanced up, eyebrows lifted quizzically. "Of course," he said, as if it were a given. "For all the good wanting does."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm scarcely in a position to become involved with anyone. Not only am I gone for months at a time, there's always a good chance I won't come back." He said it coolly, unemotionally. He knew exactly what the risks were in his profession, accepted them, perhaps even sought them.

"That's true of other professions: the elite military teams, certain construction workers. They marry, have families. I did."

""four circumstances were different."

Because Frank hadn't worked in black ops, he meant. John was a specialist in those missions that never saw the light of day, financed by funds for which there was no accounting, no records. He took care of what needed to be handled without the government becoming involved, to preserve deniability.

Frank had been considering broaching a subject with John, and now seemed like a perfect time. "Your circumstances can be different, too."

"Can they."

"I don't plan to die in harness; retirement is looking more and more attractive. You could step into my place without ever losing a beat."

"DDO?" John shook his head. "I operate in the field; you know that."

"And you know that you can operate wherever you choose. You're a natural for the job. In fact, you're better suited for it than I was when I took over. Think about it for a while-" The phone rang, interrupting him, and he broke off. The call wasn't unexpected. He lifted the receiver, spoke briefly, then hung up. "An agent is bringing the report over."

The chess game was forgotten, the real reason for their meeting taking over. Since Flight 183 went down the week before, the FBI and NTSB had been combing the rugged Carolina mountains collecting fragments, trying to piece together what had happened. Two hundred sixty-three people had died, and they wanted to know the reason. There hadn't been any unusual radio traffic; the flight had been routine, until the plane fell from the sky. The flight recorder had been found and preliminary reports said that the pilots hadn't indicated anything was wrong. Whatever had happened had been instant, and catastrophic-and therefore suspicious.

From one of his untold shadowy sources, John had heard whispers there was a new type of explosive device that airport X-ray machines couldn't detect, not even the CTX-5000 machines such as were used in Atlanta. He notified Frank, who quietly set about getting all the information available on Flight 183 as soon as NTSB and the FBI gathered it.

The crash site was difficult to work. The terrain was mountainous, heavily wooded, without easy access. The wreckage was strewn over an enormous area. Bits and pieces, both metal and human, had been found in treetops. Teams had been working nonstop for a week, first gathering the human remains and turning them over to forensic specialists for the almost impossible task of identification, then searching for even the smallest piece of the aircraft. The more pieces they found, the more complete the puzzle would be, and the more likely they were to discover what happened.

Fifteen minutes later an agent knocked on Vinay's door, rousing Kaiser. John remained in the library, out of sight, while Frank, with Kaiser beside him, collected the report.

Frank had requested two copies of the report, and on returning to the library he gave one to John. He sank back into his chair, his brow furrowed as he read. The report wasn't reassuring.

"Definitely an explosion. That wasn't really in doubt." People in the area had reported hearing an abrupt boom and seeing a bright flash. Whether or not anyone actually had seen anything was open to speculation, since the plane had gone down in the mountains where there wasn't a good line of sight in any direction. People generally didn't go around staring at the sky, though if the afternoon sun had glinted off the plane and caught someone's attention at just the right moment it was possible to have seen the actual explosion. More than likely, though, on hearing the noise, people had looked around, seen the smoke and arcing debris, and their imaginations took it from there and convinced them they had seen one hell of a fireball.

Rumors had immediately started that Flight 183 had been shot down by a missile. Congressman Donald Brookes, the House chairman of Foreign Relations, had been on Flight 183. Someone had to have wanted him dead for some reason, though all the reasons popping up on the Internet had been farfetched, to say the least. Proof of the plot, the missile theorists said, was that Congressman Brookes, who lived in Illinois, was reportedly going on vacation but for some reason was on a flight originating in Atlanta, instead of Chicago. That was obviously suspicious. Even after it was revealed that the Brookes's oldest son lived in Atlanta and they had visited him for a couple of days before leaving for Europe, the bring-down-a-plane-to-get-one-man theory persisted.

There was, however, no evidence of a missile. The pattern of rupture in the metal, plus the burn patterns and residue on the pieces of fuselage, all gave evidence that Flight 183 had been brought down by an internal explosion that had literally ripped the plane apart, blowing out a huge section of the fuselage and all of the left wing.

Preliminary chemical analysis indicated plastique. They had not, however, found any evidence of a detonator. Even in such a catastrophic explosion, microscopic and chemical evidence would have remained; if something existed, then it left its print.

"To have done this much damage, the bomb had to have been sizeable; the machines in Atlanta should have detected it." Frank was deeply worried; all luggage for the flight had been inspected, either by machines or humans. If, as John thought, the device was undetectable by their current technology, then they had a big problem on their hands.

Every piece of luggage, both checked and carry-ons, would have to be hand searched, but airlines weren't the only ones vulnerable. The possible applications of such a device were staggering. It could be used in mail bombs, to destroy federal buildings- any public building, actually-disrupt transportation and communication. No one in America paid much attention to the security of bridges, either, but let a few of them come down and traffic would grind to a standstill.

The explosive could have been disguised as something else and slipped through the machines in Atlanta. The system failed occasionally; nothing was foolproof. There should still, however, have been evidence of the detonator. They should have found a radio, or a mercury switch, or a simple timer-anything by which the explosion could be triggered. The detonator was actually how most bombs were spotted, because they were more easily detected when scanned.

John rubbed his lower lip and tossed the report onto Frank's desk. He had been most interested in the chemical analysis. The explosive found had some components in common with plastique, but there were some anomalies. "I'm thinking R.D.X." R.D.X. was cyclonite, or composition C-l. By itself it was too sensitive to handle, so it was usually mixed with a plasticiser, which would give it some of the same chemical elements as plastique. R.D.X. could be molded into any shape including shoelaces.

Frank looked up. "How? You know how luggage and packages are thrown around; an unstable explosive would have detonated on the ground."

"But what if it wasn't originally unstable? What if the compound deteriorates, and sets off a chemical reaction that causes it to explode? If you know the rate of deterioration, the explosion could easily be timed."

"Something that starts out as stable as plastique, but deteriorates and becomes its own detonator? Son of a bitch." Frank closed his eyes.

"There's always the chance some lone sociopath in a lab somewhere cooked this up, but what I'm hearing is that it came out of a top-secret lab in Europe."

"IRA?"

"I'm sure they would be standing in line to buy, but I haven't picked up any hints that they bankrolled the development."

"Who, then?"

"Take your pick; we aren't short on candidates." Terrorist groups proliferated all over the world. There were at least twenty-five hundred known organizations; some came and went, others had thousands of members and had been around for decades.

"And they'll all have this new stuff."

"Only if they have the money to buy it." The terrorist organizations might cooperate with one another, but it wasn't one big happy brotherhood. A new explosive would be a big moneymaker, closely controlled for as long as possible so there would be only one producer of it. Eventually, as happened to all new technology, everyone would have it; by then the means of detecting it would also have been developed. It was like a chess game, with moves and countermoves.

"If it's in Europe, and big money is behind it, then Louis Ronsard is our man," John said.

That in itself was a large problem. Ronsard was a shadowy Frenchman who gave his allegiance to no one group; he was the conduit, however, for many, and he had made an enormous fortune providing what was needed. He probably wasn't behind the development of the explosive, but he would be the logical person to approach as a middle man, one to handle payments and shipments-for a fee, of course.

Ronsard could be picked up, or eliminated; he wasn't in hiding. But his security was extremely tight, making a capture far more difficult than an elimination. Even if he were captured, John doubted he would give up any useful information. Sophisticated interrogation techniques could be countered by intensive training and mind control. Added to the problem of Ronsard was that he had powerful friends in the French government. He had been left alone, for all of the above reasons, but also because he was neither the source nor the user of all the nasty things he provided. He was the conduit, the controller, the valve. Eliminate him and another conduit would take his place.

Finding the source was the key, but John also had to discover to whom other shipments had already been delivered. To do that, he had to get to Ronsard.

Chapter Five

John Medina never stayed in the same place twice when he came to D.C. He had no home, literally. A home base gave anyone looking for him a starting point, and the thing about homes was that eventually, if you had one, you went there. So he lived in hotels and motels, condos, the occasional rented house-or a hut, a tent, a cave, a hole in the ground, whatever was available.

A condo was his preferred living quarters. They were more private than hotels, and, unlike a motel, had more than one exit. He didn't like sleeping in a place where he could be cornered.

The hotel he chose this time had wrought-iron balconies outside each room, which was what had made him decide in the hotel's favor. He had checked in earlier, checked for bugs, studied the security, then gone to meet Frank Vinay. Now, when he walked through the lobby to the elevators, no one who saw him would recognize him as the man who had checked in.

Disguise wasn't difficult. When he checked in he had been wearing glasses, had gray hair spray on his hair, cotton in his cheeks to fill out his face, and he had walked with a definite limp. He had also used a nasal Rochester, New York accent. His clothing had been the kind bought at a discount department store. There was no sign of that man now; he had removed the glasses and washed his hair, exchanged the gray polyester slacks for jeans, the plaid shirt for a white oxford, and the green windbreaker for a black jacket so exquisitely tailored it disguised the bulk of the weapon he wore and still looked fashionable.

He had hung the do not disturb sign on his door to keep hotel employees out. Most people would be surprised to find out how often during the day, while they were gone, the hotel staff was in and out of their rooms. Housekeeping, maintenance, management- they all had a master key and could get into any room. Plus there were professional thieves who hung around hotels and noticed the businesspeople-when they left, how long they were gone, etc. A good thief could always get into a locked room, so getting into a room was nothing more than a matter of picking out the target, hanging near the desk to find out how long someone was staying, then discreetly following to see which room the person entered. Next morning, call the room to see if anyone answers. Then go on up, and, to be on the safe side, knock on the door. If there's still no response, go in.

A DO not disturb sign at least gives the impression someone was in the room. He had also dialed a certain untraceable number and left the phone off the hook, so if anyone called, he-or she; thieves were not gender specific-would get a busy signal.

Hanging on the inside door handle was a small battery-operated alarm. If anyone ignored the sign and opened the door anyway, an ear-piercing siren sounded, which was certain to attract attention. John turned off the alarm by pressing a button on the small remote he carried in his pocket. The alarm was just a gadget, but it amused him and would startle the hell out of anyone trying to get in. He wouldn't have bothered with it if he hadn't left his computer in the room.

The room was as he had left it. He scanned for bugs anyway, as a matter of routine, and thought of Niema's undetectable device. Technology was a leapfrog affair; something new was developed and for a while that side-whatever side it was-had the advantage. Then a countermeasure was developed and the other side had the advantage. Niema's bug would give them the advantage now, but technology couldn't be kept secret forever and eventually the bad guys-the terrorists and spies and hostile governments-would have the bug, too. It could be used against him, used to capture or kill him. Niema would probably be pleased if she knew her invention had led to his death. She wouldn't know, however; very few people would. He had no family, no network of friends or coworkers. Those people who worked with him didn't know who he was.

He didn't have to hide his identity with Frank Vinay, of course, or with Jess McPherson, an old friend of his father's. It was a relief to be able to drop his guard, those rare times when he was with one of them, and just be himself.

Sitting at the desk, he disconnected the call, then booted up the laptop and hooked it to the phone line. A few typed commands had him inside one of the CIA's data banks. He was one of the few people left in the world who still used the MS-DOS operating system, but when he was working he vastly preferred it over any system that required a mouse. A mouse was great for Net surfing or playing games, but he'd found that, when he was working, a mouse slowed him down. He could type in the DOS commands much faster than he could take his hand off the keyboard, guide the mouse, click, and go back to the keyboard. In his world, seconds shaved off operating time could mean the difference between whether he got the information he needed and got out safely, or if he was caught.

There was a wealth of personal information on Louis Ronsard-his parents, where he lived growing up, his school records, his friends, his extracurricular activities. Louis hadn't been a deprived child; his father had been a wealthy industrialist, his mother a well-born beauty who had doted on her children- Louis, the oldest, and Mariette, three years younger.

Louis was attending the Sorbonne when his mother died of ovarian cancer. His father was killed five years later in an accident on the Autobahn while on a business trip to Germany. Louis had taken over the reins of the family business, and, for reasons unknown, gone renegade. From that time to the present there was precious little personal information to be had about him, though he was far from a recluse.

Ronsard owned a heavily guarded estate in the south of France. He employed a small private army to ensure his security; to be hired, one had to meet stringent standards. The Company had planted one of their own, to no avail; the agent hadn't been able to discover anything useful, because his own activities were so regulated. He was still in place, though; John made a note of the agent's name and cover.

There was a recent photo; Ronsard was a striking man, with slightly exotic features and olive skin. He wore his dark hair long, usually secured at the nape, but for social occasions he left it loose. In this photograph he was emerging from some banquet, clad in a tuxedo, with a glowing blonde on his arm. She was smiling up at him with adoration in her eyes. She was Sophie Gerrard, briefly Ronsard's lover, but no longer in contact with him.

There was a long list of Ronsard's lovers. Women found him very attractive. His liaisons never lasted long, but he was evidently considerate and affectionate before his roving eye landed on some other lady.

There was a diagram of the mansions' grounds, but nothing of the house itself. Ronsard entertained occasionally, but the affairs were very exclusive, and the CIA hadn't yet been able to get anyone inside as either a guest or domestic help. True, Ronsard hadn't been at the top of their to-do list, so little effort had been expended on doing so.

That was going to change, however. Ronsard had just moved to the top of the list.

John maneuvered his way through a few more files, checking on Ronsard's known finances, who had designed and installed the mansion's security system, if there were any existing wiring plans. He found little information; Ronsard had either wiped his records, or they had never existed in the first place.

When he finished, it was two a.m. He stretched, suddenly aware of the kinks in his shoulders. He had another meeting with Frank the coming night, and maybe they would have more information on the crash. Until then, he could relax.

He showered and fell into bed. He had the warrior's knack of quickly and easily falling asleep, but tonight he found himself staring at the ceiling where the tiny red light on the smoke alarm blinked on and off. He didn't have to wonder about his sleeplessness; he knew the reason.

Niema.

Dallas had been dead five years. Why hadn't she remarried, or at least dated someone steadily? She was young-only twenty-five when Dallas died-and pretty. He hadn't let himself ask, these past five years, hadn't let himself personally check on her, but this time he had figured enough time had passed and it was safe to ask, to find out she had a hubby and a kid or two, and had gone on with her life.

She hadn't. She was still alone.

Had she changed? Put on weight, maybe gotten a few strands of gray in her hair? A lot of people began to go gray in their twenties. Did her big dark eyes still look so deep a man could drown in them, and not care?

He could see her. She would never know. He could satisfy his curiosity, smile a little at the physical pleasure seeing her gave him, and walk away. But he knew he wouldn't see her; some breaks were better made cleanly. He was still who he was and did what he did, so there was no point in daydreams, no matter how pleasurable.

Knowing that was one thing; turning off those desires was another. He would do what he had to do, but what he wanted to do was hold her, just once, and let her know it was him she was kissing, him making love to her. Just once he wanted to strip her naked and have her, and once would have to be enough because he couldn't dare risk more.

But he had a snowball's chance in hell of having that "once," so finally he turned off the daydream, rolled over, and went to sleep.

John arrived at Frank's house as he had the night before, in a car with blacked-out windows. He backed into the attached garage, the doors of which slid up as he approached and down as soon as his car was inside. He had spent the day digging out more details about Ronsard, trying to plot a course on getting inside Ronsard's mansion and getting the information he needed; nothing had immediately presented itself, but eventually it would.

Frank opened the door, an abstract expression on his face that was evidently due to the sheaf of papers he still clutched in one hand. Frank never quit working, it seemed, not even at home; he simply changed locations. While Dodie was alive he had made a real effort to put his job aside and just be with her, but more often than not he had become lost in his thoughts and she would laughingly shoo him into his office. Now, with Dodie gone, Frank often worked sixteen hours a day.

"I was just getting coffee," he said to John. "Go on into the library and I'll bring it in there."

John stopped in his tracks and quizzically regarded his old friend. Frank wasn't a domestic person; he tried, but he didn't have a coffee-making gene in his body. John had quickly learned, after Dodie's death, that if he wanted coffee in Frank's house he'd better make it himself if he wanted it to be drinkable.

Seeing the look, Frank said irritably, "I didn't make it, Bridget did." Bridget was his housekeeper, an Agency employee who had looked after Frank and Dodie since Frank became DDO. She went home after serving Frank his supper and cleaning up the kitchen, assuming he was eating at home that night; she must have made the coffee and put it in a thermos to keep it hot

"In that case, yes, I'd like a cup." Grinning, John strolled out of the kitchen, with Frank's muttered "Smart ass," following him.

The door to the library was open. John walked in and stopped just past the threshold, his mind blank for a moment except for a silent, savage curse. Damn Frank and his meddling!

Niema Burdock rose slowly out of the chair where she had been sitting, her face pale in the mellow lamplight. Her eyes were as big and dark as he remembered; darker, narrowing as she stared at him and said one word, tight with disbelief: "Tucker."

John forced himself to move, to step inside the library as casually as if he had known she was going to be there. He closed the door; let Frank make of that what he pleased. "Actually," he said, as if five years hadn't passed, "you were right. Tucker isn't my name. It's John Medina."

He was never at a loss; he had been trained not to panic, not to lose focus. But this was a shock, the impact of her sudden presence as powerful as if he had been punched in the gut. He hadn't realized, he thought, how hungry he had been for the sight of her, otherwise why blurt out something he had kept from her five years ago?

Almost no one who met him knew his real name. It was safer that way, for both parties. So why had he told her, this woman who had every reason, if not to actually hate him, to at least avoid him? She had heard him tell her husband to, in effect, kill himself. She had been standing there staring at him with her eyes black as night, her face paper white with shock, when he told Dallas to press the button that would end his life as well as complete the mission. That wasn't something a woman forgot, or forgave.

She was almost as pale now. For a moment he hoped she hadn't heard of him before. It was possible; he was in black ops, his name whispered among people in operations, but she worked on the technical side and would seldom, if ever, come into contact with field operatives.

Her throat worked. "John Medina is ... just a legend," she said, her voice strained, and he knew she had indeed heard of him.

"Thank you," he replied casually, "though I don't know if I like the word 'just.' I'm real enough. Want to bite me to prove it?" He sat down on the edge of Frank's desk, one foot swinging, his posture totally relaxed despite the tension screaming through him.

"I thought pinching was the proven method."

"I prefer biting."

Color tinged her cheeks, but she didn't look away "Your eyes were brown," she accused. "Now they're blue."

"Colored contacts. Blue is the real color of my eyes."

"Or you're wearing colored contacts now."

"Come look," he invited. As he had expected, though, she didn't want to get that dose to him.

She gathered her composure and sank back into her chair. She crossed her legs, her posture as relaxed as his. Maybe more so; her movement riveted his attention on her legs, on the few inches of thigh she had revealed. He hadn't seen her legs before; she had worn pants, and often those had been modestly covered by the chador. They were very nice legs: slender, shapely, lightly tanned. She still looked to be in very good shape, as if she worked out regularly.

Abruptly aware of the response of his body, John snapped himself back under control. He glanced up and found her watching him, and automatically wondered if she had crossed her legs to distract him. If so, it had worked. He was irritated at himself, because sex was one of the oldest, most hackneyed distractions, and still he had let himself slip.

Frank opened the door, breaking the silence between them. He carried a tray on which there was a large thermos of coffee and three cups, but no sugar or cream. "Have you two introduced yourselves?" he asked smoothly, glancing at John so he could take the lead in giving Niema whatever name he chose.

"He says his name is really John Medina," Niema said. Her voice was cool and calm, and once again John had to admire her poise. "Five years ago I knew him as Darrell Tucker."

Frank flashed John another glance, this one full of surprise that he had so quickly revealed his true identity. "He goes by a lot of names; it's part of his job description."

"Then John Medina may be an alias, too."

"I can't give you any comfort there," Frank said with wry humor. "I've known him most of his life, and he's the real McCoy-or Medina, in this case."

John watched her absorb that, saw the quick suspicion in her eyes that Frank might be lying, as well. She wasn't a naive, trusting little soul, but neither was she experienced at completely hiding her thoughts and emotions.

"Why am I here?" she asked abruptly, switching her gaze to John.

Frank drew her attention back to him. "We have a ... situation." He poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her.

"How does that involve me? Could I have some cream and sugar, please?"

The simple question rattled Frank, unused as he was to domestic duties. He gave the tray a panicked glance, as if he hoped the requested items would materialize.

"Ah... I-"

"Never mind," she said, and composedly sipped her black coffee. "I can drink it like this. What's this situation?"

John restrained a bark of laughter. As he remembered very well, she always drank her coffee black. This was just Niema needling Frank a little, getting back at him for setting her up for such a shock. She had always been able to hold her own with the team, and the realization was still as surprising now as it had been then, because she looked like such a lady.

Frank looked at him as if asking for his help. John shrugged. This was Frank's little show, let him run it. He had no idea why Niema was there, except as Frank's heavy-handed attempt at a little matchmaking. He probably thought John needed some R and R, and since he had admitted being attracted to Niema-well, why not? Except Frank hadn't been in Iran, and he hadn't watched Niema's face while he ordered her husband to kill himself, or he would have known why not.

'Ah . . . we're very interested in the work you've been doing. An undetectable surveillance device will be invaluable. As it happens, we have an urgent need for it now. You know more about the device than anyone, since you designed it. You also have some field experience-"

"No," she interrupted. "I don't do fieldwork." She was pale again, her jaw set. She got to her feet. "If that's the only reason you wanted to talk to me, I'm sorry you wasted our mutual time. A phone call would have sufficed, and you could have saved yourself the trouble of bringing me here." She paused, then murmured ironically, "Wherever here is."

"You haven't heard all the details," Frank said, shooting another quick look at John. "And you are, might I add, an employee of the Agency, not a freelance contract agent."

"Are you going to fire her if she turns you down?" John asked interestedly, just to pin Frank down and make him squirm some more.

"No, of course not-"

"Then we have nothing more to discuss," she said firmly. "Please have me taken home."

Frank sighed, and gave up. "Of course. I apologize for the inconvenience, Mrs. Burdock." He wasn't a man accustomed to apology, but he did it well.

John let him reach for the phone before he interrupted. "Don't bother," he said easily, abandoning his lazy sprawl against the desk. "I'll drive her home."

Chapter Six

Niema got into the car and buckled her seat belt. "Shouldn't I be blindfolded or something?" she asked wryly, and she was only half joking. The garage door in front of them slid up and he pulled out, then turned left onto the street.

Tucker-no, she had to get used to thinking of him as Medina-actually smiled. "Only if you want. Don't tell me they blindfolded you to bring you here."

"No, but I kept my eyes closed." She wasn't kidding. She hadn't wanted to know where the deputy director of operations lived. She had lost her taste for adventure five years ago, and knowing where Frank Vinay lived came under the heading of information that could be dangerous.

Medina's smile turned into a grin. He was really a very good-looking man, she thought, watching his face in the dim green glow of the dash lights. In the past five years when she remembered him it had been in terms of what happened, not in how he looked, and his face had faded from her memory. Still, she had recognized him immediately, even without the heavy stubble of beard.

Seeing him was a bigger shock than she had ever thought it would be, but then again, she'd never imagined she would see him again, so there was no way she could have prepared for it. Tucker-no, Medina-was such an integral part of the worst thing that had ever happened to her that just hearing his voice had thrown her five years into the past.

"I should have known you were regular CIA, instead of a contract agent." In retrospect she felt like a gullible idiot, but then things were always clearer in the mind's rearview mirror.

"Why would you?" He sounded interested. "My cover was as a contract agent."

Looking back, she realized that Dallas had known, which was why he had urged Medina to stay behind rather than risk capture. And Dallas, an ex-SEAL accustomed to top security clearances and need-to-know, had kept the information to himself, not even telling her, his wife. But she worked for the Agency now, and she knew that was how things were. You kept things to yourself, you didn't tell friends or neighbors what you did for a living; discretion became second nature.

"Dallas knew, didn't he?" she asked, just for affirmation.

"He knew I wasn't a contract agent. He didn't know my real name, though. When I worked with him before, he knew me as Tucker."

"Why did you tell me? It wasn't necessary." She wished he hadn't. If even half the rumors she had heard whispered about the elusive, shadowy John Medina were true, then she didn't want to know who he really was. Ignorance, in this case, was safer than discretion.

"Perhaps it was."

His voice was reflective, and he didn't explain further.

"Why did you have a cover with us? We were a team. None of us were out to get you."

"If you didn't know my real name, then, if any of you were captured, you couldn't reveal it."

'And if you were captured?"

"I wouldn't be."

"Oh? How would you prevent it?"

"Poison," he said matter-of-factly.

Niema recoiled. She knew that some operatives, back in the tense Cold War days, had carried a suicide pill, usually cyanide, that they were to swallow rather than allow themselves to be captured. To know that John Medina did the same made her feel sick to her stomach.

"But- "

"It's better than being tortured to death." He shrugged. "Over the years, I've pissed off a lot of people. They would all like to have a turn removing my body parts."

From what she had heard about his exploits, he was understating the case. It was even rumored he had killed his own wife, because he discovered she was a double agent and was about to expose a highly placed mole. Niema didn't believe that particular rumor, but then neither had she believed John Medina was a real man. Not one of the people who talked about him had ever met him, seen him, or knew anyone who had. She had thought him a kind of... urban myth, though one restricted to intelligence circles.

She couldn't quite take in that not only was he real, but she knew him. And even more astounding was how accepting he was of everything entailed in being who he was, as if his notoriety was simply the price he had to pay to do what he wanted.

"Given your circumstances," she said with asperity, "you shouldn't have told me now, either." The fact that he had made her suspicious.

"Actually, I was so surprised to see you that I blurted it out without thinking."

The idea of him being taken off guard was so out of character that she snorted, and stretched out her left leg. "Here, pull this one, too."

"It's true," he murmured. "I didn't know you were going to be there."

"You had no idea Mr. Vinay wanted me to ... whatever it was he wanted me to do? And you just happened to show up? How likely is that?"

"Not very, but unlikely things happen every day."

"Does he expect you to talk me into taking the job?"

"Maybe. I don't know what he was thinking." Irritation colored his voice now. "I suspect, though, that he's working two angles. You'll have to ask him what those angles are."

"Since I'm not taking the job, whatever it is, it doesn't matter what the angles are, does it?"

He grinned suddenly. "I don't think he was expecting to be turned down, especially not so fast. Not many people can tell him no."

"Then he needed the experience."

He said admiringly, "No wonder Dallas was so crazy about you. Not many people stood up to him, either. He looked as tough as he was."

Yes, he had. Dallas had been almost six-four and weighed two hundred and thirty-five hard-muscled pounds. His biggest strength hadn't been his body, though, as superbly conditioned as it was; his mind, his determination and focus, were what had made him ... extraordinary.

She had never been able to talk about Dallas to anyone. For the past five years her memories of him had stayed bottled up inside; they hadn't been married very long, hadn't known each other very long, so they hadn't had time to develop a circle of friends. Because of their jobs they had traveled a lot; they had gotten married in a hurry in Reno, had that wonderful honeymoon in Aruba, then Dallas had been gone for six weeks and she had been in Seattle working on surveillance for Customs. With one thing or another, they hadn't even met each other's families.

After Dallas's death she had gone to Indiana and met his folks, held hands, and cried with them, but they had been too shocked, still too involved in the whys and hows to reminisce. She had written to them occasionally, but they hadn't had time to develop a relationship before Dallas's death, and after he was gone neither party seemed to have the spirit to develop one now.

Her own family, her nice, normal suburban family in Council Bluffs, Iowa, had been sympathetic and , caring, but neither were they completely able to hide their disapproval of her and Dallas being in Iran in the first place. Her entire family, parents, brothers Mason and Sam, sister Kiara, wanted nothing more than the familiar routine of nine-to-five, marriage, kids, living in the same town from cradle to grave, knowing everyone in the neighborhood, shopping at the same grocery store every week. They hadn't known what to do with the cuckoo in their nest, hadn't had any idea of the restlessness to see more, the urge to do more, that had driven Niema to leave her hometown and seek out adventure.

She had paid penance for the last five years and lived alone with memories that no one else shared. She might whisper Dallas's name in her thoughts, or sometimes when she was alone the grief would well up and she would say his name aloud, an aching, unanswered cry, but she hadn't been able to talk about him with anyone.

But Medina had known him, had been there. He would understand. He was, of all people, the only one who would fully understand.

She hadn't resisted letting him drive her home; her guilt wasn't his fault. Maybe she needed to talk to him, to put this part of the past behind her. She might have already done it, had she known how to contact him, but after they reached Paris he had vanished.

Lacing her hands in her lap, she stared out the windshield as the dark streets wound by. She wondered if Dallas would love her now, if he would even recognize the woman she had become. He had fallen in love with a gutsy young woman who'd had a taste for adventure. Those days were over, though. She was through taking risks.

"I never thanked you," she murmured. "For what you did."

His eyebrows lifted in surprise, and he slanted a quick look at her. "Thank me?"

She got the impression he wasn't just surprised, but astounded. "For getting me out of Iran," she explained and wondered why she needed to. "I know I was a liability coming out." Basket case was actually a better description. Long patches of those days were lost from her memory; she couldn't remember leaving the hut at all. She did remember walking through the cold, dark mountains, her emotional misery so intense that she hadn't felt any physical pain.

"I promised Dallas."

The words were simple, and ironclad.

It hurt to hear Dallas's name spoken aloud. In five years, not a day had gone by that she hadn't thought about her husband. The terrible pain was gone, replaced sometimes by an ache, a loneliness, but mostly she remembered the good times she'd had with him. She regretted that they hadn't had more time together, that they hadn't had the chance to learn all the little things about each other. Hearing his name brought back the ache, but it was softened now, gentled into something bearable, and she could hear the regret in Medina's voice. What time hadn't softened was her own guilt, the knowledge that Dallas wouldn't have been on that job if she hadn't wanted to take it.

And perhaps she wasn't the only one who felt guilty. Medina, under whatever guise, struck her as a man who would do what was expedient and then forget about it, but he hadn't. He had taken care of her, just as he had promised Dallas, when leaving her to freeze to death in the mountains would have been much easier. She couldn't imagine what had motivated him, but she was deeply grateful all the same. "Do you think I blamed you?"' she asked softly. "No. I never did."

Again she had surprised him. Looking at him, she saw the way his jaw tightened. "Maybe you should have," he replied.

"Why? What could you have done?" She had relived that night a thousand times on the hard journey to accepting reality. "We never could have gotten him out of the plant alive, much less out of Iran. You knew it. He knew it too. He chose to complete the mission and chose a quick death over a slow, terrible one." She managed a crooked smile. "Like you with your cyanide pill."

"I'm the one who told him to push the button."

"He would have done it no matter what you said. He was my husband, and I knew when I married him that he was a damn hero." She had known the type of man Dallas was, known that he would feel he had to complete the job at all costs, and that cost had included his life.

Medina fell silent, concentrating on his driving. She gave him directions on the next turn; she lived in McLean, on the same side of the river as Langley, so the commute was easy.

Once before she had sat beside him as he drove through the night, and he had been silent then, too. It was after Hadi had "liberated" a 1968 Ford Fairlane from the Iranian village, and they had driven into Tehran together. Then Hadi had split off, and she and Medina had gone on alone. She had been feverish and aching, battered by grief and guilt, barely functional.

Medina had taken care of her. When the nail wound in her arm became infected, from somewhere he procured a vial of antibiotic and gave her an injection. He made certain she ate and slept, and he got her across the border into Turkey. He had been there during the first awful paroxysm of grief and hadn't tried to comfort her, knowing that weeping was better than holding it in.

All in all, she owed this man her life.

Blaming Medina would have been easy, much easier than blaming herself. But the inner steel that had attracted Dallas to her in the first place made it impossible, after his death, for her to do anything but face the truth: When Medina approached her and Dallas about the job, Dallas wanted to decline. She was the one who wanted to take it. She could tell herself that the job had been important, and it had been, but there had been others Medina could have recruited if she and Dallas had turned him down.

Yes, Dallas had been very good at explosives. She was very good with electronics, whether it was putting together a functional radio or detonator or bugging a phone line. But other people were also good at those things, and they would have done the job just as well. She had wanted to go, not because she was indispensable, but because she craved the adventure.

As a child she had always been the one to climb highest in the tree, to tie bed sheets together and use them to slide down from a second-story window. She loved roller coasters and white-water rafting and had even toyed with the idea, during high school, of working on a bomb squad. To her parents' relief she had instead begun studying electronics and languages, only to find that her expertise took her farther away from home and into more danger than she ever would have gone with the local bomb squad.

Niema knew her own nature. She loved the thrill, the adrenaline rush, of danger. She had been seeking that thrill, though in pursuit of a legitimate goal, and she had gotten Dallas killed. If not for her, they would have been looking for a home on the North Carolina coast, as Dallas had wanted.

If not for her, Dallas would still be alive.

So she had given it up, that high-voltage life she had so loved. The cost was too high. Dallas's last thought had been for her, and that knowledge meant too much for her to carelessly put her life in jeopardy again.

Medina pulled up to the curb just past her driveway, then reversed into it so the car was heading out. House key in hand, she got out of the car. Dallas had also parked so the car was heading out, too, a simple precaution that allowed for faster movement and made it more difficult to be blocked in.

Funny how she hadn't thought about that in years; she simply pulled into the garage, as millions of other people did. But Medina's method of parking brought so many things back to her in a rush: the sudden alertness, the clarity of her senses, the quickened pulse. She found herself looking around, examining shadows and searching with her peripheral vision for movement.

Medina had done the same thing, his surveillance much faster and routine.

"Damn it," Niema said irritably and marched up the sidewalk to the curved archway that sheltered her front door.

" 'Damn it,' what?" He was beside her, moving silently, positioning himself so that he reached the archway first. No assailants lurked there, not that she had expected any. She just wished she hadn't noticed what he was doing.

"Damn it, I spend half an hour with you and already I'm looking for assassins in the bushes."

"There's nothing wrong with being alert and aware of your surroundings."

"Not if I were Secret Service, or even a cop, but I'm not. I just fiddle with gadgets. The only thing likely to be lurking in my bushes is a cat."

He started to reach for her house key, but she stopped him with a look. "You're making me paranoid. Is there any reason for all this?" she asked as she unlocked the door herself and opened it. Nothing sinister happened; there were no shots, no explosions.

"Sorry. It's just a habit." She had left a couple of lights on and he looked inside, his expression interested.

"Would you like to come in? We didn't get around to drinking any of the coffee at Vinay's house." Until she heard the words, she hadn't known she was going to invite him in. They weren't exactly on easy terms, though to tell the truth she was surprised at how easy it had been to talk to him. Still, he was John Medina, not a steady, reliable, respectable bureaucrat who had just taken her out to dinner.

He stepped inside, his head up and alert, his gaze moving around, absorbing details, watching as she opened the hall closet door and disarmed the security system. She had the sudden impression that he could describe everything he had seen in that brief sweep, and perhaps even tell her the security code.

She started to close the closet door and he said, "Humor me. Reset the alarm."

Because he had good reason to be acutely security conscious, she did.

Niema had bought the house three years before, when a hefty raise had given her the means to buy instead of rent, even with the outrageous property values around D.C. It was too big for one person, with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths, but she had justified the size by telling herself she would have space for her family to come visit, though they never had, and that the three bedrooms would make it easier to sell if she ever decided she wanted something else.

The house was vaguely Spanish in style, with arched doors and windows. She had painted the interior walls herself, choosing a soft peach for most of the house while her furnishings were dark green and turquoise. The carpet was an undistinguished beige, but it had been in good shape, so instead of replacing it she had covered it with a large rug in a geometric pattern of greens, blues, and peaches. The effect was cool and welcoming, feminine without being fussy.

"Nice," he said, and she wondered what conclusions he had drawn about her by seeing the way she had furnished her house.

"The kitchen is this way." She led the way, turning on the overhead light. She loved her kitchen. The room was long, with a bank of windows on the right wall. A long, narrow island topped with a mosaic of blue and terra-cotta tiles provided a wonderful work area for any cooking project, no matter how ambitious. Small pots of herbs grew on the window sills, lending their fragrance to the air. The far end of the room was a cozy breakfast nook, the small table and two chairs flanked by lush ferns.

She began making coffee, while Medina went to the windows and closed all the blinds. "Doesn't it get old?" she asked. "Having to always be on guard?"

"I don't even think about it now, I've done it for so long. And you should close the blinds anyway." Hands in his pockets, he strolled around the kitchen. Pausing in front of the block of oak that held her knife set, he pulled out the chef's knife and tested its edge on his thumb, then returned it to its slot. His next stop was the back door, the top half of which was glass; he closed the blinds there too and checked the lock.

"I usually do. I don't believe in inviting trouble." As soon as the words were out, she realized her own lie. Trouble didn't come any bigger than John Medina, and inviting him in was exactly what she had done.

"You need a stronger lock here," he said absently. "In fact, you need a new door. All anyone has to do is pop out one of these panes of glass, reach in, and unlock the door."

"I'll see to it first thing in the morning."

The dryness of her tone must have reached him, because he looked over at her and grinned. "Sorry. You already know all that, right?"

"Right." She took down two cups from the cabinets. "The crime rate in this neighborhood is low, and I do have the security system. I figure if anyone wanted in, they could break any number of windows and get in through them, not just the ones in the door."

He pulled one of the tall stools away from the island and propped one hip on it. He looked relaxed, she thought, though she wondered if he ever truly was, given who he was and what he did. She poured the coffee and set one cup in front of him, then faced him across the tiled island top. "Okay, now tell me why you drove me home, and don't say it was for old time's sake."

"Then I won't." He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment as he sipped his coffee, but whatever distracted him was quickly gone. "How undetectable is this new bug you've developed? Tell me about it."

She made a face. "Nothing is totally undetectable, you know. But it doesn't cause a fluctuation in voltage, so an oscilloscope can't pick it up. If anyone swept with a metal detector, though, that's a different story."

"Frank seemed excited about it."

Niema was immediately wary. "It isn't that big a deal, because like I said, it's good only in certain situations. If you know how someone routinely sweeps for surveillance devices, then you can tailor the bug to fit. Why would he even mention it to you?" The bug had useful applications, but it was far from being an earth-shattering discovery that was going to change the face of intelligence gathering. Why would the deputy director of operations even know about it, much less call her to a meeting at his private residence?

"I asked how you were doing. He told me what you've been working on."

Her wariness turned into outright suspicion. Okay, it was feasible that Medina would ask about her, but that didn't explain why Vinay would know anything at all about her, much less anything about her current project.

"Why would the DDO know anything about me? We work in totally different departments." The vast majority of CIA employees were not the glamorous operatives of Hollywood fame; they were clerks and analysts and techno nerds. Until Iran, Niema had craved the thrill of fieldwork, but not now. Now she was content to work on the electronics side of intelligence gathering and come home to her own house every night.

"Because I asked him to keep tabs on you."

The bald admission astonished her. "Why would you do that?" She didn't like the idea of someone constantly checking up on her.

"I wanted to know if you were all right, plus I never lose track of someone whose expertise I might want to use again."

A chill ran up her spine. Now she knew why he'd driven her home; he wanted to draw her back into that world she had walked away from when Dallas died. He was going to figuratively wave a shot of whiskey under an alcoholic's nose, lure her away from the straight and narrow. He couldn't do it unless she still had the old urge to find that adrenaline rush, she thought in growing panic. If she had truly changed, nothing he could say would entice her away from the safe life she had built.

She thought she had changed. She thought the hunger for excitement was gone. Why, then, did she feel so panicky, as if the smell of adventure was going to make her fall off the wagon?

"Don't you dare ask-" she began.

"I need you, Niema."

Chapter Seven

Damn it, why hadn't she remarried? John thought savagely. Or at least gotten herself safely involved with some steady, nine-to-five bureaucrat?

He had stayed away from her for a lot of very good reasons. His job wasn't conducive to relationships. He had brief affairs, and nothing resembling an emotional attachment. He was away for months at a time, with no communication during those times. His life expectancy sucked.

Moreover, he had thought he would be the last person on earth she'd ever want to see. He was staggered to realize she didn't blame him for Dallas's death, had never blamed him. Even though she had never trusted him, she didn't lay that at his door. It took a person of excruciating fairness to absolve him of all blame as she had done.

He had learned not to agonize over the choices he had to make. Some of them were hard decisions, and every one of them had left their mark on his soul, or what was left of it. But other people seldom saw things the same way, and that, too, he'd learned to shrug off. As his father's old friend Jess McPherson once said, he was hell on people. He used them, exploited them, and then either betrayed them or simply disappeared from their lives. The very nature of his job demanded that he not let anyone get dose enough to touch him emotionally. He had forgotten that once and let a woman get close to him; hell, he had even married her. Venetia had been a disaster, both professionally and personally, and in the fourteen years since he had been strictly solo.

Several times during the past five years he had been relieved that Niema Burdock probably hated his guts. That put her safely out of his range and killed the occasional temptation to get in touch with her. It was better that way. He would just check on her now and then, make certain she was all right-after all, he'd promised Dallas he would take care of her-and that would be that.

He had expected her to find someone else. She was young, only twenty-five when she was widowed, and both smart and pretty. He had wanted her to find someone else, because that would put her forever out of reach. But she hadn't, and he was through with being noble.

He wasn't giving her any more chances.

But she would run like hell if he simply asked her out. He would have to play her gently, like taking a world-record trout on gossamer line, never letting her feel the hook that was reeling her in until it was too late for escape. On his side was her own nature, the adventurousness she seemed determined to bury, and a very real situation that needed to be finessed. Weighed against him was the fact that, despite the uneasy bond forged between them in Iran, she didn't trust him; he'd always known she was smart.

Frank had asked her to his house on a bogus excuse, in a well-meant but awkward attempt to do a little matchmaking. Well, maybe it had worked. And maybe the excuse wasn't so bogus after all. John's mind raced, weighing risks and benefits. He decided to go for it.

"Delta Flight 183 was sabotaged. The FBI labs have turned up traces of explosive, but no detonator. The stuff seems to be a new, self-detonating compound, probably based on RDX and developed in Europe."

She put her hands over her ears. "I don't want to hear this."

John moved around the island and took her hands down, holding her with his fingers wrapped around her slender wrists. "Anything in Europe goes through an arms dealer named Louis Ronsard. He lives in the south of France."

"No," she said.

"I need you to help me get into his files and find out where the stuff is made and who has already gotten a shipment of it."

"No," she said again, but with a touch of desperation in her voice. She didn't try to pull away from him.

"Ronsard is susceptible to a pretty face-"

"Good God, you want me to whore for you?" she asked incredulously, dark eyes narrowing in dangerous warning.

"Of course not," he snapped. No way in hell would he let Ronsard, or anyone else, have her. "I want you to get an invitation to his villa so you can put a bug in his office."

"There are probably a thousand people in this city alone who could do that. You don't need me."

"I need you. Of those thousand people who could do the work, how many of them are women, because I can guarantee you no guy is going to catch Ronsard's interest and get invited to his villa. How many? Twenty, maybe? Say a hundred. Ronsard is thirty-five; how many women out of that hundred are roughly his age? And out of that number, how many of them are as attractive as you?"

She jerked on her wrists. John merely tightened his hold, while taking care not to hurt her. She was so close he could see the velvety texture of her skin. "You speak French-"

"I'm rusty."

"You'd pick it up again in no time. I need someone who's young, pretty, speaks the language, and has the skill. You meet all the qualifications."

"Get someone else!" she said furiously. "Don't try to tell me you couldn't find a contract agent who met all your criteria, someone who wouldn't know your real name. You make it sound like I'm some Mata Hari, but I've never done any undercover work at all. I'd probably get us both killed-"

"No you wouldn't. You've been on other ops-"

"Five years ago. And I just did technical stuff, not any role-playing." She added coldly, "That's your forte."

He let the slam roll off his back. After all, she was right. "I need you," he repeated. "Just this once."

"This once until something else comes up and you decide you 'need' me again."

"Niema..." He rubbed his thumbs over the insides of her wrists in a subtle caress, then released her and stepped away to pick up his coffee cup. He had pushed her enough physically; now was the time to back off and give her back control of herself, so she wouldn't feel as threatened. "I've seen you work. You're fast, you're good, and you can build a transmitter from pieces of junk. You're perfect for the job."

"I went to pieces on the last job."

"You had just heard your husband die." He didn't mince words and saw her flinch. "You're allowed to be a little shell-shocked. And you kept up anyway, we didn't have to carry you."

She turned away, absently rubbing her wrists.

"Please."

Of all the words he could have used, that was the least expected. He saw her spine stiffen. "Don't try to sweet-talk me."

"I wouldn't dream of it," he murmured.

"You're so damn sneaky. I knew it the first time I saw you. You maneuver and manipulate and-" She stopped, and turned back to face him. Her throat worked, and her big dark eyes looked haunted. "Damn you," she whispered.

He was silent, letting the lure entice her. Danger was as addictive as any drug. Firemen, cops, special forces personnel, field operatives, even the emergency department staff in hospitals-they all knew the rush, the incredible thrill when your senses are heightened and your skin feels as if it won't be able to contain all the energy pulsing through your muscles. SWAT teams, DEA agents-they were adrenaline junkies. So was he. And so was Niema.

He did what he did partly because he loved his country, and someone had to be in the sewers taking care of the shit, but also because he loved walking on the knife edge of danger, continually poised on the brink of disaster, with only his skill and his wits to keep him alive. Niema was no different. She wanted to be, but she wasn't.

"Do you know how prevalent terrorism is?" he asked conversationally. "It isn't something that happens in other countries; it happens here, all the time. Flight 183 is just the latest episode. In 1970,

Orlando, Florida, was threatened with a nuclear device if it didn't cough up a million bucks. In 1977, Hanafi Muslims took hostages in the D.C. City Council offices, and a couple of other places. In 1985, the FBI caught three Sikh Indians sent over here with a list of assassination targets. There was the World Trade Center bombing. Lockerbie, Scotland. Hell, I could give you a list three feet long."

She bent her head, but he had her undivided attention.

"We catch most explosives because of the detonator, not the explosive itself. If the bastards have come up with an explosive that begins as a stable compound, then degrades and becomes unstable and detonates, we have a big problem. One bridge taken out can foul shipping over the entire eastern seaboard. A blown dam threatens our entire power grid. Airplanes are particularly vulnerable. So I need to find out where the stuff is being manufactured, and Ronsard is my best bet. I'll find out some other way, eventually, but how many people will die in the meantime?"

She still didn't respond. He said briskly, as if she had already agreed to work with him, "I'll be there under a different cover, using an identity I've been building for quite a while. I would take you in with me as an assistant or a girlfriend, but Ronsard doesn't issue 'invitee and guest' invitations. You have to get invited in separately."

"No. I won't do it."

"Once we're in, I'll have Ronsard introduce us. I'll pretend to be smitten. That'll give us an excuse to be together."

She shook her head. "I'm not going to do it."

"You have to. I've already told you too much."

"And now you have to kill me, right?"

He put his hands in his pockets, his blue eyes alive with amusement. "I wasn't thinking of anything quite that James Bondish."

"That's what this whole thing sounds like, something out of a James Bond movie. You need someone trained in cloak-and-dagger stuff, not me."

"You'll have time to brush up on basic handgun skills. That's all you'd need, though if everything goes right, you won't even need that. We get in, you place the bug, I get into his files and copy them, and we get out. That's it."

"You make it sound as easy as brushing your teeth. If it were that easy, you would already have done it. He-what was his name? Ronsard?-Ronsard must have a pretty good security system."

"Plus a private army guarding the place," John admitted.

"So the job would be a lot trickier than you're trying to make it sound."

"Not if it goes right."

"And if it goes wrong?"

He shrugged, smiling. "Fireworks."

She wavered. He saw it, saw the temptation in her eyes. Then she shook her head. "Get someone else."

"There is no one else with quite your qualifications. The fact that you haven't been active in five years is a plus, because no one is likely to know you. The intelligence community is a fairly small one. I can build you an identity that will stand up under any investigation Ronsard does."

"What about you? You haven't exactly been inactive."

"No, but I go to a lot of trouble to make sure no one knows what I look like, or who I am. Trust me. My cover is so deep sometimes I don't know who I am myself."

She gave a little laugh, shaking her head, and John knew he had her.

"Okay," she said. "I know I'm going to regret it, but... okay."

"John," Frank Vinay said carefully, "do you know what you're doing?"

"Probably not. But I'm doing it anyway."

"Ronsard isn't anyone's fool."

John was relaxed in one of the big leather chairs in Frank's library. He steepled his fingers under his chin while he studied the chessboard. They had resumed the game that had been interrupted two days before, when an agent brought over the preliminary report on the crash of Flight 183. "You're the one who brought her into it," he pointed out.

Frank flushed. "I was being an interfering fool," he grumbled.

"And a sneaky one, or are you going to tell me you didn't have it in mind that I'd be a lot more willing to step into your shoes if I had an incentive to retire from field ops?" He moved a knight. "Check"

"Son of a bitch." Frank glared at the board for a minute, then looked up at John. "You have to retire some time, and I can't think of a better place for you to use your expertise than in my office."

" 'Some time' isn't now. Until I'm compromised, I can do more good in the field."

"Taking Niema Burdock into the field might make that sooner rather than later. For one thing, she knows who you are. For another"- Frank gave him a shrewd look-"could you leave her behind if necessary?"

John's eyes went flat and cold. "I can do whatever I have to do." How could Frank ask him that, after Venetia? "And Niema is probably the best choice I have available. I wouldn't use her if she wasn't. I need someone else in there with me, and she's the one most likely to get an invitation from Ronsard."

"What if he doesn't fall for it? What if he doesn't invite her?"

"Then I'll have to do what I can, but the risks go up. With her, I have a good chance of getting in and out without being detected."

"All right. I'll arrange for her to have an unspecified leave." Frank nudged a bishop into place.

"That's what I thought you'd do," John said, and moved a pawn. "Check and mate."

"Son of a bitch," Frank muttered.

"I'm crazy," Niema muttered to herself as she rolled out of bed before dawn. Yawning, she dressed: sweat pants and a T-shirt, then socks and athletic shoes. "Certified loony."

How had she let herself be convinced to help Medina on this job, when she had sworn she'd never let herself be sucked back into that life? Hadn't losing Dallas taught her anything?

But Medina was right about terrorism, right about the applications of such an explosive, right about the innocent people who would die. He was right, damn it. So, if she could help, then she had to do it.

She went into the bathroom and washed her face, then brushed her teeth and hair. The face that looked back at her from the mirror was still puffy from sleep, but there was color in her cheeks and a brightness to her eyes that made her hate herself. She was looking forward to this, for God's sake. Dallas had died, and she still hadn't learned anything.

"Niema! Get a move on."

She went rigid. Not quite believing what she'd heard, she opened the bathroom door and looked out into her bedroom. No one was there. She crossed over to the hall door and opened it. Light, along with the smell of freshly brewed coffee, spilled down the hall, coming from the direction of the kitchen.

"What in the hell are you doing in my house?" she snarled, stomping toward the kitchen. "And how did you get in?"

Medina sat at the island, a cup of coffee in his hand. He looked as if it were nine A.M. instead of four-thirty, his eyes alert, his lean body relaxed in black sweat pants and black T-shirt. "I told you that you needed a new lock on the back door."

"What about the alarm? I know I set the alarm."

'And I bypassed it. With a pocketknife and six inches of wire. Have some coffee."

"No thanks." Furious, she contemplated dumping the coffee on him. She had always felt safe in her house, and now, thanks to him, she didn't. "Do you know how much I paid for that alarm system?"

"Too much. Get a dog instead." He stood up from the stool. "If you aren't going to have coffee, let's take a little run."

Thirty minutes later, she was still matching him stride for stride. Talking while jogging wasn't easy, but they hadn't even tried. They had run down the street to the park half a mile from her house, then along the silent path lit only by the occasional street light. The mood she was in, she almost hoped someone tried to mug them, not that muggings were a common occurrence in this neighborhood.

Gravel and dirt crunched under their pounding feet The early morning air was cool and fragrant. She was still breathing easily and there was still plenty of spring in her legs. She loved the feel of her muscles bunching and relaxing, and gradually she began to cool down and concentrate on nothing but the running.

Beside her, he ran as if they had just started. His stride was effortless, his breathing slow and even. Dallas had run that way, she remembered, as if he could go on at this pace for hours.

"You run like a SEAL," she said, irritated that she was panting a little.

"I should," he said easily. "If I don't, then I wasted the toughest six months of my life."

She was so surprised she almost stopped. "You went through BUD/S?"

"I lived through BUD/S," he corrected.

"Is that where you met Dallas?"

"No, I was a few classes ahead of him. But he ... ah, recognized some of the stuff I did the first time we worked together."

"Did you use your real name during training?"

"No. The Navy didn't do me any favors, either. They agreed to let me take the training only if I made the physical conditioning cut, and then I was in only as long as I could make the grade."

"What was the criteria for being accepted into the class?"

"A five hundred yard swim using a breast or side stroke, in twelve and a half minutes or less, then a ten minute rest, then forty-two pushups in two minutes. There was a two minute rest after the pushups, then fifty sit-ups in two minutes. Another two minute rest, then eight pull-ups, with no time limit. After a ten minute rest, then came a mile and a half run, wearing boots and fatigues, in eleven and a half minutes. Those were the minimum requirements. If a guy wasn't in a lot better shape than that, he didn't stand much chance making it through the real thing."

He had said all of that without gasping for breath. Impressed despite herself, she asked, "Why did you do it?"

He was silent for about fifty yards. Then he said, "The better I was trained, the better my chances were for staying alive. There was a particular job where I needed every edge I could get."

"How old were you?" He couldn't have been very old, not if he was a few classes ahead of Dallas, which meant he had begun black ops work at an early age.

"Twenty-one."

Twenty-one. Not long out of his teen years, and already so dedicated to his job that he had put himself through BUD/S, a training program so tough only about 5 percent of the men who began it made it all the way through. Now she knew why he and Dallas had been so much alike in so many ways.

"How much longer are we going to run?"

"We can stop whenever you want. You're in great shape; I don't have to worry about that."

She began slowing. "Are we likely to have to run for our lives?"

He dropped into step beside her. ""You never know."

That was when she knew she was crazy for real, because she wasn't scared.

Chapter Eight

How did you know I run every morning?" she asked as they returned to the house. The run had mellowed her considerably; early morning was her favorite time of the day. The sky was beginning to turn shades of pearl and pink, and the birds were awake and singing. She felt tired but also energized, the way she always did after a run.

"I told you, Frank kept tabs on you over the years."

"Bullshit."

He burst out laughing. She gave him an irritated look as she fished the house key out of her pocket and unlocked the door. "What's so funny?"

"Hearing you curse. You look like such a madonna-"

"What!" She stared at him in amazement.

"Angel, then. It's that sweet face of yours." Grinning, he stroked one finger down her cheek, then deftly maneuvered past and stepped into the house ahead of her. She hadn't seen him reach for it, but a pistol was in his hand. "You look as if you wouldn't understand most swearwords if you heard them." He was moving, examining the house, as he spoke.

She rolled her eyes and followed him inside. "I'll try to stick to 'gosh' and 'darn,' then, so I won't shock you. And don't think you can change the subject Mr. Vinay hasn't just 'kept tabs' on me, has he? I've been under pretty dose surveillance. Tell me why."

"The surveillance isn't constant. It was at first, to establish your routine. Now it's just often enough to make certain you're okay and to see if anything's changed."

"Tell me why you've wasted Agency time and manpower like that." She had to raise her voice because he was down the hall checking the bedrooms.

"I haven't. Frank used a private agency."

Before, she had been irritated and disbelieving; now she was downright astounded. She slammed the door with a thud. ""You paid for a private agency to watch me? For God's sake, Tucker, if you wanted to know, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call?"

He was coming back up the dark hall toward her, Because he was wearing black, he was difficult to see; only his fade and bare arms and hands made him visible. Part of it was the way he moved, she thought absently. He was fluid, noiseless; you had to rely only on your eyes to detect him, because he was utterly silent.

"John," he said.

"What?"

"You called me Tucker. My name is John."

He stood directly in front of her, so close she could feel the animal heat generated by their run, smell the hot odors of sweat and man. She took a step back and tilted her head so she could look at his face. "I haven't quite adjusted yet. You were Tucker to me for five years, whether or not I ever saw you. You've been Medina for less than twelve hours."

"Not Medina. John. Call me by my first name."

He seemed strangely intent on this name business, standing motionless, his gaze fastened on her face. "All right, 'John' it is. I'll probably slip, though, especially when I get pissed at you-which so far is averaging at least once an hour."

He grinned, and she wondered if it was because he so easily irritated her or because she had said 'pissed.' What did the man think she was, a nun? He was going to make her uncomfortable if he kept laughing every time she said something the least bit blue.

She poked him in the chest with one finger. It was like poking a steel plate, with no give beneath the skin. "Since you'll be using another name when we get to France, shouldn't I be getting used to calling you that? What if I slip up then?"

"I'll be careful not to piss you off."

"You aren't going to tell me?" she asked incredulously.

"Not yet."

She pushed past him. "I'm going to take a shower. Lock the door behind you when you leave."

She fumed as she showered. There was no reason for him not to give her his cover name. He just loved being contrary and secretive, though it was such a habit for him now he probably didn't realize-no, of course he realized. He did everything deliberately; she had noticed that about him in Iran.

It followed, then, that he had intentionally revealed his own name, rather than being so surprised to see her that he blurted it out. John Medina didn't blurt out anything. He couldn't have lived this long if he did. The question was-why? He could have posed as Tucker, and she would never have known any differently. Mentally shrugging, she put the question aside. Who knew why Medina did anything?

She took her time in the bathroom, indulging in her morning ritual of moisturizing her skin, then smoothing on a body oil with a subtle scent that lingered all day. She didn't have to be at work until nine, so she didn't have to hurry. That was one reason she got up so early; she didn't like rushing around and arriving at work already frazzled. Of course, she usually got more sleep than she had last night, but Medina hadn't left until well past her normal bedtime.

Going into her bedroom, she took out a matching navy blue set of underwear, but only put on the panties. She wore a bra while she was jogging and at work, but didn't bother while she was at home. She put on her terry-cloth robe and snugly belted it, pulled her wet hair out from under the shawl collar, and walked barefoot down the hall to the kitchen to see if the coffee Medina had made was still drinkable.

He was sitting at the island bar, drinking coffee, much as he had been before. She checked only briefly, then went to the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. "I thought you were leaving."

"Why?"

She turned to face him, leaning against the cabinet and cradling the cup in her hand. His hair was wet, she noticed.

"I used your other bathroom for a shower," he said. "Hope you don't mind. I had to put these clothes back on, though."

"No, I don't mind. But I still thought you were leaving. I have to go to work."

"No, you don't. You're on indefinite leave."

She sipped her coffee, hiding her shock-and, yes, her irritation. "That's news to me."

"Frank took care of it last night. Until this job is finished, you're mine."

She didn't know if she liked the sound of that. A funny little pang tightened her stomach. She took refuge in her coffee again, hiding her expression.

He looked so pantherish and male, dressed all in black, lounging at his ease in her cheerful kitchen.

The T-shirt he wore clung to him, revealing the breadth of his shoulders and the flatness of his stomach. He was tall and lean, but more muscular than he looked when wearing street clothes. He had meant his words one way, but his physical presence was so strong she couldn't stop herself from a brief sexual speculation. Did his stamina extend to lovemaking? If so ... wow.

Immediately she pulled her thoughts away from that direction; nothing but trouble there. "So what am I supposed to do with my time until we're ready to leave? When do we leave, anyway?" she asked briskly.

"About a week. It takes time to set up a cover as foolproof as yours will be. In the meantime, we train. How are you with a handgun and self-defense?"

"Rusty."

"Have you had any formal self-defense training?"

"No. Just a rape-prevention course, the usual self-defense stuff." And the rudimentary training Dallas had begun with her, but that was five years ago, and she hadn't kept it up.

"Okay. We won't have time for anything in-depth, but in a week's time I can have you at a level where you can hold your own with most men. You're in good shape already, so that helps."

Great. It looked as if she was going to be in his company nonstop for a week. She sighed and took a skillet out of the cabinet. "I'm not doing anything else until I eat. What do you want for breakfast?"

"Take your pick," Medina said, indicating the small arsenal he had laid out on a bench. They were in a private firing range, used by CIA personnel. The huge, barnlike building was empty except for the two of them.

It wasn't anything fancy, having been built more for use than looks. The far wall of the range was stacked with sand bags and bales of hay, so no rounds of ammunition went through the walls to do damage to anything or anyone outside. The walls themselves were lined with what looked like pegboard, to contain the noise. Big industrial lights hung overhead, but they were individually controlled so that the lighting conditions could be adjusted

He indicated the first weapon. "This is a Colt .45. It's a heavy-duty cannon, with a lot of stopping power. The next one is a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver. Again, it's pretty heavy. But they're both as reliable as the sun, so you might want to practice with them. I wouldn't recommend them for regular use, though, because of the weight. You need something lighter."

He indicated the other weapons. "The next one is a SIG Sauer P226, 9mm. It's my personal favorite. The other automatic is an H&K P9S. It's half a pound lighter than the Colt, and H&K makes a fine weapon. You can't go wrong with either one."

Niema studied the handguns, then picked each one up in turn. The two revolvers were so heavy she could barely aim them. The H&K was more manageable, but for sheer ease of handling the SIG suited her much better.

"Looks like the SIG is going to be my favorite, too." She wasn't an expert with firearms, but neither was she a rank beginner. Dallas had been constitutionally unable to bear a wife who didn't know how to fire a weapon, so he had taught her the basics and insisted she practice. But that was five years ago, and she hadn't been on a firing range since.

"The SIG doesn't have a thumb safety," he said. "That lever on the left side of the frame is the decocking lever. Never, ever lower the hammer except with the decocking lever. Some SIGs are double-action and won't have the lever, but you need to get used to using it."

"It's awkward," she said after a minute spent familiarizing herself with the lever. "I can't work it without shifting my grip."

"Try using your left thumb. I learned to shoot it left-handed because I ran into the same problem."

She slid a glance at him. "Accurately?"

"Of course," he said coolly. "Or I wouldn't do it."

"Pardon me for insulting your manhood."

"My manhood isn't connected to my weapon, honey."

She bit the inside of her lip to hold back any rejoinders. That particular subject could rapidly get into dangerous waters.

A surprising amount of expertise returned as soon as she handled the weapon. She put a clip in the SIG, and Medina set the first man-shaped target at ten" yards.

"Is that all?" she asked, wondering whether or not she should be insulted.

"Most situations where you would use a handgun are fairly close quarters, and things happen fast, in five seconds or less. Work on your accuracy before you start worrying about distance. Anything much over thirty yards and you'd be better off with a rifle or shotgun, anyway."

"How do we get our weapons on board the plane?"

"We don't. I could, but it would attract too much attention. I'll get them once we're in France. By the way, we won't be traveling together."

She nodded, put on her headset, and raised the pistol. Dallas had taught her the point-and-shoot method; studies had found that people were very accurate in pointing at something, but when they tried to aim a weapon the mechanics of doing so somehow interfered with that natural ability. The idea was not to aim, but simply to point.

Medina's arms came around her from behind, his hands closing over hers and making minute adjustments in her grip. "Gently squeeze the trigger," he murmured, his voice coming through the headset.

She took a deep breath and slowly let it out, the way Dallas had taught her. When she had exhaled about half, she stopped and squeezed the trigger. The weapon jumped in her hands as if it was alive, the barrel recoiling upward from the released energy. With the headset protecting her ears, the shot was a flattened crack, like a board popping. Smoke and cordite burned her nostrils. Without a word she steadied the weapon, took a breath, and shot again.

This time Medina braced her wrists with his own hands, but this time she was more prepared for the recoil. She didn't fight it, but let her forearms absorb the shock.

"Good," Medina said, and let his arms drop from around her.

Taking her time, not rushing her shots, she emptied the clip at the target. When the clip was empty, per Medina's previous instructions, she removed the empty dip and slapped a new one in. While she was doing that he called up a new target and set this one at twenty yards. She shot all the bullets in that clip, too.

Afterward he pulled the targets up for examination. On the first target, out of a fifteen-shot clip, she had scored two rounds in the head, one in the neck, and five in the chest. "Only eight," she said in disgust. "Barely over fifty percent."

"This isn't a marksmanship competition, so don't try to be Annie Oakley. And look at it this way: With the other seven bullets, you probably scared the hell out of whoever was standing beside the target."

She had to laugh, even if it was ruefully. "Thanks a lot."

"You're welcome. Take a look at the second target."

The second target made her feel better. With both targets she had tried to divide her shots equally between the head and chest. It hadn't worked very well with the first target, and in one way she didn't approve much: only three shots went into the head. But eight shots were clustered in the chest area, meaning she had made all of those shots.

She told John what she'd been trying to do. "Forget the head," he advised. "In a tense situation, the chest is a much bigger target. You don't have to kill someone, just stop him. Now let's switch to another weapon."

"Why?"

"Because you never know what will be available. You need to be able to use whatever is at hand."

He made it sound like she was going to make a career of this, she thought grumpily. But she moved to the H&K as instructed and went through the same exercise. She ran into trouble with both the Colt and Smith & Wesson, though. The pistols were so heavy it took all her strength, using both hands, to hold her wrists steady. The first shot with the .357 jarred her teeth.

Medina stepped behind her then, wrapping his hands around her wrists and adding his strength to hers. "Unless you're with me, I'm not going to be much good with these," she said between gritted teeth.

"You're doing okay. Just take your time between shots."

She not only had to take her time, she had to work up her nerve. Now she knew why the big pistols were called hand cannons. She didn't make all her shots with them, either, but the ones that hit tore impressive holes in the cardboard targets. Afterward she had to massage her forearms to relax the muscles.

"That's enough for today," he said, taking note of her action, ""four arms will be sore if you keep on."

"Stopping suits me fine," she muttered. "I guess I'm not Rambo, either."

"Who is?" he asked dryly.

She laughed as she worked the kinks out of her shoulders. "What's next?"

"A workout, if you're up to it."

She gave him a wary look. "What kind of workout?"

"The kind where I teach you how to take care of yourself."

"I'll have you know I already take vitamins and moisturize my skin."

"Smart ass." He chuckled as he looped a companionable arm around her shoulders. "We're going to make a great team."

"A great temporary team," she corrected, ignoring the sudden thumping of her heart. No way was she going back into this full-time, or even part-time. This was a one-shot deal.

He let her have the last word, but she saw the self-satisfied quirk to his mouth, quickly smoothed out, that told her he planned otherwise. And that was almost as worrying as the job itself.

To her relief, he took it easy on her during the workout. The gym he took her to wasn't a gym at all, but an abandoned barn thirty miles south of D.C. Nevertheless, it was equipped with both weight machines and free weights, punching bags, what looked like gymnastic equipment, and a big, blue, three-inch thick foam mat.

"That isn't thick enough," she pronounced.

"It's thick enough. I'm not going to be dropping you on your head." He kicked off his shoes.

"It's my butt I'm worried about." Following his example, she took off her own shoes.

"I promise I'll take good care of your butt."

He was as good as his word. The workout didn't involve getting tossed around or twisted into a pretzel. "Rule one: Don't try to take anyone down," he said. "You aren't good enough. The best you can hope to do is get away, so that's what we'll concentrate on. You have the advantage of surprise on your side, because you're small-"

"I am not."

He cast his eyes toward the cavernous ceiling. "You're smaller than most men," he amended.

"But I'm wiry."

He laughed then. "Okay, you're wiry. Where, I don't know, but I'll take your word for it. But you look-"

This time she was the one who rolled her eyes. "I know, like an angel."

"You don't like that, huh? Then let's say you look like a lady. You look as if you've never been dirty, never sweated, never swore."

"Strike three, you're out," she muttered.

"And you don't look nearly as contrary as you are."

"I'm not contrary, I'm accurate."

"As I was saying..." He grinned down at her. "You look like a cream puff. An angelic, ladylike cream puff. So any guy who grabs you isn't going to be expecting you to do anything except maybe cry."

Deciding she'd bedeviled him enough for now, she shrugged her shoulders back and forth, loosening them. "Okay, so teach me how to make him cry."

"I'll be satisfied with just teaching you how to get away."

Courtesy of the rape-prevention class she'd taken, she already knew some of the basic stuff. John refreshed her on many of the moves: how to break the hold of someone who grabbed you from the front-you brought your arms up hard and fast inside your assailant's. A quick, stiff-arm jab of the palm up and into someone's nose might not kill him, though it could if done hard enough, but it would certainly cause him pain. So would slapping your cupped palms over his ears, a move designed to rupture the ear drums. A jab of stiffened fingers into the eyes or throat was disabling.

He showed her the most vulnerable place on the throat for crushing the trachea. Without immediate help, someone with a crushed trachea would die. Even if she couldn't manage crushing power, the blow, done properly, would disable.

They moved around on the mat, into different positions and scenarios. By necessity, the drill was close contact. Niema forced herself to ignore the sensations generated by having John's tall, hard-muscled body against hers, his arms wrapped around her in various holds as he patiently instructed her on how to break those holds.

They both worked up a sweat, and he kept at it until she was panting for breath.

"Would it help if I cried uncle?" she finally asked.

"We can stop any time you want," he said, surprised.

"Great. Now you tell me."

"I don't want to make you sore. We need to train every day, to build up your strength and stamina, and we can't if your muscles are too sore to work."

He actually looked worried, so Niema said, "No, I don't think I'll be sore, but I'm still ready for a break."

"There's some water in the fridge over there. I'm going to work with the weights while you rest."

She fetched a bottle of cold water from the rusty refrigerator standing in the corner and settled down on the mat to watch. He stripped off his T-shirt and tossed it aside. Quickly she looked away and drank more water. Seeing a man without his shirt was nothing out of the ordinary, but still... this was John Medina, and he wasn't ordinary.

She stretched out on the mat and closed her eyes, so she wouldn't give in to the temptation to stare at him. There couldn't be anything between them except the job. He was black ops, she was nine-to-five, two totally opposite lifestyles. Still, for a dizzying moment she thought of indulging in a brief affair with him.

What would it be like? She had enjoyed being with him today, even when he annoyed her. He challenged her, just by being himself. She was tired, but she could feel life coursing through her veins in a way it hadn't done in a long, long time. Had he done that, or was it the prospect of being back in action? Or was he irrevocably bound up in that action, so that she couldn't separate the two?

Her entire body felt sensitized after that workout with him. His forearms had brushed her nipples several times. His hands had been on her legs, her hips. His body had slid against hers, and several times, while they grappled, one of his legs had been between hers.

She rolled over onto her stomach and cradled her head on her arms. John Medina had "Danger Zone" written all over him, and for her own sake she should pay attention to the sign. She was already risking more than she could afford to lose.

"Time to get back to work, cream puff," he called from where he was doing bench presses.

"Cream puff, my ass," she snapped, and rolled to her feet.

Chapter Nine

Villa de Ronsard, the South of France

Louis Ronsard trusted in nothing he couldn't see, and very little that he could. Trust, in his experience, was a commodity with too high a price.

Even when he trusted, there were degrees: He trusted his sister, Mariette, to never deliberately do anything to hurt him, but she could sometimes be as foolish as she was lovely, so he trusted her with nothing that concerned his business. By necessity, he trusted a select few of his employees with some details of the business, but he made frequent checks on their financial and personal lives to detect any weakness that might pose a danger to him. His employees were forbidden to use drugs, for example, but Ronsard was under no delusion that just because he said it, it was so. So... drug tests for all the employees, from the lowest to the highest.

He was aware that he walked a knife edge of danger. The people with whom he dealt on a daily basis were not upstanding citizens. In his opinion, they were either fanatic or psychotic, or both. He had yet to be able to tell which was the most unstable.

There was only one way one could deal with such people: very cautiously.

He would not accept commissions from just anyone. The maniac who wanted to explode a bomb in a school as a protest for world peace was not going to purchase that bomb or the materials through him. Even in the world of terrorists there must be standards, no? Ronsard required an established organization, which would need his services again and so was not likely to turn on him.

For his part, he was absolutely scrupulous in delivering what he had promised. He took nothing for himself except the agreed payment. His own value, he knew, depended on his reliability. To that end, he went to extraordinary lengths to make certain nothing went wrong with any shipment, no matter how small. His business had flourished as a result, and his bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands were ... healthy.

Because he was so careful, anything out of the ordinary made him wary. Such was the phone call he received that morning on his private line, the number only a very few people knew.

"So," he murmured to himself as he leaned back in his chair and rolled a fragrant cigar, taken from an inlaid sandalwood box on his desk, in his fingers.

"So?" Cara Smith, his secretary and aide-his first aide, as she liked to call herself-looked up from the computer she was using to track his various investments. He had been surprised, when he had her investigated, to discover her name really was Smith, and that she was from the unlikely named Waterloo, Kansas, which had given her the opportunity over the years to make some dreadful puns at his expense.

"We have a request from an ... unexpected party."

Cara, of all people, knew how much he disliked the unexpected. But she also knew him, better than was sometimes comfortable, and immediately saw his interest. Something intrigued him, or he would have immediately refused the commission.

She swiveled her chair toward him and crossed her long legs. Since Cara was six feet tall, they were very long legs indeed. 'And the name is . . . ?"

"Temple."

Her cornflower blue eyes widened. "Wow."

She was so American, he thought, so adept in the inelegant phrase. "Wow, indeed."

Temple, known only by the one name, was a shadow in the already murky world of terrorists. His name had been whispered in connection with some assassinations, with certain bombings. He did not choose his targets at random, for the sake of creating terror. He might bring down an airplane, but one person on that flight was his specific target. It was unknown whether he belonged to some even more shadowy organization or if he worked for himself. If for himself, no one knew what his agenda was. Temple was an enigma.

Ronsard didn't like enigmas. He liked to know exactly with whom, and what, he was dealing.

"What does he want?"

"The RDX-a."

To his relief, she didn't say "wow" again. Nor did she ask the obvious: How did Temple even know about RDX-a? It had been tested only a week before, and though the compound had performed as it was supposed to, its existence was still known to only a few. There were a few problems in production that were currently being eliminated, such as the tendency of some batches to decompose at an accelerated rate, with unpleasant results for the handler. It was a delicate balancing act, to stabilize an unstable compound just enough to be able to predict its rate of decomposition, without rendering it too stable to perform.

"Find every available bit of information on Temple," he said. "I want to know what he looks like, where he was born-everything."

"Are you going to accept the commission?"

"It depends." Ronsard lit the cigar, dedicating himself, for a few pleasurable seconds, to the ritual. When the end was glowing to his satisfaction he savored the subtle vanilla taste on his tongue. He would have to change his clothing before seeing Laure; she loved the smell of his cigars, but the smoke wasn't good for her.

Cara had already turned back to her computer and was rapidly typing in commands. Computers were something else he didn't trust, so none of his records were on the one Cara used, which was connected to that invisible electronic world the Americans called the Web. There were encryption programs, of course, but they were constantly being broken. Teenagers hacked into the Pentagon's most secure files; corporations spent billions in computer security that leaked like a sieve. The only secure computer, in his opinion, was one that wasn't connected to anything else-like the one on his desk, where he kept his records. As an added precaution he regularly changed his password, to a word chosen at random from the dog-eared volume of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities that he always kept on his desk. He actually read the thing from time to time, though more to keep Cara from being suspicious about its presence than from any actual interest in the book. He would turn down the page from which he had chosen his password and leave the book lying out in the open as if it were of no importance.

His system wasn't perfect. He changed the password so often that sometimes he forgot which word he had chosen, hence the turned-down page. He could always recognize the word once he saw it, if he was on the correct page.

"Where's Temple from?" Cara asked. "I'm not finding anything on him using a broad search. I need a closer focus."

"America, I think, but I've heard rumors he had lived in Europe for at least ten years. Try Scotland Yard."

She sighed as she tapped keys. "This is going to get me arrested some day," she grumbled.

Ronsard smiled. He did enjoy Cara; she knew exactly what his business entailed but managed to maintain the same attitude as if she worked in a corporate office somewhere. Nor was she intimidated by him, and though a certain amount of intimidation was necessary in his chosen field, sometimes it was wearying.

Nor had she fallen in love with him, which was fortunate. Ronsard knew women, knew the effect he had on them, but Cara had bluntly told him that though she liked him she wasn't interested in sleeping with him. That, too, had been a relief.

She slept with other men, most recently his Egyptian bodyguard, Hossam, who had been obsessed with the tall blonde woman from the day he first saw her. Ronsard only hoped Hossam wouldn't lose control of his Middle-Eastern temperament when his American Norse goddess lost interest in him.

"Damn," she muttered and typed furiously. The Scotland Yard computer was giving her problems, he concluded.

"Damn!" she shouted a minute later and slapped the monitor. "The bastards have added a wrinkle-"

She began muttering to herself as she tried to electronically wriggle into the Scotland Yard database. Ronsard waited, puffing on his cigar. Cara's mutterings were only half intelligible, thank God, because as she worked her language deteriorated alarmingly.

" Shitpissfuck-"

His eyebrows rose as she got up and stalked around the office, swearing under her breath and waving her hands in the air as she appeared to be having a conversation with herself.

"Okay, what if I try this," she finally muttered and resumed her seat to pound out another series of commands.

Ten minutes later she sat back with a blissful expression on her face. "Outsmarted the sons of bitches," she crowed. "Okay, let's see what you have on 'Temple, first name unknown.'"

A file popped on the screen. Cara hit the print button, and the printer whirred to life, spitting out a single sheet of paper.

"That isn't much," Ronsard murmured as she got up and brought the sheet to him. "Try the FBI; if he's American, they may have more on him."

He began reading. Scotland Yard didn't have many hard facts on Temple. "Believed" to have worked with Baader-Meinhoff in Germany. "Believed" to have been associated with Basque Fatherland in Spain. "Believed" to have had contact with the IRA. Evidently Scotland Yard "believed" a lot of things about Temple and knew very little.

Temple was either American or Canadian, believed -that word again-to be between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. No known place of residence.

As sketchy as the information was, at least it gave him a place to begin, Ronsard thought. He had contacts throughout Europe. If anyone in either of the three organizations mentioned had any knowledge of Temple, he-Ronsard-would shortly be in possession of the same.

Cara was muttering and swearing her way through the process of gaining access to the FBI's database. When he heard the triumphant "Aha!" he knew she had succeeded.

"Well, kiss my ass, we got us a photo!" she said in astonishment. "Not a good one, his face is half-hidden, but it's something."

Ronsard left his desk to cross the room and lean over Cara's chair, peering at the computer screen. "Can you enhance it?" he asked, studying the grainy, blurred picture that showed a dark-haired man about to get into a car.

"I can enhance what we have, but nothing will show what the camera didn't get, which is half his face."

"He's wearing a ring on his left hand. A wedding band?" Interesting, Ronsard thought. Not that Temple might be married; things like that happened, even in the terrorists' world. But for him to wear such a conventional symbol as a wedding band was amusing.

The photo showed a dark-haired man, fairly tall, given the scale of the car beside him. His face was turned partially away from the camera, giving a good view of his left ear. The photograph could have been taken anywhere; no license plates were visible on any of the cars; even the make of the car was impossible to tell. The red brick building in the background was equally anonymous, without any helpful lettering or a convenient sign to give a hint of the location.

"I'll print out the information for you to read while I work on enhancing this," Cara said and set the printer to working.

The FBI had more information than Scotland Yard, which illustrated exactly how closely the two bureaus worked. What information the FBI had on an international terrorist, Interpol was supposed to have. What Interpol had, Scotland Yard should have. That was the whole purpose of Interpol. The FBI had been holding back, and he wondered why.

"Temple," he silently read. "First name Josef, or Joseph. Birthplace unknown. First identified in Tucson, Arizona, in 1987. Disappeared, resurfaced in 1992 in Berlin. Brown hair, blue eyes. Identifying marks or scars: left scapula, a diagonal scar approximately four inches long, believed to have been made by a knife or other sharp object."

Knifed in the back, Ronsard thought. Mr. Temple had indeed lived an interesting life.

"Subject wanted for questioning regarding 1987 bombing of courthouse in Tucson, Arizona; 1992 hijacking of NATO munitions truck in Italy-" Ronsard's eyebrows rose. He thought he had a sure finger on the pulse of his chosen world, but he hadn't heard anything about the NATO hijacking. The list went on. In all, the FBI wanted Temple for questioning in fifteen separate incidents.

Temple was thought to be an independent, with no known affiliation with any one organization. He was a hired weapon, Ronsard thought; he didn't kill for pleasure or for himself, but for whoever bought his services, which would not be cheap. From the list of incidents for which he was the main suspect, none of the targets were "soft." All of them were difficult, and the more difficult, the more expensive.

Who was paying him this time? Who had heard of RDX-a and hired Temple to procure it? Why hadn't he-or they-simply approached him themselves, instead of using Temple as a go-between? It had to be someone with a lot to lose if they became known.

"It isn't a wedding ring," Cara announced, printing out the photo.

Ronsard picked up the sheet as soon as the printer spat it out. She was correct; the ring seemed to have a peculiar braided design, like a dozen tiny entwined gold ropes. No, not ropes-snakes. That looked like a snake head on the ring.

And Mr. Temple's left ear was pierced. The gold hoop in it was discreet, but the photo enhancement plainly revealed it.

The people or person behind Mr. Temple were careful, sending him out to do their work while they remained safely in the background.

But Ronsard was just as wary, just as cautious. He didn't deal with anyone he didn't know.

"I think I want to meet the elusive Mr. Temple," he murmured.

Chapter Ten

McLean, Virginia

Niema hit the alarm on the clock before it could go off, got up, and dressed in her running outfit, did her usual routine in the bathroom, and sauntered into the kitchen. As she expected, Medina was sitting at his usual place at the island bar, sipping coffee. "Very funny," he growled, and she laughed. "Don't pout. You got in anyway, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but I had to climb in through the laundry-room window. Very undignified."

And very silent, she thought; she was a light sleeper, but she hadn't heard a thing. "I suppose you bypassed the alarm on the window, too."

"No, I disabled the entire thing. Get one that works off infrared or motion, not contact."

She scowled at him. The alarm system had set her back over a thousand bucks, and now he was proposing she spend another two thousand. "Why don't I just do the same thing to all my windows and doors that I did to the back door? Low tech seems to work where high tech doesn't."

"Both would be good." He grinned and lifted his cup in salute. "That was a good idea."

"Low tech" was a good description of what she had done to her back door. She bought two ordinary hook and latch sets at a hardware store, installed the first one in the usual manner with the eye screwed into the frame while the hook was mounted on the door. Then she had turned the second one upside down, butted it up against the first one, and installed it with the eye screwed into the door and the hook mounted on the frame.

With only a single hook latched, anyone with a credit card, knife, or any other thin object could slip it in the crack and force the hook up, freeing it from the eye. With two hooks, one upside down, that method wouldn't work. If you slid the credit card up from the bottom, you hit the upside down latch and pushed the hook into the eye, instead of out of it. If you came down from the top, you were pushing down on the upper latch, with the same results.

Of course, someone who was very strong or who had a battering ram could knock the door off its hinges, but that wasn't a very quiet way of breaking and entering. She was inordinately pleased that her simple solution had stymied him.

When they left the house, instead of turning right, toward the park, Medina turned left.

"The park's in the other direction," Niema said as she caught up and fell into step beside him.

"We ran there yesterday."

"Does this mean you never run the same route twice, or just that you're easily bored?"

"Bored," he said easily. "I have the attention span of a gnat."

"Liar."

His only response was a grin, and they ran in silence then, down the deserted street. There were no stars visible overhead, and the weather felt damp, as if it might rain. Her forearms were a little sore from all that shooting the day before, but other than that she felt great. Her thigh muscles stretched as they ran, and she felt her blood begin to zing through her veins as her heartbeat increased.

They had been running for half an hour when a car turned a corner onto their street, heading straight for them. It was rolling slow, as if looking for something.

John looped his right arm around her waist and whirled her behind a tree. She bit back her instinctive cry and barely got her hands out to brace herself before he crushed her against the tree trunk, holding her there with the hard pressure of his body. She saw the dull glint of metal in his left hand. She held her breath and pressed her cheek even harder into the rough bark of the tree.

"Two men," he said in an almost inaudible whisper, his breath stirring the hair at her temple. "They're probably from the private agency Frank hired."

"Probably? Don't you know?"

"No, I don't know your surveillance schedule, and they don't know I'm here. They're probably looking for you since you aren't on your usual route."

The thought of having a "surveillance schedule" was annoying. Equally annoying was the realization of how many times over the past few years cars had passed by her in the early morning hours and she hadn't thought anything of it, except to watch, with a woman's natural wariness, until the cars had turned the corner and disappeared. She had been so oblivious she was embarrassed. She should have been more alert.

The bark was scratching her cheek, and her breasts were being crushed. "Ease up," she panted. "You're squashing me."

He moved about an inch, but it helped. He remained behind the tree until the car was a block away, then lifted himself away from her. She grunted as she pushed away from the tree. "If they're ours, why don't we just let them see us?"

He resumed his steady stride, and she took up her place beside him. "Because I'm not positive they're ours, for one thing. For another, I don't want them to see me, much less see me with you."

"Some bodyguards they are anyway," she grumbled, "letting you break into my house two mornings in a row."

"They weren't there when I arrived. They must be on a drive-by."

"Why don't you just tell Mr. Vinay to call off the surveillance for now? That would be the most logical thing to do. Then, if anyone drove by, we'd know they aren't ours."

"I may do that."

The car must have just circled the block. It turned onto the street again. "Pretend to chase me and let's see if they'll shoot you," Niema said, and put on a burst of speed, knowing the car's headlights couldn't yet pick her out. She barely contained a giggle at Medina's soft curse behind her. She had taken three steps when a heavy weight hit her in the back and two arms wrapped around her, dragging her down. They landed on the soft grass beside the sidewalk, with her on her stomach and him on top of her. In the pre-dawn darkness, no one was likely to see them unless they were moving.

He held her down, despite her wriggles and erupting giggles, until the car had passed by again. "You little witch," he said breathlessly, as if he were trying to hold back his own laughter. "Are you trying to get me killed?"

"Just keeping you on your toes, Medina."

"On my belly is more like it," he grumbled, climbing to his feet and hauling her upright. "What if someone looked out their window and called the cops?"

"We'd be long gone. And if we weren't, I'd just say I stumbled and you tried to catch me. No problem."

"I hope you're having fun," he growled. A little startled, she realized she was having fun. For the first time in a long while she felt as if there was some purpose to her life, as if she had something important to do. No matter how interesting her work with surveillance devices was, benchtesting circuits didn't give her a kick.

But she felt alive now, rejuvenated, as if she had been existing in some sort of half-life for the past five years. She had kept up her running all this time, but until yesterday she hadn't been aware of the workings of her muscles, the pumping of her blood. She enjoyed sparring with Medina, both verbally and physically. She wasn't a gun fanatic, but she had also enjoyed learning about the different handguns, learning how they felt in her hand, learning her own limits and then stretching those limits. She wanted to know more, do more, be more.

This was the danger of fieldwork. She had known the lure, resisted it for five years, but now the excitement was flowing through her veins like a potent drug. She didn't know whether to hate Medina or thank him for dragging her back into this.

Was five years' penance enough? Would a hundred years be enough to empty the guilt and anguish she felt over Dallas? Her stride faltered as she thought of the times they had jogged together; afterward they had showered together, then fallen into bed and made love.

Would Dallas have been attracted to the woman she had been for those five years, the woman she had made herself become? Or would he have been bored by the insistence on structure and security, the lack of risk? She was afraid she knew the answer. Dallas had been a risk taker; for all his low-key persona, he'd been a man who thrived on challenge and danger. Why else would he have become a SEAL, then a contract agent? What had attracted him most to her, and she to him, was the instinctive knowledge that they were alike.

Medina was the same type of man, only more so. Alarm bells, suddenly loud and clear, shrilled in her head. It was one thing to allow herself to be sucked back into the heady world of espionage and contract work, but letting herself develop feelings for another man in that same world was something else entirely.

She would have to keep her guard up, because emotions could boil over in such high-stress situations. And Medina was an attractive man; more than attractive, really. If he ever let his guard down, he'd be devastating. He seemed relaxed with her, but not once had he let any personal details slip. She knew nothing about him.

She had already felt warning twinges of physical attraction during the close contact required by training. A woman would have to be dead not to notice that lean, rock-hard body, especially when he was pressed against her.

Was that why she had teased him about making the surveillance team think he was chasing her, so he would catch her and hold her? In a flash of self-awareness, she realized she had been flirting with him. Uh-oh, she thought. She'd have to be more careful in the future.

What future? This was a one-time thing, wasn't it? They would work together briefly just this once, then she would return to her safe, familiar job and he would disappear again.

"Are you ready to pack it in?"

She glanced at the luminous dial of her wristwatch; they had already been running for over an hour. Luckily they hadn't gone in a straight line, or it would have taken them another hour to get back to her house; they had circled blocks and backtracked several times, so they were no more than half a mile from home. Dawn was dose, so close that details were clearly visible now. "What if the surveillance team is still looking for me?"

"They had better be, or-" He didn't finish the sentence, but she could guess what he had meant to say: Or they would be looking for another job.

"They'll see you," she pointed out.

"Ill split off and let you go home alone. Once they see you're safely home, they'll break off surveillance."

"What else is on the agenda today? More target practice?"

"That and more self-defense training."

With her new insight into herself, she didn't know if close-contact training with him was such a good idea. "I thought only the basics were necessary."

"We might as well do something with our time.

Who knows? It may come in handy some day. By the way, some boxes will be delivered to you today. It's a new wardrobe, jewelry, things you'll need."

"Why do I need a new wardrobe?"

"It's part of the cover. You'll be attending embassy parties, posing as the daughter of old friends of the ambassador."

She would be playing dress-up, Niema thought with amusement. She looked forward to that part of the job. Like most women, she liked good clothes and the thrill of knowing she looked good.

"Try everything on," he continued. "The clothes have to fit perfectly. What doesn't will be replaced or altered."

"They can't be returned if they're altered."

"Don't worry about it, you can keep them." He looked around. "This is where I leave you. See you in five minutes." He peeled off to the right, his stride lengthening as if he hadn't already been running for over an hour. He cut between two houses, jumped a fence, and disappeared from view.

Niema turned on the afterburners. Her thighs ached from the effort, but she pushed harder, her feet pounding. It was silly to compete with him when they weren't racing; all she had to do was leisurely jog back to her house and let the surveillance team see her, so they knew she was all right. She knew it was silly; she did it anyway. She fought to suck air deep into her lungs as she raced down the sidewalk. Anyone seeing her would think she was running for her

life, she thought, except there was no one behind her.

Up ahead she saw the surveillance car, or at least she thought it was. She hadn't gotten a good look at it in the dark, but the tail lights looked the same, and there were two men in it. The car was parked at the curb; she blew by it in a dead run, without giving the men so much as a glance. When she was twenty yards past them, she heard the car engine start.

She was two blocks from home. She ignored the messages her thigh muscles were screaming at her and forced herself to maintain her speed. When she reached her house she pounded across the small front yard and to the front door. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the car cruise past. She unlocked the door and practically fell inside, gulping in huge breaths.

She leaned against the wall beside the door, wondering if the goal had been worth the effort. Her heart was pounding so hard there was a roaring in her ears.

Or was there? She forced herself to breathe regularly, her head tilted as she listened.

The shower in the second bath was running.

Muttering to herself, she stomped off to take her own shower.

Niema faced Medina across the blue foam mat. "Today I'm going to show you some strike points," he said. "Done properly-and it takes a lot of practice to do them properly-these are death blows."

She drew back and put her hands on her hips, eyeing him suspiciously. "Why would I need to know anything like that? Am I going to be in hand-to-hand combat?"

"If I thought you were, I wouldn't take you. This is partly just in case and partly because I have time on my hands." He motioned her forward. "Come on."

"You want to turn me into a trained killer because you're bored?"

That drew a flashing smile. "You won't be a trained killer. At most, you'll be able to stun someone so you can get away. I told you it takes years of practice to do this properly. The only way you'll kill someone is if you accidentally get it right." Again he motioned for her.

Warily she approached, but still remained out of his reach.

"Relax, there's no hitting in this session. I'm just going to show you some of the points and the striking motions." He took a quick step forward, grabbed her wrist, and dragged her to the middle of the mat before she could retreat.

"This is part of t'ai chi. Actually, it's the basis. Dim-Mak is death-point striking, and it involves acupuncture points. Never, never use it unless it's a life and death situation, because like I said, you might accidentally get it right." He brought her hand up and caught her fingers, then held them against the outside corner of his eye.

"Here. This exact spot. Feel it."

"I'm feeling."

"Even a slight blow here can do major damage- nausea, memory loss, sometimes death." He showed her how to do the strike, using her fingertips. Positioning was important, to get the right angle. He made her go through the motion over and over, using himself as a dummy for her to aim at; she actually hit him once, nothing more than a touch. He whirled away from her, bent over from the waist, gagging.

"Oh God, I'm sorry!" She rushed over to him and put her arms around his waist as if she could hold him up. Panic surged in her as she remembered what he'd said about a slight blow. "Should I call 911?"

He shook his head and waved off that suggestion. He pressed under his nose, and rubbed from the corner of his eye back toward his ear. His eyes were watering a little. "I'm okay," he said, straightening.

'Are you sure? Maybe you should sit down."

"I'm fine. Things like this happen all the time in training."

"Let's do something else," she suggested uneasily.

"Okay, let's move on to the temple-"

"I meant like judo."

"Why, are you going into professional wrestling?" His blue eyes were like lasers, pinning her to the spot. He caught her hand and brought it to his temple. "Here. Hit hard, straight in. It's a knock-out point, and if a vein is ruptured the attacker will die in a day or so. CPR might revive him, but he could still die from the hemorrhage.

"Here." He moved her hand to just under his nipple. He showed her the exact spot, and the positioning of her hands. "This is instant death-"

"I'm not doing it," she said hotly. "I am not going to practice on you again."

"Good." He pressed her hand in the center of his chest, between the nipples. "A blow here makes the lower body spasm and go stiff, and the attacker falls down. Here-" He pulled her hand lower, just below his sternum. "A correct blow here stops the heart."

He was relentless. The gruesome lesson went on and on. He made her perform the motions until her hand positioning was correct, but she was adamant about not using him as a dummy again. She was still shaken that such a light touch had been able to produce such a strong reaction; what if she actually hit him?

Finally, he called a halt. He had just shown her a couple of strikes that caused instant diarrhea, and she thought she really should practice those on a live target. Medina stepped back, shaking his head and grinning.

"No way. You're mad enough at me to do it."

"Damn right I am."

"You'll thank me if you're ever in a tight spot and need to know how to bring someone down."

"If that ever happens, I'll make it a point to find you and let you say 'I told you so.' But I think I'll practice the diarrhea strikes instead of the death strikes."

He walked over to get one of the bottles of water they had brought with them. He twisted off the cap

and tilted it up, his strong throat working as he swallowed. Helplessly, Niema watched him. Even though she knew she should be wary and keep a mental, if not a physical, distance, he was a fine specimen of masculinity and everything in her that was female appreciated the scenery. His sweat pants were soft, clinging to his ass and thighs like a second skin, and that black T-shirt didn't do a thing to hide the muscular contours of his chest and arms.

Her nipples tingled an alert, and a wave of heat swept over her. Clearing her throat, she tore her gaze away from him and turned her back to do some stretching exercises. Her legs especially needed the stretching, after that run this morning. She would have stretched even if they hadn't, just to give herself something to do besides think about John Medina's body.

I have to be careful, she thought. Very, very careful.

"Ready for target practice?" he asked behind her.

She groaned and straightened. What on earth had she gotten herself into?

Later that night, after a stop at the hardware store where she purchased their entire stock of hook and eye latches and spent a couple of hours installing them-except on the window in the second bathroom, which was high and small and she wanted to see if he could get in that way-she tried on the boxes of clothes that had been delivered.

Everything had a designer label. The underwear

sets were silk, the hosiery was gossamer. Each pair of shoes had to have cost upward of two hundred dollars, and there were over a dozen pairs. There were cocktail dresses, evening gowns, smart little suits that showed more leg than she normally revealed; shorts, camp shirts, lacy camisoles, jeans, cashmere sweater sets, skirts. And there was the jewelry: pearl earrings and a matching necklace, a web of small diamonds that hung on an illusion chain, gold bracelets and chains, and an enormous, breathtakingly lovely black opal pendant with matching earrings. She carefully put the opal set back in its box and reached for a yellow diamond solitaire ring.

The phone rang. She stretched to reach the receiver, holding the ring in her hand. "Hello."

"Have you looked at the clothes yet?"

"I'm going through them now." Funny how he didn't need to identify himself, she thought. Though she had never talked to him on the phone before, she recognized his voice immediately. "Do they fit?"

"Most of them."

"I'll have that taken care of tomorrow. Have you gotten to the opal pendant yet?"

"I just put it away. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." There was a touch of awe in her voice.

"There's a transmitter behind the stone, hidden between the prongs of the set. Be careful and don't jostle it. See you in the morning."

The phone clicked as he hung up. Slowly she

replaced the receiver. His last words could be taken as a warning, considering his penchant for breaking into her house. She smiled, thinking of that small bathroom window.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Medina. I'll definitely see you."

Chapter Eleven

Bingo," John said softly, and hung up the phone. Ronsard had taken the bait. The message had gone to a computer in Brussels, as per his instructions; the message had then been relayed to a computer in Toronto, which he had accessed using a calling card. Calling cards were untraceable, assuming Ronsard would even make the effort. He wouldn't expect Temple's name and number to pop up on caller ID, or for the number to be traceable.

Now he had to finesse the timing. First he had to bring Niema to Ronsard's notice and see if she was invited to the villa. If not, he would have to adjust his plan. But if Niema bagged the invitation, he didn't want to arrive at the villa until after she was already there.

Niema. As much as he had enjoyed these past few days with her, she was driving him crazy. Teasing her, touching her during her self-defense "lessons"-he had to have lost his mind to subject himself to such torture. But she delighted him on so many levels, he couldn't bring himself to stop. She was so quick to learn, and so competitive she automatically rose to any challenge. He had quietly laughed to himself that morning while he showered in her guest bath, knowing she had raced full out in an effort to beat him back to the house-after already running for over an hour.

She was aware of him now, where she never had been before. She hadn't had a clue, in Iran, how much he had envied Dallas. But he had seen her watching him when he took off his T-shirt, seen the effort she made not to stare. It was still too soon to make a move, though, so he'd had to fiercely concentrate to keep from getting an erection every time he got close to her. She had just today fully realized her attraction to him, so she was nowhere ready for him to do anything about it.

It wasn't as if they had just met and begun seeing each other. Under those circumstances, he would have felt free to move at his own pace, or at least as free as he ever felt with a woman. But they had baggage in common, the two of them; the manner of Dallas's death was something that both linked them and stood between them. No other man had been able to scale that wall because no other man had been able to understand it; he was the one who had been in that cold, dirty little hut with her, the one who watched her white, still face as she listened to her husband's last words, saw the screaming in her eyes. He was the one who held her when she at last was able to cry.

And he was the one who was going to break down that barrier of disinterest she had installed between herself and the male sex. He could do it because he understood her, because he knew that beneath her ladylike exterior beat the heart of an adventuress. He could give her the excitement she needed, both professionally and personally. God, the way she had come alive these past few days! She literally glowed. It took all his willpower not to grab her and let her know exactly how he felt.

But there was a time for that, and it wasn't now. She still wasn't comfortable with the idea of wanting anyone who wasn't Dallas, in general, and him in particular. But she would be; he would see to it.

Restlessly he got up and paced the room, automatically avoiding the window. He couldn't remember any woman's response being so important to him, not even Venetia's.

He stopped and stared sightlessly at the unremarkable framed print on the wall. After what had happened with Venetia, maybe he didn't deserve Niema. And maybe Niema wouldn't want anything to do with him, if she knew about Venetia. Maybe, hell; it was almost guaranteed. If he were honorable, he'd tell her about his dead wife.

His mouth quirked in a humorless smile. If he were honorable, he wouldn't have done a lot of the things he'd done in his life. He wanted Niema, wanted her with an intensity that continually took him off guard. And he was going to have her.

Ville de Ronsard

"Could you trace the message?" Ronsard asked Cara, who was staring at her monitor while she tapped out commands on the keyboard.

Absently she shook her head, her attention focused on the monitor. "Only to the first relay; after that, it disappeared into the ether. Temple has a damn good encryption and switch system."

Ronsard strolled around the office. The hour was early, very early, but he didn't need much sleep, and Cara adjusted her hours to his. "I thought you told me that everything on a computer leaves its print."

"It does, but the print may be a dead end. He could have programmed the first relay with a self-destroy code after the message went through. The first relay may not even be a relay; it could be the destination, but you don't seem to think Temple would be that easy to find."

"No, he wouldn't be," Ronsard murmured. "Where was the first relay, by the way?"

"Brussels."

"Then he is likely in Europe?"

"Not necessarily. He could be anywhere there's a phone line."

Ronsard tilted his head, considering the situation. "Could you tell anything if you had the actual computer in your possession?"

Her eyes gleamed with interest. "You betcha. Unless the hard drive is destroyed."

"If this is his usual means of contact, then he wouldn't destroy the link. He would safeguard it with encryption, but not destroy it. If you can discover the location of the computer, I will have it brought here."

She turned back to the monitor and began typing furiously.

Satisfied that he would soon have the computer in his possession-or rather, in Cara's possession-Ronsard returned to his desk. Laure had had a difficult night, and he was tired. He had staff who saw to her care, of course, but when she was upset or didn't feel well she wanted her papa with her. No matter where he was or what he was doing, if Laure needed him he dropped everything and went to her.

He hadn't yet gone through the mail from the day before, though Cara had opened it and put the stack on his desk. He began leafing through the bills and invitations; as usual, the latter outnumbered the former. He was invited everywhere; connections were everything in the world of business, even when that business was not of the approved sort. A great many hostesses were thrilled to have him at their functions; he was single, handsome, and carried an air of danger about him. Ronsard was cynically aware of his own attractions, and of the use they could be to him.

"Ah," he said, taking a cream-colored vellum invitation from the stack. The prime minister cordially invited him to ... He didn't bother reading what function was involved, merely checked the date. Such social gatherings were invaluable. He had ceased being amazed at how many of the world's business, social, and political leaders found a need for his services. They felt free to approach him at a charity ball or political dinner, for after all that was their world, and they felt safe and comfortable there. Once that had been his world too; he was still comfortable there, but now he knew that nowhere was safe, not really.

"Got it," Cara said and gave him the address.

Brussels

The middle-aged man looked like any other in Brussels; he was average in height, weight, coloring; there was nothing about him to cause interest. He walked at a normal pace, seemingly paying more attention to the newspaper in his hand than to where he was going, until he came to a certain apartment building. He mounted the two stone steps and let himself in the door, then took the stairs instead of the creaky elevator, so he wasn't likely to meet anyone.

On the top floor, the third one, he unlocked the door to a certain room. It was empty except for the computer humming quietly on a wooden crate, cables hooking it to the electrical outlet and phone jack. There was no printer.

The lights were programmed to go off and on at random times. The window was covered with shutters. Sometimes he came in the mornings and opened the shutters, then returned in the afternoon to shut them, so it looked as if someone was living there. He didn't think anyone ever had; there was only the computer.

Per that morning's instructions, he walked quickly over to the computer and tapped a few keys on the keyboard, entering the program called Norton Utilities. On that program was a feature called "government wipe." He pressed a few keys, waited a moment, then pressed another one. He watched briefly as the computer performed as instructed.

He took his handkerchief and wiped off the computer keyboard, then the doorknob as he was leaving. He wouldn't be back to this empty room with its electronic inhabitant.

No one saw him arrive or leave, but then, he was so very average looking.

Later that afternoon, a white van stopped down the street from the apartment building. Two men got out and walked up the narrow street; they were dressed as laborers, in paint-stained coveralls, though their van bore none of the accouterments of painters.

They went into the apartment building and took the stairs up to the third floor. Once in the narrow, dingy hallway, they each took heavy automatic pistols from inside their coveralls and quietly approached the closed door to one of the apartments. One positioned himself to the side of the door, his pistol held ready. He nodded to his companion, who cautiously reached out and tried the knob. Surprise etched both their faces when the door swung open.

Quickly they peeked around the frame, automatically jerked back, then relaxed; the room was empty. Still, they held their pistols ready as they entered the room and quickly searched it. Nothing. Not only was the room uninhabited, it showed no signs that anyone had lived there in quite some time.

On the other hand, there was that computer. It sat on the crate, quietly humming. The screen was a pure blue.

The two men were professionals; they got down on their knees and inspected the computer, following the power and telephone cords to their outlets, looking for anything unusual. Not finding anything, one of them finally reached out and turned off the computer. The screen went blank and the quiet hum died.

They briskly unplugged the computer and carried it downstairs to their van. They didn't bother closing the door behind them when they left.

Ville de Ronsard

Cara was swimming when Ronsard sent word the computer had arrived. She hauled herself out of the pool and bent over from the waist to wring the water from her hair. She knew Hossam was watching her, his dark eyes hot with excitement. She ignored him and wrapped a towel around her head and another around her torso.

Poor Hossam. All that jealous lust was getting tiresome. Hossam was getting tiresome. Cara was quickly bored with her lovers, because once they got her in bed they all seemed to get possessive and territorial. Why couldn't they just be satisfied with good sex, the way she was? She didn't like hurting them because she cared for them all, just not the way they wanted. On the other hand, she wasn't going to spend her life with a man she didn't want just because she felt sorry for him.

Extricating herself from the relationship with Hossam could be tricky. She was well aware of the cultural differences; in the beginning, they had even been exciting. Now she felt stifled whenever she was with him.

What she needed, she supposed, was a nice boy toy for her to keep, someone who knew she was the boss, at least of herself. She wasn't into dominance, just independence.

The truth was, no man she had ever met, with the exception of Ronsard, was as interesting as her computers-and she was smart enough to know Ronsard wasn't the settling-down type. Not ever. She liked him, but he wasn't for her. Maybe no one was. Maybe she was going to end up one of those eccentric, world-traveling old ladies. She kinda liked the image that brought to mind.

Hossam approached and laid his hand on her arm. "You will come to my room tonight?"

"Not tonight," she said, moving away as casually as possible. "Mr. Ronsard has brought in a computer he wants me to investigate, so I'll be working all night."

"Tomorrow, then."

"You know I can't promise that when I don't know what my schedule is."

"Marry me, and you will not have to work."

"I like working," she said. "Good night." She hurried away before he could stop her again. Yes, this situation with Hossam was definitely getting tricky. Perhaps she would ask Ronsard to reassign Hossam, though she hated to do that; after all, Hossam was only being himself. He shouldn't be punished for that.

She stopped in her room to get dressed and pin up her hair. In the States she would have hurried to the office in her bathing suit, but Ronsard was very European in his dress standards. She liked that, actually. It was nice to have standards.

He was waiting for her, his long dark hair pulled back in its usual style, giving his lean face a more exotic slant. He was dressed in black trousers and a white shirt, which was as informal as he got. "Your gift," he said, nodding to the unit that now occupied her desktop.

Quickly she hooked up the machine and sat down in front of it. She turned it on and waited for it to boot.

Nothing happened. She tried it again. The screen still remained a blank blue.

"Uh-oh."

"Is something wrong?" Ronsard asked as he approached.

"It's been wiped."

"Erased?"

"Yeah. Maybe he just used a C-prompt command. If he did, there should still be some information on the hard drive."

"And if he didn't?"

"If he used a government wipe, then there's nothing left."

'A government wipe ..."

"It's just what it sounds like. If there's anything you don't want the government to see, you use a government wipe. It's in Norton Utilities-"

He held up a hand. "Details aren't necessary. How long will it take you to find out which type of erasure he used?"

"Not long."

He waited patiently while she got into the hard drive and began searching for bits of data. There was nothing. The drive was as pristine as the day it came off the assembly line.

"Nothing," she said in disgust.

Ronsard put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "That is what I expected, really."

"Then why get the computer?"

"Because I want to know Mr. Temple. If he were careless enough to leave data on the computer, then perhaps I shouldn't deal with him. As it is-" Ronsard hesitated and gave a thin smile. "I've learned that he is almost as careful as I."

'Almost."

"I'm not going to him," Ronsard said gently. "He is coming to me."

Chapter Twelve

Your name is Niema Jamieson," Medina said, handing over a passport, driver's license, and social security card.

She looked down at them in both interest and disbelief. "Niema?" she questioned.

"Your name is so unusual you'd probably slip up if you had to answer to anything else. It's always best to stay close to your real name."

"Is that so, Mr. Darrell Tucker?" she murmured.

He gave a faint smile in acknowledgment of the hit. "I've used so many names, I ran out of similars."

She opened the passport. Her photo was there, as well as several pages of stamps. According to her passport, within just the past year she had been to Great Britain twice, once to Italy, once to Switzerland, and once to Australia. Niema Jamieson was certainly well-traveled.

The driver's license looked just as authentic. She was a resident of New Hampshire, evidently. Niema Price Jamieson.

"My middle name is Price?" she asked in disbelief.

"That's your maiden name. Your family is old friends with the ambassador's wife's family."

"So I'm married?"

"Widowed." He gave her a steady, unyielding look, as if expecting her to object to a cover line so close to her own life. "Your husband, Craig, was killed in a boating accident two years ago. The ambassador's wife-her name is Eleanor, by the way-persuaded you to join them in Paris for a vacation."

She was silent. Of course so many of the details paralleled her own life; that way the story was easy to remember.

"And if Ronsard does invite me to his home and does a background check on me, he'll find. . . what?"

"He'll find that you're exactly who you say you are. He'll find society page articles mentioning you. He'll find an article on Craig Jamieson's death that mentions his grief-stricken widow, Niema. Don't worry; your cover will stand up to any scrutiny."

"But what about the ambassador and his wife? They obviously know I'm not an old family friend."

"Yes, but they're accustomed to covers. You know how many Agency personnel are in our embassies. It's standard."

"Then why won't Ronsard suspect me?"

"Because you aren't staff. Believe me, they know, or have a good idea, who is Agency and who isn't."

She took a deep breath. "When do I leave?"

He pulled a ticket folder from the inside pocket of his jacket. "Tomorrow, on the Concord."

"Cool." Her eyes lit. She had always wanted to fly on the supersonic jet. "When will you get there?"

"You won't see me until we're both at Ronsard's villa. If he doesn't invite you-" He broke off and shrugged.

"Then I won't see you again." She tried to keep her tone matter-of-fact, but inside she didn't feel that way. In just a few days he seemed to have become the central element of the excitement she felt. But she had known from the beginning how things would be, known that he would leave as abruptly as he had appeared.

"I didn't say that."

"No, but I've worked with you before, remember? When the job's finished, you disappear. And now that I know who you are, I know why."

"Niema ..." He put his hands in his pockets, looking oddly ill at ease. Medina was always in such control of himself that his expression diverted her. "I'll be back. That's all I can say now."

She was immediately intrigued, and alarmed. Did he mean he wanted to use her on another job? Part of her wanted to shout "Hell, no!" but deep inside was a yearning, a craving for more.

Common sense took the upper hand. "This is a one-time deal, Medina; don't bank on sucking me into another job. I don't get hazardous-duty pay, you know."

"Of course you do."

Taken aback, she warily eyed him. "What do you mean?"

"I mean you get a hefty bonus for this."

"Oh, great! That means anyone in payroll-"

"Nope. This is black ops, remember? Everything comes out of an off-books account. And try to call me John, instead of Medina. John's a fairly common name, but there are a lot of people in this town who would perk up their ears if they heard you call me Medina."

Reluctantly she said, "John." She preferred thinking of him and referring to him as Medina; that kept him at a certain distance, at least in her mind. She was having a difficult enough time battling her attraction to him as it was. "Back to my original statement: This is a one-time deal. It has to be."

Hands still in his pockets, he wandered over to the kitchen window and absently fingered the hook and eye latches she had installed. For the past two mornings he had been reduced to wriggling through a damn small bathroom window, and the fit was so tight he had to do some major contortions to get in. She was so pleased with those little latches that he didn't tell her he'd figured out a way to unlatch them. The average burglar wouldn't have the means of doing it, and anyone who really, really wanted to get into the house would simply break a window anyway. The ordinary citizen usually couldn't afford the safety measures that would make a house truly burglar-proof, but then the ordinary citizen didn't need to go to that effort and expense. "Don't think you can ignore me," she warned. He gave her a brief, warm smile as he turned away from the window. "I've never thought that."

Both the smile and the statement rattled her. Deciding to change the subject, she took a deep breath. "Let's get back to the plan. What happens when-if- I wrangle an invitation to Ronsard's home? What if you aren't invited for the same time?"

"I've already received an invitation. Ronsard is hosting a formal party in ten days. He does it annually, as sort of a repayment to all the people who look the other way when delicate situations arise concerning his occupation. The security is extremely tight, even tighter than normal, because of so many people in the house. He would consider the meeting with me more controlled. If Ronsard invites you to the party, accept. If he merely invites you to his house for a visit, decline. That will only whet his interest."

"What I know about whetting interest would rattle around in a peanut shell," she muttered.

He grinned. "Don't worry, Mother Nature took care of that. We men are easy. We don't require much more than that a woman be breathing, and we're interested."

She tried to take umbrage, but instead found herself laughing. "That simple, huh?"

"Compared to women, we're amoebas. Our brains only have one cell, but it's dedicated."

So said the most complicated man she'd ever met. She shook her head. "I think we need to get to work, before your one cell goes completely haywire. What's on the agenda for today?"

"Nothing," he said. "Get some rest, pack, brush up on your French. I just came by to give you your papers."

She had become so accustomed to working out with him that the prospect of a day without that challenge seemed flat. "So this is it, huh? If I don't get that invitation, I won't see you again."

He hesitated, then reached out and lightly touched her cheek with his fingertips. He started to say something and stopped. Something like regret, only more complex, flickered briefly in his blue eyes. Without a word he turned and left, letting himself out the back door, his movements so silent she wouldn't have known he was there if she hadn't been looking at him.

She stood in the kitchen, fighting the chill that raced over her at his touch. No, she wasn't cold. She was shivering, but she wasn't cold. Just that light touch of his fingertips had set her nerve endings to tingling. Holy cow. What would it be like to actually-"No," she ordered herself aloud. "Don't go there." Don't imagine what it would be like to make love with him. Men like John Medina didn't make love, they had sex; they didn't have relationships, just encounters.

Though one couldn't tell it from the way she had lived her life for the past five years, she had sometimes thought, in a vague way, of remarrying and having children. That was always in the nebulous future, and even though there hadn't been any candidates for the position of husband, still she had expected her life to eventually take that route. If she became involved with John, though, she could kiss that dream good-bye. She wouldn't be able to settle for an ordinary Joe if she ever let herself indulge in an affair with him.

He might pass himself off as a sheep to most of the world, but she knew him for the wolf he was. And she knew her own nature, knew her craving for excitement. She'd never be able to get herself back, because sleeping with John would be going one step too far. That was the ultimate kick, and nothing else would ever equal it But if she didn't let herself taste him, she would never know what she missed. She might suspect, but she wouldn't know, and she would still be capable of happiness with that ordinary Joe who had to be somewhere in her future.

What difference did it make? she wondered, pressing a fist to the pit of her stomach in an effort to squash the butterflies that were fluttering there. He was gone. If this plan didn't work, she probably wouldn't see him again. Though he'd said he would be back, she didn't quite believe him. She couldn't let herself believe him, because if she did, she might start dreaming he was coming back for her, and that was the most dangerous fantasy of all.

Niema packed in the battered Vuitton luggage that had been delivered the day before. The luggage was a nice touch, she thought; it was expensive and fit with her supposedly well-heeled background, but still looked far from new. It looked, in fact, as if it had been around the world several times. The name tags carried her fictitious name and address.

She dressed in a stylish linen and cotton blend sage green dress for travel, a simple chemise style that she topped with a lightweight cardigan. On her feet were sensible taupe flats. For all its simplicity, or perhaps because of it, the ensemble shrieked "money." Old money, at that.

The day was bright and sunny; there wouldn't be any bad weather delays. She felt jittery and couldn't tell if it was due to anticipation or dread. But she felt ready; she wanted to be in Paris right now. She wanted to meet this Louis Ronsard and see if breathing was, indeed, all she had to do to be come-hitherish. John needed her inside Ronsard's villa; he would continue on his own, but the job was less risky if he had backup. She had to get that invitation.

Uneasily she thought of a precaution John had insisted she take: birth control pills. It was standard for female operatives, he'd told her. Did he expect her to sleep with Ronsard? She knew that sex was often the route women used to get to the men they targeted, in real life as well as in espionage. Well, her devotion to the job didn't go that deep; she would not, could not, sleep with the arms dealer, no matter how good-looking he supposedly was.

The cab arrived on time, and the driver came to the door to carry her bags. As he went back down the sidewalk she looked around at her comfortable home, wondering at the weird sense of disconnection, as if she would never see it again. This wasn't much different from going on vacation. A week, two weeks at the most, and she would be home again, once more settled into the routine of work and chores. This episode wouldn't be repeated.

She carefully locked the door and set the alarm, which John had reactivated. He had definitely made her more safety conscious, though; even with the alarm, she found herself going around to every window and door and hooking the latches. She had bought a timer for the lamps and television, to give the house at least the appearance of being lived in. And John had promised that Agency people would keep an eye on the house for her, so she wasn't really worried.

The cab driver was looking impatient, so she hurried down the walk, and with every step her spirits lifted. She was finally in action again!

* * *

She was met in Paris by a uniformed chauffeur who loaded her luggage and solicitously handed her into a large Mercedes-Benz. She sank into the leather seats and closed her eyes with a sigh. Did the Concord eliminate jet lag, she wondered, or did the body automatically note the position of the sun and know something was wrong? The supersonic flight was much faster than a regular jet, but she was still as exhausted as if the flight had taken the normal length of time. All she wanted was a long bath and a quiet place to lie down.

The Marine guards at the embassy checked the car and her passport before allowing her into the embassy grounds. As the car stopped out front, a tall, slender woman in her early sixties, with striking silver-white hair, came down the steps, her hands outstretched and her face wreathed in smiles.

"Niema!" she cried. "It's so good to see you!"

This must be Ambassador Theriot's wife, Eleanor, the old family friend. The chauffeur opened the door, and Niema climbed out, going straight to Mrs. The-riot with a warm hug.

"You look exhausted," Mrs. Theriot said, patting her cheek in a motherly way. "Jet lag is terrible, isn't it? Supposedly it's worse going west-or perhaps that's east, I can never remember which it is, but it doesn't matter because I get jet lag no matter what direction I'm traveling."

Mrs. Theriot was giving her recovery time by chattering, Niema realized. She managed a smile. "I am tired, but I don't want to waste my visit lying around."

"Don't worry about that," Mrs. Theriot cooed as she led her up the steps into the embassy. "A nap will do you a world of good. There's nothing you have to do, nowhere you have to go."

From that, Niema deduced that her presence not only wasn't expected at dinner that night, but for some reason would be a definite problem. "In that case, I would love a nap."

Still smiling, still chatting as if they had known each other for years, Eleanor Theriot led Niema to an elevator. They exited on the third floor. "This is your room," she said, opening the door to a spacious bedchamber decorated in a gorgeous combination of antique and modern pieces, and in a soothing pale turquoise color with touches of peach and white. The bed was so high there was a footstool beside it, and the mattress looked thick enough for her to sink out of sight.

"There's a private bath through here," Mrs. Theriot continued, opening a white paneled door and giving Niema a glimpse of gleaming brass bathroom fixtures -or were they gold? "Your bags will be brought up, and if you'd like a maid will unpack for you."

Niema started to say that wasn't necessary, then realized that Niema Price Jamieson was probably accustomed to such help, even if Niema Burdock wasn't. "A nap first, please," she said. "My bags can be unpacked later."

"Of course, dear. I'll tell everyone you're not to be disturbed." As she talked, Mrs. Theriot walked over to the desk and scribbled a brief note, which she gave to Niema. "When you're awake, we'll have a long talk just to catch up on gossip. I simply don't have the time to call all my friends the way I used to. Just tell me Jacqueline and Sid are all right, and I'll leave you to your nap."

"Jacqueline" and "Sid" were her make-believe parents. "Mom and Dad are fine," Niema replied. "They're in Australia now, for an extended vacation."

"How I envy them! But I won't ask any more questions now. Have a nice rest, dear." She gave Niema another hug, then let herself out.

Niema looked down at the note. "Don't assume you can trust everyone who works in the embassy," Mrs. Theriot had written. "Stick to your cover at all times."

She wadded up the note and started to toss it into the wastebasket, but on second thought tore the paper into tiny pieces and flushed it. She yawned mightily; that nap was becoming more necessary by the moment.

Her luggage arrived, carried by a serious young man who called her "ma'am." Once he was gone and the bedroom door was locked, Niema pulled the curtains closed, then stripped off her clothes and took a quick shower. Fighting to keep her eyes open, she toweled dry and stumbled to the bed, not bothering with a nightgown or pajamas. Using the two-step stool, she climbed upon the bed and stretched out between the cool, fragrant sheets. She groaned in relief as her tired muscles relaxed.

When was this ball at which she was supposed to meet Ronsard? She couldn't remember. Not tonight, for certain. Tomorrow?

Was she ready? She went over the details of her cover, even repeating "Niema Jamieson" to herself over and over, to make certain she responded when someone addressed her by that name. She couldn't just pretend to be Niema Jamieson, she had to become that person. Ronsard was sharp; he would notice if she appeared not to recognize her own name.

John had been thorough in building the cover identity. The documents would stand up to any inspection and investigation. She didn't have to worry about that aspect of her cover. No, what she worried about was her own ability; John might not have doubts about her, but she did. She had never played a role before, unless it was when they were in Iran, if wearing a chador and not speaking was the same as playing a role.

She didn't, however, doubt her ability to plant a listening device in Ronsard's office. When it came to that part of the job, she was confident she could handle it.

"Let the games begin," she murmured to herself, and went to sleep.

PART THREE

Chapter Thirteen

Paris

Louis! It is wonderful to see you. You are looking as handsome as always." The prime minister's wife beamed up her toothy smile at him as she took both his hands and planted kisses on each cheek.

Louis carried her hands to his lips and returned the salute, briefly kissing her knuckles. He was actually fond of Adeline, who was good-natured and inherently kind. Her strong features bore an unfortunate resemblance to a horse, but in the Parisian way she made the most of her best features, her eyes, and after one got to know her, one saw only her nature and didn't think of the long boniness of her face. "I would never miss the opportunity to see you, my dear."

"Flatterer." She beamed at him. "I must continue greeting the guests, but promise me you won't leave without speaking with me again. I don't see enough of you, you rogue."

He promised, an easy thing to do, then left her to the receiving line and mingled with the throng of guests crowding the ballroom and adjacent rooms. A small orchestra was discreetly installed in an alcove and partially blocked from view by a gauze curtain.

Black-clad waiters carried trays of delicate flutes half-filled with golden champagne, while others offered a dazzling array of hor d'oeuvres. Ronsard plucked a glass of champagne from one passing waiter and a delicate pastry from another. He had just taken his first sip of the rather mediocre wine-it was always mediocre at such parties-when he heard his name being called.

He turned to see his sister, Mariette, bearing down on him with her husband in tow. Eduard Cassel's expression was indulgent, as always. Mariette was a bubbly froth of a woman, as giddy and harmless as a butterfly. She was three years younger than Ronsard and he had always been protective of the pretty creature. When she married, she had chosen a man fifteen years her senior, and Eduard had taken over as her protector.

Eduard had been beneficial to Ronsard on several occasions. Positioned as he was in the Ministry, he often knew interesting little details about the government, the economy, and some high-ranking officials' personal lives, which he passed along to his brother-in-law. In return, Ronsard had set up and regularly added to a substantial trust in Mariette's name, allowing the Cassels to live in a level of comfort that far exceeded Eduard's salary.

"Louis!" Mariette flung her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. "I didn't know you would be here tonight. This is wonderful. How is Laure?"

"She is well." Louis's voice was flat, his tone pitched so his words didn't carry. He didn't discuss Laure in public. Many of his acquaintances had no idea she existed.

Mariette wrinkled her nose in apology. "Forgive me," she said contritely. "I forgot."

"Of course," he said gently and kissed her forehead as he held out his hand to her husband. "How are you, Eduard?"

"Well, thank you." Eduard was slightly heavy, balding on top, and his features could best be described as "not ugly." His expression was usually bland, disguising the shrewdness that lurked in his eyes. "And you?"

"Well." Those social niceties out of the way, Ronsard settled his arm around his sister's waist. "You look stunning. That gown is very becoming."

She beamed and smoothed a hand down the shimmery pink fabric that brought out the color in her cheeks. "You don't think it too young?"

"My dear, you are young."

"And so I tell her," Eduard said. "She grows lovelier every day." As saccharine as the compliment was, he meant it. His devotion to Mariette always weighed heavily in his favor, in Ronsard's estimation.

"Oh, there is Juliet," Mariette cried, her attention instantly diverted. "I must speak to her." She darted away, her full skirt fluttering around her as if she would take flight.

Ronsard and Eduard drifted away from the crowd, strolling casually as if they had nothing more important to do than idly chat and look for acquaintances in the throng. "I think everyone in government is here tonight," Ronsard observed. "There must be something interesting in the air."

Eduard shrugged, his heavy lips set in a benign smile. "Elections, my friend. Everyone is courting everyone else. And commerce is always interesting, is it not? The Iraqis wish to buy a very expensive, sophisticated computer system from us, but the Americans, as always, are having a tantrum at the idea. Their economy is healthy, so they can't comprehend difficulty in other countries. Our industrial leaders don't like having the Americans intrude on their business; But if we tell them to leave-" He spread his hands. "The Americans have so many lovely dollars. What does one do?"

"Whatever one must, on the surface," Ronsard said dryly. No Frenchman liked the American presence that seemed to permeate the world. France was French, and would remain so. Whatever agreements the Americans forced, they could not be everywhere and oversee everything. France agreed, then did whatever was in France's best interests. Pragmatism was the cornerstone of the French character.

"The Russians, of course, are desperate for technology. Unfortunately they have no means to pay. Perhaps the Americans will pay for them. These are interesting times, are they not?"

"Very interesting." In the past ten years, old boundaries had been completely obliterated. Politics was in a state of flux, and such an atmosphere was very favorable to his business. Instability was the greatest of motivators to a certain type of person.

"The American ambassador is here, of course," Eduard continued. "His aide is drifting around with his ears on alert."

The ambassador's aide was an employee of their Central Intelligence Agency. Everyone knew who everyone was, but still an astonishing amount of information was passed around at these functions. Intelligence officers were often conduits of information that governments wanted to dispense to other governments, but by back channels. No one, after all, wanted to precipitate a crisis.

"A family friend is visiting the ambassador and his wife. She is the daughter of one of Madame Theriot's oldest friends. A lovely young woman, if I may say so. One always sees the same faces at these things, you know; anyone new is a welcome change."

Ronsard was a man. He was always interested in a lovely young woman, provided she wasn't too young.

He had no interest in giggly adolescents. "Point her out to me," he said idly

Eduard looked around. "There," he finally said. "By the windows. Brunette, dressed in white. She has the loveliest eyes."

Ronsard located the woman in question. She was not, he saw, an adolescent. She was standing beside Madame Theriot, a smile that managed to be both polite and warm on her face as she tilted her head, listening to a minister of finance who was probably expounding on his favorite subject, horse racing.

Ronsard exhaled in appreciation. Eduard had not exaggerated; she was indeed lovely. Not beautiful, not spectacular, but. . . lovely. She wasn't dressed in a manner calculated to draw attention, but somehow she did. Perhaps it was the quiet dignity of her manner, coupled with those stunning eyes. Even from there, Ronsard could appreciate Eduard's comment about her eyes. They were huge and night-dark, the type of eyes a man could look into and forget what he was saying.

Her gown was a simple, unadorned white, relying on its exquisite cut for its charm. Her complexion was pale, so pale he wouldn't have thought she could wear white without looking washed-out, but instead the color seemed to accentuate the faintest of pink flushes that made one think one could see the warmth of her blood under that delicate skin.

She was slender without being thin, as so many fashionable women were these days. The gown skimmed over nicely rounded hips, and her bosom, though not large, was enticingly shaped. She wore a single, gracefully long strand of pearls, which matched the bracelet on her right wrist and the earrings on her lobes. She turned as he watched, and the strand of pearls swung sideways to curl under and frame her left breast.

Unconsciously she touched the strand, restoring it to is previous graceful drape, but the brief image made Ronsard's loins pleasurably tighten.

"Is she married?" The French were sophisticated about such matters, but Americans remained, for the most part, annoyingly prudish.

"Widowed," Eduard supplied.

The orchestra at that moment began playing a gently stirring movement from Beethoven, as the dancing had not yet begun. As Ronsard watched, the lovely widow's head turned toward the orchestra, her expression arrested as she listened to the music. She became very still, and her eyes seemed to fill with an aching sadness. She turned to the ministry employee and said a few words, then inclined her head to Madame Theriot and seemed to whisper something. Madame Theriot looked sympathetic and touched the young woman on the arm. Then the young woman slipped out the open patio doors into the night.

Ronsard had no idea how long she had been widowed, but obviously the music had just brought a painful memory to mind. Sad young women, in his opinion, should always be comforted. "Pardon me," he murmured to Eduard and strode across the ballroom floor.

It was a tedious passage; everyone wanted to speak to him. Women called his name and gave him slumbrous smiles. He shook hands, kissed cheeks, and made graceful escapes while he kept his eye on the patio doors. The minister of finance to whom she had been speaking seemed to dither, but finally found the courage to approach the doors. By that time Ronsard was there, and he deftly stepped in front of the man. "Your solicitude is much appreciated," he murmured, "but won't be necessary."

"Ah ..." The man blinked at him as Ronsard's identity registered. "Yes, of course."

Ronsard went outside into the warm Paris night. The flagstoned patio was lit only by indirect light, from the windows behind him and by the lights strung in the ornamental trees in the garden. Small tables and chairs had been scattered about the patio, providing guests with an opportunity to take fresh air and escape the noise of the ballroom.

The widow sat at one of those tables, her hands quiet in her lap as she looked out over the garden. She hadn't wept, Ronsard saw when he drew near, his footsteps slow and purposeful. She had kept her composure, though he thought he detected a sheen of tears in her eyes, and her mouth had that soft, sad curve that made him want to kiss a smile onto it. A mouth that delectable should always smile.

"Hello," he said gently in English, and the slight start she gave told him that she hadn't been aware of his approach. "Forgive me, I didn't intend to startle you."

She turned those big dark eyes on him, and again he felt that surge in his loins. She looked so sad, so alone and vulnerable. Even as he watched she gathered herself and sought refuge in the social face she had probably been taught to assume from the time she was out of the cradle.

"That's perfectly all right," she said, beginning to stand. Her voice was low and feminine, without the annoying nasal tones of so many Americans. "I was just about to return to the party-"

"No, don't let me displace you," he said quickly, reaching out to gently touch her arm. He was always gentle in his dealings with women, and so many of them were endearingly susceptible to that tenderness, as if they didn't get enough of it in their lives. The widow, however, looked mildly shocked that he had touched her, and she drew back just a little.

"I saw you come out and thought you looked ...upset" He had to be cautious here and ease her wariness.

For a moment she didn't say anything. She turned her head to look out into the garden, and he admired the graceful line of her neck, the curve of her cheekbone. Then she said, "The music reminded me of another time."

That was all. There were no forthcoming details, no expounding. He sensed her reluctance to give him any personal information. He was accustomed to women responding to him, trying to hold his attention; this woman's very lack of response was intriguing.

"My name is Louis Ronsard," he said, settling into the chair beside her.

"I'm pleased to meet you," she said politely. "I'm Niema Jamieson."

"Niema." He said the name slowly, tasting the sound of it. "What a lovely, unusual name."

She gave a small, quick smile. "Too unusual, sometimes. People seldom know how to pronounce it if they see it spelled out-they usually pronounce it 'Neema' instead of 'Nye-ema,' and if they hear it they don't know how to spell it. When I was a child I often wished my mother had named me Jane, or Susan, or anything straightforward."

"Is it a family name?"

"Nothing so dignified," she said, and the smile became a chuckle. He was delighted by the transformation of her face, from sadness to humor. "She liked the rhythm of the name Naomi, but not the name itself. So she substituted vowels until she found a combination she liked, and"-she spread her hands- "Niema was invented."

"I think it's lovely."

"Thank you. I've become accustomed to it." She glanced over her shoulder into the ballroom. "It's been nice talking to you. I think I should-"

"Of course," he said, getting to his feet. "You don't know me, and you're uncomfortable being alone with me." He paused a beat to give her an opportunity to demur, but she didn't, and he was amused. "Will you reserve a dance for me, Mademoiselle Jamieson?" He purposefully called her mademoiselle, to give her an opening to tell him she was widowed.

"Madame," she corrected, and he was pleasantly surprised by her accent. He was less pleased when she left it at that, withholding the fact of her widowhood; a woman who was interested would have made her marital status clear.

His own interest increased. Ronsard seldom had the opportunity these days to enjoy the chase. Women were all too willing, which was a nice state of affairs, but sometimes a man wished to be the predator.

His question hung in the air between them. Finally she said, "Yes, of course," but her tone held only politeness, not any eagerness for his company.

He was both piqued and amused. Perhaps he had become spoiled, but he knew he wasn't repulsive. Far from it, in fact. This woman, though, seemed totally unaware of him as a man.

Politely he offered his arm, and she laid a graceful hand on it. Her touch was barely perceptible; she didn't cling, didn't actually hold him. Together they walked back into the ballroom, drawing more than one pair of eyes. Ronsard saw Madame Theriot frown and whisper something to her husband. So, she wasn't pleased that her young friend had become acquainted with the notorious arms dealer?

Ronsard smiled at Madame Theriot, then turned to his prey and made her a small, graceful bow. Something in his manner must have alerted her, because her eyes suddenly widened and her soft lips parted. Before she could pull away he pressed his lips to her hand, a brief salute that he didn't allow to linger, and caressed her with his eyes. "Until later," he murmured.

Chapter Fourteen

Niema took a deep breath as she walked across the ballroom. A major hurdle had been crossed, and so swiftly, so easily, she was astounded. The plan had been for Eleanor to introduce her to people who had spoken with Ronsard, but not to the arms dealer himself. Eventually their paths would have crossed, but it would have looked odd for Eleanor to be the one who made the introductions, as she naturally would not have liked for her best friend's daughter to associate with someone like Ronsard.

None of that had been necessary. Out of the corner of her eye, she had seen him speaking with someone she had already met-his name escaped her- and both of them had been watching her. At that moment the orchestra had begun playing a particularly lovely piece of music and inspiration struck.

She allowed sadness to play across her features for a moment, then excused herself to the gentleman who was something boring in the French government. She leaned over and whispered to Eleanor, "He's watching. I'm going to slip out onto the patio."

Eleanor, whose acting skills were worthy of Hollywood, immediately saw the opportunity and what Niema was doing. She put on a concerned face and touched Niema on the arm-nothing dramatic, but a touch of sympathy that wouldn't go unnoticed.

Then Niema had simply sat on the patio and waited. Within five minutes, Ronsard joined her.

He was remarkably good looking. The photos she'd seen of him didn't compare to the man in the flesh. He was tall, with dark blue eyes set on a slant above his exotic cheekbones, and he wore his long dark hair loose on his broad shoulders. The hint of savage in an elegant tuxedo was a devastating combination.

His voice was smooth and low, his manners impeccable, and his eyes managed to convey both his interest and his concern over her sadness. A romantic, handsome Frenchman at a formal party was enough to give any woman weak knees.

As soon as she reached Eleanor, the older woman gripped her wrist and leaned over to whisper in Niema's ear, all the while frowning at Ronsard, as if she were informing Niema of his reputation. "Mission accomplished?"

Niema put a startled look on her face, then an alarmed one. She darted a quick glance at Ronsard. Yes, he was watching. She quickly looked away. "He asked for a dance," she murmured.

Eleanor, who knew only the basic story and that Niema was to draw Ronsard's attention, turned away with a practiced smile as the prime minister's wife approached, and Niema's attention was claimed by a young staffer from the embassy who was from New Hampshire and was evidently suffering from homesickness. Since Niema had never been to the state, she hoped he didn't start asking specific questions.

The only formal party she had ever been to in her life was her high school prom. This was far out of her league, but to her surprise she felt comfortable. The clothes were better, the food more exotic, the people more serious and aware of their own importance, but all in all the same dynamics applied: polite chitchat, polite laughter, the constant mingling. The politicians worked the room while the lobbyists worked the politicians. Everyone wanted something from someone else.

Her French had rapidly returned, once she heard it spoken again, but then French had been her best language. Ronsard had spoken in English, however, so that was how she had answered him. She doubted he was a man who ever let anything slip, but if he thought she didn't understand him he might be a little careless in what he said. It wasn't her intention to hide the fact that she spoke the language, though, as that was too easy to give away, and he would immediately be suspicious.

She had to avoid any appearance of being interested in him. Quite the opposite, in fact. He had to make all the moves, so he couldn't suspect her of maneuvering for an invitation to his villa. But at the same time she had to show she liked him, or she wouldn't have a reason for accepting.

In her favor was the fact that other women fawned over him. She would stand out in his mind because of her very lack of response. Men liked a challenge, and she was going to give him one.

The dancing started, and she let herself be steered around the floor by the first person who asked, who happened to be the boring gentleman she had been talking to earlier. He pumped her arm as if he expected her to spout water out of her mouth, and all the while he enthused about thoroughbred racing. She smiled and made an occasional comment, and he was happy.

Next the ambassador claimed a dance. He was a stately gentleman with silver hair and a sweet smile, a little shorter than his wife, but with a smooth tact that made her instantly comfortable. He spoke to her as if she were indeed an old friend of the family, chatting on about friends they supposedly had in common, a vacation their families had once spent together when she was a child. She wondered if one of the qualifications to an ambassadorship was to be a consummate liar, because he excelled.

After the dance with the ambassador ended, she excused herself and went to the ladies' room, where she killed as much time as she could. She didn't immediately return to the ballroom, but mingled in the other rooms, speaking to those people to whom she had already been introduced. If Ronsard really wanted to dance with her, he was going to have to find her.

He did. A warm hand closed around her elbow and he said, "You promised me a dance."

Niema hesitated. A small silence fell around them. Everyone knew who he was, of course, and waited to see if she would snub him. She saw his eyes begin to narrow, and into the silence she said, "Are you certain you want to risk your toes?"

Relieved chuckles rippled around them. His face relaxed, and a slight smile curved his lips. "My toes would be honored." He held out his hand, indicating the direction of the ballroom.

She walked calmly by his side, ignoring the hand that settled on the small of her back. The orchestra was just beginning a number slower than the others had been, and she realized that he had waited and chosen his moment-either that or bribed the orchestra.

"I thought you were going to refuse me," he said in a low voice as his arm closed about her waist and he swept her into a gliding circle. He held her closely enough that she could feel the warmth of his body, the movement of his legs against hers, but not so close that she would be alarmed and pull back.

"I was."

One dark eyebrow arched, his expression sardonic. "Why didn't you?"

"A dance won't hurt me," she said calmly.

"Neither will I." He looked down into her face, his tone gentle. "I assume Madame Theriot warned you against me."

"Understandable, don't you think?"

"Understandable, but unnecessary. I mean you no harm."

She didn't respond to that, her expression serene as he swept her around the floor. He danced with a grace that made the exercise effortless, and she thanked God that her parents had insisted she take dance lessons in high school even though she would much rather have learned how to hang glide; at least she wouldn't embarrass herself. A socialite would know how to dance, after all.

When she made no effort to pick up the conversational ball, he asked, "Are you just visiting, or have you been employed at the embassy?"

"Gracious, no!" She looked amused. "Visiting, only."

"For how long?"

"No definite time. A few weeks."

"That isn't much time," he complained softly, looking down at her with such apparent masculine interest that a woman would have to be blind to miss it.

"Monsieur Ronsard-"

"Please don't be alarmed. "You're a lovely woman, and I would like very much to see you while you're in Paris. That is all."

"There's no point in it." She looked away, staring at a point over his shoulder. She made her tone gentle and faintly sad.

He firmed the guiding touch of his hand on her back, pressing his palm against her. Her gown was fairly low cut in back, and his fingers brushed her bare skin. "There is always a point to pleasure."

"I don't seem to be very good at pleasure these days."

"Then you must learn how to enjoy yourself again."

Her lips trembled, and a look of pain haunted her eyes. He saw it, as she had meant for him to. "Forgive my clumsiness," he murmured, dipping his head so his mouth was close to her temple. "I never intended to distress you."

She firmed her lips and lifted her chin. "The orchestra is very good, isn't it? I love this piece."

He allowed her to steer the conversation into mundane waters, but she felt his unswerving gaze on her face the entire time. Louis Ronsard was definitely a man on the hunt. So far, she thought, she had done a credible job of appearing reluctant without insulting him.

The dance ended, she thanked him for it, and turned to leave. He fell into step beside her. "Have you been to Paris before?"

"Yes, of course."

"Ah. I had hoped to show you the city."

"Monsieur..." She hesitated, as if groping for words. "Forgive me if I sound presumptuous, but I'm not interested in any sort of romance. Even if your occupation wasn't a barrier I wouldn't-"

"Forgive me," he interrupted, "if I've made you in any way uncomfortable. I would like to spend time with you, yes. I would like to make you smile again, as you did out on the patio. A lovely lady should not have such sad eyes. And even if you say that, no, I may not kiss you, or delight myself in other ways, I would still like to take you out to dinner."

For a moment Niema was so diverted and charmed by the phrase "delight myself" that she couldn't stop herself from smiling.

'Aha! I have achieved one goal already." He touched one finger to the corner of her smiling lips, "Your smile is as lovely as I remembered. Please say yes to dinner. My reputation is greatly exaggerated, I promise."

She searched his face, as if looking for the truth. Finally she said, a bit hesitantly, "I haven't dated since my husband-" She broke off and looked away.

"I understand you're a widow," he said. "Yes, I asked about you. I'm sorry for your loss. It has been . .. how long?"

Five. The word echoed in her brain, and this time the sadness that flashed across her face wasn't an act. Five long years. "Two years," she managed to say, her voice constricted. "Most people think that's long enough to grieve, but... it isn't."

His expression was somber. "I think the heart has its own calendar. You mustn't let anyone rush you, including me. I give you my word I would attach no expectations to a dinner together. It would just be a meal in pleasant company, no more. Or perhaps you would prefer lunch?"

She let herself waver, then said softly, "Yes, lunch sounds ..."

"Safer?" he suggested.

"More casual. Less like a date."

He chuckled. "I see. Then, Madame Jamieson, will you not go out to dinner with me? Let's just have lunch instead."

She smiled up at him. "That sounds very nice."

As soon as he was back in his town house, Ronsard placed a secure call to the villa. Cara answered immediately, though it was late, after one A.M.

"Consult that computer of yours," he said. "I want to know whatever you can find out about Niema Jamieson, from New Hampshire. She's a widow, a friend of the American ambassador, and she's visiting them now."

"How do you spell her name?"

Ronsard hesitated, then remembered what she had said about her mother modeling the name on 'Naomi.' "N-i-e-m-a," he said. "Late twenties, early thirties. Dark hair and eyes."

"Got it. When do you want this?"

"In the morning."

"I'll get right on it."

Ronsard hung up and paced slowly around his luxurious bedroom. It had been a long time since he had been so intrigued by a woman, but that didn't mean he was careless. If Niema Jamieson wasn't what she seemed, he'd know it soon enough. And if she was, then he looked forward to a pleasant chase and seduction. Most women could be had, eventually, and he doubted she would be any different.

He had forgotten how pleasurable it was to be the pursuer, to feel that triumphant thrill when she agreed to meet him for lunch. He laughed at himself; such a small victory, but he felt like a conqueror. He would put a satisfied smile on the widow's face yet.

She had been faithful to her husband's memory for two years. Such steadfastness was rare in his world. He found he respected her for that and envied her the love she must have known. Such a love had eluded him; he loved Mariette, of course, and Laure was his heart, but a sweeping, romantic love ... no, he hadn't known one. Passion, yes. Lust. Possession. But not love. He suspected he never would love anyone in such a manner, that he wasn't capable of that depth of emotion. Or perhaps he was simply too wary, too guarded, with too much at stake to let himself become vulnerable.

Not even for a woman like Niema Jamieson.

Chapter Fifteen

The telephone beside her bed rang at six A.M., jerking Niema out of a sound sleep. She rolled over and groped for the receiver. "Hello." She sounded as groggy as she felt.

She heard a stifled chuckle. "You certainly sound alert."

John. The sound of his voice did funny things to the pit of her stomach. She settled herself deeper into the pillow. "We social butterflies need our sleep."

"Has the fluttering attracted any attention?"

"It certainly has." She yawned. "Within minutes."

"Told you. We're amoebas."

"I hope this line is secure," she said in sudden alarm.

"If it isn't, then the Company isn't doing its job.

All lines into the embassy are secure, and I'm on a secure phone. Tell me everything about last night."

How did he know she'd met Ronsard last night? she wondered in annoyance. "Are you keeping tabs on me? How? Where are you?"

"Of course I'm keeping tabs on you," he said calmly. "You didn't think I'd bring you into this and just leave you on your own, did you? I'm nearby, for the moment."

And that was all he intended to tell her, she realized. Still, it was enough. Until she heard his voice, she hadn't realized how much she had missed him, missed the constant challenge of his presence. If he was nearby, that meant she had to be on her toes, because he could pop up at any second. She didn't want to step out of the shower, stark naked, and come face to face with him. On the other hand . . .

Whoa. She backed away from that thought without finishing it. Instead she began a recital of the previous night's events. "He followed me onto the patio and introduced himself and asked for a dance later. When we danced, he asked me out to dinner. I refused. We're having lunch today at one, at Le Cafe Marly. Do you know where that is?"

"It's in the Richelieu wing of the Louvre. It's where you go to see and be seen."

"And here I thought having lunch with him would be more discreet than dinner."

"Not at Cafe Marly. Why are you trying to be discreet?"

"If I'm this fine upstanding citizen and an old family friend of the ambassador's wife, it would seem more reasonable to at least worry about seeing an arms dealer."

"Ronsard is seen by every influential person in Paris," John said dryly.

"Yes, but I'm different." She said that with an airiness that had him chuckling.

"When will you give in and have dinner with him? With enough time, I can arrange to have some of our people placed around you, the table wired, things like that."

"I don't think I will. I'll have lunch with him, but other than that I don't want to encourage him too much."

"Just make certain you encourage him enough to be invited to his estate."

"I'll be friends with him, but that's all."

A pause stretched over the line. "If you're trying to tell me you won't sleep with him, I never intended for you to," he finally said, his tone flattening out.

"That's good to hear, because sex was never an option. Even though I did go on those damn birth control pills the way you ordered."

Silence again. "The pills weren't in case you wanted to have an affair; they're in case something goes wrong."

She understood, then. If anything went awry and she was captured, she could be raped. "Got it," she said softly The issue of birth control pills hadn't arisen on the job in Iran, because she had been taking the pills anyway. She and Dallas had wanted to wait a year or so, maybe longer, before starting a family.

"I'll be in touch," he said, and hung up.

Slowly she replaced the receiver and snuggled back in bed, but any chance of sleep was gone. Her brain felt alert, racing along the way it always did when she talked with John. What she needed was a good, long run. The more she thought about it, the better the plan sounded. She would ask Eleanor where the best place to jog was. She hopped out of bed and began digging out her sweats, which she had packed for a just-in-case occasion.

Not only did Eleanor know, she arranged for one of the off-duty Marines who was a dedicated jogger to run with her. Niema and the serious young man with the sidewall haircut raced side by side until they were both dripping with sweat. By the time they returned to the embassy, she had teased him out of his stiffness and he had spilled out his life story to her, as well as the details of his wedding, which would take place during his next long leave.

Feeling both energized and relaxed by the run, she showered and ate a light breakfast, then decided to get in a bit of shopping before meeting Ronsard for lunch. Eleanor gave her a list of interesting shops, and Niema ventured out into the French capital.

When the taxi let her out at Cafe Marly's terrace on Cour Napoleon at two minutes 'til one, she was carrying a large shopping bag. She looked at the cafe and for a moment a strong yearning swept over her. She would like to be meeting John for lunch in a place like this-No, she told herself sternly, cutting off the thought. She couldn't let herself lose focus on the job. She had to concentrate, not think about what John was or wasn't doing, and what it would be like to have lunch dates with him, and dinner dates-"I'm doing it again," she muttered.

Pushing all thoughts of him out of her mind, she entered the cafe and was immediately greeted. All she had to say was "Monsieur Ronsard" and she was whisked away to a table.

Ronsard was already there, smiling as he rose to his feet. He took her hand and briefly kissed it, then seated her in the chair beside him, rather than in the one across the table. "You're even lovelier today than you were last night."

"Thank you." She was wearing a classic red sheath with a single-strand pearl necklace. If he had a discerning eye, and he seemed to, he would recognize the style and quality of Chanel. She looked around, intrigued by the cafe. Glass walls were all that separated the cafe from the stunning works of art in the Louvre.

"You're glowing. Boosting a nation's economy must agree with you." He nodded meaningfully at the shopping bag.

"A woman can never have too many pairs of shoes."

"Really? How many do you have?"

"Not enough," she said firmly, and he laughed.

Today his hair was gathered at the back of his neck with a simple, round gold clasp. But even though he was dressed in trousers and a linen jacket instead of a tuxedo, and his hair was confined, every woman in the cafe seemed to be staring at him just as they had at the ball last night. He had a natural, exotic flamboyance that drew the eye.

Evil should show on the face, she thought. It should twist and mar the features, give some indication of its presence within a person. But if Ronsard was evil, she hadn't seen any sign of it yet. So far he had been unfailingly polite and charming, with a tenderness to his manner that didn't seem at all feigned.

"So," he said, leaning back, perfectly at ease. "Tell me: Did Madame Theriot warn you about me again?"

"Of course. Eleanor cares about me."

"She thinks I'm a danger to you?"

"She thinks you're an unsavory character."

Taken by surprise by her candor, he blinked, then laughed aloud. "Then why are you here? Do you have a yearning for danger, or do you think you can rescue me from my wicked ways?"

"Neither." She regarded him with somber, dark eyes. "I think you may be a very nice man, but I can't rescue you from anything. And you're no danger to me at all."

"I think I'm insulted," he murmured. "I would like to be a danger to you, in one particular way. You must have loved him very, very much."

"More than I can say."

"What was he like?"

A smile broke across her face. "He was . .. oh, in some ways he was extraordinary, and in others he was like most men. He made faces when he shaved; he left his clothes on the floor when he took them off. He sailed, he flew his own plane, he took CPR courses and regularly donated blood, he voted in every election. We laughed and argued and made plans, like most couples."

"He was a lucky man, to be loved so completely."

"I was the lucky one. And you? Have you been married?"

"No, I haven't been so fortunate." He shrugged. "Perhaps one day." But it was obvious from his tone he thought marrying was as likely as the sun rising in the west.

"I don't think your wicked reputation scares off many women," she teased. "Every female in here has been staring at you."

He didn't even glance around, as most men would have done, to see if that were true. "If I'm alone, it's because I choose to be. I was thinking last night that I'd never felt anything like what you obviously felt- still feel-for your husband. Part of me thinks it would be pleasant to love someone that much, but a part of me is very grateful that I don't. But why am I saying this?" he asked ruefully. "Telling you I don't think I'll ever love you is not a good way to convince you to have an affair with me."

Niema laughed. "Relax," she advised, patting him on the hand. "An affair wasn't on the books anyway."

He gave her a crooked smile. "But I would very much like for it to be."

She shook her head, amusement still on her face. "It can't be. All I can offer is friendship."

"In that case, I would be honored to be your friend. And I'll keep hoping," he said, his eyes twinkling.

Later that afternoon, Ronsard picked up the sheaf of papers Cara had faxed to him. He had quickly read through them when they arrived, but now he studied them more closely. There was nothing suspicious about Niema Jamieson. She was from New Hampshire, had attended an exclusive women's college, married at the age of twenty-four, and was widowed at twenty-eight. Her husband had been killed in a yachting accident. They had been mentioned a few times in society columns, usually with a descriptive tag such as "devoted couple." She was exactly what she seemed to be, a rarity in his world.

He liked her. She could be surprisingly blunt, but without malice. In a way, he even liked that she wasn't romantically interested in him. He still wanted to take her to bed, but there was no pressure from her, no expectations to be met. She had simply had lunch with him, and that was that. Afterward she had taken a taxi back to the embassy, without hinting for another invitation-which, of course, made him even more determined to see her again. He had asked her out to dinner again, only to be gently refused. He persisted until she at least agreed to another lunch.

The telephone rang, his private line, and he absently answered it. "Ronsard."

It was Cara. "Ernst Morrell has been in contact." Ronsard's lips thinned. He neither liked nor trusted Morrell. Though by the nature of his business he dealt on a daily basis with fanatics, madmen, or plain murderers, Morrell was probably the most vicious. He was the head of a small but particularly virulent terrorist organization and had a particular fondness for bombs. He had set explosives in a hospital in Germany, killing six patients in retaliation for Germany's cooperation with the United States on a military action against Iraq.

"What does he want?"

"He's heard about RDX-a. He wants it." Ronsard swore a lurid phrase. First Temple, and now Morrell. But Temple was one thing, and Morrell something else entirely; though he had expected information about RDX-a to leak, he hadn't expected it to happen quite so fast. He and the manufacturer had an agreement; he would be the lone conduit of the compound. Such exclusivity would be enormously profitable to both of them, at least until someone else was able to duplicate the compound. He had not told anyone, because the explosive still wasn't perfected; it would be much more in demand if it were reliable, rather than having an unfortunate reputation for early detonation. That meant the manufacturer was logically responsible for, as the Americans would say, everyone and his brother knowing about RDX-a.

But it seemed as if his partners had decided to sacrifice large future riches for immediate gain. He sighed. To hell with them. He would collect his percentage and issue a warning to the buyers that the compound wasn't yet reliable. He had to protect his business on that end, since the source had proven so short-sighted.

"When does he want it?" he asked in resignation, rubbing a sudden ache between his eyes.

"He didn't say. He wants to talk to you."

"Did he leave a number?"

"Yes, and he said you could reach him there only for another forty-five minutes."

That was common, at least among the more efficient organizations: They moved frequently and had only short windows of time during which they could be contacted. Such tactics greatly reduced their chances of being located.

Ronsard jotted down the number Cara recited, and as soon as their call was disconnected he began dialing. It was a London number, he saw. The rings brrrd in his ear, then stopped as the receiver was lifted. "Bakery." The one word was heavily accented.

Ronsard said only one word, his name. There was thirty seconds of silence, then a different voice said heartily, "You are prompt, my friend." Morrell was a stocky, barrel-chested man, but his voice was incongruously light. He always spoke as if he were throwing the words from his mouth, trying to counteract the lightness of his voice by sheer velocity.

He was not, and never would be, Morrell's friend. "You have an order, I believe."

"I hear such interesting rumors about a new recipe! I have use for one thousand kilograms."

A thousand kilograms! Ronsard's eyebrows arched. That was enough explosive to destroy London, not that Morrell would use it only in one place. No, he would wreak destruction all over the industrialized world, or perhaps sell some of it himself. "Such an amount will be very, very expensive."

"Some things are worth their cost."

"Did the rumors tell you that the recipe has not been perfected?"

"Not perfected, how?"

"The results are unreliable. Unstable."

'Ah." There was silence as Morrell processed this. No sane person wanted to work with an explosive that might go off during transport, but then, Ronsard thought with grim humor, sanity was not required with these people.

"What brings about these unfortunate results?"

"Rough handling. Being dropped, for instance."

Another "Ah." If one used RDX-a on an airplane, then it would have to be in a carry-on bag so one could control the motion-a suicide mission. Or one could always use an unsuspecting courier, as on Delta Flight 183.

"One must accept these risks," Morrell finally said, meaning that he himself would not be handling the explosive.

"There is one other problem."

"So many problems!" Now Morrell sounded petulant, as if a favorite toy had been broken.

"The recipe must be used within a certain amount of time or it will . . . perform unexpectedly. Timing must be precise."

"So I have heard, my friend, so I have heard! It is a most interesting recipe."

"A thousand kilograms is a considerable amount to be handled."

"But an organized person can handle such a task. When will the shipment be ready?"

From that statement, Ronsard deduced Morrell already had his targets selected, and that they would be hit almost simultaneously. He did not, however, have enough people in his organization to do it all himself. Different organizations occasionally cooperated with each other, especially if they had mutual enemies.

To Morrell he said, "I'm not certain. That's such a large amount; the manufacturer perhaps doesn't have that much available." In fact, Ronsard was certain of it.

"It is worth a great deal of money to me to have this recipe within two weeks."

"I'll give the manufacturer your order."

"Good, very good! I will call again tomorrow."

Ronsard hung up. He was extremely irritated; by precipitously putting RDX-a on the market, the manufacturer had increased not just their risk, but his. Such risk would have to be compensated, of course. Highly compensated.

Then he had an amusing thought. Production was, he knew, still very limited. An order of a thousand kilograms would be difficult to fill, and he didn't yet know how much of the compound Temple would want. Perhaps he should simply let Temple and Morrell settle between them who got the RDX-a. A showdown, as they said in the Westerns. Yes, that would definitely be amusing.

Chapter Sixteen

“I'm having a house party in three days," Ronsard said to Niema several days later as they strolled in a small, quiet park. "At my home in the Rhone-Alpes region, south of Lyon. The countryside is beautiful, and my home is comfortable. I would like very much for you to attend the party."

She was silent, her head dipped as she walked along beside him. The canopy of trees shaded them from the warm summer sun, and birds sang overhead. They were not the only people enjoying the little park. Young mothers and nannies supervised shrieking children of all ages as they dashed about, skipping and jumping, rolling in the grass. Joggers pounded up and down the paths, singly and in pairs. Lovers walked hand in hand, sometimes stopping to kiss. Older people occupied the benches, some of them playing board games, some of them just watching the activity that surrounded them. The sweet perfume of flowers lay on the warm air like the touch of a lover.

"You aren't saying anything," he observed after a moment. "Are you worried about Madame Theriot's disapproval?"

"That, and though you say you expect only friendship, somehow I don't think you've given up hope that. . . well, that I'll change my mind."

"Of course I hope," he said matter-of-factly. "I am a man-a Frenchman. I would like very much to sleep with you. But it's also nice just being with you. You don't want favors from me, and you don't want my money. Do you realize how few people like you I have in my life?"

"Your life is what you've made it." She glanced up at him. "I refuse to feel sorry for you."

Smiling, he caught her hand and swung it between them. "There, that is what I mean. You say what you think."

"Not always," Niema said. "I'm too polite for that."

The smile became a chuckle. "Are you insulting me?"

"Of course. You know what I think of your ... profession."

Something closed in his eyes, some expression that was shuttered before she could read it. "We all do what we must."

"Not everyone. Some people do what they can."

"And there is a difference between 'must' and 'can'?"

"There seems to be. People say they do what they must when what they've done has hurt someone. People who do what they can are usually helping."

"A matter of semantics." He shrugged. "But perhaps you're right. I made a choice, when I was a young man, and now I mustn't whine. Perhaps I had other options, but at the time, at that age, I didn't see them. Given the same circumstances, I would make the same choice again."

There was no regret in his voice, only a pragmatic acceptance of who and what he was. He didn't despair over the mistakes he had made; there was no angst, no wrestling with his conscience. He had set his feet on a certain path and never looked back.

She wanted to ask him why he had made the choice he had, but the answer seemed fairly obvious: money. He had needed money, and that was the means he had chosen to get it. The "why" didn't matter; by his own free will, he had put himself across the line that divided legal from illegal. She couldn't help liking him, but at the same time she had no qualms about presenting herself to him under false pretenses. Ronsard was an adversary, however friendly and charming he might be.

"My profession aside, I still want an answer to my invitation."

"A house party." That was exactly the function to which John had wanted her to get invited, but there was no enthusiasm in her voice. "How large a party?"

That question had him smiling again. "Are you wondering if it would be a party of two, which I would much prefer? I believe there are about a hundred people invited."

"Then your house must be more than just 'comfortable,' " she said dryly.

"Perhaps that was an understatement. But there are separate guest quarters that house half that number, so not everyone is staying under the same roof."

"That is still a large roof."

"Yes, it is. Don't hold my roof against me, please."

She laughed. "I'm sure it's a very nice roof. Would you mind if I ask who the other guests are?"

His eyes gleamed. "You wouldn't ask unless you were considering accepting," he said with satisfaction. "You met many of the same guests at the prime minister's ball that you'll meet at my home."

Many, but not all. Undoubtedly some of his guests were the sort who wouldn't be invited to government functions. It was a cynical world, when the lawmakers and the lawbreakers mingled together behind the scenes. John would be there, as one of the latter group. She wondered if he would be surprised at any of the other guests, then dismissed the idea. No, he wouldn't be surprised. He probably knew of them all.

"Please say yes," he cajoled. "I won't be in Paris much longer, and your visit may end before I return."

"Yes," she said, and sighed. "I'll probably go home afterward. It would be awkward for me to visit you, then come back to the embassy. I don't want to do anything that would damage Albert's career."

He was silent as they walked along. Perhaps he didn't like being told associating with him had repercussions for others, but she wasn't going to sugarcoat anything for him. She had a job to do, and so far her instincts had been on target; so many people sucked up to him, and he was pursued by so many women that the very fact she didn't made her memorable to him.

"So I won't see you again after you leave the house party," he finally said. He gave her a wry smile. "I don't think we normally travel in the same circles."

"No," she said. "We don't."

"Then it's all the more important for you to come. There's someone I'd like for you to meet."

"I got the invitation," she told John the next morning when he called.

"Good. When are you going?"

"Day after tomorrow."

"I won't be there until the next day. There's a fancy-dress party that night, and I'll probably schedule my arrival during the party."

"How do you know the schedule? And why in the middle of the party?"

"Everyone's attention will be splintered, including Ronsard's. It's just a small advantage for me, but every detail matters. We don't know his security arrangements, the floor plan, or his schedule, so we'll have to play that part by ear. Don't forget, I'll be smitten by you the first time I see you, so we'll have an excuse to be together."

"I'm turning into a love goddess," she muttered. "Men are being smitten left and right."

He laughed quietly. "Maybe you've found your niche in life."

"Smiting men?"

"I think you could get to like it."

"That depends on what I'm smiting them with."

"See you in three days, Mata."

Ronsard left that day for his villa, so she didn't have lunch with him for the first time since they had met. Glad of the downtime, she spent a good portion of the day assembling the things she would need once she got to Ronsard's house. The CIA station chief in the embassy was of great help in procuring the tiny transmitters, batteries, and wiring she needed. If he asked any questions, he didn't ask them of her. She knew he had to have cleared everything with Langley for him to be as cooperative as he was.

The station chief didn't know anything about the job she was doing, just that he was to get whatever she needed; the Paris-based CIA contingent didn't even know she had been meeting Ronsard, unless one of the case officers had taken it on himself to follow her one day, but she couldn't think why they would. So far as any of them had known until now, she had simply been a friend, visiting the ambassador and his wife.

Lyon was about three hundred kilometers from Paris, farther than she wanted to drive, so she booked a flight and called the number Ronsard had given her to arrange to be picked up at the airport.

She was eager to arrive, to look around and see what she had to deal with, so she could make concrete plans and decisions. Being a socialite, even a subdued one, wasn't her cup of tea. She wanted to do something besides shop and have lunch and attend parties.

The weather was beautiful the day she flew down to Lyon, the flight smooth. She was met at the airport by a man in a stylish gray suit, his blond hair cut military short and his eyes hidden by sunglasses. He didn't speak other than when it was necessary, but he was efficient. He collected her luggage and handed her into a silver Jaguar, and she settled back to enjoy the drive.

They went south on the expressway, then turned east, toward Grenoble. The region was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful in France, with the French Alps rising in the east. The weather was warmer than it had been in Paris, the heat radiating through the expensive tinted glass of the Jaguar's windows.

Her first view of Ronsard's villa made her blink in astonishment, and she was glad she was wearing sunglasses to hide her expression. After all, she was supposed to be used to wealth and luxury. John should have warned her, she thought absently.

A sleekly paved drive, bordered with multi-colored flowers, led up to massive gates set in a twelve-foot-high gray stone wall that completely encircled the estate. The stone in the wall alone had to have been an enormous expense. The gates slid smoothly open as the car approached; when they drove through, the gates started closing again almost immediately.

The estate itself was massive; she estimated at least forty acres had been enclosed, though the grounds had been so artfully landscaped there were sections where she couldn't see the wall at all. The house itself-though she doubted a structure that huge could be called a mere house-was four stories high, with wings stretching out on each side. It had been built with huge slabs of pale, luminous gray marble, with faint streaks of pink and gold running through the stone. The effect was stunning.

To the right was a long, two-story building that was rather barrackslike in style, though more of that incredible landscaping went a long way toward disguising it. To the left, set like a jewel on a picturesque pond, was what looked like another house. She guessed that this was the guest quarters Ronsard had mentioned. It was large enough to be a small hotel, and looked small only in comparison to the massive-ness of the main building.

Illegal arms-dealing had to be a very, very lucrative business.

Until now she hadn't had any grasp of Ronsard's wealth, but now she had a better idea why he was pursued for his money.

There were men in shades everywhere-his private army. There seemed to be a system of dress to designate authority. Most of the men wore a dark green uniform-type pants and shirt, and these men carried weapons openly. Next in number were those wearing dark green pants, but white shirts, and they wore only side arms. Fewest in number were those wearing light gray suits like her driver.

A number of guests had already arrived. They were wandering in the formal gardens, casually but expensively dressed in what she had always thought of as country-manor style. Some sat on a side patio, indulging in cocktails. Six industrious individuals were on the tennis courts, batting the chartreuse ball back and forth with increasing languor as the heat sapped their strength.

Ronsard himself came down the broad, shallow steps to meet her, smiling, and his hands extended as she got out of the car. He took her shoulders in a light grasp and, bending, brushed his lips across her cheek. Startled, she drew back and blinked up at him. That was the first time he had done more than kiss her hand, and she must have looked uneasy because he rolled his eyes.

"One would think, from your expression, that I had attempted to remove your dress," he said dryly. "If my ego had been inflated, it would now be as flat as yesterday's champagne." He gave a rueful shake of his head. "And to think I've missed this."

"I'm sorry, I was just startled."

"No, don't apologize and ruin the effect."

"Now you're making me feel guilty."

"I'm teasing." He smiled down at her, then said briefly to the two young staffers who stood behind him like sentinels. "Put Madame's luggage in the Garden room."

"The Garden room," she repeated. "That sounds lovely."

"It's actually a small suite. I want you to be comfortable. And before your suspicious nature rears its ugly head, no, it is not next to my private suite. None of the guest rooms are."

"Consider my suspicions headed off at the pass." She took his arm, and he led her inside, where delicious coolness and airy space replaced the heat of outside.

Marble columns soared to a painted ceiling three stories high. The floor was granite flagstones, in a darker hue than the pale gray of the columns, and dotted by enormous, richly colored rugs with tight, thick weaves. Twin marble staircases curved to the left and right, coming together at the top of the arch with hallways opening off each side.

"I hope you're providing tour maps to everyone, so they don't get lost," she said as he escorted her up the stairs.

"The design is basically simple," he began, and smiled at the disbelieving look she gave him. "There aren't any cul-de-sacs. All secondary hallways lead directly back to the main hallway. If you have a sense of direction, you can find your way back to here without any difficulty."

As they mounted the stairs she looked up at an enormous tapestry hung on the left wall. "How old is your house?"

"It isn't old at all. It was built in the seventies by one of the Middle-Eastern oil billionaires. When the price of oil dropped, he needed to raise cash, and I was in a position to provide it."

Upstairs, the marble stairs gave way to dove-gray carpeting so thick her feet sank into it. Light streamed through Palladian windows; walking over to look out, she saw an enormous swimming pool in the courtyard below; the pool was irregularly shaped so that it resembled a lake, exquisitely landscaped, with a small waterfall sparkling over rocks before cascading back into the transparent turquoise water.

"The pool must be spectacular at night, like another world," she said.

"It's one of my pleasures. A long swim is relaxing after a difficult day."

He led her along the hallway, turned left down a secondary hallway, then opened a door on the right. "Here is the Garden room. I hope you will be comfortable."

Niema stepped inside, and her eyes lit with pleasure. "It's beautiful."

The reason it was called the Garden room was obvious: It was filled with greenery. Besides the lovely arrangements of cut flowers, there were eight-foot tall areca palms in strategic locations, succulent jade, rhododendrons. They were in a small sitting room; double doors to the right were opened to reveal a sumptuous bedroom. Straight ahead, glass doors opened onto a private balcony that was lush with potted trees and flowers. The balcony was the width of both the sitting room and bedroom, perhaps forty feet wide.

Ronsard was watching her move around the suite, touching the plants, smelling the flowers. "This is a peaceful place. I thought you would enjoy it; an escape from the social whirl."

"Thank you," she said sincerely. His thoughtful-ness in providing this retreat was touching. He was correct in thinking she enjoyed occasional solitude and serenity in which to recharge, but as she looked around she realized that the balcony would also provide an excellent means of clandestine entry, a la Medina. She would make certain the glass doors were always unlocked-not that they would provide much difficulty to someone as adept at breaking and entering as John was.

Her luggage had already been deposited on a padded bench at the foot of the bed. Ronsard took her arm. "A maid will unpack for you. If you aren't too tired, I have someone I'd like you to meet."

"No, I'm not tired," she said, remembering he had mentioned in Paris that he wanted her to meet someone. The electronic supplies she had brought were safely locked in her jewelry case, so she wasn't worried about the maid seeing them and reporting to Ronsard that one of his guests had brought some interesting equipment with her.

"My private wing is on the other side of the house," he said and smiled. "I wasn't lying when I said your suite wasn't next door to mine. I wish it was, but I deliberately remodeled so that the guest rooms were somewhat distant."

"For privacy, or protection?"

"Both." A tender look swept his face, an expression all the more astonishing because it seemed to be directed elsewhere. "But not my privacy, and not my protection. Come. I told her I was bringing someone to see her, and she has been excited all day, waiting."

"She?"

"My daughter. Laure."

Chapter Seventeen

His daughter? John hadn't mentioned that Ronsard had a daughter. Niema tried to hide her surprise. ""You've never mentioned her before," she said. "I thought your sister was your only family."

"Ah, well, perhaps I'm paranoid. I do everything I can to safeguard her. As you pointed out, I'm an unsavory character; I have enemies."

"I said Eleanor thinks you're an unsavory character," she corrected.

"She's right, you know. I'm far too unsavory for a woman like you."

She rolled her eyes. "Smooth, Ronsard. Women probably fall all over you when you warn them that you're too dangerous for them."

"Have I ever mentioned you have this annoying habit of seeing through my ploys?" he asked conversationally, and they both laughed.

They weren't the only people in the hallway. They passed several guests, all of whom had to speak to their host. One gentleman looked familiar, and he swept her with a knowing look. It took her a moment to place him as the horse-racing afficionado she had met at the prime minister's ball. She smiled at him and asked how his horse had finished in the weekend's race.

"You have a slave for life," Ronsard said as they continued down the hall. "He bores everyone with his talk of horses and racing."

"I like horses," she replied serenely. "And it doesn't take any more effort to be nice to someone than it does to be nasty."

Getting from one side of the huge villa to the other took some time, especially when he was continually stopped. At last, however, they passed into his private wing, which was guarded by heavy wooden double doors. "My suite is here," he said, indicating another set of double doors on the left. He showed her a family dining room, a den that surprised her with its coziness, a small movie theater, an enormous playroom filled with all manner of toys and games, a library so packed with books she doubted he could get another volume on the shelves. The titles were both fiction and nonfiction, with an amazing variety of children's books mixed in.

"This is one of Laure's favorite rooms," he said.

"She loves to read. Of course, she has outgrown fairy tales and Dr. Seuss, but I make certain there is always a selection of reading material appropriate to her age."

"How old is she?"

"Twelve. It's a delightful age. She's hovering between childhood and adolescence, unable to decide if she wants to play with her dolls or experiment with lipstick. I've forbidden the lipstick for another year, at least," he said, his lips quirking.

He turned to her, a smile still on his lips, but his eyes were somehow looking beyond her. "Laure is small for her age," he said. "Very small. I want to prepare you. Her health is ... not good. Every moment I have her is a gift from God."

An odd thing for a man like Ronsard to say, but then again, perhaps it wasn't. He opened a door into a room so cheerful and charming Niema caught her breath, and they stepped inside.

"Papa!"

The voice was young, sweet, as pure as the finest crystal. There was a whirring sound and she came rolling toward them in a motorized wheelchair, a tiny doll with an animated face and a smile that lit the world. An oxygen tank was attached to the back of the wheelchair, and transparent tubing ran from the tank to her nostrils, held in place by a narrow band around her head.

"Laure." His voice was filled with an aching tenderness. He leaned down and kissed her. He spoke in English. "This is my friend, Madame Jamieson. Niema, this is my heart, my daughter, Laura."

Niema bent forward and extended her hand. "I'm very pleased to meet you," she said, also in English.

"And I you, madame." The young girl shook Niema's hand; her fingers were painfully fragile in Niema's careful clasp. Ronsard had said his daughter was twelve; she was the size of a six-year-old, probably weighing only about fifty pounds. She was so very, very thin, her skin a bluish white. She had Ronsard's eyes, dark blue and intelligent, and an angel's smile set in an alabaster face. Her hair was a silky light brown, brushed to a careful smoothness and tied back with a festive bow.

She was wearing lipstick.

Ronsard noticed it the same time Niema did. "Laure!" he exclaimed. He put his hands on his hips and gave her a stern look. "I forbade you to wear lipstick."

She gave him a long-suffering look, as if she despaired of ever making him understand. "I wanted to look nice, Papa. For Madame Jamieson."

"You are beautiful as you are; you don't need lipstick. You are too young for makeup."

"Yes, but you're my papa," she said with unassailable logic. "You always think I'm beautiful."

"I think the shade is very flattering," Niema said, because females should always stick together. She wasn't lying; Laure displayed an intelligence beyond her years by choosing a delicate shade of rose and using only a light application. Anything more would have looked garish in such an unearthly pale face. She ignored the girl's tiny size; what was important here was her mind, not her body.

Ronsard's eyebrows flew up in disbelief. "You're taking the part of this . . . this disobedient hoyden?"

Laure giggled at hearing herself described as a hoyden. Niema met Ronsard's accusing look with an innocent expression and a shrug. "Of course. What did you expect me to do?"

"'Agree with him," Laure said. "He expects all of his women to agree with him."

This time Ronsard's astonishment wasn't feigned. Stunned at hearing such a statement issuing from his innocent daughter's lips, he stared speechlessly at her.

"But I'm not one of his women," Niema pointed out. "I'm just a friend."

"He has never brought any of the others to meet me. Since he brought you, I thought perhaps he wants you to be my maman."

Ronsard made a little choking sound. Niema ignored him to grin at the child. "No, it's nothing like that. We aren't in love with each other, and besides, your papa is allergic to marriage."

"I know, but he would marry if he thought that was what I want. He spoils me terribly. He will get anything I ask for, so I try not to ask for very much, or he would be too busy to do anything else."

She was an alarming blend of childlike innocence and trust, and an astuteness far beyond her years. Whatever her physical problems were, they had forced her to look inward much earlier than young people usually learned to do. "While he is recovering," she said, briskly turning the wheelchair, "I'll show you my rooms."

Niema strolled beside the chair while Laure gave her a guided tour of her suite. Everything had been specially outfitted so she could reach it from a wheelchair, and attached to one side of the chair was a long pair of tongs so she could pick up anything she dropped. A middle-aged woman came forward, smiling, to be introduced as Laure's nurse, Bernadette. Her bedroom opened off Laure's, so she was available during the night if she was needed.

Anything that could possibly interest a young girl had been made available. There were books, movies, dolls, games, samplers she had made, fashion magazines. Laure showed all of them to Niema, while Ronsard trailed behind, bewildered and bemused at being made to feel unnecessary.

Laure even showed Niema her makeup case. Ronsard made choking noises again. This was not a little girl's pretend makeup, but the real stuff from Dior, stunningly packaged in a silver train case. "I ordered it," Laure said, unperturbed by her father's horror. "But nothing looks right when I put it on. Even the lipstick is too . .. too much like a clown. Today, I rubbed my finger on the stick, then on my lips."

"That's good. It's called staining," Niema said, pulling a chair over to sit beside the girl and taking the train case on her lap. She began pulling out the sleek containers of makeup. "Makeup is like anything else, it takes practice to use. And some things will never look good because they don't flatter your coloring. You learn by experimenting. Would you like me to show you?"

"Oh, please," Laure said eagerly, leaning forward.

"I forbid it," Ronsard said, with more desperation than sternness. "She is too young-"

"Louis," Niema interrupted. "Go away. This is girl stuff."

He didn't go away. He sat down, a charmingly helpless expression on his face, watching as Niema demonstrated how to use each item.

A pink blush was much too dark for that white face. Niema took a tissue and wiped most of it off, leaving only a delicate tint. "Remember, none of this sets into stone when you apply it. If it is too much, wipe part of it off. I always have a tissue and cotton swabs with me when I put on makeup, so I can make the effect more subtle. Do you see my eyeliner?" She leaned closer, and Laure nodded as she stared hard at Niema's eyes.

"I use a black pencil, like this-very soft, so it doesn't pull my skin. Then I use a swab to wipe most of it away, so it's barely noticeable. But my coloring is dark, while yours is fair, so black would be too harsh for you. When you are old enough to start wearing eyeliner, use a soft gray or taupe-"

The makeup lesson went on, with Laure hanging on every word. Under Niema's tutelage, very little was actually applied to the small, skeletal face, just the merest hint of color. Laure peered in a mirror, studied herself, and smiled. "Now I don't look so ill," she said with satisfaction. "Thank you very much, Madame Jamieson. Were you watching, Papa?"

"Yes, I was watching. It looks very nice, but-"

"If I die, I want you to make certain someone puts makeup on me just like this. I do not want to look sick when I reach Heaven."

All the color drained out of Ronsard's face. Niema felt stricken on his behalf, but also for this little girl who had never in her life known what it was to enjoy good health, to run and play like other children.

"I won't wear it now, I promise," she said. "Not even lipstick, though I do like it. But... if. Promise me, Papa."

"I promise." His voice sounded hoarse, strained, unlike Ronsard's normal suave tones.

She reached over and patted his knee, the child comforting the parent. "You may take the case," she said, "and keep it safe for me. That way you will always know where it is."

He lifted her out of the wheelchair and settled her on his lap, taking care not to dislodge the oxygen tube. She was so frail, so tiny, her legs dangled like a kindergartner's. He couldn't speak for a moment, his dark head bent so that his cheek rested on the top of her head.

"You won't need it for a long, long time," he finally said.

"I know." Her eyes, though, held a different knowledge.

She seemed to be tiring. He touched her cheek. "Do you want to lie down for a while?"

"On the longue," she said. "There is a movie I wish to see."

Bemadette came over and pushed the wheelchair and its container of oxygen while he carried Laure to the plush chaise longue and carefully placed her on it. Under the rose stain, the child's lips held a tinge of blue. He covered her legs with a soft blanket while Bernadette arranged the pillows just so, propping her in a comfortable position.

"There!" she said, squirming back against the pillows. "I am in the perfect position for watching movies." She gave him a sly look. "It is a romance."

He had recovered his aplomb. "You will give me gray hair," he announced, feigning a scowl. "A romance!"

"With sex," she added mischievously.

"Tell me no more," he said, holding up his hands as if to ward off anything else she might say. "I don't want to know. A papa can bear only so much. Tell Madame Jamieson good day, and we'll leave you to your romance."

Laure held out her hand. "Good day, madame. That was fun! Will you visit me again?"

"Of course," Niema said, smiling despite the ache in her chest. "I've very much enjoyed meeting you, mademoiselle. Your papa is lucky to have you as his daughter."

Laure looked up at her father, and again the expression in her eyes was far too old for her years. "I am the one who is lucky," she said.

He kissed her, touched her cheek, and left her with a smile. His grip on Niema's hand, however, was almost bone-shattering.

When they were out in the hallway, he said, "Dieu," in a stifled tone, and bent over from the waist, bracing his hands on his knees while he took deep breaths.

Niema automatically reached out to offer him comfort. She hesitated, her hand in midair, then lightly touched his back.

After a moment he straightened and walked farther down the hall away from Laure's rooms before he spoke again. "Sometimes it is more than I can bear," he said, his voice still constrained. "I apologize. I hadn't realized she-I've tried to keep from her how very ill she is, but she's so intelligent..." The words trailed off.

"What's wrong with her?" Niema asked gently. There was a decanter of liquor and a set of glasses on a side table. She went over to it and poured him a hefty portion of whatever liquor it was. He sat on a nearby chair and downed it without question.

"Too much," he said, turning the empty glass around and around in his hands. "If it was any one thing, there would be things that could be done. She has a defective heart, only one kidney, and cystic fibrosis. The CF seems to affect her digestive system more than her lungs, or she likely would have already-"

He broke off, his throat working. "There are new drugs that help, but it's still so difficult for her to get the nutrients she needs. She eats constantly, but she doesn't grow and doesn't gain weight. What growth she has had strains her heart. A heart transplant is out of the question because of the cystic fibrosis." He gave a bitter little smile that wasn't a smile at all. "Finding a suitable heart is almost impossible. She would have to have a young child's heart, because of her size, and donor hearts from children are rare. And her blood type is A negative, which narrows the chance of finding a heart almost to zero. Even if one came available, the opinion of the medical establishment is that a healthy heart shouldn't be wasted on someone who . .. who has so many other problems."

There was nothing to say. She couldn't offer meaningless phrases of hope when Laure's condition couldn't get much more hopeless.

"I've been trying to find a heart on the black market for years." He stared blindly at the glass in his hands. "I pour money into research on genetic treatments for CF, on new drugs, anything that will buy her some time. If I can fix just one thing-just one!" he said fiercely. "Then she will have a chance."

Realization slammed into her like a blow. "That's why you-" She stopped, not needing to finish the sentence.

He finished it for her. "Became an illegal arms dealer? Yes. I had to have enormous sums of money, and quickly. The choice was drugs or weapons. I chose weapons. If anything-anything-happens that will increase her chances, whether it's a heart miraculously coming available or a new treatment, I have to be ready immediately with the cash. The research is also hideously expensive." He shrugged. "She is my child," he said simply. "The devil may have my soul, but he's welcome to it if she can live."

She had known there were layers to him. Except for his occupation, he had seemed to be an honorable man, as if he completely separated the two halves of his life. What he did was abhorrent, but he did it out of his consuming love for his child. She ached for him, and for Laure.

"What of Laure's mother?"

"She was a ... passing fancy. She didn't want to have the baby, but I convinced her to carry it to term. I paid all of her expenses and gave her a large lump sum for her trouble. I don't believe she ever saw Laure. The doctors told her the baby probably would not live, and she left. I brought Laure home with me.

"I wasn't poor. My family was more than comfortable. But it wasn't enough, not if I wanted my baby to live. So I used my entree into the Parisian upper crust to both provide contacts and protect my efforts. Don't look at me with such heartbreak in your eyes, my dear. I'm not gallant or tragic, I'm ruthless and pragmatic. My one true vulnerability is my daughter, and for her I am putty, as you saw. She can be quite ruthless in handling me, a quality she doubtless inherited from me."

"The heartbreak is for her, not you," Niema said tartly. "You made your choice."

"I would make the same choice again, as I told you before. And you might do the same." He eyed her, a cynical smile hovering on his mouth. "You never know what you might do until your child is involved."

She couldn't argue with that, not if she were honest. She wasn't the type of person who could accept, without a fight, her child's death sentence. If possible she would move heaven and earth, and if it wasn't possible she would try anyway. That was what Ronsard had done. Though she didn't agree with his path, his reaction was the same as hers would have been.

He set the glass down with a decisive thunk and got to his feet. He ran his fingers through his loosened hair and worked his shoulders as if loosening tense muscles. "I have a hundred guests waiting for me," he said. "Perhaps I should begin fulfilling my duties as host. But I wanted you to meet Laure, and ... know that part of me. Thank you for taking the time to show her about the makeup. I had no idea."

"How could you?" Niema's heart broke all over again, thinking of the young girl who wanted to look her best when she died.

"I forbid you to cry."

She squared her shoulders. "I'm not crying. But I will if I want to, and you can't stop me."

He held up his hands. "I surrender. Come, let's rejoin the party."

As they left his private wing, a tall, blonde Valkyrie of a woman approached. "I hate to disturb you," she said to Ronsard. Her accent was pure American. "But several details have come up that need your attention."

He nodded. "Niema, this is Cara Smith, my secretary. Cara, Niema Jamieson. Will you excuse me, my dear?" he asked Niema. "Duty calls."

"Certainly." Niema watched him stride off down the stairs, with Cara half a step behind him. She noted the direction in which he went; his office must be on the first floor, then, and in the west wing.

She ached with sympathy for both him and Laure. That would not, however, get in the way of her doing her job.

She walked casually in the same direction, but by the time she crossed the huge central foyer he wasn't in sight. They had disappeared through one of several doors, and it would be too obvious if she walked through the villa opening all the doors.

But at least she now had a general idea of his office's location. She would try to get him to give her a guided tour of the main floor, and surely he would indicate which room was his office.

Tomorrow, John would arrive. If she already had the location, they could possibly plant the bug and copy Ronsard's files tomorrow night.

Anticipation zinged through her. John would be here tomorrow.

Chapter Eighteen

It was ten o'clock at night when John drove up to Ronsard's estate. The grounds were so well-lit that he could see the glow from several miles away. The curving drive led him to a set of double gates, which remained closed as he approached. When he stopped, a uniformed guard came out to shine a flashlight in John's face, ask his name, and see his identity. Silently John reached inside his tuxedo jacket and produced his ID. He didn't give his name verbally, an omission that made the guard glance sharply at him, then step away to speak into the two-way radio he carried.

A moment later, he gave a signal and the gates swung open. The signal, John surmised, meant that the guard on the outside couldn't open the gates himself. He had to give the okay to someone else inside, which eliminated the chance that he could be overpowered and access gained to the estate.

He gave John another hard look as he leaned down to return the identification to him. John returned the look without expression, then drove through the gates.

He stopped the car in front of a massive curving entry and got out. Immediately a pair of red-jacketed valets approached; one got out his luggage, while the other gave him a ticket, got into the car, and drove it away. It would probably receive a thorough search while it was in their possession, John thought. His luggage, too.

Let them search. They wouldn't get any information from it, not even his fingerprints. He had carefully sprayed his fingertips with a clear-coat gel that hardened and provided a smooth finish. It was thin and very nearly undetectable to the touch and would come off when he washed his hands with hot water. A cold-water wash wouldn't disturb the gel.

The spray was a vast improvement over the methods he had used in the past; sometimes he would dip his fingertips into puddles of melted wax, but the wax wasn't very durable. For a brief job or an emergency, however, it would do. Another trick was to paint his fingertips with a thick application of clear fingernail polish, but he had to have time for it to dry or that was useless. Band-Aids wrapped around each finger were a quick and effective method of hiding his prints, but someone with bandages on every finger was noticeable-at least, if that someone was over three years old.

As he mounted the steps, a tall, tuxedo-clad man approached. "Mr. Temple," he said in a crisp British accent. "Mr. Ronsard will see you now. Follow me, please."

John silently followed, not inclined to exchange pleasantries. He could hear music, and people in formal dress stood in small groups, laughing and chattering in a mix of languages. The women glittered in jewels, and so did some of the men. His own tuxedo was severely cut, without a frill or ruffle in sight, but the cut and fit shouted that it was custom made for him. Several women glanced his way, then looked again. When he wanted, he could pass through a crowd completely unnoticed, but tonight he wanted people to notice. He walked with a silent, graceful saunter, like a panther that has seen its prey but knows there's no need to hurry.

The elegant flunky led him to a small anteroom off the foyer. The room was comfortably furnished with a sofa and two wing-back chairs, a cozy little selection of books, a small fireplace, and a selection of spirits. Considering that the room was no more than eight feet square, and that the door had a sturdy lock, John guessed that it was there more for quick and furtive lovemaking than it was for any other purpose. A good host always provided for his guests, after all.

"Monsieur Temple." Ronsard rose to his feet as

John entered. He nodded a dismissal at the other man, who silently closed the door behind him as he left. "I am Louis Ronsard." He extended his hand, every inch a gracious host.

John let a fraction of a second lapse before he took Ronsard's hand. Not a flicker of expression crossed his face. "Why am I here?" he finally asked, his tone low and controlled. "This . . . meeting wasn't necessary."

"I think it is." Ronsard was slick about it, but he was carefully studying John's face. "I don't like dealing with unknown factors. Moreover, you knew about a compound that is very new and supposed to be unknown. Would you mind telling me how you came to hear of it?"

John regarded him silently, eyes at half-mast. "I don't like to be called by name in the middle of a crowd, and my definition of a crowd is any number greater than two." Let Ronsard wait for his answers; he wasn't in the mood to be cooperative.

"I assure you, no one here has any idea who you are."

"And I assure you, there's always at least one person at parties like this who is making a list of names, to be sold afterward."

"I deal harshly with betrayal," Ronsard said softly. Evidently deciding Temple wasn't a man who could be charmed, impressed, or intimidated, he indicated the chairs. "Please, be seated. Would you like a drink?"

John chose one of the wing-back chairs. "I don't drink."

Ronsard paused with his hand on a decanter, his eyebrows lifted, then moved his hand to a bottle and poured himself a small amount of wine.

"I apologize if you think coming here has jeopardized your cover. But I'm a cautious man too, and handling this compound is not without its own risk. I do so only when I am assured that this is a legitimate order and that I am not being set up. So, given the secrecy surrounding the compound, I think you understand why I am interested in learning how you heard of it."

John steepled his fingers, staring unblinkingly at Ronsard for a long moment. He saw Ronsard's gaze flicker to the ring of entwined snakes on his left hand. "Flight 183," he finally said.

"The plane crash? Yes, that was unfortunate. I suspected it was a ... test, shall we say? I wasn't aware beforehand."

"I don't care if it was a test or not. It worked."

"But how did you find what explosive was used?"

"I ... obtained a copy of the NTSB preliminary chemical analysis. I have access to a very good lab in Switzerland. The chemical fingerprint was similar to RDX. The NTSB found no evidence of a detonator. It's self explanatory," John said, his tone bored.

"Do you really think I would believe you put all this together by extrapolation?" Ronsard smiled gently. "No, someone told you. A second party has also approached me wanting to buy a quantity of the compound, someone who has no access to the NTSB. How could he know, unless by the same leak?"

"Ernst Morrell," John supplied. "I told him."

Ronsard stared at him a moment, then drank his wine. "You surprise me," he murmured.

"Morrell will provide a ... distraction. Anything that happens will be laid at his feet."

"So he is a decoy." Ronsard shook his head, smiling. "Mr. Temple, I salute you. That is truly devious."

John relaxed, subtly but visibly. The stony expression on his face eased. He let himself blink. "If I'm lucky, the bastard will blow himself up. If I'm not lucky, he'll still bring so much heat down on himself he'll be caught. Either way, he won't step on my toes again."

"So you've met Morrell before?"

"No, but he's a blundering idiot. He interfered in a job."

Ronsard laughed, his handsome face lit with real amusement. "Monsieur Temple, I think it will be a pleasure doing business with you. We'll talk more, but I've been away from my guests too long, and I must get back to them. Come, I'll introduce you around."

"Introduce me as Mr. Smith."

"Smith," Ronsard repeated. He still looked amused. "That's my secretary's last name as well."

"Maybe we're related."

They drew more than one interested gaze when they left the anteroom. John walked with his host across the huge foyer and into a glittering ballroom. They stopped at the top of three shallow steps, looking out over the crowd. Enormous crystal chandeliers hung overhead, glittering like diamonds, and a wall of French glass doors had been opened to the night. People moved around the room, out to the patio, back in, in a constant motion that reminded him of a hive.

He looked casually around, not letting his gaze rest on anyone in particular, but he spotted Niema almost immediately. An industrialist approached Ronsard and made polite chitchat for a moment, then waited expectantly for an introduction. John had met the man before, but he'd been using a different name at the time, and with his appearance altered; his hair had been gray and he had worn brown contacts. The industrialist thought he was shaking hands with a total stranger.

A voluptuous redhead, her breasts all but bared in a skintight emerald green gown, was the next to attach herself to Ronsard's arm and angle for an introduction. Ronsard, obviously amused, obliged. John became his most impassive, not responding to any of the woman's flirtatious remarks. For all her obviousness, she was no fool; after a few minutes she switched her flirtatiousness to Ronsard, who smiled and flattered her, all the while with that look of amusement still in his eyes.

After the woman left, they were briefly alone. John let his gaze sweep the ballroom once again, and he went still.

Ronsard noticed immediately, of course. "Do you see someone you know?" he asked, becoming subtly more alert as he looked around.

"No." The word sounded as if it were being dragged out of John's throat. "Someone I'm going to know. That woman-who is she?"

"Who?"

"Dark hair, blue gown. Wearing pearls. She's talking to the tall blonde woman."

Ronsard's search narrowed on Niema. His face hardened as he realized she was the woman John had noticed. "She's with me," he said in succinct warning.

John spared his host only a glance before once more focusing on her. He let himself greedily drink her in, admiring the way the soft light gleamed on her bare shoulders. "Are you going to marry her?" he asked almost absently.

Ronsard gave a short, hard laugh. "No, of course not."

"I am."

The soft words lay between them like stones. Anger darkened Ronsard's eyes. "She's a friend, one I've come to cherish. She isn't for the likes of us."

"Perhaps not for you. If you had some claim on her, I'd back off, but you've admitted you don't. She's free-but not for long."

Ronsard was a consummate businessman. He was also astute enough to realize the man called Temple wasn't someone who could be intimidated. He took a deep breath, reaching for control. "I don't brawl over women," he said. "But neither will I allow you to force yourself on her. I say this because she . . . isn't receptive. She is a widow, and still very much in love with her dead husband. Even if she wasn't, she is one of the few principled people of my acquaintance. She frowns on people such as you and I."

"She turned you down," John stated.

"Flat." For a moment humor quirked Ronsard's mouth. "I like her. I won't have her hurt."

"Neither will I."

Into the silence that fell between them Ronsard said, "You've astonished me. I wouldn't have expected you to become enamored of any woman, especially at first sight. It seems out of character."

"It is." John drew a deep breath and let all the pent-up hunger of the past five years burn in his eyes. "It is," he repeated. "Introduce me."

"I think I will," Ronsard mused. "This should be amusing."

Niema saw the two tall, broad-shouldered men cutting their way through the crowd. Ronsard looked as dashing and debonair as usual, his long dark hair free on his shoulders, but it was the predator beside him who took her breath. John looked severe, dangerous, somehow different. His blue gaze was focused on her like a laser.

Startled, she actually took a step back, her hand lifting to the pearls around her neck.

She hadn't seen him in over a week. She wasn't prepared for the sudden impact of sensation, like a punch in the stomach. All the times before when she had seen him he had muted the dangerous power of his personality, she realized, because the full strength of it was blasting at her now.

His gaze swept down her and she felt as if he had stripped her naked, as if he were about to eat her alive. She tried to look away from him, tried to compose herself, but she couldn't. Excitement sang along her nerves. He was here, and the game had truly begun.

"Niema." They had reached her, so tall their shoulders blocked out the rest of the room, even though she was wearing heels. Ronsard took her hand and pressed a brief kiss on her knuckles. "My dear, this is Mr. Smith, who begged me for an introduction. Mr. Smith, Niema Jamieson."

"Niema." John said her name as if he tasted it.

"Mr.-Mr. Smith." She could barely speak. Her throat had inexplicably tightened. She flashed a helpless look at Ronsard, who didn't look at all pleased by her reaction. She couldn't understand it herself. She knew it played well with John's plans, but.. . she wasn't acting.

"Joseph," said John.

"I-I beg your pardon?"

"My name is Joseph."

"Joseph .. . Joseph Smith?" She blinked, trying to swallow the sudden bubble of laughter. At least he hadn't chosen Brigham Young for a name. "You're an American."

"Yes." Somehow he had her hand, his fingers hard and strong around hers. "Dance with me." It was more command than invitation.

She gave Ronsard another dazed, helpless look, but this one was over her shoulder as John led her onto the dance floor. He didn't just put his hand on her back, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her close, anchoring her to him. He clasped her hand in his free one, holding it against his chest. He began moving in a smooth rhythm and she had no choice but to follow.

He bent his head close to hers. "I fell in love with you on sight," he murmured.

"Did you?" She quivered as she fought back another laugh. "Joseph Smith?" She ducked her head against his shoulder to hide her expression. She had been bored, chatting with people with whom she had nothing in common, but now energy was flowing through every cell in her body.

"Joseph Temple, actually. I told him to introduce me as Mr. Smith."

"Temple," she repeated, burning the name in her brain cells. The one thing she couldn't do was slip up and call him John.

"Where's your room?"

"It's in the east wing. It's called the Garden room, and it has its own private balcony." She had counted the doors, so she could tell him exactly how to reach it. "Go up the stairs, take the hallway to the right. Go down ten doors, turn left, and it's the third door on the right."

"Leave the balcony doors unlocked."

"Why? Locks don't mean anything to you."

His arm tightened around her waist in a punishing squeeze for her teasing. Beneath the silk of his tuxedo, his chest was like iron. He was holding her so closely her breasts were flattened against him. The heat of his body seeped through the layers of clothing between them, and the scent of him wrapped around her, warm and masculine and flavored with some subtle cologne.

"You're holding me too close," she said, faint panic welling up in her, because the pleasure she felt was far from safe. Her hands pushed against his chest, not hard enough to be noticeable but enough to lever her upper body an inch away from him.

He simply gathered her back in, the strength in his arms overpowering her without effort. "I'm in love with you, remember? And you're helplessly fascinated by me."

How did he know? The question seared through her brain, a split second before she remembered the scenario they were enacting.

The pattern of the dance had brought them near the open French doors. He made a swooping turn and she found herself out on the patio. The night was warm, but still cooler, and much fresher, than the air inside, with so many people in one room. There were people sitting at the small tables scattered about the patio, talking and laughing, but the noise level dropped dramatically.

He stopped dancing and led her down the steps into the garden. The sweet, peppery scent of roses filled the air. Small gravel crunched under their shoes as they walked a little way down one of the paths. Though the grounds were too well-lit for there to be complete darkness, the garden provided at least some semblance of privacy.

"This is far enough," John said, stopping and turning to face her. "He can still see us." Before she had any idea what he was about to do, he framed her face with his hands and kissed her.

Automatically her hands came up and locked around his wrists. Her breath stopped for two long heartbeats, and her knees went weak. She felt as if he were supporting her only with the warm clasp of his hands on her face, though the pressure was too light to do any such thing.

His kiss was light at first, a tender tasting, an exploration. She stood motionless, dazzled by the pleasure of the simple caress, then returned it with gentle pressure. He slanted his head more and deepened the kiss, his tongue probing her mouth. Then something hot exploded inside her, and she sagged against him. He released her face and folded her in his arms, tighter than before, closer, so close she was welded to him from breast to thigh.

His mouth was ravaging, devouring. He kissed her the way he shouldn't, the way she hadn't let herself imagine: deeply, intensely, the way a man kissed a woman right before he rolled her on her back and slid between her legs. And she accepted those kisses, welcomed them, returned them. Her tongue played with his, her arms lifted to twine tightly around his neck. Her body reached to his, and she discovered he was rock hard, his erection pressed against her stomach.

The discovery so shocked her that she tore herself out of his arms, staggering back. He grabbed her arm to steady her, then immediately let his hand fall to his side. They faced each other in the scented garden, the dimness of the light not dim enough. She could see the cool, focused expression in his eyes, and the realization was another punch in the stomach. Those kisses had rocked her foundation, but John, despite the automatic response of his body, had only been doing his job. Working. Pretending to be smitten.

And Ronsard was watching them, weighing what had just happened. Niema swallowed, trying to decide what she should do. Slap John's-Temple's- face? She had been a willing participant, and Niema Jamieson wasn't a hypocrite.

Forget Niema Jamieson; she was too shattered to play a role right now. She reached down into who she really was, Niema Burdock, and found that the two women were much the same. Had John planned that deliberately, made Niema Jamieson's history so close to her own so she was essentially playing herself?

But it was Niema Burdock who gathered her dignity around her, turned, and walked quietly away. No histrionics. She made her way back up the path toward the patio and saw that Ronsard was indeed standing just outside the ballroom doors, watching them. With the bright light behind him, she couldn't read his expression, but she braced herself and approached him.

He was silent, looking down at her. She met his gaze, inwardly flinching at the cynical disillusionment she knew she would see there, but instead all she could find was concern. Her lips trembled, and suddenly tears blurred her vision.

"Oh, God," she whispered. "How?"

Ronsard extended his arm to her and she took it, and he walked her back inside as if nothing had happened. He didn't appear to hurry, but still their progress across the crowded room was mercifully fast. Her fingers dug into his arm as she dung for support. Her legs were shaking. Her entire body was shaking, fine tremors rocking her muscles.

A sumptuous buffet had been set out in another room, with tables set for those guests who wished to eat there, or they could take their plates out onto the patio or into the pool courtyard. Ronsard settled her at one of the empty tables and went to the buffet, where he loaded two plates and brought them back. At a signal from him, a waiter appeared with two glasses of champagne.

"I noticed earlier you weren't drinking," he said.

"Try it; my champagne is infinitely superior to that swill the prime minister served. Besides"- he gave a crooked smile-"you need the sedative."

She drank the champagne and ate the strawberries on her plate. He cajoled her into trying the delicious pate, too, though her throat kept threatening to close.

"I see I was too much of a gentleman," he said, amusement rich in his voice and eyes. "I should have simply grabbed you and kissed you, overwhelmed you with my animal magnetism. But really, my dear, that isn't my style."

"I-I didn't think it was mine, either." She could barely speak.

"One can never predict chemistry, though somehow we always underestimate it." He patted her hand. "And now I'm going to do something I have never thought I would do. I'm so astonished at myself I may never recover."

"What?" Ronsard's humor had a steadying effect on her. So she had responded to John with a shattering intensity-that was what she was supposed to do. It was part of their scheme. John wouldn't, couldn't, know that there hadn't been anything deliberate about her response, that for a few searing moments she had been lost in the physical pleasure she had been trying to resist since the moment John Medina had reappeared in her life.

"Mr. Smith-"

"He told me his real name," she broke in, rubbing the spot between her eyebrows, partly to shield her expression and partly because tension was beginning to give her a slight headache.

"Then .. . you know he wouldn't be using a pseudonym if there wasn't good cause. He isn't a celebrity, my dear; quite the opposite. Every law enforcement agency in the world would love to have him in its custody."

She stared at him while she pretended to work it through. "He-he's a terrorist?" Her voice was almost soundless.

Ronsard let his silence answer for him.

She drank more champagne, but that didn't loosen the knot in her throat. "He's the only man I've kissed since my husband-" Five years. Five years since Dallas had died, and she hadn't been able to feel even a flicker of response to any of the very nice men she had occasionally dated. She hadn't been able to let any of them kiss her, not because it felt like a betrayal, but because it hadn't seemed fair to them to pretend even that much. The lines between role and reality had blurred again, with Niema Burdock speaking, trying to work her way through what had happened to her in John Medina's arms.

"I can't stay here," she said, surging to her feet. "I'm going to my room. Louis-"

"I understand." He rose too, his handsome face full of concern. "I can't tell you want to do, my dear, the decision is yours. But make it with all the facts in your possession, and no matter what your answer is, I'll always cherish your friendship."

God, how could he be so nice in so many ways, and still be what he was? The puzzle of Louis Ronsard wasn't any closer to being solved than it was the day she met him. But for all the vividness of his character, she was losing her focus on him, had been from the moment she saw him walking toward her with John beside him.

Blindly she groped for his hand, squeezing it hard. "Thank you," she said, and fled.

Chapter Nineteen

It was three  when she saw the curtains by the balcony doors flutter. Niema was lying in the dark, unable to sleep, waiting for John to appear. She didn't hear anything; there was only that small flutter to signal his arrival, then his black shape silhouetted against the faint light coming through the glass behind him.

She sat up and tugged her robe, the most substantial one she had, more tightly around her. The room was dark and he couldn't see her any better than she could see him, but she felt she needed every bit of protection she could muster. He crossed the room with eerie stealth and accuracy, approaching the high four-poster bed. He leaned over and put his mouth against her ear. "Have you swept the room?"

"I checked it when I got here," she whispered back. "I figured if the place was wired, it was part of the security system rather than a patch job. It's clean."

"Mine wasn't."

"Permanent or patched?"

"Permanent. He wants to keep tabs on whomever he puts in that room. Probably other guest rooms in this place are wired, too, and he decides who he wants to stay in them."

The mattress dipped as he sat down on the side of the bed. She felt a brief flare of panic and fought it down. After all, there wouldn't be any point in kissing her now, when there wasn't anyone else around to see.

"Are you okay with what happened this evening?" he asked, an edge of concern in his voice. ""You looked stunned. I thought you understood the plan."

"I guess I didn't quite get it," she managed to say and fought to keep her tone even. "Everything's okay, though; I can handle it." His face was a pale blur in the darkness, but still, now that he was this close, she could pick out his features and feel the heat from his leg even through the bed clothes as his thigh pressed against her hip.

"As it turned out, that was the perfect reaction. You played it just right."

Only she hadn't been playing. She had managed to keep her presence of mind, but she hadn't pretended anything. The power of her response to John had been real, and that was what was frightening. As long as he thought her distress was caused only by surprise, though, she didn't feel as exposed.

"Everything's okay," she repeated, and in quiet desperation changed the subject. "What's the plan for tomorrow?"

"Ronsard and I will talk business. If I'm lucky, it'll be in his office. If not, then I'll have to find it some other way."

"I can give you the general location. It's in the west wing, ground floor. And he has a secretary, Cara Smith, so she may be in the office even if he isn't."

"Then we'll have to keep track of both of them. I'll figure out some way to keep them occupied. I'll locate the office tomorrow, check out the security system, then we'll go in tomorrow night. "You plant the bug, I copy the files, and we're out without anyone knowing."

If everything went according to plan, that is. Anything could happen, as she had already learned far too well.

"I brought you a little present." There was a faint rustle of clothing, then metal, warm from his body, was pressed into her hand. Automatically she closed her fingers around the grip of the pistol. "It's a SIG .380 caliber, smaller than the one you practiced with, but that just means it'll be easier to conceal."

"I'll tuck it in my bodice," she said dryly, because the thing still weighed over a pound and was at least six and a half inches long. Until the pistol was in her hand, she hadn't been aware of a nagging, low-level sense of alarm, but now she felt something inside her relaxing. She had never carried a weapon in her life, not even in Iran, because that would have given away her disguise; how had she become so rapidly accustomed to being armed?

He gave a low laugh. "That's my girl." There was warm approval in his voice. He patted her thigh. "I'll see you in a few hours. What are you doing tomorrow? What time do you get up?"

"I'm going to sleep as late as I can." Since she hadn't slept any yet that night, she figured she would need all she could get. "I don't have any plans beyond that, though."

"Meet me for lunch, then."

"Where?"

"The pool courtyard, one o'clock."

"Any reason for that particular place?" There had to be; John never did anything without a reason.

"See you, get in a swim, let Ronsard see the scar on my shoulder as a little extra reassurance."

"You don't have a scar on your shoulder," she said automatically, and wished she hadn't, because it revealed how closely she had looked at him when he took off his shirt that day they had been working out.

"No, but Joseph Temple does."

So he must have a fake scar, as part of his disguise. She remembered that he had looked different, too, when Ronsard introduced him, but she couldn't put her finger on exactly what the differences were. "What else have you done? You're not the same."

"I changed my hairline a little, made my brows straighter, put thin rolls of cotton in my jaw to change the shape."

"How long have you been building Joseph Temple's cover?"

"Years. At first he was only a name on a file, but gradually I circulated him more, and added a few details of description, a photo that didn't give away much. But it was enough to let Ronsard compare hairlines, and I imagine he has."

"But he'll have a photo of you now," she said. "You know he will. He wouldn't pass up an opportunity like this."

"It doesn't matter." He stood up. "Temple won't exist after he leaves here."

What was it like, she wondered, to build identities as if they were changes of clothing, putting them on for just a little while and then discarding them? Did he leave pieces of himself behind? Somehow lose just a little bit more of who he really was each time he became someone else?

As he moved toward the balcony, she thought of something. "How did you get up here?"

"I didn't. I got down. I came from the roof." With those words he slipped through the doors and disappeared.

Niema got up and locked the balcony doors, then returned to bed. She was so tired she ached, but despite her plans to sleep late she wasn't certain she could sleep at all. The next twenty-four hours were crucial, the reason she had agreed to this elaborate charade. She had to keep her mind on the job, and not on John. After this was over and she was back home, and he was gone from her life again, then she would let herself think about him because then it wouldn't matter-he would be gone.

Cara Smith always enjoyed Louis's house parties. She loved dressing up, loved the glitter and sophistication and sheer luxury. It was like something out of a fairy tale, watching men in tuxedos whirl women in jewels around a polished ballroom floor. Because she was so tall she seldom wore high heels, but for these posh occasions she put on three-inch pumps, which lifted her way over most people's heads, and eye-to-eye with Louis himself. Her legs looked as if they were six feet long, an illusion she heightened by wearing dresses that were slit up the side and exposed long, narrow strips of flesh when she walked.

But that was for night. During the day she still worked at keeping Louis's correspondence up to date, paying bills-it always surprised her that billionaires had bills, but she guessed some things were impossible to escape. She also had to handle the phones, and notify Louis of any business that cropped up, any problems that needed handling. But her hours were abbreviated, and for the most part she played with the guests. She swam, played tennis and billiards, and listened to gossip. She never failed to be amazed by the intimate details and government secrets people blabbed at parties, especially to tall, leggy blondes, as if she wasn't expected to have a brain in her head- which was, of course, why Louis let her play instead of work. She'd learned a lot of interesting stuff during these house parties.

She was fascinated by that Temple man. Few males compared with Louis in terms of elegance and sophistication. But he did. And he looked so damned cool and contained-he was a very still man, his few gestures controlled and minimal, with little expression on his face. With that kind of control over his body, she bet he could last for hours in bed. She thought of being the woman on the receiving end of all that control and went all shivery.

On the other hand, Cara was astute about which men were attracted to her, and Temple wasn't. She and a bunch of other people, including Louis, had seen him in the garden putting the move on the Jamieson woman. She had wondered how Louis would handle that, considering he had shown more attention to Mrs. Jamieson than to any other woman she could remember, but Louis was Louis-one woman didn't mean that much to him. She knew for a fact he hadn't slept alone last night, while Mrs. Jamieson had chickened out and left the party early, to hide out in her room. Boy, if she'd been in Mrs. Jamieson's place, she wouldn't have chickened out. She'd have grabbed that man by the bow tie and ridden him for all he was worth.

But she had her eye on another guy, as a consolation prize. He was rich, he wasn't bad looking, and he did something in the French defense department, or whatever they called it. He'd have lots of interesting things to tell her. From the way his wife hung on to him, he had something of interest in his pants, too. She had seen him eyeing her, so she figured he'd find a way to escape from the little woman for a while.

She couldn't wait. She hadn't had sex in-well, she couldn't remember exactly how long, but she knew it was too long. Damn Hossam and his jealousy! She'd been trying to wean him away, let him down gently, but he just wouldn't go away. She hadn't slept with him, but in the interest of keeping things calm she hadn't slept with anyone else, either. She didn't want to stir up trouble among the guys in Louis's security guard, because Louis wouldn't thank her for it.

She played a game of tennis at nine, and Mr. Defense Department showed up, sans wifey. Cara flirted outrageously with him, until she noticed a tall, mustachioed man, wearing a suit and sunglasses, watching them from the west patio. Hossam. Damn it, if she took him to her room now, which was really the only safe place to take him, Hossam would know and was likely to cause trouble. Louis would be majorly pissed if one of his guests was killed by her jealous ex-lover.

Fuming, she finished the game, then excused herself and stalked across the wide expanse of lawn to the west patio. She swished her racket angrily through the air, wishing it was connecting with Hossam's head. Why, he was stalking her. She had tried to be nice and not rub his nose in the fact that she was tired of him, but nice hadn't gotten her anywhere. It was time for some plain speaking.

He stood with his arms folded over his chest, stolidly watching as she steamed up to him. He was a big man, about six-five; she had enjoyed his size, because he wasn't big just in height, but now she wished he was normal sized so she could knock him on his ass.

"Stop it," she hissed, standing toe to toe with him and glaring up into his sunglasses. "It's over. Don't you get it? Over! O-v-e-r. Kaput. Finished. I would say it in Egyptian but I don't know the damn word. I had a good time but now I'm moving on-"

"Arabic." His voice was a deep rumble, reverberating in that big chest.

"What?"

"Egyptians speak Arabic. There's no such thing as an Egyptian language."

"Well, thank you for the lesson." She poked him in the chest. "Stop following me, stop spying on me- just stop. I don't want to cause trouble for you but I will if I have to, do you understand."

"I want only to be with you."

Gawd, she thought in despair. "Your head must be made of wood! I don't want to be with you! I've seen all your tricks, and now I want a new magician. Don't bother me again."

She pushed past him and went inside. She managed to smile at the people she passed on the way to her room, which was on the third floor facing the driveway, but inside she was furious. If Hossam messed up the best job she'd ever had, she would wring his thick neck with her bare hands. Men were enough to make a woman think of joining a convent, she thought, fuming. Maybe she didn't need another lover right now; maybe what she really needed was her head examined because she was even thinking about it.

If she saw Hossam so much as looking at her again, she'd tell Louis. Enough was more than enough.

Without appearing to, John studied the security system as Ronsard unlocked and opened the door to his office. The lock operated on a numeric code that translated to different tones, like a telephone. Ronsard was careful to keep his body between John and the control panel, so he couldn't see the numbers. John didn't even try to see them; he half-turned away, studying the hallway, noting the blinking eye of the camera that was mounted at the far end of the hall. Making sure his motion was hidden from the camera, he slipped his hand inside his jacket and triggered a powerful miniature recorder that picked up the small beep of the tones as Ronsard punched in the code.

"We won't be disturbed here," Ronsard said. "Please be seated. Would you like something to drink? Coffee?"

"No, thank you." Call him paranoid, but he was real careful about taking anything to eat or drink from someone else. A buffet was fine, if everyone else was eating, but when he was on a job he was always in control of his intake. If he had to set a drink down, he didn't pick it back up. It was a simple rule, but an effective one.

He looked around. There was a computer on Ronsard's large, antique desk, but no phone line going to it, which meant it was secure. If there were any files Ronsard didn't want compromised, they would be on that computer. Another unit sat on a Louis XIV desk across the room, and this one was hooked to a phone line, a printer, a scanner, the works.

Also on Ronsard's desk was a small monitor with an elaborate control attached to it, and from where he was sitting John could see just enough of the screen to tell it was surveillance of the hallway outside, so Ronsard knew in advance who was coming toward his office. There was probably a central surveillance control room somewhere in this massive building, but whether or not the entire building was under watch was something he'd have to find out. It could be that, like the listening devices, only certain rooms were involved. This part of the estate was, after all, Ronsard's private living quarters, and he probably wouldn't want his employees watching him.

"Who's making the compound?" he asked, deciding to at least ask. Sometimes people just blurted out what he wanted to know.

Ronsard smiled at him. "I have an agreement with the ... ah, developers. They don't use anyone else to distribute the compound, and I don't tell anyone who they are. Once it's known, you understand, then they'll be under siege. Opportunists would try to get the formula, perhaps resorting to kidnap and torture in the process; the government might try to shut them down, but would at least take over the manufacturing. That's the way governments are, isn't it?" He sat down behind his desk, "I had thought they were dealing behind my back. Both you and Ernst Morrell were asking about the compound; what else could I think? But you've relieved my mind."

"I'm glad."

The total lack of expression in John's voice brought a smile to the arms dealer's face. "So I see. Well, Mr. Temple, shall we complete our business? I have guests, and you'll want to continue your pursuit of Mrs. Jamieson. Tell me-what would you do with a wife, assuming you succeed?"

John's eyes sharpened. "Keep her safe."

"Ah. Can you do that, though?" He indicated the computers in the office, specifically the fast, powerful one on his secretary's desk, "Computers have made the world very small. Eventually, one will be able to find out anything about anyone. It's almost possible now. You won't be able to disappear the way you do now."

"Information can be falsified or erased. If I need a social security number or a credit card, I use someone else's."

"Yes, but what about her? She can't disappear, you know. She has family, friends; she has a home, a routine, and a social security number, and those credit cards you disdain. I know the lady well enough to promise you she would balk at using a stolen credit card."

Still warning him away from Niema, John realized, inwardly amused. "If she doesn't want what I can give her, all she has to do is say no. Kidnapping somebody is too chancey; it draws a lot of attention."

"Something you want to avoid," Ronsard agreed. "But if she did go with you-what would you do?"

John regarded him silently, refusing to be drawn on the question. It was a nonissue, of course, but Ronsard didn't know that. Let him think that Temple was the most secretive bastard he'd ever met, and let it go at that.

He stonewalled every attempt Ronsard made to talk about Niema, though he was actually beginning to like the guy. There was something both absurd and touching about someone as ruthless as Louis Ronsard displaying this kind of concern for a friend. Niema had gotten to him too, John thought, just the way she had Hadi and Sayyed, and himself, in Iran. The situation was almost funny. He should have been able to express an interest in Niema, with her reciprocating, and that would have been that: a burgeoning affair. Instead Niema was rattled, Ronsard was protective, and he was having to pursue a reluctant target.

Of course, no one would ever think this was part of any plan. It was just too damn implausible, like a soap opera. Maybe that was why it seemed to be working so well.

Half an hour later, their business concluded- amount of explosive needed, when, how it would be delivered, how much it would cost him-John went to his room and changed into his swim trunks. The room had been searched again, he saw; he didn't know what they expected to find that they hadn't found the first time. The fact that they hadn't found anything probably disturbed Ronsard a little. Of course, they were looking in the wrong place. Since acquiring the weapons last night after arriving here, he had given one to Niema, taped another under one of the massive hall tables outside his room, and one was strapped to his ankle. The ankle holster would have to go in a secure place while he was swimming, though. Smiling, he stuffed it and the tiny recorder under the mattress. The maids had already been in and cleaned, and the room had been searched- twice. Looking in the most obvious place in the world was now the one place they were the least likely to look.

He pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of trousers over his swim trunks, then went down to the pool courtyard. It was a hot, sunny day, but still fairly early. The ladies didn't want to mess up their hair so close to lunch time, so they were sunbathing instead of swimming, and the pool wasn't crowded.

Rather than putting his clothes in the large cabana, he shucked his shirt and dropped it over a chaise, then took off his pants and did the same with them. He didn't have anything in his pocket other than his room key, but if by leaving his clothes in the open he frustrated anyone wanting to go through his pockets, so much the better.

He dove into the pool in a long, shallow dive and began swimming laps, his arms stroking tirelessly. He was as at home in the water as he was on land, courtesy of his BUD/S training. Swimming in a pool was child's play, after swimming miles in the ocean. It was nice of Ronsard, he thought, to provide him a means of keeping up his physical conditioning. There was probably a weight room somewhere in this place, too, but he doubted he'd have time to use it.

The only thing about swimming in public was, after a while people began to notice. Not many people could swim nonstop for that length of time, even though he'd only been at it half an hour. He could have kept on, using one stroke or another, for hours, but it wasn't wise to draw that kind of attention. Already people around the pool were watching him, and he was pretty sure one woman had been counting the laps as he turned them.

He hauled himself out of the water and took a fluffy towel from the stacks Ronsard had put out for his guests, and which were constantly being replaced, and roughly swiped it over his torso. Though it wasn't one o'clock yet, he saw Niema coming toward him. She was dressed casually, in loose, drawstring natural linen pants and a blue camisole, with a gauzy white shirt worn loose over the camisole. She had pulled her thick dark hair back and secured it with a silver clasp at the nape of her neck. Her dark eyes looked huge and luminous.

She checked a little when she saw him, as if she hadn't known he was there. He stood still, staring at her, then lifted his hand and beckoned her to him.

She hesitated for a long moment before obeying, just long enough for him to begin wondering if she was going to do something totally unexpected, like turning around and leaving, which would be taking the show of reluctance a little too far and might prod her unlikely protector into action.

But then she began walking slowly to him, and he knotted the towel around his waist to hide his response as he waited for her to join him.

Chapter Twenty

Niema faltered as she approached John and slid her sunglasses on her nose to hide her expression from him. Good God, the man should put on some clothes before she had heart failure. Greedily she drank in the strong lines of his torso, the well-defined muscles of arms and shoulders, the ridges down his abdomen. His legs were the most powerful she had ever seen, the long muscles thick and sinewy in the way that showed he did it all, running and swimming as well as strength training.

Water still sparkled on his shoulders and in the hair on his chest. He had roughly towel-dried his hair and raked his hand over it to restore some semblance of order. He looked wild, and dangerous, and she ached inside with the need to touch him.

He wrapped the towel around his waist and stood like a redwood, waiting for her to reach him. At least the towel hid part of those legs. How could he look so lean when he was clothed, when he had muscles like this?

Then she reached him, and a tiny smile curved his hard mouth, a mouth that looked as if it never smiled at all and yet he made the effort for her. This was Temple, she thought, not John. John smiled and laughed. When he was himself, he was an expressive man- unless he was playing another part, unless he had been someone else for so long that even John Medina was just a role for him now.

"For a minute there, I thought you were going to turn and run," he said in a low voice. "Don't be that reluctant."

"I know what to do." She sat down in the chair he held out for her, not caring if she sounded irritable. She was irritable. She hadn't had much sleep, and her nerves were raw.

He stood behind her, looking down, and she felt his stillness. Then he put his hand inside her open shirt and lightly smoothed his palm over her bare shoulder, the movement slow and absorbed, as if he couldn't go a moment longer without touching her. Only the thin straps of her camisole obstructed him, and they might as well not have been there. She shivered as that warm hand moved over her, pushing the shirt away just enough that he could stroke that one shoulder and upper arm. It was the most restrained, sensuous touch she had ever experienced, and her entire body reacted, nipples pebbling, stomach tightening.

Then he gently restored the shirt to her shoulder and moved around to take the chair across from her. When his back was turned she saw the thin, four-inch scar on his left shoulder blade. Even knowing it wasn't real, she couldn't tell how it was applied. It certainly looked genuine.

Then he sat down facing her, and she blinked in astonishment at the small diamond stud in his left ear. His ear wasn't pierced; she would have noticed before if it had been. And he hadn't been wearing an earring last night. Well, if the scar was fake, the pierced ear could be, too; he probably had the stud glued on. And the altered hairline looked real. All these small identifying characteristics were fake; with them removed, he would never be identified as Joseph Temple, despite having the same face. As long as there were no dental records tying them together, or DNA samples to compare, he was unidentifiable.

A waiter in black shorts and white shirt approached. "May I serve you anything from the bar?"

"We'd like to order lunch," John said, his French perfect.

"Of course, sir."

He ordered puff pastries filled with chicken in cream sauce for appetizers, potato soup, and a cheese and fruit tray afterward. Thankful she wouldn't be expected to choke down a full meal, including a meat course, Niema looked around at the beautifully landscaped courtyard. It was becoming more crowded now as others elected to have their lunch by the pool rather than inside. The murmur of conversation, punctuated by splashes, laughter, and the dink of silverware, made it reasonable that they would lean together over the small round table.

John adjusted the umbrella shading them to protect her from the sun, and also to partially block anyone's view of them from the house. Before he sat down he plucked his shirt from the chaise beside him and pulled it on over his head. She almost mourned as those pecs and abs disappeared from view, but admitted to herself that at least now she'd be able to concentrate better.

"I've been in Ronsard's office," he said, pitching his voice so that only she could hear. "I have the door code and got a good look at his security system. What's on the agenda for tonight?"

"It's fancy dress every night. Buffet dinner, dancing, just like last night."

"Good. People will be moving around, so it'll be difficult to keep track of us. We're going to dance every dance-"

"Not in high heels, I'm not. I'd be crippled."

"Then don't wear heels."

She gave him a dirty look, though of course he couldn't tell since she was still wearing the sunglasses. "You're the one who provided the wardrobe. Heels are the only suitable shoes I have with me."

"Okay, we'll dance a few dances." He looked in danger of smiling again. "I'm going to be making it pretty obvious we're together, putting some strong moves on you, so don't panic."

"Why the strong moves?" Her throat had gone dry. She wished the waiter would hurry up with the mineral water John had ordered.

"So, if anyone notices us going off together, they'll just think we're looking for someplace more private- such as your room."

And instead they would be going through files. "What about Ronsard? And Cara?"

"I'll take care of her. Ronsard's a bit trickier. We may have to take our chances and hope he'll be too occupied to come to his office." He paused. "Here comes the waiter." He leaned over and took her hand, thumb rubbing lightly across the backs of her fingers. "Walk with me after lunch," he was murmuring when the waiter set down the crystal goblets of mineral water.

She drew back and picked up a goblet, sending a shaky smile in the waiter's direction.

"How much time do you need to plant the bug?" he asked when they were alone again.

"I'd like to have half an hour." She could probably do it in less time than that, but she wanted to be very, very careful with this one, because she was going to have to get into the wiring in the walls and she didn't want to leave any telltale marks. "What about the computer files? How long will it take on those?"

"Depends," he said helpfully.

"Thank you so much, Mr. Information."

He fought another smile. "I don't know what system he uses, if it's password protected or encrypted- though I'd be very surprised if he doesn't at least have a password. I have to get the password-"

"How on earth can you do that?"

"People usually write it down somewhere handy. Or it's something obvious, like their mother's name, or their kids-"

"Ronsard has a daughter," Niema said. "Laure." "A daughter? That wasn't in our information," John murmured.

"She's an invalid. He adores her, and is very protective of her privacy. For security reasons, very few people know she exists. She's so ill, she may not live long." A lump rose in her throat as she remembered Laure's skeletal face, with those dark blue eyes so like her father's, and her mischievous, practical spirit.

"Then he'd take very seriously any incident involving her," John mused.

Niema sat up straight, and snatched her sunglasses off so he could get a good look at how furious she was. "Don't you dare," she said between clenched teeth. "If you involve that child I'll-I'll..." She couldn't think of anything bad enough, but her eyes promised severe retribution.

"I'll do whatever's necessary," he softly replied. "You know that. I don't put limitations on what I'm willing to do to get a job done."

"Yes, I heard that about you," she said just as softly, rage boiling through her veins with a suddenness that took her off guard. "They say you even killed your own wife, so why would you worry about upsetting a little girl?"

Leaden silence fell between them. John's face was absolutely expressionless, his eyes so cold and empty they looked dead. "Her name was Venetia," he finally said, the words a mere rustle of sound. "Why don't you ask me if I did it? How do you think it happened? Did I shoot her, or break her neck, or cut her throat? Maybe I just tossed her out a thirty-story window. I've heard all those scenarios. Which do you think is most likely?"

She couldn't breathe. She had wanted to hit him, say something that would make an impression on him, and she had evidently succeeded beyond anything she could have expected. She hadn't believed those wild stories, hadn't really believed he had ever even been married. To know that he had, to know that his wife's name was Venetia and she had existed, was to suddenly think that those stories could be true.

"Did you?" she managed to say, barely able to force the words out through her constricted throat. "Did you kill her?"

"Yes," he said and leaned back as the waiter approached with their meal.

She strolled with him across the lush, manicured lawn. She hadn't had a chance to recover, to ask him any more questions, after he dropped that bombshell at lunch. First the waiter had been there, setting out their lunch, refilling their water glasses, asking if they needed anything else, and by the time he left, Ronsard "happened" to walk by and stayed to chat.

Niema had scarcely been able to talk; she had managed a few short answers to Ronsard's questions, but her lips were numb and she kept seeking refuge in her water glass. She remembered eating a few bites of lunch, but she had no idea how it had tasted.

After lunch, John put his trousers on over his dry swim trunks, then took her hand and led her out here. The hot sun beat down on her, bringing welcome warmth to her cold skin. She felt as if her heart were breaking. Innocence was an invisible fortress, keeping one safe, and oblivious to some things that were too horrible to contemplate. But now she no longer had that innocence, that obliviousness; she was aware of the pain, the horror, the cost. What must it be like for him, to have lived through it?

"John, I'm so sorry," she whispered.

She saw his surprise. Evidently he had expected her to be repelled by who he was, what he had done, maybe even frightened of him. She searched for the right words. "I didn't mean to hurt you. I hadn't believed the stories, or I never would have brought it up."

"Hurt me?" He sounded almost disinterested. She couldn't see his eyes behind the sunglasses, and she wanted to snatch them off his face. "The truth is the truth."

His hand was so warm and so strong, wrapped around hers, but the strength in his fingers was controlled so he wouldn't hurt her. He had never hurt her, she realized. Even when faced with her distrust and hostility in Iran, he had taken care of her, saved her life, held her in his arms while she grieved.

"Sometimes the truth is the truth, but sometimes it's something else. What really happened? Was she a double agent, the way I've heard?"

He made a noncommital sound. Growing exasperated, she squeezed his hand. "Tell me."

He stopped and turned to face her. "Or what?"

"Or nothing. Just tell me."

For a minute, she didn't think he would. Then he shrugged. "Yes, she was a double agent. She did it for the money. There weren't any extenuating circumstances; she didn't have family in the Soviet Union, or in East Germany, that was being threatened. All her family was American, and they weren't involved at all. She simply wanted the money."

So there was no excuse he could give his wife; he'd had to face the truth that she was, simply, a traitor.

That would have been devastating for almost anyone; what had it been like for him, after he had dedicated his entire life to the service of his country?

"How did you find out?"

He began walking again. "There wasn't any one big moment of truth, just a lot of little things that began adding up and made me suspicious. I set a trap for her, and she walked right into it."

"She didn't know you suspected?"

"Of course she did. She was good. But I baited the trap with something she couldn't resist: the names of our two highest-placed moles in the Kremlin. Aldrich Ames never came close to this information, it was so restricted." His lips were a thin line. "I was almost too late springing the trap. This was during the height of the Cold War, and this information was so crucial, so valuable, that she decided not to route it by the usual method. She picked up the phone and called the Soviet embassy. She asked to be brought in, because she knew I'd be after her, and she started to give them the names right there over the phone."

He took a long, controlled breath. "I shot her," he finally said, staring off at the massive wall that surrounded the estate. "I could have wounded her, but I didn't. What she knew was too important for me to take the chance, the moles too important to be brought in. They had to be left in place. She had already told her handler that she had the names; they would have moved heaven and earth to get to her, no matter what prison we put her in, no matter what security we put around her. So I killed her."

They walked in silence for a while, going from flower bed to flower bed like bees, ostensibly admiring the landscaping. Niema still clung to his hand while she tried to come to grips with the internal strength of this man. He had been forced to do something almost unthinkable, and he didn't make excuses for himself, didn't try to whitewash it or blur the facts. He lived with the burden of that day, and still he went on doing what he had to do.

Some people would think he was a monster. They wouldn't be able to get beyond the surface fact that he had deliberately killed his wife, or they would say that no information, no matter how crucial, was that important. Those who lived on the front lines knew better. Dallas had given his own life for his country, in a different battle of the same war.

John had saved untold lives by his actions, not just of the two moles but of the ensuing events to which they had been critical. The Soviet Union had broken up, the Berlin Wall had come down, and for a while the world had been safer. He was still on the front lines, putting himself in the cannon's mouth, perhaps trying to balance his own internal scales of justice.

"Why didn't she sell you out?" Niema asked. ""You're worth a pretty penny, you know."

"Thank you," he said dryly. "But I wasn't worth that much back then. I had high-level security clearance, so I was of some use to her, but she had her own clearance and access to a lot of classified documents."

"I can't imagine what it must have been like for you." Ineffable sadness was in her voice. She squeezed his hand again, trying to tell him without words how sorry she was for ever opening that particular can of worms.

He glanced down at her, then his head tilted up and he looked beyond her. He drew her closer to a huge flowering shrub, as if he were trying to shield them from view. "Brace yourself," he warned and bent his head.

His mouth settled on hers, his lips opening, molding, fusing. She put her hands on his shoulders and clung to him, her pulse pounding in her ears, her heart racing. Her entire body quickened with painful urgency, and she stifled a moan. His tongue was doing a slow, erotic dance in her mouth, advancing and retreating. He put his hands on her hips and drew her to him, lifting her, holding her so that they were groin to groin. She felt him getting erect, and she shivered with pleasure even while her inner alarm began clanging insistently. She fought to keep her legs under her and not sag against him like a limp noodle, which he definitely wasn't.

He lifted his mouth, holding it poised over hers. She stared up at him, dazed, and wished he wasn't wearing sunglasses so she could see his eyes. Still clinging to him she whispered, "Who's there?"

This time he did smile, his mouth curling upward. "Nobody. I just wanted to kiss you for being so damn sweet."

Violently she shoved away from him. "Sneak!" She stood with her lungs heaving, glaring at him. She really, really wanted to punch him, but instead she had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

"Guilty as charged." Taking her hand again, he resumed their walk across the lawn. "But what did you expect? I tell you something that proves I'm the ruthless bastard everyone says I am, and you apologize to me. Of course I had to kiss you."

"I thought it was for the job."

"Not always," he said, not looking at her. "Not everything."

Chapter Twenty-One

High heels would be a definite liability, Niema thought, going through her wardrobe in case she had overlooked a pair of shoes that was both dressy and flat-heeled, though she was certain she hadn't. High heels made too much noise, and it was impossible to run in them. A pair of ballet slippers would do nicely, but of all the different kinds of shoes John had had delivered to her, none of them were ballet slippers.

She stared at the gown she had planned to wear. It was a sleek black sheath with inch-wide straps that gradually widened to form the bodice, with the lowest point of the neckline squarely between her breasts. A sunburst of black cultured pearls was sewn at that strategic point, with strings of black pearls swinging from the sunburst. She had other gowns, but she wanted to wear the black so she would blend better into the shadows, if necessary.

Other than the sexy black heels, she had only one other pair of black shoes with her, and they were rather casual sandals, with stretchy straps. She pulled them out and stared at them, trying to think what she could do to dress them up. They would definitely be more comfortable to dance in than the high heels, but they looked like what they were: casual. Niema Jamieson wouldn't be that careless with her dress. She had classic taste in clothes and was never less than impeccably attired.

"Why couldn't you have been a slob?" she muttered to her alter ego.

She examined the gown again. It was sophisticated and understated, even with the dangling strings of black pearls, which glistened with a midnight iridescence that caught the eye. She reached up and flicked the strings with her finger, setting them to swaying. They would constantly call attention to her breasts.

She looked at the black sandals, then back up to the pearls. Curiously she examined the sunburst. The swaying strings weren't attached to the sunburst, but under it.

"Now we're cooking," she muttered and got up to get her tools. She knew why she was obsessing about her shoes, of course; so she wouldn't think about John and what he'd said about not everything being for the job. How was she supposed to take that? Was he referring to her or to something else entirely? There was so much in his past that he literally could have been talking about anything. Some guys led normal, open lives, with nothing more to hide than how many beers they had on the way home. John's past was so dosed and convoluted no one would ever know all the bits and pieces of what made him who he was.

Obsessing about the shoes had obviously failed in its purpose, because she couldn't stop thinking about him. Losing Dallas had been difficult enough, almost too much to bear; what must it have been like for John, to not only lose his wife but for it to be by his own hand? She tried to dredge up some feeling, some sympathy, for his wife, but nothing was there. The woman had been selling out her country, costing other people their lives. To Niema's way of thinking, that didn't make her much different from the terrorists who used poison gas or random bombs to kill. Dallas had died stopping people like her.

Tonight might be the last time she ever saw John.

That thought hovered in the back of her mind all the while she worked with the sandals, using glue from her tool kit to attach the pearls to the straps. There had been other times she'd known could be the last time: When he left just before she came to France; when he was only a voice on the phone and she knew she might not be invited to the villa. But this was somehow more definite. Once he got the computer files, he would leave immediately.

She would stay until the end of the house party and leave as scheduled; by this time next week, she would be home and back at work, and this would be a fantastic story she could never tell anyone.

But for right now she felt vibrantly alive, more than she ever had before. Her very skin was more sensitive than she had ever before noticed. She took a long, relaxing bath in water scented with the bath crystals provided with her room, and washed her hair. She even took a nap, something she rarely did, but the events of the day had been taxing. She gave herself a manicure and pedicure, painting her nails a deep scarlet. If she never saw John again, by God, he'd remember how she looked.

She didn't want to have to come back to her room for her tools and equipment, but neither could she carry everything in the tiny excuse for a purse that was her evening bag. It had room for a credit card, a lipstick and compact, and a key. That was it. She tried to think of someplace to hide the tools and pistol, but she didn't know the estate well enough, plus it was crawling with people.

There was no way out of it; she had to come back to the room to retrieve the things. She wrapped everything, tools and pistol, in the black silk stole that matched the gown she was wearing and placed the parcel under her lingerie in the built-in drawers in the large closet. Then she took a deep breath, braced her shoulders, and prepared for a final act for the audience.

He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs when she went down. He straightened, his blue gaze sweeping over her in a perfect imitation of an infatuated lover. Out of the corner of her eye Niema saw Ronsard watching them, his expression a mixture of ruefulness and concern. She waited until she caught his eye and gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. He spread his hands in an "I tried" gesture.

John followed her smile and his eyes narrowed, menace all but oozing from him. God, he was good. He should have gone to Hollywood; with his talent, he would already have a couple of Oscars to his credit and be making a lot more money than he was as a government employee.

She could do a little acting of her own, she thought. She slowed as she neared John, as if reluctant to take those last few steps. He frowned slightly and held out his hand to her in that arrogant gesture that demanded she come to him.

She did, silently putting her hand in his, and he led her into the ballroom where the same crowd as the night before was doing the same thing they had done the night before, only wearing different clothing. She went into his arms and he held her close, their feet barely moving, his head bent down to hers in the classic pose of a man who is totally absorbed in the woman in his arms.

"I had to leave the things in my room," she said in a low voice, the words muffled against his shoulder. "I couldn't carry them in this." She indicated the tiny evening bag.

"What? You couldn't put everything in your bodice with the SIG?" He glanced down at the fabric clinging to her breasts and the deep V of the neckline.

"Careful," she warned. "I've got a knife in there and I'll use it." She felt the movement of his lips against her temple as he smiled. "What kind of distraction did you arrange?"

"I didn't. I was afraid you'd scalp me. We'll take our chances."

"I'm good at taking chances." No sooner had the words left her mouth than she almost recoiled in shock. No, she wasn't good at all at taking chances. She used to be, but not now. Not any more.

He felt her stiffening in his arms and reacted by bringing her closer. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she said automatically.

"Nothing you're going to tell me," he corrected.

"Right."

Again there was that movement against her temple. After a moment he commented, "You're shorter than you were last night."

Trust him to notice something like that. "I'm not wearing heels. I doctored a pair of sandals so they match the gown." She stuck her foot out so he could see the pearls adorning the narrow straps.

He looked a little pained. "You butchered a Dior to decorate your shoes?"

"It's okay," she soothed. "Wearing sensible shoes was more important than the gown. Besides, black ops

is off-budget; you don't have to account for what's spent, do you?"

"No, thank God."

"So, what time do we do it?"

"No set time. We keep an eye on Ronsard, and make our move when it looks as if he's occupied."

"What about Cara?"

"Taken care of."

"I hate to tell you this, but she's standing just over there."

"She won't be for long."

Cara was wearing a dazzling white tube gown, with her long blonde hair hanging straight down her back and rhinestones dangling from her ears. She knew she looked Hollywood flashy, but there was no way she could compete with these people in terms of jewelry and couture gowns, so she didn't try. California sexy was the style she tried for and achieved.

She flirted with several men, but the sexy Frenchman with whom she had played tennis that morning was safely anchored by his wife. Deciding to troll, she began moving around the room, stopping only to talk to likely prospects. She wasn't going to worry about Hossam's feelings one minute longer; he had no claim on her.

She didn't see it coming. Someone turned too abruptly, and a glass of red wine sloshed all over her white gown. She looked down at the awful stain in dismay, knowing she would probably have to throw the garment away. "I'm so sorry," the woman who had splashed her apologized, her face contorted with dismay "I don't know how this happened; someone jostled me."

"It's perfectly all right," Cara soothed, even though it wasn't. She didn't want to upset any of Louis's guests. "I'm sure the stain will come right out. I'll just run to my room to change." She brushed away the woman's offer to pay for the dress and kept a smile on her face as she left the ballroom. She seldom used the elevator, preferring the stairs in order to get in some exercise, but tonight she chose the fastest route to her room.

The smile was gone and irritation in its place when she got off the elevator on the third floor. The long hallways were deserted, with only indirect lighting from the sconces, but she was glad no one was there to see what a mess she was. Taking the key from her tiny evening bag, she jammed it into the lock and pushed her door open, her hand unerringly finding the light switch and flipping it on.

Light flooded the room at the same time a large hand clamped over her mouth and an arm around her waist lifted her off her feet. The door was kicked shut.

Panic screamed through her, making everything around her go dim for a moment. She heard her own muffled screams and knew the sound wouldn't carry beyond the room. She clawed at the hand over her mouth, kicking and squirming in an effort to escape.

"Hush, my love. There's no need to be frightened."

Hossam! Panic turned to rage in the space of a split second. She slammed her head backward in an effort to smash his mouth, but he only chuckled and tossed her onto the bed, then landed on top of her before she could control herself enough to scramble off the bed.

"You bastard," she hissed, no longer trying to scream.

He only laughed again, sitting astride her and capturing her fists. With no more effort than if he were handling a child, he looped a scarf around her wrists, then pulled her arms over her head and tied the scarf to the headboard.

"You bastard!" she said again, louder this time, shrieking it.

"Shhh, be quiet."

I'll kill you for this! Ill tear your balls off- ummmph!"

"I told you to be quiet," he murmured, tying another scarf over her mouth. He sat back, eyeing his handiwork, and a smile spread over his dark face. "Now, my love, let's see if the magician knows any new tricks."

He took a knife from his pocket and pressed a switch. A gleaming blade shot out, the light catching the razor-sharp edges. Cara's eyes widened as she stared at the knife, then at him. She began bucking, trying to throw him off, but he squeezed her body between his thighs and ruthlessly held her still.

Muffled screams came from behind the scarf as he slipped the blade under the clingy material covering her breasts and slashed downward. The two halves of the gown parted as if it had been unzipped, baring her breasts.

Hossam paused to admire the view. Still holding the knife in one hand, he fondled her naked breasts, cupping them and stroking his thumb over her nipples, admiring the way they tightened. Then he levered himself off her. "Be still," he commanded. "I might accidentally cut you."

She forced herself to stillness as he slit the dress all the way to the hem and pulled the rags away from her. She wore nothing underneath. Modesty wasn't her strong suit, but now she squeezed her legs together in a useless effort to protect herself. Oh, God, was he going to kill her?

He stepped back and began removing his clothes. Wildly she shook her head, hot tears burning her eyes.

"Don't be frightened," he repeated, stepping out of his pants and standing naked over her. His penis jutted out from his body, telling her how ready he was. Desperately she kicked at him, trying to catch him in the balls, though she had no idea what good that would do since she was still tied and gagged.

Clicking his tongue in reproval, he grabbed her by one ankle and gave it the same treatment he had her wrists. Another ten seconds and her other leg was bound, and she was lying with her hands stretched upward and her legs spread obscenely wide.

"What a wild thing you are," he crooned, crawling on the bed between her legs. "Sweet and wild and . . . mine. Never forget that. You're mine."

She expected to be swiftly, brutally raped and had already braced herself for the violation. It didn't happen. Instead he bent down and pressed his mouth between her legs, and began loving her.

The contrast between what she had expected and what he actually did was so great that she couldn't stop the soft moan that vibrated in her throat. She arched, and he cupped her bottom in his big hands to hold her still.

The bright overhead light dazzled her eyes. She stared upward as pleasure zinged through her body, unable to raise her head to see. This was ... this was so totally unexpected she couldn't quite grasp it was happening. He brought her to a hard, rapid climax that left her gasping, her eyes tearing from the force of it.

"That is just the first one," he murmured, leaning over her. "'You know I would never, never hurt you. Tonight we will discover all the ways I can pleasure you, as no other man can." His dark eyes twinkled at her. "And afterward, perhaps I will let you tie me to the bed."

She moaned and arched as his long fingers slid into her, stimulating nerve endings that were still sensitive from her climax. Her fear had faded, because his hands on her were loving instead of brutal, and in place of fear a deep excitement was blooming. This was different, and kinky. She had never been helpless before during sex. Usually she dominated, because that was how she liked it.

But she liked this too, she found. She was totally at his mercy, naked and exposed in the bright light. He could do anything to her he wanted, and her mind reeled at the possibilities. Hossam was so big and powerful, and he tended to be slow at sex anyway. This was going to be a long night-wonderfully, deliciously long.

"It's time," John breathed into Niema's ear.

Her pulse leaped. She took a deep breath and felt herself steady. She tilted her head back and gave him such a vibrant smile that he physically checked, staring down at her.

Who was she kidding? The moment of clarity was almost blinding as they left the ballroom and climbed the curving staircase to the second floor. She was a risk-taker. She loved every minute of this. She didn't want to go home and resume her job; she wanted to stay in fieldwork, where she belonged. She had paid penance for five years, but John had wrenched her back into the life for which she was truly suited and she never wanted to leave it again.

She felt almost breathless with discovery, with an inner joy that spread through her as if she had finally returned to life, to being herself.

The long hallway was empty. With no one to watch them, they walked briskly down to her room. She retrieved the wrap from the closet and held it folded so the tools and pistol were in a pocket of fabric against her body, with the loose ends draped over her arm. "How about this?" she asked.

"Looks good. Come on."

They hurried back up the hall, but instead of going down the stairs they went straight across into the west wing. "I prowled around and found a back way," John explained.

"Ronsard's private quarters are in this direction, too."

"I know. The back way is through his rooms."

She rolled her eyes, but didn't bother asking how he'd gotten into Ronsard's rooms. Locks didn't mean anything to him.

This route wasn't without risk. There were fewer people to see them, but anyone who did would be staff who worked in the private section, and who would know immediately they didn't belong there. Guests or not, Ronsard wouldn't allow anyone to disturb his daughter.

John pulled her to a halt in front of a wooden door burnished to a high gloss. He turned the handle, and they slipped inside the room. It was a bedroom, she saw-a huge, lavish one. "Ronsard's," John whispered in unnecessary explanation. "There's a private elevator going down to the hallway where his office is located."

The elevator was small, but then it was meant to carry only one man. It was also surprisingly quiet and arrived without the customary "ding" of a commercial elevator.

The hallway they stepped into was also empty, which was good because there was no logical excuse for them to be there, especially stepping out of Ronsard's elevator. John strode to a door, pulled a small recorder out of his pocket and held it to the electronic lock. He pressed a button, and a series of tones sounded. A tiny green light on the lock lit up, there was a faint but audible click, and he opened the door.

They slipped inside and he silently closed the door behind them, then did something to the lock. "What are you doing?"

"Disabling the lock. If we're caught, the fact that the lock isn't working will at least cloud the issue in our favor a bit, but I'd still have to come up with some reason for our being here."

"Boy, you have this planned down to the last detail, don't you?"

"I don't intend to get caught. Come on, move your pretty butt and get to work."

Chapter Twenty-Two

Niema looked around while John sat down at Ronsard's desk and turned on the computer. Another setup, far more elaborate, was hooked up on a desk on the other side of the room, but he ignored that one. She checked the jacks on what must be Cara Smith's desk; there were three separate lines coming into the office, but the phones themselves were only two-line phones. The computer was on a line by itself, then. She looked at the phone on Ronsard's desk; it was identical to the other, with two lines coming in. The first line would be the business line, she guessed; the second, his private number.

There was a closed-circuit television on Ronsard's desk, also, showing the hallway outside. She followed the line on it to the wall, making sure where it connected. She liked to have a room's wiring laid out in her mind, so she knew exactly what she was looking for and at.

Ronsard's phone jack wasn't behind his desk, probably because he didn't want it in the way. She followed the lines again; the jack was behind a long leather sofa that sat against the wall. Carefully she pulled the sofa out, lifting one end to make certain there were no telltale bangs and thumps.

Kneeling down on the floor, she unfolded her evening wrap and removed the black velvet pouch that contained her tools. Laying aside the SIG, she quickly unscrewed the jack, then disconnected the wires and stripped the plastic coating to separate the wires.

The usual wiretap had a receiver or recorder close by. In this instance, that wouldn't do any good because she had no way of retrieving a tape or listening to the calls. The CIA operative in place here didn't have access to Ronsard's office. John had slipped a digital burst receiver to him; he would trigger a signal to retrieve the audio data, which he would then send by his usual route to Langley. Even if he were discovered with the receiver, nothing could be made of it because the information was digitalized. It looked like an ordinary pocket radio; it even worked as a radio.

Quickly she attached the inductive probe tip to only one of the line terminals, which didn't make a complete circuit and hence couldn't be picked up by an electronic sweep. She interfaced the leads to the junction, keeping the leads less than three inches long. The short leads made the phone bridge impossible to pick up by electrical deviations. Next she hooked up two nine-volt batteries as a power source for the receiver/transmitter and began putting everything together in the receptacle.

"Almost finished," she said. She estimated she had been working about twenty minutes. "Are you in yet?"

"Still working," John murmured absently. "The files are password protected."

"Did you try 'Laure'?"

"It was my first shot."

"Nothing in the desk?" She had been aware of him opening and closing drawers, but thought he might be looking for paper files, too.

"No." He was swiftly examining everything on top of the desk, looking for anything that might contain the password.

She screwed the jack plate into place, then repositioned the sofa. "What if it isn't written down?"

"Unless he's a fool, he changes the password on a regular basis. If he changes it, then the current one is written down somewhere. If you're finished there, look for a wall or floor safe."

"Don't tell me you're a safecracker, too."

"Okay, I won't tell you."

Swiftly she checked behind all the paintings hanging on the wall, but there was only wallpaper there. A

huge, thickly woven rug covered the floor and she threw back the edges, but again found nothing. She got out a screwdriver and, moving around the room, examined all the outlets, because sometimes dummy outlets concealed small hiding places. "Nothing," she reported. She gathered her tools and the pistol, slipping them back into the folds of her evening wrap.

John picked up a book and ruffled all the pages, holding it spine up to see if anything fell out. He paused, looking at the well-thumbed book. Niema walked over to look at the book, putting her tools down on top of the desk: A Tale of Two Cities.

John flipped to a page with a down-turned corner. "It's here. Nobody reads this more than once, unless they have to."

"It's a classic," she said, amused.

"I didn't say it wasn't good, but it isn't something you read over and over." He ran his finger down the page, looking for anything that jumped out at him. "Guillotine."

Turning back to the keyboard, he typed in the word. ACCESS DENIED flashed on the screen.

He shrugged and consulted the book again. "Dickens was damn wordy," he grumbled. "This could take all day." He tried "monarchs." ACCESS DENIED.

"Monsters" was rejected, then "enchanter."

The file list opened on "tumbrils."

"How about that," John said softly. "I was just shooting in the dark."

"Lucky shot." Except he wasn't just lucky, he was so highly trained that instinct and experience put him several jumps ahead of almost everyone else, allowing him to see the significance of a battered copy of a classic lying in the open on Ronsard's desk.

He slid a disk into the A drive and began calling up files and copying them onto the disk. He didn't take time to read any of them, he just copied them as fast as possible, one eye on the closed-circuit monitor the entire time.

Niema moved around behind the desk. "I'll watch the monitor," she said. "You copy."

He nodded, and the A drive began whirring almost continuously.

A moment later, watching the monitor, Niema saw the door at the end of the hallway open.

"Someone's coming," she whispered.

John glanced at the screen, but didn't pause in what he was doing. "That's one of the security team," he replied.

"Do they do door checks?"

"Maybe." The reply was terse. Since he had disabled the lock on the door, it would open if anyone tried it.

Niema put her hand in the folds of the evening wrap. The pistol grip felt cool and heavy under her fingers. The guard began walking down the hallway toward the office. Her heartbeat picked up and her mouth went dry.

The hallway was a long one; on the small screen, it seemed to stretch out endlessly, with the guard becoming bigger and bigger as he approached. Niema found herself counting his steps. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one-

"Don't lose your cool," John cautioned softly but didn't look up from the list of files. "Almost finished here."

The guard strode past, never even pausing outside the door. Watching him on the screen, hearing his footsteps pass by the office, gave her an odd sense of unreality because the sound came from a different direction than the activity she watched on the screen.

"That's it." Quickly he punched the release, and the disk popped out. He slipped it into a protective sleeve and put it in his inside jacket pocket. Then he turned off the computer, restored everything on the desk to its original position, and touched her elbow. "Ready?"

"I'll say."

She turned to go to the door, but suddenly he grabbed her arm, pulling her to a standstill. "More company."

She looked back at the monitor. The hallway door was opening again. Someone had stopped in the doorway, half turned away as if he were speaking to someone on the other side of the door. The tiny figure on the screen had long dark hair.

"Ronsard," she whispered, a cold twist of panic tightening her stomach. He wouldn't be in this long hallway unless he were coming to his office.

John exploded into motion, literally lifting her off her feet. In two long strides he was beside the sofa. He set her down and began stripping out of his tuxedo jacket, carelessly dropping it on the floor. "Take off your underwear and lie down," he ordered, his tone low and urgent.

They had only seconds, seconds before Ronsard would be coming through that door. Her hands shook as she pulled up her skirt and reached under it for the waistband of her panties. Pretending to have sex was such a cliche, trotted out in hundreds of movies, that no one would believe it, especially not someone as sophisticated and savvy as Ronsard. That was precisely why it just might work, because he wouldn't believe Temple would be so hokey.

Of course John, being John, wouldn't depend on a torrid clinch to give the impression he wanted. No, he wanted underwear off, clothes disarrayed, as if they truly were just about to make love.

Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel her pulse throbbing under her skin. She skimmed her panties down her thighs and let them drop, then hurriedly kicked them away and lay down on the sofa.

Leaning forward, John tugged her skirt up to her waist and pulled her legs apart, kneeling between them with one knee on the sofa while he tore open his trousers. She went numb with shock. Only the cool air washing over her naked flesh told her this wasn't a weird dream, but it had to be. This was carrying pretense further than she was prepared to take it. She couldn't be lying here half-naked with him between her spread legs and witnesses likely to come through the door at any second.

He bent down and licked her, his hard hands pushing her thighs wider as his tongue probed inside her, depositing moisture. Niema's entire body jolted and he held her down, his mouth pressed between her legs. She swallowed a shriek, her breath strangling in her throat. Oh God, he was going down on her-Ronsard would . . . She couldn't let herself think of Ronsard walking in on them now but this must be what John had planned, to be caught in an act so intimate no one would dream it was pretense-

How could it be pretense when he was actually doing it?

She whimpered and reached down, her hands sliding through his hair. She wanted to push him away but couldn't, her hands simply wouldn't obey. Bolts of sensation shot through her body, arching her in his hands. How long would she have to endure this? How long? Five seconds? Ten?

Time had become elastic, stretching beyond recognition. She shook her head in wordless protest, helplessly speared under the dual lash of fear and pleasure. Something hot and wild spiraled in her. She couldn't do this, couldn't bear it, not with his mouth on her body making every muscle tighten past endurance.

She found the strength to push weakly at his shoulders. He slid upward, his tongue swirling around her clitoris in a quick caress that nearly shot her off the sofa, but he quickly controlled her and shifted into position between her legs.

"Easy," he whispered and pressed himself to her opening.

No. He couldn't actually be doing this. Not here, not like this. She didn't want their first time to be like this.

Everything was happening too fast; her body hadn't had time to prepare itself, even with the moisture he had given her with his tongue. How could she be prepared, when she couldn't believe what he was doing, not now, not like this?

He pushed slowly into her and she wasn't nearly wet enough, her inner tissues yielding reluctantly to his intrusion. "Scream," he said, the word almost soundless.

Scream? That would certainly bring Ronsard-but that was what John wanted. The realization seared through her dazed mind. Anyone up to no good wouldn't make that kind of noise, which was guaranteed to attract attention, or be doing what they were doing.

He put no limits on what he would do to get the job done.

He withdrew a little then thrust again, forcing himself deeper, inch by inch. "Scream," he repeated, demanding now.

She couldn't. She didn't have enough air, her lungs were paralyzed, her entire body arching under the almost brutal lash of sensation. Every nerve ending felt electrified, her loins clenching as she fought the relentless swell of pleasure. She fought him too, not with her fists but with every muscle inside her, clamping down, trying to hold him, prevent him from going deeper and pushing her beyond control.

She wasn't strong enough. He thrust slowly past her resistance, bracing his hands on either side of her rib cage and leaning over her. Quick, shallow breaths panted between his parted lips; his eyes were narrowed, brilliant, the blue more intense than she had ever seen it before. With one swift movement he pulled down the left strap of her gown, baring her breast. Her nipple was already tightly beaded, flushed with color. "Scream," he insisted, thrusting harder. "Scream!"

Her head thrashed back and forth on the cushion. She choked back a sob and desperately struck out at him, trying to squirm away. She couldn't, she didn't want to, dear God please don't let her be climaxing as Ronsard walked through that door, she couldn't bear it. John caught her wrists and pinned them to the sofa, relentlessly probing ever deeper.

She couldn't stop it, couldn't contain it. She convulsed, waves of sensation pulsing through her loins. She sank into the climax, head thrown back and eyes closed, breath halted, everything fading around her until her only focus of existence was the searing pleasure. She did scream then, silently, beyond despair, as she waited for the door to open.

The door didn't open. There was nothing but silence in the hallway.

The sensual paroxysm began to ebb, the tension fading from her trembling flesh until she lay limp and pliant beneath him, her legs still open and her body still penetrated. She couldn't think, couldn't move. She felt hollow, emptied out, as if he had taken everything.

Humiliation crawled through her like lava. She turned her head aside, unable to look at him. How could she have climaxed in such a situation? What kind of person was she? What kind of man was he, to do this? Tears burned her eyes, but she couldn't wipe them away because he still held her wrists pinned.

Time stopped.

Ronsard wasn't coming into his office. She didn't know where he had gone, but he wasn't here. She waited for John to withdraw, waited for a moment that stretched on and on until the tension was more than she could bear and she had to look at him again, had to face him.

His expression was set in almost savage lines, his eyes so bright they seemed to burn her. He seemed to have been waiting for her to look at him. "I'm sorry," he said, and began moving-not away from her but inside her, thrusting, forging a deep, fast rhythm, and pierced her to her very core.

He came hard, gripping her hips while he plunged and bucked, his head thrown back and his teeth grinding together to hold back the hoarse sounds in his throat. He sank against her, panting, his chest heaving as he gulped in air.

She didn't say anything, couldn't think of anything to say. Her mind was emptied, dazed with shock. Nothing she'd ever read in Miss Manners covered this situation. The bizarreness of that thought almost made her laugh, but the laugh turned into a sob that she choked back.

Carefully he levered himself away from her; her breath caught at the drag of his flesh leaving hers. He pulled her to a sitting position. "Are you all right?"

She nodded silently, swinging her feet to the floor and pushing her skirt down to cover her thighs. He neatened himself with brisk movements, tucking in his shirt and fastening his trousers.

Her panties were lying on the floor in front of the desk. John picked them up and held them out to her. In silence she took them. Her legs felt too wobbly for her to trust them, so she sat on the sofa and worked the panties up her legs until she could lift her hips and tug the flimsy garment into place. She was very wet now, the moisture dampening her underwear and drying stickily on her inner thighs.

He walked around the desk until he could see the closed-circuit monitor. "The coast is clear," he said, as calmly as if nothing had happened. "I don't know where Ronsard went."

Shakily she got to her feet and gathered her evening wrap, fumbling with the folds to make certain they still held everything securely. John shrugged into his tuxedo jacket and straightened his tie, then raked his fingers through his hair. He looked cool and controlled.

"Are you ready?"

She nodded, and he checked the monitor again. "Here we go," he said, taking her arm and ushering her to the door.

Somehow she controlled her voice, and found the words. Somehow she sounded as casual as he did. "What about the lock? Are you going to fix it?"

"No, he'll just think it malfunctioned. This type does occasionally."

He opened the door and swiftly looked out, then ushered her into the empty hallway. He was pulling the office door shut, his hand still on the handle, when the hallway door abruptly swung open and a guard stepped through. He checked when he saw them, shouting something as he automatically reached for his weapon.

John was moving almost before the guard saw them. He pushed Niema against the wall as he went down on one knee, going for the weapon in his ankle rig. The guard panicked and fired too soon, the bullet plowing into the floor ten feet in front of him. John didn't panic. Niema saw his face, calm and expressionless, as his hand swept up. He fired twice, the first shot in the chest and the second, an insurance shot, in the head. The guard jerked like a puppet with broken strings as he crashed backward through the open door.

John gripped Niema's hand and with one motion pulled her to her feet. Screams rose beyond the open hallway door and running footsteps pounded toward them. "Come on," he said and shoved her toward the left exit, and people poured through the door behind them.

Upstairs, the three shots froze Hossam. He leaped off the bed and grabbed his pants from the floor, jerking them on as he ran for the door. He grabbed his shoulder holster as well, sliding the weapon free.

"Hossam! Don't leave me like this!" Cara's voice was sharp with panic-he had long since taken off the gag-but he ignored her and ran out the door. He did have presence of mind to slam the door closed as he went out, but that was all he took the time to do.

Barefoot, he raced down the hall to the stairway at the end and instead of using the steps he put his hand on the rail and vaulted down to the next tier, again and again until he reached the ground floor. The shots seemed to have come from directly below and to the right, which meant they were near Ronsard's office.

The long hallway was jammed with people, some of them Ronsard's guests who were exclaiming in horror. The security personnel were trying to clear them out of the hall, but the arrival of a huge, half-naked, armed man had the guests shrinking back.

"Where?" Hossam shouted.

"Out this entrance," a guard replied, pointing to the door. "It was Temple and one of the women." Hossam wheeled and plunged into the night.

Where would Temple go? Hossam briefly paused, thinking. He would try to get transportation, rather than get away on foot, but the guests vehicles were secured in a fenced area. The estate vehicles, however, were not. Hossam ran barefoot across the damp lawn, heading for the garage area.

Bright emergency lights flashed on all over the estate, lighting up the area like a football field. Armed men swarmed the lawn. Hossam yelled, "The guest vehicles! Check them!"

A large group formed, racing for the secure area. Hossam ran on toward the garage, his weapon held ready. Damn, this guy Temple had piss-poor timing! He'd had Cara ready to come for about the tenth time when he heard the shots, but he'd had to jerk out of her and leave her on the brink, still helplessly tied to the bed.

The long, shadowed garage was silent as he moved down the row of cars and Land Rovers and Jeeps. "Are you here?" he whispered.

"Here."

Hossam whirled as Temple stepped out of the shadows, towing a woman behind him. "Go, man," he hissed, pulling a set of keys out of his pocket and tossing them to Temple, who released the woman to catch them with his left hand. "The green Mercedes there."

"Thanks. Turn around."

Sighing, Eric Covert turned around. He just hoped he wouldn't be out too long, or Cara would be hysterical with rage. He never heard Temple move or felt the blow that left him stretched out on the cold concrete floor.

hapter Twenty-Three

John bent down and scooped up the big man's weapon and tossed it to Niema. "Here, hold this."

She pushed that pistol, too, into the bundle of her evening wrap. It would look suspicious if they didn't take the weapon. He unlocked the car with the automatic lock release on the key ring and they got in. "Get down on the floor," he said, putting his hand on the back of her head and pushing to make sure she obeyed.

She crouched in the well of the floor as he started the car and hit the garage door opener. The door began to slide upward and the automatic light came on overhead. He glanced at her and smiled, and shifted into gear. The powerful car shot forward, tires grabbing traction so smoothly there was no squeal or burning rubber.

The first shot shattered the window above her head, spraying glass over the interior of the car. She bit back a startled cry, covering her head with her arms as a second shot went through the passenger door and the back of the seat not three inches from John's arm, the bullet making a funny whfftt sound as it passed through the leather and fabric.

He floored the gas pedal, smoothly shifting through the gears. With each new gear the increased G-force pushed her hard against the seat. "Stay down," he said, and ducked a split second before the drivers' side window shattered.

The gates. He was heading for those massive, steel-barred gates. She barely had time to brace her hands before the impact. Metal screamed and glass shattered, and she heard more shots, the rapid coughing of automatic fire. She was thrown sideways, her head banging the gear shift. One of the heavy gates, torn off its hinges, landed half on the hood.

"Are you all right?" John shouted as he shifted into reverse. The gate spun and slid to the ground. He shifted gears again and the car shot forward, bumping over the gate, metal bars clanging.

"Yeah," she yelled, but she didn't know if he heard her over the gunfire. He wasn't returning the fire, using all his concentration to drive. She fumbled for the two weapons in the folds of her wrap; the first one she touched was the big one the Company man had been carrying. She got to her knees as she thumbed off the safety.

"God damn it, stay down!" John roared, reaching for her as if he would shove her back into the floor.

"Just drive!" She jerked away, wrapped both hands around the heavy weapon, and began firing out the window. Even if she didn't hit anyone, return fire would at least make them duck for cover. If she didn't do something, the car, with them in it, would be shot to pieces.

The heavy weapon bucked in her hand, the deep cough deafening her as hot casings ejected into the car. One bounced off her bare arm, leaving behind a sting.

The car wasn't running as smoothly as before; it jerked and hesitated, the engine cutting out. Some of the bullets had hit something critical but at least they were off the estate grounds. More shots zinged after them, but they sounded like handguns, which meant the shots didn't have their range. "We have to ditch the car," John said, turning his head to check behind them. The rearview mirror was nothing but a shattered metal frame, the mirror blasted into tiny pieces all over them.

"Where?"

"As soon as we're out of sight. With luck, they won't find the car until morning."

Niema peered over the shredded remains of the seat back. The estate was lit with so many lights it looked like a miniature city. Dozens of lights bloomed as she watched, neatly spaced apart in pairs-headlights. "They're coming," she said.

They went around a curve, and a thick stand of trees hid the estate from sight. He drove off the road, slowing so the tires wouldn't churn up the ground, easing the heavy vehicle into the trees. They bumped over limbs and rocks, and bushes scraped at the once-pristine paint job.

He didn't touch the brake pedal, just in case one of the taillights was still working. When they were far enough off the road that passing headlights wouldn't glint on metal, he stopped and killed the engine. They sat in silence broken only by the engine pinging and hissing, listening to the pursuing vehicles roar past their hiding spot.

They were less than a mile from the estate. "Now what?" she asked, her voice sounding funny, but then her ears were still ringing from the gunfire. The car interior stank of burnt gunpowder and hot metal.

"Do you feel like a nice run?"

"It's my favorite thing to do in the middle of the night, wearing sandals and a two-thousand dollar dress, with a hundred guys chasing and shooting at us."

"Just be glad the sandals aren't high-heeled." He rapped his pistol barrel on the inside lights, shattering covers and bulbs so there wouldn't be any betraying light when they opened the doors.

Gingerly she climbed up from the floor. Shards of glass dusted the seats, her shoulders, her hair. It was very dark under the trees. The door on her side

wouldn't open; a bullet had probably hit the lock mechanism. She crawled over the gear shift, glass tinkling and gritting with every movement she made.

John got out and reached in, bodily lifting her out of the car and standing her on her feet. "Shake," he directed.

They both bent over, shaking their heads and flopping their arms and clothes to dislodge any clinging bits of glass. Her arms and shoulders were stinging a little, but when she cautiously felt them her fingers came away dry, so at least she wasn't bleeding. It was a wonder they were even alive; not being cut by that hail of glass went beyond wonder into miraculous.

But when they straightened, her eyes had adjusted more to the darkness and she saw that half of John's face was darker than the other half. Her stomach plummeted. "You're hit," she said, fighting to keep her voice even. He couldn't be shot. He couldn't. Something vital in her depended on his being okay.

"By glass, not a bullet." He sounded more irritated than anything else. He took the silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and held it to his forehead. "Do you have both pistols?"

"They're in the car." She leaned forward into the car and retrieved both weapons. "What about my tools? Leave them?" She definitely didn't want to lug them around.

"Hand them here."

She gave him the velvet pouch, heavy with tools. He took the tools out and threw them, one by one, as far as he could into the trees and underbrush. If the bag of tools was found, Ronsard would wonder what they had been used for, and since they had been spotted coming out of his office he would then no doubt have a complete physical search done of all the wiring, and he would find the bug. A physical search was the only way to find it, but then no bug could be hidden when the wires themselves were examined.

"Got your wrap?"

"Why do I need it?"

"Because it's black and will hide some of that skin you're showing." She got the wrap and her evening bag out of the car, though she had to gingerly feel around until she found them. The evening bag was useless; there wasn't anything in there they could use, not even money. All her money-passport, everything, were back in her room. She wasn't worried about the passport; the name on it was false, and John would get them back into the country even without one, but money would have come in handy.

John took the bag from her, but instead of throwing it away he tucked it in his pocket. "Come on."

Running in the woods in the dark was too dangerous; they risked turned ankles at least, and possibly broken bones, so they picked their way through the trees and underbrush, pausing every so often to listen for pursuit. They could hear traffic on the road, growing more and more distant as they angled away from it. They couldn't hope that Ronsard's men would be stymied for much longer, though.

They came out of the woods onto a secondary road. "We'll follow this for a while," he said. "It's easier traveling, and while it's dark we can see them a lot sooner than they can see us."

"Are we going anywhere in particular, or just running?"

"Nice."

"Why Nice? Why not Lyon? It's closer."

"Ronsard will be watching the airport in Lyon, and all the car rentals. He'll expect us to go there."

"Then how about Marseilles?"

"Our yacht is in Nice."

"Really. I didn't know we had a yacht."

"The Company has a yacht, and the yacht has a computer with a satellite up-link. I'll be able to get this information to Langley and let them start work on it immediately."

"Nice it is, then."

He took a knife from his pocket and knelt at her feet. Grasping a fistful of fabric in his hand, he inserted the knife about level with her knee and slit her gown sideways, cutting off the bottom half of the skirt. "You have more things in the pockets of that tuxedo than Snoopy has in his dog house," she commented. "I don't see how it fits as well as it does."

"I have a very good tailor."

Now that they were out from under the trees, she could see that his head was still bleeding. He cut a narrow strip off the swath he had just removed from her gown and tied it over the cut. His tuxedo was torn and dirty, and when she looked down she saw that what remained of her gorgeous Dior gown was in the same condition. The remnant of the fabric he draped around his neck.

They began running in an easy jog, because they weren't wearing running shoes and the impact of the hard asphalt through the thin soles of their evening shoes jarred every bone and muscle as it was.

"Are we going to run all the way to Nice?" she asked after about a mile.

"No, we're going to steal a car."

"When?"

"As soon as we find one."

She tried to find a stride that was easier on her feet and legs, and tried to keep her mind focused on the present. While they were being shot at she hadn't had any trouble focusing, but now there was nothing but the rhythmic slap of their shoes on the asphalt, the easy sound of their breathing, and the night sounds surrounding them. With nothing posing an immediate threat, her thoughts zeroed in on what had happened in Ronsard's office.

She didn't want to think about it, but couldn't stop. Maybe it had been inevitable, given the tug of sexual attraction she felt for him, had felt from the moment she set eyes on him in Frank Vinay's office. He struck sparks off her, made her feel so alive she sometimes thought her skin couldn't contain her. Those kisses they had shared-maybe the setup had been pretense, but her response hadn't. With every touch, every dance, every kiss her anticipation had built until it was a wonder she hadn't climaxed as soon as he licked her.

If only it hadn't happened that way. If only he had been making love to her, instead of setting a scene for their cover story. For her, their coming together had been a cataclysmic event. For him, it had been a job.

Maybe that was what hurt so much. She wanted to mean something to him other than just another job, another means to an end. She was afraid . .. dear God, she was afraid she loved him.

She would have to be a Grade A fool to love John Medina.

Loving a man who traveled was one thing; thousands of women did. Loving a man who drew in danger with every breath was something else thousands of women did. Cops, firemen, high-iron men, oil-well riggers-they all had dangerous jobs and they were gone for long stretches of time. But at least they lived in the sunlight. At least their lives were real. John was always setting a scene, doing a job, working an angle. He was almost always someone else. She would never know if he was dead or alive, or if he was coming back even if he was alive.

She couldn't love like that. She couldn't live like that.

"Car," he said, breaking the agonized chain of her thoughts, gripping her arm and urging her off the road. "Get down." Headlights speared toward them through the darkness, the car moving fast.

She lay flat on her face in the weeds, with the evening wrap draped over her arms and shoulders and the remnants of her skirt covering her bare legs. John lay beside her, between her and the road. The car zoomed past.

Slowly they sat up. Until they stopped running, she hadn't been aware of how her feet and legs were aching. She rubbed her hands up and down her shins. "Maybe barefoot would be better than these shoes."

"On the ground, yes, but not on asphalt."

The thin straps were rubbing blisters on her feet. She eased the straps to a different position. "I'm developing a problem here."

He squatted beside her. "Blisters?"

"Not yet, but getting there."

"Okay, running is out. We need to get transportation tonight, though, because we'll be a lot easier to spot on foot during the day. I wanted to get farther away before I liberated a car, but that can't be helped."

"What difference does it make?"

"If a car is stolen practically in Ronsard's backyard, do you think he won't hear about it and figure we're the ones who stole it? Then he'll know what kind of car we're in and can have people watching for us."

She sighed. "Then we walk."

His hand dosed gently over her foot. "I don't think that's an option, either. We'll come across a farm soon, or a village, and I'll get whatever's there, even if it's a tow truck."

"Until then," she said as she got to her feet, "we walk."

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ronsard was more coldly furious than he'd ever been in his life, but more at himself than anyone else. After all, in his business one could expect treachery. What he hadn't expected was that he would have been so completely fooled. Nor had he expected that as many security personnel as were on the estate wouldn't be able to stop one car from leaving. They were supposedly professionals, but they hadn't performed as such.

He had one man dead, and another, Hossam, suffering from a concussion. Hossam had been found lying on the garage floor, only half-dressed and unconscious. Having correctly guessed that Temple would try for one of the estate vehicles, he had evidently been taken from behind. Why Hossam had been wearing only his pants when he was supposed to have been working was a puzzle, until he noticed that Cara was nowhere to be found and sent someone to investigate. She was found tied to her bed, naked and furious. He had been wondering if he would have to kill Hossam for assaulting her until her concern, when she found he had been injured, reassured him that whatever had been going on in her bedroom had been consensual.

Ronsard's guests were shocked and uneasy. The violence of the night's events had forcibly brought home to many of them exactly what sort of world their host lived in. It was all very well to flirt with danger, to boast to their friends that they had been guests at the notorious Louis Ronsard's luxurious estate, to give him information that made them feel wicked and notorious too, but the reality of it was more brutal than they could have guessed.

He imagined none of them had ever seen a man who had been shot in the head. Then all hell had broken loose outside as Temple made his escape, with a hail of automatic fire that sounded as if a small war was being waged on his front lawn, the car crashing through his front gates, his guards scattering as small-arms fire was returned at them. It wasn't just his security that had been breached, but theirs. They no longer had the illusion of safety. Most of them were leaving come the morning.

As a host, his night had been a fiasco. As a businessman, it was worse than that.

Temple and Niema had been in his office. What Niema was doing there, he couldn't imagine. Perhaps she was Temple's partner, perhaps not. Witnesses to the shooting in the hallway had agreed he was manhandling her, shoving her around, dragging her outside. On the other hand, Temple had been driving the car; who other than Niema had been shooting at his guards? It was possible Temple had been both driving and shooting; difficult, but not impossible, and Temple was a trained assassin.

What had they been doing in his office? .

The lock wasn't working. It had been, however, when he left the office the last time, because he automatically, from ingrained habit, tried the handle every time he left.

He stood in his office looking around, trying to see what Temple could have seen. What would he have been interested in? The computers, of course. But there was nothing on Cara's that would have been of interest to him, and the information in Ronsard's computer was password protected.

The password. He walked to his desk and surveyed the items on top of it. Nothing looked disturbed; his copy of A Tale of Two Cities was exactly where he had left it.

And yet-

And yet, the instinct for survival that had stood him in such good stead told him that Temple had somehow breached the security in his computer as surely as he had breached the estate's security. Ronsard couldn't afford to assume otherwise. Nor could he afford to underestimate his opponent, a man who evidently appeared and disappeared at will, and who had access to government documents before they were made public. Such a man was a man with power either behind him, or in his own hands.

They had to be found. With one phone call to the authorities in Lyon he had immediately thrown a net over the airport, then, when one of his more observant men saw where a car had been driven off the road and found the Mercedes abandoned, extended that net to the car rental services also.

They were on foot, unless Temple stole another car. Ronsard arranged that he be told immediately if any thefts were reported.

He sat down at his desk, drumming his fingers on the wood. Lyon was the most logical immediate destination-but perhaps Temple would go in the opposite direction, for that reason. Do the unexpected. Keep your opponent off balance, guessing.

This would be like a game of chess, with moves and countermoves. The key to victory was planning ahead, anticipating every move his opponent could make.

Marseilles was to the south-a larger city than Lyon, with a huge, busy port. It was farther away, but once there, the chances of escaping went up dramatically.

The port. That was the key. Temple would escape by water.

* * *

The village was a small one, no more than fifteen houses loosely grouped on each side of the road. John selected an older model Renault that was parked in front of a cottage, as the older cars were easier to hotwire. Niema stood watch while he eased the car door open and felt under the dash for the wiring harness. The interior light was burning, but he didn't have a flashlight and had to take the chance of someone seeing the light. With his knife, he stripped the wires of their plastic sheath.

Three cottages away, a dog roused from its doggy dreams and barked once, then fell silent. No light came on in any of the cottage's windows.

"Get in," John whispered, moving aside so she could crawl in from that side and not make more noise by having to open and close the passenger door, too. She wasn't a four-year-old, and the Renault was small; she banged her knee on the gear shift, her head on the interior light, and her elbow on the steering wheel. Swearing under her breath, she finally maneuvered herself into the passenger seat.

John wasn't laughing, but his mouth wore a curve that said he wanted to. The small interior light gave her the first dear look at him since they left the estate, and her heart skipped a beat. The right side of his face was streaked with dried blood, despite his efforts to wipe it off. His once-snowy shirt was rusty with dirt and blood, his hair was tousled, and beard stubble darkened his jaw. With the black strip of silk tied around his head, he looked like a disreputable, Armani-dad pirate.

If anyone saw them the way they looked now, they were busted.

He twisted the wires together, and the engine began trying to crank. It coughed, the fan turning, and he slid into the seat and gently pressed the gas pedal. With a high-pitched hum like a sewing machine, the car started. Without closing the door, he put in the clutch and shifted into low gear; the car began rolling as he let out the clutch. Fifty yards down the road, he closed the door.

"What time is it?" she asked, slumping in the seat. Her feet were throbbing. She eased them out of the sandals, knowing she might not be able to get her shoes back on and not caring. Sitting down was such a relief she almost groaned.

He glanced at his wristwatch. "A little after three. With luck, we have two or three hours before anyone notices the car is missing. Why don't you try to get some sleep?"

"I'm not sleepy." She wasn't. She was exhausted but not sleepy. She was both hungry and thirsty, and really, really needed to soak her aching feet in cold water.

"You will be. When your adrenaline drops, you'll crash."

"What about you? Don't you have adrenaline?" she snapped, though she didn't know why she was suddenly crabby.

"I'm used to it. I've learned how to work through the crash."

"I'm okay."

She wasn't, though. She glanced at him. His strong hands were steady on the wheel, his expression as calm as if he were out for a Sunday drive. Maybe she looked that calm, too, but inside she was shredded.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," she said, appalled. There was no need to ask what "it" was. She didn't want him to be reasonable and logical and tell her to just look at what they'd done as part of the job. All she wanted was to get this over with and leave with some semblance of dignity still intact.

"We have to at some point."

"No, we don't. I just want to forget it."

He paused, and his jaw tightened. "Are you mad because you came, or because I did?"

She felt like screaming. God, why wouldn't he just leave it alone? "Neither. Both."

"That's certainly a definitive answer."

"If you want definitive answers, get a dictionary."

Another pause, as if he measured her resistance. "All right, I'll drop it for now, but we will talk."

She didn't reply. Didn't he understand? Talking about what happened was like touching a wound, keeping it fresh and bleeding. But, no, how could he understand, when it wasn't like that for him?

"How far is it to Nice?"

"A couple of hundred miles if we use the expressway, less if we go over the mountains. The direct route probably won't be the fastest, though, at least not in this car. It doesn't have the horses to climb the mountains at much more than a crawl."

"The expressway should get us there by six-thirty or seven, though."

"In the neighborhood. We have to stop and steal another car."

"Another one?"

"We're too close to Ronsard's estate. He'll hear about this as soon as it's reported. We need to ditch this one."

"Where?"

"Valence, I think. I'll look for something there."

They were serial car thieves, she mused. Well, she had wanted excitement. John Medina certainly filled the bill; there were no dull stretches while in his company. But home was looking better and better, as a refuge in which she could deal with the idiocy of having fallen in love with him. She thought of her peaceful house, with everything specifically arranged to her liking-except for the double hook-and-eye latches on every door and window.

"If I can get a flight out, I'll be home by this time tomorrow," she said, then remembered her passport. "No, scratch that. No passport. How am I going to get back into the States?"

"We'll probably take military transport home."

We? He intended to travel with her? That was news. "You're going back to Washington, too?"

"For the time being."

He didn't expand on that, and she didn't ask.

Instead she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Even if she couldn't sleep, she could rest.

"A baker reported his car was stolen early this morning. . . here." Ronsard put his finger on the map. The village was thirteen kilometers from the estate, on a small, narrow road that wound in a general southwest direction and eventually bisected the expressway. Several of his security people were gathered around the desk while he spoke on the telephone to a friend with the local authorities.

If Temple went south, he would have been in the same rough area as the village. "What make and color is the car? Do you have the license?" He wrote as he listened. "Yes, thank you. Keep me informed."

He hung up and tore the sheet of paper off the pad. "Find this car," he said, handing the sheet to his men. "On the expressway to Marseilles. Bring him back alive, if possible. If not-" He broke off and shrugged.

"And the woman?"

Ronsard hesitated. He didn't know the extent of Niema's involvement. He had personally searched her room and there was nothing suspicious there. Could Temple have kidnapped her? There was one thing of which he was absolutely sure: The man was obsessed with her. The intensity with which he had watched her couldn't be feigned. He could still feel that way if they were partners, but if they weren't, Temple was the type of man who wouldn't balk at kidnapping if she wouldn't go willingly.

The Niema he knew was funny, a little sharp-tongued, and kind-hearted. He remembered the way she had shown Laure how to apply the makeup she had acquired, the gentleness, the way she didn't talk down to Laure as if being ill had somehow stunted his daughter's ability to understand.

For Laure, he said, "Try not to hurt her. Bring her to me:"

Chapter Twenty-Five

They reached Valence before dawn. John cruised down the streets, looking for a promising target. The city had a population of over sixty thousand, so he should be able to find another car without a lot of trouble.

He glanced over at Niema, sitting as erect as a soldier, and his lips compressed into a grim line. He'd almost gotten her killed tonight. He had been so certain this would be an in-and-out job, the sort he could do blindfolded, but instead they had barely escaped with their lives.

He was still taking risks with her life. He knew it, and yet he couldn't bring himself to make the call that would get them picked up, not now, not with what he'd done to her in Ronsard's office lying between them like a snake coiled ready to strike if he tried to move it.

One phone call. That was all it would take. They would be picked up within the hour and flown to Nice, where he would up-link the files and finish the job. But the way things were now, she would move heaven and earth to go home and get away from him. He couldn't let that happen, not with things the way they were between them.

He had gone to a lot of trouble to keep her from realizing how focused he was on her, and now that was working against him. She thought she was nothing more to him than a means to an end. What would she say if he told her the truth, that even though the love-making in Ronsard's office had started out as a cover, he had seen the opportunity to have her and ruthlessly used it. What was worse, he would do it again. He'd take her any way he could, whenever he could.

Everything he'd said at Ronsard's, everything he'd done, was the truth. That was why Ronsard had so easily believed the cover, because it was true. But Niema didn't seem to see it, even though he knew she wanted him, was so physically aware of him she had climaxed with startling speed. Maybe he was too damn good at his job, at playing a role. He was tired of role-playing; when he kissed her, damn it, he wanted her to know he was kissing her because he wanted to rather than because it was what was called for in some unwritten script.

A police car was coming toward them in the other lane. He was so preoccupied he almost missed how it slowed as it approached. Then instinct kicked in and reflexes took over. "We're made," he said, downshifting and taking the next right on two wheels. There was no point in being subtle; it didn't matter if they knew he'd seen them. What mattered was getting this car off the street before they were picked up. He jammed the gas pedal to the floor, needing to make the next turn before the police were able to turn around and fall in behind him.

Niema jerked to full attention. "That fast?" she asked incredulously.

"Ronsard has a lot of money. He can make a stolen vehicle a matter of prime importance." He pushed the little car as hard as he could, its motor whining. The next turn was a left, and that one too was made on two wheels. He killed the headlights and took the next left, which brought them back out on the street from which they had originally turned off.

Niema was trying to brace herself against the dash, the door, anything to keep from being slung all over the car.

He took a right. They were now, with luck, going away from the police car. The narrow street he was on was winding, and dark; unless he touched the brakes, they shouldn't be able to locate him.

He was good at driving without using the brakes. He downshifted whenever he needed to slow to take a curve, letting the engine do the work.

"What now?" she asked. She had given up on trying to brace herself and was on her knees on the floor. In spite of everything, a hint of cheerfulness had returned to her voice. He remembered the way she had grabbed the heavy pistol and returned fire as they were crashing the gates; far from getting hysterical, she thrived on excitement.

"We stay with the original plan. Dump this car, get another one."

"Is there any chance of getting a little food while we're doing all this?"

"If we can find a stream where we can clean up. We're too noticeable the way we are."

She looked down at her bare feet and tattered gown, then at his bloodstained tuxedo, and shrugged. "So we're a little overdressed. I don't think washing our faces and hands is going to help much."

She was right about that. They needed a change of clothes before they were seen in public; they were too noticeable. And he'd forgotten about the black strip tied around his head, but he couldn't remove it until they found some water, because the dried blood had stuck the material to the cut and if he pulled it off he'd start the damn thing bleeding again.

On the other hand, if the next car he stole had a full tank of gas, he could also steal some food and water and they wouldn't need to stop again until they reached Nice. They could shower on the yacht and have clothing delivered.

"We also need to find a secluded area for other reasons," she pointed out. "Understood and obeyed."

He left the Renault parked behind a shop and removed its plates. The next car they came to, he removed those plates, replaced them with the Renault's, then they went back to the Renault and put the other car's plates on it. When the local police found the car and compared the plates to the ones on the car reported stolen, they would think it was a different car. They would eventually figure it out, but at least this would slow them down a little.

"Where to now?" Niema asked. She was tired, but at least John had found a bush behind which she had relieved herself, so she wasn't in any physical discomfort, other than her sore feet.

"We walk until we find another car."

"I was afraid you were going to say that. Why didn't we just take the car we put the Renault's plates on?"

"They were too close together. We would automatically be suspected. We need a car on the other side of town."

She sighed. The last thing she wanted to do right now was walk to the other side of town. No-the last thing she wanted to do was get caught. She bit her tongue to hold back any complaints that might slip out:

They walked for forty-five minutes before he spotted the car he wanted. It was a Fiat, parked at the top of a small slope, and it was unlocked. "Get in," he said, and she thankfully crawled in. Instead of hotwiring it, he put it in neutral, braced his hands on the frame, and started it rolling. He hopped in and they rolled silently down the slope, away from the owner's house. He let it roll as far as it would and then did the hot-wiring thing. The engine was another sewing machine, but it ran smoothly, and that was all they required.

Ronsard paced quietly. He didn't like leaving everything to his men. He understood Temple, he thought, at least he didn't underestimate him. His guests were gone; there was no reason for him to remain here.

The phone rang with another update. The Renault had been found in Valence, but there was no report of Temple or Madame Jamieson. The plates on the Renault had been switched with those from a Volvo, but the Volvo hadn't been stolen.

"What other cars have been reported stolen within the past twenty-four hours?"

"A Peugeot was taken from behind a house a kilometer from the Renault. A Fiat was also stolen, but that was some distance away. And a Mercedes was reported stolen, but the owner has been out of town and does not know how long the car has been gone."

The Peugeot was the most likely, Ronsard thought. It was the closest. And yet. . . perhaps that was what Temple wished him to think. "Concentrate on the

Mercedes and Fiat," he said. "I will be joining you by helicopter in two hours. Find those two cars."

"Yes, sir," came the brisk answer.

It was noon when they reached Nice. Niema was so tired she could barely think, but somehow her body kept moving. They were met at the dock by a man in a small outboard, to take them out to the yacht that was moored in the harbor. He had to be Company, Niema thought. He was American, and he didn't ask any questions, just competently steered the boat across the harbor and brought it alongside a gleaming white sixty-footer.

She wasn't too tired to be amazed. She stared up at the yacht, with an impressive array of antennas bristling from its top. When John had said "yacht," she had expected something about twenty-five or thirty feet, with a tiny galley, a tinier head, and bunk beds in a cramped cabin. This thing was in an entirely different category.

John spoke quietly with the other man, giving him instructions on the disposition of the stolen Fiat. It was to disappear, immediately. There were other instructions as well. "Keep us under surveillance. Don't let anyone approach us without warning."

"Got it."

He turned to look at Niema. "Can you make it up the ladder?"

"Do I get to take a shower and go to bed if I do?"

"Absolutely."

"Then I can make it up the ladder." She suited action to words, setting her bare feet on the rungs and using the last of her energy to climb to the deck. John made it as easily as if he had just woke from a good night's sleep and started fresh. He looked terrible, but she couldn't see any sign of fatigue in him.

He opened the hatch door and led her inside. The interior was surprisingly spacious, with everything built in that could be built in, the design both sophisticated and luxurious. They were in the middle of the boat, in a large salon outfitted with pale golden wood and dark blue trim; a full galley lay beyond. John ushered her past the galley, into a narrow hallway, or whatever it was called on board a ship. If a kitchen was a galley, a bathroom was a head, and a bedroom was a cabin, then a hallway had to be something else too.

"Here's the head," he said, opening a door. "Everything you'll need is there. When you're finished, take either of these cabins." He indicated two doors in the hallway past the head.

"Where will you be?"

"In the office, up-linking to a satellite for a burst transmission. There are two other heads on board, so don't feel you have to hurry."

Hurry? He had to be joking.

The head was as luxuriously appointed as the rest of the boat. All of the cabinetry was built in, to save space. The glass-enclosed shower was spacious by anyone's standards, with gold-plated fixtures. A thick white terry cloth bathrobe hung on a hook behind the door, and a bath mat with a pile so thick her feet sank into it covered the glazed bronze tiles on the floor.

She investigated the contents of the vanity and found everything she could possibly need, as John had said: soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, a new toothbrush, moisturizer. In another drawer was a blow dryer and an assortment of brushes and combs.

She was so tired all she wanted to do was fall in bed and sleep for the rest of the day. They were safe, the job completed. She had done what she signed on to do.

She should feel satisfied, or at least relieved. All she felt was a great hollow pain that had started in her chest and now seemed to fill her entire body. It was finished. Over. John. The job. Everything.

"I can't let him go," she whispered, leaning her head on her hands. She loved him too much. She had tried to fight it for weeks now; loving a man like him was a tough thing to do. She had already loved one damn hero, and losing Dallas had nearly destroyed her. What she was risking now was too devastating to even contemplate, but there was no turning back.

Nor could she see any future for them. John was, essentially, a lobo. They had worked as a team on this job, but that wasn't likely to happen again. By necessity he had to limit the number of people who knew his real identity, and carefully control any contact with them. She still didn't understand why she was one of those few people, despite what he said about being taken by surprise and blurting out his real name. John Medina didn't blurt out anything: Everything he said, everything he did, was toward some aim.

So why had he told her? She was nobody, a low-level tech with a talent for electronic surveillance. He could have kept quiet and let her go on believing his name was Tucker, or he could have come up with some other name; God knows he had a list of them tucked away somewhere in that convoluted brain of his. She had no way of knowing the difference.

She would drive herself crazy wondering about him, what he was doing and why he was doing it. No sane woman could possibly love him, but if this job had taught her one thing, it was that she wasn't sane. She was an adrenaline junkie, a risk-taker, and though she had spent the past five years fighting her own nature, punishing herself for Dallas's death and trying to shape her life, her personality, into a more conventional pattern, she could no longer maintain the illusion. All John had to do was walk through a door and beckon her, and she would go with him- anywhere, any time.

It angered her that she could be so defenseless against him. If he had shown any corresponding weakness, she wouldn't feel so hopeless. He liked her, she knew; physically he had responded when they kissed, and he had certainly risen to the occasion in Ronsard's office, but a physical response from a man was so automatic she couldn't let herself read any importance into it. Men were, as he himself had pointed out, simple creatures. All they required was a warm body. She had filled that requirement.

She could stand there all day running the details around and around in her mind, like a rat trying to escape from a maze, but she always came back to the same end: She couldn't see a future with John. He was what he was. He lived in the shadows and risked his life on a daily basis, and kept his personal life to a minimum. She even loved that part of him, because how many people in the world could do what he did, make the sacrifices he had made?

All she could do was hope she saw him now and again. Even every five years would be enough, if she could just know he was alive.

Shuddering, she pushed away that last thought and at last moved into action, stripping off her filthy clothes and stepping under the warm shower. She put her mind in neutral, soaping and scrubbing and shampooing, scrubbing away at a stubborn dark stain on her thigh until she realized it was a bruise.

Getting clean made her feel marginally better, though the face she saw in the mirror was still pale and strained, her eyes shadowed with exhaustion. She took full advantage of the amenities provided, brushing her teeth, smoothing moisturizer into her skin, blow-drying her hair. There was even a tube of medicated cream, and she dabbed that on the raw places on her feet.

The grooming rituals had a sedative effect, easing the tightness of her nerves. She could sleep now, she thought, and even managed a smile to herself. As if sleeping had ever been in any doubt! She planned to spend at least ten hours horizontal, more if she could manage it.

She would deal with her dirty clothes later, she decided, and wrapped herself in the thick, soft robe. All she wanted to do now was sleep.

She opened the door and froze. John stood just outside the door, naked except for a damp towel wrapped around his waist. He had already showered; small beads of water still clung to the hair on his chest. Niema knotted her hands into fists, wrapping them with the robe sash to keep from touching him, flattening her palms against that warm, muscular wall and feeling his heart beat beneath her fingers.

"Are you finished?" she asked in surprise.

"It only took a couple of minutes. Load the disk in the computer, up-link to the satellite, and send a burst transmission. It's done."

"Good. You must be as tired as I am."

He blocked her exit from the head, looking down at her with an unreadable expression in his blue eyes. "Niema ..."

"Yes?" she prompted, when he didn't say anything else.

He held out his hand to her, palm upturned, utterly steady. "Will you sleep with me?"

Her heart gave a powerful thud that made her feel weak. She stared up at him, wondering what was going on behind that impenetrable blue gaze, and then realized it didn't matter. For now, nothing mattered but being with him. She put her hand in his and whispered, "Yes."

He put his arms around her and lifted her off her feet almost before the word was out of her mouth. His mouth closed over hers, hungry, devouring, hot. He tasted of the same toothpaste she had used. His tongue stroked urgently in her mouth and she met it with her own. She wrapped her arms around his neck and lost herself, pleasure and joy exploding through her veins.

He dropped the towel where he stood. She lost the robe somewhere on the short route to the nearest cabin. She didn't know exactly how he got her out of it, but he did. They fell on the bed. Before she could catch her breath he levered himself on top of her and pushed his legs between hers.

His penetration was abrupt and forceful. She cried out, her back arching, her nails digging into his shoulders. His penis was so hot and hard it felt like a thick, heated pipe pushing into her unprepared body. His whole body was hot with urgency, his muscles shaking as he probed deeper, working his entire length into her. His mouth covered hers, swallowing her moans as excitement swirled through her. This wasn't part of a job. This wasn't pretense. He wanted her.

He was in her to the hilt, a heavy, stretching presence. He buried his head against her shoulder, shuddering with relief as if he couldn't have borne another moment unconnected to her.

This wasn't the John Medina she knew, this man with his desperate need. He was always so controlled, but there was nothing controlled about him now.

She smoothed her hands down his back, feeling the powerful muscles rippling just under his skin. "There's a concept I want to introduce to you," she murmured. "It's called foreplay."

He lifted his head from her shoulder, smiling wryly. Propping himself on his elbows, settling more comfortably on her and in her, he framed her face in his hands and pressed a kiss to her mouth. "I'm a desperate man. Any time you let me touch you, I'm going to get inside you as fast as I can, before you have time to change your mind."

The words shocked her, hinting at a vulnerability, a need, she never would have suspected he felt.

He moved, a slow stroke that set off a small riot in her nerve endings. She gasped, her legs rising to clasp his hips. "Why would I change my mind?" she managed to ask.

"Things haven't always been . .. easy between us."

Things weren't easy between them now. There was tension and pain and uncertainty, an explosive sexual attraction, even a spark of hostility caused by the clash of two strong personalities. There was nothing serene about her relationship with him, never had been.

She slid her fingers into the damp strands of his hair, holding him as she lifted her hips and did her own stroking. "If I wanted an easy ride, I'd find a merry-go-round."

His entire body tightened, and his eyes burned laser blue. He seemed to lose his ability to breathe. She did it again, lifting to take him deep, then clamping all her internal muscles on him and holding him tight as she pulled back, milking him with her body. A harsh groan burst out of his throat. "Then hold on tight, honey, because it's gonna be long and hard." 'Actually," she purred, "it already is." The smothered sound he made was almost a laugh. "That wasn't what I meant."

"Then show me what you did mean." That look was back in his eyes again, that unreadable wall behind which something elusive moved. "A lot of different things," he murmured. "But for now, we'll concentrate on this one."

Chapter Twenty-Six

Niema woke in his arms the next morning. She lay quietly, still drowsing, slipping back and forth between sleep and awareness. She was curled on her left side and he was a solid wall behind her, his legs tangled with hers and his arm a heavy weight over her hip. His breath was warm on her shoulder.

She hadn't slept with a man like this since Dallas, she thought sleepily, the name resonating gently in her mind. No-John was the last man she had slept with. The realization was a shock. She remembered that awful time in Iran, the way he had held her and gentled her to sleep, then held her the next morning while she wept, when she woke and realized he wasn't Dallas, that Dallas would never again hold her in the night.

She couldn't see the clock, but it was almost dawn; the sky was beginning to lighten. They had been in bed-what, sixteen, seventeen hours? Making love, sleeping, making love again. He had gotten up once and brought back a tray of bread and cheese and fruit, and that had been their supper. Other than that they hadn't left the cabin except to visit the head.

She felt lethargic, content to be right where she was. Her entire body was relaxed, sated, well-used.

His lips brushed the back of her neck and she realized he was awake. She made a slight nestling movement, sighing with pleasure. How she enjoyed this, waking in the early morning, held close by the man she loved; there were few things in life more satisfying.

His morning erection prodded her, rising insistently against her bottom. She started to turn over but he stayed her with a murmur, adjusting his position and guiding himself to her opening. She arched her back, giving him a better angle. He put his hand on her stomach, bracing her, and pushed. He went slowly inside her; she was morning soft, morning wet, but their positions made her body yield reluctantly to his intrusion. She breathed through her mouth, trying to stay relaxed. With her legs together there wasn't much room inside her; he felt huge, stretching her to the limit.

The sensation bordered on pain, but was also its own turn-on. She pressed her head back against his shoulder, struggling to contain the feeling and yet take more of him. Another inch pushed into her and she moaned.

He paused. "Are you all right?" His voice was low, smoky with sleep and desire.

She didn't know. Maybe. "Yes," she whispered.

He stroked his right hand up to her breasts, lightly rubbing his fingertips on the lower slope, the way he had learned she liked. The subtle caress lit a gentle glow of pleasure, prepared her nipples for more direct contact. That came from his thumb, slowly moving over them, circling them until they hardened and stabbed into his covering palm. It was scary how fast he had caught on to all the small subtleties of how she liked to be touched, scary that his attention had been so focused on her that he hadn't missed a single hitch in her breath. After just one night, he knew her body as well as she did.

He slipped his left arm under her, curving it around her waist and cupping his hand over her mound. His middle finger slid between her fold, pressing lightly on her clitoris. Not rubbing, just pressing, holding his finger there. Then he began to thrust, using long, slow strokes that moved her body back and forth against his finger.

She cried out, jerking under the lash of pleasure. He whispered something soothing and steadied her, then resumed the motion.

"I wanted you the first time I saw you," he murmured. "God, how I envied Dallas!" His right hand stroked up and down her torso, piling sensation on top of sensation. "I stayed away from you for five long, fucking years. I gave you every chance to settle down with Mr. Right, but you didn't take them and I'm through with waiting. You're mine now, Niema. Mine."

Her thoughts reeled with shock. He wasn't given to a lot of swearing: For him to say what he just had was a measure of the strength of his feelings. "J-John?" she stuttered, reaching back for him. She hadn't had any idea any of that had been going on inside him. How could she? He was too damn good an actor.

His hips recoiled and plunged in a steady, unhurried motion that was completely at odds with the way his heartbeat was hammering against her back. "I talked you into coming on this job because I couldn't let you go." His mouth moved on her neck, finding that exact spot between neck and shoulder where the lightest touch made her go limp with pleasure, and a bite would light her up like a Christmas tree. He licked and kissed, holding her quivering body as she strained against him. She tried to part her legs, to lift her thigh over his, but he anchored her leg and held it down.

Niema squirmed, almost frantic with need. As good as his finger felt between her legs, with her legs held together the contact wasn't quite enough; his strokes inside her weren't quite deep enough, or fast enough. He had brought her to the boiling point, with touch and words, but wouldn't let her go over it.

"You were right," he breathed, the words hot on her skin. "I could have found someone else to plant the bug. Hell, I could've planted it myself. But I wanted you with me. I wanted this chance to have you."

"Let me put my leg over yours," she pleaded, almost mad with frustration. "Move faster. Please. Just do something!"

"Not yet." He kissed her neck again. Her right hand, reaching behind to grab him, clenched hard on his butt. "In Ronsard's office-"

"For God's sake, confess afterward!"

He laughed and moved her hand, dislodging her nails from his ass. "I didn't mean to go that far. I've never lost control like that before." He nuzzled her ear. "I had to taste you, had to kiss you-and then I had to have you. I wanted our first time to be in a bed, with a lot of time to spend loving you, but I couldn't stop. I forgot about the job. All that mattered was having you."

He was saying things any woman in her right mind wanted to hear from the man she loved, Niema thought dimly. But, damn him, he was saying them when she was on the verge of dying. And maybe what he was saying was turning her on even more, because every word seemed to go straight to her very core.

"You seem to think the end of this job is the end of us. Not by a long shot, sweetheart. You're mine and you're going to stay mine."

"John," she gasped. "I love you. But if you don't start moving your ass this very minute-!"

He laughed, a deep-throated sound of pure pleasure, and obeyed her command. He lifted her thigh over his hip and moved hard and fast, going deep. She stiffened, her legs trembling, and erupted in a violent climax. He joined her before her tremors had ceased.

Afterward, she couldn't stop trembling. The pleasure had been too intense, too prolonged, and she still couldn't quite believe all the things he had said. She twisted around to face him. Immediately his expression became guarded.

She managed a smile, though her heart was pounding so violently she could barely speak. "Don't think you can get away with saying things like that only when my back is turned." She touched his face, cradling his cheek in her palm. "Did you mean them?"

A shudder wracked him. "Every word."

"So did I."

He caught her fingers and pressed them to his lips, then folded them in his hand. For a moment he seemed beyond words.

She kissed his chin. "I don't expect more from you than you can give. I know who you are, remember? You have a job to do, and I won't ask you to give it up. I'll probably go back into fieldwork myself-"

"Why am I not surprised?" he asked in a wry tone.

She couldn't seem to stop touching him. All those long hours in bed with him had only made the yearning worse, instead of sating it. She stroked her hand over his rock hard chest, pressed a kiss to his throat.

"We'll work it out. We don't have to make decisions now, or even tomorrow."

His eyebrows rose and he rolled, tucking her neatly beneath him. Propped over her on his elbows, he said in amusement, "You're being very gentle with me."

"I don't want to frighten you off."

"After waiting five years to have you? Sweetheart, you couldn't frighten me off with an elephant gun. But you're right about one thing: We don't have to make any decisions other than what to eat for breakfast. We can steal a few days just for ourselves before we go back to D.C."

"Can we?" That sounded like heaven-nothing to do but sleep late, make love, lie in the sun. No roles to play, no disks to steal. They could just be themselves. She still couldn't quite take in everything he'd said: How could she not have known, not sensed his attraction to her? But maybe she had; maybe that was what she had picked up on when they were in Iran that made her so uneasy. She hadn't been able to tell what it was, because John was so good at hiding what he was thinking, but she had known there was some tension there. Would she have been ready earlier to hear what he was saying? She didn't know.

They were together now, and that was all that mattered.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

John made a call on the radio, and a couple of hours later the man with the outboard brought some clothes to the boat: jeans, T-shirts, underwear, socks, and sneakers. "Have you heard anything on Ronsard?" John asked as he took the bundle of clothes.

The man shook his head. He was dressed much as he had been the day before, in cotton pants and a pullover shirt, with dark sunglasses that prevented anyone from seeing his eyes. "Nothing since last night. His men were all over Marseilles. Looks like you lost them there. We'll keep tight surveillance on the yacht, though, just in case."

Niema waited until the Company man left, then went out on the deck. "Clothes," she said with satisfaction, taking the bundle from John's arms. "Thank God. Being naked when you have clothes to put on is one thing, but being naked when you have no choice is nerve-wracking."

He reached out and fingered the thick bathrobe she had tightly belted around her after showering a few moments ago. "You look clothed to me-too damn clothed for my taste."

"That's the point. If you have to work for something, you appreciate it more." She stepped away from that encroaching finger and headed back below deck.

"Then you should consider yourself the most appreciated woman in the civilized world," he growled.

Maybe he hadn't meant for her to hear him, but she did. Her knees went a little weak. Every time she thought of the things he'd said that morning her heart started thumping hard and fast. She was so happy she was afraid she might fly apart.

They would face problems in the future, probably in the near future. She didn't know what form their relationship would take, whether there would be any formal commitment or just an unspoken arrangement as lovers whenever they happened to be together-which might not be very often. But all of that was in the future. For right now, for these couple of stolen days before they caught a military transport back to the States, all they had to do was love each other.

He hadn't said he loved her, but he didn't have to.

She felt it every time he touched her, with a wrenching blend of tenderness and almost savage lust that made his hands tremble, or when he looked at her with his emotions naked in his eyes. John was so controlled that the very fact he let her see what he was feeling told her more than words ever could.

She didn't have to have any promises, any plans. Not today. Not tomorrow. Maybe losing Dallas had made her afraid to count on the future; all she knew was that she was happy just having John now.

He came below deck and leaned against the door frame, watching as she took all the articles of clothing out of the bag and placed them on the bed, dividing them into his and hers stacks.

"Are you going somewhere?"

"No, I just want to get dressed. I guess I can't believe Ronsard has given up, and if there's trouble I want to be wearing more than a robe."

John strolled forward and hooked a finger in the belt around her waist, pulling her against him. She went willingly, looping her arms around his neck. "We're safe enough here on the boat," he said. "The only way anyone can get to us without being seen is from underwater. We're under constant surveillance, and the boat has electronic countermeasures in place in case anyone tries to eavesdrop."

"So we have to stay on board until we're picked up?"

"I wouldn't mind a couple of days of downtime." A slight smile curved his lips. "On the other hand,

I'm not Superman, either, so we might as well get dressed."

He stripped off his tuxedo pants, which was all he was wearing, and was in shorts and jeans by the time she stepped into a pair of underpants. He eyed her feet. "You need Band-Aids on those blisters before you put on socks and shoes. I'll get the first-aid kit."

Niema sat down on the bed and examined her feet. The blisters didn't look bad and weren't bothering her; the antibiotic cream she'd put on them the day before had helped a lot, plus she had been barefoot since coming on board the boat. Still, he was right: They needed protecting. Runners learned to take care of their feet.

He came back with a small white kit in his hand and sat down beside her. "Feet up," he said, patting his lap.

Smiling at the luxury, she turned around and lay back on the pillows, lifting her feet onto his lap and giving herself up entirely into his hands. These strong hands gently cradled her feet, dabbing cool ointment on the blisters and covering them with adhesive strips. He performed the task with the same fearsome concentration he applied to everything.

Still holding her feet in his hands, he looked up at her: "Did you know the feet are an erogenous zone?"

Alarmed, she said, "I know they're a ticklish zone." She tried to regain custody of her feet but with very little effort he controlled the motion.

"Trust me." His tone was both soothing and cajoling. "I won't do anything to tickle you."

She was trying to jackknife into a sitting position when he pressed his mouth to her right instep. She fell back on the pillows, her breath tangling in her throat, spikes of pleasure shooting all the way to her groin. She sucked in a deep breath. "Do that again."

"My pleasure," he murmured, caressing her instep with his tongue and eyeing with interest her hardening nipples.

Niema closed her eyes. What he was doing was incredible: She didn't have the least inclination to laugh. His touch was firm, almost massaging. His tongue unerringly found the most sensitive spot on her instep, stroking it until she had to choke back moans of pleasure. Then he turned his attention to her left foot, shifting so he was facing her and a foot was in each hand. He divided his attention between them, kissing and licking and sucking until she could no longer hold back those moans. Her body twisted and arched, and her breathing became ragged.

She was scarcely aware of when he deftly slipped her panties down her legs, only that he was cupping her bottom in his hands and lifting her up to his mouth. His hair was cool on the insides of her thighs, his mouth hot as he stabbed his tongue into her. She was so aroused that she began climaxing in moments, the sensation so intense that blood roared in her ears and reality contracted until it existed only in the sensation between her legs.

When she finally managed to open her eyes, he was smiling at her. "See?"

"Wow." She stretched languidly. "Do you have any more tricks?"

He laughed as he stood up. "A few, but we'll work up to those."

He had taken the edge off her interest in getting dressed, but she did it anyway, then joined him on deck. The sun was bright on the water. She looked across at the crowded beach and the city beyond. "I wish we could go into the city," she said as she slipped her sunglasses on her nose.

"Maybe later. Let's see if we pick up anything else on Ronsard before we go into the city." He picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned the beach.

"Looking at the topless women?" she asked, pinching his butt. "I thought you were too sophisticated for that."

"A man never gets too sophisticated for that," he murmured and laughed when she pinched him again.

Late that afternoon he got another report from the Company men on shore. Ronsard seemed to have pulled his men; though there was still surveillance in place at the airports, no one was actively beating the bushes for them.

"Looks like we can do a little sightseeing," he said.

She was aware he was indulging her. "You've been to Nice before, haven't you?"

He shrugged. "I've been to most places before."

"What do you do for relaxation?"

He thought about that for a moment. "Hide away on a boat on the Riviera and make love to you," he finally answered.

"You mean . . . you never just get in a car and drive? Rent a cabin somewhere in the mountains, go fishing, look at the scenery?" She was aghast, wondering how anyone could live under such unrelenting stress.

"Like a normal person? No."

Mr. Medina, that's going to change, she thought staring at him. When he had downtime, she would make certain he relaxed some place where he didn't have to constantly watch his back or keep up a cover. That would probably be the only way they could be together, somewhere so isolated they would have to make an effort to see another human being.

John radioed in that they were going ashore.

"Do you want surveillance?"

He thought about it. "How many men do you have?"

"We can keep the yacht covered, or we can cover you, but we'll be stretched thin if we try to do both."

It was a calculated risk, Niema knew. Just because Ronsard's men hadn't been spotted didn't mean they weren't there. But everything in John's life was a calculated risk-and lately, so was everything in hers. This was how it would be, she thought; this was the life she was choosing, the life she wanted.

"Put one man on us," John finally said.

"Will do."

He tucked his pistol into his waistband at the small of his back, then put on a lightweight jacket. Niema had found a straw tote in the cabin and she dropped her pistol into it.

The yacht had its own motorized dinghy, and they went ashore in it. The sun was low in the sky, the light mellowing, the shadows deepening. They walked for a while, strolling along with the other tourists. They stopped for a cup of coffee at a sidewalk cafe; she browsed through some lovely little shops and started to buy a six-foot long, sky blue scarf, only to realize she had no money. "I'm broke," she told John, laughing as she pulled him out of the shop.

He looked back. "I'll get the scarf for you."

"I don't want you to get the scarf. I want you to get some money for me."

"Independent hussy," he remarked, tugging free and going back into the shop.

She waited on the sidewalk, arms crossed and toe tapping, until he rejoined her with the scarf wrapped in tissue paper. He dropped the weightless package in her tote, and a kiss on her nose. "That's from me. As for operating money, I'll have more funds delivered to us tomorrow."

"Thank you." Over his shoulder she caught a glimpse of a man watching them. He quickly turned away and entered a shop. She said thoughtfully, "Do you know what our Company tail looks like?"

"I spotted him when we left the dinghy. Khaki pants, white shirt."

"A man wearing black pants, white shirt, and a tan jacket was watching us. He went in one of the shops when he saw me looking at him."

John moved immediately, though without haste, curving his arm around her waist and walking with her into the nearest shop. Once they were inside he walked quickly through the shop, with the owner sputtering after them, and out the rear entrance. They were in a narrow cobblestoned alley, dark with shadows, open at both ends. He turned to the right, so they were going toward the shop in which their unknown watcher had gone.

If the man followed them into the shop and out the back, he would instinctively turn left, in the opposite direction from which he had come. If they could get out of the alley before he decided he'd been made and came after them, they would shake him.

They almost made it. The man burst into the alley when they were two doors from the end. The shopkeeper was squawking in his wake, frustrated that people were using her shop as a shortcut. He ignored her as if she were no more than a mosquito, brushing her off as he drew a pistol from the shoulder rig beneath his jacket.

The shopkeeper screamed and rushed back into her shop. John shoved Niema into a recessed doorway and dove in the opposite direction, pulling out his pistol and rolling as he hit the ground. The first shot clanged into a metal trash can. The second shot was John's, but the man jerked back into the shop.

"Run!" John said, and fired another shot at the doorway of the shop. "I'll keep him pinned."

She was reaching in the tote for her pistol, but at his command she took off at a dead run, knowing any delay could hinder him. Ahead of her, people were scattering away from the mouth of the alley, screaming and rushing for cover.

She reached the end and whirled around the wall, flattening herself against it and peeking around. John was working his way back, firing carefully timed shots that chipped large chunks of brick off the building. When he was near he wheeled and grabbed her wrist and they ran down the street, dodging through confused and alarmed pedestrians.

"Do we head for the dinghy?" she gasped, setting into stride.

"Not until we shake them. I don't want that boat identified."

Meaning the boat wasn't just a place for them to crash. It had classified stuff on board; maybe the boat itself was classified.

As they ran she pulled the tote bag off her shoulder and dug in the bottom of it for her pistol.

"What are you doing?" he asked, taking a look behind them. "Right!"

She wheeled right. "Putting the pistol where I can get to it without having to dig," she growled, jamming the weapon under her waistband in back as he had done and pulling her T-shirt out to cover it.

A shout followed them. Unfortunately, the streets were still crowded with tourists, and heads turned to follow them as they ran and dodged. All anyone chasing had to do was follow the ripple of disturbance.

"Left," John said, and they turned left as smoothly as if they were joined at the hip. "Right." They took the next right. If they could get people looking in different directions it might create enough momentary confusion for them to gain some ground and slip away.

They dodged onto a small side street, bright with flowers growing in boxes and in pots set on narrow stoops; the doors were gaily painted, and children wrung the last moments of sunshine from the day. John increased his speed; they had to get off that street fast, before any kids got hurt.

They turned right, down an alley so narrow sunlight never penetrated it; they had to run single file. The street ahead of them was purple with shadows, alive with people. Lights were winking on.

Someone barreled into John as soon as he emerged from the alley and they went crashing to the ground. For a split second Niema thought it was an accident, then arms grabbed her from behind and she reacted automatically, driving her elbow back into a gut that wasn't as hard as it could have been. The guy whooshed out his breath in a violent explosion. She ducked out of his hold, whirled, and poked him in the little notch beside his eye. She didn't have the proper angle, back to front, but he went

down anyway, writhing on the ground and vomiting.

John grabbed her wrist and yanked her into a run. She looked back and saw her assailant lying unmoving on the ground. The man who had tackled John was kind of half sitting, half lying against the wall. He wasn't moving either.

"Don't look," John still towed her by the wrist, so fast her feet barely touched ground. "Just run."

Her stomach turned over. "I didn't mean-"

"He did," he said briefly.

They dodged down yet another street and found themselves in a part of town where the streets seemed to branch off each other like tangled spaghetti. Ahead of them a trio of men cut across an intersection, weapons drawn. One of the men spotted them and pointed. John pulled her down the nearest bisecting street.

"How many of them are there?" she panted.

"A lot." He sounded grim. He angled back toward where they had seen the three men, hoping to come out behind them. They ran up a narrow, picturesque street, with flower boxes in the windows and old women selling a few wares on their doorsteps, from tatted lace shawls to homemade potpourri. One woman shrieked at the gun in John's hand as he and Niema ran by. A sharp angle took them to the left, and a dead end. Niema whirled and started back, but John caught her arm and pulled her toward him.

She heard what he heard. The street behind them slowly fell silent as the old women grabbed up their wares and vanished into their houses. The sounds of traffic came from a distance, but here there was nothing.

Louis Ronsard strolled into view, a slight smile on his sculpted lips and a Glock-17 in his hand. The big pistol was leveled at Niema's head.

John immediately moved at a right angle away from her. The gun didn't waver from her head. "Stop right there," Ronsard said, and John obeyed.

"My friends," he said lightly, "you left without saying good-bye."

"Good-bye," John said, without expression. He made no move with the weapon in his hand, not with that big 9mm locked dead center on Niema's forehead.

"Drop your weapon," Ronsard said to John. His dark blue eyes were arctic. John obeyed, letting the pistol drop to the street. "You abused my hospitality. If the guard hadn't surprised you, you would have gotten away with it. I never would have known you got into my computer. You did, didn't you? Otherwise you wouldn't have been leaving my office at that time, you would still have been in there working."

John shrugged. There was no point denying it. "I got what I went after. I copied everything; I know what you know."

"To what point, my friend? Blackmail? Or did you want exclusive access to the RDX-a?"

It was Temple who answered. As Niema watched, John's face altered ever so slightly, his eyes taking on a flat quality. "Whoever has the compound will make a lot of money in a very short time. Plus ... I have some uses for it."

"You could have bought whatever amount you needed."

"And you would make the money."

"So that's what this is all about? Just money?"

"It's always about money."

'And her?" Ronsard indicated Niema. "I assume she's your partner."

"I don't have partners."

"Then she is . . . ?"

"She isn't involved in this. Let her go," John said softly.

In a heartbeat Ronsard had the gun off Niema and on John, his finger already on the trigger. "Don't play me for a fool," he said, his voice low and deadly.

Niema slipped her right hand up behind her back and gripped the pistol tucked in her waistband. Ronsard caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and started to turn, but she already had the pistol out and leveled at his head.

"Perhaps," she murmured in her best Medina imitation, "you should be asking me the questions. Drop the pistol."

"I don't think so," Ronsard said, still holding his weapon on John. "Are you willing to risk your lover's life? He wasn't willing to risk yours."

She shrugged, as if it didn't matter. "Just move over there beside him."

Both men froze. John seemed to have stopped breathing, his face going white. Ronsard stared at her in astonishment, then began laughing mirthlessly. Niema didn't dare take her eyes off Ronsard, but she was almost paralyzed herself by the risk she was taking. With John's history, a wife he had killed rather than let her betray two men, for another lover to betray him would be devastating, so devastating that not even his superhuman control could hold. His reaction was crucial, because Ronsard had to believe it.

"My apologies, Monsieur Temple," Ronsard said to John. "It appears we were both used."

"Sorry, darling." She gave John an insincere smile. "I have the disk. While you were sleeping last night, I sort of confiscated it." He knew that was a lie. Not only had she not left the bed last night except to visit the head, getting the disk didn't mean anything now that the information had already been sent to Langley.

She looked back at Ronsard, to keep his attention on her instead of on John. "I would introduce myself, but it's better if I don't. I'd like to put a proposition to you, Louis-one that would benefit both of us."

"In what way?"

She smiled again. "The CIA is very interested in ... reaching an agreement with you. We don't want to put you out of business. You could be very valuable to us, and vice versa. You have access to a lot of very interesting information-and we're willing to pay you well for it."

"So would other governments," he said, his eyes still cold.

Niema kept an eye on John as well as Ronsard, willing him not to spoil the setup. "Not as much as we can. And there's an added bonus."

"Such as?"

“A heart."

The softly spoken words fell into a silence that seemed complete. John started, then halted himself. Ronsard's face twisted with hatred. "You dare," he whispered. "You dare bargain with my daughter's life?"

"I'm offering the services of the United States government in finding a heart for her. Those are services you can't match, no matter how much money you have. Even a new heart might not save her, but at least she'll have a chance to hold on until other cures can be found."

He hung there, a father's anguish on his face. "Done," he said roughly, no haggling, no jockeying for position. His love for Laure was genuine and absolute. He would do anything, even sell his soul to the devil, to save her. Working with the CIA was nothing in comparison. He lowered his weapon and nodded toward John. "What about him?"

"Mr. Temple?" Niema shrugged as she lowered her own weapon. It was a risk, but one she felt she had to take to make this agreement work. "He's ... a bonus, so to speak. I wasn't expecting to have his aid in the job, but since he was there, and so good at it, I let him do it." She had to keep John's cover, she thought. His identity as Joseph Temple couldn't be questioned.

John bent down and scooped up his pistol. Niema couldn't read his expression. His face was still pale, his eyes as dead as she had ever seen them. He started toward Ronsard.

"Temple!" she said sharply, just as a sound drew her attention to the right.

Two of Ronsard's men came around the corner. Their gazes locked immediately on John; he was the prime target of their hunt. They saw the pistol in his hand, saw him moving toward Ronsard. Niema knew, in a nanosecond of stark vision, what was going to happen. She saw their weapons train on him. He was momentarily too focused on Ronsard to react as quickly as he normally would have.

She didn't hear herself scream, a hoarse sound of rage and terror. She didn't know she was moving, didn't feel her hand holding the pistol as it began to rise. All she could hear was her heartbeat, slow and ponderous, as if it pumped molasses instead of blood. All she knew was-not again. She couldn't watch him die. She couldn't.

There was a distant roar. A blue haze of gun smoke. The stench of cordite burning her nostrils. The buck of the weapon in her hand as she fired, and kept firing. A crushing force hit her, knocked her down. She tried to stagger to her feet, but her legs wouldn't work. She fired again.

Someone else was shooting, she thought. There was a deeper roar . . . wasn't there? John. Yes, John was shooting. Good. He was still alive. . . .

The lights seemed to go out, though maybe not. She wasn't certain. There was a lot of formless noise that gradually reshaped itself into words. Something was tugging at her, and it hurt worse than anything she'd ever felt in her life, pain so sharp and all-consuming she almost couldn't breathe.

"-damn you, don't you die on me," John was raging as he tore at her clothes. "Do you hear? Don't you god damn die on me."

John rarely swore, she thought, fighting through the pain; he must be really upset. What on earth had happened?

She was hurt. She remembered now, remembered that crushing blow that knocked her down. Something had hit her.

Shot. She'd been shot. So this was what it felt like. It was worse than she had ever imagined.

"Don't die," John was snarling as he pressed down hard on her side.

She wet her lips, and managed to say, "I might not, if you'll hurry and get help."

His head jerked around and he stared at her. His pupils were pinpoints of shock, his face white and strained. "Just hold on," he said roughly. "I'll stop the bleeding." He looked beyond her, and his expression was savage. "You'd better use all the influence you have and get the best doctors in Europe, Ronsard," he said in a low, guttural tone, "because if she dies, I'll fillet you into fish bait."

Washington, D.C., three weeks later

Niema carefully got out of bed and made her way over to the lone chair in the hospital room. Her legs were steadier, she was walking more every day now, though "more" in this case meant a few minutes longer, not any great distance. She had come to hate that bed, though, and was spending as much time as she could in the chair. Sitting in a chair made her feel less like an invalid.

The last IV drip had come out that morning. She was scheduled to be dismissed from the hospital the next day. She would complete her recovery at home; Frank Vinay had visited and said it had been arranged for her to have help at home until she was strong enough to manage by herself again.

Being home again would be nice, she thought. Excitement was one thing, but a woman needed peace and quiet when she was recovering from a gunshot wound. Too much of the past three weeks was a blur, at best, or a huge blank forever lost from her memory. She vaguely remembered being in intensive care in some hospital in France. Louis Ronsard might have been there. He had held her hand once, she thought.

Then she had been flown from France to the States, back to D.C., and brought here. She didn't remember the flight at all, but the nurses told her that was what had happened. She had gone to sleep in France and woke up in D.C. That was enough to disorient anyone.

Every time she surfaced it had been to incredible pain, but she had stopped taking any painkiller a week ago, when she was moved out of intensive care into a regular room. The first couple of days had been rough, but after that every day had been easier.

The last time she'd seen John was when she'd been lying in that narrow, dead-end street in Nice. He'd had to disappear, of course. He couldn't hang around, either as Joseph Temple or John Medina. She hadn't asked Mr. Vinay about him, either. John would either show up, or he wouldn't.

Only a small lamp was on in the room; after the bright lights of intensive care shining on her day and night, she wanted only dim lights now. She turned on the radio to an instrumental station and turned the volume low. Easing back in the chair, she closed her eyes and let her mind drift with the music.

She didn't hear any strange noise or feel a draft from the door opening, but slowly she became aware of John's presence. She opened her eyes and smiled at him, not at all surprised to find him standing in the shadows across the room.

"Finally," she said, holding out her hand to him.

He came to her so silently he might have been drifting on smoke, his gaze moving hungrily over her, darkening with pain as he catalogued each pound she had lost. He cupped her face, rubbing his thumb over her bloodless cheek as he bent down and lightly pressed his mouth to hers. She put her hand on the back of his neck, something in her easing as she felt him warm and vital under her touch.

"I couldn't stay away any longer," he said in a low, rough' tone. "Frank kept me informed, but I-it wasn't the same as being here."

"I understood." She tried to stroke away the new lines that bracketed his mouth.

"When you go home tomorrow, I'll be there."

"Someone is staying with me-"

"I know. I'm the someone." He crouched down in front of her and folded her hand in his.

"Good. You can help me get back on my feet. The physical therapists here won't let me do as much as I need to be doing."

"If you think I'm going to do anything more than let you sleep and eat, you're way off base."

"Really? I thought you'd have incentive to get me up to my fighting weight again."

"Why's that?"

"So you can show me the rest of your tricks." She grinned at him. "I can't wait. I've been lying here for the past week wondering what they are."

The tension in his face relaxed as a smile touched his mouth. "It'll be a while before you're in shape for any of that."

"Depends on how fast you get me into shape, doesn't it?"

"We're going to take it nice and easy. A ruptured liver isn't something you get over in a day or two."

She was also missing part of her spleen, and the bullet had shattered two ribs. On the other hand, John was still alive, and that was the most important thing. He'd have been shot down in front of her if she hadn't drawn their attention.

"What were you doing?" she asked, drawing back and frowning at him as she was finally able to ask the question that had been nagging at her since she'd regained consciousness. "Why were you going for Ronsard like that?"

"The bastard held a gun to your head," he said simply. "And I lost control. I do that a lot where you're concerned."

"This can't keep happening."

"I'll try to do better." The tone was dry now-very dry.

"The deal I made with Ronsard-I haven't talked to Mr. Vinay about it. Will it hold?"

"Hold? They're ecstatic."

"The whole thing seemed like a good idea at the time. All he wants is money to take care of Laure; he doesn't care where it comes from or how he gets it." She paused. "Can you find her a heart?"

"We're trying. The odds are against it, but we're trying." He sighed. "And if we find her a heart, that means a healthier child somewhere won't have that chance."

"With the information Ronsard can provide, a lot of other lives will be saved, though."

They were both silent, the ethical considerations weighing heavy on each side of the argument. Where one stood, she suspected, depended on whether or not one's child was involved. She understood Ronsard's single-minded devotion to his daughter; someone else whose child was waiting on a heart wouldn't be at all understanding.

She put her hands on the arms of the chair and slowly pushed herself to a standing position. John stood also, his face anxious, his hands outstretched to catch her as if she were a toddler taking her first steps. She grinned up at him. "I'm not that fragile."

"You are to me," he said, and remembered terror swept over his face. "Damn you, no more heroics, do you hear me?"

"Leave them to you, is that it?" He took a deep breath.

"Yeah. Leave them to me."

"I can't." She put her arms around him, resting her head on his chest. "Heroes are few and far between. When you find one, you gotta take care of him." How fortunate she had been, she thought, to have loved and been loved by two such men as Dallas and John-extraordinary men by any standard.

Slowly his hands stroked up her back, his touch light so he wouldn't accidentally hurt her. "That's exactly what I was thinking."

Niema turned her lips against his chest, breathing in the hot male scent of his skin. She had lost the thread of conversation as soon as he touched her. "What's that?"

"When you find a hero, you gotta take care of her." He tilted her chin up with his hand. "Partners?"

A slow, delighted grin spread over her face, dispelling the aura of fragility. "Partners," she said, and they shook hands on the deal.

THE END

Dying To Please

Chapter 1

THE CEILING FAN STOPPED.

Sarah Stevens was so accustomed to the slight whirring noise of the fan that the lack of it immediately awakened her. She cracked open one eye and peered at her digital clock, but there weren't any bright red numerals shining back at her. She blinked in sleepy confusion, then realized what was wrong.

The electricity had gone off. Oh, great.

She rolled over onto her back, listening. The night was quiet; there was no rumble of thunder to signal a violent spring storm in the vicinity, which would have explained the loss of power. She didn't close the curtains at night, since her rooms faced the back where the grounds had privacy fencing, and through her bedroom windows she could see the faint gleam of starlight. Not only was it not raining, the sky wasn't even cloudy.

Maybe a transformer had blown. Or an auto accident might have taken down a utility pole. Any number of things could have caused the power outage.

Sighing, she sat up and reached for the flashlight she kept on the bedside table. Regardless of why the electricity was off, her job was to minimize the effect it would have on Judge Roberts, make certain he wouldn't be inconvenienced more than necessary. He didn't have any appointments in the morning, but the old dear was fussy about what time he had breakfast. Not that he'd be cranky about it, but any change in his routine upset him more now than it had even a year before. He was eighty-five; he deserved to have breakfast when he wanted it.

She picked up the receiver of the telephone; it was a land line, so the loss of power wouldn't affect it. Cordless phones were great, until the electricity went off. In addition to this one, Sarah had made certain a few strategically placed phones in the main house were land lines.

No dial tone buzzed in her ear.

Puzzled, and growing slightly worried, she got out of bed. Her two rooms were over the garage, with her combined living room and kitchen area facing the front, while her bedroom and bath faced the back. She didn't switch on the flashlight; this was her home, and she didn't need guidance to make her way to the other room. She parted the curtains covering the front windows and looked out.

None of the strategically placed lights on the Judge's manicured lawn were lit, but to the right, the soft glow of the neighbor's security lights threw long, dense shadows across the lawn.

The electricity wasn't off, then. A breaker could have kicked, but that would have affected only part of the house, or the grounds, but not both. She stood very still, logic and intuition combining: (A) The electricity was off. (B) The phone lines were out. (C) The next-door neighbor had electricity. The conclusion she reached didn't require much of a leap: someone had cut the lines, and the only reason for doing so would be to break into the house.

Cat-silent in her bare feet, she ran back to the bedroom and got her nine-millimeter automatic from the bedside table. Her cell phone, damn it, was in her SW, which was parked under the portico in back. She raced for the door, only briefly consideringdetouring to get the phone from her vehicle; her first priority was to protect the Judge. She had to get to him, make certain he was safe. He'd had a couple of credible death threats made against him during his last year on the bench, and though he had always passed them off as nothing, Sarah couldn't afford to be so cavalier.

Her quarters connected to the house via a staircase, with doors at both top and bottom; she had to switch on the flashlight as she went down the stairs so she wouldn't miss a step and fall, but as soon as she reached the bottom, she turned off the light. She paused for a moment to let her eyes readjust to the darkness, and as she did she listened, straining her ears for any sound that didn't belong. Nothing. Silently she turned the knob and opened the door in increments, an inch at the time, every nerve in her body alert. No strange sounds greeted her, so she stepped forward.

She was standing in a short hall; to her left was the door to the garage. Silently she tried the knob, and found it still locked. One door down was the laundry room; then directly across the hall was the kitchen. The battery-operated wall clock in the kitchen ticked monotonously, very loud now without the hum of the refrigerator to mask the sound. She eased into the kitchen, the glazed ceramic tile cold beneath her feet. Skirting the huge cooking island, she paused again before entering the breakfast room. There was more light here, because of the big bay window that looked out into the rose garden, but that meant she was more likely to be seen if any intruder was watching. Her pajamas were a pale blue cotton, as visible as white. She would be an easy target.

That was a chance she'd have to take.

Her heart slammed against her rib cage, and she took a slow, deep breath to calm herself, trying to control the adrenaline rushing through her system. She couldn't let herself get sucked under by the whirlpool of excitement; she had to ride it, keep her mind cool and disengaged, remember her training. She took another deep breath and eased forward, minimizing her exposure by hugging the wall as closely as she could get without actually brushing against it. Slow and easy, she thought. One step at a time, placing her bare feet carefully so she was always balanced, she worked her way around the room and to the door that opened into the back hall. She paused again, listening.

Silence.

No. A muffled sound, so slight she wasn't sure she'd heard anything at all. She waited, breathing halted, eyes deliberately unfocused so her peripheral vision could detect any movement. The hall was empty, but after a moment the sound came again, slightly louder, from . . . the sunroom?

Two formal parlors, and the dining room, were on the front side of the house; the kitchen, breakfast room, library, and sunroom were all on the back. The sunroom was a corner room, with two walls composed mostly of windows, and two pairs of sliding French doors opened onto the patio. If she had been planning to break into the house, Sarah thought, she would have picked the sunroom as the best entry point. Evidently some else had, too.

She sidled into the hall, paused half a heartbeat, then took two swift steps that carried her to the side of the huge, hundred-year old buffet that was now used to store table linens. She went to one knee on the thick carpet, concealed by the bulk of the buffet, just as someone came out of the library.

He was dressed in dark clothes and carrying something big and bulky. The computer terminal, she thought, but the hall was too dark to be certain. He carried his burden into the sunroom, and she heard more of those muffled sounds, rather like the scuff of shoes on carpet.

Her heart was thudding, but all the same she felt a little relieved. The intruder was obviously a thief, rather than a criminal bent on revenge against the Judge. That wasn't to say they weren't in danger; the thief might be violent, but his movements so far were those of someone bent on stealing what he could and sneaking away. He was organized and methodical, witness the disabled electrical and phone lines. He had probably cut the power in order to disarm the alarm system, then cut the phone lines as an added precaution.

The question was, what should she do?

She was very aware of the weapon in her hand, but the situation didn't call for lethal force. She would shoot if necessary to save the Judge's life, or her own, but she wasn't about to shoot someone over some electronic equipment. That did not, however, mean she was inclined to let him get away.

It was also possible he was armed. Burglars as a rule didn't carry weapons, because if luck wasn't with them, the jail sentence for armed robbery was so much stiffer than for a simple robbery. Just because most burglars weren't armed, though, didn't mean she could afford to assume this one wasn't.

He was big; from what she'd been able to tell in the dark hall, he was around six feet tall, and burly. She could probably handle him in a face-to-face situation-unless he was armed, and then all the training in the world wouldn't stop a bullet. There was a big difference, her father had told her, between being confident and being cocky; cocky would get you killed. The best thing to do would be take him by surprise, from behind, rather than risk getting shot.

A whisper of sound warned her, and she held still as he moved into the hallway, reversing his path from the sunroom to the library. Now would be a good time to make her move, catch him when he came back out with his arms full of stolen goods. She placed her flashlight on the floor, then transferred the pistol to her left hand and silently began rising from her crouch.

Another man came out of the sunroom.

Sarah froze, her head exposed above the edge of the buffet. Her heart kicked sickeningly hard, almost taking her breath. A11 the guy had to do was look in her direction; her face, pale and distinct in the darkness, would be clearly visible.

He didn't pause as he stealthily followed the first man into the library.

She sank back against the wall, shaking with relief. She took several deep, quiet breaths, holding each a few seconds to calm her racing heart. That had been entirely too close; another second and she would have been standing, fully revealed.

There being two men instead of just one definitely put a different spin on things. Her risk was now doubled, and her chance of success halved. Slipping outside to her SW and calling 911 on the cell phone was beginning to look like the best option, assuming she could get there undetected. The biggest problem for her was leaving the Judge unprotected. He didn't hear well; they could be in his room before he knew it; he wouldn't have a chance to hide. The old dear was valiant enough to fight any intruder, which would at the least get him hurt, and at the worst, killed.

Her job was to prevent that from happening. She couldn't if she was outside talking on the phone.

Her nerves gave one quiver, then settled down. She'd made her decision; now she had to forget everything else but her training.

There were scuffing sounds from the library and a faint grunt. Despite her tension, she began smiling. If they were trying to hoist the fifty-five-inch television, both of them would have more than they could handle and their hands would be occupied. Maybe there wouldn't be a better time to take them than right now.

She stood and stepped silently to the library, putting her back against the wall beside the door and daring a lightning-fast peek inside. One of the thieves had a penlight clamped in his teeth, allowing her to see that they were indeed wrestling with the behemoth television. Bless their hearts, they had also ruined their own night vision, making it difficult for them to see her.

She waited, and after a few more grunts and a whispered curse, one of the thieves began backing out of the library, using both hands to grip one side of the television while the other man held the opposite side. She could almost hear their bones creaking under the weight, and thanks to the thin beam of the penlight as it shone straight into the first man's sweaty face, she could see the strain in his expression.

Piece of cake.

Sarah smiled. As soon as the first thief was clear of the doorway, she stuck out her bare foot and caught his left ankle, flipping it upward. He gave a startled yelp and crashed to his back in the hallway. The huge television slammed sideways against the doorframe, then toppled forward. The man on the floor yelled in alarm, the sound changing abruptly to a high-pitched scream as the television crashed down on his pelvis and legs.

His partner tried to catch his balance, his arms flailing. The penlight dropped out of his mouth, and in the abrupt darkness he said, "Fuck!" as he pitched forward. Sarah helped him along, pivoting and landing a punch to his temple. The punch lacked her full force, as he was already going down, but it was enough to sting her knuckles and send him sprawling bonelessly across the bulk of the television, which elicited even more screams from underneath. The unconscious man slowly slid to one side, crumpled and limp; a blow to the temple usually had that effect.

"Sarah? What's going on? Why is the power off?" The Judge's voice came from the top of the back stairs, rising over the yells of the man pinned under the television.

Accurately judging that neither man was going anywhere in the next few minutes, Sarah went to the bottom of the steps. "Two men broke into the house," she said; between the Judge's partial deafness and the yowls of pain, she had to yell to make certain he heard her. "I have it handled. Stay there until I get the flashlight." The last thing she needed was to have him tumble down the stairs in the darkness, trying to come to her aid.

She retrieved the flashlight from the floor beside the buffet, then returned to the stairs to light the Judge's journey down, which he made with a speed that belied his eighty-five years. "Burglars? Have you called the police?"

"Not yet. They cut the phone lines, and I haven't had a chance to get my cell phone from my truck."

He reached the bottom of the steps and peered to the right, in the direction of all the racket. Obligingly, Sarah turned her flashlight on the scene, and after a second he chuckled. "If you'll give me that pistol, I believe I can keep these two under control while you make that call."

She handed him the pistol, butt first, then stripped the phone cord from the hall phone and bent over the unconscious thief. He was the big one, and she grunted with the effort it took to roll him over. Quickly she pulled his arms behind him, wrapped the phone cord around his wrists, then bent one leg backward and secured his wrists to his ankle. Unless he was extremely agile hopping on one foot-and with a concussion, no less-he wasn't going anywhere, regardless of whether or not there was a pistol trained on him; neither was the guy pinned under the television.

"I'll be right back," she said to the Judge, and handed him the flashlight.

Gentleman to the core, he tried to return it to her. "No, you'll need the light."

"The truck lights will come on when I hit the remote to unlock it; that's all the light I'll need." She looked around. "One of them had a penlight, but he dropped it and I don't know where it went." She paused. "I don't think I'd want to touch it, anyway; he was holding it in his mouth."

He chuckled again. "I wouldn't, either." In the reflected glow of the flashlight, she could see the sparkle of his eyes, even through his eyeglasses. Why, he was enjoying this! Come to think of it, retirement couldn't be nearly as interesting as sitting on a federal bench. He must have been thirsting for adventure, or at least a little drama, and here it had landed neatly in his lap. He'd be relating the details of this to his cronies for the next month.

She left him to the job of guarding the two thieves and retraced her steps through the breakfast room and kitchen. Her keys were in her bag, so she held carefully to the stair rail as she made her way upstairs in almost total darkness. Thank goodness she had left the door at the top open; the pale rectangle gave her a sense of orientation. Once in her quarters, she detoured to the tiny kitchen area and retrieved another flashlight from a cabinet drawer, then hurried to her bedroom and got the keys.

Thanks to the flashlight, her trip down the stairs was much faster than going up. She unlocked the back door and hit the "un lock" button on her remote even as she stepped outside. The front and rear lights on her four-wheel-drive TrailBlazer came on, as did the interior lights. She crossed swiftly to it, the flagstones cold and rough on her bare feet; darn it, she hadn't thought to put on a pair of shoes while she was upstairs.

Sliding into the driver's seat, she grabbed the tiny cell phone from the cup holder where she kept it and pressed the "on" button, waiting impatiently as it cycled through its program, then pressing the numbers with her thumb as she gingerly retraced her steps over the flagstones and went back into the house.

"Nine-one-one." The answering voice was female, calm, and almost bored.

"There's a robbery at Twenty-seven-thirteen Briarwood Road," she said, and started to explain the situation, but the 911 operator interrupted.

"Where are you calling from?"

"At the same address. I'm on the cell phone because they cut the phone lines." She skirted the kitchen island and entered the breakfast room.

"You're in the house?"

"Yes. There are two men-"

"Are they still in the house?"

"Yes."

"Are they armed?"

"I don't know. I didn't see any weapons, but they cut the power line to the house, too, so I couldn't really tell in the dark if they were armed or not."

"Ma'am, if you can, get out of the house. I have patrol units en route to the location and they should arrive in a few minutes, but you should get out of the house now."

"Send an ambulance, too," Sarah said, ignoring the operator's advice as she entered the hall and added the beam of her flashlight to that of the Judge's, playing it over the two men on the floor. She doubted either of them was capable of leaving under his own steam. The cries of the one under the television had subsided into mingled moans and curses. The one she'd punched in the temple hadn't moved at all.

"An ambulance?"

"A big television fell on one of the men, and may have broken his legs. The other man is unconscious."

"A television fell on them?"

"Just one of them," Sarah said, strictly honest. She was beginning to enjoy the phone call. "It's a fifty-five-incher, so it's really heavy. Both of them were trying to carry it out when one guy tripped and the television fell on him. The other guy landed on top."

"And the man the television fell on is unconscious?"

"No, he's conscious. The other one is the one who's out of it."

"Why is he unconscious?"

"I hit him on the head."

Judge Roberts glanced around and grinned at her, and managed to give her a thumbs-up with the hand holding the flashlight.

"So both men are incapacitated?"

"Yes." As she spoke, the unconscious one moved his head a little and groaned. "I think he's coming around. He just moved."

"Ma'am-"

"I have him tied up with phone cord," she said.

There was a tiny pause. "I'm going to repeat what you said to make sure I have it straight. One man was unconscious, but now he's coming around, and you have him tied up with phone cord."

"That's correct."

"The other man is pinned by a fifty-five-inch television, and may have broken legs."

"Correct."

"Cool," Sarah heard someone in the background say.

The 911 operator remained professional. "I have medics and two ambulances en route. Is anyone else injured?"

"No."

"Do you have any weapons?"

"One, a pistol."

"You have a pistol?"

"Judge Roberts has the pistol."

"Please tell him to put the pistol away, ma'am."

"Yes, of course." No sane police officer wanted to walk into a dark house when someone inside was holding a pistol. She relayed the message to Judge Roberts, who briefly looked mutinous, then sighed and put the pistol in a drawer of the buffet. Considering the condition of the two thieves, holding a gun on them wasn't necessary, even if it did appeal to his macho instinct.

"The pistol has been put away in a drawer," Sarah reported.

"Thank you, ma'am. The patrol units will be there momentarily. They will want to secure the weapon, so please cooperate."

"No problem. I'm going to the door now to wait for them." Leaving Judge Roberts to watch their captives, she went into the front hallway and opened one of the nine-foot-tall double doors as two Mountain Brook black-and-whites with flashing roof lights pulled into the curving drive and stopped in front of the wide steps. "They're here," she reported to the emergency operator, stepping out so the officers could see her. Powerful flashlight beams played over her, and she held up one hand to shield her eyes from the glare. "Thank you."

"Glad to be of service, ma'am."

Sarah terminated the call as two uniformed officers approached her, hands on their weapons. From their car radios came a stream of static and staccato messages that she couldn't understand, and the rotating car lights made the manicured lawn look like a weird, deserted disco. To the right, the Cheatwoods' outside floodlights came on as the neighbors checked out the action. Before long, she figured, the entire neighborhood would be awake, though only a few would be crass enough to personally investigate. The rest would use the telephone to garner information.

"There's a pistol in the buffet in the hall," she said, giving the two officers that information up front. They were edgy enough as it was; their weapons weren't out, but each of them had his hand on his gun just in case. "It belongs to me. I don't know whether or not the thieves are armed, but they're both incapacitated. Judge Roberts is watching them."

"What's your name, ma'am?" the stockier of the two asked as he edged inside the open front door, flashlight sweeping from side to side.

"Sarah Stevens. I'm Judge Roberts's butler."

She saw the glance they exchanged-a woman butler? She was used to that reaction, but all the stocky officer asked was, "Judge?"

"Lowell Roberts, retired federal judge."

He muttered something into the radio on his shoulder as Sarah led them through the dark entry, past the sweeping front staircase, and into the back hallway. Their flashlight beams played over the two men on the floor and the tall, thin, white-haired man standing watch at a safe distance.

The thief she had punched was conscious now, but definitely not with the program. He blinked several times and managed to mumble, "Wha' happened?" but no one bothered to answer. The one under the television was alternately sobbing and cursing, pushing at the weight on his legs, but he didn't have any leverage and he'd have been better off wiping his streaming nose; at least that would have accomplished something.

"What happened to that one?" the taller officer asked, shining his flashlight on the face of the one tied up.

"I hit him in the head."

"What with?" he asked, squatting beside the man and conducting a swift but thorough search.

"My fist."

He looked up in surprise, and she shrugged. "Caught him in the temple," she explained, and he nodded. A blow to the temple would addle King Kong. She didn't add that she had trained countless hours to be able to make that blow. If necessary she would elaborate, but until and unless a law enforcement officer asked her specifically about her skills, both she and her employer preferred to keep the bodyguard portion of her duties private.

The search produced a knife with a six-inch blade, secured in a sheath strapped to the man's ankle.

"They were carrying things out through there," she said, pointing to the sunroom door. "There are sliding glass doors and a patio outside."

In the distance came the shriek of sirens-many sirens-signaling the arrival of an entire fleet of policemen and medical personnel. Very shortly the house was going to be swarming with people, and she still had work to do.

"I'm going to sit over there out of the way," she said, pointing to the stairs.

The cop nodded, and Sarah took a seat on the fourth step, her bare feet tucked safely under her. First and foremost she needed to get power restored to the house, then phone service, though they could make do with cellular service. The burglar alarm had a battery reserve, so she had to assume the thieves had also done some damage there, or at least been smart enough to bypass it. Either way, the security people needed to check out everything. Probably the sliding glass doors would need to be replaced, too, but that could wait until morning.

With her list prioritized and firmly in mind and cell phone in hand, Sarah dialed Alabama Power to report a disruption in service. A good butler memorized all such pertinent numbers, and Sarah was a very good butler.

Chapter 2

IT WAS AFTER TWO IN THE MORNING WHEN THE RADIO alerted him to the call on Briarwood. Thompson Cahill was on his way home, but the call sounded a lot more interesting than anything he had waiting for him there, so he turned his pickup truck around and headed back up Highway 280. The patrol officers hadn't called for an investigator, but what the hell, the call sounded like fun and he could use a little amusement in his life.

He left 280 and got on Cherokee Road; at this time of morning there wasn't any traffic to speak of as he snaked his way through the quiet streets, so in just a few minutes he was on Briarwood. The address wasn't hard to find: it was the house with all the vehicles with flashing lights parked in front of it. That's why he was an investigator; he could figure out things like that. Duh.

He clipped his badge to his belt and got his sport jacket from the hook behind the seat, slipping it on over his faded black T-shirt. There was a tie in the pocket of the jacket; he left it there, since he didn't have a dress shirt to pull on over the T-shirt. He'd have to go for the Miami Vice look this time.

The usual assortment of uniforms were milling around: cops, firemen, medics, ambulance attendants. The windows in all the neighboring houses were ablaze with lights, and occupied by onlookers, but only a few had been curious enough to leave their houses and gather in the street. After all, this was Briarwood Road, and Briarwood meant old money.

The shift supervisor, George Plenty, greeted him. 'What are you doing here, Doc?"

"Good morning to you, too. I was on my way home and heard the call. It sounded like fun, so here I am. What happened?"

George hid a grin. The general public had no idea how much fun police work was. Parts of it, the parts that could drive a cop to drink, were grim and dangerous, but a lot of it was just damn funny. Plain and simple, people were nuts.

"The two guys were smart; cut the power and phone lines, and disabled the alarm system. Seems they thought only one old man lived here, so they figured he'd never even wake up. Turns out, though, he has a butler. The smart guys were busy carrying out a big-screen television when she tripped the one in the lead. He fell, the television fell on him, and for good measure she sucker punched the other one in the head as he was going down and knocked him cold. Then she tied him up with telephone cord." George chuckled. "He's come around, but he still isn't making a lot of sense."

"'She'?" Cahill asked, not certain George had his pronouns straight.

"She."

"A female butler?"

"So they say."

Cahill snorted. "yeah, right." The old guy might have a woman living with him, but he doubted she was his butler.

"That's their story and they're sticking to it." George looked around. "Since you're here, why don't you give the guys a hand with the statements, get this thing wrapped up."

"Sure."

He ambled into the huge house. Battery-powered lights had been set up in the hallway ahead, the spill of light-and the congestion of people-leading him to the scene. Automatically he sniffed the air; it was habit, a cop checking for alcohol or weed. What was it about the houses of rich people? They smelled different, as if the wood that framed the walls was different from the ordinary wood used to build ordinary houses. He detected fresh flowers, furniture polish, a faint, lingering odor of dinner-something Italian-but neither alcohol nor smoke of any kind, legal or illegal.

He reached the hallway and stood to the side for a minute, studying the scene. A team of medics was crouched around a guy on the floor; the carcass of a huge, broken television lay nearby. The guy on the floor was moaning and carrying on as they immobilized his left leg. Another man, a big dude, was sitting on the floor with his hands cuffed behind him. He was answering questions asked by a medic shining a light in his eyes, but it was evident the little birdies were still circling his head.

A tall, skinny old man with a shock of disordered white hair was standing to the left, out of the way, calmly giving a statement to an officer. He wore his dignity like a cloak, despite the fact that he was in a robe and pajamas, with slippers on his feet. He kept an eye on the proceedings even while he was answering questions, as if he wanted to make certain everything was handled correctly.

To the right was a flight of stairs, and on the fourth step from the bottom sat a woman in light cotton pajamas, talking on a cell phone. Her feet were bare and pressed closely together, perfectly aligned; her thick dark hair was tousled, as if she had just gotten out of bed. Well, she probably had. In another example of astute detective work, he deduced that she was the live-in, otherwise why would she be in pajamas? Damn, he was sharp tonight.

Even in pajamas, no makeup, hair a mess, she was a good-looking woman. No, better than just good-looking. She was downright fine-from what he could see maybe an eight, and that was without makeup. Money might not buy happiness, but it sure did buy old geezers some prime pussy, assuming he could still do anything other than reminisce.

The familiar anger bit at Cahill; he had lived, slept, and eaten with that anger for over two years now, and he was well aware he wasn't being fair to this woman. Finding out his wife was a lying, cheating bitch, then being dragged through a long, bitter divorce was enough to sour any man. He pushed the anger aside, though, to concentrate on the job. That was one thing he'd managed to do: the job.

He approached one of the patrol officers-Wilkins, fairly young, fairly new, and damn good, but then he had to be good to land a job with the Mountain Brook P.D. Wilkins was standing guard over the burly guy with the handcuffs and the concussion, watching as the medic checked him.

"Need a hand taking statements?"

Wilkins looked around, a little surprised to see him. In that split second of inattention the guy on the floor lunged forward, knocking down the medic and surging to his feet with surprising agility. Wilkins whirled, quick as a cat, but Cahill was quicker. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman on the stairs kind of flow to her feet as he pivoted on the ball of his left foot and planted his size eleven right boot square in the guy's solar plexus. He put just enough power in it to double the big guy over, gagging and gasping for breath. Wilkins was on the perp before he could hit the floor, and two other officers came up to help. Seeing they had him controlled-after all, he couldn't breathe yet-Cahill stepped back and glanced at the medic, who was wiping a bloody nose as he climbed to his feet. "Guess he wasn't hurt as bad as he acted."

"Guess not." Taking a pad of gauze from his supplies, the medic held it over his nose, then caught a deep breath. "Do you think he might be now?"

"He's just winded. I didn't kick him that hard." A full-power kick to the chest could stop the heart, crush the sternum, do all sorts of internal damage. He'd been careful not to even crack the guy's ribs.

Wilkins stood up, panting. "Do you still want to do some paperwork, Cahill?"

Paperwork was the bane of a cop's life; it was a measure of how bored Cahill was that he said, "Sure."

Wilkins nodded to the woman, who had resumed her seat on the stairs and her conversation on the cell phone. "Take her statement while we get Rambo here into a unit."

"Be glad to," Cahill murmured, and he meant it. The way she had moved when the robber tried to get away had piqued his interest. She hadn't screamed, hadn't scrambled to get out of the way; instead she had moved smoothly, totally balanced, her attention focused on the robber. If he himself hadn't stopped the guy, Cahill thought, she would have-or at least tried-which brought up a lot of questions he wanted to ask.

He approached the stairs, the glare of the battery-operated lights behind him and the stark light full on her face. She continued talking on the cell phone, her expression calm and focused, though she held up one finger at his approach to tell him she'd be finished in a moment.

He was a cop; he wasn't used to people telling him to wait. Faint irritation flashed through him, then instantly morphed into amusement. God, maybe he was an arrogant shithead, as his ex-wife had been fond of telling him. Besides, even if this woman was an old man's arm decoration, she was definitely easy on the eyes.

Because looking at her was so easy, he did, automatically cataloging the details: dark hair, not quite shoulder length, and dark eyes. If he were taking down a description of her, he'd have to say "brown" and "brown," but that didn't come close to the actual color. The lights glinted on her hair, making it look like dark, rich chocolate-and her eyes were darker.

He pegged her age at late twenties, early thirties. Height . . . fivefive, maybe five-six. He was tempted to give her another couple of inches but realized it was her almost military posture that gave the impression of her being taller than she actually was. Weight between one-twenty and one-thirty. Her skin was smooth and flawless, with a creamy texture that made him think of licking an ice-cream cone.

She ended the call and extended her hand to him. "Thank you for waiting. I had waded through the phone company's computerized multiple-choice menu and didn't want to start over. I'm Sarah Stevens."

"Detective Cahill." Her hand felt small and cool in his, but her grip was surprisingly strong. "Could you walk me through what happened here tonight?" Her accent wasn't southern; it wasn't anything that he could nail down. Yeah, that was it: it wasn't anything. She didn't have any kind of accent.

'I'd be glad to." She indicated the stairs. "Would you like to sit down?"

He sure would, but then he'd be rubbing shoulders with her, and that wasn't a good idea while he was on the job. His thoughts since first seeing her had been way out of line, and that wasn't good. His mental brakes went on, and he pulled back from the edge, forcing himself to concentrate on the job. "No, thanks, I'11 stand." He took his notebook from the pocket of his jacket and flipped to an empty page. "How do you spell your name?"

"Sarah with an h, Stevens with a v."

"Are you the one who discovered the break-in?"

"Yes, I am."

"Do you know approximately what time it was?"

"No, my bedside clock is electric, but I estimate it has been about thirty minutes since I woke."

'What woke you? Did you hear a noise?"

"No. My quarters are over the garage; I can't hear anything from there. When they cut the power line, my ceiling fan stopped. That's what woke me."

"Then what happened?"

Sarah related the course of events as concisely as possible, though she was acutely aware of her thin pajamas and bare feet. She wished she had taken the time to put on a robe and slippers, or pull a brush through her hair. Or maybe even do a full makeup job and slip into a negligee, spray herself with perfume, and hang an "I'm available" sign around her neck. Then she could take Detective Cahill to her quarters and sit on the side of the bed while she gave him her statement.

She smiled inwardly at her own silliness, but her heartbeat had started racing at the sight of him and was still tripping along at too fast a pace. Through whatever quirk of chemistry or biology, or maybe a combination of the two, she felt an instant physical attraction to him. It happened occasionally-this sudden little buzz that made her remember what made the world go 'round-though not for a while, and never before this strongly. She enjoyed the private thrill; it was like riding a roller coaster without having to leave the ground.

She glanced at his left hand. It was bare, though that didn't necessarily mean he was single, or uninvolved. Men who looked like he did were seldom totally unattached. Not that he was handsome; his face was kind of rough, his beard was about eight hours past being a five-o'clock shadow, and his dark hair was too short. But he was one of those men who somehow seemed more male than the other men around him, almost as if he had testosterone oozing from his pores, and women definitely noticed that. Plus his body looked totally ripped; the jacket he wore over his black T-shirt disguised that somewhat, but she had grown up around men who made it a point to be in top physical condition, and she knew the way they moved and carried themselves. Unfortunately, he also looked as if his face would break if he smiled. She could appreciate his body, but from what she could see, his personality sucked.

'What's your relationship with Judge Roberts?" he asked, his tone so neutral as to border on uninterested. He glanced up at her, his face delineated by harsh shadows that made it impossible to read his expression.

"He's my employer."

'What do you do?"

"I'm a butler."

"A butler." He said it as if he'd never before heard the word.

"I manage the household," she explained.

"And that involves . . . ?"

"A lot, such as overseeing the rest of the staff; scheduling repairs and services; some cooking; making certain his clothes are clean and his shoes shined, his car serviced and washed regularly, bills are paid, and in general that he isn't bothered by anything that he doesn't want to bother him."

"Other staff?"

"No one full-time. I count as staff the cleaning service, two women who come in twice a week; the gardener, who works three days a week; his office temp, who comes in once a week; and the cook-Monday through Friday, lunch and dinner."

"I see." He consulted his notes, as if rechecking a detail. "Does being a butler also require you to study martial arts?"

Ah. She wondered what had given her away. She had noticed, of course, that beautifully judged kick with which he had taken down the big burglar and known immediately that he did his own share of training.

"No," she said mildly.

"It's an interest you pursue on your own time?"

"Not exactly."

"Can you be more specific?"

"I'm also a trained bodyguard." She kept her voice soft, so it wouldn't carry. "The Judge doesn't like it broadcast, but he's received some death threats in the past and his family insisted he have someone trained in personal security."

He had been totally professional before, but now he looked at her with frank interest, and a little surprise. "Have any of those threats been recent?"

"No. I honestly don't think he's in active danger. I've been with him for almost three years, and in that time he hasn't received any new threats. But when he was on the bench, several people did threaten to kill him, and his daughter in particular was uneasy about his safety."

He glanced at his notes again. "So that wasn't exactly a lucky punch you threw, was it?"

She smiled faintly. "I hope not. Just as your kick wasn't just luck."

"What discipline do you practice?"

"Karate, mainly, to stay in shape."

"What degree?"

"Brown."

He gave a brief nod. "Anything else? You said 'mainly.' "

"I do kick-boxing, too. How does this pertain to the investigation?"

"It doesn't. I was just curious." He closed the little notebook. "And there isn't an investigation; I was getting a preliminary statement. It all goes in the report."

'Why isn't there an investigation?" she asked indignantly.

"They were caught in the act, with Judge Roberts's property loaded in their pickup. There's nothing to investigate. All that's left to do is the paperwork."

For him, maybe; she still had to deal with the insurance company and getting the sliding glass doors in the sunroom repaired, not to mention replacing the broken television. The Judge, typical man, had loved his big screen and had already mentioned that he was thinking about getting a high-definition television this time.

"Does the fact that I'm also the Judge's bodyguard have to go in the report?" she asked.

He had been about to move away; he paused, looking down at her. 'Why?"

She lowered her voice even more. "The Judge prefers his friends don't know. I think it embarrasses him that his kids nagged him into hiring a bodyquard. As it is, he's the envy of his crowd because he has a female butler; you can imagine the jokes they make. Plus, if there is any sort of threat to him, it gives me an edge if no one knows I'm trained to guard him."

He tapped the notebook against his palm, his expression still unreadable, but then he shrugged and said, "It isn't relevant to the case. As I said, I was just curious."

He might never smile, but she did; she gave him a big, relieved one. "Thank you."

He nodded and walked away, and Sarah sighed in regret. The packaging was fine, but the contents were blah.

The morning was beyond hectic. Getting any more sleep was impossible, of course, but getting anything accomplished was equally so. Without electricity she couldn't prepare the Judge's preferred breakfast, cinnamon French toast, or do laundry or even iron his morning newspaper so the ink didn't rub off on his fingers. She served him cold cereal, fat-free yogurt, and fresh fruit, which made him grumble about healthy food being the death of him. Nor was there hot coffee, which made them both very unhappy.

An enterprising idea sent her next door to the Cheatwoods' house, where she made a trade with the cook, Martha: the inside skinny on the night's happenings for a thermos of fresh coffee. Armed with caffeine, she returned home and calmed the troubled waters. After her own second cup, she was ready to tackle the day's problems again.

She didn't mind making a pest of herself, if she got the desired results. Two more phone calls to the power company produced a repair truck and a lanky man who without haste set to work. Half an hour later, the house hummed to life and he moseyed away.

Harassing the phone company was more trouble; they-the unknown "they" in charge-had so arranged things that either one could leave a voice mail message, forgoing the comfort of speaking to a real human in favor of saving time, or one could tolerate being put on hold for an obscene amount of time waiting for said real human to become available for haranguing. Sarah was stubborn; her cell phone weighed only a few ounces, and she had unlimited minutes. She waited; but eventually her persistence was rewarded, right before noon, by another repair truck bearing that most precious of human beings, Someone Who Could Fix Things.

Of course, as soon as the phone line was restored, the phone began ringing off the hook. All of the Judge's friends had heard about the night's adventure and they wanted a blow-by-blow description. Some busybody called the Judge's oldest son, Randall, who called his two siblings, Jon and Barbara. The Judge didn't mind so much his sons knowing, but he wrinkled his nose in dismay when the Caller ID flashed his daughter's number. Not only did Barbara worry excessively about her father, but she had by far the most forceful personality of his three children. In Sarah's opinion, Barbara was more forceful than an armored tank. For all that, Sarah really liked the woman; Barbara was good-hearted and good-tempered, just relentless.

The insurance agent arrived while the Judge was still talking to his daughter, so Sarah showed him the damage and was in the process of giving him the pertinent information for filing the claim-she even had the Judge's receipt for the purchase of the television, which impressed the hell out of the insurance agent-when Judge Roberts came wandering into Sarah's tiny office, looking pleased with himself.

"Guess who called," he said.

"Barbara," Sarah said.

"After that. The call beeped in, thank God, or I'd still be talking to her. Some television reporter wants to come out and do a feature on us."

"Us?" Sarah asked blankly.

"You, mostly."

She stared at him, startled. 'Why?"

"Because you foiled a robbery, you're a young woman, and you're a butler. He wants to know all about butlering. He said it would be a wonderful human-interest piece. Silly phrase, isn't it? 'Human interest.' As if monkeys or giraffes would be remotely interested."

"That's wonderful," said the insurance agent enthusiastically. 'Which station is it?"

The Judge pursed his lips. "I forget," he said after a moment. "Does it matter? But they'll be here tomorrow morning at eight."

Sarah hid her dismay. Her daily routine would be totally destroyed for the second day in a row. The Judge, however, was clearly excited about the prospect of his butler being interviewed. He and his friends were all retired, so they had no outlets for their natural competitiveness other than themselves. They played poker and chess, they swapped tall tales, and they tried to one-up each other. This would be a major coup for him. And even if it wasn't, she could scarcely refuse; as much as she adored him, she never forgot he was her employer.

"I'll be ready," she said, already mentally reshuffling her day so everything would be as perfect as she could make it.

Chapter 3

HE ALWAYS WATCHED ONE OF THE LOCAL STATIONS IN THE mornings, while he drank his hot tea and read the financial section of the Birmingham News. He liked to keep abreast of community happenings and politics so he could discuss them with his associates. He was actually very interested in what happened in and around Birmingham. This was his home; he had a vested interest in how the area fared.

Mountain Brook was faring very well, indeed. He took immense pride in the fact that the small town just south of Birmingham had one of the highest per capita income levels in the nation. Part of the reason for that was all the doctors who lived there and practiced in and around Birmingham, which had morphed from a steel city into an important medical center, with a disproportionate number of hospitals for its population. People came from all over the country, indeed, from all over the world, to be treated in Birmingham hospitals.

But it wasn't just doctors who lived in Mountain Brook. Professional people of all trades made their homes here. There was old money and there was new money. There were small starter houses, for young couples who wanted to live in Mountain Brook for the prestige and also for the school system for their children. There were mansions, and there were massive estates that made visitors gawk as they drove past.

His own home was his pride and joy, a three-story beauty fashioned of gray stone, lovingly furnished and maintained. It was eighteen thousand square feet, with six bedrooms and eight and a half baths. The four fireplaces were real, the marble was Italian, the two-inch-thick Berber carpeting the best money could buy. The pool was landscaped so it resembled a lovely grotto, with subtle underwater lighting and silver water trickling over stones before gently falling into the pool.

Five acres of land surrounded his home; five acres was a lot in Mountain Brook, with its astronomical land values. His property was completely walled in by a ten-foot gray stone wall. Huge wrought-iron gates guarded the entrance to his domain, and he was protected by the best security system available: motion sensors, cameras, and heat detectors, as well as the standard contact and breaking-glass alarms.

If he wanted to greet the world, he went to it; the world was not allowed to come to him.

A lawn service tended the grounds, and a pool service kept the pool sparkling. He employed a cook who came in at three P.M. and prepared dinner for him, then promptly left. He preferred to be alone in the mornings, with his tea and newspaper, and an English muffin. Muffins were civilized food, unlike the messy bacon, eggs, and biscuits so many people here seemed to prefer. Pop a muffin into the toaster and there was no mess afterward to be cleaned up, nor anyone required to prepare it for him.

All in all, he was very pleased with his world. He always got an extra measure of satisfaction from the secret knowledge of how he had acquired all this. If he had simply let things run their course, none of this would belong to him; but he had been insightful enough to realize that, left unchecked, his father would have made bad decision after bad decision until nothing of the business was left. He had had no choice but to intervene. His mother had grieved at first, but ultimately she had been better off; she had lived in cushioned comfort until heart disease ended her life seven years later.

It was extremely comforting to know that one could do what one must. The only limits he recognized were those he imposed on himself.

The television was background noise while he perused the newspaper. He had the ability to concentrate on several things at once; if anything interesting was reported, he would notice. Every morning the station did a fluff piece, which he usually ignored, but occasionally there was something marginally original on, so he was always aware of what was being said.

"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a butler?" droned the morning anchor's smooth voice. "you don't have to be royalty. In fact, there's a butler employed at a home in Mountain Brook, and the butler is . . . a woman. Meet Super Butler, coming up next, after these messages."

His attention caught, he looked up. A butler? Well, that was . . . interesting. He had never considered live-in staff because such intrusions into his privacy were intolerable, but the idea of a female butler was intriguing. People would be certain to be talking about this, so he needed to watch the segment.

The commercials over, the anchor began the lead-in, and the screen changed to a shot of a large, Tudor-style home with lush grounds and an elaborate flower garden. The next shot was of a dark-haired young woman, trim in black trousers, white shirt, and a close-fitting black vest, ironing a . . . newspaper? "Her name is Sarah Stevens," said the reporter, "and her day is not your average workday."

"The heat sets the ink, so it doesn't smudge your fingers or dirty your clothes," she explained in a brisk, low-pitched voice as she smoothed the iron over the paper, sparing a brief glance for the reporter.

He straightened as if stung, his gaze unblinking as he stared at the screen. Sarah. Her name was Sarah. It was as perfect as she was, classic instead of flashy or trendy.

Her eyes were very dark, her skin pale and smooth. Her sleek dark hair was pulled back from her face and secured in a neat roll at the back of her neck. Electrified, he couldn't take his eyes from the televised image. She was . . . perfect. He had seldom seen such perfection in his life, and when he did, he made it a point to acquire it. For all the darkness of her hair and eyes, she wasn't Hispanic or any other ethnic group he could recognize. She was simply a little exotic; not flashy, not voluptuous, just . . . perfect.

His heart was beating fast, and he had to swallow the saliva that pooled in his mouth. She was so neat and trim, her movements brisk and economical. He doubted anything as inane as a giggle had ever passed her lips.

The next shot was of her employer, a tall, thin, elderly man with white hair, glasses, and a narrow, lively face dominated by a large hooked nose. "I couldn't function without her," he said cheerfully. "Sarah handles all the household details. No matter what happens, she has it under control."

"She certainly had things under control earlier this week when there was a break-in here at the home," the reporter continued. "By herself, Sarah thwarted the robbery by tripping one of the thieves as they carried out a big-screen television."

The shot returned to her. "The television was very heavy, and they were off-balance," she said with simple modesty.

Chills of excitement ran down his back as he watched and listened, waiting for her to speak again. He wanted to hear more of her voice. The next shot was of her opening the back door of an S-Class Mercedes for her elderly employer, then going around to slide under the steering wheel.

"She is also a trained driver," the reporter intoned, "and has taken several defensive-driving courses."

"She takes care of me," said the old man, smiling from ear to ear. "She even cooks occasionally."

Back to her. "My job is to make my employer's life as comfort able as possible," she explained. "If he wants his newspaper at a certain time, then I'll have it there for him even if I have to get up at three A.M. and drive somewhere to collect it."

He had never envied anyone before in his life, but he envied that old man. Why should he have someone like her looking after him? He would be better off with a live-in nurse named Bruce, or Helga. How could he possibly appreciate the treasure of her, the sheer perfection?

Back to the reporter. "Being a butler is a highly specialized vocation, and there are very few women who enter the field. Topflight butlers train at a school in England, and they don't come cheap. To Judge Lowell Roberts in Mountain Brook, though, price doesn't matter."

"She's a member of the family," said the old man, and the final shot was of Sarah setting down a silver tray loaded with a coffee service.

She should be here, he thought violently. She should be serving him.

He remembered the old man's name: Lowell Roberts. So price didn't matter? Well. They would see. He would have her, one way or another.

Judge Roberts slapped his knees with satisfaction. "That was a good piece, don't you think?"

"It was less painful that I feared," Sarah said dryly as she cleared away his breakfast things. "They certainly took a long time to film about sixty seconds worth of story."

"Oh, you know how television is: they shoot miles of film, then edit most of it. At least they didn't get any details wrong. When I was on the bench, whenever I gave a statement or an interview, there was always at least one detail that was reported wrong."

'Will this give you bragging rights at your poker game?"

He looked a little embarrassed, but gleeful all the same. "For at least a couple of weeks," he confessed.

She had to smile. "Then it was worth it."

He turned off the VCR, because of course he had taped the segment. "I'll get copies of this made for the kids," he said.

Sarah glanced up. "I can make copies, if you'd like. My VCR is a twin-head."

"Don't start speaking technical jargon to me," he warned, waving a hand as he ejected the cassette. "Twin-head sounds like something teams of surgeons would have to correct, and one head would die in the attempt. I think I have a blank in the library-"

"I have plenty of blanks." She always kept a supply, just in case he needed one.

He slipped the cassette into the cardboard jacket and carefully wrote, "Sarah's television interview," on the adhesive strip before handing the tape to her.

"I'll get them in the mail today. And don't forget your doctor's appointment at two this afternoon."

He briefly looked mutinous. "I don't see why I need a blood test again. I've been eating better, and my cholesterol should be down."

He had been eating better than he knew; when making his French toast, Sarah substituted Egg-beaters for the eggs in the egg-and-milk mixture, spiced up a little with vanilla flavoring, and she used low-fat, high-fiber bread. She also bought two types of syrup-one was regular, the other fat-free-and mixed just enough of the regular syrup with the fat-free that the taste of the blend didn't make him suspicious. He had agreed to eat a bacon substitute if he could just have his French toast, and she also served him fresh fruit every morning. In collaboration with the cook, she had managed to drastically reduce the amount of fat in his meals without his suspecting a thing.

Of course, he would credit any drop in his cholesterol level to eating the bacon substitute instead of real bacon, and resist any other changes if he knew about them. Outsmarting him was a constant, ongoing struggle.

"Two o'clock," she said again. "And if you cancel the appointment, I'll tell Barbara."

He put his hands on his hips. "Do your parents know what a bully they raised?"

"Of course," she said smugly. "My dad gave me lessons in bullying. I rated expert."

"I knew I shouldn't have hired you," he muttered as he retreated to the safety of his library. "As soon as I saw on your application that you're from a military family, I knew you'd be trouble."

Actually, it was her military family that had tipped his decision in her favor. The Judge was a former Marine; he had fought in the Pacific during World War II. The fact that her father was a retired Marine colonel, forced to leave the service because a car accident had severely damaged his right hip and leg, had weighed heavily with him.

She sighed. While she was making copies of the tape, she would have to make one for her parents, too. They were living in a posh retirement village in Florida, and they would love being able to show this to all their friends. She had no doubt her sister and two brothers would receive copies from their mother; then she would get a phone call from at least one brother, probably both, telling her about this buddy who wanted to go out with her.

The good part of that was that she was in Alabama, while one brother was currently in California and the other was TDY- temporary duty-in Texas. Dating anyone they knew was geographically impossible. But she was thirty years old, and they were all beginning to visibly worry because she hadn't yet shown any inclination to get married and help produce the next generation. Sarah shook her head, smiling to herself. She hoped she would get married, someday, but for now she was working on her Plan.

A butler was well paid; a good butler was very well paid. A butler-bodyguard earned well over a hundred thousand a year. Her own salary was pushing a hundred and thirty thousand. Her living expenses were negligible; she bought her SW and her clothes, but that was it. Every year she salted away the vast majority of her salary in stocks and bonds, and though the stock market was down right now, she sat tight on her investments. By the time she was ready to put her Plan into effect, the market would be back up.

She would never leave the Judge, but, realistically, she knew he would live only a few more years. All the signs were there: she could get his cholesterol level down, but he had already had one severe heart attack, and his cardiologist, an old friend, was concerned. He was more visibly frail than he had been even six months ago. Though his mind remained sharp, this winter had seen one illness after another, each one taking a toll on his body. He would have maybe two more good years, she thought as tears stung her eyes, unless he had another heart attack.

But after the Judge was gone, Sarah wanted to take a year and travel the world. As a military brat, moving every two years or so, she had developed a real yen to see everything that was out there. Not being a masochist, she wanted to do it in comfort. She wanted to fly first class and stay in good hotels. With a healthy bank account and her investments as a cushion, she could go where she wanted whenever the mood took her. If she wanted to spend a month in Tahiti, she could.

It was a simple ambition, a yearlong treat in the middle of a lifetime of work. She liked her career, she wanted to get married someday and have one child, maybe two, but first she wanted that year just for herself. Since college she had resisted forming any romantic relationships of any depth, because in the back of her mind she was always aware that no man would like his girlfriend, fiancee, or wife heading off to wander the earth for a year-without him.

Her father didn't understand it. Her brothers certainly didn't understand it, because they were constantly being posted TDY all over the world. Her sister thought she was crazy for not getting married while she was still young and had her looks. Only her mother, she thought, understood her youngest child's wanderlust.

But the timing of her Plan depended on Judge Roberts, because for as long as he was alive, she intended to take care of him.

Chapter 4

HER FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME OVER, All THE STATEMENTS made and papers signed, Sarah gladly returned to her normal routine. She enjoyed the daily challenges of being in charge of a large home. She didn't have a large staff to oversee, but the house itself was an entity, in constant need of replenishing and small repairs, and she had to be on her toes to spot small problems before they developed into something major.

By the middle of the week, the phone calls from all the Judge's neighbors, friends, and family had dwindled, which was good because Wednesday was her day off. Wednesday was usually the slowest day of the week, the day in which very little happened; on Monday and Tuesday she handled the things that had cropped up over the weekend, and on Thursday and Friday she did whatever was necessary for any weekend plans the Judge had. In addition to Wednesday, she had half a day off on either Saturday or Sunday, depending on the Judge's schedule. She made herself very flexible to adjust to his needs, but in turn he was always mindful of her time off.

On her own time she dated occasionally-very occasionally, since she didn't intend to let a relationship develop beyond the casual-she shopped and did "girl things," as her brothers had always termed it, and she trained.

She had installed a set of free weights in the basement and hung a punching bag, and she managed to work out for at least half an hour every day, plus do a half-hour run. Some days she was pushed to do that much, but if she had to get up earlier than usual to get it done, she did. She considered staying in top shape part of her job, but she also loved the way she felt, toned and springy and full of energy.

In addition to karate and kick-boxing, she also studied judo and archery, and spent an hour every week at a local shooting range. She was good, but she wanted to be better, even if she was in competition only with herself. Okay, she also wanted to be better than her brothers. Daniel and Noel were both ranked expert in marksmanship, as had been their father before them, so if she intended to handle a weapon, she felt honor-bound to uphold the family standards. Whenever the entire family got together, which was usually once a year-at Christmas-she and her father and brothers would find themselves on a shooting range taking some target practice. Whoever won got possession of the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin with the perfectly centered bullet hole in it. Noel had threaded a gold chain through the hole, and if he or Daniel won the year's marksmanship challenge, they were actually crass enough to wear the coin around their necks when they were off duty, and flaunt it whenever possible. As Sarah had loftily informed them, she and her father both had more class than that.

She didn't wear it, but she had it. The coin and chain were in her jewelry box. To her brothers' consternation, she had won it the past two years in a row. Since Daniel was an Army Ranger and Noel was in the Marine Force Recon, they didn't take the competition lightly. Come to think of it, maybe they wouldn't call with a buddy who wanted to meet her after seeing the videotape; they wouldn't like any of their pals learning that their little sister was a better shot than they were.

Sarah was certain that information would somehow slip past her lips in conversation, and neither of her brothers would ever believe it was an accident. Darn.

So on Wednesday, after giving herself a pedicure that morning and painting her toenails a dark iridescent pink, she sallied forth for her usual hour of sparring at a private gym. The guys might not get a thrill getting kicked by a bare foot with iridescent pink toenails, but the sight definitely gave her morning a lift. One could simply kick ass, or one could kick ass with style; she always preferred style.

Afterward, freshly showered and invigorated, she treated herself to lunch at the Summit, did some shopping, then went to an outdoor range for target practice. Only civilians used it; cops had their own range. There was an indoor range, but if you practiced indoors all the time, when you were outside-as she was at Christmas during the matches with the men in her family-then the varying weather and light conditions could throw you.

The day was warm and springlike, though it was only mid-March. The trees were in bloom; the jonquils and forsythia had long since bloomed; lawns were turning green and growing. Here in the sunny south, winter was abbreviated, about half as long as the calendar said it should be. It could get cold, there could be snow and ice, but for the most part, winter only lightly touched the south, just enough for the deciduous trees to lose their leaves and the lawns to turn brown. After about six weeks of such nonsense- usually by the middle or end of January-the jonquils began pushing their green feelers above ground and the trees began to blush with swelling buds. The white Bradford pear trees were now in full bloom, sprinkling lawns and patches of woodland with explosions of color. All in all, this wasn't a bad place to live. Sarah could remember some of her dad's postings where it seemed as if she hadn't taken a coat off for six months. That was an exaggeration, of course, but they had lived through some long, cold winters.

There was a light breeze when she arrived at the range, but the temperature was in the high seventies and the breeze felt good even though she was wearing sandals and a short-sleeved knit top. A cold front was supposed to drop the temperatures tomorrow and trigger a round of thunderstorms during the night in advance of it, but for now the weather was perfect.

She paid her fee and selected her target, then slipped on her ear protectors and went to her bench. The range had been dug out of a slope; any bullets that missed their mark buried themselves in a twenty-foot high clay bank. Bales of hay had been stacked around as a further precaution against any stray shot, though since she had been coming there, she hadn't seen any accidents; people who practiced their marksmanship were generally serious about safety and what they were doing.

She was on her fourth target when someone walked up behind her and stood just behind her shoulder. Intent on what she was doing, she finished, ejected the empty clip, and triggered the target return before turning to her visitor.

A little shock hit her in the center of her chest as she recognized him. She removed her ear protectors. "Detective," she said, then for the life of her couldn't remember his last name. "I'm sorry, but I don't remember your name."

"Cahill."

"That's right. I'm sorry," she said again, and didn't offer an excuse about being distracted that night. She had been-by him more than the night's events and all the phone calls she had been making-but she certainly wasn't going to tell him that.

He was dressed pretty much as he had been then, minus the jacket but in boots and jeans and a T-shirt; today's choice was blue. The clingy knit of the T-shirt clung to broad shoulders, thick biceps, and the hard slabs of his pectorals. She hadn't been wrong in her assessment: the man was ripped, without in any way being muscle-bound.

She was going to have a difficult time looking him in the eye, because her own gaze didn't want to go that far north. From the neck down, he was the definition of eye candy.

The target, on the automatic line, had reached them. He reached out and pulled it from the clip, studied the pattern. "I've been watching you since you got here. You're pretty good."

"Thanks." She began reloading. 'What are you doing here? Cops usually use their own range."

"I'm here with a friend. Today's an off day, so I'm just bumming around."

Oh, dear. She didn't want to know that his day off coincided with hers. He seemed a tad friendlier today, though she had yet to see his face relax into anything close to a smile. She glanced at him in quick assessment. Seen in daylight, his face still looked rough, as if he had been hewn with a chain saw instead of the precision chisel of a sculptor. At least he was freshly shaved, but that more clearly revealed the granite lines of chin and jaw. He definitely wasn't a pretty boy. In fact, there wasn't anything the least boyish about him, pretty or otherwise.

"Are you off every Wednesday?" Damn, she wished she hadn't asked that. She didn't need to know.

"No, I swapped with another investigator. He had something special going on."

Thank you, Lord, she thought. She had never yet called a man for a date, but in his case she might give in to temptation and do it, even though he seemed to have the personality of a rock. She knew she wouldn't like it if a man dated her only for her body, so she didn't intend to let herself be guilty of the same offense.

"You could have shot them."

The growled statement was accompanied by a sudden direct look, and she almost blinked in shock. His eyes were blue, and the expression in them was hard and sharp. Cop's eyes, eyes that missed nothing. He was watching her, studying her reaction. She was so bemused that it took her a minute to realize he was talking about the robbers.

"I could have," she agreed.

'Why didn't you?"

"I didn't think the situation called for lethal force."

"They were both armed with knives."

"I didn't know that, and even if I had, they hadn't threatened the Judge or me; they hadn't even gone upstairs. If the situation had developed into one where I thought our lives were in danger, I would have shot." She paused. "By the way, thank you for not putting anything in the report about my training."

"It wasn't relevant. And I didn't do the report; it wasn't my case."

"Thank you anyway." The reports were a matter of public record; the television reporter would have picked up in a heartbeat on the bodyguard aspect of her employment. But no questions of that type had been asked during the interview, and she and Judge Roberts certainly hadn't brought it up. Being his butler was high-profile enough without the general public knowing she was also a bodyguard. Not only would that knowledge take away her edge, but it would likely attract some of the very attention they both wanted to avoid.

"Your speech," he said, that hard gaze still locked on her face. "Law-enforcement background?"

Was following his conversation always like following a jackrabbit? Still, she knew exactly what he meant. Cops spoke a special language, with certain terms and phrasing, that was similar to the military's. Having grown up a military brat, she still thought of everyone else as civilians, and when she was with them, she automatically adjusted her phrasing to a more informal level. With Detective Cahill, however, she had just as automatically fallen into the old patterns.

She shook her head. "Military."

"You were military?"

"No, my father was. And both my brothers are in service. So if I say anything like 'target acquired,' I picked it up from them."

"What branch?"

"Dad was a Marine, Noel is a Marine, Daniel is Army."

He gave a brief nod. "I was Army."

Not "in the Army," but "was Army." That tiny difference in phrasing seemed to cover a huge difference in attitude. Some guys went in because they wanted the educational opportunity; they did their tours, then they got out. The ones who simply said they were Army were the dedicated ones, the lifers. Detective Cahill was too young though, to have put in his twenty in the military, then attended a law-enforcement academy and worked his way up the ranks to detective.

"How long were you in?"

"Eight years. "

She digested that as she placed another target in the clip and sent it on its way. Eight years. Why had he left the service? She knew he had not been booted out, because he wouldn't be on the Mountain Brook force if he had a dishonorable discharge. Could he have received some injury, as her dad had, that made it too difficult to continue? She glanced at him, at that hard, fit body. Nope, she doubted that was the answer.

She didn't know him well enough to ask, nor was she certain she wanted to get to know him that well. No, she was lying to herself; she definitely wanted to get to know him better, find out if there was any humor at all behind that sourpuss face and cop's eyes; but in this case, she would be better off not knowing. Something about him-and not just his body, though that was mouthwatering-elicited too strong a response from her. It was those darn chemicals, or hormones, or something, but she knew this man could get to her. He could suck her into a relationship, against her better judgment, that would interfere with both her job and her plans.

That said, maybe she was a fool not to go after him. Maybe, sour disposition and all, he was a man she could love. Should she stick to her Plan, or go for the hunk?

Decisions, decisions.

She smothered a private laugh. Here she was going through all these mental gymnastics, and for all she knew, he didn't feel the tiniest scintilla of attraction for her. For all she knew, he was married with five kids.

Just leave it alone, she advised herself. If he was single, and if he was interested enough to make a move, then she would decide what to do.

At peace with that, she slipped her ear protectors into place, and he did the same. Taking the pistol in her left hand, she wrapped her right hand around her wrist to brace it, and calmly, methodically emptied the clip at the target. She was accustomed to a critical audience-namely her father and brothers-so Cahill's presence didn't bother her.

He removed the protectors again as the automatic return sailed the target toward them. "You shot left-handed that time."

God, he noticed everything. "I practice left-handed at least half the time."

"Why?"

"Because I take my job seriously. In a crisis, if my right hand is injured, I should still be able to protect my charge."

He waited until the target reached them, and studied the pattern. She was almost as good with her left hand as she was her right. "You train hard for a threat that you don't really think will materialize."

She shrugged. "I'm not paid to play the percentages; I'm paid to be ready. Period."

"Hey, Doc!"

He shifted his gaze down the line of shooters and lifted a hand in acknowledgment. "I think my buddy's ready to leave."

"'Doc?"' She was startled by the nickname.

"Long story." And one he didn't seem inclined to relate. "Miss Stevens." He nodded at her in good-bye and walked away before she could reply. He joined a husky guy in jeans, T-shirt, and baseball cap, who showed him a sheaf of paper targets, shaking his head in evident disgust. Detective Cahill examined the pistol, deftly reloaded it, then walked to the line and clipped on a new target.

Sarah didn't let herself watch. She had her own practicing to accomplish, so she burned three more clips left-handed, at different distances, before calling it a day. When she looked around, Detective Cahill and his buddy were gone.

Chapter 5

HAVING ESTABLISHED THAT RICK'S NEW PISTOL WAS INDEED a piece of shit, Cahill and his pal went to the gun shop where Rick had bought the pistol. Rick harangued the owner for almost an hour with no results: he had bought the pistol, it was registered in his name, the paperwork had been sent in the day he bought it, so his only recourse was with the manufacturer unless he wanted to resell the pistol to some other unsuspecting fool.

They repaired to a bar and grill for an early supper and some liquid comfort. "Order me a beer, will you?" Rick said, and took off for the bathroom. Cahill slid onto a barstool and placed the orders. He was already sipping his coffee when Rick returned.

"That was a sharp-looking woman you were talking to at the range. " Rick plopped onto the barstool beside him. "You banging her?"

Cahill slowly turned his head and regarded his friend as coolly as if he had never before seen him. 'Who the hell are you, and why the fuck would I care?"

Rick grinned in appreciation. "That was good. Very good. You almost scared me. Mind if I use it sometimes?"

"Feel free."

"So, are you banging her or not?"

"Not."

'Why not? She married or something?"

"Not that I know of."

"Then I repeat: Why not?"

"I haven't tried."

Rick shook his head and reached for his beer. "You gotta get over this, son. So you had a rough divorce; it's over. You're free now and you have to move on to the next flower."

Since Rick was a veteran of two divorces and was now looking for wife number three, Cahill sort of doubted the worth of any advice he gave concerning women. Rick was good at attracting them, but not at keeping them. But because he was also a good friend, Cahill didn't point out any of that. "Give me time," he said mildly.

"Hell, it's been a year!"

"So maybe I need a year and a half. Besides, I date."

Rick snorted. "Yeah, and they go nowhere."

"I don't want them to go anywhere. I just want sex." He stared morosely into his coffee. He definitely wanted sex, but getting it was a problem. The women who offered one-night, no-strings sex weren't the type of women he wanted. Sleaze had never appealed to him. The women who really attracted him were long-term types, and long term was exactly what he didn't need right now.

It wasn't that he hadn't gotten over Shannon; he'd gotten over her the minute he found out she was screwing a doctor from the hospital where she worked. But the divorce had been a bitch, with her fighting for everything she could get, as if she had to punish him for daring to not want her any longer. He didn't understand women, or at least he didn't understand women like Shannon; if she hadn't wanted out, then why screw around? Had she really thought he wouldn't kick her ass out if he found out? He did, he had, and she had reacted with an almost insane sense of vengeance.

He had tried to be fair. That said, he wasn't dumb; the first thing he'd done after finding out about her affair was take out half the money in their joint bank account and open an account in another bank under his name only. He had also removed her name from all his credit card accounts, which wasn't a hardship on her because she had her own credit cards, but damn if she hadn't gone ballistic when she found out. He figured she'd found out when she tried to charge something on one of his cards- after he kicked her out-so he'd made the right call on that.

He'd beat her to the punch in filing for divorce, but she had counterfiled and asked for everything: house, car, furniture, for him to pay all the bills for said house, car, and furniture, even though she made more at her job in hospital administration than he did as a cop, and she wanted alimony.

The attorney Shannon hired was a divorce shark known for his scorched-earth tactics. The only thing that had saved Cahill's ass was a sharp attorney and an even sharper female judge who had seen through Shannon like glass. He had thought he was sunk when he heard the judge was a woman, but his attorney had smiled and said, "This is going to be fun."

Cahill wouldn't classify divorce proceedings as fun, but in his case the results had been a relief. Since no children were involved, the judge had divided everything in direct proportion to their incomes. Neither of them wanted the house, so she ruled it would be sold, the mortgage paid off, and the profits, if any, split between them. Since Shannon made twice what he did, he would get twice as much of the profit as she because she was better able to afford another house. Cahill had glanced at Shannon when that decree came down, and saw her flush with rage and disbelief. Whatever she had expected, that wasn't it. She had begun whispering furiously to her lawyer, causing the judge to bang her gavel and order her to shut up.

Shannon got her car, Cahill got his truck, and they split the household furnishings. He didn't want the bed, because he suspected her doctor had been in it with her. But when he bought another house and moved into it, at least he'd had chairs to sit in, a table to eat at and dishes to use, a television to watch, and a brand new bed to sleep in. After the money from the sale of the house came in, he had systematically gotten rid of everything he and Shannon had owned together. Not a single glass remained from his marriage, not a fork or a towel.

He just wished he could get rid of the bad taste in his mouth as easily as he had gotten rid of their possessions.

The worst aftereffect was that Shannon had made him doubt his own judgment. He had loved her and expected to spend the rest of his life with her. They'd had it all mapped out: though he had a good job with the Mountain Brook Police Department- Mountain Brook officers were the highest paid in the state-after she had received her degree in hospital administration and landed a position with a hefty salary, which she had done with astonishing speed, the plan was for him to quit the force and enter medical school. Looking back, he wondered if Shannon just had a thing for doctors. He had received some medical training in the Army and loved the challenge of it, but after a couple of years on the job in Mountain Brook, he had realized he loved being a cop more than he would ever enjoy being a doctor.

Maybe that was when Shannon had started wandering, when he changed ambitions. Maybe she'd had her heart set on big bucks and glittering social events, and when he didn't come through with either one, she felt free to look for them elsewhere. But he'd thought she loved him, regardless of which object he held in his hand, a scalpel or a gun. Why hadn't he seen that something was missing? And what if he made that kind of mistake again? He had a knack for sizing up suspects immediately, but when it came to figuring out his own wife, forget it. Now he couldn't trust himself not to pick someone else just like Shannon, and be just as blind to it until he was smacked in the face with infidelity.

"You're brooding again," Rick said.

"I'm good at it," Cahill muttered.

"Well, practice does make perfect. Hell, no wonder; you didn't even order yourself a beer. I'd be brooding, too, if I had to stick to coffee. "

"I'll have a beer when we eat. I'm driving, remember?"

"Speaking of eating, I'm hungry." Rick looked around and spotted an empty booth. "Let's move over there and get some food." He grabbed his beer and slid from the barstool. Cahill got his coffee, signaled to the bartender where they were going, and joined Rick in the booth.

'Where did you meet her?" Rick asked.

'Who?"

"~7io?" he mimicked. "The woman at the range. The one with the pistol and the great ass, which, by the way, nearly stopped my heart the way it was packed in those jeans."

"The house where she works was robbed last week. I took her statement. "

"You just met her last week? There's still hope, then. You gonna ask her out?"

"Nope."

'Why the hell not?" Rick demanded, his voice rising. The waitress approached, and he broke off to grab the menu and open it. Cahill ordered a burger, fries, and a beer. After careful deliberation, Rick ordered the same thing. As soon as the waitress left, he leaned over and repeated, 'Why the hell not?"

"God, you're like a broken record," Cahill said irritably.

"Don't you think she's hot?"

He sighed. "Yeah, I think she's hot." In fact, he thought she was hotter than hot; she was scorching. The problem was, he'd already suffered third-degree burns in the relationship wars, and he didn't have any skin to spare in another losing round. Not yet, anyway. He knew that, being human, he would eventually grow enough new skin to risk another flame, but not yet.

'1hen ask her out! All she can say is no."

"She's not a one-nighter."

"So go for two."

"One night is no-strings-attached. Two is a relationship, and that's exactly what I don't want."

"Maybe not, but it's exactly what you need. When you fall off a horse, you get right back on, you don't brood about it. Get on that horse, pal, and ride."

Cahill groaned. "Give it a rest."

"Okay, okay." Rick drew lines in the condensation on his glass, then glanced up at Cahill. "You mind if I ask her out?"

He wanted to bang his head on the table. "Hell, no, I don't mind." He suspected this was where Rick had been heading all along, trying to make certain the way was clear.

"Okay. I just wanted to be sure. What's her name?"

"Sarah Stevens."

"Is she in the book? You have her number?"

"I don't know, and no."

"You didn't get her number? I thought you had to have that for your files, or something."

"She has private quarters in the house where she works. I don't know if she has a private number as well, but she probably does."

"She works in the house? Whose house? Where? What does she do?"

Sometimes talking with Rick was like conversing with a machine gun, the way he spat out questions. "She's a butler, and she works for a retired federal judge."

"I thought you said her name is 'Stevens,' not 'Butler.' "

"Rick. Pay attention. She's a buterler; like in an English mansion. With a napkin folded over her arm, and things like that."

"No shit." Rick sat back, amazed. "I didn't know we had butlers in Alabama. Oh, wait, we're talking about Mountain Brook."

"Right."

"A butler: Is that cool, or what? I didn't know women could be butlers. Wouldn't she be, like, a butleress?"

Despite himself, Cahill grinned. "I don't think so. I don't think butler has a gender, kind of like pilot."

Rick's jackrabbit brain had already moved on. "So I could call her at this old judge's number. What's his name?"

"Lowell Roberts."

"Is his number listed?"

"I don't know, and if it isn't, no, I won't get it out of the files for you."

"Some friend you are. Why the hell not?"

"Because if it's unlisted, then it's because he wants his privacy, and I won't get her in trouble by giving the number to men who call her asking for dates."

"Aha!"

"Aha, what?"

"You are interested in her!"

Cahill stared at him. "Your brain scans," he said, "must be scary." The waitress slid the beers in front of them and he took a fortifying gulp.

"That's what makes me so good with computers, pal; I think outside the box."

"In this case, there's no box."

"The hell there isn't. You think she's hot, and you won't give me her number. The evidence is in, and the prosecution rests."

"You're not harassing me into getting that number for you. Hell, for all I know, it's in the book. You haven't even looked yet."

'What good is having a friend who's a cop if he won't give me inside information?"

"So you can ask him to look at a piece of shit pistol after you've already bought it, and pronounce it a piece of shit."

Rick's quick grin flashed. 'Well, there is that, but don't get me sidetracked. I'm on a roll here. You're attracted to this woman. You went over to talk to her, even though, in your own words, you know she isn't a one-nighter. My friend, you may not realize it yet, but you're on the road to recovery. Before you know it, you'll be smiling at her across the breakfast table."

"I don't smile," Cahill said, though he was having to fight his amusement.

"So you'll be scowling at her across the breakfast table. That isn't my point."

Cahill gave up on convincing Rick of anything. "Okay, you're right; she's so hot I could walk on three legs every time I see her."

"Now you're talkin'."

"I'll break your back and chop off your legs if you call her."

"That's my boy!"

"Now, what's taking so long on those burgers?" He looked around and, right on cue, there came the waitress carrying two plates almost smothered with spicy fries.

Rick stared at him, then mournfully shook his head. '1lou're hopeless, Doc. Hopeless."

"So I've heard."

Sarah arrived back at the house feeling both tired and jazzed after a hard workout with her karate instructor. Judge Roberts was having dinner out, as he usually did on Wednesday so she wouldn't feel any need to check on him, as she would if he was anywhere in the house. She did a quick tour of the house to check that all the windows were closed and the doors locked, then headed upstairs to her quarters.

The Judge had put her mail on the small table beside the door to the stairs. She leafed through it as she climbed the stairs: a Consumer Reports magazine, a couple of catalogs, and a letter.

She placed the mail on her small two-person kitchen table, put a cup of water in the microwave, then went to the bedroom and stripped off her clothes. She had showered after her workout, but her clothes still felt sticky; she sighed in relief as the ceiling fan sent cool air washing over her naked skin. She'd had two hard workouts today, and tonight she was going to pamper herself. A facial was on her agenda, as was a long, relaxing soak in lavender-scented water.

She turned on the water to fill the tub, dumped in a pack of bath salts, then pulled on a robe and returned to the kitchen to dunk a tea bag of Salada green tea in the cup of hot water. While it was steeping, she flipped through the mail-order catalogs, then dumped them in the trash. The first sip of tea was heavenly; sighing, she sat down and opened the letter.

Dear Miss Stevens:

I would like to offer you a position in my household, in the same capacity you now fill. My estate is large and would benefit from your competent management, but I believe the benefit would be mutual. Whatever your salary is now, I will increase it by ten thousand dollars. Please call me with your decision.

Hmm, that was interesting. She wasn't tempted, but it was interesting all the same. She checked the return address; it was a street in Mountain Brook. Judging from the date at the top of the letter, he must have sent it right after seeing the television spot.

Somehow she hadn't expected other offers of employment. It was flattering, but she had no intention of leaving the Judge, no matter how much money was offered.

The offer deserved immediate attention, though, so she picked up the phone and dialed the number on the letter. After two rings an answering machine picked up and a soft masculine recorded voice said, "You've reached 6785. Please leave a message."

Sarah hesitated. She didn't like leaving a message, but people who had answering machines usually intended them to be used. "This is Sarah Stevens. Thank you for your offer of employment, but I'm very happy in my present position and I don't foresee myself leaving. Again, thank you."

She disconnected and picked up her cup of tea, then remembered her bathwater. She hurried to the bathroom to find the water level high and steaming: just right. After turning off the taps, she turned on her Bose CD player, dropped the robe to the floor, and stepped into the water, sighing as she sank down in it to the level of her chin. The hot water went to work on her tired muscles; she could almost feel the tension oozing out of them. The soft strains of the meditation CD filled the bathroom with the sound of slow, relaxing piano and strings. After another sip of tea, she leaned back and closed her eyes, happy and content.

"This is Sarah Stevens. " He stopped the recording, hit replay, and listened again.

"This is Sarah Stevens."

Her voice sounded just as it had on television, low and warm. He had been standing beside the answering machine, listening, while she left the message.

"This is Sarah Stevens."

He couldn't believe she had turned down his offer. Ten thousand dollars! But that proved her loyalty, and loyalty was a precious commodity. She would be just as loyal to him, once he had her in his house.

"This is Sarah Stevens."

He had a talent for changing people's minds, arranging things to his own satisfaction. So she didn't foresee leaving her current position? He'd see about that.

Chapter 6

AS SHE SERVED HIS BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, SARAH told the Judge, "I got a letter yesterday offering me a job. He must have seen the television spot."

For some reason, Judge Roberts was regarding his French toast with definite suspicion. He had put on his glasses and leaned down to peer closely at it. 'What are these red specks?" he demanded.

"Cinnamon. That's how you get cinnamon French toast."

"Humph. The doctor says my cholesterol is down twenty points. Switching to fake bacon wouldn't have brought it down that much, so I know you're doing something to my food."

"What can you do to French toast?" she asked rhetorically.

"Maybe it isn't the French toast. Maybe you're doctoring everything else."

She smiled as she placed a bowl of fresh sliced strawberries in front of him. "I'm not doing anything different," she cheerfully lied.

"Humph," he said again. "Does this scum-sucking bottom-feeder who's trying to hire you away from me know he'd be bringing a tyrant into his home?"

She stifled a laugh. "Scum-sucking bottom-feeder?" He was so old-school she wouldn't have been surprised if he had described someone as "dastardly." Hearing slang from him was almost on a par with the idea of the Supreme Court justices doing a rap song on the steps of the Capitol.

"Grandkids."

"Ah." Barbara's two children were fifteen and nineteen; that explained everything. Sarah amused herself for a moment picturing fifteen-year-old Blair, with her pierced eyebrow, teaching the dignified old judge the top-ten teenage insults.

"Next thing I know, you'll be feeding me tofu," he grumbled, returning to his suspicions about his food. He began eating his French toast, red specks and all.

Since the cook had been feeding him skillfully disguised tofu for several months now, Sarah had to hide a grin.

"What exactly is tofu?"

"Curds and whey, minus the whey. Soy curds, to be specific."

"That sounds revolting." He studied his fake bacon. "My bacon isn't made from tofu, is it?"

"I don't think so. I think it's just fake meat."

'Well, that's all right, then."

She would have kissed him on top of his white head if that hadn't been totally against all her training. He was such a dear, dutifully eating his fake meat while keeping a sharp eye out for encroaching tofu.

'What did you tell the bottom-feeder?"

"I thanked him for his offer, but told him I'm very happy in my present position."

His bright eyes twinkled through the lenses of his glasses. "You said he saw you on television?"

"He must have, unless one of your friends told him my name."

"It wasn't one of them, was it?" he asked suspiciously.

"No, I didn't recognize the name."

"Maybe he's a handsome young man who fell in love as soon as he saw you."

She barely restrained a snort of disbelief. "People who make job offers to someone without knowing her qualifications or getting references are idiots."

"Don't hold back, Sarah; tell me how you really feel."

This time she did laugh, because that line had to have come from Blair, too.

"You should at least interview," he surprised her by saying.

She stopped in her tracks and stared at him. 'Why?"

"Because I'm old and won't be here many more years. This might be a good opportunity for you, and he might offer a higher salary."

"He did, but that doesn't matter. Unless you fire me, I intend to be here as long as you are."

"But more money would help you with your Plan." She had told him of her intentions to take a sabbatical and travel the world, and he had been enthused by the idea, studying the world atlas and researching different countries for things he thought would interest her.

"My Plan is in good shape, and people are more important than plans, anyway."

"Pardon an old man for getting personal, but you're a lovely young woman. What about marriage, a family?"

"I hope to have those, too, just not yet. And if I never get married, I still enjoy my life and I'm pleased with my career choice. I'm happy with myself, which isn't a bad thing."

"No, it isn't. In fact, it's a rare gift." His smile was gentle as he studied her. 'When you do get married-and notice I say when, not if, because one day you'll meet a man who's too smart to let you get away-he should get down on his knees every day and thank God for his good luck."

She wanted to hug him. Instead she smiled and said, "That's a lovely compliment. Thank you. Do you suppose he'd still feel that way if I fed him tofu?"

"He'll know you're doing it for his own good." Despite that gallant reply, he eyed his empty plate again.

"I promise: no tofu in your French toast."

He sighed in relief and began eating his bowl of strawberries, without pressing for a more extensive promise. He was sharp enough that the omission told her he suspected he had already been tofu-contaminated, and was submitting with good grace so long as his beloved French toast was safe.

After lunch she received the half-expected call from one of her brothers. It was Daniel, calling from Texas. "Hey, sweetie. That was a nice piece of tape; showed you to advantage. None of the guys can believe you're my sister, and they all want me to fix them up with you."

"Fat chance," she said, smiling.

"Why not? Some of them, I admit, I wouldn't set up with a two-bit hooker, but a couple are okay guys."

"Have I mentioned how proud I am of my Susan B. Anthony medallion?" she asked sweetly.

"You wouldn't."

"I believe the subject crops up every time I have a date."

"Moving right along here," he said hastily. "In her note with the tape Mom said you stopped a burglary with a fancy punch."

"It wasn't fancy. Straight to the temple."

"Ouch. Way to go, short stuff."

"Thank you." From an Army Ranger, that was high praise. "I was expecting either you or Noel to call, maybe both, when you saw the tape."

"Noel probably hasn't seen it yet. He isn't in-country."

That was enough said. She had grown up in a military family, and she knew what it meant. Noel was Force Recon; he had been in Afghanistan, then back in California, and only God and the Pentagon knew where he was now. Well, Daniel probably knew; he and Noel had their ways of communicating.

'What about you?" she asked.

"I'm still in Texas."

"I know that." She rolled her eyes, exasperated, and knew he'd heard that tone of voice from her often enough to visualize the eye roll.

"I'll be here until the cows come home. I'm getting rusty from lack of use."

When the cows come home was family code for shipping out that day, since the cows came home every afternoon. She didn't bother asking where he was going, not that he would tell her anyway.

"Have you talked to Mom and Dad?"

"Last night. They're doing fine."

Meaning he had also told them he was shipping out. She sighed, rubbing her forehead. Worry had become a permanent fixture in all military families since September 11, but Daniel and Noel were both lifers, and both good at their jobs. Fighting terrorists wasn't like fighting a regular war, with ground lost and gained by foot soldiers. This particular war required the stealth and skill of the special forces, hitting with quick, devastating force and then vanishing.

"Take care, and don't trip over your own big feet. " That was sister code for I love you, and be careful.

"You too, Annie."

Despite her worry, as she hung up she smiled at his reference to her shooting skills. They had mercilessly called her Annie Oakley since the first time she won the competition. She couldn't have had two better brothers, even though when they were growing up, both of them had driven her nuts. She had been the tomboy of the family-their sister, Jennifer, had looked on roughhousing with disdain-and even though Sarah had been much smaller, that hadn't stopped her from inserting herself into their football games, sneaking along on their fishing trips, or wading in with her little fists whenever they tried to bully and tease her. In short, she had been a pest, and they loved her anyway.

She heard the little chime that signaled a door had opened, and glanced at the clock: straight up two o'clock. Right on schedule, the Judge was going out for his afternoon walk. On the way back he would stop at the mailbox and collect the mail; then he would want fresh coffee while he sat in his library and went through the day's haul. He loved mail, even junk mail, and leafed through all the catalogs. Retirement was good for one thing, he said: it gave him time to read things that weren't important.

She put on the coffee and readied the tray. The cook, Leona Barksdale, looked up from the tomato aspic she was making. "Is it that time?"

"On the button." She paused. "He asked about tofu today."

"Then he'll be looking for it, won't he? I'll be creative today, and not serve any. Let's see, dinner will be grilled asparagus, roasted baby potatoes and carrots, and a lamb chop. Nothing there even remotely resembling tofu." Leona checked on the rolls she had baking in the oven. "How was his cholesterol?"

"Down twenty points."

They gave each other satisfied smiles. Working in collusion to sneak healthy meals into someone who resisted the very idea was a lot more fun than feeding such food to someone who actually wanted to eat healthfully.

When she heard the door chime signaling his return, Sarah poured the coffee and filled a small four-cup carafe so he could refill his cup if he liked. Also on the tray was a plate with thin slices of Granny Smith apples, a wonderful fat-free caramel dip, and a few whole-wheat crackers, just in case he was feeling peckish. Before Sarah's arrival, his afternoon snack had often been a chocolate snack cake or a couple of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Getting him to give up the doughnuts had been a battle, and that was one in which she sympathized with him. Giving up Krispy Kreme was truly a hardship.

"Sarah?"

Instead of going into his library, he was coming toward the kitchen. She and Leona exchanged puzzled looks; then she said, "Here, sir," and stepped to the door.

Besides his usual bundle of magazines, catalogs, bills, and letters, he carried a small package. "This came for you."

He usually put her mail, if she had any, on the small table in the hall. "That's odd," she said, picking up the tray. "I haven't ordered anything."

'1here's no return address. I don't like this. It could be a letter bomb."

Several years ago, a judge in the Birmingham area had been killed by a letter bomb; that would make any judge cautious around suspicious packages; the anthrax-laced letters in Florida and then New York and Washington areas hadn't helped.

"Why would anyone send me a letter bomb?" she asked as she carried the tray down the hall, him trailing behind her with his mail and the package.

She set the coffee service on his desk where he liked it, but instead of sitting down, he put his own mail on the desk and stood holding the package, staring dubiously at it. Normally she would never open her mail until she was in her quarters for the night, but she sensed he wouldn't relax until he knew the package didn't contain anything lethal.

"Shall we see?" she asked, reaching for it.

To her surprise, he didn't hand the package to her. "Maybe we should call the bomb squad."

She didn't laugh. If he was that worried, then it wasn't a laughing matter. "If it was a bomb, wouldn't it have gone off when you picked it up?"

"No, because if it was motion sensitive, it would never make it through the mail system. Mail bombs use pressure or friction devices."

"Then let's think this through. Who knows me and would send something to me here?"

'We never should have done that television spot," he said, shaking his head. "It's brought the crazies out."

"First someone trying to hire me, and now someone sending me packages. Should we put it in water?"

Maybe it was that question, and a vision of them dunking the package in the tub and calling out the bomb squad, but he suddenly relaxed and smiled a little. "I'm being paranoid, aren't I? If anyone got a mail bomb, it would be me."

"It pays to be careful these days."

He sighed. "May I open it for you?"

She bit her lip. It was her duty to protect him, not the other way around. But he was of the generation that had been taught men protected women, and she could see this was important to him.

"Please," he said.

She nodded, moved more than she could say. "Yes, of course."

He stepped away from her, took a letter opener, and carefully slit the packing tape that sealed the seams of the small box. She found herself holding her breath as he opened the flaps, but nothing happened.

There was some brown wrapping paper concealing the contents. He pulled out the paper and looked inside, a faintly puzzled expression crossing his face.

'What is it?"

"A jewelry store box."

He set down the package and lifted out a small, flat box, about four inches square. It was white, with the store's name stamped on it in gold. He shook it, but there wasn't any noise.

"I think it's safe to say it definitely isn't a bomb," he said, handing the box to her.

She lifted the lid, and peeled back a thin layer of packed cotton. There, lying on another layer of packed cotton, was a gold teardrop pendant, with small diamonds circling a pigeon blood ruby. The gold chain was secured so it wouldn't rattle.

They both stared at the pendant. It was lovely, but disturbing. Who would send her such an exquisite piece of jewelry?

"That looks expensive."

Judge Roberts assessed it. "I'd place it at a couple of thousand dollars. Just a guess, of course, but the ruby is a good one."

'Who on earth would send me expensive jewelry?" Perplexed, she picked up the brown shipping box and pulled out the bottom layer of paper. A small white card fluttered to the floor.

"Aha." She bent and picked up the card, turning it over to read what had been written on one side. She flipped it and looked again at the other side, but it was blank.

"Does it say who sent it?"

She shook her head. "This gives me the willies."

He could see there was something written on the card. 'What does it say?"

She looked up, her dark eyes plainly revealing how puzzled and disturbed she was, and handed him the card. "It says, 'A small token of my esteem.' But who sent it?"

Chapter 7

IT HAD REAllY BEEN SO EASY, FINDING OUT HER SCHEDULE. He could have hired a private detective to watch the house, but he didn't want to involve a third party who might later make inconvenient connections. He drove down the street several times, looking for a place where he could park and watch; the traffic, while not heavy, was still busy enough that he knew he wouldn't be noticed. The problem was that there wasn't any place where he could park. It was a residential street, with houses on both sides, and people coming and going from those houses throughout the day.

But all it took was time, and perseverance. Over the following days, during his hourly drive-bys, he noted when the gardeners came, and carefully jotted it down in a little notebook he'd bought especially for this; it had a buttery-soft leather cover, much more tasteful than those brightly colored cardboard covers schoolkids seemed to prefer. An older woman, whom he presumed to be the cook, came every day around ten o'clock and left at five. The arrival and departure of a maid service was also carefully noted.

On Wednesday Sarah had left the house in the morning and hadn't returned until early evening; he had tried to follow her, but she cut over to Highway 31 and he lost her in the traffic when he was caught by a red light. Rather than drive around fruitlessly, he stopped at a pay phone and called Judge Roberts's house. The number was unlisted, but he had attained the number soon after seeing Sarah on television. He knew people who knew people, and who were always eager to do favors for him. Really, all he had to do was ask, and within a few hours he had the number.

A woman answered the phone, and he asked for "Sarah," thinking that using her first name would imply a familiarity that wasn't there. Or rather, that wasn't there yet. He felt as if he knew her already, knew her dedication and loyalty and the utter perfection of how she looked, how she acted, even the way she sounded.

"Sarah isn't in today," the woman said cheerfully.

"Oh, that's right Wait-I'm confused. Is today her off day?" He deliberately used a more casual tone and speech pattern than normal.

"Yes, it is."

"Is today Wednesday? I've lost track of the days, I've been thinking all day that it's Thursday."

She laughed. "Sorry, but it's Wednesday."

"Okay, I'll call her tonight, then. Thanks." He hung up before she could ask his name and number, and wrote down the information in tiny, precise letters: WEDNESDAY-DAY OFF.

He felt a thrill of excitement. For his purposes she would have to be away from the house. He thought he already had most of the information he needed, but he would continue watching to be certain. That was the key to success: leave nothing to chance.

He would have liked to have followed her around all day and seen what she did, what interests she had or what hobbies she pursued, but perhaps this was better.

He thought of the way she had looked when she drove out of the driveway, her dark hair loose, classic dark sunglasses shielding her eyes. She gave the impression of being aloof, mysterious, and slightly exotic. She drove her SW with quick competence, as he had known she would; that was another measure of her dedication, that she had taken defensive-driving courses. She had put herself totally at the service of that old man, who had never done anything to deserve such devotion. Why, he hadn't even earned his money, but had inherited it. Which wasn't the same as his own receipt of an inheritance, because he had saved it from his father's stupid decisions. Judge Lowell had never done anything but sit on a bench and dispense opinions as if they were Pez.

His Sarah deserved more than that old man.

She deserved . . . everything.

He wanted to give her a gift, something that would make her think of him every time she saw it. And he wanted it to be something she wore, so he could imagine her wearing it every day, touching it, treasuring it. He couldn't give her clothing; that was too crass. Flowers faded and died, then were discarded.

Jewelry, then. Wasn't that what gentlemen had given their special ladies all through history? Special pieces of jewelry had been imbued with mystery, intrigue, even curses, though of course there wouldn't be anything cursed about his gift. He couldn't even make it as special as he wanted, because there wasn't time for him to have a piece made; he would have to buy something commercially produced, but even with that handicap he would find something out of the ordinary.

He would have to buy it from a store he hadn't patronized before, so there wouldn't be a chance of anyone recognizing him. And paying by check or credit card was out of the question; he didn't want anyone to be able to trace the gift back to him. In time, she would know, but that knowledge was for the two of them alone.

He drove to his bank and withdrew five thousand dollars, and left annoyed because the drive-through teller had asked to see his driver's license. On reflection, though, he decided she had done the correct thing. He hated to be delayed or questioned, but sometimes one had to accept the burdens of society.

From there he went to the Galleria, where he could be certain he would be merely one face among many, even on a weekday. There were several jewelry stores, and he browsed through all of them before making his selection. Sarah needed something simple and classic; she would be as appalled as he by gaudiness, but anything paltry would be an insult.

He finally settled on a teardrop pendant, a lovely ruby surrounded by diamonds, and suspended from a gossamer chain. The combination of ruby and diamonds captured her essence, he thought, exotic warmth surrounded by perfect coolness.

He paid in cash, to the clerk's astonishment. With the square, flat box in his pocket he went into another jewelry store and bought a simple chain, secured in a box much like the one that contained the ruby pendant. That chain was a paltry hundred dollars, but it was the box he wanted, not the contents.

Next he had stopped at an office supply store and bought a small shipping box, filler paper to buffer the contents, and a roll of tape. He even remembered to buy scissors to cut the tape. Ordinarily it would have annoyed him no end to be put to so much trouble, but this time he was patient about all the steps he had to take. After all, this was for Sarah.

Once back in his car, he removed the cheap chain from its box and carefully replaced it with the pendant. There. Now if Sarah called the jewelry store whose name was on the box, she would find that no one there remembered selling a ruby-anddiamond pendant, that in fact they had no such item in stock. He pictured her lying in bed, tenderly touching the pendant around her neck and wondering who had sent her such a lovely gift.

He put the jeweler's box inside the shipping box, dropped in a small note to let her know how special she was, packed in the filler paper, and sealed the box. Too late he realized he hadn't bought a cheap pen for addressing the box. Scowling, he took his gold fountain pen back out of his jacket pocket. What would the rough cardboard do to the nib?

He could go to another store and buy a pen, but his patience was abruptly at an end. Unscrewing the cap from the expensive pen, he quickly printed her name and address on the box, in his irritation digging the nib into the cardboard. If necessary, he would buy another pen, but this box was going in the mail without any further delay.

The post office was busy, and despite the security concerns, the rushed postal clerk didn't notice that there wasn't a return address on the box. Besides, he knew his appearance inspired confidence. Mad bombers never looked distinguished and dignified; hairy and disgusting was more like it, from what he had seen. He was prepared even if the postal clerk had noticed the omission, having thought of a fictitious address, but he would rather the package be a total mystery when she received it.

He had noticed that Judge Roberts walked about the neighborhood every day at the same time and retrieved the mail from the mailbox when he returned home. Driving by at precisely the right time was difficult, and in fact he missed it by a few seconds, and short of stopping in the street to watch, he had to be content with what he could see through his rearview mirror. The old man took out the box and stood holding it in his hands, abruptly staring up and down the street.

The street curved and he lost sight of the old bastard. Damn him, why did he just stand there? What was he doing? Was he jealous that someone had sent a package to Sarah?

That was it. Of course he was jealous. He was old, but it had to stroke his ego to have a woman like her living with him, taking care of him. He probably told all of his cronies that he was sleeping with her.

The thought made him clench his hands in rage, until he was gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. He could almost hear those cronies, cackling and sniggering like filthy-minded teenagers.

He had to free her from all that.

Sarah had placed the box on the kitchen counter, and as she ate dinner, her gaze kept straying to it. The pendant was undeniably lovely, but she didn't want to touch it. A gift was one thing; an anonymous gift was something else entirely. It was somehow . . . ominous, as if someone had sent her a snake in disguise. She thought the Judge was right and the television spot had attracted a weirdo who had fixated on her.

She would certainly never wear the thing. She seldom wore much jewelry anyway, usually just a pair of small gold hoop earrings and her wristwatch. Not only would a lot of jewelry be inappropriate for the job, it wasn't to her personal taste. She didn't like feeling weighted down, and she particularly disliked necklaces.

In addition to that, she had no way of knowing who had sent the pendant. It could have been anyone, someone she would pass in the grocery store or who could be standing beside her in the bookstore. If she only knew who he was, she could avoid him. But, not knowing, if she wore it and he saw her, he might take it as some kind of signal. A signal for what, she didn't want to imagine.

She was trained to spot anyone following her vehicle, and when she was driving the Judge, she was always vigilant. When she was alone was when she was able to relax, and now this bastard had stolen that from her. She would have to be on alert, watchful of everyone who came near her, and she hated that.

But maybe nothing else would happen. Some weirdos backed off when the object of their obsession didn't display the expected reaction. Or, if she spotted someone following her, maybe she wouldn't try to shake him; maybe she would lead him to the pistol range and let him watch her practice. That should cool his ardor.

All things considered, she would have rather he had sent her a death threat; at least she could take that to the police. A diamond-and-ruby pendant and a card saying A small token of my esteem couldn't be considered threatening. Weird, but not threatening. He had broken no laws, and, since he had chosen to remain anonymous, she couldn't even return the gift and tell him to leave her alone.

The jewelry store hadn't been any help. The first thing she'd done was call the store whose name was printed on the box. No one there had any recollection of selling the piece of jewelry; none of them remembered even having a pendant of that description. She thanked them and hung up, frustrated. He must have had an empty jewelry box lying around and put the pendant in it. That was a dead end; there were a lot of jewelry stores in the Birmingham area, plus pawn shops, where he could have bought it. He could have bought it anywhere. Tuscaloosa was just half an hour down Interstate 59; Montgomery was only about an hour away; even Atlanta could be reached in a couple of hours. Those were just the major towns; small towns had jewelry stores, too.

So there was nothing she could do, no way of finding this guy unless he walked up to her and asked why she wasn't wearing his present. She didn't know if she wanted that to happen, even if it would give her a chance to tell him to leave her alone. Since she was dealing with a weirdo, she didn't know what to do. Who knew what would trigger him to greater weirdness?

She didn't consider herself a martial arts expert, but she was better able to take care of herself, and protect her employer, than most people. She was in good physical condition; she was an excellent shot and a pretty good driver. That said, she didn't want to have to use those particular skills. She wanted to run the Judge's household and take care of him, period. But martial arts were useful only to a certain degree, and she was human enough to feel uneasy, even a little frightened, about this development. One episode, without any threat attached, did not mean she was being stalked, but now her mind was open to the possibility and it was all she could think about.

Damn him, for stealing her peace of mind.

There was nothing she could do, other than take precautions and be on guard, and she hated that helplessness more than anything else. She wanted to do something, but what? By nature and training, she was geared to go on the offensive, and in this case all her options were defensive.

There was nothing she could do but play with the hand dealt to her, no matter how she disliked it. She had the skills to handle this; she just had to be on her toes. Maybe this was a one-shot deal. Maybe whoever it was would call tomorrow to see if she had received his gift, and she would be able to discourage him. By training she was courteous, but she was the daughter of one military man and the sister of two others, and she knew the art of forceful discouragement. If necessary, she could be nasty.

Okay, essentially this was up to her, unless he did something overtly threatening. She would be stupid, however, not to at least alert the police department and get their input.

Their input? She snorted. His input, was more like it.

She had his card, or rather, the Judge had his card. She went down the stairs and wound her way through the house to the library, where the Judge was kicked back in his leather recliner, blissfully watching his new wide-screen, high-definition television. He looked up at her polite knock.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but do you have Detective Cahill's card? I think it would be smart to notify the police about this gift, even if they can't do anything about it."

"Good idea. The card is in the file on my desk." He started to get up, but Sarah waved him back down. Bless his heart, he simply couldn't accustom himself to the idea that he shouldn't do things for her, that she was there to do for him. It was all right for her to serve his meals and take care of his clothes-to people of his generation, that was women's work-but if it involved anything else, she continually had to be on her toes or he would be doing things like opening doors for her.

"I'll get it. Please don't get up." There was only one file on his desk, a manila folder marked ROBBERY ATTEMPT. She smiled as she opened it. The file contained the police report, the newspaper clipping of the report, some photographs he'd made himself, and a copy of the insurance claim. Detective Cahill's card was paper-clipped to the police report, along with two other cards.

She wrote down his number and closed the file. "Thank you. May I get anything else for you this evening?"

"No, no, I'm fine." He waved her away, engrossed in a police chase on Court TV. It must be a guy thing, she thought, sighing. Her dad liked that show, too.

She returned to her quarters and punched in Cahill's number on her cordless phone, then abruptly disconnected before it could even ring. People with receivers could pick up conversations on cordless phones. She didn't have anything private to say, but the idea that the weirdo might be listening to her calls was revolting.

And the idea that he had so invaded her life with one gesture made her even angrier. She shouldn't have to worry about talking on a cordless phone. She should be able to go about her life as normal, damn it.

She went into her bedroom and picked up the receiver on the land-line phone. While she punched the numbers again, she pulled a pillow out from under the cover, wadded it into a ball, and shoved it behind her back as she made herself comfortable on the bed.

Cahill answered on the third ring, his voice a little surly. "Cahill." Okay, a lot surly.

"Detective Cahill, this is Sarah Stevens."

There was a slight pause, as if he was trying to place the name. "Yeah, what can I do for you?"

She could hear a television in the background, but no other voices. No kids playing, no low murmur of a wife asking, "Who is it?" He sounded alone, which was a relief. Too much of a relief, when she thought about it.

"I know there isn't anything the department can do, but I received an anonymous gift in the mail this afternoon that makes me uneasy."

"Anonymous?"

"There wasn't a return address on the box, or anything inside with a name."

'What was it, a dead cat?"

She was silent, and he sighed. "Sorry. You'd be surprised how many people used to get dead cats in the mail. That stopped when the post offices quit accepting boxes without return addresses."

'Well, they did this time. It's postmarked, but there's no return address."

"What was in the box?"

"An expensive diamond-and-ruby pendant."

"How expensive?"

"Judge Roberts says at least a couple of thousand. The card said, A small token of my esteem, but it wasn't signed. There was nothing threatening, but . . . it made me uneasy. The Judge was alarmed; he thinks the television spot attracted a crazy guy who's fixated on me."

"That's possible, but are you certain it isn't from your boyfriend?"

"No boyfriend." She could have simply said she was positive it wasn't from a boyfriend, but she didn't. No boyfriend. She couldn't be any plainer. If he was at all interested, he would call.

There was another little pause. Then he said, "Look, you're right, there's nothing we can do-"

"I know that. I just want to know what I should do, or be doing, in case this turns into something serious."

"Keep everything you get that's relevant. Keep a record of any weird phone calls, such as hang-ups or heavy breathing. Do you have Caller ID?"

"No, not on my private line."

"Then get it. And if you don't already have a cell phone, get one. Don't go anywhere without it, and I mean anywhere."

"I have a cell phone. It's always in my truck."

"Don't leave it in your truck, or in your purse. Have it in your pocket, so you can get to it immediately if you need to. Ordinarily I'd say you probably don't have anything to worry about, but an expensive gift is . . . unusual."

"That's what I thought, too." She sighed and rubbed her forehead. "I hate this. Nothing really has happened, but I feel as if something awful is about to happen."

"Don't let it get to you. Use common sense, be careful, and call if anything else happens."

"Okay. Thanks for your advice."

"You're welcome." He hung up, and Sarah gave a little laugh as she disconnected, too. Okay, she had her answer about one thing, at least: Detective Cahill might be single, but he was definitely not interested. His manner couldn't have been less personal, so that was that.

When she went back to the living room, she noticed that her curtains were open. She jerked them together, her heart pounding. Was he out there? Was he watching?

Chapter 8

NOTHING ELSE HAPPENED.THERE WERE NO PHONE CAllS, no more gifts, and if anyone had followed her, she hadn't spotted him. Once she thought someone might be following her, but if he was, he wasn't very good at it, and a white Jaguar wasn't the best car for following anyone, anyway; it was too noticeable. Before long the white Jaguar wasn't anywhere in sight in her rearview mirror, swallowed up by the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Probably it was someone who also lived in Mountain Brook, who just happened to be driving the same route for a while.

She heard from her mom, and Noel had called, so he was okay for the time being. Daniel still hadn't checked in since he left, but they would have heard if anything had happened to him, so everything was fine on the home front. Jennifer was thinking about having another child, her third, but her husband, Farrell, wasn't enthusiastic; he was perfectly happy with their two sons. Knowing Jennifer, Sarah made a mental bet she'd have another nephew- or a niece-within the year.

Just talking to her mom had made her feel better. Everything was normal at home, and that was what she needed to know. Everything seemed to be normal here, too, except for the existence of that pendant; whenever she looked at it, she was reminded that something wasn't right, that there was someone out there who thought it was okay to send an expensive gift to a woman he didn't know.

On her half-day off, on Saturday this particular week, she had her hair trimmed, got a manicure, then went to a movie. All the while she studied the people and traffic around her, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing. The same face didn't turn up at two different locations, no one followed her. She thought it was too soon to relax, but she did feel marginally better when she returned home.

Wednesday, her next off day, was much the same. No one followed her as she went to her karate class or kick-boxing workout. She spent a long time at the pistol range, just because it made her feel better, then went shopping at the Summit; that also made her feel better. There was just something about a new outfit that was good for the soul.

She browsed the bookstore for an hour, ate supper in one of the restaurants, then went to another movie. She liked movies and saw a new one at least every couple of weeks, but in the back of her mind she knew she was making it easy for anyone to approach her if he wanted. If he was still out there, she wanted to know who he was, what he looked like. She couldn't go through life worried that every man she saw might be him; she wanted a face on him, so he wasn't just a vague, threatening shape in her mind. Let him sit down next to her; let him approach her.

But she sat alone in the darkened theater, and no one spoke or even brushed against her when the movie was over and she made her way out of the theater, or even in the parking lot as she walked to her truck.

Everything looked normal at home when she drove up. The front-porch lights were on, the security lights were on, and she could see a light in the Judge's upstairs bedroom. The digital clock in the dashboard said it was almost ten o'clock, so he was probably getting ready for bed.

She parked in her usual place under the portico, and let herself in through the back door. After locking it, she began a quick tour of the house, as usual, to make certain everything was locked up. As she went toward the front of the house, she heard the television from the Judge's library, and a glance in that direction showed light spilling into the dim hallway. He must still be up, then.

The big double front doors weren't locked, which was unusual. She turned the dead bolt, then headed back to check the doors in the sunroom.

It wasn't like the Judge to leave the lights on upstairs; he automatically turned off the switch every time he left a room, even if he would be returning soon. She paused at the back staircase, a tiny frisson of unease prickling her spine. Maybe he had just gone upstairs for a moment and was coming back down to watch the ten o'clock news. She couldn't hear anything from upstairs, but then she wouldn't with the television in his library on.

She went to the open door of the library and peeked in. One lamp was on, the way he liked it when he watched television. He sat in his leather recliner, as usual, his head tipped to the side. He must have fallen asleep watching television.

But why was the upstairs light on?

Then she noticed the smell. It was difficult to identify, combining what smelled like feces with . . . something else. Her nose wrinkling, all her instincts suddenly on alert-was he ill, had he had a stroke or something?-she stepped farther into the room.

Seeing him from a different angle, she froze.

No. Oh, no.

There were dark spots and splotches sprayed across the room, and even in the dimness she could tell that some of the splotches had matter in them. She swallowed hard, standing still and listening for the intruder. She could hear the clock ticking, hear the thumping of her heartbeat, but there was no one else near . . . unless he was upstairs.

She wanted to go to the Judge. She wanted to straighten his neck, wipe the blood from his neck where it had trickled down from the small, neat wound in the side of his head. She wanted to cover . . . cover the gaping hole on the other side of his head where his skull was missing. She wanted to weep, to scream, to fly upstairs and search for his killer-a search-and-destroy mission, because no way would she let him live another minute, if she found him.

She didn't do any of those things. Instead she backed out of the library, careful not to touch anything else in case she smeared a fingerprint, and retraced her steps to the kitchen, where she had left her purse on the island. She had dropped her cell phone in it, not seeing a need to have the phone in her pocket when she was here, at home.

She'd been wrong.

She retrieved her pistol, too, and wedged her back into a corner so she couldn't be jumped from behind, in case he was still in the house. Her hands were shaking as she turned on the phone and waited for the service to connect. It seemed like ages, though probably only the normal few seconds passed, before the phone showed it was in service. She punched 911, and waited for the answer.

"Nine-one-one."

She wanted to close her eyes, but she didn't dare. She tried to speak, but no sound came out.

"Nine-one-one. Hello?"

She swallowed, and managed a thin sound. "This is . . . this is Twenty-seven-thirteen Briarwood. My employer has been shot. He's dead."

Unlike the first time Cahill had been here, the house was blazing with lights. The drive, the street, even the sidewalk was clogged with vehicles, most of them with flashing lights. Crime scene tape kept the neighbors at bay, and this was momentous enough that this time they had forgotten it wasn't genteel to gawk; all the houses on the street were lit, and people gathered beyond the line of tape, whispering to one another. An officer was filming the crowd, because a lot of times a murderer would wait around to watch the show.

The news vans from the city's television stations were pulling up, and Cahill ducked under the line before anyone could grab him.

The front door was closed, guarded by a uniformed officer who nodded at him and opened it to let him inside. The crime scene people were already at work, carefully dusting and cataloging and photographing. The EMT personnel were waiting, because there was obviously nothing they could do now. There was no life to be saved, no injuries to be treated, just a body to be transported.

A murder in Mountain Brook was big news. The last one had been . . . what, five years ago? When the murder victim was a retired federal judge, the news was even bigger. The pressure on this case would be intense.

'Who called it in?" he asked, though of course he knew.

"The butler. She's in that room there." The officer nodded toward a room to the left.

It was a breakfast room, he guessed it was called, with the kitchen connected to it. She sat at the table, a cup of coffee clasped between her hands. She was pale and still, staring at the tablecloth.

She wasn't in her pajamas this time. She wore street clothes, and she still had on lipstick. He said, "Is your car out back?"

She nodded without looking up. "It's parked under the portico." Her voice was thin, toneless.

'What kind is it?"

"A TrailBlazer." There was no interest, no curiosity in her voice.

He went through the kitchen and found the back door in a hallway. The SW was just outside. He placed his hand on the hood; still warm.

He went back inside and on the way through the kitchen, stopped to pour himself a cup of coffee. The pot was almost full, so she had evidently poured herself a cup, sat down, then forgotten to drink it.

She was still sitting exactly as he'd left her. He took the lukewarm coffee from her unresisting hands, dumped it down the sink in the kitchen, and poured another cup.

He set it in front of her. "Drink it."

She obediently took a sip.

He sat down at the table, to her right, and took out his notebook and pen. "Tell me what happened. " That was an open-ended question, not pointing her in any particular direction.

"It's Wednesday," she said, still in that thin tone.

"Yes, it is."

"It's my day off. I did the usual things-"

'Which are?"

"My karate class, kick-boxing, the pistol range."

'What time was this?" She told him; he made a careful note of all the times and asked where she took the classes. He'd check them out, make certain she was where she said she was when she said she was. 'What then?"

"I went to the Summit, went shopping."

"Did you buy anything?"

"An outfit at Parisian's, a couple of books."

"Did you notice the time?"

"Between four and five, I think. The time will be on the sales receipts." She still hadn't looked up, though she did take another sip of coffee.

"Did you come home then?"

She gave a tiny shake of her head. "No, I ate dinner out. At the . . . I can't remember the name. There at the Summit. The Italian place. I should have come home then, I usually do, but tonight I went to a movie."

"Why should you have come home?"

"Because then I would have been here. It wouldn't have happened if I'd been here."

'What movie did you see?"

This time she did look up, her eyes blank. "I can't remember." She dug in her jeans pocket and pulled out half of a computer-printed ticket. "This one."

He noted the movie, and the time. "I've thought of seeing that one myself. Was it any good?" He kept his tone casual, easy.

"It was okay. I went so he'd have a chance to approach me, if he was watching."

'What?" She had lost him on that one. 'Who?"

"I don't know. The man who sent me the pendant."

"Okay, right." He'd get into that later. 'What time did you get home?"

"Almost ten. The Judge's bedroom light was on. He usually goes to bed about ten, though sometimes he'll watch the news first."

"Does he have a television in his bedroom?"

"No." Her lips quivered. "He said bedrooms were for sleeping."

"So he watched TV in . . .?"

"The library. Where I found him."

"Let's backtrack a little. What did you do when you got home?" He sipped his coffee, and she followed suit.

"I began checking to make sure the doors were locked. I always do, before I go to bed. The front door wasn't," she said. "Locked, that is. That was unusual, for it not to be locked. I could hear the television on, and I wondered why the light was on upstairs when he was still in the library."

'What did you do?"

"I went to the library door and looked in. He was in his recliner, his head tilted as if he'd fallen asleep."

He waited, not wanting to direct her now.

"I noticed the smell," she said faintly. He knew what smell she was talking about. "And I thought he might have had a stroke, or heart attack, and soiled himself. Just one lamp was on, so the light wasn't good; but when I stepped inside, the angle was different and I saw the . . . the blood. And the other side of his head. The splatters . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"I was afraid he was still in the house. Upstairs. That's why the light was on. I thought about going up there . . ." Again she trailed off.

"I hope you didn't."

"No. But I wanted to," she whispered. "I wanted to catch him. Instead I came back to the kitchen and got my pistol and cell phone, and stood in the corner while I called nine-one-one."

'Where's your pistol now?"

"In my purse. I put it there when the first car arrived."

"May I see it?"

"It's on the cooking island."

'Would you get it for me, please?"

She got up and went into the kitchen, moving like a zombie. He followed and watched as she retrieved the pistol. It was holstered, and when he checked the clip he saw that it was full. "I always reload after I've been to the range," she said, rubbing her forehead.

She hadn't cleaned it-not yet, though he bet she did on a regular basis-and the smell of burnt gunpowder still clung to it. The ballistics wouldn't match, he knew; she was too smart to make a mistake like that. He didn't think she had killed the old guy, but he couldn't afford to totally dismiss the possibility. People were most often killed by those closest to them, so until she could be ruled out as a suspect, she was definitely on his short list.

She watched him, her face expressionless, her eyes blank. She was totally closed in on herself; some people handled stress that way, by almost shutting down.

"Let's go sit down again," he suggested, and she obeyed. "Have you had any more gifts in the mail, or strange phone calls?"

"No, just that one gift. Nothing else. I did think someone was following me once, but he wasn't."

"Are you certain?"

"He turned off. And he was in a white Jaguar. You don't follow people in a white Jaguar."

"Not unless that's the only car you have." But if someone could afford a Jaguar, he could almost certainly afford some other kind of car, too. Jaguars were just too noticeable.

So she probably wasn't being stalked. That was the first thing she had thought of, though, when she came inside and found Judge Roberts's body. "You mentioned before that Judge Roberts had received death threats. Do you know anything about them?"

"His family will have the details. I know the basics, but it all happened before I came to work for him. His family-God, I have to call them."

"We'll notify the family," he said, gentling his voice, because she suddenly looked shattered at the idea. "Do you have their names and numbers?"

"Yes, of course." She rubbed her forehead again. "He has two sons and one daughter." She gave him their names and numbers, then lapsed into silence, staring at the tablecloth again.

"I'll be back in a minute," he said, and got up. He wanted to check out the scene in the library himself and look through the rest of the house.

He was almost to the door when she asked, "Was he upstairs?"

He stopped. "No one else was in the house when the patrolmen checked." He already knew that from the report he'd received in transit.

"He didn't climb out an upstairs window, or something?"

"There wasn't any sign of anyone in the house. No open windows, nothing out of place." He couldn't tell her any more than that.

"I hope he wasn't upstairs," she said, almost to herself. "I hope I didn't let him get away. I should have gone up. I should have checked."

"No, you shouldn't-"

"I'd have killed him," she said flatly.

Chapter 9

SARAH WAS TENSE, EXHAUSTED, AND EMOTIONAllY DRAINED when she met Barbara and her family at the Birmingham airport at six the next morning. She waited downstairs in the luggage claim area, a cup of coffee in her hand. She had no idea how much coffee she'd had since finding the Judge's body, but she was absolutely certain caffeine was all that was keeping her going.

She hadn't slept; there hadn't been an opportunity to, even if she had been inclined. Cahill had kept coming back to her with questions, and she'd had so much else to do she hadn't had a spare minute. People had to be notified; the police department had taken care of the family, but she had called Leona and awakened her with the devastating news, rather than let her hear it on the early morning news. Then the calls from the family had started coming in, to such an extent that several times she had been on both the cordless phone and her cell phone.

Arrangements had to be made to house the family. Randall and his wife, Emily, had three children, all of whom were married with children of their own. Since they all lived in the Huntsville area, which was an easy drive, only Randall and Emily were coming down to stay until after the funeral, but everyone-three children and their spouses, plus four grandchildren-would be staying the night before the funeral.

Jon and his wife, Julia, lived in Mobile. They had two children, one married and one single. All of them were coming up to stay for the duration. Barbara and Dwight and their two children lived in Dallas, and they were all staying until it was over. That meant Sarah had to arrange accommodations for eleven people, including herself, in the middle of the night, available for early check-in . . . very early check-in. She would worry about the rest of Randall's family after the funeral arrangements were made.

She had booked them all into the Wynfrey. They would probably be eating at odd hours, so they needed somewhere with room service, plus the teenagers would be able to distract themselves in the attached Galleria. She herself had taken a room at the Mountain Brook Inn. It had come as a shock to realize she wouldn't be allowed to stay in the house, or even gather her own clothing. She had given a list of what she needed to Cahill, and he had arranged for someone to collect the items for her.

Her pistol had been taken, as well as the Judge's old service revolver that he kept locked in a display case. Cahill said they would be returned after the investigation was completed, meaning when it was determined whether or not either weapon had been used to commit the murder.

It was obvious she was a suspect, if only because of proximity. She had unlimited access to the house, she had a pistol, and Cahill himself had seen how proficient she was with it. She could account for her whereabouts, if only by receipts and tickets, but most of all she had no motive, so she didn't worry about herself; she couldn't, not with the constant memory of the Judge's body playing like a silent movie in her mind.

He had looked so frail in death, as if his spirit had kept one from realizing how heavily time had laid its hand on him. She was fiercely glad no one else had found him, that there'd been one last final moment between just the two of them, before strangers arrived and his body was taken over by them. The dead have no dignity, but she knew he would have hated having lost control of his bowels, hated his family seeing him like that. He would have hated her seeing him like that, too, but that was the least upsetting of all the possibilities.

The escalator began spitting out people from the newly arrived plane; Barbara and her family were among the first. Barbara was a slim, pretty woman with attractive gray streaks in her short blond hair; she was red-eyed and pale, but holding together. She spotted Sarah while she was still on the escalator, and when she stepped off, she immediately crossed to her, and the two women embraced. Tears stung Sarah's eyes; all through this awful night she had desperately needed someone to hug her so she wouldn't feel so horribly alone.

"Have you heard from Jon?" Barbara asked, pulling back and dabbing her eyes with a tattered tissue.

"They left Mobile about two this morning, so they should get to the hotel at any time."

"I hope he's careful driving."

"I talked him into letting Julia drive."

"Bless you." Barbara hugged her again. "You're still on top of things. Have the police found out anything?"

Sarah shook her head. "I don't know. I'm not family, so they won't tell me anything." Not that Cahill would tell her anything anyway, with her a suspect.

"I knew one of those rotten bastards would get out of jail and come after him," Barbara said tensely. "I knew it."

A fresh wave of guilt assailed Sarah. "I should have been there."

"Nonsense." Barbara fiercely turned on her. "It was your off day; there was no reason for you to be there. You couldn't stay with him twenty-four hours a day. Probably the monster watched the house and saw you leave. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine, for not hiring a full-time guard service. It isn't your fault, and I won't let you even think it, do you hear?"

Too late for that. Sarah thought it at least every five minutes. And what if, as she had thought in those first awful, stunned minutes, he'd been killed by the creep who had sent her the pendant? What if he'd actually come looking for her? Killing the Judge wasn't logical, but then people like that weren't logical, so why would their actions be? Knowing a weirdo was out there, she should have been at home instead of out trying to bait him into revealing himself.

It wasn't until Cahill asked about the death threats that she realized that was the most likely answer. Logically she realized it, anyway; emotionally, she hadn't shaken that first impression.

"It isn't your fault, either," she said firmly. "It's the fault of the man who pulled the trigger, no one else. We have to remember that." And she still should have been there. If it hadn't been for that double-damned pendant, she would have been.

Dwight, Barbara's husband, was over at the carousel collecting their luggage, helped by nineteen-year-old Shaw. Blair, fifteen, stood by herself, looking miserable as only teenagers can. Her honey-blond hair had metallic blue streaks in it, and her left eyebrow now sported two gold hoops.

'Wow," Sarah said, moving to reach out and to hug the girl. "Two hoops. When did you get the other one?"

"It's fake," she said. "I wanted to make Granddaddy freak out the next time we saw him, but-but now I won't get the chance!" Her face crumpled, and she hurled herself against Sarah, burying her face in her shoulder. Her slender body shook with sobs.

Barbara took charge of her daughter, taking her into her own arms and cuddling her as if she were still a toddler. Dwight and Shaw approached, loaded down with luggage and looking uncomfortable at the naked emotional display of the women. Barbara got Blair calmed down, and they all trundled out to Sarah's vehicle. Barbara got into the backseat with her kids, and Dwight buckled himself into the front passenger seat.

'What time are Randall and Emily supposed to be here?" he asked.

"Around eleven. He has a copy of the Judge's will in his safe deposit box, and his bank doesn't open until nine. He thought it might be needed."

Barbara rubbed her forehead. "I don't want to think about his will just now."

"There might be instructions for his funeral service," Dwight said gently.

"I still wish-" She sighed. "Never mind. Wishing won't accomplish anything." She took a deep breath as Sarah began winding her way through the parking deck toward the exit. "Sarah, do you know when the police will let us into the house?"

"It will probably be a few days, at least." And she would have to arrange for the library to be cleaned before the family went in; she didn't want them seeing the scene the way it was now, with the blood splatters and smears. She would give anything if she hadn't seen it, if the past twelve hours had never happened. If she could go back, she would do things differently; instead of dawdling at the Summit, she would go home, and whoever the killer was, when he arrived, she would handle it, and the Judge would still be alive.

But she couldn't go back. No one could.

"The detective will be in touch with you at the hotel," she said evenly. "Try to get some sleep, if you can."

'Will you be there? When the detective talks to us?" Barbara's voice wavered a little.

"If you want me to be." As desperately as she had needed to be hugged a little while ago, she just as desperately needed to be alone so she could release the pent-up grief and tears. She had held everything in, mostly from shock, but now the shock was wearing off and the awful reality was setting in.

"Please. I'm so-I can't think clearly."

Sarah didn't know how clearly she was thinking herself, but if Barbara wanted her present, she'd be there. If Cahill gave them a few hours, at least she'd be able to take a shower and change clothes, maybe even grab a nap, have breakfast. As soon as she thought of food, her stomach heaved and her throat tightened. No food, then, not yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Tomorrow. What was she supposed to do tomorrow? Whatever the family needed, she supposed. Whatever they didn't feel they could handle, she would do for them. And when the last service for them had been performed, then what?

She wasn't ready. She had thought she'd have another couple of years, getting things ready to put her Plan in motion. She had thought the Judge would gradually become more frail, or perhaps a heart attack or stroke would take him, but that his death would be natural. She would still have grieved, they all would have, but there wouldn't be this tearing pain at a life cut short. No one had been ready for him to leave, not like that.

She got the family settled in the hotel, and just as she was about to leave Jon and his family arrived. So she stayed, helping them, answering Jon's questions. Finding comfort in numbers, Barbara and Dwight and their kids joined them, and when Sarah finally left, they were all crowded into the suite's parlor, crying a little, but pulling together. Final arrangements would have to wait until Randall arrived, so they could all decide together, but Barbara already had out a sheet of the hotel stationery and was making a list of things that needed to be done.

Barbara would be all right. She was hurting, but she was making a list. That was the way women always coped, by doing what needed to be done.

The day was overcast, and cooler than it had been lately. Sarah welcomed the brisk air on her face as she walked to the TrailBlazer. For the moment she had nothing to do, and it felt odd. Barbara had her cell phone number and her room number at the Mountain Brook Inn, and would call her when it was time to meet with Cahill. Sarah had, probably, a couple of hours to herself. She could take that shower.

When she was finally in her room, the silence was almost overwhelming. For hours now she had been busy, surrounded by people, voices, lights. Even when she had been sitting and answering questions, she had been occupied. Now she was alone, and she had nothing to do for anyone else right now.

Methodically she unpacked the few clothes she had with her, hung the dress in the bathroom to steam out wrinkles while she showered, then finally stepped under the warm, relaxing spray. And there, finally, she cried.

She cried long and hard, crumpled against the side of the tub enclosure with her face buried in her hands and the water beating down on her head. The accumulation of hours of stress and grief tore at her. She wanted to destroy something, she wanted to hit and maim, she wanted . . . she wanted the Judge back, and that wasn't going to happen.

Finally, nature took its course and the violent weeping subsided into dull acceptance. She finished showering, wrapped her wet hair in a thick hotel towel, and fell naked into bed. The room was dim and cool, she was exhausted, and she slept almost immediately.

The phone woke her at ten o'clock. She fumbled for it, fighting to sound alert.

"Hello, this is Sarah."

"Sarah, it's Barbara. Detective Cahill will be here at eleven. Can you make it by then?"

"I'll be there," she promised, already rolling out of bed.

Her hair was a mess, still damp and tangled. She put on the small pot of hotel in-room coffee, then quickly blow-dried her hair and brushed her teeth. The coffee had finished brewing by then, so she grabbed a cup and sipped it while she returned to the bathroom and finished getting ready. There wasn't much to do; she didn't really care how she looked today, so she settled for moisturizer and a sheen of lip gloss, and let the rest go.

She didn't have much choice in the way of clothing. One dress, and two of her everyday butler's outfits. She didn't even have a jacket, and she thought she would need one today. Her normal white shirt, black pants, and black vest would have to do. Maybe Cahill could arrange for someone to get more clothes for her, if she wasn't going to be allowed back in the house by at least tomorrow.

The overcast was beginning to produce a light drizzle, and the chill went right through her on the short walk to her vehicle. The first thing she did after starting the engine was turn on the seat heater; the second was slide on sunglasses to cover her raw, swollen eyes.

Normally the drive to the Wynfrey was a short one, ten to fifteen minutes, but an accident on 280 slowed her and she arrived at the Wynfrey at about five of. As luck would have it, Cahill was entering the lobby at the same time. "Why are you here?" he asked brusquely.

"Because the family wanted me to be." She was a little surprised at how hoarse her voice was.

He nodded, then didn't speak again as they walked to the elevators. She was too tired and empty to say anything pertinent, or even not pertinent. Anything else he had to say to her would pro~ ably be more questions, so she was just as glad he refrained. To give him his due, he had to be as tired as she was, maybe more so.

She slanted a quick glance at him. Somewhere along the line he'd showered and shaved, and changed clothes. If he was exhausted, he didn't show it. Maybe he'd grabbed some sleep, too.

He was wearing a jacket and tie. The jacket reminded her that she was cold. "Could you have someone get a coat from the house for me?" she asked. "It doesn't matter which one."

He looked at her, a swift assessment that took in every detail. Maybe he noticed she was shivering. "I'll take care of it."

"Thanks."

The family was all gathered in Barbara's suite. Randall and Emily had arrived, and Sarah felt a moment of sharp guilt. She should have been here when they arrived, helped them get settled. Randall shook her hand, and reserved Emily hugged her, which made her eyes sting with tears again.

Barbara, a hostess to the core, had arranged for a selection of fruit and cheese and pastries to be brought to the suite's parlor. Bottles of water and a fresh pot of coffee stood ready. Sarah asked what everyone wanted to drink, and quietly set about providing them with it. It was a knack she had, remembering how everyone requested his coffee, honed by the courses she'd taken in the school for butlers. Some butlers could do it in small groups of five or six, some needed to write it down, but for some reason in her brain the information was filed differently. When she was asked to describe Randall, for instance, she would say six feet tall, gray hair, hazel eyes, likes his coffee heavy with cream. Emily was five-seven, dark red hair helped along every two weeks by her hairdresser, brown eyes, two sugars, no cream.

Cahill, she remembered from the endless cups of coffee he drank the night before, was as simple as it could get: black.

When she gave him his requested cup of coffee, he nodded his thanks, then said, "Is it too bright in here for you?"

She had forgotten she was still wearing her sunglasses. "Sorry," she murmured, removing them. "I forgot." Her red, swollen eyes were par for the course in this room.

"Have you eaten anything?" Barbara asked, coming up to put her hand on Sarah's shoulder.

"Not yet."

"Then sit down and eat. Now. If I can, you can."

At Barbara's insistence, she put some fruit and Danish on a small plate, then looked around for a seat. Barbara had requested the hotel bring in extra chairs to accommodate everyone; the families were grouped together, of course, leaving the only empty seat beside Cahill. She sat down, and under Barbara's eagle eye forked a small square of fresh pineapple and carried it to her mouth.

She forced herself to chew, and the piece of pineapple began to expand. If she had been alone, she would have spit it out. Briefly she closed her eyes and fought the tightening of her throat. And she chewed.

"Swallow," Cahill said in a low tone that only she could hear.

She tried. On the second try, the pineapple actually went down.

Because eating was only common sense, she tackled that with the same determination she did everything else. While she listened to the family's questions and Cahill's matter-of-fact answers, she broke off tiny pieces of the Danish and concentrated on chewing and swallowing.

Something about Cahill's presence was reassuring. Though she couldn't remember any murders in Mountain Brook in the almost three years she had lived here, he came across as a man who had seen violent death before and knew how to handle it, knew what needed to be done. His matter-of-factness pulled the family away from any highly emotional displays as they unconsciously emulated him. Even Sarah could find a measure of gratitude for his presence; while he was there, he was in charge. All she had to do was chew and swallow.

She listened to his quiet, to-the-point questions about the death threats the Judge had received in the past. Barbara actually had a file on that, reminding Sarah of how much the daughter resembled the father in traits and mannerisms. She handed it over to Cahill, who looked through it, then glanced up. "May I keep this for a while?"

"Yes, of course." Barbara pressed her hands down hard on her knees. "It's so hard to ask this, but . . . where is Daddy? We need to make funeral arrangements."

"The coroner's office took charge of him," Cahill said. "After an autopsy is performed, he'll be released to you."

Heads came up all over the room. "Autopsy?" Randall said. "Why is there an autopsy?"

"It's automatic for a homicide. State law requires it."

"That's ridiculous," Barbara said. "If you don't know why someone is dead, it makes sense, but Daddy was shot. The reason why he's dead is obvious." Her voice trembled a bit on the word "dead," but she quickly firmed it again.

"The cause of death seems obvious, but sometimes a victim is shot or burned to hide the true cause, such as poison or strangulation."

"Does it really matter, at this point?" Julia asked.

"The manner of death tells us things about the perpetrator. For instance, who would have access to a particular poison? Who was strong enough to strangle a man? I think the cause of death in your father's case is clear-cut, a gunshot wound, but the final decision is the medical examiner's."

"So when will we be able to . . . to get Daddy?"

"I can't say for certain, ma'am, but tomorrow would be my best guess."

"Okay." She pinched the bridge of her nose, then looked at her brothers. "This is Thursday. If he's released tomorrow, we can have the funeral service on either Sunday or Monday. What do you think?"

"Sunday," Randall said immediately. "That will make it easier for people to attend the service."

"I agree," Jon put in.

"Then Sunday it is." She wrote that on her list.

Cahill looked at Randall. "Mr. Roberts, you mentioned you have a copy of your father's will. Do you have it with you?"

"Yes, it's in my briefcase."

"Do you know the contents?"

"No, it's sealed. I mean, we all know the general contents, but not the specifics."

"May I see it, please?"

Randall's eyebrows went up. "May I ask why?"

"Sometimes inheritances play a part in motive."

Barbara sucked in a sharp breath. "Are you suggesting one of us killed our daddy?" All over the room, people were bristling.

"No, ma'am; there's no evidence to suggest that. I'm just covering all bases. I don't want to overlook something that may help me solve the case."

Randall fetched the legal-size envelope. As he'd said, it was firmly sealed. Cahill glanced up for permission, Randall nodded, and with a firm motion he tore the flap open and pulled out the thick document.

He quickly scanned it, flipping the pages. Suddenly he paused, and his head came up, sharp blue eyes fastening on Sarah.

"Miss Stevens, did you know under the terms of this will you inherit a substantial sum of money?"

Chapter 10

SARAH BLINKED, MORE BEMUSED THAN STUNNED.SHE WAS a little punchy and so tired that she wasn't certain she had heard him correctly. She even looked around, as if there might be another Miss Stevens in the room. Not finding anyone, she looked back at Cahill to find him still focused on her. "Do you mean me?" she asked, still not quite making the connection.

"Judge Roberts's butler, Sarah Stevens. That's you."

She nodded, and in the middle of a nod brought her hand up to rub her forehead. Maybe it was lack of sleep, maybe it was too much caffeine, but she was developing a wall-banger of a headache. "He left something to me?" To her distress, her voice wavered, and she felt her lower lip begin to quiver before she sternly bit down on it. She couldn't do anything, however, to hide the bright sheen of tears in her eyes.

"Of course he did," Barbara said. "He told us he was going to."

"He . . . he never mentioned anything to me."

"He thought you'd argue," Jon explained.

"Excuse me," Sarah said abruptly, and fled to the bathroom before she disgraced herself by breaking down and sobbing like a child.

Her face crumpled as soon as she shut the bathroom door, and she grabbed a towel to hold over her mouth to muffle the sound.

By sheer force of will she brought herself back under control, choked back the sobs, and with a tissue blotted her eyes before the tears could fall. A few deep breaths brought a small measure of calm.

She didn't think anything had ever touched her so much as learning the Judge had left a bequest to her. She was well paid, and she had loved taking care of him. She had loved him, for his sweetness and humor, his old-fashioned manners, his basic goodness. She hadn't expected any inheritance, and in truth would indeed have argued against it. She had been with him not quite three years; how could that in any way supplant his children, his lifetime friends?

But evidently he hadn't thought the same, and neither did his family. The thought of their generosity brought the tears welling again, and she determinedly blotted them away. She would not cry, not here and not now. The family had enough to bear without her adding her own emotional distress to the load.

A cold wet washcloth cooled her cheeks, and felt good to her aching head when she pressed it to her forehead. She would have liked to lie down with an ice pack on her head, but, like crying, that, too, would have to be postponed.

Feeling more in control, she rejoined them in the parlor. "I'm sorry," she murmured, resuming her seat beside Cahill.

"I take it you didn't know.'

She shook her head. He either believed her or he didn't. She couldn't work up enough energy to care.

"Daddy swore us to secrecy," Barbara said. A tiny, sad smile wavered on her mouth. "He got a kick out of sneaking something by you. He said it was the only thing he ever got by you."

"He said you confiscated his Snickers bars," Shaw put in, a real smile breaking over his face and banishing the sadness and tension. "He always gorged on them when he came to visit, because he knew he couldn't have them when he got home."

"And his Twinkies. I'd sneak Twinkies to him when I came," Blair confessed.

Sarah groaned, looking at a roomful of guilty, suddenly smiling faces. "No wonder I had such a time getting his cholesterol level down!"

Barbara patted her knee. "He loved you for taking care of him. We love you for taking care of him. When he mentioned putting you in his will, we were all for it."

Cahill cleared his throat, drawing attention back to him. "Thank you for the information," he said, getting to his feet. "I know this is a difficult time for you all, and I appreciate your help. I want you to know I'm sorry about your father, and we're doing everything we can to find the perpetrator. I'll run these names, and with any luck we'll find one of these guys in the area."

Like lemmings, everyone else stood, and a flurry of handshakes and thank-yous broke out as Cahill slowly but inexorably inched his way toward the door. Somehow he had Sarah by the elbow and was pulling her with him. "I'll walk you to your truck," he said.

Inwardly she sighed. He probably had some more questions to ask her. Since she was included in the will, in his mind she was probably that much more suspect. But he was doing his job, so she grabbed her bag and sunglasses and managed a quick good-bye to everyone, with instructions to call her if they needed anything, before he had her out the door.

There was a couple in the elevator, so he didn't say anything on the ride down to the lobby. They stepped outside, and the cold, damp wind slapped her in the face, making her shiver. The temperature seemed to be dropping, and the drizzle had progressed to a steady light rain. She hugged her arms and said, "I didn't kill him."

"I'm fairly sure of that myself," he said mildly.

Startled, she looked up at him. "Then why all the suspicious questions?"

"Because it's my job. You'll be checked out, you'll be looked at, and you'll be questioned."

"Cross every t and dot every i."

"You got it." He took off his jacket and held it over her head. "Come on."

She shivered and hurried her steps as he strode across the parking lot, with her huddled under his jacket like a chick under his wing. The first thing she was going to do when she got into the TrailBlazer was turn on the seat heater.

"What's your room number?" he asked. "I'll have someone bring a jacket to you. That's if you're going back to the inn now, that is."

She gave him her room number and added wryly, "I hope I make it back there without falling asleep."

His hand abruptly tightened on her elbow, hauling her to a stop. "I'll drive you."

"And then I'd be stranded. Thanks, but I'll make it. I'm punchy and I have a killer headache, but the coffee will keep me awake for a little while."

"You need to eat."

"I ate," she said, startled by all this concern. "You watched me."

"You ate four bites. I counted."

"And it was all I could do to swallow those. Don't push, Cahill."

He had shifted so that he was between her and the truck, the breadth of his shoulders blocking some of the wind from her. The rain was soaking his back, but he ignored it as he stared silently down at her, his expression unreadable. Even through her fatigue, she felt something uneasy begin to stir. hat?" she demanded, moving back half a step.

He shook his head. "Nothing. You're out on your feet. Go get some sleep."

"That sounds like a plan." He moved out of the way, and Sarah hit the remote to unlock the door, hurrying to get out of the wind and rain.

"Sarah," he said as she put the key in the ignition. He still held his jacket, rather than putting it back on.

"Yes?"

"I probably don't have to say this, but don't leave town."

Cahill followed her to the Mountain Brook Inn, just to make certain she got there, and that she didn't endanger herself or any other motorist. When she turned left into the inn's parking lot, he tapped his horn lightly in good-bye, and she lifted one hand in acknowledgment but she didn't turn her head to look.

She was holding up okay, but the stunned, desolate expression in her dark eyes was arousing his protective instincts. Not cop instincts, but man-woman instincts, exactly what he didn't need.

For one thing, he'd been telling the truth when he said he was fairly certain she hadn't killed the Judge. Fairly certain, though, was a long way from completely certain. She hadn't even asked how much money she would inherit, which wasn't normal. Maybe she would have held off in front of the family, but when they were alone, she should have asked . . . unless she already knew. And if she knew she stood to inherit a hundred grand, that could be a motive to off the old guy; God knows a lot of people had been killed for a lot less money.

Balanced against that, her grief and shock seemed genuine. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying; either that, or she had sprayed herself in the eyes with something to make it look as if she'd been crying. She was either a smart killer and a very good actress, or she was grieving.

His gut said she was genuinely grieving. But since his gut was also insisting he try to get her into bed, he had to take into consideration the lust factor, which had clouded his judgment before. Shannon, Sarah. Both names started with S; that couldn't be good.

He'd tried to ignore his attraction to Sarah, but it hadn't gone away. Her face had an annoying habit of popping into his mind whenever he tried to relax. He was fine when he was at work, but let him sit down in the evening to watch the news or read the paper and Bam!-there she was. He'd see her sitting on the stairs in her thin cotton pajamas, or standing on the pistol range with her concentration totally focused on the target, the sunshine picking out red and gold glints in her hair. A man knew he was in trouble when he noticed the glints in a woman's hair. Boobs, yeah; he was supposed to notice boobs. But hair glints?

When he was lifting weights in his basement, he'd think about lifting Sarah, up and down, astride him, and he'd get a hard-on while he was bench-pressing. Or when he was doing push-ups, he'd think about having Sarah beneath him, with the same result.

The truth was, he couldn't think about much else. It was a miracle he'd managed to keep his distance from her, because he hadn't been this obsessed with sex since he was sixteen. Naw, it wasn't a miracle; it was plain fear. He wanted her too much. He didn't think he'd been this desperate to fuck Shannon even in those first falling-in-love days. Of course, he'd already been fucking Shannon, so maybe that wasn't a good comparison.

The investigation was all that kept him from turning the car around and heading back to the Mountain Brook Inn. Until Sarah was cleared, she was off-limits. She had the sales receipts, she had the merchandise to match the sales receipts, the signature on her credit card matched the ones on the charge slips, and she had the movie ticket. A little more verification, some checking into her financial status, and she would be in the clear. Hell, Judge Roberts's kids stood to inherit a hell of a lot more than Sarah did; they all had alibis, too, but killers could be hired.

Cahill didn't have a good feeling about this one. Most murders were committed by someone close to the victim, a family member, a neighbor, a friend. This felt like the toughest of all cases, a killing by a stranger. What was the link? What had brought the killer to the house? Was it someone Judge Roberts had sentenced? On the surface that made the most sense, except for the fact there was no sign of forced entry or of a struggle. It was as if he had opened the door to the killer, invited him in, and chatted with him in the library.

As if he knew him.

So maybe they were back to the neighbor, family member, or friend scenario.

Cahill tried to mentally walk through it. None of the neighbors had noticed a car in the driveway, but it was dark. Sarah had arrived home just before ten and found the body shortly afterward; she had called 911 at 10:03, the patrol cars had gotten there within five minutes, and he himself had arrived about fifteen minutes after her call. Rigor had just been starting in the body, which roughly placed the time of death, say, between six and eight, maybe eight-thirty. He thought it would be later rather than sooner, because it wasn't dark at six P.M.

Judge Roberts had opened the door to his killer. No shots had been fired right then, which would have been the most likely time and place for the shooting if the killer was someone who had done prison time because of the Judge and was out for vengeance. Instead they had walked into the library and sat down, or at least the Judge sat. He hadn't been alarmed; he'd been relaxed, the footrest of his recliner up.

The killer wasn't a stranger, wasn't someone who had threatened the Judge in the past.

It would be interesting to see what fingerprints the technicians had collected. The Judge's, Sarah's, possibly the cook's, definitely the cleaning ladies': those should be there. Sarah had given her fingerprints in the wee hours, for comparison. The cook, Leona Barksdale, had been scheduled to come in this morning to be printed, though she'd tearfully said she hadn't been inside that room in a few weeks. The cleaning ladies were set for this afternoon. Who else? The house was cleaned regularly, so any prints should be new ones.

The neighborhood would have to be canvassed; anyone could have walked over under cover of darkness, shot Judge Roberts, and calmly walked back home. Again, he ran into the question of motive. From what he'd found out so far, the old judge had been well liked. There weren't any skeletons hanging in his closet, no nastiness that surfaced in private. He didn't cheat, in either cards or business. He didn't gamble, didn't drink to excess, and so far as Cahill had been able to find out, hadn't romanced anyone since his wife died eight years before.

So why would someone who hadn't run afoul of him in his court want to kill him?

If the motive wasn't revenge, sex, or money, what was left?

Nothing, that was what was left. So the motive still had to be one of the three. He doubted it was revenge, because the Judge had known his killer, invited him in. Sex? The man was eighty-five, hadn't dated, and from what everyone said, had been completely faithful to his wife while she was alive. That left money.

Somehow, it always came back to money.

And that brought him full circle, back to Sarah.

His kids had grown up rich. They had always known the money was there. So why kill him now? Why not ten years ago, or last year? Why not wait a few years more and let him die of natural causes? Unless one of them was in financial difficulty-which he would find out-there was no reason for any of them to set up his murder. One of the adult grandchildren, perhaps? That bore looking into.

But Sarah was the most likely suspect.

Shit.

Sarah woke at three, disoriented and groggy. She lay there listening to the muted rumble of the air-conditioning, blinking at the thick curtains pulled over the window, and trying to remember where she was. Her head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton; it was an effort to think, much less move.

Then she remembered, and for a long moment the grief clawed at her throat, her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, but that didn't help. She still saw the Judge sitting so peacefully in his leather recliner, with his blood and parts of his brain splattered across the room. She still smelled the awful, mingled smell of blood and body waste, and with a smothered sound, she opened her eyes.

Slowly, every muscle aching, she sat up. She was naked, pajamas not having been on the list of clothes she'd given Cahill. She had cried herself to sleep, and her eyelids felt gritty and raw. All in all, she thought, she didn't look very much like an ultracapable butler-or even an incompetent one.

The room was cold. Despite the chilly day, she'd turned on the air when she got back to the room, because her nose was stuffy and heat would have made breathing even more difficult. All she had wanted to do was fall into bed, so she had put the DO NOT DTSTURB sign on the door and unplugged the phone. She'd placed her cell phone on the table beside the bed, so the family could get in touch with her if she was needed, but other than that, she hadn't want to talk to anyone.

The room was too cold. Actually, it was freezing. Sarah darted out of the warm nest of covers, swiftly switched the thermostat over to Heat, then dived back into bed and huddled under the covers, shivering.

There was something white on the floor just inside the door. Message slips. Sighing, she retrieved them-there were two-and once more retreated to the bed. This time, though, she switched on the lamp and stuffed the pillow behind her back so she could read the messages.

One was from the front desk. A jacket had been delivered for her, and they were holding it at the desk. The other was from Cahill, and was brief: "Call me." The time was listed as two-thirty.

Sighing, she picked up her cell phone and called the number listed.

He answered almost immediately. "Cahill." His deep voice was alert; he was probably buzzed on caffeine.

'1his is Sarah Stevens. I got your message."

'Were you asleep?"

"Mmm. I slept about four hours. By the way, thanks for sending the jacket over."

'~You're welcome. Listen, do you by any chance know if anyone owed Judge Roberts some money? Was he worried about any of his investments?"

Sarah rubbed her hand over her face. "He loaned money on a regular basis, but they were more like gifts, because if anyone tried to repay him, he'd just wave it away."

"Did anyone in the neighborhood borrow money from him?"

"Not that I know of. In that neighborhood? Who would need a loan?"

"Depends on whether or not anyone has a gambling problem, or is into drugs. Maybe someone wants to hide the money he spends on his honey. There are all sorts of possibilities. What about his family? Any of them having financial difficulty?"

"He never mentioned it if they were. I don't think there's a bad apple in the bunch." She paused, synapses firing as she followed this line of questioning and saw where it was leading. Coolly she said, "I'll get a copy of my own bank statement to you, and my investment portfolio. Do you want canceled checks, too?"

"Please." His tone remained brisk and professional.

"Actually, you'll have to get them. They're at the house."

"Where?"

"There's a fire safe in the closet. Everything is in there."

"Thank you." He disconnected, and Sarah growled as she disconnected her own phone. For a while this morning he had seemed a bit warmer, more human, but he was back to his old brusque self. To her dismay, it didn't matter whether he was friendly or not; there was something about him that made her want to lean on him. It didn't even matter that he was checking into her finances, trying to find a motive for her to have killed the Judge; the same process would clear her. He was doing his job. She wouldn't have felt nearly as confident if he'd blown off the possibility that she was guilty. He had to consider everyone, or something crucial might slip through the cracks.

Barbara and the rest of the family were convinced the killer was some ex-con from the Judge's past. After her first panicked assumption that her weirdo had done it, she had gone with logic and agreed with the others. Cahill didn't seem to be on the same page, though; he was concentrating more on her and the family. What had the cops found that he hadn't told?

She knew she was innocent, and she knew the family was innocent. She had observed all of them over the past years, at holidays and on vacation, and one and all they had loved the Judge. He adored his children and grandchildren, and got on well with all of the in-laws. So what did Cahill know that she had missed?

The room was warmer now, and she got out of bed, grimacing when she caught sight of herself in the dresser mirror. Her face was drawn and colorless, her eyes swollen. She felt weak and shaky, the result of almost twenty-four hours without much food. Four tiny bites of Danish and fruit didn't provide a lot of nourishment. She needed to eat something, even if she had to choke it down. Maybe she would go down to the hotel restaurant, later. For now, though, she put on another pot of coffee and turned on the television, then crawled back into bed. She needed to be distracted by something mindless more than she needed food.

She had nothing to do. She was accustomed to there always being something to do. Her life was very organized for that reason, so every chore would be accomplished. She should be doing paperwork now, keeping track of the household expenses; she always did that on Thursdays.

She could go buy some pajamas. She was close to three major shopping centers: Brookwood, the Summit, and the Galleria. But it was still raining, she was exhausted and groggy, and frankly she didn't give a damn whether or not she had pajamas to sleep in.

She discovered that the Weather Channel was the most interesting program on at three-thirty in the afternoon. She turned off the television, turned off the bedside light, and pulled up the covers. As soon as she closed her eyes, though, she saw the Judge in his recliner, his head lolled to the side-and she smelled the odor. Hastily she sat up again and turned on the lamp.

What was she thinking? She had just made a pot of coffee. She couldn't believe she'd put on the coffee, then gone back to bed. Nothing drastic would happen, of course, other than the coffee getting old and bitter. Neither she nor the Judge could stand old coffee-

He always came into the kitchen early in the morning, not waiting for her to bring the coffee to him. They would stand there chatting, leisurely sipping and sharing what they both considered one of life's finest little pleasures.

They would never share that first blissful cup of coffee again.

Like a loop of film that never stopped running, she saw him again: his white head tilted to the side, that thin dark streak running down his neck. His hair was a little mussed, but in the dim light that was, at first, the only thing she noted that was different. His hands were relaxed on the arms of the recliner, the footrest was up, as if he had just dozed off.

His hands were relaxed. The footrest was up.

Sarah stared across the room, seeing nothing but the awful scene from the night before. She had the feeling of the ground tilting beneath her, as if she had stepped out of reality into quicksand.

The footrest was up.

He was in his recliner-actually reclining.

The front door wasn't locked.

But the front door was always locked. He locked it himself as soon as he came in from his afternoon walk. In all the time Sarah had worked for him, she couldn't remember him ever leaving the front door unlocked.

What were the odds that the one time he did leave it unlocked, his killer walked in? Not very likely. Hell, the odds were astronomical against such a thing happening. He was very safety conscious, after the threats against him, and especially after the robbery.

So he hadn't forgotten to lock the door; he had unlocked it. To let someone in?

Why would he let a stranger come in? The answer was simple: He wouldn't.

There was no sign of a struggle. No sign of forced entry-at least, none that Cahill had mentioned to her or the family, and she was certain he would have told them if there had been.

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. It made sense, in an awful way. The Judge had let someone he knew into the house. They had gone into the library . . . to talk? He'd been sitting in his favorite chair, the big leather recliner; he was relaxed, the footrest in the up position. And this acquaintance had pulled a gun and shot him in the head.

This was what Cahill had figured out, what he hadn't told them. Whoever the killer was, the Judge hadn't felt threatened. He had known his killer, felt comfortable and relaxed in his presence.

She almost vomited, because that meant she likely knew him, too.

Chapter 11

HE FELT GOOD. HE'D FORGOTTEN HOW GOOD IT REAllY DID feel, to hold all that power in his own hands, to take charge of his own destiny. It had been . . . how long? Seven years? That was proof he was in control, that he wasn't one of those maniacs who were slaves to compulsion. In the almost thirty years since he had taken care of the problem of his father, this was only the third time he'd been forced to act. Four times, total, in almost thirty years.

All in all, he felt justifiably proud of himself. Not many men could control themselves so well, not if they knew the rush, the sheer joy, of the act. Even more important, not many men were intelligent enough to get away with it.

But the old man was out of the way now, and Sarah was free. Nothing stood in her way; she could come to him now.

Cahill sat in his cubicle, slowly leafing through the files and bank statements retrieved from the fireproof safe in Sarah's closet. Finally he dumped everything in an oversized padded bag and sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. Holy shit. The woman wasn't hurting for money.

Not that a hundred grand wasn't a lot of money, but she didn't need it. Must be nice, he thought, to be in a position where you didn't need a hundred grand. Some people would grab for everything they could get, and no amount would ever be enough, but people like that didn't devote themselves to training for a well-paying job, then devote themselves to the job and save like mad. No, people who were just out for the money would steal it, commit fraud, marry old people and then in an effort to kill them, fiddle with the multitude of drugs old people always seemed to take, but they wouldn't work for it.

Sarah had evidently saved the vast majority of her salary from the time she started work. She'd invested it, and from what he could see she'd been smart about it. She hadn't gone heavily into tech stocks, and those she'd had she'd sold just as they started crashing, while she could still make some profit. She had blue-chip stocks, she had mutual funds, she had some workhorse stocks. She'd salted money away in a retirement fund, planning for the future. She had just turned thirty, and with everything added together she was knocking on the door of the millionaires' club.

That was one smart woman.

And being so smart, would she risk everything to add another hundred large to her account? Money was relative. If you were working a minimum-wage job and barely scraping by, with nothing left over for extras, then a hundred thousand was an enormous amount of money. He'd known mothers to kill their kids for a five-thousand-dollar insurance policy. But if you already had way over a hundred thousand, then in comparison it wasn't nearly as impressive. In this case, the risk outweighed the gain.

So there went her possible motive.

Good.

"You got anything?" his lieutenant asked, pausing by his desk. "The butler didn't do it."

"I thought she was top of your list."

"The motive evaporated."

"Money? How does money evaporate?"

"She has plenty of it. You know how much butlers make?"

The lieutenant scratched his nose. "I gather it's more than we thought."

"She makes more than you and me combined."

"No shit!"

"My thoughts exactly." Cahill shook his head. "She had everything to lose and, comparatively, not that much to gain. Not anything, when you consider that she earned more in a year working for him than she'll get in his will. She'd be better off with him still alive. So there goes the motive. Not only that, she thought the world of the old man."

The lieutenant was a good guy, and he trusted his investigators. "So what else do we have?"

"Not much. The neighbors didn't see anything, and they all have alibis. The family all checks out, so far. Unless forensics turns up a smoking gun, this isn't looking good."

"It's been less than twenty-four hours."

But it was knocking hard on twenty-four hours, and if murders weren't solved quickly, they tended not to be solved at all.

'What about the cons he received death threats from? Anything turned up on them?"

"None of them are known to be in this area. One is currently a ward of the state, in the St. Clair facility, living off taxpayer money. One is in federal lockup. Only two are at large, and one of them is in Eugene, Oregon. The last known location of the last one was Chicago, in January." Cahill flipped a photo onto his desk of a heavyset man with a mustache. "Carl Jarmond. I don't think it's him."

"But he's a possibility."

Cahill shook his head. "Would Judge Roberts have let this man in his house? I don't think so. Every outside door in that house has a peephole, so he didn't open the door blind. He knew whoever it was."

"What numbers were on call return and redial?"

"I checked redial from every phone in the house. Nothing suspicious. The butler called her folks, and the phones the victim would have used showed calls to his banker, and another to an old friend of his-who also has an alibi. Call return was interesting. The phone in the library returned a call from a pay phone in the Galleria."

"Have you found out what time the call was made?"

'We're working on getting a list of all calls, both in and out."

"No way of telling who made it, though."

Cahill shook his head. The time of the call would tell them some things, such as if it was made close to the time of the murder, but that was about it. The Galleria was a busy mall; unless you were green-haired, spike-collared, and wore a Bozo suit-or, alternatively, were naked-the chances were small anyone would pay much attention to you. The chances of getting a viable fingerprint from the phone were somewhere between zero and laughable. Video cameras from nearby stores trained on the store entrances might have caught something, though. That was worth checking. He said as much to the lieutenant.

"Good idea, Doc." He checked his watch. "Get started on that in the morning. For now, go home and get some sleep. You were up all night last night, and you haven't stopped today."

"I grabbed about three hours early this morning. I'm okay." His training in the Army had taught him how to function with a lot less rest than that, and for a longer time. "But I think I will call it a day." He definitely had something else to do, something he didn't think he could put off much longer. He might as well test the waters now.

At eight o'clock that night, the Weather Channel was still on, and Sarah had watched the same weather fronts for almost five hours now. Nothing had changed. She still felt sick, mentally running through all the Judge's acquaintances, the neighbors, anyone whom he wouldn't hesitate to let into the house. The problem was, he knew a lot of people whom she didn't know. She knew his immediate circle of friends, the immediate neighbors and some of the others, but of course he had old school chums, friends in law practice, college buddies, whom she'd never met. But why would any of them want to kill him?

The why of it was driving her crazy.

If they only knew why, she thought, they could figure out who. Why would anyone want to kill him, other than someone he'd sentenced to prison? And if it was an ex-con, why would the Judge have let him in the house, sat down, and relaxed? He wouldn't have.

Why ?

The phone rang and she grabbed it, glad for the distraction; maybe Barbara needed something done that would occupy her for a couple of hours.

"Have you had supper yet?"

She didn't need him to identify himself; Cahill's deep voice and abrupt tone was identification enough.

"Supper?"

"Or lunch?"

"I slept through lunch, remember."

"Then let's go to Milo's and get a hamburger."

Sarah dragged her hand through her hair. She needed to eat, but her stomach was still tied in knots. She hesitated long enough that he said, "Sarah?"

"I'm here. It's . . . I really don't feel like eating."

"Get ready anyway. I'll be there in ten minutes." He hung up, and she stared at the phone in astonishment.

Ten minutes!

Despite her shakiness, in ten minutes she was dressed, had brushed her teeth and washed her face, and was dragging a brush through her hair when he knocked on the door.

"You look like hell," he said by way of greeting.

"You're pretty, too," she said coolly, stepping back to let him in. Just because she was dressed didn't mean she was going anywhere with him. After all, she hadn't had on any clothes at all when he called.

He looked down at her bare feet. "Get your shoes on. Socks, too. The temperature's in the forties."

"I don't feel like eating," she repeated.

"Then you can watch me eat."

"Your charm is enormous." Despite the sarcasm, despite everything, for the first time that day she found herself smiling. It wasn't much of a smile, but it was real. He was like a Sherman tank, without finesse, but packing a great deal of power.

"Yeah, I know. It's exceeded only by the size of my-" He caught himself, flicking a quick glance at her. "---ego," he finished, and she could have sworn color stained his cheekbones. Evidently cops weren't supposed to make risque comments to suspects. He bent down and picked up her shoes, extending them to her. She got the impression he'd put them on her if she didn't do it herself.

She sat down on the bed and put on her socks and shoes. "I assume you're hungry and you want to talk to me, so you're killing two birds with one stone."

He shrugged. 'You can assume whatever you want."

Well, what on earth did that mean? As it happened, she wanted to talk to him, too, about her conclusions on the Judge's murder; she didn't mind watching him eat while they were talking.

They stopped at the front desk for her to get the jacket being held for her there. It was her Berber fleece, and she gratefully pulled it on as they left the hotel. The rain had stopped, but very recently, because the trees were still dripping. The pavement was dark and shiny.

Instead of the car he'd been driving earlier, he led her to a pickup truck, dark blue in color. The truck looked like something he'd drive, being short on fancy extras but with plenty of power. At least it had running boards, so she could get in without help. He opened the door for her and waited until she was settled in the seat before closing it and going around to his side.

Milo's was a hamburger tradition in the Birmingham area, with what most locals swore was the best hamburger in the world, and the best iced tea. The hamburger didn't have all the fancy stuff, like lettuce and tomato and pickles-though you could get cheese on it if you wanted-but it did have a dark sauce that almost defied the taste buds to decipher what was in it. That was it. Double meat, chopped onions, and the sauce. The burgers dripped with sauce. People bought extra containers of the sauce. They dipped their spicy fries in it, they poured more on their burgers, they used it at home on their own grilled burgers.

Needless to say, a Milo's hamburger was a messy affair. Even if her stomach had been cooperating, Sarah wouldn't have felt like dealing with the mess. When Cahill asked if she was sure she didn't want anything, she said, "I'm sure," and went to a table against the wall to wait for him.

When he joined her, he carried a tray with two tall paper cups of iced tea, three hamburgers, and two orders of fries. The tray was also loaded with little paper cups full of ketchup and packets of salt. She stared at the bounty with disbelieving eyes. "You said you were hungry, but I thought you were talking normal, human hungry, not Koko the gorilla hungry."

He set the tray on the table and took the seat across from her. "Part of it is for you. I hope you like onions, because I do. Eat." He put a cup of tea, a burger, and an order of fries in front of her.

"What does the fact that you like onions have to do with whether or not I like onions?" she murmured, trying to convince her stomach to unknot. She really did need to eat, and normally she liked a Milo's as well as anyone else. She just wasn't certain she could swallow, or that any food would stay down even if she could.

"In case I break down and kiss you, I wouldn't want to gross you out with onion breath." Without looking up, he began salting his fries.

Just like that, the world tilted on its axis. Sarah looked wildly around the restaurant, wondering if she had stepped into some alternate universe. "What did you say?" she asked faintly. Surely she had misheard him.

"You heard me. " He glanced up, and snorted. "If you could see your face. You act as if a man's never been attracted to you before. "

Okay, she'd risk a stomach in revolt. She had to do something to give herself time to adjust to this sudden shift. She plucked out a fry, dipped it in ketchup, and took a bite. The hot, spicy taste slapped her taste buds awake. She took her time chewing and swallowing, so she was then able to reply in an even tone. "Let's just say few men could have made it plainer than you that you aren't attracted."

"When I run scared, I do it right." He unwrapped his first burger, doctored it with salt, and took a big bite.

She took refuge in another french fry. After three or four of them, she decided she needed something bigger, so she unwrapped her burger. Dark sauce coated the waxed paper, dripped from between the two halves of bun. She took a bite-God, heaven-while she thought this through. His turnabout was too abrupt; there had to be something behind it. Ah, she had it.

"You think I killed the Judge," she said, "but you don't have any evidence, so you think if you get close to me, I might let something incriminating slip."

"Good try." He looked up at her, his hard cop's gaze very blue, very direct. "Look, my ex-wife would tell you in a heartbeat that I'm an asshole, and, hell, she may be right. I'll tell you, up front, that I haven't been fit company since the divorce. It was vicious, and getting over something like that takes awhile. I haven't wanted to get involved with anyone, other than-"

He stopped, and she said, "For sex," filling in the blank.

"I wasn't going to be that blunt, but, yeah."

So he was divorced, and the process had been nasty. Healing from a split like that was like healing from any other trauma; it took time, and it wasn't easy. That made him a bad risk right now, not that she was in the market for a relationship, either. "How long has it been?"

"Two years since I caught her cheating on me, a year since the divorce was final."

"Ouch. Very nasty." What kind of idiot would cheat on a man like him? Not that she had any way of judging, but if her feminine instincts had been cats, they'd all have been purring right now in response to the testosterone she could practically smell on him.

"Yeah, it was. But it's over, maybe more over than I realized. I'm attracted to you, I tried to ignore it, and it didn't work. By the way, I've already seen your bank statement and investment portfolio; you don't need Judge Roberts's money."

"So I'm not a suspect now?"

"Let's just say as far as I'm concerned, you're in the clear."

That called for another bite or two of hamburger, chased by a french fry. "Some people might think you're after me because of the money. The timing is a tad suspicious."

"A tad," he agreed. "You make almost three times as much money as I do, and Mountain Brook cops are well paid. But I'd say you usually make more than anyone you date, so you're used to it."

"My dates don't usually see my bank statement first," she said dryly.

"Look, money's nice, but I'm not hurting. My ego isn't hurt by a woman making more than I do, either."

"I know, you told me; it's enormous."

There it was again, that flush of color on his cheekbones. Fascinated, she watched it fade as he devoted himself to his second hamburger. Despite the circumstances, she was really beginning to enjoy herself.

He wiped his mouth. "Okay, you've accused me of trying to get close to you so I can get enough evidence to convict you of murder-a little undercover work, I guess-and of wanting your money. Anything else?"

"I'll let you know if anything comes to mind."

"You do that. In the meantime, on my side of the table is a lot of attraction. How about your side?"

He definitely had the finesse of a tank. On the other hand, that blunt honesty was somehow reassuring. A woman would always know where she stood with this man, for good or ill.

The big question was, what did she want to do about it?

His honesty forced her to be at least as straightforward as he was. "My side looks pretty much like your side. That doesn't mean getting involved would be a good idea."

A very male smile of satisfaction curved his mouth. "Getting involved is what it's all about. Millions of people work hard to get involved, actively search for it. Think of all the hours of hard labor put in in singles' bars."

"I've never been to a singles' bar. That should tell you something."

"That you've never needed to. I figure any time you don't have a man, it's because you don't want one."

She didn't say anything, staring down at the table. She saw that she'd eaten half of the burger, and all of the fries. His method of distracting her had certainly worked. On the other hand, she definitely felt better with some food in her stomach, even fast food. She could almost feel her energy level rising.

'We can take this as slow as you want," he said. '1his isn't a good time for you, and I have a couple of speed bumps in my way, too. I just wanted you to know I'm interested." He shrugged. "You don't have to get through this alone, unless that's the way you want it."

Oh, damn. She'd been doing so well, pushing her grief to the background for a little while. Just like that her eyes began swimming, and she blinked rapidly, trying to hold back the tears.

"Ah, hell, I didn't mean to-Let's get out of here." He began gathering paper and napkins, dumping the trash into a bin and placing the tray on top. Blindly she followed him out of the restaurant, and as they walked to his truck, he put his arm around her.

"I'm sorry," he said, thrusting a handkerchief into her hands.

She wiped her eyes, leaning into the strength and warmth of his body. His arm felt good around her. She wanted to put her head on his shoulder and weep; instead she took a deep breath. "He was a sweet man. I'll cry a lot for him before this is over."

He unlocked the door and she climbed inside, reaching for the seat belt. He stopped her, his hand over hers, and he leaned inside.

She made no move to evade the kiss. She didn't want to evade it. She wanted to know how he kissed, how he tasted. His mouth was warm, the contact light, almost gentle, as if his intent was more to comfort than arouse.

That lasted about two seconds. Then he slanted his head, his lips parted, and he deepened the kiss until his tongue was in her mouth and her arms were around his neck. The bottom dropped out of her stomach and her entire body clenched, and she knew her purring instincts hadn't been wrong. Good Lord, the man could kiss.

He lifted his head, running his tongue along his lower lip as if savoring the taste of her. "That was good." His tone was so low it almost rumbled.

"Yes, it was." Her own tone was a tad . . . breathy. Where had that come from? She had never sounded breathy before in her life.

"Do you want to do it again?"

'We'd better not."

"Okay," he said, and kissed her again.

This man was dangerous. If she wasn't careful, she'd be involved in a full-fledged affair with him before she knew it-maybe even before morning. Now was definitely not the time, and she had to get herself under control while she still could. After giving her the cold shoulder, now he was moving at light speed in the opposite direction, and she was a little shell-shocked.

It took some effort, but she pulled her mouth away, gasping for air. "Red light, Detective. Stop."

He was breathing hard, too, but he stepped back. "Permanently?" The word was raw with disbelief.

"No!" Her answer was embarrassingly forceful. "Just . . . for now." She took a deep breath. '1here are more important things to talk about."

"Such as?"

"Such as, I think the Judge knew the killer."

His face went blank. He closed her door and went around to the driver's side, getting behind the wheel and starting the truck. A light drizzle had started again, and he turned on the windshield wipers.

"I know he did," he said. "But what makes you think so?"

Chapter 12

MAYBE HE WASN'T SO CONVINCED OF HER INNOCENCE, after all. The thought cooled her down, gave her a bit of much needed mental distance from him. "I know the Judge.... knew him," she corrected herself. "He never, never left the doors unlocked. I checked the house every night before going to bed and not once did he leave any door unsecured. It was automatic for him; when he came inside, he locked the door behind him. I guess he got in the habit after he got the first death threat, when Mrs. Roberts was still alive. But last night"-God, was it only last night, it felt like a week-"the front door was unlocked."

"Could be coincidence."

"That he'd leave the door unlocked on the one night a killer came looking for him?" She threw Cahill a derisive glance. "I don't think so. I think this person came to the door, and the Judge knew him and let him in. When I found him, the Judge was sitting in his recliner, with the footrest up. He was relaxed. He didn't feel he was in any danger. So he knew the guy."

'Why are you so certain it was a man?"

That question gave her pause. "I suppose I'm thinking in general terms. It's easier than saying 'the killer' every time. And the cons who made the death threats were all men, so the idea stuck. Plus the weirdo who sent me the pendant is most likely a man, and my first thought was that he had done it."

"Hmm." Cahill scratched his jaw, as if considering that possibility. "Has he contacted you again? Sent anything else? Have you had any hang-ups on the phone, or any other kind of strange call?"

"No, nothing else at all. Just the pendant. One incident doesn't establish a pattern, does it?"

"You know the saying. Once in a row doesn't mean shit."

"That's what I figured."

Deftly he steered through the traffic on 280. "Last night, you said you went to the movie so he'd have a chance to approach you, if he was watching."

She'd been in shock the night before, but she thought that was pretty much verbatim what she'd said. Cahill was sharp, very sharp. "That's right."

He glanced at her. "What made you think he'd be watching?"

"Nothing, except the gift made me feel so uneasy. I hadn't been able to put it out of my mind. Something like that is . . . It put me on edge. That's the only way I can describe it." She shuddered. "Just the thought that he might be following me, watching me, gives me the creeps. And not knowing who he is made it worse, so I thought I'd give him the opportunity to introduce himself. At least then I'd know what he looks like."

"But no one approached?"

"No one tried to sit next to me, no one spoke to me, no one even looked at me a second time that I could tell."

"You know, if someone was fixated on you, and crazy enough to start following you around, giving him an opportunity like that wasn't a great idea."

"Probably not," she agreed. "But if he tried anything, I thought I'd be able to take him by surprise."

"The karate, you mean? What if he'd had training, too?"

"Then I'd be in trouble. I thought the odds were in my favor, though."

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "I don't like the idea of you trying to draw anyone out like that. That's my personal reaction. My reaction as a cop is, don't ask for trouble."

"That's basically the same thing," she said, amused.

"How about that. Look, if anything strange happens, if you think you're being followed, if you get another gift, or a funny phone call, let me know. Immediately. Day or night."

"I don't think you'd be very thrilled if I called you at three A.M. to tell you some drunk had just called the wrong number."

"I said to call me, and I meant it. Who knows? Maybe all you'll need to do will be to roll over and punch me."

She rubbed her forehead. Light speed? He was moving at warp speed now. The biggest problem she had was that it didn't turn her off. No matter how fast he moved, her hormones were keeping pace. For her own sanity, she needed him to again suspect her of murder, so she could pull back. Otherwise . . . she didn't want to think about otherwise.

She had always been cautious about dating, about serious relationships. Part of it was because being tied down didn't fit in with her life plans right now, but another big part of it was something inside herself that was intensely private and self-sufficient. Letting someone in on a romantic level wasn't easy, because that meant letting go of some of her personal control. She could and did make friends easily, she loved the Judge, liked his family, but there had always been another level of intimacy that she hadn't let anyone reach. Cahill, she thought, might reach that level.

It was a case of good chemistry, but bad timing. She wasn't ready to settle down, and Cahill was recovering from a rocky divorce. He might be looking for a relationship, but she seriously doubted he put the word "permanent" in front of it. Rebound romances weren't a good idea at any time. In another year or so . . . maybe he'd be a better risk. As for where she would be in another year or so, that was anyone's guess.

So letting this thing go any further wasn't a good idea.

He waved a hand in front of her face. "Are you in there?"

She batted his hand away. "I'm thinking."

"That's a relief. I was afraid the idea of sleeping with me put you in a catatonic state."

She was surprised into laughing, an actual, honest laugh. "That happens often, does it?"

"I hadn't thought so, but looking back, there may have been one or two times-" He grinned and shrugged, and Sarah laughed again.

"It must be your enormous charm."

"I thought that was my ego."

"That, too." It was on the tip of her tongue to ask what other enormous qualities he had, but she stopped herself in time. Sexy banter was always fun, but with him she sensed the situation could get out of control before she knew it, as fast as he moved. He could take a quip and move her right into bed with it, if she wasn't on her guard. She was too damned susceptible to him, but at least she knew it.

"Cahill-"

"My name's Thompson. Some people call me Tom, some call me Doc. You can call me sweetheart."

A sound dangerously close to a giggle bubbled in her throat. "Are you always this sure of yourself?"

"Faint hearts, and all that. If you don't like me, you'll slap me down, or just plain slap me. You said the attraction is mutual, so I'm taking you at your word." He turned into the parking lot and slotted the truck into an empty space, turning off the engine and headlights. The drizzle immediately began to dot the windshield, distorting the lights and images.

"I don't rush into any relationship, especially not one with a man who's newly divorced and still carrying around a lot of baggage. "

He shifted, angling his upper body toward her, his left arm draped over the steering wheel and the right one stretched out along the back of the seat, inviting her to slide closer. Why couldn't the truck have nice, safe bucket seats, instead of a bench seat? She could have sworn the truck tilted to the left, too, because staying on her own side was more difficult than it should have been.

"Baggage is normal," he said. "It's what makes us who we are. Granted, I'd rather not be an embittered woman-hater, but-"

He stopped, because she was definitely giggling. "Good," he said, his expression softening as he used one finger to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. "You sounded as if you were convincing yourself of something with that baggage argument. Don't think too much, Sarah. Let's just see where this goes. We may bore each other to tears within a week."

She snorted. "Yeah, right."

"Stranger things have happened." That one finger touched her cheek, lightly stroked. Without thinking she turned her face and nestled it against his hand, and just that simple touch made her nipples harden. He smiled, as if he knew the effect he had on her. "Once you get over this weird hang-up you have about having wild monkey sex with a man you barely know, we can have a lot of fun."

She bailed out of the truck, and was still laughing as she strode into the hotel lobby, sending him off with a backward wave. Laughing felt strange, with everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, but it also felt good. Laughter didn't stop the grief, but it made the weight of it a little easier to bear.

In one fell swoop, Cahill had fed her, distracted her, aroused her, and amused her. Not many men were that versatile, she thought as she rode the elevator upward. His sly sense of humor was astonishing when she remembered how dour he'd seemed the night he interviewed her about the robbery.

Which left her . . . where?

She really, really wanted to forget caution and common sense, and have a flaming hot affair with him. The sex would be . . . She couldn't even begin to imagine the sex, because she'd never before had such a strong physical reaction to anyone. And therein was the big problem. Not the sex, but the way she felt. She could get in over her head before she knew it, and letting herself care too much about him was just asking for a heartache.

The smart thing to do would be to start hunting for a job in another state. Florida, maybe, on one of those huge Palm Beach estates. She'd be closer to her parents, too. There was always California, or the Hamptons; she wasn't worried about finding another job. She had to update her resume anyway; she no longer had a job, or a place to live. She hadn't really absorbed that before, with all her attention focused on what had happened, but the shock had lessened a little and she was beginning to think of all the ramifications.

She probably wouldn't have the option of having a flaming hot affair with him, unless it was a short one-or a long-distance one. Cahill didn't strike her as a long-distance-type man. So all of this angst and indecision was a waste of time; she had to deal with reality, and reality dictated she get a job. She had chosen a very specialized field in which to make her living, so that meant she couldn't find a position just anywhere; she was limited to the moneyed communities, such as Beverly Hills, Buckhead, Mountain Brook.

It was possible she would stay on in Mountain Brook; she'd already had the one job offer, though she doubted it was still open now, after she had so definitely turned it down. That was assuming she would take the position, anyway; the interview process was a two-way street. The employer had to feel comfortable with her, but she also had to feel comfortable with the employer. After all, she would be fitting herself into the home, forming the structure of routine and comfort. If she didn't like the employer, then the level of dedication she demanded of herself would be difficult to maintain, and she would be miserable.

She felt better now that she was focused on the hard facts, rather than the tantalizing possibilities of a relationship with Cahill; the ground beneath her had solidified. She could deal with him, so long as she kept her head. For the next few days, anyway, she had more serious things to consider.

The rain continued the next day, heavier and colder. The medical examiner released Judge Roberts's body to his family and they began the task of making the final arrangements. Sarah handled placing the obituary in the newspapers, and she put herself completely at the disposal of the family.

She drove them to the funeral home they'd chosen, to deal with casket selection and the financial matters. The Judge had wanted to be buried beside his wife, had even bought a double tombstone when she died with his name already chiseled on it, so at least they didn't have to deal with that decision. Selecting a casket, however, shattered them. Randall and Jon held together, but they seemed incapable of making a decision; they kept looking to Barbara, and Barbara began silently crying.

Sarah stepped out of the background and gave Barbara a hug. "I know," she murmured in sympathy. "But it has to be done."

Barbara turned to her, eyes blinded by tears. "Which one do you like?"

The question floored her. Stunned, Sarah looked around at the caskets, and at Randall and Jon. They were both watching her now with a sort of desperate plea in their expressions. It couldn't be plainer that they couldn't handle this.

Sarah took a deep breath. "I like the bronze one." It was expensive, but they could easily afford it, and they would feel better thinking they'd bought the best for their father.

"I like that one best, too," Randall said quickly.

Barbara blotted her eyes. "The bronze?" she asked, her voice quivering. She looked at it. "It's very nice, isn't it?"

"The best," the funeral director put in. After all, business was business.

"I like the color." Barbara took a deep breath and turned to Sarah again. "I think you're right. We'll take the bronze."

From there they visited a florist to order flowers. The service would be at two o'clock on Sunday, at the huge church the Judge had attended. Sarah had already gotten rooms for the rest of Randall's family, who were driving down that day, Friday, after work and school. Visitation for friends would be at the funeral home on Saturday night, and before that, there was shopping to be done.

Sarah had had the presence of mind to request a charcoal suit and black pumps from her closet, but she needed panty hose and a few other small items. Barbara decided the clothes she'd brought wouldn't do at all, and Blair tearfully confided she didn't even own any dark clothes. Julia, Jon's wife, also decided she needed something different. Only Emily had come fully prepared.

The most logical thing to do was to begin at the Galleria, since it was attached to the hotel, but Blair had already roamed the mall from end to end, both stories, and wasn't satisfied with anything. Barbara did find some shoes she liked at Parisian, and Sarah quickly picked up the items she needed, including several black umbrellas, since it appeared they would be going back out in the rain after all.

By evening, they had exhausted the contents of the Summit, Brookwood, and Sarah had driven them to all the exclusive boutiques that she knew of in the area. Barbara finally settled on a stylish black suit with a long, slim skirt, which, given the weather forecast, was a good idea. Blair selected a black skirt that ended just above her knees, and a slim-fitting, short jacket in eggplant; she had removed the ring from her eyebrow and washed the colored streaks from her hair. Funerals were serious business, both emotionally and fashionwise. Julia had been much more decisive than the other two, making her selection, a navy blue dress with a matching tunic jacket, at the first department store they visited in the Summit.

Sarah's feet were so tired she was almost limping by the time she herded her charges back to the hotel. The rain had fallen unceasingly all day long, making shopping even more difficult, as they'd had to juggle umbrellas along with everything else. Her shoes were wet, her pants were damp, and despite the Berber jacket she was cold. All she wanted to do was take a hot shower and sit down with her feet elevated. Her cell phone hadn't rung all day long, and there were no messages waiting for her when she reached the inn. Maybe, she thought, she could rest now.

The room phone rang as she was peeling off her damp socks. She groaned and flopped back on the bed, considering not answering it. But it might be one of the family, so she picked it up on the sixth ring.

"Ms. Stevens, this is Greg Holbrook with the News. I'd like to interview you about the tragic murder-"

"I'm not giving interviews," she said firmly. "Good-bye." She disconnected, then immediately rang the front desk and asked for a different room, booked under a false name. The next hour was spent handling that and getting her things switched to a room four doors down. She should have thought of the press before and taken those same precautions.

Her new room was cold, having been empty all day. She turned the heat on full blast, and when the chill was gone, began stripping for that hot shower that she needed desperately now. Right on cue, her cell phone rang.

At least this wasn't likely to be the press. But if it was someone in the Judge's family, then it meant something had come up she needed to handle.

"Where are you?" Cahill demanded irritably. "The front desk said you'd checked out."

"Bless them," she said with deep gratitude. "A reporter called my room, so I changed rooms and booked it under a different name. "

"Good. Have you had supper?"

"I've eaten today, if that's what you're asking."

"It isn't. I'm asking specifically about supper."

"Then, no, I haven't, and you couldn't blow me out of this room with dynamite. I took three of the ladies shopping. My feet hurt, I'm cold, and I want a hot shower. Period."

"Poor baby," he said, and she could tell he was smiling. 'What's your room number?"

"I'm not telling. I don't want company."

"I give a great foot massage."

The thought of having her feet massaged almost made her moan. She had the presence of mind, though, to say, "I'll take a rain check. I'm exhausted, and dealing with you takes a lot of energy. I'm not up to it tonight."

"That's probably the best kiss-off I've ever had. Okay, I'll see you tomorrow. Sleep tight."

"Tomorrow?" Tomorrow was Saturday. She had . . . nothing to do. The realization was so strange as to be disorienting. Her Saturdays were always busy. If she took her half day on Saturday, then the mornings were spent getting the Judge's day arranged and everything taken care of. If she didn't take her half day on Saturday, that was because something was going on that required her supervision. Either way, Saturdays were busy days.

"I'll be working," Cahill said. "Checking out some things. But I'll see you tomorrow night at the funeral home."

That should be safe enough.

'When will we be able to get into the house?"

"Maybe Sunday. I think we've about done everything we can there."

'Will you let me know ahead of time? I want to have the library cleaned before the family sees it."

"Of course," he said gently, and repeated, "Sleep tight," before hanging up.

The day of the funeral dawned clear and cold, with a wind that sliced through jackets. This was probably winter's last hurrah, Sarah thought-blackberry winter, the cool spell that came right after the blackberry bushes had bloomed. Indeed, the forecast called for a fast warming trend. On Monday the temperature was supposed to reach sixty-two; on Tuesday, seventy-five. By week's end it was forecast to be in the low eighties.

At the family's insistence she sat with them in church. Cahill sat somewhere behind her; he'd said hello when he came in, briefly touched her hand, then pulled back to the fringes to watch. She wasn't certain exactly what he was watching for, but no detail escaped his attention.

In her mind, she said good-bye to the Judge. She could almost feel his spirit hovering nearby, perhaps taking leave of his loved ones. Her lips trembled as she remembered all the funny things he'd said, the twinkle in his eyes, the joy he'd had in life. Losing him was like losing a grandfather, and there would always be a tiny gap in her heart, in her life, that only he could fill.

The church was filled to overflowing. His old friends were devastated by his loss, and they all looked more frail than they had just a few days before, as if some of their spirit was gone, too. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers, roses and carnations and mums, and hothouse gardenias with their hauntingly sweet smell. There couldn't be many flowers left in Birmingham, Sarah thought, looking at the huge wall of floral offerings behind the casket.

Southern funerals were maudlin and ultimately comforting, with their ceremony and tradition. Because the Judge was a war veteran, his VFW chapter posted an honor guard. During the funeral procession to the cemetery, all traffic they met stopped, with most people turning on their headlights in sympathy and pulling off the highway if they could. Police cars blocked intersections for the procession to go through unimpeded. Sarah had always been amused by the traffic etiquette for a funeral, but today, now that she was in the procession, she was grateful for the consideration.

There was an additional brief service at the grave; then the family pulled back and the somber work of burial began. After the grave was filled in and covered with the huge array of flowers, Barbara and Blair each selected a perfect rose from one of the arrangements for a keepsake. Randall and Jon looked uncomfortable, as if they, too, wanted a rose; but they were men, so they stood back rather than admit to such sentimentality. Their wives, though, exchanged glances with Barbara and made their own floral selections.

Normally there was food served after a funeral, at the bereaved's home. With the Judge's house still off-limits-and having guests there in the house where he had been murdered didn't seem right, anyway-one of his friends had offered the hospitality of his house. Many of the funeral attendees trooped off for food, drink, and reminiscing, but Sarah slipped away to her SW. A couple of reporters were in the crowd, and she wanted to get away before they could buttonhole her.

Cahill caught up with her as she got behind the steering wheel. "You can arrange for those cleaners," he said. "I'll hold the family off until tomorrow, give you time to take care of things."

"Thanks." Now that the funeral was over, she was at a loss. There was nothing else to do, other than handle the cleaning. "Is it okay if I get some of my stuff out?" She was thinking specifically of her laptop, so she could begin updating her resume.

He looked surprised. "You can stay there, if you want."

She shuddered at the thought. "Not now. Not until the library is cleaned."

He nodded in understanding, and gave her a card. "This firm specializes in hard-to-remove stains." Meaning blood, and brain matter.

She glanced at the name. "Thank you. I'll call them first thing in the morning."

"You can call now; that second number is the guy's home phone. They're geared for emergencies."

That couldn't be a great job, cleaning up after murders. On the other hand, someone had to do it, and in cases like this it was best to hand the chore off to professionals. She knew she couldn't bear tackling the job herself, even though she was trained to handle all types of stain removal.

'Will you be all right?" Cahill asked, blue eyes very clear and direct as he studied her tired face. He shifted so his shoulders blocked the open door, giving them the illusion of privacy. "I have some things to do, but if you need company, I'll-"

"No. " She touched his hand, then swiftly withdrew because just that brief touch was sharp temptation. "Thanks, but I'm okay. I have some things to take care of, too."

"I'll call you tomorrow, then." He leaned into the SW and kissed her on the cheek. "Keep your cell phone on so I don't have to hunt you down."

"Are you planning to arrest me?"

'We still need to discuss some things, make some decisions. I'11 take you into custody if I have to." He walked away, and she stared at his broad back, tiny shivers prickling her spine.

If she intended to run, she needed to do it soon. Very soon.

Chapter 13

CAHILL HATED SURVEILLANCE VIDEOTAPES. THE ANGLES WERE weird, the quality was very iffy, and mostly they were boring. They were also invaluable if anything interesting happened within the camera's range. So far, he hadn't found anything interesting.

The pay phones in the Galleria were located all through the mall, some of them close to the parking decks, some of them around the escalators. The one from which Judge Roberts had been called was near one of the escalators. If the gods had been smiling on him, the Galleria would have had surveillance cameras aimed at the huge main concourse; no such luck. He'd had to settle for the stores near that particular pay phone. The security cameras aimed at the store entrances were the only ones that could possibly pick up the traffic at that pay phone.

Most of them were complete washouts. The angle was wrong; one camera had malfunctioned and showed nothing new on the tape for a couple of weeks, which told Cahill how often it was checked. Most surveillance tapes ran on loops; if you didn't get to them before the loop was completed, they would begin taping over whatever was at the beginning. Wait too long, and everything in the desired time period was gone.

The best part about them was that they were timed and dated. He had the exact time of the call made to Judge Roberts, so he didn't have to watch each entire tape. Allowing for discrepancies in the timers, he began fifteen minutes before the targeted time, and watched for fifteen minutes afterward. That was half an hour on each tape, taking note of the people who walked past the store entrances, comparing them to the next tape, and the next one. He finally hit paydirt: a man in a light-colored suit used that particular phone and the digital time on the tape put it within two minutes of what the telephone company said was the time of the call. Cahill continued watching, and no one else used that phone for at least five minutes. The next user was a young girl in baggy jeans and huge, clunky boots.

Bingo. The man in the light-colored suit was the most likely suspect.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the angle was awful, and showed only the lower two-thirds of the body.

Back to all the other tapes, trying to catch a glimpse of a man wearing a light-colored suit as he walked past the stores on his way to that phone.

Finally he came up with an image, blurred, the face turned away, but at least he had something. When the picture was enhanced, maybe they would be able to pick out something that would lead them to the guy. Maybe Sarah or one of the family would recognize him.

"Sarah, please, stay," Barbara said, leaning over to take both of Sarah's hands in hers. They were in the suite's parlor, alone, amazingly. "The house will have to be closed up and sold, and none of us can spare the time right now. We talked it over, and all of us are strapped for time. There's so much to be done with the legal aspects, Blair is still in school, Randall's granddaughter has to have open-heart surgery-we need you. Your salary will be the same."

Sarah squeezed Barbara's hands. "Of course I'll stay. You don't have to convince me. I'll be here as long as you need me."

"You've been a godsend; you have no idea. If you hadn't been here, I don't think I could have coped." Barbara was tired, her face drawn with grief, but she was dry-eyed.

"Do you have any idea how long-"

"At least a month, maybe more. We have to settle his affairs, his personal effects have to be packed, things put in storage. We don't want the house to sit empty until it sells; houses deteriorate so fast without someone living in them. It may sell immediately, but it may not."

A house on Briarwood, in the old-money section? Some people would be reluctant to buy a house in which a murder had occurred, but the location and the house itself would probably overcome that. Sarah would be surprised if it was on the market for a full month before someone snapped it up. This was a perfect interim situation for her: she could afford to take her time looking for a new position anyway, but this way she wouldn't have to dip into her savings. She wouldn't have to pack in a rush, but could do that gradually, too. Instead of an abrupt uprooting, she could ease into a new job, new quarters, new responsibilities.

"I assume you want the grounds kept up, and the house cleaners in on a regular basis."

"Oh, of course; the house will be much easier to sell if it's looking well kept. It's so difficult to think of selling it," Barbara said, her voice trailing away. "He lived there almost fifty years. I grew up there. It's a wonderful old house, full of memories, and he took such good care of it. Mother designed it, you know. It's her dream house."

"Is there no way you could keep it in the family?"

"I don't think so. None of us want to move back here, and of course the estate taxes are horrendous, even divided three ways. The house will have to be sold to help pay them. None of us can afford to keep the house and pay that much additional tax. I know Daddy would have liked for one of us to have it, but the way things are-" She shrugged helplessly, and moved on to another topic.

"When the police let us into the house tomorrow, Randall and Jon and I are going to select some mementos. Daddy left directions for the main things, of course, but there are some smaller items that we want. Randall and Jon can take their selections home with them, since they're driving, but would you box mine up and ship them to me?"

Sarah got out the small pad that was always in her bag, and made a note. "Do you want me to arrange a meal there tomorrow? Leona will be more than happy to prepare any meal you like."

Barbara hesitated, then shook her head. "I don't know exactly what time we'll be there, or how long it will take us to go through things. I don't even know how many of us will be there."

"I can arrange something," Sarah said. "A big pot of soup, and sandwiches, if nothing else."

"That would be wonderful. Or we could all go to Milo's. Shaw is beginning to complain because he hasn't had a hamburger yet."

Sarah felt a private little zing at the mention of Milo's. Maybe one day she wouldn't associate Cahill's kisses with the hamburgers, but right now the two were closely linked in her mind. She felt a sudden intense craving for a hamburger herself.

Staying in Mountain Brook meant she would be seeing him again. She didn't know if that was good or bad, but she definitely knew the idea was exciting.

Barbara didn't know it, but the cleaners were at the house now. The rate for cleaning on Sunday night was higher than during the week, but Sarah thought it was well worth it for the Judge's family to be able to get into the house as early as possible tomorrow, since Barbara and her brood had a late-afternoon flight back to Dallas. Sarah planned, after leaving the Wynfrey, to go to the house to check that the cleaning job was adequate, but then she was going back to the inn to spend the night. Even though her quarters were totally separate, she wasn't ready yet to be alone there. Going back wouldn't be easy, she thought.

Nor was it. The cleaners were already gone when she got there later that night, and she had to force herself to go inside, to walk down the hall and look into the library. A strong sense of deja vu seized her just outside the door, and she froze; when she looked inside, would the Judge be sitting there in his recliner, his blood and brains splattered against the far wall, and on the carpet? Would the smell still be there?

No, the smell was gone. She would be able to tell from here if it lingered, wouldn't she? The odor had been pervasive, finding its way down the hall, into the breakfast room, even the kitchen. A11 she could smell now was something clean and citrusy.

Steeling herself, she entered the library. The cleaners had done a good job with the carpet and wall; they had evidently cleaned the carpet in the entire room, so no one could tell by a clean spot exactly where they had removed a stain. The recliner was gone; she had no idea where it was. Maybe the police had it, though what they would want with the recliner, she couldn't imagine. Or perhaps the cleaners had removed it from the room for some reason; maybe the odor was impossible to remove from leather.

Tomorrow she would ask the whereabouts of the recliner. It might be in the garage, but she wasn't going to look for it tonight. Slowly she backed out of the room, turning out the light and closing the door. She didn't imagine she would ever again enter that room, for any reason.

She hadn't collected the mail since Wednesday, but someone, probably Cahill, had brought it in and put it on the kitchen island. He'd have gone through the mail, of course, to see if there was anything suspicious, any correspondence that bore looking into. She flipped through the stack; if there had been anything unusual, Cahill had taken it with him, because all she saw was the normal bills, catalogs, and magazines.

She left the mail on the island and went upstairs to her quarters. Everything was subtly wrong, out of place; someone had searched every inch, so she supposed she should be grateful for the relative neatness. At least the contents of drawers hadn't been dumped on the floor and left. She straightened the books in the bookcase, neatly stacked the few magazines, put the potted plants back in place, adjusted the position of a vase, some framed pictures.

In the bedroom, her bed had been stripped. She gathered the discarded sheets to put in the wash, then went into the bathroom and began methodically putting it to rights. She couldn't put her life back the way it was, but she could reconstruct her immediate surroundings.

She put out fresh towels, and arranged all her cosmetics the way she preferred.

Back in the bedroom, she remade the bed, then opened the double closet doors and began rehanging her clothes, arranging them so what she wore most often was close to hand. Her shoes were a jumbled mess; she pulled all of them out of the closet, then sat down on the floor and paired them up, putting them back in the closet in neat rows.

She really hated that someone had gone through her underwear drawer. She was a bit of a fanatic about her underwear, courtesy of two brothers who had loved to tease her by hiding it, or by tying her bra to a forked stick to make a slingshot. Older brothers were a real trial. She wished now she had a video of Noel with her very first pair of lacy panties stuck on his head; she'd love to show it to his Marine buddies. Her brothers had never treated Jennifer like that, but then she would only have cried, and that was no fun. Sarah had chased after them with fury in her eyes and murder in her heart; if she'd ever caught them, blood would have been shed.

Sarah had been forced to hide her underwear for years, stuffing it in unlikely places so Daniel and Noel couldn't find it. Once they were gone, she had reveled in being able to have a real underwear drawer. She always neatly folded each garment, and the lacy, sexy stuff was in its own drawer. She didn't segregate by color-she wasn't that far gone-but it truly annoyed her to see her careful stacks all messed up and mixed together.

Cahill had probably searched her underwear drawer personally. He looked like the type who would enjoy something like that. She could just see him holding up a pair of black lace-

Oh, yes, she could see him. A wave of heat washed over her. She knew she was in real trouble, when the idea of him going through her underwear turned her on instead of making her angry.

Maybe she should forget caution and just go for broke. She'd never devoted herself to a relationship before, but maybe Cahill was someone she could truly love. Maybe there could be something real and permanent between them, and she was in danger of losing it because she couldn't stop listening to her head instead of her heart. Yes, he'd just come through a rough divorce; a year wasn't enough time to emotionally recover; he'd admitted as much himself. Yes, the odds said he was a bad risk right now. But sometimes you lucked out, and won by going against the odds.

So the real question was did she have the guts to give it all she had, to stop holding back? She had always used the Plan as an excuse for walking away before a relationship could really go anywhere; that excuse was real, because she truly wanted to execute the Plan; but the other part of her reason was that loving someone meant giving away some of your personal control, and she had always prized that above any man she was dating.

If she became involved with Cahill, she might eventually walk away from him, but she wouldn't walk away heart-whole. He could do some damage to her. She suspected she could love him as she had never loved anyone before, if she let him get close.

No matter what she decided, there were risks-big ones. She could either risk loving him and losing him, or she could risk missing out on the love of her life because she was afraid.

Sarah didn't like thinking herself cowardly, in anything.

"Do you recognize this man?" Cahill asked the next morning, letting a blurry photograph slide from a big envelope down onto the breakfast table. The photograph had been enhanced and enlarged, and it was still piss-poor. It was, however, all he had.

Sarah looked at the photograph and gave a decisive shake of her head. Randall, Barbara, and Jon all crowded around and stared at it. "I don't think so," Randall said doubtfully. "Not without seeing his face. He doesn't ring any bells, though. Why?"

"He made the last call to your father, from a pay phone in the Galleria."

Barbara jerked back as if stung. "You mean he might be the killer?"

"I can't make that assumption," Cahill said evenly. "I'd like to, but I can't. But your father might have said something to this man about a visitor he was expecting, or any other detail that might help. I'd definitely like to talk to this guy."

They all stared at the photograph again, as if concentration would wrest an elusive memory from their brains. The man in the photograph was trim, wearing a light-colored suit, with neat pale hair, either blond or gray. His head was turned so that the camera caught only the line of his left jaw and cheekbone. Unless you knew the man well, it would be impossible to recognize him from that picture.

Sarah handed Cahill a cup of coffee and tilted her head for another look at the photograph. "He's wearing a suit," she said. "The weather was warm last Wednesday."

Both Randall and Jon looked up, their attention caught. "It was too warm to wear a jacket," Jon said, "unless you were wearing a suit for work."

Barbara looked puzzled. "So what?"

"So he's white-collar," Cahill explained. "Professional."

She sighed. "All of Daddy's friends were white-collar professionals."

"Retired," Sarah put in. "That man isn't retired."

"He's younger than Daddy, then, but that's obvious from the picture. Either that or he's had a face-lift." Barbara pointed to the fairly firm jawline.

"Take what you know," Cahill prompted. "Younger than your father-say, no older than early fifties-professional. The hair is probably gray, or blond that's going gray. He's in good shape, trim, I estimate about six feet tall. No one comes to mind?"

They all shook their heads, regretfully.

'Well, if you think of anything, let me know." Cahill replaced the photograph in the envelope. "Don't concentrate on his close friends, but on someone he would know only casually."

"Sarah would be more help there than any of us," Jon said. 'We've all lived away from the area for years, so we don't know anyone he may have met recently." He made a wry face. "By 'recently' I mean the last ten years, at least."

"Longer than that." Barbara sighed. "Dwight and I moved to Dallas before Shaw was born, and he's nineteen. Make that twenty years. I'm afraid we won't be any help there, Detective. Sarah is your only hope."

Everyone looked at Sarah, who shook her head. "He knew so many people. He was forever nodding to someone, then saying he didn't remember his name but he worked with so-and-so. He never really talked about anyone other than his close circle of buddies."

"So unless this guy"-Cahill tapped the envelope-"calls again, he's a dead end."

"I'm afraid so, at least as far as I'm concerned. One of the neighbors might recognize him, or you might try the Judge's friends. They were a pretty close group."

"I'll do that." He looked at the others. "I need to get back to work, but is there anything I can do for you here?"

Barbara gave him a sad, gentle smile. 'We're just packing up photographs and personal items that we want to keep. Thank you for all you've done, the advice you've given. I know you'll do everything possible to find whoever killed Daddy."

"Yes, ma'am, I will." He glanced at Sarah. 'Would you walk out to the car, Miss Stevens?"

The day was warmer than the day before, but still chilly enough that she grabbed a jacket on the way out. The sun was bright, picking out the fresh, bright colors of spring, the pink of the azaleas, the tender green of new leaves, the white and pink dogwoods. Sarah squinted at the brightness, lifting her hand to shade her eyes.

'What is it, Detective Cahill?"

"Nothing much, I just wanted a minute alone with you. What are your plans for now? They'll be selling the house, right? What are you going to do?"

"I'm staying here, for now. They all have to leave this afternoon, so I'll handle all the packing, getting things ready for the house to be put on the market."

"You're staying here? In the house?"

"I can look after things better if I'm here, on-site."

"Will it bother you to be here alone?"

"It bothers me that the Judge is dead. It bothers me to go into the library, because I keep seeing his body there, and smelling . . . smelling things. But it doesn't bother me to be alone. I think what happened was targeted specifically at him, though I have no idea why. So I'm not in any danger." She paused, struck by a fleeting expression on his tough face. "Am I? Is there something you haven't told me?"

"No, nothing. I think you're safe. It's just that you have more guts than most people. A lot of men I know wouldn't want to stay here by themselves."

"So who says men have more guts than women?"

He grinned at the challenge in her voice. "No one. Men just tend to do stupid things out of pride. Now that I've admitted we're all idiots, will you have dinner with me tonight?"

"What? Go out with an idiot?"

'1hink of the entertainment value."

"You have a point." She smiled up at him. "I'd like that, then. What time, and where are we going?"

"Six-thirty, and we'll go someplace casual, if that's all right with you. "

"Casual is great."

He winked at her as he got in the car. "See you at six-thirty."

Her heart was lighter as she went back inside the house. She still grieved, but life did go on; the awful thing about cliches was that they were usually right. The terrible pain and depression had lifted, and she was already looking ahead, focusing on the future. She had chores to accomplish, affairs to be put in order, a job to find.

But more immediately, she had a date with Cahill.

Chapter 14

"YOU'LL NEVER GUESS," SHE SAID BY WAY OF GREETING when she opened the door to him that night, "what came in the mail today."

He tensed. "Another gift?"

"Something almost worse," she grumbled. "Two job offers."

His dark, level brows knotted. "And that's bad, how?"

"They were postmarked Saturday. These people must have written the letters almost immediately after they heard about the Judge."

"I repeat: That's bad, how?"

She gave him an impatient glance. "Vultures. It's like people who read the obituaries and call the surviving spouse for a date immediately after the funeral."

"I think it's smart, if they want you. Get an offer in first, and you might take it before any others come in."

"Too late, since I had one week before last, right after that segment aired."

"But they didn't know that. I'd do the same thing," he said reasonably. "I see you, I want you, I make my move and try to cut out anyone else thinking the same thing."

She snorted as she pulled on her jacket. "Really bad analogy, Cahill. You saw, and you ran."

"Don't I get brownie points for working up enough courage to come back?"

"No. I don't work on the points system."

"Then I guess I'll have to rely on physical coercion." He caught the front of her jacket in his fist and pulled her to him. Sarah lifted her head to meet his kiss; it wasn't until his mouth touched hers that she realized how sharp was her need to feel this again, to have him hold her. Their tongues engaged in slow combat, sliding, probing, twining. He wasn't in any hurry, and neither was she.

He lifted his mouth enough to murmur, "Are you coerced yet?"

"Not yet. Keep trying."

His mouth curled in a smile as he rested his forehead against hers. "I don't want to overstep my bounds. Give me some ground rules, here. If I get rowdy and out of control, at what point do you slap my face? The trick is to stop just short of that point."

Sarah lifted her brows. "I don't slap faces; I kick asses."

'Wow. That sounds interesting. Pants up, or down?"

She buried her face against his jacket, snickering. "I should have guessed you'd be a pervert."

"A boy just wants to have fun. " His big, warm hand slid up and down her back in a restless movement that told her he didn't like restraining himself, but was doing it anyway. "And if we don't get going, I may get my ass kicked. I've never been very good at knowing when to stop."

On the contrary, he had wooing down to a fine art-for wooing her, anyway. He made it very plain he was attracted, but didn't come on too hot and heavy for the early stages of getting to know each other. She was thoroughly charmed by his wry humor, more charmed than she wanted him to know. If he pushed his luck, she thought, she might very well end up in bed with him, and she deeply appreciated that he was restraining himself because she suspected he knew exactly how charmed she was. Cahill was one sharp cookie.

"Did either of the job offers look interesting?" he asked as he opened the door of his truck for her.

"No, they both wanted me to start immediately, and that's out. I'll be here at least another month; when the house is ready to close up, I doubt the family will want to continue paying my salary just to sit in my quarters, so I don't expect it to last much more than a month, but I'm not free until then."

"You don't think they'll hold the position open? It isn't as if butlers are thick on the ground around here."

She shrugged. '1hey might, they might not. I think they only want me because of the so-called celebrity factor, and I don't like the idea of that."

"Since you're trained as a bodyguard, too, will you consider only jobs with that need?"

"That would be nice," she said wryly. '1he pay is a lot higher. But, no, a lot of things come into consideration. How much I like the family, for one thing. Whether or not there are any positions open for both butler and bodyguard, where in the country the job is, things like that."

"You don't like certain parts of the country?"

"It isn't that. I'm a military brat; I'm used to living just about anywhere. But my parents and sister live in Florida, and I like for visiting them to be fairly convenient."

"You're close to your folks?"

"We talk on the phone a lot. I don't get to see them as much as I'd like, maybe three or four times a year, but I'd say we're close. Even though my brothers are both in the military and are sent all over the world, still, we manage phone calls. How about you?"

'Well, we're originally from this area, so I have aunts and uncles and cousins scattered all over central Alabama. My sister, DeeDee, lives in Redneck Riviera-that's Gulf Shores, to outsiders-and my brother, Dudley Do-Right, lives in Montgomery."

"DeeDee and Do-Right?" she asked, amused.

"She was named after the two grandmothers, Devonna and Darnelle. Which one would you like to be called?"

"DeeDee, hands down."

"No joke. Dudley, now-his real name is Thane-is a state cop, so he wears the Do-Right uniform. Between the two of them, they've made me an uncle five times. DeeDee's the oldest, by two years. I'm thirty-six, by the way."

"You don't have any kids?"

"No, thank God. That's the only good thing about my divorce, that we didn't have any kids whose lives we wrecked. The rest of the family always thought I was a slacker for not reproducing, but now they're glad, too."

'What about your parents?"

"They thought I was a slacker, too."

She punched his arm. "Smart aleck."

He grinned, then frowned a little and rubbed his arm. "Ow. You pack a punch."

"I pulled it. You're just a wuss." Yeah, right. His arm was so hard, she could have seriously damaged her knuckles. "Your parents," she prompted.

"They live in Kentucky. They had a reason for moving there, but I don't know what it was."

'What's wrong with Kentucky?"

"It snows there."

'What's wrong with snow?"

"I've been a patrol cop, you know. Have you ever seen what happens down here when it snows?"

She began to laugh, because one inch of snow could and did cause havoc with traffic. Southerners didn't deal well with snow; it was a giant headache for patrol cops, with all the accidents. For someone who had spent one memorable winter in upstate New York, the alarm caused by a snow flurry down here was hilarious.

Abruptly she noticed that they were heading south, away from town. "Where are we going?"

"How do you feel about high school baseball?"

She paused. "Is that a rhetorical question, or are you telling me something?"

"One of my cousins has a game tonight, a doubleheader. We'll miss the first game, but by the time we get something to eat and get to the field, we should be just in time for the second game. JoJo plays shortstop."

JoJo was evidently the cousin. "I like baseball, but this jacket isn't heavy enough for sitting out for hours in the cold."

"I have a blanket behind the seat, a thick wool one. We can cuddle on the bleachers, and with the blanket wrapped around us no one will know if I sneak a feel every now and then."

"I'll know."

"God, I hope so. If you don't, then I've either lost my touch or my aim."

Maybe a public place was the safest place to be with him. "A11 right," she said. "I'm willing. We can even grab a hot dog at the game if you want to catch some of the first one."

"I knew you were good folk," he said happily.

Sitting on cold bleachers on a chilly night, surrounded by yelling, laughing, chatting parents and siblings, a few teachers, and clumps of students, turned out to be more fun than she remembered from the days when Daniel and Noel had played baseball. For one thing, Cahill's cousins-there were about ten of them there-were all loony. She had to wonder if the sense of humor was a family trait. For another, cuddling under that blanket with him was . . . more than fun.

The king-size blanket, as he promised, was thick wool. He wrapped it around both of them before they even sat down, so even her legs were protected from the chill. His body heat and the blanket combined to keep her toasty warm, even though the April night was so chilly their breaths fogged. He was pressed all along her left side, his hard thigh rubbing hers, and he kept his right arm around her except for those times when he felt compelled to leap to his feet and yell insults at the home plate umpire who, as it turned out, was yet another cousin.

A few times he even managed to cop a feel, as he had promised. The caress was subtle, just his thumb rubbing against the side of her right breast, but it was deliberate and she knew it. The first time it happened, she glanced sharply up at him to find him innocently watching the game, a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. She retaliated by trailing her left hand up his thigh, oh, so slowly, stopping just south of the bull's-eye. He tensed, the smile leaving his mouth, and though he kept his gaze on the game, he had that unfocused look that told her he'd lost track of the action on the field.

She felt terribly naughty, doing such things in public, even though they were wrapped like mummies in that wonderful blanket and no one could tell a thing. She wanted to forget about teasing him and go for the gold with a stroke that would make his eyes roll back in his head; she wanted to twist her body a little so his hand was fully cupping her breast.

She didn't have to twist her body. He managed just fine without her help.

She caught her breath at the warm pressure of his hand, at the stroke of his thumb over her nipple. It didn't matter that the triple layers of bra, shirt, and jacket protected her skin from his touch; her breasts tightened, her nipples drawing into hard little peaks, and her entire lower body clenched in response.

"Are you okay?" he asked, his tone casual, as if he were asking if she was cold.

She really, really wanted to grab him, but squeezing a man's genitals on the first date was way out of her league. She settled for burrowing her right hand inside his shirt and pulling his chest hair. Hard. He couldn't control a flinch.

"I'm a little hot," she said, just as casually. "Maybe we can loosen the blanket."

"Good idea," he said, sounding a little strangled now, and they both shrugged the blanket down to their waists. They resorted to coffee to fight the chill for the remainder of the ball game.

Because he had to work the next day, after the game was over he drove her straight home. When he kissed her good night, she was smart enough to hold his hands while he did. He was grinning when he lifted his head. "I haven't had my hands held during a kiss since high school."

"I haven't been groped at a ball game since high school, either."

"It was fun, wasn't it?"

She found herself smiling. "Yeah, it was."

"Do you have plans for tomorrow night? And every night this week?"

"You're asking me out every night?"

"I have to wear you down. How else am I going to get to second base without getting tagged out? Here's the agenda: tomorrow night we go bowling-"

"Bowling'"

"Cosmic bowling. It's a hoot."

She didn't bother asking what cosmic bowling was. "What about Wednesday?"

"Movie."

"Thursday?"

"Symphony."

From the ridiculous to the sublime. She shook her head in amazement; at least she wouldn't be bored. "Friday?"

"I'm hoping by that time we'll have moved on to the wild monkey sex."

She hooted with laughter, and he smiled as he leaned against the doorjamb. "Is it a date?" he asked. "Or dates."

"Up until Friday."

'We'll see," he said, and whistled as he walked back to his truck.

He was positively Machiavellian.

Chapter 15

THERE WAS AN ARTICLE IN THE NEWSPAPER TUESDAY MORNING under the headline EACK OF EVIDENCE HAMPERS POEICE IN MOUNTAIN BROOK MURDER. Cahill grunted in disgust as he read the article.

The Mountain Brook Police Department is offering no information other than "no comment" on their investigation into the murder of retired federal Judge Lowell Roberts. The investigation seems to have stalled, and concerned citizens are wondering if the department, which hasn't investigated a murder in five years, is experienced enough to handle this type of case.

"That's bullshit," he growled, tossing the paper onto his desk. All of the investigators in the detective division were pissed. The lieutenant was pissed. Basically, everyone was pissed. The investigation was stalled, all right, but it had nothing to do with incompetence or lack of experience. If the idiot who wrote that article had done his research, he'd have known that the Mountain Brook department was top-notch, with excellent people and excellent equipment. The head evidence technician had handled the gathering of evidence, and he'd done it right. Cahill himself had done a tour of duty with the Birmingham Police Department, where murder investigations were much more commonplace; all of the detectives were experienced. They knew how to run an investigation, but they couldn't manufacture evidence that wasn't there.

It came back to lack of motive. When Judge Roberts had been murdered he hadn't been walking down the street and been a victim of a drive-by shooting, a for-kicks murder. His murder was deliberate, planned, and executed with precision-an assassination, in fact. Whoever had killed him had known it was Sarah's day off and the Judge would be alone in the house. The mystery phone call by the mystery man from the pay phone in the Galleria was the only lead they had, but no one so far had recognized anything about the man in the photograph. They'd talked to friends, neighbors, family, and come up with exactly zilch.

The easy way hadn't panned out. Things would have been a lot simpler if Judge Roberts had been gunned down as he opened the door, or walking to his car; then the revenge scenario would have played. Instead Cahill kept coming back to the inescapable conclusion that the Judge had known his killer and willingly let him into the house.

And that brought Cahill right back to the mystery man in the surveillance photo. The timing of that phone call was right. Someone whom the Judge knew, from out of town maybe, who had called and said, Hey, I'm in the area; and the Judge invited him to the house, and the guy killed him. That was the scenario the circumstances supported. But who, and why? That was the old truism-find out why, and you'll know who.

Too bad he didn't have any fucking idea.

He scrubbed his hands over his face. His bad feeling about this case hadn't gone away. The answer was out there, but they weren't getting any closer to it and he was afraid they wouldn't. This one was going to be filed under "Unsolved." He hated unsolved crimes of any sort, but a murder really ate at him. Even as a kid puzzles had nagged at him, and he couldn't stop until they were solved. The damned Rubik's Cube had driven him up the wall until he got it figured out. On a scale of one to ten, the Rubik's Cube was like a five, and a murder was like ten zillion. That's how bad it nagged at him. He could easily become obsessed with this case if he wasn't careful.

This one was more personal than it should have been, because it had touched Sarah. If she'd been at home instead of at the movie, she might have been killed, too. She felt guilty because she thought she could have prevented it, but Cahill got a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach every time he thought of her there in the house with a killer. She would have gone to her quarters and left the two . . . friends? acquaintances? talking in the Judge's library; she might not even have heard the shot, if it was silenced. Then, because she had seen him, the killer would have quietly gone up those stairs to her quarters. She wouldn't have been expecting him, she wouldn't have been armed, and he would have killed her. It was that simple, and he broke out in a sweat every time he played it through in his mind. Going to the movie had saved her life, and she had gone because she wanted to give the idiot who sent her the fancy pendant an opportunity to approach her. Funny how things worked out; by sending her the pendant and making her so uneasy, the weirdo had saved her life.

Sarah was . . . he didn't know what Sarah was. Fascinating. Sexy. Strong and tender at the same time. He didn't know what would happen between them; he wasn't even letting himself think about what might or might not happen. With her, he was living totally in the present. When he was with her, he didn't think about the past, and he didn't care about the future. Hell, that was a lie, because if he had anything to say about it, the future included getting her clothes off and having some really hot, wet, wrecking-the-bed sex. Now that was some real planning for the future.

It felt good to focus on one woman, rather than have more of those ships-that-pass-in-the-night encounters that took some of the pressure off his balls but left him still feeling alone the next day. He enjoyed playing with Sarah, and that was exactly what they were doing: playing. Having fun. It had been too damn long since he'd had fun, too long since he'd felt the particular thrill of watching a woman's face and feeling in sync with her.

Like last night, for instance; she had seriously thought about grabbing his balls as payback, but had decided not to ratchet up the intimacy between them to that degree. Her dark eyes had been cool and challenging, but still he'd known what she was thinking, read it in the slight tensing of her very toned body. He'd been ready to endure a certain amount of pain-he doubted she'd cripple him, but she would still have made him hurt-in order to speed things up between them. Too bad she'd thought better of grabbing him, because from the way he looked at it, if she'd hurt him, she would have had to kiss it to make it better. Worked for him.

Getting a hard-on at work wasn't a good idea. Cahill wrenched his thoughts upward.

He had a month to get her, the month she estimated it would take her to get everything packed and to close up the house. She would be taking another job; he hoped she would still be in this area, but nothing was guaranteed. As she had said, if someone needed her combined services of butler and bodyguard, the pay was much better, and how many people around here needed a bodyguard? He figured the odds were at least fifty-fifty she'd be leaving the area, so he had to work fast. Who knows? Maybe if they were having an affair, she'd take a job nearby and they could take their time with each other, see where this thing went.

That thought edged too far into the future, and he pulled back from it. All he could handle right now was right now. He would see Sarah every night, and every second in between the murder he had to investigate, plus the other investigations that came up.

The newspaper said the police didn't have a clue in the Roberts murder. What a shame.

He was pleased; once again, he had proven himself more intelligent than others. Of course there were no clues. First he had seen Sarah safely in the movie, then he had driven to the Galleria and made the phone call from a pay phone. Thousands of people were in the Galleria every day; there was no way to pick him out. Judge Roberts, the old fool, had been happy to talk to the friend of a friend about a point of law, and as easy as that he was in the house.

Though his fingerprints weren't in any AFIS data banks for the simple reason that he'd never been fingerprinted, he had still made certain to note everything he touched while he was in the house, and he had carefully wiped those surfaces before leaving. He had refused anything to drink, so there was no cup or glass to be taken care of. He had also picked up the spent cartridge shell from the carpet where the automatic had ejected it, and disposed of it in the trash the next day. The trash had since been picked up, so that was gone.

He was safe. Now he could concentrate on Sarah.

He didn't want to repeat his offer too soon. She wouldn't like that; her sense of propriety would be offended. But neither could he afford to wait too long, because her services would be in demand. He had discovered through his network of acquaintances in the neighborhood-really, one couldn't call them friends--that the Roberts family was putting the house up for sale and had arranged for her to stay on to oversee that, for the time being.

Things couldn't have been more perfect. He had time, a grace period as it were, to carefully think through how he would word the next offer. He'd made a mistake the last time, not taking her sense of loyalty into account and reducing her worth to merely that of money. Of course she was worth that amount, she was worth much more, but a woman of her conscientious nature would need something in addition to money: a sense of purpose.

She had to think he needed her. He did need her, so much more than she could imagine. Since first seeing her, he had come to realize she was the perfect woman for him, the woman he'd been waiting for his entire life, and he wouldn't be complete without her.

He felt almost dizzy, thinking of her here, in his home. He would give her everything she could possibly want, protect her from a world that couldn't possibly appreciate her sheer perfection. It had to be a trial to her, forced constantly to deal with people who weren't worthy of her. When she was with him, there would be none of that. She wouldn't need other people. Together, they would be perfection.

Tuesday was an incredibly sad and lonely day. It was the first day she had been entirely alone in the house; yesterday the family had been here until the early afternoon; then she had gone out with Cahill, which took her mind off the emptiness. Cahill, she suspected, could take her mind off dying.

Today, however, he wasn't there. The knowledge that she would see him that night was a beacon she kept in the back of her mind, a bit of brightness against the gloom. She kept herself busy. She didn't have to hunt for things to do; there was a huge amount of work to be done.

She began the work of methodically packing up each room, with a master inventory she devised and entered into her laptop, to show what contents were in which box and from which room they were taken. The boxes would be numbered, and on each box she'd tape an envelope containing a packing list for that particular box. The chore was time-consuming and exhausting, but that wasn't enough to keep her mind off the fact that she was alone in this huge house, or to keep her from remembering every time she passed the library what had happened in there.

The phone rang incessantly. The callers didn't mean any harm, with their questions about the family and what they intended to do, but the constant interruptions meant Sarah didn't accomplish as much as she'd planned, and the questions kept the Judge fresh in her mind. She didn't want to forget him, but she would have liked a little distance from the pain.

Thinking about Cahill provided that distance. Maybe she was thinking about him too much for her own well-being, but . . . well, she'd just have to deal with that.

Far from being the humorless man she'd first thought him, he had a lighthearted streak that made her laugh and kept her on her toes. She sensed that he was being careful with her-not because she was fragile, but rather because she wasn't.

Sarah knew her own worth, her own strength; she was neither a Kleenex to be used and casually tossed away, nor a butterfly who would gaily flit away on her own. Cahill wanted her, but he was wary of anything except a sexual, superficial relationship with anyone, and he wasn't certain exactly how serious he wanted to get with her. They had fun together, but on a certain level they were like two heavyweight boxers, circling, each testing the other's strength, not committing until they knew whether or not they were going to get hammered.

She liked him more than anyone she had dated before-but then how could she not like someone who would take her to both a bowling alley and a symphony? She had known from the beginning that the physical chemistry was great; overwhelming was a better word. Still, she could resist physical attraction if that was all there was. In Cahill's case, the total package was as seductive as a Lorelei, pulling her to him.

Lunch was a sandwich and a glass of water, eaten in her quarters. The silence beat at her, until she thought she could hear her own heartbeat. She washed the knife she had used, and the glass, and put them away. Then she burst into tears.

Half an hour later she found herself sitting on the steps leading from the portico to the flower garden. The bright sunshine beat down on her upturned face, her bare arms, and the air was redolent with the sweet freshness of spring. Birds chirped madly in the trees, their colors flashing as they darted about. Bees zipped from bloom to bloom, drunk on nectar. Inside the house was sadness, but out here was life and warmth.

Footsteps sounded on the stones behind her, and she turned her head to see Cahill. "Hi," he said, dropping down to sit beside her. "You didn't answer the doorbell, so I walked around to see if your truck was here."

"I'm here," she said, unnecessarily. "I'm just . . . taking a break."

He studied her taut face and swollen eyes, then gently eased her into his arms and cradled her head against his shoulder. "Bad day, huh?"

"So far, it sucks." God, being held felt so good. He was solid and strong, and she turned her face against his neck so she could inhale the heated aroma of his body. She put her arms around him, one arm looped around his neck and the other pressed to his back; her fingers dug into the layered muscles there, traced the indentation of his spine.

He tilted her head back and kissed her, and his palm settled warmly over her right breast. She allowed the caress, leaning into him and surrendering to the kiss. Just now she needed cuddling, needed the physical comfort of his presence, so she didn't protest when he unbuttoned her sleeveless blouse and unhooked the front closure of her bra, pushing it aside. Fresh air gently brushed over her bare flesh, puckering her nipples; then they were covered by the hot slide of his callus-roughened palm. "God, you're pretty," he said, his tone low and rough. "Look at this."

She opened her eyes and looked. Her breasts were the color of warm cream, with small, pinkish brown nipples. She wasn't overly endowed, but her breasts plumped in his palm, his hard, tanned fingers in sharp male contrast to the very womanly curves. He stroked his thumb over one nipple and it beaded more tightly, flushing with color.

A sound like far-off thunder rumbled in his throat, and she looked up to see a sheen of sweat on his forehead. "I'm working," he said hoarsely.

"You couldn't prove it by me," she murmured. She thought she could sit here in the sunshine for hours, letting him fondle her. Except she wouldn't be sitting here for hours, she would very shortly find herself on her back, on the stones of the portico; not exactly a comfortable place for lovemaking.

"I just stopped by to check on you. I can't stay." He kissed her again, his hand still working its warm magic on her breasts; then he reluctantly released her. Actually, he released her as if it tore his skin off to separate from her. "Just remember where we were, and we'll pick up there tonight."

Feeling much better, she rehooked her bra and began buttoning her blouse. "Sorry, it doesn't work that way. You'll have to start over."

"Not a problem," he said, smiling.

She snorted. "I didn't think it would be." Then she smiled, too, a little mistily. "Thanks for stopping by. I was feeling blue."

"I noticed. Six-thirty again?"

She nodded. "I'll be ready."

"So will I."

"That wasn't what I meant."

'Well, hell," he said in disgust.

Already she could feel her smile edging into a grin, feel laughter beginning to bubble. "Go back to work, Cahill, and remember: Never take anything for granted."

'Well, hell," he said again.

Chapter 16

ON WEDNESDAY, A WEEK AFTER THE MURDER, SARAH FOUND herself following her old schedule. She had forgotten to reschedule her karate and kick-boxing sessions anyway, so she worked in the house until it was time for the classes, then devoted herself to the hardest workouts she had put herself through in a long time. It's exactly a week today, she kept thinking. Exactly a week. A week ago, the most important thing in her life had been finding out who'd sent her that pendant. Today, she couldn't remember exactly how the pendant looked. It had been relegated to unimportance by what had happened later that night.

She was supposed to go to a movie with Cahill that night. Remembering that she'd gone to a movie last Wednesday, too, she knew she couldn't do it. She called the number Cahill had given her, and he answered immediately.

"This is Sarah. I'm sorry, but I can't do a movie tonight."

He paused. "Has something come up?"

"No, it's just . . . it was a week ago today, and I went to a movie then, too."

"Okay." His tone was gentle. 'We'll do something else."

"No, I-" She wanted to be with him, but maybe after last night a cooling-down period was in order. She had managed to keep things from getting out of hand, or even progressing any further than they already had, but he was making serious inroads in her resolve. The cooling-down period was for her. "Not tonight. We're still on for tomorrow night, but I won't be good company tonight."

"Are you getting cold feet?"

Trust him to bypass sympathy and politeness, and go straight to the heart of the matter! "Trust me," she said wryly. "If my feet are cold, it's the only part of me that is."

He blew out a short, sharp breath. "You just made it impossible for me to sit down."

"I hope no one can overhear you."

He ignored that. "I'll be at home if you change your mind, or if you decide you want company."

"Thanks, Cahill." Her voice was soft. "You're a sweetheart."

"Told you you'd be calling me that," he said smugly.

No matter what, he could lift her spirits. She hung up feeling slightly elated, the way she always felt around him. The fizz saw her through the rest of that difficult day.

On Thursday night, on the way to the symphony, he said, "I have a friend who's dying to meet you. He's lowlife scum who thinks he can charm you away from me, but if you don't mind feeling dirty by association, he really, really wants to do some target practice with you. I have an extra weapon you can use, since we still have yours."

She laughed. "He's a lowlife scum who makes you feel dirty by association? Sure, I'd like to meet him."

"Thought so. How about tomorrow afternoon, about two o'clock, at that range you were at before."

"Two o'clock? Don't you have to work? Or are you sending me out to get dirty by association all on my own?"

"I'm off half a day tomorrow, and all of the weekend." He slanted an appraising glance at her. 'Wear that dress."

If that wasn't just like a man. "To target practice? In your dreams."

"You have no idea about my dreams," he said feelingly. In one of those swings of temperature so common to spring, the day had seen the mid-eighties and hadn't cooled down much with sunset. Sarah had dressed accordingly, in an sleeveless aqua sheath that made her warm coloring glow, and brought along a shawl to drape over her arms if she became chilled. The sheath clung in all the right places and skimmed others, and was cut low enough in front to show a hint of cleavage. Cahill had been eyeing that hint since he picked her up.

Prudently she didn't ask him about his dreams, because she was fairly certain he'd tell her. If Cahill had a shy bone in his body, she hadn't found it yet.

The symphony was wonderful; she loved classical music, and Cahill talked knowledgeably about the program, proving that he hadn't picked the symphony just to impress her. "Do you come to the symphony often?" she asked.

"Not as often as I'd like, but a couple of times a year, at least. I have to work it into my schedule."

"I can see how it would be tough making time for the symphony, what with all the ball games and the bowling."

He grinned. "Admit it. You liked cosmic bowling."

"I'd never bowled in the dark before." In fact, she'd had a ball Tuesday night; cosmic bowling was a hoot. The balls and pins were painted with glow-in-the-dark paint; the regular lights were turned off and the black lights turned on. Anything white, such as teeth or shoes, or a shirt, had taken on an unearthly glow. It was a little disconcerting to suddenly see teeth flashing at you in the darkness. The next time they went, though, she would make Cahill wear a white shirt so she could keep track of him.

She worked that night after he took her home and got up early the next morning to get in some extra time packing so that she could take off early to meet Cahill's friend. If anything, she was putting in more hours now than she had while the Judge was alive, but she was so wary of short-timing the family that she was doing the opposite. Cahill had a way of consuming time-witness this afternoon-so she wanted to have extra hours built up during the week as a cushion.

It was another warm day, eighty-seven degrees. She wore a pair of tan knit slacks with an elastic waistband for comfort, since she would be sweating on the practice range, a short-sleeved, V-necked T, and sandals, with heavy-duty sunscreen slathered on all exposed skin. "Damn," Cahill said when he picked her up. "I hoped you'd change your mind about the dress."

"Yeah, I could just see me bending over to pick up cartridges in that dress."

"Man, so could I," he said, sighing.

His friend, Rick Mancil, was the stocky man she'd seen him with at the range before. Rick had black hair, pale green eyes, and was as irrepressible as the Energizer Bunny. His opening line to her was, "If you get tired of putting up with this jackass, just give me a call and I'll have you at the altar before you can say 'Mrs. Mancil."'

"Believe him," Cahill drawled. "He's done it twice already."

Sarah blinked. "Married women you've dated?"

"Just married," Rick corrected. "But we won't talk about that."

She sensed that Cahill wanted her to show off her marksmanship for Rick, so she obliged. She and Rick got side-by-side targets; he exclaimed at length about his pistol, how accurate it was, how it had never jammed, and so on; she glanced at Cahill, who was leaning negligently against a post with his ankles crossed, and he shrugged, smiling. "He never runs down," he said.

"That's a good thing in a man," Rick said, winking at her.

Sarah looked back at Cahill. "Aren't you going to shoot?"

He gave a brief shake of his head. Rick said, '`e won't bring him into this. He beats me every time, the damn show-off. It's that military training of his, gives him an unfair advantage."

As far as that went, so did her own military training. Hers had been private, courtesy of her father, but training was training.

They began with the targets fairly close, moving them back after every clip. Sarah fired steadily, concentrating as she did when she was competing against her brothers. The buck of the pistol in her hand was as familiar to her as driving a car; she almost didn't have to think about what she was doing, the habit was so ingrained.

"I can't believe this," Rick complained good-naturedly. "Doc said you were good, but I'm good, and you're beating me on every target."

"Shoot left-handed," Cahill said to Sarah, and Rick gawked at him.

"Left-handed? She shoots both ways?"

Sarah simply switched hands and proceeded to empty the clip at the target. As usual, you could have covered all the holes in the target with a playing card.

"You son of a bitch," Rick said to Cahill, his tone disbelieving. "You brought in a ringer! She's a professional, isn't she?"

"I'm a butler," Sarah corrected. She had to admit she was enjoying herself, especially the byplay between the two men.

"Pay up," Cahill said, holding out his hand.

Growling, Rick pulled out his wallet and laid five twenties in Cahill's palm.

'Wait a minute," she said indignantly. "You made a side bet and didn't cut me in on the action?"

'What did I tell you?" Rick asked. "He's a jackass. "

"You didn't cut me in, either," she pointed out, carefully putting down her weapon and crossing her arms, glaring at them.

"Uh . . . "

"Say, 'I'm a jackass, too,"' Cahill prompted in an almost-whisper.

"I'm a jackass, too!" Rick repeated loudly. His pale eyes sparkled with laughter.

'Were you two in high school together?" she asked. "Just wondering."

"God, no. Can you imagine?" Cahill grinned as he put the money in his pocket.

"Not without shuddering, no."

Cahill clapped Rick on the shoulder. 'Well, buddy, it's been fun. We'll do this again when I need extra money, okay? We're going to leave you now; I have steaks marinating at home. We'll think of you with every bite."

"You do that," Rick said, managing a forlorn look. He even gave them a sad wave as they left, like a little kid being left behind while the other kids go off to play.

"God, he's exhausting!" Sarah said when they were in the truck. "Fun, but exhausting."

"Two ex-wives said the same thing. If there's such a thing as a manic-depressive who's always manic, that's Rick."

'What does he say about you? Other than that you're a jackass?"

"That I'm sneaky. And stubborn."

"I agree; they're good traits in a cop."

"Mmm. So you think I'm sneaky?"

Sarah looked at him, at ease behind the wheel, long legs encased in boots and tight jeans, a crisp white T-shirt molded to his torso. His lips were slightly curled in amusement, as if he knew where this was going. Oh, yes, he was sneaky.

'What's this about 'steaks marinating at home'? That's the first I've heard about these steaks, much less their location."

"I have a built-in grill, it's Friday, the weather's warm. What else does a red-blooded southern boy do but cook out? Besides, I know where you live; don't you want to know where I live?"

She did, damn it. She wanted to know if he was a slob, if he had one chair and a huge television, if his refrigerator had nothing but frozen dinners, cheese, and beer in it. She wanted to know if he left whiskers in the sink when he shaved, if he made his bed in the mornings or left the covers tossed on the floor. She definitely had it bad, so bad she wanted to groan.

'Where exactly do you live?" she asked, and he smiled at her capitulation.

"Down 280, in Shelby County."

The Birmingham metro area was spreading fast to the south; Shelby was the fastest growing county in Alabama, with businesses and subdivisions springing up almost overnight, which was why traffic on 280, the main artery into Birmingham, was such a nightmare. Property values in Shelby were soaring.

"How long have you lived there?"

"Just a year, since the divorce was final. I lucked out finding this house; actually, it belonged to a cousin who was transferred to Tucson. The house Shannon and I lived in sold almost immediately, so I had my split of the money from that as a hefty down payment and that got the mortgage payments down into the reasonable range."

"I suppose I thought you'd have an apartment, or live in a condo."

"I like the privacy of my own house. It's not a new house; it was built in the late seventies and needed some work done on it. I'm pretty good with my hands, so I've been doing the repairs, fixing it up."

She could see him as a handyman; he had that air of capability that said he could do pretty much whatever interested him. Maybe it was just her, but she thought men with hammers were sexy.

She didn't know what she'd expected, but it wasn't a traditional brick house, with a yard that sloped away at the back, and a neat sidewalk bordered by trimmed hedges. The brick was a soft red, and the shutters were dark blue, the front door painted a shade or two lighter. The driveway curved around to the back of the house. "There's a full basement," he said. "The garage used to be there, but my cousin turned it into a playroom for his kids. Actually, it's a lot of house for just one person, but I like the room."

He parked beside the walkway, and let her in the front door. Either he'd just had in a cleaning service, she thought, or he wasn't a slob. The hardwood in the entry gleamed, and there was a fresh, lemony smell in the air.

His hand was a warm weight in the small of her back. "The living room," he said, gesturing to the left. The room was completely empty, the carpet spotless, and the curtains drawn. "I don't have any use for it, so I haven't bothered with furniture. Same with the dining room. The kitchen has a breakfast nook, and that's where I eat. The den is here."

The den was cozy, with a large fireplace, big windows looking out over the backyard, and an entertainment center with a big television. She felt gratified at that evidence of his guy-ness. He had furniture, though: an overstuffed sofa and two big recliners, plus the requisite number of end tables and lamps. All in all, it looked fairly civilized. The den was separated from the kitchen by a half-wall topped off with a row of white wooden spindles. "The kitchen needed work," he said. "I refinished the cabinets, put in that island." The wood cabinets had a natural finish that glowed with a soft golden color. The island was made of the same wood, with a smooth-surface cooktop surrounded by ceramic tile.

There weren't any dirty dishes in the sink. The counter surface held a block of knives, a microwave, and a coffeemaker, but that was it. The breakfast nook at the other end of the kitchen held a white table with a ceramic tile top in a yellow-and-blue pattern, and the four chairs grouped around the table were painted the same shade of yellow, while the rug underneath was blue.

"Are you sure you weren't in the Navy?" she asked, looking around at the spotless kitchen. Navy people learned to put everything in its assigned place, because there wasn't any spare room aboard a ship.

He grinned. 'What did you expect, a pigsty? The laundry may pile up, but I'm fairly neat. I do have someone who comes in every other week and does the basic cleaning, because I don't think of things like dusting. C'mon, I'll show you the rest of the house."

The rest of the house was a half-bath next to the kitchen, two good-sized bedrooms at the front of the house, separated by a nice large bathroom, and the master bedroom and bathroom suite at the back. His bed was king-sized, but then she would have put money on that. And it was made up. The room was neat, but it wasn't spotless; one of his shirts hung over the back of a chair, and a coffee cup with an inch of cold coffee in it sat on the dresser. "So that's where I left it," he said, picking up the cup. "I looked all over for the damn thing this morning."

She liked it that he hadn't straightened up the place, not that it needed much. He didn't have to have things perfect, and he wasn't trying to impress her. Perversely, she was impressed anyway, with his confidence and sense of self.

"I don't know about you," he said, "but I'm hungry. Let's fire up the grill and get those steaks on."

The steaks were filets, two inches thick and so tender she almost didn't need a knife. While the steaks were cooking, she microwaved two potatoes, tossed the salad, and heated the rolls. Instead of wine, he produced a jug of iced tea.

If he had put on some soft, gauzy, romantic music, she might have had a chance, but instead he turned on the television to Fox News Channel and had the news playing in the background. Maybe he wasn't trying to seduce her-at least not actively trying-but he was succeeding anyway.

After they had cleaned up the few dishes and put the kitchen to rights, working quickly and easily together, he said, "I want to show you the basement. I think you'll like it."

He led the way down the stairs and turned on the bright overhead lights.

The first thing she noticed was that the walls were very utilitarian, with bare pipes against the brick. The second was that he did some serious workouts down here.

To her left was an impressive set of free weights, and a punching bag hung motionless from a beam. There was a weight machine, the type that converted to accommodate all types of exercises, and a treadmill.

He stayed by the door while she wandered over to the free weights and ran her fingers over the cold metal of the dumbbells, then examined the weight machine and the computerized treadmill. He put a good deal of effort and money into staying in shape, though she bet the treadmill was used only during really nasty weather. A little rain wouldn't keep this man indoors; it probably took a downpour with a lot of lightning to do the trick. Idly she wondered how many miles a day he ran, but what interested her the most was the large exercise mat that covered a full half of the basement floor. There was only one use for a mat like that.

She knew he'd studied karate from the way he had leveled the robber with a kick, but he'd never mentioned it again, and with everything that had happened since then, she'd forgotten about it. She wondered why he hadn't brought up the subject, since he knew she studied karate. His silence couldn't be because he was at a lower level than she; Tom Cahill didn't have a fragile ego. Quite the opposite, in fact.

"You do your karate workouts here?"

He was leaning against the doorframe, one ankle hooked over the other, his arms crossed; his eyes were lazy and hooded as he watched her. He lifted one shoulder in a negligent shrug. "It isn't karate so much as a mixture of a lot of stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"I've studied karate, judo, dim mak, silat. What works best in the real world, though, is a combination of wrestling and good old dirty street fighting."

He was probably very good at fighting dirty, she thought, her heart kicking into a slightly faster beat. Why on earth would she find that sexy? But, damn it, everything about him was sexy, from the sleek, muscled power of his body to that unnerving stillness he was using to such good effect. It was like being watched by a great cat; his motionlessness only served to underline the sense of tension, as if he was preparing to pounce.

The mood between them while they ate had been light, teasing, but now she could feel that molten attraction throbbing between them. The air was thick and heavy, as if a storm were building-not outside, but in here. She wasn't naive; she knew exactly what kind of storm it was, and if she intended to escape, she needed to move now. 'Well," she said briskly, swinging toward the door and, unfortunately, toward him, "it's getting late, and I should be-"

"Stay," he said.

Stay. His voice was low, the single word slow and dark, like velvet rubbing against her skin. She froze, held motionless by the promise of his tone, the temptation contained in that single word. There was no teasing now, no lightness.

Sex with him would be good. Better than good-better even than ice cream. It would be mind-emptying. She was very much afraid it would be shattering.

She swung around yet again, facing away from him. She stared at the punching bag, feeling her heart thumping against her breastbone, sending her blood racing and making her feel hot, jittery . . . excited. Involuntarily her loins clenched as if she already held him inside her. She wanted that, wanted it with an intensity that almost swamped her common sense. Desperately she tried to think of all the reasons why he wasn't a good bet for any kind of relationship except a sexual one, but, my God, the sex . . . The physical chemistry between them had grown even stronger, stronger than she had ever imagined it could be, like an electrical field she could sense through every pore of her skin.

She didn't dare turn around, didn't dare look at him or let him look at her. He would know at a glance, if he didn't already, how close to the edge she was. And she didn't want to see the open sexual hunger that was certain to be in his gaze, didn't want to read the signs of arousal in his face and body.

Stay . . . not just for coffee, or for more talk. He meant stay the night, in his bed.

"No," she said, and almost wept at the effort it took to say that one word.

His hand closed lightly, gently over the nape of her neck, his fingers sliding under the thick fall of her hair. She hadn't heard him move, hadn't known he was so close, and her nerves skittered wildly. He wasn't trying to hold her; his touch was more of a caress than a grip. She could move away if she really wanted to. And that was the problem, because what she really wanted was him. Her skin tingled from his warm, hard hand, the slight rasp of his roughened fingers on the sensitive cords of her neck. Involuntarily she imagined how those rough hands would feel on the rest of her body, and a shiver ran down her spine.

He was big, dwarfing her with his size, her head tucked neatly under his chin. His furnacelike heat wrapped around her. He would be heavy, and probably dominating, but she could also imagine him lying back and letting her set the pace-

"Stay," he said again, as if she hadn't refused.

She hung on to her sanity, barely. "That wouldn't be smart."

"Fuck smart." His hot breath stirred over the fine hairs on the back of her neck, making her shiver again. His low voice made the word a weapon to be used, a deeper level of intimacy between them. "It would sure as hell be good." He stroked her neck where his breath had warmed her skin. "If you like it slow, I'll be slow. If you like it hard and fast, then that's the way you'll get it." His mouth replaced his fingers, his tongue slowly licking, and the shiver became a fine tremor that shook her entire body.

"Which is it?" he murmured. "Slow . . . or fast? Slow . . ." He licked the tendons in the curve of her neck and shoulder, then gently bit down. The sensation was electric; she jolted, a moan escaping her as her head, like a daisy too heavy for its stem, fell back to rest against his shoulder. ". . . or fast?"

His hands closed over her breasts, his thumbs rubbing over her nipples. His erection was a rock-hard bulk in his jeans, pushing against her bottom. Her legs threatened to give way beneath her, and she heard her own breathing, shallow and rapid, almost panting.

"Easy?" he whispered in her ear. "Or hard?"

Hard. Dear God, hard.

She pushed away from him and turned, bracing her hands against the wall behind her. He watched her like a patient tiger: hungry, but certain the prey was his. And she was. He knew it; she knew it. The only thing left to negotiate was the degree of difficulty, and pride demanded she make his victory as difficult as possible.

"I have a rule," she said.

Wariness entered his eyes. "Do I want to know?"

She managed a shrug. "Probably not."

He scrubbed a hand over his jaw, five o'clock shadow rasping his rough palm. "Tell me anyway."

She smiled, slow and sure. "I don't sleep with anyone I can beat in a fight."

The wariness slowly edged into disbelief. He stared at her. "Shit! You want me to fight you for it?"

She shrugged again and strolled toward the mat. "I wouldn't put it quite so crudely, but . . . yeah."

He took a deep breath. "Sarah, this isn't a good idea. I don't want to hurt you."

"You won't," she said confidently.

His eyes began to narrow. "You really think you're that good?"

She angled a smile at him over her shoulder, and the smile was almost a smirk. She might be defeated, but she was going to enjoy the process. "I think you'll bend over backward to keep from hurting me."

He got it now, and he didn't like it. "You're that sure I'll pull my punches and let you turn me into a punching bag? Let you win?"

She heaved a sigh. "If you break my jaw or knock me out, I'11 be in too much pain-not to mention a really bad mood-for what you have in mind."

"Yeah, well, if I let you kick the shit out of me, I won't be in any shape to do anything anyway."

She lifted one shoulder in a delicate movement. 'What a dilemma."

He scrubbed his hand over his face again. "Fuck."

"Maybe." She paused, and couldn't resist taunting him. "If you're good enough."

He studied her for a moment, then came to a decision, his expression hardening. "Okay, here's how we'll do it: strip wrestling."

Strip urrestling? He was diabolical, she thought. "No fair. I've never studied wrestling. and you outweigh me by seventy-five pounds."

"Closer to a hundred," he said, and she secretly gulped. That meant he was even more muscled than she'd thought. "C'mon, this was your idea. You know we aren't going to stand toe-to-toe and slug it out, so this is the alternative. At least you aren't likely to get hurt. I'll take a handicap, too."

With a handicap, she could probably make it interesting. She had no delusions that she could win, but she could make him put out the effort. "It's a deal."

He put his hands on his hips and studied her. "Here's what we'll do: I have to pin you, but all you have to do is knock me down, and you can use whatever method you like. The first one completely naked loses."

Her heart was definitely going to jump out of her chest. The thought of wrestling naked with him was almost enough to make her dizzy with sexual hunger.

"And, " he continued, "we decide now what counts as wearing apparel, and we both start out with the same number of items."

She nodded. "That's fair."

He studied her. "The earrings have to go. The posts will dig into your head."

Silently she removed the gold studs and laid them aside.

"Your bracelet and my wristwatch balance each other out." He glanced at her sandaled feet. "No socks, so I'm two up on you there."

"Let's both start out barefooted," she said, slipping out of her sandals.

He removed his boots and socks. "Okay, how many pieces of clothing do you have left?"

"Four, not counting the bracelet." Pants, shirt, bra, panties.

"I'm only wearing three."

"Put your socks back on and they'll count as one."

He put his socks on again and stepped onto the mat. "That makes us even at five. Five throws won't take long."

He was that certain of victory, the smug bastard. Well, she was also certain he'd win-she was counting on it-but if he thought he'd win in five straight throws, he was seriously underestimating his woman. Speed was her strength, and she moved like lightning, whipping her leg behind his and dumping him on his ass before he could counter the move. She smiled down at him and moved out of reach. "The socks," she said.

Silently he stripped them off and tossed them aside, then climbed to his feet. "You're fast." He was much more alert now.

She smiled. "That's what my sensei always said."

Fifteen minutes later he said, "Pin." Breathing raggedly, he crawled off her. His hard gaze swept over her bare breasts, lingered on the tightly puckered nipples. 'We're tied again. Take off your panties."

Her stomach tightened with anticipation. Panting, trying to control the rapid gasps, she held up her wrist. 'What about my bracelet?"

"I'm saving it for last."

Sarah climbed shakily to her feet. She had been putting every ounce of effort she could into resisting him, and he'd probably been holding back to make certain she wasn't hurt. This match was going on longer than she'd imagined it would, and she didn't know how much longer she could stand the rub of his mostly naked body against hers. But then, looking at him, she didn't know how much longer he could stand it either. His erection bulged against the front of his shorts, and his skin was covered with sweat. There was a set to his jaw that made her stomach tighten in delight.

She took a few deep breaths, then hooked her fingers in the elastic of her bikini panties and shimmied them down to drop around her ankles. He made a raw, smothered sound, his gaze locked on the triangle of dark pubic curls between her legs. Without looking away, he pushed his shorts down and stepped out of them.

Now it was her turn to smother the sound that rose in her throat. His penis thrust out, thick and pulsing, so big she couldn't decide whether to worry or celebrate. Wow. She wavered, then caught herself.

"Wait," she said, her voice sounding thick to her own ears. "I haven't won your shorts yet."

"Just pretend they're still on," he said, and pounced.

She was on the mat before she could blink, but at the last second she managed to twist just enough to avoid being pinned. His heavy weight bore her down, overwhelming her, the way it had all the previous times he'd pinned her. While she appreciated his efforts not to hurt her, she was as helpless now against him as she had been the first time he'd pinned her. Her only hope had been to remain on her feet, evade him and look for her chance, but he'd already taken her down.

Desperately she braced one foot on the mat and pushed, seeking leverage. He shifted to counter her move, and his hips slid between the open V of her legs, the smooth heat of his penis pressing into her labia. He froze, a sound almost like a growl rumbling in his throat. As if he couldn't help himself he pushed, and the thick bulbous head began to enter her.

For just a split second she forgot everything but the burning need in her body to lift, to take. She waited almost too long, but at the last possible moment she twisted frantically, dislodging him, and managed to roll closer to the wall. He gave another growl, this one more like a snarl, and was on her again before she could get to her feet.

That overwhelming weight hit her, smothered her, took her down. His hands were on her shoulders, pushing them down. "Pin," he said hoarsely, and the match was over.

Panting, he lifted his weight off her and climbed to his feet. "Stay there."

She stayed. She was too exhausted to do otherwise, and too turned on to move even if she'd been able. She closed her eyes, gulping in air as she listened to the rustle of his clothing. He was getting a condom, she thought, and opened her mouth to tell him he didn't need one, but he was already back, lifting her arms over her head. Cool, smooth metal clamped around her wrists. There was a snick, and she was caught.

Bemused, she stared at him. Handcuffs? She angled her head back to look. He'd looped the cuffs around a pipe before fastening them to her wrists. Experimentally she moved her hands. He hadn't closed them tightly, but they were tight enough that she couldn't pull her hands out. "Are these necessary?"

"Yeah." His chest heaved as he reached out and slowly rubbed his hand over her breasts. "Just in case you decide to go for two out of three matches."

"I don't renege, Cahill." She arched her torso into that hand, loving the feel of it on her nipples.

"And I don't take chances." He bent his dark head and kissed her. It was a marauding kiss, deep and hard, but she had known when she taunted him into a fight it would arouse all those male, conquering-warrior instincts. She softened beneath him, giving him what he demanded, which was nothing short of unconditional surrender.

He spread her legs and moved over her, and she braced herself for his immediate penetration. She caught her breath, waiting, trembling with need, her hips automatically lifting.

"Not yet," he growled. "I'm too close. I wouldn't last ten seconds."

Neither will I, she thought, but didn't say anything. She wasn't a fool; if he wanted to dawdle, then let him.

Not that there was any letting to it; he was in control, and all she could do was lie there and enjoy the dawdling.

God, he was heavy. His body was rock hard, sweaty from exertion. She opened her legs wider to give him a more comfortable cradle, sliding her thighs up his hips and tilting her pelvis, seeking. His erection nudged her again, and instinctively she wiggled, trying to take it in.

He swore and slid down her body, removing temptation from her reach. "Damn, you can't give up, can you?" he muttered. "I said not yet."

"Sadist." She couldn't lie still; desire rode her like an unbearable itch, an implacable hunger. Her body moved under him, dancing its need, calling to him with her open thighs and the hot scent of her body.

"More like a masochist." He kissed his way down her throat, over the slope of her breast, then clamped his mouth over one tight nipple and strongly sucked at it. Electricity arced from breast to loins, bowing her upward; he slipped his left arm around her hips and held her in that position as he moved to her other breast.

He wasn't being gentle with her. The pressure of his mouth verged on pain, but it wasn't quite there, teetering on that exquisite edge between pain and pleasure. Just as it began to tilt over the edge, he moved, sliding down her torso, kissing and nipping. His tongue probed her shallow navel, and a surprised cry burst from her throat, her body arching again. God, he was going to make her come just by kissing her navel. But then he was gone from there, too, his mouth sliding lower as he smoothed his free hand over her hips and abdomen, before slipping it between her legs.

Yes. There. That was what she wanted, almost. She squirmed against his hand, but he just held it there, covering her with his palm, letting her feel the heat and strength. Her hips lifted, riding a wave of painful anticipation. She wanted his fingers inside her, she wanted his mouth on her.

"Do it," she gritted, pushing herself against his hand. "Please!"

He gave a low, raw laugh, his head pressed against her inner thigh and his breath hot on her flesh. With his thumb he probed her, dragging it up the closed folds of her labia and opening them so he could see all of her. She panted, her head tossing back and forth on the mat as he circled her clitoris, teasing it to fullness. Just when she thought she'd scream in frustration, he closed his mouth on her and his tongue began circling and flicking as he dragged his thumb down and pressed it deep inside.

Desperately she grabbed the pipe behind her and held on. Spots swam in front of her eyes and her entire body bucked as she came. She heard her own hoarse cries, but they sounded distant, as if someone else made them. For a long, magic moment nothing existed but her body and the firestorm of sensation as her inner contractions peaked, then slowly began to ebb. Her thighs had been clenched around his head but now her legs fell limply open.

He was licking her.

At first the leisurely caresses were soothing. She made a little humming sound of pleasure as his tongue probed her entrance. But the probing and licking continued, and the glorious lassitude began to fade, replaced by a familiar heat and tension. "What are you waiting for?" she gasped, twisting a little.

"I want you ready again." Gently he blew on her, his breath cool on her overheated flesh.

"I am ready!" The need had rebuilt so fast she was breathless.

"Not quite," he murmured, gently catching her clitoris between his teeth, then torturing her with lightning flicks of his tongue. She groaned under the lash of pleasure, but as good as this felt, she wanted more. She wanted him inside her. Now.

'Just a little closer," he crooned, slipping his thumb inside her again. Then he replaced his hand with his mouth and he kissed her, deeply, his tongue probing, while his wet thumb moved farther down and pushed into her in a bold, shocking thrust that made stars explode in her head. She came again, convulsing, screaming, trying to fight him because the sensations were too sharp to be borne. He held her down, drawing out the moment, holding her at the peak.

Finally she collapsed, trembling, her ears ringing as she struggled to find some measure of control.

"Damn it," he said, slow and deep, as he moved up her limp body. "There's no way in hell I can wait until you're ready again."

She didn't care. She was beyond caring, beyond even opening her eyes as he positioned himself between her legs and guided his penis to her wet entrance, then began sinking into her.

Oh God oh God. Sarah pressed her head hard against the mat, forcing herself to breathe deeply. He was big enough that his penetration wasn't easy; if she hadn't been so wet from two climaxes, so utterly relaxed, taking him would have been painful. As it was, though, their fit was perfect, so perfect that tears sprang to her eyes. She was tight around him; he was deep within her. He pushed one more time and he was there, touching a place inside her that, impossibly, rekindled the heat of desire. She hadn't thought she could climax again, but as he began to thrust she realized differently. The heat inside her began to grow, became hunger, lifting her body to him.

He held her legs wide and hammered into her, driven now by his own blind urgency. Every inward stroke forced her closer and closer to that moment when the tension would become too much, when the heat was scalding and nerve endings couldn't endure any more. He thrust harder and harder, their loins slapping together, and she was almost there, almost there, almost . . .

He came, his powerful body bowing and bucking, shuddering, pumping. Hoarse, rough cries tore from his throat as he gripped her hips and pulled her groin tight against him. Then, slowly, he collapsed on top of her.

A small, wild sound vibrated in her throat. Almost . . . there.

She needed him to move, needed him deeper. Frantically she tugged at the handcuffs. "Take them off," she panted.

'Wha-" He didn't lift his head. His entire body was shaking, a fine tremor from muscles taxed to the limit.

"The handcuffs." She could barely speak; her voice was guttural. She surged upward, seeking the final touch that would send her over the edge. He was still hard, still inside her, but she needed him deeper, wanted him deeper. "Take them off."

"God," he gasped. "Give me a minute."

"Nowinshe shrieked, maddened by the completion that lurked just out of her grasp. She fought the cuffs like a madwoman. "Take them off!"

"All right, just hold still!" He subdued her, holding her down as he got the key from under the edge of the mat where he'd stashed it. He stretched higher on her body as he reached for the cuffs, forcing his penis deeper, and something very close to a howl erupted from her throat. Alarmed, afraid he'd injured her, he hastily unlocked the handcuffs and started to draw back from her.

Sarah lunged upward, locking her legs around his in a vise as she grabbed his ass and pulled him in tighter, as deep as she could take him. There, right there-ah! Her hips pumped as she pistoned herself on him, and she felt the peak coming closer . . . closer . . . She screamed, caught in an orgasm more intense than the others, so intense she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't see. She heard him make an inhuman sound; then he was thrusting hard, groaning, his arms locked around her as he began coming again.

She either passed out or slept; she wasn't certain which. Slowly she became aware of the whisper of cool air on her damp skin, of the mat sticking to her naked body, of the man sprawled so heavily on top of her. His heaving breaths had slowed to a more normal pace, telling her that at least a few minutes had passed. The sticky moisture of his semen had seeped out of her to pool uncomfortably beneath her bare bottom.

Was he asleep? She managed to lift her arm and touch his shoulder. He stirred and turned his head so his face pressed into the curve of her neck. "God," he muttered, his voice muffled. "That's the first time I've ever come twice with one hard-on. It damn near killed me."

That was such a guy thing to say that she smiled. She would have laughed if she'd had the energy, but the fact was, she was damn near dead herself.

Slowly, every movement an effort, he levered himself off her and collapsed by her side. He lay on his back with his arm covering his eyes, breathing deeply. After a minute he cursed. "Please tell me you're on the pill."

"I'm on the pill," she parroted obediently.

He groaned, long and heartfelt. "Fuck."

This time she did laugh, though it was a little weak. "No, I really am on the pill."

He lifted his arm enough to peer at her with one eye. "You are?"

"I am."

"You wouldn't joke with a poor, crippled wreck of a man?"

"I would, but not about this."

"Thank God." He tried to sit up, wavered, then fell back. "I'11 get up in a minute."

Bully for him. Sarah knew for a fact her legs wouldn't support her. "Are you sure about that?"

"No," he admitted, and closed his eyes.

Chapter 17

CAHILL LAY HEAVILY ON HER, HIS BIG BODY TREMBLING IN the aftermath of orgasm. They were in his bed, the room cool and dark around them. Sarah had no idea what time it was; she could have lifted her head to peer at the digital alarm clock on the bedside table, but she didn't have the energy. Nor did the time matter; what mattered was the shattering realization that she was in trouble.

She couldn't say she hadn't known what she was doing. She had walked into the situation with her eyes open, knowing that she was already way too vulnerable to him,-too close to falling in love, and that making love with him would only increase her vulnerability.

She had known, and she'd done it anyway.

It wasn't the sex-though God knows the word that best described it was too: too hot, too raunchy, too powerful. This wasn't just sex, this was mating . . . at least on her part. And that was the problem.

She hadn't wanted to love him. She'd thought-hoped-that she could keep that core part of herself separate, and inviolate. She'd failed miserably, or maybe spectacularly, because she hadn't been prepared for the inescapable fact that on every level he was her match. Not just physically, but emotionally, even in their personalities, they came together as equals. She might never in her lifetime find another man who matched her as well as Cahill did, and if this didn't work out, it was going to hurt her for a long, long time.

Her arms were still looped around his neck, her legs still hugged him close. Since the moment they had come upstairs and fallen into bed, and that had to be hours ago, she didn't think they had been out of physical contact with each other for more than five minutes, total. They had cuddled and stroked and kissed, dozed in a tangle of legs and arms, and made love with an almost savage hunger. This wasn't just the result of sexual deprivation, though it had been a long time for her; nor was it that first fascination with a new love. This was different. This was more.

As they rested, their heartbeats had slowed, become synchronized. Cahill nuzzled her neck, then gently pulled out of her body and fell on his side. "God, I'm hungry."

Just like that he banished her malaise, and she sputtered with laughter. "You're supposed to say something romantic and lover-like, Cahill. What happened to, at least, 'That was great'?"

He yawned and stretched. "It fell by the wayside somewhere around the fourth time." Reaching out one long arm, he switched on the bedside lamp and propped up on one elbow, looking down at her with a sleepy, sated gaze. "If you listen hard, I think you'll hear a chocolate chip cookie calling you, too."

"Chocolate chip? Why didn't you say so?" She scrambled out of bed and headed toward the bathroom. "I'll meet you in the kitchen."

"Do you like 'em hot or cold?" he called as he pulled on a pair of black boxers.

"Gooey."

"Hot it is."

She entered the kitchen just as he was pouring two glasses of milk. The microwave dinged, and he removed a plate piled high with chocolate chip cookies.

"I borrowed a T-shirt," she said as she sat down. "I hope you don't mind." The shirt came almost to mid-thigh, covering all the important parts.

He eyed her. "It looks better on you than it does on me." He sat down across from her, and put the plate between them. "Dig in."

She did. The cookies were warm and soft, the chocolate chips melted just enough to be gooey, the way she preferred. Midway through the second one she asked, "What time is it?"

"Almost four. "

She groaned. "It's almost dawn and we haven't had any sleep. Or much, anyway."

'What difference does it make? It's Saturday. We can sleep as long as we like."

"No, I can't. I need to go home."

"Why?"

She stared at the cookie, at the crumbs that fell when she pinched off a bite. "Do you mean other than that's where my birth control pills are?"

He watched her over the rim of the glass as he downed a healthy slug of milk. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Other than that. Not that the pills aren't important."

"You know the saying: Miss one and you're an idiot. Miss two, and you're a mommy." She took a deep breath. She had been honest with herself, and he deserved no less. "And I need to regroup."

"Regroup from what?"

"From this. You. Sex. This is . . . this is-"

"-pretty powerful stuff," he said, completing the sentence. "For me, too. So why is it making you run?"

"I'm not running, just retreating a little." She circled the top of her glass with her finger, then looked up at him, sitting there watching her with his cop's eyes, his jaw darkened with a day's growth of beard. "I think this is more powerful stuff to me than it is to you, and that's a big risk for me to take."

"You aren't in this alone, Sarah. You can't talk degrees of feeling like you're comparing thermometers."

"I can when I'm the one registering the high number."

"You don't know that for certain."

She blinked at him as he continued eating a cookie. 'What are you saying?"

"Is this confession time?" He rubbed the back of his neck. "Shit, I'm no good at this kind of talk at any time, much less at four in the morning. Okay, here it is: I don't know exactly what we have, but I know we have something. I know I don't want you to leave. I know I want you in a way I've never wanted anyone else, and I know you're not a woman who plays games. This isn't a game to me, either. You can pull back from me because you're afraid of taking a risk, or we can see where this goes."

She stared at him, feeling the quiet unfurling of happiness inside, like a flower blooming. She had expected him to retreat when she confessed to being emotionally involved. She hadn't said the "L" word, but she might as well have; he couldn't have missed her meaning. Not that the basic situation had changed- he hadn't said the "L" word, either. But he hadn't got that uncomfortable expression guys got when a woman started clinging and all they really wanted was to get the hell away from her.

Cahill had been burned; she, on the other hand, was relatively free of scars. Maybe the fact that this was uncharted territory for her was why she was frightened she'd get hurt. If Cahill could risk it, then so could she.

"All right," she said calmly. "So now what happens?"

"I suggest we finish our milk and cookies, and go back to bed."

"And then what?"

The look he gave her was faintly exasperated. "Are you going to write this down in an appointment book or something?"

"I'm big on organization. Humor me."

"All right. I know you have your job to do. I have mine. Some days I won't have much free time, some days you won't. Unless you want to move in with me-No?" he asked when she shook her head. "I didn't think so. Not yet, anyway. But failing that, then we continue as we have this week, together in our free time. We probably won't get much cosmic bowling done-"

"But I so enjoyed it," she murmured, earning an appreciative grin from him.

"-but I can promise I'll do my best to keep you entertained. How does that sound?"

"Hmm, I don't know. What do you have in mind?"

'Well, for starters I thought I'd fuck your brains out. Then, as an encore, I thought I'd fuck your brains out."

"Just what I like," she said. "Variety."

He set the plate of cookies on the counter and put the empty milk glasses in the sink. "If it's variety you want," he said, turning to pull her to her feet, "what do you think about the table?"

Her heart began hammering at the expression on his face, that heavy-lidded, intent look that meant he was aroused. "It's a very nice table."

"Glad you like it," he said, and lifted her onto it.

They spent the weekend together. She insisted on spending some time at the Judge's house, working on the packing and inventory, so he helped her. Because the house wasn't hers, she didn't feel free to invite him to stay the night, so she packed a few clothes and toiletries and drove herself back to his house with him, where they spent the rest of the day in bed. Sunday was pretty much a rerun of Saturday, to her delight. She put her worries on hold and let things between them develop as they would. What else could she do, other than run? Caution was in her nature, but running wasn't.

Early Monday morning, she drove back home and determinedly set to work. Barbara called at ten, pulling her from the chore of folding and packing more towels and washcloths than a small army could use.

"I've talked to a realtor," Barbara said. "He'll be there sometime today to put up a sign, so don't be surprised if you see someone in the front yard. Actually, I've already had a couple of people call me here at home-you know, acquaintances who know someone who's looking for a house in Mountain Brook, so maybe it won't be a problem to sell."

"I don't think it will," Sarah replied, thinking that she might not have a full month here after all.

"I'm flying in this weekend to help you pack up Daddy's clothes and personal things." Her voice wobbled a little. "I'm not looking forward to it, but I need to do it. This still doesn't seem real, and maybe . . . maybe putting his things away will help."

"Do you want me to pick you up at the airport?"

"No, I'll rent a car so I can come and go without bothering you. And would you book a room at the Wynfrey for me? I don't think I can stay in the house."

"I'll be glad to. Do you want a suite?"

"Just a room will do, since I'll be alone. Sarah, you know how long it takes a will to go through probate. I've talked to Randall and Jon about this, and we all agree. If you need the money Daddy left you, we'll go ahead and give it to you now out of our accounts, and take it back out of the estate when everything is settled."

"Oh, no, don't do that," Sarah said, shocked. "I don't need the money, and I really wish you wouldn't-"

"Don't argue," Barbara said firmly. "Daddy left you the money, and that's that."

There was nothing Sarah could do but say, "Thank you. Truly, though, I don't need the money now."

"All right, but if you change your mind, all you have to do is tell me. Oh, by the way, I've written a letter of recommendation for you, too; I'm bringing it with me, so don't let me forget to give it to you. You've been wonderful; I don't know what we would have done without you."

"It's been my pleasure," Sarah said sadly, because it truly had been a pleasure to serve the Judge and his family.

There was another job offer in the mail that day. She read it and put it with the others. This one didn't require her to start immediately, so it was a possibility. She made a mental note to call later, to set up an appointment for an interview.

To her astonishment, every day there was another job offer in the mail, and a couple of offers were made by phone. She disregarded those immediately, preferring the more formal approach. Still, she was amazed at the number of offers coming in; her salary wasn't cheap, so she hadn't expected what was almost a cornucopia of opportunities.

"It's that television spot," Cahill said when she told him about it Thursday night. They were watching television, sitting together in his big recliner with her in his lap. She was proud they were actually watching television; this was the first night they hadn't gone straight to bed after eating dinner. "You're a celebrity, of sorts, so some people will want to hire you whether they really need you or not."

"That isn't the type of job I want, just to be someone's status symbol. Judge Roberts needed someone to organize and run the household for him. He was elderly, he lived alone, he had some health problems, and he simply didn't want to be bothered by the details."

"Plus he needed your bodyguard skills."

Sarah fell silent, because her skills hadn't done any good. When the Judge had needed her, she hadn't been there.

"Hey," Cahill said softly. "It wasn't your fault. You couldn't have stopped it. There would have been no reason for you to be suspicious of this guy, whoever he is, because the Judge knew him, asked him to come in. Would you have stayed in the room with them while they talked?"

"No, of course not."

"Then how could you have stopped it? The guy probably used a silencer; you wouldn't even have heard the shot."

"At least I could have identified him-" She stopped, thinking it through. "He'd have killed me, too."

Cahill's arms tightened around her. "He'd have to, because you'd know his name, what he looked like. Thank God you went to a movie." He kissed her forehead, then tilted her head back and kissed her mouth, lingering until she began to think they wouldn't be watching television much longer.

"When did you say Mrs. Pearson is flying in?" he asked, lifting his head.

"Tomorrow night."

"Does this mean you won't be sleeping here?"

"I can't," she said, regretfully.

"Then why are we wasting time?"

Later, when he'd turned out the light and they were lying drowsily together, he said, "If you don't mind, let me check out the people who sent you those job offers."

"Why?" she asked, startled into lifting her head. "Do you think something's wrong?" She didn't see how anything could be.

"No, nothing in particular. It's just a precaution. Humor me. "

"Okay, if you want."

"I do," he said firmly.

Chapter 18

"WE DO A LOT OF ENTERTAINING." MERILYN LANKFORD TOOK A sip of coffee from a cup of translucent bone china, the huge yellow diamond on her hand glittering as it caught the sunlight. "And we travel, so we need someone to look after the house while we're gone." She suddenly smiled, her eyes twinkling. "I've always told Sonny I need a wife. Miss Stevens, will you marry me?"

Sarah had to laugh. Mrs. Lankford was a petite, energetic brunette with artfully done highlights to hide the growing gray in her hair, bright green eyes that invited the world to laugh with her, and a nonstop schedule. Her two daughters were grown, the older one married and the younger one a senior in college. She had a job in real estate, an interest in several charities, and a husband who ran two thriving businesses that depended on contacts for sales, hence the entertaining. Judge Roberts had been old money; the Lankfords were unabashedly new money, and they were enjoying every penny.

Two years before, they had built a rambling, ostentatious Spanish-style house, with nooks and crannies everywhere, arched alcoves, bricked courtyards, a center fountain, and anything else they could think of. The pool was Olympic size. Mr. Lankford had what he called a media room, crammed with whatever he could think of in the way of electronics, from computer to stereo, including the big-screen television that all men seemed to need to feel complete-and this was in addition to the home theater, with the drop-down projection screen, the ten reclining theater seats upholstered in lush velvet, and the wraparound stereo sound system. The Lankfords had his-and-her marble bathrooms, closets the size of most people's houses, ten bathrooms, eight bedrooms, and what was obviously more money than they knew what to do with.

The whole setup made Sarah want to laugh, it was so over-the-top. It was also obvious that Merilyn enjoyed everything about her new house, from the silly to the luxurious. She knew it was ostentatious, and she didn't care. She had wanted the sunken marble tub, she could afford it, so she got one; it was that simple.

Sarah liked the Lankfords, Merilyn especially. From her point of view, the setup was good; there were separate quarters for her use, an actual little Spanish-style, fully furnished bungalow set back behind the pool and half hidden from view by a lush wall of trailing ivy. Merilyn must have paid the earth to have the mature ivy transplanted, but the effect was wonderful.

Even more important, Sarah thought, Merilyn truly needed her. The other prospective employers had, she sensed, wanted her more as a trophy or a status symbol than anything else. She had even received a second offer from the man who had tried to hire her after seeing her on television. People like that didn't really need her. Attitude went a long way in her consideration.

The entire process had become a little weird. She was supposed to be the one being interviewed, not the other way around, but she kept getting the feeling that people were almost auditioning for her. This certainly hadn't been addressed in training, so she pretended not to notice. Regardless of which job she took, after a while things would adjust to their natural state and her employers would become accustomed to treating her as they should. The Lankfords were the fourth interview she'd had, and she thought they might be the last. Matters had progressed with the Judge's estate faster than the family had anticipated; only a week after listing the house for sale, the realtor had a serious offer on the table, and the buyers wanted to close immediately. In order to get the house ready for them, on Barbara's instructions, Sarah had brought in extra labor to help with packing and moving. The house was almost empty; all that was left was what was in her own quarters.

The furniture wasn't hers; neither were the dishes or cookware. She did have her own bed linens, because she preferred silky sheets, but for the most part, all she had to move were her personal effects-her clothes and toiletries and books, a music system, and her collection of cassettes and CDs. Cahill had told her she didn't have to rush into a job, she could always move in with him and take her time looking, but she didn't feel right doing that. She wanted a bit more independence than that, regardless of how much time she had been spending at his house.

After she and Merilyn discussed salary, duties, benefits, and off-days, Merilyn beamed a high-wattage, cheerleader smile at her. "So, when can you start?"

Sarah made the decision right then. "Two days. If you don't mind, I'll move my things into the bungalow tomorrow. I'll need to sit down with you and Mr. Lankford to go over your schedules and needs, and if possible, I'd like a diagram of the house."

"It's awful, isn't it? I'll just give you a set of the blueprints; we have at least ten, fifteen copies left," Merilyn said cheerfully. 'We built this house, and I still sometimes get turned around and have to look out a window to see where I am. You know, if it's Tuesday this must be the den, that type of thing. Only in the movies it was Belgium, not the den, but you know what I mean."

"It must be fun," Sarah said, smiling.

"It's more fun than you can imagine. Building the house was like an adventure; we drove the builder crazy, because we'd come up with new ideas for what we wanted almost every day, but we kept paying him bonuses, so he made out okay. This is probably the only house we'll ever build, unless, God forbid, it burns down or something, so we went all out. The first night we lived here, we played hide-and-seek like two kids. I can't wait until we have grandchildren so I can play hide-and-seek with them, there are so many good places to hide." Suddenly she smacked herself in the head. 'What am I saying? I'm too young to be a grandmother! I don't know what's wrong with me; comments like that have been popping out of my mouth for the last year or so. Do you think I need estrogen, or something?"

Sarah laughed. "Or grandchildren."

"Bethany, my oldest, is just twenty-four, and that seems so young, too young to start a family, so I hope she'll wait another few years. But I was just twenty when I had her, and I didn't think I was too young."

"We never do," Sarah murmured.

They agreed on the terms of a very simple contract; then Merilyn gave her a set of keys for both the bungalow and the house, the codes for the gate and security systems, and a copy of the blueprints, which was a huge roll consisting of at least thirty pages, and weighed about five pounds. Feeling a bit bemused by the speed with which Merilyn accomplished things, Sarah drove home and called Barbara to let her know that, unless something unforeseen had come up, she was finished clearing and packing and would be moving out tomorrow, clearing the way for the new owners.

'Where will you be?" Barbara asked. "I don't want to lose track of you, Sarah. You've been a part of our family for almost three years, and I can't imagine not knowing where you are or how to get in touch with you."

"I've taken a position with Sonny and Merilyn Lankford, on Brookwood."

"Oh," said Barbara. "New money." Location, location, location; it told everything.

"Very new, and having a lot of fun with it."

"Then God bless them. Do you have their number handy?"

"Actually, I'll have a private line, so let me give you that number." She had already memorized it, so she rattled it off. "And you still have my cell phone number, don't you?"

"In my address book. I'll call the bank and have the balance of this month's salary paid into your account tomorrow. You take care of yourself, you hear?"

"You, too."

After hanging up, Sarah allowed herself a moment to look around the two cozy rooms that had been hers, then shook off the sadness and nostalgia and briskly began packing up her books. As she packed, she called her mom and gave her the details of her new job, as well as the telephone number and address. Dad was well; Jennifer thought she might be pregnant-big surprise there, she'd been trying for, what, a whole month?-and Daniel was back on his home base in Kentucky. Everyone was safe and accounted for.

She worked steadily, her mind already going over what she had seen of the Lankfords' house, working out schedules for having the hundreds of windows washed and cleaning what had to be hundreds of miles of grout. The cleaning itself was the job of the housekeeper, or the cleaning service, but arranging and overseeing was Sarah's job. The house was easily twice as large as Judge Roberts's house, so she'd have her hands full just with domestic responsibilities.

Her cell phone rang, startling her. She grabbed it out of her bag. "Hello."

"Just checking to see when you'll be home," Cahill said, his deep voice easy and relaxed.

Sarah glanced at her watch and grimaced. The time had gotten away from her; it was almost seven o'clock. "I'm sorry; I was packing my things and didn't pay attention to the time. Are you at home? "

"On my way; I'm running late, too. Do you want to meet me somewhere for dinner?"

She looked down at her clothes; she'd changed into jeans be fore she started packing, and they were stained and dusty. "I'm too dirty to eat out. Do you want me to pick up something on the way home?"

"I can do that. How about a plate from Jimmie's?"

Jimmie's was a mom-and-pop restaurant that served plate lunches-a meat and three vegetables for five-ninety-five, or four veggies for four-eighty-five; your choice of dinner roll or corn bread. The weekly menu never varied. This was Tuesday, but it wasn't Belgium; it was meat loaf day at Jimmie's.

"That sounds good. Just vegetables for me, and corn bread. You know which veggies I like." He should; they had been there something like seven times in the past two weeks.

"How much longer are you going to stay?"

"I'll stop now. I'm almost finished, anyway."

"See you in about half an hour, then. If you get home before I do, leave the things in the truck and I'll take them in for you when I get home."

He hung up, and Sarah made a wry face at the phone. "Damn," she muttered. He thought she would be staying with him, though every time he'd mentioned her moving in, she had resisted the idea.

Maybe it was old-fashioned, even silly of her, but she didn't like the idea of living with him. A sleep-over was one thing; in fact, she had slept over with him almost every night since they became lovers. But the only way she would consider actually living with a man was if they were married or at least engaged. Cahill had asked her to do a lot of things, but marry him wasn't one of them. Until then-

Until then?

She jerked herself up short. Was her subconscious planning to marry him? Had it not listened to all her lectures about the dangers of getting involved with a man who had gone through a vicious divorce in his recent past? Despite everything, was she so in love with him that she was already dreaming of happily-ever-after?

Hell, yes, she was.

Her stupidity was surpassed only by her optimism. She closed her eyes, a little amused at herself, a little despairing. Hope sprang eternal, all right, and there was nothing she could do but play out the hand and see what happened.

She loaded some of the boxes in the SUV, then washed her face and hands and locked up, as usual checking all the doors and windows in the house and making certain the alarm was set. That would be her duty only one more time; then she would focus solely on the Lankfords and their comfort, their routine.

Jimmie's must have been busy, because Cahill still wasn't home when she got there. She let herself in with the spare key he'd given her, and jumped into the shower to rinse off the rest of the grime from the boxes. She wrapped herself in the terry-cloth robe she'd left there and walked out of the bedroom just as she heard the back door open.

"Honey, I'm home!" he called, making her grin as she entered the kitchen. He had set the takeout plates on the table and was getting the jug of tea from the fridge. "And I'm starving," he added.

"So am I. Why were you so late?"

"A woman took her three-year-old to his pediatrician, and the doc noticed the kid was covered with bruises. She said he fell down the stairs. The doc was suspicious and called it in, we investigated, and they don't have stairs. Bastards. Plus we were going over some old cases."

Meaning they were still sifting through the evidence taken from the Judge's house, going over it again and again, trying to spot something they'd missed. The case was cold, and getting colder by the minute, but they were still trying. He looked tired, but who wouldn't be after dealing with people who would beat up a three-year-old?

"I had another interview today," she said as they sat down. "Sonny and Merilyn Lankford, on Brookwood; big Spanish-type house."

"Yeah, I know the place. How did it go?"

"I took the job."

He paused with his fork on the way to his mouth, his gaze sharpening as he studied her. "Same setup you had with Judge Roberts? On-site quarters?"

"Yes, a separate little bungalow. I have the weekends off unless they have a party planned, in which case I'll substitute one of the other days."

'When do you start?"

He had on his cop face, and that was his cop voice, cool and dispassionate. He'd been expecting her to move in with him, and he didn't like it that things weren't going his way.

"Day after tomorrow."

"So tomorrow night is the last night you'll be spending here."

Her appetite was fading fast. "Tomorrow is the last night I'll be spending every night with you. Whether or not it's the last night, period, is up to you."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I have a job to do, and I won't short-time them. But when I'm free, if you want me, I'll be here."

"Oh, yeah," he said softly. "I want you."

"But you're angry because I took the job."

"No, I know you had to find another job. I don't like it because you won't be here. That's two different things."

"I've loved being here with you, Cahill." Love being the operative word. "But we both knew it was temporary. My staying here at night, I mean."

"Okay, okay." He looked frustrated. 'We'll manage. I just don't like it. And before you stay a single night at this place, I want to check these people out. Remember our agreement?"

"I don't think Merilyn Lankford's a terrorist or a money launderer for the mob," she said, relieved he wasn't trying to talk her out of taking the job.

"You never know. People have all kinds of dirty laundry in their closets. For my peace of mind, okay?" He reached behind him where he'd hung his jacket on the back of the chair and took out his notebook. "Give me their full names again, and address."

Sighing, she did.

"Sonny's his real name? Not a nickname?"

"I suppose."

"Never mind, I can find out. If they've ever even had a traffic ticket, I'll know about it." He slipped the notebook back into his pocket and resumed eating.

A disruption in his domestic arrangements wasn't enough to kill his appetite, she noticed with amusement and made herself begin eating again, too.

Inevitably her mind slipped back to the Judge; how could it not, when what had happened to him was the reason Cahill wanted to check out the Lankfords? Tomorrow would be four weeks since the murder; every Wednesday was a sad anniversary. She didn't know if she would ever be able to live through another Wednesday without remembering.

"There's nothing new on the case, is there?" she asked, though she thought he'd tell her if there was. But maybe not; he kept most things about his work pretty close to his chest.

"No. We're not giving up, though. There had to be a reason, and sooner or later we'll find out what it was. Someone will talk, let something slip, and it'll get back to us. Or someone will get pissed and give us a call, tell what they know. We're still talking to people, showing that picture around, trying to shake some memories. It'll come. Sooner or later, it'll come."

Chapter 19

HE COULDN'T BELIEVE IT, WHEN HE HEARD, AND OF COURSE he did hear; Mountain Brook was a small town, and people knew people; someone always talked. She had gone to work for those nouveau riche Lankfords, with the ghastly house that proved just how nouveau their riches truly were. He received a nice little letter from her, politely telling him she had taken another position, but by the time the letter arrived, he had already heard the news.

He held the letter in his hand, staring at her neat, firm signature. He had read it over dozens of times since receiving it, though the words never changed. He thought he could almost smell her on the paper, a light, fresh scent that hit him with a shaft of pain, because she should be here. She should be with him. Every day the pain of her absence became more acute, as if something vital in his life was lacking. It was intolerable.

He rubbed the sheet of paper over his face, seeking comfort in knowing that she had touched this, had sent it personally to him.

How could she do this to him? Didn't she know-? No, of course not. She couldn't know, he reminded himself. He mustn't get angry with her, because, after all, she hadn't yet met him. As soon as she did, she would know how perfect their lives would be together. She probably felt sorry for those nasty Lankfords and would try to bring a touch of class to their tacky lives. It was a useless effort, but his Sarah was a valiant creature. She would try, and keep trying, until her heart broke at the futility of it.

He actually knew the Lankfords, because, after all, business was business. He'd never been to their house, though; perhaps it was time he visited. Getting an invitation wouldn't be difficult; they entertained with vaudevillian gusto, as if they had no idea of the pleasure of solitude, or quiet.

What a wonderful idea, visiting the Lankfords; he would be able to see Sarah close at hand, because obviously she would be overseeing everything. Perhaps she would even be introduced to him. One didn't normally introduce the servants to the guests, but Merilyn Lankford was just gauche enough to do it. Not that Sarah was an ordinary servant; in her own way she was queen, but the world she ruled was always behind-the-scenes. She deserved to have his world to rule, rather than that monument to tackiness.

For Sarah's own sake, not to mention his, he had to get her out of there. He had to act, the sooner the better. He mustn't be careless, though. This would require planning and thought, and no small degree of skill. He looked forward to the challenge.

People were creatures of habit; they wore their little rut of routine in the fabric of their lives; then they stayed in the rut because it was easier than climbing out. According to psychologists, it was fact that most people preferred what they knew, even if it was horrible, to the uncertainty of the unknown. Women stayed with abusive husbands, not out of hope, but out of fear of being on their own. It was the great unknown. Only daring souls, or desperate ones, broke out of their ruts.

People tended to follow the same patterns day after day, week after week. The same people would be at the same place at roughly the same time. Cahill didn't expect the man in the photograph to show up and use the same pay phone at the same time of night; but maybe, just maybe, someone would be in the Galleria who was in the habit of being there then and had been there the night Judge Roberts was killed, and had noticed . . . what? Something. Anything.

None of the store clerks had noticed anything, but then they were trained to watch what went on in their stores, not out in the mall concourse. But what about the people sitting on the benches, strolling around, the clutch of teenagers giggling and trying to act cool, the young woman slowly pushing a baby stroller back and forth with her foot while she ate a cinnamon roll? Were they there every night? Every Wednesday night? What was their routine?

At about the same time of night the call had been made, on a hunch Cahill went to the Galleria and stopped every shopper he met in the area of that particular pay phone and showed them the photograph. Did anything about this man ring any bells? Did they know someone who resembled him? Was it possible they'd seen him before, here in the Galleria?

He got a lot of funny looks, no's, and shakes of the head. Some people merely glanced at the photograph before saying, "Naw," and walking on. Some people took the time to study it before handing it back. No, he didn't look familiar. Sorry.

Cahill kept at it. Nothing was breaking in the case; there were no rumors, no one was dropping a dime to get back at someone- nothing. The wall they'd hit was high and wide. They had the slug that killed the Judge, but not the cartridge. They didn't have any prints that scored a hit on AFIS; they didn't have the murder weapon; they didn't have a witness; they didn't have a motive. They didn't have shit.

He was getting angry. No one should be able to commit murder and walk away. It happened, but it offended him on a deep level, in that part of him that made him a cop.

He stopped a twenty-something guy who had a black-lipsticked girl hanging on him like a window-unit air conditioner.

They both had attitude, but they looked at the photograph anyway. "I dunno," the guy said, frowning a little. "He reminds me of somebody, but I can't place him, y'know?"

Cahill kept his own demeanor and voice neutral. He could be a badass when he needed to be, but tonight he'd deliberately been very low-key so if anyone had anything to say, he or she would feel comfortable talking to him. "Is it someone you've seen here in the Galleria before?"

"Naw, it ain't that. Hey, I know! He looks like my banker!"

"Your banker?"

"Yeah-William Teller!"

They walked away laughing. "Cute," Cahill said under his breath, turning away and not letting himself respond to the smart-ass, but the guy had better hope they never crossed paths if he was doing something he shouldn't-and he looked like the type who would.

Cahill worked the shoppers until the announcement came that the mall was closing. This had been another dead end, but if he kept coming back, kept showing the photograph, maybe sooner or later something would pop.

The house was dark when he got home. He sat in the driveway for a minute staring at the windows. "Shit," he muttered. Coming home to a dark house had never bothered him before, but now he wanted to punch something because he didn't like this worth a damn. In just a couple of weeks he'd gotten so accustomed to having Sarah there that not having her there felt almost as bad as when he'd first broken up with Shannon.

Hell, in a way it was worse. He hadn't missed Shannon. Finding out she was screwing around had killed everything he felt for her except anger. He missed Sarah, though; it was a constant ache. He could forget about it while he was working, but the knowledge that she wouldn't be there when he got home was always there in the back of his mind, waiting for a moment when he wasn't occupied to punch him in the gut.

He finally got out of the truck and went inside, flipping on lights, turning on the television, getting himself something to drink. It was his normal routine, and it wasn't enough. The emptiness of the house made him furious.

Sarah had spent Saturday night with him, and the sex had been so hot he'd thought his head would explode. He couldn't get enough of her, and that was damn scary. She was openly, honestly sensual, giving freely of herself and delighting in his body as fiercely as he delighted in hers. It almost scared him sometimes, the way they were in such perfect sync, in bed and out.

He was suspicious when something seemed perfect, but the way he and Sarah fit together was . . . perfect. Even when they argued, he knew he didn't intimidate her-hell, he wasn't certain she could be intimidated. And that was perfect. He didn't have to handle her with kid gloves. The sex was hot and raunchy: perfect. They made each other laugh: perfect. Maybe it was because she was from a military family, but she seemed to get him in a way no other woman had: perfect.

What wasn't perfect was that she wasn't with him.

He hated her living in that damn bungalow. He hated it with a savagery that he tried hard to keep hidden. He'd been reasonable about her career; hell, he'd even been sensitive. When she told him she'd taken the job and would live on-site, he hadn't roared, "Fuck that! Over my dead body!" Which was exactly what he'd felt like saying. Being reasonable was a pain in the ass.

What really pissed him off, though, was he didn't have any right to argue with her about it.

They were lovers, nothing more. He'd never said anything other than something along the lines of, "Let's see where this goes." He hadn't made any commitment, hadn't asked her for one, though he thought it was mutually understood neither of them would see anyone else. That lack of commitment gnawed at him now. He should have said something before, and he didn't know if speaking up now would do any good. She had agreed to terms and signed a contract, and, knowing Sarah, she wouldn't even try to amend the terms-not for just a live-in lover.

That chapped his ass, too. He didn't want to be "just" anything to her. He wanted to be her center.

She was a very easy person to live with, but he'd always been aware that she had an ironclad set of personal standards. That was part of what so attracted him to her. If she said she would do something, she'd either do it or try everything humanly possible to keep her word. If Sarah made a commitment, she kept it. When she married, her husband would never have to worry about Sarah sleeping around. She might kick his ass out and divorce him, but she wouldn't cheat on him-and only a fool would cheat on her.

The two weeks of intense, no-commitment sex had been great, but he'd been a fool to think it would hold her. She had never allowed herself to lose focus on her job with the Roberts family, or on interviewing for another job. He'd just assumed she wasn't in any hurry to find another job, that they'd have more time together.

To what end? The conclusion would have been the same. Whether she was here two weeks or two months, she'd still been looking for another job. He guessed he should be grateful she'd found one fast, because if she'd kept looking, she might have gone farther afield and ended up working in Atlanta or some place even farther away, which would really suck.

If he'd wanted to keep her here, he should have raised the bar-the commitment bar. But, God, the only thing that would have held her would have been a marriage proposal and just the thought of getting married again made him break out in a cold sweat. Maybe they could have a long engagement.

No, she'd see through that in a heartbeat. And that was assuming she'd say yes to a proposal, anyway. She had her big plan for traveling the world, and she was actively working to achieve that ambition. She really wanted to do it, and she'd structured her life to achieve that goal, keeping herself free and unencumbered. He didn't know how the plan would work within the structure of a marriage, if it could work, if she'd be willing to get married beforehand or if she'd insist on waiting until afterward.

She'd all but told him she loved him. Hell, he knew she loved him. But he hadn't done anything about it, hadn't solidified or formalized their relationship; he'd been happily coasting along, seeing "where this thing goes," and it had cost him. Big time.

Sarah wasn't a woman to take lightly, or for granted. He didn't think he'd committed either of those crimes, but neither had he shown how her how deeply important to him she'd become.

He could let things rock on as they were now; they'd have the weekends together, which was as much as a lot of couples had. He could talk to her on the phone, maybe even grab lunch together sometimes if their schedules meshed. And he'd have the weekends.

It wasn't enough. He wanted to be with her every night. He wanted to sit at the table and talk about their days while they ate. He wanted to share the morning newspaper with her, and fight over who got the front-page section first. He wanted those sparring sessions they'd had; she wasn't up to his weight, but she was fast enough to almost make up for the difference. And whether it had been karate, kick-boxing-or his favorite, naked wrestling- the session had always ended in grinding, explosive sex. He couldn't work out now without getting a hard-on. The basement gym was permeated with the scent of her, the smell of sex, the memories of what they'd done and how often they'd done it.

Hell, even his breakfast table carried memories.

He missed her.

He did a quick check of the time, then picked up the phone and dialed her number.

"Hi," he said when she answered.

"Hi, yourself." He could almost hear the smile in her voice.

"Did I wake you?" Sarah wasn't a night owl; she was often up early, so she was usually in bed by ten at the latest, and sometimes by nine. He'd been taking a chance by calling her.

"No. I'm in bed, but I've been reading."

"What are you wearing?"

She laughed. "Is this one of those heavy-breathing calls?"

"It could be."

"I'm wearing cotton pajamas. You've seen them."

"I have?" He couldn't remember her wearing anything at all to bed, not even one of his T-shirts.

"The first time we met. You may remember the occasion. I was sitting on the stairs, the electricity was off, two bad guys were lying on the floor."

"Oh, yeah, I vaguely remember that. I thought you were Judge Roberts's bed warmer."

"What?" She sounded outraged.

"Gorgeous young hottie living with an old guy; what else was a cop to think?"

"Umm, maybe that she was a butler just as she said?"

"Cops don't believe anything right off the bat. By the time I talked to you a few minutes, I knew the score."

"It's a good thing you didn't mention this to me at the time."

"I'm smart that way. I miss you, Sarah."

She paused. "I miss you, too. Can't be helped."

"Not right now, no. But there has to be some fine-tuning we can do to this situation, some way of working things out so we have more time together. We'll talk about it this weekend."

"I can't spend Saturday with you; the Lankfords are having a party, so I'll have to be here. I'll be off on Sunday and Monday instead."

He ground his teeth together. That robbed them of a day, because he had to work Monday. But at least he'd get to wake up with her. "Okay, I'll see you Sunday, then-unless you want to come over Saturday night after the party."

"It'll be late. Really late. Early Sunday morning, probably."

"I don't care. Wake me up."

"I'll do that," she said.

Chapter 20

THE DRIVEWAY WAS LINED WITH CARS, AND EVERY LIGHT IN the huge house seemed to be on. Guests milled through the rooms, on the patios, around the pool. Merilyn had a favorite caterer, so Sarah had arranged everything with the owner, a slim, sixtyish woman named Brenda Nelson who handled the behind-the-scenes madness with aplomb. Waiters circulated among the guests, carrying trays of drinks and hors d'oeuvres. A huge buffet table had been set up by the pool, and it groaned under the weight of food; two bars had been set up, one by the pool and one inside.

There were the inevitable spills and splashes. Sarah circulated unobtrusively, trying to spot the accidents as soon as they occurred so they could be wiped up. The real cleaning would have to wait until Monday morning, when she already had a cleaning service set to come in and do the heavy stuff, but liquids and food had to be wiped up immediately before someone slipped in the mess and fell.

Brenda made certain there were plates and glasses aplenty; but there were myriad other details for Sarah to check, such as ashtrays in abundance for the smokers, who didn't number that many and went outside anyway, despite Merilyn's cheery, "Oh, pooh, go ahead and smoke; it doesn't bother me." The ashtrays had to be emptied, cleaned, and put out for reuse. The supply of monogrammed paper hand towels in the bathrooms had to be watched, the guests' personal belongings monitored, a tryst between a drunken lady and her not-so-drunken would-be lover interrupted before it reached an embarrassing stage, lost car keys found-and when, inevitably, a woman tottered on her high heels and fell into the pool, Sarah made certain she had suffered no harm and was dried off, provided with makeup and hair dryer if she wished to repair things and rejoin the party, and found clothes to wear. Luckily the lady was good-natured, normal-sized, and having too much fun to leave.

Merilyn was everywhere, chatting and laughing. She was one of those hostesses who loved a party, and her pleasure was infectious. At one point she was standing with a group of men- flirting, actually-when she spied Sarah and beckoned her over. Sighing inside, because it looked as if she were going to be put on display, Sarah put on her bland, professional expression and approached.

"Sarah, I just found out both of these gentlemen also tried to hire you after the awful thing that happened to Judge Roberts," Merilyn said. "Carl Barnes, Trevor Densmore, this is Sarah Stevens, domestic organization specialist."

"How do you do?" she murmured with a modified bow. She didn't offer to shake hands; that was usually a woman's prerogative, but not a butler's. If someone offered to shake her hand, she would, but she waited on their preference.

Trevor Densmore was a tall, slim man with gray hair and a shy smile; he actually blushed when she gave him a slight smile. Carl Barnes, however, a blond man with harsh features and cold eyes, looked at her with hooded speculation, as if he was wondering if Sonny Lankford found his way out to the little bungalow at night. She recognized both names; Trevor Densmore was the man who had sent her two letters offering employment. Carl Barnes's offer had been so high she'd had to wonder exactly what duties he expected her to perform in addition to running the household. Probably he'd thought his offer was preemptive; instead it had made her suspicious.

"I'm pleased to meet you," Mr. Densmore said in a voice as soft and shy as his smile. He blushed again and looked down at his shoes.

"If I were you, Merilyn, I'd keep an eye on Sonny," Carl Barnes said in a voice that was just a little too loud. 'With a woman who looks like this around, a man might get some ideas."

Implying that she herself would go along with any such ideas, Sarah thought, hiding her temper. She shouldn't let herself respond, but when Merilyn looked startled and temporarily speechless, Sarah murmured, "A gentleman wouldn't." She could make some implications of her own.

Mr. Barnes flushed, and his cold eyes glared at her. Merilyn recovered enough to slap him on the arm. "Carl, if you're going to be nasty, go stand somewhere alone so you won't bother the other guests. I didn't introduce Sarah just so you could insult her, as well as both Sonny and me." She managed to make her tone just firm enough that he knew she was serious, without being nasty in return.

"I was just joking," he muttered, taking refuge in the classic passive-aggressive response.

"I'm sure you were." This time she patted his arm. "Come on, let's find Georgia; there's something I need to tell her." She towed him away with her, in search of his wife. Watching them go, Sarah had to hide a smile. He thought everything was just fine, glossed over; instead Merilyn was remanding him into his wife's custody.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Densmore said. "Carl can be crude when he's had too much to drink."

"No offense taken," Sarah said, lying without compunction. "It was so nice to meet you, Mr. Densmore. I remember your letters; your offer was very kind."

"Thank you." He smiled shyly. "I wasn't certain if I should . . . I mean, I didn't know how I should contact you. I hope you didn't mind. "

Mind a job offer? "I was flattered." She glanced around. "Excuse me, Mr. Densmore, but I have duties I have to attend to."

"I understand. It was nice meeting you, too, Miss Stevens."

She was glad to escape and return to more familiar territory. She made certain to stay away from Carl Barnes, however.

She was beautiful. He'd wondered how she would dress, if she would wear pants, perhaps a feminine version of a tuxedo, though the Lankford party wasn't formal. Her choice was understated and severely elegant: a long, narrow black skirt, slim but not confining, teamed with a tailored white shirt and a short, fitted black jacket. The outfit looked vaguely military, though without the brass buttons or braid. Her thick dark hair was pulled back in a very neat bun, and she wore small gold hoops in her ears. She wasn't wearing the pendant.

At first he'd been a bit insulted, until he realized it would be out of place for the function she was performing. What had the Lankford woman called her? Oh, yes-a domestic organization specialist. She wouldn't be wearing diamonds and rubies in that capacity. The pendant was for when they were alone.

Though perhaps he'd been a bit stingy with the pendant. When compared with the monstrous canary diamond ring Merilyn Lankford wore, the pendant was insignificant. He wasn't in the habit of buying jewelry, so he might have erred. How humiliating, to think that perhaps Sarah wasn't wearing the pendant, not because it was inappropriate, but because it was paltry!

No, she'd never think anything like that. She was too much a lady. Why, look how she had handled that crass boor, Carl Barnes. Not by a flicker of an eyelid had she betrayed any expression, giving only that murmured reply about "a gentleman"-which, obviously, Barnes wasn't. He'd been so proud of her.

He had watched her all evening. She was unobtrusive, discreet, and paid excruciating attention to detail. Any mishap, no matter how small, was dealt with immediately and with a minimum amount of fuss and embarrassment. Her dedication to her job was heartwarming in this age when clerks acted as if it was an imposition to help customers.

Could Merilyn Lankford even begin to appreciate the honor Sarah did her by being there? Of course not. Merilyn had no idea what a jewel she had, or how briefly she would have her.

The situation was even more intolerable than he had supposed. His Sarah shouldn't be exposed to crude remarks such as the one Carl Barnes had made. When she was at his house, she would be shielded from that. He would protect her from the world. Things were almost ready to his satisfaction; a few more preparations, and then it would be time to bring Sarah home.

The party broke up around one-thirty, which wasn't all that late. These people were businesspeople, pillars of the community, and most of them were regular churchgoers; they couldn't sleep very late the next morning and still attend services.

Merilyn still looked as fresh as she had when the party started, her green eyes sparkling. 'Well, that was a success!" she declared, looking around the wreck of her ballroom-size living room. Nothing was actually destroyed, but nothing seemed to be in the correct place, either. "No one threw up, no one set anything on fire, and no fights were started. That's pretty good, if I do say so myself!"

Sonny regarded his wife with fond, if weary, indulgence. He was a stocky man with graying dark hair and a collection of laugh lines. "You can say it on our way upstairs," he said, spreading his arms and pretending to herd her in the direction of the stairs. "I'm bushed. Let's go to bed."

"But there's still-"

"Nothing that Brenda and I can't handle," Sarah said, smiling. "I'll lock up and set the alarm when I leave."

Merilyn hated to go to bed when anyone else was still awake, afraid she might miss something, even if that something was cleaning and loading a multitude of plates and glassware. "But-"

"But, but, but," Sonny said, no longer pretending to herd her but actually doing it, crowding her with his body and gradually forcing her toward the stairs. "No matter what you think of, there's nothing that won't wait until morning."

She backed up, but she peeked around him like a child being torn away from the playground. When he succeeded in getting her started up the stairs, Sarah waved good night, then joined Brenda and her crew in the kitchen.

Things were well in hand, because Brenda had had someone washing dishes from the very beginning. As they were brought in soiled, they were washed. That way there was always a fresh supply if needed, and when the evening was over, there wasn't an avalanche of dirty dishware to be cleaned before it could be packed in the boxes and taken back to the shop. As a result, the last wave of dirty plates and glasses had already been washed, and the crew was busy packing up the chafing dishes and folding a small mountain of table linens.

With everything going well there, Sarah went on a tour of the house, righting a tipped-over potted plant here, picking up a dropped spoon there, gathering towels and-oops-someone's underwear. Either someone was very forgetful, or a tryst had occurred in the bathroom.

She threw away the underwear, emptied the trash cans, sprayed air freshener all through the rooms, and straightened cushions and chairs. Brenda came in to report they had everything loaded in the vans and were leaving. After seeing them off, Sarah did one more tour of the house, checking windows and doors. Finally, a little after three, she set the alarm, stepped out into the courtyard, locked the door behind her, and traipsed past the pool and down a short path to her little bungalow.

She was so tired she ached all over, but she was wide awake. She took a shower to freshen up; usually a warm shower relaxed her, but tonight she felt even more awake than she had before. She thought of sitting down to read, but Cahill had told her to come over no matter what time the party was over.

She was officially off-duty until Tuesday. She was freshly showered, wide awake, and a naked man whom she happened to be crazy about was just a short drive away.

"Decisions, decisions," she said to herself. Sure. Like there was any doubt. She picked up the phone. She had a key, but only a fool would walk in unannounced on a sleeping man who happened to keep a loaded pistol on the bedside table.

"Cahill."

She knew she'd woken him up, but his voice was clear and cool; since all the detectives were essentially on call twenty-four hours a day, he'd had his share of middle-of-the-night calls.

"The party's over. I'm on my way."

"I'll be waiting."

Humming, she quickly got the small bag she'd packed earlier, which contained a couple of changes of clothes and her makeup and toiletries, plus a book or two. Not that she had much time to read when she was with Cahill, but it might happen. She secured the bungalow, loaded her things in the TrailBlazer, and in twenty minutes was pulling into his driveway. The kitchen light was on.

She all but danced up the steps to the back door, which opened before she got there. Cahill stood outlined in the light, tall and broad-shouldered, and wearing only a pair of his sexy boxers, which he had put on solely because he knew he'd be opening the door.

"Hubba hubba," she said in a growly tone; then she dropped her purse and overnight bag and hurled herself into his arms. He caught her, lifting her so her legs could curl around his waist, and they sank into a long, deep, hungry kiss.

When they surfaced, he licked his lower lip in that way he had of tasting her. '~You didn't plan this right," he said, nibbling at her mouth.

"I didn't?" She pulled back a little, frowning at him. 'What did I do wrong?"

"For one thing, you're wearing jeans." He kissed her again as he kicked her bags inside and shut the door, then fumbled with the lock. "If you'd been thinking straight, you'd have on a skirt but no panties."

"Sounds breezy." She went back for another kiss.

Gripping her hips, he moved her against his rock-hard erection as he carried her down the hall to the bedroom. "But if you had," he whispered, "I'd already be inside you."

"You're right; I was incredibly stupid." She squirmed, rubbing herself up and down on him and making her own breath catch as the familiar hot rush began spreading through her.

"You can make it up to me." He dumped her on the bed and unfastened her jeans, then began stripping them down her legs.

"Really? Got any ideas?"

"Plenty."

"Are they legal in this state?"

"Nope."

"I'm shocked," she said. "Shocked. You're sworn to uphold the law."

"You can make a citizen's arrest afterward." He pulled her knit top off over her head and tossed it aside. Since she wasn't wearing a bra, she was naked. When it came to removing her clothes, he set world speed records.

"A citizen's arrest," she mused. "Does this mean I get to handcuff you?"

"You mean you like the kinky stuff, too?" He shoved down his boxers and stepped out of them, pulled her to the edge of the bed and put his hands behind her thighs, pushing them up and apart. She held her breath as he made the connection and began wedging the broad head of his penis into her, past the tightness of her opening. Then he was in, leaning over her as he pushed slow and deep, and she began breathing again. She arched her hips, taking him in to the hilt.

The hall light was still on, silhouetting him as he leaned over her, his wide shoulders blocking out the light. They fell silent, con centrating on the rhythm and sensations, the heat and moisture, the fullness she felt, the tightness he felt. He wet his thumb and gently rubbed it over her clitoris, bringing her body up to him in a tight arch. Sarah gasped, reaching for him, wanting the heaviness of his weight on her. He gave her what she wanted, coming down on top of her and crushing her into the mattress with the force of his thrusts, his hands under her hips grinding her even harder on him. She came, bowing under him, her heels digging into the backs of his thighs while her nails sank into his shoulders. It was always fast the first time, fast and hard, raw in its intensity. He climaxed right after she did, and as they lay together in the aftermath, she felt herself begin to drift to sleep, so deeply content it went all the way down to a molecular level. This was where she belonged, right here with him. The "here" didn't matter; it could be anywhere, so long as she was with Cahill.

Chapter 21

SARAH AWOKE AT TEN TO THE SMELL OF FRESH COFFEE. SHE rolled over, stretching and yawning. She hadn't been sleeping all that well since moving into the bungalow, but she always slept like a rock at Cahill's . . . for what time he let her sleep, that is.

She'd missed him, both mentally and physically. It wasn't just the sex, though there was no 'just" to sex with him; it was too raw and exciting. But more than that, she missed his physical presence beside her in bed, the heat and weight and comfort. As often as not she had slept with her head pillowed on his shoulder, or pressed against his back. If she wasn't touching him, then he was touching her, a subconscious signal even in sleep that they weren't alone.

He came into the bedroom wearing only jeans and carrying a cup of coffee. She sat up and pushed her hair out of her face. "If that's for me, I'll be your sex slave forever."

"It's yours, so I guess we need to talk terms of servitude." He handed her the cup, and she sipped, half-closing her eyes in delight at the first taste. The mattress dipped as he sat down beside her.

She took another sip. "For starters, I don't get time off for good behavior."

"Definitely not," he agreed, stroking her arm. "No parole, though I guess you could get . . . special privileges for sucking up to the warden."

"In more ways than one," she murmured, rubbing one finger over the bulge in his jeans. 'When do I start?"

The corners of his mouth were kicking up at her boldness. "I think you already have. And if you don't stop that and get your butt out of bed, your breakfast will get cold."

"You have breakfast ready? Great, I'm starving." Dropping the sex-kitten act, she balanced the coffee cup as she climbed out of the nest of covers and headed for the bathroom. "What am I having?"

"Cereal."

"You jerk! That's already cold! " she called after him. She could hear him laughing softly as he went toward the kitchen.

Her reflection in the bathroom mirror wasn't that of a woman who had worked most of the night and was still a few hours short of the recommended eight hours of sleep. Her hair was tousled, her eyelids a little swollen, but she looked rested . . . and glowing. Sex with Cahill could do that for a woman, she thought, smiling as she brushed her hair.

Cahill had brought in her overnight bag and purse. She washed her face, brushed her teeth and got dressed. Dressed much as he had been, barefoot and in jeans-though she did pull on a shirt-she and her coffee cup made their way to the kitchen.

Breakfast was cereal, but he had also sliced some fresh peaches and put a cup of her favorite vanilla yogurt beside the bowl. He'd prepared the same thing for himself, but doubled the amounts. "Yum," she said, sitting down. "But it's so late, you shouldn't have waited for me, you could have already eaten. You must be even hungrier than I am."

"I had a bagel about eight o'clock."

"What time did you get up?"

"Almost seven. I went for a run, ate the bagel, read the paper, twiddled my thumbs."

"Poor baby." She picked up her spoon and dug in. "What else did you do?"

"You still weren't awake, so I had sex with your unconscious body-"

"Did not."

"Did, too."

"Okay, so you dozed off and were dreaming. What time did you wake up?"

"Nine-thirty." He forked a slice of juicy peach into his mouth. "I was tired. My sleep got interrupted last night."

"How are you feeling now?"

"Rarin' to go."

"Good, because I feel great." She stopped eating to stretch, raising her arms high over her head. Cahill's gaze followed the movement of her breasts. "After breakfast settles, I think I'll go for a run, too. Are you up for another one?"

"I'm up for several things. I think I can fit in another run."

She eyed him appreciatively as they finished breakfast. He'd told her he'd started working out a lot when he and his wife split up; physical exercise was a great stress-reliever. He'd been in good shape before, but not like he was now. His abs and pecs were like rocks. He was a big man, but he hadn't bulked up all that much, just hardened and defined. Touching him was a tactile marvel- smooth, warm skin covering muscles so hard there was almost no give to his flesh.

He got up to carry his empty dishes to the sink. Sarah propped her chin on her hand to watch him, her eyes half closed and a tiny smile on her face. "Your ex-wife has to be the biggest idiot walking the earth."

He gave her a startled look, then shrugged. "Make that a twotiming, vindictive idiot. What made you think of her?"

"You. You're neat, domesticated, intelligent-"

"Keep going," he said.

"-good-looking, sense of humor, sexy-"

"And yours."

She stopped, her stomach suddenly flip-flopping. "Are you?" she whispered.

He put the milk in the refrigerator and gave her a wry smile. "Oh, yeah."

She took a deep breath. "Wow."

"That's kind of the way it takes me, too." He refilled their coffee cups and sat down. "So that's what we need to talk about. I want more than what we have now. If you do, too, then we need to figure out how to work this."

She nodded.

"Sarah. Let me hear you say it."

"I want more," she managed. She couldn't believe this was happening, so fast, and at the breakfast table on a sunny Sunday morning.

"Okay. Your job-for now-requires you to live on-site. My hours right now are longer than usual. If weekends are all we can manage, then we'll deal with that, but . . . how long are you on duty at night?"

"Until they're ready to go to bed or tell me they won't need me for anything else that night. So far, they usually tell me to call it a day right after dinner. I think they like to have their evenings alone, unless they're entertaining."

"Are you allowed to have visitors? God, this sounds like Victorian England."

She laughed. "Of course I can have visitors during my own time. I wouldn't feel comfortable with you sleeping over-"

He waved that away. "Sex is secondary. Well, almost secondary. The point is we need to see more of each other than we have since you started work there. It's been driving me crazy, not seeing you. Let's just handle this right now, and later on we'll handle your world tour. Somehow. I won't ask you to give it up, because you really want to do it. I'll just whine a lot."

She did really want to have her year of travel, but she really wanted Cahill, too. "I'm a reasonable woman," she said. "I know how to compromise." She had always remained heart-whole and free because she'd never before met anyone who was important enough to her to get in the way of her plans. Cahill was that important. She would travel some, but a whole year away from him? No way. She wasn't willing to do that.

He cleared his throat. 'We-uh . . . we'll probably get married."

"Ya think?" she asked, then started laughing. She couldn't help it. If the man got any more unromantic, the people in charge of Valentine's Day would put a bounty on him.

He grabbed her and hauled her into his lap. "Is that a yes or a no?"

"You haven't asked a question. You stated a probability."

'Well, then, do you agree with the probability?"

She might never hear the question, she thought, amused. She'd have to work on him. She intended to be married only once in her life, so she wanted to hear that question. "I agree with the probability." She gave him a serene smile and kissed him on the cheek. 'When you're thinking in more black-and-white terms, we'll talk about it again."

He groaned and dropped his head onto her shoulder. "You're going to put me through the wringer, aren't you?"

"Of course, sweetheart. That's what women are for."

He didn't know where Sarah was. When he'd checked early Sunday morning, her SW was gone, and she hadn't been back to the Lankfords' house since. At the party, casual questions had elicited the information from Merilyn that Sarah's weekends were normally free, but when they entertained on the weekend, she would take a different day off. In this case, when the party ended, she wouldn't be back on duty until Tuesday morning.

Thinking she might go somewhere, he'd gotten up early and driven by the monstrosity; having already checked, he knew her usual parking spot was visible from the street-just the rear quarter panel, but enough to tell the vehicle was hers. But she must have gotten a very early start, because when he drove by right after dawn, she had already left.

Did she have family in the area? He kicked himself for not asking. Of course, her family didn't have to be in the area; she could have flown to visit them, and taken the first flight of the morning.

For a brief moment he entertained the unpleasant idea that she might have a boyfriend-juvenile term-but, no, Sarah had too much class to spend the weekend with some local yokel. The times he'd followed her before, she had shopped and run errands, but never had she met a man anywhere. The problem was, there had been long stretches when he hadn't been able to find her, so he didn't know whom she might know in the area. She was likely visiting family or friends, but he would have liked to have known exactly where; he hated not knowing.

After he took care of Roberts, for instance, he hadn't stayed to watch the excitement because he knew criminals often couldn't resist watching the show and police these days routinely filmed the spectators. When he had driven by the next morning, after the hullabaloo had died down, the driveway had been barricaded and the house sealed off with yellow tape. He had no idea where she had gone. A friend's house, a hotel? The Wynfrey was the most likely hotel, so he'd gone straight there but hadn't seen her SW. It had been raining, anyway, and he disliked driving in the rain, so he'd gone home.

After the funeral, she had gone back to the house. She had then stayed there almost all day, every day, so he had relaxed and stopped driving by so often. According to the grapevine, she was getting the house ready to close, packing everything up for the family. Then one night he happened to check, and she wasn't there; there were no lights on at the house. Where had she gone?

The problem was, there was no place in the neighborhood where he could park and watch for her. If an unfamiliar car stopped, it was immediately noticed. Nor could he continually drive by; he had business to attend to, meetings, phone calls. He had to do all the monitoring himself to avoid the risk of bringing in a stranger who might talk, so he eventually had to accept that he simply wouldn't be able to keep track of her all the time. He didn't like it, but he was a reasonable, patient man; he could wait.

The most important thing was that he knew she wasn't supposed to be back until Tuesday morning.

The other time had worked like a charm, so Sunday night he followed the same routine. He drove to the Galleria in the dark blue Ford he had bought only a little over a month before; after all, the Jaguar was so noticeable. The Ford was so ordinary as to be almost invisible. It didn't compare to the Jaguar, of course, but it was perfect for its purpose. But when he called there was no answer. Frustrated, he tried several more times before giving up in disgust.

The next night, though, he knew the Lankfords were at home, because he'd checked, and there weren't any extra cars in the driveway, either. They were alone. He made the call, and of course Sonny was glad to see him. Sonny was always willing to talk business, and when one owned a bank . . . well, people liked to see him. Sonny was too stupid to see anything unusual in his coming to him, rather than the other way around. The fool was probably flattered.

The silenced pistol was tucked in his waistband at the small of his back, covered by his jacket, when Sonny let him into the house. The man hadn't even bothered to put on a jacket, he saw with contempt. He was dressed in slacks and pullover knit shirt, and he was wearing house slippers, for God's sake. Totally classless.

'Where's Merilyn?" he asked easily. People talked to him, told him things. They trusted him. Why shouldn't they?

"Upstairs. She'll be down in a minute. You said you wanted to talk to both of us?"

"Yes. Thank you for seeing me tonight. I won't take up much of your time." Sonny still didn't see the ludicrousness of that statement.

"Nonsense, it's a pleasure. Would you like something to drink? We have hard, soft, and everything in between." Sonny led the way into the den; thank God he hadn't taken him into that horrible room with the gargantuan television. There was a television in the den, of course, but it was normal-sized.

"A glass of wine would be nice." He had no intention of drinking it, but the pretense of accepting his hospitality would keep Sonny relaxed.

They made small talk, and still Merilyn didn't appear. He began to get a little concerned. He didn't want to spend a lot of time here; the longer he waited, the more likely it was someone would notice the car, as bland as it was, or the phone would ring and Sonny-or Merilyn-would say, sorry, we can't talk, our banker is visiting. Wouldn't that be just lovely.

He glanced at his watch, and Sonny said, "I don't know what's keeping Merilyn. I'll go check-"

"No, don't bother," he said, getting to his feet. In a smooth motion he reached behind his back, took out the pistol, and pointed it at Sonny's head. He was so close that Sonny could have reached out and swatted it away-if he'd had time, but he was slow to react. Pity.

Calmly he pulled the trigger.

The bullet entered Sonny's head just above his left eyebrow, angling back and to the right, taking out both hemispheres of his brain. He was always amazed at how small and neat the entry wound was; when the bullet exited, however, it had flattened, and it took a huge chunk of skull and brain with it. Amazing.

The sound of the shot was just a little cough; it wouldn't even have been heard in the next room.

He turned to go in search of Merilyn, and froze. She stood just outside the doorway, her face drained of color, her eyes wide and horrified. He lifted the pistol once more, and she ran.

He didn't have time to get off another shot. Grimly he ran after her; he couldn't afford to let her escape, even briefly. She might run screaming from the house, which would attract attention. But, no, the dear ran into another room and slammed the door; he heard the lock click.

He shook his head and put a bullet in the lock; the door swung uselessly open. Merilyn whirled, the phone in her hand. He shook his head again. "Bad girl," he said softly, and pulled the trigger.

She slumped to the carpet, eyes popped out from the force of the bullet that had entered right between them. He stepped over to her and removed the cordless phone from her hand. He listened, but there was no one on the line; either she hadn't had time to dial 911 or she'd been too flustered to think. He calmly wiped the phone with his handkerchief and replaced it on the charger.

Merilyn's hand lay outstretched, as if she were reaching for him. The canary diamond glittered at him, and he had an idea-a brilliant one, if he did say so himself. If he took the ring, it would look as if a burglary had occurred. The ring had to be worth a small fortune; he had investigated the cost of jewelry more closely today and discovered that a good stone was hideously expensive. This ring, for instance, had probably set Sonny back close to a quarter of a million dollars. Really.

He was embarrassed that he'd given Sarah such a small token in comparison. This was a particularly fine stone, and the color would look wonderful on her, with her warm skin tones. Not in this setting, of course; she wouldn't like such gaudiness. But after a certain amount of time had passed, when the police weren't actively looking for a large yellow diamond ring, he could remove the stone from the setting and take it to a jeweler in, say, Atlanta, and have a wonderful piece fashioned for her, with the canary diamond as the center stone. Yes, he could just see it now.

He leaned down and tugged the ring from Merilyn's finger. It was a tight fit; the dear must have gained a little weight. He'd saved her from having to have the ring resized.

Pleased with himself, he carefully retraced his steps through the house and wiped everything he might have touched. After he let himself out the front door, he wiped the door handle and the doorbell button. As he drove away, he smiled.

That had gone very nicely.

Chapter 22

ON MONDAY MORNING AFTER CAHILL WENT TO WORK, SARAH worked out, booked herself a manicure and pedicure for that afternoon, then spent a few blissful hours doing absolutely nothing. After visiting the salon to get her nails done, she bought groceries and cooked a spaghetti supper. Cahill had just eaten his third slice of butter-dripping garlic bread when his phone rang. He squinted at the number in the little window, and sighed.

"Yeah. Cahill." He listened for a minute, then said, "I'm on my way."

He sighed as he got up. He was still wearing his holster, so all he had to do was knot his tie and slip on his jacket. "I gotta go," he said unnecessarily.

"I know." She got up and kissed him. "Is it something that you can finish fast, or will it take a while?"

He sighed again. "I'll probably be a few hours, maybe longer."

"Okay. I'll be here when you get back."

He looked down at her, blue eyes heavy-lidded and sensual. "I like hearing that," he said, bending down to give her a long, slow kiss that made her heart begin pounding. Damn, the man knew how to kiss.

After he left, she cleaned up the kitchen, then watched television for a while. An ad for a fast-food joint showed a picture-perfect banana split, and her saliva buds started working overtime. She didn't need a banana split; it was something like six weeks worth of calories. She'd have to run a hundred miles to work it off.

She told herself all that. Usually she was very good about resisting cravings, because usually she didn't have cravings. She ate a healthy, well-balanced diet, and didn't think about food all that much. It was almost time for her period, though-and when it was that time of the month, she craved ice cream.

She resisted the craving for over an hour, then surrendered.

She got up and looked in the freezer section of the refrigerator. Aha! There was a half-gallon carton of Breyers Natural Vanilla with flecks of real vanilla bean. She reached in to get it, and her heart sank. The carton was way too light. She pried off the top and groaned; there was barely a tablespoon of ice cream left. Why on earth hadn't he eaten that last tablespoon and thrown the carton away? Or better yet, remembered to buy more?

Growling to herself, she got her purse and drove back to the supermarket. If she had known she was going to start craving ice cream, she could have bought it while she was there earlier.

She decided that if she was going to indulge, she might as well do it right and make the mother of all banana splits. Then the craving would be gone, and she could return to eating nice, sensible, healthy foods. Besides, when you added the bananas, that made the ice cream more healthy, right?

She did it right. She picked out the best-looking bananas she could find. She bought maraschino cherries. She bought pineapple sauce. Chocolate syrup. Chopped pecans in caramel sauce, and, while she was at it, caramel sauce. She bought vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate ice cream, because a real banana split had all three flavors. What else? Oh, yeah, whipped cream. And vanilla wafers to hold it all together.

Man, she could hardly wait.

To her surprise, Cahill was home when she got back. She carried in her haul. 'What are you doing back so soon? I thought you wouldn't be back until ten or later."

He shrugged. "Things just went faster than I thought. Where have you been?"

"The grocery store. I would have left a note, but I didn't think you'd be here to read it, so there didn't seem much point."

He leaned against the cabinet and watched as she unloaded the bags. 'What's going on? Are we having an ice cream party?"

"Banana split. I saw one on television and my mouth started watering. You didn't even have any ice cream," she said accusingly.

"I did, too."

"One spoonful that's almost dehydrated does not count as having ice cream."

He eyed the three cartons. 'Well, I certainly have ice cream now."

"You certainly do."

He waited a minute. "May I have some, too?"

"You want in on this banana split lovefest?"

"You betcha. If it's a lovefest, I'm interested. I bet I can think of more things to do with this chocolate syrup than you can."

"You can keep your hands off my chocolate syrup. I have plans for it."

"All of it?"

She winked at him. "Maybe not."

She got two shallow bowls from the cabinet, lined up all her ingredients, and set to work peeling and slicing the bananas lengthwise. She put the slices in the bowls, and shored them up with vanilla wafers. Next came the ice cream.

"Just vanilla in mine," Cahill said, watching in fascination. "I don't get fancy with my ice cream."

"You're missing out on a great culinary experience."

"I'll taste you afterward."

Three scoops of vanilla for him, one each of the vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate for her. "Pineapple and pecans?" she asked, holding out the little jars, and he nodded. She added liberal helpings to both bowls. Next came the caramel sauce, then the chocolate syrup. She topped the growing mound with generous globs of whipped cream, and crowned it all with maraschino cherries. She put two cherries on hers, just because she liked them.

"Holy shit," Cahill said when he took the bowl. "This weighs at least two pounds."

"Enjoy," she said, taking hers to the table and digging in.

"My God," he groaned half an hour later. Y can't believe you ate all of that."

"You ate all of yours," she replied, looking pointedly at his empty bowl.

"I'm bigger than you. And I'm stuffed."

"So am I," she admitted. "But it was good, and that took care of my craving." She carried the bowls to the sink and rinsed them out, then put them in the dishwasher. She was so full she thought she might burst, and she didn't want to see ice cream again for another millennium . . . or at least another month.

"Now," he said. "About that chocolate syrup . . ."

"Don't even think it."

He did think it, of course, and say it as well. What's more, after a couple of hours, they ended up trying it. Chocolate syrup on her, chocolate syrup on him . . . It was a shame she'd wasted so much on the banana splits. It boggled her mind, what they could have done with a full bottle.

She was still smiling early the next morning when she drove back to the Lankford house. It was not quite six o'clock, but she wanted to be there bright and early and get started on the day. She stopped at the gate and retrieved the morning newspaper from the box, then keyed in the code, and the gates swung smoothly open. She drove in and parked as usual beside the little bungalow. After carrying in her things, she hurriedly changed clothes and walked across the courtyard to the main house, letting herself in with her key.

She turned to punch in the code on the security panel and stopped when she realized it wasn't beeping the little warning that a door had been opened while the alarm was set. Frowning, she examined the lights. No wonder it hadn't beeped; the alarm wasn't set. Merilyn must have forgotten it. She and Sonny both were a bit lax about the house's security system, since the property was walled and gated. They figured if the outside property was secure, so was the house.

She went into the kitchen and started the coffee, then carried the newspaper through the tangle of halls and rooms to Sonny's den, where he liked to read it while he caught the morning news. He didn't like to hurry, so he was usually awake and downstairs by six-thirty, giving him plenty of time for the newspaper and breakfast before he left for the office at eight-forty.

The low-level lights were on in the hallway, as were the lamps. Come to think of it, the light over the front door had also been on. Sarah frowned, suddenly uneasy. Something was wrong; maybe one of them had gotten sick during the night, because she thought she smelled-

The smell.

Panic hit her like a tidal wave, sending her reeling back toward the kitchen. That smell! It couldn't mean what she thought; it was just that she associated the scent with something terrible. Anything similar brought back the nightmare. Either Sonny or Merilyn had a digestive virus, that was all. They had her cell phone number, they should have called, and she'd have come back immediately to handle things.

She swallowed the bile in her throat. "Mr. Lankford?" she called. "Hello?"

There wasn't an answer. The house was silent around her, except for the almost inaudible hum of electricity that said the house was wired and everything was working.

"Hello," she called again.

She didn't have her pistol; it still hadn't been returned to her. Since she wasn't performing any bodyguard function for the Lankfords, she hadn't worried about it. The police department would eventually return it to her. Now, with every tiny hair on her body lifting in alarm, she wished she had it.

She should retreat, maybe call Cahill and get him to come check out the house. But the house felt . . . empty, just as the Judge's house had felt-as if there was no life inside it.

She eased down the hallway, then halted, gagging a little.

The smell. That damn smell.

I can't do this again. The thought burned through her mind. This couldn't be happening. Not again. She was imagining things. Maybe not the smell, but she was letting it panic her. She should find out what was wrong, who was sick. She should be calm, and take charge. That was part of her job, handling whatever crisis arose here.

She took two more steps. The door to the den was maybe three more steps away. She forced herself to take those steps, practically throwing herself forward like someone who had finally worked up enough nerve to leap off a tower bungee-jumping. The odor had an almost oily quality to it, sticking to her throat, coating her tongue. She gagged again, and covered her nose and mouth with her hand as she looked inside the den.

He was sprawled on the floor in a half-sitting position, his head and shoulders supported by the heavy coffee table. His head was bent at an unnatural angle, as if he hadn't had room to lie flat. The wound was . . .

She didn't look for Merilyn. As she had done once before, she backed away, slowly, shaking, little mewling sounds coming from her throat. She was vaguely shocked at herself for making such sounds. They sounded so weak, and she was strong. She had always been strong.

She didn't feel strong now. She wanted to run screaming from this house, find someplace safe and dark and cower inside it, until this horror was gone.

She wanted . . . she wanted Cahill. Yes. When he was here, she wouldn't feel so helpless, so shaken. She had to call Cahill.

She kept backing down the hall, and as she had once before, she found herself standing in the kitchen. She was shaking violently now, and she knew she was on the verge of hysteria.

No. She wouldn't give in to it. Couldn't. There were things to be done, that all-important call to make.

Not Cahill. Not first. The first call had to be 911. She had to do things right. Maybe Merilyn was still alive, maybe the medics could get here in time to save her, if she made the 911 call first.

Her hand was shaking so hard she couldn't hit the right numbers on the keypad. She disconnected and tried again, with the same result. Weeping, cursing, she banged the phone against the counter. 'Work, damn it! Work!"

The phone came apart in her hand, plastic sections flying. She threw what was left of it against the wall. She needed another phone. She needed . . . another . . . damn . . . phone!

She tried to think. Phones were all over this house, but where exactly? She hadn't worked here long enough for the knowledge to be automatic, not now when she could barely form a single coherent thought.

And she couldn't hunt for one. She might find Merilyn instead.

She couldn't think about it, couldn't think of that energetic, cheerful, good-hearted woman lying in a pool of blood somewhere. Concentrate. Find a phone.

The bungalow. She knew where the phone was in there.

She tried to run, but her legs wobbled beneath her and she staggered, falling to one knee on the courtyard pavers. She didn't notice any pain, but bounded up and staggered the rest of the way to the bungalow door.

There was a phone just inside, in the living room. She grabbed it and started to jab at the buttons, but stopped herself and managed to drag in a few deep, shaky breaths. It was hard won, but she found a small measure of calm. She had to get herself under control; she was no good to anyone if she let herself fall apart.

Her hands were still trembling, but she managed to push 911, and she waited.

Cahill couldn't believe it. He fucking couldn't believe it. At first he thought he'd heard wrong, that the report was a hoax, or that the address was wrong. Something. For one murder to occur in Mountain Brook was unusual enough, but a double murder only a matter of weeks after the first one? And discovered by the same woman who had called in the first one? Un-fucking-believable.

He had an icy feeling in the pit of his stomach, a cold hard knot of dread that had nothing to do with Sarah's safety-she'd called the murder in, so she was okay-and everything to do with being a cop. He was a damn good cop, combining experience, intuition, and a talent for analyzing cold hard facts without letting his emotions cloud the issue. Intuition was telling him now that this stretched coincidence way the hell too far.

When he got to the house, the scene made the one at Judge Roberts's house look organized. Squad cars, unmarked cars, vans, medics, and a fire engine clogged the driveway and street, but at least they belonged. The curious, the sightseers, the media vans, the print reporters, all formed a crowd that had brought traffic to a grinding halt. Hell, there was even a helicopter overhead.

He clipped his badge to his belt where it could be seen and waded through the clog of onlookers, ducking under the crime scene tape and asking the first uniform he came to, "Have you seen the lieutenant?"

"He's inside."

"Thanks."

Sarah was somewhere inside, or in that little house behind the pool. He didn't search for her, though; he had to see the lieutenant first.

The house was a warren; a big warren, but a warren nevertheless, as if the architect had been both schizophrenic and dyslexic. He finally found the lieutenant standing in a hallway peering inside a room, but not stepping inside and carefully not touching anything. The room would be the crime scene, then, or one of them.

"I need to talk to you," he said to the lieutenant, motioning his head to the side.

"This is a fucking mess," the lieutenant muttered under his breath, still staring inside the room. He looked tired, though the day had just begun. "Yeah, what is it?"

"You may want to keep me clear of this case. Conflict of interest. I'm involved with Sarah Stevens."

"The butler?" Lieutenant Wester said sharply. "Involved, how? You've been out a couple of times?"

'We're practically living together." That was an exaggeration, but not by much.

"I thought she lives in that little house out back."

"That's her quarters when she's on duty. When she isn't, she's at my house."

"Shit." The lieutenant rubbed his hand over his head. He didn't have much hair and what he did have he kept very short, so he wasn't disturbing anything. "How long has this been going on?"

"Since she was dropped from the suspect list in the Roberts murder."

"Shit. I gotta tell you, Doc, I have a bad feeling about this. Maybe we cleared her too soon in the other case. What are the fucking odds, huh?" he asked in a furious whisper. "We don't have a murder here in years; then she comes to town and whoever she goes to work for gets popped in the head, clean shot, professional. The first guy left her a hundred grand in his will. A big diamond worth a quarter of a million is missing now, and, get this: She's the one who noticed, when she ID'd the woman's body. Coincidence, my ass. Coincidences like this don't happen. My gut says it isn't looking good for your girlfriend."

"Yeah," Cahill said bleakly. "I know."

Chapter 23

LIEUTENANT WESTER WAS IN A QUANDARY. HE NEEDED EVERY detective he had, but he didn't want to jeopardize the case by muddying the waters with a conflict of interest. The conflict came only if Cahill allowed emotion to get in the way of his job. He figured Cahill could do the job; Cahill knew he could. It would hurt, but he could do it. It was best, though, if he was assigned to something else.

Cahill knew it was best, but it still pissed him off. Not that the lieutenant made the decision, but that there was a decision to be made at all. Cahill figured he should have been smarter than this; he'd missed something, somewhere. If Sarah had done all the killings-or had them done, he couldn't forget that possibility- then he'd screwed up by not following his initial thought, and two more people were dead.

And if Sarah was innocent-a possibility that was looking more remote by the minute-then there was something colossally wrong. That thing with the pendant: had she picked up a stalker, or had she sent it to herself as a means of deflecting suspicion, if necessary?

Maybe he wasn't on the case, but his brain was working anyway, sifting through all the possible scenarios.

He asked permission to see her. Part of him wanted to make certain she was all right, but the cop part of him wanted to see how she looked, how she acted. Body language and physical responses said a lot.

Sarah was in the bungalow, sitting on the sofa in the cozy living room while a medic put a dressing on her right knee and a patrol officer watched from the doorway. Her pants leg was torn, and Cahill could see the bloodstains, like rust, on her leg. Her face was paper white.

'What happened?" he asked, standing back and watching.

"She fell in the courtyard and hurt her knee," the medic said matter-of-factly, taping a bandage over the bluish, oozing wound. "It'll be sore tomorrow," he told Sarah.

She nodded absently.

'When did you fall?" Cahill asked her. "And how?"

"I didn't fall." Sarah's voice was so wispy it was almost transparent, and without inflection. She didn't look at him. "I wobbled and went down on one knee."

'When?" he repeated.

She made a vague gesture. 'When I was hunting for a telephone."

'Why were you hunting for a telephone?" From what he'd seen, there were telephones all through the house, including a shattered one in the kitchen.

"To call. About-" She made another vague gesture, this time toward the house.

"There are telephones in the house. Why did you come out here?"

"I didn't know where she was. I didn't . . . want to see her." She paused, and for the first time made eye contact. "But I saw her anyway. They asked me to identify her. I saw her anyway."

The symptoms of mental shock were very good, very convincing. Hell, maybe they were real. Her body language was consistent with shock, too, sitting motionless unless something was required of her, and then her movements were slow, sluggish. She was very pale. Makeup? Her pupils were dilated, too, but eyedrops could produce that effect.

He hated what he was thinking, but he couldn't let himself be blinded. He might not he on the case, but that didn't mean his analysis couldn't be used.

Another thought occurred: Had she developed a relationship with him as a means of deflecting suspicion, maybe, or keeping tabs on any progress with the Roberts killing? If so, she must have been congratulating herself on her success, because the Roberts case was going exactly nowhere.

He wanted to keep questioning her, but it would be better if he backed off now, let the detectives assigned to the case ask the questions. Besides, there was something he needed to check.

He nodded to the patrolman and stepped out of the bungalow, taking a deep breath of the fresh warm air. He sought out Lieutenant Wester again. "Do we have a rough time of death?"

"The ME hasn't made a determination yet, but I saw the bodies myself and rigor is pretty far advanced. I'd say"-he rocked his hand-"twelve hours. In that neighborhood."

Fuck. That fell in the time span when he'd been out on call and she had made that sudden trip to the supermarket, even though she had bought groceries earlier in the day. The trip was nicely explained by a sudden, convenient craving for a banana split. Was she cold-blooded enough that she had come back here, killed two people, then stopped off for ice cream on the way back to his house? Or had she bought the ice cream as an excuse for being out? An alibi, so she could show him the receipt and say, "See? I was here. I couldn't have been there."

This was practically a mirror situation of the Roberts murder. She had no eyewitness alibi to definitely say she was somewhere else at the time of the killing, but she had the receipt from where she'd been shopping.

On the other hand, she couldn't have known he'd be called out last night. She couldn't have planned anything ahead of time. Had she just been waiting, knowing he would eventually be called out at night, and when he did, she'd make her move? She wouldn't have been in any hurry; she could afford to wait for the right moment. After all, she was collecting that hefty salary, and if she had her eye on the missing yellow diamond ring, it wasn't going anywhere.

She hadn't kept the receipt from the supermarket. He clearly remembered her putting the plastic bags and the receipt in the trash. If she was that sharp, that organized a killer, throwing away the receipt was a sloppy thing to do. Or a smart one. She could then say, "If I thought I'd need an alibi, why would I have thrown away the receipt?"

God, this was driving him crazy. No matter what angle he came up with, a tiny shift put an entirely different light on the most significant, or insignificant, actions.

He went home and went through his kitchen trash can. The plastic bags were right there, practically on top, with only the fruit peelings and empty yogurt container from breakfast on top of them. He pulled out the bags-there were two of them- straightened them out, and looked inside. There was the receipt, crumpled but nice and dry, without any smears.

He looked at the time on it. Eight-fifty-seven. That was about the time he'd gotten home. Where had she been for the rest of the time he'd been gone?

The interview room was small, utilitarian, nonthreatening, with a camera attached to the ceiling recording the interview.

The detective, Rusty Ahern, was a good interviewer. He was about five-nine, with sandy hair and freckles and an open expression that invited confessions. Very nonthreatening, very sympathetic. No matter how neutral Cahill made his expression and his voice, he could never be as nonthreatening as Rusty. He was too big, and as Rusty himself had pointed out, "Your eyes always look like a shark's." Rusty was particularly good with women; they trusted that Howdy Doody expression.

Cahill, along with the lieutenant and two other detectives, watched the interview on a monitor as it was recording. Sarah sat practically motionless, for the most part staring at nothing, as if she had shut down emotionally. Cahill remembered she'd acted the same after the first killing. A protective response, maybe? A way of distancing herself? Or a very good act?

"Where were you last night?" Rusty asked gently.

"Cahill's house."

"Detective Cahill?"

"Yes."

'Why were you there?"

"I spent the weekend with him."

"The entire weekend?"

"Not Saturday. There was a party Saturday night. I worked."

"What time did you get to Detective Cahill's house? After the party on Saturday."

"Four o'clock?" she said, making it a question. "I don't remember exactly. Early. Before dawn."

"Why did you go so early in the morning?"

"So we could be together."

Rusty didn't ask any questions about their relationship, thank God. He moved right on with establishing a time line. 'Were you together all day Sunday?"

"Yes."

"And you spent Sunday night with Detective Cahill?"

"Yes."

"What about yesterday? Monday. When Detective Cahill went to work, what did you do?"

"Damn, Rusty must think he's a lawyer," Detective Nolan muttered. "Listen to those questions."

The questions were unusually detailed, step-by-step. Usually an interview was less structured, inviting the suspect to just talk. But Sarah wasn't chattering; she was answering only the questions asked, and most of those as briefly as possible. Since she wasn't volunteering information, Rusty was dragging it out of her.

"I worked out. Bought groceries."

"Is that all?"

"I had a manicure."

"Where did you work out?"

"The basement."

"The basement, where?"

"Cahill's house."

On and on, establishing when and where she got the manicure, where she bought groceries, what time she was there. What did she do then? Cooked supper. Spaghetti. Had it ready when Cahill got home. Then he got a call and had to leave. He said he'd be gone for several hours.

Rusty looked down at his notes. He had the exact time of the call to Cahill, as well as what time he'd arrived back home. He had the checkout time of the receipt for the ice cream. If she tried to screw with the timing, he'd know. 'What did you do then?"

"I cleaned up the kitchen, and watched television."

"Is that all you did?"

"I went for ice cream." 'What time was this?"

"I don't know. After eight." 'Where did you go?"

She told him the name of the supermarket. 'What time did you leave the supermarket?"

"I don't know."

"Can you estimate how long you were there?" She lifted one shoulder. "Fifteen minutes."

'Where did you go when you left the supermarket?" "Back to Cahill's house."

'Was he there?"

"Yes. He got back sooner than he'd expected." 'What time was this?"

"I don't know. I didn't look at the time."

"Did you stop anywhere else between the supermarket and Detective Cahill's house?"

"No."

"You said you bought groceries earlier in the day. Why didn't you buy the ice cream then?"

"I wasn't craving it then."

"You had a sudden craving for ice cream?"

"Yes."

"Do you crave ice cream very often?"

"Once a month."

Rusty looked a little puzzled. 'Why just once a month?"

"Right before my menstrual period. I want ice cream then."

'Whoa," Nolan said in Cahill's ear. "TMI." Too much information. He didn't want to hear about menstrual cycles.

Rusty looked a little nonplussed, too, as if he didn't know where to go with that information. Cahill kept his expression impassive as he watched. This was tough enough as it was, having his private life brought into an investigation. What was she thinking? What was going on behind those dark eyes?

Hell, what did he know? When it came to women, he was evidently both blind and stupid; he was a detective, and it had still taken him over a year to realize Shannon was cheating on him. But it was one thing to be duped by a cheating wife, and another to so totally miss the boat with a killer. He'd had sex with this woman. Slept beside her. Laughed with her. He'd have bet his life that she was one of the straightest arrows he'd ever met, and he was having a tough time reconciling what he knew of her as a woman with the circumstances that said she might be a stone-cold killer.

That was the bitch. Everything was circumstantial. The coincidences stretched beyond credulity, yet they didn't have a shred of physical evidence to tie her to the murders.

"My wife craves chocolate," Lieutenant Wester said. "I always know when she's going to start her period, because she's shoving Hershey's Kisses in her mouth like a squirrel stocking up for the winter."

"God, can't we talk about something else?" Nolan groaned.

Rusty had her up to the time she arrived at the Lankford house. 'What did you do then?"

"I went to the main house to start the coffee."

"Did you notice anything unusual?"

"The alarm wasn't set. It didn't beep when I unlocked the kitchen door and went in."

'Was that unusual?"

'When I'm there, I always set the alarm. Mrs. Lankford sometimes forgets, though."

"So it wasn't unusual."

"Not really."

'What did you do then?"

"I started the coffeemaker, then took the newspaper . . . I was taking the newspaper to the den. Mr. Lankford liked to read it there, while he watched the news. The lights were on," she said, and her voice trailed away to nothing.

"The lights?"

"The hallway lights. They were on. And the lamps. They shouldn't have been on that early."

'Why not?"

"I'm the only one up that early, and I had just gotten there."

'What did you think?"

"I thought . . . I thought someone must be sick."

'Why did you think that?"

"The smell. I noticed the smell." She gripped her arms tightly, holding herself, and she began to rock a little, back and forth. The rocking was a sign of distress, the automatic attempt of the body to find comfort. Someone should be holding her, Cahill thought, his stomach knotting even tighter than it already was.

'What smell was that?"

She stared blankly at him, then abruptly stopped rocking and clapped a hand over her mouth. Rusty sprang for the trash can and got it to her just in time. She leaned over the can, retching violently, though nothing but fluid came up. Cahill clenched his teeth. She must not have eaten anything since breakfast, and that was hours ago. She kept retching, straining, even after her stomach was empty, and the sounds she made were painful to hear.

"I'll get you a paper towel," Rusty said, stepping to the door.

Sarah remained bent over the trash can, her body occasionally heaving in spasm. The monitoring room was silent as they watched. Cahill fought the need to go to her, take care of her. He had to stay out of this. He had to let Rusty do his job.

Rusty came back with a wet paper towel. Sarah took it with violently trembling hands, and washed her face. "I'm sorry," she said in a muffled voice, then buried her face in her hands and began to weep in long, shuddering sobs that reminded Cahill of how she had wept after Judge Roberts was killed.

God. He couldn't watch this. He got up and paced around the room, rubbing the back of his neck to ease the kinks.

If she had done those killings, then she was the world's best actress, bar none. What he saw on the screen was a woman in shock and grieving. People sometimes reacted that way if they had killed in the heat of the moment, then realized with horror what they had done. Killers who coldly executed their victims with well-placed shots to the head didn't grieve for them afterward. The circumstances were so suspicious they stank to high heaven, but the details didn't fit. She didn't fit.

She didn't fit. No matter what the circumstances were, she didn't fit. "She didn't do it," he said softly, suddenly, completely certain. Okay, so he could be blind when it came to romantic shit, and he'd taken a hard kick in the chops because of it; as a cop, he saw very clearly, and she wasn't guilty.

Lieutenant Wester gave him a sympathetic look. "Doc, you're sleeping with her. Don't let your little head do the thinking for your big head."

"You can mark it down," Cahill said. "I know her. She couldn't have done it."

"You're too involved," Nolan said. "Just let us do our jobs. If she didn't do it, we'll find out. And if she did do it, we'll find that out, too."

They all looked back at the monitor. Rusty had waited silently as the storm of weeping subsided, and now he asked softly, "Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Water? A Coke?"

'Water," she managed to say, her voice thick. "Thank you."

He got a cup of water for her, and Cahill turned to watch the screen again as she took a couple of sips, cautiously, as if she wasn't certain the water would stay down.

'What happened after you noticed the smell?"

The rocking started again, subtle and heartbreaking. "I . . . I almost ran. I remembered the smell. When the Judge was murdered, the smell was . . . was the same. I couldn't go in there. I wanted to run."

At least she was talking a little more, rather than answering the questions with monosyllables.

"Did you run?"

She shook her head. "I kept telling myself it was just that someone was sick. A stomach virus. It was my job to handle things, clean

up any mess . . ." She trailed off again.

'What did you do?"

"I went to the door of the den and looked in. He was . . . lying there. His neck was bent." Unconsciously she cocked her head to show the position Sonny Lankford had been in. Rusty waited to see if she would continue talking, but she lapsed into silence until prodded by another question.

'What did you do then?"

"I b-backed to the kitchen and tried to call nine-one-one. I wanted to call Cahill first. I wanted him there. But nine-oneone . . . the medics . . . maybe they could help. So I tried to call nine-one-one first."

"Tried to call?"

"I couldn't-I was shaking so hard I hit the wrong buttons.

The phone wouldn't work. I banged it down on the counter and it broke. The phone broke."

"You banged the phone down on the counter?"

"Yes. "

'Why?"

"It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work!"

"Then what?"

"I threw it."

Sarah was the most self-possessed person he knew, Cahill thought. If she had lost control to that extent, she had been hysterical. She was frightened, and hurting, and he hadn't so much as touched her hand when he'd gone to see her in the bungalow. No wonder she was hugging herself; someone needed to do it.

"I needed another phone," she said, for the first time speaking without being prompted by a question. "I couldn't think, couldn't remember where one was. I haven't worked there very long, and the house is complicated. I didn't want to hunt for a phone, because I didn't know where Mrs. Lankford was and I didn't want to find her, I didn't want to see her." New tears streaked down her face. "So I went to my quarters, the bungalow. I know where the phone is in there. I didn't have to hunt for it. I called nine-one-one and they kept me on the line. I wanted to hang up, but they wouldn't let me. They kept me on the line."

'Why did you want to hang up?"

"Cahill," Sarah said, her voice wobbling, her eyes blind with tears. "I wanted to call Cahill. I needed him."

Cahill abruptly left the room. He went into the bathroom, locked the door, then bent over the toilet and vomited.

Chapter 24

IT TOOK A WHILE BEFORE SHE BEGAN THINKING COHERENTLY, logically, but Sarah had nothing but time on her hands. She sat alone in the interview room for long stretches of time, broken by periods when the detective with sandy hair and freckles would ask her a lot of questions. If she had to go to the bathroom, she was escorted. If she asked for something to drink, it was brought to her.

She wondered if they would let her leave, if she tried. She hadn't been arrested, hadn't been handcuffed, she had come here voluntarily. Besides, she had no place else to go. She couldn't stay in the bungalow, she hadn't been able to think clearly enough was murdered; she had been under suspicion then, too, until he'd checked out her story, but it hadn't been personal. She'd understood. But now . . . he knew her now, as no one else had ever known her. Last night, except for when he'd gone on that call, she had been with him all night. They'd made love, several times. And yet he thought she had left the house soon after he did, driven to the Lankfords' house, shot both of them in the head, then stopped by the grocery store and bought ice cream on the way back to his house.

She would have understood him doing his job. It would have hurt, but she'd have understood. She didn't understand him actually believing she was guilty.

That cut, so deeply and cruelly she wasn't certain the wounds would ever heal. With one slash he'd severed the bonds between them, leaving her adrift. She felt like an astronaut whose safety line has snapped, only no one from the mother ship was making any effort to retrieve her. She was lost, floating farther and farther away, and she didn't much care.

The grief she'd felt when the Judge was killed was nothing compared to this. It wasn't just over the violent death of the Lankfords, those friendly, down-to-earth people whom she'd liked very much; it was for the loss of Cahill as well, of the magic she'd thought they shared. She loved him, but he didn't, couldn't love her, because to really love someone you had to know that person, know what made her tick, how she was put together as a human being. Cahill obviously had no clue about her. If he had, he'd have come to her and said, "I know it looks bad, but I believe in you. I'm behind you."

Instead he'd looked at her as if she were dirt, and then he'd walked away.

That wasn't love. He'd wanted to screw her, that was all. And, boy, had he ever.

She understood now why he was so bitter and distrustful after finding out his wife had betrayed him. She didn't know if she'd ever be able to really trust anyone again, either. Her family, yes; she could rely on them through thick and thin, hell and high water, and every other applicable cliche. But anyone else? She didn't think so. The lessons learned hardest were the lessons learned best.

In the meantime, she did something that was foreign to her nature: she endured. She had always been one of those people who, when something wasn't to their liking, didn't rest until they had wrestled, pummeled, and otherwise whipped whatever it was into a shape more to their liking. In this instance, however, there was nothing she could do. She couldn't change the past. Cahill had walked away from her when she needed him most, and no amount of wrestling or pummeling on her part would alter that.

It was a funny type of love that talked marriage one day, and turned its back the next. So why wasn't she laughing?

Instead she sat in the armless chair in the windowless little interview room, and let time wash around her. She was in no hurry. She had nothing to do, and nowhere to go.

Lieutenant Wester rubbed his hand over his nearly bald head. "Okay," he said wearily. "What do we have? Do we hold her, book her, or let her go?"

Everyone was exhausted. The media was in an uproar, the mayor was in an uproar, city hall was in an uproar, and the citizens of Mountain Brook were frightened. Three of their number had been murdered in their homes in the past month, which would have been big news in any community but in Mountain Brook was horrifying. The murder victims had thought they were safe, with their security systems and walled estates, electric gates and floodlights. Instead they had been no safer than a young mother in a drug-ridden neighborhood, cowering with her children in the bathtub at night because the walls were too thin to stop the bullets that regularly whined through the streets.

People paid a high price to live in Mountain Brook, with its crushing property tax. They paid through the nose for the astronomical real estate values, the excellent school system, the illusion of safety. The property taxes bought them a town without slums, and a police department that they expected to keep crime to a minimum, and solve the ones that did occur. When the people in multimillion-dollar homes lost that illusion of safety, they were vocal in their unhappiness. That made the mayor unhappy, which made the captain unhappy, et cetera, et cetera. The pressure was on the investigative division to produce results, or else.

Rusty Ahern consulted the papers before him. "Okay. Here's what I think: We have three spent shell casings, which on preliminary testing appear to match the bullet that killed Judge Roberts. We don't have any viable fingerprints, in either case. We have no physical evidence other than the three shell casings, period. We also have no sign of forced entry at either location, indicating the victims knew the perp and opened the door. We have a busted lock on an interior door. Call-back on the Lankfords' phone went to a pay phone in the Galleria, the same pay phone that showed up as the last call to Judge Roberts. I don't know about you guys, but that right there leads me to think Miss Stevens didn't do either murder."

"How so?" Nolan asked. "I'm not following."

"She wouldn't have any reason to call ahead, to make certain the electric gates were open, or the victims were at home, or whatever," Cahill said. "She had full access to both homes. All she had to do was go in, at any time."

"Right. And what would be the motive?" Ahern asked. "That's what's driving me crazy. Nothing was taken in the Roberts killing. Miss Stevens got a hefty chunk in his will, but that's in probate, it isn't as if you're handed a check as soon as the body's planted. And like you pointed out, Doc, she isn't hurting for money."

"That doesn't mean anything," Nolan said. "Some people always want more. And don't forget that big diamond ring that's missing. A rock worth a quarter of a million will get a lot of people's attention. Plus some people are just fucking crazy."

Cahill held on to his temper. "But she isn't. She's as sane and even-tempered as anyone I've ever met, and, Nolan, if you say one more time she has me pussy-whipped, I'm going to feed you your teeth." They'd been in each other's faces a couple of times already today. Both of them were tired and irritable, and Nolan had a habit of carrying teasing too far.

"Let's cool it, guys," Wester said. "Doc, what about that photo you came up with from the pay phone on the Roberts case? Has it been shown around the Lankfords' neighborhood?"

"Not yet. We've been concentrating on Sarah."

'Well, get it out and circulate it. Since the last call to the Lankfords' came from the same pay phone, that guy has to be our man."

"But it still doesn't make sense," Nolan argued. "Why kill Judge Roberts and not take anything, unless it was for the money in the will? So it's in probate; she'll get it eventually. Look at it this way: she works for Roberts and he gets popped. She goes to work for the Lankfords and they get popped. Does anybody else see a pattern here?"

"Then what's your theory on the guy in the picture?" Wester asked.

"It's simple. They're working together. Has to be. She goes inside and gets all the information, the alarm codes, the keys, whatever is needed. I don't know how they'd decide when-I mean, she worked for Judge Roberts for almost three years, so why wait so long to off him? Then she's with the Lankfords only a little over a week and they get offed. Maybe it's whenever they need the money. Who knows? But she makes sure she has an alibi, and he waltzes in and does the job. They never even know he's in the house until he walks up on them and pulls the trigger. He has no known connection to the victims, so it's essentially a stranger killing, and they're damn hard to solve."

"Do you have an alarm system in your house?" Cahill asked.

"Yeah, it's called a dog."

"Well, the victims would hear the killer come in. In both houses, whenever an outside door or window was opened, an alert is beeped. If you weren't expecting anyone to be there, you'd check it out, right? You wouldn't sit in your recliner and wait."

"Unless they thought it was Stevens."

"In the Lankfords' case, they knew she was gone until Tuesday morning."

Wester frowned. "You're saying in both cases the victims knew the killer."

"Looks like it to me."

"And the killer in both cases is the same guy."

They all looked at one another.

'We're still missing something," Ahern said. "Motive."

"I keep telling you, it's the money," said Nolan.

"And I keep telling you," Cahill said impatiently, "the only way money makes sense is if Sarah is doing the killing."

"Or is having it done."

"But the victims knew the killer, who is very probably the man who made the calls from the pay phone. You yourself said her so-called partner wouldn't have any connection to the victims, so it can't be both ways. They either knew him, or they didn't. If they didn't know him, why did they let him in the house? Why did Judge Roberts sit down to talk to him? The killer was an acquaintance of both Roberts and the Lankfords."

'Well, shit." Nolan frowned at the surface of the table, thinking hard.

"So our guy is someone they knew in business, or moved in the same circles. My guess is business," Cahill said. 'Judge Roberts was in his mid-eighties, and he didn't do the party circuit. He had his circle of poker-playing cronies, and that was it. But he still had business concerns that he stayed on top of, and Sonny Lankford had more irons in the fire than a blacksmith."

"Looking at it that way, the motive may be money after all," said Ahern. 'We need to find out what business ventures or financial concerns they had in common, some deal that went bad but they came out of okay, while someone else lost his shirt."

"But then it would be sheer coincidence that Sarah Stevens happened to be working for both Roberts and the Lankfords when each was murdered," Wester said. "That's bullshit. Coincidences like that don't happen."

"Maybe it's not as far-fetched as you'd think," Ahern said, doodling furiously on his legal pad as he chased his thoughts. "How many people can afford a butler, especially one who makes in the range that Sarah Stevens makes? Not many. It would be a small circle, even in Mountain Brook. Most people here work like hell to pay the property taxes and their mortgages, and keep their kids in school. But these rich folks who can afford her, they probably all know one another, through business if not socially. They had to get rich somehow, didn't they? I say business dealings are the link."

"A lot of companies have had problems this past year. It's possible someone took a soaking and is holding a grudge about it." Wester considered the scenario. So far, it made more sense than any other theory they'd considered. "Okay, I'll take this to the captain. We'll put out some statement that's vague enough it won't spook this guy. He's already killed three people, and he may have started liking it. We don't want any more bodies in this town."

He looked at Ahern. "You can release Miss Stevens, have someone collect some clothes for her and drive her to a motel. And, no, she can't stay at your house," he said pointedly to Cahill. "I want you to stay away from her for the time being. The press is going to be all over us for turning her loose, and if one of those guys follows her and finds out she's living with a Mountain Brook detective, our collective asses will go up in flames. Is that clear?"

Cahill saw the wisdom of Sarah's not living in his house. Staying away from her, though, wasn't in the cards. He had some major bridge repair to do, and he wasn't going to wait until they broke this case to do it. All day it had been burning in his gut, the way she'd cried when she said she needed him. She had walked in on a horror this morning, made all the worse by being a repeat of the scene with Judge Roberts. She'd been a walking basket case, and he hadn't gone to her, hadn't held her. She'd been alone all day, slowly rocking back and forth, hugging herself. Even worse, she knew he'd thought she was the killer.

This wasn't merely doing his job; this was a lack of trust so gargantuan he didn't know if he'd be able to regain his lost ground. He'd die trying, though. If he had to crawl to her on his hands and knees, literally as well as figuratively, to get her forgiveness, then he'd wear out the knees in every pair of pants he owned if that was what it took.

She was in a fragile state right now. He remembered that when the Judge was killed she hadn't been able to eat; today she certainly hadn't had anything since breakfast, which was at least a thousand years ago from the way he felt. They had offered her food, but she had refused it with a silent shake of her head. She was usually the strong one, the go-to person in a crisis, but now she needed someone to take care of her.

The first order of business was to get her things from the bungalow and get her checked into a hotel under an assumed name so she could rest. Ahern would take care of that.

There was no way in hell, though, that Cahill intended to let her leave without apologizing, for whatever good that would do.

He walked down the short hall and opened the door to the interview room. She looked up, then quickly averted her gaze when she recognized him. She was still pale, her face drawn and her dark eyes dull. Coming so soon after the Judge's murder, this had knocked her flat.

He stepped inside and closed the door. The ceiling-mounted camera wasn't on right now; they were private. If she wanted to slap his face, he'd take it. If she wanted to kick him in the balls, he guessed he'd take that, too. He'd take anything from her if she would forgive him afterward. But she didn't move, even when he crouched beside the chair so he could see her face.

"Ahern is going to take you to a hotel so you can rest," he said quietly. 'We'll pick up your clothes and bring them to you. Let him check you in; you'll be under an assumed name, so the press can't find you."

"I'm not being arrested?" she asked, her voice thin and colorless.

"Sarah . . . we know you didn't do it."

'Why? Did some evidence turn up today? You thought I was guilty this morning." There was no accusation, no heat in the words, just a statement of fact. He felt as if she had put miles of mental distance between them, between herself and everyone else. It was the only way she could cope.

"I was wrong," he said simply. "I'm sorry. God, I can't tell you how sorry I am. The coincidence slapped me in the face, and all I could think was that you'd gone out last night after I left on the call."

"I understand."

The lack of inflection in her voice made him wince. "Do you forgive, too?"

"No."

"Sarah-" He reached out, and she pulled back, her expression frantic.

"Don't touch me."

He dropped his hand. "All right. For now. I know I fucked up big time, but I won't let you go. We think we're getting this thing figured out, and-"

"It isn't up to you," she interrupted.

'What? What isn't up to me?"

"Letting me go. You don't have a choice."

There was a big black hole yawning at his feet, and he felt as if he were being sucked down into it. If he lost her-well, that wasn't going to happen. He refused to let it. Once she was over the initial shock, she would at least listen to him. Sarah was the most reasonable person he'd ever met. And if she wouldn't listen, then he didn't mind fighting dirty. He'd do whatever it took to keep her.

'We'll talk later," he said, stepping back to give her the space she needed right now.

"There's no point."

"There's every point. I'll give you some room and time now, but don't ever think I've given up. Ever."

"You should," she said, and went back to staring at the wall.

Fifteen minutes later, Ahern hurried her out the back door and across the parking lot to his car. The print and television reporters camped out by the front saw them and the cameramen got some footage, but that was it. One enterprising guy jumped into his car and started to follow, but his way was blocked when a white Jaguar swung in front of him, and by the time he pulled into traffic, both the unmarked cop car and the white Jaguar had vanished from sight.

Chapter 25

TREVOR DENSMORE HAD NEVER BEEN MORE SHOCKED IN HIS life than when the news reports made it plain Sarah was being held as a suspect. This was terrible. How could they possibly . . . why, there wasn't a shred of evidence against her. Not a shred. How could there be? He'd been careless last night and left behind the shell casings, causing himself a moment of worry, but they could in no way be linked to Sarah. As for himself, all he had to do next was dispose of the pistol-after first filing off the registration number, of course. He hated taking care of such menial details himself, but he could hardly ask his secretary to handle it, now could he?

The most important thing was to make certain Sarah was all right. She was so pale, in the news footage shown. She had discovered the bodies of both Judge Lowell Roberts, her previous employer, and the Lankfords, which suggested she was like the miscreants who set fires, then called in the report, pretending they had discovered it so they could deflect suspicion from themselves. The police were wise to such tactics, which he supposed explained why she was under suspicion, but, oh, dear . . . he'd done her such a terrible wrong.

Not once had he considered that she would be the one who found the bodies. Not once. He should have realized it, because of course she was the most logical person to do so; she was conscientious, meaning she would be the first one on duty in the morning. The shocks he'd made her endure had to have been terrible. He couldn't think how he could have arranged for someone else to discover the bodies, but he could have thrown a blanket over them or something. People nowadays always had those throw things draped everywhere, like shawls for furniture; he detested such clutter himself. He could have used them, however, to spare Sarah a measure of shock.

He was so distressed by his thoughtlessness that he had his secretary cancel his appointments and left his office early. What to do, what to do?

The first order of business was to get her released, but how? He could scarcely call the police department and demand her release, not without explanations he didn't care to make. Then the brilliant idea occurred. It was risky, but worth the gamble if it freed Sarah.

Even as efficient as he was, it still took him a few hours to accomplish the deed. Then, not knowing what else to do, he drove to city hall and parked in the parking lot of the nearby bank and waited. He didn't want to join the jackals who were lingering with their satellite-dish-equipped vans and videocameras, and, really, he had no idea how long it would be before the effects of his plan were discovered. But when Sarah was released, he intended to be there to offer his support.

Why, in retrospect, things couldn't have worked out better. She would be upset, in need of a safe haven. He could give her that, and more . . . so much more.

He had carefully chosen his vantage point, and when he needed to change the angle of vision to better see what was going on-it was so frustrating not to know exactly; he hated being kept in the dark like this-he would simply walk down the sidewalk as if he were going to the dry cleaners, or whatever.

Luck was on his side, but then, it always was. He became more and more exasperated as he waited; the incompetent yokels, what was taking them so long? Just as he reached his limit and decided to go home-after all, no one would expect him to wait forever- he saw Sarah leave the police department by a side door at the back of the building. She was with a man, probably a detective, since he was escorting her across the narrow drive to the parking lot the police used. The news crews spotted them, of course, as they got into an unmarked city car of common lineage. One reporter ran to his car and jumped in, but Trevor timed things perfectly, smoothly swinging the Jaguar into traffic at just the right moment to block the reporter from pulling out. There was more traffic behind him, inadvertently performing the same blocking maneuver.

Trevor kept his eye on the unmarked car as he followed, keeping at least one car between them. Really, he was getting very good at this.

Where was he taking her? Back to the Lankfords' house? Surely not. But she had no other home. To a friend's home, then, or a hotel. The good news was that she obviously had not been arrested, just detained and questioned, and now they had decided they had no reason to hold her. He wasn't certain exactly how police procedure worked, but he did know that if she had been arrested, she would have been detained until a bond hearing, where bail would either be set or denied.

All he had to do was follow to see where she was being taken; then he would decide how best to approach her. This time she would come to him. He was certain of it.

"Do you have any preferences?" Detective Ahern asked her. 'Which hotel, I mean."

"I don't care."

Ahern glanced at her, at a loss. He'd gone into the interview room thinking, like everyone else, that she was guilty. Her reactions during the interview, plus some logical thinking, had convinced him she wasn't. Normally he didn't concern himself much if someone was upset; in his line of work, it was to be expected, and unless they were hysterical and throwing punches or objects, he left them to handle things on their own. This was different, though; because of her connection to Cahill, she was one of theirs. This was more personal.

"The lieutenant told Doc to stay away from you until things settle down. The press would go crazy if they found out you're living with him."

"I'm not," she said flatly.

He was about to step knee-deep in shit, he just knew it, but he plowed on. "So if Doc isn't around much, that's why. He wants to be. By the way, he's been arguing us into the ground all day about your innocence. He believes in you, Sarah. We're working our butts off to get this thing figured out, but he-"

"Detective Ahern," she said.

"What?"

"Shut up." She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Now what?

He was saved by a call coming in on his phone. Eyes widening, he listened in disbelief.

"Shit!" he said explosively.

She jerked upright, and he had the impression she had actually dozed off in those few seconds. "What?"

"There's been another killing." He stepped on the gas. "If you don't mind, I'm taking you to the Mountain Brook Inn. It's close by, and I need to get to the scene."

"That's fine."

He was agitated. "It sounds like the same MO, Sarah. We'll know more when we investigate, but if it is, you're totally clear. The press won't bother you."

"Why?" She shook her head. "Who?"

"I don't know; I just have the address. But evidently the kill is recent, just a few hours old. You couldn't have done it." His hands tightened on the steering wheel. "Shit. We have a maniac on our hands."

When they reached the inn, she said, "Just let me out in front. I'll check myself in." She shrugged. "Now it doesn't matter if they know I'm here, does it? I may get some phone calls, but they won't be beating down my door." With this latest development, she had gone from suspect to . . . what? Material witness? Incredibly unlucky?

"Do me a favor," Ahern said. "Use a false name anyway. Use 'Geraldine Ahern,' that's my mother's name. That way we can find you."

"Okay," she agreed. This wasn't something she cared about. Right now, nothing was. She just wanted to be alone, and she wanted to sleep.

She got her purse and got out of the car. Before she closed the door, Ahern leaned over and said, "We'll have your clothes brought to you. Just sit tight. "

She'd have to sit tight, she thought as she watched Ahern drive away, unless she called a taxi, because she didn't have a way of going anywhere. The TrailBlazer was still at the Lankfords' house.

She was so exhausted that for long moments she simply stood there in the late afternoon warmth, trying to dissipate the chill that seemed to go all the way through to her bones. What would she do if the staff at the front desk refused to let her stay here? If they had been watching television today, her face and name would have been all over the news. They might even think she had escaped custody, though why she would then try to check into a nearby hotel was more than she could imagine.

The events of the day crashed down on her, sapping what little strength she had left, swaying her on her feet. She closed her eyes, struggling for control.

"Miss Stevens?" asked a softly hesitant voice. "Sarah?"

Dazed, she opened her eyes and found herself staring at a man who looked familiar, though she couldn't quite place him. He stood a few feet from her, watching her with concern. She hadn't heard his footsteps, hadn't realized anyone was near.

"Are you all right?" he asked shyly; and then she placed him. Saturday night. The party.

"Mr. Densmore," she said.

He looked pleased that she remembered him. "Please call me Trevor. My dear, I've been thinking about you all day. This is terrible, what's happened. You must have been so afraid."

Her throat locked, and she stared at him. After the events of the day, this gentle sympathy was almost her undoing.

"The newscasters made it sound as if the police suspect you, but that's ridiculous. You couldn't possibly have done such a thing; the very idea. Are you staying here for the time being?"

"I-" She swallowed. "I haven't checked in yet."

"Then let's go in and get you a room so you can rest. Have you eaten anything today? There's a cafe here, I believe. I'd be honored if you'd join me for a meal."

He was a virtual stranger, but after only one meeting he had more faith in her than Cahill had. The difference between them slapped her in the face, sent her reeling. She didn't realize she had swayed again until Mr. Densmore reached out to touch her arm. "My dear, you're on the verge of collapse. Come with me. You'll feel better after you've had something to eat, I promise."

It was so easy just to let him take charge. All but the most simple actions seemed beyond her capability now; it was a relief not to make decisions, not even about what she ate. Before she knew it they were in the cafe and he was quietly ordering hot tea and soup for her, making soft comments that didn't require replies but nevertheless wove a sort of buffer zone around her and gave her something else to concentrate on. All day the same scenes had been replaying in her mind, all day the same horrible thoughts had chased around and around, and he offered surcease from that. She listened to him, and she allowed herself to forget, just for a little while.

He was gentle in his insistence that she eat, but relentless. After a day of feeling battered, it was good to be taken care of. She made herself eat half the bowl of soup, and sip the hot tea. At least she began to feel a little warmer, but her mind was still in a fog and she was surprised when she suddenly focused on what Mr. Densmore was saying.

"You still want to hire me?" she asked in dazed astonishment.

He blushed, and fiddled with his teaspoon, unnecessarily stirring the already stirred tea, then precisely placing the spoon on the rim of the saucer. "I know this is terrible timing," he said. "I'm sorry. This is so embarrassing."

"No, it isn't that," she said quickly. "It's just-I apologize. I'm so tired I can't concentrate. Thank you very much for your offer, but, Mr. Densmore . . . it may not be safe. My employers seem to be-" She stopped, her lips suddenly trembling, unable to go on.

"That can 't have anything to do with you, " he said firmly. "It's just a horrible coincidence. It's been on the news that there's been another incident, so that proves you aren't involved in any way."

The media was on top of things today if it was already on the news about this latest killing, she thought tiredly. But they were in a high state of alert, monitoring the police radios and 911 calls, so it was possible they were at this latest scene almost before the cops were.

Another person was dead. She should be horrified for the victim's sake, for the family's sake, but all she could feel was grateful that she wasn't there.

"My offer still stands," he said, his shy smile beginning to form. "I was impressed with your abilities when I saw you on television, and again last Saturday. Please think about it. My estate is extensive; I've been coping with part-time staff, but it would really benefit from permanent, expert supervision. It's very quiet, and I have excellent security."

Her mind felt filled with cotton, but one thought at least was clear: the job offers wouldn't be pouring in this time, the way they had after the Judge was killed. After what happened to the Lankfords, she would at the least be regarded as a jinx, though this last killing would at least prove she wasn't a murderer. Not many people would want someone like her in the house. Probably Mr. Densmore wouldn't have, either, if he hadn't already met her and formed his own opinion about her character.

She should take her time finding another position. She should advertise in the papers in Atlanta and Palm Beach, maybe even New Orleans. She could stay with her parents while she searched, assuming the police would let her leave the area. Right now, even with this newest development, that was a big assumption.

Since this job was falling into her lap, the simplest thing would be to take it. She would have somewhere to live, and something to occupy her mind. When she felt better, when she was more herself, then she could decide what to do on a permanent basis.

"I have to be honest with you, Mr. Densmore. After what's happened, I don't think I want to stay in this area. I'm grateful for your offer, and if you're still interested in hiring me knowing that it may be temporary-"

"I am," he said quickly. "I understand completely how you feel. But after things have settled down and you see the arrangements at my estate, I hope you'll change your mind about leaving."

She took a deep breath. "In that case, I accept your offer."

Chapter 26

THE VICTIM'S NAME WAS JACOB WANETTA, FIFTY-SIX YEARS old, the president and CEO of Wanetta Advertising. He lived on Cherokee Road, and he and his wife were golfing enthusiasts. He was working at home that day, and he'd been hale and hearty when his wife was picked up by a friend a little after lunch to play nine holes at the Mountain Brook Country Club, then have cocktails. He'd waved them off from the front door, so it wasn't a matter of the wife saying he was alive then, the friend had seen him, too. When the wife arrived home after a fun afternoon of golf and gin, she found her husband sprawled beside the hearth in his den, a bullet through his brain.

The evidence technicians found the shell casing where it had rolled under the sofa, and immediate comparisons were being made to see if it matched the three found at the Lankfords. From the damage done, the bullet looked to be the same caliber as the others, though the ME would have to weigh the slug to be certain. The shot appeared to have been delivered in the same manner as two of the others. Except for Mrs. Lankford, who had been shot between the eyes, the other killing wounds had all entered from the left, indicating the killer had been standing to the left of the victim and was right-handed. That had to be sheer coincidence, where he stood, but maybe not. Maybe, being right-handed, he deliberately maneuvered so he was on the victim's left, giving himself an unencumbered shot. If he stood to the victim's right, shooting would require swiveling his body, and might give the victim time to react.

As it was, none of the victims had stood a chance. They hadn't had time to do more than blink, if that. Except for Merilyn Lankford; she had obviously been trying to call for help.

Jacob Wanetta had been a hefty, athletic guy. If any of them could have fought, he would have been the one. But he'd gone down just like the others, without resistance. There were no overturned chairs, no lamps knocked askew, nothing . . . just that very efficient killing.

He had been killed while Sarah was safely at the police department. There was no question of her innocence, and since by all indications he and the Lankfords had been killed by the same person, that effectively removed the media focus from her. The chief put out a statement that they had been concerned for Miss Stevens's safety, but they had at no time considered her a suspect. That was a flat-out lie, but who cared, if it killed the media's interest in her?

Ahern said he'd left her at the Mountain Brook Inn, with instructions to check in under Geraldine Ahern, his mother's name. Cahill wished Ahern had actually gone inside with her and seen to it himself, but he understood the urgency to get to the scene. When Mrs. Wanetta's hysterical phone call had come into 911, there in the police department, everyone had scrambled like fighter pilots racing to meet an oncoming wave of bombers.

They were stretched thin, trying to handle the normal problems that cropped up plus three murders in one day. With this latest development, Lieutenant Wester decided there wasn't any reason to keep Cahill separate from the Lankford case; Wester had only five investigators to begin with, so he needed every one of them concentrating on this. As far as Cahill was concerned, that also lifted the restrictions on him involving Sarah, not that he'd intended to pay much attention to them anyway. Still, it was nice to know his ass wasn't going to get busted for doing it.

It was close to midnight when Wester decided they were all so tired they were losing their effectiveness. They'd have to wait and see if the evidence techs came up with any new physical evidence. They had already interviewed as many friends and neighbors as they could-unless they started dragging people from their beds-and, as Nolan put it, they were starting to get "the stupids."

Sarah hadn't been far from Cahill's mind all day, and abruptly he remembered to ask, "Ahern, did you have anyone take Sarah's clothes to her?"

Ahern gave him a blank look, then groaned. "Shit, I forgot." He glanced at his watch. He had called his wife two hours ago and told her he'd be home soon.

"I'll do it," Cahill said. Wester was listening to them and when he didn't say anything, Cahill knew he was cleared.

"Are you sure about that?" Ahern asked, giving him a shrewd look. "You might want to stay out of reach for a few days."

"No, that's exactly what I don't need to do."

He was as short on sleep as everyone else-probably shorter, considering what he and Sarah had done with the chocolate syrup the night before-but he had no interest in going home without seeing her first. She, on the other hand, probably wouldn't be glad to see him at any time, much less in the wee hours of the morning.

Tough shit.

He picked up her clothes first, figuring she wouldn't refuse to see him if he had her things. He got everything, digging out her suitcases and cleaning out the closet, because he assumed she wouldn't be coming back here to stay anyway. In just the short time she'd been here, though, she had already put her personal touches on the bungalow, with her books and photographs, and her music collection. He thought about packing those up, too, but she wouldn't have room for them in a hotel room, and he didn't want to take the time right now. She needed her clothes; the other things could wait.

He was fast, but thorough, remembering to get all her toiletries and makeup from the tiled bathroom, and her underwear from the built-in drawers in the closet. Packing her things was easy; she was very neat, which made things go faster. Maybe she hadn't been here long enough for her things to have developed a life of their own. He had a stubborn hope that one day her clothes would push his out of the closet, and he'd complain about needing a bigger house just for the closet space. He had a stubborn hope for a lot of things, and they all revolved around Sarah.

Finally he had everything packed in his truck, and as he wound his way over to 280, he called Sarah's cell phone number, but the recording came on immediately informing him that the customer was not in service at this time. He was used to her keeping it on the entire time she was at his house, putting it on the charger every night, but now there was no reason for her to make it easy for anyone to get in touch with her. Growling, he got the number of the Mountain Brook Inn from Information, was put through, and asked for Geraldine Ahern.

Sarah was one of those people who woke instantly when disturbed, springing from bed ready to do battle, thwart burglars, or cook breakfast. He began to worry when she hadn't answered by the fourth ring. She did answer on the sixth one, though, and her voice sounded dull. "Hello."

"I'm bringing your clothes over," he said. 'What's your room number?"

She paused. "Just leave them at the front desk."

"No."

"What?"

There, that was better; there was a little life in her voice. "If you want your clothes, you'll have to see me."

"Are you holding my clothes hostage?" More life. It was outrage, but at least it was life.

"If you don't want them now, I'll take them home with me and you can pick them up there."

"Damn you, Cahill-" She stopped, and he could hear her exhaling through her nose in exasperation. "All right." She told him her room number and slammed down the phone.

Progress was being made.

He didn't mind arguing. It was not talking at all that drove him crazy. As long as she was talking to him, even if by dint of coercion, then he had a chance.

At the inn, he got a luggage cart and loaded all of her things on it, then wheeled it to the elevator past the watchful eye of the clerk manning the desk. Cahill opened his jacket a little, flashing the tin on his belt, and the clerk became interested in other things.

Sarah must have been standing at the door, because she jerked it open before he could even knock. The squeaking of the luggage cart must have alerted her. She already had a hand extended to take one bag when she registered the load on the luggage cart.

"I brought everything," he said, keeping his voice down because of the other guests sleeping on this floor. It was a wonder he remembered the courtesy, because Sarah was naked, clutching a sheet around her. "I didn't figure you'd be staying there again."

"No," she said, shuddering. "But what about my-"

"You can get the rest of your stuff later." He wasn't above using his size to get what he wanted; he grabbed two of the suitcases and moved forward, and she was forced to step back from the door. He set down the suitcases, planting himself in the doorway, and swiveled to get the other bags. Before she could get the two suitcases hauled to the side, he had the others inside and he stepped forward, closing the door behind him. She had turned on every light in the place, making certain the room was as far from intimate as she could make it, even smoothing the bedspread back over the bed after she'd removed the sheet that was now wrapped around her.

But she hadn't put on her clothes, and she'd had time to do so. Instead she was wrapped in a sheet, and she was naked beneath it. He wondered if she even realized what that revealed about her emotions. Normally he would have said yes, but after the day she'd had, she probably didn't realize.

She clutched the sheet tighter, lifting her chin. "Thank you. Now get out."

"You look like a Victorian maiden protecting her virtue," he said, shifting the suitcases himself.

She had still been pale, her features pinched, but now her eyes narrowed and color washed into her cheeks. She was a good strategist, though; she must have sensed that a good fight to clear the air was just what he wanted, because she bit back whatever she had been about to say and moved several feet away. "Leave."

He moved closer. Maybe he could make her mad enough to swing at him; she'd have to let go of that sheet then. "Make me," he invited.

"I'm not doing this," she said, briefly closing her eyes and shaking her head. "If I have to, I'll call your supervisor and make a harassment charge against you. It's over. We didn't work out. End of story."

"No," he said. Shannon had once said he could give stubborn lessons to a jackass, and he intended to live up to his reputation. "Sarah, I love you."

Her head snapped up, and the expression in her eyes was furious. "No you don't. "

His eyes narrowed. "The hell I don't."

Then she was advancing on him, holding the sheet with one hand and poking at him with a stiffened finger with the other. "You don't even know who I am," she snapped, breathing fire. "If you did, if you had paid the slightest amount of attention to me other than when you wanted to screw me, you'd never, not for one damn second, have thought I murdered anyone, much less someone I liked as much as I did M-Merilyn." Her chin wobbled, and her face began to crumple. "And-and I loved the Judge," she said in a trembling voice, trying hard not to cry. "You can't love someone you don't know, and you don't k-know me."

It wasn't just her voice trembling; she was shaking all over. Cahill felt something clench in his chest. Damn it, he hadn't liked it when she said he screwed her. He didn't like the term, didn't like what it implied. Fucking, yeah; when they made love, it was earthy and hot and sweaty, and that was fucking. But it had always been making love, too. It had never been just screwing.

She was falling apart in front of him. Cahill breathed a curse and pulled her into his arms, easily subduing the feeble girlypounding she did on his chest; then she sort of crumpled against him and began to cry as she had earlier, in great, heaving sobs.

He picked her up and sat down on the bed, holding her on his lap and murmuring soft things to her, doing the things he should have done this morning. She wasn't holding the sheet now, her hands were fisted on his jacket, and the sheet began to loosen around her slender body. Ruthlessly he helped it along, pulling his jacket out of her grip and shrugging out of it at the same time as he tugged on the sheet, exposing more and more of her warm skin.

He fell back on the bed, twisting so she was on her back and he was leaning over her as he pulled the sheet completely free. She was still crying and she made a weak grab for the sheet, but he caught her hand and held it as he bent his head to kiss her, at the same time stroking his free hand over her smooth breasts, down her flat belly, then finally to the ultrasoft folds between her legs.

Her mouth was salty from her tears. She whimpered a protest, but she was arching toward him, and when he released her hand, it slid around his neck. He moved fast, opening his pants and shifting on top of her, parting her legs and settling between them. He guided his penis to her, and pushed. She wasn't wet but she was moist enough, though he had to rock several times to get all the way inside her.

She whimpered again, and went still, staring up at him with drenched, heartbreaking eyes.

"Shhh," he murmured, moving gently inside her. Usually she gave as good as she got, standing toe-to-toe with him whether they were sparring or making love, and this vulnerability hurt him deep inside. Maybe this was wrong, loving her now when her defenses were down, but it was the fastest way he knew to reestablish the connection between them. The bonds of the flesh . . . not just sex but the linking of two bodies, the most primitive way of seeking comfort and not feeling alone.

He would have made it last the rest of the night, if he could have. As it was he stopped whenever he felt his orgasm building, lying still until the urge subsided then slowly stroking again. All the while he was kissing her, caressing her, telling her he loved her as he coaxed her from acceptance to response. He had never concentrated on a woman before as he concentrated now on Sarah, alert for every nuance, every caught breath, every shift of her legs. He'd always been hyperaware of her when they made love, but this was even more so. He felt as if his very survival depended on loving her now, on reforging the link his suspicion had broken.

It was a long time happening, but finally her hips began to move to meet him, and her fingers dug into his shoulders. He kept his pace slow, loving the feel of her tightening around him as if she was trying to hold him inside. The pulse at the base of her throat was hammering, and her nipples were tight, flushed with color. Tension coiled in her finely honed body, lifting her to every inward thrust, her legs sliding around his and locking in that way she had of holding him in, as if she couldn't get enough of him.

Her head tilted back, a groan sounding deep in her throat.

He pushed deep, held there, and felt her begin coming. He was so close, had been on the edge for so long, that he began coming, too, as soon as he felt the first contraction around him. He tried not to thrust, tried to hold himself still and deep for her pleasure, and his own pleasure spread through him like hot melted wax.

She lay beneath him, breathing hard, and tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes to streak into the hair at her temples. "I can't believe I did that," she choked out.

Struggling for breath, he propped on his elbow and wiped his thumb across her wet cheek. "I'd undo the day if I could," he said hoarsely. "God, I'm so sorry. It isn't just that I'm a cop; after I was such a stupid fool trusting Shannon, I-"

"I'm not your ex-wife!" she shouted furiously, and shoved against his shoulders. "I don't give a damn what she did. Get . . . off me, damn it; your badge is scratching my stomach!"

Ah, shit. He rolled off her and flopped on his back. He was still wearing his holster, too. He guessed he was lucky she hadn't pulled his pistol and shot him.

She jackknifed to a sitting position and glared down at him, her face still wet with tears. "I'll say this for you," she said bitterly, "you've taught me a lesson. It'll be a cold day in hell before I trust-" She stopped herself, letting her breath out in a long, weary sigh. "Oh, God. I sound just like you."

He got up and went into the bathroom, washing and straightening, tucking his shirt into his pants. Sarah got up and came to stand beside him, unconcerned about her nakedness as she washed her face, then wiped away the results of their lovemaking. Their eyes met in the mirror.

"I love you," he said. "That isn't going to change."

Her shoulders slumped. "The hell of it is, I still love you, too. I just can't get past this right now."

"I can wait." He smoothed her hair back, stroked her cheek. "As long as it takes. But don't throw us away. Don't make any drastic decisions. Give it time, and let's see what happens."

She stared at him in the mirror, and sighed as if in defeat. "All right. For now. I hope I wouldn't have let you make love to me if there was nothing left, so I have to think maybe there is. Just . . . give me some room, okay? Let me get some of myself back."

He took a deep breath. He felt as if he'd won the lottery, or a stay of execution. Something.

She made a wry face. "I don't know if it's drastic, but I've already made a hasty decision. I already have another job."

He felt blank with shock. "What? How? Here?"

"Yes, here. It's someone I'd already met, and he'd offered me the job. He was coming into the hotel this afternoon and saw me, and he made the offer again on the spot. I took it."

"What's his name?"

"Trevor Densmore." Her voice was weary, all her temporary energy fading fast.

He didn't remember the name. "Have I already checked him out?"

"No, his name wasn't on my list of possibles."

"Then why take the job now, if you wouldn't consider it before?"

"It's a place to hide," she said simply.

Chapter 27

SARAH WOKE THE NEXT MORNING ACHING FROM HEAD TO toe. She lay in bed, trying to think of a reason why she should get up today. Though she had slept deeply, she felt as exhausted as she had when she'd gone to bed the night before. The wee-hours visit from Cahill hadn't helped, either.

She'd sent him home, afterward. He hadn't wanted to go, but she supposed he thought he'd won all the victories he was going to win that night. He did take her truck keys so that he could have it picked up and delivered to her. She suspected he'd do it himself; he was in major suck-up mode, and she didn't know if that made her happy or made her want to cry. Maybe both.

She still couldn't believe she'd let him make love to her, not with things the way they were between them. But he'd been achingly gentle, and she had so badly needed to be held. The scent of his body was warm and familiar, excitingly male; she knew all the details of that body so well, from the sandpaper texture of his jaw to the shape of his toes. She'd wanted nothing more than to curl up in his arms and find oblivion, so when he actually did take her in his arms, she caved with embarrassing speed.

He'd never before been so gentle, or so slow. She had gone to sleep with her body still tingling deep inside. But now she ached, her muscles knotting into cramps.

"Damn," she muttered, wanting to roll over and bury her face in the pillow again. Her menstrual period had started; that's why she was cramping, why she felt so achy. It was right on time, so she shouldn't have been caught unawares, but the trauma of the day before had knocked everything else out of her mind.

Groaning, she rolled out of bed. Thank goodness Cahill had brought over all her personal stuff, or else she'd have been in a pickle. She sorted through the bags until she found the one containing the supplies she needed, then she shuffled into the bathroom for a long, hot shower.

She felt as if she should be doing something, but there was nothing to be done. This wasn't the same situation she'd been in with Judge Roberts's family; she had known them, grown close to them, and they'd depended on her. She had never even met the Lankfords' two daughters, Bethany and Merrill. Her heart ached for them, but she was an outsider, and even if they had wanted her to help she didn't know if she was capable of giving it. Not this time. Not now. She was too emotionally battered, too drained.

After she finished showering, she was shaking with exhaustion, but more than sleep, she needed to be with someone who loved her unconditionally, someone who was always there. She dug her cell phone from her purse, turned it on, and called her mother.

"Oh, hi, sweetie," her mother said. She sounded unusually frazzled. Sarah's mother was normally an oasis of calm, a master of organization. Sarah was instantly alert.

"Mom? What's wrong?"

To her dismay, her mother burst into tears, but she controlled them almost immediately. By that time, though, Sarah was on her feet in alarm. "Mom?"

"I wasn't going to call any of you just yet, but your father had some chest pains last night. We spent the night in the ER; they did some tests and they said he didn't have a heart attack-"

Sarah's breath whooshed out of her, and she sat back down. "Then what's wrong with him?"

"We don't know. He's still hurting a little, though you know him, he still has that Marine mentality that he's going to tough this out. I've made him an appointment with an internist for later this afternoon for a physical and to schedule some more tests." Her mother took a deep breath. "I suppose I wouldn't be so scared if he hadn't always been so healthy. I've never seen him in pain the way he was last night."

"I can be there on an afternoon flight-" Sarah began, then stopped, wondering if she could leave. What had Cahill told her before, after Judge Roberts was murdered? Don't leave town. But she'd been cleared, so there shouldn't be a problem. Then she remembered Mr. Densmore and groaned; she was supposed to begin the job there.

"No, don't be silly," her mother said, her voice more brisk now. "It wasn't a heart attack; all the enzymes or whatever were normal. There's no point in flying down here for what may be nothing more than a severe case of heartburn. If the doctor seems at all concerned this afternoon, I'll call you."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. Now, enough about that. How are things going with your new job?"

Sarah had been aching to cry on her mother's shoulder, figuratively speaking, but no way was she going to add to her mother's worries right now. "It didn't work out," she said. "Actually, I have a new position already, and I wanted you to have the phone number."

"I thought you really liked the new people, the Lankfords."

She had. Her throat tightened, and she had to swallow. "It wasn't that. Something unexpected came up and they had to relocate." She wished she had been able to think of some other lie, because that one was too horribly true; it wasn't a lie at all.

"These things happen." As a military wife, her mother was a past master at relocating. "Okay, I have a pen. What's the new telephone number?"

Sarah had written it down the night before. She got out her little notebook and flipped to the correct page, then read off the number. "And there's always my cell phone, but I wanted to let you know the new developments."

"You concentrate on settling in. I'm sure he'll be okay, he's feeling better and already making growling noises about not needing a doctor. I'll have to twist his arm to get him to the doctor's office this afternoon."

"Call me, okay? If there's the least thing wrong."

"I will."

Sarah hung up and sat there for a long time, trying to come to grips with this added worry. There was nothing she could do, at least not right now; she needed to take care of herself so she would be in shape to act if she was needed.

She searched for the aspirin among her scattered effects, found the bottle, and took two. Then she fell back into bed, and was asleep in minutes.

It was almost two o'clock when the phone rang. She rolled over and blinked at the clock in disbelief, then fumbled for the phone.

"I'm bringing your truck over," Cahill said. "I had a patrolman drop me off at the Lankfords to pick it up, so you'll have to take me back to the station."

She blinked sleepily. "Okay." Her voice sounded fuzzy even to herself.

"Did I wake you up?" he asked suspiciously.

"Yeah. I had a rough night," she said, and let him make of that what he wanted.

"I'll be there in ten minutes or so," he said, and hung up.

She hauled herself out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. All her clothes were packed in suitcases, so they were wrinkled. She herself looked like the Wicked Witch of the West on a bad day. Cahill could just wait until she put herself to rights.

He did, but not patiently. She refused to let him into the room, so he went back down to the lobby. When she was ready and started to leave the room, she discovered why she hadn't been awakened by housekeeping: the DO NOT DISTURB sign was out. Cahill must have put it out when he left. She left the sign where it was and took the elevator down to the lobby.

"Have you found out anything new today?" she asked during the drive to the police station.

"Nothing except the same weapon was used to kill all four people. Have you watched any news today, or read the newspaper?"

"No, why?"

"I wondered if you could remember ever seeing Jacob Wanetta anywhere."

"He's the fourth victim?"

"Yeah."

"The name isn't familiar."

A moment later he stopped at a service station and stuck some change in a newspaper vending machine, pulling out the last remaining copy of the morning paper. Getting back behind the wheel, he tossed the paper onto her lap.

She didn't read the story, didn't let herself focus on the headlines. Instead she focused on the grainy black-and-white photo of a dark-haired, heavy-jawed man who gave the impression of bull-like strength. Nothing about him was familiar. "I've never seen him before that I can remember," she said, laying the paper aside. She couldn't help feeling relieved; at least she had no connection with this killing.

He stopped before they reached city hall and the police department, pulling into a parking lot and turning off the ignition. "Reporters have been hanging around," he said. "I'll walk the rest of the way, so they don't see you." He half turned in the seat, the back of his right hand brushing her cheek. "I'll call you tonight. I'll try to see you, but we're working our asses off and I don't know what time we'll call it a night."

"You don't have to check on me. I'm okay." She was lying, right now, but she would be okay in the future. She needed to regroup, get a lot of sleep, and let time put a little more distance between her and the murders. She needed a little distance between herself and Cahill, too, some time in which she didn't have to deal with him. She didn't want to think things over; she didn't want to think at all.

"It's for my peace of mind, okay?" he muttered. "I know things aren't straight between us, not yet, so I need to see you every so often to make sure you're still here."

"I'm not running, Cahill," she said, stung that he thought she might. "If I leave, you'll know beforehand. And I've already accepted the job with Mr. Densmore, remember?"

He grunted. Even with everything that was going on, he'd made the time to run a check on Trevor Densmore. "For what it's worth, he doesn't have any type of record."

"I didn't think he would have. I might as well call him and arrange a time to move over there."

He gave her a worried glance. 'Why don't you give it another day? You still look exhausted."

She knew how she looked: chalky white, with dark circles under her eyes. She felt exhausted, even after all the hours of sleep. Physical tiredness wasn't her problem; it was the overload of stress that was doing her in.

"Maybe I'd feel better if I had something to do. It can't hurt."

The move into Mr. Densmore's house was accomplished in little time and with little effort. House wasn't the right term, though; it was an estate, a fortress, five acres of prime real estate protected by a high gray stone wall. The entrance was guarded by huge wrought-iron gates that operated automatically and were watched over by cameras positioned at regular intervals.

The house itself was three stories high, made of the same gray stone, which gave it a medieval look. Inside the walls, the grounds were carefully manicured, not a shrub or a leaf out of place, not a blade of grass poking a little higher than the blades around it.

Inside was more of the same. Either shy Mr. Densmore liked a monochromatic color scheme, or his decorator was frigid and lacked imagination. It was more gray, everywhere. The marble in the sleek bathrooms was gray. The plush carpeting was a pale, icy gray. The furniture all seemed to be gray and white, with darker grays thrown in for contrast. The effect was of being in an ice cave.

But he was proud of his home, almost boyish in his eagerness to show it to her, so she had to acquit the decorator. He truly loved the sterile atmosphere that surrounded him. She made appropriate noises of admiration, wondering why he cared what she thought. She was a butler, not a prospective buyer.

She was glad she had been up front with him about it being a temporary position, because she didn't like her accommodations at all. She preferred separate quarters, a small oasis that was hers and gave her a life beyond the job. The room he escorted her to was large and lavishly appointed, like a pricey hotel room. The room was too large, making it seem cavernous. There was a king-size four-poster bed and a sitting area, and the furniture didn't begin to fill up the space. She felt cold just looking at the room. The attached bathroom was sleek, dark gray marble, almost black, with polished chrome faucets and handles. Even the thick towels were dark gray. She hated it on sight.

He was almost pink with excitement. "I'll make us some tea," he said, rubbing his hands together as if he couldn't contain himself. "We can have it while we go over your duties."

She hoped there were a lot of duties, something to keep her busy. A place this large should have a staff; the Judge's house hadn't been half this big, but it had seemed to pulse with life. This stone mausoleum felt empty.

She carried in her suitcases, but didn't start unpacking. He instructed her to park her TrailBlazer in the four-car attached garage, in the empty bay next to a surprisingly nondescript dark blue Ford. The white Jaguar that sat in the bay closest to the house seemed much more Mr. Densmore's type, or the white S(lass Mercedes parked beside it. When she came through into the kitchen-more dark gray marble, and stainless steel appliances-he was just pouring hot tea into two cups sitting side by side.

"There," he said, fussing with the sugar bowl and tiny pitcher of cream as if he were an aged spinster entertaining a suitor. It struck her that he might be lonely, here in this huge house by himself, and that made her uneasy.

She was trained to run establishments, not provide emotional or physical companionship. Over time she and the Judge had developed a close, caring relationship, but the circumstances had been entirely different. Mr. Densmore wasn't just a banker, he owned a bank, and though she didn't know his age, she guessed him to be no older than his early sixties at the most. He was young enough to be going to an office every day; banking was a complicated business, and even with capable management there would still be a lot to oversee, decisions to be made. She knew he socialized, because she had met him at a party. So this sterile, empty home life was discordant, somehow, as if his business life didn't bleed over into his private life-as if he didn't have a private life. During the tour of the house, she hadn't seen a single family photograph or any of the individual touches that marked a home.

She couldn't work here. She hated to leave him in the lurch, but she didn't think she would be; she felt as if there was no real need for her here, or at least not a need she wanted to consider. Exhaustion and desperation had led her to a bad decision, but it wasn't a permanent one.

"There," he said, bringing the tea tray over to the table and setting it down. He placed a cup and saucer before her. "I hope you like it; it's a blend I get from England. The taste is a bit unusual, but I find it's quite addictive."

She sipped the tea; the taste was unusual, but not unpleasant. It was slightly more bitter than she was accustomed to, so she added a thin slice of lemon to adjust the taste.

He was watching her with an eager, expectant expression, so she said, "It's very good."

He beamed. "I knew you'd like it." He picked up his own cup, and she sipped again as she tried to think of the right words.

After a few moments, she realized there were no right words, just honest ones. "Mr. Densmore, I've made a mistake."

He set down his cup, blinking at her. "How so, my dear?"

"I should never have accepted your offer. I deeply appreciate it, but the decision was too hasty and there were several factors I didn't take into account. I can't tell you how very sorry I am, but I won't be able to take the position."

He blinked a little faster. "But you brought your luggage."

"I know. I'm sorry," she repeated. "If I've inconvenienced you in any way, if you've made plans based on my presence, of course I'11 see that through, and I wouldn't feel right, under these circumstances, accepting any salary for doing so. I haven't been thinking clearly, or I would never have made such a hasty decision."

In silence he drank his tea, his head down. Then he sighed. "You mustn't distress yourself; mistakes happen, and you've handled yourself with dignity. But, yes, I have made plans for the coming weekend, so if you wouldn't mind staying until then?"

"Of course not. Is it a party?"

There was a tiny pause. "Yes, you know the sort, reciprocation for the invitations I've received. Catered, of course. About fifty people."

She could handle that. Since this was already late on Wednesday afternoon, there should be a fair amount of work to keep her busy, getting ready for a party on such short notice. She only hoped he had a regular caterer who would accommodate him, even if it meant bringing in extra staff. If he didn't, she would have to move heaven and earth both to find a caterer at this late date.

"I'll take care of everything," she said.

He sighed. "I really wish things could have worked out differently."

Chapter 28

HE WAS VERY DISPLEASED WITH SARAH, THOUGH HE supposed he should make allowances for the upset she had suffered, part of which was his fault. He simply hadn't expected her to be so . . . flighty, though perhaps that was the wrong word. Indecisive. Yes, that was a better description.

He couldn't really be angry with her, because it was so obvious she had suffered over the past day and a half, but he could definitely be displeased. Why, how could she even think of leaving here? Couldn't she see how perfect his house was for her, a fit, wonderful setting for her own crisp perfection? She wouldn't be leaving, of course; he couldn't allow that. He had fantasized about her taking care of him, but it was obvious that, for the time being at least, he would have to take care of her.

Hmm. That must be what was wrong. Sarah wasn't herself. She was very pale, and the serene glow that had first attracted him was gone. He would keep her here and take care of her, and when she felt better, she would be more rational.

Luckily he had planned for all exigencies. No, not luck at all: careful planning and attention to detail. That was the key to suc- cess, whether it was in business or in personal matters. He hadn't thought it likely Sarah would be unhappy here, but he had allowed for that remote possibility, and as a result he was now capable of handling it. If he had made any oversight, it was that he hadn't predicted this after seeing yesterday how obviously distraught she was. Soon she would feel much better, and there would be no more foolish talk about leaving.

The printout from the phone company showed three calls to the Lankfords from that pay phone in the Galleria-on Sunday night. There had been a fourth call on Monday night, at roughly the same time as the murders. It was impossible to pinpoint a time of death without a witness; all they could get was a time frame. But it looked as if the killer had intended to go to the Lankfords' house on Sunday night. According to the youngest Lankford daughter, Merrill, who was in college in Tuscaloosa, her parents had driven down to have dinner with her that night and stayed until almost eleven. That had extended their lives by twenty-four hours, and given their daughter one last opportunity to see them.

Cahill wished to hell they'd had this printout on Tuesday, because Sarah couldn't possibly have made those phone calls; she'd been with him every minute Sunday. He wished a lot of things, number one of which was that he'd never met his ex-wife and let her fuck with his mind. That was the final analysis: he'd let his experience with her affect him. No more. No matter what happened now, he would focus on the person concerned, and not filter everything through his memory of Shannon. He'd been emotionally free of her for two years, but for the first time he felt mentally free. She had no influence on him now.

Those multiple phone calls opened up an avenue of opportunity that hadn't existed before. He'd gone back to the shop in the mall that had the camera with the best angle, and got the tape for Sunday and Monday nights. The angles were still piss-poor and none of the images were good, but it was the same man. Same hair, same body build, same style of dress.

That was the bastard. That was the killer. There was no doubt in his mind now, or in anyone else's in the department.

The problem was, no one seemed to recognize him. Granted, the stills taken from the tape and enlarged were poor quality, grainy, and never really showed his face. But you could get an impression of him, and still no one had said, "Hey, he reminds me of so-and-so." The police needed a break, a stroke of fate, a miracle. They needed someone with an artist's eye who would note the line of the jaw, the way the ear was set, and make the connection to a live human being.

Mrs. Wanetta didn't recognize the man, but she was so tranquilized she might not have known her own mother. None of their three grown children found anything familiar about him, so that eliminated the possibility of his being a friend of the family; same thing with the Lankford daughters. It had to be a business connection, but again, none of Jacob Wanetta's employees recognized the man in the photos.

Somewhere, someone had to know this bastard.

Leif Strickland, the department's resident electronic genius, stuck his head in the door. His eyes were wide with excitement, his hair sticking up where he'd run his hands through it. "Hey, Doc, come listen. I think I've got the son of a bitch on tape!"

Everyone within hearing distance quickly crammed into his electronic lair. "This is from the Lankford answering machine," Leif said. All answering machine tapes were seized as a matter of course; if the machines were digital, the whole thing was taken.

"Don't tell me he left a message," Cahill said.

"No, not quite. See, the phone Mrs. Lankford was trying to use had one of those buttons for instant record, you know, like if who you're talking to starts threatening to kill you, you can, like, press this little button and bingo, it records on your answering machine. Now, she probably wasn't trying to record anything, she was trying to call for help, but she was nervous, right? She's grabbing at the phone, punching buttons she doesn't mean to punch. I listened to all the messages, but there was this one space with a funny noise on it. Not . . . I don't know, it just sounded funny. So I isolated it and ran it through some enhancement programs, and-"

"For God's sake, we don't need to know how," Cahill interrupted. "Let's listen to it."

Leif gave him the wounded look of a true techie dealing with philistines who didn't appreciate the beauty of electronics. "Okay, here it is. It's not very plain, I need to enhance it some more, eliminate static-" He broke off as Cahill glared at him, and silently punched a button.

Static, fumbling, the harsh rasp of panicked breathing. Then there was a soft sound, and a tiny whoosh and pop.

'What was that?"

"The sound at the last was the shot being fired," Leif said matter-of-factly. "Silencer. But listen to it again, listen to what comes right before that."

They all listened again, and to Cahill it sounded like a voice.

"He said something. The bastard said something. What was it? Can you isolate it?"

"I'll work on it. Listen again, and you can make out the words."

There wasn't another sound in the room, not even breathing, as he replayed the tape one more time.

How soft the voice was, how gentle. Cahill narrowed his eyes to slits, concentrating. "Something 'girl.'"

"Give the man a prize!" Leif crowed. "It's 'bad girl."' He played the tape again, and now that they all knew what they were listening for, it was understandable, and chilling.

"Bad girl." Almost an admonishing tone, tenderly scolding. Then the pop of the silenced bullet, and nothing else.

They had an audible record of Merilyn Lankford's murder. If they could get an ID-when they got an ID-they'd be able to match voiceprints and put him at the scene.

"Bingo," Leif said cheerfully.

"My dear, if you don't mind my saying so, you look as if you're at the end of your rope," Mr. Densmore said gently. "You've been through an extraordinarily difficult experience. Lightning won't strike if you sit down and have another cup of tea, will it? Tea is a wonderful restorative. I'll brew a fresh pot," he offered.

She needed something to eat more than she needed tea, Sarah realized belatedly, trying to think when she had last eaten anything. It had to have been the soup she'd had with Mr. Densmore late yesterday afternoon, making it more than twentyfour hours since she'd had a meal.

She had just served his dinner. Mr. Densmore's cook came in at three and prepared his evening meal; she had already come and gone by the time Sarah arrived. Obviously she had prepared only for Mr. Densmore, but that didn't matter. As soon as Sarah had Mr. Densmore fed and his dishes cleared away, she would find something to eat.

He had hovered anxiously near her, making her uneasy, but now she realized he was afraid she might collapse. The thought broke through her depression and made her smile. "Mr. Densmore, has anyone ever told you how sweet you are?"

His eyes widened, and he blushed. "Oh . . . my-well, no."

Sweet and lonely; she felt sorry for him, but not enough to stay in this ghastly house and provide him the companionship he so obviously needed. Still, maybe the caffeine in the tea would give her a boost, keep her going until she had an opportunity to eat.

"Tea sounds wonderful," she said, and he beamed at her.

"Excellent! I know you'll feel a lot better."

He stood up from the table, and Sarah said hastily, "Please, finish your dinner first. I'll put on the tea."

"No, I'll do it. I'm very particular about my tea."

Since his tea appeared to be so important to him and his dinner was a cold one anyway, fresh chicken salad with pecans and red grapes-and because even if she didn't intend to take any pay for her stay here, this was his house and he was still the boss-she stopped protesting.

He went into the kitchen and put the water on to heat, then returned to the dining room and sat down at the enormous chrome-and-glass table to finish his meal. With nothing to do until he finished, Sarah retreated to a corner. She had seldom felt so useless as she did here; she got the impression he didn't expect her to do any actual work, just . . . be there. The respite she craved wasn't here; there wasn't any peace, any calm, just boredom and a vague sense of uneasiness.

She was so tired she could barely stand, and she had developed a raging headache, probably from not eating. It could also be caffeine deprivation, since she hadn't had her coffee that morning; if that was the case, the tea was doubly welcome. She might even have two cups.

He finished just as the kettle in the kitchen began whistling. "Ah! The water's ready," he said, just in case she couldn't hear that piercing noise. He strode into the kitchen, and Sarah busied herself collecting his dishes and carrying them through to rinse and put in the dishwasher.

By the time she finished with that and a few other odds and ends, he was pouring the steeped tea into the cups. '7here!" he said with satisfaction, carrying the tray through to the dining room. She was forced to follow him and, at his insistence, sit at the table.

"Tell me," he said as she sipped the hot, fragrant brew. "How did you decide to become a butler?"

She could talk about her work, she thought with relief. "My father was a colonel in the Marines," she said. "Growing up, I watched the stewards and how they handled all the functions, and it was fascinating. They knew protocol, they handled the guest lists, emergencies, they smoothed over any embarrassing moments . . . they're a marvel in action. I liked the way they were trained to handle anything."

"But obviously you weren't a steward in the military, were you?"

"Oh, no, there's actually a school where you train as a butler." He asked question after question, and she gratefully focused on answering him. Here at last was something her tired mind could latch on to, something that didn't require a lot of thought.

Maybe it was just the giddiness that comes with extreme fatigue, but she began to feel . . . almost tipsy. Her head swam suddenly, and she clutched at the table. 'Wow. Excuse me, Mr. Densmore. I'm dizzy all of a sudden. I haven't eaten today, and I think it's catching up with me."

He looked alarmed. "You haven't eaten? My dear, why didn't you say so? You shouldn't have been standing there waiting on me; you should be taking care of yourself. Here, you sit right there and I'll bring you something. What would you like?"

She blinked at him, owl-like. How could she tell him what she'd like when she didn't know what was available here? Anyway, she wouldn't "like" anything; she would eat because she needed to, but the last thing she had really wanted was-

"Ice cream," she mumbled. The words were alarmingly hard to pronounce.

"Ice cream?" He paused, blinking at her in that way of his. "I don't believe I have any ice cream. Would you like anything else?"

"No," she said, trying to explain. "Not what I want. Last thing I . . ." She lost the thread of what she was saying and stared at him, bewildered. Everything was beginning to slowly rotate around her, and she had the vague, surprising idea that she might be about to faint. She had never fainted before.

He was beginning to move away from her, or seemed as if he was. She couldn't be certain, the way things were whirling. "Wait," she said, trying to stand up, but her legs buckled under her.

He rushed forward and grabbed her before she hit the floor, his grip surprisingly strong. "Don't worry," she heard him say as her vision faded and her ears began to feel as if cotton were stuffed in them. "I'll take care of you."

Chapter 29

THE FIRST THING SHE BECAME AWARE OF WAS A HEADACHE, a literal throbbing inside her skull. Oh, that's right . . . she'd gone to bed with a headache. She was in an uncomfortable position, but she was afraid to move, afraid the least twitch would set the hammers to pounding even harder than they already were. She was queasy, too, and she thought she might vomit. Something was wrong, but the fuzziness in her brain kept her from figuring out what.

She tried to remember . . . something. Anything. For a sickening moment there was nothing there, no sense of place or time, just a horrifying lurch into the unknown. Then the texture of the fabric beneath her made sense, and she knew she was in bed. Yes, that made sense. She had a headache, and she was in bed. She remembered going . . . no, she didn't remember going to bed. The last clear memory was . . . but that eluded her, too, and she stopped fighting for it, letting the darkness and oblivion claim her again.

When next she woke, she thought she must have the flu. What else could account for this overwhelming sense of illness? She was seldom ill, even with the sniffles, but surely only something as serious as the flu could make her feel so sick. For the first time, she understood what people meant when they said they felt too sick to go to a doctor. There was no way she could get to a doctor; one would have to come to her.

Something was tugging on her head. It was a gentle, rhythmic tugging, and instead of making her headache worse, it actually soothed it, as if the sensation dulled her perception of the throbbing.

Her arms ached. She tried to move them and found she couldn't.

Alarm pierced through the fogginess in her brain. She tried again to move her arms, with the same lack of result. "My arms," she whimpered, and her voice sounded awful, so hoarse it was unrecognizable.

"Poor dear," a soft voice murmured. "You'll be all right. There, doesn't this feel good?"

The rhythmic tugging continued, slow and easy, and after a moment she realized someone was brushing her hair.

It did feel good, but she didn't want her hair brushed. She wanted to move her arms. Despite the headache, despite her queasy stomach, she shifted uneasily in the bed and found she couldn't move her legs, either.

Panic, hard and bright, made her eyes flare open. Her vision swam with fuzzy images that didn't quite make sense. There was a man . . . but he wasn't Cahill, and that wasn't possible. Why was a man who wasn't Cahill brushing her hair?

"I'll get you some water," the soft voice crooned. "You'd like that, wouldn't you, dear? Nice, cold water will feel so good on your throat. You've been asleep for such a long time I've been worried about you."

A cool hand slipped behind her neck and lifted her head, and a glass was put against her lips. The cold water hit her mouth in a rush, soaking into parched tissues, loosening her tongue from the roof of her mouth. Her stomach heaved as she swallowed, but thank God she didn't vomit. She swallowed again, then again, before the glass was taken away.

"Not too much, dear. You've been very sick."

She was still very sick if she was paralyzed, but maybe this man didn't know she couldn't move. She closed her eyes, fighting for strength, but, dear God, she didn't have any. She was so weak that she felt almost boneless.

"I'll bring you some soup in a little while. You need to eat something. I didn't realize you hadn't eaten, and I'm afraid I accidentally made you ill."

The softness of the voice clicked, and memory crept back. "Mr. Densmore?"

"Yes, dear, I'm right here."

"I feel so sick," she whispered, opening her eyes and blinking. This time she found her vision had cleared a little, and she could plainly see his face, full of concern.

"I know, and I'm sorry for that."

"I can't move."

"Of course not. I couldn't have you hurting yourself, now could I?"

"H-hurting myself?" She was winning the battle against the fog; with every passing second she felt less confused, more aware of her surroundings. She felt as if she were surfacing from anesthesia, which she remembered well from when she broke her left arm when she was six years old, and she'd been put under general anesthesia when it was set. She'd hated the anesthesia a lot more than she'd hated the cast.

"If you tried to leave," Mr. Densmore explained, but that didn't make any sense.

"I can't. I haven't." Tried to leave? She had tried to get up from the table, and that was the last thing she remembered.

"I know, I know. Don't get upset. Just stay calm, and everything will be all right." The brush moved slowly through her hair. "You have such lovely hair, Sarah. Overall I'm very pleased with you, though your indecisiveness was an unpleasant surprise. Still, you've been through a lot of upset. I'm sure you'll settle down with time."

He wasn't making any sense. Settle down? She frowned, her brow wrinkling, and he smoothed the creases with his fingertip. "Don't frown, you'll wrinkle your pretty skin. I was right about how lovely a ruby would look against your skin. But I've looked all through your things, and I can't find the pendant. Why aren't you wearing it?"

Pendant?

A chill ran through her, and she went very still as an awful suspicion seized her. Her stomach heaved again, but this time with fear.

'Why aren't you wearing the pendant I sent to you?" he asked, sounding a little petulant.

He was the one. He was the stalker, the weirdo whose presence she'd sensed, like a hidden cancer. He'd waited, and seized his chance. She wasn't sick at all, she realized; the bastard had drugged her, and since she hadn't eaten anything in over a day, the drug had hit her hard.

She had to answer him. Don't annoy him, she thought. Don't do anything to make him wary. Think. She needed an excuse that wasn't her fault. Think! "Allergic," she whispered.

The brush paused in its motion. "My dear, I'm so sorry," he said contritely. "I had no idea. Of course you shouldn't wear something that will give you a rash. But where is it? Perhaps you could put it on for just a moment, so I could see you wearing it."

"Jewelry box," she whispered. "Could I have more water?"

"Of course, dear, since the first has stayed down." He lifted her head and held the glass to her lips again, and she gulped as much as she could. "There," he said as he let her head rest on the pillow again. 'Where's your jewelry box?"

"At the bungalow. Lankford estate. Crime scene . . . police have it sealed. I can't get in."

He made an exasperated noise. "I should have realized. Don't worry, dear, I'll take care of collecting the rest of your things. You'll feel so much more comfortable with your own possessions around you."

Sarah tried once again to move her arms, and this time she felt something wrapped around her wrists. The truth occurred to her in a sickening rush: she was tied to the bed. She fought the panic that threatened to overwhelm her. She couldn't give in to it, she had to think, she had to concentrate. If she panicked she was helpless, but if she kept her wits, she might outsmart him.

She had one big advantage: she knew he was dangerous, but he didn't know she was.

Cahill. He knew she was here. Sooner or later he would call and want to see her, talk to her. All she had to do was keep things calm and under control until then. She didn't want to do anything to agitate Densmore, prod him into violence. He was a stalker, obsessed with her; he was happy now because she was here, under his control. So long as he believed that, she was safe. She hoped she was safe. But if he thought she was trying to escape from him, he was likely to explode into violence. If that happened, if she couldn't make a clean escape, then she had to make certain she was ready to handle him.

But there was no telling how long it would take Cahill to try to contact her. He knew she was here, but all the cops were working almost around the clock trying to find the killer. He would try her cell phone first, and if she didn't answer, he would try again later. "Later," however, could be days later.

No, Cahill wouldn't wait that long. He was too tenacious.

But in the meantime she had to help herself. The first order of business was to convince Densmore to untie her.

She made her voice weaker than it truly was. If he wanted her sweet and helpless, she'd give him sweet and helpless, at least until she could kick his ass. "Mr. Densmore?"

"Yes, dear?"

"I . . . I'm so embarrassed to say this."

"You don't have to be embarrassed about anything. I'm here to take care of you."

"I need to use the bathroom," she whispered, and she had the benefit of that being so true she was on the verge of really embarrassing herself. Add in the fact that she was having her menstrual period, and the situation was not good.

"Dear me. That does present a problem."

"I-I think I'm paralyzed," she said, and let her voice wobble. It was better that he thought she was more incapacitated than she really was. Not that she would be able to fight or run even if she was untied, at this point, but she wanted him to think she was recovering very slowly.

"Of course you aren't," he exclaimed, his voice warm with sympathy. "I just used restraints to keep you from harming yourself. Now, let me see, how can we work this?"

She squirmed a little; her distress was becoming so acute that it was no problem to let a tear leak out of her eye. She needed to see if she could walk, or if too much of the drug he'd given her was still in her system.

"Yes, that will work, " he murmured to himself, and folded back the covers. To her immense relief she saw that she was still wearing her clothes; he'd removed her shoes, but that was all. He worked diligently, untying her ankles and then refashioning the thin, woven nylon restraints into a sort of hobble, with an extra length attached to it and held in his hand. If she could walk at all, it would be in very short steps, and if she tried anything, all he had to do was jerk the rope in his hand and she'd fall flat on her face.

She was truly crying by the time he got all that worked out and began releasing her hands.

"I'm sorry, I know you have to be miserable," he crooned. "Just a few more minutes, and I'll help you to the bathroom."

"Please hurry," she croaked, squeezing her eyes shut.

At last he was helping her to sit up, and she saw immediately that even if she were untied, she wouldn't be able to accomplish much. Better to do nothing to arouse his suspicions this time, and wait until she was in better shape. She had to remember that he was stronger than he looked, if he'd managed to get her upstairs all by himself. Unconscious people, since they were totally limp, were a bitch to move.

She was so woozy that she could barely sit up; in fact, she couldn't, not without help, and she leaned heavily into him. It turned her stomach to touch him, but she had to concentrate on allaying his suspicions, and if that meant accepting his help, she'd grit her teeth and do it.

He got her on her feet. Her knees immediately buckled, and he was supporting her entire weight. She clung to him as he half walked, half dragged her, to the big gray marble bathroom that was part of her quarters.

All of her toiletries were set out on the vanity; since he'd unpacked for her, she hoped her personal supplies were in the vanity drawers. Yes, there was the bag she had packed everything in, sitting on a shelf; even if he'd left the tampons in the bag, she could get to them.

He eased her over to the toilet, and stood there a moment looking uncomfortable. "Er . . . do you need any help?"

She braced her hand against the wall, panting. "I think I can manage." He should feel safe leaving her in here; there was a window, but it was glass block; she couldn't see out, no one could see in, and it didn't open. Even if she could break it out, the room he'd given her was on the second floor; the first floor in this house, she'd noticed, had what appeared to be sixteen-foot ceilings, so the drop would be much higher than from the ordinary second-story window.

She'd risk it, though, if that turned out to be her only chance.

He looked around, and she could see him mentally cataloging the contents of the room to see if there was anything she could use as a weapon or to escape. He was very careful, and he didn't trust her. She leaned heavily against the wall, underscoring her weakness.

"All right," he finally said. "I'll be right outside if you need me. "

"Could you leave the door open a little?" she asked. "Please? So you can hear me in case I fall." Talk about reverse psychology, asking him to do the very thing he intended to do anyway; perhaps that would convince him she wasn't making a break for it.

He looked pleased and gave her his shy smile as he left the bathroom and pulled the door half-closed. That was all the privacy she was going to get, but at this point she didn't give a damn.

The relief was almost painful, and those damn weak tears leaked down her face again. She found the box of tampons in the bottom vanity drawer and took care of that problem, too. Feeling much better and not nearly as desperate, but still very weak, she hobbled to the sink and leaned against it while she wet a washcloth and washed her face and private areas. If he peeped, then he peeped; she didn't give a damn. She needed to freshen up more than she needed to worry about her modesty.

She drank more water, greedily gulping it down, then made her slow and wobbly way to the door. "Please," she said weakly. "Help me back to bed."

Densmore rushed to her side. "Lean on me," he said tenderly. "Poor dear." He supported her on the trek back to the bed and helped her lie down again. She was trembling, and it wasn't a pretense; her legs felt as if they wouldn't have supported her another minute. He caressed her cheek, smoothed her hair back from her face, then began fastening the restraints around her arms and ankles. She had to bite her lip when he touched her, but she didn't protest, just lay limply, her eyes closed. Cahill did that sometimes, pushing back her hair and stroking her cheek, and she hated that Densmore had so closely mirrored the action. "I'll be right back with some food," he murmured, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

There was nothing she could do, trussed as she was, so she didn't even tug against the nylon restraints. She wouldn't put it past the bastard to have this place wired for both video and audio, and if he was watching her on camera, she didn't intend to do anything that would put him on alert.

That brief excursion had exhausted her small store of strength. She took a deep breath and let herself sink into the waiting darkness. She would use the darkness this time, to get stronger.

"Sarah?"

The voice seemed to come from far away, but she was instantly alert, instantly aware. She lay still, letting herself appear to awake gradually.

"Sarah, wake up. I have soup."

She shifted restlessly and rolled her head to the side. "Wha-?"

"You need to eat. Wake, up, dear."

She opened her eyes as he set a tray on the bedside table. "Good, good," he said, smiling at her. "Let's see, what would be the best way to do this? I think I should feed you, don't you? I'11 put another pillow behind you to raise your head more, and here's a towel to catch any spills."

He suited actions to words, lifting her head and stuffing an extra pillow behind her head and shoulders, raising her to a more reclining position, then draping a towel over her chest and tucking it under her chin.

"This is a nice chicken soup," he said, and chuckled to himself. "Could I have made a more cliched choice? But it is very good, and hearty. You don't need red meat for a hearty soup or stew, though a lot of people seem to think so. I don't eat red meat, just chicken, turkey, and fish."

In that case, considering how he'd turned out, he should beat a path to Milo's and hope he could be saved, she thought sarcastically as he brought the spoon to her lips and she obediently opened them, like a child. Sarcasm felt good; outwardly she had to be meek, but inside she was still fierce, still herself.

The soup was good, though, and she forced herself to eat every bite. She had to concentrate on recovering as fast as possible; she would need her strength.

After she had finished the soup, she blinked drowsily at him. "Thank you," she murmured. "That was good." She yawned. "Excuse me. I'm still so sleepy."

"Of course." He patted her lips with a napkin and removed the towel from under her chin. "I'll leave you alone and let you rest, but I'll check back occasionally to see if you need anything. I have a surprise for you," he said slyly.

"A surprise?"

"It'll be waiting for you when you wake up."

That assurance wasn't conducive to sleep, and after he left, she carefully examined the ceiling and walls, looking for anything that could possibly be a camera. Without looking closer it was impossible to tell, so she had to go on the assumption that she was being watched. She didn't overtly tug on her restraints, but she began tensing and releasing her muscles, starting in her legs and working up. She had to fight off the lingering effects of whatever drug he'd given her, and keep her circulation going and her muscles limber. If an opportunity for escape presented itself, she had to be ready to take it.

Why in hell wasn't Sarah answering her cell phone? Cahill had called her repeatedly, unwilling to stay out of touch for very long with matters so tenuous between them. Yes, they'd made love and she'd agreed to give him some time, a chance to see if they could work things out, but the temporary nature of the agreement nagged at him. He didn't want temporary; he wanted permanent.

She had gone to Densmore's house late yesterday afternoon. Okay, he could understand her not answering her cell phone while she was getting settled in, but the phone had been on and when she checked it, she would see that she'd had some calls. She should have called him back by now. Today, the phone hadn't been on; he'd been getting the "customer not in service" message.

Densmore's phone number was unlisted, but if you had the right software and search engine, that didn't matter. Cahill pulled up the information and called the estate, only to get an answering machine that answered in a computerized voice. He left a simple message: Call Detective Cahill at the Mountain Brook Police Department. It wasn't personal, and it was the type of message that people tended to deliver immediately. Still she hadn't called.

A frightened public was calling in tips and leads that led nowhere, but every one of them had to be checked out, and he literally didn't have time to eat. He was frustrated enough in his efforts to contact Sarah, though, that he made time to actually drive by the estate like a lovesick teenager, to see if he could spot her SW parked there. The wrought-iron gates were securely shut, and he couldn't see any type of vehicle.

The damn place looked like a fortress, anyway, with that high stone wall surrounding it. The wall by itself had to have cost a fortune, and from what he could see, it was wired like Fort Knox. Mr. Densmore evidently valued his privacy.

He called the estate number and left another message, this time letting his impatience show, and leaving the impression that Miss Stevens should get in touch with the department, for her own good. That should get some response, if anyone at all was inside the house.

His phone rang a short time later and he snatched it up. "Cahill."

"Detective Cahill." It was a man's voice, kind of soft, like you'd expect a priest's to be, but full of authority, too. "This is Trevor Densmore. You've left two messages for Miss Stevens and it sounded imperative that she contact you. I'm sorry, but Miss Stevens is ill, and is unable to talk."

"Ill?" Cahill asked sharply, alarm prickling his spine. "In what way?"

"Laryngitis." Densmore chuckled. "I meant it literally that she's unable to talk. Perhaps in a few days she'll be able to call."

The son of a bitch disconnected before Cahill could say anything else. Damn it! He wanted to see her, but the estate was walled and gated; he couldn't enter without either an invitation or a search warrant, neither of which was likely to be forthcoming.

Sarah was sick? She'd told him that she almost never even caught a cold, so for her to suddenly catch some bug seemed ironic. She'd been under a lot of stress, and that played hell with the immune system, but . . . that fast? Literally the next day? Bullshit. She might be avoiding him, though.

No, that wasn't Sarah, either. Sarah didn't avoid; she faced things head-on. Even if she did have laryngitis, she'd have gotten on the phone and croaked a reply to him.

He had the feeling that guy Densmore was lying. He didn't know the man and Sarah seemed to like him, or at least appreciate his offer, but Cahill's gut said something was wrong. Why would Densmore lie? There was no reason to, which made Cahill feel even more uneasy. But it wasn't that there was no reason for lying; it was just that Cahill didn't know the reason.

Well, one way or another, if Sarah didn't get in touch with him soon, he was going to see her if he had to climb over the damn wall. He'd probably get arrested for trespassing, but at least he'd know whether or not she was okay.

When Sarah woke again, her head was still pounding, worse than it had been when she went to sleep. That awful foggy feeling was back, but this time she didn't have to wonder what was wrong. She knew; Densmore had drugged her again. Whatever it was had to have been in the soup.

But why drug her again? He had her tied, and helpless.

She lay very still, fighting the grogginess, willing herself to throw off the effects of the drug. She mustn't let this happen again.

She couldn't afford to lose any more strength by refusing to eat or drink, but she couldn't escape if she was unconscious all the time, either.

She was too cool, and she shifted uncomfortably but, with her hands tied, was unable to pull the covers up around her shoulders. She could feel air moving on her bare skin-

Her mind seized, paralyzed by the awful realization. Densmore had removed her clothes. She was naked.

Chapter 30

"SURPRISE!" HIS VOICE WAS GAY, PRACTICALLY BUBBLING with good humor. "I know you're awake, I didn't give you nearly as much this time. Stop playing possum and open those pretty eyes. "

Filled with a horror she could barely even begin to comprehend, Sarah opened her eyes and stared at him. Night pressed against the windows, telling her hours had passed, hours in which she'd been unconscious and totally at his mercy. All thoughts of placating him, of pretending to go along with him, had utterly vanished. "What have you done to me'" she asked hoarsely.

He was sitting beside her on the bed, fully clothed. He blinked at her. "Done? Why, nothing. Why do you ask?"

"My clothes-"

"Oh, that. They were dirty. My goodness, this was the second day you'd worn them, plus you slept in them. Pulling them off . . . let's just say the logistics were complicated, so I cut them off. They were ruined, anyway."

She held her horror, her gut-wrenching fear, at bay and stared down the length of her naked body. The covers were all thrown back, exposing her. But her legs were still together, still tied so she couldn't move them. She hadn't thought she would ever be grateful she was restrained in such a manner, but in this case . . .

She took several heaving breaths, fighting free of the nightmare that had begun sucking her down. "Ruined?" she managed to gasp.

He made a face, and gestured toward her groin. "You know. You really should have told me you were in the flowers. I wouldn't have allowed myself to become so excited. It was a disappointment to have to wait, but I made do."

In the flowers . . . ? He must mean because she was menstruating. If that had put him off, she had never before been so grateful for her cycle. But that also meant he had looked at her, and she wanted to weep with humiliation. She didn't, she fought off the urge, fiercely reclaiming her control. Then she looked down at herself again; she saw the wet, sticky drops on her stomach, splashed across her thighs, and she almost vomited.

She forgot about control, her mind going blank and her body arching, madly fighting the restraints in her need to get his unspeakable filth off her body. "Get it off!" she shrieked. "How dare you! How dare you!"

He actually looked bewildered. 'What's wrong? What is it?"

"You jerked off on me, you miserable bastard!" She began to sob, futilely straining to break the nylon cords. "Wash . . . it . . .off!" She screamed the last word at him.

"Don't take that tone with me, young lady," he said sharply.

"You touched me!" She was roaring in her fury, her utter outrage. "You looked at me! You had no right!"

"Stop that. Stop it right now. I understand your modesty, but surely you realize your current state has only delayed the natural progression of our relationship. I knew the moment I saw you that you were meant for me. You belong here, with me. We'll be so happy, my dear. You'll see. I'll give you anything you want; I'll treat you like a queen. Look, I've already given you this ring. The stone needs to be reset, but the color and shape are perfect for you. I knew as soon as I saw it that this stone was too good for that tacky woman. I'll take it off in just a minute because I know you're allergic to jewelry, but I wanted you to see it first. When I have it reset, I'll have the band lined with something that's hypoallergenic, so you can wear it. " He lifted her left hand as far from the mattress as he could, given the bonds around her wrists. "See. Isn't it gorgeous?"

She stared at the ring he'd slipped on her finger, at the huge yellow diamond surrounded by smaller white diamonds. She knew that ring. She had marveled at the size of the center stone every time she had seen it, on Merilyn Lankford's finger.

The bottom dropped out of her stomach in a sickening rush, as she looked into the smiling face of a killer.

Cahill checked his watch, scowling. It was getting late, almost time for the mall to close, and he was damn tired of showing these photographs to tired shoppers and shop employees. Something was nagging at him, something he couldn't quite place. He'd been without sleep more hours than he cared to count, reminding him of certain missions he'd been on in the Army, and all he wanted was a chance to sit down somewhere quiet and think. There was something Densmore had said that bothered him, but he'd gone over the conversation again and again in his mind, and nothing had clicked. Still, it was there. He knew it-whatever "it" was.

Thursday was ticking to a close. Sarah had been at the Densmore estate only a little more than twenty-four hours-okay, closer to thirty hours, not that he was counting-but it felt as if days had passed since he'd talked to her, and the lack of contact was gnawing at him. Maybe that, rather than anything Densmore had actually said, was what bothered him. He was worried about her, he knew she was there, so he naturally associated his uneasiness with Densmore. Yeah, yeah, he knew the psychology. Too bad he didn't believe it.

He stopped a well-preserved woman, probably in her sixties, with that put-together look that shouted "money."

"Excuse me, ma'am, but we're trying to locate this man. Do you recognize him?"

He'd try calling Sarah one more time, he thought. If he didn't get to talk to her, he would present himself at the gate and demand to be let in. He could say he had a warrant for her arrest. Something.

The woman took the photograph and briefly studied it, then handed it back to Cahill. 'Why, yes, I do," she said coolly. "I believe it's my banker."

"Thank you," Cahill said automatically, biting back what he really wanted to say. Another William Teller fan. Ha-ha. He was too tired for this shit-'Wait a minute. What did you say?"

Her eyebrows slightly lifted to suggest she was less than impressed with his attitude in particular and himself in general; she repeated, "I believe that's my banker. He has a certain distinction, a way of carrying himself. And of course there's the hair."

Cahill wasn't tired anymore. Adrenaline was surging through his system. 'What's his name?"

"Trevor Densmore. He owns-"

Cahill didn't wait to hear what Trevor Densmore owned. He was running for the exit, his heart pounding in sheer terror as he dialed Wester. He burst into the night air and sprinted across the parking lot to the city Impala he was driving.

"I've got an ID," he barked into the phone when Wester answered. "Trevor Densmore. He's a banker. He has Sarah, God damn it. He has Sarah." He unlocked the car and got in, starting the motor and putting the transmission in drive before he had the door closed. The tires squealed on the asphalt as the car rocketed across the lot toward the exit.

'What do you mean, 'he has Sarah'?" Wester snapped.

"He hired her. She went to the estate yesterday afternoon, and I haven't been able to get in touch with her since. I'm on my way over there now."

"Doc, don't you go off half-cocked, God damn it! We have to do this right. I'll get a search warrant-"

"I talked to him on the phone this afternoon," Cahill snarled. "It's the same voice that's on the Lankford tape. I knew something was wrong, something bothered me about him, but I didn't fucking put it together." When he reached Highway 31, the light was red. He turned on his lights and bulled through the intersection, turning left toward I-459. He hit the on-ramp topping sixty miles an hour.

Wester was still talking when Cahill tossed the phone aside. If he got busted, he got busted. Nothing and no one was keeping him on the outside of that gray wall.

It all made sense now, the why that had eluded them and kept all the pieces from falling into place. The killings hadn't been about business, or revenge, or money. They had been about Sarah. He remembered her calling him weeks ago, before the first killing, telling him she'd received an anonymous gift in the mail. That was the bastard's first contact, the first sign of his obsession. Cahill hadn't given it much thought since then because that had been the only contact; there hadn't been any letters or phone calls that would normally signal a stalker's escalating obsession.

But Sarah had known, had sensed something was seriously wrong. She'd been trying to lure her unknown admirer into the open. When Judge Roberts was killed, her first thought was that her so-called stalker had done it.

And she'd been right.

First he'd tried to hire her away from the Judge. When that didn't work, he eliminated the obstacle and once more offered her a job. When she went to work for the Lankfords, he moved swiftly and took them out of the picture, making her once more available. This time there wouldn't be a small rush of job offers, the way there had been before; after all, who wanted to hire someone who appeared to be the kiss of death and was under suspicion herself for the murders? Trevor Densmore did, that's who. He wasn't worried about the murders. He had no reason to be.

All he wanted was Sarah. When the media was running wild after the Lankfords had been killed, saying Sarah had been ar- rested, Densmore had solved that little problem by immediately going out and killing someone else to prove she couldn't possibly be the killer. As soon as she was released, he made his move, and this time it had worked.

He had Sarah. Son of a bitch, he had Sarah.

There was an expression on his face, in his eyes, that made her shudder. He looked at her naked body and reached out, his hand sliding over her breast. Sarah said jerkily, "I can't wear the ring. Please take it off. It's already itching."

He stopped, lifting his hand as he blinked at her. "Of course! I'm so sorry; I merely wanted you to see it. I should have realized how sensitive your skin is." He slipped the ring off her finger and put it in his pocket. His eyes went dreamy again. "You're so perfect," he crooned, reaching out to touch her breast again, and Sarah cringed.

She had to stop him. She couldn't bear it if he kept touching her. She would rather he killed her than touch her.

Stalkers did that, when the object of their obsession didn't measure up to the fantasy they had built up in their minds. The obsession turned to rage and they struck out, destroying the person who had so painfully failed them by not adhering to the fiction.

She would drive him to that rage before she'd let him rape her. 13ut he wasn't at that stage yet; because of her menses, she had a little time. She had no idea how long she could hold him off, but she would do it as long as possible. She knew Cahill; he would be knocking on the gate before long. It might be tomorrow morning, it might be tomorrow night, but he would be there. If she couldn't escape, then all she had to do was hold out, and keep Densmore at bay.

"I don't like to be touched," she said, shrinking away from his fingers as they tweaked her nipple. She made her voice innocent and distressed, the way he seemed to like.

He did that blinking thing again, really fast several times in a row, as if he were connecting with reality. He looked confused. "But . . . it's all right when I touch you. We're supposed to be together."

"I don't like being touched," she repeated. "It hurts. It hurts my skin."

He drew back, staring at her in consternation. "Oh, dear. I hadn't realized your skin is so sensitive. That's a problem I hadn't considered. But you aren't allergic to being touched; it's more of an acute sensitivity to being touched. Am I right? I'll be very gentle, my dear, and you'll gradually become accustomed to-"

Oh, God. She clenched her teeth. "No," she said, keeping her voice soft. "I'm sorry. It's a medical condition; it won't go away."

"A medical condition?" He had been reaching out to her again, but he paused, the dreaminess in his eyes morphing into something hard and ugly. "I've never heard of such a thing."

"You're right, it's an acute sensitivity. My nerve endings are permanently inflamed. I can tolerate clothing, if it's made from certain material, but I have to take pain medication even for that-" She was babbling and she didn't care if it made sense or not, so long as he believed it enough not to touch her again. "-and anti-inflammatories. I'm out of my anti-inflammatory medication. With everything that happened I was so upset I forgot to get my prescription refilled. Every time you touch me it feels as if you're burning me with a hot iron."

"Well, my word." That seemed to have stymied him. If he'd had a firmer grip on reality, it would never have worked, but he was so caught up in his fantasy world that he couldn't concentrate on anything else. "I certainly don't want to do anything that causes you pain." He smiled at her. "Unless you need to be punished, of course. But you'll never do anything to make me angry, will you? You'll iron my newspaper and prepare my breakfast for me, just the way you did for that old goat, Lowell Roberts."

"If you like," she managed, hurting inside at the thought of the poor Judge, of the Lankfords, and that other man this lunatic had killed.

"You'll take care of me," he crooned. "And I'll take care of you." He leaned down and pressed his mouth to her forehead.

Sarah gagged, and her control broke. "Don't touch me!" she screamed.

Like lightning his hand was on her throat, pressing hard, and he bent over so his face was close to hers. He was livid with rage. "Do not ever speak to me that way again," he ground out.

He was cutting off her air. She gagged again, choking, frantically trying to think what to do. She'd pushed him too far; she had to hold him off but keep him as calm as possible until Cahill could get here. Surely he would be here soon. She could make it to morning. "I'm . . . sorry!" she managed to gasp. "Hurts."

His face was still red as he released her throat and stood. Desperately she sucked in deep breaths, fighting the darkness that had begun to edge her vision.

"You have to learn," he hissed, dragging his belt from his pant loops. "You must be disciplined until you learn proper behavior. You . . . do . . . not . . . speak to me . . . that way."

Sarah choked back another scream and tried to roll away as the belt whistled down.

Those fucking gates had to be twelve feet high; the wall was at least ten. He thought about ramming the gates with the car, but that would set off an alarm and warn the bastard he was coming. Cahill pulled the car as close to the wall as he could get it, then climbed on top of it. Standing on the roof of the car, he jumped and caught the top of the wall.

Pain seared his hands. The top of the wall was embedded with glass, or barbed wire. Something. He dropped back, took off his jacket, and tossed it so it draped over the wall. He jumped again, hoping the jacket would snag and stay in place instead of sliding to the ground. It did. He braced his bleeding hands on the jacket and hoisted himself the rest of the way up and over, landing on the grass and rolling. He came to his feet with coiled balance, and took his pistol from its holster. Then he set out across the wide expanse of lawn, toward the gray stone mansion that loomed in the night like a hulking beast.

A shrill beeping split the air. Densmore halted the belt in mid-swing, his head coming up. "I do believe we have company," he said mildly. "I wonder who it could possibly be. Excuse me, my dear."

Sarah choked, sobbing, as the door closed behind him. He'd wielded the belt with savage fury, raising bloody, stinging welts all along her back and sides. She'd managed to roll over, to protect her breasts and belly, but not before he'd hit her across the stomach at least twice. She was crying so hard she couldn't catch her breath, but as soon as the door closed she flipped onto her back.

One of the restraints holding her hands had come loose. She would never have been able to roll over if it hadn't, but her panicked lunge had pulled it free from the bed frame where he'd secured it. In his rage, Densmore hadn't noticed.

Her right hand was free, but the way the restraints were looped and crossed to restrict movement, she needed to reach under the bed to free her left hand-and with her legs bound she didn't have enough range of movement to do so. Ignoring the searing pain in her back, she jerked frantically against the nylon cord, hoping the one around her left hand would give, too.

It didn't.

There was a glass of water sitting on the bedside table. She grabbed the glass and slammed it against the edge of the table. Water splashed the bed, her bare flesh, and the fine crystal shattered, sending shards of glass flying. She was left clutching most of the base of the glass, her hand bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts. Frantically she began slicing at the nylon cords, not caring if she sliced skin, too. Her left hand jerked free, and she turned her attention to the cords binding her ankles.

When she was free, she bounded to her feet; her knees promptly gave way and she sprawled on the carpet. Cursing, sobbing, she stood again, and staggered toward the door. By the time she reached the hall, she was running.

That's when the first shot was fired. Then another.

Cahill.

Cahill was beyond caring about his job, about his own possible stay behind bars; by the time he reached the house, his only thought was of getting to Sarah. He didn't politely ring the doorbell, he put two forty-caliber bullets in the dead-bolt lock, then kicked the door open. He went in low, rolling across the floor, but the bastard was waiting for him, hidden in the darkness of the hallway.

The first shot barely missed Cahill's head. He fired at the muzzle flash, then the second shot caught him high on the chest, with a kick like a mule. He was wearing his body armor, but the impact knocked his breath out and he sprawled across the floor, unconscious.

"Cahill," she whispered, standing at the top of the stairs and staring down at the wide expanse of the foyer, and Cahill's body lying limp and unmoving on the granite floor.

She went numb. This wasn't happening. Not Cahill. The bastard couldn't have taken Cahill from her, too.

She swayed, reaching out, and half stumbled against a gray metal floor lamp standing sentry beside a black enameled table.

Not Cahill.

The rage was a red tidal wave, rising in one massive surge and seizing her in its grip. She wasn't aware of pulling the floor lamp free from the plug. She wasn't aware of moving. She went down the stairs with a steady, purposeful stride, gaining speed as she went.

"Densmore. " That wasn't her voice. It sounded like something from The Exorcist, deep and raw. She reached the bottom of the stairs. "You bastard, where are you ?"

There was movement to her right, in the shadows. She swung in that direction and saw Densmore materializing from the darkness into the dim light, like a phantom, a demon. His face was twisted with fury. "I told you not to speak to me that way," he hissed, his hand rising.

She didn't care. The rage suffusing her made the heavy floor lamp feel like nothing in her hands as she stepped forward, into the pistol, into the bullet, swinging the lamp like a baseball bat. If Cahill was dead, she simply didn't care anymore what happened. The explosion of the shot was deafening in the cavernous foyer, a blast of hot wind along her left side just as she slammed the base of the floor lamp into Densmore's skull. He crashed backward into the wall, a fine spray of blood flying from his head, his chest, and she swung the lamp again, and again, screaming wordlessly.

"Sarah! Sarah!"

The bellow finally pierced her consciousness. The lamp was suddenly too heavy to hold, and dropped from her nerveless fingers. Slowly, numbly, she turned as Cahill struggled to stand. He was holding a hand to his chest and wheezing, but she didn't see any blood.

"Easy, sweetheart," he said. "The son of a bitch can't die more than once."

E P I L 0 G U E

CAHILL SLUNG HIS JACKET OVER HIS SHOULDER AS HE entered the house. He was in a good mood; the review board had ruled the shooting a righteous one, and he was no longer on administrative leave. He'd missed doing his job, though for the first week he'd been glad enough to take it easy; even through body armor, a slug gave the body a beating and left a hell of a bruise. At first he thought it had cracked a couple of ribs, too, but they were just bruised-as if there were any 'just" to it. He'd felt as if the mule had not only kicked him, it had then turned around and stomped on him.

He and Sarah had recuperated together. He was fine, and Sarah's mother had called to let her know that her father had indeed had a bad case of heartburn, so she didn't have that to worry about. And physically Sarah was fine. She'd been living with him since they were released from the hospital early the next morning, after he'd been x-rayed and poked, and the cuts on his hands sutured. His wounds were simple in nature. Sarah though-

On the surface, she wasn't badly hurt. Some cuts on her hand, one requiring four stitches, but the others had been minor. The welts that striped her smooth skin and left raw, bleeding patches had been treated the way you'd treat a skinned knee, with cleaning and an antibiotic ointment over the worst patches. No matter how long he lived, he'd never forget the sight of her coming down those stairs, steady and unstoppable, naked and so covered with blood his heartbeat had faltered, but her eyes had glittered like black fire in her white face. She'd been carrying that heavy floor lamp in one hand, roaring for Densmore, and when the bastard started to shoot her, she hadn't paused, just waded in with that lamp like she was DiMaggio going for the long one. Cahill, struggling for breath, still woozy, was amazed he'd been able to make the shot. He'd barely missed Sarah, and the bullet had exploded Densmore's heart. Densmore had been dead before the lamp ever hit his skull, not that a little thing like that had stopped Sarah.

By the time Cahill could get to her, he could hear sirens as squad cars converged on the house. He'd have to open the gates for them, he thought, but right now he needed to take care of Sarah. He'd taken off his shirt and put it on her, and she'd just stood there staring down at Densmore and the hole in his chest. She'd turned then, her expression already growing remote as she said, "Damn you, Cahill; I wanted to kill him."

He'd wanted to hold her, but there wasn't any way he could put his arms around her without causing her pain. Instead he'd held her left hand, the one that wasn't cut, getting blood all over her from his own cuts. He'd moved the lamp aside, and been astonished at its weight. Most people would have needed two hands to lift it, much less swing it.

After he opened the gates, he and Sarah were carted off to the hospital, and since then he'd been on administrative leave, so he hadn't been involved in any of the investigation or mop-up. The other guys, though, had kept him informed.

Densmore had planned that Sarah wouldn't ever leave that room. They'd found tiny cameras everywhere, even in the bathroom. She'd have had no privacy at all. The room, like the house, was a fortress. Its windows were unbreakable, and didn't open. The door had been reinforced steel. The only reason Sarah had been able to escape that night was that, in his hurry to see about the intruder, Densmore had left the door unlocked.

Who knew what made a sick bastard like that tick? Everyone who knew him said he seemed like such a nice man-yeah, they always were-on the quiet side, a little shy, but a shark when it came to business. He did tend to become obsessed with little things, though, and could turn nasty if everything wasn't done to his satisfaction. According to his secretary, he'd gotten more obsessive over the years, to the point that she had to have her chair sitting in one precise spot or he went into a rant.

His personal papers had been more revealing. Evidently sweet, shy Trevor Densmore had killed his own father over a business disagreement. Why he'd document a thing like that was anyone's guess, since if he hadn't already been dead, it would have been one more nail in his coffin-Alabama was a death penalty state, and this would have been a death penalty case-but the department psychologist read the papers and said the contents were an almost perfect example of how the mind of an egomaniac worked. Trevor Densmore thought he was smarter than everyone else, better than everyone else, and deserved only the best. That was it in a simplistic nutshell: Densmore thought he should have whatever he wanted, and he had no internal brakes when it came to getting it. If there was an obstacle, he either moved it, or he destroyed it.

Evidently, when he'd seen Sarah on television, he'd developed an instant obsession with her-Cahill could kind of understand that, given his own feelings about her-and had set out to obtain her. When she refused his first offer out of loyalty to the Judge, he'd removed that obstacle by killing Judge Roberts. But she still hadn't accepted his offer; she'd gone to work for the Lankfords, which had enraged him because he thought the Lankfords were so far beneath him. Killing people meant no more to him than stepping on a bug; they were unimportant, nothing. What mattered was getting what he wanted.

Cahill wished he could kill the son of a bitch again. What he'd done to Sarah . . .

She'd been withdrawn since then, and he couldn't reach her, even though it had been over three weeks; the bruises and welts had faded and healed, the sutures had been removed, and they'd lived together under the same roof the entire time, but he couldn't reach her. She'd retreated to someplace inside herself where he couldn't go, and it was driving him crazy.

When he'd first seen her, naked and bloody, he'd taken a second kick to the chest, thinking Densmore had raped her. He'd asked her if that was so, before the first patrolman came in with weapon drawn, and she'd shaken her head. But the assault she'd suffered had bruised her inside, in her mind, and that hadn't healed.

It wasn't just the brutality of the beating, or coming face-to-face with death; it was everything, the accumulation of shock and grief and horror. She'd been helpless, in the control of a madman, and she couldn't forget it or get past it.

They hadn't slept together since then; she slept in one of the other bedrooms. At first he hadn't minded. They'd both been sore and wounded, and she hadn't been able to bear the slightest touch for several days. But now after three weeks, he definitely minded. He wanted her, he needed her, and he wanted to put their lives back together. Sarah had simply ignored everything he said.

"Sarah?" he called now, wanting to tell her the news about the inquest.

There was no answer, but the door to the basement stood open. He went down the stairs; the solid thunk of fists hitting the punching bag telling him she was working out some major hostility.

She was wearing gray sweatpants and a black sports bra, and she'd evidently been beating the hell out of the punching bag for quite a while, because her shoulders gleamed with sweat and the waistband of the sweatpants was dark. The expression on her face was grimly intent.

He leaned against the wall and watched her. There was still some pink discoloration showing the location of the newly healed stripes, but in a few months they would be completely gone. She'd lost some weight, a few pounds, making her sleek muscles a little more pronounced. She looked lean and fit, kind of like Linda Hamilton in T2, and he felt a serious hard-on growing.

She glanced over at him. "How did it go?"

"I'm off administrative leave. They ruled it a righteous shooting. I go back to work tomorrow."

"Good." She threw a flurry of punches that impressed him with their fury. He was glad she was taking it out on the punching bag and not on him.

He took a chance and said, "What about you?"

'When am I going back to work, do you mean?"

``Yeah."

"I don't know that I will, at least not for a while. And I don't know if I can find a position in this area again; I sort of have a bad rep with employers right now."

"Are you going to look for a job somewhere else?" he asked, as casually as possible, though his lungs felt as if they were decompressing.

"That depends."

"On what?"

She stopped punching the bag and mopped off her face and arms with a towel. "He took something from me," she said quietly. "He didn't have to rape me to do his damage. Every time I think of sex, I think of being helpless, and hating, and being so disgusted and repulsed I can barely breathe. I think of all the time I've put into my training, and when it came down to crunch time, it was totally useless. I was helpless against him. "

"Not quite," he said. "You bashed his head in."

"That doesn't count. He was already dead." She gave him a feral smile. "But it felt good anyway."

"It damn sure did." He hadn't said it out loud before, but the thought was there. "I enjoyed killing him."

The look in her eyes said she understood, and envied him the privilege.

"So where does this leave us?" he asked. With everything that had happened, that was still the most important question.

She walked up to him with a prowling, dangerous, totally feminine rhythm that set his heart to racing. "That depends."

He felt like a broken record. "On what?" She was close enough now that he could smell her, sweaty and hot and all female. He was so hard he was hurting.

She slid her hands around his waist, and he felt the tug as she pulled his handcuffs free. "On you," she said, and for the first time in three weeks, she smiled. "Let's see if we still fit."

He lay on the exercise mat, his arms stretched over his head and handcuffed to a pipe. He was naked, and sweating, and so desperate he was begging. The woman was killing him.

She was in no hurry. She sat astride him, but she wasn't riding him. She had tucked him in, slid down to the hilt, then just sat there. At first he wondered what she was doing, and then he'd known; he'd felt her internal muscles clenching him, releasing, clenching, milking him while she sat virtually motionless. The sensation had been electric, and maddening, taking him to the edge of orgasm without pushing him over.

She'd already come twice. The first time had seemed to take her by surprise as she convulsed around him, but she'd determinedly chased the second one. By then he'd been begging, dying to thrust, but every time his hips moved she stopped.

God, she was something. Just looking at her made his heart feel like bursting. She was magnificent, naked and totally given over to what she was doing, her head thrown back and her eyes half-closed, her nipples red and tight. Surely by now she had all the bad memories replaced with good ones, but if she hadn't, Lord, he'd die happy.

She leaned over and kissed him, her mouth hot, her tongue promising wild things. 'We still fit," she murmured.

"I never doubted it," he managed to say, but the words ended in a groan.

"I did, but I couldn't let him win. You're too important to me, Cahill. I had to make certain I could push him away."

"Did you? Is he gone?"

She rotated her hips. "Oh, yeah."

"Then for God's sake," he whimpered, "put me out of my misery."

To his everlasting relief, she did. When he could think and hear and speak again, she was lying propped on her elbow beside him, leisurely stroking his chest.

"I love you, Cahill," she said seriously.

"I love you, too, and don't you think it's about time you started calling me Tom?"

"I'll think about it. Maybe on our fifth anniversary."

Now, that sounded good. 'When's our first one going to be?" he asked as casually as possible.

"Hmm, let me see. What do you think about July of next year?"

Since they were now in the last week of May, it sounded fine.

She stretched above him, unlocking the cuffs; as soon as he was free, he rolled, tucking her beneath him. She tensed for just a moment, then relaxed beneath his weight, her hands sliding up his back. "I thought he'd killed you," she whispered fiercely, burying her face in his shoulder. "I hate him for what he's done to our lives, for the damage he did to so many lives."

"He wins only if we let him, sweetheart." He kissed her, slowly, lingering. "Did you mean it, or was I reading more into your answer than I should? Are you going to marry me?"

"Oh, yeah," she said, grinning. "At least he clarified that issue for me. When I thought you were dead, I knew that nothing was more important than loving you: not traveling the world, not even if he shot me, too. I got over being mad at you in a hurry."

"I'm not going to make a practice of getting shot every time you get mad at me," he muttered.

"You won't have to, sweetheart." She kissed his shoulder and snuggled against him. "You won't have to.

Loving Evangeline

Chapter One

Davis Priesen didn’t think of himself as a coward, but he would rather have had surgery without anesthesia than face Robert Cannon and tell him what he had to tell him. It wasn’t that the majority stockholder, CEO and president of Cannon Group would hold him responsible for the bad news; Cannon had never been known to shoot the messenger. But those icy green eyes would become even colder, even more remote, and Davis knew from experience that he would feel the frigid touch of fear along his spine. Cannon had a reputation for scrupulous fairness, but also for unmatched ruthlessness when someone tried to screw him. Davis couldn’t think of anyone he respected more than Robert Cannon, but that didn’t relieve his dread.

Other men in Cannon’s position, with his power, insulated themselves behind layers of assistants. It was a measure of his own control and personal remoteness that only Cannon’s personal assistant guarded the gates to his inner sanctum. Felice Koury had been Cannon’s PA for eight years and ran his office with the precision of a Swiss watch. She was a tall, lean, ageless woman with iron-gray hair and the smooth complexion of a twenty-year-old. Davis knew that her youngest child was in his mid-twenties, putting Felice at least in her mid-forties, but it was impossible to guess her age from her appearance. She was cool under fire, frighteningly efficient and had never shown a hint of nervousness around her boss. Davis wished he had a little of that last ability.

He had called beforehand to make certain Cannon could see him, so Felice wasn’t surprised when he entered her office. “Good morning, Mr. Priesen.” She reached immediately for the phone and punched a button. “Mr. Priesen is here, sir.” She replaced the receiver and stood. “He’ll see you now.” With the smooth efficiency that always intimidated him, she was at the door of the inner office before he could reach it, opening it for him, then firmly closing it when he was inside. There was nothing subservient in Felice’s attention; rather, he felt as if she controlled even his entrance into Cannon’s office. Which, of course, she did.

Cannon’s office was huge, luxurious and exquisitely decorated. It was a tribute to his taste that the effect was relaxing, rather than overwhelming, even though original oil paintings hung on the walls and a two-hundred-year-old Persian rug was underfoot. To the right was a large sitting area, complete with entertainment center, though Davis doubted that Cannon ever used the large-screen television or VCR for anything other than business. Six Palladian windows marched along the wall, framing the matchless views of New York City as if they were six paintings. The windows were works of art in themselves, beautifully fashioned panes of cut glass that took the light streaming through them and splintered it into diamonds.

Cannon’s massive desk was another antique, a masterpiece of carved black wood that supposedly had belonged to the eighteenth-century Romanovs. He looked very at home behind it.

He was a tall, lean man, with the elegant grace and power of a panther. There was something pantherish about his coloring, too, with his sleek black hair and pale green eyes. One might even think of Robert Cannon as indolent. One would be dangerously mistaken.

He rose to his feet to shake hands, his long, well-shaped fingers gripping Davis’s with surprising strength. Davis was always taken aback by the steeliness of that grip.

On some occasions Cannon had invited him to the sitting area and asked if he would like coffee. This was not one of those occasions. Cannon hadn’t reached his position by misreading people, and his eyes narrowed as he examined the tension in Davis’s face. “I would say it’s good to see you, Davis,” he remarked, “but I don’t think you’re here to tell me something I’m going to like.”

His voice had been easy, almost casual, but Davis felt his tension go up another ten notches. “No, sir.”

“Is it your fault?”

“No, sir.” Then, scrupulously honest, he admitted, “Though I probably should have caught it sooner.”

“Then relax and sit down,” Robert said gently as he reseated himself. “If it isn’t your fault, you’re safe. Now, tell me what the problem is.”

Davis nervously took a seat, but relaxing was out of the question. He perched on the edge of a soft leather chair. “Someone in Huntsville is selling our software for the space station,” he blurted.

Cannon was never a restless man, but now he became even more still, and those green eyes took on the glacial look that Davis dreaded. “Do you have proof?” he asked. “Yes, sir.”

“Do you know who?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Fill me in.” With those abrupt words, Cannon leaned back, his gaze focused on Davis like a pale green laser.

Davis did, stumbling several times as he tried to explain how he had become suspicious and done a bit of investigating on his own to verify his suspicions before he accused anyone. Cannon listened in silence, and Davis wiped the sweat from his brow as he described the results of his sleuthing. The Cannon Group company, PowerNet, located in Huntsville, Alabama, was currently working on highly classified software developed for NASA. That software was definitely showing up in the hands of a company affiliated with another country. This wasn’t just industrial espionage, which would have been enough; this was treason.

His suspicions had centered on Landon Mercer, the company manager. Mercer had divorced the year before, and his style of living had gone noticeably upward. His salary was very good, but not good enough to support a family and live the way he had been living. Davis had discreetly hired an investigation service that had discovered large deposits into Mercer’s bank account. After following him for several weeks, they had reported that he regularly visited a marina in Guntersville, a small town nearby, situated on Guntersville Lake, an impoundment of the Tennessee river.

The owner/operator of the marina was a woman named Evie Shaw; the investigators hadn’t yet been able to find out anything substantive from her bank accounts or spending habits, which could mean only that she was smarter than Mercer. On at least two occasions, however, Mercer had rented a motorboat at the marina, and shortly after he had left in the boat, Evie Shaw had closed the marina, gotten into her own boat and followed him. They had returned separately, some fifteen minutes apart. It looked as if they were meeting somewhere on the big lake, where they would find it very easy both to conceal their actions, and to see and hear anyone approaching them. It was much safer than trying to conduct clandestine business in the busy marina; in fact, the popularity of the marina made it all the odder that she would close it down in the middle of the day.

When Davis had finished and sat nervously cracking his knuckles, Cannon’s face was hard and expressionless. “Thank you, Davis,” he said calmly. “I’ll notify the FBI and take it from here. Good work.”

Davis flushed as he got to his feet. “I’m sorry I didn’t catch it sooner.”

“Security isn’t your area. Someone was falling down on the job. I’ll take care of that, too. We’re lucky that you’re as sharp as you are.” Robert made a mental note to both increase Davis’s salary, which was already healthy, and begin grooming him for more responsibility and power. He had shown a sharpness and initiative that shouldn’t go unrewarded. “I’m sure the FBI will want to speak with you, so stay available for the rest of the day.”

“Yes, sir.”

As soon as Davis had left, Robert used his private line to call the FBI. The bureau maintained a huge force in the city, and he had had occasion to work with them before. He was put through immediately to the supervisory agent. His control was such that none of his rage was revealed in his voice as he requested that the two best agents come to his office as soon as possible. His influence was such that no questions were asked; he was simply given the quiet assurance that two agents would be there within the half hour.

That done, he sat back and considered all the options open to him. He didn’t allow his cold fury to cloud his thinking. Uncontrolled emotion was not only useless, it was stupid, and Robert never allowed himself to do anything stupid. He took it personally that someone at one of his companies was selling classified computer programs; it was a blemish on his own reputation. He had nothing but contempt for someone who would sell out his own country merely for the money involved, and he would stop at nothing to halt the theft and put the perpetrator behind bars. Within fifteen minutes, he had formulated his plan of action.

The two agents arrived in twenty minutes. When Felice buzzed him, he told her to send them in, and that he wanted no interruptions of any kind until the gentlemen had left. A perfect secretary to the bone, she asked no questions.

She ushered the two conservatively dressed men into his office and firmly closed the door behind them. Robert stood to welcome them, but all the while he was assessing them with his cool, unreadable gaze. The younger man, about thirty, was immediately recognizable as a midlevel civil servant, but there was also a certain self-assurance in the man’s eyes that Robert approved of. The older man, perhaps in his early fifties, had light brown hair that had gone mostly gray. He was not quite of average height, and was stocky of build. The blue eyes, behind metal-framed glasses, were tired, but nevertheless sparkled with intelligence and authority. No junior agent, this.

The older man held out his hand to Robert. “Mr. Cannon?” At Robert’s nod, he said, “I’m William Brent, senior agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is Lee Murray, special agent assigned to counterespionage.”

“Counterespionage,” Robert murmured, his eyes cool. The presence of these two particular agents meant that the FBI had already been investigating PowerNet. “Good guess, gentlemen. Please sit down.”

“It wasn’t much of a guess,” Agent Brent replied ruefully, as they took the offered seats. “A corporation such as yours, which handles so many government contracts, is unfortunately a prime target for espionage. I’m also aware that you have some experience in that area yourself, so it followed that you might need our particular talents, so to speak.”

He was good, Robert thought. Just the type of person to inspire trust. They wanted to know if he knew anything, but they weren’t going to tip their own hand if he didn’t mention PowerNet. That little charade was a screen of innocence, behind which they could exhibit surprise and consternation if he informed them that he had discovered a leak at the company, or hide their own knowledge if he didn’t mention the matter.

He didn’t let them get away with it. “I see you’ve picked up some disquieting information yourselves,” he said remotely. “I’m interested in knowing why you didn’t contact me immediately.”

William Brent grimaced. He had heard that nothing got by Robert Cannon, but still, he hadn’t expected the man to be so acute.

Cannon was looking at him with a slight, cool lift of his eyebrow that invited explanations, an expression most people found difficult to resist.

Brent managed to control the inclination to rush into speech, mingling explanation with apology; he was astonished that the impulse even existed. It made him study Robert Cannon even more closely. He already knew a lot about the man, as he had made it his business to find out. Cannon came from a cultured, moneyed background, but had made himself much wealthier with his own astute business sense, and his reputation was impeccable. He also had a lot of friends in both the State and Justice departments, powerful men in their own right, who held him in the greatest respect. “Look, here,” one of those men had said. “If something crooked is going on with any of me Cannon Group companies, I’d take it as a personal favor if you’d let Robert Cannon know about it before you do anything.”

“I can’t do that,” Brent had replied. “It would compromise the investigation.”

“Not at all,” the man had said. “I would trust Cannon with the country’s most sensitive intelligence. As a matter of fact, I already have, on several occasions. He’s done some… favors for us.”

“It’s possible he could be in on it,” Brent had warned, still resisting the idea of briefing a civilian outsider on the situation developing down in Alabama.

But the other man had shaken his head. “No. Not Robert Cannon.”

After learning something about the nature and magnitude of the “favors” Cannon had done, and the dangers involved, Brent had reluctantly agreed to apprise Cannon of the situation before they put any plans into operation. Cannon had derailed that by calling first, and they hadn’t been certain if he already knew, or not. The plan had been to keep quiet until they found out why he had called. It hadn’t worked. He’d seen through them immediately.

Brent was used to reading men, but he couldn’t read Cannon. His persona was that of a wealthy, cultured, sophisticated man, and Brent supposed he was all that, but nevertheless, it was only the first layer. The other layers, whatever they were, were so well hidden that he only sensed their existence, and even that was due only to his own access to privileged information. Watching Cannon’s leanly handsome face, he couldn’t catch so much as a flicker of expression; there were only those remote eyes watching him with unlimited patience.

Making a swift decision, William Brent leaned forward. “Mr. Cannon, I’m going to tell you a lot more than I had originally planned. We have a definite problem at one of your companies, a software company down in Alabama—”

“Suppose I tell you what I know?” Robert interrupted in an even tone. “Then you can tell me if you have anything to add.”

With calm, precise sentences, he recounted what Davis Priesen had told him. The two agents shared one startled, involuntary glance that revealed they hadn’t discovered as much as Davis had, which upped that young man’s stock with Robert even more.

When he had finished, William Brent cleared his throat and leaned forward. “Congratulations. You’re a bit ahead of us. This will help us considerably in our investigation—”

“I’m flying down there tomorrow morning,” Robert said.

Brent looked disapproving. “Mr. Cannon, I appreciate your desire to help, but this is best handled by the bureau.”

“You misunderstand. I don’t intend to help. This is my company, my problem. I’ll take care of it myself. I’m merely apprising you of the situation and my intentions. I don’t have to take the time to set up a cover and get inside the operation, because I own it. I will, of course, keep you informed.”

Brent was already shaking his head. “No, it’s out of the question.”

“Who better? I not only have access to everything, my presence wouldn’t be as alarming as that of federal investigators.” He paused, then said gently, “I’m not a rank amateur.”

“I’m aware of that, Mr. Cannon.”

“Then I suggest you talk this over with your superiors.” He glanced at his watch. “In the meantime, I have arrangements to make.”

He had no doubt that when Brent took this to his superiors, he would be surprised and chagrined to be told to back off and let Robert Cannon handle this problem on his own. They would provide every assistance, of course, and have backup in place if he needed it, but Agent Brent would find that Robert was calling the shots.

He spent the rest of the day clearing his calendar. Felice made the open-ended flight arrangements and his hotel reservation in Huntsville. Just before leaving that night, he checked his watch and took a chance. Though it was eight o’clock in New York, it was only six in Montana, and the long summer daylight hours meant ranch work went on for much longer than during the winter.

To his delight, the phone was picked up on the third ring and his sister’s lazy drawl came over the line. “Duncans’ Madhouse, Madelyn speaking.”

Robert chuckled. He could hear in the background the din his two young nephews were making. “Had a busy day, honey?”

“Robert!” Pleasure warmed her voice. “You might say that. Would you be interested in having your nephews for a prolonged visit?”

“Not until they’re housebroken. I won’t be at home, anyway.”

“Where are you off to this time?”

“Huntsville, Alabama.”

She paused. “It’s hot down there.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You might even sweat,” she warned him. “Think how upset you’d be.”

His firm mouth twitched at the amusement in her voice. “That’s a chance I’ll have to take.”

“It must be serious, then. Trouble?”

“A few glitches.”

“Take care.”

“I will. If it looks as though I’ll be down there for any length of time, I’ll call you and give you my number.”

“All right. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” He smiled a bit as he hung up. It was typical of Madelyn that she hadn’t asked questions but had immediately sensed the seriousness of the situation awaiting him in Alabama. In six words she had given him her blessing, her support and her love. Though she was actually only his stepsister, the affection and understanding between them were as strong as if they had been connected by blood.

Next he called the woman he had been escorting rather regularly lately, Valentina Lawrence. The relationship hadn’t progressed far enough that he would expect her to wait until his return, so the easiest thing for both of them was if he made it clear that she was free to see anyone she wished. It was a pity; Valentina was too popular to remain unattached for long, and he suspected he would be in Alabama for several weeks.

She was just the sort of woman Robert had always been most attracted to: the thoroughbred racehorse type—tall, lean, small-breasted. Her makeup was always impeccable and understated, her clothing both stylish and tasteful. She had a genuinely pleasant personality, and enjoyed the theater and opera as much as he did. She would have been a wonderful companion, if this problem hadn’t interfered.

It had been several months since he had ended his last relationship, and he was feeling restless. He much preferred living with a woman to living alone, though he was perfectly content with his own company. He deeply enjoyed women, both mentally and physically, and he normally preferred the steadiness of a long-term relationship. He didn’t do one-nighters and disdained those who were so stupid. He refrained from making love to a woman until she had committed herself to a relationship with him.

Valentina accepted the news of his prolonged absence with grace; after all, they weren’t lovers and had no claim on each other. He could hear the gentle regret in her voice, but she didn’t ask him to call when he returned.

That final piece of business concluded, he sat for several minutes, frowning as he allowed himself to think about the relationship that hadn’t quite developed into intimacy, and how long it would be before he had time to attend to the sexual part of his life again. He wasn’t pleased at the prospect of a long wait.

He wasn’t casual about sex in any way. His intense sexuality was always under strict control; with the difference between a man’s strength and a woman’s, a man who wasn’t in control could easily brutalize a woman, something that disgusted him. He tempered both his sexual appetite and his steely strength, reining them in with the icy power of his intellect. He never pressured a woman, though he always made it clear when he was attracted, so she would know where she stood. But he let his lady set the pace, let the intimacy progress at her speed. He respected a woman’s natural caution about opening her tender, vulnerable body to a much bigger, stronger male. When it came to sex, he treated women gently and took his time so they could become fully aroused. Such control was no hardship; he could spend hours caressing soft, feminine skin and intriguing curves. Lingering over the lovemaking helped satisfy his own hunger, while intensifying his partner’s.

There was nothing like making love that first time with a new partner, he mused. Never again was the experience so intense and hungry. He always tried to make it special for his lady, to make her feel special. He never stinted on the little details that made a woman feel treasured: romantic dinners for two, candlelight, champagne, thoughtful gifts, his complete attention. When the time finally came to retire to the bedroom, he would use all of his skill and control to satisfy her again and again before he allowed release for himself.

Thinking about what the problem in Alabama was causing him to miss made him irritated.

He was roused by a knock on his door. He looked up as Felice stuck her head in. “You should have gone home,” he reproved. “You didn’t have to stay.”

“A messenger brought this envelope for you,” she said, approaching to place it on his desk. She ignored his comment. No matter how late, she seldom left before he did.

“Go home,” he said calmly. “That’s an order. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Do you need anything before I go? A fresh pot of coffee?”

“No, I won’t be staying much longer myself.”

“Then have a good trip.” She smiled and left the room. He could hear her in the outer office gathering together her possessions and locking everything up for the night.

He doubted that anything about the trip would be good. He was in a vengeful mood and out for blood.

He noticed that the manila envelope had no return address. He opened it and slid several pages out There was one grainy, photostated picture, a recap of the situation and what they already knew about it, and a brief message from Agent Brent, identifying the woman in the picture and informing Robert that the bureau would cooperate with him in all matters, which was only what he had expected.

He picked up the reproduced photograph and studied it. It was of very poor quality, but pictured a woman standing on a dock, with motorboats in the background. So this was Evie Shaw. She was wearing sunglasses, so it was difficult to tell much about her, other than she had blondish, untidy hair and seemed to be rather hefty. No Mata Hari there, he thought, his fastidious taste offended by her poor choice of clothes and her general hayseed appearance. She looked more like a female mud wrestler, a coarse hick who was selling out her country for greed.

Briskly he returned the papers to the envelope. He looked forward to bringing both Landon Mercer and Evie Shaw to justice.

Chapter Two

At was a typically hot, sultry Southern summer day. The sky overhead was a deep, rich blue, dotted with fat white clouds that lazily sailed along on a breeze so slight it barely rippled the lake’s surface. Gulls wheeled overhead and boats bobbed hypnotically in their slips. A few diehard fishermen and skiers dotted the water, ignoring the heat, but most of the fishermen who had gone out that morning had returned before noon. The air was heavy and humid, intensifying the odors of the lake and the surrounding lush, green mountains.

Evangeline Shaw looked out over her domain from the big plate-glass windows at the rear of the main marina building. Everyone on earth needed his own kingdom, and hers was this sprawling skeletal maze of docks and boat slips. Nothing within these few square acres escaped her attention. Five years ago, when she had taken over, it had been run-down and barely paying expenses. A sizable bank loan had been required to give it the infusion of capital it had needed, but within a year she had had it spruced up, expanded and bringing in more money than it ever had before. Of course, it took more money to run it, but now the marina was making a nice profit. With any luck she would have the bank loan paid off in another three years. Then the marina would be completely hers, free and clear of debt, and she would be able to expand even more, as well as diversify her holdings. She only hoped business would hold up; the fishing trade had slacked off a lot, due to the Tennessee Valley Authority’s “weed management” program that had managed to kill most of the water plants that had harbored and protected the fish.

But she had been careful, and she hadn’t overextended. Her debt was manageable, unlike that of others who had thought the fishing boom would last forever and had gone deeply into debt to expand. Her domain was secure.

Old Virgil Dodd had been with her most of the morning, sitting in the rocking chair behind the counter and entertaining her and her customers with tales of his growing-up days, back in the 1900s. The old man was as tough as shoe leather, but almost a century weighed on his increasingly frail shoulders, and Evie was afraid that another couple of years, three at the most, would be too much for him. She had known him all her life; he had been old all her life, changing little, as enduring as the river and the mountains. But she knew all too well how fleeting and uncertain human life was, and she treasured the mornings that Virgil spent with her. He enjoyed them, too; he no longer went out fishing, as he had for the first eighty years of his life, but at the marina he was still close to the boats, where he could hear the slap of the water against the docks and smell the lake.

They were alone now, just the two of them, and Virgil had launched into another tale from his youth. Evie perched on a tall stool, occasionally glancing out the windows to see if anyone had pulled up to the gas pump on the dock, but giving most of her attention to Virgil.

The side door opened, and a tall, lean man stepped inside. He stood for a moment before removing his sunglasses, helping his eyes adjust to the relative dimness, then moved toward her with a silent, pantherish stroll.

Evie gave him only a swift glance before turning her attention back to Virgil, but it was enough to make her defenses rise. She didn’t know who he was, but she recognized immediately what he was; he was not only a stranger, he was an outsider. There were a lot of Northerners who had retired to Guntersville, charmed by the mild winters, the slow pace, low cost of living and natural beauty of the lake, but he wasn’t one of them. He was far too young to be retired, for one thing. His accent would be fast and hard, his clothes expensive and his attitude disdainful. Evie had met his kind before. She hadn’t been impressed then, either.

But it wasn’t just that. It was the other quality she had caught that made her want to put a wall at her back.

He was dangerous.

Though she smiled at Virgil, instinctively she analyzed the stranger. She had grown up with bad boys, daredevils and hell-raisers; the South produced them in abundance. This man was something different, something… more. He didn’t embrace danger as much as he was danger. It was a different mind-set, a will and temperament that brooked no opposition, a force of character that had glittered in those startlingly pale eyes.

She didn’t know how or why, but she sensed that he was a threat to her.

“Excuse me,” he said, and the deepness of his voice ran over her like velvet. A strange little quiver tightened her belly and ran up her spine. The words were courteous, but the iron will behind them told her that he expected her to immediately attend to him.

She gave him another quick, dismissive glance. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said, her tone merely polite, then she turned back to Virgil with real warmth. “What happened then, Virgil?”

No hint of emotion showed on Robert’s face, though he was a bit startled by the woman’s lack of response. That was unusual. He wasn’t accustomed to being ignored by anyone, and certainly not by a woman. Women had always been acutely aware of him, responding to the intense masculinity he kept under ruthless control. He wasn’t vain, but his effect on women was something he largely took for granted. He couldn’t remember ever wanting a woman and not having her, eventually.

But he was willing to wait and use the opportunity to watch this woman. Her appearance had thrown him a little off balance, also something unusual for him. He still hadn’t adjusted his expectations to the reality.

This was Evie Shaw, no doubt about it. She sat on a stool behind the counter, all her attention on an old man who sat in a rocking chair, his aged voice gleeful as he continued to recount some tall tale from his long-ago youth. Robert’s eyes narrowed fractionally as he studied her.

She wasn’t the thick-bodied hayseed he had expected. Or rather, she wasn’t thick-bodied; he reserved judgment on the hayseed part. The unflattering image he’d formed must have been caused by the combination of bad photography and poorly fitting clothes. He had walked in looking for a woman who was coarse and ill-bred, but that wasn’t what he’d found.

Instead, she… glowed.

It was an unsettling illusion, perhaps produced by the brilliant sunlight streaming in through the big windows, haloing her sunny hair and lighting the tawny depths of her hazel eyes. The light caressed her golden skin, which was as smooth and unblemished as a porcelain doll’s. Illusion or not, the woman was luminous.

Her voice had been surprisingly deep and a little raspy, bringing up memories of old Bogie and Bacall movies and making Robert’s spine prickle. Her accent was lazy and liquid, as melodious as a murmuring creek or the wind in the trees, a voice that made him think of tangled sheets and long, hot nights.

Watching her, he felt something inside him go still.

The old man leaned forward, folding his gnarled hands over the crook of his walking cane. His faded blue eyes were full of laughter and the memories of good times. “Well, we’d tried ever way we knowed to get John H. away from that still, but he weren’t budging. He kept an old shotgun loaded with rat shot, so we were afeard to venture too close. He knowed it was just a bunch of young’uns aggravating him, but we didn’t know he knowed. Ever time he grabbed that shotgun, we’d run like jack-rabbits, then we’d come sneakin’ back…”

Robert forced himself to look around as he tuned out the rest of Virgil’s tale. Ramshackle though the building was, the business seemed to be prospering, if the amount of tackle on hand and the number of occupied boat slips were any indication. A pegboard behind the counter held the ignition keys to the rental boats, each key neatly labeled and numbered. He wondered how she kept track of who had which boat.

Virgil was well into his tale, slapping his knee and chortling. Evie Shaw threw back her head with a shout of pure enjoyment, her laughter as deep as her speaking voice. Robert was suddenly aware of how accustomed he had become to carefully controlled social laughter, how shrill and shallow it was compared to her unabashed mirth, with nothing forced or held back.

He tried to resist the compulsion to stare at her, but, to his surprise, it was like resisting the need to breathe. He could manage it for a little while, but it was a losing battle from the start. With a mixture of fury and curiosity, he gave in to the temptation and let his gaze greedily drink her in.

He watched her with an impassive expression, his self-control so absolute that neither his posture nor his face betrayed any hint of his thoughts. Unfortunately, that self-control didn’t extend to those thoughts as his attention focused on Evie Shaw with such intensity that he was no longer aware of his surroundings, that he no longer heard Virgil’s cracked voice continuing with his tale.

She wasn’t anything like the women he had always found most attractive. She was also a traitor, or at least was involved in industrial espionage. He had every intention of breaking her, of bringing her to justice. Yet he couldn’t take his eyes off her, couldn’t control his wayward thoughts, couldn’t still the sudden hard thumping in his chest. He had been sweating in the suffocating heat, but suddenly the heat inside him was so blistering that it made the outer temperature seem cool in comparison. His skin felt too tight, his clothing too restrictive. A familiar heaviness in his loins made the last two sensations all too real, rather than products of his imagination.

The women he had wanted in the past, for all the differences in their characters, had shared a certain sense of style, of sophistication. They had all looked—and been—expensive. He hadn’t minded, and had enjoyed spoiling them more. They had all been well dressed, perfumed, exquisitely turned out. His sister Madelyn had disparagingly referred to a couple of them as mannequins, but Madelyn herself was a clotheshorse of the highest order, so he had been amused rather than irritated by the comment.

Evie Shaw, in contrast, evidently paid no attention to her clothes. She wore an oversize T-shirt that she had knotted at the waist, a pair of jeans so ancient that they were threadbare and almost colorless, and equally old docksiders. Her hair, a sun-streaked blond that ranged in color from light brown to the palest flax, and included several different shades of gold, was pulled back and confined in an untidy braid that was as thick as his wrist and hung halfway down her back. Her makeup was minimal and probably a waste of time in this humidity, but with her complexion, she didn’t really need it.

Damn it, how could she glow like that? It wasn’t the sheen of perspiration, but the odd impression that light was attracted to her, as if she forever stood in a subtle spotlight. Her skin was lightly tanned, a creamy golden hue, and it looked like warm, living satin. Even her eyes were the golden brown hazel of dark topaz.

He had always preferred tall, lean women; as tall as he was himself, he had felt better matched with them on the dance floor and in bed. Evie Shaw was no more than five-four, if that. Nor was she lean; rather, the word that came to mind was luscious, followed immediately by delicious. Caught off guard by the violence of his reaction, he wondered savagely if he wanted to make love to her or eat her, and the swift mental answer to his own question was a flat, unequivocal “yes.” To both choices.

She was a symphony of curves, not quite full-figured, but sleek and rounded, the absolute essence of femaleness. No slim, boyish hips there, but a definite flare from her waist, and she had firm, round buttocks. He had always adored the delicacy of small breasts but now found himself entranced by the soft globes that shaped the front of the annoyingly loose T-shirt. They weren’t big, heavy breasts, though they had a slight bounce that riveted his attention whenever she moved; they weren’t exactly voluptuous, but were just full enough to be maddeningly tempting. Their soft, warm weight would fill his hands, hands that he tightened into fists in an effort to resist the urge to reach out and touch her.

Everything about her was shaped for a man’s delight, but he wasn’t delighted by his reaction. If he could respond to her like this, maybe Mercer was her pawn rather than the other way around. It was a possibility he couldn’t ignore.

Not only was she nothing like the women he had previously desired, he was furious with himself for wanting her. He was down here to gather evidence that would send her to prison, and he couldn’t let lust make him lose sight of that. This woman was wading hip-deep in the sewer of espionage, and he shouldn’t feel anything for her except disgust. Instead he was struggling with a physical desire so intense that it was all he could do to simply stand there, rather than act. He didn’t want to court her, seduce her; he wanted to grab her and carry her away. His lair was a hideously expensive Manhattan penthouse, but the primitive instinct was the same one that had impelled men to the same action back when their lairs were caves. He wanted her, and there was nothing civilized or gentle about it. The urge made a mockery of both his intellect and his self-control.

He wanted to ignore the attraction, but he couldn’t; it was too strong, the challenge too great. Evie Shaw was not just ignoring him, she was totally oblivious to the pure male intent that was surging through him. He might as well have been a post for all the attention she was paying to him, and every aggressive cell in his body was on alert. By God, he would have her.

The door behind him opened, and he turned, grateful for the interruption. A young woman, clad in shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, smiled at him and murmured, “Hello,” as she approached. Both the smile and the look lingered for just a moment before she turned her attention to the two people behind the counter. “Have you enjoyed your visit, PawPaw? Who all has been in today?”

“Had a good time,” Virgil said, slowly getting to his feet with a lot of help from the cane. “Burt Mardis spent some time with us, and both of the Gibbs boys came by. Have you got the young’uns rounded up?”

“They’re in the car with the groceries.” She turned to Evie. “I hate to run, but it’s so hot I want to get the food put up before it spoils.”

“Everything I can, I put off until night,” Evie said. “Including buying groceries. Bye, Virgil. You take care of that knee, all right? And come back soon.”

“The knee feels better already,” he assured her. “Getting old ain’t no fun, but it’s better than dying.” He winked and steadily made his way down the aisle, using the cane but otherwise not making much allowance for his noticeable limp.

“See you later, Evie,” the young woman said as she turned to go. She gave Robert another smile in passing.

When the old man and young woman had left and the door had closed behind them, Robert leaned negligently against the counter and said in a mild tone, “I assume she’s his granddaughter.”

Evie shook her head and turned away to check the gas pumps again. She was too aware of being alone with him, which was ridiculous; she was alone with male customers several times a day and had never felt the least hint of uneasiness—until now. She had felt a subtle alarm the second he had walked in the door. He hadn’t said or done anything untoward, but still, she couldn’t shake that feeling of wariness. “Great-granddaughter. He lives with her. I apologize for making you wait, but I’ll have other customers, while Virgil is ninety-three, and he may not be around much longer.”

“I understand,” he said calmly, not wanting to antagonize her. He held out his hand, a gesture calculated to force her to look at him, truly acknowledge him, touch him. “I’m Robert Cannon.”

She put her hand in his, just slowly enough to let him know that she was reluctant to shake hands with him and did it only to be polite. Her fingers were slim and cool and gripped his with surprising strength. “Evie Shaw,” she said. He made certain his own grip was firm, but not enough to hurt, and promptly released her. The contact was brief, impersonal… and not enough.

Immediately she turned away and said briskly, “What is it you need, Mr. Cannon?”

He came up with several graphic ideas but didn’t give voice to them. Instead he thoughtfully eyed her slim back, rapidly adjusting his impressions. He had thought her oblivious to him, but she was too studiously ignoring him for that; no, quite the contrary, she was very aware of him, and very on edge. In a flash, all of his plans changed.

He had entered the marina wanting only to look around a little, get an idea of the security and layout of the place, maybe buy a fishing license or map, but all of that had changed in the past few minutes. Rather than shadow Mercer, he now intended to stick to Evie Shaw like glue.

Why was she so wary of him? She had been, right from the beginning, even before he had introduced himself. The only explanation that came to mind was that she had already known who he was, had somehow recognized him, and she could only have done that if she had been briefed. If so, this operation was more sophisticated than he had expected. It wouldn’t be beyond his capabilities, but it would certainly be more of a challenge. With one of his lightning-fast decisions, he changed the base of his investigation from Huntsville to Guntersville. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, he had, on a couple of memorable occasions, found himself attracted to female operatives; taking them to bed had been a risk, but a delightful one. Danger certainly added to the excitement. Bedding Evie Shaw, he suspected, would be an event he would never forget.

“First, I need information,” he said, irritated because she still wasn’t looking at him, but not a hint of it sounded in his voice. He needed to lull her suspicions, make her comfortable with him. Gentling women had never been difficult for him before, and he didn’t expect it to be now. As far as anyone outside a few government officials knew, he was nothing more than a very wealthy businessman; if she was as smart as he now suspected her to be, she would soon see the benefits in becoming close to him, not only for what he could give her but for the information she could get from him. A summer fling would be perfect for her needs, and he intended to give her just that.

“Perhaps you should go to the Visitors’ Center,” she suggested.

“Perhaps,” he murmured. “But I was told that you can help me.”

“Maybe.” Her tone was reluctant. She certainly wasn’t committing herself to anything. “What kind of information do you need?”

“I’m taking a long vacation here, for the rest of the summer,” he said. “My second reason for coming here is to rent a boat slip, but I also want someone to show me around the lake. I was told that you know the area as well as anyone.”

She faced him, her gaze hooded. “That’s true, but I don’t guide. I can help you with the boat, but that’s all.”

She had thrown up a wall as soon as she had seen him, and she had no intention of being cooperative about anything. He gave her a gentle smile, one that had been soothing nervous women for years. “I understand. You don’t know me.”

He saw the involuntary reaction to that smile in the way her pupils flared. Now she looked uncertain. “It isn’t that. I don’t know a lot of my customers.”

“I believe the going rate for guides is a hundred a day, plus expenses. I’m willing to pay twice that.”

“It isn’t a matter of money, Mr. Cannon. I don’t have the time.”

Pushing her now wouldn’t accomplish anything, and he had a lot to get in place before he could really pursue her. He had made certain she wouldn’t forget him, which was enough for a first meeting. “Can you recommend a guide, then?” he asked, and saw her relax a little.

She reeled off several names, which he committed to memory, for he fully intended to learn the river. Then she said, “Would you like to look at the boat slips that are available now?”

“Yes, of course.” It would give him a chance to inspect her security arrangements, too.

She picked up a portable phone and clipped it to a belt loop, then came out from behind the counter. Robert fell into step slightly behind her, his heavy-lidded gaze wandering over her curvy hips and heart-shaped bottom, clearly outlined by the snug jeans. Her sun-streaked head barely reached the top of his shoulder. His blood throbbed warmly through his veins as he thought of cupping her bottom in his hands. It was an effort to wrench his attention away from the image that thought provoked.

“Do you just leave the store unattended?” he asked as they walked down the dock. The sunlight was blinding as it reflected off the water, and he slipped his sunglasses into place again. The heat was incredible, like a sauna.

“I can see from the docks if anyone drives up,” she replied.

“How many others work here?”

She gave him a curious glance, as if wondering why he would ask. “I have a mechanic, and a boy who works mornings for me during the summer, then shifts to afternoons during the school year.”

“How many hours a day are you open?”

“From six in the morning until eight at night.”

“That’s along day.”

“It isn’t so bad. During the winter, I’m only open from eight until five.”

Four of the docks were covered, and most of the slips were occupied. A variety of crafts bobbed in the placid water: houseboats, cabin cruisers, pontoon boats, ski boats, sailboats. The four covered docks were on the left, and the entrance to them was blocked by a locked gate. To the right were two uncovered docks, for use by general traffic. The rental boats were in the first row of boat slips on the secured dock closest to the marina building.

Evie unlocked the padlock that secured the gate, and they stepped onto the floating dock, which bobbed gently on the water. Silently she led him down the rows of boats, indicating which of the empty slips were available. Finally she asked, “What size boat do you have?”

He made another instant decision. “I intend to buy a small one. A speedboat, not a cabin cruiser. Can you recommend a good dealership in the area?”

She gave him another of those hooded looks, but merely said in a brisk tone, “There are several boat dealerships in town. It won’t be hard to find what you want.” Then she turned and started back toward the marina office, her steps sure and graceful on the bobbing dock.

Again Robert followed her, enjoying the view just as much as he had before. She probably thought she was rid of him, but there was no way that would happen. Anger and anticipation mingled, forming a volatile aggression that made him feel more alert, more on edge, than he ever had before. She would pay for stealing from him, in more ways than one.

“Will you have dinner with me tonight?” he asked, using a totally unaggressive tone. She halted so abruptly that he bumped into her. He could have prevented the contact, but deliberately let his body collide with hers. She staggered off balance, and he grabbed her waist to steady her, easing her back against him before she regained control. He felt the shiver that ran through her as he savored the heat and feel of her under his hands, against his thighs and loins and belly. “Sorry,” he said with light amusement. “I didn’t realize having dinner with me was such a frightening concept.”

She should have done a number of things. If reluctant, she should have moved away from the subtle sexuality of his embrace. If compliant, she should have turned to face him. She should have hastened to assure him that his invitation hadn’t frightened her at all, then accepted to prove that it hadn’t. She did none of those things. She stood stock-still, as if paralyzed by his hands clasping her waist. Silence thickened between them, growing taut. She shivered again, a delicately sensual movement that made his hands tighten on her, made his male flesh quiver and rise. Why didn’t she move, why didn’t she say something?

“Evie?” he murmured.

“No,” she said abruptly, her voice raspier than usual. She wrenched away from him. “I’m sorry, but I can’t go out to dinner with you.”

Then a boat idled into the marina, and he watched her golden head turn, her face light with a smile as she recognized her customer. Sharp fury flared through him at how easily she smiled at others, but would scarcely even glance at him.

She lifted her left arm to wave, and with shock Robert focused on that slim hand.

She was wearing a wedding ring.

Chapter Three

Evie tried to concentrate on the ledgers that lay open on her desk, but she couldn’t keep her mind on posting the day’s income and expenses. A dark, lean face kept forming in her mind’s eye, blotting out the figures. Every time she thought of those pale, predatory eyes, the bottom would drop out of her stomach and her heart would begin hammering. Fear. Though he had been polite, Robert Cannon could no more hide his true nature than could a panther. In some way she could only sense, without being able to tell the exact nature of it, he was a threat to her.

Her instincts were primitive; she wanted to barricade herself against him, wall him out. She had fought too long to put her life on an even keel to let this dark stranger disrupt what she had built. Her life was placid, deliberately so, and she resented this interruption in the even fabric of days she had fashioned about herself.

She looked up at the small photograph that sat on the top shelf of her old-fashioned rolltop desk. It wasn’t one of her wedding photos; she had never looked at any of those. This photo was one that had been taken the summer before their senior year in high school; a group of kids had gotten together and spent the whole day on the water, skiing, goofing off, going back on shore to cook out. Becky Watts had brought her mother’s camera and taken photos of all of them that golden summer day. Matt had been chasing Evie with an ice cube, trying to drop it down her blouse, but when he finally caught her, she had struggled and made him drop it. Matt’s hands had been on her waist, and they had been laughing. Becky had called, “Hey, Matt!” and snapped the photo when they both automatically looked over at her.

Matt. Tall, just outgrowing the gangliness of adolescence and putting on some of the weight that came with maturity. That shock of dark hair falling over his brow, crooked grin flashing, bright blue eyes twinkling. He’d always been laughing. Evie didn’t spare any looks for the girl she had been then, but she saw the way Matt had held her, the link between them that had been obvious even in that happy-go-lucky moment. She looked down at the slim gold band on her left hand. Matt.

In all the years since, there hadn’t been anyone. She hadn’t wanted anyone, had been neither interested nor tempted. There were people she loved, of course, but in a romantic sense her emotional isolation had been so complete that she had been totally unaware if any man had been attracted to her… until Robert Cannon had walked into her marina and looked at her with eyes like green ice. Though his expression had been impassive, she had felt his attention focus on her like a laser, had felt the heated sexual quality of it. That, and something else. Something even more dangerous.

He had left immediately after looking at the boat slips, but he would be back. She knew that without question. Evie sighed as she got up and walked to the French doors. She could see starlight twinkling on the water and stepped out onto the deck. The warm night air wrapped around her, humid, fragrant. Her little house sat right on the riverfront, with steps leading down from the deck to her private dock and boathouse. She sat in one of the patio chairs and propped her feet on the railing, calmed by the peacefulness of the river.

The summer nights weren’t quiet, what with the constant chirp of insects, frogs and night birds, the splash of fish jumping, the rustle of the trees, the low murmur of the river itself, but there was a serenity in the noise. There was no moon, so the stars were plainly visible in the black bowl of the sky, the fragile, twinkling light reflected in millions of tiny diamonds on the water. The main river channel curved through the lake not sixty feet from her dock, the current ruffling the surface into waves.

Her nearest neighbors were a quarter of a mile away, out of sight around a small promontory. The only houses she could see from her deck were on the other side of the lake, well over a mile away. Guntersville Lake, formed when the TVA had dammed the Tennessee River back in the thirties, was both long and wide, irregularly shaped, curving back and forth, with hundreds of inlets. Numerous small, tree-covered islands dotted the lake.

She had lived here all her life. Here was home, family, friends, a network of roots almost two hundred years old that spread both wide and deep. She knew the pace of the seasons, the pulse of the river. She had never wanted to be anywhere else. The fabric of life here was her fortress. Now, however, her fortress was being threatened by two different enemies, and she would have to fight to protect herself.

The first threat was one that made her furious. Landon Mercer was up to no good. She didn’t know the man well, but she had a certain instinct about people that was seldom wrong. There was a slickness to his character that had put her off from the start, when he had first begun renting one of her boats, but she hadn’t actually become suspicious of him for a couple of months. It had been a lot of little things that had gradually alerted her, like the way he always carefully looked around before leaving the dock; it would have made sense if he’d been looking at the river traffic, but instead he’d looked at the parking lot and the highway. And there was always a mixture of triumph and relief in his expression when he returned, as if he’d done something he shouldn’t have and gotten away with it.

His clothes were wrong, somehow. He made an effort to dress casually, the way he thought a fisherman would dress, but never quite got it right. He carried a rod and reel and one small tackle box, but from what Evie could tell, he never used them. He certainly never came back with any fish, and the same lure had been tied onto the line every time he went out. She knew it was the same one, because it was missing the back set of treble hooks. No, Mercer wasn’t fishing. So why carry the tackle? The only logical explanation was that he was using it as a disguise; if anyone saw him, they wouldn’t think anything about it.

But because Evie was alert to anything that threatened her domain, she wondered why he would need a disguise. Was he seeing a married woman? She dismissed that possibility. Boats were noisy and obvious; using them wasn’t a good way to sneak around. If his lover’s house was isolated, a car would be better, because then Mercer wouldn’t have to worry about the vagaries of the weather. If the house had neighbors within sight, then a boat would attract attention when it pulled up to the dock; river people tended to notice strange boats. Nor was an assignation in the middle of the lake a good idea, given the river traffic.

Drugs, maybe. Maybe the little tackle box was full of cocaine, instead of tackle. If he had a system set up, selling in the middle of the river would be safe; the water patrol couldn’t sneak up on him, and if they did approach, all he had to do was drop the evidence over the side. His most dangerous time would be before he got out on the water, while he could be caught carrying the stuff. That was why he never examined the parking lot when he returned; the evidence was gone. For all intents and purposes, he had just been enjoying a little fishing.

She had no hard evidence. Twice she had tried to follow him, but had lost him in the multitude of coves and islands. But if he was using one of her boats to either sell or transfer drugs, he was jeopardizing her business. Not only could the boat be confiscated, the publicity would be terrible for the marina. Boat owners would pull out of the slips they rented from her; mere were enough marinas in the Guntersville area that they could always find another place to house their boats.

Both times Mercer had headed toward the same area, the island-dotted area around the Marshall County Park, where it was easy to lose sight of a boat. Evie knew every inch of the river; eventually she would be able to narrow down the choices and find him. She didn’t have any grandiose scheme to apprehend him, assuming he was doing something illegal. She didn’t even intend to get all that close to him; she carried a pair of powerful binoculars with her in the boat. All she wanted to do was satisfy her suspicions; if she was correct, then she would turn the matter over to the sheriff and let him work it out with the water patrol. That way, she would have protected both her reputation and the marina. She might still lose the boat, but she didn’t think the sheriff would confiscate it if she were the one who put him onto Mercer to begin with. All she wanted was to be certain in her own mind before she accused a man of something as serious as drug dealing.

The problem with following Mercer was that she never knew when to expect him; if she had customers in the marina, she couldn’t just drop everything and hop in a boat.

But she would handle that as the opportunity presented itself. Robert Cannon was something else entirely.

She didn’t want to handle him. She didn’t want anything to do with him—this man with his cold, intense eyes and clipped speech, this stranger, this Yankee. He made her feel like a rabbit facing a cobra: terrified, but fascinated at the same time. He tried to hide his ruthlessness behind smooth, cosmopolitan manners, but Evie had no doubts about the real nature of the man.

He wanted her. He intended to have her. And he wouldn’t care if he destroyed her in the taking.

She touched her wedding ring, turning it on her finger. Why couldn’t Matt have lived? So many years had passed without him, and she had survived, had gotten on with her life, but his death had irrevocably changed her. She was stronger, yes, but also set apart, isolated from other men who might have wanted to claim her. Other men had respected that distance; he wouldn’t.

Robert Cannon was a complication she couldn’t afford. At the very least, he would distract her at a time when she needed to be alert. At the worst, he would breach her defenses and take what he wanted, then leave without any thought for the emotional devastation he left behind. Evie shuddered at the thought. She had survived once; she wasn’t sure she could do it again.

Today, when he had put his hands on her waist and pulled her against his lean, hard body, she had been both shocked and virtually paralyzed by the exquisite pleasure of the contact. It had been so many years since she had felt that kind of joy that she had forgotten how enthralling, how potent, it was to feel hard male flesh against her. She had been startled by the heated strength of his hands and the subtle muskiness of his scent. She had been swamped by the sensations, by her memories. But her memories were old ones, of two young people who no longer existed. The hands holding her had been Matt’s; the eager, yearning kisses had been from Matt’s lips. Time had dulled those memories, the precious ones, but the image of Robert Cannon was sharp, almost painful, in its freshness.

The safest thing would be to ignore him, but that was the one thing she was sure he wouldn’t allow.

Robert strolled into the offices of PowerNet the next morning and introduced himself to the receptionist, a plump, astute woman in her thirties who immediately made a phone call and then personally escorted him to Landon Mercer’s office. He was in a savage mood, had been since he’d seen the wedding ring on Evie Shaw’s hand, but he gave the receptionist a gentle smile and thanked her, making her blush. He never took out his temper on innocents; in fact, his self-control was so great that the vast majority of his employees didn’t know he even had a temper. The few who knew otherwise had learned it the hard way.

Landon Mercer, however, was no innocent. He came swiftly out of his office to meet Robert halfway, heartily greeting him. “Mr. Cannon, what a surprise! No one let us know you were in Huntsville. We’re honored!”

“Hardly that,” Robert murmured as he shook hands with Mercer, deliberately modifying his grip to use very little strength. His mood deteriorated even further to find that Mercer was tall and good-looking, with thick blond hair and a very European sense of style. Expertly Robert assessed the cost of the Italian silk suit Mercer was wearing, and mentally he raised his eyebrows. The man had expensive tastes.

“Come in, come in,” Mercer urged, inviting Robert into his office. “Would you like coffee?”

“Please.” The acceptance of hospitality, Robert had found, often made subordinates relax a little. Landon Mercer would be edgy at his sudden appearance, anyway; it wouldn’t hurt to calm him down.

Mercer turned to his secretary, who was making herself very busy. “Trish, would you bring in two coffees, please?”

“Of course. How do you take yours, Mr. Cannon?”

“Black.”

They went on into Mercer’s office, and Robert took one of the comfortable visitors’ chairs, rather than automatically taking Mercer’s big chair behind the desk to show his authority. “I apologize for just dropping in on you without warning,” he said calmly. “I’m in the area on vacation and thought I’d take the opportunity to see the operation, since I’ve never personally been down here.”

“We’re pleased to have you anytime,” Mercer replied, still in that hearty tone of voice. “Vacation, you say? Strange place to take a vacation, especially in the middle of summer. The heat is murderous, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“Not so strange.” Robert could almost hear Mercer’s furiously churning, suspicious thoughts. Why was Robert here? Why now? Were they on to Mercer? If they were, why hadn’t he been arrested? Robert didn’t mind Mercer being suspicious; in fact, he was counting on it.

There was a light knock on the door; then Trish entered with two cups of steaming coffee. She passed Robert’s to him first, then gave the other cup to Mercer. “Thank you,” Robert said. Mercer didn’t bother with the courtesy.

“About your vacation?” Mercer prompted, when Trish had closed the door behind her.

Robert leaned back in the chair and indolently crossed his legs. He could feel Mercer sharply studying him and knew what he would see: a lean, elegantly dressed man with cool, slightly bored eyes, certainly nothing to alarm him, despite this unexpected visit. “I have a house on the lake in Guntersville,” he said in a lazy, slightly remote tone. It was a lie, but Mercer wouldn’t know that. “I bought it and some land several years ago. I’ve never been down here before, but I’ve let several of my executives use the place, and they’ve all returned with the usual exaggerated fishing stories. Even allowing for that, they’ve all been enthusiastic about coming back, so I thought I’d try out the fishing for myself.”

“I’ve heard it’s a good lake,” Mercer said politely, but the mental wheels were whirling faster than before.

“We’ll see.” Robert allowed himself a slight smile. “It seems like a nice, quiet place. Just what the doctor ordered.”

“Doctor?”

“High blood pressure. Stress.” Robert shrugged. “I feel fine, but the doctor insisted that I needed a long vacation, and this seemed like the perfect place to avoid stress.”

“That’s for sure,” Mercer said. Suspicion still lingered in his eyes, but now it was tempered with relief at the plausible explanation for Robert’s presence.

“I don’t know how long I’ll stay,” Robert continued in an indifferent tone. “I won’t be dropping in on you constantly, though. I’m supposed to forget about work for a while.”

“We’ll be glad to see you anytime, but you really should listen to your doctor,” Mercer urged. “Since you’re here, would you like a tour of the place? There isn’t much to see, of course, just a lot of programmers and their computers.”

Robert glanced at his watch, as if he had somewhere else to go. “I believe I have time, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“No, not at all.” Mercer was already on his feet, anxious to complete the tour and send Robert on his way.

Even if he hadn’t already known about Mercer, Robert thought, he would have disliked him; there was a slickness to him that was immediately off-putting. Mercer tried to disguise it with a glib, hearty attitude, but the man thought he was smarter than everyone else, and the contempt slipped through every so often. Did he treat Evie with the same attitude? Or was she, despite her relative lack of sophistication, cool and discerning enough that Mercer watched his step with her?

They were probably lovers, he thought, even though she was married. When had marital vows ever prevented anyone from straying, if they were so inclined? And why would a woman involved in espionage hesitate at cheating on her husband? Odd that her marital status hadn’t been included in the information he’d received on her, but then, why would it be, unless her husband was also involved? Evidently he wasn’t, but nevertheless, as soon as Robert had returned to his hotel room in Huntsville the afternoon before, he had called his own investigative people and asked for information concerning the man. He was coldly furious; he had never, under any circumstances, allowed himself to become involved with a married woman, and he wasn’t going to lower his standards now. But neither had he ever wanted another woman as violently as he wanted Evie Shaw, and knowing that he had to deprive himself made his temper very precarious. Mercer was all smooth bonhomie as he escorted Robert through the offices, pointing out the various features and explaining the work in progress. Robert made use of the tour to gather information. Calling on his ability to totally concentrate on one thing at a time, he pushed Evie Shaw out of his mind and ruthlessly focused on the business at hand. PowerNet was housed in a long, one-story brick building. The company offices were in front, while the real work, the programming, was done in the back, with computer geniuses working their peculiar magic. Robert quietly noted the security setup and approved; there were surveillance cameras, and motion and thermal alarms. Access to the classified material could be gained only by a coded magnetic card, and the bearer still had to have the necessary security clearance. No paperwork or computer disks were allowed to leave the building. All work was logged in and placed in a secure vault when the programmers left for the day.

For Robert, the security measures made things simple; the only way the system could have been breached without detection was by someone in a position of authority, someone who had access to the vault: Landon Mercer.

He made a point of checking his watch several times during the tour, and as soon as it was completed, he said, “I’ve enjoyed this very much, but I’m supposed to meet with a contractor to do a few repairs on the house. Perhaps we could get together for a round of golf sometime.”

“Of course, anytime,” Mercer said. “Just call.” Robert allowed himself a brief smile. “I’ll do that.” He was satisfied with the visit; his intention hadn’t been to do any actual snooping but rather to let Mercer know he was in town and to see for himself the security measures at PowerNet. He had the security layout from the original specs, of course, but it was always best to check out the details and make certain nothing had been changed. He might have to slip into the building at night, but that wasn’t his primary plan, merely a possibility. Catching Mercer on-site with classified data didn’t prove anything; the trick was to catch him passing it to someone else. Let his presence make Mercer nervous. Nervous people made mistakes.

An envelope from his personal investigators was waiting for him at the desk when he returned to the hotel. Robert stepped into the empty elevator and opened the envelope as the car began moving upward. He quickly scanned the single sheet. The information was brief. Matt Shaw, Evie’s husband, had been killed in a car accident the day after their wedding, twelve years before.

He calmly slid the sheet back into the envelope, but a savage elation was rushing through him. She was a widow! She was available. And, though she didn’t know it yet, she was his for the taking.

Once in his hotel room, he picked up the phone and began making calls, sliding the chess pieces of intrigue into place.

Chapter Four

Evie stuck her head out the door. “Jason!” she bellowed at her fourteen-year-old nephew. “Stop horsing around. Now!”

“Aw, okay,” he grudgingly replied, and Evie pulled her head back inside, though she kept an eye on him, anyway. She adored the kid but never forgot that he was just a kid, with an attention span that leaped around like a flea and all the ungovernable energy and awkwardness that went with early adolescence. Her niece, Paige, was content to sit inside with her, in the air-conditioning, but a couple of Jason’s buddies had come by, and now they were out on the docks, clowning around. Evie expected any or all of the boys to fall into the water at any time.

“They’re so jerky,” Paige said with all the disdain a thirteen-year-old could muster, which was plenty.

Evie smiled at her. “They’ll improve with age.”

“They’d better,” Paige said ominously. She pulled her long, coltish legs up into the rocking chair and returned to the young-adult romance she was reading. She was a beautiful girl, Evie thought, studying the delicate lines of the young face, which still wore some of the innocence of childhood. Paige had dark hair, like her father, and a classic bone structure that would only improve with age. Jason was more outgoing than his sister, but then, Jason was more outgoing than just about everyone.

A boat idled into the marina and pulled up to the gas pumps. Evie went outside to take care of her customers, two young couples who had already spent too much time on the water, judging by their sunburns. After they had paid and left, she checked on Jason and his friends again, but for the time being they were ambling along one of the docks and refraining from any rough horseplay. Knowing teenage boys as she did, she didn’t expect that state of affairs to last long.

The day was another scorcher. She glanced up at the white sun in the cloudless sky; no chance of rain to cool things off. Though she had been outside for only a few minutes, she could already feel her hair sticking to the back of her neck as she opened the door to the office and stepped inside. How could the boys stand even being outside in this heat, much less doing anything as strenuous as their energetic clowning around?

She paused as she entered, momentarily blinded by the transition from bright sunlight into relative dimness. Paige was chatting with someone, her eager tone unusual in a girl who was normally quiet except with family members. Evie could see a man standing in front of the counter, but it was another minute before her vision cleared enough for her to make out his lean height and the width of his shoulders. She still couldn’t see his features clearly, but nevertheless a tiny alarm of recognition tingled through her, and she drew a controlled breath. “Mr. Cannon.”

“Hello.” His pale green gaze slipped downward, leisurely examined her legs, which were exposed today, because the heat had been so oppressive that she had worn shorts. The once-over made her feel uncomfortable, and she slipped behind the counter to ring up the gas sale and put the money in the cash drawer.

“What may I do for you?” she asked, without looking at him. She was aware of Paige watching them with open interest, alerted perhaps by the difference in Evie’s manner from the way she usually treated customers.

He ignored the distance in her tone. “I’ve brought my boat.” He paused. “You do still have an available slip?”

“Of course.” Business was business, Evie thought. She opened a drawer and pulled out a rental agreement. “If you’ll complete this, I’ll show you to your slip. When you were here the other day, did you see any particular location that you’d like?”

He glanced down at the sheet in his hand. “No, any one of them will do,” he absently replied as he rapidly read the agreement. It was straightforward and simple, stating the rental fee and outlining the rules. At the bottom of the sheet was a place for two signatures, his and hers. “Is there an extra copy?” he asked, the businessman in him balking at signing something without keeping a record of it.

She shrugged and pulled out an extra copy of the rental agreement, took the one he held from his hands and slipped a sheet of carbon paper between the two sheets. Briskly she stapled them together and handed them back to him. Controlling a smile, Robert swiftly filled out the form, giving his name and address and how long he intended to rent the slip. Then he signed at the bottom, returned the forms to her and pulled out his wallet. The small sign taped to the counter stated that the marina accepted all major credit cards, so he removed one and laid it on the counter. She still didn’t look at him as she prepared a credit-card slip. Robert watched her with well-hidden greed. In the three days since he’d first met her, he had decided that she couldn’t possibly have been as lovely as he had first thought or have such an impact on his senses. He had been wrong. From the moment he had entered the marina and watched her through the plate-glass window as she pumped gas, tension had twisted his guts until he could barely breathe. She was still as sleek and golden and sensual as a pagan goddess, and he wanted her.

He had accomplished a lot in those three days. In addition to making the first chess move with Mercer, he had bought a boat, a car and a house on the river. It had taken two days for the dealership to rig the boat, but he had taken possession of the house faster than that, having moved in the afternoon before. The Realtor still hadn’t recovered from his blitzing style of decision making. But Robert wasn’t accustomed to being thwarted; in record time the utilities had been turned on, the paperwork completed, a cleaning service from Huntsville dragooned into giving the place a thorough cleaning, and new furniture both selected and delivered. He had also put another plan into progress, one that would force Evie Shaw and Landon Mercer into a trap.

Silently Evie handed him the credit-card slip to sign. He scrawled his signature and returned it to her just as shouts from outside made her whirl. Robert glanced out the window and saw several teenage boys roughhousing on the docks. “Excuse me,” Evie said, and went over to open the door.

“They’re going to get it now,” Paige piped up with obvious satisfaction, getting to her knees in the rocking chair.

Just as Evie reached the door, Jason laughingly pushed one of his buddies, who immediately returned the shove, with interest. Jason had already turned away, and the motion propelled him forward; his sneakers skidded on a wet spot perilously close to the edge of the dock. His gangly arms began windmilling comically as he tried to reverse direction, but his feet shot out from under him and he flew into the air, over the water.

“Jason!”

He was too close to the dock. Evie saw it even as she raced through the door, her heart in her mouth. She heard the sickening crack as his head hit the edge of the dock. His thin body went limp in midair, and a half second later he hit the water, immediately slipping beneath the surface.

One of the boys yelled, his young voice cracking. Evie caught only a glimpse of their bewildered, suddenly terrified faces as she fought her way through the thick, overheated air. The dock looked so far away, and she didn’t seem to be making any progress, even though she could feel her feet thudding on the wood. Frantically she searched the spot where Jason had gone under, but there was nothing, nothing…

She hit the water in a long, flat dive, stroking strongly for where she had last seen him. She was dimly aware of a distant splashing, but she ignored it, all her attention on reaching Jason in time. Don’t let it be too late. Dear God, don’t let it be too late. She could still hear the sodden thunk of his head hitting the dock. He could already be dead, or paralyzed. No. Not Jason. She refused to lose him; she couldn’t lose him. She couldn’t go through that again.

She took a deep breath and dived, pushing her way through the water, her desperately searching hands reaching out. Visibility in the river wasn’t good; she would have to locate him mostly by touch. She reached the muddy bottom and clawed her way along it. He had to be here! There was the dark pillar of the dock, telling her that she wasn’t too far away from where he had gone in.

Her lungs began to ache, but she refused to surface. That would use precious seconds, seconds that Jason didn’t have.

Maybe the wave motion had washed him under the dock.

Fiercely she kicked, propelling herself into the darker water under the dock. Her groping hands swept the water in front of her. Nothing.

Her lungs were burning. The need to inhale was almost impossible to resist. Grimly she fought the impulse as she forced her way down to feel along the bottom again.

Something brushed her hand.

She grabbed, and clutched fabric. Her other hand, groping blindly, caught an arm. Using the last of her strength, she tugged her limp burden out of the shadow of the docks and feebly kicked upward. Progress was frustratingly, agonizingly slow; her lungs were demanding air, her vision fading. Dear God, had she found Jason only to drown with him, because she lacked the strength to get them to the surface?

Then strong hands caught her, gripping her ribs with bruising force, and she was propelled upward in a mighty rush. Her head broke the surface, and she inhaled convulsively, choking and gasping.

“I have you,” a deep, calm voice said in her ear. “I have both of you. Just relax against me.”

She could hardly do anything else. She was supported by an arm as unyielding as iron as he stroked the short distance to the dock. The boys were on their knees, reaching eager hands down toward him. “Just hold him,” she heard Cannon order. “Don’t try to pull him out of the water. Let me do it. And one of you go call 911.”

“I already have,” Evie heard Paige say, the girl’s voice wavery and thin.

“Good girl.” His tone changed to brisk command, the words close by her ear. “Evie. I want you to hang on to the edge of the dock. Can you do that?”

She was still gasping, unable to talk, so she nodded.

“Let go of Jason. The boys are holding him, so he’ll be okay. Do it now.”

She obeyed, and he placed her hands on the edge of the dock. Grimly she clung to the wood as he heaved himself out of the water. She pushed her streaming hair out of her eyes with one hand as he knelt down and slipped both hands under Jason’s arms. “He might have a spinal-cord injury,” she croaked.

“I know.” Robert’s face was grim. “But he isn’t breathing. If we don’t get him up here and do CPR, he won’t make it.”

She swallowed hard and nodded again. As gently as possible, Robert lifted Jason out of the water, the muscles in his arms and shoulders cording under the wet shirt. Evie took one agonized look at Jason’s still, blue face, and then she hauled herself out of the water, using strength she hadn’t known she still possessed. She collapsed on the dock beside Jason, then struggled to her knees. “Jason!”

Robert felt for a pulse in the boy’s neck and located a faint throb. Relieved, he said, “He has a heartbeat,” then bent over the sprawled, limp body, pinching the boy’s nostrils shut and using his other hand to press on his chin, forcing his mouth open. He placed his own mouth on the chill blue lips and carefully, forcefully, blew his breath outward. The thin chest rose. Robert lifted his mouth, and the air sighed out of the boy, his chest falling again.

Evie reached out, then forced herself to draw back. She couldn’t do anything that Robert wasn’t already doing, and she was still so weak and shaky that she couldn’t do it nearly as well. She felt as if she were choking on her pain and desperation, on the overwhelming need to do something, anything. Her ears were buzzing. She would rather die herself than helplessly watch someone else she loved slowly die before her eyes.

Robert repeated the process again and again, silently counting. Fiercely he focused on what he was doing, ignoring the terrified kids grouped around them, not letting himself think about Evie’s silence, her stillness. The kid’s chest was rising with each breath forced into him, meaning oxygen was getting into his lungs. His heart was beating; if he didn’t have a serious head or spinal injury, he should be okay, if he would just start breathing on his own. The seconds ticked by. One minute. Two. Then abruptly the boy’s chest heaved, and he began choking. Quickly Robert drew back.

Jason suddenly convulsed, rolling to his side and knocking against Evie as he choked and gagged. She lurched sideways, off balance, unable to catch herself. Robert’s hand shot out across Jason to steady her, the lean fingers catching her arm and preventing her from going into the water a second time. With effortless strength, he dragged her across Jason’s legs, pulling her to him.

Water streamed from Jason’s nostrils and open mouth. He gulped and coughed again, then abruptly vomited up a quantity of river water.

“Thank God,” Robert said quietly. “No paralysis.”

“No.” Evie pulled loose from his grip. Tears burned her eyes as she crouched once again by Jason’s side. Gently she touched the boy, soothing him, and noticed that the back of his head was red with blood. “You’ll be okay, honey,” she murmured as she examined the cut. “Nothing that a few stitches won’t fix.” She glanced up and saw Paige’s white, tear-streaked face. “Paige, get a towel for me, please. And be careful! Don’t run.”

Paige gulped and headed back toward the marina. She didn’t exactly run, but it was close.

Jason’s coughing fit subsided, and he lay exhausted on his side, gulping in air. Evie stroked his arm, repeating that he was going to be all right.

Paige returned with the towel, and gently Evie pressed it to the deep cut, stanching the flow of blood. “A-aunt Evie?” Jason croaked, his voice so hoarse it was almost soundless.

“I’m here.”

“Can I sit up?” he asked, beginning to be embarrassed by me attention.

“I don’t know,” she replied neutrally. “Can you?”

Slowly, cautiously, he eased himself into a sitting position, but he was weak, and Robert knelt down to support him, shifting so that one strong thigh was behind Jason’s back. “My head hurts,” Jason groaned.

“I imagine so,” Robert said in a calm, almost genial voice. “You hit it on the edge of the dock.” Sirens wailed, swiftly coming closer. Jason’s eyes flickered as he realized a further fuss was going to be made.

Gingerly he reached back and touched his head. Wincing, he let his hand fall to his side. “Mom’s going to be peed off,” he said glumly.

“Mom isn’t the only one,” Evie replied. “But we’ll settle that between ourselves later.”

He looked abashed. He tried to move away from Robert’s support but didn’t quite make it. Then the paramedics were there, hurrying down the dock, carrying their tackle boxes of medical equipment. Robert drew back and pulled Evie with him, giving the paramedics room to work. Paige sidled over and slipped her arms around Evie’s waist, burrowing close and hiding her face against Evie’s wet shirt in a child’s instinctive bid for reassurance. It was a simple thing for Robert to put his arms around both of them, and Evie was too tired, too numb, to resist. She stood docilely in his embrace. His strength enfolded her; his heat comforted her. He had saved Jason’s life, and maybe even her own, because she wasn’t certain she could have gotten Jason to the surface without his help. If so, she would simply have drowned with him rather than let him go and try to save her own life at the expense of his.

Jason was quickly checked; then the paramedics began preparations to transport him to the hospital. “That cut will have to be stitched,” one of them said to Evie. “He probably has a concussion, too, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep him overnight, at least.”

Evie stirred in Robert’s embrace. “I have to call Rebecca,” she said. “And I want to ride with him to the hospital.”

“I’ll drive you,” he said, releasing her. “You’ll need a way back.”

“Rebecca can bring me,” she said as she hurried to the office, Robert and Paige both following her inside. She reached for the phone, then halted, rubbing her forehead. “No, she’ll stay with Jason. Never mind. I can drive myself.”

“Of course you can,” he said gently. “But you won’t, because I’m driving you.”

She gave him a distracted look as she dialed her sister’s number. “That isn’t necessary—Becky. Listen, Jason slipped on the dock and cut his head. He’s going to be okay, but he needs stitches, and the paramedics are taking him to the hospital. They’re leaving now. I’ll meet you there. Yes, I’m bringing Paige with me. Okay. Bye.”

She hung up, then lifted the receiver and dialed another number. “Craig, this is Evie. Can you take over the marina for a couple of hours? Jason’s had an accident, and I’m going with him to the hospital. No, he’ll be okay. Five minutes? Great. I’m leaving now.”

Then, moving swiftly, she got her purse from under the counter and fished out her keys. Like lightning, Robert caught her hand and calmly removed the keys from her grasp. “You’re too shaky,” he said in a gentle, implacable tone. “You came close to drowning yourself. Don’t fight me on this, Evie.”

It was obvious that she lacked the strength to physically fight him for the keys. Frustrated, she gave in rather than waste more time. “All right.”

She drove a sturdy, serviceable four-wheel-drive pickup, handy for pulling boats up a launch ramp. Paige raced ahead to scramble inside, as if afraid she would be left behind if she didn’t beat them to the vehicle. Evie was only grateful that the child automatically slid to the middle of the seat, positioning herself between Evie and Robert and hastily buckling herself in.

“It’s a straight shift,” she blurted unnecessarily as she buckled her own seat belt.

He gave her a gentle smile as he started the engine. “I can manage.”

Of course, he did more than manage. He shifted gears with the smooth expertise of someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Evie’s heart gave a little thump as she tried to imagine Robert Cannon being awkward at anything.

She forced herself to watch the road, rather than him, as she gave directions to the hospital. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to feel that primal pull deep inside her. He was dripping wet, of course, his black hair plastered to his head and his white silk shirt clinging to his muscled torso like a second skin. His leanness was deceptive; the wet shirt revealed the width of his shoulders and chest, and the smooth, steely muscles of his abdomen and back. She thought the image of him, the outline of his body, was probably branded on her mind for all eternity, as was everything else that had happened in the last fifteen minutes. Only fifteen minutes? It felt like a lifetime.

He drove fast, pulling into the hospital parking lot right behind the ambulance. The hospital was small but new, and he couldn’t fault the staffs response. Jason was whisked into an examining room before Evie could reach his side to speak to him.

Firmly Robert took her arm and ushered both her and Paige to seats in the waiting area. “Sit here,” he said, and though his voice was mild, that implacable tone was in it again. “I’ll get coffee for us. How about you, sweetheart?” he asked Paige. “Do you want a soft drink?”

Dumbly Paige nodded, then shook her head. “May I have coffee, too, Aunt Evie?” she whispered. “I’m cold. Or maybe hot chocolate.”

Evie nodded her agreement, and Robert strode to the vending machines. She put her arm around Paige and gathered her close, knowing that the girl had suffered a shock at seeing her brother almost die. “Don’t worry, honey. Jason will be home by tomorrow, probably, griping about his headache and driving you up the wall.”

Paige sniffed back tears. “I know. I’ll get mad at him then, but right now I just want him to be okay.”

“He will be. I promise.”

Robert returned with three cups, one filled with hot chocolate and the other two with coffee. Evie and Paige took theirs from him, and he settled into the chair on Evie’s other side. When she sipped the hot brew, she found that he had liberally dosed it with sugar. She glanced at him and found him watching her, gauging her reaction. “Drink it,” he said softly. “You’re a little shocky, too.”

Because he was right, she obeyed without argument, folding her cold fingers around the cup in an effort to warm them. Her wet clothes were uncomfortably chilly here in the air-conditioned hospital, and she barely restrained a shiver. He should be cold, too, she thought, but knew that he wasn’t. His arm touched hers, and she felt heat radiating through his wet clothing.

As slight as it was, he felt the shiver that raced through her. “I’ll get a blanket for you,” he said, rising to his feet.

She watched him approach the desk and speak to the nurse. He was courteous, restrained, but in about thirty seconds he was returning with a blanket in his hands. He had an air of natural command, she thought. One look into those icy green eyes and people scurried to do his bidding.

He bent over her to tuck the blanket around her, and she let him. Just as he finished, the emergency room doors swung open and her sister, Rebecca, hurried inside, looking tense and scared. Seeing Evie and Paige, she changed her direction to join them. “What’s happening?” she demanded.

“He’s in the treatment room now,” Robert answered for Evie, his deep voice as soothing as when he’d talked to Paige. “He’ll have a few stitches in the back of his head, and a bad headache. They’ll probably keep him overnight, but his injuries are relatively minor.”

Rebecca turned her shrewd brown eyes on him and bluntly demanded, “Who are you?”

“This is Robert Cannon,” Evie said, making an effort to appear calm as she made the introductions. “He dragged both Jason and me out of the water. Mr. Cannon, this is my sister, Rebecca Wood.”

Rebecca took in Robert’s wet clothes, then looked at Evie, seeing the strain on her sister’s pale face. “I’ll see about Jason first,” she said in her usual decisive manner. “Then I want to know exactly what happened.” She turned and marched toward a nurse, identified herself and was directed to the treatment room where Jason was located.

Robert sat down beside Evie. “What branch of the military was your sister in?” he asked, provoking a nervous giggle from Paige.

“I think it’s called motherhood,” Evie replied. “She began practicing on me at an early age.”

“She’s older, I presume.”

“Five years.”

“So you’ve always been ‘baby sister’ to her.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I’m sure you don’t. Drink your coffee,” he admonished, lifting the cup himself and holding it to her lips.

Evie drank, then gave him a wry glance. “You aren’t bad at the mother-hen routine yourself.”

He allowed himself a slight smile. “I take care of my own.” The words were a subtle threat—and a warning, if she were astute enough to hear it.

She didn’t make the obvious retort, that she wasn’t “his”; instead she withdrew, sinking back in her chair and staring straight ahead. Jason’s close call had brought too many old memories to the surface, making it difficult for her to deal with anything just now, much less Robert Cannon. Right now, what she wanted most of all was to crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head, shutting out the world until she felt capable of facing it again. Maybe by the time night came, certainly by tomorrow, she would be all right. Then she would worry about the way he had taken over and about the gentle possessiveness that she couldn’t fight. With Cannon, Evie was beginning to link gentleness with an implacable force of will that let nothing stand in his way. He would be tender and protective, but he would not be thwarted.

They sat in silence until Rebecca came out of the treatment room to rejoin them. “They’re keeping him overnight,” she said. “He has a slight concussion, a big shaved spot on the back of his head and ten stitches. He also won’t say exactly what happened, other than mumbling that he fell. What’s he trying to hide from me?”

Evie hesitated, trying to decide exactly what to tell Rebecca, and that gave Paige enough time to pipe up. “Scott and Jeff and

Patrick came by the marina, and they were all acting silly out on the docks. Aunt Evie yelled at Jason to settle down, but they didn’t. Jason pushed Patrick, and Patrick pushed him back, and Jason slipped and fell, and hit his head on the dock, then went into the water. Aunt Evie went in after him, and she was under forever and ever, and Mr. Cannon tried to find both of them. Then Aunt Evie came up, and she had Jason, and Mr. Cannon pulled them to the dock. Jason wasn’t breathing, Mom, and Aunt Evie nearly drowned, too. Mr. Cannon had to do that artificial breathing stuff on Jason, and then Jason started coughing and puking, and the paramedics came. I called 911,” she finished in a rush.

Rebecca looked a bit bemused at this flood of words from her quiet child but heard the fear still lurking under the loquaciousness. She sat down beside Paige and hugged her. “You did exactly right,” she praised, and Paige gave a little sigh of relief.

Rebecca examined Evie’s pale, drawn face. “He’s all right,” she said reassuringly. “At least for now. As soon as he’s recovered, I’m going to kill him. Better yet, I think I’ll ground him for the rest of the summer. Then I’ll kill him.”

Evie managed a smile. “If he lives through all that, I want a turn at him.”

“It’s a deal. Now, I want you to go home and get out of those wet clothes. You look worse than Jason does.”

The smile, this time, was easier. “Gee, thanks.” But she knew that Rebecca’s sharp eyes had seen below the surface and recognized the strain that she was under.

“I’ll see to her,” Robert said, standing and urging Evie to her feet. She wanted to protest, she really did, but she was so tired, her nerves so strained, that it was too much effort. So she managed to say goodbye to Rebecca and Paige, and tell them to kiss Jason for her; then she gave in and let him usher her out of the building and across the parking lot to the truck. She had left the blanket behind, but the searing afternoon heat washed over her like a glow, and she shivered with delight.

Robert’s arm tightened around her waist. “Are you still cold?”

“No, I’m fine,” she murmured. “The heat feels good.”

He opened the truck door and lifted her onto the seat. The strength in his hands and arms, the ease with which he picked her up, made her shiver again. She closed her eyes and let her head rest against the window, as much from a desire to shut him out as from an almost overpowering fatigue.

“You can’t go to sleep,” he said as he got in on the driver’s side, amusement lacing his tone. “You have to give me directions to your house.”

She forced herself to open her eyes and sit up, and gave him calm, coherent directions. It didn’t take long to get anywhere in Guntersville, and less than fifteen minutes later he stopped the truck in her driveway. She rumbled with the door but was so clumsy that he was there before she managed it, opening it and supporting her with a firm hand under her elbow. She got out, reluctant to let him inside her house but accepting the inevitable. Best just to go shower and change as fast as she could, and get it over with.

He entered right behind her. “Have a seat,” she invited automatically as she headed toward her bedroom. “I’ll be out in about fifteen minutes.”

“I’m still too wet to sit down,” he said. “But take your time. I’ll go out on the deck, if that’s okay with you.”

“Of course,” she said, giving him a polite smile without really looking at him, and escaped into me privacy of her bedroom.

Robert eyed the closed door thoughtfully. She was so wary of him that she wouldn’t even look at him if she could help it. It wasn’t a response he was accustomed to from a woman, though God knew she had reason to be wary, given his assumption that she knew of his connection to PowerNet. She couldn’t have acted any more guilty if he had caught her red-handed. He could opt for patience and let time disarm her, but he already had plans in motion that would force the issue, so he decided to allay her suspicions in another manner, by making a definite, concerted effort to seduce her. He had planned to seduce her, anyway; he would simply intensify the pressure.

He heard the shower start running. He couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to look around, and he took advantage of it.

The house was probably forty years old, he thought, but had been remodeled so the interior was open and more modern, with exposed beams and gleaming hardwood floors. She had a green thumb; indoor plants of all sizes occupied every available flat surface. He could see into the kitchen from where he stood in the living room, and beyond that was the deck, with double French doors opening onto it. A dock led from the deck down to a boathouse.

Her furnishings were neat and comfortable, but certainly not luxurious. Without haste, he went over to the big, old-fashioned rolltop desk and methodically searched it, unearthing nothing of any great interest, not that he had expected to find anything. It wasn’t likely she would have been fool enough to leave him in the room with an unlocked desk if the desk contained anything incriminating. He looked through her bank statement but found no unusually large deposits, at least at this particular bank or on this particular statement.

There was a small, framed photograph on the desk. He picked it up and examined the two people pictured. Evie, definitely—a very young Evie, but already glowing with seductiveness. The boy, for he was nothing more than that, was probably her husband, dead now for twelve years. Robert studied the boy’s face more closely, seeing laughter and happiness and yes, devotion. But had the boy any idea how to handle the sensual treasure that the girl in his arms represented? Of course not; what teenage boy would? Still, Robert felt an unexpected and unpleasant twinge of jealousy for this long-dead boy, for the riches that had so briefly been his. Evie had loved him, enough that she still wore his wedding ring after all these years.

He heard the shower shut off and replaced the photograph, then quietly walked out onto the deck. She had a nice place here, nothing extravagant, but cozy and homey. There was plenty of privacy, too, with no houses visible except for those on the far side of the lake. The water was very blue, reflecting both the green of the mountains and the deep blue bowl of the sky. The afternoon was slipping away, and the sun was lower now, but still white and searing. Soon it would begin to turn bronze, and the lush scents of the heavy greenery would grow stronger. By the time purple twilight brought a respite from the heat, the air would be redolent with honeysuckle and roses, pine and fresh-cut grass. Time was slower here; people didn’t rush from one occupation to another. He had actually seen people sitting on their front porches, reading newspapers or shelling peas, occasionally waving to passersby. Of course, people from New York and other large cities would say that the locals here had nothing to rush to, but from what he’d seen they stayed busy enough; they just didn’t get in any great hurry.

He heard Evie come to the open French door. “I’m ready,” she said.

He turned and looked at her. Her newly washed hair was still wet, but she had braided it and pinned the braids up so they wouldn’t get her shirt damp. She had exchanged the shorts for jeans, and had on a pink T-shirt that made her golden skin glow. But her cheeks were still a bit pale, and her expression was strained.

“You have a nice place,” he said.

“Thanks. I inherited it from my in-laws.”

Though he knew the answer, now was the time to ask for information; it would be odd if he didn’t. “You’re married?” he asked.

“Widowed.” She turned and retreated into the house, and Robert followed her.

“Ah. I’m sorry. How long has it been?”

“Twelve years.”

“I saw the picture on the desk. Is that your husband?”

“Yes, that’s Matt.” She stopped and looked toward the photograph, and an ineffable sadness darkened her eyes. “We were just kids.” Then she seemed to gather herself and walked briskly to the door. “I need to get back to the marina.”

“My house is about five miles from here,” he said. “It won’t take long for me to shower and change.”

She carried a towel out to the truck and dried the seat before she got inside. She didn’t even bother protesting his continued possession of her keys; it would be pointless, though she was now obviously calm enough to drive safely.

His clothes had dried enough that they were merely damp now, rather than dripping wet, but she knew they had to be uncomfortable. Hers certainly had been. Her conscience twinged. He had not only saved Jason’s life but likely hers, as well, and had put himself to a great deal of trouble to see that she was taken care of. No matter how he alarmed her, she knew that she would never forget his quick actions or his cool decisiveness.

“Thank you,” she said softly, staring straight ahead. “Jason and I probably wouldn’t have made it without you.”

“The likelihood was unnerving,” he said, his tone cool and even. “You’d pushed yourself so far that you couldn’t have gotten him out of the water. Didn’t it occur to you to let go of him and come up for another breath?”

“No.” The single word was flat. “I couldn’t have done that” He glanced at her profile, saw the deepening strain in her expression and deftly changed the subject. “Will your sister really ground him for the rest of the summer?”

Evie was startled into a laugh, a rusty little sound that went right to his gut. “I’d say he’ll be lucky if that’s all she does. It isn’t that he was fooling around, but that I’d already told him to stop and he disobeyed me.”

“So he broke a cardinal rule?”

“Just about.”

Robert intended to have a few words with the young man himself, about acting responsibly and the possible consequences of reckless actions, but he didn’t mention it to Evie. She was obviously very protective of her niece and nephew, and though she couldn’t say that it wasn’t any of his business, she wouldn’t like it. His conversation with Jason would be private.

When he stopped in the driveway of his new house, Evie looked around with interest. “This place has been on the market for almost a year,” she said.

“Then I’m lucky no one beat me to it, aren’t I?” He got out and walked around the truck to open the door for her. Though she hadn’t waited for him to perform the service at the hospital, that had been an emergency; nor would she have waited when they had reached her house, if she had been able to get the door open in time. He’d had the strong impression then that she had wanted to bolt inside and lock him out. Now, however, she waited with the natural air of a queen, as if he were only doing what he should. She might be dressed in jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt, but that didn’t lessen her femininity one whit; she expected that male act of servitude. Robert had always preferred to treat women with the small courtesies but hadn’t insisted on them when his partner had protested. He was both amused and charmed by Evie’s rather regal, very Southern attitude.

He mused about this subtle signal as he ushered her into the house. Though she was still very wary of him, obviously on some level her resistance had weakened. Anticipation tightened his muscles, but he deliberately resisted it. Now was not the time. Not quite yet.

“Make yourself at home while I shower,” he invited, smiling faintly as he walked toward his bedroom, which was down the hallway to the right. He had no doubt that she would do exactly as he had done, take full advantage of the opportunity to do a quick search.

Evie stood in the middle of the living room after he had gone, too tense to “make herself at home.” She looked around, trying to distract herself. The house was sprawling and modern, one story of brick and redwood, easily three times the size of her own. A huge rock fireplace dominated the left wall, the chimney soaring upward to the cathedral ceiling. Twin white ceiling fans stirred a gentle breeze. The furniture was chic but comfortable-looking, sized to fit a man of his height.

The living room was separated from the dining room by a waist-high planter in which luxurious ferns flourished. Huge double windows revealed a deck, furnished with comfortable chairs, an umbrella table and even more plants. Hesitantly she walked into the dining room for a better view. The kitchen opened up to the right, an immaculate oasis gleaming with the most modem appliances available. Even the coffeemaker looked as if the user would need a degree in engineering to work the thing. There was a breakfast nook on the far side of the kitchen, occupied by a smallish table with a white ceramic tile top. She could see him sitting there in the mornings, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. Double French doors, far more ornate and stylish than her own, led from the breakfast nook onto the deck. She would have liked to explore further but felt too constrained here on his territory. Instead she retreated to the living room once more.

Robert took his time showering and dressing. Let her look around all she wanted; the fact that she wouldn’t find anything alarming would help allay her suspicions. She would begin to relax, which was exactly what he wanted.

A lot of men, maybe most of them, would have made a move while they had been at her house; she had been more off-balance, vulnerable. He had even had the opportunity, had he chosen to take it, of walking in on her while she was unclothed. But he had elected to wait, knowing she would be more at ease now that the most provocative and dangerous circumstances were past. He hadn’t made a pass at her then, so she wouldn’t be expecting him to do so now. And since she wouldn’t be mentally prepared to handle an advance, her response would be honest, unguarded.

Finally he stopped dawdling and returned to the living room. To his surprise, she was still standing almost exactly where he had left her, and little of the strain had faded from her face. She turned to watch him. Her lovely golden brown eyes were still dark with some inner distress that went far deeper than the episode with Jason, traumatic as that had been.

Robert paused while still several feet from her, studying those somber eyes. Then he simply moved forward with a graceful speed that gave her no time to evade him, and took her in his arms. He heard her instinctive intake of breath, saw the alarm widening her eyes as she lifted her head to protest, a protest that was smothered when his mouth covered hers.

She jerked in his arms, and he gently controlled the action, pulling her even more firmly against him. He took care not to hurt her but deepened the insistent pressure of his mouth until he felt her own mouth yield and open. The sweetness of her lips sent an electrical thrill along his nerves, tightening his muscles and swelling his sex. He took her mouth with his tongue, holding her still for the imitative sexual possession, repeating the motion again and again, until she shivered and softened in his arms, her lips beginning to cling to his.

Her tentative response made his head swim, and to his surprise he had to struggle to maintain his control. But she felt perfect in his arms, damn her, all those soft, luscious curves molding to the hard, muscled planes of his body. Her mouth was sweeter than any he had ever tasted before, and the simple act of kissing her was arousing him to an unbelievable degree.

He didn’t want to stop. He hadn’t planned to do more than kiss her, but he hadn’t expected the intensity of his own response. His mouth crushed fiercely down on hers, demanding even more. He heard the soft, helpless sound she made in her throat; then her arms lifted around his neck, and she pressed full length against him. Pure, primitive male triumph roared through him at this evidence of her own arousal. He could feel her breasts, round and firm, the nipples hard against his chest, and he slipped his hand under her shirt to cup one of them, his thumb rubbing across the peaked nipple through the thin lace of her bra. Her body arched, her hips pressing hard against his… and then suddenly she was fighting, panicked, trying to squirm free.

He let her go, though every cell in his body was screaming for more. “Easy,” he managed to say, but the word was low and rough and his breath was uneven. He tried for a more controlled reassurance. “I won’t hurt you, sweetheart.”

Evie had backed away from him, her face pale but her lips swollen and red from his kisses. She forced herself to stop retreating, to stand her ground and face him. The sensual pull of his masculinity was almost overwhelming, tempting her to go back into those arms, to yield to that fierce domination. She felt a sense of doom; he was far more dangerous to her than she had first suspected.

“Yes, you will,” she whispered. Her teeth were chattering. “Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?”

Chapter Five

One looked ready to bolt. To soothe her, he moved back a few paces and let his hands relax at his sides. His eyes gleamed with faint irony. “You’re a lovely woman, sweetheart. Surely you aren’t surprised that I’m attracted to you? As for what I want from you, I was holding you closely enough that the answer to that question should have been obvious.”

She didn’t respond to his gentle teasing. Instead her somber gaze remained locked on his face, trying to probe beneath that smooth, urbane sophistication. He was very cosmopolitan, beyond a doubt, but he used that slick surface as a shield to hide the real man, the man who had kissed her with such ruthless passion. There were many hidden layers to him, his motives complex and unfathomable. Yes, he was attracted to her, as she was to him. It would be foolish to deny her own participation, and Evie wasn’t a foolish woman. But she always had the feeling that he was studying her, manipulating her in some subtle manner. From the very first she had sensed his determination to force himself into her life, and he was doing exactly that with a calm force of will that refused to be denied. Whatever his motive, it was something that went beyond the physical.

“I don’t have casual sex,” she said.

He almost smiled. It was merely an expression in those pale eyes, rather than an actual movement of his mouth. “My dear, I promise you there wouldn’t be anything casual about it.” He paused. “Are you involved with someone else?”

She shook her head. “No.”

He wasn’t surprised that she had denied any involvement with

Mercer. “Then we don’t have a problem, do we? You can’t say that you aren’t attracted to me, too.”

She lifted her chin, and his pale eyes gleamed at that proud motion. “That velvet glove covers an iron fist, doesn’t it?” she commented neutrally. “No, I can’t say that I’m not attracted to you.”

Her perception disturbed him, a reaction that he didn’t allow to surface. “I can be determined when I want something… or someone.”

She made an abrupt motion, as if tiring of the verbal jousting. “I phrased it wrong. I don’t have affairs, either.”

“A wise decision, but in this case too restrictive.” He approached her now, and she didn’t retreat. Gently he cupped her face with one long-fingered hand, his fingers stroking over the velvety texture of her cheek. God, she was lovely, not classically beautiful, but glowing with an intensely female seductiveness that made him think her name was very apt indeed. So must Eve have been, glorious in her nudity. No wonder Adam had been so easily led, a weakness he wouldn’t allow himself, though he intended to fully enjoy Evie’s sensuality. Her sweet, warm scent wafted up to him. “I won’t force you,” he murmured. “But I will have you.”

“If you won’t use force, how do you intend to go about it?” she asked.

His eyebrows lifted. “You think I should warn you?”

“Yes.”

“An interesting notion, but one I’m going to leave untried.” He rubbed his thumb over her lower lip. “For now, sweetheart, we’d better get back to the marina. You have a business to run, and I have a boat to get into a slip.”

He let his hand drop as he spoke, and Evie turned from him with relief, as if she had been released from a force field. Her face tingled where he had touched her, and she remembered the electric sensation when he had put his hand on her breast. His boldness spoke of vast experience and self-confidence with women, something that put her at a disadvantage.

They were both silent on the drive back to the marina. She was vaguely surprised to see how late it was, the sun dipping low even for these long summer days. The sultry heat hadn’t abated, though there was a hint of purple on the horizon that gave the promise of a cooling rain shower.

Robert’s speedboat, a sleek, dark eighteen-footer, was still where he had left it, hitched to a black Jeep Renegade. Thank heavens it hadn’t been blocking the launch ramps, or Craig would have had a mess on his hands. She hurried into the marina office, and Craig looked up from the sports magazine he was reading. “Is everything okay?” he asked, getting to his feet. “The kids said that Jason nearly drowned.”

“He has a concussion, but he’ll go home tomorrow,” she said. “Thanks for coming in. I’m sorry for wrecking your day.”

“No problem,” he said cheerfully. He was seventeen, a tall, muscular, dark-haired kid who would be a senior when the new school year started. He had been working part-time for her for almost two years and was so steady that she had no qualms about leaving him in charge. “Say, what about that new boat outside?”

“It’s mine,” Robert said, stepping inside. “I’ll be renting a slip here.” He held out his hand. “I’m Robert Cannon.”

Craig took his hand with a firm grip. “Craig Foster. Glad to meet you, Mr. Cannon. You must be the guy who pulled Evie and Jason out of the water. The kids said it was a tall Yankee.”

“I’m the guy,” Robert affirmed, amusement in his eyes.

“Thought so. Want me to help you get the boat into a slip?”

“I can do it,” Evie said. “I’ve taken enough time out of your day.”

“You pay me for it,” Craig replied, grinning. “I might as well, since I’m already here. Mom won’t be expecting me back until supper, anyway.” He and Robert left, chatting companionably.

Kids seemed to like Robert, Evie thought, watching them from the window. Even shy Paige had been at ease with him. He didn’t treat kids as equals—he was the adult, his was the authority—but at the same time he didn’t dismiss them. Authority and responsibility sat easily on those broad shoulders, she mused. He was obviously accustomed to command.

For her own sake, her own protection, she had to hold him at bay, and she didn’t know if she could. Today, with a few kisses and frightening ease, he had shown her that he could arouse her beyond her own control. She could love him, and that was the most terrifying prospect of all. He was a strong man, in mind and soul as well as body, a man worthy of love. He would steal her heart if she weren’t careful, if she didn’t keep her guard up at all times.

She turned away from the window. Twelve years ago, love had almost destroyed her, leaving only a forlorn heap of ashes from which she had laboriously rebuilt a controlled, protected life. She couldn’t do that again; she didn’t have the strength to once more live through that hell and emerge victorious. She had already lost too many people to believe that love, or life, lasted forever. She couldn’t do anything about the people she already loved, the ones already in her heart: her family, old Virgil, a very few close friends, but she hadn’t allowed anyone new to stake a claim on her emotions. She had already paid out too much in pain and had precious little reserve of spirit left. She had almost lost Jason today, and the pain had been overwhelming. Rebecca knew, had realized that if Evie hadn’t been able to find Jason, she would now be mourning a sister as well as a son. That was the real basis for her sister’s fury with Jason.

And Evie knew that Robert Cannon planned to force his way into her life. He would be here for the summer, he’d said; he wouldn’t be looking for anything more than a pleasant affair, companionship during the long, lazy weeks. If she fell in love with him, that would make the affair sweeter. But at the end of summer he would go back to his real life, and Evie would have to continue here, with one more wound on a heart that had barely survived the last blow. Emotionally, she couldn’t afford him.

There were always a hundred and one things to be doing around the marina, but suddenly she couldn’t think of a single one. She felt oddly disoriented, as if the world had been turned upside down. Maybe it had.

She called the hospital and was put through to Jason’s room. Her sister answered the phone on the first ring. “He’s grouchy and has a throbbing headache,” Rebecca cheerfully announced when Evie asked his condition. “I have to wake him every couple of hours tonight, but if he does okay, then he can go home in the morning. Paul left just a few minutes ago to take Paige to his mother’s, then he’s coming back here. How about you? Nerves settled down yet?”

“Not quite,” Evie said truthfully, though Jason’s close call wasn’t all that had unsettled her. “But I’m over the shakes.”

“Are you at home, I hope?”

“You know better than that.”

“You should have taken it easy for the rest of the day,” Rebecca scolded. “I had hopes that Mr. Cannon would take you in hand. He seems good at giving orders.”

“World-class champion,” Evie agreed. “I’ll come by to see Jason after the marina closes. Do you want me to bring you anything? A pillow, a book, a hamburger?”

“No, I don’t need anything. Don’t come here. Jason’s okay, and you need to go home and rest. I mean it, Evie.”

“I’m okay, too,” Evie calmly replied. “And I want to see Jason, even if just for a few minutes—” She cried out in surprise as the phone was plucked from her hand. She whirled as Robert lifted the receiver to his ear.

“Mrs. Wood? Robert Cannon. I’ll see that she goes straight home. Yes, she’s still a little wobbly.”

“I am not,” Evie said, narrowing her eyes at him. He reached out and gently stroked her cheek. Deliberately she stepped back, out of his reach.

“I’ll take care of her,” he firmly assured Rebecca, never moving his gaze from Evie’s face. “On second thought, I’ll take her out to dinner before I take her home. I think so, too. Goodbye.”

As he hung up, Evie said in a cold voice, “I despise being treated as if I’m a helpless idiot.”

“Hardly that,” he murmured.

She didn’t relent. “I suppose you thought that I would feel safe and protected, to have you take over and make my decisions for me. I don’t I feel insulted.”

Robert lifted an inquisitive brow, hiding his true reaction. He had indeed hoped to provoke exactly that response from her and felt an uneasy surprise that she had so easily gone straight to the truth of the matter. She was proving to be uncomfortably astute. “What I think,” he said carefully, “is that you were in more danger than you want your sister to know, and that you’re still shaky. If you go to the hospital again, you’ll have to put up a front to keep from scaring both her and Jason, and that will put even more strain on you.”

“What I think,” she replied, standing with her fists clenched at her sides, “is that I’m in far more danger from you than I ever was from the water.” Her golden brown eyes were cool and unwaveringly level.

Again he felt a twinge of discomfort at her insight. Still, he was certain he could soften her stand, and his tone turned gently cajoling. “Even if I offer you a truce for tonight? No kisses, not even any hand-holding. Just dinner, then I’ll see you safely home, and you can get a good night’s rest.”

“No, thank you. I won’t have dinner with you, and I can get home by myself.”

He gave her a considering look. “In that case, the offer of a truce is null and void.”

His tone was so calm that she listened to it first, rather than to the actual words. She hesitated only a split second, but that was enough for him to have her in his arms again, and again she felt overcome by his steely, deceptive strength. His body was unyielding, his grip careful but unbreakable. The male muskiness of his clean, warm skin made her head swim. She had the dizzy impression that his mouth was lowering to hers and quickly ducked her head to rest it against his chest. It was disconcerting to hear a quiet chuckle over her head.

“Such a cowardly act, from one who isn’t,” he murmured, the words rich with amusement “But I don’t mind simply holding you. It has its own compensations.”

She was a coward, though, Evie thought. She was terrified of him, not in a physical way, but emotional fear was just as weighty a burden to carry. She was handling him all wrong; he wouldn’t be accustomed to rejection, so every time she turned him down it made him just that much more determined to have his way. If she had played up to him from the beginning, gushed over him, he would have been bored and left her alone. Hindsight, though, despite its acuity, was depressingly useless.

His hand moved soothingly over her back, subtly urging her closer. It was so easy to let him take more of her weight, so easy to give in to the strain and fatigue she had been successfully fighting until now. She resisted the urge to put her arms around him, to feel the heated vibrancy of his body under her hands, but she could hear the strong, steady thumping of his heartbeat beneath her ear, feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, and that was enough to work its own seduction. The forces of life were strong in him, luring women to that intense strength. She was no different from all those countless, nameless others.

“Robert,” she whispered. “Don’t.” A cowardly, shameless, useless plea.

That hand stroked up to her shoulder blades, rubbed the sensitive tendons that ran from her neck to her shoulders, massaged her tender nape. “Evie,” he whispered in return. “Don’t what?” He continued without waiting for a reply. “Is Evie your real name, or is it a nickname for Eve? Or possibly Evelyn? No matter, it suits you.”

Her eyes drifted shut as his warmth and strength continued to work their black magic on her nerves, her will. Oh God, it would be so foolishly easy just to give in to him. His skill was nothing short of diabolical. “Neither. It’s short for Evangeline.”

“Ah.” The short sigh was one of approval. He truly hadn’t known her full name; none of the reports he had seen had called her anything except Evie. “Evangeline. Feminine, spiritual, sensual… sad.”

Evie didn’t respond outwardly to that analysis of her name, but the last word shook her. Sad… yes. So sad that for several long, bleak years she couldn’t have said if the sun ever shone or not, because with her heart she had seen only gray. She could see the sunshine now; the relentless current of life as a whole had swept her out of the darkness, but there was never a day when she didn’t realize how closely the shadows lurked. They were always there, a permanent counterpoint to life. If there was light, there had to be darkness; joy was balanced by pain, intimacy by loneliness. No one sailed through life untouched.

He was subtly rocking her with his body, a barely perceptible swaying that nevertheless urged her deeper and deeper into his embrace. He was aroused again; there was no mistaking that. She thought she should move away, but somehow in the past few minutes that had ceased to be an option. She was so tired, and the gentle motion of his body was soothing, like the swaying of a boat at anchor. The ancient rhythms were difficult to resist, linked as they were to instincts aeons beyond her control.

After several minutes he murmured, “Are you going to sleep?”

“I could,” she replied, not opening her eyes. Beyond the danger, there was deep comfort in his embrace.

“It’s almost six-thirty. Under the circumstances, I’m sure your customers would understand if you closed a little early.”

“An hour and a half isn’t a ‘little’ early. No, I’ll stay until eight, as usual.”

“Then so will I.” He stifled his surge of annoyance. He himself let very few things interfere with his work—in actuality, only Madelyn and her family—but he didn’t like the idea of Evie pushing herself into exhaustion at the marina.

“It isn’t necessary.”

“I rather believe it is,” he replied thoughtfully.

“I still won’t go out to dinner with you.”

“Fair enough. I’ll bring dinner to you. Do you have any preferences?”

She shook her head. “I’m not very hungry. I was going to have a sandwich when I got home.”

“Leave it all to me.”

She said against his chest, “You take charge very naturally. I suppose this is normal behavior for you.”

“I’m decisive, yes.”

“Don’t forget autocratic.”

“I’m sure you’ll remind me if I forget.”

She heard the undertone of amusement in his voice. Damn him, why couldn’t he be nasty in his bullying, rather than relentlessly, gently cosseting? She never allowed herself to rely on anyone, though Rebecca had been trying to take care of her for years, but Robert simply ignored her resistance.

“I realize I’m rushing you,” he murmured into her hair. “Today is only the second time we’ve met. I’ll back off, sweetheart, and give you time to get to know me better and feel more comfortable around me. Okay?”

Her head moved up and down. She didn’t want to agree to have anything to do with him, but right now she would grasp at any offer to cool down the situation. He had knocked her off balance, and she still hadn’t regained it. Yes, she needed time, a lot of it.

Robert cupped her chin in his hand and forced her to lift her head away from the shelter of his chest. His pale green eyes were glittering with intensity. “But I won’t go away,” he warned.

Evie slept heavily that night, exhausted by the stress of the day. When she woke at dawn at the far-off roar of an early fisherman’s outboard motor, she didn’t rise immediately as was her habit but lay watching the pearly light spread across the sky.

For twelve years she had kept herself safe inside her carefully constructed fortress, but Robert was storming the walls. Had stormed them, if she was honest with herself. He was already in the inner court, though he hadn’t yet managed to breach the defenses of the keep. Since Matt’s death, she hadn’t really seen any man, but Robert had forced her to see him. She was attracted to him, mentally as well as physically; it was only with effort that she had kept her emotions still safely locked away. She didn’t want to love him and knew she risked doing exactly that if she continued to see him.

But she would see him, time and again. He had warned her—or was it a promise?—that he wasn’t going to leave her alone, and he wasn’t a man who could be easily distracted from his purpose.

He would kiss her, hold her, caress her. Eventually, she knew, all of her caution would vanish under the sheer force of physical desire, and she wouldn’t be able to stop him—or herself.

She closed her eyes and relived the way he had kissed her the afternoon before, the way he had tasted, the calm expertise with which he had deepened the kiss. She thought of his lean fingers on her breast, and her nipples throbbed. For the first time since Matt, she wondered about making love in relation to herself. She thought of the feel of Robert’s hard weight pressing down on her, of his hands and mouth moving over her bare skin, of his muscled thighs spreading hers apart as he positioned himself to take her. The appeal of her fantasy was strong enough to make her entire body clench with desire. Yes, she wanted him, as much as she feared the pain he would leave behind when he walked out of her life.

A prudent woman would immediately see a doctor about birth control, and Evie was a prudent woman. She could protect herself in that way, at least.

Chapter Six

Evie slid two food-filled plates onto the table, one in front of Rebecca and the other in front of her own seat, then refilled their coffee cups. “Thanks.” Rebecca sighed, picking up her fork. Her eyes were dark-circled after the long, sleepless night spent with Jason in the hospital.

Evie sat down. After making a doctor’s appointment for the next day, she had called the hospital to check on Jason. He was fine, but Rebecca had some definitely frayed edges. Not only had she been awake all night to keep watch on him and wake him regularly, evidently Jason had become as fractious and ill-tempered as he’d been as a baby whenever he was ill. He had complained about everything, griping about being woken every hour, even though both the doctor and Rebecca had explained the reason for it. In short, his mother’s wrath was about to come down hard on his sore head.

So Evie had gone up to the hospital to take care of the myriad details involved in releasing Jason. Then she’d followed them home, helped get the restless teenager settled, pushed Rebecca into a chair and set about making breakfast for them all. She knew her way around Rebecca’s kitchen as well as she did her own, so the work went smoothly, and in no time at all they were digging into scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. Jason was enthroned on the couch with a tray on his lap and the television blaring.

The coffee revived Rebecca enough that her big-sister instincts kicked in. She gave Evie a shrewd look over the rim of her cup. “Where did you have dinner last night?”

“At the marina. Sandwiches,” Evie clarified.

Rebecca sat back, looking disgruntled. “He said he would take you out to dinner, then make sure you got home okay.”

“I didn’t want to go out.”

“Really,” Rebecca grumbled, “I’d thought the man was made of stronger stuff than that.”

If he’d been any stronger, Evie thought wryly, she would have slept in his bed last night. “I was too tired to go out, so he brought sandwiches there. It was kind of him to do everything he did yesterday.”

“Especially hauling both you and my brat out of the river,” Rebecca said judiciously as she demolished a slice of bacon. “I need to thank him again for you. I’m reserving judgment on the wisdom of saving Jason.”

Evie chuckled at Rebecca’s sardonic statement. A sharp turn of phrase was a family trait that she shared with her sister, and even Paige had been exhibiting it for some time now.

“However,” Rebecca continued in the same tone, “I know a man on the hunt when I see one, so don’t try to throw me off the subject by telling me how kind he was. Kindness was the last thing on his mind.”

Evie looked down at her eggs. “I know.”

“Are you going to give him a chance, or are you going to look straight through him, like all the others?”

“What others?” Evie asked, puzzled.

“See what I mean? They were invisible to you. You’ve never even noticed all the guys who would have liked to go out with you.”

“No one’s ever asked me out.”

“Why would they, when you never notice them? But I’ll bet Robert asked you out, didn’t he?”

“No.” He’d told her that she was going out to dinner with him, and he had told her that he intended to make love to her, but he’d never actually asked her out.

Rebecca looked disbelieving. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“I am not. But he’ll probably ask the next time he comes to the marina, if that’s any consolation to you.”

“The real question,” her sister said shrewdly, “is if you’ll go with him.”

“I don’t know.” Evie propped her elbows on the table, the coffee cup cradled in her palms as she sipped the hot liquid. “He excites me, Becky, but he scares me, too. I don’t want to get involved with anyone, and I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop myself with him.”

“This is bad?” asked her sister with some exasperation. “Honey, it’s been twelve years. Maybe it’s time you became interested in men again.”

“Maybe,” Evie said in qualified agreement, though privately she didn’t think so at all. “But Robert Cannon isn’t the safest choice I could make, not by a long shot. There’s something about him… I don’t know. I just get the feeling that he’s coming on to me for another reason besides the obvious. There’s a hidden agenda there somewhere. And he puts up a good front, but he’s not a gentleman.”

“Good. A gentleman would probably take you at your word and never bother you again, after a hundred or so refusals. I have to admit, though, he struck me as being both gentle and protective.”

“Possessive,” Evie corrected. “And ruthless.” No, he wasn’t a gentleman. That cold force of will in his green diamond eyes was the look of an adventurer with a predator’s heart. A hollow look of fear entered her own eyes.

Rebecca leaned forward and touched Evie’s arm. “I know,” she said gently. And she did, because Rebecca had been there and seen it all. “I don’t want to push you into doing something you’ll regret, but you never know what’s going to happen. If Robert Cannon is someone you could love, can you afford to pass up that chance?”

Evie sighed. Rebecca’s arguments to the contrary, could she afford to take that chance? And was she going to have the choice?

To her relief, Robert wasn’t at the marina when she arrived to relieve Craig. Huge, black-bellied clouds were threatening overhead, and a brisk, cool wind began to blow, signaling one of the tempestuous thunderstorms so common during summer. Both pleasure-boaters and fishermen began coming in off the lake, and for an hour she didn’t have a moment’s rest. Lightning forked downward over the mountains, a slash of white against the purplish black background. Thunder boomed, echoing over the water, and the storm broke with blinding sheets of rain blowing across the lake.

With all of the fishermen who had put in at the marina safely off the water and the other boats snugly in their slips, Evie gladly retreated to the office where she could watch the storm from behind the protection of the thick, Plexiglas windows. She hadn’t quite escaped all the rain, though, and she shivered as she rubbed a towel over her bare arms. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in about ten minutes; the break from the heat was welcome, but the abrupt contrast was always chilling.

She loved the energy and drama of thunderstorms, and settled contentedly into her rocking chair to watch this one play out against the background of lake and mountains. Listening to the rain was unutterably soothing. Inevitably she became drowsy and got up to turn on the small television she kept to entertain Paige and Jason. A small logo at the bottom of the television screen announced “T’storm watch.”

“I’m watching, I’m watching,” she told the television, and returned to the rocking chair.

Eventually the violence of the storm dissipated, but the welcome rain continued, settling down to a steady soaker, the kind farmers loved. The marina was deserted, except for the mechanic, Burt Mardis, who was contentedly working on an outboard motor in the big metal building where he did all the repairs. She could see him occasionally through the open door as he moved back and forth. There wouldn’t be any more business until the weather cleared, which it showed no signs of doing. At the top of the hour the local television meteorologist broke in on the normal programming to show the progression of the line of thunderstorms that were marching across the state, as well as the solid area of rain they had left behind, stretching all the way back into Mississippi. Rain was predicted well into the night, tapering off shortly before midnight.

It looked like a long, lazy afternoon ahead of her. She always kept a book there for such times and pulled it out now, but so much time had lapsed since she had started the thing that she didn’t remember much about it, so she had to start over. Actually, this was the third time she had started over; she would have to carry it home if she ever hoped to finish it.

But she was already fighting drowsiness and after ten minutes she knew that reading was going to tip the scales in favor of sleep. Regretfully she put the book aside and looked around for some chores to do. Craig, however, had cleaned up that morning; the floors were freshly swept and mopped, the merchandise impeccably straight on the shelves or hanging on pegboard hooks.

She yawned and desperately turned the television channel to rock music videos. That should jar her awake.

When Robert walked in half an hour later, she was standing in front of the television, watching with a sort of amazed disbelief. Turning to him, she said in bemusement, “I wonder why bird-legged, sunken-chested musicians feel compelled to show their bodies to the audience?”

He was startled into a deep chuckle. He almost never laughed aloud, his amusement normally expressed, at most, by a twinkle in his eyes. This was twice, though, that Evie had charmed him into laughter. No one would ever suspect her of espionage, he thought suddenly, perhaps because of that very charm. It would be almost impossible for anyone who knew her at all to think ill of her. Even he, who was well aware of her activities, couldn’t keep himself from wanting her with a violence that both angered him and made him uneasy, because he couldn’t control it.

He pushed those thoughts away as he walked toward her. If he let himself think about it now he would become enraged all over again, and Evie was so astute that he might not be able to hide it from her. When he reached her, though, and encircled her with his arms, forgetting about the other was laughably easy.

She blinked up at him, startled. Automatically she put her hands against his chest in a defensive movement. “You said you were going to back off and give me time,” she accused.

“I am,” Robert replied, lifting her left hand and pressing his warm, open mouth to the tender flesh on the inside of her wrist. Her pulse fluttered and raced beneath his lips. The scent of her skin was fresh and elusively, lightly fragrant, teasing him far more than if she had dabbed herself with perfume, no matter how expensive. He touched the tip of his tongue to the delicate blue veins that traced just under her skin and felt the throb of her blood beneath his touch.

Evie trembled at the subtle caress, her knees weakening. He felt that betraying quiver and gathered her more firmly against him, then lightly bit the pad at the base of her thumb. She swallowed a gasp; dear God, she hadn’t known that could be so erotic.

“Will you go out to dinner with me tonight?” he murmured as his lips traveled on to her palm. Again his tongue flicked out, tasting her. Her hand trembled at the sensation.

“No, I can’t” The instinctive denial was out before she could stop it, the habits of a dozen years firmly ingrained. Stunned, she realized that she had wanted to accept, much as a moth yearned toward the flame.

“Do you have another date?”

“No. It—it’s difficult.” He had no idea how difficult. She took a deep breath. “I haven’t dated since my husband died.”

Robert lifted his head, a slight frown drawing the black wings of his eyebrows together. “What did you say?”

She flushed and tugged her hand free. She started to wipe her palm against her jeans but instead tightly closed her fingers to hold the feel of his kiss. “I haven’t gone out with anyone since Matt died.”

He was silent, digesting this information, weighing it for truth. It was difficult to believe of anyone, but especially of a woman who looked like Evie. It was possible, of course, that she wasn’t having an affair with Mercer after all, but to have lived like a nun for twelve years just didn’t seem feasible. Still, he wasn’t about to infuriate her by suggesting she was a liar.

Instead he gently stroked the underside of her jaw with the back of one finger and was immediately absorbed with the velvety texture of her skin. “Why is that?” he murmured a bit absently. “I know all the men down here can’t be blind.”

She bit her lip. “It was my choice. I… wasn’t interested, and it didn’t seem fair to waste a man’s time under those circumstances.”

“Reasonable, for a while. But twelve years?”

Restlessly she tried to pull away from him, but he stilled the movement, tightening the arm that remained around her. They were pressed firmly together from waist to knees, his muscled thighs hard and warm against hers. A man’s strength was wonderful, she thought, inviting a woman to relax against him. Until Robert had taken her in his arms, she hadn’t realized how very much she needed to be held. But not by just any man; only by him. In that moment Evie knew for certain that she had lost the battle. There was no use trying to evade him; not only would he refuse to let her get away with it, but she didn’t want to get away with it, not any longer. For better or worse, and with dizzying speed, she had gotten herself involved with Robert Cannon. Dear God, she didn’t know if she had the strength to do this, but she knew she had to try.

She didn’t try to explain those twelve years. Instead she said, to his chest, “All right. I’ll go out with you. Now what?”

“For starters, you could raise your head.”

Slowly she did, mentally bracing herself as she met his crystalline eyes. She had expected to see amusement in them, but it was triumph glittering there rather than mirth. She shivered, more from sudden alarm than from the coolness brought by the steady rain.

“Cold?” he asked softly, rubbing his warm hands up the length of her arms.

“No. Afraid,” she admitted, with painful candor. “Of you, of getting involved with you.” Her eyes were deep and mysterious with shadows as she looked up at this man who had so inexplicably forced himself into her life. If he insisted on establishing some kind of romantic relationship with her, he should know up front how she felt about a few things. “I’m not good at games,

Robert. Don’t kiss me unless it’s for real. Don’t come around unless you mean to stay.”

“Do you mean marriage?” he asked coolly, his expressive eyebrows lifting.

Her cheeks burned at his tone. Of course it was ridiculous to think of marriage; that wasn’t at all what she had meant. At least, not the legality of marriage, the institution itself. Mentally she shied from the notion, unable to even think of it. “Of course not! I never want to get married again. But the stability, the emotional security, what I had with Matt… well, I won’t settle for anything less than that, so if you’re looking for a summer affair, I’m not your woman.”

His mouth twisted as an unreadable expression crossed his face. “Oh, but you are. You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.”

She shivered again, but her gaze didn’t waver. “I want emotional commitment. Under those terms, if you’re still willing to get involved with me, I’ll go out with you. I’m not comfortable with you, but I expect that will change as we get to know each other. And I don’t want to sleep with you. That would just be too risky.” He probably thought she meant physically, but for her the emotional risk was by far more dangerous.

He studied her face for a long moment before saying calmly, “All right, we’ll take our time and get to know each other. But I do want to make love with you, and I’m not going to take a vow of chastity.” He cupped her face in his hands, and the glitter in his eyes became more pronounced as his head began to slowly descend. “All you have to do to stop me, at any time,” he whispered as his mouth touched hers, “is say no.”

Her breath sighed out of her, as soft as a night breeze. The freedom to enjoy him was glorious; it felt as if she had long been frozen and was now thawing, growing warm with life again. For the first time her mouth opened welcomingly beneath his, and he took it with a calm mastery that liquefied her bones. He could give lessons in kissing, she thought hazily. His tongue probed and stroked, enticing her into a like response, so that their tongues touched and curled and petted. It was surprisingly sweet, and totally erotic.

It seemed as if he kissed her like that for a long time, simply holding her face between his palms, her body still pressed full against his. The play of his lips and tongue was both lulling and arousing. Her anxiety faded even as warmth slowly spread through her breasts and loins, making her feel as soft as butter. Her left hand was closed around his right wrist, but her right hand was leisurely stroking his back, feeling the firm, hard layers of muscle, the hollow of his spine, instinctively learning some of the details of how he was made.

The television played on unnoticed. No one came to the door on this rainy day; they stood alone in the office, oblivious to the music and the steady patter of the rain, hearing only each other’s breathing and the soft, unconscious sounds of pleasure. Like a morning glory opening its shy face to the sun, Evie slowly bloomed in his arms, her golden sensuality growing in confidence. He was painfully aroused but held himself under strict control, ignoring his own condition so that she didn’t feel pressured. She felt… safe, free to relax, and let herself feel the new sensations, explore the limits of her own desire. It was very different from the way it had been with Matt. She had been a girl then, and now she was a woman, with a woman’s deeper and richer passion.

Though he had kissed her before, she had been distracted by the dangerous desire she felt for this man. Now, having given in, she could concentrate on the little details. She reveled in his taste, as the coolness of his lips rapidly became warm, then hard and hot. She measured the broadness of his shoulders, her palms smoothing over the curve of the joint and feeling the hardness of his solid bones covered by pads of muscle. She touched his hair, feeling it thick and silky and cool, warmer underneath, where it lay close to his skull. She felt the rasp of his five o’clock stubble against her cheeks. She inhaled the clean, musky scent of his maleness, a faint odor of soap, the fresh smell of rain on his clothes and skin.

“God.” Abruptly he drew away, letting his head fall back as he drew in a deep breath. Her response had been hesitant at first, but then she had come alive in his arms, and he felt singed, as if he had been holding the sweetest of fires. His own response to her shook him with its violence. It was difficult to think of anything but taking her, and only their present location kept him from trying. “I’m the one calling a halt this time, sweetheart. We either have to stop or find a more private place.”

She felt bereft, suddenly deprived of his touch. Her heart was pounding, and her skin felt as if it glowed with heat. Still, he was right. This wasn’t the place for making out like teenagers. “There isn’t a more private place,” she said as she reached out to turn the television from rock to a country video station. The music abruptly changed from rap to a hauntingly passionate love song, and that was even more jarring to her nerves. She punched the Off button, and in the sudden quiet the rain sounded heavier than before. She looked out the window at the gray curtain that veiled the lake, obscuring the far bank.

“No one will be using their boats for the rest of the day,” Robert said. “Why don’t you close early and we’ll go to Huntsville for dinner.”

She considered how his questions and suggestions sounded like statements and demands. Had no one before her ever said no to this man? “I can’t close early.”

“The rain is supposed to last halfway through the night,” he said reasonably.

“But that won’t stop people from coming in to buy tackle. Granted, there probably won’t be many, maybe not any, but the sign says that I’m open until eight.”

And she would be, he thought, exasperated by the difficulty of courting a woman who refused to make time for him. He had certainly never had that problem before. In fact, he couldn’t say that he’d ever had a problem with a woman at all—until Evie. Getting close to her presented him with as many obstacles as a mine field. Ruefully he thought that if he was going to spend any time with her, most of it would obviously be here at the marina.

Rather than become angry, which would only make her more obstinate, he said, “Could Craig swap shifts with you occasionally, if we give him advance notice?”

A tiny smile lifted the corners of her mouth, telling him that he was learning. “I suppose he could. He’s generally accommodating.”

“Tomorrow?”

This time she almost laughed aloud. “I can’t tomorrow.” She had an appointment with her doctor at ten in the morning. Though she had told Robert that she didn’t want to sleep with him, he had said only that he would stop if she told him to. The “if” told her that she should be prudent, because his physical effect on her was potent. Of course, she wasn’t going to tell Robert that she was arranging birth control; he would consider it a green light to making love.

He sighed. “The day after tomorrow?”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Thank you,” he said with faint irony.

Robert received two phone calls the next morning. He was out on the deck, reading a sheaf of papers that Felice had faxed to him; it was remarkably easy, he’d found, to keep abreast of things by way of phone, computer and fax. The first call was from Madelyn. “How are things in Alabama?”

“Hot,” he replied. He was wearing only gym shorts. The rain of the day before had made everything seem even more green and lush, the scents more intense, but it hadn’t done anything to ease the heat. If anything, the heat was worse. The morning sun burned on his bare chest and legs. Luckily, with his olive complexion, he didn’t have to worry about sunburn.

“The weather is perfect here, about seventy-five degrees. Why don’t you fly up for the weekend?”

“I can’t,” he said, and realized how much he sounded like Evie. “I don’t know how long I’ll be down here, but I can’t leave until everything is tied up.”

“The invitation stands,” Madelyn said in her lazy drawl. A funny pang went through him as he realized how similar Madelyn’s accent was to Evie’s. “If you do happen to find a couple of days free, we’d love to see you.”

“I’ll try to get up there before I go back to New York,” he promised.

“Try really hard. We haven’t seen you since spring. Take care.”

The phone rang again almost immediately. This time it was the man he had hired to keep watch on Landon Mercer. “He had a visitor last night. We followed the visitor when he left, and we’re working on identifying him. There hasn’t been anything of interest on the phones.”

“All right. Keep watching and listening. Has he spotted his tail yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Anything in his house?” Robert was briefly thankful that he was a civilian and didn’t have to follow the same tortuous rules and procedures that cops did, though it could have been sticky if his men had been caught breaking and entering. They hadn’t seized any evidence, merely looked for it. Information was power.

“Clean as a whistle. Too clean. There’s not even a bank statement lying around. We found out that he has a safety deposit box, so he might keep his paperwork in it, but we haven’t been able to get into it yet. I’m working on getting a copy of his bank statement.”

“Keep me informed,” Robert said, and hung up. In a few days Mercer would start feeling a slight squeeze. He wouldn’t think much of it at first, but soon it would become suffocating. Robert’s plans for Evie, both personal and financial, were moving along nicely, too.

Chapter Seven

Robert didn’t intend to see Evie at all that day. He was an expert strategist in the eternal battle between men and women; after his determined pursuit of her, she would be expecting him to either call or come to the marina, and the lack of any contact with him would knock her slightly off balance, further weakening her defenses. He had often thought that seduction was similar to chess, in that the one who could keep the other guessing was the one in control of the game.

He was in control of the seduction. His instincts in that part of the game were infallible. It might take him a few weeks of gentling, but Evie would end up in his bed. Not long after that, he would have this entire mess cleaned up; Mercer and Evie would be arrested, and he would go back to New York.

Damn.

That was the problem, of course. He didn’t want Evie in jail. He had been furious when he had come down here, determined to put both her and her lover away for a very long time. But that was before he had met her, before he had held her and tasted the heady sweetness of her. Before he had seen the underlying sadness in those golden brown eyes, and wondered if he would cause that expression to deepen. The thought made him uneasy.

Was she even guilty? At first he had been convinced that she was; now, even after such a short acquaintance, he was no longer certain. No criminal was untouched by his deeds. There was always a mark left behind, perhaps in a certain coldness in the eye, a lack of moral concern in certain matters. He hadn’t been able to find any such mark in Evie. He had often thought that those who dealt in espionage, in the betrayal of their own country, were some of the coldest people ever born. They lacked the depth of emotion that others had. That lack of feeling wasn’t evident in Evie; if anything, he would say that she felt far too much.

She hadn’t hesitated at all in going into the river after Jason. That in itself wasn’t unusual; any number of strangers would have done the same thing, much less a relative. But, knowing that every second counted, she had stayed down far too long herself in the effort to find the boy. He knew as surely as he knew the sun was in the sky that she would not have been able to make it back to the surface without his help… and that she had been willing to die rather than release Jason and save herself. Even now, the memory made his bones turn cold.

He had gone inside to work at the computer, but now he got up and restlessly walked out onto the deck, where the burning sun could dispel his sudden chill.

Only a person of deep emotion was capable of that kind of sacrifice.

He braced his hands on the top railing and stared out at the river. It wasn’t green today, but rather a rich blue, reflecting the deep blue of the cloudless sky. There was little, if any, breeze, and the water’s surface was calm. It lapped gently against the dock and the bank with a sound that tugged at something deep within him. All life had originated in the sea; perhaps it was an echo of that ancient time that made people respond so to water. But this river, peaceful as it was now, had almost taken Evie’s life.

He shivered from another chill. He couldn’t remember, he thought absently, when he had been so enraged… or so afraid. He had ruthlessly controlled both emotions, allowing no hint of them to surface, but they had roiled deep within him. It hadn’t been an intellectual anger, but rather a gut-level rage at fate, at chance, which had seemed to be snatching Evie out of his grasp before he could… what? Have her indicted? He snorted mirthlessly at that idea. The thought hadn’t entered his mind. No, he had been furious that he wouldn’t be able to hold her, make love to her, that the endless stretch of his days wouldn’t have her in them.

Was Evie the type of person who could betray her country? He was beginning to doubt his own information.

Indecision wasn’t normally part of Robert’s makeup, and he was impatient with himself now. He couldn’t allow his doubts about Evie’s guilt to alter his plans. If she was innocent, then she wouldn’t be harmed. She would have some uncomfortable moments, she would be worried, but in the end he would take care of the situation, and she would be okay.

Thinking about her made him edgy. He glanced at his watch; it was a little after noon. She should be at the marina now, and he should already have heard from the tail that he had assigned to follow her every move.

Right on cue, the phone rang, and he stepped inside to pick it up.

“She went to Huntsville this morning,” a quiet female voice reported. “Her destination was an office building. The elevator closed before I could get on it with her, so I don’t know where she went. I waited, and she returned to the lobby after an hour and twenty-three minutes. She drove straight home, changed clothes and then went to the marina. Mercer was in his office at PowerNet the entire time, and they didn’t talk on the phone. There was no contact between them at all.”

“What kind of tenants are in the office building?”

“I made a list. There are two insurance firms, a real estate office, four medical doctors, four lawyers, three dentists, an office temp company and two computer programming firms.”

Damn, Robert thought bleakly. Aloud he said, “Find out where she went. Concentrate first on the two programming firms.”

“Yes, sir.”

He swore as he hung up. Why couldn’t she have spent the morning shopping, or paying bills?

He wanted to see her. He wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. He wanted to whisk her away to some secluded place and keep her locked up there until he had this mess settled. He wanted to ride her until she wept with submission. The violence of all those longings was alien to him, but he couldn’t deny it. She had definitely gotten under his skin in a way no other woman had ever done.

Temper and frustration merged, and with a muttered curse he gave in. After swiftly dressing, he left the house and climbed in the black Jeep. Damn it, he wanted to see her, so he would.

Virgil was visiting with Evie again that day. His knee was better, he said, and indeed, he was walking with less effort. The day had been fairly busy, with customers in and out on a regular basis, and Virgil had passed the time with several old friends and casual acquaintances.

She was busy ringing up a fisherman’s purchase of gas, a soft drink and a pack of crackers when the door opened. Without looking, she knew Robert had entered. Her skin tingled, and she felt an instant of panic. She had hoped, foolishly, that she wouldn’t see him that day, that her frazzled nerves would have a chance to recover somewhat before she actually went out with him the next night. On the other hand, she thought wryly, time and distance probably wouldn’t help at all. Even if he wasn’t there personally, he was in her mind, dominating both her thoughts and dreams.

Her customer taken care of, she allowed herself to look at him as he genially introduced himself to Virgil, who remembered him, of course. Very little got by that old man.

Robert was wearing jeans and a loose, white cotton shirt. A khaki baseball cap covered his black hair, and a pair of expensive sunglasses dangled from one hand. Her blood raced through her veins in excitement; even in such casual dress, there was something elegant and dangerous about him. The jeans were soft and faded with age, and he was as at home in them as he was in his silk shuts.

Then he was touching her on the arm, and it was like being burned with a tiny spark of electricity. “I’m going to take the boat out for a while, run the river and learn something about it”

So he wasn’t going to be hanging around the marina all day. She was both relieved and disappointed. “Have you hired a guide?”

“No, but the river channel’s marked, isn’t it?”

“Yes, there shouldn’t be any problem, unless you want to explore out of the channel. I’ll give you a map.”

“Okay.” Thoughtfully Robert looked at Virgil. “Would you like to show me around the lake, Mr. Dodd? That is, if you don’t have plans for the afternoon.”

Virgil cackled, his faded eyes suddenly gleaming with enthusiasm. “Plans?” he snorted. “I’m ninety-three years old! Who in tarnation makes plans at my age? I could stop breathin’ any minute now.”

Amusement danced in Robert’s eyes, making them look like pale green diamonds. “I’m willing to take the chance if you are, but I warn you, a corpse in the boat would be a real inconvenience.”

Virgil hauled himself out of the rocking chair. “Tell you what, son. For the chance to park myself in a boat again, I’ll try real hard not to put you to the trouble of havin’ to call the coroner.”

“It’s a deal.” Robert winked at Evie as he turned away.

Evie shook her head as she smiled at Virgil. She knew better than to try talking him out of going. Besides, he deserved to enjoy an hour or so on the river he loved, and she had faith that Robert would be as skillful at handling a boat as he was at everything else he did. How had he guessed, on such short acquaintance, that Virgil would dearly love getting out on the water again?

“Both of you be careful,” she admonished. “Virgil, don’t forget your cap.”

“I won’t, I won’t,” he said testily. “Think I’m fool enough to go out without somethin’ on my head?”

“I’ll bring the boat around to the dock,” Robert said, and she was grateful to him for sparing Virgil the longer walk to the boat slip. He reached the door, stopped and came back to her. “I forgot something.”

“What?”

He cupped her chin in one hand, leaned down and calmly kissed her. It wasn’t a passionate kiss; it was almost leisurely. Still, when he lifted his head, her heart was pounding and her thoughts scattered. “That,” he murmured.

She heard Virgil’s cracked laughter and became aware of the interested gazes of the two customers who were browsing among the hooks and spinner baits. Her cheeks burned with a blush, and she turned away to fiddle with some papers until she could regain her composure.

Virgil patted her on the arm. Though stooped under the weight of nine decades, he was still taller than she, and he grinned at her. “Heard tell that young feller made hisself useful the other day, when Becky’s boy fell in.”

She cleared her throat. “Yes. If he hadn’t been there, Jason and I both would probably have drowned.”

“Fast mover, is he?”

She found herself blushing again and waved Virgil off with shooing motions. Why on earth had Robert kissed her in public? She would never have thought that he was given to public displays of affection; there was something too contained about him. But he had certainly done just that!

She watched out the window as he idled the sleek black boat around to the dock, the powerful motor rumbling like thunder. The sunglasses were in place on the high-bridged nose, giving him a remote, lethal air. She had seen soldiers with that exact expression, and she wondered at it. With a start, she realized how little she knew about Robert Cannon. What did he do for a living? She knew he had to have some money to be able to afford that house, a new boat and the new Jeep. Where was he from? Did he have family, had he been married before, was he married now, did he have children? A chill went through her as she thought of all she didn’t know about him.

And yet, in a way, she knew the man. He was cool and complicated, a private man who kept a subtle but permanent distance between himself and everyone else. The distance wasn’t physical, God knows; he was the most physical, sensual man she’d ever met. Emotionally, though, he always held something back, keeping the inner man untouched. Probably most people thought of him as very controlled and unemotional; Evie agreed with the controlled part, but there was a ferocity lurking beneath the control that alarmed her even as it called to her own inner fire. He was ruthless, he was autocratic… and he had seen, almost at a glance, how much an old man would love to take a boat ride on his beloved river once more.

Her breath caught, and there was a pain in her chest. Panic filled her as she watched Virgil hobble out to the dock as Robert brought the boat alongside. Robert held out a strong hand, and Virgil gripped it and stepped aboard the craft. There was a wide smile on his face as he settled onto the seat. Robert handed him a life jacket, and obediently Virgil slipped it on, though Evie was fairly certain he’d never worn one before in his life.

The panic that almost suffocated her was comprised of equal parts terror and tenderness. She couldn’t feel this much for him, not so soon. You had to know someone for that, and she had just been thinking how little she knew about him. She was fascinated by him, that was all. It was understandable. He was the first man in her life since Matt’s death, twelve long, desolate years ago. He had brought passion alive in her again, with his skillful kisses and determined pursuit.

She had never felt so violently attracted to a man before.

With Matt… they had grown up together, they’d been in the same class in school, from first grade through graduation. She had known Matt as well as she knew herself; they’d been like two halves of a whole. The love had grown gradually between them, pure and steady, like a candle flame. Robert… Robert was an inferno, and the heat between them could leave her in ashes.

Robert and Virgil had been gone for over an hour when Landon Mercer strolled into the marina. “Hi, doll,” he said jovially. “How’s the prettiest woman in this part of the state?”

Evie’s expression was impassive as she glanced at him. Unfortunately, business had slowed down and she was there alone. She always preferred to have company around when she had to deal with him. Of course, being alone meant that she would have the opportunity to follow him again. Her thoughts began to hum. “Hello, Mr. Mercer.”

“Landon,” he said, as he always did. He leaned against the counter in a negligent pose, one designed to show off his physique. Mercer was a good-looking man, she admitted, but he left her cold.

“Do you want to rent a boat today?” she asked, turning to check which ones were available, though she knew without looking. She had quickly discovered that the best way to deflect his attention was to appear oblivious to it.

“Sure do. It’s been a while since I’ve done any fishing, so I decided to play hooky from work this afternoon.” He laughed at his own pun.

Evie managed a polite smile. He had brought in a small tackle box and one rod and reel, the same rig he always carried. The same lure was tied to the line.

“Do you want any particular boat?”

“No, any of them will do.” He leaned closer. “When I get back, why don’t we go out to dinner tonight? Not anywhere here. We’ll go someplace nice, maybe in Birmingham.”

“Thanks, but I’m busy tonight,” she replied, her tone conveying no interest at all. Unfortunately, he was so taken with his own charm that he was oblivious to her lack of response to him.

“Tomorrow night, then. It’s Saturday night. We can even go to Atlanta for some real fun, since we wouldn’t have to be back for work.”

“The marina’s open seven days a week.”

“Oh. Okay, we’ll go to Birmingham.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Mercer. I’m busy tomorrow night, too.”

“C’mon, how busy can you be? Whatever it is, you can put it off.”

Her teeth were on edge. She barely managed to be polite as she said, “I have a date tomorrow night.”

“Now I’m jealous. Who’s the lucky man?”

“No one you know.” She took an ignition key from the peg-board and slid it across the counter to him. “There you go. Number five, the one at the end of the dock.”

He took out his wallet and extracted a couple of twenties. “I’ll have it back in two hours.” He picked up the ignition key.

“Fine.” She mustered a smile. “Have a good time. Hope you catch a lot.”

“I never do, but it’s fun to try,” he said breezily as he picked up his tackle and went out the door.

Evie put the money into the cash drawer and locked it, all the while eyeing Mercer as he walked down the dock. He was looking around, studying the parking lot and the traffic on the street out front, as well as on the bisecting causeway.

Swiftly she picked up the phone and buzzed Burt in the maintenance building. He picked up just as Mercer was getting into the boat.

“Burt, I’m taking the boat out for a while,” Evie said swiftly. “I’m locking the store, but keep an eye on the gas pumps while I’m gone.”

“Sure,” he said, as unquestioning as ever. Burt Mardis didn’t have a curious bone in his body.

Mercer was idling away from the dock. Evie jammed a ball cap on her head, grabbed her sunglasses and hurried from the building. She locked the door behind her, then sprinted for her own boat.

He was beyond the wave breakers by the time she reached her boat, and she heard the roar as he opened up the throttle. She all but threw herself into the boat and turned the key in the ignition. The motor coughed to life with a satisfying roar. Her boat was faster than any of the rentals, but on the water, and at speed, it was difficult to distinguish one vessel from another.

She had to idle away from the marina, because a fast takeoff would make waves large enough to violently rock the boats in their slips, possibly damaging them. Swearing at every lost second, she waited until she was past the wave breakers before pushing the throttle forward. The motor roared, and the front end of the boat lifted in the air as the vessel shot forward. It planed off almost immediately, the nose dropping into the running position.

She scanned the water for Mercer; unfortunately, he had gained enough distance that she couldn’t positively identify him, and there were three boats speeding away from her, small specks that bobbed slightly as they cut through the waves. Which one was Mercer? The sun wasn’t far past its apex, and the glare turned the lake into a mirror. Hot air hit her, pulling tendrils of hair loose around her face. The scent of the river filled her head and lungs, and a quiet exultation spread through her. This was a part of her life that she loved—the wind in her face, the sense of speed, the feel of the boat as it glided over calm water and bumped over waves. Though there were other boats on the lake, and houses visible all along the shoreline, when she was speeding across the water it was like being alone with God. She would have been perfectly content, if only she knew what Mercer was up to.

After a minute one boat slowed and turned toward another marina. As she neared, she could tell that it held two passengers.

That left two. The throttle was full forward, and she was gaining on one, while the other, probably a speedy bass boat, was pulling away. Since her boat was faster than the rental, the one she was overtaking had to be Mercer. Cautiously she throttled back, enough to stay at a pace with him but not so close that he would see and identify her. Just about everyone on the water would be wearing a ball cap and sunglasses, and her hair was pulled back in a braid rather than flying loose, so she felt fairly confident that he wouldn’t recognize her.

He was heading toward the same area, where there were a lot of small islands dotting the lake. She wouldn’t be able to get very close, because once he cut his speed he would be able to hear other boats. Her best bet, she thought, was to stop some distance away and pretend to be fishing.

The boat ahead slowed and cut between two islands. Evie kept her speed steady and cruised on past. There was a distance of over two hundred yards between them, but she could tell that now he was idling closer to the bank of the island on the right.

She turned in the opposite direction, away from him. A barge was coming downriver, heavily loaded and settled deep into the water, pushing out a wave as it plowed forward. If she let the barge come between her and Mercer, it would block his activities for almost half a minute, plenty long enough for her to lose him. But if she moved inside the barge’s path, it would put her closer to him than she wanted to be.

There was no help for it. She tucked her long braid inside her shirt to hide that identifying detail and turned the boat to angle back across the river ahead of the barge.

“Guntersville Lake’s easy to learn,” Virgil stated. “ ‘Course, I was fishin’ the river back before the TVA built the dam, so I knowed the lay of the land before the water backed up and covered it. Not many of us around now remembers the way it used to be. River used to flood a lot. So Roosevelt’s boys decided we needed us a dam, so there wouldn’t be no more floods. Well, hell, ‘course there ain’t, ‘cause now the land that flooded ever now an’ then is permanently under water. The government calls it flood control. They throwed around words like eminent domain, but what they did is take people’s land, turn them off their farms, and put a lot of good land under water.”

“The TVA brought electricity to the Tennessee River Valley, didn’t it?” Robert asked. He was holding the boat to around twenty miles an hour, not much more than idling speed to the powerful motor behind them, but the slow speed made conversation possible. They had to raise their voices, but they could hear each other.

Virgil snorted. “Sure it did. Glad to have it, too. But nobody ever thought the TVA built that dam to make our lives easier. Hell, we knew what was goin’ on. It was the Depression, and Roosevelt would have built the second Tower of Babel to make jobs for folks, for all the good it did to the economy. It took the war to kick-start things again.”

“Did you fight in the war?”

“Too old for that one.” Virgil cackled with glee. “Imagine that! Over fifty years ago, they said I was too old! But I was in the first one. Lied about my age to get in. Not that they checked too close, ‘cause they needed men could hit the broad side of a barn with a rifle slug. During the second one, I volunteered to help train the younger fellers with their rifles, but that was all stateside. Suited me. My wife weren’t none too pleased with me, anyway, leavin’ her to handle five young’uns on her own. She’d have been mad as hell if I’d gone overseas. Our oldest boy, John Edward, was seventeen when it all started, and he joined the navy.

It fretted her enough that he was gone. He made it back fine, though. Imagine that. The boy went through a war in the Pacific without a scratch, then come home and died two years later with the pneumonia. Life’s got a lotta strange turns in it. Don’t guess I’ll see too many more of them, but then, I didn’t plan on hangin’ around this long to begin with.”

The old man lapsed into silence, perhaps remembering all the people who had come and gone through his life. After a minute he roused himself. “Got a lot of creeks emptyin’ into the lake. We passed Short Creek a ways back. This here’s Town Creek.”

Robert had studied maps of the lake, so when Virgil identified the creeks he was able to pinpoint their location. Since the river channel was marked, staying in safely deep water was no problem. It was when he ventured out of the river channel that Virgil’s expertise came in handy, because he knew where it was shallow, where the hidden stump rows were lurking just under the surface, ready to tear the bottom out of a boat if the driver wasn’t careful. For several more minutes, Virgil devoted himself to his appointed task, pointing out quirks of the lake.

Then he said, “I’ve lost a lot of folks over the years. My own mama and pa, of course, and all my brothers and sisters. There were sixteen of us, and I’m the only one left. Got a piss pot full of nieces and nephews, though, and all of their kids, and their kids’ kids. My wife passed on in sixty-four. Lord, it don’t seem like it’s been that long. I’ve lost three of my own kids. Parents ought not to outlive their kids. It ain’t right. And all my friends that I growed up with, they’re long gone.

“Yep, I’ve had to bury many a loved one, so I get right protective of the ones I got left.” Faded blue eyes were suddenly piercing as he turned them on Robert. “Evie’s a special woman. She’s had enough sorrow in her young life, so if you don’t mean to do right by her, it would be a kindness if you’d leave her alone and haul your ass back up north.”

Robert’s face was impassive. “Evie’s related to you?” he asked neutrally, ignoring Virgil’s rather combative statement. He wasn’t about to get into an argument with a ninety-three-year-old man.

Virgil snorted. “Not by blood. But I’ve knowed her all her life, watched her grow up, and there’s not a finer woman in this town. Now, I watch television, so I know times have changed from when I was young enough to court a woman. Back then we had enough respect for womenfolk not to do nothing to cause them harm. But, like I said, times have changed. I know young folks now get serious about things without tyin’ the knot proper, and that ain’t what I’m talkin’ about. Thing is, if you’re just lookin’ for a good tune, then find some other woman. Evie ain’t like that.”

Robert had to struggle with several conflicting emotions. Foremost was his cold, instinctive anger at Virgil’s scolding interference. In neither his business nor his personal life was he accustomed to being taken to task. Right after that, though, was amusement. He was thirty-six and, moreover, an extremely wealthy man who wielded a great deal of power in both financial and political circles. He almost smiled at Virgil lumping him in with “young folks.”

What took most of his attention, though, was this second warning that Evie wasn’t a good-time girl. Evie herself had issued the first warning: Don’t kiss me unless it’s for real. After Virgil’s little speech, the underlying meaning of those warnings was clear, though the reason wasn’t

“I don’t usually discuss my relationships,” he finally said in a faintly distant tone, just enough to signal his displeasure. “But my interest in Evie isn’t casual.” In any way. “What did you mean, she’s had enough sorrow in her life?” Because that had been the basis of the talk: Don’t hurt her.

“I mean, life ain’t been easy on her. Grief comes to everybody, if they live long enough. Some folks, though, it hits harder than others. Losin’ Matt the way she did, the day after they got married… well, it changed her. There ain’t no sunshine in her eyes now, the way there used to be. She never looked at another man since Matt died, until you. So don’t disappoint her, is what I’m sayin’.”

Robert was knocked off balance by the surge of jealousy that seared through him. Jealousy? He’d never been jealous in his life, especially where a woman was concerned. Either his women were faithful to him or the relationship ended. Period. How could he be jealous of a boy who had been dead for a dozen years? But Evie still wore Matt Shaw’s wedding ring on her finger and had evidently remained faithful to him even after all this time. Forget Mercer; that had obviously been an error. An understandable one, but still an error. He was both glad that she wasn’t involved with Mercer, at least on that level, and furious that she was determined to waste herself on a memory. I don’t want to sleep with you, she’d said. She was still trying to be faithful to a dead husband.

“What kind of person was Matt?” he asked. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to talk about the boy, but he felt compelled to find out.

“He was a fine boy. Would have been a good man, if he’d had the chance. Good-natured, honest. Kindhearted, too. Can’t say that about too many folks, but Matt didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He never dated anybody but Evie, and it was the same with her. They planned to marry each other from the time they started high school together. Never saw two kids love each other the way they did. It was a shame that they didn’t have no more time together than what they had. She didn’t even have his child to keep part of him alive. Damn shame. She needed somthing to live for, back then.”

Robert had had enough. He couldn’t listen to much more about how wonderful Matt Shaw had been, and how much Evie had loved him, without losing his temper. He couldn’t remember the last time he had lost control, but mere was a deep-seated fury in him now that was surging forward. He didn’t try to analyze his anger; he simply and ruthlessly contained it, shoving it down as he turned the boat downriver and headed back toward the marina. He eased the throttle forward so the noise would make conversation impossible.

Fifteen minutes later they were idling up to the docks. At the sound of the motor, a man wearing grease-covered coveralls came out of the maintenance building and walked out on the dock. He nodded a greeting to Robert and said to Virgil, “Come in outta the sun and keep me company for a while. Evie closed the office and took her boat out for a while.” As he talked, he extended a muscular arm to steady Virgil as he climbed out of the boat onto the dock.

“When was this?” Robert asked sharply.

The mechanic shrugged. “An hour, maybe. I didn’t pay no attention to the time.”

She had refused to close the marina early one rainy late afternoon, when there had been no customers, but now she had closed it not long after lunch on a beautiful, sunny, busy day. Robert’s eyes narrowed. He looked at the parking lot. He knew the make, model and color of Mercer’s car, and there it sat

Damn her. She had left to meet with the traitorous bastard.

Chapter Eight

Robert was standing on the dock when Evie eased her boat into its regular slip. He was wearing those extra dark sunglasses that completely hid his eyes, but she didn’t need to see them to know that they were icy with rage. Maybe it was the way he moved, very deliberately, every action contained, that alerted her to his mood. An uncontrollable shiver ran over her, despite the heat. There was something far more alarming about that cold, ruthless control than if he had been violent. Again she had the thought that he was the most dangerous man she’d ever seen. But what had put him in such a menacing mood?

She tied off and leapt up onto the dock. “Did Virgil enjoy himself?” she asked as she stepped around Robert, heading toward the office. He wasn’t the only one who had self-control. Right now she had other concerns besides dealing with his temper. She could hear the roar of a boat coming closer; that might or might not be Mercer, but she wasn’t taking any more chances. When Mercer returned to the marina, she intended to be inside the office building, doing business as usual.

“Just a minute,” Robert said, his tone clipped, and reached for her.

Evie evaded his grasp. “Later,” she said, and hurried up the dock.

He was right behind her when she unlocked the door, but he didn’t have a chance to say anything. Virgil had seen her boat and was slowly making his way across the lot. Robert eyed the old man’s progress; he wouldn’t have time to get any answers out of her before Virgil was there, so it would be better to wait, as she’d said, until later. Once more he controlled his anger and frustration, but the fury in him remained hot. If anything, he was becoming even angrier.

Virgil reached the doorway and gave a sigh of pleasure as the cool air-conditioning washed over him. “Got spoiled in my old age,” he griped. “The heat didn’t used to bother me none.”

“No point in letting it bother you back then,” Evie pointed out, smiling at him. “There wasn’t any air-conditioning, so we all had to put up with it.”

The old man eased into the rocking chair. “Spoiled,” he repeated contentedly.

She went over to a vending machine and fed in the change for three soft drinks. She kept the machine’s temperature set low enough to form ice crystals in the drinks, to the delight of her customers. She popped the tops off the bottles and thrust one into Robert’s hands, then gave another to Virgil. The third she drank herself, turning up the bottle for a long, cold swallow of the crisp, biting liquid.

She saw Robert eye the hourglass bottle in his hand with a less-than-thrilled expression; then he, too, took a drink. His tastes were probably too sophisticated to run to soft drinks, she thought, but if he was going to live here for the summer, he should do as the natives did. One of the front lines of defense against the heat was to consume cola every day as coolant for the insides.

A boat was idling in past the wave breakers. A quick glance told Evie that it was the rental boat. Mercer had seen her, she knew, but she didn’t think he had recognized her. Wearing the universal ball cap and sunglasses, with her hair tucked in, she could have been anyone. It was doubtful that he had even been able to tell she was a woman.

Robert hitched one hip onto the counter, a sockless, docksider-clad foot swinging as he nursed the soft drink. His expression didn’t give anything away, but she had the strong impression that he was… waiting. Until they could talk? No. It was more immediate than that.

She watched Mercer tie up the boat and walk jauntily along the dock, tackle box in one hand and useless tackle in the other. Then the door opened and he breezed in, all ego and self-satisfaction. “Nothing today, doll,” he said in his obnoxious, too-hearty manner. “Maybe I’d have better luck if you went along. What do you say?”

“I’m not much for fishing,” she lied without compunction, causing Virgil to almost choke on his drink.

Robert’s back, as he sat on the counter, had been half-turned toward Mercer. Now he shifted around to face the other man. “Hello, Landon,” he said coolly. “I’d like to go fishing with you the next time you take the afternoon off.”

Evie was startled to hear Robert call Mercer by his first name, and a mental alarm began clanging. How did Robert know the man?

But if she was startled, the effect on Mercer was electric. He froze in place, his face draining of color as he gaped at Robert. “M-Mr. Cannon,” he shuttered. “I—uh, how—w-what are you doing here?”

The black slashes of Robert’s eyebrows rose in that sardonic way of his. Mercer was totally aghast at having run into him, Evie saw, and the tension in her relaxed. Whatever the connection, Robert wasn’t in league with Mercer, or the other man wouldn’t have been so taken aback at his presence.

The most obvious answer to Mercer’s question would have been that he kept his boat here; that wasn’t, however, what Robert said. Instead he looked deliberately at Evie and said, “The place has a certain attraction.”

She felt silly, but she couldn’t stop the color from heating her face. Mercer looked even more aghast, for some reason.

“Oh,” he mumbled. “Yeah, sure.” With an effort, he regained a bit of control and managed a sickly smile. “It’s getting late. I should be going. Call me when you’re free, Mr. Cannon, and we’ll get in that game of golf we talked about.”

“Or some fishing,” Robert suggested, his voice like silk.

“Uh… yeah. Yes, we’ll do that. Anytime.” Mercer tossed the boat keys onto the counter and hastily left.

“Wonder what set his britches on fire,” Virgil mused.

“Perhaps it was his bad luck in taking an afternoon off from work to go fishing and running into his employer at the marina,” Robert suggested, his eyes hooded.

Virgil leaned back in the rocker, wheezing with laughter. “Well, I’ll be! He works for you, eh? Bet that ruined his fun for the day.”

“I’m certain it did.”

Evie stood motionless, absorbing all the nuances of the brief scene with Mercer, and also the silkiness of Robert’s murmured reply. He had taken a great deal of pleasure in watching Mercer squirm. He had also made that remark about her being the reason for his presence for the same reason: to make Mercer squirm. After all, what man would feel comfortable to find out he had just come on to the boss’s woman… in front of the boss? This was in addition to being caught playing hooky from work.

Mercer probably didn’t realize it, but it had been plain to Evie that Robert disliked him. He had been perfectly cordial, but the dislike had been there, underlying every word. She was enormously relieved. For a horrible moment she had been afraid that Robert was involved with whatever crooked deal Mercer had going on, but Mercer’s manner certainly hadn’t been that of someone who had met a friend. She was worried, though, to find that Mercer worked for Robert. Just as she didn’t want his dirty waves to touch the marina, she also didn’t want him to somehow harm Robert.

She hadn’t been successful in finding out any more about what Mercer was up to; he had idled a twisting path around several of the islands, finally stopping for a moment on the back side of one of the larger ones. She hadn’t been able to see what, if anything, he was doing. If she had had a trolling motor, she would have been able to get much closer without him hearing her, but her boat wasn’t equipped with one. Then Mercer had started his motor again and resumed his weaving in and out of the islands. She had watched him as best she could, but there was no way to keep him in sight all the time. When he had finally left the islands, it had taken all the speed her boat was capable of to outpace him and reach the marina far enough in advance that he wouldn’t see her.

So she still had nothing but suspicion. While she was wondering whether or not to confide in Robert when she had nothing of substance to tell him, Virgil’s great-granddaughter came in. This time she was carrying a wide-eyed, eleven-month-old girl on her hip, and was followed by two towheaded boys, ages four and six. “PawPaw, PawPaw,” both boys yelled. They ran toward the rocking chair, climbing up on Virgil’s lap with a naturalness that suggested they had been doing it all their lives.

“Well, how’d it go?” Virgil asked, gathering both small bodies against him. “Did the dentist give you a sucker?”

“Yep,” said the oldest one, pulling a bright red lollipop from his pocket. “Mom says it’s okay, because it’s sugarless. You want it?” His expression said that he was disappointed by the sugarless state of the candy.

“It’s tempting,” Virgil allowed, “but you keep it.” Evie smiled as she watched Virgil with his great-greatgrandchildren, then turned back to their mother. “Sherry, this is Robert Cannon. He and Virgil have been out running the river today. Robert, Virgil’s great-granddaughter, Sherry Ferguson.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Sherry said with her friendly smile. She obviously remembered Robert from the first time he had come to the marina. She shifted the baby onto her other hip and held out her hand.

Robert reached to shake Sherry’s hand, and the baby evidently thought he was reaching for her; with a gurgle of pleasure she released her grip on Sherry’s blouse and lunged forward, both dimpled little arms outstretched. Sherry made a startled grab for the child, but Robert was faster, scooping the baby into his arms almost before she had left the safety of her mother’s.

“Allison Rose!” Sherry gasped, staring at the baby. “I’m sorry,” she apologized to Robert as she reached to retrieve her child. “I don’t know what got into her. She’s never gone to a stranger like that before.”

Allison Rose wouldn’t have any of it; she shrieked and turned away from her mother’s hands, clinging to Robert’s shirt with all her might.

“She’s all right,” Robert said, his wonderful deep voice now holding a soothing tone to calm both mother and daughter. One powerful hand steadied the baby’s back as his eyes smiled at Sherry. “I’ve always had a way with women.”

That was nothing less than the truth, Evie thought, her blood moving in a slow throb through her veins as she watched him cradle the baby as comfortably as if he had a dozen of his own. Was there anything the man couldn’t do? Sherry was all but melting under that smiling look, and tiny Allison was in heaven.

Perched on his arm, Allison looked around with a beatific expression, as if she were a queen surveying her subjects. Robert bent his head to brush his nose against the soft blond curls and reflected that girls were different from boys even at this young age. He had rocked Madelyn’s two boys when they were infants and played with them as toddlers, but they hadn’t been quite as soft as the baby girl in his arms, and her scent was indefinably sweeter. He found himself enchanted by the tiny sandals on her feet and the ruffled sundress she wore. The feel of her chubby, dimpled arms clinging to him was strangely satisfying.

Oh God, Evie thought. Her chest was so tight she could barely breathe. She had to turn away to hide the shattered look in her eyes. Why couldn’t he have been uncomfortable with babies? Why did he have to cradle Allison so tenderly and close his eyes with delight at her sweet baby scent? The emotion swelling in her was so overwhelming that she couldn’t think, couldn’t function.

For the rest of her life she would remember the exact moment when she fell in love with Robert Cannon.

She busied herself fiddling with papers, though she couldn’t have said what those papers were. As if from a distance, she could hear Sherry asking about Virgil’s excursion on the river, could hear the enthusiasm in Virgil’s reply and Robert’s comments. The calm, soothing tone was still there, she noticed. How could Sherry fail to be reassured about the safety of the outing when his utter placidity and self-confidence said that he had taken every care without appearing to fuss over Virgil’s safety?

He did it deliberately, she realized as she listened to them talk. She felt oddly detached, not really hearing words, but rather the way things were said, the underlying emotion. Robert was a master at reading people, then using his voice and manner with uncanny accuracy to manipulate them into the response he desired. It was almost as if he were a puppeteer, pulling everyone’s strings so subtly that they never noticed they were being directed by his will.

And if he manipulated them, then it followed that he manipulated her.

There was a dull roaring in her ears, as if she might faint. Evie flatly refused to do something that silly and concentrated on breathing deeply. As she sucked in the first breath, she discovered that it was the first time she had done so for some time, judging by the acute relief in her lungs. She had simply stopped breathing, probably about the time Robert had rubbed his face against Allison’s curls. No wonder she had felt faint.

Emotionally she had been groping for solid ground, had felt her fingers finally brush against something to which she had thought she could hold. Now she felt as if that lifeline had been jerked away from her and she was lost again, swirling away. Had anything Robert said to her been the truth, or had every word been a subtle manipulation, designed to… what? Get her into his bed? Was the thrill, for him, in the chase? The problem was that he could just as easily be sincere. How was she to tell the difference?

The answer, she thought painfully, was that she couldn’t. Only time would tell if she could depend on him, entrust her heart to him, and she doubted that the time was there. He’d said he was here for the rest of the summer, and summer was half-over. He would be here another six, maybe seven, weeks.

“Evie.” Her name was spoken quietly, almost in her ear. She felt his heat against her back, smelled the fresh, clean sweat on his body. His hand touched her arm. “Sherry and Virgil are leaving.”

She turned, summoning both a smile and self-control. No one else had noticed her preoccupation, she saw, but Robert had, another disturbing example of his acute perception. Allison had been enticed, with one of the red suckers as bait, back into Sherry’s arms, where she was engrossed with turning the cellophane-wrapped candy around and around, trying to find access. Finally she simply popped it into her mouth, cellophane and all. Virgil was standing, and the boys were already at the door, shouting that they wanted a Blizzard before they went home, while Sherry insisted that she wasn’t driving all the way to Boaz to get one, at which Virgil added that he wouldn’t mind having a Blizzard, himself. That, of course, settled the issue.

Evie added her voice to all the rowdy commotion, telling them goodbye, telling Virgil to take care. The boys raced out the door and headed toward the docks. Sherry stepped out and said, “Y’all get back here, now!” in a tone that stopped them in their tracks and brought them, pouting, back to her. It took another few minutes to get everyone settled in the station wagon, and through it all Evie was acutely aware of Robert standing very close behind her, his hand on the small of her back. Neither Sherry nor Virgil would have missed the body language, much less the touch, that stated his claim on her.

The silence after their departure was almost deafening. She closed the door and tried to slide past him, but his hands closed on her waist, and, with a dizzy whirl, she found herself plunked down on the counter with him standing between her legs to prevent her from getting down. She stared at the center of his chest, refusing to look up at him. She didn’t want this, didn’t want to confront him when she was still reeling from the jolting realization that she loved him and could trust him even less than she had thought.

“Damn it,” he said very softly. Then, “Look at me.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to talk to the top of your head.”

“I can hear you just fine the way I am.”

He hissed a curse just under his breath and caught her face between his hands, tilting it up. He was careful not to hurt her, but there was no resisting the easy strength of that grip. She tried to concentrate on his nose, but the pale green glitter of his eyes dominated his face, drawing her attention. There was no way not to see the cold fury there.

“Where did you go?”

The question was deceptively calm, almost idle. If she hadn’t been able to see his eyes, if she hadn’t been able to feel the roiling anger in him, she might have been fooled. “I had an errand to run.”

“Ah.” His hands tightened on her face. “Were you meeting Landon Mercer?” he asked abruptly. “Are you having an affair with him?”

She stared at him, stupefied. For several moments she was unable to formulate a single thought, her mind a total blank. How on earth had he managed to link her to Mercer? He had been gone when she had left, and she and Mercer had not come back at the same time. But she had left because of Mercer, even though she hadn’t been with him. She could feel her cheeks heating and knew that she looked guilty, but she still couldn’t seem to manage a coherent reply. Then the last question sank in, and she snapped, “No, I’m not having an affair with him! I detest the man!”

Robert’s lips were thin. “Then why did you sneak off to meet with him?”

“I didn’t sneak anywhere,” she flared. “And I did not meet him!”

“But you closed the office in the middle of a busy day,” he said relentlessly. “When you wouldn’t close it a little early on a rainy afternoon when there weren’t any customers at all.”

“I told you, I had an errand.”

“So you went in a boat?”

“I live on the water,” she pointed out, light brown eyes glowing more golden by the second. “I can cross the lake faster than I can drive to my house. Sometimes, if the weather is good and I’m in the mood, I use the boat, anyway, rather than driving.”

The dangerous look hadn’t faded from his eyes. “Are you saying that you went home?”

Very deliberately she caught his wrists and removed his hands from her face. “I had an errand,” she repeated. “I didn’t meet Mercer. I’m not having an affair with him. And what in hell makes you think you have the right to interrogate me?” The last sentence was shouted as she tried to shove him away.

He didn’t move, not an inch. “This,” he said in a stifled tone, then moved forward as he bent his head to her.

She caught her breath at the heat of his mouth, the ravaging pressure. His movement had forced her thighs even wider, and he settled his hips in the notch. Evie quivered at the hard thrust of his sex against the vulnerable softness of her private body, alarmed by the contact even through several layers of cloth. The passion in him was as overwhelming as his anger had been, buffeting her, bending her under his will. His arms were painfully tight, and she tried to push him away once more, with the same result. “Stop it,” he muttered against her mouth, and one arm dropped to encircle her bottom and pull her closer against him, rubbing her against the ridge beneath his jeans.

Unexpected, acute, the pleasure that shot through her loins made her cry out, the sound muffled by his lips. He repeated the motion, rocking his pelvis against her in a fury of jealousy and desire. The jolt was even stronger, and she arched in his arms, her hands lifting to cling to his shoulders. The transition from anger to desire was so swift that she couldn’t control it, and the current of pleasure leaped within her. Every move he made increased the sensation, pushed her higher, as if she were being forced up a mountain and the purpose, once she reached the peak, was to hurl her over. The dizzying, panicked sensation was the same, and she clutched at him as the only anchor.

It had never been like this with Matt, she thought dimly. Their youthful passion had been shy, untutored, sweet but hesitant. Robert was a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

Though he hadn’t touched them, her breasts were throbbing, the nipples tightly drawn and aching. She arched again, a soft, frantic sound in her throat as she tried to ease the ache by rubbing them against his chest. He knew, and whispered, “Easy,” just as his hand closed over one firm, jutting mound.

She whimpered at the heat, the delicious pressure. She knew she should stop him, but putting an end to this ecstasy was the last thing she wanted to do. Her body was pliant, voluptuous with need, glowing with heat. He put his hand under her shirt and deftly opened the front snap of her bra. The cups slid apart, and then his fingers were on her naked flesh. He stroked the satin curves, then circled the tight nipples until she writhed in an agony of unfulfillment. “Is this what you want?” he murmured, and lightly pinched the distended tips. She moaned as a river of heat ran through her, gathering moisture to deposit between her thighs.

He bent her backward over his arm, the position thrusting her breasts upward. Her shirt was pulled up to completely bare them, she realized, wondering when that had happened. She saw her nipples, as red as berries; then his mouth closed over one, and her eyes closed as her head fell back.

He was going to take her right here, on the counter. She felt his determination, his own rampant desire. Panic surged through her, combating the heat that undermined her own will and common sense. He would take her here, where anyone could walk in and see them. He would take her without any thought for birth control. And she, besides risking her reputation and the chance of pregnancy, would lose the last bit of protection she retained for her heart.

His mouth was tugging at her nipple, drawing strongly on it before moving to the other one. And his hands were working at the waistband of her jeans, unsnapping and unzipping.

Desperately she wedged her arms between their bodies and stiffened them. “No,” she said. The word was hoarse, barely audible. “Robert, no! Stop it!”

He froze, his muscled body taut as he held himself motionless for a long moment. Then, very slowly, he lifted his hands from her and moved back, one step, then two. His breathing was fast and audible.

Evie couldn’t look at him as she slid from the counter and hastily fumbled her clothing back into presentable shape, fastening her bra, smoothing her shirt down, snapping and zipping her jeans. Her own breath was coming light and fast.

“Don’t look so scared,” he said calmly. “I gave you my word that I’d stop, and I did.”

No, the problem wasn’t with his willpower, she thought wildly, but with hers. Had they been anywhere else but in the marina, she didn’t know if she could have made herself say no.

“Nothing to say?” he asked a moment later, when she remained silent.

She cleared her throat. “Not yet.”

“All right” He still sounded far too calm and in control. “We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock.”

“Seven,” she echoed as he left.

Robert was on the secure mobile phone in the Jeep by the time he had pulled out of the marina’s parking lot. “Did you follow him from the time he left work?” he asked as soon as the phone was answered.

“Yes, sir, we did. We saw your Jeep at the marina and pulled back.”

“Damn. I was out in my boat. He rented a boat and met someone out on the lake, possibly Evie, because she left the marina in her boat, too. Was he carrying anything when he left work?”

“Not that we could tell, but he could easily have had a disk in his coat pocket.”

“He didn’t fish in his suit. Where did he change clothes?”

“At his house. He was there for not quite five minutes, then came out carrying a tackle box and a fishing rod.”

“If he had a disk at all, it would have been in the tackle box.”

“Yes, sir. We didn’t have a chance to get to it.”

“I know. It wasn’t your fault. First thing, though, I’m going to have a secure phone put in the boat. That way, if I’m out on the water, you can get in touch with me.”

“Good idea. We went through his house again while we had the chance. Nothing.”

“Damn. Okay, continue to watch him. And send someone out to Evie’s house tonight.”

“The matter we discussed?”

“Yes,” Robert replied. It was time for the pressure to begin.

Chapter Nine

The next morning was awful. Evie hadn’t slept well—had scarcely slept at all. She had set the alarm for four-thirty, and when it went off she had been asleep for less than two hours. Dreaming about Robert was one thing, but she had been wideawake and hadn’t been able to get him out of her mind. Her thoughts had darted from the seething passion of his lovemaking, incomplete as it had been, to the unease she felt every time she thought of how he so skillfully manipulated people. She tried to analyze what he did and couldn’t find any time when he had been malicious, but that didn’t reassure her.

Sometime after midnight, lying in the darkness and staring at the ceiling, she realized what it was that so bothered her. It was as if Robert allowed people to see and know only a part of him; the other part, probably the closest to being the real man, was standing back, inviolate, carefully watching and analyzing, gauging reactions, deciding which subtle pressures to apply to gain the results he wanted. Everyone was shut away from that inner man, the razor-sharp intelligence functioning almost like a computer, isolated in a sterile environment. What was most upsetting was to realize that this was how he wanted it, that he had deliberately fashioned that inner isolation and wasn’t about to invite anyone inside.

What place could she hope to have in his life? He desired her; he would be perfectly willing to make her the center of his attention for a time, in order to gain what he wanted: a carnal relationship. But unless she could break through into that fiercely guarded inner core, she would never reach his emotions. He would be fine, but she would break her heart battering against his defenses.

She, better than others, knew how important emotional barriers were. She had propped herself up with her own defenses for many years, until she had slowly healed to the point where she could stand on her own. How could she condemn him for staying within his own fortress? She didn’t know if she should even try to get inside.

The thing was, she didn’t know if she had a choice any longer. For better or worse, this afternoon he had slipped through her defenses. Such a little thing: playing with a baby. But it was the little things, rather than the watershed events, on which love was built. She had softened toward him when he had saved her and Jason’s lives, but her heart had remained her own. Today she had fallen in love; it wasn’t something she could back away from and ignore. It might be impossible to breach Robert’s defenses and reach his heart, but she had to try.

Finally she drifted into sleep, but the alarm too soon urged her out of bed. Heavy-eyed, she put on the coffee and showered while it was brewing. Then, as she absently munched on a bowl of cereal and poured in the caffeine, a dull cramp knotted her lower belly. “Damn it,” she muttered. Just what she needed; she was going out with Robert for the first time that night, and her period was starting. She had thought she had another couple of days before it was due. She made a mental note that in a few days she should begin taking the birth-control pills the doctor had just prescribed.

Normally her period didn’t bother her, but the timing of this one, added to lack of sleep, made her cranky as she left the house in the predawn darkness and climbed into the truck.

The sturdy pickup, usually so reliable despite its high mileage, made some unfamiliar noises as she drove along the dark, deserted side road. “Don’t you dare break down on me now,” she warned it. She was just getting on a firm financial footing; a major repair job right now was just what she didn’t need.

She reached U.S. 431 and turned onto it. The truck shuddered and began making loud clanging noises. Startled, she slowed and swept the gauges with a quick glance. The temperature was fine, the oil—Oh God, the oil gauge was red-lining. She slammed on the brakes and started to veer toward the shoulder, and that was when the engine blew. There were more clanging and grinding noises, and smoke boiled up around the hood, obscuring her vision. She steered the truck off the highway, fighting the heavy wheel as, deprived of power, the vehicle lurched to a halt.

Evie got out and stood looking at the smoking corpse as it pinged and rattled, the sounds of mechanical death. Her language was usually mild, but there were some occasions that called for swear words, and this was one of them. She used every curse word she had ever heard, stringing them together in rather innovative ways. That didn’t bring life back to the motor, and it didn’t make her bank account any healthier, but it relieved some of her frustration. When she ran out of new ways to say things, she stopped, took a deep breath and looked up and down the highway. Dawn was lightening the sky, and traffic was picking up; maybe someone she knew would come by and she wouldn’t have to walk the full two miles to a pay phone. With a sigh she got the pistol out from under the truck seat, slipped it into her purse, then locked the truck—though obviously anyone who stole it would have to haul it away—and began walking.

It was less than a minute when another pickup rolled to a stop beside her. She glanced around and saw the boat hitched up behind. Two men were in the truck, and the one on the passenger side rolled down his window. “Havin’ trouble?” Then he said, a bit uncertainly, “Miss Evie?”

With relief she recognized Russ McElroy and Jim Haynes, two area fisherman whom she had known casually for several years. “Hi, Russ. Jim. The motor in my truck just blew.”

Russ opened the door and hopped out. “Come on, we’ll give you a ride to the marina. You don’t need to be out by yourself like this. There’s too much meanness goin’ on these days.”

Gratefully she climbed into the cab of the truck and slid to the middle of the seat. Russ got back in and closed the door, and Jim eased the rig onto the highway. “You got a good mechanic?” Jim asked.

“I thought I’d have Burt, the mechanic at the marina, take a look at it. He’s good with motors.”

Jim nodded. “Yeah, I know Burt Mardis. He’s real good. But if he can’t get to it, there’s another guy, owns a shop just off Blount, who’s just as good. His name’s Roy Simms. Just look it up in the phone book, Simms’ Automotive Repair.”

“Thanks, I’ll remember that.”

Jim and Russ launched into a discussion of other good mechanics in the area, and soon they reached the marina. She thanked them, and Russ got out again to let her out. They probably hadn’t intended to put in at her marina, but since they were there they decided they might as well. As she unlocked the gate that blocked the launch ramp, Jim began to maneuver the truck so he could back the boat into the water. Next she unlocked the office and turned on the lights. Just as Jim and Russ were idling away from the dock, Burt drove up, and she went to tell him about the demise of her truck.

It wasn’t long after dawn when the phone rang. Robert opened one eye and examined the golden rose of the sky as he reached for the receiver. “Yes.”

“The truck didn’t make it into town. It blew just as she reached the highway. She caught a ride to the marina.”

Robert sat up in bed. He could feel the fine hairs on the back of his neck prickling with mingled anger and alarm. “Damn it, she hitchhiked?”

“Yeah, I was a little worried about that, so I followed to make certain she didn’t have any trouble. No problem. It was a couple of fishermen who picked her up. I guess she knew them.”

That wasn’t much better. Guntersville wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime, but anything could happen to a woman alone. Neither did it soothe him that she had been followed, that help was right behind if she’d needed it. The situation shouldn’t have arisen in the first place. “Why was the timing off?”

“The hole in the oil line must have been bigger than West thought. Probably there’s a big oil puddle in her driveway. She would have seen it if it hadn’t still been dark when she left the house.”

In a very calm, remote voice Robert said, “If anything had happened to her because of his mistake, I wouldn’t have liked it.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then, “I understand. It won’t happen again.”

Having made his point, Robert didn’t belabor it. He moved on. “Be careful when you’re in the house tonight. I don’t want her to notice anything out of place.”

“She won’t. I’ll see to it myself.”

After hanging up the phone, Robert lay back down and hooked his hands behind his head as he watched the sun peek over the mountains. The day before had made him more uncertain than ever of Evie’s connection with Mercer. He was fairly certain she had rendezvoused with Mercer out on the water, but either she hadn’t told Mercer of his presence, or she had been unaware of his own connection with PowerNet. This appeared to be an efficient espionage ring, to have escaped notice and capture for as long as they had; given that, Evie should have known of him. At the very least, Mercer should have notified her of his presence. What reason could they have had for keeping her in the dark about his identity, unless her participation was very peripheral and no one had thought she needed to know?

The other possibility was that Evie had indeed recognized his name, or been notified, but for reasons of her own had chosen not to pass on the information that he had leased a slip at her marina and appeared to have formed an intense personal interest in her.

Either way, it followed that Evie wasn’t on good terms with the others in the espionage ring. On the one hand, it gave him a weakness he could exploit. On the other, her life could be in danger.

Evie made arrangements to have a wrecker tow the truck to the marina. That accomplished, Burt stuck his head under the hood to begin the examination. Next he lay down on a dolly and rolled underneath for another view. When he emerged, he wasn’t optimistic about rebuilding the motor. “Too much damage,” he said. “You’d be better off just buying another motor.”

She had been expecting that, and she had already been mentally juggling her finances. The payment on the bank loan for the marina would be late this month, and then she would have to put off other payments to make the one on the loan. She could get by without transportation for a few days by using the boat to go back and forth from home to the marina. If she absolutely needed to go somewhere, she could borrow Becky’s car, though she didn’t like to.

“I’ll call around and try to find one,” she said. “Will you have time to put it in for me?”

“Sure,” Burt said easily. “It’s a little slow right now, anyway.”

By the time Craig arrived to relieve her, it was all arranged. She had located an engine, and Burt would begin work putting it in as soon as it arrived. Depending on how much marina work came in, she might be driving home the next afternoon.

In Evie’s experience, things didn’t generally work that well. She wouldn’t be surprised if Burt was suddenly flooded with a lot of boats needing attention.

The trip across the lake was enjoyable, despite her worries. The water was green, the surrounding mountains a misty blue, and fat, fluffy clouds drifted lazily across the sky, offering an occasional brief respite from the blazing sun. Gulls wheeled lazily over the water, and an eagle soared high in the distance. It was the kind of day when being inside was almost intolerable.

With that thought in mind, once she arrived home she put her financial worries on hold and got out the lawn mower to give her yard a trimming. She glared at the big black oil stain on the driveway where the truck had been parked. If it had been daylight when she’d left this morning, if she hadn’t swapped shifts with Craig, she would have seen the oil and not have driven the truck; the motor would still be intact, and the repair bill would be much smaller.

Just simple bad timing.

The yard work finished, she went inside to cool off and tackle the housework, which was minimal. By three o’clock she was back outside, sitting on the dock with her feet in the water and a sweat-dewed glass of ice tea beside her. Fretting about the truck wouldn’t accomplish anything. She would handle this just as she had handled every other money crisis that had arisen over the years, by strict economizing until all bills were paid. She couldn’t do anything more than that, since it wasn’t likely a good fairy would drop the money into her lap. Though there might be the possibility of taking a part-time job in the mornings at one of the fast-food restaurants serving breakfast. Forty dollars a week was a hundred and sixty dollars a month, enough to pay the power bill, with a little left over for the gas bill. But for now all she wanted was to sit on the dock with her feet in the water and gaze at the mountains, feeling contentment spread through her.

That was how Robert found her. He came around the side of the house and paused when he saw her sitting on the weathered dock, her eyes closed, face lifted to the sun. The long, thick, golden braid had been pulled forward over one shoulder, revealing the enticing, delicate furrow of her nape. She was wearing faded denim shorts and a white chemise top, hardly a sophisticated outfit, but his pulse began to throb as he studied the graceful curve of her shoulders, the delectable roundness of her slender arms, the shapeliness of her legs. Her skin glowed with a warm, pale gold luminescence, like a succulent peach. His eyes, his entire body, burned as he stared at her. His mouth was literally watering, and he had to swallow. He had never felt such urgent lust for any other woman. What he wanted was to simply throw himself on her and have her right here, right now, without thought or finesse.

She was unaware of his presence until the dock vibrated when he stepped onto it. There was no alarm in her eyes as she turned her head to see who had come visiting, only lazy curiosity followed by a warm look of welcome. Even the average five-year-old in a large city was more wary than the people around here, he thought as he sat down beside her and began taking off his shoes.

“Hi,” she said, a sort of smiling serenity in that one word, which was drawled so that it took twice as long for her to say than it did for him.

He found himself smiling back, actually smiling, his mouth curved into a tender line as his heart pounded inside his chest. He had wanted her from the moment he’d first seen her; he’d been, several times, unexpectedly charmed by her. Both reactions were acute at this moment, but even more, he was enchanted.

He had whirled across countless dance floors with countless beautiful women in his arms, women who could afford to pamper themselves and wear the most expensive gowns and jewelry, women whom he had genuinely liked. He had made love to those women gently, slowly, in luxurious surroundings. He had taken women when the added fillip of danger made each encounter more intense. But never had he felt more enthralled than he was right now, sitting beside Evie on a weathered old dock, with a blazing afternoon sun, almost brutal in its clarity, bathing everything in pure light. Sweat trickled down his back and chest from the steamy heat, and his entire body pulsed with life. Even his fingertips throbbed. It took all of his formidable self-control to prevent himself from pushing her down on the dock and spreading her legs for his entry.

And yet, for all the intensity of his desire, he was oddly content to wait. He would have her. For now he was caught in the enchantment of her slow smile, in the luminous sheen of her skin, in her warm, female scent that no perfume could match. Simply to sit beside her was to be seduced, and he was more than willing.

Having removed his shoes, he rolled up the legs of his khaki pants and stuck his feet into the water. The water was tepid, but refreshing in contrast to the heat of his skin. It made him feel almost comfortable.

“It isn’t seven o’clock yet,” she pointed out, but she was smiling.

“I wanted to make sure you hadn’t chickened out.”

“Not yet. Give me a couple of hours.”

Despite the teasing, he was certain she wouldn’t have stood him up. She might be nervous, even a little reluctant, but she had agreed, and she would keep her word. Her lack of enthusiasm in going out with him might have been insulting if he hadn’t known how potent her physical reaction to him was. Whatever reasons she had for being wary of him, her body was oblivious to them.

She lazily moved her feet back and forth, watching the water swirl around her ankles. After a minute of wondering about the advisability of bringing up the subject that had been bothering her so much, she decided to do so, anyway. “Robert, have you ever let anyone really get close to you? Has anyone ever truly known you?”

She felt his stillness, just for a split second. Then he said in a light tone, “I’ve been trying to get close to you from the moment I first saw you.”

She turned her head and found him watching her, his ice-green eyes cool and unreadable. “That was a nice evasion, but you just demonstrated what I meant.”

“I did? What was that?” he murmured indulgently, leaning forward to press his lips to her bare shoulder.

She didn’t let that burning little caress distract her. “How you deflect personal questions without answering them. How you keep everyone at arm’s length. How you watch and manipulate and never give away anything of your real thoughts or feelings.”

He looked amused. “You’re accusing me of being difficult to get to know, when you’re as open as the Sphinx?”

“We both have our defenses,” she admitted readily.

“Suppose I turn your questions around?” he said, watching her intently. “Have you ever let anyone get close to you and really get to know you?”

A pang went through her. “Of course. My family… and Matt.”

She lapsed into silence then, and Robert saw the sadness move over her face, like a cloud passing over the sun. Matt again! What had been so special about an eighteen-year-old boy that twelve years later just the mention of his name could make her grieve? He didn’t like himself for the way he felt, violently jealous and resentful of a dead boy. But at least Matt’s memory had diverted Evie from her uncomfortable line of questioning.

She seemed content to sit in silence now, dabbling her feet in the water and watching the sunlight change patterns as it moved lower in the sky. Robert left her to her thoughts, suddenly preoccupied with his own.

Her perception was disturbing. She had, unfortunately, been dead on the money. He had always felt it necessary to keep a large part of himself private; the persona he presented to the world, that of a wealthy, urbane businessman, was not false. It was merely a small part of the whole, the part that he chose to display. It worked very well; it was perfect for doing business, for courting and seducing the women he wanted, and was an entree into those parts of the world where his business was not quite what it seemed.

None of his closest associates suspected that he was anything other than the cool, controlled executive. They didn’t know about his taste for adventure, or the way he relished danger. They didn’t know about the extremely risky favors he had done, out of sheer patriotism, for various government departments and agencies. They didn’t know about all the ongoing, specialized training he did to keep himself in shape and his skills sharp. They didn’t know about his volcanic temper, because he kept it under ruthless control. Robert knew himself well, knew his own lethal capabilities. It had always seemed better to keep the intense aspects of his personality to himself, to never unleash the sheer battering force of which he was capable. If that meant no one ever really knew him, he was content with that. There was a certain safety in it.

No woman had ever reached the seething core of his emotions, had ever made him lose control. He never wanted to truly love a woman in the romantic sense, to find himself open to her, vulnerable to her. He planned to marry someday, and his wife would be supremely happy. He would treat her with every care and consideration, pleasing her in bed and cosseting her out of it. She would never want for anything. He would be a tender, affectionate husband and father. And she would never know that she had never truly reached him, that his heart remained whole, in his isolated core.

Madelyn, of course, knew that there were fiercely guarded depths to him, but she had never probed. She had known herself to be loved, and that was enough for her. His sister was a formidable person in her own right, her lazy manner masking an almost frightening determination, as her husband had discovered to his great surprise.

But how could Evie, on such short acquaintance, so clearly see what others never did? It made him feel exposed, and he didn’t like it one damn bit. He would have to be more careful around her.

The sun was shining full on his back now, and his spine was prickling with sweat. Deciding that the silence had gone on long enough, he asked in an idle tone, “Where’s your truck?”

“I’m having a new motor put in it,” she replied. “I might have it back by tomorrow afternoon, but until then I’m using the boat to get to the marina and back.”

He waited, but there was no additional explanation. Surprised, he realized that she wasn’t going to tell him about the motor blowing, wasn’t going to broadcast her troubles in any way. He was accustomed to people bringing their problems to him for deft handling. He had also thought it possible that Evie would ask him for a loan to cover the repairs. They hadn’t discussed his financial status, but she had seen the new boat, the new Jeep, the house on the waterfront, and she was far from stupid; she had to know he had money. He wouldn’t have given her a loan, of course, because that would have defeated his subtle maneuvering to put financial pressure on her, but still, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d asked. Instead, she hadn’t even planned to tell him that her truck had broken down.

“If you need to go anywhere, call me,” he finally offered.

“Thanks, but I don’t have any errands that can’t be put off until I get the truck back.”

“There’s no need to put them off,” he insisted gently. “Just call me.”

She smiled and let the subject drop, but he knew she wouldn’t call. Even if he installed himself at the marina until her truck was repaired, she wouldn’t tell him if she needed anything.

He took her hand and gently stroked her fingers. “You haven’t asked me where we’re going tonight.”

She gave him a surprised look. “I hadn’t thought about it” That was the truth. Where they went was inconsequential; the fact that she would be with him was what had occupied her mind.

“That isn’t very flattering,” he said with a faint smile.

“I didn’t say I hadn’t thought about going out with you. It’s just that the where never entered my mind.”

The sophisticated socialites he normally squired about New York and the world’s other major cities would never have made such an artless confession. Or rather, if they had, it would have been in an intimately flirtatious manner. Evie wasn’t flirting. She had simply stated the truth and let him take it as he would. He wanted to kiss her for it but refrained for now. She would be more relaxed if she didn’t have to deal with a seduction attempt every time she saw him.

Then she turned to him, brown eyes grave and steady. “I answered your question,” she said. “Now answer mine.”

“Ah.” So she had been delayed but not diverted. Swiftly he decided on an answer that would satisfy her but not leave him open. It had the advantage of being the truth, as far as it went. “I’m a private person,” he said quietly. “I don’t blurt out my life story to anyone who asks. You don’t either, so you should understand that.”

Those golden brown eyes studied him for another long moment; then, with a sigh, she turned away. He sensed that his answer hadn’t satisfied her, but that she wasn’t going to ask again. The sensation of being given up on wasn’t a pleasant one, but he didn’t want her to keep prying, either.

He checked his watch. There were a few calls he had to make before picking her up for the evening, not to mention showering and changing clothes. He kissed her shoulder again and got to his feet. “I have to leave or I’ll be late to an appointment. Don’t stay out much longer or you’ll get a sunburn. Your shoulders are already hot.”

“All right. I’ll see you at seven.” She remained sitting on the dock, and Robert looked down at her streaked tawny head with stifled frustration. Just when he thought he was finally making serious progress with her, she mentally retreated again, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell. But this afternoon’s mood was an odd blend of contentment, melancholy and resignation. Maybe she was worried about the truck; maybe she was nervous about their first date, though why she should be, when he’d already had her half-naked, was beyond his comprehension.

The truth was that she was as opaque to him as he was to others. He had always had the ability to read people, but Evie’s mind was either closed to him or she reacted in a totally unexpected way. He couldn’t predict what she would do or tell what she was thinking, and it was slowly driving him mad. He forced himself to walk away, rather than stand there waiting for her to look up at him. What would that accomplish? It was likely that she would figure out why he was waiting and look up just to get it over with, so he would go. Little mind games were only for the insecure, and Robert didn’t have an insecure bone in his body. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to leave her. The only time he wasn’t worried about what she was doing was when he was with her.

As he climbed into the Jeep, he wryly reflected that it was a sad state of affairs when he was so obsessed with a woman he couldn’t trust out of his sight.

Evie remained where she was until long after the sound of the Jeep’s engine had faded in the distance. Robert had stonewalled her questions, and sadly she realized that he simply wasn’t going to allow her to get close to him. She supposed she could make a pest of herself and keep yammering at him, but that would only make him close up more. No, if she wanted a relationship with him, she would have to content herself with the little he was comfortable in giving. She had known Matt to the bone and loved him as deeply. How ironic it was that now she had fallen in love with a man who allowed her to touch only the surface.

Finally she pulled her feet out of the water and stood. This had been a day of fretting, though she had tried not to. She would be better off getting ready for her big date. She had the feeling she would need every bit of preparation she could manage.

Chapter Ten

A woman couldn’t have asked for a more perfect escort, she realized about halfway through the evening. For all his sophistication, or perhaps because of it, there was something very old-fashioned in the courtesy and protectiveness with which he treated her. Everything was arranged for her pleasure, her comfort, and she herself was old-fashioned enough, Southern enough, to accept it as the way things should be. Robert Cannon was courting her, so of course he should make certain she was pleased by the evening.

His attention was solely on her. He didn’t eye other women, though she noticed other women watching him. He held her chair for her whenever she got up or sat down, poured wine for her and asked the maitre d’ to turn up the thermostat when he noticed her shivering. It was a matter of his own presence that his request was instantly honored. Whenever they walked, his hand rested warmly on the small of her back in a protective, possessive touch.

In no time, he had put her at ease. It was only natural that she had been nervous about the evening; after all, she hadn’t been on a date in twelve years, and there was a great deal of difference between eighteen and thirty. Back then a date had been a hamburger and a movie, or just getting together with a bunch of friends at the skating rink. She wasn’t at all certain what one did on a date with a man who was used to the most cosmopolitan of entertainments.

As she watched his dark, lean face, she realized how truly sophisticated he was. He had brought her to a very nice restaurant in Huntsville, but she was well aware that it didn’t compare to the sort of establishments available in New York or Paris or New

Orleans. Not by even a hint, though, did he indicate that the standards were less than those to which he was accustomed. Others, worldly but less sophisticated—and certainly less polite—would have subtly tried to impress by describing the truly good restaurants where they’d eaten. Not Robert. She doubted that he even thought of it, for he had the true sophisticate’s knack of being at home in any surrounding. He didn’t rate or compare; he simply enjoyed. He would have been as happy eating barbecue with his fingers as he was dining with gold flatware and blotting his mouth with a starched linen napkin.

Oh, God. Not only did he play with babies, he was totally comfortable in her world. Just one more thing to love.

He waved his fingers in front of her face. “You’ve been watching me and smiling for about five minutes,” he said with amusement coloring his tone. “Ordinarily I’d be flattered, but somehow it makes me uneasy.”

Her mouth quirked as she picked up her fork. “It shouldn’t, because actually it was flattering. I was thinking how comfortable you are down here, despite how different things are.”

He shrugged and said gently, “The differences are mostly good ones, though I admit I wasn’t prepared for the heat. Somehow, ninety degrees in New York is different from ninety degrees here.”

Her brows lifted delicately. “Ninety degrees isn’t all that hot.”

He chuckled and again wondered briefly at her ability to amuse him. It wasn’t anything overt, just the subtle differences in her outlook and the way she phrased it. “That’s the difference, one of attitude. Though, of course, it gets hotter than that occasionally, to a New Yorker ninety degrees is hot. To you, it’s a nice day.”

“Not exactly. Ninety degrees is hot to us, too. It’s just that, compared to a hundred degrees, it isn’t bad.”

“Like I said, attitude.” He sipped his wine. “I like New York for what it is. I like it down here for the same reason. In New York there’s an air of excitement and energy, the opera and ballet and museums. Here, you have clean air, no overcrowding, no traffic jams. No one seems to hurry. People smile at strangers.” His eyes lingered on her face, and when he continued his voice was a little deeper. “Though I admit I’ve been disappointed that I haven’t heard you say ‘y’all’ at all. In fact, I’ve heard it very few times since I’ve been here.”

She hid her smile. “Why would I say it to you? Y’all is plural. You’re singular.”

“Is it? That minor detail had escaped me.”

“That you’re singular?” She paused, aware that she was trespassing into his private life and that he might well shut down as he had that afternoon. “Have you ever been married?”

He sipped his wine again, and his eyes glittered at her over the rim of the glass. “No,” he replied easily. “I was engaged once, when I was in college, but we both realized in time that getting married—particularly to each other—would have been a stupid thing to do.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-six. To satisfy any other pertinent questions you may have, my sexual interest is exclusively in women. I’ve never done drugs, and I don’t have any communicable diseases. My parents are dead, but I have a sister, Madelyn, who lives in Montana with her husband and two sons. There are a few distant cousins, but we don’t keep in touch.”

She regarded him calmly. He was totally relaxed, telling her that he didn’t regard those details of his life as being particularly revealing. They were simply facts. She listened, though, because such minutiae made up the skeleton of his life. “Becky and I have relatives scattered all over the state,” she said. “One of my uncles has a huge farm down around Montgomery, and every June we get together there for a family reunion. We aren’t a close family, but we’re friendly, and it’s a way to stay in touch. If it wasn’t for the reunion, Jason and Paige would never know Becky’s side of the family, only their father’s, so we make an effort to go every year.”

“Your parents are dead?” He knew they were, for that had been in the supplementary report he had received.

“Yes.” The golden glow in her eyes dimmed. “Becky is the only immediate family I have. When Mom died, I lived with

Becky and Paul until Matt and I married.” Her voice faltered, just a little, at the end.

“What about afterward?” he asked gently.

“Then I lived with Matt’s parents.” The words were soft, almost soundless. “Where I live now. It was their house. The marina was theirs, too. Matt was their only child, and when they died, they left everything to me.”

Robert was pierced by another arrow of jealousy. She was still living in the house where Matt had grown up; there was no way she could walk into that house without being reminded of him at every turn. “Have you ever thought of moving? Of buying a more modern house?”

She shook her head. “Home is important to me. I lost my home when Mom died, and though Becky and Paul made me welcome, I was always aware that it was their home and not mine. Matt and I were going to live in a trailer, at first, but after he died I couldn’t… Anyway, his parents asked me to live with them, and they needed me as much as I needed company. Maybe because they needed me, I felt comfortable there, more like it really was my own home. And now,” she said simply, “it is.”

He regarded her thoughtfully. He had never felt that sort of attachment for a place, never felt the tug of roots. There had been a large country estate in Connecticut, when he was growing up, but it had simply been the place where he lived. Now his penthouse served the same emotionless function. Evie wouldn’t like it, though it was spacious and impeccably decorated. Still, he was comfortable there, and the security was excellent.

The restaurant featured a live band, and they were really very good. In keeping with the image of the place, they played old standards, meant for real dancing rather than solitary gyrations. He held out his hand to Evie. “Would you like to dance?”

A glowing smile touched her face as she placed her hand in his, but then she hesitated, and a look of uncertainty replaced the pleasure. “It’s been so long,” she said honestly, “that I don’t know if I can.”

“Trust me,” he said, soothing her worries. “I won’t let you come to grief. It’s like riding a bicycle.”

She went into his arms. She was stiff at first, but after several turns she relaxed and let the pleasure of the music and the movement sweep through her. Robert was an expert dancer, but then, she hadn’t expected anything else. He held her closely enough that she felt secure, but not so close as to touch intimately. More of those exquisite manners, she thought.

As the music continued, she realized that he didn’t have to be blatant. Dancing was its own seduction. There was the tender way he clasped her hand, the warm firmness of his other hand on her back. His breath brushed her hair; the clean scent of his skin teased her nostrils. This close, she could see the closely shaven stubble of his beard, dark against his olive skin. Occasionally her breasts brushed against his chest or arm, or their thighs slid together. It was stylized, unconsummated lovemaking, and she wasn’t immune to it.

They left at midnight. During the forty-minute drive back to Guntersville, Evie sat silently beside him as he competently handled the black Renegade. They didn’t speak until he pulled into her driveway and turned off the ignition, flooding the sudden darkness with silence. As their eyes adjusted, they could see the river stretching, soundless and glistening, behind her house.

“Tomorrow night?” he asked, turning toward her and draping one arm over the steering wheel.

She shook her head. “I can’t. I haven’t arranged for Craig to take over my shift, so he’ll open the marina in the morning as usual. I wouldn’t, anyway. That isn’t the deal we made.”

He sighed. “All right, we’ll compromise. How about swapping shifts with him once a week? Would that be acceptable to your strange scruples? He works for you, rather than the other way around, you know.”

“He’s also a friend, and he does a lot of favors for me. I won’t take advantage of him.” The coolness in her voice told him that he had offended her.

He got out and walked around to open the door for her. As he lifted her to the ground, he said with a touch of whimsy, “Will you try to make a little time for me, anyway?”

“I’ll talk to Craig about it,” she replied noncommittally.

“Please.”

She extracted her house key from her purse, and Robert deftly lifted it out of her fingers. He unlocked the door, reached inside to turn on a light, then stepped back. “Thank you,” she said.

He delayed her with his hand on her arm as she started to go inside. “Good night, sweetheart,” he murmured, and placed his mouth over hers.

The kiss was slow and warm and relatively undemanding. He didn’t touch her, except for his hand on her arm and his lips moving over hers. Unconsciously she sighed with pleasure, opening her mouth to the warmth of his breath and the leisurely penetration of his tongue.

When he lifted his head, her breasts were tingling, her body was warm, and she was breathing faster than normal. It gratified her to notice that his breath, too, was a little rough. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. Then he kissed her again and walked back to the Jeep.

She closed the door, locked it and leaned against it until she heard the sound of the Jeep fade in the distance. Her chest felt tight, her heart swollen and tender. She wanted to weep, and she wanted to sing.

Instead, she kicked off her shoes and walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water. Her left foot landed solidly in something wet and cold, and she jumped in alarm. Quickly she turned on the kitchen light and stared in dismay at the puddle around the bottom of the refrigerator. Even more ominously, there was no faint humming sound coming from the appliance. She jerked the door open, but no little light came on. The ulterior remained dark.

“Oh no, not now,” she moaned. What a time for the refrigerator to die! She simply couldn’t afford to get it repaired now. She supposed she could buy a new one on credit, but she hated to add another payment to the monthly load. The refrigerator had been elderly, but why couldn’t it have lasted another year? By then she would have paid off a couple of debts and had more ready cash. Another six months would have made a difference.

There was nothing, however, that she could do about the refrigerator at nearly one in the morning. She was drooping with fatigue, but she mopped up the water and put down towels to catch any additional leaks.

When she finally got into bed, she couldn’t sleep. That part-time job she had thought about during the afternoon now looked like a necessity, rather than an option. Her lower abdomen was dully aching. The evening with Robert, about which she had been so nervous, had turned out to be the best part of the day.

At seven o’clock she was on the phone to Becky. While Becky was calling around to her friends, Evie began systematically calling in response to every Refrigerator For Sale ad in the paper. As she had suspected, even at that early hour there were a number of calls that weren’t answered. One, which had seemed the most promising, had sold the refrigerator as soon as the ad appeared.

By nine o’clock, she and Becky had located a good refrigerator for sale. At a hundred dollars, it was more than she could readily afford, but considerably less than a new one would cost. Becky came to get her, and they drove out together to look at it.

“It’s ten years old, so it probably has another five to seven years,” the woman said cheerfully as she showed them into the kitchen. “There isn’t anything wrong with it, but we’re building a new house, and I wanted a big side-by-side refrigerator. We were getting one, anyway, but last week I found just what I wanted, on sale at that, so I didn’t wait. As soon as I get this one sold, I can have the new one delivered.”

“It’s sold,” Evie said.

“How are you going to get it home?” asked Becky practically. “Until your truck is fixed, you don’t have any way to haul it” Having stated the problem, she set about trying to solve it, running down the list of everyone she knew who owned a pickup truck and might be available.

Evie’s own list was formidable. After all, she knew a lot of fishermen. Half an hour later, Sonny, a friend who worked second shift and had his mornings free, was on his way.

Time was running short for Evie by the time they got the refrigerator to her house. She called Craig to let him know what was going on and that she might be a few minutes late. “No sweat,” was his easygoing reply.

Sonny hooked up the ice maker while Evie and Becky hurriedly transferred what food had survived from the old refrigerator into the new one. The frozen stuff was okay, and since she hadn’t opened the door, most of the food in the other compartment was still cool and salvageable. She threw away the eggs and milk, just to be on the safe side.

“Do you want me to haul off the old one?” Sonny asked.

“No, you need to go to work. Let’s just push it out onto the deck, and I’ll take care of getting rid of it when I get my truck back. Thanks, Sonny. I don’t know what I’d have done without you today.”

“Anytime,” he said genially, and bent his muscles to the job of getting the old refrigerator outside.

After that was accomplished and Sonny had left, Becky grinned at her sister “I know you’re in a hurry to get to the marina, so I’ll call you tonight I can’t wait to hear all the juicy details about your evening with Robert.”

Evie blew a wisp of hair out of her face. “It was fine,” she said, smiling because she knew the answer would disappoint Becky. “I was worried for nothing. He was a perfect gentleman all night long.”

“Well, damn,” muttered her once-protective big sister.

With Murphy’s Law in full effect, when Evie arrived at the marina she found that the afternoon before had indeed brought Burt several repair jobs on boats that had to be done before he could get to her truck. Because the people who used the marina were her livelihood, she didn’t protest the delay. Financially, it would be better for her if even more repair jobs came in. Enough of them would pay for fixing her truck.

Craig met her at the dock, took one look at her and said, with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, “Boss, you need to stop all this carousing and get a good night’s sleep.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Not really. Dark circles are in this month.”

“If one more thing tears up,” she said direly, “I’m going to shoot it”

He put his brawny young arm around her shoulders. “Aw, everything will be okay. Chin up, boss. You’re just tired. If you want to take a nap, I’ll hang around for another couple of hours. I’ve got a date tonight, but I’m free this afternoon.”

She smiled at him, touched by his offer. “No, I’m fine. You go on home, and I’ll see about getting a morning job to help pay for all this stuff that’s going kablooey.”

“What stuff?” asked a deep voice behind them. She and Craig turned. A boat had been idling outside, and the noise had masked the sound of Robert’s arrival. Unlike her, he looked well rested. His expression didn’t give anything away, but she sensed that he didn’t like Craig putting his arm around her.

“My refrigerator died last night,” she replied. “I spent the morning locating a good used one and getting it home.”

That seemed to give him pause, for some reason. Then he gave her a considering look and said, “You didn’t get much sleep, did you?”

“A few hours. I’ll sleep like a log tonight, though.”

Craig said, “If you’re sure you don’t want me to stay for a while…?”

“I’m sure. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay.” He took off, whistling. Robert turned to watch him go, a tall, well-built boy who gave the promise of being an outstanding man.

“You don’t have any reason to be jealous of Craig,” Evie said coolly as she brushed by him, heading toward the office and the promise of air-conditioning.

Robert’s eyebrows climbed as he followed her. When they were inside, he murmured, “I don’t recall saying anything.”

“You didn’t, but it was plain what you were thinking.”

He was taken aback. God, her perception was expanding into mind reading. He didn’t like the feeling of transparency.

“I’ve known Craig since he was a child. There’s absolutely nothing sexual in our relationship.”

“Maybe not from your perspective,” he said calmly, “but I was a teenage boy once myself.”

“I don’t want to hear about raging hormones. If all you can do is criticize, then leave. I’m too tired to deal with it right now.”

“So you are.” He took her in his arms and tucked her head into the hollow of his shoulder. With one hand he stroked her sun-warmed hair, which was restricted into its usual braid. The night before, she had worn it in an elegant twist. One day soon—or rather, one night—he was going to see it down and spread across his pillow.

Gently he swayed, rocking her. The support of his hard, warm body was so delicious that Evie felt her eyes drifting shut. When she realized that she actually was dozing off, she forced herself to lift her head and step away. “Enough of that or I’ll be asleep in your arms.”

“You’ll sleep there eventually,” he said. “But in different surroundings.”

Her heart gave a great thump. What he so effortlessly did to her simply wasn’t fair. Unbidden, she thought of the one night she had slept in Matt’s arms, the sweetness that had so shortly been overlaid with bitterness and regret when his life had ended me next day. Sleeping with Robert wouldn’t be anything like that long-ago night…

He saw the sadness darken her eyes again, and he felt like swearing savagely. Every time he thought he was making progress, he slammed into Matt Shaw’s ghost, standing like an ethereal wall between Evie and any other man. As unlikely—as damned ridiculous—as it seemed, he couldn’t doubt that she’d been entirely chaste during her widowhood. Her connection with Landon Mercer, whatever else it was, certainly wasn’t physical.

Her relationship with him, on the other hand, certainly would be.

“Did you come by for any particular reason?” she asked.

“Just to see you for a moment. Would you like to get a quick bite to eat tonight before you go home?”

“I don’t think so. I’m so tired I just want to go home and get some sleep.”

“All right.” Gently he touched her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Take care going across the lake tonight.”

“I will. The days are so long, I’ll be home before it gets dark.”

“Take care, anyway.” He leaned over and kissed her, then left.

As soon as he was out of her sight, his black brows pulled together in a frown. Last night’s ploy hadn’t worked all that well because of something he simply hadn’t considered, and he was impatient with himself. He’d been born into money and had made even more, so the option of buying a second-hand refrigerator hadn’t occurred to him. He had no idea what she’d paid for it, but he assumed that it was considerably less than a new one, even the cheapest model, would have cost. Though a little more financial pressure had been brought to bear on her, it hadn’t been as much as he’d planned.

Mercer was beginning to find the financial waters a little choppy these days, too. It wasn’t anything for him to worry about… yet. Soon he would find himself in a pinch with a growing need for ready cash. The next time he made a move, Robert would be ready for him. The net was slowly closing.

He estimated another two weeks, three at the most. He could make things move faster, but he was oddly reluctant to bring everything to a close just yet. If Mercer tried to make another sale, of course he would have to act, but until then, he intended to use the time to complete Evie’s seduction.

That was, if he could keep her mind off her dead husband. Robert’s jealous fury was banked, but glowing hotly under the restraint. It was ironic that he, of all people, should be jealous. It wasn’t an emotion that he’d ever felt before, and he’d been coolly contemptuous of those who allowed someone to become that important to them. But he had never wanted a woman so violently, nor found himself up against such a formidable rival. That, too, was a new experience for him. If a woman had been interested in another man, he had simply moved on, on the theory that battling for her affections was too much trouble and complicated what was, for him, a fairly simple issue.

But then he’d met Evangeline. Her name whispered through his mind, as musical and elegant as the wind sighing in the trees. Evangeline. A poetic name, associated with undying love.

He couldn’t accept that she was Matt Shaw’s forever, that he might never have her.

Damn it, what was this appeal that teenage boys had for her? He had wanted to punch Craig in the jaw for daring to touch her, but his own sense of fair play had restrained him. Craig looked to be as strong as a young ox, but Robert knew his own capabilities. He could easily have killed the boy without meaning to.

Because Matt had died so young, was Evie’s taste forever frozen at that age? The idea was distasteful. He was disgusted with himself for even thinking it. He had no basis for the ugly speculation; he knew very well that there was nothing sexual between Evie and Craig. It was his own jealousy that had spurred the thought.

He had to have her. Soon.

Chapter Eleven

Evie slept soundly for ten hours that night, from nine until seven the following morning. She woke feeling much better, though she was groggy from sleeping so hard. She stumbled through the house toward the kitchen, keeping her fingers crossed that nothing else had gone on the fritz during the night, especially the coffee-maker. Everything seemed to be in working order, though, so she put on a pot of coffee and headed back toward the bathroom while it was brewing.

Fifteen minutes later, semidressed and with hair and teeth brushed, she was contentedly curled in a chair on the deck, sipping her first cup of coffee. She closed her eyes as the morning sun bathed her with soothing heat. It was a perfect morning, clear and still and fragrant. The birds were singing madly, and the temperature was still comfortable, probably in the high seventies.

She heard tires singing on the road, the particular note that meant four-wheel drive, and a few seconds later Robert pulled into her driveway. Though she couldn’t see either the driveway or the road from the deck, and though she knew any number of people who had four-wheel-drive vehicles, she had no doubt of her visitor’s identity. Her blood had started moving faster, her skin tingled, and a subtle heat that had nothing to do with either the sun or the coffee had begun spreading through her body.

How many women had loved him? Instinct told her that she was far from the first Poor creatures. They, like her, had been unable to resist that gentle, ruthless charm. She knew just as certainly that he had never loved any of them in return.

Through the open patio door she heard the knock at the front “Robert?” she called. “I’m on the deck.”

His footsteps in the grass were silent as he walked around, but in fifteen seconds he was coming up the three shallow steps onto the deck. He stopped, his eyes kindling as he stared at her.

Surprised, she curled a little tighter in the chair. “What have I done now?”

His expression relaxed as he moved to take the chair beside her. “You mistake the matter. That was lust, not anger.”

“Ah.” She used the cup to hide her face as she took another sip. “That should tell you something.”

“Should it?”

“That I see anger from you more often than I do lust.” Her heart was pounding even harder. My God, she was flirting. She was stunned by the realization. She had never in her life engaged in suggestive banter with a man, especially not to discuss his lust for her. She didn’t think she had ever even flirted with Matt; somehow things had always seemed settled between them, and they hadn’t gone through that dizzying, intense stage of courtship before commitment. They had grown up committed to each other.

“Again you mistake the matter,” Robert said idly.

“In what way?”

“The lust is always there, Evangeline.”

The quiet, almost casual, statement left her breathless. This time she took refuge in good manners, unwinding her legs to stand up as she said, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“I’ll get it,” he said, stopping her with a hand on her shoulder. His touch lingered, his fingertips lightly caressing the curve of the joint “You look as contented as a cat. Just tell me where the cups are.”

“In the cabinet directly over the coffeemaker. I don’t have any cream, only skim milk—”

“It doesn’t matter. I drink it black, like you. While I’m in there, would you like a refill?”

Silently she handed him her cup, and he disappeared into the house.

As Robert got a cup from the cabinet, he noticed that his hand was shaking slightly. He was both amused and amazed at the force of his reaction to her, though he had gotten used to being at least semi-aroused whenever he was in her company. But when he had first seen her this morning… well, he had wanted to see her with her hair down, and now he had gotten his wish.

He just hadn’t expected the potency of his response, hadn’t expected that thick, tawny-gold, streaky mantle flowing halfway down her back, the sunlight glinting along the strands like precious metal. Only the ends curled, frothing in delight at having been released from the confines of her habitual braid. One lock hung over her shoulder and breast, the curl wrapping around her nipple as perfectly as if it had been created to do just that. It had taken only a glance for him to tell that she wasn’t wearing a bra under the pale peach camisole top with the tiny tucks down the front that she probably thought disguised her braless state.

He should have become accustomed by now to the luminosity of her skin. He hadn’t. Every time he saw her anew, he was struck by the way she seemed to glow. This morning the effect had been particularly acute. She had been curled in the chair like a cat, sleepy and slightly tousled, her shapely legs and delicate feet bare, the bright sunlight somehow lighting her from within.

He wanted to pick her up and carry her back into the dim coolness of her bedroom, strip her naked and sate himself on the golden pearl of her flesh. But he remembered, with an unpleasant jolt, that this was the house where Matt had grown up. He didn’t want to take her here, where the memories of the boy abounded.

“Robert?” Her tone was questioning at his long delay.

“I’m just reading your coffee cups,” he called back, and heard her chuckle in reply.

He chose the cup that said, “I’m forty-nine percent sweet. It’s the other fifty-one percent you have to worry about,” and poured coffee into it, then refilled her cup. He carried both of them out onto the deck and carefully gave hers to her, not wanting even a drop of the hot liquid to spill on her bare legs.

“That’s quite a collection of cups.”

“Isn’t it? Jason and Paige are the culprits. Every birthday, every Christmas, they give me a cup as a gag gift. It’s become tradition. They put so much time and effort into picking the cup that it’s gotten to where unwrapping it is the highlight of the occasion. They don’t let Becky or Paul see it beforehand, so it’s always a surprise to them, too.”

“Some of them are rather suggestive.”

She grinned. “Paige’s doing. She’s an expert at finding them.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That delicate, innocent child?”

“That precocious, inventive child. Don’t let the shyness fool you.”

“She didn’t seem shy to me. She started talking to me right away when I first met her.”

“Blame your own charm. She isn’t that open with most people. But considering the way Sherry’s baby took to you,” she said judiciously, “it seems that little girls have an affinity for you.”

“That’s all well and good,” he replied, watching her calmly over the rim of his cup, “but what about the grown-up ones?”

“I’ll bring you a big stick tomorrow so you can keep them beat off.” Very calmly he leaned over to place his cup on the deck, then took her cup from her hand and put it beside his. She eyed him warily. “What are you doing?”

“This.” With one swift, deft movement, he scooped her out of her chair, and settled down in his again with her on his lap. She sat stunned, stiffly erect, her eyes big with surprise. He retrieved her cup and placed it in her hands, then shifted her so she was off balance and had to relax against his chest.

“Robert,” she said in a weak protest.

“Evangeline.” His voice lingered over the long i.

She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She sat there wrapped by his strength, his warmth, his scent. She could feel the steady thumping of his heart. She had known that he was tall, but even now, with her sitting on his lap, her head wasn’t as high as his. She felt physically overwhelmed and remarkably safe. Not from him, but from the rest of the world.

His thighs were hard under her, and something else was, too.

“Finish your coffee,” he said, and unthinkingly she raised the cup to her lips.

They sat there in peaceful silence as the heat grew and the traffic on the river increased. When their cups were empty, he set them aside, then caught her face in his hand and turned it up for his slow, deep kiss.

Like a flower turning toward the sun, she shifted toward him, fitting herself more firmly against him. The taste of coffee was in his mouth and hers. His tongue gently explored, and she trembled, her arms lifting to encircle his neck. How long he drank from her mouth she didn’t know; time was measured only by the heavy pulse of her blood, throbbing through every inch of her body.

His hand brushed across her breast, pushing her hair aside, then returned to firmly cup the soft mound. Evie stiffened slightly, but he soothed her with a deep murmur, not really a word, only a calming sound. He had had his hands and his mouth on her breasts before, but he could sense that she was still uncertain about allowing the caress. He petted her, gently circling her nipples with one fingertip until they stood temptingly erect, stroking the lush curves with tender care. He wanted her to relax, but instead the tension in her changed, became more finely charged, and he knew that he was arousing her instead.

Deliberately he unbuttoned the first three buttons of the camisole and slid his hand inside. With a sharply indrawn breath, she turned her face into his neck, but she didn’t say the one word that would stop him. Her satiny flesh was cool to his touch, the small nipples puckered and tight. He played with them, rubbing them between his fingers, lightly pinching as he watched her with acute attention to learn exactly what she liked. Slowly her breasts grew warm from his touch, the paleness taking on a pinkish glow.

Evie held herself very still, barely breathing, her eyes closed as she tried to deal with the delicate, exquisite pleasure sweeping through her. She knew she was playing with fire, but she couldn’t seem to make herself stop. What if he carried her inside? She would have to call a halt then, because she was still having her period, and she was neither sophisticated nor experienced enough to either let him proceed or tell him, without embarrassment, why he couldn’t.

“Shall I stop?” he asked, the sound very low.

She swallowed. “I think you should.” But she didn’t lift her face, and that wasn’t the agreed signal. He shifted her, lifted her, and the shocking heat of his mouth closed over the distended nipple of her exposed breast. She cried out, her nipple prickling at the sensation, and fire shot straight through to her loins.

Then, incredibly, his mouth left her body and he was sitting her up on his lap. “We have to stop,” he was saying with gentle regret. “I don’t think you’re ready to give me the go-ahead, and I don’t want to push my self-control much further.”

Evie bent her head, struggling with a mixture of relief and chagrin as she fumbled with her buttons, restoring her clothing to order. He was right, of course. She didn’t want their intimacy to go any further than it already had, though she intended to be prepared if it did.

She managed to smile at him as she scrambled out of his lap and bent down to get the coffee cups. “Thank you,” she said, and carried the cups inside.

Robert rubbed his hand over his eyes. God, that had been closer than he’d let on, at least for him. Would she have let him make love to her, after all? Somehow he didn’t think so; he could still sense reluctance in her. In a few more minutes she would have said no, and the way he felt now, the strain might well have killed him. Even if she had said yes, he didn’t want to make love to her in this house, so it was just as well he’d had the sense to stop.

They spent the morning together without a repeat of the scene on the deck. He’d already had enough frustration for one day, he decided. When it was time for her to cross the lake to work, he kissed her goodbye and left.

The wind blowing in her face helped clear Evie’s mind as she sped across the water. What did he do for most of the day? she wondered. He’d said that he was on vacation, but a person, especially a man like Robert, could take only so much relaxation.

To her relief, Burt had made real progress on the marina jobs and thought he would be able to get started on her truck that afternoon. The prospect of having a vehicle to drive home the next day made her cheerful. Perhaps the run of bad luck was over.

She called the local fast-food restaurants to ask about a part-time job in the mornings, but with school out for the summer, none of them needed any help, all of the part-time jobs being filled by teenagers. Call again after school starts, she was told.

“Well, that was a dead end,” she muttered to herself as she hung up from the last call. It looked as if the pendulum of luck hadn’t swung back her way, after all.

On the other hand, she had the knack of existing on practically nothing when she had to. Over the next few days Evie cut operating expenses where she could and her personal expenses to the bone. She ate oatmeal or cold cereal for breakfast, and allowed herself one sandwich for lunch and one for supper. There were no snacks, no soft drinks, nothing extra. She turned off the air-conditioning at home, making do with the ceiling fans and drinking a lot of ice water. She was pragmatic enough that she didn’t feel particularly deprived by these cost-cutting measures. It was simply something that had to be done, so she did it and didn’t think much about it one way or the other.

For one thing, Robert occupied a great deal of her thoughts. If he didn’t drop by the house in the morning, he came by the marina in the afternoon. He often kissed her, whenever they were alone, but he didn’t pressure her for sex. The more he refrained, the more confused she became about whether she wanted to make love with him or not. She had never bemoaned her lack of practical experience before, but now she did; she needed every bit of help she could muster in handling her feelings for him. With every passing day she wanted him more physically, but caution kept warning her away from letting him become more important to her than he already was. She loved him, but somehow, if she didn’t make love with him, some small part of her heart remained hers. If he claimed her body, he would claim all of her, and she would have no reserve to fall back on when the end came.

Still, she was acutely aware of how gradually and skillfully he was undermining her resolve. Every day she became more accustomed to his kisses, to the touch of those lean hands, until he had only to look at her and her breasts would tighten in anticipation. Frightened of the consequences if her willpower faltered, she began taking the birth-control pills on schedule, and as she did so, she wondered if she wasn’t actually weakening her own position, for knowing that she was protected might make her less inclined to say no. She was well and truly caught on the horns of that particular dilemma, afraid not to take the pills and afraid of what would happen if she did. In the end, the deciding factor had been that she would rather gamble with her own well-being than that of a helpless baby.

When the next weekend came, Robert once again asked her to swap shifts with Craig so they could have an evening out. Remembering with pleasure the first time she’d had dinner with him, and the dancing afterward, she quickly agreed.

When he picked her up the next night, a slow fire lit the green of his eyes as he looked her up and down. Evie felt a very female gratification at his response. She knew she was looking particularly good, her hair and makeup just as she had wanted, and her dress was very flattering. It was the only cocktail dress she owned, purchased three years before, when the chamber of commerce had organized a party for the local businessmen and women to meet some manufacturing representatives who were thinking about locating in Guntersville.

The deal had fallen through, but the cocktail dress was still smashing. It was teal green, a shade that did wonders for her complexion. There was a full, flirty skirt that swirled just above her knees, a sweetheart bodice supported by thin straps, and it was very low-cut in the back. She had pinned up her hair in a loose twist, with several tendrils left around her ears. Simple gold hoop earrings and her wedding band were the only jewelry she wore, but she had never liked a lot of jewelry weighing her down, so she was satisfied.

Robert was wearing an impeccable black suit with a snowy white silk shirt, but with the heat so oppressive, she wondered how he could stand it. Not that he looked hot; on the contrary, he was as cool and imperturbable as ever, except for the expression hi his eyes.

“You’re lovely,” he said, touching her cheek and watching her bloom at the compliment.

“Thank you.” She accepted his verbal appreciation with serene dignity as he drew her outside and locked the door behind them.

He helped her into the Jeep, and as he got in on the other side he said, “I think you’ll like the club we’re going go. It’s quiet, has good food and a wonderful patio for dancing.”

“Is it in Huntsville?”

“No, it’s here. It’s a private club.”

She didn’t ask how, if it were private, he had managed to get reservations for them. Robert didn’t make a show of being wealthy and influential, but he obviously was, given the quality of his clothing, the things he’d bought. Any local bigwig worth his salt would be more than willing to extend an invitation for Robert to join his club.

There was no place in Guntersville that couldn’t be gotten to rather quickly. Robert turned the Jeep off of the highway onto a small private road that wound toward the river and soon was parking in a paved lot. The club was a sprawling one-story cedar-and-rock affair, with manicured grounds and a soothing atmosphere. She had seen it before only from the water which glistened just beyond the club. It was only seven-thirty, still daylight, but already the parking lot was crowded.

Robert’s hand was firm and very warm on Evie’s bare back as he ushered her inside, where they were met by a smiling, very correct maitre d’. They were seated in a small horseshoe booth, upholstered in buttery soft leather.

They ordered their meals, and Robert requested champagne. Evie didn’t know anything about wines, period, but his choice brought a spark to the waiter’s eyes.

The only time she had tasted champagne had been at her wedding, and that had been an inexpensive brand. The pale gold wine that Robert poured into her glass had nothing in common with that long-ago liquid except its wetness. The taste was dry and delicious, the bubbles dancing in her mouth and exploding with flavor. She was careful to only sip it, not knowing what effect it would have on her.

As before, the evening was wonderful, so wonderful that it was half-over before Evie realized that Robert was herding her toward some swiftly nearing conclusion as implacably as a stallion herded the mare he had chosen to breed, keeping after her, blocking all retreat, until she was cornered. Robert was unfailingly gentle and courteous, but nevertheless relentless. She could see it in those pale eyes, in which a fire smoldered. He intended to have her before the evening was finished.

It was evident in the way he touched her almost constantly, small touches that looked casual but were not. They were seductive touches, light caresses that both gentled her and accustomed her to his hand on her body, while at the same time patiently beginning the process of arousing her.

When they danced, his fingertips moved over her bare back, leaving a trail of heat behind and making her shiver in response. His body moved against hers in rhythm with the music, with her heartbeat, until it seemed as if the music flowed through her. And when they returned to their booth, he was close beside her. Several times she shifted uncomfortably, putting more distance between them, but he was inexorable; he would move closer, so that she could feel the heat of his body, smell the faint, spicy scent of his cologne and the muskiness of his skin. He would lightly stroke her arm, or trace the line of her jaw with one long finger, or rub his thumb over the curve of her collarbone. His leg would slide along hers, and then she would feel the hard curve of his arm behind her back, the firm clasp of his hand at her waist. With every move he made her more aware of him and at the same time broadcast his possession of her to any male in the vicinity who might be thinking of poaching.

Evie was both alarmed and excited, and therefore couldn’t get her thoughts in order. She managed to retain an outward calm, but inside she was quietly panicking. Robert had always presented the image of an urbane, eminently civilized man, but from the beginning she had seen beneath the cosmopolitan surface to a far more primitive man, a man of swift and ruthless passion. Now she saw that she had underestimated that volatile streak. He meant to take her to bed with him that very night, and she didn’t know if she could stop him.

She didn’t even know if she wanted to stop him. Was it the champagne, or the fever of desire he had been expertly feeding, not just tonight, but from the moment he’d first kissed her? Her usually clear thought processes kept getting tangled by the slowly increasing heat and hunger of her own body. She tried to think why she should say no, why he was so dangerous for her, but all she could bring to mind was his mouth on her breasts, the way it felt when he touched her.

Physically… oh God, physically he had destroyed all the years of control, of peaceful solitude. She had wanted no man since Matt—until Robert—and she had never wanted Matt this much. Matt had died on the verge of manhood and was forever frozen in her memory as a laughing, wonderful boy. Robert was a man, in the purest sense of the word. He knew the power of the flesh. He knew that, in the taking of her body, he would also be forging a claim, a possession as old as time. His experience far exceeded hers, and he wanted all of her. She would never be able to hold herself, her inner self, inviolate against his taking. A small voice in her cried out in abject fear, and she struggled toward control.

But he seemed to sense whenever that clear inner voice would gather itself, whenever she would panic as she realized anew what he was doing, and with a warm, lingering touch and the brush of his hard body against her soft curves, he would fan the flames of physical desire to overcome the voice of sanity. He was too good at seduction; even though she recognized it, she couldn’t stop it. She had the bitter realization that he could have had her any time he’d wanted, that her will was proving no match for his expertise. He had held back only for some reason of his own, and now he had decided that he wasn’t waiting any longer.

He asked her to dance again, and helplessly she went into his arms. She felt too warm, her skin too sensitive. She could feel the fabric of her dress sliding over her body, rasping her nipples, caressing her belly and thighs. Whenever he touched her, her entire body seemed to clench. They moved across the dance floor on the patio, and he held her close while his powerful legs slid against hers, sometimes thrusting his thigh between hers, and she began to throb with a hollow ache between her legs. In the distance, heat flashes lit the sky over the mountains with flickers of purple and gold. There was a sullen rumble of thunder, and the air was humid and still, waiting.

She felt weak, physically weak. She hadn’t known that desire robbed the muscles of power. She melted against him, flowed against him, until she felt as if only his arm around her was holding her up.

He brushed his hard mouth over the fragile skin at her temple, his warm breath stirring her hair, touching her ear. “Shall we go home?”

A last, small vestige of caution cried, “No!” but she was so caught in his sensual web that she could only nod her head, and the cry remained unvoiced. She leaned against him as he walked her out to the Jeep.

Not even on the way home did he ease the relentless pressure. After he had shifted gears, he put his right hand on her thigh, sliding it up under her skirt, and the heat of his palm on her naked flesh almost made her moan aloud. She didn’t even realize where he was taking her until he parked in front of his house, rather than hers.

“This isn’t—” she blurted.

“No,” he said quietly. “It isn’t. Come inside, Evie.”

She could say no. Even now, she could say no. She could insist that he take her home. But even if she did, she suspected, the outcome would be the same. All she would be changing was the location.

He held out his hand. The intent behind it was ruthless. She could feel the heavy arousal and hunger that tightened his lean, powerful frame. He was going to take her.

She put her hand in his.

Even though she sensed his savage satisfaction at her tacit surrender, he remained gentle. If he had not, perhaps her common sense would have won after all. But he was too experienced to make that mistake, and she found herself standing in his moonlit bedroom with his big bed looming behind her. She looked out the French doors to the lake, a black mirror reflecting the cool, pale moon. Another low rumble of thunder reached her ears, and she knew that the heat flashes were continuing, bright bursts of light that teased with their promise of rain but never delivered.

Robert put his hands on her waist and turned her to him. Her heart thudded painfully against her ribs as he bent his head and his mouth claimed hers. His kisses were slow, so slow, and devastatingly thorough. His tongue probed, and his mouth drank deeply from hers as his hands leisurely moved over her body, unzipping, loosening, removing. The bodice of her dress fell to her waist, and beyond. He paused a moment to caress her smooth back, the inward curve of her waist; then he gently removed the dress and tossed it aside.

She stood before him wearing only high heels and panties. He caught her to him for more kisses, his tongue stroking deeply within. His hands moved over her breasts, molding them under his lean fingers. Desperately Evie clung to his broad, muscled shoulders, trying to steady her spinning senses. His silk shirt slid across her tightly budded nipples, making her whimper. He murmured soothingly as he unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of it, dropping it, too, to the floor. Then her naked breasts were pressed full against his bare chest, nestled into the curly black hair, and she heard herself make a low, hungry sound.

“Easy, darling,” he whispered. He kicked out of his shoes and unfastened his pants, letting them drop. His thick sex extended the front of his short, snug boxers. She arched against him, blindly thrusting her pelvis forward to nestle that rigid length. His breath hissed inward, and his control cracked. Fiercely he crushed her to him, his arms tightening until pain made her cry out, the sound stifled against his shoulder.

He lowered her to the bed, the sheets cool against her heated flesh. In a swift movement he divested himself of his shorts. Evie’s eyes flared as she saw him totally naked, aroused, the muscles in his body taut with desire and the strain of control. His leanness was dangerously deceptive, for it was all steely muscle, the graceful strength of a panther rather than the bulk of a lion. He lowered himself beside her, one arm cradling her head, while his other hand efficiently removed her shoes and panties. Her total nudity was suddenly startling; she made a brief movement to cover herself, a movement that he halted by catching her wrists and pinning them on each side of her head. Then, very deliberately, he mounted her.

Evie couldn’t catch her breath. He was heavier, much heavier, than she had imagined. The sensations were alarming, jarring through her consciousness, coming too swiftly on waves of pleasure that both panicked and beguiled. She was violently aware of his muscled thighs pushing between hers, holding them apart, of his furry, ridged abdomen rubbing against her much softer belly, of the hard press of his chest on her breasts. Between her legs, on her bare loins, she could feel the insistent push of his naked sex against her. Her own sex felt swollen and hot, throbbing in rhythm to her own heartbeat.

He loomed over her in the darkness, much bigger, much stronger. The moonlight was sufficient for her to see the pale gutter of his eyes, the hard planes of his face. His expression was stamped with savage male triumph.

Then he released her wrists and cupped her jaw in one hard, hot hand, turning her face up to him. He held her for the deep thrust of his tongue, the blatant domination of his mouth. Helplessly she responded, caught in the heated madness.

He suckled her breasts, lingering over them and making her writhe with pleasure, and all the while she could feel that hard length impatiently nudging her softest flesh.

The moment came too soon, and not fast enough. He braced himself over her on one arm and reached between their bodies with the other. She felt his lean fingers on her sex, gently parting the folds, finding and stroking her soft, wet entrance. Her hips strained instinctively upward. Her entire body was throbbing. “Robert,” she whispered. The single word was taut with strain.

He guided his rigid shaft to her, leaning over and into her as he tightened his buttocks and increased the pressure against the tender opening, forcing it to widen and admit him.

Evie stiffened, her breath quickening. The pressure swiftly became burning pain, real pain. He rocked against her, forcing himself fractionally deeper with every controlled thrust. Her fists knotted the sheet beneath her. She turned her head away, closing her eyes against the hot tears that seeped out beneath her lashes.

He froze as realization hit him.

He turned her head so that she faced him. Her eyes flew open, brilliant with tears in the silver moonlight, and then she couldn’t look away. His chest was heaving with the force of his breathing, the sound loud in the quiet, still bedroom. There was nothing of the urbane sophisticate in the man who leaned over her, his face hard with desire. For a split second she saw straight into his soul, into the frighteningly intense, primitive core of him. He held her, forced her to look at him, and with a guttural, explosive sound of control breaking, thrust hard into the depths of her silky body, forcing his way past the barrier of her virginity. She cried out, her body arching under the deep lash of pain. Beyond the pain was the stunning shock of invasion, worse than she had imagined, her delicate inner tissues shivering as they tried to adjust to and accommodate the hard bulk of the intruder.

A rough, deep growl sounded in his throat as he gripped her hips, pulling her more tightly into his possession.

He rode her hard, thrusting heavily, his hips hammering and recoiling as he imprinted his physical brand on her flesh. He had never before been less than gentle with a woman, but with Evie he was ferocious in his need. He couldn’t be gentle, not with his head and heart reeling, his entire body exploding with savage pleasure. She was hot and tight, silky, wet… and his. No one else’s. Ever. His.

He shuddered, gasping, convulsing, and she felt the hot wash of his seed deep inside her. Then he slowly collapsed, shaking in every muscle, blindly groping for support. His heavy weight settled over her, pressing her into the mattress.

Dazed, Evie lay beneath him. She felt shattered, unable to form a coherent thought.

And then she found that it wasn’t over.

Chapter Twelve

Slowly Robert surfaced from the depths of pure physical sensation, his mind sluggishly beginning to function once more. The power of what he had experienced left him shaken, with a sense of being outside himself, not quite connected. He was intensely aware of his own body in a way he never had been before. He could feel the warmth of his blood pumping through his veins with the heavy, slowly calming beats of his heart. He could feel the harsh bellowing of his lungs decreasing to a more normal pace, feel the intense sexual satisfaction relaxing his muscles, feel the hot, delicious clasp of Evie’s body as he remained firmly inside her, satisfied but not yet sated. She was naked beneath him, just the way he had wanted.

Then, with an abrupt shift, the sluggishness was gone from his brain and reality settled in with ruthless clarity. Robert tensed, appalled at himself. He had lost control, something that had never happened before. Gentleness on his part had never been more needed, and instead he had taken her like a marauder, intent only on his own pleasure, on the conquest and possession of her silky flesh.

She lay motionless beneath him, holding herself in a sort of desperate stillness, as if to avoid attracting his attention again. His heart squeezed painfully. Robert shoved aside the matter of her virginity—he would know the answer to that puzzle later—and concentrated instead on the task of reassuring her. His mind was racing. If he let her escape him now, he would have a hell of a time getting anywhere near her again, and he couldn’t blame her for being wary. Wary, hell. She would probably be downright scared, and with good reason.

He had shown her the relentless drive of passion but none of the pleasure. She had known nothing but pain, and the scale was dangerously tilted; unless he could balance the pain with pleasure, he was afraid he would lose her. It was the first time Robert had felt that sort of fear, but a sensation of panic seized him and mixed with his determination. A part of his brain remained blindingly clear. He knew exactly how to bring a woman to climax in a variety of ways: fast or slow, using his mouth or hands or body. He could gently take her to ecstasy with his mouth, and that way would perhaps be the kindest, but his instinct rejected it. He had to do it fast, before she recovered enough to begin fighting—God, he couldn’t bear that—and he had to do it the same way that had caused her the pain to begin with. He wanted her to find pleasure in his body rather than dread the thrust that brought their flesh together.

He was still hard, and once more he began moving, slowly, within her. She tensed, and her hands flattened against his chest as if she would try to shove him off. “No,” he said harshly, forestalling her resistance. “I won’t stop. I know I’m hurting you now, but before I’m finished I’m going to make you like having me inside you.”

She stared up at him, her eyes darkened with distress. But she didn’t say anything, and he gathered her close, adjusting their positions so she would have the maximum sensation. He could feel her thighs quivering alongside his hips.

He took a deep breath and gentled his voice, wanting to reassure her. “I can make it good for you,” he promised, brushing her soft mouth with kisses and feeling it tremble beneath his. “Will you trust me, Evangeline? Will you?”

Still she didn’t say anything, hadn’t spoken a word since whispering his name at the beginning. Robert hesitated for half a heartbeat, then lifted her hands and put them around his neck. After a moment her fingers shifted slightly to press against him, and relief shuddered through him at that small gesture of permission.

Evie closed her eyes again, gathering herself to once more endure this painful use of her body. At the moment, that was the limit of her capability; she couldn’t act, couldn’t think, could only endure. She wanted to curl herself into a protective ball and weep in shock and pain and disappointment, but she couldn’t do that, either. She was helpless, her body penetrated; she was dependent on his mercy, and he seemed to have none.

At first there was only more pain. But then, abruptly, the twisting thrust of his hips made her arch off the bed with something that wasn’t pain, but was just as sharp. There was no warning, no gradual lessening of pain and buildup of pleasure, only that jolt of sensation that made her cry out. He did it again, and with a strangled moan she discovered that her body was even less under her control than she had thought

She had been cold, but now she was suffused with heat, great waves of it, rolling up from her toes until she felt as if her entire body glowed. It concentrated between her legs, increasing with each inward thrust. Her hands slid from his neck to his shoulders, clinging now, her nails biting into the hard layer of muscle. He was gripping her buttocks, lifting her up to meet him, moving her, rocking her subtly back and forth, and each tiny movement set off new explosions of pleasure within her. She had the sensation of being relentlessly driven up an internal mountain toward some point she couldn’t see, but now she was straining to reach it. He pushed her further with each hard recoil of his hips until she was panting and desperate, sobbing as she arched tightly into him. And then he forced her over the edge, and Evie screamed as her senses shattered.

She shuddered and bucked, trying to meld into his flesh, as devastated by the paroxysms of pleasure as she had been by the pain that went before. Robert held himself still and deep, gritting his teeth, but the frantic milking of her internal muscles was more than he could stand, and with a groan he gave himself over, pulsing with release. Somehow he forced himself not to thrust, to let her take her pleasure and not intrude with his, and that only intensified the sensation. From a distance he heard himself groan again as he dissolved, collapsing heavily in her arms.

If Evie had been dazed before, she was even more so now. She lay limply beneath him, drifting in and out of a haze. The demands he’d made on her body, the roller-coaster succession of pain and shock and ecstasy, had left her with neither mind nor body functioning. Perhaps she dozed; she knew she dreamed, flickering images that faded too swiftly to grasp as she surfaced into foggy consciousness once more. She felt him separate himself from her, knew he was trying to be careful, but couldn’t prevent a moan at the pain of his withdrawal. She didn’t open her eyes as he paused, then murmured softly, a soothing sound that also held a note of apology, and completed the motion. She felt instantly bereft, cold in the air-conditioned darkness. She would have curled protectively on her side, but her limbs were too heavy. The next moment the dark fog closed about her again.

A light snapped on, blindingly bright against her eyelids. She flinched away from it, but he stilled her with a touch. The mattress shifted as he sat down beside her and firmly parted her thighs. Evie made a faint sound of protest and tried to struggle upward, but again the effort was too much.

“Shh,” he whispered, a mere rustle of reassurance. “Let me make you more comfortable, sweetheart. You’ll sleep better.”

A cool wet cloth touched her between her legs. Deftly, tenderly, he cleaned away the evidence of their lovemaking, then dried her with a soft towel. Evie gave a soft sigh of pleasure. He returned the washcloth and towel to the bathroom, and when he came back to turn out the lamp and slide into bed beside her, she was asleep. She didn’t rouse even when he turned her into his arms, cradling her protectively against him.

Evie woke in the still, dark silence before dawn. The moon had long since set, and even the stars seemed to have given up their twinkling efforts. The darkness that pressed against the patio doors was more complete than at any other time of night, in the last moments before being dispelled by the first graying that heralded the approach of the sun. She was still sleepy, exhausted by the tumultuous night in Robert’s arms. It was as if her body was no longer hers, the way he called forth and controlled her responses. He had seduced her past caring about fear, about pain, so that her body arched eagerly into his possessive thrusts.

Robert lay beside her, his breathing slow and deep. One arm was curled under her head, the other lay heavily across her waist His heat enveloped her, welcome in the cool night. The strangeness of his presence beside her made her breath catch.

She didn’t want to think about the night that had just passed, or the things that had happened between them. She was too tired, too off balance, to handle the riot of impressions and thoughts that whirled in her brain, but she was also too tired to fend them off. She gave up the effort and instead tried to make sense of what she was feeling.

She had never thought that giving herself to the man she loved would prove so traumatic, but it had. The physical pain, oddly, was the least of it, the most understandable. She had known that, under his urbane manner, Robert had the soul of a conqueror. She had also known that he had been sexually frustrated from the time they’d met. It would have made her very uneasy if, under those circumstances, his control hadn’t wavered. She hadn’t expected such a complete collapse, but then, to be perfectly fair, he hadn’t expected everything that had happened, either.

She should have told him that she was a virgin, she knew, but the telling would have required an explanation that she simply hadn’t been able to give. Talking about Matt, reliving those brief hours of their marriage, was too painful. Her throat tightened with dread, knowing that Robert would demand that explanation soon. She had hoped—foolishly—that he wouldn’t be able to tell, that her first time would provide no more than a momentary discomfort that she could easily disguise or ignore. She felt like weeping and laughing at the same time. Had she told him, that might well have been the extent of her pain. As it was, she had paid dearly for keeping her secret, only to have it known, anyway.

The two most difficult things for her to deal with, however, were mingled grief and terror. She had known that sleeping with Robert would destroy her defenses, but she hadn’t known how panicked she would feel, or that giving herself to him would call up such poignant memories of Matt. She couldn’t distance herself from the grief; loving Matt, and losing him the way she had, had shaped her life and her soul. He had, in effect, made her into the woman she was now.

For twelve years she had been faithful to him, and his memory had wrapped around her like an invisible shield, protecting her. But now she had given herself irrevocably to another man, in both heart and body, and there was no going back. She loved Robert with an intensity that swelled in her chest and made her breath catch. For better or worse, he filled her life now. She would have to let Matt go, surrender his memory so that it became only a small, indelible part of her, rather than a bulwark between her and the world. It was like losing him twice.

“Goodbye, Matt,” she whispered in her mind to the image of the laughing, dark-haired boy she carried there. “I loved you… but I’m his now, and I love him, too, so much.” The image stilled, then nodded gravely, and she saw a smile, a blessing, move across the young face as it faded away.

She couldn’t bear it. With a low, keening sound of grief she surged out of bed, awakening Robert. He shot out a hand to catch her, but she evaded it and stood in the middle of the floor, looking wildly around the dark bedroom, her fist pressed to her mouth to stop the sobs that pressed for release.

“What’s wrong?” he asked softly, every muscle in his body tense and alert. “Come back to bed, sweetheart.”

“I—I have to go home.” She didn’t want to turn on a light, feeling unable to bear his too-discerning gaze, not now, with her emotions stripped bare. But she needed to find her clothes, get dressed… There was a dark heap on the carpet, and she snatched it up, touch telling her that it was her dress. Oh God, her muscles protested every move she made, his lovemaking during the night echoing now in her flesh. A deep internal ache marked where he had been.

“Why?” His voice remained soft, compelling. “It’s early yet. We have time.”

Time for what? she wanted to ask, but she knew, anyway. If she got back into that bed, he would make love to her again. And again. Shaking with grief, caught in the transition between the old love and the new, she thought she would break into pieces if he touched her. She was irrevocably passing from one phase of her life into another, traumatic enough under any circumstances, but she had the sensation of leaving a secure fortress and plunging headlong into unknown danger. She needed to be alone to deal with what she was feeling, to get herself back.

“I have to go,” she repeated in a ghostly voice, tight with suppressed tears.

He got out of bed, his naked body pale in the shadowy darkness. “All right,” he said gently. “I’ll take you home.” She watched in bewilderment as he stripped the top sheet from the bed. His next movement was a blur, so swift that she couldn’t tell what he was doing until it was too late. With two quick steps he was beside her. He swathed the sheet tightly around her, then lifted her in his arms. “Later,” he added as he opened the patio doors and stepped outside with her.

The early morning was silent, as if all God’s creatures were holding their breath, waiting for first light. Not even a cricket chirped. The water lapped at the bank with only a slight rustling sound, like silk petticoats. Robert sat down in one of the deck chairs and held her cradled on his lap, the sheet protecting her from the cool, damp air.

Evie tried to hold herself tight, all emotion contained. She managed for a few minutes. Robert simply held her, not saying anything, looking out over the dark water as if he, too, were waiting for the dawn. It was his silence that defeated her; if he had talked, she could have concentrated on her replies. Faced with nothing but her own thoughts, she lost the battle.

She turned her face into his neck as hot tears ran down her cheeks and her body shook with sobs.

He didn’t try to hush her, didn’t try to talk to her, simply held her more closely to him and gave her the comfort of his body. It was, despite her chaotic emotions, a considerable comfort. The bonds of the flesh that he had forged during the night were fresh and strong, her senses so attuned to him that it was as if his breath were hers, her jerky inhalations gradually slowing and taking on the steady rhythm of his.

When she had calmed, he used a comer of the sheet to dry her face. He didn’t bother to wipe her tears from his neck.

Exhausted, empty of emotion, her eyes burning and grainy feeling, she stared out at the lake. In a tree close by, a bird gave a tentative chirp, and as if that were a signal, in the next moment hundreds of birds began singing madly, delirious with joy at the new day. In the time while she had wept, the morning had grown perceptibly lighter, the darkness fading to a dim gray that gave new mystery to details that had been hidden before. That dark hump out in the water—was that a stump, a rock or a magical sea creature that would vanish with the light?

Robert was very warm, the heat of his powerful, naked body seeping through the sheet in animal comfort. She felt the steely columns of his thighs beneath her, the solid support of his chest, the secure grasp of his arms. She rested her head against that wide, smoothly muscled shoulder and felt as if she had come home.

“I love you,” she said quietly.

Foolish of her to admit it; how many other women had told him the same thing, especially after a night in his arms? It must be nothing new to him. But what would she gain by holding it back? It would allow a pretense, when he left, that he had been nothing more than a summer affair, but she couldn’t fool herself with a sop to her pride. Probably she couldn’t even fool him, though he would be gentleman enough to allow her the pretense.

All the same, she was glad of his self-possession. He didn’t parrot the words back to her; she would have known he was lying, and she would have hated that. Nor did he act uncomfortable or nervous. He merely gave her a searching look and asked in a level tone, “Then why the tears?”

Evie sighed and returned to staring at the water. He was due some explanation, would probably insist on one, but even though she loved him, she simply couldn’t strip her soul bare and blurt out everything. She had a deeply private core, and even if she remained Robert’s lover for years, there would be some things she wouldn’t be able to tell him, memories that brought up too much pain.

“Evie.” It wasn’t a prompt but a gentle, implacable demand.

Sadness haunted her eyes and trembled around her mouth. She was very familiar with it, had walked with it for twelve years, gone to bed with it at night, awakened with it on countless mornings. Sadness and a deep loneliness that neither friends nor family had been able to dispel had been her constant, invisible companions. But Robert wanted an answer. A man who had held a woman through such a bout of bitter weeping should at least know the reason for her tears.

“I realized,” she finally said in a low, shaking voice, “that Matt is truly gone now.”

Cradled against him as she was, she felt the way his muscled body tightened. His words, however, were still controlled. “He’s been gone for a long time.”

“Yes, he has.” Only she knew exactly how long those twelve years had been. “But until last night, I was still his wife.”

“No,” he said flatly. “You weren’t.” He put one finger under her chin and tilted it up, forcing her to look at him. It was light enough now for her to see those pale eyes glittering. “You were never his wife. You never slept with him. I hope you aren’t going to try to pretend you weren’t a virgin, because I’m not a fool, and the stain on the sheet isn’t because you’re having your period.”

Evie flinched. “No,” she whispered. God, it was eerie how he had gone straight to the secret she had kept for so long.

“You married him,” he continued relentlessly. “How is it that I’m the only man who’s ever had you?”

Sadness still darkened her eyes, but she said, “I had a June wedding,” and a wealth of grief and irony lay in those brief words.

He didn’t understand, but he lifted his dark brows, inviting her to continue.

“It’s impossible to book a church for a wedding in June unless you do it about a year in advance,” she explained. “Matt and I picked the day when we were still juniors in high school. But there’s no way to do any personal planning that far ahead of time.” Evie turned her head away from him once more, toward her private solace, the water. “It was a beautiful wedding. The weather was perfect, the decorations were perfect, the cake was perfect. Everything went off without a hitch. And my period started that morning.”

Robert was silent, still waiting. Evie swallowed, aching inside as she looked back at the innocent girl she had been. “I was so embarrassed that night, when I had to tell Matt that we couldn’t make love. We were both miserable.”

“Why didn’t you—” he began, but then stopped as he realized that two teenagers wouldn’t have the ease and experience of two adults.

“Exactly,” Evie said, as if he had put his thoughts into words. “We had never made love, obviously. Matt didn’t have any more experience than I did. What experience we had, we’d gotten together, but we’d both wanted to wait until after we were married. So there we were, two eighteen-year-olds on our wedding night, and all we could do was neck and hold hands. Matt was so miserable that we didn’t even do much of that.

“But he was basically such a cheerful person that nothing depressed him for long. He was making jokes about it the next morning, making me laugh, but we both agreed that it was something we’d never tell our kids when we got old.” Her voice wavered and faded until it was almost soundless. “He died that day.”

Gently Robert pushed a strand of hair away from her face. So she had never made love with her young husband, but for over a decade had kept herself untouched for him. With an acuteness of insight that often made people uncomfortable, he saw exactly how it had been. Traumatized by Matt’s death, she had doubly mourned the fact that they had never been able to make love and had sealed herself off from other men. If her first time couldn’t be with Matt, it would be with no one. She had existed ever since as an animated Sleeping Beauty whose body had kept on functioning while her emotions had been suspended.

Robert felt a deep, savage satisfaction. Despite that enormous barrier, he had succeeded where others hadn’t even been able to begin. Her first time had been his. She was his.

He had always despised promiscuity but hadn’t prized virginity. It had seemed to him the height of hypocrisy to demand something from a woman that he himself lacked. All of his sophisticated affairs, however, had nothing in common with the powerful, primitive sense of jealous possessiveness that had swept over him the moment he had realized that he was the only man ever to make love to Evie.

Her association with Landon Mercer, whatever it was, was certainly not romantic in any sense. Sitting there in the early dawn, with Evie cradled on his lap, Robert made a swift decision. He wouldn’t stop the investigation, wouldn’t warn her in any way, because the espionage had to be halted before it did irreparable harm to both the space station and national security. But when the net was tightened and all the traitorous little fish caught, he would step in and use his influence to shield Evie from prosecution. She wouldn’t escape punishment, but the punishment would be his, and his alone, to mete out. The simple truth was that he couldn’t bear for her to go to prison. He was astonished at himself, but there it was.

He didn’t know why she was involved in something so vile. He was a very good judge of people, and he would have sworn that honor was a cornerstone of her character. Therefore, she had to be doing it for what she considered a good reason, though he couldn’t imagine what that could be. It was possible she didn’t realize exactly what was going on; that explanation fit better than any other, and made him all the more determined to protect her. As he had told her once, he was good at taking care of his own, and last night Evie had become his in the most basic of ways.

He was fiercely glad that nature’s rhythm had interfered with her wedding night all those years ago. Poor Matt. A lot of his jealousy for the boy faded away, and a rather poignant pity took its place. Matt Shaw had died without ever tasting the perfection of his young wife’s body.

Robert remembered the moment the night before when he had removed her last garment and seen her totally naked, nothing left to his imagination any longer. To his numb surprise, his imagination had fallen short. He had seen her breasts before, but each time he had marveled at how firm and round they were, delightfully upright, the nipples small and a delectable shade of dark pink. Her body curved in to a lithe waist, then flared again to very womanly hips. Her skin, in the silver moonlight, had glowed like alabaster. Instead of being model thin, like the women he had been accustomed to, her curves had been lush and sensual. He hadn’t been able to wait but had mounted her immediately.

A gentleman would have been far more considerate of her than he had been, but he had always been wryly aware that, despite what all his acquaintances thought, he was definitely not a gentleman. He was controlled and intelligent and not a cruel man, but that wasn’t the same thing as being gentlemanly. Where Evie was concerned, though, his control went right out the window. His mouth took on a grim line as he remembered the wild rush of passion, the primitive instinct to make her his, that had blotted out all reason. Not only had he hurt her, he hadn’t used a condom. He, who had never before neglected to make certain some form of protection was used, hadn’t even given a thought to birth control.

She might be pregnant. He allowed the possibility to seep into his mind just as the golden light began to seep over the ridge of mountains. To his surprise, he didn’t feel any panic or disgust at his stupidity. Rather, he felt pleased—and intrigued.

He put his hand inside the sheet, resting it on her cool, flat belly. “We may be parents. I didn’t wear a condom.”

“It’s all right.” She gave him a composed look. The tears and grief were now well under control. “I went to my doctor in Huntsville and got a prescription for birth-control pills.”

He felt a not altogether pleasant jolt. He should have been relieved, but instead he was strangely disappointed. Common sense prevailed however. “When?”

“Not long after meeting you,” she said wryly.

Robert almost snorted at the amount of work he’d had his people doing, trying to find out what she had been doing, whom she had seen, that day in Huntsville. He would pull them off that particular job now, but he would be damned if he’d tell them what she had been doing.

He lifted his eyebrows at her, a sardonic look on his face. “I distinctly remember you saying that you didn’t intend to sleep with me.”

“I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean I’d leave something that important to chance, because you were determined, and I wasn’t entirely sure of my willpower.”

“Your willpower would have been fine,” he said, “if you hadn’t wanted me, too.”

“I know,” she admitted softly.

Dawn was well and truly upon them now, golden light spilling across the water. The roar of outboard motors broke the serene hush of the morning, and soon the river would be crowded with fishermen and pleasure boaters. Though Evie’s position on his lap would keep anyone from seeing he was naked, Robert thought it best not to chance shocking the locals. After all, she ran a business here, and she might be recognized. He stood up easily, still cradling her securely in his arms, and carried her back through the open patio doors.

He had never been more content than he was at this moment. Evie probably didn’t know what was really going on with Mercer and was involved only peripherally; he would be able to protect her without much problem. He had taken her to bed, and now he knew what had lain beneath her mysterious sadness. He doubted that Evie would ever completely stop thinking about Matt, but that was okay now, because Matt Shaw’s ghost had been banished and she had emerged from her emotional deep freeze. She had said that she loved him, and he knew instinctively that she hadn’t been mouthing the words merely to rationalize their lovemaking. If she hadn’t already loved him, he would never have been able to seduce her.

Some of the women who had come before had also told him that they loved him—most of them, in fact. The declarations had never elicited more from him than a rather tender pity for their vulnerability. Though he had liked and enjoyed all his lovers, none of them had ever managed to pierce his shell; he doubted any of them had even known the shell existed.

Evie’s simple statement, though, had filled him with a satisfaction so fierce that his blood had thrummed through his veins. She hadn’t expected him to respond. Now that he thought about it, she expected less from him than anyone else ever had. It was a startling realization to a man accustomed to having people come to him with their problems, expecting him to make decisions that would affect thousands of workers and millions of dollars. Evie expected nothing. How was it, then, that she gave so much?

He carried her into the bathroom and stood her on her feet, then unwrapped her from the sheet. The sight of her creamy golden flesh aroused him again, drew his hands to cup her breasts and feel the cool, silky weight of them. His thumbs rubbed across her nipples, making them tighten. Evie’s eyes were wide with alarm as she stared at him.

His mouth quirked into a crooked smile. “Don’t look so worried,” he said as he bent down to press his lips to her forehead. “I’ll restrain myself until you’ve had time to heal. Get in the tub, sweetheart, while I put on the coffee. A bath will relieve some of the soreness.”

“Good idea,” she said with absolute sincerity.

He chuckled as he left her there. The feeling of contentment was even deeper. She was his.

Chapter Thirteen

How could experiencing such a night not leave an imprint on her face? Evie wondered as she got ready for work. After her leisurely soak in the soothing hot water and an equally leisurely breakfast, which Robert had cooked with the same easy competence with which he handled everything else, he had driven her home and reluctantly kissed her goodbye for the day, saying that he had some business to attend to in Huntsville but would try to get back before she closed the marina. If not, he would come to her house.

She had forced herself to do the normal things, but she felt as if her entire life had been turned upside down, as if nothing were the same. She wasn’t the same. Robert had turned her into a woman who actively longed for his possession, despite the discomfort of her newly initiated body. She hadn’t known, hadn’t even suspected, that passion could be so savage and all-encompassing, that the pain would be as nothing before the need to link her body with his.

She wanted him even more now than before. He had brought up the long-buried sensuality of her nature and made it his, so that she responded to the lightest touch of his hand. When she thought of him, her body throbbed with the need to wrap her legs around him and take him inside her, to cradle his heavy weight, accept and tame the driving need of his masculinity. The scent of his skin, warm and musky, aroused her. Her memory was filled now with details that she hadn’t known before, like the guttural growl of his words and the way his neck corded when he threw his head back in the arching frenzy of satisfaction.

She stared at her face in the mirror as she swiftly braided her hair. Her eyes had shadows under them, but she didn’t look tired. She simply looked… like herself. If there was any change at all, it was in the expression in her eyes, as if there was a spark that had been missing before.

But if her face was the same, her body bore the signs of his lovemaking. Her breasts were pink and slightly raw from contact with his beard stubble, her nipples so sensitive from his mouth that the soft fabric of her bra rasped them. There were several small bruises on her hips, where he had gripped her during his climax, and her thighs ached. She was sore enough that every step reminded her of his possession and awakened echoes of sensation that made her acutely aware of her body.

It was much earlier than usual when she drove to the marina, but she needed the distraction to take her mind off Robert. If she was lucky, Sherry would bring Virgil by to spend the day with her.

Craig was gassing up a boat when she arrived. When he had finished, he came in and rang up the sale, putting the money in the cash drawer. “How come you’re in so early? Have a nice time last night?”

Her nerves jumped, but she managed a composed smile. “Yes, we did. We went to a private club for dinner and dancing. And I came in early… just because.”

“That’s a good enough reason for me.” He brushed his dark hair out of his eyes and gave her an urchin’s grin. “I’m glad you’re going out with him. You deserve some fun, after the way you’ve worked to build up this place.”

“Thanks for swapping shifts with me.”

“You bet.”

Another customer idled up to the docks, and Craig went out again. Evie picked up the morning mail and began sorting through it. The junk mail and sales papers went into the trash. The bills went to one side, to be juggled later. One letter was from a New York bank she’d never heard of, probably wanting her to apply for a credit card. She started to toss it without opening it, but on second thought decided to see what it was about. She picked up the penknife she used as a letter opener and slit the envelope.

Thirty seconds later, her brows knit in puzzlement, she let the single sheet of paper drop to the desk. Somehow this bank had gotten her confused with someone else, though she couldn’t think how they had gotten her name on one of their files when she had never done business with them. The letter stated, in brisk terms, that due to a poor payment record they would be forced to foreclose on her loan unless it was paid in full within thirty days.

She would have ignored it except that the amount noted was the same as what she owed her bank for the loan against the marina. She knew that figure well, had struggled to get it down to that amount. Each payment brought it even lower. She didn’t know how, but obviously her file had gotten into this other bank’s computers, and they wanted her to pay fifteen thousand, two hundred and sixty-two dollars within thirty days.

Well, it was obviously something she would have to clear up before it got even more tangled. Evie called her bank, gave her name and asked for her loan officer, Tommy Fowler, who was also an old school friend.

The line clicked, and Tommy’s voice said, “Hi, Evie. How’re you doing?”

“Just fine. How are you and Karen doing, and the kids?”

“We’re doing okay, though Karen says the kids are driving her crazy, and if school doesn’t start soon she’s going to get herself arrested, so she can have some peace and quiet.”

Evie chuckled. The Fowler kids were known for their frenetic energy.

“What can I help you with today?’’ Tommy asked.

“There’s been a really strange mix-up, and I need to know how to straighten it out. I got a letter today from a bank in New York, asking for payment in full on a loan, and it’s the same amount as the one I took out from you, on the marina.”

“Is that so? Wonder what’s going on. Do you have your account number handy?’’

“Not with me, no. I’m at work, and all my bookkeeping is at home.”

“That’s okay, I’ll pull it up under your name. Just a minute.”

She could hear the tapping of computer keys as he hummed softly to himself. Then he stopped humming and silence reigned, stretching out for so long that Evie wondered if he’d left the room. Finally a few more keys were tapped, then more silence.

He fumbled with the receiver. “Evie, I—” Reluctance was heavy in his voice.

“What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

“There’s a problem, all right, hon. A big one. Your loan was bought by that bank.”

Evie’s mind went blank. “What do you mean, bought?”

“I mean we sold off some of our loans. It’s a common practice. Banks do it to reduce their debt load. Other financial institutions buy them to diversify their own debt load. According to the records, this transaction took place ten days ago.”

“Ten days! Just ten days, and already they’re demanding payment in full? Tommy, can they do that?”

“Not if you’ve fulfilled the terms of the loan. Have you… ah… were you late with the payment?”

She knew he must have her payment record there in front of him, showing that she had been late several times, though she had never fallen a full month behind and had always gotten back on schedule. “It’s late now,” she said numbly. “I had an unexpected expense, and it’ll be next week before I can.”

She heard him exhale heavily. “Then they’re legally within their rights, though the normal procedure would be to make an effort at collecting the payment, rather than the full amount.”

“What do I do?”

“Call them. It should be fairly easy to straighten out After all, you’re a good risk. But be sure to follow up by letter, so you’ll have a record in writing.”

“Okay. Thanks for the advice, Tommy.”

“You’re welcome. I’m sorry about this, hon. It never would have happened if we’d still held the loan.”

“I know. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Call me if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“Thanks,” she said again and hung up.

Her heart was pounding as she dialed the number on the letterhead. An impersonal voice answered and nasally requested her business. Evie gave the name of the man who had signed the letter, and the connection was made before she could even say please.

The call was brief. Mr. Horowitz was as brisk as his letter had been and as impersonal as the operator. There was nothing he could do, nor did he sound interested in trying. The outstanding amount was due in full by the time limit set forth in the letter, or the loan would be foreclosed and the property forfeit.

Slowly she hung up and sat there staring out the window at the blindingly bright day. The lake was crowded with boaters, people laughing, having fun. The marina was busy, with owners cleaning their craft, others using her ramps to launch their boats, still others idling in for gas. If she didn’t somehow come up with over fifteen thousand dollars within the next thirty days, she would lose it all.

She loved the marina. Because she and Matt had been playmates before they had become sweethearts, she had spent a lot of time here even as a child. She had spent hours playing on the docks, had grown up with the smell of the water in her nostrils. The rhythms of the marina were as much a part of her as her own heartbeat. She had helped Matt work here, and later, after his death, had taken over the lion’s share of the work from his parents. When they had left the marina to her, she had channeled all her energy and efforts into making it prosperous, but it had been a labor of love. The marina, as much as her family, had given her a reason for going on when she had been doubtful that she wanted to even try.

This was her kingdom, her home, as much or more than the house in which she lived. She couldn’t bear to lose it. Some way, any way, she would find the money to pay off the loan.

The most obvious solution was to borrow against the house. The amount of the debt would be the same, but it would be stretched out over a longer period of time, and that would actually lower the payments. She felt giddy for a moment as the shock and horror lifted from her shoulders. She would be in even better shape than before, with more free cash every month.

She called Tommy again and got the ball rolling. He agreed that a mortgage was the perfect solution. He would have to get an okay on the loan, but he didn’t foresee any problems and promised to call her as soon as permission came through.

When she hung up, Evie sat with her head in her hands for a long moment. She felt as if she had just survived combat. She was shaky, but elated at her victory. If she had lost the marina… She couldn’t let herself imagine it.

When she finally lifted her head and looked out the window, driven by a need to see her domain still safe and secure, still hers, her face broke into a smile. Business was good today. So good, in fact, that Craig desperately needed a hand and was probably wondering why she wasn’t out there helping him. Evie bounded to her feet, energy restored, and rushed out to help him with the sudden glut of customers.

Robert arrived at the marina just after seven that evening. It had been busy all day, and she was on the dock selling gas and oil to yet another happy, sun-roasted boater. Alerted by a sensitivity to her lover’s presence, Evie looked around and saw him standing just outside the door, watching her. She lifted her hand. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He nodded and stepped inside, and she turned her attention back to her customer.

Robert watched her through the big window as he stepped behind the counter. He had been notified that she had received the letter and called the bank that he had arranged to buy her loan, and that, as instructed, they had been totally unwilling to cooperate on the matter. Glancing down, he saw the letter lying on top of the stack of mail, the single sheet of paper neatly folded and stuffed back into the envelope.

She had to be upset. He regretted the need for it, but he had decided to see the plan through. Though he was almost certain she didn’t know exactly what Mercer was doing, that she was more of an unwitting accomplice than anything else, there was still the small chance that she was involved up to her pretty neck. Because of that, he couldn’t relent in his financial pressure. If she was involved, she would be forced into another sale just to raise the money to pay the loan. If she wasn’t involved, he would take care of her money problems just as soon as he had Mercer in jail. There were others, and he would get them, too. But Evie was his, one way or the other.

Since he had left her that morning, he had several times been struck with amazement that he wouldn’t see her sent to jail, even if she was guilty. This was his country’s security at stake, something he took very seriously indeed. He had risked his life more than once for the same principle. He had relished the adventure, but the underlying reason for taking those risks had been a simple, rock-solid love of country. If Evie had betrayed it, she deserved prison. But acknowledging that in no way changed his decision. He would protect her from prosecution.

The sunburned customer and his trio of friends, all young men in their early twenties, were obviously in no hurry to stop chatting with Evie. Robert scowled out the window, but he couldn’t blame them. Only a dead man wouldn’t respond to her curvy, glowing femininity.

He slipped the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it. There was no reason for doing so, except a meticulous attention to detail. He wanted to know exactly what it said. Swiftly he scanned the  , satisfied with the way it had been handled. Then he read Evie’s notes, hastily scribbled in the margin.

She had written down the name “Tommy Fowler,” with a phone number beside it. Underneath she had written “mortgage house” and circled that

A smile tugged at his mouth. She was certainly a resourceful, common-sense woman. Relief welled up in him. If she was truly involved in stealing the NASA computer programs, she wouldn’t be trying to mortgage her house to pay the loan; she would simply arrange another buy. In his experience, criminals didn’t think of things like honest work to pay off debts; they were leeches, living off the effort of others, and would simply steal again.

Robert returned the letter to the envelope. More than ever, he regretted the need to play out what he had begun, but he never left anything to chance, certainly not in a matter this serious. He would have to squash any attempt to mortgage the house, of course. Evie would be worried sick, but he would make it up to her afterward.

He sat down on the high stool and watched her as she finally got rid of the four admiring young men. She was dressed much as she had been the first time he’d seen her, in jeans and a T-shirt with her tawny blond hair in a thick, loose braid. His reaction, too, was almost the same: he was poleaxed with lust. The only difference was that it was more intense now, and he hadn’t thought that possible. But now he knew exactly how she looked naked, knew all the delectable textures and curves of her body, and the hot, tight clasp of being sheathed deep inside her. He shivered with desire, his burning gaze locked on her as she walked up the dock. He knew the sounds she made at the peak of pleasure, knew how she clung to him, the way her legs locked convulsively around him, and how her nipples hardened to tight little raspberries. He knew the taste of her, the scent, and wanted to have it again.

She came inside, glanced at him and froze in place. He saw the shudder of awareness that rippled over her as she sensed his arousal. God, was she even more attuned to him than she had been before? The thought was unsettling.

“Come here,” he said softly, and she blindly walked into his arms.

He didn’t rise from the stool but pulled her between his thighs. Her arms circled his shoulders as he bent his mouth to hers. He kissed her for a long time, so hungry for her that he couldn’t be gentle. Evie moved against him, her hips rolling in a languorous, wanton manner that made his heart almost stop in his chest. Kissing her when her response was reluctant had been intoxicating enough; now that she was willing, her mouth clung to his in a way that made him forget about Mercer and the stolen computer programs, about the mess she was embroiled in, even where he was, everything but the hot joy of holding her.

But she would be too sore for any more lovemaking today, and reluctantly he eased away from her mouth, trailing kisses across her temple and the curve of her jaw. He would have to restrain himself for a while yet.

“How did your day go?” he murmured, opening the door for her to tell him about the problem with the bank loan.

“It was as busy today as I’ve ever seen it,” she replied, leaning back in the circle of his arms. Her eyes were soft and sleepy. “How about yours?”

“Tedious. I had some boring details to handle.” That was a lie. No detail was boring to him.

“I wish you had been here today, I’d have put you to work. I think everyone who owns a boat was on the water today.” She glanced over his shoulder. “There’s another one,” she said as she slipped out his arms.

This group didn’t need any gas but trooped inside in search of some snacks and cold drinks. They had the ruddiness of people who had been out in the sun and wind all day, and brought with them the coconut scent of sunscreen lotion. Once inside, they seemed reluctant to leave the air-conditioning and milled around looking at the fishing tackle. Evie didn’t try to hurry them, instead chatting pleasantly. They were two couples about her age, out for a day of relaxation on the lake. One of the women mentioned how nice it was to have a day away from the kids, and for a while the conversation centered on the antics of their children. When the group finally left, it was with friendly goodbyes.

“Alone at last,” Robert said, glancing at his watch. “It’s closing time, anyway.”

“Thank goodness.” Evie stretched and yawned, catching herself in midstretch with a wince that she quickly covered, but not quickly enough. He saw that slight hesitation. He would indeed have to exercise self-control.

He helped her to close up, then sent her home while he stopped for takeout. They ate dinner together, then sat out on the deck in the cooling night, talking softly about routine things. But Evie soon became sleepy, a direct result of not sleeping much the night before. On her third yawn, Robert stood up and held out his hand. “That’s it, sleepyhead. Bedtime.”

She put her hand in his and let him pull her to her feet. He led her to the bedroom and gently began undressing her.

“Robert, wait,” she said uneasily, trying to draw away from him. “I can’t—”

“I know,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “I told you I’d give you time to heal. I didn’t say anything about not sleeping together, but sleep is the operative word.”

She relaxed into his arms again, and he finished the task of undressing both of them. It was too warm in the house for him to be comfortable, but when they were both naked and lying on the bed, the ceiling fan wafted a cooling breeze over them, and he began to get drowsy, anyway. They lay nestled spoon fashion, his hard thighs under her round bottom, one hand possessively covering a breast.

He lay quietly. She was already asleep, her breathing slow and even. All his objections to staying in this house had faded when he had found that Evie had never truly been Matt’s wife. He would still have preferred being in his own house; the bed was much bigger, for one thing. But Evie would be more comfortable in her own home, and that was the most important thing. He had notified his people where he would be, just as he had notified them that Evie would be staying with him the night before.

He had given her every opportunity to tell him about the bank loan, but she hadn’t said a word about it Just as she had with the blown motor in her truck, she kept her trouble to herself rather than running to him for help or even emotional support. For someone who was so open and friendly, Evie was a very solitary person, accustomed to handling everything on her own. Though he would have had to turn her down if she’d asked for help, he wanted her to confide in him, to let him far enough into her life that he knew about the problems as well as the pleasures. When they were married, he would make damn certain he knew every time she stubbed her toe.

Until that moment, he hadn’t let his plans for the future progress that far, but suddenly it seemed the thing to do. He had never wanted any other woman the way he wanted Evie, and he sincerely doubted that he ever would. After this mess was settled, he intended to keep her close by, which would mean taking her to New York with him. And he knew Evie. Though she had given herself to him, she was essentially a conventional soul. She would want the security of marriage; therefore, he would marry her. Other women had wanted marriage from him, but this was the first time in his life he’d been willing to give it. He couldn’t imagine ever becoming bored with Evie, which had always happened with other lovers. Even more, he couldn’t imagine letting any other man have the chance to marry her.

He didn’t regret the impending loss of freedom. He thought of dressing her in silk gowns and expensive jewelry, of settling her in the lap of luxury—his—so that she wouldn’t have to work seven days a week or worry about paying bills. She wouldn’t have to make do with a secondhand refrigerator or drive around in a beat-up old truck. She wouldn’t be so tired that dark smudges lay under her eyes. He would take her with him on his business trips, show her Paris and London and Rome, and they would take vacations on the ranch in Montana. Madelyn, he suspected, would gloat because he had finally been caught, but she would like Evie. Evie, despite that glowing sensuality, wasn’t the type of woman that other women disliked on sight. She was friendly and courteous and unselfconscious about her looks. He had seen a lot of women who were far more vain than Evie, and with a lot less reason.

Within a month, perhaps even sooner, all of this would be behind them and they would be in New York. He fell asleep, thinking with pleasure of having her all to himself.

As usual, Evie woke at dawn. Robert lay close beside her, his body heat bathing her in warmth, despite the fact that the sheet had been kicked completely off the bed. He had done that, she supposed, because he wasn’t accustomed to doing without air-conditioning. His arm was draped heavily across her hips, and his breath stirred the hair at the back of her neck.

She had slept with him for two nights in a row now and wondered how she would be able to bear the desolation when he was no longer there.

She turned within the circle of that enveloping arm and rose up on one elbow. He woke immediately. “Is anything wrong?” he asked, and just for a moment there was something feral and frightening in his eyes, and an instant tension in his muscles, as if he were poised to attack.

Quickly she shook her head to reassure him. “No. I just wanted to see you.”

He relaxed at her words, lying back on the pillows. His olive-toned skin was dark against the whiteness. His thick black hair was tousled, and his jaw darkened by a heavy stubble. She was entranced by his sheer, uncomplicated masculinity, not yet smoothed over with grooming and clothes that somewhat obscured his true nature. Lying there with his iron-hard body naked and relaxed, he looked like what he was, a warrior honed down and redefined by years of battle.

She put her hand on his chest, and he lay quietly, watching her from beneath lowered lids but content to let her do as she wished. She didn’t whisper her love to him; she had already told him how she felt and didn’t intend to badger him about it. She concentrated, instead, on learning as much as she could about him. She had spent the first eighteen years of her life gathering memories about Matt, but she would have a much shorter time with Robert, and she didn’t want to waste a minute.

She bent over him, her long hair trailing across his chest and shoulder as she planted a line of gentle kisses down his body. He smelled delicious in the morning, she thought, all warm and sleepy. The crispy curls of black hair on his chest invited her to rub her cheek against them, catlike. His nipples, tiny and brown, were almost hidden in the hair. She sought them out, tickled by the minute points that stood out when she rubbed her fingertip across them. Robert flexed restlessly on the sheet as desire tightened his muscles, then forced himself to relax again to better enjoy her attentions.

“I wonder if that’s the same expression a pasha would have, lying back and letting his favorite concubine pleasure him,” she murmured.

“Probably.” He put his hands on her head, fingers sliding beneath the heavy fall of hair to massage her scalp. “You do pleasure me, Evangeline.”

She continued her dreamy exploration, down the furry ridged abdomen toward his hips and thighs, detouring around his early morning erection. Something high on the inside of his left thigh caught her eye, and she bent closer to examine the mark. The morning sunlight clearly revealed a stylized outline of an eagle, or perhaps a phoenix, with upswept wings. The tattoo was small, not even an inch in length, but so finely made that she could see the fierceness of the raptor.

She was startled by the tattoo—not the design, but its very presence. Lightly she traced her finger over it, wondering why he had it. After all, Robert hardly seemed the type of man who would have a tattoo; he was too polished and sophisticated. But for all that sophistication, he wasn’t quite civilized, and the tattoo matched that part of him. This was perhaps the only overt signal he permitted himself that he was more than what he seemed.

“How long have you had it?” she asked, looking up at him.

He was watching her with piercingly intent eyes. “Quite a while.”

It was a very inexact answer, but she sensed that it was all she would get from him, at least for now. Slowly she leaned down and licked the tattoo, her tongue gently caressing the sign in his flesh that signaled the presence of the inner man.

A low, rough sound vibrated in his throat, and his entire body tightened.

“Do you want me?” she whispered, licking him again. She felt very warm, and slightly drunk with her feminine power. Desire was unfurling inside her, opening like a flower. Her breasts throbbed, and she rubbed them against his leg.

He gave a strangled laugh, almost undone by her natural sensuality. “Look a few inches to your right and tell me what you think.”

She did, turning her head with slow deliberation to survey the straining, pulsing length of his sex. “I believe you do.”

“The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is, how do you feel?”

Evie gave him a slow, luminous smile of desire that promised him more than he thought he could survive. “I feel… willing.” she purred, crawling up the length of his body to lie on him as she wound her arms around his neck.

His face was strained as he rolled, placing her beneath him. “I’ll be careful,” he promised in a rough whisper.

She reached up to touch his beard-roughened cheek and opened her thighs to clasp them around him. Her heart was in her eyes as he began slowly, with almost agonizing care, to enter her. “I trust you,” she said, giving him her body as surely as she had given him her heart.

Chapter Fourteen

Landon Mercer caught himself wearing a habitually worried expression whenever he glanced into a mirror. Nothing was going right, for no particular reason that he could tell. One day he had been feeling pretty damn good about himself and the way everything was going, and the next it all began to go to hell. It was just little things at first, like that bastard Cannon showing up and nearly giving him a heart attack, though it turned out that Cannon had been the least of his worries. The big boss’s reputation had been vastly overstated; he was nothing more than another lazy playboy, born into money, without any real idea of what it was like to get out and hustle for what he had.

Sometimes, though, Cannon had a cold look in his eyes that was downright spooky, as if he could see right through flesh. Mercer wouldn’t soon forget the panic he’d felt when Cannon had caught him in Shaw’s Marina. For one terror-stricken minute, Mercer had thought he was caught, that they’d somehow managed to find out what he was doing. But all Cannon had seemed interested in was that he’d taken off from work for the afternoon, something he’d been careful not to do again. Of all the damn luck! There were plenty of marinas in Guntersville; why had Cannon picked Shaw’s? It wasn’t the biggest, or the best run. In fact, for him, its major attraction was that it was small, a bit out of the way and basically a one-horse outfit. Evie Shaw didn’t have time to pay attention to everything going on around her.

Of course, once Cannon had seen Evie, it was understandable why he kept hanging around. Mercer had been trying for months to get her to go out with him, but she was as standoffish as she was stacked. He just didn’t have enough money, he supposed; she had latched on to Cannon fast enough.

Of course, if things had worked out, he would have had enough money to interest her. He wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t blown the payoffs; he’d invested them. The ventures he’d picked had all seemed sound. He’d stayed away from the high-interest but volatile money markets and opted for slower but more secure returns. In a few years, he’d figured, he would have enough money invested to be on easy street.

But stocks that had looked good one day went sour the next, prices going on a steady slide as other investors dumped their shares. In one terrible week the tidy little nest egg he’d built up had decreased in value to less than half of what it had been before. He had sold out, taking a loss, and in a desperate move to recoup his money had invested it all in the money markets. The money market had promptly plummeted, almost wiping him out. He felt like King Midas in reverse; everything he touched turned to dross.

When he was contacted about another sale, he was so relieved that he almost thanked them for calling. If his bank account didn’t get a cash transfusion soon, he wouldn’t be able to make his car payment, or the payments on all his credit cards. Mercer was horrified at the thought of losing his beloved Mercedes. There were more expensive cars, and he intended to have them eventually, but the Mercedes was the first car he’d had that said he was somebody, a man on the way up. He couldn’t bear to go back to being nothing.

Evie felt as if she had been split into two separate beings. Half of her was deliriously happy, overwhelmed by the intoxication of having Robert for a lover. She had never dreamed she could be so happy again, or feel so whole, but the great emptiness that had lurked in her heart for so long had been filled. Robert was both passionate and considerate, paying her so much attention that she felt as if she were the center of his universe. He never ignored her, never took anything about her for granted, always made her feel as if she were the most desirable woman he’d ever seen. Whenever they went out, his attention never wandered to other women, though she was well aware of other women looking at him.

She saw him every day, slept with him almost every night. As she became more at ease with her own body and the passion he aroused, their lovemaking became more leisurely, and even more intense, until sometimes she screamed with the force of it. He was a sophisticated lover, leading her into new positions, new variations, new sensations, and he was so skilled that he didn’t make her feel awkward or ignorant. He made love to her almost every night. Only once, but that once was long and complete, leaving her sated and sleepy. Then, in the morning when they woke, they would make love again, silently, drifting in that half-awake state when dreams still shadow consciousness.

His mastery of her body was so complete that thoughts of him were always with her, lurking just under the surface, ready to come to the fore and bringing desire with them. She didn’t know which she enjoyed most, the intense sessions at night or the dreamy ones of early morning. It was amazing how quickly her body had learned to crave sexual pleasure with him, so that, as the afternoon hours advanced, she would become jittery with anticipation and need. He knew it, surely. She could see him watching her, as if gauging her readiness. Sometimes she had a violent desire to pin him to the floor and have her way with him, but she always restrained herself, because the buildup of desire, though maddening, was equally delicious.

She had become accustomed to containing her thoughts and emotions, guarding them behind a wall of reserve, but Robert drew her out. They had long, involved discussions about a wide variety of subjects. Sitting out on the deck at night, staring up at the stars, they would discuss astronomy and various theories, from the big bang to black holes, dark matter and the relativity of time. His intelligence and the scope of his interests were almost frightening. Without giving any indication of restlessness, his mind was always working, looking for new facts to absorb or arranging those he already had. They would trade sections of the newspaper, and debate politics and national events. They swapped childhood stories, she telling him about growing up with an older sister as bossy as Becky, he making her laugh with stories of his indomitable younger sister, Madelyn. He told her about the ranch in Montana, which he owned in partnership with Reese Duncan, Madelyn’s husband, and about their two rowdy little boys.

The sense of closeness with Robert was at once seductive and terrifying. There was a powerful lure that drew her to him, creating an intimacy as much of the mind as of the body, so that she was no longer a solitary creature but half of a couple, her entire sense of being altering to include him. Sometimes, in the back of her mind, she wondered how she would survive if he were to leave—she had to think of it as if now, rather than when—and the thought of losing him made her almost sick with terror.

She couldn’t let herself worry about that. Loving him now, in the present, demanded all her attention. She couldn’t hold anything back; she was helpless to even try.

At the same time, the other part of her, the part that wasn’t preoccupied with Robert, worried incessantly about the bank loan and the mortgage on the house. Tommy hadn’t called her back. She had called the bank twice; the first time he said that permission simply hadn’t come through yet, but he didn’t think there was any problem and that she should just be patient. The second time she called, he was out of town.

She couldn’t wait much longer. It had already been eleven days, leaving just nineteen until the loan had to be paid. If her bank couldn’t give her a loan, she would have to find a bank that would, and if all banks moved so slowly, she could find herself running out of time. Just thinking of the possibility was enough to make her break out in a cold sweat.

She tried to think of other options, of some way to quickly raise the money in case the loan didn’t go through fast enough. She could put her boat up for sale, but it wasn’t worth even half the amount that she needed and might not sell in time, anyway. Asking Becky and Paul for a loan was out of the question; they had their own financial responsibilities, and supporting two teenagers was expensive.

She could sell the rental boats, which would raise enough money but deprive her of a surprisingly tidy bit of income. Of course, with the loan paid, and if she didn’t have to take out another one, she would have much more available cash and would soon be able to acquire more boats for rent. The only problem with that was time—again. In her experience, people took their time buying boats. Boats, even in a town like Guntersville that was geared toward the river, weren’t a necessity of life. People looked at them, thought about it, discussed it over the dinner table, checked and double-checked their finances. It was possible, but unlikely, that she would be able to sell enough of them to raise the money she needed in the time she had.

Of the limited options available to her, however, that was the best one. She put a sign that read Used Boats For Sale in front of the marina and posted other notices in the area tackle stores. Even if she sold only one, that would lower the amount of money she would need to borrow.

Robert noticed the sign immediately. He walked in late that afternoon, removed his sunglasses and pinned her with a pale, oddly intense look. “That sign out front—which boats are for sale?”

“The rental boats,” she calmly replied and returned her attention to waiting on a customer. Once she had made the decision to sell the boats, she hadn’t allowed herself any regrets.

He moved behind the counter and stood in front of the window with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the marina. As she had known he would, he waited until the customer had left before turning to ask, “Why are you selling them?”

She hesitated for a moment. She hadn’t told him anything about her financial worries and didn’t intend to do so now, for a variety of reasons. One was simply that she was reticent about personal problems, disinclined to broadcast her woes to the world. Another was that she was fiercely possessive about the marina, and she didn’t want word to get around that it was on shaky financial ground. Yet another was that she didn’t want Robert to think she was obliquely asking for a loan, and she would be distressed if he offered one. He was obviously wealthy, but she didn’t want the issue of money to become a part of their relationship. If it did, would he ever be certain, in his own mind, that her attraction to him wasn’t based on his wealth? Still another reason was that she didn’t want anyone else to have a share, and thus a say-so, in the marina. Banks were one thing, individuals another. The marina was hers, the base on which she had rebuilt the ruins of her life. She simply couldn’t give up any part of it.

So when she answered, she merely said, “They’re getting old, less reliable. I need to buy newer ones.”

Robert regarded her silently. He didn’t know whether to hug her or shake her, and in fact he could do neither. It was obvious that she was trying to raise money by any means available, and he wanted to put his arms around her and tell her it would be all right. But his instinct to protect his own had to be stifled, at least for now. Despite his decision that she was largely innocent in Mercer’s espionage dealings, the small chance that he was wrong about her wouldn’t let him relent. Soon he would know for certain, one way or the other. But if she sold the rental boats, what means would Mercer use to deliver the goods? Every one of those rental boats was now equipped with tiny electronic bugs that would allow them to be tracked; if Mercer was forced to use some other boat, or even change his method of delivery entirely, Robert would lose his control of the situation.

On the plus side, he was certain Mercer would act soon. They had intercepted a very suspicious phone call, putting them on the alert. It didn’t matter if Evie managed to sell a couple of boats, or even most of them, so long as she had one remaining when Mercer made his move. He would simply have to monitor the situation and step in to prevent a sale if it looked as if she would manage to unload all of them.

Aloud he asked, “Have you had any offers yet?”

She shook her head, a wry smile curving her mouth. “I just put the sign up this morning.”

“Have you put an ad in any of the newspapers?”

“Not yet, but I will.”

That might bring in more customers than he could block, he thought with a sigh. The easiest way would be to stop the ads from being printed; there weren’t that many area newspapers. The phones both here and at her house were being monitored, so he would know which papers she called. Somehow he hadn’t expected to have so much trouble keeping abreast of her maneuvers. Evie was a surprisingly resourceful woman.

Five days later, Evie rushed in from overseeing a delivery of gas to answer the phone. She pushed a wisp of hair out of her face as she lifted the receiver. “Shaw’s Marina.”

“Evie? This is Tommy Fowler.”

As soon as she heard his voice, she knew. Slowly she sank down onto the stool, her legs so weak that she needed the support. “What’s the verdict?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

He sighed. “I’m sorry, hon. The board of directors says we already have too many real-estate loans. They won’t okay the mortgage.”

Her lips felt numb. “It isn’t your fault,” she said. “Thanks, anyway.”

“It isn’t a lost cause. Just because we aren’t making that type of loan right now doesn’t mean other banks aren’t.”

“I know, but I have a deadline, and it’s down to fourteen days. It’s taken you longer than that to tell me no. How long would it take to process a loan at any other bank?”

“Well, we took longer than usual. I’m sorry as hell about it, Evie, but I had no idea the okay wouldn’t go through. Go to another bank. Today, if possible. An appraiser will have to make an estimate of the house’s value, but it’s waterfront property and in good shape, so it’s worth a lot more than the amount you want to mortgage. Getting an appraiser out there is what will take so much time, so get started as soon as you can.”

“I will,” she said. “Thanks, Tommy.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said glumly. “I couldn’t do anything. Bye, hon.”

She sat there on the stool for a long time after she hung up the phone, trying to deal with her disappointment and sense of impending disaster. Though she had been worried, the worry had been manageable, because even though she had been making contingency plans, she had been certain the mortgage would go through.

She hadn’t sold a single boat.

Time was of the essence, and she didn’t have a lot of faith in getting a loan through any other bank. It was as if an evil genie was suddenly in control of things, inflicting her with malfunctioning machinery and uncooperative banks.

Still, she had to try. She couldn’t give up and perhaps lose the marina from lack of effort. She wouldn’t lose the marina. No matter what, she simply refused to let it go. If she couldn’t get a mortgage, if she couldn’t sell the boats, she had one other option. It was strictly last-resort, but it was there.

She picked out a bank with a good reputation and called to make an appointment with a loan officer for the next morning.

The heat was already intense the next day when she was getting ready. Despite the ceiling fans, her skin was damp with perspiration, making her clothes cling to her. Robert hadn’t asked why her house was so hot, but the past three nights he had insisted on taking her to his home and bringing her back after breakfast. This morning she had showered at his house as she usually did, then asked him to bring her home earlier than usual because she had a business appointment at nine. He hadn’t asked any questions about that, either.

She retrieved her copy of the deed from the fireproof security box under the bed and braced herself like a soldier going to war. If this bank wouldn’t give her a loan, she wasn’t going to waste any more time going to another one. Time was too short. She would rather be too hasty than take the chance of losing the marina.

She rolled the truck window down, and the wind blowing in her face cooled her as she drove to the bank. The heat was building every day, and soon it would be unbearable in the house if she didn’t turn on the air-conditioning. She smiled grimly. She might as well turn it on; one way or the other, she would have the money to pay the power bill.

Her appointment was with a Mr. Waldrop, who turned out to be a stocky, sandy-haired man in his late forties. He gave her a strangely curious look as he led her into his small office. Evie took one of the two comfortable chairs arranged in front of the desk, and he settled into the big chair behind it.

“Now then, Mrs. Shaw, what can we do for you today?”

Concisely, Evie told him what she needed, then pulled the copy of the deed from her purse and placed it on his desk. He unfolded it and looked it over, pursing his lips as he read.

“It looks straightforward enough.” He opened his desk and extracted a sheet of paper. “Fill out this financial statement, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Evie took the sheet of paper and went out to one of the small searing areas off the lobby. While she was answering the multitude of questions, her pen scratching across the paper, someone else came in to see Mr. Waldrop. She glanced up automatically, then realized she knew the newcomer, not an unusual occurrence in a small town like Guntersville. He was Kyle Brewster, a slightly shady businessman who owned a small discount store, dealing in seconds and salvage material. He was also known as a gambler and had been arrested once, several years back, when the back room of a pool hall had been raided on the information that an illegal game was being conducted there. Evie supposed that Kyle was fairly successful in his gambling; his style of living was considerably higher than the income from the discount store could provide.

The door to Mr. Waldrop’s office was left open. She couldn’t hear what Kyle was saying, only the indistinct drawl of his voice, but Mr. Waldrop’s voice was more carrying. “I have the check right here,” he was saying cheerfully. “Do you want to cash it, or deposit it into your account?”

Evie returned her attention to the form, feeling slightly heartened. If the bank would lend money to Kyle Brewster, she saw no reason why it wouldn’t lend money to her. Her business was more profitable, and her character was certainly better.

Kyle left a few minutes later. When Evie completed the form, someone else had come in and was with Mr. Waldrop. She sat patiently, watching the hour hand on the clock inch to ten o’clock, then beyond. At ten-thirty, the other customer left and she carried the form in to Mr. Waldrop.

“Have a seat,” he invited as he looked over the information she had provided. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He carried the form out with him.

Evie crossed her fingers, hoping the loan would be okayed that morning, pending an appraisal of the property. She would get the bank’s appraiser out to the house if she had to call him ten times a day and hound him until he appeared.

More time ticked by. She shifted restlessly in the chair, wondering what was taking so long. But the bank seemed busy this morning, so perhaps the person Mr. Waldrop had taken the form to was also tied up, and Mr. Waldrop was having to wait.

Forty-five minutes later Mr. Waldrop returned to his office. He settled into his chair and tapped his fingertips together. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Shaw,” he said with real regret. “We simply aren’t making this type of loan right now. With the economy the way it is…”

Evie sat up straight. She could feel the blood draining from her face, leaving the skin tight. Enough was enough. “The economy is fine,” she interrupted sharply. “The recession didn’t hit down here the way it did in other parts of the country. And your bank is one of the strongest in the country. There was an article in one of the Birmingham papers just last week about this bank buying another one in Florida. What I want to know is why you would lend money to someone like Kyle Brewster, a known gambler with a police record, but you won’t make a loan on a property worth five or six times that amount.”

Mr. Waldrop flushed guiltily. A distressed look came into his eyes. “I can’t discuss Mr. Brewster’s business, Mrs. Shaw. I’m sorry. I don’t make the decisions on whether or not to okay a loan.”

“I realize that, Mr. Waldrop.” She also realized something else, something so farfetched she could hardly believe it, but it was the only thing that made any sense. “I didn’t have a chance of getting the loan, did I? Having me fill out that form was just for show. Someone is stepping in to block the loan, someone with a lot of influence, and I want to know who it is.”

His flush turned even darker. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “There’s nothing I can tell you.”

She stood and retrieved the deed from his desk. “No, I don’t suppose you can. It would mean your job, wouldn’t it? Goodbye, Mr. Waldrop.”

She was almost dizzy with fury as she went out to the truck. The heat slammed into her like a blow, but she ignored it, just as she ignored the scorching heat of the truck’s upholstery. She sat in the parking lot, tapping her finger against the steering wheel as she stared unblinkingly at the traffic streaming by on U.S. 431.

Someone wanted the marina. No one had made an offer to buy it, so that meant whoever it was knew she wasn’t likely to sell. This mysterious someone was powerful enough, well-connected enough with the local bankers, to block her attempts to get a loan. Not only that, the original transfer of the loan from her bank to the New York bank had probably been arranged by this person, though she couldn’t think of anyone she knew with that kind of power.

She couldn’t think why anyone would want her little marina enough to go to such an extreme. Granted, she had made a lot of improvements in it, and business was better every year. When she paid off the outstanding debt, the marina would turn a healthy profit, but it wouldn’t be the kind of money that would warrant such actions from her unknown enemy.

Why didn’t matter, she thought with the stark clarity that comes in moments of crisis. Neither did who. The only thing that mattered was that she kept the marina.

There was one move she could make that wouldn’t be blocked, because she wouldn’t be the one obtaining the loan. She wouldn’t breathe a word about this to anyone, not even Becky, until it was a done deal.

Numbly she started the truck and pulled out into traffic, then almost immediately pulled off again when she spotted a pay phone outside a convenience store. Her heart was thudding with slow, sickening power against her ribs. If she let herself think about it, she might not have the nerve to do it. If she waited until she got back home, she might look around at the dear, familiar surroundings and not be able to make the call. She had to do it now. It was a simple choice. If she lost the marina, she stood to lose everything, but if she sacrificed the house now, she would be able to keep the marina.

She slid out of the truck and walked to the pay phone. Her legs seemed to be functioning without any direction from her brain. There was no phone book. She called Information and got the number she wanted, then fed in another quarter and punched the required numbers. Turning her back on the traffic, she put her finger in her other ear to block out noise as she listened to the ringing on the other end of the line.

“Walter, this is Evie. Do you and Helene still want to buy my place on the river?”

“She stopped at a convenience store immediately after leaving the bank and made a call from a pay phone,” the deep voice reported to Robert.

“Could you tell what number she called?”

“No, sir. Her position blocked the numbers from view.”

“Could you hear anything she was saying?”

“No, sir. I’m sorry. She kept her back turned, and the traffic was noisy.”

Robert rubbed his jaw. “Have you checked to see if it was the marina she called?”

“First thing. No such luck. She didn’t call Mercer, either.”

“Okay. It worries me, but there isn’t anything we can do about it. Where is she now?”

“She drove straight home from the convenience store.”

“Let me know if she makes any more calls.”

“Yes, sir.”

Robert hung up and stared thoughtfully out at the lake as he tried to imagine who she had called, and why. He didn’t like the angry little suspicion that was growing. Had she called the unknown third party to whom Mercer had been selling the stolen computer programs? Was she involved up to her pretty little neck after all? He had backed her up against a financial wall, just to find out for certain, but he had a sudden cold, furious feeling that he wasn’t going to like the results worth a damn.

Chapter Fifteen

“Would you like to go fishing this morning?” Robert asked lazily, his voice even deeper than usual. “We’ve never been out in a boat together.”

It was six-thirty. The heat wave was continuing, each day seeing temperatures in the high nineties, and it was supposed to reach the hundred mark for the next few days, at least. Even at that early hour, Evie could feel the heat pressing against the windows.

It was difficult to think. Robert had just finished making love to her, and her mind was still sluggish with a surfeit of pleasure. He had awakened her before dawn and prolonged their loving even more than usual. Her entire body still throbbed from his touch, the echoes of pleasure still resounding in her flesh. The sensation of having him inside her lingered, though he had withdrawn and moved to lie beside her. Her head was cradled on one muscled arm, while his other arm lay heavily across her lower abdomen. She would have liked nothing better than to snuggle against him and doze for a while, then wake to even more lovemaking. It was only when she was sleeping, or when Robert was making love to her, that she was able to forget what she was doing.

But the throb of pleasure was lessening, and a dull ache resumed its normal place in her chest. “I can’t,” she said. “I have some errands to run.” Errands such as finding a place to live. Walter and Helene Campbell had jumped at the chance to buy her house. They had wanted it for years and had decided to pay cash for it and worry about the financing later, afraid she would change her mind if she had a chance to think about it. Evie had promised she would be out within two weeks.

She couldn’t bring herself to tell Robert, at least, not yet. She was afraid he would feel pressured to ask her to live with him, when he seemed perfectly satisfied with things the way they were now. It was difficult to think of anyone pressuring Robert to do anything he didn’t want to do, and he might not offer, but neither did she want him to think she was hinting that he should. It would be best to find an apartment or house for rent first, then tell him about it.

For that matter, she hadn’t told Becky, either. She hadn’t told anyone. She had made her decision, but hadn’t managed to come to terms with it yet. Every time she thought about moving, tears burned in her eyes. She couldn’t bear to go into the explanations and listen to the arguments.

She didn’t let herself think about who was behind all these financial maneuverings. First she had to concentrate on saving the marina and finding a place to live. After that was settled, she would try to find out who had been doing this to her.

“What kind of errands?” Robert asked, nuzzling her ear. His hand stroked warmly over her stomach, then covered her left breast. Her nipple, still sensitized from the strong suckling he had subjected it to a short while ago, twinged with a sharp sensation and immediately puckered against his palm. Her breathing deepened. Rather than becoming less intense with familiarity, his sensual power over her body seemed to increase each time he took her.

“I have to pay a few bills and do some shopping,” she lied, and wondered why he’d asked. He had no compunction about taking over every facet of her private life but seldom inquired about what she did when they weren’t together.

“Why not put it off until tomorrow?” His nuzzling was growing a bit more purposeful, and she closed her eyes as pleasure began to warm throughout her body again.

“I can’t,” she repeated regretfully. He rolled her nipple between this thumb and forefinger, making it even harder. She caught her breath at the tug of desire, as if the nerves of her nipples were directly connected to those in her loins.

“Are you certain?” he murmured, pressing his open mouth against the rapid pulse at the base of her throat.

Going fishing didn’t tempt her, at least not in this heat. Lying in bed with him all morning, though, was so tempting it took all of her willpower to resist. “I’m certain,” she forced herself to say. “It has to be done today.”

Another man might have turned surly at having his advances refused, but Robert only sighed as he rested his head once again on the pillow. “I suppose we should get up, then.”

“I suppose.” She turned into him, pressing her face against his chest. “Hold me, just for a minute.”

His arms tightened around her, satisfyingly tight. “What’s wrong?’’

“Nothing,” she whispered. “I just like for you to hold me.”

She felt his muscles tense. Abruptly he rolled on top of her, his hair-roughened thighs pushing hers apart. Startled, she looked up into slitted green eyes, glittering beneath those heavy black lashes. She couldn’t read his expression but sensed his tightly contained violence.

“What—” she began to ask.

He thrust heavily into her, the power of his penetration making her body arch and shudder. He had had her only a little while before, but he was as hard as if that had never happened, so hard that she felt bruised by the impact of his flesh against hers. She gasped and clutched his shoulders for support. Not since the first time he’d taken her had he moved so powerfully. A primal feminine fear beat upward on tiny wings and mingled with an equally primitive sense of excitement. He wasn’t hurting her, but the threat was there, and the challenge was whether she could handle him in this dangerous mood, all raw, demanding masculinity.

Desire flooded through her. She dug her nails into his muscular buttocks, pulling him deeper, arching her hips higher to take all of him. He grunted, his teeth clenched against the sound. Evie locked him to her, as fiercely female as he was dominatingly male, not only accepting his thrusts but demanding them. The sensation spiraled rapidly inside her, burning out of control, and she bit his shoulder. He cursed, the word low and hoarse, then slid his arms under her bottom to lift her even more tightly against him. All of his heavy weight bore her into the mattress as they strained together.

The sensation peaked, and Evie cried out as she shuddered wildly in the throes of pleasure. His hips hammered three more times; then he stiffened and began to shake as satisfaction took him, too. He ground his body against hers, as if he could meld their flesh.

The room slowly stopped spinning about her. She heard the twin rhythms of their panting breaths begin to calm. His heartbeat seemed to be thudding through her body, until it was in sync with her own. Their bodies were sealed together with sweat, heat rolling off them in waves.

Their first lovemaking of the morning had lasted an hour. This time, it hadn’t taken even five minutes. The fury and speed of it, the raw power, left her even more exhausted than she’d been before.

What had aroused him so violently? After their first night Robert had been a slow, considerate lover, but he had just taken her like a marauder.

He was very heavy on top of her, making breathing difficult. She gasped, and he shifted his weight to the side. Pale green eyes opened, the expression still shuttered. His mouth had a ruthless line to it. “Stay with me today,” he demanded.

Regret pierced her, sharp and poignant. “I can’t,” she said. “Not today.”

For a split second something frightening flickered in his eyes, then was gone. “I tried,” he said with rueful ease, rolling off her and sitting up. He stretched, rolling his shoulders and lifting his muscled arms over his head. Evie eyed his long, powerful back with pleasure and approval. The layered muscles were tight and hard, the deep hollow of his spine inviting kisses, or clutching hands. He was wide at the shoulders, his body tapering in a lean vee to his hips. She reached out and ran a lingering hand over the round curve of his buttocks, loving the cool resilience of his flesh.

He looked at her over his shoulder, and she saw a smile come into those green eyes. He leaned over to kiss her, his mouth lingering warmly for a moment; then with a yawn he was off the bed and heading toward the shower. She watched him until he closed the bathroom door behind him, drinking in his tall, naked body. She felt like smacking her lips, like a child drooling after a tasty treat. He was a fine figure of a man, all right. Sometimes, when she saw him sprawled naked and sleepy beside her, it was all she could do to keep from attacking him. She lay in bed for a while, listening to the shower run and entertaining a wicked, delicious fantasy in which he was tied to the bed and totally at her mercy.

But a glance at the clock told her that time was still ticking away. Sighing, she got out of bed and slipped into his shirt, then went to the kitchen to make coffee.

When she returned, he was just coming out of the bathroom, a towel draped around his neck but otherwise still completely naked. His skin was glowing from the shower, his black hair wet and slicked back.

“I put on the coffee,” she said as she went to take her turn in the shower.

“I’ll start breakfast. What do you want this morning?”

The thought of what she had to do that day killed her appetite. “I’m not hungry. I’ll just have coffee.”

But when she had showered and dressed, she went into the kitchen to find that he had his own ideas about what she was having for breakfast A bowl of cereal, as well as a glass of orange juice and the requested coffee, was sitting at her customary place at the table. “I’m really not hungry,” she repeated, lifting the coffee cup and inhaling the fragrant steam before sipping.

“Just a few bites,” he cajoled, taking his own place beside her. “You need to keep up your strength for tonight.”

She gave him a heated, slumberous look, remembering her fantasy. “Why? Are you planning something special?”

“I suppose I am,” he said consideringly. “It’s special every time we make love.”

Her heart swelled in her chest, making it impossible for her to speak. She simply looked at him, her golden brown eyes glowing.

He picked up the spoon and put it into her hand. “Eat. I’ve noticed you haven’t been eating much while it’s been so hot, and you’re losing weight.”

“Most people would consider that a good thing,” she pointed out.

His black eyebrows lifted. “I happen to like your butt as round as it is now, and your breasts perfectly fit my hands. I don’t want to sleep with a stick. Eat.”

She laughed, amused by his description of her rear end, and dipped the spoon into the cereal. It was her favorite brand, of course; once he had seen the box in her cabinets, a box of the same cereal had taken up residence in his.

She managed to choke down a few bites, more than she wanted and not enough to satisfy him, which was a reasonable compromise. The cereal felt like a lump in her stomach.

Less than an hour later he kissed her goodbye at her door. “I’ll see you tonight, sweetheart. Take care.”

As she entered the house, she thought it a little odd for him to have added that last admonition. What on earth did he think she would be doing?

Sadly she dressed for work, so she wouldn’t have to come back to the house before going to the marina. She wouldn’t be braiding her hair in front of this mirror very many more times, she thought. After this afternoon, the house would no longer belong to her. Walter and Helene were getting a real estate agent, a friend of theirs, to handle the transaction immediately. They were supposed to bring all the paperwork to the marina this afternoon, along with a cashier’s check in the specified amount. Evie was taking the deed to the property, the surveyor’s report that she had had done when she inherited the house, as well as the certification of me title search that had also been done at that time. It was a measure of their trust in her that they were willing to forgo another title search, probably against their agent friend’s advice.

She addressed an envelope to the bank in New York, stamped it and added it to her stack of papers. She would take the cashier’s check immediately to her bank, deposit it and have another cashier’s check made out in the amount of the outstanding loan against the marina. Then she would express-mail that check to New York, to Mr. Horowitz’s attention. All her financial troubles would be over.

She wouldn’t have her home any longer, but she could live anywhere, she told herself. The marina was more important, the means of her support. With it, she could someday buy another house. It wouldn’t hold the memories this one did, but she would make it into a home.

She took a last look in the mirror. “Standing here won’t get anything done,” she said softly to herself and turned away.

She spent the morning driving around Guntersville. She had checked a few of the rental ads in the newspaper but didn’t want to call them yet, preferring to see the houses and the neighborhoods before calling. She knew she was just stalling, despite the urgency of the situation, but somehow actually making contact was beyond her at the moment. She gave herself a stern talking-to, but it didn’t help much. She didn’t like any of the houses she saw.

It was almost noon when she came to a decision. She made an abrupt turn, causing a car behind her to squeal its tires and the irate driver to lean on the horn. Muttering an apology, she cut through a shopping-center parking lot and back onto the highway, but in the opposite direction.

The apartment complex she had chosen was new, less than two years old, incongruously known as the Chalet Apartments. She stopped the truck outside the office and went inside. Twenty minutes later she was the new resident of apartment 17, which consisted of a living room and combination dining room/kitchen downstairs, along with a tiny laundry area just big enough to hold a washer and dryer, and two bedrooms upstairs. There were no one-bedroom apartments available. She paid a deposit, collected two sets of keys and went back out to the truck.

It was done. She doubted she would be happy there, but at least she would have a roof over her head while she took her time looking for a house.

The cellular phone beeped, and Robert answered it as he threaded his way through the traffic on Gunter Avenue, the oneway street that bisected Guntersville’s downtown area and also ran through a neighborhood of grand old houses that looked turn-of-the-century.

“I think she spotted me.”

“What happened?” he asked in a clipped tone.

“First she just drove around, all over town. I had to hang back so I wouldn’t be as easy to spot. She slowed down several times but didn’t stop anywhere. Maybe she was looking for something. Then she got on the highway, going south toward Albertville. She was on the inside lane, I was on the outside. All of a sudden, without a turn signal, she whipped the truck into a parking lot and nearly got hit doing it I was in the wrong lane and couldn’t follow her. By the time I got turned around, she’d vanished.”

“Damn.” Robert felt both tired and angry. Just when he’d been convinced of Evie’s innocence, she was suddenly doing some very suspicious things. She was obviously worried about the marina, but there was something else on her mind, something she was trying to keep hidden. This morning, in bed, he had been seized by the urgent need to keep her with him all day, thereby preventing her from doing anything foolish. He wasn’t used to women refusing any request he made, but Evie didn’t appear to have any trouble doing it. She had said no with insulting ease.

Furious, he had even tried to seduce her into staying with him, only to lose his control, something he’d sworn wouldn’t happen again. And afterward she’d still said no.

“I’ll pick her up again when she comes to the marina,” the man said in his ear. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“It wasn’t your fault No tail’s perfect.”

“No, sir, but I should have been more careful about letting her see me.”

“Have two cars next time, so you can swap.”

“Yes, sir.”

Robert ended the call and replaced the receiver. It took all his self-control to keep from driving to the marina to wait for her so he could shake some sense into her as soon as he saw her. But he had to play this through to the end.

As mundane as it was, he had his own errand to run that day: grocery shopping. It wasn’t something he normally did for himself, but it wasn’t an onerous duty. Despite its strangeness, or perhaps because of it, he didn’t mind doing it. Southerners imbued grocery shopping with the same casualness that characterized almost everything else they did. Shoppers ambled down the aisles, stopping to talk with chance-met acquaintances or to strike up conversations with strangers. The first time he had gone into the big grocery store, he had been amused by the thought that a New Yorker relaxed in the park with more energy than Southerners shopped. But when in Rome… He had learned to slow his own pace, to keep from smashing into old ladies who had stopped to pass the time of day.

Today, though, he wasn’t in the mood to be amused. It went against his protective, controlling nature to leave Evie to hang herself with all the evidential rope he was feeding to both her and Mercer. He wanted to snatch her away from here, kidnap her if necessary. But if she were involved with Mercer, that would scare off the others and they might never be caught. Not knowing for certain, one way or the other, was driving him crazy with frustration.

Two more days. From the telephone calls they had intercepted, they knew that Mercer would transfer more stolen data the day after tomorrow. Evie hadn’t been able to sell any of the rental boats, so that was one less problem for Robert. It didn’t matter which boat Mercer took, since they were all wired. As a precaution, he had also had Evie’s boat wired. In two days it would all be over except for the cleanup. In three days, if all went on schedule, he would be back in New York, and Evie would be with him.

He wouldn’t need many groceries, just enough for three days, but he was completely out of coffee and almost out of food, and he didn’t want to eat in restaurants for three days. He strode through the aisles of the grocery store, his expression remote as he planned the damage-control measures he would use. Operating with his usual efficiency, he was in and out of the store within fifteen minutes. As he walked out the automatic doors with a grocery bag in his arms, though, the woman just entering through the other set of doors stopped and stared at him.

“Robert.”

He paused, immediately recognizing Evie’s sister, Becky. Another shopper was exiting behind him, and he stepped out of the way. “Hello, Becky. How are you?” He smiled faintly. “And how’s Jason? I haven’t seem him at the marina again.”

“Didn’t Evie tell you? He can’t come back to the marina for the rest of the summer. That’s a real punishment to him,” Becky said dryly. “The marina’s one of his favorite places.” She too, stepped away from the doors. “There’s no sense standing here blocking traffic. I’ll walk you to your car.”

They strolled across the hot, sticky pavement. The heat was smothering, and sweat began to gather almost immediately on his skin. Wryly he waited, seeing Becky’s determination plain on her face. The protective older sister wanted to have a heart-to-heart talk with him, to make certain he didn’t hurt Evie.

They reached the Jeep, and he stored the groceries inside, leaving the door open so some of the heat inside could dissipate. He leaned against the vehicle and calmly eyed her. “You worried about Evie?” he prompted.

She flashed him a rueful look. “Am I that easy to read?”

“She mentioned that you’re a bit protective,” he murmured.

Becky laughed and pushed her hair out of her face. Her hair was darker than Evie’s, but in that moment Robert saw a flash of resemblance, a similarity in expression and in the husky tone of their voices. “The big-sister syndrome,” she said. “I didn’t use to be this bad, only since—”

She stopped, and Robert felt his curiosity stir. “Since when?”

Becky didn’t answer immediately, instead turning her gaze to the traffic on the highway. It was a delaying tactic, to give her time to think and organize her answer. He waited patiently.

“Are you serious about her?” she asked abruptly.

He wasn’t accustomed to being interrogated about his intentions, serious or otherwise, but he quelled his surge of irritation. Becky was asking only out of concern for Evie, an emotion he shared. In a very level tone he said, “I intend to marry her.”

Becky closed her eyes on a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” she said.

“I didn’t realize the state of our relationship was so critical,” he said, still in that cool, dead-level tone.

Becky’s eyes opened, and she gave him a considering look. “You can be very intimidating, can’t you?”

He almost smiled. If he could, it obviously wasn’t working on her. He’d never managed to intimidate Evie, either.

Becky sighed and looked again at the traffic. “I was worried. I didn’t know how important Evie is to you, and… well, the success of your relationship is critical to her.”

His curiosity became intense. “In what way?”

Becky didn’t answer that directly, either. Instead she asked, “Has she told you about Matt?”

Robert’s eyes glittered suddenly. “Probably more than even you know,” he said, his voice deepening as he remembered the first time he’d made love to Evie.

“About how he died?”

Sweat trickled down his back, but suddenly nothing could have moved him from the scorching asphalt parking lot. “He died in a car accident, didn’t he?” He couldn’t remember if Evie had told him that, or if it had been in the report he’d requested on Matt Shaw.

“Yes, the day after they married.” She paused, organizing her thoughts, and again she made what appeared to be a shift in topic. “Our father died when Evie was fifteen. I was twenty, already married, already about to be a mother. A year later our mother died. Can you understand the difference in the way losing our parents affected us?” she asked, her voice strained. “I loved them both dearly, but I had built my home with Paul. I had him, I had my son, I had an entire life away from my parents. But losing Daddy shook Evie’s foundations, and then when Mother died… Evie didn’t just lose Mother, she lost her home, too. She came to live with Paul and me, and we loved having her, but it wasn’t the same for her. She was still just a kid, and she had lost the basis of her life.”

Robert stood silently, all his attention on this insight into Evie’s past life. She didn’t talk about her childhood much, he realized. They had talked about a lot of things, sitting on the deck at night with all the lights off and the starry sky spread like a quilt overhead, but it was as if Evie had closed a mental door on her life before Matt’s death.

“But she had Matt,” Becky said softly. “He was a great kid. We’d known him all his life, and I can’t remember when they hadn’t been inseparable, first as buddies, then as sweethearts. They were the same age, but even as young as he was, when Daddy died, Matt was right there beside Evie. He was there with her when Mother died. I think he was her one constant, the only person other than me who had been there for as long as she could remember. But I had my own family, and Evie had Matt. He put a smile back in her eyes, and because she had him, she weathered the loss of our parents. I remember what she was like back then, a giggling teenager as rowdy as Jason is now, and full of mischief.”

“I can’t picture Evie as rowdy,” he commented, because Becky’s voice had become strained, and he wanted to give her a moment to compose herself. “There’s something so solemn about her.”

“Yes, there is,” Becky agreed. “Now.”

The jealousy he thought he had banished swelled to life again. “Because of Matt’s death.”

Becky nodded. “She was in the car with him.” Tears welled in her eyes. “For the rest of my life, I’ll carry two pictures of Evie in my mind. One is of her on her wedding day. She was so young and beautiful—so glowing—that it hurt to look at her. Matt couldn’t take his eyes off her. The next time I saw her, she was in a hospital bed, lying mere like a broken doll, her eyes so empty that—” She stopped, shuddering.

“They had spent me night in Montgomery and were going on to Panama City the next morning. It was raining. It was Sunday, and they were in a rural area. There wasn’t much traffic. A dog ran out into the highway, and they hit it, and Matt lost control of the car. The car left the road and rolled at least twice, then came to a stop, on its right side, in a stand of trees. Evie was pinned on the bottom. Matt was hanging in his seat belt above her. She couldn’t get out, couldn’t get to him, and he b-bled to death in front of her, his blood dripping down on her. He was conscious, she said.” Furiously Becky dashed the tears from her cheeks. “No one saw the car for a long time, what with the rain and the trees blocking the view. He knew he was dying. He told her he loved her. He told her goodbye. He’d been dead for over an hour before anyone saw the car and came to help.”

Robert turned to stone, his eyes burning as he pictured, far too clearly, what a young girl had gone through that rainy Sunday. Then he reached out automatically and took Becky in his arms, holding her head against his shoulder while she wept.

“I’m sorry,” she finally managed, lifting her head and wiping her eyes yet again. “It’s just that, when I let myself think about it, it tears my heart out all over again.”

“Yes,” he said. Still holding her with one arm, he fished his handkerchief out of his pocket and gently wiped her face.

“She’s never let herself love anyone else,” she said fiercely. “Do you understand? She hasn’t risked letting anyone else get close to her. She’s stuck with the people she already loved, before the accident—Paul and me, Jason and Paige, and a few, very few, special friends, but no one else. If you hadn’t pulled her and Jason out of the river, she would have drowned rather than let him go, because she couldn’t have stood to lose anyone else she loves. She’s been so… so solitary, keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.”

“Until me,” he said.

Becky nodded and managed a wavery little smile. “Until you. I didn’t know whether to be glad or terrified, so I’ve been both. I want her to have what I’ve got, a husband I love, kids I love, a family that will give her a reason to go on living when someone else dies.” She saw the sudden flare in Robert’s eyes and said quickly, “No, she never said anything about suicide, not even right after Matt died. That isn’t what I meant. She recovered from her injuries—both legs were broken, some ribs, and she had a concussion—and did exactly what the doctors told her, but you could see that she wasn’t interested. For years, life for her was just going through the motions, and every day was an effort. It took a long time, but finally she found a sort of peace. Evie’s incredibly strong. In her place, I don’t know if I could have managed it.”

Robert kissed Becky’s forehead, touched and pleased by this fiercely competent woman’s concern for her sister. He would, he realized, like having her for a sister-in-law. “You can put down your shield and sword, and rest,” he said gently. “I’ll take care of her now.”

“You’d better,” Becky said, her fierceness not one bit abated. “Because she’s already paid too much for loving people. God only knows where she found the courage to love you. I’ve been terrified that you didn’t care about her, because if you waltzed out of here at the end of the summer, it might well destroy her.”

Robert’s eyes glittered. “When I waltz out of here,” he said, “I’m taking her with me.”

Chapter Sixteen

W alter and Helene Campbell were in their mid-sixties, retired, comfortable but not wealthy. Evie’s house was just what they wanted, well-built and maintained, but old enough and small enough that her asking price was much less than what they would have paid for a new house on the lakefront. They were both thrilled to the point of giddiness at their unexpected good fortune, for though they had asked several times if she would sell, they had long since given up hope that she would.

They arrived at the marina over half an hour early, their estate agent in tow and bearing a huge sheaf of papers. Having never bought or sold a house before, Evie was struck by the amount of paperwork it evidently required and amazed that the agent had managed to get it all prepared in less than a day.

There weren’t sufficient chairs for everyone to sit down, so they stood grouped around the counter. The agent explained the purpose of each document as he presented it first for her signature, then the Campbells’. After an hour of dedicated document-signing, it was finished. Evie had sold her house, and the check was in her hand.

She managed a smile to send the joyous Campbells on their way, but as soon as the door had closed behind them, her smile collapsed. She closed her eyes and shuddered in an effort to control the grief that had been growing since she had made the phone call the day before. No matter that she had told herself it was just a house and she could live anywhere, it was her home, and she had just lost part of herself. No, not lost it—sold it.

But the marina was a more important part of her foundation, and the green cashier’s check in her hand had just saved it.

She wiped the betraying moisture from her eyes and braced her shoulders. She called Burt and told him she had to go to the bank and would be back in about half an hour. “Okay,” he said, as laconic as ever, when she asked him to watch for customers.

The transaction at the bank took very little time. The Campbells’ cashier’s check was deposited and a new cashier’s check cut in the amount she owed on the loan. Tommy Fowler saw her standing at the counter and came out to speak to her, his eyes anxious.

“How’re you doing, Evie?”

She heard the worry in his tone and managed a version of the same smile she had given the Campbells. “I’m okay. I have the money to pay the loan.”

Relief flooded his face. “Great! That didn’t take long. So another bank gave you the mortgage?”

“No, I sold my house.”

The relief faded, and he stared at her, aghast. “Sold your house? But, Evie… God, why?”

She wasn’t about to tell him, with the teller and other customers listening, that she suspected someone of blocking the mortgage. “It was something I’d been thinking about,” she lied. “Now my bank account is healthy, the marina is out of debt and will turn a pure profit, and I can take my time looking for another house.”

Varying expressions were flickering across Tommy’s face like slides. The final one, a rather uneasy relief, was testament to his belief in her pragmatic lie. “I guess it’s worked out, then,” he said.

She kept her smile intact with an effort. “Yeah, I guess it has.”

The teller handed the check over the counter to her, and she slipped it into the envelope. “I’m getting this mailed today,” she said to Tommy. “Thanks for all you did.”

“I didn’t manage to do anything,” he replied.

“Well, no, but you tried.”

She left the bank and drove straight to the post office, where the precious envelope was dispatched by express mail. She felt a sense of finality. It was done; she had gotten past this. It hadn’t been easy, but now she could move on.

Robert was waiting at the marina when she got back. “Where have you been?” he demanded, striding up as she slid out of the truck.

She blinked at the unguarded fierceness of his tone. Robert was seldom overt in his reactions, except in bed. “The bank and the post office. Why?”

He didn’t answer but caught her shoulders in a hard grasp and pulled her to him. His mouth was heavy and hungry, demanding rather than seducing a response from her. Evie made a muffled sound of surprise, her hands lifting to rest against his chest, but she gave him what he wanted, her mouth opening to admit the thrust of his tongue, her lips shaping to the pressure of his.

Passion rose sharply between them, strong and heady. She hadn’t recovered her balance after the difficult events of the day and she melted against him, drawn irresistibly to the whipcord strength of his body. Although a whirlwind was tossing the rest of her life about, he wasn’t swayed but remained solidly on his feet and in control. Though she had bitterly resisted—and feared—coming to depend on him, his very presence now made her feel better. She was both aroused and comforted by the familiarity of his body, his warm animal scent, all the subtle details by which she knew her mate.

He drew back, hampered by the public nature of the parking lot. Inside wouldn’t be much better, with people coming and going. He threaded his hands through her hair, tilting her face back so he could read every nuance of her expression. He must have been pleased by the drowning look of desire he saw there, for his fingers tightened on her scalp. “Not here, damn it. But as soon as I get you home…” He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Raw lust was on his face and in his voice, violent and intense.

Recalled to where she was, Evie cast a half-embarrassed look around and touched his hand as she slipped from his grasp. How many hours until they could go home? She didn’t know if she could wait that long. Her body was throbbing.

The long afternoon was an exercise in self-control, and she wished the summer days weren’t quite so long. She needed Robert, needed his driving presence within her, taking her into oblivion so she could forget everything but the almost narcotic pleasure of making love with him. She felt raw, her emotions sharp and too near the surface.

It was difficult, when she was finally able to close the marina that night, to hold to the schedule they had established. Robert wanted to take her straight to his house, but she resisted. “I don’t want to leave my truck here overnight,” she said. “You’d either have to bring me to pick it up in the morning or waste your morning hanging around so you could drive me to work.”

“It wouldn’t be a waste,” he growled, his lean face taut, and she knew what he envisioned them doing to pass the time.

Temptation weakened her, but she shook her head again. “It would be so blatant, if my truck was still here and you brought me to work. Craig—”

“You’re worried about Craig knowing that we sleep together?” he asked, amusement lighting his eyes. “He’s seventeen, sweetheart, not seven.”

“I know, but… this isn’t New York. We’re more conventional down here.”

He was still smiling, but he gave in with good grace. “All right, protect his tender sensibilities, though I have to tell you that most teenage boys have the sensibility of a rhino in heat.”

She laughed, and it felt good, her heart lightening. “Then let’s just say that I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

He kissed her forehead. “Then go home, sweetheart. I bought some fillets this afternoon, and I’ll get them ready to grill before I pick you up.”

“I have a better idea,” she said. “You start grilling, and I’ll drive over. That will save even more time.”

He smiled again as he rubbed his thumb over her lower lip in a gentle caress. “You make me feel like a teenage rhino myself,” he murmured, and she blushed.

Anticipation heated her blood as she drove home, preoccupying her so much that she showered and dressed without more than a twinge of sadness. Her heartbeat pounded in the rhythm of his name.

It was still hot, so hot that she couldn’t bear the idea of encasing her legs in clothing, but she didn’t want to wear shorts. She opted instead for a gauzy blue skirt and a sleeveless, scoop-necked chemise, with her breasts unconfined beneath. The floaty skirt was virtually transparent, clearly showing her legs, but allowed air to filter through the flimsy fabric and cool her skin. She would never have worn it out in public, but to Robert’s house… yes, definitely.

He came to the door when he heard the truck in his driveway. His face tightened as he watched her walk toward him. “God,” he muttered. As soon as she was inside, he slammed the door and caught her arm, pulling her rapidly down the hall to the bedroom.

“What about the steaks?” she cried, startled by his haste despite the pleasant frustration of the afternoon.

“Screw the steaks,” he said bluntly, wrapping his arms around her and falling across the bed. His heavy weight crushed her into the mattress. With a quick motion he flipped the skirt to her waist and caught the waistband of her panties, tugging them down her legs. When her feet were free, he tossed her underwear aside and pulled her thighs apart, kneeling between them.

Evie laughed, the sound low and provocative. He hadn’t even kissed her, and her entire body was throbbing. He was tearing at his belt buckle with impatient fingers, and she added her hands to the confusion, trying to find the tab of his zipper and pull it down. She could feel the hard, swollen ridge of his sex, pushing at his clothing. He granted as his length sprang free and lowered himself between her legs.

No matter how many times he took her, she always felt a small sense of surprise at his size and heat, and a flutter of uncertainty at the stretching sensation that followed the initial pressure as he sank deep within. She gasped, her entire body lifting to the impact. She was tender from the unbridled lovemaking of the morning, his thrusting sex rasping against inner tissues that were sensitive to the least touch. Intense pleasure rippled through her, tossing her unprepared into paroxysms of satisfaction. She cried out, her hands digging into his back as the shivery delight went on and on, past bearing, until she thought she would die if he didn’t let the pleasure ebb. He was muttering hotly in her ear, sex words, the sound indistinct but the meaning clear.

And then he shuddered, too, holding himself deep as the spasms took him. Afterward, he lay heavily on her, both of them breathing deeply in the exhausted aftermath. Drowsily she let her eyes drift shut, only to open them again as he suddenly chuckled, the small movement shaking them both. “Definitely like a teenager,” he murmured, nuzzling the lobe of her ear before taking it between his teeth and gently biting it. “No matter how often I have you, I want you again almost as soon as I move off you. The only time I’m satisfied is when we’re like this.” He thrust lazily, their bodies still linked.

“Then let’s stay like this.” She ran her hands down his muscular back, feeling the heat of him through the fabric of his shirt. “Someone will find us in a couple of weeks.”

He laughed and kissed her. “They’d probably think, wow, what a way to go, but I’d prefer both of us being warm and pliable. If I want to keep you that way, I suppose I’d better feed you, hadn’t I?” He kissed her again and rolled away to sit up.

She stretched, replete, the afternoon’s aching frustration relieved. Even the hollowness in her chest had faded, though by no means vanished. She had never had this before, she thought dimly, this bone-deep sense of connection. And she wouldn’t have it now if Robert had been less ruthlessly determined to have his way.

They spent the next couple of hours grilling the steaks, then sitting out on the deck after they had eaten and cleaned the kitchen. The night was thick and warm, the temperature still in the high eighties. Robert stretched out on a chaise longue and pulled Evie down on top of him. There were no lights on in the house, and the concealing darkness was like a blanket. They lay there in the heavy, peaceful silence, with his hand slowly moving over her back. Slowly his caresses grew more purposeful, and Evie melted against him. Her chemise top was lifted off over her head and dropped to the deck. She hadn’t put her underwear back on, so when his hand moved under the gauzy skirt, he touched only the bare flesh of her thighs and buttocks. He cupped the twin mounds in his hands and held her hard against him, nestling his arousal in the soft junction of her thighs.

“You have on too many clothes,” she murmured, kissing the underside of his jaw.

“You, on the other hand, hardly have on any.”

“Whose fault is that?” Her wandering mouth nibbled down his neck. “I was completely dressed when I arrived here.”

“I wouldn’t say that, sweetheart. Even if your nipples hadn’t been sticking out like little berries, the delicious jiggle of your breasts when you walked made it obvious you weren’t wearing anything under your top. And this thing,” he continued lazily, grasping a handful of material, “doesn’t qualify as a skirt.” Tiring of her mouth being on his throat rather than his own mouth, he pulled her up for a long kiss, during which his own clothing was opened and removed. Sighing with pleasure, she lifted the skirt out of the way and settled over him, gasping a little as he slid inside her.

Then they lay quietly again, bodies linked, content with the sensation as it was. The lights of a night fisherman drifted by on the lake, but they were shielded by the darkness. Sometime later it became difficult to lie still. Hidden impulses twinged deep inside, inviting undulating movement. She resisted, but knew he was feeling the same compulsion. He was growing even harder, reaching deeper into her, and a fine tension invaded his muscles as he lay motionless beneath her.

She pressed her forehead hard against his jaw, fighting not to move. He throbbed inside her, and she moaned softly. Her inner muscles clenched in helpless delight on his invading length, then did so again, and her soft cries floated in the night air as the moment took her. In an effort to control his own reaction, Robert gripped her bottom hard, his teeth clenched against the almost overwhelming need to give in. He won, but sweat beaded on his forehead from the struggle.

When she stilled, he lifted her from him and bent her over the end of the chaise. He knelt behind her, his thighs cupping hers, and thrust heavily into her moist, relaxed sheath. She clung to the chaise, unable to stifle her moans of pleasure as his rhythmic motion increased in speed and power. He convulsed, flooding her with warmth, and lay heavily over her for a long time, while his breathing slowed and his heartbeat returned to normal.

Recovered, he gathered their scattered clothing and pushed it into her arms, then lifted her and carried her inside, to the big bed that awaited them.

They slept late the next morning, until after nine o’clock. She yawned and stretched like a sleepy cat, and Robert held her close, stroking her tangled hair away from her face. As usual, he had awakened her at dawn with silent, drowsy lovemaking; then they had both gone back to sleep.

With a quick kiss and a lingering pat on her bare bottom, he left the bed and headed toward his shower. Evie yawned again and got up herself. She slipped into his shirt as she went to the kitchen to make coffee. “Robert, you need an automatic timer on your coffeemaker,” she muttered to herself as she scooped the coffee into the round filter. Not that they would ever remember to prepare the coffee and set the timer before they went to bed.

Standing there in the sun-drenched kitchen, listening to the coffeemaker pop and hiss, she became aware that she felt strangely light, almost carefree. She hugged herself in an effort to contain the elusive feeling. She was happy, she thought with some surprise. Despite selling the house, she was happy. She had saved the marina, and she had Robert. Most of all, she had Robert

Her love for him quietly grew each time she was with him. He was such a complicated, controlled, private man; no matter how often he made love to her, he still kept that inner core of himself inviolate, not allowing her or anyone else inside. Knowing that had no effect on the way she felt about him. He hadn’t opened his heart to her, but that in no way made him less worthy of love. He might never love her, she realized. But if this was all he could give a woman, then she would take it.

A ringing interrupted the quiet. It sounded like a telephone, but the phone mere in the kitchen definitely wasn’t ringing, and this sound was muffled, as if it were in a different room. The line in Robert’s office must be a different number, she realized. He was in the shower and wouldn’t be able to hear it. It rang only once, though, and she realized that the answering machine there must have picked up the call.

She walked down the hall to the office and opened the door. The whirring sound of the fax machine greeted her. So it hadn’t been a call, after all, but a fax.

The machine stopped whirring and lapsed into silence after having spat out only one sheet of paper. As she turned to go, her eye was caught by a name on the page, and curiously she turned back.

It was her name that had caught her attention.

The message was brief. “Mr. Horowitz just reported that a cashier’s check from E. Shaw, in full payment of the outstanding amount, was delivered by express mail and received by him. His hands are tied. Further instructions?” The scrawled signature looked like “F. Koury.”

Evie picked up the page and read it again. At first she was merely puzzled. Why would this F. Koury be telling Robert that she had paid the loan? And why would Mr. Horowitz be reporting it at all? Robert didn’t even know about the loan, much less the threat of foreclosure.

Her mind stopped, along with her breathing. She hung there, paralyzed by a sickening realization. Robert knew all about it because he was the one who had been blocking her efforts to mortgage the house. He was also the reason why her loan had been bought, and why Mr. Horowitz had been so intractable in demanding full payment. He had been instructed to give her no cooperation at all, instructed by Robert Cannon. Her lover was her enemy.

Her chest was hurting. She gasped and resumed breathing, but the pain remained, a cold, heavy lump in her chest. The sense of betrayal was suffocating.

Obviously Robert was far wealthier and more powerful than she had imagined, to have this much influence, she thought with detached calm. She didn’t know why he wanted her marina, but he obviously did. There were a lot of why’s she couldn’t comprehend, particularly right now. Maybe later, when she could think better, some of this would make sense.

Right now, all she could think was that Robert had tried to take over her marina and had cost her her home.

That distance she had sensed in him had been all too real. He hadn’t committed his heart because, for him, it had all been business. Had he seduced her simply so he could stay close and keep tabs on what she was doing? Given what else he had done, that seemed to her like a reasonable assumption.

Her lips felt numb, and her legs moved like an automaton’s as she left the office, carefully closing the door behind her. The damning fax was still in her hand as she returned to the kitchen.

The hopeless enormity of the situation overwhelmed her. How ironic that she had fallen in love with the man who was coolly trying to destroy her! Oh, she doubted he looked at it in such melodramatic terms, but then, he probably saw the whole thing as a successful business takeover, rather than a love affair.

She heard the shower cut off. With slow, achingly precise movements, she folded the fax and dropped it into the trash, then poured a cup of coffee. She desperately needed the caffeine, or anything, to bolster her. Her hands were shaking slightly as she lifted the cup to her lips.

She was standing in front of the window when Robert came into the kitchen a few moments later, wearing only a pair of jeans and still rubbing a towel across his chest. He stopped, his entire body clenching at the sight of her. God, she was breathtaking, with her mane of tawny gold hair loose and tousled. She was wearing only his shirt, and it was unbuttoned. There had never been another garment invented, he thought with a surge of desire, that looked better on a woman than a man’s shirt. She was sipping coffee and looking out the window, lost in thought, her expression as calm and remote as a statue’s.

He dropped the towel and went to her, sliding one arm around her as he took the cup and lifted it to his own lips. He imagined he could taste her on the rim, but then, his senses were so attuned to her that he could pick her out of a crowd blindfolded.

No woman had ever responded to him the way Evie did. She was pure fire in his arms, reveling in every thrust, tempting more from him. If he was gentle, she melted. If he was rough in his passion, she clung to him, clawed at him, her soaring desire feeding his own until they were both frenzied with need. He wanted her incessantly.

He smoothed his hand over the curve of her bottom, delighting in the silky texture of her flesh. “The shower’s all yours, sweetheart.”

“All right,” she said automatically, but he had the impression she didn’t really hear him. She was still looking out the window.

He tipped his head to see if he could tell what had her so interested. He saw only a wide expanse of lake, dotted with a few boats. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing. Just the lake.” She turned away from his embrace and left the kitchen.

Robert’s brows briefly knit in puzzlement, but he was hungry, and breakfast took precedence at the moment. He had scarcely gotten the bacon started when Evie reappeared in the kitchen, fully dressed, and with her keys in her hand.

“A fax came in while you were in the shower,” she said quietly.

He turned, going still at what he saw in her face—or rather, what he didn’t see. She was pale and expressionless, her eyes empty. With a chill, he remembered how Becky had described the look in Evie’s eyes after the accident and he knew it must have been something like this. She looked so terribly remote, as if she had somehow already left.

“Who was it from?” he asked, keeping his voice gentle while his mind raced, sorting through the possibilities, all of them damning. The worst-case scenario was if she was indeed working with Mercer and had found out that the trap was closing tight about them.

“An F. Koury.”

“Ah.” He nodded, concealing a sense of relief. “My secretary.” Probably it had nothing to do with Mercer, then, but why was Evie looking so frozen?

“It’s there in the trash, if you want to read it, but I can tell you what it said.”

He leaned against the cabinet and crossed his arms, eyeing her carefully. “All right. Tell me.”

“Mr. Horowitz notified your secretary that he’d received a cashier’s check from E. Shaw for payment in full of the loan, and that his hands were tied. She asked for further instructions.”

Robert’s expression didn’t change, but inwardly he was swearing viciously. Of all the things for Evie to stumble onto! It was less damaging, from a security standpoint, than anything connected with Mercer would have been, but a hell of a thing to try to explain to a lover. He’d never intended her to know about it. The pressure had been real, but he would never have let it go to foreclosure. He didn’t rush into explanations but waited for her reaction so he could better gauge what to say to her. And how in hell had she managed to get the money to pay the loan?

“You’re the reason I couldn’t get a mortgage on my house,” she said, her voice so strained it was almost soundless.

She’d put it together quickly, he thought. But then, from the beginning, she’d proven herself to be uncomfortably astute. “Yes,” he said, disdaining to lie.

“You’re behind the loan being sold to another bank in the first place.”

He inclined his head and waited.

She was gripping the keys so tightly that her fingers were white. He noted that small giveaway of emotion held in check. She took several shallow breaths, then managed to speak again. “I want your boat gone from my marina by the end of the day. I’ll refund the balance of the rent.”

“No,” he said gently, implacably. “I’m holding you to the agreement.”

She didn’t waste her breath on an argument she couldn’t win. She had hoped he would have the decency to do as she asked, but given his ruthless streak, she hadn’t really expected it.

“Then leave it there,” she said, her voice as empty as her eyes. “But don’t call me again, because I don’t want to talk to you. Don’t come by, because I don’t want to see you.”

Sharply he searched her expression, looking for a way to penetrate the wall she had thrown up between them. “You won’t get rid of me that easily. I know you’re angry, but—”

She laughed, but it was raw and hollow, not a sound of amusement. Robert winced. “Is that how you’ve decided to ‘handle’ me? I can see you watching me, trying to decide which angle to take to calm me down,” she said. “You never just react, do you? You watch and weigh other people’s reactions so you can manipulate them.” She heard the strain in her voice and paused to regain control of it. “No, I’m not angry. Maybe in fifty years or so, it’ll just be anger.” She turned on her heel and started for the door.

“Evie!” His voice cracked like a whiplash, and despite herself, she stopped, shivering at the force of will he commanded. This wasn’t the cool strategist speaking but the ruthless conqueror.

“How did you pay off the loan?” The words were still sharp.

Slowly she looked at him over her shoulder, her eyes dark and unguarded for a moment, stark with pain. “I sold my house,” she said, and walked out.

Chapter Seventeen

Robert started to go after her, then stopped. Instead he swore and hit the countertop with his fist. He couldn’t explain anything to her, not yet. Every instinct in his body screamed for him to stop her, but he forced himself to let her go. He stood rigidly, listening as the truck door slammed and the motor started. She didn’t spin the wheels or anything like that; she simply backed out of the driveway and drove away without histrionics.

God! She had sold her house. The desperation of the action staggered him, and with sudden, blinding clarity he knew, beyond the faintest doubt, that she wasn’t involved with Mercer in any way. A woman who could make money by espionage would never have sold her home to pay a debt. She had appeared to be leaving the marina and meeting with Mercer on the lake, but it must have been nothing more than damnable coincidence. Evie was totally innocent, and his machinations had cost her her home.

She wouldn’t listen to anything he said right now, but after he had the espionage ring broken up and Mercer safely behind bars, he would force her to understand why he had threatened foreclosure on her loan. That he had suspected her of espionage was another rocky shoal he would have to navigate with care. He didn’t imagine it would be easy to get back into her good graces, but in the end he would have her, because he didn’t take no for an answer when he really wanted something. And he wanted Evie as he had never wanted anything or anyone else in his life.

He would have to make amends, of course, far beyond apologies and explanations. Evie was the least mercenary person he’d ever met, but she had a strong sense of justice, and an offer of reparation would strike a chord with her. He could buy her house from the new owners—they probably wouldn’t be willing to sell at first, but he cynically suspected that doubling the price would change their minds—and present her with the deed, but he far preferred that she have a newer, bigger house. The simplest thing would be to deed over his own house to her. It meant nothing to him, he could buy a house anywhere he wanted, but Evie needed a base that was hers and hers alone. It would be a vacation home, a getaway when they needed a break from the hubbub of New York, a place for her to stay when she wanted to visit Becky.

He fished the damning fax out of the trash and read it. Three concise sentences, Felice at her most efficient. There was nothing more he could do about the loan; realizing that, she had deprioritized it and sent the information by fax so he could have it immediately but respond at his leisure, rather than calling and wasting both his time and hers. Felice was a genius at whittling precious seconds here and there so she would have more time to devote to the truly important matters. In this instance, however, her knack for superefficiency had worked against him and perhaps cost him Evie.

No. No matter what, he wouldn’t let Evie go.

Evie drove automatically, holding herself together with desperate control. She tried to empty her mind, but it wasn’t possible. How could she be so numb but hurt so much at the same time? She literally ached, as if she had been beaten, yet felt somehow divorced from her body. She had never felt as remote as she did now, or as cold and hollow. The heat of the sun washed over her, but it didn’t touch her. Even her bones felt cold and empty.

Why? She hadn’t asked him that and couldn’t think of a reason that would matter. The why of it wasn’t important. The hard fact was that he had sought her out for a reason that had nothing to do with love or even attraction, used the intimacy he had deliberately sought as a means to gather information that he wanted, and men turned that knowledge against her. How had he known about the loan in the first place? She supposed it was possible a credit report would have given him the information, but a far more likely explanation was that he had simply taken a look through the papers in her desk at home. There had been ample opportunity for him to do so; the very first time he had been in her house, she remembered, was when he had brought her home to change clothes after Jason had fallen in the water, and she had left him alone while she showered and changed.

She didn’t know why he had targeted her marina, and she didn’t care. She marked it down to simple avarice, the greedy impulse to take what belonged to others.

She hadn’t known him at all.

She was still calm and dry-eyed when she reached her house. No—not her house any longer, but the Campbells’. Dazed, she unlocked the door and walked inside, looked at the familiar form and content of her home, and bolted for the bathroom. She hung over the toilet and vomited up the little coffee she had swallowed, but the dry, painful heaves continued long after her stomach was emptied.

When the spasms finally stopped, she slumped breathless to the floor. She had no idea how long she lay there, in a stupor of exhaustion and pain, but after a while she began to cry. She curled into a ball, tucking her legs up in an effort to make herself as small as possible, and shuddered with the violent, rasping sobs that tore through her. She cried until she made herself sick and vomited again.

It was a long time before she climbed shakily to her feet. Her eyelids were swollen and sore, but she was calm, so calm and remote that she wondered if she would ever be able to feel anything again. God, she hoped not!

She stripped, dropping her clothes to the floor. She would throw them out later; she never wanted to see that skirt again, or any other garment she had worn that night. She was shivering as she climbed into the shower, where she stood for a long time, letting the hot water beat down on her, but the heat sluiced off her skin just like the water, none of it soaking in to thaw the bone-deep cold that shook her.

She would have stood there all day, paralyzed by the mind-numbing pain, but at last the hot water began to go and the chill forced her out. She wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed, close her eyes and forget, but that wasn’t an option. She wouldn’t forget. She would never forget. She could stay in the shower forever, but it wouldn’t wash his touch off her flesh or his image out of her mind.

He had never wanted her at all. He had wanted the marina.

The marina. Her mind fastened on it with desperate gratitude. She still had the marina, had salvaged something from the ruin Robert Cannon had made of her life. No matter how much damage he had done, he hadn’t won.

The habits of years took over as she moved slowly about, getting ready to go to work. After towel-drying her hair, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror to brush out the tangles and braid it. Her own face looked back at her, white and blank, her eyes dark, empty pools. Losing Matt had been devastating, but she had carried the knowledge of his love deep inside. This time she had nothing. The care Robert had shown her had been an illusion, carefully fostered to deceive her. The passion between them, at least on his part, had been nothing more than a combination of mere sex and his own labyrinthine plotting. The man could give lessons to Machiavelli.

He had destroyed the protective shield that had encased her for so many years. She had thought she couldn’t bear any more pain, but now she was learning that her capacity for pain went far beyond imagination. She wouldn’t die from it, after all; she would simply rebuild the shield, stronger than before, so that it could never be penetrated again. It would take time, but she had time; she had the rest of her life to remember Robert Cannon and how he had used her.

She hid her sore, swollen eyes behind a pair of sunglasses and carefully drove to the marina, not wanting to have an accident because she wasn’t paying attention. She refused to die in a car accident and give Cannon the satisfaction of winning.

When she drove up to the marina, everything looked strangely normal. She sat in the truck, staring at it for a few seconds, bewildered by the sameness of it. So much had happened in such a short time that it seemed as if she had been gone for weeks, rather than overnight. No matter what, she still had this.

Robert prowled the house like a caged panther, enraged by the need to wait. Waiting was alien to him; his instinct was to make a cold, incisive decision and act on it. The knowledge of the pain Evie must be feeling, and what she must be thinking, ate at him like acid. He could make it up to her for the house, but could he heal the hurt? Every hour he was away from her, every hour that passed with her thinking he had betrayed her, would deepen the wound. Only the certainty that she would refuse to listen to him now kept him from going after her. When Mercer was in jail, when he had the proof of what he’d been doing and could tell her the why, then she would listen to him. She might slap his face, but she would listen.

It was almost three o’clock when the phone rang. “Mercer’s moving early,” his operative barked. “He panicked and called them from the office. No dead drop this time. He told them that he needed the money immediately. It’s a live handoff, sir. We can catch the bastards red-handed!”

“Where is he now?”

“About halfway to Guntersville, the way he was driving. We have a tail on him. I’m on the way, but it’ll take me another twenty-five minutes to get there.”

“All right. Use the tracking device and get there as fast as you can. I’ll go to the marina now and get ahead of him. He’s never seen my boat, so he won’t spot me.”

“Be careful, sir. You’ll be outnumbered until we can get there.”

Robert smiled grimly as he hung up the phone. Everything he needed was in the boat: weapons, camera, binoculars and tape recorder. Mercer’s ass was in a sling now.

He drove to the marina, ignoring the speed laws. He only hoped Evie wouldn’t come out when she saw him and do something foolish like cause a scene. He didn’t have time for it, and he sure as hell didn’t want to attract any attention. He tried to imagine Evie causing a scene, but the idea was incongruous. No, she wouldn’t do that; it wasn’t her style at all. She would simply look through him as if he didn’t exist. But when he reached the marina, he didn’t take any chances. He went straight to the dock where his boat was moored, not even glancing at the office.

Evie heard him drive up. She knew the sound of that Jeep as intimately as she knew her own heartbeat. She froze, trying to brace herself for the unbearable, but the seconds ticked past and the door didn’t open. When she forced herself to turn and look out the window, she caught a glimpse of his tall, lean figure striding purposefully down the dock toward his boat. A minute later she heard the deep cough of the powerful motor, and the sleek black boat eased out of its slip. As soon as he was out of the Idle Speed Only zone, he shoved the throttle forward, and the nose of the boat rose like a rearing stallion as the craft shot over the water, gaining speed with every second.

She couldn’t believe how much it hurt just to see him.

Landon Mercer walked in ten minutes later. Loathing rose in her throat, choking her, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming at him. Today, though, there was none of the slimy come-on attitude he thought was so irresistible; he was pale, his face strained. He was wearing slacks and a white dress shirt, the collar unbuttoned. Sweat beaded on his forehead and upper lip. He carried the same tackle box, but no rod and reel.

“Got a boat for me, Evie?” he asked, trying to smile, but it was little more than a grimace.

She chose a key and gave it to him. “Use the one on the end.”

“Thanks. I’ll pay you when I get back, okay?” He was already going out the door when he spoke.

Something in her snapped. It was a quiet snap, but suddenly she had had enough. Mercer was definitely up to no good, and today he hadn’t even made the pretense of going fishing. The marina was all she had left, and if that bastard was dealing drugs and dragged her into it by using her boats, she might lose the marina after all.

Over her dead body.

It was too much, all the events of the day piling on top of her. She wasn’t thinking when she strode out to the truck and retrieved her pistol from under the seat, then hurried to her own boat. If she had been thinking, she would have called the police or the water patrol, but none of that came to mind. Still reeling from shock, she could focus on only one thing—stopping Mercer.

Robert had positioned his boat where he could see Mercer leave the marina and fall in behind him without attracting his notice. The tracking device was working perfectly, the beeping increasing in speed as Mercer approached his position, then decreasing as the rental boat sped past. Not wanting to get too close and scare off the people Mercer was meeting, he started the motor and began idling forward, letting Mercer put more distance between them.

Another boat was coming up fast on the left, intersecting his path at a right angle. There was enough space that Robert didn’t have to back off his speed, and he kept his eye on the diminishing dot on Mercer’s boat. Then the other boat flashed across his line of vision, and he saw a long blond braid bouncing as the boat took the waves.

Evie! His heart leapt into his throat, almost choking him. Her appearance stunned him; then, suddenly, he knew. She was following Mercer! That was what she’d been doing all along. With that unsettling intuition of hers, she had known that Mercer was up to no good and had taken it upon herself to try to find out what it was. He even knew her reasoning: by using one of her boats, Mercer was involving her marina. Robert knew better than most to what lengths she would go to protect that place. She would give up her home, and she would risk her life.

Swearing savagely, he picked up the secure phone and punched in the number even as he pushed the throttle forward. “Evie is following Mercer,” he snarled when the call was answered on half a ring. “She’s on our side. Pass the word and make damn sure no one fires on her by mistake!”

His blood ran cold at the thought. None of his people would shoot at her, but what about the others?

* * * * *

Mercer was heading toward the islands again, as she had known he would. She kept about five hundred yards between them, enough distance that her presence wouldn’t worry him, at least not yet. She would close the gap in a hurry when he reached the islands and slowed down.

The pistol lay in her lap. It was a long-barreled .45 caliber, very accurate, and she not only had a license to carry it, she knew how to use it. Whatever Mercer was doing, it was going to stop today.

There was another boat anchored between two of the smaller islands, two men inside it. Mercer didn’t take his usual circuitous route around and through the islands, but headed straight toward the other boat. Grimly Evie increased her speed and followed.

Mercer pulled up alongside the other boat and immediately passed the tackle box over. Evie saw one of the men point to her as she neared, and Mercer turned to look. She wasn’t wearing a hat or sunglasses, and though her hair was braided, she knew she was easily recognizable as a woman. But she didn’t care if Mercer recognized her, because the time for stealth was past.

The fact that she was a woman, and alone, made them less cautious than they should have been. Mercer was standing, his feet braced against the gentle rocking of the boat. Confident that they hadn’t been caught doing anything suspicious, he said something in a low tone to the two other men, then raised his voice to call to her. “Evie, is something wrong?”

She waved to allay any suspicions. She was still twenty yards away. She eased the throttle into neutral, knowing that the boat would continue nosing forward for several yards even without power. Then, very calmly, she lifted the pistol and pointed it at the man holding the tackle box.

“Don’t make me nervous,” she said. “Put the tackle box down.”

The man hesitated, darting a petrified look at his partner, who was still behind the wheel of the boat. Mercer was frozen, staring at her and the huge pistol in her hand.

“Evie,” he said, his voice shaking a little. “Listen, we’ll cut you in. There’s a hell of a lot of money—”

She ignored him. “I told you to put the box down,” she said to the man who was holding it. Her mind still wasn’t functioning clearly. All she could think was that if he dropped the tackle box into the river, the evidence would sink and there wouldn’t be any way of proving what he was doing. She had no idea how she would manage to get three men and three different boats to the authorities, but there was a lot of boat traffic on the river this afternoon, and eventually someone would come over this way.

Another boat was coming up behind her already, way too fast. Mercer’s attention switched to it, and a sick look spread over his face, but Evie didn’t let her attention waver from the man holding the tackle box. A sleek black boat appeared in her peripheral vision, nosing up to the side of the boat holding the two men. Robert rose from the seat, holding the steering wheel steady with his knee as he leveled a pistol on the three men, his two-fisted grip holding the weapon dead level despite the rocking of the boat.

“Don’t even twitch a muscle,” he said, and the tone of his voice made Evie risk a quick glance at him. The facade of urbanity had fallen completely away, and he made no attempt now to disguise his true nature. The lethal pistol in his hand looked like a natural extension of his arm, as if he had handled weapons so often it was automatic to him now. His face was hard and set, and his eyes held the cold ferocity of a hunting panther.

The waves made by Robert’s boat were washing the others closer together, inexorably sweeping Evie’s boat forward to collide with them. “Look out,” she warned sharply, dropping one hand to the throttle to put her motor into reverse, to counteract the force of the waves. The two other boats bumped together with staggering force, sending Mercer plunging into the river. The man holding the tackle box cursed and flailed his arms, fighting for balance, and dropped the box. It fell into the bottom of the boat. Robert’s attention was splintered, and in that instant the driver of the boat reached beneath the console and pulled out his own weapon, firing as soon as he had it clear. Evie screamed, her heart stopping as she tried to bring her pistol around. Robert ducked to the side, and the bullet tore a long gouge out of the fiberglass hull. Going down on one knee, he fired once, and the driver fell back, screaming in pain.

The second man dived sideways into the rental boat. Mercer was clinging to the side, screaming in panic as the man hunched low in the boat and turned the ignition key. The motor coughed into life, and the boat leapt forward. Knowing she couldn’t get a good shot at a moving target, especially with her own boat still rocking, Evie dropped the pistol and shoved the throttle back into forward gear. The two boats collided with a grinding force that splintered the fiberglass of both craft, her more powerful motor shoving her boat on top of the other. The impact tossed her out of the seat, and she hit the water with a force that knocked her senseless.

She recovered consciousness almost immediately but was dazed by the shock. She was underwater, the surface only a lighter shade of murky green. There was a great roaring in her ears, and a vibration that seemed to go straight through her. Boats, she thought dimly, and terror shot through her as she realized how much danger she was in. If the drivers couldn’t see her, they might drive right over her, and the propeller would cut her to pieces.

She clawed desperately for the surface, kicking for all she was worth. Her head cleared the water, and she gulped in air, but there was a boat almost on top of her, and she threw herself to the side. Someone in the boat yelled, and she heard Robert’s deep voice roaring, but she couldn’t understand his words. Her ears were full of water, and dizziness made everything dim. If she passed out, she thought, she would drown. She blinked the water out of her eyes and saw the wreckage of the two boats, not five yards away. She struggled toward it and shakily hooked her arm over the side of the rental boat. It was very low in the water and would probably sink within half an hour, but for now it was afloat, and that was all that mattered.

The boat that had almost hit her was idling closer. Two men were in it, dressed in jeans and T-shirts. The driver brought the boat around sideways to her, and the other man leaned out, his arm outstretched to her. The sunlight glinted off a badge pinned to the waistband of his jeans. Evie released the rental boat and swam the few feet to the other craft. The man caught her arms, and she was hauled out of the water and into the boat.

She sank down onto the floor. The man knelt beside her. His voice was anxious. “Are you all right, Mrs. Shaw?”

She was panting from exertion, gulping air in huge quantities, so she merely nodded. She wasn’t hurt, just dazed from the impact, so dazed that it was a minute before she could wonder how he knew her name.

“She’s okay!” she heard him yell.

Gradually her confusion faded, and things began to sort themselves out. She remained quietly in the bottom of the boat, propped against one of the seats, and watched as the two men in the water were hauled out and roughly handcuffed, and the man Robert had shot was given medical aid. Though pale and hunched over, he was still upright and conscious, so Evie assumed he would live.

Four more boats had arrived, each of them carrying a team of two men, and all of those men wore badges, either pinned to their jeans or hung around their necks. She heard one of them briskly identify himself to Mercer as FBI and assumed that they all were.

Other boats who had seen the commotion on the water were approaching but stopped at a short distance when they noticed the badges. “Y’all need any help with those boats?” one fisherman called. “We can keep ‘em afloat and haul ‘em to a marina, if you want.”

She saw one agent glance at Robert, as if for permission, then say, “Thanks, we’d appreciate your help.” Several of the fishermen idled forward and added their boats to the snarl.

Evie resisted the urge to look at Robert, though she could feel his hard, glittering gaze on her several times. For the rest of her life she would remember the cold terror she’d felt when that man had shot at him and she had thought she would have to watch another man she loved die in front of her. The devastation she’d been feeling all day, bad as it was, paled in comparison to that horror. Robert didn’t want her, had used her, but at least he was alive. Reaction was setting in, and fine tremors were starting to ripple through her body.

The mopping-up seemed to take forever, so long that her sopping clothes began to dry, as stiff as cardboard from the river water. The wounded man was placed in another boat and taken for further medical attention, with two agents in attendance. Mercer and the other man were taken away next, both of them handcuffed. There was a lot of maneuvering around the two wrecked boats as the salvaging continued. Gathering her strength, she took control of the boat she was in, while the driver added his efforts to the job. Finally, though, it all seemed to be winding down. Robert brought his boat alongside the one Evie was handling.

“Are you all right?” he asked sharply.

She didn’t look at him. “I’m fine.”

He raised his voice. “Lee, get this boat. I’m taking Evie back to the marina.”

Immediately the agent clambered back into the boat, and Evie relinquished her place behind the wheel. She didn’t want to go anywhere with Robert, however, and looked around for anyone else she knew.

“Get in the boat,” he said, his voice steely, and rather than make a fool of herself, she did. There was no way to avoid him, if he was determined to force the issue. If he wanted to discuss private matters, then she would prefer that they were private when he did.

Nothing was said on the ride back to the marina. The black boat moved like oiled silk over the choppy waves, but still every small bump jolted her head. She closed her eyes, trying to contain the nausea rising in her throat.

As Robert throttled down to enter the marina, he glanced over at her and swore as he took in her closed eyes and pale, strained face. “Damn it, you are hurt!”

Immediately she opened her eyes and stared resolutely ahead. “It’s just reaction.”

Coming down off an adrenaline high could leave a person feeling weak and sick, so he accepted the explanation for now but made a mental note to keep an eye on her for a while.

He idled the boat into his slip, and Evie climbed onto the dock before he could get out and assist her. True daughter of the river that she was, she automatically tied the lines to the hooks set in the wood, the habits of a lifetime taking precedence over her emotions. The boat secured, she turned without a word and headed toward the office.

Burt was behind the counter when she entered, and a look of intense relief crossed his lined face, followed by surprise and then concern when he saw her condition. It went against his grain to ask personal questions, so the words came reluctantly out of his throat, as if he were forcing them. “Did the boat flip? Are you all right?”

Two questions in a row from Burt? She needed to mark this date on her calendar. “I’m all right, just a little shaken up,” she said, wondering how many more times that day she would have to say those words. “The boat’s wrecked, though. Some guys are bringing it in.”

Robert opened the door behind her, and Burt’s expression went full cycle, back to relief. “I’ll get back to the shop, then. How long do you reckon it’ll take ‘em to get the boat here?”

“About an hour,” Robert answered for her. “They’ll have to idle in.” He went to the soft-drink machine and fed in quarters, then pushed the button. With a clatter, the bottle rolled down into the slot, and he deftly popped off the top.

“Well, don’t make no difference. I reckon I’ll stay until they get here.” Burt left the unnatural surroundings of the office and headed back to where he felt most comfortable, leaving the oily smell of grease behind.

Evie walked behind the counter and sat down, wanting to put something between herself and Robert. It didn’t work, of course; he knew all the moves, all the stratagems. He came behind the counter, too, and propped himself against it with his long legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle.

He held out the Coke. “Drink this. You’re a little shocky and need the sugar.”

He was probably right. She shrugged and took the bottle, remembering another time when she’d been fished out of the water, and how he had insisted she drink very sweet coffee. The last thing she wanted to do was faint at his feet, so she tilted the bottle and drank.

He watched until he was satisfied that she was going to follow his orders, then said, “Mercer was manager of my computer programming firm in Huntsville. We’ve been working on programs for the space station, as well as other things, and the programs are classified. They began turning up where they shouldn’t. We figured out that Mercer was the one who was stealing them, but we hadn’t managed to catch him at it, so we didn’t have any proof.”

“So that’s what was in the tackle box,” she said, startled. “Not dope. Computer disks.”

His dark eyebrows rose. “You thought he was a drug dealer?”

“That seemed as plausible as anything. You can’t sneak up on anyone in the middle of the river. He must have been weighting the package and dropping it in a shallow spot between the islands, and the others were picking it up later.”

“Exactly. But if you thought he was a drug dealer,” he said, his voice going dangerously smooth, “why in hell did you follow him today?”

“The federal seizure law,” she replied simply. “He was in my boat. I could have lost everything. At the very least, he could have given the marina a bad reputation and driven away business.”

And she would do anything to protect the marina, he thought furiously, including sell her house. Of course she hadn’t balked at following a man she suspected of being a drug dealer! She had been armed, but his blood ran cold at the thought of what could have happened. She had been outnumbered three to one. In all honesty, however, she had had the situation under control until the waves from his boat had washed them all together.

“You could have killed yourself, deliberately ramming the boat like that.”

“There wasn’t much speed involved,” she said. “And my boat was bigger. I was more afraid of the gas tanks exploding, but they’re in the rear, so I figured they’d be okay.”

She hadn’t had time to consider all that, he thought; her reaction had been instantaneous and had nearly given him a heart attack. But a lifetime spent around boats had given her the knowledge needed to make such a judgment call. She hadn’t known that reinforcements were almost there, she had simply seen that one of them was about to escape, and she had stopped him. Robert didn’t know if she was courageous or foolhardy or both.

She still hadn’t so much as glanced at him, and he knew he had his work cut out for him. Carefully choosing his words, he said, “I’ve been working with the FBI and some of my own surveillance people to set a trap for Mercer. I soured some deals he had made, put some financial pressure on him, to force him to make a move.”

It didn’t take more explanation than that. Watching her face, he saw her sort through the implications and the nuances of what he had just said, and he knew the exact moment when she realized he had also suspected her. A blank shield descended over her features. “Just like you did with me,” she murmured. “You thought I was working with him, because he was using my boats, and because I’d been following him, trying to find out what he was doing.”

“It didn’t take me long to decide that if you were involved at all, you probably didn’t realize what was going on. But you kept doing suspicious things, just enough that I didn’t dare relax my pressure on you.”

“What sort of suspicious things?” she asked, a note of disbelief entering her flat tone.

“Leaving the marina in the middle of the day to follow him. The day before yesterday, when you left the bank, you immediately stopped at a pay phone and made a call that we couldn’t monitor. Yesterday you led the guy following you all over Guntersville, then ditched him by making an abrupt turn across traffic, and we weren’t able to find you again until you came to work.”

Evie laughed, but the sound was bitter and disbelieving. “All that! It’s amazing how a suspicious mind can see suspicious actions everywhere. When the mortgage was turned down a second time, I realized there had to be someone behind it, someone who was blocking the loans. I couldn’t lose the marina. The only thing left to do was sell the house, and I knew if I didn’t make the call right then, I’d lose my nerve. So I stopped at the first pay phone I came to and called some people who have tried several times to buy the house, to see if they were still interested. They were so interested that they decided to pay me immediately rather than take a chance that I’d change my mind.

“Yesterday,” she said softly, “I was looking for a place to live. But I knew I was just dithering, and that the longer I put it off, the worse it would be. So I made a quick turn, drove to an apartment complex and rented an apartment.”

Yes, he thought, watching her colorless face. A quick, sharp pain was better than endless agony. Innocent actions based on desperate decisions.

She shrugged. “I thought you wanted the marina. I couldn’t figure out why. It means a lot to me, but if you were looking for a business investment, there are bigger, more profitable ones around. Instead, you thought I was a traitor, and what better way to keep tabs on me than to start a bogus relationship and push it until we were practically living together?”

This was the tricky part, he thought. “It wasn’t bogus.”

“The moon isn’t round, either,” she replied, and turned to look out the windows at her kingdom, saved at such cost to herself.

“I wasn’t going to go through with the foreclosure,” he said. “It was just a means of pressure. Even if you’d been guilty, I’d already decided to prevent them from prosecuting you.”

“How kind of you,” she murmured.

He uncrossed his ankles and left the support of the counter, moving until he was directly in front of her. He put his hands on her shoulders, warmly squeezing. “I know you’re hurt and angry, but until Mercer was caught, I didn’t dare ease up on the pressure.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Thank God,” he said, closing his eyes in relief.

She shrugged, her shoulders moving under his hands. “National security is more important than hurt feelings. You couldn’t have done anything else.”

The flat note was still in her voice. He opened his eyes and saw that he hadn’t cleared all the hurdles. The issue of the house was still between them.

“I’m sorry about your house,” he said gently. “I would never have let you sell it if I’d known that was what you were planning.” He cupped her cheek with one hand, feeling the warm silkiness of her skin under his fingers. “I can’t get your house back, but I can give you mine. I’m having the deed made over in your name.”

She stiffened and jerked her face away from his hand. “No, thank you,” she said coldly, standing up and turning to stare out the window, her back to him.

Of course she had jumped to the wrong conclusion, he thought, annoyed with himself that he had brought up the house before settling the other issue. “It isn’t charity,” he said in a soothing tone, putting his hand on the nape of her neck and gently rubbing the tense muscles he found there. “It isn’t even much of a gesture, come to that, since it will be staying in the family. Evie, sweetheart, will you marry me? I know you love it here, but we can compromise. I won’t take you completely away from your family. We can use the house for vacations. We’ll come down every summer for a long vacation, and of course we’ll visit several times during the year.”

She pulled away from him and turned to face him. If she had been white before, she was deathly pale now. Her golden brown eyes were flat and lusterless, and with a chill he remembered how Becky had said she’d looked after Matt had died. What he saw in Evie’s eyes was an emotional wasteland, and it froze him to the bone.

“Just like everything else, your compromises are heavily in your favor,” she said, a rawness in her voice that made him flinch. “I have a better one than that. Why don’t you stay in New York, and I’ll stay here, and that way we’ll both be a lot happier.”

“Evie…” He paused, forced himself to take a deep breath and reached for control. She was wildly off balance, of course, with everything that had happened today. She loved him, and he had hurt her. Somehow he had to convince her to trust him again.

“No!” she said violently. “Don’t try to decide how you’re going to manipulate me into doing what you want. You’re too intelligent for your own good, and too damn subtle. Nothing really reaches you, does it?” She spread her hands far apart and gestured. “You’re over here, and everyone else is way over here, and never the twain shall meet. Nobody and nothing gets close to you. You’re willing to marry me, but nothing would change. You’d still keep yourself closed off, watching from the distance and pulling strings to make all the puppets do what you want What I had with Matt was real, a relationship with a person instead of a facade! What makes you think I’d settle for what you’re offering?” She stopped, shuddering, and it was a moment before she could speak again. “Go away, Robert.”

Chapter Eighteen

Evie’s absence left a great, gaping hole in his life. Robert had never before in his life missed a woman or let one assume enough importance to him that he was lonely without her, but that was the predicament he found himself in now. After her flat rejection of his marriage proposal, he’d returned to New York the next day and immediately taken up the threads of his business concerns, but the social whirl he had enjoyed before seemed simultaneously too frantic and too boring. He didn’t want to attend the opera or the endless parade of dinner parties; he wanted to sit out on the deck in the warm, fragrant night, listening to the murmur of the river and enjoying the array of stars scattered across the black sky. He wanted to lie naked on the chaise with Evie, motionless, their bodies linked, until their very stillness was unbearably erotic and they both shattered with pleasure.

Sex had always been a controlled but extremely important part of his life, but now he found himself unresponsive to the lures cast his way. His sex drive hadn’t abated; it was driving him crazy. But he didn’t want the controlled pleasure he’d known before, his mind staying remote from his body. He hadn’t been remote when he’d made love with Evie, and several times he hadn’t been controlled, either. Having her naked under him, thrusting into her tight, unbelievably hot sheath, and feeling her turn into pure flame in his arms…

The carnal image brought him to full arousal, and he lunged to his feet to prowl restlessly around the apartment, swearing between his teeth with every step. Nothing else made him hard these days, but just the thought of Evie could do it. He wanted her, and her absence was like acid, eating away at his soul.

He still couldn’t decide what had gone wrong. He sensed the answer, but it was an ethereal thing, always floating just beyond his comprehension. His inability to understand the problem was as frustrating, in its own way, as his hunger for Evie. He had always been able to grasp nuances, see clearly to the crux of any problem, with a speed that left others in the dust. Now it was as if his brain had failed him, and the thought infuriated him.

It wasn’t the house. As much as that had hurt her, she had understood his explanation; he had seen that in her eyes. Balanced against national security, her house was nothing, and she had believed him when he’d told her that he’d never intended to go through with the foreclosure. It was a dreadful miscalculation on his part, and though it chafed that he had made such a mistake, Evie had made a move that no one could have anticipated. Mortgage the house, yes, but not sell it. He was still stunned by the solution she had chosen.

But she had forgiven him for that, had even forgiven him for suspecting that she might be a traitor.

Why in hell, then, had she refused to marry him? The expression in her eyes still haunted him, and he lay awake nights aching with the need to put the glow back into her face. His golden, radiant Evie had looked like… ashes.

She loved him. He knew that as surely as he knew his heart beat in his chest. And still she had turned him down. “Go away, Robert,” she’d said, and the finality in her voice had stunned him. So he had gone away, and he felt as if, every day away from her, he died a little more.

Madelyn had called several times, and she was becoming insistent that he come to Montana for a visit. Knowing his sister as he did, he was ruefully aware that he had maybe two more days to get out there before she turned up on his doorstep, holding one toddler by the hand and the other balanced on her hip, a ruthless expression in those lazy gray eyes. She knew him well enough to sense that something was wrong, and she wouldn’t rest until she knew what it was. Her determination had been a fearsome thing when she’d been a child, and it had gotten worse as she’d grown older.

Robert swore in frustration, then made a swift decision. Other than Evie, Madelyn was the most astute woman he knew. Maybe, as a woman, she could put her finger on the reason that was eluding him. He called Madelyn to let her know he was coming.

With the time difference, it was still early the next morning when his plane landed in Billings. The ranch was another hundred and twenty miles, and had its own airstrip, so he had long since developed the habit of renting a small plane and flying the rest of the way, rather than making the long drive. As he banked to align the Cessna with the runway, he saw Madelyn’s four-wheel drive Explorer below; she was leaning against the hood, her long hair lifting in the breeze. The color of her hair was lighter and cooler than Evie’s tawny-blond mane, but still his heart squeezed at the similarity.

He landed the plane and taxied it close to the vehicle. As he cut the engine, he could see the two lively little boys bouncing in the cargo area, and a rueful smile touched his eyes. He had missed the little hooligans. He wanted some of his own.

As he crossed the pavement, Madelyn came to meet him, her lazy stroll fluid and provocative. “Thank God you’re here,” she said. “The imps of Satan have been driving me crazy since I told them you were coming. Did you know that when a one-year-old says Uncle Robert, it sounds remarkably like Ali Baba? I’ve heard it fifteen thousand times in the past hour, so I’m an expert.”

“Dear God,” he murmured, looking past her to where the two imps of Satan were shrieking what was undoubtedly their version of his name.

She went up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek and he hugged her to him. Something guarded inside him always relaxed when he set foot on the ranch. The sense of nature was much closer here, just as it had been in Alabama.

Madelyn waited until after lunch before broaching the subject he knew had been eating her alive with curiosity. The boys had been put down for their afternoon naps, and he and Reese were sitting at the table, relaxing over coffee. Madelyn came back into the dining room, sat down and said, “All right, what’s wrong?”

He gave her a wry smile. “I knew you couldn’t wait much longer. You’ve always been as curious as a cat.”

“Agreed. Talk.”

So he did. It felt strange. He couldn’t remember ever needing help before in deciding what to do. He concisely outlined the situation with Mercer, explaining Evie’s suspected involvement and the method he had used to force them into action. He described Evie, unaware of the aching hunger in his eyes as he did so. He told them everything—how Evie had sold her house to stop the foreclosure on the marina, how she had discovered that he was behind it all, and how Mercer had been caught. And how she had turned down his marriage proposal.

He was aware that Madelyn had stiffened during his recital of events, but she was looking down at the table, and he couldn’t read her expression. When he finished, however, she lifted her head, and he was startled to see the molten fury in her eyes.

“Are you that dense?” she shouted, jumping to her feet with a force that overturned her chair. “I don’t blame her for not marrying you! I wouldn’t have, either!” Infuriated, she stomped out of the dining room.

Bemused, Robert turned to stare after her. “I didn’t know she could move that fast,” he murmured.

Reese gave a startled shout of laughter. “I know. It took me by surprise the first time I made her lose her temper, too.”

Robert turned back to his brother-in-law, a big, tough rancher as tall as himself, with dark hair and hazel-green eyes, coloring that he had passed on to his two sons.

“What set her off?”

“Probably the same thing that set her off when I was being that dense, too,” Reese explained, amusement in his eyes.

“Would someone please explain it to me?” Robert asked with strained politeness. On the surface he was still in complete control, but inside he was dying by inches. He didn’t know what to do, and that had never happened to him before. He was at a complete loss.

Reese leaned back in his chair, toying with the handle of his cup. “I almost lost Madelyn once,” he said abruptly, looking down. “She probably never told you, but she left me. She didn’t go far, just into town, but it might as well have been a million miles, the way I felt.”

“When was this?” Robert asked, his eyes narrowing. He didn’t like knowing that Madelyn had had problems and hadn’t told him about them.

“When she was pregnant with Ty. I tried everything I could think of to convince her to come back, but I was too stupid to give her the one reason that mattered.”

Reese was going somewhere with this, Robert realized. He was a private man and not normally this talkative. “Which reason was that?”

Reese lifted his gaze to meet Robert’s, and hazel-green eyes met ice-green ones, both stark with emotion.

“It isn’t easy to give someone else that kind of power over you,” Reese said abruptly. “Hell, it wasn’t easy to even admit it to myself, and you’re twice as bad as I ever was. You’re a tough son of a bitch, more dangerous than you want people to know, so you keep it all under control. You’re used to controlling everything around you, but you can’t control this, can you? You probably don’t even know what it is. I practically had to be hit in the head before I saw the light. You love her, don’t you?”

Robert froze, and his eyes went blank with shock. Love? He’d never even thought the word. He wanted Evie, wanted to marry her, wanted to have children with her. God, he wanted all of that with a fierce passion that threatened to destroy him if he didn’t get it. But everything in him rebelled at the thought of being in love. It would mean a terrible helplessness; he wouldn’t be able to hold himself apart from her, to keep uncompromised the basic invulnerability that was at the core of him. He was well aware of his true nature, knew the savage inside. He didn’t want to unleash that kind of raw passion, didn’t want anyone to even know it existed.

But Evie knew, anyway, he realized, and felt another shock. She had seen through him right from the beginning. With that maddening intuition of hers, she sometimes went straight into his thoughts. He could shut everyone else out, but he had never been able to shut out Evie, and he had spent the entire time they were together trying to regain control over himself, over the situation, over her. She knew him for what he was, and she loved him, anyway.

He swore, running a shaking hand over his face, blinding truth staring him in the eye. Evie wouldn’t have loved him if that savage intensity hadn’t been there. She had known real love with Matt, and lost it; only something incredibly powerful could take her beyond that. Loving Evangeline couldn’t be a civilized, controlled affair; she would want him heart and soul, nothing held back.

The house hadn’t been the issue. Neither had suspecting her of a crime. He could offer her a hundred houses, all the power his wealth could bring, and none of that would tempt her. What she wanted was the one thing he hadn’t offered: his love.

“It was that simple,” Reese said softly. “I told Maddie that I love her. More importantly, I admitted it to myself.”

Robert was still stunned, still turned inward. “How do you know?” he murmured.

Reese made a low, harsh sound. “Do you feel as if you can never get enough of her? Do you want to make love to her so much that the ache never quite leaves your gut? Do you want to protect her, carry her around on a satin cushion, give her everything in the world? Are you content just being with her, listening to her, smelling her, touching her hand? Do you feel as if someone’s torn your guts out, you miss her so much? When Maddie left me, it hurt so damn bad I could barely function. There was a big empty hole in me, and it ached so much I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. The only thing that could make it better was seeing her. Is that the way it feels?”

Robert’s green eyes were stark. “Like I’m bleeding to death inside.”

“Yep, that’s love,” Reese said, shaking his head in sympathy.

Robert got to his feet, his lean face setting in lines of determination. “Kiss Madelyn goodbye for me. Tell her I’ll call her.”

“You can’t wait for morning?”

“No,” Robert said as he took the stairs two at a time. He couldn’t wait another minute. He was on his way to Alabama.

Evie didn’t like her new home. She felt hemmed in, though she had a corner apartment and neighbors on only one side. When she looked out the window, she saw another apartment building, rather than the river sweeping endlessly past. She could hear her neighbors through the thin walls, hear them arguing, hear their two small children whining and crying. They were out until all hours, children in tow, and came dragging the poor little tykes in at one or two in the morning. The commotion inevitably woke her, and she would lie in bed staring at the dark ceiling for hours.

She could look for another place, she knew, but she couldn’t muster enough energy or interest to do it. She forced herself to go to the marina every day, and that was the limit of what she could do. She was going through the motions, but each day it took more and more effort, and soon she would collapse under the strain.

She felt cold, and she couldn’t get warm. It was an internal cold, spreading out from the vast emptiness inside, and no amount of heat could get past it. Just thinking his name was like having a knife jabbed into her, shards of pain splintering in all directions, but she couldn’t get him out of her mind. A glimpse of black hair brought her head snapping around; a certain deep tone of voice made her heart stop for an instant—a precious instant—as uncontrollable joy shot through her and she thought, He’s back! But he never was, and the joy would turn to ashes, leaving her more desolate than before.

The sun burned down, the heat wave continuing, but she couldn’t feel its heat or see its bright light. The world was colored in tones of cold gray.

I got through this before, she would think on those mornings when there didn’t seem to be any reason to get out of bed. I can do it again. But the fact was, doing it before had nearly killed her, and the depression that sucked all the spirit out of her was getting deeper every day. She didn’t know if she had the strength to fight it.

Becky had gone ballistic when she found out Robert had left town. “He told me he was going to ask you to marry him,” she’d roared, so enraged her hair had practicality been standing on end.

“He did,” Evie had said listlessly. “I said no.” And she had refused to answer any more questions; she hadn’t even told Becky why she’d sold the house.

Summer was coming to an end, burning itself out. It was almost time for school to start. The calendar said that fall was a month away, but the scent of it was in the air, crisp and fresh, without the redolent perfumes of summer. She was burning herself out, too, Evie thought, and didn’t much care.

She went to bed as soon as it was dark, hoping to get a few hours’ sleep before her noisy neighbors came home. It was usually a useless effort. Whenever she stopped, she couldn’t keep the memories at bay; they swarmed at her from all the comers of her mind. Lying in bed, she would remember Robert’s warm presence beside her, feel his weight compressing the mattress, and the memory was so real that it was almost as if she could reach out and touch him. Her body throbbed, needing his touch, the exquisite relief of having him inside her. She would relive every time he had made love to her, and her breasts would grow heavy with desire.

He was gone, but she wasn’t free of him.

That night was no different; if anything, it was worse. She tossed about, trying to ignore the fever in her flesh and the misery in her heart. The T-shirt she wore rasped her aching nipples, tempting her to remove it, but she knew better. When she had tried to sleep nude, her skin had become even more sensitive.

Someone banged on the door, startling her so much that she bolted upright in bed. She glanced at the clock. It was after ten.

She got up and slipped on a robe. The banging came again, as thunderous as if someone was trying to beat down her door. She paused to turn on a lamp in the living room. “Who is it?”

“Robert. Open the door, Evie.”

She froze, her hand on the knob, all the blood draining from her face. For a moment she thought she would faint. “What do you want?” she managed, the words so low that she wasn’t sure he could hear them, but he did.

“I want to talk to you. Open the door.”

The deep, rich voice was the same, the tone as controlled as ever. She leaned her head against the door facing, wondering if she had the strength to send him away again. What remained to be said? Was he going to try to make her accept the house? She couldn’t live there; the memories of him were too strong.

“Evangeline, open the door.”

She fumbled with the lock and opened the door. He stepped in immediately, tall and overwhelming. She was swamped by her reactions as she fell back a pace. The scent of him was the same, the leashed vitality of his tall, lean body slamming against her like a blow. He closed the door and locked it, and when he turned back to her she saw that his black hair was tousled, and a dark shadow of beard covered his cheeks. His eyes were glittering like green fire as they fastened on her. He didn’t give the apartment a glance.

“I’m only going to ask you once more,” he said abruptly. “Will you marry me?”

Evie shuddered with the strain, but slowly shook her head. She could have married him before, when she’d thought he cared for her at least a little, but when she had realized he’d only been using her… No, she couldn’t do it.

A muscle clenched in his jaw. She could feel the tension in him, like some great beast coiled to jump, and she took another step back. When he spoke, however, his voice was almost mild. “Why not?”

The contrast of his voice to the energy she could feel pulsing in him was maddening. All the misery of the past weeks congealed inside her, and she felt herself splintering inside. “Why not?” she cried incredulously, her voice shaking. “My God, look at yourself! Nothing touches you, does it? You’d take everything I have to give, but you’d never let me inside where you really live, where I could reach the real man. You keep yourself behind a cold wall, and I’m tired of bruising myself against it!”

His nostrils flared. “Do you love me?”

“Is that what you came for?” Tears welled in her eyes, rolled slowly down her cheeks. “A sop to your ego? Yes, I love you. Now get out!”

She saw his powerful muscles tense, saw his eyes flare with something savage. Her heart leapt, and too late she saw the danger. She turned to run, but Robert grabbed her, whirling her to face him. Confused, Evie thought at first it was one of his carefully gauged actions, designed to impress upon her how serious he was, but then she saw his eyes. The pupils were contracted to tiny black points, the irises huge and glittering like pale fire. His face was tight and pale, except for two spots of color high on the blades of his cheekbones. Not even Robert, she thought dazedly, could control those physical reactions.

His hands tightened on her waist until his fingers dug painfully into her soft flesh, a grip that she knew would leave bruises. “You’re right,” he said almost soundlessly. “I’ve never wanted anyone to get close to me. I’ve never wanted to care this much for anyone, to let you or anyone else have this kind of power over me.’’ His lips drew back over his teeth, and he was breathing hard. “Shut you out? My God, I’ve tried to, but I can’t. You want the real man, sweetheart? All right, I’m yours. I love you so much it’s tearing me apart. But there’s a flip side to it,” he continued harshly. “I’ll give you more than I’ve ever given any other human being, but by God, I’ll take more, too. You don’t get to pick and choose which qualities you like the best. It’s a package deal. You get all the bad with the good, and I warn you now, I’m not a gentleman.”

“No,” she whispered, “you’re not.” She hung in his grip, her eyes fastened on his face, seeing the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the ferocity of his expression. Her heart thundered at what he had just said, her mind reeling with joy. He loved her? She almost couldn’t take it in, couldn’t believe he’d actually said it. She stared up into those fiery eyes, too dazed to say anything else.

“I’m jealous,” he muttered, still in that tone of stifled violence. “I don’t want you even looking at another man, and if any fool tries to come on to you, he’ll be lucky if I only break his arm.” He shook her with enough force to make her teeth snap together.

“I want you all the time, and now, damn it, I’ll take you. I’ll be on you so often, four and five times a day, that you’ll forget what it’s like not to have me inside you. No more being a gentleman and restricting myself to twice a day.”

Her golden brown eyes widened. “No,” she said faintly. “I wouldn’t want you to restrict yourself.” There were no controls on him now; she could feel the passion surging through him, a wild and savage force that caught her up in its tide and swept her along with him.

“I’ll want you at my beck and call. I can’t ignore the business, so I’ll expect you to fit your schedule around mine, to be available whenever I’m home.” As he talked, he moved her backward and roughly pushed her against the wall. His hands tugged at her panties, stripping them down her legs. He leaned against her, his heavy weight pinning her to the wall as he tore his pants open. She gave a brief, incoherent prayer of thanks that her neighbors were gone, then clung to his shoulders as he hooked one arm under her bottom and lifted her. Her heart pounding, her blood rushing through her veins on a giddy tide of joy, she parted her thighs, and he shoved himself between them. His penetration was fast and rough. She bit back a cry and buried her face against his neck. She could feel his own heartbeat thudding against her breast.

They were both motionless, overwhelmed by the stunning relief and pleasure of their bodies being joined once more, she trying to adjust to the hard fullness of him, he groaning at the tightness of her inner clasp on his sex. Then, still caught in the savage exaltation of emotional freedom, he drove mercilessly into her.

“I don’t want to wear a condom,” he said fiercely, his breath hot against her ear. “I don’t want you to take birth-control pills. I don’t want you to act like my semen is some hostile marauder that you have to protect yourself against. I want to give it to you. I want you to want it. I want you to have my babies. I want a house full of kids.” With each word he thrust, pushing himself deeper and deeper into her.

She moaned, shuddering around him with the force of her pleasure. “Yes.” She had unleashed a monster of passion, a total dictator, but she could meet his power with her own. This was the real man, the one who made her feel alive again, who sent heat throbbing through every cell of her body. She wasn’t cold any longer, but radiant with vibrant life.

“I want marriage.” His teeth were ground together, and a drop of sweat ran down his temple. “I want you tied to me—legally, financially, every way I can devise. I want you to take my name, Evangeline, do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, and splintered with joy. “Robert, yes!”

He bucked violently against her with his climax, flooding her with moisture and heat. Evie locked her legs around him and took him deep within, her senses whirling and fading, all consciousness gone except for the primal awareness of him inside her.

Some endless time later, she realized that she was on the bed and he was stretched out naked beside her. She hadn’t fainted, but neither had she been aware of anything else but him. He hadn’t released her during the entire time he had stripped both her and himself, struggling out of clothing while still keeping her in his grasp. She turned to snuggle closer, and the lure of his body, after the long deprivation, was too great. She found herself on top of him, wriggling to find the right contact and nestle his sex against the soft heat between her legs. He caught his breath, and she felt him begin to harden again.

“You might get started on that house full of kids sooner than you thought,” she murmured, moving against him again in voluptuous delight. “I stopped taking the birth-control pills the day you left.”

“Good.” He caressed her bottom and hip, urging her closer to him. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said even as he slipped inside her.

She heard the worry in his voice and knew that he was uneasy with releasing all the force he’d kept contained for so long. She kissed him and bit his lip as his subtle movements made her nerve endings riot with pleasure. “You can’t hurt me by loving me,” she said.

His eyes glittered in the faint light coming from the lamp in the living room. “That’s good,” he murmured. “Because God knows I do.”

Epilogue

Evie heard the elevator arrive and crouched down beside the tiny, adorable creature who was clinging unsteadily to the chair in the entrance hall. “There’s Daddy,” she whispered, and watched her daughter’s big eyes go round with delight. She barely restrained herself from gathering the baby into her arms; sometimes the surge of love was so strong that she thought she would burst from the force of it.

The elevator doors slid open, and Robert stepped out, an indescribable light flaring in his pale green eyes as he saw them waiting for him. With a joyous gurgle, the baby let go of the chair and hurled herself toward him, every toddling step teetering on the edge of disaster. Robert turned absolutely white, dropped his briefcase with a thud, and went down on one knee to swoop her into his arms. “My God,” he said, shocked. “She’s walking!”

“For a couple of hours now,” Evie said, smiling as Angel caught her father’s silk tie in one tiny, chubby hand and began babbling at him. “It makes my heart stop every time she lurches across the floor.”

“She’s too young to walk. She’s only seven months old.” Aghast, he stared down at the small head, covered with downy dark hair, that butted against his chest. He had been just as aghast when she had started crawling at five months. If he could, Robert would have kept his darling offspring as a babe in arms for the first five years of her life. She, however, was blissfully oblivious of his panic at her daring.

Still holding the baby, he hugged Evie close for a long kiss, one that quickly grew heated despite his squirming burden, who tried to poke her fingers between their mouths. They had named her Jennifer Angelina, intending to call her Jenna, but instead she had been Angel from the day she’d been born. She was angelic only when she was asleep, however; during waking hours, she had the fearless spirit of a daredevil.

Evie clung to his mouth for a long time, her hand clenching his hair to hold him in place. She had been waiting all day for him to come home, feeling shivery and excited and a little frightened.

“You were right,” she murmured.

He lifted his head, and the green eyes gleamed. “I was, huh?”

She laughed and pinched him. “You knew you were.” They had decided to have another baby as soon as possible. Both pregnancy and delivery had been easy for her, and though they had decided that two children would fill the house they were building just fine, they had both wanted to have them close together.

Three weeks ago, they had spent the night locked together, lost in the passion that hadn’t faded during the sixteen months of their marriage. When they had awakened at dawn, for their ritual of morning love, Robert had looked down at her with his sleepy green eyes barely open and said, “We made a baby last night.”

She had thought so, too, her instincts certain even before the early pregnancy test she’d taken just that morning had confirmed it Already it was as if she could feel that hot, tiny weight in her womb, pulsing with life.

She leaned her head against his broad shoulder, remembering the sheer terror she’d felt when she had realized that she was pregnant the first time. Taking a chance on loving Robert had required all her courage, but now there was to be someone else to love, someone who was part of her, part of Robert. She would have no defense against this new little person, and she had thought she would shatter from the fear. But Robert had known how she was feeling, had seen the raw fear in her eyes and hadn’t left her side all day. He had called Felice and announced that he wouldn’t be in, cancel everything, and had spent the day holding Evie on his lap or making love to her. His solution, she thought wryly, had been to overwhelm her with what had gotten her in that condition to begin with; the tactic had been amazingly successful.

Angel was trying to throw herself bodily out of his arms. Sighing, he released Evie to bend down and set the baby on her chubby feet. As soon as he released her, she was off like a wobbly rocket. Evie went back into his arms, but they both kept a weather eye on their precocious daughter as she began investigating a fascinating crack in the hardwood floor.

Evie rested her head on his chest, reassured by the strong, steady thump of his heart beneath her ear. Far from losing himself in his work and demanding that she structure her time around him, as he’d said he would, Robert had instead ruthlessly reorganized his office schedule so he could spend every available moment with her and Angel. She had known that he was a man of alarming intensity, but instead of being frightened when he focused it on her, she had bloomed. Robert wasn’t a man who loved lightly; when he loved, it was with every fiber of his being.

His hand moved to Evie’s belly and pressed in gentle reassurance. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

She lifted her head and gave him a luminous smile. His love had renewed her strength, banished the shadows. “I’ve never been better.”

Robert kissed her, savoring her sweet taste and the familiar, delicious tension of desire that quivered in their bodies. “I love you, Evangeline,” he said, gathering her close to him. Loving her was the most joyous, satisfying thing he’d ever done. She demanded everything from him and gave him all of herself, and sometimes he was staggered by the richness of the bond between them. He’d been right; loving Evangeline took everything he had, heart and soul.

Mackenzie’s

1 - Mackenzie’s Mountain

Chapter One

He needed a woman. Bad.

Wolf Mackenzie spent a restless night, with the bright full moon throwing its silver light on the empty pillow beside him. His body ached with need, the sexual need of a healthy man, and the passing hours only intensified his frustration. Finally he got out of bed and walked naked to the window, his big body moving with fluid power. The wooden floor was icy beneath his bare feet but he welcomed the discomfort, for it cooled the undirected desire that heated his blood.

The colourless moonlight starkly etched the angles and planes of his face, living testimony to his heritage. Even more than the thick black hair worn long to touch his shoulders, even more than the heavy-lidded black eyes, his face proclaimed nun Indian. It was in his high, prominent cheekbones and broad forehead, his thin lips and high-bridged nose. Less obvious, but just as fierce, was the Celtic heritage from his father, only one generation removed from the Scottish Highlands. It had refined the Indian features inherited from his mother into a face like a blade, as clean and sharply cut as it was strong. In his veins ran the blood of two of the most warlike peoples in the history of the world, Comanche and Celt. He had been a natural warrior, a fact soon discovered by the military when he had enlisted.

He was also a sensualist. He knew his own nature well, and though he controlled it, there were times when he needed a woman. He usually visited Julie Oakes at those times. She was a divorced woman, several years older, who lived in a small town fifty miles distant. Their arrangement had lasted five years; neither Wolf nor Julie was interested in marriage, but both had needs, and they liked each other. Wolf tried not to visit Julie too often, and he took care that he was never seen entering her house; he accepted the fact, unemotionally, that her neighbours would be outraged if they knew she slept with an Indian. And not just any Indian; a rape charge stuck to a man forever.

The next day was a Saturday. There would be the normal chores, and he had to pick up a load of fencing materials in Ruth, the small town just at the base of his mountain, but Saturday nights were traditionally for howling. He wouldn't howl, but he'd visit Julie and bum off his sexual tension in her bed.

The night was turning colder, and low heavy clouds were moving in. He watched until they obscured the moon, knowing they meant new snow. He didn't want to return to his empty bed. His face was impassive, but his loins ached. He needed a woman.

Mary Elizabeth Potter had numerous small chores to occupy her time that Saturday morning, but her conscience wouldn't let her rest until she had talked to Joe Mackenzie. The boy had dropped out of school two months before, a month before she had arrived to take the place of a teacher who had abruptly quit. No one had mentioned the boy to Mary, but she'd run across his school record, and curiosity had led her to read it. In the small town of Ruth, Wyoming, there weren't that many students in school, and she had thought she'd met them all. In fact, there were less than sixty students, but the graduation rate was almost one hundred percent, so any dropout was unusual. When she had read Joe Mackenzie's record, she'd been stunned. The boy had been at the top of his class, with straight A's in all subjects. Students who did poorly would get discouraged and drop out, but every teaching instinct she had was outraged that such an outstanding student would just quit. She had to talk to him, try to make him understand how important it was to his future that he continue his education. Sixteen was so young to make a mistake that would haunt him the rest of his life. She wouldn't be able to sleep at night until she had done her best to talk him into returning.

It had snowed again during the night and had turned bitterly cold. The cat meowed plaintively as it wound around her ankles, as if complaining about the weather. "I know, Woodrow," she consoled the animal. "The floor must be cold to your feet." She could sympathize. She didn't think her feet had been warm since she had moved to Wyoming.

Before another winter came, she promised herself, she would own a pair of warm, sturdy boots, fur-lined and waterproof, and she would stomp about in the snow as if she'd been doing it all her life, like a native. Actually she needed the boots now, but the expenses of moving had wiped out her cash reserves, and the teachings of her thrifty aunt prevented her from buying the boots on credit.

Woodrow meowed again as she put on the warmest, most sensible shoes she owned, the ones she privately called her "old maid schoolteacher shoes." Mary paused to scratch behind his ears, and his back arched in ecstasy. She had inherited him with the house, which the school board had arranged for her to live in; the cat, like the house, wasn't much. She had no idea how old Woodrow was, but both he and the house looked a little run-down. Mary had always resisted owning a cat—it seemed the crowning touch to an old maid's life—but finally her fate had caught up with her.

She was an old maid. Now she owned a cat. And wore old maid shoes. The picture was complete.

"Water seeks its own level," she told the cat, who looked back at her with his unconcerned Egyptian gaze. "But what do you care? It doesn't hurt you that my personal water level seems to stop at sensible shoes and cats."

But as she looked in the mirror to make certain her hair was tidy, she sighed. Sensible shoes and cats were just her style, along with being pale, slight and nondescript. "Mousy" was a good word. Mary Elizabeth Potter had been born to be an old maid.

She was dressed as warmly as she could manage, unless she put on socks to wear with her sensible shoes, but she drew the line at that. Dainty white anklets with long ruffled skirts were one thing, but knee socks with a wool dress were something else entirely. She was willing to be dowdy for the sake of warmth; she was not willing to be tacky.

Well, there was no point in putting it off; it wasn't going to get any warmer until spring. Mary braced herself for the shock of cold air on a system that still expected the warmth of Savannah. She had left her tidy little nest in Georgia for the challenge of a tiny school in Wyoming, for the excitement of a different way of life; she even admitted to a small yearning for adventure, though of course she never allowed it to surface. But somehow, she hadn't taken the weather into account. She had been prepared for the snow, but not the bitter temperatures. No wonder there were so few students, she thought as she opened the door and gasped as the wind whipped at her. It was too cold for the adults to undress enough to do anything that might result in children!

She got snow in her sensible shoes when she walked to her car, a sensible two-door, midsize Chevrolet sedan, on which she had sensibly put a new set of snow tires when she had moved to Wyoming. According to the weather report on the radio that morning, the high would be seven degrees below zero. Mary sighed again for the weather she had left behind in Savannah; it was March now, and spring would be in full swing, with flowers blooming in a riot of colours.

But Wyoming was beautiful, in a wild, majestic way. The soaring mountains dwarfed the puny man-made dwellings, and she had been told that, come spring, the meadows would be carpeted in wildflowers, and the crystal-clear creeks would sing their own special song. Wyoming was a different world from Savannah, and she was just a transplanted magnolia who was having trouble getting acclimated.

She had gotten instructions on how to get to the Mackenzie residence, though the information had been reluctantly given. It puzzled her that no one seemed interested in the boy, because the people in the little town had been friendly and helpful to her. The most direct comment she had gotten had been from Mr. Hearst, the grocery-store owner, who had muttered that "the Mackenzies aren't worth your trouble." But Mary considered any child worth her trouble. She was a teacher, and she meant to teach.

As she got into her sensible car, she could see the mountain called Mackenzie's Mountain, as well as the narrow road that wound up its side like a ribbon, and she quailed inside. New snow tires notwithstanding, she wasn't a confident driver in this strange environment. Snow was… well, snow was alien, not that she'd let it stop her from doing what she had set her mind on doing.

She was already shivering so hard that she could barely fit the key into the ignition. It was so cold! It actually hurt her nose and lungs to inhale. Perhaps she should wait for better weather before attempting the drive. She looked at the mountain again. Maybe in June all of the snow would have melted… but Joe Mackenzie had already been out of school for two months. Maybe in June the gap would seem insurmountable to him, and he wouldn't make the effort. It might already be too late. She had to try, and she didn't dare let even another week go by.

It was her habit to give herself pep talks whenever she was pushing herself to do something she found difficult, so she muttered under her breath as she began the drive. "It won't seem so steep once I'm actually on the road. All uphill roads look vertical from a distance. It's a perfectly negotiable road, otherwise the Mackenzies wouldn't be able to get up and down, and if they can do it, I can do it." Well, perhaps she could do it. Driving on snow was an acquired skill, one she hadn't as yet mastered.

Determination kept her going. When she finally reached the mountain and the road tilted upward, her hands clenched on the steering wheel as she deliberately refrained from looking over the side at the increasing distance to the valley floor. Knowing how far it was possible for her to fall if she drove off the edge wouldn't help her at all; in Mary's opinion, that would be in the category of useless knowledge, of which she already had quite enough.

"I won't slide," she muttered. "I won't go fast enough to lose control. This is like the Ferris wheel. I was certain I was going to fall out, but I didn't." She had ridden the Ferris wheel once, when she'd been nine years old, and no one had ever been able to talk her into trying it again. Carousels were more her style.

"The Mackenzies won't mind if I talk to Joe," she reassured herself in an attempt to get her mind off the drive. "Maybe he had trouble with a girlfriend, and that's why he doesn't want to go to school. At his age, it's probably all blown over by now."

Actually the drive wasn't as bad as she'd feared. She began to breathe a little easier. The incline was more gradual than it had appeared, and she didn't think she had too much farther to go. The mountain wasn't as enormous as it had looked from the valley.

She was so intent on her driving that she didn't notice the red light appear on the dash. She had no warning of overheating until steam suddenly erupted from beneath the hood, the frigid air instantly converting the mist into ice crystals on the windshield. Mary instinctively hit the brakes, then uttered a discreet oath when the wheels began sliding. Quickly she lifted her foot from the brake pedal, and the tires found traction again, but she couldn't see. Closing her eyes, she prayed that she was still going in the right direction and let the car's weight slow it to a stop.

The engine was hissing and bellowing like a dragon. Shaking in reaction, she turned off the ignition and got out of the car, gasping as the wind lashed her like an icy whip. The hood release mechanism was stiff from the bitter cold, but finally yielded, and she raised the hood to see what had happened, on the grounds that it would be nice to know what was wrong with the car even if she couldn't fix it. It didn't take a mechanic to see the problem: one of the water hoses had split, and hot water was spitting fitfully from the break.

Instantly she recognized the precariousness of her position. She couldn't stay in the car, because she couldn't let the motor run to keep her warm. The road was a private one, and the Mackenzies might not leave their ranch at all that day, or that entire weekend. It was too far, and too cold, for her to walk back to her own house. Her only option was to walk to the Mackenzie ranch and pray it wasn't very far. Her feet were already numb.

She didn't let herself dwell on the thought that she might not make it to the Mackenzie ranch, either. Instead she began to walk steadily up the road and tried to ignore the snow that got inside her shoes with each step.

She rounded a curve and lost sight of her car, but when she looked ahead there was still no sign of a house, or even a barn. She felt alone, as if she had been dropped into the middle of a wilderness. There was only the mountain and the snow, the vast sky and herself. The silence was absolute. It hurt to walk, and she found that she was sliding her feet instead of picking them up. She had gone fewer than two hundred yards.

Her lips trembled as she hugged herself in an effort to retain her body's heat. Painful or not, she would just have to keep walking.

Then she heard the low growl of a powerful engine, and she stopped, relief welling in her so painfully that tears burned her eyes. She had a horror of crying in public and blinked them back. There was no sense in crying; she had been walking less than fifteen minutes and hadn't been in any real danger at all. It was just her overactive imagination, as usual. She shuffled through the snow to the side of the road, to get out of the way, and waited for the approaching vehicle.

It came into view, a big black pickup with enormous tires. She could feel the driver's eyes lock on her, and in spite of herself she ducked her head in embarrassment. Old maid schoolteachers weren't accustomed to being the center of attention, and on top of that she felt a perfect fool. It must look as if she had gone for a stroll in the snow.

The truck slowed to a stop opposite her, and a man got out. He was big, and she instinctively disliked that. She disliked the way big men looked down at her, and she disliked being forced by sheer physical size to look up at them. Well, big or not, he was her rescuer. She wound her gloved fingers together and wondered what she should say. How did a person ask to be rescued? She had never hitched a ride before; it didn't seem proper for a settled, respectable schoolteacher.

Wolf stared at the woman, astounded that anyone would be out in the cold while dressed so stupidly. What in hell was she doing on his mountain, anyway? How had she gotten here?

Suddenly he knew who she was; he'd overheard talk in the feed store about the new schoolteacher from someplace down South. He'd never seen anyone who looked more like a schoolteacher than this woman, and she was definitely dressed wrong for a Wyoming winter. Her blue dress and brown coat were so frumpy that she was almost a cliché; he could see wisps of light brown hair straggling out from under her scarf, and oversize horn-rimmed glasses dwarfed her small face. No makeup, not even lip gloss to protect her lips.

And no boots. Snow was caked almost to her knees.

He had surveyed her completely in two seconds and didn't wait to hear what explanation she had for being on his mountain, if she intended to say anything at all. So far she hadn't uttered a word, but continued to stare at him with a faintly outraged look on her face. He wondered if she considered it beneath her to speak to an Indian, even to ask for help. Mentally he shrugged. What the hell, he couldn't leave her out here.

Since she hadn't spoken, he didn't, either. He simply bent down and passed one arm behind her knees and the other behind her back, and lifted her as he would a child, ignoring her gasp. As he carried her to the truck, he reflected that she didn't weigh much more than a child. He saw a flash of startled blue eyes behind the lenses of her glasses; then her arm passed around his neck and she was holding him in a convulsive grip, as if she were afraid he'd drop her.

He shifted her weight so he could open the passenger door and deposited her on the seat, then briskly wiped the snow from her feet and legs as well as he could. He heard her gasp again, but didn't look up. When he had finished, he dusted the snow from his gloves and went around to climb behind the wheel.

"How long have you been walking?" he muttered reluctantly.

Mary started. She hadn't expected his voice to be so deep that it almost reverberated. Her glasses had fogged from the truck's heat, and she snatched them off, feeling her cold cheeks prickle as blood rushed to them. "I… not long," she stammered. "About fifteen minutes. I blew a water hose. That is, my car did."

Wolf glanced at her in time to see her hastily lower her eyes again and noticed her pinkened cheeks. Good, she was getting warm. She was flustered; he could see it in the way she kept twisting her fingers together. Did she think he was going to throw her down on the seat and rape her? After all, he was a renegade Indian, and capable of anything. Then again, the way she looked, maybe this was the most excitement she'd ever had.

They hadn't been far from the ranch house and reached it in a few minutes. Wolf parked close to the kitchen door and got out; he circled the truck and reached the passenger door just as she opened it and began to slid down. "Forget it," he said, and lifted her again. Her sliding motion had made her skirt ride halfway up her thighs. She hastily pushed the fabric down, but not before his black eyes had examined her slim legs, and the colour deepened in her cheeks.

The warmth of the house enfolded her, and she inhaled with relief, hardly noticing as he turned a wooden chair away from the table and placed her on it. Without speaking he turned on the hot water tap and let it run, then filled a dishpan, frequently checking the water and adjusting the temperature.

Well, she had reached her destination, and though she hadn't accomplished her arrival in quite the manner she had intended, she might as well get to the purpose of her visit. "I'm Mary Potter, the new schoolteacher."

"I know," he said briefly.

Her eyes widened as she stared at his broad back. "You know?"

"Not many strangers around."

She realized that he hadn't introduced himself and was suddenly unsure. Was she even at the right place? "Are… are you Mr. Mackenzie?"

He glanced over his shoulder at her, and she noticed that his eyes were as black as night. "I'm Wolf Mackenzie."

She was instantly diverted. "I suppose you know your name is uncommon. It's Old English—"

"No," he said, turning around with the dishpan in his hands. He placed it on the floor beside her feet. "It's Indian."

She blinked. "Indian?" She felt incredibly stupid. She should have guessed, given the blackness of his hair and eyes, and the bronze of his skin, but she hadn't. Most of the men in Ruth had weathered skin, and she had simply thought him darker than the others. Then she frowned at nun and said in a positive tone, "Mackenzie isn't an Indian name."

He frowned back at her. "Scottish."

"Oh. Are you a half-breed?"

She asked the question with the same unconsciousness as if she had been asking directions, silky brows lifted inquiringly over her blue eyes. It set his teeth on edge. "Yeah," he grunted. There was something so irritating about the primness of her expression that he wanted to shock her out of her prissiness. Then he noticed the shivers shaking her body, and he pushed his irritation aside, at least until he could get her warm. The clumsy way she had been walking when he'd first seen her had told him that she was in the first stages of hypothermia. He shrugged out of his heavy coat and tossed it aside, then put on a pot of coffee.

Mary sat silently as he made coffee; he wasn't a very talkative person, though that wasn't going to make her give up. She was truly cold; she would wait until she had a cup of that coffee, then begin again. She looked up at him as he turned back to her, but his expression was unreadable. Without a word he took the scarf from her head and began unbuttoning her coat. Startled, she said, "I can do that," but her fingers were so cold that any movement was agony. He stepped back and let her try for a moment, then brushed her hands aside and finished the job himself.

"Why are you taking my coat off when I'm so cold?" she asked in bewilderment as he peeled the coat down her arms.

"So I can rub your arms and legs." Then he proceeded to remove her shoes.

The idea was as alien to her as snow. She wasn't accustomed to anyone touching her, and didn't intend to become accustomed. She started to tell him so, but the words vanished unsaid when he abruptly thrust his hands under her skirt, all the way to her waist. Mary gave a startled shriek and jerked back, almost oversetting the chair. He glared at her, his eyes like black ice.

"You don't have to worry," he snapped. "This is Saturday. I only rape on Tuesdays and Thursdays." He thought about throwing her back out into the snow, but he couldn't let a woman freeze to death, not even a white woman who obviously thought his touch would contaminate her.

Mary's eyes grew so wide they eclipsed the rest of her face. "What's wrong with Saturdays?" she blurted, then realized that she had almost issued him an invitation, for pity's sake! She clapped her gloved hands to her face as a tide of red surged to her cheeks. Her brain must have frozen; it was the only possible explanation.

Wolf jerked his head up, not believing she had actually said that. Wide, horrified blue eyes stared at him from over black leather gloves, which covered the rest of her face but couldn't quite hide the hot colour. It had been so long since he'd seen anyone blush that it took him a minute to realize she was acutely embarrassed. Why, she was a prude! It was the final cliché to add to the dowdy, old maid schoolteacher image she presented. Amusement softened his irritation. This was probably the highlight of her life. "I'm going to pull your panty hose off so you can put your feet in the water," he explained in a gruff voice.

"Oh." The word was muffled because her hands were still over her mouth.

His arms were still under her skirt, his hands clasped on her hips. Almost unconsciously he felt the narrowness of her, and the softness. Dowdy or not, she still had the softness of a woman, the sweet scent of a woman, and his heartbeat increased as his body began to respond to her nearness. Damn, he needed a woman worse than he'd thought if this frumpy little schoolteacher could turn him on.

Mary sat very still as one powerful arm closed around her and lifted her so he could strip the panty hose down her hips and legs; the position put his head close to her breasts and stomach, and she stared down at his thick, shiny black hair. He had only to turn his head and his mouth would brush against her breasts. She had read in books that a man took a woman's nipples into his mouth and sucked them as a nursing infant would, and she had always wondered why. Now the thought made her feel breathless, and her nipples tingled. His roughly callused hands brushed against her bare legs; how would they feel on her breasts? She began to feel oddly warm, and a little dizzy.

Wolf didn't glance at her as he tossed the insubstantial panty hose to the floor. He lifted her feet onto his thigh and slid the dishpan into place, then slowly lowered her feet into the water. He had made certain the water was only warm, but he knew her feet were so cold even that would be painful. She sucked in her breath but didn't protest, though he saw the gleam of tears in her eyes when he looked up at her.

"It won't hurt for long," he murmured reassuringly, moving so that his legs were on each side of hers, clasping them warmly. Then he carefully removed her gloves, struck by the delicacy of her white, cold hands. He held them between his warm palms for a moment, then made a decision and unbuttoned his shut as he crowded closer to her.

"This will get them warm," he said, and tucked her hands into the hollows of his armpits.

Mary was dumbstruck. She couldn't believe that her hands were nestled in his armpits like birds. His warmth seared her cold fingers. She wasn't actually touching skin; he wore a T-shirt, but it was still the most ultimate she had ever been with another person. Armpits… well, everyone had them, but she certainly wasn't accustomed to touching them. She had never before been this surrounded by anyone, least of all a man. His hard legs were on each side of hers, clasping them; she was bent forward a little, her hands neatly tucked beneath his arms, while he briskly rubbed his hands over her arms and shoulders, then down to her thighs. She made a little sound of surprise; she simply couldn't believe this was happening, not to Mary Elizabeth Potter, old maid schoolteacher ordinaire.

Wolf had been concentrating on his task but he looked up at the sound she made, into her wide blue eyes. They were an odd blue, he thought, not cornflower or that pure dark blue. There was just a hint of grey in the shade. Slate blue, that was it. Distantly he noticed that her hair was straggling down from the ungodly knot she'd twisted it into, framing her face in silky, pale brown wisps. She was very close, her face just inches from his. She had the most delicate skin he'd ever seen, as fine-grained as an infant's, so pale and translucent he could see the fragile tracery of blue veins at her temples. Only the very young should have skin like that. As he watched, another blush began to stain her cheeks, and unwillingly he felt himself become entranced by the sight. He wondered if her skin was that silky and delicate all over—her breasts, her stomach, her thighs, between her legs. The thought was like an electrical jolt to his system, overloading his nerves. Damn, she smelled sweet! And she would probably jump straight out of that chair if he lifted her skirt the way he wanted to and buried his face against her silky thighs.

Mary licked her lips, oblivious to the way his eyes followed the movement. She had to say something, but she didn't know what. His physical nearness seemed to have paralyzed her thought processes. My goodness, he was warm! And close. She should remember why she had come here in the first place, instead of acting like a ninny because a very good-looking, in a rough sort of way, very masculine person was too close to her. She licked her lips again, cleared her throat, and said, "Ah… I came to speak to Joe, if I may."

His expression changed very little, yet she had the impression that he was instantly aloof. "Joe isn't here. He's doing chores."

"I see. When will he be back?"

"In an hour, maybe two."

She looked at him a little disbelievingly. "Are you Joe's father?"

"Yes."

"His mother is…?"

"Dead."

The flat, solitary word jarred her, yet at the same time she was aware of a faint, shocking sense of relief. She looked away from him again. "How did you feel about Joe quitting school?"

"It was his decision."

"But he's only sixteen! He's just a boy—"

"He's Indian," Wolf interrupted. "He's a man."

Indignation mingled with exasperation to act as a spur. She jerked her hands from his armpits and planted them on her hips. "What does that have to do with anything? He's sixteen years old and he needs to get an education!"

"He can read, write and do math. He also knows everything there is to know about training horses and running a ranch. He chose to quit school and work here full-time. This is my ranch, and my mountain. One day it will be his. He decided what to do with his life, and it's train horses." He didn't like explaining his and Joe's personal business to anyone, but there was something about this huffy, dowdy little teacher that made him answer. She didn't seem to realize he was Indian; intellectually she knew it, but she obviously had no idea what it meant to be Indian, and to be Wolf Mackenzie in particular, to have people turn aside to avoid speaking to him.

"I'd like to talk to him anyway," Mary said stubbornly.

"That's up to him. He may not want to talk to you."

"You won't try to influence him at all?"

"No."

"Why not? You should at least have tried to keep him in school!"

Wolf leaned very close, so close that his nose was almost touching hers. She stared into his black eyes, her own eyes widening. "He's Indian, lady. Maybe you don't know what that means. Hell, how could you? You're an Anglo. Indians aren't welcome. What education he has, he got on his own, without any help from the Anglo teachers. When he wasn't being ignored, he was being insulted. Why would he want to go back?"

She swallowed, alarmed by his aggression. She wasn't accustomed to men getting right in her face and swearing at her. Truthfully, Mary admitted that she wasn't accustomed to men at all. When she had been young, the boys had ignored the mousy, bookish girl, and when she had gotten older the men had done the same. She paled a little, but she felt so strongly about the benefits of a good education that she refused to let him intimidate her. Big people often did that to smaller people, probably without even thinking about it, but she wasn't going to give in simply because he was bigger than she. "He was at the head of his class," she said briskly. "If he managed that on his own, think of what he could accomplish with help!"

He straightened to his full height, towering over her. "Like I said, it's up to him." The coffee had long since finished brewing, so he turned to pour a cup and hand it to her. Silence fell between them. He leaned against the cabinets and watched her sip daintily, like a cat. Dainty, yeah, that was a good word for her. She wasn't tiny, maybe five three, but she was slightly built. His eyes dropped to her breasts beneath that dowdy blue dress; they weren't big, but they looked nice and round. He wondered if her nipples would be a delicate shell pink, or rosy beige. He wondered if she would be able to take him comfortably, if she would be so tight he'd go wild—

Sharply he brought his erotic thoughts to a halt. Damn it, that particular lesson should have been etched into his soul! Anglo women might flirt with him and twitch themselves around him, but few of them really wanted to get down and dirty with an Indian. This prissy little frump wasn't even flirting, so why was he getting so turned on? Maybe it was because she was a frump. He kept imagining how the dainty body beneath that awful dress would look, stripped bare and stretched out on the sheets.

Mary set the cup aside. "I'm much warmer now. Thank you, the coffee did the trick." That, and the way he'd run his hands all over her, but she wasn't about to tell him that. She looked up at him and hesitated, suddenly uncertain when she saw the look in his black eyes. She didn't know what it was, but there was something about him that made her pulse rate increase, made her feel faintly uneasy. Was he actually looking at her breasts?

"I think some of Joe's old clothes will fit you," he said, face and voice expressionless.

"Oh, I don't need any clothes. I mean, what I have on is perfectly—"

"Idiotic," he interrupted. "This is Wyoming, lady, not New Orleans, or wherever you're from."

"Savannah," she supplied.

He grunted, which seemed to be one of his basic means of communication, and took a towel from a drawer. Going down on one knee, he lifted her feet from the water and wrapped them in a towel, rubbing them dry with a touch so gentle it was at odds with the thinly veiled hostility of his manner. Then, standing, he said, "Come with me."

"Where are we going?"

"To the bedroom."

Mary stopped, blinking at him, and a bitter smile twisted his mouth. "Don't worry," he said harshly. "I'll control my savage appetites, and after you get dressed, you can get the hell off my mountain."

Chapter Two

Mary drew herself up to her full height and lifted her chin, her mouth setting itself in a prim line. "It isn't necessary to make fun of me, Mr. Mackenzie," she said calmly, but her even tone was hard won. She knew she fell short in the come-hither department; she didn't need sarcasm to remind her. Usually she wasn't disturbed by her mousiness, having accepted it as an unchangeable fact, much like having the sun rise in the east. But Mr. Mackenzie made her feel strangely vulnerable, and it was oddly painful that he should have pointed out how unappealing she was.

Wolf's straight black brows drew together over his high-bridged nose. "I wasn't making fun of you," he snapped. "I was dead serious, lady. I want you off of my mountain."

"Then I'll leave, of course," she replied steadily. "But it was still unnecessary to make fun of me."

He put his hands on his hips. "Make fun of you? How?"

A flush tinged her exquisite skin, but her grey-blue eyes never wavered. "I know I'm not an attractive woman, certainly not the type to stir a man's—er, savage appetites."

She was serious. Ten minutes ago he'd have agreed with her that she was plain, and God knew she was no fashion plate, but what astounded him was that she honestly didn't seem to realize what it meant that he was Indian, or what he'd meant by his sarcasm, or even that he had been strongly aroused by her closeness. A lingering throbbing in his loins reminded him that his reaction hadn't completely subsided. He gave a harsh laugh, the sound devoid of amusement. Why not put a little more excitement in her life? When she heard the flat truth, she wouldn't be able to get off his mountain fast enough.

"I wasn't joking or making fun," he said. His black eyes glittered at her. "Touching you like that, being so close to you that I could smell the sweetness, turned me on."

Astonished, she stared at him. "Turned you on?" she asked blankly.

"Yeah." She still stared at him as if he were speaking a different language, and impatiently he added, "Got me hot, however you want to describe it."

She pushed at a silky strand that had escaped from her hairpins. "You're making fun of me again," she accused. It was impossible. She had never made a man… aroused a man in her life.

He was already irritated, already aroused. He had learned to use iron control when dealing with Anglos, but something about this prim little woman got under his skin. Frustration filled him until he thought he might explode. He hadn't intended to touch her, but suddenly he had his hands on her waist, pulling her toward him. "Maybe you need a demonstration," he said in a rough undertone, and bent to cover her mouth with his.

Mary trembled in profound shock, her eyes enormous as he moved his lips over hers. His eyes were closed. She could see the individual lashes, and for a moment marvelled at how thick they were. Then his hands, still clasped on her waist, drew her into firm contact with his muscled body, and she gasped. He took instant advantage of her opened mouth, probing inside with his tongue. She quivered again, and her eyes slowly closed as a strange heat began to warm her inside. The pleasure was unfamiliar, and so intense that it frightened her. A host of new sensations assailed her, making her dizzy. There was the firmness of his lips, his heady taste, the startling intimacy of his tongue stroking hers as if enticing it to play. She felt the heat of his body, smelled the warm muskiness of his skin. Her soft breasts were pressed against the muscular planes of his chest, and her nipples began to tingle in that strange, embarrassing way again.

Suddenly he lifted his mouth from hers, and sharp disappointment made her eyes fly open. His black gaze burned her. "Kiss me back," he muttered.

"I don't know how," Mary blurted, still unable to believe this was happening.

His voice was almost guttural. "Like this." He took her mouth again, and this time she parted her lips immediately, eager to accept his tongue and feel that odd, surging pleasure once more. He moved his mouth over hers, moulding her lips with fierce pleasure, teaching her how to return the pressure. His tongue touched hers again, and this time she responded shyly in kind, welcoming his small invasion with gentle touches of her own. She was too inexperienced to realize the symbolism of her acceptance, but he began to breathe harder and faster, and his kiss deepened, demanding even more of her.

A frightening excitement exploded through her body, going beyond mere pleasure and becoming a hungry need. She was no longer cold at all, but burning inside as her heartbeat increased until her heart was banging against her ribs. So this was what he meant when he'd said she got him hot. He got her hot, too, and it stunned her to think he had felt this same restless yearning, this incredible wanting. She made a soft, unconscious sound and moved closer to him, not knowing how to control the sensations his experienced kisses had aroused.

His hands tightened painfully on her waist, and a low, rough sound rumbled in his throat. Then he lifted her, pulled her closer, adjusted her hips against his and graphically demonstrated his response to her.

She hadn't known it could be like that. She hadn't known that desire could burn so hot, could make her forget Aunt Ardith's warnings about men and the nasty things they liked to do to women. Mary had quite sensibly decided that those things couldn't be too nasty, or women wouldn't put up with them, but at the same time she had never flirted or tried to attract a boyfriend. The men she had met at college and on the job had seemed normal, not slavering sex fiends; she was comfortable with men, and even considered some to be friends. It was just that she wasn't sexy herself; no man had ever beaten down doors to go out with her, or even managed to accomplish the dialling of her telephone number, so her exposure to men hadn't prepared her for the tightness of Wolf Mackenzie's arms, the hunger of his kisses, or the hardness of his manhood pushing against the juncture of her thighs. Nor had she known that she could want more.

Unconsciously she locked her arms around his neck and squirmed against him, tormented by increasing frustration. Her body was on fire, empty and aching and wanting all at once, and she didn't have the experience to control it. The new sensations were a tidal wave, swamping her mind beneath the overload from her nerve endings.

Wolf jerked his head back, his teeth locked as he relentlessly brought himself back under control. Black fire burned in his eyes as he looked down at her. His kisses had made her soft lips red and pouty, and delicate pink coloured her translucent porcelain skin. Her eyes were heavy-lidded as she opened them and slowly met his gaze. Her pale brown hair had slipped completely out of its knot and tumbled silkily around her face and over her shoulders. Desire was on her face; she already looked tousled, as if he had done more than kiss her, and in his mind he had. She was light and delicate in his arms, but she had twisted against him with a hunger that matched his own.

He could take her to bed now; she was that far gone, and he knew it. But when he did, it would be because she had consciously made the decision, not because she was so hot she didn't know what she was doing. Her inexperience was obvious; he'd even had to teach her how to kiss—the thought stopped as abruptly as if he'd hit a mental wall, as he realized the full extent of her inexperience. Damn it, she was a virgin!

The thought staggered him. She was looking at him now with those greyish blue eyes both innocent and questioning, languid with desire, as she waited for him to make the next move. She didn't know what to do. Her arms were locked around his neck, her body pressed tightly to his, her legs opened slightly to allow him to nestle against her, and she was waiting for him because she didn't have a clue how to proceed. She hadn't even been kissed before. No man had touched those soft breasts, or taken her nipples in his mouth. No man had loved her at all before.

He swallowed the lump that threatened to choke him, his eyes still locked with hers. "God Almighty, lady, that nearly got out of hand."

She blinked. "Did it?" Her tone was prim, the words clear, but the dazed, sleepy look was still in her eyes,

Slowly, because he didn't want to let her go, and gently, because he knew he had to, he let her body slip down his until she was standing on her feet again. She was innocent of the ramifications, but he wasn't. He was Wolf Mackenzie, half-breed, and she was the schoolteacher. The good citizens of Ruth wouldn't want her associating with him; she was in charge of their young people, with untold influence on their forming morals. No parents would want their impressionable daughter being taught by a woman who was having a wild fling with an Indian ex-con. Why, she might even entice their sons! His prison record could be accepted, but his Indian blood would never go away.

So he had to let her go, no matter how much he wanted to take her to his bedroom and teach her all the things that went on between a man and a woman.

Her arms were still around his neck, her fingers buried in the hair at his nape. She seemed incapable of movement. He reached up to take her wrists and draw her hands away from him.

"I think I'll come back later."

A new voice intruded in Mary's dreamworld of newly discovered sensuality, and she jerked away, colour burning her cheeks as she whirled to face the newcomer. A tall, dark-hatred boy stood just inside the kitchen door, his hat in his hand. "Sorry, Dad. I didn't mean to barge in."

Wolf stepped away from her. "Stay. She came to see you, anyway."

The boy looked at her quizzically. "You could have fooled me."

Wolf merely shrugged. "This is Miss Mary Potter, the new schoolteacher. Miss Potter, my son, Joe."

Even through her embarrassment, Mary was jolted that he would call her "Miss Potter" after the intimacy they had just shared. But he seemed so calm and controlled, as if it hadn't affected him at all, while every nerve in her body was still jangling. She wanted to fling herself against him and give herself up to that encompassing fire.

Instead she stood there, her arms stiffly at her sides while her face burned, and forced herself to look at Joe Mackenzie. He was the reason she was here, and she wouldn't allow herself to forget it again. As her embarrassment faded, she saw that he was very like his father. Though he was only sixteen, he was already six feet tall and would likely match his father's height, just as his broad young shoulders showed the promise of being as powerful. His face was a younger version of Wolf's, as strong-boned and proud, the features precisely chiseled. He was calm and controlled, far too controlled for a sixteen-year-old, and his eyes, oddly, were pale, glittering blue. Those eyes held something in them, something untamed, as well as a sort of bitter acceptance and knowledge that made him old beyond his years. He was his father's son.

There was no way she could give up on him.

She held out her hand to him. "I'd really like to talk to you, Joe."

His expression remained aloof, but he crossed the kitchen to shake her hand. "I don't know why."

"You dropped out of school."

The statement hardly needed verification, but he nodded. Mary drew a deep breath. "May I ask why?"

"There was nothing for me there."

She felt frustrated by the calm, flat statement, because she couldn't sense any uncertainty in this unusual boy. As Wolf had said, Joe had made up his own mind and didn't intend to change it. She tried to think of another way to approach hum, but Wolf's quiet, deep voice interrupted.

"Miss Potter, you can finish talking after you get into some sensible clothes. Joe, don't you have some old jeans that might be small enough to fit her?"

To her astonishment, the boy looked her over with an experienced eye. "I think so. Maybe the ones I wore when I was ten." For a moment amusement sparkled in his blue-diamond eyes, and Mary primmed her mouth. What did these Mackenzie men get out of needlessly pointing out her lack of attractiveness?

"Socks, shirt, boots and coat," Wolf added to the list. "The boots will be too big, but two pairs of socks will hold them on."

"Mr. Mackenzie, I really don't need extra clothes. What I have on will do until I get home."

"No, it won't. The high temperature today is about ten below zero. You aren't walking out of this house with bare legs and those stupid shoes."

Her sensible shoes were suddenly stupid? She felt like flying to their defence, but suddenly remembered the snow that had gotten inside them and frozen her toes. What was sensible in Savannah was woefully inadequate in a Wyoming whiter.

"Very well," she assented, but only because it was, after all, the sensible thing to do. She still felt uncomfortable about taking Joe's clothes, even temporarily. She had never worn anyone else's clothes before, never swapped sweaters or blouses with chums as an adolescent Aunt Ardith had thought such familiarity ill-bred.

"I'll see about your car while you change." Without even glancing at her again, he put on his coat and hat and walked out the door.

"This way," Joe said, indicating that she should follow him. She did so, and he looked over his shoulder. "What happened to your car?"

"A water hose blew."

"Where is it?"

She stopped. "It's on the road. Didn't you see it when you drove up?" An awful thought struck her. Had her car somehow slid off the mountain?

"I came up the front side of the mountain. It's not as steep." He looked amused again. "You actually tried driving up the back road in a car, when you're not used to driving in snow?"

"I didn't know that was the back road. I thought it was the only road. Couldn't I have made it? I have snow tires."

"Maybe."

She noticed that he didn't sound very confident in her ability, but she didn't protest, because she wasn't very confident herself. He led the way through a rustic but comfortable living room and down a short hallway to an open door. "My old clothes are boxed up in the storage room, but it won't take long for me to dig them out. You can change in here. It's my bedroom."

"Thank you," she murmured, stepping inside the room. Like the living room, it was rustic, with exposed beams and thick wooden walls. There was nothing in it to indicate it was inhabited by a teenage boy: no sports apparatus of any kind, no clothes on the floor. The full-size bed was neatly made, a homemade quilt smoothed on top. A straight chair stood in one corner. Next to his bed, bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling; the shelves were obviously handmade, but weren't crude. They had been finished, sanded and varnished. They were crammed with books, and curiosity led her to examine the titles.

It took her a moment to realize mat every book had to do with flight, from da Vinci's experiments through Kitty Hawk and space exploration. There were books on bombers, fighters, helicopters, radar planes, jets and prop planes, books on air battles fought in each war since pilots first shot at each other with pistols in World War I. There were books on experimental aircraft, on fighter tactics, on wing design and engine capability.

"Here are the clothes." Joe had entered silently and placed the clothes on the bed. Mary looked at him, but his face was impassive.

"You like planes," she said, then winced at her own banality.

"I like planes," he admitted without inflection.

"Have you thought about taking flying lessons?"

"Yes." He didn't add anything to that stark answer, however; he merely left the room and closed the door behind him.

She was thoughtful as she slowly removed her dress and pulled on the things Joe had brought. The collection of books indicated not merely an interest in flying, but an obsession. Obsessions were funny things; unhealthy ones could ruin lives, but some obsessions lifted people to higher planes of life, made them shine with a brighter light, burn with a hotter fire, and if those obsessions weren't fed, then the person withered, a life blighted by starvation of the soul. If she were right, she had a way to reach Joe and get him back in school.

The jeans fit. Disgusted at this further proof that she had the figure of a ten-year-old boy, she pulled on the too-big flannel shirt and buttoned it, then rolled the sleeves up over her hands. As Wolf had predicted, the worn boots were too big, but the two pairs of thick socks padded her feet enough that the boots didn't slip up and down on her heels too much. The warmth was heavenly, and she decided she would pinch pennies any way she could until she could afford a pair of boots.

Joe was adding wood to the fire in the enormous rock fireplace when she entered, and a little grin tugged at his mouth when he saw her. "You sure don't look like Mrs. Langdale, or any other teacher I've ever seen."

She folded her hands. "Looks have nothing to do with ability. I'm a very good teacher—even if I do look like a ten-year-old boy."

"Twelve. I wore those jeans when I was twelve."

"What a consolation."

He laughed aloud, and she felt pleased, because she had the feeling neither he nor his father laughed much. "Why did you quit school?"

She had learned that if you kept asking the same question, you would often get different answers, and eventually the evasions would cease and the real answer would emerge. But Joe looked at her steadily and gave the same answer as before. "There was nothing for me there."

"Nothing more for you to learn?"

"I'm Indian, Miss Potter. A mixed-breed. What I learned, I learned on my own."

Mary paused. "Mrs. Langdale didn't—" She stopped, unsure of how to phrase her question.

"I was invisible." His young voice was harsh. "From the time I started school. No one took the time to explain anything to me, ask me questions, or include me in anything. I'm surprised my papers were even graded."

"But you were number one in your class."

He shrugged. "I like books."

"Don't you miss school, miss learning?"

"I can read without going to school, and I can help Dad a lot more if I'm here all day. I know horses, ma'am, maybe better than anyone else around here except for Dad, and I didn't learn about them in school. This ranch will be mine someday. This is my life. Why should I waste time in school?"

Mary took a deep breath and played her ace. "To learn how to fly."

He couldn't prevent the avid gleam that shone briefly in his eyes, but it was quickly extinguished. "I can't learn how to fly in Ruth High School. Maybe someday I'll take lessons."

"I wasn't talking about flying lessons. I was talking about the Air Force Academy."

His bronze skin whitened. This time she didn't see a gleam of eagerness, but a deep, anguished need so powerful it shook her, as if he'd been shown a glimpse of heaven. Then he turned his head, and abruptly he looked older. "Don't try to make a fool of me. There's no way."

"Why isn't there a way? From what I saw in your school records, your grade average will be high enough."

"I dropped out."

"You can go back."

"As far behind as I am? I'd have to repeat this grade, and I won't sit still while those jerks call me a stupid Indian."

"You aren't that far behind. I could tutor you, bring you up fast enough that you could start your senior year in the fall. I'm a licensed teacher, Joe, and for your information, my credentials are very good. I'm qualified to tutor you in the classes you need."

He took a poker and jabbed at a log, sending a shower of sparks flying. "What if I do it?" he muttered. "The Academy isn't a college where you take an entrance exam, pay your money and walk in."

"No. The usual way is to be recommended by your congressman."

"Yeah, well, I don't think my congressman is going to recommend an Indian. We're way down on the list of people it's fashionable to help. Dead last, as a matter of fact."

"I think you're making too much of your heritage," Mary said calmly. "You can keep blaming everything on being Indian, or you can get on with your life. You can't do anything about other people's reactions to you, but you can do something about your own. You don't know what your congressman will do, so why give up when you haven't even tried yet? Are you a quitter?"

He straightened, his pale eyes fierce. "I don't reckon."

"Then it's time to find out, isn't it? Do you want to fly bad enough that you'll fight for the privilege? Or do you want to die without ever knowing what it's like to sit in the cockpit of a jet doing Mach 1?"

"You hit hard, lady," he whispered.

"Sometimes it takes a knock on the head to get someone's attention. Do you have the guts to try?"

"What about you? The folks in Ruth won't like it if you spend so much time with me. It would be bad enough if I were alone, but with Dad, it's twice as bad."

"If anyone objects to my tutoring you, I'll certainly set him straight," she said firmly. "It's an honour to be accepted into the Academy, and that's our goal. If you'll agree to being tutored, I'll write to your congressman immediately. I think this time your heritage will work in your favour."

It was amazing how proud that strong young face could be. "I don't want it if they give it to me just because I'm Indian."

"Don't be ridiculous," she scoffed. "Of course you won't be accepted into the Academy just because you're half Indian. But if that fact catches the congressman's interest, I say, good. It would only make him remember your name. It'll be up to you to make the grade."

He raked his hand through his black hair, then restlessly walked to the window to look out at the white landscape. "Do you really think it's possible?"

"Of course it's possible. It isn't guaranteed, but it's possible. Can you live with yourself if you don't try? If we don't try?" She didn't know how to go about bringing someone to a congressman's attention for consideration for recommendation to the Academy, but she was certainly willing to write to every senator and representative Wyoming had seated in Congress, a letter a week, until she found out.

"If I agreed, it would have to be at night. I have chores around here that have to be done."

"Night is fine with me. Midnight would be fine with me, if it would get you back in school."

He gave her a quick look. "You really mean it, don't you? You actually care that I dropped out of school."

"Of course I care."

"There's no 'of course' about it. I told you, no other teacher cared if I showed up in class. They probably wished I hadn't."

"Well," she said in her briskest voice, "I care. Teaching is what I do, so if I can't teach and feel I'm doing some good, then I lose part of myself. Isn't that how you feel about flying? That you have to, or you'll die?"

"I want it so bad it hurts," he admitted, his voice raw.

"I read somewhere that flying is like throwing your soul into the heavens and racing to catch it as it falls."

"I don't think mine would ever fall," he murmured, looking at the clear cold sky. He stared, entranced, as if paradise beckoned, as if he could see forever. He was probably imagining himself up there, free and wild, with a powerful machine screaming beneath him and taking him higher. Then he shook himself, visibly fighting off the dream, and turned to her. "Okay, Miss Teacher, when do we start?"

"Tonight. You've already wasted enough time."

"How long will it take for me to catch up?"

She gave him a withering look. "Catch up? You're going to leave them in the dust. How long it takes depends on how much work you can do."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, grinning a little.

She thought that already he looked younger, more like a boy, than he had before. He was, in all ways, far more mature than the other boys his age in her classes, but he looked as if a burden had been lifted from him. If flying meant that much to him, how had it felt to set himself a course that would deny him what he wanted most?

"Can you be at my house at six? Or would you rather I come here?" She thought of that drive, in the dark and snow, and wondered if she'd make it if he wanted her to come here.

"I'll come to your house, since you aren't used to driving in snow. Where do you live?"

"Go down the back road and take a left. It's the first house on the left." She thought a minute. "I believe it's the first house, period."

"It is. There isn't another house for five miles. That's the old Witcher house."

"So I've been told. It was kind of the school board to arrange living quarters for me."

Joe looked dubious. "More like it was the only way they had of getting another teacher in the middle of the year."

"Well, I appreciated it anyway," she said firmly. She looked out the window. "Shouldn't your father be back by now?"

"Depends on what he found. If it was something he could fix right then, he'd do it. Look, here he comes now."

The black pickup roared to a stop in front of the house, and Wolf got out. Coming up on the porch, he stomped his feet to rid his boots of the snow caked on them and opened the door. His cool black gaze flickered over his son, then to Mary. His eyes widened fractionally as he examined every slim curve exhibited by Joe's old jeans, but he didn't comment.

"Get your things together," he instructed. "I have a spare hose that will fit your car. We'll put it on, then take you home."

"I can drive," she replied. "But thank you for your trouble. How much is the hose? I'll pay you for that."

"Consider it neighbourly assistance to a greenhorn. And we'll still take you home. I'd rather you practiced driving in the snow somewhere other than on this mountain."

His dark face was expressionless, as usual, but she sensed that he'd made up his mind and wouldn't budge. She got her dress from Joe's room and the rest of her things from the kitchen. When she returned to the living room, Wolf held a thick coat for her to wear. She slipped into it; since it reached almost to her knees and the sleeves totally obscured her hands, she knew it had to be his.

Joe had on his coat and hat again. "Ready."

Wolf looked at his son. "Have you two had your talk?"

The boy nodded. "Yes." He met his father's eyes squarely. "She's going to tutor me. I'm going to try to get into the Air Force Academy."

"It's your decision. Just make sure you know what you're getting into."

"I have to try."

Wolf nodded once, and that was the end of the discussion. With her sandwiched between them, they left the warmth of the house, and once again Mary was struck by the bitter, merciless cold. She scrambled gratefully into the truck, which had been left running, and the blast of hot air from the heater vents felt like heaven.

Wolf got behind the wheel, and Joe got in beside her, trapping her between their two much bigger bodies. She sat with her hands primly folded and her booted feet placed neatly side-by-side as they drove down to an enormous barn with long stables extending off each side of it like arms. Wolf got out and entered the barn, then returned thirty seconds later with a length of thick black hose.

When they reached her car, both Mackenzies got out and poked their heads under the raised hood, but Wolf told her, in that tone of voice she already recognized as meaning business, to stay in the truck. He was certainly autocratic, but she liked his relationship with Joe. There was a strong sense of respect between them.

She wondered if the townspeople were truly so hostile simply because the Mackenzies were half Indian. Something Joe had said tugged at her memory, something about it would be bad enough if it were just him involved, but it would be twice as bad because of Wolf. What about Wolf? He'd rescued her from an unpleasant, even dangerous, situation, he'd seen to her comfort, and now he was repairing her car.

He'd also kissed her silly.

She could feel her cheeks heat as she remembered those fierce kisses. No, the kisses, and remembering them, begot a different kind of heat. Her cheeks were hot because her own behaviour was so appalling she could barely bring herself to think about it. She had never—never!—been so forward with a man. It was totally out of character for her.

Aunt Ardith would have had a conniption fit at the thought of her mousy, sedate niece letting a strange man put his tongue in her mouth. It had to be unsanitary, though it was also, to be honest, exciting in a primitive way.

Her face still felt hot when Wolf got back into the truck, but he didn't even look at her. "It's fixed. Joe will follow us."

"But doesn't it need more water and antifreeze?"

He cast her a disbelieving look. "I had a can of antifreeze in the back of the truck. Weren't you paying attention when I got it out?"

She blushed again. She hadn't been paying attention; she'd been lost in reliving those kisses he'd given her, her heart thundering and her blood racing. It was an extraordinary reaction, and she wasn't certain how to handle it. Ignoring it seemed the wisest course, but was it possible to ignore something like that?

His powerful leg moved against hers as he shifted gears, and abruptly she realized she was still sitting in the middle of the seat. "I'll get out of your way," she said hastily, and slid over by the window.

Wolf had liked the feel of her sitting next to him, so close that his arm and leg brushed her whenever he changed gears, but he didn't tell her that. Things had gotten way out of hand at the house, but he didn't have to let them go any further. This deal with Joe worried him, and Joe was more important to him than the way a soft woman felt in his arms.

"I don't want Joe hurt because your do-gooder instincts won't leave well enough alone." He spoke in a low, silky tone that made her jump, and he knew she sensed the menace in it. "The Air Force Academy! That's climbing high for an Indian kid, with a lot of people waiting to step on his fingers."

If he'd thought to intimidate her, he'd failed. She turned toward him with fire sparking in her eyes, her chin up. "Mr. Mackenzie, I didn't promise Joe he would be accepted into the Academy. He understands that. His grades were high enough to qualify him for recommendation, but he dropped out of school. He has no chance at all unless he gets back into school and gets the credits he needs. That's what I offered him: a chance."

"And if he doesn't make it?"

"He wants to try. Even if he isn't accepted, at least he'll know he tried, and at least he'll have a diploma."

"So he can do exactly what he would have done without the diploma."

"Perhaps. But I'm going to begin checking into the procedure and qualifications on Monday, and writing to people. The competition to get into the Academy is really fierce."

"The people in town won't like you tutoring him."

"That's what Joe said." Her face took on that prim, obstinate look. "But I'll have something to say to anyone who kicks up about it. Just let me handle them, Mr. Mackenzie."

They were already down the mountain that had taken her so long to drive up. Wolf was silent for the rest of the drive, so Mary was, too. But when he pulled up to the old house where she was living, he rested his gloved hands on the steering wheel and said, "It isn't just Joe. For your sake, don't let on that you're doing it. It's better for you if no one knows you've ever even spoken to me."

"Why ever not?"

His smile was wintry. "I'm an ex-con. I did time for rape."

Chapter Three

Afterward, Mary kicked herself for simply getting out of the truck without saying a word in response to his bald statement, but at the time she had been shocked to the core and incapable of a response. Rape! The crime was repulsive. It was unbelievable. She had actually kissed him! She'd been so stunned that she'd merely nodded goodbye to him and told Joe that she'd see him that night, then gone in the house without thanking them for all their help and trouble.

Now reality set in. Standing alone in the old-fashioned kitchen, she watched Woodrow hungrily lapping milk from his saucer while she considered the man and his statement. She abruptly snorted. "Hogwash! If that man's a rapist, I'll boil you for supper, Woodrow."

Woodrow looked remarkably unconcerned, which to Mary indicated that the cat agreed with her judgment, and she had a high opinion of Woodrow's ability to know what was best for himself.

After all, Wolf hadn't said that he'd committed rape. He'd said that he had served time in prison for rape. When Mary thought of the way both Mackenzies automatically and bitterly accepted that they would be shunned because of their Indian blood, she wondered if perhaps the fact that Wolf was part Indian figured in his conviction. But he hadn't done it. She knew that as well as she knew her own face. The man who had helped her out of a bad situation, warmed her cold hands against his own body and kissed her with burning male hunger, simply wasn't the type of man who could hurt a woman like that. He was the one who had halted before those kisses had gone too far; she had already been putty in his hands.

It was ridiculous. There was no way he was a rapist. Oh, perhaps it hadn't been any great hardship for him to stop kissing her; after all, she was mousy and inexperienced and would never be voluptuous, but… Her thoughts trailed off as remembered sensations intruded. She was inexperienced, but she wasn't stupid. He had been—well, hard. She had distinctly felt it. Perhaps he hadn't had an outlet for his physical appetites lately and she had been handy, but still he hadn't taken advantage of her. He hadn't treated her with a sailor's attitude that any port in a storm would suffice. What was that awful term she had heard one of her students use once? Oh, yes—horny. She could accept that Wolf Mackenzie had been in that condition and she had accidentally stirred his fire in some way that still remained a mystery to her, but the bottom line was that he hadn't pushed his advantage. What if he had?

Her heart started a strong, heavy beat, and heat crept through her, while an achy, restless feeling settled low inside. Her breasts tightened and began throbbing, and automatically she pressed her palms over them before she realized what she was doing and jerked her hands down. But what if he had touched them? What if he had put his mouth on her? She felt as if she would melt now, just thinking about him. Fantasizing. She pressed her thighs together, trying to ease the hollow ache, and a whimper escaped her lips. The sound was low, but seemed inordinately loud in the silent house, and the cat looked up from his saucer, gave a questioning meow, then returned to the milk.

Would she have been able to stop him? Would she even have tried to stop him? Or would she now be standing here remembering making love instead of trying to imagine how it would be? Her body tingled, but from barely awakened instincts and needs rather than true knowledge.

She had never before known passion, other than the passion for knowledge and teaching. To find her body capable of such strong sensations was frightening, because she had thought she knew herself well. Suddenly her own flesh was alien to her, and her thoughts and emotions were abruptly unruly. It was almost like a betrayal.

Why, this was lust! She, Mary Elizabeth Potter, actually lusted after a man! Not just any man, either. Wolf Mackenzie.

It was both amazing and embarrassing.

Joe proved a quick, able student, as Mary had known he would be. He was prompt, arriving right on time, and thankfully alone. After stewing over the morning's events for the entire afternoon, she didn't think she could ever face Wolf Mackenzie again. What must he think of her? To her mind, she had practically attacked the man.

But Joe was alone, and in the three hours that followed, Mary found herself liking him more and more. He was hungry for knowledge and absorbed it like a dry sponge. While he worked on the assignments she had set out for him, she prepared a set of records in which to keep the time he spent on each subject, the matter covered and his test scores. The goal they had set for themselves was much higher than just a high school diploma. Though she hadn't promised it, she knew she wouldn't be satisfied unless Joe was accepted into the Air Force Academy. There had been something in his eyes that told her he would never be complete unless he could fly; he was like a grounded eagle, his soul yearning for the sky.

At nine o'clock she called a halt and noted the time in her records. Joe yawned as he rocked the chair onto its back legs. "How often do we do this?"

"Every night, if you can," she replied. "At least until you catch up with the rest of your class."

His pale, blue-diamond eyes glittered at her, and again she was struck by how old those eyes were. "Do I have to go back to regular classrooms next year?"

"It would help if you did. You'd be able to get much more work done, and we could do your advanced studies here."

"I'll think about it. I don't want to leave Dad in the lurch. We're expanding the ranch now, and it means a lot more work. We have more horses now than we've ever had before."

"Do you raise horses?"

"Quarter horses. Good ranch horses, trained to handle cattle. We not only breed them, but people bring their own horses to the ranch for Dad to train. He's not just good, he's the best. Folks don't mind that he's an Indian when it comes to training their horses."

Again the bitterness was apparent. Mary propped her elbows on the table and leaned her chin on her upraised, folded hands. "And you?"

"I'm Indian, too, Miss Potter. Half Indian, and that's more than enough for most people. It wasn't as bad when I was younger, but an Indian kid isn't much of a threat to anyone. It's when that kid grows up and starts looking at the white Anglo daughters that all hell breaks loose."

So a girl had been part of the reason Joe had quit school. Mary raised her eyebrows at him. "I imagine the white Anglo daughters looked back, too," she said mildly. "You're very good-looking."

He almost grinned at her. "Yeah. That and two bits will get me a cup of coffee."

"So they looked back?"

"And flirted. One acted like she really cared something about me. But when I asked her to a dance, the door was slammed in my face right quick. I guess it's okay to flirt with me, sort of like waving a red flag at a bull from a safe distance, but there was no way she was actually going to go out with an Indian."

"I'm sorry." Without thinking, Mary reached out and covered his strong young hand with her own. "Is that when you quit school?"

"There didn't seem to be any point in going. Don't think I was serious about her, or anything like that, because it hadn't gotten that far. I was just interested in her. But the whole thing made it plain that I was never going to fit in, that none of those girls would ever go out with me."

"So what did you plan on doing? Working on the ranch for the rest of your life and never dating, never getting married?"

"I'm sure not thinking of getting married!" he said strongly. "As for the rest of it, there are other towns, bigger towns. The ranch is doing pretty good now, and we have a little extra money." He didn't add that he'd lost his virginity two years before, on a trip to one of those bigger towns. He didn't want to shock her, and he was certain she would be shocked if she had any idea of his experience. The new teacher wasn't just prim, she was innocent. It made him feel oddly protective. That, and the fact that she was different from the other teachers he'd known. When she looked at him she saw him, Joe Mackenzie, not the bronzed skin and black hair of a half-breed. She had looked into his eyes and seen the dream, the obsession he'd always had with planes and flying.

After Joe had left, Mary locked the house and got ready for bed. It had been a tumultuous day for her, but it was a long time before she slept, and then she overslept the next morning. She deliberately kept herself busy that day, not giving herself time to moon over Wolf Mackenzie, or fantasize about things that hadn't happened. She mopped and waxed until the old house was shiny, then dragged out the boxes of books she had brought from Savannah. Books always gave a house a lived-in look. To her frustration, however, there was no place to put them. What she needed was some of that portable shelving; if all it required for assembly was a screwdriver, she should be able to put it up herself. With her customary decisiveness, she made plans to check at the general store the next afternoon. If they didn't have what she needed, she would buy some lumber and hire someone to build some shelves.

At lunch on Monday she made a call to the state board of education to find out what she had to do to make certain Joe's studies would be accepted toward his diploma. She knew she had the qualifications, but there was also a good deal of paperwork to be done before he could earn the necessary credits by private tutoring. She made the call on the pay phone in the tiny teacher's lounge, which was never used because there were only three teachers, each teaching four grades, and there was never any time for a break. Nevertheless it had three chairs and a table, a tiny, dented refrigerator, an automatic coffee maker and the pay phone. It was so unusual for any of the teachers to use the lounge that Mary was surprised when the door opened and Sharon Wycliffe, who taught grades one through four, poked her head in.

"Mary, are you feeling sick or anything?"

"No, I'm fine." Mary stood and dusted off her hands. The receiver had carried a grey coating, evidence of how often it was used. "I was making a call."

"Oh. I just wondered. You'd been in here a long time, and I thought you might not be feeling well. Who were you calling?"

The question was asked without any hesitancy. Sharon had been born in Ruth, had gone to school here, had married a local boy. Everyone in Ruth knew every one of the other one hundred and eighty inhabitants; they all knew each other's business and saw nothing unusual about it. Small towns were merely large extended families. Mary wasn't taken aback by Sharon's open curiosity, having already experienced it.

"The state board. I needed some information on teaching requirements."

Sharon looked alarmed. "Do you think you aren't properly certified? If there's any trouble, the school board will likely commit mass suicide. You don't know how hard it is to find a teacher with the proper qualifications willing to come to a town as small as Ruth. They were almost at the panic stage when you were located. The kids were going to have to start going to school over sixty miles away."

"No, it isn't that. I thought I might begin private tutoring, if any of the kids need it." She didn't mention Joe Mackenzie, because she couldn't forget the warnings both he and his father had given her.

"Thank goodness it isn't bad news," Sharon exclaimed. "I'd better get back to the kids before they get into trouble." With a wave and a smile she withdrew her head, her curiosity satisfied.

Mary hoped Sharon didn't mention it to Dottie Lancaster, the teacher who taught grades five through eight, but she knew it was a futile hope. Eventually, everything in Ruth became common knowledge. Sharon was warm and full of good humour with her young charges, and Mary's teaching style was rather relaxed, too, but Dottie was strict and abrupt with the students. It made Mary uncomfortable, because she sensed Dottie regarded her job as merely a job, something that was necessary but not enjoyed. She had even heard that Dottie, who was fifty-five, was thinking about an early retirement. For all Dottie's shortcomings, that would certainly upset the local school board, because as Sharon had pointed out, it was almost impossible to get a teacher to relocate to Ruth. The town was just too small and too far away from everything.

As she taught the last classes of the day, Mary found herself studying the young girls and wondering which one had daringly flirted with Joe Mackenzie, then retreated when he had actually asked her out. Several of the girls were very attractive and flirtatious, and though they had the shallowness typical of teenagers, they all seemed likable. But which one would have attracted Joe, who wasn't shallow, whose eyes were far too old for a sixteen-year-old boy? Natalie Ulrich, who was tall and graceful? Pamela Hearst, who had the sort of blond good looks that belonged on a California beach? Or maybe it was Jackie Baugh, with her dark, sultry eyes. It could be any of the eight girls in her classes, she realized. They were used to being pursued, having had the stupendous good luck to be outnumbered, nine to eight, by the boys. They were all flirts. So which one was it?

She wondered why it mattered, but it did. One of these girls, though she hadn't broken Joe's heart, had nevertheless dealt him what could have been a life-destroying blow. Joe had taken it as the final proof that he'd never have a place in the white man's world, and he'd withdrawn. He still might never re-enter this school, but at least he'd agreed to be tutored. If only he didn't lose hope.

When school was out, she swiftly gathered all the materials she would need that night, as well as the papers she had to grade, and hurried to her car. It was only a short drive to Hearst's General Store, and when she asked, Mr. Hearst kindly directed her to the stacks of shelving in a corner.

A few minutes later the door opened to admit another customer. Mary saw Wolf as soon as he entered the store; she had been examining the shelving, but it was as if her skin was an alarm system, signalling his nearness. Her nerves tingled, the hair at the nape of her neck bristled, she looked up, and there he was. Instantly she shivered, and her nipples tightened. Distress at that uncontrollable response sent blood rushing to her face.

With her peripheral vision she saw Mr. Hearst stiffen, and for the first time she truly believed the things Wolf had told her about the way he was regarded in town. He hadn't done anything, hadn't said anything, but it was obvious Mr. Hearst wasn't happy to have him in the store.

Quickly she turned back to the shelving. She couldn't look him in the eye. Her face heated even more when she thought of the way she'd acted, throwing herself at him like a sex-starved old maid. It didn't help her feelings that he probably thought she was a sex-starved old maid; she couldn't argue with the old maid part, but she had never paid much attention to the other until Wolf had taken her in his arms. When she thought of the things she had done…

Her face was on fire. Her body was on fire. There was no way she could talk to him. What must he think of her? With fierce concentration, she read the instructions on the box of shelving and pretended she hadn't seen him enter the store.

She had read the instructions three times before she realized she was acting just like the people he had described: too good to speak to him, disdaining to acknowledge knowing him. Mary was normally even-tempered, but suddenly rage filled her, and it was rage at herself. What sort of person was she?

She jerked the box of shelving toward her and nearly staggered under the unexpected weight. Just as she turned, Wolf laid a box of nails on the checkout counter and reached in his pocket for his wallet.

Mr. Hearst glanced briefly at Wolf; then his eyes cut to where Mary was struggling with the box. "Here, Miss Potter, let me get that," he said, rushing from behind the counter to grab the box. He grunted as he hefted it in his arms. "Can't have you wrestling with something this heavy. Why, you might hurt yourself."

Mary wondered how he thought she would get it from her car into her house if she didn't handle it herself, but refrained from pointing that out. She followed him back to the counter, squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, looked up at Wolf and said clearly, "Hello, Mr. Mackenzie. How are you?"

His night-dark eyes glittered, perhaps in warning. "Miss Potter," he said in brief acknowledgment, touching the brim of his hat with his fingers, but he refused to respond to her polite inquiry.

Mr. Hearst looked sharply at Mary. "You know him, Miss Potter?"

"Indeed I do. He rescued me Saturday when my car broke down and I was stranded in the snow." She kept her voice clear and strong.

Mr. Hearst darted a suspicious look at Wolf. "Hmmph," he said, then reached for the box of shelving to ring it up.

"Excuse me," Mary said. "Mr. Mackenzie was here first."

She heard Wolf mutter a curse under his breath, or at least she thought it was a curse. Mr. Hearst turned red.

"I don't mind waiting," Wolf said tightly.

"I wouldn't dream of cutting in front of you." She folded her hands at her waist and pursed her lips. "I couldn't be that rude."

"Ladies first," Mr. Hearst said, trying for a smile.

Mary gave him a stern look. "Ladies shouldn't take advantage of their gender, Mr. Hearst. This is an age of equal treatment and fairness. Mr. Mackenzie was here first, and he should be waited on first."

Wolf shook his head and gave her a disbelieving look. "Are you one of those women's libbers?"

Mr. Hearst glared at him. "Don't take that tone with her, Indian."

"Now, just a minute." Controlling her outrage, she shook her finger at him. "That was rude and entirely uncalled for. Why, your mother would be ashamed of you, Mr. Hearst. Didn't she teach you better than that?"

He turned even redder. "She taught me just fine," he mumbled, staring at her finger.

There was something about a schoolteacher's finger; it had an amazing, mystical power. It made grown men quail before it. She had noticed the effect before and decided that a schoolteacher's finger was an extension of Mother's finger, and as such it wielded unknown authority. Women grew out of the feeling of guilt and helplessness brought on by that accusing finger, perhaps because most of them became mothers and developed their own powerful finger, but men never did. Mr. Hearst was no exception. He looked as if he wanted to crawl under his own counter.

"Then I'm certain you'll want to make her proud of you," she said in her most austere voice. "After you, Mr. Mackenzie."

Wolf made a sound that was almost a growl, but Mary stared at him until he jerked the money from his wallet and threw it on the counter. Without another word, Mr. Hearst rang up the nails and made change. Equally silent, Wolf grabbed the box of nails, spun on his heel and left the store.

"Thank you,'' Mary said, finally relenting and bestowing a forgiving smile on Mr. Hearst. "I knew you would understand how important it is to me that I be treated fairly. I don't wish to take advantage of my position as a teacher here." She made it sound as if being a teacher was at least as important as being queen, but Mr. Hearst only nodded, too relieved to pursue the matter. He took her money and dutifully carried the box of shelving out to her car, where he stored it in the trunk for her.

"Thank you," she said again. "By the way, Pamela—she is your daughter, isn't she?"

Mr. Hearst looked worried. "Yes, she is." Pam was his youngest, and the apple of his eye.

"She's a lovely girl and a good student. I just wanted you to know that she's doing well in school."

His face was wreathed in smiles as she drove away.

Wolf pulled over at the corner and watched his rearview mirror, waiting for Mary to exit the store. He was so angry he wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled, and that made him even angrier, because he knew he wouldn't do it.

Damn her! He'd warned her, but she hadn't listened. Not only had she made it plain they were acquainted, she had outlined the circumstances of their meeting and then championed him in a way that wouldn't go unnoticed.

Hadn't she understood when he'd told her he was an ex-con, and why? Did she think he'd been joking?

His hands clenched around the steering wheel. She'd had her hair twisted up in a knot again, and those big glasses perched on her nose, hiding the soft slate-blue of her eyes, but he remembered how she had looked with her hair down, wearing Joe's old jeans that had clung tightly to her slender legs and hips. He remembered the way passion had glazed her eyes when he'd kissed her. He remembered the softness of her lips, though she had had them pressed together in a ridiculously prim expression.

If he had any sense he'd just drive away. If he stayed completely away from her, there wouldn't be anything for people to talk about other than the fact that she was tutoring Joe, and that would be bad enough in their eyes.

But how would she get that box out of the car and into the house when she got home? It probably weighed as much as she did. He would just carry the box in for her, and at the same time peel a strip off her hide for not listening to him.

Oh, hell, who was he fooling? He'd had a taste of her, and he wanted more. She was a frumpy old maid, but her skin was as pale and translucent as a baby's, and her slender body would be soft, gently curving under his hands. He wanted to touch her. After kissing her, holding her, he hadn't gone to see Julie Oakes because he hadn't been able to get the feel of Miss Mary Potter out of his mind, off of his body. He still ached. His physical frustration was painful, and it was going to get worse, because if he'd ever known anything, it was that Miss Mary Potter wasn't for him.

Her car pulled out from in front of the store and passed him. Smothering another curse, he put the truck in gear and slowly followed her. She maintained a sedate pace, following the two-lane highway out of town, then turning off on the narrow secondary road that led to her house. She had to see his truck behind her, but she didn't give any indication that she knew she was being followed. Instead she drove straight to her house, carefully turned in at the snow-packed driveway and guided the car around to her customary parking spot behind the house.

Wolf shook his head as he pulled in behind her and got out of the truck. She was already out of her car, and she smiled at him as she fished the house key out of her purse. Didn't she remember what he'd told her? He couldn't believe that he'd told her he'd served time for rape and still she greeted him as calmly as if he were a priest, though they were the only two people for miles around.

"Damn it all, lady!" he barked at her, his long legs carrying him to her in a few strides. "Didn't you listen to anything I said Saturday?"

"Yes, of course I listened. That doesn't mean I agreed." She unlocked the trunk and smiled at him. "While you're here, would you please carry this box in for me? I'd really appreciate it."

"That's why I stopped," he snapped. "I knew you couldn't handle it."

His ill temper didn't seem to faze her. She merely smiled at him again as he lifted the box onto his shoulder, then led the way to the back door and opened it.

The first thing he noticed was that the house had a fresh, sweet smell to it, instead of the musty smell of an old house that had stood empty for a long time. His head lifted, and against his will he inhaled the faint scent. "What's that smell?"

She stopped and sniffed delicately. "What smell?"

"That sweet smell. Like flowers."

"Flowers? Oh, that must be the lilac sachet I put in all the drawers to freshen them. So many of the sachets are overpowering, but the lilacs are just right, don't you think?"

He didn't know anything about sachets, whatever they were, but if she put them in all the drawers, then her underwear must smell like lilacs, too. Her sheets would smell like lilacs and the warm scent of her body. His body responded strongly to the thought, and he cursed, then set the box down with a thud. Though the house was chilly, he felt sweat break out on his forehead.

"Let me turn up the heat," she said, ignoring his cursing. "The furnace is old and noisy, but I don't have any wood for the fireplace, so it'll have to do." As she talked, she left the kitchen and turned down a hallway, her voice growing fainter. Then she was back, and she smiled at him again. "It'll be warm in just a minute. Would you like a cup of tea?" After giving him a measuring look she said, "Make that coffee. You don't look like a tea-drinking man."

He was already warm. He was burning up. He pulled off his gloves and tossed them on the kitchen table. "Don't you know everybody in that town will be talking about you now? Lady, I'm Indian, and I'm an ex-con—"

"Mary," she interrupted briskly.

"What?"

"My name is Mary, not 'lady.' Mary Elizabeth." She added the second name out of habit because Aunt Ardith had always called her by both names. "Are you certain you don't want coffee? I need something to warm up my insides."

His hat joined the gloves, and he raked an impatient hand through his hair. "All right. Coffee."

Mary turned to run the water and measure the coffee, using the activity to hide the sudden colour in her face. His hair. She felt stupid, but she'd hardly noticed his hair before. Maybe she'd been too upset, then too bemused, or maybe it was just that his midnight-black eyes had taken her attention, but she hadn't noticed before how long his hair was. It was thick and black and shiny, and touched his broad shoulders. He looked magnificently pagan; she had immediately pictured him with his powerful chest and legs bare, his body covered only by a breechclout or loincloth, and her pulse rate had gone wild.

He didn't sit down, but propped his long body against the cabinet beside her. Mary kept her head down, hoping her blush would subside. What was it about the man that the mere sight of him triggered erotic fantasies? She had certainly never had any fantasies before, erotic or otherwise. She had never before looked at a man and wondered what he looked like nude, but the thought of Wolf nude made her ache inside, made her hands itch to touch him.

"What the hell are you doing letting me even come in your house, let alone inviting me to have coffee?" he asked in a low, rough voice.

She blinked at him, her expression startled. "Why shouldn't I?"

He thought he might explode with frustration. "Lady—"

"Mary."

His big fists clenched. "Mary. Don't you have any better sense than to let an ex-con into your house?"

"Oh, that." She dismissed it with a wave of her hand. "It would be wise to follow your advice if you were truly a criminal, but since you didn't do it, I don't think that applies in this instance. Besides, if you were a criminal, you wouldn't give me that advice."

He couldn't believe the casual way she disregarded any possibility of his guilt. "How do you know I didn't do it?"

"You just didn't."

"Do you have any reason for your deduction, Sherlock, or are you going on good old feminine intuition?"

She jerked around and glared at him. "I don't believe a rapist would have handled a woman as tenderly as you—as you handled me," she said, her voice tapering off into a whisper, and the colour surged back into her face. Mortified by the stupid way she continued to blush, she slapped her palms to her face in an effort to hide the betraying colour.

Wolf clenched his teeth, partly because she was white and therefore not for him, partly because she was so damned innocent, and partly because he wanted so fiercely to touch her that his entire body ached. "Don't build any dreams because I kissed you Saturday," he said harshly. "I've been too long without a woman, and I'm—"

"Horny?" she supplied.

He was staggered by the incongruity of that word coming from her prim mouth. "What?"

"Horny," she said again. "I've heard some of my students say it. It means—"

"I know what it means!"

"Oh. Well, is that what you were? Still are, for all I know."

He wanted to laugh. The urge almost overpowered him, but he changed the sound into a cough. "Yeah, I still am."

She looked sympathetic. "I understand that can be quite a problem."

"It's hard on a guy."

It took a moment, but then her eyes widened, and before she could stop herself, her gaze had slid down his body. Instantly she jerked her head back up. "Oh. I see. I mean—I understand."

The need to touch her was suddenly so strong that he had to give in to it, had to touch her in even the smallest way. He put his hands on her shoulders, savouring her softness, the delicacy of her joints under his palms. "I don't think you do understand. You can't associate with me and still work in this town. At best, you'd be treated like a leper, or a slut. You would probably lose your job."

At that, she pressed her lips together, and a militant light came into her eyes. "I'd like to see someone try to fire me for associating with a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen. I refuse to pretend I don't know you."

"There's knowing, and there's knowing. It would be bad enough for you to be friends with me. Sleeping with me would make your life here impossible."

He felt her stiffen under his hands. "I don't believe I've asked to sleep with you," she said, but the colour rose in her face again. She hadn't actually said the words, but he knew she certainly had thought about what it would be like.

"You asked, all right, but you're so damned innocent you didn't realize what you were doing," he muttered. "I could crawl on top of you right now, sweetheart, and I'd do it if you had any real idea of what you're asking for. But the last thing I want is to have some prissy little Anglo screaming 'rape' at me. Believe me, an Indian doesn't get the benefit of the doubt."

"I wouldn't do anything like that!"

He smiled grimly. "Yeah, I've heard that before. I'm probably the only man who has ever kissed you, and you think you'd like more, don't you? But sex isn't pretty and romantic, it's hot and sweaty, and you probably wouldn't like the first time at all. So do me a favour and find some other guinea pig. I have enough troubles without adding you to the list."

Mary jerked away from him, pressing her lips firmly together and blinking her eyes as fast as she could to keep the tears from falling. Not for anything would she let him make her cry.

"I'm sorry I gave you that impression," she said, her voice stifled but even. "It's true I've never been kissed before, but I'm sure you aren't surprised by that I'm obviously not Miss America material. If my—my response was out of line, I apologize. It won't happen again." She turned briskly to the cabinet. "The coffee is ready. How do you take yours?"

A muscle jerked in his jaw, and he grabbed his hat. "Forget the coffee," he muttered as he jammed the hat on his head and reached for his gloves.

She didn't look at him. "Very well. Goodbye, Mr. Mackenzie."

Wolf slammed out the door, and Mary stood there with an empty coffee cup in her hand. If it really was goodbye, she didn't know how she would be able to stand it.

Chapter Four

Mary wasn't weak-willed, and she refused to give in to the desolation that filled her every time she thought of that horrible day. During the days she prodded, cajoled and enticed her students toward knowledge; at night she watched Joe devour the facts she spread before him. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable, and he not only caught up with the students in her regular classes, he passed them.

She had written her letters to the Wyoming members of Congress, and had also written to a friend for all the information she could find on the Air Force Academy. When the package came, she gave it to Joe and watched his eyes take on that fiercely intent, enthralled look he got whenever he thought of flying. Working with Joe was a joy; her only problem was that he reminded her so strongly of his father.

It wasn't that she missed Wolf; how could she miss someone she had seen only twice? He hadn't imbedded himself in her daily routine so that her life seemed empty without him. But while she had been with him, she had felt more vividly alive than she ever had before. With Wolf, she hadn't been Mary Potter, old maid, she had been Mary Potter, woman. His intense masculinity had reached parts of her that she hadn't known existed, bringing to life dormant yearnings and emotions. She argued with herself that what she felt was plain old garden-variety lust, but that didn't stop the ache she felt whenever she thought of him. Even worse was her humiliation because her inexperience had been so obvious, and now she knew he thought of her as a sex-starved old maid.

It was April before the inevitable happened and word got out that Joe Mackenzie was spending a lot of time at the new teacher's house. At first Mary wasn't aware of the rumour flying through the town, though the kids in her classes had been watching her strangely, and there had been a lot of whispering. Sharon Wycliffe and Dottie Lancaster, the other two teachers, also took to giving her odd looks and whispering to each other. It didn't take Mary long to decide that the secret was no longer secret, but she went about her business with a serene smile. She had already received a favourable letter from a senator, signalling his interest in Joe, and despite her own arguments for caution, her spirits were high.

The school board's regular meeting was scheduled for the third week in April. The afternoon of the meeting, Sharon, with elaborate casualness, asked Mary if she planned to attend. Mary looked at her in surprise. "Of course. I thought all of us were expected to attend on a regular basis."

"Well, yes. It's just that—I thought—"

"You thought I would avoid the meeting now that everyone knows I've been teaching Joe Mackenzie?" Mary asked directly.

Sharon's mouth fell open. "What?" Her voice was weak.

"You didn't know? Well, it isn't an earth-shattering secret." She shrugged. "Joe thought people would be upset if I tutored him, so I haven't said anything. From the way everyone has been acting, I thought the cat was out of the bag."

"I think it was the wrong cat," Sharon admitted sheepishly. "His truck was seen at your house at night and people—um—got the wrong idea."

Mary felt blank. "What wrong idea?"

"Well, he's big for his age and all."

Still Mary didn't understand, until Sharon blushed hotly. Then comprehension burst on her brain like a flash, and horror filled her, followed swiftly by anger. "They think I'm having an affair with a sixteen-year-old boy?" Her voice rose with each word.

"It was late at night when his truck was seen," Sharon added, looking miserable.

"Joe leaves promptly at nine o'clock. Someone's idea of 'late' differs from mine." Mary stood and began shoving papers into her tote, her nostrils flaring, her cheeks white. The awful thing was that she had to simmer until seven o'clock that night, but she didn't think waiting would cool her temper. If anything, pressure would build. She felt savage, not only because her reputation had been impugned, but because Joe had also been attacked. He was trying desperately to make his dreams come true, and people were trying to tear him down. She wasn't a hen fussing with one chick; she was a tigress with one cub, and that cub had been threatened. It didn't matter that the cub was seven inches taller than she and outweighed her by almost eighty pounds; Joe, for all his unusual maturity, was still young and vulnerable. The father had disdained her protection, but there was no power on earth that could stop her from defending the son.

Evidently word had spread, because the school board meeting was unusually crowded that night. There were six members of the board: Mr. Hearst, who owned the general store; Francie Beecham, an eighty-one-year-old former teacher; Walton Isby, the bank president; Harlon Keschel, who owned the combination drugstore/hamburger joint; Eli

Baugh, a local rancher whose daughter, Jackie, was in Mary's class; and Cicely Karr, who owned the service station. All of the board members were solid members of the small community, all of them property owners, and all of them except Francie Beecham had stony faces.

The board meeting was held in Dottie's classroom, and extra desks were brought from Mary's classroom so there would be enough seats for everyone, an indication of how many people felt it necessary to attend. Mary was certain that at least one parent of each of her students was present. As she entered the room, every eye turned toward her. The women looked indignant; the men looked both hostile and speculative, and that made Mary even angrier. What right did they have to look down on her for her supposed sins, while at the same time they were wondering about the details?

Leaning against the wall was a tall man in a khaki deputy sheriff's uniform, watching her with narrowed eyes, and she wondered if they meant to have her arrested for sexual misconduct. It was ridiculous! If she had looked anything other than exactly what she was, a slight, mousy old maid, their suspicions would at least have made more sense. She poked an errant strand of hair back into the knot at the back of her head, sat down and folded her arms, intending to let them make the first move.

Walton Isby cleared his throat and called the meeting to order, no doubt feeling the importance of his position with so many people present to watch the proceedings. Mary drummed her fingers on her arm. The board went through the routine of its normal business, and suddenly she decided she wasn't going to wait. The best defence, she'd read, was an attack.

When the normal business was finished, Mr. Isby cleared his throat again, and Mary took it as a signal that they were about to get down to the real purpose of the meeting. She rose to her feet and said clearly, "Mr. Isby, before you continue, I have an announcement to make."

He looked startled, and his florid face turned even redder. "This is—uh, well, irregular, Miss Potter."

"It's also important." She kept her voice at the level she used when lecturing and turned so she could see the entire room. The deputy straightened from his position against the wall as everyone's attention locked on her like a magnet to a steel bar. "I'm certified to tutor pupils privately, and the credits they earn in private lessons are as legitimate as those earned in a public classroom. For the past month, I've been tutoring Joe Mackenzie in my home—"

"I'll just bet you have," someone muttered, and Mary's eyes flashed.

"Who said that?" she demanded crisply. "It was incredibly vulgar."

The room fell silent.

"When I saw Joe Mackenzie's school records, I was outraged that a student of his intelligence had quit school. Perhaps none of you know it, but he was at the top of his class. I contacted him and persuaded him to take lessons to catch up to his classmates, and in one month he has not only caught them, he has surpassed them. I have also been in contact with Senator Allard, who has expressed an interest in Joe. Joe's strong academic standing has made him a candidate for recommendation to the Air Force Academy. He's an honour to the community, and I know all of you will give him your support."

She was gratified to see the stunned looks in the room and sat down with the cool poise Aunt Ardith had tirelessly drummed into her. Only rabble got into brawls, Aunt Ardith had said; a lady could make her point in other ways.

Whispers rustled through the room as people put their heads together, and Mr. Isby shuffled the three sheets of paper in front of him as he searched for something to say. The other members of the board put their heads together, too.

She looked around the room, and a shadow in the hall beyond the open door caught her attention. It was only a slight movement; if she hadn't looked at precisely that second, she would have missed it. As it was, it took her a moment to make out the outline of a tall man, and her skin tingled. Wolf. He was out in the hall, listening. It was the first time she had seen him since the day he'd come to her house, and even though all she could see was a darker outline against the shadows, her heart began to pound.

Mr. Isby cleared his throat, and the murmuring in the room settled down. "That is good news, Miss Potter," he began. "However, we don't think you've given the best appearance as an example to our young people—"

"Speak for yourself, Walton," Francie Beecham said testily, her voice cracking with old age.

Mary stood again. "In precisely what way have I given the wrong appearance?"

"It doesn't look right to have that boy in your house all hours of the night!" Mr. Hearst snapped.

"Joe leaves my home at exactly nine o'clock, after three hours of lessons. What is your definition of 'all hours of the night'? However, if the board doesn't approve of the location, I take it all are agreed that the schoolhouse will be used for night classes? I have no objection to moving the lessons here."

Mr. Isby, who was at heart a good-natured soul, looked harassed. The board members put their heads together again.

After a minute of heated consultation, they looked up again. Harlon Keschel wiped his perspiring face with a handkerchief. Francie Beecham looked outraged. This time it was Cicely Karr who spoke. "Miss Potter, this is a difficult situation. The odds against Joe Mackenzie being accepted into the Air Force Academy are high, I'm sure you'll admit, and the truth is that we don't approve of your spending so much time alone with him."

Mary's chin lifted. "Why is that?"

"Because you're a newcomer to this area, I'm sure you don't understand the way things are around here. The Mackenzies have a bad reputation, and we fear for your safety if you continue to associate with the boy."

"Mrs. Karr, that's hogwash," Mary replied with inelegant candour. Aunt Ardith wouldn't have approved. She thought of Wolf standing out in the hallway listening to these people slandering both him and his son, and she could almost feel the heat of his temper. He wouldn't let it hurt him, but it hurt her to know he was hearing it.

"Wolf Mackenzie helped me out of a dangerous situation when my car broke down and I was stranded in the snow. He was kind and considerate, and refused payment for repairing my car. Joe Mackenzie is an outstanding student who works hard on their ranch, doesn't drink or carouse—" she hoped that was true "—and has never been anything but respectful. I consider both of them my friends."

In the hallway, the man standing in the shadows knotted his fists. Damn the little fool, didn't she know this would probably cost her her job? He knew that if he stepped into that room all the hostility would instantly be focused on him, and he started to move, to draw their attention away from her, when he heard her speaking again. Didn't she know when to shut up?

"I would be as concerned if any of your children dropped out of school. I can't bear to see a young person give up on the future. Ladies and gentlemen, I was hired to teach. I intend to do that to the best of my ability. All of you are good people. Would any of you want me to give up if it were your child?"

Several people looked away and cleared their throats. Cicely Karr merely raised her chin. "You're sidestepping the point, Miss Potter. This isn't one of our children. This is Joe Mackenzie. He's… he's—"

"Half Indian?" Mary supplied, lifting her brow in question.

"Well, yes. That's part of it. The other part is his father—"

"What about his father?"

Wolf had to stifle a curse, and he started to step forward again when Mary asked scornfully, "Are you concerned because of his prison sentence?"

"That's cause enough, I should think!"

"Should you? Why?"

"Cicely, sit down and hush," Francie Beecham snapped. "The girl has a point, and I agree. If you start trying to think at this stage of your life, it could bring on hot flashes."

Just for a moment there was stunned silence in the room; then it exploded in thunderous laughter. Rough ranchers and their hard-working wives held their stomachs as they bent double, tears running down their faces. Mr. Isby turned so red his face was almost purple; then he burst into a great whooping laugh that sounded like a hysterical crane laying eggs, or so Cicely Karr told him. Her face was red, too, from anger. Big Eli Baugh actually rolled out of his chair, he was laughing so hard. Cicely grabbed his hat from the back of his chair and hit him over the head with it. He continued to howl with laughter as he protected his head with his arms.

"You can buy your motor oil from some other place from now on!" Cicely roared at Mr. Baugh, continuing to bash him with his hat. "And your gas! Don't you or any of your hands set foot on my property again!"

"Now, Cicely," Eli choked as he tried to dodge his hat.

"Folks, let's have some order in here," Harlon Keschel pleaded, though he looked as if he were enjoying the spectacle of Cicely bashing Eli with his own hat. Certainly everyone else in the room was. Almost everyone, Mary thought, as she spotted Dottie Lancaster's cold face. Suddenly she realized that the other teacher would have been glad to see her fired, and she wondered why. She'd always tried to be friendly with Dottie, but the older woman had rebuffed all overtures. Had Dottie seen Joe's truck at Mary's house and started the gossip? Would Dottie have been out driving around at night? There were no other houses on Mary's road, so no one would have been driving past to visit a neighbour.

The uproar had died down, though there was still an occasional chuckle heard around the room. Mrs. Karr continued to glare at Eli Baugh, having for some reason made him the focal point of her embarrassed anger rather than turning it on Francie Beecham, who had started it all.

Even Mr. Isby was still grinning as he raised his voice. "Let's see if we can get back to business here, folks."

Francie Beecham piped up again. "I think we've handled enough business for the night. Miss Potter is giving the Mackenzie boy private school lessons so he can go to the Air Force Academy, and that's that. I'd do the same thing if I were still teaching."

Mr. Hearst said, "It still don't look right—"

"Then she can use the classroom. Everyone agreed?" Francie looked at the other board members, her wrinkled face triumphant. She winked at Mary.

"It's okay by me," Eli Baugh said as he tried to reshape his hat. "The Air Force Academy—well, that's something. I don't reckon anyone from this county has ever been to any of the academies."

Mr. Hearst and Mrs. Karr disagreed, but Mr. Isby and Harlon Keschel sided with Francie and Eli. Mary stared hard at the shadowed hallway, but couldn't see anything now. Had he left? The deputy turned his head to see what she was looking at, but he didn't see anything, either, because he gave a slight shrug and looked back at her, then winked. Mary was startled. More people had winked at her that night than in the rest of her life total. What was the proper way to handle a wink? Were they ignored? Should she wink back? Aunt Ardith's lectures on proper behaviour hadn't covered winking.

The meeting broke up with a good deal of teasing and laughter, and more than a few of the parents took a moment to shake Mary's hand and tell her she was doing a good job. It was half an hour before she was able to get her coat and make it to the door, and when she did, she found the deputy waiting for her.

"I'll walk you to your car," he said in an easy tone. "I'm Clay Armstrong, the local deputy."

"How do you do? Mary Potter," she replied, holding out her hand.

He took it, and her small hand disappeared in his big one. He set his hat on top of dark brown curly hair, but his blue eyes still twinkled, even in the shadow of the brim. She liked him on sight. He was one of those strong, quiet men who were rock steady, but who had a good sense of humour. He'd been delighted by the uproar.

"Everyone in town knows who you are. We don't often have a stranger move in, especially a young single woman from the South. The first day you were here, the whole county heard about your accent. Haven't you noticed that all the girls in school are trying to drawl?"

"Are they?" she asked in surprise.

"They sure are." He slowed his walk to keep pace with her as they walked to her car. The cold air rushed at her, chilling her legs, but the night sky was crystal clear, and a thousand stars winked overhead in compensation.

They reached her car. "Would you tell me something, Mr. Armstrong?"

"Anything. And call me Clay."

"Why did Mrs. Karr get so angry at Mr. Baugh, instead of at Miss Beecham? It was Miss Beecham who started the whole thing."

"Cicely and Eli are first cousins. Cicely's folks died when she was young, and Eli's parents took her to raise. Well, Cicely and Eli are the same age, so they grew up together and fought like wildcats the whole time. Still do, I guess, but some families are like that. They're still pretty close."

That kind of family was strange to Mary, but it sounded warm and secure, too, to be able to fight with someone and know he still loved you.

"So she hit him for laughing at her?"

"And because he was convenient. No one is going to get too angry with Miss Beecham. She taught all the adults in this county, and we all still think a lot of that old lady."

"That sounds so nice," Mary said, smiling. "I hope I'm still here when I'm that old."

"Are you planning to raise Cain at school board meetings, too?"

"I hope so," she repeated.

He leaned down to open the car door for her. "I hope so, too. Be careful driving home." After she got in, he closed the door and touched his fingers to his hat brim, then strode away.

He was a nice man. Most of the people in Ruth were nice. They were blind where Wolf Mackenzie was concerned, but basically they weren't vicious people.

Wolf. Where had he gone?

She hoped Joe wouldn't decide to stop his lessons because of this. Though she knew it was foolish to count her chickens prematurely, she felt a growing certainty that he would be accepted into the Academy and was inordinately proud that she could be part of getting him there. Aunt Ardith would have said that pride goeth before a fall, but Mary had often thought that a person would never fall if he didn't first try to stand. On more than one occasion she had countered Aunt Ardith's cliché of choice with her own "nothing ventured, nothing gained." It had always made Aunt Ardith huffy when her favourite weapon was turned against her. Mary sighed. She missed her acerbic aunt so much. Her supply of clichés might wither from lack of use without Aunt Ardith to sharpen her wits against.

When she turned into her driveway, she was tired, hungry and anxious, afraid that Joe would try to be noble and stop his lessons so she wouldn't have any more trouble because of him. "I'll teach him," she muttered aloud as she stepped out of the car, "if I have to follow him around on horseback."

"Who are you following around?" Wolf demanded irritably, and she jumped so violently that she banged her knee against the car door.

"Where did you come from?" she demanded just as irritably. "Darn it, you scared me!"

"Probably not enough. I parked in the barn, out of sight."

She stared up at him, drinking in the sight of his proud, chiselled face and closed expression. The starlight was colourless, revealing his features in stark angles and shadows, but it was enough for her. She hadn't realized how starved she had been for the sight of him, the heart-pounding nearness of him. She couldn't even feel the cold now, the way blood was racing through her veins. This was probably what "being in heat" meant. It was breathtaking and a little scary, but she decided she liked it.

"Let's go in," he said when she made no effort to move, and Mary silently led the way to the back door. She'd left it unlocked so she wouldn't have to fumble with a key in the dark, and Wolf's black brows drew together when she turned the knob and pushed the door open.

They entered, and Mary closed the door behind them, then turned on the light. Wolf stared down at her, at the silky brown hair escaping from its knot, and he had to clench his fists to keep from grabbing her. "Don't leave your door unlocked again," he ordered.

"I don't think I'll be burgled," she countered, then admitted honestly, "I don't have anything a self-respecting burglar would want."

He'd sworn he wouldn't touch her, but even though he'd known it would be difficult to keep his hands to himself, he hadn't realized quite how difficult. He wanted to grab her and shake some sense into her, but he knew if he touched her in any way at all, he wouldn't want to stop. Her female scent teased his nostrils, beckoning him closer; she smelled warm and delicately fragrant, so feminine it made his entire body ache with longing. He moved away from her, knowing it was safer for them both if he put some distance between them.

"I wasn't thinking about a burglar."

"No?" She considered that, then realized what he'd meant and what she'd said in response. She cleared her throat and marched to the stove, hoping he wouldn't see her red face. "If I make a pot of coffee, will you drink a cup this time or storm out like you did before as soon as it's made?"

The tart reproach in her voice amused him, and he wondered how he had ever thought her mousy. Her clothes were dowdy, but her personality was anything but timid. She said exactly what she thought and didn't hesitate to take someone to task. Less than an hour before she had taken on the entire county on his behalf. The memory of it sobered him.

"I'll drink the coffee if you insist on making it, but I'd rather you just sat down and listened to me."

Turning, Mary slid into a chair and primly folded her hands on the table. "I'm listening."

He pulled the chair next to her away from the table and turned it to the side, facing her, before he sat down. She turned an unsmiling gaze on him. "I saw you in the hall tonight."

He looked grim. "Damn. Did anyone else notice me?" He wondered how she had seen him, because he'd been very careful, and he was good at not being seen when he didn't want to be.

"I don't think so." She paused. "I'm sorry they said those things."

"I'm not worried about what the good people of Ruth think about me," he said in a hard tone. "I can handle them, and so can Joe. We don't depend on them for our living, but you do. Don't go to bat for us again, unless you don't like your job very much and you're trying to lose it, because that's damn sure what will happen if you keep on."

"I won't lose my job for teaching Joe."

"Maybe not. Maybe they'll have some tolerance for Joe, especially since you threw the Academy at them, but I'm another story."

"Nor will I lose my job for being friendly with you. I have a contract," she explained serenely. "An ironclad contract. It isn't easy to get a teacher in a place as small and isolated as Ruth, especially in the middle of winter. I can lose my job only if I'm judged incompetent, or break the law, and I defy anyone to prove me incompetent."

He wondered if that meant she didn't rule out breaking the law, but didn't ask her. The kitchen light was shining directly down on her head, turning her hair to a silvery halo and distracting him with its glitter. He knew her hair was brown, but it was such a pale, ash brown that it had no red tones, and when light struck it the strands actually looked silver. She looked like an angel, with her soft blue eyes and translucent skin, and her silky hair slipping from its confining knot to curl around her face. His insides knotted painfully. He wanted to touch her. He wanted her naked beneath him. He wanted to be inside her, to gently ride her until she was all soft and wet, and her nails were clawing at his back—

Mary reached out and put her slim hand on his much larger one, and just that small touch burned him. "Tell me what happened," she invited softly. "Why were you sent to prison? I know you didn't do it."

Wolf was a hard man, by nature as well as necessity, but her simple, unquestioning faith in him shook him to the bone. He had always stood alone, isolated by his Indian blood from Anglos and by his Anglo blood from Indians. Not even his parents had been close to him, though they had loved him and he had loved them in return. They had simply never truly known him, never been admitted into his private thoughts. Nor had he been close to his wife, Joe's mother. They had slept together, he'd been fond of her, but she, too, had been kept at a distance. Only with Joe had his reserve been breached, and Joe knew him as no other person on earth did. They were part of each other, and he fiercely loved the boy. Only the thought of Joe had gotten him through the years in prison alive.

It was more than alarming that this slight Anglo woman had a knack for touching nerves he'd thought completely insulated; he didn't want her close to him, not in any emotional way. He wanted to have sex with her, but he didn't want her to matter to him. Angrily he realized that she already mattered to him, and he didn't like it at all.

He stared at her fragile hand on his, her touch light and soft. She didn't shrink from touching him, as if he were dirty; nor was she grasping at him as some women did, rapaciously, wanting to use him, to see if the savage could satisfy their shallow, greedy appetites. She had simply reached out to touch him because she cared.

Ever so slowly he watched his hand turn and engulf hers, enfolding the pale, slim fingers within his callused palm as if to protect them.

"It was nine years ago." His voice was low, harsh; she had to lean forward to hear him. "No—almost ten years. Ten years this June. Joe and I had just moved here. I was working for the Half Moon Ranch. A girl from the next county was raped and killed, and her body dumped just within the far boundary of Half Moon. I was picked up and questioned, but hell, I'd been expecting it from the minute I heard about the girl. I was new to the area, and Indian. But there was no evidence against me, so they had to let me go.

"Three weeks later, another girl was raped. This one was from the Rocking L Ranch, just to the west of town. She was stabbed, like the other girl, but she lived. She'd seen the rapist." He paused for a minute, the expression in his black eyes shuttered as he looked back at those long-ago years. "She said he looked like an Indian. He was dark, with black hair, and he was tall. Not many tall Indians around. I was picked up again before I even knew another girl had been raped. They put me in a lineup with six dark-haired Anglos. The girl identified me, and I was charged. Joe and I lived on Half Moon, but somehow no one remembered seeing me at home the night that girl was raped, except Joe, and a six-year-old Indian kid's word didn't carry much weight."

Her chest hurt when she thought of how it had been for him, and for Joe, who had been only a small child. How much worse had it been for Wolf because of Joe, worrying what would happen to his son? She didn't know of anything she could say now to lessen that ten-year-old outrage, so she didn't try; she just tightened her fingers around his, letting him know he wasn't alone.

"I was put on trial and found guilty. I'm lucky they weren't able to tie me to the first rape, the girl who'd been murdered, or I'd have been lynched. As it was, everyone thought I'd done it."

"You went to prison." It was so hard to believe, even though she knew it was true. "What happened to Joe?"

"He was made a ward of the state. I survived prison. It wasn't easy. A rapist is considered fair game. I had to be the roughest son of a bitch in there just to live from one night to the next."

She had heard tales about what happened to men in prison, and her pain increased. He had been locked up, away from the sun and the mountains, the clear fresh air, and she knew it had been like caging a wild animal. He was innocent, but his freedom and his son had been taken from him, and he'd been thrown in with the dregs of humanity. Had he slept soundly even once the entire time he'd been in prison, or had he merely dozed, his senses attuned to attack?

Her throat was tight and dry. All she could manage was a whisper. "How long were you in?"

"Two years." His face was hard, his eyes full of menace as he stared at her, but she knew the menace was directed inward, at his bitter memories. "Then a series of rapes and murders from Casper to Cheyenne were tied together and the guy was caught. He confessed, seemed proud of his accomplishments, but a little put out that they hadn't given him complete credit. He admitted to the two rapes in this area, and gave them details no one but the rapist could have known."

"Was he Indian?"

His smile was flinty. "Italian. Olive-skinned, curly haired."

"So you were released?"

"Yeah. My name was cleared, and they said 'Sorry about that,' and turned me loose. I'd lost my son, my job, everything I'd owned. I found out where they'd put Joe and hitched there to get him. Then I rodeoed for a while to get some money and lucked out. I did pretty well. I won enough to come back here with something in my pocket. The old guy who had owned Half Moon had died with no heirs, and the land was about to be sold for taxes. It wiped me out, but I bought the land. Joe and I settled here, and I began training horses and building up the ranch."

"Why did you come back?" She couldn't understand it. Why return to the place where he'd been so mistreated?

"Because I was tired of always moving on, never having a place of my own. Damn tired of being looked down on as a trashy, shiftless Indian. Tired of my son not having a home. And because there was no way in hell I was going to let the bastards get the best of me."

The aching in her intensified. She wished she could ease the anger and bitterness in him, wished she dared take him in her arms and soothe him, wished he could become a part of the community instead of a thorn in its side.

"They're not all illegitimate," she said, and wondered why his mouth suddenly twitched as if he might smile. "Any more than all Indians are trashy or shiftless. People are just people, good and bad."

"You need a keeper," he replied. "That Pollyanna attitude is going to get you in trouble. Teach Joe, do what you can for him, but stay the hell away from me, for your own sake. These people didn't change their minds about me just because I was released."

"You haven't tried to change their minds. You've just kept rubbing their noses in their guilt," she pointed out, her tone acerbic.

"Am I supposed to forget what they did?" he asked just as sharply. "Forget that their 'justice' consisted of putting me in a lineup with six Anglos and telling that girl to 'pick out the Indian'? I spent two years in hell. I still don't know what happened to Joe, but it was almost three months after I got him back before he spoke a word. Forget that? Like hell."

"So, they won't change their minds, you won't change your mind, and I won't change mine. I believe we have a stalemate."

His dark eyes burned with frustration as he glared at her, and suddenly he seemed to realize he was still holding her hand. He released her abruptly and stood. "Look, you can't be my friend. We can't be friends."

Now that her hand was free, Mary felt abandoned and cold. She clasped her hands in her lap and looked up at him. "Why? Of course, if you simply don't like me…" Her voice trailed off, and she bent her head to examine her hands as if she'd never seen them before.

Not like her? He couldn't sleep, his temper was frayed, he got hard whenever he thought about her, and he thought about her too damn much. He was so physically frustrated that he thought he might go mad, but he couldn't even ease himself with Julie Oakes or any other woman now, because all he could think about was baby-fine brown hair, slate-blue eyes and skin like translucent rose petals. It was all he could do to keep from taking her, and only the knowledge of how the good townspeople of Ruth would turn on her if he made her his woman kept him from grabbing her. Her stubborn principles hadn't prepared her for the pain and trouble she would face.

Suddenly his frustration boiled over, and he was filled with rage at having to walk away from the one woman he wanted to the point of madness. Before he could stop himself, he reached down and grasped her wrists, hauling her to her feet. "No, damn it, we can't be friends! Do you want to know why? Because I can't be around you without thinking of stripping you naked and taking you, wherever we happen to be. Hell, I don't know if I'd take the time to strip you! I want your breasts in my hands, your nipples in my mouth. I want your legs around my waist, or your ankles on my shoulders, or any position at all if I can just get inside you." He'd pulled her so close that his warm breath brushed her cheeks as he rasped the low, harsh words at her. "So, sweetheart, there's no way we can be friends."

Mary shivered as her body responded to his words. Though they'd been spoken in anger, they told her that he felt the same way she did, and described actions she could only half imagine. She was too inexperienced and honest to hide her feelings from him, so she didn't even try. Her eyes were filled with painful longing. "Wolf?"

Just that, but the way she said his name, with an aching little inflection at the end, made his grip on her wrists tighten. "No."

"I—I want you."

Her whispered, trembly confession left her completely vulnerable to him, and he knew it. He groaned inwardly. Damn it, didn't she have any sense of self-protection at all? Didn't she know what it did to a man to have the woman he wanted offer herself like that, with no qualifications or holding back? His control was stretched hair-thin, but he grimly held on to it because the hard truth was that she truly didn't know. She was a virgin. She was old-fashioned, strictly raised, and had only the vaguest idea of what she was inviting.

"Don't say that," he finally muttered. "I've told you before—"

"I know," she interrupted. "I'm too inexperienced to be interesting, and you… you don't want to be used as a guinea pig. I remember." She seldom cried, but she felt the salty wetness burning her eyes, and he winced at the hurt he saw there.

"I lied. God, how I lied."

Then his control broke. He had to hold her, feel her in his arms just for a little while, have her taste on his mouth again. He drew her wrists up and placed her hands around his neck, then bent his head even as he locked his arms around her and drew her up tight against him. His mouth covered hers, and her eager response seared him. She knew what to do now; her lips parted, allowing his tongue entrance, where she met him with soft, welcoming touches from her own tongue. He had taught her that, just as he'd taught her to melt against him, and the knowledge drove him almost as crazy as the feel of her soft breasts flattening against his chest.

Mary drowned in the sheer ecstasy of being in his arms again, and the tears that she'd held back spilled past her lashes. This was too painful, and too wonderful, to be mere lust. If this was love, she didn't know if she could bear it.

His mouth was hungry and hard, taking long, deep kisses that left her clinging to him mindlessly. His hand moved surely up her stomach and closed over her breast, and all she could do was make a soft sound of pleasure low in her throat. Her nipples burned and throbbed; his touch both assuaged the pain and intensified it, making her want more. She wanted it the way he had described it, with his mouth on her breasts, and she twisted feverishly against him. She was empty and needed to be filled. She needed to be his woman.

He jerked his head up and pressed her face against his shoulder. "I have to stop. Now." He groaned the words. He was shaking, as hot as any teenage stud in the back seat of his daddy's car.

Mary briefly weighed all of Aunt Ardith's strictures against the way she felt and accepted that she was in love, because this mingled glory and torment could be nothing else. "I don't want to stop," she said raggedly. "I want you to love me."

"No. I'm Indian. You're white. The people in this town would destroy you. Tonight was just a taste of what you'd have to go through."

"I'm willing to risk it!" she cried desperately.

"I'm not. I can take it, but you—you hang on to your Pollyanna principles, sweetheart. I can't offer you anything in return." If he'd thought there was even a fifty-fifty chance of living here in peace, Wolf would have taken the risk, but he knew there wasn't, not the way things were. Other than Joe, she was the only human being in the world he'd ever wanted to protect, and it was the hardest thing he'd ever done.

Mary lifted her head from his shoulder, revealing her wet cheeks. "All I want is you."

"I'm the one thing you can't have. They'd tear you apart." Very gently he pulled her arms down and turned to leave.

Her voice came behind him, low and strained as she fought against tears. "I'll risk it."

He stopped, his hand on the doorknob. "I won't."

For the second time she watched him walk away, and this time was far worse than the first.

Chapter Five

Joe was unusually distracted; he was normally the most attentive of students, applying himself to the subject at hand with almost phenomenal concentration, but tonight he had something else on his mind. He'd accepted without comment their move to the school for lessons and never even hinted that he'd learned the subject of the school board meeting that had resulted in the change of locations. As it was the beginning of May, and the day had been unseasonably warm, Mary was half inclined to put his restlessness down to spring fever. It had been a long winter, and she was restless herself.

Finally she closed the book before her. "Why don't we go home early tonight?" she suggested. "We're not getting much done."

Joe closed his own book and pushed his fingers through his thick black hair, identical to his father's. Mary had to look away. "Sorry," he said on a long exhalation. It was typical that he didn't offer an explanation. Joe didn't often feel the need to justify himself.

But in the weeks she'd been tutoring him, they had had a lot of personal conversations between the prepared lessons, and Mary never hesitated when she thought one of her students might be troubled. If it were only spring fever gnawing at him, then she wanted him to say so. "Is something bothering you?"

He gave her a wry smile, one that was too adult to belong to a sixteen-year-old boy. "You could say that."

"Ah." That smile relieved her, because now she thought she knew the cause of his restlessness. It was indeed spring fever, after a fashion. As Aunt Ardith had often lectured her niece, "When a young man's sap rises, a girl should look out. I declare, they seem to ran mad." Evidently Joe's sap was rising. Mary wondered if women had sap, too.

He picked up his pen and fiddled with it for a moment before tossing it aside as he made up his mind to say more. "Pam Hearst asked me to take her to a movie."

"Pam?" This was a surprise, and possible trouble. Ralph Hearst was one of the townspeople most adamantly opposed to the Mackenzies.

Joe's ice-blue eyes were hooded as he glanced at her. "Pam is the girl I told you about before."

So, it was Pam Hearst. She was pretty and bright, and her slim young body had a form guaranteed to affect a young man's sap. Mary wondered if Pam's father knew she had been flirting with Joe and that was one reason for his hostility.

"Are you going to go?"

"No," he said flatly, surprising her.

"Why?"

"There aren't any movie houses in Ruth."

"So?"

"That's the whole point. We'd have to go to another town. No one we know would be likely to see us. She wanted me to pick her up behind the school, after it got dark." He leaned back in his chair and looped his hands behind his head. "She was too ashamed to go to the dance with me, but I'm good enough for her to sneak around and see. Maybe she thought that even if we were seen, the idea that I might go to the Academy would keep her from getting in too much trouble. Folks seem taken with the idea." His tone was ironic. "I guess it makes a difference when the Indian wears a uniform."

Suddenly her impulsive announcement at the school board meeting didn't seem like such a good idea. "Do you wish I hadn't told them?"

"You had to, considering," he replied, and by that she knew he was aware of the subject of that meeting. "It puts extra pressure on me to get into the Academy, because if I don't they'll all say that the Indian just couldn't cut it, but that's not a bad thing. If it will push me to do more, then I'm that much closer to getting in."

Privately, Mary didn't think Joe needed any added incentive; he wanted it so badly now that the need burned in him. She returned the conversation to Pam. "Does it bother you, that she asked now?"

"It made me mad. And it really made me mad having to turn her down, because I sure would like to get my hands on her." He stopped abruptly and gave Mary another of those too-adult looks before a little grin tugged at his lips. "Sorry. I didn't mean to get too personal. Let's just say that I'm attracted to her physically, but that's all it is, and I can't afford to fool with that kind of situation. Pam's a nice girl, but she doesn't figure in my plans."

Mary understood what he meant. No woman figured in his plans, other than to provide physical release, for a long time, if ever. There was something solitary about him, as there was about Wolf, and in addition, Joe was so possessed by the spectre of flight that part of him was already gone. Pam Hearst would marry some local boy, settle down in Ruth or nearby, and raise her own family in the same calm setting where she'd grown up; she wasn't meant for the brief attention Joe Mackenzie could give her before he moved on.

"Do you have any idea who started the gossip?" Joe asked, his pale eyes hard. He didn't like the idea of anyone hurting this woman.

"No. I haven't tried to find out. It could have been anyone who drove by and saw your truck at my house. But most people seemed to have forgotten about it now, except for—" She stopped, her eyes troubled.

"Who?" Joe demanded flatly.

"I don't mean that I think she started the gossip," Mary said hastily. "I just feel uneasy around her. She dislikes me, and I don't know why. Maybe she's this way with everyone. Has Dottie Lancaster—"

"Dottie Lancaster!" He gave a harsh laugh. "Now there's a thought. Yeah, she could have started the gossip. She's had a rough life, and I kind of feel sorry for her, but she did her best to make my life hell when I was in her classes."

"Rough? How?"

"Her husband was a truck driver, and he was killed years ago when her son was just a baby. He was on a run in Colourado, and a drunk driver ran him off the side of a cliff. The drunk was an Indian. She never got over it and blames all Indians, I guess."

"That's irrational."

He shrugged, as if to say a lot of things were irrational. "Anyway, she was left alone with her kid, and she had a hard time. Not much money. She started teaching, but she had to pay someone to take care of the kid, and he needed special training when he was old enough to start school, which took even more money."

"I didn't know Dottie had any children," Mary said, surprised.

"Just Robert—Bobby. He's about twenty-three or four,

I guess. He still lives with Mrs. Lancaster, but he doesn't go around other people much."

"What's wrong with him? Does he have Down's syndrome, or a learning disability?"

"He's not retarded. Bobby's just different. He likes people, but not in groups. A lot of people together make him nervous, so he pretty much stays to himself. He reads a lot, and listens to music. But once he had a summer job at the building supply store, and Mr. Watkins told Bobby to fill a wheelbarrow full of sand. Instead of pushing the wheelbarrow to the sandpile and shovelling the sand in, Bobby would get a shovelful of sand and carry it back to the wheelbarrow. It's things like that. He'd have trouble getting dressed, because he'd put his shoes on first, and then he couldn't get his jeans on."

Mary had seen people like Bobby, who had trouble with practical problem-solving. It was a learning disability, and took a lot of patient, specialized training to handle. She felt sorry for him, and for Dottie, who couldn't have had a happy life.

Joe pushed his chair back and stood up, stretching his cramped muscles. "Do you ride?" he asked suddenly.

"No. I've never even been on a horse." Mary chuckled. "Will that get me thrown out of Wyoming?"

His tone was grave. "It could. Why don't you come up on the mountain some Saturday and I'll give you riding lessons? School will be out for the summer soon, and you'll have a lot of time to practice."

He couldn't know how appealing the idea was, not only to ride but to see Wolf again. The only thing was, it would hurt just as much to see him as it did not to see him, because he was still out of her reach. "I'll think about it," she promised, but she doubted she would ever take him up on the offer.

Joe didn't push it, but he didn't intend to let it drop, either. He'd get Mary up on the mountain one way or another. He figured Wolf had about reached the limits of his restraint. Parading her right under his nose would be like leading a mare in heat in front of a stallion. His pretty, tart-tongued little teacher would be lucky if his dad didn't have her flat on her back before she had the hello out of her mouth. Joe had to hide his smile. He'd never seen anyone get to Wolf the way Miss Mary Elizabeth Potter had. She had Wolf so tied in knots he was as dangerous as a wounded cougar.

He mentally hummed a few bars of "Matchmaker."

When Mary got home the next Friday afternoon, there was a letter in the mailbox from Senator Allard, and her fingers trembled as she tore it open. If it was bad news for Joe, if Senator Allard had declined to recommend him to the Academy, she didn't know what she would do. Senator Allard wasn't their only possibility, but he had seemed the most receptive, and a turndown from him would really be discouraging.

The senator's letter to her was brief, thanking her for her efforts in bringing Joe to his attention. He had decided to recommend Joe for admittance to the Academy, for the freshman class beginning after Joe's graduation from high school. From there on, it would be up to Joe to pass the rigorous academic and physical examinations.

Enclosed was a private letter of congratulations to Joe.

Mary hugged the letters to her breast, and tears welled in her eyes. They had done it, and it hadn't even been that difficult! She had been prepared to petition every congressman every week until Joe was given his chance, but it hadn't been necessary. Joe's grades and credits had done it for him.

It was news too good to wait, so she got back into her car and drove up Mackenzie's Mountain. The drive was much different now; the snow had melted, and wildflowers bloomed beside the road. After the harsh winter cold, the spring warmth felt like a blessing on her skin, though it still wasn't nearly as warm as the springs she had known in Savannah. She was so excited and happy that she didn't even notice the steep drop on the side of the road as it wound higher, but she did notice the wild grandeur of the mountains, stretching magnificently toward the dark blue heavens. She drew a deep breath and realized that the spring did make up for the winter. It felt like home, a new home, a place dear and familiar.

The tires threw out a spray of gravel as she slid to a stop at the kitchen door of Wolf's one-story frame house, and before the vehicle had rocked back on its springs she was bounding up the steps to pound on the door. "Wolf! Joe!" She knew she was yelling in a very unladylike manner, but she was too happy to care. Some situations just called for yelling.

"Mary!"

The call came from behind her, and she whirled. Wolf was coming from the barn at a dead run, his powerful body surging fluidly. Mary yelped in excitement and launched herself from the steps, her skirt flying up as she bolted down the gravelled drive toward the barn. "He got it!" she screamed, waving the letters. "He got it!"

Wolf skidded to a halt and watched the sedate teacher literally skipping and leaping toward him, her skirt kicking up around her thighs with each step. He just had time to realize there was nothing wrong, that she was laughing, when, three steps away, she went airborne. He braced himself and caught her weight against his chest, his brawny arms wrapping around her.

"He got it!" she shrieked again, and threw her arms around his neck.

Wolf could think of only one thing, and it made his mouth go dry. "He got it?"

She waved the letters under his nose. "He got it! Senator Allard—the letter was in my mailbox—I couldn't wait—where's Joe?" She knew she was almost incoherent and made an effort to compose herself, but she just couldn't stop grinning.

"He's in town picking up a load of fencing. Damn it, are you sure that's what it says? He still has a year of school—"

"Not a year, not at the rate he's going. But he'll have to be seventeen, anyway. The senator has recommended him for the freshman class starting after he graduates. Less than a year and a half!"

Fierce pride filled Wolfs face, the warrior's pride he'd inherited from both Comanche and Celt. His eyes glittered with black fire, and exultantly he lifted her high, his hands under her armpits, and twirled around with her. She threw back her head, shrieking with laughter, and suddenly Wolf felt his entire body clench with desire. It was as powerful as a blow to the gut, knocking the wind out of him. She was soft and warm in his arms, her laughter was as fresh as the spring, and he wanted her out of the prim little shirt-waist she wore.

Slowly his face changed to a harder, more primitive cast. She was still laughing as he lowered her, her hands braced on his shoulders, but he stopped when her breasts were level with his face. The laughter died in Mary's throat as he deliberately brought her closer to him and buried his face between her breasts. His grip shifted, one arm locking around her buttocks and the other around her back, and his hot mouth searched for her nipple. He found it, his mouth clamping down on it through the barriers of her dress and bra, but the sensation was still so exquisite that her breath caught on a moan and her back arched, pushing her breast against him.

It wasn't enough. She burrowed her fingers through his hair, digging into his skull to push him harder against her, but it wasn't enough. She wanted him with sudden, fierce desperation. The layers of cloth that kept him from her drove her mad, and she squirmed against him, low whimpers coming from her throat. "Please," she begged. "Wolf—"

He lifted his head, his eyes savage with need. His blood was thundering through his veins, and he was breathing hard. "Do you want more?" The words were guttural, a normal tone beyond him.

She squirmed against him again, her hands clutching desperately. "Yes."

Very gently he let her slide down his body, deliberately rubbing her over the hardened bulge in his jeans, and both of them shuddered. Wolf was beyond thinking of all his reasons for not becoming involved with her, beyond anything but the urge to mate. To hell with what anyone thought.

He looked around, gauging the distance to both house and barn. The barn was closer. Clamping his hand around her wrist, he strode toward the big open double doors that revealed the dim interior.

Mary could barely get her breath as she was all but dragged in his wake. Her senses bewildered by the sudden cessation of pleasure, she was confused by his actions and wanted to ask what he was doing, but she didn't have enough oxygen in her lungs to form the question. Then they were inside the barn, and she was swamped by the perceptions of dim light, animal warmth and the earthy smells of dust, hay, leather and horses. She heard soft nickers and the muffled stamping of hooves on straw. Wolf led her into an empty stall and dragged her down onto the fresh hay. She sprawled on her back, and he came down on top of her, his muscled weight pressing her even deeper into the hay.

"Kiss me," she whispered, reaching up to thrust her fingers into his long hair and pull him down to her.

"I'll kiss you all over before I'm through with you," he muttered, and bent his head. Her mouth opened under the force of his, and his tongue moved into her in a deep rhythm that she instinctively recognized and accepted, responded to eagerly. He was heavy, but it was so natural that she bear his weight that she rejoiced in the pressure of his body. She wrapped her arms around his thickly muscled shoulders and hugged him even tighter to her; she wanted to be as close as she could to him, and to that end her hips undulated slightly, adjusting to the carnal pressure of his loins.

The slow movements of her hips beneath him made him feel as if his head would explode from the rush of blood through his body. He made a low, rough sound in his throat and reached for the zipper at the back of her dress. He thought he would die if he didn't feel her silky skin under his hands, if he didn't sheathe his throbbing flesh inside her.

It was startlingly new to her, bringing a delicate flush to her cheeks, but it was still so right that she didn't even think of protesting. She didn't want to protest. She wanted Wolf. She was female to his male, warm and sexual, intensely aware of being a woman and offering herself to the man she loved. She wanted to be naked for him, so she helped him by pulling her arms free of the sleeves as he tugged the dress from her shoulders and let it fall to her waist. She had felt racy, daring to buy a bra with a single front clasp, but as he looked down at her breasts, barely covered by the thin, flesh-coloured material, she was so glad she had done it. He deftly opened the clasp with one hand, a trick she hadn't learned yet, and watched the edges pull back to bare her soft curves, stopping before her nipples were revealed.

He made that rough sound again, almost like a growl, and bent to nuzzle the bra aside. His mouth, warm and wet, slid across her breast and clamped on the tightly beaded nipple. She jumped, her entire body reacting to a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain, as he sucked strongly at her. Mary's eyes closed, and she moaned. She couldn't bear it; it felt too good, a hot river of pleasure-pain impulses running from breast to loin, where an empty ache made her press her legs together and arch beneath him, silently begging for the release her body had never known, but sensed with ancient wisdom.

Wolf felt her move beneath him again, and the last shred of control he'd retained, vanished. Roughly he jerked her skirt to her waist and kneed her thighs apart, settling himself between the vulnerable V of her legs. She opened her eyes, a little shocked by what she could feel down there, but eager to know more. "Take off your clothes," she whispered frantically, and tore at the buttons on his shirt.

He reared back on his knees and tore his shirt open, then off. His naked skin glistened with a fine patina of sweat; in the dim light, filled with floating dust motes, the overlay of sleek bronze skin on powerful muscles gave him the look of live art sculpted by a master's hand. Mary's gaze moved hungrily, feverishly, over him. He was perfect, strong and male, the scent of his body hot and faintly musky. She reached out for him, her hands sliding over his broad chest, lightly haired in a diamond pattern stretching from nipple to nipple. She touched those tight little buds, and he froze, a massive shiver of pleasure rippling through his muscles.

He groaned aloud and dropped his hands to his belt. He unbuckled the wide band of leather, then unsnapped his jeans and jerked the zipper down, the hissing of the metal teeth blending with their harsh breathing. With some last desperate fragment of willpower, he kept himself from lowering his pants. She was a virgin; he couldn't allow himself to forget that, even in his urgency. Damn it, he had to regain some control, or he'd both scare and hurt her, and he would die before he turned her first time into a nightmare.

Mary's slim fingers curled in the hair on his chest and tugged lightly. "Wolf," she said. Just his name, just that one word, but her voice was warm and low and drugged sounding, and it beckoned him more powerfully than anything he'd known before.

"Yes," he said in response. "Now." He leaned forward to cover her again, then froze as a distant sound came to his ears.

He swore quietly and sank back on his heels, battling desperately to control his body and his frustration.

"Wolf?" Now her tone was hesitant, consternation and self-consciousness creeping into it. That inflection made him feel murderous, because she hadn't been self-conscious before. She had been warm and loving, willing to give herself without reserve.

"Joe will be here in a few minutes," he said flatly. "I can hear his truck coming up the mountain."

She was still so far out of it that she merely looked confused. "Joe?"

"Yes, Joe. Remember him? My son, the reason you're up here in the first place."

Her cheeks flooded with colour, and she jerked into an upright position, as far as she could, because her thighs were still draped over his. "Oh my God," she said. "Oh my God. I'm naked. You're naked. Oh my God."

"We're not naked," Wolf muttered, wiping his sweaty face. "Damn it."

"Almost!"

"Not enough." Even her breasts were rosy with embarrassment now. He looked at them with regret, remembering her sweet taste and the way her velvety little nipple had bloomed in his mouth. But the sound of the truck was much closer now, and with a low, obscene comment on his son's rotten timing, he got to his feet and effortlessly lifted Mary to hers.

Tears blurred her vision as she turned her back to fumble with that blasted space-age clasp on her bra. What ever had possessed her to buy such a contraption? Aunt Ardith would have been outraged. Aunt Ardith would have fallen on the ground in a hissy fit if she'd even thought of her niece rolling naked in the hay with a man. And, darn it, she hadn't even been able to finish her rolling!

"Here, I'll do it," Wolf said in a far gentler tone than she'd ever before heard from him. He turned her around and deftly handled the diabolical clasp. Mary kept her head down, unable to look him in the eye, but the contrast of his sun-bronzed hands against her pale breasts made her feel hot again. She swallowed and looked at his belt buckle. He'd zipped his jeans back up and buckled his belt, but the visible swell of his loins told her he wasn't completely unaffected by this interruption. That made her feel better, and she blinked the tears from her eyes as he helped her back into her dress and turned her around to zip it.

"You have hay in your hair," he teased, and picked the straw from the tangled tresses, then brushed it from her dress.

Mary put up both hands to discern the state of her hair and found it had come completely down. "Leave it," Wolf said. "I like it down. It looks like silk."

Nervously she combed her fingers through the strands and watched as he leaned down to pick up his shirt from the hay. "What will Joe think?" she blurted as the truck pulled to a stop outside the barn.

"That he's lucky he's my son, or I'd have killed him," Wolf muttered grimly, and Mary wasn't certain he was teasing. He put his shirt on but didn't bother buttoning it before stepping into the open door. Taking a deep breath, Mary braced herself to get through the embarrassment and followed him.

Joe had just gotten out of the truck, and now he stood beside the door, his ice-blue eyes moving from his father to Mary and back, taking in Wolfs stone face and open shirt, and Mary's tousled hair. "Damn it!" he swore and slammed the door shut. "If it had just taken me fifteen minutes longer—"

"My feelings exactly," Wolf concurred.

"Hey, I'll leave—"

Wolf sighed. "No. She came to see you anyway."

"That's what you said the first time." Joe grinned hugely.

"And I just said it again." He turned to Mary, and some of the enjoyment of her stunning news returned to his eyes. "Tell him."

She couldn't think. "Tell him?"

"Yeah. Tell him."

Slowly her dazed mind registered what he was saying. She looked in bewilderment at her empty hands. What had happened to the letters? Had they lost them in the hay? How mortifying it would be to have to search through the hay for them! Not knowing what else to do, she spread her hands and said simply, "You're in. I got the letter today."

Blood drained from Joe's face as he stared at her, and he reached out blindly to rest his hand on the truck as if to steady himself. "I got in? The Academy? I got into the Academy?" he asked hoarsely.

"You got the recommendation. It's up to you to pass the exams."

He threw back his head and screamed, an exultant, spine-chilling sound like that of a hunting panther, then leaped at Wolf. The two of them pounded each other's backs, laughing and yelling, then finally just hugging each other in a way two weaker men couldn't have done. Mary folded her hands and watched them, smiling, so happy her heart swelled to the point of pain. Then suddenly an arm reached out and snagged her, and she found herself sandwiched between the two Mackenzies, almost smashed flat by their celebration.

"You're smothering me!" she protested in a gasping voice, wedging her hands against two broad chests and pushing. One of those chests was bare, exposed by an unbuttoned shirt, and the touch of his warm skin made her go weak in the knees. Both of them laughed at her protest, but both of them immediately gentled their embrace.

Mary patted her hair down and smoothed her dress. "The letters are here somewhere. I must have dropped them."

Wolf gave her a wicked look. "You must have."

His teasing made her happy deep inside, and she smiled at him. It was a quietly intimate smile, the sort that a woman gives the man she loves after she has been in his arms, and it warmed him. To cover his reaction, he turned to look for the dropped letters and spotted one on the drive, while the other had fallen close to the barn door. He retrieved both of them, and gave Joe the one addressed to him.

The boy's hands shook as he read the letter, even though he already knew the contents. He couldn't believe it. It had happened so fast. A dream come true should have been harder to attain; he should have had to sweat blood to get it. Oh, he wasn't driving one of those twenty-million dollar babies yet, but he would. He had to, because he would be only half alive without wings.

Mary was watching him with proud indulgence when she felt Wolf stiffen beside her. She looked at him inquiringly. His head was lifted as if he scented danger, and his face was suddenly as impassive as stone. Then she heard the sound of an engine and turned as a deputy sheriffs car rolled to a stop behind Joe's truck.

Joe turned, and his face took on the same stony look as Wolfs as Clay Armstrong got out of the county car.

"Ma'am." Clay spoke to her first, tipping his hat.

"Deputy Armstrong." Two hundred years of strict training on social behaviour were in her voice. Aunt Ardith would have been proud. But she sensed some threat to Wolf, and it was all she could do not to put herself between him and the deputy. Only the knowledge that he wouldn't appreciate the action kept her standing at his side.

Clay's friendly blue eyes weren't friendly at all now. "Why are you up here, Miss Potter?"

"Why are you asking?" she shot back, putting her hands on her hips.

"Just skip to the good part, Armstrong," Wolf snapped.

"Fine," Clay snapped back. "You're wanted for questioning. You can come with me now, the easy way, or I can get a warrant for your arrest."

Joe stood frozen, fury and hell in his eyes. This had happened before, and he'd lost his father for two nightmarish years. It seemed even more terrible this time, because just moments before they had been celebrating, and he'd been on top of the world.

Wolf began buttoning his shirt. In a voice like gravel he asked, "What happened this time?"

"We'll talk about that at the sheriffs office."

"We'll talk about it now."

Black eyes met blue, and abruptly Clay realized this man wouldn't move a foot unless he had some answers. "A girl was raped this morning."

Sulphuric rage burned in those night-dark eyes. "So naturally you thought of the Indian." He spat the words like bullets from between clenched teeth. God, this couldn't be happening again. Not twice in one lifetime. The first time had almost killed him, and he knew he'd never go back to that hellhole, no matter what he had to do.

"We're just questioning some people. If you have an alibi, there's no problem. You'll be free to go."

"I suppose you picked up every rancher in this area? Do you have Eli Baugh at the sheriff's office answering questions?"

Clay's face darkened with anger. "No."

"Just the Indian, huh?"

"You have priors." But Clay looked uncomfortable.

"I don't have… one… single… prior conviction," Wolf snarled. "I was cleared."

"Damn it, man, I know that!" Clay suddenly yelled. "I was told to pick you up, and I'm going to do my job."

"Well, why didn't you just say so? I wouldn't want to stop a man from doing his job." After that sarcastic jab, Wolf strode to his truck. "I'll follow you."

"You can ride in the car. I'll bring you back."

"No, thanks. I'd rather have my own wheels, just in case the sheriff decides a walk would do me good."

Swearing under his breath, Clay went to the car and got in. Dust and gravel flew from his tires as he headed back down the mountain, with Wolf behind him slinging even more dust and gravel.

Mary began shaking. At first it was just a tremor, but it swiftly escalated into shudders that rattled her entire body. Joe was standing as if turned to stone, his fists clenched. Suddenly he whirled and slammed his fist into the hood of his truck. "By God, they won't do it to him again," he whispered. "Not again."

"No, they certainly won't." She was still shaking, but she squared her shoulders. "If I have to get every judge and court in this country involved, I will. I'll call newspapers, I'll call television networks, I'll call—oh, they don't have any idea of who all I can call." The network of Old Family contacts she had left behind in Savannah was still there, and more favours would be called in than the sheriff of this county could count. She'd hang him out to dry!

"Why don't you go home?" Joe suggested in a flat tone.

"I want to stay."

He'd expected her to quietly walk to her car, but at her words he looked at her for the first time. Deep inside, part of him had thought she wouldn't be able to leave fast enough, that he and Wolf would be alone again, as they had always been. They were used to being alone. But Mary stood her ground as if she had no intention of budging off this mountain, her slate-blue eyes full of fire and her fragile chin lifted in the way that he'd learned meant others could just get out of her path.

The boy, forced by circumstance to grow up hard and fast, put his strong arms around the woman and held her, desperately absorbing some of her strength, because he was deathly afraid he'd need it. And Mary held him. He was Wolf's son, and she'd protect him with every ounce of fight she had.

Chapter Six

It was after nine when they heard Wolf's truck, and both of them froze with mingled tension and relief: tension because they dreaded to hear what had happened, and relief because he was home instead of locked in jail. Mary couldn't imagine Wolf in jail, even though he'd spent two years in prison. He was too wild, like a lobo that could never be tamed. Imprisoning him had been an act so cruel as to be obscene.

He came in the back door and stood there staring at her, his dark face expressionless. She and Joe sat at the kitchen table, nursing cups of coffee. "Why are you still here? Go home."

She ignored the flatness of his tone. He was so angry she could almost feel the heat from across the room, but she knew it wasn't directed against her. Getting up, she dumped her lukewarm coffee into the sink and got another cup from the cabinet, then poured fresh coffee into both cups. "Sit down, drink your coffee and tell us what happened," she said in her best schoolteacher voice.

He did reach for the coffee, but he didn't sit down. He was too angry to sit. The rage boiled in him, robbing his movements of their usual fluidity. It was starting all over again, and he'd be damned if he'd go to prison again for something he hadn't done. He'd fight any way he could and with any weapon he could, but he'd die before he'd go back to prison.

"They let you go," Joe said.

"They had to. The girl was raped around noon. At noon I was delivering two horses to the Bar W R. Wally Rasco verified it, and the sheriff couldn't figure out a way I could have been in two different places, sixty miles apart, at the same time, so he had to let me go."

"Where did it happen?"

Wolf rubbed his forehead, then pinched his nose between his eyes as if he had a headache, or maybe he was just tired. "She was grabbed from behind when she got in her car, parked in her own driveway. He made her drive almost an hour before telling her to pull off on the side of the road. She never saw his face. He wore a ski mask. But she could tell he was tall, and that was enough of a description for the sheriff."

"The side of the road?" Mary blurted. "That's… weird. It doesn't make sense. I know there's not much traffic, but still, someone could have come by at any time."

"Yeah. Not to mention that he was waiting for her in her driveway. The whole thing is strange."

Joe drummed his fingers on the table. "It could have been someone passing through."

"How many people 'pass through' Ruth?" Wolf asked dryly. "Would a drifter have known whose car it was, or when she was likely to come out of the house? What if the car belonged to a man? That's a big chance to take, especially when rape seems to have been the only thing on his mind, because he didn't rob her, even though she had money."

"Are they keeping her identity secret?" Mary asked.

He looked at her. "It won't stay a secret, because her father was in the sheriff's office waving a rifle and threatening to blow my guts out. He attracted a lot of attention, and people talk."

His face was still expressionless, but Mary sensed the bitter rage that filled him. His fierce pride had been dragged in the dust—again. How had he endured being forced to sit there and listen to insults and threats? Because she knew he'd been insulted, by vile words describing his mixed heritage as well as by the very fact he'd been picked up for questioning. He was holding it all in, controlling it, but the rage was there.

"What happened?"

"Armstrong stopped it. Then Wally Rasco got there and cleared me, and the sheriff let me go with a friendly warning."

"A warning?" Mary jumped to her feet, her eyes flashing. "For what?"

He pinched her chin and gave her a coldly ferocious smile. "He warned me to stay away from white women, sweetcake. And that's just what I'm going to do. So you go on home now, and stay there. I don't want you on my mountain again."

"You didn't feel that way in the barn," she shot back, then darted a look at Joe and blushed. Joe just quirked an eyebrow and looked strangely self-satisfied. She decided to ignore him and turned back to Wolf. "I can't believe you're letting that mush-brain sheriff tell you who you can see."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Maybe it hasn't dawned on you yet, but it's all starting again. It doesn't matter that Wally Rasco cleared me. Everyone is going to remember what happened ten years ago, and the way they felt."

"You were cleared of that, too, or doesn't that count?"

"With some people," he finally admitted. "Not with most. They're already afraid of me, already distrust and dislike me. Until this bastard is caught, I probably won't be able to buy anything in that town, not groceries, gas or feed. And any white woman who has anything to do with me could be in real danger of being tarred and feathered."

So that was it. He was still trying to protect her. She stared at him in exasperation. "Wolf, I refuse to live my life according to someone else's prejudices. I appreciate that you're trying to protect me—"

She could hear an audible click as his teeth snapped together. "Do you?" he asked with heavy sarcasm. "Then go home. Stay home, and I'll stay here."

"For how long?"

Instead of answering her question, he made an oblique statement. "I'll always be a half-breed."

"And I'll always be what I am, too. I haven't asked you to change," she pointed out, pain creeping into her voice. She looked at him with longing plain in her eyes, as no woman had ever looked at him before, and the rage in him intensified because he couldn't simply reach out and take her in his arms, proclaim to the world that she was his woman. The sheriff's warning had been clear enough, and Wolf knew well that the hostility toward him would rapidly swell to explosive proportions. It could easily spill over onto Mary, and now he wasn't just worried that she would lose her job. A job was nothing compared to the physical danger she could suffer. She could be terrorized in her own home, her property vandalized; she could be cursed and spat upon; she could be physically attacked. For all her sheer determination, she was still just a rather slight woman, and she would be helpless against anyone who wanted to hurt her.

"I know," he finally said, and despite himself, he reached out to touch her hair. "Go home, Mary. When this is over—" He stopped, because he didn't want to make promises he might not be able to keep, but what he'd said was enough to put a glowing light in her eyes.

"All right," she murmured, putting her hand on his. "By the way, I want you to get a haircut."

He looked startled. "A haircut?"

"Yes. You want me to wear my hair down, and I want you to get a haircut."

"Why?"

She gave him a shrewd look. "You don't wear it long because you're Indian. You wear it long just to upset people, so they'll never forget your Indian blood. So get it cut."

"Short hair won't make me less Indian."

"Long hair won't make you more Indian."

She looked as if she would stand there until doomsday unless he agreed to get a haircut. He gave in abruptly, muttering, "All right, I'll get a haircut."

"Good." She smiled at him and went on tiptoe to kiss the corner of his mouth. "Good night. Good night, Joe."

"Goodnight, Mary."

When she was gone, Wolf wearily ran his hand through his hair, then frowned as he realized he'd just agreed to cut it off. He looked up to find Joe watching him steadily.

"What are we going to do?" the boy asked.

"Whatever we have to," Wolf replied, his expression flinty.

When Mary bought groceries the next morning, she found everyone in the store huddling together in small groups of two or three and whispering about the rape. The girl's identity was quickly revealed; it was Cathy Teele, whose younger sister, Christa, was in Mary's class. The entire Teele family was devastated, according to the whispers Mary heard as she gathered her groceries.

Next to the flour and cornmeal, she encountered Dottie Lancaster, who was flanked by a young man Mary assumed was Dottie's son. "Hello, Dottie." Mary greeted the woman pleasantly, even though it was possible Dottie had started the rumour about her and Joe.

"Hello." Dottie wore a distressed expression, rather than her habitual sour one. "Have you heard about that poor Teele girl?"

"I haven't heard anything else since I entered the store."

"They arrested that Indian, but the sheriff had to let him go. I hope now you'll be more careful about the company you keep."

"Wolf wasn't arrested." Mary managed to keep her voice calm. "He was questioned, but he was at Wally Rasco's ranch when the attack occurred, and Mr. Rasco backed him up. Wolf Mackenzie isn't a rapist."

"A court of law said he was and sentenced him to prison."

"He was also cleared when the true rapist was caught and confessed to the crime for which Wolf had been convicted."

Dottie drew back, her face livid. "That's what that Indian said, but as far as we know, he just got out on parole. It's easy to see whose side you're on, but then, you've been running with those Indians since the day you came to Ruth. Well, miss, there's an old saying that if you sleep with dogs, you're bound to get fleas. The Mackenzies are dirty Indian trash—"

"Don't you say another word," Mary interrupted, colour high in her cheeks as she took a step toward Dottie. She was furious; her hand itched to slap the woman's self-righteous face. Aunt Ardith had said that a lady never brawled, but Mary was ready to forever relinquish any claim she had to the tide. "Wolf is a decent, hard-working man, and I won't let you or anyone else say he isn't."

Dottie's colour was mottled, but something in Mary's eyes made her refrain from saying anything else about Wolf. Instead she leaned closer and hissed, "You'd better watch yourself, Miss Goody-Goody, or you'll find yourself in a lot of trouble."

Mary leaned closer, too, her jaw set. "Are you threatening me?" she demanded fiercely.

"Mama, please," the young man behind her whispered in a frantic tone, and tugged at Dottie's arm.

Dottie looked around at him, and her face changed. She drew back, but told Mary contemptuously, "You just mark my words," and stalked away.

Her son, Bobby, was so distressed he was wringing his hands as he hurried after Dottie. Immediately, Mary was sorry she had let the horrid little scene develop; from what Joe had told her, Bobby had a hard enough time handling everyday problems without adding more.

She took a few deep breaths to regain her composure, but almost lost it again when she turned and found several people standing in the aisle, staring at her. They had all obviously heard every word, and looked both shocked and avid. She had no doubt the tale would be all over town within the hour: two of the schoolteachers brawling over Wolf Mackenzie. She groaned inwardly as she picked up a bag of flour. Another scandal was just what Wolf needed.

In the next aisle, she met Cicely Karr. Remembering the woman's comments during the school board meeting, Mary couldn't stop herself from saying, "I've received a letter from Senator Allard, Mrs. Karr. He's recommending Joe Mackenzie for admission to the Academy." She sounded challenging even to her own ears.

To her surprise, Mrs. Karr looked excited. "He is? Why, I never would've believed it. Until Eli explained it to me, I didn't quite realize what an honour it is." Then she sobered. "But now this terrible thing has happened. It's awful. I—I couldn't help overhearing you and Dottie Lancaster. Miss Potter, you can't imagine what it was like ten years ago. People were frightened and angry, and now the same nightmare has started again."

"It's a nightmare for Wolf Mackenzie, too," Mary said hotly. "He was sent to prison for a rape he didn't commit. His record was cleared, but still he was the first person the sheriff picked up for questioning. How do you think he feels? He'll never get back the two years he spent in prison, and now it looks as if everyone is trying to send him there again."

Mrs. Karr looked troubled. "We were all wrong before. The justice system was wrong, too. But even though Mackenzie proved he didn't rape Cathy Teele, don't you see why the sheriff wanted to question him?"

"No, I don't."

"Because Mackenzie had reason to want revenge."

Mary was aghast. "So you thought he'd take revenge by attacking a young woman who was just a child when he was sent to prison? What sort of man do you think he is?" She was horrified by both the idea and the feeling that everyone in Ruth would agree with Mrs. Karr.

"I think he's a man who hates," Mrs. Karr said firmly. Yes, she believed Wolf capable of such horrible, obscene revenge; it was in her eyes.

Mary felt sick; she began shaking her head. "No," she said. "No. Wolf is bitter about the way he was treated, but he doesn't hate. And he would never hurt a woman like that." If she knew anything in this world, she knew that. She had felt urgency in his touch, but never brutality.

But Mrs. Karr was shaking her head, too. "Don't tell me he doesn't hate! It's in those black-as-hell eyes every time he looks at us, any of us. The sheriff found out he'd been in Vietnam, in some special assassination group, or something. God only knows how it warped him! Maybe he didn't rape Cathy Teele, but this would be a perfect opportunity for him to get revenge and have it blamed on whoever did rape her!"

"If Wolf wanted revenge, he wouldn't sneak around to get it," Mary said scornfully. "You don't know anything about the kind of man he is, do you? He's lived here for years, and none of you know him."

"And I suppose you do?" Mrs. Karr was getting red in the face. "Maybe we're talking about a different kind of 'knowing.' Maybe that rumour about you carrying on with Joe Mackenzie was half right, after all. You've been carrying on with Wolf Mackenzie, haven't you?"

The scorn in the woman's voice enraged Mary. "Yes!" she half shouted, and honesty impelled her to add, "But not as much as I'd like."

A chorus of gasps made her look around, and she stared into the faces of the townspeople who had stopped in the aisle to listen. Well, she'd really done it now; Wolf had wanted her to distance herself from him, and instead she'd all but shouted from the rooftops that she'd been "carrying on" with him. But she couldn't feel even the tiniest bit of shame. She felt proud. With Wolf Mackenzie she was a woman, not a dowdy, old maid schoolteacher who even owned a cat, for heaven's sake. She didn't feel dowdy when she was with Wolf; she felt warm, wanted. If she had any regrets, it was that Joe hadn't been fifteen minutes later returning the day before, or even five minutes, because more than anything she wanted to be Wolf's woman in every way, to lie beneath his thrusting body, eagerly accepting the force of his passion and giving him her own. If for that, for loving him, she was ostracized, then she counted society well lost.

Mrs. Karr said icily, "I believe we'll have to have another school board meeting."

"When you do, consider that I have an ironclad contract," Mary shot back, and turned on her heel. She hadn't gathered all of the groceries she needed, but she was too angry to continue. When she plunked the items down on the counter, the clerk looked as if she wanted to refuse to ring them up, but she changed her mind under Mary's glare.

She stormed home and was gratified when the weather seemed to agree with her, if the grey clouds forming overhead were any indication. After storing her groceries, she checked on the cat, who had been acting strange lately. A horrid thought intruded: surely no one would have poisoned the cat? But Woodrow was sunning himself peacefully on the rug, so she dismissed the idea with relief.

When this is over…

The phrase echoed in her memory, tantalizing her and stirring an ache deep inside. She longed for him so intensely that she felt as if she were somehow incomplete. She loved him, and though she understood why he thought it better for her to stay away from him right now, she didn't agree. After what had happened that morning with Dottie Lancaster and Cicely Karr, there was no point in allowing this exile. She might as well have stood in the middle of the street and shouted it: she was Wolf Mackenzie's woman.

Whatever he wanted from her, she was willing to give. Aunt Ardith had raised her to believe that intimacy belonged only in marriage, if a woman for some reason felt she simply couldn't live without a man, though Aunt Ardith had made it plain she couldn't imagine what such a reason would be. While Mary had accepted that people obviously were ultimate outside of marriage, she had never been tempted to it herself—until she'd met Wolf. If he wanted her for only a short time, she counted that as better than nothing. Even one day with him would be a bright and shining memory to treasure during the long, dreary years without him, a small bit of warmth to comfort her. Her dream was to spend a lifetime with him, but she didn't allow herself to expect it. He was too bitter, too wary; it was unlikely he would permit an Anglo to get that close to him. He would give her his body, perhaps even his affection, but not his heart or his commitment.

Because she loved him, she knew she wouldn't demand more. She didn't want anger or guilt between them. For as long as she could, in whatever way, she wanted to make Wolf happy.

He had asked her to wear her hair down, and the silky weight of it lay around her shoulders. She had been surprised, looking in the mirror that morning, how the relaxed hairstyle softened her face. Her eyes had glowed, because leaving her hair down was something she could do for him. She looked feminine, the way he made her feel.

There was no point in trying to make people think her neutral now, not after those arguments she'd gotten into. When she told him what had happened, he'd see the uselessness of trying to maintain the sham. She even felt relieved, because her heart hadn't been in it.

She had started to change into one of her shapeless housedresses when she caught sight of herself in the mirror and paused. In her mind she relived that moment the day she'd first met Wolf, when he'd seen her in Joe's old jeans and his eyes had momentarily widened with a look so hot and male it had the power, even now, to make her shake. She wanted him to look at her like that again, but he wasn't likely to as long as she kept wearing these—these feed sacks!

Suddenly she was dissatisfied with all her clothing. Her dresses were, without exception, sturdy and modest, but they were also too drab and loose-fitting. Her slight build would be better displayed in delicate cottons and light, cheerful colours, or even hip-hugging jeans. She turned and looked at her bottom in the mirror; it was slim and curvy. She could see no reason why she should be ashamed of it. It was a very nice bottom, as bottoms went.

Muttering to herself, she zipped herself back into her serviceable "good" dress and grabbed her purse. Ruth wouldn't offer much in the way of new clothes, but she could certainly buy some jeans and sassy little tops, as well as some neat skirts and blouses that, above all, actually fit her.

And she never wanted to see another "sensible" shoe in her life.

The grey clouds lived up to their promise, and it began to rain as she made the drive into town. It was a steady rain, just the sort ranchers and farmers everywhere loved, rather than a downpour that simply ran off instead of soaking into the ground. Aunt Ardith wouldn't have set foot out of the house during a rain, but Mary ignored it. She stopped first at the one store in Ruth that dealt exclusively in women's clothing, though by necessity the clothes weren't hot from a fashion show in Paris. She bought three pairs of jeans, size six, two lightweight cotton sweaters, and a blue chambray shirt that made her feel like a pioneer. A snazzy denim skirt, paired with a ruby-red sweater, flattered her so much she spun on her heel in delight, just like a child. She also chose a brown skirt, which fit so well she couldn't turn it down despite the colour, and teamed a crisp pink blouse with it. Her final choice was a pale lavender cotton skirt and matching top, which sported a delicate lace collar. Still in a fit of defiance and delight, she picked out a pair of dressy white sandals as well as a pair of track shoes. When the saleswoman rang them up and called out the total, Mary didn't even blink an eye. This had been too long in coming.

Nor was she finished. She locked her packages in the car and dashed through the rain to Hearst's general store, where everyone bought boots. Since Mary planned to be spending most of her time on Wolf's mountain, she figured she'd need a pair.

Mr. Hearst was almost rude to her, but she stared him down and briefly thought of shaking her schoolteacher's finger at him. She discarded the idea because the finger lost its power if used too often, and she might really need it sometime in the future. So she ignored him and tried on boots until she finally found a pair that felt comfortable on her feet.

She couldn't wait to get home and put on her jeans and chambray shirt; she might even wear her boots around the house to get them broken in, she thought. Woodrow wouldn't know her. She thought of that look in Wolf's eyes and began to shiver.

Her car was parked up the street, a block away, and it was raining hard enough now that she made a disgusted noise at herself for not driving from the clothing store to Hearst's. Ruth didn't have sidewalks, and already huge puddles were standing on the pavement. Well, she had on her sensible shoes; let them earn their keep!

Putting her head down and holding the box containing her boots up in an effort to ward off part of the rain, she darted from the sheltering overhang of the roof and immediately got wet to the ankles when she stepped into a puddle. She was still grumbling to herself about that when she passed the small alley that ran between the general store and the next building, which had formerly been a barbershop but now stood empty.

She didn't hear anything or see a flurry of movement; she had no warning at all. A big hand, wet with rain, clamped over her mouth, and an arm wrapped around the front of her body, effectively holding her arms down as her attacker began hauling her down the alley, away from the street. Mary fought instinctively, wriggling and kicking while she made muffled sounds behind the man's palm. His hand was so tight on her face that his fingers dug painfully into her cheek.

The tall, wet weeds in the alley stung her legs, and the pounding rain stung her eyes. Terrified, she kicked harder. This couldn't be happening! He couldn't just carry her off in broad daylight! But he could; he had done it to Cathy Teele.

She got one arm free and reached back, clawing for his face. Her desperate fingers found only wet, woolly cloth. He cursed, his voice low and raspy, and hit her on the side of the head with his fist.

Her senses blurred as her head was rocked with pain, and her struggles grew aimless. Vaguely she was aware when they reached the end of the alley and he dragged her behind the abandoned building.

His breathing was fast and harsh in her ear as he forced her down on her stomach in the gravel and mud. She managed to get her arm free again and put her hand out to break her fall; the gravel scraped her palm, but she barely felt it. His hand was still over her mouth, suffocating her; he ground her face into the wet dirt and held her down with his heavy weight on her back.

He scrabbled with his other hand for her skirt, pulling it up. Wildly she clawed at his hand, trying to pull it free so she could scream, and he hit her again. She was terrified and kept clawing. Cursing, he forced her legs apart and thrust himself against her. She could feel him through his pants and her undergarments, pushing at her, and began gagging. God, no!

She heard her clothing tear, and overpowering revulsion gave her strength. She bit savagely at his hand and reached back for his eyes, her nails digging for flesh.

There was a roaring in her ears, but she heard a shout. The man on top of her stiffened, then braced his hand beside her head and used it to balance himself as he leaped to his feet. Her vision blurred by rain and mud, she saw only a blue sleeve and a pale, freckled hand before he was gone. From above and behind her came a loud boom, and vaguely she wondered if now she would be struck by lightning. No, lightning came before the thunder.

Running footsteps pounded the ground, going past her. Mary lay still, her body limp and her eyes closed.

She heard low cursing, and the footsteps returned. "Mary," a commanding voice said. "Are you all right?"

She managed to open her eyes and looked up at Clay Armstrong. He was soaked to the skin, his blue eyes furious, but his hands were gentle as he turned her onto her back and lifted her in his arms.

"Are you all right?" The words were sharper now.

The rain stung her face. "Yes," she managed, and turned her head into his shoulder.

"I'll get him," Clay promised. "I swear to you, I'll get the bastard."

There was no doctor in town, but Bessie Pylant was a registered nurse, and Clay carried Mary to Bessie's house. Bessie called the private practitioner for whom she worked and got him to drive over from the next town. In the meantime she carefully cleaned Mary's scrapes and put ice on the bruises, and began pouring hot, too-sweet tea down her. Clay had disappeared. Bessie's house was suddenly full of women; Sharon Wycliffe came and assured Mary that she and Dottie could handle things on Monday if Mary didn't feel like working; Francie Beecham told tales of her own teaching days, her purpose obvious, and the other women took their cues from her. Mary sat quietly, clutching so tightly at the blanket Bessie had wrapped around her that her knuckles were white. She knew the women were trying to divert her, and was grateful to them; with rigid control she concentrated on their commonplace chatter. Even Cicely Karr came and patted Mary's hand, despite the argument they'd had only a few hours before.

Then the doctor arrived, and Bessie led Mary into a bedroom for privacy while the doctor examined her. She answered his questions in a subdued voice, though she winced when he probed the sore place on the side of her head where the man had struck her with his fist. He checked her pupil response and her blood pressure, and gave her a mild sedative.

"You'll be all right," he finally said, patting her knee. "There's no concussion, so your headache should go away soon. A good night's sleep will do more for you than anything I can prescribe."

"Thank you for driving out here," Mary said politely.

Desperation was growing in her. Everyone had been wonderful, but she could feel a fine wire inside her being coiled tighter and tighter. She felt dirty and exposed. She needed privacy and a shower, and more than anything she needed Wolf.

She left the bedroom and found that Clay had returned. He came to her immediately and took her hand. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm all right." If she had to say that one more time, she thought she would scream.

"I need a statement from you, if you think you can do it now."

"Yes, all right" The sedative was taking effect; she could feel the spreading sensation of remoteness as the drug numbed her emotions. She let Clay lead her to a chair and pulled the blanket tight around her once more. She felt chilled.

"You don't have to be afraid," Clay soothed. "He's been picked up. He's in custody now."

That aroused her interest, and she stared at him. "Picked up? You know who it is?"

"I saw him." The iron was back in Clay's voice.

"But he was wearing a ski mask." She remembered that, remembered feeling the woolly fabric under her fingers.

"Yeah, but his hair was hanging out from under the mask in back."

Mary stared up at him, the numbness in her changing into a kind of horror. His hair was long enough to hang out from under the mask? Surely Clay didn't think—surely not! She felt sick. "Wolf?" she whispered.

"Don't worry. I told you he's in custody."

She clenched her fists so tightly that her nails dug crescents in her palms. "Then let him go."

Clay looked stunned, then angry. "Let him go! Damn, Mary, can't you get it through your head that he attacked you?"

Slowly she shook her head, her face white. "No, he didn't."

"I saw him," Clay said, spacing out each word. "He was tall and had long black hair. Damn it, who else could it have been?"

"I don't know, but it wasn't Wolf."

The women were silent, sitting frozen as they listened to the argument. Cicely Karr spoke up. "We did try to warn you, Mary."

"Then you warned me about the wrong man!" Her eyes burning, Mary stared around the room, then turned her gaze back to Clay. "I saw his hands! He was a white man, an Anglo. He had freckled hands. It wasn't Wolf Mackenzie!"

Clay's brow creased in a frown. "Are you certain about that?"

"Positive. He put his hand on the ground right in front of my eyes." She reached out and grabbed his sleeve. "Get Wolf out of jail, right now. Right now, do you hear me! And he'd better not have a bruise on him!"

Clay got up and went to the telephone, and once again Mary looked at the women in the room. They were all pale and worried. Mary could guess why. As long as they had suspected Wolf, they had had a safe target for their fear and anger. Now they had to look at themselves, at someone who was one of them. A lot of men in the area had freckled hands, but Wolf didn't His hands were lean and dark, bronzed by the sun, callused from years of hard manual work and riding. She had felt them on her bare skin. She wanted to shout that Wolf had no reason to attack her, because he could have her any time he wanted, but she didn't. The numbness was returning. She just wanted to wait for Wolf, if he came at all.

An hour later he walked into Bessie's house as if he owned it without knocking. An audible gasp rose when he appeared in the doorway, his broad shoulders reaching almost from beam to beam. He didn't even glance at the other people in the room. His eyes were on Mary, huddled in her blanket her face colourless.

His boots rang on the floor as he crossed to her and hunkered down. His black eyes raked her from head to toe; then he touched her chin, turning her head toward the light so he could see the scrape on her cheek and the bruises where hard fingers had bitten into her soft flesh. He lifted her hands and examined her raw palms. His jaw was like granite.

Mary wanted to cry, but instead she managed a wobbly smile. "You got a haircut" she said softly, and linked her fingers together to keep from running them through the thick, silky strands that lay perfectly against his well-shaped head.

"First thing this morning," he murmured. "Are you all right?"

"Yes. He—he didn't manage to… you know."

"I know." He stood. "I'll be back later. I'm going to get him. I promise you, I'll get him."

Clay said sharply, "That's a matter for the law."

Wolfs eyes were cold black fire. "The law isn't doing a very good job." He walked out without another word, and Mary felt chilled again. While he had been there, life had begun tingling in her numb body, but now it was gone. He had said he would be back, but she thought she should go home. Everyone was very kind, too kind; she felt as if she would scream. She couldn't handle any more.

Chapter Seven

Though he was stunned by Wolf's changed appearance, it took Clay only a moment to follow him. As he had suspected, Wolf stopped his truck at the alley where Mary had been attacked. By the time Clay parked the county car and entered the alley, Wolf was down on one knee, examining the muddy ground. He didn't even glance up when Clay approached. Instead he continued his concentrated examination of every weed and bit of gravel, every scuff mark, every indentation.

Clay said, "When did you get a haircut?"

"This morning. At the barbershop in Harpston."

"Why?"

"Because Mary asked me to," Wolf said flatly, and returned his attention to the ground.

Slowly he moved down the alley and to the back of the buildings, pausing at the spot where Mary's attacker had thrust her to the ground. Then he moved on, following exactly the path the attacker had taken, and it was in the next alley that he gave a grunt of satisfaction and knelt beside a blurred footprint.

Clay had been over the ground himself, and so had many other people. He said as much to Wolf. "That print could belong to anyone."

"No. It's made by a soft-soled shoe, not a boot." After examining the print awhile longer, he said, "He toes in slightly when he walks. I'd guess he weighs about one seventy-five, maybe one eighty. He isn't in very good shape. He was already tired when he got this far."

Clay felt uneasy. Some people would have simply passed off that land of tracking ability as part of Wolf's Indian heritage, but they would have been wrong. There were excellent trackers of wildlife who could follow a man's footsteps in the wilderness as easily as if he had wet paint on the bottoms of his boots, but the details Wolf had discerned would have been noted only by someone who had been trained to hunt other men. Nor did he doubt what Wolf had told him, because he had seen other men, though not many, who could track like that.

"You were in Nam." He already knew that, but suddenly it seemed far more significant.

Wolf was still examining the footprint. "Yes. You?"

"Twenty-first Infantry. What outfit were you with?"

Wolf looked up, and a very slight, unholy smile touched his lips. "I was a LRRP."

Clay's uneasy feeling became a chill. The LRRPs, pronounced "lurp," were men on long-range reconnaissance patrol. Unlike the regular grunts, the LRRPs spent weeks in the jungles and hill country, living off the land, hunting and being hunted. They survived only by their wits and ability to fight, or to fade away into the shadows, whichever the situation demanded. Clay had seen them come in from the bush, lean and filthy, smelling like the wild animals they essentially were, with death in their eyes and their nerves so raw, so wary, that it was dangerous to touch them unexpectedly, or walk up to their backs. Sometimes they hadn't been able to bear the touch of another human being until their nerves settled down. A smart man walked lightly around a LRRP fresh in from the field.

What was in Wolf's eyes now was cold and deadly, an anger so great Clay could only guess at its force, though he understood it. Wolf smiled again, and in the calmest tone imaginable, one almost gentle, he said, "He made a mistake."

"What was that?"

"He hurt my woman."

"It's not your place to hunt him. It's a matter for the law."

"Then the law had better stay close to my heels," Wolf said, and walked away.

Clay stared after him, not even surprised by the blunt words claiming Mary as his woman. The chill ran down his back again and he shivered. The town of Ruth had made a mistake in judging this man, but the rapist had made an even bigger one, one that might prove fatal.

Mary stoically ignored all the protests and pleas when she announced her intention of driving home. They meant well, and she appreciated their concern, but she couldn't stay another moment. She was physically unharmed, and the doctor had said her headache would fade in the next few hours. She simply had to go home.

So she drove alone in the misting rain, her movements automatic. Afterward, she could never recall a moment of the drive. All she was aware of when she let herself into the creaky old house was a feeling of intense relief, and it so frightened her that she pushed it away. She couldn't afford to let herself relax, not now. Maybe later. Right now she had to hold herself together very tightly.

Woodrow looped around her ankles several times, meowing plaintively. Mary stirred herself to feed him, though he was as fat as a butterball already, then found herself exhausted by that brief effort. She sat down at the table and folded her hands in her lap, holding herself motionless.

That was how Wolf found her half an hour later, just as the grey daylight began to fade. "Why didn't you wait for me?" he asked from the doorway, his tone a low, gentle growl.

"I had to come home," Mary explained.

"I would have brought you."

"I know."

He sat down at the table beside her and took her cold, tightly clasped hands in his. She looked at him steadily, and his heart clenched like a fist in his chest.

He would have given anything never to have seen that look in her eyes.

She had always been so indomitable, with her "damn the torpedoes" spirit. She was slight and delicately made, but in her own eyes she had been invincible. Because the very idea of defeat was foreign to her, she had blithely moved through life arranging it to suit herself and accepted it as only natural that shopkeepers quaked before her wagging finger. That attitude had sometimes irritated, but more often entranced, him. The kitten thought herself a tiger, and because she acted like a tiger, other people had given way.

She was no longer indomitable. A horrible vulnerability was in her eyes, and he knew she would never forget the moments when she had been helpless. That scum had hurt her, humiliated her, literally ground her into the dirt.

"Do you know what really horrified me?" she asked after a long silence.

"What?"

"That I wanted the first time to be with you, and he was going to—" She stopped abruptly, unable to finish.

"But he didn't."

"No. He pulled up my skirt and pushed against me, and he was tearing my clothes when Clay—I think Clay shouted. He might have fired a shot. I remember hearing a roaring sound, but I thought it was thunder."

Her flat little monotone bothered him, and he realized she was still in shock. "I won't let him get near you again. I give you my word."

She nodded, then closed her eyes.

"You're going to take a shower," Wolf said, urging her to her feet. "A long, warm shower, and while you're taking it, I'll fix something for you to eat. What would you like?"

She tried to think of something, but even the thought of food was repugnant. "Just tea."

He walked upstairs with her; she was steady, but the steadiness seemed fragile, as if she were barely holding herself under control. He wished that she would cry, or yell, anything that would break the tension encasing her.

"I'll just get my nightgown. You don't mind if I get my nightgown, do you?" She looked anxious, as if afraid she was being too troublesome.

"No." He started to reach out and touch her, to slide his arm around her waist, but dropped his hand before contact was made. She might not want anyone to touch her. A sick feeling grew in him as he realized she might find his, and any other man's, touch disgusting now.

Mary got her nightgown and stood docilely in the old-fashioned bathroom while Wolf adjusted the water. "I'll be downstairs," he said as he straightened and stepped back. "Leave the door unlocked."

"Why?" Her eyes were big and solemn.

"In case you faint, or need me."

"I won't faint."

He smiled a little. No, Miss Mary Elizabeth Potter wouldn't faint; she wouldn't allow herself to be so weak. Maybe it wasn't tension holding her so straight; it might be the iron in her backbone.

He knew he wouldn't be able to coax her to eat much, if anything, but he heated a can of soup anyway. His timing was perfect; the soup had just boiled and the tea finished steeping when Mary entered the kitchen.

She hadn't thought to put on a robe; she wore only the nightgown, a plain white cotton eyelet garment. Wolf felt himself begin to sweat, because as demure as the nightgown was, he could still see the darkness of her nipples through the fabric. He swore silently as she sat down at the table like an obedient child; now wasn't the time for lust. But telling himself that didn't stop it; he wanted her, under any circumstances.

She ate the soup mechanically, without protest, and drank the tea, then thanked him for making it. Wolf cleared the table and washed up the few dishes; when he turned, Mary was still sitting at the table, her hands folded and her eyes staring at nothing. He froze briefly and muttered a curse. He couldn't bear it another minute. Swiftly he lifted her out of the chair and sat down in it, then settled her on his lap.

She was stiff in his arms for a moment; then a sigh filtered between her lips as she relaxed against his chest. "I was so frightened," she whispered.

"I know, honey."

"How can you know? You're a man." She sounded faintly truculent.

"Yeah, but I was in prison, remember?" He wondered if she would know what he was talking about, and he saw her brow furrow as she thought.

Then she said, "Oh." She began scowling fiercely. "If anyone hurt you—" she began.

"Hold it! No, I wasn't attacked. I'm good at fighting, and everyone knew it." He didn't tell her how he'd established a reputation for himself. "But it happened to other prisoners, and I knew it could happen to me, so I was always on guard." He'd slept only in light naps, with a knife made from a sharpened spoon always in his hand; his cell had hidden a variety of weapons, a lot of which the guards had seen and not recognized for what they were. It would have taken another LRRP to have seen some of the things he'd done and the weapons he'd carried. Yeah, he'd been on guard.

"I'm glad," she said, then suddenly bent her head against his throat and began to cry. Wolf held her tightly, his fingers laced through her hair to press against her skull and hold her to him. Her soft, slender body shook with sobs as she wound her arms around his neck. She didn't say anything else, and neither did he, but they didn't need words.

He cradled her until finally she sniffed and observed dazedly, "I need to blow my nose."

He stretched to reach the napkin holder and plucked a napkin from it to place in her hands. Mary blew her nose in a very ladylike manner, then sat still, searching in her depths for the best way to handle what had happened. She knew it could have been much worse, but it had been bad enough. Only one thought surfaced: she didn't want to be alone tonight. She hadn't been able to tolerate the women fussing around her, but if Wolf would just stay with her, she'd be all right.

She looked up at him. "Will you stay with me tonight?"

Every muscle in his big body tensed, but there was no way he could deny her. "You know I will. I'll sleep on the—"

"No. I mean—if you could sleep with me tonight, and hold me so I won't be alone, just for tonight, I think I'll be all right tomorrow."

He hoped it would be that easy for her, but he doubted it. The memories would linger on, springing out from dark corners to catch her when she least expected it. Until the day she died, she would never entirely forget, and for that he wanted to catch her assailant and break the guy's neck. Literally.

"I'll call Joe and let him know where I am," he said, and lifted her from his lap.

It was still early, but her eyelids were drooping, and after he called Joe he decided there was no point in putting it off. She needed to be in bed.

He turned out the lights and put his arm around her as they climbed the narrow stairs together. Her flesh was warm and resilient beneath the thin cotton, and the feel of her made his heart begin a slow, heavy beat His jaw clenched as blood throbbed through his body, pooling in his groin. He was in for a miserable night, and he knew it.

Her bedroom was so old-fashioned it looked turn-of-the-century, but he hadn't expected anything else. The delicate lilac smell he associated with Mary was stronger up here. The ache in his loins intensified.

"I hope the bed is big enough for you," she said, worrying as she eyed the double bed.

"It'll do." It wasn't big enough, but it would do. He'd have to spend the night curled around her. Her bottom would be nestled against him, and he would quietly go insane. Suddenly he didn't know if he could do it, if he could lie with her all night and not take her. No matter what his mind said, his body knew exactly what it wanted; he was already so hard it was all he could do to keep from groaning.

"Which side do you want?"

What did it matter? Torment was torment, no matter what side he was on. "The left."

Mary nodded and turned back the covers. Wolf wanted to look away as she climbed into bed, but his eyes wouldn't obey. He saw the curve of her buttocks as the nightgown was momentarily pulled tight. He saw her pale, slim legs and immediately pictured them clasped around his waist. He saw the outline of her pretty breasts with their rosy nipples, and he remembered the feel of her breasts in his hands, her nipples in his mouth, her smell and taste.

Abruptly he bent down and pulled the sheet up over her. "I have to take a shower."

He saw the brief dart of fear at being alone in her eyes, but then she conquered it and said, "The towels are in the closet next to the bathroom door."

He was swearing savagely to himself as he stood in the bathroom, jerking his clothes off. A cold shower wouldn't help; he'd had a lot of them lately, and the effect was remarkably short-lived. He needed Mary—naked, beneath him, sheathing his swollen and throbbing flesh. She would be so tight that he wouldn't last a minute—

Damn. He couldn't leave her, not tonight. No matter what it cost him.

His entire body was aching as he stood under the warm, beating water. He couldn't crawl into bed with her like this. The last thing she needed right now was to have him poking at her all night. She needed comfort, not lust. Not only that, he wasn't entirely certain of his control. He'd been too long without a woman, had wanted her for too long.

He couldn't leave her, but he couldn't go to her like this. He knew what he had to do, and his soapy hand slid down his body. At least this would give him some modicum of control, because he would rather slit his own throat than see that fear and vulnerability in Mary's eyes again.

She was lying very still when he rejoined her, and she didn't move as he turned out the light. It wasn't until his weight depressed the mattress that she shifted to lie on her side. He positioned himself on his side, too, and hooked an arm around her waist to pull her firmly back into the cradle of his body. She sighed, and he felt the tension slowly ebb from her body as she relaxed against him.

"This is nice," she whispered.

"You aren't afraid?"

"Of you? No. Never of you." Her tone was liquid with tenderness. She lifted her hand to reach back and cup his jaw in her palm. "I'll be all right in the morning, wait and see. I'm just too tired right now to deal with it. Will you hold me all night?"

"If you want me to."

"Please."

He brushed her hair to one side and pressed a kiss into the nape of her neck, delighting in the delicate little shiver that rippled through her body when he did so. "My pleasure," he said gently. "Good night, sweetheart."

It was the storm that woke her. It was barely dawn, the light still dim, though the black clouds contributed to the greyness. The storm was fierce, reminding her of the ferocious thunderstorms in the South. Lightning ripped the dark sky apart, and the booming thunder made the very air vibrate. She lazily counted the seconds between the lightning flashes and the thunder to see how far away the storm was: seven miles. But it was pouring rain, the sound loud on the old tin roof. It was wonderful.

She felt both acutely alive and deeply calm, as if she were waiting for something. Yesterday was, by its very definition, in the past. It could no longer hurt her. Today was the present, and the present was Wolf.

He wasn't in the bed, but she knew he had been there during the night. Even in sleep she had sensed him, felt his strong arms holding her. Sleeping together was a joy so deep she couldn't express it, as if it had been meant to be. Perhaps it had been. She couldn't stop herself from hoping.

Where was he? She thought she smelled coffee and got out of bed. She visited the bathroom, brushed her hair and teeth, and returned to the bedroom to dress. Oddly she felt suddenly constrained by the bra she put on and discarded it. A subtle pulsating sensation had enveloped her entire body, and the sense of waiting increased. Even underpants were too much. She simply pulled on a loose cotton house-dress over her nude body and went downstairs in her bare feet.

He wasn't in the parlour, or the kitchen, though the empty coffeepot and the cup in the sink explained the lingering scent. The kitchen door was open, the screen door no barrier to the cool damp air, and the fresh smell of rain mingled with that of the coffee. His truck was still parked at the back porch steps.

It took only a few minutes to boil water and steep a tea bag, and she drank the tea while sitting at the kitchen table, watching the rain sheet down the window. It was cool enough that she should have been chilled, wearing only the thin dress, but she wasn't, even though she could feel how her nipples had tightened. Once that would have embarrassed her. Now she thought only of Wolf.

She was halfway between the table and the sink, empty cup in hand, when suddenly he was there, standing on the other side of the screen door, watching her through the wire mesh. His clothing was plastered to his skin, rainwater dripping off of his face. Mary froze, her head turned to stare at him.

He looked wild, primitive, his eyes narrow and glittering, his feet braced apart. She could see every breath that swelled his chest, see the pulse that throbbed at the base of his throat. Though he was very still, she could feel his entire body pulsating with tension. In that moment she knew he was going to take her, and she knew that was why she had waited.

"I'll always be a half-breed," he said in a low, harsh voice, barely audible over the drumming rain. "There will always be people who look down on me because of it Think long and hard before you agree to be my woman, because there's no going back."

Softly, clearly, she said, "I don't want to go back."

He opened the screen door and entered the kitchen, his movements slow and deliberate. Mary's hand shook as she reached out to place her cup on the cabinet; then she turned to face him.

He put his hands on her waist and gently drew her up against him; his clothes were wet, and immediately the front of her dress absorbed the moisture until the damp fabric was moulded to her body. Mary slid her hands up his shoulders to join at the back of his neck and lifted her mouth to his. His kiss was slow and deep, making her toes curl as hot excitement began to dart through her. She knew how to kiss now and welcomed his tongue while she teased him with her own. His chest lifted with a deep, sharp intake of breath, and his grip on her tightened. Suddenly the kiss was no longer slow, but hungry and urgent, and the pressure of his mouth was almost painful.

She felt him gathering her skirt in his hand to lift it; then his callused palm was sliding up her thigh. He reached her hip and paused, shuddering with violent arousal as he realized she was naked under the dress; then his hand moved to her bare buttocks and caressed them. It was surprisingly pleasurable, and she moved her bottom against his hand. He had opened up an entire new world for her, the world of sensual pleasure, and he was constantly expanding the limits.

He couldn't wait much longer, and he lifted her in his arms. His face was hard and intent as he looked down at her. "Unless the house catches on fire, I won't stop this time," he said quietly. "I don't care if the phone rings, or if anyone drives up, or even knocks on the bedroom door. This time, we finish it."

She didn't reply, but gave him a slow, sweet smile that made him burn to take her right there. His arms tightened as he carried her up the narrow, creaky stairs and into her bedroom, where he carefully placed her on the bed.

He stood looking down at her for a moment, then walked to the window and raised it. "Let's let the storm in," he said, and then it was with them, filling the half-dark room with sound and vibration. The rain-chilled air washed over her, cool and fresh on her heated skin. She sighed, the small sound drowned out by the din of thunder and rain.

There by the window, with the dim grey light outlining the bulge and plane of powerful muscle, Wolf removed his wet clothing. Mary lay quietly on the bed, her head turned to watch him. The shirt went first, revealing his sleek, heavy shoulders and washboard stomach. She knew from touching him that he was unbelievably hard, with no give beneath his smooth skin. He bent down to tug off his boots and socks, then straightened and unbuckled his belt. The noise of the storm made his movements a pantomime, but she imagined the small pop as he unsnapped his jeans, then the hissing of the zipper as metal teeth pulled apart. Without hesitation he pushed down his jeans and underwear and stepped free of them.

He was naked. Her heart jerked painfully in her chest as she stared at him, for the first time feeling remarkably small and helpless beside him. He was big, he was strong, and he was undeniably male. She couldn't look away from his hard manhood. She was going to take him inside her, accept his heavy weight as they joined in the act of mating, and she was a little frightened.

He saw it in her eyes as he eased down beside her. "Don't be afraid," he whispered, brushing her hair away from her face. His hands were gentle as he reached under her and unzipped her dress.

"I know what's going to happen," she murmured, turning her face against his shoulder. "The mechanics of it, anyway. But I just don't see how it's possible."

"It is. I'll take it slow and easy."

"All right." She whispered her acquiescence and let him lift her so he could pull the dress off of her shoulders. Her breasts were bare, and she could feel them tightening, swelling, her nipples puckering. He bent to kiss both nipples, wetting them with his tongue, and her back arched as heat spread through her. He quickly stripped the dress down her hips and legs, the need to have her bare under his hands too urgent for him to ignore it any longer.

Mary quivered, then lay still. It was the first time since babyhood that anyone but herself had seen her completely nude; her cheeks heated, and she closed her eyes as she struggled with the sensations of embarrassment and painful exposure. He touched her breasts, gently squeezing them; then his rough palm slowly moved down her stomach until his fingers touched her silky triangle of curls. She made a small sound, and her eyes flew open to find him watching her with such a fierce, heated expression that she forgot her embarrassment. She was suddenly proud that he wanted her so intensely, that her body aroused him. Her legs relaxed, and one finger delved between her soft folds, lightly stroking the ultra-sensitive flesh he found. Mary's entire body tensed again, and she moaned. She hadn't known anything could feel like that, but she sensed there was more, and she didn't know if she could survive it. This was pleasure too intense to be borne.

"Do you like that?" Wolf murmured.

She gasped, her slender body beginning to writhe slowly on the sheets in a rhythm as old as the ages. He opened her legs farther with his hand, then returned to his sensual exploration, and at the same time bent to hungrily cover her mouth with his own. Mary's head spun, and her nails dug into his shoulders as she clung to him. She couldn't believe how he was touching her, how it made her feel, but she never wanted it to stop. He was causing a fever inside her, one that spread and intensified until she was aware of nothing but her own body and his. His stroking fingers raised her to delirium while his mouth muffled the small moans she made.

She tore her mouth away from his. "Wolf, please," she begged, frantic with need.

"Just a minute longer, sweetheart. Look at me. Let me see your face when I—ahh."

She whimpered. He was touching her even more intimately, finding her damp and swollen. His black gaze was locked with hers as he slowly slid his finger inside her, and they both shuddered convulsively.

Wolf knew he couldn't wait any longer. His entire body was throbbing. She was soft and wet and incredibly tight, and she was writhing on the verge of ecstasy. Her pale, translucent skin intoxicated him, enthralled him; just touching her made him wild. The textures of her body excited him more than anything he'd ever known before. Everything about her was soft and silky. Her hair was baby-fine, her skin delicate and satiny; even the curls between her legs were soft, rather than springy. He wanted her more than he wanted his next breath.

He moved between her legs, spreading them to make room for his hips to nestle against her. She inhaled sharply as she felt him, hard and burning. Their eyes met again as he reached down between their bodies and guided himself into position, then began entering her.

The storm was right over them now. The lightning cracked, and the almost simultaneous thunder boomed, rattling the old house. The sharply gusting wind blew the curtains straight out into the room, spattering rain on the floor in front of the open window and carrying a fine mist over their bodies. Mary cried, her tears mingling with the mist on her face, as she accepted his slow penetration.

He was braced over her on his forearms, his face just an inch from hers. He licked the tears away, then kissed her mouth, and she tasted salt. She could feel burning pain as her body stretched to admit him, and enormous pressure. More tears seeped from the corners of her eyes. He deepened the kiss as his buttocks flexed, exerting more pressure, and suddenly her body's barrier gave way. He pushed deep into her, burying himself to the hilt with a deep, almost tortured groan of pleasure.

There was pain, but there was also a lot more. He'd told her that making love was hot and sweaty, and that she probably wouldn't like it, and he was both right and wrong. It was hot and sweaty, and raw, and primitive. It was so powerful that it swept her along with its rhythms. Despite the pain, she felt exalted by his possession. She could feel the tension and savage excitement in his powerful body as she cradled him with her legs and arms, her soft depths filled with him. She loved him, and he needed her. She had never really lived before, until this moment when she gave herself to the man she loved.

She couldn't keep it back, not that it mattered. He had to know already. Mary had never worn an emotional mask. Her hands moved over his sleek, wet shoulders and into his thick hair. "I love you," she said, her soft voice barely audible over another booming roll of thunder.

If he replied, she didn't hear him. He reached down between their bodies again, but this time his hand was on her, and he began moving. Heat shimmered through her again, making the discomfort fade; her body arched, hips lifting in an effort to take him even deeper, and she told him again that she loved him. Sweat beaded his taut face as he tried to control his thrusts, but the storm was in the room, in their bodies. Her hips undulated, rolling, driving him mad. They strained together, their movements punctuated by the thunder, by the thudding of the headboard against the wall, and by the creaking of the bedsprings beneath them. Low groans and soft cries; wet flesh and trembling muscles; hands clutching frantically; harsh, rapid breathing and urgent thrusts—she knew all of that, felt it, heard it, and felt herself being consumed by the fever.

"Wolf?" Her questioning cry was thin, frantic. Her nails dug into the flexing muscles of his back.

"Don't fight it, baby. Let it go." He was groaning, feeling his own completion approaching, and he had no more control left. He removed his hand from between them and gripped her hips, lifting them, fitting himself more solidly to her and rocking against her loins.

Mary felt the tension and fever increase to unbearable levels, and then her senses exploded. She cried out, her entire body shuddering and clenching. It was the sweetest madness imaginable, a pleasure beyond description, and it continued until she thought she might die of it. He held her until she quietened, then began thrusting hard and fast. His guttural cries blended with the thunder as he crushed her against the mattress, his body convulsing as the powerful jetting of completion emptied him.

They were silent afterward, as if words would be an intrusion between them. Their mating had been so compelling and urgent that nothing else had existed. Even the storm, as violent as it was, had been only an accompaniment. Slowly, reluctantly, Mary felt reality return, but she was content to lie beneath him and do nothing more than stroke his hair.

Their breathing had long since steadied and the storm moved away when he disengaged their bodies and shifted onto his side. He cradled her for a time, but now that their skin had cooled, the mist-dampened bed was distinctly uncomfortable. When she began to shiver, he got out of bed and crossed to the window to close it. She watched as his muscles alternately bunched and relaxed with each movement of his nude body. Then he turned, and she was instantly, helplessly, fascinated. She wished for the nerve to run her hands all over him, especially his loins. She wanted to inspect him, like an exploration, going over uncharted territory.

"Like what you see?" His voice was low and filled with amusement.

Things had gone too far between them for her to be embarrassed now. She looked up at him and smiled. "Very much. I imagined you once in a loincloth, but this is much better."

He reached down and plucked her from the bed as easily as if she were a feather. "We'd better get dressed before you get cold, and before I forget my good intentions."

"What good intentions?"

"Not to keep at you until you're so sore you can't walk."

She looked gravely at him. "You made it wonderful for me. Thank you."

"It was pretty damn wonderful for me, too." One side of his mouth quirked upward, and he slid his hands into her silvery brown hair. "No bad moments?"

She understood what he meant and leaned her head against his chest. "No. That was an entirely different thing."

But she hadn't forgotten, either, and he knew it. She was still shaky and vulnerable inside, though she kept her chin proudly lifted. He intended for someone to pay for the damage done to her indomitable spirit.

He'd spent years living quietly on the fringes, maintaining the sort of armed truce that had existed between him and the citizens of Ruth, but no more. For Mary, he would find the creep who had attacked her, and if the townspeople didn't like it, that was just too bad.

Chapter Eight

She threw Wolf's wet clothes into the dryer, then prepared a late breakfast. Neither of them talked much. Despite her determination to overcome her shock, she couldn't quite forget those horrifying moments when she had been helpless at the hands of a madman, for he certainly was mad. No matter what she was doing or thinking, a lightning flash of memory would catapult her back to the attack, just for a minute, until she could regain control and put it from her again.

Wolf watched her, knowing what she was experiencing by the way her slight body would tense, then slowly relax. He'd lived through flashbacks, of Vietnam, of prison, and he knew how they worked, as well as the toll they took. He wanted to take her to bed again, to keep the shadows at bay for her, but knew from the occasional gingerness of her movements that she was too new to lovemaking for another bout right now to be anything other than abusive. When she was used to him… A very slight smile curved his lips as he thought of the hours of pleasure and all the different ways he would take her.

But first he had to find the man who had attacked her.

When his clothes were dry, he dressed and pulled Mary out to the back porch with him. The rain had diminished to a drizzle, so he figured they wouldn't get too wet. "Come out to the barn with me," he said, taking her hand.

"Why?"

"I want to show you something."

"I've been in the barn. There's nothing interesting in there."

"There is today. You'll like it."

"All right" They hurried through the drizzle to the old barn, which was dark and musty, without the warmth and rich, animal smells of his barn. Dust tickled her nose. "It's too dark to see anything."

"There's enough light. Come on." Still holding her hand, he led her into a stall where a couple of boards were missing from the wall, letting in the dreary light. After the darkness of the inner barn, she could see fairly well.

"What is it?"

"Look under the feed trough."

She bent down and looked. Curled up, in a nest of dusty straw and an old towel she recognized, was Woodrow. Curled against Woodrow's belly were four little rat-looking things.

She straightened abruptly. "Woodrow's a father!"

"Nope. Woodrow's a mother."

"A mother!" She stared at the cat, who stared back at her enigmatically before beginning to lick the kittens. "I was specifically told that Woodrow is male."

"Well, Woodrow is female. Didn't you look?"

Mary gave him a severe look. "I don't make a habit of looking at an animal's private parts."

"Just mine, right?"

She blushed, but couldn't deny the charge. "Right."

He slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her close for a slow, warm kiss. She sighed and softened against him, reaching up to clasp the back of his neck as his mouth moved over hers. The strength of his big body reassured her, made her feel safe. When his hard arms were around her, nothing could harm her.

"I have to go home," he murmured when he lifted his mouth from hers. "Joe will do as much as he can, but it takes both of us to get everything done."

She had thought she could handle it, but panic seized her at the thought of being alone. Quickly she controlled herself and let her arms drop from around his neck. "Okay." She started to ask if she'd see him later, but kept the words unsaid. Oddly, now that their relationship was so intimate, she felt far less sure of herself than she had before. Letting him get that close, letting him enter her body, had exposed a vulnerability she hadn't known was there. That kind of intimacy was a little scary.

"Get a jacket," he said as they left the barn.

"I already have a jacket."

"I meant, get one now. You're going with me."

She gave him a quick look, then dropped her gaze away from the awareness in his. "I have to be alone sometime," she said quietly.

"But not today. Go on, get that jacket."

She got the jacket and climbed up into his truck, feeling as if she had been reprieved from execution. Maybe by the time night came she would have her fears under control.

Joe came out of the barn as they drove up and walked to the passenger side of the truck. When Mary opened the door, he reached in and lifted her from the truck, then hugged her tightly. "Are you all right?" His young voice was gruff.

She hugged him in return. "He didn't hurt me. I was just scared."

Over her head Joe looked at his father and saw the cold, controlled rage in those black eyes as they lingered on the slight woman in his son's arms. Someone had dared to hurt her, and whoever it was would pay. Joe felt a deep primitive anger, and knew it was only a fraction of what Wolf felt. Their eyes met, and Wolf gave a slight shake of his head, indicating that he didn't want Joe to pursue the subject. Mary was here to relax, not relive the attack.

Wolf approached and looped his arm over her shoulder, using the pressure to turn her toward the stable. "Feel up to helping with the chores?"

Her eyes lit. "Of course. I've always wanted to see how a ranch works."

He automatically shortened his long stride to match hers as the three of them walked toward the stable. "This isn't a ranch, exactly. I run a small herd, but more for training and our personal beef than any other reason."

"What sort of training?"

"Training the horses to work a herd. That's what I do. I break and train horses. Quarter horses mostly, for ranchers, but sometimes I handle the odd show horse or Thoroughbred, or a fractious pleasure mount."

"Don't Thoroughbred owners have their own trainers?"

He shrugged. "Some horses are harder to train than others. An expensive horse isn't worth a damn if no one can get near him." He didn't elaborate, but Mary knew that he got the horses no one else was able to handle.

The long stable jutted out to the right of the barn. When they entered, Mary inhaled the rich earth scents of horses, leather, manure, grain and hay. Long satiny necks poked over the stall doors, and inquisitive whickers filled the air. She had never been around horses much, but she wasn't afraid of them. She moved down the line, patting and stroking, murmuring to the animals. "Are these all quarter horses?"

"No. That one in the next stall is a Canadian cutting horse—that's a type, not a breed. He belongs to a rancher in the next county north. Down in the last stall is a saddle-bred, for some big rancher's wife in Montana. He's going to give her the horse for her birthday in July. The rest of them are quarter horses."

They were all young horses, and as playful as children. Wolf treated them as such, talking to them in a low, crooning tone, gentling them like overgrown babies. Mary spent the entire afternoon in the stables with Wolf and Joe, watching them attend to the endless chores of cleaning and feeding, checking shoes, grooming. The drizzle finally stopped in the late afternoon, and Wolf worked with a couple of the young quarter horses in the pen behind the stable, slowly and gently getting them accustomed to bits and saddles. He didn't rush them, or lose his patience when a fractious young horse shied away from him whenever Wolf tried to lift a saddle onto his back. He just soothed the colt and reassured him before trying again. Before the afternoon was over, the colt was ambling around the pen as if he'd been wearing a saddle for years.

Mary was enthralled, partly by his low, velvety voice, and partly by the way his strong hands moved over the young animals, teaching and soothing all at once. He had done that with her, but his hands had also excited her. She shivered as memories washed over her, and her breasts tightened.

"I've never seen anyone like him," Joe said beside her, keeping his tone low. "I'm good, but not near as good as he is. I've never seen a horse he couldn't settle down. We had a stallion brought to us a couple of years ago. He'd been put out to stud, but he was so damn vicious the handlers couldn't control him. Dad just put him in a stall and left him alone, but every so often he'd leave sugar cubes, apples or carrots on the top of the stall door and stand there until the stallion got a good look at him. Then he'd walk off, and the stallion would get whatever he'd left on the door.

"The stallion started watching for him and snorting at him if Dad was taking his time about getting the food over there. Then Dad stopped moving away, and the stallion, Ringer, had to come up to the door while Dad was there if he wanted the food. The first few times, he tried to tear the stall apart, but finally he gave in and got the food. Next he had to eat out of Dad's hand if he wanted his treat. Dad switched completely to carrots then, to make sure he didn't lose any fingers. Finally Ringer was hanging his head over the stall, and he'd nuzzle Dad's shirt like a kid hunting candy. Dad petted him and groomed him—Ringer loved being brushed—and gradually broke him to the saddle and started riding him. I worked with him, too, after Dad had him settled down, and I guess he finally decided he didn't have to fight all the time.

"We had a mare come in heat, and Dad called Ringer's owner to ask if he wanted us to try Ringer on our mare. The guy gave his okay, Ringer performed like a real gentleman, and everybody was happy. The owner got his expensive stud civilized, and we got a hefty fee, as well as a hell of a colt out of the mare Ringer covered."

Mary blinked at all this talk of being "in heat" and "covered," and cleared her throat. "He's wonderful," she agreed, and cleared her throat again. Her skin felt hot and sensitive. She couldn't take her eyes off Wolf, tall and lean and broad-shouldered, the weak sunlight glinting off his black hair.

"When we get through here, maybe we could do a few lessons tonight, since I missed Friday night," Joe said, interrupting her thoughts.

She didn't like thinking about why he had missed Friday night, about the long hours spent waiting to hear if Wolf had been jailed. This afternoon had been a small oasis of calm, with the semblance of normality, but it would be a long time before things were back to normal in the county. A young girl had been raped, and Mary had been attacked the very next day. People would be enraged and wary, looking at their neighbours and wondering. God help any stranger who happened to wander through, at least until the man was caught.

Tires crunched on the gravel, and Joe left his post to see who had ventured up on Mackenzie's Mountain. He was back in a moment, with Clay Armstrong behind him. It was a replay of Friday afternoon, and Mary felt her heart lurch; surely Clay wasn't going to arrest Wolf now?

"Mary." Clay nodded at her and touched the brim of his hat. "You doing okay?"

"Yes." She said it firmly.

"I thought I'd find you up here. Do you feel like going over it again with me?"

Wolf pulled off his gloves as he approached. His eyes were flinty. "She went over it with you yesterday."

"Sometimes people remember little things after the shock has passed."

Because she sensed Wolf was about to throw Clay off his property, she turned and put her hand on his arm. "It's okay. I'm okay."

She was lying, and he knew it, but her mouth had taken on that stubborn set that meant she wouldn't back down. He felt a tinge of amusement; his kitten was getting back some of her confidence, after all. But no way was he going to let Clay question her alone. He looked at Joe. "Put the horse up. I'm going with Mary."

"That isn't necessary," Clay said.

"It is to me."

Mary felt dwarfed between the two big men as they walked up to the house; she thought she might soon find such protectiveness smothering. A smile touched her lips.

Clay probably felt he had to protect her from Wolf as well as from another attack, while Wolf was determined to protect her, period. She wondered what Clay would think if he knew that she didn't want to be protected from Wolf. Aunt Ardith would say Wolf had taken advantage of her, and Mary earnestly hoped he would do so again. Soon.

Wolf caught her sidelong glance and stiffened as he felt her interest and warmth. Damn it, didn't she know how he'd react, and that it could get embarrassing? Already he could feel the tension in his loins. But, no, she didn't know. Despite their early morning lovemaking, she was still too innocent about sex in general, and the effect she had on him in particular, to know what that look did to him. He hurried his step. He needed to sit down.

When they entered the kitchen, Mary moved around making coffee as naturally as she would have in her own house, emphasizing to Clay that she and Wolf were a couple. Folks in the county were just going to have to get used to it.

"Let's go through it from the beginning," Clay said.

Mary paused fractionally, then resumed her steady movements as she measured coffee into the percolator. "I'd just bought new boots at Hearst's store and was walking back to my car—my boots! I dropped them! Did you see them? Did anyone pick them up?"

"I saw them, but I don't know what happened to them. I'll ask around."

"He must have been standing against the side of Hearst's store, because I'd have seen him if he had been on the other side of the alley. He just grabbed me and put his hand over my mouth. He held my head arched back, so I couldn't move it at all, and started dragging me down the alley. I got one hand free and reached back, trying to scratch his face, but he had on a ski mask. He hit me in the head with his fist and I—I really don't remember much after that until he pushed me down. I kept scratching him, and I think I clawed his hand, because he hit me again. Then I bit him on the hand, but I don't know if I drew blood.

"Someone yelled, and he got up and ran. He put his hand on the ground right in front of my face when he got up. His sleeve was blue, and he had freckles on his hand. A lot of freckles. Then… you were there."

She fell silent and moved to look out the kitchen window, her back to the men sitting at the table, so she didn't see the murderous look in Wolf's eyes, or the way his big fists clenched, but Clay did, and it worried him.

"I was the one who yelled. I saw the package lying on the ground and went over to see what it was, and then I heard scuffling from the back of the building. When I saw him, I yelled and pulled my revolver, and fired over his head to try to stop him."

Wolf looked savage. "You should have shot the son of a bitch. That would have stopped him."

In retrospect Clay wished he'd shot the guy, too. At least then they wouldn't be racking their brains trying to put an ID to him, and the townspeople wouldn't be so jittery. Women were carrying an assortment of weapons with them wherever they went, even outside to hang the wash to dry. The mood people were in, it would be dangerous for a stranger to stop in the county.

That was what bothered him, and he said as much. "It looks like someone would have noticed a stranger. Ruth is a small town, and people pretty well know everyone in the county. A stranger would have been noticed right off, especially one with long black hair."

Wolf gave a wintry smile. "Everyone would have thought it was me."

At the window, Mary stiffened. She had been trying not to listen, trying to push away the memories that had been called up by her recounting of what had happened. She didn't turn around, but suddenly all her attention was focused on the conversation behind her. What Wolf had said was true. On seeing her attacker's long black hair, Clay had immediately had Wolf arrested.

But that long black hair, so distinctive, didn't fit with the wealth of rust-coloured freckles she'd seen on the man's hand. And his skin had been pale. Fair people freckled. The black hair didn't fit.

Unless it was a disguise. Unless the object had been to frame Wolf.

Her spine prickled, and she felt both hot and cold. Whoever had done it hadn't known that Wolf had had his hair cut. But the choice of victim was puzzling; it didn't make sense. Why attack her? Surely no one would think Wolf would attack the one person in town who'd championed him, and she'd made it plain how she felt. Unless she had been a random choice, it just didn't make sense. After all, there was no link between herself and Cathy Teele, no common ground. It could all be chance.

Still without turning around, she asked, "Wolf, do you know Cathy Teele? Have you ever spoken to her?"

"I know her by sight. I don't speak to little Anglo girls." His tone was ironic. "Their parents wouldn't like it."

"You're right about that," Clay said wearily. "A few months back Cathy told her mother you were the best-looking man around, and that she wouldn't mind dating Joe if he weren't younger than she was. The whole town heard about it. Mrs. Teele pitched a fit."

That chill ran down Mary's spine again. There was a link, after all: Wolf. Nor could she dismiss it as coincidence, though something about the whole thing was skewed.

She twisted her hands together, and turned to face them. "What if someone is deliberately trying to frame Wolf?"

Wolf's face went hard and blank, but Clay looked startled. "Damn," he muttered. "Why did you think of that?"

"The long black hair. It could have been a wig. The man had freckles on his hand, a lot of freckles, and his skin was pale."

Wolf got to his feet, and though Mary knew she never had anything to fear from him, she fell back a step at the expression in his eyes. He didn't say anything; he didn't have to. She had seen him angry before, but this was different. He was enraged, but it was an icy rage, and he was in perfect control of himself. Perhaps that was what alarmed her.

Then Clay said, "Sorry, but I don't think it'll wash. Once we had all thought about it, it didn't make sense that Wolf would have attacked you, of all people. You've stood up for him right from the beginning, when the rest of the people in town—"

"Wouldn't spit on me if I were on fire," Wolf finished.

Clay couldn't deny it. "Exactly."

The coffee had finished brewing, and Mary poured three cups. They were silent and thoughtful as they sipped, all of them turning things around in their minds, trying to make the pieces fit. The truth was that no matter how things were arranged, something was always off, unless they went with the idea that a criminal had chosen Mary and Cathy at random, and had perhaps used a long black wig for disguise by pure coincidence.

Everything in Mary rejected the idea of coincidence. So that meant someone was deliberately trying to implicate Wolf. But why choose her as a victim?

To punish Wolf by hurting the people who had championed him?

It was all supposition, without a shred of evidence. Wolf had lived here for years without anything like this happening, even though his presence was like salt on the wound of the town's conscience. They didn't like him, and he didn't let them forget. Still, they had all existed under a silent truce.

So what had triggered the violence?

She rubbed her temples as a sudden twinge of pain threatened to become a full-scale headache. Since she seldom had headaches, she supposed the tension was getting to her, and determined not to let it. She'd never been a Nervous Nellie and didn't intend to start now.

Clay sighed and pushed his empty cup back. "Thanks for the coffee. I'll get the report finished tomorrow. I'll bring the papers by the school for you to sign—uh, are you planning to go to work, or stay home?"

"Why, work, of course."

"Of course," Wolf muttered, and scowled at her. Mary lifted her chin at him. She saw no reason why she should suddenly become an invalid.

Clay left soon afterward, and Joe came up from the stables to join in the dinner preparations. It felt right, the three of them together, working together as comfortably as if they had done so for years. Joe winked at her once, and she blushed, because it was fairly easy to read the expression in his young-old eyes. Awareness, amusement and approval were all there. Was he simply assuming she and Wolf had become intimate because Wolf had spent the night at her house, which she supposed was the common-sense thing to assume, or was there something different about her? What if everyone in town could just look at her and know?

Wolf curved his hand around her waist. She had been standing motionless for several minutes, the pan in her hand forgotten, as she both frowned and blushed. The blush told him what she was thinking, and the familiar tension in his body made his fingers tighten until they dug into her ribs. She looked up at him, her grey-blue eyes wide and startled; then awareness shot into them, and her eyelids dropped to half veil the desire she couldn't disguise.

Joe reached to take the pan from her nerveless fingers. "I think I'll go see a movie somewhere," he announced.

Mary jerked her head around, tearing herself from the sensual spell Wolf spun about her so easily. "No! Your lessons, remember?"

"Another night won't hurt."

"Another night will hurt," she insisted. "The Academy isn't something you can take for granted just because Senator Allard is going to recommend you. You can't afford to let up for a minute."

Wolf released her. "She's right, son. You can't let your grades slip." He could wait. Barely.

It was after nine when Mary closed the books she and Joe had been using and stretched her arms over her head. "Could you take me home now?" she asked Wolf, barely suppressing a yawn. It had been an eventful day.

His face was impassive. "Why don't you stay here." It was more of a command than a suggestion.

"I can't do that!"

"Why not?"

"It isn't proper."

"I stayed with you last night."

"That's different."

"How?"

"I was upset."

"Your bed's too small. Mine's bigger."

"I'm getting out of here," Joe said, and suited the action to the words.

Mary got huffy. "Did you have to say that in front of him?"

"He knew anyway. Remember what I said about no going back?"

She stilled and said, "Yes." That warm look entered her eyes again. "I don't want to go back. But I can't stay here tonight. I have to go to work in the morning."

"No one would think any less of you if you didn't."

"I would." She had that look again, the stubborn, determined expression of a fierce will.

Wolf got to his feet. "All right. I'll take you home." He went into his bedroom and several minutes later reappeared with a small shaving kit in his hand and a change of clothes slung over his shoulder. He knocked briefly on Joe's door as he passed it. "I'll be home in the morning."

The door opened. Joe was barefoot and shirtless, having been preparing to take a shower. "Okay. Are you going to take her to school, or do you want me to?"

"I don't need anyone to take me to work," Mary interrupted.

"That's tough." Wolf turned back to his son. "Baugh is bringing a couple of horses up in the morning, so I'll have to be here. You take her to school, and I'll get her in the afternoon."

"I'm driving my own car, and you can't stop me!"

"That's okay. You'll just have an escort." Wolf crossed the floor to her and took her arm. "Ready?"

Realizing that he'd made up his mind and there wasn't anything she could do about it, Mary walked with him out to the truck. The night air was growing cold, but his big body radiated heat, and she moved closer to him. As soon as they were in the truck, he roughly took her in his arms and bent his head to hers. She opened her mouth beneath his onslaught and thrust her fingers into his thick hair. The warm taste of his mouth filled her; the pressure of his arms around her rib cage, of his hard-muscled chest on her breasts, drugged her more surely than any sedative. If he had pulled her down onto the seat and taken her right then, she wouldn't have objected.

As it was, when he put her from him, her entire body was throbbing. She sat silently on the drive down the mountain, thinking of their lovemaking that morning, aching for it to be repeated. A thought echoed in her mind: so this was what it meant to be a woman.

Woodrow was waiting patiently on the back doorstep. Mary fed him—her!—while Wolf showered and shaved. He didn't have a heavy beard, but two days' growth had darkened his jaw, and her face burned a little from contact with his when they had kissed. She felt that deep, almost painful sense of waiting again as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

He silently entered and stood for a moment watching her before she sensed his presence and turned. "The shower's yours."

He was naked, and slightly damp from the humidity in the bathroom. His black hair glistened under the light, and glittering droplets of water were caught in the dark curls of hair on his chest. He was already aroused. The throbbing in her body became acute.

She showered, and afterward, for the first time, sprayed perfume on her pulse points. She had never bought perfume in her life, but luckily one of her students in Savannah had given her the bottle for Christmas. The scent was sweetly exotic.

She opened the bathroom door, then gasped and fell back. Wolf was waiting for her in the doorway, his eyes narrow and fierce as they raked her. She had boldly left off her nightgown, and under his perusal the deep throbbing intensified. He put his big hands on her breasts and lifted them slightly so that they were plumped in his palms. Her nipples tightened even before he began rubbing them with his thumbs. Mary stood very still, her breath quick and shallow, her eyes half closed as she tried to deal with the pleasure his hands brought.

Wolfs own eyes were narrow black slits. "I wanted to do this the day I found you on the road," he murmured. "Such a pretty little body inside that ugly dress. I wanted to take it off of you and see you naked."

The heat in his eyes, in his voice, made her shiver and sway toward him. He pulled her out of the doorway and into the dark hall, then put his hands on her waist and lifted her. She remembered when he had done that before and moaned even before his mouth closed over her nipple. He sucked it so strongly that her back arched, and she cried out as her legs parted and wrapped around his hips for balance. He groaned, unable to wait a minute longer. He had to get inside her or go mad. He shifted her, guided himself and entered her.

Mary shuddered, then went very still as he slowly pushed into her. It was even better than before. Her inner muscles gently clasped and relaxed as she accommodated him, sending waves of pleasure radiating out through her body. She clung to him, gasping. Desire worked its magic on her body, tightening some muscles, loosening others, so that she was both taut and pliable as she lifted herself, then sank back down. The effect of that small movement had both of them gasping, and Wolf shifted to brace his back against the wall. She did it again, then again. He put his hands on her buttocks to take control of the motion and began driving into her. Her skin felt on fire. She radiated heat, making her skin feel tight and smooth and so extraordinarily sensitive that she could feel each of his fingers on her bottom, the rasp of his chest hair on her breasts, the tiny nubs of his nipples, the muscled wall of his belly, the coarse hair at his groin. She could feel him deep inside her.

Her back arched, and her nerves convulsed. Wolf fought his own response, not wanting it to end so quickly, and held her until she quietened. Then he carried her into the bedroom, her legs still locked around him, and eased her down on the bed.

She swallowed and relaxed her hold on him. "You haven't—?"

"Not yet," he murmured, and began moving strongly into her.

She didn't want it to end. She took his thrusts, cradled him when a harsh groan tore from his throat and the powerful shudders of completion shook him, and afterward held him as he rested on her body. She didn't want him to withdraw, to leave her empty again. She had existed in a sort of genteel limbo all her life until she had met him and begun to live. In just a few short months he had so completely taken over the focus of her life that the years before were hazy.

He gathered himself and tried to move off her. Mary tightened her legs around him, and he grunted.

"Let me up, sweetheart. I'm too heavy for you."

"No you aren't," she whispered, and kissed his throat.

"I weigh twice what you do. Do you even weigh a hundred pounds?"

"Yes," she said indignantly. She weighed a hundred and five.

"Not much more than that. I weigh two hundred, and I'm a foot taller than you. If I go to sleep on you, you'll smother."

He did sound drowsy. She ran her hand down the muscled ridges of his side. "I want to stay like this."

He thrust gently against her. "Like this?"

"Yes." She breathed the word.

He settled onto her, but shifted part of his weight to the side. "Is this okay?"

It was wonderful. She could breathe, but he was still close to her, still inside her. He quickly dozed off, as content as she with the position, and Mary smiled in the darkness as she held him.

The dark thoughts slowly intruded. Someone had deliberately tried to frame him, to put him back in prison. The thought of Wolf without his freedom was obscene and scary, because she knew enough about him to know he would never let himself be sent to prison again.

She wanted to keep him safe, to shield him in her arms, putting her own body between him and danger. Dear God, what had started it all? Things had been so quiet! What had been the trigger?

Then she knew, and horror almost stopped her breath. She had been the trigger.

While Wolf and Joe had been outcasts, punished for their heritage and Wolfs past, everything had been calm. Then she had come to town, an Anglo woman, but instead of aligning herself with the townspeople, she had championed the Mackenzies. With her help, Joe had achieved an honour offered to very few. Other people had begun saying what a nice thing it was that the Mackenzie boy was going to the Academy. Cathy Teele had said that Wolf was the best-looking man in the county. The boundaries between the town and the Mackenzies had begun blurring. Someone, with a maggot of hate festering deep inside, had been unable to stand it.

And she had been the cause of it all. If anything happened to Wolf, it would be her fault.

Chapter Nine

She didn't know what to do. The thought that she was the cause of all that had happened tormented her, disturbing her sleep. She moved restlessly, waking Wolf, and he sensed her distress though he attributed it to the wrong cause. He soothed her with whispers and pulled her more completely beneath him. She felt him harden inside her. His lovemaking was gentle this time, and when it was over she slept as effortlessly as a child until he awoke her again in the total darkness before dawn. She turned to him without question.

Joe drove up just as she and Wolf were preparing breakfast, and without a word Wolf broke more eggs into a bowl to be scrambled. Mary smiled at him, even though she was placing more bacon in the frying pan. "How do you know he's hungry?"

"He's awake, isn't he? My kid eats like a horse."

Joe came in the back door and headed for the coffee, which had already finished brewing. "Morning."

"Good morning. Breakfast will be ready in about ten minutes."

He grinned at her, and Mary smiled back. Wolf watched her, his gaze sharp. She looked frail this morning, her skin pale and even more translucent than usual, with faint mauve shadows under her eyes. She smiled readily, but he wondered what had made her look so delicate. Had he tired her with his lovemaking, or were memories of the attack disturbing her? He thought it must be the latter, because she had responded eagerly every time he'd reached for her. Knowing that she was still frightened made him even more determined to find whoever had attacked her. After Eli Baugh had delivered the horses and left, Wolf planned to do some tracking.

Joe was right behind Mary's car on the way to the school, and he didn't leave immediately, as she had expected. It was still too early for the students to begin arriving, so he walked with her into the empty building and even inspected the rooms. Then he leaned against the door-jamb and waited.

Mary sighed. "I'm perfectly safe here."

"I'll just wait until some other people show up."

"Did Wolf tell you to do this?"

"Nope. He knew he didn't have to."

How did they communicate? By telepathy? Each seemed to know what the other was thinking. It was disconcerting. She just hoped they couldn't read her thoughts, because she'd had some decidedly erotic ones lately.

What would everyone think of Joe's presence? He was so obviously a watchdog. She wondered if it would trigger another act of violence, and she felt sick, because she knew it might. Instinct, sharpened by her fierce protectiveness for both Mackenzies, told her that her theory was correct. Just the possibility that they could become accepted had driven someone over the edge. It revealed so much hate that she shivered.

Sharon and Dottie entered the building and halted briefly when Joe turned his head and looked at them as they passed the open door. "Mrs. Wycliffe. Mrs. Lancaster," he said in acknowledgment as he touched his fingertips to the brim of his hat in a brief salute.

"Joe," Sharon murmured. "How are you?"

Dottie gave him a brief, almost frightened look and hurried to her classroom. Joe shrugged. "I've been doing a bit of studying," he allowed.

"Just a bit?" Sharon asked wryly. She stepped past him to greet Mary, then said, "If you don't feel like working today, Dottie and I can handle your classes. I never dreamed you'd be here today, anyway."

"I was merely frightened," Mary said firmly. "Clay prevented anything else from happening. Cathy is the one who needs sympathy, not I."

"The whole town is in an uproar. Anyone who has freckles on his hands is getting the third degree."

Mary didn't want to talk about it. The image of that freckled hand made her feel nauseated, and she swallowed convulsively. Joe frowned and stepped forward. Mary put up her hand to keep him from throwing Sharon out of the classroom, but at that moment several students entered, and their chatter distracted everyone. The kids said, "Hi, Joe, howya been?" as they clustered around him. They all wanted to know about his plans for the Academy and how he'd gotten interested.

Sharon left to attend to her own classes, and Mary watched Joe with the kids. He was only sixteen, but he seemed older than even the seniors. Joe was young, but he wasn't a kid, and that was the difference. She noticed that Pam Hearst was in the group. She wasn't saying much, but she never took her eyes off Joe, looking at him with both longing and pain, though she tried to hide it. Several times Joe gave the girl a long look that made her fidget uncomfortably.

Then he checked his watch and left his former classmates to say to Mary, "Dad will be here to follow you home. Don't go anywhere alone."

She started to protest, then thought of the man out there who hated them enough to do what he'd done. She wasn't the only one at risk. She reached out and caught his arm. "You and Wolf be careful. You could be the next targets."

He frowned, as if that hadn't occurred to him. The attacker was a rapist, so men wouldn't consider themselves in danger. She wouldn't have thought of it, either, if she hadn't been convinced that the whole thing was intended to punish the Mackenzies. What greater punishment could there be than to kill them? At some point the madman might decide to take a rifle and dispense his own twisted brand of justice.

Clay showed up at lunch with the papers for her to read and sign. Aware of the kids watching them with acute interest, she walked with him out to the car. "I'm worried," she admitted.

He propped his arm on top of the open door. "You'd be foolish if you weren't worried."

"Not for myself. I think Wolf and Joe are the real targets."

He gave her a quick, sharp look. "How do you figure that?"

Heartened that he hadn't immediately dismissed the idea, but was watching her with a troubled expression in his eyes, Mary told him her theory. "I think Cathy and I were specifically chosen as targets to punish Wolf. Don't you see the link? She said she thought Wolf was handsome, and that she'd like to date Joe. Everyone knows I've been friends with them from the first. So we were chosen."

"And you think he'll attack again?"

"I'm certain he will, but I'm afraid he'll go after one of them this time. I doubt he'd try to manhandle either of them, but what chance would they have against a bullet? How many men in this county have a rifle?"

"Every last mother's son," Clay replied grimly. "But what set this guy off?"

She paused, her face miserable. "I did."

"What?"

"I did. Before I came here, Wolf was an outcast. Everyone was comfortable with that. Then I made friends with him and worked with Joe to get him into the Academy. A lot of people were a little proud of that and were friendlier. It was a crack in the wall, and whoever is doing this just couldn't stand it."

"You're talking about a lot of hate, and it's hard for me to see. People around here don't get along with Wolf, but a lot of it is fear instead of hate. Fear and guilt. The people in this county sent him to prison for something he didn't do, and his presence constantly reminds them of it. He isn't a very forgiving person, is he?"

"Something like that would be a little hard to forgive," Mary pointed out.

He had to agree with that and sighed wearily. "Still, I can't think of anyone who seems to hate him to the point of attacking two women just because they were friendly to him. Hell, Cathy wasn't even friendly. She just made a chance remark."

"So you agree with me? That all of this is because of Wolf?"

"I don't like it, but I guess I do. Nothing else makes sense, because there may be a few coincidences in life, but none in crime. Everything has a motive."

"So what can we do?"

"We won't do anything," he said pointedly, "I will talk to the sheriff about it, but the fact is we can't arrest anyone without evidence, and all we have is a theory. We don't even have a suspect."

Her jaw set in firm lines. "Then you're passing up a marvellous chance."

He looked suspicious. "To do what?"

"Set a trap, of course."

"I don't like this. I don't know what you're thinking, but I don't like it."

"It's common sense. He failed in his—er, objective with me. Perhaps I could—"

"No. And before you get on your high horse, just think of what Wolf would say if you told him you were setting yourself up as bait. You might—might—be allowed out of his house by Christmas."

That was true enough, but she saw a way around it. "Then I just won't tell him."

"There's no way to keep it from him, unless it didn't work. If it did work—I sure as hell wouldn't want to be around when he found out, and something like that couldn't be kept quiet."

Mary considered all of Wolf's possible reactions and didn't like any of them. On the other hand, she was terrified that something might happen to him. "I'll take the chance," she said, making her decision.

"Not with my help, you won't."

Her chin lifted. "Then I'll do it without your help."

"If you get in the way of our investigations, I'll put you in the pokey so fast your head will spin," he threatened. When she didn't appear impressed, he swore under his breath. "Hell, I'll just tell Wolf and let him ride herd on you."

She frowned and considered shaking her schoolteacher's finger in his face. "You listen to me, Clay Armstrong. I'm the best chance you have of luring this guy out into the open. You don't have any suspects now. What are you going to do, wait until he attacks some other woman and maybe kills her? Is that how you want to work it "No, that isn't how I want to work it! I want you and every other woman to stay alert and not go anywhere alone. I don't want to risk you or anyone else. Have you thought that sometimes traps don't work, that the animal gets the bait and still gets away? Do you really want to face the possibility of that?"

The thought made her sick to her stomach, and she swallowed to control the sudden rise of nausea. "No, but I'd do it anyway," she said steadily.

"For the last time, no. I understand that you want to help, but I don't like the idea. This guy is too unstable. He grabbed Cathy in her own driveway, and took you off of the town's main street. The chances he took are crazy, and he probably is, too."

With a sigh, Mary decided that Clay was simply too protective for him to be able to agree to use a woman as bait; it was totally against his basic nature. That didn't mean, however, that she needed his agreement. All she needed was someone who could act as a guard. She hadn't thought of any real plan yet, but obviously there had to be two people to make even the simplest trap work: the bait, and the one who kept the bait from being harmed.

Clay got in the car and closed the door, then leaned out the open window. "I don't want to hear any more about it," he warned.

"You won't," she promised. Not talking to him about it wasn't the same as not doing it.

He gave her a suspicious look, but started the car and drove away. Mary returned to her classroom, her thoughts darting around as she tried to think of a solid plan for luring a rapist with a minimum of danger to herself.

Wolf arrived at the school ten minutes before classes were over. He propped his shoulder against the wall just outside her classroom door and listened to her clear voice instructing her students on how geography and history had combined to produce the current state of Middle East politics. He was certain that wasn't in any of the textbooks, but Mary had a knack for giving her students a way of relating the present to their studies. It made the subjects both more interesting and more understandable. He had heard her doing the same thing with Joe, not that Joe needed encouragement to read. Her students responded easily to her; in such a small class, there was very little formality. They called her "Miss Potter," but weren't shy about asking questions, offering answers, even teasing.

Then she looked at her watch and released them, just as the doors to the other two classrooms opened. Wolf straightened from the wall and walked into her room, aware of how the kids' chatter halted abruptly when they became aware of his presence. Mary looked up and smiled, a private smile meant only for him, and it made his pulse accelerate that she was so open about how she felt.

He removed his hat and shoved his fingers through his hair. "Your escort service has arrived, ma'am," he said.

One of the girls giggled nervously, and Wolf slowly turned his head to look at the motionless teenagers. "Are you girls going home in pairs? Any of you boys making sure they get home all right?"

Christa Teele, Cathy's younger sister, murmured that she and Pam Hearst were walking together. The other four girls said nothing. Wolf looked at the seven boys. "Go with them." It was an order, one that the boys obeyed instantly. The kids left the room, automatically separating so that each girl had at least one male escort.

Mary nodded. "Very nicely done."

"You'll notice that they all had enough sense not to argue that they didn't need an escort."

She frowned at him, because she felt it hadn't been necessary for him to make that point. "Wolf, really, I'm perfectly safe on the drive from my house to here. How could anything happen to me if I don't stop?"

"What if you had a flat? What if a radiator hose blew again?"

It was obvious there was no way she could set her trap if Wolf or Joe was hovering over her every second. It was also obvious from the narrow look Wolf was giving her that he had no intention of changing his mind. Not that it mattered at the moment, as she hadn't come up with a plan yet. But when she did, she would also have to come up with some scheme for slipping away from her watchdogs.

Wolf draped her sweater over her shoulders and picked up her purse and keys, then ushered her out the door. Dottie looked up from where she was locking her own classroom door and stood transfixed while Wolf locked Mary's door, rattled the knob to make certain the lock held, then put his arm around her waist. He saw Dottie and touched the brim of his hat. "Mrs. Lancaster."

Dottie ducked her head and pretended to be having trouble with her key. Her face was flushed. It was the first time Wolf Mackenzie had ever spoken to her, and her hands shook as she dropped the key into her purse. Almost uncontrollable fear made her break out in a sweat. She didn't know what she was going to do.

Wolf's arm was solid around Mary's waist as they walked to her car. Its weight made her heartbeat quicken. All he had to do was put his hands on her and her body began to ready itself for him. An exquisite shudder began deep inside, spreading outward in a warm tide.

He felt the sudden tension in her slender body as he opened the car door. She was breathing faster, too. He looked down at her, and his entire body tightened, because she was watching him with desire plain in her soft, slate-blue eyes. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips parted.

He stepped back. "I'll be right behind you." The words were guttural.

She drove sedately home, though her blood was thundering through her veins and pounding in her ears. Never had the isolated, bedraggled old house looked better. Woodrow was sunning on the steps, and Mary stepped over her to unlock the back door. Wolf was out of his truck and right behind her, just as he had promised, by the time she had the door open.

Without a word she took off her sweater, deposited her purse on a chair and walked up the stairs, acutely aware of the heavy tread of Wolfs boots as he followed. They stepped into her bedroom.

He had her naked before she could gather her wits, though she wouldn't have wanted to protest even if he'd given her time. He bore her down on the bed, his big body overwhelming her, his brawny arms cradling her. The hair on his chest rasped her sensitive nipples into hardened peaks, and with a low moan of excitement she rubbed her breasts against him to increase the sensation. He opened her thighs and settled himself between them. His voice was low and rough as he murmured in her ear an explicit explanation of what he was going to do.

Mary drew back a little, her blue eyes slightly shocked, feeling slightly excited, and also slightly embarrassed because she was excited. How was it possible to feel both scandalized and excited? "Wolf Mackenzie!" she said, her eyes going even larger. "You said… that word!"

His hard face looked both tender and amused. "So I did."

She swallowed. "I've never heard anyone say it before. I mean, not in real life. In movies—but of course that isn't real life, and in movies it almost never means what it really means. They use it as an adjective instead of a verb." She looked perplexed at such an inexplicable grammatical oversight.

He was smiling as he entered her, his black eyes shining. "This," he said, "is the verb."

He loved the way she looked when he made love to her, her eyes languorous, her cheeks flushed. She sucked in her breath and moved beneath him, taking him completely into her and enveloping nun in her sweet heat. Her hands moved up to the back of his neck. "Yes," she agreed seriously. "This is the verb."

If their first lovemaking had been fierce, since then he had been teaching her how sweet it was when the pleasure was protracted, when the caresses and kisses lingered while tension slowly coiled within until it was so hot and powerful that it exploded out of control. His hunger for her was so strong that he tried to put off his climax for as long as possible, so he could stay inside her and feed that hunger. It wasn't a hunger for sex, per se, though it had a strong sexual base. He didn't simply want to make love, he wanted—needed—to make love to her specifically, to Mary Elizabeth Potter. He had to feel her silky, fragile skin under his hands, feel her soft body sheathing him, smell her unique scent of womanhood, forge ancient bonds with each slow thrust and acceptance of their bodies. He was a half-breed; his spirit was strong and uncomplicated, his instincts close to those of his ancestors of both races. With other women, he had had sex; with Mary, he mated.

He wrapped his arms around her and rolled onto his back. Startled, Mary sat up, accidentally assuming the exact position he'd wanted her in. She gasped as the motion forced him deep inside her. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing," he murmured, reaching up to place his hands over her breasts. "I'm letting you do the doing."

He watched her face as she considered the situation and was aware of the exact second that her excitement and arousal overcame her discomfort with the unfamiliar position. Her eyelids dropped again, and she bit her lower lip as she moved gently on him. "Like this?"

He almost groaned aloud. That slow movement was exquisite torture, and she quickly got into the rhythm of it He had thought to prolong their lovemaking by changing positions, but now he was afraid he'd outsmarted himself. As old-fashioned as she was, she was also astonishingly sensuous. After a few minutes he desperately rolled again and put her under him.

Mary linked her arms behind his neck. "I was having fun."

"So was I." He kissed her briefly, then again, their lips lingering together. "Too much."

She smiled, that secret, womanly little smile she used only with him, and the sight of it made him burn. He forgot about control, forgot about everything but the pleasure that awaited them. Afterward, sated and exhausted, they both dozed.

At the sound of a vehicle, Wolf rolled out of bed, instantly alert. Mary stirred sleepily. "What is it?"

"You have company."

"Company?" She sat up and pushed her hair out of her face. "What time is it?"

"Almost six. We must have gone to sleep."

"Six! It's time for Joe's lesson!"

Wolf swore as he began jerking on his clothes. "This situation's getting out of hand. Damn it, every time I make love to you my own son interrupts us. Once was bad enough, but he's making a habit of it."

Mary was scrambling into her own clothes, wishing that the circumstances weren't so embarrassing. It was hard to face Joe when it was so obvious that she and his father had just been in bed together. Aunt Ardith would have disowned her for so forgetting her morals and sense of proper behaviour. Then she looked at Wolf as he stamped his feet into his boots, and her heart felt as if it had expanded until it filled her entire chest. She loved him, and there was nothing more moral than love. As for proper behaviour—she shrugged, mentally kissing propriety goodbye. One couldn't have everything.

Joe had deposited his books on the table and was making a pot of coffee when they entered the kitchen. He looked up and frowned. "Look, Dad, this situation is getting out of hand. You're cutting into my lesson time." Only the twinkle in his ice-blue eyes kept Wolf from getting angry; after a moment, he tousled his son's hair.

"Son, I've said it before, but you've got lousy timing."

Joe's lesson time was even more limited because they had to take time to eat. They were all starving, so they decided on sandwiches, which were quick, and had just finished when another car drove up.

"My goodness, this house is getting popular," Mary muttered as she got up to open the door.

Clay took his hat off as he entered. He paused and sniffed. "Is that coffee fresh?"

"Yep." Wolf stretched to reach the pot while Mary got a cup from the cabinet for Clay.

He sprawled in one of the chairs and gave a weary sigh, which turned to one of appreciation as he inhaled the fragrant steam rising from the coffee as Wolf poured it "Thanks. I thought I'd find you two here."

"Has anything come up?" Wolf drawled.

"Nothing except a few complaints. You made some people a little nervous."

"Doing what?" Mary interjected.

"Just looking around," Wolf said in a casual tone that didn't fool her at all, nor did it fool Clay.

"Leave it alone. You're not a one-man vigilante committee. I'm warning you for the last time."

"I don't reckon I've done anything illegal, just walking around and looking. I haven't interfered with any law officers, I haven't questioned anyone, I haven't destroyed or hidden any evidence. All I've done is look." Wolf's eyes gleamed. "If you're smart, you'll use me. I'm the best tracker you're going to find."

"And if you're smart, you'll spend your time looking out after what's yours." Clay looked at Mary, and she primmed her mouth. Darn him, he was going to tell!

"That's what I'm doing."

"Maybe not as well as you think. Mary told me about a plan she's got to use herself as bait to bring this guy out in the open."

Wolf's head snapped around, and his brows lowered over narrowed black eyes as he pinned her with a gaze so furious it was all she could do to keep her own gaze steady. "I'll be damned," he said softly, and it was an expression of determination rather than surprise.

"Yeah, that's what I said. I heard you and Joe are escorting her to and from the school, but what about the time in between? And school will be out in a couple of weeks. What about then?"

Mary drew her slender shoulders up. "I won't be talked around as if I'm invisible. This is my house, and let me remind all of you that I'm well over twenty-one. I'll go where I want, when I want." Let them make of that what they would! She hadn't lived with Aunt Ardith for nothing; Aunt Ardith would have died, just on principle, before she would have let a man tell her what to do.

Wolf's eyes hadn't wavered from her. "You'll do what you're damn well told."

"If I were you," Clay suggested, "I'd take her up on the mountain and keep her there. Like I said, school will be out in a couple of weeks, and this old house is pretty isolated. No one has to know where she is. It'll be safer that way."

Enraged, Mary reached out and whisked the cup of coffee away from Clay, then dumped the contents in the sink. "You're not drinking my coffee, you tattletale!"

He looked astounded. "I'm just trying to protect you!"

"And I'm just trying to protect him!" she shouted.

"Protect who?" Wolf snapped.

"You!"

"Why do I need protecting?"

"Because whoever is doing this is trying to harm you! First by trying to frame you for the attacks, and second by attacking people who don't hate you as he does!"

Wolf froze. When Mary had first advanced the beginnings of her theory the night before, he and Clay hadn't believed it because it simply hadn't made sense that anyone trying to frame Wolf would try to make anyone believe he would attack Mary. But when Mary put it the way she just had, that the attacks were a sort of twisted punishment, it began to make horrible sense. A rapist was warped, so his logic would be warped.

Mary had been attacked because of him. Because he had been so attracted to her that he hadn't been able to control it, some madman had attacked her, terrified and humiliated her, tried to rape her. His lust had brought attention to her.

His expression was cold and blank as he looked at Clay, who shrugged. "I have to buy it," Clay said. "It's the only thing that even halfway makes sense. When she made friends with you and got Joe into the Academy, folks began to look at you differently. Someone couldn't stand it."

Mary twisted her hands. "Since it's my fault, the least I can do is—"

"No!" Wolf roared, surging to his feet and turning over his chair with a clatter. He lowered his voice with a visible effort. "Go upstairs and get your clothes. You're going with us."

Joe slapped his hand on the table. "About damn time." He got up and began clearing the table. "I'll do this while you pack."

Mary pursed her lips. She was torn between wanting the freedom to put her plan into action—when she thought of it—and the powerful temptation of living with Wolf. It wasn't proper. It was a terrible example to her students. The townspeople would be outraged. He'd watch her like a hawk! On the other hand, she loved him to distraction and wasn't the least ashamed of their relationship. Embarrassed, sometimes, because she wasn't accustomed to such intimacy and didn't know how to handle it, but never ashamed.

Also on the other hand, if she dug in her heels and remained here, Wolf would simply stay here with her, where they would be far more visible and far more likely to outrage the town's sensibilities. That was what decided her, because she didn't want even more animosity directed at Wolf because of her. That could be all that was needed to goad the rapist into attacking him directly, or going after Joe.

He put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a little push. "Go," he said gently, and she went.

When she was safely upstairs and out of hearing, Clay looked at Wolf with a troubled, angry expression. "For what it's worth, she thinks you and Joe are in danger, that this maniac may just start shooting at you. I kind of agree with her, damn it."

"Let him try," Wolf said, his face and voice expressionless. "She's most vulnerable on the way to and from school, and I don't think this guy is going to wait patiently. He hit two days in a row, but he got scared when you nearly got him. It'll take a while for him to settle down, then he'll be looking for another hit to make. In the meantime, I'll be looking for him."

Clay didn't want to ask, but the question was burning his tongue. "Did you find anything today?"

"I eliminated some people from my list."

"Scared some of them, too."

Wolf shrugged. "Folks had better get used to seeing me around. If they don't like it, tough."

"I also heard that you made the boys escort the girls home from school. The girls' parents were mighty relieved and grateful."

"They should have taken care of it themselves."

"It's a quiet little town. They aren't used to things like this."

"That's no excuse for being stupid." And it had been stupid to overlook their daughters' safety. If he'd been that careless in Nam, he would have been dead.

Clay grunted. "I still want to make my point. I agree with Mary that you and Joe are the primary targets. You may be good, but nobody's better than a bullet, and the same goes for Joe. You don't just have to look after Mary, you have to look after yourselves, too. I'd like it if you could keep her from even finishing out the year at school, so the three of you could stay up on your mountain until we catch this guy."

It went against Wolf's grain to hide from anyone, and that was in the look he gave Clay. Wolf had been trained to hunt; more than that, it was in his nature, in the genes passed down from Comanche and Highland warriors that had mingled in his body, in the formation of his character.

"We'll keep Mary safe," was all he said, and Clay knew he'd failed to convince Wolf to stay out of it.

Joe was leaning against the cabinets, listening. "The people in town are going to raise hell if they find out Mary's staying with us," he put in.

"Yeah, they will." Clay stood up and positioned his hat on his head.

"Let them." Wolf's voice was flat. He'd given Mary the chance to play it safe, but she hadn't taken it. She was his now, by God. Let them squawk.

Clay sauntered to the door. "If anyone asks me, I've arranged for her to live in a safer place until this is over. Don't reckon it's anyone's business where that place is, do you? Though of course, knowing Mary, she'll probably tell everyone right out, just like she did Saturday in Hearst's store."

Wolf groaned. "Hell! What did she do? I haven't heard about it."

"Didn't reckon you would have, what with all that happened that afternoon. Seems she got into it with both Dottie Lancaster and Mrs. Karr, and all but told both of them she was yours for the taking." A slow grin shaped Clay's mouth. "From what I heard, she laced into them good."

When Clay had left, Wolf and Joe looked at each other. "It could get interesting around here."

"It could," Joe agreed.

"Keep an eye out, son. If Mary and Armstrong are right, we're the ones this bastard is really after. Don't go anywhere without your rifle, and stay alert."

Joe nodded. Wolf wasn't worried about hand-to-hand fighting, not even if the other guy was armed with a knife, because he'd taught Joe how to fight the way he'd learned in the military. Not karate, kung fu, tae kwon do, or even judo, but a mixture of many, including good old street fighting. The object of a fight wasn't fairness, but winning, in any way possible, with any weapon handy. It was what had kept him alive and relatively unscathed in prison. A rifle was something else, though. They would have to be doubly alert.

Mary returned and plunked two suitcases on the floor. "I have to have my books, too," she announced. "And someone has to get Woodrow and her kittens."

Chapter Ten

Mary tried to tell herself that she couldn't sleep because she was in a strange bed, because she was too excited, because she was too worried, because—she ran out of excuses and couldn't think of anything else. Though she was pleasantly tired from Wolfs lovemaking, she felt too uneasy to sleep and finally knew why. She turned in his arms and put her hand on his jaw, loving the feel of his facial structure and the slight rasp of his beard beneath her fingers. "Are you awake?" she whispered.

"I wasn't," he said in a low rumble. "But I am now."

She apologized and lay very still. After a moment he squeezed her and pushed her hair away from her face. "Can't you sleep?"

"No. I just feel—strange, I think."

"In what way?"

"Your wife—Joe's mother. I was thinking of her in this bed."

His arms tightened. "She was never in this bed."

"I know. But Joe's in the other room, and I thought this was how it must have been when he was little, before she died."

"Not usually. We were apart a lot, and she died when Joe was two. That was when I got out of the military."

"Tell me about it," she invited, still in a whisper. She needed to know more about this man she loved. "You must have been very young."

"I was seventeen when I enlisted. Even though I knew I'd probably have to do a tour in Vietnam, it was my only way out. My folks were dead, and my grandfather, Mother's father, never really accepted me because I was half Anglo. All I knew was that I had to get off the reservation. It was almost as bad as prison. It is prison, in a different way. There was nothing to do, nothing to hope for.

"I met Billie when I was eighteen. She was a Crow half-breed, and I guess she married me because she knew I'd never go back to the reservation. She wanted more. She wanted bright lights and city life. Maybe she thought a soldier had it good, transferring from base to base, partying when he was off duty. But she didn't look down on me because I was a half-breed, and we decided to get married. A month later I was in Nam. I got her a ticket to Hawaii when I had R and R, and she went back pregnant Joe was born when I was nineteen, but I was home from my first tour and got to see him being born. God, I was so excited. He was screaming his head off. Then they put him in my hands, and it was like taking a heart punch. I loved him so much I would have died for him."

He was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he gave a low laugh. "So there I was, with a newborn son and a wife who didn't think she'd gotten such a good deal, and my enlistment was almost up. I had no prospects of a job, no way of supporting my baby. So I re-upped, and things got so bad between Billie and me that I volunteered for another tour. She died right before my third tour ended. I got out and came home to take care of Joe."

"What did you do?"

"Worked ranches. Rodeoed. It was all I knew. Except for the time I spent in service, I can't remember not working with horses. I was horse crazy when I was a kid, and I guess I still am. Joe and I drifted around until it was time for him to start school, and we landed in Ruth. You know the rest of it."

She lay quietly in his arms, thinking of his life. He hadn't had it easy. But the life he'd led had shaped him into the man he was, a man of strength and iron determination. He had endured war and hell and come out even stronger than before. The thought that someone would want to harm him made her so angry she could barely contain it. Somehow she had to find some way to protect him.

He escorted her to school the next morning, and again Mary was aware of how everyone stared at him. But it wasn't fear or hatred she saw in the kids' eyes; rather, they watched him with intense curiosity, and even awe. After years of tales, he was a larger-than-life figure to them, someone glimpsed only briefly. Their fathers had dealt with him, the boys had watched him at work, and his expertise with horses only added to tales about him. It was said that he could "whisper" a horse, that even the wildest one would respond to a special crooning tone in his voice.

Now he was hunting the rapist. The story was all over the county.

Dottie wouldn't even talk to Mary that day; she walked away whenever she approached and even ate lunch by herself. Sharon sighed and shrugged. "Don't pay any attention to her. She's always had a burr under her blanket about the Mackenzies."

Mary shrugged, too. There didn't seem to be any way she could reach Dottie.

Joe drove into town that afternoon to follow her home. As they walked out to their respective vehicles, she told him, "I need to stop at Hearst's for a few things."

"I'll be right behind you."

He was on her heels when she entered the store, and everyone turned to look at them. Joe gave them a smile that could have come straight from his father, and several people hastily looked away. Sighing, Mary led her six-foot watchdog down the aisle.

Joe paused fractionally when his gaze met that of Pam Hearst. She was standing as if rooted, staring at him. He tipped his hat and followed Mary.

A moment later he felt a light touch on his arm and turned to see Pam standing behind him. "Could I talk to you?" she asked in a low voice. "I—it's important. Please?"

Mary had moved on. Joe shifted his position so he could keep her in sight and said, "Well?"

Pam drew a deep breath. "I thought… maybe… would you go with me to the town dance this Saturday night?" she finished in a rush.

Joe's head jerked. "What?"

"I said—will you go with me to the dance?"

He thumbed his hat back and gave a low whistle under his breath. "You know you're asking for trouble, don't you? Your dad just might lock you in the cellar for a year."

"We don't have a cellar." She gave him a small smile, one that had an immediate reaction on his sixteen-year-old hormones. "And I don't care, anyway. He's wrong, wrong about you and your dad. I've felt horrible about how I acted before. I—I like you, Joe, and I want to go out with you."

He was cynical enough to say, "Yeah. A lot of people started liking me when they found out I had a shot at the Academy. Sure funny how that worked out, isn't it?"

Hot spots of colour appeared on her cheeks. "That's not why I'm asking you out!"

"Are you sure? It seems I wasn't good enough to be seen in public with you before. You didn't want people to say Pam Hearst was going out with a 'breed. It's different when they can say you're going out with a candidate for the Air Force Academy."

"That's not true!" Pam was truly angry now, and her voice rose. Several people glanced their way.

"It looks that way to me."

"Well, you're wrong! You're just as wrong as my dad is!"

As if he'd been cued, Mr. Hearst, alerted by Pam's raised voice, started down the aisle toward them. "What's going on back here? Pam, is this br—boy bothering you?"

Joe noticed how quickly "breed" had been changed to "boy" and lifted his eyebrows at Pam. She flushed even redder and whirled to face her father.

"No, he isn't bothering me! Wait. Yes. Yes, he is! He's bothering me because I asked him to go out with me and he refused!"

Everyone in the store heard her. Joe sighed. The fat was in the fire now.

Ralph Hearst turned purplish red, and he halted in his tracks as abruptly as if he'd hit a wall. "What did you say?" he gasped, evidently not believing his ears.

Pam didn't back down, even though her father looked apoplectic. "I said he refused to go out with me! I asked him to the Saturday night dance."

Mr. Hearst's eyes were bulging out of their sockets. "You get on to the house. We'll talk about this later!"

"I don't want to talk about it later, I want to talk about it right now!"

"I said get on to the house!" Hearst roared. He turned his infuriated gaze on Joe. "And you stay away from my daughter, you—"

"He's been staying away from me!" Pam yelled. "It's the other way around! I won't stay away from him! This isn't the first time I've asked him out. You and everyone else in this town are wrong for the way you've treated the Mackenzies, and I'm tired of it. Miss Potter is the only one of us who's had the guts to stand up for what she thinks is right!"

"This is all her fault, that do-gooding—"

"Stop right there." Joe spoke for the first time, but there was something in his cool voice, in his pale blue eyes, that stopped the man. Joe was only sixteen, but he was tall and muscular, and there was a sudden alertness to his stance that made the older man pause.

Pam jumped in. She was bright and cheery-natured, but as headstrong as her father. "Don't start on Miss Potter," she warned. "She's the best teacher we've ever had here in Ruth, and if you do anything to get rid of her, I swear I'll drop out of school."

"You'll do no such thing!"

"I swear I will! I love you, Dad, but you're wrong! All of us talked about it at school today, about how we'd seen the teachers treat Joe over the years, and how wrong it was, because he's obviously the smartest of us all! And we talked about how Wolf Mackenzie was the one who made sure all of us girls got home all right yesterday. No one else thought of it! Or don't you care?"

"Of course he cares," Mary said briskly, having walked up without anyone except Joe noticing. "It's just that Wolf, with his military experience, knew what to do." She'd made that up, but it sounded good. She put her hand on Mr. Hearst's arm. "Why don't you take care of your customers and just let them fight it out? You know how teenagers are."

Somehow Ralph Hearst found himself at the front of the store again before he realized it. He stopped and looked down at Mary. "I don't want my girl dating a half-breed!" he said fiercely.

"She'll be safer with that half-breed than with any other boy around," Mary replied. "For one thing, he's steady as a rock. He won't drink or drive fast, and for another, he has no intention of getting involved with any girl around here. He'll be going away, and he knows it."

"I don't want my daughter dating an Indian!"

"Are you saying that character doesn't mean anything? That you'd rather have Pam go out with a drunk Anglo, who might get her killed in a car accident, than with a sober Indian, who would protect her with his life?"

He looked stricken and rubbed his head in agitation. "No, damn it, that isn't what I mean," he muttered.

Mary sighed. "My Aunt Ardith remembered every old chestnut she ever heard, and one of the ones she brought out most often was 'pretty is as pretty does.' You go by how people act, don't you, Mr. Hearst. You've voted according to how the candidates have stood on issues in the past, haven't you?"

"Of course." He looked uncomfortable. "And?" she prompted.

"All right, all right! It's just—some things are hard to forget, you know? Not things that Joe has done, but just… things. And that father of his is—"

"As proud as you are," she cut in. "All he ever wanted was a place to raise his motherless son." She was laying it on so thick she expected to hear violins in the background any moment now, but it was about time these people realized some things about Wolf. Maybe he was more controlled than civilized, but his control was very good, and they would never know the difference.

Deciding it was time to give him some breathing room, she said, "Why not talk it over with your wife?" He looked relieved at the suggestion. "I'll do that." Joe was walking up the aisle; Pam, who had turned her back, was busily neatening a stack of paint thinner in an obvious effort to act casual. Mary paid for the items she'd gathered, and Joe lifted the sack. Silently they walked out together.

"Well?" she asked as soon as they were outside.

"Well, what?"

"Are you taking her to the dance?"

"It looks like it. She won't take no for an answer, like someone else I know."

She gave him a prim look and didn't respond to his teasing. Then, as he opened the car door for her, a thought struck, and she looked at him in horror. "Oh, no," she said softly. "Joe, that man is attacking women who are friendly to you and Wolf."

His whole body jerked, and his mouth tightened. "Damn," he swore. He thought a minute, then shook his head. "I'll tell her tomorrow that I can't go."

"That won't do any good. How many people heard her say what she did? It will be all over the county by tomorrow, whether you take her to the dance or not."

He didn't reply, merely closed the door after she'd gotten into the car. He looked grim, far too grim for a boy his age.

Joe felt grim, too, but an idea was taking form. He'd watch out for Pam and warn her so she'd be on guard, but maybe this would draw the rapist out. He'd use Mary's plan, but with different bait: himself. He'd make certain Pam was safe, but leave himself open at times when he was alone. Maybe, when the guy realized he couldn't get at a helpless woman, he'd get so frustrated he'd go after one of his real targets. Joe knew the chance he was taking, but unless Wolf could find the track he was looking for, he didn't see any other option.

Mary looked around for Wolf when they got home, but she couldn't find him. She changed into jeans and walked outside. She found Joe in the barn, grooming a horse. "Is Wolf out here?"

He shook his head and continued brushing the horse's gleaming hide. "His horse is gone. He's probably checking fences." Or hunting for a certain track, but he didn't say that to Mary.

She got him to show her how to brush the horse and took over for him until her arm began to hurt. The horse snorted when she stopped, so she went back to brushing. "This is harder than it looks," she panted.

Joe grinned at her over the back of another horse. "It'll give you a few muscles. But you've finished with him, so don't spoil him. He'll stand there all day if someone will keep brushing him."

She stopped and stepped back. "Well, why didn't you say so?" He put the horse in his stall, and Mary walked back to the house. She had almost reached the porch when she heard the rhythmic thudding of a horse's hooves and turned to see Wolf riding up. She caught her breath. Even though she was ignorant about horses, she knew that not many people looked the way he did on a horse. There was no bouncing or jiggling; he sat so easily in the saddle, and moved so fluidly with the animal, that he looked motionless. The Comanche had arguably been the world's best horsemen, better even than the Berber or Bedouin, and Wolf had learned well from his mother's people. His powerful legs controlled the big bay stallion he was riding, so that the reins were lightly held and no harm done to the horse's tender mouth.

He slowed the horse to a walk as he approached her. "Any trouble today?"

She decided not to tell him about Pam Hearst. That was Joe's business, if he wanted it known. She knew he'd tell

Wolf, but in his own time. "No. We didn't see anyone suspicious, and no one followed us."

He reined in and leaned down to brace his forearm on the saddle horn. His dark eyes drifted over her slim figure. "Do you know how to ride?"

"No. I've never been on a horse."

"Well, that situation is about to be remedied." He kicked his boot free of the stirrup and held his hand out to her. "Put your left foot in the stirrup and lift yourself as I swing you up."

She was willing. She tried. But the horse was too tall, and she couldn't reach the stirrup with her foot. She was staring at the bay with an aggravated expression when Wolf laughed and shifted back in the saddle. "Here, I'll pick you up."

He leaned out of the saddle and caught her under the arms. Mary gasped and grabbed at his biceps as she felt her feet leave the ground; then he straightened and set her firmly on the saddle in front of him. She grabbed the saddle horn as he lifted the reins, and the horse moved forward.

"This is a long way up," she said, bouncing so hard her teeth rattled.

He chuckled and wrapped his left arm around her, pulling her back against him. "Relax and let yourself go with the horse's rhythm. Feel how I'm moving and move with me."

She did as he said and felt the rhythm as soon as she relaxed. Her body automatically seemed to sink deeper into the saddle, and her torso moved with Wolfs. The bouncing stopped. Unfortunately by that time they had reached the barn and her first ride was over. Wolf lifted her down and dismounted.

"I liked that," she announced.

"You did? Good. We'll start you on riding lessons tomorrow."

Joe's voice came to them from a stall farther down. "I started her on grooming lessons today."

"You'll be as comfortable with horses as if you'd been around them all of your life," Wolf said, and leaned down to kiss her. She went on tiptoe, her lips parting. It was a long moment before he lifted his head, and when he did, his breathing was faster. His eyes were hooded and narrow. Damn, she got to him so fast he reacted like a teenager when he was around her.

When Mary had gone back to the house, Joe came out of the stall and looked at his father. "Find anything today?"

Wolf began unsaddling the bay. "No. I've had a good look around the ranches, but none of the prints match. It has to be someone from town."

Joe frowned. "That makes sense. Both of the attacks were in town. But I can't think of anyone it could be. I guess I've never noticed before if someone has freckled hands."

"I'm not looking for freckles, I'm looking for that print. I know how he walks, toeing in a little and putting his weight on the outside of his feet."

"What if you find him? Do you think the sheriff will arrest him just because he has freckles on his hands and walks a certain way?"

Wolf smiled, a movement of his lips that was totally without mirth. His eyes were cold. "When I find him," he said softly, "if he's smart, he'll confess. I'll give the law a chance, but there's no way he'll walk free. He'll be a lot safer in jail than out on the streets, and I'll make certain he knows it." It was an hour before they finished with the horses. Joe lingered to look over his tack, and Wolf walked up to the house alone. Mary was absorbed in cooking, humming as she stirred the big pot of beef stew, and she didn't hear him come in the back door. He walked up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder.

Blind terror shot through her. She screamed and threw herself sideways, to press her back against the wall. She held the dripping spoon in her hand like a knife. Her face was utterly white as she stared at him.

His face was hard. In silence they stared at each other, time stretching out between them. Then she dropped the spoon on the floor with a clatter. "Oh God, I'm sorry," she said in a thin voice, and covered her face with her hands.

He drew her to him, his hand in her hair, holding her head to his chest. "You thought it was him again, didn't you?"

She clung to him, trying to drive away the terror. It had come out of nowhere, taking her by surprise and shattering the control she'd managed to gain over her memory and emotions. When Wolf's hand had touched her shoulder, for a brief, horrifying moment it had been happening all over again. She felt cold; she wanted to sink into his warmth, to let the reality of his touch overcome the hideous memory of another touch.

"You don't have to be afraid," he murmured into her hair. "You're safe here." But he knew her memory was still there, that a touch from behind meant a nightmare to her. Somehow he had to take away that fear, so she could be free of it.

She regained control and eased herself away from him, and he let her, because he knew it was important to her. She appeared almost normal through dinner and Joe's lesson; the only sign of strain was an occasional haunted expression in her eyes, as if she hadn't completely succeeded in pushing the memory away.

But when they went to bed and her silky body was under his hands, she turned to him as eagerly as ever. Wolfs lovemaking left her no room for anything else, no lingering memories or vestiges of terror. Her entire body and mind were occupied with him. Afterward she curled against him and slept undisturbed, at least until the greying dawn, when he woke her and pulled her beneath him again.

Mary was fully aware of the tenuousness of both her relationship with Wolf and her presence in his house. He often told her explicitly how much he wanted her, but in terms of lust, not love. He never spoke a word about loving, not even during lovemaking, when she was unable to keep from telling him over and over that she loved him. When the fever of lust passed, he might well cut her out of his life, and she tried to prepare herself for that possibility even while she absorbed the maximum pleasure from the present situation.

She knew that living with him was for her protection, and only temporary. She also knew that it was nothing short of scandalous for a small-town schoolteacher to shack up with the local black sheep, and that was exactly how the townspeople would view the situation if they knew about it. She knew the risk she was taking with her career, and decided that the days and nights with Wolf were worth it. If she lost her job, there were other jobs, but she knew there would be no other loves for her. She was twenty-nine and had never even felt a twinge of interest or excitement over any other man. Some people loved only once, and it appeared she was one of them.

The only time she allowed herself to worry over the future was on the drives to and from school, when she was alone in the car. When she was with Wolf she didn't want to waste even a single second on regrets. With him, she was totally alive, totally female.

She worried about Wolf and Joe, too. She knew Wolf was actively hunting the man who had attacked her, and she was terrified he would be hurt. She couldn't let herself even think that he might be killed. And Joe was up to something; she knew it. He was too much like Wolf for her not to recognize the signs. He was preoccupied, and far too sober, as if faced with making a choice when neither of the alternatives was very attractive. But she couldn't get him to open up to her, and that alone frightened her, for Joe had talked to her from the beginning.

Joe was on edge. He'd told Pam to be more cautious than usual, and he tried to make certain she never walked home alone, but there was always a chance she'd be careless. He'd also made a point of letting himself be seen alone, and evidently unaware of the need for caution, but nothing happened. The town was quiet, if edgy. He was forced to the same awareness that Wolf already had, that with so few clues, all they could do was stay alert and wait until the man made a mistake.

When Joe told his father that he was going to the dance with Pam, Wolf looked piercingly at the boy. "Do you know what you're doing?"

"I hope so."

"Watch your back."

The terse advice brought a thin smile to Joe's mouth. He knew he could be making a big mistake by going to that dance, that the scene could turn ugly, but he'd told Pam he'd take her, and that was that. He'd have to be doubly alert, but damn, he wanted to hold her in his arms while they shuffled slowly across the sawdust floor. Even though he knew he was going away and they'd never have anything permanent between them, he was strongly attracted to her. He couldn't explain it and knew it wouldn't last, but he felt it now, and it was now that he had to deal with it

Pam was edgy, too, when he picked her up. She tried to hide it by talking too fast and too brightly, until he put his hand over her mouth. "I know," he muttered. "It worries me, too."

She tossed her head, freeing her mouth. "I'm not worried. It'll be all right, you'll see. I told you, all of us have talked about it."

"Then why are you so nervous?"

She looked away from him and cleared her throat. "Well, this is the first time I've been out with you. I just felt—I don't know—nervous and scared and excited all at once."

He thought about that for a few minutes, and silence filled the cab of the truck. Then he said, "I guess I can understand being nervous and excited, but why scared?"

Now it was Pain's turn to be silent, and she flushed a little when she finally said, "Because you're not like the rest of us."

That grim look settled around Joe's mouth. "Yeah, I know. I'm a 'breed."

"It isn't that," she snapped. "It's—you're older than the rest of us, somehow. I know we're the same age, but inside you're all grown up. We're ordinary people. We'll stay right here and ranch the way our folks have. We'll marry people from the same background and stay in the county, or move to another county just like it, and have kids and be content. But you're not like that. You're going to the Academy, and you won't be back, at least not to stay. You may come back for a visit, but that's all it'll be."

It surprised him that she had it so neatly pegged. He did feel old inside, and always had, especially in comparison to other kids his age. And he knew he wouldn't be back here to ranch. He belonged in the sky doing Mach 2, marking his place in the universe with a vapour trail.

They were quiet the rest of the way to the dance. When Joe parked his truck with the collection of other trucks and a few cars, he braced himself for whatever could happen.

He was prepared for almost anything, but not for what actually took place. When he and Pam walked into the rundown old building used for the dances, for a moment there was a certain stillness, a strange silence; then in the next heartbeat the noise picked back up and everyone returned to his own conversation. Pam put her hand in his and squeezed it.

A few minutes later the live band started up, and couples drifted onto the sawdust-covered planks of the dance floor. Pam led him to the middle of the floor and smiled at him.

He smiled back, wryly admitting and admiring her courage. Then he took her in his arms to enter the slow rhythm of the dance.

They didn't talk. After wanting for so long just to touch her, he was content to hold her and move with her. He could smell her perfume, feel the softness of her hair, the resilient mounds of her breasts, the movement of her legs against his. As young people have done from the beginning of time, they swayed together in their own private world, reality suspended.

Reality intruded, however, when he heard an angry mutter of "dirty Indian" and automatically stiffened as he looked around for the speaker.

Pam said, "Please," and drew him back into the dance.

When the song ended, a boy stood on his chair and yelled, "Hey, Joe! Pam! Over here!"

They looked in the direction of the yell, and Joe couldn't help grinning. Every student in the three classes Mary taught was grouped at the table, with two empty chairs waiting for him and Pam. They were waving and calling.

The kids saved the evening. They enveloped him and Pam in a circle of laughter and dancing. Joe danced with every girl in the group; the boys talked horses, cattle, ranching and rodeoing, and between them made certain none of the girls had a chance to sit down much. The kids also talked to the other people at the dance, and soon everyone knew that the half-breed was going to the Air Force Academy. Ranchers are generally hard-working, conservative and firmly patriotic, and before too long, anyone who had a hard word to say about the half-breed found himself hushed and told to mind his manners.

Joe and Pam left before the dance was over, because he didn't want to keep her out too late. As they walked to his truck, he shook his head. "I never would have believed it," he said softly. "Did you know they would all be here?"

Pam denied it. "But they knew I'd asked you. I guess the whole town knew I'd asked you. It was fun, wasn't it?"

"It was fun," he agreed. "But it could have gotten rough. You know that, don't you? If it hadn't been for the guys—"

"And girls!" she interrupted.

"Them, too. If it hadn't been for them, I'd have been thrown out."

"It didn't happen. And next time it will be even better."

"Is there going to be a next time?"

She looked suddenly unsure of herself. "You—you can still come to the dances, even if you don't want to come with me."

Joe laughed as he opened the truck door. He turned and put his hands on her waist, then lifted her onto the seat. "I like being with you."

About halfway back to Ruth, Pam put her hand on his arm. "Joe?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you want to—uh, that is, do you know any place to stop?" She faltered on the words.

He knew he should resist the temptation, but he couldn't He turned off on the next side road they came to, then left the road to bounce across a meadow for about a mile before he parked beneath a stand of trees.

The mild May night wrapped around them. The moonlight couldn't penetrate the shelter of the trees, and the dark cab of the truck was a warm, safe cave. Pam was a pale, indistinct figure as he reached for her.

She was pliant and eager, yielding to his hands, pressing against him to take more of his kisses. Her firm young body made him feel as if he would explode. Barely aware of what he was doing, Joe shifted and twisted until they were lying on the seat with Pam half beneath him. Soon her breasts were bare, and he heard her strangled intake of breath as he took a nipple into his mouth. Then her nails were digging into his shoulders, and her hips arched.

It was quickly getting out of control. Clothing was opened and pushed aside. Bare skin touched bare skin. Somehow, Pam's jeans were off. But when he slid his hands inside her panties, she whispered, "I've never done this before. Will it hurt?"

Joe groaned aloud, but forced himself to stillness. It took every ounce of willpower he possessed, but he stopped his hands. His body throbbed painfully, and he savagely controlled it. After a long minute he sat up and pulled Pam to a sitting position astride his lap.

"Joe?"

He leaned his forehead against hers. "We can't do it," he murmured regretfully.

"But why?" She moved against him, her body still empty and aching with a need she didn't understand. "Because it would be your first time."

"But I want you!"

"I want you, too." He managed a wry grin. "I guess it's pretty obvious. But your first time—baby, it should be with someone you love. And you don't love me."

"I could," she whispered. "Oh, Joe, I truly could."

He was so frustrated that he could barely control his voice enough to speak, but he managed. "I hope you don't. I'm leaving. I have a chance waiting for me that I'd die before I'd give up."

"And no girl is going to change your mind?"

Joe knew the truth inside him, and he knew Pam wouldn't like it, but he had to be honest with her. "No girl could change my mind. I want to go to the Academy so much that nothing can keep me here."

She caught his hands and shyly brought them up to her breasts. "We could still, you know, do it. No one would know."

"You'd know. And when you fall in love with some guy, you'd regret that your first time wasn't with him. God, Pam, don't make this so hard for me! Slap my face or something." The way her firm young breasts filled his hands made him wonder if he wasn't crazy for passing this up.

She leaned forward and rested her head on his shoulder. He felt the way her body shook as she began to cry, and he folded his arms around her.

"You've always been special to me," she said in a stifled tone. "Do you have to be so darn conscientious?"

"Do you want to take a chance on getting pregnant at sixteen?"

That stopped her tears. She sat up. "Oh. I thought you'd have a—don't all boys carry them?"

"I guess not. And it wouldn't matter if I did have one. I don't want to get involved—not this kind of involved—with you or anyone else, because no matter what, I'm going to the Academy. Besides, you're too young."

She couldn't stop the giggle that burst out. "I'm as old as you are."

"Then we're too young."

"You're not." She sobered and cupped his face in her hands. "You're not young at all, and I guess that's why you stopped. Every other boy I know would have had his jeans off so fast he'd have fabric burns on his legs. But let's make a bargain, okay?"

"What kind of bargain?"

"We'll still be friends, won't we?"

"You know it"

"Then we'll go around together and keep things light. No more messing around like this, because it hurts too much when you stop. You go away to Colorado like you've planned, and I'll take things as they come. I may get married. But if I don't, you come on back here one summer and we'll both be old enough then. Will you be my first lover?"

"It won't keep me in Ruth," he said steadily.

"I don't expect it to. But is it a bargain?"

He accepted that the years could make a difference, and he knew she'd most likely be married. If not—maybe.

"If you still want to then, yeah, it's a bargain."

She held out her hand, and they solemnly shook to seal the deal. Then she kissed him and began putting on her clothes.

Mary was waiting up for him when he got home, an anxious look in her eyes. She got to her feet and tightened the belt of her robe. "Are you okay?" she asked. "Did anything happen?"

"I'm fine. Everything went okay."

Then he saw that the anxious look was really fear. She touched his arm. "You didn't see anyone who—" She stopped, then started again. "No one shot at your truck, or tried to run you off the road?"

"No, it was quiet." They looked at each other for a moment, and Joe realized that Mary had feared the same thing that had occurred to him. More than that, she knew he had decided to take the chance in an effort to draw the rapist out.

He cleared his throat. "Is Dad in bed?"

"No," Wolf said quietly from the doorway. He wore only a pair of jeans. His black eyes were steady. "I wanted to make certain you were okay. This was like watching Daniel walk into the lion's den."

"Well, Daniel made it out okay, didn't he? So did I. It was even fun. The whole class was there."

Mary smiled, the dread lifting from her mind. She knew now what had happened. Knowing that the situation could get ugly if Joe had gone to the dance without backup, the kids had taken it on themselves to make him a part of their group and let everyone at the dance know he was accepted. Wolf held out his hand, and Mary went to him. She could sleep now. They were safe for another night, these two men whom she loved.

Chapter Eleven

School was out. Mary was intensely proud of her students. The seniors had all graduated, and all of the undergraduates had passed. All of them intended to finish high school, and a couple of them wanted to go to college. It was a record to thrill any teacher's heart.

Joe didn't get a respite. Mary decided he needed more advanced classes in math than she was qualified to teach and began a search for a teacher who was qualified. She found one in a town seventy miles distant, and three times a week Joe made the trip for a two-hour accelerated course. She continued to teach him at night.

The days passed in a haze of happiness for Mary. She seldom left the mountain, seldom saw anyone except Wolf and Joe. Even when they were both gone, she felt safe. It had been only a little over two weeks since the attack, but it seemed as if it had happened a long time ago. Whenever a sliver of memory surfaced to unsettle her emotions, she scolded herself for letting it bother her. Nothing had happened, except she had been terrified. If anyone needed care and consideration, it was Cathy Teele. So Mary pushed the memories away and concentrated on the present. The present, inevitably, was Wolf.

He dominated her life, waking and sleeping. He began teaching her how to ride and how to help him with the horses, and she suspected he used the same method with her that he used with the young colts and fillies that were brought to him. He was firm and demanding, but utterly clear in his instructions and what he wanted out of both her and the horses. When they obeyed, he rewarded them with approval and affection. In fact, Mary mused, he was easier on the horses than he was on her! When they disobeyed, he was unfailingly patient. When she didn't do something exactly as he'd told her, he let her know about it in unmistakable terms.

But he was always affectionate. Actually, she decided, "lusty" was a better description. He made love to her every night, sometimes twice. He made love to her in the empty stall where Joe had interrupted them. He made love to her in the shower. She knew she wasn't even close to voluptuous, but he seemed enthralled with her body. When they lay in bed at night he would turn on the lamp and lean on his elbow, watching as he stroked his hand over her from shoulders to knees, seemingly fascinated by the difference between her pale, delicate skin and his dark, powerful, work-callused hand.

Wyoming weather in the summer was generally cool and dry, at least compared to Savannah, but the summer vacation from school had scarcely begun when a heat wave sent the temperatures into the nineties, even edging into the low hundreds by late afternoon. For the first time in her life, Mary wished she had some shorts to wear, but Aunt Ardith had never allowed them. She did find, however, that her plain cotton skirts were cooler than the new jeans she was so proud of, allowing for the circulation of whatever breeze happened to wander by. Not that Aunt Ardith would have approved of Mary's attire even then, for Mary declined to wear a slip or hosiery. Aunt Ardith had donned both articles of clothing every day of her life and would have considered anyone who dared to go without a slip an out-and-out hussy.

One morning just after Joe had left to drive to his class, Mary walked out to the barn and reflected on her state of hussiness. All in all, she was satisfied with it. Being a hussy had its advantages.

She could hear some horses snorting and stamping around in the small corral behind the barn, though Wolf usually used the larger one adjacent to the stables for training. The sound of activity, however, told her where she could find him, and that was all she wanted to know.

But when she rounded the corner of the barn, she stopped in her tracks. Wolf's big bay stallion was mounting the mare she had been riding during her lessons. The mare's front hooves were hobbled, and protective boots covered her rear hooves. The stallion was snorting and grunting, and the mare squealed as he entered her. Wolf moved to her head to steady her, and then she stood quietly. "There, sweetheart," he crooned. "You can handle this big old guy, can't you?"

The mare shivered under the impact of the stallion's thrusts, but she stood still for the service and it was over in only a couple of minutes. The stallion snorted and dropped off her, his head down low as he snuffled and blew.

Wolf continued talking in that low, soothing voice to the mare as he bent down to remove the hobble. As he started to remove the boots, Mary stepped forward and caught his attention. "You—you tied her!" she said accusingly.

He grinned as he finished unbuckling the protective boots. Miss Mary Elizabeth Potter stood before him in full form, her back ramrod-straight, chin lifted. "I didn't tie her," he said with amused patience. "I hobbled her."

"So she couldn't get away from him!"

"She didn't want to get away from him."

"How do you know?"

"Because she would have kicked him if she hadn't been ready for him to cover her," he explained as he led the mare back into the barn. Mary followed, her face still filled with indignation.

"A lot of good it would have done if she'd kicked him—you put those boots on her so she wouldn't hurt him!"

"Well, I didn't want my stallion damaged. On the other hand, if she had resisted service, I would have gotten her out of there. When a mare resists, it means I've misjudged the time, or something is wrong with her. But she took him nicely, didn't you girl?" he finished, patting the mare's neck.

Mary watched, fidgeting, as he washed the mare. She still didn't like the idea of the mare being unable to run away from the stallion, even though this particular mare was now standing as placidly as if nothing had happened a few minutes ago. It disturbed her on a deep emotional level that didn't respond to logic, and she felt uneasy.

Wolf led the mare to her stall, fed her and gave her fresh water. Then he squatted in front of the faucet to wash his hands and arms. When he looked up, Mary was still standing there, a troubled, almost frightened look in her eyes. He straightened. "What's wrong?"

Desperately she tried to shrug her uneasiness aside, but it didn't work. It was plain in her face and voice. "It looked—it looked…" Her voice trailed off, but suddenly he understood.

He moved slowly toward her and wasn't surprised when she backed up a step. "Horses aren't people," he said gently. "They're big, and they snort and squeal. It looks rough, but that's just how horses mate. It would be even rougher if they were allowed to run free, because they'd kick and bite."

She looked at the mare. "I know. It's just—" She stopped, because she really couldn't say what was bothering her.

Wolf reached her and put his hands on her waist, holding her lightly so she wouldn't be alarmed and wouldn't know that she couldn't break free unless he let her. "It's just that the roughness reminded you of being attacked?" he finished for her.

She gave him a quick, disturbed look, then just as quickly looked away.

"I know the memory is still there, baby." He slowly tightened his hands, bringing her close against him and just holding her. After a moment she began to relax, and her silky head rested against his chest. Only then did he put his arms around her, because he didn't want her to feel restrained.

"I want to kiss you," he murmured.

She lifted her head and smiled at him. "That's why I came out here: to tempt you into a kiss. I've become a shameless hussy. Aunt Ardith would have disowned me."

"Aunt Ardith sounds like a pain in the—"

"She was wonderful," Mary said firmly. "It's just that she was very old-fashioned and had strict notions of what was proper and what wasn't. For instance, only shameless hussies would wear a skirt without a proper petticoat underneath." She lifted her skirt a little to show him.

"Then let's hear it for shameless hussies." He bent his head and kissed her, and felt the familiar hot excitement begin building in his body. Ruthlessly he controlled it, because control was critical right now. He had to show Mary something, and he couldn't do it if his libido overcame his common sense. He had to do something to banish that ever-present fear from the back of her mind.

He raised his head and hugged her for a minute before letting his arms drop. Instead he took her hands and held them, and the expression on his face made the smile leave her eyes. He said slowly, "Are you willing to try something that might get you over being frightened?"

She looked cautious. "Such as?"

"We could reenact parts of the attack."

Mary stared at him. She was curious, but also wary. Part of her didn't want to do anything that would remind her of that day, but on the other hand, she didn't like being afraid. She said, "Which parts?"

"I could chase you."

"He didn't chase me. He grabbed me from behind."

"So will I, when I catch you."

She considered it. "It won't work. I'll know it's you."

"We could try."

She stared at him for a long time, then stiffened as a thought came to her. "He threw me facedown on the ground," she whispered. "He was on top of me, rubbing himself against me."

Wolf's face was strained. "Do you want me to do that, too?"

She shuddered. "Want you to? No. But I think you're going to have to. I don't want to be afraid any longer. Make love to me like that—please."

"What if you get really scared?"

"Don't—" She swallowed. "Don't stop."

He looked at her for a long minute, as if measuring her resolve; then his mouth began to quirk up on one side. "All right. Run."

She didn't. She stared at him. "What?"

"Run. I can't chase you if you don't run."

All of a sudden she felt silly at the thought of running about the yard like a child. "Just like that?"

"Yeah, just like that. Think of it this way: when I catch you, I'm going to pull your clothes off and make love to you, so why are you waiting?"

He removed his hat to hook it on a post. Mary took a step backward, then, despite her dignity, whirled and ran. She heard the thudding of his boots as he came after her, and laughed with excitement despite herself. She knew she didn't have a prayer of reaching the house; his legs were much longer than hers. Instead she relied on agility and dodged around his truck, then a tree.

"I'm going to get you," he growled, his voice right behind her, and his hand closed briefly on her shoulder before she sprinted away from him.

She sought refuge behind his truck again, with him on the other side. They feinted, but neither gained an advantage. Panting, her face alight with both excitement and triumph, Mary taunted him, "Can't catch me, can't catch me."

A slow, unholy smile touched his mouth as he looked at her. She was almost glowing with her success, her silky brown hair tumbling around her face, and he wanted her so much it hurt. He wanted to take her in his arms and make love to her, and he swore to himself because he couldn't, not right now. First he had to play this through, and, despite her brave words, he hoped she could bear it.

They had been staring at each other, and suddenly it struck her how savage he looked. He was aroused. She knew that look on his face as well as she knew her own, and her breath caught. He wasn't playing; he was deadly earnest. For the first time, fear began to creep in on her. She tried to tamp it down, because she knew Wolf would never hurt her. It was just—oh, damn, something about it did remind her of the attack, no matter how she tried to push the thought away. The playfulness drained out of her, and an unreasonable panic took its place. "Wolf? Let's stop now."

His chest rose and fell with his breathing, and a bleak look entered his eyes, but his voice was guttural. "No. I'm going to catch you."

She ran blindly, leaving the dubious safety of the truck. His running steps behind her sounded like thunder, obscuring every other sound, even that of her rasping breath. It was like being in that alley again, even though a part of her clung to the knowledge that this was Wolf, and she wanted him to do this. She hadn't had a chance to run from her attacker, but he had been behind her; she had heard his breathing just as she now heard Wolf's. She screamed, a high, terrified sound, just before Wolf caught her and bore her down, on her stomach, to the ground, his heavy weight coming down on top of her.

He supported himself on his arms to keep from crashing her, and nuzzled her ear. "Ha, I caught you." He forced himself to say the words lightly, but his chest was tight with pain at what she was going through. He could feel the terror that held her in its grip, and he began trying to loosen its bonds, speaking softly to her, reminding her of the heated, sensuous pleasures they had shared. Tears stung his eyes at the sounds she made, those of a trapped and terrified animal. God, he didn't know if he could do it. The lust had died in him at her first scream.

At first she straggled like a wild thing, kicking and bucking, trying to free her arms, but he held them clamped down. She was maddened with fear, so much so that despite the difference in their sizes and strength, she might have hurt him if not for his training. As it was, all he could do was hold her and try to break through the black mist of fear that enveloped her.

"Calm down, sweetheart, calm down. You know I won't hurt you, and I won't let anyone else hurt you. You know who I am." He repeated it over and over, until exhaustion claimed her, and her straggles became weak and aimless. Only then could she begin to listen; only then could his crooning words penetrate the barrier of fear. Suddenly she collapsed on the ground with her face buried in the hot, sweet grass and began to cry.

Wolf lay on top of her with his arms still locked securely around her and soothed her while she cried. He petted her and kissed her hair, her shoulder, her delicate nape, until at last she lay limply on the grass, both tears and energy exhausted. The endless caresses affected him, too, now that she was calmer; he felt a return of the desire that was never far away from him since he'd met her.

He nuzzled her neck again. "Are you still frightened?" he murmured.

Braised, swollen eyelids were closed over her eyes. "No," she whispered. "I'm sorry I keep putting you through this. I love you."

"I know, sweetheart. Hold on to that thought." Then he lifted himself back on his knees and pushed her skirt to her waist.

Mary's eyes flared open when she felt him pulling down her underpants, and her voice was sharp. "Wolf! No!"

He stripped the garment down her legs, and Mary trembled in reaction. It was so much like before, in the alley. She was on her stomach on the ground, with a man's weight on top of her, and she couldn't bear it. She tried to scramble forward, but he locked one arm around her waist and held her while he unfastened his jeans with the other hand. He kneed her thighs farther apart and eased himself against her, then let his weight down on her again.

"This reminds you of it, doesn't it?" he asked in a low, gentle voice. "Being on the ground, on your stomach, with me behind you. But you know I won't hurt you, that you don't have to be afraid, don't you?"

"I don't care. I don't like this! Let me up, I want up!"

"I know, baby. Come on now, relax. Think of how many times I've made love to you and how much you've enjoyed it. Trust me."

The smell of the hot earth was in her nostrils. "I don't want you to make love to me now," she managed to say, albeit raggedly. "Not like this."

"Then I won't. Don't be afraid, baby. I won't go any further unless you want me to. Just relax, and let's feel each other. I don't want you to be afraid when I come up behind you. I admit, your pretty little rear end turns me on. I like to look at it and touch it, and when you cuddle it against me in bed it drives me crazy. I guess you've noticed, though, haven't you?"

Dazedly, she tried to gather her scattered senses. He'd never hurt her before, and now that the haze of fear was fading, she knew he never would. This was Wolf, the man she loved, not her attacker. She was in his strong arms, where she was safe.

She relaxed, her tired muscles going limp. Yes, he was definitely aroused. She could feel him, nestled between her spread legs, but true to his word he was making no move to enter her.

He stroked her sides and kissed her neck. "Are you all right now?"

She sighed, a barely audible release of breath. "Yes," she whispered.

He shifted to his knees again and sat back on his heels. Before she could guess what he was about, his steely hands lifted her up and back, so she was sitting astride his thighs, but facing away from him. Their naked loins were pressed together, but still he didn't enter her.

The first twinge of excitement sang along her nerves. The moment was doubly erotic because they were out in the open, crouched on the grass with the hot, bright sun blazing down on them. If anyone happened to drive up, they would be caught. The sudden sense of danger sharply heightened her arousal. Actually, from the front they were covered, because her skirt was draped over his thighs.

Then that protective cover was whisked away as he pulled her skirt up and to the side. He held her to him with one hand on her stomach, and the other hand slid down between her legs. The intimate contact brought a sharp little cry to her lips.

"Do you like that?" he murmured against her ear and gently nipped the lobe.

Mary made some incoherent answer. His rough fingertips were rasping over her most sensitive flesh, creating and building such pleasure that she could barely speak. He knew exactly how to touch her, how to build her to readiness and take her to ecstasy. Mindlessly she arched back against him; the movement brought his manhood more solidly against her, and she groaned aloud.

"Wolf—please!"

He groaned, too, from between clenched teeth. "I'll please you any way you want, baby. Just tell me how."

She could barely speak for the powerful coil of sensation tightening inside her. "I want you."

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Like this?"

She moved against him and this time had to choke back a cry. "Yes!"

He eased her forward until she was on her stomach again and covered her. His entry was slow and gentle, and fever enveloped her. Eagerly she met the impact of his thrusts, her body on fire, all thoughts suspended before such all-consuming need. This wasn't a nightmare; this was another part of the sensual delights he'd been teaching her. She writhed against him and felt the coil tighten unbearably. Then it sprang free, and she convulsed in his arms. He clamped his hands on her hips and loosed his own responses, driving into her hard and fast until his pulsing release freed him.

They lay together on the grass for a long time, half-dozing, too exhausted to move. Only when Mary felt her legs begin to tingle from too much sun did she find the strength to push her skirt down. Wolf murmured a protest and slid his hand up her thigh.

She opened her eyes. The sky was bright blue, cloudless, and the sweet scent of fresh grass filled her lungs, radiated through her body. The earth was hot beneath her, the man she loved dozed beside her, and every inch of her still held the remnants of sensation from their lovemaking. The memory of it, so fresh and powerful, began to warm her body to desire again, and suddenly she realized that his plan had worked. He had recreated the scenario that had so terrified her, but substituted himself for the attacker. Instead of fear, pain and humiliation, he had given her desire and, ultimately, an ecstasy so strong it had taken her out of herself. He had replaced a terrible memory with a wonderful one. His hand was lying low on her abdomen now, and the simple intimacy of his touch stunned her. She could be carrying his child. She had been aware of the probable consequences of making love without protection, but it was what she wanted, and he had made no mention of birth control. Even if their relationship didn't last, she wanted his baby, a child with his strength and fire. If it could be a duplicate of him, nothing would make her happier. She stirred, and the pressure of his hand on her abdomen increased. "The sun is too hot," she murmured. "I'm getting burned."

He groaned, but fastened his jeans and sat up. Then he picked up her underpants, put them in his pocket and lifted her in his arms in the same motion he used to get to his feet.

"I can walk," she informed him, though she wound her arms around his neck.

"I know." He grinned down at her. "It's just that it's more romantic to carry you into the house to make love."

"But we just made love."

There was fire in his black eyes. "So?"

Wolf was just about to enter the feed store when a tingle touched the back of his neck like a cool wind. He didn't stop, which would have signalled an alarm to anyone watching, but, using his peripheral vision, he took a quick look around. The sense of danger was like a touch. Someone was watching him. His sixth sense was highly developed from hard training and years of application, and further enhanced by the strong mysticism of his heritage.

It wasn't just that he was being watched; he could feel the hatred directed toward him. He strode into the feed store and immediately stepped to the side, flattening himself against the wall as he looked out the door. Conversation in the store halted as if the words had hit a stone wall, but he ignored the thick silence. Adrenaline pumped through his body; he didn't notice that his gloved hand automatically slid over his chest to touch the knife that had been securely attached to the webbing he'd worn sixteen years before, in a steamy, hauntingly beautiful little country that reeked of blood and death. Only when his hand encountered nothing but his shirt did he realize that old habits had come to the fore.

Suddenly he realized that it was the man he'd been hunting, standing somewhere out there and staring at him with hatred, and rage surged through him. He didn't need a knife. Without a word he removed his hat and boots, the hat because it increased his silhouette, the boots because they were too noisy. In his sock feet he ran lightly past the stunned and silent little knot of men who had been standing around chewing the fat. Only one voiced a hesitant, "What's going on?"

Wolf didn't take time to answer, but slipped out the back door of the feed store. His movements were silent, deliberate, as he used every available bit of cover while moving from building to building, working his way around so he would come out behind where he had estimated the man to be. It was hard to pinpoint his position, but Wolf had automatically picked out the best locations for concealment. If he kept looking long enough, he'd find another of the tracks he'd been searching for; the guy would get careless, and Wolf would get him.

He slid around the back of the drugstore, feeling the heat of the sun-warmed boards against his back. He was more cautious than before, not wanting the wood to rasp against his shirt. It was gravelly here, too, and he placed his feet with care to keep the little rocks from making a telltale grinding.

He heard the heavy, thudding sound of someone running, as if he had bolted in panic. Wolf ran around the front of the building and knelt briefly to inspect a faint print in the dust, only a part of a print, but his blood surged. It was the same print, same shoe, same toeing-in stride. He sprinted like the big timber wolf he'd been named for, no longer caring about noise, racing up the street, looking left and right for anyone in the street.

Nothing. No one. The street was empty. He stopped to listen. He heard birds, the rustle of a fitful breeze in the trees, the far-off sound of an engine climbing the slight rise on the north side of the town. Nothing else. No fast breathing, no running footsteps.

Wolf swore to himself. The guy was worse than an amateur, he was clumsy and made stupid moves, as well as being out of shape. If he'd been anywhere close by, Wolf would have been able to hear his labuored breathing. Damn it, somehow his quarry had slipped away.

Wolf looked at the quiet houses nestled under the trees. Ruth didn't have residential and commercial zoning; it was too small. The result was that the houses and few businesses were mixed together without order. The man could have gone into any of the houses; the way he'd disappeared so suddenly left no other possibility. It verified Wolfs conviction that the rapist lived in Ruth; after all, both attacks had happened right in town.

He noted who lived in the houses on the street and tried to think of who inside them matched Mary's description of a heavily freckled man. No one came to mind. But someone would. By God, Wolf vowed, someone would. He was slowly eliminating men from his mental list. Eventually, there would be only one left.

From inside a house, a curtain moved fractionally. The sound of his own raspy breathing as he sucked air into his labouring lungs filled the man's ears. Through the tiny crack he'd made, he could see the Indian still standing in the street, staring at first one house, then another. Murderous black eyes moved across the window where the man stood, and he automatically stepped back out of sight.

His own fear sickened and enraged him. He didn't want to be afraid of the Indian, but he was.

"Damn filthy Indian!" He whispered the words, then echoed them in his head. He liked doing that, saying things out loud the first time, then saying them to himself for his private understanding and enjoyment.

The Indian was a murderer. They said he knew more ways of killing people than normal folks could even imagine. The man believed it, because he knew firsthand how Indians could kill.

He'd like to kill the Indian, and that boy of his with the strange, pale eyes that looked through him. But he was afraid, because he didn't know how to kill, and he knew he'd wind up getting killed himself. He was too afraid of getting that close to the Indian to even try it.

He'd thought about it, but he couldn't come up with a plan. He'd like to shoot the Indian, because he wouldn't have to get close to do that, but he didn't have a gun, and he didn't want to draw attention to himself by buying one. But he liked what he'd done to get back at the Indian. It gave him savage satisfaction to know he was punishing the Indian by hurting those stupid women who had taken up for him. Why couldn't they see him for the filthy, murdering trash he was? That stupid Cathy had said the Indian was good-looking! She'd even said she'd go out with the boy, and he knew that meant she'd let the boy touch her, and kiss her. She'd been willing to let the filthy Mackenzies kiss her, but she'd fought and screamed and gagged when he'd touched her.

It didn't make sense, but, he didn't care. He'd wanted to punish her and punish the Indian for—for being there, for letting stupid Cathy look at him and think he was good-looking.

And the schoolteacher. He hated her almost as much as he hated the Mackenzies, maybe more. She was so goody-goody, making people think the boy was something special, trying to talk people around so they'd be friendly to the half-breeds. Preaching in the general store!

He'd wanted to spit on her. He'd wanted to hurt her, bad. He'd been so excited he almost hadn't been able to stand it when he'd dragged her down that alley and felt her squirming beneath him. If that stupid deputy hadn't shown up, he'd have done to her what he'd done to Cathy, and he knew he'd have liked it more. He'd wanted to hit her with his fists while he did it to her. That would have shown her. She would never have stuck up for the half-breeds again.

He still wanted to get her, to teach her a lesson, but school was out now, and he'd heard people say that the deputy had made her move to some safe place, and no one knew where she was. He didn't want to wait until school started again, but he thought he might have to.

And that stupid Pam Hearst. She needed a lesson, too. He'd heard that she had gone to a dance with the half-breed boy. He knew what that meant. He'd had his hands on her, and she'd probably let him kiss her and maybe do a lot more, because everyone knew what the Mackenzies were like. As far as he was concerned, that made Pam a slut. She deserved to be taught a lesson just like Cathy, and just like the lesson the schoolteacher still had coming.

He peeked outside again. The Indian was gone. He immediately felt safe, and he began to plan.

When Wolf walked back into the feed store, the same group of men were still there. "We don't much like you tracking folks around like we're criminals," one man snapped.

Wolf grunted and sat down to pull on his boots. He didn't care if they liked it or not.

"Did you hear what I said?"

He looked up. "I heard."

"And?"

"And nothing."

"Now look here, damn it!"

"I'm looking."

The men fidgeted under his cold black stare. Another spoke up. "You're making the women nervous."

"They should be nervous. It might keep them on guard, keep them from getting raped."

"It was some drifter trash who blew in and blew out! Likely the sheriff won't ever find who did it."

"It's trash, all right, but he's still here. I just found his track."

The men fell silent and looked at each other. Stu Kilgore, the foreman on Eli Baugh's spread, cleared his throat. "We're supposed to believe you can tell it was made by the same man?"

"I can tell." Wolf gave them a smile that was closer to a snarl. "Uncle Sam made sure I got the best training available. It's the same man. He lives here. He slipped into one of the houses."

"That's hard to believe. We've lived here all our lives. The only stranger around is the schoolteacher. Why would someone just up and start attacking women?"

"Someone did. That's all I care about, that and catching him."

He left the men murmuring among themselves while he loaded his feed.

Pam was bored. Since the two attacks, she hadn't even stepped outside the house by herself; she'd been pretty scared at first, but the days had passed without any more attacks, and the shock had worn off. Women were beginning to venture out again, even by themselves.

She was going to another dance with Joe, and she wanted a new dress. She knew he was going away, knew she couldn't hold him, but there was still something about him that made her heart race. She refused to let herself love him, even though she knew any other boyfriend would have a hard time replacing Joe. Hard, but not impossible. She wasn't going to mope after he'd left; she'd get on with her life—but right now he was still here, and she savoured every moment with him.

She really wanted a new dress, but she'd promised Joe she wouldn't go anywhere alone, and she didn't intend to break her promise. When her mother returned from shopping with a neighbour, she'd ask her about going with her to get a new dress. Not in Ruth, of course; she wanted to go to a real town, with a real dress shop.

Finally she picked up a book and walked out onto the back porch, away from the sun. There were neighbours on both sides, and she felt safe. She read for a while, then became sleepy and lay down on the porch swing, arranging her long legs over the back of the swing. She dozed immediately.

The abrupt jolting of the swing awakened her some time later. She opened her eyes and stared at a ski mask, with narrowed, hate-filled eyes glittering through the slits. He was already on her when she screamed.

He hit her with his fist, but she jerked her head back so that the blow landed on her shoulder. She screamed again and tried to kick him, and the unsteady swing toppled them to the porch. She kicked again, catching him in the stomach, and he grunted, sounding oddly surprised.

She couldn't stop screaming, even as she scrabbled away from him. She was more terrified than she'd ever been before in her life, but also oddly detached, watching the scene from some safe distance. The wooden slats of the porch scraped her hands and arms, but she kept moving backward. He suddenly sprang, and she kicked at him again, but he caught her ankle. She didn't stop. She just kicked, using both legs, trying to catch him in the head or the groin, and she screamed.

Someone next door yelled. The man jerked his head up and dropped her ankle. Blood had seeped through the multicoloured ski mask; she'd managed to kick him in the mouth. He said "Indian's dirty whore" in a hate-thickened voice, and jumped from the porch, already running.

Pam lay on the porch, sobbing in dry, painful gasps. The neighbour yelled again, and somehow she garnered enough strength to scream "Help me!" before the terror made her curl into a ball and whimper like a child.

Chapter Twelve

Wolf wasn't surprised when the deputy's car pulled up and Clay got out. He'd had a tight feeling in his gut since he'd found that footprint in town. Clay's tired face told the story.

Mary saw who their visitor was and automatically got a cup for coffee; Clay always wanted coffee. He took off his hat and sat down, heaving a sigh as he did so.

"Who was it this time?" Wolf asked, his deep voice so rough it was almost a growl.

"Pam Hearst."

Joe's head jerked up, and all the colour washed out of his face. He was on his feet before Clay's next words came.

"She fought him off. She isn't hurt, but she's scared. He jumped her on the Hearsts' back porch, for God's sake. Mrs. Winston heard her screaming, and the guy ran. Pam said she kicked him in the mouth. She saw blood on the ski mask he was wearing."

"He lives in town," Wolf said. "I found another print, but it's hard to track in town, with people walking around destroying what few prints there are. I think he ducked into one of the houses along Bay Road, but he might not live there."

"Bay Road." Clay frowned as he mentally reviewed the people living on Bay Road; most of the townspeople lived along it, in close little clusters. There was also another cluster of houses on Broad Street, where the Hearsts lived. "We might have him this time. Any man who has a swollen lip will have to have an airtight alibi."

"If it just split his lip, you won't be able to tell. The swelling will be minimal. She would have to have really done some damage for it to be visible more than a day or so." Wolf had had more than his share of split lips, and delivered his share, too. The mouth healed swiftly. Now if Pam had knocked some teeth out, that would be a different story.

"Any blood on the porch?"

"No."

"Then she didn't do any real damage." There would have been blood sprayed all over the porch if she'd kicked out his teeth.

Clay shoved his hand through his hair. "I don't like to think of the uproar it would cause, but I'm going to talk to the sheriff about making a house-to-house search along Bay Road. Damn it, I just can't think of anyone it could be."

Joe abruptly left the room, and Wolf stared after his son. He knew Joe wanted to go to Pam, and knew that he wouldn't. Some of the barriers had come down, but most of them were still intact.

Clay had watched Joe leave, and he sighed again. "The bastard called Pam an 'Indian's dirty whore'." His gaze shifted to Mary, who had stood silently the whole time. "You were right"

She didn't reply, because she'd known all along that she was right. It made her sick to hear the name Pam had been called, because it so starkly revealed the hatred behind the attack.

"I suppose all the tracks at Pam's house have been ruined." Wolf said it as a statement, not a question.

"Afraid so." Clay was regretful, but practically everyone in town had been at the Hearsts' house before he'd gotten there, standing around the back porch and tramping around the area.

Wolf muttered something uncomplimentary under his breath about damn idiots. "Do you think the sheriff will go along with a house-to-house search?"

"Depends. You know some folks are going to kick up about it no matter what the reason. They'll take it personally. This is an election year," he said, and they took his point

Mary listened to them talking, but she didn't join in. Now Pam had been hurt; who was next? Would the man work up enough courage to attack Wolf or Joe? That was her real terror, because she didn't know if she could bear it. She loved them with all the fierceness of her soul. She would gladly put herself between them and danger.

Which was exactly what she would have to do.

It made her sick to even think of that man's hands on her again, but she knew in that moment that she was going to give him the opportunity. Somehow, she was going to lure him out. She wouldn't allow herself the luxury of hiding out on Mackenzie's Mountain any longer.

She would begin driving into town by herself. The only problem would be in getting away from Wolf; she knew he'd never agree if he had any idea what she was doing. Not only that, he was capable of preventing her from leaving at all, either by disabling her car or even locking her in the bedroom. She didn't underestimate him.

Since he had moved her up on the mountain with him, he'd been delivering and picking up horses, rather than letting the owners come up to the ranch, where they might see her. Her whereabouts were a well-kept secret, known only to Wolf, Joe and Clay. But that meant she was left alone several times a week while Wolf and Joe ran errands and delivered horses. Joe also left for his math lessons, and they had to ride fences and work the small herd of cattle, just as every rancher did. She really had a lot of opportunities for slipping away, at least the first time. It would be infinitely more difficult to get away after that, because Wolf would be on his guard.

She quietly excused herself and went in search of Joe. She peeked into his bedroom, but he wasn't there, so she went out on the front porch. He was leaning against one of the posts, his thumbs hooked in his front pockets. "It isn't your fault."

He didn't move. "I knew it could happen."

"You aren't responsible for someone else's hate."

"No, but I am responsible for Pam. I knew it could happen, and I should have stayed away from her."

Mary made an unladylike sound. "I seem to remember it was the other way around. Pam made her choice when she made that scene in her father's store."

"All she wanted was to go to a dance. She didn't ask for this."

"Of course not, but it still isn't your fault, any more than it would have been your fault if she'd been in a car accident. You can say you could have delayed her so she'd have been a minute later getting to that particular section of road, or hurried her up so she'd have been earlier, but that's ridiculous, and you know it."

He couldn't prevent a faint smile at the starchiness of her tone. She should be in Congress, cracking her whip and haranguing those senators and representatives into some sort of fiscal responsibility. Instead she'd taken on Ruth, Wyoming, and none of them had been the same since she'd set foot in town.

"All right, so I'm taking too much on myself," he finally said. "But I knew it wasn't smart to go out with her in the first place. It isn't fair. I'll be leaving here when I finish school, and I won't be back. Pam should be dating someone who's going to be around when she needs him."

"You're still taking too much on yourself. Let Pam make her own decisions about who she wants to date. Do you plan to isolate yourself from women forever?"

"I wouldn't go that far," he drawled, and in that moment he sounded so much like his father that it startled her. "But I don't intend to get involved with anyone."

"It doesn't always work out the way you want. You were involved with Pam even before I came here."

That was true, as far as it went. He sighed and leaned his head against the post. "I don't love her."

"Of course not. I never thought you did."

"I like her; I care for her. But not enough to stay, not enough to give up the Academy." He looked at the Wyoming night, the almost painful clarity of the sky, the brightly winking stars, and thought of jockeying an F-15 over these mountains, with the dark earth below and the glittering stars above. No, he couldn't give that up.

"Did you tell her that?"

"Yes."

"Then it was her decision."

They stood in silence, watching the stars. A few minutes later Clay left, and neither of them thought it strange that he hadn't said goodbye. Wolf came out on the porch and automatically slid his arm around Mary's waist, hugging her to his side even as he put his hand on his son's shoulder. "You okay?"

"Okay enough, I suppose." But he understood now the total rage he'd seen in Wolf's eyes when Mary had been attacked, the same rage that still burned in a rigidly controlled fire inside his father. God help the man if Wolf Mackenzie ever got his hands on him.

Wolf tightened his arm around Mary and led her inside, knowing it was best to leave Joe alone now. His son was tough; he'd handle it.

The next morning Mary listened as they discussed their day. There were no horses to deliver or pick up, but Joe had a math lesson that afternoon, and they intended to use the morning inoculating cattle. She had no idea how long it would take to treat the whole herd, but imagined they would both be tied up the entire morning. They would be riding a couple of the young quarter horses, to teach them how to cut cattle.

Joe had changed overnight; it was a subtle change, but one that made Mary ache inside. In repose, his young face held a grimness that saddened her, as if the last faint vestiges of boyhood had been driven from his soul. He'd always looked older than his age, but now, despite the smoothness of his skin, he no longer looked young.

She was a grown woman, almost thirty years old, and the attack had left scars she hadn't been able to handle alone. Cathy and Pam were just kids, and Cathy had to handle a nightmare that was far worse than what Mary and Pam had undergone. Joe had lost his youth. No matter what, that man had to be stopped before he damaged anyone else.

When Wolf and Joe left the house, Mary gave them plenty of time to get far enough away so they wouldn't hear her car start, then hurried out of the house. She didn't know what she was going to do, other than parade through Ruth on the off chance that her presence might trigger another attack. And then what? She didn't know. Somehow she had to be prepared; she had to get someone to keep watch so the man could be caught. It should have been easy to catch him; he'd been so careless, attacking out in the open and in broad daylight, making stupid moves, as if he attacked on impulse and without a plan. He hadn't even taken the simplest precautions against getting caught. The whole thing was strange. It didn't make sense.

Her hands were shaking as she drove into town; she was acutely aware that this was the first time since the day she'd been attacked that she was without protection. She felt exposed, as if her clothing had been stripped away.

She had to get someone to watch her, someone she trusted. Who? Sharon? The young teacher was her friend, but Sharon wasn't aggressive, and she thought the situation called for aggressiveness. Francie Beecham was too old; Cicely Karr would be too cautious. She discounted the men, because they would get all protective and refuse to help. Men were such victims to their own hormones. Machismo had killed a lot more people than PMS.

Pam Hearst sprang to mind. Pam would be extremely interested in catching the man, and she'd been aggressive enough to kick him in the mouth, to fight him off. She was young, but she had courage. She'd had the courage to go against her father and date a half-breed.

Conversation ceased when she walked into Hearst's store; it was the first time she'd been seen since the end of school. She ignored the thick silence, for she had what she suspected was a highly accurate guess as to the subject of the conversation she'd interrupted, and approached the checkout counter where Mr. Hearst stood.

"Is Pam at home?" she asked quietly, not wanting her question to be heard by the entire store.

He looked as if he'd aged ten years overnight, but there was no animosity in his face.

He nodded. The same thing had happened to Miss Potter, he thought. If she could talk to Pam, maybe she could take that haunted look out of his baby girl's eyes. Miss Potter had a lot of backbone for such a little thing; maybe he didn't always agree with her, but he'd damn sure learned to respect her. And Pam thought the world of her. "I'd appreciate it if you'd talk to her," he said. There was an odd, almost militant expression in her soft bluish eyes. "I'll do that," she promised, and turned to leave. She almost bumped into Dottie and was startled into a gasp; the woman had been right behind her.

"Good morning," Mary said pleasantly. Aunt Ardith had drilled the importance of good manners into her.

Strangely, Dottie seemed to have aged, too. Her face was haggard. "How are you doing, Mary?"

Mary hesitated, but she could detect none of the hostility she was accustomed to from Dottie. Had the entire town changed? Had this nightmare brought them to their senses about the Mackenzies? "I'm fine. Are you enjoying the vacation?"

Dottie smiled, but it was merely a movement of her facial muscles, not a response of pleasure. "It's been a relief."

She certainly didn't look relieved; she looked worried to a frazzle. Of course, everyone should be worried.

"How is your son?" Mary couldn't remember the boy's name, and she felt faintly embarrassed. It wasn't like her to forget names.

To her surprise, Dottie went white. Even her lips were bloodless. "W—why do you ask?" she stammered.

"He seemed upset the last time I saw him," Mary replied. She could hardly say that only good manners had prompted the question. Southerners always asked after family.

"Oh. He—he's all right. He hardly ever leaves the house. He doesn't like going out." Dottie looked around, then blurted "Excuse me," and left the store before Mary could say anything else.

She looked at Mr. Hearst, and he shrugged. He thought Dottie had acted a bit strange, too.

"I'll go see Pam now," she said.

She started to walk to the Hearst house, but the memory of what had happened the last time she'd walked through town made chills run up her spine, and she went to her car. She checked the back seat and floorboard before opening the door. As she started the engine, she saw Dottie walking swiftly up the street, her head down as if she didn't want anyone to speak to her. She hadn't bought anything, Mary realized. Why had she been in Hearst's store, if not to make a purchase? It couldn't be browsing, because everyone knew what every store in town carried. Why had she left so suddenly?

Dottie turned left down the small street where she lived, and abruptly Mary wondered what Dottie was doing walking around alone. Every woman in town should know better. Surely she had enough sense to be cautious.

Mary drove slowly up the street. She craned her neck when she reached the street where Dottie had turned and saw the woman hurrying up the steps of her house. Her eyes fell on the faded sign: Bay Road.

Bay Road was where Wolf thought the rapist had dodged into a house. It made sense that he wouldn't have entered a house that wasn't his home, unless he was a close friend who came and went just like a family member. That was possible, but even a very close friend would give a yell before just walking into someone else's house, and Wolf would have heard that.

Dottie was certainly acting odd. She'd looked as if she'd been stung by a bee when Mary had asked about her son… Bobby, that was his name. Mary was pleased that she'd remembered.

Bobby. Bobby wasn't "right." He did things in a skewed way. He was unable to apply logic to the simplest of chores, unable to plan a practical course of action.

Mary broke out in a sweat and had to stop the car. She'd only seen him once, but she could picture him in her mind: big, a little soft-looking, with sandy hair and a fair complexion. A fair, freckled complexion.

Was it Bobby? The one person in town who wasn't totally responsible for himself? The one person no one would ever suspect? Except his mother. She had to tell Wolf.

As soon as the thought formed, she dismissed it. She couldn't tell Wolf, not yet, because she didn't want to put that burden on him. His instincts would tell him to go after Bobby; his conscience would argue that Bobby wasn't a responsible person. Mary knew him well enough to know that, no matter which decision he made, he would always have regrets. Better for the responsibility to be hers than to push Wolf into such a position.

She'd call Clay. It was his job, after all. He'd be better able to deal with the situation.

Only a few seconds passed as her thoughts rushed through her mind. She was still sitting there staring at Dottie's house when Bobby came out on the porch. It took him a moment, but suddenly he noticed her car and looked straight at her. A distance of less than seventy-five yards separated them, still too far for her to read his expression, but she didn't need a close-up for sheer terror to spurt through her. She stomped on the gas pedal and the car shot forward, slinging gravel, the tires squealing.

It was only a short distance to the Hearst house. Mary ran to the front door and banged her fist on it. Her heart felt as if it would explode. That brief moment when she had been face-to-face with him was almost more than she could stand. God, she had to call Clay.

Mrs. Hearst opened the door a crack, then recognized Mary and swung it all the way open. "Miss Potter! Is something wrong?"

Mary realized that she must look wild. "Could I use your phone? It's an emergency."

"Why—of course." She stepped back, allowing Mary inside.

Pam appeared in the hallway. "Miss Potter?" She looked young and scared.

"The phone's in the kitchen."

Mary followed Mrs. Hearst and grabbed the receiver. "What's the number of the sheriffs department?"

Pam got a small telephone book from the countertop and began flipping through the pages. Too agitated to wait, Mary dialled the number for Information.

"Sheriff's department, please."

"What city?" the disembodied voice asked.

She drew a blank. For the life of her, she couldn't remember the name of the town.

"Here it is," Pam said.

Mary disconnected the call to Information, then dialled as Pam recited the number. The various computer clicks as the connection was made seemed to take forever.

"Sheriffs office."

"Deputy Armstrong, please. Clay Armstrong."

"One moment."

It was longer than one moment. Pam and her mother stood tensely, not knowing what was going on but reacting to her urgency. Both of them had dark circles under their eyes. It had been a bad night for the Hearst family.

"Sheriff's office," a different voice said.

"Clay?"

"You looking for Armstrong?"

"Yes. It's an emergency!" she insisted. "Well, I don't know where he is right now. You want to tell me what the trouble is—hey, Armstrong! Some lady wants you in a hurry." To Mary, he said, "He'll be right here."

A few seconds later Clay's voice said, "Armstrong."

"It's Mary. I'm in town."

"What the hell are you doing there?"

Her teeth were chattering. "It's Bobby. Bobby Lancaster. I saw him—"

"Hang up the phone!"

It was a scream, and she jumped, dropping the receiver, which dangled from the end of its cord. She flattened against the wall, for Bobby stood there, inside the kitchen, with a huge butcher knife in his hand. His face was twisted with both hate and fear.

"You told!" He sounded like an outraged child.

"Told—told what?"

"You told him! I heard you!"

Mrs. Hearst had shrunk back against the cabinets, her hand at her throat. Pam stood as if rooted in the middle of the floor, her face colourless, her eyes locked on the young man she'd known all her life. She could see the slight swelling of his lower lip.

Bobby shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as if he didn't know what to do next. His face was red, and he looked almost tearful.

Mary strove to steady her voice. "That's right, I told him. He's on his way now. You'd better run." Maybe that wasn't the best suggestion in the world, but more than anything she wanted to get him out of the Hearsts' house before he hurt someone. She desperately wanted him to run.

"It's all your fault!" He looked hunted, as if he didn't know what to do except cast blame. "You—you came here and changed things. Mama said you're a dirty Indian-lover."

"I beg your pardon. I prefer clean people."

He blinked, confused. Then he shook his head and said again, "It's your fault."

"Clay will be here in a few minutes. You'd better go."

His hand tightened on the knife, and suddenly he reached out and grabbed her arm. He was big and soft, but he was faster than he looked. Mary cried out as he twisted her arm up behind her back, nearly wrenching her shoulder joint loose.

"You'll be my hostage, just like on television," he said and pushed her out the back door.

Mrs. Hearst was motionless, frozen in shock. Pam leaped for the phone, heard the buzzing that signalled a broken connection and held the button down for a new line. When she got a dial tone, she dialled the Mackenzies' number. It rang endlessly, and she cursed, using words her mother had no idea she knew. All the while she leaned to the side, trying to see where Bobby was taking Mary.

She was just about to hang up when the receiver was picked up and a deep, angry voice roared, "Mary?"

She was so startled that she almost dropped the phone. "No," she choked. "It's Pam. He has Mary. It's Bobby Lancaster, and he just dragged her out of the house—"

"I'll be right there."

Pam shivered at the deadly intent in Wolf Mackenzie's voice.

Mary stumbled over a large rock hidden by the tall grass and gagged as the sudden intense pain made nausea twist her stomach.

"Stand up!" Bobby yelled, jerking at her.

"I twisted my ankle!" It was a lie, but it would give her an excuse to slow him down.

He'd dragged her across the small meadow behind the Hearsts', through a thick line of trees, over a stream, and now they were climbing a small rise. At least it had looked small, but now she knew it was deceptively large. It was a big open area, not the smartest place for Bobby to head, but he didn't plan well. That was what had thrown everyone off from the beginning, what had never seemed quite right. There had been no logic to his actions; Bobby reacted rather than planned.

He didn't know what to do for a twisted ankle, so he didn't worry about it, just pushed her along at the same speed. She stumbled again, but somehow managed to retain her balance. She wouldn't be able to bear it if she fell on her stomach and he came down on top of her again.

"Why did you have to tell?" he groaned.

"You hurt Cathy."

"She deserved it!"

"How? How did she deserve it?"

"She liked him—the Indian."

Mary was panting. She estimated they'd gone over a mile. Not a great distance, but the gradual uphill climb was telling on her. It didn't help that her arm was twisted up between her shoulder blades. How long had it been? When could she expect Clay to arrive? It had been at least twenty minutes.

Wolf made it off his mountain in record time. His eyes were like flint as he leaped from the truck before it had rocked to a complete stop. He and Joe both carried rifles, but Wolf's was a sniper rifle, a Remington with a powerful scope. He'd never had occasion to try a thousand-yard shot with it, but he'd never missed his target at closer range.

People milled around the back of the house. He and Joe shouldered their way through the crowd. "Everybody freeze, before you destroy any more tracks!" Wolf roared, and everyone stopped dead.

Pam darted to them. Her face was streaked with tears. "He took her into the trees. There," she said and pointed.

A siren announced Clay's arrival, but Wolf didn't wait for him. The trail across the meadow was as plain to him as a neon sign would have been, and he set off at a lope, with Joe on his heels.

Dottie Lancaster was terrified, and nearly hysterical. Bobby was her son, and she loved him desperately no matter what he'd done. She'd been sick when she'd realized he was the one who had attacked Cathy Teele and Mary; she'd almost worried herself into an early grave as she wrestled with her conscience and the sure knowledge that she'd lose her son if she turned him in. But that was nothing compared to the horror she'd felt when she discovered he'd slipped from the house. She'd followed the sounds of a disturbance and found all of her nightmares coming true: he'd taken Mary, and he had a knife. Now the Mackenzies were after him, and she knew they would kill him.

She grabbed Clay's arm as he surged past her. "Stop them," she sobbed. "Don't let them kill my boy."

Clay barely glanced at her. He shook her loose and ran after them. Distraught, Dottie ran, too.

By then some of the other men had gotten their rifles and were joining the hunt. They'd always felt sorry for Bobby Lancaster, but he'd hurt their women, and there was no excuse for it.

Wolf's heartbeat settled down, and he pushed the panic away. His senses heightened, as they always did when he was on the hunt. Every sound was magnified in his ears, instantly recognizable. He saw every blade of grass, every broken twig and overturned rock. He could smell every scent nature had left, and the faint acrid, coppery tang of fear. His body was a machine, moving smoothly, silently.

He could read every sign. Here Mary had stumbled, and his muscles tightened. She had to be terrified. If he hurt her—she was so slight, no match at all for a man. The bastard had a knife. Wolf thought of a blade touching her delicate, translucent skin, and rage consumed him. He had to push it away because he couldn't afford the mistakes rage could cause.

He broke out of the tree line and suddenly saw them, high on the side of the rise. Bobby was dragging Mary along, but at least she was still alive.

Wolf examined the terrain. He didn't have a good angle. He moved east, along the base of the rise.

"Stop!"

It was Bobby's voice, only faintly heard at that distance. They had halted, and Bobby was holding Mary in front of him. "Stop or I'll kill her!"

Slowly, Wolf went down on one knee and raised the rifle to his shoulder. He sighted through the scope, not for a shot, but to see how he should set it up. The powerful scope plainly revealed the desperation on Bobby's face and the knife at Mary's throat.

"Bobbeee!" Dottie had reached them, and she screamed his name.

"Mama?"

"Bobby, let her go!"

"I can't! She told!"

The men had clustered around. Several of them measured the distance by eye and shook their heads. They couldn't make the shot, not at that range. They were as likely to hit Mary as Bobby, if they hit anything at all.

Clay looked down at Wolf. "Can you make the shot?"

Wolf smiled, and Clay felt that chill run up his spine again at the look in Wolf's eyes. They were cold and murderous. "Yeah."

"No!" Dottie sobbed the word. "Bobby!" she screamed. "Please, come down!"

"I can't! I've got to kill her! She likes him, and he's a dirty Indian! He killed my father!"

Dottie gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. "No," she moaned, then screamed again. "No! He didn't!" Pure hell was living in her eyes.

"He did! You said—an Indian—" Bobby broke off and began dragging Mary backward.

"Do it," Clay said quietly.

Wolf braced the barrel of the rifle in the notch of a sapling. It was small but sturdy enough to be steady. Without a word he sighted in the cross hairs of the scope.

"Wait," Dottie cried, anguish in her voice.

Wolf looked at her.

"Please," she whispered. "Don't kill him. He's all I have."

His black eyes were flat. "I'll try."

He concentrated on the shot, shutting everything out as he always had. It was maybe three hundred yards, but the air was still. The image in the scope was huge and clear and flattened, the depth perception distorted. Mary's face was plain. She looked angry, and she was tugging at the arm around her shoulder, the one that held the knife to her throat.

God, when he got her back safe and sound, he was going to throttle her.

Because she was so small, he had a larger target than would normally have been presented. His instincts were to go for a head shot, to take Bobby Lancaster completely out of life, but he'd promised. Damn, it was going to be a bitch of a shot. They were moving, and he'd limited his own target area by promising not to go for a kill.

The cross hairs settled, and his hands became rock steady. He drew in a breath, let out half of it and gently squeezed the trigger. Almost simultaneously with the sharp thunder in his ear he saw the red stain blossom on Bobby's shoulder and the knife drop from his suddenly useless hand even as he was thrown back by the bullet's impact. Mary staggered to the side and fell, but was instantly on her feet again.

Dottie sagged to her knees, sobbing, her hands over her face.

The men surged up the hill. Mary ran down it and met Wolf halfway. He still had the rifle in his hand, but he caught her up in his arms and held her locked to him, his eyes closed as he absorbed the miracle of her, warm and alive against him, her silky hair against his face, her sweet scent in his lungs. He didn't care who saw them, or what anyone thought. She was his, and he'd just lived through the worst half hour of his existence knowing that at any moment her life could be ended.

Now that it was over, she was crying.

She'd been dragged up the hill, and now Wolf dragged her down it. He was swearing steadily under his breath, ignoring her gasping protests until she stumbled. Then he snatched her up under his arm like a sack and continued down. People stared after them in astonishment, but no one moved to stop him. After today, they all viewed Wolf Mackenzie differently.

Wolf ignored her car and thrust her into his truck. Mary pushed her hair out of her face and decided not to mention the car; they would pick it up later. Wolf was in a rage, his face set and hard.

They had almost reached the road that wound up his mountain before he spoke. "What in hell were you doing in town?" The even tone didn't fool her. The wolf was dangerously angered.

Perhaps she wasn't as cautious as she should have been, but she still wasn't afraid of him, not of the man she loved. She respected his temper, but she didn't fear him. So she said, just as calmly, "I thought seeing me might trigger him into doing something stupid, so we could identify him."

"You triggered him, all right. What he did wasn't nearly as stupid as what you did. What did you do, parade up and down the streets until he grabbed you?"

She let the insult pass. "Actually it never came to that. I intended to talk to Pam first. I stopped at the store to ask Mr. Hearst if she was home and bumped into Dottie. She acted so strange and looked so worried that it made me wonder. She almost ran out of the store. Then, when I saw her turn onto Bay Road, I remembered Bobby, what he looked like. He came out on the porch and looked at me, and I knew he was the one."

"So you made a citizen's arrest?" he asked sarcastically.

Mary got huffy. "No. I'm not stupid, and you'd better not make another smart remark, Wolf Mackenzie. I did what I thought I had to do. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but there it is. Enough was enough. I couldn't take the chance someone else could be hurt, or that he might start taking shots at you or Joe.

"I drove to Pam's house and called Clay. I had no intention of confronting Bobby, but it didn't work out that way. He followed me to Pam's and heard me talking on the phone. So he grabbed me. You know what happened then."

She was so matter-of-fact about it that he tightened his hands on the steering wheel to keep from shaking her. If she hadn't been crying just a few minutes ago, he might have lost his tenuous control on his temper.

"Do you know what might have happened if I hadn't come back to the barn for something and noticed your car was missing? It was just chance I was there when Pam called to tell me Bobby had grabbed you!"

"Yes," she said patiently. "I know what could have happened."

"It doesn't bother you that he came close to cutting your throat?"

"Close doesn't count except in horseshoes and hand grenades."

He slammed on the brakes, so enraged he could barely see. He wasn't aware of shutting off the motor, only of closing his hands on her slender shoulders. He was so close to pulling her across his knees that he was shaking, but she didn't seem to realize that she should be frightened. With a faint sound she dived into his arms, clinging to him with surprising strength.

Wolf held her and felt her trembling. The red haze left his vision, and looked at me, and I knew he was the one."

"So you made a citizen's arrest?" he asked sarcastically.

Mary got huffy. "No. I'm not stupid, and you'd better not make another smart remark, Wolf Mackenzie. I did what I thought I had to do. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but there it is. Enough was enough. I couldn't take the chance someone else could be hurt, or that he might start taking shots at you or Joe.

"I drove to Pam's house and called Clay. I had no intention of confronting Bobby, but it didn't work out that way. He followed me to Pam's and heard me talking on the phone. So he grabbed me. You know what happened then."

She was so matter-of-fact about it that he tightened his hands on the steering wheel to keep from shaking her. If she hadn't been crying just a few minutes ago, he might have lost his tenuous control on his temper.

"Do you know what might have happened if I hadn't come back to the barn for something and noticed your car was missing? It was just chance I was there when Pam called to tell me Bobby had grabbed you!"

"Yes," she said patiently. "I know what could have happened."

"It doesn't bother you that he came close to cutting your throat?"

"Close doesn't count except in horseshoes and hand grenades."

He slammed on the brakes, so enraged he could barely see. He wasn't aware of shutting off the motor, only of closing his hands on her slender shoulders. He was so close to pulling her across his knees that he was shaking, but she didn't seem to realize that she should be frightened. With a faint sound she dived into his arms, clinging to him with surprising strength.

Wolf held her and felt her trembling. The red haze left his vision, and he realized that she was frightened, but not of him. With her normal damn-the-torpedoes attitude, she'd done what she'd thought was right and was probably trying to put up a calm front so he wouldn't be alarmed.

As if anything could ever alarm him more than seeing an unbalanced rapist hold a knife to her throat.

Frantically he started the truck. It wasn't far to his house, but he didn't know if he could make it. He had to make love to her, soon, even if it was in the middle of the road. Only then would the fear of losing her begin to fade, when he felt her beneath him once more and she welcomed him into her delicate body.

Mary brooded. It had been four days since Wolf had shot Bobby; the first two days had been filled with statements and police procedures, as well as newspaper interviews and even a request from a television station, which Wolf had refused. The sheriff, not being a fool, had hailed Wolf as a hero and praised the shot he'd made. Wolf's military service record was dug up, and a lot was written about the "much-decorated Vietnam veteran" who had saved a schoolteacher and captured a rapist.

Bobby was recuperating in a hospital in Casper; the bullet had punctured his right lung, but he was lucky to be alive under the circumstances. He was bewildered by everything that had happened and kept asking to go home. Dottie had resigned. She'd have to live the rest of her life knowing that her hatred had taken seed in her son's mind and caused the entire nightmare. She knew Bobby would be taken away from her, at least for a time, and that they would never be able to live in Ruth again, even if he was ever a free man. But wherever Bobby was sent, she intended to be close by. As she'd told Wolf, he was all she had.

It was over, and Mary knew that Wolf would never be treated as an outcast again. The threat was past, and the town was safe. Just knowing who it was and that he'd been caught made a lot of difference in Cathy Teele's recovery, though what had happened would always mark her life.

So there was no reason why Mary couldn't return to her own house.

That was why she was brooding. In those four days, Wolf hadn't said a word about her remaining with him. He'd never said a word of love, not even during their wild lovemaking after he'd snatched her to safety. He hadn't said anything at all about their personal situation.

It was time to go home. She couldn't stay with him forever, not when there was no fear for her safety now. She knew their affair would probably continue, at least for a while, but still the thought of leaving his house depressed her. She'd loved every minute of her time on Mackenzie's Mountain, loved sharing the little commonplace things with him. Life consisted of the small things, with only scattered moments of intensity.

She calmly packed and refused to let herself cry. She was going to be under control and not make a scene. She loaded her suitcases into her car, then waited for Wolf to return to the house. It would be childish to sneak off, and she wouldn't do it; she'd tell him she was returning to her home, thank him for his protection and leave. It would be immensely civilized.

As it happened, it was late afternoon when Wolf got back. He was sweaty and coated with dust, and limping a little, because a cow had stepped on his foot. He wasn't in a good mood.

Mary smiled at him. "I've decided to get out of your hair, since there's no reason to be afraid of staying by myself now. I've already packed and loaded everything in the car, but I wanted to stay until you got home to thank you for everything you've done."

Wolf paused in the act of gulping cool, fresh water down his parched throat. Joe froze on the step, not wanting them to see him. He couldn't believe Wolf would let her leave.

Slowly, Wolf turned his head to look at her. There was a savage expression in his eyes, but she was concentrating too hard on maintaining control to see it. She gave him another smile, but this one was harder, because he hadn't said a word, not even, "I'll call you."

"Well," she said brightly, "I'll see you around. Tell Joe not to forget his lessons."

She marched out the front door and down the steps.

She'd gotten halfway to her car when a hard hand clamped down on her shoulder and spun her around,

"I'll be damned if you're setting foot off this mountain," he said in a harsh tone.

He towered over her. For the first time Mary felt it was a disadvantage that she only reached his shoulder. She had to tilt her head back to talk to him, he was so close. The heat from his body enveloped her like steam. "I can't stay here forever," she replied reasonably, but now she could see the look in his eyes and she shivered. "I'm a smalltown schoolteacher. I can't just cohabit with you—"

"Shut up," he said.

"Now see here—"

"I said shut up. You aren't going anywhere, and you're damn well going to cohabit with me for the rest of your life. It's too late today, but first thing in the morning we're going into town for our blood tests and license. We're going to be married within a week, so get your little butt back in that house and stay there. I'll bring your suitcases in."

His expression would have made most men back up a few steps, but Mary crossed her arms. "I'm not marrying someone who doesn't love me."

"Hellfire!" he roared and jerked her up against him. "Not love you? Damn, woman, you've been wrapping me around your little finger since the first time I set eyes on you! I'd have killed Bobby Lancaster in a heartbeat for you, so don't you ever say I don't love you!"

As a declaration of love cum marriage proposal, it wasn't exactly romantic, but it was certainly exciting. Mary smiled up at him and went on tiptoe to loop her arms around his neck. "I love you, too."

He glared down at her, but noticed how pretty she looked with her soft pink sweater bringing out the delicate roses in her cheeks, and her slate-blue eyes twinkling at him. A breeze flirted with her silky, silvery-brown hair, and suddenly he buried his face in the baby-fine strands at her temple.

"God, I love you," he whispered. He'd never thought he would love any woman, least of all an Anglo, but that was before this slight, delicate creature had bulldozed her way into his life and completely changed it. He could no more live without her now than he could live without air. "I want children," she stated. He smiled against her temple. "I'm willing." She thought about it some more. "I think I'd like four." A slight frown creased his brow as he held her tighter. "We'll see." She was too small and delicate for that many pregnancies; two would be better. He lifted her in his arms and started for the house, where she belonged.

Joe watched from the window and turned away with a grin as his father lifted Mary against his chest.

Epilogue

Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado

Joe opened the letter from Mary and began grinning as he read. His roommate looked at him with interest. "Good news from home?"

"Yeah," Joe said without looking up. "My stepmother is pregnant again."

"I thought she just had a baby."

"Two years ago. This is their third."

His roommate, Bill Stolsky, watched Joe finish the letter. Privately he was a little awed by the calm, remote half-breed. Even when they'd been doolies, first-year cadets, and normally regarded as lower than the low, there had been something about Joe Mackenzie that had kept the upper-classmen from dealing him too much misery. He'd been at the top of his class from the beginning, and it was already known that he was moving on to flight training after graduation. Mackenzie was on the fast track to the top, and even his instructors knew it.

"How old is your stepmother?" Stolsky asked in curiosity. He knew Mackenzie was twenty-one, a year younger than himself, though they were both seniors in the Academy.

Joe shrugged and reached for a picture he kept in his locker. "Young enough. My dad's pretty young, too. He was just a kid when I was born."

Stolsky took the picture and looked at the four people in it. It wasn't a posed photograph, which made it more intimate. Three adults were playing with a baby. The woman was small and delicate, and was looking up from the baby in her lap to smile at a big, dark, eagle-featured man. The man was one tough-looking dude. Stolsky wouldn't want to meet him in an alley, dark or otherwise. He glanced quickly at Joe and saw the strong resemblance.

But the baby was clinging to the big man's finger with a dimpled fist and laughing while Joe tickled his neck. It was a revealing and strangely disturbing look into Mackenzie's private life, into his tightly knit family.

Stolsky cleared his throat. "Is that the newest baby?"

"No, that picture was made when I was a senior in high school. That's Michael. He's four years old now, and Joshua is two." Joe couldn't help grinning and feeling worried at the same time when he thought of Mary's letter. Both his little brothers had been delivered by caesarean, because Mary was simply too slender to have them. After Joshua's birth, Wolf had said there would be no more babies, because Mary had had such a hard time carrying Josh. But Mary had won, as usual. He'd have to make a point of getting off on leave when this baby was due.

"Your stepmother isn't—uh—"

"Indian? No."

"Do you like her?"

Joe smiled. "I love her. I wouldn't be here without her." He stood and walked to the window. Six years of hard work, and he was on the verge of getting what he'd lived for: fighter jets. First there was flight training, then Fighter Training School. More years of hard work loomed before him, but he was eager for them. Only a small percentage made it to fighters, but he was going to be one of them.

The cadets in his class who were going on to flight training had already been thinking of fighter call signs, picking theirs out even though they knew some of them would wash out of flight training, and an even greater number would never make it to fighters. But they never thought it would be them; it was always the other guy who washed out, the other guy who didn't have the stuff.

They'd had a lot of fun thinking up those signs, and Joe had sat quietly, a little apart as he always was. Then Richards had pointed at him and said, "You'll be Chief."

Joe had looked up, his face calm and remote. "I'm not a chief." His tone had been even, but Richards had felt a chill.

"All right," he'd agreed. "What do you want to be called?"

Joe had shrugged. "Call me 'Breed.' It's what I am."

Already, though they hadn't even graduated yet, people were calling him Breed Mackenzie. The name would be painted on his helmet, and a lot of people would forget his real name.

Mary had given him this. She'd pushed and prodded, fought for him, taught him. She'd given him his life, up in the blue.

Mary turned into Wolf's arms. She was nude, and his big hand kept stroking down her pale body as if searching out signs of her as-yet-invisible pregnancy. She knew he was worried, but she felt wonderful and tried to reassure him. "I've never felt better. Face it, pregnancy agrees with me." He chuckled and stroked her breasts, lifting each one in turn in his palm. They were fuller now, and more sensitive.

He could almost bring her to satisfaction just with his mouth on her nipples.

"But this is the last one," he said.

"What if it's another boy? Wouldn't you like to try for a girl just once more?"

He groaned, because that was the argument she'd used to talk him into getting her pregnant this time. She was determined to have her four children.

"Let's make a deal. If this one is a girl, there won't be any more. If it's a boy, we'll have one more baby, but that's the limit, regardless of its sex."

"It's a deal," she agreed. She paused. "Have you thought that it's possible you could father a hundred children and they'd all be boys? You may not have any female sperm. Look at your track record, three boys in a row—"

He put his hand on her mouth. "No more. Four is the absolute limit."

She laughed at him and arched her slender body against him. His response was immediate, even after five years of marriage. Later, when he slept, Mary smiled into the darkness and stroked his strong back. This baby was a boy, too, she felt. But the next one—ah, the next one would be the daughter he craved. She was certain of it.

2 - Mackenzie's Mission

Prologue

"Man must be trained for war, and woman for

the relaxation of the warriors; all else is folly."

—Friedrich Nietzsche

"Hogwash."

—Linda Howard

He was a legend even before he graduated from the Academy, at least among his own classmates and the underclassmen. As first in his graduating class he had his pick of assignments, and to no one's surprise, he chose fighter jets. The politically savvy all knew that the fastest way to promotion in the Air Force was as an aviator, and fighter wings, with their inherent glamour, had always been the most visible. But those who knew Joe Mackenzie, newly commissioned officer in the United States Air Force, knew he didn't give a damn about promotion, only about flying.

His superiors had doubts about his suitability for fighters, but that was the training he had chosen, and they decided to give him the opportunity. He was six foot three, almost too tall for a fighter jockey. He'd be okay as a bomber pilot, but the dimensions of the cockpit in a fighter meant it would be a tight fit for him, and the physical demands of G forces were generally better met by men who were less than six feet tall, and of stockier build. Of course, there were exceptions to every rule, and the statistics for the physical build of the best fighter pilots were general profiles, not hard-and-fast rules. So Joe Mackenzie was given his chance at fighter training.

His training instructors found that, despite his height, he was better than competent: he was superb. He was that once-in-a-lifetime jet jockey, the one who set the standards for everyone who came after him. He was peculiarly suited, both physically and mentally, for the job he had chosen. His eyesight was better than twenty-twenty, his reflexes were phenomenal and his cardiovascular condition was so good that he was able to withstand greater G forces than his shorter fellow trainees. He remained at the top in his classes on physics and aerodynamics. He had a light touch with the controls and was willing to spend extra hours in the flight simulator perfecting his skills. Most of all, he had the unteachable quality of "situation awareness," the ability to be aware of everything going on around him in a fluid situation and adjust his actions accordingly. All aviators had to have it to some degree, but only in the best of them was it highly developed. He had an amazing degree of it. By the time Joe Mackenzie earned his wings, he was already known as a "hot stick," one of those with the magic touch.

As a very young captain in the first Gulf War, he downed three enemy aircraft in one day, an achievement that, to his relief, wasn't publicized. The reasons for it were political: to ensure better public relations with their allies, the United States Air Force was willing to let pilots from the other countries get the glory. Captain Mackenzie was more than willing to go along with policy. It had been mere chance, on the second day of the war, that had put him in the middle of the toughest resistance the enemy put up during the short length of the hostilities. He hadn't been impressed with the enemy pilots' skills. Nevertheless, for about three minutes it had been a real fur ball, when he and his wingman had been jumped by six enemy fighters.

The end result was an almost indecently fast promotion to Major, and Joe Mackenzie, tactical call sign "Breed," was recognized as the fastest of the fast trackers, a fast-burner on his way to a general's star.

During the second Gulf War, Major Mackenzie scored two more official kills in air-to-air combat and was designated an ace. This time there was no way to keep his achievements out of the media, not that the Pentagon wanted to; it recognized that it had a public-relations gold mine in the handsome half-breed American Indian, who exemplified all of the qualities they most wanted to project. He was given the choice assignments and made lieutenant colonel at the age of thirty-two. It was generally recognized that for Breed Mackenzie, there was nowhere to go but up.

Chapter One

She was the most beautiful bitch he'd ever seen, fast and sleek and deadly. Just looking at her made his heart beat faster. Even parked in the hangar, her engines cold and wheels chocked, she gave the impression of pure speed.

Colonel Joe Mackenzie reached out and touched the fuselage, his long fingers caressing her with the light touch of a lover. The dark metallic skin of her airframe had a slick feel to it mat was different from every other fighter he'd flown, and the difference entranced him. He knew it was because her airframe was a revolutionary new composite of thermoplastics, graphite and industrial spider silk, which was far stronger and more flexible than steel, meaning she could withstand far greater force without breaking apart than any aircraft ever before built. Intellectually he knew that, but emotionally he felt that it was because she was so alive. She didn't feel quite like metal; maybe it was the spider silk, but she wasn't as cold to the touch as any other airplane.

Developmental programs were usually given code names that didn't reflect the program's nature, which was why the earlier SR-71 Blackbird had been code named "Oxcart." This particular bird, a second-generation advanced tactical fighter, bore the unusually descriptive code name of Night Wing, and when it went into production it would receive some suitably macho designation like the F-1S Eagle or the F-16 Fighting Falcon, but to Colonel Mackenzie she was "Baby." There were actually five prototypes, and he called them all Baby. The test pilots assigned to the program under his command complained that she—whichever "she" it was—always acted up with them because he had spoiled her for other pilots. Colonel Mackenzie had given them his legendary ice-blue stare and replied, "That's what all my women say." His face had remained perfectly expressionless, leaving his men uncertain if that was the truth or a joke. They suspected it to be the truth.

Joe Mackenzie had flown a lot of hot planes, but Baby was special, not just in her construction and power, but her weapons system. She was truly revolutionary, and she was his; as program manager, it was his responsibility to get the kinks worked out of her so she could go into full production. That was assuming Congress came through with the funding, but General Ramey was confident that there wouldn't be any problem there. For one thing, the manufacturer had brought her in on budget, unlike the overrun fiasco that had killed the A-12 in the last decade.

For a long time stealth technology had detracted from a fighter plane's agility and power, until the advent of supercruise had alleviated some of the power problems. Baby was both stealthy and agile, with vectored thrust that let her turn tighter than any fighter had ever turned before, and at higher speeds. She super-cruised at Mach 2, and broke Mach 3 in afterburner. And her weapons system used adjustable laser firing, ALF, a mild little acronym for what would someday revolutionize warfare. Mackenzie knew he was involved in the making of history. Lasers had been used for targeting for some time, the beam guiding missiles to the selected location, but for the first time lasers were being used as the weapons themselves. Scientists had finally solved the difficulty of a manageable energy source for X-ray lasers and teamed it with sophisticated optics. Sensors in the pilot's helmet allowed him to spot a missile, target or enemy plane in any direction, and the adjustable targeting system followed the direction of the sensors in the helmet. No matter how an enemy plane turned and juked it couldn't escape; a target would have to go faster than the speed of light to escape the laser beam, something not likely to happen.

Baby was so complex that only the best of the best had been assigned to this phase of her development, and the security surrounding her was so tight that an ant would have had a hard time getting into the hangar without proper clearance.

"Anything you need, sir?"

Joe turned, shifting his attention to Staff Sergeant Dennis Whiteside, known as "Whitey," who possessed fiery red hair, a multitude of freckles and a mechanical genius that bordered on miraculous where airplanes were concerned. Whitey considered Baby his plane and suffered the pilots touching her only because he couldn't figure out a way to prevent it

"Just checking her over before I turn in," Joe replied. "Weren't you supposed to go off duty hours ago?"

Whitey took a rag from his back pocket and gently polished the spot where Joe's fingers had touched the plane. "There were some things I wanted to make sure were done right," he replied. "You're taking her up in the morning, aren't you, sir?"

"Yes."

Whitey grunted. "At least you don't jerk her around the way some of those guys do," he said grouchily.

"If you notice any of my guys treating any of the birds rough, let me know."

"Well, it ain't rough, exactly. It's just that they don't have your touch."

"All the same, I mean what I said."

"Yes, sir."

Joe clapped Whitey on the shoulder and headed for his quarters. The sergeant stared after him for a long minute. He had no doubt that the colonel would indeed make any pilot pray he would die and go to hell just to escape his wrath if any of them were caught being careless or stupid with any of the Night Wing prototypes. Colonel Mackenzie was notorious for accepting nothing less than perfection from his pilots, but at the same time they all knew that he valued his men's lives above all else, and maintenance on the buds had to be top-notch, which was why Whitey was still in me hangar long after he should have been off duty. Mackenzie demanded the best from everyone in this program, with no exceptions. A mistake in maintenance on the ground could lead to the loss of one of these eighty-million-dollar aircraft, or even the death of a pilot. It wasn't a job for anyone with a casual attitude.

As Joe walked through the desert night he saw a light on in one of the offices and turned his steps toward the metal building. He didn't object to people working late, but he wanted everyone to be awake and alert the next day, too. There were some workaholics assigned to the Night Wing project who would work eighteen hours a day if he didn't ride herd on them.

His steps were silent, not because he was trying to sneak up on anyone but because that was how he'd been taught to walk from the time he'd taken his first step. Not that anyone in the offices would have heard him approaching anyway; the air conditioners were humming, trying to offset the late July heat and never quite succeeding. The metal Quonset huts seemed to absorb the blistering sun.

The building was dark except for the light in a cubicle on the left. It was one of the offices used by the civilian laser-targeting team, working on-site to troubleshoot the glitches that inevitably showed up when a new system was put into operation. Joe remembered that a new technician had been scheduled to arrive that day, to replace one of the original team who had had a slight heart attack a week before. The guy who'd had the attack was doing okay, but his doctor didn't want him working in the hundred-degree-plus heat, so the company had flown in a replacement.

Joe was curious about the replacement, a woman named Caroline Evans. He'd heard the other three members of the team grousing about her, calling her "the Beauty Queen," and their tone hadn't been admiring. The team might be civilian, but he couldn't allow friction within the group to affect their work. If everyone couldn't get along, he would have to tell the laser-systems people to replace their replacement. He wanted to talk to whichever of the team was working late, find out if Ms. Evans had arrived without incident and exactly what the problem was that they didn't want to work with her.

He walked silently up to the open doorway and stood in it for a minute, watching. The woman in the office had to be the Beauty Queen herself, because she sure as hell wasn't anyone he'd ever met before. He would have remembered if he had.

It wasn't any hardship to watch her, that was for certain. His erect posture slowly stiffened as every muscle in his body surged to alert status. He'd been tired, but suddenly adrenaline was humming through his system and all of his senses became acute, just the way they did when he kicked in the afterburners and went ballistic.

She wore a straight red skirt that ended well above her knees. Her shoes were off, and she was leaning back in her chair, her bare feet propped on the desk. Joe leaned his shoulder against the door frame, leisurely surveying the smooth, curved legs that had been exposed. No stockings; the heat made them impractical. Nice legs. Better than nice. Verging on stupendous.

A sheaf of computer printouts were on her lap, and she was checking each item, referring occasionally to a textbook beside her. A cup of pale green tea was gently steaming within easy reach of her often blindly reaching hand. Her hair was a pale, bell-shaped curve, combed straight back from her face in the classic style and just long enough to bounce on her shoulders. He could see only part of her face, enough to note her high cheekbones and full lips.

Suddenly he wanted her to face him. He wanted to see her eyes, hear her voice.

"Time to shut it down for the night," he said.

She shot up from the chair with a stifled shriek, tea spilling in one direction and the computer printout in another, long legs flying as she brought them down to the floor, the chair sent spinning across the room to crash into the filing cabinets. She whirled to face him, one hand pressed to her breast as if she could physically calm her heartbeat. A very shapely breast, he noticed, for her hand had pulled the fabric of her cotton blouse tight across her flesh.

Anger flashed like lightning across her face, then was just as suddenly gone as her eyes widened. "Oh my God," she said in a hushed tone. "It's G.I. Joe."

He caught the subtle undertone of sarcasm, and his black eyebrows lifted. "Colonel G.I. Joe."

"So I see," she said admiringly. "A full bird colonel. And a ring-knocker," she added, pointing to his academy ring and using the less than complimentary term for an academy graduate. "Either you mugged a colonel and stole his insignia, had a fantastic face-lift and dyed your hair black, or you have a sponsor with some heavy-duty juice who's rushing you through me grades."

He kept his expression bland. "Maybe I'm damn good at what I do."

"Promotion on merit?" she asked, as if it were a concept so impossible it was beyond consideration. "Naahh."

He was accustomed to women reacting to him in varying ways, ranging from fascination to a certain intimidation that bordered on fear, always based on a very physical awareness of him. He was also used to commanding respect, if not liking. None of that was in Caroline Evans' expression. She hadn't taken her eyes off him for a second, her gaze as steady and piercing as a gunslinger's. Yeah, that was it; she was facing him like an adversary.

He straightened away from the door frame and held out his hand, abruptly deciding to put the situation on a professional standing and let her know who she was dealing with. "Colonel Joe Mackenzie, project manager." Service protocol stated that shaking hands was a woman's choice, that a male officer should never extend his hand to a woman first, but he wanted to feel her hand in his and sensed that if he gave her the option, even that touch wouldn't be allowed.

She didn't hesitate but firmly clasped his hand. "Caroline Evans, replacement for Boyce Walton on the laser team." Two quick up and down pumps, then she withdrew her hand.

Since she was barefoot, he could accurately estimate her height as around five-four, the top of her head was even with his collarbone. The difference in their sizes didn't intimidate her, even though she had to look up to meet his gaze. Her eyes were a dark green, he saw, framed by dark lashes and brows that suggested the gold of her hair was chemically achieved.

He nodded toward the printout on the floor. "Why are you working so late, especially on your first day on the job? Is anything wrong that I need to know about?"

"Not that I know of," she replied, stooping down to pick up the accordion of paper. "I was just double-checking some items."

"Why? What made you think of it?"

She gave him an impatient look. "I'm a chronic double-checker. I always double-check that the oven is off, the iron unplugged, the door locked. I look both ways twice before I cross a road."

"You haven't found anything wrong?"

"No, of course not. I've already said so."

He relaxed once he was assured that nothing was wrong with the targeting system and resumed his leisurely and enjoyable survey of Caroline Evans as she took a roll of paper towels from a desk drawer and used a couple of sheets to blot up the spilled tea. She bent and twisted with a fluid ease that struck him as sexy. Everything she had done so far, even the barely veiled challenge of her gaze, had struck him as sexy. His loins tightened in response.

She tossed the wet paper towels in the trash and slipped her feet into her shoes. "Nice meeting you, Colonel," she said without looking at him. "See you tomorrow."

"I'll walk you to your quarters."

"No thanks."

The immediate, casual dismissal of his offer irritated him. "It's late, and you're alone. I'm walking you to your quarters."

She did look at him then, turning to face him and putting her hands on her hips. "I appreciate the offer, Colonel, but I don't need those kinds of favors."

"Those kinds of favors? What kind are we talking about?"

"The kind that do more harm than good. Look, you're the head honcho. If anyone sees you walking me to my quarters, within two days I'll be hearing snide comments about how I wouldn't be on the team if I wasn't playing footsie with you. It's a hassle I can do without."

"Ah," he said as understanding dawned. "You've run into this before, haven't you? No one thinks you can look like that and have a brain, too."

She stared at him belligerently. "What do you mean, 'look like that'? Just how do I look?"

She had the temperament of a hedgehog, but Joe had to fight the urge to put his arms around her and tell her that he would fight her battles for her from now on. She wouldn't appreciate the gesture, and he wasn't certain why he wanted to make it, since she appeared more than capable of waging her own wars. If he were smart, he would play it safe, make some noncommittal comment to keep from treading on her toes any further, but he hadn't become a fighter pilot because he wanted to play it safe. "Fetching," he replied, and his eyes were hard and bright and hungry.

She blinked, as if startled. She took a step back and said, "Oh," in a soft, befuddled tone.

"You have to know you're attractive," he pointed out.

She blinked again. "Looks shouldn't enter into it. You look like a walking recruiting poster, but it hasn't hurt your career, has it?"

"I'm not defending discrimination," he said. "You asked the question, and I answered it. You look fetching."

"Oh." She was watching him warily now as she sidled past

He put his hand on her arm, stopping her. The feel of her smooth, warm flesh under his palm tempted him to explore, but he resisted. "If anyone here hassles you, Caroline, come to me."

She darted an alarmed look at his hand on her arm. "Uh—yeah, sure."

"Even if it's a member of your own team. You're civilians, but this is my project I can have anyone replaced if he causes trouble."

His touch was making her visibly jittery, and he studied her for a long minute, his brows drawing together in a slight frown, before he let her go. "I mean it," he said in a gentler tone. "Come to me if you have any trouble. I know you don't want me to walk you to your quarters, but I'm going in that direction anyway, since I'm turning in, too. I'll give you a thirty-second head start, so we won't be walking together. Is that okay?"

"Thirty seconds isn't very long."

He shrugged. "It'll put about thirty yards between us. Take it or leave it." He checked his watch. "Starting now."

She immediately turned and fled. That was the only word for it. She all but hiked up that tight skirt and ran. Joe's eyebrows climbed in silent question. When the thirty seconds were up, he left the building and caught sight of her slim figure, barely visible in the darkness and still moving at a fast clip. All the way to his own quarters, he pondered on what had turned an Amazon into a skittish filly.

Caroline slammed and locked the door to her Spartan quarters and leaned against the wood as she released her breath in a big whoosh. She felt as if she'd just had a narrow escape from a wild animal. What was the Air Force thinking, letting that man run loose? He should be locked up somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon, where they could use him for their posters but keep the susceptible women of America safe.

Maybe it was his eyes, as pale blue and piercing as the lasers she worked on. Maybe it was the way he towered over her, or the graceful power of his muscular body. Maybe it was his deep voice, the particular note in it when he said she was "fetching," or the heat of his lean, callused hand when he'd touched her. Maybe it was all of that, but what had all but panicked her had been the hungry, predatory gleam in those eyes when he'd looked at her.

She'd been doing well up until then. She had definitely been at her off-putting best, both arrogant and dismissive, which had never before failed to keep men at a safe distance. It was a trade-off; it kept her from being friends with her co-workers, but it also stopped any sexual advances before they started. She had battled her way out of so many clinches during college and graduate school and her early days on the job, that she had learned to go on the offensive from the beginning. With all of that experience, she should have been able to keep her composure, but one look from Colonel "Laser-Eye" Mackenzie, one slightly admiring comment, and she had lost both her composure and her common sense. She had been ignominiously routed.

Well, that was what happened when you had Ph.D.s for parents. They had seen the signs of superior intelligence in their only offspring and taken immediate steps to give her the schooling she deserved. All through elementary and high school she had been the youngest in her class, due to her accelerated progress. She hadn't had one date in high school; she had been too weird, too gangly and awkward as she went through puberty two or three years after her classmates.

It hadn't been any better in college. She had started her freshman year right after her sixteenth birthday, and what college man in his right mind would go out with a girl who was legally still jailbait, when there were so many legal lovelies both willing and available?

Isolated and lonely, Caroline had devoted herself to her studies and found herself finishing her senior courses during her eighteenth year. At about the same time the guys in her classes had realized that the Evans girl might be an egghead, but she was easy on the eyes. This time, there was no issue of age to protect her. Having never learned dating skills with anyone her own age, she was totally at a loss on how to handle these… these octopuses who suddenly couldn't seem to keep their hands off her. Disconcerted, alarmed, she had withdrawn further into her studies and begun developing a prickly shield for protection.

Her transformation as she reached maturity wasn't drastic enough to equal that of an ugly duckling into a swan; she had simply grown from a gangly adolescent into a woman. Her menses had been late in coming, as if her body had to balance nature by dawdling along while her mind raced ahead. It was all a matter of bad tuning. When her classmates were going through puberty, she was still literally playing with dolls. When she went through puberty, they were already settled into the dating game. She never matched them in terms of physical or emotional maturity. When she was ready to begin dating, she found herself being groped by boys accustomed to a much more sophisticated level of intimacy.

In the end, it was just easier to drive them all away.

So here she was, twenty-eight years old, genius IQ, a bona fide specialist in light amplification and optic targeting, possessed of a Ph.D. in physics, reduced to idiocy and panic because a man had said she was "fetching."

It was disgusting.

It was also a bit frightening, because she sensed Colonel Mackenzie hadn't been alienated as she had intended; instead, he'd looked like a man who enjoyed a challenge.

She hit herself on the forehead. How could she have been such an idiot? The colonel was & jet jockey, for heaven's sake. He was a member of a different breed, a man who positively thrived on challenge. The way to keep from attracting his attention was to appear meek and mild, with maybe a little simpering thrown in. Problem was, she didn't know how to simper. She should have gone to a finishing school rather than graduate school. She would have taken Simpering 101 over and over until she had it nailed.

Maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe she could act sweet and helpless enough to fool him. No—that would invite attention from the men who did like that sort of behavior in a woman. She was caught—damned if she did and damned if she didn't.

The only thing left to do was put up a good fight.

When Joe reached his quarters he stripped out of his uniform, then stood under a cool shower until he began to feel human again. The desert in July was a real bitch, sucking the moisture from his body until even his eyeballs felt dry, but Baby required tight security, and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada supplied that, in spades. Despite the discomfort and spartan conditions, he was grateful for the security and didn't look forward to taking the wraps off Baby, as would happen when Congress voted on funding. The media would see her then, not that her revolutionary nature was evident in her appearance; her design wasn't radically different from that of the F-22, which was what made it possible for them to do the test flights at Nellis instead of Edwards in California, where test flights were traditionally made. Snoops looked for something different at Edwards, but here at Nellis, with so many different types of aircraft taking part in the war games they conducted, she wasn't so obvious.

The other pilots based here had to notice that they were doing test flights with an aircraft that wasn't exactly like the F-22, but no one who wasn't working on the program was allowed a close look at the Night Wing prototypes, and security was a way of life here anyway. Baby's differences were in her skin and in the electronics suite, her weapons system; when she was unveiled, she would galvanize every hostile espionage agency in the world, and security would have to be even tighter, though he didn't see how it could.

He'd been thinking of Baby, but suddenly the image of Caroline Evans filled his mind and he grinned, wondering what it would take to tame the little hedgehog. His skin suddenly felt hot and tight, despite the cool water, so he shut off the shower and stepped out of the cubicle. It he could get her in the shower with him, they would probably turn the water to steam.

He stood in front of the air conditioner, letting the cold air blow over his wet, naked body and enjoying the shivers that rippled over him, but it didn't do much to ease the sense of fullness in his loins. Grimly he pushed thoughts of Ms. Evans out of his mind. When he was dry enough not to drip, he went, still naked, into the tiny kitchen area and slapped a sandwich together. The freedom from clothes let something inside him relax. He had spent almost half his life in the military, surrounded by regulations and wearing uniforms, and he felt comfortable with it at home, but at the same time there was still a primitive part of him that sometimes said, "That's enough," and he had to strip.

He had grown up on a horse ranch in Wyoming and he returned there every chance he got; spending a week or two riding the roughest broncs on the ranch satisfied the same wild restlessness in him, but he was tied up with the Night Wing project and couldn't get any free time, so the clothes had to go. The only garment he ever regretted having to remove was his flightsuit; if he could just spend all his time in the air, he'd be all right.

Damn it, the higher he was promoted, the less he flew. Responsibilities and paperwork took up more and more of his time. He had accepted the position of project manager on Night Wing only because he'd been guaranteed he would be able to fly the babies. The Air Force had wanted its best in the cockpits of the new planes, and the pilots assigned were all top-notch, but more than that, it had wanted the hands-on opinion of the best of the best, and Colonel Joe Mackenzie still stood head and shoulders above all the others.

Joe wasn't vain about his skill with a fighter, because he'd worked too damn hard to attain it. He'd been born with the intellect, eyesight and lightning-fast reflexes, but the rest was the result of countless hours of study, of practice, of drilling himself in the flight simulator until every reaction was automatic and instantaneous. Even at the age of thirty-five his reaction time was still faster than that of the young Turks coming out of flight school, and his eyesight was still better than twenty-twenty. He had a lot of flying time left, if the military would let him have it. He'd shot up through the ranks so fast that he would probably get his first star in another year, and then he'd be lucky if he could wrangle enough flying time to remain qualified.

The alternative was to resign his commission to take a job with an aircraft manufacturer as a test pilot, throwing away his years in the military. He liked the Air Force, didn't want to leave it, but the idea of being grounded was unbearable. Life would be flat without the challenge of mastering both nature and machine, and knowing his life hung in the balance if he didn't do it right.

Caroline slid into his mind again, a challenge of a different sort plain in her gunslinger's eyes. He could plainly picture the color of those eyes, dark green mostly, mingled with a bit of blue, and gold flecks lighting the depths. The thought of those eyes looking up at him as he moved over her in bed made his heart begin pounding hard and fast, just the way he would take her.

He wanted to make the little hedgehog purr like a kitten.

Chapter Two

Caroline had stringent comfort requirements, which meant it sometimes took her a while to get dressed. If something didn't feel right on a particular day, she took it off and put on something else. Before she left for work each morning she sat, stretched, twisted, moved her arms back and forth, then lifted them over her head to see if her clothes were going to irritate her during the day. She couldn't bear being distracted by an uncomfortable seam or an aggravating fit.

Women's fashions were a sore point with her. Why were most designers men? She thought it should be against the law for a man to design women's clothes. She had decided while still in adolescence that men had no idea how uncomfortable women's fashions usually were and really didn't care, since they themselves weren't called upon to spend hours standing in tendon-shortening high heels, encased in sweltering hosiery, bound either by bras or dresses tight enough to take over the job of lifting and separating, or pushing together to create cleavage, according to the dictates of the occasion.

And why were women's fashions made out of flimsy material, while the temperatures in most offices and restaurants was always set low, so the men in their suits would be comfortable? She found this stupid on two counts: one, why were men required to wear jackets anyway—and was there anything more ridiculous than that remnant of the breastplate, the necktie, that they knotted around their throats like a hangman's noose, interfering with a few basic things like breathing and swallowing—and why weren't women allowed to wear coats, too, if the men felt unable to give theirs up? Fashion, in her mind, consisted of equal parts stupidity and lunacy. In a logical world, people would wear functional clothing, like jeans and loafers and sweatshirts.

She couldn't change the world, but she could control her own small part of it by insisting on her own comfort. Today she chose a full, gathered white skirt mat came to midcalf, with an elastic waistband. She topped it with an oversize white T-shirt and twisted two scarves, one melon and one aqua, together to be tied around her waist as a belt. Her shoes were white flats. She was cool, coordinated and comfortable, just the way she wanted to be.

During the night she had tried to analyze just what it was about Colonel Mackenzie that had so discomfited her; other men had come on to her like gangbusters and she'd managed to handle it, so why had his rather mild remark, coupled with a look that wasn't mild at all, sent her into such panic? It was definitely the look that had done it. She'd never seen eyes like those before, pale blue diamonds glittering in a bronzed face, so piercing it felt as if they were cutting right into her flesh, and she'd sensed that the man behind them wasn't like any man she'd met before, either.

There were several possible reasons, but none that she could pin down as the primary cause of her reaction. She would just have to handle herself as well as possible, keep her guard up and try to make certain there were always other people around whenever she had dealings with the colonel. Why couldn't he have come around earlier the day before, when the rest of the team had still been working? If he had, she would have slept better last night.

She glanced around, making certain that everything was switched off, then patted her skirt pockets to assure herself that her keys were in there. Pockets were required; every outfit she wore had to have pockets, because handbags were another of her pet peeves. Why were women condemned to lug them around their entire fives? Why couldn't women have pockets like men? Because fashion said that it ruined the "lines" of their clothes. Because women were thought to be too vain. Because men were continually handing items to women with a casual, "Put this in your purse," meaning, "So you can carry it and I won't have to." For women to be truly liberated, she thought, they should have burned their purses instead of their brassieres. And then thrown their high-heeled shoes onto the bonfire.

To keep from having to carry a bag, she had stocked her desk the day before with the grooming items she was likely to need during any given day. After all, not liking purses was no reason to go without lipstick. She did have personal standards to uphold.

She was normally the first person at work, and that morning was no exception. She liked mornings, and dawn in the desert was something special, with everything so clear and crisply outlined. Later in the day heat waves would blur the edges of the landscape, but right now it was perfect. She hummed as she made coffee. No matter how hot it got, coffee was a necessity in every workplace she'd ever seen.

She tore the wrapper off a honey bun, slapped the pastry into the microwave and zapped it for ten seconds. Breakfast was now ready. She settled into her chair and began rereading a report on the targeting system's last performance as she absently pinched bites from the pastry.

Thirty minutes later Cal Gilchrist came in, looking surprised when he saw her at her desk. "You're in early," he said as he went straight to the coffeepot "I didn't see you at chow."

"I ate a honey bun here." Having finished reading, she tossed the report aside. Of the other three members of the team, Cal was the most amiable. To be honest, she admitted, he was more amiable than even herself. He was good-natured, friendly and capable, maybe thirty years old, still single and he enjoyed an active social life. She had met him before, but this was the first time they'd worked on a project together. They actually worked for two different companies, she with Boling-Wahl Optics, which had developed the laser targeting system, and Cal with DataTech, which had teamed with Boling-Wahl on the computer program that ran the system.

"There's another test at 0800," Cal said as he sipped his coffee. "When Adrian and Yates get here, we'll all go to the control room so we can listen in on the flights. Colonel Mackenzie's going up today. He always comes back to the control room after a flight, and I'll introduce you to him."

"We've already met," she replied. "He came by last night before I quit for the day."

"What did you think of him?"

She thought for a moment, trying to come up with a concise answer, and finally settled on "Scary."

Cal laughed. "Yeah, I wouldn't want to cross him. I would have sworn that fighter pilots didn't respect anything, but they sure as hell respect him, in the air and on the ground. One of them said mat Mackenzie is the best pilot in the Air Force, period. That's saying a lot, considering none of this group are slouches."

The other two members of the team arrived. Yates Korleski, a short, sturdy, balding man, was the senior member and head of the team. Adrian Pendley was Caroline's fly in the ointment on this particular assignment He was tall and good-looking, divorced, and unrelentingly negative about having Caroline on the team.

When she had first gone to work for Boling-Wahl he had given her the rush, and he'd never forgiven her for the brush-off she had given him in return. He was good at his job, though, so she was determined to work with him, even if it meant ignoring his incessant little gibes.

He walked past her without speaking, but Yates paused beside her desk. "Did you get settled in okay?"

"Yes, thanks. Met the head honcho last night, too."

Yates grinned. "What did you think of him?"

"Like I told Cal, he's a bit scary."

"Just don't ever make a mistake, or you'll find out how scary."

"No allowing for human error, huh?"

"Not with his birds or his men."

Yates wandered off in the direction of the coffeepot, and Caroline decided that maybe her panic of the night before had been justified. Yates had been working on defense contracts for twenty years, so if he was impressed, the colonel wasn't any ordinary joe. She grimaced at the inadvertent mental play on words.

At the appointed time they all trooped to the airfield, where the flights were being monitored. Their IDs were checked before they were allowed to enter the control room, reminding her of the tight security. The place swarmed with guards, and she knew that the Night Wing project was only one of several going on. There were a lot of civilians working at Nellis, people with both the highest credentials and the highest security rating. Just being here meant that her background had been checked so thoroughly that her file probably even contained the brand of breakfast cereal she'd liked best as a child.

The control room was a busy place, lined with monitors and people manning them. Practically every part of the Night Wing aircraft incorporated some radical change from how aircraft had been designed in the past, so there were a lot of different companies and defense contractors working to make certain everything was operational. A group of pilots had gathered, too, some in flightsuits and some in regular service uniforms. Several whistles filled the air when they caught sight of Caroline, and one grinning pilot clasped his hands over his heart

"I'm in love," he announced to the group at large.

"Don't pay any attention to him, ma'am," another of the pilots said. "That's the third time this week, and it's only Tuesday. He's fickle, very fickle."

"But good-looking," the first pilot said in defense of himself. "So what about it, beautiful? Want to get married, live in a rose-covered cottage and have beautiful children?"

"I'm allergic to roses," she said.

"And men," Adrian muttered behind her, just loud enough for her to hear. She ignored him.

"Forget the roses," the pilot said grandly. The tag on his shirt said his name was Major Austin Deale. "I'm adaptable. And fun. Did I mention that we'll have lots of fun?"

A deep voice came over the speaker, and as if a switch had been thrown, the pilots stopped their bantering and turned toward the monitor. It took Caroline a moment to realize that it was an in-cockpit camera, letting them see what the pilot was doing and seeing.

"There are four planes up today," Lieutenant Colonel Eric Picollo said, setting up the situation for them. "Two Night Wings and two F-22s. The F-22 is the only thing in production fast enough to give the prototypes a good test. The Night Wings are doing some stress maneuvers, and then they'll test the targeting system."

The deep voice came from the speakers again, laconic and matter-of-fact, as if the man weren't screaming along faster than the speed of sound high above the desert floor. Caroline shivered, and goose bumps rose on her arms.

"Go to MIL."

"Going to MIL," another voice answered.

"Military power throttle setting," Cal, who was standing just to her right, whispered. "All or more of an engine's rated thrust."

She nodded her understanding, her attention fixed on the monitor. All she could see of Colonel Mackenzie was his gloved hands and long legs, with the throttle between them, but she knew it was him she was watching rather than the other Night Wing pilot. There was just something about the way he moved.

The pilots took the aircraft through a series of maneuvers, and the sensors embedded in the aircraft's skin sent back readings of the stress levels on the airframe.

"Twenty degrees alpha," the deep voice said, confirming what the digital readout on the computer screen was telling them. "Thirty… forty… fifty… sixty."

One of the pilots standing behind her muttered, "Damn," in a nervous tone.

"Alpha is angle of attack," Major Deale whispered, noticing Caroline's puzzled look. His own expression was tense. "Most high-performance aircraft can only do about twenty degrees before they stall out. We've taken Baby to fifty degrees, because her vectored thrust gives better control, but even the X-29 wasn't controllable above seventy degrees."

"Seventy," said the calm voice. "Seventy-five."

The major had turned pale. He was staring at the changing numbers on the computer screen as if he could control them by willpower alone.

"Seventy-seven… seventy-nine… eighty… controls feel a little spongy. That's enough for now, leveling out."

"How'd Mad Cat do?" someone asked.

"Sixty-five," another someone replied, and the group chuckled.

"Was that his alpha, or his pucker factor?"

"I was sweating at fifty."

"We'll have to haul Mad Cat out of the cockpit. He won't have any starch left in his legs at all."

"Bet Breed's heart rate didn't even go up. He bleeds ice water, man, pure ice water."

Next, the aircraft pulled both negative and positive Gs, provoking more comments as the speakers carried the sounds of the grunts the pilots made to force more oxygen into their brains and keep from blacking out A trained pilot could normally withstand up to six positive Gs before gray-out began, but with specialized breathing techniques tolerance could be raised to about nine Gs for short periods of time.

The colonel was pulling ten Gs.

"Level out, level out," a captain said under his breath.

Major Deale was sweating. "Don't do this to me," he muttered. "Come on, Breed. Don't push it any further."

"Levelling out," a calm voice said over the radio, and she heard the quiet release of air from several pairs of lungs.

"That son of a bitch is a genetic freak," the captain said, shaking his head. "Nobody is supposed to be able to tolerate that. How long?"

"Not long," the second lieutenant at the monitor replied. "He actually hit ten for about four-tenths of a second. He's done it before."

"I can only tolerate nine for that long. And he was making sense when he talked! I'm telling you, he's a genetic freak."

"Gawdamighty, think what he must've been like ten years ago."

"About the same as now," Major Deale said.

The next series of tests involved the laser targeting, and Caroline edged her way closer to the monitors. She felt oddly shaky inside, and she tried to gather her thoughts. When she had been chosen to replace Walton on the test site, she had done some quick research on jet aircraft, and that, coupled with her general technical knowledge, told her exactly how dangerous those maneuvers had been. He could have lost control of the aircraft at such extreme angles of attack, or he could have blacked out pulling so many Gs and not regained consciousness in tune to keep from drilling the aircraft nose-first into the desert floor. The reactions of the other pilots told their own tale.

Adrian slipped in front of her, effectively blocking her view, since he was so much taller. Caroline brought her mind back to the current situation. She had no doubt he had done it deliberately, and if she let him get away with it he would only do something worse the next time. "Excuse me, Adrian," she said politely. "Since you're so tall, let me stand in front of you so we both can see."

Yates looked up and smiled, either not seeing or choosing to ignore the sour expression on Adrian's face. "Good idea. Step up in front, Caroline."

The targeting test went well. They were currently sighting in on stationary targets, and all of the components performed within the acceptable range. The data streamed across the screen, each item swiftly checked and noted against the hard-copy lists they all carried.

The four aircraft landed safely, and the atmosphere in the control room suddenly lightened to an almost giddy buzz. The laser team stood around Lieutenant Colonel Picollo and went over the rest results with him. Caroline was initially surprised at his knowledge of the subject, then realized that she shouldn't be. After all, he and the other pilots had been working on this project for some time; they would have had to be brain-dead not to absorb some of the information. "The colonel may have more questions," he finally said, "but it looks like we can start testing how well it targets and tracks a moving object now."

An arm slipped around her waist, and Caroline went rigid. Her head whipped around. Major Deale grinned at her as his arm tightened. Behind him, she could see the other pilots watching and grinning, too. They all looked like posters for a dental convention. Dismay filled her. Damn, it was starting already.

"So, beautiful, where do you want to go for dinner tonight?" the major asked.

"Hands off, Daffy," came a deceptively mild voice behind them. "Dr. Evans will be with me tonight."

There was no mistaking the speaker's identity. Even if she hadn't recognized those smooth, deep tones, she would have known by the way her heart began pulsing wildly and her lungs suddenly constricted, making it difficult to breathe.

They all turned around at once. Mackenzie was still in his flightsuit, helmet under his arm. His black hair was drenched with sweat and plastered to his skull, and his eyes were bloodshot from pulling Gs. His expression was calm and remote as he looked at them.

"I saw her first," Major Deale protested, but he dropped his arm from around her waist "Damn it, Breed, you can't just take one look and decide—"

"Yes I can," Mackenzie said, then turned to Picollo and began firing questions at him.

The major turned and gave Caroline a slow, considering look, as if he were really seeing her for the first time, and maybe he was. Until then she had been just a reasonably pretty face, a lark, but now he had to look at her as a person. "I've never seen Breed do that before, and I've known him for fifteen years," he said thoughtfully.

"I don't know him at all," Caroline replied in a tart voice. "I mean, I met him last night. Is he always that autocratic?"

"Breed? Autocratic?" The major pursed his lips.

"Despotic," Caroline elaborated helpfully. "Dictatorial. Peremptory."

"Oh, that kind of autocratic. You mean, does he make a habit of commandeering a woman's company for dinner?"

"That narrows it down nicely."

"Nope. First time. He usually has to beat women off with a stick. They love him to death. It's the glamour of his profession, you know, the lure of the wild. Women looove uniforms, but underneath he's really dull and boring."

"Daffy…" The calm voice was both patient and warning.

The major looked over Caroline's shoulder and broke into a smile. "I was just singing your praises."

"I heard."

Mackenzie was right at her elbow, but she didn't dare glance at him. She had specifically asked him the night before not to single her out in any way, but the very next time she met him he had all but hung a sign around her neck that said "Mackenzie's Woman." She struggled to subdue the impulse to sink her fist into his belly. For one thing, violence was seldom the answer to anything. For another, he was the project manager, and it would be a very stupid career move. For yet another, he looked like he was made of tempered steel and it would probably break her hand.

So she did the prudent thing and concentrated on Major Deale. "Daffy? As in duck?"

"No," Mackenzie said with grim relish. "As in petunia."

"As in flower child," added the captain, who had been in the group watching the monitors.

"As in… blooming idiot," several others said in unison.

"Petunia," Caroline repeated. "Flowers. Daffy Deale. Daffydeale. Daffodil!" she finished with a peal of laughter.

The major gave Mackenzie a dirty look. "I used to have a good, macho nickname. Concise. Thought provoking. Provocative. 'Big.' That's a good nickname, isn't it? Big Deale. It made women think. Was it just a play on my name, or was there a deeper meaning there? Then this… this spoilsport started calling me Daffy, and Petunia, and I got stuck with it."

Mackenzie smiled. Caroline glimpsed it from the comer of her eye, and the reaction she had been trying to ignore was back in full force. She felt simultaneously hot and cold. Shivers ran up her back, but her skin felt flushed.

"Could you see me in my office in half an hour, Dr. Evans?" the colonel asked now. She hated the way he phrased something as a question when the underlying tone made it an order.

She turned and smiled brightly at him. "If you insist, Colonel."

His eyes gleamed with recognition of the way she had forced him to make it an outright order, but he didn't hesitate. "I do."

"Half an hour, then."

As she and the others walked back to their own offices, Adrian paused beside her. "Smart move," he said, his hostility plain. "Snuggle up to the head man and it doesn't matter if you screw up on the job."

She kept her eyes straight ahead. "I don't screw up on the job." There wasn't any point in denying that she had any sort of relationship with Mackenzie, so she didn't waste the effort.

Cal glanced back, saw Adrian walking beside her, and slowed his steps to allow them to come even with him. "The complicated stuff starts with the moving targets, but so far there haven't been many problems with the program. It's almost scary how well the tests have gone."

Adrian walked on ahead without speaking, and Cal whistled softly through his teeth. "He's not the president of your fan club, is he? When we heard you were going to be the replacement he made some snide remarks, but I didn't figure it was open warfare. What's the deal?"

"Personality conflict," Caroline replied. Trying to place the blame was another pointless exercise.

He looked worried. "We have to function well as a team, or Colonel Mackenzie will have us all replaced, and that won't look good on our records. They're under a deadline with these tests. They want something good to show Congress and the media when the vote for funding comes up, and that's in a few weeks, I think."

"I can ignore Adrian," she assured him.

"I hope so. I'll try to be a buffer when I can, but at some point the two of you will have to work together."

"When it comes to work, I think both of us are professional enough to put our differences aside. But thanks for the thought."

Cal nodded, then grinned at her. "So, the good colonel's interested. He made it pretty plain, didn't he?"

"Without reason," she said grimly.

"Maybe from your way of thinking, but not from his."

It was foolish of her, but she began to look forward to meeting Colonel Mackenzie in the privacy of his office. Project manager be damned, she was going to tell him a few things. At the appointed time, she got directions to the appropriate Quonset hut and marched across the tarmac with anger propelling every stride.

The outer desk was occupied by Sergeant Vrska, a burly young man who looked better suited to a pro-football team than a desk, but he greeted Caroline pleasantly and ushered her into the colonel's private office.

Mackenzie had showered and changed into his summer service uniform; the blue of the material only intensified the pale blue of his irises. He leaned back in his chair and watched her calmly, as if waiting for her explosion.

Caroline considered exploding, even though he was obviously expecting it. For one thing, it would release a great deal of tension. Losing her temper, however, would only give the advantage to him. There was no invitation to take a seat, but she did so anyway, then crossed her legs and leaned back, her manner making it plain that the opening gambit was his.

"I read your file," he said. "Impressive credentials. You were always ahead of your age group in school, began college at sixteen, B.S. degree at eighteen, master's at nineteen, got your doctorate at twenty-one. Boling-Wahl considers you one of the most brilliant physicists in the country, if not the world."

She didn't know what she had expected, but a listing of her accomplishments wasn't it She gave him a wary look.

"You've never dated," he continued. Alarm shot through her, and she sat up straight, her thoughts darting around as she tried to anticipate where he was going with that line. "Not in high school, which is halfway understandable, considering your age and study load, but not in college or graduate school, either. You've never had a boyfriend, period. In short, Dr. Evans, you don't have any experience at all in handling a rowdy bunch like my men. It upset you when Major Deale put his arm around your waist"

She didn't speak, but continued to watch him.

"We all have to work together, because we have a lot to do and not much time left to do it in. I don't want morale wrecked by hostility, and I don't want you to suffer behavior from my men that makes you uncomfortable. They're men, and they live their lives flying on the edge of disaster. They're wild and arrogant, and they need to blow off steam, typically with booze and women and dumb stunts. One way to keep them from hitting on you is to turn this base into a war zone, with everybody disliking you and not cooperating with you, which won't get the work done. The other way is to let them think you're mine."

She didn't like his phrasing. "That's so Neanderthal, it has hair all over it"

"They won't bother you then," he continued, ignoring her comment "In fact they'll be downright protective."

She stood up and began pacing his office. "I just want to be left alone so I can work. Is that such a big thing to ask? Why should I have to hide behind a false relationship?"

"For one thing, they all assume that you've had the normal experiences of a woman your age."

She scowled at him, not liking the way he'd phrased the sentence. Her "age" indeed! He'd made it sound as if she were almost ready to file for Social Security.

"It won't occur to them that their actions could actually be frightening to you," he continued. "There's also the possibility that some of their teasing won't be so lighthearted, that a couple of them might make some serious moves on you and could turn ugly when you slap them down. I can't afford the disruption to the program if I had to bring disciplinary charges against any of my men. I need them, and I need you. Even if they knew you're so inexperienced, it wouldn't keep them from trying to get in your pants. If anything, knowing that you're a virgin would make it worse. The best thing is to mark you out of bounds for them by pretending you're involved with someone else, and the only man on the base they wouldn't consider poaching on is me. So from now on, as far as they're concerned, you're mine. All you have to do is act halfway friendly to me in front of them, rather than glaring at me as if you'd like to have my head on a platter."

"With an apple stuffed in your mouth," she muttered. Then the details of what he'd just said hit her and she stared at him in mortification, her eyes widening and color burning in her cheeks. Damn it, why hadn't she hooted with laughter when he'd talked about her being a virgin? Now it was too late to deny it.

Joe was still watching her with that calm, remote expression, but his eyes were narrowed and strangely intense.

She couldn't meet that penetrating gaze. Her embarrassment was almost unbearable. She summoned her last dregs of composure and said, "All right" Then, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, she succumbed to the powerful urge to run from him.

Chapter Three

For several minutes after she had literally run from his office, Joe remained leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head and a small, satisfied smile curving the corners of his firm mouth.

So she was a virgin. He had only been guessing, but it had been a good guess. An experienced woman wouldn't have been so embarrassed or at such total loss about what to say or do. Poor little darling. For all her intelligence, she was a babe in the woods when it came to men and sex, and the reaction she had learned in her youth, when some idiot had probably scared the hell out of her by grabbing at her, had become her standard way of dealing with a man's attention.

He had been in the office before dawn, his mind on her rather than the coming flight and on impulse he had requested her file. It had been interesting reading.

From the time she had started school, she had been separated from her own age group, and she had responded to the inevitable social alienation by devoting herself to her studies, thereby widening the gulf as she outpaced her schoolmates. That wasn't exactly what had been in her file, of course; the impersonal papers had listed only numbers and accomplishments, except for the detailed security check, which had noted the lack of a personal relationship with a man—ever—but neither her psychological profile nor a detailed investigation had revealed any hint of homosexuality. Her work record did reveal a few instances when Dr. Evans hadn't gotten along with a co-worker, always male, but as the field of physics was dominated by men that wasn't in itself meaningful.

Remembering her reaction to him the night before, Joe had begun thinking. Was she so bristly because she had always been the odd man out, socially, emotionally and physically, during her childhood and adolescence? Her own age group would have shunned her, and her classmates wouldn't have been interested in socializing with someone who, compared to them, was a child. By the time she was physically mature and old enough for it not to matter, the pattern was set and she had so many defenses in place that no one could get past all the thorns.

The only way for a man to get close to her was for her to open the gate herself, something that wasn't likely to happen. But then he had seen the way she tensed when Daffy had put his arm around her waist, and the answer had flashed into his mind. A second later he had put his plan into action.

Her work was important to her. For that, she would tolerate the fiction of having a relationship with him, even though she had made it plain the night before that she didn't want to be gossiped about. He knew she was going to be gossiped about under any circumstances, because she just wasn't the type of woman who faded into the woodwork. Given the choice of having to pretend to be involved with him and putting up with the gossip, or possibly not being able to work on the Night Whig project at all, she had chosen the former. He had counted on that very reaction while he had been forming his argument.

Now the other men would leave her alone, giving him an unobstructed field, and he meant to use his advantage to the fullest. She would have to spend time with him, get to know him, learn to relax with him.

Her seduction would be the sweetest mission he'd ever undertaken. Taming that little hedgehog in bed would be more exciting than breaking Mach 3.

Caroline didn't dare return to work; she knew her discomfort would be written plainly on her face for everyone to see, and Adrian would make some snide comments about taking care of her love life on her own time. She darted into the nearest ladies' room and sought privacy in a stall.

She was trembling all over and felt strangely close to tears. She seldom cried, because it didn't accomplish anything except making her nose stuffy. Even more strangely, she had been ignominiously routed again, and it was time she faced the facts.

It wasn't anything Colonel Mackenzie had done that frightened her so; it was her own reactions to him that were terrifying. Intelligence wasn't worth anything if she hid her head in the sand and didn't admit the truth to herself. She had let herself grow too cocky about her ability to keep men at a distance by using her sharp tongue; not only was the colonel not intimidated by it—damn the man, he seemed to enjoy it!—but maybe she had been able to hold off those other men only because she hadn't been attracted to any of them. The shortness of breath, the panic attacks, the pounding of her heart and cowardly behavior, could all mean only one thing: sexual attraction. As an intelligent female, her instinctive impulse was to run for her life.

She excused herself for not having recognized it immediately, because after all, it was the first time she had ever experienced the phenomenon. She hadn't known how to drive a car the first time she had gotten behind the steering wheel, either. She had always been slightly puzzled by both genders' sometimes feverish antics when trying to attract someone of the opposite sex, but now she knew what was at the bottom of it all. Gonads. It was disconcerting to have one's glands turn traitor.

And now there was this situation she had somehow become mired in. She felt certain that if she only applied herself to it, she would be able to come up with some other solution, but her brain didn't seem to want to work. It was probably a side effect of overactive gonads. After all, thinking wasn't conducive to mating.

She tried to organize her thoughts. As the situation stood, she had agreed to pretend to be having a relationship with Colonel Mackenzie so the men would leave her alone and she would be able to work, and also so the men wouldn't be distracted by her. Did the colonel pretend to have a relationship with every woman on base? Why her? What was it about her that was so disruptive that she had to be neutralized? She knew she was a reasonably attractive woman, but she certainly wasn't a femme fatale.

And just what would pretending to be involved with him entail? Small talk and smiling? She thought she could handle that. She had never cooed like a lovesick bird the way she had seen some women do, but it couldn't be that difficult. But if he thought this pseudo-relationship involved any hugging and kissing, she would have to call it off immediately, because her heart just couldn't stand the strain. All that adrenaline rushing around couldn't be healthy.

But the situation wasn't unmanageable. If she just kept her head and remembered not to trust him no matter how reasonable he seemed, she should be all right

With that thought firmly in mind, she squared her shoulders and left her refuge. As she crossed the tarmac, the desert heat scorched the top of her head and made her arms bum. Everything shimmered around her, and her ears were assaulted by the constant roar of jet engines as planes took off and landed. Airmen swarmed everywhere, attending to the business of the huge base. The activity was exhilarating, and even more exciting was the knowledge that she was working on the most advanced jet fighter ever designed.

Work had always been her panacea. She enjoyed it, embraced it, because it was the one part of her life where she excelled, where she fit in. It was comforting and familiar, even though Adrian Pendley was certain to do his best to ruin it for her. Well, if she could ignore Mackenzie, she could easily ignore Adrian.

The colonel's darkly tanned, hawkish face swam before her eyes, forming amid the heat waves, and she stumbled on the edge of the tarmac before quickly regaining her balance. So she wasn't ignoring Mackenzie mat well; she would get better at it. For her own sake, she had to.

Sure enough, when she walked back to the office, with her clothing damp with sweat and wisps of hair sticking to her face, Adrian looked at her and sneered. "Didn't you know it's too hot for a quick tussle? You'll learn to save it for a weekend in Vegas."

Yates looked up and frowned. Caroline caught his eye and shrugged to show that it didn't matter.

The laser program was fully developed; they were there as a trouble-shooting team, and since the day's tests had gone well, there was little more to do than recap what they'd seen. Then they went over the next planned test, the first one using a moving target. The aircraft that would be used in the next tests weren't the two that had flown that day, and their targeting systems had already been checked as part of the regularly implemented maintenance schedule. All of that had been done before Caroline's arrival on the base. They did have to check the systems on the aircraft that had flown that day, and she, Yates and Adrian changed into coveralls for the job. Cal remained behind, rechecking the computer data.

"All the different systems people working on the Night Wing project have gotten along well," Yates said as they walked to the hangar. "It's been one of the smoothest operations I've been involved in."

"So don't go screwing it up by insulting any of them," Adrian said.

Yates stopped and swung around to confront Adrian. "That's enough," he said evenly.

"It's only the truth. You know she has a reputation for being hard to work with."

"I know what I'm hearing, and Caroline isn't the one who's being an ass. I hope I don't have to tell you that Colonel Mackenzie can have anyone on this team replaced with one phone call, and he'd do it in a heartbeat if he thought friction between any of us was hindering the work. If mat happens, your career at Boling-Wahl would effectively be over, and that goes for both of you."

Caroline stuffed her hands deep in the pockets of her coveralls. Though Yates had been directing his ire toward Adrian, she knew that her position at Boling-Wahl was a bit tenuous, due to her past difficulties on a couple of jobs. One of those incidents had been with Adrian. Perhaps she had been assigned to work with him as a sort of test and her job depended on passing it.

Adrian turned to glare at her. "I'll stay out of her way," he finally muttered, "if she stays out of mine." Then he strode on ahead of them.

Yates sighed, and he and Caroline resumed walking, but at a more leisurely pace. "Ignore him as much as you can," he advised. "I didn't realize the situation between the two of you was so hostile."

"I'm not hostile," Caroline said in surprise.

He gave her a thoughtful look. "No, I don't guess you are. But he is. Is it just a case of mutual dislike, or did something happen that I need to know about?"

She shrugged. "I don't suppose it's any big secret. He came on to me when I first started work for Boling-Wahl, and I turned him down."

"Ahh. A hurt ego."

"It would make more sense if we'd been involved and then broken up, but it was never that personal. I guess he doesn't take rejection well."

"That's all it was? You turned him down for a date?" Yates asked skeptically.

"Not exactly. He made a pass at me."

"And you…?"

She stared straight ahead, but she could feel her cheeks heating again. "He was… well, it was a pretty strong pass, if you know what I mean, and I couldn't seem to make him understand that I wasn't interested. I tried being polite, but it wasn't getting through and he wouldn't let me go. So I told him I'd have gone to work at a zoo if I'd wanted to be grabbed by an ape."

Yates chuckled. "Not very tactful, but effective."

That wasn't all she'd told Adrian, but she thought she had admitted to enough. "He took it personally."

"The two of you will have to get along for the duration."

"I understand. I won't snipe back. But if he grabs me again," she warned, "I won't be nice."

Yates patted her arm. "If he grabs you, knock him on the head with something."

She fully intended to.

They spent the rest of the day checking the targeting systems on the two aircraft, and everything looked good. As maintenance crews crawled in, under, over and around the sleek black aircraft, the scene reminded Caroline of Gulliver being swarmed over by the Lilliputians. Lines and hoses snaked everywhere, crisscrossing the hangar floor.

Adrian didn't speak to her except about work, and that suited her fine. He was good at what he did, and as long as he restricted himself to that, she had no problem with him. Maybe Yates' lecture had made an impression on him.

It was late afternoon before they had the two systems thoroughly checked, and Caroline was glad to call it a day. Thoughts of a long, cool shower filled her head. She returned to the office and didn't bother changing out of the coveralls, simply collecting her dress and checking to make certain everything was locked up. Security demanded that nothing be left out on their desks.

When she reached her quarters she turned the air conditioning on high and stood in front of the cold air for a minute, sighing with relief. There was a benefit to having small rooms: they cooled off quickly. She counted herself lucky to have two rooms, period. The first room was a combination living room, dining room and kitchen, meaning that a nondescript couch and matching nondescript chair, with a scratched fake-wood coffee table, occupied one half of the room and the other half was taken up by a galley-size kitchen and a battered Formica table with two chairs. The predominant color seemed to be institutional green. The room was about twelve feet square and opened directly into the bedroom. The bedroom and bath combined were the same size as the front room. She had a bed that was supposed to be double-sized but didn't quite make it, but since she slept alone it didn't matter. There was a scarred chest of drawers, a cramped closet and a cramped bathroom with barely enough room for the essential plumbing, and then only because there was a small shower stall rather than a bathtub. It was livable, but she couldn't see herself ever growing fond of it

On the bright side, one of the first things she had done had been to replace the light bulbs in the bathroom with new ones of sufficient wattage for the application of makeup. She probably had the brightest bathroom on base. She rather liked the idea.

She took the long, cool shower she had promised herself, gradually turning the hot water off as she became accustomed to the chill, until the spray was satisfyingly cold. She felt herself revive as her overheated skin drank in the moisture. She didn't turn the water off until she was shivering, then dried herself briskly and dressed in loose, cotton knit pants and a big T-shirt, which perfectly suited her notions of comfort.

Now for food. She had decided from the outset to eat in her quarters as much as possible, so she had stocked the tiny kitchen with a few staples. She was standing in front of an open cabinet door studying the contents and trying to decide on her meal when someone knocked on the door.

"Who is it?" she called.

"Mackenzie."

He didn't have to identify himself by name, she thought irritably as she strode to the door and opened it. All he had to do was rumble something in that deep voice.

She braced herself in the opening and felt the heat settle over her like a suffocating blanket "What do you want?" she demanded. He wasn't wearing a uniform, but the glove-soft jeans, scuffed boots and white T-shirt were oddly disturbing, while the inevitable dark sunglasses every pilot wore hid his eyes. She didn't like it; she didn't want to know what he was like when he was off duty.

Joe noted her challenging stance and the fierceness of her glare. Evidently she had decided that her best course of action was to simply carry on as usual. He was glad; being around her might not be comfortable, but it was sure as hell exciting, and he didn't want mat to change.

"Supper," he said.

She crossed her arms. "I'm not feeding you."

"No, I'm feeding you," he said mildly. "Remember? I told Daffy you'd be with me tonight, and everyone will know about it tomorrow if you aren't" It was an effort to keep his voice mild and his eyes on her face, because she was obviously braless. The thin T-shirt she was wearing plainly revealed the shape of her high breasts and the darker circles of her nipples. Every muscle in his big body tensed with growing arousal.

"Just a cheeseburger," he cajoled in the soft voice he'd often used to calm nervous mares. "You don't even have to change. Just slip on your shoes and we'll go off base and find a hamburger joint"

Caroline hesitated. The thought of a cheeseburger was enticing, since she had been about to choose between two brands of cold cereal.

"All right," she decided abruptly. "Give me a minute." She dashed into the bedroom and put on a pair of sandals, then raked a comb through her hair. Her freshly washed face stared back at her from the mirror, and she contemplated putting on makeup, then shrugged. A cheeseburger was waiting.

Just before she left the room she remembered that she wasn't wearing a bra and hurriedly put one on. She didn't think he would have noticed, but it was better to play it safe.

He hadn't entered her quarters but was still standing just outside the open door. Caroline turned the lock on the door and stepped out, closed the door firmly, then tried the knob to make certain the lock had caught Satisfied, she dropped her keys into her pocket

He was driving a muscular black pickup truck. Caroline looked at him in surprise as he opened the door and she climbed up into the seat. "I never would have figured you for a truck person," she said as he slid his long legs under the steering wheel.

"I grew up on a horse ranch in Wyoming," he said. "I've driven pickups all my life. What did you think I'd drive?"

"Something low and red and flashy."

"I save my speeding for the air." His ice-blue eyes flicked at her. "What do you drive? I know what you're driving now is a rental car, since you flew in, so that doesn't count"

Caroline settled back in the seat. She decided that she rather liked sitting up high so she could see, and she was feeling more comfortable by the minute. Maybe it was the truck that did it; it was such a no-nonsense kind of vehicle. "What do you think I drive?"

"Something safe and dependable."

"Oh."

The one syllable was a little disgruntled. Joe controlled a smile. "Am I wrong?"

"A tad."

"So what do you drive?"

She turned her head to the side and stared out the window. "Something low and red and flashy." She had absolutely rebelled against buying anything sedate and conservative. She had wanted power and speed and handling, and had paid a small fortune to get it.

"How flashy?" he asked.

"A Corvette," she said, and suddenly chuckled at the contrast between them.

Joe looked at her again. He couldn't keep from it. She had lived the life of a total egghead, reclusive and socially awkward, but the fire in her couldn't be hidden. It was revealed in the unconscious sex appeal with which she moved and dressed, the fierceness of her temper, the adventurous car she drove. She sat so decorously on the passenger side, but her face was lifted to the hot wind blowing in through the lowered windows. There was a streak of wildness in her that intrigued him, and he shifted restlessly to ease the constriction of his jeans.

They were checked through the gate, and he turned the truck toward the sunset, blazing red and gold in front of them. She didn't seem to feel any need to carry on a conversation; Joe was comfortable with silence, too, so he let it continue.

Caroline couldn't stop herself from glancing at him every few minutes, though she would then jerk her gaze back to the sunset. The T-shirt bared his powerful arms, darkly tanned by the desert sun. He had so many muscles, it was unnerving. She knew that fighter pilots regularly worked out, because a dense muscle mass seemed to help them resist the effects of pulling Gs, but his muscularity was somehow different He was powerful—the way a panther or a wolf is powerful—from a lifetime of work and using his body. The sun outlined his profile in gold, mercilessly revealing the bladelike bone structure, as clean and fierce as an ancient warrior's face cast on a coin.

She stared at the thin, high-bridged nose, the wide forehead and high, chiseled cheekbones. His mouth was almost brutally clear-cut. The hot wind was sifting through his thick black hair, disarranging the short military cut and her vision blurred as a disturbing vision filled it of this man with his hair long and flying around his broad, bare shoulders. Her heart thumped in a sort of painful panic, and she jerked her gaze away yet again, but it didn't do any good. She could still see him in her mind. It took her only a minute to decide mat if out of sight wasn't going to be out of mind, she might as well give in and let her eyes feast.

She turned her head toward him, and her hungry gaze slipped down over his wide, powerful chest to his flat belly. She just couldn't stop it, though neither was she brave enough to let her eyes rest on the fly of his jeans, instead hurriedly skimming on to those long, muscled legs.

She blurted out, "Aren't you almost too big to get into a cockpit?"

He briefly took his eyes off the road to look at her, though the dark lenses kept her from reading his expression. She wished he would take them off. "It's a tight fit," he replied, his voice low and slow and growling. "But I always manage to squeeze in."

The underlying sexuality of his words hit her like a sledgehammer. She was woefully inexperienced but not naive, and there was no mistaking his meaning. Now she was glad he had those dark glasses on, because she didn't want to read his expression. She wanted to hide her face in her hands. She wanted to jump out of the truck and run all the way back to the base and the safety of her quarters. Had she been mad? She had actually climbed in the truck with this man, and now here they were, alone in the Nevada desert with the sunset rapidly darkening to purple.

Then she remembered that it was her own reaction to him that frightened her, not anything he had done, and she wondered miserably if she should tell him to bail out now while he still could. The way she had been ogling him, he was probably wondering if he would make it back to the base with his pants on, though considering the notorious libido of pilots in general and military pilots in particular, he might not fight very hard. Maybe it was the contrast he presented that got to her the way no man had before, the sense of an intense, smoldering sexuality beneath that cool remoteness. And maybe, if she was lucky, he had no idea of the tumult going on inside her.

Joe was glad of the dark lenses that protected his eyes from the sun, because they allowed him to study her without her being aware of it She had put on a bra, damn it, but the thin restricting material couldn't quite disguise the pebbled hardness of her nipples. The little darling was aroused—and upset by it; he could feel her tension, see it in the faint trembling of her body mat her still posture couldn't control. His eyes went back to her distended nipples, and his hands tightened on the steering wheel as he inevitably began thinking about taking those hard buds into his mouth. She was so beautifully responsive, and she didn't even know it. If she could be so aroused by a naughty comment, what would she be like when he was actually making love to her?

She wasn't the only one who was aroused. If he looked at her nipples one more time, he might have to stop the truck on the side of the road, and she was far from ready for that. To keep himself from making a big mistake, he didn't look at her again until they had reached his favorite drive-in hamburger joint, which was just seedy enough to be interesting.

He parked beside one of the speakers and turned off the ignition, then removed his sunglasses and put them on the dash. "What do you want?"

She wished he had phrased it differently. She leaned down so she could read the menu posted above the speaker and scowled as she forced herself to concentrate on food. The heavenly aroma of frying hamburgers, onions and French fries filled the air; why did the most unhealthy food always smell the best? "A cheeseburger basket and large soft drink."

He punched the button on the speaker, and when a tinny voice answered, he ordered two cheeseburger baskets. Then he half turned toward Caroline, his wide shoulders wedged into the corner of the truck, and casually said, "I'm going to kiss you when we get back to the base."

Caroline stared wide-eyed at him, her heart going into its crazy thumping rhythm again. "I want onions on my cheeseburger. Lots of onions."

"You don't have to be afraid I'm going to grab you," he continued as if she hadn't spoken. "It'll just be a kiss, outside your door where anyone walking by can see us, and someone probably will. I won't even put my arms around you if you don't want me to."

"I don't want you to kiss me," she said, withdrawing to her own corner of the truck and glaring at him across the expanse of the front seat.

"I'm going to anyway. It's expected."

"I don't care what's expected. I agreed to come out with you tonight because it does seem to be a good way to keep all the others in line, but I never agreed to any kissing."

"Don't you like kissing?"

She glared sullenly at him. The perfect answer would be that yes, she liked kissing, but she didn't want to kiss him. The perfect answer, however, was a bald-faced lie, and from the way her heart was fluttering like a Victorian maiden's at the prospect of kissing him, she wouldn't be able to carry it off. Lying, she found, seemed to work better when performed with a certain amount of detachment.

On the other hand, the truth was the worst answer she could give him. No, she hadn't liked any of the sloppy kisses mat had been forced on her in a hit-or-miss fashion because she'd been fighting like a wildcat to avoid them, but the thought of kissing him made her light-headed, and she was afraid she would like it too much.

When she didn't reply he said calmly, "When we get back to your quarters, unlock your door, then turn and hold out your hand to me. I'll take it, lean over and kiss you. It won't be a long kiss, but it can't be a quick peck, either. Does three seconds sound long enough to you? Then I'll let go of your hand and say good-night. On a busy base, any number of people will see us, and the word will spread that we don't seem to be having a flaming affair, but we're definitely involved."

She cleared her throat. "Three seconds?" That didn't sound like very long. Surely she could manage not to disgrace herself for three seconds.

"Just three seconds," he reassured her.

Chapter Four

The cheeseburger—without onions—and fries were delicious, reminding her of those few precious times during her childhood when she had been allowed to stay over with her mother's brother and his wife, both of them about ten years younger than her parents, and Uncle Lee had invariably treated her to the biggest, juiciest hamburger she could eat, followed by ice cream, another forbidden food. Her parents had allowed her to eat sorbet or frozen yogurt, but never ice cream. If it hadn't been for Uncle Lee, Caroline thought she might have reached the age of majority without knowing the joys of junk food. She still always felt as if she were having a special treat when she indulged.

After the cheeseburgers, he gave her a slow smile and asked, "Ever played the slots?"

"No. I've never been to a casino."

"That's about to change." He started the truck, and soon they were tooling down Las Vegas Boulevard, an endless array of flashing neon lights in every color of the rainbow. They blinked, they arrowed, they cascaded, they exploded in endless neon showers, inviting one and all to sample whatever it was they were advertising. The big casinos drew the largest crowds, of course, but a goodly number of people were just strolling, tourists determined to see everything in this town geared toward attracting them. People were dressed in clothing that ran the gamut from shorts to formal gowns.

"Do you like to gamble?" she asked.

"I never gamble."

She snorted. "Except with your life. I was in the control room today, remember? Hitting eighty degrees alpha and pulling 10 Gs isn't what I'd call safe living."

"That isn't gambling. Baby was built to give us an unlimited angle of attack, but her capability doesn't do us any good if we don't know how to fly her. My job is to make certain she does what she's supposed to do, get her fully tested out and operational and find out her limitations. I can't do that if I don't exceed what we're already doing in the F-22."

"None of the other pilots are pushing the envelope like that."

His eyes were utterly calm when he looked at her. "They will now. Now that they know Baby will operate under those conditions."

"You did it just to show them it could be done?"

"No. I did it because it's my job."

And because he loved it. The thought echoed in her mind. She had seen it that day when he had entered the control room after his flight, tired and sweaty, his eyes bloodshot, his expression as remote as ever. But his eyes had given him away. They had been fierce and… exalted, the fires of life burning white hot in him.

He parked the truck, and they strolled down the sidewalk. "Do you feel lucky?" he asked.

She shrugged. "How does lucky feel?"

"Want to try it?"

She paused before the entrance to one of the casinos, feeling the cool air gush out through the opened doors. Rows and rows of slot machines stretched before her and even spread out on the sidewalk. Most of them were manned by people automatically feeding in their tokens of worship and pulling the levers. Occasionally there were cries of delight as coins in varying numbers came tumbling out to reward their persistence, but mostly the machines took rather than gave.

"It isn't cost-effective," she said after studying the procedure for a few minutes.

He laughed softly. "That isn't the point Never gamble if you can't afford to lose, that's rule number one. Rule number two is to have fun."

"They don't look like they're having fun," she said doubtfully.

"That's because they've forgotten rule number two, and maybe even number one. C'mon, I'll stake you."

But she waited another few minutes, until she saw someone abandon a machine that hadn't paid anything in quite a while. The law of averages said it was more likely to pay out than one that had just disgorged a few coins would be to do so again. She sat down in front of it and fed in the quarters, feeling like an idiot as she did so. Joe stood behind her, softly laughing when the mechanical bandit gave her nothing in return. After she had fed in about five dollars without winning anything, Caroline began to take it personally. She muttered warnings and threats as she went through the procedure again—and lost again.

"Remember rule number two," Joe cautioned, amusement in his voice.

She told him what he could do with rule number two, and he chuckled.

She hitched her stool closer to the machine and shoved a quarter into the slot. She pulled the lever and the pictures began whirring, then one by one clicked into place. Bells began ringing and quarters began flooding out of the bottom slot, spilling out onto the floor. Caroline jumped up and stared at the silver coins as other slot players crowded around, offering congratulations, and a smiling casino employee came over. Then she gave Joe a look of consternation. "All those quarters won't fit in my pocket."

He threw back his head and began laughing. She stared at his strong brown throat and felt suddenly dizzy as that damn light-headed feeling swept over her again.

The casino employee, still smiling, said, "We'll be glad to change the coins into bills."

They did, and to her relief Caroline found that the flood of quarters wasn't a great fortune after all, only a little over seventy dollars. She returned Joe's stake to him and stuffed the remaining bills into her pocket.

"Did you have fun?" he asked as they left the casino.

She thought about it "I suppose so, but I was beginning to feel a little vindictive toward that machine. I don't think I have the temperament to be a gambler."

"Probably not," he agreed, and took her hand in his to gently pull her out of the path of a man who wasn't looking where he was going. But then he didn't release her as she had expected.

She looked down at their clasped hands. His hand was big and hard, the ringers lean, his palm tough with calluses, but his grip was careful, as if he were very aware of his strength. She had never held hands before, and the touch of palm against palm was surprisingly intimate. She was beginning to realize that fear had kept her from doing a lot of pleasurable things before, but then, she had never before been even tempted to explore them. Her reactions to other men who had tried to venture into a physical relationship with her had varied from bored and disinterested to absolute revulsion.

She could tug her hand free. That was the safest course of action, but somehow she couldn't do it. So she ignored the situation, acted as if her hand wasn't nestled in his much more powerful one like a bird taking shelter, and inwardly she savored every moment of it.

Finally they walked back to the truck, and she realized she was reluctant for the night to come to an end. It was her first date, if she cared to categorize it as such, and it was almost over.

They were both silent on the drive back to the base, and inevitably her mind turned to the coming kiss. She felt both panicked and excited. Another first for her, the first kiss she had actually agreed to and welcomed. It was a toss-up whether she would bolt in fear or hurl herself into his arms.

The moment of truth came all too soon. He parked in front of her quarters and got out to walk around the truck and open the door for her. There were a number of personnel going about their business, glancing at them with idle curiosity, and she knew he had perfectly gauged the situation.

She took out her keys and unlocked the door, then turned and faced him in the colorless glow of the vapor lights overhead. Her eyes were solemn and defenseless as she stared at him, his eyes glittering like ice.

"Hold out your hand," he commanded softly, and she obeyed.

His hard, warm hand enclosed her fingers, and he pulled her closer even as he bent. His mouth lightly touched hers, lifted, settled again. He turned his head slightly to adjust the pressure, and somehow the motion parted her own lips, so that they yielded to the molding of his.

His taste was warm and pleasant and… male. The scent of him enveloped her, and she shivered in response. His mouth was still on hers, moving gently. She felt the tip of his tongue touch and tease, making her stiffen at the jumbled memory of some uninvited, intrusive kiss, but this was nothing like that. She felt enticed rather than coerced, and his taste was filling her senses. Warm pleasure shuddered up from her depths; with a little whimper she opened her mouth, and slowly he took her.

The carnality of it was staggering, and so was her reaction to it. She heard herself whimper again, and then somehow she was pressed hard against him, her head tilted up and back to give him deeper access, an access he took with a hard male dominance that stunned her. She felt weak and hot, and her breasts tightened with an ache that contact with his hard chest both soothed and intensified. Her loins felt hot, too, as coils of pleasure tightened deep inside. She was clinging to his hand like a lifeline.

Slowly he lifted his mouth, and it was all he could force himself to do to break the contact. He gave in to the temptation to take several more quick kisses from the soft, innocent mouth that had so quickly warmed to awareness, then he had to release her hand and step back. He had promised her. He wanted nothing more than to shove her inside her dark quarters and carry her down to the floor, mounting her with quick, hard urgency, but restraint now would bring him much sweeter rewards in the future. So he controlled his rough, quick breathing and tried to control the fierce rush of blood through his veins.

"Three seconds," he said.

Her eyes were glazed as she stared at him, and she was weaving slightly. "Yes," she whispered. "Three seconds."

She didn't move. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. "Go inside, Caroline." His voice was low and calm. "Good night."

"Good night" She moved jerkily to obey, and as she reached the threshold she paused to look at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were huge and dark with some indefinable emotion. "That was much longer than three seconds."

She switched on the light, then closed and carefully locked the door. Even as she turned the bolt, she heard him drive away, telling her that he hadn't been tempted to linger for even a second, or hadn't considered the idea of knocking on her door. He had accomplished his mission, which was to establish their "relationship," so as far as he was concerned, there was no reason to hang around.

She sat down on the couch and remained there, motionless, for quite some time. She had some thinking to do, and she always concentrated better if she could just sit still and totally lock herself inside her brain, or perhaps it was more a matter of locking everything else out, and that included physical stimuli.

It hadn't taken any psychoanalysis for her to understand years ago how her upbringing and accelerated progress through school had combined with her own nature to make her the odd man out, but she hadn't minded. Why should she worry that she had never learned how to associate with the opposite sex on a social and emotional level, when there hadn't been anyone of the opposite sex she was interested in associating with anyway? So she had never regretted her out-of-sync relationship with the rest of the world—until now.

Now, for the first time, she was strongly attracted to a man and wanted him to be attracted to her, but how did she go about accomplishing that feat? When other girls had been learning how, she had been studying physics. She was an expert in laser optics, but she didn't know a damn thing about flirting.

Why couldn't she have gotten her feet wet with someone less challenging, say a fellow physicist who had also spent more time with books than people and was a little awkward socially, too? But, no, instead she had fallen head over heels in attraction with a hotshot fighter pilot, a man who could make women go weak in the knees with one look from those diamond-blue eyes. She didn't have to be an expert at kissing to be able to tell that he was, and she had a sneaking suspicion that she had made a fool out of herself. All he had done was hold her hand, as he'd promised, and she had practically been all over him. She had a distinct memory of pushing hard against him and rubbing her front against his like a cat, and thinking that she was going to fall in a heap at his feet.

He'd been nice to her this evening. He'd treated her as a friend, had let her relax, and she had had fun. She couldn't remember the last time she had done something so totally useless and enjoyed it. Simple playing hadn't been part of her childhood; her parents had carefully monitored her activities to make certain they were geared toward her educational progress. No ABC blocks for her; she had used flash cards. In defense of her parents, though, she had been an impatient child, irascible when the pace had lagged behind the speed of her inquisitive, hungry intellect. Her childhood hadn't been unhappy, just different, and she had made her own choices in life.

She was groping her way through unfamiliar territory, but Caroline's approach to any problem was to tackle it head-on. She didn't really know how to use the weapons nature had given her, but Joe Mackenzie was about to find them all brought to bear on him.

The first step in solving any problem was to research the subject. It was early enough that a lot of people were still awake, and there were plenty of female Air Force personnel who turned out to be willing to lend her magazines with articles that she thought addressed the problem, and she was even able to come up with quite a bit of research on fighter pilots in general. She was an accomplished speed reader and sat up for several hours plowing her way through magazines offering such intriguing articles as "He's Bad, Bad, Bad—So Why Do You Love Him Anyway?" and "Finding The Gold in The Dross—When Not To Give Up." Double titles seemed to abound, as well as hundreds of glossy photos of women five feet nine inches tall who weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, most of which was evidently hair and breasts. She learned how to tell when he was cheating, and how to get revenge. She learned how to break into real estate or start her own company, how to win at blackjack—she committed that to memory—and where to stay on vacation in Europe. Interesting stuff. She just might subscribe.

The material on fighter pilots was even more interesting.

She was in the office before dawn, dressed in a loose, lightweight jumpsuit. When she had been making her selection that morning, seduction had collided with comfort, and seduction had lost without even a whimper. The temperature hit a hundred and ten during the day, for heaven's sake.

She hauled out the specs for the day's tests and began rechecking them, making a mental note to ask Cal a few questions about the computer program. She had taken a second major in computer programming, which had seemed to be a good complement to physics, and it had in fact come in very handy on several occasions. She logged onto the computer and began running the tests through it, rechecking once again that everything was as perfect as they could get it.

"How long have you been in—"

She shrieked at the voice right behind her and came up swinging, overturning her chair in the process. Joe's hand shot up and caught her right fist before it could connect with his face, and a split second later he caught the left one in his other hand, the twin movements like lightning.

"Don't do that again!" she yelled, going up on tiptoe to glare at him, thrusting her jaw up to his. Her eyes were still dilated from fright. "What are you trying to do, give me a heart attack? From now on, whistle before you get to the door!"

With a deft motion he twisted her arms behind her back, still holding her fists clasped in his palms. The action brought her breasts firmly against him and encased her within his arms. "I didn't mean to scare you," he said softly. "But if your first reaction is always to attack, you should learn how to do it right, so you won't wind up in the sort of predicament you're in now." He saw interest sharpen the dark bluish-green of her eyes and knew that he had successfully deflected her attention from the fact that he was holding her captive.

Caroline considered the situation. She tugged briefly on her arms, but he held her firmly, and there was no way she could free herself from those iron hands. He was too tall for her to hit him in the face with her head. "I still have the option of stomping your instep and kicking your ankle or knee."

"Yes, but you're too close to put much power behind it. You can hurt me, but not enough to make me let you go. If I were an attacker, sweetheart, right now you'd be in some serious trouble."

She wiggled experimentally again, testing her limits of movement. His arms were locked around her, and she was pressed fully against his muscled body. She shivered a little at the unexpected pleasure of it, so surrounded by his warmth and scent. He smelled delicious; she had never noticed any other man smelling the way Joe did, and it wasn't just the fresh scent of soap lingering on his skin. It was a hot, musky scent, subtle and powerful, making her want to bury her nose against him and drink it in. The effects were strong and immediate; her breasts began to tingle and ache as her nipples peaked, and hot tension tightened her loins.

She cleared her throat and tried to take her mind off her body's reaction; they were in the office, for heaven's sake. Just because she had changed her mind about wanting to experience more of this man/woman thing didn't mean she wanted to do it here. "Umm…so what should I do when I want to attack?"

"You should learn how to fight first," he replied, and pressed a quick, hard kiss on her mouth as he released her.

Her lips tingled from the kiss, and she licked them. His gaze slid to her mouth and darkened. She tried for nonchalance to hide the fact that she was shaking all over. "So, what do you recommend?" she asked as she set the chair upright and briskly backed out of the computer program, just to give herself something to do. She switched the machine off and faced him with a bright smile. "Martial arts?"

"Dirty street fighting would be better. It teaches you how to win any way you can, and to hell with fighting fair. It's the only way you should ever go into a fight."

"You mean like throwing dirt in the guy's eyes and stuff like that?"

"Whatever works. The idea is to win, and stay alive."

"Is that the way you fight?" she asked. She desperately needed to sit down, her legs were shaking so much, but he would tower over her if she did, and the thought of that made her nervous, too. She compromised by propping herself on the edge of the desk. "Is that what the Air Force teaches its pilots now?"

"No, that's the way I was taught to fight when I was a kid."

"Who taught you?"

"My father."

She supposed it was a masculine bonding thing. Her father had taught her calculus, but that wasn't quite the same.

"I've been researching the typical fighter pilot," she said. "It's interesting reading. In some ways, you're the perfect stereotype."

"Is that so?" He showed his teeth in a very white smile, though maybe it wasn't a smile at all.

"Well, in some ways you're atypical. You're unusually tall, more suited to a bomber than a fighter. But fighter pilots are typically intelligent, aggressive, arrogant and as determined—maybe stubborn is a better word—as a bulldog. They want to be in control at all times."

He crossed his arms over his chest, dark lashes shadowing his glittering eyes.

"Fighter pilots have keen eyesight and fast reactions. Most of you have blue or light-colored eyes, so you're certainly typical on that. And here's an interesting little tidbit… fighter pilots usually have more female children than male."

"Finding out will be fun," he drawled.

She cleared her throat. "Actually, I thought you might already know."

He lifted his eyebrows. "Why's that?"

"I did notice that they called you Breed. I assumed it's because you do it so well."

One corner of his mouth moved in a slow smile. "My breeding productivity doesn't have anything to do with it. They call me Breed because I'm a half-breed Indian."

Caroline was so startled that she could only stare at him. "A Native American?"

He shrugged. "That's what you can call it if you want, but I've always called myself an Indian. Changing labels doesn't change anything else." His voice was casual, but he was watching her closely.

She studied him just as closely. His skin was certainly dark enough, with a deep bronze hue that she had assumed was a dark tan. His hair was thick and black and straight, those sculpted cheekbones high and prominent, his nose thin and high-bridged, and his mouth was typically clean-cut and sensual. His eyes, however, were an oddity. She frowned and said accusingly, "Then how can you have blue eyes? Blue is a recessive gene. You should have dark eyes."

He had been alert to how she would receive his heritage, but at her reply something in him relaxed. How else would Caroline respond to something but with a demand for more information? She wasn't shocked or repelled, as some people still were by his mixed heritage, or even titillated, as sometimes happened—though he had become accustomed to that because women were often excited by his profession, too. Nope, she honed right in on the genetic question of why he had blue eyes.

"My parents were both half-breeds," he explained. "Genetically I'm still half Indian and half white, but I got the recessive blue-eyed gene from both my parents. I'm one-quarter Comanche, one-quarter Kiowa and half white."

She nodded in satisfaction, the mystery of his eye color having been explained. She pursued the subject with interest. "Do you have any brothers or sisters? What color are their eyes?"

"Three brothers and one sister. Half brothers and sister, to be precise. My mother died when I was a baby. My stepmother is white, and she has blue eyes. So do my three brothers. Dad was wondering if he was ever going to have a black-eyed baby until my sister was born."

She was fascinated by this glimpse of family life. "I'm an only child. I always wanted a brother or sister when I was little," she said, unaware of the faint wistful note in her voice. "Was it fun?"

He chuckled and hooked his foot in the chair, turning it around so he could drop his tall frame into it. Caroline remained propped against the edge of the desk, still effectively pinned there, because he was in the way, but she wasn't paying attention to that any longer.

"I was sixteen when Dad married Mary, so I didn't grow up with them, but it was fun in a different way. I was old enough to appreciate babies, to take care of them. The best times were when I would go home on leave and they would swarm all over me like little monkeys. Dad and Mary always take off for one night alone while I'm there, and I have the kids to myself. They aren't little anymore, but we all still like it."

She tried to imagine this big, dangerous-looking man relaxed and surrounded by kids. Even just talking about them had softened his face. It wasn't until she saw him that way that she realized what a barrier he kept between himself and everyone else, because there was no barrier between him and his family. With them he would relax the iron control that characterized his every move, lose the remoteness that lay over his expression and in his eyes. The relationship he had with his men was different. It was the camaraderie that is established with a group whose members work together and depend on each other for a long time. That wasn't personal, and in a way it required him to retain his control. Suddenly she felt cold and a little lost, because she wasn't inside his intimate little circle. She wanted him to relax that guard with her, let her see the inner man and get close to him. With her recent feminine awakening came another insight, one that hurt even more: she wanted him to want her enough to lose that frightening control. It hurt because he didn't, and she knew it. What was frightening was that she knew it wouldn't matter to her unless she was already far more involved emotionally than she had thought.

She became aware that she had been staring silently at him for several long minutes, and he had been just as quietly watching her, one eyebrow slightly quirked as he waited for her to say something. She blushed without knowing why. He came lithely to his feet, stepping forward, so close that his legs were touching hers. "What's on your mind, sweetheart?"

"You," she blurted out. Why was he standing so close? Her pulse was beginning to race again. What was it about him that being close to him put her brain into neutral and her body into overdrive?

"What about me?"

She tried to think of something clever and casual, but she had never learned how to prevaricate or hide her feelings. "I don't know anything about men. I don't know how to act around them or how to attract them."

His expression was wry. "You're doing okay."

What did he mean by that? She was being her usual blunt self, which had always sent men running. This was more difficult than she'd imagined it would be. She found that she was wringing her hands and was vaguely astonished at herself, because she'd never thought she was the hand-wringing type. "Am I? Good. I've never seen anyone I wanted to attract before, so I'm at something of a loss. I know you said we'd just pretend to have a relationship so your men wouldn't bother me, but would it be too much of a bother for you if I wanted to make it more real?"

"Just how'real' did you have in mind?" he asked, amused.

Again she was at a loss. "Well, how would I know? I just know that I'm attracted to you, and I'd like for you to be attracted to me, but I've never done this before, so you're asking me to play a game without knowing the rules. Would you hand a football to some guy who'd never heard of the game before and say 'Here you go, buddy. Play ball'?"

His eyes danced at the astringency of her tone, but his voice was calm and grave when he replied, "I see your point."

"So?" She spread her hands inquiringly. "What are the rules? That is, if you don't mind playing."

"Oh, I like a little game now and then."

He was drawling again. She gave him an uncertain glance, wondering if he was making fun of her.

He put his hands on her hips and moved her a little farther back on the desk. Caroline grabbed his upper arms, her nails digging into his biceps. No one had ever touched her hips before, except for one eager beaver who had pinched her bottom and gotten shoved over a wastebasket for his effort. The steely muscles under her fingers made her doubt she would be able to shove Joe anywhere.

He moved even closer and somehow used his hard thighs to spread her legs. She looked down in shock. He was between her legs. Her head jerked back up, but before she could say anything he brushed a light, gentle kiss across her mouth. The contrast between that non-threatening kiss and his very threatening position between her legs disoriented her.

He cupped her face with one hand, slowly caressing her cheek, his fingertips moving lightly over the smooth, velvet texture of her skin. His other hand slipped around over her bottom and firmly pulled her forward until he was nestled ultimately in the notch of her thighs. Caroline's heart thumped violently, and she lost her breath, as well as her ability to sit upright. Her bones turned liquid and she sank against him, unintentionally deepening the embrace. The hard bulge of his sex throbbed against the soft yielding of her loins, and she felt an answering throbbing begin deep inside her.

He kissed her again, this time with a slowly increasing demand. Helplessly she opened her mouth to the probing of his tongue. His hips moved against her, between her spread thighs, in the same rhythm as his tongue moved in her mouth. The hard bulge in his trousers was even harder, even bigger.

Her senses were swimming, just as they had been the night before. His tongue probed deep into her mouth, stroking her own tongue and demanding a response. His taste was hot and heady, his skin smelling of soap and man. Her breasts were throbbing, and again the only relief seemed to be contact with his hard, muscled chest. It was all almost too much to bear, but the only alternative was to tear herself out of his arms, and she couldn't make herself do that.

She couldn't, but he could. Somehow she found herself being gently freed and set away from him. She swayed, and he steadied her, his hard hands clasping her arms. She stared up at him a little wildly. Damn his control! Why couldn't he feel even a little of the turmoil that enveloped her? He had gotten aroused, no doubt about that, but it hadn't affected his control at all, while she was about to go up in flames.

"The rules are simple," he said calmly. "We have to let you get accustomed to touching and being touched, and find out what you like. We'll take it slow, go a little bit further each time. I'll pick you up at seven tonight."

He kissed her again and left as silently as he had entered the room. Caroline sat on the desk, trying to get control of her heart and lungs, trying to deal with the empty ache of her body. She was in trouble. She was in big trouble. She had started something she couldn't handle, but she wouldn't have called it off even if she thought she could, and she strongly suspected it was beyond her control anyway.

Unless she was very much mistaken, Joe Mackenzie intended to have an affair with her. A full-fledged, get-naked, lovemaking affair. And she was willing; she was going into this with her eyes open, knowing full well that for him it was likely to be only an affair, while it would be much more to her. He would always be in control, the strong core of him always guarded and remote and uninvolved, while she was well on her way to losing her heart

Chapter Five

The tests went well that day, which was a good thing, because Caroline was in a daze. Adrian made a snide remark to her when they were alone and she confounded him by giving him a vague smile. She was alarmed at her own lack of concentration. That had never been a problem before; her ability to concentrate was so strong that one professor in college had made the comment that she would be able to read during an earthquake, and he hadn't been far off the mark.

She would never have believed that a man could totally disrupt her thought processes, especially since he wasn't paying her any particular attention. He didn't have to, she realized. He had made his intention plain the day before, and he'd been seen kissing her goodnight; as far as everyone on base was concerned, she was Colonel Mackenzie's woman. He was the alpha male, and none of the other men would challenge him for his chosen mate. She was a little appalled at this demonstration of how little things had changed since prehistoric times, even though she had done her part by going along with him. Now there was food for thought. Had she gone along with him because his suggestion had made sense, or because he was the alpha male and she had felt subconsciously compelled to obey him?

Nah. She had never felt compelled, subconsciously or otherwise, to obey anyone. She had gone along with him because he made her heartbeat go crazy, pure and simple, and it was useless to keep looking for extenuating circumstances with which to excuse herself.

When they were back in the office going over the day's test results and preparing for the next day's flights, Cal rolled his chair over to hers. "So, how'd it go on the date with the boss man?"

Despite herself, her hands immediately started trembling and she laid down the paper she had been trying to read. "Very casual, low-key. Why do you ask?"

To her surprise, his friendly eyes were full of concern. "Well, I've never known you to date before, and I guess I just wanted to make sure he wasn't twisting your arm. He is the head man on this project, and he has a lot of influence, not just with the base commander and the men here, but all the way to the Pentagon."

She was touched. "And you thought I might feel I had to go out with him to stay on the team?"

"Something like that, yeah."

She patted his hand, smiling. "Thanks, but everything's okay."

"Good. Adrian isn't bothering you too much, is he?"

"I haven't paid any attention to him, so I guess he isn't."

Cal smiled and rolled back to his own desk.

Caroline checked the time. Three and a half hours until seven o'clock. She had always found her work engrossing, but along with her loss of concentration she had evidently become a clock-watcher, too. No one had ever warned her that associating with men was efficiency-destroying.

For almost the first time in her life she stopped work when everyone else did. She hurried to her quarters, turned the air conditioner on high and jumped into the shower. It was only as she was stepping out of the stall that she realized she didn't know where they were going or how she should dress.

She stared at the telephone. She could call him. She didn't know his number, but that wasn't any problem, because the base operator would. It was the sensible thing to do. She was a big believer in being sensible, so she sat down on the bed and placed the call before she talked herself out of her own common sense. He answered on the first ring. "Mackenzie."

God, his voice sounded even deeper on the phone. She took a deep breath. "This is Caroline. Where are we going tonight?" There, that was just right. To the point, no silliness, a simple request for information.

"Wear a skirt," he replied maddeningly, cutting through her no-nonsense question to the reason behind it. "Something I can get my hands under."

The receiver clicked in her ear, and she stared at it. The damn man had hung up on her! And her heart was racing again. Damn him, damn him, damn him. It wasn't fair. She was all but in a panic with anticipation and fear and wanting, and his heartbeat was probably as steady as a rock.

A skirt? After that comment, he was lucky she wasn't running for the hills. There was no way she could get in that truck with him expecting at any moment to feel those hot, callused hands sliding up her thighs. If he'd kept his mouth shut she would probably have worn a skirt because it was cooler, but if she wore one now, she would automatically be giving him permission to put his hand up it, and God knows what else. And it wasn't that she didn't want him to, just that he'd said they would go slow and that didn't sound slow at all to her, and even if it was, she would like to have a little control over the situation. What she would really like was to destroy his control, to have him as hot and bothered and on the verge of madness as she was.

She sat down on the bed and took several deep breaths. Maybe nuns had the right idea. Men were obviously detrimental to a woman's mental health.

She put on khaki fatigue pants and a tailored white shirt. That was as close as she was going to get to a skirt… not very close at all.

He knocked on the door at seven o'clock precisely, and when she opened it he burst out laughing. "What have you been thinking?" he asked, still chuckling. "That I'm a big bad wolf all set to gobble you up?"

"The thought crossed my mind."

He watched as she double-checked the appliances in the small quarters, then locked and double-checked the door. She was a cautious woman indeed. He put his hand on her waist as he walked her to the truck. "You don't have anything to worry about," he said soothingly. "I'm not going to eat you." Three seconds ticked by before he murmured, "Yet."

He felt her jump. Her peculiar blend of inexperience and sexuality was slowly driving him mad. When he kissed her, she responded with a heat and intensity that brought him to the brink of violence, but at the same time he sensed that she was ready to bolt at any time. She reminded him of nothing so much as a filly when a stallion is brought to her for the first time, nervous and apt to bite or kick, while at the same time her scent was telling the stallion she was more than ready for his mounting and he was going wild trying to accomplish it. Well, he'd calmed many a mare for both riding and servicing, and he knew just how to go about it.

He lifted her into the truck before she could change her mind and went around to the driver's side. The proposition she had put to him that morning had been in his mind all day, as had the blunt, forthright way she had done it. Caroline didn't know how to be flirtatious or sweetly cajoling; she had just laid it on the line, and her ego with it. He had wanted to take her in his arms and hold her, tell her that she needed to learn how to protect herself better than that. She had no defenses and didn't even realize it. Everything about her was straight ahead, no detours or subterfuges. He'd never had a woman ask for him like that before, ask him to teach her about men and sex. He'd been half-aroused all day, silently cursing the constrictions of his uniform.

Now he was in his customary off-duty jeans and boots, but the jeans were even more restrictive. He shifted position uncomfortably, trying to stretch his leg out to give himself more room. Damn it, he either needed to get out of his pants or get rid of his hard-on—preferably both, and in that order.

"Where are we going this time?" she asked, pushing her wind-blown hair out of her face.

"Do you like Mexican?"

Her eyes lit up. "Tacos," she purred. "Enchiladas. Sopapillas."

He laughed. "Got it." As she pushed her hair back once more, he said, "Would you rather I put up the windows and turned on the air conditioning?"

"No, I like it." She paused before admitting, "My'vette is a convertible."

He was smiling as he returned his attention to the road. Her name should have been Paradox, because she was one conflicting characteristic after another.

They went to his favorite Mexican restaurant in Vegas, where the best enchiladas she'd ever eaten, coupled with a frozen Margarita, relaxed her and made her forget that she was nervous. Joe drank water with his dinner, something she found curious. "I thought pilots were supposed to be hard drinkers," she said.

"Most of us put away our share of pilot juice," he said lazily.

"But not you?"

"Nope. There's a time limit within which you aren't supposed to drink if you're going to be flying the next day, but I think it's too close. I want perfect control of myself and my machine. The laws of physics and aerodynamics aren't very forgiving at Mach 2." He lifted his glass of water in a little toast. "Not only that, I'm a half-breed. I don't drink. Period."

She gave a brief nod as if admitting the wisdom of that. "If it's so dangerous, why do any pilots drink?"

"To wind down. You're so tense for so long, with the adrenaline burning up your veins, that you can't come down from the high. Our lives are on the line every minute up there, even on routine flights. Hell, there's no such thing as a routine flight"

She started to ask a question about Night Wing, but remembered where they were and left it for another time. Security wasn't something she took lightly.

After dinner she said, "What now?" then wished she hadn't. She also wished she hadn't had that Margarita. She saw his point about needing perfect control.

"Now, sweetheart, we play."

When he said play, he meant play. Ten minutes later they were on a miniature golf course.

She hefted the putter experimentally. "I've never done this before."

"Looks like I'm going to be first with you at a lot of things," he replied with that maddening calm of his.

She scowled and lifted the putter like a bat. "Maybe not."

He kissed her even as he relieved her of the putter with a move so fast she saw only a blur. Disgruntled, she thought that if he'd lived in the Old West he would have been a gunfighter.

"Your first lesson," he said, turning her so her back was to him and putting his arms around her. He folded her hands around the handle in the correct manner and showed her how to swing, smooth and level, hitting the ball with carefully restrained power. Strength wasn't a factor in miniature golf; the game required judgment and coordination.

He made a hole in one on the first green. "You've done this before," she accused.

"Among other things."

"New rule. Each innuendo will add a stroke to your score."

"Good. Added strokes means it'll last longer."

She wanted to throw her ball at him and stomp off the green, but instead she shouted with laughter and firmly added another stroke to his score. Rules were rules.

To her surprise, she seemed to have the needed judgment of distance, force and direction, and challenged him even though she had never played before. He was too aggressive by nature to give her the game and set himself to the task of beating her, displaying intense concentration and superb hand-eye coordination. Caroline was just as determined, and the game was largely played in silence, to a tie. He pointed out that it was a draw only because of the penalty stroke she'd added to his score.

"So let's play another," she challenged. "Throw this one out, and the best two out of three wins."

"Deal."

They had to play five more games, because two others ended in draws. He won the first game, she won the second, and the next two were the ties; he finally ended it by winning the fifth game by one stroke.

She was scowling as they turned in their putters, and Joe was reminded of the look on her face the night before, when the slot machine had kept taking her quarters without making a payoff. He had had the idle thought that she was on the verge of dismantling the machine when it had finally paid out. No doubt about it, Caroline made no pretense of being good-natured about losing. She didn't like it. He understood that, because he didn't like it, either.

On the drive back to the base he slowed and pulled off the road, then drove about a quarter of a mile into the desert before stopping. He killed the lights and motor, and the night silence poured in through the open windows.

"Are you ready for another first?"

Caroline tensed. "What kind of first?"

"Parking."

"Thanks, but I had to pass a test on that when I got my driver's license."

He chuckled at the testy comment but sensed the nervousness behind it. "Here are our rules on making out. Number one, I'm not going to make love to you.

Your first time is going to be on a bed, not in the front seat of a truck. Number two, we're going to keep most of our clothes on, because if we don't, your first time will be in the front seat of a truck."

She cleared her throat. "It sounds pretty frustrating."

"It is. That's the whole point of parking and making out." He laughed and slid out from behind the steering wheel, then scooped her onto his lap. A little more shifting and he was sitting with his back propped against the passenger door, his long legs stretched out on the seat, while she was lying pressed against his right side, half on the seat and half on him, her head on his shoulder with her face tilted up, and he was leisurely kissing her.

If the windows had been up they would have fogged over. His mouth was slow and hot and demanding, making her forget about time. The slow beat of pleasure began to pound in her veins, and her arms wound about his neck.

His palm covered her breast and the shock jolted her, making her tear her mouth from his. He ruthlessly took it again, stifling her instinctive protest, so she could only whimper into his mouth. As the shock faded, she began to whimper from the pleasure of it, and her nipple beaded tightly beneath the layers of cloth.

"Do you like it?" he murmured. "Or do you want me to stop?"

She liked it, maybe too much, but she didn't want him to stop. Her breast was tingling and throbbing, the heat from it spreading down to her loins. His strong fingers were slowly kneading, taking care not to hurt her, then he found the turgid nipple and rubbed it through her shirt. She moaned and arched against him.

"Caroline?" he prompted. "Do you want me to stop? Or do you want more?"

"Don't stop," she said, her voice hoarse with strain. "Please, don't stop."

He kissed her reassuringly. "I won't. I'm going to unbutton your shirt and slip my hand inside. All right?"

How was she supposed to stand that when she felt as if she were flying into a thousand pieces right now? But as soon as he said it, she knew that she wanted his hand on her naked breast, that the barriers of cloth between them were too maddening to tolerate. "All right," she whispered, and somehow her hand was busy with the buttons of his shirt as he unfastened hers. She wanted to feel his bare skin as much as she wanted his touch on hers.

His long fingers dipped inside her open shirt and trailed lightly along the edges of her bra, pausing at the front center fastening. "Umm, good," he said, and deftly unfastened the garment. She felt suddenly vulnerable as it loosened; then he slid his hand inside, and all her nerve endings rioted. His palm was hot and rough, the callused skin rasping over her swollen nipples as he rubbed and lightly pinched. She heard herself moan and buried her face against his shoulder to stifle the sound.

He shifted on the seat so he was more on his side and she was lying flatter. She felt like a doll, helpless to prevent him from moving her as he willed. He spread her open shirt wide, exposing her breasts to the bright starlight shining through the windshield. She had seen men do it to women in movies, but still she was unprepared when he bent his head and closed his mouth over her nipple, drawing it in with a curling motion of his tongue. Caroline arched wildly under the lash of a sensation so exquisite and unbearable that her entire body quivered. He controlled her with those incredibly strong hands of his and the pressure of his iron-muscled legs, pressing her down into the seat, and somehow he was on top of her.

Her heart was beating so hard it hurt, and her blood was pounding through her veins. She clung to him, barely able to breathe as her body adjusted to his weight and unyielding hardness. The jarring unfamiliarity of it was matched by a deeper, more primitive sense of lightness. He moved his thighs, spreading her legs and settling himself between them, pushing the hard ridge of his manhood against her soft folds. "This is how we'll be when we make love," he whispered, pressing slow kisses on her neck and collarbone, then moving down to suckle deeply on both her breasts, leaving her nipples tight and wet and painfully sensitive to the night air when he lifted his head. He eased the coolness with the hot pressure of his chest.

His voice was a low, almost soundless rustle in her ear. "I'll move like this, slow and easy, until we're both ready to climax." His hips rocked leisurely, rhythmically pressing his sex against hers. Caroline's whole body lifted into the contact, her slender hips straining and reaching. She wanted to speak, to beg him to do something to ease this unbearable tension inside her, but all she could do was gasp for air and dig her nails into his shoulders in an effort to communicate her need to him.

"Then, when it's time, when we can't stand it any longer, I'll start moving harder and faster, going deeper and deeper into you."

She made a high, wild, pleading sound, spreading her thighs wider and lifting them to clasp his hips. Her ankle banged the steering wheel, a welcome distraction, because the slight pain eased her body's primal attention, but it wasn't enough. She twisted under him, frantic with heat and need and a deep, empty ache.

Joe caught his breath at her wild beauty, fierce and demanding, with only the starlight shining across her face. Her body was hot and tense and untamed, demanding a satisfaction she hadn't yet known, but the lure of which was compelling her ever closer and closer to the edge. He wanted to unfasten her pants and drag them down, then bare his own loins and drive into her, hard and fast, just as he'd told her. He wanted her naked, lying stretched out before him on a bed to cushion her from the force of his thrusts. He wanted to take her with swift, rough lust, plunging into her hot womanhood from behind so her buttocks slapped against his belly with the raw sound of sex. The blood of his ancestors ran hot and thick through his veins, the blood of warriors, uncomplicated, as forceful as the elements. He saw himself taking her with the sun burning down on their naked skin and nothing beneath them but the hard, hot earth. And she was clinging to him, a warrior's woman, as fierce and demanding as he was. He had known she was wild the first time he'd seen her, a wildness that had been stifled and controlled, but it was there, just waiting to break out

He hadn't intended to go this far, but she was pure flame in his arms, her response immediate and strong. His hardness stretched painfully beneath his jeans, demanding his own release, and grimly he knew it wouldn't take much. But the seat of his truck wasn't the place to take her virginity; it was too cramped, too awkward, too inconvenient, and he had also promised her that he wouldn't make love to her tonight. Caroline needed to know that she could trust him, so he grimly fought for control. It wasn't easy; he was close to climax himself, racked with frustration, but his iron will slowly won out, and he eased himself from the clinging embrace of her arms and legs.

"We have to stop," he said, making his voice even. It took more effort than he liked. "If we don't, you'll lose your cherry right here."

"Yes," she whispered, reaching for him again. She didn't care if her first time was in a pickup truck. Her body burned and ached, and she needed the surcease of his possession.

He caught her hands and firmly held them down. "No. Not here and not now."

She stared at him, her eyes wild with frustration; then anger exploded hotly through her veins. She shoved at him, fighting to sit up in a flurry of tangled arms and legs, and scrambled away from him. "Then why did you let it go that far if you didn't intend to finish it?" she shouted. "You… you tease!"

Frustration frayed his own temper. Damn it, did she think it had been easy for him to stop? "Because I got carried away, too!" he snapped.

"Yes, I can tell," she said with a sneer. "It really shows. Your breathing speeded up a little bit there."

Furious, he grabbed her hand and carried it to the front of his jeans, pressing her palm hard against the rigid length of his manhood. "Maybe this feels unaffected to you, but you came damn close to finding out just how involved I am." His voice was guttural with rage, and that made him even angrier, because it was evidence of just how far his control had eroded.

She jerked her hand away, even though the feel of that thick ridge was fascinating. She was too angry to be diverted. "I didn't say no, did I?" she demanded hotly. "Just what was wrong with here and now?"

He ground his teeth together, savagely fighting both his anger and a violent resurgence of sexual need. It had been a mistake to force her hand down on his groin. "Here isn't a bed, and now isn't enough time. When I get in you, I'm not going to get up for a long time. A cramped quickie isn't what you need or what I want."

She crossed her arms and stared furiously out the windshield.

He was silent, too, as he mastered his temper and his voice, reaching deep down to find the icy control for which he was famous. He was astonished at how quickly she had made him lose his temper, something he couldn't remember doing since childhood. He had been angry, but losing control was something he didn't permit himself to do. It seemed Caroline had an astonishing knack for breaking through to his primitive impulses, and, even more disturbingly, she wasn't even trying. He had always controlled the relationships he had with women, letting them get only as intimate as he wanted, ending things when he wanted. The first night he had met Caroline he had coolly decided to have an affair with her, but on his terms and his timetable. It was disconcerting to realize she could not only tempt him to break his own rules but could actually make him fight to control himself.

"My quarters are in the BOQ," he finally said evenly. "I can't take you there. It would be just as inappropriate to use your quarters. Tomorrow is Friday, and I'm off duty this weekend. We'll check into a hotel in Vegas and spend the weekend there."

He assumed she was still willing, she thought angrily, and was disgusted with herself because she was. But he'd made it plain that it had to be his way or not at all. He was the man in control.

"All right," she said through clenched teeth.

The drive back to the base was completed in an atmosphere more like that between adversaries rather than two people who had just decided to begin an affair. When they reached her quarters, she opened the door and jumped down without waiting for him.

He left the engine running and caught her just as she reached the door, catching her arm and whirling her around. "My good-night kiss," he reminded her, and hauled her into his arms.

There was no way anyone watching could have mistaken that kiss as polite or friendly or in the getting-to-know-you stage. He held her plastered to him from knees to breast, her head bent back under the pressure of his kiss. His mouth was hot and angry and overwhelming, forcing her to acknowledge his dominance. For a few seconds she tried to push him away; then she yielded abruptly to the penetration of his tongue and pressed herself even closer to his hard frame, accepting his aggression and meeting it with her own.

He released her abruptly and stepped away, his eyes glittering. "You won't need to pack a nightgown," he said.

She stood silently glaring as he walked to the truck and got in. "I hadn't planned to," she muttered as he drove off.

Chapter Six

Caroline couldn't find her ID tag the next morning. She searched the dresser top where she usually put it, the kitchen table, the cabinet tops, under the furniture, in the dirty laundry where she had thrown the clothes she had worn the day before, even the trash cans, but it wasn't to be found. She sat down and tried to think what she had done with the thing, since she knew she had worn it the day before, but she drew a complete blank. Joe had had her so distracted that she might have eaten it for all she knew.

She couldn't get into the buildings without that tag; they were coded and electronically scanned at the entrances, and anyone entering a classified area without the proper ID set off an alarm that had the security police swarming with weapons drawn. She was mortified that she had so carelessly misplaced it. Security was so tight that cards couldn't be duplicated; the lost or damaged one had to be voided out of the computer system, a new one issued with a new code and that information fed into the computers. Also because of the security, a jillion forms had to be filled out in quadruplicate to authorize and verify the change. Probably even the base commander, Major General Tuell, would have to sign off on it

She had had it the day before; she couldn't have gotten into the buildings without it. She distinctly remembered it snagging on a file folder. The tag had just been clipped on, so could it have been tugged loose without her noticing it? Probably. Joe's kisses had turned her brain into mush, and she hadn't been able to concentrate on anything but seeing him that night

If the tag was lying somewhere in the office, why hadn't the alarm been set off when she had left without the proper identification? Or was the scan positioned so that it only read the tags of those entering the building, on the theory that if no one without identification got in, they didn't have to worry about who got out It was a logical theory; she had no problem with it Her problem was how to find out if her tag was in the office.

She considered her options. If she called the security police to have them check, it would mean reports and explanations, the very thing she wanted to avoid. So she called Cal to get him to search the office for her. If he didn't find the tag, she would report it lost and face the hassle.

It took him several rings to answer the phone, and his voice was groggy. "Hullo."

"Cal, this is Caroline. I'm sorry to wake you, but I think I dropped my ID card in the office yesterday, and I need you to look for it before I report that it's gone."

He made a grunting noise. "Wha—?" He sounded bewildered and still half-asleep. "Caroline?"

"Yes, this is Caroline. Are you awake? Did you understand what I said?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm awake. I got it." He yawned into the receiver. "Look for your ID card. Lord, Caroline, how'd you misplace something like that?"

"I think I snagged it on a file folder."

"So wear it on a chain around your neck instead of clipping it on."

Since she had roused him from a sound sleep, she allowed him his disgruntled advice. Maybe it was a psychological thing, but she didn't like chains around her neck, even when they were called necklaces. Instead she would make a mental note to add her ID card to the list of things she double-checked.

"How long will it take you to get dressed?" she asked.

"Give me five minutes." He yawned again. "What time is it?"

She looked at the clock. "It's 5:43."

He groaned audibly. "I'm on my way. Actually, I'm trying to focus my eyes. You owe me one. I wouldn't do this for just anybody."

"Thanks," she said fervently.

She met him outside the Quonset building five minutes later. He was unshaven, his hair rumpled, his eyes bleary, but he was dressed, and his own ID tag was hanging on a chain around his neck. She stood outside while he shuffled through the door, still yawning. He was back in less than three minutes, carrying her tag, which she took with a stream of thank-you's.

"It was under your desk," he said, blinking owlishly at her. "What are you doing going to work this early?"

"I usually do," she said, surprised. She thought everyone knew her habit of going in early and staying late.

He suddenly broke into his normal, easygoing grin. "I'm going to have to revise my opinion of Colonel Mackenzie downward, since he obviously isn't keeping you up late. I'm disappointed in the man."

She lifted her eyebrows in feigned astonishment. "You thought he would let anything interfere with work? Surely you jest."

"Evidently I do. Well, have fun. I'll mosey on back to shower and shave and mainline some coffee. More moving-target tests today. We need to be on our toes, and I'm barely on my feet."

She gave him a quick kiss on his beard-roughened cheek, "Thanks, Cal. It would have taken forever to get it replaced, not to mention all of the reports."

"Anytime, anytime." Then he snickered. "Or you could have called Adrian to look for it."

"I'd rather face the security police."

"That's what I thought." With a wave, he began trudging back to his own quarters, and Caroline firmly clipped the tag in place with a sigh of relief.

At six-thirty, she was engrossed in running through the tests when a low, melodious whistle caught her attention. She burst out laughing and looked up, and two seconds later Joe silently appeared in the doorway.

"Another first," he observed. "No flying cups, reports or fists."

He was dressed in his flightsuit, though he wasn't in full harness yet. Her heart was suddenly in her throat. None of the other flights or tests had made her nervous, but abruptly she felt stricken, barely able to breathe. She had never cared before, and all of a sudden her objectivity was destroyed.

It took a special type of man to be a military aviator, and even more so to qualify as a fighter pilot. The numbers were still overwhelmingly male, though women were now accepted into fighter training. Analysts were finding that the female jet jockey shared some personality characteristics with the male pilots, mostly coolness under pressure and situation awareness, but in other significant ways the female pilots were indubitably different from the males. The men were naturally arrogant and supremely self-confident; it took that kind of man to be a fighter pilot, to have the kind of assurance that would not only allow him to climb into a machine and streak through the sky at three times the speed of sound, but to have the bloody confidence that he could master not only the machine but anything that might happen, and live to do it again. Fighter training only reinforced that supreme self-confidence.

She stared at him, seeing not only the cool confidence in his eyes but the actual eagerness to strap on that lethal beauty he called Baby. He enjoyed the speed and power, the risk, the ultimate challenge of it He had no doubt in his ability to make the aircraft perform as he wanted and bring it safely to earth again. His air of arrogant invincibility was almost godlike in its fierceness.

But for all his skill and superiority, he was a man, a human being. And men could be killed.

"You're going up today," she said, barely able to force the words through her constricted throat "You didn't tell me."

One eyebrow rose in a faintly quizzical expression. "I'm going up today," he replied mildly. "What about it?"

What was she supposed to tell him, that she was terrified because his chosen occupation was one of the most dangerous in the world? She didn't have the right to impose her fears on him. There was no commitment between them, only an agreement to have an affair, which officially hadn't even begun yet. It wasn't his fault that she was falling in love with him, and even if he returned the sentiment, she wouldn't tell him she was afraid, because she wouldn't risk the possibility of distracting him when he needed to concentrate wholly on his job.

So she swallowed her fear and fought for control. "You're too…um, I think overwhelming is the word, in a flightsuit. What do you have on under it?"

The diversion worked. The other eyebrow rose to join its twin. "T-shirt and shorts. Did you expect me to be stark naked?"

"I didn't know. I'd never thought about it before." She made a shooing motion with her hand. "Go on, get out of here. You destroy my concentration. I couldn't work all day yesterday after what you did, so I'm not letting you near me this morning."

As soon as the words were out of her mouth she realized she should have known better. The light of battle gleamed coolly in his eyes as he walked toward her. She had inadvertently issued a challenge, and his dominant nature compelled him to call her on it.

She was still sitting down, and he leaned over her, bracing his hands on the arms of the chair and capturing her before she could scramble away. He kissed her, slanting his hard mouth over hers and using his tongue with devastating thoroughness. Her toes curled in her shoes; she surrendered without even the pretense of struggle, accepting his intrusion and welcoming it with unguarded eagerness.

He shuddered and instantly straightened, his face hard with lust. "What are you wearing tonight?"

She struggled to gather her senses, so easily scattered by his touch. "I don't know. Does it matter?"

She had never before seen his eyes so blue and intense. "No. You'll be naked five minutes after we check into the hotel."

The image was shattering. Helplessly she closed her eyes, her mouth going dry. When she opened them again, he was gone.

If she affected him even half as much as he affected her, he wouldn't be able to fly the damn plane. The fear rose nauseatingly in her throat again, surging back at full force. It took all of her willpower to force it away, but she managed it, because she knew that when it came down to it, that cold-blooded control of his would shut out every thought that didn't pertain to flying, the real love of his life. The truth hurt, but she took comfort in it, too, for as unpalatable as it was it would keep him safe, and that was all she asked.

Cal had been making a point of arriving in the mornings before Adrian, but she had disrupted his schedule that morning and was still alone when Adrian came in. He gave her an almost automatic look of dislike, poured a cup of coffee and sat down without speaking. Adrian didn't bother her much, anyway, but that morning she was so on edge that she scarcely even noticed he was there. She sat at her desk, torn between fear and anticipation. Part of her mind persisted in dwelling on the dangers of test flights, while the other part kept sliding away to sensual images of the coming night. She couldn't believe she was actually looking forward to it, but not even the realistic expectation of discomfort, at the least, was enough to quell her fever. She wanted Joe, needed him desperately, with an instinct so primal that the threat of pain was swept aside like a toothpick in a flood.

But first she had to live through the flights today.

"Dreaming about lover boy?" Adrian asked nastily.

She blinked at the interruption. "What? Oh—yes. I was. Sorry. Did you ask me something?"

"Only about your love life. I'm a little surprised, though. I didn't think it was men you liked, or have you decided to try some variety?"

Inexperience was not the same thing at all as ignorance, and she knew exactly what he was hinting at. She gave him a cold look, suddenly relishing the idea of a good, clean battle, free of entangling emotions. "Did you know I was always so much younger than the boys in my class that I was almost through college before I was mature enough for any of them to notice me?"

The question startled him; the puzzlement showed on his good-looking face. "So?"

"So they came after me hot and heavy, expecting me to know the score, but I didn't know anything at all about men and dating. I'd never been around kids my own age. I'd never been kissed, never been to a prom, never learned the things other girls learned at parties and on double dates. When those guys came on so strong it scared the hell out of me, so I said and did whatever it took to run them off. Are you getting the picture?"

He didn't, not at first. His incomprehension was plain. But then understanding broke through his hostility, and he stared at her in shocked disbelief. "Are you saying you were afraid of me?"

"Well, what else could I be?" she flashed. "You were grabbing at me and wouldn't take no for an answer."

"For God's sake, I'm not a rapist!" he snapped.

"How was I supposed to know?" She stood up and shook her fist at him. "If you hadn't been so damn sure of yourself and thought no woman could resist you, you might have noticed that I was scared!"

"You didn't act scared!"

"So I get belligerent when I feel threatened." She was standing over him now, glaring and all but breathing fire. "For your information, Colonel Mackenzie is the first man to notice how uneasy I was, and he doesn't attack me like a hungry octopus." No, all he did was make love to her with that infuriating control of his, reducing her to mush while he remained perfectly clearheaded. That, however, wasn't any of Adrian's business. "I'm tired of your snide remarks, do you understand? Put a sock in it, as of right now, or I'll stuff one in for you."

The shock left his face, and he glared back at her with a return of hostility. "Am I supposed to feel guilty because you're a social misfit? You're not the only one with problems, lady. I'd just gone through a god-awful divorce, my wife had dumped me for a weasel who made twice as much money as I did and I needed a little ego building myself. So don't blame me for not noticing your delicate psyche and pandering to it, because you sure as hell didn't notice mine!"

"Then we're even," she charged. "So get off my back!"

"With pleasure!"

She stomped back to her chair and flung herself into it. After glaring at the spec sheet for about thirty seconds she muttered, "I'm sorry about your wife."

"Ex-wife."

"She probably isn't happy."

Adrian leaned back in his chair, scowling at her. "I'm sorry I scared you. I didn't mean to."

It was an effort, but she growled, "That's okay."

He mumbled something and turned to his own work.

She had sought relief and distraction in anger, and it had succeeded while it lasted, but now that the confrontation was over her edginess came creeping back. Still, it looked like the air might have cleared some between Adrian and herself, or at least settled down, so it had been beneficial in that way.

Yates and Cal came trooping in, Cal still looking rumpled and sleepy, but he gave Caroline a grin and a wink. Then they all went over to the control room for the day's flights. The pilots were still there, four of them suited up in full harness, with straps and hoses and oxygen masks, and wearing speed jeans. Joe and Captain Bowie Wade were flying the Night Wings; Daffy Deale and Mad Cat Myrick were flying chase in the F-22s. Joe was totally absorbed in the job at hand, as she had known he would be, and the knot of fear in her throat relaxed some to actually be able to see it.

She tried not to let herself stare at him but the impulse was irresistible. He was a lodestone to her eyes, and she was fascinated by him. It wasn't just his tall, superbly muscled body or the chiseled perfection of his face, but the aura surrounding him. Joe Mackenzie was a warrior—cool, nerveless, lethal in his controlled savagery. The blood of countless generations of warriors ran in his veins; his instincts were those honed in past wars, in numberless bloody battles. The other pilots had some of the same instincts, the same aura, but in him those things had been condensed and purified, meeting in a perfect combination of body, intellect and ability. The others knew it; it was obvious in the way they looked at him, the respect they automatically gave him. It wasn't just that he was a colonel and in charge of the project, though his rank garnered its own respect, but what they gave him as a man and a pilot they would have given him even had they all outranked him. Some men stood out from the crowd, and Joe Mackenzie was one of them. He could never have been a businessman, a lawyer or a doctor. He was what he was, and he had sought the profession that would let him do what he was so perfectly suited to do.

He was a warrior.

He was the man she loved.

Somehow she had lost the ability to breathe, and it didn't matter. She felt dazed, mired in unreality. There couldn't be any more fooling herself. She had admitted her vulnerability to him, but never the immediacy of it. She had warned herself against the danger of letting herself fall in love with him, fretted that she might be losing her heart, but it had all been an emotional smoke screen to keep her from admitting that it was already too late. She'd had no more control over it than she had over her own body whenever he touched her, which should have been enough warning by itself. Her only excuse for her own blindness was that she'd never been in love before and simply hadn't recognized it.

She couldn't look at him as he and the three other pilots left the control room. If he'd glanced at her, everything that she was feeling would have been plain on her face, and she didn't want him to see it, to maybe think about it at the wrong time. She felt absurdly naked, stripped of all her emotional protection, every nerve ending exposed and agitated by the merest stirring of air.

All four birds lifted off, and technicians crowded the terminals, intently studying the information already pouring back in from the sensors embedded in the skins of the Night Whigs.

Within half an hour they were in position over the test site, where drones would provide them with moving targets at which to aim their lasers. Caroline always anticipated trouble, because in her experience no new system worked in practice exactly the way it worked in theory, but the tests had gone well so far, and she was optimistic that there wouldn't be any major problems. That day, however, seemed to prove her right in her anticipation of trouble and wrong in her hope that it would be minor. The targeting systems refused to lock on the drones, though they had done so the day before. Two different aircraft were up there today, however, and a totally disgusted project manager ordered the day's tests scrapped and the birds back to the base for a thorough check of the targeting systems.

Joe didn't lose his temper, but his displeasure was plain when he strode back into the control room, his hair matted with sweat from the helmet.

"The birds are in the hangar," he said with icy control, including Caroline in his ire as part of the laser team. "The same two are going back up Monday morning. You still have most of today to find the problem and fix it." He turned and strode off, and Cal whistled softly between his teeth.

Yates sighed. "Okay, people, let's get into our coveralls and get out to the hangars. We have work to do."

Caroline was already mentally sorting through the options. Laser targeting wasn't new; just the way they were applying it was. The problem could be the sensors in the pilots' helmets, those in the missile optics, even the switch that activated the targeting. What was disturbing was that it had happened to both aircraft at the same time, possibly indicating a basic problem in manufacturing or even design. She glanced at Cal and saw that he was frowning deeply, for he would be thinking that for both aircraft to experience the same difficulty at the same time could indicate trouble with the programming of the on-board computers. They were worrying about the problem from different angles, but both of them had realized the implications.

This had just been a peachy-keen day from the very beginning. If the night with Joe followed the same pattern, she would probably find out she was frigid.

They worked through lunch, running computer analyses of the sensors to try to pinpoint the trouble, but nothing showed up. Everything seemed to be working perfectly. They ran the same tests on the three birds that hadn't had any trouble and compared the results, again coming up with nothing. Everything matched. According to the computer, there was no reason why the lasers shouldn't have locked on to the moving targets.

It was late afternoon, and the heat had built to an uncomfortable level inside the hangar despite the best efforts of the huge air conditioners, when Cal reran the tests on the firing mechanisms of one of the malfunctioning units, and on one that was working. For whatever reason, maybe just the gremlins that invariably plagued every project, this time the computer showed a break in the electrical current in the trigger mechanisms. They were all aggravated because the problem had turned out to be so relatively simple after they had driven themselves crazy for hours and forgone lunch when it was something that could be repaired in less than an hour.

She was in a wonderful mood for a romantic assignation: tired, hungry, hot and ill-tempered. She made a point of scowling down at the ID tag clipped to her pocket before she left the building and headed for her quarters.

A long, cold shower made her feel better, though she was still scowling as she literally threw some clothes and toiletry items into an overnight bag. If he wasn't such a martinet, they wouldn't have felt so driven to solve the problem. She could have eaten lunch. She wouldn't now feel so frazzled and out of sorts. It would serve him right if she refused to go.

The only thing was, she wasn't that big a fool. She wanted to be with him more than she wanted to eat, more than she wanted anything.

It was only six o'clock when the knock came on the door. She was dressed, but her hair was still wet, and she was still hungry. She threw the door open. "We worked through lunch," she charged ominously. "We got finished—" she turned to check the clock "—thirty-five minutes ago. It was nothing—just a break in the current in the switches—but it took us forever to find it, because we were hungry and couldn't concentrate."

Joe lounged in the open doorway and surveyed her thoughtfully. "Do you always get ill-tempered when you're hungry?"

"Well, of course. Doesn't everyone?"

"Um, no. Most people don't."

"Oh."

He held out his hand to her. "Come on, then, and I'll feed you."

"My hair isn't dry."

"It'll dry fast enough in this heat. Are you packed?"

She fetched the overnight bag and did her quick, automatic tour to make certain everything was turned off. Joe took the bag from her hand and ushered her out, closing the door behind him. She stood there and stared meaningfully at the doorknob until he sighed and tried to turn it, to show her it was locked. Satisfied, she walked to the truck. He stowed the bag, then lifted her onto the seat. She had chosen to wear a halter-top sundress with a full skirt, deciding that it no longer mattered if he could slide his hand under it, since she had given him permission to do much more than that, but she nearly had heart failure when that warm, hard hand slipped up under the material and squeezed her bare thigh.

All thoughts of food fled her mind. She stared at him, hunger of another sort building, her need revealed in her suddenly darkened eyes and quickened breath. Joe lightly stroked her inner thigh with his fingertips, then forced himself to withdraw his hand. "Maybe I'll feed you first," he muttered.

Chapter Seven

They could have eaten sawdust for all the attention she paid to their meal. All she remembered afterward was that the restaurant was cool and dim, and the dry wine had a crisp, pleasant bite to it. He sat across from her, big and masculine, and with that dangerous glitter in his blue-diamond eyes. He was thinking about the coming night, too, and his sexual intent was plain for her to see. He meant for her to know what he was thinking; he made his possessiveness obvious in the way he looked at her, his gaze lingering on her breasts, his voice low and deep with the gentling, persuasive note of seduction.

They lingered over the meal, and the waiting abraded her nerves like coarsely woven wool. Her clothing irritated her, her breasts ached. She blurted out, "Why are we waiting?"

He had been leisurely studying her erect nipples thrusting against her bodice, and his gaze slowly lifted to her face, scorching her with blue fire. "For you to settle down and relax," he murmured. "For night to fall, so you can have complete darkness, if it would make you feel more secure."

"I don't care." She stood up, her face as fierce and proud as a Valkyrie, her hair as pale as that of those virgin warriors. "You'll have to find some other way to relax me."

Slowly he stood, too, his face hard with the force of his surging lust. Silence strained between them as he paid the bill and they went back out to the truck. The heat was still almost suffocating, the sun a huge red ball low on the horizon, bathing everything with a crimson glow. His fierce, ancient bloodlines were obvious in the primal light falling across the stark lines of his face, giving the lie to the facade of civilization he wore in the form of a white dress shirt and black slacks. He should have been wearing buckskin pants and moccasins, his torso bare, his thick black hair falling free to those wide, powerful shoulders.

She remembered her terror of the morning, that he could be hurt or killed during a flight, and knew she would try never to tell him.

He checked them in at one of the Hilton hotels and, still silently, they rode the elevator upward, with the bellboy carrying their two small bags.

He had taken a one-bedroom suite, and the bellboy performed his customary routine, carrying the bags into the bedroom, showing them how to operate things they already knew how to operate, busily drawing open the curtains to let in the fierce red light of sundown. Joe pressed a five-dollar bill into his hand, and the bellhop took off.

She was still standing in the bedroom, her feet rooted to the carpet while she very determinedly did not stare at the king-size bed, and she listened to Joe lock and chain the door. He walked into the bedroom and very calmly pulled the curtains again, plunging the room into a gloom relieved only by what light spilled through the open doorway. The very air felt charged with tension. He opened his black leather bag and took out a box of condoms, placing it on the bedside table.

"A whole box?" she asked in a husky voice that didn't sound like her own.

He came to stand behind her and deftly undid her dress. As it loosened and fell off her shoulders he said, "I'll go down to the gift shop and buy some more when we run out."

She was suddenly trembling madly, for she had worn only her panties under the dress. No bra, no slip, no hosiery. As the dress pooled around her ankles she was left standing all but naked in front of him, her breasts tight, her nipples thrusting forward in aching need. He lifted her in his arms, and her shoes were left behind on the floor, caught in the froth of material.

He placed one knee on the bed as he lowered her to the surface, then remained kneeling that way while he swiftly, efficiently stripped her panties down her legs. Until that moment she hadn't realized how desperately she had needed that small scrap of protection, or how exposed and vulnerable she would feel without them. She made an incoherent sound of protest as she tried to sit up, for she was naked while he was still completely dressed, but the glitter in his eyes as he stretched her out on her back made her stop struggling.

Joe paused, taking the time to study her naked form and savor the primal satisfaction of the moment when she finally lay bare before him, her tender body exposed and his for the taking. He could already see the signs of arousal in her, manifested in the way her nipples had flushed darker and tightened into buds, and in the way her slim thighs, instinctively pressed together to guard the exquisitely sensitive flesh between them, quivered and flexed in a subtle message. Pale curls, only a shade or two darker than her hair, decorated her mound; a small, fleeting smile tugged at his mouth for a second as he remembered that he hadn't thought her hair color was natural. According to the evidence of his eyes, it indisputably was her own. Those blond curls were so tempting that suddenly just looking wasn't enough.

He put his hand on her breast, gently kneading, cupping, his rough thumb circling her nipple and making it draw even tighter. She caught her breath, which made her breast swell even more fully into his palm. With the same calm assurance he stroked his other hand down her abdomen to slip it between her legs, pressing his fingers hard against the soft folds of her womanhood. Lightning shimmered through her, lifting her hips from the bed in an automatic seeking of more. If his thumb had felt rough on her nipple, it felt even more so now as it rasped across flesh so sensitive she quivered wildly at the slightest touch.

It was unbearable and she suddenly fought away from him, rising to her knees on the bed, her breasts heaving with the force of her breathing. Joe stood up and began unbuttoning his shirt

His powerful torso was bared as he stripped out of the garment, his skin bronzed, soft black hair matting his chest in a neat diamond and running in a silky line down the center of his stomach. His own nipples were small, dark and tight He kicked his shoes off. Lean fingers unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly, hooked in the waistbands of both trousers and undershorts and pushed them down. His eyes never left her slim, nude body as he bent to remove them. When he straightened, he was as naked as she.

The strength evident in his masculine body was almost frightening. He could overwhelm her without effort if he chose. Iron-hard muscles ridged his flat belly, corded his rib cage and long thighs. His male length rose thick and full from his groin, visibly throbbing with the force of his lust. Despite the responding heat of her own blood, beating through her veins in rhythm with the throbbing in her loins, she began to have serious doubts about the possibility of this. She made a soft, panicked sound.

"Shh, sweetheart," he murmured softly. "Don't be nervous." His hard hands closed gently on her shoulders, and somehow she found herself lying on her back again, and he was lying beside her, the heat of his big body searing and enveloping her as he folded her close to him. His nakedness was overwhelming, the strength of his sexuality no longer masked either by clothing or the boundaries enforced by society. He continued to soothe her with low whispers that might not even have been words, while his hands stroked slow fire over her.

Caroline clung to him, unsure of herself in this dramatically intensified situation. She had thought he had led her into sensual territory before, but now she found that she had only been loitering in the doorway. If it hadn't been for the pleasure, she would have bolted. But the pleasure… ah, it was slow and insidious and mind numbing, gently seducing her into relaxing her tight muscles; then, when her resistance was gone, it abruptly turned into a thundering storm that crashed through her nerves and muscles. Her slender body quivered with it, drawing tight as a bowstring again, but this time from a different cause, and he was too instinctive a male animal not to immediately sense that difference. His hands moved over her with a sure and shattering purpose, no longer to calm, but to intensify her arousal.

His mouth drew her nipples into wet beads of sensual torment, punished by sharp little bites and soothed by his tongue. She writhed sinuously in his arms, her hips lifting and rolling in an ancient rhythm that called to him as surely as a drumbeat. Once again his fingers delved between the soft feminine folds and found her moist and swollen, aching for his touch; her thighs opened unconsciously to give him greater freedom, an opportunity he immediately exploited. He carefully penetrated her with one long finger, and a wild little sound burst from her throat as she surged upward against his hand. He lingered over her, drunk with the scent of her warm, aroused body, the silkiness of her skin. He would have crushed her against him if he could have absorbed her into himself, so violent was the urge to meld their two bodies together.

His probing touch taught him both the height of her excitement and the strength of her virginity, and his stomach muscles tightened with almost unbearable anticipation. He couldn't wait much longer, but he wanted her so hot that she would willingly accept the pain of his penetration in order to take the deeper pleasure of their joining. She was so tight he didn't know if he could stand it, but he would go mad if he didn't thrust himself into her sweet depths.

She was arching nearer and nearer to climax as his sensual torment continued, her head thrashing on the bed in a tangle of blond hair, her hands clutching at him with desperate strength. She moaned and sank her nails into his chest. "Now." Her voice was hoarse. "Now now now now!"

He couldn't stand it any longer himself. He spread her thighs wide and mounted her, his hard weight pressing her into the mattress as his rigid length pushed against the soft heat of her intimate flesh and felt it begin to yield beneath the pressure. Then the exquisite feel of nakedness brought him to his senses, and he drew back from her, from the maddening closeness of penetration. He reached for the box on the bedside table, extracting one of the small foil packets and tearing it open with his teeth.

"No," Caroline said fiercely, pushing his hand away. "Not this time, not the first time. I want to feel you, only you."

Her passion-dark eyes glared up at him; her slim, heated body called to him with a primitive message. She was wild and pagan, even more the Valkyrie now when she lay naked, her thighs open to accept the male intrusion that would end her maidenhood. She challenged his domination, demanded his body and seed in this most ancient celebration of fertility.

Joe braced himself on his arms above her, his face savage as he brought his hips back to hers. He was experienced sexually where she wasn't, knew the wild risk they were taking, but this one time, this first time he, too, wanted her without anything between them.

Caroline went still at the first blunt probing.

Their eyes met and held. A tiny muscle in his cheek twitched as he increased the pressure. Pain threatened for her, became a reality, but she didn't try to push him away. She wanted this, hungered for his possession with a violence that made the pain as nothing. He didn't take it easy with her. His penetration was inexorable: invading, stretching, forcing her soft sheath to accept and hold his turgid length. She arched wildly, unable to take any more, and by her own action found that she could. He gave a harsh sound of pleasure.

"Yes," he muttered tightly. "That's right, sweetheart, you can take me. Come on. More. Do it again." The exquisite feel of her was mind shattering, like hot silk, tight and wet and incredibly soft.

Driven by some frantic need she did, and suddenly he was seated in her to the hilt, the solidness of his possession making hot tears spring to her eyes. The stretched, too-full sensation was unbearable, yet she bore it because the only alternative was to stop, and that was impossible. She was impelled by a need too instinctive for caution, too fierce to slow. The hard planes of his chest crushed her breasts; his hands slid under her and gripped her buttocks with bruising force as he lifted her into his thrusts, and sharp pleasure exploded through her. She clung to him, sobbing and gasping and half screaming.

Grinding his teeth, he fought his own climax and rode her hard, intensifying her spasms of release. Gradually she stopped shaking and the frantic tension eased from her muscles, letting her relax in his arms. A soft, almost purring note sounded in her throat. "Joe," she whispered, just his name, and the lazy pleasure in her voice almost sent him over the edge.

"Now," he said gutturally, rising to his knees. It was his turn, and his need was so savage he could barely control it. He hooked his arms under her legs and leaned forward, bracing himself on his hands with her legs forced high and wide, draped over his arms. She was completely vulnerable to him like that, totally unable to limit the depth of his thrusts, and he took full advantage of it. He drove into her hard and deep, his powerful shoulders hunched with the effort as he hammered into her, and the pleasure hit him just as it had her, without warning, slamming into him like a runaway train. He jerked convulsively under the force of it, a harsh cry ripping from his throat. The spasms went on and on, emptying him into the hot depths of the woman beneath him. When it finally did end, he sank heavily onto her, his chest heaving as his tortured lungs fought for air. His heart was thudding frantically in his chest, and he was so weak he couldn't roll away from her. He'd never felt like this even when pulling Gs, and certainly never from having sex.

He dozed. She should have protested his heavy weight, but instead she cradled him close, loving the feel of his big body crushing her into the mattress. She could barely move, barely breathe, and it was heaven. She ached all over, but especially between her legs, where his heavy manhood still nestled within her, yet she was filled with a sense of contentment that permeated every cell of her body and all but negated the discomfort. Her eyes drifted shut. She had wanted it just the way it had been—raw and forceful. The only thing that could have made it better would have been if he had lost that damnable control of his. It had given a little, but still it had held, whereas she had been helpless in the grip of a wild passion that had known no limits.

"Caroline." His mouth settled over hers just as he said her name, and drowsily she realized that she must have slept, because she hadn't felt him move, but now he was braced on his elbows, her head cradled in his palms. Without pause she responded, her mouth opening and molding itself to his.

A little while later he forced himself to stop kissing her and gently disengaged their bodies. She remained limply sprawled on the bed while he went into the bathroom and came out a moment later with a wet washcloth. She thought she should be embarrassed at the intimate way he cleaned her, but it was beyond her. She yawned like a sleepy cat and curled onto her side when he had finished. "Did I bleed?" she asked, her voice holding only an absentminded curiosity.

"Only a little." He caressed her buttocks possessively, filled with fierce satisfaction that she had given herself to him so completely. She hadn't held anything back, hadn't let discomfort or fear of the unknown prevent her from hurling herself headlong into the situation. He'd never been wanted like that before, had never wanted anyone like that before, with no reservations or restraints, no boundaries. Any other woman would have been frightened by the savagery of his possession, but Caroline had reveled in it. He'd never been so savage before, had never allowed himself to give in to the fierceness of his sexual needs. His rampant sexuality had always been held under ruthless control, yet now he had not only given in to it, he had done so without protection. He might have made her pregnant with that one irresponsible act.

He should have been furious and disgusted with himself, but somehow he wasn't. The utter pleasure of it had been too strong to allow room for regrets. A dangerous image formed in his mind, a picture of Caroline swollen with his child, and to his surprise he began to be aroused again.

She was asleep. He carried the washcloth back to the bathroom and returned to turn back the covers and tuck her between the cool sheets. She murmured softly; then, when he slipped in beside her, she cuddled against him, automatically seeking the comfort of his warmth. He cradled her head on his shoulder, his free arm wrapped possessively around her hips to hold her close. He went to sleep almost as easily as she had.

When he awakened later, his acute sense of time told him that he'd been asleep for about two hours. He was achingly aroused, and by the time he had caressed her awake, she was, too. This time he forced himself to use protection, though for the first time he bitterly resented the thin barrier between their complete intimacy. She gasped a little when he entered her, her tender flesh sore from the first tune, but again she wouldn't let him be gentle, even if he had wanted to be. There would be time for gentleness later, for now there was only the flood tide of desire, demanding release. They writhed and surged together in the darkness, the only sound the roughness of their breathing and the creaking of the bed beneath them.

They slept again. He awakened three more times during the night and had her. He wondered when the urgency would lessen.

It was after eight the next morning when he opened his eyes to find the bright morning sun trying valiantly to pierce the heavy curtains. The room was dim, the air conditioning quietly humming, the air pleasantly cool. His body ached from the unbridled activities of the night

Caroline lay curled on her side, facing away from him, and for a moment he admired the delicate line of her spine. How could such a soft, delicately made body have withstood the demands he had made on it?

The bed was a wreck. The covers were all pulled loose and twisted, and mostly on the floor. At some point during the night Caroline had pulled one corner of the bedspread up to hug to her breasts. Even the fitted bottom sheet had come loose. One pillow was stuffed under the headboard. He had a distinct memory of there having been three pillows, but he had no idea where the other two were. He also had a distinct memory of having placed one under her hips during one of their ravenous encounters. He yawned, wondering if she would want to remake the bed before the hotel maids could see it. He didn't see much point in remaking it at all.

He was hungry and gently shook her awake. "What do you want for breakfast, sweetheart? I'll call room service, then we can take a bath while we're waiting."

She opened one eye. "Coffee," she murmured.

"What else?"

She sighed. "Food." The eye closed.

He chuckled. "Can you narrow it down a little?"

She thought about it. "Nothing green," she finally mumbled into the mattress. "I can't eat green in the mornings."

Stunned by the idea, he shuddered with revulsion. Come to think of it, he couldn't eat anything green in the mornings, either.

He ordered pecan waffles and bacon for both of them, with coffee and orange juice. The impersonal voice on the other end of the line informed him that it would be forty-five minutes to an hour before his order arrived, which was fine with him. He hung up the phone and shook Caroline awake again.

"Do you want a shower or a tub bath?"

"Tub. Can't sit down in a shower."

He went into the bathroom and turned on the faucets of the playground-size bathtub. Despite the size of the thing, the water level rose quickly. He returned to the bedroom and lifted Caroline in his arms. Her own arms curled trustingly around his neck. "Are you very sore?" he asked with concern.

"Not too sore, if that's what you're asking." She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. "It's just that I can't walk."

He stepped into the tub with her still in his arms and carefully lowered himself into the warm water, then reclined against the back of the tub with her between his legs, her back to his chest. She sighed with pleasure as the warm water began soaking the stiffness from her legs and easing the discomfort between them.

She would have expected to be embarrassed by the intimacy that had passed between them during the night, as well as uneasy with their nudity, but she didn't feel any of that. She felt bone-deep contentment, a sense of lightness and completion that she'd never before known existed. He was her man, she was his woman; how could she be embarrassed with him?

He bathed her, lathering his hands with the fragrant soap and gently sliding them over the tender parts of her body, which somehow seemed to need more attention than the other parts. By the time he finished she was feeling very warm and so was he, if the fullness of his hard male length was any indication. She returned the favor and bathed him, but the imminent arrival of their food prevented him from doing anything to relieve his arousal.

There were two thick, hooded terry bathrobes hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and they put them on a scant two minutes before the brisk knock on the door heralded room service. Joe signed the order slip while the cart was immobilized and the covers removed from the dishes.

The delicious scent of coffee brought her drifting in from the bedroom. Joe's eyes sharpened with the quick resurgence of lust. Even with her face bare of makeup, her hair tousled and her body wrapped in a thick bathrobe, she was more alluring than every other woman he'd had or even seen. The men she worked with might call her the Beauty Queen because of her fastidious attention to her appearance, but her attraction didn't rely on it.

She attacked the food with unselfconscious appetite, and he thought that even the way she ate made him hard. When she was finished she leaned back with a sigh of contentment and smiled at him, a lazy smile that made his blood sizzle.

"What are we going to do today?"

He lifted his black eyebrow. His pale eyes looked as hard and brilliant as diamonds, and there was fire in their depths. "I don't plan on leaving the suite this entire weekend," he said evenly. "Unless we run out of condoms."

Slowly she stood up. "Maybe room service will deliver," she said in a voice that was suddenly tight with need, and then she was in his arms.

Chapter Eight

She drowned in sensuality that weekend. The two rooms of that impersonal hotel suite became very personal, imbued with the aura and memories of their lovemaking. They didn't leave the suite at all, relying on room service for their food, and never dressing in anything except the bathrobes.

As a lover, he more than matched the strength of her passion. Caroline never did anything in halfway measures; she had been fiercely virgin, and now she was just as fierce in the giving of herself. He had never before given free rein to his appetites, but with Caroline he could. He sated himself with her, and yet never felt as if he had had enough. The hunger would roar back, again and again.

He had no inhibitions. He was earthy and powerful, sweeping her along with him, introducing her to more variations, techniques and positions than she could have imagined. Sometimes he was on top and sometimes she was; sometimes he was behind her. Sometimes he used his mouth, and he taught her how to use hers to pleasure him. He made love to her in the bathtub, on the couch, on the floor, wherever they happened to be.

He had a beeper on his belt, but the beeper remained silent and the outside world didn't intrude on them. She had never before been so completely, overwhelmingly involved with another human being, to the exclusion of everything else. She didn't think about work, didn't fret for a book to read. She simply experienced.

By Sunday morning the initial frenzied hunger had been fed and their lovemaking had become more leisurely, bringing with it the patience to linger over both arousal and satisfaction. An hour of sensual play had satisfied them for the moment, and Joe ordered a late breakfast; then they lounged in the parlor with their feet up while they watched television and caught up on the news. Caroline curled against his side, heavy-eyed with contentment.

He lifted a pale strand of her hair and let it drift down, the sunlight catching the gold and making it glitter. "Where are your parents?" he asked absently, paying more attention to the play of light than to his own question.

"Usually, or at this exact moment?" Her voice was just as lazy as his.

"Both."

"Usually they're in North Carolina, where they teach. Right this moment, they're in Greece on a summer-long cultural tour. They're supposed to come home the middle of September."

"Were you lonely when you were little?"

"Not that I noticed. I wanted to learn," she explained. "I couldn't learn fast enough to keep myself satisfied. I wasn't a comfortable child to be around, I don't think. If I hadn't had them for parents I probably would have been a complete wreck, but they helped me handle the frustration and didn't try to limit what I learned."

"You were probably a holy terror," he said dryly.

"Probably." She felt comfortable with it. "What about you?"

He didn't answer immediately, and a tiny quiver of unease intruded on her massive contentment. He would talk easily about his experiences as a pilot, about work, but he kept his private life very private. He had relaxed his guard a little in telling her that he was a half-breed, and that he had three brothers and one sister, but very little else. He hadn't related any childhood experiences to let the conversation get very close to him. Of course, she reminded herself, she hadn't known him for long at all, actually less than a week. The speed and intensity of their relationship dazed her, made the flow of time seem exaggeratedly long.

"No, I wasn't a holy terror," he finally said. She sensed the remoteness in his answer.

"Are any of your brothers or your sister?"

Because she was so close to him, she could feel the subtle relaxation of his muscles. "Just my sister, and it isn't that she's destructive or bad tempered, just very determined to have her own way. She's a little steamroller."

His deep love for his family was evident in his voice. She snuggled closer to him, hoping to keep him talking. "How old are your brothers and sister? What are their names?"

"Michael is eighteen. He's just gotten out of high school and starts college next month. He's interested in cattle ranching and will probably start his own spread when he gets out of college. Joshua is sixteen, and he's the best-natured of the bunch, but he's a jet freak, just like I was at his age. Damn his hide, though, he wants to be a Navy flier. Zane is thirteen, and he's… intense. Silent and dangerous, like Dad. Then there's Maris. She's eleven going on a hundred. Small for her age, so delicate she looks like a breeze would send her airborne, and a will like iron. We're all good with horses, damn good, but Dad is sheer magic with them, and so is Maris."

"What about your stepmother?" Anything to keep him talking.

He gave a quiet laugh. "Mary. She's even smaller than you are."

She sat up. "I'm not small." Her chin jutted out belligerently.

"You're not exactly tall, either. Not quite average, I'd say. I'm almost a foot taller than you." He pulled her back down against his side, her head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder. "Do you want to know about Mary or not?"

"Go ahead," she grumbled, and he kissed her forehead.

"Mary is warm and open and loving, and when she makes up her mind to do something she's unstoppable. She's a teacher. I wouldn't have made it into the Academy without her tutoring."

"So you didn't mind when she and your father married?"

"Mind?" He gave that quiet laugh again. "I did everything I could to throw them together. Not that it was all that difficult. Dad was like a corralled stallion. He was determined to have her, no matter how many fences he had to kick down or go over."

His ease and earthy understanding of his father's sexual nature made her smile. For her part, she simply couldn't imagine her own parents as intensely sexual beings, probably because they weren't. She was proof that they did have sex, but both of them were low-key and concerned more with intellectual matters than those of a physical nature. Their love life was probably warm and affectionate, rather than the raw, raunchy, intense lovemaking Joe had swept her into.

"What about your dad? What's he like?"

"Tough. Dangerous. And the best father in the world. Even when I was a little kid, I always knew he'd fight to the death for me."

That was an odd way to describe one's parent, but looking at Joe she could easily believe that his father was dangerous. They were probably mirror images of each other.

"That's enough about me," he said abruptly, though very little of the conversation had actually told her about him. She sensed that wariness in him again as the steel door guarding his inner thoughts clanged shut. He lifted her astride his lap and pushed her robe open, closing his hands over her breasts. "I want to find out about you."

She shivered and looked down at her breasts, at his bronze hands covering the soft, pale mounds. "That's no longer virgin territory to you."

"So it isn't." The blue of his eyes grew darker, more intense. He stroked one of his hands down her belly and into the notch of her legs, lightly probing. "This isn't, either, but it's even more exciting now than it was before. I could only imagine what you'd feel like before, but now I know how tight and hot you are, and how you start getting wet as soon as I touch you." He circled her delicate opening with one rough fingertip, using exquisite care. She shuddered as pleasure rushed through her, hot and sharp, tightening her muscles and giving him the dampness he sought as her body immediately began preparing to receive him. He pushed his finger a little way into her, and her body quickened, her breath sighing in and out of her lungs, a fine quivering seizing her.

Joe pushed his own robe open. He was as ready as a stallion, his thin nostrils flaring at the female scent of her. With his hand on her bottom he urged her forward, positioned her, then reached down to hold himself steady as she sank onto him with a soft, wild cry. She enveloped him, and he moved his hand, using it to urge her closer.

"Now I know how soft you are," he whispered, "and how you shiver around me, how all those sweet little muscles try to grab me tight and start milking me when we're… damn!" The last word was low and fierce. Caroline scarcely heard it. She began moving on him, hungry for him, desperate for the release already luring her.

His hands bit into her hips almost as if he would stay her movements, and she whimpered, but then with another muttered curse he grasped her buttocks and moved her in a hard, quick rhythm on his invading length. This wasn't one of the leisurely times; it was fast and ruthless and basic. She grabbed at his shoulders for balance as she began convulsing and only a heartbeat later he joined her, his head arching back, veins and tendons cording in his muscular neck.

Recovery took longer than the act itself. She slumped forward to lie in exhausted silence on his chest. He smoothed her hair away from her face with gentle fingers, then held her close to him. "I haven't been taking very good care of you," he said quietly. "That's twice."

She couldn't think of any way he could take any better care of her. "What is?" she murmured.

"That I've taken you without protection."

"But I asked you to." She closed her eyes, savoring in both memory and actuality the intimate feel of him, "I wanted to know everything, feel everything, about you."

"The first time, yes. Even then, I should have had better sense. And there wasn't any excuse for this time."

At the hardness of his tone she sat up and squarely met his gaze. "I'm neither a child nor an idiot, Joe. I know the risk and the consequence, and the responsibility is half mine. I could have said no, but I didn't. The risk isn't that great. One of the benefits of having an inquiring mind is that I'm curious about almost everything, so I read about it. I know all about rhythm and timing, and we're fairly safe. Safe enough that I'm not going to sweat and watch the calendar."

"There's no guarantee on that. All the timing can give us is better than even odds, and I told you, I'm not a gambler."

"Would you mind so very much?" she asked steadily.

"Wouldn't you?"

She shook her head. "No." Her voice was quiet and rock solid.

He gave her a piercing look. She waited for him to ask her why, but he didn't. Instead he said, "I want to know if your next period is even a day late."

His tone of command was so obvious that she snapped off a sharp salute and barked, "Yes, sir!" Sometimes he was very much the colonel.

He laughed and swatted her lightly on the bottom as he shifted her off his lap. She stood up and tied the robe around her. "When do we have to leave?"

"I arranged for a late checkout," he said. "By six tonight."

So their remaining time locked in their private little world could now be counted in a dwindling number of hours. It was amazing how quickly she had grown accustomed to room and maid service, to having him all to herself, to the intoxicating delights of the flesh. Probably this seclusion would wear thin if it stretched out for a week, but she would like to have that week. It wasn't to be, however. Tomorrow they would both be back at work, she on the ground and he in the air. Tomorrow she would have to deal with the fear all over again, because the man she loved was doing something dangerous and she couldn't stop it. It would be obscene to even try. Joe was an eagle; only death or age would ground him. She would gladly endure years of quiet terror, if only they would be granted.

For now, she didn't want to waste even one minute before they were forced to face real life again.

She didn't know what this weekend had meant to him, maybe only a prolonged, intense roll in the hay, sufficient for the pleasure it provided, but for her the man and the weekend had been the catalyst that had unlocked the passion of her nature. She felt… changed inside, somehow, freer, more content. It was as if she had been viewing life through a gray veil and it had been ripped aside, letting her see the true, vibrant colors. She no longer felt set aside and isolated, but part of it all. She was no longer alone, as she had essentially been for most of her life, from the time she had first realized that her brain made her different. In giving herself to him, she had gained rather than lost, because she now had a part of Joe that would never leave her. He had given her memories, experience… ecstasy. Under his earthy tutelage, she had bloomed inside herself, learned the rich depths of her own nature.

Abruptly, despite her own common sense and in full recognition of the difficulties it would involve, she hoped that the timing had been wrong for her and she was carrying his child.

"What?" he asked, black brows lifted, and she realized she had been standing in front of him staring intently at him for God only knew how long.

A slow smile broke across her face, lighting her up like dawn. "I was just thinking," she said seriously, "that a lot more women would enlist if you'd just pose for recruiting posters in the nude."

He looked briefly startled, then gave a roar of laughter as he surged to his feet. He grabbed a fistful of robe and hauled her to him. "Do you mean you'd share me with the women of America?"

"Not in this lifetime."

"Not even if my country needed my services? Where's your patriotism?"

She reached into his open robe and firmly cupped him. "One place it isn't," she replied sweetly, "is here."

He began to fill her palm as he responded to her touch, despite their recent lovemaking. "I'll give you two days to stop that, then I'm calling the police."

"We don't have two days," she pointed out. She looked at the clock. "We only have about eight hours."

"Then damn if I'm going to waste a minute of it," he replied, swiftly lifting her into his arms. He preferred the bed for prolonged lovemaking. As he carried her into the other room she clung tightly, wishing that time could stand still.

It didn't, of course. It couldn't, despite her wishes. It felt strange leaving their intimate cocoon, but by six-thirty they were headed back to the base. She sat silently, trying to brace herself for the abrupt end to the intimacy they had shared for the past two days. She would sleep alone that night and every night, until the weekend came again. Perhaps even then. He hadn't said anything about tomorrow night, much less next weekend.

She glanced at him. It was a subtle difference, but the closer they got to the base he became less her lover and more the colonel. His thoughts were already on Night Wing, on those sleek, deadly, beautiful planes and how they responded to his skilled hands. Maybe the change in him was that he became their lover rather than hers. They flew for him; they carried him higher and faster than she ever could. She only hoped they would protect him as fiercely, and bring him back to her.

Long before she was ready, he was depositing her at her door. He stood in front of her, those clear, bottomless eyes lingering over every detail of her appearance. "I'm not going to kiss you good-night," he said. "I won't want to stop. I'm too used to having you."

"Then… good night." She started to hold out her hand, then quickly pulled it back. She couldn't share even a handshake with him. It was too much after the concentrated intimacy of the weekend, too much of a temptation, too sharp a reminder that tonight they would sleep alone.

"Good night." He turned abruptly and strode to his truck. Caroline quickly unlocked the door and stepped inside, not wanting to see him drive away. The tiny quarters, luxurious as they were in comparison with most of the temporary quarters on base, were both desolate and suffocating. She quickly turned the air conditioner on high, but nothing could ease the emptiness. Nothing, that is, except Joe.

She didn't sleep well that night. She kept reaching for him, searching for his warmth, for the big, hard, masculine body she had slept draped over and entangled with for the past two nights. Her own body, abruptly deprived of the sensual orgy it had become accustomed to, ached with frustration.

She was awake well before dawn and finally gave up on sleep. Work had always been a panacea for her, so perhaps it would be again. She was assigned to the project to work, after all, not to moon over the project manager.

It did help. She managed to lose herself quite satisfactorily in preparation for the day's tests. Joe didn't stop by, for which she was oddly grateful. She was just now getting her bearings back; if he'd kissed her, she would have been lost again. She would probably also have been stretched out across one of the desks with her legs wrapped around his waist. Typically, he had seen the temptation and resisted it. She wasn't certain she could have.

As usual, Cal was the second to arrive. "Where were you this weekend?" he asked casually. "I tried to call a couple of times to see if you wanted to catch a movie."

"In Vegas," she replied. "I stayed there."

"Wish I'd thought of that. It's a fun town, isn't it? Did you hit the casinos?"

"I'm not much of a gambler. Miniature golf is more my game."

He laughed as he got himself a cup of coffee. "You'd better watch living in the fast lane like that," he advised. "Too much excitement can make you old."

If that were the case, she would have aged at least a hundred years over the weekend. Instead, she felt more alive than she ever had before.

Joe wasn't in the control room when the laser team arrived; the pilots were already in the aircraft, engines screaming. The assignments were the same as they had been on Friday: Joe and Bowie Wade in the Night Wings, Daffy Deale and Mad Cat Myrick in the F-22s. All the project teams gathered around their assigned monitors so they could scan the sensor readouts during the flight.

The birds lifted off.

It went smoothly at first, with the lasers locking on to the drones just the way they were supposed to do. Caroline let out a long sigh of relief. She wasn't naive enough to think there wouldn't be any more problems, but at least that particular one seemed to have been solved. They ran through it time after time, at different speeds and ranges. Yates was smiling.

On their return to base, Mad Cat was on Joe's wing and Daffy was shadowing Bowie Wade, to provide visual verification during the flights. Caroline was still idly watching the monitor when suddenly Bowie's target signal lit up. "Did he hit the switch?" she asked aloud.

Yates and Adrian turned back to the monitor, their brows knit with puzzlement. Cal looked up from his own computer. Almost simultaneously, the computer started flashing the red firing signal and all hell broke loose on the radio and in the control room.

"I'm hit, I'm hit!" Daffy screamed, and Bowie was yelling, "This goddamn thing just went off! What the hell happened?"

"What's the damage?" It was Joe's voice, deep and cool, the authority in it overriding everything else.

"No control, my hydraulics are shot to hell. I can't hold it." Daffy's voice was tight.

"Eject!" Bowie was yelling. "Stop screwing around, Daffy. You can't make it!"

The voices were stepping all over each other, and the control room was in an uproar. The pilots there were turned to stone, their faces frozen masks as they waited to see if one of their own made it back or was going to die right in front of them.

Then Joe's voice again, roaring. "Eject—eject—eject! Now!"

The iron authority got through to Daffy as nothing else could have, and the computers registered a pilot ejection.

"I see a chute!" It was Mad Cat. "He's too low, he's too low—"

Then the radio exploded with noise as the F-22 augered into the desert floor.

Chapter Nine

Joe was in a rage when he strode into the control room, but his rage was cold, ice-cold. His eyes were blue frost as he fastened them on the laser team. "What the hell happened?" he snapped. "The laser cannon isn't even supposed to be activated, much less go off by itself."

They were all at a loss. The systems had checked out perfectly on Friday afternoon.

"Well?" The single word was as sharp as the crack of a rifle. "I nearly lost a man because of it. An eighty-million-dollar aircraft is in tiny pieces all over a square mile of desert. Do any of you have any idea what the hell you're doing?"

The control room was dead silent as everyone waited for a reply, any reply. Yates said softly, "We don't know what happened. But we'll find out."

"You're damn right you will. I want a report on this within thirty-six hours, your analysis of the problem and what you've done to fix it. All flights are scrubbed until I know what happened and I'm satisfied it won't happen again." He didn't even glance at Caroline as he turned and walked out, still as furious as he had been when he had entered the room.

Someone whistled softly through their teeth. Yates' face was drawn. "We don't sleep until we know," he said simply.

The loss of the aircraft was bad enough, but it was Daffy's close call that had stretched Joe's control perilously close to the snapping point. Daffy was lost to him anyway: he'd been too low when he ejected for his chute to adequately deploy, and he had landed too hard and too fast. He was hospitalized now with a concussion and a broken left leg.

Bowie, badly shaken, swore he hadn't touched either the lock-on switch or the trigger, and Joe believed him. Bowie was too good, too careful, but the damn laser cannon had somehow locked on and fired by itself, and Daffy had nearly died. The computers would tell them exactly what had happened, but what Joe wanted to know was why. The lasers weren't supposed to be activated yet, but the one on Bowie's bird, at least, had been. Had peak energy been used, the F-22 would have been destroyed in the air and Daffy wouldn't have had any chance at all.

Joe's anger was intensified because the misfire was probably linked to the lock-on problem they'd had the

Friday before. Caroline had said the problem was a simple break in the electrical signal and that it had been corrected, but obviously the trouble was much worse than that, and, far from being corrected, it had nearly killed a man. His fury included Caroline; she was part of the laser team, and his relationship with her had nothing to do with her responsibility as a team member. It wouldn't win her any special favors or leniency.

The laser team wouldn't be the only one working late. The loss of an F-22 and the injury of a pilot weren't things the Air Force took lightly. He had to make a report to the base commander and to General Ramey in the Pentagon. Moreover, they couldn't afford this kind of trouble with the Night Wings, not with the vote for funding coming up shortly in Congress. He had to get the tests completed and the kinks worked out; one of the major pluses the project had going for it was that it was coming in on time and under budget, and delays meant money. If the Night Wings were over budget and not working properly when the vote was taken, the project would be in trouble. Funding depended on how well he did his job and demonstrated both the feasibility and dependability of the buds.

His call on a secure line to General Ramey only underlined his concern. "You have to find out what happened with that laser cannon and make damn sure it never happens again," the general said quietly, but those who knew Ramey knew that he meant what he said. "The vote is close, too close for us to afford this kind of snafu. What good is it to have the first feasible

X-ray laser cannon if it's uncontrollable? We have to have it, Joe. The Night Wing project is too important."

"Yes, sir," Joe replied. Having flown the birds, he knew exactly how important they were. An aviator going up in a superior aircraft had a much better chance, all other things being equal, of coming back alive. The Night Wing buds gave a huge advantage to American pilots, and to Joe that meant American lives saved as well as wars won. He had already been in two wars and he was only thirty-five, and the world situation was even more volatile now than it had been when he had entered the Academy back during the Cold War. Brushfire wars sprang up overnight, and all of them had the potential of dragging the rest of the world into the maw, while technology was exploding. Within five years the F-22s would merely be equal to other countries' fighters, rather than vastly superior. The Night Wings would get that edge back—in a big way.

"Is there any indication of sabotage?" the general asked.

"There haven't been any alarms triggered, but I've asked the security police for an analysis of the work patterns to see if there's anything suspicious."

"What's your gut feeling?" General Ramey had the utmost respect for Joe's instincts.

Joe paused. "A catastrophic situation developed without warning. We don't know yet if it involves only that one laser cannon or if it's common to all the aircraft, but it's either a major problem with the system, or someone deliberately caused it It's fifty-fifty, so I can't ignore the possibility of sabotage. I'll know more after I get the computer analysis."

"Call me immediately when you know something."

"Yes, sir, I will."

Joe sat back in his chair, his eyes thoughtful. Sabotage. No one ever liked to consider it, but he couldn't afford to discount it. Technology constantly created new techniques in spying and sabotage. The security police had gone to great lengths to keep Night Wing under wraps, which was why every entrance into every building, both doors and windows, contained sensors linked to a central computer that kept track or who was in each building at any given time, recording both entrance and exit times. Guards were also posted at the hangars at night and no one had approached the planes without proper clearance, but if the problem was sabotage, that meant only that the saboteur had the required security clearance.

If he were lucky, the laser team would find the problem and it would be something mechanical, something explicable. If not, he wanted to have the security check already in progress.

What a bitch. If they didn't find out what was wrong immediately, it would ensure that he wouldn't see Caroline tonight, and last night without her had been pure torment. It was amazing how quickly his body had become accustomed to frequent gratification, and how strong his sexual hunger for her was. He'd never wanted a woman that way before, like an incessant fever that refused to be cooled. He'd never enjoyed a woman that way before, without any boundaries or restrictions. She was vital and electric, as straightforward with her loving as her thoughts and personality were. It had been a mistake to let his thoughts slip to her. His pants had become very uncomfortable. Down, boy, he thought wryly. Now was definitely not the time or the place.

No matter how they checked, they couldn't discover how the laser had been activated by accident. Caroline's actual expertise was with the laser itself, not with the triggering mechanism. That was Adrian's field, and he was surly because of it. If the problem was laid at his door, he might be recalled from the project or possibly even fired. Typically, he took out his frustration on Caroline.

"What are you, a jinx?" he muttered, scowling as he painstakingly checked every detail of the firing mechanism. "Everything was going fine, just a few minor kinks now and then, until you showed up. Things started falling apart as soon as you started working on them."

"I haven't worked on that mechanism," she pointed out, refusing to let him anger her or to get embroiled in a finger-pointing episode. She didn't have to say anything else, however, because Adrian took her comment to mean that he had been working on it, so therefore it was obviously his fault.

"Let's stop the bickering," Yates ordered. "Cal, is anything showing up on the computer?"

Cal looked exhausted, his eyes bloodshot from staring at a monitor screen and stacks of dim printouts for too many hours. He shook his head. "It's all checking out on paper."

They were standing grouped around the laser pod on the belly of the aircraft Bowie had been flying. Caroline stared at the pod, deliberately blotting out what everyone else was saying as she tried to sort things out. The laser seemed to be in perfect working order, as did the firing mechanism. The lock-on was also performing perfectly, but then, they already knew that. After all, it had locked on to Daffy's bird and blown it out of the sky. But what had told it to lock on? According to the computer record, Bowie definitely hadn't touched the switch, so the lock-on and firing mechanisms had both operated automatically, something they weren't supposed to do. Nor was the laser supposed to have been activated; actually firing the lasers hadn't been scheduled for another ten days. Three things had gone wrong simultaneously: the laser had activated, the lock-on had targeted Daffy's aircraft and the thing had automatically fired. None of those three things was supposed to have happened at all; for all of them to have happened at the same time went beyond chance or Murphy's Law.

She didn't like the direction her thoughts were taking. If it wasn't logical for those three things to have happened by accident, then they had to have happened by design. The laser couldn't be activated by an accidental bump, and it certainly didn't have an outside switch labeled On and Off. Activating the laser was something the laser team had to do with a precise set of commands to the computer. Because of the security involved, they were the only ones with access to those commands.

Inescapable logic indicated that one of the team had activated the laser.

Caroline didn't believe in leaping to conclusions. Her work habits were orderly and painstakingly precise. Before she let herself begin thinking that one of the three men she worked with was deliberately sabotaging the laser, she had to make certain there was no way anyone outside the team could do it. Everything was computerized now, and though safeguards were built into the programs and elaborate precautions taken, nothing was impossible. There were a lot of things so difficult that no one had done them yet, but that didn't make them impossible. It was feasible that if someone could get the activation commands, he or she could also get into the program and use them. And it would be child's play for anyone that knowledgeable about computers to add commands that would override the pilot's physical keying of the lock-on switch, say if another aircraft came within a certain distance. Maybe Bowie had been flying a ticking timebomb today, just waiting for the right set of circumstances. It had been Daffy's bad luck that he had been assigned to shadow Bowie, but it could as easily have been Mad Cat, or even Joe, who had been shot down.

Yates had been watching her thoughtfully for several minutes. She was standing motionless, her gaze locked on the pod but not seeing it, with all her concentration turned inward. He could almost see that computer brain running down a checklist and inexorably narrowing the possibilities.

"What is it?" he finally asked when he couldn't stand the suspense any longer. "Any ideas?"

She blinked, and her eyes slowly refocused on him. "I think we should check the computer program," she finally said. "If it isn't the equipment, it has to be the program."

Cal looked positively haggard. "Do you know how long it will take to check this entire program?" he asked incredulously. "This thing is huge. It's the most complicated program I've ever worked on."

"Maybe a Cray…" she murmured, looking back at the pod.

"Book time on a Cray supercomputer?" Yates made it a question, but he was already mentally running through the logistics. "Expensive as hell."

"Not as expensive as stopping the program."

"It could take forever to get a booking, unless the Pentagon can line up some priority time."

"Yeah, that's a fine idea," Adrian said impatiently, "but you people are forgetting that the big man gave us thirty-six hours, of which we have already used ten. I don't think he's going to be satisfied with a possibility."

"We've come up with nothing everywhere else. Do you have a better idea?" Caroline replied just as impatiently.

He glared at her without answering. The truth was, they had all reached a dead end.

Caroline didn't mention her other conclusion, that if the solution to their problem was in the computer program they still had to discover whether it was a basic error in programming or if someone had deliberately programmed it in, but running everything through a Cray would give them the answer to that. By comparing the working program with the original, the Cray could tell them if the working program had been altered in any way. If it hadn't, then it was back to the drawing board for DataTech; if it had, then they had to find the person responsible for the changes.

"So what do we do?" Cal asked, rubbing his eyes. "Stop looking and just assume we're going to find it in the program, or stay up all night looking for something when we don't know what we're looking for?"

Despite herself, Caroline had to grin. "If you're as groggy as that sentence sounded, I don't think you can stay up all night."

He gave her a bleary look and an equally bleary grin. "Sad, isn't it? In my younger days I could carouse all night and work all day, then go back out for more carousing. What you see here is a shadow of my former self."

"I'm glad you two don't find this serious," Adrian snapped.

"Knock it off!" Yates ordered, temper in his usually calm voice. They were all tired and frazzled. He moderated his tone. "I mean it literally as well as figuratively. We aren't accomplishing anything except exhausting ourselves. We're calling it quits for the night, despite what I said earlier. I think we've eliminated everything it could be except the program, so that's our logical next step, and we can't do it here. I'm going to clean up and have a good meal while I think about this, then I'm going to have a talk with Colonel Mackenzie. Let's get some rest."

Captain Ivan Hodge, head of security, said without preamble, "We have a very suspicious pattern here, sir."

Joe's stem face showed no emotion, though he wished the captain hadn't found anything.

Major General Tuell's flinty eyes became even flintier. As base commander, he was ultimately responsible for everything that happened, and he was intensely concerned with whatever had caused the crash of an F-22. "Show us what you've found."

The captain was carrying a thick log. He deposited it on Joe's desk and flipped it open to a premarked page. "Here." He noted an entry he had already highlighted in yellow. "This is the security code number for a member of the laser team, Caroline Evans. She arrived last Tuesday as a replacement for a worker who had a heart attack."

Joe's guts knotted up and his eyes went blank as he waited for Captain Hodge to continue.

"She has a pattern of arriving in the morning before everyone else and being the last to leave," the captain said, and Joe relaxed a little. Caroline was a workaholic; hardly damning circumstances, and he himself had walked in on her unannounced several times, catching her doing nothing suspicious… although she had quickly cleared the computer screen that one time.

He had briefly wondered about it, then forgotten it, until now.

"You yourself have that pattern, sir," Captain Hodge said to Joe. "In itself, it doesn't mean anything." He flipped to another premarked page. "But here, on Thursday night, the sensors show Ms. Evans entering the laser work area shortly before 2400 and not leaving until almost 0400. She was alone the entire time. She reentered the building at 0600 for her normal workday. The birds went up that morning and for the first time experienced some malfunction with the lasers, isn't that right?"

The ice was back in Joe's eyes. "Yes."

"She left the area late that afternoon with the other members of the team and didn't return until Sunday night, again shortly before 2400. Again, she was the only person there. She left the building at 0430, returned at her usual time of 0600. This time, Major Deale's aircraft was shot down. Hell of a lot more disruptive than the lasers not working at all. These midnight appearances in the work area, combined with the fact that the trouble didn't start until she arrived, don't look good." The captain hesitated as he looked at Joe. The colonel's expression was enough to make any sane man hesitate, and Captain Hodge considered himself very sane. Nevertheless, it had to be said. "I understand you've taken a… uh, personal interest in Ms. Evans."

"We've gone out together a few times." They'd done a hell of a lot more than that, he thought savagely. She had given herself to him with a completeness that had shattered his memories of other women, reduced them to nothingness. And after they had returned from Vegas Sunday night she had slipped out to the work area and… done what? Secretly activated the laser on Bowie's aircraft? Had the laser on the bird he'd been flying been activated, too? Could he just as easily have been the one who shot down a friend?

Captain Hodge looked uncomfortable. "While you were with her, did she say anything? Ask any questions pertaining to Night Wing?"

"No." He was certain of that. Work had been mentioned in only the most general way. But then again, why should she have to ask him anything? "She has the clearance to find out anything about the project that she wants without having to ask anyone else."

"That's true. But did she say anything that, in retrospect, you could construe as being a reason for wanting the lasers to fail? Or for wanting to scuttle the Night Wing project?"

"No." But she wouldn't; Caroline was too smart for that. Caroline was brilliant. Caroline was perfectly capable of activating the lasers; she was not only an expert, she had access to the codes. "She has the knowledge and she had the opportunity," he heard himself saying. "Do you have anything else? Motive, anything suspicious in her past, any current money problems?"

"Her background is clean as a whistle," the captain admitted. "We're going to do a total recheck to make certain it's correct and none of it has been fabricated, but that's only a precaution. Everyone connected with this project has been verified down to the fillings in their teeth."

"Clarify this for me," Major General Tuell said. "She could activate the lasers from the work area, without actually being in contact with the lasers themselves? The birds are under twenty-four-hour guard."

"Yes, sir," Captain Hodge said. "By computer command. And Ms. Evans carried a double major in college. She got her doctorate in physics, but she also has a master's in computer sciences. She knows her way around computers."

"I see." The general sighed. "What are your recommendations?"

"We won't file formal charges, sir. We can prove opportunity, and the timing is very suspicious, but we haven't as yet proven that the computers have actually been reprogrammed to arm and fire the lasers. There's still a possibility that it's a mechanical snafu."

"But you don't think so?"

"No sir. The problems began when she arrived, and in both instances they occurred after she had made midnight visits to the work area. She's a civilian. I recommend that the FBI be notified and that she be restricted to base, but not yet taken into custody. As a precaution, I would also restrict the entire laser team from the work area until this is settled."

"Why is that, Captain?"

"As I said, sir, as a precaution. She may not be the only one involved."

"The logs don't show anyone else entering the work area at suspicious times."

"That doesn't mean they didn't know about it. I think Colonel Mackenzie will agree with me that it's less expensive to halt testing for a few days than to lose another F-22, or maybe even one of the prototypes."

"Yes." Joe's voice was hard. "Are you going to question Ms. Evans?"

"Yes sir."

"I'd like to be there."

"Of course, sir." Captain Hodge thought wryly that Colonel Mackenzie didn't have to have permission; he had supreme authority on this base with anything concerning the Night Wing project. He would defer to Major General Tuell, but it would be by choice.

"When?"

"I can have my people escort her here now, if you'd like."

"Then do it."

Major General Tuell stood. "Gentlemen, I'm leaving this in your hands. I trust you'll both make certain of our position before charges are filed. However, do whatever has to be done to solve this. The project is too important."

They both saluted, and he returned it. As he left, Captain Hodge gestured to Joe's telephone and said, "With your permission, sir."

Joe nodded curtly. Captain Hodge lifted the receiver and pressed a code. "Have Ms. Caroline Evans, C12X114, escorted to Colonel Mackenzie's office. Verify."

Whoever had answered the phone repeated the code number. Captain Hodge said, "Correct. Thank you."

He hung up the phone and turned to Joe. "Ten minutes," he said.

Chapter Ten

Caroline had never felt so small and exposed and terrified. She sat in a chair in Joe's office and tried to catch his eye, to silently plead with him to believe her, but he wouldn't look at her. Or rather, he was looking at her all right, but it was with a cold, totally impersonal gaze, as if he were observing a bug. He wasn't seeing her, Caroline. It was the look on his face more than anything else that frightened her. It was as hard as stone.

"No, I did not reenter the work area on those occasions," she repeated for what seemed like the hundredth time.

"The sensors logged both your entrance and exit tunes, Ms. Evans." Captain Hodge, the head of base security, was also good at repeating himself.

"Then the sensors are wrong."

"No, the sensors are extremely accurate. State-of-the-art."

"The sensors are wrong." She drew a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She felt almost sick with fear. "I dislodged my ID card somehow during the day Thursday. I discovered it was missing Friday morning when I dressed."

"So you keep saying. We have no record of you filing a report on this so-called missing card, and you realize, of course, how important this would be on a top-security project. Perhaps you would like to explain your reasoning again."

"I remembered snagging it on a file folder Thursday and thought it must have come loose then. I didn't notify security because it seemed like a lot of bother when I was fairly certain it wasn't lost but was still in the office."

"But the sensors record you leaving the building that afternoon with the other members of your team. You had to have had your tag on for that to be possible, and believe me, Ms. Evans, the security works on both entering and exiting. If anyone crosses that threshold from any direction without the proper identification, it triggers an alarm."

"And that's why I'm telling you that the sensors have to be malfunctioning. When I discovered that I'd misplaced my tag, I called Cal Gilchrist and got him to check the office for me. He found my tag lying on the floor under my desk. He brought it back out to me and returned to his quarters while I began work. All you have to do is ask him."

"Mr. Gilchrist will be asked the appropriate questions. However, what the logs show is that both you and Mr. Gilchrist entered the building together and left together two minutes later. Then you reentered alone, and it was over an hour before Mr. Gilchrist returned."

"That's impossible. I did not go into the building until Mr. Gilchrist returned with my tag. What do your precious sensors tell you when two tags but only one body leave a building?"

The captain ignored her question and instead made a quick notation on the clipboard he carried. "Did you also misplace your tag on Sunday night?"

"No. I didn't enter the building on Sunday night." She couldn't prevent herself from giving Joe another quick, imploring glance. What was he thinking? Surely he didn't suspect her of sabotaging the lasers.

"The sensors say you did. And by your own testimony, your ID tag was with you."

"The tag was exactly where I had left it Friday afternoon when I put it on again this morning."

"You didn't move it at all during the weekend?"

"I spent the weekend in Vegas."

"And left your tag behind."

"Do you wear your ID tag off-base, Captain?" she shot back.

He said mildly, "I'd like to remind you that I'm not the one under suspicion."

"Under suspicion of what? Spell it out for me," she challenged.

He refused to be drawn. "You spent all weekend in

Vegas, you say. You didn't return to the base either Friday night or Saturday night?"

"No."

"Where were you in Vegas?"

"At the Hilton."

"There's more than one. But of course this can be verified?"

Joe interrupted. "Ms. Evans and I spent the weekend together. I can verify her time from late Friday afternoon until 1900 hours Sunday."

"I see." Captain Hodge kept his voice noncommittal, but Caroline's face burned. This time she didn't glance at Joe. "So the name tag was locked in your quarters the entire time."

She tried another calming breath. They didn't seem to be working very well. "Yes."

"You're certain your quarters were secured."

"Yes. I always double-check my door."

He looked skeptical. " 'Always' is a very exact term. It means without fail. Are you saying you've never failed to double-check your door?"

"On this occasion, Colonel Mackenzie himself checked the door while I watched."

The captain glanced at Joe, who nodded. Joe's eyes were hooded, his expression unreadable.

"You verify that the tag was in your possession and no one else's. You were recorded entering the work area at exactly—" he paused to check the log "—2347 on Sunday night."

"I was in bed at that time Sunday night."

"Alone?" the captain asked indifferently.

"Yes."

"No one can verify that. You say you were in bed. The computer log says you were in the work area."

"Talk to Cal Gilchrist!" she said fiercely. "Stop wasting time with this and verify what I've already told you."

"On Thursday morning, when I walked into your office you cleared the screen and turned the computer off," Joe said. His voice was cold and deep. "What was on the screen that you didn't want me to see?"

She stared at him in silence, completely at a loss. He sounded as certain of her guilt as Captain Hodge was, but surely he knew… She tried to concentrate, to bring the occasion to mind. Thursday morning. He had startled her yet again, she remembered, and when she had reflexively started to slug him he had jerked her into his arms. She remembered fiddling with the computer to give herself something to do while she tried to get a handle on her reaction to him, but she had no idea what she had been working on.

"I don't remember," she said weakly.

"Come on," he scoffed. "You remember everything. You have a mind like a steel trap."

"I don't remember," she repeated, staring at him. With a shock she realized that the expression in his eyes was one of disdain… disgust… even rage. Yes, it was mostly rage, but not the normal heat of temper. Joe Mackenzie's rage was ice-cold, and all the more frightening because of it. He was looking at her as if he could destroy her without regret. He didn't believe her!

The enormity of that realization almost choked her. As it was, a huge knot in her chest swelled until she could scarcely breathe, until her heart was beating with slow, painful effort. Had their situations been reversed she would have given him her complete, unqualified trust without hesitation, because, despite the evidence, she knew he would never betray his country. Evidently he believed her capable of doing just that. Her thought processes were orderly and logical, but all of a sudden a staggering instinctive knowledge filled her: she would trust him because she had been fascinated by him, intensely involved with learning about him as a man because she loved him, while for him their time together had been purely physical. He hadn't bothered to learn about her as a person because he didn't care.

In shock, she withdrew. She didn't move physically, but she had been reaching out to him mentally, and now she slammed her mind's door on those thoughts. She pulled all her reactions inward, bolting them inside in an effort to reestablish her emotional safeguards. It was probably too late, but the human animal's instincts were always to survive, and so she obeyed those instincts. Her face went smooth and expressionless, and she stared back at him with eyes as blank as glass. She couldn't afford to give him even a sliver of herself.

"What were you working on?" he repeated.

"I don't remember." Even her voice was flat. She had so desperately clamped down on her emotions that none of them stood a chance of escaping. Just as emotionlessly she said, "I'm going to assume I'm under suspicion of sabotage."

"We haven't said that," Captain Hodge replied.

"Nor have you said that I'm not, and this feels very much like an interrogation." She fastened her gaze on him, because she couldn't bear to look at Joe. She didn't know if she could ever look at Joe again. Later, when she was alone, she would regroup and take stock, do a damage assessment, but for right now she felt as if everything in her would shatter if she had to look at him. The pain was just too great; she couldn't handle it, so she had to ignore it.

"We couldn't find any malfunction at all in the laser on Captain Wade's aircraft," she said, and even managed a little bit of pride in the evenness of her tone. It was as flat as the EEG line of a corpse. "We all talked it over. Yates Korleski, the team leader, was going to talk to Colonel Mackenzie tonight after he'd thought about it a bit longer, but we think the problem is in the computer program."

Captain Hodge looked mildly interested. "What kind of problem are you talking about, Ms. Evans?"

"We don't know. We want to compare the working program with the original to tell us if any changes have been made on the program we're actually using."

"And if there are changes?"

"Then we find out what those changes are."

"Whose idea was it to verify the program?"

"Mine."

"What made you think of it?"

"It was a process of elimination. The computer program is about all that's left that could be wrong."

"But the program was working perfectly before you arrived. It would be a major feather in your cap if you solved a problem of this magnitude, wouldn't it, Ms. Evans?"

She didn't flinch, just continued to stonily watch him. "I didn't sabotage the program so I could have the glory of finding the problem."

"I didn't accuse you of doing so. I merely asked if it would be a feather in your cap if you pinpointed a major flaw in a project this large and important."

"I already have a good professional reputation, Captain. That's why I'm on the team."

"But you weren't an original member, so evidently you weren't good enough for that. Did you resent not being picked in the beginning?"

"I didn't know about it, so I couldn't be resentful. I was working on something else. The Night Wing project was already in full swing before I finished my own project I only became available a month ago. That's verifiable," she added before he could ask.

"Hmmm." He studied the notes he had on his clipboard a moment longer, then looked up with a thin smile that didn't reach his eyes. "I believe that's all I have to ask you for now, Ms. Evans. You may go. Oh—you're restricted to the base. It wouldn't look good if you were caught trying to leave."

"Are my telephone calls also restricted?"

"Do you need to call someone?" he asked without answering her question. "An attorney, perhaps?"

"Do I need one?"

He gave her that thin smile again. "We haven't pressed any charges yet."

He just had to put that "yet" in there, she noticed distantly, but it didn't affect her. "You aren't filing charges but I'm restricted to base. Let me remind you that I'm a civilian, Captain Hodge, not a part of the military."

"And let me remind you, Ms. Evans, that you are on a military base and this is a military matter. If necessary, we can hold you in the brig for the maximum length of time before charges have to be formally filed. A lot of this can be checked out by then, and you may be exonerated, but if you insist on spending the time behind bars, we can accommodate you."

"You've made your point."

"I thought I had."

Caroline got up and concentrated on her legs. She made certain they didn't wobble, that they moved when she told them to. She didn't look at Joe as she walked out of the office, or at burly Sergeant Vrska on duty in the outer office. Evidently the good sergeant left only when the colonel did.

They would talk to Cal, and he would verify everything she had told them, which would force them to accept that their precious security sensors could and had malfunctioned. Perhaps there had been a major foul-up in security and two ID tags had been issued with the same bar code. Perhaps someone had been entering the work area with a duplicate of her tag and had indeed been sabotaging the computer program, but questioning Cal would force them to admit that it wasn't her.

She wasn't worried about being charged with sabotage, though enduring the captain's questions hadn't been a pleasant experience. But she might never recover from the look in Joe's eyes and the realization that he didn't trust her, that he believed her capable of sabotage.

She had made a monumental, colossal fool of herself. Despite the superior capability of her brain, she had made the fundamental feminine mistake of assuming that making love with a man signaled a commitment from him. No, not making love, having sex. That was another mistake she had made, assigning too much importance to the act. To men it was the simple gratification of a physical appetite, like eating. No emotional baggage was involved. She had made love; he had had sex. She had given herself to him, heart, soul and body, and he had given her pleasure in return but nothing of himself beyond the temporary use of his own body. Magnificent as his body was, she had wanted more. She had thought she was getting more.

Oh, she hadn't gone so far as to think he was in love with her, but she had still thought he cared, at least a little. But she had been confusing sexual technique with emotions. He had none, at least none that she could reach. He was always controlled, his inner self firmly locked away from everyone except his immediate family. She was beginning to see the wisdom of that. Right now she would give anything if her own emotions had been that protected, so she wouldn't be about to collapse and curl up in a fetal knot from the pain of it. She would do so if she thought it would ease the pain, but she knew it wouldn't. There was no ease.

Perhaps when he knew the truth he would expect to continue their affair as if nothing had happened. Caroline tried to imagine how she would handle the situation if he did, but she simply couldn't bring anything to mind.

Nor could she imagine continuing to work here, seeing him every day. She had always been right, after all, never to become involved with anyone. The first time she had done so had certainly been a disaster. So now she either had to do the unthinkable and somehow manage to survive working with him, or she had to ruin her professional reputation by asking to be taken off the project.

It looked as if her work would be all she had, so she'd be damned if she would throw that away just because of a man, even if that man was Colonel Joe Mackenzie. If it took every ounce of strength she had, she would finish this damn project. She would talk with him about work. She would even be polite. But there was no way she would ever risk opening her heart to him again. She simply couldn't afford the pain. This was already costing her almost more than she could bear, and the ordeal had just begun.

"Cal Gilchrist categorically denies finding her ID card under her desk," Hodge told Joe later. It was almost midnight, but there was no possibility of sleep in sight. "He says she called him early Friday morning and asked him to walk her to the building because she thought someone had followed her the morning before and it made her nervous. He says he also went inside with her for a quick check of the building, then returned to his quarters to shower and shave."

Joe's face was stony. He hadn't allowed himself to hope that Gilchrist would verify everything she had said. It would have been asking for too much, when the sensors had plainly placed her there when she shouldn't have been.

"Then why use him for an alibi? She must have known he wouldn't cover for her."

"Maybe not. Evidently they're fairly good friends. Certainly Adrian Pendley wouldn't have gone a single step out of his way for her. And maybe she and Gilchrist had something going on in the past, for her to feel confident he would protect her if he could."

"No." At least he was certain about that. Caroline had never been intimate with anyone but him. Before Ivan could question him on his certainty Joe asked, "What about Korleski? Did they discuss the possibility that the problem was with the computer program?"

"Yes. She told the truth right down the line with that. He verified that she's the one who suggested the program be checked. He was also vehement that she wouldn't sabotage a project so she could have the credit of saving it. Neither did he believe she would do it for money."

"Did he think anyone else on the laser team would do it for either money or prestige?" Joe asked.

Ivan shook his head.

"How do the rest of them check out?"

"It'll take time to reverify everything, but all of them are spotless. I never would have suspected her if it hadn't been for the entrance and exit records."

Joe could understand that. He never would have suspected her, either, but then, he hadn't been able to see past his own obsession with her. All he'd been able to think about was getting her in bed and burying himself in that sweet body. Now he had to wonder how much of it had been calculated, if she had indeed been so attracted to him that she'd given up her virginity to him with hardly a thought or if she had done it… God, what possible reason was there for making love with him the way she had, other than desire? No, she hadn't come on to him in an attempt to find out classified information on Night Wing or to use him for protection if she were caught. She hadn't needed him to find out anything; she had access to all the information she wanted. And it was simply too iffy to assume he would protect her just because he'd slept with her. Caroline had wanted him. Even if he couldn't trust anything else about her, he could trust that.

So what did he do now? He'd never before been so enraged and… hurt. He might as well admit it. This had been like taking a roundhouse to the gut. Nobody had ever gotten to him the way Caroline had, with her uncomplicated fierceness. She had been forthright and brutally honest, without any hidden agenda or stratagems. He wanted to be able to step back from the situation and look at it without emotion, but he couldn't.

He'd never felt about any aircraft the way he felt about Night Wing. It was special. It was more than special. It was history in the making, pure magic in the air. He would give his own life unhesitatingly to protect those planes, because they were necessary to protect his country. Simple patriotism, pure love for those buds. They were his.

And he'd considered Caroline his, too. His woman.

If the choice had been simply between Caroline and the aircraft, he would have chosen Caroline. He might despise himself for it, but he couldn't have stood by and let her be harmed. But between Caroline and his country… There was no choice. There couldn't be. He couldn't let there be. No matter how fierce and gutsy she was, no matter how she challenged him on a level no one else ever had before and threw herself without restraint into the battle. She hadn't let him be gentle when he'd taken her for the first tune; she had insisted on receiving his full strength and had met him with her own. Caroline met life head-on, without wavering.

He paused in his thoughts, a tiny frown puckering his eyebrows. Caroline didn't seem the type to sneak around in the dark. Maybe he hadn't known her as well as he'd thought, but he would have sworn there wasn't a devious bone in her body.

He wanted to see her. He wanted to ask her some questions one on one, without anyone else in the room to buffer them. He would get the truth out of her come hell or high water.

Chapter Eleven

He had intended to go straight to her quarters, but he stopped halfway there and detoured to his own quarters in the BOQ instead. He was too angry to face her now, especially in the temporary civilian housing where there would be too many onlookers who didn't need to know any of what was going on.

He didn't think he'd ever been this angry before, but then, he'd never been betrayed like this before. Damn it, why would she do something like that? It had to be money, but he'd never understood the mentality that could view treason as just another financial opportunity.

Treason. The word reverberated through his consciousness. If she were charged and convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her natural life behind bars, without possibility of parole.

He would never make love to her again. The thought made him erupt with fury, and he restlessly paced the small confines of his quarters. One weekend hadn't been enough. He doubted that a thousand weekends would be enough to get her out of his system. Nor could he let himself forget that he had made love to her twice without protection. Despite her assurances that the timing was wrong, she could be pregnant.

Hell, what a mess! If she was pregnant… There wasn't any use in borrowing trouble; he'd know soon enough. But what would he do if she was carrying his child? There still wasn't any way he could keep her out of prison.

That was assuming she would even tell him. By the time she had left his office that night she had refused to even look at him. He'd been watching her, trying to read her reactions, and all of a sudden she had started withdrawing. He'd seen it happen right in front of his eyes. It was as if a light had been quenched. All the vitality, the responsiveness, the incredible energy of her, had vanished, and all that had been left was a frozen mannequin of a woman who had answered in a monotone and whose eyes were as blank as a doll's.

It had been infuriating to see her that way. He had wanted to jerk her to her feet and shake her, to make that wonderful, uncomplicated anger come rushing upward to meet him. But he hadn't. If he gave in to those urges, he would lose his control once and for all, and he never wanted to do that.

What he did want to do, more than anything else in the world, was storm over to her quarters and make love to her so hard and so long that when it was over she would know she belonged to him. Maybe it wouldn't solve any of this, but it would sure as hell make him feel better. But he couldn't do that, either. Seeing her at all would knock down the last critical brick behind which he had dammed up his temper, releasing a flood of emotion that would sweep him away along with everything else.

Caroline lay on top of the covers on her narrow mattress, too listless to crawl between the sheets and actually go to bed. Such a normal action was beyond her. She had showered and dressed for bed, but she couldn't even go through the motions of pretending to sleep. All she could do was lie there in the silent darkness and stare at the ceiling. She could feel her heart beating, feel the slow, rhythmic expansions of her rib cage as she breathed. Those actions said that she still lived, but she didn't feel alive. She felt numb, dead inside.

By now they would have talked to Cal, who would have verified that she'd been telling the truth. Joe would know that he'd been wrong, but somehow that didn't give her any satisfaction. Still, she had expected at least a phone call from either him or Captain Hodge, to say "Sorry, we made a mistake." Surely they wouldn't be stupid enough to think she was resting and would rather they wait until morning to tell her.

Or Cal could have lied.

She couldn't deny the possibility. The thought had slipped into her consciousness not long after she had lain down on the bed. If she hadn't been so upset, it might have occurred to her earlier. It was the natural progression of the line of thought she had been following earlier in the hangar, when she had been staring at the laser pod and sorting out the various ways in which what had happened could have happened.

Cal was a whiz with computers. He was the one who had found that minor glitch on Friday, but only when Caroline had begun nosing around the computer. She hadn't thought anything of it then, but if he had tampered with the commands, he wouldn't have wanted her to really concentrate on the program. He knew she had a degree in computer science, because they had talked shop on several occasions. And on both Friday and today—yesterday, now, since it was past midnight—he had really looked exhausted. From being up all night? Cal was normally as bouncy as a rubber ball.

And Cal was the only other person who had touched her ID tag. Maybe he had picked it up on Thursday when she'd lost it and had left when she had so that the sensors would match the number of warm bodies leaving with the number of ID cards. She hadn't known the sensors monitored those leaving the buildings, too, but maybe Cal had; after all, he'd been working here from the beginning and noticed things like that, while she tended to pay attention only to what directly concerned her job.

Even if he had used her ID tag to regain entrance to the building Thursday night, she knew he hadn't had it on Sunday night.

But how easily could they be duplicated? He would have had to leave the base to get it done, but she was certain it was possible. After all, the sensors had said she had reentered the work area at midnight, which would have given him several hours to have a copy made.

Then she had called him on Friday morning asking him to search the office for her tag, which had given him the perfect opportunity to return it to her and keep security from being notified. Otherwise he wouldn't have been able to use the card again, because security would have removed that particular code from the computers.

She stopped her thoughts and rubbed her forehead, trying to force everything into making sense. If her call for help had been pure chance, then there wouldn't have been any reason for him to have had the card duplicated. Had he played the odds that she would call him? They were good odds, she had to admit. She wouldn't have called Yates, and she certainly wouldn't have wasted her tune calling Adrian. It was also a good bet that she wouldn't have wanted to call security. Not a certainty, but good enough that it wasn't much of a risk, either.

So what had happened then? The sensors showed both her and Cal entering the building, then both leaving. He must have had her card on him where the sensor could read it, thereby establishing proof that he hadn't had the opportunity to tamper with the computer program because he hadn't been in there alone. But why hadn't the sensor noticed that there were two cards but only one body?

Maybe the sensors weren't as good as Captain

Hodge obviously liked to believe they were. Maybe they were programmed to catch people without cards, but no one had thought to program it to catch cards without people. Maybe Cal had figured out a way to fool it. There were a lot of maybes, all of them possible. As good as he was with computers, maybe he had somehow gotten into the base computers and logged her both in and out of the building that morning. She didn't know and might never find out.

But what would Cal do now, if he were guilty? If the programs had been tampered with, he would know that analysis would discover it. Would he try to get back into the program and cover his tracks by undoing what he had done, hoping that the analysis wouldn't go any further than a simple comparison? Or would he try to plant more evidence against her?

She had to go with the second option. It was so much more feasible. Why would Cal go to so much trouble only to undo it? No, as long as the finger was pointing toward her, he would be smart to try to make certain it remained pointing in that direction.

Her heart suddenly began thundering in her chest. If Cal were guilty, if he were going to do anything else, he would have to do it tonight, while things were still in an upheaval. Given enough tune, the security net would settle down so tightly that nothing would be able to escape, but there were still windows of opportunity when things first started happening.

She knew the entire laser team was being restricted from the work area, but had their bar codes already been deleted from the computers? The military worked a lot like big business when it came to office work: most of it was done during the day. Since the restriction order had only been issued that night, had Captain Hodge called in someone to enter it into the computer or left it to be done first thing in the morning? Knowing human nature, she would bet on the latter. After all, she was the only one under suspicion, and she was probably under surveillance in the interim.

On a hunch she rolled out of bed and silently walked to the small, old-fashioned crank-out window set high in the wall in the kitchen area. She had to stand on a chair to see out of it. Sure enough, a security police car was parked on the opposite side of the street. In the glow of the streetlight she could plainly see two men in the front seat. They were making no effort to disguise their purpose, but then, why should they? This wasn't clandestine surveillance, but plain old guard duty.

There was no other door.

There was, however, another high, narrow window in the bedroom. In the almost total darkness she carefully made her way back to the bedroom and stared at the small oblong of light in the wall. A man certainly couldn't get through there, and she had doubts that she could, either. Nevertheless, she stood on the bed and peeped out. That side of the street was empty.

Well, there was no point in putting herself to a lot of trouble if Cal was peacefully sleeping in bed. She mustn't let herself forget that he might be totally innocent, that he had indeed verified her story. Innocent until proven guilty was the law of the land, though

Captain Hodge could use a little refresher course in the concept.

She didn't want to turn on any lights, alerting those two out front that she was awake, so she dialed Cal's number by feel. What better way to find out if he was in his quarters than to call him? If he answered, she might even chat awhile.

By the fifth ring she began to have serious doubts that he was there. She let it ring longer, just in case he was sleeping very soundly, but on the twentieth ring she replaced the receiver. Twenty rings, especially since the phones were installed right beside the beds to make certain the occupants would be awakened by any middle-of-the-night phone calls, would wake even the soundest of sleepers. Cal wasn't in his quarters.

She clenched her teeth in anger. Damn him! She had thought he was her friend; she had liked him, trusted him. First Joe, now Cal. Her mind immediately shied away from Joe, because that hurt was too powerful to linger over. It was much safer to focus her anger on Cal.

She stared up at that little window again. Two long, narrow louvered panes that cranked out to let the built-up heat of the day escape. She would have to dismantle the entire mechanism in the dark, and even then, she wasn't certain she would fit through the slot.

Well, she would never know if she didn't try.

Working on lasers and computers had made her familiar with tools, and she never traveled anywhere without a small pouch containing a selection of screwdrivers and pliers, because she never knew when she would need them. She fetched the pouch from the closet and dumped the tools out on the bed. Problem was, in the dark she couldn't tell which tool she needed.

She did have a pencil flashlight and decided she would have to take the risk of the small beam being detected through the window, but it wasn't likely to throw a lighted patch on the ground outside and alert the guards. She climbed up on the bed and switched the flashlight on for only the smallest of intervals, just long enough for her to see that the screws holding the mechanism in place needed a Phillips head screwdriver. Five minutes later the two window slats and the cranking mechanism, in pieces, were lying on her bed.

That had been the easy part. Getting through the window was something else.

She measured it visually. She could angle her shoulders through; her head and hips would be the biggest problem, but her buttocks would compress and her skull wouldn't. She decided to go headfirst, so she could find out immediately if her head would fit through. It would be awful to go out feetfirst, then be stuck with her head inside and the rest of her body outside. Humiliating, at the very least. That is, if she didn't find herself hanged.

First, she had to change clothes and put on some shoes. She shone the pencil flashlight on the contents of her closet, taking care that no light was visible from the outer rooms. Dark clothes would be practical, but she hadn't brought any dark clothes with her. It was

August in the southern Nevada desert; she hadn't anticipated being obliged to sneak around in the dark.

She would stand out like a sore thumb in her light-colored clothes, but there wasn't any help for it. She would just have to make certain no one saw her.

Nevertheless irritated by her lack of preparedness, she quickly pulled on a pair of thin cotton pants and a T-shirt, and defiantly slipped her ED tag into her pocket. If she got caught, they wouldn't be able to say she didn't have proper identification. As an afterthought, she added her keys to her pocket. She could hardly reenter by the window, though if she managed to catch Cal up to no good, she wouldn't have to worry about the guards out front

She climbed up on the bed again, but a minute's experimentation made it plain that she needed to be higher so she could angle through from a more horizontal position. She got a kitchen chair and balanced it on the bed, then climbed up on the chair. It was a wobbly perch, but she was holding on to the edge of the window and wasn't afraid of falling.

One arm and shoulder went first, then she turned her head to the side and eased it through the slot, earning nothing more horrendous than a minor scrape. She wiggled the other shoulder and arm through and braced her arms on the wall below her as she wriggled forward. As soon as her hips were through, she suspected, her center of gravity would shift drastically forward and she would fall on her head, dragging her legs the rest of the way through the window. It wasn't a high drop, but she didn't want to break her neck landing.

To prevent it, or at least slow her down, she hooked her legs backward so her heels were braced against the inside wall, and inched forward some more.

The edge of the window cut into her soft bottom but she ignored the pain and forced herself on through. Immediately she lurched forward and only her hooked legs inside kept her from doing exactly as she had feared. Frantically, she braced her arms again, forcing herself as far away from a vertical position as possible, then cast a fearful glance toward the front of the building where the guards were parked. To her relief, she couldn't see the car from where she was.

She hung there a minute before she faced the inevitable: there was no graceful way to do it. She was going to be scraped and bruised. Moreover, there was no way she could now reverse the process and inch back inside. Her legs were trembling from the strain. Without giving herself time to dwell on how much it was going to hurt, she straightened her legs and gave a push with her arms at the same time, launching herself the rest of the way out of the window. She tried to turn in midair so nothing vital was damaged on landing, like her head, and succeeded in turning mostly to the side. The impact was harder than she ever would have suspected for such a short distance. The loose gravel scraped skin on her temple and cheek, down the side of her left arm and on her left ankle. She had banged both knees somehow, and jarred her shoulder.

But she couldn't just sit there and take stock of her injuries. Her senses were still swimming when she forced herself to move, to scramble against the shadows at the side of the building and walk quickly in the opposite direction. Only when she had gone almost a hundred yards without hearing a warning shout did she relax and take a deep breath. Immediately her pains made themselves felt, and she stopped to lean over and rub both aching knees, then her bottom. She rotated her shoulder to make certain it was in working order and gingerly touched the side of her face. She didn't seem to be bleeding, but the scrapes burned. A scarf threaded through the loops of the pants usually served her as a belt, but she stripped it out and carefully blotted the scrapes to remove the dirt and tiny bits of gravel from her face.

Something else she could lay at Cal's door.

She trudged the long way around, no longer making an effort to avoid being seen on the theory that someone would be more likely to notice her if she was trying not to be noticed. If she acted normally, no one would pay any attention to her.

Joe sat up and threw the sheet off, cursing steadily under his breath even as he got up and began dressing in jeans and boots. It wasn't military business he had to attend to, and the long, restless hours in a bed that was far too empty had steadily eroded his patience until there was none left. He glanced at his watch, surprised to see mat it was only about 0200 hours. He'd been in bed less than two hours, but it had felt more like four or five. It didn't matter. No matter how long it had been, he wasn't going to be able to sleep until he'd had it out with Caroline. He wanted to hear her explanation of why she'd done what she had, and he wanted her to tell him to his face. He wouldn't let her ignore him again the way she had earlier in his office.

He decided to walk rather than take the truck for the relatively short distance; maybe the walk would settle him down. He was dangerously close to exploding, and he knew it. He had been six years old the last time he'd lost his temper, and he'd sworn then never to do it again, but Caroline tested his control to the extreme.

He'd walked less than a quarter of a mile when he first saw the slim figure walking boldly through the night, and his first thought was that temper was making him hallucinate. He stopped and stepped back out of sight, going down on one knee next to a trash can. He hadn't mistaken her identity; the overhead streetlights gleamed on her pale hair, and he knew that walk as ultimately as he knew his own face. The arrogant set of slim shoulders, the gentle sway of rounded hips, were burned into his memory.

Was she coming to see him? His heart thumped wildly, but then he wondered how she had gotten past her guards. He knew they had been there, because he had suggested to Hodge that it would be a good idea, and Hodge had agreed. He'd even heard Hodge give the orders. But here she was, walking around the base at two a.m., not a guard in sight.

He waited until she had walked past him before slipping from his cover. As always, he moved soundlessly, dropping back about fifty yards but always keeping her in sight. If she turned toward the BOQ he could rapidly close the distance and approach her. But she didn't even pause at the BOQ, and his anger rose to the boiling point. She was headed straight for the laser work area, damn her treacherous little heart. His palm itched with the almost irresistible impulse to storm up behind her, take her by the nape of the neck and bend her over his knee. By the time he got through walloping that pretty little backside he would feel a lot better and she would have a better appreciation of just how angry he was. Damn it, didn't she know how serious her situation was?

Of course she did. By her own actions, she was proving herself guilty. Probably she intended to finish the traitorous work she had already begun.

He thought of stopping to alert the security police, but decided in favor of keeping her in sight. If she tried anything like setting the place on fire he could subdue her and hold her until security got there. In fact, he would enjoy subduing her. He just might get that walloping accomplished while they were waiting.

He saw her stop and get something out of her pocket, then attach it to her shirt. Her ID tag. Why hadn't Hodge relieved her of it? Because he hadn't seen any need to; she had been under guard, and the codes would be deleted from the computer first thing in the morning. Joe was suddenly furious again, but this time at both Hodge and himself. They had been inexcusably lax, especially for a project with security as tight as Night Wing. She couldn't get off the base, but she could still wreak havoc on base. They relied too much on technology to do their guarding for them, something he intended to change immediately.

Someone was already inside the building; there was a very dim glow coming from one of the windows, barely noticeable. Caroline saw it, too. He saw her head turn as she stared at the light; then she continued straight up to the door and slipped inside, as silent as a wraith.

Twenty seconds later, he followed. He wasn't wearing his ID tag, so he knew central security would be alerted immediately.

Up ahead, he saw Caroline reach into the office and flip on the light switch, bathing her in the bright light. "What did you do, use my name tag again?" she demanded furiously of someone else inside. "The computers will probably go crazy when they record Caroline Evans entering twice in a row. You sabotaged my project, damn you!"

Realization burst in his brain like a bomb, and shock slammed through him as she stepped completely inside the office, out of sight Damn the little idiot! She didn't have one iota of caution. She had simply charged straight in without thinking that cornering a traitor could be dangerous. Joe launched himself down the corridor, running silently, desperately praying with every fiber in him that he wouldn't hear a gunshot that would mean the end of that foolhardy courageousness.

He heard a sudden movement, a gasp, a sickening thud, and he burst through the open doorway just as Caroline slid to the floor. Cal Gilchrist was standing in front of a glowing computer monitor, his face utterly white. Too late Joe saw Cal's eyes dart to the side, behind him. He tried to whirl, but he'd been too distracted by his own unreasoning fear. Before he could react, something hard crashed against his temple. It felt as if his head was exploding. Then there was nothing but total blackness.

Chapter Twelve

Caroline slowly regained consciousness, at first aware only of being jounced uncomfortably. Her head hurt with a deep throbbing that dulled her senses, but gradually she became aware of pain in her shoulder and arms, too. Then she began to realize that she could hear voices, that there was someone else near her, but for a blank, frightening moment she didn't know who or where she was.

Then she recognized one of the voices, and awareness swept through her. She remembered everything. Cal. It was his voice she recognized, and just as she realized that, she also realized that she was in a vehicle of some sort, perhaps a van, and she was tied. Gagged, too, damn it.

Slowly she opened her eyes, quickly closing them again in pain when a bright light flashed quickly through the windows. She heard a rushing sound and realized some other vehicle had passed them on the road, nothing more. She tried again, this time opening her lids only a slit so she could accustom herself to the discomfort. This must be what a hangover felt like, and she hadn't even indulged. All the misery without any of the fun.

Someone was lying beside her.

This time she closed her eyes in panic, startled by the realization that there was a man right next to her. She was acutely aware of her helplessness. Oh, God, were they going to rape her?

But the man wasn't moving. Cautiously she opened her eyes one more tune and found herself staring straight into Joe Mackenzie's pale, furious eyes.

Even if she hadn't been gagged, she couldn't have said a word, she was so astonished. How had he gotten there? She had a good idea how she had come to be in such a predicament, because she had foolishly rushed into the office to confront Cal without making certain he was alone. But how had Joe gotten involved? Then fear swelled in her chest, because he was in danger, too.

"I say we forget about it and get out of the country," Cal was saying feverishly. "It's over. I can't take it any further. They're going to check the entire system, and they'll find everything."

"I told the others you didn't have the nerve for this," someone else replied dismissively. Caroline tore her gaze from Joe's and craned her neck so she could see up front. Another man was sitting beside Cal, who was driving. She didn't recognize him, but at the same time he looked vaguely familiar.

"Nothing was said about murder," Cal replied furiously.

"And I suppose if that pilot had died when his plane was shot down, you wouldn't have been responsible for mat?"

"That was different." Despite his words, Cal's tone was uneasy.

"Yeah, sure."

"That was… chance. But this is cold-blooded murder. I can't do it"

"No one's asking you to do it," the other man said impatiently. "You don't have the nerve for it. We'll take care of it. Don't worry, you won't even see it happen."

If her hands hadn't been tied behind her back, Caroline would have lunged for the man, she was so angry. He was talking about killing them as casually as he would talk about doing the laundry! Joe silently nudged her ankle with his boot; actually, it was more of a kick, and her ankle was already sore. She turned her glare on him, and he gave a tiny, warning shake of his head. She kicked him in return, and he blinked at the pain.

They were in a van, one which was evidently used for hauling cargo rather than people, for there was no carpeting on the floor, only bare metal. The vehicle swayed with every turn, curve and bump, adding to the discomfort of her position. She was lying on her sore shoulder anyway, and having her hands tied behind her made it worse.

She tried to discern what they had used to bind her; it felt like nylon cord, while it was probably her own scarf they had tied around her mouth, adding insult to injury. Her keys were still in her pocket. If she could get them out, and if she and Joe turned so their backs were to each other, and if they had enough time, she might be able to use the edge of a key to saw through the nylon. The keys weren't sharp, but they were rough. Joe's pockets had probably been searched for a knife, a common item for men to carry, but women weren't expected to carry anything in their pockets, and evidently Cal and his cohort had totally overlooked hers.

"There's no point in killing them," Cal was saying raggedly. "It's over. We barely got out of there before the security police started swarming all over the place. By now they know I left the base, and they have a record of the van's license plate. When Caroline and the colonel are both reported missing but neither of them is recorded as leaving the base, they'll put two and two together so fast there'll be an APB out for the van within another hour, at most. Right now we're looking at life, but if we kill them, we'll get the death penalty."

To Caroline that sounded like a very convincing argument, but the other man didn't seem impressed. He didn't even bother to respond.

Sometimes she wished she weren't so darn logical. She couldn't turn off her thought processes even when they were telling her something she would rather not know. If the other man disregarded Cal's argument, then it must be because he had some reason to believe he himself wouldn't be tied in to the sabotage. As Cal had pointed out, his own involvement was known, but this other guy must think himself safe… except Cal knew about him and could tie him to everything. Therefore, the man felt safe only if he knew that Cal wasn't going to be alive to make the connection.

Furiously she began rubbing her face against the floor of the van, trying to scrape the gag away from her mouth, pushing against it with her tongue at the same time. Joe glared another warning at her, but she ignored him. Her frantic movements attracted the attention of the man in the passenger seat up front, and he turned around.

His voice was genial. "Welcome back, Ms. Evans. I hope your headache isn't too bad."

Joe had closed his eyes again and was still lying motionless. Caroline made an angry noise, muffled by the scarf, and continued her struggles. She kicked her bound feet and twisted her torso, all the while fighting the gag.

"You might as well stop wasting your time," the man said in a mild, faintly bored tone. "You can't get free, and all you're doing is pulling the cord tighter."

She wasn't concerned about the cord. Her two aims were to get the gag off and somehow dislodge the keys from her pocket. Not an impossible task, since her pants were loose, flimsy cotton, but not an easy one, either, because the pockets were deep. She mumbled a few unintelligible curses at him and continued with her struggle.

She had managed to push the scarf out of her mouth, and on an impulse she scooted over next to Joe and pushed her face hard against his shoulder, using the contact and the friction between his shirt and the scarf to roll the gag downward. Joe didn't move, and his eyes remained closed. She worked her jaw until the gag slipped down to hang around her neck. The man in the front seat was frowning at her, starting to get up on his knees and twist around.

"You dirtbag, you've killed him!" she croaked, forcing as much rage as possible into her voice, even though her tongue and jaw didn't want to work.

The van swayed alarmingly as Cal jerked on the wheel, his head swiveling around to stare into the back. The other man fought for his balance. "Keep your eyes on the road!" he barked at Cal.

"You said he was just unconscious!"

"He isn't dead, damn it. I hit him harder than I did her because I didn't want any trouble with the big bruiser if he woke up before we could get them out of there and tied up."

Caroline yelled, "Cal, he's going to kill you, too! Why else wouldn't he be worried about a murder charge unless he's going to try to blame the whole thing on you?"

The man lunged at her from over the seat, reaching back to grab her around the throat. Quick as a cat she turned her head and sank her teeth into his arm. He howled and tried to jerk back, but she hung on like a limpet, working her jaws to inflict as much damage as possible.

The van was swerving all over the road. Cal was using his right arm to grab at the other man while still driving. Both men were yelling and cursing. Suddenly the other man used his right fist to club her on the side of the head and she saw stars, her jaws going slack as she helplessly sank back. She didn't lose consciousness, but the blow definitely addled her.

They were fighting in the front seat, and the van rose dangerously on two wheels; then Cal jammed on the brakes and it slewed violently to one side, sliding off the pavement. She felt the distinct difference between pavement and dirt; then the van tipped a little to the right as it came to rest, probably in a shallow ditch. The movement threw her against Joe, and she felt his muscles tense as he took her weight, but he didn't so much as even grunt. Instead, there was an almost soundless, barely intelligible whisper against her ear. "There's a knife in my right boot."

Well, of course there was. Didn't all colonels carry knives in their shoes? Furious because he managed to be armed when she couldn't even get her keys out of her pocket, she thought about biting him, too. Instead, she hurled herself toward the rear of the van, collecting even more bruises in the process. Cal and the other man were still grappling, and she caught a glimpse of something metallic gleaming in the other man's hand. Instinctively she recognized it as a pistol.

Cal somehow got his door open and leapt out, probably figuring he didn't have very good odds in such close quarters with a pistol. The other man was swearing viciously, steadily, as he shoved open his own door and went in pursuit.

Caroline rolled around so her back was to Joe's feet, searching by feel for his right boot, struggling to push his pants leg up so she could reach the knife. They wouldn't have long, probably less than a minute. Her scrabbling fingers, numbed from the tightness of the nylon cord, finally grasped the knife handle and drew it out.

Joe was already rolling, presenting his bound hands to her. It wasn't easy to position the knife between their backs, unable to see if she was slicing into flesh or nylon, but she figured Joe would let her know when she got to skin. The knife must have been sharp; within five seconds she felt the cord give and he was rolling away from her again and sitting up. The blade was removed from her numb hands. She twisted her head to see him bending forward to quickly slice the cord around his feet; then he whirled toward her. She felt a swift tug at her hands and they came free. Before she could even bring her arms around he had jackknifed to a sitting position and freed her feet. Only then did he remove his own loosened gag, tugging it down so it hung around his neck just the way the scarf hung around hers.

A shot boomed from in front of them.

"Stay back here," Joe ordered as he lithely swung into the front and folded himself behind the steering wheel. The engine was still running; he slammed the van into gear and stepped on the gas pedal. The wheels spun uselessly, and he cursed himself even as he let up on the gas and put the transmission in reverse, this time easing down on the gas. He was used to his truck, but the van didn't have that kind of traction. The tires clawed for purchase on the loose, shifting dirt, finally caught and reversed out of the rut he'd dug with the first effort.

In the beam of the headlights he could see the second man running back toward the van. There wasn't any sign of Cal.

Caroline's head popped up beside him as he shifted into first, and simultaneously the man stopped and lifted the pistol. Joe put his hand on Caroline's head and shoved her sideways as he ducked himself, just as the pistol boomed again and the windshield shattered, spraying shards of glass all over the interior of the van. He kept his foot on the gas pedal and his head down as the van leapt out of the slight depression and skidded when the tires touched asphalt, slewing sideways again. He fought to keep the vehicle upright.

More shots, one following immediately after the other. He could feel the impact of the heavy slugs on the van. One headlight went out. Briefly he saw the man pinned in the remaining headlight; then the guy jumped sideways to safety as the van roared past

"Caroline!" he shouted, needing to know if she was okay, but he had his hands full battling the van, the wind full in his face and blinding him now that the windshield was gone, and he couldn't turn to see.

"What?" she shouted in reply.

"Stay down, he might shoot—"

Before he could complete the sentence, bullets ripped into the rear of the van, shattering those windows, too. His blood went cold.

"Caroline!"

"What?" she roared, plainly aggravated, and he could have laughed with relief. If Caroline was in a bad mood, she was all right.

The relief didn't last half a minute. A quick glance at the gauges showed the engine's temperature was quickly climbing; one of the shots must have hit the radiator. They were out in the desert somewhere, without a sign of a town, community or even a lone dwelling. The only light was from the stars and their one headlight. They wouldn't be able to get far before the engine locked up, but he intended to put every foot of distance that he could between them and the man with the gun.

The temperature gauge redlined. He kept his foot on the gas pedal.

The engine locked with a harsh, grinding sound. Caroline shot up beside him as they rolled to a stop. "What's going on?"

"Some of those shots hit the radiator. The motor's gone. Come on, out of the van."

She obeyed, pushing the sliding side door open and staggering out into the cool desert night. "Over here," Joe ordered, and she made her way painfully around the van.

"Now what?"

"Now we walk. I hope you're wearing good shoes."

She shrugged. She was wearing loafers, not as good as boots, but better than sandals. She hadn't dressed with an odyssey like this in mind, but what did it matter? She had to walk, even if she'd been barefoot.

"In which direction?"

"Back the way we came."

"He's back there."

"Yeah, but we don't know where we are, or how far it is to even a gas station going in the direction we were heading. At least we know that if we go back the way we came, we're going at least roughly toward the base."

Logical. But… "If we're going back the way we came, why didn't you drive in that direction to begin with?"

"Because then he'd know what direction we were going in," he explained. "He'll find the van, but he won't know if we continued on ahead or doubled back."

"But obviously we're going to have to pass by him at some point."

"Very possible, but not a dead certainty. He may decide to run rather than try to catch us. Since we don't know, we have to assume he's after us."

She trudged silently beside him as he walked out into the desert. They didn't dare risk walking on the road, so that meant they had to parallel it, far enough from the roadside that they couldn't easily be spotted, but close enough that they wouldn't lose sight of the pavement. She ached in so many places that it didn't seem worth the effort to worry about any of them. They had to walk, so she walked. It was as simple as that.

"Are you wearing a watch?" she asked. "What time is it? It isn't dawn yet, so they couldn't have taken us far."

Joe tilted his wrist to read the luminous dial. "It's four-thirty, so it'll be dawn soon. If they just threw us in the van and left immediately, before the security police could close the base, we're talking at least an hour of driving time. We could be anywhere from thirty to sixty miles away from base."

Walking sixty miles was a daunting thought, but not nearly as daunting as facing that man again. "There are others," she said aloud. "Maybe close by. They could have been taking us to turn over to them. It'll be dawn soon, but we don't dare try to flag anyone down, because we don't know who the others are or what they look like."

"You got it," he said grimly.

"So we have to walk every foot of that blasted sixty miles."

"Unless we see a state trooper. At least when the sun comes up I'll have some idea where we are."

Too far away from anything to suit her. She stopped talking, partly because sound carried so far in the desert and she didn't want to alert anyone to their presence, but mostly because it was taking all her effort just to walk. She had been awake all night—except for when she'd been unconscious, but she was fairly certain that didn't qualify as rest—and she was exhausted. Her head pounded. She supposed Joe's head hurt, too, but he'd only been hit once. First she had tumbled out her window, then she'd been hit on the head, probably with the pistol, then with that guy's fist, and finally she had hit her head against the side of the van when Joe had shoved her. The wonder was that she had any sense left at all. She ached in every muscle of her body, and a good many of the bruises adorning her had come at Joe's hands. She was glad she'd kicked him back and only wished she had gone ahead and bitten him, too. She hoped he had the granddaddy of all headaches.

Twice he drew her down when a noise alerted him. She never did see anything, but he had superior eyesight, so she let him do the work while she seized the opportunity to rest. When he decided it was safe to continue on he would urge her to her feet with an implacable hand under her elbow, and she would walk some more.

Dawn began to turn the sky pearly to their left, giving them the basic information that they had been carried north into the desert and were now headed south, back toward the base. She supposed it was good information to have, in case they had to lose contact with the road.

"We can't go on much longer," Joe murmured in her ear. "Anyone passing will be able to see us from the road, and it'll get too hot to walk, anyway. We need to find shelter for the day."

She didn't like the sound of that. It was safer to stay hidden and sleep during the day, walking only at night, but it was sure going to take them a long time to get to the base. If she hadn't been so tired she could have argued, but she was beginning to feel incapable of going another foot, and she suddenly realized just how much the night's events had taken out of her. They simply had to rest.

He veered sharply away from the road, deeper into the desert. The light slowly changed to gray, letting them see details but not yet color. A huge rocky outcropping loomed in the distance, and she stared at it in dismay. That was almost surely where he was going, and she wasn't certain she could make it. She ground her teeth to keep from protesting. She either made it or she took a nap in the sun, which would soon be broiling. She was also thirsty, but they had no water, so there wasn't any point in bringing it up. He had to be thirsty, too.

When they finally reached the rocks she leaned thankfully against one huge boulder. "Now what?" she gasped.

"Stay here."

He was already gone, vanished into the rocks. She mumbled, "Sure," and sank down to the ground. Her temples were throbbing. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the stone behind her.

It felt as if she had no sooner closed her eyes than he was saying. "Come on," as he ruthlessly hauled her to her feet. He pulled her higher up into the rocks and shade enveloped her. Until then, she hadn't realized how quickly the desert had heated. He'd found a niche in the rock deep enough to provide protection for both of them, and he deposited her in the crude shelter.

"I've already checked for snakes," he said as he put a stick in her hand. "But if any show up, knock them away with this. I'm going to wipe out our tracks and find something to drink."

Automatically she closed her fingers around the stick. She knew she should be uneasy at the thought of snakes, not to mention watchful, but she had more important things to do right then, like sleep. She turned over onto her right side, because it hurt the least, and immediately dozed.

Joe stared down at her, his jaw muscles flexing. The left side of her face was bruised and scraped, and so was her left arm. He could plainly see a lump on her temple. She was chalk white with exhaustion and pain, her clothes dirty and sporting a few small tears. The contrast between her normally pristine appearance and now, when she lay bedraggled at his feet, sleeping in the dirt, utterly enraged him. Cal Gilchrist was probably dead, but he wanted the other one dead, too, for what they had put her through. He himself hadn't done a very spectacular job of keeping her safe, and he included himself in his rage.

She looked so small and helpless, curled on her side like that, though he knew she wasn't exactly helpless. He remembered her furious struggle to free her mouth from the gag so she could yell her suspicions at Gilchrist; she had caused the fight between the two men, thereby engineering their own escape. It was up to him now to make certain nothing else happened to her.

His own fatigue pulled at him as he backtracked for quite a distance, then obliterated all sign of their passing on his return to the outcropping. He ignored the weariness of his muscles. They needed water; not desperately, not yet, but they would stay much stronger if they had adequate liquids. Before he let her get dehydrated he would take the chance of flagging down a car, but it hadn't come to that yet, and he didn't want to take unnecessary chances. With an expert eye he noted the stunted plant life dotting the desert floor, studying the growth pattern and picking out the plants that looked slightly more succulent than others growing nearby and indicating more moisture underground. They would be all right.

He climbed back to the niche in the rocks. Caroline hadn't moved; she was breathing with the slow, heavy rhythm of deep sleep. Suddenly it seemed like a lifetime since he had held her, felt her nestling trustingly in his arms, and one moment longer was too long. He lay down beside her and eased her into his arms, cradling her head on his shoulder. She sighed, her soft breath brushing his skin.

Damn her, why hadn't she called him, told him of her suspicions about Gilchrist? It had been obvious that she wasn't surprised to find the man in the work area, had in fact gone there specifically to find him. She had barged straight into danger rather than picking up the telephone and calling him, or even Hodge. All of this could have been prevented if she'd just made that call instead of trying to do things herself.

That would be the first thing he got straightened out between them when she woke up. Why the hell hadn't she trusted him? If he had to tie her to the bed every time she was out of his sight to keep her from rushing headlong into dangerous situations, he would do it He remembered the black terror he'd felt, seeing her dart into the office to confront the saboteur, and he wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled.

Instead he held her tighter, smoothing her pale hair back from her face. He could feel her heart beating against his, and right now that was all he required. He slept as easily as she had, simply closing his eyes and letting weariness sweep over him in a tide.

Chapter Thirteen

It was the heat that woke her. She felt rested, her headache having subsided to a distant and far more tolerable ache. Slowly she sat up, staring out at the glaringly hot landscape stretched before her, wavering in the heat: reds in every shade, yellows, browns, sand colors. Small specks of green that testified to the sparse plant life. Beautiful. Basic. Cal was probably dead somewhere out there, and despite what he had done, what he had tried to do, she couldn't help but mourn him. He hadn't wanted to kill them, had argued against harming them. Poor Cal. He'd been a traitor, but not a murderer, though what he'd been doing could easily have led to someone's death. Poor Cal. But if Joe had been harmed because of him, she would have killed him herself. Sweat stung her eyes, and she dried her face on the arm of her shirt. If it hadn't been for the sheltering rock, the heat would have been intolerable. She reached out and touched the stone, found it cool to the touch. Where the sun kissed it, it would fry eggs.

Joe wasn't there, but she wasn't alarmed. She had a vague impression that he'd been lying beside her, and the imprint in the dirt confirmed that. Probably he had disturbed her when he'd gotten up, and that had allowed the heat to intrude on her consciousness.

She felt incredibly grubby, and looking down at herself, she saw that she was incredibly grubby. She didn't think she'd been this dirty since… come to think of it, she'd never been this duty before. She had been a fastidious child, eschewing the joys of mud puddles for those of computers and books.

Stiffly she climbed to her feet, wincing as her various aches made themselves felt. Aching or not, nature called.

When she returned to the niche, she found Joe leaning propped against the rocks, looking disgustingly capable. His eyes were piercingly alert, and even though his clothes were as dirty as hers, they looked made to be dirty. Jeans and a khaki shirt were far more utilitarian than thin white cotton pants and an oversize white T-shirt. Even his scruffy boots were better suited to the desert than her loafers; she had to be careful how she stepped, to avoid getting the fine silt inside her shoes, where it would promptly rub her feet raw.

After a single encompassing look mat avoided meeting his gaze, she stepped past him and sank down in the shade of the rocks again.

Joe's back teeth ground together. He'd thought he had himself firmly in control once more, but all of a sudden he was right back to where he'd started, dangerously close to the precipice. She was shutting him out, damn it, and he found it intolerable.

Grimly he regulated his breathing, forcing his hands to relax, his jaw to unclench. She was still fragile from the rough handling she'd had the day before; now wasn't the time to force a confrontation, even if he had been sure of his control, which he wasn't. Later. He promised himself full satisfaction—later.

"We both need something to drink," he finally said. "Come on."

Unhesitatingly she got to her feet without any sign of her usual argumentativeness, which had to mean she was very thirsty.

They didn't have far to walk; Joe had already scouted the area and marked the most likely spot in a small arroyo, where the scrub grew profusely. He knelt on the sandy bottom and began scooping up the sand with his hands. It quickly grew damp. He slipped the knife from his boot and dug deeper, until muddy water began to gather in the hole.

His gag had been made from a handkerchief, and it came in handy now. He spread the square of cloth over the water to filter the liquid, then gestured for her. "Drink."

Caroline didn't take exception to his curt tone; he had produced water, and that was the important thing. She didn't cavil about unsanitary conditions or the indignity of having to get on her hands and knees and lap liquid like a dog. It was water. She would gladly stand on her head to get it if it was required. She could feel the membranes of her mouth and throat absorbing the tepid moisture, and it was wonderful.

Still, she forced herself to stop long before her thirst was quenched and moved away from the tiny water hole. She gestured to him. "Your turn." She didn't know how much water there was; there might be only enough for both of them to have a few swallows each.

He stretched out full length on the sand to drink, which she considered and decided was a far more comfortable position. She should have thought of it herself, but then, she had never lapped water from a puddle before. She would know next time. Absently she studied his prone figure. As big as he was, it stood to reason that he had more blood in his body than she did, so he would probably require more water. Biology had never been one of her interests, but she would bet he had at least one more deciliter of blood than she did, perhaps two. An interesting little tidbit she needed to investigate…

She blinked and became aware that he had risen to his feet and was waiting, having evidently asked her something. "Do you want more water or don't you?" he repeated impatiently.

"Oh. Yes, thank you." This time she stretched out as he had done, which gave her better access to the small puddle of water. She sucked enthusiastically until she began to feel as if she'd had enough. She paused to ask, "Have you finished, or do you want more?"

"I've had enough," he said.

She soaked the handkerchief as best she could, then gingerly washed her face and hands, wincing when the water stung the scrapes. When she had finished, she offered the handkerchief to Joe, and he scrubbed the damp material over his own face and hands, and around the back of his neck. The moisture had a cooling effect, something he needed right then.

"We'll wait in the rocks until sundown," he said, and she nodded. Without another word she headed back to the protective niche.

Damn it, she was treating him like some stranger she'd been stranded with. No, even worse than that. She would have talked more to a stranger. She hadn't once looked him in the eye. Her gaze would slide past his face without connecting, as if he were someone she passed on the street. His hands clenched into hard fists as he strode after her. It was time to have it out, damn it

She was sitting on the ground in the niche when he got there, her arms looped casually around her drawn-up knees. Joe deliberately walked so close that his boots nudged her feet, forcing her to either stand up and face him or tilt her head back as far as it would go. She continued to sit.

"Why the hell didn't you call me last night instead of tackling Gilchrist on your own?" he asked softly, so softly it would take a discerning ear to catch the quiet fury underlying the words.

Caroline heard it but didn't much care. She shrugged. "I didn't think of it I wouldn't have, anyway. Why would I?"

"So I could take care of it. So you wouldn't nearly have gotten yourself killed."

"And you, too," she pointed out. "How did you get involved?"

"I was following you."

"Ah." She gave him a brittle smile. "Thought you'd catch me in the act, didn't you? What a surprise to find out it was someone else who got caught."

"And you knew it when you went there. Damn it, Caroline, for such a smart person, that was a stupid thing to do. You should have called me when you first suspected him."

"Yeah, sure. Why waste my breath?" she asked scornfully. "I'd already seen how much you believed me. I'd rather have called Adrian Pendley than you, and he hates my guts."

His breath hissed softly between his teeth as he leaned down and grasped her arms, jerking her unceremoniously to her feet "If you ever need anything," he said, the words deliberately spaced as he forced them out, "you call me. My woman doesn't go to someone else."

She pulled sharply, trying to dislodge his grip on her arms, but he merely tightened his hands. "Interesting, I'm sure," she snapped. "When you find her, be sure to tell her that, but I'm not interested."

A red mist swam in front of his eyes. "Don't push me," he heard himself say hoarsely. "You're mine, damn it Admit it."

Again she tried to pull away, her blue-green eyes spitting fire at him. If he thought he could just pick up again where they had left off, now that it had been proven to his satisfaction that she was worthy, he was in for a nasty surprise. She wanted to scream at him, but instead she limited herself to a scathing retort. "We had a hot weekend in bed, but that doesn't give you a deed to me. Boy, were my eyes opened. I knew you weren't madly in love with me or anything, but you really can't have much of an opinion of someone at all if you think they're capable of betraying their country. It was certainly a learning experience—"

"Shut up." His voice was guttural now.

"Don't tell me to shut up," she fired back. "The next time I go to bed with a man I'll make certain he—"

"You'll never go to bed with any man but me." He began shaking her, the force of it whipping her head back and forth. The thought of her turning to another man was unbearable, shattering the last tenuous thread of his control and letting rage spew forth like lava, red-hot and molten. She was his, and he was never going to let her go.

Somehow his mouth was on hers, his hand locked in her hair at the back of her head, holding her still. He tasted blood, whether his or hers he didn't know, but the coppery taste called up a fiercely primitive instinct to brand her as his, sear his flesh into hers so she would never be free of him. His skin felt burning hot and too tight, as if it would burst from the force of his blood pounding beneath it. His manhood was iron hard with lust, straining against the front of his jeans.

He carried her to the ground, blind with the need to feel her soft body beneath him. He began jerking at her pants, tugging them down and off. Her underwear tore when it was subjected to the same treatment.

Caroline lay still, staring in mute fascination at his face. She had always sensed his control and resented it, but abruptly it had shattered, and the naked intensity of his expression was almost frightening. Almost, because in the deepest, most basic part of her, she trusted him not to hurt her. She saw the savagery of his eyes, felt the barely restrained strength of his hands as he stripped her clothing away, and his wildness called her own fierce spirit soaring up to meet him.

She heard herself give a wild cry; then her hands were buried in his thick black hair, pulling him down to her.

He tore at the fly of his jeans, grunting as he freed his rigid length. He entered her with a powerful, driving thrust that made her cry out again from the impact of it; then her legs came up to hold him in the cradle of her hips as her silky hot depths wrapped around him, yielding, caressing, demanding. The sensation made him feel as if his skull was going to explode.

He rode her hard, grinding her into the hard ground beneath them in his frenzy to irrevocably meld their flesh into one. He'd never felt so savage, so utterly dominant and primitive; he was out of control, reacting purely as a male animal who needed his mate more than anything else in the world.

Caroline lifted her hips to meet his heavy thrusts. She had been sucked up into the maw of a powerful storm, and she loved it, reveled in it, embraced it and wanted more. The pleasure exploded in her, hard and deep. She clutched his hair, her heels digging into the backs of his muscled thighs as her slim body arched in a powerful bow, lifting him with her. The rhythmic surge rolled through her like thunder, and she gave herself up to it with a cry.

Her completion called up his own, the exquisite milking sensation on his hard length sending him over the edge. He convulsed with a powerful jetting that emptied him but seemed to go on forever, longer and harder and deeper than he'd ever known before. He was barely conscious when it ended, barely able to move. He didn't have the strength to roll away from her, or even to support his weight on his arms. He sank down onto her with the dim wish that he would never have to move, that they could lie there entwined for the rest of their lives.

He needed her for the rest of his life. He'd always loved flying with a passion that had overshadowed what he'd felt for other women, but right from the start he'd found it impossible to put Caroline out of his mind as he'd always been able to do once he was in the cockpit. She would never make a comfortable wife, but hell, if comfort and placidity were what he wanted, he would never have become a fighter pilot. He'd never been in a fighter yet, not even Baby, that kept him on his toes the way Caroline did. She both delighted him and challenged him, and she met the strength of his sexual drive with matching strength. He was a warrior, and she was as fierce as he was, with more guts than brains, and that was saying a lot. In more ancient times she would have fought beside him, a sword in her own hand. His Valkyrie. He felt humbled by her spirit.

"I love you," he said. He hadn't known the words were there until they came out, but he wasn't surprised by them. Somehow he found enough strength to surge up onto his elbows, looking down at her with his savage, glittering eyes narrowed. "You're my woman. Don't ever forget it."

Caroline's eyes flared, the pupils expanding to huge black circles that almost completely swallowed the vivid color of her irises. "What did you say?" she demanded.

He thrust his hips against her, deepening the invasion of his still-firm male flesh. God, how could he still be aroused? He was almost dead from exhaustion, but the want, the need, was still there. "I said I love you. And you're mine, Caroline Evans. Forever and a day. Til death and beyond."

"In sickness and in health," she prompted; then suddenly tears welled and overflowed, trickling down her temples.

He cradled her head in his hands and caught the tears with his tongue, tenderly nuzzling against her. His own chest felt tight. He'd never imagined his valiant little warrior crying, and it was almost more than he could bear. "Why the tears?" he murmured, pressing light kisses across her face and neck. "Did I hurt you?"

"You nearly killed me," she replied. "When you didn't believe me." And she balled up her fist and punched him on the side of the head, because it was the only place she could reach. It was an awkward punch, because of their closeness and her position, and didn't pack as much power as she would have liked, but he gave a very satisfying grunt. "Don't let it happen again."

He jerked his head back and glared down at her. "Why in hell did you do that?"

"Because you deserved it," she said, and blinked back another tear.

Joe's mouth twitched, and the glare turned into something tender. "I'm sorry," he breathed, feathering a kiss on each corner of her mouth. "I'm sorry. I was a blind, bull-headed ass. Just the suggestion that you might have betrayed me sent me into a flat spin, and I couldn't pull out of it. I was on my way over to see you when you came marching toward me, right down the middle of the base like you owned it, when you were supposed to be under guard." A quick frown knitted his brow, and he pulled back a little to scowl at her. "How did you get out?"

"I dismantled the glass slats in the bedroom window and crawled out."

He looked astounded. "You can't fit through there. It's too little."

"Hah. I got some scrapes from it and hurt my shoulder when I fell, because I had to go out headfirst, but it can be done." Then she judiciously added, "Though I don't think you would fit through even if you were greased from head to foot."

"Or any other man on base," he said dryly.

"Well, times have changed," she pointed out. "The security police should realize that women are a permanent part of the Air Force, even flying fighters into combat now, so they should adjust their thinking."

Typical of Caroline to point out the security police's errors in letting her escape. He would be sure to pass them on to Hodge. If he beat Caroline to it, that is.

She gave a delicate little cat yawn, and her dark sea-colored eyes looked sleepy. Still, Joe was reluctant to disengage their bodies, though she was lying naked with nothing beneath her but the hard ground. He solved the problem by anchoring her hips with a hard arm and rolling so he was on bottom. She made a soft sound of contentment, very like a purr, and nestled her head into the hollow where his neck and shoulder met.

He leisurely stroked her slim back for a minute, then abruptly his hands tightened, and he lifted her off his chest to give her a hard look. "What about you?" he demanded sharply. "Do you love me, Caroline? Say it"

"Yes, sir, Colonel," she murmured in response to the commanding tone. She supposed it was something he couldn't help. "I love you, Colonel, sir. Stupid of me, wasn't it, to fall in love when you were so determined to hold back, to not give me anything more than sex?"

Tension pulled the skin tight across his cheekbones, starkly revealing the chiseled bone structure. He felt the nausea of panic coiling in his stomach, because suddenly he saw that Caroline would never tolerate that rigid control, doling out passion and love in measured amounts. She wanted all of him. A cliff yawned at his feet, and if he stepped over the edge his life would never be the same, but if he didn't take that one step, he would lose her. He knew it all the way down to his bones, and just the thought of it was a hammer blow to the chest that told him he would never be able to survive the reality. His instincts were too sharp, too primal, for him to think he would be able to shrug it off. She was his mate; there was no other for him.

Somehow he forced his lips to move, though they felt numb. "I… I need to be in control."

He felt her hand on his hair, gently stroking, her soft fingertips trailing down to his cheek and then to his lips. "I noticed," she said, softly wry.

It was hard to explain, impossible with her lying on top of him, so close that she couldn't miss even the most minute change in his expression. He lifted her off him, though his body felt abruptly incomplete without the linkage to hers. She looked disoriented by the sudden shift, automatically crossing her arms over her bare breasts in response to her inner uncertainty. The gesture was so innately feminine that he grabbed her to him, holding her close and savoring the feel of her silky skin, gathering his strength. He brushed the dirt from her back, took off his shirt and slipped it on her. Her own clothes, he saw, were a tangled mess.

He kissed her, hard and quick, before tension drove him to his feet. He stood with his back to her, staring out over the stark, lovely desert.

"Dad was put in prison when I was six years old," he said. His voice was hoarse and raw. "He was innocent. The guy who had committed the crime was finally caught for something else, and he admitted everything. But Dad spent two years in prison, and for those two years I was in foster homes."

There was total silence behind him, but he sensed the intensity of her attention. "Maybe there was just something about me that the man in the first home hated. Maybe it was because I'm a half-breed. They kept other foster kids, but he singled me out. I was just a kid. I broke things, I'd lose my temper playing with the other kids, the way kids do. I was bigger and stronger than most kids my age, but I didn't know how to control that strength. If any of them said anything about Dad being a duty half-breed jailbird, I went at them and did as much damage as I could. God, did I have a temper.

"And this man would beat me whenever I did something, even if it was stumble over an ashtray that he'd left on the floor. At first he used a belt, but it wasn't long before he was using his fists. I fought him, and he beat me that much worse. I missed more school than I attended, because he wouldn't let me go to school with my face bruised up."

It got harder to say, the memories blacker as he dredged them up, and the worst was yet to come. He made himself continue. "He kicked me down the steps once, broke a couple of my ribs. And still I kept fighting him. I guess you could say I didn't have stopping sense, but my temper flashed like black powder, and I couldn't control it. He started burning me with cigarettes if I sassed him, or twisting my fingers, just to see if he could make me cry.

"I was in a nightmare and I couldn't get out," he said softly. "Nobody seemed to care what happened to me. I was just a half-breed, worth less than a mongrel dog on the side of the road. Then one day he slapped me, and I really lost my temper. I went on a rampage. I kicked in the television set, threw all the little knick-nacks against the wall, got in the kitchen and started breaking the dishes, and he was right behind me, hitting me with his fists, trying to kick my ribs in. I lost, of course. I was only six, even if I was big for my age. He dragged me down to the basement, stripped me naked and beat the bloody hell out of me."

His heart was pounding now, just as it had been that day almost thirty years before. He'd never said it before, but it had to be said now. "Then he raped me."

He could hear the swift movement behind him, feel the rush of air as Caroline surged to her feet. He kept his back turned.

"Looking back, I think it shocked him that he'd done it He never touched me again, even in the slightest way. And I never lost control again," he said remotely. "He must have called the welfare people, or maybe his wife did. I was gone from that house within two weeks. I spent those two weeks in the basement, alone, silent. I stopped talking. The other foster homes were okay, I guess, but I didn't take any chances. I did exactly what I was told, never lost my temper, never lost control, never talked. Then one day, when I was eight, Dad showed up. He'd gotten out of prison and tracked me down. I don't know if he had authorization to get me or if no one was brave enough to tell him he couldn't, but he picked me up and held me so close it hurt, and it was the best hurt in the world. I was safe again."

"Did you tell him?" she asked, the first time she had spoken. He was a little startled at the harshness of her tone.

"No. I've never told anyone, until now. If you knew my dad, you'd know why. He would have gone after the guy and literally killed him with his bare hands, and I couldn't stand to lose Dad again." He steeled himself to turn and face her, braced for the pity he would see in her eyes, but what he saw was a long way from pity. She was standing with her fists clenched, her face savage with rage. If that long-ago man had been standing there right then, Caroline Evans would have killed him, too. She wasn't a half-breed Comanche warrior, but her spirit was just as swift and fierce, and her sea-colored eyes were blazing. Startled, he began to laugh.

"Don't laugh, don't you dare laugh!" she roared. "I'll kill him—"

"You don't have to, sweetheart," he soothed, jerking her into his arms when she evaded his more gentle attempts to embrace her. "He's dead. He died two years after the welfare people took me away. After I had graduated from the Academy I decided to check, just for the information. Hell, who am I kidding? There's no telling what I would have done if he'd still been alive."

He pushed her hair away from her face and kissed her. "Maybe I was tougher than most kids, but he didn't damage me permanently, except for always wanting to be in control. He didn't warp me sexually. Being around Dad was probably the best therapy I could have had, as far as sex is concerned. He was always totally open about it, treating it as just part of nature. And we had the horse ranch. A kid learns the basics damn fast on a ranch. I was okay within six months of getting back with Dad. There was a bedrock of love there that never let me down."

"Except you're still a control fanatic," she growled.

He had to laugh again. "You can't even lay all the blame for that on what happened. I'm a fighter pilot. My life depends on being in control. It's part of my training as well as my personality."

She nuzzled her face against his sweat-dampened chest. "Well, you have a reason for it, but that doesn't mean I like it."

"No, I don't guess you would," he said in amusement. "That's why you continually push me, trying to make me lose control. Well, lady, you succeeded. Are you pleased with yourself?" His voice turned deep and serious. "I could have hurt you, sweetheart."

She looked like the cat who had had an entire gallon of cream, not just a measly saucerful. "It was wonderful," she purred. "And I wasn't frightened. You can't hurt me by loving me. The only way you'll ever hurt me is if you stop loving me."

His arms tightened around her. "Then you're safe for a lifetime." He held her close for a long, long time, and he felt something relax within him, something that he hadn't even known was tightly wound. She was inside his defenses now, and he no longer had to keep his guard up. Defeat had never been sweeter, because he'd come away with the grand prize.

At the moment his grand prize was bruised and half-naked, but still valiant He released her with a little swat to her bare backside. "Get your clothes on, woman. It's sundown, and we have to get back to the base."

Chapter Fourteen

It was almost anticlimactic. The danger the night before had been very real, but it wasn't long after dusk when they veered back close to the road and a car came by, cruising very slowly, shining a spotlight off to the side. Caroline gasped and started to hit the dirt, but Joe kept her upright with a firm grip on her arm. His eagle eyes had spotted something she couldn't make out in the darkness: the row of lights on top of the car. Literally dragging her in his wake, he strode out into the road.

The car stopped. The spotlight wavered, then settled on him. "I'm Colonel Joe Mackenzie, out of Nellis," he said. His deep voice carried that unmistakable note of command. "I need to get back to the base as soon as possible."

The state trooper switched off the spot and got out of the car, "We've been searching for you, sir," he said in a respectful tone. Military personnel or not, there was something about Joe Mackenzie that elicited that response. "Are you all right, injured in any way? A van was found—"

"We know about the van. We were in it," Joe said dryly.

"We were ordered by the governor to give every assistance to the military in finding you. A statewide search was started this morning."

Joe put his arm around Caroline and ushered her into the back seat; then he went around and took a seat up front. Caroline found herself staring at the back of his head through steel mesh.

"Hey," she said indignantly.

Joe glanced back and began to laugh. "Finally," he said, "I've found a way to control you."

"The sensor alarms went wild," Captain Hodge said. "Once when Ms. Evans entered the work area after she was already recorded as being inside, and again when you entered without your ID tag, Colonel. The first guard was there within two minutes, but the building was empty. They must have dragged both of you out immediately and then panicked. They loaded you in Mr. Gilchrist's van and bolted.

"Ms. Evans' quarters were checked and she was discovered missing. Amazing. I didn't know anyone could get out a window that small," he said, glancing at her.

"I'm not very thick," she replied coolly.

He cleared his throat at the look in her eyes. "I tried to notify you, Colonel, and found that you were missing, too, though there was no record of you leaving the base. Nor had Ms. Evans attempted to leave. There was a record, however, of Mr. Gilchrist leaving immediately after the alarm had sounded."

"The other guy must have been hidden in back with us," Joe said.

"Who was he?" she asked. "He looked familiar, but at the same time I didn't know him."

Hodge looked at his ever-present clipboard. "His name was Carl Mabry. You'd probably seen him in the control room. He was a civilian working with the radar."

"How did Gilchrist get involved with him?" Joe asked. "And there are others. Have you found out anything about them?"

They were sitting in his office. Both he and Caroline had been checked over by the medics and declared basically sound. Somewhere along the line, Caroline's clothes had vanished and the well-meaning nurses had tried to stuff her into one of the too-revealing backless, shapeless gowns that were standard for every hospital. Caroline's sense of style had been outraged, but the green surgicals had appealed to her. She was wearing a set now and somehow looked dashing in them.

"Evidently, Gilchrist was recruited after he began work here," Hodge said. "Mabry belonged to a radical group that opposed defense spending. You know the type. They want the money for humanitarian purposes, even if they have to kill to get it."

"Then just how," Caroline asked in an awful tone, "did he get security clearance?"

Hodge winced. "I—uh, we're still checking on that. But he didn't have clearance into the laser building."

"So how did he get in without triggering the alarms?" Joe asked impatiently.

Caroline snorted. "The program has a major weakness. The alarm is set off by a body entering or leaving without a card—but not a card entering or leaving without a body."

Hodge's hair was too short to pull, so he ran both hands over his crew-cut head. "What?" he almost yelled.

"Well, it's obvious. I certainly didn't go into the building with Cal when he was supposedly searching for my tag, but the computer said that I did, which means he must have had the tag with him and flashed it so the sensors would pick it up, thereby destroying any record that he had entered the building alone and discrediting my story of having misplaced my tag. There wasn't anything Cal didn't know about computers. He probably figured it out not long after he started work on base, testing it by swinging the tag through me doorway on a string, or something like that. If he'd been caught, he wasn't doing anything he would be arrested for, just playing with the computers like any hacker would. Evidently he picked up my tag when I lost it, but left at the same time I did that day so the sensors weren't set off. He carried it off base and had it duplicated, then returned the original to me the next morning so there wouldn't be a report on it The night we caught them—" She paused, looking confused. "When was it? Just last night?"

"Seems longer, doesn't it?" Joe commented, grinning at her.

"Anyway, he would have entered with the duplicate tag, then tossed it through the doorway to Mabry, who would also have used it to enter. If you check the logs, you'll probably find entry, exit, then reentry with just a few seconds between. If you had been on your toes, Captain Hodge, you would have made certain my code had been immediately deleted from the computer instead of waiting until morning, thinking you had me safely under guard."

Hodge was crimson with embarrassment. "Yes, ma'am," he mumbled.

"Likewise, instead of assuming you had the problem contained, the entire laser team should have been restricted to base until you were certain."

"Yes, ma'am."

"The sensor program needs to be rewritten. It's humiliating to think of a sophisticated security system being bypassed by two people tossing ID tags through a doorway like kids playing catch."

"Yes, ma'am."

Joe had covered his mouth with his hand to hide his grin, but his blue crystal eyes were shining. Poor Hodge, by-the-book person that he was, was no match for Caroline at her most haughty, and his little hedgehog was most definitely feeling put upon. He decided to intervene before the captain was reduced to a sense of total inadequacy. "You used the past tense when speaking of Mabry. Is he dead?"

"Suicide. Gilchrist, by the way, was doing it for the money, not for any ideological reason, but Mabry firmly believed that the Night Wing program should be scrapped. They intended to cause so many problems with the tests that funding wouldn't be granted. Good plan, considering the economic and political climate. Pressure is high in Washington to spend money only on things that work. We've tied Mabry to a group called Help Americans First I don't know if we'll be able to implicate any of them without his testimony, but we might be able to turn up a paper trail that ties them to it. We know they were willing to kill both you and Ms. Evans to complete their sabotage of the lasers, so we aren't talking about innocent do-gooders here."

"I want them nailed, Hodge," Joe said softly.

"Yes, sir. The FBI is working on it."

Caroline yawned. Despite sleeping all day, she was tired; it had been an eventful twenty-four hours. Joe leaned back in his chair and hooked his hands behind his head, watching her. It gave him a deep sense of contentment to watch her.

"You're the first to know, Hodge," he said lazily. "Ms. Evans and I are going to be married."

To his amusement, a look of disbelief crossed the captain's face. Hodge looked at Caroline the way he would have looked at a wild animal that had suddenly been turned loose, as if he didn't know whether to run or freeze. She returned the look with a sort of warning indifference.

"Uh… good luck, Colonel," Hodge blurted out "I mean—congratulations."

"Thank you. And I'll probably need that luck."

Two weeks later Caroline whirled in her husband's powerful arms to the strains of a waltz. Washington society glittered around them. The huge ballroom was resplendent with silks and satins, jewels both paste and real, bright chatter and serious dealing. Intermingled with the formal black, gray and midnight-blue tuxedos of the civilians were the gorgeous dress uniforms of the various branches of the military. Joe looked magnificent in his. Caroline saw more than one set of feminine eyes following him wherever he went, and she had been forced to glare several of the owners of those eyes into submission.

"We should have waited," she said.

"For what?" His arm tightened around her as he swung her around.

"To get married."

"For God's sake, why?"

"For your family."

He laughed aloud. "Dad understood. When he decided to marry Mary, he had the deed done within two days. It took me three."

"General Ramey seemed pleased," she commented.

"He is. The Air Force likes its officers to be married. It makes us more settled."

"Sure," she replied doubtfully. "If going Mach 3 is considered settled."

The funding for Night Wing had been granted by a wide margin in Congress the day before. Joe had had to testify before the committee, requiring his presence in Washington, and he had categorically refused to be separated from his wife, so Caroline's presence had also been required.

The federal investigation into Help Americans First was ongoing, as was the final phase of testing on the Night Wing project, but the aircraft and laser systems were all functioning perfectly. The damage Cal had done to the computer program had been rectified. And Caroline was slowly beginning to realize what it would mean to her life to be married to a career military officer. When the final testing was completed he would be taking over as wing commander of the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing at Langley AFB in Virginia. She had learned a lot about the military in the ten days they had been married and knew that Joe would be up for his first star after that posting. He was thirty-five years old and would probably make general before he was thirty-seven. She would never admit it to him, because she felt he needed someone who didn't jump every time he issued an order, but sometimes she was a little in awe of his abilities.

He pulled her closer, and the movement of the waltz brought her lower body into firm contact with his. Her gaze flew up to meet his, and she saw his arousal reflected in the glittering blue depths of his eyes.

"I like you in white," he murmured.

"That's good. I wear it a lot." She was wearing it now. Her ball gown was pure, snowy white.

"You look better on white sheets than anyone I know."

"Hmm. I'm going to take flying lessons, so maybe I'll need to have several jumpsuits made in white."

Incredibly, she felt his shoulder tense under her hand. "Flying lessons? Why? If you want to fly, I'll teach you."

She gave him a calm smile. "No. I'd turn you into a trembling wreck if you tried to teach me how to fly, and I'd be ready to kill you. But I need to know, so I'll know something of what it's like for you up there." She figured it was the best way to get over the fear she felt every time he went up. Rather than risk clipping his wings, out of his concern for her, she would grow her own wings.

He still looked uneasy. "Caroline…"

"Joe," she replied firmly, "I'm good at anything I decide to do. Physics, computers, sex. I'll be good at flying, too. And having babies."

He stopped dead in the middle of the dance floor. "Caroline!"

She lifted her brows, ignoring the smiling glances directed their way. "What?"

"Are you pregnant?"

"It's possible," she said serenely. "The timing wasn't right during our weekend in Vegas, but what about since then? Name one time when you used any protection. If I'm not now, the odds are good I will be before the end of the year."

He couldn't seem to breathe. Hell, she probably was pregnant. As she had said, she was very good at anything she decided to do, and so was he.

"It'll be interesting," she said, "to find out if you make girl babies or boy babies."

A slow grin moved his hard, beautiful mouth. "As long as I make you, I'm happy."

"Oh, you do make me, Colonel Mackenzie. Very well indeed. When are we going to Wyoming?"

He adjusted to her lightning change of subject without a pause and resumed the dance. "Next month. I'll only have a week, but we'll get back for Christmas."

"Good. I've talked to Boling-Wahl, and they'll try to keep me assigned to projects in your general vicinity, though of course I won't be working on any project for the Air Force. I may be working in Baltimore while you're at Langley, but the commute isn't bad."

"Not bad," he said doubtfully, "but I don't really like the idea of you having to battle that traffic."

She pulled back a little and her brows slowly rose. "Me?" she asked after a delicate pause.

He stifled a shout of laughter. "I have to be closer to the base than that," he explained, keeping his voice level with an effort.

"Oh." She considered the situation for a moment, then said, "Okay, I'll do it this time. But you owe me, big time, because I believe in being comfortable, and fighting the traffic violates that belief. I'll let you know when I think of some way you can make it up to me."

He tugged her closer, still fighting laughter as he savored the feel of her in his arms. "Mary's going to love you," he said under his breath.

* * * * *

Mary did love her.

The two women were immediate friends, sensing a basic likeness in each other. Caroline fell in love, not only with his family but with Ruth, Wyoming and the prosperous horse ranch on top of Mackenzie's Mountain. The place was beautiful, and the ranch house was one of the most cheerful places she'd ever been in her life.

Mary Mackenzie was a slight, delicately formed woman with soft blue-gray eyes, pale brown hair and the most exquisite complexion in the world. At first sight she struck Caroline as rather plain, but by day's end her gaze had accustomed itself to the glowing purity of Mary's features and she thought her mother-in-law incredibly beautiful. Certainly Wolf Mackenzie thought his wife was beautiful, if the obvious love and lust in his black eyes every time he looked at her were anything to go by.

She had never seen two men more alike than Joe and his father, the only real difference being that Wolfs eyes were as black as night while Joe's were that brilliant, diamond blue. And looking at Wolf, she could easily understand why Joe had thought his father would kill the man who had abused him, if he had known about it. Wolf Mackenzie protected his own. Like his son, he was pure warrior.

Mary was dwarfed by her sons, even thirteen-year-old Zane, the intense one. Michael was off at college; it would be Christmas before she would meet him. But Joshua, at sixteen, was almost as big as Wolf and Joe. Josh was as bright and lighthearted as Zane was dark and quiet, his gaze watchful. The same dangerous intensity that burned in both Joe and Wolf was evident in the boy.

Then there was Maris. At eleven, she was small for her age, with Mary's slight build and exquisitely translucent complexion. Her hair was pale, her eyes as black as Wolfs. She was her father's shadow, her small hands gentling and soothing the fractious horses as well as Wolf's strong ones did.

For the first time Caroline saw Joe with horses, and another element of his character fell into place. He was infinitely patient with them and rode as if he'd been born in the saddle, which he almost had.

She stood at the kitchen window watching him and Wolf and Maris in the corral with a tall black mare who was currently Maris's favorite. Mary came to stand beside her, knowing instinctively who Caroline was watching. "He's wonderful, isn't he?" Mary sighed. "I loved him the first moment I saw him, when he was sixteen. There aren't many men in this world like Joe. He was a man even then, and I mean it in the purest sense of the word. Of course, I'm prejudiced, but you are, too, aren't you?"

"Just looking at him gives me shivers," Caroline admitted dreamily, then caught herself with a laugh. "But don't tell him that. Sometimes he can be very much the colonel. I try to keep him from being too commanding."

"Oh, he knows. The thing is, you give him shivers, too. Keeps things nice and balanced. I should know.

His father has been giving me shivers for almost twenty years now. Do you suppose it's inherited?"

"It probably is. Look at Joshua and Zane."

"I know," Mary sighed. "I feel so sorry for all the girls in school. And all those poor girls in college with Michael haven't had time to get used to him, the way the girls he grew up with did. Not that it did them much good."

"Maris will balance it out with the boys."

Through the window she watched Joe lightly vault the fence and start toward the house. Wolf tousled Maris's hair and followed his son, while Maris remained with the mare.

Both men entered the house, their tall, broad-shouldered forms suddenly making the kitchen seem too small. They brought with them the earthy scents of the outdoors, horse and hay and clear fresh air mingled with their own male sweat

"You two look guilty," Joe observed. "What have you been talking about?"

"Genetics," Caroline replied.

His brows lifted in that characteristic way. She shrugged. "Well, I can't help it I'm probably going to be very interested in genetics for the next eight and a half months. Do you want to lay odds on whether it's a boy or a girl?"

"Oh, it's a boy," Mary said, her entire face lit with delight. Joe had gone weak at the knees, and Wolf was laughing at his son as he helped him to a chair. "Joe's a Mackenzie, hardly a female sperm to be found. Mackenzies have to work really hard to have daughters. That's why they appreciate them so much."

Epilogue

Mary was absolutely right. John Mackenzie, eight pounds and two ounces, made his debut right on time. His heritage was immediately apparent in the thick black hair, blue eyes and straight black brows of his father. After his birth Caroline slept, and Joe dozed in the chair by her bed, his son lying on his chest and making squeaky little grunting noises. Caroline awakened, her drowsy eyes moving around the room until her gaze lit on the pair by her side. She reached out, first touching her husband's hand and then the tiny hand that lay curled on his chest.

Joe's eyes opened. "Hi," he said softly.

"Hi, yourself." He looked wonderful, she thought. Kind of grubby and rumpled. He was still in uniform, having been summoned straight from the base. The nurses were probably all swooning at his feet. She grabbed his tie and pulled him closer. "Give me a kiss."

He did, his mouth lingering hungrily over hers. "In a few weeks I'll give you a lot more."

"Umm. I can't wait." He made a few lascivious promises to her that made her heart pound, and she laughed as she took the sleeping baby from him. "You shouldn't talk like that in front of him. He's too young."

"It's nothing new to him, sweetheart. He's been well acquainted with me from the very beginning."

She looked down at the tiny, serious face, and this time her heart swelled, blooming until it nearly filled her chest. It was incredible. This magnificent little creature was incredible. Her parents, having decided to stay in Greece for a couple of years, were on their way, but the flight was so long and the connections so horrible that it would be another ten hours before they arrived. John's other grandparents, however, had managed to get there before he was born, and he'd already been in their arms.

"Where are Wolf and Mary?" she asked sleepily.

"In the cafeteria. They said they were hungry, but I think they wanted to give us some time alone."

"I wish they'd brought Maris and the boys."

"They were taking final exams at school. They'll see him soon enough."

She looked back down at the baby, tracing the downy cheek with her fingertip. To her surprise, he abruptly turned his head toward the touch, the tiny mouth opening as he sought it

Joe laughed and said, "That isn't it, son. You need to fine-tune your targeting a little."

The baby had begun fretting. Caroline opened her gown and gently guided the avid little mouth to her breast. He clamped down on it with a grunting noise.

"He's a typical Mackenzie," she murmured. "Which means he isn't typical at all."

She looked up and met Joe's eyes, brilliant and filled with more desire and love than she'd ever thought to see in her life. No, there was nothing typical about this man. He was on a fast track to the stars, and he was carrying her with him.

3 - Mackenzie's Pleasure

Mackenzie's Pleasure is dedicated to all the wonderful fans who fell as much in love with the Mackenzies as I did

Prologue

Wolf Mackenzie slipped out of bed and restlessly paced over to the window, where he stood looking out at the stark, moonlit expanse of his land. A quick glance over his bare shoulder reassured him that Mary slept on undisturbed, though he knew it wouldn't be long before she sensed his absence and stirred, reaching out for him. When her hand didn't encounter his warmth, she would wake, sitting up in bed and drowsily pushing her silky hair out of her face. When she saw him by the window she would slide out of bed and come to him, nestling against his naked body, sleepily resting her head on his chest.

A slight smile touched his hard mouth. Like as not, if he stayed out of bed long enough for her to awaken, when they returned to the bed it wouldn't be to sleep but to make love. As he remembered, Maris had been conceived on just such an occasion, when he had been restless because Joe's fighter wing had just been deployed overseas during some flare-up. It had been Joe's first action, and Wolf had been as tense as he'd been during his own days in Vietnam.

Luckily, he and Mary were past the days when spontaneous passion could result in a new baby. Nowadays they had grandkids, not kids of their own. Ten at the last count, as a matter of fact.

But he was restless tonight, and he knew why.

The wolf always slept better when all of his cubs were accounted for.

Never mind that the cubs were adults, some of them with children of their own. Never mind that they were, one and all, supremely capable of taking care of themselves. They were his, and he was there if they needed him. He also liked to know, within reason, where they were bedding down for the night. It wasn't necessary for him to be able to pinpoint their location—some things a parent was better off not knowing—but if he knew what state they were in, that was usually enough. Hell, sometimes he would have been glad just to know which country they were roaming.

His concern wasn't for Joe, this time. He knew where Joe was—the Pentagon. Joe wore four stars now, and sat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Joe would still rather strap on a metal bird and fly at twice the speed of sound, but those days were behind him. If he had to fly a desk, then he would damn sure fly it the best it could be flown. Besides, as he'd once said, being married to Caroline was more challenging than being in a dogfight and outnumbered four to one.

Wolf grinned when he thought of his daughter-in-law. Genius IQ, doctorates in both physics and computer sciences, a bit arrogant, a bit quirky. She'd gotten her pilot's license just after the birth of their first son, on the basis that the wife of a fighter pilot should know something about flying. She had received her certification on small jet aircraft around the time the third son had made his appearance. After the birth of her fifth son, she had grumpily told Joe that she was calling it quits with that one, because she'd given him five chances and obviously he wasn't up to the job of fathering a daughter.

It had once been gently suggested to Joe that Caroline should quit her job. The company that employed her was heavily engaged in government contract work, and the appearance of any favoritism could hurt his career. Joe had turned his cool, blue laser gaze on his superiors and said, "Gentlemen, if I have to choose between my wife and my career, I'll give you my resignation immediately." That was not the answer that had been expected, and nothing else was said about Caroline's work in research and development.

Wolf wasn't worried about Michael, either. Mike was the most settled of all his children, though just as focused. He had decided at an early age that he wanted to be a rancher, and that's exactly what he was. He owned a sizable spread down toward Laramie, and he and his wife were happily raising cattle and two sons.

The only uproar Mike had ever caused was when he decided to marry Shea Colvin. Wolf and Mary had given him their blessing, but the problem was that Shea's mother was Pam Hearst Colvin, one of Joe's old girlfriends—and Pam's father, Ralph Hearst, was as adamantly opposed to his beloved granddaughter marrying Michael Mackenzie as he had been to his daughter dating Joe Mackenzie.

Michael, with his typical tunnel vision, had ignored the whole tempest. His only concern was marrying Shea, and to hell with the storm erupting in the Hearst family. Quiet, gentle Shea had been torn, but she wanted Michael and refused to call off the wedding as her grandfather demanded. Pam herself had finally put an end to it, standing nose to nose with her father in the middle of his store.

"Shea will marry Michael," she'd stormed, when Ralph had threatened to take Shea out of his will if she married one of those damn breeds. "You didn't want me to date Joe, when he was one of the most decent men I've ever met. Now Shea wants Michael, and she's going to have him. Change your will, if you like. Hug your hate real close, because you won't be hugging your granddaughter—or your great-grandchildren. Think about that!"

So Michael had married Shea, and despite his growling and grumping, old Hearst was nuts about his two great-grandsons. Shea's second pregnancy had been difficult, and both she and the baby had nearly died. The doctor had advised them not to have any more children, but they had already decided to have only two, anyway. The two boys were growing up immersed in cattle ranching and horses. Wolf was amused that Ralph Hearst's greatgrandchildren bore the Mackenzie name. Who in hell ever would have thought?

Josh, his third son, lived in Seattle with his wife, Loren, and their three sons. Josh was as jet-mad as Joe, but he had opted for the Navy rather than the Air Force, perhaps because he wanted to succeed on his own, not because his older brother was a general.

Josh was cheerful and openhearted, the most outgoing of the bunch, but he, too, had that streak of iron determination. He'd barely survived the crash that left him with a stiffened right knee and ended his naval career, but in typical Josh fashion, he had put that behind him and concentrated on what was before him. At the time, that had been his doctor—Dr. Loren Page. Never one to dither around, Josh had taken one look at tall, lovely Loren and begun his courtship from his hospital bed. He'd still been on crutches when they married. Now, three sons later, he worked for an aeronautics firm, developing new fighter aircraft, and Loren practiced her orthopedic specialty at a Seattle hospital.

Wolf knew where Maris was, too. His only daughter was currently in Montana, working as a trainer for a horse rancher. She was considering taking a job in Kentucky, working with Thoroughbreds. From the time she'd been old enough to sit unaided on a horse, her ambitions had all centered around the big, elegant animals. She had his touch with horses, able to gentle even the most contrary or vicious beast. Privately Wolf thought that she probably surpassed his skill. What she could do with a horse was pure magic.

Wolf's hard mouth softened as he thought of Maris. She had wrapped his heart around her tiny finger the moment she had been placed in his arms, when she was mere minutes old, and had looked up at him with sleepy dark eyes. Of all his children, she was the only one who had his dark eyes. His sons all looked like him, except for their blue eyes, but Maris, who resembled Mary in every other way, had her father's eyes. His daughter had light, silvery brown hair, skin so fine it was almost translucent, and her mother's determination. She was all of five foot three and weighed about a hundred pounds, but Maris never paid any attention to her slightness; when she made up her mind to do something, she persisted with bulldog stubbornness until she succeeded. She could more than hold her own with her older, much larger and domineering brothers.

Her chosen career hadn't been easy for her. People tended to think two things. One was that she was merely trading on the Mackenzie name, and the other was that she was too delicate for the job. They soon found out how wrong they were on both counts, but it was a battle Maris had fought over and over. She kept at it, though, slowly winning respect for her individual talents.

The mental rundown of his kids next brought him to Chance. Hell, he even knew where Chance was, and that was saying something. Chance roamed the world, though he always came back to Wyoming, to the mountain that was his only home. He had happened to call earlier that day, from Belize. He'd told Mary that he was going to rest for a few days before moving on. When Wolf had taken his turn on the phone, he had moved out of Mary's hearing and quietly asked Chance how bad he was hurt.

"Not too bad," Chance had laconically replied. "A few stitches and a couple of cracked ribs. This last job went a little sour on me."

Wolf didn't ask what the last job had entailed. His soldier-of-fortune son occasionally did some delicate work for the government, so Chance seldom volunteered details. The two men had an unspoken agreement to keep Mary in the dark about the danger Chance faced on a regular basis. Not only did they not want her to worry, but if she knew he was wounded, she was likely to hop on a plane and fetch him home.

When Wolf hung up the phone and turned, it was to find Mary's slate blue gaze pinned on him. "How bad is he hurt?" she demanded fiercely, hands planted on her hips.

Wolf knew better than to try lying to her. Instead he crossed the room to her and pulled her into his arms, stroking her silky hair and cradling her slight body against the solid muscularity of his. Sometimes the force of his love for this woman almost drove him to his knees. He couldn't protect her from worry, though, so he gave her the respect of honesty. "Not too bad, to use his own words."

Her response was instant. "I want him here."

"I know, sweetheart. But he's okay. He doesn't lie to us. Besides, you know Chance."

She nodded, sighing, and turned her lips against his chest. Chance was like a sleek panther, wild and intolerant of fetters. They had brought him into their home and made him one of the family, binding him to them with love when no other restraint would have held him. And like a wild creature that had been only half-tamed, he accepted the boundaries of civilization, but lightly. He roamed far and wide, and yet he always came back to them.

From the first, though, he had been helpless against Mary. She had instantly surrounded him with so much love and care that he hadn't been able to resist her, even though his light hazel eyes had reflected his consternation, even embarrassment, at her attention. If Mary went down to fetch Chance, he would come home without protest, but he would walk into the house wearing a helpless, slightly panicked "Oh, God, get me out of this" expression. And then he would meekly let her tend his wounds, pamper him and generally smother him with motherly concern.

Watching Mary fuss over Chance was one of Wolf's greatest amusements. She fussed over all of her kids, but the others had grown up with it and took it as a matter of course. Chance, though...he had been fourteen and half wild when Mary had found him. If he'd ever had a home, he didn't remember it. If he had a name, he didn't know it. He'd evaded well-meaning social authorities by staying on the move, stealing whatever he needed, food, clothes, money. He was highly intelligent and had taught himself to read from newspapers and magazines that had been thrown away. Libraries had become a favorite place for him to hang out, maybe even spend the night if he could manage it, but never two nights in a row. From what he read and what little television he saw, he understood the concept of a family, but that was all it was to him—a concept. He trusted no one but himself.

He might have grown to adulthood that way if he hadn't contracted a monster case of influenza. While driving home from work, Mary had found him lying on the side of a road, incoherent and burning up with fever. Though he was half a foot taller than she and some fifty pounds heavier, somehow she had wrestled and bullied the boy into her truck and taken him to the local clinic, where Doc Nowacki discovered that the flu had progressed into pneumonia and quickly transferred Chance to the nearest hospital, eighty miles away.

Mary had driven home and insisted that Wolf take her to the hospital—immediately.

Chance was in intensive care when they arrived. At fkst the nursing staff hadn't wanted to let them see him, since they weren't family and in fact didn't know anything about him. Child services had been notified, and someone was on the way to take care of the paperwork. They had been reasonable, even kind, but they hadn't reckoned with Mary. She was relentless. She wanted to see the boy, and a bulldozer couldn't have budged her until she saw him. Eventually the nurses, overworked and outclassed by a will far stronger than their own, gave in and let Wolf and Mary into the small cubicle.

As soon as he saw the boy, Wolf knew why Mary was so taken with him. It wasn't just that he was deathly ill; he was obviously part American Indian. He would have reminded Mary so forcibly of her own children that she could no more have forgotten about him than she could one of them.

Wolf's expert eye swept over the boy as he lay there so still and silent, his eyes closed, his breathing labored. The hectic color of fever stained his high cheekbones. Four different bags dripped an IV solution into his muscular right arm, which was taped to the bed. Another bag hung at the side of the bed, measuring the output of his kidneys.

Not a half-breed, Wolf had thought. A quarter, maybe. No more than that. But still, there was no doubting his heritage. His fingernails were light against the tanned skin ' of his fingers, where an Anglo's nails would have been pinker. His thick, dark brown hair, so long it brushed his shoulders, was straight. There were those high cheekbones, the clear-cut lips, the high-bridged nose. He was the most handsome boy Wolf had ever seen.

Mary went up to the bed, all her attention focused on the boy who lay so ill and helpless on the snowy sheets. She laid her cool hand lightly against his forehead, then stroked it over his hair. "You'll be all right," she murmured. "I'll make sure you are."

He had lifted his heavy lids, struggling with the effort. For the fkst time Wolf saw the light hazel eyes, almost golden, and circled with a brown rim so dark it was almost black. Confused, the boy had focused fkst on Mary; then his gaze had wandered to Wolf, and belated alarm flared in his eyes. He tried to heave himself up, but he was too weak even to tug his taped arm free.

Wolf moved to the boy's other side. "Don't be afraid," he said quietly. "You have pneumonia, and you're in a hospital." Then, guessing what lay at the bottom of the boy's panic, he added, "We won't let them take you."

Those light eyes had rested on his face, and perhaps Wolf's appearance had calmed him. Like a wild animal on guard, he slowly relaxed and drifted back to sleep.

Over the next week, the boy's condition improved, and Mary swung into action. She was determined that the boy, who still had not given them a name, not be taken into state custody for even one day. She pulled strings, harangued people, even called on Joe to use his influence, and her tenacity worked. When the boy was released from the hospital, he went home with Wolf and Mary.

He had gradually become accustomed to them, though by no stretch of the imagination had he been friendly, or even trustful. He would answer their questions, in one word if possible, but he never actually talked with them. Mary hadn't been discouraged. From the first, she simply treated the boy as if he was hers—and soon he was.

The boy who had always been alone was suddenly plunged into the middle of a large, volatile family. For the first time he had a roof over his head every night, a room all to himself, ample food in his belly. He had clothing hanging in the closet and new boots on his feet. He was still too weak to share in the chores everyone did, but Mary immediately began tutoring him to bring him up to Zane's level academically, since the two boys were the same age, as near as they could tell. Chance took to the books like a starving pup to its mother's teat, but in every other way he determinedly remained at arm's length. Those shrewd, guarded eyes took note of every nuance of their family relationships, weighing what he saw now against what he had known before.

Finally he unbent enough to tell them that he was called Sooner. He didn't have a real name.

Maris had looked at him blankly. "Sooner?"

His mouth had twisted, and he'd looked far too old for his fourteen years. "Yeah, like a mongrel dog."

"No," Wolf had said, because the name was a clue. "You know you're part Indian. More than likely you were called Sooner because you were originally from Oklahoma—and that means you're probably Cherokee."

The boy merely looked at him, his expression guarded, but still something about him had lightened at the possibility that he hadn't been likened to a dog of unknown heritage.

His relationships with everyone in the family were complicated. With Mary, he wanted to hold himself away, but he simply couldn't. She mothered him the way she did the rest of her brood, and it terrified him even though he delighted in it, soaking up her loving concern. He was wary of Wolf, as if he expected the big man to turn on him with fists and boots. Wise in the ways of wild things, Wolf gradually gentled the boy the same way he did horses, letting him get accustomed, letting him realize he had nothing to fear, then offering respect and friendship and, finally, love.

Michael had already been away at college, but when he did come home he simply made room in his family circle for the newcomer. Sooner was relaxed with Mike from the start, sensing that quiet acceptance.

He got along with Josh, too, but Josh was so cheerful it was impossible not to get along with him. Josh took it on himself to be the one who taught Sooner how to handle the multitude of chores on a horse ranch. Josh was the one who taught him how to ride, though Josh was unarguably the worst horseman in the family. That wasn't to say he wasn't good, but the others were better, especially Maris. Josh didn't care, because his heart was wrapped up in planes just the way Joe's had been, so perhaps he had been more patient with Sooner's mistakes than anyone else would have been.

Maris was like Mary. She had taken one look at the boy and immediately taken him under her fiercely protective wing, never mind that Sooner was easily twice her size. At twelve, Maris had been not quite five feet tall and weighed all of seventy-four pounds. It didn't matter to her; Sooner became hers the same way her older brothers were hers. She chattered to him, teased him, played jokes on him— in short, drove him crazy, the way little sisters were supposed to do. Sooner hadn't had any idea how to handle the way she treated him, any more than he had with Mary. Sometimes he had watched Maris as if she was a ticking time bomb, but it was Maris who won his first smile with her teasing. It was Maris who actually got him to enter the family conversations: slowly, at first, as he learned how families worked, how the give-and-take of talking melded them together, then with more ease. Maris could still tease him into a rage, or coax a laugh out of him, faster than anyone else. For a while Wolf had wondered if the two might become romantically interested in each other as they grew older, but it hadn't happened. It was a testament to how fully Sooner had become a part of their family; to both of them, they were simply brother and sister.

Things with Zane had been complicated, though. Zane was, in his own way, as guarded as Sooner. Wolf knew warriors, having been one himself, and what he saw in his youngest son was almost frightening. Zane was quiet, intense, watchful. He moved like a cat, gracefully, soundlessly. Wolf had trained all his children, including Maris, in self-defense, but with Zane it was something more. The boy took to it with the ease of someone putting on a well-worn shoe; it was as if it had been made for him. When it came to marksmanship, he had the eye of a sniper, and the deadly patience.

Zane had the instinct of a warrior: to protect. He was immediately on guard against this intruder into the sanctity of his family's home turf.

He hadn't been nasty to Sooner. He hadn't made fun of him or been overtly unfriendly, which wasn't in his nature. Rather, he had held himself away from the newcomer, not rejecting, but certainly not welcoming, either. But because they were the same age, Zane's acceptance was the most crucial, and Sooner had reacted to Zane's coolness by adopting the same tactics. They had ignored each other.

While the kids were working out their relationships, Wolf and Mary had been pushing hard to legally adopt Sooner. They had asked him if that was what he wanted and, typically, he had responded with a shrug and an expressionless, "Sure." Taking that for the impassioned plea it was, Mary redoubled her efforts to get the adoption pushed through.

As things worked out, they got the word that the adoption could go forward on the same day Zane and Sooner settled things between them. The dust was what had caught Wolf's attention. At first he hadn't thought anything of it, because when he glanced over he saw Maris sitting on the top rail of the fence, calmly watching the commotion. Figuring one of the horses was rolling in the dirt, Wolf went back to work. Two seconds later, however, his sharp ears caught the sound of grunts and what sounded suspiciously like blows.

He walked across the yard to the other corral. Zane and Sooner had gotten into the corner, where they couldn't be seen from the house, and were ferociously battering each other. Wolf saw at once that both boys, despite the force of their blows, were restraining themselves to the more conventional fisticuffs rather than the faster, nastier ways he'd also taught them. He leaned his arms on the top rail beside Maris. "What's this about?"

"They're fighting it out," she said matter-of-factly, without taking her eyes from the action.

Josh soon joined them at the fence, and they watched the battle. Zane and Sooner were both tall, muscular boys, very strong for thek ages. They stood toe to toe, taking turns driving their fists into each other's faces. When one of them got knocked down, he got to his feet and waded back into the fray. They were almost eerily silent, except for the involuntary grunts and the sounds of hard fists hitting flesh.

Mary saw them standing at the fence and came out to investigate. She stood beside Wolf and slipped her small hand into his. He felt her flinch every time a blow landed, but when he looked at her, he saw that she was wearing her prim schoolteacher's expression, and he knew that Mary Elizabeth Mackenzie was about to call the class to order.

She gave it five minutes. Evidently deciding this could go on for hours, and that both boys were too stubborn to give in, she settled the matter herself. In her crisp, clear teaching voice she called out, "All right, boys, let's get this wrapped up. Supper will be on the table in ten minutes." Then she calmly walked back to the house, fully confident that she had brought detente to the corral.

She had, too. She had reduced the fight to the level of a chore or a project, given them a time limit and a reason for ending it.

Both boys' eyes had flickered to that slight retreating figure with the ramrod spine. Then Zane had turned to

Sooner, the coolness of his blue gaze somewhat marred by the swelling of his eyes. "One more," he said grimly, and slammed his fist into Sooner's face.

Sooner picked himself up off the dirt, squared up again and returned the favor.

Zane got up, slapped the dirt from his clothes and held out his hand. Sooner gripped it, though they had both winced at the pain in their knuckles. They shook hands, eyed each other as equals, then returned to the house to clean up. After all, supper was almost on the table.

At supper, Mary told Sooner that the adoption had been given the green light. His pale hazel eyes had glittered in his battered face, but he hadn't said anything.

"You're a Mackenzie now," Maris had pronounced with great satisfaction. "You'll have to have a real name, so choose one."

It hadn't occurred to her that choosing a name might require some thought, but as it happened, Sooner had looked around the table at the family that pure blind luck had sent him, and a wry little smile twisted up one side of his bruised, swollen mouth. "Chance," he said, and the unknown, unnamed boy became Chance Mackenzie.

Zane and Chance hadn't become immediate best friends after the fight. What they had found, instead, was mutual respect, but friendship grew out of it. Over the years, they became so close that they could well have been born twins. There were other fights between them, but it was well known around Ruth, Wyoming, that if anyone decided to take on either of the boys, he would find himself facing both of them. They could batter each other into the ground, but by God, no one else was going to.

They had entered the Navy together, Zane becoming a SEAL, while Chance had gone into Naval Intelligence.

Chance had since left the Navy, though, and gone out on his own, while Zane was a SEAL team leader.

And that brought Wolf to the reason for his restlessness. Zane.

There had been a lot of times in Zane's career when he had been out of touch, when they hadn't known where he was or what he was doing. Wolf hadn't slept well then, either. He knew too much about the SEALs, having seen them in action in Vietnam during his tours of duty. They were the most highly trained and skilled of the special forces, their stamina and teamwork proven by grueling tests that broke lesser men. Zane was particularly well-suited for the work, but in the final analysis, the SEALs were still human. They could be killed. And because of the nature of their work, they were often in dangerous situations.

The SEAL training had merely accentuated the already existing facets of Zane's nature. He had been honed to a perfect fighting machine, a warrior who was in top condition, but who used his brain more than his brawn. He was even more lethal and intense now, but he had learned to temper that deadliness with an easier manner, so that most people were unaware they were dealing with a man who could kill them in a dozen different ways with his bare hands. With that kind of knowledge and skill at his disposal, Zane had learned a calm control that kept him in command of himself. Of all Wolf's offspring, Zane was the most capable of taking care of himself, but he was also the one in the most danger. Where in hell was he?

There was a whisper of movement from the bed, and Wolf looked around as Mary slipped from between the sheets and joined him at the window, looping her arms around his hard, trim waist and nestling her head on his bare chest.

"Zane?" she asked quietly, in the darkness.

"Yeah." No more explanation was needed.

"He's all right," she said with a mother's confidence. "I'd know if he wasn't."

Wolf tipped her head up and kissed her, lightly at first, then with growing intensity. He turned her slight body more fully into his embrace and felt her quiver as she pressed to him, pushing her hips against his, cradling the rise of his male flesh against her softness. There had been passion between them from their first meeting, all those years ago, and time hadn't taken it from them.

He lifted her in his arms and carried her back to bed, losing himself in the welcome and warmth of her soft body. Afterward, though, lying in the drowsy aftermath, he turned his face toward the window. Before sleep claimed him, the thought came again. Where was Zane?

Chapter 1

Zane Mackenzie wasn't happy.

No one aboard the aircraft carrier USS Montgomery was happy; well, maybe the cooks were, but even that was iffy, because the men they were serving were sullen and defensive. The seamen weren't happy, the radar men weren't happy, the gunners weren't happy, the Marines weren't happy, the wing commander wasn't happy, the pilots weren't happy, the air boss wasn't happy, the executive officer wasn't happy, and Captain Udaka sure as hell wasn't happy.

The combined unhappiness of the five thousand sailors on board the carrier didn't begin to approach Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie's level of unhappiness.

The captain outranked him. The executive officer outranked him. Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie addressed them with all the respect due their rank, but both men were uncomfortably aware that their asses were in a < sling and their careers on the line. Actually, their careers were probably in the toilet. There wouldn't be any court-martials, but neither would be there any more promotions, and they would be given the unpopular commands from now until they either retired or resigned, their choice depending on how clearly they could read the writing on the wall.

Captain Udaka's broad, pleasant face was one that wore responsibility easily, but now his expression was set in lines of unhappy acceptance as he met the icy gaze of the lieutenant-commander. SEALs in general made the captain nervous; he didn't quite trust them or the way they operated outside normal regulations. This one in particular made him seriously want to be somewhere—anywhere—else.

He had met Mackenzie before, when both he and Boyd, the XO, had been briefed on the security exercise. The SEAL team under Mackenzie's command would try to breach the carrier's security, probing for weaknesses that could be exploited by any of the myriad terrorist groups so common these days. It was a version of the exercises once conducted by the SEAL Team Six Red Cell, which had been so notorious and so far outside the regulations that it had been disbanded after seven years of operation. The concept, however, had lived on, in a more controlled manner. SEAL Team Six was a covert, counterterrorism unit, and one of the best ways to counter terrorism was to prevent it from happening in the first place, rather than reacting to it after people were dead. To this end, the security of naval installations and carrier battle groups was tested by the SEALs, who then recommended changes to correct the weaknesses they had discovered. There were always weaknesses, soft spots—the SEALs had never yet been completely thwarted, even though the base commanders and ships' captains were always notified in advance.

At the briefing, Mackenzie had been remote but pleasant. Controlled. Most SEALs had a wild, hard edge to them, but Mackenzie had seemed more regular Navy, recruiting-poster perfect in his crisp whites and with his coolly courteous manner. Captain Udaka had felt comfortable with him, certain that Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie was the administrational type rather than a true part of those wild-ass SEALs.

He'd been wrong.

The courtesy remained, and the control. The white uniform looked as perfect as it had before. But there was nothing at all pleasant in the deep voice, or in the cold fury that lit the pale blue gray eyes so they glittered like moonlight on a knife blade. The aura of danger surrounding him was so strong it was almost palpable, and Captain Udaka knew that he had been drastically wrong in his assessment of Mackenzie. This was no desk jockey; this was a man around whom others should walk very lightly indeed. The captain felt as if his skin was being flayed from his body, strip by strip, by that icy gaze. He had also never felt closer to death than he had the moment Mackenzie had entered his quarters after learning what had happened.

"Captain, you were briefed on the exercise," Zane said coldly. "Everyone on this ship was advised, as well as notified that my men wouldn't be carrying weapons of any sort. Explain, then, why in hell two of my men were shot!"

The XO, Mr. Boyd, looked at his hands. Captain Udaka's collar felt too tight, except that it was already unbuttoned, and the only thing choking him was the look in Mackenzie's eyes.

"There's no excuse," he said rawly. "Maybe the guards were startled and fired without thinking. Maybe it was a stupid, macho turf thing, wanting to show the big bad SEALs that they couldn't penetrate our security, after all. It doesn't matter. There's no excuse." Everything that happened on board his ship was, ultimately, his responsibility. The trigger-happy guards would pay for their mistake—and so would he.

"My men had already penetrated your security," Zane said softly, his tone making the hairs stand up on the back of the captain's neck.

"I'm aware of that." The breach of his ship's security was salt in the captain's wounds, but nothing at all compared to the enormous mistake that had been made when men under his command had opened fire on the unarmed SEALs. His men, his responsibility. Nor did it help his feelings that, when two of their team had gone down, the remainder of the SEAL team, unarmed, had swiftly taken control and secured the area. Translated, that meant the guards who had done the shooting had been roughly handled and were now in sick bay with the two men they had shot. In reality, the phrase "roughly handled" was a euphemism for the fact that the SEALS had beaten the hell out of his men.

The most seriously wounded SEAL was Lieutenant Higgins, who had taken a bullet in the chest and would be evacuated by air to Germany as soon as he was stabilized. The other SEAL, Warrant Officer Odessa, had been shot in the thigh; the bullet had broken his femur. He, too, would be taken to Germany, but his condition was stable, even if his temper was not. The ship's doctor had been forced to sedate him to keep him from wreaking vengeance on the battered guards, two of whom were still unconscious.

The five remaining members of the SEAL team were in Mission Planning, prowling around like angry tigers looking for someone to maul just to make themselves feel better. They were restricted to the area by Mackenzie's order, and the ship's crew was giving them a wide berth. Captain Udaka wished he could do the same with Mackenzie. He had the impression of cold savagery lurking just beneath the surface of the man's control. There would be hell to pay for this night's fiasco.

The phone on his desk emitted a harsh brr. Though he was relieved by the interruption, Captain Udaka snatched up the receiver and barked, "I gave orders I wasn't to be—" He stopped, listening, and his expression changed. His gaze shifted to Mackenzie. "We'll be right there," he said, and hung up.

"There's a scrambled transmission coming in for you," he said to Mackenzie, rising to his feet. "Urgent." Whatever message the transmission contained, Captain Udaka looked on it as a much-welcomed reprieve.

Zane listened intently to the secure satellite transmission, his mind racing as he began planning the logistics of the mission. "My team is two men short, sir," he said. "Higgins and Odessa were injured in the security exercise." He didn't say how they'd been injured; that would be handled through other channels.

"Damn it," Admiral Lindley muttered. He was in an office in the US. Embassy in Athens. He looked up at the others in the office: Ambassador Lovejoy, tall and spare, with the smoothness bequeathed by a lifetime of privilege and wealth, though now there was a stark, panicked expression in his hazel eyes; the CIA station chief, Art Sandefer, a nondescript man with short gray hair and tired, intelligent eyes; and, finally, Mack Prewett, second only to Sandefer in the local CIA hierarchy. Mack was known in some circles as Mack the Knife; Admiral Lindley knew Mack was generally considered a man who got things done, a man whom it was dangerous to cross. For all his decisiveness, though, he wasn't a cowboy who was likely to endanger people by going off half-cocked. He was as thorough as he was decisive, and it was through his contacts that they had obtained such good, prompt information in this case.

The admiral had put Zane on the speakerphone, so the other three in the room had heard the bad news about the SEAL team on which they had all been pinning their hopes. Ambassador Lovejoy looked even more haggard. "We'll have to use another team," Art Sandefer said. "That'll take too much time!" the ambassador said with stifled violence. "My God, already she could be—" He stopped, anguish twisting his face. He wasn't able to complete the sentence.

"I'll take the team in," Zane said. His amplified voice was clear in the soundproofed room. "We're the closest, and we can be ready to go in an hour."

"You?" the admiral asked, startled. "Zane, you haven't seen live action since—"

"My last promotion," Zane finished dryly. He hadn't liked trading action for administration, and he was seriously considering resigning his commission. He was thirty-one, and it was beginning to look as if his success in his chosen field was going to prevent him from practicing it; the higher-ranking the officer, the less likely that officer was to be in the thick of the action. He'd been thinking about something in law enforcement, or maybe even throwing in with Chance. There was nonstop action there, for sure.

For now, though, a mission had been dumped in his lap, and he was going to take it.

"I train with my men, Admiral," he said. "I'm not rusty, or out of shape."

"I didn't think you were," Admiral Lindley replied, and sighed. He met the ambassador's anguished gaze, read the silent plea for help. "Can six men handle the mission?" he asked Zane.

"Sir, I wouldn't risk my men if I didn't think we could do the job."

This time the admiral looked at both Art Sandefer and Mack Prewett. Art's expression was noncommittal, the Company man refusing to stick his neck out, but Mack gave the admiral a tiny nod. Admiral Lindley swiftly weighed all the factors. Granted, the SEAL team would be two members short, and the leader would be an officer who hadn't been on an active mission in over a year, but that officer happened to be Zane Mackenzie. All things considered, the admiral couldn't think of any other man he would rather have on this mission. He'd known Zane for several years now, and there was no better warrior, no one he trusted more. If Zane said he was ready, then he was ready.' 'All right. Go in and get her out.''

As the admiral hung up, Ambassador Lindley blurted, "Shouldn't you send in someone else? My daughter's life is at stake! This man hasn't been in the field, he's out of shape, out of practice—"

"Waiting until we could get another team into position would drastically lower our chances of finding her," the admiral pointed out as kindly as possible. Ambassador Lindley wasn't one of his favorite people. For the most part, he was a horse's ass and a snob, but there was no doubt he doted on his daughter. "And as far as Zane Mackenzie is concerned, there's no better man for the job."

"The admiral's right," Mack Prewett said quietly, with the authority that came so naturally to him. "Mackenzie is so good at what he does it's almost eerie. I would feel comfortable sending him in alone. If you want your daughter back, don't throw obstacles in his way."

Ambassador Lindley shoved his hand through his hair, an uncharacteristic gesture for so fastidious a man; it was a measure of his agitation. "If anything goes wrong..."

It wasn't clear whether he was about to voice a threat or was simply worrying aloud, but he couldn't complete the sentence. Mack Prewett gave a thin smile. "Something always goes wrong. If anyone can handle it, Mackenzie can."

After Zane terminated the secure transmission he made his way through the network of corridors to Mission Planning. Already he could feel the rush of adrenaline pumping through his muscles as he began preparing, mentally and physically, for the job before him. When he entered the room with its maps and charts and communication systems, and the comfortable chairs grouped around a large table, five hostile faces turned immediately toward him, and he felt the surge of renewed energy and anger from his men.

Only one of them, Santos, was seated at the table, but Santos was the team medic, and he was usually the calmest of the bunch. Ensign Peter "Rocky" Greenberg, second in command of the team and a controlled, detail-oriented kind of guy, leaned against the bulkhead with his arms crossed and murder in his narrowed brown eyes. Antonio Withrock, nicknamed Bunny because he never ran out of energy, was prowling the confines of the room like a mean, hungry cat, his dark skin pulled tight across his high cheekbones. Paul Drexler, the team sniper, sat cross-legged on top of the table while he wiped an oiled cloth lovingly over the disassembled parts of his beloved Remington bolt-action 7.62 rifle. Zane didn't even lift his eyebrows at the sight. His men were supposed to be unarmed, and they had been during the security exercise that had gone so damn sour, but keeping Drexler unarmed was another story.

"Planning on talcing over the ship?" Zane inquired mildly of the sniper.

His blue eyes cold, Drexler cocked his head as if considering the idea. "I might."

Winstead "Spooky" Jones had been sitting on the deck, his back resting against the bulkhead, but at Zane's entrance he rose effortlessly to his feet. He didn't say anything, but his gaze fastened on Zane's face, and a spark of interest replaced some of the anger in his eyes.

Spook never missed much, and the other team members had gotten in the habit of watching him, picking up cues from his body language. No more than three seconds passed before all five men were watching Zane with complete concentration.

Greenberg was the one who finally spoke. "How's Bobcat doing, boss?"

They had read Spooky's tension, but misread the cause, Zane realized. They thought Higgins had died from his wounds. Drexler began assembling his rifle with sharp, economical motions. "He's stabilized," Zane reassured them. He knew his men, knew how tight they were. A SEAL team had to be tight. Their trust in each other had to be absolute, and if something happened to one of them, they all felt it. "They're transferring him now. It's touchy, but I'll put my money on Bobcat. Odie's gonna be okay, too." He hitched one hip on the edge of the table, his pale eyes glittering with the intensity that had caught Spooky's attention. "Listen up, children. An ambassador's daughter was snatched a few hours ago, and we're going into Libya to get her."

Six black-clad figures slipped silently along the narrow, deserted street in Benghazi, Libya. They communicated by hand signals, or by whispers into the Motorola headsets they all wore under their black knit balaclava hoods. Zane was in his battle mode; he was utterly calm as they worked their way toward the four-story stone building where Barrie Lovejoy was being held on the top floor, if their intelligence was good, and if she hadn't been moved within the past few hours.

Action always affected him this way, as if every cell in his body had settled into its true purpose of existence. He had missed this, missed it to the point that he knew he wouldn't be able to stay in the Navy without it. On a mission, all his senses became more acute, even as a deep center of calm radiated outward. The more intense the action, the calmer he became, as time stretched out into slow motion. At those times he could see and hear every detail, analyze and predict the outcome, then make his decision and act—all within a split second that felt like minutes. Adrenaline would flood his body—he would feel the blood racing through his veins—but his mind would remain detached and calm. He had been told that the look on his face during those times was frighteningly remote, jarring in its total lack of expression.

The team moved forward in well-orchestrated silence. They each knew what to do, and what the others would do. That was the purpose of the trust and teamwork that had been drilled into them through the twenty-six weeks of hell that was formally known as BUD/S training. The bond between them enabled them to do more together than could be accomplished if each worked on his own. Teamwork wasn't just a word to the SEALs, it was their center.

Spooky Jones was point man. Zane preferred using the wiry Southerner for that job because he had unfrayable nerves and could ghost around like a lynx. Bunny With-rock, who almost reverberated with nervous energy, was bringing up the rear. No one sneaked up on Bunny—except the Spook. Zane was right behind Jones, with Drexler, Greenberg and Santos ranging between him and Bunny. Greenberg was quiet, steady, totally dependable. Drexler was uncanny with that rifle, and Santos, besides being a damn good SEAL, also had the skill to patch them up and keep them going, if they were patchable. Overall, Zane had never worked with a better group of men.

Their presence in Benghazi was pure luck, and Zane knew it. Good luck for them and, he hoped, for Miss Lovejoy, but bad luck for the terrorists who had snatched her off the street in Athens fifteen hours ago. If the Montgomery hadn't been just south of Crete and in perfect position for launching a rescue, if the SEALs hadn't been on the carrier to practice special insertions as well as the security exercise, then there would have been a delay of precious hours, perhaps even as long as a day, while another team got supplied and into position. As it was, the special insertion into hostile territory they had just accomplished had been the real thing instead of just a practice.

Miss Lovejoy was not only the ambassador's daughter, she was an employee at the embassy, as well. The ambassador was apparently very strict and obsessive about his daughter, having lost his wife and son in a terrorist attack in Rome fifteen years before, when Miss Lovejoy had been a child of ten. After that, he had kept her secluded in private schools, and since she bad finished college, she had been acting as his hostess as well as performing her "work" at the embassy. Zane suspected her job was more window dressing than anything else, something to keep her busy. She had never really worked a day in her life, never been out from under her father's protection—until today.

She and a friend had left the embassy to do some shopping. Three men had grabbed her, shoved her into a car and driven off. The friend had immediately reported the abduction. Despite efforts to secure the airport and ports—cynically, Zane suspected deliberate foot-dragging by the Greek authorities—a private plane had taken off from Athens and flown straight to Benghazi.

Thanks to the friend's prompt action, sources on the ground in Benghazi had been alerted. It had been verified that a young woman of Miss Lovejoy's description had been taken off the plane and hustled into the city, into the very building Zane and his team were about to enter.

It had to be her; there weren't that many red-haired Western women in Benghazi. In fact, he would bet there was only one—Barrie Lovejoy.

They were betting her life on it.

Chapter 2

Barrie lay in almost total darkness, heavy curtains at the single window blocking out most of whatever light would have entered. She could tell that it was night; the level of street noise outside had slowly diminished, until now there was mostly silence. The men who had kidnapped her had finally gone away, probably to sleep. They had no worries about her being able to escape; she was naked, and tied tightly to the cot on which she lay. Her wrists were bound together, her arms drawn over her head and tied to the frame of the cot. Her ankles were also tied together, then secured to the frame. She could barely move; every muscle in her body ached, but those in her shoulders burned with agony. She would have screamed, she would have begged for someone to come and release the ropes that held her arms over her head, but she knew that the only people who would come would be the very ones who had tied her in this position, and she would do anything, give anything, to keep from ever seeing them again.

She was cold. They hadn't even bothered to throw a blanket over her naked body, and long, convulsive shivers kept shaking her, though she couldn't tell if she was chilled from the night air or from shock. She didn't suppose it mattered. Cold was cold.

She tried to think, tried to ignore the pain, tried not to give in to shock and terror. She didn't know where she was, didn't know how she could escape, but if the slightest opportunity presented itself, she would have to be ready to take it. She wouldn't be able to escape tonight; her bonds were too tight, her movements too restricted. But tomorrow—oh, God, tomorrow.

Terror tightened her throat, almost choking off her breath. Tomorrow they would be back, and there would be another one with them, the one for whom they waited. A violent shiver racked her as she thought of their rough bands on her bare body, the pinches and slaps and crude probings, and her stomach heaved. She would have vomited, if there had been anything to vomit, but they hadn't bothered to feed her.

She couldn't go through that again.

Somehow, she had to get away.

Desperately she fought down her panic. Her thoughts darted around like crazed squirrels as she tried to plan, to think of something, anything, that she could do to protect herself. But what could she do, lying there like a turkey all trussed up for Thanksgiving dinner?

Humiliation burned through her. They hadn't raped her, but they had done other things to her, things to shame and terrorize her and break her spirit. Tomorrow, when the leader arrived, she was sure her reprieve would be over. The threat of rape, and then the act of it, would shatter her and leave her malleable in their hands, desperate to do anything to avoid being violated again. At least that was what they planned, she thought. But she would be damned if she would go along with their plan. She had been in a fog of terror and shock since they had grabbed her and thrown her into a car, but as she lay there in the darkness, cold and miserable and achingly vulnerable in her nakedness, she felt as if the fog was lifting, or maybe it was being burned away. No one who knew Barrie would ever have described her as hot-tempered, but then, what she felt building in her now wasn't as volatile and fleeting as mere temper. It was rage, as pure and forceful as lava forcing its way upward from the bowels of the earth until it exploded outward and swept away everything in its path.

Nothing in her life had prepared her for these past hours. After her mother and brother had died, she had been pampered and protected as few children ever were. She had seen some—most, actually—of her schoolmates as they struggled with the misery of broken parental promises, of rare, stressful visits, of being ignored and shunted out of the way, but she hadn't been like them. Her father adored her, and she knew it. He was intensely interested in her safety, her friends, her schoolwork. If he said he would call, then the call came exactly when he'd said it would. Every week had brought some small gift in the mail, inexpensive but thoughtful. She'd understood why he worried so much about her safety, why he wanted her to attend the exclusive girls' school in Switzerland, with its cloistered security, rather than a public school, with its attendant hurly-burly. She was all he had left.

He was all she had left, too. When she'd been a child, after the incident that had halved the family, she had clung fearfully to her father for months, dogging his footsteps when she could, weeping inconsolably when his work took him away from her. Eventually the dread that he, too, would disappear from her life had faded, but the pattern of overprotectiveness had been set.

She was twenty-five now, a grown woman, and though in the past few years his protectiveness had begun to chafe, she had enjoyed the even tenor of her life too much to really protest. She liked her job at the embassy, so much that she was considering a full-time career in the foreign service. She enjoyed being her father's hostess. She had the duties and protocol down cold, and there were more and more female ambassadors on the international scene. It was a moneyed and insular community, but by both temperament and pedigree she was suited to the task. She was calm, even serene, and blessed with a considerate and tactful nature.

But now, lying naked and helpless on a cot, with bruises mottling her pale skin, the rage that consumed her was so deep and primal she felt as if it had altered something basic inside her, a sea change of her very nature. She would not endure what they—nameless, malevolent "they"— had planned for her. If they killed her, so be it. She was prepared for death; no matter what, she would not submit.

The heavy curtains fluttered.

The movement caught her eye, and she glanced at the window, but the action was automatic, without curiosity. She was already so cold that even a wind strong enough to move those heavy curtains couldn't chill her more.

The wind was black, and had a shape.

Her breath stopped in her chest.

Mutely she watched the big black shape, as silent as a shadow, slip through the window. It couldn't be human; people made some sound when they moved. Surely, in the total silence of the room, she would have been able to hear the whisper of the curtains as the fabric moved, or the faint, rhythmic sigh of breathing. A shoe scraping on the floor, the rustle of clothing, anything—if it was human. After the black shape had passed between them, the curtains didn't fall back into the perfect alignment that had blocked the light; there was a small opening in them, a slit that allowed a shaft of moonlight, starlight, street light—whatever it was—to relieve the thick darkness. Barrie strained to focus on the dark shape, her eyes burning as she watched it move silently across the floor. She didn't scream; whoever or whatever approached her, it couldn't be worse than the only men likely to come to her rescue.

Perhaps she was really asleep and this was only a dream. It certainly didn't feel real. But nothing in the long, horrible hours since she had been kidnapped had felt real, and she was too cold to be asleep. No, this was real, all right.

Noiselessly the black shape glided to a halt beside the cot. It towered over her, tall and powerful, and it seemed to be examining the naked feast she presented.

Then it moved once again, lifting its hand to its head, and it peeled off its face, pulling the dark skin up as if it was no more than the skin of a banana.

It was a mask. As exhausted as she was, it was a moment before she could find a logical explanation for the nightmarish image. She blinked up at him. A man wearing a mask. Neither an animal, nor a phantom, but a flesh-and-blood man. She could see the gleam of his eyes, make out the shape of his head and the relative paleness of his face, though there was an odd bulkiness to him that in no way affected the eerily silent grace of his movements. Just another man.

She didn't panic. She had gone beyond fear, beyond everything but rage. She simply waited—waited to fight, waited to die. Her teeth were the only weapon she had, so she would use them, if she could. She would tear at her attacker's flesh, try to damage him as much as possible before she died. If she was lucky, she would be able to get him by the throat with her teeth and take at least one of these bastards with her into death.

He was taking his time, staring at her. Her bound hands clenched into fists. Damn him. Damn them all.

Then he squatted beside the cot and leaned forward, his head very close to hers. Startled, Barrie wondered if he meant to kiss her—odd that the notion struck her as so unbearable—and she braced herself, preparing to lunge upward when he got close enough that she had a good chance for his throat.

"Mackenzie, United States Navy," he said in a toneless whisper that barely reached her ear, only a few inches away.

He'd spoken in English, with a definitely American accent. She jerked, so stunned that it was a moment before the words made sense. Navy. United States Navy. She had been silent for hours, refusing to speak to her captors or respond in any way, but now a small, helpless sound spilled from her throat.

"Shh, don't make any noise," he cautioned, still in that toneless whisper. Even as he spoke he was reaching over her head, and the tension on her arms suddenly relaxed. The small movement sent agony screaming through her shoulder joints, and she sucked in her breath with a sharp, gasping cry.

She quickly choked off the sound, holding it inside as she ground her teeth against the pain. "Sorry," she whispered, when she was able to speak.

She hadn't seen the knife in his hand, but she felt the chill of the blade against her skin as he deftly inserted the blade under the cords and sliced upward, felt the slight tug that freed her hands. She tried to move her arms and found that she couldn't; they remained stretched above her head, unresponsive to her commands.

He knew, without being told. He slipped the knife into its scabbard and placed his gloved hands on her shoulders, firmly kneading for a moment before he clasped her forearms and gently drew her arms down. Fire burned in her joints; it felt as if her arms were being torn from her shoulders, even though he carefully drew them straight down, keeping them aligned with her body to lessen the pain. Barrie set her teeth again, refusing to let another sound break past the barrier. Cold sweat beaded her forehead, and nausea burned in her throat once more, but she rode the swell of pain in silence.

He dug his thumbs into the balls of her shoulders, massaging the sore, swollen ligaments and tendons, intensifying the agony. Her bare body drew into a taut, pale arch of suffering, lifting from the cot. He held her down, ruthlessly pushing her traumatized joints and muscles through the recovery process. She was so cold that the heat emanating from his hands, from the closeness of his body as he bent over her, was searingly hot on her bare skin. The pain rolled through her in great shudders, blurring her sight and thought, and through the haze she realized that now, when she definitely needed to stay conscious, she was finally going to faint.

She couldn't pass out. She refused to. Grimly she hung on, and in only a few moments, moments that felt much longer, the pain began to ebb. He continued the strong kneading, taking her through the agony and into relief. She went limp, relaxing on the cot as she breathed through her mouth in the long, deep drafts of someone who has just run a race.

"Good girl," he whispered as he released her. The brief praise felt like balm to her lacerated emotions. He straightened and drew the knife again, then bent over the foot of the cot. Again there was the chill of the blade, this time against her ankles, and another small tug, then her feet were free, and involuntarily she curled into a protective ball, her body moving without direction from her brain in a belated, useless effort at modesty and self-protection. Her thighs squeezed tightly together, her arms crossed over and hid her breasts, and she buried her face against the musty ticking of the bare mattress. She couldn't look up at him, she couldn't. Tears burned her eyes, clogged her throat.

"Have you been injured?" he asked, the ghostly whisper rasping over her bare skin like an actual touch. "Can you walk?"

Now wasn't the time to let her raw nerves take over. They still had to get out undetected, and a fit of hysteria would ruin everything. She gulped twice, fighting for control of her emotions as grimly as she had fought to control the pain. The tears spilled over, but she forced herself to straighten from the defensive curl, to swing her legs over the edge of the cot. Shakily she sat up and forced herself to look at him. She hadn't done anything to be ashamed of; she would get through this. "I'm okay," she replied, and was grateful that the obligatory whisper disguised the weakness of her voice.

He crouched in front of her and silently began removing the web gear that held and secured all his equipment. The room was too dark for her to make out exactly what each item was, but she recognized the shape of an automatic weapon as he placed it on the floor between them.

She watched him, uncomprehending, until he began shrugging out of his shirt. Sick terror hit her then, slamming into her like a sledgehammer. My God, surely he wasn't—

Gently he put the shirt around her, tucking her arms into the sleeves as if she was a child, then buttoning each button, taking care to hold the fabric away from her body so his fingers wouldn't brush against her breasts. The cloth still held his body heat; it wrapped around her like a blanket, warming her, covering her. The sudden feeling of security unnerved her almost as much as being stripped naked. Her heart lurched inside her chest, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Hesitantly she reached out her hand in an apology, and a plea. Tears dripped slowly down her face, leaving salty tracks in their wake. She had been the recipient of so much male brutality in the past day that his gentleness almost destroyed her control, where their blows and crudeness had only made her more determined to resist them. She had expected the same from him and instead had received a tender care that shattered her with its simplicity.

A second ticked past, two: then, with great care, he folded his gloved fingers around her hand.

His hand was much bigger than hers. She felt the size and heat of it engulf her cold fingers and sensed the control of a man who exactly knew his own strength. He squeezed gently, then released her.

She stared at him, trying to pierce the veil of darkness and see his features, but his face was barely distinguishable and blurred even more by her tears. She could make out some details, though, and discern his movements. He wore a black T-shirt, and as silently as he had removed his gear, he now put it on again. He peeled back a flap on his wrist, and she caught the faint gleam of a luminous watch.

"We have exactly two and a half minutes to get out of here," he murmured. "Do what I say, when I say it."

Before, she couldn't have done it, but that brief moment of understanding, of connection, had buoyed her. Barrie nodded and got to her feet. Her knees wobbled. She stiffened them and shoved her hair out of her face. "I'm ready."

She had taken exactly two steps when, below them, a staccato burst of gunfire shattered the night.

He spun instantly, silently, slipping away from her so fast that she blinked, unable to follow him. Behind her, the door opened. A harsh, piercing flood of light blinded her, and an ominous form loomed in the doorway. The guard—of course there was a guard. Then there was a blur of movement, a grunt, and the guard sagged into supporting arms. As silently as her rescuer seemed to do everything else, he dragged the guard inside and lowered him to the floor. Her rescuer stepped over the body, snagged her wrist in an unbreakable grip and towed her from the room.

The hallway was narrow, dirty and cluttered. The light that had seemed so bright came from a single naked bulb. More gunfire was erupting downstairs and out in the street. From the left came the sound of pounding feet. To the right was a closed door, and past it she could see the first step of an unlit stairway.

He closed the door of the room they had just left and lifted her off her feet, slinging her under his left arm as if she was no more than a sack of flour. Barrie clutched dizzily at his leg as he strode swiftly to the next room and slipped into the sheltering darkness. He had barely shut the door when a barrage of shouts and curses in the hallway made her bury her face against the black material of his pants leg.

He righted her and set her on her feet, pushing her behind him as he unslung the weapon from his shoulder. They stood at the door, unmoving, listening to the commotion just on the other side of the wooden panel. She could discern three different voices and recognized them all. There were more shouts and curses, in the language she had heard off and on all day long but couldn't understand. The curses turned vicious as the guard's body, and her absence, were discovered. Something thudded against the wall as one of her kidnappers gave vent to his temper.

"This is One. Go to B."

That toneless whisper startled her. Confused, she stared at him, trying to make sense of the words. She was so tired that it took her a moment to realize he must be speaking a coded message into a radio. Of course he wasn't alone; there would be an entire team of rescuers. All they had to do was get out of the building, and there would be a helicopter waiting somewhere, or a truck, or a ship. She didn't care if they'd infiltrated on bicycles; she would gladly walk out—barefoot, if necessary.

But first they had to get out of the building. Obviously the plan had been to spirit her out the window without her kidnappers being any the wiser until morning, but something had gone wrong, and the others had been spotted. Now they were trapped in this room, with no way of rejoining the rest of his team.

Her body began to revolt against the stress it had endured for so many long hours, the terror and pain, the hunger, the effort. With a sort of distant interest she felt each muscle begin quivering, the shudders working their way up her legs, her torso, until she was shaking uncontrollably.

She wanted to lean against him but was afraid she would hinder his movements. Her life—and his—depended completely on his expertise. She couldn't help him, so the least she could do was stay out of his way. But she was desperately in need of support, so she fumbled her way a couple of steps to the wall. She was careful not to make any noise, but he sensed her movement and half turned, reaching behind himself with his left hand and catching her. Without speaking he pulled her up against his back, keeping her within reach should he have to change locations in a hurry.

His closeness was oddly, fundamentally reassuring. Her captors had filled her with such fear and disgust that every feminine instinct had been outraged, and after they had finally left her alone in the cold and the dark, she had wondered with a sort of grief if she would ever again be able to trust a man. The answer, at least with this man, was yes.

She leaned gratefully against his back, so tired and weak that, just for a moment, she had to rest her head on him. The heat of his body penetrated the rough fabric of the web vest, wanning her cheek. He even smelled hot, she noticed through a sort of haze; his scent was a mixture of clean, fresh sweat and musky maleness, exertion and tension heating it to an aroma as heady as that of the finest whiskey. Mackenzie. He'd said his name was Mackenzie, whispered it to her when he crouched to identify himself.

Oh, God, he was so warm, and she was still cold. The gritty stone floor beneath her bare feet seemed to be wafting cold waves of air up her legs. His shirt was so big it dwarfed her, hanging almost to her knees, but still she was naked beneath it. Her entire body was shaking.

They stood motionless in the silent darkness of the empty room for an eternity, listening to the gunfire as it tapered off in the distance, listening to the shouts and curses as they, too, diminished, listened for so long that Barrie drifted into a light doze, leaning against him with her head resting on his back. He was like a rock, unmoving, his patience beyond anything she had ever imagined. There were no nervous little adjustments of position, no hint that his muscles got tired. The slow, even rhythm of his breathing was the only movement she could discern, and resting against him as she was, the sensation was like being on a raft in a pool, gently rising, falling—

She woke when he reached back and lightly shook her. "They think we got away," he whispered. "Don't move or make any sound while I check things out."

Obediently she straightened away from him, though she almost cried at the loss of his body heat. He switched on a flashlight that gave off only a slender beam; black tape had been placed across most of the lens. He flicked the light around the room, revealing that it was empty except for some old boxes piled along one wall. Cobwebs festooned all of the comers, and the floor was covered with a thick layer of dust. She could make out a single window in the far wall, but he was careful not to let the thin beam of light get close to it and possibly betray their presence. The room seemed to have been unused for a very long time.

He leaned close and put his mouth against her ear. His warm breath washed across her flesh with every word. "We have to get out of this building. My men have made it look as if we escaped, but we probably won't be able to hook up with them again until tomorrow night. We need someplace safe to wait. What do you know about the interior layout?"

She shook her head and followed his example, lifting herself on tiptoe to put her lips to his ear. "Nothing," she whispered. "I was blindfolded when they brought me here."

He gave a brief nod and straightened away from her. Once again Barrie felt bereft, abandoned, without his physical nearness. She knew it was just a temporary weakness, this urge to cling to him and the security he represented, but she needed him now with an urgency that was close to pain in its intensity. She wanted nothing more than to press close to him again, to feel the animal heat that told her she wasn't alone; she wanted to be in touch with the steely strength that stood between her and those bastards who had kidnapped her.

Temporary or not, Barrie hated this neediness on her part; it reminded her too sharply of the way she had clung to her father when her mother and brother had died. Granted, she had been just a child then, and the closeness that had developed between her and her father had, for the most part, been good. But she had seen how stifling it could be, too, and quietly, as was her way, she had begun placing increments of distance between them. Now this had happened, and her first instinct was to cling. Was she going to turn into a vine every time there was some trauma in her life? She didn't want to be like that, didn't want to be a weakling. This nightmare had shown her too vividly that all security, no matter how solid it seemed, had its weak points. Instead of depending on others, she would do better to develop her own strengths, strengths she knew were there but that had lain dormant for most of her rife. From now on, though, things were going to change.

Perhaps they already had. The incandescent anger that had taken hold of her when she'd lain naked and trussed on that bare cot still burned within her, a small, white-hot core that even her mind-numbing fatigue couldn't extinguish. Because of it, she refused to give in to her weakness, refused to do anything that might hinder Mackenzie in any way. Instead she braced herself, forcing her knees to lock and her shoulders to square. "What are we going to do?" she whispered. "What can I do to help?"

Because there were no heavy blackout curtains on this grimy window, she was able to see part of his features as he looked at her. Half his face was in shadow, but the scant light gleamed on the slant of one high, chiseled cheekbone, revealed the strong cut of his jaw, played along a mouth that was as clearly defined as that of an ancient Greek statue.

"I'll have to leave you here alone for a little while," he said. "Will you be all right?"

Panic exploded in her stomach, her chest. She barely choked back the scream of protest that would have betrayed them. Grinding her teeth together and electing not to speak, because the scream would escape if she did, she nodded her head.

He hesitated, and Barrie could feel his attention focusing on her, as if he sensed her distress and was trying to decide whether or not it was safe to leave her. After a few moments he gave a curt nod that acknowledged her determination, or at least gave her the benefit of the doubt. "I'll be back in half an hour," he said. "I promise."

He pulled something from a pocket on his vest. He unfolded it, revealing a thin blanket of sorts. Barrie stood still as he snugly wrapped it around her. Though it was very thin, the blanket immediately began reflecting her meager body heat. When he let go of the edges they fell open, and Barrie clutched frantically at them in an effort to retain that fragile warmth. By the time she had managed to pull the blanket around her, he was gone, opening the door a narrow crack and slipping through as silently as he had come through the window in the room where she had been held. Then the door closed, and once again she was alone in the darkness.

Her nerves shrieked in protest, but she ignored them. Instead she concentrated on being as quiet as she could, listening for any sounds in the building that could tell her what was going on. There was still some noise from the street, the result of the gunfire that had alarmed the nearby citizenry, but that, too, was fading. The thick stone walls of the building dulled any sound, anyway. From within the building, there was only silence. Had her captors abandoned the site after her supposed escape? Were they in pursuit of Mackenzie's team, thinking she was with them?

She swayed on her feet, and only then did she realize that she could sit down on the floor and wrap the blanket around her, conserving even more warmth. Her feet and legs were almost numb with cold. Carefully she eased down onto the floor, terrified she would inadvertently make some noise. She sat on the thin blanket and pulled it around herself as best she could. Whatever fabric it was made from, the blanket blocked the chill of the stone floor. Drawing up her legs, Barrie hugged her knees and rested her head on them. She was more comfortable now than she had been in many long hours of terror and, inevitably, her eyelids began to droop heavily. Sitting there alone in the dark, dirty, empty room, she went to sleep.

Chapter 3

Pistol in hand, Zane moved silently through the decrepit old building, avoiding the piles of debris and crumbled stone. They were already on the top floor, so, except for the roof, the only way he could go was down. He already knew where the exits were, but what he didn't know was the location of the bad guys. Had they chosen this building as only a temporary hiding place and abandoned it when their victim seemingly escaped? Or was this their regular meeting place? If so, how many were there, and where were they? He had to know all that before he risked moving Miss Lovejoy. There was only another hour or so until dawn; he had to get her to a secure location before then.

He stopped at a turn in the corridor, flattening himself against the wall and easing his head around the corner just enough that he could see. Empty. Noiselessly, he moved down the hallway, just as cautiously checking the few rooms that opened off it.

He had pulled the black balaclava into place and smeared dust over his bare arms to dull the sheen of his skin and decrease his visibility. Giving his shirt to Miss Lovejoy and leaving his arms bare had increased his visibility somewhat, but he judged that his darkly tanned arms weren't nearly as likely to be spotted as her naked body. Even in the darkness of the room where they had been keeping her, he had been able to clearly make out the pale shimmer of her skin. Since none of her clothes had been in evidence, giving her his shirt was the only thing he could have done. She'd been shaking with cold—evidence of shock because the night was warm—and she likely would have gone into hysterics if he'd tried to take her out of there while she was stark naked. He had been prepared, if necessary, to knock her out. But she'd been a little trooper so far, not even screaming when he had suddenly loomed over her in the darkness. With his senses so acute, though, Zane could feel how fragile her control was, how tightly she was strung.

It was understandable. She had likely been raped, not once but many times, since she had been kidnapped. She might fall apart when the crisis was over and she was safe, but for now she was holding together. Her gutsiness made his heart clench with a mixture of tenderness and a lethal determination to protect her. His first priority was to get her out of Libya, not wreak vengeance on her kidnappers—but if any of the bastards happened to get in his way, so be it.

The dark maw of a stairwell yawned before him. The darkness was reassuring; it not only signaled the absence of a guard, it would shield him. Humans still clung to the primitive instincts of cave dwellers. If they were awake, they wanted the comfort of light around them, so they could see the approach of any enemies. Darkness was a weapon that torturers used to break the spirit of their captives, because it emphasized their helplessness, grated on their nerves. But he was a SEAL, and darkness was merely a circumstance he could use. He stepped carefully into the stairwell, keeping his back to the wall to avoid any crumbling edges of the stone. He was fairly certain the stairs were safe, otherwise the kidnappers wouldn't have been using them, but he didn't take chances. Like idiots, people stacked things on stair steps, blocking their own escape routes.

A faint lessening of the darkness just ahead told him that he was nearing the bottom of the steps. He paused while he was still within the protective shadow, listening for the slightest sound. There. He heard what he'd been searching for, the distant sound of voices, angry voices tripping over each other with curses and excuses. Though Zane spoke Arabic, he was too far away to make out what they were saying. It didn't matter; he'd wanted to know their location, and now he did. Grimly he stifled the urge to exact revenge on Miss Lovejoy's behalf. His mission was to rescue her, not endanger her further.

There was a stairwell at each end of the building. Knowing now that the kidnappers were on the ground floor at the east end, Zane began making his way to the west staircase. He didn't meet up with any guards; as he had hoped, they thought the rescue had been effected, so they didn't see any point now in posting guards.

In his experience, perfect missions were few and far between, so rare that he could count on one hand the number of missions he'd been on where everything had gone like clockwork. He tried to be prepared for mechanical breakdowns, accidents, forces of nature, but there was no way to plan for the human factor. He didn't know how the kidnappers had been alerted to the SEALs' presence, but he had considered that possibility from the beginning and made an alternate plan in case something went wrong. Something had—exactly what, he would find out later: except for that brief communication with his men, telling them to withdraw and switch to the alternate plan, they had maintained radio silence.

Probably it was pure bad luck, some late-night citizen unexpectedly stumbling over one of his men. Things happened. So he had formulated Plan B, his just-in-case plan, because as they had worked their way toward the building, he'd had an uneasy feeling. When his gut told him something, Zane listened. Bunny Withrock had once given him a narrow-eyed look and said, "Boss, you're even spookier than the Spook." But they trusted his instincts, to the point that mentally they had probably switched to Plan B as soon as he'd voiced it, before he had even gone into the building.

With Miss Lovejoy to consider, he'd opted for safety. That was why he had gone in alone, through the window, after Spook's reconnaissance had reported that the kidnappers had set guards at intervals throughout the first floor. There were no lights in any of the rooms on the fourth floor, where Miss Lovejoy was reportedly being held, so it was likely there was no guard actually in the room with her; a guard wouldn't want to sit in the darkness.

The kidnappers had inadvertently pinpointed the room for him: only one window had been covered with curtains. When Zane had reached that room, he had carefully parted the heavy curtains to make certain they hadn't shielded an interior light, but the room beyond had been totally dark. And Miss Lovejoy had been there, just as he had expected.

Now, ostensibly with nothing left to guard, the kidnappers all seemed to be grouped together. Zane cat-footed through the lower rooms until he reached the other staircase, then climbed silently upward. Thanks to Spooky, he knew of a fakly secure place to take Miss Lovejoy while they waited for another opportunity for extraction; all he had to do was get her there undetected. That meant he had to do it before dawn, because a half-naked, red-haired Western woman would definitely be noticeable in this Islamic country. He wouldn't exactly blend in himself, despite his black hair and tanned skin, because of his dark cammies, web gear and weaponry. Most people noticed a man with camouflage paint on his face and an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.

He reached the room where he'd left Miss Lovejoy and entered as quietly as he'd left. The room was empty. Alarm roared through him, every muscle tightening, and then he saw the small, dark hump on the floor and realized that she had curled up with the thin survival blanket over her. She wasn't moving. Zane listened to the light, almost inaudible evenness of her breathing and realized she had gone to sleep. Again he felt that subtle inner clenching. She had been on edge and terrified for hours, obviously worn out but unable to sleep; the slight measure of security he'd been able to give her, consisting of his shirt, a blanket and a temporary, precarious hiding place, had been enough for her to rest. He hated to disturb her, but they had to move.

Gently he put his hand on her back, lightly rubbing, not shaking her awake but easing her into consciousness so she wouldn't be alarmed. After a moment she began stirring under his touch, and he felt the moment when she woke, felt her instant of panic, then her quietly determined reach for control.

"We're moving to someplace safer," he whispered, removing his hand as soon as he saw she was alert. After what she had been through, she wouldn't want to endure a man's touch any more than necessary. The thought infuriated him, because his instinct was to comfort her; the women in his family, mother, sister and sisters-in-law, were adored and treasured by the men. He wanted to cradle Barrie Lovejoy against him, whisper promises to her that he would personally dismember every bastard who had hurt her, but he didn't want to do anything that would undermine her fragile control. They didn't have time for any comforting, anyway.

She clambered to her feet, still clutching the blanket around her. Zane reached for it, and her fingers tightened on the fabric, then slowly loosened. She didn't have to explain her reluctance to release the protective cloth. Zane knew she was still both extrasensitive to cold and painfully embarrassed by her near nudity.

"Wear it this way," he whispered, wrapping the blanket around her waist sarong-style so that it draped to her feet. He tied the ends securely over her left hipbone, then bent down to check that the fabric wasn't too tight around her feet, so she would have sufficient freedom of movement if they had to run.

When he straightened, she touched his arm, then swiftly lifted her band away, as if even that brief touch had been too much. "Thank you," she whispered.

"Watch me closely," he instructed. "Obey my hand signals." He explained the most basic signals to her, the raised clenched fist that meant "Stop!" and the open hand that meant merely "halt," the signal to proceed and the signal to hide. Considering her state of mind, plus her obvious fatigue, he doubted she would be able to absorb more than those four simple commands. They didn't have far to go, anyway; if he needed more commands than that, they were in deep ca-ca.

She followed him out of the room and down the west staircase, though he felt her reluctance to step into the Stygian depths. He showed her how to keep her back to the wall, how to feel with her foot for the edge of the step. He felt her stumble once, heard her sharply indrawn breath. He whirled to steady her; his pistol was in his right hand, but his left arm snaked out, wrapping around her hips to steady her as she teetered two steps above him. The action lifted her off her feet, hauling her against his left side. She felt soft in his grip, her hips narrow but nicely curved, and his nostrils flared as he scented the warm sweetness of her skin.

She was all but sitting on his encircling arm, her hands braced on his shoulders. Reluctantly he bent and set her on her feet, and she immediately straightened away from him. "Sorry," she whispered in the darkness.

Zane's admiration for her grew. She hadn't squealed in alarm, despite nearly falling, despite the way he'd grabbed her. She was holding herself together, narrowing her focus to the achievement of one goal: freedom.

She was even more cautious in her movements after that one misstep, letting more distance grow between them than he liked. On the last flight of steps he stopped, waiting for her to catch up with him. Knowing that she couldn't see him, he said, "Here," when she was near, so she wouldn't bump into him.

He eased his way down the last couple of steps into the faint light. There was no one in sight. With a brief wave of his hand he signaled her forward, and she slipped out of the darkness of the stairwell to stand beside him.

There was a set of huge wooden double doors that opened onto the street, but Zane was aware of increased noise outside as dawn neared, and it was too risky to use that exit. From their left came a raised voice, shouting in Arabic, and he felt her tense. Quickly, before the sound of one of her kidnappers unnerved her, he shepherded her into a cluttered storage room, where a small, single window shone high on the wall. "We'll go out this window," he murmured. "There'll be a drop of about four feet to the ground, nothing drastic. I'll boost you up. When you hit the ground, move away from the street but stay against the side of the building. Crouch down so you'll present the smallest possible silhouette. Okay?"

She nodded her understanding, and they picked their way over the jumbled boxes and debris until they were standing under the window. Zane stretched to reach the sill, hooked his fingers on the plaster and boosted himself up until he was balanced with one knee on the sill and one booted foot braced against a rickety stack of boxes. The window evidently hadn't been used in a long time; the glass was opaque with dust, the hinges rusty and stiff. He wrestled it open, wincing at the scraping noise, even though he knew it wouldn't carry to where the kidnappers were. Fresh air poured into the musty room. Like a cat he dropped to the floor, then turned to her.

"You can put your foot in my hand, or you can climb on my shoulders. Which do you prefer?"

With the window open, more light was coming through. He could see her doubtful expression as she stared at the window, and for the first time he appreciated the evenness of her features. He already knew how sweetly her body was shaped, but now he knew that Miss Lovejoy didn't hurt his eyes at all.

"Can you get through there?" she whispered, ignoring his question as she eyed first the expanse of his shoulders and then the narrowness of the window.

Zane had already made those mental measurements. "It'll be a tight fit, but I've been through tighter ones."

She gazed at his darkened face, then gave one of her sturdy nods, the one that said she was ready to go on. Now he could see her calculating the difficulty of maneuvering through the window with the blanket tied around her waist, and he saw the exact moment when she made her decision. Her shoulders squared and her chin came up as she untied the blanket and draped it around her like a long scarf, winding it around her neck and tossing the ends over her shoulders to dangle rakishly down her back.

"I think I'd better climb on your shoulders," she said. "I'll have more leverage that way."

He knelt on the floor and held his hands up for her to catch and brace herself. She went around behind him and daintily placed her right foot on his right shoulder, then lifted herself into a half crouch. As soon as her left foot had settled into place and her hands were securely in his, he rose steadily until he was standing erect. Her weight was negligible compared to what he handled during training. He moved closer to the wall, and she released his right hand to brace her hand against the sill. "Here I go," she whispered, and boosted herself through the window.

She went through it headfirst. It was the fastest way, but not the easiest, because she had no way of breaking her fall on the other side. He looked up and saw the gleam of pale, bare legs and the naked curves of her buttocks; then she vanished from sight, and there was a thump as she hit the ground.

Quickly Zane boosted himself up again. "Are you all right?" he whispered harshly.

There was silence for a moment, then a shaky, whispered answer. "I think so."

"Take the rifle." He handed the weapon to her, then dropped to the floor while he removed his web gear. That, too, went through the window. Then he followed, feet first, twisting his shoulders at an angle to fit through the narrow opening and landing in a crouch. Obediently, she had moved to the side and was sitting against the wall with the blanket once more clutched around her and his rifle cradled in her arms.

Dawn was coming fast, the remnants of darkness no more than a deep twilight. "Hurry," he said as he shrugged into the web vest and took the rifle from her. He slid it into position, then drew the pistol again. The heavy butt felt reassuring and infinitely familiar in his palm. With the weapon in his right hand and her hand clasped in his left, he pulled her into the nearest alley.

Benghazi was a modern city, fairly Westernized, and Libya's chief port. They were near the docks, and the smell of the sea was strong in his nostrils. Like the vast majority of waterfronts, it was one of the rougher areas of the city. From what he'd been able to tell, no authorities had shown up to investigate the gunfire, even supposing it had been reported. The Libyan government wasn't friendly—there were no diplomatic relations between the United States and Libya—but that didn't mean the government would necessarily turn a blind eye to the kidnapping of an ambassador's daughter. Of course, it was just as likely that it would, which was why diplomatic channels hadn't been considered. The best option had seemed to go in and get Miss Lovejoy out as quickly as possible.

There were plenty of ramshackle, abandoned buildings in the waterfront area. The rest of the team had withdrawn to one, drawing any pursuers away from Zane and Miss Lovejoy, while they holed up in another. They would rendezvous at oh-one-hundred hours the next morning.

Spooky had chosen the sites, so Zane trusted their relative safety. Now he and Miss Lovejoy wended their way through a rat's nest of alleyways. She made a stifled sound of disgust once, and he knew she'd stepped on something objectionable, but other than that she soldiered on in silence.

It took only a few minutes to reach the designated safe area. The building looked more down than up, but Spooky had investigated and reported an intact inner room. One outer wall was crumbled to little more than rubble. Zane straddled it, then caught Miss Lovejoy around the waist and effortlessly lifted her over the heap, twisting his torso to set her on the other side. Then he joined her, leading her under half-fallen timbers and around spiderwebs that he wanted left undisturbed. The fact that he could see those webs meant they had to get under cover, fast.

The door to the interior room hung haphazardly on one hinge, and the wood was rotting away at the top. He pulled her inside the protective walls. "Stay here while I take care of our tracks," he whispered, then dropped to a crouch and moved to where they had crossed the remnants of the outer wall. He worked backward from there, scattering dirt to hide the signs of their passage. There were dark, wet places on the broken pieces of stone that were all that remained of the floor. He frowned, knowing what those dark patches meant. Damn it, why hadn't she said something? Had she left a trail of blood straight to their hiding place?

Carefully he obliterated the marks. It wasn't completely her fault; he should have given more thought to her bare feet. The truth was, his mind had been more on her bare butt and the other details of her body that he'd already seen. He was far too aware of her sexually; the proof of it was heavy in his loins. After what she had been through that was the last thing she needed, so he would ignore his desire, but that didn't make it go away.

When he had worked his way to the room, he silently lifted the door and reset it in the frame, bracing it so it wouldn't sag again. Only then did he turn to face her. "Why didn't you tell me you'd cut your foot? When did it happen?" His voice was low and very even.

She was still standing where he'd left her, her face colorless in the half light coming through the open shutters of the window, her eyes so huge with fatigue and strain that she looked like a forlorn, bedraggled little owl. A puzzled frown knit her brows as she looked at her feet. "Oh," she said in dazed discovery as she examined the dark stains on her left foot. "I didn't realize it was cut. It must have happened when I stepped in that... whatever... in the alley. I remember that it hurt, but I thought there was just a sharp rock under the... stuff."

At least it hadn't happened any sooner than that. Their position should still be safe. He keyed the radio, giving the prearranged one click that told the team he was in the safe area and receiving two clicks in return, meaning his men were secure in their position, too. They would check in with each other at set intervals, but for the most part they would spend the day resting. Relieved, Zane turned his mind to other matters.

"Sit down and let me see your foot," he ordered. The last thing he needed was for her to be hobbled, though from what he'd seen of her so far, she wouldn't breathe a word of complaint, merely limp along as fast as she could.

There was nothing to sit on except the broken stones of the floor, so that was where she sat, carefully keeping the blanket wrapped around her waist. Her feet were filthy, caked with the same mess that caked his boots. Blood oozed sullenly from a cut on the instep of her left foot.

Zane shucked off his black hood and headset, took off his web vest and removed his gloves; then he unpacked his survival gear, which included a small and very basic first-aid kit. He sat cross-legged in front of her and lifted her foot to rest on his thigh. After tearing open a small packet containing a premoistened antiseptic pad, he thoroughly cleaned the cut and the area around it, pretending not to notice her involuntary flinches of pain, which she quickly tried to control.

The cut was deep enough that it probably needed a couple of stitches. He took out another antiseptic pad and pressed it hard over the wound until the bleeding stopped. "How long has it been since your last tetanus vaccination?" he asked.

Barrie thought that she had never heard anything as calm as his voice. She could see him clearly now; it was probably a good thing she hadn't been able to do so before, because her nerves likely couldn't have stood the pressure. She cleared her throat and managed to say, "I don't remember. Years," but her mind wasn't on what she was saying.

His thick black hair was matted with sweat, and his face was streaked with black and green paint. The black T-shirt he wore was grimy with mingled dust and sweat, not that the shirt she had on was in much better shape. The material strained over shoulders that looked a yard wide, clung to a broad chest and flat stomach, stretched over powerful biceps. His arms were corded with long, steely muscles, his wrists almost twice as thick as hers; his long-fingered hands were well-shaped, callused, harder than any human hands should be—and immensely gentle as he cleansed the wound on her foot.

His head was bent over the task. She saw the dense black eyelashes, the bold sweep of his eyebrows, the thin and arrogantly high bridge of bis nose, the chiseled plane of his cheekbones. She saw his mouth, so clear-cut and stern, as if he seldom smiled. Beard stubble darkened his jaw beneath the camouflage paint. Then his gaze flicked up to her for a moment, cool and assessing, as if he was gauging her reaction to the sting of the antiseptic, and she was stunned by the clear, pale beauty of his blue gray eyes. He had silently and efficiently killed that guard, then stepped over the body as if it didn't exist. A wicked, ten-inch black blade rode in a scabbard strapped to his thigh, and he handled both pistol and rifle with an ease that bespoke a familiarity that went far beyond the normal. He was the most savage, dangerous, lethal thing, man or beast, that she had ever seen—and she felt utterly safe with him.

He had given her the shirt off his back, treating her with a courtesy and tenderness that had eased her shock, calmed her fears. He had seen her naked; she had been able to ignore that while they were still trapped in the same building with her kidnappers, but now they were relatively safe, and alone, and she was burningly aware of both his intense masculinity and of her nakedness beneath his shirt. Her skin felt unusually sensitive, as if it was too hot and tight, and the rasp of the fabric against her nipples was almost painfully acute.

Her foot looked small and fragile in his big hands. He frowned in concentration as he applied an antibiotic ointment to the cut, then fashioned a butterfly bandage to close the wound. He worked with a swift, sure dexterity, and it was only a moment before the bandaging was complete. Gently he lifted her foot off his leg. "There. You should be able to walk with no problem, but as soon as we get you to the ship, get the doc to put in a couple of stitches and give you an injection for tetanus."

"Yes, sir," she said softly.

He looked up with a swift, faint smile. "I'm Navy. That's, 'Aye, aye, sir.'"

The smile nearly took her breath. If he ever truly smiled, she thought, she might have heart failure. To hide her reaction, she held out her hand to him. "Barrie Lovejoy. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance."

He folded his fingers around hers and solemnly shook hands. "Lieutenant-Commander Zane Mackenzie, United States Navy SEALs."

A SEAL. Her heart jumped in her chest. That explained it, then. SEALs were known as the most dangerous men alive, men so skilled in the arts of warfare that they were in a class by themselves. He didn't just look lethal; he was lethal.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"My pleasure, ma'am."

Hot color flooded her face as she looked at her blanket-covered lap. "Please, call me Barrie. After all, your shirt is the only thing I..." Her voice trailed off, and she bit her lip. "I mean, formality at this point is—"

"I understand," he said gently, breaking into her stumbling explanation. "I don't want you to be embarrassed, so the circumstances are strictly between us, if you prefer. But I advise you to tell the ship's surgeon, or your own doctor, for the sake of your health."

Barrie blinked at him in confusion, wondering what on earth her health had to do with the fact that he'd seen her naked. Then comprehension dawned; if she hadn't been so tired, she would have realized immediately what conclusion he had drawn from the situation.

"They didn't rape me," she whispered. Her face flushed even hotter. "They—they touched me, they hurt me and did some... other things, but they didn't actually rape me. They were saving that for today. Some important guy in their organization was supposed to arrive, and I suppose they were planning a sort of p-party."

Zane's expression remained calm and grave, and she knew he didn't believe her. Why should he? He'd found her tied up and naked, and she'd already been in the kidnappers' hands for most of a day. Chivalry wasn't part of their code; they had refrained from rape only on orders from their leader, because he wanted to be there to enjoy her himself before the others had their turn on her.

He didn't say anything, and Barrie busied herself with the used antiseptic pads, which were still damp enough to clean the rest of the disgusting muck from her feet. She longed for a bath, but that was so far out of the question that she didn't even voice the wish.

While she busied herself with tidying up, he explored the small room, which didn't take long, because there was nothing in it. He closed the broken shutters over the window; the wooden slats were rotted away at the top, allowing some light through but preventing any passersby from seeing inside.

With the room mostly dark once more, it was like being in a snug, private cave. Barrie smothered a yawn, fighting the fatigue that dragged on her like lead weights. The only sleep she'd had was that brief nap while Zane had been finding a way out of the building, and she was so tired that even her hunger paled in comparison.

He noticed, of course; he didn't miss anything. "Why don't you go to sleep?" he suggested. "In a couple of hours, when more people are moving around and I won't be as noticeable, I'll go scrounge up something for us to eat and liberate some clothes for you."

Barrie eyed the paint streaking his face. "With makeup like that, I don't believe you're going to go unnoticed no matter how crowded the streets are."

That faint smile touched his lips again, then was gone. "I'll take it off first."

The smile almost kept her awake. Almost. She felt her muscles slowly loosening, as if his permission to sleep was all her body needed to hear. Her eyelids were too heavy for her to hold open anymore; it was like a veil of darkness descending. With her last fraction of consciousness, she was aware of his arms around her, gently lowering her to the floor.

Chapter 4

She had gone to sleep like a baby, Zane thought, watching her. He'd seen it often enough in his ten nephews, the way little children had of dropping off so abruptly, their bodies looking almost boneless as they toppled over into waiting arms. His gaze drifted over her face. Now that dawn was here, even with the shutters closed, he could plainly see the exhaustion etched on her face; the wonder was that she had held up so well, rather than that she'd gone to sleep now.

He could use some rest himself. He stretched out beside her, keeping a slight distance between them; not touching, but close enough that he could reach her immediately if their hiding place was discovered. He was still wired, too full of adrenaline to sleep yet, but it felt good to relax and let himself wind down while he waited for the city to come completely awake.

Now he could also see the fire in her hair, the dark auburn shade that, when she stood in the sun, would glint with gold and bronze. Her eyes were a deep, soft green, her brows and lashes like brown mink. He wouldn't have been surprised by freckles, but her skin was dear and creamy, except for the bruise that mottled one cheek. There were bruises on her arms, and though he couldn't see them, he knew the shirt covered other marks left by brutal men. She'd insisted they hadn't raped her, but probably she was ashamed for anyone else to know, as if she'd had any choice in the matter. Maybe she wanted to keep it quiet for her father's sake. Zane didn't care about her reasons; he just hoped she would get the proper medical care.

He thought dispassionately about slipping to the building where they'd held her and killing any and all of the bastards who were still there. God knew they deserved it, and he wouldn't lose a minute's worth of sleep over any of them. But his mission was to rescue Miss Lovejoy—Barrie—and he hadn't accomplished that yet. If he went back, there was the chance that he would be killed, and that would endanger her, as well as his men. He'd long ago learned how to divorce his emotions from the action so he could think clearly, and he wasn't about to compromise a mission now... But damn, he wanted to kill them.

He liked the way she looked. She wasn't drop-dead gorgeous or anything like that, but her features were regular, and asleep, with her woes put aside for the moment, her expression was sweetly serene. She was a pretty little thing, as finely made as an expensive porcelain figurine. Oh, he supposed she was probably of middle height for a woman, about five feet five, but he was six-three and outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, so to him she was little. Not as little as his mother and sister, but they were truly slight, as delicate as fairies. Barrie Lovejoy, for all her aristocratic bloodlines, had the sturdiness of a pioneer. Most women, with good reason, would have broken down long before now.

He was surprised to feel himself getting a little drowsy. Despite their situation, there was something calming about lying here beside her, watching her sleep. Though he was solitary by nature and had always preferred sleeping alone after his sexual appetite had been satisfied, it felt elementally right, somehow, to guard her with his body as they slept. Had cavemen done this, putting themselves between the mouth of the cave and the sleeping forms of their women and children, drowsily watching the gentle movements of their breathing as the fires died down and night claimed the land? If it was an ancient instinct, Zane mused, he sure as hell hadn't felt it before now.

But he wanted to touch her, to feel the softness of her flesh beneath his hand. He wanted to fold her within the warm protection of his body, tuck her in close, curl around her and keep her there with an arm draped around her waist. Only the knowledge that the last thing in the world she would want now was a man's touch kept him from doing just that.

He wanted to hold her. He ached to hold her.

She was dwarfed by his shirt, but he'd seen the body hidden by the folds of cloth. His night vision was very good; he'd been able to discern her high, round breasts, not very big, but definitely mouth-watering, and tipped with small, tight nipples. She was curvy, womanly, with a small waist and rounded hips and a neat little triangle of pubic hair. He'd seen her buttocks. Just thinking about it made him feel hollowed out with desire; her butt was fine indeed. He would like to feel it snuggled up against his thighs.

He wasn't going to be able to sleep, after all. He was fully aroused, desire pulsing through his swollen and rigid flesh. Wincing, he turned onto his back and adjusted himself to a more comfortable position, but the comfort was relative. The only way he would truly find ease was within the soft, hot clasp of her body, and that wasn't likely to happen.

The small room grew brighter and warmer as dawn developed into full morning. The stone walls would protect them from most of the day's heat, but soon they would need water. Water, food, and clothes for her. A robe would be better than Western-style clothing, because the traditional Muslim attire would cover her hak, and there were enough traditionalists in Benghazi that a robe wouldn't draw a second glance.

The streets were noisy now, the waterfront humming with activity. Zane figured it was time for him to do some foraging. He wiped the camouflage paint from his skin as best he could and disguised what was left by smearing dirt on his face. He wasn't about to go unarmed, so he pulled the tail of his T-shirt free from his pants and tucked the pistol into the waistband at the small of his back, then let the shirt fall over it. Anyone who paid attention would know the bulge for what it was, but what the hell, it wasn't unusual for people to go armed in this part of the world. Thanks to his one-quarter Comanche heritage, his skin had a rich bronze hue, and in addition he was darkly tanned from countless hours of training in the sun and sea and wind. There was nothing about his appearance that would attract undue notice, not even his eyes, because there were plenty of Libyans with a European parent.

He checked Barrie, reassuring himself that she was still sleeping soundly. He'd told her that he would be slipping out for a while, so she shouldn't be alarmed if she woke while he was gone. He left their crumbling sanctuary as silently as he had entered it.

It was over two hours before he returned, almost time for the designated check-in time with his men. He had a definite talent for scavenging, he thought, though outright thievery would probably be a better term. He carried a woman's black robe and head covering, and wrapped up in it was a selection of fruit, cheese and bread, as well as a pair of slippers he hoped would fit Barrie. The water had been the hardest to come by, because he'd lacked a container. He'd solved that by stealing a stoppered gallon jug of wine, forbidden by the Koran but readily available anyway. He had poured out the cheap, sour wine and filled the jug with water. The water would have a definite wine taste to it, but it would be wet, and that was all they required.

While he had the opportunity, he disguised the entrance to their lair a bit, piling some stones in front of it, arranging a rotted timber so that it looked as if it blocked the door. The door was still visible, but looked much less accessible. He tested his handiwork to make certain they could still get out easily enough, then slipped inside and once again braced the door in its sagging frame.

He turned to check on Barrie. She was still asleep. The room was considerably warmer, and she had kicked the blanket aside. His shirt was up around her waist.

The kick of desire was like taking a blow to the chest. He almost staggered from it, his heart racing, his breath strangling in his throat. Sweat beaded on his forehead, ran down his temple. God.

He should turn away. He should put the blanket over her. He should put sex completely out of his mind. There were any number of things he should do, but instead he stared at her with a hunger so intense he ached with it, quivered with it. Greedily his gaze moved over every female inch of her. His sex was throbbing like a toothache. He wanted her more intensely than he'd ever wanted a woman before. His famous cool remoteness had failed him—there wasn't a cool inch on him, and his desire was so damn strong and immediate, he was shaking from the effort of resisting it.

Moving slowly, stiffly, he set his purloined goodies on the floor. His breath hissed between his clenched teeth. He hadn't known sexual frustration could be this painful. He'd never had any trouble getting a woman whenever he'd wanted one. This woman was off-limits, though, from even an attempt at seduction. She'd been through enough without having to fend off her rescuer, too.

As warm as the room was now, if he spread the blanket over her she would only kick it off again. Gingerly he went down on one knee beside her and with shaking hands pulled the shirt tail down to cover her. With slight disbelief he eyed the fine tremor of his fingers. He never trembled. He was rock steady during the most tense and dangerous situations, icily controlled in combat. He had parachuted out of a burning plane, swum with sharks and sewn up his own flesh. He had ridden unbroken horses and even bulls a time or two. He had killed. He had done all of that with perfect control, but this sleeping, red-haired woman made him shake.

Grimly he forced himself to turn aside and pick up the radio headset. Holding the earpiece in place, he clicked once and immediately heard two clicks in response. Everything was okay.

Maybe some water would cool him down. At least thinking about it was better than thinking about Barrie. He dropped a couple of purification tablets into the jug, in case the small amount of wine that had remained in it wasn't enough to kill all the invisible little critters. The tablets didn't improve the taste any—just the opposite— but they were better than a case of the runs.

He drank just enough to relieve his thirst, then settled down with his back to a wall. There was nothing to do but wait and contemplate the walls, because he sure as hell didn't trust himself to look at Barrie.

Voices woke her. They were loud, and close by. Barrie bolted upright, her eyes huge with alarm. Hard arms grabbed her, and an even harder hand clamped itself over her mouth, stifling any sound she might have made. Confused, disoriented, in sheer terror she began to fight as much as she could. Teeth. She should use her teeth. But his fingers were biting hard into her jaw, and she couldn't open her mouth. Desperately she tried to shake her head, and he merely gathered her in tighter, tucking her against him in a way that was oddly protective.

"Shh" came that toneless whisper, and the familiarity of it cut through the panic and fog of sleep. Zane.

Instantly she relaxed, weak with relief. Feeling the tension leave her muscles, he tilted her face, still keeping his hand over her mouth. Their eyes met in the shadowed light, and he gave a brief nod as he saw that she was awake now, and aware. He released her jaw, his hard fingers trailing briefly over her skin in apology for the tightness of his grip. The barely there caress went through her like lightning. She shivered as it seared a path along nerve endings throughout her body and instinctively turned her face into the warm hollow created by the curve of his shoulder.

The arm around her had loosened immediately when she shivered, but at her action she felt him hesitate a fraction of a second, then gather her snugly against him once more.

The voices were closer, and added to them were some thuds and the sound of crumbling rock. She listened to the rapid, rolling syllables of Arabic, straining to concentrate on the voices. Were they the same voices she had heard through yesterday's long nightmare? It was difficult to tell.

She didn't understand the language; hers had been a finishing-school education, suited to an ambassador's daughter. She spoke French and Italian fluently, Spanish a little less so. After her father's posting in Athens she had made it a point to study Greek, too, and had learned enough that she could carry on a simple conversation, though she understood more than she spoke.

Fiercely she wished she had insisted on lessons in Arabic, too. She had hated every moment she'd spent in the kidnappers' hands, but not speaking the language had made her feel even more helpless, more isolated.

She would rather die than let them get their hands on her again.

She must have tensed, because Zane gave her a light squeeze of reassurance. Swiftly she glanced at his face. He wasn't looking at her; instead he was concentrating on the fragile, half-rotted door that protected the entrance to their sanctuary, and on the voices beyond. His expression was utterly calm and distant. Abruptly she realized that he did understand Arabic, and whatever was being said by the people picking through the ruins of the building, he wasn't alarmed by it. He was alert, because their hiding place could be compromised at any moment, but evidently he felt confident of being able to handle that problem.

With reason, no doubt. From what she'd seen, she thought he was capable of handling just about any situation. She would trust him with her life—and had.

The voices went on for a long time, sometimes coming so close to their hiding place that Zane palmed that big pistol and held it aimed unwaveringly at the door. Barrie stared at that hand, so lean and powerful and capable. There wasn't the slightest tremor visible; it was almost unreal, almost inhuman, for any man to be that calm and have such perfect control over his body.

They sat silently in the warm, shadowy little room, their breathing for the most part their only movements. Barrie noticed that the blanket no longer covered her legs, but the shirt, thank God, kept her reasonably decent. It was too hot to lie under the blanket, anyway.

Time crept by at a sloth's pace. The warmth and silence were hypnotic, lulling her into a half dream state of both awareness and distance. She was ferociously hungry, but unaffected by it, as if she was merely aware of someone else's hunger. After a while her muscles began to ache from being in one position for so long, but that didn't matter, either. Thirst, though, was different. In the increasing heat, her need for water began to gnaw at her. The kidnappers had given her some water a couple of times, but she'd had nothing to drink in hours—since she had learned they expected her to relieve herself in their presence, in fact. She had chosen to do without water rather than provide them with such amusement again.

Sweat streaked down Zane's face and dampened his shirt. She was perfectly content to remain where she was, nestled against his side. The arm around her made her feel safer than if their hiding place had been constructed of steel, rather than crumbling stone and plaster, and rotting wood.

She had never been exposed to a man like him before. Her only contact with the military had been with the senior officers who attended functions at the embassy, colonels and generals, admirals, the upper brass; there were also the Marine guards at the embassy, with their perfect uniforms and perfect manners. Though she supposed the Marine guards had to be exemplary soldiers or they wouldn't have been chosen as embassy guards, still, they were nothing like the man who held her so protectively. They were soldiers; he was a warrior. He was as different from them as the lethal, ten-inch black blade strapped to his thigh was from a pocketknife. He was a finely honed weapon.

For all that, he wasn't immortal, and they weren't safe. Their hiding place could be discovered. He could be killed; she could be recaptured. The hard reality of that was something she couldn't ignore as she could hunger and cramped muscles.

After a long, long time, the voices went away. Zane released her and walked noiselessly to the door to look out. She had never before seen anyone move with such silent grace, like a big jungle cat on velvet paws instead of a battle-hardened warrior in boots.

She didn't move until he turned around, the faint relaxation of his expression telling her the danger was past. "What were they doing?" she asked, taking care to keep her voice low.

"Scavenging building materials, picking up blocks, any pieces of wood that hadn't rotted. If they'd had a sledgehammer, they probably would have dismantled these walls. They carted the stuff off in a wheelbarrow. If they need more, they'll probably be back."

"What will we do?"

"The same thing we did this time—hunker down and keep quiet."

"But if they come in here—"

"I'll handle it." He cut her worry short before she could completely voice it, but he did it with a tone of reassurance. "I brought some food and water. Interested?"

Barrie scrambled to her knees, eagerness in every line of her body. "Water! I'm so thirsty!" Then she halted, her recent experience fresh in her mind. "But if I drink anything, where will I go to... you know."

He regarded her with faint bemusement, and she blushed a little as she realized that wasn't a problem he normally encountered. When he and his men were on a mission, they would relieve themselves wherever and whenever they needed.

"I'll find a place for you to go," he finally said. "Don't let that stop you from drinking the water you need. I also found some clothes for you, but as hot as it's getting in here, you'll probably want to wait until night before you put them on."

He indicated the black bundle beside his gear, and she realized it was a robe. She thought of the modesty it would provide, and gratitude flooded her; at least she wouldn't have to face his men wearing nothing more than his shirt. But he was right; in the heat of day, and in the privacy of this small room, she would prefer wearing his shirt. They both knew she was bare beneath it; he'd already seen her stark naked, and demonstrated his decency by giving her the shirt and ignoring her nakedness, so there was no point now in swathing herself in an ankle-length robe.

He produced a big jug and unstoppered it. "It'll taste funny," he warned as he passed the jug to her. "Purification tablets."

It did taste funny—warm, with a chemical flavor. But it was wonderful. She drank a few swallows, not wanting to make her stomach cramp after being empty for so long. While she was drinking, he unwrapped the bits of food he'd procured—a loaf of hard bread, a hunk of cheese and several oranges, plums and dates. It looked like a feast.

He straightened the blanket for her to sit on, then took out his knife and cut small portions of both the loaf and cheese and gave them to her. She started to protest that she was hungry enough to eat much more than that, but realized that what he had would have to last them all day, and perhaps longer than that. She wasn't about to complain about the amount of food she did have.

She had never been particularly fond of cheese, and she suspected that if she hadn't been so hungry she wouldn't have been fond of this cheese, either, but at the moment it was delicious. She nibbled at both bread and cheese, finding satisfaction in the simple act of chewing. As it happened, she had overestimated her appetite. The small portion he had given her was more than enough.

He ate more heartily, and polished off one of the oranges. He insisted that she eat a couple of the juicy slices and drink a bit more water. Feeling replete, Barrie yawned and refused the offer of another orange slice.

"No, thanks, I'm full."

"Would you like to freshen up now?"

Her head whipped around, sending her red hair flying. Amusement twinkled in his pale eyes at her eager, pleading expression. "There's enough water?"

"Enough to dampen a bandana."

She didn't have a bandana, of course, but he did. Carefully he poured just enough water from the jug to wet the square cloth, then politely turned his back and busied himself with his gear.

Slowly Barrie smoothed the wet cloth over her face, sighing in pleasure at the freshness of the sensation. She hadn't realized how grimy she felt until now, when she was able to rectify the situation. She found a sore place on her cheek, where one of the men had hit her, and other tender bruises on her arms. Glancing at Zane's broad back, she quickly unbuttoned the shirt just enough that she could slide the handkerchief inside and rub it over her torso and under her arms. After she fastened the garment, her dusty legs got the same attention. The dampness was wonderfully cooling, almost voluptuous in the sensual delight it gave her.

"I'm finished," she said, and returned the dark bandana to him when he turned around. "It felt wonderful. Thank you."

Then her heart leaped in her chest, because he evidently felt the same need to cool off as she had, but unlike her, he didn't keep his shirt on. He peeled the snug black T-shirt off over his head and dropped it on the blanket, then sat on his heels while he moistened the bandana and began scrubbing it over his face.

Oh, my. Helplessly she stared at the rippling muscles of his chest and stomach, the way they flexed and relaxed with the flow of his movements. The dim light caught the deep bronze of his skin, gleamed on the smooth, powerful curve of his shoulder. Her fascinated gaze wandered over the slant of his shoulder blades, the diamond of black hair that stretched from nipple to nipple on his chest. He twisted around to reach for something, and she found his back equally fascinating, with the deep furrow of his spine bisecting two muscular planes.

There was an inch-long scar on his left cheekbone. She hadn't noticed it before because his face had been so dirty, but now she could plainly see the silvery line of it. It wasn't a disfiguring scar at all, just a straight little slash, as precise as a surgeon's cut. The scar along his rib cage was different, easily eight or nine inches in length, jagged, the scar tissue thick and ridged. Then there were the two round, puckered scars, one just above his waist, the other just below his right shoulder blade. Bullet wounds. She'd never seen one before, but she recognized them for what they were. There was another slash running along his right bicep, and God only knew how many other scars there were on the rest of his body. The warrior hadn't led a charmed life; his body bore the signs of battle.

He squatted half-naked, unconcernedly rubbing the damp handkerchief across his sweaty chest, lifting his arms to wash under them, exposing the smooth undersides and intriguing patches of hair. He was so fundamentally, elementally male, and so purely a warrior, that her breath strangled in her lungs as she watched him.

The rush of warmth through her body told her that she was more female than she'd ever imagined.

A little dazed, she sat back, resting against the wall. Absently she made certain the shirt tail preserved her modesty, but thoughts were tumbling through her mind, dizzyingly fast yet very clear.

They weren't out of danger yet.

During the past twenty-four horrific hours, she hadn't spent a lot of time wondering about the motive behind her kidnapping. She'd had too much to deal with as it was, the sheer terror, the confusion, the pain of the blows they'd given her.

She'd been blindfolded much of the time, and disoriented. She'd been humiliated, stripped naked and roughly fondled, taunted with the prospect of rape, and yet they had stopped short of rape—for a reason. Sheer psychological torture had undoubtedly played a role, but most of all they'd had orders to save her for the man who was to arrive today.

Who was he? He was the one behind her kidnapping; he had to be. But why?

Ransom? When she thought about it now, coolly and clearly, she didn't think so. Yes, her father was rich. Many a diplomat came from a moneyed background; it wasn't unusual. But if money had been the motive, there were others who were richer, though perhaps she had been chosen specifically because it was well known that her father would beggar himself to keep her safe. Perhaps.

But why would they have taken her out of the country? Wouldn't they have wanted to keep her close by, to make the exchange for money easier? No, the very fact that they'd taken her out of the country meant they'd kidnapped her for another reason. Maybe they would have asked for money anyway; since they already had her, why not? But money wasn't the primary object. So what was?

She didn't know, and since she didn't know who the leader was, she had no way of guessing what he truly wanted.

Not herself. She dismissed that notion out of hand. She wasn't the object of obsession, because no man so obsessed with a woman that he was driven to such lengths would let his men maul her. Nor was she the type to inspire obsession, she thought wryly. Certainly none of the men she'd dated had shown any signs of obsessive behavior.

So... there was something else, some piece of puzzle she was missing. Was it someone she knew? Something she'd read or seen?

Nothing came to mind. She wasn't involved in intrigue, though of course she knew which employees at the embassy were employed by the CIA. That was standard, nothing unusual. Her father often spoke privately with Art Sandefer and, lately, Mack Prewett, too. She'd often thought that Art was more bureaucrat than spy, though the intelligence in his tired gaze said he'd done his time in the field, too. She didn't know about Mack Prewett. There was something restless and hard about him, something that made her uneasy.

Her father said Mack was a good man. She wasn't certain about that, but neither did he seem like a villain. Still, there had been that time a couple of weeks ago when she hadn't known anyone was with her father and had breezily walked in without knocking. Her father had been handing a thick manila envelope to Mack; both of them had looked startled and uncomfortable, but her father wasn't a diplomat for nothing. He'd efficiently smoothed over the slight awkwardness, and Mack had left the office almost immediately, taking the envelope with him. Barrie hadn't asked any questions about it, because if it was CIA business, then it wasn't her business.

Now she wondered what had been in that envelope.

That small incident was the only thing the slightest bit untoward that she could remember. Art Sandefer had once said that there was no such thing as coincidence, but could that moment be linked to her kidnapping? Could it be the cause of it? That was a reach.

She didn't know what was in the envelope, hadn't shown any interest in it. But she had seen her father giving it to Mack Prewett. That meant... what?

She felt as if she was feeling her way through a mental maze, taking wrong turns, stumbling into dead ends, then groping her way back to logic. Her father would never, in any way, do anything that would harm her. Therefore, that envelope had no significance—unless he was involved in something dangerous and wanted out. Her kidnapping made sense only if someone was using her as a weapon to make her father do something he didn't want to do.

She couldn't accept the idea of her father doing anything traitorous—at least, not voluntarily. She wasn't blind to his weaknesses. He was a bit of a snob, he didn't at all like even the idea that someday she might fall in love and get married, he was protective to the point of smothering her. But he was an honorable man, and a truly patriotic man. It could be that the kidnappers were trying to force her father to do something, give them some information, perhaps, and he had resisted; she could be the means they were using to force him to do what they wanted.

That felt logical. The envelope probably had nothing at all to do with her kidnapping, and Art Sandefer was wrong about coincidence.

But what if he wasn't?

Then, despite her instincts about him, her father was involved in something he shouldn't be. The thought made her sick to her stomach, but she had to face the possibility, had to think of every angle. She had to face it, then put it aside, because there was nothing she could do about it now.

If the kidnappers had been going to use her as a weapon against her father, then they wouldn't give up. If it had just been ransom, they would have thrown up their hands at her supposed escape and said the Arabic equivalent of, "Ah, to hell with it."

The leader hadn't been here. She didn't even know where "here" was; she'd had too much on her mind to ask questions about her geographic location.

"Where are we?" she murmured, thinking she really should know.

Zane lifted his eyebrows. He was sitting down, lounging against the wall at a right angle to her, having finished cleaning up, and she wondered how long she'd been lost in thought. "The waterfront district," he said. "It's a rough section of town."

"I meant, what town?" she clarified.

Realization dawned in his crystal clear eyes. "Benghazi," he said softly. "Libya."

Libya. Stunned, she absorbed the news, then went back to the mental path she'd been following.

The leader had been flying in today. From where? Athens? If he'd been in contact with his men, he would know she'd somehow escaped. But if he had access to the embassy, and to her father, then he would also know that she hadn't been returned to the embassy. Therefore, she would logically still be in Libya. Also logically, they would be actively searching for her.

She looked at Zane again. His eyes were half-closed, he looked almost asleep. Because of the heat, he hadn't put his T-shirt back on. But despite the drowsy look on his face, she sensed that he was vitally aware of everything going on around them, that he was merely letting his body rest while his mind remained on guard.

After the humiliation and pain her guards had dealt her, Zane's concern and consideration had been like a balm, soothing her, helping to heal her bruised emotions before she even had time to know how deep the damage went. Almost before she knew it, she had been responding to him as a woman does to a man, and somehow that was all right.

He was the exact opposite of the thugs who had so delighted in humiliating her. Those thugs were probably searching all over the city for her, and until she was out of this country, the possibility existed that they would recapture her. And if they did, this time there would be no respite.

No. It was intolerable. But if the unthinkable happened, she would be damned if she would give them the satisfaction they'd been anticipating. She would be damned if she would let them take her virginity.

She had never thought of her virginity as anything other than a lack of experience and inclination. At school in Switzerland there had been precious few opportunities for meeting boys, and she hadn't been particularly interested in those she had met. After she left school, her father's protective possessiveness, as well as her duties at the embassy, had restricted any social life she might have developed. The men she met hadn't seemed any more | interesting than the few boys she had met while in school. With AIDS added in as a threat, it simply hadn't seemed worth the risk to have sex simply for the experience.

But she had dreamed. She had dreamed of meeting a man, growing to love him, making love with him. Simple, universal dreams.

The kidnappers had almost taken all that from her, almost wrecked her dream of loving a man by abusing her so severely that, if she had remained in their hands much longer, she knew she would have been so severely traumatized that she might never have been able to love a man or tolerate his touch. If Zane hadn't taken her out of there, her first sexual experience would have been one of rape.

No. A thousand times no.

Even if they managed to recapture her, she wouldn't let them murder that dream.

Scrambling to her feet, Barrie took the few steps to where Zane lounged against the wall. She saw his muscled body come to alertness at her action, though he didn't move. She stood over him, staring at him with green eyes burning in the dim light. The look he gave her was hooded, unreadable.

"Make love to me," she said in a raw voice.

Chapter 5

"Barrie..." he began, his tone kind, and she knew he was going to refuse.

"No!" she said fiercely. "Don't tell me I should think about it, or that I really don't want to do it. I know what I went through with those bastards. I know you don't believe it, but they didn't rape me. But they looked at me, they touched me, and I couldn't stop them." She stopped and drew a deep breath, steadying herself. "I'm not stupid. I know we're still in danger, that you and your men could be wounded or even killed trying to rescue me and that I could end up back in their hands anyway. I've never made love before, with anyone. I don't want my first time to be rape, do you understand? I don't want them to have that satisfaction. I want the first time to be with you."

She had surprised him, she saw, and she had already noticed that Zane Mackenzie wasn't a man whose expression revealed much of what he was thinking. He sat up straight, his pale eyes narrowed as he examined her with a piercing gaze.

He was still going to refuse, and she didn't think she could bear it. "I promise," she blurted desperately. "They didn't do that to me. I can't have any disease, if that's what you're worried about."

"No," he said, his voice suddenly sounding strained. "That isn't what I'm worried about."

"Don't make me beg," she pleaded, wringing her hands together, aware that she was already doing exactly that.

Then the expression in those pale eyes softened, grew warmer. "I won't," he said softly, and rose to his feet with that powerful, feline grace of his. He towered over her, and for a moment Barrie felt the difference in their sizes so sharply that she wondered wildly what she thought she was doing. Then he moved past her to the blanket; he knelt and smoothed it, then dropped down on it, stretching out on his back, and watched her with a world of knowledge in his slightly remote, too-old eyes.

He knew. And until she read that knowledge in his eyes, she hadn't even been aware of what she really needed. But watching him lie down and put himself at her service, something inside her shattered. He knew. He understood the emotions roiling deep inside her, understood what had brought her to him with her fierce, startling demand. It wasn't just that she wanted her first time to be of her own volition, with the man of her choice; the kidnappers had taken something from her, and he was giving it back. They had tied her down, stripped her, humiliated her, and she had been helpless to stop them. Zane was giving control back to her, reassuring her and at the same time subtly letting her exact her vengeance against the male of the species.

She didn't want to lie helpless beneath him. She wanted to control this giving of her body, wanted things to move at her pace instead of his, wanted to be the one who decided how much, how far, how fast.

And he was going to let her do it.

He was giving control of his body to her.

She could barely breathe as she sank to her knees beside him. The warm, bare, richly tanned flesh lured her hands closer, closer, until the urge overcame her nervousness and her fingers lightly skimmed over his stomach, his chest. Her heart hammered wildly. It was like petting a tiger, knowing how dangerous the animal was but fascinated beyond resistance by the rich pelt. She wanted to feel all of that power under her hands. Carefully she flattened her hands along his ribs, molding his flesh beneath her palms, feeling the resilience of skin over the powerful bands of muscle and, beneath that, the strong solidity of bone. She could feel the rhythmic thud of his heartbeat, the expansion of his ribs as he breathed.

Both heartbeat and breathing seemed fast. Swiftly she glanced at his face and blushed at what she saw there, the heat in his heavy-lidded eyes, the deepened color of his lips. She knew what lust looked like; she'd seen the cruel side of it on the faces of her captors, and now she saw the pleasurable side of it in Zane. It startled her, because somehow she hadn't considered lust in the proposition she'd made to him, and her hands fell away from his body.

His lips parted in a curl of amusement that revealed the gleam of white teeth, and she felt her heart almost stop. His smile was even more potent than she'd expected. "Yeah, I'm turned on," he said softly. "I have to be, or this won't work."

He was right, of course, and her blush deepened. That was the trouble with inexperience. Though she knew the mechanics of lovemaking, and once or twice her escort for the evening had kissed her with unexpected ardor and held her close enough for her to tell that he was aroused, still, she'd never had to deal directly with an erection—until now.

This particular one was there for her bidding. Furtively she glanced at the front of his pants, at the ridge pushing against the cloth.

"We don't have to do this," he offered once again, and Barrie flared from hesitance to determination.

"Yes, I do."

He moved his hands to his belt. "Then I'd better—"

Instantly she stopped him, pushing his hands up and away, forcing them down on each side of his head. "I'll do it," she said, more fiercely than she'd intended. This was her show.

"All right," he murmured, and again she knew that he understood. Her show, her control, every step of the way. He relaxed against the blanket, closing his eyes as if he was going to take a nap.

It was easier, knowing he wasn't watching her, which of course had been his intention. Barrie didn't want to fumble, didn't want to underline her inexperience any more than she already had, so before she reached for his belt she studied the release mechanism for a moment to make certain she understood it. She didn't give herself time to lose her nerve. She simply reached out, opened the belt and unfastened his pants. Under the pants were black swim trunks. Puzzled, Barrie stared at them. Swim trunks?

Then she understood. He was a SEAL; the acronym stood for SEa, Air and Land. He was at home in all three elements, capable of swimming for miles. Since Benghazi was a seaport, that was probably how his team had infiltrated, from the sea. Maybe they'd used some sort of boat to reach land, but it was possible they'd been dropped off some distance from the port and had swum the rest of the way.

He had risked his life to save her, was still doing so, and now he was giving her his body. Everything inside her squeezed tight, and she trembled from the rush of emotion. Oh, God. She had learned more about herself in the past twenty-four hours than in the entire past twenty-five years of her life. Perhaps the experience had changed her. Either way, something had happened inside her, something momentous, and she was learning how to deal with it.

She had let her father wrap her in a suffocating blanket of protection for fifteen years; she couldn't blame him for it, because she'd needed that blanket. But that time was past. Fate had pitched her headlong into life, ripped her out of her protective cocoon, and like a butterfly, she couldn't draw the silken threads back around her. All she could do was reach out for the unknown.

She slipped her hands under the waistband of the swim trunks and began working them, and his pants, down his hips. He levered his pelvis off the ground to aid her. "Don't take them all the way off," he murmured, still keeping his eyes closed and his hands resting beside his head. "I can handle things if I get caught with my pants down, but if they're completely off, it would slow me down some."

Despite her nervousness, Barrie smiled at that supreme self-confidence, the wry humor. If he wasn't so controlled, he could be described as cocky. He had no doubt whatsoever about his fighting ability.

Her hands stroked down his buttocks as she slipped her hands inside his garments. An unexpected frisson of pleasure rippled through her at the feel of his butt, cool and smooth, hard with muscle, lush connoisseurs would envy her the moment, and she wished she had the nerve to linger, to fully appreciate this male perfection. Instead she tugged at his clothes, pulling them down to the middle of his thighs. He relaxed, letting his hips settle on the blanket again, and Barrie studied the startling reality of a naked man. She'd read books that described sexual arousal, but seeing it firsthand, and at close range, was far more impressive and wondrous.

Blindly she reached out, her hand drawn as if by a magnet. She touched him, stroking one fingertip down the length of his swollen sex. It pulsed and jerked upward, as if following the caress. He inhaled sharply. His reaction wanned her, and the tightness in her chest, her body, clenched once more, then began to loosen with that rush of warmth. Bolder now, she folded her fingers around him, gently sighing with pleasure as she felt the heat beneath the coolness, iron beneath silk, the urgent throbbing.

And she felt her own desire, rushing like a heated river through her flesh, turning angry determination into love-making. This is how it should be, she thought with relief; they should come together in pleasure, not in anger. And she didn't want to wait, didn't want to give herself time to reconsider, or she would lose her nerve.

Swiftly she straddled him, mounted him. No longer in anger at other men, no longer in desperation. Pleasure, warm and sweet. With her knees clasping his hips, acting on instinct, she held the thick shaft in position and slowly sank down on him, guiding their bodies together.

The first brush of his flesh against hers was hot, startling, and she instinctively jerked herself upright, away from the alien touch. Zane quivered, the barest ripple of reaction, then once more lay motionless between her legs, his eyes still closed, letting her proceed at her own pace.

Her chest was so constricted she could barely breathe; she sucked in air in quick little gasps. That contact, brief as it had been, had touched off an insistent throbbing between her legs, as if her body, after its initial startled rejection, had paused in instinctive recognition of female for male. Her breasts felt tight and feverish beneath the black fabric of his shirt. Alien, yes... but infinitely exciting. Desire wound through her, the river rising.

She told herself that she was prepared for the sudden acute sense of vulnerability, for her body's panic at the threat of penetration, even though desire was urging her on to that very conclusion. More gingerly, she settled onto him again, holding herself steady as she placed him against the entrance to her body and let her weight begin to impale her on the throbbing column of flesh.

The discomfort began immediately and was worse than she'd expected. She halted her movement, gulping as she tried to control her instinctive flinching away from the source of pain. He was breathing deeply, too, she noticed, though that was the only motion he made. She pushed harder, gritting her teeth against the burning sensation of being stretched, and then she couldn't bear any more and jerked herself off him. This time the discomfort between her legs didn't go away but continued to burn.

It wasn't going to get any better, she told herself. She might as well go ahead and do it. Breathing raggedly, once more she lowered herself onto him. Tears burned in her eyes as she struggled to complete the act. Why wouldn't it just go in? The pressure between her legs was enormous, intolerable, and a sob caught in her throat as she surged upward.

"Help me," she begged, her voice almost inaudible.

Slowly his eyes opened, and she almost flinched at the pale fire that burned there. He moved just one hand, the right one. Gently he touched her cheek, his callused fingertips rough and infinitely tender; then he trailed them down her throat and lightly over the shirt to her left breast, where they lingered for a heart-stopping moment at her nipple, then finally down to the juncture of her legs.

The caress was as light as a whisper. It lingered between her legs, teasing, brushing, stroking. She went very still, her body poised as she concentrated on this new sensation. Her eyes closed as all her senses focused on his hand and what it was doing, the way he was touching her. It was delicious, but not... quite... enough. He tantalized her with the promise of something more, something that was richer, more powerful, and yet that lightly stroking finger never quite touched her where she wanted. Barrie inhaled deeply, her nipples rising in response. Her entire body hung in suspense. She waited, waited for the gentle touch to brush her with ecstasy, waited.... Her hips moved, her body instinctively seeking, following his finger.

Ah. There. Just for a moment, there, A low moan bubbled up in her throat as pleasure shot through her. She waited for him to repeat the caress, but instead his fingers moved maddeningly close, teasing and retreating. Again her hips followed, and again she was rewarded by that lightning flash of pure sensation.

A subtle, sensual dance began. He led, and she followed. The just-right touches came more often, the pleasure became more shattering as the intensity built with each repetition. Between her legs, his male shaft still probed for entrance, and somehow each movement of her hips seemed to ease him a bit closer to that goal. Her body rocked, swaying in the ancient rhythm of desire, surging and retreating like the tides. She could feel him stretching her, feel the discomfort sharpened by her movements. . .and yet the desire lured her onward like a Lorelei, and somehow she began to need him inside her, need him to the point that the pain no longer mattered. She braced her hands on his chest, and her movements changed, lifting and falling rather than swaying side to side. His touch changed, too, suddenly pressing directly on the place where she most wanted it.

She bit her lip to keep from crying out. His thumb rubbed insistently, releasing a torrent, turning the warm river into something wild and totally beyond her control. She was so hot that she was burning up with desire, aching with emptiness. The pain no longer mattered; she had to have what his body promised, what hers needed. With a low moan she pressed downward, forcing her soft flesh to admit the intruder. She felt the resistance, the inner giving; then suddenly his hot, swollen sex pushed up inside her.

It hurt. It hurt a lot. She froze in place, and her eyes flew open, huge with distress. Their gazes locked, hers dark with pain, his burning with ruthlessly restrained desire. Suddenly she became aware of how taut the muscled body beneath her was, how much his control was costing him. But he had promised to let her set the pace, and he had kept that promise, moving only when she had asked for help.

Part of her wanted to stop, but a deeper, more powerful instinct kept her astride him. She could feel him throbbing inside her, feel the answering tightening of her body, as if the flesh knew more than the mind, and perhaps it did. He tensed even more. His skin gleamed with sweat, his heartbeat hammered beneath her palm. She felt a jolt of excitement at having this supremely male, incredibly dangerous warrior as hers to command, just for this time suspended from reality. They had met only hours ago; they had only hours left before they would likely never see each other again. But for now he was hers, embedded inside her, and she wasn't going to forgo a moment of the experience.

"What do I do now?" she whispered.

"Just keep moving," he whispered in return, and she did.

Rising. Falling. Lifting herself almost off him, then sinking down. Over and over, until she forgot about the pain and lost herself in the primeval joy. His hand remained between her legs, continuing the caress that urged her onward, even though she no longer needed to be urged. She moved on him, faster and faster, taking him deeper and deeper. His powerful body flexed between her thighs, arching, and a growl rumbled in his throat. Immediately he forced himself to lie flat again, chained by his promise.

Up. Down. Again. And again, the crescendo building inside her, the heat rising to an unbearable fever, the tension coiling tighter and tighter, until she felt as if she would shatter if she moved another muscle. She froze in place over him, whimpering, unable to push herself over the final hurdle.

The growl rumbled in his throat again. No, deeper than a growl; it was the sound of a human volcano exploding from the forces pent up inside. His control broke, and he moved, fiercely clamping both hands on her hips and pulling her down hard even as he arched once more and thrust himself in her to the hilt. He hadn't gone so deep before; she hadn't taken that much of him. The sensation was electric. She stifled a scream as he convulsed beneath her, heaving upward between her thighs, lifting her so that her knees left the ground. His head was thrown back, his neck corded with the force of his release, his teeth bared. Barrie felt the hot spurting of his release, felt him so deep inside her that he was touching the very center of her being, and it was enough to push her over the edge.

Pure lightning speared through her. She heard herself cry out, a thin cry of ecstasy that nothing could stifle. All her inner muscles contracted around him, relaxed, squeezed again, over and over, as if her body was drinking from his.

Finally the storm subsided, leaving her weak and shaking. Her bones had turned to jelly, and she could no longer sit upright. Helplessly she collapsed forward, folding on him like a house of cards caught in an earthquake. He caught her, easing her down so that she lay on his chest, and he wrapped his arms around her as she lay there gasping and sobbing. She hadn't meant to cry, didn't understand why the tears kept streaming down her face. "Zane," she whispered, and couldn't say anything more.

His big, hard hands stroked soothingly up and down her back. "Are you okay?" he murmured, and there was something infinitely male and intimate in his deep voice, an undertone of satisfaction and possessiveness,

Barrie gulped back the tears, forcing herself to coherency. "Yes," she said in a thin, waterlogged tone. "I didn't know it would hurt so much. Or feel so good," she added, because she was crying for both reasons. Odd, that she should have been as unprepared for the pleasure as she had been for the pain. She felt overwhelmed, unbalanced. Had she truly been so foolish as to think she could perform such an intimate act and remain untouched emotionally? If she had been capable of that kind of mental distance she wouldn't have remained a virgin until now. She would have found a way around her father's obsessive protectiveness if she had wanted to, if any man had ever elicited one-tenth the response in her this warrior had aroused within two minutes of their meeting. If her rescuer had been any other man, she wouldn't have asked such an intimate favor of him.

Their lovemaking had forged a link between them, a bond of the flesh that was far stronger and went far deeper than she'd imagined. Despite her chastity, had she believed the modern, permissive notion that making love could have no more lasting meaning than simple fun, like riding a roller coaster? Maybe, for some people, sex could be as trivial as a carnival ride, but she would never again think of lovemaking as anything that shallow. True love-making was deep and elemental, and she knew she would never be the same. She hadn't been from the moment he had given her his shirt and she had fallen in love with him. Without even seeing his face, she had fallen in love with the essence of the man, his strength and decency. It wouldn't have mattered if, when morning came, his features had been ugly or twisted with scars. In the darkness of that barren room, and the darkness of her heart, she had already seen beneath whatever lay on the surface, and she had loved him. It was that simple, and that difficult.

Just because she felt that way didn't mean he did. Barrie knew what a psychologist would say. It was the white-knight syndrome, the projection of larger-than-life characteristics onto a person because of the circumstances. Patients fell in love with their doctors and nurses all the time. Zane had simply been doing his job in rescuing her, white to her it had meant her life, because she hadn't for a moment supposed that her captors would let her live. She owed him her life, would have been grateful to him for the rest of that life—but she didn't think she would have loved just any man who had crawled through that window. She loved Zane.

She lay silently on him, her head nestled against his throat, their bodies still linked. She could feel the strong rhythm of his heartbeat thudding against her breasts, could feel his chest expand with each breath. His hot, musky scent excited her more than the most expensive cologne. She felt more at home here, lying with him on a blanket in the midst of a shattered building, than she ever had in the most luxurious and protected environment.

She knew none of the details of his life. She didn't know how old he was, where he was from, what he liked to eat or read or what programs he watched on television. She didn't know if he'd ever been married.

Married. My God, she hadn't even asked. She felt suddenly sick to her stomach. If he was married, then he wouldn't be the man she had thought he was, and she had just made the biggest mistake of her life.

But neither would the fault be entirely his. She had begged him, and he had given her more than one chance to change her mind. She didn't think she could bear it if he'd made love to her out of pity.

She drew a deep breath, knowing she had to ask. Ignorance might be bliss, but she couldn't allow herself that comfort. If she had done something so monumentally wrong, she wanted to know.

"Are you married?" she blurted.

He didn't even tense but lay utterly relaxed beneath her. One hand slid up her back and curled itself around her neck. "No," he said in that low voice of his. "You can take your claws out of me now." The words were lazily amused.

She realized she was digging her fingernails into his chest and hastily relaxed her fingers. Distressed, she said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you."

"There's pain, and there's pain," he said comfortably. "Bullets and knives hurt like hell. In comparison, a little she-cat's scratching doesn't do much damage."

"She-cat?" Barrie didn't know if she should be affronted or amused. After a brief struggle, amusement won. None of her friends or associates would ever have described her in such terms. She'd heard herself described as ladylike, calm, circumspect, conscientious, but certainly never as a she-cat.

"Mmm." The sound was almost like a purr in his throat. His hard fingers lazily massaged her neck, while his other hand slipped down her back to burrow under the shirt and curl possessively over her bottom. His palm burned her flesh like a brand. "Dainty. And you like being stroked."

She couldn't deny that, not when he was the one doing the stroking. The feel of his hand on her bottom was startlingly erotic. She couldn't help wiggling a little, and then gasped as she felt the surge of his flesh inside her. His breath caught, too, and his fingers dug into the cleft of her buttocks.

"I need to ask you a couple of questions," he said, and his voice sounded strained.

Barrie closed her eyes, once again feeling the warm loosening deep inside that signaled the return of desire. That had been a remarkable sensation, when his sex had expanded inside her, both lengthening and getting thicker. Oh, dear. She wanted to do it again, but she didn't think she had the strength. "What?" she murmured, distracted by what was happening between her legs.

"Did you get rid of the ghosts?"

Ghosts. He meant her lingering horror at the way those men had touched her. She thought about it and realized, with some surprise, that she had. She was still angry at the way she'd been treated, and she would dearly love to have Zane's pistol in her hands and those men in her sights, even though she'd never held a pistol before in her life. But the wounded, feminine part of her had triumphed by finding pleasure in making love with Zane, and in doing so she had healed herself. Pleasure... somehow the word fell far short of what she had experienced. Even ecstasy didn't quite describe the intensity, the sensation of imploding, melting, becoming utterly lost in her physical self.

"Yes," she whispered. "The ghosts are gone."

"Okay." His voice still sounded strained. "Second question. Will that damn shirt have to be surgically removed?"

She was startled into sitting upright. The action drove him deeper inside her and wrenched a sharp gasp from her, a groan from him. Panting, she stared at him. They had just made love—were, in fact, still making love—but the shirt she wore was what had kept her from going to pieces when he'd first found her, had given her the nerve to run barefoot down dark alleys, had become the symbol of a lot more than just modesty. Maybe she wasn't as recovered as she'd thought. The kidnappers had stripped her, forced her to be naked in front of them, and when Zane had first entered the room and seen her that way, she had been mortified. She didn't know if she could be naked with him now, if she could let him see the body that had been pinched and bruised by other men.

His crystal clear gaze was calm, patient. Again he understood. He knew what he was asking of her. He could have left things as they were, but he wanted more. He wanted her trust, her openness, with no dark secrets between them.

He wanted them to become lovers.

The realization was sharp, almost painful. They had loved each other physically, but with restraint like a wall between them. He had done what she had asked of him, had held himself back until the last moment, when his climax had shattered his control. Now he was asking something of her, asking her to give as he had given.

Almost desperately she clutched the front of the shirt. "I—they left marks on me."

"I've seen bruises before." He reached up and gently touched her cheek. "You have one right here, as a matter of fact."

Instinctively she reached up to the cheek he'd touched, feeling the tenderness. As soon as she released the front of the shirt, he moved his hands to the buttons and slowly began unfastening them, giving her time to protest. She bit her lip, fighting the urge to grab the widening edges of the cloth and hold them together.

When the garment was open all the way down, he slid his hands inside and cupped her breasts, his palms hot as they covered the cool mounds. Her nipples tingled as they hardened, reaching out for the contact. "The bruises shame them," he murmured. "Not you."

She closed her eyes as she sat astride him, feeling him hard and hot inside her, his hands just as hard and hot on her breasts. She didn't protest when his hands left her breasts, left them feeling oddly tight and aching, while he pushed the black shirt off her shoulders. The fabric puddled around her arms, and he lifted each in turn, slipping them free.

She was naked. The warm air brushed against her bare skin with the lightest of touches, and then she felt his fingertips doing the same, trailing so gently over each of the dark marks on her shoulders, her arms and breasts, her stomach, that she barely felt him. "Lean down," he said.

Slowly she obeyed, guided by his hands, down, down— and he lifted his head, meeting her mouth with his.

Their first kiss... and they'd already made love. Bar-rie was shocked at how she could have been so foolish as to forgo the pleasure of his kisses. His lips were firm, warm, hungry. She sank against him with a little sound of mingled surprise and delight humming in her throat. Her breasts flattened against him, the crisp hair on his chest rasping her ultrasensitive nipples, another joy she had unknowingly skipped.

Oh, this was delicious. His tongue probed for entrance, and she immediately gave it.

Several minutes later he let his head drop to the blanket. He was panting slightly, his eyes heavy-lidded. "I have another question."

"What?" She didn't want to give up the delights of his mouth. She'd never enjoyed kissing so much before, but he was diabolically good at it. She followed him down, nipping at his lower Up, depositing hot little kisses.

He chuckled beneath her mouth. The deep, rusty sound charmed her. She sensed that his laughter was even rarer than his smiles, therefore doubly precious.

"Will you let me be on top this time?"

The question surprised her into laughter. She stifled it as best she could, burying her head against his neck, but her body shook with giggles. He slipped out of her, making her laugh even harder. She was still laughing when he wrapped one strong arm around her and rolled, lifting her so they didn't roll off the blanket, efficiently tucking her beneath him and settling between her legs. Her laughter caught on a gasp as he surged heavily into her.

Her senses swam as she was bombarded by new feelings, when she had already experienced so much. She'd known he was a big man, but lying beneath him sharply brought home the difference in their sizes. Though he propped his weight on his forearms to keep from crushing her, she still felt the heaviness of that iron-muscled body. His shoulders were so broad that he dwarfed her, wrapped around her, shielded her. When she had been on top, she had controlled the depth of his penetration. The control was his now, her thighs spread wide by his hips. He felt bigger, harder than he had before.

He waited a moment to see how she would accept the vulnerability of her position. But she didn't feel vulnerable, she realized. She felt utterly secure, buffered by his strength. Tremulously she smiled at him and lifted her arms to wind them around his neck.

He smiled in return. And then Zane Mackenzie made love to her.

Chapter 6

There seemed to be scarcely a moment for the test of the day when they weren't making love, resting from making love or about to make love. The sounds of the waterfront surrounded them, the low bellow of ships, truck horns, the sounds of chains and cranes, but inside that small, dim room there seemed to be nothing else in the world but each other. Barrie lost herself in the force of his unbridled sensuality and discovered within herself a passion that matched his. The need to be quiet only added to the intensity.

He kissed the bruises on her breasts and sucked her nipples until they throbbed with pleasure. His beard-stubbled chin rasped against her breasts, her belly, but he was always careful not to cause her pain as he searched for all the other bruises on her body and paid them the same tender homage.

"Tell me how they hurt you," he murmured, "and I'll make it better."

At first Barrie shied away from divulging the details, even to him, but as the hot afternoon wore on and he pleasured her so often she was drunk with the overload on her senses, it began to seem pointless to keep anything from him. Haltingly she began to whisper things to him.

"Like this?" he asked, repeating the action that had so upset her—except it wasn't the same. What had been meant to punish at the hands of the kidnappers became purest pleasure in Zane Mackenzie's hands. He caressed her until her body forgot those other touches, until it remembered only him.

She whispered another detail, and he wiped out that memory, too, replacing the bad with caresses that lifted her to peak after sensual peak. She couldn't imagine being handled more tenderly than he handled her, or with such delight. He didn't try to hide how much he enjoyed looking at her, touching her, making love to her. He reveled in her body, in the contrast between her soft curves and his hard muscularity. It aroused her to be the focus of such intense masculine pleasure, to feel his absorption with the texture of her skin, the curve of her breast, the snug sheathing between her legs. He explored her; he petted her, he drowned her in sexuality. The area around them was still so busy they didn't dare converse much, so they communicated with their bodies.

Three times, while they were lying drowsily in the aftermath of loving, he checked his watch and reached for the headset radio. He would click it once, listen, then put it aside.

"Your men?" she asked, after the first time.

He nodded. "They're hiding out, waiting until it's safe to rendezvous."

Then the chatter of voices outside became louder as some people approached, and they fell silent.

The afternoon wore on, and the light began to dim. She wasn't particularly hungry, but Zane insisted that she eat. He pulled up his pants; she once more donned his shirt. More formally attired now, they sat close together on the blanket and finished off the bread and fruit, but neither of them wanted any of the cheese. The water was warm and still tasted of chemicals. Barrie sat within the curve of his arm and dreaded leaving.

She wanted to be safe and comfortable again, but she hated to lose this closeness with Zane, this utter reliance and companionship and intimacy. She wouldn't push him to continue their relationship; under the circumstances, he might feel responsible and think he would have to let her down gradually, and she didn't want to put him in that position. If he indicated that he wanted to see her afterward, then... why, then her heart would fly.

But even if he did, it would be difficult for them to see each other regularly. He was more than just a military man; he was a SEAL. Much of what he did couldn't be discussed. He would have a home base, duties, missions. If they escaped safely, the danger to him didn't end there. A chill settled around her heart when she thought of the times in the future when, because it was his job, he would calmly and deliberately walk into a deadly situation. While they were hidden in this small room might be the only time she could ever be certain he was safe and unharmed.

The fear and uncertainty would almost drive her mad, but she would endure them, she would endure anything, for the opportunity to see him, to grow closer to him. Their relationship, if there was to be one, would have to grow in reverse. Usually people came to know each other, grew to trust and care, and then became lovers; they had become lovers almost immediately, and now they would have to get to know each other, find out all the quirks and personal history and tastes that made them individuals.

When she got back, she would have to deal with her father. He must be frantic, and once she was safely home, he would be even more paranoid and obsessive. But if Zane wanted her, she would have to deliberately hurt her father's feelings for the first time in her life; he would be supplanted as number one in her life. Most parents handled the change in their offsprings' lives with happiness, assuming the chosen mate was decent, but Barrie knew it wouldn't matter who she fell in love with, her father would be opposed to him. No man, to him, was good enough for her. Even more, he would bitterly resent anything that would take her out of his protection. She was all he had left of his family, and it didn't help that she greatly resembled her mother. As ambassador, her father had a very active social life, but he'd only ever loved one woman, and that was her mother.

She would never turn her back on her father, because she loved him dearly, but if the chance for a relationship, possibly a lifetime, with Zane was in the balance, she would put as much distance between herself and her father as necessary until he accepted the situation.

She was planning her life around dreams, she thought wryly as she brushed the bread crumbs from the blanket. She would do better to let the future take care of itself and concern herself with how they were going to get out of Benghazi.

"What time do we leave?"

"After midnight. We'll give most people time to get settled down for the night." He turned to her with the heavy-lidded gaze she had already learned signaled arousal and, reaching out, he began to unbutton her shirt. "Hours," he whispered.

Afterward they lay close together, despite the heat, and dozed. She didn't know how long it was before she woke, but when she did it was to almost total darkness. Unlike the night before, though, when she had lain in cold, lonely terror, now she was pressed against Zane's side, and his arms securely held her. Her head was pillowed on his shoulder, one bare leg was hooked over his hips. She stretched a bit and yawned, and his arms tightened, letting her know that he was awake. Perhaps he had never slept at all, but had held her and safeguarded her. The noise beyond the ruined building had died down; even the sounds from the docks were muted, as if the darkness smothered them.

"How much longer?" she asked, sitting up to fumble for the jug of water. She found it and drank; the taste wasn't too bad, she decided. Maybe she was becoming used to the chemicals, whatever they were.

He peeled the cover from his watch so he could see the luminous dial. "Another few hours. I need to check in with the guys in a couple of minutes."

She passed the water jug to him, and he drank. They lay back down, and she cuddled close. She put her right hand on his chest and felt the strong, healthy thudding of his heart. Idly she twirled her fingers in the crisp hairs, delighting in the textures of his body.

"What happens then? When we leave, I mean."

"We get out of the city, make our rendezvous point just at sunrise, and we're picked up."

He made it sound so simple, so easy. She remembered the swim trunks he wore and lifted her head to frown at him, even though she knew he couldn't see her. "Is our rendezvous point on dry land?"

"Not exactly."

"I see. I hope you have a boat?" It was a question, not a statement.

"Not exactly."

She caught his chest hairs and gave them a tug. "Exactly what do you have?"

"Ouch!" Snagging her hand, he disentangled it and lifted it to his mouth, lightly brushing his lips across her knuckles. "Exactly, we have a Zodiac, a seven-man, motorized inflatable craft. My team came in short two men, so there are only six of us. We'll be able to fit you in."

"I'm so glad." She yawned and snuggled her head more securely into the hollow of his shoulder. "Did you leave someone behind so there would be room for me?"

"No," he said shortly. "We're undermanned because of a problem I'll have to take care of when we get back. If there had been any other team available, we wouldn't be here, but we were the closest, and we needed to get you out in a hurry, before they moved you."

His tone dissuaded her from asking about the problem that put him in such a black mood, but she'd seen him in action; she knew she wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of his anger when he got back. She waited while he picked up the .headset and checked in with his men, then returned to her questions.

"Where do we go in the Zodiac?"

"Out to sea," he said simply. "We radio ahead, and we'll be picked up by a helicopter from the Montgomery, an aircraft carrier. You'll be flown home from the carrier."

"What about you?" she whispered. "Where will you go?" That was as close as she would allow herself to get to asking him about his future plans.

"I don't know. My team was performing exercises on the Montgomery, but that's blown to hell now, with two of them injured. I'll have to clean up that mess, and I don't know how long it will take."

He didn't know where he would be, or if he did, he wasn't saying. Neither was he saying that he would call her, though he did know where she would be. Barrie closed her eyes and listened painfully to all that he wasn't saying. The hurt was worse than she'd anticipated, but she closed it off in a place deep inside. Later it would come out, but if she only had a few hours left with him, she didn't intend to waste them crying about what might have been. Few women would have a chance to even know a man like Zane Mackenzie, much less love him. She was greedy; she wanted it all, wanted everything, but even this little bit was more than a lot of people experienced, and she would have to be grateful for that.

Whatever happened, she could never return to the safe little cocoon her father had fashioned for her. She couldn't let herself forget the kidnapping and the unknown why of it. Of course, her father would know why; the kidnapper would already have made his demands. But Barrie wanted to know the reason, too; after all, she had been more directly affected than anyone else.

Lightly Zane touched her nipple, circling it with his callused fingertips and bringing it erect. "I know you have to be sore," he said, sliding his hand down her belly to nestle it between her legs. "But can you take me again?" With the utmost care he eased one long finger into her; Barrie winced, but didn't flinch away from htm. Yes, she was sore; she had been sore since the first time. She had discovered that the discomfort was easily discounted when the rewards were so great.

"I could be persuaded," she whispered, sliding her hand down his belly to measure his immediate seriousness. She found that he was very serious. Granted, she had no experience against which to compare this, but she had read magazine articles and knew that usually only teenage boys and very young men could maintain this pace. Maybe it was because he was in such superb physical condition. Maybe she was just lucky, though twenty-four hours before she hadn't thought so. But circumstances had changed, and so had she.

Fate had given her this man for now, and for a few more hours, she thought as he leaned over her and his mouth captured hers. She would make the most of it.

* * *

Once mote he led her through the maze of alleys, but this time she was clad in the enveloping black robe, and a chador covered her hair. Her feet were protected by slippers, which were a little too big and kept slipping up and down on her heels, but at least she wasn't barefoot. It felt strange to have on clothes, especially so many, even though she was bare underneath the robe.

Zane was once more rigged out with his gear and weaponry, and with the donning of those things he had become subtly more remote, almost icily controlled, the way he'd been the night before when he'd first found her. Barrie sensed his acute alertness and guessed that he was concentrating totally on the job at hand. She silently followed him, keeping her head a little bowed as a traditional Muslim woman would do.

He halted at the corner of a building and sank to his haunches, motioning for her to do the same. Barrie copied him and took the extra precaution of drawing the chador across her face.

"Two, this is One. How's it looking?" Once more he was speaking in that toneless whisper that barely carried to her, though she was right behind him. After a moment he said, "See you in ten."

He glanced around at Barrie. "It's a go. We don't have to shift to Plan C."

"What was Plan C?" she whispered.

"Run like hell for Egypt," he said calmly. "It's about two hundred miles due east."

He would do it, too, she realized. He would steal some kind of vehicle and go for it. His nerves must be made of solid iron. Hers weren't; she was shaking inside with nervousness, but she was holding up. Or maybe it wasn't nervousness; maybe it was exhilaration at the danger and excitement of action, of escaping. As long as they were still in Benghazi, in Libya, they hadn't really gotten free.

Ten minutes later he stopped in the shadow of a dilapidated warehouse. Perhaps he clicked his radio; in the dark, she couldn't tell. But suddenly five black shapes materialized out of the darkness, and they were surrounded before she could blink.

"Gentlemen, this is Miss Lovejoy," Zane said. "Now let's get the hell out of Dodge."

"With pleasure, boss." One of the men bowed to Barrie and held out his hand. "This way, Miss Lovejoy."

There was a certain rough elan about them that she found charming, though they didn't let it interfere with the business at hand. The six men immediately began moving out in choreographed order, and Barrie smiled at the man who'd spoken as she took the place he had indicated in line. She was behind Zane, who was second in line behind a man who moved so silently, and blended so well into the shadows, that even knowing he was there, sometimes she couldn't see him. The other four men ranged behind her at varying distances, and she realized that she couldn't hear them, either. In fact, she was the only one of the group who was making any noise, and she tried to place her slippered feet more carefully.

They wound their way through the alleys and finally stopped beside a battered minibus. Even in the darkness Barrie could see the huge dents and dark patches of rust that decorated the vehicle. They stopped beside it, and Zane opened the sliding side door for her. "Your chariot," he murmured.

Barrie almost laughed as he handed her into the little bus: if she hadn't had experience navigating long evening gowns, she would have found the ankle-length robe awkward, but she managed it as if she was a nineteenth-century lady being handed into a carriage. The men climbed in around her. There were only two bench seats; if there had ever been a third one in the back, it had long since been removed, perhaps to make room for cargo. A wiry young black man got behind the steering wheel, and Zane took the other seat in front. The eerily silent man who had been on point squeezed in on her left side, and another SEAL sat on her right, carefully placing her in a human security box. The other two SEALs knelt on the floorboard behind them, their muscular bodies and their gear filling the limited space.

"Let's go, Bunny Rabbit," Zane said, and the young black man grinned as he started the engine. The minibus looked as though it was on its last wheels, but the motor purred.

"You shoulda been there last night," the black guy said. "It was tight for a minute, real tight." He sounded as enthusiastic as if he was describing the best party he'd ever attended.

"What happened?" Zane asked.

"Just one of those things, boss," the man on Barrie's right said with a shrug evident in his voice. "A bad guy stepped on Spook, and the situation went straight into fubar."

Barrie had been around enough military men to know what fubar meant. She sat very still and didn't comment.

"Stepped right on me," the SEAL on her left said in an aggrieved tone. "He started squalling like a scalded cat, shooting at everything that moved and most things that didn't. Aggravated me some." He paused. "I'm not staying for the funeral."

"When we got your signal we pulled back and ran like hell," the man on her right continued. "You must’ve already had her out, because they came after us like hound dogs. We laid low, but a couple of times I thought we were going to have to fight our way out. Man, they were walking all over us, and they kept hunting all night long."

"No, we were still inside," Zane said calmly. "We just stepped into the next room. They never thought to check it."

The men snorted with mirth; even the eerie guy on her left managed a chuckle, though it didn't sound as if he did it often enough to be good at it.

Zane turned around in the seat and gave Barrie that brief twitch of a smile. "Would you like some introductions, or would you rather not know these raunchy-smelling bums?"

The atmosphere in the bus did smell like a locker room, only worse. "The introductions, please," she said, and her smile was plain in her voice.

He indicated the driver. "Antonio Withrock, Seaman Second Class. He's driving because he grew up wrecking cars on dirt tracks down South, so we figure he can handle any situation."

"Ma'am," said Seaman Withrock politely.

"On your right is Ensign Rocky Greenberg, second in command."

"Ma'am," said Ensign Greenberg.

"On your left is Seaman Second Class Winstead Jones."

Seaman Winstead Jones growled something unintelligible. "Call him Spooky or Spook, not Winstead," Zane added.

"Ma'am," said Seaman Jones.

"Behind you are Seamen First Class Eddie Santos, our medic, and Paul Drexler, the team sniper."

"Ma'am," said two voices behind her.

"I'm glad to meet you all," Barrie said, her sincerity plain. She had trained her memory at countless official functions, so she had their names down cold. She hadn't yet put a face to Santos or Drexler, but from his name she figured Santos would be Hispanic, so that would be an easy distinction to make.

Greenberg began to tell Zane the details of everything that had happened. Barrie listened and didn't intrude. The fact was, this midnight drive through Benghazi felt a littie surreal. She was surrounded by men armed to their eyeteeth, but they were traveling through an area that was still fairly active for so late at night. There were other vehicles in the streets, pedestrians on the sidewalks. They even stopped at a traffic light, with other vehicles around them. The driver, Withrock, hummed under his breath. No one else seemed concerned. The traffic light changed, the battered little minibus moved forward, and no one paid them any attention at all.

Several minutes later they left the city. Occasionally she could see the gleam of the Mediterranean on their right, which meant they were traveling west, toward the center of Libya's coast. As the lights faded behind them, she began to feel lightheaded with fatigue. The sleep she had gotten during the day, between bouts of lovemaking, hadn't been enough to offset the toll stress had taken on her. She couldn't see herself leaning on either of the men beside her, however, so she forced herself to sit upright and keep her eyes open.

She suspected that she was more than a little punch-drunk.

After a while Zane said, "Red goggles."

She was tired enough that she wondered if that was some kind of code, or if she'd misunderstood him. Neither, evidently. Each man took a pair of goggles from his pack and donned them. Zane glanced at her and said in explanation, "Red protects your night vision. We're going to let our vision adjust now, before Bunny kills the headlights."

She nodded, and closed her eyes to help her own vision adjust. She realized at once that, if she wanted to stay awake, closing her eyes for whatever reason wasn't the smartest thing to do, but her eyelids were so heavy that she couldn't manage to open them again. The next thing she knew, the minibus was lurching heavily from side to side, throwing her against first Greenberg, then Spooky. Dazed with sleep, she tried to hold herself erect, but she couldn't seem to find her balance or anything to hold on to. She was about to slide to the floorboard when Spooky's forearm shot out in front of her like an iron bar, anchoring her in the seat.

"Thank you," she said groggily.

"Anytime, ma'am."

Sometime while she had been asleep, Bunny had indeed killed the headlights, and they were plunging down an embankment in the dark. She blinked at something shiny looming in front of them; she had a split second of panic and confusion before she recognized the sea, gleaming in the starlight.

The minibus lurched to a halt. "End of the line," Bunny cheerfully announced. "We have now reached the hidey-hole for one IBS. That's military talk for inflatable boat, small," he said over his shoulder to Barrie. "These things are too fancy to be called plain old rafts."

Zane snorted. Barrie remembered that he'd described it as exactly that, a raft.

Watching them exit the minibus was like watching quicksilver slip through cracks. If there had been a working overhead light when the SEALs had commandeered the vehicle, they had taken care of that detail, because no light came on when the doors were cracked open. Spooky slipped past her, no mean feat given the equipment he was carrying, and when Greenberg slid the side door open a few inches, Spooky wiggled on his stomach through the small opening. One second he was there, the next he was gone. Barrie stared at the door with widened eyes in full appreciation of how he'd acquired his nickname. He was definitely spooky.

The others exited the minibus in the same manner; it was as if they were made of water, and when the doors opened they simply leaked out. They were that fluid, that silent. Only Bunny, the driver, remained behind with Barrie. He sat in absolute silence, pistol in hand, as he methodically surveyed the night-shrouded coast. Because he was silent, she was too. The best way not to be any trouble to them, she thought, was to follow their example.

There was one quick little tap on the window, and Bunny whispered, "It's clear. Let's go, Miss Lovejoy."

She scooted over the seat to the door while Bunny eeled out on the driver's side. Zane was there, opening the door wider, reaching in to steady her as she slid out onto the ground. "Are you holding up okay?" he asked quietly.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak, because she was so tired her speech was bound to be slurred.

As usual, he seemed to understand without being told. "Just hold on for another hour or so, and we'll have you safe on board the carrier. You can sleep then."

Without him, though; that fact didn't need stating. Even if he intended to continue their relationship, and he hadn't given any indication of it, he wouldn't do so on board the ship. She would put off sleeping forever if it would postpone the moment when she had to admit, once and for all, that their relationship bad been a temporary thing for him, prompted by both the hothouse of intimacy in which they'd spent the day, and her own demands.

She wouldn't cry; she wouldn't even protest, she told herself. She'd had him for a day, for one incredibly sensual day.

He led her down to the small, rocky strip of beach, where the dark bulk of the IBS had been positioned. The other five men were gathered around it in specific positions, each standing with his back to the raft while he held his weapon at the ready, edgily surveying the surroundings.

Zane lifted her into the IBS and showed her where to sit. The IBS bobbed in the water as the men eased it away from the shore. When the water was chest deep on Santos, the shortest one, they all swung aboard in a maneuver they had practiced so many times it looked effortless. Spooky started the almost soundless motor and aimed the IBS for the open sea.

Then a roar erupted behind them, and all hell broke loose.

She recognized the sharp rat-tat-tat of automatic weapons and half turned to look behind them. Zane put his hand on her head and shoved her down to the bottom of the boat, whirling, already bringing his automatic rifle around as he did so. The IBS shot forward as Spooky gave it full throttle. The SEALs returned fire, lightning flashing from the weapons, spent cartridges splattering down on her as she curled into a ball and drew the chador over her face to keep the hot brass from burning her.

"Drexler!" Zane roared. "Hit those bastards with explosives!"

"Got it, boss!"

Barrie heard a grunt, and something heavy and human fell across her. One of the men had been hit. Desperately she tried to wriggle out from under the crushing weight so she could help him, but she was effectively pinned, and he groaned every time she moved.

She knew that groan.

Terror such as she had never felt before raced through her veins. With a hoarse cry she heaved at the heavy weight, managing to roll him to the side. She fought her way free of the enveloping chador and didn't even notice the hot cartridge shell that immediately skimmed her right cheek.

An explosion shattered the night, lighting up the sea like fireworks, the percussion knocking her to the bottom of the boat again. She scrambled to her knees, reaching for Zane. "No," she said hoarsely. "No!"

The light from the explosion had sharply delineated every detail in stark white. Zane lay sprawled half on his side, writhing in pain as he pressed his hands to his abdomen. His face was a colorless blur, his eyes closed, his teeth exposed in a grimace. A huge wet patch glistened on the left side of his black shirt, and more blood was pooling beneath him.

Barrie grabbed the chador and wadded it up, pressing it hard to the wound. A low animal howl rattled in his throat, and he arched in pain. "Santos!" she screamed, trying to hold him down while still holding the chador in place. "Santos!"

With a muttered curse the stocky medic shouldered her aside. He lifted the chador for a second, then quickly pressed it into place and grabbed her hand, guiding it into position. "Hold it," he rapped out. "Press down—hard."

There was no more gunfire, only the hum of the motor. Salt spray lashed her face as the boat shot through the waves. The team maintained their discipline, holding their assigned positions. "How bad is it?" Greenberg yelled.

Santos was working feverishly. "I need light!"

Almost instantly Greenberg had a flashlight shining down on them. Barrie bit her lip as she saw how much blood had puddled around them. Zane's face was pasty white, his eyes half-shut as he gasped for breath.

"He's losing blood fast," Santos said. "Looks like the bullet got a kidney, or maybe his spleen. Get that damn helicopter on the way. We don't have time to get into international waters." He popped the cap off a syringe, straightened Zane's arm and deftly jabbed the needle into a vein. "Hang on, boss. We're gonna get you airlifted outta here."

Zane didn't reply. He was breathing noisily through his clenched teeth, but when Barrie glanced at him she could see the gleam of his eyes. His hand lifted briefly, touched her arm, then fell heavily to his side.

"Damn you, Zane Mackenzie," she said fiercely. "Don't you dare—" She broke off. She couldn't say the word, couldn't even admit to the possibility that he might die.

Santos was checking Zane's pulse. His eyes met hers, and she knew it was too fast, too weak. Zane was going into shock, despite the injection Santos had given him.

'' I don't give a damn how close in we still are!" Greenberg was yelling into the radio. "We need a helo now. Just get the boss out of here and we'll wait for another ride!"

Despite the pitching of the boat, Santos got an IV line started and began squeezing a bag of clear plasma into Zane's veins. "Don't let up on the pressure," he muttered to Barrie.

"I won't." She didn't take her gaze off Zane's face. He was still aware, still looking at her. As long as that connection was maintained, he would be all right. He had to be.

The nightmare ride in the speeding boat seemed to take forever. Santos emptied the first bag of plasma and connected a second one to the IV. He was cursing under his breath, his invectives varied and explicit.

Zane lay quietly, though she knew he was in terrible pain. His eyes were dull with pain and shock, but she could sense his concentration, his determination. Perhaps the only way he could remain conscious was by focusing so intently on her face, but he managed it.

But if that helicopter didn't get there soon, not even his superhuman determination would be able to hold out against continued blood loss. She wanted to curse, too, wanted to glare at the night sky as if she could conjure a helicopter out of thin air, but she didn't dare look away from Zane. As long as their gazes held, he would hold on.

She heard the distinctive whap-whap-whap only a moment before the Sea King helicopter roared over them, blinding lights picking them out. Spooky throttled back, and the boat settled gently onto the water. The helicopter circled to them and hovered directly overhead, the powerful rotors whipping the sea into a frenzy. A basket dropped almost on their heads. Working swiftly, Santos and Greenberg lifted Zane into the basket and strapped him in, maneuvering around Barrie as she maintained pressure on the wound.

Santos hesitated, then indicated for her to let go and move back. Reluctantly she did. He lifted the chador, then immediately jammed it back into place. Without a word he straddled the basket, leaning hard on the wound. "Let's go!" he yelled. Greenberg stepped back and gave the thumbs-up to the winch operator in the helicopter. The basket rose toward the hovering monster, with Santos perched precariously on top of Zane. As the basket drew even with the open bay, several pairs of hands reached out and drew them inward. The helicopter immediately lifted away, banking hard, roaring toward the carrier.

There was an eerie silence left behind. Barrie slumped against one of the seats, her face rigid with the effort of maintaining control. No one said a word. Spooky started the motor again, and the little craft shot through the darkness, following the rapidly disappearing lights of the helicopter.

It was over an hour before the second helicopter settled onto the deck of the huge carrier. The remaining four members of the team leaped to the deck almost before the helicopter had touched down. Barrie clambered after them, ran with them. Greenberg had one hand clamped on her arm to make certain she didn't get left behind.

Someone in a uniform stepped in front of them. "Miss Lovejoy, are you all right?"

Barrie gave him a distracted glance and dodged around him. Another uniform popped up, but this one was subtly different, as if the wearer belonged on board this gigantic ship. The first man had worn a dress uniform, marking him as a non-crew member. Greenberg skidded to a halt. "Captain—"

"Lieutenant-Commander Mackenzie is in surgery," the captain said. "Doc didn't think he'd make it to a base with such a high rate of blood loss. If they can't get the bleeding stopped, they'll have to remove his spleen."

The first uniformed officer had reached them. "Miss Lovejoy," he said firmly, taking her arm. "I'm Major Hodson. I'll escort you home."

The military moved at its own pace, to its own rules. She was to be taken home immediately; the ambassador wanted his daughter back. Barrie protested. She yelled, she cried, she even swore at the harried major. None of it did any good. She was hustled aboard another aircraft, this time a cargo transport plane. Her last glimpse of the Montgomery was as the sun's first rays glistened on the blue waters of the Mediterranean, and the sight was blurred by her tears.

Chapter 7

By the time the transport touched down in Athens, Barrie had cried so hard and for so long that her eyes were swollen almost shut. Major Hodson had tried everything to pacify her, then to console her; he assured her that he was just following orders, and that she would be able to find out bow the SEAL was doing later. It was understandable that she was upset. She'd been through a lot, but she would have the best medical care—

At that, Barrie shot out of the uncomfortable web seat, which was all the transport plane afforded. "I'm not the one who was shot!" she yelled furiously. "I don't need medical care, best, worst or mediocre! I want to be taken to wherever Zane Mackenzie is taken. I don't care what your orders are!"

Major Hodson looked acutely uncomfortable. He tugged at the collar of his uniform. "Miss Lovejoy, I'm sorry. I can't do anything about this situation. After we're on the ground and your father is satisfied that you're okay, then where you go is up to you."

His expression plainly said that as far as he was concerned, she could go to hell. Barrie sat down, breathing hard and wiping away tears. She'd never acted like that before in her life. She'd always been such a lady, a perfect hostess for her father.

She didn't feel at all ladylike now; she felt like a ferocious tigress, ready to shred anyone who got in her way. Zane was severely wounded, perhaps dying, and these fools wouldn't let her be with him. Damn military procedure, and damn her father's influence, for they had both wrenched her away from him.

As much as she loved her father, she knew she would never forgive him if Zane died and she wasn't there. It didn't matter that he didn't know about Zane; nothing mattered compared to the enormous horror that loomed before her. God, don't let him die! She couldn't bear it. She would rather have died herself at her kidnappers' hands than for Zane to be killed while rescuing her.

The flight took less than an hour and a half. The transport landed with a hard thump that jerked her in the web seat, then taxied for what seemed like an interminable length of time. Finally it rolled to a stop, and Major Hodson stood, plainly relieved to be free of his unpleasant burden.

A door was slid open, and a flight of steps rolled up to it. Clutching the black robe around her, Barrie stepped out into the bright Athens sunlight. It was full morning now, the heat already building. She blinked and lifted a hand to shield her eyes. It felt like forever since she'd been in the sunshine.

A gray limousine with darkly tinted windows was waiting on the tarmac. The door was shoved open, and her father bounded out, dignity forgotten as he ran forward. "Barrie!" Two days of worry and fear lined his face, but there was an almost desperate relief in his expression as he hurried up the steps to fold her in his arms.

She started crying again, or maybe she had never stopped. She buried her face against his suit, clutching him with desperate hands. "I've got to go back," she sobbed, the words barely intelligible.

He tightened his arms around her. "There, there, baby," he breathed. "You're safe now, and I won't let anything else happen to you, I swear. I'll take you home—"

Wildly she shook her head, trying to pull away from him. "No," she choked out. "I've got to get back to the Montgomery. Zane—he was shot. He might die. Oh, God, I've got to go back now!"

"Everything will be all right," he crooned, hustling her down the steps with an arm locked around her shoulders. "I have a doctor waiting—"

"I don't need a doctor!" she said fiercely, jerking away from him. She'd never done that before, and his face went blank with shock. She shoved her hair out of her face. The tangled mass hadn't been combed in two days, and it was matted with sweat and sea spray. "Listen to me! The man who rescued me was shot. He might die. He was still in surgery when Major Hodson forced me on board this plane. I want to go back to the ship. I want to make sure Zane is okay."

William Lovejoy firmly took hold of his daughter's shoulders again, leading her across the tarmac to the waiting limo. "You don't have to go back to the ship, sweetheart," he said soothingly. "I'll ask Admiral Lind-ley to find out how his man is doing. He is one of the SEAL team, I presume?"

Numbly she nodded.

"There wouldn't be any point in going back to the ship, I'm sure you can see that. If he survived surgery, he'll be airlifted to a military hospital."

If he survived surgery. The words were like a knife, hot and slicing, going through her. She balled her hands into fists, every cell in her body screaming for heir to ignore logic, ignore the attempts to soothe her. She needed to get to Zane.

Three days later, she stood in her father's office with her chin high and her eyes colder than he'd ever seen them. "You told Admiral Lindley to block my requests," she accused.

The ambassador sighed. He removed his reading glasses and carefully placed them on the inlaid walnut desk. "Barrie, you know I've denied you very little that you've asked for, but you're being unreasonable about this man. You know that he's recovering, and that's all you need to know. What point would there be in rushing to his bedside? Some tabloid might find out about it, and then your ordeal would be plastered in sleazy newspapers all over the world. Is that what you want?"

"My ordeal?" she echoed. "My ordeal? What about his? He nearly died! That's assuming Admiral Lindley told me the truth, and he really is still alive!"

"Of course he is. I only asked Joshua to block any inquiries you made about his location." He unfolded his tall form from the chair and came around to lean against the desk and take her resistant hands in his. "Barrie, give yourself time to get over the trauma. I know you've invested this... this guerrilla fighter with all sorts of heroic characteristics, and that's only normal. After a while, when you've regained your perspective, you'll be glad you didn't embarrass yourself by chasing after him."

It was almost impossible to contain the volcanic fury rising in her. Nobody was listening; no one wanted to listen. They kept going on and on about her ordeal, how she would heal in time, until she wanted to pull her hair out. She had insisted over and over that she hadn't been raped, but she had fiercely refused to be examined by a doctor, which of course had only fueled speculation that the kidnappers had indeed raped her. But she'd known her body bore the marks of Zane's lovemaking, marks and traces that were precious and private, for no one else's eyes. Everyone was treating her as if she was made of crystal, carefully not mentioning the kidnapping, until she thought she would go mad.

She wanted to see Zane. That was all. Just see him, assure herself that he would be all right. But when she'd asked one of the Marine officers stationed at the embassy to make some inquiries about Zane, it was Admiral Lindley who had gotten back to her instead of the captain.

The dignified, distinguished admiral had come to the ambassador's private quarters less than an hour before. Barrie hadn't yet returned to her minor job in the embassy, feeling that she couldn't keep her mind on paperwork, so she had received the admiral in the beautifully appointed parlor.

After polite conversation about her health and the weather, the admiral came to the point of his visit. "You've been making some inquiries about Zane Mackenzie," he said kindly. "I've kept abreast of his condition, and I can tell you now with complete confidence that he'll fully recover. The ship's surgeon was able to stop the bleeding, and it wasn't necessary to remove his spleen. His condition was stabilized, and he was transferred to a hospital. When he's able, he'll be sent Stateside for the remainder of his convalescence."

"Where is he?" Barrie had demanded, her eyes burning. She'd scarcely slept in three days. Though she was once more impeccably clothed and coifed, the strain she'd been under had left huge dark circles under her eyes, and she was losing weight fast, because her nerves wouldn't let her eat.

Admiral Lindley sighed. "William asked me to keep that information from you, Barrie, and I have to say, I think he's right. I've known Zane a long time. He's an extraordinary warrior. But SEALs are a breed apart, and the characteristics that make them such great warriors don't, as a whole, make them model citizens. They're trained weapons, to put it bluntly. They don't keep high profiles, and most information about them is restricted."

"I don't want to know about his training," she said, her voice strained. "I don't want to know about his missions. I just want to see him."

The admiral shook his head. "I'm sorry."

Nothing she said budged him. He refused to give her even one more iota of information. Still, Zane was alive; he would be all right. Just knowing that made her feel weak inside, as the unbearable tension finally relaxed.

That didn't mean she would forgive her father for interfering.

"I love him," she now said deliberately. "You have no right to keep me from seeing him."

"Love?" Her father gave her a pitying look. "Barrie, what you feel isn't love, it's hero-worship. It will fade, I promise you."

"Do you think I haven't considered that?" she fired back. "I'm not a teenager with a crush on a rock star. Yes, I met him under dangerous, stressful circumstances. Yes, he saved my life—and he nearly died doing it. I know what infatuation is, and I know what love is, but even if I didn't, the decision isn't yours to make."

"You've always been reasonable," he argued. "At least concede that your judgment may not be at its sharpest right now. What if you acted impulsively, married this man—I'm sure he'd jump at the chance—and then realized that you really didn't love him? Think what a mess it would be. I know it sounds snobbish, but he isn't our kind. He's a sailor, and a trained killer. You've dined with kings and danced with princes. What could the two of you have in common?"

"First, that doesn't just sound snobbish, it is snobbish. Second, you must not think much of me as a person if you consider your money my only attraction."

"You know that isn't what I meant," he said, genuinely shocked. "You're a wonderful person. But how could someone like that appreciate the life you live? How do you know he wouldn't have his eye on the main chance?"

"Because I know him," she declared. "I know him in a way I never would have if I'd met him at an embassy party. According to you, a SEAL couldn't be kind and considerate, but he was. They all were, for that matter. Dad, I've told you over and over that I wasn't raped. I know you don't believe me, and I know you've suffered, worrying about me. But I swear to you—I swear—that I wasn't. They were planning to, the next day, but they were waiting for someone. So, though I was terrified and upset, I haven't been through the trauma of a gang rape the way you keep thinking. Seeing Zane lying in a pool of blood was a hell of a lot more traumatic than anything those kidnappers did!"

"Barrie!" It was the first time her father had ever heard her curse. Come to think of it, she had never cursed at all, until rough men had grabbed her off the street and subjected her to hours of terror. She had cursed them, and meant it. She had cursed Major Hodson, and meant that, too.

With an effort, she regulated her tone. "You know that the first attempt to get me out didn't quite work."

He gave an abrupt nod. He'd suffered agonies, thinking their only hope of rescuing her had failed and imagining what she must be suffering. That was when he'd given up hope of ever seeing her alive again. Admiral Lindley hadn't been as pessimistic; the SEALs hadn't checked in, and though there were reports of gunfire in Benghazi, if a team of SEALs had been killed or captured, the Libyan government would have trumpeted it all over the world. That meant they were still there, still working to free her. Until they heard from the team that the rescue had failed, there was still hope.

"Well, it did work, in a way. Zane came in alone to get me, while the rest of the team was a diversion, I guess, in case things went wrong. He had a backup plan, what to do if they were spotted, because you can't control the human factor." She realized she was repeating things Zane had said to her during those long hours when they had lain drowsily together, and she missed him so much that pain knotted her insides. "The team was so well-hidden that one of the guards didn't see Spooky until he actually stepped on him. That's what gave the alarm and started the shooting. A guard had been posted in the corridor outside the room where they had me tied up, and he ran in. Zane killed him," she said simply. "Then, while the others were chasing the team, he got me out of the building. We were separated from the team and had to hide for a day, but I was safe."

The ambassador listened gravely, soaking up these details of how she had been returned to him. They hadn't talked before, not about the actual rescue. She had been too distraught about Zane, almost violent in her despair. Now that she knew he was alive, even though she was still so angry she could barely contain it, she was able to tell her father how she had been returned to him alive.

"While I stayed in our hiding place, Zane risked his life by going out and stealing food and water for us, as well as the robe and chador for me. He took care of the cut on my foot. When scavengers were practically dismantling the place around us, he kept himself between me and any danger. That's the man I fell in love with, that's the man you say isn't 'our kind.' He may not be yours, but he's definitely mine!"

The expression in her father's eyes was stunned, almost panicked. Too late, Barrie saw that she had chosen the wrong tack in her argument. If she had presented her concern for Zane as merely for someone who had done so much for her, if she had insisted that it was only right she thank him in person, her father could have been convinced. He was very big on preserving the niceties, on behaving properly. Instead, she had convinced him that she truly loved Zane Mackenzie, and too late she saw how much he had feared exactly that. He didn't want to lose her, and now Zane presented a far bigger threat than before.

"Barrie, I..." He fumbled to a stop, her urbane, sophisticated father who was never at a loss for words. He swallowed hard. It was true that he'd seldom denied her anything, and those times he had refused had been because he thought the activity she planned or the object she wanted—once it had been a motorcycle—wasn't safe. Keeping her safe was his obsession, that and holding tightly to his only remaining family, his beloved child, who so closely resembled the wife he'd lost.

She saw it in his eyes as his instinct to pamper her with anything she desired warred with the knowledge that this time, if he did, he would probably lose her from his life. He didn't want occasional visits from her; they had both endured that kind of separation during her school years. He wanted her there, in his everyday life. She knew part of his obsession was selfish, because she made domestic matters very easy for him, but she had never doubted his love for her.

Pure panic flashed in his expression. He said stiffly, "I still think you need to give yourself time for your emotions to calm. And surely you realize that the conditions you describe are what that man is used to. How could he ever fit into your life?"

"That's a moot question, since marriage or even a relationship was never discussed. I want to see him. I don't want him to think that I didn't care enough even to check on his condition."

"If any sort of relationship was never discussed, why would he expect you to visit him? It was a mission for him, nothing more."

Barrie's shoulders were military straight, her jaw set, her green eyes dark with emotion. "It was more," she said flatly, and that was as much of what had happened between her and Zane as she was willing to discuss. She took a deep breath and pulled out the heavy artillery. "You owe it to me," she said, her gaze locked with his. "I haven't asked any details about what happened here, but I'm an intelligent, logical person—"

"Of course you are," he interrupted, "but I don't see—"

"Was there a ransom demanded?" She cut across his interruption.

He was a trained diplomat; he seldom lost control of his expression. But now, startled, the look he gave her was blank with puzzlement. "A ransom?" he echoed.

A new despair knotted itself in her stomach, etched itself in her face. "Yes, ransom," she said softly. "There wasn't one, was there? Because money wasn't what he wanted. He wants something from you, doesn't he? Information. He's either trying to force you to give it to him, or you're already in it up to your eyebrows and you've had a falling out with him. Which is it?"

Again his training failed him; for a split second his face revealed panicked guilt and consternation before his expression smoothed into diplomatic blandness. "What a ridiculous charge," he said calmly.

She stood there, sick with knowledge. If the kidnapper had been using her as a weapon to force her father into betraying his country, the ambassador most likely would have denied it, because he wouldn't want her to be worried, but that wasn't what she'd read in his face. It was guilt.

She didn't bother responding to his denial. "You owe me," she repeated. "You owe Zane."

He flinched at the condemnation in her eyes. "I don't see it that way at all."

"You're the reason I was kidnapped."

"You know there are things I can't tell you," he said, releasing her hands and walking around the desk to resume his seat, symbolically leaving the role of father and entering that of ambassador. "But your supposition is wrong, and, of course, an indication of how off-balance you still are."

She started to ask if Art Sandefer would think her supposition was so wrong, but she couldn't bring herself to threaten her father. Feeling sick, she wondered if that made her a traitor, too. She loved her country; living in Europe as much as she had, she had seen and appreciated the dramatic differences between the United States and every other country on earth. Though she liked Europe and had a fondness for French wine, German architecture, English orderliness, Spanish music and Italy in general, whenever she set foot in the States she was struck by the energy, the richness of life where even people who were considered poor lived well compared to everywhere else. The United States wasn't perfect, far from it, but it had something special, and she loved it.

By her silence, she could be betraying it.

By staying here, she remained in danger. Kidnapping her had failed once, but that didn't mean he, the unknown, faceless enemy, wouldn't try again. Her father knew who he was, she was certain of it. Immediately she saw how it would be. She would be confined to the embassy grounds, or allowed out only with an armed escort. She would be a prisoner of her father's fear.

There was really no place she would be entirely safe, but remaining here only made the danger more acute. And once she was away from the enclave of the embassy, she would have a better chance of locating Zane, because Admiral Lindley's influence couldn't cover every nook and cranny of the globe. The farther away from Athens she was, the thinner that influence would be.

She faced her father, knowing that she was deliberately breaking the close ties that had bound them together for the past fifteen years. "I'm going home," she said calmly. "To Virginia."

Two weeks later, Zane sat on the front porch of his parents' house, perched on top of Mackenzie's Mountain, just outside Ruth, Wyoming. The view was breathtaking, an endless vista of majestic mountains and green valleys. Everything here was as familiar to him as his own hands. Saddles, boots, some cattle but mostly horses. Books in every room of the sprawling house, cats prowling through the barns and stables, his mother's sweet, bossy coddling, his father's concern and understanding.

He'd been shot before; he'd been sliced up in a knife fight. He'd had his collarbone broken, ribs cracked, a lung punctured. He had been seriously injured before, but this was the closest he'd ever come to dying. He'd been bleeding to death, lying there in the bottom of the raft with Barrie crouched over him, pressing the chador over the wound with every ounce of her weight. Her quickness, her determination, had made the difference. Santos squeezing the plasma from the bags into his veins had made the difference. He had been so close that he could pick out a dozen details that had made the difference; if any one of them hadn't happened, he would have died.

He'd been unusually quiet since leaving the naval hospital and returning home for convalescence. It wasn't that he was in low spirits, but rather that he had a lot of thinking to do, something that hadn't been easy when practically the entire family had felt compelled to visit and reassure themselves of his relative well-being. Joe had flown in from Washington for a quick check on his baby brother; Michael and Shea had visited several times, bringing their two rapscallion sons with them; Josh and Loren and their three had descended for a weekend visit, which was all the time Loren's job at the hospital in Seattle had allowed. Mans had driven all night to be there when he was brought home. At least he'd been able to walk on his own by then, even if very slowly, or likely she would still be here. She had pulled up a chair directly in front of him and sat for hours, her black eyes locked on his face as if she was willing vitality from her body into his. Maybe she had been. His little sister was fey, magical; she operated on a different level than other people did.

Hell, even Chance had shown up. He'd done so warily, eyeing their mother and sister as if they were bombs that might go off in his face, but he was here, sitting beside Zane on the porch.

"You're thinking of resigning."

Zane didn't have to wonder how Chance had known what was on his mind. After nearly battering each other to death when they were fourteen, they had reached an unusual communion. Maybe it was because they'd shared so much, from classes to girls to military training. Even after all this time, Chance was as wary as a wounded wolf and didn't like people to get close to him, but even though he resisted, he was helpless against family. Chance had never in his life been loved until Mary had brought him home with her and the sprawling, brawling Mackenzies had knocked him flat. It was fun to watch him still struggle against the family intimacy each time he was drawn into the circle, because within an hour he always surrendered. Mary wouldn't let him do anything else; nor would Maris. After accepting him as a brother, Zane had never even acknowledged Chance's wariness. Only Wolf was willing to give his adopted son time to adjust—but there was still a limit on how much time he would allow.

"Yeah," he finally said.

"Because you nearly bought it this time?"

Zane snorted. "When has that ever made any difference to either of us?" He alone of the family knew the exact details of Chance's work. It was a toss-up which of them was in the most danger.

"Then it's this last promotion that did it."

"It took me out of the field," Zane said quietly. Carefully he leaned back in the chair and propped his booted feet on the porch railing. Though he was a fast healer, two and a half weeks wasn't quite long enough to let him ignore the wound. "If two of my men hadn't been wounded in that screwup on the Montgomery, I wouldn't have been able to go on this last mission."

Chance knew about the screwup. Zane had told him about it, and screwup was the most polite description he'd used. As soon as he'd regained consciousness in the naval hospital, he'd been on the phone, starting and directing the investigation. Though Odessa would fully recover, it was likely Higgins would have to retire on disability. The guards who had shot the two SEALs might escape court-martial if their counsel was really slick, but at the very least they would be cashiered out of the service. The extent of the damage to the careers of Captain Udaka and Executive Officer Boyd remained to be seen; Zane had targeted the shooters, but the ripple effect would go all the way up to the captain.

"I'm thirty-one," Zane said. "That's just about the upper limit for active missions. I'm too damn good at my job, too. The Navy keeps promoting me for it, then they say I'm too highly ranked to go on missions."

"You want to throw in with me?" Chance asked casually.

He'd considered it. Very seriously. But something kept nagging at him, something he couldn't quite bring into focus.

"I want to. If things were different, I would, but..."

"What things?"

Zane shrugged. At least part of his uneasy feeling could be nailed down. "A woman," he said.

"Oh, hell." Chance kicked back and surveyed the world over the toes of his boots. "If it's a woman, you won't be able to concentrate on anything until you've gotten her out of your system. Damn their sweet little hides," he said fondly. Chance generally had women crawling all over him. It didn't hurt that he was drop-dead handsome, but he had a raffish, daredevil quality to him that brought them out of the woodwork.

Zane wasn't certain he could get Barrie out of his system. He wasn't certain he wanted to. He didn't wonder why she had disappeared without even saying goodbye, hope you're feeling better. Bunny and Spook had told him how she'd been dragged, kicking and yelling and swearing, aboard a plane and taken back to Athens. He figured her father, combined with the Navy's policy of secrecy concerning the SEALs, had prevented her from finding out to which hospital they'd taken him.

He missed her. He missed her courage, her sturdy willingness to do whatever needed doing. He missed the serenity of her expression, and the heat of her lovemaking.

God, yes.

The one memory, more than any of the others, that was branded in his brain was the moment when she had reached for his belt and said in that fierce whisper, "I'll do it!"

He'd understood. Not just why she needed to be in control, but the courage it took her to wipe out the bad memories and replace them with good ones. She'd been a virgin; she had told the truth about that. She hadn't known what to do, and she hadn't expected the pain. But she had taken him anyway, sweetly, hotly, sliding her tight little body down on him and shattering his control the way no other woman had ever done.

She could have been a spoiled, helpless little socialite; she should have been exactly that. Instead she had made the best of a tense, dangerous situation, done what she could to help and hadn't voiced a single complaint.

He liked being with her, Weed talking to her. He was too much of a loner to easily accept the word love in connection with anyone other than family, but with Bar-rie...maybe. He wanted to spend more time with her, get to know her better, let whatever would develop get to developing.

He wanted her.

First things first, though. He had to get his strength back; right now he could walk from room to room without aid, but he would think twice about heading down to the stables by himself. He had to decide whether or not he was going to stay in the Navy; it felt like time to be moving on, since the reason he'd joined in the first place was being taken away from him as he moved up the ranks. If he wasn't going to remain a SEAL, then what would he do for a living? He had to decide, had to get his life settled.

Barrie might not be interested in any kind of relationship with him, though from the way Spook and Bunny had described her departure, he didn't think that was the case. The day of lovemaking they had shared had been more than propinquity for both of them.

Getting in touch with her could take some doing, though. That morning he had placed a call to the embassy in Athens. He'd given his name and asked to speak to Barrie Lovejoy. It had been Ambassador William Lovejoy who had come on the line, however, and the conversation hadn't been cordial.

"It isn't that Barrie doesn't appreciate what you did, but I'm sure you understand that she wants to put all of that behind her. Talking with you would bring it all back and needlessly upset her," the ambassador bad said in a cool, well-bred voice, his diction the best money could buy.

"Is that her opinion, or yours?" Zane had asked, his tone arctic.

"I don't see that it matters," the ambassador had replied, and hung up.

Zane decided he would let it rest for now. He wasn't in any shape to do much about it, so he would wait. When he had his mind made up about what he was going to do, there would be plenty of time to get in touch with Barrie, and now that he knew the ambassador had given orders for his calls not to be routed to her, the next time he would be prepared to do an end run around her father.

"Zane," his mother called from inside the house, pulling his thoughts to the present. "Are you getting tired?"

"I feel fine," he called back. It was an exaggeration, but he wasn't unduly tired. He glanced at Chance and saw the smirk on his brother's face.

"With all the worry about you, she forgot about my cracked ribs," Chance whispered.

"Glad to be of service," Zane drawled. "Just don't expect me to get shot every time you bang yourself up a little." The entire family thought it was hilarious the way Chance reacted to Mary's coddling and fussing, as if the attention terrified him, even though he was never able to resist her. Chance was putty in Mary's hands, but then, they all were. They'd grown up with the fine example of their father to emulate, and Wolf Mackenzie might growl and stomp, but Mary usually got her way.

"Chance?"

Zane controlled a grin as Chance stiffened, the smirk disappearing from his face as if it had never been.

"Ma'am?" he answered cautiously.

"Are you still keeping a pressure wrap on your ribs?"

That familiar panicked expression was in his eyes now. "Ah...no, ma'am." He could have lied; Mary would have believed him. But none of them ever lied to her, even when it was in their best interests. It would hurt the little tyrant s feelings too much if she ever discovered any of her kids had lied to her.

"You know you're supposed to wrap them for another week," said the voice from inside the house. It was almost like hearing God speak, except this voice was light and sweet and liquidly Southern.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Come inside and let me take care of that.''

"Yes, ma'am," Chance said again, resignation in his voice. He got up from his rocking chair and went into the house. As he passed Zane, he muttered, "Getting shot didn't work. Try something else."

Chapter 8

Two months later, Sheriff Zane Mackenzie stood naked at the window of the pleasant two-bedroom Spanish-style house he had bought in southern Arizona. He was staring out over the moonlit desert, something wild and hot running through him at the sight. His SEAL training had taught him how to adapt to any environment, and the hot, dry climate didn't bother him.

Once he'd made up his mind to resign his commission, things had rapidly fallen into place. Upon hearing that he was leaving the Navy, a former SEAL team member who was now on the governor's staff in Phoenix had called and asked if he would be interested in serving the remaining two years of the term of a sheriff who had died in office.

At first Zane had been taken aback; he'd never considered going into law enforcement. Moreover, he didn't know anything about Arizona state laws.

"Don't worry about it," his friend had said breezily. "Sheriff is a political position, and most of the time it's more administrative than anything else. The situation you'd be going into is more hands-on, though. A couple of the deputies have quit, so you'd be shorthanded until some more can be hired, and the ones still there will resent the hell out of you because one of them wasn't appointed to finish out the sheriff's term."

"Why not?" Zane asked bluntly. "What's wrong with the chief deputy?"

"She's one of the ones who quit. She left a couple of months before the sheriff died, took a job on the force in Prescott."

"None of the others are qualified?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"Then what would you say?"

"You gotta understand, there's not a lot of selection here. A couple of the young deputies are good, real good, but they're too young, not enough experience. The one twenty-year guy isn't interested. A fifteen-year guy is a jerk, and the rest of the deputies hate his guts."

Sheriff. Zane thought about it, growing more intrigued with the idea. He had no illusions about it being a Cakewalk. He would have difficulties with the fifteen-year veteran, at least, and likely all the other deputies would have some reservations and resistance about someone from the outside being brought in. Hell, he liked it better that way. Cakewalks didn't interest him. He'd rather have a challenging job any day. "Okay, I'm interested. What does it involve?"

"A lot of headache, mostly. The pay's decent, the hours are lousy. A reservation sits on part of the county, so you'll have to deal with the BIA. There's a big problem with illegal immigrants, but that's for the INS to worry about. Generally, this isn't a high crime area. Not enough people."

So here he was, his strength back, the owner of a house and a hundred acres of land, newly sworn in as sheriff. He'd brought in a few of his horses from his parents' place in Wyoming. It was a hell of a change from the Navy.

It was time to see about Barrie. He'd thought about her a lot over the past few months, but lately he couldn't think about anything else. The uneasy feeling was persisting, growing stronger. He'd put his resources to work, and to his surprise found that she'd left Athens within a week of being returned there. She was currently living at the Lovejoy private residence in Arlington, Virginia. Moreover, last month the ambassador had abruptly asked to be replaced, and he, too, had returned to Virginia. Zane wished Mr. Lovejoy had remained in Athens, but his presence was a problem that could be handled.

No matter what her father did or said, Zane was determined to see Barrie. There was unfinished business between them, a connection that had been abruptly cut when he'd been shot and she had been forced aboard a flight to Athens. He knew the hot intimacy of those long hours together could have been a product of stress and propinquity, but at this point, he didn't give a damn. There were other considerations, ones he couldn't ignore. That was why he had a flight out of Tucson to Washington in the morning. He needed to be sleeping, but one thought kept going around and around in his head. She was pregnant. He couldn't say why he was so convinced of it. It was a gut feeling, an intuition, even a logical conclusion. There hadn't been any means of birth control available; they had made love several times. Put the two facts together, and the possibility of pregnancy existed. He didn't think it was a mere possibility, though; he thought it was a fact.

Barrie was going to have his baby.

The rush of fierce possessiveness he felt was like a tidal wave, sweeping away all his cautious plans. There wouldn't be any gradual getting-to-know-each-other stage, no easing into the idea of a serious relationship. If she was pregnant, they would get married immediately. If she didn't like the idea, he would convince her. It was as simple as that.

She was pregnant. Barrie hugged the precious knowledge to herself, not ready yet to let anyone else know, certainly not her father. The kidnapping and the aftermath had driven a wedge between them that neither of them could remove. He was desperate to restore their former relationship; nothing else could have induced him to resign from a post, an action that could have had serious repercussions for his career if it hadn't generally been thought that he had resigned because she had been so traumatized by the kidnapping that she couldn't remain in Athens and he wanted to be with her.

She tried not to think about whatever he might be involved in, because it hurt. It hurt horribly that he might be a traitor. Part of her simply couldn't believe it; he was an old-fashioned man, a man to whom honor wasn't just a word but a way of life. She had no proof, only logic and her own deductions... that, and the expression he hadn't quite been able to hide when she had asked him directly if he was involved in anything that might have resulted in her being kidnapped.

It also hurt horribly that he had kept her from Zane. She had made inquiries once she reached Virginia, but once again she had collided with a stone wall. No one would give her any information at all about him. She had even contacted SEAL headquarters and been politely stonewalled again. At least with the SEALs it was probably policy to safeguard the team members' identities and location, given the sensitive nature of the antiterrorism unit.

She was having his baby. She wanted him to know about it. She wouldn't expect anything of him that he didn't want to give, but she wanted him to know about his child. And she desperately wanted to see him again. She was adrift and lonely and frightened, her emotions in turmoil, and she needed some security in that part of her life, at least. He wasn't the kind of man who would blithely walk away from his offspring and ignore their existence. This baby would be a permanent link between them, something she could count on.

She doubted her father would relent concerning Zane even if he knew about the baby; his possessiveness would probably extend to a grandchild, even an illegitimate one. He would take steps to keep her pregnancy quiet, and even when the news got around, as it inevitably would, people would assume it was a child of rape, and they would look at her pityingly and talk about how brave she was.

She thought she would go mad. She had escaped to Virginia only to have her father follow. He panicked if she went anywhere unescorted. She had her own car, but he didn't want her driving it; he wanted his driver to take her wherever she wanted to go. She had had to sneak to a pharmacy to buy a home pregnancy test, though she had been sure fairly early on that she was pregnant. The test had merely confirmed what her body had already told her. Barrie knew she should be worried and upset about this unplanned pregnancy, but it was the only thing in her life right now that made her happy. She was intensely lonely; the kidnapping and the long hours alone with Zane had set her apart from the other people in her life. She had memories they couldn't share, thoughts and needs no one could understand. Zane had been there with her; he would have understood her occasional pensiveness, her reticence in talking about it. It wasn't that she was secretive, for she would have liked to talk to someone who understood. But what she had shared with Zane was like a combat experience, forming a unique bond between the people who had lived it.

She wouldn't be able to keep her pregnancy secret much longer; she had to arrange prenatal care, and all telephone calls were now recorded. She supposed she could sneak out again and set up a doctor's appointment from a pay phone, but she would be damned if she would.

Enough was enough. She was an adult, and soon to be a mother. She hated the fact that her relationship with her father had deteriorated to the point where they barely spoke, but she couldn't find a way to mend it. As long as the possibility of his involvement in treasonous activities remained, she was helpless. She wanted him to explain, to give her a plausible reason why she had been kidnapped. She wanted to stop looking over her shoulder every time she went out; she didn't want to feel as if she truly needed to be guarded. She wanted to live a normal life. She didn't want to raise her baby in an atmosphere of fear.

But that was exactly the atmosphere that permeated the house. It was stifling her. She had to get away, had to remove herself from the haunting fear that, as long as her father was involved in whatever had given him such a guilty expression, she could be kidnapped again. The very thought made her want to vomit, and she didn't have just herself to worry about now. She had her baby to protect.

The fatigue of early pregnancy had gotten her into the habit of sleeping late, but one morning she woke early, disturbed by a pair of raucous birds fighting for territory in the tree outside her window. Once she was awake, nausea soon followed, and she made her usual morning dash to the bathroom. Also as usual, when the bout of morning sickness had passed, she felt fine. She looked out the window at the bright morning and realized she was inordinately hungry, the first time in weeks that the idea of food was appealing.

It was barely six o'clock, too early for Adele, the cook, to have arrived. Breakfast was normally at eight, and she had been sleeping past that. Her stomach growled. She couldn't wait another two hours for something to eat.

She put on her robe and slippers and quietly left her room; her father's bedroom was at the top of the stairs, and she didn't want to disturb him. Even more, she didn't want him to join her for an awkward tete-a-tete. He tried so hard to carry on as if nothing had happened, and she couldn't respond as she had before.

He should still be asleep, she thought, but when she reached the top of the stairs she heard him saying something she couldn't understand. She paused, wondering if he'd heard her after all and had been calling out to her. Then she heard him say Mack in a sharp tone, and she froze.

A chill roughened her entire body, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. The only Mack she knew was Mack Prewett, but why would her father be talking to him? Mack Prewett was still stationed in Athens, as far as she knew, and since her father had resigned, he shouldn't have had any reason to be talking to him.

Then her heart leaped wildly as another possibility occurred to her. Perhaps he had been saying Mackenzie and she'd heard only the first syllable. Maybe he was talking about Zane. If she listened, she might find out where he was, or at least how he was. With no additional information about his condition, it had been hard to believe Admiral Lindley's assurance that he would fully recover. Belief required trust, and she no longer trusted the admiral, or her father.

She crept closer to his door and put her ear against it.

"—finished soon," he was saying sharply, then he was silent for a moment. "I didn't bargain on this. Barrie wasn't supposed to be involved. Get it wrapped up, Mack."

Barrie closed her eyes in despair. The chill was back, even colder than before. She shook with it, and swallowed hard against the return of nausea. So he was involved, he and Mack Prewett both. Mack was CIA. Was he a double agent, and if so, for whom? The world situation wasn't like it had been back in the old days of the Cold War, when the lines had been clearly drawn. Nations had died since then, and new ones taken their place. Religion or money seemed to be the driving force behind most differences these days; how would her father and Mack Prewett fit into that? What information would her father have that Mack wouldn't?

The answer eluded her. It could be anything. Her father had friends in every country in Europe, and any variety of confidential information could come his way. What didn't make sense was why he would sell that information; he was already a wealthy man. But money, to some people, was as addictive as a narcotic. No amount was ever enough; they had to have more, then still more, always looking for the next hit in the form of cash and the power that went with it.

Could she have been so wrong in her judgment of him? Had she still been looking at him with a child's eyes, seeing only her father, the man who had been the security in her life, instead of a man whose ambitions had tainted his honor?

Blindly she stumbled to her bedroom, not caring if he heard her. He must still have been engrossed in his conversation, though, or she didn't make as much noise as she thought she had, because his door remained closed.

She curled up on the bed, protectively folding herself around the tiny embryo in her womb.

What was it he hadn't bargained on? The kidnapping? That was over two months in the past. Had there been a new threat to use her as a means of ensuring he did something?

She was helplessly fumbling around in the dark with these wild conjectures, and she hated it. It was like being in alien territory, with no signs to guide her. What was she supposed to do? Take her suspicions to the FBI? She had nothing concrete to go on, and over the years her father had made a lot of contacts in the FBI; who could she trust there?

Even more important, if she stayed here, was she in danger? Maybe her wild conjectures weren't wild at all. She had seen a lot during her father's years in foreign service and noticed even more when she had started working at the embassy. Things happened, skulduggery went on, dangerous situations developed. Given the kidnapping, her father's reaction and now his unreasonable attitude about her safety, she didn't think she could afford to assume everything would be okay.

She had to leave.

Feverishly she began trying to think of someplace she could go where it wouldn't be easy to find her, and how she could get there without leaving a paper trail that would lead a halfway competent terrorist straight to her. Meanwhile, Mack Prewett wasn't a halfway competent bureaucrat, he was frighteningly efficient; he was like a spider, with webs of contacts spreading out in all directions. If she booked a flight using her real name, or paid for it with a credit card, he would know.

To truly hide, she had to have cash, a lot of it. That meant emptying her bank account, but how could she get there without her father knowing? It had reached the point where she would have to climb out the window and walk to the nearest pay phone to call a cab.

Maybe the house was already being watched.

She moaned and covered her face with her hands. Oh, God, this was making her paranoid, but did she dare not suspect anything? As some wit had observed, even paranoids had enemies.

She had to think of the baby. No matter how paranoid an action seemed, she had to err on the side of safety. If she had to dress in dark clothing, slither out a window in the wee hours of the morning and crawl across the ground until she was well away from this house... as ridiculous as it sounded, she would do it. Tonight? The sooner she got away, the better.

Tonight.

That decision made, she took a deep breath and tried to think of the details. She would have to carry some clothing. She would take her checkbook and bank book, so she could close out both her checking and savings accounts. She would take her credit cards and get as much cash as she could on them; everything together would give her a hefty amount, close to half a million dollars. How would she carry that much money? She would need an empty bag.

This was beginning to sound ludicrous, even to her. How was she supposed to crawl across the lawn in the darkness, dragging two suitcases behind her?

Think! she fiercely admonished herself. Okay, she wouldn't have to carry either clothes or suitcases with her.

All she would need to carry was her available cash, which was several hundred dollars, her checkbook and savings account book, and her credit cards, which she would destroy after they had served their purpose. She could buy new clothes and makeup, as well as what luggage she would immediately need, as soon as a discount store opened. She could buy do-it-yourself hair coloring and dye her red hair brown, though not until after she had been to the bank. She didn't want the teller to be able to describe her disguise.

With cash in her possession, she would have several options. She could hop on Amtrak and go in any direction, then get off the train before her ticketed destination. Then she could buy a cheap used car, pay cash for it, and no one would know where she went from there. To be on the safe side, she would drive that car for only one day, then trade it in on a better car, again paying cash.

These were drastic measures, but doable. She still wasn't certain she wasn't being ridiculous, but did she dare bet that way, when her life, and that of her child, could hang in the balance? Desperate times call for desperate measures. Who had said that? Perhaps an eighteenth-century revolutionary; if so, she knew how he had felt. She had to disappear as completely as possible. She would mail her father a postcard before she left town, letting him know that she was all right but that she thought it would be better to get away for a while, otherwise he would think she had indeed been kidnapped again, and he would go mad with grief and terror. She couldn't do that to him. She still loved him very much, even after all he had done. Again a wave of disbelief and uncertainty hit her. It seemed so impossible that he would sell information to terrorists, so opposite to the man she had always known him to be. She was aware that he wasn't universally well liked, but the worst accusation she had ever heard leveled against him was that he was a snob, which even she admitted was accurate. He was very effective as a diplomat and ambassador, working with the CIA, which was of course set up in every embassy, using his social standing and contacts to smooth the way whenever a problem cropped up. He had personally been acquainted with the last six presidents, and prime ministers called him a friend. This man was a traitor?

It couldn't be. If she had only herself to consider, she would give him the benefit of the doubt.

But there was the baby, the tiny presence undetectable to any but herself. She could feel it in her breasts, which had become so tender she was always aware of them, and in the increased sensitivity and pressure low down in her abdomen, as her womb began to swell with amniotic fluid and increased blood flow. It was almost a hot feeling, as if the new life forming within her was generating heat with the effort of development.

Zane's baby.

She would do anything, no matter how Draconian, to keep it safe. She had to find some secure place where she could get the prenatal care she needed. She would have to change her name, get a new driver's license and a new social security card; she didn't know how these last two would be accomplished, but she would find out. There were always shady characters who could tell her. The driver's license could be forged, but the social security card would have to come through the regular administration. Even though social security was being phased out, until it was completely gone, everyone still had to have a number in order to get a legitimate job.

There was something else to consider. It would be stupid of her to live off her cash until it was all gone. She would need a job, anything that paid enough to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. She had degrees in art and history, but she wouldn't be able to use her own name, so she wouldn't be able to use those degrees to get a teaching job.

She didn't know what the job situation would be wherever she settled; she would simply have to wait and see. It didn't matter what she did, waiting tables or office work, she would take whatever was available.

She glanced at the clock: seven-thirty. Nerves notwithstanding, she was acutely hungry now, to the point of being sick with it. Her pregnant body had its own agenda, ignoring upset emotions and concentrating only on the business at hand.

The thought brought a smile to her face. It was almost as if the baby was already stomping a tiny foot and demanding what it wanted.

Tenderly she pressed her hand over her belly, feeling a slight firmness that surely hadn't been there before. "All right," she whispered to it. "I'll feed you."

She showered and dressed, mentally preparing herself to face her father without giving anything away. When she entered the breakfast room, he looked up with an expression of delight, quickly tempered by caution. "Well, it's a pleasure to have your company," he said, folding the newspaper and laying it aside.

"Some birds woke me up," she said, going to the buffet to help herself to toast and eggs. She fought a brief spell of nausea at the sight of sausage and changed her mind about the eggs, settling on toast and fruit. She hoped that would be enough to satisfy the demanding little creature.

"Coffee?" her father asked as she sat down. He already had the silver carafe in his hand, poised to pour.

"No, not today," she said hastily, as her stomach again clenched warningly. "I've been drinking too much caffeine lately, so I'm trying to cut down." That was a direct lie. She had stopped drinking anything with caffeine in it as soon as she suspected she might be pregnant, but it was as if her system was still warning her against it. "I'll drink orange juice." So far, that hadn't turned her stomach.

She applied herself to her food, replying civilly to his conversational gambits, but she couldn't bring herself to wholeheartedly enter into a discussion with him the way she once would have done. She could barely look at him, afraid her feelings would be plain on her face. She didn't want him any more alert than he already was.

"I'm having lunch with Congressman Garth," he told her. "What are your plans for the day?"

"None," she replied. Her plans were all for the night.

He looked relieved. "I'll see you this afternoon, then. I'll drive myself, so Poole will be available to drive you if you do decide to go anywhere."

"All right," she said, agreeing with him because she wasn't going anywhere.

Once he'd left the house, she spent the day reading and occasionally napping. Now that she had made up her mind to go, she felt more peaceful. Tomorrow would be an exhausting day, so she needed to rest while she could.

Her father returned in the middle of the afternoon. Barrie was sitting in the living room, curled up with a book. She looked up as he entered and immediately noticed how the drawn look of worry eased when he saw her. "Did you have a nice lunch?" she asked, because that was what she would have done before.

"You know how these political things are," he said. Once he would have sat down and told her all about it, but this time he smoothly evaded talking specifics. Senator

Garth was on several important committees concerning national security and foreign affairs. Before she could ask any more questions, he went into his study, closing the door behind him. Before, he had always kept it open as an invitation to her to visit whenever she wanted. Sadly Barrie looked at the closed door, then returned to her book.

The doorbell startled her. She put the book aside and went to answer it, cautiously looking through the peephole before opening the door. A tall, black-haired man was standing there.

Her heart jumped wildly, and a wave of dizziness swept over her. Behind her, she heard her father coming out of his study. "Who is it?" he asked sharply. "Let me get it."

Barrie didn't reply. She jerked the door open and stared up into Zane's cool, blue gray eyes. Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe.

That sharp gaze swept down her body, then came up to her face. "Are you pregnant?" he asked quietly, his voice pitched low so her father couldn't hear, even though he was rapidly approaching.

"Yes," she whispered.

He nodded, a terse movement of his head as if that settled that. "Then we'll get married."

Chapter 9

Her father reached them then, and shouldered Barrie aside. "Who are you?" he demanded, still in that sharp tone.

Zane coolly surveyed the man who would be his father-in-law. "Zane Mackenzie," he finally replied, when he had finished his appraisal. His darkly tanned face was impassive, but there was a piercing quality to his pale eyes that made Barrie suddenly aware of how dangerous this man could be. It didn't frighten her; under the circumstances, this quality was exactly what she needed.

William Lovejoy had been alarmed, but now his complexion turned pasty, and his expression froze. He said stiffly, "I'm sure you realize it isn't good for Barrie to see you again. She's trying to put that episode behind her—"

Zane looked past Lovejoy to where Barrie stood, visibly trembling as she stared at him with pleading green eyes. He hadn't realized how green her eyes were, a deep forest green, or how expressive. He got the impression that she wasn't pleading for him to be nice to her father, but rather that she was asking for help in some way, with some thing. His battle instincts stirred, his senses lifting to the next level of acuity. He didn't know exactly what she was asking of him, but he would find out, as soon as he dealt with the present situation. It was time to let the former ambassador know exactly where he stood.

"We're getting married," he said, still looking at Barrie, as he cut through the ambassador's continuing explanation on why it would be best if he left immediately. His steely voice, which had instantly commanded the attention of the deadliest guerrilla fighters in the world, cut through Lovejoy's stuffy, patronizing explanation.

The ambassador broke off, and a look of panic flashed across his face. Then he said, "Don't be ridiculous," in a strained tone. "Barrie isn't going to marry a sailor who thinks he's something special because he's a trained assassin."

Zane's cool gaze switched from Barrie to her father and went arctic cold, the blue fading to a gray that glinted like shards of ice. Lovejoy took an involuntary step back, his complexion going from pasty to white.

"Barrie, will you marry me?" Zane asked deliberately, keeping his gaze focused on Lovejoy.

She glanced from him to her father, who tensed as he waited for her answer.

"Yes," she said, her mind racing. Zane. She wouldn't question the miracle that had brought him here, but she was so desperate that she would have married him even if she hadn't loved him. Zane was a SEAL; if anyone could keep her safe from the unknown enemy who had her father so on edge, he could. She was carrying his child, and evidently that possibility was what had brought him to Virginia in search of her. He was a man who took his responsibilities seriously. She would have preferred that he cared for her as deeply as she did for him, but she would take what she could get. She knew he was attracted to her; if he wasn't, she wouldn't be pregnant.

She would marry him, and perhaps with time he would come to love her.

Her father flinched at her answer. Half turning to her, he said imploringly, "Baby, you don't want to marry someone like him. You've always had the best, and he can't give it to you."

Squaring her shoulders, she said, "I'm going to marry him—as soon as possible."

Seeing the intractability in her expression, her father looked at Zane. "You won't get a penny of her inheritance," he said with real venom.

"Dad!" she cried, shocked. She had her own money, inheritances from her mother and grandparents, so she wasn't worried about being destitute even if he carried through on his threat; it was the fact that he'd made the threat at all, that he would try to sabotage her future with Zane in such a blatant, hurtful manner, that hurt.

Zane shrugged. "Fine," he said with deceptive mildness. Barrie heard the pure iron underlying the calm, even tone. "Do what you want with your money, I don't give a damn. But you're a fool if you thought you could keep her with you for the rest of your life. You can act like an ass and cheat yourself out of your grandchildren if you want, but nothing you say is going to change a damn thing."

Lovejoy hung there, his face drawn with pain. Anguish darkened his eyes as he looked at his daughter. "Don't do it," he pleaded, his voice shaking.

Now it was her turn to wince, because in spite of everything, she hated to hurt him. "I'm pregnant," she whispered, straightening her shoulders against any other hurtful thing he might say. "And we're getting married."

He swayed on his feet, stunned by her announcement. She hadn't thought it possible he could turn any whiter, but he did. "What?" he croaked. "But—but you said you weren't raped!"

"She wasn't," Zane said. There was a soft, drawling, very masculine undertone in his voice.

Their eyes met. Barrie gave him a soft, wry smile. "I wasn't," she verified, and despite everything, a sudden, subtle glow lit her face.

Her father couldn't think of anything else to say. He gaped at them for a moment, unable to handle this turn of events. Then a red tide of anger ran up his face, chasing away the pallor. "You bastard!" he choked out. "You took advantage of her when she was vulnerable— "

Barrie grabbed his arm and jerked him around. "Stop it!" she yelled, her slender body tense with fury. Her nerves had been shredded since that morning, and this confrontation was only making them worse. Zane's sudden appearance, though it made her almost giddy with happiness, was another shock to her system, and she'd had enough. "If anyone took advantage, I did. If you want the details I'll give them to you, but I don't think you really want to know!"

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him if he'd thought he could keep her a virgin forever, but she bit the bitter words off unspoken. That would be too hurtful, and once said, she would never be able to take the words back. He loved her, perhaps too much; his fear of losing her was why he was lashing out. And, despite everything, she loved him, too. Pain congealed inside her as she stared starkly at him, all pretense gone. "I know," she whispered. "Do you understand? I know. I know why you've been so paranoid every time I've left the house. I have to leave."

He inhaled sharply, shock ripping away his last vestige of control. He couldn't sustain her burning gaze, and he looked away. "Keep her safe," he said to Zane in a stifled voice, then walked stiffly toward his study.

"I intend to." That difficulty solved, he spared no more than a glance for his departing foe. His gaze switched to Barrie, and a slow, heart-stopping smile touched his lips. "Go get packed," be said.

They were on their way within the hour.

She hurried up to her bedroom and filled her suitcases, bypassing the evening gowns and designer suits in favor of more practical clothing. The ankle-length cotton skirt she was already wearing was comfortable enough for travel; she pulled on a silk shirt over the sleeveless blouse she wore and let it go at that. Every instinct she had was screaming at her to hurry.

She dragged the bags to the top of the stairs. It didn't require a lot of effort, they all had wheeled bottoms, but when Zane saw her, he left his post by the door and took the stairs two at a time. "Don't lift those," he ordered, taking the bags from her hands. "You should have called me."

His tone was the same one he had used in commanding his men, but Barrie was too nervous to fight that battle with him right now. He lifted all three cases with an ease that made her blink and started down the stairs with them. She rushed after him. "Where are we going? Are we flying or driving?"

"Las Vegas. Flying."

"You already have the tickets?" she asked in surprise.

He paused and glanced over his shoulder at her, the dark wings of his eyebrows lifting fractionally. "Of course," he said, and resumed his trip down the stairs.

Such certainty and self-assurance were daunting. Briefly she wondered what on earth she was getting herself into. More and more she was becoming aware of just how much in control Zane Mackenzie was, of himself and everything around him. She might never be able to break through that barrier. Except in bed. The memory zinged through her, bringing a flush to her cheeks that wasn't caused by rushing around. He had lost control there, and it had been... breathtaking.

"What time is the flight?" Once more she hurried to catch up to him. "Will we have time to go to my bank? I need to close out my accounts—"

"You can transfer them to a local bank when we get home."

While he carried her bags out to the rental car he was driving, Barrie went to the study and knocked softly on the door. There was no answer; after a moment she opened the door anyway. Her father was sitting at the desk, his elbows propped on top of it and his face buried in his hands.

"Bye, Dad," she said softly.

He didn't answer, but she saw his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed.

"I'll let you know where I am."

"No," he said, his voice strangled. "Don't." He lifted his head. His eyes were anguished. "Not yet. Wait... wait a while."

"All right," she whispered, understanding slicing through her. It was safer for her that way. He must suspect the phone line was tapped.

"Baby, I—" He broke off and swallowed hard again. "I only want you to be happy—and safe."

"I know." She felt dampness on her cheeks and wiped away the tears that were wetting them.

"He isn't the kind of man I wanted for you. The SEALs are—well, never mind." He sighed. "Maybe he can keep you safe. I hope so. I love you, baby. You've been the center of my life. You know I never meant—" He halted, unable to go on.

"I know," she said again. "I love you, too."

She quietly closed the door and stood with her head bowed. She didn't hear him approach, but suddenly Zane was there, his arm hard around her waist as he drew her with him out to the car. He didn't ask any questions, just opened the door for her and helped her inside, then closed the door with a finality that was unmistakable.

She sat tensely during the drive to the airport, watching the traffic buzz around them.

"This is the most privacy we'll have for a while," Zane said as he competently threaded the car through the insanity of rush hour. "Why don't you tell me what's going on?" He had slipped on a pair of sunglasses, and his eyes were hidden from her view, but she didn't have to see them to know how cool and remote the expression in them was.

She lifted her chin and stared straight ahead, considering the way his suggestions sounded like orders. This wasn't going to be easy, but he had to know everything. She needed his protection, at least while she still carried his child. He wouldn't be on guard unless he knew there was a threat. She had to be honest with him. "I want you to know—one of the reasons I agreed to marry you is that I need protection, and you're a SEAL. If anything... dangerous... happens, you'll know how to handle it."

"Dangerous, how?" He sounded very matter-of-fact, almost disinterested. She supposed that, given his job, danger was so common to him that it was more the rule than the exception.

"I think the kidnappers may try again. And now I have more than just myself to worry about." Briefly, unconsciously, her hand moved to her lower belly in the instinctive way a pregnant woman touched the growing child within, as if reassuring it of its safety.

He glanced in the rearview mirror, calmly studying the traffic behind and around them. After a moment of consideration, he went straight to the heart of the matter. "Have you notified the FBI? The police?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I think Dad may be involved," she said, almost strangling on the words.

Once again he checked the rearview mirror. "In what way?"

He sounded so damn remote. She clenched her hands into fists, determined to hold on to her control. If he could be self-contained, then so could she. She forced her voice to evenness. "The reason for the kidnapping wasn't ransom, so they must want information from him. I can't think of anything else it could be."

He was silent for a moment, deftly weaving in and out of the tangle of vehicles. She could almost hear that cool, logical brain sorting through the ramifications. Finally he said, "Your father must be in it up to his neck, or he'd have gone to the FBI himself. You would have been taken to a safe place and surrounded by a wall of agents."

He'd reached exactly the same conclusion she had. That didn't make her feel any better. "Since we've been back in Vkginia, he's been impossible. He doesn't want me to leave the house by myself, and he's monitoring all telephone calls. He was always protective, but not like this. At first I thought he was overreacting because of what happened in Athens, but when I thought it through, I realized the threat still existed." She swallowed. "I'd made up my mind to sneak out tonight and disappear for a while."

If Zane had waited another day, she would have been gone. He wouldn't have had any idea where to find her, and she had no way of contacting him. Tears burned her eyes at the thought. Dear God, it had been so close.

"Hold on," he said, then jerked the steering wheel to the right, cutting across a lane of traffic and throwing the car into a sharp turn into another street. The tires squealed, and horns blared. Even with his warning, she barely had time to brace herself, and the seat belt tightened with a jerk.

"What's wrong?" she cried, struggling to right herself and ease the strangling grip of the seat belt.

"There's a possibility we had company. I didn't want to take any chances."

Alarmed, Barrie twisted around in the seat, staring at the cars passing through the intersection behind them, vainly trying to see anyone who looked familiar or any vehicle making an obvious effort to cut across traffic and follow them. The traffic pattern looked normal.

"Two Caucasian men, in their thirties or forties, both wearing sunglasses," Zane said with no more emphasis than if he'd been observing the clouds in the sky. She remembered this almost supernatural calmness from before. In Benghazi, the more tense the situation, the cooler he had become, totally devoid of emotion. For him to take the action he had, he'd been certain they were being followed. The bottom dropped out of her stomach, and she fought a sudden rise of nausea. To suspect she was in danger was one thing, having it confirmed was something else entirely.

Then what he'd said registered in her brain. "Caucasian?" she echoed. "But—" She stopped, because of course it made sense. While she had subconsciously been looking for Libyans, she had to remember that this Gordian knot of intrigue involved both Libyans and Mack Prewett's cohorts; given his resources, she had to be suspicious of everyone, not just Middle Easterners. Black, white or Oriental, she couldn't trust anyone—except Zane.

"Since they know what I'm driving, we're going to ditch the car." Zane took another turn, this time without the dramatics, but also without signaling or slowing down more than was necessary. "I'll make a phone call and have the car taken care of. We'll get a ride to the airport."

She didn't ask who he would call; the area was crawling with military personnel from all the branches of service. Someone in dress whites would collect the car and return it to the rental company, and that would be that. By then, she and Zane would be on their way to Las Vegas.

"They'll be able to find me anyway," she said suddenly, thinking of the airline ticket in her name.

"Eventually. It'll take a while, though. We have a substantial grace period."

"Maybe not." She bit her lip. "I overheard Dad talking to Mack Prewett this morning. Mack's CIA, deputy station chief in Athens. Dad told him that he wanted this finished, that he never meant for me to be involved."

Zane lifted his eyebrows. "I see."

She supposed he did. If her father was working with the CIA in anything legitimate, he would have been able to protect her through legal channels. Mack Prewett's involvement changed the rules. He would have access to records that ordinary people wouldn't have. Even though the CIA didn't operate within the United States, the tentacles of influence were far-reaching. If Mack wanted to know if she'd taken a flight out of either of the major area airports, he would have that information within minutes.

"If they were sharp enough to get the license plate number on the car, they'll have my name very shortly,'' he said. "If they didn't get the number, then they won't have a clue about my identity. Ether way, it's too late to worry about it now. They either have it or they don't, and there's no need to change our immediate plans. We'll take the flight to Las Vegas and lose them there, at least for a while."

"How will we lose them? If Mack can get access to your records..."

"I resigned my commission. I'm not a SEAL anymore."

"Oh," she said blankly. She struggled to adjust to yet another change. She had already been imagining and mentally preparing for life as the wife of a military officer, with the frequent moves, the politics of rank. It wouldn't have been much different from life in the embassy, just on a different level. Now she realized she had no idea what kind of life they would have.

"What will we do, then?" she asked.

"I've taken the job of sheriff in a county in southern Arizona. The sheriff died in office, so the governor appointed me to complete his term. There are two years left until new elections, so we'll be in Arizona for at least two years, maybe more."

A sheriff! That was a definite surprise, and the offhand manner with which he had announced it only deepened her sense of unreality. She struggled to focus on the important things. "What your job is doesn't matter," she said as evenly as possible. "It's your training that counts."

He shrugged and wheeled the car into the entrance of a parking garage. "I understand." His voice was flat, emotionless. "You agreed to marry me because you think I'll be able to protect you." He let down the window and leaned out to get the ticket from the automatic dispenser. The red barrier lifted, and he drove through.

Barrie wound her fingers together. Her initial flush of happiness had given way to worry. Zane had come after her, yes, and asked her to marry him, but perhaps she'd been wrong about the attraction between them. She felt uprooted and off-balance. Zane didn't seem particularly happy to see her, but then, she had certainly tossed a huge problem into his lap. He would become a husband and a father in very short order, and on top of that, he had to protect them from an unknown enemy. He hadn't even kissed her, she thought, feeling close to tears, and she was a little surprised at herself for even thinking of such a thing right now. If he was right and someone had been following them, then the danger had been more immediate than she had feared. How could she worry about his reasons for marrying her? After all, the baby's safety was one of the reasons she was marry ing him. "I want you to protect our baby," she said quietly. "There are other reasons, but that's the main one." Her feelings for him were something she could have handled on her own; she wouldn't take that chance with her baby's safety.

"A damn important one. You're right, too." He gave her a brief glance as he pulled the car into a parking slot on the third level. "I won't let anything hurt you or the baby."

He pulled off his sunglasses and got out of the car with a brief "Wait here," and strode off toward a pay phone. When he reached it, he punched in a series of numbers, then turned so he could watch her and the car while he talked.

Barrie felt her nerves jolt and her stomach muscles tighten as she stared across the parking deck at him. She was actually marrying this man. He looked taller than she remembered, a little leaner, though his shoulders were so wide they strained the seams of his white cotton shirt. His black hair was a bit longer, she thought, but his tan was just as dark. Except for the slight weight loss, he didn't show any sign of having been shot only a little over two months earlier. His physical toughness was intimidating; he was intimidating. How could she have forgotten? She had remembered only his consideration, his passion, the tender care he'd given her, but he'd used no weapon other than his bare hands to kill that guard. While she had remembered his lethal competency and planned to use it on her own behalf, she had somehow forgotten that it was a prominent part of him, not a quality she could call up when she needed it and tuck away into a corner when the need was over. She would have to deal with this part of him on a regular basis and accept the man he was. He wasn't, and never would be, a tame house cat.

She liked house cats, but she didn't want him to be one, she realized.

She felt another jolt, this time of self-discovery. She needed to be safe now, because of the baby, but she didn't want to be permanently cossetted and protected. The grueling episode in Benghazi had taught her that she was tougher and more competent than she'd ever thought, in ways she hadn't realized. Her father would have approved if she'd married some up-and-coming ambassador-to-be, but that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted some wildness in her life, and Zane Mackenzie was it. For all that maddening control of his, he was fierce and untamed. He didn't have a streak of wildness; he had a core of it.

The strain between them unnerved her. She had dreamed of him finding her and holding out his arms, of falling into them, and when she had opened the door to him today she had expected, like a fool, for her dream to be enacted. Reality was much more complicated than dreams.

The truth was, they had known each other for about twenty-four hours total, and most of those hours had been over two months earlier. In those hours they had made love with raw, scorching passion, and he had made her pregnant, but the amount of time remained the same.

Perhaps he had been involved with someone else, but a sense of responsibility had driven him to locate her and find out if their lovemaking had had any consequences. He would do that, she thought; he would turn his back on a girlfriend, perhaps even a fiancee, to assume the responsibility for his child.

Again she was crashing into the brick wall of ignorance; she didn't know anything about his personal life. If she had known anything about his family, where he was from, she would have been able to find him. Instead, he must think she hadn't cared enough even to ask about his condition, to find out if he had lived or died.

He was coming back to the car now, his stride as smooth and effortlessly powerful as she remembered, the silent walk of a predator. His dark face was as impassive as before, defying her efforts to read his expression.

He opened the door and slid behind the wheel. "Transport will be here in a few minutes."

She nodded, but her mind was still occupied with their personal tangle. Before she lost her nerve, she said evenly, "I tried to find you. They took me back to Athens immediately, while you were still in surgery. I tried to get in touch with you, find out if you were still alive, how you were doing, what hospital you were in—anything. Dad had Admiral Lindley block every inquiry I made. He did tell me you were going to be okay, but that’s all I was able to find out."

"I guessed as much. I tried to call you at the embassy a couple of weeks after the mission. The call was routed to your father."

"He didn't tell me you'd called," she said, the familiar anger and pain twisting her insides. Since she'd been forced off the Montgomery, those had been her two main emotions. So he had tried to contact her. Her heart lifted a little. "After I came home, I tried again to find you, but the Navy wouldn't tell me anything."

"The antiterrorism unit is classified." His tone was absent; he was watching in the mirrors as another car drove slowly past them, looking for an empty slot.

She sat quietly, nerves quivering, until the car had disappeared up the ramp to the next level.

"I'm sorry," she said, after several minutes of silence. "I know this is a lot to dump in your lap."

He gave her an unreadable glance, his eyes very clear and blue. "I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to be."

"Do you have a girlfriend?"

This time the look he gave her was so long that she blushed and concentrated her attention on her hands, which were twisting together in her lap.

"If I did, I wouldn't have made love to you," he finally said.

Oh, dear. She bit her lip. This was going from bad to worse. He was getting more and more remote, as if the fleeting moment of silent communication between them when he'd asked her to marry him had never existed. Her stomach clenched, and suddenly a familiar sensation of being too hot washed over her.

She swallowed hard, praying that the nausea that had so far confined itself to the mornings wasn't about to put in an unexpected appearance. A second later she was scrambling out of the car and frantically looking around for a bathroom. God, did parking decks have bathrooms?

"Barrie!" Zane was out of the car, striding toward her, his dark face alert. She had the impression that he intended to head her off, though she hadn't yet chosen a direction in which to dash.

The stairwell? The elevator? She thought of the people who would use them and discarded both options. The most sensible place was right there on the concrete, and everything fastidious in her rebelled at the idea. Her stomach had different ideas, however, and she clamped a desperate hand over her mouth just as Zane reached her.

Those sharp, pale eyes softened with comprehension. "Here," he said, putting a supporting arm around her. The outside barriers of the parking deck were waist-high concrete walls, and that was where he swiftly guided her. She resisted momentarily, appalled at the possibility of throwing up on some unsuspecting passerby below, but his grip was inexorable, and her stomach wasn't waiting any longer. He held her as she leaned over the wall and helplessly gave in to the spasm of nausea.

She was shaking when it was over. The only comfort she could find was that, when she opened her eyes, she saw there was nothing three stories below but an alley. Zane held her, leaning her against his supporting body while he blotted her perspiring face with his handkerchief, then gave it to her so she could wipe her mouth. She felt scorched with humiliation. The strict teachings of her school in Switzerland hadn't covered what a lady should do after vomiting in public.

And then she realized he was crooning to her, his deep voice an almost inaudible murmur as he brushed his lips against her temple, her hair. One strong hand was splayed over her lower belly, spanning her from hipbone to hipbone, covering his child. Her knees felt like noodles, so she let herself continue leaning against him, let her head fall into the curve of his shoulder.

"Easy, sweetheart," he whispered, once again pressing his lips to her temple. "Can you make it back to the car, or do you want me to carry you?"

She couldn't gather her thoughts enough to give him a coherent answer. After no more than a second, he evidently thought he'd given her enough time to decide, so he made the decision for her by scooping her up into his arms. A few quick strides brought them to the car. He bent down and carefully placed her on the seat, lifting her legs into the car, arranging her skirt over them. "Do you want something to drink? A soft drink?"

Something cold and tart sounded wonderful. "No caffeine," she managed to say.

"You won't be out of my sight for more than twenty seconds, but keep an eye out for passing cars, and blow the horn if anything scares you."

She nodded, and he hit the door lock, then closed the door, shutting her inside a cocoon of silence. She preferred the fresh air but understood why she shouldn't be standing outside the car, exposed to view—and an easy target. She leaned her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. The nausea was gone as swiftly as it had come, though her insides felt like jelly. She was weak, and sleepy, and a bit bemused by his sudden tenderness.

Though she shouldn't be surprised, she thought. She was pregnant with his child, and the possibility of exactly that was what had brought him in search of her. As soon as he'd realized she was nauseated, a condition directly related to her condition, so to speak, he'd shown nothing but tender concern and demonstrated once again his ability to make snap decisions in urgent situations.

His tap on the window startled her, because in her sleepy state she hadn't thought he'd been gone nearly long enough to accomplish his mission. But a green can, frosty with condensation, was in his hand, and suddenly she ferociously wanted that drink. She unlocked the door and all but snatched the can from him before he could slide into the seat. She had it popped open and was drinking greedily by the time he closed the door.

When the can was empty, she leaned back with a sigh of contentment. She heard a low, strained laugh and turned her head to find Zane looking at her with both amusement and something hot and feral mingled in his gaze. "That's the first time watching a woman drink a soft drink has made me hard. Do you want another? I'll try to control myself, but a second one might be more than I can stand."

Barrie's eyes widened. A blush warmed her cheeks, but that didn't stop her from looking at his lap. He was telling the truth. Good heavens, was he ever telling the truth! Her hand clenched with the sudden need to reach out and stroke him. "I'm not thirsty now," she said, her voice huskier than usual. "But I'm willing to go for a second one if you are."

The amusement faded out of his eyes, leaving only the heat behind. He was reaching out for her when his head suddenly snapped around, his attention caught by an approaching vehicle. "Here's our ride," he said, and once again his voice was cool and emotionless.

Chapter 10

She was marrying him because she wanted his protection. The thought gnawed at Zane during the long flight to Las Vegas. She sat quietly beside him, sometimes dozing, talking only if he asked her a question. She had the drained look of someone who had been under a lot of pressure, and now that it had eased, her body was giving in to fatigue. Finally she fell soundly asleep, her head resting against his shoulder.

The pregnancy would be taking a toll on her, too. He couldn't see any physical change in her yet, but his three older brothers had produced enough children that he knew how tired women always got the first few months— at least, how tired Shea and Loren had been. Nothing ever slowed Caroline down, not even five sons.

At the thought of the baby, fierce possessiveness jolted through him again. His baby was inside her. He wanted to scoop her onto his lap and hold her, but a crowded plane wasn't the place for what he had in mind. That would have to wait until after the marriage ceremony, when they were in a private hotel room. He wanted her even more than he had before. When she had opened the door and he'd looked down into her stunned green eyes, his arousal had been so strong and immediate that he'd had to restrain himself from reaching for her. Only the sight of her father bearing down on them had held him back.

He shouldn't have waited as long as he had. As soon as he'd been able to get around okay, he should have come after her. She had been living in fear, and handling it the same way she had in Benghazi, with calm determination. He didn't want her ever to be afraid again. Bunny's and Spooky's arrival at the parking deck, in Bunny's personally customized 1969 Oldsmobile 442, had been like a reunion. Barrie had tumbled out of the rental car with a happy cry and been enthusiastically hugged and twirled around by both SEALs. They were both discreetly armed, he'd noticed approvingly. They were wearing civilian clothes, with their shirts left loose outside their pants to conceal the firepower tucked under their arms and in the smalls of their backs. Normally, when they were off-duty, they didn't carry firearms, but Zane had explained the situation to them and left their preparations to their own discretion, since he wasn't their commanding officer any longer. In typical fashion, they had prepared for anything. His own weapon was still resting in a holster under his left armpit, covered by a lightweight summer jacket.

"Don't you worry none, ma'am," Spooky had reassuringly told Barrie. "We'll get you and the boss to the airport safe and sound. There's nothing outside of NASCAR that can keep up with Bunny's wheels."

"I'm sure there isn't," she'd replied, eyeing the car. It looked unremarkable enough; Bunny had painted it a light gray, and there wasn't any more chrome than would be on a factory job. But the deep-throated rumble from the idling engine didn't sound like any sound a factory engine would make, and the tires were wide, with a soft-looking tread.

"Bulletproof glass, reinforced metal," Bunny said proudly as he helped Zane transfer her luggage to the trunk of his car. "Plate steel would be too heavy for the speed I want, so I went with the new generation of body armor material, lighter and stronger than Kevlar. I'm still working on the fireproofing."

"I'll feel perfectly safe," she assured him.

As she and Zane crawled into the back seat of the two-door car, she whispered to him, "Where's Nascar?"

Spooky could hear a pin drop at forty paces. Slowly he turned around in the front seat, his face mirroring his incredulity. "Not where, ma'am," he said, struggling with shock. "What. NASCAR. Stock car racing." A good Southerner, he'd grown up with stock car racing and was always stunned when he encountered someone who hadn't enjoyed the same contact with the sport.

"Oh," Barrie said, giving him an apologetic smile. "I've spent a lot of time in Europe. I don't know anything about racing except for the Grand Prix races."

Bunny snorted in derision. "Play cars," he said dismissively. "You can't run them on the streets. Stock car racing, now that's real racing." As he was speaking, he was wheeling his deceptive monster out of the parking deck, his restless gaze touching on every surrounding detail.

"I've been to horse races," Barrie offered, evidently in an attempt to redeem herself.

Zane controlled a smile at the earnestness of her tone. "Do you ride?" he asked.

Her attention swung to him. "Why, yes. I love horses."

"You'll make a good Mackenzie, then," Spooky drawled. "Boss raises horses in his spare time." There was a bit of irony in his tone, because SEALs had about as much spare time as albinos had color.

"Do you really?" Barrie asked, her eyes shining.

"I own a few. Thirty or so."

"Thirty!" She sat back, a slight look of confusion on her face. He knew what she was thinking: one horse was expensive to own and keep, let alone thirty. Horses needed a lot of land and care, not something she associated with an ex-Naval officer who had been a member of an elite antiterrorism group.

"It's a family business," he explained, swiveling his head to examine the traffic around them.

"Everything's clear, boss," Bunny said. "Unless they've tagged us with a relay, but I don't see how that's possible."

Zane didn't, either, so he relaxed. A moving relay surveillance took a lot of time and coordination to set up, and the route had to be known. Bunny was taking such a circuitous route to the airport that any tail would long since have been revealed or shaken. Things were under control—for now.

They made it to National without incident, though to be on the safe side Bunny and Spooky had escorted them as far as the security check. While Zane quietly handled his own armed passage through security, his two former team members had taken themselves off to collect the rental car and turn it in, though to the agency office at Dulles, not National, where he had rented it. Just another little twist to delay anyone who was looking for them.

Now that they were safely on the plane, he began planning what he would do to put an end to the situation.

The first part of it was easy. He would put Chance on the job of finding out what kind of mess her father was involved in; for her sake, he hoped it wasn't anything treasonous, but whatever was going on, he intended to put a stop to it. Chance had access to information that put national security agencies to shame. If William Lovejoy was selling out his country, then he would go down. There was no other option. Zane had spent his adult years offering his life in protection of his country, and now he was a peace officer sworn to uphold the law; it was impossible for him to look the other way, even for Barrie. He didn't want her to be hurt, but he damn sure wanted her to be safe.

Barrie slept until the airliner's wheels bounced on the pavement. She sat upright, pushing her hair away from her face, looking about with a slight sense of disorientation. She had never before been able to sleep on a plane; this sleepiness was just one more of the many changes her pregnancy was making in her body, and her lack of control over the process was disconcerting, even frightening.

On the other hand, the rest had given her additional energy, something she needed to face the immense change she was about to make in her life. This change was deliberate, but no less frightening.

"I want to shower and change clothes first," she said firmly. This marriage might be hasty, without any resemblance to the type of wedding ceremony she had always envisioned for herself, but while she was willing to forgo the pomp and expensive trappings, she wasn't willing — outside of a life-and-death situation — to get married wearing wrinkled clothes and still blinking sleep from her eyes.

"Okay. We'll check in to a hotel first." He rubbed his jaw, his callused fingers rasping over his beard stubble. "I need to have a shave anyway."

He had needed to shave that day in Benghazi, too. In a flash of memory she felt again the scrape of his rough chin against her naked breasts, and a wave of heat washed over her, leaving her weak and flushed. The cool air blowing from the tiny vent overhead was suddenly not cool enough.

She hoped he wouldn't notice, but it was a faint hope, because he was trained to take note of every detail around him. She imagined he could describe every passenger within ten rows of them in either direction, and when she'd been awake she had noticed that he'd shown an uncanny awareness of anyone approaching them from the rear on the way to the lavatories.

"Are you feeling sick?" he asked, eyeing the color in her cheeks.

"No, I'm just a little warm," she said with perfect truth, while her blush deepened.

He continued to watch her, and the concern in his eyes changed to a heated awareness. She couldn't even hide that from him, damn it. From the beginning it had been as if he could see beneath her skin; he sensed her reactions almost as soon as she felt them.

Slowly his heavy-lidded gaze moved down to her breasts, studying the slope and thrust of them. She inhaled sharply as her nipples tightened in response to his blatant interest, a response that shot all the way to her loins.

"Are they more sensitive?" he murmured.

Oh, God, he shouldn't do this to her, she thought wildly. They were in the middle of a plane full of people, taxiing toward an empty gate, and he was asking questions about her breasts and looking as if he would start undressing her any minute now.

"Are they?"

"Yes," she whispered. Her entire body felt more sensitive, from both her pregnancy and her acute awareness of him. Soon he would be her husband, and once again she would be lying in his arms.

"Ceremony first," he said, his thoughts echoing hers in that eerie way he had. "Otherwise we won't get out of the hotel until tomorrow."

"Are you psychic?" she accused under her breath.

A slow smile curved his beautiful mouth. "It doesn't take a psychic to know what those puckered nipples mean."

She glanced down and saw her nipples plainly beaded under the lace and silk of her bra and blouse. Her face red, she hastily drew her shirt over the betraying little nubs, and he gave a low laugh. At least no one else was likely to have heard him, she thought with scant comfort. He'd pitched his voice low, and the noise on board made it difficult to overhear conversations, anyway.

The flight attendants were telling them to remain in their seats until the plane was secured and the doors opened, and as usual the instructions were ignored as passengers surged into the aisles, opening the overhead bins and dragging down their carry-on luggage or hauling it out from under the seats. Zane stepped deftly into the aisle, and the movement briefly pulled his jacket open. She saw the holster under his left arm and the polished metal butt of the pistol tucked snugly inside it. Then he automatically shrugged one shoulder, and the jacket fell into place, a movement he'd performed so many times he didn't have to think about it.

She'd known he was armed, of course, because he'd informed the airport and airline security before they'd boarded the plane. During the boredom and enforced inactivity of the flight, however, she had managed to push the recent events from her mind, but the sight of that big automatic brought them all back.

He extended his hand to steady her as she stepped into the aisle ahead of him. Standing pressed like sardines in the line, she felt him like a warm and solid wall at her back, his arms slightly extended so that his hands rested on the seat backs, enveloping her in security. His breath stirred the hair on top of her head, making her realize anew exactly how big he was. She was of average height, but if she leaned back, her head would fit perfectly into the curve of his shoulder.

The man in front of her shifted, forcing her backward, and Zane curved one arm around her as he gathered her against his body, his big hand settling protectively over her lower belly. Barrie bit her lip as her mind bounced from worry to the pleasure of his touch. This couldn't go on much longer—either this exquisite frustration or the sharp darts of terror—or she would lose her mind.

The line of passengers began to shuffle forward as the doors were opened and they were released from the plane. Zane's hand dropped from her belly. As she began to move forward, Barrie caught the eye of an older woman who had chosen to remain in her seat until the stampede was over, and the woman gave her a knowing smile, her gaze flicking to Zane.

"Ma'am," Zane said smoothly in acknowledgment, and Barrie knew he'd caught the little byplay. His acute awareness of his surroundings was beginning to spook her.

What if she didn't want him to notice everything? Most women would be thrilled to death with a husband who actually took note of details, but probably not to the extent that Zane Mackenzie did.

On the other hand, if the alternative was living without him, she would learn how to cope, she thought wryly. She'd spent over two months pining for him, and now that she had him, she wasn't about to get cold feet because he was alert. He was a trained warrior—an assassin, her father had called him. He wouldn't have survived if he hadn't been aware of everything going on around him, and neither would she.

That alertness was evident as they followed the signs to the baggage claim area. The airport was a shifting, flowing beehive, and Zane's cool gaze was constantly assessing the people around them. As he had more than once before, he kept himself between her and everybody else, steering her close to the wall and protecting her other side with his body. He'd already taken one bullet while doing that, she thought, and had to fight the sudden terrified impulse to grab him and shove him against the wall.

Before they reached the baggage claim, however, he pulled her to a halt. "Let's wait here a minute," he said.

She strove for calm, for mastery over the butterflies that suddenly took flight in her stomach. "Did you see anything suspicious?" she asked.

"No, we're waiting for someone." He looked at her, his cool gaze warming as he studied her face. "You're a gutsy little broad, Miss Lovejoy. No matter what, you hold it together and try to do the best you can. Not bad for a pampered society babe."

Barrie was taken aback. She'd never been called a broad before, or a society babe. If it hadn't been for the teasing glint in his eyes, she might have taken exception to the terms. Instead, she considered them for a moment, then gave a brief nod of agreement. "You're right," she said serenely. "I am gutsy for a pampered society babe."

He was surprised into a chuckle, a deliriously rich sound that was cut short when they were approached by a middle-aged man who wore a suit and carried a radio set in his hand. "Sheriff Mackenzie?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Travis Hulsey, airport security." Mr. Hulsey flashed his identification. "We have your luggage waiting for you in a secure area, as requested. This way, please."

So he'd even thought of that, Barrie marveled as they followed Mr. Hulsey through an unmarked door. An attempt to grab her inside the airport would be tricky, given the security, so the most logical thing to do would be to wait at the ground transportation area, where everyone went after collecting luggage, then follow them to their destination and wait for a better opportunity. Zane had thwarted that; he must have made the arrangements when he'd gone forward to the lavatory.

The dry desert heat slapped them in the face as soon as they stepped through the door. Her three suitcases and his one garment bag, which he had collected from a locker at National, were waiting for them at a discreet entrance well away from the main ground transportation area. Also waiting for them was a car, beside which stood a young man with the distinctive austere military haircut, even though he wore civilian clothes.

The young man all but snapped to attention. "Sir," he said. "Airman Zaharias at your service, sir."

Zane's dark face lit with amusement. "At ease," he said. "I'm not my brother."

Airman Zaharias relaxed with a grin. "When I first saw you, sir, I wasn't sure."

"If he pulled rank and this is messing up your leave time, I'll get other transport."

"I volunteered, sir. The general did me a personal favor when I was fresh out of basic. Giving bis brother a ride downtown is the least I can do."

Brother? General? Barrie raised some mental eyebrows. First horses, now this. She realized she didn't know anything about her soon-to-be husband's background, but the details she'd gleaned so far were startling, to say the least.

Zane introduced her with grave courtesy. "Barrie, Airman Zaharias is our safe transport, and he has donated his personal vehicle and time off for the service. Airman Zaharias, my fiancee, Barrie Lovejoy."

She solemnly shook hands with the young airman, who was almost beside himself in his eagerness to please.

"Glad to meet you, ma'am." He unlocked the trunk and swiftly began loading their luggage, protesting when Zane lifted two of the bags and stowed them himself. "Let me do that, sir!"

"I'm a civilian now," Zane said, amusement still bright in his eyes. "And I was Navy, anyway."

Airman Zaharias shrugged. "Yes, sir, but you're still the general's brother." He paused, then asked, "Were you really a SEAL?"

"Guilty."

"Damn," Airman Zaharias breathed.

They climbed into the air-conditioned relief of the airman's Chevrolet and were off. Their young driver evidently knew Las Vegas well, and without asking for instructions he ignored the main routes. Instead he circled around and took Paradise Road north out of the airport. He chattered cheerfully the entire time, but Barrie noticed that he didn't mention the exact nature of the favor Zane's general brother had done for him, nor did he venture into personal realms. He talked about the weather, the traffic, the tourists, the hotels. Zane directed him to a hotel off the main drag, and soon Airman Zaharias was on his way and they were checking in to the hotel.

Barrie bided her time, standing quietly to one side while Zane arranged for them to be listed in the hotel's computer as Glen and Alice Temple—how he arrived at those names she had no idea—and ignoring the clerk's knowing smirk. He probably thought they were adulterous lovers on a tryst, which suited her just fine; it would keep him from being curious about them.

They weren't alone in the elevator, so she held her tongue then, too. She held it until they were in the suite Zane had booked, and the bellman had been properly tipped and dismissed. The suite was as luxurious as any she had stayed in in Europe. A few hours before, she might have worried that the cost was more than Zane could afford, that he'd chosen it because he thought she would expect it. Now, however, she had no such illusion. As soon as he had closed and locked the door behind the bellman, she crossed her arms and stared levelly at him. "Horses?" she inquired politely. "Family business? A brother who happens to be an Air Force general?"

He shrugged out of his jacket, then his shoulder holster. "All of that," he said.

"I don't know you at all, do I?" She was calm, even a little bemused, as she watched him wrap the straps around the holster and deposit the weapon on the bedside table.

He unzipped his garment bag and removed a suit from it, then began unpacking other items. His pale glance flashed briefly at her. "You know me," he said. "You just don't know all the details of my family yet, but we haven't had much time for casual chatting. I'm not deliberately hiding anything from you. Ask any question you want."

"I don't want to conduct a catechism," she said, though she needed to do exactly that. "It's just..." She spread her hands in frustration, because she was marrying him and she didn't already know all this.

He began unbuttoning his shirt. "I promise I'll give you a complete briefing when we have time. Right now, sweetheart, I'd rather you got your sweet little butt in one shower while I get in the other, so we can get married and into this bed as fast as possible. About an hour after that, we'll talk."

She looked at the bed, a bigger-than-king-size. Priorities, priorities, she mused. "Are we safe here?"

"Safe enough for me to concentrate on other things."

She didn't have to ask what those other things were. She looked at the bed again and took a deep breath. "We could rearrange the order of these things," she proposed. "What do you think about bed, talk and then wedding? Say, tomorrow morning?"

He froze in the act of removing his shirt. She saw his eyes darken, saw the sexual tension harden his face. After a moment he pulled the garment free and dropped it to the floor, his movements deliberate. "I haven't kissed you yet," he said.

She swallowed. "I noticed. I've wondered—"

"Don't," he said harshly. "Don't wonder. The reason I haven't kissed you is that, once I start, I won't stop. I know we're doing things out of order—hell, everything's been out of order from the beginning, when you were naked the first time I saw you. I wanted you then, sweetheart, and I want you now, so damn bad I'm aching with it. But trouble is still following you around, and my job is to make damn sure it doesn't get close to you and our baby. I might get killed—"

She made a choked sound of protest, but he cut her off. "It's a possibility, one I accept. I've accepted it for years. I want us married as soon as possible, because I don't know what might happen tomorrow. In case I miscalculate or get unlucky, I want our baby to be legitimate, to be born with the Mackenzie name. A certain amount of protection goes with that name, and I want you to have it. Now."

Tears swam in her eyes as she stared at him, at this man who had akeady taken one bullet for her and was prepared to take another. He was right—she knew him, knew the man he was, even if she didn't know what his favorite color was or what kind of grades he'd made in school. She knew the basics, and it was the basics she had so swiftly and fiercely learned to love. So he wasn't as forthcoming as she might have wished; she would deal with it. So what if he was so controlled it was scary, and so what if those uncanny eyes noticed everything, which would make it difficult to surprise him on Christmas and his birthday? She would deal with that, too, very happily.

If he was willing to die for her, the least she could do was be completely honest with him.

"There's another reason I agreed to marry you," she said.

His dark brows lifted in silent question.

"I love you."

Chapter 11

He wore a dark gray suit with black boots and a black hat. Barrie wore white. It was a simple dress, ankle length and sleeveless, classic in its lines and lack of adornment. She loosely twisted up her dark auburn hair, leaving a few wisps hanging about her face to soften the effect. Her only jewelry was a pair of pearl studs in her ears. She got ready in the bath off the bedroom, he showered in the bath off the parlor. They met at the door between the two rooms, ready to take the step that would make them husband and wife.

At her blunt declaration of love, an equally blunt expression of satisfaction had crossed his face, and for once he didn't hide anything he was feeling. "I don't know about love," he'd said, his voice so even she wanted to shake him. "But I do know I've never wanted another woman the way I want you. I know this marriage is forever. I'll take care of you and our children, I'll come home to you every night, and I'll try my damnedest to make you happy."

It wasn't a declaration of love, but it was certainly one of devotion, and the tears that came so easily to her these days swam in her eyes. Her self-contained warrior would love her, when he lowered his guard enough to let himself. He had spent years with his emotions locked down, while he operated in tense, life-and-death situations that demanded cool, precise thoughts and decisions. Love was neither cool nor concise; it was turbulent, unpredictable, and it left one vulnerable. He would approach love as cautiously as if it was a bomb.

"Don't cry," he said softly. "I swear I'll be a good husband."

"I know," she replied, and then they had both gone to their separate bathrooms to prepare for their wedding.

They took a taxi to a chapel, one of the smaller ones that didn't get as much business and didn't have a drive-through service. Getting married in Las Vegas didn't take a great deal of effort, though Zane took steps to make it special. He bought her a small bouquet of flowers and gave her a bracelet of dainty gold links, which he fastened around her right wrist. Her heart beat heavily as they stood before the justice of the peace, and the bracelet seemed to burn around her wrist. Zane held her left hand securely in his right, his grip warm and gentle, but unbreakable.

Outwardly it was all very civilized, but from the first moment they'd met, Barrie had been acutely attuned to him, and she sensed the primal possessiveness of his actions. He had already claimed her physically, and now he was doing it legally. She already carried his child inside her. His air of masculine satisfaction was almost visible, it was so strong. She felt it, too, as she calmly spoke her vows, this linkage of their lives. During a long, hot day in Benghazi they had forged a bond that still held, despite the events that had forced them apart.

He had one more surprise for her. She hadn't expected a ring, not on such short notice, but at the proper moment he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced two plain gold bands, one for her and one for him. Hers was a little loose when he slipped it over her knuckle, but their eyes met in a moment of perfect understanding. She would be gaining weight, and soon the ring would fit. She took the bigger, wider band and slid it onto the ring finger of his left hand, and she felt her own thrill of primal satisfaction. He was hers, by God!

Their marriage duly registered, the certificate signed and witnessed, they took another taxi to the hotel. "Supper," he said, steering her toward one of the hotel's dining rooms. "You didn't eat anything on the plane, and it's after midnight eastern time."

"We could order room service," she suggested.

His eyes took on that heavy-lidded look. "No, we couldn't." His tone was definite, a little strained. His hand was warm and heavy on the small of her back. "You need to eat, and I don't trust my self-control to last that long unless we're in a public place."

Perhaps feeding her was his only concern, or perhaps he knew more about seduction than most men, she thought as they watched each other over a progression of courses. Knowing that he was going to make love to her as soon as they reached the suite, anticipating the heaviness of his weight on her, the hard thrust of his turgid length into her... the frustration readied her for him as surely as if he was stroking her flesh. Her breasts lifted hard and swollen against the bodice of her dress. Her in-sides tightened with desire, so that she had to press her legs together to ease the throbbing. His gaze kept dropping to her breasts, and as before, she couldn't temper her response. She could feel her own moisture, feel the heaviness in her womb.

She was scarcely aware of what she ate—something bland, to reduce the chances of early-pregnancy nausea. She drank only water. But turnabout was fair play, so she lingered over each bite while she stared at his mouth, or in the direction of his lap. She delicately licked her lips, shivering with delight as his face darkened and his jaw set. She stroked the rim of her water glass with one fingertip, drawing his gaze, making his breath come harder and faster. Beneath the table, she rubbed her foot against the muscled calf of his leg.

He turned to snare their waiter with a laser glare. "Check!" he barked, and the waiter hurried to obey that voice of command. Zane scribbled their room number and his fictitious name on the check, and Barrie stared at him in amazement. It was hard to believe he could remember something like that when she could barely manage to walk.

For revenge, when he pulled her chair back so she could stand, she allowed the knuckles of one hand to brush, oh, so very lightly, against his crotch. He went absolutely rigid for a moment, and his breath hissed out between his teeth. All innocence, Barrie turned to give him a sweetly inquiring What's-wrong? look.

His darkly tanned face was even darker with the flush running under the browned skin. His expression was set, giving away little, but his eyes were glittering like shards of diamond. His big hand closed firmly around her elbow. "Let's go," he said in the soundless whisper she'd first heard in a dark room in Benghazi. "And don't do that again, or I swear I'll have you in the elevator."

"Really." She smiled at him over her shoulder. "How... uplifting."

A faint but visible shudder racked him, and the look he gave her promised retribution. "Here I've been thinking you were so sweet."

"I am sweet," she declared as they marched toward the elevator. "But I'm not a pushover."

"We'll see about that. I'm going to push you over." They reached the bank of elevators, and he jabbed the call button with more force than necessary.

"You won't have to push hard. As a matter of fact, you can just blow me over." She gave him another sweet smile and pursed her lips, blowing a tiny puff of air against his chest to demonstrate.

The bell chimed, the doors opened, and they stood back to allow the car's passengers to exit. They stepped inside alone, and even though people were hurrying toward them to catch that car, Zane ruthlessly punched their floor number and then the door close button. When the car began to rise, he turned on her like a tiger on fresh meat.

She stepped gracefully out of his reach, staring at the numbers flashing on the digital display. "We're almost there."

"You're damn right about that," he growled, coming after her. In the small confines of the elevator she didn't have a chance of evading him, not that she wanted to. What she wanted was to drive him as crazy as he was driving her. His hard hands closed around her waist and lifted her; his muscled body pinned her to the wall. His hips pushed insistently at hers, and she gasped at how hard he was. Automatically her legs opened, allowing him access to the tender recesses of her body. He thrust against her, his hips moving rhythmically, and his mouth came down on hers, smothering, fiercely hungry.

The bell chimed softly, and the elevator gave a slight lurch as it stopped. Zane didn't release her. He simply turned with her still in his grasp and left the elevator, striding rapidly down the hall to their suite. Barrie twined her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips, biting back little moans as each stride he took rubbed his swollen sex against the aching softness of her loins. Pleasure arced through her like lightning with every step, and helplessly she felt her hips undulate against him in a mindless search for a deeper pleasure. A low curse hissed out from between his clenched teeth.

She didn't know if they passed anyone in the hall. She buried her face against his neck and gave in to the soaring hunger. She had needed him for so long, missed him, worried herself sick about him. Now he was here, vitally alive, about to take her with the same uncomplicated fierceness as before, and she didn't care about anything else.

He pushed her against a wall, and for one terrified, delirious moment she thought she had tempted him too much. Instead he unhooked her legs from around his waist and let her slide to the floor. He was breathing hard, his eyes dilated with a sexual hunger that wouldn't be denied much longer, but on one level he was still very much in control. Lifting one finger to his lips to indicate silence, he slipped his right hand inside his jacket. When his hand emerged, it was filled with the butt of that big automatic. He thumbed off the safety, dealt with the electronic lock on the door to their suite, depressed the door handle and slipped noiselessly inside. The door closed as silently as it had opened.

Barrie stood frozen in the hallway, sudden terror chasing away her desire as she waited with her eyes closed and her hands clenched into fists, all her concentration focused on trying to hear anything from inside the suite. She heard nothing. Absolutely nothing. Zane moved like a cat, but so did other men, men like him, men who worked best under cover of night and who could kill as silently as he had dispatched that guard in Benghazi. Her kidnappers hadn't possessed the same expertise, but whoever was behind her abduction wouldn't use Middle Eastern men here in the middle of the glitter and flash of Las Vegas. Perhaps this time he would hire someone more deadly, someone more interested in getting the job done than in terrifying a bound and helpless woman. Any thump, any whisper, might signal the end of Zane's life, and she thought she would shatter under the strain.

She didn't hear the door open again. All she heard was Zane saying, "All clear," in a calm, normal tone, and then she was in his arms again. She didn't think she moved; she thought he simply gathered her in, pulling her into the security of his embrace.

"I'm sorry," he murmured against her hair as he carried her inside. He paused to lock and chain the door. "But I won't take chances with your safety."

Fury roared through her like a brushfire. She lifted her head from the sanctuary of bis shoulder and glared at him. "What about yours?" she demanded violently. "Do you have any idea what it does to me when you do things like that? Do you think I don't notice when you put yourself between me and other people, so if anyone shoots at me, you'll be the one with the bullet hole?" She hit him on the chest with a clenched fist, amazing even herself; she had never struck anyone before. She hit him again. "Damn it, I want you healthy and whole! I want our baby to have its daddy! I want to have more of your babies, so that means you have to stay alive, do you hear me?"

"I hear," he rumbled, his tone soothing as he caught her pounding fists and pressed them against his chest, stilling them. "I'd like the same things myself. That means I have to do whatever's necessary to keep you and Junior safe."

She relaxed against him, her lips trembling as she fought back tears. She wasn't a weepy person; it was just the hormonal roller coaster of pregnancy that was making her so, but still, she didn't want to cry all over him. He had enough to handle without having to deal with a sobbing wife every time he turned around.

When she could manage a steady tone, she said in a small voice, "Junior, is it?"

She saw the flash of his grin as he lifted her in his arms. "I'm afraid so," he said as he carried her to the bed. "My sister Mans is the only female the Mackenzies have managed to produce, and that was twenty-nine years and ten boys ago."

He bent and gently placed her on the bed and sat down beside her. His dark face was intent as he reached beneath her for the zipper of her dress. "Now let's see if I can get you back to where you were before you got scared, and we'll introduce Junior to his daddy," he whispered.

Barrie was seized by a mixture of shyness and uneasiness as he stripped the dress down her hips and legs, then tossed it aside. Since her kidnappers had stripped her in a deliberate attempt to terrorize her, to break her spirit, she hadn't been comfortable with being naked. Except for those hours hidden in the ruins in Benghazi, when Zane had finally coaxed her out of his shirt and she had lost herself in his lovemaking, she had hurried through any times of necessary nudity, such as when she showered, pulling on clothes or a robe as soon as possible. Once upon a time she had lingered after her bath, enjoying the wash of air over her damp skin as she pampered herself with perfumed oils and lotions, but for the past two months that luxury had fallen beneath her urgent need to be covered.

Zane wanted her naked.

Her dress was already gone, and the silk and lace of her matching bra and underpants weren't much protection. Deftly he thumbed open the front fastening of her bra, and the cups loosened, sliding apart to reveal the inner curves of her breasts. Barrie couldn't help herself; she protectively crossed her arms over her breasts, holding the bra in place.

Zane paused, his face still as his pale gaze lifted to her face, examining the helpless, embarrassed expression she wore. She didn't have to explain. He'd been there; he knew. "Still having problems with that shirt?" he asked gently, referring to the way she'd clung so desperately to his garment.

He'd switched on a single lamp. She lay exposed in the small circle of light, while his face was shadowed. She moistened her lips and nodded once, a slight acknowledgment that was all he needed.

"We can't undo things," he said, his face and tone serious. Using one finger, he lightly stroked the upper curves of her breasts, where they plumped above the protection of her crossed arms. "We can put them behind us and move on, but we can't undo them. They stay part of us, they change us inside, but as other things happen, we change still more. I remember the face of the first man I killed. I don't regret doing it, because he was a bomb-happy piece of scum who had left his calling card on a cruise ship, killing nine old people who were just trying to enjoy their retirement. Right then he was trying like hell to kill me... but I always carry his face with me, deep inside."

He paused, thinking, remembering. "He's a part of me now, because killing him changed me. He made me stronger. I know that I can do whatever has to be done, and I know how to go on. I've killed others," he said, as calmly as if he was discussing the weather, "but I don't remember their faces. Only his. And I'm glad I won."

Barrie stared at him, the shadows emphasizing the planes and hollows of his somber face, deepening the oldness in his eyes. Deep inside she understood, the realization going past thought into the center of instinct. Being kidnapped had changed her; she'd faced that before Zane had rescued her. She was stronger, more decisive, more willing to take action. When he'd shown up that afternoon, she had been preparing to take extraordinary measures to protect herself and the child she carried by disappearing from the comfortable life she'd always known. She'd been naked with Zane before—and enjoyed it. She would again.

Slowly she lifted one hand and stroked the precise line of the small scar on his left cheekbone. He turned his head a little, rubbing bis cheek against her fingers.

"Take off your clothes," she suggested softly. Balance. If her nudity was balanced by his, she would be more comfortable.

His eyebrows quirked upward. "All right."

She didn't have to explain, but then, she'd known she wouldn't. She lay on the bed and watched him peel out of his jacket, then remove the shoulder holster, which once more carried its lethal cargo. This last was carefully placed on the bedside table, where it would be within reach. Then his shirt came off, and he dropped it on the floor, along with her dress and his jacket.

The new scar on his upper abdomen was red and puckered, and bisected by a long surgical scar where the ship's surgeon had sliced into him to stop the bleeding and save his life. She had seen the scar before, when he had removed his shirt before showering, but she had been under orders not to touch him then lest she make him forget his priorities. There was no such restriction now.

Her fingers moved over the scar, feeling the heat and vitality of the man, and she thought how easily all of that could have been snuffed out. She had come so close to losing him....

"Don't think about it," he murmured, catching her hand and lifting it to his lips. "It didn't happen."

"It could have."

"It didn't." His tone was final as he bent over to tug off his boots. They dropped to the floor with twin thuds, then he stood to unfasten his pants.

He was right. It hadn't happened. Pick yourself up, learn something, and go on. It was in the past. The future was their marriage, their child. The present was now, and as Zane swiftly stripped off his remaining clothes, a lot more urgent.

He sat beside her again, comfortable in his own skin. It was such wonderful skin, she thought a little dreamily, reaching out to stroke his gleaming shoulders and furry chest and rub the tiny nipples hidden among the hair until they stood stiffly erect. She knew she was inviting him to reciprocate, and her breath caught in her chest as she waited for him to accept.

He wasn't slow about it. His hands went to the parted cups of her bra, and his gaze lifted to hers. "Ready?" he asked with a slight smile.

She didn't reply, just shrugged one shoulder so that her breast slid free of the cup, and that was answer enough.

He glanced downward as he pushed the other cup aside, and she saw his pupils flare with arousal as he looked at her. His breath hissed out through parted lips. "I see our baby here," he whispered, gently touching one nipple with a single fingertip. "You haven't gained any weight, your stomach's still flat, but he's changed you here. Your nipples are darker, and swollen." Ever so lightly, his touch circled the aureola, making it pucker and stand upright. Barrie whimpered with the rush of desire, the familiar lightning strike from breast to loin.

He rubbed his thumb over the tip, then gently curved his hand beneath her breast, lifting it so that it plumped in his palm. "How much more sensitive are they?" he asked, never looking up from his absorption with these new details in her body.

"Some—sometimes I can't bear the touch of my bra." she breathed.

"Your veins are bluer, too," he murmured. "They look like rivers running under a layer of white satin." He leaned down and kissed her, taking possession of her mouth while he continued to fondle her breasts with exquisite care. She melted with a purring little hum of pleasure, lifting herself so she could taste him more deeply. His lips were as hot and forceful as she remembered, as delicious. He took his time; the kiss was slow and deep, his tongue probing. Her pregnancy-sensitive breasts hardened into almost painful arousal, her loins becoming warm and liquid.

He bore her down onto the pillows, his hands slipping over her body, completely removing the bra and then disposing of her underpants. His eyes glittered hotly as he leaned over her. "I'm going to do everything to you I couldn't do before," he whispered. "We don't have to worry about being on guard, or making noise, or what time it is. I'm going to eat you up, Little Red."

She should have been alarmed, because his expression was so fierce and hungry she could almost take him literally. Instead, she reached out for him, almost frantic with the need to feel him covering her, taking her.

He had other ideas. He caught her hands and pressed them to the bed, as she had once done to him. He had trusted her with control, and now she returned the gift, arching her body up for whatever was his pleasure.

His pleasure was her breasts, with their fascinating changes. He took one distended nipple into his mouth, carefully, lightly. That was enough to make her moan, though not with pain; the prickles of sensation were incredibly intense. His tongue batted at her nipple, swirled around it, then pushed it hard against the roof of his mouth as he began suckling.

Her cry was thin, wild. Her breath exploded out of her lungs, and she couldn't seem to draw in any replacement air. Oh, God, she hadn't realized her breasts were that sensitive, or that he would so abruptly push her past both pleasure and pain into a realm so raw and powerful she couldn't bear it. She surged upward, and he controlled the motion, holding her down, transferring his mouth to her other nipple, which received the same tender care and enticement, then the sudden, deliberate pressure that made her cry out again.

He wouldn't stop. She screamed for him to, begged him, but he wouldn't stop. She heard her voice, frantic, pleading: "Zane—please. Oh, God, please. Don't—more. More" And then, sobbing, "Harder!" And she realized she wasn't begging him to stop, but to continue. She writhed in his arms as he pushed her higher and higher, harder and harder, his mouth voracious on her breasts, and suddenly all her senses coalesced into a huge single throb that centered in her loins, and she came apart with pleasure.

When she could breathe again, think again, her limbs were weak and useless in the aftermath. She lay limply on the bed, her eyes closed, and wondered how she had survived the implosion.

"Just from sucking your breasts?" he murmured incredulously as he kissed his way down her stomach. "Oh, damn, are we going to have fun for the next seven months!"

"Zane... wait," she whispered, lifting one hand to his head. It was the only movement she had enough energy to make. "I can't—I need to rest."

He slid down between her legs and lifted her thighs onto his shoulders. "You don't have to move," he promised her in a deep, rich voice. "All you have to do is lie there." Then he kissed her, slowly, deeply, and her body arched as it began all over again, and he showed her all the things he hadn't been able to do to her before.

He brought her to completion once more before finally crawling forward and settling his hips between her thighs. She moaned when he filled her with a smooth, powerful thrust. She quivered beneath him, shocked by the thickness and depth of his penetration. How could she have forgotten? The discomfort took her by surprise, and she clung to him as she tried to adjust, to accept. He soothed her, whispering hot, soft words in her ear, stroking her flesh, which was already so sensitive that even the smooth sheet beneath her felt abrasive.

But, oh, how she had wanted this. This. Not just pleasure, but the sense of being joined together, the deep and intimate linkage of their bodies. This fed a craving within her that the climaxes he'd given her hadn't begun to touch. Her hips lifted. She wanted all of him, wanted him so deep that he touched her womb, ripening with his seed. He tried to moderate the thrusts that were rapidly pushing her toward yet another climax, but she dug her nails into his back, insisting without words on everything he had to give.

He shuddered, and with a deep-throated groan, gave her what she asked.

She slept then. It was long after midnight on the east coast, and she was exhausted. She was disturbed by the presence of the big, muscled man beside her in the bed, though, his body radiating heat like a furnace, and she kept waking from a restless doze.

He must sleep like a cat, she thought, because every time she woke and changed positions, he woke up, too. Finally he pulled her on top of him, settling her with her face tucked against his neck and her legs straddling his hips. "Maybe now you can rest," he murmured, kissing her hair. "You slept this way in Benghazi."

She remembered that, remembered the long day of making love, how he had sometimes been on top when they dozed, and sometimes she had. Or perhaps she had been the only one who dozed while he had remained alert.

"I've never slept with a man before," she murmured in sleepy explanation, nestling against him. "Slept slept, that is."

"I know. I'm your first in both cases."

The room was dark; at some time he had turned off the lamp, though she didn't remember when. The heavy curtains were drawn against the neon of the Las Vegas night, with only thin strips of light penetrating around the edges. It reminded her briefly of that horrible room in Benghazi, before Zane had taken her away, but then she shut out the memory. That no longer had the power to frighten her. Zane was her husband now, and the pleasant ache in her body told her that the marriage had been well and truly consummated.

"Tell me about your family," she said, and yawned against his neck.

"Now?"

"Mmm. We're both awake, so you might as well."

There was a twitch of flesh against her inner thigh. "I can think of other things to do," he muttered.

"I'm not ruling anything out." She wriggled her hips and was rewarded by a more insistent movement. "But you can talk, too. Tell me about the Mackenzie clan."

She could feel his slight shrug. "My dad is a half-breed American Indian, my mom is a schoolteacher. They live on a mountain just outside Ruth, Wyoming. Dad raises and trains horses. He's the best I've ever seen, except for my sister. Maris is magic with horses."

"So the horses really are a family business."

"Yep. We were all raised on horseback, but Maris is the only one who went into the training aspect. Joe went to the Air Force Academy and became a jet jockey, Mike became a cattle rancher, Josh rode jets for the Navy, and Chance and I went to the Naval Academy and got our water wings. We can both fly various types of aircraft, but flying is just a means of getting us to where we're needed, nothing else. Chance got out of Naval Intelligence a couple of years ago."

Barrie's talent with names kicked in. She lifted her head, all sleepiness gone as she ran that list of names through her head. She settled on one, put the details together and gasped. "Your brother is General Joe Mackenzie on the Joint Chiefs of Staff?" Of course. How many Joe Mackenzies were Air Force generals?

"The one and only."

"Why, I've met him and his wife. I think it was the year before last, at a charity function in Washington. Her name is Caroline."

"You're right on target." He shifted a little, and she felt a nudging between her legs. She inhaled as he slipped inside her. Talk about right on target.

"Joe and Caroline have five sons, Michael and Shea have two boys, and Josh and Loren have three," Zane murmured, gently thrusting. "Junior will be the eleventh grandchild."

Barrie sank against him, her attention splintered by the pleasure building with each movement of his hips. "Don't talk," she said, and heard his quiet laughter as he rolled over and placed her beneath him...just where she wanted to be.

Chapter 12

Barrie awoke to nausea, sharp and urgent. She bolted out of bed and into the bathroom, barely reaching it in time. When the bout of vomiting was over, she sank weakly to the floor and closed her eyes, unable to work up enough energy to care that she was curled naked on the floor of a hotel bathroom, or that her husband of less than twelve hours was witness to it all. She heard Zane running water; then a wonderfully cool, wet washcloth was placed on her heated forehead. He flushed the toilet, something she hadn't been able to manage, and said, "I'll be right back."

As usual, she rapidly began to feel better after she had thrown up. Embarrassed, she got up and washed out her mouth and was standing in front of the mirror surveying her tousled appearance with some astonishment when Zane appeared with a familiar green can in his hand.

He had already popped the top. She snatched the can from him and began greedily drinking, tilting the can up like some college freshman guzzling beer. When it was empty, she sighed with repletion and slammed the can down on the countertop as if it was indeed an empty soldier of spirits. Then she looked at Zane, and her eyes widened.

"I hope you didn't go out to the drink machine like that," she said faintly. He was still naked. Wonderfully, impressively naked. And very aroused.

He looked amused. "I got it out of the minibar in the parlor." He glanced down at himself, and the amusement deepened. "There's another can. Want to go for it?"

Barrie drew herself up and folded a bold hand around his thrusting sex. "I'm not the kind of woman who loses her inhibitions after a couple of Seven-Ups," she informed him with careful dignity. She paused, then winked at him. "One will do."

Somehow she had expected they would make it back to the bed. They didn't. His hunger was particularly strong in the mornings, and after a tempestuous few moments she found herself on her knees, half bent over the edge of the bathtub while he crouched behind her. Their love-making was raw and fast and powerful, and left her once again lying weakly on the floor. She found some satisfaction in the fact that he was sprawled beside her, his long legs stretched under the vanity top.

After a long time he said lazily, "I'd thought I could wait until we were in the shower. I underestimated the effect of a soft drink on you, sweetheart... and what watching you drink it does to me."

"I think we're on to something," she reflected, curling nakedly against him and ignoring the chill of the floor. "We need to buy stock in the company."

"Good idea." He turned his head and began kissing her, and for a moment she wondered if the bathroom floor was going to get another workout. But he released her and rose lithely to his feet, then helped her up. "Do you want to have room service, or go down to a restaurant for breakfast?"

"Room service." She was already hungry, and with room service their breakfast should be there by the time she showered and dressed. She gave Zane her order, then, while he called it in, she selected the clothes she wanted. The silk dress was badly wrinkled, so she carried it into the bathroom with her to let the steam from her shower repair the damage.

She took her time in the shower, but even so, some wrinkles remained in the dress by the time she finished. She left the water running and turned it on hot to increase the amount of steam. On a hook behind the door hung a thick terry-cloth bathrobe with the hotel's logo stitched on the breast pocket. She pulled it on and belted it around her, smiling at the weight and size of the garment, and went out to see how long it would be before their breakfast arrived.

Zane wasn't in the bedroom; she could hear him talking in the parlor, and wondered if room service had been unusually quick. But she heard only his voice as she walked to the open door.

He was on the phone, half-turned away from her as he sat on the arm of the couch. She had the impression that he was listening to the shower running even as he carried on his conversation.

"Keep the tail on her father, as well as on his tail," he was saying. "I want to catch them all at one time, so I don't have to worry about any loose ends. When the dust settles, Justice and State can sort it out between them."

Barrie gasped, all the color washing out of her face. Zane's head jerked around, and he stared at her, the blue mostly gone from his eyes, leaving them as sharp and gray as frost.

"Yeah," he said into the receiver, his gaze never wavering from hers. "Everything's under control here. Keep the pressure on." He hung up and turned fully to face her.

He hadn't showered yet, she noticed dully. His hair wasn't wet; there was no betraying dampness to his skin. He must have gotten on the phone as soon as she had begun her shower, setting in motion the betrayal that could send her father to jail.

"What have you done?" she whispered, barely holding herself together against the pain that racked her. "Zane, what have you done?"

Coolly he stood and came toward her. Barrie backed up, clutching the lapels of the thick robe as if it could protect her.

He flicked a curious glance toward the bathroom, where billows of steam were escaping from the half-open door. "Why is the shower still running?"

"I'm steaming the wrinkles out of my dress," she answered automatically.

His eyebrows lifted wryly. Though she didn't find the pun amusing, she had the thought that this was evidently a wrinkle he hadn't anticipated.

"Who were you talking to?" she asked, her voice stiff with hurt and betrayal and the strain of holding it all under control.

"My brother Chance."

"What does he have to do with my father?"

Zane watched her steadily. "Chance does intelligence work for a government agency; not the FBI or CIA."

Barrie swallowed against the constriction in her throat. Maybe Zane hadn't betrayed her father; maybe he'd already been under surveillance. "How long has he been following my father?"

"Chance is directing the tails, not doing them himself," Zane corrected.

"How long?"

"Since last night. I called him while you were showering then, too."

At least he didn't try to lie or evade. "How could you?" she whispered, her eyes wide and stark.

"Very easily," he replied, his voice sharp. "I'm an officer of the law. Before that, I was an officer in the Navy, in service to this country. Did you think I would ignore a traitor, even if it's your father? You asked me to protect you and our baby, and that's exactly what I'm doing. When you clean out a nest of snakes, you don't pick out a few of them to kill and leave the others. You wipe them out."

The edges of her vision blurred, and she felt herself sway. Oh, God, how could she ever forgive him if her father went to prison? How could she ever forgive herself? She was the cause of this. She had known the kind of man Zane was, but she had allowed herself to ignore it because she'd wanted him so desperately. Of course he'd turned her father in; if she'd been thinking clearly, instead of with her emotions, her hormones, she would have known exactly what he would do, what he had done. It didn't take a genius to predict the actions of a man who had spent his life upholding the laws of his country, and only a fool would ignore the obvious conclusion.

She hadn't even thought about it, so she guessed that made her the biggest fool alive.

She heard him say her name, his tone insistent, and then her vision was blocked by his big body as he gripped her arms.

Desperately she hung on to consciousness, gulping in air and refusing to let herself faint. "Let go of me," she protested, and was shocked at how far away her voice sounded.

"Like hell I will." Instead he swung her off her feet and carried her to the bed, then bent to place her on the tumbled sheets.

As he had the night before, he sat beside her. Now that she was lying down, her head cleared rapidly. He was leaning over her, one arm braced on the other side of her hip, enclosing her in the iron circle of his embrace. His gaze never left her face.

Barrie wished she could find refuge in anger, but there was none. She understood Zane's motives, and his actions. All she could feel was a huge whirlpool of pain, sucking her down. Her father! As much as she loved Zane, she didn't know if she could bear it if he caused her father to be arrested. This wasn't anything like theft or drunken driving. Treason was heinous, unthinkable. No matter what conclusion her logic drew, she simply couldn't see her father doing anything like that, unless he was somehow being forced to do it. She knew she wasn't the weapon being used against him, although she had been drawn into it, probably when he had balked at something. No, she and Zane had both realized immediately that if she was being threatened and her father had nothing to hide, he would have had her whisked away by the FBI before she knew what was happening.

"Please," she begged, clutching his arm. "Can't you warn him somehow, get him out of it? I know you didn't like him, but you don't know him the way I do. He's always done what he thought was best for me. He was always there when I needed him, and b-before I left he gave me his blessing." Her voice broke on a sob, and she quickly controlled it. "I know he's a snob, but he isn't a bad person! If he's gotten involved in something he shouldn't, it was by accident, and now he doesn't know how to get out without endangering me! That has to be it. Zane, please!"

He caught her hand, folding it warmly within his. "I can't do that," he said quietly. "If he hasn't done anything wrong, he'll be all right. If he's a traitor—" He shrugged, indicating the lack of options. He wouldn't lift a finger to help a traitor, period. "I didn't want you to know anything about it because I didn't want you to be upset any more than necessary. I knew I wouldn't be able to protect you from worry if he's arrested, but I didn't want you to find out about it beforehand. You've had enough to deal with these past couple of months. My first priority is keeping you and the baby safe, and I'll do that, Barrie, no matter what."

She stared at him through tear-blurred eyes, knowing she had collided with the steel wall of his convictions. Honor wasn't just a concept to him, but a way of life. Still, there was one way she might reach him. "What if it was your father?" she asked.

A brief spasm touched his face, telling her that she'd struck a nerve. "I don't know," he admitted. "I hope I'd be able to do what's right... but I don't know."

There was nothing more she could say.

The only thing she could do was warn her father herself.

She moved away from him, sliding off the bed. He lifted his arm and let her go, though he watched her closely, as if waiting for her to faint or throw up or slap him in the face. Considering her pregnancy and her state of mind, she realized, all three were possible, if she relaxed her control just a fraction. But she wasn't going to do any of them, because she couldn't afford to waste the time.

She hugged the oversize robe about her, as she had once hugged his shirt. "What exactly is your brother doing?" She needed as much information as possible if she was going to help her father. Maybe it was wrong, but she would worry about that, and face the consequences, later. She knew she was operating on love and blind trust, but that was all she had to go on. When she thought of her father as the man she knew him to be, she knew she had to trust both that knowledge and his honor. Despite their enormous differences, in that respect he was very like Zane, the man he'd scorned as a son-in-law: honor was a part of his code, his life, his very being.

Zane stood. "You don't need to know, exactly."

For the first time she felt the flush of anger redden her cheeks. "Don't throw my words back at me," she snapped. "You can say no without being sarcastic."

He studied her, then gave a curt nod. "You're right. I'm sorry."

She stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door. The small room was hot and damp with steam, the air thick with it. Barrie turned off the shower and turned on the exhaust fan. There wasn't a wrinkle left in the silk dress. Hurriedly she shed the robe and pulled on the underwear she'd carried into the bathroom, then pulled the dress on over her head. The silk stuck to her damp skin; she had to jerk the fabric to get it into place. The need to hurry beat through her like wings. How much time did she have before room service arrived with their breakfast?

The mirror was fogged over. She grabbed a towel and rubbed a clear spot on the glass, then swiftly combed her hair and began applying a minimum of makeup. The air was so steamy that it would be a wasted effort to apply very much, but she wanted to appear as normal as possible.

Oh, God, the exhaust fan was making so much noise she might not have heard their breakfast arriving. Hastily she cut it off. Zane would have knocked if their food was here, she assured herself. It hadn't arrived yet.

She tried to remember where her purse was, and think how she could get it and get out the door without Zane knowing. His hearing was acute, and he would be watching for her. But the room service waiter would bring their breakfast to the parlor, and Zane, being as cautious as he was, would watch the man's every move. That was the only time he would be distracted, and the only chance she would have to get out of the room undetected. Her window of opportunity would be brief, because he would call her as soon as the waiter left. If she had to wait for an elevator, she was sunk. She could always try the stairs, but all Zane would have to do was take the elevator down to the lobby and wait for her there. With his hearing, he probably heard the elevator every time it chimed, and that would give him an idea of whether she had been able to get one of the cars or had taken the stairs.

She opened the bathroom door a little, so he wouldn't be able to catch the click of the latch.

"What are you doing?" he called. It sounded as if he was standing just inside the double doors that connected the bedroom to the parlor, waiting for her.

"Putting on makeup," she snapped, with perfect truth. She blotted the sweat off her forehead and began again with the powder. Her brief flash of anger was over, but she didn't want him to know it. Let him think she was furious; a woman who was both pregnant and angry deserved a lot of space.

There was a brief knock on the parlor door, and a Spanish-accented voice called out, "Room service."

Quickly Barrie switched on the faucet, so the sound of running water would once again mask her movements. Peering through the small opening by the door, she saw Zane cross her field of vision, going to answer the knock. He was wearing his shoulder holster, which meant, as she had hoped, that he was on guard.

She slipped out of the bathroom, carefully pulled the door back to leave the same small opening, then darted to the other side of the bedroom, out of his line of sight if he glanced inside when he passed by the double doors. Her purse was lying on one of the chairs, and she snatched it up, then slipped her feet into her shoes.

The room service cart clattered as it was rolled into the room. Through the open parlor doors she could hear the waiter casually chatting as he set up the table. Zane's pistol made the waiter nervous; she could hear it in his voice. And his nervousness made Zane that much more wary of him. Zane was probably watching him like a hawk, those pale eyes remote and glacier-cold.

Now was the tricky part. She eased up to the open double doors, peeking through the crack to locate her husband. Relief made her knees wobble; he was standing with his back to the doors while he watched the waiter. The running faucet was doing its job; be was listening to it, rather than positioning himself on the other side of the table so he could watch both the waiter and the bathroom door. He probably did it deliberately, dividing his senses rather than diluting the visual attention he was paying to the waiter.

Her husband was not an ordinary man. Escaping him, even for five minutes, wouldn't be easy.

Taking a deep breath, she silently crossed the open expanse, every nerve in her body drawn tight as she waited for his hard hand to clamp down on her shoulder. She reached the bedroom door to the hallway and held the chain so it wouldn't clink when she slipped it free. That done, her next obstacle was the lock. She moved her body as close to the door as possible, using her flesh to muffle the sound, and slowly turned the latch. The dead bolt slid open with smooth precision and a snick that was barely audible even to her.

She closed her eyes and turned the handle then, concentrating on keeping the movement smooth and silent. If it made any noise, she was caught. If anyone was walking by in the hallway and talking, the change in noise level would alert Zane, and she was caught. If the elevator was slow, she was caught. Everything had to be perfect, or she didn't have a chance.

How much longer did she have? It felt as if she had already taken ten minutes, but it was probably no more than one. Crockery was still rattling in the parlor as the waiter arranged their plates and saucers and water glasses. The door opened, and she slipped through, then spent the same agonizing amount of time making sure it closed as silently as it opened. She released the handle and ran.

She reached the elevators without hearing him shout her name and jabbed the down button. It obediently lit, and remained lit. There was no welcoming chime to signal the arrival of the elevator. Barrie restrained herself from punching the button over and over again in a futile attempt to convey her urgency to a piece of machinery.

"Please," she whispered under her breath. "Hurry."

She would have tried calling her father from the hotel room, but she knew Zane would stop her if he heard her on the phone. She also knew her father's phone was tapped, which meant that incoming calls were automatically recorded. She would try to protect her father, but she refused to do anything that might endanger either Zane or their baby by leading the kidnappers straight to the hotel. She would have to call her father from a pay phone on the street, and a different street, at that.

Down the hall, she heard the room service cart clatter again as the waiter left their suite. Her heart pounding, she stared at the closed elevator doors, willing them to open. Her time was down to mere seconds.

The melodic chime sounded overhead.

The doors slid open.

She looked back as she stepped inside, and her heart nearly stopped. Zane hadn't yelled, hadn't called her name. He was running full speed down the hall, his motion as fluid and powerful as a linebacker's, and pure fury was blazing in his eyes.

He was almost there.

Panicked, she simultaneously pushed the buttons for the lobby and for the door to close. She stepped back from the closing gap as Zane lunged forward, trying to get his hand in the door, which would trigger the automatic opening sensor.

He didn't quite make it. The doors slid shut, and the box began to move downward. "God damn it," he roared in frustration, and Barrie flinched as his fist thudded against the doors.

Weakly she leaned against the wall and covered her face with her hands while she shook with reaction. Dear God, she'd never imagined anyone could be so angry. He'd been almost incandescent with it, his eyes all but glowing.

He was probably racing down the stairs, but he had twenty-one floors to cover, and he was no match for the elevator—unless it stopped to pick up passengers on other floors. This possibility nearly brought her to her knees. She watched the numbers change, unable to breathe. If it stopped even once, he might catch her in the street. If it stopped twice, he would catch her in the lobby. Three times, and he would be waiting for her at the elevator.

She would have to face that rage, and she'd never dreaded anything more. Leaving Zane had never been her intention. After she'd warned her father, she would go back to the suite. She didn't fear Zane physically; she knew instinctively that he would never hit her, but somehow that wasn't much comfort.

She had wanted to see him lose control, outside of that final moment in lovemaking when his body took charge and he gave himself over to orgasm. Nausea roiled in her stomach, and she shuddered. Why had she ever wished for such a stupid thing? Oh, God, she never wanted to see him lose his temper again.

He might never forgive her. She might be forsaking forever any chance that he could love her. The full knowledge of what she was risking to warn her father rode her shoulders all the way to the lobby, one long, smooth descent, without any stops.

The rattle and clink of the slot machines never stopped, no matter how early or how late. The din surrounded her as she hurried through the lobby and out to the street. The desert sun was blindingly white, the temperature already edging past ninety, though the morning was only half gone. Barrie joined the tourists thronging the sidewalk, walking quickly despite the heat. She reached the corner, crossed the street and kept walking, not daring to look back. Her red hair would be fairly easy to spot at a distance, even in a crowd, unless she was hidden by someone taller. Zane would have reached the lobby by now. He would quickly scan the slot machine crowd, then erupt onto the street.

Her chest ached, and she realized she was holding her breath again. She gulped in air and hurried to put a building between herself and the hotel entrance. She was afraid to look back, afraid she would see her big, black-haired husband bearing down on her like a thunderstorm, and she knew she would never be able to outrun him.

She crossed one more street and began looking for a pay phone. They were easy to find, but getting an available one was something else again. Why were so many tourists using pay phones at this time of the morning? Barrie stood patiently, the hot sun beating down on her head, while a blue-haired elderly lady in support stockings gave detailed instructions to someone on when to feed her cat, when to feed her fish and when to feed her plants. Finally she hung up with a cheerful, "Bye-bye, dearie," and she gave Barrie a sweet smile as she hobbled past. The smile was so unexpected that Barrie almost burst into tears. Instead she managed a smile of her own and stepped up to the phone before anyone could squeeze ahead of her.

She used her calling card number because it was faster, and since she was calling from a pay phone, it didn't matter how she placed the call. Please, God, let him be there, she silently prayed as she listened to the tones, then the ringing. It was lunchtime on the east coast; he could be having lunch with someone, or playing golf—he could be anywhere. She tried to remember his schedule, but nothing came to mind. Their relationship had been so strained for the past two months that she had disassociated herself from his social and political appointments.

"Hello?"

The answer was so cautious, so wary sounding, that at first she didn't recognize her father's voice.

"Hello?" he said again, sounding even more wary, if possible.

Barrie pressed the handset hard to her ear, trying to keep her hand from shaking. "Daddy," she said, her voice strangled. She hadn't called him Daddy in years, but the old name slipped out past the barrier of her adulthood.

"Barrie? Sweetheart?" Life zinged into his voice, and she could picture him in her mind, sitting up straighter at his desk.

"Daddy, I can't say much." She fought to keep her voice even, so he would be able to understand her. "You have to be careful. You have to protect yourself. People know. Do you hear me?"

He was silent a moment, then he said with a calmness that was beyond her, "I understand. Are you safe?"

"Yes," she said, though she wasn't sure. She still had to face her husband.

"Then take care, sweetheart, and I'll talk to you soon."

"Bye," she whispered, then carefully hung the receiver in its cradle and turned to go to the hotel. She had taken about ten steps when she was captured in the hard grip she had been dreading. She didn't see him coming, so she couldn't brace herself. One second he wasn't there, the next second he was, surfacing out of the crowd like a shark.

Despite everything, she was glad to see him, glad to get it over with instead of dreading the first meeting during every dragging step to the hotel. The tension and effort had drained her. She leaned weakly against him, and he clamped his arm around her waist to support her. "You shouldn't be out in the sun without something on your head," was all he said. "Especially since you haven't eaten anything today."

He was in control, that incandescent fury cooled and conquered. She wasn't foolish enough to believe it was gone, however. "I had to warn him," she said tiredly. "And I didn't want the call traced to the hotel."

"I know." The words were brief to the point of curt-ness. "It might not make any difference. Las Vegas is crawling with a certain group of people this morning, and you may have been spotted. Your hair." Those two words were enough. Redheads were always distinctive, because there were so few of them. She felt like apologizing for the deep, rich luster of her hair.

"They're here?" she asked in a small voice. "The kidnappers?"

"Not the original ones. There's a deep game going on, baby, and I'm afraid you just jumped into the middle of it."

The sun beat down on her unprotected head, the heat increasing by the minute. Every step seemed more and more of an effort. Her thoughts scattered. She might have plunged Zane and herself into the very danger she'd wanted to avoid. "Maybe I am a pampered society babe with more hair than brains," she said aloud. "I didn't mean—"

"I know," he said again, and unbelievably, he squeezed her waist. "And I never said you have more hair than brains. If anything, you're too damn smart, and it seems you have a natural talent for sneaking around. Not many people could have gotten out of that suite without me hearing them. Spook, maybe. And Chance. No one else."

Barrie leaned more of her weight against him. She was on his left side, and she felt the hard lump of the holster beneath his jacket. When he'd grabbed her, he'd instinctively kept his right hand free, in case he needed his pistol. What he didn't need, she thought tiredly, was having to support her weight and keep his balance in a firefight. She forced herself to straighten away from him, despite the way his arm tightened around her waist. He gave her a questioning look.

"I don't want to impede you," she explained.

His mouth curved wryly. "See what I mean? Now you're thinking of combat stuff. If you weren't so sweet, Mrs. Mackenzie, you'd be a dangerous woman."

Why wasn't he lambasting her? She couldn't imagine he'd gotten over his fury so fast; Zane struck her as the type of man who seldom lost his temper, but when he did, it was undoubtedly a memorable occasion—one that could last for years. Maybe he was saving it for when they were in the privacy of the suite, remaining on guard while they were in the street. He could do that, compartmentalize his anger, shove it aside until it was safe to bring it out.

She found herself studying the surging, milling, strolling crowd of tourists that surrounded them, looking for ' any betraying sign of interest. It helped take her mind off how incredibly weak she felt. This pregnancy was making itself felt with increasing force; though it had been foolish of her to come out into the sun without eating breakfast, and without a hat, normally she wouldn't have had any problem with the heat in this short amount of time.

How much farther was it to the hotel? She concentrated on her steps, on the faces around her. Zane maintained a slow, steady pace, and when he could, he put himself between her and the sun. The human shade helped, marginally.

"Here we are," he said, ushering her into the cool, dim cavern of the lobby. She closed her eyes to help them adjust from the bright sunlight and sighed with relief as the blast of air-conditioning washed over her.

The elevator was crowded on the ride up. Zane pulled her against the back wall, so he would have one less side to protect, and also to set up a human wall of protection between them and the open doors. She felt a faint spurt of surprise as she realized she knew what he was thinking, the motives behind his actions. He would do what he could to keep anything from happening, and to protect these people, but if push came to shove, he would ruthlessly sacrifice the other people in this elevator to keep her safe.

They got off on the twenty-first floor, the ride uneventful. A man and woman got off at the same time, a middle-aged couple with Rochester accents. They turned down the hallway leading away from the suite. Zane guided Barrie after them, following the couple until they reached their room around the corner. As they walked past, Barrie glanced inside the room as the couple entered it; it was untidy, piled with shopping bags and the dirty clothes they'd worn the day before.

"Safe," Zane murmured as they wound their way to the suite.

"They wouldn't have had all the tourist stuff if they'd just arrived?"

He slanted an unreadable look at her. "Yeah."

The suite was blessedly cool. She stumbled inside, and Zane locked and chained the door. Their breakfast still sat on the table, untouched and cold. He all but pushed her into a chair anyway. "Eat," he ordered. "Just the toast, if nothing else. Put jelly on it. And drink all the water."

He sat down on the arm of the couch, picked up the phone and began dialing.

Just to be safe, she ate half a slice of dry toast first, eschewing the balls of butter, which wouldn't melt on the cold toast anyway. Her stomach was peaceful at the moment, but she didn't want to do anything to upset it. She smeared the second half slice with jelly.

As she methodically ate and drank, she began to feel better. Zane was making no effort to keep her from hearing his conversation, and she gathered he was talking to his brother Chance again.

"If she was spotted, we have maybe half an hour," he was saying. "Get everyone on alert." He listened a moment, then said, "Yeah, I know. I'm slipping." He said goodbye with a cryptic, "Keep it cool."

"Keep what cool?" Barrie asked, turning in her chair to face him.

A flicker of amusement lightened his remote eyes. "Chance has a habit of sticking his nose, along with another part of his anatomy, into hot spots. He gets burned occasionally."

"And you don't, I suppose?"

He shrugged. "Occasionally," he admitted.

He was very calm, unusually so, even for him. It was like waiting for a storm to break. Barrie took a deep breath and braced herself. "All right, I'm feeling better," she said, more evenly than she felt. "Let me have it."

He regarded her for a moment, then shook his head-regretfully, she thought. "It'll have to wait. Chance said there's a lot of activity going on all of a sudden. It's all about to hit the fan."

Chapter 13

They didn't have even the half hour Zane had hoped for.

The phone rang, and he picked it up. "Roger," he said, and placed the receiver into its cradle. He stood and strode over to Barrie. "They're moving in," he said, lifting her from the chair with an implacable hand. "And you're going to a different floor."

He was shoving her out of harm's way. She stiffened against the pressure of his hand, digging in her heels. He stopped and turned to face her, then placed his hand over her belly. "You have to go," he said, without a flicker of emotion. He was in combat mode, his face impassive, his eyes cold and distant.

He was right. Because of the baby, she had to go. She put her hand over his. "All right. But do you have an extra pistol I could have—just in case?"

He hesitated briefly, then strode into the bedroom to his garment bag. The weapon he removed was a compact, five-shot revolver. "Do you know how to use it?"

She folded her hand around the butt, feeling the smoothness of the wood. "I've shot skeet, but I've never used a handgun. I'll manage."

"There's no empty chamber, and no safety," he said as he escorted her out the door. "You can pull the hammer back before you fire, or you can use a little more effort and just pull the trigger. Nothing to it but aiming and firing. It's a thirty-eight caliber, so it has stopping power." He was walking swiftly toward the stairs as he talked. He opened the stairwell door and began pushing her up the stairs, their steps echoing in the concrete silo. "I'm going to put you in an empty room on the twenty-third floor, and I want you to stay there until either Chance or I come for you. If anyone else opens the door, shoot them."

"I don't know what Chance looks like," she blurted.

"Black hair, hazel eyes. Tall. So good-looking you start drooling when you see him. That's what he says women do, anyway."

They reached the twenty-third floor. Barrie was only slightly winded, Zane not at all. As they stepped into the carpeted silence of the hallway, she asked, "How do you know which rooms are empty?"

He produced one of the electronic cards from his pocket. "Because one of Chance's people booked the room last night and slipped me the key card while we were eating supper. Just in case."

He always had an alternate plan—just in case. She should have guessed.

He opened the door to room 2334 and ushered her inside, but he didn't enter himself. "Lock and chain the door, and stay put," he said, then turned and walked swiftly toward the stairwell. Barrie stood in the doorway and watched him. He stopped and looked at her over his shoulder. "I'm waiting to hear the door being locked," he said softly.

She stepped back, turned the lock and slid the chain into place.

Then she stood in the middle of the neat, silent room and quietly went to pieces.

She couldn't stand it. Zane was deliberately walking into danger—on her account—and she couldn't join him. She couldn't be there with him, couldn't guard his back. Because of the baby growing inside her, she was relegated to this safe niche while the man she loved faced bullets for her.

She sat on the floor and rocked back and forth, her arms folded over her stomach, keening softly as tears rolled down her face. This terror for Zane's safety was worse than anything she'd ever felt before, far worse than what she'd known at the hands of her kidnappers, worse even than when he'd been shot. At least she'd been there then. She'd been able to help, able to touch him.

She couldn't do anything now.

A sharp, deep report that sounded like thunder made her jump. Except it wasn't thunder; the desert sky was bright and cloudless. She buried her face against her knees, weeping harder. More shots. Some lighter, flatter in tone. A peculiar cough. Another deep thundering, then several in quick succession.

Then silence.

She pulled herself together and scrambled to the far corner of the room, behind the bed. She sat with her back against the wall and her arms braced on her knees, the pistol steady as she held it trained on the door. She didn't see how anyone other than Zane or Chance could know where she was, but she wouldn't gamble on it. She didn't know what any of this was about, or who her enemies were, except for Mack Prewett, probably.

Time crawled past. She didn't have her wristwatch on, and the clock radio on the bedside table was turned away from her. She didn't get up to check the time. She simply sat there with the pistol in her hand and waited, and died a little more with each passing minute of Zane's absence.

He didn't come. She felt the coldness of despair grow in her heart, spreading until it filled her chest, the pressure of it almost stopping her lungs. Her heartbeat slowed to a heavy, painful rhythm. Zane. He would have come, if he'd been able. He'd been shot again. Wounded. She wouldn't let herself even think the word dead, but it was there, in her heart, her chest, and she didn't know how she could go on.

There was a brief knock on the door. "Barrie?" came a soft call, a voice that sounded tired and familiar. "It's Art Sandefer. It's over. Mack's in custody, and you can come out now."

Only Zane and Chance were supposed to know where she was. Zane had said that if anyone else opened the door, to shoot them. But she'd known Art Sandefer for years, known and respected both the man and the job he did. If Mack Prewett had been dirty, Art would have been on top of it. His presence here made sense.

"Barrie?" The door handle rattled.

She started to get up and let him in, then sank back to the floor. No. He wasn't Zane and he wasn't Chance. If she had lost Zane, the least she could do was follow his last instructions to the letter. His objective had been her safety, and she trusted him more than she had ever trusted anyone else in her life, including her father. She definitely trusted him more than she did Art Sandefer.

She was unprepared for the peculiar little coughing sound. Then the lock on the door exploded, and Art Sandefer pushed the door open and stepped inside. In his hand was a pistol with a thick silencer fitted onto the end of the barrel. Their eyes met across the room, his weary and cynical and acutely intelligent. And she knew.

Barrie pulled the trigger.

Zane was there only moments, seconds, later. Art had slumped to a sitting position against the open door, his hand pressed to the hole in his chest as his eyes glazed with shock. Zane kicked the weapon from Art's outstretched hand, but that was all the attention he paid to the wounded man. He stepped over him as if he wasn't there, rapidly crossing the room to where Barrie sat huddled in the corner, her face drawn and gray. Her ga2e was oddly distant and unfocused. Panic roared through him, but a swift inspection didn't reveal any blood. She looked unharmed.

He hunkered down beside her, gently brushing her hair from her face. "Sweetheart?" he asked in a soft tone. "It's over now. Are you all right?"

She didn't answer. He sat down on the floor beside her and pulled her onto his lap, holding her close and tight against the warmth of his body. He kept up a reassuring murmur, a gentle sound of reassurance. He could feel the thud of her heartbeat against him, the rhythm hard and alarmingly slow. He held her tighter, his face buried against the richness of her hair.

"Is she all right?" Chance asked as he, too, stepped over Art Sandefer and approached his brother and new sister-in-law. Other people were coming into the room, people who tended to the wounded man. Mack Prewett was one of them, his eyes sharp and hard as he watched his former superior.

"She'll be fine," Zane murmured, lifting his head. "She shot Sandefer."

The brothers' eyes met in a moment of understanding. The first one was tough. With luck and good care, Sandefer would survive, but Barrie would always be one of those who knew what it was like to pull that trigger.

"How did he know which room?" Zane asked, keeping his voice calm.

Chance sat down on the bed and leaned forward, his forearms braced on his knees. His expression was pleasant enough, his eyes cool and thoughtful. "I must have a leak in my group," he said matter-of-factly. "And I know who it is, because only one person knew this room number. I'll take care of it."

"You do that."

Barrie stirred in Zane's grip, her arms lifting to twine around his neck. "Zane," she said, her voice faint and choked, shaking.

Because he'd felt the same way, he heard the panic in her voice, the despair. "I'm okay," he whispered, kissing her temple. "I'm okay."

A sob shook her, then was quickly controlled. She was soldiering on. Emotion swelled in his chest, a huge golden bubble of such force that it threatened to stop his breathing, his heartbeat. He closed his eyes to hold back the tears that burned his lids. "Oh, God," he said shakily. "I thought I was too late. I saw Sandefer walk in before I could get off a round at him, and then I heard the shot."

Her arms tightened convulsively around his neck, but she didn't say anything.

Zane put his hand on her belly, gulping in air as he fought for control. He was trembling, he noticed with distant surprise. Only Barrie could make mincemeat of his nerves. "I want the baby," he said, his voice still shaking. "But I didn't even think about it then. All I could think was that if I lost you—" He broke off, unable to continue.

"Baby?" Chance asked, politely inquiring.

Barrie nodded, her head moving against Zane's chest. Her face was still buried against him, and she didn't look up.

"Barrie, this is my brother Chance," Zane said. His tone was still rough, uneven.

Blindly Barrie held out her hand. Amused, Chance gently shook it, then returned it to Zane's neck. He had yet to see her face. "Glad to meet you," he said. "I'm happy about the baby, too. That should deflect Mom's attention for a while."

The room was filled to overflowing: hotel security, Las Vegas police, medics, not to mention Mack Prewett and the FBI, who were quietly controlling everything. Chance's people had pulled back, melting into the shadows where they belonged, where they operated best. Chance picked up the phone, made one brief call, then said to Zane, "It's taken care of."

Mack Prewett came over and sat down on the bed beside Chance. His face was troubled as he looked at Barrie, clutched so tightly in Zane's arms. "Is she all right?"

"Yes," she said, answering for herself.

"Art's critical, but he might make it. It would save us a lot of trouble if he didn't." Mack's voice was flat, emotionless.

Barrie shuddered.

"You were never meant to be involved, Barrie," Mack said. "I began to think Art was playing both sides, so I asked your father to help me set him up. The information had to be legitimate, and the ambassador knows more people, has access to more inside information, than can be believed. Art went for the bait like a hungry carp. But then he asked for something really critical, the ambassador stalled, and the next thing we knew, you'd been snatched. Your dad nearly came unglued."

"Then those bastards in Benghazi knew we were coming in," Zane said, his eyes going cold.

"Yeah. I managed to shuffle the time frame a little when I gave the information to Art, but that was the most I could do to help. They weren't expecting you as early as you got there."

"I couldn't believe it of him. Art Sandefer, of all people," Barrie said, lifting her head to look at Mack. "Until I saw his eyes. I thought you were the dirty one."

Mack smiled crookedly. "It rocked me that you figured out anything was going on at all."

"Dad tipped me off. He acted so frightened every time I left the house."

"Art wanted you," Mack explained. "He was playing it cool for a while, or we would have had this wrapped up weeks ago. But it wasn't just the information. Art wanted you."

Barrie was stunned by what Mack was saying. She glanced at Zane and saw his jaw tighten. So that was why she hadn't been raped in Benghazi; Art had been saving her for himself. He could never have released her, of course, if she had seen his face. Perhaps he would have drugged her, but more likely he would simply have raped her, kept her for himself for a while, then killed her. She shuddered, turning her face once more against Zane's throat. She was still having trouble believing he was safe and unharmed; it was difficult to drag herself out of the black pit of despair, even though she knew the worst hadn't happened. She felt numb, sick.

But then a thought occurred to her, one she would have had sooner if concern for Zane hadn't wiped everything else from her mind. She looked at Mack again. "Then my father's in the clear."

"Absolutely. He was working with me from the get-go." He met her gaze and shrugged. "Your dad can be a pain in the rear, but his loyalty was never in question."

"When I called him this morning—"

Mack grimaced. "He was relieved to know you loved him enough to call, despite the evidence against him. Your leaving the hotel stirred up a hornet's nest, though. I thought we had everything under control."

"How?"

"Me," Chance interjected, and for the first time Barrie looked at her brother-in-law. She didn't drool, but she had to admit that his good looks were startling. Viewed objectively, he was the most handsome man she'd ever seen. However, she far preferred Zane's scarred, somber face, with its ancient eyes.

"I checked into another hotel under Zane's name," Chance explained. "You weren't listed at all, but Art knew you were with Zane, because he'd checked the license plate on that rental car and traced the rental to Zane's credit card. We didn't want to make it too obvious for him, we wanted him to have to work to find us, so he wouldn't be suspicious. When he found out you'd married Zane, though, he stopped being so cautious." Chance grinned. "Then you went for a walk this morning, and fubar happened. The pay phone you chose was right across the street from the hotel where I'd checked in, and Art's people spotted you immediately."

Across the room, the medics finally had Art Sandefer ready for transport to a hospital. Zane watched the man being carried out, then cut his narrowed gaze to Mack. "If I'd known about you a little sooner, most of this could have been avoided."

Mack didn't back down from that glacial stare. "As far as that goes, Commander, I didn't expect you to have the contacts you have—" he glanced at Chance "—or to move as fast as you did. I'd been working on Art for months. You made things happen in one day."

Zane stood, effortlessly lifting Barrie in his arms as he did so. "It's over now," he said with finality. "If you gentlemen will excuse me, I need to take care of my wife."

Taking care of her involved getting a third room, because the suite was in bad shape and he didn't want her to see it. He placed her on the bed, locked the door, then stripped both her and himself and got into bed with her, holding their naked bodies as close together as possible. They both needed the reassurance of bare skin, no barriers between them. He got hard immediately, but now wasn't the time for lovemaking.

Barrie couldn't seem to stop trembling, and, to her astonishment, neither could Zane. They clung together, touching each other's faces, absorbing the smell and feel of each other in an effort to dispel the terror.

"I love you," he whispered, holding her so close her ribs ached from the pressure. "God, I was so scared! I can't keep it together where you're concerned, sweetheart. For the sake of my sanity, I hope the rest of our lives are as dull as dishwater."

"They will be," she promised, kissing his chest. "We'll work on it." And tears blurred her eyes, because she hadn't expected so much, so fast.

Then, finally, it was time for more. Gently he entered her, and they lay entwined, not moving, as if their nerves couldn't stand a sharp assault now, even one of pleasure. That, too, came in its own time... her pleasure, and his.

Epilogue

"Twins," Barrie said, her voice still full of stunned bewilderment as she and Zane drove along the road that wound up the side of Mackenzie's Mountain. "Boys."

"I told you how it would be," Zane said, glancing at the mound of her stomach, which was much too big for five months of pregnancy. "Boys."

She gave him a glassy stare of shock. "You didn't," she said carefully, "say they would come in pairs."

"There haven't been twins in our family before," Zane said, just as carefully. In truth, he felt as shaky as Barrie did. "This is a first."

She stared out the window, her gaze passing blindly over the breathtaking vista of craggy blue mountains. They lived in Wyoming now; with Zane's two-year tenure as sheriff in Arizona over, he had declined to run for election, and they had moved closer to the rest of the family. Chance had been after him for those two years to join his organization—though Barrie still wasn't certain exactly what that organization was—and Zane had finally relented. He wouldn't be doing fieldwork, because he didn't want to risk the life he had with Barrie and Nick and now these two new babies who were growing inside her, but he had a rare knack for planning for the unexpected, and that was the talent he was using.

The entire family, including her father, was gathered on the mountain to celebrate the Fourth of July, which was the next day. Zane, Barrie and Nick had driven up two days before for an extended visit, but today had been her scheduled checkup, and he'd driven her into town to the doctor's office. Given the way her waistline had been expanding, they should have expected the news, but Zane had simply figured she was further along in her pregnancy than they'd thought. Seeing those two little fetuses on the ultrasound had been quite a shock, but there hadn't been any doubt about it. Two heads, two tails, four arms and hands, four legs and feet—and both babies definitely male. Very definitely.

"I can't think of two names," Barrie said, sounding very near tears.

Zane reached over to pat her knee. "We have four more months to think of names."

She sniffed. "There's no way," she said, "that I can carry them for four more months. We'll have to come up with names before then."

They were big babies, both of them, much bigger than Nick had been at this stage.

"After Nick, it took a lot of courage just to think of having another baby," she continued. "I'd geared myself up for one. One. Zane, what if they're both like Nick?"

He blanched. Nick was a hellion. Nick had a good shot at turning the entire family gray-haired within another year. For a very short person with a limited vocabulary, their offspring could cause an unbelievable uproar in a remarkably short period of time.

They reached the crest of the mountain, and Zane slowed the car as they neared the large, sprawling ranch house. A variety of vehicles were parked around the yard—Wolf's truck, Mary's car, Mike and Shea's Suburban, Josh and Loren's rental, Ambassador Lovejoy's rental, Maris's snazzy truck, Chance's motorcycle. Joe and Caroline and their five hooligans had arrived by helicopter. Boys seemed to be everywhere, from Josh's youngest, age five, to John, who was Joe's oldest and was now in college and here with his current girlfriend.

They were adding two more to the gang.

They got out and walked up the steps to the porch. Zane put his arm around her and hugged her close, tilting her face up for a kiss that quickly grew heated. Barrie glowed with a special sexuality when she was pregnant, and the plain truth was he couldn't resist her. Their love play was often extended these days, now that pregnancy had once again made her breasts as sensitive as they had been when she'd carried Nick.

"Stop that!" Josh called cheerfully from inside the house. "That's what got her in that condition in the first place!"

Reluctantly Zane released his wife, and together they went into the house. "That isn't exactly right," he told Josh, who laughed.

The big television was on, and Maris, Josh and Chance were watching some show-jumping event. Wolf and Joe were discussing cattle with Mike. Caroline was arguing politics with the ambassador. Mary and Shea were organizing a game for the younger kids. Loren, who was often an oasis of calm in the middle of the Mackenzie hurricane, gave Barrie's rounded stomach a knowing look. "How did the checkup go?" she asked.

"Twins," Barrie said, still in that numb tone. She gave Zane a helpless, how-did-this-happen look.

The whirlwind of activity came to a sudden stop. Heads lifted and turned. Her father gasped. Mary's face suddenly glowed with radiance.

"Both boys," Zane announced, before anyone could ask.

A sigh almost of relief went around the room. "Thank God," Josh said weakly. "What if it was another one – or fwo – likeNick!"

Barrie's head swiveled around as she began searching for a particular little head. "Where is Nick?" she asked.

Chance bolted upright from his sprawled position on the couch. The adults looked around with growing panic. "She was right here," Chance said. "She was dragging one of Dad's boots around."

Zane and Barrie both began a rapid search of the house. "How long ago?" Barrie called.

"Two minutes, no more. Just before you drove up." Maris was on her knees, peering under beds.

"Two minutes!" Barrie almost moaned. In two minutes, Nick could almost single-handedly wreck the house. It was amazing how such a tiny little girl with such an angelic face could be such a demon. "Nick!" she called. "Mary Nicole, come out, come out, wherever you are!" Sometimes that worked. Most times it didn't.

Everyone joined in the search, but their black-haired little terror was nowhere to be found. The entire family had been ecstatic at her birth, and she had been utterly doted on, with even the rough-and-tumble cousins fascinated by the daintiness and beauty of the newest Mackenzie. She really did look angelic, like Pebbles on the old Flints tones cartoons. She was adorable. She had Zane's black hair; slanted, deceptively innocent blue eyes; and dimples on each side of her rosebud mouth. She had sat up by herself at four months, crawled at six, walked at eight, and the entire family had been on guard ever since.

They found Wolf's boot beneath Mary's glassed-in collection of angels. From the scuff marks on the wall, Zane deduced his little darling had been trying to knock the collection down by heaving the boot at it. Luckily the boot had been too heavy for her to handle. Her throwing arm wasn't well developed yet, thank God.

She had a frightful temper for such a little thing, and an outsize will, too. Keeping her from doing something she was determined to do was like trying to hold back the tide with a bucket. She had also inherited her father's knack for planning, something that was eerie in a two-year-old. Nick was capable of plotting the downfall of anyone who crossed her.

Once, when Alex, Joe's second oldest, had seen her with a knife in her hand and swiftly snatched it away before she could harm anyone or anything, Nick had thrown a howling temper tantrum that had been halted only when Zane swatted her rear end. Discipline from her adored daddy made her sob so heartbrokenly that everyone else got a lump in their throats. That, and making her sit down in her punishment chair, were so far the only two things they'd discovered that could reduce her to tears.

When she had stopped sobbing, she had pouted in a corner for a while, all the time giving Alex threatening looks over one tiny shoulder. Then she had gone to Bar-rie for comfort, crawling into her mother's lap to be rocked. Her next stop had been Zane's lap, to show him that she forgave him. She'd wound her little arms around his neck and rubbed her chubby little cheek against his rough one. She'd even taken a brief nap, lying limply against his broad shoulder. She'd woken, climbed down and darted off to the kitchen, where she'd implored Mary, whom she called Gamma, for a "dink." She was allowed to have soft drinks without caffeine, so Mary had given her one of the green bottles they always kept in store especially for Nick. Zane and Barrie always shared a look of intimate amusement at their daughter's love for Seven-Up, but there was nothing unusual about seeing her clutching the familiar bottle in her tiny hands. She would take a few sips, then with great concentration screw the top onto the bottle and lug it around with her until it was finally empty, which usually took a couple of hours.

On this occasion, Zane had happened to be watching her, smiling at her blissful expression as her little hands closed on the bottle. She had strutted out of the kitchen without letting Mary open the bottle for her and stopped in the hallway, where she vigorously shook the bottle with so much vigor that her entire little body had been bouncing up and down. Then, with a meltingly sweet smile on her face, she had all but danced into the living room and handed the bottle to Alex with a flirtatious tilt of her head. "Ope’ it, pees," she'd said in her adorable small voice... and then she'd backed up a few steps.

"No!" Zane had yelled, leaping up from his chair, but it was too late. Alex had already twisted the cap and broken the seal. The bottle spewed and spurted, the sticky liquid spraying the wall, the floor, the chair. It hit Alex full blast in the face. By the time he'd managed to get the cap securely back on the bottle, he was soaked.

Nick had clapped her hands and said, "Hee, hee, hee," and Zane wasn't certain if it was a laugh or a taunt. It didn't matter. He had collapsed on the floor in laughter, and there was an unbreakable law written in stone somewhere that you couldn't punish youngsters if you'd laughed at what they'd done.

"Nick!" he called now. "Do you want a Popsicle?" Next to Seven-Ups, Popsicles were her favorite treat.

There was no answer.

Sam tore into the house. He was ten, Josh and Loren's middle son. His blue eyes were wide. "Uncle Zane!" he cried. "Nick's on top of the house!"

"Oh, my God," Barrie gasped, and rushed out of the house as fast as she could. Zane tore past her, his heart in his throat, every instinct screaming for him to get to his child as fast as possible.

Everyone spilled into the yard, their faces pale with alarm, and looked up. Nick was sitting cross-legged on the edge of the roof, her little face blissful as she stared down at them. "Hi," she chirped.

Barrie's knees wobbled, and Mary put a supporting, protective arm around her.

It was no mystery how Nick had gotten on the roof—a ladder was leaning against the house, and Nick was as agile as a young goat. The ladder shouldn't have been there; in fact, Zane would have sworn it hadn't been when he and Barrie had arrived, no more than five minutes earlier.

He started up the ladder, his gaze glued on his daughter. A scowl screwed her small features together, and she scrambled to her feet, perilously close to the edge of the roof. "No!" she shrieked. "No, Daddy!"

He froze in place. She didn't want to come down, and she was absolutely fearless. She paid no more heed to her danger than if she'd been in her bed.

"Zane," Barrie whispered, her voice choked.

He was shaking. Nick stomped one little foot and pointed a dimpled finger at him. "Daddy down," she demanded.

He couldn't get to her in time. No matter how fast he moved, his baby was going to fall. There was only one thing to do. "Chance!" he barked.

Chance knew immediately. He ambled forward, not making any swift movements that would startle her. When he was directly below her, he grinned at his cherubic niece, and she grinned at him. He was her favorite uncle.

"Dance," she crowed, showing all her tiny white teeth.

"You little Antichrist," he said fondly. "I'm really going to miss you when you're in prison. I give you... oh, maybe to the age of six."

Benjy, Josh's youngest, piped up behind them, "Why did Uncle Chance call her Dannychrist? Her name's Nick."

Nick spread her arms wide, bouncing up and down on her tiptoes. Chance held up his arms. "Come on, cupcake," he said, and laughed. "Jump!"

She did.

He deftly snagged her in midair, and hugged the precious little body to his chest. Barrie burst into tears of relief. Then Zane was there, taking his daughter in his arms, pressing his lips to her round little head, and Barrie rushed over to be enveloped in his embrace, too.

Caroline looked at Joe. "I forgive you for not having any female sperm," she announced, and Joe laughed.

Josh was frowning sternly at Sam. "How did the ladder get there?" he demanded.

Sam looked at his feet.

Mike and Joe began to frown at their boys.

"Whose bright idea was it to play on top of the house?" Mike asked of the seven boys who hadn't been inside, and thus absolved of blame.

Seven boys scuffed their shoes on the ground, unable to look up at the three fathers confronting them.

Josh took down the ladder, which was supposed to be in the barn. He pointed to the structure in question. "March," he said sternly, and two boys began their reluctant walk to the barn—and their retribution. Benjy clung to Loren's leg, blinking at his two older brothers.

Mike pointed to the barn. His two boys went.

Joe raised an eyebrow at his three youngest. They went.

The three tall, broad-shouldered brothers followed their sons to the barn.

Nick patted Barrie's face. "Mommy cwy?" she asked, and her lower lip quivered as she looked at Zane "Fix Daddy."

"I'll fix, all right," he muttered. "I'll fix some glue to your little butt and stick you on a chair."

Barrie giggled through her tears. "Everyone wished for a girl," she said, hiccuping as she laughed and cried at the same time. "Well, we got our wish!"

Wolf reached out and plucked his only granddaughter from his son's brawny arms. She beamed at him, and he said ruefully, "With luck, it'll be thirty years before there's another one. Unless ..." His dark eyes narrowed as he looked at Chance.

"No way," Chance said firmly. "You can turn that look on Maris. I'm not getting married. I'm not reproducing. They're starting to come by the bunches now, so it's time to call a halt. I'm not getting into this daddy business."

Mary gave him her sweet smile. "We'll see," she said.

4 - Mackenzie's Magic

Synopsis:  Maris, the only Mackenzie daughter, is magic. She's fey, almost psychic and can charm the wildest horse - as well as other dangerous animals, such as the undercover FBI agent who's hot on the trail of a killer, and in whose bed Maris lands. The problem is, she was wanted for horse theft, but she was banged on the head and doesn't remember what happened or how she got there. With no memory, she had little chance of proving her innocence or eluding the villains behind the prize stallion's mysterious disappearance. Her only hope for salvation? The stranger in her bed.

Dear Reader,

Not all that long ago, the world was a much slower place. Generations of a family would be born, grow up, marry, set up their own homes, and all stay within the same neighborhood. It wasn't unusual for a house to be home to three generations at the same time. Babies were born in the same house where grandparents died, and there was a wonderful sense of continuity, of roots, that has gone by the wayside now as families scatter to the four corners of the earth.

But we still have that yearning for the safe place of our hearts, the center of the family, and Christmas is the perfect expression of that "Are you going home for Christmas?" is a phrase spoken thousands¡Xmillions¡Xof times as the holiday nears. People seldom live in the same house their entire lives now, but the house isn't the home; the family is. The family is the sanctuary, and people travel untold miles to reach it every year at that special time, the time of Christmas.

I hope you reach your sanctuary, and I hope you have a wonderful Christmas.

Linda Howard

Chapter One

Her head hurt.

The pain thudded against the inside of her skull, pounded on her eyeballs. Her stomach stirred uneasily, as if awakened by all the commotion.

"My head hurts." Maris Mackenzie voiced the complaint in a low, vaguely puzzled tone. She never had headaches; despite her delicate appearance, she possessed in full the Mackenzie iron constitution. The oddity of her condition was what had startled her into speaking aloud.

She didn't open her eyes, didn't bother to look at the dock. The alarm hadn't gone off, so it wasn't time to get up. Perhaps if she went back to sleep the headache would go away.

"I'll get you some aspirin."

Maris's eyes snapped open, and the movement made her head give a sickening throb.

The voice was male, but even more startling, it had been right beside her; so close, in fact, that the man had only murmured the words and still his warm breath had stirred against her ear. The bed shifted as he sat up.

There was a soft click as he turned on the bedside lamp, and the light exploded in her head. Quickly she squeezed her eyes shut again, but not before she saw a man's broad, strongly muscled, naked back, and a well-shaped head covered with short, thick dark hair.

Confused panic seized her. Where was she? Even more important, who was he? She wasn't in her bedroom; one glance had told her that. The bed beneath her was firm, comfortable, but not hers.

An exhaust fan whined to life when he turned on the bathroom light. She didn't risk opening her eyes again, but instead relied on her other senses to orient herself. A motel, then. That was it. And the strange whump-ing sound she had only now heard was the blower of the room's climate-control unit.

She had slept in plenty of motels, but never before with a man. Why was she in a motel, anyway, instead of her own comfortable little house close by the stables? The only time she stayed in motels was when she was traveling to or from a job, and since she had settled in Kentucky a couple of years ago the only traveling she'd done had been when she went home to visit the family.

It was an effort to think. She couldn't come up with any reason at all why she was in a motel with a strange man.

Sharp disappointment filled her, temporarily piercing the fogginess in her brain. She had never slept around before, and she was disgusted with herself for having done so now, an episode she didn't remember with a man she didn't know.

She knew she should leave, but she couldn't seem to muster the energy it would take to jump out of bed and escape. Escape? She wondered fuzzily at the strange choice of word. She was free to leave any time she wanted...if she could only manage to move. Her body felt heavily relaxed, content to do nothing more than lie there. She needed to do something, she was certain, but she couldn't quite grasp what that something was. Even aside from the pain in her head, her mind felt fuzzy, and her thoughts were vague and drifting.

The mattress shifted again as he sat down beside her, this time on the side of the bed closest to the wall, away from the hurtful light. Carefully Maris risked opening her eyes just a little; perhaps it was because she was prepared for the pain, but the resultant throb seemed to have lessened. She squinted up at the big man, who sat so close to her that his body heat penetrated the sheet that covered her.

He was facing her now; she could see more of him than just his back. Her eyes widened.

It was him.

"Here you go," he said, handing the aspirin to her. His voice was a smooth, quiet baritone, and though she didn't think she'd ever spoken to him before, something about that voice was strangely familiar.

She fumbled the aspirin from his hand and popped them into her mouth, making a face at both the bitter taste of the pills and her own idiocy. Of course his voice was familiar! After all, she'd been in bed with him, so she supposed she had talked to him beforehand, even if she couldn't remember meeting him, or how she'd gotten here.

He held out a glass of water. Maris tried to prop herself up on her elbow to take it, but her head throbbed so violently that she sank back against the pillow, wincing with pain as she put her hand to her forehead. What was wrong with her? She was never sick, never clumsy. This sudden uncooperativeness of her own body was alarming.

"Let me do it.'' He slipped his arm under her shoulders and effortlessly raised her to a sitting position, bracing her head in the curve of his arm and shoulder. He was warm and strong, his scent musky, and she wanted to press herself closer. The need surprised her, because she'd never before felt that way about a man. He held the glass to her lips, and she gulped thirstily, washing down the pills. When she was finished, he eased her down and removed his arm. She felt a pang of regret at the loss of his touch, astonishing herself.

Fuzzily she watched him walk around the bed. He was tall, muscular, his body showing the strength of a man who did physical work instead of sitting in an office all day. To her mingled relief and disappointment, he wasn't completely naked; he wore a pair of dark gray knit boxers, the fabric clinging snugly to his muscled butt and thighs. Dark hair covered his broad chest, and beard stubble darkened his jaw. He wasn't handsome, but he had a physical presence that drew the eye. It had drawn hers, anyway, since she'd first seen him two weeks ago, forking down hay in the barn.

Her reaction then had been so out of character that she had pushed it out of her mind and ignored it, or at least she had tried. She had deliberately not spoken to him whenever their paths crossed, she who had always taken pains to know everyone who worked with her horses. He threatened her, somehow, on some basic level that brought all her inner defenses screaming to alert. This man was dangerous.

He had watched her, too. She'd turned around occasionally and found his gaze on her, his expression guarded, but still, she'd felt the male heat of his attention. He was just temporary help, a drifter who needed a couple of weeks' pay in his pocket before he drifted away again, while she was the trainer at Solomon Green Horse Farms. It was a prestigious position for anyone, but for a woman to hold the job was a first. Her reputation in the horse world had made her a sort of celebrity, something she didn't particularly enjoy; she would rather be with the horses than putting on an expensive dress and adorning a party, but the Stonichers, who owned Solomon Green, often requested her presence. Maris wasn't a snob, but her position on the farm was worlds apart from that of a drifter hired to muck out the stables.

He knew his way around horses, though; she'd noticed that about him. He was comfortable with the big animals, and they liked him, which had drawn her helpless attention even more. She hadn't wanted to pay attention to the way his jeans stretched across his butt when he bent or squatted, something that he seemed to do a thousand times a day as he worked. She didn't want to notice the muscles that strained the shoulder seams of his shirts as he hefted loaded shovels or pitchforks. He had good hands, strong and lean; she hadn't wanted to notice them, either, or the intelligence in his blue eyes. He might be a drifter, but he drifted for his own reasons, not because he wasn't capable of making a more stable life for himself.

She'd never had time for a man in her life, hadn't particularly been interested. All her attention had been focused on horses, and building her career. In the privacy of her bed at night, when she wasn't able to sleep and her restless body felt too hot for comfort, she had admitted to herself the irony of her hormones finally being kicked into full gallop by a man who would likely be gone in a matter of weeks, if not days. The best thing to do, she'd decided, would be to continue ignoring him and the uncomfortable yearnings that made her want to be close to him.

Evidently she hadn't succeeded.

She lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the light as she watched him return the water glass to the bathroom, and only then did she notice what she herself was wearing. She wasn't naked; she was wearing her panties, and a big T-shirt that drooped off her shoulders. His T-shirt, specifically.

Had he undressed her, or had she done it herself? If she looked around, would she find their clothes haphazardly tossed together? The thought of him undressing her interfered with her lung function, constricting her chest and stifling her oxygen flow. She wanted to remember¡Xshe needed to remember¡Xbut the night was a blank. She should get up and put on her own clothes, she thought. She should, but she couldn't. All she could do was lie there and cope with the pain in her head while she tried to make sense of senseless things.

He was watching her as he came back to bed, his blue eyes narrowed, the color of his irises vivid even in the dim light. "Are you all right?"

She swallowed. "Yes." It was a lie, but for some reason she didn't want him to know she was as incapacitated as she really was. Her gaze drifted over his hairy chest and flat belly, down to the masculine bulge beneath those tight boxers. Had they really... ? For what other reason would they be in a motel bed together? But if they had, why were they both wearing underwear?

Something about those sophisticated boxer shorts teemed a little out of place on a guy who did grunt work on a horse farm. She would have expected plain white briefs.

He turned off the lamp and stretched out beside her, the warmth of his body wrapping around her as he settled the sheet over them. He lay on his side, facing her, one arm curled under his pillow and the other resting across her belly, holding her close without actually wrapping her in his embrace. It struck her as a carefully measured position, close without being intimate.

She tried to remember his name, and couldn't.

She cleared her throat. She couldn't imagine what he would think of her, but she couldn't bear this fogginess in her mind any longer. She had to bring order to this confusion, and the best way to do that was to start with the basics. "I'm sorry," she said softly, almost whispering. "But I don't remember your name, or¡Xor how we got here."

He went rigid, his arm tightening across her belly. For a long moment he didn't move. Then, with a muffled curse, he sat bolt upright, the action jarring her head and making her moan. He snapped on the bedside lamp again, and she closed her eyes against, the stabbing light.

"Damn it," he muttered, bending over her. He sank his long fingers into her hair, sifting through the tousled silk as he stroked his fingertips over her skull. "Why didn't you tell me you were hurt?"

"I didn't know I was." It was the truth. What did he mean, hurt?

"I should have guessed." His voice was grim, his mouth set in a thin line. "I knew you were pale, and you didn't eat much, but I thought it was just stress." He continued probing, and his fingers brushed a place on the side of her head that made her suck in her breath as a sickening throb of pain sliced through her temples.

"Ah." Gently he turned her in to him, cradling her against his shoulder while he examined the injury. His fingers barely touched her scalp. "You have a nice goose egg here."

"Good," she mumbled. "I'd hate for it to be a bad goose egg."

He gave her another narrow-eyed look, something he had down to an art. "You have a concussion, damn it. Are you nauseated? How's your vision?"

"The light hurts," she admitted. "But my vision isn't blurred."

"What about nausea?"

"A little."

"And I've been letting you sleep," he growled to himself, half under his breath. "You need to be in a hospital."

"No," she said immediately, alarm jangling through her. The last thing she wanted was to go to a hospital. She didn't know why, but some instinct told her to stay away from public places. "It's safer here."

In a very controlled tone he said, "I can handle the safety. You need to see a doctor."

Again there was that nagging sense of familiarity, but she couldn't quite grasp what it was. There were other, more serious, things to worry about, however, so she let it go. She took stock of her physical condition, because a concussion could be serious, and she might indeed need to be in a hospital. There was the headache, the nausea... What else? Vision good, speech not slurred. Memory? Rapidly she ran through her family, remembering names and birthdays, thinking of her favorite horses through the years. Her memory was intact, except for... She tried to pinpoint her last memory. The last thing she could remember was eating lunch and walking down to the stables, but when had that been?

"I think I'm going to be okay," she said absently. "If you don't mind, answer a couple of questions for me. First, what's your name, and second, how did we wind up in bed together?"

"My name's MacNeil," he said, watching her closely.

MacNeil. MacNeil. Memory rushed back, bringing with it his first name, too. "I remember," she breathed. "Alex MacNeil." His name had struck her when she'd first heard it, because it was so similar to the name of one of her nephews, Alex Mackenzie, her brother Joe's second-oldest son. Not only were their first names the same, but their last names both indicated the same heritage.

"Right. As for your second question, I think what you're really asking is if we had sex. The answer is no."

She sighed with relief, then frowned a little. "Then why are we here?" she asked in bewilderment.

He shrugged. "We seem to have stolen a horse," he said.

Chapter Two

Stolen a horse? Maris blinked at him in total bewilderment, as if he'd said something in a foreign language. She'd asked him why they were in bed together, and he'd said they had stolen a horse. Not only was it ridiculous that she would steal a horse, but she couldn't see any connection at all between horse thievery and sleeping with Alex MacNeil.

Then a memory twinged in her aching head, and she went still as she tried to solidify the confused picture. She remembered moving rapidly, driven by an almost blinding sense of urgency, down the wide center aisle of the barn, toward the roomy, luxurious stall in the middle of the row. Sole Pleasure was a gregarious horse; he loved company, and that was why his stall was in the middle, so he would have companionship on both sides. She also remembered the fury that had gripped her; she'd never been so angry before in her life.

"What'is it?" he asked, still watching her so intently that she imagined he knew every line of her face.

"The horse we 'seem' to have stolen¡Xis it Sole Pleasure?"

"The one and only. If every cop in the country isn't already after us, they will be in a matter of hours." He paused. "What were you planning on doing with him?"

It was a good question. Sole Pleasure was the most famous horse in America right now, and very recognizable, with his sleek black coat, white star, and white stocking on the right foreleg. He'd been on the cover of Sports Illustrated, had been named their Athlete of the Year. He'd won over two million dollars in his short career and been retired at the grand old age of four to be syndicated at stud. The Stonichers were still weighing the offers, determined to make the best deal. The horse was black gold prancing around on four powerful, lightning-fast legs.

What had she been going to do with him? She stared at the ceiling, trying to bring the hours missing from her memory back to the surface of consciousness. Why would she steal Sole Pleasure? She wouldn't have sold him, or raced him¡Xin disguise, of course¡Xon her own. She rejected those possibilities out of hand. Stealing a horse was so foreign to her nature that she was at a loss to explain having apparently done exactly that. The only reason she could even imagine having for taking a horse would be the animal was in danger. She could see herself doing that, though she was more likely to take a whip to anyone mistreating one of her babies, or any horse at all, for that matter. She couldn't bear seeing them hurt.

Or killed.

The thought knifed through her, and suddenly she knew. Oh, God, she knew.

She jerked upright in bed. Instantly pain mushroomed inside her skull, the pressure almost blinding her for a second. She gave a gasping, almost soundless cry; a hard arm shot upward and closed around her, preventing her getting up, but it didn't matter anyway. She felt her muscles going slack, unable to support her, and she slumped over on him. The pain quickly subsided to a far more manageable level, but the moment of agony left her weak and shaking, collapsed on his chest, in his arms, her eyes closed as she tried to recover from the shock. MacNeil gently turned so that she was flat on her back and he was half over her, one heavy, hairy, muscled leg thrown across her much slimmer ones, his arm under her neck, his broad shoulders blocking the light from her closed eyelids. One big hand covered her left breast, the contact brief and warm and electrifying, then moved up to her throat. She felt his fingers pressing against the artery there, then a soft sigh eased from him, and he briefly leaned down to press his forehead against hers, very gently, as if he were afraid the touch might hurt her. She swallowed, trying to control her breathing. That was the limit of her control, though, because there was nothing she could do about the speed at which her blood was thundering through her veins. Only the thought of Sole Pleasure kept her focused. Maris gulped, opening her eyes and staring up at him. "They were going to kill him," she said in a stifled tone. "I remember. They were going to kill him!" Renewed rage bubbled in her bloodstream, giving force to the last sentence.

"So you stole him to save his life."

He said it much more as a statement than as a question, but Maris nodded anyway, remembering at the last second to limit herself to only a tiny movement of her head. The calmness of his voice again piqued her interest with its familiarity. Why wasn't he alarmed, indignant, or any number of other responses that could reasonably be expected? Maybe he'd already guessed, and she had only confirmed his suspicion.

He was a drifter, a man who routinely walked away from responsibility, but even though he'd guessed what she was doing, he had involved himself anyway. Their situation was highly precarious, because unless she could prove the charge she'd made, they would be arrested for stealing Sole Pleasure, the most valuable horse in the country. All she remembered now was the danger to the stallion, not who was behind it, so proving it could be a bit chancy.

Chancy... Chance. Chance and Zane. The thought of her brothers was like sunrise, bringing light to the darkness in her mind. No matter what was going on or who was behind it, all she had to do was call Zane, and he would get to the bottom of it. Maybe that had been her original plan, lost in the fog that obscured the past twelve hours. Get Sole Pleasure out of harm's way, contact Zane, and lay low until the danger was over. She stared at the ceiling, trying to remember any other detail that would help clear up the situation. Nothing. "Did I call anyone last night?" she asked. "Did I say anything about calling one of my brothers?"

"No. There was no time or opportunity to call anyone until we got here, and you were out like a light as soon as you hit the bed."

That information didn't clear up the question of whether she had undressed herself or he had done it. She scowled a little, annoyed at how the physical intimacy of the situation kept distracting her from the business at hand.

He was still watching her closely; she felt as if his attention hadn't wavered from her for so much as a split second. She could sense him analyzing every nuance of her expressions, and the knowledge was unsettling. She was accustomed to people paying attention to her; she was, after all, the boss. But this was different, on an entirely different level, as if he missed nothing going on around him.

"Were you going to call your family for help?" he asked when she didn't say anything else.

She pursed her lips. "That would have been the most logical thing to do. I should probably call them now." Zane had left the SEALs, he was much easier to contact; Barrie and the kids kept him closer to home. And he would know how to get in touch with Chance, though the odds of Chance even being in the country weren't good. It didn't matter; if she needed them, if she made the call, she knew her entire family would descend on Kentucky like the Vikings swooping down on a medieval coastal village¡Xand heaven help those who were behind all this.

Maris tried to ease herself away from him so that she could sit up and reach the phone. To her amazement, he tightened his grip, holding her in place.

"I'm okay," she said in reassurance. "As long as I remember to move slowly and not jar my head, I can manage. I need to call my brother as soon as possible so he can¡X"

"I can't let you do that," he said calmly.

She blinked, her dark eyes growing cool. "I beg you pardon?" Her tone was polite, but she let him hear the steel underlying it.

His lips twitched, and a ruefully amused look entered his eyes. "I said I can't let you do that." The amusement spread to his mouth, turning the twitch into a smile. "What are you going to do, fire me?"

Maris ignored the taunt, because if she couldn't prove Sole Pleasure was in danger, neither of them would have to worry about a job for some time. She lay still, considering this sudden change in the situation, possibilities running through her mind. He was too damn sure of himself, and she wondered why. He didn't want her to call for help. The only reason she could come up with was that he must be involved somehow, in the plot to kill Sole Pleasure. Maybe he was the one who'd been hired to do it. Suddenly looking up into those blue eyes, Maris felt the danger in him again. It wasn't just a sensual danger, but the inherent danger of a man who had known violence. Yes, this man could kill.

Sole Pleasure might already be dead. She thought of that big, sleek, powerful body lying stiff, never to move again, and a nearly crippling grief brought the sheen of tears to her eyes. She couldn't control that response, but she allowed herself no other. Maybe she was wrong about MacNeil, but for Sole Pleasure's sake, she couldn't take the chance.

"Don't cry," he murmured, his voice dropping into a lower note. He lifted his hand to gently stroke her hair away from her temple. "I'll take care of things."

This was going to hurt. Maris knew it, and accepted the pain. Her father had taught her to go into a fight expecting to get hurt; people who didn't expect the pain were stunned by it, incapacitated and, ultimately, defeated. Wolf Mackenzie had taught his children to win fights.

MacNeil was too close; she was also lying flat on her back, which took away a lot of her leverage. She had to do it anyway. The first blow had to count.

She snapped her left arm up at him, striking for his nose with the heel of her palm.

He moved like lightning, his right forearm coming up to block the blow. Her palm slammed into his arm with enough force to jar her to the teeth. Instantly she recoiled and struck again, this time aiming lower, for his solar plexus. Again that muscular forearm blocked her way, and this time he twisted, catching both of her arms and pinning them to the pillow on each side of herhead. With another smooth motion he levered himself atop her, his full weight crushing her into the bed.

The entire thing took three seconds, maybe less. There had been no explosion of movement; anyone watching might not even have realized a brief battle had taken place, so tight had been the movements of attack and response, then counterattack. Her head hadn't even been unduly jarred. But Maris knew. Not only had she been trained by her father, she had also watched Zane and Chance spar too often to have any doubts. She had just gone up against a highly trained professional¡Xand lost.

His blue eyes were flinty, his expression cold and remote. His grip on her wrists didn't hurt, but when she tried to move her arms, she found that she couldn't.

"Now, what in hell was that about?" His voice was still calm, but edged with an icy sharpness.

Then it all fell together. His control, his utter self-confidence, the calmness that seemed so familiar. Of course it was familiar¡Xshe saw it constantly, in her brothers. Zane had just that way of speaking, as if he could handle anything that might happen. MacNeil hadn't hurt her, even when she had definitely tried to hurt him. She couldn't have expected such concern from a thug hired to kill a horse. The clues were there, even those sexy gray boxers. This was no drifter.

"My God," she blurted. "You're a cop."

Chapter Three

"Is that why you attacked?" If anything, those blue eyes were even colder.

"No!" she said absently, staring up at his face as if she'd never seen a man before. She felt stunned, as if she really hadn't. Something had just happened, but she wasn't sure what. It was like the way she'd felt when she first saw him, only more intense, primally exciting. She frowned a little as she tried to pin down the exact thought, or sensation, or whatever it was. His hands tightened on her wrists, drawing her back to the question he'd asked and the answer he wanted, and reluctantly she gathered her thoughts. "I just now realized that you're a cop. The reason I tried to hit you was because you wouldn't let me call my family, and I was afraid you might be one of the bad guys."

"So you were going to try to take me out?" He looked furious at the idea. "You have a concussion. How in hell did you expect to fight me? And who taught you those moves, anyway?"

"My father. He taught all of us how to fight. And I could have won, against most men," she said simply. "But you¡XI know professional training when I see it."

"So the fact that I know how to fight makes you think I'm a cop?"

She could have told him about Zane and Chance, who, even though they weren't cops, had many of the same characteristics she'd noticed in him. She didn't, though, because she wasn't one hundred percent certain their organization or agency or whatever it was was exactly squared away with either the State or Justice Department. Instead, she gave MacNeil a secret little smile. "Actually, it was your shorts."

He was startled out of his control, his blue eyes widening. "My shorts?"

"They aren't briefs. They're not white. They're too sexy."

"And that's a dead giveaway for being a cop?" he asked incredulously, color staining his cheekbones.

''Drifters don't wear sexy gray boxers,'' she pointed out. She didn't mention the interest she could feel stirring in those sexy gray boxers. Perhaps, under the circumstances, she shouldn't have mentioned his underwear. Not that his reaction was unexpected, she thought. She was barely clothed, and he wore even less. She could feel the hard, hairy bareness of his legs against hers, the pressure of his hips. Just minutes before, she had thought his touch carefully controlled, so that there was no intimacy, despite his closeness. She didn't feel that way now. It wasn't just his arousal; there was something very intimate in the way he held her beneath him, as if their brief battle had startled him out of his careful control and provoked him into a heated, purely male response. She took a deep breath as an unfamiliar excitement made her heart beat faster made every cell in her body tingle with life. The secret part of her, the wildness that she had always known was there but which no man had ever before managed to touch, shivered in fierce satisfaction at the way he held her.

"Cops don't necessarily wear them, either.'' Her comment about his shorts had definitely disturbed him. She smiled again, her dark eyes half closing in sensual delight as she absorbed the novel sensation of having a hard male body on top of her¡X an extremely aroused male body. "If you say so. I've never seen one undressed before. What kind of cop are you, specifically?"

He was silent for a moment, studying her face. She didn't know what he saw there, but the set of his mouth eased, and if anything, he settled even more heavily against her. "Specifically, FBI. Special agent." A federal agent? Startled out of her sensual preoccupation, she gave him a puzzled look. "I didn't think stealing a horse was a federal crime."

He almost smiled. "It isn't. Look, if I let go of your hands, are you going to try to kill me again?"

"No. I promise," she said. "Besides, I wasn't trying to kill you, and even if I had been, I'm not as good as you are, so you don't have to worry."

"I can't tell you how reassuring that is," he said dryly, but he released her hands and shifted his position a little, propping himself over her on his forearms. The change forced his hips more firmly against hers, forced her thighs slightly apart to accommodate the pressure. She caught her breath. His interest had grown, to the point that there was no politely ignoring it. But he was ignoring it, not in the least embarrassed by his body's response to her.

Maris took another deep breath, delighting in the way the simple action rubbed her breasts against the hard, muscled planes of his chest, making her nipples tingle. Oh, God, that felt so good. She would gladly lie in his arms and do nothing more than breathe, if they didn't have a stolen champion horse stashed somewhere and someone presumably on their trail, trying to kill both them and the stallion.

But they did have a stolen horse hidden away, and a big problem on their hands. She focused her thoughts, and despite the fact that she was lying helplessly pinned beneath him, she fixed him with a dark, penetrating gaze. "So why was a federal special agent mucking out my stables?"

"Trying to find out who's been killing horses and collecting the insurance money on them¡Xboss." He added the last word in a dry tone, responding to her arrogant claiming of the Solomon Green stables as her own.

She ignored the not-so-subtle teasing, because she'd heard it so often from her family. What she loved, she claimed; it was as simple as that. She drew her head back deeper into the pillow and gave him a frankly skeptical look. "Insurance fraud rates a special agent?"

"It does when it involves kidnapping, crossing state lines and murder."

Murder. So she'd been right: Someone was trying to kill them. Had this someone hit her on the head, or had she gained the goose egg by a more mundane method, such as falling? "What brought you to Solomon Green?"

"A tip." One corner of his mouth curved slightly. His face was so close to hers that she could see the tiny lines created by the movement, as if he smiled easily. "Law enforcement agencies couldn't operate without snitches."

"So you knew Sole Pleasure was in danger?" She didn't like that. Anger began to smolder in her dark eyes. "Why didn't you tell me? I could have been on guard without causing any suspicion. You didn't have a right to gamble with his life."

"All of the horses are insured. Any of them could have been targeted. Sole Pleasure should have been their least likely target, because he's so well-known. His death would raise a lot of questions, attract a lot of attention." He paused, watching her carefully. "And, until last night, you were on my list of suspects.''

She absorbed that, her only reaction a slight tightening of her mouth. "How did last night change your mind? What happened?" It was both frustrating and frightening, not being able to remember.

"You came to me for help. You were so angry you could barely speak, and you were scared. You said we had to get Sole Pleasure out of there, and if I didn't want to help, you'd manage on your own."

"Did I say who was after him?"

He gave a slight shake of his head. "No. Like I said, you were barely speaking. You wouldn't answer any questions. I thought at the time you were too scared, and once we had the horse safe, I was going to give you a little time to settle down before I started questioning you. Then I noticed how pale and shaky you were, maybe a little shocky from the adrenaline crash. You wanted to go on, but I made you stop here. You conked out as soon as we got in the room.''

That reminded her again of both the interesting question of whether she had undressed herself or he had done it for her and his rather irritating assumption that he could make her do anything. She frowned when she realized that he could back up that assumption with action; her current position proved it. He hadn't hurt her, but physically she was still very much under his control.

Her frown deepened as she grew more annoyed with herself than before. She was doing it again, letting her attention drift. She could keep letting herself get sidetracked by her undeniable attraction to him, or she could keep her mind on the problem at hand. Sole Pleasure's life, and perhaps her own, depended on doing whatever she could to help this man.

There was no question which was most important.

"The Stonichers," she said slowly. "They're the only ones who would benefit financially from Sole Pleasure's death, but they'd make more by syndicating him for stud, so killing him doesn't make sense.''

"That's another reason I didn't think he was in danger. I was watching all the other horses. The insurance on them wouldn't be as much, but neither would their deaths cause much of a stir."

"How did I find you?" she asked. "Did I come to your room? Call you? Did anyone see us, or did you see anyone?" His room was one of ten, tiny but private, in a long, narrow block building the Stonichers had built specifically to house the employees who were transient and had no other quarters, as well as those who needed to be on-site. As the trainer, Maris was important enough to have her own small three-room cottage on the premises. The foaling man, Mr. Wyse, also had his own quarters, an upstairs apartment in the foaling barn, where he watched the mothers-to-be on video monitors. There were always people around; someone had to have seen them.

"I wasn't in my room. I'd been in the number two barn, checking around, and had just gone out the back door when you rode by on Sole Pleasure. It was dark, so I didn't think you'd seen me, but you stopped and told me I had to help you. The truck and trailer that brought in that little sorrel mare this afternoon were still sitting there, hooked up, so we loaded Sole Plea-sure in and took off. If anyone saw us, I doubt they could even have seen there was a horse in the trailer, much less recognized it as Sole Pleasure."

It was possible, she thought. The number two barn was where the mares who had been sent to the farm for breeding were stabled. Night came early in December, and the horses were already settled down, the workers relaxing or at supper. The truck and trailer didn't belong to Solomon Green, and everyone knew they had brought in a mare that afternoon, so no one would think anything of the rig leaving, except the driver, who had decided to spend the night and start back at dawn the next day. And Sole Pleasure was exceptionally easy to load; he never made a fuss and, in fact, seemed to enjoy traveling. Loading him wouldn't have taken more than a minute, and then they would have been on their way.

"I didn't have a chance to call my family," she said, "but did you call anyone while I was asleep?"

"I went out to a pay phone and let my office know what was going on. They'll try to run interference for us, but they can't be too obvious without blowing the operation. We still don't know who's involved in the ring¡Xunless you've remembered something else in the past few minutes?"

"No," she said regretfully. "My last clear memory is of walking down to the stables yesterday afternoon. I know it was after lunch, but I don't know the exact time. What little else I remember is just flashes of being angry, and scared, and running to Pleasure's stall."

"If you remember anything else, even the smallest detail, tell me immediately. By taking the horse, we've given them the perfect opportunity to kill him and blame it on us, or at least they'll see it that way, since they don't know I'm FBI. They'll be after us hot and heavy, and I need to know who to expect."

"Where's Pleasure now?" she asked in alarm, put-ting her hands on his shoulders and pushing. She squirmed under him, trying to slip free of his weight so that she could get up, get dressed and get to the horse. It wasn't like her to be so lax about a horse's comfort and security, and though she had watched MacNeil enough to know that he was conscientious with the animals, the final responsibility was hers.

"Calm down. He's all right." MacNeil caught her hands, once more holding them down on the pillow. "I've got him stashed in the woods. No one's going to find him. I couldn't make it easy for them. Leaving him in the parking lot, where anyone could get at him, would have made even a fool suspicious. They're going to have to come to us in order to find him."

She relaxed against the pillows, reassured about Pleasure's safety. "All right. What are we going to do now?"

He hesitated. "My original plan was to find out what you knew, then put you somewhere safe until we had everything settled."

"Where were you going to put me, in the trailer with Pleasure?" she asked, a slight caustic edge to her voice. "Well, too bad. I can't tell you what I know, and you need to keep me handy in case I do remember something. You're stuck with me, MacNeil, and you aren't putting me anywhere."

"There's only one place I'd like to put you," he said slowly. "And I already have you there."

Chapter Four

It wasn't a surprise, given all the evidence at hand.

Pure male possessiveness was in Alex MacNeil's attitude, in every line of his body, staring plainly down at her from those sharp blue eyes.

Maris knew she wasn't mistaken about that look. She had grown up seeing it in her father's eyes every time he looked at her mother, seen the way he stood so close to her, touched her, a subtle alertness in every muscle of his body. She had also seen it innumerable times in her five brothers, first with their girlfriends and later, for four of them, with their wives. It was a look of desire, heated and potent.

It was both scary and exhilarating, startling her, and yet at the same time it was as if she had known, from the moment she first saw him, that there was something between them and eventually she would have to deal with it.

That was why she'd been at such pains to avoid him, not wanting the complication of an involvement with him, or having to endure the resultant gossip among the other employees. She had dated, some, but she had instinctively shied away whenever a boy or man showed signs of becoming too involved, possessive. She'd never had much time or patience for anything that interfered with her concentration on her horses and her career, nor had she ever wanted to let anyone that close to her.

She had a strong private core that she'd never let anyone touch, except for her family. It seemed to be a Mackenzie trait, the ability to be alone and be perfectly content, and even though all her brothers except Chance had eventually married and were frighteningly in love with their wives, they had married because they were in love. Maris had always been content to wait until that once-in-a-lifetime love happened to her, too, rather than waste time by flinging herself without thought into a brief affair with any man who just happened to have the right physical chemistry with her.

The chemistry was there with MacNeil, all right. The proof of it, on his part, was pressing urgently against the soft notch of her legs, tempting her to open her thighs wider and allow herself to feel that rigid length full against her loins. The fact that she wanted to do so was proof of the right chemistry on her part. She should move away, she knew she should, but she didn't. There wasn't a cell in her body that wanted to move, unless it was closer into his embrace.

She stared up into his beard-stubbled face, into blue eyes that were hard and darkened by sharp desire, a desire he was ruthlessly containing. Her own eyes were dark, bottomless pools as she met that sharp gaze. "The question is," she said slowly, "what are you going to do about it?"

"Not very damn much," he muttered, shifting restlessly against her. His jaw tightened at the sensations resulting from that movement, and his breath sighed out between his teeth. "You have a concussion. You have a killer headache. We have an unknown number of unknown people looking for us, so I have to keep my mind on the situation, instead of thinking about getting into your little panties. And even if you said yes, damn it, I'd have to say no, because the concussion could be causing mental impairment!" The last sentence was raw with frustration, ground out as if every word hurt him.

She lay very still beneath him, though her instinct was to part her thighs and cradle him against her, pulling him into her soft heat. Her eyes went as dark as night, softening, something mysterious and eternal moving there. "My headache is better." Her voice was low, her gaze drawing him in. "And I'm not mentally impaired."

"Oh, God," he groaned, resting his forehead against hers and closing his eyes. "Two out of four."

Maris moved her hands, and he immediately freed them. She laid her palms against his shoulders, and he tensed, waiting for her to push him away, knowing it was for the best but dreading the loss of contact. She didn't push. Instead, she curved her hands over the powerful muscles that cushioned the balls of his shoulder joints, trailed her fingers over the curve of his collarbone and finally flattened her hands against the hard planes of his chest. His crisp black chest hair tickled her palms. His tiny flat nipples hardened to pinpoints, intriguing her. His heartbeat was hard and strong, throbbing beneath her touch.

She was amazed, a little taken aback, by the intensity of the desire that shook her. No, not just desire¡Xneed. Need, hot and strong. She had seen sexual attraction all her life, at the most basic level in her horses and the other animals on the ranch, and in her own family as something powerful and tender and somehow both straightforward and complicated at the same time. She didn't underestimate the compelling power of sex. She had seen it, but she'd never before felt it, not this heat and ache, this emptiness that could be filled only by him, this melting sensation deep inside. She had always thought that if she ever felt this way it would be associated with love, and love was impossible here, because she didn't know him, not really. She knew his name and his occupation, but nothing about the type of person he was, and it was impossible to love a stranger. Be attracted, yes, but not love.

But her sister-in-law Barrie had once said that within five minutes of meeting Zane she had known the kind of person he was, and loved him. They had been strangers, but extraordinary circumstances had forced them into an intimate situation and shown them facets of each other's characters that otherwise would have taken months for them to discover.

Maris considered her own situation and the stranger who was so intimately sharing it with her. What had she learned about him since awakening¡Xor regaining consciousness¡Xin his arms?

He wasn't pushing her. He wanted her, but he wasn't pushing. The circumstances weren't right, so he was waiting. He was a patient man, or at least a man who knew how to be patient when he had to be, something that was entirely different. He was intelligent; she would have seen that days¡Xweeks¡Xago, if she had let herself study him. She wasn't certain, but she thought that an FBI special agent had to have a law degree. He had some working medical knowledge, at least about concussions. He was evidently strong-willed enough to have gotten her to do something she didn't want to do, though, of course, with a concussion she wouldn't have been at her best. He had taken care of her. And most of all, despite the fact that she had slept almost naked in his arms, he hadn't taken sexual advantage of her.

That was quite a list. He was patient, intelligent, educated, strong-willed, caring and honorable. And there was something else, the subtle quality of danger and controlled power. She remembered the quiet, authoritative tone of his voice, the utter confidence that he could take care of any problem that might arise. In that he was like her brothers, particularly Zane and Chance, and they were two of the most dangerous men she could imagine.

She had always known that one of the reasons she'd    never fallen in love was that so few men could compare favorably with the men in her family. She had been content to dedicate herself to her career, unwilling to settle for less than what she knew a man could be. But Alex MacNeil was of that stamp, and her heart lurched. Suddenly, for the first time in her life, she was in danger of falling in love.

And then, looking into those eyes so blue it was like drowning in the ocean, she knew. She remembered the change inside herself, the quiet recognition of her mate.

"Oh, dear," she said softly. "I have a very important question to ask you."

"Shoot," he said, then gave a wry shrug of apology at his word choice.

"Are you married, or otherwise involved with anyone?"

He knew why she was asking the question. He would have had to be dead not to feel the electricity between them, and his state of arousal proved that he was far from it. "No. No involvements, period." He didn't ask the same question of her; the background check he'd run on all the employees at Solomon Green had given him the basic information that she was single and had no record of prior arrests. In the time he'd worked at the farm, from the questions he'd asked, he had also found out that she didn't date any one man on a steady basis. The other guys had kidded him about having the hots for the boss, and he'd gone along with the idea. Hell, it was true, so why not use it as part of his cover?

Maris took a deep breath. This was it, then. With the directness with which she faced life, and the fey quality with which she saw things so clearly, she gave him a tiny smile. "If you aren't already thinking of marrying me," she said, "you'd better get used to the idea."

Mac kept his expression still, not allowing it to betray the shock that was reverberating through him. Marriage? He hadn't even kissed her yet, and she was talking marriage!

A sane man would get up and get his mind back on the business at hand, which included keeping them alive through the next few hours. A sane man wouldn't continue to lie here with this woman in his arms, not if he wanted to preserve his enjoyable single state.

He wanted her, no doubt about that. He was familiar with desire, having indulged that particular urge since the age of fourteen, and knew how to ignore it when indulgence would interfere with work. The work was absorbing, and he'd thrown himself into it with the cool, incisive intelligence that he also used to govern his personal life. He'd always been the one in control in his relationships, the one who called an end to things whenever he thought a woman was beginning to cling, to expect more from him than he was willing to give. It wasn't fair to string a woman along and let her hope when there was no hope, so he always simply ended the affair before it got to the tears-and-recriminations stage.

But then, he'd never met Maris Mackenzie before.

He didn't get up. More disturbing, he didn't laugh and say the concussion must have impaired her mentally after all. She was small, delicately built, even fragile, so it was ridiculous for him to dread making her angry or, even worse, hurting her feelings. He wanted to continue holding her, wanted to cradle her close to him and protectively cover her, keep her safe from the danger that would erupt around them within the next couple of hours, shield her from everything¡Xexcept himself. He wanted her open to him, vulnerable, naked, completely at his disposal. He wanted to sink into those beguiling, mysterious black eyes and forget everything but the feverish delight of thrusting into her. The sharp turn of events had thrown him off balance, that was all. Until last night, she and everyone else at Solomon Green had been on his list of possible suspects, and he had refused to let himself dwell on the heat that ran through him every time her slight, disconcertingly female body came within sight. Hell, she hadn't even had to be in sight; the thought of her had slipped into his consciousness at odd times during the day and disturbed his sleep at night.

He had resented his inability to ignore her as easily as she ignored him. She had a very still, intense quality about her, a focus that bespoke a will of iron. She was as absorbed in her job as he was in his, to the point that he'd thought she didn't even know he existed as a person, much less as a man. The idea had been strangely disturbing. He'd needed to blend in, but instead he'd found himself wanting to stand out, so that she would look at him with recognition in her eyes instead of a blank stare. Night after night he'd lain alone and thought about her, resenting both the fact that he couldn't seem to stop and the fact that she was oblivious to him. He wanted her to be as aware of him as he was of her, wanted to know that she, too, twisted on lonely sheets and thought of him in bed with her.  He wanted her with an intensity that infuriated him. Everything about her appealed to him, and that was surprising in itself, because there was nothing overtly sexual about her manner. She was pure business; she never flirted, never played favorites with the men un-der her authority, never made a suggestive remark, didn't go out of her way to make herself more attractive. Not that she had to; he couldn't have been more aware of her than if she made a practice of parading naked in front of him.

He knew exactly how her jeans clung to her curvy little ass, had imagined more than once gripping those round cheeks in his hands and lifting her into his thrust. He'd studied the shape of her high, round breasts underneath the flannel shirts she wore and, considering the slightness of her build, driven himself crazy thinking about how tight she would be when he slid into her. He'd had all the normal, heated sexual thoughts. But he'd also found himself absorbed in the satiny texture of her skin, as flawless as if she didn't spend countless hours outdoors. No woman should have skin like that, as pure as a child's, and so trans-lucent he could see the fragile blue veins in her temples. He would look at her pale brown hair, bleached by the sun into streaks of ashy blond, and think of how it would trail across his arm like a fall of silk. Her eyes were as black as night, fey and unfathomable, tempting a man to try to plumb those mysterious depths.

Desire, like heat, was measured in degrees, and ran the gamut from lukewarm to vaporization. She had long since turned him to steam, he thought; it was nothing short of a miracle that he'd held her in his arms all night and done nothing more than that, even though all she was wearing was a pair of skimpy, blood-pressure-raising panties and his own T-shirt, which was so large on her that it kept slipping down to reveal one silky shoulder.

This was desire, all right¡Xand more. It was want carried to a higher degree than he'd ever before experienced, a fever that refused to cool, a need he hadn't let himself satisfy. Until last night, he hadn't even let himself talk to her, even though he'd known he should, to see what, if anything, he could find out from her. Oddly enough, she had seemed to avoid him, too, though he'd noticed immediately that Ms. Mackenzie was a hands-on trainer who knew everyone working under her and was on easy terms with them. She was pure magic with the horses and a tyrant when it came to their care, but a benevolent tyrant, and everyone from the stable hands to the riders seemed to treat her with varying degrees of respect and adoration. It was out of character for her to avoid him, but that was exactly what she'd done.

It had made him suspicious. It was his job to be suspicious, to notice anything out of the ordinary, and her behavior toward him had made him wonder if something about him had made her suspicious, put her on guard. With his background, he was familiar with horses, which had made him the logical choice for the job, and he'd tried to blend in. Still, he was always aware that his training had permanently changed him, and a sharp eye might be able to spot the little things that forever set him apart from others: the extraordinary alertness, so that he was aware of every little detail of the activity going on around him; his sharp, fast reflexes; his unconscious habit of placing himself in positions that could be defended.

And she had spotted those details, known what they meant. He didn't at all like the swiftness with which she had sized him up and said, "You're a cop," even if her actions of the night before had already convinced him that she wasn't involved in the ring that killed racehorses and collected the insurance money. She saw too much, with those black eyes of hers, and now she was looking at him as if she could see into his soul.

Honesty prodded at him. Even though every hormone in his body was roaring at him not to do anything to jeopardize his current position, to stay right where he was, on top of her and all but between her legs, he ground his teeth and said what he knew be had to say.

"Marriage? You must be hurt worse than I thought, since you're delirious."

She didn't take offense. Instead, she curled her arms around his neck and gave him that small, inscrutable, damnably female smile again. "I understand.¡v She said gently. "You need time to get used to the idea, and you have a job to do. This can wait. Right now, you have to catch some damn horse killers.

Chapter Five

She needed to clear her head, needed some time away from him so that her nerves would settle down. Maris pushed lightly against his shoulders; he hesitated, but then rolled to the side, freeing her from his weight. The loss of that heavy pressure, the vital heat, was so unexpectedly painful that she almost reached out to pull him over her again. One glance at the straining fabric of his shorts told her that he might not be able to withstand any more temptation, and while her entire body yearned for him, she wanted to be able to fully enjoy their first time together. She had a concussion, and there were an unknown number of people after them who would likely try to kill them, as well as Sole Pleasure¡Xpowerful distractions, indeed.

Gingerly she sat up on the side of the bed, being very careful to hold her head as still as possible. The aspirin had helped; the pain was still there, but it didn't throb as sickeningly as it had before. She eased into a standing position and was relieved when the room remained stable.

Instantly he was on his feet beside her, his hand on her arm. "What are you doing? You need to rest as much as possible."

"I'm going to take a shower and get dressed. If I'm going to be shot at, I want to be on my feet and wearing clothes when it happens." God, he was big, and there was all that naked flesh right in front of her. She took a deep breath, fighting the urge to press herself against him, to find out exactly where her head would fit against his shoulder now that they were standing up.

His body was so beautiful, his shoulders wide and powerful, his arms and legs thick with muscle. How silly she'd been to avoid him all these weeks, when she could have been getting to know him! Silently she mourned those wasted days. She should have realized sooner why her reaction to him had been so sharp, why she'd felt that odd sense of fright.

This was the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life. No matter where her career had taken her, home had always been a mountain in Wyoming, and Alex MacNeil was going to change that. Her home would be with him, wherever he was, and an FBI special agent could be assigned anywhere. Though her life would never be completely without horses, he might be assigned to a city, where she wouldn't be able to find a job as trainer. She had never before met a man whom she would even consider putting ahead of her horses¡X but she looked at him and instinctively thought, No contest.

He was hers. She was his. She recognized it at every level of her being, as if she were vibrating to a resonance that only he produced.

But danger surrounded them, and she had to be prepared.

He had been watching her face with that narrow-eyed, intensely focused way of his. He didn't release her, but drew her closer, his arm circling her narrow waist. "Forget whatever you're thinking. You don't have to do any thing but stay out of the way."

His nearness was too tempting. Maris leaned her head on his chest, rubbing her cheek against the hairy roughness as an almost painful tenderness filled her. "I won't let you do this alone." His nipple was right there, only a few inches from her mouth, and as irresistible as catnip to a kitten. She moved those few inches, and her tongue darted out, delicately licking the flat brown circle.

He shuddered, his arm tightening convulsively around her. But his gaze was grim and determined as he cupped her chin with his other hand and gently lifted her face. "It's my job," he said in the even, quietly implacable tone she had heard before. "You're a civilian, and you're hurt. The best way you can help me is by staying out of the way."

She smiled in wry amusement. "If you knew me better, you wouldn't say that." She was fiercely, instinctively, protective of those she loved, and the thought of letting him face danger alone made her blood freeze in horror. Unfortunately, fate had decreed that she love a man whose profession was putting himself between the lawless elements in society and those he had sworn to protect. She couldn't demand that he quit his job any more than her family had demanded that she quit the dangerous work of gentling unbroken horses. He was what he was, and loving him meant not trying to change him.

She straightened away from him. "I'm still going to shower and dress. I still don't want to face anyone in just my panties and a T-shirt...." She paused. "Except you."

He inhaled sharply, his nostrils flaring, and she saw his hand flex as if he wanted to reach for her again. Because time had to be growing short, she stepped away from him, away from temptation, and gathered up her clothes. Just as she reached the bathroom door a thought occurred to her, and she stopped, looking back at him. Was he alone? Though Zane and Chance never talked about their assignments, they had sometimes discussed techniques, back in their training days, and she had absorbed a lot. It would be very unusual for an FBI agent to be working without backup.

"Your partner should be close by," she said. "Am I right?"

His eyebrows lifted in faint surprise; then he smiled. "In the parking lot. He got into position an hour or so after we got here. No one's going to take us by surprise."

If his partner hadn't been on watch, Maris realized, MacNeil never would have relaxed his guard enough to be in bed with her or let himself be distracted by the sexual attraction between them. Still, she was certain

he hadn't slept but had remained awake in case his partner signaled him.

"What's his name? What does he look like? I need to be able to tell the good guys from the bad."

"Dean Pearsall. He's five-eleven, skinny, dark hair and eyes, receding hairline. He's from Maine. You can't miss the accent."

"It's cold out there," she said. "He must be frozen."

"Like I said, he's from Maine. This is nothing new to him. He has a thermos of coffee, and he lets the car run enough to keep the frost off the windshield, so he can see."

"Won't that be a dead giveaway, no frost on the car?"

"Only if someone knows how long the car has been there, and it isn't a detail most people notice." He picked up his jeans and stepped into them, never taking his eyes off her as he considered the somewhat startling workings of her nimble brain. "Why did you think of it?"

She gave him a sweet smile, her mother's smile. "You'll understand when you meet my family." Then she went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Her smile faded immediately once she was alone. Though she fully realized and accepted the wisdom of not interfering with a trained professional and his partner, she was also sharply aware that plans could go wrong and people could get hurt. It happened, no matter how good or careful someone was. Chance had been wounded several times; he always tried to keep it from their mother, but somehow Mary always sensed when he'd been hurt, and Maris did, too. She could fed it deep inside, in a secret place that only those she loved had managed to touch. She had been almost insane with fear that time when Zane was nearly killed rescuing Barrie from terrorists in Libya, until she saw him for herself and felt his steely life force undiminished.

It had happened to Zane, and he was the best planner in the business. In fact, expecting things to go wrong was one of the things that made Zane so good at what he did. There was always a wild card in the deck, he said, and she had to be prepared for it, no matter how it was played.

Her advantages were that she was trained in self-defense, was a very good shot, and knew more about battle tactics than anyone could expect. On the other hand, her pistol was in her cottage, so she was unarmed, unless she could talk MacNeil into giving her a weapon. Considering how implacable his expression had been, she didn't think she had much chance of that. She was also concussed, and though the headache had lessened and she was feeling better now, she wasn't certain how well she could function if the situation called for fast movement. The fact that her memory hadn't returned was worrisome; the injury could be more severe than she'd initially thought, even though her other symptoms had lessened.

Who had hit her? Why was someone trying to kill Sole Pleasure? Damn it, if only she could remember!

She wrapped a towel around her head to keep her hair dry and stood under a lukewarm spray of water, going over and over the parts she remembered, as if she could badger her bruised brain into giving up its secrets. Everything had been normal when she went back to the stables after lunch. It had been after dark, say around six or six-thirty, when she stumbled across MacNeil. Sometime during those five hours she had learned that Sole Pleasure was in danger and either surprised someone trying to kill him or confronted the person beforehand and earned herself a knock on the head.

It didn't make sense, but the Stonichers had to be behind the threat to their prize stallion, because they were the only ones who could benefit financially from his death. Since they would make much more by syndicating him for stud, the only way killing him made any sense at all was if he had some problem that would prevent them from syndicating him.

It wasn't a question of health; Maris had grown up around horses, loved them with a passion and devotion that had consumed her life, and she knew every detail of the well-being of her charges. Sole Pleasure was in perfect health, an unusually strong, fast horse who was full of energy and good spirits. He was a big, cheerful athlete who ran for the sheer love of running, sometimes mischievous but remarkably free of bad habits. She loved all her horses, but Pleasure was special to her. It was unthinkable that anyone would want to kill him, destroy forever that big, good-natured heart and matchless physical ability,

The only thing she could think of that would interfere with his syndication, the only possible reason anyone would grab for insurance money rather than hold out for the much larger fortune to be gained from syndicating him, was if the fertility tests had proved him sterile.

If that was the case, the Stonichers might as well geld him and race him as long as he was healthy. But injuries happened to even the hardiest animals, and a racing career could be ended in a heartbeat. The great filly Ruffian had been on the way to victory, well ahead of her male opponent in a special match race, when an awkward step shattered her leg and she had to be put down. Given the uncertainties of winning purses on the track and the given of insurance money, if Sole Pleasure was sterile, the Stonichers could conceivably be going for the sure thing and have hired someone to kill him.

She didn't want to think it of them. Joan and Ronald Stonicher had always seemed like decent people to her, though not the kind with whom she would ever be close friends. They were Kentucky blue bloods, born into the life, but Ronald particularly seemed to be involved in raising horses only because he'd inherited the farm. While Joan knew the horses better and was a better rider than her husband, she was a cool, emotionally detached woman who paid more attention to social functions than she did to the earthy functions in the stables. The question was, could they deliberately kill a champion Thoroughbred for the insurance money?

No one else was in a position to collect, so it had to be them.

They wouldn't do it themselves, however. Maris couldn't imagine either one of them actually doing the deed. They had hired someone to kill Pleasure, but who? It had to be someone she saw every day, some-one whose presence near the horses wouldn't attract attention. It was likely one of the temporary hands, but she couldn't rule out a longtime employee; a couple hundred thousand would be terribly tempting to someone who didn't care how he earned it.

She turned off the shower and stepped out, turning the situation around and around in her head. By the time she was dressed, one thought was clear: MacNeil knew who the killer was.

She opened the door and stepped out, almost stumbling over him. He was propped against the counter-top in the small dressing area, his arms crossed and his long legs stretched out, patiently waiting in case she became dizzy and needed him. He, too, had dressed, and though he looked mouth-wateringly tough and sexy in jeans, flannel shirt and boots, she regretted no longer being able to see him in nothing more than tight-fitting boxers.

Maris jabbed a slender finger at his chest. "You know who it is, don't you?" something the way you did, but he wasn't as lucky. The next morning there was a dead horse in the stall and the kid was missing. That was in Connecticut. A week later his body was found in Pennsylvania."

She stared at him, her dark eyes stark. The Stonich-ers might just be after the money, but they had aligned themselves with people who were truly evil. Any regret she might have felt for them vanished.

MacNeil's face was like stone. "I won't move too soon and blow the investigation. No matter what, I'm going to nail these bastards. Do you understand?"

She did. Completely. That left only one thing to do. "You refuse to compromise the case, and I won't let Pleasure be hurt. That means you'll have to use me as the bait."

Chapter Six

"Absolutely not." The words were flat and implacable. "No way in hell."

"You have to."

He looked down at her with mingled exasperation and amusement. "Sweetheart, you've been the boss for so long that you've forgotten how to take orders. I'm running this show, not you, and you'll damn well do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it, or you're going to find yourself handcuffed and gagged and your sweet little ass stuffed in a closet until this is over."

Maris batted her long eyelashes at him. "So you think my ass is sweet, huh?"

"So sweet I'll probably be biting it before too much longer." The concept appealed to him; she could tell by the way his eyes darkened. She was rather taken by it, herself. Then he shrugged the moment away and grinned. "But no matter how good you taste or how fast you flutter those eyelashes, you aren't going to change my mind about this."

She crossed her arms and offered him an irrefutable fact. "You need me. I don't know what I saw or who hit me. It could have been one of the Stonichers, or it could have been whoever they hired. But they don't know that I can't remember, and they don't know about you, so they think I'm the biggest threat to them."

"That's exactly why you're staying out of sight. If it's one of the Stonichers holding the gun, I can't predict how he or she will act. Give me a professional killer any day, rather than an amateur, who's likely to panic and do something really stupid, like shooting you in front of a bunch of witnesses."

"God forbid you should have to deal with anyone who would get rattled by committing murder," she said, sweetly sarcastic, and he gave her another of those patented narrow looks of his. She continued with her argument. "They're probably surprised that I haven't already called the cops on them. By now they're figuring I was either hurt more than they'd thought at first and I'm lying unconscious somewhere, or that I've realized I have no proof to take to the cops, so I have no excuse for stealing a priceless horse. Either way, they want me. I'm the perfect patsy. They can kill Pleasure, make it look like I did it, and then kill me. Everything's tied up nice and clean, and who knows, the insurance policy may even pay double indemnity, which is more money in everyone's pocket. Nothing will make them commit faster than seeing me."

"Damn it, no." He shook his head in exasperation. "I can't believe the way your mind works. You must read a lot of thrillers."

She glared at him, affronted. Her argument was perfectly logical, and he knew it. That didn't mean he liked it. It didn't even mean he would agree with it; she was fast learning that she could add protective to the list of his characteristics. And stubborn. God forbid she should forget stubborn.

"Sweetheart..." He smoothed his hands over her shoulders, an unfamiliar, tender ache in his chest as he felt the delicacy of her bones. He tried to think of the words that would convince her to leave this business to him and Dean. It was their job; they were trained for it. She would be in the way, and worrying about her would drive him crazy. God, she evidently thought she was seven feet tall and made of pig iron, but he could see how pate she was, how carefully she moved. She wasn't normally fragile, despite the slightness of her build; he'd seen her ride, effortlessly controlling stallions that most men would have trouble handling, so he knew she was strong. She was also alarmingly valiant, and he didn't know if his nerves could stand the stress.

"Look at it this way," she said. "As long as they don't know where Pleasure is, I'm safe. They need me to get to him."

He didn't argue, didn't try to convince her. He just shook his head and said, "No."

She gave his forehead an experimental rap with her knuckles, a puzzled look on her face.

He drew back a little, blinking in surprise. "What are you doing?"

"Seeing if your head's made out of wood," she retorted, her exasperation showing through. "You're letting your emotions interfere with your job. I'm your best bet¡Xso use me!"

Mac stood motionless. He couldn't have been more stunned if this delicate fire-eater had suddenly lifted him over her head and tossed him through the window. He was letting his emotions interfere with the job? That was the last thing he'd ever imagined anyone would say to him. What made him so good at his job was his ability to divorce himself from the emotions that could hamper his actions. He'd always been the one who kept his head, who remained cool no matter how tense the situation. He might have some sleepless nights afterward, he might sweat bullets, but while the job was going down he was an iceman.

He couldn't be emotional about her; it wasn't logical. Okay, so he'd had the hots for her since he'd first seen her. Chemistry happened. With her, it had happened in a big way. And he liked her; he'd learned a lot about her since she had practically commandeered him the night before. She was quick-thinking, had a sense of humor, and was too damned gutsy for his peace of mind. She also responded to his slightest touch, her soft body melting against him, with a sheer delight that went to his bead faster than a bit of whiskey.

He frowned. Only the fact that she was concussed had kept him from taking her, and even then, it had been a near thing. Never mind that they were waiting for a killer to come after them, that he had deliberately left a trail that was just difficult enough to keep from being obvious. He never should have undressed last night; he knew that. But the fact was, he had wanted to feel her against his skin, and so he'd taken off everything but his shorts and slipped into bed with her. Dean would beep him when anyone showed up; if Mac had timed it right, he figured it would take another hour at least before anything happened, but still he should have been dressed and ready in case some-thing went wrong. Instead, he had been on top of her, between her legs, and thinking that only two thin layers of cotton were keeping him from her. It would have taken him maybe five seconds to get those two layers out of the way, and then he would have been inside her and to hell with anything else.

But none of that was emotion. That was liking, and a powerful lust. So she had this crazy idea, after spending only a few hours with him¡Xand being asleep most of that time¡Xthat they were going to get married. Just because she felt that way didn't mean he did, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let himself be buffaloed into something like marriage, no matter how hard he got whenever she was anywhere around.

The thought of using her as bait almost made the top of his head come off, but that wasn't emotion, it was common sense.

"You're concussed," he finally said. "You're moving like a snail, and you don't need to be moving at all. You'd be more of a hindrance than a help, because I'd have to watch you, as well as myself."

"Then give me a weapon," she replied, her tone so unruffled that he wasn't sure he'd heard right.

"A weapon?" he echoed incredulously. "Good God, you think I'm going to arm a civilian?"

She straightened away from his grasp, and his palms ached from the loss of contact. All of a sudden her black eyes weren't bottomless at all, they were cool and flat, and the recognition of what he was seeing jolted him.

"I can handle a pistol as well as you, maybe better."

She wasn't exaggerating. He'd seen that look in the eyes of snipers, and in the eyes of some fellow agents who had been there, done that, and had the guts to do it again. He had seen it in his own eyes, and he'd understood when some women had shied away from him, frightened by the dangerous edge they sensed in him.

Maris wouldn't shy away. She looked delicate, but she was pure steel.

He could use her. The thought flashed into his brain, and he couldn't dismiss it. Policy said that no civilians should be involved if it could be avoided, but too many times it couldn't be avoided. She was right; she was his best bet, and he would be a fool if he compromised the investigation by not using her. It wrenched every instinct he had to do it, but he had to put his feelings aside and concentrate on the job.

Damn it, he thought in surprise, he had been letting his emotions cloud his thinking. That wasn't a good sign, and he had to put a stop to that kind of idiocy right now.

"All right," he said swiftly, wheeling around to get their jackets. He jerked his on and began stuffing Maris into hers. "Time's short, so we have to move fast. First we need to get the stallion out of the trailer and hidden somewhere else, then position the trailer so that whoever comes can't see that he isn't in it. Then we come back here. You drive the truck, I'll be hidden in the truck bed, under some blankets or something." He turned out the bathroom light and began ushering her toward the door. "We'll post Dean down the road, where he can see them arrive. He'll leave then and get into position at the trailer. He'll give us warning. You leave by the back way just as they arrive, let them get a glimpse of the truck. They follow."

They reached the door. MacNeil turned out the lights and took a small radio out of his pocket, keying it. "Is everything clear?" he asked. "We're coming out."

"What?" His partner's voice was startled. "Yeah, everything's clear. What's up?"

"Tell you in a minute."

He slipped the radio back into his pocket and unchained the door. He paused then, looking down at her. "Are you sure you can do this? If your head is hurting too much, let me know now, before it goes any further."

"I can do it." Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact, and he gave a short nod.

"Okay, then." He opened the door, and cold air slapped her in the face. She shivered, even though she was wearing her thick down jacket. The weather bureau had been predicting the arrival of a cold front, she remembered. She had watched the noon news and weather yesterday; perhaps that was why she now had this thick jacket instead of the flannel-lined denim jacket she had been wearing yesterday morning. She was glad she had changed coats, because the temperature now had to be in the twenties.

She looked around as she left the cozy warmth of the motel room. The motel office and the highway were on her right. MacNeil took her arm and steered her to the left, circling her behind a late-model pickup truck that was covered over with frost. "Hold it a minute," he said, and left her hidden by the truck's bulk while he went around to the driver's side. He opened the door and leaned in. She caught the faint metallic jingle of keys; then the motor started and settled into a quiet idle. She noticed with approval that the interior light hadn't come on, which meant he had taken care of that little detail earlier.

Interior lights. As he closed the truck door with a barely audible click, the neon light from the motel sign slanted across his high cheekbones, and a door opened in her mind.

She remembered the way his face had looked last night as he drove, the grimness of his expression highlighted by the faint green glow from the dash.

She remembered the desperation with which she had hidden her condition from him. She had been afraid to let him know how weak she was, how terribly her head hurt, that she was vulnerable in any way. He hadn't said much, just driven in dark silence, but even through her pain she had felt the physical awareness running between them like a live electrical wire. If she showed any vulnerability, she'd thought, he would be on her.

That was why he'd come with her, not because he was concerned about Sole Pleasure.

Her thinking had been muddled by the knock she'd taken on the head. She had been terrified for Pleasure's safety, trying to think of the best way to protect him, and she hadn't been certain she could trust MacNeil. She had taken a big chance in asking for his help; he had given it without question, but afterward she'd been too unbalanced by the concussion and the strength and unfamiliarity of her own sensual awareness of him to think straight.

She had wound up exactly where she was afraid she would, under him in bed. And he hadn't done a darn thing, except make her fall in love with him.

"Come on," he said softly, not looking at her. In fact, he was looking at everything except her, his head swiveling, restless eyes noting every detail of their surroundings.

The early morning was dark and silent, so cold that their breath fogged into ice crystals. No stars winked overhead, and she knew why when a few white flakes began drifting soundlessly to the ground. A cold breeze sliced through her jeans, freezing her legs.

He led her across to a nondescript tan Oldsmobile that was backed into a parking slot between a scraggly bush, the motel's attempt at landscaping, and a Volvo station wagon. She walked carefully, and her headache obliged by remaining bearable.

He opened the rear door of the four-door car and put her inside, then he got into the front, beside his partner. Dean Pearsall was exactly as MacNeil had described him, thin and dark, as well as definitely puzzled. "What the hell's going on?"

Briefly MacNeil outlined the plan. Pearsall's head swiveled, and he looked over the seat at Maris, doubt plain in his expression.

"I can do it," she said, not giving him time to voice that doubt.

"We have to work fast," MacNeil said. "Can you get the video equipment set up?"

"Yeah," Pearsall replied. "Maybe. We're cutting it damn close, though."

"Then let's not waste any more time." MacNeil popped open the glove box and removed a holstered pistol. He took it out, checked it, then slid it back into the holster before handing it back to Maris. "It's a .38 revolver, five shots, and there's a round under the hammer."

She nodded and checked the weapon herself. A faint smile eased the grim line of his mouth as he watched her; he wouldn't have taken someone else's word on the state of a weapon's readiness, either.

"There's a Kevlar vest on the seat beside you. It'll be way too big for you, but put it on anyway," he instructed.

"That's your vest," Pearsall said.

"Yeah, but she's going to wear it."

Maris slipped the revolver into her coat pocket and grabbed the vest. "I'll put it on in the truck," she said as she opened the door and slid out. "We have to hurry."

The snowflakes were still drifting down, ghostly in the predawn quiet. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel as she and MacNeil crossed the parking lot to the truck. The defroster had cleared the bottom half of the windshield, and that was enough for him to drive.

He didn't turn on the headlights until they were on the highway and he could tell there was nothing in sight in either direction except for the tan Oldsmobile, which had pulled out behind them. Then he hit the switch, and the green dash lights illuminated his face just as they had earlier.

Maris shrugged out of her coat and into the Kevlar vest. It was heavy and far too big, so big it covered her hips, but she didn't waste her time arguing about wearing the cumbersome garment, because she knew MacNeil would never give in on this.

"I remember driving with you last night," she said.

He glanced at her. "Your memory's back?"

"Not all of it. I still don't remember who hit me on the head, or taking Pleasure. By the way, don't you think you should tell me?"

He grunted. "I don't know who hit you. There's a choice between at least three people, maybe more."

"Ronald and Joan are two. Who's the one you followed to Solomon Green?"

"The new vet. Randy Yu."

Maris was silent. That name surprised her; she would have thought of a lot of other people before she would have come up with the vet's name. She'd been impressed with his skill, and he'd never shown anything but the utmost care for his four-legged patients. He was a quarter Chinese, in his middle thirties, and with the strength a veterinarian needed. If he was the one she'd tangled with, she was surprised she'd managed to get away from him with no more than a bump on the head. Of course, whoever she'd fought with wouldn't have expected her to know how to fight, much less fight hard and dirty.

"It makes sense," she said, thinking about it. "A quick injection, Pleasure dies of cardiac arrest, and it looks like natural causes. Not nearly as messy as a bullet."

"But you ruined that plan for them," MacNeil said, harshness underlying the calm of his tone. "Now they'll be planning to use bullets¡Xfor both you and the horse."

Chapter Seven

Sole Pleasure wasn't happy. He didn't like being alone, he didn't like being cramped in a small trailer for so long, and he was both hungry and thirsty. MacNeil had backed the horse trailer deep into a section of woods, so deep she didn't know how he'd managed it, and Pleasure didn't like the unfamiliar surroundings, either. He was a horse accustomed to open pastures, roomy stalls, noise and people. As soon as they got out of the truck they heard his angry neighing and the thud of one of his rear hooves repeatedly kicking against the back of the trailer.

"He'll hurt himself!" Maris hurried to the trailer, moving faster than she should have for the sake of her head, but if Pleasure managed to break his leg, he would have to be put down. "Easy, baby, easy," she crooned as she unlatched the back gate, the special note she used for her horses entering her tone. The kicking stopped immediately, and she could almost see the alert black ears swiveling to catch her voice.

"Hold it." MacNeil's hand came down on top of hers as she started to open the gate. "I'll get him out. He's fractious, and I don't want him bumping you around. You stand over there and keep talking to him."

She gave him a considering look as she moved to the side. Really, the man was acting as if this were the first time she'd ever been hurt. Anyone who worked with horses could expect to be kicked, bitten, bruised and bucked off¡Xthough she hadn't been thrown since she'd been a kid. Still, she'd collected her share of injuries: Both arms had been broken, as well as her collarbone. She'd had a concussion before, too. What was the best way to handle an overprotective man, especially after you were married?

Exactly the way her mother handled her father, she thought, grinning. By standing her ground, talking rings around him, and distracting him with sex, and by choosing her battles and sometimes actually letting him have his way. This was one of the times to not kick up a fuss. She would ignore him later, when the stakes were greater.

MacNeil skillfully backed the big stallion out of the trailer; Pleasure came eagerly, happy to have company again, relieved to be unconfined. He showed his happiness by dancing around and playing, shoving MacNeil with his head and generally acting like any four-year-old. All things considered, Maris was just as happy not to be on the receiving end of those head butts, or to have to control all that power as he danced around. He would have been quieter for her¡Xthe horses found her especially soothing¡Xbut any jolt right now wasn't fun.

MacNeil led Pleasure away from the trailer, the stallion's hooves almost soundless on the thick pad of pine needles and decomposing leaves that carpeted the forest floor. He tied the reins to a sapling and patted the animal's glossy neck. "Okay, you can come over now," he called to Maris. "Keep him happy while I reposition the trailer."

She took control of the stallion, calming him with her voice and hands. He was still hungry and thirsty, but he was such a curious, gregarious horse that his interest in the proceedings kept him occupied. Dean Pearsall had stopped the Oldsmobile farther back, positioning the car so its headlights lit the area. MacNeil got in the truck and put it in reverse, leaning out the open door to check his position as he backed the track up to the trailer. He was good at it; it took some people forever to get the trailer hitch in the right position, but MacNeil did it on the first try. Pretty good for an FBI agent, Maris thought. He was a fed now, but he'd obviously spent a lot of time around horses in the past.

It was snowing a little more heavily now, the headlight beams catching the drifting flakes as they sifted through the bare branches of the hardwoods. The pines were beginning to acquire a dusting of white. MacNeil maneuvered the trailer around, threading it through the trees, repositioning it so that it directly faced the narrow trail they'd made and anyone coming down it wouldn't, be able to see that Pleasure wasn't inside. There were high, narrow side windows in the trailer, but none in front.

As soon as the trailer was in position and MacNeil had unhooked the truck and pulled away, Pearsall went to work, squirming underneath the trailer and setting up a video camera so that it couldn't easily be seen but would still have a good angle on anyone approaching the trailer.

MacNeil turned to Maris. "While Dean's working, let's get Pleasure tucked away back in the woods." He checked the luminous hands on his watch. "We need to be out of here in five minutes, ten tops."

The trailer contained blankets that had been used to cover the mare who had been brought to Solomon Green the day before. Maris got the darkest one and spread it across Pleasure's broad back. He liked that, swaying his muscular rump as if he were doing the hootchie-cootchie, and blowing in the particular way he did when he was pleased. She laughed, the sound quiet and loving, as she reached up to hug his big neck. He lipped her hair, but gently, as if he'd somehow realized by the way she moved that she wasn't quite up to speed.

"This way." MacNeil's voice held an odd note as he handed a flashlight to Maris, then untied the reins and began leading Pleasure deeper into the trees. He curved his other arm around Maris, holding her close to his side as they walked. Between the oversize Kevlar vest and her thick down jacket, he couldn't feel her, so he slipped his hand under the coat, under the vest, resting it on the swell of her hip. "How are you feeling?" he asked as they picked their way through the dark woods, stepping over fallen limbs and evading bushes that clutched at their clothes.

"Okay." She smiled up at him, letting herself lean closer into the heat and strength of his big body. "I've had a concussion before, and though this one isn't any fun, I don't think it's as bad as the first one. The pain is going away faster, so I don't understand why I can't remember what happened."

Her bewilderment was plain, and his fingers tightened on her hip. "A different part of your brain is affected, I guess. And parts of your memory are already coming back, so by tomorrow you'll probably remember everything."

She hoped so; these blank holes in her life were unsettling. It was just a matter of a few hours now, as she regained partial memory of things that had happened both before and after she was hit, but she didn't like not knowing everything that had happened. She remembered driving with MacNeil, but why couldn't she remember arriving at the motel?

Only one way to find out what she wanted to know. "Did I undress myself?"

Glancing up, she saw him smile at the abrupt change of subject. His voice deepened, evidence of the way the memory affected him. "It was a joint effort."

Maybe she would have been embarrassed an hour ago, but not now. Instead she felt a sort of aroused contentment fill her at the thought of him pulling off his T-shirt and putting it on her, the soft cotton still warm from his body.

"Did you touch me?" The whispered words were like heated honey, flowing over him, telling him how much she liked the idea.

"No, you were too out of it." But he'd wanted to, he thought. God, how he'd wanted to. He helped her over a fallen tree, supporting her so that she wouldn't stumble, but he was remembering how she'd looked sitting on the side of the bed, wearing nothing but her panties, her eyes closing, her pale hair floating around her delicate, satiny shoulders. Her breasts were high, firm, small but deliciously round, her nipples like dark pink little crowns. His right hand clenched on the reins; his palm was actually aching to touch her now, to fill his hand with that cool, richly resilient flesh and warm it with his loving.

"Well, darn," she said sedately, and in the glow of the flashlight he saw the welcome in her night-dark eyes.

He inhaled deeply, reaching for control. They had no time for any delay, much less one that would last an hour. An hour? He gave a mental snort. Who was he kidding? He was so worked up that five minutes was more like it, and that was only if his self-control turned out to be a lot stronger than it felt right now.

"Later," he promised, his voice a rough growl of need. Later, when this was settled and his job done. Later, when he could take the time with her that he wanted to take, behind a locked door and with the telephone off the hook. Later, when she felt better, damn it, and wasn't dealing with a concussion. He figured it would be two days, at least, before her headache was gone¡Xtwo long, hellish days.

He stopped and looked back. They had gone far enough that he could no longer see the headlights through the trees. A small hollow dipped just ahead, and he led Sole Pleasure into it. The hollow blocked the wind, and tall trees leaning overhead protected him from the light snow. "You'll be okay here for a couple of hours," he told the horse as he tied the reins to a low, sturdy branch. Pleasure would be able to move around some, and if there were any edible leaves or stray blades of grass, he would be able to graze within a small area.

"Be good," Maris admonished the horse, stroking his forehead. "We won't be gone long. Then we'll take you back to your big, comfortable stall, and you can have your favorite feed, and an apple for dessert." He blew softly, then bobbed his head up and down in agreement. She didn't know how many actual words he understood, but he definitely understood the love in her voice, and he knew she was telling him good stuff.

MacNeil took the flashlight from her hand and settled his arm around her again as they walked back to the truck. Pleasure neighed his disapproval of being left alone, but soon the trees blotted out the sound and there was only the rustle of their feet in the leaves.

"You know what to do," he said. "They won't follow you too closely on the highway, because they won't want to make you suspicious. Let them see where you leave the road, but then drive as fast as you can, to give yourself as much time as possible. They'll be able to follow the tracks. Pull up to the trailer, get out of the truck and get into the trees. Don't waste time, don't look back to see what I'm doing. Get into a protected place and stay there until either Dean or I come for you. If anyone else shows up, use that pistol."

"You need the vest more than I do." Worry gnawed at her. He was sending her out of harm's way, while he would be right in the middle of it, without protection. "They might pull in before you're completely out of sight and get a shot off at you. The only way I'll let you do this is if you're wearing the vest."

There that stubborn streak was again, she thought. Streak? Ha! He was permeated with it. She was beginning to think that if she scratched his skin, stubbornness would ooze out instead of blood. Living with him was going to be interesting; as he'd noted, she was used to being the boss, and so was he. She looked forward to the fights¡Xand to the making up.

Pearsall was waiting for them when they got back. "Everything's ready," he said. "There's a six-hour tape in the camera, and the battery pack is fully charged. Now, if we can just get back into position before the bad guys show up, we're set."

MacNeil nodded. "You leave first. We'll let you get out of sight before we follow. Radio if you see anything suspicious."

"Give me an extra minute so I can swing through the motel parking lot to make sure there aren't any new arrivals. Then I'll pull back and take up position."

Pearsall got into the car and backed out, his headlights bobbing through the trees.

Darkness settled around them as they listened to the sound of the car fading in the distance. MacNeil opened the passenger door of the truck and put his hands on Maris's waist, lifting her onto the seat. In the darkness, his face was only a pale blur. "Whatever happens, make sure you stay safe," he growled, and bent his head to her.

His lips were cold, and firm. Maris wound her arms around his neck and opened her mouth to him as he deepened the kiss, slanting his head for better contact. His tongue wasn't cold at all, but hot and strong, and her entire body tightened with excitement as she leaned closer to him. It wasn't enough; with the pleasure came frustration. She swiveled on the seat to face him, parting her legs so that he stood between them, pressed hard against her as the kiss changed yet again, into something fierce with need.

It was their first kiss, but there was no tentative-ness, no searching. They already knew each other, had already made the inner adjustment to the hot ache of physical desire, and accepted the hunger. They were already lovers, though their bodies hadn't yet been joined. The pact had been made. Invisible strands of attraction had been pulling them together from the first, and the web was almost complete.

He tore his mouth away from hers, breathing hard, his breath fogging in the cold air. "No more," he said, the words strained. "Not now. I'm as hard as a rock already, and if we¡X" He broke off. "We have to go. Now."

"Have we given Dean enough time?''

"Hell, I don't know! All I know is that I'm about ten seconds away from pulling your jeans off, and if we don't go now, the whole plan is blown."

She didn't want to let him go. Her arms didn't want to release their hold on him, her thighs didn't want to loosen from around his hips. But she did it, forced herself to open her embrace, because she could feel the truth pushing against her.

In silence he stepped back, and she turned in the seat so that she faced forward. He closed the door, then walked stiffly around the truck to climb in under the steering wheel, a look of acute discomfort on his face.

She wasn't good for his sanity, he thought as he started the truck and put it in gear. She made him forget about the job and think only about sex. Not sex in general, but sex in particular. Sex with her. Again and again, holding that slim body beneath him until he was satisfied.

He tried to imagine being sated with her, and be couldn't. Alarm tingled through him. He tried to think of some of the other women he'd slept with over the years, but their names wouldn't come to mind, then faces eluded him, and there was no concrete memory of how any of them had felt. There was only her mouth, her breasts, her legs. Her voice, her body in his arms, her hair spread across the pillow. He could imagine her in the shower with him, her face across the table from him every morning, her clothes hanging beside his in the closet.

The most frightening thing was that it was so damn easy to imagine it all. The only thing that frightened aim more was the thought that it might not happen, that he was actually using her in a setup where she could be hurt, despite all the pains he was taking to keep her safe.

They left the cover of the woods, and he eased the truck across the rutted ditch and onto the highway. No headlights appeared in either direction. Fat snow-flakes swirled and danced in the beams of their own headlights, and the low clouds blocked any hint of the approaching dawn. The radio remained silent, meaning Dean hadn't seen anything suspicious. After several minutes the lights of the motel sign came into view, and a few seconds after that they passed the Oldsmobile, pulled off on the side of the road and were facing back the way they'd come. It looked unoccupied, but Mac knew Dean was there, watching everything. No vehicle could approach the motel without being seen.

He pulled into the parking lot and backed into a slot, so that she could get out faster. He left the engine running, though he killed the lights. He turned to face her.

"You know what to do. Do exactly that and nothing else. Understand?"

"Yes."

"All right. I'm going to get into the back of the truck now. If the fools start shooting early, hit the floorboards and stay there."

"Yes, sir," she said, this time with a hint of dryness.

He paused with his hand on the door handle. He looked at her and muttered something under his breath. Then she was in his arms again, and his mouth was hard, urgent, as he kissed her. He let her go as abruptly as he'd grabbed her, and got out of the truck. Without another word, he closed the door, then vaulted lightly into the truck bed, where he lay down out of sight and waited for a killer to appear.

Chapter Eight

The motel was located where a small side road entered the main highway. The highway ran in front of the motel, the secondary road along the right side. Dean had checked out the little road as soon as he arrived and found that it wandered aimlessly through the rural area. No one looking for them was likely to arrive by that route, because it went nowhere and took its time getting there. The Stonichers and/or their hired killer would be on the highway, checking motels, following the faint but deliberate trail Mac had left. The plan was for Maris to let their pursuers catch a glimpse of her as she drove around the back of the motel and onto the secondary road. She would turn left, then right, onto the highway. They would notice immediately that she wasn't pulling the horse trailer, so instead of trying to cut her off, they would hang back and follow her, expecting her to lead them to Sole Pleasure.

At least Mac hoped that was how it worked. If Yu was the only one following them, that was how it would go down. Yu was a professional; he would keep his head. If anyone else was with him, the unpredictability factor shot sky-high.

It was cold in the back of the truck. He had forgotten to get any blankets to cover himself, and the snow was still falling. Mac huddled deeper into his coat and tried to be thankful he was out of the wind. It wasn't working.

The minutes dragged by, drawn out agonizingly by his tension as he waited. Dawn finally began to penetrate the cloud cover, the darkness fading to a deep gray, though true daylight was at least an hour away. Traffic would begin picking up soon, making it difficult for Dean to spot their tail. People would begin leaving the motel, complicating the traffic pattern even more. And better light would make it more difficult for Maris to hide in the woods.

"Come on, come on," he muttered. Had he made the trail too difficult?

Right on cue, the radio clicked. Mac keyed it once in reply, then gave a single rap on the back of the cab to alert Maris, who had shifted into position behind the wheel.

The radio clicked again, twice this time. Quickly he rapped twice on the cab. Maris put the truck into gear and eased out of the parking slot. She was turning the corner behind the motel when headlights flashed across the cab as a vehicle pulled into the lot, and Mac knew the lure had been cast. In a few seconds they would know if the bait had been taken.

Maris kept the truck at an even pace. Her instinct was to hurry, but she didn't want whoever was following them to know they'd been spotted. The car hadn't turned the corner behind them by the time she pulled onto the secondary road, so if it was them, they were hanging back, not wanting her to spot them.

She stopped at the stop sign, then turned right onto the highway. Watching her rearview mirror as she turned, she saw the car easing out from behind the motel. Its lights were off now, and its gray color made it difficult to spot in the faint light; she wouldn't have noticed it at all if she hadn't been looking for it.

They were driving Ronald's gray Cadillac. Maris had only seen it once or twice, because she usually dealt with Joan, who drove a white BMW. The driveway wasn't visible from the stables, and she seldom paid attention to the comings and goings at the big house. All that interested her was at the stables.

Still, she wondered that they would drive one of their personal cars at all, until she realized that it didn't matter. Sole Pleasure was their horse, and no crime had been committed. If she had called the police, it would have been their word against hers that a crime had even been attempted, and no one in the world would believe the Stonichers were willing to kill a horse worth over twenty million dollars.

Dean's Oldsmobile was nowhere in sight. Maris hoped she was giving him the time he needed to drive the car deep enough into the woods that it couldn't be seen and to work his way into position on foot.

Watching the mirror, she saw the Cadillac turn onto the highway behind her. Without its headlights on, and with the swirling snow cutting visibility, she could barely make out the gray bulk. They would be able to see her much better than she could see them, though, because her lights were on; that was why they were hanging back so far, because they were unable to judge how visible they themselves were.

Their caution was working for her and against them. The distance would give her a few extra seconds to get out of the truck and hide, a few seconds longer for Dean to get set, a few seconds longer that Mac was safe. She tried not to think of him lying on the cold metal bed, unprotected from any stray bullets except by a thin sheet of metal that wouldn't even slow down a lead slug.

It was only a few miles to the place where she would leave the road and drive into the woods. A couple of times the snow became so heavy that she couldn't sec the Cadillac behind her. The white flakes were beginning to dust the ground, but it was a dry, fluffy snow that swirled up with every breath of wind, and the passage of the truck blew it off the highway.

She maintained a steady speed, assuming they could see her, even though she couldn't see the Cadillac. She couldn't do anything that would make them suspicious. Finally she passed the mile marker that told her she was close, and she began braking, looking for the tire ruts where they'd driven before. There. She steered the truck off the highway, bouncing across the ditch faster than, for the sake of her head, she wanted to, but she didn't want to go any slower than she already was. Now that they had seen her leave the highway, she wanted to go as fast as she could, to gain a few more of those precious seconds.

Her headache, which had lessened but never disappeared, increased in severity with each bounce. She ignored it, gritting her teeth against the pain, concentrating on steering the truck on the narrow, winding path MacNeil had already blazed through the trees. She couldn't begin to imagine how difficult it must have been to do this with the trailer in tow, but it was a testament to both his stubbornness and skill that he had.

The Cadillac wouldn't be able to take the bumps and holes as fast as the truck did; it was too low to the ground. More seconds gained.

A bare limb scraped over the windshield, then her headlights caught the dark bulk of the trailer, almost concealed among the trees. Now. She parked the truck in the exact position MacNeil had decreed, killed the lights so the glare wouldn't blind the camera hidden under the trailer, then slipped out the door and walked swiftly to the trailer and then beyond it. She cut sharply to the left, stepping in places where the snow hadn't sifted down. She left no tracks as she removed herself from the scene so he could do his job without worrying about her.

She'd caught movement in her peripheral vision as she walked away, a big, dark shape silently rolling over the side of the truck bed to conceal himself behind one of the tires. At least he would have some protection, she thought, trying to console herself with that. His mind might be easier now, but hers certainly wasn't. He needed the vest she was wearing; she would never forgive herself if he was killed because she'd agreed to take his vest. It would have been better to remove herself entirely, even if it meant they wouldn't be able to get any solid evidence against the Stonichers. The FBI would get another crack at Randy Yu, but she would never find another MacNeil.

She'd gone far enough. She stopped, her back against a big oak. Snowflakes drifted silently down in the gray dawn, settling in a lacy cap on her unprotected head. She leaned her aching head against the tree and closed her eyes, listening, waiting, her breath almost halted, her heart barely beating, waiting.

. Mac waited, his eyes never leaving the rutted trail. They might drive right up to the truck, but if Yu was in charge, they would probably get out of the car and come the rest of the way on foot. He and Dean were prepared for both circumstances. The underbrush was thick; if they tried to force their way through it, they would make a lot of noise. The best thing to do was to walk up the trail, staying close to the edges. Maris had parked the truck so that they could bypass it only on the driver's side; the tailgate on the passenger side was right up against the bushes. Anyone coming along that trail would be funneled into the camera's view and duly recorded on tape.

After what seemed an interminable length of time, he heard a twig snap. He didn't move. His position, crouched by the right front tire, was secure; he couldn't be seen until they walked in front of the truck, but by then they would have looked into the cab and seen it was empty, and wouldn't pay any more attention to the truck. They would be looking instead at the trailer, and at Maris's small footprints in the thin layer of snow, leading right up to it.

There were other sounds now, rustles from careless feet, more than one pair; the brushing sounds of clothing, the harshness of someone who was slightly winded trying to regulate their breathing. They were close, very close.

The footsteps stopped. "She isn't in the truck." The whisper was barely audible, sexless.

"Look! Her footprints go right up to the trailer." It was another whisper, excitement making it louder than the first.

"Shut... up." The two words were hissed between clenched teeth, as if they had already been said more than once.

"Don't tell me to shut up. We have her cornered. What are you waiting for?"

Though still whispering, the speaker's voice was so forceful that it was almost as audible as if he¡Xor she¡X had spoken aloud. The mike might have caught it, Mac thought. With enhanced sound-extraction techniques, which the Bureau had, he was certain the words were now on tape. The only problem was, they hadn't exactly been damning.

"You hired me to do a job. Now stay out of my way and let me do it." There was fury evident now, in both words and tone.

"You're the one who bungled it the first time, so don't act as if you're Mr. Infallible. If you'd been half as smart as you seem to think you are, the horse would already be dead and Maris Mackenzie wouldn't suspect a thing. I didn't bargain on murder when I hired you."

That should do it, Mac thought with grim satisfaction. They had just talked themselves into a prison sentence.

He tightened the muscles in his legs, preparing to step out and identify himself, pistol trained and ready. A crashing, thudding noise behind him made him freeze in place. He looked over his shoulder and almost groaned aloud. A big, black, graceful horse was prancing through the trees toward them, proudly shaking his head as if wanting them to admire his cleverness in getting free.

"There he is! Shoot him!" It was a shout. Pleasure's unexpected appearance had started them out of caution. Almost instantaneously there was the sharp crack of a shot, and bark exploded from the tree just behind the horse.

Damn amateurs! He silently cursed. Pleasure was behind him; if he stood up now, he would be looking straight down the barrel, caught between the shooter and the target. He couldn't do anything but wait for the next shot to hit the beautiful, friendly stallion, who had evidently caught their scent and pulled free so he could join the party.

Dean realized Mac's predicament and stepped from concealment, pistol braced in both hands. "FBI! Drop your weapons on the ground¡Xnow."

Mac surged upward, bracing his arms across the hood of the truck. He saw Randy Yu, his hands already reaching upward as his pistol thudded to the ground. You could always trust a professional to know how to do things. But Joan Stonicher was startled by Mac's sudden movement, and she wheeled toward him, her eyes wide with panic and rage. She froze, the pistol in her hand and her finger on the trigger.

"Ease off, lady," Mac said softly. "Don't do anything stupid. If I don't get you, my partner will. Just take your finger off the trigger and let the gun drop. That's all you have to do, and we'll all be okay."

She didn't move. From the excellent viewpoint he had, Mac could see her finger trembling.

"Do as he says," Randy Yu said wearily. The two agents had them caught in an excellent cross field. There was nothing they could do, and no sense in making things worse.

Pleasure had shied at the noise of the shot, neighing his alarm, but his life had been too secure for him to panic. He trotted closer, his scooped nostrils flaring as he examined their familiar scents, searching for the special one he could detect. He came straight for Mac.

Joan's eyes left Mac and fastened on the horse. He saw the exact instant when her control shattered, saw her pupils contract and her hand jerk.

A shrill whistle shattered the air a split second before the shot.

A lot of things happened simultaneously. Dean shouted. Randy Yu dropped to the ground, his hands covering his head. Pleasure screamed in pain, rearing. Joan's hand jerked again, back toward Mac.

And there was another whistle, this one ear splitting.

Maris stepped from behind a tree, her black eyes glittering with rage. The pistol was in her hand, trained on Joan. Joan wheeled back toward this new threat, and without hesitation Mac fired.

Chapter Nine

He was mad enough to murder her, Maris thought.

She was still so enraged herself that it didn't matter. Fury burned through her. It was all she could do to keep from dismantling Joan Stonicher on the spot, and only the knowledge that Pleasure needed her kept her even remotely under control.

The woods were swarming with people, with medics and deputies and highway patrol officers, with onlookers, even some reporters already there. Pleasure was accustomed to crowds, but he'd never before been shot, and pain and shock were making him unruly. He'd wheeled at Maris's whistle, and his lightning reflexes had saved his life; Joan's bullet had gouged a deep furrow in his chest, tearing the muscle at an angle but not penetrating any internal organs. Now it took all of Maris's skill to keep him calm so she could stop the bleeding; he kept moving restlessly in circles, bumping her, trying to pay attention to her softly crooning voice but distracted by the pain.

Her head was throbbing, both from Pleasure's skittishness and from her own desperate run through the woods. She'd heard him moving through the trees, and in a flash she'd known exactly what had happened, what he would do. How he'd gotten free didn't matter; he had heard and smelted them, and pranced happily to greet them, sure of his welcome. She'd known he would catch her scent on MacNeil's clothes and go straight to him. It had been a toss-up which of them would be shot first, MacNeil or Pleasure. All she could do was try to get there in time to draw the horse's attention, as well as everyone else's.

For one awful, hellish moment, when Pleasure screamed and she saw Joan swing back toward MacNeil, she'd thought she'd lost everything. She had stepped out from the trees, moving in what felt like slow motion. She couldn't hear anything then, not even Pleasure; she hadn't been able to see anything except Joan, her vision narrowing to a tunnel with her target as the focus. She hadn't been aware of whistling again, or of taking the pistol from her pocket, but the weapon had been in her hand and her finger had been smoothly tightening on the trigger when Joan jerked yet again, panicked, this time aiming at Maris. That was when Mac had shot her. At such close range, just across the hood of the truck, his aim had been perfect. The bullet had shattered her upper arm.

Joan would probably never have use of that arm again, Maris thought dispassionately. She couldn't bring herself to care.

The entire scene had been recorded, complete with audio. The camera had playback capability and Dean had obliged the sheriff by playing the tape for him. Both Yu and Joan were nailed, and Yu, being the professional he was, was currently bargaining for all he was worth. He was willing to carry others down with him if it would lighten his sentence.

It had stopped snowing, though the day hadn't gotten any warmer. Her hands were icy, but she couldn't leave Pleasure to warm them. Blood glistened on his black chest and down his legs, staining his white stocking, splattering on the snow-frosted leaves and on Maris. She whispered to him, controlling him mostly with her voice, crooning reassurance and love to him while she held his bridle in one hand and with the other held some gauze the medics had given her to the wound on his chest. She had asked a deputy to contact a vet, but as yet no one had shown up.

Yu could have seen to the horse, but he hadn't offered, and Maris wouldn't have trusted him, anyway. It was he who had hit her on the head. As soon as she saw him again she had remembered that much, remembered his upraised arm, the cold, remorseless expression in his dark eyes. Other memories were still vague, and there were still blank spots, but they were gradually filling in.

She must have gone to the big house to see Joan about something. She didn't know why, but she remembered standing with her hand raised to knock, and freezing as Joan's voice filtered through the door.

"Randy's going to do it tonight. While everyone's eating will be a good time. I told him we couldn't wait any longer, the syndicates are pushing for a decision."

"Damn, I hate this," Ronald Stonicher had said. "Poor Pleasure's been a good horse. Are you certain the drug won't be detected?"

"Randy says it won't, and it's his can on the line," Joan had coolly replied.

Maris had backed away, so angry she could barely contain herself. Her first concern had been for Pleasure. It was the time when the stable hands would either be eating or have gone home for the night. She couldn't delay a moment.

Her next memory was of running down the aisle to his stall. She must have surprised Randy Yu there, though she didn't remember actually coming up on him. She remembered enough to testify, though, even if she never remembered anything else, and assuming her testimony was needed. The tape was solid evidence.

Another vehicle joined the tangle, and a roly-poly man in his late fifties, sporting a crew cut, got out of a battered pickup truck. He trudged wearily toward Maris, clutching a big black bag in his hand. Finally, the vet, she thought. Dark circles under his eyes told her that he'd probably been up late, possibly all night, with an ailing animal.

Tired or not, he knew horses. He stopped, taking in Pleasure's magnificent lines, the star on his forehead, the bloodstained white stocking. "That's Sole Pleasure," he said in astonishment.

"Yes, and he's been shot," Maris said tersely. Her head was throbbing; even her eyeballs ached. If Pleasure didn't settle down soon, her head would likely explode. "No internal organs affected, but some chest muscle torn. He won't settle down and let the bleeding stop."

"Let's take care of that problem, first off. I'm George Norton, the vet hereabouts." He was working as he spoke, setting down the bag and opening it. He prepared a hypodermic and stepped forward, smoothly injecting the sedative into one of the bulging veins in Pleasure's neck. The stallion danced nervously, his shoulder shoving her once again. She clenched her teeth, enduring.

"He'll quiet down in a minute." The vet gave her a sharp glance as he peeled away the blood-soaked gauze she'd been holding to the wound. "No offense, but even with the blood, the horse looks in better shape than you do. Are you all right?"

"Concussion."

"Then for God's sake stop letting him bump you around like that," he said sharply. "Sit down somewhere before you fall down."

Even in the midst of everything that was going on, as the medics readied Joan for transport, Mac somehow heard the vet. All of a sudden he was there, looming behind her, reaching over her shoulder for Pleasure's bridle. "I'll hold him." The words sounded as if he were spitting them out one at a time, like bullets. "Sit down."

"I¡X" She'd started to say "I think I will," but she didn't have a chance to finish the sentence.

He assumed she was about to mount an argument, and barked out one word. "Sit!"

"I wasn't going to argue," she snapped back. What did he think she was, a dog? Sit, indeed. She felt more like lying down.

She decided to do just that. Pleasure was going to be all right; as soon as he quieted and let the vet do his work, the bleeding would stop. The torn muscle would have to be stitched, antibiotics administered, a bandage secured, but the horse would heal. Even though the truck and trailer were stolen, under the circumstances she couldn't imagine that there would be any problem with using them to transport Pleasure back to Solomon Green. Until the vet was finished and Pleasure was loaded in the trailer, she intended to stretch out on the truck seat.

Wearily she climbed into the cab. The keys were still in the ignition, so she started the engine and turned on the heater. She took off her coat, removed the Kevlar vest and placed it in the floorboards, then lay down on the seat and pulled the coat over her.

She almost cried with relief as the pain immediately began easing now that she was still. She closed her eyes, letting the tension drain out of her, along with the terror and absolute rage. She might have killed Joan. If the woman had shot Mac, she would have done it. Enveloped in that strange vacuum of despair and rage, she had been going for a head shot. She hadn't even thought about Pleasure, not in that awful moment when Joan turned on Mac. She was glad she hadn't had to pull the trigger, but she knew she would have. Knowing her own fiercely protective nature was one tiling, but this was the first time she had been faced with the true extent of it. The jolt of self-knowledge was searing.

Mac had already faced this; it was in his eyes. She had seen it in her father, in her brothers, the willingness to do what was necessary to protect those they loved and those who were weaker. It wasn't easy. It was gut-wrenching, and those who were willing to stand on the front lines paid for it in a thousand little ways she was only beginning to understand. She hadn't had to take that final, irrevocable step, but she knew how close it had been.

Her mother also had that willingness, and a couple of her sisters-in-law. Valiant Mary, intrepid Caroline, sweet Barrie. They had each, in different circumstances, faced death and seen the bottom line. They would understand the wrenching she felt. Well, maybe Caroline wouldn't. Caroline was so utterly straightforward, so focused, that Joe had once compared her to a guided missile.

The door by her head was wrenched open, and cold air poured in. "Maris! Wake up!" Mac barked, his voice right over her. His hand closed on her shoulder as if he intended to shake her.

"I am awake," she said, without opening her eyes. "The headache's better, now that I'm still. How much longer will it be before I can take Pleasure back?"

"You aren't taking him anywhere. You're going to a hospital to be checked out."

"We can't just leave him here.''

"I've arranged for him to be driven back."

She could hear the effort he was making to be calm; it was evident in his careful tone.

"Are things about wrapped up here?"

"Close enough that I can leave it with Dean and take you to a hospital."

He wouldn't let it go until a doctor had told him she was all right, Maris realized, and with a sigh she opened her eyes and sat up. She understood. If their situations were reversed, she would be doing the same thing.

"All right," she said, slipping on her coat. She turned off the ignition and picked up the Kevlar vest. "I'm ready."

Her willingness scared him. She saw his eyes darken, saw his jaw clench. "I'll be okay," she said softly, touching his hand. "I'm going because I know you're worried, and I don't want you to be."

His expression changed, something achingly tender moving in his eyes. Gently he scooped her into his arms and lifted her from the truck.

Dean had brought the Oldsmobile out of its hiding place. Mac carried her to it and deposited her on the front seat as carefully as if she were made of the most fragile crystal. He got in on the driver's side and started the car; the milling crowd in front of them parted, allowing them through. She saw Pleasure, standing quietly now. The bandage was in place, and the wild look was gone from his eyes. He was watching the activity with his characteristic friendly curiosity.

As they drove by, Dean lifted his hand to wave. "What about Dean?" Maris asked.

"He'll get transport. It isn't a problem."

She paused. "What about you? When do you leave? Your job here is finished, isn't it?" She didn't intend to let him get away, but she wasn't sure exactly how much he understood of their situation.

"It's finished." The words were clipped. The look he gave her was one of restrained violence. "I'll have to do the paperwork, tie up some loose ends. I may have to leave tonight, tomorrow at the latest, but I'll be back, damn it!"

"You don't sound happy about it," she observed.

"Happy? You expect me to be happy?" His jaw clenched. "You didn't obey orders. You stepped right out into the open, instead of staying hidden the way you were supposed to. That idiot woman could have killed you!"

"I was wearing the vest." She pointed that out rather mildly, she thought.

"The damn vest only improves the odds, it isn't a guarantee! The issue here is that you didn't follow the plan. You risked your life for that damn horse! I didn't want him hurt, either, but¡X"

"It wasn't for Pleasure," she said, interrupting him. "It was for you." She looked out the window at the snow-dusted pastures they were passing.

It was quiet in the car for a moment.

"Me?" He was using that careful tone again.

"You. I knew he'd go straight to you, that he'd catch my scent on your clothes. At the very least he would distract you, bump you with his head. It was even possible he'd give away your position."

Mac was silent, absorbing the shock of the realization that she was willing to risk her own life to protect his. He did the same thing on a fairly regular basis, but it was his job to take risks and protect others. But he'd never before felt the terror he'd known when he saw Maris draw Joan's attention, and he hoped he never felt it again.

"I love you," she said quietly.

Damn. Sighing inwardly, Mac kissed his bachelorhood goodbye. Her courage stunned him, humbled him. No other woman he'd known would have put herself on the line the way Maris had done, both physically and emotionally. She didn't play games, didn't jockey for control. She simply knew, and accepted; he'd seen it in the soft depths of her black eyes, an instinctive inner knowledge that few people ever achieved. If he didn't snatch her up, it would be the biggest mistake of his life.

Mac didn't believe in making mistakes.

"How long does it take to get married in Kentucky?" he asked abruptly. "If we can't get it done tomorrow, we'll go to Las Vegas¡Xassuming the doctor says you're all right."

He hadn't said he loved her, but she knew he did. She sat back, pleased with the situation. "I'm all right," she said, completely confident.

Chapter Ten

"Getting married in Las Vegas seems to be a tradition in my family," she mused the next day as her new husband ushered her into their suite. "Two of my brothers have done it."

"Two? How many brothers do you have?"

"Five. All of them older." She smiled sweetly at him over her shoulder as she walked to the window to look out at the blazing red sunset. It was odd how completely connected to him she felt, when they hadn't had tune to talk much, to share the details of their lives. Events had swept them along like gulls before a hurricane.

The emergency room doctor had pronounced her concussion mild and told her to take it easy for a day or so. He had agreed with her that, if she had been going to lapse into a coma, she would already have done so. Over the course of the day her memory had completely returned, filling in the blank spots, so she knew she was okay.

Reassured, Mac had driven her back to Solomon Green and turned his attention to the job, ruthlessly clearing up details and paperwork so he could concentrate on the business of getting married. While she slept, he and Dean had worked. He had arranged for time off, checked into the details of marriage in Kentucky, decided it couldn't be done fast enough to suit him and booked them on a flight to Las Vegas.

Ronald Stonicher had been arrested for conspiracy to commit fraud; he'd had no idea his wife and Randy Yu planned to kill Maris, too, and was shattered by what had happened. Joan had undergone surgery on her arm, and according to the surgeon the nerve and tissue damage was extensive; he expected her to regain some use of the arm, but she would never again be able to write with her right hand, or eat, do or anything else requiring precise movements. Randy was spilling his guts to the feds, implicating a lot of people in the horse world in the scheme to kill off horses for the insurance money. He hadn't been charged with killing the sixteen-year-old boy. Evidently he had some information on it, though, and was holding that in reserve to bargain for an even bigger break on the charges.

Maris had called her mother, briefly filled her in on what had happened and told her she was getting married. "Have fun, baby," Mary had told her daughter. "You know your father will want to walk you down the aisle, so we'll plan another wedding for Christmas. That gives me three weeks. There shouldn't be any problem."

Most people would have screamed in panic at the thought of organizing a wedding in three weeks. Mary saw no problem, and from experience Maris knew that while other people might have problems accomplishing what her mother wanted, in the end she would have her way,

Mac had phoned his family, which consisted of his mother, stepfather and two half-sisters. They would be joining the Mackenzies in Wyoming for the wedding at Christmas.

During the ceremony an hour before, Maris had learned that her husband's full name was William Alexander MacNeil. "A few people call me Will," he told her afterward, when she mentioned how difficult it was for her to think of him as Alex. "Most people call me Mac." Since in her mind she had already begun shortening MacNeil to Mac, that suited her fine.

"Five older brothers?" Mac asked now, walking up behind her and slipping his arm around her waist. He bent his head to nuzzle her pale hair.

"Five. Plus twelve nephews and one niece."

He chuckled. "Holidays must be lively."

"Riotous would be a better word. Wait until you see."

He turned her in his arms. "What I can't wait to see is my wife, in bed with me."

She clung to his neck as he lifted her and carried her into the bedroom. His mouth closed on hers as he lowered her to the bed, and the aching passion that had subsided but never vanished surged back at full force. He crushed her into the mattress in his need, but at the same time he tried not to be rough as he eased her out of her clothes.

She squirmed against him, pulling at his clothes, the roughness of the fabric against her nakedness driving her crazy. Mac drew back, staring down at her delicate body with open hunger. He was breathing hard, obviously struggling for control, his eyes hard and glittering with lust. Gently he shaped her breasts with his hand, each in turn, rubbing his thumb over her nipples and bringing them to aching hardness. "Hurry," she whispered, reaching for his belt. He laughed a little, though there was no humor in the sound; instead, it was raw with need. He shed his clothes, kicking them away, and rolled on top of her. A groan of deep satisfaction tore from her throat as his heavy weight settled on her, and she opened her legs to cradle him close. She wanted him with a ferocity that would brook no delay, wanted him as she had never wanted or needed anything else in her life.

Mac positioned himself, then framed her face with his hands and kissed her as he slowly pushed into her body. Her flesh resisted, and she gasped, surprised by the painful difficulty. She had expected all her riding to have eased the way, but the lack of a barrier had in no way prepared her for his size.

He lifted his mouth, staring down at her as realization dawned. He didn't say anything, didn't ask any questions, but something hot and primitive flared deep in his gaze. As gently as possible, he completed his penetration, and when he was fully home inside her he waited, waited until the tension left her and her body softened beneath him, around him. Then he began moving, a slight rocking at first that did no more than nudge him back and forth, but enough to make her gasp again, this time with sensual urgency, and lift herself to him.

He took exquisite care with her, restraining the power of his thrusts, maintaining a slow, easy pace even when anticipation clawed at him, making him groan aloud with each movement. She clung to him, desperately searching for her own ease, trying to take him as deep inside her as possible, because instinct led her to that satisfaction. She cried out, overwhelmed by the sheer glory of this dance and struggle they shared, by the generosity of his loving.

She surged upward, unable to bear it a moment longer, and everything inside her shattered with a burst of pleasure so intense that she lost herself, sucked down in the whirlpool of sensation, a mindless creature knowing only the feel of his body, and hers. And she felt him join her, convulsing, thrusting, hotly emptying.

He cradled her afterward, stroking her with shaking hands as if to reassure himself she was real, that both of them were still whole.

"How did this happen?" he asked roughly. He tilted her chin so he could look into her face, and she saw that the glitter in his eyes was wetness now, not lust. "How could I love you so much, so fast? What kind of magic did you use?"

Tears burned her own eyes. "I just loved you," she said, the words simple. "That's all. I just loved you."

The mountain was wreathed with snow, and her heart lifted when she saw it. "There," she said, pointing. "That's Mackenzie's Mountain."

Mac stared with interest at the massive bulk. He'd never known anyone before who owned an entire mountain, and he wondered about the people, and the way of life, that had nurtured this magical creature beside him. In the two days they had been married, he had come to wonder how he'd ever existed without her. Loving her was like becoming whole, when he hadn't even known anything was missing. She was so delicate and fairylike, with her pale hair streaming over her shoulders and her great black eyes that held all the knowledge of centuries of women, but he'd learned that she was strong, and that the heart of a lion beat beneath her lovely breasts.

His wife! The unexpected marvelousness of it kept waking him in the middle of the night to look at her, to wonder at how fast it had happened. Only three days before, she had awakened in his arms and politely said, "I'm sorry, but I don't remember your name," and the realization that she'd been hurt had jarred him down to his toes. Only three days, and yet now he couldn't imagine sleeping without her, or waking without seeing her sleepy urchin's grin as she curled into his arms. He had only five days off, so they had to make the best of it. Yesterday they had made a fast trip to San Antonio, where he had introduced her to his family. Both of his sisters had arrived with their broods of kids, three each, husbands in tow, but after the crowd Maris was accustomed to, she hadn't turned a hair at any of it. His mother had been absolutely thrilled that he'd married at last, thrilled at the prospect of a Christmas wedding on top of a snow-covered mountain in Wyoming. Having gotten the telephone number from Maris, her mother had already called his mother, and they'd evidently become fast friends, judging from the number of times his mother referred to what Mary had said.

Today they were in Wyoming, and Mac wondered why he was getting a tight feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Tell me about your brothers," he murmured. "All five of them." He knew something about older brothers, being one himself.

She smiled, her eyes going soft. "Well, let's see. My oldest brother, Joe, is a general in the air force¡Xon the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a matter of fact. His wife, Caroline, has doctoral degrees in physics and computer science, and they have five sons.

"My next-oldest brother, Mike, owns one of the largest cattle ranches in the state. He and Shea have two sons.

"Next is Josh. He was a navy fighter pilot, aircraft carrier, until a crash stiffened his knee and the navy grounded him. Now he's a civilian test pilot. His wife, Loren, is an orthopedic surgeon. They have three sons."

''Do any of your brothers have anything but sons?" Mac asked, fascinated by the recital, and growing more worried by the minute. He tried to focus on the mundane. He thought he remembered Maris saying she had a niece, but perhaps he'd been mistaken.

"Zane has a daughter." There was a different note in Maris's voice and he raised his eyebrows in inquiry, but she ignored him. "He and Barrie also have twin sons, two months old. Zane was a Navy SEAL. Barrie's an ambassador's daughter."

A SEAL. He wondered how much worse this could get.

"Then there's Chance. He and Zane might as well be twins. They're the same age, and I think their brains are linked. Chance was in Naval Intelligence. He isn't married." She deliberately didn't mention what Zane and Chance did now, because it seemed safer not to.

"I wonder," Mac murmured to himself as he steered their rented four-wheel-drive up the mountain, "why I expected you to have a normal family."

She lifted delicate brows at him. "You're a special agent with the FBI," she pointed out. "There isn't one of those standing on every street corner, you know."

"Yeah, but my family is normal.''

"Well, so is mine. We're just overachievers." Her smile turned into a grin, the urchin's grin that had laced itself around his heart and tightened the bonds every time he saw it. He stopped the Jeep in the middle of the road and reached for her. His kiss was hard, urgent with hunger. Her eyes were slumberous when he released her. "What was that for?" she murmured, her hand curling around his neck.

"Because I love you." He wanted to tell her one last time, in case he didn't survive the coming confrontation. She might think her family would welcome him with open arms, but he had a much better understanding of the male psyche and he knew better. He put the Jeep in gear again, and they resumed their drive up the snow-covered road.

When they topped the crest and saw the big ranch house sprawling in front of them, Maris said happily, "Oh, good, everyone's here," and Mac knew he was a dead man. Never mind that he'd married her before sleeping with her; he was an unknown quantity, and he was making love to their darling every night. She was the only daughter, the baby, for God's sake. He understood. If he lived, and he and Maris ever had a daughter, there was no way in hell he was going to let some horny teenage boy anywhere near his little girl.

He looked at the array of vehicles parked in front of the house, enough vehicles to form a good parade, and wondered if they would give chase if he turned around and headed back down the mountain.

Well, it had to be done. Resigned, he parked the Jeep and came around to open the door for Maris, clasping his hands around her narrow waist and lifting her to the ground. She took his hand and led him up the steps, all but running in her eagerness.

They stepped into warmth, into noise, into confusion. A very small person wearing red overalls suddenly exploded from the crowd, racing forward on chubby legs and shrieking, "Marwee, Marwee," at the top of her lungs. Maris laughed and dropped to her knees, holding out her arms in time to catch the tiny tornado as she launched herself forward. Mac looked down at the little girl, not much more than a baby, and fell in love. He lost his heart. It was that simple.

She was beautiful. She was perfect, from the silky black hair on her round little head to her crystal-blue eyes, dimpled cheeks, rosebud mouth and dainty, dimpled hands. She was so small she was like a doll, and his arms ached to hold her. Little kids and babies had never affected him like this before, and it shook him.

"This is Nick," Maris said, rising to her feet with her niece in her arms. "She's the one and only granddaughter."

Nick reached out a tiny hand and poked him in the chest, in a movement so exactly like Maris's that Mac couldn't help grinning. "Who dat?" the little angel asked.

"This is Mac," Maris said, and kissed the soft, chubby cheek. Nick solemnly regarded him for a moment, then stretched out her arms in the manner of someone who is absolutely sure of their welcome. Automatically he reached out and took her, sighing with pleasure as the little body nestled against his chest.

Mac became aware of a spreading silence in the room, of what looked like an entire football team of big men getting to their feet, menace in every movement, in the hard faces turned toward him.

Maris looked at them, her face radiant, and he saw her eyes widen with surprise at their militant stances.

He eyed the competition. His father-in-law had iron gray hair and the black eyes Maris had inherited, and looked as if he ate nails for breakfast. His brothers-in-law looked just as lethal. Expertly Mac assessed each one, trying to pick out the most dangerous one. They all looked like bad asses. The one with the graying temples and the laser blue eyes, that would be the general, and damn if he didn't look as if he went into combat every day. That one would be the rancher, whipcord lean, iron hard, a man who faced down Mother Nature every day. The test pilot...let's see, that would be the one standing with his feet apart in the instinctive cocky stance of someone who coolly gambled with death and never blinked an eye.

Then Mac's gaze met a pair of deadly, icy eyes. That one, he thought. That was the most dangerous one, the one with the quiet face and eyes like blue-gray frost. That one. He would bet a year's pay that was the SEAL. But the one who moved up to stand beside him looked just as lethal, despite the almost unearthly handsomeness of his face. That would be the one in naval intelligence.

He was in big trouble. Instinctively he moved, depositing Nick in Maris's arms and stepping in front of them both, shielding them with his body. Six pairs of fierce eyes noted the action.

Maris peeked around his shoulder, assessing the situation. "Moth-er! " she called urgently, stressing both syllables as she brought in reinforcements.

"Maris!" There was utter delight in the soft voice that came from what Mac assumed was the kitchen, the cry followed by light, fast footsteps. A small, delicate woman, no bigger than Maris and with the same exquisite, translucent skin, burst into the room. She was laughing as she grabbed her daughter, hugging her and doing the same to him, even though he stood rigidly, not daring to take his eyes off the threat looming in front of them like a wall.

"Mom," Maris said, directing her mother's attention across the room. "What's wrong with them?"

Mary took one look at her husband and sons and put her hands on her hips. "Stop that right now," she ordered. "I refuse to have this, do you hear?"

Her voice was sweetly Southern, as light as a breeze, but Wolf Mackenzie's black eyes flickered to her. "We just want to know a little about him," he said in a voice as deep and dark as thunder.

"Maris chose him," Mary replied firmly. "What else could you possibly need to know?''

"A lot," the one with the quiet, lethal eyes said. "This happened too fast."

"Zane Mackenzie!" a pretty redhead exclaimed, stepping out of the kitchen and eyeing him in amazement. "I can't believe you said that! We got married after knowing each other for one day!" She crossed the no-man's-land between the two battle lines, hugged Maris and turned to glare at her husband.

So he'd been right, Mac thought. That was the SEAL. It would look good on his tombstone: He Was Right.

"This is different," said the general, a perfect clone of Wolf Mackenzie except for his light blue eyes. He, too, looked as if nails were a regular part of his diet.

"Different, how?" asked a crisp voice, and a stylish blonde stepped out of the kitchen. She pinned a sharp green gaze on the six men. "You're all suffering from an overdose of testosterone. The main symptom is an inability to think." Marching forward, she aligned herself on Mac's other side. Something that was both heated and amused lit the general's eyes as he looked at his wife.

Another bruiser, the test pilot, said, "Maris is¡X"

"A grown woman," another feminine voice said, interrupting. A tall, curvy woman with chestnut hair and serene blue eyes took up a position beside the blonde. "Hi, I'm Loren," she said to Mac. "The one who just spoke is Josh, my husband, who usually exhibits better sense.''

"And I'm Shea, Mike's wife." Another reinforcement arrived. She was dark haired, and sweetly shy. She stood beside Loren, crossed her arms over her chest and calmly looked across at her husband.

The two sides looked at each other, the men glaring at their turncoat wives, the women lined up protectively beside Mac. He was a little stunned to find himself surrounded by this perfumed wall of femininity.

Caroline gave her husband glare for glare. "Every one of us was welcomed with open arms when we married into this family, and I expect you to extend the same courtesy to Maris's husband¡Xor else!"

Joe considered the challenge, his pale blue eyes glittering as he cocked his head. "Or else, what?" he asked, his deep voice silky and full of something that might have been anticipation.

Silence fell in the room, even the kids were quiet as they watched their parents. Mac looked at the six women ranged on either side of him, and his face softened into tender amusement. "It's okay," he said. "I understand."

"I'm glad you do, because I don't," Maris growled.

"It's a--"

"Don't say it's a man thing," Mary warned, interrupting, and he bit back the words.

"No, ma'am," he said meekly.

Wolf's dark face lightened, and his lips twitched. Those two words were very familiar to him.

Nick squirmed to get down, and Maris leaned over to deposit her on her feet. The little girl patted Mac on the knee and said, "Mac," with great satisfaction in her tone. She trotted across to her father, holding up her arms to be picked up. Zane leaned down and lifted her, settling her on one brawny arm. "Dat's Mac," she said, pointing. "I wike him."

Suddenly that hard, deadly face softened into a smile, and a big hand smoothed a silky tendril of hair away from her face. "I noticed," he said dryly. "He took one look at you and turned into your slave, just like the rest of us. That's what you really like, isn't it?"

Her little head bobbed up and down, very definitely. Zane chuckled as he shot an amused glance across the room at her mother. "I thought you would."

From somewhere down the hall came a baby's wail. "Cam's awake," Barrie said, and immediately abandoned Mac to go to her baby.

"How does she do that?" Chance asked of the room in general. "They're only two months old. How do you tell twins apart by their cries?"

The females, Nick included, had won. The tension in the room dissipated, smiles breaking out as Chance followed his sister-in-law down the hall, intent on finding out if she'd been right. Before he walked out he winked at Mac, in a moment of male understanding. The crisis had come and gone, because when it came down to it, the Mackenzie men were unwilling to distress their women. The women had liked Mac on sight, and that was that.

Barrie was back in only a moment, a squirming bundle in her arms. Chance followed her, expertly holding another one. "She was right," he announced, shaking his head in bewilderment.

Mac looked at the two tiny faces, finding them as identical as if they were mirror images. It was impossible to tell them apart even by looking at them; how in hell did Chance know if she was right or not?

"Cameron," Barrie said, indicating her burden and smiling at his skeptical look. "Chance is holding Zack." She also carried two small, milk-filled bottles.

"How do you know?" He shook his head, still looking for any distinguishing difference in the babies.

"Cameron's the most impatient, but Zack is more determined."

"You can tell that in their cries?''

"Well, of course," she said, as if anyone should be able to do the same.

Nick was climbing up on her father's shoulder, gripping his hair for leverage. "Wook, Unca Dance," she exclaimed, standing upright and releasing her safety hold.

Zane reached up and snagged his daughter off his shoulder. "Here, swap with me," he said, and he and Chance exchanged kids. Zane settled the baby in the crook of his arm and took one of the bottles from Barrie, expertly slipping the nipple into the rapacious little mouth.

Chance balanced Nick on his hands, firmly holding her feet while she straightened and crowed with delight at her achievement. "Chance," he coaxed. "My name is Chance. Chance."

Nick placed her little hands on each side of his face, leaning close to peer into his eyes and impress him with her seriousness. "No," she said with great finality. "Dance. Oo say it wong."

The room exploded with laughter at Chance's expression. He eyed the pint-size dictator in his hands, then shook his head and gave up. "Are you sure you want to marry into this family?" He directed the question at Mac.

Mac looked at Maris and winked. "Yeah," he said.

Zane was watching him while the baby took the bottle, his calm eyes measuring. "Maris said you're an FBI special agent," he said, and something in his tone must have alerted Maris.

"No," she said firmly, pushing Mac toward the kitchen. "You can't have him. Being in the FBI is enough. You absolutely can't have him."

Mac found himself borne along on the tide of women, because they all wanted to discuss the wedding, but before he left the room he looked back. His gaze met Zane's... and Zane Mackenzie smiled.

"Welcome to the family," he said.

Epilogue

"You so pwetty," Nick sighed, her big blue eyes rapt as she propped her elbows on Maris's knee and stared at her aunt. The entire process of preparing for a wedding had fascinated the little girl. She had intently scrutinized everything as the women of the household had painstakingly made hundreds of tiny net bags, filled them with bird seed and tied them with ribbons. She had stood on her tiptoes, clinging to the table's edge, and watched as Shea, who made wonderful cakes, practiced making dozens of roses from icing before decorating Maris's wedding cake. Before long the practice roses had all borne evidence of a tiny, investigative finger. Once Nick had determined they were edible, they'd gradually disappeared, and her little face wore telltale smears.

Maris's gown held her absolutely enthralled. The long skirt, the lace, the veil, everything about it entranced her. When Maris had tried it on for the final fitting, Nick had clasped her hands under her chin and with shining eyes had said, "Oo a pwincess!"

"You're pretty, too, darling," Maris said. Nick was her flower girl. Zane had muttered about inviting disaster, and since Nick wasn't quite three years old, Maris was prepared for anything, including an outright refusal to perform her role. At the rehearsal the night before, however, Nick had strutted down the aisle with her little basket of rose petals and proudly strewn them, aware that every eye was on her. Whether she would do so when watched by a huge crowd was another question, but she was undeniably adorable in her long, blush pink dress, with ribbons and flowers in her silky black hair.

"I know," Nick replied matter-of-factly, and left her post at Maris's knee to return to the mirror to admire herself. It was something she had done every five minutes since Barrie had dressed her.

Barrie and Caroline were the acknowledged fashion mavens of the Mackenzie family, and they had taken over the arrangement of Maris's hair and the application of her makeup. They were astute enough to keep things simple, rather than overwhelming Maris's dainty face and frame with big hair and layers of makeup. Barrie had finished her hair and retired to a rocking chair to nurse the twins before the ceremony started. She supplemented their feedings with a bottle, but breast milk kept them contented longer, and she didn't want to have to feed them again in the middle of the reception.

Mary had quickly realized that the Mackenzie house, as large as it was, simply couldn't hold the crowd that was invited to the wedding. Because Christmas was on a Wednesday, the church in Ruth had held its Christmas service on Sunday, freeing it for the ceremony. The nine-foot-tall Christmas tree still stood in the corner, its multitude of white lights twinkling. Holly and evergreen needles still decorated the windowsills, filling the church with a wonderful aroma. White lights outlined the arched doorway, the windows, the sanctuary and the steps leading up to it. Rows of white candles lent their mellow glow to the church. None of the overhead lights would be on, but the tree, the Christmas lights and the candles combined to give the setting a magical aura.

This was Christmas Eve, a time when most of the occupants of Ruth would normally have been at home either having their private celebrations or preparing for them the next day. This year they were attending a wedding. From the private room off the vestibule, Maris could hear the swell of noise as more and more people arrived.

Mary stood quietly, a sheen of tears in her slate blue eyes as she watched her daughter prepare for her wedding. It didn't matter that Maris and Mac were already married; this was the wedding that counted. This was her beloved daughter who looked so delicate and beautiful in her silvery white gown, a color that turned Maris's pale, ash brown hair to a darker shade of silver. She remembered the first time she had seen her daughter, only seconds old, so tiny and lovely and already staring around with big, solemn black eyes, her father's eyes. She remembered the tears that had sheened Wolf's own black eyes as he'd taken Maris in his arms and hugged the little scrap to his chest as if she were the most precious thing he'd ever seen.

There were thousands of other memories. Her first tooth, her first step, her first word¡Xpredictably, "horsie." Maris sitting on a pony for the first time, her eyes huge with delight while Wolf kept a protective arm around her. Maris, a little shadow dogging her father's footsteps just -as her older brothers had done. Mans in school, fiercely joining in any fight the boys had gotten into, her little fists flying as she rushed to their defense, utterly ignoring the fact that the boys were twice her size. Maris sobbing when her old pony had died, and her radiant joy when, the next Christmas, Wolf had given her her first "real" horse.

There had been Maris's first date, and Wolf's scowling, prowling nervousness until his baby was safely back under his roof. One of Mary's favorite memories was of Zane and Josh and Chance pacing along with their father; if Joe and Mike had been there, they would have been pacing, too. As it was, the poor boy who had been so brave as to take Maris out had been terrified when the four Mackenzie males met them on the front porch on their return and had never asked her out again. They had gotten better about it over the years, but Maris must have forgotten her first date or she wouldn't have been so surprised at their reaction to Mac when she'd brought him home. Men. Mary loved her men, but really, they could be so overbearing. Why, they liked Mac, once they'd gotten over their bristly protectiveness. If Maris didn't watch out, Zane would have Mac recruited into whatever it was he and Chance.

Zane. Mary stopped short in her thoughts, looking around the room. All three of his children were here, with Barrie. Usually he was tending to at least one of the babies, or riding herd on Nick. That meant Zane was free and unencumbered, and she was sure it wasn't by accident.

"Zane's free," she announced, because she thought Maris really ought to know.

Her daughter's head snapped up, and her lovely eyes caught fire. "I'll skin him alive," she said wrathfully. "I will not have Mac gone for months on end the way Chance is. I just got him, and I'm not letting him go."

Barrie looked startled; then she, too, realized the significance of having all three children with her. She shook her head in rueful acknowledgment of her husband's canniness. "It's too late to do anything about it now. He's had plenty of time to have a private talk with Mac, and you know Zane, he planned it perfectly."

Maris scowled, and Caroline drew back with the eye shadow brush in her hand. "I can't do this with your eyebrows all scrunched up," she admonished. Maris smoothed her expression, and Caroline went back to work. "I don't believe in letting hormone-driven men interfere in a woman's wedding. You can skin him alive tomorrow. Ambush him when he least expects it."

"Zane always expects everything," Barrie said, grinning. Then she looked at her daughter, who was twirling and dancing in front of the mirror, admiring herself. "Except Nick," she added. "He wasn't prepared for her."

"Was anyone?" Loren murmured, smiling fondly down at the little girl. Nick, hearing her name, stopped her pirouetting to favor them all with an angelic smile that didn't fool them for one second.

"Mac's besotted with her," Maris said. "He didn't turn a hair even when she polished his boots with the Magic Marker."

"An indication of true love if I've ever seen it," Caroline said dryly. She touched the mascara wand to Maris's already dark lashes, then stood back to admire her handiwork. "There! Mac would be crazy to leave you and go running around half-civilized countries where there's no sanitation and no shopping." Caroline's philosophy in life was to be comfortable, and she went to extraordinary lengths to accomplish it. She would gladly walk miles to find the perfect comfortable pair of shoes. It made perfect sense to her, since her work often required her to be on her feet for hours; how could she possibly concentrate if her toes were cramped?

"I don't think Mac would care about the shopping," Shea said. She picked Nick up and whirled around the room with the giggling little girl, humming a lively tune.

There was a knock on the door, and John poked his head inside. "It's time," he said. His pale blue gaze fell on Caroline. "Wow, Mom, you look great."

"Smart guy," she said approvingly. "I'll let you stay in my will."

He grinned and ducked out again. Maris stood, sucking in a deep breath. It was time. Never mind that they'd been married for three weeks already; this was a production, and practically the entire town was on band to witness it.

Shea set Nick on her feet and got the basket of rose petals from the top of the closet, where they'd put it to keep Nick from scattering the flowers around the room. They'd already picked up the velvety petals once, and once was enough.

Barrie laid Zack beside Cameron. Both babies were sleeping peacefully, their little bellies full. Right on time, one of Shea's teenaged nieces arrived to watch them while Barrie attended the wedding.

The music began, their cue to begin entering the sanctuary.

One by one they began filing out, escorted by the Mackenzie men to their reserved seats. Zane's big form filled the doorway. Maris said, "No," and he grinned as he held his hand out to Barrie.

"Just a minute." Barrie stooped in front of Nick, straightening the ribbons in her hair and at last placing the basket of flower petals in the eager, dimpled little hands. "Do the flowers just the way you did them last night, okay? Do you remember?"

Nick nodded. "I fwow dem aroun' on de fwoor."

"That's right, sweetheart." Having done all she could, Barrie stood and went to Zane, who slipped his arm around her waist and briefly hugged her close before they left to take their places.

Wolf came to the door, severely elegant in a black tuxedo. "It's time, honey," he said to Maris. His black eyes were tender as he wrapped his arms around her and rocked her back and forth, the way he had done all her life. Maris laid her head on her father's chest, almost overwhelmed by the sudden rush of love for him. She'd been so lucky in her parents!

"I was beginning to wonder if you'd ever forget about horses long enough to fall in love," he said, "but now that you have, I feel like we haven't had you long enough."

She chuckled against his chest. "That's exactly how I knew." She lifted her head, her eyes shining with both tears and laughter. "I kept forgetting about Sole Pleasure and thinking only about Mac. It had to be love."

He kissed her forehead. "In that case, I'll forgive him."

"Poppy!"

The imperious small voice came from the vicinity of his knee. They looked down. Nick was tugging on Wolf's pant leg. "We dotta huwwy. I dotta fwow fwowers."

As usual, her mangled English made him laugh. "All right, cupcake." He leaned down and took her free hand, to keep her from darting ahead of them and "fwowing fwowers" before they were ready.

He and Maris and Nick made their way into the vestibule, and Maris leaned down to kiss Nick's cheek. "Are you ready?" she asked.

Nick nodded, her slanted blue eyes wide and shining with excitement, and she clutched the flower basket with both hands.

"Here you go, then." Gently Maris urged Nick forward, into the center aisle. The church glowed with candlelight, and hundreds of smiling faces were turned toward them, it seemed.

Nick stepped out into the limelight like a Miss America taking her victory walk. She bestowed smiles to the left and the right, and she daintily reached into the basket for a rose petal. One. She held it out and let it drift downward. Then she reached for another. One by one she distributed the rose petals on the carpet with dainty precision, taking her time, even stooping once to adjust a petal that had fallen too close to another one.

"Oh, God." Beside her, Maris could feel Wolf shaking with laughter. "She's enjoying this too much. At this rate, you won't get to walk down the aisle until midnight."

People were turning and looking, and laughing at Nick's concentration on the task. Barrie buried her head in Zane's shoulder, lost in a helpless fit of giggling. Zane was grinning, and Chance was laughing out loud. Mac, standing at the altar, was beaming at the little imp who had so won his heart. The pianist, looking around, saw what was taking so long and gamely continued playing.

Tickled to be the center of attention, Nick began improvising. The next rose petal was tossed backward, over her shoulder. The minister choked, and his face turned red as he tried to hold back his guffaws.

She twirled on her tiptoes, flinging rose petals in a circle. Several flew out of the basket, and she frowned, stooping to pick them up and return them to the basket.

I can't laugh, Maris thought, feeling it bubbling inexorably upward. If laugh, I'll laugh until I cry, and it'll ruin my makeup. She put her hand over her mouth to hold the mirth inside, but it didn't work. Her chest constricted, her throat worked and suddenly laughter burst joyously out of control.

Nick stopped and turned to look, beaming at them, waiting for them to tell her what a good job she was doing.

"Fwow, I mean, throw them," Maris managed to say between whoops.

The little head lilted to one side. "Wike dis?" she asked, taking a handful of petals from the basket and flinging them upward.

At least it was a handful, and not just one. "Like that," Maris said in approval, hoping it would speed the procedure.

It did. Another handful followed the first one, and Nick's progress down the aisle picked up speed. At last she reached the end, and bestowed an absolutely radiant smile on Mac. "I fwowed dem all," she told him.

"You did it just right," he said, barely able to speak for laughing. Her mission accomplished, she strutted to the pew where Zane and Barrie sat, and held up her arms to be lifted to the seat.

Relieved, the pianist launched into the familiar strains of "Here Comes the Bride," and at last Wolf and Maris began their stately walk down the aisle. Everyone rose to their feet and turned to watch, smiling.

Because time had been so short, there were no Bridesmaids or groomsmen, no maid of honor or best man, so only Mac awaited Maris at the altar. He watched her approach, his hard face relaxed in a tender expression, his blue eyes still shining from his laughter. As soon as she stopped beside him, he gently took her hand in his, and behind them, they heard his mother give a teary, joyful little gasp.

Because Maris and Mac were already married, they had decided to skip the part about "who gives this woman." Wolf leaned down and kissed his daughter's cheek, hugged her tenderly, then shook hands with Mac and took a seat beside Mary.

"Dearly beloved," the minister began; then there was another gasp behind them. Recognizing Barrie's voice, Maris wasn't surprised when a little body slithered between her and Mac, taking a stance directly in front of them.

"I do it, too," Nick chirped, her little voice audible in every corner of the church.

Glancing over her shoulder, Maris saw Zane start to rise to retrieve his errant offspring. She shook her head, smiling. He winked and sank back into his seat.

So Nick stood pressed against their legs while the minister performed the service. They could feel her quivering with excitement, and Mac subtly gathered her closer to him so he would have a better chance of grabbing her if she started to do something startling, such as peek under the minister's cassock. She was already eyeing the garment with some curiosity. But she was content for the moment, completely taken with the ceremony, the candles, the twinkling Christmas tree, the beautiful clothes. When the minister said, "You may now kiss the bride," and Mac did so, Nick merely tilted her head back to watch.

"What's the best way to handle her when we leave?" Mac whispered against Maris's lips.

"Pick her up and hand her to Zane as we pass," she whispered back. "He'll be expecting it."

The pianist launched into the familiar stirring strains. Mac swooped Nick up with one arm, put the other around Maris, and they hurried up the aisle to the accompaniment of music, laughter, tears and a round of applause. As they passed the second pew, a tiny girl in a long dress was deftly passed from one pair of strong arms to another.

The reception was a long, glorious party. Maris danced endlessly with her husband, her father, all her brothers, several of her nephews, her brothers-in-law and an assortment of old friends. She danced with the sheriff, Clay Armstrong. She danced with Ambassador Lovejoy, Barrie's father. She danced with Shea's father and grandfather, with the ranchers and merchants and gas station attendants. Finally Mac claimed her again, holding her close and swaying to the music as he rested his cheek against hers.

"What did Zane say to you?" she demanded suddenly.

She felt him grin, though he didn't lift his head. "He said you'd know."

"Never mind that. What did he say?"

"You already know what he said."

"Then what did you say?"

"That I'm interested."

She growled. "I don't want you to spend months out of the country. I'm willing¡Xbarely¡Xto let the FBI use you on investigations, but I don't like it. I want you with me every night, not thousands of miles away."

"That's exactly what I told Zane. Remember, I don't have to do what Chance does." He held her closer, dropping his voice to an intimate murmur. "Has your period started yet?"

"No." She was only two days late¡Xbut two days was two days, and she was normally very regular. It was possible her system had been disrupted by the concussion and the stress of everything that had happened, so she wasn't making any announcements yet. "Would you mind if I am pregnant so soon?"

"Mind?" He kissed her ear. "When we might get our own Nick?" His shoulders quivered under her embrace. "I didn't think she was ever going to get rid of those damn flower petals."

"She's one of a kind, I hope." But she leaned against him, feeling her breasts, her entire body, tighten with desire. If she wasn't already pregnant, she likely would be soon, given how often he made love to her.

They danced in silence for a moment, then Mac said, "Pleasure should have arrived by now."

She had to blink back tears, because Mac had given her the most wonderful gift for Christmas. With Sole Pleasure's worth hugely reduced now that the racing world had been rocked with news of his very low sperm count, the syndication offers had evaporated. It was possible Pleasure could sire a foal, but it was such a small possibility as to be negligible. He still had worth as a racehorse, and Ronald Stonicher might have gotten more for him than Mac had offered, but huge legal expenses had been staring him in the eye, and he'd jumped at the chance to sell the horse. Maris had worried so about Pleasure's future that Mac had made the offer for him without telling her, because he didn't want her to be disappointed in case the deal fell through.

"Dad can hardly wait to ride him," she said. "He's said several times that he envied me because I got to work with Pleasure."

They fell silent, simply enjoying the feel of being in each other's arms. Their wedding hadn't been a stately, solemn affair¡XNick had seen to that¡Xbut it had been perfect. People had laughed and enjoyed themselves, and everyone for years would smile whenever they thought of Maris Mackenzie's wedding.

"It's time to throw the bouquet!"

The cry went up, and they swung around to see a crowd of giggling teenage girls gathering for the tradition, flipping back their hair, throwing sidelong glances at the older Mackenzie boys. There were more mature women there, too, giving Chance measuring looks.

"I thought you were supposed to throw it when we're ready to leave?" Mac said, amused.

"Evidently they can't wait."

She didn't mind hurrying things up a little; after that dance, she was ready to be alone with her husband.

Nick had been having the time of her short life, stuffing herself with cake and mints, and being whirled around the dance floor in the arms of her father, her grandfather and all her uncles and cousins. When she saw Maris get the bouquet that had so fascinated her earlier, with all the "pwetty" flowers and lace and ribbons, she squirmed away from Sam's grip on her hand and moved to where she had a better view of the situation, her little head cocked to the side as she intently watched.

Maris climbed on the dais, turned her back and threw the bouquet high over her shoulder. Cries of "Catch it! Catch it!" filled the reception hall.

Almost immediately there was a collective cry of alarm. Maris whirled. The crowd of girls and women was rushing forward, eyes lifted, intent on the bouquet sailing toward them. And directly in front of them, also concentrating on the bouquet as she darted forward, was a tiny figure in pale pink.

There was a surge of black-clad bodies moving forward as seventeen males, one MacNeil and sixteen Mackenzies, from six-year-old Benjy up to Wolf, all leapt for the little girl. Maris caught a glimpse of Zane's face, utterly white as he tried to reach his baby before she was trampled, and somehow she, too, was running, leaping from the dais, heedless of her dress.

Two crowds of people were moving toward each other at breakneck speed, with Nick caught in the middle. One of the teenage girls looked down, saw Nick and emitted a shrill scream of panic as she tried to stop, only to be shoved forward by the girl behind her.

Chance had been standing back, avoiding any contact with that wedding bouquet business, but as a result, his movements were less impeded. He reached Nick two steps ahead of Zane, scooping her up, enfolding her in his arms and rolling with her out of harm's way. Zane veered, putting himself between Chance and anyone who might stumble over him, and in another second there was practically a wall of boys and men protecting the two on the floor.

The bouquet hit Chance in the middle of the back.

Carefully he rolled over, and Nick's head popped out of the shield he'd made with his arms. "Wook!" she said, spying the bouquet. "Oo caught de fwowers, Unca Dance!"

Maris skidded to a stop beside them. Chance lay very still on the floor, with Nick on his chest. He glared up at Maris, his light, golden-hazel eyes narrow with suspicion. "You did that on purpose," he accused.

The MacNeils and the Mackenzies moved forward, smiles tugging at stern mouths. Maris crossed her arms. "There's no way I could have arranged this." She had to bite her lip to keep from laughing at his outraged expression.

"Hah. You've been doing spooky stuff all your life."

Nick leaned over and grasped one of the ribbons of the bouquet, pulling it toward her. Triumphantly she deposited it on Chance's chest. "Dere," she said with satisfaction, and patted it.

Zane rubbed the side of his nose, but he was less successful than Maris at hiding his grin. "You caught the bouquet," he said.

"I did not," Chance growled. "She hit me in the back with it!"

Mary walked up and stood beside Wolf, who automatically put his arm around her. Slowly a radiant smile spread across her face. "Why, Chance!" she exclaimed. "This means you're next."

"I¡Xam¡Xnot¡Xnext." He ground the words out, sitting up with Nick in his arms. Carefully he put her on her feet, then climbed to his own. "Trickery doesn't count. I don't have time for a wife. I like what I do, and a wife would just get in the way." He was backing away as he talked. "I'm not good husband material, anyway. I--"

A little hand tugged on his pant leg. He stopped and looked down.

Nick stretched on tiptoe, holding the bouquet up to him with both hands. "Don't fordet oor fwowers," she said, beaming.

***** The End *****

Mr. Perfect

Copyright © 2000 by Linda Howington

ISBN: 0-671-03406-5

Many thanks to Sgt. Henry Piechowski of the Warren, Michigan, Police Department, for patiently and cheerfully answering all of my questions. He took my phone calls, gave me his time, and did his best to make sure I got it right. Any errors are strictly mine.

Thanks, Sergeant.

Prologue

Denver, 1975

"This is ridiculous!" Clutching her purse so tightly her knuckles were white, the woman glared across the desk at the school principal. "He said he didn't touch the hamster, and my child doesn't lie. The very idea!"

J. Clarence Cosgrove had been principal of Ellington Middle School for six years, and a teacher for twenty years before that. He was accustomed to dealing with irate parents, but the tall, thin woman seated before him and the child sitting so sedately beside her, unnerved him. He hated to use the vernacular, but they were weird. Though he knew it was a wasted effort, he tried to reason with her. "There was a witness – "

"Mrs. Whitcomb put him up to saying that. Corin would never, never have hurt that hamster, would you, darling?"

"No, Mother." The voice was almost unearthly sweet, but the child's eyes were cold and unblinking as they stared at Mr. Cosgrove, as if weighing the denial's effect on him. "See, I told you so!" the woman cried triumphantly. Mr. Cosgrove tried again. "Mrs. Whitcomb – "

" – has disliked Corin from the first day of school. She's the one you need to be interrogating, not my child." The woman's lips were thin with fury. "I spoke with her two weeks ago about the filth she was putting in the children's heads, and told her that while I couldn't control what she told the other children, I absolutely would not have her speaking about" – she darted a glance at Corin – "s-e-x to my child. That's why she's done this."

"Mrs. Whitcomb has an excellent record as a teacher. She wouldn't – "

"She has! Don't tell me what that woman won't do when she obviously has! Why, I wouldn't put it beyond her to have killed the hamster herself!"

"The hamster was her personal pet, which she brought to school to teach the children about – "

"She could still have killed it. Good God, it was just a big rat," the woman said dismissively. "I don't understand what all the fuss is about even if Corin had killed it, which he didn't. He's being persecuted – persecuted – and I won't stand for it. Either you take care of that woman or I'll do it for you."

Mr. Cosgrove removed his glasses and wearily polished the lenses, just to give himself something to do while he tried to think of a way to neutralize this woman's poison before she ruined a good teacher's career. Reasoning with her was out; so far she hadn't let him complete a single sentence. He glanced at Corin; the child was still watching him, wearing an angelic expression totally at odds with those cold eyes.

"May I speak with you privately?" he asked the woman. She looked taken aback. "Why? If you think you can convince me my darling Corin – "

"Just for a moment," he interrupted, hiding his tiny spurt of relish at being the one doing the interrupting this time. From her expression, she didn't like it at all. "Please." He tacked that on, though he was almost beyond being polite. "Well, all right," she said reluctantly. "Corin, darling, go stand outside. Stay right by the door, where Mother can see you."

"Yes, Mother."

Mr. Cosgrove got up and firmly closed the door behind the child. She looked alarmed at this turn of events, at not being able to see her child, and half rose out of her chair. "Please," he said again. "Sit down."

"But Corin – "

" – will be all right." Another interruption scored on his side, he thought. He resumed his seat and picked up a pen, tapping it against his desk blotter as he tried to come up with a diplomatic way to broach his subject. There was no way diplomatic enough for this woman, he realized, and decided to jump right in. "Have you ever considered getting help for Corin? A good child psychologist – "

"Are you crazy?" she hissed, her face twisted with instant rage as she surged to her feet. "Corin doesn't need a psychologist! There's nothing wrong with him. The problem is with that bitch, not with my child. I should have known this meeting was a waste of time, that you'd take her side."

"I want what's best for Corin," he said, managing to keep his voice calm. "The hamster is just the latest incident, not the first one. There's been a pattern of disturbing behavior that goes beyond mischief – "

"The other children are jealous of him," she charged. "I know how the little bastards pick on him, and that bitch does nothing to stop it or protect him. He tells me everything. If you think I'll let him stay in this school and be hounded – "

"You're right," he said smoothly. On the Scoreboard her interruptions outnumbered his, but this was the important one. "Another school would probably be best, at this stage. Corin doesn't fit in here. I can recommend some good private schools – "

"Don't bother," she snapped as she strode to the door. "I can't imagine why you think I'd trust your recommendation." With that parting shot, she jerked open the door and grabbed Corin by the arm. "Come along, darling. You won't ever have to come back here again." "Yes, Mother."

Mr. Cosgrove moved to his window and watched as the pair got into an old two-door Pontiac, yellow with brown rust spots pocking the left front fender. He had solved his immediate problem, that of protecting Mrs. Whitcomb, but he was well aware that the bigger problem had just walked out of his office. God help the faculty at whatever school Corin landed in next. Maybe, somewhere down the line, someone would step in and get Corin into counseling before too much damage was done… unless it was already too late.

Out in the car, the woman drove in stiff, furious silence until they were out of sight of the school. She stopped at a stop sign and, without warning, slapped Corin so hard his head banged against the window. "You little bastard," she said through gritted teeth. "How dare you humiliate me that way! To be called into the principal's office and talked to as if I were some idiot. You know what you're going to get when we get home, don't you? Don't you?" She screamed the last two words at him.

"Yes, Mother." The child's face was expressionless, but his eyes gleamed with something that could almost be anticipation.

She gripped the steering wheel with both hands, as if trying to throttle it. "You'll be perfect if I have to beat it into you. Do you hear me? My child will be perfect."

"Yes, Mother," Corin said.

CHAPTER ONE

Warren, Michigan, 2000

Jaine Bright woke up in a bad mood.

Her neighbor, the blight of the neighborhood, had just roared home at three A.M. If his car had a muffler, it had long since ceased functioning. Unfortunately, her bedroom was on the same side of the house as his driveway; not even pulling the pillow over her head could block out the sound of that eight-cylinder Pontiac. He slammed the car door, turned on his kitchen porch light – which by some evil design was positioned to shine directly into her eyes if she was lying facing the window, which she was – let his screen door slam three times as he went in, came back out a few minutes later, then went back in, and evidently forgot about the porch light, because a few minutes later the light in the kitchen blinked out but that damn porch light stayed on.

If she had known about her neighbor before she bought this house, she never, never would have closed on the sale. In the two weeks she had lived here, he had single- handedly managed to destroy all the joy she'd felt on buying her first house.

He was a drunk. Why couldn't he be a happy drunk? she wondered sourly. No, he had to be a surly, nasty drunk, the kind who made her afraid to let the cat go outside when he was home. BooBoo wasn't much of a cat – he wasn't even hers – but her mom loved him, so Jaine didn't want anything to happen to him while she had temporary custody. She would never be able to face her mom again if her parents returned from their dream vacation, touring Europe for six weeks, to find BooBoo dead or missing. Her neighbor already had it in for poor BooBoo anyway, because he'd found paw prints on the windshield and hood of his car. From the way he had reacted, you'd have thought he drove a new Rolls rather than a ten-year-old Pontiac with a bumper crop of dings down both sides. Just her luck, she had been leaving for work at the same time he did; at least, she'd assumed at the time he'd been going to work. Now she thought he'd probably been going to buy more booze. If he worked at all, then he had really weird hours, because so far she hadn't been able to discern a pattern in his arrivals and departures. Anyway, she had tried to be nice on the day he spotted the paw prints; she'd even smiled at him, which, considering how he had snapped at her because her housewarming party had woken him up – at two in the afternoon! – had been a real effort for her. But he hadn't paid any attention to the peace-offering smile, instead erupting out of his car almost as soon as his butt hit the seat. "How about keeping your damn cat off my car, lady!" The smile froze on her face. Jaine hated wasting a smile, especially on an unshaven, bloodshot-eyed, foul-tempered jerk. Several blistering comments sprang to mind, but she bit them back. After all, she was new to the neighborhood, and she had already gotten off on the wrong foot with this guy. The last thing she wanted was a war between them. She decided to give diplomacy one more shot, though it obviously hadn't worked during the housewarming party. "I'm sorry," she said, keeping her voice even. "I'll try to keep an eye on him. I'm baby-sitting him for my parents, so he won't be here much longer." Just five more weeks. He had snarled some indistinct reply and slammed back into his car, then roared off, the powerful engine rumbling like thunder. Jaine cocked her head, listening. The Pontiac's body looked like hell, but that motor ran smooth as silk. There were a lot of horses under that hood. Diplomacy evidently didn't work on this guy. Now, here he was, waking up the entire neighborhood at three A.M. with that blasted car. The injustice of it, after he had snapped at her for waking him up in the middle of the afternoon, made her want to march over to his house and hold her finger against his doorbell until he was up and as wide awake as everyone else.

There was just one little problem. She was the teeniest bit afraid of him.

She didn't like it; Jaine wasn't accustomed to backing down from anyone, but this guy made her uneasy. She didn't even know his name, because the two times they'd met hadn't been the "hello, my name is so-and-so" type of encounters. All she knew was that he was a rough-looking character, and he didn't seem to hold down a regular job. At best, he was a drunk, and drunks could be mean and destructive. At worst, he was involved in illegal stuff, which added dangerous to the list.

He was a big, muscular guy, with dark hair cut so short he almost looked like a skinhead. Every time she had seen him, he looked as if he hadn't shaved in two or three days. Add that to the bloodshot eyes and bad temper, and she came up with drunk. The fact that he was big and muscular only added to her uneasiness. This had seemed like such a safe neighborhood, but she didn't feel safe with him as her next-door neighbor.

Grumbling to herself, she got out of bed and pulled down the window shade. She had learned over the years not to cover her windows, because an alarm clock might not wake her up, but sunlight always did. Dawn was better than any clanging noise at getting her out of bed. Since she had, several times, found her clock knocked onto the floor, she assumed it had roused her enough to attack it, but not enough to completely wake her.

Her system now was sheer curtains over a shade; the sheers kept anyone from seeing inside unless a light was on, and she raised the shade only after she'd turned out the light for the night. If she was late to work today, it would be her neighbor's fault, for forcing her to rely on the clock instead of the sun.

She stumbled over BooBoo on the way back to bed. The cat jumped up with a startled yowl, and Jaine damn near had a heart attack. "Jesus! BooBoo, you scared the hell out of me." She wasn't used to having a pet in the house, and she was always forgetting to watch where she stepped. Why on earth her mother had wanted her to baby-sit the cat, instead of Shelley or Dave, was beyond her. They both had lads who could play with BooBoo and keep him entertained. Since school was out for summer vacation, that meant someone was home at both their houses almost all day, every day.

But, nooo. Jaine had to keep BooBoo. Never mind that she was single, was at work five days a week, and wasn't used to having a pet. If she did have a pet, it wouldn't be one like BooBoo, anyway. He'd been in a feline pout ever since he'd been neutered, and he took out his frustration on the furniture. In just one week, he had frayed the sofa to the point that she would have to have it reupholstered. And BooBoo didn't like her. He liked her well enough when he was in his home, coming around to be petted, but he didn't like being in her home at all. Every time she tried to pet him now, he arched his back and hissed at her. To top it off, Shelley was mad at her because Mom had chosen Jaine to baby-sit her precious BooBoo. After all, Shelley was the oldest, and obviously more settled. It didn't make sense that Jaine had been chosen over her. Jaine agreed with her, but that didn't soothe the hurt feelings.

No, what really topped it off was that David, who was a year younger than Shelley, was mad at her too. Not because of BooBoo; David was allergic to cats. No, what had him steamed was that Dad had stored his precious car in her garage – which meant she couldn't park in her own garage, since it was a single, and it was damned inconvenient. She wished David had the blasted car. She wished Dad had left it in his own garage, but he'd been afraid to leave it unattended for six weeks. She understood that, but she didn't understand why she'd been chosen to baby-sit both cat and car. Shelley didn't understand the cat, David didn't understand the car, and Jaine didn't understand any of it.

So both her brother and sister were mad at her, BooBoo was systematically destroying her sofa, she was terrified something would happen to Dad's car while it was in her care, and her sot of a neighbor was making her life miserable.

God, why had she ever bought a house? If she had stayed in her apartment, none of this would be happening, because she hadn't had a garage and pets hadn't been allowed.

But she had fallen in love with the neighborhood, with its older, nineteen-forties-vintage houses and corresponding low prices. She had seen a good mix of people, from younger families with children to retired people whose families visited every Sunday. Some of the older folks actually sat on their porches during the cool of the evening, waving to passersby, and children played in their yards without worrying about drive-by shootings. She should have checked out all her neighbors, but at first blush this had seemed like a nice, safe area for a single woman to live, and she had been thrilled at finding a good, solid house at such a low price.

Because thinking about her neighbor was guaranteed to prevent her from going back to sleep, Jaine linked her hands behind her head and stared up at the dark ceiling as she thought about all the things she wanted to do with the house. The kitchen and bath both needed modernizing, which were big-ticket improvements and something she wasn't financially ready to tackle. But new paint and new shutters would go a long way toward improving the exterior, and she wanted to knock down the wall between the living and dining rooms, open it up so the dining room was more of an alcove than a separate room, with an arch that she could paint in one of those faux- stone paints so it looked like rock… She woke to the annoying beep of the alarm clock. At least the damn thing had woken her up this time, she thought as she rolled over to silence the alarm. The red numbers shining at her in the dim room made her blink, and look again. "Ah, hell," she groaned in disgust as she leaped out of bed. Six-fifty-eight; the alarm had been going off for almost an hour, which meant she was late. Way late.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it," she muttered as she jumped into the shower and, a minute later, jumped out again. As she brushed her teeth, she dashed into the kitchen and opened a can of food for BooBoo, who was already sitting beside his bowl glaring at her.

She spat into the sink and turned on the water to wash the toothpaste down the drain. "Of all days, why couldn't you have jumped on the bed when you got hungry? No, today you decided to wait, and now I don't have time to eat." BooBoo indicated that he didn't care whether she ate or not, so long as he had food.

She dashed back into the bathroom, did a hurried makeup job, slipped earrings into her earlobes and her watch onto her wrist, then grabbed the outfit she always grabbed when she was in a hurry because she didn't have to fuss with it: black trousers and a white silk shell, with a snazzy red jacket topping it off. She jammed her feet into her shoes, grabbed her purse, and was out the door. The first thing she saw was the little gray-haired lady who lived across the street, putting out her trash. It was trash-collection day.

"Hell, damn, shit, piss, and all those other words," Jaine muttered under her breath as she wheeled and rushed back into the house. "I'm trying to cut back on my swearing," she snapped at BooBoo as she pulled the trash bag out of the can and tied off the tapes, "but you and Mr. Congeniality are making it tough."

BooBoo turned his back on her.

She dashed out of the house again, remembered she hadn't locked the door, and dashed back, then dragged her big metal garbage can down to the curb and deposited the morning's offerings inside it, on top of the other two bags already in it. For once, she didn't try to be quiet; she hoped she woke up the inconsiderate jerk in the house next door.

She ran back to her car, a cherry red Dodge Viper that she loved, and just for good measure, when she started the engine, she revved it up a few times before putting it in reverse. The car shot backward and with an almighty clang collided with her garbage can. There was another clang as the can rolled into her next-door neighbor's can and knocked it over, sending the lid rolling down the street.

Jaine closed her eyes and tapped her head on the steering wheel – gently; she didn't want a concussion. Though maybe she should give herself a concussion; at least then she wouldn't have to worry about getting to work on time, which was now a physical impossibility. She didn't swear, though; the only words that came to mind were words she really didn't want to use.

She put the car in park and got out. What was needed now was control, not a temper tantrum. She righted her dented can and placed the spilled bags back inside it, then jammed the warped lid back on top. Next she returned her neighbor's can to its full and upright position, gathered the trash – he wasn't nearly as neat with his trash collection as she was, but what did you expect from a drunk – then walked down the street to collect the lid.

It lay tilted against the curb in front of the next house down. As she bent to pick it up, she heard a screen door slam behind her.

Well, she had gotten her wish: the inconsiderate jerk was awake.

"What in hell are you doing?" he barked. He looked scary, in his sweatpants and torn, dirty T-shirt, a black scowl on his unshaven face.

She turned and marched back to the worse-for-wear pair of cans and slammed the lid down on top of his can. "Picking up your garbage," she snapped.

His eyes were shooting fire. Actually they were just bloodshot, as usual, but the effect was the same. "Just what is it you have against letting me get some sleep? You're the noisiest damn woman I've ever seen – " The injustice of that made her forget she was a little afraid of him. Jaine stalked up to him, glad she was wearing shoes with two-inch heels that lifted her up so she was level with his… chin. Almost.

So what if he was big? She was mad, and mad beat big any day of the week.

"I'm noisy?" she said through gritted teeth. It was tough to get much volume when her jaw was locked, but she tried. "I'm noisy?" She jabbed her finger at him. She didn't want to actually touch him, because his T-shirt was torn and stained with… something. "I'm not the one who woke the whole neighborhood at three o'clock this morning with that piece of junk you call a car. Buy a muffler, for God's sake! I'm not the one who slammed his car door once, the screen door three times – what, did you forget your bottle and have to go back for it? – and left his porch light on so it shone into my bedroom and kept me from sleeping." He opened his mouth to blast her in return, but Jaine wasn't finished. "Furthermore, it's a hell of a lot more reasonable to expect people to be sleeping at three o'clock in the morning than it is at two in the afternoon, or" – she checked her watch – "seven-twenty-three in the morning." God, she was so late. "So back off, buddy! Go crawl back into your bottle. If you drink enough, you'll sleep through anything."

He opened his mouth again. Jaine forgot herself and actually poked him. Oh, yuk. Now she'd have to boil her finger. "I'll buy you a new can tomorrow, so just shut up. And if you do anything to hurt my mom's cat, I'll take you apart cell by cell. I'll mutilate your DNA so it can never reproduce, which would probably be a good thing for the world." She swept him with a blistering look that took in his ragged, dirty clothes and unshaven jaw. "Do you understand me?"

He nodded.

She took a deep breath, reaching for the rein on her temper. "Okay. All right, then. Damn it, you made me cuss; and I'm trying not to do that."

He gave her a strange look. "Yeah, you really need to watch that damn cussing."

She pushed her hair out of her face and tried to remember if she had brushed it this morning. "I'm late," she said. "I haven't had any sleep, any breakfast, or any coffee. I'd better leave before I hurt you."

He nodded. "That's a good idea. I'd hate to have to arrest you."

She stared at him, taken aback. "What?"

"I'm a cop," he said, then turned and walked back into his house.

Jaine stared after him, shocked. A cop?

"Well, fuck," she said.

CHAPTER TWO

Every Friday, Jaine and three friends from Hammerstead Technology, where they all worked, met after work at Ernie's, a local bar and grill, for a glass of wine, a meal they didn't have to prepare, and girl talk. After working all week in a male-dominated atmosphere, they really, really needed the girl talk.

Hammerstead was a satellite company supplying computer technology to the General Motors plants there in the Detroit area, and computers were still largely a male domain. The company was also fairly large, which meant the general atmosphere was a little weird, with its sometimes uneasy blending of computer geeks who didn't know the meaning of the words "appropriate for the office" and the usual corporate management types. If Jaine had worked in any of the research-and-development offices with the weirdos, no one would have noticed she was late to work that morning. Unfortunately, she was in charge of the payroll department, and her immediate supervising manager was a real clock watcher.

Because she had to make up the time she was late that morning, she was almost fifteen minutes late getting to Ernie's, but the other three had already gotten a table, thank God. Ernie's was already filling up, the way it always did on a weekend night, and she didn't like waiting in the bar for a table even when she was in a good mood, which she wasn't.

"What a day," she said as she dropped into the empty fourth chair. While she was thanking God, she'd add to the list her thanks that today was Friday. It had been a bitch, but it was the last bitch – at least until Monday. "Tell me about it," Marci muttered as she stubbed out a cigarette and promptly lit another one. "Brick's been on a tear lately. Is it possible for men to have PMS?"

"They don't need it," Jaine said, thinking of her jerk of a neighbor – a cop jerk. "They're born with testosterone poisoning."

"Oh, is that what's wrong?" Marci rolled her eyes. "I thought it was a full moon or something. You'll never guess – Kellman grabbed my ass today."

"Kellman?" the other three said in synchronized astonishment, their combined voices drawing the attention of everyone around them. They burst into laughter, because of all the possible offenders, he was the least likely.

Derek Kellman, age twenty-three, was the walking definition of nerd and geek. He was tall, gangly, and moved with all the grace of a drunken stork. His Adam's apple was so prominent in his thin neck that it looked as if he had swallowed a lemon that became permanently lodged in his throat. His red hair was a stranger to a brush; it would be matted flat in one place and standing out in spikes in another: a terminal case of bed head. But he was an absolute genius with computers, and in fact they were all sort of fond of him, in a protective, big-sisterly way. He was shy, awkward, and absolutely clueless about everything except computers. The office buzz was that he'd heard there were two sexes, but wasn't certain the rumor was true. Kellman was the last person anyone would suspect of being an ass grabber.

"No way," Luna said.

"You're making that up," T.J. accused.

Marci laughed her husky smoker's laugh and took a deep drag off her cigarette. "Swear to God, it's true. All I did was walk past him in the hallway. The next thing I know, he grabs me with both hands and just stands there, holding my ass like it's a basketball and he's about to start dribbling."

The mental image had them all giggling again. "What did you do?" Jaine asked.

"Well, nothing," Marci admitted. "The problem is, Bennett was watching, the jerk."

They groaned. Bennett Trotter thrived on picking on those he considered his subordinates, and poor Kellman was his favorite target. "What could I do?" Marci asked, shaking her head. "No way was I going to give the asshole more ammunition to use against the poor kid. So I patted Kellman on the cheek and said something flirty, along the lines of 'I didn't know you cared.' Kellman turned as red as his hair and dodged into the men's room."

"What did Bennett do?" Luna asked.

"He got that nasty smirk on his face and said that if he'd known I was so hard up I'd settle for Kellman, in the interest of charity he'd have offered his services a long time ago."

That set off an epidemic of eye-rolling. "In other words, he was his usual jerk self," Jaine said in disgust. There was political correctness, and then there was reality, and the reality was that people were people. Some of the guys they worked with at Hammerstead were nasty leeches, and no amount of sensitivity training was going to change that. Most of the guys were okay, though, and it all evened out because some of the women were barbed- wire bitches. Jaine had stopped looking for perfection, in the workplace or anywhere else. Luna thought she was too cynical, but then Luna was the youngest of their group and her rose-tinted glasses were still intact – a bit faded now, but intact.

On the surface, the four friends had nothing in common other than their place of work. Marci Dean, the head of accounting, was forty-one, the oldest of the group. She had been married and divorced three times and, since the last trip through the courtroom, preferred less formal arrangements. Her hair was bleached platinum blond, her smoking was her ginning to take its toll on her skin, and her clothes were always just a bit too tight. She liked beer, blue-collar men, rowdy sex, and admitted to a fondness for bowling. "I'm a man's dream," she'd say, laughing. "I have beer tastes on a champagne budget."

Marci's current live-in boyfriend was a guy named Brick, a big, muscle-bound oaf whom none of the other three liked. Privately, Jaine thought his name was appropriate, because he was as dense as a brick. He was ten years younger than Marci, worked only occasionally, and spent most of his time drinking her beer and watching her television. According to Marci, though, he liked sex just the way she did and that was reason enough to keep him around for a while.

Luna Scissum, the youngest, was twenty-four and the wunderkind of the sales division. She was tall, willowy, and had both the grace and dignity of a cat. Her perfect skin was the color of pale, creamy caramel, her voice was gentle and lyrical, and men dropped at her feet like flies. She was, in effect, the direct opposite of Marci. Marci was blatant; Luna was remote and ladylike. The only time anyone had ever seen Luna angry was when someone referred to her as 'African-American'.

"I'm an American," she had snapped, whirling on the offender. "I've never even been to Africa. I was born in California, my father was a major in the Marine Corps, and I'm not a hyphenated anything. I have a black heritage, but I also have a white one." She had held out one slim arm and studied the color of it. "Looks to me like I'm brown. We're all just different shades of brown, so don't try to set me apart."

The guy had stammered an apology, and Luna, being Luna, had given him a gracious smile and forgave him so gently that he ended up asking her out on a date. She was currently dating a running back for the Detroit Lions football team; unfortunately, she had fallen hard for Shamal King, while he was known for his wild partying with other women in every city where there was an NFL team. All too often Luna's dark hazel eyes held an unhappy expression, but she refused to give up on him. T.J. Yother worked in human resources, and she was the most traditional of the four. She was Jaine's age, thirty, and had been married to her high-school sweetheart for nine years. They lived in a nice suburban home with two cats, a parrot, and a cocker spaniel. The only obvious fly in T.J.'s ointment was that she wanted children and her husband, Galan, did not. Privately, Jaine thought T.J. could be a little more independent. Though Galan worked as a supervisor on the three-to-eleven shift at Chevrolet and wasn't at home anyway, T.J. was always checking her wristwatch, as though she had to be home at a certain time. From what Jaine gathered, Galan didn't approve of their Friday night get-together. All they did was meet at Ernie's and have dinner, and they were never out later than nine; it wasn't as if they were hitting all the bars and drinking until the wee hours.

Well, no one's life was perfect, Jaine thought. She hadn't done so great in the romance department herself. She'd been engaged three times but hadn't yet made it to the altar. After the third breakup, she had decided to give dating a rest for a while and concentrate on her career. Here she was, seven years later, still concentrating. She had a good credit record, a nice bank account, and had just bought her first very own house – not that she was enjoying the house as much as she had thought she would, what with that nasty-tempered, inconsiderate cretin next door. He might be a cop, but he still made her uneasy, because cop or not, he looked like the type who would burn down your house if you got on his bad side. She had been on his bad side from the day she moved in. "I had another episode with my neighbor this morning," she said, sighing as she propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her entwined fingers. "What did he do this time?" T.J. was sympathetic, because, as they all knew, Jaine was stuck, and bad neighbors could make your life a living hell. "I was in a hurry and backed into my trash can. You know how when you're running late you always do things that would never happen if you took your time? Everything went wrong this morning. Anyway, my can knocked his down, and the lid bounced into the street. You can imagine the noise. He came charging out the front door like a bear, yelling that I was the noisiest person he'd ever seen."

"You should have lacked his can over," Marci said. She wasn't a believer in turning the other cheek. "He'd have arrested me for disturbing the peace," Jaine said mournfully. "He's a cop."

"No way!" They all looked incredulous, but then, they had heard her describe him, and red eyes, beard stubble, and dirty clothes didn't sound very coplike.

"I guess cops are just as likely to be drunks as anyone else," T.J. said, a little hesitantly. "More so, I'd say." Jaine frowned, thinking back to the morning's encounter. "Come to think of it, I didn't smell anything on him. He looked like he'd been on a three-day drunk, but he didn't smell like it. Damn, I hate to think he can be that grouchy when he isn't hungover."

"Pay up," Marci said.

"Damn it!" Jaine said, exasperated with herself. She had made a deal with them that she'd pay each a quarter every time she cursed, figuring that would give her the incentive to quit.

"Double it," T.J. chortled, holding out her hand. Grumbling, but being careful not to swear, Jaine dug out fifty cents for each of them. She made certain she always had plenty of change these days.

"At least he's just a neighbor," Luna said soothingly. "You can avoid him."

"So far I'm not doing a very good job at it," Jaine admitted, scowling at the table. Then she straightened, determined to stop letting the jerk dominate her life and her thoughts the way he had for the past two weeks. "Enough about him. Anything interesting going on with you guys?" Luna bit her lip, and misery chased across her face. "I called Shamal last night, and a woman answered."

"Oh, damn." Marci leaned across the table to pat Luna's hand, and Jaine had a moment of envy at her friend's verbal freedom.

The waiter chose that moment to distribute menus that they didn't need, because they knew all the selections by heart. They gave him their orders, he collected the unopened menus, and when he left, they all leaned closer to the table.

"What are you going to do?" Jaine asked. She was an expert at breaking up, as well as at being dumped. Her second fiance, the bastard, had waited until the night before the wedding, the rehearsal night, to tell her he couldn't go through with it. Getting over that had taken a while – and she wasn't going to pay up for words she thought, but didn't say out loud. Was "bastard" a curse word, anyway? Was there an official list she could consult?

Luna shrugged. She was close to tears, and trying to be nonchalant. "We aren't engaged, or even seeing each other exclusively. I don't have any right to complain."

"No, but you can protect yourself and stop seeing him," T.J. said gently. "Is he worth this kind of pain?" Marci snorted. "No man is."

"Amen," Jaine said, still thinking of her three broken engagements.

Luna picked at her napkin, her long, slender fingers restless. "But when we're together, he… he acts as if he really cares. He's sweet, and loving, and so considerate –"

"They all are, until they get what they want." Marci stubbed out her third cigarette. "That's personal experience speaking, you understand. Have your fun with him, but don't expect him to change."

"Isn't that the truth," T.J. said ruefully. "They never change. They may put on an act for a while, but when they think they have you sewed up and tied down, they relax and Mr. Hyde shows his hairy face again."

Jaine laughed. "That sounds like something I would say."

"Except there weren't any curse words," Marci pointed out. T.J. waved a signal to cut the jokes. Luna looked even more miserable than before. "So I should either put up with being one of a herd, or stop seeing him?"

"Well… yeah."

"But it shouldn't be that way! If he cares for me, how can he be interested in all those other women?"

"Oh, that's easy," Jaine replied. "The one-eyed snake has no taste."

"Sweetheart," Marci said, her smoker's voice as kind as she could make it, "if you're looking for Mr. Perfect, you're going to spend your whole life being disappointed, because he doesn't exist. You have to get the best deal you can, but there will always be problems." "I know he isn't perfect, but – "

"But you want him to be," T.J. finished.

Jaine shook her head. "Isn't going to happen," she announced. "The perfect man is pure science fiction. Not that we're perfect, either," she added, "but most women do at least try. Men don't try. That's why I gave up on them. Relationships just don't work out for me." She paused, then said thoughtfully, "I wouldn't mind having a sex slave, though."

The other three burst out laughing, even Luna. "I could get into that," Marci said. "I wonder where I can get one?"

"Try Sexslaves-R-Us," T.J. suggested, and they dissolved into laughter again.

"There's probably a Web site," Luna said, choking a little. "Of course there is." Jaine was totally deadpan. "It's on my Favorites list: www.sexslaves.com."

"Just type in your requirements and you can rent Mr. Perfect by the hour or the day." T.J. waved her glass of beer, carried away with enthusiasm.

"A day? Get real." Jaine hooted. "An hour is asking for a miracle."

"Besides, there is no Mr. Perfect, remember?" Marci said. "Not a real one, no, but a sex slave would have to pretend to be exactly what you wanted, wouldn't he?" Marci was never without her soft leather briefcase. She opened it and dug out a pad of paper and a pen, slapping them down on the table. "He most certainly would. Let's see, what would Mr. Perfect be like?"

"He'd have to do the dishes half the time without being asked," T.J. said, slapping her hand down on the table and drawing curious looks their way.

When they managed to stop laughing long enough to be coherent, Marci scribbled on her pad. "Okay, number one: Do the dishes."

"No, hey, doing the dishes can't be number one," Jaine protested. "We have more serious issues to address first." "Yeah," Luna said. "Seriously. What do we think a perfect man would be like? I've never thought about it in those terms. Maybe it would help if I had it clear in my mind what I like in a man."

They all paused. "The perfect man? Seriously?" Jaine wrinkled her nose.

"Seriously."

"This is going to take some thinking," Marci pronounced. "Not for me," T.J. said, the laughter fading from her face. "The most important thing is that he wants the same things out of life that you do."

They lapsed into a little pond of silence. The attention their laughter had gotten from the diners at the surrounding tables moved on to more promising targets.

"Wants the same things out of life," Marci repeated as she wrote it down. "That's number one? Are we agreed?" "That's important," Jaine said. "But I'm not sure it's number one."

"Then what's number one for you?"

"Faithfulness." She thought of her second fiance, the bastard. "Life's too short to waste it on someone you can't trust. You should be able to depend on the man you love not to lie to you or cheat on you. If you have that as a base, you can work on the other stuff."

"That's number one for me," Luna said quietly. T.J. thought about it. "Okay," she finally said. "If Galan wasn't faithful, I wouldn't want to have a baby with him."

"I'll go along with that," Marci said. "I can't stand a two- timer. Number one: He's faithful. Doesn't cheat or lie." They all nodded.

"What else?" She sat with the pen poised over the pad. "He should be nice," T.J. offered.

"Nice?" Marci looked incredulous.

"Yes, nice. Who wants to spend her life with a jerk?"

"Or next door to one?" Jaine muttered. She nodded in agreement. "Nice is good. It doesn't sound exciting, but think about it. I think Mr. Perfect would be kind to kids and animals, help old ladies across the street, not insult you when your opinion is different from his. Being nice is so important it's close to being number one."

Luna nodded.

"Okay," Marci said. "Hell, you've even convinced me. I don't guess I've ever known a nice guy. Number two: Nice." She wrote it down. "Number three? I have my own idea on this one. I want a guy who's dependable. If he says he's going to do something, he should do it. If he's supposed to meet me somewhere at seven, he should be there at seven, not come strolling in at nine-thirty or maybe not at all. Is there a vote on this one?" They all four raised their hands in an aye vote, and "Dependable" went down in the number three slot. "Number four?"

"The obvious," Jaine said. "A steady job."

Marci winced. "Ouch. That one hurt." Brick was currently sitting on his butt instead of working.

"A steady job is part of being dependable," T.J. pointed out. "And I agree, it's important. Holding down a steady job shows maturity and a sense of responsibility."

"Steady job," Marci said as she wrote.

"He should have a sense of humor," Luna said. "Something more than an appreciation for The Three Stooges?" Jaine asked.

They began snickering. "What is it with men and The Three Stooges?" T.J. asked, rolling her eyes. "And bodily function jokes! Put that at number one, Marci – no toilet jokes!"

"Number five: Sense of humor." Marci chuckled as she wrote. "In the interest of fairness, I don't think we can dictate what form the humor takes."

"Sure we can," Jaine corrected. "He's going to be our sex slave, remember?"

"Number six." Marci called them to order by tapping her pen on the rim of her glass. "Let's get back to business, ladies. What's number six?"

They all looked at each other and shrugged. "Money's nice," T.J. finally offered. "It isn't a requirement, not in real life, but this is fantasy, right? The perfect man should have money."

"Filthy rich or comfortable?"

That called for more thought.

"I like filthy rich, myself," Marci said.

"But he would want to call all the shots if he was filthy rich. He'd be used to it."

"No way is that going to happen. Okay, money is nice, but not too much money. Comfortable. Mr. Perfect is financially comfortable."

Four hands went up, and "Money" was written in beside the number six.

"Since this is fantasy," Jaine said, "he should be good- looking. Not drop-dead gorgeous, because that could be a problem. Luna's the only one of us pretty enough to hold her own with a handsome guy."

"I'm not doing so good at it, am I?" Luna replied with a tinge of bitterness. "But, yeah, for Mr. Perfect to be perfect, you should enjoy looking at him."

"Hear, hear. Number seven is: Good to look at." When she had finished writing, Marci looked up with a grin. "I'm going to be the one to say what we've all been thinking. He should be great in bed. Not just good; he should be great. He should be able to make my toes curl and my eyes roll back in my head. He should have the stamina of a Kentucky Derby winner and the enthusiasm of a sixteen- year-old."

They were still rolling with laughter when the waiter plunked their orders down on the table. "What's so funny?" he asked.

"You wouldn't understand," T.J. managed to gasp. "I get it," he said wisely. "You're talking about men." "Nope, we're talking science fiction," Jaine said, which sent them off again. The people at the other tables were staring at them again, trying to overhear what was so funny.

The waiter left. Marci leaned over the table. "And while I'm at it, I want my Mr. Perfect to have a ten-incher!"

"Oh, my!" T.J. pretended to swoon, fanning herself. "What I couldn't do with ten inches – or rather, what I could do with ten inches!"

Jaine was laughing so hard she had to hold her sides. Keeping her voice down was an effort, and her words shook with hilarity. "C'mon! Anything over eight inches is strictly for show-and-tell. It's there, but you can't use it. It might look good in a locker room, but let's face it – those extra two inches are leftovers."

"Leftovers," Luna gasped, holding her stomach and shrieking with laughter. "Let's hear it for l-leftovers!"

"Oh, boy." Marci wiped her eyes as she scribbled rapidly. "Now we're cooking. What else does Mr. Perfect have?" T.J. weakly waved her hand. "Me," she offered between giggles. "He can have me."

"If we don't trample you getting to him," Jaine said, and raised her glass. The other three lifted theirs, and they touched rims with ringing clinks. "To Mr. Perfect, wherever he is!"

CHAPTER THREE

Saturday morning dawned bright and early – way too bright, and way the hell too early. BooBoo woke Jaine at six A.M. by yowling in her ear. "Go away," she mumbled, pulling the pillow over her head.

BooBoo yowled again, and batted the pillow. She got the message: either get up, or he was going to unsheathe his claws. She pushed the pillow aside and sat up, glaring at him. "You're evil, y'know that? You couldn't do this yesterday morning, could you? No, you have to wait until my day off, when I don't have to get up early." He looked unimpressed with her outrage. That was the thing about cats; even the scruffiest one was convinced of its innate superiority. She scratched him behind his ears and a low rumble shivered through his entire body. His slanted yellow eyes closed in bliss. "You just wait," she told him. "I'm going to get you addicted to this scratching stuff, then I'm going to stop doing it. You're going to go cold turkey, pal."

He jumped down from the bed and padded to the open bedroom door, pausing to look back as if checking to make certain she was getting up. Jaine yawned and threw back the covers. At least she hadn't been disturbed by her neighbor's noisy car during the night, plus she had pulled down the window shade to keep out the morning light, so she had slept soundly until BooBoo's wake-up call. She raised the shade and peeked through the sheer curtains at the driveway running beside hers. The battered brown Pontiac was there. That meant she had either been exhausted and slept like the dead, or he'd gotten a new muffler on the thing. She thought the exhausted-and-dead part was more likely than him getting a new muffler. BooBoo evidently thought she was wasting time, because he gave a warning meow. Sighing, she pushed her hair out of her face and stumbled to the kitchen – stumbled being the operative word, because BooBoo helped her along by winding around her ankles as she walked. She desperately needed coffee, but knew from experience that BooBoo wouldn't leave her alone until he was fed. She opened a can of food, dumped it on a saucer, and set it on the floor. While he was occupied, she put on a pot of coffee, then headed for the shower.

Stripping off her summer sleepwear of T-shirt and panties – during winter she added socks to the ensemble – she stepped into a nice warm shower and let it pummel her awake. Some people were larks; some were owls; Jaine was neither. She didn't function well until after a shower and a cup of coffee, and she liked to be in bed by ten at the latest. BooBoo was upsetting the natural order of things with his demands to be fed before anything else was done. How could her mom have done this to her? "Just four weeks and six days more," she muttered to herself. Who would have thought that a cat that was normally so loving would turn into such a tyrant when he wasn't in his regular environment?

After a long shower and two cups of coffee, her synapses started connecting and she began remembering all the things she needed to do. Buy the jerk next door a new trash can – check. Buy groceries – check. Do laundry – check. Mow the lawn – check.

She felt a little excited at the last item. She had grass to cut, her very own grass! She had lived in apartments since leaving home, none of which had come with lawns. There were usually some tiny patches of grass between the sidewalk and the building, but maintenance always took care of mowing them. Hell – heck, they were so tiny the job could have been done with scissors.

But her new home came with its very own lawn. In anticipation of this moment, she had invested in a brand- new lawn mower, self-propelled, state-of-the-art, guaranteed to make her brother, David, turn green with envy. He'd have to buy a riding mower to one-up her on this, and since his lawn wasn't any bigger than hers, a riding mower would be an expensive sop to his ego. Jaine figured his wife, Valerie, would step in before he did anything that foolish.

Today, she would have her inaugural grass-cutting. She could barely wait to feel the power of that red monster pulsing under her hands as it decapitated all those blades of grass. She had always been a sucker for red machinery.

First things first, though. She had to make a run to Wal- Mart and buy a new trash can for the jerk. A promise was a promise, and Jaine always tried to keep her word. A quick bowl of cereal later, she pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, stuck her feet in a pair of sandals, and was on her way.

Who knew a metal trash can would be so hard to find? Wal-Mart had only the plastic kind in stock. She invested in one for herself, but didn't feel she had the right to change her neighbor's type of trash can. From there she drove to a home-and-garden supply store, but struck out there, too. If she had bought her own metal can she would have known where to find another one, but it had been a housewarming present from her mother – that was Mom, Queen of the Practical Gift.

By the time she finally located a large metal trash can, at a hardware store – well, duh- – it was nine o'clock and the temperature was already edging out of warm into uncomfortable. If she didn't get the grass mowed soon, she would have to wait until sundown for the heat to abate. Deciding that grocery shopping could wait, she wedged the can into her minuscule backseat and headed south on Van Dyke until she reached Ten Mile Road, then turned right. Minutes later she turned onto her street and smiled at the neat, older houses nestled under their mature shade trees.

A few of the houses had tricycles and bicycles on the front lawns. These older neighborhoods were seeing an influx of younger couples as they discovered the reasonable price of the aging houses. Instead of disintegrating, the houses were receiving face-lifts and remodels; in a few years, the price of real estate would shoot up again, but for now this area was just right for people just starting out. As she got out of the car, the neighbor on the other side of her house walked over to the waist-high white picket fence separating the properties and waved. "Good morning!" Mrs. Kulavich called.

"Good morning," Jaine replied. She had met the pleasant old couple the day she moved in, and Mrs. Kulavich had brought her a nice thick pot of stew the next day, with fragrant homemade rolls. If only the jerk on the other side could have been more like the Kulavichs, Jaine would have been in seventh heaven, though she couldn't even begin to picture him bringing her homemade rolls. She walked over to the fence for a neighborly chat. "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" Thank God for weather, because the world would be hard up for a conversational gambit without it.

"Oh, my, it's going to be a scorcher." Mrs. Kulavich beamed at her and brandished a trowel in one gloved hand. "I have to do my gardening early, before it gets too hot."

"I had the same idea about mowing my lawn this morning." Others were of the same mind, she noticed. Now that she was paying attention, she could hear the roar of a lawn mower three doors up from Mrs. Kulavich and another across the street.

"Smart girl. Take care not to get too hot; my George always wets a towel and puts it on the back of his neck when he mows, though our grandsons help him with the mowing and he doesn't do it as often as he used to." She winked. "I think he cranks up the old mower now just because he's in the mood to do something manly." Jaine smiled and started to excuse herself, but something occurred to her and she turned back to the old lady. "Mrs. Kulavich, do you know the man who lives on the other side of me?" What if the jerk had lied to her? What if he wasn't really a cop? She could just see him having a good laugh at her expense, while she tiptoed around and tried to be nice to him.

"Sam? My, yes, I've known him all his life. His grandparents used to live there, you know. Lovely people. I was so glad when Sam moved in after his grandmother finally passed last year. I feel much safer having a policeman so close by, don't you?"

Well, that shot that theory in the ass. Jaine managed a smile. "Yes, of course." She started to say something about the strange hours he kept, but saw the gleam in Mrs. Kulavich's bright blue eyes and bit back the words. The last thing she needed was for her elderly neighbor to think she had any interest in the jerk and maybe tell him, since Mrs. Kulavich was obviously on good terms with him. She took care of that by adding, "I thought he might be a drug dealer or something."

Mrs. Kulavich looked scandalized. "Sam, a drug dealer? Oh, my. No, he would never do anything like that."

"That's a relief." Jaine smiled again. "I suppose I'd better start mowing before it gets much hotter."

"Be sure to drink plenty of water," Mrs. Kulavich called after her.

"I will."

Well, drat, Jane thought as she wrestled the trash can out of her backseat. The jerk was a cop; he hadn't lied. There went her dream of seeing him hauled away in handcuffs. She deposited the can by his back porch, then released the plastic can she had bought for herself from the trunk. If the can hadn't been plastic, she never could have gotten it in there, but plastic compressed. When she opened the trunk, it sprang at her like something alive. She put the can behind her small kitchen stoop, neatly out of sight from the street, then went inside and quickly changed into shorts and a halter top. That was what suburban ladies wore to mow their lawns, wasn't it? Then she remembered her older neighbors, and changed the halter top for a T- shirt; she didn't want to give some old gent a heart attack. She felt a thrill of anticipation as she unlocked the padlock on the garage doors and slipped inside, fumbling until she reached the switch that turned on the single overhead light. Her dad's pride and joy sat there, completely covered by a custom-made canvas tarp, lined with felt so it wouldn't scratch the paint. Damn, she wished he had left it at David's. The car wasn't as much trouble as BooBoo, but she worried about it a lot more.

The deciding factor in leaving it at her house, she thought, was that her garage still had the old-fashioned double doors rather than a modern garage door that slid up. Her dad worried about the car being seen from the street; she could get into her garage without opening the doors more than the twelve inches required for her to slip through, while everything in David's double garage was visible every time he raised his door. First chance she got, she was putting in an automatic garage door.

She had covered her new lawn mower with a sheet so it wouldn't get dusty. She removed the sheet and stroked her hand over the cool metal. Maybe her low-tech garage wasn't the deciding factor in her baby-sitting the car; maybe it was because she was the only one of her dad's children who shared his enthusiasm for cars. She was the one who had hung over the fender of their family sedan, staring into the mysterious mechanical bowels as her dad changed the oil and spark plugs. By the time she was ten, she had been helping him. By the time she was twelve, she had taken over the chore. For a while she had considered going into automotive mechanical engineering, but the training took years and she wasn't really that ambitious. All she wanted was a job that paid well and that she didn't hate, and she was as good with numbers as she was with motors. She enjoyed cars; she didn't want to turn them into a job.

She wheeled her lawn mower past her dad's car, taking care not to touch it. The canvas tarp protected it from the ground up, but she didn't take any chances where that car was concerned. Opening one of the garage doors only enough to let her get the lawn mower out, she ushered her new baby out into the sunlight. The red paint gleamed; the chrome handlebars glistened. Oh, it was pretty. At the last minute, she remembered something about the mowing ritual, and moved her car to the street; one had to be careful about accidentally slinging a rock that could break a window or chip a paint job. She looked at the jerk's car and shrugged; he might notice BooBoo's paw prints, but he'd never notice another dent in that thing. With a happy smile, she fired up the little motor. The thing about cutting grass, she discovered, was that you had an instant sense of achievement. You could see exactly where you had been and what you had accomplished. Her dad and David had always taken care of that chore when she was growing up, much to her relief, because mowing the lawn had looked boring. Only as she had grown older had she seen the lure of having your own grass, and now she felt as if she had finally, at the age of thirty, stepped into full adulthood. She was a home owner. She mowed her lawn. Cool.

Something tapped her on the shoulder.

She shrieked and released the lawn mower handles, jumping to one side and whirling to face her attacker. The mower stopped in its tracks.

The jerk stood there, bloodshot eyes, snarl on his face, dirty clothes: his usual presentation. He reached over and slid the lever on the mower to the off position, and the efficient little engine growled to a stop.

Silence.

For about half a second.

"What in hell did you do that for?" she roared, her face turning red with temper as she stepped closer, unconsciously balling her right hand into a fist. "I thought you were trying to quit cussing," he taunted. "You'd drive a saint to cussing!"

"That let's you out, doesn't it?"

"You're damn right!"

He eyed her right hand. "Are you going to use that, or are you going to be reasonable?"

"What –?" She glanced down and saw that her arm was half-cocked, her fist already drawn back. With great effort she uncurled her fingers. They immediately assumed the fight position again. She really, really wanted to slug him, and she got even angrier because she couldn't. "Reasonable?" she yelled, stepping even closer. "You want me to be reasonable? You're the one who scared the hell out of me and turned off my mower!"

"I'm trying to sleep," he said, enunciating the words with clear pit stops between each one. "Is it asking too much for a little consideration?"

She gaped at him. "You act as if I'm out here mowing at dawn. It's almost ten o'clock! And I'm not the only one who's committing the high crime of cutting grass. Listen," she commanded, as the muted roar of neighborhood mowers hummed up and down the street.

"They aren't mowing right outside my bedroom window!"

"So get in bed at a decent hour. It isn't my fault you stay up most of the night!"

His face was getting as red as hers. "I'm on a task force, lady! Irregular hours are part of the job. I sleep when I can, which, since you moved in, hasn't been very damn often!" She threw up her hands. "All right! Fine! I'll finish the job tonight, when it cools down." She made a shooing motion. "Just stagger on back to bed. I'll go inside and sit for the next eleven hours. Or will that disturb your beauty rest, too?" she inquired sweetly.

"Not unless you have firecrackers in your ass," he snapped, and stalked back into his house.

There was probably a law against throwing rocks at someone's house, she thought. Fuming, she wheeled her lawn mower back into the garage, carefully padlocked the doors, then retrieved her car from the curb. She'd like to show him what she could do with a few firecrackers, and she sure wouldn't be sitting on them.

She stomped inside and glared at BooBoo, who ignored her while he washed his paws. "A task force," she growled. "I'm not unreasonable. All he had to do was explain, in a calm voice, and I'd have been glad to put off mowing until later. But woo, he'd rather make an ass of himself."

BooBoo looked at her.

"Ass isn't a swear word," she said defensively. "Besides, it isn't my fault. I'll let you in on a secret about our neighbor, BooBoo: Mr. Perfect, he's not!"

CHAPTER FOUR

Jaine managed to get through the weekend without another confrontation with her jerk neighbor and was at work fifteen minutes early in an effort to atone for her Friday lateness, even though she had worked overtime on Friday to make up for it. As she stopped at the gate, the watchman leaned out and eyed the Viper with disapproval. "When're you going to get rid of the piece of junk and buy a Chevrolet?"

She heard it almost every day. This was what happened when you worked in the Detroit area in anything remotely connected with the automotive industry. You had to show brand loyalty to whichever of the Big Three directly or indirectly employed you. "When I can afford it," she replied, as she always did. Never mind that the Viper had cost the earth, even though it was used and had over fifty thousand miles on it when she bought it. "I just bought a house, you know. If my dad hadn't given this to me, I wouldn't be driving it."

That last was a direct lie, but it tended to get people off her back for a while. Thank God no one here knew who her father was, or they would have known he was a Ford man through and through. He had been insulted when she bought the Viper and never failed to make a few derogatory remarks about it.

"Yeah, well, your dad should have known better." "He doesn't know anything about cars." She tensed, expecting lightning to strike her dead for that whopper. She parked the Viper at a back corner of the lot, where it was less likely to get dinged. People at Hammerstead joked that the car was being shunned. She had to admit it was inconvenient, especially during bad weather, but getting wet was better than letting the Viper get injured. Just driving on I-696 to get to work was enough to give her gray hair.

Hammerstead occupied a four-story red-brick building with a gray arched portico and six curving steps leading up to impressive double doors. That entrance, however, was used exclusively by visitors. All the employees entered by a metal side door with an electronic lock into a narrow, puke green hallway, on which were the offices of maintenance and electrical, and a dark, dank room labeled "Storage." Just what was stored there, Jaine didn't want to know.

At the end of the puke green hallway were three steps that led up to another metal door. This one opened onto a gray-carpeted hall that ran the length of the building, front to back, and off which offices and other hallways branched like veins. The two lower floors were reserved for the computer nerds, those strange and irreverent beings who talked in a foreign language about bytes and USB ports. Access to these floors was limited; one had to have an employee's access card to get into the puke green hallway, then another to enter any of the offices and rooms. There were two elevators, and at the far end of the building, for the more energetic, were the stairs. As she entered the gray-carpeted hall, a large hand- lettered sign caught her attention. The sign was posted directly above the call buttons for the elevators. In green and purple crayon, outlined with black Magic Marker for emphasis, was a new company directive: EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, ALL EMPLOYEES WILL BE REQUIRED TO TAKE A COMBINATION OF GINKGO AND VIAGRA, SO YOU CAN REMEMBER WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE DOING.

She began giggling. The nerds were in fine form today. By nature they rebelled against authority and structure; such signs were commonplace, at least until someone in management arrived and took them down. She imagined eyes all up and down the hallway were plastered to tiny cracks as the culprits enjoyed others' reactions to their latest attack on corporate dignity.

The door behind her opened, and Jaine turned to see who the next arrival was. She barely refrained from wrinkling her nose.

Leah Street worked in human resources, and she could be counted on to not see the humor in anything. She was a tall woman whose ambition was to rise into management, though she didn't seem to know how to go about doing so. She wore rather girlish clothes instead of the more businesslike suits that would have complemented her willowy build. She was an attractive woman, with feathery blond hair and good skin, but clueless when it came to fashion. Her best feature was her hands, which were slim and elegant, and which she always kept perfectly manicured.

True to form, Leah gasped when she read the sign, and began turning red. "That's disgraceful," she snapped, reaching out to take it down.

"If you touch it, your fingerprints will be on it," Jaine said, totally deadpan.

Leah froze, her hand only a fraction of an inch from the paper.

"There's no telling how many people have already seen it," Jaine continued as she punched the up button. "Someone in management is bound to hear about it and investigate even if the sign isn't here any longer. Unless you plan on eating it – which I wouldn't, the germ count on that thing must be in the gazillions – how are you going to dispose of it without being seen?"

Leah flashed Jaine a look of dislike. "You probably think this disgusting trash is funny."

"As a matter of fact, I do."

"I wouldn't be surprised if you put it up yourself."

"Maybe you should tell on me," Jaine suggested as the elevator doors opened and she stepped inside. "Try calling 1-800-WHO-CARES."

The elevator doors closed, leaving Leah standing outside them glaring at her. That was the most acrimonious exchange they'd ever had, though Leah wasn't known for the ability to get along with others. How she had ever landed a job in HR was beyond Jaine. Most of the time, she simply felt sorry for the woman.

Today wasn't one of those times.

Mondays were always the busiest day of the week in the payroll department, because that was when all the time cards for the week before were turned in. Hammerstead worked at supplying computer technology to General Motors, not at putting its own payroll system on computer. They still did it the old-fashioned way, with time cards that were punched by a clock. It was a lot of paperwork, but so far payroll had not been stopped by a software glitch or a hard-drive crash. Maybe that was why Hammer-stead hadn't upgraded: the payroll, like the mail, had to go through.

By ten o'clock, she was ready for a break. Each floor had a snack room, with the usual assortment of vending machines, cheap cafeteria tables and metal chairs, a refrigerator, a coffeemaker, and a microwave oven. There were several women and one man grouped around a single table when Jaine entered, all of the women laughing their heads off and the guy looking indignant. Jaine poured herself a much-needed cup of coffee. "What's up?" she asked.

"A special edition of the newsletter," one of the women, Dominica Flores, answered. Her eyes were wet from laughing. "This one is going down in history."

"I don't see what's so funny" said the guy, scowling. "You wouldn't," a woman said, snickering. She held out the newsletter to Jaine. "Take a look."

The company newsletter wasn't officially sanctioned, not by any stretch of the imagination. It originated from the first two floors; give that many imaginations access to desktop publishing, and it was bound to happen. The newsletter appeared at irregular intervals, and there was usually something in it that had management trying to round up all the copies.

Jaine took another sip of coffee as she took the newsletter. The guys actually did a pretty professional job of it, though with the equipment and software at their disposal, it would have been a disgrace if they hadn't. The newsletter was named The Hammerhead and a nasty- looking shark was the logo. It wasn't a hammerhead shark, but that didn't matter. The articles were set in columns, there were good graphics, and a fairly witty cartoonist who signed his work "Mako" usually poked fun at some aspect of corporate life.

Today the headline was set in huge boldface letters: DO YOU MEASURE UP? Below it read, "What Women Really Want," with a tape measure coiled like a cobra ready to strike.

"Forget about it, guys," the article began. "Most of us are nonstarters. For years we've been told it's not what we've got, it's how we use it, but now we know the truth. Our expert panel of four women, friends who work here at Hammerstead, have come up with a list of their requirements for the perfect man."

Uh-oh. Jaine almost groaned, but managed to bite back the sound and show nothing but interest in her expression. Damn it, what had Marci done with that list she had written down? They would all be teased unmercifully, and this was the kind of thing that stuck forever. She could just see tape measures by the dozen turning up on her desk every morning.

Hastily she skimmed down the article. Thank God; none of their names were mentioned. They were listed as A, B, C, and D. She was still going to wring Marci's neck, but now she wouldn't have to fold, spindle, and mutilate her. The entire list was there, starting with "faithful" in the number one spot. The list wasn't bad until it hit number eight, "great in bed," but after that it deteriorated rapidly. Number nine was Marci's ten-inch requirement, complete with all their accompanying comments, including her own about the last two inches being leftovers.

Number ten had to do with how long Mr. Perfect should be able to last in bed. "Definitely longer than a television commercial," had been T.J.'s – Ms. D's – rather scathing indictment. They had settled on half an hour as the optimum length of lovemaking, not counting foreplay. "Why not?" Ms. C – that was Jaine – was quoted as saying. "This is a fantasy, right? And a fantasy is supposed to be exactly what you want it to be. My Mr. Perfect could give me thirty minutes of thrusting time – unless you're having a quickie, in which case thirty minutes would kind of defeat the purpose."

The women were all howling with laughter, so Jaine figured some expression must be on her face. She just hoped it looked like astonishment rather than horror. The guy – she thought his name was Gary or Craig, something like that – was turning redder by the minute. "You wouldn't think it was so funny if a bunch of men said that their ideal woman had to have big boobs," he snapped, getting to his feet.

"Oh, come off it," Dominica said, still grinning. "Like men haven't gone for big boobs since their knuckles still dragged the ground. It's nice to see a little payback." Oh, great. A battle between the sexes. Jaine could just imagine the conversations going on around the building. She forced a smile as she handed back the newsletter. "I guess we're going to hear about this for a while."

"Are you kidding?" Dominica asked, grinning. "I'm going to frame my copy and hang it where my husband sees it first thing in the morning when he wakes up and last thing at night when he goes to bed!"

As soon as Jaine got back to her office, she dialed Marci's extension. "Guess what I just saw in the newsletter," she growled, keeping her voice low.

"Oh, damn." Marci groaned aloud. "How bad is it? I haven't seen a copy yet."

"From what I read, it's pretty much verbatim. Damn it, Marci, how could you?"

"That's a quarter," Marci said automatically. "And it was an accident. I don't want to say too much here in the office, but if you can meet me for lunch, I'll tell you what happened."

"Okay. Railroad Pizza at twelve. I'll call T.J. and Luna; they'll probably want to be there, too."

"This sounds like a lynch party," Marci said mournfully. "Could be," Jaine said, and hung up.

Railroad Pizza was about half a mile from Hammerstead, which made it a popular place with the employees. They did a booming take-out business, but they also had half a dozen booths and about that many tables. Jaine got the back booth, where they would have the most privacy. Within minutes, the other three arrived and slid into the booth, T.J. next to Jaine, Marci and Luna across from them.

"God, I'm sorry," Marci said. She looked miserable. "I can't believe you showed the list to someone!" T.J. was horrified. "If Galan ever finds out – "

"I don't see why you're so upset," Luna said, puzzled. "I mean, yeah, it'd be a little embarrassing if people found out we're the ones who made the list, but it's really kind of funny."

"Would you still think it's funny six months from now when guys are still coming up to you offering to show you that they measure up?" Jaine asked.

"Galan wouldn't think it's funny at all," T.J. said, shaking her head. "He'd kill me."

"Yeah," Marci said glumly. "Brick isn't what you'd call sensitive, but he'd get pissed that I said I wanted ten inches." She gave a weak smile. "Guess you can say he'd come up short."

"How did it happen?" T.J. asked, burying her face in her hands.

"I went shopping Saturday, and I ran into Dawna what's- her-name, you know, that Elvira look-alike on the first floor," Marci said. "We got to talking, went for a late lunch, had a couple of beers. I showed her the list, we had a good laugh, and she asked for a copy. I didn't see why not. After a few beers, I don't see why not about a lot of things. She asked a few questions, and somehow I wound up writing down everything we'd said."

Marci had an almost photographic memory. Unfortunately, a few beers didn't seem to affect her memory, just her judgment.

"At least you didn't give her our names," T.J. said. "She knows who we are," Jaine pointed out. "Marci had the list, so any idiot can figure out she's one of the four friends. Take it from there."

T.J. covered her face with her hands again. "I'm dead. Or divorced."

"I don't think anything will come of it," Luna said soothingly. "If Dawna was going to spill the beans on us, she would already have told her pals on the first floor. We're safe. Galan will never know."

CHAPTER FIVE

Jaine was on edge the rest of the day, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She couldn't imagine how nervous T.J. must have felt, because if this ever got out and Galan found out about it, he'd deal T.J. misery for the rest of her life. When it came down to the bottom line, T.J. was the one who had the most to lose. Marci was in a relationship, but at least she wasn't married to Brick. The thing Luna had going with Shamal King was on-again, off-again at best, without commitment.

Of the four, Jaine was the one who would have the least difficulty if their identities became known. She wasn't in a relationship, having given up on men, and she answered to no one but herself. She'd have to endure the teasing, but that was all.

Once she analyzed the situation and came to that conclusion, she stopped worrying so much. So what if some office clown tried to show off his wit? She could hold her own with any bozo.

Her improved mood lasted until she got home and found that BooBoo, in an attempt to impress on her how upset he was at having to stay in a strange house, had completely shredded one of the cushions on her sofa. Tufts of stuffing were scattered all over the living room. She closed her eyes and counted to ten, then to twenty. There was no point in getting angry at the cat; he probably wouldn't understand, and wouldn't care even if he did. He was as much a victim of circumstance as she was. He hissed at her when she reached for him. She usually left him alone when he did that, but in a moment of pity she scooped him up anyway and burrowed her fingers into his fur, kneading the limber muscles of his back. "Poor kitty" she crooned. "You don't know what's going on, do you?" BooBoo snarled at her, then ruined the effect by lapsing into a rumbling purr.

"Just hold on for four weeks and five days. That's thirty- three days. You can put up with me that long, can't you?" He didn't look as if he agreed, but didn't care as long as she continued kneading his back. She carried him into the kitchen and gave him a treat, then put him on the floor with a fuzzy toy mouse to battle.

Okay. The cat was trashing her house. She could cope. Her mom would be horrified at the damage and pay for it, of course, so all in all Jaine was just being a little inconvenienced.

She was impressed by her own mellowness.

She got a drink of water, and as she stood at the sink, her neighbor arrived home. At the sight of that brown Pontiac she could feel her mellowness begin to circle the drain. But the car was quiet, so evidently he had replaced the muffler. If he was trying, so could she. Mentally she put a stopper in the drain.

She watched out the window as he got out of the car and unlocked his kitchen door, which faced hers. He was wearing slacks and a white dress shirt, with a tie hanging loose around his neck and a jacket slung over his shoulder. He looked tired, and when he turned to enter the house, she saw the big black pistol in the holster on his belt. This was the first time she had seen him wearing anything except old, dirty clothes, and she felt a bit disoriented, as if the world had shifted off center. Knowing he was a cop and seeing him as a cop were two different things. The fact that he was wearing street clothes instead of a uniform meant he wasn't a patrol officer, but was at least a detective in rank.

He was still a jerk, but he was a jerk with heavy responsibilities, so maybe she could be more understanding. She had no way of knowing when he was asleep, short of knocking on his door to ask him, which kind of defeated the purpose if she didn't want to disturb him when he was sleeping. She just wouldn't mow her lawn when he was at home, period. That didn't mean she wouldn't tear a strip off his rhinoceros hide whenever he disturbed her, because fair was fair, but she would try to get along with him. After all, they would probably be neighbors for years and years.

God, that thought was depressing.

Her mellowness and charity toward all lasted… oh, a couple of hours.

At seven-thirty she settled down in her big easy chair to watch some television and read for a while. She often did both simultaneously, figuring that if anything really interesting happened on the tube, it would get her attention. A cup of green tea steamed gently at her elbow, and she antioxidized herself with an occasional sip. A loud crash destroyed the quietness of her little neighborhood.

She surged out of the chair, sliding her feet into her sandals as she ran for the front door. She knew that sound, having heard it hundreds, thousands of times in her childhood, when her dad would take her to the test sites where she watched them crash car after car. Porch lights were coming on up and down the street; doors were opening and curious heads were popping out like turtles peeking out of their shells. Five doors down, illuminated by the corner streetlight, was a tangle of crumpled metal.

Jaine ran down the street, her heart thumping, her stomach tightening as she braced herself for whatever she might see and tried to remember the basic first aid steps. Other people were pouring out of their houses now, mostly elderly people, the women wearing bedroom slippers and shapeless dresses or robes, the men in their sleeveless undershirts. There were a few high-pitched, excited children's voices, the sound of mothers trying to keep their kids corralled, fathers saying, "Keep back, keep back, it might explode."

Having seen a lot of crashes, Jaine knew an explosion wasn't likely, but fire was always a possibility. Just before she reached the car in the street, the driver's side door was thrust open and a belligerent young man erupted from behind the steering wheel.

"What the fuck!" he yelled, staring at the crumpled front end of his car. He had rear-ended one of the cars parked along the curb.

A young woman came running from the house directly beside them, her eyes wide with horror. "Omigod, omigod! My car!"

The belligerent young man rounded on her. "This your car, bitch? What the fuck you doin' parking it in the street?" He was drunk. The fumes hit Jaine's nose, and she moved back a step. Around her, she could hear the collective neighborhood concern changing to disgust.

"Someone go get Sam," she heard an old man mutter. "I will." Mrs. Kulavich headed back down the street, shuffling as fast as she could in her terry-cloth bedroom slippers.

Yeah, where was he? Jaine wondered. Everyone else who lived on the street was out here.

The young woman whose car had been smashed was crying, her hands over her mouth as she stared at the wreckage. Behind her, two young children, about five and seven, stood uncertainly on the sidewalk.

"Goddamned bitch," the drunk snarled, starting toward the young woman.

"Hey," one of the older men piped up. "Watch your language."

"Fuck you, pops." He reached the crying woman and clamped a heavy hand on her shoulder, spinning her around.

Jaine started forward, pure anger flaring in her chest. "Hey, buddy," she said sharply. "Leave her alone." "Yeah," a quavering elderly voice said from behind her. "Fuck you, too, bitch," he said. "This stupid bitch wrecked my car."

"You wrecked your own car. You're drunk and ran into a parked car."

She knew it was a losing effort; you couldn't reason with a drunk. The problem was, the guy was just drunk enough to be aggressive and not drunk enough to be staggering. He shoved the young woman, and she stumbled backward, caught her heel on a protruding root of one of the big trees that lined the street, and sprawled on the sidewalk. She cried out, and her children screamed and began crying. Jaine charged him, bulldozing into him from the side. The impact sent him staggering. He tried to regain his balance but instead fell on his butt, his feet in the air. He struggled up and with another lurid curse lunged for Jaine. She dodged to the side and stuck out her foot. He stumbled, but this time managed to stay on his feet. This time when he turned, his chin was lowered, tucked close to his chest, and there was blood in his eyes. Oh, shit, she'd done it now.

She automatically fell into a boxing stance, learned from many fights with her brother. Those fights were years in the past, and she figured she was about to get stomped, but maybe she'd get in a few good punches.

She heard excited, alarmed voices around her, but they were oddly distant as she focused on staying alive. "Somebody call nine-one-one."

"Sadie's getting Sam. He'll handle it."

"I've already called nine-one-one." That was a little girl's voice.

The drunk charged, and this time there was no evading him. She went down under his onslaught, kicking and punching and trying to block his punches all at the same time. One of his fists hit her in the rib cage, and the power behind it stunned her. Immediately they were surrounded by her neighbors, the few younger men trying to wrestle the drunk off her, the older guys helping by kicking him with their slippered feet. Jaine and the drunk rolled, and a few of the older guys were mowed down, collapsing on top of the heap.

Her head thudded against the ground, and a glancing blow stung her cheekbone. One arm was pinned by a fallen neighbor, but with her free hand she managed to grab a chunk of flesh at the guy's waist and twist it, pinching as hard as she could. He bellowed like a wounded water buffalo.

Then abruptly he was gone, lifted from her as if he weighed no more than a pillow. Dazed, she saw him slam to the ground beside her, his face mashed into the dirt as his arms were wrenched behind him and handcuffs snapped around his wrists.

She struggled to a sitting position and found herself practically nose to nose with her neighbor the jerk. "Damn it, I might have known it was you," he snarled. "I should arrest both of you on drunk and disorderly charges."

"I'm not drunk!" she said indignantly.

"No, he's drunk, and you're disorderly!"

The unfairness of his charge made her choke with rage, which was a good thing, because the words that hung in her throat probably would have gotten her arrested for real.

Around her, anxious wives were helping doddering husbands to their feet, fussing over them and checking for scrapes or broken bones. No one seemed much the worse for the fracas, and she figured the excitement would keep their hearts beating for several more years, at least. Several women were clustered around the young woman who had been shoved down, clucking and fussing. The back of the woman's head was bleeding, and her kids were still crying. In sympathy, or maybe because they were feeling left out, a couple more kids began wailing. Sirens screeched in the distance, coming closer with every second.

Crouched beside the captive drunk, holding him down with one hand, Sam looked around in disbelief. "Jesus," he muttered, shaking his head.

The old lady from across the street, her gray hair in pin curls, leaned over Jaine. "Are you all right, dear? That was the bravest thing I ever saw! You should have been here, Sam. When that… that hoodlum shoved Amy down, this young lady knocked him flat on his butt. What's your name, dear?" she asked, turning back to Jaine. "I'm Eleanor Holland; I live across the street from you."

"Jaine," she supplied, and glared at her next-door neighbor. "Yeah, Sam, you should have been here."

"I was in the shower," he growled. He paused. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." She scrambled to her feet. She didn't know if she was fine or not, but she didn't seem to have any broken bones and she wasn't dizzy, so there couldn't be any major damage.

He was looking at her bare legs. "Your knee is bleeding." She looked down and noticed that the left pocket of her denim shorts was almost torn off. Blood trickled down her shin from a scrape on her right knee. She jerked the torn pocket the rest of the way off and pressed the cloth to her knee. "It's just a scrape."

The cavalry in the form of two patrol cars and a fire medic truck, arrived with flashing lights. Uniformed officers began wading through the crowd, while neighbors directed the medics to the injured.

Thirty minutes later, it was all over. Wreckers had hauled the two damaged cars away, and the uniforms had hauled the drunk away. The injured young woman, lads in tow, had been taken to an emergency room to have the cut on the back of her head stitched. Minor scrapes had been cleaned and bandaged, and the elderly warriors shepherded home.

Jaine waited until the medics were gone, then peeled the huge wad of gauze and tape off her knee. Now that the excitement was over, she was exhausted; all she wanted was a hot shower, a chocolate chip cookie, and bed. She yawned as she began trudging down the street to her house.

Sam the jerk fell into step beside her. She glanced up at him, then focused straight ahead. She didn't like the look on his face or the way he loomed over her like a dark cloud. Damn, the man was big, a couple of inches, maybe three, over six feet, and with shoulders that looked a yard wide.

"Do you always jump feet first into dangerous situations?" he asked in a conversational tone.

She thought about it. "Yeah," she finally said. "Figures."

She stopped in the middle of the street and turned to face him, her hands planted on her hips. "Look, what was I supposed to do, just stand there while he beat her to a pulp?"

"You might have let a couple of the men grab him." "Yeah, well, no one was grabbing him, so I didn't wait around."

A car turned the corner, coming toward them. He took her arm and moved her out of the street. "You're, what, five- three?" he asked, assessing her.

She scowled at him. "Five-five."

He rolled his eyes, and his expression said, Yeah, right. She ground her teeth. She was five-five – almost. What did a tiny fraction of an inch matter?

"Amy, the woman he hurt, is a good three inches taller than you and probably outweighs you by almost thirty pounds. What made you think you could handle him?"

"I didn't," she admitted.

"Didn't what? Think? That was obvious."

I can't slug a cop, she thought. I can't slug a cop. She repeated that to herself several times. Finally she managed to say, in an admirably even tone, "I didn't think I could handle him."

"But you jumped him anyway."

She shrugged. "It was a moment of insanity." "No argument there."

That did it. She stopped again. "Look, I've had it with your snide remarks. I stopped him from beating that woman to a pulp in front of her lads. Jumping him like that wasn't a smart thing to do, and I fully realize I could have been hurt. I'd do it again. Now carry your ass on down the street, because I don't want to walk with you."

"Tough," he said, and latched on to her arm again. She had to walk, or be dragged. Since he wouldn't let her walk home by herself, she picked up her pace. The sooner they parted company, the better.

"You in a hurry?" he asked, his grip on her arm reeling her back in and forcing her to match his more leisurely stride. "Yeah. I'm missing – " She tried to think what was on television, but drew a blank. "BooBoo's due to cough up a hair ball, and I want to be there."

"You like hair balls, huh?"

"They're more interesting than my present company," she said sweetly.

He grimaced. "Ouch."

They drew even with her house, and he had to release her. "Put ice on the knee so it won't bruise," he said. She nodded, took a few steps, then turned back to find him still standing at the end of her walk, watching her. "Thanks for getting a new muffler."

He started to say something sarcastic, she could see it in his expression, but then he shrugged and merely said, "You're welcome." He paused. "Thank you for my new trash can."

"You're welcome." They stared at each other for a moment longer, as if waiting to see which one would start the battle anew, but Jaine put an end to the standoff by turning around and going inside. She locked the door behind her and stood for a moment, looking at the cozy, already familiar, feels-like-home living room. BooBoo had been at the cushion again; more stuffing was strewn on the carpet. She sighed. "Forget the chocolate chip cookie," she said aloud. "This calls for ice cream."

CHAPTER SIX

Jaine woke up early the next morning, without benefit of clock or sun. The simple act of rolling over woke her, because every muscle in her body screamed in protest. Her ribs ached, her knee stung, her arms ached every time she moved them; even her butt was sore. She hadn't had this many aches and pains since the first time she went roller-skating.

Groaning, she eased into a sitting position and inched her legs over the side of the bed. If she felt this bad, she wondered how the old guys felt. They hadn't been punched, but the fall would have been rougher on them. Cold was better for sore muscles than heat was, but she didn't think she was brave enough to face a cold shower. She'd rather tackle a belligerent drunk any time than stand naked under a freezing blast of water. She compromised by showering in tepid water, then gradually turned the hot water completely off. Gradually working up to the cold water didn't help; she stood it for about two seconds, then climbed out of the shower much faster than she had climbed in.

Shivering, she quickly dried off and stepped into her long, blue, front-zip robe. She seldom bothered with it during the summer, but today it felt good.

Getting up early had one advantage: she got to wake up BooBoo, rather than the other way around.

He didn't take kindly to having his beauty rest disturbed. The disgruntled cat hissed at her, then stalked off to find a more private place to sleep. Jaine smiled.

She didn't have to hurry that morning, since she had gotten up too early, which was good, because her sore muscles made it plain hurrying wasn't on the agenda today. She lingered over her coffee, a rare weekday treat, and instead of making do with cold cereal the way she usually did, she popped a frozen waffle into the toaster and sliced up some strawberries to go on top. After all, a woman who had been in a brawl deserved a little extra treat.

After finishing the waffle, she drank another cup of coffee and pulled up the robe to examine her scraped knee. She had put ice on it as directed, but there was still a nice large bruise, and her entire knee was stiff and sore. She couldn't loll around all day on a pile of ice packs, so she popped a couple of aspirin and resigned herself to discomfort for a couple of days.

Her first real surprise of the day came when she began dressing and put on a bra. As soon as she fastened the front hook, tightening the band around her sore rib cage, she knew the bra had to go. Standing in front of her closet, naked except for her panties, she faced another dilemma: what did a braless woman wear if she didn't want anyone to know she was braless?

Even in an air-conditioned office, the weather was too hot for her to keep a jacket on all day. She had some pretty dresses, but her nipples would be plainly outlined beneath the thin fabrics. Hadn't she read something once about Band-Aids over the nipples? Anything was worth a try. She got two Band-Aids, plastered them over her nipples, then pulled on one of the dresses and examined herself in the mirror. The Band-Aids were clearly outlined. Okay, that didn't work. Plain surgical tape might do the trick, but she didn't have any. Besides, the dress revealed her scraped knee, and it looked gross. She peeled off the Band-Aids and went back to examining the contents of her closet.

In the end she settled on a long hunter green skirt and a white knit top that she covered with a cadet blue silk shirt. She knotted the shirttails at her waist, put on blue and green stretchy bead bracelets, and was rather impressed when she consulted her mirror.

"Not bad," she said, turning to examine the result. "Not bad at all."

Luckily her hair was no problem. It was thick and glossy, a nice dark reddish brown, and had plenty of body. Her current style was a sort of modified shag that required no more than brushing, which was good, because raising her arms made her ribs hurt. She made short work of the brushing.

But there was a bruise on her cheekbone. She scowled in the mirror and gingerly touched the small blue spot. It wasn't sore, but it was definitely blue. She seldom did a full makeup job – why waste it on work? – but today she would have to bring out the big guns.

By the time she sashayed out the door in her chic serendipitous outfit and with full battle paint in place, she thought she looked pretty damn good.

The jerk – Sam – was unlocking his car door when she stepped out. She turned and took her time locking the door behind her, hoping he would simply get into his car and leave, but no such luck.

"Are you okay?" he asked, his voice right behind her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Stifling a shriek, she whirled. Bad move. Her ribs protested; she gave an involuntary groan and dropped her keys.

"Damn it!" she shouted, when she could breathe again. "Stop sneaking up on me like that!"

"It's the only way I know," he said, his face expressionless. "If I waited until you turned around, I wouldn't be sneaking." He paused. "You cussed."

As if she needed him to point that out. Fuming, she dug in her purse for a quarter and slapped it in his hand. He blinked as he looked down at the quarter. "What's this for?"

"Because I swore. I have to pay a quarter when I'm caught. That's how I'm motivating myself to stop."

"Then you owe me a hell of a lot more than a quarter. You said a couple of words last night."

She curled her lip at him. "You can't go back into the past and collect. I'd have to empty out my bank account. You have to catch me at the time."

"Yeah, well, I did. Saturday, when you were mowing your lawn. You didn't pay me then."

Silently, her teeth gritted together, she dug out another quarter.

He looked extremely smug as he pocketed his fifty cents. Any other time she might have laughed, but she was still mad at him for scaring her. Her ribs hurt, and when she tried to stoop down to retrieve her keys, they hurt even more. Not only that, her knee refused to bend. She straightened and gave him a look of such frustrated fury that one corner of his mouth twitched. If he laughs, she thought, I'm going to lock him under the chin. Since she was still standing on her stoop, the angle was perfect. He didn't laugh. Cops were probably taught to be cautious. He bent down to pick up her keys. "The knee won't bend, huh?"

"Neither will the ribs," she said grumpily, taking the keys and easing down the three steps.

His brows lowered. "What's wrong with your ribs?" "He landed a punch."

He blew out an exasperated breath. "Why didn't you say something last night?"

"Why? They're not broken, just bruised."

"You know this for a fact, huh? You don't think maybe they could be cracked?"

"They don't feel cracked."

"And you have so much experience with cracked ribs you know how they feel."

She set her jaw. "They're my ribs, and I say they're not cracked. End of discussion."

"Tell me something," he said conversationally, strolling beside her as she stalked, as best as she was able, to her car. "Is there ever a day when you don't pick a fight?"

"The days when I don't see you," she shot back. "And you started it! I was prepared to be a nice neighbor, but you snarled at me every time you saw me, even though I apologized when BooBoo got on your car. Besides, I thought you were a drunk."

He stopped, surprise etched on his face. "A drunk?"

"Bloodshot eyes, dirty clothes, getting home in the wee hours of the morning, making a lot of noise, grouchy all the time as if you had a hangover… what else was I to think?" He rubbed his face. "Sorry, I wasn't thinking. I should have showered, shaved, and dressed in a suit before I came out to tell you that you were making enough noise to raise the dead."

"Just grabbing a clean pair of jeans would have sufficed." She unlocked the Viper and began to consider another problem: how was she going to get into the low-slung little rocket?

"I'm refinishing my kitchen cabinets," he offered after a short pause. "With the hours I've been working lately, I'm having to do it a little at a time, and sometimes I fall asleep with my dirty clothes on."

"Did you ever think of leaving the cabinets until your off days and getting a little more sleep? It might help your disposition."

"There's nothing wrong with my disposition." "No, not if it belongs to a rabid skunk." She opened the car door, stowed her purse inside, and tried to psych herself up for the effort of sliding behind the wheel. "Hot set of wheels," he said, looking the Viper over. "Thanks." She glanced at his Pontiac and didn't say anything. Sometimes silence was more charitable than words.

He saw the glance and grinned. She wished he hadn't done that; the grin made him look almost human. She wished they weren't standing out in the early morning sun, because she could see how dense his black eyelashes were and the rich brown striations in his dark eyes. Okay, so he wasn't a bad-looking man, when his eyes weren't red and he wasn't snarling.

Suddenly his eyes went cold. He reached out and gently rubbed his thumb along her cheekbone. "You have a bruise there."

"Da – " She caught herself before the word slipped out. "Darn it, I thought I had it covered."

"You did a good job. I didn't see it until you were standing in the sun." He crossed his arms and scowled down at her. "Any other injuries?"

"Just sore muscles." She looked ruefully at the car. "I've been dreading having to get in the car."

He looked at the car, then at her as she gripped the open door and slowly, painfully lifted her right leg and eased it inside. He blew out a breath, as if steeling himself to perform an unpleasant task, and held her arm to steady her as she inched her way under the wheel.

"Thanks," she said, relieved the task was over. "Sure." He crouched down in the open door. "You want to file charges for assault?"

She pursed her lips. "I hit him first."

She thought he might be fighting another grin. God, she hoped he won; she didn't want to see another one so soon. She might start thinking he was human. "There is that," he agreed. He stood up and started to close the car door for her. "A massage will help the soreness. And a steam bath."

She gave him an outraged look. "Steam? You mean I had a cold shower this morning for nothing?"

He began laughing, and she really, really wished he hadn't done that. He had a nice deep laugh and very white teeth. "Cold is good, too. Try alternating heat and cold to loosen up. And get a massage if you can."

She didn't think Hammerstead had a spa hidden anywhere on the premises, but she might call around and book one for this afternoon when she got off work. She nodded. "Good idea. Thanks."

He nodded and closed the door, stepping back. Lifting one hand in a wave, he walked to his car. Before he even got the door open, Jaine had the Viper purring down the street.

So maybe she could get along with him, she thought, smiling a little. He and his handcuffs had certainly come in handy the night before.

Despite lingering to talk to him, she was still early to work, which gave her time to ease out of the car. Today the sign above the elevator buttons said: FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION; IT'S BUNDLED WITH YOUR SOFTWARE. Somehow she thought management would frown more on that than on the sign from the day before, but all the geeks and nerds on the first two floors probably thought it was hilarious. The office gradually filled. The conversation that morning was exclusively about the article in the newsletter, split fifty-fifty between the contents and speculation about the identity of the four women. Most were of the opinion the entire article was the brainchild of the author, that the four friends were fictitious, which suited Jaine just fine. She kept her mouth shut and her fingers crossed. "I scanned the article and sent it to my cousin in Chicago," she overheard someone say as he walked past in the hallway. She was fairly certain he wasn't talking about an article in the Detroit News.

Great. It was spreading.

Because she winced at just the thought of having to get into and out of the car several times to go to lunch, she made do with peanut butter crackers and a soft drink in the snack room. She could have asked T.J. or one of the others to bring her back something for lunch, but didn't feel like going into explanations of why she had problems getting into her car. Saying she tackled a drunk would sound like bragging, when in truth she had simply been too angry to think about what she was doing. Leah Street entered and took her neatly packed lunch out of the refrigerator. She had a sandwich (turkey breast and lettuce on whole wheat), a cup of vegetable soup (which she heated in the microwave), and an orange. Jaine sighed, torn between hate and envy. How could you like someone who was so organized? People like Leah, she thought, were put on earth to make everyone else look inefficient. If she had thought, she could have packed her own lunch instead of having to make do with peanut butter crackers and a diet soda.

"May I join you?" Leah asked, and Jaine felt a twinge of guilt. Since they were the only two people in the snack room, she should have asked Leah to sit down. Most people at Hammer-stead would simply have sat down, but maybe Leah had been made to feel unwelcome often enough that she felt she had to ask.

"Sure," Jaine said, trying to infuse some warmth into her voice. "I'd like the company." If she were Catholic, she'd definitely have to confess that one; it was an even bigger whopper than saying her father didn't know anything about cars.

Leah got her nutritious, attractive meal arranged and sat down at the table. She took a small bite of the sandwich and chewed daintily, blotted her mouth, then ate an equally small spoonful of soup, after which she blotted her mouth again. Jaine watched, mesmerized. She imagined the Victorians must have had the same table manners. Her own manners were good, but Leah made her feel like a barbarian.

After a moment Leah said, "I suppose you saw that disgusting newsletter yesterday."

Disgusting was one of Leah's favorite words, Jaine had noticed.

"I assume you mean that article," she said, because it seemed pointless to dance around. "I glanced at it. I didn't read the entire thing."

"People like that make me ashamed to be a woman." Well, that was going a little too far. Jaine knew she should leave it alone, because Leah was Leah and nothing was going to change her. But some little demon inside – okay, the same demon that always prompted her to open her mouth when she should keep it shut – made her say, "Why is that? I thought they were honest."

Leah put down her sandwich and gave Jaine an outraged look. "Honest? They sounded like whores. All they wanted in a man was money and a big… a big…"

"Penis," Jaine supplied, since Leah didn't seem to know the word. 'And I don't think that was all they wanted. I seem to remember something about fidelity and dependability, sense of humor – "

Leah dismissed that with a wave of her hand. "Believe that if you want, but the entire point of the whole article was sex and money. It was obvious. It was also vicious and cruel, because just think how it made men who didn't have a lot of money and a big… thing – "

"Penis," Jaine interrupted. "It's called a penis." Leah pressed her lips together. "Some things aren't meant to be discussed in public, but I've noticed before you have a potty mouth."

"I do not!" Jaine said heatedly. "I admit I swear sometimes, but I'm trying to stop, and penis isn't a dirty word; it's the correct word for a body part, just like saying 'leg.' Or do you have an objection to legs, too?"

Leah gripped the edge of the table with both hands, holding so tightly her knuckles turned white. She took a deep breath. "As I was saying, think how it made those men feel. They must think they aren't good enough, that they're somehow inferior."

"Some of them are," Jaine muttered. She should know. She had been engaged to three of the inferior ones, and she wasn't thinking about their genitals, either. "No one should be made to feel that way," Leah said, her voice rising. She took another bite of sandwich, and Jaine saw, to her surprise, that the other woman's hands were shaking. She was genuinely upset.

"Look, I think most people who read the article thought it was funny," she said in a conciliatory tone. "It was obviously meant to be a humorous piece."

"I don't feel that way at all. It was filthy, ugly, and mean- spirited."

So much for conciliation. "I don't agree," Jaine said flatly, gathering up her trash and depositing it in a can. "I think people see what they expect to see. Someone who's mean expects others to be just as mean, the way people with dirty minds see smut everywhere."

Leah went white, then red. "Are you saying I'm dirty- minded?"

"Take it any way you like." Jaine went back to her office before their little disagreement escalated into open warfare. What was wrong with her lately? First her neighbor, and now Leah. She didn't seem able to get along with anyone, not even BooBoo. Of course, no one got along with Leah, so she didn't know if that should count, but she was definitely going to make a bigger effort to get along with Sam. So he rubbed her the wrong way; she had evidently been doing a good job of rubbing him the wrong way, too. The problem was, she was out of practice in getting along with men; since the breakup of her third engagement, she had been off men in a big way. But what woman wouldn't be, with her history? Three engagements and three breakups by the time she was twenty-three wasn't a good track record. It wasn't that she was dog food; she had a mirror, and the mirror reflected a slim, pretty woman with almost-dimples in her cheeks and an almost-cleft in her chin. She had been popular in high school, so popular that she had gotten engaged to Brett, the star pitcher on the baseball team, in her senior year. But she had wanted to go to college and Brett had wanted to give baseball a shot, and somehow they had just drifted apart. Brett's baseball career had been a nonstarter, too. Then there was Alan. She had been twenty-one, fresh out of college. Alan had waited until the night before the wedding, rehearsal night, to let her know he was in love with an ex-girlfriend and he had only gone with Jaine to prove he was really over the ex, but it hadn't worked, sorry, no hard feelings.

Sure. In your dreams, bastard.

After Alan she had eventually become engaged to Warren, but maybe she had been too gun-shy by then to truly commit herself. For whatever reason, after he asked and she said yes, they both seemed to pull back and the relationship had kind of died a slow death. They had both been grateful to finally bury the thing.

She supposed she could have gone ahead and married Warren, despite the lack of heat on both their parts, but she was glad she hadn't. What if they had had children, then split? If she ever did have children, Jaine wanted it to be in a solid marriage, the land her parents had. She had never thought the demise of her engagements was her fault; two had been mutual decisions, and one had definitely been Alan's fault, but… was something wrong with her? She didn't seem to inspire lust, much less devotion, in the men she had dated.

She was jerked out of her unhappy thoughts when T.J. stuck her head in the office door. T.J. looked pale. "A reporter for the News is here talking to Dawna," she blurted. "God, you don't think –?"

T.J. looked at Jaine; Jaine looked at T.J.

"Ah, hell," Jaine said in disgust, and T.J. was so upset she didn't even demand her quarter.

That night, Corin stared at the newsletter, reading and rereading the article. It was filth, pure filth. His hands were shaking, making the little words dance. Didn't they know how this hurt? How could they laugh? He wanted to throw the newsletter away, but he couldn't. Anguish gnawed at him. He couldn't believe he actually worked with the people who had said all these hurtful things, who mocked and terrorized – He took a deep breath. He had to control himself. That was what the doctors said. Just take the pills, and control yourself. And he did. He had been good, very good, for a long time now. Sometimes he even managed to forget himself.

But not now. He couldn't forget now. This was too important.

Who were they?

He needed to know. He had to know.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was like having the Sword of Damocles hanging over her head, Jaine thought gloomily the next morning. It hadn't dropped yet, but she knew it would. The "when" depended on how long it took Dawna to spill the beans that she had gotten the list from Marci. Once Marci's identity was known, they might as well all start wearing signs that said, "I'm guilty."

Poor T.J. was worried sick, and if Jaine had been married to Galan Yother, she would probably have been worried sick, too. How could something that had been innocent fun between four friends have turned into something that might break up a marriage?

She hadn't slept well, again. She had taken more aspirin for her sore muscles, soaked in a hot tub, and by the time she went to bed, she was feeling much more comfortable. Fretting about that darn article kept her awake long past her usual bedtime, and woke her before dawn. She positively dreaded getting the morning paper, and as for going to work – she would rather wrestle another drunk. On loose gravel.

She drank coffee and watched the sky lighten. BooBoo had evidently forgiven her for waking him again, because he sat beside her washing his paws and purring whenever she absently scratched behind his ears.

What then happened wasn't her fault. She was standing at the sink rinsing out her cup when the kitchen light in the house across the way flicked on and Sam walked into view.

She stopped breathing. Her lungs seized, and she stopped breathing.

"Sweet baby Jesus," she croaked, and managed to inhale. She was seeing more of Sam than she had ever thought she would; everything, in fact. He stood in front of the refrigerator, stark naked. She barely had time to admire his buns before he took a bottle of orange juice from the fridge, twisting off the top and tilting it to his mouth as he turned around.

She forgot all about his buns. He was more impressive coming – no pun intended – than he was going, and that was saying something, because his butt was severely cute. The man was hung.

"My God, BooBoo," she gasped. "Take a look at that!" The fact was, Sam looked pretty damn good all over. He was tall, lean in the waist, hard-muscled. She wrenched her gaze north just a little and saw that he had a nice, hairy chest. She already knew he had a good face, if a bit battered. Sexy dark eyes, white teeth, and a good laugh. And he was hung.

She pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart was doing more than pitter-pattering; it was trying to sledgehammer its way through her sternum. Other parts of her body were joining in the excitement. In a moment of insanity, she thought about running right over to audition as his mattress.

Oblivious of the tumult going on inside her, as well as the heart-stopping view across the way, BooBoo continued licking his feet. His priorities were obviously a real mess. Jaine gripped the sink to keep from folding in a limp heap on the floor. It was a good thing she was off men, or she really might have charged across the two driveways and right up to his kitchen door. But off men or not, she still appreciated art, and her neighbor was a work of art, hovering somewhere between classic Grecian statue and porn star.

She hated to do it, but she had to tell him to close his curtains; it was the neighborly thing to do, right? Blindly, not wanting to miss a moment of the show, she reached for the phone, then paused. Not only did she not know his number, she didn't even know his last name. Some neighbor she was; she had lived here two and a half weeks and still hadn't introduced herself to him, though if he was any kind of a cop, he had found out her name. Of course, he hadn't rushed over to introduce himself, either. If it hadn't been for Mrs. Kulavich, she wouldn't have known his first name was Sam.

She wasn't stymied, though. She had written down the Kulavich's phone number on the pad by the phone, and she managed to tear her gaze from the spectacle next door long enough to read it. She punched in their number, and belatedly worried that they might not be awake yet. Mrs. Kulavich answered on the first ring. "Hello!" she chirped so enthusiastically Jaine knew she hadn't woken them.

"Hi, Mrs. Kulavich, it's Jaine Bright, next door. How are you?" Social niceties had to be observed, after all, and with the older generation that could take a while. She was hoping for ten or fifteen minutes. She watched as Sam killed the bottle of orange juice and tossed the empty. "Oh, Jaine! It's so nice to hear from you!" Mrs. Kulavich said, as if she had been out of the country or something. Mrs. Kulavich was evidently one of those people who talked in exclamation points when she was on the phone. "We're fine, just fine! And you?"

"Fine," she answered automatically, not missing a minute of the action. Now he was getting out the milk. Eewwh! Surely he wasn't going to mix orange juice and milk. He opened the milk and sniffed it. His biceps bulged as his arm lifted. "My, oh, my," she whispered. Evidently the milk didn't pass muster, because he jerked his head back and set the carton aside.

"What was that?" Mrs. Kulavich said.

"Uh – I said fine, just fine." Jaine wrenched her attention from its wayward path. "Mrs. Kulavich, what is Sam's last name? I need to call him about something." That was an understatement.

"Donovan, dear. Sam Donovan. But I have his number here. It's the same number his grandparents had. I'm so glad, because that way I can remember it. It's easier to get older than it is to get wiser, you know." She laughed at her own wit.

Jaine laughed, too, though she didn't know at what. She groped for a pencil. Mrs. Kulavich slowly recited the number, and Jaine jotted it down, which wasn't easy to do without looking at what she was writing. Her neck muscles were locked in the upright position, so she had no choice but to look through the kitchen window next door. She thanked Mrs. Kulavich and said good-bye, then took a deep breath. She had to do this. No matter how it hurt, how it would deprive her, she had to call him. She took another deep breath and dialed his number. She saw him cross the kitchen and pick up a cordless. He was standing in profile to her. Oh, wow. Double wow.

Saliva gathered in her mouth. The damn man had her all but slobbering.

"Donovan."

His deep voice was rusty, as if he wasn't truly awake yet, and the single word clipped with irritation. "Urn… Sam?"

"Yeah?"

Not the most welcoming of responses. She tried to swallow and found it was difficult to do when her tongue was hanging out. She reeled it in and sighed with regret. "This is Jaine, next door. I hate to tell you this, but you might want to… close your curtains."

He wheeled to face the window, and they stared at each other across the two driveways. He didn't dart to the side, or squat out of sight, or do anything else that might indicate embarrassment. Instead, he grinned. Damn, she wished he wouldn't do that.

"Got an eyeful, did you?" he asked as he walked to the window and reached for the curtains.

"Yes, I did." She hadn't blinked in five minutes, at least. "Thank you." He pulled the curtains together, and her whole body went into mourning.

"My pleasure." He chuckled. "Maybe you can return the favor sometime."

He hung up before she could reply, which was a good thing, because she was speechless as she closed her blinds. Mentally she smacked her forehead. Duh! All she would have had to do at any time was close her own blinds.

"Yeah, like I'm stupid or something," she said to BooBoo. The image of taking her clothes off for him shook her – and excited her. What was she, an exhibitionist? She never had been in the past, but now… Her nipples were hard, standing out like raspberries, and as for the rest of her… Well. She had never gone in for casual sex, but this sudden lust for Sam the jerk, of all people, floored her. How could he go from jerk to tempting just by taking off his clothes?

"Am I so shallow?" she asked BooBoo, and considered the idea for a moment, then nodded. "You betcha." BooBoo meowed, evidently in agreement.

Oh, dear. How could she look at Sam again without remembering how he looked naked? How could she meet him without blushing or letting him see that she had a major case of the hots for his body? She was much more comfortable having him as an adversary than she was seeing him as an object of lust. She preferred her lust objects at a safer distance… say, on a movie screen. He hadn't been embarrassed, though, so why should she? They were both adults, right? She had seen naked men before. She just had never seen Sam naked before. Why couldn't he have had a beer belly and a shriveled wiener, instead of rock-hard abs and an impressive morning erection?

She began drooling again.

"This is disgusting," she said aloud. "I'm thirty years old, not a teenager screaming over… whoever it is they scream over now. I should at least be able to control my saliva glands."

Her saliva glands thought differently. Every time an image of Sam popped into her head, which was about every ten seconds – she had to enjoy the image for about nine seconds before she banished it – she would have to swallow. Repeatedly.

She had left for work early yesterday morning, when Sam had been leaving at the same time. If she left at her regular time today, he should already be gone, right? But he'd said he was on a task force and kept irregular hours, therefore he might leave at any time. She couldn't time her departure so it didn't coincide with his; she would have to carry on as usual and keep her fingers crossed. Maybe tomorrow she would be able to face him with more composure, but not today, not with her body revved and her saliva glands working overtime. She should just forget about it and get ready for work.

She stood in front of her open closet door and found herself in a dilemma. What did one wear when she might meet her neighbor whom she had just seen naked? Thank God for the scrape on her knee, she finally decided. It was pants or long skirts until the knee healed, which prevented her from sashaying out in the black, above-the- knee sheath with spaghetti straps that she usually wore to parties when she wanted to look sleek and sophisticated. The black sheath made a statement, something along the lines of "Look at me, don't I look sexy," but was definitely inappropriate for work. The scraped knee saved her from a major faux pas.

Better to err on the side of caution, she finally decided, and chose the most severe man-tailored pants outfit she owned. Never mind that she had always liked the way the pants clung to her butt, or that it never failed to elicit a few admiring remarks from the male contingent at work; she wasn't going to see Sam today. He had to be even more uncomfortable about what had happened than she was. If anyone avoided anyone, he would avoid her.

Would a man who was embarrassed have flashed her that wicked grin? He knew he looked good; better than good, damn it.

In an effort to get her mind off exactly how good he looked, she turned on the television to catch the morning news while she dressed and did her makeup.

She was applying cover-up stick to the bruise on her cheekbone when the female anchor of the local morning newscast said in a chirpy voice, "Freud never found out what it is that women want. If he had talked to four area women, however, he would have known the answer to his famous question. Find out if your husband or boyfriend is Mr. Perfect when we return, after these messages." Jaine was so stunned she couldn't even think of a curse word to say. Her legs suddenly weak, she sank down on the closed toilet seat. Dawna, the bitch, must have given them up immediately. No – if she had named names, the phone would have been ringing nonstop. So far they were still anonymous, but that was bound to change today. She hurried into the bedroom and dialed T.J.'s number, silently praying that her friend hadn't yet left for work. T.J. lived farther out than Jaine did, so she left home a little earlier.

"Hello." T.J. sounded rushed, and a little irritable. "It's Jaine. Have you seen the news yet this morning?" "No, why?"

"Mr. Perfect made the news."

"Oh. My. God." T.J. sounded as if she might faint, or vomit, or both.

"They don't have our names yet, I don't think, since no one has called. Someone at Hammerstead will figure it out today, though, so that means by afternoon it'll be common knowledge."

"But it won't be on TV, will it? Galan always watches the news."

"Who knows?" Jaine rubbed her forehead. "I guess it depends on how slow news is today. But if I were you, I'd turn off all the phones and unplug the one that's hooked to the answering machine."

"Done," T.J. said. She paused and said bleakly, "I guess I'll find out if Galan and I have anything worth holding on to, won't I? I can't expect him to be happy about this, but I do expect him to be understanding. After we talked about our Mr. Perfect last week, I did some thinking, and, well…" And Galan hadn't compared very favorably, Jaine thought. "On second thought," T.J. said very quietly, "I'm not going to turn off the phones. If it's going to happen, I'd rather just get it over with."

After she hung up, Jaine hurried to finish getting ready. The quick phone call hadn't taken long, and the television commercials were just ending. The newscaster's perky voice made her flinch.

"Four area women have gone public with their list of requirements for the perfect man…"

Three minutes later, Jaine closed her eyes and sagged weakly against the vanity. Three minutes! Three minutes was an eternity of airtime. Of all the days for there to be no shootings or accidents blocking the freeways or a war, a famine – anything to keep such an insignificant story off the air!

The news story had stopped short of the raunchy requirements, but made sure the viewers knew they could get the List, as it was being called, and the accompanying article, in their entirety, on the station's Web site. Women and men had been interviewed for their reaction to items on the List. Everyone seemed to agree with the first five requirements, but after that opinions began to vary widely – usually with women taking one view and men the other. Maybe if she took a week's vacation, starting immediately, this would all have blown over by the time she got back from Outer Mongolia.

But that would be the coward's way out. If T.J. needed supporting, Jaine knew she had to be there for her. Marci could also be facing the end of a relationship, but in Jaine's opinion, losing Brickhead wouldn't be much of a loss, and besides, Marci deserved some flack for spilling this whole thing to Dawna in the first place. With dread weighting down her every step, she forced herself out to the car. As she unlocked it, she heard a door open behind her and automatically glanced over her shoulder. For a moment she stared blankly at Sam as he turned to lock his kitchen door; then memory came roaring back, and in panic she fumbled with the door handle.

Nothing like a little notoriety to make a woman forget she wanted to avoid a certain man, she thought savagely. Had he been watching for her?

"Are you feeling better today?" he asked as he strolled up. "Fine." She half-tossed her purse into the passenger seat and slid under the wheel.

"Don't put it there," he advised. "When you stop at traffic lights, anyone can come up, pop the window, grab the purse, and be gone before you know what's happening." She grabbed her sunglasses and slid them on, pathetically grateful for the protection they gave her as she dared to glance at him. "Where should I put it, then?"

"In the trunk is the safest place."

"That isn't very convenient."

He shrugged. The movement made her notice how broad his shoulders were, and that reminded her of other parts of his body. Heat began to build in her cheeks. Why couldn't he have been a drunk? Why wasn't he still wearing sweatpants and a stained, torn T-shirt, instead of oatmeal slacks and a midnight blue silk shirt? A cream-and-blue- and-crimson tie was knotted loosely at his strong throat, and he carried a jacket in one hand. That big black pistol rested in a holster against his right kidney. He looked tough and competent, and way too good for her peace of mind.

"I'm sorry if I embarrassed you this morning," he said. "I was still half-asleep and wasn't paying attention to the windows."

She managed a nonchalant shrug. "I wasn't embarrassed. Accidents happen." She wanted to leave, but he was standing so close she couldn't shut the door. He hunkered down in the V formed by the car and the open door. "Are you sure you're okay? You haven't insulted me yet, and we've been talking" – he glanced at his watch – "about thirty seconds already."

"I'm in a mellow mood," she said flatly. "I'm saving my energy in case something important comes along." He grinned. "That's my girl. I feel better now." He reached out and lightly touched her cheekbone. "The bruise is gone."

"No, it isn't. Makeup is a wonderful thing." "So it is." His finger trailed down to the dent in her chin and lightly tapped it before withdrawing. Jaine sat frozen, ambushed by the abrupt realization that he was flirting with her, for God's sake, and her heart was doing that sledgehammer thing again.

Oh, boy.

"Don't kiss me," she said warningly, because he seemed somehow closer, though she hadn't seen him move, and his gaze was centered on her face in that intent look men get before they make their move.

"I don't intend to," he replied, smiling a little. "I don't have my whip and chair with me." He stood up and stepped back, his hand on the car door to close it. He paused, looking down at her. "Besides, I don't have time right now. We both have to get to work, and I don't like rush jobs. I'll need a couple of hours, at least."

She knew she should keep her mouth shut. She knew she should just close the car door and drive away. Instead she said blankly, "A couple of hours?"

"Yeah." He gave her another of those slow, dangerous smiles. "Three hours would be even better, because I figure that when I do kiss you, we'll both end up naked."

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Oh," Jaine muttered to herself as she drove to work on autopilot, which in Detroit traffic was more than a little hazardous. "Oh?" What kind of snappy comeback was that? Why hadn't she said something like "In your dreams, buddy," or "My goodness, did hell freeze over while I wasn't looking?" Why hadn't she said anything except oh, for cripes sake. She could do better than that in her sleep. She hadn't said it nonchalantly, as if she had been asking for information and the answer wasn't very interesting. No, that damn syllable had been so weak it didn't even register on the Wuss-O-Meter. Now he'd think all he had to do was waltz over to her house and she'd fall on her back for him. The worst part of it was, he might be right. No. No, no, no, no, no. She didn't do casual, and she wasn't good at serious, so that pretty much took care of the romance department. No way was she going to have a fling with the next-door neighbor, whom only yesterday – or was it the day before? – she had thought of as "the jerk".

She didn't even like him. Well, not much. She definitely admired the way he had slammed that drunk facedown on the ground. There were times when brute force was the only satisfying response; she had felt extremely satisfied, seeing the drunk smashed into the dirt and handled as easily as if he'd been a child.

Was there anything else she liked about Sam, other than his body – that was a given – and his ability to manhandle drunks? She thought for a moment. There was also something appealing about a man who refinished his cabinets, though she couldn't put her finger on exactly what it was; a touch of domestication, maybe? He definitely needed something to offset all that macho swagger. Except he didn't swagger; he strolled. He didn't have to swagger when he wore a pistol as big as a hair dryer on his belt. As far as phallic symbols went, he pretty much had that aced – not that he needed a symbol with the real deal he had right there in his pants… She clenched her hands on the steering wheel, trying to control her breathing. She turned on the air-conditioning and adjusted the vents so the cold air blew on her face. Her nipples felt tight, and she knew if she checked, she'd find they were standing up like little soldiers. Okay. What she was dealing with here was a major case of the hots. The fact was there, and she had to face it, which meant she had to be a sane, intelligent adult about this and get on birth control pills as fast as possible. Her period was due any day, which was good; she could get the pills and get started on them almost immediately. Not that she would tell him. The pills were just a precaution, in case her hormones overruled her gray matter. Such a silly thing had never happened before, but then she had never before practically had a meltdown at the sight of a man's sticky-out part, either.

What in hell was wrong with her? she wondered wrathfully. She'd seen sticky-out parts before. Granted, Sam's was impressive, but as an intensely curious young woman in college she'd seen a couple of porn films, flipped through the occasional Play-girl, so she'd seen bigger. Besides, for all the fun they'd had talking about their Mr. Perfect and how big his penis had to be, the penis wasn't nearly as important as the man to whom it was attached. Mr. Perfect. Memory returned like a slap in the face. Damn, how could she have forgotten?

The same way she had earlier forgotten about Sam and his Mr. Happy because she'd been preoccupied with the silly newscast, that was how. As distractions, both subjects ranked right up there with, say, her house burning down.

Today should be fairly quiet, she thought. Out of the eight hundred and forty-three people who worked at Hammerstead, the odds were several of the people who knew them had seen the newscast and would guess their identities. Someone would directly ask Dawna, she would spill the rest of the beans, and the information would flash over the entire building with the speed of E-mail. But as long as that information was contained to Hammerstead, T.J. had at least a chance of keeping Galan from finding out. He didn't socialize much with his wife's coworkers, except for his obligatory attendance at the company Christmas party, where he stood around looking bored. Surely there would be something more important that would happen today, locally if not nationally. These were the dreaded dog days of summer, when Congress wasn't in session and all the senators and representatives either had gone home or were junketing around the world, so there wasn't much national news unless there was some sort of catastrophe. She didn't want a plane to crash or anything like that, but maybe something that didn't involve loss of life could happen.

She began praying for a stomach-churning stock market dip – so long as the market began recovering by the end of the day, of course. Another roller-coaster ride before the market suddenly surged to an all-time high would be nice. That should keep the newscasters occupied long enough for Mr. Perfect to be forgotten.

As soon as she pulled up to the gate at Hammerstead, though, she saw that her expectation of a quiet day had been optimistic. Three television news vans were parked off to the side. Three scruffy-looking men with Minicams were each filming one of three individuals, a man and two women, who stood in front of the fence with Hammerstead in the background. The three reporters were spaced far enough apart that they didn't intrude on each other's shots, and they were talking earnestly into their microphones.

Jaine's stomach made a dive. She still had hope, though; the stock market hadn't opened yet.

"What's going on?" were the first words she heard when she entered the building. Two men were walking down the hall ahead of her. "What's with the TV crews? Have we been bought out or closed down, or something?"

"Didn't you watch the news this morning?"

"Didn't have time."

"Seems some of the women who work here have come up with their own definition of Mr. Perfect. All of the television stations are running it as a human-interest feature, I guess."

"So what's their definition of Mr. Perfect? Someone who always puts the lid down on the John?"

Whoops, Jaine thought. They had forgotten that one. "No, from what I heard it was the usual Boy Scout junk: faithful and honest and helps old ladies across the street, shit like that."

"Hey, I can do that," the first man said in a tone of discovery.

"Then why don't you?"

"I didn't say I wanted to."

They laughed together. Jaine entertained herself with a wonderful fantasy of punting both of them through the door ahead, but was content with asking, "Are you saying you're unfaithful? What a winner!"

They both looked around as if startled to see her there, but they had to have heard the door opening and someone walking behind them, so she didn't fall for the innocent act. She knew their faces but not their names; they were junior management types, late twenties or early thirties, spiffed up in their French blue dress shirts and conservative ties. "Sorry," the first man said in insincere apology. "We didn't see you."

"Right," she said, rolling her eyes. Then she caught herself; she didn't need to get involved in these conversations. Let this particular battle of the sexes be waged without her; the less attention she and the other three drew, the better for them.

In silence she and the two men strode to the elevators. There was no sign posted there today, making her feel deprived. Marci, looking tense, was waiting for her in the office. "I guess you saw the news," she said to Jaine. Jaine nodded. "I called T.J. and gave her a heads-up."

"I can't tell you how sorry I am this has happened," Marci said, lowering her voice as someone walked by the open door.

"I know," Jaine said, sighing. There wasn't any point in staying pissed at Marci; what was done was done. And this wasn't the end of the world, not even for T.J. If Galan found out about it and went so ballistic that he and T.J. ended up divorced, then the marriage wasn't very strong anyway.

"Dawna gave them my name," Marci continued. "The phone drove me nuts all morning. All the stations want interviews, and so does the News." She paused. "Did you see the article this morning?"

Jaine had totally forgotten about the morning paper; the peep show next door had been too distracting. She shook her head. "I haven't read the paper yet."

"It was actually pretty cute. It was in the section where they always put recipes and things like that, so maybe not many people read it."

That was good to hear; it was being treated as human interest rather than news, and a lot of people never read what was still thought of as the "women's section." Unless an animal was involved, or a baby, human-interest stories tended to fade fast. This one had already lived past its natural life span.

"Are you going to talk to them? The news people, I mean." Marci shook her head. "No way. If it was just me, yeah, I'd have a little fun – so what if Brick gets his drawers in a wad? But with you guys involved, it's different."

"T.J.'s the one with the big worry. I thought about it yesterday, and I don't have anything to lose if my name gets out there, so don't fret about me. Luna didn't seem worried, either. But T.J. – " Jaine shook her head. "That's a problem."

"Big time. Personally, I don't think it would be much of a loss if she and Galan split, but I'm not her, and she probably thinks the same about Brick." Marci grinned. "Shit, most of the time I think the same about him." No argument there, Jaine thought.

Gina Landretti, who also worked in payroll, entered the office. Judging from the way her eyes lit when she saw Marci and Jaine talking, the penny had dropped. "Hey," she said, a big grin spreading across her face. "It's you! I mean, you're the four friends. I should have realized when I read Marci's name, but it just now clicked. The other two are that pretty girl in sales and the one in human resources, right? I've seen you go to lunch together." There was no point in denying it. She and Marci looked at each other, and Jaine shrugged.

"This is so cool!" Gina enthused. "I showed the newsletter to my husband yesterday, and he got really pissed when he got to number eight on the list, like he isn't always turning around to look at women with big boobs, you know? I had to laugh. He still isn't speaking to me." She didn't look very worried.

"We were just having fun," Jaine said. "This has gotten out of hand."

"Oh, I don't think so. I think it's great. I told my sister in New York about it, and she wanted a copy of the whole article, not just the little bit that was in this morning's paper."

"Your sister?" Jaine's stomach got that sinking feeling again. "Your sister who works for one of the networks?" "ABC. She's a staffer on Good Morning America." Marci began to look alarmed, too. "Uh – she just had a personal interest, right?"

"She thought it was hilarious. I wouldn't be surprised if you got a call from them, though. She mentioned what a great feature the List would make." Gina sailed to her desk, happy with her part in providing them with publicity. Jaine dug a dollar out of her purse and gave it to Marci, then said four very pithy words.

"Wow." Marci looked impressed. "I've never heard you say that before."

"I save it for emergencies."

Her phone rang. Jaine eyed it. Since it wasn't yet eight o'clock, the phone had no business ringing. There could be nothing but bad news waiting if she answered. On the third ring, Marci scooped it up. "Payroll," she said briskly. "Oh – T.J. This is Marci. We were talking – Oh, damn, honey, I'm sorry," she said, her tone changing to helpless concern.

Jaine snatched the receiver from Marci. "What's happened?" she demanded.

"I'm outed," T.J. said bleakly. "I just picked up my voice mail messages, and there are seven calls from reporters. I bet you have the same calls on your voice mail, too." Jaine looked at the message light. It was blinking like it had a tic.

"Maybe if Marci and I talked to them, that would keep them off you and Luna," she suggested. "All they want is a story, right? They need a face to go with the story; then it's over with and they move on to something else."

"But they have all our names."

"That doesn't mean they need four interviews. Any comment should satisfy them."

Marci, having followed the conversation just by listening to Jaine's end of it, said, "I can do the interviews by myself, if you think it would work."

T.J. heard Marci's offer. "It's worth a shot, I suppose. But I'm not going to run from this. If they aren't satisfied after they talk to you and Marci, or just Marci, then we'll all four sit down and give them their interview, and whatever happens will happen. I refuse to feel guilty and worried because we were having fun and made up a silly list." "Okay," Marci said when Jaine hung up. "I'll call Luna and fill her in, and then I'll call those reporters back and set up something for lunch. I'll take all the heat, downplay it as much as I can." She crossed her fingers. "This can work." All morning long people stuck their heads in the door and made laughing comments to her; at least, the women did. Jaine also received a couple of measuring offers, as she had expected, from two of the guys and a few sarcastic remarks from others. Leah Street gave her a horrified look and stayed far away, which suited Jaine just fine, though she expected to see a "whore of Babylon" sign appear on her desk at any time. Leah was having more problems with this than T.J. and that was saying a lot. All the messages on her voice mail were from reporters; she deleted them and didn't return any of the calls. Marci must have been busy doing her mop-up campaign, because there weren't any additional calls after about nine. The sharks, promised some chum, were now circling Marci.

Just in case the barbarians were still at the gate, Jaine chickened out and bought her lunch from the snack room vending machines again. If the diversion didn't work and this was only the quiet before the storm, she intended to make the most of it. As it turned out, there wasn't that much quiet, because the snack room was full of people who had brought their lunches that day, including Leah Street, who was sitting alone at a table even though the other tables were crowded.

The buzz of conversation transformed into a mixture of catcalls and applause when Jaine appeared. The applause, predictably, came only from women. There was nothing she could do but take a bow, sweeping as low as her scraped knee and sore ribs would allow. "Thank you very much," she said in her best Elvis imitation.

She fed her money into the machines and escaped as fast as possible, trying to ignore the comments of "That was so funny!" and "Yeah, you women get bitchy if some guy makes a remark about – "

The snack room quickly became a battleground with the lines drawn between the sexes.

"Damn, damn, damn," Jaine muttered to herself as she went back to her office, diet soft drink and crackers in hand. Whom did she pay when she swore only to herself? she wondered. Should she put the money in a fund to pay for future transgressions?

Lunch had long been over and the time was closing in on two when Marci called. She sounded tired. "Interviews are over," she said. "Let's see if the heat dies down." The reporters were no longer camped at the gate when Jaine left work. She raced home to catch the local news, skidding to a stop in her driveway and slinging small gravel. She was glad Sam wasn't home, or he'd be coming out to read her the riot act.

BooBoo had been at the cushion again. Jaine ignored the clumps of stuffing scattered over the carpet and grabbed the remote, clicking on the television and sitting on the edge of her easy chair. She waited through the stock market report – no crashes or dramatic dips, damn it – the weather, and the sports. Just when she was beginning to hope Marci's interview wouldn't air, the newscaster said in a dramatic tone, "Coming up next: the List. Four local women tell what they want in a man."

She groaned and flopped back in her chair. BooBoo jumped into her lap, the first time he had done so since coming to stay with her. Automatically she scratched his ears, and he began to vibrate.

The commercials ended and the newscast resumed. "Four local women, Marci Dean, Jaine Bright, T.J. Yother, and Luna Scissum, have put together a list of desirable qualities for the perfect man. The four friends work at Hammerstead Technology, and the List, as it has become known, was the result of a recent lunchtime brainstorming session."

Wrong, Jaine thought. They'd been at Ernie's, after work. Either the reporter hadn't asked and just assumed they'd been having lunch together, or "lunchtime" sounded better than "met at a bar after work." Come to think of it, lunchtime would probably work better for T.J. since Galan didn't like those Friday after-work get-togethers. Marci's face flashed on the screen. She was smiling, relaxed, and at the reporter's question, threw back her head for a hearty laugh.

"Who doesn't want Mr. Perfect?" she asked. "Of course, each woman would have different requirements, so what we put on our list wouldn't necessarily be on someone else's list."

Okay, that was diplomatic, Jaine thought. This was good; nothing controversial so far.

Then Marci blew it. The reporter, politically correct down to her toenails, made a comment about the shallowness of the physical requirements on the List. Marci's eyebrows arched, and she got a beady look in her eyes. Watching, Jaine could only groan, because those were Marci's warning signs before she went on the attack. "Shallow?" Marci drawled. "I think it's honest. I think every woman daydreams about a man with, shall we say, certain generous parts, don't you?"

"You didn't edit that out!" Jaine shrieked at the television, jumping to her feet and dumping poor BooBoo to the floor. He leaped to safety barely in time, turning to glare at her. She ignored him. "This is in family time! How could you put something like that on the air?"

Ratings, that was how. With news at a premium, television stations across the country were scrambling for viewers. Sex sells, and Marci had just sold it for them.

CHAPTER NINE

The phone rang. Jaine hesitated, debating whether or not to answer it. No more reporters should be bothering to call, since Marci had given them their story, but considering the timing, the call was probably from someone who knew her and had just heard her name on television and wanted to talk to her, as if her fifteen minutes of dubious fame could somehow rub off on him/her by association. She didn't want to rehash anything about that damn list; she just wanted it to die. On the other hand, it might be Luna or T.J. or Marci. She finally answered on the seventh ring, prepared to lapse into an Italian accent and pretend to be someone else.

"How could you do this to me?" her brother, David, snapped.

Jaine blinked, trying to shift gears. God, would he never get over not being given temporary custody of their dad's car?

"I didn't do anything to you. It isn't my fault Dad wanted to leave the car here. I'd rather you have it, believe me, because now I have to park my car in the driveway instead of the garage."

"This isn't about the car!" he half-yelled. "That thing on television! How could you do that? How do you think it'll make me look?"

This was getting weird. She thought rapidly, trying to come up with some way this would affect David, but the only thing she could think of was perhaps he didn't meet all the list's criteria and he didn't want Valerie to know there were criteria. Discussing her brother's physical attributes wasn't something she wanted to do.

"I'm sure Valerie won't make any comparisons," she said as diplomatically as possible. "Uh, I have a pot boiling on the stove, and I need to – "

"Valerie?" he demanded. "What's she got to do with this? Are you saying she was in on this… this list thing?" Weirder and weirder. She scratched her head. "I don't think I know what you're talking about," she finally said. "That thing on television!"

"What about it? How does it affect you?"

"You gave your name! If you'd ever gotten married, you wouldn't still have 'Bright' as your last name, but no, you have to stay single, so your name is the same as mine. It isn't a real common name, in case you've never noticed! Just think of the ribbing I'm going to take at work because of this!"

This was going a bit far, even for David. His paranoia was usually much less pronounced. She loved him, but he'd never quite gotten over his conviction that the universe revolved around him. His attitude had at least been understandable when he'd still been in high school, because he was tall and handsome and had been wildly popular with the girls, but he'd been out of high school for fifteen years.

"I don't think anyone will notice," she said as carefully as possible.

"That's your problem; you never think before you open your big mouth – "

She didn't think now; she just did what came naturally. "Kiss my ass," she said, and slammed down the phone. Not the most mature reaction, she thought, but a satisfying one.

The phone rang again. No way was she answering it, she thought, and for the first time wished she had Caller ID. Maybe she needed it.

The ringing went on and on. After she counted twenty, she snatched up the receiver and yelled, "What!" If David thought he could harass her like this, see what he thought when she called him at two in the morning. Brothers! It was Shelley. "Well, you've done it now," was her sisterly opening shot.

Jaine rubbed between her eyebrows; a definite headache was forming. After the exchange with David, she waited to see where this one was going.

"I won't be able to hold up my head in church." "Really? Oh, Shelley, I'm so sorry," Jaine said sweetly. "I didn't realize you have the dreaded Limp Neck disease. When were you diagnosed?"

"You are such a show-off. You never think of anyone but yourself. Did it ever cross your mind, just once, how something like this would affect me, or the children? Stefanie is mortified. All her friends know you're her aunt – "

"How do they know? I've never met her friends." Shelley paused. "I suppose Stefanie told them."

"She's so mortified she owned up to the relation? Strange."

"Strange or not," Shelley said, regrouping, "that's a disgusting thing for you to put out there in public." Swiftly Jaine mentally reviewed Marci's television spot. It hadn't been that specific. "I didn't think Marci was that bad."

"Marci? What are you talking about?"

"The spot on television. Just now."

"Oh. You mean it's on television, too?" Shelley asked in rising horror. "Oh, no!"

"If you didn't see it on television, what are you talking about?"

"That thing on the Internet! Stefanie got it from there." The Internet? Her headache exploded into full bloom. One of the geeks at work had probably posted the newsletter article, in its entirety. Fourteen-year-old Stefanie had indeed had an education.

"I didn't put it on the Internet," she said tiredly. "Someone at work must have."

"Regardless of who did it, you're behind that… that list even existing!"

Suddenly Jaine was fed up past the gills; she felt as if she had been walking a tightrope for several days now, she was stressed to the max, and the people who should be most concerned and supportive were giving her hell. She couldn't take any more, and she couldn't even think of anything scathing to say. "You know," she said quietly, interrupting Shelley's harangue, "I'm tired of the way you and David automatically assume I'm to blame without even asking me how this whole thing happened. He's mad at me about the car and you're mad at me about the cat, so you attack without asking if I'm okay with all this attention about the list, which if you thought for one second, you'd know I'm not okay with it at all. I just told David to kiss my ass, and you know what, Shelley? You can kiss my ass, too." With that, she hung up on yet another sibling. Thank God, there weren't any more. "That was me at my peacemaking, mediating best," she said to BooBoo, then had to blink away an uncharacteristic dampness in the eyes.

The phone rang again. She turned it off. The numbers in the message window on the answering machine said she had way too many messages. She deleted them without listening to any of them and went to the bedroom to get out of her work clothes. BooBoo padded in her wake. The prospect of getting any comfort from BooBoo was dubious, but she picked him up anyway and rubbed her chin against the top of his head. He tolerated the caress for a minute – after all, she wasn't doing the good stuff, scratching behind his ears – then wiggled free and jumped lightly to the floor.

She was too tense and depressed to sit down and relax, or even eat. Washing the car would burn off some energy, she thought, and quickly changed into shorts and a T-shirt. The Viper wasn't very dirty – they hadn't had any rain in over two weeks – but she liked it to gleam. All that washing and polishing, besides burning off stress, was satisfying to her soul. She definitely needed some soul- satisfying right now.

She fumed as she collected the things she would need to make the Viper beautiful. It would serve Shelley right if Jaine took BooBoo over there and left him to destroy her cushions; since Shelley had new furniture – it seemed she always had new furniture – she likely wouldn't be as sanguine as Jaine about losing cushion stuffing. The only thing that kept her from transferring BooBoo was the fact that their mom had entrusted her beloved cat to her custody, not Shelley's.

As for David – well, it was pretty much the same situation. She would have transferred Dad's car to David's garage except for the fact her dad had asked her to take care of it, and if anything happened to it while it was in David's custody, she would feel doubly responsible. Any way she looked at it, she was stuck. After gathering her chamois cloths, pail, special car-washing soap that wouldn't make the paint job lose its luster, wax, and window cleaner, she let BooBoo out onto the kitchen porch so he could watch the proceedings. Since cats didn't like water, she didn't think he'd be very interested, but she wanted the company. He settled in a tiny patch of late afternoon sunshine and promptly took a kitty nap.

The driveway next door was bereft of dented brown Pontiac, so she didn't have to worry about accidentally spraying the thing and arousing Sam's ire, though in her opinion, a good wash job wouldn't hurt it. Probably wouldn't help much, either – it was too far gone for such surface beautifying to make much difference – but a dirty car offended her. Sam's car offended her a lot. She settled down to industriously washing and rinsing, one section at a time, so the soap didn't have time to dry and cause spots. This particular soap wasn't supposed to spot, but she didn't trust it. Her dad had taught her to wash a car this way, and she had never found a better method. "Hey."

"Shit!" she shrieked, jumping a foot in the air and dropping her soapy cloth. Her heart nearly exploded out of her chest. She whirled, water hose in hand.

Sam jumped back as water sprayed across his legs. "Watch what the hell you're doing," he snapped. Jaine was instantly incensed. "Okay," she said agreeably, and let him have it full in the face.

He yelped and dodged to the side. She stood braced, water hose in hand, watching as he rubbed a hand across his dripping face. The first water attack, accidental as it had been, had wet his jeans from the knees down. The second one had pretty much taken care of his T-shirt. The front of it was soaking wet, sticking to his skin like plaster. She tried not to notice the hard planes of his chest. They faced each other like gunfighters, separated by no more than ten feet. "Are you fucking crazy?" he half- shouted.

She let him have it again. She sprayed with a vengeance, chasing him with the stream of water as he tried to dodge and dance out of its way.

"Don't tell me I'm crazy!" she shouted, putting her finger over the nozzle to narrow the opening and thus get more force, and distance. "I've had it with people blaming me for everything!" She got him in the face again. "I'm so damn sick of you, and Shelley, and David, and everyone at work, and all the stupid reporters, and BooBoo shredding my cushions! I'm fed up, do you hear?"

He abruptly switched tactics, from evade to attack. He came in low, like a linebacker, not trying to evade the blast of water she aimed at him. About half a second too late, she tried to dodge to the side. His shoulder crashed into her midriff, the impact driving her back against the Viper. Quick as a snake striking, he snatched the water hose from her grip. She lunged for the hose, and he wrestled her back into place, pinning her to the Viper with his weight.

They were both breathing hard. He was soaking wet from head to toe, water leaching out of his clothes into hers until she was almost as wet as he. She glared up at him, and he glared down at her, their noses only a few inches apart.

Water was clinging to his lashes. "You sprayed me," he accused, as if he couldn't believe she had done such a thing.

"You scared me," she accused in return. "It was an accident."

"That was when you sprayed me the first time. You did it on purpose the second time."

She nodded.

"And you said 'shit' and 'damn.' You owe me fifty cents."

"I'm putting in a new rule. You can't incite me to riot, then fine me for rioting."

"You're welshing on me?" he asked in disbelief. "You bet. It's all your fault."

"How's that?"

"You deliberately scared me, and don't try to deny it. That makes the first word your fault." She gave an experimental wiggle, trying to slide out from under the pressure of his weight. Damn, he was heavy, and about as unyielding as the sheet metal behind her.

He squelched her escape attempt by settling even more heavily against her. Water from his clothes dripped down her legs.

"What about the second one?"

"You said f – " She caught herself. "My two words added together aren't nearly as bad as your one word."

"What, they have a points system now?"

She gave him a withering look. "The point is, I wouldn't have said either word if (a) you hadn't scared me and (b) you hadn't cussed at me first."

"If we're assigning blame here, I wouldn't have cussed if you hadn't sprayed me."

"And I wouldn't have sprayed you if you hadn't scared me. See, I told you it was all your fault," she said triumphantly, tilting her chin at him.

He took a deep breath. The movement of his chest flattened her breasts even more than they already were, making her abruptly aware of her nipples. Her nipples were acutely aware of him. Uh-oh. Her eyes widened in sudden alarm.

He was looking down at her with an unreadable expression. "Let me go," she said, more nervous than she cared to reveal.

"No."

"No!" she repeated. "You can't say no. It's against the law to hold me against my will."

"I'm not holding you against your will; I'm holding you against your car."

"By force!"

He shrugged an admission. He didn't seem very alarmed at the prospect of violating any laws against manhandling neighbors.

"Let me go," she said again.

"I can't."

She eyed him suspiciously. "Why not?" Actually, she was afraid she knew why not. "Why not" had been growing in his wet jeans for a few minutes now. She was doing her dead level best to ignore it, and from the waist up – except for her rebellious nipples – she was mostly succeeding. From the waist down, she was an abject failure. "Because I'm going to do something I'll regret." He shook his head, as if he didn't understand it himself. "I still don't have a whip and chair, but what the hell, I'll risk it."

"Wait," she squeaked, but it was too late.

His dark head dipped.

The late afternoon spun away. From somewhere up the street she heard a child shriek with laughter. A car drove by. The faint sound of hedge clippers drifted to her ears. All of that seemed very far away and disconnected from reality. What was real was Sam's mouth on hers, his tongue tangling with hers, the warm male scent of his body in her nostrils and filling her lungs. And his taste – oh, his taste. He tasted like chocolate, as if he had just eaten a Hershey bar. She wanted to devour him. She realized she was clutching fistfuls of wet cotton fabric. One at a time, without breaking the kiss, he peeled her hands off his shirt and tucked them around his neck, allowing him to settle more completely against her, from knee to shoulder.

How could just a kiss arouse her so totally? But it wasn't just a kiss; he used his entire body, rubbing his chest against her nipples until the friction made them stand out, hard and aching, moving the bulge of his erection against her stomach with a slow, subtle rhythm that was nevertheless as powerful as a sea surge.

Jaine heard the wild, smothered sound that erupted from her throat, and she tried to climb him, tried to get high enough to position that bulge where it would do the most good. She was burning hot, dying with heat, half-mad from the sudden onslaught of sexual need and frustration. He was still holding the water hose in one hand. He locked both arms around her and lifted her the few inches needed. The stream of water arced wildly, splattering BooBoo and making him jump up with an outraged hiss, then splashing against the car and wetting them even more. She didn't care. His tongue was in her mouth, and her legs were wrapped around his hips and that bulge was right where she wanted it.

He moved – another of those subtle, rolling thrusts – and she damn near climaxed right there. Her nails bit into his back, and she made a guttural sound, arching in his arms. He tore his mouth free from hers. He was panting, the expression in his eyes hot and wild. "Let's go inside," he said, the words so low and rough they were almost unintelligible, not much more than a growl. "No," she moaned. "Don't stop!" Oh, God, she was close, so close. She arched against him again.

"Jesus Christ!" He closed his eyes, his expression savage with lust barely restrained. "Jaine, I can't fuck you out here. We have to go inside."

Fuck? Inside?

Oh my God, she was about to do it with him and she wasn't on the pill yet!

"Wait!" she yelled in panic, pushing against his shoulders, uncoiling her legs from around his hips and kicking wildly. "Stop! Let me go!"

"Stop?" he said in outraged disbelief. "You said 'don't stop' just a second ago."

"I changed my mind." She was still pushing on his shoulders. She was still accomplishing exactly nothing. "You can't change your mind!" He sounded desperate now.

"Yes, I can."

"Do you have herpes?"

"No."

"Syphilis?"

"No."

"Gonorrhea?"

"No."

"AIDS?"

"No!"

"Then you can't change your mind."

"What I have is a ripe egg." That was probably a lie. Almost positively a lie. She would probably start her period tomorrow, so the little ovum was long past viability, but she didn't take chances with potential offspring. If any life was left in the bundle of DNA, Sam's sperm would jump- start it. Some things were just a given.

The ripe-egg news gave him pause. He thought about it. Offered: "I can use a condom."

She gave him a withering look. At least, she hoped it withered him. So far, he was remarkably unwithered. "Condoms have only about a ninety to ninety-four percent success rate. That means, at best, their fail rate is six percent."

"Hey, those are good odds."

Another withering look. "Oh, yeah? Can you imagine what would happen if even one of your little marauders jumped my girl?"

"They'd tie up and fight like two wildcats in a sack."

"Yeah. Like we just did."

He looked horrified. He released her and stepped back. "They'd be in the sack before they even introduced themselves."

"We've never introduced ourselves," she felt compelled to point out.

"Shit." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I'm Sam Donovan."

"I know who you are. Mrs. Kulavich told me. I'm Jaine Bright."

"I know. She told me. She even told me how you spell your name."

Now, how on earth had Mrs. Kulavich known that? "It was supposed to be Janine," she explained. "But the first n got left off the birth certificate form, and Mom decided she liked it that way." Jaine wished she had been a Janine. "Shelley,"

"David," "Janine"; the names all fit. Jaine was a wild card, the odd one out.

"I like 'Jaine' better," he said. "It suits you. You aren't a Janine."

Yeah, she thought morosely. That was the problem. "So what's this problem you're having with… who was it? Oh, yeah. Shelley, David, everyone at work, the reporters, and BooBoo. Why are you having trouble with reporters?" She was impressed by his memory. She couldn't have rattled off a list of names that had been shouted at her while she was being sprayed with cold water. "Shelley is my older sister. She's mad at me because Mom asked me to baby-sit BooBoo and she wanted the honor herself. David's my brother. He's mad at me because Dad asked me instead of David to baby-sit his car. You know who BooBoo is."

He looked over her shoulder. "He's the cat on your car."

"On my – " She whirled in horror. BooBoo was pussyfooting across the Viper's hood. She snatched him off before he had time to evade, and indignantly returned him to the house. Then she rushed back to the Viper and bent down to inspect the hood for even the tiniest scratch. "Don't guess you like a cat on your car either," Sam said smugly.

She tried out another withering look on him, though she had noticed the egg news had done a good job of withering him anyway. "There's no comparison between my car and yours," she growled, then gave the empty driveway a startled look. No brown Pontiac. But here was Sam. "Where is your car?"

"The Pontiac isn't mine. It belongs to the city." She felt weak with relief. Thank God. It would have been a serious blow to her self-esteem if she'd slept with the owner of that wreck. On the other hand, maybe she needed the Pontiac as a mental brake on her sexual impulses. If it had been sitting there, the preceding episode probably wouldn't have gotten so out of hand.

"Then how did you get home?" she asked, looking around. "I keep my truck parked in the garage. Keeps the dust and pollen and bird deposits off it."

"Truck? What kind of truck?"

"Chevy."

"Four-wheel drive?" He looked like a four-wheel-drive kind of guy.

He gave her a superior sneer. "Is there any other kind?"

"Oh, man," she sighed. "Can I see it?"

"Not until we finish our negotiations."

"Negotiations?"

"Yeah. About when we're going to finish what we just started."

Her mouth fell open. "You mean you aren't going to let me see your truck until I agree to have sex with you?"

"You got it."

"You're crazy if you think I want to see your truck that bad!" she shouted.

"It's red."

"Oh, man," she whined.

He crossed his arms. "Put up or shut up."

"Don't you mean 'put out'?"

"I said we'd negotiate a date. I didn't say we'd do it now. You couldn't pay me to go anywhere near your egg." She gave him a speculative look. "I'll show you my power plant if you'll show me your truck."

He shook his head. "No deal."

She never told anyone about her dad's car. For all her friends knew, he was simply paranoid about the family sedan. But it was a bargaining chip to top all bargaining chips, the ace in the hole, the guaranteed result-getter. Besides, Sam was a cop; it probably wouldn't hurt to have him in the loop, so he would know that her garage needed protecting at all times. The car was insured for a fortune, but it was also irreplaceable.

"I'll let you see my dad's car if you let me see your truck," she said slyly.

Despite himself, he looked interested. Probably her expression told him that her dad's car was out of the ordinary.

"What kind is it?"

She shrugged. "I don't say the words out in public." He leaned down and offered his ear to her. "Whisper them."

She put her mouth against his ear and felt faint from the warm male scent that wafted to her nostrils again. She whispered two words.

He straightened so abruptly he bumped her nose. "Ouch!" She rubbed the aching tip.

"Let me see it," he said hoarsely.

She crossed her arms, mimicking his earlier position. "Do we have a deal? You see my dad's car, and I see your truck?"

"Hell, you can drive my truck!" He turned and looked at her garage as if it were the Holy Grail. "It's in there?"

"Safe and secure."

"It's an original? Not a kit?"

"Original."

"Man," he breathed, already striding to the garage. "I'll get the key." She dashed inside for the key to the padlock, and returned to find him waiting impatiently. "Be careful and open the door just enough to slide through," she cautioned. "I don't want it seen from the street."

"Yeah, yeah." He took the key from her and inserted it in the padlock.

They entered the dark garage, and Jaine fumbled for the light switch. The overheads came on, illuminating the low- slung, tarp-covered hump.

"How did he get it?" Sam asked in a half whisper, as if he were in church. He reached for the edge of the tarp. "He was on the development team."

He gave her a sharp look. "Your dad is Lyle Bright?" She nodded an admission.

"Man," he sighed, and lifted the tarp.

A low moan broke from his throat.

She knew how he felt. She always felt a little breathless herself when she looked at the car, and she had grown up with it.

It wasn't particularly flashy. The automobile paints back then hadn't had the shine of today's paints. It was a kind of silvery gray, spare, without the luxuries so taken for granted by today's consumer. There wasn't a cup holder in sight.

"Man," he said again, bending to look at the instrumentation. He was careful not to touch the car. Most people, ninety-nine out of a hundred, couldn't have resisted. Some would have been brash enough to swing a leg over the low frame and slide into the driver's seat. Sam treated the car with the reverence it deserved, and an odd sensation squeezed her heart. She felt a little light- headed, and everything in the garage began to fade out of focus except for his face. She concentrated on breathing, blinking fast, and in a moment the world clicked back into place.

Wow. What was that all about?

He re-covered the car as tenderly as a mother covers a sleeping infant. Wordlessly he fished his keys out of his jeans pocket and held them out to her.

She took them, then looked down at her clothes. "I'm wet."

"I know," he replied. "I've been looking at your nipples." Her mouth fell open, and she quickly clamped her hands over the pertinent portions of her wet T-shirt. "Why didn't you say something?" she demanded hotly.

He made a scoffing noise in the back of his throat. "What, you think I'm crazy?"

"It would serve you right if I drove your truck without changing clothes!"

He shrugged. "After you let me see this, plus your nipples, I guess I owe you."

She started to argue that she hadn't let him see her nipples, that he had looked without her permission; then she remembered that she had seen a lot more than his nipples that morning and decided not to bring up the subject.

Like he was going to give her the choice. "Besides," he pointed out, "you saw my cock. That has to be worth more points than nipples."

"Hah," she said. "Value is in the eye of the beholder. And I did tell you to cover up, if you'll remember."

"After you'd watched for how long?"

"Only long enough to call Mrs. Kulavich and get your number," she said self-righteously because it was the truth. So what if she'd had to chat with Mrs. Kulavich for a minute? "And you didn't seem to think it was important enough to cover up. No, you waved it around like you were starting a race with it."

"I was enticing you."

"You were not! You didn't know I was looking." He arched an eyebrow.

She threw the keys back at him. "I wouldn't drive your truck now if you begged me! It probably has cooties in it! You lech, you disgusting… disgusting penis-waver – " He fielded the keys with one hand. "Are you saying you weren't enticed?"

She started to tell him she hadn't felt even a twinge of enticement, but her tongue refused to utter what would have been the biggest lie of her life.

He smirked. "Thought so."

There was only one way to recover the upper hand. Jaine put her hands on her hips, letting her nipples thrust against the thin wet layers of bra and T-shirt. Like a laser- guided missile, his gaze homed in on the front of her shirt. She saw him swallow.

"You don't play fair," he said thickly.

She smirked in retaliation for his smirk. "Remember that," she said, and turned to leave the garage.

He slipped past her. "I go first," he said. "I want to see you stepping into the sunlight."

Her hands clamped back in position over her breasts. "Spoilsport," he muttered, and slid sideways through the narrow opening. He stepped back inside so abruptly she collided with him.

"You have two problems," he said.

"I do?"

"Yeah. First, you left the water on. You're going to have a hell of a water bill."

She sighed. The driveway must be awash by now. Sam had obviously driven her insane, or she would never have been so careless.

"What's the second problem?"

"Your yard is full of those reporters you mentioned."

"Oh, shit," she moaned.

CHAPTER TEN

Sam handled the situation. He left the garage, locking the padlock behind him so no particularly nosy reporter could peek inside and see her – though she rather thought he was protecting the car more than he was her. She listened at the door as he walked over to the Viper and said, "Excuse me, but I need to get to that faucet to turn off the water. Would you move, please." He was extraordinarily polite. Jaine wondered why he was never that polite when he was talking to her. Of course, his tone was such that it was more of an order than a request, but still… "What can I do for you guys?"

"We want to interview Jaine Bright about the List," a strange voice said.

"I don't know a Jaine Bright," Sam lied.

"She lives here. According to public records, she bought this house a few weeks ago."

"Wrong. I bought this house a few weeks ago. Damn, there must have been an error when the deed was registered. I'll have to get this straightened out."

"Jaine Bright doesn't live here?"

"I told you, I don't know a Jaine Bright. Now, if you guys don't mind, I need to get back to washing my car."

"But – "

"Maybe I should introduce myself," Sam said, his tone suddenly soft. "I'm Detective Donovan, and this is private property. You're trespassing. Do we need to continue this discussion?"

Evidently they didn't. Jaine stood motionless as engines started and cars departed. It was a miracle the reporters hadn't heard her and Sam talking in the garage; they must have been talking among themselves, or they would have. Certainly she and Sam had been so engrossed in their own conversation they hadn't heard the reporters arrive. She waited for Sam to come unlock the garage. He didn't. She heard water splashing and tuneless whistling. The jerk was washing her car.

"You had better be doing it right," she said between clenched teeth. "If you let the soap dry, I'll skin you alive." Helplessly she waited, not daring to yell and bang on the door in case a reporter was still lurking. If any of them had half a brain, they'd know that while Sam might be able to squeeze into the Viper, no way would he spend that kind of money to buy a car he'd have to drive with his knees jammed up around his ears. Vipers weren't made for tall, linebacker types. He was better suited to a truck. She thought of the red Chevy four-wheel drive and began to pout. She had almost bought one, before the Viper won her over.

She wasn't wearing her wristwatch, but she estimated it was over an hour, closer to an hour and a half, before he unlocked the door. Twilight was deepening into night and her T-shirt was dry, that was how long she had stood impatiently waiting to be freed.

"You took your sweet time," she hissed as she stalked out of the garage.

"You're welcome," he said. "I finished washing your car, then I waxed and buffed it."

"Thank you. Did you do it right?" She rushed over to the car, but there wasn't enough light left to tell if there were any streaks.

He didn't take umbrage at her lack of faith. Instead he said, "Want to tell me about the reporters?"

"No. I want to forget the whole thing."

"I don't think that's going to happen. They'll be back as soon as they check the records and find out I own the house next door, which will be first thing in the morning."

"I'll be at work by then."

"Jaine," he said, and this time he used his cop tone of voice.

She sighed and sat down on the porch steps. "It's that stupid list."

He settled beside her and stretched out his long legs. "What stupid list?"

"About the perfect man."

He came to attention. "That list? The one that was in the paper?"

She nodded.

"You wrote it?"

"Not exactly. I'm one of the four friends who came up with the list. All this hullabaloo about it is an accident. No one was ever supposed to see the list, but it got into the newsletter at work and it's even on the Internet, and everything has snowballed from there." She folded her arms on top of her drawn-up knees and rested her head on them. "It's a mess. There must be no other news at all for the list to be getting this land of attention. I've been praying for a stock market crash."

"Bite your tongue."

"Just a temporary one."

"I don't get it," he said after a minute. "What's so interesting about the list? 'Faithful, nice, employed.' Big deal."

"There's more than what was in the newspaper," she said miserably.

"More? What kind of more?"

"You know. More."

He thought about it, then said cautiously, "Physical more?"

"Physical more," she agreed.

Another pause. "How much more?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I'll just look it up on the Web."

"Fine. You do that. I don't want to talk about it." His big hand settled on the nape of her neck and squeezed. "It can't be that bad."

"Yes, it can. T.J. might end up divorced because of this. Shelley and David are both mad at me because I'm making them look bad."

"I thought they were mad about the cat and the car."

"They are. They're using the cat and the car as a springboard to get even angrier about the list."

"They sound like pains in the ass to me."

"But they're family, and I love them." She hunched her shoulders. "I'll go get your money."

"What money?"

"For the cuss words."

"You're gonna pay me?"

"It's the only honorable thing to do. But now that you know the new rule about making me swear, this is the only time I'll pay you when it's your fault. Seventy-five cents, right? Two earlier, then one when you saw the reporters."

"Sounds about right."

She went inside and dug out seventy-five cents. She was out of quarters; she had to pay him off in dimes and nickels. He was still sitting on the step when she returned, but he stood up to drop the change in his pocket. "Are you going to invite me in, maybe cook dinner for me?" She snorted. "Get real."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay, then, do you want to go grab a bite to eat?"

She thought about it. There were definite pros and cons to accepting. The obvious benefit was not having to eat alone, if she had felt like going to the trouble of preparing something, which she didn't. The biggest con was spending more time with him. Spending time with Sam could be dangerous. The only thing that had saved her earlier was that they hadn't been in a private place. If he got her alone in his truck, there's no telling what would happen. On the other hand, she would get to ride in the truck… "I'm not asking you to solve the meaning of life," he said irritably. "Do you want to grab a burger or not?"

"If I go, you can't touch me," she warned.

He held up both hands. "I swear. I've already said you couldn't pay me to go anywhere near that sperm-eating egg of yours. So when are you going on the pill?"

"Who said I was?"

"I'm saying you'd better."

"You stay away from me and you won't have to worry about it." No way would she tell him she'd already planned to go on the pill. She had forgotten to call the clinic today, but that would be her first call in the morning. He grinned. "You talk a good game, babe, but it's the bottom of the ninth and I'm ahead ten to nothing. The only thing left for you to do is lie down."

If any other man had said that to her, she'd have handed him his ego in shreds. The best she could do now was delay him. "Am I still at bat?"

"Yeah, but it's two down and a three-oh count." "I can still hit a home run."

"Not likely."

She growled at his disparagement of her resistance. "We'll see about that."

"Oh, hell. You're making this a contest, aren't you?"

"You're the one who started it. Bottom of the ninth and you're ahead ten to nothing, my ass."

"That's another quarter."

" Ass' isn't a cuss word."

"Says who – " He stopped himself and heaved a big sigh. "Never mind. You sidetracked me from the subject. Do you want to go get something to eat or not?"

"I'd rather have Chinese than a burger."

Another sigh. "Fine. We'll eat Chinese."

"I like that place on Twelve Mile Road."

"All right," he yelled.

She gave him a brilliant smile. "I'll go change." "So will I. Five minutes."

Jaine hurried into the house, well aware that he was hurrying as well. He didn't think she could change in five minutes, did he? She'd show him.

She stripped to the skin as she raced to the bedroom. BooBoo trailed after her, meowing plaintively. It was long past his dinnertime. She pulled on a pair of dry panties, hooked herself into a dry bra, pulled a red short-sleeved knit top over her head, jerked on a pair of white jeans, and stepped into sandals. She ran back into the kitchen and opened a can of food for BooBoo, dumped it into his plate, grabbed her purse, and was out the door just as Sam jumped off his kitchen porch and headed to his garage. "You're late," he said.

"I am not. Besides, you only had to change clothes. I changed clothes and fed the cat."

He had a modern garage door. He pressed the button on the control in his hand, and it slid up like oiled silk. She sighed, assailed by a bad case of garage-door envy. Then, in the light that came on automatically when the door opened, she saw the gleaming red monster. Chrome twin pipes. Chrome roll bar. Tires so big she would have had to vault into the seat if he hadn't also had chrome bars to aid those not blessed with his length of leg. "Oh," she breathed, and clasped her hands. "This is just what I wanted until I saw the Viper."

"Bench seats," he said, and lifted a wicked eyebrow at her. "If you're really good, after you get on the pill and your eggs are under control, I'll let you seduce me in the truck." She managed not to react. Thank God he didn't realize how tenuous her self-control really was, though it was the thought of seducing him rather than the location that revved her up again.

"Nothing to say?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Oh, damn," he said as he put both hands around her waist and effortlessly lifted her into the cab. "Now I'm worried."

Marci's plan hadn't worked. T.J. faced the inevitable after the third reporter called. God, why didn't this thing just go away? What was so fascinating about a funny list? Not that Galan would think it was at all funny, she thought, depressed. He didn't seem to think anything was funny anymore, unless it was something that happened at work. He had been so much fun when they were dating, full of laughter and jokes. Where had that cheerful boy gone? They didn't even see each other much anymore. She worked eight to five, he worked three to eleven. By the time he got home, she was asleep. He didn't get up until after she had left for work. The most telling thing, she thought, was that he didn't have to work the three to eleven shift. He had chosen it. If his intention had been to get away from her, she thought, he had accomplished his aim.

Maybe their marriage was already over and she simply hadn't faced the fact. Maybe Galan didn't want to have children because he knew it was on the rocks. The thought made her chest hurt, deep inside. She loved him. Rather, she loved the person she knew he was, inside the surly exterior that was all she had seen for the past few years. If she were sleepy or thinking of something else and he popped into mind, the face she saw was the young, laughing Galan, the one she had loved so desperately in high school. She loved the clumsy, fumbling, eager, loving Galan who had made love to her, the first time for both of them, in the back of his dad's Oldsmobile. She loved the man who had brought her a single red rose on their first anniversary because he couldn't afford a dozen.

She didn't love the man who hadn't said "I love you" in so long she couldn't remember the last time.

T.J. felt so helpless, compared to her friends. If anyone tried to give Marci guff, she blew him off and looked for someone to fill his shoes – or rather, her bed. Luna was upset over Shamal, but she didn't sit at home waiting for him; she carried on with her life. And as for Jaine – Jaine was complete in a way T.J. knew she herself wasn't. Whatever life handed her, Jaine faced with humor and guts. Not one of the three would take the grief from Galan that she had been silently enduring for over two years. She hated her own weakness. What would happen if she and Galan split? They would have to sell the house, and she loved her house, but so what? She could live in an apartment. Jaine had lived in one for years. T.J. could live alone, though she never had. She would learn to handle everything herself. She would get a cat – no, a dog, for protection. And she would date again. What would it be like to spend time with a man who didn't insult her every time he opened his mouth?

When the phone rang, she knew it was Galan. Her hand was steady when she lifted the receiver.

"Have you lost your mind?" were his first words. He was breathing heavily, telling her he had worked himself into a rage.

"No, I don't believe so," she said calmly.

"You've made me a laughingstock here at the plant – "

"If anyone is laughing, it's because you let him," she interrupted. "I'm not going to talk to you about it on the phone. If you want to talk to me in a civil tone when you get home, I'll wait up for you. If you intend to rant and rave, I have better things to do than listen to you." He hung up on her.

Her hand was shaking a little now as she replaced the receiver. Tears blurred her eyes. If he thought she would beg him for forgiveness, he was sadly mistaken. She had lived the last two years on Galan's terms and been miserable. Maybe it was time she lived her life on her terms. If she lost Galan, at least she could hold on to her self-respect.

The phone rang again half an hour later.

T.J. frowned as she went to answer it. She didn't think Galan was likely to call back, but maybe he'd thought about what she said and realized she wasn't going to roll over and play dead this time when he raised his voice. "Hello," she said. "Which one are you?"

She frowned at the ghostly whisper. "What? Who is this?"

"Are you Ms. A? B? Which one are you?"

"Get a life," snapped the new T.J. and she slammed down the phone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jaine jumped out of bed early the next morning, determined to leave for work before Sam was stirring. While her heartbeat accelerated with excitement at the thought of sparring with him again, her head told her he had likely pulled up the list on the Web last night after they returned home from pigging out on small Chinese doughnuts. He was worse than a pit bull in not letting go of anything, and he had bugged her about the rest of the list the entire time they were eating. She did not want to know his thoughts on anything after number seven on the list. She was on her way out the door at the ungodly time of seven A.M. when she saw that her answering machine was full of messages again. She started to hit the delete button, but hesitated. With her parents traveling, anything could happen: one of them could become ill, or there might be some other sort of emergency. Who knows? Shelley or David might even have called to apologize. "Fat chance," she muttered as she hit the play button. There were messages from three reporters, one print and two television, requesting interviews. Two hang-ups, back- to-back. The sixth call was from Pamela Morris, who introduced herself as Gina Landretti's sister. Her voice had the mellow, modulated tones of a television announcer as she informed Jaine she would love to book her on Good Morning America to talk about the List, which was absolutely sweeping the country. The seventh message was from People magazine, requesting the same. Jaine fought down rising hysteria as she listened to three more hang-ups. Whoever it was waited for a long time, silently, before hanging up. Idiot.

She cleared the calls; she had no intention of returning any of them. This whole situation had moved beyond silly into downright ridiculous.

She made it out of the driveway without sight of Sam, which meant her morning was off to an even-tempered start. She felt so good that she tuned the radio to a country station and listened to the Dixie Chicks singing that Earl had to die. She even sang along, and wondered if Sam the cop would think Earl's death was justifiable homicide. Maybe they could even argue about it. She knew she had it bad when the thought of arguing with Sam was more exciting than, say, winning the lottery. She had never before met anyone who not only didn't blink an eye at anything she said but could go toe-to-toe with her – verbally, that is – and not break a sweat. It was a very freeing notion, that she could say anything and he wouldn't be shocked. Sometimes she had the feeling he enjoyed rousing her temper. He was cocky – in more ways than one – and irritating, macho, smart, and sexy as hell. And he had the proper reverence for her dad's car, plus he had done a pretty good job washing and waxing the Viper. She had to get those birth control pills, fast. There were more reporters at the Hammerstead gates. Someone must have tipped this bunch off about what she drove, because flashbulbs began exploding as she slowed for the guard to lift the barrier arm. He grinned down at her. "Wanna take me for a test drive and see if I meet the requirements?" he asked.

"Let me get back to you," she said. "I'm already booked for the next two and a half years."

"Figures," he said, and winked.

She was so early that the puke-green hallway was empty. She was not so early, however, that some of the nerds weren't ahead of her. She paused to read the new elevator sign: REMEMBER: FIRST YOU PILLAGE, THEN YOU BURN. THOSE WHO DO NOT COMPLY WILL BE SUSPENDED FROM THE RAIDING TEAM.

There, she felt better; a day without an elevator sign was a terrible thing to endure.

She was in her office before she realized the reporters and guard hadn't upset her. They weren't important. Her battle with Sam was far more interesting, especially since they both knew where it was heading. She had never had an affair before, but she figured the one she would have with Sam would singe the sheets. Not that she intended to be too easy for him; he was going to have to fight to get her, even after she was on birth control pills. It was the principle of the thing.

Besides, frustrating him would be fun.

Gina Landretti came into work early, too. "Oh, good," she said, her eyes lighting when she saw Jaine at her desk. "I need to talk to you, and I hoped you would be in early so we wouldn't have an audience."

Jaine gave an internal groan. She could see what was coming from a mile away.

"Pam called me last night," she began. "You know, my sister. Anyway, she's been trying to get in touch with you, and guess what? She wants to book you on the show! Good Morning America! Isn't that exciting? Well, all four of you, of course, but I told her you were probably the spokesperson."

"Ah… I don't think we have a spokesperson," Jaine said, a little nonplused by Gina's assumption.

"Oh. Well, if you did, you would be it. The spokesperson." Gina seemed so proud that Jaine cast about for a diplomatic way of saying, "No way."

"I didn't know your sister was a program booker." "Oh, she isn't, but she spoke to the booker and she's very interested, too. This would be a feather in Pam's cap," Gina confided. "The word is out the other networks will probably contact you today, so Pam wanted to get the jump on them. This could really help her career." Meaning that if she, Jaine, didn't cooperate, any setbacks in Gina's sister's career would be laid directly on her doorstep.

"There might be a problem," Jaine said, looking as contrite as possible. "T.J.'s husband isn't happy with all this publicity – "

Gina shrugged. "So only three of you go on the show. Actually, it would probably be just fine if you were the only one – "

"Luna's much prettier – "

"Well, yeah, but she's so young. She doesn't have your authority."

Great. Now Jaine had "authority".

She tried to use some of that authority and infuse her tone with firmness. "I don't know. I don't like all this publicity, either. I'd rather the whole thing just faded away." Gina looked at her in horror. "You can't mean that! Don't you want to be rich and famous?"

"Rich, I wouldn't mind. Famous, no. And I don't see how going on Good Morning America would make me rich."

"You could get a book deal out of this! One of those multimillion-dollar advances, you know, like those women who wrote the book about rules."

"Gina!" Jaine half-shouted. "Reality check here! How could the List be a book, unless the preferred size of a man's penis is discussed for three hundred pages?"

"Three hundred?" Gina looked dubious. "I think a hundred and fifty would be plenty."

Jaine looked around for something against which to bang her head.

"Please, please say you'll say yes to Pam," Gina pleaded, folding her hands together in the classic supplicant pose. In a flash of inspiration, Jaine said, "I'll have to talk to the other three. It'll be a group deal, or nothing at all."

"But you said T.J. – "

"I'll talk to the other three," she repeated. Gina looked unhappy, but evidently recognized some of that mysterious authority she thought Jaine possessed. "I thought you'd be thrilled," she mumbled.

"I'm not. I like my privacy."

"Then why did you put the List in the newsletter?" "I didn't. Marci got drunk and let it slip to Dawna what's- her-name."

"Oh." Gina looked even more unhappy, as if she realized Jaine was even less thrilled about the whole situation than she had previously thought.

"My whole family is mad at me about this," Jaine grumbled.

Despite her disappointment, Gina was a nice woman. She sat down on the edge of Jaine's desk, her expression changing to one of sympathy. "Why? What does it have to do with them?"

"My opinion exactly. My sister says I've embarrassed her and she won't be able to hold her head up in church, and my fourteen-year-old niece got the entire transcript off the Web, so Shelley's angry about that, too. My brother is angry because I've embarrassed him in front of the guys where he works – "

"I don't see how, unless they've been comparing themselves in the rest room and he came up short," Gina commented, then giggled.

Jaine said, "I don't want to think about that"; then she began giggling, too. She and Gina looked at each other and burst into gales of laughter, laughing until tears welled and ruined their mascara. Sniffing, they giggled their way to the ladies' room to repair the damage.

At nine o'clock, Jaine was called into her immediate supervisor's office.

His name was Ashford M. de Wynter. Every time she heard the name, she thought she was dreaming of Manderley She dearly wanted to ask if the M stood for "Max," but was afraid to find out. Maybe he was playing to the illusion, but he always dressed in a very European manner and had been known to say "shedult" instead of "schedule."

He was also an asshole.

Some people come by it naturally. Others work very hard at it. Ashford de Wynter did both.

He didn't ask Jaine to be seated. She sat anyway, earning a frown for her presumption. She suspected the reason for this little conference and wanted to be comfortable while he chewed her out.

"Ms. Bright," he began, looking as if he smelled something distasteful.

"Mr. de Wynter," she replied.

Another frown, from which she deduced it hadn't been her turn to speak.

"The situation at the gate has become untenable." "I agree. Perhaps if you tried a court order…" She let the suggestion trail off, knowing he didn't have the authority to obtain one even if there was a basis for it, which she doubted. The "situation" wasn't endangering anyone, nor were the news people hindering the employees. The frown became a glare. "Your facetiousness is unappreciated. You know very well this situation is your doing. It's unseemly and distracting, and people are becoming unhappy."

For "people," she thought, read "his superiors."

"How is it my doing?" she asked mildly.

"That vulgar List of yours…"

Maybe he and Leah Street had been separated at birth, she mused. "The List isn't mine, any more than it's Marci Dean's. It was a collaborative effort." What was it with everyone, holding her solely responsible for the List? Was it that mysterious "authority" again? If she had that kind of power, maybe she should start wielding it more often. She could make shoppers let her go to the head of the line, or have her street plowed first when it snowed. "Ms. Bright," Ashford de Wynter said in quelling tones. "Please."

Meaning, please don't take him for an idiot. He was too late; she already did.

"Your brand of humor is very recognizable," he added. "Perhaps you weren't the only one involved, but you were undeniably the chief instigator. Therefore it falls to you to rectify the situation."

Jaine might gripe about Dawna to her friends, but she wasn't about to mention anyone else's name to de Wynter. He already knew the other three names. If he chose to believe the majority of the fault was hers, nothing she could say would change his mind.

"Okay," she said. "I'll go to the gate at lunch and tell them you don't appreciate all this publicity and you want them to get off Hammerstead property or you'll have them arrested."

He looked as if he had swallowed a mackerel. "Ah… I don't think that would be the best way to handle things."

"What do you suggest?"

Now, there was a question. His expression went absolutely blank.

She hid her relief. It would have shredded her ego if de Wynter had been able to think of a workable solution when she hadn't been able to come up with even an unworkable one.

"A staffer from Good Morning America has called," she continued. "I'll blow her off. People magazine is supposed to call, too, but I just won't take the call. All that free publicity can't be good for the company…"

"Television? National television?" he asked weakly. He stretched his neck like a turkey. "Ah… it would be a wonderful opportunity, wouldn't it?"

She shrugged. She didn't know if it was wonderful or not, but it was undeniably an opportunity. Of course, she had just talked herself into a corner; publicity was exactly what she didn't want. She undoubtedly had a serious character defect, since she couldn't bear to let Ashford de Wynter get the best of her in anything.

"Maybe you should run the idea by the powers that be," she suggested, getting to her feet. If she was lucky, someone in the upper echelons would veto the idea. He was torn between excitement and a reluctance to let her know that he had to ask anyone at all – as if she didn't know exactly what his position was and how much authority it entailed. He was in the middle of middle management, and that was as high as his cream was going to rise.

As soon as she got back to her desk, Jaine called a war council. Luna, Marci, and T.J. all agreed to meet for lunch in Marci's office.

She explained the current status to Gina and spent the rest of the morning, with Gina's aid, dodging calls. At lunch the four of them, fortified with a selection of crackers and diet sodas, gathered in Marci's office. "I think we can declare the situation officially out of control," Jaine said gloomily, and filled them in on Gina's sister and the calls that had come in that morning from NBC and People magazine, just as Gina had predicted. They all looked at T.J.

T.J. shrugged. "I don't see any point in trying to put out the fire now. Galan knows. He didn't come home last night."

"Oh, honey," Marci said sympathetically, reaching out to touch T.J.'s arm. "I'm so sorry."

T.J.'s eyes looked bruised, as if she had spent the night crying, but she seemed calm. "I'm not," she said. "This just brought things out in the open. He either loves me or he doesn't. If he doesn't, then he should get the hell out of my life and quit wasting my time."

"Wow," Luna said, blinking her lovely eyes at T.J. "You go, girl."

"What about you?" Jaine asked Marci. "Any trouble with Brick?"

Marci gave her wry, seen-everything-tried-most-of-it grin. "There's always trouble with Brick. Let's just say he reacted in typical Brick fashion, with a lot of yelling and a lot of beer drinking. He was still asleep when I left this morning."

They all looked at Luna.

"I haven't heard from him," she said, and grinned at Jaine. "You were right about all the measurement offers and jokes. I'm just telling all the guys that my vote was for twelve inches, but the rest of you wanted to downsize. That generally stops them cold."

When they stopped laughing, Marci said, "Okay, my giving the local guys an interview didn't do the trick. What the hell – whaddaya say we stop trying to unring the bell and have fun with this thing?"

"De Wynter is running the idea of free national publicity by the suits upstairs," Jaine said.

"Like they won't fall on this like a starving woman on a chocolate bar?" T.J. scoffed. "I'm with Marci. Let's punch up the list and really have some fun with it; you know, add some items to it, expand on our discussions and explanations."

David and Shelley were going to have cows, Jaine thought. Well, they probably needed the milk. "What the hell," she said.

"What the hell," Luna seconded.

They looked at each other, grinned, and Marci whipped out her pen and pad. "We might as well get started, give them a story worth printing."

T.J. gave a rueful shake of her head. "This will really bring the crazies out of the woodwork. Did any of you get any weird calls last night? Some guy – I think it was a guy, could have been a woman – whispered, 'Which one are you?' He wanted to know if I was Ms. A."

Luna looked startled. "Oh, I got one of those. And a couple of hang-ups that I thought might be him again. But you're right; the way he was whispering, you couldn't really tell if it was a man or a woman."

"I had about five hang-ups on my answering machine," Jaine said. "I had the phone turned off."

"I went out," Marci said. "And Brick threw the answering machine against the wall, so I'm temporarily messageless. I'll pick up a new one on the way home this afternoon."

"So probably all four of us got calls from the same guy" Jaine said, feeling a little uneasy and grateful that she had a cop living next door.

T.J. shrugged and grinned. "The price of fame," she said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jaine grumbled to herself all the way home, though she did remember to stop at the clinic and pick up a three- month supply of birth control pills. Upper management had decided that milking the situation for all the publicity they could was nothing but good, and things had happened fast after that. On behalf of the others she had accepted an interview on Good Morning America, though why a morning news show would be interested when it obviously couldn't get into the racier items on the list, she couldn't fathom. Maybe it was nothing more than network one- upmanship at work. She could understand the print organizations being interested – say, Cosmopolitan, or even one of the men's monthlies. But what could People print, other than a personal slant about the four of them and the impact the list had made on their lives? Evidently sex sold even when it couldn't be discussed. The four of them were supposed to go to the ABC affiliate there in Detroit at the supposedly reasonable hour of four A.M. and the interview would be taped. They were to be dressed, coifed, and mascaraed before they arrived. An ABC correspondent, not Diane or Charlie, was flying to Detroit to conduct the interview, rather than have them sit on an empty set with tiny plugs in their ears, talking to the air while someone back in New York asked the questions. Having an actual live person doing the interviewing was evidently a great honor. Jaine tried to feel honored, but merely felt tired in anticipation of having to get up at two A.M. in order to dress, coif, and mascara herself. There was no brown Pontiac in the driveway next door, no sign of life in the house.

Bummer.

BooBoo had cushion stuffing clinging to his whiskers when he greeted her. Jaine didn't even bother to glance into the living room. The only thing she could do at this point to protect what was left of her sofa was close the door so he couldn't get into the living room, but then he would transfer his frustration to some other piece of furniture. The sofa already had to be repaired; let him have it. A sudden suspicious feeling and a trip to the bathroom told her that her period had arrived, right on schedule. She heaved a sigh of relief. She was safe from her inexplicable weakness for Sam for a few days now. Maybe she should also give up shaving her legs; no way would she embark on an affair with bristly legs. She wanted to hold him off for at least a couple more weeks, just to frustrate him. She liked the idea of Sam being frustrated.

Going into the kitchen, she peered out the window. Still no brown Pontiac, though she supposed he could be driving his truck as he had yesterday. The curtains were closed on his kitchen window.

It was difficult to frustrate a man who wasn't there. A car pulled into her driveway, parked behind the Viper. Two people got out, a man and a woman. The man had a camera slung around his neck and carried a variety of bags. The woman carried a tote bag and was wearing a blazer despite the heat.

There was no point in trying to evade any more reporters, but no way was she allowing anyone in her stuffing-strewn living room. Going to the kitchen door, she opened it and stepped onto the porch. "Come in," she said tiredly. "Would you like some coffee? I was just about to make a fresh pot."

Corin stared at the face in the mirror. Sometimes he disappeared for weeks, months, but there he was again in the reflection, as if he had never left. He hadn't been able to work today, afraid of what would happen if he saw them in the flesh. The four bitches. How dare they make fun of him, taunt him with their List? Who did they think they were? They didn't think he was perfect, but he knew better.

After all, his mother had trained him.

Galan was at home when T.J. arrived. For a moment her stomach knotted with nausea, but she didn't allow herself to hesitate. Her self-respect was on the line. She lowered the garage door and entered the house through the mudroom, as always. The mudroom opened into the kitchen, her beautiful kitchen, with its white cabinets and appliances and gleaming copper pots hanging on the rack over the center island. Her kitchen was right out of a decorator's book, and it was her favorite room in the entire house – not because she liked cooking, but because she loved the ambience. There was a small alcove full of ferns and herbs and small blooming flowers, filling the air with freshness and perfume. She had snuggled two easy chairs and a table into the alcove, plus an overstuffed footstool for weary feet and tired legs. The alcove was mostly glazed glass, letting in plenty of light but repelling the heat and cold. She loved to curl up there with a good book and a hot cup of tea, especially during the winter when outside the ground was blanketed in snow but inside she was all snug and comfortable, surrounded by her perpetual garden.

Galan wasn't in the kitchen. T.J. dropped her purse and keys in their usual place on the island, kicked off her shoes, and put on a pot of water to heat for tea. She didn't call his name, didn't go looking for him. She supposed he was in his den, watching television and nursing his grudge. If he wanted to talk to her, he could come out of his cave.

She changed into shorts and a clingy tank top. Her body was still good, though more muscular than she liked, the result of years on a girls' soccer team. She would have preferred Luna's willowy build, or Jaine's more delicate curviness, but all in all was satisfied with herself. Like most married women, though, she had gotten out of the habit of wearing formfitting clothes, usually wearing sweats during the winter and baggy T-shirts during the summer. Maybe it was time she started making the most of her looks, the way she had when she and Galan were still dating. She wasn't accustomed to having Galan home for supper. Her evening meal was usually either delivered or something she microwaved. Guessing that he wouldn't eat even if she cooked something – boy, that would show her if he went hungry, wouldn't it? – she went back to the kitchen and got out one of her frozen dinners. It was low in fat and calories, so she could indulge with an ice cream bar afterward.

Galan emerged from his den while she was licking the last of the ice cream from the stick. He stood watching her, as if waiting for her to jump in with an apology so he could proceed with his rehearsed rant.

T.J. didn't oblige. Instead she said, "You must be sick, since you aren't at work."

His lips thinned. He was still a good-looking man, she thought dispassionately. He was trim, tanned, his hair only a little thinner than when he was eighteen. He always dressed well, in stylish colors and silk blends, expensive leather loafers. "We need to talk," he said grimly. She lifted her brows in polite query, the way Jaine would have done. Jaine could accomplish more with the lift of a brow than most people could with a sledgehammer. "You didn't have to miss work just for that."

From his expression she could see that wasn't her scripted reply. She was supposed to attach more importance to their relationship – and his temper. Well, tough.

"I don't think you realize how seriously you've damaged me at work," he began. "I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive you for making me a laughingstock. I'll tell you one thing, though: we don't have any chance of working this out as long as you're still hanging around with those three bitches you call friends. I don't want you seeing them again, do you hear me?"

"Ah, so that's it," T.J. said in dawning realization. "You think you can use this to tell me who I can have as friends and who I can't. Okay. Let's see… if I give up Marci, you can give up Jason. For Luna… oh, how about Curt? As for Jaine – well, if I give up Jaine, you're going to have to give up Steve, at least; though, personally, I've never cared for Steve, so I think you should throw in an extra just to keep things even."

He stared at her as if she had grown two heads. He and Steve Rankin had been best buds since junior high. They went to see the Tigers during the summer and the Lions during winter. They did major male-bonding stuff. "You're crazy!" he burst out.

"That I'd ask you to give up your friends? Fancy that. If I have to, you have to."

"I'm not the one tearing our marriage apart with stupid lists about who you think is the perfect man!" he yelled. "Not 'who'," she corrected. " 'What.' You know, things like consideration. And faithfulness." She watched him closely when she said the last, wondering suddenly if Galan's two- year suspension of affection had a more basic reason than simply growing apart.

His gaze flickered away from her.

T.J. braced herself against the crippling pain. She pushed it into a little box and tucked it away deep inside so she could function through the next few minutes, and days, and weeks.

"Who is she?" she asked in a tone so casual she might have been asking if he had picked up the laundry. "Who is who? What she?"

"The famous other woman. The one you're always comparing me to in your head."

He flushed and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I haven't been unfaithful to you," he muttered. "You're just trying to change the subject – "

"Even if you haven't been physically unfaithful, which I'm not certain I believe, there's still someone you're attracted to, isn't there?"

He turned even redder.

T.J. went to the cabinet and took out a cup and a tea bag. Placing the bag in the cup, she poured boiling water on it. After a minute she said, "I think you need to go to a motel."

"T.J. – "

She lifted a hand, not looking at him. "I'm not making any hasty decisions about divorce or even separation. I meant you need to go to a motel for tonight so I can think without you around trying to turn things around and blame everything on me."

"What about that goddamn list – "

She waved a hand. "The list isn't important." "The hell it isn't! All of the guys at work are riding me about how you like monster cocks – "

"And all you had to do was say, yeah, you had me spoiled," she said impatiently. "So the list got a little risque. So what? I think it was pretty funny, and evidently so do most people. We're going to be on Good Morning America tomorrow morning. People magazine wants to do an interview. We decided we're going to talk to whoever asks, so the thing will die a quicker death. Some other story will come along in a few days, but until then we're going to have fun."

He stared at her, shaking his head. "You're not the woman I married," he said in heavy accusation.

"That's okay, because you're not the man I married." He turned and left the kitchen. T.J. looked down at the cup of tea in her hand, blinking back tears. Well, it was out in the open now. She should have seen what was going on a long time ago. After all, who knew better than she how Galan acted when he was in love?

Brick wasn't asleep on the sofa the way he usually was when Marci got home, though his old pickup was in the driveway. She went through into the bedroom and found him stuffing clothes in a duffel. "Going somewhere?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said sullenly.

She watched him pack. He was good-looking in a beer- drinking kind of way, with too-long dark hair, an unshaven jaw, slightly heavy features, and his usual costume of tight jeans, tight T-shirt, and scuffed boots. Ten years younger than her, never good at holding down a job, oblivious of anything that didn't involve sports – let's face it, he wasn't the catch of the century. She wasn't in love with him, thank God. She hadn't been in love with anyone in years. All she wanted was company and sex. Brick provided the sex, but he wasn't much company.

He zipped up the duffel, hefted it by the handles, and brushed past her.

"Are you coming back?" she asked. "Or should I forward the rest of your stuff to wherever you're going?" He glared at her. "Why're you asking? Maybe you got somebody else all lined up to take my place, huh? Somebody with a ten-inch dick, just the way you like." She rolled her eyes. "Oh, jeez," she muttered. "Lord save me from injured male egos."

"You wouldn't understand," he said, and to her surprise, she detected a note of hurt in his rough voice. Marci stood blinking as Brick stormed out of the house and slammed into his truck. He slung gravel as he peeled out of the driveway.

She was astounded. Brick, hurt? Whoever would have thought?

Well, either he would be back or he wouldn't. She gave a mental shrug and opened the box containing her new answering machine, deftly hooking it up. As she recorded an outgoing message, she wondered how many calls she had missed because Brick had thrown the other answering machine against the wall. Even if he had bothered to answer the phone, he wouldn't have taken any messages for her, not in the mood he was in.

If there was anything important, she thought, they would call back.

She had barely completed the thought when the phone rang. She lifted the receiver. "Hello."

"Which one are you?" whispered a ghostly voice.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jaine cracked open one eye and glared at the clock, which was emitting an extremely annoying high-pitched beeping sound. Finally recognizing it as the alarm – after all, she'd never heard it at two A.M. before – she reached over and slapped it. She snuggled down in the renewed silence, wondering why in hell the alarm had gone off at that ungodly hour.

Because she had set it to go off at that ungodly hour, that was why.

"No," she moaned to the dark room. "I can't get up. I've only been in bed four hours!"

She got up anyway. She had had the presence of mind before going to bed to prepare the coffeemaker and set the timer for 1:50. The smell of coffee drew her, stumbling, to the kitchen.

She turned on the overhead light, then had to squint her eyes against the glaring brightness.

"Television people are aliens," she mumbled as she reached for a cup. "Real humans wouldn't do this on a regular basis."

With one cup of coffee in her, she managed to make it into the shower. As the water poured down on top of her head, she remembered that she hadn't intended to wash her hair. Since she hadn't factored in the time to wash and dry her hair when she calculated the time to get up, she was now officially behind schedule. She groaned and leaned against the wall. "I can't do this."

A minute later, she talked herself into trying. She rapidly shampooed and loofahed herself, and three minutes later jumped out of the shower. With another cup of coffee steaming close to hand, she blow-dried her hair, then used a dab of hair gloss to smooth down the flyaway tendrils. When one got up so early makeup was necessary to cover the automatic look of horror and sheer disbelief; she applied it with a fast but lavish hand, going for the glamorous, just-left-a-party look. What she got was closer to a hangover look, but she wasn't wasting any more time on a hopeless cause.

Don't wear white or black, the television lady had said. Jaine put on a long, narrow black skirt, figuring the lady had meant to avoid black on her top half, which was what would be seen. She paired a scoop-neck, three-quarter- length-sleeved red sweater with the black skirt, cinched a black belt around her waist, and slipped her feet into black pumps at the same time as she was fastening classic gold hoops in her ears.

She glanced at the clock. Three A.M. Damn, she was good at this!

She would bite her tongue off before she ever admitted it. Okay, what else? Food and water for BooBoo, who was staying out of sight. Smart kitty, she thought. That little chore taken care of, she let herself out at five after three. The driveway next door was still empty. No brown Pontiac sat there, nor had she heard any other vehicle enter the driveway during the night. Sam hadn't come home.

He probably had a girlfriend, she thought, gritting her teeth. Duh! She felt like an idiot. Of course he had a girlfriend. Men like Sam always had a woman or two, or three, on their strings. He hadn't been able to get anywhere with her, thanks to her lack of birth control, so he had simply buzzed on over to the next flower in line. "Jerk," she growled as she got into the Viper. She should have remembered her past experiences in the relationship wars and not let herself get so excited. Evidently her hormones had overruled her common sense and she had become drunk on ovarian wine, the most potent, sanity- destroying substance in the universe. In short, she had taken one look at his naked body and gone into heat. "Forget about that," she muttered to herself as she drove the dark, quiet residential streets. "Don't think about it." Sure. Like she was going to forget the sight of that joystick of his waving proud and free.

She felt like crying at the thought of having to give up that awe-inspiring, mouthwatering erection when she hadn't even had a crack at it yet, but pride demanded. She refused to be one of a crowd in a man's head, much less his bed.

His only excuse, she thought, was if he was lying in a hospital somewhere, too badly injured to dial a telephone. She knew he hadn't been shot or anything; that would have been in the news, if a cop had been wounded. Mrs. Kulavich would have told her if he'd been in a traffic accident. No, he was alive and well, somewhere. It was the where that was the problem.

Just to cover all bases, she tried to work up a teeny bit of worry over him, but all she could manage was a heartfelt desire to maim him.

She knew better than to lose her head over a man. That was what was so humiliating: she knew better. Three broken engagements had taught her that a woman needed to keep her wits about her when dealing with the male species, or she could get seriously hurt. Sam hadn't hurt her – not much, anyway – but she had been on the verge of making a really stupid mistake and she hated to think she was so gullible.

Damn him, why couldn't he at least have called? If she had a lock of his hair, she thought, she could put a curse on him, but she was willing to bet he wouldn't let her anywhere near him with a pair of scissors.

She entertained herself with thinking up imaginative curses just in case she did manage to get some of his hair. She particularly liked the one that gave him a bad case of wilt. Hah! Let him see how many women were impressed when his joystick became a joyless noodle. On the other hand, maybe she was overreacting. One kiss did not a relationship make. She had no claim on him, his time, or his erections.

Like hell she didn't.

Okay, so much for logic. She had to go with her gut feeling here, because it wasn't allowing room for anything else. Her feelings for Sam were way out of the norm, composed of almost equal parts fury and passion. He could make her angrier, faster, than anyone else she had ever known. He also hadn't been far off the mark with his assertion that when he kissed her, they would both end up naked. If he had chosen his location better, if they hadn't been standing in her driveway, she wouldn't have regained her senses in time to stop him.

While she was being honest with herself, she might as well admit that she was exhilarated by their conflicts. With all three of her fiancés – in fact, with most people – she had held herself back, pulled her verbal punches. She knew she was a smart-ass; Shelley and David had both gone out of their way to tell her so. Her mother had tried to get her to temper her responses and had partially succeeded. All through school she had struggled to keep her mouth shut, because the lightning-quick workings of her brain left her schoolmates bewildered, unable to keep up with her thought processes. Nor did she want to hurt anyone's feelings, which she had quickly learned she could do just by speaking her mind.

She treasured her friendships with Marci, T.J. and Luna because, as different as they all were, the other three accepted and weren't intimidated by her more caustic remarks. She felt the same sort of relief in her dealings with Sam, because he was as much of a smart-ass as she was, with the same verbal agility and speed. She didn't want to give that up. Once she admitted that, she realized she had two choices: she could walk away, which had been her first inclination, or she could teach him a lesson about… about trifling with her affections, damn it! If there was one thing she didn't want anyone trifling with, it was her affections. Well, okay, there were two things – she didn't want anyone trifling with the Viper, either. But Sam… Sam was worth fighting for. If he had other women in his head and bed, then she would simply have to oust them, and make him pay for putting her to the trouble. There. She felt better now. Her course of action was decided. She arrived at the television station faster than she had anticipated, but then there wasn't much traffic on the freeways and streets that early in the morning. Luna was already there, climbing out of her white Camaro, looking as fresh and rested as if this were nine in the morning instead of not quite four. She was wearing a gold silk wrap dress that made her cream-and-coffee skin glow. "This is spooky, isn't it?" she said when Jaine joined her and they walked to the back door of the station, as they had been instructed.

"Weird," Jaine agreed. "It's unnatural for anyone to be awake and functioning at this hour."

Luna laughed. "I'm certain everyone else on the road was up to no good, because why else would they be out?"

"Drug dealers and perverts, every one of them."

"Prostitutes."

"Bank robbers."

"Murderers and wife-beaters."

"Television personalities."

They were still laughing when Marci drove up. As soon as she joined them she said, "Did you see all the weirdos on the street? They must come out at midnight or something."

"We've already had that conversation," Jaine said, grinning. "I guess it's safe to say none of us is a party animal, crawling home in the wee hours of the morning." "I've done my share of crawling," Marci said cheerfully. "Until I got tired of shoe prints on my hands." She looked around. "I can't believe I'm here before T.J.; she's always early, and I'm usually late."

"Maybe Galan had a tantrum and told her she couldn't come," Luna suggested.

"No, she would have called if she wasn't coming," Jaine replied. She checked her watch: five before four. "Let's go inside. They might have coffee, and I need a steady supply if I'm going to be coherent."

She had been in a television station before, so Jaine wasn't surprised by the cavernous space, the darkness, the snaking cables all over the floor. Cameras and lights stood like sentinels over the set, while monitors watched over everything. There were people around, jean-and- sneaker clad, plus one woman wearing a chic peach suit. She came toward them with a bright, professional smile on her face and her hand outstretched.

"Hello, I'm Julia Belotti, with GMA. I assume you're the Ladies of the List?" She laughed at her own joke as she shook hands all around. "I'll be doing your interview. But aren't there four of you?"

Jaine refrained from making a show of counting noses and saying, "No, I think there are only three of us." That was smartass stuff, the sort she typically held back. "T.J. is late," Marci explained.

"T.J. Yother, right?" Ms. Belotti wanted to show she had done her homework. "I know you're Marci Dean; I caught the local bit that was aired." She looked at Jaine, her gaze assessing. "You are…?"

"Jaine Bright."

"The camera is going to love your face," Ms. Belotti said, then turned with a smile to Luna. "You must be Luna Scissum. I must say, if Ms. Yother is as attractive as the rest of you, this will be a real hit. You do know the buzz your List is getting in New York, don't you?"

"Not really," Luna said. "We're surprised at all the attention it's been getting."

"Be sure and say something to that effect when we're taping," Ms. Belotti instructed, checking her watch. A tiny frown of annoyance began to pleat her brow; then the door opened and T.J. entered, her hair and makeup flawless, her dress a rich blue that flattered her warm coloring. "Sorry I'm late," she said, joining the little group. She didn't offer any excuse, just the apology, and Jaine gave her a sharp look, seeing the fatigue under the makeup. They all had a good reason for looking fatigued, considering the hour, but T.J. had added stress.

"Where is the ladies' room?" Jaine asked. "I'd like to check my lipstick, if there's time, then find a cup of coffee if there is any."

Ms. Belotti laughed. "There's always coffee in a television station. The ladies' room is this way." She directed them down a hallway.

As soon as its door swung shut behind them, everyone turned to T.J. "Are you all right?" Jaine asked. "If you're asking about Galan, yeah, I'm all right. I sent him to a motel last night. Of course, he may have called his girlfriend to join him, but that's his choice." "Girlfriend!" Luna echoed, her eyes widening in shock. "Son of a bitch," Marci said, leaving it to T.J. to decide if she was calling Galan that or just using it as an expletive. Jaine said, "He doesn't have much leverage now to use against you on this list thing, does he?"

T.J. laughed. "None, and he knows it." She looked at their concerned faces. "Hey, I'm okay. If he wants out of the marriage, I'd rather know now before I waste more time trying to keep things going. Once I decided that, I stopped worrying."

"How long has he been having an affair?" Marci asked. "He swears he isn't, that he hasn't been physically unfaithful. Ask me if I believe that."

"Oh, sure," Jaine said. "I believe the sun rises in the west, too."

"He might be telling the truth," Luna put in. "Possible, but not likely," Marci said with the voice of experience. "Whatever they admit to is only the tip of the iceberg. It's human nature."

T.J. checked her lipstick. "I don't think it makes much difference. If he's in love with someone else, then what does it matter whether or not he's slept with her? Anyway, forget about him. I am; if there's any making up to do, he'll have to be the one to do it. I'm going to play this list thing up as big as it'll get. And if there's any sort of book offer, I say we go for it. We might as well get some money for all the trouble we've been through."

"Amen to that," Marci said, and added, "Brick left. His feelings were hurt."

They gaped at that, trying to imagine Brick with feelings. "If he doesn't come back," she complained, "I'll have to do the dating thing again. Man, I hate the thought of that. Going out dancing, letting men buy me drinks… it's awful." They were laughing as they left the ladies' room. Ms. Belotti was waiting for them. She directed them to the coffee urn, where someone had procured four mugs for them. "We have a small set ready for taping whenever you get settled," she said, a subtle way of telling them to shut up and sit down. "The soundman needs to get you miked and sound-checked, and the lighting has to be adjusted. If you'll come this way…"

Their purses were stashed out of sight, and coffee mugs in hand, they settled on a set decorated to look like a cozy living room, with a sofa and two easy chairs, a couple of fake ferns, a discreet lamp that wasn't turned on. A guy who looked about twenty years old began attaching tiny microphones to them. Ms. Belotti clipped on her own microphone to the lapel of her jacket.

None of them had been intelligent enough to wear a jacket. Luna's gold wrap dress was okay, as was the collar-bone slamming neckline of T.J.'s dress. Marci wore a sleeveless, mock-turtleneck sweater, which meant the only place the microphone could be attached was right on her throat. She would have to be very careful moving her head or the resulting noise would blot out everything else. Then the soundman looked at Jaine's red scoop-neck sweater, and said, "Uh-oh."

Jaine grinned and held out her hand. "I'll clip it on. Do you want it to the side or right in the middle?" He grinned back at her. "I'd like it right in the middle, thanks."

"No flirting," she admonished as she slipped the mike under her sweater and clipped it to her neckline, between her breasts. "It's too early."

"I'll be good." With a wink, he taped the cord to her side, then returned to his equipment. "Okay, I need all of you to talk, one at a time, so I can check the sound." Ms. Belotti began an easy conversation, asking if they were all from the Detroit area. When the sound was duly checked and the cameras were set, Ms. Belotti looked at the producer, who then did the countdown, pointed to her, and she went smoothly into the lead-in comments about the famous – "or infamous, depending on your point of view" – List that had swept the country and was being discussed over breakfast tables in every state. Then she introduced them in turn, and said, "Do any of you have a Mr. Perfect in your lives?"

They all laughed. If only she knew!

Luna nudged Jaine's knee with her own. Taking the cue, Jaine said, "No one is perfect. We joked at the time that the list is really science fiction."

"Science fiction or not, people are taking it seriously."

"That's up to them," Marci put in. "The qualities we listed are our ideas of what would make the perfect man. A group of four other women would probably come up with different qualities, or list them in a different order."

"You do know that feminist groups are outraged at the physical and sexual requirements on the List. When women have struggled so long not to be judged by their looks or bust size, they feel you have damaged their position by judging men according to their physical attributes."

Luna raised one perfect eyebrow. "I thought part of the feminist movement was to give women the freedom to be honest about what they want. We listed what we want. We were honest." This line of questioning was her cup of tea; she thought political correctness was an abomination and never hesitated to say so.

"We also never thought the List would become public," T.J. put in. "Its release was accidental."

"You would have been less honest if you had known the List would be published?"

"No," Jaine cracked. "We would have upped the requirements." What the hell; why not have fun with it, as T.J. had suggested?

"You said you didn't have a Mr. Perfect in your life," Ms. Belotti said smoothly. "Do you have a man at all?" Well, that little dig had been slipped in with the ease of an expert, Jaine thought, wondering if the slant of the interview was to paint them as women who couldn't keep a man. Grinning a little, she had to admit that, given all their circumstances, the slant was pretty damn accurate. But if Ms. Belotti wanted a little controversy, why not give it to her? "Not really," she said. "Not many men can measure up."

Marci and T.J. laughed. Luna restricted herself to a smile. From offstage came a quickly smothered snicker. Ms. Belotti turned to T.J. "I understand you're the only one of the group who is married, Ms. Yother. What does your husband think about the List?"

"Not much," T.J. admitted cheerfully. "Any more than I liked it when he would turn around to ogle large breasts." "So this is a bit of tit for tat?"

Too late she realized her choice of words wasn't the best in the world. "More tit than tat," Marci said gravely. Good thing the interview was taped instead of live. "The thing is," Luna said, "most of the requirements are qualities all people should have. Number one was faithfulness, remember? If you're in a relationship, you should be faithful. Period."

"I've read the entire article about the List, and, if you're honest, you'll admit that most of your conversation wasn't about the qualities of faithfulness or dependability. The most intense discussion was about a man's physical characteristics."

"We were having fun," Jaine said calmly. "And we aren't crazy; of course we want men who look good to us." Ms. Belotti checked her notes. "In the article, you aren't identified by name. You're listed as A, B, C, and D. Which of you is A?"

"We don't intend to divulge that," Jaine said. Beside her, she felt Marci straighten a little.

"People are very interested in who said what," Marci said. "I've had anonymous phone calls asking which one I am." "So have I," T.J. put in. "But we aren't going to say. Our opinions weren't unanimous; one might have felt more strongly about a particular point than the other three did. We want to protect our privacy on that front." Another poor choice of words. When their laughter died down, Ms. Belotti turned once more to the personal. "Are you dating anyone?" she asked Luna.

"No one exclusively." Take that, Shamal.

She looked at Marci. "And you?"

"Not at the moment." Take that, Brick.

"So only Ms. Yother is in a relationship. Do you think this means you might be too exacting in your requirements?"

"Why should we lower our standards?" Jaine asked, eyes flashing, and the interview went downhill from there. "God, I'm sleepy," T.J. said, yawning, when they left the studio at six-thirty. Ms. Belotti had plenty of material to edit down for the short piece that would actually be aired. At one point she had abandoned her notes and passionately argued the feminist point of view. Jaine doubted any morning television show could use even a fraction of what had been said, but the studio crew had been fascinated. Whatever was used, it was supposed to be aired next Monday. Maybe then all the interest would die down. After all, how long could the List be discussed? People had lives to lead, and the List had already long outlived its allotted fifteen minutes.

"Those phone calls worry me a little," Marci said, frowning at the bright, cloudless morning sky. "People are weird. You never know whose chain we're pulling."

Jaine knew one person whose chain she hoped to pull. If some of what she had said was aired, Sam would probably take it as a personal challenge. She certainly hoped he did – because that was exactly how she had meant it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Okay," Marci said when they had been served their coffee and given their orders at the diner where they had all stopped for breakfast, "tell us about Galan."

"Nothing much to tell," T.J. replied, shrugging. "He was at home yesterday when I got home. He began with a demand that I give up my friends – three in particular, and guess who they are. I countered with a demand that he give up one of his friends for each one of mine I had to give up. Then – I guess it was feminine intuition, because all of a sudden I wondered if he'd been so cold for the past two years because of another woman."

"What's wrong with him?" Luna demanded indignantly. "Doesn't he have any idea how lucky he is to have you?" T.J. smiled. "Thanks for the vote. I'm not giving up, you know. We might be able to work this out, but I'm not going to let it destroy me if we don't. I did some heavy thinking last night, and this isn't all Galan's fault. I'm not Mrs. Perfect any more than he's Mr. Perfect."

"You haven't been seeing another man," Jaine said pointedly.

"I didn't say we were equally at fault. If he's interested in keeping our marriage going, he has a lot of making up to do. But I have some things to make up to him, too."

"Like what?" Marci asked.

"Oh… I haven't exactly let myself go, but neither have I made any special effort to attract him. I've also been caving in to everything he says in an effort to please him, and let's face it, on the surface that sounds good for him, but if he wants an equal partner, then it must be maddening. I bounce ideas off you guys the way I used to do with him, but now it's as if I keep all the interesting parts of myself away from him. I give him the cook and housekeeper instead of the lover and partner, and that isn't good for a marriage. No wonder he got bored."

"Do you know how typical that is?" Jaine said, her tone shaded with indignation. "Whatever happens, women take the blame for it." She stirred her coffee, glaring into the cup. "I know, I know, sometimes we need to. I hate being wrong, damn it."

"That's a quarter," said three voices.

She dug in her purse for the change, but came up with only forty-six cents. She laid a dollar on the table instead. "One of you can make change for the other two. I need to stock up on change again. Sam wiped me out." There was a long pause, with three pairs of eyes trained on her. Finally Luna said delicately, "Sam? Who's Sam?"

"You know. Sam. My neighbor."

Marci pursed her lips. "Would this be the same neighbor who turned out to be a cop but whom you've described at various times as a jerk, a drunk, a drug dealer, a bottom- feeding son of a bitch, a hulk who hasn't seen a razor or a shower in this millennium – "

"Okay, okay," Jaine said. "Yeah, it's the same guy."

"And you're now on a first-name basis with him?" T.J. asked, amazed.

Jaine's face heated. "Kind of."

"Oh my god." Luna's eyes were huge. "She's blushing."

"This is scary," Marci said, and the three pairs of eyes blinked in astonishment.

Jaine squirmed in the booth, feeling her face get even hotter. "It isn't my fault," she blurted defensively. "He has a red truck. A four-wheel drive."

"I can see where that would make a big difference," T.J. said, studying the ceiling.

"So he isn't that big a jerk," Jaine muttered. "So what? Actually, he is a jerk, but he has his good points." "And the best one is in his pants, right?" quipped Marci, who, like a honey badger, always went straight for the groin.

Luna displayed a shocking lack of decorum by making a whooping sound and saying, "Dive! Dive! Dive!" just like in a submarine war movie.

"Stop it!" Jaine hissed. "I haven't done that!"

"Oh-ho!" T.J. leaned closer. "Just what have you done?"

"Exactly one kiss, smarty and that's all."

"One kiss does not a blush make," Marci said, grinning. "Especially not on your face."

Jaine sniffed. "Obviously you've never been kissed by Sam, or you wouldn't make such an erroneous statement."

"That good, huh?"

She couldn't help the sigh that heaved out of her lungs, or the way her lips curved. "Yeah. That good."

"So how long did it last?"

"I told you, we haven't had sex! It was just a kiss." Like the Viper was just a car, and Mount Everest was just a hill. "I meant the kiss," Marci said impatiently. "How long did it last?"

Jaine drew a blank on that. She hadn't exactly timed it, and besides, there had been a lot of other stuff going on, like an impending but ultimately denied climax, that had occupied most of her attention. "I don't know. Five minutes or so, I guess."

They all sat there blinking at her. "Five minutes?" T.J. asked weakly. "One kiss lasted five minutes?" There went that damn blush again; she could feel it creeping up her face.

Luna slowly shook her head in disbelief. "I hope you're on birth control pills, because you're definitely in the red zone. He could score at any time."

"That's what he thinks, too," Jaine said, and scowled. "As it happens, I renewed my prescription yesterday." "Evidently he isn't the only one who thinks it," T.J. cracked, and broke into a big grin. "Hey, this is something to celebrate!"

"You're all acting as if I was a lost cause." "Let's just say that your social life sucked," Marci said. "It did not."

"When was the last time you had a date?"

She had her there, because Jaine knew it had been a long time, so long she couldn't say exactly when. "So I don't date much. It's by choice, not necessity. My track record in picking men isn't exactly outstanding, remember."

"So what's different about this Sam cop person?"

"A lot," Jaine said vaguely, remembering him naked. After a moment of reverie she shook herself back to reality. "Half the time I want to strangle him."

"And the other half?"

She grinned. "I want to tear his clothes off." "Sounds like the basis of a good relationship to me," Marci said. "That's certainly more than I had with Brick, and I kept him around for a year."

Jaine was relieved to have the topic shift away from Sam. How could she explain what she didn't understand herself? He was maddening, they rubbed sparks off each other, and he hadn't come home at all the night before. She should be running in the opposite direction instead of trying to plot ways to get him all for herself. "What did he say?"

"Not much, which was surprising. When Brick's mad, he's about as reasonable as a two-year-old having a tantrum." Marci propped her chin on her folded hands. "I admit, he took me off guard. I was prepared for yelling and cussing, but not hurt feelings."

"Maybe he cares more than you thought," Luna said, but even she sounded dubious.

Marci snorted. "What we had was convenient for both of us, but not exactly the affair of the century. What about you? Have you heard from Shamal?" Marci's change of subject indicated she was as ready to abandon the subject of Brick as Jaine had been to talk about someone else other than Sam.

"As a matter of fact, I did." Luna looked thoughtful. "He was… I don't know… kind of impressed with all the publicity. As if I were suddenly a more valuable person, if you know what I mean. He asked me out for dinner, instead of saying he'd stop by the way he always has before."

A little pool of silence engulfed the booth. They all looked at each other, uneasy at Shamal's sudden change of attitude.

Luna's expression was still thoughtful. "I said no. If I wasn't interesting enough for him before, then I'm not interesting enough now."

"Way to go," Jaine said, immensely relieved. They exchanged high fives all around the booth. "So what now? Is Shamal officially in the past, or are you in a holding pattern?"

"A holding pattern. But I'm not calling him again; if he wants to see me, he can do the dialing."

"But you turned him down," Marci pointed out. "I didn't tell him to get lost; I just told him no, I had other plans." She shrugged. "If we're to have any kind of relationship, the ground rules are going to have to change, meaning I get to make some of them instead of playing everything his way."

"We're a mess," Jaine said, sighing, and sought refuge in her cup of coffee.

"We're normal," T.J. corrected.

"That's what I said."

They were giggling when the waitress brought their orders and plopped the plates in front of them. Their love lives were, collectively, a disaster, but so what? They had scrambled eggs and hash browns to make them feel better.

Because it was Friday, they kept to their tradition of eating at Ernie's after work. Jaine found it difficult to believe only a week had passed since they had so lightheartedly composed the List. In a week, a lot had changed. For one thing, the atmosphere at Ernie's: when they walked in, there was a round of applause and a chorus of boos. Some women, undoubtedly the outraged feminist contingent, joined in the booing.

"Can you believe this?" T.J. muttered as they were seated. "If we were prophets, I'd say we were about to be stoned." "It was fallen women who were stoned," Luna said. "That's us, too," Marci said, and laughed. "So we get a reaction from people. So what? If anyone wants to say something to our faces, I think we can hold our own." Their usual waiter brought their usual drinks. "Hey, you guys are famous now," he said cheerfully. If he was upset by certain items on the List, he didn't show it. Of course, it was possible he had no idea what the items were. Jaine said, "Just think, we came up with the idea last Friday night, sitting at that table right over there."

"You did? Wow." He looked at the table in question. "Just wait until I tell the boss."

"Yeah, maybe he can gild the table, or something." The waiter slowly shook his head, looking doubtful. "I don't think so. Isn't that what you do to horses?" She was tired, courtesy of getting up at the ungodly hour of two, so it took her a second to make the connection. "That's geld, not 'gild'."

"Oh." Relief washed over his face. "I was wondering how you could do that to a table."

"Well, it takes four people," Jaine said. "One to hold each leg."

T.J. had her head down on the table, her shoulders shaking as she tried to stifle her mirth. Marci's eyes were looking a little wild, but she managed to give her order with only a mild shake to her voice. Luna, the most composed of them all, waited until all the orders had been taken and he had disappeared into the kitchen before she clapped her hands over her mouth and laughed until tears ran down her face.

"One for each leg," she repeated, gasping, and went off into more whoops.

Their dinner wasn't as relaxed as usual, because people kept coming up to their table and making comments, both snide and complimentary. When their orders arrived, their food was burned; evidently the cook was among the booers.

"Let's get out of here," Marci finally said in disgust. "Even if we could eat this charcoal stuff, we wouldn't have a chance to with all the interruptions."

"Do we pay for it?" Luna asked, examining the hockey puck that was supposed to have been a hamburger patty. "Normally, I'd say no," Jaine replied. "But if we make a fuss tonight, it's likely to be in the paper tomorrow morning."

Sighing, they agreed. Leaving their plates largely untouched, they paid the tab and left. They usually lingered over their meal, but this time when they left, it was just after six; the summer sun still hung low in the sky, and the heat was scorching.

They all retreated to their respective cars. Jaine started the Viper's engine and sat for a moment listening to the rumbling purr of a powerful, well-tuned machine. She turned the fan on "high" and adjusted the air vents so the cold air blew on her face.

She didn't want to go home and see the news, in case the List was featured again. Deciding to buy groceries instead of waiting until tomorrow, she turned north on Van Dyke, zooming past the GM plant on the left and resisting the urge to turn right, which would have taken her to the Warren Police Department. She didn't want to see if a red pickup truck or a battered brown Pontiac was in the parking lot. All she wanted to do was stock up on food and get home to BooBoo; she had been gone so long he had probably started on another cushion.

Jaine wasn't one who lingered over grocery shopping. She hated doing it, so she attacked a grocery store as if it were a racecourse. Piloting a buggy at high speed, she zipped through the produce department, tossing cabbage and lettuce and an assortment of fruit into the basket, then raced up and down the other aisles. She didn't cook much, because it was too much trouble for just one person, but occasionally she would prepare a roast or something similar, then eat sandwiches made from it for a week. BooBoo's cat food was a necessity, though – An arm wrapped around her waist and a deep voice said, "Miss me?"

She managed to strangle her shriek so it emerged as not much more than a squeak, but she jumped at least a foot straight up and almost crashed into a stack of Sheba cat food.

Whirling around, she quickly positioned the buggy between them and gave him a look of wide-eyed alarm. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I don't know you. You have me mixed up with someone else."

Sam scowled. Other shoppers were watching them with acute interest; at least one lady looked as if she intended to call the cops if he made one wrong move. "Very funny," he growled, and deliberately removed his jacket, revealing the holster on his belt and the big black pistol that resided in it. Since his badge was also clipped to his belt, the wide-eyed tension on aisle seven melted away as murmurings of "He's a cop" reached them. "Go away," Jaine said. "I'm busy."

"So I see. What is this, the Produce Five Hundred? I've been chasing you up and down the aisles for the last five minutes."

"No you haven't," she returned, checking her watch. "I haven't been here five minutes."

"Okay, three. I saw this red streak heading up Van Dyke and turned around to follow it, figuring it was you."

"Is your car equipped with radar?"

"I'm in my truck, not a city car."

"Then you can't prove how fast I was going." "Damn it, I wasn't going to give you a ticket," he said, annoyed. "Though if you don't slow down, I'm going to call a patrolman to do the honors."

"So you came in here just to harass me?"

"No," he said with exaggerated patience, "I came in here because I've been gone and I wanted to check in." "Gone?" she repeated, opening her eyes as wide as they would go. "I had no idea."

He ground his teeth together. She knew because she could see his jaw working. "All right, I should have called." The words sounded as if they had been ripped, painfully, from his gut.

"Really? Why is that?"

"Because we're…"

"Neighbors?" she supplied, when he couldn't seem to find the word he wanted. She was beginning to enjoy herself, at least as much as was possible when she was bleary- eyed from lack of sleep.

"Because we have this thing going." He scowled down at her, looking not at all happy about their "thing." "Thing? I don't do things."

"You'll do mine," he said under his breath, but she heard him anyway and had just opened her mouth to blast him when a kid, maybe eight years old, ran up and poked her in the ribs with a plastic laser weapon, making electric zinging noises as he repeatedly pulled the trigger. "You're dead," he said victoriously.

His mother came hurrying up, looking harassed and helpless. "Damian, stop that!" She gave him a smile that was little more than a grimace. "Don't bother the nice people."

"Shut up," he said rudely. "Can't you see they're Terrons from Vaniot?"

"I'm sorry," the mother said, trying to drag her offspring away. "Damian, come on or you'll have to have a time-out when we get home."

Jaine barely refrained from rolling her eyes. The kid poked her in the ribs again. "Ouch!"

He made those zinging noises again, taking great pleasure in her discomfort.

She plastered a big smile on her face and leaned down closer to precious Damian, then cooed in her most alienlike voice, "Oh, look, a little earthling." She straightened and gave Sam a commanding look. "Kill it." Damian's mouth fell open. His eyes went as round as quarters as he took in the big pistol on Sam's belt. From his open mouth began to issue a series of shrill noises that sounded like a fire alarm.

Sam cursed under his breath, grabbed Jaine by the arm, and began tugging her at a half-trot toward the front of the store. She managed to snag her purse from the buggy as she went past. "Hey, my groceries!" she protested. "You can spend another three minutes in here tomorrow and get them," he said with pent-up violence. "Right now I'm trying to keep you from getting arrested."

"For what?" she asked indignantly as he dragged her out of the automatic doors. People were turning to look at them, but most were following the sounds of Damian's shrieks to aisle seven.

"How about threatening to kill that brat and causing a riot?"

"I didn't threaten to loll him! I just ordered you to." She had trouble keeping up with him; her long skirt wasn't made for running.

He whirled her around the side of the building, out of sight, and plastered her against the wall. "I can't believe I missed this," he said in a goaded tone.

She glared up at him and didn't say anything. "I was in Lansing," he snarled, bending down so close his nose nearly touched hers. "Interviewing for a state job."

"You don't owe me any explanations."

He straightened and looked skyward, as if seeking help from the Almighty. She decided to give an inch. "All right, so a phone call wouldn't have been too pushy." He said something under his breath. She had a good idea what it was, but unfortunately, he wasn't paying out money for every cuss word. If he had been, she would have hit the jackpot. She grabbed his ears, pulled his head down, and kissed him. Just like that he had her pinned to the wall, his arms so tight around her she could barely breathe, but breathing wasn't number one on her list of priorities right then. Feeling him against her, tasting him – that was important. His pistol was on his belt, so she knew that wasn't what was prodding her in the stomach. She wiggled against it just to make certain. Nope, definitely not a pistol.

He was breathing hard when he lifted his head. "You pick the damnedest places," he said, looking around. "I pick? I was in there minding my own business, doing a little grocery shopping, when I was attacked by not one but two maniacs – "

"Don't you like kids?"

She blinked. "What?"

"Don't you like kids? You wanted me to kill that one."

"I like most kids," she said impatiently, "but I didn't like that one. He poked me in the ribs."

"I'm poking you in the stomach."

She gave him a sweet smile, one that made him shudder. "Yeah, but you aren't using a plastic laser gun."

"Let's get out of here," he said, looking desperate, and hustled her to her car.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Do you want coffee?" Jaine asked as she unlocked the kitchen door and led him inside. "Or iced tea?" she added, thinking a tall, cool glass would be just the ticket right now, with the scorching heat outside.

"Tea," he said, ruining her image of cops living on coffee and doughnuts. He was looking around her kitchen. "How is it you've only lived here a couple of weeks and this place already looks more lived-in than mine?" She pretended to consider the matter. "I believe it's called unpacking."

He looked up at the ceiling. "I missed this?" he muttered at the plaster, still seeking enlightenment.

Jaine sneaked several glances at him as she got two glasses from the cabinet and filled them with ice. Her blood was zinging through her veins, the way it always did when she was around, whether from anger or exhilaration or lust, or a combination of all three. Confined by her cozy kitchen, he seemed even bigger, his shoulders filling the doorway and his size dwarfing her small, made-for-four table with the inlaid ceramic tile top.

"What kind of state job were you interviewing for?"

"State police, field detective division."

Taking the pitcher of tea from the refrigerator, she poured the two glasses full. "Lemon?"

"No, just straight." He took the glass from her, his fingers brushing hers. That was enough to make her nipples pucker and stand at attention. His gaze zeroed in on her mouth. "Congratulations," he said.

She blinked at him. "Have I done something?" She hoped he wasn't referring to all the publicity over the List – oh, God, the List. She had forgotten about it. Had he read the entire thing? Of course he had.

"You haven't cussed once, and we've been together half an hour. You didn't even swear when I dragged you out of the supermarket."

"Really?" She smiled, pleased with herself. Maybe having to pay all those fines was working on her subconscious. She was still thinking a lot of swear words, but the fines didn't kick in unless she said them out loud. Progress was being made.

He tilted the glass up and drank. She watched, mesmerized, as his strong throat worked. She struggled with a violent urge to tear his clothes off. What was wrong with her? She had watched men drink all her life, and it had never before affected her like this, not even with any of her three ex-fiancés.

"More?" she asked when he drained the glass and set it down.

"No, thanks." That hot, dark gaze went over her, settled on her breasts. "You look extra spiffy today. Anything special going on?"

She wasn't going to avoid the subject, no matter how touchy it was. "We had an interview for Good Morning America this morning – at four A.M. if you can believe it! I had to get up at two," she complained, "and I've been comatose most of the day."

"The List is getting that much publicity?" he asked, surprised. "I'm afraid so," she said morosely, sitting down at the table. He didn't sit down across from her, but took the chair beside her. "I tracked it down on the Web. It was funny stuff – Ms. C." She gaped at him. "How did you know?" she demanded. He snorted. "Like I wouldn't recognize your smart-ass mouth even in print. 'Anything over eight is strictly for show-and-tell'," he quoted at her.

"I might have known you'd remember only the sex stuff."

"Sex is much on my mind these days. And just for the record – I don't have anything for show-and-tell." If he didn't, he hadn't missed it by much, Jaine thought, remembering with great fondness how he had looked in profile.

He continued, "I'm just happy I'm not in the point-and- laugh category."

Jaine shrieked with laughter and threw herself back in the chair so hard it tipped her out onto the floor. She sat there holding her ribs, which had pretty much stopped aching but now decided to resume at such rough treatment, but she couldn't stop laughing. BooBoo cautiously approached, but decided he didn't want to get within touching distance and instead sought refuge under Sam's chair.

Sam leaned down and scooped up the cat, settling him on his lap and stroking down the long, lean body. BooBoo closed his eyes and set up a buzz-saw purr. The cat purred, and Sam watched her, waiting until the gales of laughter had subsided to giggles and wheezing. She sat on the floor with her arms wrapped around her ribs and her eyes wet with tears. If she had any mascara left, it had to be running down her cheeks, she thought. "Need any help getting up?" he asked. "I should warn you that if I get my hands on you, I may have trouble taking them off again."

"I can manage, thanks." Carefully, and not without some difficulty because of her long skirt, she got to her feet and wiped her eyes with a napkin.

"Good. I'd hate to disturb… what's his name? BooBoo? What the hell kind of name for a cat is BooBoo?"

"Don't blame me; blame my mother."

'A cat should have a name it can live up to. Naming him BooBoo is like naming your son Alice. BooBoo shoulda been named Tiger, or Romeo – "

Jaine shook her head. "Romeo's out."

"You mean he's –?"

She nodded.

"In that case, I guess BooBoo's a pretty good name for him, though BooHoo would be more appropriate." She had to hold her ribs really, really tight to keep from bursting into more laughter. "You're such a guy."

"What the hell did you want me to be, a ballerina?" No, she didn't want him to be anything except what he was. No one else had ever made excitement fizz along her veins like champagne, and that was quite an achievement, considering that a week ago they hadn't exchanged anything except insults. Only two days had passed since their first kiss, two days that had seemed like an eternity because there hadn't been any more lasses until she grabbed his ears at the supermarket and pulled him down to her level.

"How's your egg?" he asked, lids heavy over his dark eyes, and she knew his thoughts weren't far from hers. "History," she replied.

"Then let's go to bed."

"You think all you have to do is say, 'Let's go to bed,' and I'll fall over on my back?" she asked indignantly. "No, I hoped I'd have a chance to do a bit more than that before you fell over on your back."

"I'm not falling anywhere."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm having my period." Funny, she couldn't remember ever saying that to a man before, especially without even a twinge of self-consciousness. His brows snapped down. "You're what?" he asked in growing anger.

"Having my period. Menstruating. Maybe you've heard about it. It's when – "

"I have two sisters; I think I know a little about periods. And one of the things I know is that the egg is fertile roughly in the middle of the cycle, not close to the end!" Busted. Jaine pursed her lips. "Okay, so I lied. There's always a slight chance the timing is off, and I wasn't willing to take that chance, all right?"

It evidently wasn't all right. "You stopped me," he groaned, closing his eyes as if he were in acute pain. "I was damn near dying, and you stopped me."

"You make it sound on a level with treason." He opened his eyes, glaring at her. "What about now?" He was about as romantic as a rock, she thought, so why was she so turned on? "Your idea of foreplay is probably @

"You awake?' " she grumbled.

He made an impatient gesture. "What about now?" "No."

"Jeez!" He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes again. "What's wrong with now?"

"I told you, I'm having my period."

"So?"

"So… no."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't want to!" she yelled. "Give me a break!" He sighed. "I get it. PMS."

"PMS is before, you idiot."

"That's what you say. Ask any man and you'll hear a different story."

"Like they're experts," she scoffed.

"Honey, the only experts in PMS are men. That's why men are so good at fighting wars; they learned Escape and Evade at home."

She thought about throwing a frying pan at him, but BooBoo was in the line of fire, and anyway, she would have to find a frying pan first.

He grinned at the expression on her face. "Know why PMS is called PMS?"

"Don't you dare," she threatened. "Only women can tell PMS jokes."

"Because 'mad cow disease' was already taken." Forget the frying pan. She looked around for a knife. "Get out of my house."

He put BooBoo on the floor and stood up, evidently ready to Escape and Evade. "Settle down," he said, putting the chair between them.

"Settle down, my ass! Damn it, where's my butcher knife?" She looked around in frustration. If she had only lived here longer, she would know where she had put everything! He came out from behind the chair, around the table, and had a firm grip on both her wrists before she could remember which drawer held her cutting knives. "You owe me fifty cents," he said, grinning down at her as he pulled her against him.

"Don't hold your breath! I told you I wouldn't pay when it's your fault." She blew her bangs out of her eyes so she could glare at him more effectively.

He bent his head and kissed her.

Time stood still again. He must have released her wrists, because her arms slid around his neck. His mouth was hot and hungry, and he kissed the way no man should kiss and still be allowed to run free. His scent was as warm and musky as sex, filling her lungs, permeating her skin. He put one big hand on her bottom and lifted her off her feet, aligning their bodies more completely, groin to groin. The long skirt hampered her, preventing her from wrapping her legs around him. Jaine arched in frustration, almost ready to cry. "We can't," she whispered when he raised his mouth a fraction of an inch.

"We can do other things," he murmured in reply, sitting down with her across his lap, tilted back across his supporting arm. Deftly he slipped his hand inside the scooped neckline of her sweater.

She closed her eyes in delight as his rough palm scraped over her nipple. He exhaled, a long, sighing sound; then it was as if they both held their breath as his hand shaped itself over her breast, learning her size and softness, the texture of her skin.

In silence he withdrew his hand and pulled the sweater off over her head, then deftly unzipped her bra and pushed it off her shoulders to fall to the floor.

She lay half-naked across his lap, her breath coming fast and shallow as she watched him looking at her. She knew her own breasts, but what were they like from a man's point of view? They weren't big, but were firm and upright. Her nipples were small and pinkish-brown, velvety soft and delicate compared to the rough fingertip he used to lightly circle one, making the aureole pucker even more tightly.

Pleasure speared through her, making her clench her legs tightly together to contain it.

He lifted her, arching her even more across his arm, and bent his head to her breasts.

He was gentle, totally without haste. She was stunned by his caution now, given his rapacious kisses. He nuzzled his face against the underside of her breasts, kissing the curves, licking gently at her nipples until they were reddened and so tight they couldn't possibly get any tighter. When he finally began sucking her with slow, firm pressure, she was so ready it was as if he had touched her with a live wire. She couldn't control her body, couldn't stop herself from arching wildly in his arms; her heart was thundering, her pulse racing so fast she was dizzy. She was helpless; she would have done virtually anything he wanted. When he stopped, it was by his own willpower, not hers. She could feel him shaking, his strong, powerful body quaking against her as if he were chilled, though his skin was hot to the touch. He sat her upright and pressed his forehead to hers, his eyes squeezed shut and his hands roughly stroking her hips, her bare back. "If I ever get inside you," he said in a strained tone, "I'll last, like, two seconds. Maybe."

She was crazy. She had to be, because two seconds of Sam sounded better than anything else she could bring to mind right now. She stared at him with glazed eyes and ripe, swollen mouth. She wanted those two seconds. She wanted them bad.

He looked down at her breasts and made a sound halfway between a whine and a groan. Muttering a curse, he leaned down and snagged her sweater from the floor, pressing it to her chest. "Maybe you'd better put this back on."

"Maybe I should," she said, and her voice sounded drugged even to herself. Her arms didn't seem to be working; they remained twined around Sam's neck. "Either you put on the sweater, or we go to the bedroom." That wasn't much of a threat, she thought, when every cell in her body was saying "Yes! Yes! Yes!" As long as she could keep her mouth from saying it, she was holding her own, but she was beginning to have serious doubts about holding him off for even a couple of days, much less a couple of weeks the way she had planned. Torturing him didn't sound like nearly as much fun as it had before, because now she knew just how much she would also be torturing herself.

He stuffed her arms inside the sweater and pulled it over her head, jerking the fabric into place. The sweater was inside out, she saw, but who cared? She didn't. "You're trying to kill me," he accused. "I'm going to make you pay, too."

"How?" she asked with interest, leaning against him. The same thing that was wrong with her arms was also wrong with her spine; it wouldn't hold her upright. "Instead of that half hour of thrusting time you claim you want, I'm going to stop at twenty-nine minutes." She snickered. "I thought you were holding out for two seconds."

"That's just the first time. The second time we're going to set the sheets on fire."

It behooved her, she thought, to get off his lap. His erection was like an iron bar prodding her hip, and talking about sex wasn't helping any. If she really, really didn't want to go to bed with him now, she should get up. But she really, really did want to go to bed with him, and only a small portion of her brain was still cautious. That small portion, however, was insistent. She had learned the hard way not to assume happily-ever-after would happen for her, and just because they were hot for each other didn't mean there was anything between them other than sex.

She cleared her throat. "I should get up, shouldn't I?"

"If you have to move at all, do it slowly."

"That close, huh?"

"Just call me Mount Etna."

"Who's Edna?"

He laughed, as she had intended, but the sound was strained. Gingerly she eased off his lap. He winced and awkwardly climbed to his feet. The front of his pants looked deformed, the way it was tented out. Jaine tried not to stare.

"Tell me about your family," she blurted.

"What?" He looked as if he was having trouble following the change of subject.

"Your family. Tell me about them."

"Why?"

"To get your mind off… you know." She indicated the "you know" in question. "You said you have two sisters."

"And four brothers."

She blinked. "Seven. Wow."

"Yeah. Unfortunately, my oldest sister, Dorothy, was the third child. My folks kept trying to have another girl so she wouldn't be the only one. They had three more boys trying to get Doro a sister."

"Where are you in the lineup?"

"Second."

"Are you a close family?"

"Fairly close. We all live here in the state except for Angie, the baby. She goes to college in Chicago."

The diversion had worked; he looked a little more relaxed than he had a moment before, though his gaze still had a tendency to settle on her braless breasts. To give him something to do, she poured another glass of iced tea and handed it to him.

"Have you ever been married?"

"Once, about ten years ago."

"What happened?"

"Nosy, aren't you?" he said. "She didn't like being a cop's wife; I didn't like being a bitch's husband. End of story. She split for the West Coast as soon as the papers were signed. What about you?"

"Nosy, aren't you?" she threw back at him, then hesitated. "Do you think I'm a bitch?" God knows she hadn't always been on her best behavior with him. Come to think of it, she'd never been on her best behavior with him. "Nah. You're damn scary, but you aren't a bitch."

"Gee, thanks," she muttered; then, because fair was fair, she said, "No, I've never been married, but I've been engaged three times."

He paused with the glass halfway to his mouth and gave her a startled look. "Three times?"

She nodded. "I guess I'm not very good at the man- woman stuff."

His gaze went back to her breasts. "Oh, I don't know. You're doing pretty good at keeping me interested."

"So maybe you're a mutant." She shrugged helplessly. "My second fiance decided he was still in love with an ex- girlfriend, who I guess wasn't all that ex, but I don't know what happened with the other two."

He snorted. "They were probably scared."

"Scared!" For some reason, that hurt, just a little. She felt her lower lip wobble. "I'm not that bad, am I?" "Worse," he said cheerfully. "You're hell on wheels. You're just lucky I like hot rods. Now, if you'll put your clothes on right side out, I'll take you out to dinner. How does a burger sound?"

"I'd rather have Chinese," she said as she went down the short hall to her bedroom.

"Figures."

He muttered the reply, but she heard him anyway, and she was smiling as she closed her bedroom door and pulled off the red sweater. Since he liked hot rods, she was going to show him just how fast she could go. The problem was, he had to catch her.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Corin couldn't sleep. He got out of bed and turned on the light in the bathroom, checking in the mirror to make certain he was still there. The face that stared back at him was that of a stranger, but the eyes were familiar. He had seen those eyes look back at him for most of his life, but sometimes he was gone and they didn't see him. An array of yellow medicine bottles were lined up, according to size, on the vanity so he would see them every day when he got up and remember to take his medication. It had been several days now – he couldn't remember exactly how many – since he had taken the pills. He could see himself now, but when he took the pills, his thinking got clouded and he faded away in the mist. It was better, they had told him, if he stayed in the mist, hidden away. The pills worked so well that sometimes he even forgot he was there. But there was always a sense of something wrong, as if the universe were askew, and now he knew what it was. The pills might hide him, but they couldn't make him go away.

He hadn't been able to sleep since he stopped taking the pills. Oh, he dozed, but real sleep eluded him. Sometimes he felt as if he were shaking apart inside, though when he held out his hands, they were steady. Was there something addictive in the pills? Had they lied to him? He didn't want to be a drug addict; addiction was a sign of weakness, his mother had always told him. He couldn't be addicted because he couldn't be weak. He had to be strong, he had to be perfect.

He heard an echo of her voice in his head. "My perfect little man," she had called him, stroking his cheek. Whenever he failed her, whenever he was less than perfect, her wrath had been so overwhelming his world would threaten to come apart at the seams. He would do anything to keep from disappointing his mother, but he had kept an awful secret from her: sometimes he had deliberately transgressed, just a little, so she would punish him. Even now the thought of those punishments sent a thrill through him. She would have been so disappointed if she had guessed his secret delight, so he had always struggled to keep his pleasure hidden.

Sometimes he missed her so much. She always knew just what to do.

She would know, for instance, what to do about those four bitches who mocked him with their list for being perfect. As if they knew what perfection was! He knew. His mother had known. He had always tried so hard to be her perfect little man, her perfect son, but he had always fallen short, even on those times when he wasn't misbehaving just a little, on purpose, so she would punish him. He had always known there was an imperfection in him that he would never be able to correct, that he always disappointed his mother on a basic level just by being.

They thought they were so smart, the four bitches – he liked the way that sounded, the Four Bitches, like some perverted Roman deity. The Furies, the Graces, the Bitches. They tried to play it cute, hiding their identities by using A, B, C, and D instead of their names. There was one in particular he hated, the one who said, "If a man isn't perfect, he should try harder." What did they know? Had they ever tried to measure up to a standard so impossibly high only perfection could meet it, and fallen short every day of their lives? Had they?

Did they know what it was like for him to try and try, yet know deep inside he was going to fail, until finally he learned to enjoy the punishment because that was the only way he could live with it? Did they know? Bitches like them didn't deserve to live.

He could feel that inner shaking again, and he wrapped his arms around himself, holding himself together. It was their fault he couldn't sleep. He couldn't stop thinking about them, about what they said.

Which one was it? Was it that bleached blonde, Marci Dean, who swished her ass in front of all the men like she was some goddess and they were nothing but dogs who would come running whenever she wanted? He had heard she would sleep with anyone who asked, but that most of the time she beat them to the punch. His mother would have been appalled at such trashy behavior. "Some people don't deserve to live."

He could hear her whisper inside his head, the way she often did when he didn't take the pills. He wasn't the only one who disappeared when he took the medication the way they instructed; Mother disappeared, too. Maybe they went away together. He didn't know, but he hoped so. Maybe she punished him for taking the pills and making her disappear. Maybe that was why he took the pills, so he and Mother could go away and… No, that wasn't right. When he took the pills, it was as if he didn't exist. He felt the thought slipping away from him. All he knew was that he didn't want to take the pills. He wanted to find out which bitch was which. That sounded funny so he repeated it to himself, and silently laughed. Which bitch was which. That was good.

He knew where they all lived. He had gotten their addresses from their files at work. It was so easy, for anyone who knew how, and of course no one had questioned him.

He would go to her house and find out if she was the one who had said that awful, stupid thing. He was pretty sure it was Marci. He wanted to teach that stupid, vicious bitch a lesson. Mother would be so pleased.

Marci was a night owl, even during the workweek. She didn't need much sleep, so even though she didn't party nearly as hearty as she had when she was younger – say, in her thirties – she seldom went to bed before one A.M. She watched old movies on television; she read three or four books a week; she had even developed a fondness for cross-stitching. She had to laugh at herself whenever she picked up her cross-stitch hoop, because this had to be proof the party girl was getting old. But she could empty out her mind when she was working cross-stitch. Who needed meditation to gain inner serenity when she could get the same effect by duplicating with needle and thread a small colored pattern of Xs? At least when she had completed a pattern, she had something to show for it.

In her time she had tried a lot of stuff that people probably wouldn't expect of her, she thought. Meditation. Yoga. Self-hypnotism. Finally she had decided a beer worked just as well and her insides were as serene as they were going to get. She was what she was. If anyone didn't like it, screw 'em.

Usually, on a Friday night, she and Brick would hit a couple of bars, do some dancing, drink a few beers. Brick was a fine dancer, which was surprising because he looked like someone who would rather die than get on a dance floor, kind of a cross between a truck driver and a biker. He wasn't much of a conversationalist, but he sure had some moves.

She had thought about going out without him, but the idea wasn't very exciting. With all the hoopla this week about that damn List, she was a little tired. She wanted to settle down with a book and rest. Maybe tomorrow night she'd go out.

She missed Brick. She missed his presence, anyway, if not him in particular. When he wasn't in the sack or on a dance floor, he was pretty boring. He slept; he drank beer; he watched television. That was it. He wasn't a great lover, either, but he sure was an eager one. He was never too tired and was always willing to try anything she wanted.

Still, Brick was just further proof she wasn't any good at picking men. At least she wasn't stupid enough any longer to marry them. Three times was enough, thank you. Jaine fretted because she'd been engaged three times, but at least she hadn't actually married three times. Besides, Jaine just hadn't met anyone yet who could hold his own with her. Maybe that cop… Hell, probably not. Life had taught Marci that things seldom worked out just right. There was always a bump in the road, a glitch in the software.

It was after midnight when the doorbell rang. She placed a bookmark between the pages so she wouldn't lose her place and got up from the couch where she had been sprawled. Who on earth could that be? It wouldn't be Brick returning, because he had a key.

That reminded her: she needed to get her locks replaced. She was too cautious to simply get her key back and assume he hadn't made a duplicate. So far he hadn't displayed any thieving habits, but one never knew what a man might do when he was pissed at a woman. Because she was cautious, she looked through the peephole. She frowned and stepped back to unlock the door and remove the chain. "Hey," she said, opening the door. "Is something wrong?"

"No," said Corin, and hit her in the head with the hammer he had been holding against his leg.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

On Monday, the elevator sign read: XEROX AND WURLITZER HAVE ANNOUNCED THEY WILL MERGE TO MARKET REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS.

Jaine was still chuckling when the elevator doors opened. She felt as if she were fizzing on the inside, a direct result of a weekend filled with Sam. She still hadn't been filled with Sam, but she had started on the birth control pills that morning. Not that she had told him she was going to, of course. Frustration was driving her crazy, but anticipation was lighting up her whole world. She couldn't remember ever feeling so alive, as if every cell in her body were awake and singing.

Derek Kellman stepped forward to exit the elevator as she was getting on. "Hi, Kellman," she said cheerfully. "How're things going?"

He turned bright red, and his Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. "Uh – okay," he mumbled as he ducked his head and hurried off the elevator.

Jaine smilingly shook her head and punched the button for the third floor. She couldn't imagine Kellman getting up enough nerve to grab Marci's ass; she and everyone else in the building would have paid good money to have seen it.

As usual, she was the first one in the office; she liked getting a jump on Monday mornings, with all the payroll to handle. If she could just keep her mind on the job, she was off to a good start.

The List thing was dying down, maybe. Everyone who wanted an interview had one, except for People magazine. She hadn't watched television that morning, so she had no idea what snippets of their Friday morning interview actually made it on air. Someone would be certain to tell her, though, and if she ever felt the urge to watch it, which wasn't likely, at least one of the other three would have taped the program.

Funny how she didn't much care. How could she worry about the List with Sam occupying so much of her time and thoughts? He was maddening, but he was funny and sexy and she wanted him.

After eating dinner together Friday night, he had awakened her at six-thirty Saturday morning by spraying her bedroom window with the water hose, then inviting her out to help him wash his truck. Figuring she owed him, since he had washed the Viper, she quickly pulled on some clothes, put on some coffee, and joined him outside. He hadn't wanted to just wash the truck; he wanted it waxed and buffed, all the chrome cleaned and polished, the interior vacuumed, all the windows washed. After two hours of intense labor, the truck had gleamed. He had then pulled it into his garage and asked what she was cooking him for breakfast.

They had spent the day together, arguing and laughing, watching a ball game on television, and were getting ready to go out for dinner when his beeper went off. He used her phone to call in, and before she knew it, he was out the door with a quick lass and a "I don't know when I'll be back."

He was a cop, she reminded herself. As long as he remained a cop – and he seemed set on making a career of it, given his interview with the state police – his life would be a series of interruptions and urgent summons. Broken dates would come with the package. She had thought about it and decided what the hell, she was tough, she could handle it. But if he were in danger… she didn't know if she could handle that nearly as well. Was he still working on that task force? Was it something he was permanently assigned to, or were things like that temporary? She knew so little about law enforcement, but she would definitely be finding out more.

He had returned Sunday afternoon, tired, grumpy, and not inclined to talk about what he'd been doing. Instead of badgering him with questions, she let him nap in her big easy chair while she read, curled up on one of the two remaining cushions on the couch.

Being with him like that, not on a date or anything, just being, had felt somehow… right. Watching him sleep. Enjoying the sound of his breathing. And not daring, not yet, to put the L-word to what she was feeling. It was too soon, and she was still too wary from past experiences to blindly trust that this excitement when she was with him would last forever. Her wariness was also the real basis for her reluctance to sleep with him. Yeah, frustrating him was fun and she enjoyed the heat in his eyes when he looked at her, but deep down she was still afraid to let him get too close to her. Maybe next week. "Hey, Jaine!" She looked up as Dominica Flores stuck her head in the door, her eyebrows raised in query.

"I just caught part of the thing on television this morning; I had to leave before it was finished, but I set the VCR. It was so cool! You looked hot, really hot. Everyone looked good, y'know, but, wow, you were great."

"I didn't see it," Jaine said.

"Really? Wow, if I were on national television, I'd stay out of work to watch myself."

Not if you were as sick of the whole thing as I am, Jaine thought. She managed a smile anyway.

At eight-thirty Luna called. "Have you heard from Marci?" she asked. "She hasn't come to work yet, but when I called her at home, there wasn't an answer."

"No, I haven't talked to her since Friday."

"It isn't like her to miss work." Luna sounded worried. She and Marci were pretty tight, surprisingly so considering the gap between their ages. "And she didn't call in late or sick or anything."

That really wasn't like Marci. She hadn't reached her position as head of accounting by being unreliable. Jaine frowned; now she was worried. "Have you tried her cell phone?"

"It isn't on."

The first thought that sprang to Jaine's mind was that there had been a traffic accident. The Detroit traffic was horrendous during rush hour. "I'll call around and see if I can find her," she said, not voicing her sudden concern to Luna.

"Okay. Let me know."

As she hung up, Jaine tried to think of who to call to find out if there had been a traffic accident somewhere on the freeway between Sterling Heights and Hammerstead. And did Marci come down Van Dyke to hit I-696 or avoid Van Dyke and take one of the Mile roads over to Troy where she could pick up I-75?

Sam would know whom to call.

Quickly she looked up the number of the Warren Police Department, dialed it, and asked for Detective Donovan. Then she was put on hold. She waited impatiently, tapping a pen against the desktop, for several minutes. Finally the voice came back to say that Detective Donovan wasn't available, would she like to leave a message? Jaine hesitated. She hated to bother him for something that could easily turn out to be nothing, but she didn't think anyone else at the department would take her concern seriously. So a friend was half an hour late to work; that wasn't generally cause enough to call out the troops. Sam might not take her seriously either, but he would at least make an effort to find out something. "Do you have his pager number?" she finally asked. "It's important." It was important to her, though it might not be to them. "What does this concern?"

Irritated, she wondered if women regularly called Sam at work. "I'm one of his snitches," she said, crossing her fingers at the lie. "Then you should have his pager number."

"Oh, for God's sake! Someone could be hurt or dead – "

She caught herself. "Okay, so I'm pregnant, and I thought he'd like to know."

The voice laughed. "Is this Jaine?"

Oh, my God, he'd been talking about her! Her face flamed. "Um – yes," she mumbled. "Sorry."

"Not a problem. He said if you ever called to make sure you got in touch with him."

Yeah, but how had he described her? She refrained from asking and jotted down his pager number. "Thanks," she said. "You're welcome. Uh – about this pregnancy thing…"

"I lied," she said, and tried to work up a smidgen of shame in her tone. She didn't think she succeeded, because the woman laughed.

"You go, girl," said the woman, and hung up, leaving Jaine to wonder exactly what she meant.

She pressed the disconnect button on her desk phone, then dialed Sam's pager. It was one of the numerical pagers, so she left her number. Since it wasn't a number he would recognize, she wondered how long it would take him to return her call. In the meantime she called accounting. "Has Marci arrived yet?"

"No," was the worried reply. "We haven't heard from her."

"This is Jaine, extension three-six-two-one. If she comes in, tell her to call me immediately."

"Will do."

It was nine-thirty before her phone rang again. She snatched up the receiver, hoping Marci had finally shown up. "Jaine Bright."

"I hear we're going to be parents." Sam's deep voice purred over the telephone line.

Damn blabbermouth! she thought. "I had to say something. She didn't believe I was a snitch."

"Lucky I warned everyone about you," he said, then asked, "What's up?"

"Nothing, I hope. My friend Marci – "

"Marci Dean, one of the infamous List Ladies?" She might have known he'd have the details on all of them. "She hasn't come in to work, hasn't called, isn't answering her home phone or cell phone. I'm afraid she might have been in an accident on the way to work, but I don't know who to contact to find out. Can you steer me in the right direction?"

"No problem. I'll get in touch with our traffic division and get them to check reports. Let's see, she lives in Sterling Heights, doesn't she?"

"Yes." Quickly Jaine gave him the address, then paused as another awful thought struck her. "Sam… her boyfriend was really upset about the List. He left Thursday night, but he might have come back."

There was a slight pause; then his tone turned brisk and businesslike. "I'll contact both the sheriff's department and the Sterling Heights P.D. have her place checked out. It's probably nothing, but it won't hurt to be certain."

"Thanks," she whispered.

Sam didn't like what he was thinking, but he'd been a cop too long to write off Jaine's concern as overreacting. An irate boyfriend – one with a wounded ego, at that, over that damn List – and a missing woman were ingredients in far too many incidents of violence. Maybe Ms. Dean's car had broken down, but maybe not. Jaine wasn't the type to panic over nothing, and she had definitely been afraid. Maybe she had some feminine intuition going there, but he didn't discount that, either. Hell, his mom had eyes in the back of her head and had always, without fail, been waiting up for him and his brothers whenever they had been up to mischief. To this day he didn't know how she had known, but he accepted it nevertheless. He placed two calls, the first to the Sterling Heights P.D. the next to a pal in traffic who could check for victims in any morning traffic accident. The Sterling Heights sergeant he spoke to said they would immediately send a car to check out Ms. Dean's residence, so he held off on calling the sheriff's department. He left his cell phone number with both contacts.

His pal in traffic checked in first. "No major accidents this morning," he said. "A few fender benders is all, and a guy dumped his motorcycle in the middle of Gratiot Avenue, but that's it."

"Thanks for checking," Sam said.

"Any time."

At ten-fifteen, his cell phone rang again. It was the Sterling Heights sergeant. "You called it, Detective," he said, sounding weary.

"She's dead?"

"Yeah. It's pretty brutal. You got a name for that boyfriend? None of the neighbors are at home for us to ask, and I think we need to have a little talk with him."

"I can get it. My lady friend is – was – Ms. Dean's best friend."

"Appreciate the help."

Sam knew he was treading on someone else's territory, but he figured since he had tipped them to the scene, the sergeant would cut him some slack. "Can you give me any details?"

The sergeant paused. "What land of cell phone are you using?"

"Digital."

"Secure?"

"Until the hackers figure out a way to get the signal."

"Okay. He used a hammer on her. Left it at the scene. We might get some prints off it, might not."

Sam winced. A hammer did a god-awful amount of damage.

"Not much of her face is left, plus she was stabbed multiple times. And she was sexually attacked." If the boyfriend had left his semen behind, he was nailed. "Any semen?"

"Don't know yet. The M.E. will have to do tests. He – ah – did her with the hammer."

Jesus. Sam took a deep breath. "Okay. Thanks, Sergeant."

"Appreciate the help. Your lady friend – is she who you intend to ask about the boyfriend?"

"Yeah. She called me because she was worried when Ms. Dean didn't show up for work this morning."

"Can you just ask her about the boyfriend, and stall her on the rest?"

Sam snorted. "I'd have a better chance of stalling sundown."

"One of those, huh? Can she keep it quiet? We're pretty sure this is Ms. Dean, but we haven't made a positive I.D. yet, and the family hasn't been contacted."

"I'll get her to leave work. She's going to be pretty upset." He wanted to be with her when he told her, anyway. "Okay. And, Detective – if we can't locate any family locally, we may need your friend to identify the body."

"You have my number," Sam said quietly. He sat for a minute after they hung up. He didn't have to imagine the gory details; he had seen too many murder scenes in all their bloody reality. He knew what a hammer or a baseball bat could do to the human head. He knew what multiple stab wounds looked like. And, like the sergeant, he knew that this murder had been perpetrated by someone who knew the victim because the attack had been personal; the face had been attacked. The multiple stab wounds were indicative of rage. And since most female murder victims were killed by someone they knew, usually the husband or boyfriend, or the ex-whatever, the odds were overwhelming that Ms. Dean's boyfriend was the killer. He took a deep breath and dialed Jaine's number again. When she answered, he said, "Do you know Marci's boyfriend's name?"

She audibly inhaled. "Is she all right?"

"I don't know anything yet," he lied. "Her boyfriend –?"

"Oh. His name is Brick Geurin." She spelled the last name for him.

"Is 'Brick' his real name or a nickname?"

"I don't know. 'Brick' is all I ever heard her call him."

"Okay, that's enough. I'll get back with you when I hear something. Oh – want to meet me for lunch?"

"Sure. Where?"

She still sounded scared, but she was holding together the way he had known she would. "I'll pick you up, if you can get me through the gate."

"No problem. Twelve?"

He checked his watch. Ten-thirty-five. "Can you make it earlier, say eleven-fifteen or so?" That would just give him time to get to Hammerstead.

Maybe she knew, maybe she caught on then. "I'll meet you downstairs."

She was waiting for him at the front of the building when the guard let him through the gate. She was wearing another of those long, lean skirts that looked like a million bucks on her, which meant there was no way she could climb into his truck without help. He got out and walked around to open the door for her. Her eyes were anxious as she studied his expression. He knew he was wearing his cop face, as emotionless as a mask, but she went white. He put his hands around her slender waist and lifted her into the truck, then walked back around to get behind the wheel.

A tear slid down Jaine's cheek. "Tell me," she said, her voice choked.

He sighed, then reached out and drew her into his arms. "I'm so sorry," he said against her hair.

She clutched his shirt. He could feel her shaking, and held her even tighter. "She's dead, isn't she," she said in a trembling whisper, and it wasn't a question. She knew.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jaine had cried so much her eyes were swollen almost shut. Sam had simply held her through the initial storm of weeping, parked in front of Hammerstead; then when she regained a bit of control, he asked, "Can you eat anything?"

She shook her head. "No." Her voice was thick. "I need to tell Luna… and T.J. – "

"Not yet, honey. Once you tell them, it'll be all over the building; then someone will call the newspaper or a radio or television station, and it'll be all over the news. Her family hasn't been notified yet, and they don't need to hear it that way."

"She doesn't have much family." Jaine fished a tissue out of her purse, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "She has a sister in Saginaw, and I think an elderly aunt and uncle in Florida. That's all I ever heard her mention."

"Do you know her sister's name?"

"Cheryl. I don't know her last name."

"It's probably in an address book at her house. I'll tell them to look for a Cheryl in Saginaw." He dialed a number on his cell phone, and spoke quietly to whoever answered on the other end, imparting the information about Marci's sister.

"I need to go home," Jaine said, staring through the windshield. She reached for the door handle, but Sam stopped her, holding her in place with a firm hand on her arm.

"No way are you driving right now," he said. "If you want to go home, I'll take you."

"But my car – "

"Isn't going anywhere. It's in a secure place. If you need to go anywhere, I'll drive you."

"But you might have to leave."

"I'll handle it," he said. "You aren't driving." If she hadn't been so shattered, she would have argued with him, but tears welled again and she knew she couldn't see to drive. Neither could she could go back inside; she couldn't handle facing anyone right now, couldn't handle the inevitable questions without breaking down. "I have to let the office know I'm going home," she said.

"Can you handle it, or do you want me to do it?" "I can," she said, her voice trembling. "Just… not right now."

"Okay. Fasten your seat belt."

Obediently she buckled the belt around her and sat deathly still as Sam put the truck in gear and negotiated the freeway traffic. He drove silently, not intruding on her grief while she tried to accept that Marci was gone. "You – you think Brick did it, don't you?"

"He'll be questioned," Sam said neutrally. At this point, Geurin would be the number one suspect, but the evidence would have to support it. Even while you played the odds, you had to always be aware that the truth could go against the percentages. Who knows? They might find out Ms. Dean had been seeing someone else, too. Jaine began crying again. She put her hands over her face and sat hunched over, her shoulders shaking. "I can't believe this is happening," she managed to say, then wondered dully how many millions of other people said exactly the same thing during a crisis.

"I know, honey."

He did know, she realized. In his job, he probably saw way too many scenes of this sort.

"H-how did –? I mean, what happened?"

Sam hesitated, reluctant to tell her Marci had been both bludgeoned and stabbed. He didn't know the exact cause of death, hadn't seen the crime scene, so he didn't know if she had died from head trauma or if she had died from the stab wounds.

"I don't know all the details," he finally said. "I know she was stabbed. I don't know the time of death or anything." Those three statements were true, without being anywhere close to the whole truth.

"Stabbed," Jaine repeated, and closed her eyes as if trying to visualize the crime.

"Don't," he said.

She opened her eyes and looked questioningly at him. "You were trying to imagine what happened, how she looked, if it hurt," he said, more harshly than he intended. "Don't."

She took a deep breath, and he expected her to lash out at him, transferring the focus of her grief and anger to him, but instead she nodded, trusting that he knew best. "I'll try, but – how do I not think about it?"

"Think about her instead," he said, because he knew she would anyway. It was part of the grieving process. She tried to say something, her throat working, but tears welled up again, and she settled for a jerky nod. She didn't say anything else all the way home to Warren. She felt old as she walked across their driveways to her house. Sam went with her, his arm around her, and she was grateful for his support as she ponderously climbed the steps to the kitchen door. BooBoo came meowing, tail twitching, as if asking why she was home so early. She leaned down to scratch behind his ears, taking comfort in the warmth of the sinuous body and the softness of his fur. She put her purse on the table and sank down in one of the kitchen chairs, holding BooBoo on her lap and stroking him while Sam called his sergeant and carried on a quiet conversation. She tried not to think about Marci, not yet. She did think about Luna and T.J. and the anxiety they must feel because they hadn't yet heard from Marci. She hoped Marci's sister was contacted soon, because when she reported off for the rest of the day, her friends would know something was dreadfully wrong. If they called here to check on her, she didn't know what she would say or if she could even manage to talk to them.

Sam set a glass of tea in front of her. "Drink it," he said. "You've leaked enough to be dehydrated."

Impossibly, that earned a shaky smile. He kissed the top of her head, then sat down beside her with his own glass of tea.

She put BooBoo down, sniffed, and blotted her eyes. "Exactly what did you tell everyone at the department about me?" she asked, just for something to talk about. He tried for an innocent look. On that rough-hewn face, it didn't work very well.

"Nothing much. Just that if you called, to tell you how to get in touch with me. I should have thought to give you my pager number anyway."

"Nice try," she commented.

"Did it work?"

"Nope."

"Okay, I told them you cuss like a sailor – " "I do not!"

" – have the sweetest ass this side of the Rocky Mountains, and if you called, to get in touch with me pronto because I've been trying to get you into bed and you might be calling to say yes."

He was trying to cheer her up, she thought. She felt her chin wobble. "That's so sweet," she managed to say, and burst into tears again. She hugged herself, rocking back and forth. This outburst was violent but short, as if mentally she couldn't sustain such anguish for a long period of time.

Sam scooped her onto his lap and held her head against his shoulder. "I told them you were special," he murmured, "and that if you called, I wanted to talk to you no matter where I was or what I was doing."

That was probably a lie, too, she thought, but it was as sweet as the other one. She gulped and managed to say, "Even if you're doing your task force stuff?" He paused. "Maybe not then."

Her head was aching from crying so much, and her face felt hot. She wanted very much to ask him to make love to her now, but she swallowed the words. As much as she needed the comfort and closeness, the affirmation of life, she wouldn't feel right; their first time shouldn't be under such circumstances. Instead she snuggled her face against his neck and inhaled his warm male scent, taking what comfort she could from his closeness. "What exactly does a task force do?"

"Depends. Task forces are formed for different reasons."

"What does your task force do?"

"It's a multidepartment violent crimes task force. We apprehend violent criminals."

She didn't like the sound of that. She was more comfortable thinking of him asking questions, writing stuff down in a little notebook; in short, detecting. Apprehending violent criminals sounded as if he was breaking down doors and stuff like that, and facing mean people who were likely to shoot at him.

"I want to ask you some questions about that," she said, lifting her head to frown at him. "But not right now. Later." He blew out a relieved breath.

He held her on his lap for quite a while. He held her close while she called the office and reported off for the rest of the day. She managed to keep her voice even, but Mr. de Wynter wasn't in and she had to talk to Gina, who was full of questions and also reported that both Luna and T.J. had called several times.

"I'll call them back," Jaine said, and hung up. Miserably she buried her face against Sam's shoulder again. "How long do I have to dodge them?"

"At least until they aren't at work. I'll check with the sergeant at Sterling Heights to see if her sister has been contacted yet. And just don't answer your phone; anyone who needs me will either page me or call on my cell phone."

Eventually she left the comfort of his lap and went to the bathroom to wash her face with cold water. She peered at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were red, and her entire face was puffy from crying; she looked like hell, and didn't care. Wearily she changed into jeans and a T-shirt, and took two aspirin for her pounding head.

She was sitting on the side of the bed when Sam came looking for her. He loomed in the doorway, big and masculine and utterly comfortable even in the feminine environs of her bedroom. He sat down beside her. "You look tired. Why don't you take a nap?"

She was tired, almost overwhelmingly so, but at the same time she didn't think she could sleep.

"At least lie down," he said, seeing the doubt on her face. "And don't worry; if you do go to sleep and I learn something, I'll wake you up immediately."

"Scout's honor?"

"Scout's honor."

"Were you ever a scout?"

"Hell, no. I was too busy getting into trouble." He was being so sweet she wanted to hug him to pieces. Instead she kissed him and said, "Thanks, Sam. I don't know what I'd have done today without you."

"You'd have managed anyway," he said, and returned the kiss with interest, but drew back before it could heat into anything serious. "Sleep if you can," he said, and quietly left the room, closing the door behind him. She lay down and closed her burning eyes. Eventually the aspirin began to work on her headache, and when she opened her eyes, she realized that the afternoon had grown late. She looked at the clock in some astonishment; three hours had passed. She had slept after all. She had some treated eye pads for soothing tired and puffy eyes, so she placed two of them over her lids and rested for a little while longer, trying to muster some energy for the next few draining days. When she sat up and removed the eye pads, the puffiness was noticeably less. She brushed her hair and teeth, then wandered out to find Sam watching television with BooBoo asleep in his lap.

"Any news?"

He had considerably more details now than he had earlier, but none he wanted her to know. "The sister has been notified, and the press knows Marci's identity now. It'll probably be on the evening news."

Her face tightened with sorrow.

"Luna? T. J.?"

"I turned off your phones after you went to sleep. There are a couple of messages from them on your machine, though."

She checked the time again. "They're on their way home from work now. I'll try their numbers in a few minutes. I'd hate for them to hear it on television."

She had barely gotten the words out of her mouth when two cars pulled into her driveway: Luna's Camaro and T.J.'s Buick. Jaine briefly closed her eyes, trying to brace herself for the next few minutes, and walked barefoot out onto the front porch to meet her friends. Sam came out behind her.

"What's going on?" T.J. half-yelled, her pretty face haggard with tension. "We can't find Marci, you left work and won't answer your telephone – damn it, Jaine…" Jaine felt her face start to crumple. She clamped a hand over her mouth, trying to hold back the sobs that convulsed her chest.

Luna stopped in her tracks, tears welling. "Jaine?" she asked in a shaky voice. "What's happened?"

Jaine took several deep breaths, fighting for control. "It – it's Marci," she managed to say.

T.J. paused with one foot on the first step. She clenched her hands, already beginning to cry even as she asked, "What is it? Is she hurt?"

Jaine shook her head. "No. She – she's dead. Someone killed her."

Luna and T.J. came to her in a rush, and they clung together, weeping for the friend they loved and had lost forever.

Corin sat in front of the television, rocking back and forth as he waited, waited. For three days he had caught every newscast, but so far no one knew what he had done and he thought he would burst. He wanted the world to know the first of the four bitches was dead.

But he didn't know if she was the right one. He didn't know if she was A, B, C, or D. He hoped she was C. C was the one who had said that awful thing about trying harder to be perfect. C was the one who really, really needed to die. But how could he make sure? He had called them, but one never answered her phone, and the other three wouldn't tell him anything.

But there was one he didn't have to worry about now. One down and three to go.

There! The newscaster, looking oh-so-serious, said, "A shocking murder in Sterling Heights takes the life of one of the Detroit area's latest celebrities. Details when we return."

At last! Relief filled him. Now everyone would know they shouldn't say such things about Mother's perfect little man. He rocked back and forth, singing softly to himself. "One down and three to go. One down and three to go…"

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Finding Meldon Geurin, nickname "Brick," didn't take very long. A few questions led to his favorite bar, which led to the names of some of his friends, which led to the statement that, "Yeah, Brick, uh, he and his old lady, uh, had a fight or something, and I heard he's crashing with Victor."

"What's this Victor's last name?" Detective Roger Bernsen asked very nicely, but even when he asked nicely, it came out sounding somehow like a threat, because Detective Bernsen was about two hundred and fifty pounds tightly packed on a five-eleven frame, with a twenty-inch neck, a bullfrog voice, and an expression that said he was about an inch away from a road rage. He couldn't help his voice, didn't care about his weight, and practiced the expression. The total package was very intimidating.

"Uh – Abies. Victor Abies."

"Any idea where Victor lives?"

"In the city, man."

So the Sterling Heights detective contacted the Detroit P.D. and Meldon "Brick" Geurin was picked up and held for questioning.

Mr. Geurin was in a surly mood when Detective Bernsen sat down to talk with him. His eyes were bloodshot and he stank of stale booze, so his surliness could perhaps be attributed to the wrath of grapes.

"Mr. Geurin," said the detective in a polite tone that nevertheless made Mr. Geurin flinch, "when did you last see Ms. Marci Dean?"

Mr. Geurin's head snapped up, a movement he seemed to regret. When he could speak, he said sullenly, "Thursday night."

"Thursday? Are you certain of that?"

"Yeah, why? Did she say I stole something? She was there when I left, and if she says I took something of hers, she's lyin'."

Detective Bernsen didn't respond to that. Instead he said, "Where have you been since Thursday night?"

"In jail," Mr. Geurin said, even more sullenly than before. Detective Bernsen sat back, the only outward evidence of his astonishment. "Where were you in jail?" "Detroit."

"When were you picked up?"

"Thursday night sometime."

"And you were released when?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"So you spent three days as a guest of the city of Detroit?" Mr. Geurin smirked. "Guest. Yeah."

"What were the charges?"

"Drunk driving, and they said I resisted."

All of that could easily be checked out. Detective Bernsen offered a cup of coffee to Mr. Geurin but wasn't surprised when it was refused. Leaving Mr. Geurin alone, the detective stepped out to make a call to the Detroit P.D. The facts were as Mr. Geurin had stated them. From 11:34 P.M. Thursday night until 3:41 P.M. Sunday afternoon, Mr. Geurin had been in jail.

As an alibi, it was tough to beat.

Ms. Dean had last been seen alive when she and her three friends left Ernie's on Friday night. Given the condition of the body and the progression of rigor mortis, factored in with the temperature in the climate-controlled house, Ms. Dean had been killed some time Friday night or Saturday morning.

Mr. Geurin, however, was not the killer.

That simple fact presented the detective with a more difficult puzzle than he had first assumed. If Mr. Geurin hadn't done it, who had? So far they hadn't turned up any other romantic relationships, no frustrated lover enraged by her refusal to leave Mr. Geurin. Since she and Mr. Geurin had, in effect, broken off their relationship on Thursday night, that theory didn't fly anyway. But the attack had been a very personal one, characterized by rage, overkill, and the attempt to blot out the victim's identity. The stab wounds were postmortem; the hammer blows had killed her, but the killer had still been in a rage and had resorted to the knife. The wounds had bled very little, indicating that her heart was no longer beating when she received them. The sexual attack had also been postmortem.

Marci Dean had known her killer, had probably let him into the house, since there were no signs of forced entry. With Mr. Geurin out of the picture, the detective was back to square one.

He would have to retrace her steps Friday night, he thought. Start at Ernie's. Where had she gone from there? Had she hit a bar or two, maybe picked up some guy and taken him home with her?

His brow creased in thought, he returned to Mr. Geurin, who was slumped in the chair with his eyes closed. He sat up when Detective Bernsen entered the room. "Thank you for your cooperation," Detective Bernsen said politely. "I'll arrange a ride for you if you need it." "That's it? That's all you wanted to ask me? What's this about?"

Detective Bernsen hesitated. If there was one thing he hated doing, it was bearing the news of death. He could remember an army chaplain coming to the door in 1968 and advising the detective's mother that her husband wouldn't be returning alive from Vietnam. The memory of grief was seared on his brain.

But Mr. Geurin had been put to some trouble in this matter and deserved an explanation. "Ms. Dean was attacked in her home – "

"Marci?" Mr. Geurin sat upright, suddenly alert, his entire manner changed. "Is she hurt? Is she all right?" Detective Bernsen hesitated again, caught by one of those uncomfortable insights into human emotion. "I'm sorry," he said as gently as possible, knowing the news would be more upsetting than he had previously supposed. "Ms. Dean didn't survive the attack."

"Didn't survive? You mean she… she's dead?" "I'm sorry," the detective said again.

Brick Geurin sat stunned for a moment, then slowly began to collapse. He buried his unshaven face in his hands and sobbed.

Her sister, Shelley, arrived on Jaine's doorstep before seven the next morning. "I wanted to catch you before you went to work," she said briskly when Jaine opened the kitchen door.

"I'm not going to work today." Jaine automatically took another cup from the cabinet and filled it with coffee, then passed it to Shelley. What now? She didn't feel up to dealing with sisterly outrage.

Shelley set the cup on the table and put her arms around Jaine, holding her close. "I didn't hear about Marci until I caught the morning news, and I came right over. Are you okay?" Tears stung Jaine's eyes again, when she had thought she couldn't possibly cry any more. She should have been all cried out. "I'm okay," she said. She hadn't slept much, hadn't eaten much, and felt as if only half her cylinders were firing, but she was dealing. As much as Marci's death hurt now, she knew she'd get through this. The old saw about time marching on was an old saw precisely because it was so true.

Shelley held her at arm's length, studying her colorless face and raw, swollen eyes. "I brought a cucumber," she said. "Sit down."

A cucumber?

"Why?" Jaine asked warily. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Put slices on your eyes, silly," Shelley said in exasperation. She often sounded exasperated when dealing with Jaine. "It'll make the swelling to down."

"I have some eye pads for that."

"Cucumbers are better. Sit down."

Because she was so tired, Jaine sat. She watched as Shelley took an enormous cucumber out of her shoulder bag and washed it, then looked around. "Where are your knives?"

"I don't know. One of the drawers."

"You don't know where your knives are?"

"Please. I haven't lived here even a month yet. How long did it take you to get unpacked when you and Al moved?"

"Well, let's see, we moved eight years ago, so… eight years." Humor sparkled in Shelley's eyes as she began methodically opening and closing cabinet drawers. There was one hard rap on the kitchen door; then it opened before she could get up. Sam stepped into the kitchen. "I saw a strange car and came over to make sure no reporters were bothering you," he said to Jaine. Legions of reporters had called the night before, including representatives from all four major television networks. Shelley turned around with the huge cucumber in her hand. "Who are you?" she asked bluntly.

"Her neighbor the cop," Sam said. He eyed the cucumber. "Have I interrupted something?"

Jaine wanted to hit him, but she didn't have the energy. Still, something in her lightened at his presence. "She's going to put it on my eyes."

He gave her a sideways, you-gotta-be-kidding look. "It'll roll off."

She decided she would definitely hit him. Later. "Cucumber slices."

His expression changed to skeptical, I-wanna-see-this. He went to the cabinet and took down another cup and poured himself some coffee. Lounging against the cabinets with his long legs crossed, he waited. Shelley turned to Jaine, more than a little bemused. "Who is this?" she demanded.

"My neighbor," Jaine said. "Shelley, this is Sam Donovan. Sam, my sister, Shelley."

He held out his hand. "Pleased to meet you." Shelley shook hands, but she looked as if she didn't want to. She resumed looking for a knife. "You live here three weeks, and you already have a neighbor who just walks in and knows where your coffee cups are?"

"I'm a detective," Sam told her, grinning. "It's my job to find out stuff."

Shelley gave him her Queen Victoria look, the one that said she was not amused.

Jaine thought about getting up and hugging him, just because he made her feel better. She didn't know what she would have done without him yesterday. He had been a rock, standing like a wall between her and all the phone calls, and when Sam told someone to stop calling, there was a note in his voice that made people pay attention. But he wouldn't be there today, she realized. He was dressed for work, in light tan slacks and a crisp white shirt. His pager was clipped to his belt, and his pistol rode on his right kidney. Shelley kept eyeing him as if he were some exotic species, only half her attention on finding a knife. She finally opened the correct drawer, though, and pulled out a paring knife.

"Oh," Jaine said with mild interest. "So that's where they are."

Shelley turned to face Sam, knife in one hand and cucumber in the other. "Are you sleeping together?" she asked in a hostile tone.

"Shelley!" Jaine said sharply.

"Not yet," Sam said with utter confidence.

Silence fell in the kitchen. Shelley began peeling the cucumber with short, vicious strokes of the knife. "You don't look much like sisters," Sam observed, as if he hadn't just stopped the conversation cold.

They had heard that comment, or a version of it, their entire lives. "Shelley looks like Dad but has Mom's coloring, and I look like Mom but have Dad's coloring," Jaine said automatically. Shelley was tall, almost five inches taller than Jaine, and lanky and blond. The blond hair was purchased, but looked good with Shelley's hazel brown eyes.

"Are you staying with her today?" Sam asked Shelley. "I don't need anyone to stay with me," Jaine said. "Yes," said Shelley.

"Run interference and keep the reporters away from her, okay?"

"I don't need anyone to stay with me," Jaine repeated. "Okay," Shelley said to Sam.

"Fine," Jaine said. "This is just my house. No one pay any attention to me."

Shelley whacked off two slices of cucumber. "Tilt your head back and close your eyes."

Jaine tilted and closed. "I thought I was supposed to lie down for this."

"Too late." Shelley plopped the cold green slices on Jaine's sore eyelids.

Oh, that felt good, cold and moist and incredibly soothing. She would probably need an entire grocery bag full of cucumbers before Marci's funeral was over, Jaine thought, and just like that the sadness was back. Sam and Shelley had pushed it away for a few moments, and she was grateful to them for the respite.

"I got a call from the investigating detective," Sam said. "Marci's boyfriend, Brick, was in jail in Detroit from Thursday night until late Sunday afternoon. He's in the clear."

"A stranger broke in and killed her?" Jaine asked, removing the cucumber slices and raising her head to look at him.

"Whoever it was, there was no sign of forced entry." She had read that much in the morning paper. "You know more than you're telling, don't you?"

He shrugged. "Cops always know more than they tell." And he wasn't going to divulge any details; she could tell by the way his expression slipped into his cop mask. She tried not to imagine what those details might be. He drained his coffee and rinsed out the cup, turning it upside down on the drainboard. Then he bent down and kissed her, the pressure on her mouth warm and brief. "You have both my pager and cell phone numbers, so if you need me, call."

"I'm okay," she told him, and meant it. "Oh – Do you know if Marci's sister is here?"

He shook his head. "She's gone back to Saginaw. There's nothing she can do here, yet. The house is still cordoned off, and an autopsy is required in murder cases. How long that will take depends on the M.E.'s workload. The funeral may not be until this weekend."

That was another detail she didn't want to think about, Marci's body lying on a refrigerated slab for several days. "I'll go to work tomorrow, then. I'd like to help her sister with the arrangements, if she wants, but I don't guess there's anything to do yet."

"Not yet." He kissed her again, then lifted her hands, still holding the cucumber slices, and replaced them on her eyelids. "Keep them there. You look like hell."

"Gee, thanks," she said dryly, and heard him chuckle as he left.

There was that silence again. Then Shelley said, "He's different."

Different from Jaine's three ex-fiances, she meant. No joke.

"Yeah," she agreed.

"This looks pretty serious. You haven't known him for long."

If Shelley only knew! She was probably counting the entire three weeks Jaine had lived here. There was no telling what she would say if she knew that for the first two of those weeks Jaine had thought Sam was either a drunk or a drug dealer.

"I don't know how serious it is," she said, knowing she was lying. "I'm not rushing into anything." For her part, she couldn't get much more serious. She was in love with the big jerk. Exactly how or what he felt was still open for discussion.

"That's good," Shelley said. "The last thing you want is another broken engagement."

She could have gone all day without mentioning Jaine's miserable track record, but then Shelley had never been noted for her tact. On the other hand, Jaine had never doubted that her sister loved her, which made up for a lot of tactlessness.

The phone rang. Jaine removed the cucumber slices and reached for the cordless at the same time Shelley did. "Sam said for me to answer the phone," Shelley hissed, as if whoever was calling could hear her.

Ring.

"Since when do you take orders from someone you just warned me against?" Jaine asked dryly.

Ring.

"I didn't exactly warn – "

Ring.

Knowing the mini-argument could go on for half an hour, Jaine punched the "talk" button before the answering machine could pick up. "Hello."

"Which one are you?"

"What?" she asked in astonishment.

"Which one are you?"

She disconnected and set the phone down, frowning. "Who was it?" Shelley asked.

"A crank call. Marci, T.J. and Luna have been getting them since the List came out." Her voice caught a little when she mentioned Marci. "It's the same guy, he always says the same thing."

"Have you reported to the phone company that you're getting obscene calls?"

"They aren't obscene. He says, 'Which one are you?' in this weird whisper. I guess it's a guy, because it's hard to tell when someone's whispering."

Shelley rolled her eyes. "A crank call about the List? You can bet it's a guy. Al says all the guys at work have been really ticked off about parts of it. I'll let you guess which parts they don't like."

"The parts having to do with their parts?" As if she had to guess.

"Men are so predictable, aren't they?" Shelley moved around the kitchen, opening drawers and doors. "What are you doing?"

"Finding out where everything is so I won't have to look for anything when I start cooking."

"You're cooking? What?" For a slightly disjointed moment, Jaine wondered if Shelley had brought over the ingredients of whatever she planned to cook for her family's supper that night. After all, she had pulled a gigantic cucumber out of her purse; God only knew what else was in there. A roast, maybe?

"Breakfast," Shelley said. "For us. And you're going to eat it, too."

Actually, Jaine was hungry this morning, having skipped supper the night before. Did Shelley think she was crazy? No way was she going to argue with food. "I'll try," she said meekly, and replaced the cucumber slices on her eyes while her sister bustled around preparing made-from- scratch pancakes.

Corin sat staring at the phone, feeling his disappointment wash through him in waves. She hadn't told, either. At least she hadn't snapped at him the way the others had. He had thought she would, had prepared himself for whatever she might say. She had a big mouth on her, as his mother would have said. He often disapproved of the way she talked at work, with all that cursing. His mother wouldn't have liked her at all.

He didn't know what to do now. Killing the first bitch had been… so overwhelming. He hadn't expected that wild, hot rush of joy, almost of ecstasy. He had gloried in it, but afterward he had been frightened. What would Mother do if she knew he enjoyed it? He had always been so afraid she would find out his secret pleasure at her punishments. But the killing… oh, the killing. He closed his eyes, swaying back and forth a little as he relived every moment of it in his mind. The shock in the bitch's eyes that split second before the hammer hit her, the sodden thudding sounds, then the joy that leapt through his veins and the feeling of being all-powerful, of knowing she was helpless to stop him because he was so strong – Tears welled into his eyes, because he had enjoyed it so much and now it was over.

He hadn't enjoyed anything so much since the day he had killed Mother.

No – don't think about that. They said he shouldn't think about that. But they said he should take the pills, and they were wrong about that, weren't they? The pills made him go away. So maybe he should think about Mother. He went into the bathroom and checked in the mirror. Yes, he was still there.

He had brought a tube of lipstick from the bitch's house. He didn't know why. After she was dead, he had walked around, looking at her things, and when he was in her bathroom checking himself in the mirror, he had noticed the ungodly amount of makeup strewn about the bathroom, covering every flat surface. The bitch had certainly believed in beautifying herself, hadn't she? Well, she wouldn't be needing this anymore, he had thought, and slipped the lipstick into his pocket. Since that night it had been sitting on the vanity in his bathroom. He uncapped the tube and twisted the bottom. The obscenely shaped crimson length poked out, like a dog's penis. He knew what a dog's penis looked like because he had – no, don't think of that.

Leaning forward, he carefully outlined his lips in bright red. He straightened and stared at himself in the mirror. He smiled, his red lips stretching over his teeth, and he said, "Hello, Mother."

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was amazing, Jaine thought the next morning when she stepped onto the elevator at work, how her world could be so altered while most of the people who worked at Hammerstead were unaffected by Marci's death. Of course Luna and T.J. were as grief-stricken as she, and the people in Marci's department were sad and shocked, but most of the people she met on the way in had either not mentioned it at all or said something along the lines of, "Yeah, I heard about that. Awful, isn't it?" The computer nerds, of course, were unaffected by anything that didn't involve gigabytes. The elevator sign this morning read: NEW PRESS RELEASE BY THE FDA: RED MEAT IS NOT BAD FOR YOU. RESULTS OF TESTS SHOW IT IS FUZZY GREEN MEAT THAT IS BAD FOR YOU.

Since fuzzy green meat sounded like the ordinary contents of the average computer nerd's refrigerator, that notice probably had deep personal meaning for most of them, Jaine thought. On any other day, she would have laughed. Today she couldn't summon up even a smile.

Neither T.J. nor Luna had worked the day before, either. They had arrived on her doorstep a little after eight A.M. their eyes in the same condition hers had been. Shelley had whacked off more slices from her cucumber, then set about making more pancakes, which were as comforting to her friends as they had been to Jaine.

Shelley had never met Marci, but she was willing to listen to them talk about her, which they had done all day long. They had cried a lot, laughed some, and wasted a lot of time hazarding theories about what had happened, since Brick was undeniably in the clear. They knew they weren't going to stumble on The Truth, but talking about it helped. Marci's death was so unbelievable that only by endlessly rehashing it could they gradually come to terms with losing her.

For once, she wasn't early. Mr. de Wynter was already there, and he immediately asked her to step into his office. Jaine sighed. She might be head of payroll, but unfortunately the position carried no power, only responsibility. By leaving work early on Monday and not working at all on Tuesday, she had left them shorthanded. De Wynter must have been sweating, wondering if they would get everything finished in time; people tended to get unreasonable when their paychecks didn't arrive on schedule.

She was prepared to accept his criticism, so she was taken aback when he said, "I want to tell you how sorry I am about your friend. That's an awful thing to happen." She had sworn she wouldn't cry at work today, but de Wynter's unexpected sympathy almost did her in. She blinked to hold back the tears. "Thank you," she said. "It is awful. And I want to apologize for leaving the department in the lurch on Monday – "

He shook his head. "I understand. We put in some extra hours, but no one complained. When is the funeral service scheduled?"

"It hasn't been, yet. The autopsy – "

"Oh, of course, of course. Please let me know when it will be; a lot of people here at Hammerstead would like to attend."

Jaine nodded her promise, and escaped back to her own desk and a pile of work.

She had known the day would be tough, but she hadn't anticipated quite how tough. Gina and all the others in her department had to extend their sympathies, of course, which almost had her weeping again. Since she didn't have a cucumber with her, she had to fight the tears all day long.

Without it being planned, both T.J. and Luna showed up at lunchtime. "Railroad Pizza?" T.J. asked, and they all got in T.J.'s car for the short drive.

They had just received their vegetarian pizzas when Jaine remembered she hadn't told them about the crank phone call she had received just before they arrived they day before. "I finally got one of those 'Which one are you?' calls," she said.

"Aren't they creepy?" Luna took an unenthusiastic bite of pizza. Her lovely face looked as if she had aged ten years in the last two days. "Since the rest of us have had at least two of them, I'm surprised it took him so long to get to you."

"Well, I have had a lot of hang-ups on my answering machine, but I just assumed they were from reporters."

"Probably. God knows we've all had plenty of those." T.J. rubbed her forehead. "My head is pounding. I think it finally really hit me last night when I got home, and I cried until I was sick. Galan – "

Jaine looked up. "Yes, how is the Galan situation? Is he still bunking down in a motel?"

"No. He was at work Monday when we heard, of course, but he had called several times and left messages for me, and he came home that night. I guess the situation is still up in the air. What with Marci, I haven't felt like hashing things out with him. He's been pretty quiet, but… considerate, too. Maybe he's hoping I'll forget." She took an almost vicious bite of pizza.

"Guess there's not much chance of that," Jaine said dryly, and Luna smiled.

"Not in this lifetime," T.J. said. "But let's talk about something interesting, like Sam." She got a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. "I can't believe you thought that sexy hunk was a drug-dealing drunk."

Jaine found that she, too, could smile today. "What can I say? He cleans up well. You should see him when he's wearing old, torn clothes, hasn't shaved, and is in a really bad mood."

"Those dark eyes… Wow." Luna fanned herself with her hand. "Plus he has a really nice set of shoulders, in case you haven't noticed."

Jaine refrained from saying that she had noticed everything about Sam. They didn't need to know about the kitchen-window episode. Funny, she thought, she had regaled them almost every day with tales about her fractious encounters with him when she still thought he was a drunken jerk, but once things started getting more personal between them, she had stopped talking about him.

"He's hot for you, too," T.J. added. "That man wants to jump your bones. Take my word for it."

"Maybe," Jaine said vaguely. She didn't want to discuss how badly her bones wanted to be jumped by him, or how close they had already been to making love. "You don't have to be psychic to know that," Luna told T.J. her tone wry. "He came right out and said so." T.J. laughed. "So he did. He isn't shy, is he?" No, shy was one thing Sam Donovan definitely wasn't. Brash, cocky, arrogant, smart, sexy, sweet – those words described him down to his bones. She doubted he had a single shy gene in his body, thank God.

T.J.'s cell phone rang. "It's probably Galan," she said, sighing as she fished it out of her purse. She flipped it open and punched the receive button. "Hello?" Jaine watched as her face turned red. "How did you get this number?" she snapped, and punched the off button. "Bastard," she muttered as she returned the phone to her purse.

"I take it that wasn't Galan," Jaine said.

"It was that creep." T.J.'s voice quivered with anger. "I'd like to know how he got my cell number, because I don't give it out a lot."

"Is there an information for cell numbers, maybe?" Luna asked.

"The account's in Galan's name, not mine, so how would he know I'm the one who carries the phone?"

"What did he say?" asked Jaine.

"The usual 'Which one are you?' crap. Then he said, 'Marci.' Just her name. Damn him, that's a sick thing to do."

Jaine put down her slice of pizza. She was suddenly cold all over, the fine hairs at the nape of her neck standing up. My God, what if those phone calls had something to do with Marci's murder? Maybe it was a stretch, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was some weirdo who really, really hated them because of the List, and now he was coming after them one by one – She was hyperventilating. T.J. and Luna were both staring at her. "What's wrong?" Luna asked in alarm. "I just had the most horrible thought," Jaine whispered. "What if he's the one who killed Marci? What if he's after us all?"

Twin expressions of pure shock crossed their faces. "No way," Luna said in instant rejection.

"Why not?"

"Because! That's so crazy. Things like that don't happen. Well, maybe to celebrities, but not to normal people."

"Marci was murdered," Jaine said, still unable to get much volume to her voice. "Was that normal?" She shivered. "The phone calls at home I didn't think much about, but you're right, T.J. how did he get your cell phone number? I'm sure there are ways, but most people wouldn't know how. Are we being stalked?"

Both of them stared at her again.

"Now I'm scared," Luna said after a moment. "You live alone, I live alone, Galan doesn't get home until almost midnight, and Marci was alone."

"But how would he know that? I mean, Brick was living with her until just the day before," T.J. protested. Her intuition gave Jaine another lock in the gut. She thought she was going to be ill. "It was in the newspaper – 'no sign of forced entry.' I heard Sam talking on the phone. They thought it was Brick because he was her boyfriend and he had a key, but it wasn't Brick, so they think it was someone else Marci knew. She let him in and he lulled her." She swallowed. "It's someone we all know."

"Oh, my God." Luna clapped both hands over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror.

T.J. dropped her slice of pizza. She looked sick, too, and suddenly afraid. She tried for a shaky laugh. "We're scaring ourselves, like little kids telling ghost stories around a campfire."

"Good. If we're scared, we'll be more careful. I'm going to call Sam as soon as I get back to the office – " T.J. took her cell phone out of her purse and turned it on. "Here," she said, extending it across the table to Jaine. "Call him now."

Jaine dug in her purse for the scrap of paper on which he had written both of his numbers. Her hands were shaking as she tried his cell phone first. The connection was made and a ring sounded in her ear. Twice. Three times – "Donovan."

She gripped the little phone hard with both hands. "This is Jaine. Sam – we're scared. We've all been getting crank calls since the List came out, but I haven't mentioned it because they weren't threatening or anything, he just asks which one we are – you know, A, B, C, or D – but he just called T.J. on her cell phone and said Marci's name. How did he get T.J.'s number? The phone's in her husband's name, so how would he know T.J. is the one with the phone instead of Galan? I heard you say Marci probably knew her killer and let him in the house, and whoever called T.J. knows her because otherwise how would he have her number, and I know I sound hysterical, but I'm scared and I wish you would tell me I'm letting my imagination run away with me – "

"Where are you?" he asked quietly.

"Railroad Pizza. Please tell me I'm letting my imagination run away with me."

"I think you need to get Caller ID," he said, his tone still too even. "If T.J. and Luna don't have it, tell them to get it. Today. Call the phone company from work to get it started, and stop on the way home to buy the units." She took a deep breath. "Okay. Caller ID."

"Do you have a cell phone? Or Luna?"

"No, just T.J."

"Both of you need to get one, and keep it with you, so you'll have a way to call for help if you can't get to a land line. And I mean with you, in a pocket, not in your purse or car."

"Cell phones. Check." They were going to have several stops on the way home, she thought.

"Did anything about his voice sound familiar?" "No, he whispers, but it's kind of a loud whisper. It sounds funny."

"Any background noise that you can identify?" She relayed the question to T.J. and Luna. They shook their heads. "No, nothing."

"Okay. Where do T.J. and Luna live?"

She gave him their addresses. T.J. lived in Mount Clemens, Luna in Royal Oak, all towns on the north side of Detroit.

Sam swore. "Royal Oak is in Oakland County. That's four different departments in two different counties who need to get a heads-up on this."

"You were supposed to tell me I'm crazy," she said in a shaky voice, though somehow she had known he wouldn't.

"Marci's dead," he said bluntly. "All four of you have gotten the same crank call. Do you want to trust your life to coincidence?"

Put in those terms, maybe she wasn't crazy after all. She took a deep breath. "What should we do?"

"Tell T.J. and Luna that, until we find out who's making these calls, not to let anyone in their houses except family, don't get in a car with anyone except family, not even if they have a breakdown and someone offers a ride. Keep their doors and windows locked, and if either of them has an automatic garage door, make sure no one gets inside when the door raises."

"How long will it take to find this creep?" "Depends. If he's just a dumb fuck making phone calls, the Caller ID may nab him, or the call return number. If not, we'll put a trace on your lines."

"But if he's a dumb f – " She caught herself before she said the word. "If he's a dumb you-know-what, how did he get T.J.'s cell phone number?"

"Like you said. He knows her."

As T.J. parked in front of Hammerstead, they all looked out at the big brick building. "It's probably someone who works here," Jaine said.

"It would almost have to be," Luna said. "Some jerk who thinks it's funny to scare us."

"Sam said we shouldn't trust our lives to coincidence. Until we know better, we should assume that the guy who's making the phone calls is the same guy who killed Marci."

"I can't believe we work with a murderer," T.J. said faintly. "I just can't. It's too unbelievable. Jerks, yes. Just look at Bennett Trotter. Marci hated his guts."

"So do we all." Bennett Trotter was the resident slimeball. A twinge of memory made Jaine frown as she tried to nail it down. "The night we came up with the List… remember, Marci was telling us about Kellman grabbing her ass? Wasn't it Bennett who had something to say about it?"

"I think so," T.J. said, but doubtfully. "I don't really remember."

"I do," said Luna. "Bennett said something about taking Kellman's place if Marci was that hard up."

"He's a bottom feeder, but I can't see him killing anyone," T.J. said, shaking her head.

"The point is, we don't know, so we have to assume everyone is guilty. When Sam finds out who has been making the calls, if whoever it is has an alibi, then we can relax. Until then, we're on guard against everyone." Jaine wanted to shake T.J.; she just couldn't seem to grasp that they might be in danger, too. They probably weren't; she hoped they weren't. But the whole thing with the telephone call today took the crank calls to another level, and she was deeply uneasy. Part of her agreed with T.J.; the whole supposition was too fantastic, too unbelievable. She was simply letting her imagination run away with her. Another, more primal, part of her brain said that Marci was dead, murdered, and whoever killed her was still out there. That seemed even more unbelievable than the other, yet it was true.

She tried another tactic. "If Sam thinks we should be extra careful, that's good enough for me. He knows a lot more about these things than we do."

"That's true," T.J. said. "If he's worried, we should do what he said."

Jaine mentally rolled her eyes. After their first exposure to Sam, T.J. Luna, and even Shelley had all begun acting as if he were the Grand Pooh-Bah. Well, whatever worked; what mattered was that they were cautious.

They walked together into the building, then parted to go to their different departments. Mindful of Sam's instructions, she called the phone company to arrange for Caller ID and all the other bells and whistles, including call forwarding. It occurred to her that it might come in handy to be able to transfer her incoming calls to, say, Sam's house.

Sam called Detective Bernsen. "Roger, my gut tells me we have a bigger problem than we thought."

"How's that?"

"You know that Ms. Dean was one of the List Ladies, right?"

"Yeah, what about it, other than giving the reporters something to howl about?"

"Turns out all four of the ladies have been getting crank calls from the same guy. He asks them which one they are."

"Which one?"

"Yeah. Have you read the List?"

"I haven't had the pleasure. My wife has quoted parts of it to me, unfortunately."

"The four women are identified only as A, B, C, and D. So this guy asks them which one they are, like it's important to him. Today while they were at lunch, he called on T.J.'s cell phone and asked the usual question, then said Ms. Dean's name. No threats or anything like that, just her name."

"Huh," said Roger, which meant he was thinking. "T.J.'s cell phone is in her husband's name, so most people would think he's the one who carries it. This guy not only knew the number, he knew T.J. is the one with the phone."

"So he's either familiar with the ladies or he knows the husband."

"Why would a husband give his wife's cell phone number to another man?"

"Good point. Okay, the caller knows the ladies. Huh."

"The odds are Marci Dean knew the killer. She opened her door and let him in, right?"

"Right. She had a peephole in the door. She could see whoever came knocking."

"The crank caller disguises his voice, speaks only in a whisper."

"Meaning they might recognize his voice if he spoke normally. You think the killer and the crank caller are the same guy?"

"Either that or it's a big coincidence."

"Son of a bitch." Like most cops, Roger wasn't big on coincidence. "Where does this guy know all of them from? They work together or something?"

"Yeah, at Hammerstead Technology, just off I-696 at South-field. He probably works there, too."

"He's someone with access to their personal information. That should narrow it down."

"Hammerstead develops computer technology. A lot of people there would know how to access the personnel files."

"It couldn't be easy, could it?" Roger asked wearily. "My gut tells me something about the List set him off, and he's going to be coming after the other three."

"Jesus. You may be right. You got their names and addresses?"

"T.J. Yother, Mount Clemens, husband's name is Galan. Luna Scissum, Royal Oak, unmarried and lives alone." He gave Roger the street addresses. "Jaine Bright, the third one, is my next-door neighbor. She's single, too."

"Huh. Is she your lady friend?"

"Yeah."

"So you're dating one of the List Ladies? Man, that takes balls." Roger caught his own joke and laughed. "You have no idea." Sam grinned, thinking of Jaine and her stubborn chin with that cute little dent in it, and her almost-dimples and sparkling blue eyes. She attacked life, rather than simply letting it happen; he'd never before met anyone so annoying and funny and sharp. He had major plans for her, the most immediate of which was getting her under him. No way would he let anything happen to her, even if he had to quit his job and become her twenty-four- hour-a-day bodyguard.

"Okay, if you're right, at least we have a place to start," Roger said, briskly returning to the subject. "Hammerstead Technology. I'll get the ball rolling on getting access to their personnel files, see what shakes out of the tree, but if you're right about the computer geeks, this could take a while. Officially, I don't know what we can do to keep the ladies safe. You're talking four different towns – "

"And two counties. I know." The administrative hassle would be a bitch. Sam got a headache just thinking about it.

"Unofficially, we'll work out something. We'll call in favors, maybe get some guys to volunteer for watchdog duty. The ladies do know to be cautious, right?"

"They're all supposed to get Caller ID and cell phones today. We might get lucky if he calls one of them again. I also told them not to let anyone in except family, not to accept rides from anyone. I don't want this son of a bitch to be able to get anywhere near them."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Jaine found herself studying every man she saw at work that day, wondering if he was the one. That one of them could be a killer was almost beyond belief. They all seemed so normal, or at least as normal as any other large group of men who worked in the computer industry. Some of them she knew and liked, some of them she knew and didn't like, but she couldn't see any of them as killers. A lot of guys, particularly the ones on the first two floors, she knew by sight but not by name. Had Marci known one of them well enough that she had let him into her house?

Jaine tried to think what she would do if someone she recognized knocked on her door at night, maybe claiming to have had car trouble. Until today, she probably would have opened her door without hesitation, wanting only to be helpful. The killer, even if he turned out to be some stranger, had forever robbed her of that trust, that inner sense of security. She had liked to think she was smart and aware, that she didn't take chances, but how often had she opened her door at a knock without asking who was on the other side? She shuddered now to think of it. Her front door didn't even have a peephole in it. She could see who was at the door only if she climbed on her sofa and pulled back the curtain, then leaned far to the right. And the upper half of her kitchen door was nothing but nine small panes of glass, easily smashed; then all any intruder would have to do was reach in and unlock it. She had no alarm system, no means of protecting herself – nothing! The best she could hope to do if anyone broke into her house while she was there was escape out the window, assuming she could get it open.

She had a lot of work to do, she thought, before she would feel safe in her house again.

She worked half an hour later than usual, doing a little catch-up on the pile of paperwork that had accumulated during her absence. As she was crossing the parking lot, she noticed there were only a handful of cars remaining and, for the first time, realized how vulnerable she was leaving work late like this, alone. All three of them, she and Luna and T.J. should time their arrivals and departures with the crowd, to take advantage of the safety in numbers. She hadn't even told them she intended to work late.

There was so much she had to think about now, so much inherent danger in things she had never before had to consider.

"Jaine!"

As she crossed the parking lot, the sound of her name broke into her consciousness, leaving her aware that someone had called her at least twice, maybe more. She turned around, mildly surprised to see Leah Street hurrying after her.

"I'm sorry," she apologized, though she wondered what Leah wanted. "I was thinking and didn't hear you at first. Is something wrong?"

Leah stopped, her graceful hands fluttering, an uncomfortable expression on her face. "I just – I wanted to say I'm sorry about Marci. When is the funeral?"

"I don't know yet." She didn't feel up to explaining again about the autopsy. "Marci's sister is making the arrangements."

Leah nodded jerkily. "Let me know, please. I'd like to attend."

"Yes, of course."

Leah seemed to want to say something else or maybe didn't know what else to say; either condition was awkward. Finally she bobbed her head and turned to hurry to her own car. Her full skirt flew around her legs. Today's dress was particularly hopeless, a lavender print that did nothing for her coloring and with a small ruffle around the neckline. It looked like a yard-sale reject, though Leah pulled down a good salary – Jaine knew exactly how much – and probably shopped at nice department stores. She simply had no fashion sense.

"On the other hand," Jaine muttered to herself as she unlocked the Viper, "I have no people sense." Her judgment must be seriously off, because the two people from whom she would never have expected sympathy and sensitivity – Mr. de Wynter and Leah Street – were the two who had gone out of their way to tell her they were sorry about Marci.

Mindful of Sam's instructions, she drove to an electronics store and bought a Caller ID unit, signed up for cellular service, went through all the paperwork for that, then had to choose a phone. The selection engrossed her; did she want one of the little flip-tops or one that didn't flip? She decided on the non-flipper, figuring that if she were running for her life from a crazed murderer, she didn't want to have to deal with flipping up before dialing. Next she had to decide on a color. She immediately dismissed black as too basic. Neon yellow? It would be difficult to misplace. The blue one was cute; she didn't see many blue ones. On the other hand, there was nothing like red.

Once she selected the red phone, she had to wait for it to be programmed. By the time she left the electronics store, the late summer sun was almost down, clouds were sweeping in from the southwest, and she was starving. Because a cool wind was blowing in off those clouds, promising rain, and she still had two more stops to make before she went home, she got a fast-food burger and a soft drink and gulped them down as she drove. The burger wasn't very good, but it was food, and that was all her stomach required.

Her next stop was a firm that installed security systems, where she answered questions, selected the system she wanted, and wrote a large check. The system would be installed a week from the upcoming Saturday. "But that's ten days!" Jaine said, frowning. The beefy man consulted an appointment book. "Sorry, but that's the earliest we can get to you." Deftly she reached over the desk and plucked her check from where it lay in front of him. "I'll call around and see if someone else can get to me sooner than that. Sorry I wasted your time."

"Hold on, hold on," he said hastily. "Is this some kind of emergency? If someone is having trouble, we move them to the top of the list. You shoulda said so."

"It's an emergency," she said firmly.

"Okay, let me see what I can do." He studied the appointment book again, scratched his head, tapped his pencil on the book, and said, "I can work you in this Saturday, since it's an emergency."

Careful not to let any triumph show in her expression, she returned the check to him. "Thank you," she said, and meant it.

Her next stop was a building materials store. It was a huge place, with everything one would need to build a house, except the money. She bought a peephole for the front door – the instructions said "Easy to install" – and a new kitchen door that wasn't half glass and two new deadbolts. After making arrangements for the door to be delivered on Saturday, and paying extra for the privilege, she heaved a sigh of relief and started home.

Rain began splattering on the windshield just as she turned onto her street. Darkness had fallen, deepened by the cloud cover. Lightning flashed briefly in the west, lighting up the belly of the storm system, and thunder rumbled.

Her house was dark. She usually got home well before dark, so she didn't leave any lights on. Normally she wouldn't worry about stepping into a dark house, but tonight she felt a chill creep up her spine. She was edgy, more aware of her vulnerability. She sat for a moment in the car, reluctant to turn off the motor and go inside. No vehicle was parked in Sam's driveway, but there was a light on in his kitchen; maybe he was at home. She wished he would leave his truck in the driveway instead of parking it in the garage, so she could tell when he was there and when he wasn't.

Just as she turned off the headlights and ignition, she saw movement to her left. Her heart jumped into her throat, then she realized it was Sam, coming down his front steps.

Relief flooded through her. She gathered her purse and plastic shopping bags and got out of the car. "Where the hell have you been?" he shouted, looming behind her as she locked the car door.

She hadn't expected him to start yelling; startled, she dropped one of the bags. "Damn it!" she said as she leaned down to pick it up. "Do you have to make a career out of scaring me?"

"Someone needs to scare you." He grabbed her upper arms and hauled her up to face him. He was shirtless, and she found herself nose-to-pectoral-muscle with him. "It's eight o'clock, you may have a killer stalking you, and you don't bother to call and let anyone know where you are? You deserve more than just being scared!"

She was tired, nervous, the rain was getting heavier by the minute, and she was in no mood to be yelled at. She lifted her head to glare at him, and water trickled down her face. "You told me to get Caller ID and a cell phone, so if I'm late, it was your idea!"

"It took you three goddamn hours to accomplish what a normal person can do in half an hour?"

Was he saying she wasn't normal? Incensed, she put both hands on his bare chest and shoved him as hard as she could. "Since when did I start answering to you?" He staggered back maybe an inch.

"Since about a week ago!" he said furiously, and kissed her.

His mouth was hard and angry, and his heart pounded like a sledgehammer beneath her hands. As always when he kissed her, it was as if time spun away, leaving only the here and now. The taste of him filled her; his bare skin was hot to the touch, despite the rain beating down on them. He locked her against him, his arms so tight she couldn't draw a deep breath, and against her belly she felt the thrust of his erection.

He was shaking, and suddenly she realized just how scared he had been on her behalf. He was big and rough- looking, and strong enough to hold his own with an ox; every day he probably saw, without flinching, things that would make the average person cringe in horror. But tonight he had been afraid – afraid for her. Her chest ached suddenly, as if her heart squeezed. Her knees wobbled and she sank against him, melting into him, rising on tiptoe to meet his lass with equal force, equal passion. He groaned, deep in his throat; the kiss changed, the anger fading, to be replaced by violent hunger. She had surrendered totally, but that didn't seem to be enough for him because he sank his hand in her hair and pulled her head back, arching her neck and exposing her throat to his mouth. Rain spattered in her face, and she closed her eyes, helpless in his iron grip and not wanting to be anywhere else.

After the emotional upheaval of the past three days she needed to lose herself in the physical, to push all the grief and fear away and feel only Sam, think only of Sam. He lifted her off her feet and began walking with her, and she didn't protest except when he stopped kissing her, didn't struggle except to get closer.

"Damn it, would you stop wiggling?" he growled in a strained tone, shifting her to one side as he climbed his front steps.

"Why?" Her voice sounded smoky, sexy. She hadn't known her throat would do that.

"Because I'm going to come in my jeans if you don't," he half-shouted in raw frustration.

Jaine thought about his problem for maybe half a heartbeat. Since the only way she could be certain not to overexcite him was to tear herself out of his grip and not touch him at all, that meant she would be depriving herself.

"Suffer," she told him.

"Suffer?" He sounded outraged. He wrenched open his front door and carried her inside. It was dark in the living room, the only light filtering through from the kitchen. He smelled of heat and rain and wet hair. She tried to run her hands over those broad shoulders and found herself still encumbered by purse and shopping bags. Impatiently she dropped them to the floor, then attached herself to him like a limpet.

Cursing, he staggered a few steps and pinned her to the wall. He tugged at her slacks with rough hands, attacking the button and zipper until the button flew off and the zipper yielded. Her slacks slid down her legs and pooled around her feet. She kicked off her shoes, and he lifted her out of the circle of fabric. Immediately she wound her legs around his hips, feverishly trying to get closer, to meld their bodies and ease this wildfire of need that was burning her up on the inside.

"Not yet!" Panting, he leaned his weight against her to keep her in place against the wall and unwrapped her legs from his waist. Her ribcage depressed by his weight, Jaine could manage only the first protesting moan before he hooked his fingers in the waistband of her panties and tugged them down her thighs.

Oh.

She tried to think why she had been going to make him wait another couple of weeks, at least, maybe even a whole menstrual cycle. Nothing reasonable came to mind, not when making him wait also meant making herself wait – not when she was so scared that the same person who had killed Marci might also be targeting the rest of them and she would kick herself if she died without knowing what it was like to make love with him. Right here, right now, there was nothing more important than trying this man on for size.

She kicked her panties away he lifted her high once again, and she coiled her legs around him. His knuckles brushed between her legs as he unfastened his jeans and let them drop. She caught her breath as the last barrier fell from between them and his penis pressed against her, naked and hot, searching. Pleasure zinged through her, making her nerve endings sizzle. She arched helplessly seeking more, needing more.

He swore softly, under his breath, and hitched her just a little higher to adjust her position. She felt the head of his penis probing at her, smooth and hard and hot, then an almost incredible sense of pressure as he eased his support and let her weight sink down on it. Her body resisted at first, then began to stretch and admit him, inch by searing inch. She felt everything in her begin to tighten as sensation roared through her – He stopped, breathing hard, his hot face buried against her neck. His voice muffled, he said rawly, "Did you go on the pill?"

Jaine dug her nails into his bare shoulders, almost sobbing with need. How could he stop now? Only the thick head of his penis was inside her, and it wasn't enough, wasn't nearly enough. Her inner muscles clenched around him, trying to draw him deeper, and an explosive curse tore from his throat.

"Damn it, Jaine, did you go on the pill?"

"Yes," she finally managed to say, and her tone was just as raw as his.

He braced her against the wall and with one rough thrust pushed his entire length inside her.

She heard herself cry out, but the sound was distant. Every cell in her body focused on the thick shaft pounding back and forth inside her, his rhythm hard and fast, and she climaxed the same way. Sensation exploded in her, and she bucked against him, screaming, her hips jerking and her entire body shuddering. The rest of the world spun completely away.

He came a second later, driving into her with almost brutal force. She thudded against the wall with each deep thrust, her weight sliding down and forcing him even deeper, so deep that she stiffened convulsively and climaxed again. Afterward, he rested heavily against her, his skin damp with sweat and rain. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving as he sucked in air. The house was dark and silent except for the rain drumming on the roof and the gasping sounds of their overtaxed lungs. The wall was cool against her back, but uncomfortably hard. Jaine tried to think of something clever to say, but her mind refused to work. This was too serious, too damn important, for quips. So she closed her eyes and rested her cheek on his shoulder while her galloping heartbeat slowly began to calm and her loins relaxed around his shaft. He muttered something unintelligible and tightened his grip on her, holding her with one arm around her back and the other under her bottom as he stepped out of his jeans and unsteadily walked to the bedroom. He was still inside her, her body anchored to his, as he lowered them to the bed and settled on top of her.

The room was dark and cool, the bed wide. He stripped off her silk shirt and unzipped her bra, tossing both garments to the floor. Now they were both totally naked, his chest hair rasping her nipples as he began to move again. His rhythm this time was slower but no less powerful as each thrust took him in to the hilt.

To her surprise, the fever began to build again. She had thought she was too exhausted to be aroused again, but she found out differently. She hooked her legs around his and ground her pelvis up to meet each thrust, clinging to him, pulling him even deeper into her, and when she came, the paroxysm was even stronger than the others. He made a guttural sound, climaxing while she still shuddered beneath him.

A long time later, when pulses had slowed, sweat had dried, and muscles had become halfway responsive again, he levered himself off her and rolled onto his back, one arm draped over his eyes. "Shit," he said under his breath. Because the room was so quiet, she heard him. A tiny flare of temper made her eyes narrow. She still felt like a limp, overcooked noodle, so a tiny flare was all she could manage. "Gee, that's romantic," she said sarcastically. The man hadn't been able to keep his hands off her for a week, and now that they had finally made love, "shit" was the best comment he could make, as if the whole experience had been a mistake?

He lifted the arm covering his eyes and turned his head to glare at her. "I knew you were trouble the first time I saw you."

"What do you mean, trouble?" She sat up, glaring back at him. "I am not trouble! I'm a very nice person except when I have to deal with jerks!"

"You're the worst kind of trouble," he snapped. "You're marrying trouble."

Considering three men had already found better things to do than marry her, that wasn't the most tactful comment he could have made. It was especially hurtful coming from a man who had just given her three explosive orgasms. She snatched up the pillow and whacked him on the head with it, then bolted out of bed. "I can take care of that problem for you," she said, fuming as she searched the dark bedroom for her bra and shirt. Damn it, where was the light switch? "Since I'm so much trouble, I'll stay on my side of the driveway and you can stay the hell on your side of the driveway!" She was shouting by the time she was finished. There – that white blur might be her bra. She swooped down on it and picked it up, but it was a sock. A smelly sock. She threw it at him. He swatted it aside and lunged out of bed, reaching for her. "What did you do with my damn clothes!" she bellowed at him, evading his outstretched hand and storming around the room in the dark. "And where's the damn light switch?"

"Would you settle down!" he said, sounding suspiciously as if he were snorting with laughter.

He was laughing at her. Tears stung her eyes. "Hell, no, I won't settle down!" she shouted, and swung toward the door. "You can keep the damn clothes, I'll walk home naked before I stay here with you another minute, you insensitive jerk – "

A hard-muscled arm locked around her waist and sent her airborne. She shrieked, arms flailing; then she bounced on the bed and the air left her lungs with a "whoof." She had time to suck in just a little air before Sam landed on her, his heavy weight flattening her and forcing another exhalation. He was laughing as he subdued her with ridiculous ease; in five seconds flat she couldn't wiggle anything.

To her astonishment and rage, she discovered he had another erection; it throbbed against her closed thighs. If he thought she would open her legs for him again after – He shifted, expertly pressed with his knee, and her legs opened anyway. Another shift and he slid smoothly inside her, and she wanted to scream because he felt so good and she loved him and he was a jerk. Her lousy luck with men was still holding.

She burst into tears.

"Ah, babe, don't cry," he said soothingly, moving gently inside her.

"I will if I want to," she sobbed as she clung to him. "I love you, Jaine Bright. Will you marry me?"

"No way in hell!"

"You have to. You owe me your next paycheck for all the cussing you've done tonight. You won't have to pay up if we get married."

"There's no rule like that."

"I just made one." He framed her head with his big hands and stroked her cheeks with his thumbs, wiping away the tears.

"You said shit."

"What else is a man supposed to say when he sees his glorious bachelor days coming to a swift and ignominious end?"

"You've been married before."

"Yeah, but that didn't count. I was too young to know what I was doing. I thought fucking was the same as loving." She wished he would be still. How could he carry on a conversation while doing what he was doing to her? No – she wished he would shut up, and keep doing exactly what he was doing, except maybe a little faster. And a little harder.

He kissed her temple, her jaw, the almost-dent in her chin. "I always heard that sex was different with a woman you loved, but I didn't believe it. Sex was sex. Then I got inside you and it was like sticking my cock in an electrical outlet."

"Oh. Was that what all that shaking and yelling was about?" She sniffled, but she was paying attention. "Smart-ass. Yeah, that's what it was about, not that I was the only one doing some shaking and yelling. It was different. Hotter. Stronger. And when it was over, I wanted to do it all over again."

"You did do it all over again."

"That proves it, then. For God's sake, I've already come twice and here I am hard again. That's either a fucking miracle, no pun intended, or it's love." He kissed her mouth, slowly and deeply, using his tongue. "Watching you throw a temper tantrum always gets me hard." "I don't throw tantrums. Why is it when a man gets mad, he's aaangry, but when a woman gets mad, it's just a tantrum?" She paused, struck by what he'd said. "Always?"

"Always. Like when you knocked over my trash can, then yelled at me and poked me in the chest."

"You were hard?" she asked in astonishment. "As a rock."

She said wonderingly, "Well, son of a b – gun." "So answer my question."

She opened her mouth to say "yes," but caution made her remind him, "I don't do really well with engagements. Gives the guy too much time to think."

"I'm skipping the engagement part. We're not getting engaged; we'll just get married."

"In that case, yes, I'll marry you." She turned her face into his throat and inhaled the heat and scent of his body, thinking that if the perfumers of the world could bottle whatever it was Sam had, the female population would be in perpetual heat.

He growled in frustration. "Because you love me?" he prompted.

She smiled, her lips moving against his skin. "Crazy, wild, absolutely, insanely in love with you," she affirmed. "We'll get married next week."

"I can't do that!" she said in horror, drawing back to stare up at him as he loomed over her, slowly moving back and forth, back and forth, like seaweed floating on the tide. "Why the hell not?"

"Because my parents won't be back from vacation for… I've lost count of the days. About three weeks, I think."

"Can't they come home early? Where are they, anyway?"

"Touring Europe. And this is Mom's dream vacation, because Dad has Parkinson's, and even though the medication really helps, he's gotten a little worse lately and she was afraid this would be their last chance. He was always too busy before he retired to get away for that length of time, so this is special to both of them, you know?"

"Okay, okay. We'll do it the day after they get home."

"Mom won't even be unpacked!"

"Tough. Since we aren't getting engaged, we can't do the big church wedding thing – "

"Thank God," she said feelingly. She had gone through that experience with number two, the bastard, with all the expense and planning and trouble, only to have him back out at the last minute.

He heaved a sigh of relief, as if he had been afraid she would say she wanted a big wedding. "We'll have everything ready to go. All your parents will have to do is show up."

Jaine had been doing a really good job concentrating on the conversation while he was doing what he was doing, and she was impressed out of her skull that he could keep up his side of the conversation under these circumstances, but her body suddenly reached the point of no return. She gasped, her hips rising convulsively against him.

"We'll talk later!" she said hoarsely, grabbed his butt, and pulled him hard into her.

They didn't talk at all for quite a while.

Jaine stirred, yawning. She would have been content to lie in his arms all night long, but a sudden thought made her bolt upright. "BooBoo!"

Sam made a noise halfway between a grunt and a groan. "What?"

"BooBoo. He must be starving! I can't believe I forgot about him." She scrambled out of bed. "Where's the light switch? And why don't you have any bedside lamps?"

"Beside the door, right side. Why would I need bedside lamps?"

"For reading." She swept her hand along the wall, found the switch, and flipped it up. Bright light flooded the room. Sam shielded his eyes, blinking, then flopped over on his stomach. "I read in the living room."

Her own eyes took a minute to adjust. When they did, her pupils widened at the wreck they had made of the bed. The covers were twisted and hanging off, the pillows were – where were the pillows? – and the bottom sheet was pulled free at one corner and wadded in the middle of the bed. "Holy cow," she said in astonishment, then shook herself and looked around for her clothes.

Sam opened his eyes and propped up on one elbow, his dark eyes both sleepy and intent as he watched her search the room. She found her shirt tangled in the bedcovers. She got down on her knees to peer under the bed for her bra; he scooted closer so he'd have a better view of her backside waving in the air.

"How on earth did it get under the bed?" she fussed, dragging the bra out of its hiding place.

"Crawled," he suggested.

She gave him a quick grin and looked around. "And my pants are…?"

"In the living room."

She went into the living room, turned on a lamp, and was in the process of untangling her pants when Sam wandered in, stark naked and carrying a pair of sneakers. Jaine didn't bother with her bra, but slipped into her panties, then pulled on her shirt and pants. Sam stepped into his jeans and pulled them up, then sat down and put on the sneakers.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Walking you to your door."

She opened her mouth to say that wasn't necessary; then she remembered it was necessary, at least for now. She put on her shoes, stuffed her bra in her purse, then gathered up her shopping bags. Sam slid his pistol out of its holster, holding it in his right hand. "Give me your key and stay behind me," he said.

She dug her key chain out of her purse, selected the house key for him, and handed it over.

The rain had stopped, leaving the night warm and humid. Crickets chirped, and at the end of the street the corner light wore a misty halo. They crossed both driveways and went up the steps to the kitchen door. Sam tucked the pistol in his waistband while he unlocked the door; then he returned the keys to her and drew the pistol once more. He opened the door, reached inside, and flipped on the light switch.

He uttered a vicious curse. Jaine blinked at the destruction illuminated by the overhead light, then she screamed, "BooBoo!" and tried to lunge past Sam.

He blocked her with an out-thrust arm, turning so that his big body barred the entrance. "Go to my house and call nine-one-one," he barked. "Now!"

"But BooBoo – "

"Go!" he yelled, giving her a shove that almost sent her flying off the stoop. Then he wheeled and stepped into the house.

He was a cop; she had to trust him in this. Her teeth chattering, she ran back to his house and into the kitchen, where she knew he had a cordless. Grabbing it up, she punched the talk button, then 911.

"Where are you calling from?" The voice was impersonal and almost uninterested.

"Uh – next door." Jaine closed her eyes. "I mean, I'm calling from my next door neighbor's. My house has been ransacked." She gave her own address. "My neighbor is a cop, and he's going through the house right now." Carrying the phone, she walked out on the front porch, staring across the driveways at her little house, where lights now blazed from two of the windows. As she watched, the light in her bedroom came on. "He's armed – "

"Who is?" The dispatcher sounded suddenly alarmed. "My neighbor is! Tell the police if they see a half-naked man with a gun, don't shoot, he's one of them!" She took a deep breath, her heart pounding so hard she thought she would be sick. "I'm going over there."

"No! Ma'am, don't go over there. If your neighbor is a policeman, stay out of his way. Ma'am, are you listening?"

"I'm here." She didn't say she was listening. Her hand was shaking, clattering the phone against her teeth. "Stay on the phone, ma'am, so I can keep the responding officers up-to-date on the status. Units have already been dispatched to your address; they'll be there in a few minutes. Just be patient, please."

She couldn't be patient, but she could be sensible. She waited on the porch, tears tracking down her face as she stared unblinkingly at her own house, where Sam was methodically searching it and putting his life in danger every time he entered a room. She didn't dare think about BooBoo. The dispatcher said something else but she had stopped listening, though she did make a noise to let the woman know she was still there. In the distance she could hear the shrill of sirens.

Sam stepped out on the kitchen stoop, BooBoo cradled in his left arm.

"BooBoo!" Jaine threw down the phone and ran across to them. Sam let her take the cat from him, then he tucked the pistol in his waistband.

"Whoever did it didn't hang around," he said, putting his arm around her and urging her back toward his house. With BooBoo safe and disgruntled in her arms, she dug in her heels. "I want to see – "

"Not yet. Let the techs do their job first, maybe find something that will give us a clue who this bastard is."

"You went in – "

"And I was careful not to disturb anything," he said, exasperated. "Come on, let's sit down. The guys will be here in a minute."

She remembered that she had thrown the phone aside. She picked it up and handed it to him. "Nine-one-one is still on the line."

He put it to his ear, but kept a firm grip on her while he succinctly outlined the situation and said the house was clear, then disconnected. He put both arms around Jaine – and BooBoo – and held her close.

"Where did you find BooBoo?"

"He was hiding under that shelf thing in the hallway." She stroked the cat's head, so grateful he was all right that she almost cried again. Her mom would never forgive her if anything happened to BooBoo.

"Do you think it was him?" she asked Sam, her voice low. He was silent for a moment. The sirens were much closer now, the sound growing louder and louder in the still night air. As two cars turned the corner onto their street, Sam said, "I can't afford not to think it."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Lights were coming on up and down the street, heads poking out of doors, as Sam and Jaine went to meet the patrolmen. "Detective Donovan," said one of the patrolmen, grinning. "So you're the half-naked man we were told not to shoot."

Sam scowled down at Jaine. She cuddled BooBoo closer. "You're carrying a pistol," she explained. "I didn't want them to shoot you by mistake."

Sadie and George Kulavich came down their sidewalk and stood peering at the flashing lights. They were both wearing robes over their nightclothes; Mr. Kulavich wore bedroom slippers, but Mrs. Kulavich had put on rain boots. Mrs. Kulavich craned her neck, then came closer. Across the street, Jaine could see Mrs. Holland come out her front door.

Sam heaved a sigh. "I checked the house," he said to the patrolmen. "It's been trashed, but no one is in there. You guys take over while I go put on a shirt."

Mrs. Kulavich had edged close enough to hear him. She beamed at him. "Don't bother on my account," she said. "Sadie!" Mr. Kulavich said in rebuke.

"Oh, hush, George! I'm old, not dead!"

"I'll remind you of that the next time I want to watch the Playboy Channel," he growled.

Sam coughed and strode into his house, keeping his pistol held low against his leg so their bright-eyed old neighbors wouldn't spot it and get too excited.

Jaine became aware of the speculation in the neighbors' eyes as they studied her. She remembered that she hadn't put on her bra, and her silk shirt probably made that fairly obvious. She didn't look down to check, just kept BooBoo cradled to her chest. She didn't reach up to check her hair, either, because she knew it was a mess. The rain had wet it, then she had wallowed in bed with Sam for a couple of hours; it was probably sticking out in spikes. Given Sam's state of undress… well. She imagined the conclusion they were jumping to was pretty damn accurate.

Thinking about the neighbors was easier than thinking about her house.

After her first horrifying glimpse of the kitchen, she didn't know if she wanted to see the rest of the house. This, coming so soon after the trauma of Marci's death, was almost more than she could bear, so she concentrated on other things, such as the way Mrs. Kulavich winked at her when Sam came out of the house wearing a neat oxford shirt with the tails tucked into his jeans and his badge clipped to his belt. She wondered if he had put on underwear.

"Are you official?" she asked, eyeing the badge. "Might as well be. I'm on the scene, and we're all on call after eleven."

She gaped at him. "After elev – what time is it, anyway?"

"Almost midnight."

"Poor BooBoo," she said in horror. "Could you try to find some of his food and let me have a can, so I can feed him?"

Sam looked down at her, the expression in his dark eyes telling her he knew she was avoiding facing the reality about her house, but also saying that he understood. "Okay, I'll find something for him." He glanced over at Mrs. Kulavich. "Sadie, why don't you and Eleanor take Jaine in my house and put on a pot of coffee, okay?"

"Of course, dear."

With Mrs. Kulavich and Mrs. Holland flanking her, Jaine went back inside Sam's house and into the kitchen. She put BooBoo down and looked around with interest, since this was the first time she had seen much of the house. Before, they hadn't bothered to turn on a light until she was getting dressed, so she had seen the bedroom and the living room, both of which were furnished with only the essentials. The kitchen, like hers, had a small table and four chairs occupying one end of it, and the stove was about twenty years old. The refrigerator, though, looked brand new, and so did the coffeemaker. Sam had his priorities.

Mrs. Kulavich efficiently prepared the coffee and turned on the machine. Jaine became aware of a pressing need. "Um… do you know where the bathroom is?"

"Of course, dear," said Mrs. Holland. "The big bathroom is the second door on the left in the hallway, and there's a small bathroom opening off Sam's bedroom."

Funny that they knew that when she hadn't, but then it was difficult to explore much when one was flat of her back with a two-hundred-pound man on top of her. She chose the big bathroom, because it was closer, and carried her purse with her. Hurriedly she stripped off her clothes, used the facilities, then found a washcloth and washed away the evidence of four hours of sex. She used his deodorant, combed her hair – which was indeed sticking out in spikes all over her head – and this time when she dressed she put on her bra.

Feeling more in control, she returned to the kitchen for a much-needed cup of coffee.

"It's terrible about your house, dear," said Mrs. Holland, "but wonderful about Sam. I take it congratulations are in order?"

"Eleanor," admonished Mrs. Kulavich. "Times are different now. Young people don't get married just because they've been jumping each other's bones."

"That doesn't mean they shouldn't," said Mrs. Holland severely.

Jaine cleared her throat. So much had happened that she could barely comprehend it all, but the hours in bed with Sam stood out clearly in her mind. "He did ask me to marry him," she confided. "And I said yes." She didn't use the cursed word "engaged."

"Oh, my!" Mrs. Kulavich beamed at her.

"That's wonderful! When's the wedding?"

"In about three weeks, when my parents get back from vacation." She made a rash decision. "And everyone on the street is invited." So their small wedding just got a little bigger; so what?

'"You'll have to have a bridal shower," said Mrs. Holland. "Where's a pen and notepad? We have to make plans." "But I don't need – " Jaine began, then saw the expressions on their faces and stopped in mid-sentence. Belatedly she realized that she did indeed need a bridal shower, to help replace what had just been destroyed. Her chin wobbled. She quickly firmed it as one of the patrolmen stepped into the kitchen carrying two cans of cat food. "Detective Donovan sent these over," he said. Grateful for the distraction, Jaine looked around for BooBoo. He wasn't anywhere in sight. Upset at being plopped down in a strange environment, he was probably hiding. She knew all his favorite hiding places in her house, but she had no idea where he would hide in Sam's. As bait, she opened one of the cans of food, then crawled through the house softly calling BooBoo's name, pushing the open can in front of her. She finally found him behind the couch, but even with the lure of food, it took her fifteen minutes to coax him out of his hiding place. He crept out and daintily began eating, while she stroked him and took comfort in his warm, sinuous body.

He would have to go to Shelley's house, she thought. She couldn't risk letting him stay with her now. Tears seared her eyes, and she bent her head to hide them, concentrating on the cat. When she hadn't been at home, the maniac had taken out his rage on her possessions. While she was grateful beyond telling that she had been in Sam's bed rather than her own, she couldn't risk BooBoo and her dad's car again – The car. Oh, my God, the car.

She sprang to her feet, startling BooBoo so much he darted back behind the couch. "I'll be right back," she called to Mrs. Kulavich and Mrs. Holland, then ran outside. "Sam!" she yelled. "The car! Did you check the car?" Her yard and Sam's were full of neighbors. Since the Viper was sitting right there in her driveway, startled faces turned toward her. She hadn't thought to check the Viper, but as much as she loved it, her dad's car was at least five times more valuable, and totally irreplaceable. Sam came out on the kitchen stoop. He glanced at the garage and jumped from the stoop. Together they ran to the garage.

The door was still padlocked. "He couldn't have gotten in, could he?" Jaine asked in an agonized whisper. "Maybe he wouldn't have tried, since your car was sitting in the driveway. He probably thought the garage was empty. Is there another way in?"

"No, not without knocking a hole in the wall." "Then the car is okay." He put his arm around her and walked her back toward the house. "You don't want to open the door with all these people watching, do you?" She gave an emphatic shake of her head. "I'll have to move the car," she said, planning ahead. "David will have to take it. And Shelley will have to take BooBoo. Mom and Dad will understand, under the circumstances."

"We can put the car in my garage, if you want." She thought about it. At least it would be close to hand, and whoever was doing this didn't know about the car in the first place, so it should be safe. "Okay. We'll move it when everyone leaves."

She didn't look at the Viper as she walked by it, but she stopped. Staring hard at the blue lights on top of the patrol cars, she asked Sam, "Is my car okay? I can't look."

"It looks okay. I don't see any scratches or anything, and nothing's broken."

She heaved a sigh of relief and sort of sagged against him. He hugged her, then sent her back to his kitchen and the care of Sadie and Eleanor.

It was dawn before she was allowed to enter her house. She was surprised at the amount of attention given to what was essentially vandalism, but she supposed Sam was responsible for that. Of course, he didn't think it was just vandalism.

Neither did she.

She couldn't. Walking through her house, looking at the destruction, she noticed immediately how personal it all was. Her television hadn't been touched – strange, since it was an expensive item – but all her dresses and underwear had been shredded. Her jeans and pants, however, hadn't been touched.

In the bedroom, her sheets and pillows and mattress had been hacked to pieces, her perfume bottles broken. In the kitchen, everything made of glass had been broken, all her plates and bowls, glasses, cups, even the heavy lead- crystal serving trays she had never used. And in the bathroom, her bath linen was untouched, but all her makeup was destroyed. Tubes were smashed, powder dumped, and all the compacts of eyeshadow and blush looked as if they had been stomped, then ground to pieces.

"He destroyed everything feminine," she whispered, looking around. The bed was kind of generic, but her bed linen was feminine, in soft pastels with lace-trimmed edges.

"He hates women," Sam agreed, coming to stand beside her. His face was grim. "A psychiatrist would have a field day with this."

She sighed, exhausted from lack of sleep and the sheer size of the task before her. She glanced at him; he hadn't had any more sleep than she had, which amounted to nothing more than a couple of short naps. "Are you going to work today?"

He gave her a startled look. "Sure. I have to get with the detective working Marci's case and bring him up to speed on this."

"I'm not even going to try to work. It'll take a week to get this mess cleaned up."

"No, it won't. Call a cleaning service." He put a thumb under her chin and tilted up her face, looking at the bruises of fatigue that shadowed her eyes. "Then go to sleep – in my bed – and let Mrs. Kulavich oversee the cleaning. She'll be thrilled."

"If she is, then she's in dire need of therapy," Jaine said, once more surveying the wreckage of what had been her home. She yawned. "I also need to go shopping, to replace my clothes and makeup."

He grinned. "The kitchen stuff can wait, huh?" "Hey, I know what's important." She leaned against him and looped her arms around his waist, reveling in the freedom to do so, reveling also in the way his arms automatically went around her.

She suddenly stiffened. She couldn't believe she hadn't once thought about Luna and T.J. tonight. Her brain must be misfiring, that was the only explanation. "I forgot about Luna and T.J.! My God, I should have called them immediately, warned them – "

"I did," said Sam, folding her back in his arms. "I called them last night, on my cell phone. They're okay, just worried about you."

She yawned and relaxed against him once more, letting her head nestle on his chest. His heart thump-thumped in her ear. She was exhausted but couldn't stop her thoughts from circling like buzzards around a fresh kill. If she couldn't wind down, she would never be able to sleep. "How do you feel about medicinal sex?" she asked him. Interest lit his dark eyes. "Does it involve swallowing?" She chuckled against his shirt. "Not yet. Maybe tonight. What this involves now is relaxing me enough so I can sleep. Are you interested?"

For answer, he took her hand and placed it over the fly of his jeans. He had a long, thick growth under his zipper. She hummed with pleasure as she ran her fingers up and down the length of it, feeling the tiny, spasmodic movements of his body that he couldn't control. "God, you're easy," she said.

"Thinking about swallowing always gets me hard." Hand in hand, they walked back to his house, where he relaxed her.

"The evidence techs didn't find a usable fingerprint," Sam told Roger Bernsen a couple of hours later. "But they did find a partial shoe print. Looks like a running shoe; I'm trying to get a make on the brand by the tread pattern." Detective Bernsen said what Sam already knew: "He broke in intending to kill her, and trashed her place instead when she wasn't there. You got a fix on the time?" "Between eight P.M. and midnight, roughly." Mrs. Holland kept a close watch on the street, and she said she hadn't seen a strange car or anyone unknown to her before Sam himself had arrived home. After dark, everyone was inside.

"Lucky she wasn't at home."

"Yeah." Sam didn't want to think about the alternative. "We gotta start running down those personnel files at Hammerstead."

"The C.E.O. is my next call. I don't want anyone else knowing that we're checking the files. He can have them pulled without anyone questioning him. Maybe they can be copied to our computers so we don't have to risk going there."

Roger grunted. "By the way, the M.E. has released Ms. Dean's body. I've contacted her sister."

"Thanks. We need to have someone videotaping the funeral."

"You think he'll be there?"

"I'm betting on it," Sam said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Corin hadn't been able to sleep, but he didn't feel tired. Frustration gnawed at him. Where had she been? She would have told him, he thought. Sometimes, most of the time, he didn't like her at all, but sometimes she could be nice. If she had been feeling nice, she would have told him.

He didn't know what to think about her. She didn't dress like a whore the way Marci Dean had, but men always looked at her anyway, even when she was wearing pants. And when she was being nice, he liked her, but when she cut people to shreds with her tongue, he wanted to hit her and hit her, and just keep hitting her until her head was all soft and she couldn't do those things to him anymore…. But was that her, or Mother? He frowned, trying to remember. Sometimes things got so confused. Those pills must still be affecting him.

Men looked at Luna, too. She was always sweet to him, but she wore a lot of makeup and Mother thought her skirts were always too short. Short skirts made men think nasty thoughts, Mother said. No good woman ever wore short skirts.

Maybe Luna just acted sweet. Maybe she was really bad. Maybe she was the one who had said those things, and made fun of him, and caused Mother to hurt him. He closed his eyes and thought of how Mother had hurt him, and a tingle of excitement went through him. He ran his hand down his front, the way he wasn't supposed to, but it felt so good that sometimes he did it anyway. No. That was bad. And when Mother had hurt him, she had just been showing him how bad that thing was. He shouldn't enjoy it.

But the night hadn't been a total waste. He had a new lipstick. He took off the top and twisted the base so the vulgar thing slid out. It wasn't bright red like Marci's, it was more of a pinkish color, and he didn't like it nearly as well. He painted his lips, scowled at his reflection in the mirror, then wiped off the color in disgust.

Maybe one of the others would have a lipstick that suited him better.

Laurence Strawn, C.E.O. of Hammerstead Technology, was a man with a boisterous laugh and a knack for seeing the big picture. He wasn't good with details, but then, he didn't need to be.

That morning he had received a call from a Warren detective named Donovan. Detective Donovan had been very persuasive. No, they didn't have a warrant to search Hammerstead's personnel records, and they preferred to keep this as quiet as possible. What he was asking for was cooperation in catching a murderer before he could kill again, and they had a hunch he worked at Hammerstead.

Why was that? Mr. Strawn had asked, and was told about the phone call to T.J. Yother's cell phone, whose number he wouldn't have known was hers unless he had access to certain information about her. Since they were fairly certain Marci Dean had known her killer and that the same man was the one who had called T.J.'s cell phone, then it followed that they both knew him, that, in fact, all four of the friends knew him. That made it highly probable that he worked at Hammerstead with them.

Mr. Strawn's immediate reaction was that he didn't want this leaking to the press. He was, after all, a C.E.O. His second, more thought-out reaction, was that he would do whatever possible to stop this maniac from killing more of his employees. "What do you want me to do?" he asked. "If we have to, we'll come to Hammerstead to go over the files, but we'd prefer not to alert anyone that we're looking. Can you access the files and attach them to an E-mail to me?"

"The files are on a separate system that isn't on-line. I'll have them copied to a CD for my files, then send it to you. What's your E-mail address?"

Unlike a lot of chief executive officers and corporate presidents, Laurence Strawn knew his way around computers. He'd had to become proficient just to understand what the loonies on the first two floors were doing.

"T.J. Yother works in human resources," he added as he copied down Detective Donovan's E-mail address, another talent he had, that of doing two things at once. "I'll have her do it. That way we know there won't be a leak."

"Good idea," said Sam. With that accomplished with surprising ease – he thought he'd like Laurence Strawn – he turned his attention to the partial shoe print the techs had lifted from Jaine's bathroom floor, where the bastard had stepped in the ruins of her makeup and left a pretty good imprint behind. He just hoped it was enough to identify the style. O. J. Simpson aside, when they caught this guy, it would help if they could prove he owned the type of shoe that had made the print, and in the same size. It would be even better if there were still little clumps of makeup caught in the treads.

He spent most of the morning on the phone. Who said detective work wasn't dangerous and exciting? Last night had been a little more dangerous and exciting than he liked, he thought grimly. He didn't like playing "what if," but in this case he couldn't help it. What if he had been called away? What if Jaine hadn't been late, he hadn't been worried, and they hadn't argued? They might have parted with a good-night kiss, Jaine going to her house alone. Considering the destruction of her house, he shuddered to think what would have happened if she had been there. Marci Dean had been both taller and heavier than Jaine, and she hadn't been able to fight off her attacker, so the chances of Jaine doing so were practically nil.

He sat back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head, staring at the ceiling and thinking. Something was getting by him here, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Not yet, anyway; sooner or later, it would come to him, because he wouldn't be able to stop worrying it until he found the answer. His sister Doro said he was a cross between a snapping turtle and a rat terrier: once he had his teeth in something, he never let go. Of course, Doro hadn't meant it as a compliment.

Thinking of his Doro reminded him of the rest of his family, and the news he had to break. He scribbled on his notepad: Tell Mom about Jaine. This was going to come as a big surprise to them, because the last they'd heard he wasn't even dating anyone regularly. He grinned; hell, he still wasn't. He was skipping that part, as well as the engagement, and just going straight to marriage, which was probably the best way to get Jaine there. But the family stuff would have to wait. Right now he had dual priorities: catch a killer, and keep Jaine safe. Those two tasks didn't leave time for anything else. Jaine woke up in Sam's bed a little after one P.M. not really rested but with her batteries recharged enough that she felt ready to take on the next crisis. After dressing in jeans and a T-shirt, she went next door to check on the cleaning progress. Mrs. Kulavich was there, walking from room to room to make certain no shortcuts were taken. The two women who were doing the cleaning seemed to take her supervision in stride.

They certainly were efficient, Jaine thought. The bedroom and bathroom were already clean; the savaged mattress and box spring were gone, the shreds of cloth swept up and put in trash bags that sat bulging beside the stoop. Before going to sleep, she had called her insurance agent and found that her homeowners' insurance, so recently converted from renters' insurance, would cover part of the replacement cost of the household goods. Her clothes weren't covered at all.

"Your insurance agent was here not an hour ago," Mrs. Kulavich said. "He looked around and took pictures, and was going to the police department to get a copy of the report. He said he didn't think there would be any problem."

Thank goodness for that. She had been out a lot of money lately, and her bank account was seriously shriveled. The telephone rang. It was one of the nonfeminine things that hadn't been damaged, so Jaine picked it up. She never had gotten around to hooking up the Caller ID unit, she remembered, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach at the thought of answering without knowing in advance who was calling.

It could be Sam, though, so she hit the talk button and put the phone to her ear. "Hello?"

"Is this Jaine? Jaine Bright?"

It was a woman's voice, vaguely familiar.

Relieved, she said, "Yes, it is."

"This is Cheryl… Cheryl Lobello, Marci's sister." Pain shot through her. That was why the voice sounded familiar; it reminded her of Marci's. Cheryl's voice lacked the smoker's rasp, but the underlying tone was the same. Jaine gripped the phone tighter. "Marci talked about you a lot," she said, blinking back the tears that hadn't been very far away since Monday when Sam had told her about Marci's death.

"I was going to say the same thing to you," Cheryl said, managing a sad little laugh. "She was always calling to tell me some remark you had made that cracked her up. She talked about Luna a lot, too. God, this doesn't seem real, does it?"

"No," Jaine whispered.

After a choked silence, Cheryl marshaled her control and said, "Anyway the medical examiner has released her b- body to me, and I'm making the funeral arrangements. Our parents are buried in Taylor, and I think she would want to be close to them, don't you?"

"Yes, of course." Her voice didn't sound like Marci's, Jaine thought; it was too thick with tears.

"I've arranged for a graveside service Saturday at eleven." Cheryl gave her the name of the funeral home and instructions on how to get to the cemetery. Taylor was south of Detroit and just east of Detroit Metro airport. Jaine wasn't familiar with the area, but she was really good at following instructions and stopping for directions. She tried to think of something to say that would lessen Cheryl's pain, but how could she when she couldn't even lessen her own?

Then it hit her, what she and Luna and T.J. should do. Marci would love it.

"We're going to hold a wake for her," she blurted. "Would you like to come?"

"Awake?" Cheryl sounded taken aback. "An Irish wake type of thing?"

"Kind of, though we aren't Irish. We're going to sit around and lift a beer or two in her honor, and tell all sorts of stories about her."

Cheryl laughed, this time a real laugh. "She would get a kick out of that. I'd love to come. When is it?" Since she hadn't talked to Luna and T.J. about it yet, she wasn't certain exactly when this wake would begin, but it would have to be Friday night. "Tomorrow night," she said. "Let me get back to you with the time and place – unless you think the funeral home would let us sit up with her and have it there?"

"I kind of don't think so," Cheryl said, and sounded so much like Marci that Jaine got a lump in her throat all over again.

After writing down Cheryl's number, Jaine went over to Sam's and got the bag containing her Caller ID unit and new cell phone, which she hadn't even turned on yet. She sat at the table and carefully read the instructions, frowned, then wadded them into a ball and threw them in the trash. "It can't be that complicated," she muttered. "Just hook this thing between the line and the phone. How else would it work?"

Looked at logically, it was simple enough. She unplugged the phone from the wall jack, took the phone wire provided with the unit, and hooked the unit to the jack, then connected the phone to the unit. Presto bingo. Then she went over to Sam's house and dialed her number to see if the thing worked.

It did. When she pressed the display button, Sam's name popped up in the little window, with his number under it. Man, technology rocked.

She had a list of calls to make, and the first one was to Shelley. "I need you to take BooBoo for the rest of Mom and Dad's vacation," she said.

"Why?" asked Shelley belligerently, her hurt feelings evident.

"Because my house was vandalized last night and I'm afraid BooBoo will be hurt."

"What?" Shelley fairly shrieked. "Someone broke into your house? Where were you? What happened?"

"I was with Sam," Jaine said, and left it at that. "And the house was pretty well trashed."

"Thank God you weren't at home!" Then she paused, and Jaine could hear her sister's thoughts churning. Shelley wasn't slow. "Wait a minute. The house has already been trashed and BooBoo wasn't hurt, was he?"

"No, but I'm afraid he might be."

"You expect them to come back and trash your house again?" Shelley was shrieking again. "It's that List, isn't it? You have a bunch of crazies after you!"

"Just one, I think," Jaine said, and her voice caught. "Oh, my God. You think the man who killed Marci broke into your house? That's what you think, isn't it? Jaine, my God, what are we going to do? You have to get out of there. Come stay with me. Stay in a hotel. Something!"

"Thanks for the offer, but Sam beat you to it, and I feel safe with him. He has a gun. A big one."

"I know; I saw it." Shelley was silent a moment. "I'm scared."

"So am I," Jaine admitted. "Sam's working on it, though, and he has a couple of leads. Oh, by the way, we're getting married."

Shelley began shrieking again. Jaine took the phone away from her ear. When there was silence again, she put the phone back and said, "The tentative date is the day after Mom and Dad get back."

"But that's only three weeks! We can't get everything done! What about the church? What about the reception? What about your gown?"

"No church, no reception," Jaine said firmly. "And I'll find a gown. I don't have to have one made for me; one off the rack will do fine. I have to go shopping anyway, because the creep cut up most of my clothes."

More shrieking. She waited until Shelley's outrage died down. "Hey, let me give you my new cell phone number," she said. "You're the first one."

"I am, huh?" Shelley sounded fatigued from all her shrieking. "What about Sam?"

"Even he doesn't have it."

"Wow, I'm honored. You forgot to give it to him, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, let me get a pen." There were rustling noises. "I can't find one." More noises. "Okay, shoot." "You found a pen?"

"No, but I have a can of Cheez Whiz. I'll write your number on the counter with it, then find a pen and copy it." Jaine recited her number and listened to the spewing noise as Shelley Cheez-Whizzed it on her countertop. "Are you at home, or at work?"

"At home."

"I'll come pick up BooBoo now."

"Thanks," Jaine said, relieved that worry was taken off her hands.

Next she called Luna and T.J. at work, and did the three- way calling thing. They fussed over her, too, and she could hear the underlying knowledge in their voices that it could have happened to them. As Jaine had expected, they loved the idea of a wake for Marci. Luna immediately volunteered her apartment, and the time was set. She gave them her cell phone number, too.

"I have something to tell both of you," T.J. said, keeping her voice low. "But not while I'm here."

"Come by when you get off work," Jaine said. "Luna, can you make it?"

"Sure. Shamal called again, but I'm not in the mood to go out with him, not with Marci – " She stopped, and audibly swallowed.

"You shouldn't go out with him anyway," Jaine said. "Remember what Sam said: family only. That means no dates."

"But Shamal isn't – " Luna stopped herself again. "This is awful. I can't be certain, can I? I can't take the chance." "No, you can't," T.J. said. "None of us can." No sooner had Jaine hung up from talking with her friends than the phone rang. Al's name and number popped up in the little window. She picked up the phone and said, "Hi, Shelley."

"You finally got Caller ID," Shelley said. "Listen, I think we should call Mom and Dad."

"If you want to tell them I'm getting married, fine, though I'd rather do it myself. But don't even think about telling them to come home because of this crazy guy."

"This crazy guy is a killer, and he's after you! You don't think they would want to be here?"

"What could they do? And I don't intend to let him get me. I'm having an alarm system installed, and I'm staying with Sam. Mom and Dad would just be worried, and you know how Mom has looked forward to this vacation."

"They should be here," Shelley insisted.

"No, they shouldn't. Let them enjoy this. You think I'd let a crazy guy stand between me and my wedding? This one is going to go through if I have to hog-tie him and drag him to the altar. Or whatever," she added, remembering that it wasn't going to be a church wedding.

"You're trying to distract me, and it isn't working. I want to call Mom and Dad."

"I don't, and it's my situation, so what I say goes."

"I'm going to tell David."

"You may tell David, but no one, absolutely no one, is to tell Mom and Dad. Promise me, Shel. No one in your family, no one in David's family, neither friend nor foe, is to tell Mom and Dad about this. Or send them an express letter. Or a telegram, E-mail, or any other form of communication, including skywriting. Have I covered all the bases?"

"I'm afraid so," Shelley said.

"Good. Let them enjoy their vacation. I promise I'll be careful."

Sam got a call from Laurence Strawn early in the afternoon. "I'm leaving myself wide open for a lawsuit for invasion of privacy," he said. "But a court order would take time and might alert the guy, so to hell with it. If this gives you an edge, then it's worth a hundred lawsuits." Sam definitely liked this guy.

"Check your E-mail," Strawn continued. "It's a hell of an attachment, it will probably take quite a while to download."

"That was fast."

"Ms. Yother has incentive," said Strawn, and hung up. Sam turned to his computer and downloaded his E-mail. When he saw how many Ks of RAM the attached file took, he winced. "I hope I have the memory," he muttered, then clicked on the attachment and opened the file. Thirty minutes later, it was still downloading. He drank some coffee, did some paperwork, called Bernsen and told him he had the personnel files, drank some more coffee. Bernsen was on his way over to get a copy, and Sam hoped the damn thing finished downloading before he arrived.

Finally the screen cleared. He loaded the paper tray in the printer and set it to printing. When the tray was empty, he loaded it again. Damn it, going through this many files would take forever, even if he and Bernsen didn't have other cases to work and could concentrate on this. It looked as if he would be doing a lot of night reading. The printer ran out of toner. Cursing, Sam stopped the task, hunted down a toner cartridge, and was doing battle with it when one of the clerks took pity on him and popped it in place. The printer resumed spitting out pages. Bernsen arrived, and they sat together watching the printer. "I'm tired just looking at this," Bernsen said, eyeing the enormous stack of paper.

"You take half and I'll take half. We'll run the names, see what the computer spits out."

"Thank God we only have to do the men."

"Yeah, but the computer industry is heavily male. Most of these files are on men; it's not a fifty-fifty split." Bernsen sighed. "I wanted to watch the ball game tonight." He paused. "I got the M.E.'s report on Ms. Dean. No sperm."

Sam wasn't really surprised. In a lot of sexual abuse cases there weren't any sperm present, either because the perpetrator used a condom – some actually did – or because he didn't ejaculate. It would have been nice to have the DNA for positive identification, just in case they needed it.

"He did find a hair, though, that wasn't Ms. Dean's. I'm impressed he spotted it, because Ms. Dean was blond, and so is this guy."

A wolfish smile spread across Sam's face. A hair. Just a single hair, but it gave them the DNA they needed. The case was slowly coming together. A partial shoe print, a single hair; it wasn't much to go on, but they were making progress.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When Sam got home that afternoon, both T.J. and Luna were just going in his front door. That meant Jaine was in his house, rather than hers. He liked that. He hoped she was making herself comfortable, because he didn't intend to let her sleep in her own house until after he had caught Marci's killer, and maybe not even then. Having her around was way too much fun to give up, even temporarily.

The day was miserably hot, and sweat crawled down his spine as he went inside. He put the heavy stack of paper, half of the printed-out personnel files from Hammerstead, on the coffee table, then stood for a minute inhaling the blessedly cool air. With his lungs rescued from heat damage, he shrugged out of his jacket and followed the noise into the kitchen.

Jaine was pouring four glasses of iced tea, which meant she had seen him drive up.

"You're just in time," she said.

He removed his pistol and badge and laid them on the counter next to the coffeemaker. "For what?" He took one of the glasses of tea and drank deeply, his throat working. "We're planning a wake for Marci. Her sister, Cheryl, is going to come."

"Where and when?" he asked briefly.

"Tomorrow night, at my apartment," said Luna. "Okay. I can be there."

Looking startled, Jaine said, "But if we're all together, aren't we safe?"

"Not necessarily. You could just be providing him with a golden opportunity to get all of you at once. I won't intrude, but I'll be there."

Jaine snorted. If Sam was anywhere around, he intruded. He was one of those people you couldn't ignore. T.J. slanted a meaningful look at him. "Before we get started, I have news."

"I have news," said Jaine.

"So do I," said Sam.

They all waited. No one said anything. Luna finally spoke up. "Since I'm the only one who doesn't have news, I'll direct this." She pointed at T.J. "You go first. You've had my curiosity up since we talked on the phone." T.J. raised her eyebrows at Sam, and he knew she was asking if it was all right to tell the other two what she had been doing. Since she would have told them anyway if he hadn't shown up, he said, "Go ahead."

"I made copies of all the personnel files for Mr. Strawn," she said. "He said a certain detective had asked to see them, and he was granting permission."

Three sets of eyes turned in his direction. He made a face. "I brought a lot of paperwork home with me. We're running all the names for prior convictions or outstanding warrants, too."

"How long will that take?" Jaine asked.

"If nothing pops up on the computer to point us in the right direction, we'll have to go through all the files and see if something sticks out, maybe dig deeper."

"A day? Two days?" she prodded.

"You're an optimistic little cuss, aren't you?" He took a long swallow of the cold tea.

Luna made a T with her hands, signaling a time-out, then pointed at Sam. "Your turn."

"The M.E. found a blond hair on Marci that wasn't hers." The three women went very still, and he knew their minds were racing, trying to think of all the blond men at Hammer-stead. "Does anyone spring to mind?" he asked. "Not really," Jaine said. "And what you call blond, we might call light brown." She looked at the others, who shrugged. "There are a lot of guys at work who qualify." "Don't drop your guard," he warned. "She might have picked up the hair somewhere else. It's a lead, and when we catch him, if the DNA matches, then we have him nailed. Just be extra careful around the blond guys."

"That's a cheerful thought," Luna said glumly. "I think I'm the only brunette in sales."

"I'm going to go through the files by department, starting with accounting, since Marci was the first target. By the way," he said to T.J. "thanks for giving them to me broken down into the separate departments."

She gave him a wry look. "Anything I can do to help." Luna directed the conversation again, pointing at Jaine. "It's your turn."

Jaine took a deep breath. After three broken engagements, she had to brace herself to announce that she intended… again… to get married. She glanced at Sam, and he winked at her.

"Samandlaregettingmarried," she said in a rush, running the words together as if they would attract less attention that way. What the gods didn't notice, they couldn't squash.

Sam put his fingers in his ears to block out the squeals that erupted. T.J. hugged Jaine. Luna hugged Sam. Then they somehow all ended up hugging each other. The circle was too small without Marci, Jaine thought, but she refused to let tears ruin this little celebration. Life went on. It was sadder without Marci, emptier, but it went on nevertheless.

"How? I mean, when?" T.J. asked.

"In three weeks, when her folks get home," Sam replied. "I was thinking maybe in a judge's chambers, but my family would never fit, and they'll all want to be there."

"Maybe a park," Jaine said.

"Why a park? Someone's house should be large enough. My folks have a big place; they had to have, with seven kids."

She cleared her throat. "Well, there's my family, your family, T.J. and Luna, your cop friends, and I kind of… um… invited everyone on the street."

"Well, yeah," he said. "George and Sadie would have to come, and Eleanor, and… and, goddamn it, our small wedding is already up to about a hundred people, isn't it?" he finished in a frustrated tone.

"Afraid so, kemo sabe."

"That means food, and stuff like that."

"You got it."

"Who the hell is going to handle all this?" His expression clearly said he wasn't.

"Shelley will. She loves this kind of sh – stuff. Nothing fancy, though. I'm on a tight budget, with the house payment and new security system, the cell phone, and now I have to buy new clothes and a new mattress and box spring – "

"You don't need the mattress and box spring," he pointed out, and T.J. and Luna began hooting with laughter. T.J. got five bucks from her purse and slapped it in Luna's hand.

"Told you," Luna crowed.

Jaine narrowed her eyes at them. "You've been betting on my love life," she accused.

"Yes, and I have to say, I'm disappointed in you," T.J. said, trying for a severe tone. She was still laughing, so the attempt didn't quite come off. "I thought you'd hold him off for at least another couple of weeks."

"She couldn't resist me," Sam said smugly, pouring himself another glass of tea.

"I felt sorry for him," Jaine corrected. "All that whining and begging. It was pitiful."

His grin promised retribution. She felt a thrill of anticipation. She might have to make love with him, oh, three or four times to soothe his hurt feelings. What a sacrifice!

She loved the way he was so comfortable with her friends. He sat down at the table and helped them plan the wake, though his contribution was, "Beer and popcorn. What more do you need at a wake?" Which proved he had no understanding of women and food.

After T.J. and Luna left, they went out to move her dad's car from her garage to his. As he helped her fold the tarp back and uncover the little silver bullet of a car, he said, "Do you have the keys with you?"

She fished them out of her jeans pocket and dangled them in front of his eyes. "Wanna drive?"

"Are you trying to suck up to me, to make up for that crack about whining and begging?"

"No, I planned on making that up to you later." He grinned and swiped the keys out of her hand. "Oh, man," he sighed as he toed off his shoes and swung one long leg over the door, then the other, and slid down into the driver's seat. The little car fit him like a glove. He ran his hands over the steering wheel. "How did you say your dad got it?"

"He bought it, back in 1964, but he had an 'in.' You know: 'Built by Shelby, Powered by Ford.' Dad was on the production team that developed the motor. He fell in love with the car. Mom was furious with him for spending so much money on a car when they had a baby – Shelley – and needed to buy a house with more space. Only a thousand of them were built. One thousand and eleven, to be exact. So now Dad has one of the original Cobras, and it's worth more than they paid for their house." He glanced over his shoulder at the Viper sitting in her driveway. "Your dad isn't the only one who spends a fortune on cars."

"I'm a chip off the old block. Besides, I bought the Viper used, so it isn't like I shelled out the full sixty-nine grand for it. I lived off Hamburger Helper and tuna casserole for three years to pay for it."

He shuddered. "But it's paid for, right?"

"Free and clear. I couldn't have afforded the house if I still had to make those car payments. It's Dad's fault I bought it, anyway."

"How's that?"

She nodded at the Cobra. "What do you think he used to teach me to drive?"

Sam looked aghast. "He let a beginner drive it?" "That's how he taught us all how to drive. He said if we could handle the Cobra, we could handle anything. But Shelley and David didn't really have the knack for it, they were more comfortable in Mom's Lincoln. Some people like comfort over speed, I guess." Her expression said she didn't understand it, but accepted it anyway. "Jesus." He was actually pale at the thought of three untutored teenagers behind the wheel of this car. "Dad hates my Viper," she confided, then grinned. "Part of it is because it isn't a Ford, but he really, really hates that the Viper has him beat at top-end speed. The Cobra has faster acceleration, but over any distance I can catch him."

"You've been racing?" he bellowed, looking as if he would jump out of the car.

"Just to see what the horses could do," she assured him. "And it wasn't street racing. We went to a test track." He closed his eyes. "You and your dad are a lot alike, aren't you?" he asked, his tone as filled with horror as if he had just discovered they were typhoid carriers. "Yeah, you'll like him."

"I can't wait."

When Luna arrived at her apartment, she was startled to see Shamal King sitting on the floor beside the door. He stood up when he saw her, and she stopped in her tracks, irrational fear flooding her. Shamal was big and well- muscled. For a terrified instant she thought he – but that was impossible. The killer was a blond, a white man. She swallowed, weak from panic and relief, one following so closely on the heels of the other.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, reaction making her blunt, and saw surprise in his eyes at her lack of welcome.

"I haven't seen you lately," he purred in the velvety voice that had women flocking to him, though the millions he made carrying a football didn't hurt. He usually had a small entourage of hangers-on around him; he loved his fame and the limelight, and made the most of it. "The last two weeks have been crazy," she said. "First there was the List, then Marci – " She stopped, her throat seizing. She still couldn't believe Marci was gone. No; she did believe it. She just hadn't accepted it. "Yeah, I'm sorry about that. The two of you were tight, weren't you?"

He really didn't know much about her, she thought. Their relationship, such as it was, had always been about him. "She was my best friend," she said, and tears blurred her eyes. "Look, Shamal, I'm not in the mood for – "

"Hey, I didn't come here for that," he said, frowning as he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his tailored silk pants. "If it was just sex I wanted, I could get that from – " He stopped, evidently realizing that wasn't the wisest thing to say. "I've missed you," he said helplessly, ill at ease. That wasn't the type of thing Shamal King said to women. Luna stepped past him and unlocked her door. "Really," she said in a dry tone. It was funny; for almost a year, since the moment she met Shamal, she had dreamed about him saying something like that, indicating that she was, in any way, special to him. Now that he had, she wasn't inclined to give an inch. Maybe she had already given all she could, gone as far as possible. He shifted from one foot to the other. He didn't know what to say, she realized. He had always been too handsome, too gifted, and now he was too rich; girls had always chased him. He had been sought after and idolized and pandered to since junior high, when his running ability became obvious. This was new territory for Shamal King. "Would you like to come in?" she finally asked. "Yeah, sure."

He looked around her small apartment, as if he was seeing it for the first time. Going over to the bookcase to examine the books she had there, and the family photographs. "Your dad?" he asked, picking up a photo of a stern, handsome Marine major.

"Yes, right before he retired."

"So you're an army brat?"

"A Marine brat," she corrected, concealing her wince at his failure to recognize the uniform.

He looked uncomfortable again. "I don't know anything about the military. All I've ever done is play football. I guess you've traveled all over the world, huh?"

"Parts of it."

"I could tell you're sophisticated." He returned the photograph to its place, precisely lined it up as she'd had it. "You know wines, and things like that." Luna felt a twinge of surprise. He sounded a little insecure, an emotion she would never have associated with him. He was always so cocky and brash, as if he thought it only natural to receive as much attention as he did. He lived in a mansion, she thought, and he was intimidated because she had traveled some and been exposed to a lot of formal dinners.

"Would you like something to drink?" she offered. "I don't have anything stronger than beer. There's also fruit juice and milk."

"A beer," he said, relieved. Maybe he'd been afraid she would offer him a selection of white wines. She got two beers out of the refrigerator and twisted the tops off, then handed him one. He watched, fascinated, as she took a long swallow.

"I've never seen you drink beer."

She shrugged. "It's kind of endemic to a military base. I like it."

He sat down and rolled the frosty bottle between his hands. After a moment of gathering his courage, he said, "Luna – the reason I'm here – " He stopped, and did some more bottle rolling.

She sat down across from him and crossed her long legs. He eyed the elegant length of exposed skin, as she had meant for him to do. "Yes?"

He cleared his throat. "When you stopped coming around, I… well, it kind of surprised me. I thought we… that is – "

"We had sex," she said gently, deciding to help him along. At the rate he was going, he would still be trying at midnight to spit out whatever it was he wanted to say. "That's all it ever was to you, and all you seemed to want. I wanted more, but I guess you get that a lot from all your other girlfriends."

More discomfort. "It – uh… it was more than just sex."

"Um-hmm. That's why you have something like three girls for every day of the week, a party in every city you go to. Shamal, I'm not an idiot. I woke up and smelled the coffee. I wanted to be special to you, but I'm not."

"Yes, you are," he insisted. He examined the beer bottle again, a flush darkening his face. "More special than you know," he mumbled. "I don't want to lose you. What do I have to do?"

"Lose all the other girls," she said promptly. "If you can't be faithful, I'm not interested."

"Yeah, I know." He managed a faint grin. "I read the List. Parts of it I can't manage."

She smiled. "Parts of it were a joke. The first five items weren't."

"So if I… lose the other girlfriends, you'll come back?" She thought about it, thought about it for so long that he began to sweat, even in the air-conditioned apartment. She had already written him off in her mind, she realized, even if her heart hadn't quite been convinced. Turning things back around would take some effort.

"I'll give it a try," she finally said, and he collapsed back on the couch with a "whoosh" of relief. She held up a slender hand. "But – if you're unfaithful at all, that means even just groping a girl at a party the way I've seen you do, then I'm history. No second chances, because you've already used them all up."

"I swear," he said, holding up his right hand. "No more fucking around."

"Screwing," she said.

"What?"

"Screwing around."

"That's what I said. Same thing."

"No, your language could use a little cleaning up. That's what I meant."

"Babe, I'm a football player. We swear."

"That's fine, when you're on a field, but you aren't on a field now."

"Man," he complained, but good-naturedly. "Already you're trying to change me."

She shrugged in a take-it-or-leave-it manner. "My dad can peel your skin off when he's swearing, but he watches his language around Mom because she doesn't like it. I don't care for it either. My friend Jaine is trying to stop swearing and has done a really good job. If she can do it, anyone can."

"Okay, okay. I'll try." Suddenly he grinned. "Hey, this is kind of homey, isn't it? Domesticated. You ragging on me, and me promising to do better. Like a couple." Luna laughed, and went into his arms. "Yes," she said. "Just like a couple."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Bleary-eyed at dawn on Saturday morning, Sam yawned and sat up on Luna's couch. Around midnight the women had decided he could watch the apartment just as well from inside as he could outside, and insisted he come in. He was tired, so he did. He hadn't had much sleep for two days and nights – he would have gotten more if there hadn't been a certain smart-ass lying under him, insisting on wiggling her pretty butt – and was disgusted after a day chasing leads that turned out to be nothing on another case he was working, plus not getting anywhere on the files from Hammerstead. The computers hadn't turned up anything so far on the names they had run, except for the odd unpaid ticket and a few domestic disturbances. By midnight, fueled by beer and chocolate, the four women were still going strong. Cheryl turned out to be a toned- down version of Marci, similar in looks and voice and with the same boisterous sense of humor. They had talked until they were hoarse, laughed and cried, drunk beer and eaten everything they could get their hands on. It had been an amazing sight.

They moved the wake into the kitchen, and he stretched out on the couch. He had slept, but with one ear attuned to the noise from the kitchen. Nothing alarming had happened, except he discovered that Jaine sang a lot when she was tipsy.

When he woke, he noticed immediately that the noise had died down. In fact, it was downright quiet. Quietly he opened the kitchen door and peeked in. They were all asleep, breathing with the heaviness of fatigue and alcohol. T.J. was snoring slightly, a delicate sound that didn't qualify as a full-fledged snore. Having grown up in a house with four brothers and his dad, he knew exactly how a full-fledged snore sounded.

Jaine was under the table. Literally. She was curled up with her head pillowed on her folded hands, looking like an angel. He snorted; that was a real con. She had probably practiced sleeping like that since she was a little kid. Luna rested her head on her folded arms, like a child in grammar school. She was a sweet kid, he thought, though she had to have some grit to her to hold her own with the others. Cheryl's head was on the table, too, but she was using a pot holder as a pillow – a flat one. With enough beer inside you, a lot of things made sense that normally wouldn't.

He searched for and found the coffee and filters and put on a pot of coffee, not making any attempt to be quiet. They continued to sleep. When the coffee was ready, he hunted through the cabinets for the coffee cups, and got down five of them. He poured four of them only half full, in case there were some shaky hands, but his he filled to the rim. Then he said, "Okay, ladies, time to wake up." He might as well have been talking to the wall for all the effect his announcement had.

"Ladies!" he sounded, more loudly.

Nothing.

"Jaine! Luna! T.J.! Cheryl!"

Luna lifted her head an inch and looked blearily at him, then let her head drop back down on her arms. The other three didn't stir.

A grin spread over his face. He could shake them awake, he supposed, but that wouldn't be much fun. What was fun was finding a pot and a metal spoon and banging them together, then watching the four women bolt upright, wild- eyed. Jaine hit her head on the table and yelled, "Son of a bitch!"

His mission accomplished, Sam distributed the coffee cups, bending over to give Jaine hers; she was sitting under the table, rubbing her head and glaring. God, he loved that woman.

"C'mon, get it in gear," he said to the group at large. "The funeral is in roughly five hours."

"Five hours?" Luna groaned. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. That means you have to be at the funeral home in four hours."

"No way," T.J. pronounced, but she managed a sip of coffee.

"You have to sober up – "

"We aren't drunk," came a growl from beneath the table. " – eat something, if you can, shower, wash your hair, whatever it is you have to do. You don't have time to sit under the table growling."

"I'm not growling."

No, that was more like a snarl. Maybe some medicinal sex would sweeten her mood – if he lived through it. At the moment, he kinda knew how the male praying mantis felt when he was approaching Ms. Mantis, knowing the sex was going to be great but he was going to get his head bitten off.

Ah, well. Some things were worth losing your head. Cheryl stood up, very creakily. She had the imprint of the pot-holder loop on her cheek. She drank some coffee, cleared her throat, and said, "He's right. We have to get moving, or we'll be late."

A slender arm thrust out from under the table, holding an empty coffee cup. Sam got the carafe and refilled the cup. The arm was retracted.

God willing, he could look forward to forty or fifty years with her. It was scary. What was even scarier was that he liked the idea.

T.J. finished her coffee and got up for a refill, so she was functional. She said, "Okay. I can do this. Let me pee and wash my face, and I'm good to drive home." She stumbled down the short hall, and a sudden wail floated back: "God, I can't believe I told Sam I have to pee!"

Fifteen minutes later he had them all lined up, even Jaine, and they were all scowling at him. "I can't believe you're making us do this!" she snapped, but obediently blew into the Breathalyzer.

"I'm a cop. No way am I letting any of you drive until I've checked that you're okay." He looked at the reading and grinned, shaking his head. "It's a good thing I'm here, babe, because you aren't driving anywhere. You're slightly over the limit."

"I am not!"

"Yes, you are. Now drink some more coffee and be quiet while I check the others."

Cheryl was okay. T.J. was okay. Luna was okay, barely. "You cheated!" Jaine accused, her expression thunderous. "How in hell can I cheat? You're the one who blew into it!"

"Then it's wrong! It's defective. We all drank the same amount, so how can I be over the limit when no one else is?"

"They outweigh you," he said patiently. "Luna's pushing the edge, but she's legal. You aren't. I'll drive you home." Now she looked like a sulky kid. "Which vehicle are we going to leave here, yours or mine?"

"Yours. Let it look as if Luna has company, if anyone checks the parking lot."

That argument got to her. She was still pouting, but after a minute she said, "Okay." With only a little more trouble he got her bundled into his truck, where she promptly went back to sleep.

She woke up enough to get into his house under her own power, but she stood glowering as he turned on the shower and began stripping himself, then her. "Did you intend to wash your hair?" he asked. "Yes."

"Good. Then it won't matter when I do this." He picked her up and swung her into the shower, directly under the stream of water. She sputtered and coughed, but didn't fight him. Instead she heaved a big sigh, as if the water felt good.

After her hair was shampooed and rinsed, she said, "I'm not in a good mood."

"I noticed."

"I'm always cranky when I haven't had enough sleep."

"Oh, is that the problem?" he asked dryly.

"The biggest part. I'm usually very happy when I've had a few beers."

"You were happy last night. This morning is a different story."

"You think I have a hangover. I don't. Well, a little headache, but not much. Just let this be a warning to you if you keep me from sleeping again tonight."

"I kept you from sleeping? I kept you from sleeping?" he repeated incredulously. "You are the same woman who shook me out of a sound sleep at two A.M. yesterday morning, aren't you?"

"I didn't shake you. I kind of bounced on you, but I didn't shake you."

"Bounced," he repeated.

"You had a hard-on. I couldn't let it go to waste, could I?"

"You could have woke me up before you started not letting it go to waste."

"Look," she said, exasperated, "if you don't want it used, don't lie on your back with it sticking up like that. If that isn't an invitation, I don't know what is."

"I was asleep. It does that on its own." It was doing it on its own right now, as a matter of fact. It poked her in the stomach.

She looked down… and smiled. It was a smile that made his testicles draw up in fear.

With a sniff, she turned her back on him and ignored him as she finished showering.

"Hey!" he said, to get her attention. Alarm was in his tone. "You aren't going to let this one go to waste, are you?" They made it to the funeral home on time, but it was close. He drove her back to Luna's to pick up her car, so if the killer was at the funeral, he wouldn't see her getting out of Sam's truck and figure out where she was staying. With the Cobra in his garage, he had to park the truck either in the driveway or in Jaine's garage, which was a pain in the ass, since she didn't have an automatic garage door opener.

He was relaxed, and Jaine was in an infinitely more mellow mood, too. Medicinal sex was great stuff. She had managed to resist him for a full five minutes, but just when he was beginning to really sweat, she cuddled up to him with a sparkle in those blue eyes and whispered, "I'm feeling tense. I think I need relaxing."

She looked great, he thought, watching her from across the room. She wore a neat little navy suit that hit right at her knees, and sexy pumps. She had let him watch while she put on what she called her "funeral face". Evidently women had a makeup strategy for every occasion. The eyeliner and mascara were waterproof, to head off smudges. No blush or foundation, just powder, because she would be hugging people and didn't want to leave smears on their clothing. And kiss-proof lipstick in what she called a "discreet mauve," though he had no idea what in hell mauve was. Her lipstick looked pinkish, but women couldn't just say "pink."

Women were a different species. Aliens. That was the only explanation.

Cheryl wore black and looked very dignified. Her husband had joined her, and stood beside her, holding her hand. T.J. wore a dark green suit, and her husband also attended with her. Mr. Yother was a trim, all-American type, with neat brown hair and regular features. He didn't hold T.J.'s hand, and Sam noticed that T.J. didn't look at him very often. There was trouble there, he thought. Luna wore a form-fitting column of red that hit her at mid- calf. She was, simply, beautiful. She walked over to join Jaine, and Sam moved closer, to hear what they were saying.

"Marci loved red," Jaine said, smiling at Luna and reaching for her hand. "I wish I had thought of it." Luna's lips trembled. "I wanted to send her off in style. This isn't in bad taste, is it?"

"Are you kidding? It's great. Everyone who knew Marci will understand, and if they didn't know Marci, then they don't matter."

Roger Bernsen was there, trying to blend in. He didn't do it very well, but he was trying. He didn't come over to speak, but then, they weren't here to socialize. They moved around, studying the crowd, listening to conversations. There were several blond men in attendance, but Sam carefully studied each one of them and none seemed to be paying any special attention to Jaine or the others. Most of them were with their wives. The killer could be married, he knew, and live a very normal life on the surface, but unless he was a stone-cold serial killer he would show some kind of emotion when faced with his handiwork, and his other targets.

Sam didn't think they were dealing with that land of killer; the attacks were too personal, and too emotional, like someone out of control.

He continued to watch all during the graveside service, which was mercifully brief. The heat was already stifling, though Cheryl had scheduled the service as early as possible to avoid the worst part of the day. He caught Bernsen's eye, and Roger slowly shook his head. He hadn't spotted anything either. Everything was being taped, and they would watch the film later, to see if there was anything they had missed, but Sam didn't think there was. Damn it, he'd been certain the killer would attend.

Cheryl was weeping a little, but mostly keeping it under control. Sam saw Jaine blot her eyes with the edge of a folded tissue: more female strategy to preserve the makeup. He didn't think his sisters knew all these tricks. A pretty, slender woman in a black dress approached Cheryl and was extending her condolences when she suddenly broke down and collapsed in Cheryl's startled arms, sobbing. "I just can't believe it," she wept. "The office isn't the same without her."

T.J. and Luna moved closer to Jaine, both of them eyeing the woman with "what's going on?" expressions. Sam walked over, too. People were grouping in clusters, politely ignoring the emotional storm, so he wouldn't be conspicuous doing the same thing.

"I might have known Leah would play this for all she's worth," T.J. muttered in disgust. "She's a drama queen," she added, for Sam's benefit. "She's in my department, and she does this on a regular basis. Give her something the least bit upsetting and she turns it into a tragedy." Jaine was watching the display in disbelief, her eyes wide. She shook her head and said mournfully, "The wheel's still going around, but her hamster's dead."

T.J. choked on a bark of laughter and tried to turn it into a cough. She quickly turned her back, her face red as she tried to control herself. Luna was biting her lower lip, but a snicker broke through and she, too, had to turn her back to the scene. Sam covered his mouth with his hand, but his shoulders were shaking. Maybe people would think he was crying.

A red dress! The bitch wore a red dress. Corin couldn't believe his eyes. That was so shameful, so cheap. He wouldn't have believed it of her, and he was so shocked it was all he could do to keep his hands off her. Mother would be horrified.

Women like that didn't deserve to live. None of them did. They were dirty, filthy whores, and he would be doing the world a favor by getting rid of them.

Luna sighed with relief when she finally stepped into her apartment and could lock off her high heels. Her feet were killing her, but looking good for Marci was worth the pain. She would do it all again if she had to, but she was glad she didn't.

Now that the funeral was over, she felt numb, exhausted. The wake had helped immensely; talking about Marci, laughing, crying, had been a catharsis that had allowed her to get through the day. The funeral itself, the ritual, was its own comfort. Her dad had told her that military funerals, with all the pomp and protocol and the precisely orchestrated movements, were a comfort to the families. The rituals said: This person counted. This person was respected. And the services were sort of an emotional marker, a point at which the grieving could honor the dead and yet have a starting place for the rest of their lives. It was funny how they had all connected to Cheryl. It was like having Marci, but different, because Cheryl was definitely her own person. It would be nice to stay in touch with her.

Luna twisted her arms to reach the back zipper of her dress, and had it half unzipped when someone rang her doorbell.

She froze, sudden panic freezing her veins. Oh, my God. He was out there, she knew it. He had followed her home. He knew she was here alone.

She edged toward the phone, as if he could see through the door and know what she was doing. Would he break it down? He had broken into Jaine's house, by knocking out a pane of glass, but was he strong enough to break down a door? She had never even thought to find out if her door was reinforced, or a simple wooden door.

"Luna?" The voice was puzzled, low. "It's Leah. Leah Street. Are you okay?"

"Leah?" she said weakly, relief making her dizzy. She bent over at the waist, breathing deeply to fight off the shakes. "I tried to catch up with you, but you were in too much of a hurry," Leah called.

Yes, she had been. She had been desperate to get home and out of those shoes.

"Just a minute, I was about to change clothes." Why on earth was Leah here? she wondered as she crossed to the door and unchained it. Before she unlocked it, however, she put her eye to the peephole to make certain it was Leah, though she knew she had recognized the voice.

It was Leah, looking sad and tired, and suddenly Luna felt guilty about the way they had laughed at her at the funeral. She couldn't imagine why Leah wanted to talk to her, they had never exchanged more than a few words in passing, but she unlocked the door. "Come in," she invited. "It was miserably hot at the service, wasn't it? Would you like something cold to drink?"

"Yes, please," Leah said. She was carrying a large shoulder bag, and she eased its weight off her shoulder, clutching it in her arms like it was a baby. As Luna turned to go to the kitchen, she noticed how Leah's blond hair glistened in the light. She checked, a tiny frown knitting her brow, and started to turn back. She was too late.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Jaine woke up at ten-thirty Sunday morning. She woke up then only because the phone was ringing. She started to fumble for the receiver, remembered this was Sam's house, and snuggled back into the pillow. So what if it was on her side of the bed? His phone, his responsibility. He stirred beside her, all heat and hardness and musky male scent.

"Get the phone, will you?" he said sleepily. "It's for you," she mumbled.

"How d'you know?"

"It's your phone." She hated having to point out the obvious.

Muttering something under his breath, he heaved himself up on one elbow and leaned over her to reach the phone, squashing her into the mattress. "Yeah," he said. "Donovan."

"Yeah," he said again, after a short pause. "She's here." He dropped the phone onto the pillow in front of her and smirked. "It's Shelley."

She thought a few swear words, but didn't say them. Sam still hadn't made her pay for the "son of a bitch" she'd yelled when she hit her head on the table, and she didn't want to remind him. Cradling the phone to her ear, she said, "Hello," as Sam lay down beside her again. "Long night?" Shelley asked sarcastically.

"About twelve, thirteen hours. The usual for this time of year."

A hard, warm body pressed against her back, and a hard, warm hand smoothed over her belly on a slow sweep up to her breasts. Something else that was hard and warm prodded her bottom.

"Ha, ha," said Shelley. "You have to come get this cat." She didn't sound like the point was negotiable. "BooBoo? Why?" Like she didn't know. Sam was rubbing her nipples, and she put her hand over his to still his fingers. She needed to concentrate, or she might get stuck with BooBoo again.

"He's destroying my furniture! He's always seemed like such a sweet cat, but he's a destructive demon!"

"He's just upset at being in a strange place." Deprived of her nipples, Sam moved his hand down to another interesting spot. She clamped her legs together to halt the slide of his fingers.

"He isn't nearly as upset as I am!" Shelley sounded more than upset; she sounded outraged. "Look, I can't take care of planning your wedding when I have to watch this demon cat every second of the day."

"Do you want to risk him getting killed? Do you want to tell Mom that you let a psycho nutcase killer mutilate her cat because you care more about your furniture than you do her feelings?" Boy, that was good, if she did say so herself. Masterful.

Shelley was breathing hard. "You fight dirty" she complained.

Sam tugged his hand free from the clamp of her thighs and chose another angle of attack: her rear guard. That thought-destroying hand stroked her bottom, then slid on down and around, finding just what he wanted and working two long fingers into her. She gasped and almost dropped the phone.

Shelley also chose another angle of attack. "You aren't even staying at your house, you're staying with Sam. BooBoo will be all right there."

Oh, no. She couldn't concentrate. His fingers were big and rough, and they were driving her out of her mind. It was his revenge for making him answer the phone, but if he didn't stop it he was going to have an outraged cat shredding everything in his house.

"Just pet him a lot," she managed to gasp. "He'll settle down." Yeah, in a couple of weeks. "He especially likes to have his ears scratched."

"Come get him."

"Shel, I can't just bring a cat into someone else's house!"

"Sure you can. Sam would put up with a herd of maniac demon cats just to get in your pants. Use your power now, while it lasts! In a few months he won't even bother to shave before crawling into bed with you."

Great. Shelley was trying to turn this into a male-female power issue. Sam's knuckle rubbed over her clitoris, and she almost mewed. She managed to say, "I can't," though she wasn't certain to whom she was saying it, Sam or Shelley.

Sam said, "Yes, you can," in a low, smoky voice, and Shelley shrieked in her ear, "Oh, my God, you're doing it right now, aren't you? I heard him! You're talking to me on the phone while Sam is boinking you!"

"No, no," Jaine babbled, and Sam promptly made a liar out of her by sliding out his fingers and replacing them with a hard thrust of his full-grown morning erection. She bit her lip, but a strangled sound escaped anyway.

"I can see I'm wasting my time talking to you now," Shelley said. "I'll call again when you aren't occupied. How long does it usually take him? Five minutes? Ten?" Now she wanted an appointment. Since biting her lip hadn't worked, Jaine tried biting the pillow. Desperately reaching for a moment of control, just a moment, she managed to say, "A couple of hours."

"Two hours!" Shelley was shrieking again. She paused. "Does he have any brothers?"

"F-four."

"Man!" There was another pause as Shelley evidently weighed the advantages and disadvantages of dumping Al in favor of a Donovan. She finally sighed. "I'm going to have to rethink my strategy. You'd probably let BooBoo tear my house down, brick by brick, before you'd do anything to upset that particular applecart, wouldn't you?"

"You got it," Jaine agreed, her eyes closing. Sam shifted position, getting to his knees and straddling her right leg, with her left one hooked over his arm. Forking her that way, his penetration was deep and straight in, and his left thigh rubbed right where it did the most good. She had to bite the pillow again.

"Okay, I'll let you go." Shelley sounded defeated. "I tried."

"Bye," Jaine said thickly, and fumbled to return the phone to its hook, but couldn't quite reach it. Sam leaned forward to do the honors, and the movement pushed him so deeply inside her that she shrieked and climaxed. When she could speak, she pushed her hair out of her face and said, "You're evil." She was panting and weak, unable to do anything except lie there.

"No, babe, I'm good," he countered, and proved it. When he was lying beside her, sweaty and limp, he said sleepily, "I gather we almost got BooBoo back."

"Yeah, and you weren't helping matters," she grumbled. "She knew what you were doing, too. I'll probably never live this down."

The phone rang again. Jaine said, "If it's Shelley, I'm not here."

"Like she'll believe that," he said as he groped for the receiver.

"I don't care what she believes, as long as I don't have to talk to her right now."

"Hello," he said. "Yeah, she's here."

He extended the phone, and she took it, glaring at him. He mouthed, "Cheryl," and she sighed with relief. "Hi, Cheryl."

"Hi. Listen, I've been trying to call Luna. I have some photos of Marci that she wanted to have copied, and I wanted her address to mail them to her. I was just there yesterday, but who pays attention to street signs and numbers? Anyway, she isn't answering her phone, so do you have the address?"

Jaine sat upright, a chill roughening her bare skin. "She isn't answering? How long have you been trying to call?" "Since eight, I guess. About three hours." Cheryl suddenly got it, and said, "Oh, God."

Sam was out of bed, pulling on his pants. "Who?" he asked sharply, and turned on his cell phone. "Luna," Jaine answered, her throat tight. "Listen, Cheryl, maybe it's nothing. Maybe she went to church, or out to breakfast with Shamal. Maybe she's with him. I'll check and have her call you when I find her. Okay?" Sam punched out numbers on the cell phone as he pulled a clean shirt out of the closet and shrugged into it. Carrying his socks and shoes, he left the bedroom, talking so quietly into the little phone she couldn't hear what he was saying.

To Cheryl she said, "Sam's calling some people. He'll find her." She hung up without saying good-bye, then vaulted out of bed and began fumbling for her own clothes. She was shaking, the tremors growing worse by the second. Just a few minutes ago she had been so blissed out, and now this awful terror was making her sick; the contrast was almost paralyzing.

She stumbled into the living room, fastening her jeans, as Sam was going out the door. He was wearing his pistol and his badge. "Wait!" she cried, panicked. "No." He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. "You can't go."

"Yes I can." Wildly she looked around for her shoes. They were in the bedroom, damn it. "Wait for me!" "Jaine." It was his cop voice. "No. If anything has happened, you'll only be in the way. You wouldn't be allowed inside, and it's too damn hot to sit out in the truck. Go over to T.J.'s and wait there. I'll call you as soon as I know something."

She was still shaking, and now she was crying, too. No wonder he didn't want her along. She swiped her hand over her face. "P-promise?"

"I promise." His expression softened. "Be careful on the way to T.J.'s. And, babe – don't let anyone in the door, okay?"

She nodded, feeling worse than useless. "Okay." "I'll call," he said again, and was gone.

Jaine slumped down on the sofa and cried in raw, ragged gulps. She couldn't do this again; she just couldn't. Not Luna. She was so young and beautiful, that bastard couldn't have hurt her. Luna had to be with Shamal; she had been so luminously happy at his sudden turnaround that they were probably spending every spare moment together. Sam would find her. Shamal's number was unlisted, but cops had ways of getting unlisted numbers. Luna would be with Shamal, and then Jaine would feel silly for panicking this way.

Finally she stopped crying and mopped her face. She had to get to T.J.'s, to wait for Sam's call. She started to the bedroom, then abruptly turned back and locked the front door.

She arrived at T.J.'s twenty minutes later, having done nothing more than brush her teeth and hair and finish dressing. She leaned on the doorbell. "T.J. it's Jaine! Hurry!"

She heard running footsteps, the cocker spaniel barking; then the door was wrenched open and T.J. 's worried face swam before her. "What's wrong?" T.J. asked, jerking her inside the door, but Jaine couldn't tell her; she couldn't get the words out. Still barking hysterically, the cocker spaniel, Trilby, jumped up on their legs.

"Trilby, hush!" T.J. said. Her chin trembled, and she swallowed. "Luna?"

Jaine nodded, still unable to talk. T.J. put her hand over her mouth as awful, gut-wrenching cries tore from her throat, and she fell back against the wall. "No, no!" Jaine managed to say, putting her arms around T.J. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean – " She took a deep breath. "We don't know yet. Sam's on his way over there, and he's going to call here when he knows – "

"What's going on?" Galan asked in alarm, stepping into the foyer. A section of the Sunday paper was in his hand. Trilby ran over to him, her little stump of a tail wagging ferociously.

That damn shaking had started again. Jaine tried to control it. "Luna's missing. Cheryl hasn't been able to get her on the phone."

"So she's gone grocery shopping," Galan said, shrugging. T.J. gave him a look of such fury it should have scorched his skin. "He thinks we're hysterical and Marci was lolled by some doper."

"That makes a lot more sense than the bunch of you being stalked by a maniac," he shot back. "Stop dramatizing everything."

"If we're dramatizing it," Jaine said, "so are the police." Then she bit her lip. She didn't want to get in the middle of a domestic dispute. T.J. and Galan had enough trouble without her adding to it.

Galan shrugged again. "T.J. said you're marrying a cop, so he's probably humoring you. Come on, pooch." He turned and walked back to his den and his newspaper, Trilby scampering around his feet.

"Forget him," T.J. said. "Tell me what happened." Jaine related what Cheryl had said and the time frame. T.J. glanced at the clock; it was now just after noon. "Four hours, at least. She isn't grocery shopping. Has anyone called Shamal?"

"His number's unlisted, but Sam will take care of it." They went into the kitchen, where T.J. had been reading. Her open book lay in the alcove. T.J. put on a pot of coffee. They were each on their second cup, the cordless phone at T.J.'s elbow, when it finally rang. She snatched it up. "Sam?"

She listened for a moment, and watching her face, Jaine felt the hope die out of her. T.J. looked stunned, all color draining from her. Her lips moved, but no sound emerged. Jaine grabbed the phone. "Sam? Tell me."

His voice was heavy. "Baby, I'm sorry It looks like it happened last night, maybe as soon as she got home from the funeral."

T.J. laid her head on the table, weeping. Jaine reached to touch her shoulder, trying to offer comfort, but she could feel herself folding in, giving in to the grief, and she didn't know if she had any comfort to offer.

"Stay there," Sam said. "Don't go anywhere. I'll be there when I can get free. This isn't my jurisdiction, but we're all putting our heads together. It may be several hours, but don't go anywhere," he repeated.

"Okay," Jaine whispered, and hung up.

Galan came to the door and stood hovering, staring at T.J. as if he hoped she was still overreacting, but something in his face said that this time he knew better. He was pale. "What?" he croaked.

"That was Sam," Jaine said. "Luna's dead." Then her fragile control broke, and it was a long time before she could do anything except weep and hold on to T.J. It was sunset before Sam arrived. He looked tired and angry. He introduced himself to Galan, because neither Jaine nor T.J. thought to.

"You were at the funeral," Galan said suddenly, his gaze sharpening.

Sam nodded. "A Sterling Heights detective was, too. We hoped we could spot him, but he's either too slick or he wasn't there."

Galan glanced at his wife. T.J. was sitting quietly, absently stroking the black-and-white cocker spaniel. Yesterday Galan's gaze had been remote, but there was nothing remote about the way he was watching her now. "Someone's really after them. It's so damn hard to believe."

"Believe it," Sam said briefly, his guts twisting with fury as he remembered what had been done to Luna. She had suffered the same vicious, personal attack, her face battered beyond recognition, the multiple stab wounds, the sexual abuse. Unlike Marci, she had still been alive when he stabbed her; the apartment floor was awash in blood. Her clothes had also been shredded, just like Jaine's. When he thought how close Jaine had come to dying, what she would have suffered if she had been at home on Wednesday night, he could barely contain his rage. "Did you get in touch with her parents?" Jaine asked hoarsely. They lived in Toledo, so they weren't far away. "Yes, they're already here," Sam said. He sat down and put his arms around her, cradling her head on his shoulder.

His pager beeped. He reached for his belt and silenced it, then glanced at the number and cursed, rubbing his face. "I have to go."

"Jaine can stay here," T.J. said, before he could ask. "I don't have any clothes," Jaine said, but she wasn't protesting, just stating a problem.

"I'll drive you home," Galan said. "T.J. will go, too. You can pack whatever you need, stay as long as you want." Sam nodded in approval. "I'll call," he said as he went out the door.

Corin rocked back and forth. He couldn't sleep, couldn't sleep, couldn't sleep. He hummed to himself, the way he had done when he was little, but the magic song didn't work. He wondered when it had stopped working. He didn't remember.

The bitch in red was dead. Mother was so pleased. Two down and two to go.

He felt good. For the first time in his life, he was pleasing Mother. Nothing he had ever done before had been good enough for her because he had always been flawed, no matter how hard she tried to make him perfect. He was doing this right, though; she was very pleased. He was ridding the world of the whoring bitches, one by one by one. No. Too many "ones". He hadn't done three yet. He had tried, but one hadn't been at home.

He remembered seeing her at the funeral, though. She had laughed. Or was it the other one? He felt confused, because the faces kept swimming in his memory. One shouldn't laugh at funerals. It was very hurtful to the bereaved.

But which one had laughed? Why couldn't he remember? It didn't matter, he thought to himself, and felt better. They both had to die, and then it wouldn't matter which one had laughed, or which one was "Ms. C." It wouldn't matter, because finally – finally – Mother would be happy and she would never, never hurt him again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

On Monday morning, Sam sat in the Warren R D. with his head propped on his hands, wading through the Hammerstead files again and again. The NCIC computers hadn't given them a hit on any of the names, so he and Bernsen were simply reading and rereading, looking for something that would click in their heads and give them the clue they needed.

It was there; Sam knew it was. They just hadn't found it yet. He suspected he already knew what it was, because of that nagging gut feeling he had missed something. He couldn't put his finger on it, but it was there, and sooner or later the bell would chime. He just hoped it was sooner, like in the next minute.

This guy hated women. He wouldn't get along with them, wouldn't like working with them. There might be a note in his file about a complaint lodged by someone, maybe even a harassment charge. Something like that should have jumped out at them on the first once-over, but maybe the complaint had been worded in such a way that the charge wasn't actually spelled out.

Neither Jaine nor T.J. was working today. They were still together, though they had moved from T.J.'s house to Shelley's, along with that yappy little cocker spaniel that sounded the alarm at any kind of intrusion, whether it was a bird on the patio or someone coming up the walk. He had been afraid Jaine would want to spend the day at home, since her new alarm system had been installed – under the eagle eye of Mrs. Kulavich, who was taking her guardian duties seriously – on Saturday while they were attending Marci's funeral. An alarm system was fine, but it wouldn't stop a determined killer.

But Jaine hadn't wanted to be alone. She and T.J. were clinging together, shocked and dazed at what had happened to their tight little circle of friends. There was no doubt in anyone's mind now that the List was what had triggered the violence, and the area police departments were putting together a task force to coordinate and work the cases, since no two of the friends lived in the same jurisdiction.

The national news organizations had been all over the story. "Who is killing the Ladies of the List?" one newscaster had intoned. "The Detroit area has been shocked by the violent murders of two of the women who authored the humorous and controversial Mr. Perfect List that took the nation by storm a couple of weeks ago." Reporters were camped outside Hammerstead again, wanting to interview anyone who was acquainted with the two victims. The task force had arranged to get copies of any interview tapes the reporters might make, in case their guy gave in to his ego and wanted to see himself on national television, mourning his two "friends". Reporters had also been at Jaine's house, but left when they discovered no one was at home. He imagined they had checked out T.J.'s, too, which was why he had called Shelley and told her to ask Jaine and T.J. to spend the day with her. Shelley had been more than glad to comply. He figured that the snoops would talk to people who knew people and eventually find Shelley, but for today at least Jaine and T.J. weren't being bothered.

Sam rubbed his eyes. He had gotten maybe two hours sleep. The page last night had been to the scene of another homicide, a teenage boy. That had quickly wrapped up with the arrest of the kid's new girlfriend's ex, who had taken it personally that the kid had told him to eat shit and die. The paperwork, however, was always a bitch. Where was the report on the shoe tread they had found in Jaine's house? Getting an answer usually didn't take this long. He searched his desk, but no one had laid it there in his absence. Maybe it had gone to Bernsen, since they had cross-referenced each other on all the paperwork. Before Luna's death, not everyone had been convinced the break-in at Jaine's house had anything to do with Marci's murder, but he and Bernsen had been. Now, of course, there was no doubt in anyone's mind. He called Roger. "Did the report on that shoe tread come to you?"

"Haven't seen it. You mean you don't have it yet?" "Not yet. The lab must have lost it. I'll shoot them another request." Damn it, he thought as he hung up. The one thing they didn't need was a delay. Maybe the shoe print wasn't important, but maybe the shoe was a rare one, so unusual that someone at Hammerstead would say, "Oh, yeah, so-and-so has a pair. Paid a fortune for them." He went back to the files, frustrated almost to the point of breaking something. It was right here under his nose; he knew it. All he had to do was figure it out. Galan left work early. Yesterday's events had left him so shaken he couldn't concentrate. All he wanted was to pick up T.J. at Jaine's sister's house and take her home where he could watch over her.

He didn't know how they had lost touch with each other. No – he knew, all right. The innocent flirting at work with Xandrea Conaway had started to seem important, and maybe it had never been so innocent. When had he started comparing everything T.J. and everything she said and did, to Xandrea, who was always dressed up and never nagged?

Of course T.J. wasn't dressed up at home, he realized. Neither was he. That was what homes were for, relaxing and being comfortable. So what if she complained when he didn't take out the garbage? He complained if she left her makeup scattered all over the vanity. People who lived together inevitably got on each other's nerves sometimes. That was part of being married.

He had loved T.J. since he was fourteen years old. How had he lost sight of that, and of what they had together? Why had it taken the terror of realizing a killer actually was stalking T.J. and her friends for him to realize it would kill him to lose her?

He didn't know how he could make it up to her. He didn't know if she would even let him. For the past week or so, since she had guessed he was infatuated with Xandrea, she had pulled away from him. Maybe she believed he'd actually been unfaithful to her, though he had never let the situation between him and Xandrea get so far out of hand. They had kissed, yes, but nothing more.

He tried to imagine how he would feel if another man kissed T.J. and felt sick to his stomach. Maybe kisses weren't so forgivable.

He would crawl on his belly to her if she would smile at him again like he mattered to her.

Jaine's sister lived in a big, two-story Colonial in St. Clair Shores. The doors were down on the triple-bay garage, but Sam Donovan's red muscle-truck was parked in the driveway. He parked beside it and went up the curving walk to the double front doors, where he rang the bell and waited.

Donovan answered the door. Galan noticed Sam was still wearing his pistol. If he had one, he thought, he would probably wear it too, legal or not.

"How are they?" he asked softly, stepping inside. "Tired. Still in shock. Shelley said they slept off and on all day, so I guess they didn't get much sleep last night." Galan shook his head. "They sat up talking most of the night. Funny; they didn't talk much about the bastard who did this, or how close Jaine came the other night when he broke into her house. They just talked about Luna and Marci."

"It's like losing two family members so close together. It'll take them a while to recover from this." Sam dealt with grief on a regular basis; he knew Jaine would recover, because that kick-ass spirit of hers just wouldn't stay down, but he also knew it could take weeks, maybe even months, before the shadow of pain left her eyes. In part of the house, things were normal. Shelley's husband, Al, watched television. Their teenage daughter, Stefanie, was upstairs on the phone, while eleven-year-old Nicholas played video games on the computer. The women had gathered in the kitchen – why was it always the kitchen? – to talk and drink diet sodas and eat whatever comfort food Shelley had on hand.

The ravages of grief had left both Jaine and T.J. pale, but they were dry-eyed. T.J. looked startled to see her husband.

"What are you doing here?" She didn't sound particularly glad to see him.

"I wanted to be with you," he replied. "I know you're tired, so I didn't want you to have to wait until midnight to go home. Not to mention Shelley and her family probably go to bed a lot earlier than that."

Shelley waved her hand dismissively. "Don't worry about that. We usually stay up late while the kids are out of school."

"What about the reporters?" T.J. asked. "We won't have any peace if they're still swarming the place."

"I doubt they would hang around forever," Sam said. "They'd like an interview, yeah, but they can get statements from other people. More than likely, since you weren't at home today, they'll call instead of camping out in your yard."

"Then I would like to go home," T.J. said, standing. She hugged Shelley. "Thanks a million. You were a lifesaver today."

Shelley returned the hug. "Any time. Come back tomorrow, if you don't go to work. Whatever you do, don't stay home alone!"

"Thanks. I may take you up on it, but… I think I'll go to work tomorrow. Getting back into the routine will help take my mind off things."

Jaine said, "I think Sam and I will go home, too. He looks as exhausted as I feel."

"Are you going to work tomorrow?" T.J. asked. "I don't know. Maybe. I'll call and let you know." "Trilby," T.J. called, and the dog jumped up, bright eyes sparkling and her entire body wagging in enthusiasm. "C'mon, girl, let's go home."

Trilby barked and scampered around T.J.'s legs. Galan leaned down to pet her, and she licked his hand. "Where's your leash?" he asked, and she dashed off to find it. Usually the dog's antics could make T.J. laugh, but tonight she couldn't manage even a smile.

On the drive home, T.J. sat staring out the window. "You didn't have to leave work early," she said. "I'm fine."

"I wanted to be with you," he repeated, and drew a deep breath. He would prefer to have this talk once they were home, where he could put his arms around her, but maybe now was the best time. At least she couldn't walk away. "I'm sorry," he said softly.

She didn't glance at him. "For what?"

"For being an asshole; for being a stupid asshole. I love you more than anything or anyone else on earth, and I can't stand the thought of losing you."

"What about your girlfriend?" She made the word sound so immature, as if he were a horny teenager who couldn't see past the moment.

He winced. "I know you don't believe me, but I swear I haven't been that stupid."

"Exactly how stupid have you been?"

She had never let him get away with anything, he remembered. Even in high school, T.J. would pin him to the wall if he tried to evade telling her whatever she wanted to know.

Keeping his eyes on the road, because he was afraid to look at her, he said, "Flirting stupid. And kissing stupid. But no more than that. Not ever."

"Not even groping?" Her tone said she didn't believe him. "Not ever," he repeated firmly. "I… Damn it, T.J. it didn't feel right, and I don't mean anything physical. She wasn't you. I don't know; maybe I let my ego get the best of me, because I kind of liked the thrill, but it was wrong and I knew it."

"Who exactly is 'she'?" T.J. asked.

Saying her name took every ounce of courage he had, because putting an actual name to the woman personalized it, made it real. "Xandrea Conaway."

"Have I met her?"

Galan shook his head, then realized she still wasn't looking at him. "No, I don't think so."

"Xandrea," she repeated. "She sounds like a mixed drink." He knew better than to say anything the least bit nice about Xandrea. Instead he said, "I do love you. Yesterday when you found out about Luna and I realized – " His voice cracked. He had to swallow before he could continue. "When I realized you're in danger, it was like a slap in the face."

"Being hunted by a psycho killer is kind of an attention getter," she said dryly.

"Yeah." He decided to go for broke and asked, "Will you give me another chance?"

"I don't know," she said, and his heart sank. "I told you I wouldn't be hasty or do anything drastic, and I won't. My attention is a little splintered right now, so I think we should just shelve this discussion for a while." Okay, he thought. That was a swing and a miss, but he hadn't struck out yet.

"May I sleep with you?"

"You mean have sex?"

"No. I mean sleep with you. In our bed. I'd like to make love with you, too, but if you won't do that, will you at least let me sleep with you?"

She thought about it for so long that he began to think he'd swung at and missed another ball. Finally she said, "Okay."

He heaved a sigh of relief. She wasn't brimming over with enthusiasm, but she wasn't kicking him out, either. It was a chance. They had a lot of years together, and that was holding them together when couples without much of a history might already have called it quits. He couldn't expect to undo in one night the accumulated damage he had wrought over the past two years.

But she had hung in there with him, so he wasn't going to quit now, no matter how surly she got, or how long it took him to make her believe he loved her. The most important thing was keeping her alive, even if she walked out on him afterward. He didn't know if he could stand losing her, but he knew he sure as hell couldn't stand burying her.

"I'm so tired," Jaine said. "You must be exhausted."

"I've been running on coffee all day long," Sam replied. "The jolt is wearing off, though. Want to make it an early night?"

She yawned. "I don't think I have a choice. I doubt I could stay awake if I tried." She rubbed her forehead. "I've had a splitting headache all day, and nothing I've taken has been able to touch it."

"Damn," he said mildly. "We aren't even married yet, and already you're having headaches."

That earned a faint smile.

"Did Shelley whip out a giant cucumber today?" The smile grew a little, though it was tinged with sadness. "Yeah. Every time we closed our eyes, she plastered us with cucumber slices. I don't know if they work, but they feel good." She paused. "Did you make any progress today?"

He grunted in disgust. "All I've done is tread water. The computer didn't turn up anything, so Bernsen and I have been going over the files to see if we missed something. Do you remember any harassment complaints, or any trouble between two employees?"

"I remember when Sada Whited caught her husband fooling around with Emily Hearst and they had a brawl in the parking lot, but I doubt that's what you're looking for." She yawned again. "Harassment complaints, huh? I can't remember any. Bennett Trotter probably should have a sexual harassment complaint filed against him every day, but I don't think anyone has. And he has dark hair."

"We haven't ruled out brunettes. We haven't ruled out anyone. Marci could have picked up that blond hair from someone she brushed against in the grocery store. Tell me more about Bennett Trotter."

"He's a jerk, always making comments that he thinks are sexy, but he's the only one who thinks they are. You know the type."

He did. He wondered if Bennett Trotter could provide proof of his whereabouts on the two days in question. "There are several people whom no one likes," Jaine continued. "My boss, Ashford de Wynter, is one. He was in a real snit over the List, until the company decided to go with the free publicity, then he mellowed out." Sam added Ashford de Wynter to his mental list. "Anyone else?"

"I don't know everyone. Let's see. No one likes Leah Street, but I don't guess she counts."

The name was familiar. It took him only a second to place it. "She's the drama queen."

"And a pain in the rear. I'm glad she's not in my department. T.J. has to put up with her every day."

"Anyone else besides Trotter and de Wynter?"

"No one that sticks out. I remember a guy named Gary or something like that who was really bent out of shape when the List first came out, because some of the women were ragging him about it, but he wasn't violent about it, just sulky."

"Can you find out his name for certain?"

"Sure. Dominica Flores was one of the women needling him. I'll call her in the morning."

It was strange how altered everything was, T.J. thought the next morning as she entered Hammerstead. Marci and Luna weren't here. They would never be here again. As difficult to accept as Marci's death was, Luna's was impossible. T.J. still couldn't get her mind around it. Luna had been so damn bright and sweet, how could anyone want to kill her over a stupid list?

The killer was here in this building, she thought. She might walk past him in the hallway. Maybe coming to work wasn't the smartest thing to do, but in a weird way she had wanted to be here because he was here. Maybe he would say something, though she knew that possibility was remote. Maybe she would catch an expression on his face – something, anything, that would help them figure out who he was. She wasn't any kind of Sherlock Holmes, but she wasn't stupid, either.

Jaine had always been the most intrepid of their group, but T.J. figured she could be a little daring, too. Coming to work today felt daring. Jaine wasn't coming in; the headache she'd had yesterday hadn't let up, and she was spending another day with Shelley, being pampered. T.J. had to admit she also liked the idea of Galan worrying about her. It was silly, maybe even stupid, to come to work when she knew he was alarmed about it, but he had taken her for granted for so long that his present intense concern was like balm to her hurt feelings. He had surprised her last night with what he said. Maybe they could make it together. She wasn't going to rush into accepting his apology any more than she had rushed into a divorce when their marriage first started crumbling, but she did love him, and for the first time in a long while, she thought he might love her, too.

Luna and Shamal had finally worked out their differences, too, right before she had been killed. She had had two days of happiness with him. Two days, when she should have had a lifetime.

T.J. felt a sudden chill. Did she herself have only two days with Galan, to work on their fragile truce? No. The killer was not going to get to her, the way he had to Marci and Luna. She couldn't imagine how Luna could have let him into her apartment the way the police thought. Maybe he had already been inside, waiting for her. Sam said they hadn't found any sign of forced entry, but maybe he could pick locks or something. Maybe he had somehow gotten his hands on a key. She didn't know how he could have, but he had to have gotten in somehow. If Galan was at work when she got home this afternoon, she thought, she wasn't going inside the house alone. She would get a neighbor to walk through the house with her. And she had Trilby for added security; nothing got past the little dog. Cockers were very protective of their families. Sometimes her barking was a nuisance, but now T.J. was thankful she was so alert.

Leah Street looked up in surprise when T.J. entered the office. "I didn't expect you today," she said. T.J. hid her own surprise. Leah's clothing was never flattering, but she was at least neat. Today she looked as if she had grabbed something off the floor. She wore a skirt and blouse, but the skirt sagged on one side and the hem of her slip showed. T.J. hadn't realized anyone still wore slips when they didn't have to, especially in the late- summer heat. Leah's blouse was wrinkled, and there was a stain on the front. Even her hair, which was usually so immaculate, looked as if she hadn't combed it before coming to work.

Realizing Leah was watching her expectantly, T.J. pulled her mind back to what had been said.

"I thought working would help. You know, the routine of it."

"Routine." Leah nodded, as if the word was somehow profound.

Weird. But then, Leah had always been a couple of french fries short of a Happy Meal. Nothing drastic, just a little… off.

From what T.J. could tell, Leah was really off today, occupying her own little world. She hummed, she filed her nails, she answered a few calls. She sounded rational, at least, if not very effective. "I don't know, I'll get back to you," seemed to be her phrase of the day.

A little after nine she disappeared, and came back ten minutes later with dirt stains on her blouse. Coming over to T.J. she leaned down and whispered, "I'm having a problem getting to some files. Will you help me move some boxes?"

What files? What boxes? Almost all their files were on computer. T.J. started to ask what she was talking about, but Leah gave a quick, embarrassed look around the office as if she was in some difficulty that had nothing to do with files, and didn't want the others to know. Why me? T.J. thought, but sighed and said, "Sure." She followed Leah to the elevator. "Where are these files?" she asked.

"Downstairs. In the Storage room."

"I didn't know anything was actually stored in 'Storage'," T.J. joked, but Leah didn't seem to get it. "Of course there is," she said, sounding bewildered. The elevator was empty, and they didn't meet anyone in the first floor hallway, which wasn't surprising considering the time of morning. Everyone was in his or her office, the computer nerds were probably having a spitball war, and it wasn't time yet for the morning coffee break, when people started moving around more.

They went down the narrow, puke green hallway, and Leah opened the door marked "Storage," stepping aside for T.J. to enter ahead of her. T.J. wrinkled her nose at the smell, dank and sour, as if no one had been in there for quite a while. It was also dark.

"Where's the light switch?" she asked, not stepping inside. Something hard hit her in the back, shoving her forward into the dark, smelly room. T.J. sprawled on the rough concrete floor, scraping skin off her hands and knees. Sudden horrified realization exploded in her mind, and she managed to roll to the side and scramble to her feet as a long metal pipe came whistling down.

She screamed, or she thought she did. She wasn't certain, because her heartbeat was thunderous in her ears and she couldn't hear anything else. She tried to grab the pipe, and wrestled briefly for possession of it. But Leah was strong, very strong, and with a hard shove knocked T.J. off her feet again.

T.J. heard that whistling noise again; then lights exploded in her head and she didn't hear anything else.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A door opened out in the hallway. Corin froze, listening to the heavy footsteps as they crossed the hall; then there was the sound of another door opening and closing. It was someone in maintenance, he realized. If the man had looked in this direction and seen the open door of the storage room, he would certainly have come to investigate.

Corin was agonized. Why hadn't he thought of the possibility that one of the maintenance workers could be nearby? He should have; he hadn't been careful enough, and Mother would be angry.

He looked at the woman lying on the dirty concrete floor, barely visible in the light coming through the open door of the storage room. Was she breathing? He couldn't tell, and he was afraid to make any noise now.

He hadn't done this right at all. He hadn't planned well, and that frightened him, because when he didn't do something perfectly, Mother was enraged. He had to please her, had to think of something he could do, some way he could make up for his mistakes.

The other one. The one with the smart mouth. He had made a mistake with her, too, but it wasn't his fault she hadn't been at home, was it? Would Mother understand? No. Mother never accepted excuses.

He would have to go back and get it right.

But what would he do if she wasn't at home, again? She wasn't here; he knew, because he had checked. Where could she be?

He would find her. He knew who her parents were and where they lived, he knew the names of her brother and sister, and their addresses. He knew a lot of things about her. He knew a lot of things about everyone who worked here, because he loved reading their private files. He could write down their social security numbers and dates of birth and find out all sorts of things about them on his computer at home.

She was the last one. He couldn't wait. He needed to find her now, needed to finish the task Mother had given him. Very quietly he laid down the pipe beside the unmoving woman, and crept out of the storage room. He closed the door as silently as possible, then tiptoed away. Detective Wayne Satran stopped by Sam's desk with a fax. "Here's the report on the shoe print you've been waiting for." He dropped the fax on top of a pile of reports and continued to his own desk.

Sam picked up the report and read the first line: "The tread does not match – "

What the hell? All crime labs had books or databases on sneaker tread patterns, updated on a regular basis. Sometimes a manufacturer wouldn't get around to sending in an update whenever they changed their styles or refused to do so for reasons of their own. When that happened, usually a lab would simply buy a pair of the shoes in question to get the pattern.

Maybe the shoes had been bought in another country. Maybe they were an obscure off-brand, or maybe the guy was slick enough to have used a knife to change the tread pattern. He didn't think so, though. This was no organized killer; this guy operated on emotion and opportunity. He started to toss the report, but realized it was rather wordy for a simple "does not match." He couldn't afford to overlook a single detail, couldn't let his sense of urgency distract him. He began reading again. "The tread does not match that of any athletic shoe for men. The pattern does, however, match an exclusive style that is manufactured only for women. The section of tread pattern available is insufficient for determining exact size, but indicates probable size between eight and ten."

A woman's shoe? The guy was wearing women's shoes? Or… the guy was a woman.

"Son of a bitch!" Sam said between his teeth, lunging for the phone and punching in Bernsen's number. When Roger answered, he said, "I got the report back on the shoe. It's a woman's."

There was dead silence for a moment; then Roger said, "You're shitting me." He sounded as appalled as Sam felt. "We excluded the female employees from the NCIC search. We hog-tied ourselves. We have to go through their files, too."

"You're telling me a woman – " Roger fell silent, and Sam knew he was thinking of the things that had been done to Marci's body, and Luna's. "Jesus."

"Now we know why Luna opened her door. It didn't make sense that she would. But she was on guard against a man, not a woman." That feeling of having missed something was growing stronger.

A woman. Think of a blond woman. Immediately he flashed to Marci's funeral, and the tall blond woman who had broken down and wept in Cheryl's arms. A drama queen, T.J. had said, but Jaine had a different take on it: The wheel's still going around, but her hamster's dead. She thought the woman had a loose screw, that there was something wrong there. Damn it! She had even mentioned her when he asked about employees who had experienced difficulty getting along with others at work. T.J. had said something else, something that hadn't clicked at the time: the woman was in her department, human resources. The woman had access to everything, all the information in all the files, including private phone numbers and the names and addresses of relatives to call in case of an emergency.

That was it. That was what had been nagging at him. Laurence Strawn had specifically told him the personnel files weren't on computers with Internet connections; it was impossible to hack into them. Whoever had called T.J.'s cell phone number had gotten it from her file, but that file, without specific authorization, was accessible only to those in H.R.

What was her name? What was her damn name?

He reached for the phone to call Jaine, but the name popped into his head before he could dial Shelley's number: Street. Leah Street.

He dialed Bernsen instead. "Leah Street," he rasped when Roger answered. "She's the one who was crying all over Marci's sister at the funeral."

"The blonde," Roger said. "Shit! She fit the profile, too." Right down to the ground, Sam thought. The nervousness, the excessive emotion, the inability to stay in the background.

"I've got the file here," Roger said. "There are several complaints about her attitude. She didn't get along with people. God, this is classic. We'll bring her in for questioning, see what we can shake loose."

"She'll be at work," Sam said, and alarm clawed his gut. "T.J. went to work today. They're in the same department, Human Resources."

"Get on the phone to T.J." Roger said. "I'm on my way." Sam quickly looked up the number at Hammerstead. An automated answering message picked up on the first ring, and he ground his teeth. He had to listen until the recording gave the appropriate extension for Human Resources, which took valuable time. Damn it! Why didn't companies use real people to answer the phone? Messages were cheaper, but in an emergency the delay could cause real trouble.

Finally the recorded message gave the extension he wanted, and he punched it in. A harried voice picked up on the fourth ring. "Human Resources, Fallon speaking."

"T.J. Yother, please."

"I'm sorry, Ms. Yother has stepped out of the office."

"How long has she been gone?" he asked sharply. Fallon wasn't a pushover. "Who is this?" she asked just as sharply.

"Detective Donovan. It's important I find her. Listen to me: is Leah Street there?"

"Why, no." Fallon's tone had changed. She was a lot more cooperative now. "She and T.J. left together about half an hour ago, I guess. The phones have been ringing like crazy and with both of them gone we've been short- handed. They – "

Sam interrupted, "If T.J. returns, tell her to call me immediately, Detective Sam Donovan." He gave the number. He thought about alerting Fallon to the situation but quickly decided against it; if Leah hadn't bolted, he didn't want to alarm her. "Can you switch me to Mr. Strawn's office?" Only Laurence Strawn had the authority to do what he wanted.

"Yes – sure. Of course." She paused. "Do you want me to?"

Sam closed his eyes and bit back a raw curse. "Yes, please."

"Okay. Hold on."

A series of electronic tones sounded in his ear, then the smooth voice of Mr. Strawn's executive secretary. Sam cut into her practiced welcoming spiel. "This is Detective Donovan. Is Mr. Strawn available? It's an emergency." The two words "detective" and "emergency" got him put through immediately to Strawn. Quickly Sam outlined the situation. "Call the gate and don't let anyone leave, and start searching for T.J. Check every broom closet and bathroom stall. Don't confront Ms. Street, but don't let her leave. Detective Bernsen is on the way."

"Hold on," Strawn said. "I'll call the gate right now." He was back on the line in about thirty seconds. "Ms. Street left the premises about twenty minutes ago."

"Was T.J. with her?"

"No. The guard said she was alone."

"Then find T.J." Sam said urgently. He simultaneously wrote a note and signaled Wayne Satran. Wayne took the note, read it, and jumped into action. "She's somewhere in the building, and maybe she's still alive." Maybe. Marci had been dead from the first hammer blow. Luna hadn't died immediately, but she had also suffered head trauma so severe she died before she could completely bleed out from the stab wounds. The M.E. estimated, based purely on his personal experience, that she had lived, maybe, a couple of minutes after the initial attack. The attacks were vicious and overwhelming.

"Should I be discreet about it?" Strawn asked. "At this point, finding her fast is what's most important. Leah Street has already escaped. Alert everyone in the building to assist in the search. When you find her, if she's alive, do whatever you can to help her. If she's dead, try to preserve the scene. Emergency personnel are on the way." That was what Wayne had been doing, getting the wheels rolling. Law enforcement officers from several different jurisdictions were converging on Hammerstead, as well as medics and evidence techs.

"We'll find her," Laurence Strawn said quietly. Sam's instinct, as a cop, was to go to the scene. He stayed where he was, knowing he could do more good right there.

Leah Street's file was on Roger's desk. Sam called the Sterling Heights P.D. and got the detective who answered to look in the file and give him Leah's home address and phone number, plus her social security number. After a minute the detective picked up the phone and said, "I don't find a Leah Street. 'There's a 'Corin Lee Street,' but no 'Leah'."

Corin Lee? Jesus. Sam rubbed his forehead, trying not to wonder what in hell that meant. Was Leah a man or a woman? The names were too similar for coincidence. "Is Corin Street a man or a woman?" he asked. "Let me see." A pause. "Here it is. Female." Maybe, Sam thought. "Okay, thanks. That's the one I want." The detective read off the information Sam had requested. He copied it down, accessed the motor vehicle department and got her license plate number and description of the car.

He then had a BOLO – "be on the lookout" – issued for the car. He didn't know if she was armed; so far, she hadn't used a firearm, but that didn't mean she didn't have one, and she might well have a knife with her. She was unstable as hell, like nitroglycerin; she had to be approached with caution.

Where had she gone? Home? Only a real looney-tunes would – but Leah Street was a real looney-tunes. He got officers en route to her house.

While he was getting everything in motion, he tried not to think about T.J. Had they found her yet? Were they too late?

How much time had lapsed? He checked his watch; ten minutes since he had talked to Strawn, so that was thirty minutes since Leah had left Hammerstead. She could hit the interstate highway system and in half an hour could be anywhere in the Detroit area, or have crossed over into Windsor, Canada. That would be great; they already had four or five jurisdictions involved, so why not bring in another nation?

He thought about calling Jaine, but decided to wait. He didn't know anything definite about T.J. and couldn't put her through the ordeal of waiting to hear, not so soon after Luna.

Thank God Jaine was at Shelley's house. She wasn't alone, and she was safe, because Leah didn't know who Shelley was or where she lived – Unless Jaine had listed Shelley as her "contact in case of emergency."

Because he and Roger had divided the personnel files alphabetically, with Sam taking the top half of the stack of printed sheets and Roger the bottom half, Roger had Leah Street's file – and he had Jaine's. There were more Bs than any other letter of the alphabet, and he hurriedly riffled through the stack. When he found Jaine's file, he jerked the pages out and quickly scanned them. Shelley was listed.

The bottom dropped out of his stomach. He didn't bother with a land line; he dialed Shelley's number on his cell phone and was running when he went out the door. The reporters had done some investigating and tracked down Shelley, looking for Jaine. The constantly ringing phone got on their nerves so much that Shelley had finally turned it off, and they went out on the patio in back to sit by the pool. Sam had been so insistent that Jaine keep her cell phone with her that she took it outside with her and laid it beside her hip on the cushion of the teak chaise.

A large umbrella was angled overhead to block the sun, and Jaine dozed a little while Shelley read. The house was blessedly quiet; knowing Jaine's nerves were raw, Shelley had sent Nicholas to a friend's house to play, and Stefanie had gone to the mall with her friends. A CD of classical piano pieces was playing softly in the background, and Jaine felt her headache finally begin to recede, like a wave pulling back from the shore.

She couldn't think any more about Marci and Luna, not right now. Her mind and emotions were exhausted. In her lightly dozing state, she thought about Sam, and what a rock he was. Was it only three weeks ago she had thought he was the blight of the neighborhood? So much had happened that she had lost her perspective of time; it seemed as if she had known him for months.

They had been lovers for almost a week, and in another few weeks they would be married. She couldn't believe she was making such an important move so hastily, but it felt right. Sam felt right, as if they were interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. She hadn't rushed into anything with her other three fiances, and look how well those engagements had turned out. This time she was just going to do it. To hell with caution; she was going to marry Sam Donovan.

There was so much to do, so many details to handle. Thank God for Shelley, because she was in charge of all the tactical problems, such as location and food, music, flowers, invitations, large awnings for shade and shelter. Never shy, Shelley had already talked to Sam's mother and oldest sister, Doro, and involved them in the preparations. Jaine was a little chagrined to realize she hadn't yet met any of Sam's family, but with Marci's death and funeral, and now Luna, she hadn't had the opportunity. She was just happy Sam had thought to tell his folks before Shelley called, or it would have been an even bigger shock.

The doorbell chimed softly in the background, pulling her from her drifting thoughts. She sighed as she glanced over at Shelley, who wasn't moving. "Aren't you going to see who's at the door?"

"No way. It's probably just a reporter."

"It might be Sam."

"Sam would have called – Oh, right. I turned off the phones. Damn it," Shelley griped, putting her book facedown on the table between the two chaises. "I'm getting into a really good part. Just once I'd like to read a book without being interrupted. If it isn't the kids, it's the telephone. If it isn't the telephone, it's the doorbell. Wait until you and Sam have kids," she warned as she opened the glass patio door and stepped inside.

Sam alternated between cussing and praying as he wove between cars, his dash light flashing. There was no answer at Shelley's. He had left a message on the answering machine, but where could they be? Jaine wouldn't have gone anywhere without calling him, not under the current circumstances. He had never before in his life been so terrified. He had patrol cars on the way to Shelley's house, but, God, what if it was already too late? He remembered Jaine's cell phone. Driving with one hand, the gas pedal pressed to the floorboard, he glanced at his phone and pressed Jaine's speed-dial number. Then he waited for the connection to be made, and he prayed some more.

The patio gate rattled. The privacy fence around the pool was eight feet high, constructed of wooden slats in a solid lattice weave, but the gate was made of wrought-iron bars. Startled, Jaine sat up and glanced over.

"Jaine!"

It was Leah Street, of all people. She looked frantic, and with one hand she rattled the gate again as if she could shake it open.

"Leah! What's wrong? Is it T.J.?" Jaine bolted from the chaise and ran toward the gate. Her heart almost leaped from her chest, so strong was the panic that seized her. Leah blinked, as if Jaine's question surprised her. Her strangely intent gaze locked on Jaine. "Yes, it's T.J." she said, and shook the gate one more time. "Open the gate."

"What's happened? Is she all right?" Jaine skidded to a halt in front of the gate and reached to open it, then realized she didn't have a key to the lock. "Open the gate," Leah repeated.

"I can't, I don't have the key! I'll get Shelley – " Jaine was almost weeping in terror as she turned away, but Leah reached through the gate and grabbed her arm. "Hey!" Startled out of her panic, Jaine jerked free and whirled to stare at Leah. "What the hell – " The words died in her throat. Leah's outstretched hand had blood on it, and two of her fingernails were broken. The woman pressed closer to the gate, and Jaine saw more red splotches on the baggy skirt.

Instinct had Jaine backing up a step.

"Open the goddamn gate!" Leah shrieked, shaking the gate with her left hand as if she were a crazed chimpanzee on the inside of a cage. Her feathery blond hair flew around her face.

Jaine stared at the blood, and the blond hair. She saw the weird glitter in Leah's eyes, the twisted expression on her face, and everything inside her went cold. "You murdering bitch," she half-whispered.

Leah was as quick as a striking snake. She whipped her right arm away from her side and thrust it through the bars of the gate, swinging something at Jaine's head. Jaine lurched backward and lost her balance, stumbling several more steps before falling. She twisted to the side as she fell, landing on her hip. Driven by adrenaline, she bounced to her feet before she felt any pain from the jarring impact. Leah swung again. It was a tire tool, Jaine saw. She backed farther away from the gate and screamed, "Shelley! Call the police! Hurry!"

On the chaise, her cell phone began to ring. Involuntarily she glanced toward it, just as Leah, on a surge of insane strength, began beating the gate with the tire tool. The metal rang under the force of the blows, and the lock gave way.

Leah shoved the gate open, an unholy expression twisting her face as she stepped inside. "You're a whore," she rasped, raising the tire tool. "You're a lewd, vulgar whore, and you don't deserve to live."

Not daring to take her gaze off Leah, even for a second, Jaine inched to the side, trying to get at least a chair between them. She knew what the blood on Leah's hands and clothing meant, knew that T.J. was dead, too. All of them were gone, now. All of her friends. This insane bitch had killed them.

She had backed up too much. She was almost on the edge of the pool. Quickly she adjusted her direction, angling away from the pool.

Shelley stepped out of the house, her face white and her eyes wide. She carried one of Nicholas's hockey sticks. "I called the police," she said, her voice shaking as she stared at Leah like a mongoose watching a cobra. And like a cobra, Leah's attention swung to Shelley. No, Jaine thought, the word like a faint whisper in her mind. Not Shelley, too.

"No!" The roar burst out of her throat, and she literally felt herself expanding as a wildfire of rage burst through her, as if her skin couldn't contain it. A red mist swam in front of her eyes, and her vision narrowed, focused until she saw only Leah. She wasn't aware of lunging forward, but Leah wheeled back to face her, tire tool raised. Shelley swung the hockey stick, momentarily distracting Jaine. The thick wood hit Leah on the shoulder, and she screamed in rage, but didn't drop the tire tool. Instead she swung it in a broad, sideways arc that caught Shelley across the rib cage. Shelley screamed in pain and folded forward. Leah raised the heavy iron to hit Shelley on the back of the head, and Jaine crashed into her, all the force of her fury lending her strength.

Leah was taller, heavier. She gave way under Jaine's assault, banging Jane's back with the tire tool, but Jaine was too close for her to get in an effective blow. Leah stiffened and recovered her balance, and thrust Jaine away. She raised her weapon again and took two quick steps toward Jaine.

Shelley straightened, holding her ribs, her face suffused with rage. She lunged forward, too, and the three of them staggered back under her momentum.

Jaine's left foot slipped off the edge of the pool, and like dominoes, all three of them plunged into the water. Tangled together, struggling, they went to the bottom. Leah still gripped the tire tool, but the water impeded her swings and she couldn't get any force behind them. She twisted wildly, trying to break free.

Jaine hadn't had time to gulp in air before she went under. Her lungs burned, her chest convulsing, as she fought not to inhale water. She wrenched away and lunged for the surface, dragging in huge breaths of air as soon as her face was clear. She choked and sputtered, and looked wildly around. Neither Shelley nor Leah had surfaced. Jaine took a deep breath and ducked back underwater. Their struggle had taken them farther into the deep end of the pool. She saw the froth of bubbles, their twisting forms and floating hair, and Leah's full skirt billowing around them like a jellyfish. Jaine scissored her legs, kicking herself toward them.

Leah had one arm around Shelley's neck. Wildly, Jaine latched her hand in Leah's hair and pulled back as hard as she could, and Leah couldn't maintain her hold. Shelley shot upward like a balloon.

Leah twisted and got one hand on Jaine's throat, her fingers digging in. The incredible pressure made Jaine gag, and water rushed into her mouth.

She brought her legs up and braced them on Leah's stomach, and pushed. Nails clawed her neck as she tore free, and red stained the water in front of her face. Then Shelley was there again, pushing Leah down on the bottom of the pool. Jaine clawed her way through the water to add her strength to Shelley's, pushing and fighting and not daring to let go, needing air again, unable to breathe, unwilling to release Leah and surface. Leah's clawing hands fastened on her blouse and locked tight. Leah's struggles grew weaker. Her bulging eyes glared at them through the crystal clear water, then slowly glazed over.

The water exploded behind them. Weakly Jaine turned her head and saw a dark shape, then another, surging toward them in a stream of bubbles. Strong hands wrenched her out of Leah's death grip, while another pair pulled Shelley away and shoved her upward. Jaine saw her sister's bare legs kicking, and she tried to follow her, but she had been longer without air than Shelley and she no longer had the strength to kick. She felt herself sort of sink to the bottom, then one of the uniformed cops grabbed her and kicked strongly toward the surface, carrying them both up into life-giving air.

She was only half-aware of being dragged out of the pool, of being stretched out on the concrete. She gagged, coughing convulsively and curling in on herself as she fought to get air past her swollen throat. She heard Shelley's hoarse cries, and the cops were talking simultaneously, the words jumbling in her head. People were rushing around, and someone else jumped into the water, droplets arcing upward in the bright sunshine and splashing in her face.

Then Sam was there, his face utterly white as he lifted her to a sitting position and braced her in his arms. "Don't panic," he said reassuringly, his voice steady though his arms trembled. "You can breathe. Don't fight so hard. Just take slow breaths. Easy, babe. That's the way. Breathe in nice and easy."

She concentrated on his voice, on doing what he said. When she stopped gulping so frantically, her throat relaxed and oxygen rushed past the swollen membranes. Weakly she let her head rest against his chest, but she managed to put a reassuring hand on his arm to let him know she was conscious.

"I couldn't get here in time," he said rawly. "My God, I couldn't get here in time. I tried to call, but you didn't answer. Why didn't you answer the goddamn phone?"

"Reporters kept calling," Shelley gasped. "I turned the phones off." She winced and clutched her ribs, her face colorless.

There seemed to be a thousand sirens piercing the air, the sound reverberating in Jaine's ears. Just when it became unbearably loud, the sound cut off in mid-shriek, and a moment later, or maybe it was several minutes later, white-shirted medics were surrounding her and Shelley, and she was taken from Sam's supporting arms. "No – wait!" She twisted frantically, screaming Sam's name, except the scream was a barely audible croak. He motioned for the medics to back off a minute, and put his arms around her again.

"T.J.?" she managed to ask, scalding tears burning her eyes.

"She's alive," Sam said, his own voice still raw with emotion. "I got the word on the way over. They found her in a storage room at work."

Jaine's eyes asked what had to be asked.

Sam hesitated. "She's hurt, honey. I don't know how bad it is, but the important thing is, she's alive." Sam didn't stay to watch Leah's – Corin Lee's – body being removed from the pool. There were enough officers present to handle everything, and this wasn't his jurisdiction anyway. He had more important things to do, such as be with Jaine. When she and Shelley were transported to a local hospital, he followed in his truck. They were whisked away to treatment cubicles. After making certain the hospital notified Al right away, Sam leaned against the wall. He was sick to his stomach; he had sworn to serve and protect, but he hadn't been able to protect the woman he loved more than anyone else in the world. Until the day he died, he would never forget the feeling of helpless terror as he raced through the streets, knowing he was already too late and couldn't get to Jaine in time to save her.

He had put the pieces of the puzzle together, but too late to save her and T.J. from harm.

T.J. was in critical condition. According to Bernsen, the only thing that saved her was that when she fell, she somehow rolled so that her head was partially protected by the base of an old office chair. Something must have frightened Leah away before she could finish the job, and she had gone in search of Jaine.

Sam was slumped in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the waiting area when Bernsen came in. "Jesus, what a nightmare," Roger said, dropping into the chair beside Sam's. "I heard their injuries are minor. What's taking so long?"

"I guess no one's in a hurry. Shelley – Jaine's sister – is being x-rayed for a broken rib. They're checking Jaine's throat. That's all I know." He rubbed his face. "I damn near fucked up, Roger. I didn't put it together until it was almost too late, then I couldn't get to Jaine in time."

"Hey, you put it together in time to get other people to them. T.J.'s alive, which she wouldn't be if they hadn't found her when they did. The uniforms who dragged the women out of the pool said they all came close to drowning. If you hadn't alerted them, got the officers there ahead of you – " Roger broke off and shrugged. "Personally, I think you did a helluva job, but I'm just a detective, what the fuck do I know?"

The E.R. doctor finally came out of Jaine's cubicle. "We're going to admit her, keep her overnight for observation," he said. "Her throat is bruised and swollen, but the larynx isn't ruptured and the hyoid bone is intact, so she'll make a full recovery. We're admitting her just as a precaution."

"May I see her now?" Sam asked, standing.

"Sure. Oh – her sister has two cracked ribs, but she'll be all right, too." He paused. "Looks like it was one hell of a fight."

"It was," said Sam, and stepped into the treatment cubicle, where Jaine was sitting on a vinyl examination table. Her eyes brightened when she saw him, and though she didn't say a word, her expression was enough as she reached out her hand to him. Gently he took it in his, then used it to pull her closer and fold her in his arms.

Twenty-two hours later, T.J. managed to open one swollen eye a tiny slit, and move her fingers just enough to squeeze Galan's hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"I can't believe you haven't told your parents," T.J. said. Her voice was still weak and slightly slurred, but the scolding tone was clear. "No, wait – I can believe you didn't tell them, but I can't believe neither Shelley nor David did. How can you not tell your parents someone tried to kill both you and Shelley and almost succeeded?" Jaine rubbed her nose. "Remember when you were a kid and you'd do almost anything to keep your parents from finding out you were in trouble? It was kind of like that, but it…" She shrugged. "It was over. You were alive, and Shelley and I were both okay, and I didn't want to talk about it. There was all the media coverage driving me crazy, Luna's funeral to get through, and I couldn't handle anything else."

T.J. carefully turned her head, which was still swathed in bandages, to look out her hospital window. She had been out of I.C.U. for a week and change now, but much of the preceding week was forever lost to her. She remembered nothing about the day of the attack, so exactly what had happened was unknown. Sam and Detective Bernsen had put forth a logical theory, but no one would ever know for certain.

"I wish I had been able to go to her funeral," she said, her expression sad and distant.

Jaine didn't say anything, but inwardly she shuddered. No, you don't, she thought. She wished she didn't have that memory.

Two weeks had passed, and every night she had jerked awake from a sound sleep, drenched in sweat, her heart pounding in terror from a nightmare she couldn't remember. Of course, considering Sam's prescription for disturbed sleep, the experience hadn't been all bad. She might wake up in terror, but she went back to sleep with every muscle limp from an overdose of pleasure. Sam had had a few bad nights himself, especially at first. Hero that he was, it bothered him that he hadn't been able to reach her first. That lasted until she climbed into the shower one night, stuck her head under the water, and started yelling, "Help, help, I'm drowning!" Well, she had tried to yell, anyway, but her throat had still been bruised and swollen, and Sam said she sounded more like a bullfrog's mating croak. He had jerked the shower curtain back and stood there glaring at her while water splattered all over the floor.

"Are you making fun of my hero complex?"

"Yeah," she said, and stuck her head back under the stream of water for another drowning imitation. He turned the water off with a snap of his wrist, slapped her on the bare butt sharply enough to make her say, "Hey!" in indignation, then wrapped his arms around her and lifted her bodily from the tub.

"You have to pay for that," he growled, striding toward the bed and tossing her onto it, then stepping back to strip off his damp clothes.

"Oh, yeah?" Naked and wet, she stretched sinuously, arching her back. "What do you have in mind?" With one hand she reached out to stroke his bobbing erection, then rolled onto her stomach and captured him in her grip. He went very still.

Delicately, like a cat, she licked. He shuddered. She tasted the entire length. He groaned.

She licked again and ran her tongue along the underside. "I think I should really, really have to pay" she murmured. "And I think it should involve… swallowing." She took him in her mouth and suited actions to words.

Since then, at least once a day, Sam would put on a pitiful face and say, "I feel so guilty."

Hah.

His attitude, more than anything, had helped her through the trauma. He hadn't babied her. He had loved her, comforted her, made love to her so often she was sore, but that was it, and it was more than enough. She had been able to laugh again.

She had visited T.J. every day. Already T.J. was taking physical therapy daily to help her overcome the resultant disabilities from her head injuries. Her speech was slurred, but better every day; and her control over her right leg and arm was iffy at best, but that too, with work, would improve greatly. Galan had been constantly by T.J.'s side, and if the naked devotion in his eyes was any indication, their marital difficulties were behind them.

"Back to your parents," T.J. said now. "Are you going to tell them when you meet them at the airport today?"

"Not right away," Jaine said. "I have to introduce them to Sam first. And we have the wedding to talk about. Besides, I thought Shelley and I should tell them together."

"You'd better do it before they go home, because their neighbors are bound to rush straight over when they see your folks are back."

"Okay, okay. Ill tell them."

T.J. grinned. "And tell them they can thank me for delaying your wedding a week, which will give them time to rest." Jaine snorted. True, delaying the wedding a week would allow T.J. to attend, albeit in a wheelchair, but she doubted her dad, at least, would thank anyone. Having the wedding the next day would have suited him just fine, because there would be less hoopla for him to endure. She checked her watch. "I gotta go. I'm meeting Sam in an hour." She leaned over the bed and kissed T.J.'s cheek. "I'll see you tomorrow,"

Galan entered the room bearing a huge bouquet of lilies, filling the room with their perfume. "Just in time," Jaine said, winking at him as she sailed past.

"Yes," said J. Clarence Cosgrove, his voice reedy with age, "I remember Corin Street very well. The situation was very strange, but there was nothing we could do. We didn't even know Corin was a girl until she reached puberty. Oh, her sex was on her birth certificate, of course, but who checks that? Her mother said Corin was her son, so… we accepted it."

"She was raised as a boy?" Sam asked. He was at his desk, his long legs propped on an open drawer, the phone glued to his ear.

"To my knowledge, the mother never admitted or even acted as if she knew Corin was female. Corin was a badly disturbed child. Badly disturbed," Mr. Cosgrove repeated. "She was a constant discipline problem. She lolled a classroom pet, but Mrs. Street wouldn't accept that Corin could ever do anything like that. She made the statement, often and to anyone who would listen, that she had the perfect little boy."

Bingo, thought Sam. Mr. Perfect. That was the trigger that had set Corin Lee Street off like a bomb that had been slowly ticking down over the years. It wasn't the content of the List itself, but rather the title that she had found so unbearable.

"She took Corin out of my school," Mr. Cosgrove continued. "But I made a point of finding out what I could about the child. The behavioral problems worsened over the years, of course. When Corin was fifteen, she killed her mother. I remember it was a particularly brutal murder, though I can't recall the specific details. Corin spent several years in a mental institution and was never charged with the murder."

"Did the murder take place there in Denver?" "Yes, it did."

"Thank you, Mr. Cosgrove. You've helped fill in a lot of the blanks."

After he hung up, Sam tapped his pen on his desk as he pondered what he had learned so far about Corin Lee Street. She had entered the mental institution as Corin, but she was Leah – evidently chosen because of the name's similarity to "Lee" – when she came out. The picture that had emerged was that of an extremely unstable and dangerous woman who had been abused both mentally and physically by her mother until the violence that had been leaking out all of her life finally burst out of control. The psychiatrists could argue all day about which came first, the abuse or the violent personality, but Sam didn't care. He just wanted a clear picture of the woman who had wreaked so much destruction.

After he talked to Mr. Cosgrove, Corin's middle-school principal, he called the Denver P.D. and eventually got to talk with the detective who had investigated Mrs. Street's gruesome murder. Corin had beaten her mother to death with a floor lamp, then poured rubbing alcohol on the woman's face and set it on fire. When the body was discovered, Corin was incoherent and obviously mentally unsound. She had been confined in a mental institution for seven years.

More digging turned up the psychiatrist who had treated Corin. On being informed of Corin's death and the circumstances, the woman sighed. "She was released against my better judgment," she said. "But she functioned better than I expected, if she went that many years before she began deteriorating. When she was on her medication, she was functional, but she was still – I hate to use labels, even when they're accurate – psychotic. In my opinion, it was only a matter of time before she began lolling. She had all the classic symptoms."

"How did she change from Corin into Leah?"

"Corin was her maternal grandfather's name. Her mother simply refused to accept that her child was female. Females were… 'Unworthy' and 'dirty' were the terms Corin used. Mrs. Street gave Corin a male name, she raised her as a boy, dressed her as a boy, told everyone Corin was her son. If Corin ever made any sort of mistake, even as a very small child, she was punished in a variety of ways: beaten, jabbed with pins, locked in dark closets. Then she reached puberty, and all hell figuratively broke out. Mrs. Street couldn't bear the changes in Corin's body. Menstruation particularly upset her."

"I bet," Sam said, feeling almost nauseated at this litany of abuse.

"After puberty, whenever Corin made a mistake, she was punished in a sexual manner. I leave the details to your imagination."

"Thanks," Sam said dryly.

"She hated her own body, hated female sexuality. With therapy and medication, she did finally develop a rather rudimentary female personality, and she named herself Leah. She worked hard at being a woman. I never had any hopes, though, of her having a normal sexual relationship, or a normal relationship of any land. She learned some female mannerisms, and the medication controlled her violent tendencies, but her grasp of reality was tenuous at best. I'm really surprised she was able to work at the same job for a number of years. Is there anything else you'd like to know?"

"No, Doctor, I think you've answered all my questions," Sam replied. He had needed to know. If Jaine ever wanted to know, he would have the answers for her, but so far she hadn't asked a single question about Leah Street. Maybe that was good. He had known Jaine was a fighter, but he had been surprised by how fiercely she tackled recovery, as if it were an adversary to be whipped into shape. She wasn't going to let Leah Street defeat her in anything.

He checked the time and saw he was running late. "Damn it," he muttered. She would never let him hear the end of it if they were late meeting her folks at the airport. He had some important news for her, news that couldn't wait, and he didn't want her to be angry when he told her. He drove like a maniac to meet her at her parents' house on time. Since all four of them and six weeks' worth of luggage couldn't fit in either her Viper or his truck, they were driving her mom's Lincoln to the airport. She was already in the driver's seat, motor running, when he skidded to a stop in the driveway and leaped out of the truck.

"You're late," she said, chirping the tires as soon as his butt hit the seat. He reached for his seat belt. "We'll make it," he said confidently. With Jaine at the wheel, he had no doubt. Maybe he should warn her about speeding, he thought, then thought better of it. "Remember that interview I had with the state a few weeks back?"

"You got the job," she said.

"How did you know?"

"Why else would you mention it?"

"I trained at the state police academy, so I won't have to do that again. I can go straight into detective work. The problem is, I'll have to relocate."

"So?" She rolled her eyes.

"Don't do that! Watch the road."

"I am watching!"

"It doesn't bother you that we'd have to move? You just bought your house."

"What would bother me," she said succinctly, "is if you lived in one city and I lived in another. That would suck." Oh, man, his favorite word.

She reached the airport in record time and parked the car. As they were hurrying to the arrival gate, she said, "Remember, Dad has Parkinson's, so if his arm is shaking, that's why."

"I remember," he said, his long legs easily keeping stride with her.

They had just reached the gate when passengers began pouring out. Her parents appeared almost immediately. Jaine squealed and ran to her mother, throwing her arms around her and hugging fiercely, then repeating the procedure with her dad.

"This is Sam!" she said, dragging him forward. Her folks already knew about the impending marriage, so her mother threw her arms around him and he got hugged, too.

Jaine's dad extended a wildly trembling right hand. "Here," he said. "You hold my hand while I take care of the shaking."

Sam burst into a roar of laughter. Jaine's mother said, "Lyle! Really!"

"What?" he asked, looking affronted at her rebuke. "If I can't have a little fun with it, what's the point in having it?" In those bright blue eyes, Sam saw a gleam that told him Jaine was a chip off the old engine block.

"We have a lot of news," Jaine said, linking arms with her mother and walking down the concourse. "You have to promise not to get mad."

That was guaranteed to keep them calm, Sam thought. Lyle Bright said, "Just as long as you haven't wrecked my car."

Midnight Rainbow

Chapter One

He was getting too old for this kind of crap, Grant Sullivan thought irritably. What the hell was he doing crouched here, when he'd promised himself he'd never set foot in a jungle again? He was supposed to rescue a bubble-brained society deb, but from what he'd seen in the two days he'd had this jungle fortress under surveillance, he thought she might not want to be rescued. She looked as if she was having the time of her life: laughing, flirting, lying by the pool in the heat of the day. She slept late; she drank champagne on the flagstone patio. Her father was almost out of his mind with worry about her, thinking that she was suffering unspeakable torture at the hands of her captors. Instead, she was lolling around as if she were vacationing on the Riviera. She certainly wasn't being tortured. If anyone was being tortured, Grant thought with growing ire, it was he himself. Mosquitoes were biting him, flies were stinging him, sweat was running off him in rivers, and his legs were aching from sitting still for so long. He'd been eating field rations again, and he'd forgotten how much he hated field rations. The humidity made all of his old wounds ache, and he had plenty of old wounds to ache. No doubt about it: he was definitely too old.

He was thirty-eight, and he'd spent over half his life involved in some war, somewhere. He was tired, tired enough that he'd opted out the year before, wanting nothing more than to wake up in the same bed every morning. He hadn't wanted company or advice or anything, except to be left the hell alone. When he had burned out, he'd burned to the core.

He hadn't quite retreated to the mountains to live in a cave, where he wouldn't have to see or speak to another human being, but he had definitely considered it. Instead, he'd bought a run-down farm in Tennessee, just in the shadow of the mountains, and let the green mists heal him. He'd dropped out, but apparently he hadn't dropped far enough: they had still known how to find him. He supposed wearily that his reputation made it necessary for certain people to know his whereabouts at all times. Whenever a job called for jungle experience and expertise, they called for Grant Sullivan.

A movement on the patio caught his attention, and he cautiously moved a broad leaf a fraction of an inch to clear his line of vision. There she was, dressed to the nines in a frothy sundress and heels, with an enormous pair of sunglasses shading her eyes. She carried a book and a tall glass of something that looked deliciously cool; she arranged herself artfully on one of the poolside deck chairs, and prepared to wile away the muggy afternoon. She waved to the guards who patrolled the plantation grounds and flashed them her dimpled smile.

Damn her pretty, useless little hide! Why couldn't she have stayed under Daddy's wing, instead of sashaying around the world to prove how "independent" she was? All she'd proved was that she had a remarkable talent for landing herself in hot water.

Poor dumb little twit, he thought. She probably didn't even realize that she was one of the central characters in a nasty little espionage caper that had at least three government and several other factions, all hostile, scrambling to find a missing microfilm. The only thing that had saved her life so far was that no one was sure how much she knew, or whether she knew anything at all. Had she been involved in George Persall's espionage activities, he wondered, or had she only been his mistress, his high class "secretary"? Did she know where the microfilm was, or did Luis Marcel, who had disappeared, have it? The only thing anyone knew for certain was that George Persall had had the microfilm in his possession. But he'd died of a heart attack—in her bedroom—and the microfilm hadn't been found. Had Persall already passed it to Luis Marcel? Marcel had dropped out of sight two days before Persall died—if he had the microfilm, he certainly-wasn't talking about it. The Americans wanted it, the Russians wanted it, the Sandinistas wanted it, and every rebel group in Central and South America wanted it. Hell, Sullivan thought, as far as he knew, even the Eskimos wanted it.

So where was the microfilm? What had George Persall done with it? If he had indeed passed it to Luis Marcel, who was his normal contact, then where was Luis? Had Luis decided to sell the microfilm to the highest bidder? That seemed unlikely. Grant knew Luis personally; they had been in some tight spots together and he trusted Luis at his back, which said a lot.

Government agents had been chasing this particular microfilm for about a month now. A high-level executive of a research firm in California had made a deal to sell the government-classified laser technology his firm had developed, technology that could place laser weaponry in space in the near future. The firm's own security people had become suspicious of the man and alerted the proper government authorities; together they had apprehended the executive in the middle of the sale. But the two buyers had escaped, taking the microfilm with them. Then one of the buyers double-crossed his partner and took himself and the microfilm to South America to strike his own deal. Agents all over Central and South America had been alerted, and an American agent in Costa Rica had made contact with the man, setting up a "sting" to buy the microfilm. Things became completely confused at that point. The deal had gone sour, and the agent had been wounded, but he had gotten away with the microfilm. The film should have been destroyed at that point, but it hadn't been. Somehow the agent had gotten it to George Persall, who could come and go freely in Costa Rica because of his business connections. Who would have suspected George Persall of being involved in espionage? He'd always seemed just a tame businessman, albeit with a passion for gorgeous "secretaries"—a weakness any Latin man would understand. Persall had been known to only a few agents, Luis Marcel among them, and that had made him extraordinarily effective. But in this case, George had been left in the dark; the agent had been feverish from his wound and hadn't told George to destroy the film.

Luis Marcel had been supposed to contact George, but instead Luis had disappeared. Then George, who had always seemed to be disgustingly healthy, had died of a heart attack… and no one knew where the microfilm was. The Americans wanted to be certain that the technology didn't fall into anyone else's hands; the Russians wanted the technology just as badly, and every revolutionary in the hemisphere wanted the microfilm in order to sell it to the highest bidder. An arsenal of weapons could be purchased, revolutions could be staged, with the amount of money that small piece of film would bring on the open market.

Manuel Turego, head of national security in Costa Rica, was a very smart man; he was a bastard, Grant thought, but a smart one. He'd promptly snatched up Ms. Priscilla Jane Hamilton Greer and carried her off to this heavily guarded inland "plantation." He'd probably told her that she was under protective custody, and she was probably stupid enough that she was very grateful to him for "protecting" her. Turego had played it cool; so far he hadn't harmed her. Evidently he knew that her father was a very wealthy, very influential man, and that it wasn't wise to enrage wealthy, influential men unless it was absolutely necessary. Turego was playing a waiting game; he was waiting for Luis Marcel to surface, waiting for the microfilm to surface, as it eventually had to. In the meantime, he had Priscilla; he could afford to wait. Whether she knew anything or not, she was valuable to him as a negotiating tool, if nothing else.

From the moment Priscilla had disappeared, her father had been frantic. He'd been calling in political favors with a heavy hand, but he'd found that none of the favors owed to him could get Priscilla away from Turego. Until Luis was found, the American government wasn't going to lift a hand to free the young woman. The confusion about whether or not she actually knew anything, the tantalizing possibility that she could know the location of the microfilm, seemed to have blunted the intensity of the search for Luis. Her captivity could give him the edge he needed by attracting attention away from him.

Finally, desperate with worry and enraged by the lack of response he'd been getting from the government, James Hamilton had decided to take matters into his own hands. He'd spent a small fortune ferreting out his daughter's location, and then had been stymied by the inaccessibility of the well-guarded plantation. If he sent in enough men to take over the plantation, he realized, there was a strong possibility that his daughter would be killed in the fight. Then someone had mentioned Grant Sullivan's name.

A man as wealthy as James Hamilton could find someone who didn't want to be found, even a wary, burnt-out ex-government agent who had buried himself in the Tennessee mountains. Within twenty-four hours, Grant had been sitting across from Hamilton, in the library of a huge estate house that shouted of old money. Hamilton had made an offer that would pay off the mortgage on Grant's farm completely. All the man wanted was to have his daughter back, safe and sound. His face had been lined and taut with worry, and there had been a desperation about him that, even more than the money, made Grant reluctantly accept the job.

The difficulty of rescuing her had seemed enormous, perhaps even insurmountable; if he were able to penetrate the security of the plantation—something he didn't really doubt—getting her out would be something else entirely. Not only that, but Grant had his own personal experiences to remind him that, even if he found her, the odds were greatly against her being alive or recognizably human. He hadn't let himself think about what could have happened to her since the day she'd been kidnapped.

But getting to her had been made ridiculously easy; as soon as he left Hamilton's house, a new wrinkle had developed. Not a mile down the highway from Hamilton's estate, he'd glanced in the rearview mirror and found a plain blue sedan on his tail. He'd lifted one eyebrow sardonically and pulled over to the shoulder of the road.

He lit a cigarette and inhaled leisurely as he waited for the two men to approach his car. "Hiya, Curtis."

Ted Curtis leaned down and peered in the open window, grinning. "Guess who wants to see you?"

"Hell," Grant swore irritably. "All right, lead the way. I don't have to drive all the way to Virginia, do I?"

"Naw, just to the next town. He's waiting in a motel."

The fact that Sabin had felt it necessary to leave headquarters at all told Grant a lot. He knew Kell Sabin from the old days; the man didn't have a nerve in his body, and ice water ran in his veins. He wasn't a comfortable man to be around, but Grant knew that the same had been said about himself. They were both men to whom no rules applied, men who had intimate knowledge of hell, who had lived and hunted in that gray jungle where no laws existed. The difference between them was that Sabin was comfortable in that cold grayness; it was his life—but Grant wanted no more of it. Things had gone too far; he had felt himself becoming less than human. He had begun to lose his sense of who he was and why he was there. Nothing seemed to matter any longer. The only time he'd felt alive was during the chase, when adrenaline pumped through his veins and fired all his senses into acute awareness. The bullet that had almost killed him had instead saved him, because it had stopped him long enough to let him begin thinking again. That was when he'd decided to get out.

Twenty-five minutes later, with his hand curled around a mug of strong, hot coffee, his booted feet propped comfortably on the genuine, wood-grained plastic coffee table that was standard issue for motels, Grant had murmured, "Well, I'm here. Talk."

Kell Sabin was an even six feet tall, an inch shorter than Grant, and the hard musculature of his frame revealed that he made it a point to stay in shape, even though he was no longer in the field. He was dark—black-haired, black-eyed, with an olive complexion—and the cold fire of his energy generated a force field around him. He was impossible to read, and was as canny as a stalking panther, but Grant trusted him. He couldn't say that he liked Sabin; Sabin wasn't a man to be friendly. Yet for twenty years their lives had been intertwined until they were virtually a part of each other. In his mind, Grant saw a red-orange flash of gunfire, and abruptly he felt the thick, moist heat of the jungle, smelled the rotting vegetation, saw the flash of weapons being discharged… and felt, at his back, so close that each had braced his shoulders against the other, the same man who sat across from him now. Things like that stayed in a man's memory.

A dangerous man, Kell Sabin. Hostile governments would gladly have paid a fortune to get to him, but Sabin was nothing more than a shadow slipping away from the sunshine, as he directed his troops from the gray mists.

Without a flicker of expression in his black eyes, Sabin studied the man who sat across from him in a lazy sprawl—a deceptively lazy sprawl, he knew. Grant was, if anything, even leaner and harder than he had been in the field. Hibernating for a year hadn't made him go soft. There was still something wild about Grant Sullivan, something dangerous and untamed. It was in the wary, restless glitter of his amber eyes, eyes that glowed as fierce and golden as an eagle's under the dark, level brows. His dark blond hair was shaggy, curling down over his collar in back, emphasizing that he wasn't quite civilized. He was darkly tanned; the small scar on his chin wasn't very noticeable, but the thin line that slashed across his left cheekbone was silver against his bronzed skin. They weren't disfiguring scars, but reminders of battles.

If Sabin had had to pick anyone to go after Hamilton's daughter, he'd have picked this man. In the jungle Sullivan was as stealthy as a cat; he could become part of the jungle, blending into it, using it. He'd been useful in the concrete jungles, too, but it was in the green hells of the world that no one could equal him.

"Are you going after her?" Sabin finally asked in a quiet tone.

"Yeah."

"Then let me fill you in." Totally disregarding the fact that Grant no longer had security clearance, Sabin told him about the missing microfilm. He told him about George Persall, Luis Marcel, the whole deadly cat-and-mouse game, and dumb little Priscilla sitting in the middle of it. She was being used as a smokescreen for Luis, but Kell was more than a little worried about Luis. It wasn't like the man to disappear, and Costa Rica wasn't the most tranquil place on earth. Anything could have happened to him. Yet, wherever he was, he wasn't in the hands of any government or political faction, because everyone was still searching for him, and everyone except Manuel Turego and the American government was searching for Priscilla. Not even the Costa Rican government knew that Turego had the woman; he was operating on his own.

"Persall was a dark horse," Kell admitted irritably. "He wasn't a professional. I don't even have a file on him."

If Sabin didn't have a file on him, Persall had been more than a dark horse; he'd been totally invisible. "How did this thing blow open?" Grant drawled, closing his eyes until they were little more than slits. He looked as if he were going to fall asleep, but Sabin knew differently.

"Our man was being followed. They were closing in on him. He was out of his mind with fever. He couldn't find Luis, but he remembered how to contact Persall. No one knew Persall's name, until then, or how to find him if they needed him. Our man just barely got the film to Persall before all hell broke loose. Persall got away."

"What about our man?"

"He's alive. We got him out, but not before Turego got his hands on him."

Grant grunted. "So Turego knows our guy didn't tell Persall to destroy the film."

Kell looked completely disgusted. "Everyone knows. There's no security down there. Too many people will sell any scrap of information they can find. Turego has a leak in his organization, so by morning it was common knowledge. Also by morning, Persall had died of a heart attack, in Priscilla's room. Before we could move in, Turego took the girl."

Dark brown lashes veiled the golden glitter of Grant's eyes almost completely. He looked as if he would begin snoring at any minute. "Well? Does she know anything about the microfilm or not?"

"We don't know. My guess is that she doesn't. Persall had several hours to hide the microfilm before he went to her room."

"Why the hell couldn't she have stayed with Daddy, where she belongs?" Grant murmured.

"Hamilton has been raising hell for us to get her out of there, but they aren't really close. She's a party girl. Divorced, more interested in having a good time than in doing anything constructive. In fact, Hamilton cut her out of his will several years ago, and she's been wandering all around the globe since. She'd been with Persall for a couple of years. They weren't shy about their relationship. Persall liked to have a flashy woman on his arm, and he could afford her. He always seemed like an easygoing good time guy, well-suited to her type. I sure as hell never figured him for a courier, especially one sharp enough to fool me."

"Why don't you go in and get the girl out?" Grant asked suddenly, and he opened his eyes, staring at Kell, his gaze cold and yellow.

"Two reasons. One, I don't think she knows anything about the film. I have to concentrate on finding the film, and I think that means finding Luis Marcel. Two, you're the best man for the job. I thought so when I… ah… arranged for you to be brought to Hamilton's attention."

So Kell was working to get the girl out, after all, but going about it in his own circuitous way. Well, staying behind the scenes was the only way he could be effective. "You won't have any trouble getting into Costa Rica," Kell said. "I've already arranged it. But if you can't get the girl out…"

Grant got to his feet, a tawny, graceful savage, silent and lethal. "I know," he said quietly. Neither of them had to say it, but both knew that a bullet in her head would be a great deal kinder than what would happen to her if Turego decided that she did know the location of the microfilm. She was being held only as a safety measure now, but if that microfilm didn't surface, she would eventually be the only remaining link to it. Then her life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel.

So now he was in Costa Rica, deep in the rain forest and too damned near the Nicaraguan border for comfort. Roaming bands of rebels, soldiers, revolutionaries and just plain terrorists made life miserable for people who just wanted to live their simple lives in peace, but none of it touched Priscilla. She might have been a tropical princess, sipping daintily at her iced drink, ignoring the jungle that ate continuously at the boundaries of the plantation and had to be cut back regularly.

Well, he'd seen enough. Tonight was the night. He knew her schedule now, knew the routine of the guards, and had already found all the trip lines. He didn't like traveling through the jungle at night, but there wasn't any choice. He had to have several hours to get her away from here before anyone realized she was missing; luckily, she always slept late, until at least ten every morning. No one would really think anything of it if she didn't appear by eleven. By then, they'd be long gone. Pablo would pick them up by helicopter at the designated clearing tomorrow morning, not long after dawn.

Grant backed slowly away from the edge of the jungle, worming himself into the thick greenery until it formed a solid curtain separating him from the house. Only then did he rise to his feet, walking silently and with assurance, because he'd taken care of the trip lines and sensors as he'd found them. He'd been in the jungle for three days, moving cautiously around the perimeter of the plantation, carefully getting the layout of the house. He knew where the girl slept, and he knew how he was going to get in. It couldn't have been better; Turego wasn't in the house. He'd left the day before, and since he wasn't back by now, Grant knew that he wasn't coming. It was already twilight, and it wasn't safe to travel the river in the darkness.

Grant knew exactly how treacherous the river was; that was why he would take the girl through the jungle. Even given its dangers, the river would be the logical route for them to take. If by some chance her departure were discovered before Pablo picked them up, the search would be concentrated along the river, at least for a while. Long enough, he hoped, for them to reach the helicopter.

He'd have to wait several more hours before he could go into the house and get the girl out. That would give everyone time to get tired, bored and sleepy. He made his way to the small clearing where he'd stashed his supplies, and carefully checked it for snakes, especially the velvety brown fer-de-lance, which liked to lie in clearings and wait for its next meal. After satisfying himself that the clearing was safe, he sat down on a fallen tree to smoke a cigarette. He took a drink of water, but he wasn't hungry. He knew that he wouldn't be until sometime tomorrow. Once the action was going down he couldn't eat; he was too keyed up, all his senses enhanced so that even the smallest sound of the jungle crashed against his eardrums like thunder. Adrenaline was already pumping through his veins, making him so high that he could understand why the Vikings had gone berserk during battle. Waiting was almost unbearable, but that was what he had to do. He checked his watch again, the illuminated dial a strange bit of civilization in a jungle that swallowed men alive, and frowned when he saw that only a little over half an hour had passed.

To give himself something to do, to calm his tightly wound nerves, he began packing methodically, arranging everything so he would know exactly where it was. He checked his weapons and his ammunition, hoping he wouldn't have to use them. What he needed more than anything, if he was to get the girl out alive, was a totally silent operation. If he had to use his carbine or the automatic pistol, he'd give away their position. He preferred a knife, which was silent and deadly.

He felt sweat trickle down his spine. God, if only the girl would have sense enough to keep her mouth shut and not start squawking when he hauled her out of there. If he had to, he'd knock her out, but that would make her dead weight to carry through vegetation that reached out to wrap around his legs like living fingers.

He realized that he was fondling his knife, his long, lean fingers sliding over the deadly blade with a lover's touch, and he shoved it into its sheath. Damn her, he thought bitterly. Because of her, he was back in the thick of things, and he could feel it taking hold of him again. The rush of danger was as addictive as any drug, and it was in his veins again, burning him, eating at him like an acid—killing him and intensifying the feeling of life all at once. Damn her, damn her to hell. All this for a spoiled, silly society brat who liked to amuse herself in various beds. Still, her round heels might have kept her alive, because Turego fancied himself quite a lover.

The night sounds of the jungle began to build around him: the screams of the howler monkeys, the rustles and chirps and coughs of the night denizens as they went about their business. Somewhere down close to the river he heard a jaguar cough, but he never minded the normal jungle sounds. He was at home here. The peculiar combination of his genes and the skills he'd learned as a boy in the swamps of south Georgia made him as much a part of the jungle as the jaguar that prowled the river's edge. Though the thick canopy blocked out all light, he didn't light a lamp or switch on a flashlight; he wanted his eyes to be perfectly adjusted to the dark when he began moving. He relied on his ears and his instincts, knowing that there was no danger close to him. The danger would come from men, not from the shy jungle animals. As long as those reassuring noises surrounded him, he knew that no men were near.

At midnight he rose and began easing along the route he'd marked in his mind, and the animals and insects were so unalarmed by his presence that the din continued without pause. The only caution he felt was that a fer-de-lance or a bushmaster might be hunting along the path he'd chosen, but that was a chance he'd have to take. He carried a long stick that he swept silently across the ground before him. When he reached the edge of the plantation he put the stick aside and crouched down to survey the grounds, making certain everything was as expected, before he moved in.

From where he crouched, he could see that the guards were at their normal posts, probably asleep, except for the one who patrolled the perimeter, and he'd soon settle down for a nap, too. They were sloppy, he thought contemptuously. They obviously didn't expect any visitors in as remote a place as this upriver plantation. During the three days he'd spent observing them, he'd noted that they stood around talking a great deal of the time, smoking cigarettes, not keeping a close watch on anything. But they were still there, and those rifles were loaded with real bullets. One of the reasons Grant had reached the age of thirty-eight was that he had a healthy respect for weapons and what they could do to human flesh. He didn't believe in recklessness, because it cost lives. He waited. At least now he could see, for the night was clear, and the stars hung low and brilliant in the sky. He didn't mind the starlight; there were plenty of shadows that would cover his movements.

The guard at the left corner of the house hadn't moved an inch since Grant had been watching him; he was asleep. The guard walking the grounds had settled down against one of the pillars at the front of the house. The faint red glow near the guard's hand told Grant that he was smoking and if he followed his usual pattern, he'd pull his cap over his eyes after he'd finished the cigarette, and sleep through the night.

As silently as a wraith, Grant left the concealing jungle and moved onto the grounds, slipping from tree to bush, invisible in the black shadows. Soundlessly, he mounted the veranda that ran alongside the house, flattening himself against the wall and checking the scene again. It was silent and peaceful. The guards relied far too heavily on those trip lines, not realizing they could be dismantled.

Priscilla's room was toward the back. It had double sliding glass doors, which might be locked, but that didn't worry him; he had a way with locks. He eased up to the doors, put out his hand and pulled silently. The door moved easily, and his brows rose. Not locked. Thoughtful of her.

Gently, gently, a fraction of an inch at a time, he slid the door open until there was enough room for him to slip through. As soon as he was in the room he paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust again. After the starlight, the room seemed as dark as the jungle. He didn't move a muscle, but waited, poised and listening.

Soon he could see again. The room was big and airy, with cool wooden floors covered with straw mats. The bed was against the wall to his right, ghostly with the folds of mosquito netting draped around it. Through the netting he could see the rumpled covers, the small mound on the far side of the bed. A chair, a small round table and a tall floor lamp were on this side of the bed. The shadows were deeper to his left, but he could see a door that probably opened to the bathroom. An enormous wardrobe stood against the wall. Slowly, as silently as a tiger stalking its prey, he moved around the wall, blending into the darkness near the wardrobe. Now he could see a chair on the far side of the bed, next to where she slept. A long white garment, perhaps her robe or nightgown, lay across the chair. The thought that she might be sleeping naked made his mouth quirk in a sudden grin that held no real amusement. If she did sleep naked, she'd fight like a wildcat when he woke her. Just what he needed. For both their sakes, he hoped she was clothed.

He moved closer to the bed, his eyes on the small figure. She was so still… The hair prickled on the back of his neck in warning, and without thinking he flung himself to the side, taking the blow on his shoulder instead of his neck. He rolled, and came to his feet expecting to face his assailant, but the room was still and dark again. Nothing moved, not even the woman on the bed. Grant faded back into the shadows, trying to hear the soft whisper of breathing, the rustle of clothing, anything. The silence in the room was deafening. Where was his attacker? Like Grant, he'd moved into the shadows, which were deep enough to shield several men.

Who was his assailant? What was he doing here in the woman's bedroom? Had he been sent to kill her or was he, too, trying to steal her from Turego?

His opponent was probably in the black corner beside the wardrobe. Grant eased the knife out of its sheath, then pushed it in again; his hands would be as silent as the knife.

There… just for a moment, the slightest of movements, but enough to pinpoint the man's position. Grant crouched then moved forward in a blurred rush, catching the man low and flipping him. The stranger rolled as he landed and came to his feet with a lithe twist, a slim dark figure outlined against the white mosquito netting. He kicked out, and Grant dodged the blow, but he felt the breeze of the kick pass his chin. Moving in, he caught the man's arm with a numbing chop. He saw the arm fall uselessly to the man's side. Coldly, without emotion, not even breathing hard, Grant threw the slim figure to the floor and knelt with one knee on the good arm and his other knee pressed to the man's chest. Just as he raised his hand to strike the blow that would end their silent struggle, Grant became aware of something odd, something soft swelling beneath his knee. Then he understood. The too-still form on the bed was so still because it was a mound of covers, not a human being. The girl hadn't been in bed; she'd seen him come through the sliding doors and had hidden herself in the shadows. But why hadn't she screamed? Why had she attacked, knowing that she had no chance of overpowering him? He moved his knee off her breasts and quickly slid his hand to the soft mounds to make certain his weight hadn't cut off her breath. He felt the reassuring rise of her chest, heard the soft, startled gasp as she felt his touch, and he eased a little away from her.

"It's all right," he started to whisper, but she suddenly twisted on the floor, wrenching away from him. Her knee slashed upward; he was unguarded, totally vulnerable, and her knee crashed into his groin with a force that sent agony through his whole body. Red lights danced before his eyes, and he sagged to one side, gagging at the bitter bile that rose in his throat, his hands automatically cupping his agonized flesh as he ground his teeth to contain the groan that fought for release.

She scrambled away from him, and he heard a low sob, perhaps of terror. Through pain-blurred eyes he saw her pick up something dark and bulky; then she slipped through the open glass door and was gone.

Pure fury propelled him to his feet. Damn it, she was escaping on her own. She was going to ruin the whole setup! Ignoring the pain in his loins, he started after her. He had a score to settle.

Chapter Two

Jane had just reached for her bundle of supplies when some instinct left over from her cave-dwelling ancestors told her that someone was near. There hadn't been any sound to alert her, but suddenly she was aware of another presence. The fine hairs on the back of her neck and her forearms stood up, and she had frozen, turning terrified eyes toward the double glass doors. The doors had slid open noiselessly, and she had seen the darker shadow of a man briefly outlined against the night. He was a big man, but one who moved with total silence. It was the eerie soundlessness of his movements that had frightened her more than anything, sending chills of pure terror chasing over her skin. For days now she had lived by her nerves, holding the terror at bay while she walked a tightrope, trying to lull Turego's suspicions, yet always poised for an escape attempt. But nothing had frightened her as much as that dark shadow slipping into her room.

Any faint hope that she would be rescued had died when Turego had installed her here. She had assessed the situation realistically. The only person who would try to-get her out would be her father, but it would be beyond his power. She could depend on only herself and her wits. To that end, she had flirted and flattered and downright lied, doing everything she could to convince Turego that she was both brainless and harmless. In that, she thought, she'd succeeded, but time was fast running out. When an aide had brought an urgent message to Turego the day before, Jane had eavesdropped; Luis Marcel's location had been discovered, and Turego wanted Luis, badly.

But by now Turego surely would have discovered that Luis had no knowledge of the missing microfilm, and that would leave her as the sole suspect. She had to escape, tonight, before Turego returned.

She hadn't been idle since she'd been here; she'd carefully memorized the routine of the guards, especially at night, when the terror brought on by the darkness made it impossible for her to sleep. She'd spent the nights standing at the double doors, watching the guards, clocking them, studying their habits. By keeping her mind busy, she'd been able to control the fear. When dawn would begin to lighten the sky, she had slept. She had been preparing since the first day she'd been here for the possibility that she might have to bolt into the jungle. She'd been sneaking food and supplies, hoarding them, and steeling herself for what lay ahead. Even now, only the raw fear of what awaited her at Turego's hands gave her the courage to brave the black jungle, where the night demons were waiting for her.

But none of that had been as sinister, as lethal, as the dark shape moving through her bedroom. She shrank back into the thick shadows, not even breathing in her acute terror. Oh, God, she prayed, what do I do now? Why was he there? To murder her in her bed? Was it one of the guards, tonight of all nights, come to rape her?

As he passed in front of her, moving in a slight crouch toward her bed, an odd rage suddenly filled Jane. After all she had endured, she was damned if she'd allow him to spoil her escape attempt! She'd talked herself into it, despite her horrible fear of the dark, and now he was ruining it!

Her jaw set, she clenched her fists as she'd been taught to do in her self-defense classes. She struck at the back of his neck, but suddenly he was gone, a shadow twisting away from the blow, and her fist struck his shoulder instead. Instantly terrified again, she shrank back into the shelter of the wardrobe, straining her eyes to see him, but he'd disappeared. Had he been a wraith, a figment of her imagination? No, her fist had struck a very solid shoulder, and the faint rippling of the white curtains over the glass doors testified that the doors were indeed open. He was in the room, somewhere, but where? How could a man that big disappear so completely?

Then, abruptly, his weight struck her in the side, bowling her over, and she barely bit off the instinctive scream that surged up from her throat. She didn't have a chance. She tried automatically to kick him in the throat, but he moved like lightning, blocking her attack. Then a hard blow to her arm numbed it all the way to her elbow, and a split second later she was thrown to the floor, a knee pressing into her chest and making it impossible to breathe.

The man raised his arm and Jane tensed, willing now to scream, but unable to make a sound. Then, suddenly, the man paused, and for some reason lifted his weight from her chest. Air rushed into her lungs, along with a dizzying sense of relief, then she felt his hand moving boldly over her breasts and realized why he'd shifted position. Both terrified and angry that this should be happening to her, she moved instinctively the split second she realized his vulnerability, and slashed upward with her knee. He sagged to the side, holding himself, and she felt an absurd sense of pity. Then she realized that he hadn't even groaned aloud. The man wasn't human! Choking back a sob of terror, she struggled to her feet and grabbed her supplies, then darted through the open door. At that point she wasn't escaping from Turego so much as from that dark, silent demon in her room.

Heedlessly, she flung herself across the plantation grounds; her heart was pounding so violently that the sound of her blood pumping through her veins made a roar in her ears. Her lungs hurt, and she realized that she was holding her breath. She tried to remind herself to be quiet, but the urge to flee was too strong for caution; she stumbled over a rough section of ground and sprawled on her hands and knees. As she began scrambling to her feet, she was suddenly overwhelmed by something big and warm, smashing her back to the ground. Cold, pure terror froze her blood in her veins, but before even an instinctive scream could find voice, his hand was on the back of her neck and everything went black.

Jane regained consciousness by degrees, confused by her upside down position, the jouncing she was suffering, the discomfort of her arms. Strange noises assailed her ears, noises that she tried and failed to identify. Even when she opened her eyes she saw only blackness. It was one of the worst nightmares she'd ever had. She began kicking and struggling to wake up, to end the dream, and abruptly a sharp slap stung her bottom. "Settle down," an ill-tempered voice said from somewhere above and behind her. The voice was that of a stranger, but there was something in that laconic drawl that made her obey instantly.

Slowly things began to shift into a recognizable pattern, and her senses righted themselves. She was being carried over a man's shoulder through the jungle. Her wrists had been taped behind her, and her ankles were also secured. Another wide band of tape covered her mouth, preventing her from doing anything more than grunting or humming. She didn't feel like humming, so she used her limited voice to grunt out exactly what she thought of him, in language that would have left her elegant mother white with shock. A hard hand again made contact with the seat of her pants. "Would you shut the hell up?" he growled. "You sound like a pig grunting at the trough."

American! she thought, stunned. He was an American! He'd come to rescue her, even though he was being unnecessarily rough about it… or was he a rescuer? Chilled, she thought of all the different factions who would like to get their hands on her. Some of those factions were fully capable of hiring an American mercenary to get her, or of training one of their own to imitate an American accent and win her trust.

She didn't dare trust anyone, she realized. Not anyone. She was alone in this.

The man stopped and lifted her from his shoulder, standing her on her feet. Jane blinked her eyes, then widened them in an effort to see, but the darkness under the thick canopy was total, she couldn't see anything. The night pressed in on her, suffocating her with its thick darkness. Where was he? Had he simply dropped her here in the jungle and left her to be breakfast for a jaguar? She could sense movement around her, but no sounds that she could identify as him; the howls and chittering and squawks and rustles of the jungle filled her ears. A whimper rose in her throat, and she tried to move, to seek a tree or something to protect her back, but she'd forgotten her bound feet and she stumbled to the ground, scratching her face on a bush.

A low obscenity came to her ears, then she was roughly grasped and hauled to her feet. "Damn it, stay put!"

So he was still there. How could he see? What was he doing? No matter who he was or what he was doing, at that moment Jane was grateful for his presence. She could not conquer her fear of darkness but the fact that she wasn't alone held the terror at bay. She gasped as he abruptly lifted her and tossed her over his shoulder again, as effortlessly as if she were a rag doll. She felt the bulk of a backpack, which hadn't been there before, but he showed no sign of strain. He moved through the stygian darkness with a peculiar sure-footedness, a lithe, powerful grace that never faltered.

Her own pack of pilfered supplies was still slung around her shoulders, the straps holding it even though it had slid down and was bumping against the back of her head. A can of something was banging against her skull; she'd probably have concussion if this macho fool didn't ease up. What did he think this was, some sort of jungle marathon? Her ribs were being bruised against his hard shoulder, and she felt various aches all over her body, probably as a result of his roughness in throwing her to the floor. Her arm ached to the bone from his blow. Even if this was a real rescue, she thought, she'd be lucky if she lived through it.

She bounced on his shoulder for what seemed like days, the pain in her cramped limbs increasing with every step he took. Nausea began to rise in her, and she took deep breaths in an effort to stave off throwing up. If she began to vomit, with her mouth taped the way it was, she could suffocate. Desperately she began to struggle, knowing only that she needed to get into an upright position.

"Easy there, Pris." Somehow he seemed to know how she was feeling. He stopped and lifted her off his shoulder, easing her onto her back on the ground. When her weight came down on her bound arms she couldn't suppress a whimper of pain. "All right," the man said. "I'm going to cut you loose now, but if you start acting up, I'll truss you up like a Christmas turkey again and leave you that way. Understand?"

She nodded wildly, wondering if he could see her in the dark. Evidently he could, because he turned her on her side and she felt a knife slicing through the tape that bound her wrists. Tears stung her eyes from the pain as he pulled her arms around and began massaging them roughly to ease her cramped muscles.

"Your daddy sent me to get you out of here," the man drawled calmly as he began easing the tape off of her mouth. Instead of ripping the adhesive away and taking skin with it, he was careful, and Jane was torn between gratitude and indignation, since he'd taped her mouth in the first place.

Jane moved her mouth back and forth, restoring it to working condition. "My daddy?" she asked hoarsely.

"Yeah. Okay, now, Pris, I'm going to free your legs, but if you look like you're even thinking about kicking me again, I won't be as easy with you as I was the last time." Despite his drawl, there was something menacing in his tone, and Jane didn't doubt his word.

"I wouldn't have kicked you the first time if you hadn't started pawing at me like a high school sophomore!" she hissed.

"I was checking to see if you were breathing."

"Sure you were, and taking your time about it, too."

"Gagging you was a damned good idea," he said reflectively, and Jane shut up. She had yet to see him as anything more than a shadow. She couldn't even put a name to him, but she knew enough about him to know that he would bind and gag her again without a moment's compunction.

He cut the tape from around her ankles, and again she was subjected to his rough but effective massage. In only a moment she was being pulled to her feet; she staggered momentarily before regaining her sense of balance.

"We don't have much farther to go; stay right behind me, and don't say a word."

"Wait!" Jane whispered frantically. "How can I follow you when I can't see you?"

He took her hand and carried it to his waist. "Hang on to my belt."

She did better than that. Acutely aware of the vast jungle around her, and with only his presence shielding her from the night terrors, she hooked her fingers inside the waistband of his pants in a death grip. She knotted the material so tightly that he muttered a protest, but she wasn't about to let go of him.

Maybe it didn't seem very far to him, but to Jane, being towed in his wake, stumbling over roots and vines that she couldn't see, it seemed like miles before he halted. "We'll wait here," he whispered. "I don't want to go any closer until I hear the helicopter come in."

"When will that be?" Jane whispered back, figuring that if he could talk, so could she.

"A little after dawn."

"When is dawn?"

"Half an hour."

Still clutching the waistband of his pants, she stood behind him and waited for dawn. The seconds and minutes crawled by, but they gave her the chance to realize for the first time that she'd truly escaped from Turego. She was safe and free… well almost. She was out of his clutches, she was the only one who knew what a close call she'd had. Turego would almost certainly return to the plantation this morning to find that his prisoner had escaped. For a moment she was surprised at her own lack of elation, then she realized that she wasn't out of danger yet. This man said that her father had sent him, but he hadn't given her a name or any proof. All she had was his word, and Jane was more than a little wary. Until she was actually on American soil, until she knew beyond any doubt that she was safe, she was going to follow poor George Persall's ironclad rule: when in doubt, lie.

The man shifted uncomfortably, drawing her attention. "Look, honey, do you think you could loosen up on my pants? Or are you trying to finish the job you started on me with your knee?"

Jane felt the blood rush to her cheeks, and she hastily released her hold. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize," she whispered. She stood stiffly for a moment, her arms at her sides; then panic began to rise in her. She couldn't see him in the darkness, she couldn't hear him breathing, and now that she was no longer touching him, she couldn't be certain that he hadn't left her. Was he still there? What if she was alone? The air became thick and oppressive, and she struggled to breathe, to fight down the fear that she knew was unreasonable but that no amount of reason could conquer. Even knowing its source didn't help. She simply couldn't stand the darkness. She couldn't sleep without a light; she never went into a room without first reaching in and turning on the light switch, and she always left her lights on if she knew she would be late returning home. She, who always took extraordinary precautions against being left in the dark, was standing in the middle of a jungle in darkness so complete that it was like being blind.

Her fragile control broke and she reached out wildly, clawing for him, for reassurance that he was still there. Her outstretched fingers touched fabric, and she threw herself against him, gasping in mingled panic and relief. The next second steely fingers grasped her shirt and she was hurled through the air to land flat on her back in the smelly, rotting vegetation. Before she could move, before she could suck air back into her lungs, her hair was pulled back and she felt the suffocating pressure of his knee on her chest again. His breath was a low rasp above her, his voice little more than a snarl "Don't ever—ever—come at me from behind again."

Jane writhed, pushing at his knee. After a moment he lifted it, and eased the grip on her hair. Even being thrown over his shoulder had been better than being left alone in the darkness, and she grabbed for him again, catching him around the knees. Automatically he tried to step away from her entangling arms but she lunged for him. He uttered a startled curse, tried to regain his balance, then crashed to the ground.

He lay so still that Jane's heart plummeted. What would she do if he were hurt? She couldn't possibly carry him, but neither could she leave him lying there, injured and unable to protect himself. Feeling her way up his body, she scrambled to crouch by his shoulders. "Mister, are you all right?" she whispered, running her hands up his shoulders to his face, then searching his head for any cuts or lumps. There was an elasticized band around his head, and she followed it, her nervous fingers finding an odd type of glasses over his eyes. "Are you hurt?" she demanded again, her voice tight with fear. "Damn it, answer me!"

"Lady," the man said in a low, furious voice, "you're crazier than hell. If I was your daddy, I'd pay Turego to keep you!"

She didn't know him, but his words caused an odd little pain in her chest. She sat silently, shocked that he could hurt her feelings. She didn't know him, and he didn't know her—how could his opinion matter? But it did, somehow, and she felt strangely vulnerable.

He eased himself to a sitting position, and when she didn't say anything, he sighed. "Why did you jump me like that?" he asked in resignation.

"I'm afraid of the dark," she said with quiet dignity. "I couldn't hear you breathing, and I can't see a thing. I panicked. I'm sorry."

After a moment he said, "All right," and got to his feet. Bending down, he grasped her wrists and pulled her up to stand beside him. Jane inched a little closer to him.

"You can see because of those glasses you're wearing, can't you?" she asked.

"Yeah. There's not a lot of light, but enough that I can make out where I'm going. Infrared lenses."

A howler monkey suddenly screamed somewhere above their heads, and Jane jumped, bumping into him. "Got another pair?" she asked shakily.

She could feel him hesitate, then his arm went around her shoulders. "Nope, just these. Don't worry, Pris, I'm not going to lose you. In another five minutes or so, it'll start getting light."

"I'm all right now," she said, and she was, as long as she could touch him and know that she wasn't alone. That was the real terror: being alone in the darkness. For years she had fought a battle against the nightmare that had begun when she was nine years old, but at last she had come to accept it, and in the acceptance she'd won peace. She knew it was there, knew when to expect it and what to do to ward it off, and that knowledge gave her the ability to enjoy life again. She hadn't let the nightmare cripple her. Maybe her methods of combating it were a little unorthodox, but she had found the balance within herself and she was happy with it.

Feeling remarkably safe with that steely arm looped over her shoulders, Jane waited beside him, and in a very short time she found that she could indeed see a little better. Deep in the rain forest there was no brilliant sunrise to announce the day—the sunrise could not be seen from beneath the canopy of vegetation. Even during the hottest noon, the light that reached the jungle floor was dim, filtered through layers of greenery. She waited as the faint gray light slowly became stronger, until she could pick out more of the details of the lush foliage that surrounded her. She felt almost swamped by the plant life. She'd never been in the jungle before; her only knowledge of it came from movies and what little she'd been able to see during the trip upriver to the plantation. During her days at the plantation she'd begun to think of the jungle as a living entity, huge and green, surrounding her, waiting. She had known from the first that to escape she would have to plunge into that seemingly impenetrable green barrier, and she had spent hours staring at it.

Now she was deep within it, and it wasn't quite what she'd expected. It wasn't a thick tangle, where paths had to be cut with a machete. The jungle floor was littered with rotting vegetation, and laced with networks of vines and roots, but for all that it was surprisingly clear. Plant life that lingered near the jungle floor was doomed. To compete for the precious light it had to rise and spread out its broad leaves, to gather as much light as it could. She stared at a fern that wasn't quite a fern; it was a tree with a buttressed root system, rising to a height of at least eight feet, only at the top it feathered into a fern.

"You can see now," he muttered suddenly, lifting his arm from her shoulders and stripping off the night vision goggles. He placed them carefully in a zippered section of his field pack.

Jane stared at him in open curiosity, wishing that the light were better so she could really see him. What she could see gave wing to hundreds of tiny butterflies in her stomach. It would take one brave hombre to meet this man in a dark alley, she thought with a frightened shiver. She couldn't tell the color of his eyes, but they glittered at her from beneath fierce, level dark brows. His face was blackened, which made those eyes all the brighter. His light colored hair was far too long, and he'd tied a strip of cloth around his head to keep the hair out of his eyes. He was clad in tiger-striped camouflage fatigues, and he wore the trappings of war. A wicked knife was stuck casually in his belt, and a pistol rode his left hip while he carried a carbine slung over his right shoulder. Her startled eyes darted back up to his face, a strong-boned face that revealed no emotion, though he had been aware of her survey.

"Loaded for bear, aren't you?" she quipped, eyeing the knife again. For some reason it looked more deadly than either of the guns.

"I don't walk into anything unprepared," he said flatly.

Well, he certainly looked prepared for anything. She eyed him again, more warily this time; he was about six feet tall, and looked like… looked like… Her mind groped for and found the phrase. It had been bandied about and almost turned into a joke, but with this man, it was deadly serious. He looked like a lean, mean, fighting machine, every hard, muscled inch of him. His shoulders looked to be a yard wide, and he'd carried her dead weight through the jungle without even a hint of strain. He'd knocked her down twice, and she realized the only reason she wasn't badly hurt was that, both times, he'd tempered his strength.

Abruptly his attention left her, and his head lifted with a quick, alert motion, like that of an eagle. His eyes narrowed as he listened. "The helicopter is coming," he told her. "Let's go."

Jane listened, but she couldn't hear anything. "Are you sure?" she asked doubtfully.

"I said let's go," he repeated impatiently, and walked away from her. It took Jane only a few seconds to realize that he was heading out, and in the jungle he would be completely hidden from view before he'd gone ten yards. She hurried to catch up to him.

"Hey, slow down!" she whispered frantically, catching at his belt.

"Move it," he said with a total lack of sympathy. "The helicopter won't wait forever; Pablo's on the quick side anyway."

"Who's Pablo?"

"The pilot."

Just then a faint vibration reached her ears. In only a moment it had intensified to the recognizable beat of a helicopter. How could he have heard it before? She knew that she had good hearing, but his senses must be almost painfully acute.

He moved swiftly, surely, as if he knew exactly where he was going. Jane concentrated on keeping up with him and avoiding the roots that tried to catch her toes, she paid little attention to their surroundings. When he climbed, she climbed; it was simple. She was mildly surprised when he stopped abruptly and she lifted her head to look around. The jungle of Costa Rica was mountainous, and they had climbed to the edge of a small cliff, looking down on a narrow, hidden valley with a natural clearing. The helicopter sat in that clearing, the blades lazily whirling.

"Better than a taxicab," Jane murmured in relief, and started past him.

His hand closed over her shoulder and jerked her back. "Be quiet," he ordered, his narrowed gaze moving restlessly, surveying the area.

"Is something wrong?"

"Shut up!"

Jane glared at him, incensed by his unnecessary rudeness, but his hand was still clamped on her shoulder in a grip that bordered on being painful. It was a warning that if she tried to leave the protective cover of the jungle before he was satisfied that everything was safe, he would stop her with real pain. She stood quietly, staring at the clearing herself, but she couldn't see anything wrong. Everything was quiet. The pilot was leaning against the outside of the helicopter, occupied with cleaning his nails; he certainly wasn't concerned with anything.

Long minutes dragged past. The pilot began to fidget, craning his neck and staring into the jungle, though anyone standing just a few feet behind the trees would be completely hidden from view. He looked at his watch, then scanned the jungle again, his gaze moving nervously from left to right.

Jane felt the tension in the man standing beside her, tension that was echoed in the hand that held her shoulder. What was wrong? What was he looking for, and why was he waiting? He was as motionless as a jaguar lying in wait for its prey to pass beneath its tree limb.

"This sucks," he muttered abruptly, easing deeper into the jungle and dragging her with him.

Jane sputtered at the inelegant expression. "It does? Why? What's wrong?"

"Stay here." He pushed her to the ground, deep in the green-black shadow of the buttressed roots of an enormous tree.

Startled, she took a moment to realize that she'd been abandoned. He had simply melted into the jungle, so silently and swiftly that she wasn't certain which way he'd gone. She twisted around but could see nothing that indicated his direction; no swaying vines or limbs.

She wrapped her arms around her drawn-up legs and propped her chin on her knees, staring thoughtfully at the ground. A green stick with legs was dragging a large spider off to be devoured. What if he didn't come back… whoever he was. Why hadn't she asked him his name? If something happened to him, she'd like to know his name, so she could tell someone—assuming that she could manage to get out of the jungle herself. Well, she wasn't any worse off now than she had been before. She was away from Turego, and that was what counted.

Wait here, he'd said. For how long? Until lunch? Sundown? Her next birthday? Men gave such inexact instructions! Of course, this particular man seemed a little limited in the conversation department. Shut up, Stay here and Stay put seemed to be the highlights of his repertoire.

This was quite a tree he'd parked her by. The bottom of the trunk flared into buttressed roots, forming enormous wings that wrapped around her almost like arms. If she sat back against the tree, the wings would shield her completely from the view of someone approaching at any angle except head on.

The straps of her backpack were irritating her shoulders, so she slid it off and stretched, feeling remarkably lighter. She hauled the pack around and opened it, then began digging for her hairbrush. Finding this backpack had been a stroke of luck, she thought, though Turego's soldiers really should be a little more careful with their belongings. Without it, she'd have had to wrap things up in a blanket, which would have been awkward.

Finally locating the hairbrush, she diligently worked through the mass of tangles that had accumulated in her long hair during the night. A small monkey with an indignant expression hung from a branch overhead. It scolded her throughout the operation, evidently angry that she had intruded on its territory. She waved at it.

Congratulating herself for her foresight, she pinned her hair up and pulled a black baseball cap out of the pack. She jammed the cap on and tugged the bill down low over her eyes, then shoved it back up. There wasn't any sun down here. Staring upward, she could see bright pinpoints of sun high in the trees, but only a muted green light filtered down to the floor. She'd have been better off with some of those fancy goggles that. What's-his-name had.

How long had she been sitting there? Was he in trouble?

Her legs were going to sleep, so she stood and stomped around to get her blood flowing again. The longer she waited, the more uneasy she became, and she had the feeling that a time would come when she'd better be able to move fast. Jane was an instinctive creature, as sensitive to atmosphere as any finely tuned barometer. That trait had enabled her to hold Turego at bay for what seemed like an endless succession of days and nights, reading him, sidestepping him, keeping him constantly disarmed, and even charmed. Now the same instinct warned her of danger. There was some slight change in the very air that stroked her bare arms. Warily, she leaned down to pick up her backpack, slipping her arms through the straps and anchoring it this time by fastening the third strap around her middle.

The sudden thunderous burst of automatic weapon fire made her whirl, her heart jumping into her throat. Listening to the staccato blasts, she knew that several weapons were being fired, but at whom? Had her friend been detected or was this something else entirely? Was this the trouble he'd sensed that had made him shy away from the clearing? She wanted to think that he was safe, observing everything from an invisible vantage point in the jungle, but with a chill she realized that she couldn't take that for granted.

Her hands felt cold, and with a distant surprise she realized that she was trembling. What should she do? Wait, or run? What if he needed help? She realized that there was very little she could do, since she was unarmed, but she couldn't just run away if he needed help. He wasn't the most amiable man she'd ever met, and she still didn't exactly trust him, but he was the closest thing to a friend she had here.

Ignoring the unwillingness of her feet and the icy lump of fear in her stomach, Jane left the shelter of the giant tree and began cautiously inching through the forest, back toward the clearing. There were only sporadic bursts of gunfire now, still coming from the same general direction.

Suddenly she froze as the faint sound of voices filtered through the forest. In a cold panic she dove for the shelter of another large tree. What would she do if they were coming in this direction? The rough bark scratched her hands as she cautiously moved her head just enough to peer around the trunk.

A steely hand clamped over her mouth. As a scream rose in her throat, a deep, furious voice growled in her ear, "Damn it, I told you to stay put!"

Chapter Three

Jane glared at him over the hand that still covered her mouth, her fright turning into relieved anger. She didn't like this man. She didn't like him at all, and as soon as they were out of this mess, she was going to tell him about it!

He removed his hand and shoved her to the ground on her hands and knees. "Crawl!" he ordered in a harsh whisper, and pointed to their left.

Jane crawled, ignoring the scratches she incurred as she squirmed through the undergrowth, ignoring even the disgusting squishiness when she accidentally smashed something with her hand. Odd, but now that he was with her again, her panic had faded; it hadn't gone completely, but it wasn't the heart-pounding, nauseating variety, either. Whatever his faults, he knew his way around.

He was on her tail, literally, his hard shoulder against the back of her thighs, pushing her onward whenever he thought she wasn't moving fast enough. Once he halted her by the simple method of grabbing her ankle and jerking her flat, his urgent grip warning her to be quiet. She held her breath, listening to the faint rustle that betrayed the presence of someone, or something, nearby. She didn't dare turn her head, but she could detect movement with her peripheral vision. In a moment the man was close enough that she could see him plainly. He was obviously of Latin ancestry, and he was dressed in camouflage fatigues with a cap covering his head. He held an automatic rifle at the ready before him.

In only a moment she could no longer see or hear him, but they stayed motionless in the thick tangle of ferns for long, agonizing minutes. Then her ankle was released and a hand on her hip urged her forward.

They were moving away from the soldier at a right angle. Perhaps they were going to try to get behind their pursuers, then take off in the helicopter while the soldiers were still deep in the jungle. She wanted to know where they were going, what they would do, who the soldiers were and what they wanted—but the questions had to remain bottled up inside her. Now was definitely not the time for talking, not with this man—what was his name?—practically shoving her through the undergrowth.

Abruptly the forest cleared somewhat, allowing small patches of sunlight to filter through. Grasping her arm, he hauled her to her feet. "Run, but be as quiet as you can," he hissed in her ear.

Great. Run, but do it quietly. She threw him a dirty look, then ran, taking off like a startled deer. The most disgusting thing was that he was right behind her, and she couldn't hear him making a sound, while her own feet seemed to pound the earth like a drum. But her body seemed cheered by the small amount of sunlight, because she felt her energy level surge despite her sleepless night. The pack on her shoulders seemed lighter, and her steps became quick and effortless as adrenaline began pumping through her veins.

The brush became thicker, and they had to slow their pace. After about fifteen minutes he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder and pulled her behind the trunk of a tree. "Rest a minute," he whispered. "The humidity will wipe you out if you aren't used to it."

Until that moment Jane hadn't noticed that she was wringing wet with sweat. She'd been too intent on saving her skin to worry about its dampness. Now, she became aware of the intense humidity of the rain forest pressing down on her, making every breath she drew lie heavily in her lungs. She wiped the moisture from her face, the salt of her perspiration stinging the small scratches on her cheeks.

He took a canteen from his pack. "Take a drink; you look like you need it."

She had a very good idea what she looked like, and she smiled wryly. She accepted the canteen and drank a little of the water, then capped it and returned it to him. "Thanks."

He looked at her quizzically. "You can have more if you want."

"I'm okay." She looked at him, seeing now that his eyes were a peculiar golden brown color, like amber. His pupils seemed piercingly black against that tawny background. He was streaked with sweat, too, but he wasn't even breathing hard. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he was damned good at this. "What's your name?" she asked him, desperately needing to call him something, as if that would give him more substance, make him more familiar.

He looked a little wary, and she sensed that he disliked giving even that much of himself away. A name was only a small thing, but it was a chink in his armor, a link to another person that he didn't want. "Sullivan," he finally said reluctantly.

"First or last?"

"Last."

"What's your first name?"

"Grant."

Grant Sullivan. She liked the name. It wasn't fancy; he wasn't fancy. He was a far cry from the sleekly sophisticated men she usually met, but the difference was exciting. He was hard and dangerous, mean when he had to be, but he wasn't vicious. The contrast between him and Turego, who was a truly vicious man, couldn't have been more clear-cut.

"Let's go," he said. "We need to put a lot more space between the hounds and the foxes."

Obediently she followed his direction, but found that her burst of adrenaline was already dissipating. She felt more exhausted now than she had before the short rest. She stumbled once, catching her booted foot in a liana vine, but he rescued her with a quick grab. She gave him a tired smile of thanks, but when she tried to step away from him he held her. He stood rigid and it frightened her. She jerked around to look at him, but his face was a cold, blank mask, and he was staring behind her. She whirled again, and looked down the barrel of a rifle.

The sweat congealed on her body. For one moment of frozen terror she expected to be shot; then the moment passed and she was still alive. She was able then to look past the barrel to the hard, dark face of the soldier who held the rifle. His black eyes were narrowed, fastened on Sullivan. He said something, but Jane was too upset to translate the Spanish.

Slowly, deliberately, Sullivan released Jane and raised his arms, clasping his hands on top of his head. "Step away from me," he said quietly.

The soldier barked an order at him. Jane's eyes widened. If she moved an inch this maniac would probably shoot her down. But Sullivan had told her to move, so she moved, her face so white that the small freckles across her nose stood out as bright dots of color. The rifle barrel jerked in her direction, and the soldier said something else. He was nervous, Jane suddenly realized. The tension was obvious in his voice, in his jerky movements. God, if his finger twitched on the trigger…! Then, just as abruptly, he aimed the rifle at Sullivan again.

Sullivan was going to do something. She could sense it. The fool! He'd get himself killed if he tried to jump this guy! She stared at the soldier's shaking hands on the rifle, and suddenly something jumped into her consciousness. He didn't have the rifle on automatic. It took her another moment to realize the implications; then she reacted without thought. Her body, trained to dance, trained in the graceful moves of self-defense, went into fluid motion. He began moving a split second later, swinging the weapon around, but by then she was close enough that her left foot sliced upward under the barrel of the gun, and the shot that he fired went into the canopy over their heads. He never got a chance at another shot.

Grant was on him then, grabbing the gun with one hand and slashing at the man's unprotected neck with the side of the other. The soldier's eyes glazed over, and he sank limply to the ground, his breathing raspy but steady.

Grant grabbed Jane's arm. "Run! That shot will bring every one of them swarming down on us!"

The urgency of his tone made it possible for her to obey, though she was rapidly depleting her reserves of energy. Her legs were leaden, and her boots weighed fifty pounds each. Burning agony slashed her thighs, but she forced herself to ignore it; sore muscles weren't nearly as permanent as being dead. Urged on by his hand at her back, she stumbled over roots and through bushes, adding to her collection of scratches. It was purely a natural defense mechanism, but her mind shut down and her body operated automatically, her feet moving, her lungs sucking desperately at the heavy, moist air. She was so tired now that she no longer felt the pain in her body.

The ground abruptly sloped out from under her feet. Her senses dulled by both terror and fatigue, she was unable to regain her balance. Grant grabbed for her, but the momentum of her body carried them both over the edge of the hill. His arms wrapped around her, and they rolled down the steep slope. The earth and trees spun crazily, but she saw a rocky, shallow stream at the bottom of the slope and a small, hoarse cry tore from her throat. Some of those rocks were big enough to kill them and the smaller ones could cut them to pieces.

Grant swore, and tightened his grip on her until she thought her ribs would splinter under the pressure. She felt his muscles tighten, felt the desperate twist he made, and somehow he managed to get his feet and legs in front of him. Then they were sliding down in a fairly upright position, rather than rolling. He dug his heels in and their descent slowed, then stopped. "Pris?" he asked roughly, cupping her chin in his hand and turning her face so he could see it. "Are you hurt?"

"No, no," she quickly assured him, ignoring the new aches in her body. Her right arm wasn't broken, but it was badly bruised; she winced as she tried to move it. One of the straps on the backpack had broken, and the pack was hanging lopsidedly off her left shoulder. Her cap was missing.

He adjusted the rifle on his shoulder, and Jane wondered how he had managed to hold on to it. Didn't he ever drop anything, or get lost, or tired, or hungry? She hadn't even seen him take a drink of water!

"My cap came off," she said, turning to stare up the slope. The top was almost thirty yards above them and the slope steep enough that it was a miracle they hadn't crashed into the rocks at the streambed.

"I see it." He swarmed up the slope, lithe and surefooted. He snatched the cap from a broken branch and in only a moment was back beside her. Jamming the cap on her head, he said, "Can you make it up the other side?"

There was no way, she thought. Her body refused to function any longer. She looked at him and lifted her chin. "Of course."

He didn't smile, but there was a faint softening of his expression, as if he knew how desperately tired she was. "We have to keep moving," he said, taking her arm and urging her across the stream. She didn't care that her boots were getting wet; she just sloshed through the water, moving downstream while he scanned the bank for an easy place to climb up. On this side of the stream, the bank wasn't sloped; it was almost vertical and covered with what looked like an impenetrable tangle of vines and bushes. The stream created a break in the foliage that allowed more sunlight to pour down, letting the plants grow much more thickly.

"Okay, let's go up this way," he finally said, pointing. Jane lifted her head and stared at the bank, but she didn't see any break in the wild tangle.

"Let's talk about this," she hedged.

He gave an exasperated sigh. "Look, Pris, I know you're tired, but—"

Something snapped inside Jane, and she whirled on him, catching him by the shirt front and drawing back her fist. "If you call me 'Pris' just one more time, I'm going to feed you a knuckle sandwich!" she roared, unreasonably angry at his continued use of that hated name. No one, but no one, had ever been allowed to call her Priscilla, Pris, or even Cilia, more than once. This damned commando had been rubbing her face in it from the beginning. She'd kept quiet about it, figuring she owed him for kicking him in the groin, but she was tired and hungry and scared and enough was enough!

He moved so quickly that she didn't even have time to blink. His hand snaked out and caught her drawn back fist, while the fingers of his other hand laced around her wrist, removing her grip from his shirt. "Damn it, can't you keep quiet? I didn't name you Priscilla, your parents did, so if you don't like it take it up with them. But until then, climb!"

Jane climbed, even though she was certain at every moment that she was going to collapse on her face. Grabbing vines for hand holds, using roots and rocks and bushes and small trees, she squirmed and wiggled her way through the foliage. It was so thick that it could have been swarming with jaguars and she wouldn't have been able to see one until she stuck her hand in its mouth. She remembered that jaguars liked water, spending most of their time resting comfortably near a river or stream, and she swore vengeance on Grant Sullivan for making her do this.

Finally she scrambled over the top, and after pushing forward several yards found that the foliage had once again thinned, and walking was much easier. She adjusted the pack on her back, wincing as she found new bruises. "Are we heading for the helicopter?"

"No," he said curtly. "The helicopter is being watched."

"Who are those men?"

He shrugged. "Who knows? Sandinistas, maybe; we're only a few klicks from the Nicaraguan border. They could be any guerrilla faction. That damned Pablo sold us out."

Jane didn't waste time worrying about Pablo's duplicity; she was too tired to really care. "Where are we going?"

"South."

She ground her teeth. Getting information out of this man was like pulling teeth. "South where?"

"Limon, eventually. Right now, we're going due east."

Jane knew enough about Costa Rica to know what lay due east, and she didn't like what she'd just been told. Due east lay the Caribbean coast, where the rain forest became swamp land. If they were only a few kilometers from the Nicaraguan border, then Limon was roughly a hundred miles away. In her weariness, she felt it might as well have been five hundred miles. How long would it take them to walk a hundred miles? Four or five days? She didn't know if she could stand four or five days with Mr. Sunshine. She'd known him less than twelve hours, and she was already close to death.

"Why can't we just go south and forget about east?"

He jerked his head in the direction from which they'd come. "Because of them. They weren't Turego's men, but Turego will soon know that you came in this direction, and he'll be after us. He can't afford to have the government find out about his little clandestine operations. So… we go where he can't easily follow."

It made sense. She didn't like it, but it made sense. She'd never been in the Caribbean coastal region of Costa Rica, so she didn't know what to expect, but it had to be better than being Turego's prisoner. Poisonous snakes, alligators, quicksand, whatever… it was better than Turego. She'd worry about the swamp when they were actually in it. With that settled in her mind, she returned to her most pressing problem.

"When do we get to rest? And eat? And, frankly, Attila, you may have a bladder the size of New Jersey, but I've got to go!"

Again she caught that unwilling twitch of his lips, as if he'd almost grinned. "We can't stop yet, but you can eat white we walk. As for the other, go behind that tree there." He pointed, and she turned to see another of those huge, funny trees with the enormous buttressed roots. In the absence of indoor plumbing it would have to do. She plunged for its shelter.

When they started out again he gave her something hard and dark to chew on; it tasted faintly like meat, but after examining it suspiciously she decided not to question him too closely about it. It eased the empty pains in her stomach, and after washing a few bites down with cautious sips of water, she began to feel better and the rubbery feeling left her legs. He chewed a stick of it, too, which reassured her in regard to his humanity.

Still, after walking steadily for a few hours, Jane began to lose the strength that had come with her second wind. Her legs were moving clumsily, and she felt as if she were wading in knee-deep water. The temperature had risen steadily; it was well over ninety now, even in the thick shelter of the canopy. The humidity was draining her as she continued to sweat, losing water that she wasn't replacing. Just when she was about to tell him that she couldn't take another step, he turned and surveyed her with an impersonal professionalism.

"Stay here while I find some sort of shelter for us. It's going to start raining in a little while, so we might as well sit it out. You look pretty well beat, anyway."

Jane pulled her cap off and wiped her streaming face with her forearm, too tired to comment as he melted from sight. How did he know it was going to start raining? It rained almost every day, of course, so it didn't take a fortune-teller to predict rain, but she hadn't heard the thunder that usually preceded it.

He was back in only a short while, taking her arm and leading her to a small rise, where a scattering of boulders testified to Costa Rica's volcanic origin. After taking his knife from his belt, he cut small limbs and lashed them together with vines, then propped one end of his contraption up by wedging sturdier limbs under the corners. Producing a rolled up tarp from his backpack like a magician, he tied the tarp over the crude lean-to, making it waterproof. "Well, crawl in and get comfortable," he growled when Jane simply stood there, staring in astonishment at the shelter he'd constructed in just a few minutes.

Obediently she crawled in, groaning with relief as she shrugged out of her backpack and relaxed her aching muscles. Her ears caught the first distant rumble of thunder; whatever he did for a living, the man certainly knew his way around the jungle.

Grant ducked under the shelter, too, relieving his shoulders of the weight of his own backpack. He had apparently decided that while they were waiting out the rain they might as well eat, because he dug out a couple of cans of field rations.

Jane sat up straight and leaned closer, staring at the cans. "What's that?"

"Food."

"What kind of food?"

He shrugged. "I've never looked at it long enough to identify it. Take my advice: don't think about it. Just eat it."

She put her hand on his as he started to open the cans. "Wait. Why don't we save those for have-to situations?"

"This is a have-to situation," he grunted. "We have to eat."

"Yes, but we don't have to eat that!"

Exasperation tightened his hard features. "Honey, we either eat this, or two more cans exactly like them!"

"Oh, ye of little faith," she scoffed, dragging her own backpack closer. She began delving around in it, and in a moment produced a small packet wrapped in a purloined towel. With an air of triumph she unwrapped it to expose two badly smashed but still edible sandwiches, then returned to the backpack to dig around again. Her face flushed with success, she pulled out two cans of orange juice. "Here!" she said cheerfully, handing him one of the cans. "A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a can of orange juice. Protein, carbohydrates and vitamin C. What more could we ask for?"

Grant took the sandwich and the pop-top can she offered him, staring at them in disbelief. He blinked once, then an amazing thing happened: he laughed. It wasn't much of a laugh. It was rather rusty sounding, but it revealed his straight white teeth and made his amber eyes crinkle at the corners. The rough texture of that laugh gave her a funny little feeling in her chest. It was obvious that he rarely laughed, that life didn't hold much humor for him, and she felt both happy that she'd made him laugh and sad that he'd had so little to laugh about. Without laughter she would never have kept her sanity, so she knew how precious it was.

Chewing on his sandwich, Grant relished the gooiness of the peanut butter and the sweetness of the jelly. So what if the bread was a little stale? The unexpected treat made such a detail unimportant. He leaned back and propped himself against his backpack, stretching his long legs out before him. The first drops of rain began to patter against the upper canopy. It would be impossible for anyone to track them through the downpour that was coming, even if those guerrillas had an Indian tracker with them, which he doubted. For the first time since he'd seen the helicopter that morning, he relaxed, his highly developed sense of danger no longer nagging him.

He finished the sandwich and poured the rest of the orange juice down his throat, then glanced over at Jane to see her daintily licking the last bit of jelly from her fingers. She looked up, caught his gaze, and gave him a cheerful smile that made her dimples flash, then returned to the task of cleaning her fingers.

Against his will, Grant felt his body tighten with a surge of lust that surprised him with its strength. She was a charmer, all right, but not at all what he'd expected. He'd expected a spoiled, helpless, petulant debutante, and instead she had had the spirit, the pure guts, to hurl herself into the jungle with two peanut butter sandwiches and some orange juice as provisions. She'd also dressed in common-sense clothing, with good sturdy boots and green khaki pants, and a short-sleeved black blouse. Not right out of the fashion pages, but he'd had a few distracting moments crawling behind her, seeing those pants molded to her shapely bottom. He hadn't been able to prevent a deep masculine appreciation for the soft roundness of her buttocks.

She was a mass of contradictions. She was a jet-setter, so wild that her father had disinherited her, and she'd been George Persall's mistress, yet he couldn't detect any signs of hard living in her face. If anything, her face was as open and innocent as a child's, with a child's enthusiasm for life shining out of her dark brown eyes. She had a look of perpetual mischievousness on her face, yet it was a face of honest sensuality. Her long hair was so dark a brown that it was almost black, and it hung around her shoulders in snarls and tangles. She had pushed it away from her face with total unconcern. Her dark brown eyes were long and a little narrow, slanting in her high-cheekboned face in a way that made him think she might have a little Indian blood. A smattering of small freckles danced across those elegant cheekbones and the dainty bridge of her nose. Her mouth was soft and full, with the upper lip fuller than the lower one, which gave her an astonishingly sensual look. All in all, she was far from beautiful, but there was a freshness and zest about her that made all the other women he'd known suddenly seem bland.

Certainly he'd never been as intimate with any other woman's knee.

Even now, the thought of it made him angry. Part of it was chagrin that he'd left himself open to the blow; he'd been bested by a lightweight! But another part of it was an instinctive, purely male anger, sexually based. He'd watch her knee now whenever she was within striking distance. Still, the fact that she'd defended herself, and the moves she'd made, told him that she'd had professional training, and that was another contradiction. She wasn't an expert, but she knew what to do. Why would a wild, spoiled playgirl know anything about self-defense? Some of the pieces didn't fit, and Grant was always uneasy when he sensed details that didn't jibe.

He felt pretty grim about the entire operation. Their situation right now was little short of desperate, regardless of the fact that they were, for the moment, rather secure. They had probably managed to shake the soldiers, whoever they worked for, but Turego was a different story. The microfilm wasn't the only issue now. Turego had been operating without the sanction of the government, and if Jane made it back and filed a complaint against him, the repercussions would cost him his position, and possibly his freedom.

It was Grant's responsibility to get her out, but it was no longer the simple in-and-out situation he'd planned. From the moment he'd seen Pablo leaning so negligently against the helicopter, waiting for them, he'd known that the deal had gone sour. Pablo wasn't the type to be waiting for them so casually; in all the time Grant had know him, Pablo had been tense, ready to move, always staying in the helicopter with the rotors turning. The elaborate pose of relaxation had tipped Grant off as clearly as if Pablo had hung a sign around his neck. Perhaps Pablo had been trying to warn him. There was no way he'd ever know for certain.

Now he had to get her through the jungle, out of the mountains, and south through a swamp, with Turego in hot pursuit. With luck, in a day or so, they'd find a village and be able to hitch a ride, but even that depended on how close behind Turego was.

And on top of that, he couldn't trust her. She'd disarmed that soldier far too casually, and hadn't turned a hair at anything that had happened. She was far too matter-of-fact about the whole situation. She wasn't what she seemed, and that made her dangerous.

He was wary of her, but at the same time he found that he was unable to stop watching her. She was too damned sexy, as lush and exotic as a jungle orchid. What would it be like to lie with her? Did she use the rich curves of her body to make a man forget who he was? How many men had been taken in by that fresh, open expression? Had Turego found himself off balance with her, wanting her, knowing that he could force her at any time—but being eaten alive by the challenge of trying to win her, of making her give herself freely? How else had she managed to control him? None of it added up to what she should have been, unless she played with men as some sort of ego trip, where the more dangerous the man, the greater the thrill at controlling him.

Grant didn't want her to have that much influence over him; she wasn't worth it. No matter how beguiling the expression in her dark, slanted eyes, she simply wasn't worth it. He didn't need the sort of complication she offered; he just wanted to get her out, collect his money from her father, and get back to the solitude of the farm. Already he'd felt the jungle pulling at him, the heated, almost sexual excitement of danger. The rifle felt like an extension of his body, and the knife fit his palm as if he'd never put it down. All the old moves, the old instincts, were still there, and blackness rose in him as he wondered bitterly if he'd ever really be able to put this life behind him. The blood lust had been there in him, and perhaps he'd have killed that soldier if she hadn't kicked the rifle up when she had.

Was it part of the intoxication of battle that made him want to pull her beneath him and drive himself into her body, until he was mindless with intolerable pleasure? Part of it was, and yet part of it had been born hours ago, on the floor of her bedroom, when he'd felt the soft, velvety roundness of her breasts in his hands. Remembering that, he wanted to know what her breasts looked like, if they thrust out conically or had a full lower slope, if her nipples were small or large, pink or brown. Desire made him harden, and he reminded himself caustically that it had been a while since he'd had a woman, so it was only natural that he would be turned on. If nothing else, he should be glad of the evidence that he could still function!

She yawned, and blinked her dark eyes at him like a sleepy cat. "I'm going to take a nap," she announced, and curled up on the ground. She rested her head on her arm, closed her eyes and yawned again. He watched her, his eyes narrowed. This utter adaptability she displayed was another piece of the puzzle that didn't fit. She should have been moaning and bitching about how uncomfortable she was, rather than calmly curling up on the ground for a nap. But a nap sounded pretty damned good right now, he thought.

Grant looked around. The rain had become a full-fledged downpour, pounding through the canopy and turning the jungle floor into a river. The constant, torrential rains leeched the nutrients out of the soil, making the jungle into a contradiction, where the world's greatest variety of animal and plant life existed on some of the poorest soil. Right now the rain also made it almost impossible for them to be found. They were safe for the time being, and for the first time he allowed himself to feel the weariness in his muscles. He might as well take a nap, too; he'd wake when the rain stopped, alerted by the total cessation of noise.

Reaching out, he shook her shoulder, and she roused to stare at him sleepily. "Get against the back of the lean-to," he ordered. "Give me a little room to stretch out, too."

She crawled around as he'd instructed and stretched out full length, sighing in ecstasy. He pushed their backpacks to one side, then lay down beside her, his big body between her and the rain. He lay on his back, one brawny arm thrown behind his head. There was no twitching around, no yawning or sighing, for him. He simply lay down, closed his eyes and went to sleep. Jane watched him sleepily, her gaze lingering on the hawklike line of his profile, noting the scar that ran along his left cheekbone. How had he gotten it? His jaw was blurred with several days' growth of beard, and she noticed that his beard was much darker than his hair. His eyebrows and lashes were dark, too, and that made his amber eyes seem even brighter, almost as yellow as an eagle's.

The rain made her feel a little chilled after the intense heat of the day; instinctively she inched closer to the heat she could feel emanating from his body. He was so warm… and she felt so safe… safer than she'd felt since she was nine years old. With one more little sigh, she slept.

Sometime later the rain ceased abruptly, and Grant woke immediately, like a light switch being flipped on. His senses were instantly alert, wary. He started to surge to his feet, only to realize that she was lying curled against his side, with her head pillowed on his arm and her hand lying on his chest. Disbelief made him rigid. How could she have gotten that close to him without waking him? He'd always slept like a cat, alert to the smallest noise or movement—but this damned woman had practically crawled all over him and he hadn't even stirred. She must've been disappointed, he thought furiously. The fury was directed as much at himself as at her, because the incident told him how slack he had become in the past year. That slackness might cost them their lives.

He lay still, aware of the fullness of her breasts against his side. She was soft and lush, and one of her legs was thrown up over his thigh. All he had to do was roll over and he'd be between her legs. The mental image made moisture break out on his forehead. God! She'd be hot and tight, and he clenched his teeth at the heavy surge in his loins. She was no lady, but she was all woman, and he wanted her naked and writhing beneath him with an intensity that tied his guts into knots.

He had to move, or he'd be taking her right there on the rocky ground. Disgusted at himself for letting her get to him the way she had, he eased his arm from beneath her head, then shook her shoulder. "Let's get moving," he said curtly.

She muttered something, her forehead puckering, but she didn't open her eyes, and in a moment her forehead smoothed as she lapsed back into deep sleep. Impatiently, Grant shook her again. "Hey, wake up."

She rolled over on her stomach and sighed deeply, burrowing her head against her folded arm as she sought a more comfortable position. "Come on, we've got to get going," he said, shaking her more vigorously. "Wake up!" She aimed a drowsy swat at him, as if he were a pesky fly, brushing his hand aside. Exasperated, Grant caught her shoulders and pulled her to a sitting position, shaking her once again. "Damn it, would you get up? On your feet, honey; we've got some walking to do." Her eyes finally opened, and she blinked at him groggily, but she made no move to get up.

Swearing under his breath, Grant hauled her to her feet. "Just stand over there, out of the way," he said, turning her around and starting her on her way with a swat on her bottom before he turned his attention to taking down their shelter.

Chapter Four

Jane stopped, her hand going to her bottom. Awakened now, and irritated by his light, casual slap, she turned. "You didn't have to do that!"

"Do what?" he asked with total disinterest, already busy removing the tarp from the top of the lean-to and rolling it up to replace it in his backpack.

"Hit me! A simple 'wake-up' would have sufficed!"

Grant looked at her in disbelief. "Well, pardon me all to hell," he drawled in a sarcastic tone that made her want to strangle him. "Let me start over. Excuse me, Priscilla, but nappy time is over, and we really do have to—hey! Damn it!" He ducked in time, throwing his arm up to catch the force of her fist. Swiftly he twisted his arm to lock his fingers around her wrist, then caught her other arm before she could swing at him with it. She'd exploded into fury, hurling herself at him like a cat pouncing. Her fist had hit his arm with enough strength that she might have broken his nose if the blow had landed on target. "Woman, what in hell is wrong with you?"

"I told you not to call me that!" Jane raged at him, spitting the words out in her fury. She struggled wildly, trying to free her arm so she could hit him again.

Panting, Grant wrestled her to the ground and sat astride her, holding her hands above her head, and this time making damned certain that her knee wouldn't come anywhere near him. She kept wriggling and heaving, and he felt as if he were trying to hold an octopus, but finally he had her subdued.

Glaring at her, he said, "You told me not to call you Pris."

"Well, don't call me Priscilla, either!" she fumed, glaring right back.

"Look, I'm not a mind reader! What am I supposed to call you?"

"Jane!" she shouted at him. "My name is Jane! Nobody has ever called me Priscilla!"

"All right! All you had to do was tell me! I'm getting damned tired of you snapping at my ankles, understand? I may hurt you before I can stop myself, so you'd better think twice before you attack again. Now, if I let you up, are you going to behave?"

Jane still glared at him, but the weight of his knees on her bruised arms was excruciating. "All right," she said sullenly, and he slowly got up, then surprised her by offering his hand to help her up. She surprised herself by taking it.

A sudden twinkle lit the dark gold of his eyes. "Jane, huh?" he asked reflectively, looking at the surrounding jungle.

She gave him a threatening look. "No 'Me Tarzan, you Jane' stuff," she warned. "I've heard it since grade school." She paused, then said grudgingly, "But it's still better than Priscilla."

He grunted in agreement and turned away to finish dismantling their shelter, and after a moment Jane began helping. He glanced at her, but said nothing. He wasn't much of a talker, she'd noticed, and he didn't improve any on closer acquaintance. But he'd risked his own life to help her, and he hadn't left her behind, even though Jane knew he could have moved a lot faster, and with a lot less risk to himself, on his own. And there was something in his eyes, an expression that was weary and cynical and a little empty, as if he'd seen far too much to have any faith or trust left. That made Jane want to put her arms around him and shield him. Lowering her head so he wouldn't be able to read her expression, she chided herself for feeling protective of a man who was so obviously capable of handling himself. There had been a time in her own life when she had been afraid to trust anyone except her parents, and it had been a horrible, lonely time. She knew what fear was, and loneliness, and she ached for him.

All signs of their shelter obliterated, he swung his backpack up and buckled it on, then slung the rifle over his shoulder, while Jane stuffed her hair up under her cap. He leaned down to pick up her pack for her, and a look of astonishment crossed his face; then his dark brows snapped together. "What the—" he muttered. "What all do you have in this damned thing? It weighs a good twenty pounds more than my pack!"

"Whatever I thought I'd need," Jane replied, taking the pack from him and hooking her arm through the one good shoulder strap, then buckling the waist strap to secure it as well as she could.

"Like what?"

"Things," she said stubbornly. Maybe her provisions weren't exactly proper by military standards, but she'd take her peanut butter sandwiches over his canned whatever any time. She thought he would order her to dump the pack on the ground for him to sort through and decide what to keep, and she was determined not to allow it. She set her jaw and looked at him.

He put his hands on his hips and surveyed her funny, exotic face, her lower lip pouting out in a mutinous expression, her delicate jaw set. She looked ready to light into him again, and he sighed in resignation. Damned if she wasn't the stubbornest, scrappiest woman he'd ever met. "Take it off," he growled, unbuckling his own pack. "I'll carry yours, and you can carry mine."

If anything, the jaw went higher. "I'm doing okay with my own."

"Stop wasting time arguing. That extra weight will slow you down, and you're already tired. Hand it over, and I'll fix that strap before we start out."

Reluctantly she slipped the straps off and gave him the pack, ready to jump him if he showed any sign of dumping it. But he took a small folder from his own pack, opened it to extract a needle and thread, and deftly began to sew the two ends of the broken strap together.

Astounded, Jane watched his lean, calloused hands wielding the small needle with a dexterity that she had to envy. Reattaching a button was the limit of her sewing skill, and she usually managed to prick her finger doing that. "Do they teach sewing in the military now?" she asked, crowding in to get a better look.

He gave her another one of his glances of dismissal. "I'm not in the military."

"Maybe not now," she conceded. "But you were, weren't you?"

"A long time ago."

"Where did you learn how to sew?"

"I just picked it up. It comes in handy." He bit the thread off, then replaced the needle in its package. "Let's get moving; we've wasted too much time as it is."

Jane took his backpack and fell into step behind him; all she had to do was follow him. Her gaze drifted over the width of his shoulders, then eased downward. Had she ever known anyone as physically strong as this man? She didn't think so. He seemed to be immune to weariness, and he ignored the steamy humidity that drained her strength and drenched her clothes in perspiration. His long, powerful legs moved in an effortless stride, the flexing of his thigh muscles pulling the fabric of his pants tight across them. Jane found herself watching his legs and matching her own stride to his. He took a step, and she took a step automatically. It was easier that way; she could separate her mind from her body, and in doing so ignore her protesting muscles.

He stopped once and took a long drink from the canteen, then passed it to Jane without comment. Also without comment, and without wiping the mouth of the canteen, she tipped it up and drank thirstily. Why worry about drinking after him? Catching cold was the least of her concerns. After capping the canteen, she handed it back to him, and they began walking again.

There was madness to his method, or so it seemed to her. If there was a choice between two paths, he invariably chose the more difficult one. The route he took was through the roughest terrain, the thickest vegetation, up the highest, most rugged slope. Jane tore her pants sliding down a bluff, that looked like pure suicide from the top, and not much better than that from the bottom, but she followed without complaining. It wasn't that she didn't think of plenty of complaints, but that she was too tired to voice them. The benefits of her short nap had long since been dissipated. Her legs ached, her back ached, her bruised arms were so painful she could barely move them, and her eyes felt as if they were burning out of their sockets. But she didn't ask him to stop. Even if the pace killed her, she wasn't going to slow him down any more than she already had, because she had no doubt that he could travel much faster without her. The easy movements of his long legs told her that his stamina was far greater than hers; he could probably walk all night long again without a noticeable slowing of his stride. She felt a quiet awe of that sort of strength and conditioning, something that had been completely outside her experience before she'd met him. He wasn't like other men; it was evident in his superb body, in the awesome competence with which he handled everything, in the piercing gold of his eyes.

As if alerted by her thoughts, he stopped and looked back at her, assessing her condition with that sharp gaze that missed nothing. "Can you make it for another mile or so?"

On her own, she couldn't have, but when she met his eyes she knew there was no way she'd admit to that. Her chin lifted, and she ignored the increasingly heavy ache in her legs as she said, "Yes."

A flicker of expression crossed his face so swiftly that she couldn't read it. "Let me have that pack," he growled, coming back to her and jerking the straps free of the buckles, then slipping the pack from her shoulders.

"I'm handling it okay," she protested fiercely, grabbing for the pack and wrapping both arms around it. "I haven't complained, have I?"

His level dark brows drawing together in a frown, he forcefully removed the pack from her grasp. "Use your head," he snapped. "If you collapse from exhaustion, then I'll have to carry you, too."

The logic of that silenced her. Without another word he turned and started walking again. She was better able to keep up with him without the weight of the pack, but she felt frustrated with herself for not being in better shape, for being a burden to him. Jane had fought fiercely for her independence, knowing that her very life depended on it. She'd never been one to sit and wait for someone else to do things for her. She'd charged at life head-on, relishing the challenges that came her way because they reaffirmed her acute sense of the wonder of life. She'd shared the joys, but handled the problems on her own, and it unsettled her now to have to rely on someone else.

They came to another stream, no wider than the first one they had crossed, but deeper. It might rise to her knees in places. The water rushing over the rocks sounded cool, and she thought of how heavenly it would be to refresh her sweaty body in the stream. Looking longingly at it, she stumbled over a root and reached out to catch her balance. Her palm came down hard against a tree trunk, and something squished beneath her fingers.

"Oh, yuk!" she moaned, trying to wipe the dead insect off with a leaf.

Grant stopped. "What is it?"

"I smashed a bug with my hand." The leaf didn't clean too well; a smear still stained her hand, and she looked at Grant with disgust showing plainly on her face. "Is it all right if I wash my hand in the stream?"

He looked around, his amber eyes examining both sides of the stream. "Okay. Come over here."

"I can get down here," she said. The bank was only a few feet high, and the underbrush wasn't that thick. She carefully picked her way over the roots of an enormous tree, bracing her hand against its trunk to steady herself as she started to descend to the stream.

"Watch out!" Grant said sharply, and Jane froze in her tracks, turning her head to look askance at him.

Suddenly something incredibly heavy dropped onto her shoulders, something long and thick and alive, and she gave a stifled scream as it began to coil around her body. She was more startled than frightened, thinking a big vine had fallen; then she saw the movement of a large triangular head and she gave another gasping cry. "Grant! Grant, help me!"

Terror clutched at her throat, choking her, and she began to claw at the snake, trying to get it off. It was a calm monster, working its body around her, slowly tightening the lethal muscles that would crush her bones. It twined around her legs and she fell, rolling on the ground. Dimly she could hear Grant cursing, and she could hear her own cries of terror, but they sounded curiously distant. Everything was tumbling in a mad kaleidoscope of brown earth and green trees, of Grant's taut, furious face. He was shouting something at her, but she couldn't understand him; all she could do was struggle against the living bonds that coiled around her. She had one shoulder and arm free, but the boa was tightening itself around her rib cage, and the big head was coming toward her face, its mouth open. Jane screamed, trying to catch its head with her free hand, but the snake was crushing the breath out of her and the scream was almost soundless. A big hand, not hers, caught the snake's head, and she dimly saw a flash of silver.

The snake's coils loosened about her as it turned to meet this new prey, seeking to draw Grant into its deadly embrace, too. She saw the flash of silver again, and something wet splashed into her face. Vaguely she realized that it was his knife she'd seen. He was swearing viciously as he wrestled with the snake, mostly astride her as she writhed on the ground, struggling to free herself. "Damn it, hold still!" he roared. "You'll make me cut you!"

It was impossible to be still; she was wrapped in the snake, and it was writhing with her in its coils. She was too crazed by fear to realize that the snake was in its death throes, not even when she saw Grant throw something aside and begin forcibly removing the thick coils from around her body. It wasn't until she actually felt herself coming free of the constrictor's horrible grasp that she understood it was over, that Grant had killed the snake. She stopped fighting and lay limply on the ground. Her face was utterly white except for the few freckles across her nose and cheekbones; her eyes were fixed on Grant's face.

"It's over," he said roughly, running his hands over her arms and rib cage. "How do you feel? Anything broken?"

Jane couldn't say anything; her throat was frozen, her voice totally gone. All she could do was lie there and stare at him with the remnants of terror in her dark eyes. Her lips trembled like a child's, and there was something pleading in her gaze. He automatically started to gather her into his arms, the way one would a frightened child, but before he could do more than lift his hand, she dragged her gaze away from his with a visible effort. He could see what it cost her in willpower, but somehow she found the inner strength to still the trembling of her lips, and then her chin lifted in that characteristic gesture.

"I'm all right," she managed to say. Her voice was jerky, but she said the words, and in saying them, believed it. She slowly sat up and pushed her hair away from her face. "I feel a little bruised, but there's nothing bro—"

She stopped abruptly, staring at her bloody hand and arm. "I'm all bloody," she said in a bewildered tone, and her voice shook. She looked back at Grant, as if for confirmation. "I'm all bloody," she said again, extending her wildly trembling hand for him to see. "Grant, there's blood all over me!"

"It's the snake's blood," he said, thinking to reassure her, but she stared at him with uncontrolled revulsion.

"Oh, God!" she said in a thin, high voice, scrambling to her feet and staring down at herself. Her black blouse was wet and sticky, and big reddish splotches stained her khaki pants. Both her arms had blood smeared down them. Bile rose in her throat as she remembered the wetness that had splashed her face. She raised exploring fingers and found the horrible stickiness on her cheeks, as well as smeared in her hair.

She began to shake even harder, and tears dripped down her cheeks. "Get it off," she said, still in that high, wavering voice of utter hysteria. "I have to get it off. There's blood all over me, and it isn't mine. It's all over me; it's even in my hair… It's in my hair!" she sobbed, plunging for the stream.

Cursing, Grant grabbed for her, but in her mad urgency to wash the blood away she jerked free of him, stumbling over the body of the snake and crashing to the ground. Before she could scramble away again, Grant pounced on her, holding her in an almost painful grip while she fought and sobbed, pleading and swearing at him all at once.

"Jane, stop it!" he said sharply. "I'll get the blood off you. Just hold still and let me get our boots off, okay?"

He had to hold her still with one arm and pull her boots off with his free hand, but by the time he started to remove his own boots she was crying so hard that she lay limply on the ground. His face was grim as he looked at her. She'd stood up to so much without turning a hair that he hadn't expected her to fall apart like this. She'd been pulling herself together until she'd seen the blood on herself, and that had evidently been more than she could bear. He jerked his boots off, then turned to her and roughly undid her pants and pulled them off. Lifting her into his arms as easily as he would have lifted a child, he climbed down the bank and waded out into the stream, disregarding the fact that his own pants were being soaked.

When the water reached the middle of his calves, he stood her in the stream and bent to begin splashing water on her legs, rubbing the blood stains from her flesh. Next, cupping water in his palms, he washed her arms and hands clean, dripping the cooling water over her and soaking her blouse. All the while he tended to her, she stood docile, with silent tears still running down her face and making tracks in the blood smeared across her cheeks.

"Everything's all right, honey," he crooned soothingly to her, coaxing her to sit down in the stream so he could wash the blood from her hair. She let him splash water on her head and face, blinking her eyes to protect them from the stinging water, but otherwise keeping her gaze fixed on his hard, intent features. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wet it, then gently cleaned her face. She was calmer now, no longer crying in that silent, gutwrenching way, and he helped her to her feet.

"There, you're all cleaned up," he started to say, then noticed the pink rivulets of water running down her legs. Her blouse was so bloody that he'd have to take it off to get her clean. Without hesitation, he began to unbutton it. "Let's get this off so we can wash it," he said, keeping his voice calm and soothing. She didn't even glance down as he unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it off her shoulders, then tossed it to the bank. She kept her eyes on his face, as if he were her lifeline to sanity and to look away meant a return to madness.

Grant looked down, and his mouth went dry as he stared at her naked breasts. He'd wondered how she looked and now he knew, and it was like being punched in the stomach. Her breasts were round and a little heavier than he'd expected, tipped by small brown nipples, and he wanted to bend down and put his mouth to them, taste them. She might as well have been naked; all she had on was a pair of gossamer panties that had turned transparent in the water. He could see the dark curls of hair beneath the wisp of fabric, and be felt his loins tighten and swell. She was beautifully made, long-legged and slim-hipped, with the sleek muscles of a dancer. Her shoulders were straight, her arms slim but strong, her breasts rich; he wanted to spread her legs and take her right there, driving deeply into her body until he went out of his mind with pleasure. He couldn't remember ever wanting a woman so badly. He'd wanted sex, but that had been simply a physical pleasure, and any willing female body had been acceptable. Now he wanted Jane, the essence of her; it was her legs he wanted wrapped around him, her breasts in his hands, her mouth under his, her body sheathing him.

He jerked his gaze away from her, bending to dip the handkerchief in the water again. That was even worse; his eyes were level with the top of her thighs, and he straightened abruptly. He washed her breasts with a gentle touch, but every moment of it was torture to him, feeling her silky flesh under his fingers, watching her nipples tighten into reddened little nubs as he touched them.

"You're clean," he said hoarsely, tossing the handkerchief to the bank to join her blouse.

"Thank you," she whispered, then fresh tears glittered in her eyes, and with a little whimper she flung herself against him. Her arms went around him and clung to his back. She buried her face against his chest, feeling reassured by the steady beat of his heart and the warmth of his body. His very presence drove the fear away; with him, she was safe. She wanted to rest in his arms and forget everything.

His hands moved slowly over her bare back, his calloused palms stroking her skin as if he relished the texture of it. Her eyes slid shut, and she nestled closer to him, inhaling the distinctly male scent of his strong body. She felt oddly drunk, disoriented; she wanted to cling to him as the only steady presence in the world. Her body was awash in strange sensations, from the rushing water swirling about her feet to the faint breeze that fanned her wet, naked skin, while he was so hard and warm. An unfamiliar heat swept along her flesh in the path of his hands as they moved from her back to her shoulders. Then one hand stroked up her throat to cup her jaw, his thumb under her chin and his fingers in her hair, and he turned her face up to him.

Taking his time about it, he bent and fitted his mouth to hers, slanting his head to make the contact deep and firm. His tongue moved leisurely into her mouth, touching hers and demanding a response, and Jane found herself helplessly giving him what he wanted. She'd never been kissed like that before, with such complete confidence and expertise, as if she were his for the taking, as if they had reverted to more primitive times when the dominant male had his pick of the women. Vaguely alarmed, she made a small effort to free herself from his grasp. He subdued her with gentle force and kissed her again, holding her head still for the pressure of his mouth. Once again Jane found herself opening her mouth for him, forgetting why she'd struggled to begin with. Since her divorce a lot of men had kissed her and tried to make her respond. They'd left her cold. Why should this rough… mercenary, or whatever he was, make shivers of pleasure chase over her body, when some of the most sophisticated men in the world had only bored her with their passion? His lips were warm and hard, the taste of his mouth heady, his tongue bold in its exploration, and his kisses caused an unfamiliar ache to tighten within her body.

A mindless little whimper of delight escaped her throat, the soft female sound making his arms tighten around her.

Her hands slid up to his shoulders, then locked around his neck, hanging on to him for support. She couldn't get close enough to him, though he was crushing her against him. The buttons of his shirt dug into her bare breasts, but she wasn't aware of any pain. His mouth was wild, hungry with a basic need that had flared out of control, bruising her lips with the force of his kisses, and she didn't care. Instead she gloried in it, clinging to him. Her body was suddenly alive with sensations and needs that she didn't recognize, never having felt them before. Her skin actually ached for his touch, yet every stroke of his hard fingers made the ache intensify.

Boldly cupping her breast in his palm, he rubbed the rough pad of his thumb across her tightly puckered nipple, and Jane almost cried aloud at the surge of heat that washed through her. It had never been like this for her before; the urgency of the pure, brazen sensuality of her own body took her by surprise. She'd long ago decided that she simply wasn't a very physical person, then forgotten about it. Sex hadn't been something that interested her very much. The way Grant was making her feel completely shattered her concept of herself. She was a female animal in his arms, grinding against him, feeling and glorying in the swollen response of his body, and hurting with the emptiness deep inside her.

Time disappeared as they stood in the water, the late afternoon sun dappling them with the shifting patterns of light created by the sheltering trees. His hands freely roamed her body. She never even thought of resisting him. It was as if he had every right to her flesh, as if she were his to touch and taste. He bent her back over his arm, making her breasts jut enticingly, and his lips traveled hotly down her throat to the warm, quivering mounds. He took her nipple into his mouth and sucked strongly, and she surged against him like a wild creature, on fire and dying and wanting more.

His hand swept downward, his fingers curving between her legs to caress her through the silk of her panties. The boldness of his touch shocked her out of her sensual frenzy; automatically she stiffened in his grasp and brought her arms down from around his neck to wedge them between their bodies and push against him. A low, guttural sound rattled in his throat, and for a brief, terrified moment she thought there wouldn't be any stopping him. Then, with a curse, he thrust her away from him.

Jane staggered a little, and his hand shot out to catch her, hauling her back to face him. "Damn you, is this how you get your kicks?" he asked, infuriated. "Do you like seeing how far you can push a man?"

Her chin came up, and she swallowed. "No, that's not it at all. I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't have thrown myself at you like that—"

"Damned right, you shouldn't," he interrupted savagely. He looked savage; his eyes were narrowed and bright with rage, his nostrils flared, and his mouth a thin, grim line. "Next time, you'd better make sure you want what you're asking for, because I'm damned sure going to give it to you. Is that clear?"

He turned and began wading to the bank, leaving her standing in the middle of the stream. Jane crossed her arms over her bare breasts, suddenly and acutely aware of her nakedness. She hadn't meant to tease him, but she'd been so frightened, and he'd been so strong and calm that it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to cling to him. Those frenzied kisses and caresses had taken her by surprise, shaken her off balance. Still, she wasn't about to have sex with a man she barely knew, especially when she didn't quite know if she liked what little she did know about him.

He reached the bank and turned to look at her. "Are you coming or not?" he snapped, so Jane waded toward him, still keeping her arms over her breasts.

"Don't bother," he advised in a curt voice. "I've already seen, and touched. Why pretend to be modest?" He gestured to her blouse lying on the ground. "You might want to wash the blood out of that, since you're so squeamish about it."

Jane looked at the blood-stained blouse, and she went a little pale again, but she was under control now. "Yes, I will," she said in a low voice. "Will you… will you get my pants and boots for me, please?"

He snorted, but climbed up the bank and tossed her pants and boots down to her. Keeping her back turned to him, Jane pulled on her pants, shuddering at the blood that stained them, too, but at least they weren't soaked the way her blouse was. Her panties were wet, but there wasn't anything she could do about that now, so she ignored the clammy discomfort. When she was partially clad again, she squatted on the gravel at the edge of the stream and began trying to wash her blouse. Red clouds drifted out of the fabric, staining the water before being swept downstream. She scrubbed and scrubbed before she was satisfied, then wrung out as much water as possible and shook the blouse. As she started to put the blouse on, he said irritably, "Here," and held his shirt in front of her. "Wear this until yours gets dry."

She wanted to refuse, but she knew false pride wouldn't gain her anything. She accepted the shirt silently and put it on. It was far too big, but it was dry and warm and not too dirty, and it smelled of sweat, and the musky odor of his skin. The scent was vaguely comforting. There were rust colored stains on it, too, reminding her that he'd saved her life. She tied the tails in a knot at her waist and sat down on the gravel to put on her boots.

When she turned, she found him standing right behind her, his face still grim and angry. He helped her up the bank, then lifted their packs to his shoulders. "We're not going much farther. Follow me, and for God's sake don't touch anything that I don't touch, or step anywhere except in my footprints. If another boa wants you, I just may let him have you, so don't push your luck."

Jane pushed her wet hair behind her ears and followed obediently, walking where he walked. For a while, she stared nervously at every tree limb they passed under, then made herself stop thinking about the snake. It was over; there was no use dwelling on it.

Instead she stared at his broad back, wondering how her father had found a man like Grant Sullivan. They obviously lived in two different worlds, so how had they met?

Then something clicked in her mind, and a chill went down her spine. Had they met? She couldn't imagine her father knowing anyone like Sullivan. She also knew what her own position was. Everyone wanted to get their hands on her, and she had no way of knowing whose side Grant Sullivan was on. He'd called her Priscilla, which was her first name. If her father had sent him, wouldn't he have known that she was never called Priscilla, that she'd been called Jane from birth? He hadn't known her name!

Before he died, George had warned her not to trust anyone. She didn't want to think that she was alone in the middle of the jungle with a man who would casually cut her throat when he had no further use for her. Still, the fact remained that she had no proof that her father had sent him. He'd simply knocked her out, put her over his shoulder and hauled her off into the jungle.

Then she realized that she had to trust this man; she had no alternative. He was all she had. It was dangerous, trusting him, but not as dangerous as trying to make it out of the jungle on her own. He had shown flashes of kindness. She felt a funny constriction in her chest as she remembered the way he'd cared for her after he'd killed the snake. Not just cared for her, kissed her—she was still shaken by the way he'd kissed her. Mercenary or not, enemy or not, he made her want him. Her mind wasn't certain about him, but her body was.

She would have found it funny, if she hadn't been so frightened.

Chapter Five

They moved directly away from the stream at a forty-five-degree angle, and it wasn't long before he stopped, looked around and unslung the packs from his shoulders. "We'll camp here."

Jane stood in silence, feeling awkward and useless, watching as he opened his pack and took out a small, rolled bundle. Under his skilled hands, the bundle was rapidly transformed into a small tent, complete with a polyethylene floor and a flap that could be zipped shut. When the tent was up he began stripping vines and limbs from the nearby trees to cover it, making it virtually invisible. He hadn't so much as glanced in her direction, but after a moment she moved to help him. He did look at her then, and allowed her to gather more limbs while he positioned them over the tent.

When the job was completed, he said, "We can't risk a fire, so we'll just eat and turn in. After today, I'm ready for some sleep."

Jane was, too, but she dreaded the thought of the night to come. The light was rapidly fading, and she knew that it would soon be completely dark. She remembered the total blackness of the night before and felt a cold finger of fear trace up her backbone. Well, there was nothing she could do about it; she'd have to tough it out.

She crouched beside her pack and dug out two more cans of orange juice, tossing one to him; he caught it deftly, and eyed her pack with growing irritation. "How many more cans of this do you have in that traveling supermarket?" he asked sarcastically.

"That's it. We'll have to drink water from now on. How about a granola bar?" She handed it to him, refusing to let herself respond to the irritation in his voice. She was tired, she ached, and she was faced with a long night in total darkness. Given that, his irritation didn't seem very important. He'd get over it.

She ate her own granola bar, but was still hungry, so she rummaged for something else to eat. "Want some cheese and crackers?" she offered, dragging the items out of the depths of the pack.

She looked up to find him watching her with an expression of raw disbelief on his face. He held out his hand, and she divided the cheese and crackers between them. He looked at her again, shook his head and silently ate his share.

Jane saved a little of her orange juice, and when she finished eating she took a small bottle from the pack. Opening it, she shook a pill into the palm of her hand, glanced at Grant, then shook out another one. "Here," she said.

He looked at it, but made no move to take it. "What the hell's that?"

"It's a yeast pill."

"Why should I want to take a yeast pill?"

"So the mosquitoes and things won't bite you."

"Sure they won't."

"They won't! Look at me. I don't have any insect bites, and it's because I take yeast pills. It does something to your skin chemistry. Come on, take it. It won't hurt you."

He took the pill from her hand and held it with a pained expression on his face while she took her own, washing it down with a sip of the orange juice she'd saved. She passed the can to him, and he muttered something obscene before he tossed the pill into his mouth and slugged down the rest of the juice.

"Okay, bedtime," he said, rising to his feet. He jerked his head toward a tree. "There's your bathroom, if you want to go before we turn in."

Jane stepped behind the tree. He was crude, he was rude, he was a little cruel—and he had saved her life. She didn't know what to expect from him. No matter how rough he was, he would eventually disarm her with an unexpected act of kindness. On the other hand, when things were going smoothly between them, he would say things that stung, as if deliberately trying to start a quarrel.

He was waiting for her by the opening of the tent. "I've already put the blanket down. Crawl in."

She knelt down and crawled into the small tent. He had spread the blanket over the floor, and she sat on it. He shoved their packs inside. "Put these out of the way," he instructed. "I'm going to take a quick look around."

She shoved the packs into the far corners of the tent, then lay down on her back and stared tensely at the thin walls. The light was almost gone; only a glimmer entered through the translucent fabric. It wasn't quite as dark outside yet, but the limbs he'd used as camouflage made it darker inside. The flap parted, and he crawled in, then zipped the opening shut.

"Take your boots off and put them in the corner next to your feet."

Sitting up, she did as he said, then lay down again. Her eyes strained open so widely that they burned. Her body stiff with dread, she listened to him stretch and yawn and make himself comfortable.

Moments later the silence became nearly as unbearable as the darkness. "A collapsible tent comes in handy, doesn't it?" she blurted nervously. "What is it made out of?"

"Nylon," he replied, yawning again. "It's nearly indestructible."

"How much does it weigh?"

"Three pounds and eight ounces."

"Is it waterproof?"

"Yes, it's waterproof."

"And bug proof?"

"Bug proof, too," he muttered.

"Do you think a jaguar could—"

"Look, it's jaguar proof, mildew proof, fire proof and snake proof. I personally guarantee you that it's proof against everything except elephants, and I don't think we're going to be stomped on by an elephant in Costa Rica! Is there any other damned thing you're worried about?" he exploded. "If not, why don't you be quiet and let me get some sleep?"

Jane lay tensely, and silence fell again. She clenched her fists in an effort to control her nervousness, listening to the growing cacophony of the jungle night. Monkeys howled and chattered; insects squeaked their calls; underbrush rustled. She was exhausted but she had no real hope of sleeping, at least not until dawn, and at dawn this devil beside her would want to start another day of marathon travel.

He was totally silent in that unnerving way of his. She couldn't even hear him breathe. The old fear began to rise in her chest, making her own breathing difficult. She might as well be alone, and that was the one thing she absolutely couldn't bear.

"Where are you from?"

He heaved a sigh. "Georgia."

That explained his drawl. She swallowed, trying to ease the constriction of her dry throat. If she could just keep him talking, then she wouldn't feel so alone. She'd know he was there.

"What part of Georgia?"

"South. Ever hear of the Okefenokee?"

"Yes. It's a swamp."

"I grew up in it. My folks own a farm just on the edge of it." It had been a normal boyhood, except for the skills he'd learned automatically in the swamp, those skills, which had eventually changed his life by shaping him into something not quite human. He willed the memories away, pulling a mental shade down over them, isolating himself. There was no use in thinking about what had been.

"Are you an only child?"

"Why all the questions?" he snapped, edgy at revealing any information about himself.

"I'm just interested, that's all."

He paused, suddenly alert. There was something in her voice, a tone that he couldn't quite place. It was dark, so he couldn't see her face; he had to go entirely by what his ears told him. If he kept her talking, he might be able to figure it out.

"I've got a sister," he finally said reluctantly.

"I'll bet she's younger. You're so bossy, you must be an older brother."

He let the dig pass and said only, "She's four years younger."

"I'm an only child," she volunteered.

"I know."

She searched frantically for something else to say, but the darkness was making her panic. She felt herself move to grab for him, then remembered what he'd said about startling him, and about not making offers she didn't mean. She ground her teeth together and stilled her reaching hands, the effort so intense that tears actually welled in her eyes. She blinked them away. "Grant," she said in a shaking voice.

"What?" he growled.

"I don't want you to think I'm throwing myself at you again because I'm really not, but would you mind very much if I… just held your hand?" she whispered. "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid of the dark, and it helps if I know I'm not alone."

He was still for a moment; then she heard his clothing rustle as he rolled onto his side. "You're really that afraid of the dark?"

Jane tried for a laugh, but the sound was so shaky that it was close to a sob. "The word'terrified' only begins to describe how afraid I am. I can't sleep in the dark. All the time I was at that wretched plantation I was awake all night long, never sleeping until dawn. But at least I could use that time to watch the guards and figure out their routine. Besides, it wasn't as totally dark there as it is here."

"If you're so all-fired scared of the dark, why were you getting ready to hit the jungle on your own?"

A dark, handsome, incredibly cruel face swam before her mind's eye. "Because even dying in the jungle would be better than Turego," she said quietly.

Grant grunted. He could understand that choice, but the fact that she had so correctly summed up the situation illustrated once again that she was more than what she seemed. Then again, perhaps she already had reason to know just how vile Turego could be. Had Turego raped her, or would it have been rape? With this woman, who knew? "Did you have sex with him?"

The blunt question made her shudder. "No. I'd been holding him off, but when he left yesterday… it was just yesterday, wasn't it? It seems like a year ago. Anyway, I knew that, when he came back, I wouldn't be able to stop him any longer. My time had run out."

"What makes you so certain of that?"

Jane paused, wondering just how much to tell him, wondering how much he already knew. If he was involved, he would be familiar with Luis's name; if he wasn't, the name would mean nothing to him. She wanted to tell him; she didn't want to be alone in this nightmare any longer. But she remembered George telling her once that secrecy was synonymous with security, and she quelled the need to turn into Grant's arms and tell him how afraid and alone she had been. If he wasn't involved already, he was safer not knowing anything about it. On the other hand, if he was involved, she might be safer if he didn't realize how deeply she was a part of things. Finally, to answer his question, she said, "I wasn't certain. I was just afraid to stay, afraid of Turego."

He grunted, and that seemed to be the end of the conversation. Jane clenched her jaw against the sudden chattering of her teeth. It was hot and steamy inside the dark tent, but chills were running up and down her body. Why didn't he say something else, anything, rather than lying there so quietly? She might as well have been alone. It was unnatural for anyone to be that soundless, that utterly controlled.

"How was Dad?"

"Why?"

"I just wondered." Was he being deliberately evasive? Why didn't he want to talk about her father? Perhaps he hadn't been hired by her father at all and didn't want to be drawn into a conversation about someone he was supposed to have met, but hadn't.

After a measured silence, as if he had carefully considered his answer, he said, "He was worried sick about you. Surprised?"

"No, of course not," she said, startled. "I'd be surprised if he weren't."

"It doesn't surprise you that he'd pay a small fortune to get you out of Turego's hands, even though you don't get along with him?"

He was confusing her; she felt left out of the conversation, as if he were talking about someone else entirely. "What are you talking about? We get along perfectly, always have."

She couldn't see him, couldn't hear him, but suddenly there was something different about him, as if the very air had become electrically charged. A powerful sense of danger made the fine hairs on her body stand up. The danger was coming from him. Without knowing why, she shrank back from him as far as she could in the confines of the small tent, but there was no escape. With the suddenness of a snake striking, he rolled and pinned her down, forcing her hands over her head and holding them shackled there in a grip that hurt her wrists. "All right, Jane, or Priscilla, or whoever you are, we're going to talk. I'm going to ask the questions and you're going to answer them, and you'd better have the right answers or you're in trouble, sugar. Who are you?"

Had he gone mad? Jane struggled briefly against the grip on her wrists, but there was no breaking it. His weight bore down heavily on her, controlling her completely. His muscled legs clasped hers, preventing her from even kicking. "W—what…?" she stammered. "Grant, you're hurting me!"

"Answer me, damn you! Who are you?"

"Jane Greer!" Desperately, she tried to put some humor in her voice, but it wasn't a very successful effort.

"I don't like being lied to, sugar." His voice was velvety soft, and the sound of it chilled her to her marrow. Not even Turego had affected her like this; Turego was a dangerous, vicious man, but the man who held her now was the most lethal person she'd ever seen. He didn't have to reach for a weapon to kill her; he could kill her with his bare hands. She was totally helpless against him.

"I'm not lying!" she protested desperately. "I'm Priscilla Jane Hamilton Greer."

"If you were, you'd know that James Hamilton cut you out of his will several years ago. So you get along with him just perfectly, do you?"

"Yes, I do!" She strained against him, and he deliberately let her feel more of his weight, making it difficult for her to breathe. "He did it to protect me!"

For a long, silent moment in which she could hear the roaring of her blood in her ears, she waited for his reaction. His silence scraped along her nerves. Why didn't he say something? His warm breath was on her cheek, telling her how close he was to her, but she couldn't see him at all in that suffocating darkness. "That's a good one," he finally responded, and she flinched at the icy sarcasm of his tone. "Too bad I don't buy it. Try again."

"I'm telling you the truth! He did it to make me a less attractive kidnap target. It was my idea, damn it!"

"Sure it was," he crooned, and that low, silky sound made her shudder convulsively. "Come on, you can do better than that."

Jane closed her eyes, searching desperately for some way of convincing him of her identity. None came to mind, and she had no identification with her. Turego had taken her passport, so she didn't have even that. "Well, what about you?" she blurted in sudden fury. She'd taken a lot from him, endured without complaining, and now he'd frightened her half out of her mind. She'd had her back to the wall before, and had learned to strike back. "Who are you? How do I know that Dad hired you? If he did why didn't you know that no one ever calls me Priscilla? You were sloppy with your homework!"

"In case you haven't noticed, honey, I'm the one on top. You answer my questions."

"I did, and you didn't believe me," she snapped. "Sorry, but I don't have my American Express card with me. For God's sake, do I look like a terrorist? You nearly broke my arm; then you knocked me out. You've bounced me on the ground like a rubber ball, and you've got the utter gall to act like I'm dangerous? My goodness, you'd better search me, too, so you'll be able to sleep tonight. Who knows? I might have a bazooka strapped to my leg, since I'm such a dangerous character!" Her voice had risen furiously, and he cut her off by resting all his weight on her ribcage. When she gasped, he eased up again.

"No, you're unarmed. I've already had your clothes off, remember?" Even in the darkness, Jane blushed at the memory, thinking of the way he'd kissed her and touched her, and how his hands on her body had made her feel. He moved slowly against her, stopping her breath this time with the suggestive intimacy of his movements. His warm breath stirred her hair as he dipped his head closer to her. "But I wouldn't want to disappoint a lady. If you want to be searched, I'll oblige you. I wouldn't mind giving you a body search."

Fuming, Jane tried again to free her hands, but finally fell back in disgust at the futile action. Raw frustration finally cleared her mind, giving her an idea, and she said harshly, "Did you go in the house when Dad hired you?"

He was still, and she sensed his sudden increase of interest. "Yes."

"Did you go in the study?"

"Yes."

"Then a hotshot like you would have noticed the portrait over the mantle. You're trained to notice things, aren't you? The portrait is of my grandmother, Dad's mother. She was painted sitting down, with a single rose on her lap. Now, you tell me what color her gown was," she challenged.

"Black," he said slowly. "And the rose was blood red."

Thick silence fell between them; then he released her hands and eased his weight from her. "All right," he said finally. "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt—"

"Well, gee, thanks!" Huffily she rubbed her wrists, trying to keep her anger alive in the face of the enormous relief that filled her. Evidently her father had hired him, for otherwise how could he have seen the portrait in the study? She wanted to remain mad at him, but she knew she would forgive him because it was still dark. In spite of everything she was terribly glad he was there. Besides, she told herself cautiously, it was definitely better to stay on this man's good side.

"Don't thank me," he said tiredly. "Just be quiet and go to sleep."

Sleep! If only she could! Consciously, she knew she wasn't alone, but her subconscious mind required additional affirmation from her senses. She needed to see him, hear him, or touch him. Seeing him was out of the question; she doubted he'd leave a flashlight burning ail night, even assuming he had one. Nor would he stay awake all night talking to her. Perhaps, if she just barely touched him, he'd think it was an accident and not make a big deal out of it. Stealthily she moved her right hand until the backs of her fingers just barely brushed his hairy forearm—and immediately her wrist was seized in that bruising grip again.

"Ouch!" she yelped, and his fingers loosened.

"Okay, what is it this time?" His tone showed plainly that he was at the end of his patience.

"I just wanted to touch you," Jane admitted, too tired now to care what he thought, "so I'll know I'm not alone."

He grunted. "All right. It looks like that's the only way I'm going to get any sleep." He moved his hand, sliding his rough palm against hers, and twined their fingers together. "Now will you go to sleep?"

"Yes," she whispered. "Thank you."

She lay there, enormously and inexplicably comforted by the touch of that hard hand, so warm and strong. Her eyes slowly closed, and she gradually relaxed. The night terrors didn't come. He kept them firmly at bay with the strong, steady clasp of his hand around hers. Everything was going to be all right. Another wave of exhaustion swept over her, and she was asleep with the suddenness of a light turning off.

Grant woke before dawn, his senses instantly alert. He knew where he was, and he knew what time it was; his uncanny sixth sense could pinpoint the time within a few minutes. The normal night sounds of the jungle told him that they were safe, that there was no other human nearby. He knew immediately the identity of the other person in the tent with him. He knew that he couldn't move, and he even knew why: Jane was asleep on top of him.

He really didn't mind being used as a bed. She was soft and warm, and there was a female smell to her that made his nostrils flare in appreciation. The softness of her breasts against him felt good. That special, unmistakable softness never left a man's mind, hovering forever in his memory once he'd felt the fullness of a woman against him. It had been a long time since he'd slept with a woman, and he'd forgotten how good it could feel. He'd had sex—finding an available woman was no problem—but those encounters had been casual, just for the sake of the physical act. Once it was finished, he hadn't been inclined to linger. This past year, especially, he'd been disinclined to tolerate anyone else's presence. He'd spent a lot of time alone, like an injured animal licking its wounds; his mind and his soul had been filled with death. He'd spent so much time in the shadows that he didn't know if he'd ever find the sunlight again, but he'd been trying. The sweet, hot Tennessee sun had healed his body, but there was still an icy darkness in his mind.

Given that, given his acute awareness of his surroundings, even in sleep, how had Jane gotten on top of him without waking him? This was the second time she'd gotten close to him without disturbing him, and he didn't like it. A year ago, she couldn't have twitched without alerting him.

She moved then, sighing a little in her sleep. One of her arms was around his neck, her face pressed into his chest, her warm breath stirring the curls of hair in the low neckline of his undershirt. She lay on him as bonelessly as a cat, her soft body conforming to the hard contours of his. Her legs were tangled with his, her hair draped across his bare shoulder and arm. His body hardened despite his almost savage irritation with himself, and slowly his arms came up to hold her, his hands sliding over her supple back. He could have her if he wanted her. The highly specialized training he'd received had taught him how to deal excruciating pain to another human being, but a side benefit to that knowledge was that he also knew how to give pleasure. He knew all the tender, sensitive places of her body, knew how to excite nerves that she probably didn't even know she had. Beyond that, he knew how to control his own responses, how to prolong a sensual encounter until his partner had been completely satisfied.

The sure knowledge that he could have her ate at him, filling his mind with images and sensations. Within ten minutes he could have her begging him for it, and he'd be inside her, clasped by those long, sleek, dancer's legs. The only thing that stopped him was the almost childlike trust with which she slept curled on top of him. She slept as if she felt utterly safe, as if he could protect her from anything. Trust. His life had been short on trust for so many years that it startled him to find someone who could trust so easily and completely. He was uncomfortable with it, but at the same time it felt good, almost as good as her body in his arms. So he lay there staring into the darkness, holding her as she slept, the bitter blackness of his thoughts contrasting with the warm, elusive sweetness of two bodies pressed together in quiet rest.

When the first faint light began to filter through the trees, he shifted his hand to her shoulder and shook her lightly. "Jane, wake up."

She muttered something unintelligible and burrowed against him, hiding her face against his neck. He shifted gently to his side, easing her onto the blanket. Her arms still hung around his neck, and she tightened her grip as if afraid of falling. "Wait! Don't go," she said urgently, and the sound of her own voice woke her. She opened her eyes, blinking owlishly at him. "Oh. Is it morning?"

"Yes, it's morning. Do you think you could let me up?"

Confused, she stared at him, then seemed to realize that she was still clinging around his neck. She dropped her arms as if scalded, and though the light was too dim for him to be certain, he thought that her cheeks darkened with a blush. "I'm sorry," she apologized.

He was free, yet oddly reluctant to leave the small enclosure of the tent. His left arm was still under her neck, pillowing her head. The need to touch her was overwhelming, guiding his hand under the fabric of her shirt, which was actually his. He flattened his hand against her bare stomach. His fingers and palm luxuriated in the warm silkiness of her skin, tantalized by the knowledge that even richer tactile pleasures waited both above and below where his hand now rested.

Jane felt her breathing hasten in rhythm, and her heartbeat lurched from the slow, even tempo of sleep to an almost frantic pace. "Grant?" she asked hesitantly. His hand simply rested on her stomach, but she could feel her breasts tightening in anticipation, her nipples puckering. A restless ache stirred to life inside her. It was the same empty need that she'd felt when she'd stood almost naked in his arms, in the middle of the stream, and let him touch her with a raw sensuality that she'd never before experienced. She was a little afraid of that need, and a little afraid of the man who created it with his touch, who leaned over her so intently.

Her only sexual experience had been with her husband. The lack of success in that area of their marriage had severely limited what she knew, leaving her almost completely unawakened, even disinterested. Chris had given her no useful standard, for there was no comparison at all between her ex-husband—a kind, cheerful man, slender and only a few inches taller than she was—and this big, rough, muscular warrior. Chris was totally civilized; Grant wasn't civilized at all. If he took her, would he control his fearsome strength, or would he dominate her completely? Perhaps that was what frightened her most of all, because the greatest struggle of her life had been for independence: for freedom from fear, and from the over protectiveness of her parents. She'd fought so hard and so long for control of her life that it was scary now to realize that she was totally at Grant's mercy. None of the training she'd had in self-defense was of any use against him; she had no defense at all. All she could do was trust him.

"Don't be afraid," he said evenly. "I'm not a rapist."

"I know." A killer, perhaps, but not a rapist. "I trust you," she whispered, and laid her hand against his stubbled jaw.

He gave a small, cynical laugh. "Don't trust me too much, honey. I want you pretty badly, and waking up with you in my arms is straining my good intentions to the limit." But he turned his head and pressed a quick kiss into the tender palm of the hand that caressed his cheek. "Come on, let's get moving. I feel like a sitting duck in this tent, now that it's daylight."

He heaved himself into a sitting position and reached for his boots, tugging them on and lacing them up with quick, expert movements. Jane was slower to sit up, her entire body protesting. She yawned and shoved her tangled hair back from her face, then put on her own boots. Grant had already left the tent by the time she finished, and she crawled after him. Once on her feet, she stretched her aching muscles, then touched her toes several times to limber up. While she was doing that, Grant swiftly dismantled the tent. He accomplished that in so short a time that she could only blink at him in amazement. In only a moment the tent was once more folded into an impossibly small bundle and stored in his backpack, with the thin blanket rolled up beside it.

"Any more goodies in that bottomless pack of yours?" he asked. "If not, we eat field rations."

"That yukky stuff you have?"

"That's right."

"Well, let's see. I know I don't have any more orange juice—" She opened the pack and peered into it, then thrust her hand into its depths. "Ah! Two more granola bars. Do you mind if I have the one with coconut? I'm not that crazy about raisins."

"Sure," he agreed lazily. "After all, they're yours."

She gave him an irritated glance. "They're ours. Wait—here's a can of…" She pulled the can out and read the label, then grinned triumphantly. "Smoked salmon! And some crackers. Please take a seat, sir, and we'll have breakfast."

He obediently sat, then took his knife from his belt and reached for the can of salmon. Jane drew it back, her brows lifted haughtily. "I'll have you know that this is a high class eating establishment. We do not open our cans with knives!"

"We don't? What do we use, our teeth?"

She lifted her chin at him and searched in the backpack again, finally extracting a can opener. "Listen," she said, giving the opener to him, "when I escape, I do it in style."

Taking the opener, he began to open the can of salmon. "So I see. How did you manage to get all of this stuff? I can just see you putting in an order with Turego, collecting what you wanted for an escape."

Jane chuckled, a rich, husky sound that made him lift his dark gold head from his task. Those piercing yellow eyes lit on her face, watching her as if examining a treasure. She was busy fishing crackers out of the backpack, so she missed the fleeting expression. "It was almost like that. I kept getting these 'cravings,' though I seldom mentioned them to Turego. I'd just have a word with the cook, and he generally came up with what I wanted. I raided the kitchen or the soldiers' quarters for a little something almost every night."

"Like that pack?" he queried, eyeing the object in question.

She patted it fondly. "Nice one, isn't it?"

He didn't reply, but there was a faint crinkling at the corners of his eyes, as if he were thinking of smiling. They ate the salmon and crackers in companionable silence, with the food washed down by water from Grant's canteen. He ate his granola bar, but Jane decided to save hers for later.

Squatting beside the pack, she took her brush and restored order to her tangled mane of hair, then cleaned her face and hands with a premoistened towelette. "Would you like one?" she asked Grant politely, offering him one of the small packets.

He had been watching her with a stunned sort of amazement, but he took the packet from her hand and tore it open. The small, wet paper had a crisp smell to it, and he felt fresher, cooler, after cleaning his face with it. To his surprise, some of the face black he'd put on before going in after Jane had remained on his skin; he'd probably looked like a devil out of hell, with those streaks on his face.

A familiar sound caught his attention and he turned to look at Jane. A tube of toothpaste lay on the ground beside her, and she was industriously brushing her teeth. As he watched, she spat out the toothpaste, then took a small bottle and tilted it to her mouth, swishing the liquid around, then spitting it out, too. His stunned gaze identified the bottle. For five whole seconds he could only gape at her; then he sat back and began to laugh helplessly. Jane was rinsing her mouth with Perrier water.

Chapter Six

Jane pouted for a moment, but it was so good to hear him laugh that after a few seconds she sat back on her heels and simply watched him, smiling a little herself. When he laughed that harsh, scarred face became younger, even beautiful, as the shadows left his eyes. Something caught in her chest, something that hurt and made a curious melting feeling. She wanted to go over and hold him, to make sure that the shadows never touched him again. She scoffed at herself for her absurd sense of protectiveness. If anyone could take care of himself, it was Grant Sullivan. Nor would he welcome any gesture of caring; he'd probably take it as a sexual invitation.

To hide the way she felt, she put her things back into her pack, then turned to eye him questioningly. "Unless you want to use the toothpaste?" she offered.

He was still chuckling. "Thanks, honey, but I have tooth powder and I'll use the water in the canteen. God! Perrier water!"

"Well, I had to have water, but I wasn't able to snitch a canteen," she explained reasonably. "Believe me, I'd much rather have had a canteen. I had to wrap all the bottles in cloth so they wouldn't clink against each other or break."

It seemed completely logical to her, but it set him off again. He sat with his shoulders hunched and shaking, holding his head between his hands and laughing until tears streamed down his face. After he had stopped, he brushed his own teeth, but he kept making little choking noises that told Jane he was still finding the situation extremely funny. She was lighthearted, happy that she had made him laugh.

She felt her blouse and found it stiff, but dry. "You can have your shirt back," she told him, turning her back to take it off. "Thanks for the loan."

"Is yours dry?"

"Completely." She pulled his shirt off and dropped it on her backpack, and hurriedly began to put her blouse on. She had one arm in a sleeve when he swore violently. She jumped, startled, and looked over her shoulder at him.

His face was grim as he strode rapidly over to her. His expression had been bright with laughter only a moment before, but now he looked like a thundercloud. "What happened to your arm?" he snapped, catching her elbow and holding her bruised arm out for his inspection. "Why didn't you tell me you'd hurt yourself?"

Jane tried to grab the blouse and hold it over her bare breasts with her free arm, feeling horribly vulnerable and exposed. She had been trying for a nonchalant manner while changing, but her fragile poise was shattered by his closeness and his utter disregard for her modesty. Her cheeks reddened, and in self-defense she looked down at her badly bruised arm.

"Stop being so modest," he growled irritably when she fumbled with the blouse. "I told you, I've already seen you without any clothes." That was embarrassingly true, but it didn't help. She stood very still, her face burning, while he gently examined her arm.

"That's a hell of a bruise, honey. How does your arm feel?"

"It hurts, but I can use it," she said stiffly.

"How did it happen?"

"In a variety of ways," she said, trying to hide her embarrassment behind a bright manner. "This bruise right here is where you hit me on the arm after sneaking into my bedroom and scaring me half to death. The big, multicolored one is from falling down that bluff yesterday morning. This little interesting welt is where a limb swung back and caught me—"

"Okay, I get the idea." He thrust his fingers through his hair. "I'm sorry I bruised you, but I didn't know who you were. I'd say we were more than even on that score, anyway, after that kick you gave me."

Jane's dark chocolate eyes widened with remorse. "I didn't mean to, not really. It was just a reflex. I'd done it before I thought. Are you okay? I mean, I didn't do any permanent damage, did I?"

A small, unwilling grin tugged at his lips as he remembered the torment of arousal he'd been enduring on her account. "No, everything's in working order," he assured her. His gaze dropped to where she clutched her blouse to her chest, and his clear amber eyes darkened to a color like melted gold. "Couldn't you tell that when we were standing in the stream kissing?"

Jane looked down automatically, then jerked her gaze back up in consternation when she realized where she was looking. "Oh," she said blankly.

Grant slowly shook his head, staring at her. She was a constant paradox, an unpredictable blend of innocence and contrariness, of surprising prudery and amazing boldness. In no way was she what he'd expected. He was beginning to enjoy every moment he spent with her, but acknowledging that made him wary. It was his responsibility to get her out of Costa Rica, but he would compromise his own effectiveness if he allowed himself to become involved with her. Worrying over her could cloud his judgment. But, damn, how much could a man stand? He wanted her, and the wanting increased with every moment. In some curious way he felt lighter, happier. She certainly kept him on his toes! He was either laughing at her or contemplating beating her, but he was never bored or impatient in her company. Funny, but he couldn't remember ever laughing with a woman before. Laughter, especially during the past few years, had been in short supply in his life.

A chattering monkey caught his attention, and he looked up. The spots of sunlight darting through the shifting layers of trees reminded him that they were losing traveling time. "Get your blouse on," he said tersely, swinging away from her to sling his backpack on. He buckled it into place, then swung her pack onto his right shoulder. The rifle was slung over his left shoulder. By that time, Jane had jerked her blouse on and buttoned it up. Rather than stuffing it in her pants, she tied the tails in a knot at her waist as she had with Grant's shirt. He was already starting off through the jungle.

"Grant! Wait!" she called to his back, hurrying after him.

"You'll have to stay with me," he said unfeelingly, not slackening his pace.

Well, did he think she couldn't? Jane fumed, panting along in his path. She'd show him! And he could darn well act macho and carry both packs if he wanted; she wasn't going to offer to help! But he wasn't acting macho, she realized, and that deflated some of her indignation. He actually was that strong and indefatigable.

Compared to the harrowing day before, the hours passed quietly, without sight of another human being. She followed right on his heels, never complaining about the punishing pace he set, though the heat and humidity were even worse than the day before, if that were possible. There wasn't any hint of a breeze under the thick, smothering canopy. The air was still and heavy, steamy with an almost palpable thickness. She perspired freely, soaking her clothes and making her long for a real bath. That dousing in the stream the day before had felt refreshing, but didn't really qualify as bathing. Her nose wrinkled. She probably smelled like a goat.

Well, so what, she told herself. If she did, then so did he. In the jungle it was probably required to sweat.

They stopped about midmorning for a break, and Jane tiredly accepted the canteen from him. "Do you have any salt tablets?" she asked. "I think I need one."

"You don't need salt, honey, you need water. Drink up."

She drank, then passed the canteen back to him. "It's nearly empty. Let's pour the Perrier into it and chuck the empty bottles."

He nodded, and they were able to discard three bottles. As he got ready to start out again, Jane asked, "Why are you in such a hurry? Do you think we're being followed?"

"Not followed," he said tersely. "But they're looking for us, and the slower we move, the better chance they have of finding us."

"In this?" Jane joked, waving her hand to indicate the enclosing forest. It was difficult to see ten feet in any direction.

"We can't stay in here forever. Don't underrate Turego; he can mobilize a small army to search for us. The minute we show our faces, he'll know it."

"Something should be done about him," Jane said strongly. "Surely he's not operating with the sanction of the government?"

"No. Extortion and terrorism are his own little sidelines. We've known about him, of course, and occasionally fed him what we wanted him to know."

"We?" Jane asked casually.

His face was immediately shuttered, as cold and blank as a wall. "A figure of speech." Mentally, he swore at himself for being so careless. She was too sharp to miss anything. Before she could ask any more questions, he began walking again. He didn't want to talk about his past, about what he had been. He wanted to forget it all, even in his dreams.

About noon they stopped to eat, and this time they had to resort to the field rations. After a quick glance at what she was eating, Jane didn't look at it at all, just put it in her mouth and swallowed without allowing herself to taste it too much. It wasn't really that bad; it was just so awfully bland. They each drank a bottle of Perrier, and Jane insisted that they take another yeast pill. A roll of thunder announced the daily downpour, so Grant quickly found them shelter under a rocky outcropping. The opening was partially blocked by bushes, making it a snug little haven.

They sat watching the deluge for a few minutes; then Grant stretched out his long legs, leaning back to prop himself on his elbow. "Explain this business of how your father disinherited you as a form of protection."

Jane watched a small brown spider pick its way across the ground. "It's very simple," she said absently. "I wouldn't live with around-the-clock protection the way he wanted, so the next best thing was to remove the incentive for any kidnappers."

"That sounds a little paranoid, seeing kidnappers behind every tree."

"Yes," she agreed, still watching the spider. It finally minced into a crevice in the rock, out of sight, and she sighed. "He is paranoid about it, because he's afraid that next tune he wouldn't get me back alive again."

"Again?" Grant asked sharply, seizing on the implication of her words. "You've been kidnapped before?"

She nodded. "When I was nine years old."

She made no other comment and he sensed that she wasn't going to elaborate, if given a choice. He wasn't going to allow her that choice. He wanted to know more about her, learn what went on in that unconventional brain. It was new to him, this overwhelming curiosity about a woman; it was almost a compulsion. Despite his relaxed position, tension had tightened his muscles. She was being very matter-of-fact about it, but instinct told him that the kidnapping had played a large part in the formation of the woman she was now. He was on the verge of discovering the hidden layers of her psyche.

"What happened?" he probed, keeping his voice casual.

"Two men kidnapped me after school, took me to an abandoned house and locked me in a closet until Dad paid the ransom."

The explanation was so brief as to be ridiculous; how could something as traumatic as a kidnapping be condensed into one sentence? She was staring at the rain now, her expression pensive and withdrawn.

Grant knew too much about the tactics of kidnappers, the means they used to force anxious relatives into paying the required ransom. Looking at her delicate profile, with the lush provocativeness of her mouth, he felt something savage well up in him at the thought that she might have been abused.

"Did they rape you?" He was no longer concerned about maintaining a casual pose. The harshness of his tone made her glance at him, vague surprise in her exotically slanted eyes.

"No, they didn't do anything like that," she assured him. "They just left me in that closet… alone. It was dark."

And to this day she was afraid of the dark, of being alone in it. So that was the basis for her fear. "Tell me about it," he urged softly.

She shrugged. "There isn't a lot more to tell. I don't know how long I was in the closet. There were no other houses close by, so no one heard me scream. The two men just left me there and went to some other location to negotiate with my parents. After awhile I became convinced that they were never coming back, that I was going to die there in that dark closet, and that no one would ever know what had happened to me."

"Your father paid the ransom?"

"Yes. Dad's not stupid, though. He knew that he wasn't likely to get me back alive if he just trusted the kidnappers, so he brought the police in on it. It's lucky he did. When the kidnappers came back for me, I overheard them making their plans. They were just going to kill me and dump my body somewhere, because I'd seen them and could identify them." She bent her head, studying the ground with great concentration, as if to somehow divorce herself from what she was telling him. "But there were police sharpshooters surrounding the house. When the two men realized that they were trapped, they decided to use me as a hostage. One of them grabbed my arm and held his pistol to my head, forcing me to walk in front of them when they left the house. They were going to take me with them, until it was safe to kill me."

Jane shrugged, then took a deep breath. "I didn't plan it, I swear. I don't remember if I tripped, or just fainted for a second. Anyway, I fell, and the guy had to let go of me or be jerked off balance. For a second the pistol wasn't pointed at me, and the policemen fired. They killed both men. The… the man who had held me was shot in the chest and the head, and he fell over on me. His blood splattered all over me, on my face, my hair…" Her voice trailed away.

For a moment there was something naked in her face, the stark terror and revulsion she'd felt as a child; then, as he had seen her do when he'd rescued her from the snake, she gathered herself together. He watched as she defeated the fear, pushed the shadows away. She smoothed her expression and even managed a glint of humor in her eyes as she turned to look at him. "Okay, it's your turn. Tell me something that happened to you."

Once he'd felt nothing much at all; he'd accepted the chilled, shadowed brutality of his life without thought. He still didn't flinch from the memories. They were part of him, as ingrained in his flesh and blood, in his very being, as the color of his eyes and the shape of his body. But when he looked into the uncommon innocence of Jane's eyes, he knew that he couldn't brutalize her mind with even the mildest tale of the life he'd known. Somehow she had kept a part of herself as pure and crystalline as a mountain stream, a part of childhood forever unsullied. Nothing that had happened to her had touched the inner woman, except to increase the courage and gallantry that he'd seen twice now in her determined efforts to pull herself together and face forward again.

"I don't have anything to tell," he said mildly.

"Oh, sure!" she hooted, shifting herself on the ground until she was sitting facing him, her legs folded in a boneless sort of knot that made him blink. She rested her chin in her palm and surveyed him, so big and controlled and capable. If this man had led a normal life, she'd eat her boots, she told herself, then quickly glanced down at the boots in question. Right now they had something green and squishy on them. Yuk. They'd have to be cleaned before even a goat would eat them. She returned her dark gaze to Grant and studied him with the seriousness of a scientist bent over a microscope. His scarred face was hard, a study of planes and angles, of bronzed skin pulled tautly over the fierce sculpture of his bones. His eyes were those of an eagle, or a lion; she couldn't quite decide which. The clear amber color was brighter, paler, than topaz, almost like a yellow diamond, and like an eagle's, the eyes saw everything. They were guarded, expressionless; they hid an almost unbearable burden of experience and weary cynicism.

"Are you an agent?" she asked, probing curiously. Somehow, in those few moments, she had discarded the idea that he was a mercenary. Same field she thought, but a different division.

His mouth quirked. "No."

"Okay, let's try it from another angle. Were you an agent?"

"What sort of agent?"

"Stop evading my questions! The cloak-and-dagger sort of agent. You know, the men in overcoats who have forty sets of identification."

"No. Your imagination is running wild. I'm too easily identifiable to be any good undercover."

That was true. He stood out like a warrior at a tea party. Something went quiet within her, and she knew. "Are you retired?"

He was quiet for so long that she thought he wasn't going to answer her. He seemed to be thinking of something else entirely. Then he said flatly, "Yeah, I'm retired. For a year now."

His set, blank face hurt her, on the inside. "You were a… weapon, weren't you?"

There was a terrible clarity in his eyes as he slowly shifted his gaze to her. "Yes," he said harshly. "I was a weapon."

They had aimed him, fired him, and watched him destroy. He would be matchless, she realized. Before she'd even known him, when she'd seen him gliding into her darkened bedroom like a shadow, she'd realized how lethal he could be. And there was something else, something she could see now. He had retired himself, turned his back and walked away from that grim, shadowed life. Certainly his superiors wouldn't have wanted to lose his talents.

She reached out and placed her hand on his, her fingers slim and soft, curling around the awesome strength of his. Her hand was much smaller made with a delicacy that he could crush with a careless movement of his fingers, but implicit in her touch was the trust that he wouldn't turn that strength against her. A deep breath swelled the muscled planes of his chest. He wanted to take her right then, in the dirt. He wanted to stretch her out and pull her clothes off, bury himself in her. He wanted more of her touch, all of her touch, inside and out. But the need for her satiny female flesh was a compulsion that he couldn't satisfy with a quick possession, and there wasn't time for more. The rain was slowing and would stop entirely at any moment. There was a vague feeling marching up and down his spine that told him they couldn't afford to linger any longer.

But it was time she knew. He removed his hand from hers, lifting it to cup her chin. His thumb rubbed lightly over her lips. "Soon," he said, his voice guttural with need, "you're going to lie down for me. Before I take you back to your daddy, I'm going to have you, and the way I feel now, I figure it's going to take a long time before I'm finished with you."

Jane sat frozen, her eyes those of a startled woodland animal. She couldn't even protest, because the harsh desire in his voice flooded her mind and her skin with memories. The day before, standing in the stream, he'd kissed her and touched her with such raw sexuality that, for the first time in her life, she'd felt the coiling, writhing tension of desire in herself. For the first time she'd wanted a man, and she'd been shocked by the unfamiliarity of her own body. Now he was doing it to her again, but this time he was using words. He'd stated his intentions bluntly, and images began forming in her mind of the two of them lying twined together, of his naked, magnificent body surging against her.

He watched the shifting expressions that flitted across her face. She looked surprised, even a little shocked, but she wasn't angry. He'd have understood anger, or even amusement; that blank astonishment puzzled him. It was as if no man had ever told her that he wanted her. Well, she'd get used to the idea.

The rain had stopped, and he picked up the packs and the rifle, settling them on his shoulders. Jane followed him without a word when he stepped out from beneath the rocky outcropping into the already increasing heat. Steam rose in wavering clouds from the forest floor, immediately wrapping them in a stifling, humid blanket.

She was silent for the rest of the afternoon, lost in her thoughts. He stopped at a stream, much smaller than the one they'd seen the day before, and glanced at her. "Care for a bath? You can't soak, but you can splash."

Her eyes lit up, and for the first time that afternoon a smile danced on her full lips. He didn't need an answer to know how she felt about the idea. Grinning, he searched out a small bar of soap from his pack and held it out to her. "I'll keep watch, then you can do the same for me. I'll be up there."

Jane looked up the steep bank that he'd indicated. That was the best vantage point around; he'd have a clear view of the stream and the surrounding area. She started to ask if he was going to watch her, too, but bit back the question. As he'd already pointed out, it was too late for modesty. Besides, she felt infinitely safer knowing that he'd be close by.

He went up the bank as sure-footedly as a cat, and Jane turned to face the stream. It was only about seven feet wide, and wasn't much more than ankle-deep. Still, it looked like heaven. She hunted her lone change of underwear out of her pack, then sat down to pull off her boots. Glancing nervously over her shoulder to where Grant sat, she saw that he was in profile to her, but she knew that he would keep her in his peripheral vision. She resolutely undid her pants and stepped out of them. Nothing was going to keep her from having her bath… except maybe another snake, or a jaguar, she amended.

Naked, she gingerly picked her way over the stony bottom to a large flat rock and sat down in the few inches of water. It was deliciously cool, having run down from a higher altitude, but even tepid water would have felt good on her over-heated skin. She splashed it on her face and head until her hair was soaked. Gradually she felt the sweaty stickiness leave her hair, until the strands were once more silky beneath her fingers. Then she took the small bar of soap out from under her leg, where she'd put it for safekeeping, and rubbed it over her body. The small luxury made her feel like a new woman, and a sense of peace crept into her. It was only a simple pleasure, to bathe in a clear, cool stream, but added to it was her sense of nakedness, of being totally without restrictions. She knew that he was there, knew that he was watching her, and felt her breasts grow tight.

What would it be like if he came down from that bank and splashed into the water with her? If he took the blanket from his pack and laid her down on it? She closed her eyes, shivering in reaction, thinking of his hard body pressing down on her, thrusting into her. It had been so many years, and the few experiences she'd had with Chris hadn't taught her that she could be a creature of wanting, but with Grant she wasn't the same woman.

Her heart beat heavily in her breast as she rinsed herself by cupping water in her palms and pouring it over her. Standing up, she twisted the water out of her hair, then waded out. She was trembling as she pulled on her clean underwear, then dressed distastefully in her stained pants and shirt. "I'm finished," she called, lacing up her boots.

He appeared soundlessly beside her. "Sit in the same place where I sat," he instructed, placing the rifle in her hands. "Do you know how to use this?"

The weapon was heavy, but her slim hands looked capable as she handled it. "Yes. I'm a fairly good shot." A wry smile curved her lips. "With paper targets and clay pigeons, anyway."

"That's good enough." He began unbuttoning his shirt, and she stood there in a daze, her eyes on his hands. He paused. "Are you going to guard me from down here?"

She blushed. "No. Sorry." Quickly she turned and scrambled up the bank, then took a seat in the exact spot where he'd sat. She could see both banks, but at the same time there was a fair amount of cover that she could use if the need arose. He'd probably picked this out as the best vantage point without even thinking about it, just automatically sifting through the choices and arriving at the correct one. He might be retired, but his training was ingrained.

A movement, a flash of bronze, detected out of the corner of her eye, told her that he was wading into the stream. She shifted her gaze a fraction so she wouldn't be able to see him at all, but just the knowledge that he was as naked as she had been kept her heart pounding erratically. She swallowed, then licked her lips, forcing herself to concentrate on the surrounding jungle, but the compulsion to look at him continued.

She heard splashing and pictured him standing there like a savage, bare and completely at home.

She closed her eyes, but the image remained before her. Slowly, totally unable to control herself, she opened her eyes and turned her head to look at him. It was only a small movement, a fraction of an inch, until she was able to see him, but that wasn't enough. Stolen glances weren't enough. She wanted to study every inch of him, drink in the sight of his powerful body. Shifting around, she looked fully at him, and froze. He was beautiful, so beautiful that she forgot to breathe. Without being handsome, he had the raw power and grace of a predator, all the terrible beauty of a hunter. He was bronzed all over, his tan a deep, even brown. Unlike her, he didn't keep his back turned in case she looked; he had a complete disregard for modesty. He was taking a bath; she could look or not look, as she wished.

His skin was sleek and shiny with water, and the droplets caught in the hair on his chest glittered like captured diamonds. His body hair was dark, despite the sun-streaked blondness of his head. It shadowed his chest, ran in a thin line down his flat, muscled stomach, and bloomed again at the juncture of his legs. His legs were as solid as tree trunks, long and roped with muscle; every movement he made set off ripples beneath his skin. It was like watching a painting by one of the old masters come to life.

He soaped himself all over, then squatted in the water to rinse in the same manner she had, cupping his palms to scoop up the water. When he was rinsed clean, he stood and looked up at her, probably to check on her, and met her gaze head on. Jane couldn't look away, couldn't pretend that she hadn't been staring at him with an almost painful appreciation. He stood very still in the stream, watching her as she watched him, letting her take in every detail of his body. Under her searching gaze, his body began to stir, harden, growing to full, heavy arousal.

"Jane," he said softly, but still she heard him. She was so attuned to him, so painfully sensitive to every move and sound he made, that she would have heard him if he'd whispered. "Do you want to come down here?"

Yes. Oh, God, yes, more than she'd ever wanted anything. But she was still a little afraid of her own feelings, so she held back. This was a part of herself that she didn't know, wasn't certain she could control.

"I can't," she replied, just as softly. "Not yet."

"Then turn around, honey, while you still have a choice."

She quivered, almost unable to make the required movement, but at last her muscles responded and she turned away from him, listening as he waded out of the water. In less than a minute he appeared noiselessly at her side and took the rifle from her hands. He had both packs with him. Typically, he made no further comment on what had just happened. "We'll get away from the water and set up camp. It'll be night pretty soon."

Night. Long hours in the dark tent, lying next to him. Jane followed him, and when he stopped she helped him do the work they had done the night before, setting up the tent and hiding it. She didn't protest at the cold field rations, but ate without really tasting anything. Soon she was crawling into the tent and taking off her boots, waiting for him to join her.

When he did, they lay quietly side by side, watching as the remaining light dimmed, then abruptly vanished.

Tension hummed through her, making her muscles tight. The darkness pressed in on her, an unseen monster that sucked her breath away. No list of compulsive questions leaped to her lips tonight; she felt oddly timid, and it had been years since she'd allowed herself to be timid about anything. She no longer knew herself.

"Are you afraid of me?" he asked, his voice gentle.

Just the sound of his voice enabled her to relax a little. "No," she whispered.

"Then come here and let me keep the dark away from you."

She felt his hand on her arm, urging her closer, then she was enfolded in arms so strong that nothing could ever make her afraid while they held her. He cradled her against his side, tucking her head into the hollow of his shoulder. With a touch so light that it could have been the brush of a butterfly's wings, he kissed the top of her head. "Good night, honey," he whispered.

"Good night," she said in return.

Long after he was asleep, Jane lay in his arms with her eyes open, though she could see nothing. Her heart was pounding in her chest with a slow, heavy rhythm, and her insides felt jittery. It wasn't fear that kept her awake, but a churning emotion that shifted everything inside her. She knew exactly what was wrong with her. For the first time in too many years, everything was right with her.

She'd learned to live her life with a shortage of trust. No matter that she'd learned to enjoy herself and her freedom; there had always been that residual caution that kept her from letting a man get too close. Until now she'd never been strongly enough attracted to a man for the attraction to conquer the caution—Until now. Until Grant. And now the attraction had become something much stronger. The truth stunned her, yet she had to accept it: she loved him. She hadn't expected it, though for two days she had felt it tugging at her. He was harsh and controlled, bad-tempered, and his sense of humor was severely underdeveloped, but he had gently washed the snake's blood from her, held her hand during the night, and had gone out of his way to make their trek easier for her. He wanted her, but he hadn't taken her because she wasn't ready. She was afraid of the dark, so he held her in his arms. Loving him was at once the easiest and most difficult thing she'd ever done.

Chapter Seven

Once again he awoke to find her cuddled on top of him, but this tune it didn't bother him that he had slept peacefully through the night. Sliding his hands up her back, he accepted that his normally keen instincts weren't alarmed by her because there was absolutely no danger in her except perhaps the danger of her driving him crazy. She managed to do that with every little sway of her behind. Reveling in the touch of her all along his body, he moved his hands down, feeling her slenderness, the small ribs, the delicate spine, the enticing little hollow at the small of her back, then the full, soft mounds of her buttocks. He cupped his palms over them, kneading her with his fingers. She muttered and shifted against him, brushing at a lock of hair that had fallen into her face. Her eyelashes fluttered, then closed completely once more.

He smiled, enjoying the way she woke up. She did it by slow degrees, moaning and grousing while still more asleep than awake, frowning and pouting, and moving against him as if trying to sink herself deeper into him so she wouldn't have to wake up at all. Then her eyes opened, and she blinked several times, and as quickly as that the pout faded from her lips and she gave him a slow smile that would have melted stone.

"Good morning," she said, and yawned. She stretched, then abruptly froze in place. Her head came up, and she stared at him in stupefaction. "I'm on top of you," she said blankly.

"Again," he confirmed.

"Again?"

"You slept on top of me the night before last, too. Evidently my holding you while you sleep isn't enough; you think you have to hold me down."

She slithered off him, sitting up in the tent and straightening her twisted, wrinkled clothing. Color burned in her face. "I'm sorry. I know it can't have been very comfortable for you."

"Don't apologize. I've enjoyed it," he drawled. "If you really want to make it up to me, though, we'll reverse positions tonight."

Her breath caught and she stared at him in the dim light, her eyes soft and melting. Yes. Everything in her agreed. She wanted to belong to him; she wanted to know everything about his body and let him know everything about hers. She wanted to tell him, but she didn't know how to put it into words. A crooked smile crossed his face; then he sat up and reached for his boots, thrusting his feet into them and lacing them up. Evidently he took her silence for a refusal, because he dropped the subject and began the task of breaking camp.

"We have enough food for one more meal," he said as they finished eating. "Then I'll have to start hunting."

She didn't like that idea. Hunting meant that he'd leave her alone for long stretches of time. "I don't mind a vegetarian diet," she said hopefully.

"Maybe it won't come to that. We've been gradually working our way out of the mountains, and unless I miss my guess we're close to the edge of the forest. We'll probably see fields and roads today. But we're going to avoid people until I'm certain it's safe, okay?"

She nodded in agreement.

Just as he'd predicted, at midmorning they came abruptly to the end of the jungle. They stood high on a steep cliff, and stretched out below them was a valley with cultivated fields, a small network of roads, and a cozy village situated at the southern end. Jane blinked at the suddenly brilliant sunlight. It was like stepping out of one century into another. The valley looked neat and prosperous, reminding her that Costa Rica was the most highly developed country in Central America, despite the thick tangle of virgin ram forest at her back.

"Oh," she breathed. "Wouldn't it be nice to sleep in a bed again?"

He grunted an absent reply, his narrowed eyes sweeping the valley for any sign of abnormal activity. Jane stood beside him, waiting for him to make his decision.

It was made for them. Abruptly he grabbed her arm and jerked her back into the sheltering foliage, dragging her to the ground behind a huge bush just as a helicopter suddenly roared over their heads. It was flying close to the ground, following the tree line; she had only a glimpse of it before it was gone, hidden by the trees. It was a gun-ship, and had camouflage paint.

"Did you see any markings?" she asked sharply, her nails digging into his skin.

"No. There weren't any." He rubbed his stubbled jaw. "There's no way of telling who it belonged to, but we can't take any chances. Now we know that we can't just walk across the valley. We'll work our way down, and try to find more cover."

If anything, the terrain was even more difficult now. They were at the edge of a volcanic mountain range, and the land had been carved with a violent hand. It seemed to be either straight up, or straight down. Their pace was agonizingly slow as they worked their way down rocky bluffs and up steep gorges. When they stopped to eat, they had covered less than one-fourth the length of the valley, and Jane's legs ached as they hadn't since the wild run through the jungle the first day.

Right on schedule, just as they finished eating, they heard the boom of thunder. Grant looked around for shelter, considering every outcropping of rock. Then he pointed. "I think that's a cave up there. If it is we'll be in high cotton."

"What?" Jane asked, frowning.

"Sitting pretty," he explained. "Luxurious accommodations, in comparison to what we've had."

"Unless it's already occupied."

"That's why you're going to wait down here while I check it out." He moved up the fern covered wall of the gorge, using bushes and vines and any other toehold he could find. The gorge itself was narrow and steep, enclosing them on all four sides. Its shape gave a curious clarity to the calls of the innumerable birds that flitted among the trees like living Christmas decorations, all decked out in their iridescent plumage. Directly overhead was a streak of sky, but it consisted of rolling black clouds instead of the clear blue that she'd seen only moments before.

Grant reached the cave, then immediately turned and waved to her. "Come on up; it's clear! Can you make it?"

"Have I failed yet?" she quipped, starting the climb, but she'd had to force the humor. The desolation had been growing in her since they'd seen the valley. Knowing that they were so close to civilization made her realize that their time together was limited. While they had been in the forest, the only two people locked in a more primitive time, she'd had no sense of time running out. Now she couldn't ignore the fact that soon, in a few days or less, their time together would end. She felt as if she'd already wasted so much time, as if the golden sand had been trickling through her fingers and she'd only just realized what she held. She felt panic-stricken at the thought of discovering love only to lose it, because there wasn't enough time to let it grow.

He reached his hand down and caught hers, effortlessly lifting her the last few feet. "Make yourself comfortable; we could be here a while. This looks like the granddaddy of all storms."

Jane surveyed their shelter. It wasn't really a cave; it was little more than an indentation in the face of the rock, about eight feet deep. It had a steeply slanting ceiling that soared to ten or eleven feet at the opening of the cave, but was only about five feet high at the back. The floor was rocky, and one big rock, as large as a love seat and shaped like a peanut, lay close to the mouth of the cave. But it was dry, and because of its shallowness it wasn't dark, so Jane wasn't inclined to find fault with it.

Given Grant's eerie sense of timing, she wasn't surprised to hear the first enormous raindrops begin filtering through the trees just as he spread out the tarp at the back of the cave. He placed it behind the big rock, using its bulk to shelter them. She sat down on the tarp and drew her legs up, wrapping her arms around them and resting her chin on her knees, listening to the sound of the rain as it increased in volume.

Soon it was a din and the solid sheets of water that obscured their vision heightened the impression that they were under a waterfall. She could hear the crack of lightning, feel the earth beneath her shake from the enormous claps of thunder. It was dark now, as the rain blotted out what light came through the thick canopy. She could barely see Grant, who was standing just inside the mouth of the cave with his shoulder propped against the wall, occasionally puffing on a cigarette.

Chills raced over her body as the rain cooled the air. Hugging her legs even tighter for warmth, Jane stared through the dimness at the broad, powerful shoulders outlined against the gray curtain of rain. He wasn't an easy man to get to know. His personality was as shadowy as the jungle, yet just the sight of that muscular back made her feel safe and protected. She knew that he stood between her and any danger. He had already risked his life for her on more than one occasion, and was as matter-of-fact about it as if being shot at were an everyday occurrence. Perhaps it was for him, but Jane didn't take it so lightly.

He finished his cigarette and field-stripped it. Jane doubted that anyone would track them here through the rain, but it was second nature to him to be cautious. He went back to his calm perusal of the storm, standing guard while she rested.

Something shifted inside her and coiled painfully in her chest. He was so alone. He was a hard, lonely man, but everything about him drew her like a magnet, pulling at her heart and body.

Her eyes clouded as she watched him. "When this was over he'd walk away from her as if these days in the jungle had never existed. This was all routine for him. What she could have of him, all that she could ever have of him, was the present, too few days before this was over. And that just wasn't enough.

She was cold now, chilled to her bones. The unceasing, impenetrable curtain of rain carried a damp coldness with it, and her own spirits chilled her from the inside. Instinctively, like a sinuous cat seeking heat, she uncoiled from the tarp and went up to him, gravitating to his certain warmth and comfort. Silently she slid her arms around his taut waist and pressed her face into the marvelous heat of his chest. Glancing down at her, he lifted an eyebrow in mild inquiry. "I'm cold," she muttered, leaning her head on him and staring pensively at the rain.

He looped his arm around her shoulder, holding her closer to him and sharing his warmth with her. A shiver ran over her; he rubbed his free hand up her bare arm, feeling the coolness of her skin. Of its own accord his hand continued upward, stroking her satiny jaw, smoothing the dark tangle of hair away from her face. She was in a melancholy mood, this funny little cat, staring at the rain as if it would never stop, her eyes shadowed and that full, passionate mouth sad.

Cupping her chin in his hand, he tilted her face up so he could study her quiet expression. A small smile curved the corners of his hard mouth. "What's wrong, honey? Rain making you feel blue?" Before she could answer, he bent his head and kissed her, using his own cure.

Jane's hands went to his shoulders, clinging to him for support. His mouth was hard and demanding and oh so sweet. The taste of him, the feel of him, was just what she wanted. Her teeth parted, allowing the slow probing of his tongue. Deep inside her, fire began to curl, and she curled too, twining against him in an unconscious movement that he read immediately.

Lifting his mouth from hers just a little, he muttered, "Honey, this feels like an offer to me."

Her dark eyes were a little dazed as she looked up at him. "I think it is," she whispered.

He dropped his arms to her waist and wrapped them around her, lifting her off her feet, bringing her level with him. She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him fervently, lost in the taste and feel of his mouth, not even aware he'd moved until he set her down to stand on the tarp. The dimness at the back of the cave hid any expression that was in his eyes, but she could feel his intent amber gaze on her as he began calmly unbuttoning her shirt. Jane's mouth went dry, but her own shaking fingers moved to his chest and began opening his shirt in turn.

When both garments were hanging open, he shrugged out of his and tossed it on the tarp, never taking his eyes from her. Tugging his undershirt free of his pants, he caught the bottom of it and peeled it off over his head. He tossed it aside, too, completely baring his broad, hairy chest. As it had the day before, the sight of his half-naked body mesmerized her. Her chest hurt; breathing was incredibly difficult. Then his hard, hot fingers were inside her shirt, on her breasts, molding them to fit his palms. The contrast of his heated hands on her cool skin made her gasp in shocked pleasure. Closing her eyes, she leaned into his hands, rubbing her nipples against his calloused palms. His chest lifted on a deep, shuddering breath.

She could feel the sexual tension emanating from him in waves. Like no other man she'd known, he made her acutely aware of his sexuality, and equally aware of her own body and its uses. Between her legs, an empty throb began to torment her, and she instinctively pressed her thighs together in an effort to ease the ache.

As slight as it was, he felt her movement. One of his hands left her breast and drifted downward, over her stomach and hips to her tightly clenched thighs. "That won't help," he murmured. "You'll have to open your legs, not close them." His fingers rubbed insistently at her and pleasure exploded along her nerves. A low moan escaped from her lips; then she swayed toward him. She felt her legs parting, allowing him access to her tender body. He explored her through her pants, creating such shock waves of physical pleasure that her knees finally buckled and she fell against him, her bare breasts flattening against the raspy, hair-covered expanse of his chest.

Quickly he set her down on the tarp and knelt over her, unzipping her pants and pulling them down her legs, his hands rough and urgent. He had to pause to remove her boots, but in only moments she was naked except for the shirt that still hung around her shoulders. The damp air made her shiver, and she reached for him. "I'm cold," she complained softly. "Get me warm."

She offered herself to him so openly and honestly that he wanted to thrust into her immediately, but he also wanted more. He'd had her nearly naked in his arms before. In the stream, that wisp of wet silk had offered no protection, but he hadn't had the time to explore her as he'd wanted. Her body was still a mystery to him; he wanted to touch every inch of her, taste her and enjoy the varying textures of her skin.

Jane's eyes were wide and shadowed as he knelt over her, holding himself away from her outstretched arms. "Not just yet, honey," he said in a low, gravelly voice. "Let me look at you first." Gently be caught her wrists and pressed them down to the tarp above her head, making her round, pretty breasts arch as if they begged for his mouth. Anchoring her wrists with one hand, he slid his free hand to those tempting, gently quivering mounds.

A small, gasping sound escaped from Jane's throat. Why was he holding her hands like that? It made her feel incredibly helpless and exposed, spread out for his delectation, yet she also felt unutterably safe. She could sense him savoring her with his eyes, watching intently as her nipples puckered in response to the rasp of his fingertips. He was so close to her that she could feel the heat of his body, smell the hot, musky maleness of his skin. She arched, trying to turn her body into that warmth and scent, but he forced her flat again.

Then his mouth was on her, sliding up the slope of her breast and closing hotly on her nipple. He sucked strongly at her, making waves of burning pleasure sweep from her breast to her loins. Jane whimpered, then bit her lip to hold back the sound. She hadn't known, had never realized, what a man's mouth on her breasts could do to her. She was on fire, her skin burning with an acute sensitivity that was both ecstatic and unbearable. She squirmed, clenching her legs together, trying to control the ache that threatened to master her.

His mouth went to her other breast, the rasp of his tongue on her nipple intensifying an already unbearable sensation. He swept his hand down to her thighs, his touch demanding that she open herself to him. Her muscles slowly relaxed for him, and he spread her legs gently. His fingers combed through the dark curls that had so enticed him before, making her body jerk in anticipation; then he covered her with his palm and thoroughly explored the soft, vulnerable flesh between her legs. Beneath his touch, Jane began to tremble wildly. "Grant," she moaned, her voice a shaking, helpless plea.

"Easy," he soothed, blowing his warm breath across her flesh. He wanted her so badly that he felt he would explode, but at the same time he couldn't get enough of touching her, of watching her arch higher and higher as he aroused her. He was drunk on her flesh, and still trying to satiate himself. He took her nipple in his mouth and began sucking again, wringing another cry from her.

Between her legs a finger suddenly penetrated, searching out the depths of her readiness, and shock waves battered her body. Something went wild inside her, and she could no longer hold her body still. It writhed and bucked against his hand, and his mouth was turning her breasts into pure flame. Then his thumb brushed insistently over her straining, aching flesh, and she exploded in his arms, blind with the colossal upheaval of her senses, crying out unconsciously. Nothing had ever prepared her for this, for the total, mind-shattering pleasure of her own body.

When it was over, she lay sprawled limply on the tarp. He undid his pants and shoved them off, his eyes glittering and wild. Jane's eyes slowly opened and she stared up at him dazedly. Grasping her legs, he lifted them high and spread them; then he braced himself over her and slowly sank his flesh into hers.

Jane's hands clenched on the tarp, and she bit her lips to keep from crying out as her body was inexorably stretched and filled. He paused, his big body shuddering, allowing her the time to accept him. Then suddenly it was she who couldn't bear any distance at all between them, and she surged upward, taking all of him, reaching up her arms to pull him close.

She never noticed the tears that ran in silvered streaks down her temples, but Grant gently wiped them away with his rough thumbs. Supporting his weight on his arms, sliding his entire body over her in a subtle caress, he began moving with slow, measured strokes. He was so close to the edge that he could feel the feathery sensation along his spine, but he wanted to make it last. He wanted to entice her again to that satisfying explosion, watch her go crazy in his arms.

"Are you all right?" he asked in a raw, husky tone, catching another tear with his tongue as it left the corner of her eye. If he were hurting her, he wouldn't prolong the loving, though he felt it would tear him apart to stop.

"Yes, I'm fine," she breathed, stroking her hands up the moving, surging muscles of his back. Fine… What a word for the wild magnificence of belonging to him. She'd never dreamed it could feel like this. It was as if she'd found a half of herself that she hadn't even known was missing. She'd never dreamed that she could feel like this. Her fingers clutched mindlessly at his back as his long, slow movements began to heat her body.

He felt her response and fiercely buried his mouth against the sensitive little hollow between her throat and collarbone, biting her just enough to let her feel his teeth, then licking where he'd bitten. She whimpered, that soft, uncontrollable little sound that drove him crazy, and he lost control. He began driving into her with increasing power, pulling her legs higher around him so he could have more of her, all of her, deeper and harder, hearing her little cries and going still crazier. There was no longer any sense of time, or of danger, only the feel of the woman beneath him and around him. While he was in her arms he could no longer feel the dark, icy edges of the shadows in his mind and soul.

In the aftermath, like that after a storm of unbelievable violence, they lay in exhausted silence, each reluctant to speak for fear it would shatter the fragile peace. His massive shoulders crushed her, making it difficult for her to breathe, but she would gladly have spent the rest of her life lying there. Her fingers slowly stroked the sweat-darkened gold of his hair, threading through the heavy, live silk. Their bodies were reluctant to leave each other, too. He hadn't withdrawn from her; instead, after easing his weight down onto her, he'd nestled closer and now seemed to be lightly dozing.

Perhaps it had happened too quickly between them, but she couldn't regret it. She was fiercely happy that she'd given herself to him. She'd never been in love before, never wanted to explore the physical mysteries of a man and a woman. She'd even convinced herself that she just wasn't a physical person, and had decided to enjoy her solitary life. Now her entire concept of herself had been changed, and it was as if she'd discovered a treasure within herself. After the kidnapping she had withdrawn from people, except for the trusted precious few who she had loved before: her parents, Chris, a couple of other friends. And even though she had married Chris, she had remained essentially alone, emotionally withdrawn. Perhaps that was why their marriage had failed, because she hadn't been willing to let him come close enough to be a real husband. Oh, they had been physically intimate, but she had been unresponsive, and eventually he had stopped bothering her. That was exactly what it had been for her: a bother. Chris had deserved better. He was her best friend, but only a friend, not a lover. He was much better off with the warm, responsive, adoring woman he'd married after their divorce.

She was too honest with herself to even pretend that any blame for their failed marriage belonged to Chris. It had been entirely her fault, and she knew it. She'd thought it was a lack in herself. Now she realized that she did have the warm, passionate instincts of a woman in love—because she was in love for the first time. She hadn't been able to respond to Chris, simply because she hadn't loved him as a woman should love the man she marries.

She was twenty-nine. She wasn't going to pretend to a shyness she didn't feel for the sake of appearance. She loved the man who lay in her arms, and she was going to enjoy to the fullest whatever time she had with him. She hoped to have a lifetime; but if fate weren't that kind, she would not let timidity cheat her out of one minute of the time they did have. Her life had been almost snuffed out twenty years ago, before it had really begun. She knew that life and time were too precious to waste.

Perhaps it didn't mean to Grant what it did to her, to be able to hold and love like this. She knew intuitively that his life had been much harder than hers, that he'd seen things that had changed him, that had stolen the laughter from his eyes. His experiences had hardened him, had left him extraordinarily cautious. But even if he were only taking the shallowest form of comfort from her, that of sexual release, she loved him enough to give him whatever he needed from her, without question. Jane loved as she did everything else, completely and courageously.

He stirred, lifting his weight onto his forearms and staring down at her. His golden eyes were shadowed, but there was something in them that made her heart beat faster, for he was looking at her the way a man looks at the woman who belongs to him. "I've got to be too heavy for you."

"Yes, but I don't care." Jane tightened her arms about his neck and tried to pull him back down, but his strength was so much greater than hers that she couldn't budge him.

He gave her a swift, hard kiss. "It's stopped raining. We have to go."

"Why can't we stay the night here? Aren't we safe?"

He didn't answer, just gently disengaged their bodies and sat up, reaching for his clothes, and that was answer enough. She sighed, but sat up to reach for her own clothes. The sigh became a wince as she became aware of the various aches she'd acquired by making love on the ground.

She could have sworn that he wasn't looking at her, but his awareness of his surroundings was awesome. His head jerked around, and a slight frown pulled his dark brows together. "Did I hurt you?" he asked abruptly.

"No, I'm all right." He didn't look convinced by her reassurance. When they descended the steep slope to the floor of the gorge, he kept himself positioned directly in front of her. He carried her down the last twenty feet, hoisting her over his shoulder despite her startled, then indignant, protests.

It was a waste of time for her to protest, though; he simply ignored her. When he put her down silently and started walking, she had no choice but to follow.

Twice that afternoon they heard a helicopter, and both times he pulled her into the thickest cover, waiting until the sound had completely faded away before emerging. The grim line of his mouth told her that he didn't consider it just a coincidence. They were being hunted, and only the dense cover of the forest kept them from being caught. Jane's nerves twisted at the thought of leaving that cover; She wasn't afraid for just herself now, but for Grant, too. He put himself in jeopardy just by being with her. Turego wanted her alive, but Grant was of no use to him at all.

If it came to a choice between Grant's life and giving Turego what he wanted, Jane knew that she would give in. She'd have to take her chances with Turego, though it would be impossible now to catch him off guard the way she had the first time. He knew now that she wasn't a rich man's flirtatious, charming plaything. She'd made a fool of him, and he wouldn't forget.

Grant stepped over a large fallen tree and turned back to catch her around the waist and lift her over it with that effortless strength of his. Pausing, he pushed her tangled hair back from her face, his touch surprisingly gentle. She knew how lethal those hands could be. "You're too quiet," he muttered. "It makes me think you're up to something, and that makes me nervous."

"I was just thinking," she defended herself.

"That's what I was afraid of."

"If Turego catches us…"

"He won't," Grant said flatly. Staring down at her, he saw more now than just an appealing, sloe-eyed woman. He knew her now, knew her courage and strength, her secret fears and her sunny nature. He also knew her temper, which could flare or fade in an instant. Sabin's advice had been to kill her quickly rather than let Turego get his hands on her; Grant had seen enough death to accept that as a realistic option at the time. But that was before he had known her, tasted her and felt the silky texture of her skin, watched her go wild beneath him. Things had changed now. He had changed—in ways that he neither welcomed nor trusted, but had to acknowledge. Jane had become important to him. He couldn't allow that, but for the time being he had to accept it. Until she was safe, she could be his, but no longer. There wasn't any room in his life for permanency, for roots, because he still wasn't certain that he'd ever live in the sunshine again. Like Sabin, he'd been in the shadows too long. There were still dark spots on his soul that were revealed in the lack of emotion in his eyes. There was still the terrible, calm acceptance of things that were too terrible to be accepted.

If things had gone as originally planned, they would have gotten on that helicopter and she would be safely home by now. He would never have really known her; he would have delivered her to her father and walked away. But instead, they had been forced to spend days with only each other for company. They had slept side by side, eaten together, shared moments of danger and of humor. Perhaps the laughter was the more intimate, to him; he'd known danger many times with many people, but humor was rare in his life. She had made him laugh, and in doing so had captured a part of him.

Damn her for being the woman she was, for being lively and good-natured and desirable, when he'd expected a spoiled, sulky bitch. Damn her for making men want her, for making him want her. For the first time in his life he felt a savage jealousy swelling in his heart. He knew that he would have to leave her, but until then he wanted her to be his and only his. Remembering the feel of her body under his, he knew that he would have to have her again. His golden eyes narrowed at the feeling of intense possessiveness that gripped him. An expression of controlled violence crossed his face, an expression that the people who knew him had learned to avoid provoking. Grant Sullivan was dangerous enough in the normal way of things; angered, he was deadly. She was his now, and her life was being threatened. He'd lost too much already; his youth, his laughter, his trust in others, even part of his own humanity. He couldn't afford to lose anything else. He was a desperate man trying to recapture his soul. He needed to find again even a small part of the boy from Georgia who had walked barefoot in the warm dirt of plowed fields, who had learned survival in the mysterious depths of the great swamp. What Vietnam had begun, the years of working in intelligence and operations had almost completed, coming close to destroying him as a man.

Jane and her screwball brand of gallantry were the source of the only warmth he'd felt in years.

He reached out and caught her by the nape of her neck, his strong fingers halting her. Surprised, she turned an inquiring glance at him, and the small smile that had begun forming on her lips faded at the fierce expression he couldn't hide.

"Grant? Is something wrong?"

Without thinking, he used the grip he had on her neck to pull her to him, and kissed her full lips, still faintly swollen from the lovemaking they'd shared in the cave. He took his time about it, kissing her with slow, deep movements of his tongue. With a small sound of pleasure she wound her arms around his neck and lifted herself on tiptoe to press more fully against him. He felt the soft juncture of her thighs and ground himself against her, his body jolting with desire at the way she automatically adjusted herself to his hardness.

She was his, as she'd never belonged to any other man.

Her safety hinged on how swiftly he could get her out of the country, for he sensed Turego closing in on them. That man would never give up, not while the microfilm was still missing. There was no way in hell, Grant vowed, that he would allow Turego ever to touch Jane again. Lifting his mouth from hers, he muttered in a harsh tone, "You're mine now. I'll take care of you."

Jane rested her head against his chest. "I know," she whispered.

Chapter Eight

1 hat night changed forever the way Jane thought of the darkness. The fear of being alone in the dark would probably always remain with her, but when Grant reached out for her, it stopped being an enemy to be held at bay. It became instead a warm blanket of safety that wrapped around them, isolating them from the world. She felt his hands on her and forgot about the night.

He kissed her until she was clinging to him, begging him wordlessly for release from the need he'd created in her. Then he gently stripped her and himself, then rolled to his back, lifting her astride him. "I hurt you this morning," he said, his voice low and rough. "You control it this time; take only as much as you're comfortable with."

Comfort didn't matter; making love with him was a primitive glory, and she couldn't place any limits on it. She lost control, moving wildly on him, and her uninhibited delight snapped the thin thread of control he was trying to maintain. He made a rough sound deep in his throat and clasped her to him, rolling once again until she was beneath him. The wildly soaring pleasure they gave each other wiped her mind clear of everything but him and the love that swelled inside of her. There was no darkness. With his passion, with the driving need of his body, he took her out of the darkness. When she fell asleep in his arms, it was without once having thought of the impenetrable darkness that surrounded them."

The next morning, as always, she awoke slowly, moving and murmuring to herself, snuggling against the wonderfully warm, hard body beneath her, knowing even in her sleep that it was Grant's. His hands moved down her back to cup and knead her buttocks, awakening her fully. Then he shifted gently onto his side, holding her in his arms and depositing her on her back. Her eyes fluttered open, but it was still dark, so she closed them again and turned to press her face against his neck.

"It's almost dawn, honey," he said against her hair, but he couldn't force himself to stop touching her, to sit up and put on his clothing. His hands slipped over her bare, silky skin, discovering anew all the places he'd touched and kissed during the night. Her response still overwhelmed him. She was so open and generous, wanting him and offering herself with a simplicity that took his breath away.

She groaned, and he eased her into a sitting position, then reached out to unzip the flap of the tent and let in a faint glimmer of light. "Are you awake?"

"No," she grumbled, leaning against him and yawning.

"We have to go."

"I know." Muttering something under her breath, she found what she presumed to be her shirt and began trying to untangle it. There was too much cloth, so she stopped in frustration and handed it to him. "I think this is yours. It's too big to be mine."

He took the shirt, and Jane scrambled around until she found her own under the blanket they'd been lying on. "Can't you steal a truck or something?" she asked, not wanting even to think about another day of walking.

He didn't laugh, but she could almost feel the way the corners of his lips twitched. "That's against the law, you know."

"Stop laughing at me! You've had a lot of specialized training, haven't you? Don't you know how to hot-wire an ignition?"

He sighed. "I guess I can hot-wire anything we'd be likely to find, but stealing a vehicle would be like advertising our position to Turego."

"How far can we be from Limon? Surely we could get there before Turego would be able to search every village between here and there?"

"It'd be too risky, honey. Our safest bet is still to cut across to the east coast swamps, then work our way down the coast. We can't be tracked in the swamp." He paused. "I'll have to go into the village for food but you're going to stay hidden in the trees."

Jane drew back. "Like hell."

"Damn it, don't you realize that it's too dangerous for you to show your face?"

"What about your face? At least I have dark hair and eyes like everyone else. Don't forget, that soldier saw you, and your pilot friend no doubt told them all about you, so they know we're together. That long blond mane of yours is pretty unusual around here."

He ran his hand through his shaggy hair, faintly surprised at how long it was. "It can't be helped."

She folded her arms stubbornly. "You're not going anywhere without me."

Silence lay between them for a moment. She was beginning to think she'd won a surprisingly easy victory when he spoke, and the even, almost mild tone of his voice made chills go up her spine, because it was the most implacable voice she'd ever heard. "You'll do what I say, or I'll tie and gag you and leave you here in the tent."

Now it was her turn to fall silent. The intimacy that had been forged between them had made her forget that he was a warrior first, and her lover second. Despite the gentle passion with which he made love to her, he was still the same man who had knocked her out and thrown her over his shoulder, carrying her away into the jungle. She hadn't held a grudge against him for that, after the reception she'd given him, but this was something else entirely. She felt as if he were forcibly reminding her of the original basis of their relationship, making her acknowledge that their physical intimacy had not made her an equal in his eyes. It was as if he'd used her body, since she had so willingly offered it, but saw no reason to let that give her any influence over him.

Jane turned away from him, fumbling with her shirt and finally getting it straight. She wouldn't let him see any hint of hurt in her eyes; she'd known that the love she felt was completely one-sided.

His hand shot out and pulled the shirt away from her. Startled, she looked at him. "I have to get dressed. You said we need to—"

"I know what I said," he growled, easing her down onto the blanket. The lure of her soft body, the knowledge that he'd hurt her and her characteristic chin-up attempt to keep him from seeing it, all made it impossible for him to remember the importance of moving on. The core of ice deep inside his chest kept him from whispering to her how much she meant to him. The remoteness bred into him by years of living on the edge of death hadn't yet been overcome; perhaps it never would be. It was still vital to him to keep some small significant part of himself sealed away, aloof and cold. Still, he couldn't let her draw away from him with that carefully blank expression on her face. She was his, and it was time she came to terms with the fact.

Putting his hands on her thighs, he spread them apart and mounted her. Jane caught her breath, her hands going up to grab at his back. He slowly pushed into her, filling her with a powerful movement that had her body arching on the blanket.

He went deep inside her, holding her tightly to him. Her inner tightness made him almost groan aloud as wild shivers of pleasure ran up his spine. Shoving his hand into her hair, he turned her head until her mouth was under his, then kissed her with a violence that only hinted at the inferno inside him. She responded to him immediately. Her mouth molded to his and her body rose to meet his thrusts in increasingly ecstatic undulations. He wanted to immerse himself in her, go deeper and deeper until they were bonded together, their flesh fused. He held her beneath him, their bodies locked together in total intimacy. He reveled in the waves of intensifying pleasure that made them clutch at each other, straining together in an effort to reach the peak of their passion. When he was inside her, he no longer felt the need to isolate himself. She was taking a part of him that he hadn't meant to offer, but he couldn't stop it. It was as if he'd gotten on a roller coaster and there was no way to get off until it reached the end of the line. He'd just have to go along for the ride, and he meant to wring every moment of pleasure he could from the short time that he had her all to himself.

Jane clung to his shoulders, driven out of her senses by the pounding of his body. He seemed to have lost all control; he was wild, almost violent, his flesh so heated that his skin burned her palms. She was caught up in the depth of his passion, writhing against him and begging for more. Then, abruptly, her pleasure crested, and he ground his mouth against hers to catch her mindless cries. Her hot flare of ecstasy caught him in its explosion, and he began shuddering as the final shock waves jolted through his body. Now it was she who held him, and when it was over he collapsed on her, his eyes closed and his chest heaving, his body glistening with sweat.

Her fingers gently touched the shaggy, dark gold threads of his hair, pushing them away from his forehead. She didn't know what had triggered his sudden, violent possession, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that, despite everything, he needed her in a basic way that he didn't welcome, but couldn't deny. That wasn't what she wanted, but it was a start. Slowly she trailed her hand down his back, feeling the powerful muscles that lay under his supple bronzed skin. The muscles twitched then relaxed under her touch, and he grew heavier as the tension left him.

"Now we really have to go," he murmured against her breast.

"Ummm." She didn't want to stir; her limbs were heavy, totally relaxed. She could happily have lain there for the rest of the day, dozing with him and waking to make love again. She knew that the peace wouldn't last; in a moment he stirred and eased their bodies apart.

They dressed in silence, except for the rustling of their clothing, until she began lacing her boots on her feet. He reached out and tilted her chin then, his thumb rubbing over her bottom lip. "Promise me," he demanded, making her look at him. "Tell me that you're going to do what I say, without an argument. Don't make me tie you up."

Was he asking for obedience, or trust? Jane hesitated, then went with her instincts. "All right," she whispered. "I promise."

His pupils dilated, and his thumb probed at the corner of her lips. "I'll take care of you," he said, and it was more than a promise.

They took down the tent; then Jane got out the meager supply of remaining food. She emptied the last of the Perrier into his canteen, disposed of the bottles, and broke in two the granola bar that she'd been saving. That and a small can of grapefruit was their breakfast, and the last of their food.

The morning was almost gone, and the heat and humidity had risen to almost unbearable levels, when Grant stopped and looked around. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. "We're almost even with the village. Stay here, and I'll be back in an hour or so."

"How long is 'or so'?" she asked politely, but the sound of her teeth snapping together made him grin.

"Until I get back." He took the pistol out of its holster and extended it to her. "I take it you know how to use this, too?"

Jane took the weapon from his hand, a grim expression on her mouth. "Yes. After I was kidnapped, Dad insisted that I learn how to protect myself. That included a course in firearms, as well as self-defense classes." Her slim hand handled the gun with respect, and reluctant expertise. "I've never seen one quite like this. What is it?"

"A Bren 10 millimeter," he grunted.

Her eyebrows lifted. "Isn't it still considered experimental?"

He shrugged. "By some people. I've used it for a while; it does what I want." He watched her for a moment, then a frown drew his brows together. "Could you use it, if you had to?"

"I don't know." A smile wobbled on her mouth. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

He touched her hair, hoping fervently that she never had to find the answer to his question. He didn't want anything ever to dim the gaiety of her smile. Bending, he kissed her roughly, thoroughly, then without a word blended into the forest in that silent, unnerving way of his. Jane stared at the gun in her hand for a long moment, then walked over to a fallen tree and carefully inspected it for animal life before sitting down.

She couldn't relax. Her nerves were jumpy, and though she didn't jerk around at every raucous bird call or chattering monkey, or even the alarming rustles in the underbrush, her senses were acutely, painfully attuned to the noises. She had become used to having Grant close by, his mere presence making her feel protected. Without him, she felt vulnerable and more alone than she had ever felt before.

Fear ate at her, but it was fear for Grant, not herself. She had walked into this with her eyes open, accepting the danger as the price to be paid, but Grant was involved solely because of her. If anything happened to him, she knew she wouldn't be able to bear it, and she was afraid. How could he expect to walk calmly into a small village and not be noticed. Everything about him drew attention, from his stature to his shaggy blond hair and those wild, golden eyes. She knew how single-mindedly Turego would search for her, and since Grant had been seen with her, his life was on the line now just as much as hers.

By now Turego must know that she had the microfilm. He'd be both furious and desperate; furious because she'd played him for a fool, and desperate because she could destroy his government career. Jane twisted her fingers together, her dark eyes intent. She thought of destroying the microfilm, to ensure that it would never fall into the hands of Turego or any hostile group or government—but she didn't know what was on it, only that it was supremely important. She didn't want to destroy information that her own country might need. Not only that, but she might need it as a negotiating tool. George had taught her well, steeped her in his cautious, quicksilver tactics, the tactics that had made him so shadowy that few people had known of his existence. If she had her back to the wall, she would use every advantage she had, do whatever she had to—but she hoped it wouldn't come to that kind of desperation. The best scenario would be that Grant would be able to smuggle her out of the country. Once she was safe in the States, she'd make contact and turn the microfilm over to the people who should have it. Then she could concentrate on chasing Grant until he realized that he couldn't live without her. The worst scenario she could imagine would be for something to happen to Grant. Everything in her shied away even from the thought.

He'd been hurt too much already. He was a rough, hardened warrior, but he bore scars, invisible ones inside as well as the ones that scored his body. He'd retired, trying to pull himself away, but the wasteland mirrored in his eyes told her that he still lived partially in the shadows, where sunlight and warmth couldn't penetrate.

A fierce protectiveness welled up inside her. She was strong; she'd already lived through so much, overcome a childhood horror that could have crippled her emotionally. She hadn't allowed that to clip her wings, had learned instead to soar even higher, reveling in her freedom. But she wasn't strong enough to survive a world without Grant. She had to know that he was alive and well, or there would be no more sunshine for her. If anyone dared harm him…

Perspiration curled the hair at her temples and trickled between her breasts. Sighing, she wondered how long she had been waiting. She wiped her face and twisted her hair into a knot on top of her head to relieve herself of its hot weight on the back of her neck. It was so hot! The air was steamy, lying on her skin like a wet, warm blanket, making it difficult to breathe. It had to rain soon; it was nearing the time of day when the storms usually came.

She watched a line of ants for a time, then tried to amuse herself by counting the different types of birds that flitted and chirped in the leafy terraces above her head. The jungle teemed with life, and she'd come to learn that, with caution, it was safe to walk through it—not that she wanted to try it without Grant. The knowledge and the experience were his. But she was no longer certain that death awaited her behind every bush. The animal life that flourished in the green depths was generally shy, and skittered away from the approach of man. It was true that the most dangerous animal in the jungle was man himself.

Well over an hour had passed, and a sense of unease was prickling her spine. She sat very still, her green and black clothing mingling well with the surrounding foliage, her senses alert.

She saw nothing, heard nothing out of the ordinary, but the prickling sensation along her spine increased. Jane sat still for a moment longer, then gave in to the screaming of her instincts. Danger was near, very near. Slowly she moved, taking care not to rustle even a leaf, and crawled behind the shelter of the fallen tree's roots. They were draped in vines and bushes that had sprung to life already, feeding off the death of the great plant. The heaviness of the pistol she held reminded her that Grant had had a reason for leaving it with her.

A flash of movement caught her attention, but she turned only her eyes to study it. It was several long seconds before she saw it again, a bit of tanned skin and a green shape that was not plant or animal, but a cap. The man was moving slowly, cautiously, making little noise. He carried a rifle, and he was headed in the general direction of the village.

Jane's heart thudded in her breast. Grant could well meet him face to face, but Grant might be surprised, while this man, this guerrilla, was expecting to find him. Jane didn't doubt that normally Grant would be the victor, but if he were overtaken from behind he could be shot before he had a chance to act.

The distinctive beating of helicopter blades assaulted the air, still distant, but signaling the intensified search. Jane waited while the noise of the helicopter faded, hoping that its presence had alerted Grant. Surely it had; he was far too wary not to be on guard. For that, if nothing else, she was grateful for the presence of the helicopters.

She had to find Grant before he came face to face with one of the guerrillas and before they found her. This lone man wouldn't be the only one searching for her.

She had learned a lot from Grant these past few days, absorbing the silent manner in which he walked, his instinctive use of the best shelter available. She slid into the jungle, moving slowly, keeping low, and always staying behind and to the side of the silent stalker. Terror fluttered in her chest, almost choking her, but she reminded herself that she had no choice.

A thorny vine caught her hair, jerking it painfully, and tears sprang to her eyes as she bit her lip to stifle a reflexive cry of pain. Trembling, she freed her hair from the vine. Oh, God, where was Grant? Had he been caught already?

Her knees trembled so badly that she could no longer walk at a crouch. She sank to her hands and knees and began crawling, as Grant had taught her, keeping the thickest foliage between herself and the man, awkwardly clutching the pistol in her hand as she moved.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, signaling the approach of the daily rains. She both dreaded and prayed for the rain. It would drown out all sound and reduce visibility to a few feet, increasing her chances for escape—but it would also make it almost impossible for Grant to find her.

A faint crackle in the brush behind her alerted her, but she whirled a split second too late. Before she could bring the pistol around, the man was upon her, knocking the gun from her grip and twisting her arm up behind her, then pushing her face into the ground. She gasped, her breath almost cut off by the pressure of his knee on her back. The moist, decaying vegetation that littered the forest floor was ground into her mouth. Twisting her head to one side, Jane spat out the dirt. She tried to wrench her arm free; he cursed and twisted her arm higher behind her back, wringing an involuntary cry of pain from her.

Someone shouted in the distance, and the man answered, but Jane's ears were roaring and she couldn't understand what they said. Then he roughly searched her, slapping his free hand over her body and making her face turn red with fury. When he was satisfied that she carried no other weapons, he released her arm and flipped her onto her back.

She started to surge to her feet, but he swung his rifle around so close that the long, glinting barrel was only a few inches from her face. She glanced at it, then lifted her eyes to glare at her captor. Perhaps she could catch him off guard. "Who are you?" she demanded in a good imitation of a furious, insulted woman, and swatted the barrel away as if it were an insect. His flat, dark eyes briefly registered surprise, then wariness. Jane scrambled to her feet and thrust her face up close to his, letting him see her narrowed, angry eyes. Using all the Spanish she knew, she proceeded to tell him what she thought of him. For good measure she added all the ethnic invective she'd learned in college, silently wondering at the meaning of everything she was calling the soldier, who looked more stunned by the moment.

She poked him repeatedly in the chest with her finger, advancing toward him, and he actually fell back a few paces. Then the other soldier, the one she'd spotted before, joined them, and the man pulled himself together.

"Be quiet!" he shouted.

"I won't be quiet!" Jane shouted in return, but the other soldier grabbed her arms and tied her wrists. Incensed, Jane kicked out behind her, catching him on the shin with her boot. He gave a startled cry of pain, then whirled her around and drew his fist back, but at the last moment stayed his blow. Turego probably had given orders that she wasn't to be hurt, at least until he'd gotten the information he wanted from her.

Shaking her tangled hair away from her eyes, Jane glared at her captors. "What do you want? Who are you?"

They ignored her, and pushed her roughly ahead of them. With her arms tied behind her, her balance was off, and she stumbled over a tangled vine. She couldn't catch herself, and pitched forward with a small cry. Instinctively one of the soldiers grabbed for her. Trying to make it look accidental, she flung out one of her legs and tangled it through his, sending him crashing into a bush. She landed with a jolt on a knotted root, which momentarily stunned her and made her ears ring.

He came out of nowhere. One moment he wasn't there; the next he was in the midst of them. Three quick blows with the side of his hand to the first soldier's face and neck had the man crumpling like a broken doll. The soldier who Jane had tripped yelled and tried to swing his rifle around, but Grant lashed out with his boot, catching the man on the chin. There was a sickening thud; the man's head jerked back, and he went limp.

Grant wasn't even breathing hard, but his face was set and coldly furious as he hauled Jane to her feet and roughly turned her around. His knife sliced easily through the bonds around her wrists. "Why didn't you stay where I left you?" he grated. "If I hadn't heard you yelling—"

She didn't want to think about that. "I did stay," she protested. "Until those two almost walked over me. I was trying to hide, and to find you before you ran straight into them!"

He gave her an impatient glance. "I would've handled them." He grabbed her wrist and began dragging her after him. Jane started to defend herself, then sighed. Since he so obviously had handled them, what could she say? She concentrated instead on keeping her feet under her and dodging the limbs and thorny vines that swung at her.

"Where are we going?"

"Be quiet."

There was a loud crack, and Grant knocked her to the ground, covering her with his body. Winded, at first Jane thought that the thunder of the approaching storm had startled him; then her heart convulsed in her chest as she realized what the noise had been. Someone was shooting at them! The two soldiers hadn't been the only ones nearby. Her eyes widened to dark pools; they were shooting at Grant, not at her! They would have orders to take her alive. Panic tightened her throat, and she clutched at him.

"Grant! Are you all right?"

"Yeah," he grunted, slipping his right arm around her and crawling with her behind the shelter of a large mahogany tree, dragging her like a predator carrying off its prey. "What happened to the Bren?"

"He knocked it out of my hand… over there." She waved her hand to indicate the general area where she'd lost the gun. Grant glanced around, measuring the shelter available to him and swearing as he decided it was too much of a risk.

"I'm sorry," Jane said, her dark eyes full of guilt.

"Forget it." He unslung the rifle from his shoulder, his motions sure and swift as he handled the weapon. Jane hugged the ground, watching as he darted a quick look around the huge tree trunk. There was a glitter in his amber eyes that made her feel a little in awe of him; at this moment he was the quintessential warrior, superbly trained and toned, coolly assessing the situation and determining what steps to take.

Another shot zinged through the trees, sending bark flying only inches from Grant's face. He jerked back, then swiped at a thin line of blood that trickled down from his cheekbone, where a splinter had caught him.

"Stay low," he ordered, his tone flat and hard. "Crawl on your belly through those bushes right behind us, and keep going no matter what. We've got to get out of here."

She'd gone white at the sight of the blood ribboning down his face, but she didn't say anything. Controlling the shaking of her legs and arms, she got down on her stomach and obeyed, snaking her way into the emergent shrubs. She could feel him right behind her, directing her with his hand on her leg. He was deliberately keeping himself between her and the direction from which the shots had come, and the realization made her heart squeeze painfully.

Thunder rumbled, so close now that the earth shuddered from the shock waves. Grant glanced up. "Come on, rain," he muttered. "Come on."

It began a few minutes later, filtering through the leaves with a dripping sound, then rapidly intensifying to the thunderous deluge that she'd come to expect. They were soaked to the skin immediately, as if they'd been tossed into a waterfall. Grant shoved her ahead of him, heedless now of any noise they made, because the roar of the rain obliterated everything else. They covered about a hundred yards on their hands and knees, then he pulled her upright and brought his mouth close to her ear. "Run!" he yelled, barely making himself heard over the din of the pummeling rain.

Jane didn't know how she could run but she did. Her legs were trembling, she was dizzy and disoriented, but somehow her feet moved as Grant pulled her through the forest at breakneck speed. Her vision was blurred; she could see only a confused jumble of green, and the rain, always the rain. She had no idea where they were going, but trusted Grant's instincts to guide them.

Suddenly they broke free of the jungle's edge, where man had cut back the foliage in an attempt to bring civilization to a small part of the tropical rain forest. Staggering across fields turned into a quagmire by the rain, Jane was held upright only by Grant's unbreakable grip on her wrist. She fell to her knees once and he dragged her for a few feet before he noticed. Without a word he scooped her up and tossed her over his shoulder, carrying her as effortlessly as ever, showing no trace of the exhaustion she felt.

She closed her eyes and hung on, already dizzy and now becoming nauseated as her stomach was jolted by his hard shoulder. Their surroundings had become a nightmare of endless gray water slapping at them, wrapping them in a curtain that obliterated sight and sound. Terror lay in her stomach in a cold, soggy lump, triggered by the sight of the blood on Grant's face. She couldn't bear it if anything happened to him, she simply couldn't___

He lifted her from his shoulder, propping her against something hard and cold. Jane's fingers spread against the support, and dimly she recognized the texture of metal. Then he wrenched open the door of the ancient pickup truck and picked her up to thrust her into the shelter of the cab. With a lithe twist of his body he slid under the wheel, then slammed the door.

"Jane," he bit out, grabbing her shoulder in a tight grip and shaking her. "Are you all right? Are you hit?"

She was sobbing, but her eyes were dry. She stretched out a trembling hand to touch the red streak that ran down his rain-wet face. "You're hurt," she whispered; he couldn't hear her over the thunder of the rain pounding on the metal top of the old truck, but he read her lips and gathered her in his arms, pressing hard, swift kisses to her dripping hair.

"It's just a scratch, honey," he reassured her. "What about you? Are you okay?"

She managed a nod, clinging to him, feeling the incredible warmth of his body despite the soggy condition of his clothes. He held her for a moment, then pulled her arms from around his neck and put her on the other side of the truck. "Sit tight while I get this thing going. We've got to get out of here before the rain stops and everyone comes out."

He bent down and reached under the dash of the truck, pulling some wires loose.

"What are you doing?" Jane asked numbly.

"Hot-wiring this old crate," he replied, and gave her a quick grin. "Pay close attention, since you've been so insistent that I do this. You may want to steal a truck someday."

"You can't see to drive in this," she said, still in that helpless, numb tone of voice, so unlike her usual cheerful matter-of-fact manner. A frown drew his brows together, but he couldn't stop to cradle her in his arms and reassure her that everything was going to be all right. He wasn't too sure of that himself; all hell had broken loose, reminding him how much he disliked being shot at—and now Jane was a target as well. He hated this whole set-up so much that a certain deadly look had come into his eyes, the look that had become legend in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

"I can see well enough to get us out of here."

He put two wires together, and the engine coughed and turned over, but didn't start. Swearing under his breath, he tried it again, and the second time the engine caught. He put the old truck in gear and let up on the clutch. They lurched into motion with the old vehicle groaning and protesting. The rain on the windshield was so heavy that the feeble wipers were almost useless, but Grant seemed to know where he was going.

Looking around, Jane saw a surprisingly large number of buildings through the rain, and several streets seemed to branch away from the one they were on. The village was a prosperous one, with most of the trappings of civilization, and it looked somehow incongruous existing so close to the jungle.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"South, honey. To Limon, or at least as far as this crate will carry us down the road."

Chapter Nine

Limon. The name sounded like heaven, and as she clung to the tattered seat of the old truck, the city seemed just as far away. Her dark eyes were wide and vulnerable as she stared at the streaming windshield, trying to see the road. Grant gave her a quick look, all he could safely spare when driving took so much of his attention. Keeping his voice calm, he said, "Jane, scoot as far into the corner as you can. Get your head away from the back window. Do you understand?"

"Yes." She obeyed, shrinking into the corner. The old truck had a small window in back and smaller windows on each side, leaving deep pockets of protection in the corners. A broken spring dug into the back of her leg, making her shift her weight. The upholstery on this side of the seat was almost nonexistent, consisting mostly of miscellaneous pieces of cloth covering some of the springs. Grant was sitting on a grimy patch of burlap. Looking down, she saw a large hole in the floorboard beside the door.

"This thing has character," she commented, regaining a small portion of her composure.

"Yeah, all of it bad." The truck skewed sideways on a sea of mud, and Grant gave all his attention to steering the thing in a straight line again.

"How can you tell where we're going?"

"I can't. I'm guessing." A devilish grin twisted his lips, a sign of the adrenaline that was racing through his system. It was a physical high, an acute sensitivity brought on by pitting his wits and his skills against the enemy. If it hadn't been for the danger to Jane, he might even have enjoyed this game of cat and mouse. He risked another quick glance at her, relaxing a little as he saw that she was calmer now, gathering herself together and mastering her fear. The fear was still there, but she was in control.

"You'd better be a good guesser," she gasped as the truck lurched sickeningly to the side. "If you drive us off a cliff, I swear I'll never forgive you!"

He grinned again and shifted his weight uncomfortably. He leaned forward over the wheel. "Can you get these packs off? They're in the way. And keep down!"

She slithered across the seat and unbuckled the backpacks, pulling them away from him so he could lean back. How could she have forgotten her pack? Stricken that she'd been so utterly reckless with it, she drew the buckles through the belt loops of her pants and fastened the straps.

He wasn't paying any attention to her now, but was frowning at the dash. He rapped at a gauge with his knuckle. "Damn it!"

Jane groaned. "Don't tell me. We're almost out of gas!"

"I don't know. The damned gauge doesn't work. We could have a full tank, or it could quit on us at any time."

She looked around. The rain wasn't as torrential as it had been, though it was still heavy. The forest pressed closely on both sides of the road, and the village was out of sight behind them. The road wasn't paved, and the truck kept jouncing over the uneven surface, forcing her to cling to the seat to stay in it—but it was a road and the truck was still running along it. Even if it quit that minute, they were still better off than they had been only a short while before. At least they weren't being shot at now. With any luck Turego would think they were still afoot and continue searching close by, at least for a while. Every moment was precious now, putting distance between them and their pursuers.

Half an hour later the rain stopped, and the temperature immediately began to climb. Jane rolled down the window on her side of the truck, searching for any coolness she could find. "Does this thing have a radio?" she asked.

He snorted. "What do you want to listen to, the top forty? No, it doesn't have a radio."

"There's no need to get snippy," she sniffed.

Grant wondered if he'd ever been accused of being "snippy" before. He'd been called a lot of things, but never that; Jane had a unique way of looking at things. If they had met up with a jaguar, she probably would have called it a "nice kitty"! The familiar urge rose in him, making him want to either throttle her or make love to her. His somber expression lightened as he considered which would give him the most pleasure.

The truck brushed against a bush that was encroaching on the narrow road. Jane ducked barely in time to avoid being slapped in the face by the branches that sprang through the open window, showering them with the raindrops that had been clinging to the leaves.

"Roll that window up," he ordered, concern making his voice sharp. Jane obeyed and sat back in the corner again. Already she could feel perspiration beading on her face, and she wiped her sleeve across her forehead. Her hand touched her hair, and she pushed the heavy mass away from her face, appalled at the tangled ringlets she found. What she wouldn't give for a bath! A real bath, with hot water and soap and shampoo, not a rinsing in a rocky stream. And clean clothes! She thought of the hairbrush in her pack, but she didn't have the energy to reach for it right now.

Well, there was no sense in wasting her time wishing for something she couldn't have. There were more important issues at hand. "Did you get any food?"

"In my pack."

She grabbed the pack and opened it, pulling out a towel-wrapped bundle of bread and cheese. That was all there was, but she wasn't in the mood to quibble about the limited menu. Food was food. Right now, even field rations would have been good.

Leaning over, she took his knife from his belt and swiftly sliced the bread and cheese. In less than a minute, she'd made two thick cheese sandwiches and returned the knife to its sheath. "Can you hold the sandwich and drive, or do you want me to feed you?"

"I can manage." It was awkward, wrestling with the steering wheel and holding the sandwich at the same time, but she would have to slide closer to him to feed him, and that would expose her head in the back window. The road behind them was still empty, but he wasn't going to take any chances with her welfare.

"I could lie down with my head in your lap and feed you," she suggested softly, and her dark eyes were sleepy and tender.

He jerked slightly, his entire body tensing. "Honey, if you put your head in my lap, I might drive this crate up a tree. You'd better stay where you are."

Was it only yesterday that he'd taken her so completely in that cave? He'd made her his, possessed her and changed her, until she found it difficult to remember what it had been like before she'd known him. The focus of her entire life had shifted, redirected itself onto him.

What she was feeling was plainly revealed in her eyes, in her expressive face. A quick glance at her had him swallowing to relieve an abruptly dry throat, and his hands clenched on the wheel. He wanted her, immediately; he wanted to stop the truck and pull her astride him, then bury himself in her inner heat. The taste and scent of her lingered in his mind, and his body still felt the silk of her skin beneath his. Perhaps he wouldn't be able to get enough of her to satisfy him in the short time they had remaining, but he was going to try, and the trying would probably drive him crazy with pleasure.

They wolfed down the sandwiches, then Jane passed him the canteen. The Perrier was flat, but it was still wet, and he gulped it thirstily. When he gave the canteen back to her, she found herself gulping, too, in an effort to replenish the moisture her body was losing in perspiration. It was so hot in the truck! Somehow, even trekking through the jungle hadn't seemed this hot, though there hadn't been even a hint of breeze beneath the canopy. The metal shell of the truck made her feel canned, like a boiled shrimp. She forced herself to stop drinking before she emptied the canteen, and capped it again.

Ten minutes later the truck began sputtering and coughing; then the engine stopped altogether, and Grant coasted to a stop, as far to one side of the narrow road as he could get. "It lasted almost two hours," he said, opening the door and getting out.

Jane scrambled across the truck and got out on his side, since he'd parked so close to the edge that her door was blocked by a tree. "How far do you think we got?"

"Thirty miles or so." He wound a lock of her hair around his forefinger and smiled down at her. "Feel up to a walk?"

"A nice afternoon stroll? Sure, why not?"

He lowered his head and took a hard kiss from her mouth. Before she could respond he'd drawn away and pushed her off the road and into the shelter of the forest again. He returned to the truck, and she looked back to see him obliterating their footprints; then he leaped easily up the low bank and came to her side. "There's another village down the road a few more miles; I hoped we'd make it so we could buy more gas, but—" He broke off and shrugged at the change of plans. "We'll follow the road and try to get to the village by nightfall, unless they get too close to us. If they do, we'll have to go back into the interior."

"We're not going to the swamp?"

"We can't," he explained gently. "There's too much open ground to cover, now that they know we're in the area."

A bleak expression came and went in her eyes so fast that he wasn't certain he'd seen it. "It's my fault. If I'd just hidden from them, instead of trying to find you…"

"It's done. Don't worry about it. We just have to adjust our plans, and the plan now is to get to Limon as fast as we can, any way we can."

"You're going to steal another truck?"

"I'll do whatever has to be done."

Yes, he would. That knowledge was what made her feel so safe with him; he was infinitely capable, in many different areas. Even wearily following him through the overgrown tangle of greenery made her happy, because she was with him. She didn't let herself think of the fact that they would soon part, that he'd casually kiss her goodbye and walk away, as if she were nothing more than another job finished. She'd deal with that when it happened; she wasn't going to borrow trouble. She had to devote her energies now to getting out of Costa Rica, or at least to some trustworthy authorities, where Grant wouldn't be in danger of being shot while trying to protect her. When she'd seen the blood on his face, some vital part inside of her had frozen knowing that she couldn't survive if anything happened to him. Even though she'd been able to see that he wasn't badly hurt, the realization of his vulnerability had frightened her. As strong as he was, as vital and dangerous, he was a man, and therefore mortal.

They heard only one vehicle on the road, and it was moving toward the village where they'd stolen the truck. The sun edged downward, and the dim light in the forest began to fade. Right before the darkness became total, they came to the edge of a field, and down the road about half a mile they could see the other village spread out. It was really more of a small town than a village; there were bright electric lights, and cars and trucks were parked on the streets. After days spent in the jungle, it looked like a booming metropolis, a cornerstone of civilization.

"We'll stay here until it's completely dark, then go into town," Grant decided, dropping to the ground and stretching out flat on his back. Jane stared at the twinkling lights of the town, torn between a vague uneasiness and an eagerness to take advantage of the comforts a town offered. She wanted a bath, and to sleep in a bed, but after so much time spent alone with Grant, the thought of once more being surrounded by other people made her wary. She couldn't relax the way Grant did, so she remained on her feet, her face tense and her hands clenched. "You might as well rest, instead of twitching like a nervous cat."

"I am nervous. Are we going on to Limon tonight?"

"Depends on what we find when we get into town." She glared down at him in sudden irritation. He was a master at avoiding straight answers. It was so dark that she couldn't make out his features; he was only a black form on the ground, but she was certain that he was aware of her anger, and that the corner of his mouth was turning up in that almost-smile of his. She was too tired to find much humor in it, though, so she walked away from him a few paces and sat down, leaning her head on her drawn-up knees and closing her eyes.

There wasn't even a whisper of sound to warn her, but suddenly he was behind her, his strong hands massaging the tight muscles of her shoulders and neck. "Would you like to sleep in a real bed tonight?" he murmured in her ear.

"And take a real bath. And eat real food. Yes, I'd like that," she said, unaware of how wistful her tone was.

"A town this size probably has a hotel of some sort, but we can't risk going there, not looking the way we do. I'll try to find someone who takes in boarders and won't ask many questions."

Taking her hand, he pulled her to her feet and draped his arm over her shoulder. "Let's go, then. A bed sounds good to me, too."

Walking across the field, ever closer to the beckoning lights, Jane became more conscious of how she looked, and she pushed her fingers through her tangled hair. She knew that her clothes were filthy, and that her face was probably dirty. "No one is going to let us in," she predicted.

"Money has a way of making people look past the dirt."

She glanced up at him in surprise. "You have money?"

"A good Boy Scout is always prepared."

In the distance, the peculiarly mournful wail of a train whistle floated into the air, reinforcing the fact that they'd left the isolation of the rain forest behind. Oddly, Jane felt almost nakedly vulnerable, and she moved closer to Grant. "This is stupid, but I'm scared," she whispered.

"It's just a mild form of culture shock. You'll feel better when you're in a tub of hot water."

They kept to the fringes of the town, in the shadows. It appeared to be a bustling little community. Some of the streets were paved, and the main thoroughfare was lined with prosperous looking stores. People walked and laughed and chatted, and from somewhere came the unmistakable sound of a jukebox, another element of civilization that jarred her nerves. The universally-known red and white sign of a soft drink swung over a sidewalk, making her feel as if she had emerged from a time warp. This was definitely culture shock.

Keeping her pushed behind him, Grant stopped and carried on a quiet conversation with a rheumy-eyed old man who seemed reluctant to be bothered. Finally Grant thanked him and walked away, still keeping a firm grip on Jane's arm. "His sister-in-law's first cousin's daughter takes in boarders," he told her, and Jane swallowed a gasp of laughter.

"Do you know where his sister-in-law's first cousin's daughter lives?"

"Sure. Down this street, turn left, then right, follow the alley until it dead ends in a courtyard."

"If you say so."

Of course he found the boarding house easily, and Jane leaned against the white adobe wall that surrounded the courtyard while he rang the bell and talked with the small, plump woman who answered the door. She seemed reluctant to admit such exceedingly grimy guests. Grant passed her a wad of bills and explained that he and his wife had been doing field research for an American pharmaceutical company, but their vehicle had broken down, forcing them to walk in from their camp. Whether it was the money or the tale of woe that swayed Señora Trejos, her face softened and she opened the grill, letting them in.

Seeing the tautness of Jane's face, Señora Trejos softened even more. "Poor lamb," she cooed, ignoring Jane's dirty state and putting her plump arm around the young woman's sagging shoulders. "You are exhausted, no? I have a nice cool bedroom with a soft bed for you and the senor, and I will bring you something good to eat. You will feel better then?"

Jane couldn't help smiling into the woman's kind dark eyes. "That sounds wonderful, all of it," she managed in her less-than-fluent Spanish. "But most of all, I need a bath. Would that be possible?"

"But of course!" Señora Trejos beamed with pride. "Santos and I, we have the water heated by the tank. He brings the fuel for the heating from San Jose."

Chatting away, she led them inside her comfortable house, with cool tiles on the floors and soothing white walls. "The upstairs rooms are taken," she said apologetically. "I have only the one room below the stairs, but it is nice and cool, and closer to the conveniences."

"Thank you, Señora Trejos," Grant said. "The downstairs room will more than make us happy."

It did. It was small, with bare floors and plain white walls, and there was no furniture except for the wood framed double bed, a cane chair by the lone, gracefully arched window, and a small wooden washstand that held a pitcher and bowl. Jane gazed at the bed with undisguised longing. It looked so cool and comfortable, with fat fluffy pillows.

Grant thanked Señora Trejos again; then she went off to prepare them something to eat, and they were alone. Jane glanced at him and found that he was watching her steadily. Somehow, being alone with him in a bedroom felt different from being alone with him in a jungle. There, their seclusion had been accepted. Here there was the sensation of closing out the world, of coming together in greater intimacy.

"You take the first turn at the bath," he finally said. "Just don't go to sleep in the tub."

Jane didn't waste time protesting. She searched the lower floor, following her nose, until she found Señora Trejos happily puttering about the kitchen. "Pardon, señora," she said haltingly. She didn't know all the words needed to explain her shortage of a robe or anything to wear after taking a bath, but Señora Trejos caught on immediately. A few minutes later Jane had a plain white nightgown thrust into her hands and was shown to the senora's prized bathroom.

The bathroom had cracked tile and a deep, old-fashioned tub with curved claw feet, but when she turned on the water it gushed out in a hot flood. Sighing in satisfaction, Jane quickly unbuckled the backpack from her belt and set it out of the way, then stripped off her clothes and got into the tub, unwilling to wait until it was full. The heat seeped into her sore muscles and a moan of pleasure escaped her. She would have liked to soak in the tub for hours, but Grant was waiting for his own bath, so she didn't allow herself to lean against the high back and relax. Quickly she washed away the layers of grime, unable to believe how good it felt to be clean again. Then she washed her hair, sighing in relief as the strands came unmatted and once again slipped through her fingers like wet silk.

Hurrying, she wrapped her hair in a towel and got her safety razor out of the backpack. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she shaved her legs and under her arms, then smoothed moisturizer into her skin. A smile kept tugging at her mouth as she thought of spending the night in Grant's arms again. She was going to be clean and sweet-smelling, her skin silky. After all, it wasn't going to be easy to win a warrior's love, and she was going to use all the weapons at her disposal.

She brushed her teeth, then combed out her wet hair and pulled the white nightgown over her head, hoping that she wouldn't meet any of Señora Trejos's other boarders on the short trip back to her room. The señora had told her to leave her clothes on the bathroom floor, that she would see that they were washed, so Jane got the backpack and hurried down the hall to the room where Grant waited.

He had closed the shutters over the arched window and was leaning with one shoulder propped against the wall, declining to sit in the single chair. He looked up at her entrance, and the inky pupils at the center of his golden irises expanded until there was only a thin ring of amber circling the black. Jane paused, dropping the pack beside the bed, feeling abruptly shy, despite the tempestuous lovemaking she'd shared with this man. He looked at her as if he were about to pounce on her, and she found herself crossing her arms over her breasts, aware that her nakedness was fully apparent beneath the thin nightgown. She cleared her throat, her mouth suddenly dry. "The bathroom is all yours."

He straightened slowly, not taking his eyes from her. "Why don't you go on to bed?"

"I'd rather wait for you," she whispered.

"I'll wake you up when I come to bed." The intensity of his gaze promised her that she wasn't going to sleep alone that night.

"My hair… I have to dry my hair."

He nodded and left the room, and Jane sat down on the chair weakly, shaking inside from the way he'd looked at her. Bending over, she rubbed her hair briskly, then began to brush it dry. It was so thick and long that it was still damp when Grant came back into the room and stood silently, watching her as she sat bent over, her slender arms curving as she drew the brush through the dark mass. She sat up, tossing her head to fling her hair back over her shoulders, and for a moment they simply stared at each other.

They had made love before, but now sensual awareness was zinging between them like an electric current. Without even touching each other, they were both becoming aroused, their heartbeats quickening, their skin growing hot.

He had shaved, probably using the razor she'd left in the bathroom. It was the first time she'd seen him without several days' growth of beard, and the clean, hard lines of his scarred face made her breath catch. He was naked except for a towel knotted around his lean waist, and as she watched he pulled the towel free and dropped it to the floor. Reaching behind him, he locked the door. "Are you ready for bed?"

"My hair… isn't quite dry."

"Leave it," he said, coming toward her. The brush dropped to the floor as he caught her hand and pulled her up. Instantly she was in his arms, lifted off her feet by his fierce embrace. Their mouths met hungrily, and her fingers tangled in his water-darkened hair, holding him to her. His mouth was fresh and hot, his tongue thrusting deep into her mouth in a kiss that made her whimper as currents of desire sizzled her nerves.

He was hard against her, his manhood pushing against her softness, his hands kneading her hips and rubbing her over him. Jane pulled her mouth free, gasping, and dropped her head to his broad shoulder. She couldn't contain the wild pleasure he was evoking, as if her body were out of control, already reaching for the peak that his arousal promised. She'd been quite content to live celibately for years, the passion in her unawakened until she met Grant. He was as wild and beautiful and free as the majestic jaguars that melted silently through the tangled green jungle. The wildness in him demanded a response, and she was helpless to restrain it. He didn't have to patiently build her passion; one kiss and she trembled against him, empty and aching and ready for him, her breasts swollen and painful, her body growing wet and soft.

"Let's get this thing off you," he whispered, pulling at the nightgown and easing it up. Reluctantly she released him, and he pulled the gown over her head, dropping it over the chair; then she was back in his arms, and he carried her to the bed.

Their naked bodies moved together, and there was no more waiting. He surged into her, and she cried out a little from the delicious shock of it. Catching the small cry with his mouth, he lifted her legs and placed them around his waist, then began to move more deeply into her.

It was like the night before. She gave no thought to anything but the man with shoulders so broad that they blocked out the light. The bed was soft beneath them, the sheets cool and smooth, and the rhythmic creak of the springs in time with his movements was accompanied by the singing of insects outside the window. Time meant nothing. There was only his mouth on hers, his hands on her body, the slow thrusts that went deep inside her and touched off a wildfire of sensation, until they strained together in frenzied pleasure and the sheets were no longer cool, but warm from their damp, heated flesh.

Then it was quiet again, and he lay heavily on her, drawing in deep breaths while her hands moved over his powerful back. Her lips trembled with the words of love that she wanted to give him, but she held them back. All her instincts told her that he wouldn't want to know, and she didn't want to do anything to spoil their time together.

Perhaps he had given her something anyway, if not his love, something at least as infinitely precious. As her sensitive fingertips explored the deep valley of his spine, she wondered if he had given her his baby. A tremor of pleasure rippled down her body, and she held him closer, hoping that her body would be receptive to his seed.

He stirred, reaching out to turn off the lamp, and in the darkness he moved to lie beside her. She curled against his side, her head on his shoulder, and after a moment he gave a low chuckle.

"Why don't you just save time and get on top of me now?" he suggested, scooping her up and settling her on his chest.

Jane gave a sigh of deep satisfaction, stretching out on him and looping her arm around his neck. With her face pressed against his throat she was comfortable and safe, as if she'd found a sheltering harbor. "I love you," she said silently, moving her lips without sound against his throat.

They woke with the bright early morning sun coming through the slats of the shutters. Leaving Jane stretching and grousing on the bed, Grant got up and opened the shutters, letting the rosy light pour into the room. When he turned, he saw the way the light glowed on her warm-toned skin, turning her nipples to apricot, catching the glossy lights in her dark hair. Her face was flushed, her eyes still heavy with sleep.

Suddenly his body throbbed, and he couldn't bear to be separated from her by even the width of the small room. He went back to the bed and pulled her under him, then watched the way her face changed as he slowly eased into her, watched the radiance that lit her. Something swelled in his chest, making it difficult for him to breathe, and as he lost himself in the soft depths of her body he had one last, glaringly clear thought: she'd gotten too close to him, and letting her go was going to be the hardest thing he'd ever done.

He dressed, pulling on the freshly washed clothes that one of Señora Trejos's daughters had brought, along with a tray of fruit, bread and cheese. Jane flushed wildly when she realized that Señora Trejos must have brought a tray to them the night before, then discreetly left when she heard the sounds they had been making. A quick glance at Grant told her that he'd had the same thought, because the corner of his mouth was twitching in amusement.

The señora had also sent along a soft white off-the-shoulder blouse, and Jane donned it with pleasure, more than glad to discard her tattered black shirt. After selecting a piece of orange from the tray, she bit into the juicy fruit as she watched him pull his dark green undershirt over his head.

"You're going to be pretty noticeable in those camouflage fatigues," she said, poking a bit of the orange into his mouth.

"I know." He quickly kissed her orange-sticky lips. "Put the shirt in your pack and be ready to go when I get back."

"Get back? Where are you going?"

"I'm going to try to get some sort of transport. It won't be as easy this time."

"We could take the train," she pointed out.

"The rifle would be a mite conspicuous, honey."

"Why can't I go with you?"

"Because you're safer here."

"The last time you left me, I got into trouble," she felt obliged to remind him.

He didn't appreciate the reminder. He scowled down at her as he reached for a spear of melon. "If you'll just keep your little butt where I tell you to, you'll be fine."

"I'm fine when I'm with you."

"Damn it, stop arguing with me!"

"I'm not arguing. I'm pointing out some obvious facts! You're the one who's arguing!"

His eyes were yellow fire. He bent down until they were almost nose to nose, his control under severe stress. His teeth were clenched together as he said, evenly spacing the words out, "If you make it home without having the worst spanking of your life, it'll be a miracle."

"I've never had a spanking in my life," she protested.

"It shows!"

She flounced into the chair and pouted. Grant's hands clenched; then he reached for her and pulled her out of the chair, hauling her up to him for a deep, hard kiss. "Be good, for a change," he said, aware that he was almost pleading with her. "I'll be back in an hour—"

"Or so!" she finished in unison with him. "All right, I'll wait! But I don't like it!"

He left before he completely lost his temper with her, and Jane munched on more of the fruit, terribly grateful for something fresh to eat. Deciding that he'd meant only for her to stay in the house, not in the room, she first got everything ready for them to leave, as he'd instructed, then sought out the señora and had a pleasant chat with her. The woman was bustling around the kitchen preparing food for her boarders, while two of her daughters diligently cleaned the house and did a mountain of laundry. Jane had her arms deep in a bowl of dough when Grant returned.

He'd gone first to their room, and when he found her in the kitchen there was a flicker of intense relief in his eyes before he masked it. Jane sensed his presence and looked up, smiling. "Is everything arranged?"

"Yes. Are you ready?"

"Just as soon as I wash my hands."

She hugged the señora and thanked her, while Grant leaned in the doorway and watched her. Did she charm everyone so effortlessly? The señora was beaming at her, wishing her a safe journey and inviting her back. There would always be a room for the lovely young señora and her husband in the Trejos house!

They collected their packs, and Grant slung the rifle over his shoulder. They risked attracting attention because of it, but he didn't dare leave it behind. With any luck they would be on a plane out of Costa Rica by nightfall, but until they were actually on their way he couldn't let his guard down. The close call the day before had been proof of that. Turego wasn't giving up; he stood to lose too much.

Out in the alley, Jane glanced up at him. "What exactly did you arrange?"

"A farmer is going into Limon, and he's giving us a ride."

After the adventure of the last several days that seemed almost boringly tame, but Jane was happy to be bored. A nice, quiet ride, that was the ticket. How good it would be not to feel hunted!

As they neared the end of the alley, a man stepped suddenly in front of them. Grant reacted immediately, shoving Jane aside, but before he could swing the rifle around there was a pistol in his face, and several more men stepped into the alley, all of them armed, all of them with their weapons pointed at Grant. Jane stopped breathing, her eyes wide with horror. Then she recognized the man in the middle, and her heart stopped. Was Grant going to die now, because of her?

She couldn't bear it. She had to do something, anything.

"Manuel!" she cried, filling her voice with joy. She ran to him and flung her arms around him. "I'm so glad you found me!"

Chapter Ten

It was a nightmare. Grant hadn't taken his narrowed gaze off her, and the hatred that glittered in his eyes made her stomach knot, but there was no way she could reassure him. She was acting for all she was worth, clinging to Turego and babbling her head off, telling him how frightened she'd been and how this madman had knocked her out and stolen her away from the plantation, all the while clinging to Turego's shirt as if she couldn't bear to release him. She had no clear idea of what she was going to do, only that somehow she had to stay unfettered so she could help Grant, and to do that she had to win Turego's trust and soothe his wounded vanity.

The entire situation was balanced on a knife edge; things could go in either direction. Wariness was in Turego's dark eyes, as well as a certain amount of cruel satisfaction in having cornered his prey. He wanted to make her suffer for having eluded him, she knew, yet for the moment she was safe from any real harm, because he still wanted the microfilm. It was Grant whose life was threatened, and it would take only a word from Turego for those men to kill him where he stood. Grant had to know it, yet there wasn't even a flicker of fear in his expression, only the cold, consuming hatred of his glare as he stared at Jane. Perhaps it was that, in the end, that eased Turego's suspicions somewhat. He would never relax his guard around her again, but Jane could only worry about one thing at a time. Right now, she had to protect Grant in any way she could.

Turego's arm stole around her waist, pulling her tightly against him. He bent his head and kissed her, a deeply intimate kiss that Jane had to steel herself not to resist in any way, even though she shuddered at having to endure the touch and taste of him. She knew what he was doing; he was illustrating his power, his control, and using her as a weapon against Grant. When he lifted his head, a cruel little smile was on his handsome mouth.

"I have you now, chiquita," he reassured her in a smooth tone. "You are quite safe. This… madman, as you called him, will not bother you again, I promise. I am impressed," be continued mockingly, inclining his head toward Grant. "I have heard of you, señor. Surely there can be only one with the yellow eyes and scarred face, who melts through jungles like a silent cat. You are a legend, but it was thought that you were dead. It has been a long time since anything was heard of you."

Grant was silent, his attention now on Turego, ignoring Jane as if she no longer existed. Not a muscle moved; it was as if he'd turned to stone. He wasn't even breathing. His utter stillness was unnerving, yet there was also the impression of great strength under control, a wild animal waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. Even though he was only one against many, the others were like jackals surrounding a mighty tiger; the men who held their weapons trained on him were visibly nervous.

"Perhaps it would be interesting to know who now pays you for your services. And there are others who would like very much to have an opportunity to question you, yes? Tie him, and put him in the truck," Turego ordered, still keeping his arm around Jane. She forced herself not to watch as Grant was roughly bound and dragged over to a two ton military-type truck, with a canvas top stretched over the back. Instead she gave Turego her most dazzling smile and leaned her head on his shoulder.

"I've been so frightened," she whispered.

"Of course you have, chiquita. Is that why you resisted my men when they found you in the forest yesterday?"

She might have known he was too sharp to simply believe her! She let her eyes widen incredulously. "Those were your men? Well, why didn't they say so? They were shoving me around, and I was afraid they wanted to… to attack me. I had managed to slip away from that crazy man; I'd have made it, too, if it hadn't been for all the noise your men made! They led him right to me!" Her voice quivered with indignation.

"It is over; I will take care of you now." He led her to the truck and assisted her into the cab, then climbed in beside her and gave terse instructions to the driver.

That was exactly what she was afraid of, being taken care of by Turego, but for the moment she had to play up to him and somehow convince him that she was totally innocent of her escape from under the noses of his guards. He hadn't gotten where he was by being a gullible idiot; though she'd successfully fooled him the first time, the second time would be much more difficult.

"Where are we going?" she asked innocently, leaning against him. "Back to the plantation? Did you bring any of my clothes with you? He brought me this blouse this morning," she said, plucking at the soft white fabric, "but I'd really like to have my own clothes."

"I have been so worried about you that I did not think of your clothes, I confess," Turego lied smoothly. His hard arm was around her shoulders, and Jane smiled up at him. He was unnaturally handsome, with perfect features that would have done better on a statue than a man, though perhaps Turego wasn't quite human. He didn't show his age; he looked to be in his twenties, though Jane knew that he was in his early forties. Emotion hadn't changed his face; he had no wrinkles, no attractive crinkles at the corners of his eyes, no signs that time or life had touched him. His only weakness was his vanity; he knew he could force himself on Jane at any time, but he wanted to seduce her into giving herself willingly to him. She would be another feather in his cap; then, once he had the microfilm, he could dispose of her without regret.

She had only the microfilm to protect her, and only herself to protect Grant. Her mind raced, trying to think of some way she could free him from his bonds, get some sort of weapon to him. All he needed was a small advantage.

"Who is he? You seem to know him."

"He hasn't introduced himself? But you have spent several days alone with him, my heart. Surely you know his name."

Again she had to make a split second decision. Was Grant's real name commonly known? Was Grant his real name, anyway? She couldn't take the chance. "He told me that his name is Joe Tyson. Isn't that his real name?" she asked in an incredulous voice, sitting up to turn the full force of her brown eyes on him, blinking as if in astonishment.

Oddly, Turego hesitated. "That may be what he calls himself now. If he is who I think he is, he was once known as the Tiger."

He was uneasy! Grant was tied, and there were ten guns on him, but still Turego was made uneasy by his presence! Did that slight hesitation mean that Turego wasn't certain of Grant's real name and didn't want to reveal his lack of knowledge—or was the uncertainty of a greater scope?

Was he not entirely certain that Grant was the Tiger? Turego wouldn't want to make himself look foolish by claiming to have captured the Tiger, only to have his prisoner turn out to be someone much less interesting.

Tiger. She could see how he had gained the name, and the reputation. With his amber eyes and deadly grace, the comparison had been inevitable. But he was a man, too, and she'd slept in his arms. He'd held her during the long hours of darkness, keeping the night demons away from her, and he'd shown her a part of herself that she hadn't known existed. Because of Grant, she felt like a whole person, capable of love and passion, a warm, giving woman. Though she could see what he had been, the way she saw him now was colored by love. He was a man, not a supernatural creature who melted through the dark, tangled jungles of the world. He could bleed, and hurt. He could laugh, that deep, rusty laugh that caught at her heart. After Grant, she felt contaminated just by sitting next to Turego.

She gave a tinkling laugh. "That sounds so cloak-and-daggerish! Do you mean he's a spy?"

"No, of course not. Nothing so romantic. He is really just a mercenary, hiring himself out to anyone for any sort of dirty job."

"Like kidnapping me? Why would he do that? I mean, no one is going to pay any ransom for me! My father doesn't even speak to me, and I certainly don't have any money of my own!"

"Perhaps something else was wanted from you," he suggested.

"But I don't have anything!" She managed to fill her face and voice with bewilderment, and Turego smiled down at her.

"Perhaps you have it and are not aware of it."

"What? Do you know?"

"In time, love, we shall find out."

"No one tells me anything!" she wailed, and lapsed into a pout. She allowed herself to hold the pout for about thirty seconds, then roused to demand of him again, like an impatient child, "Where are we going?"

"Just down this street, love."

They were on the very fringes of the town, and a dilapidated tin warehouse sat at the end of the street. It was in sad shape, its walls sagging, the tin roof curled up in several places, sections of it missing altogether in others. A scarred blue door hung crookedly on its hinges. The warehouse was their destination, and when the truck stopped beside the blue door and Turego helped Jane from the cab, she saw why. There were few people about, and those who were in the vicinity quickly turned their eyes away and scurried off.

Grant was hauled out of the back of the truck and shoved toward the door; he stumbled and barely caught his balance before he would have crashed headlong against the building. Someone chuckled, and when Grant straightened to turn his unnerving stare on his captors, Jane saw that a thin trickle of blood had dried at the corner of his mouth. His lip was split and puffy. Her heart lurched, and her breath caught. Someone had hit him while he had his hands tied behind his back! Right behind her first sick reaction came fury, raw and powerful, surging through her like a tidal wave. She shook with the effort it took to disguise it before she turned to Turego again. "What are we going to do here?"

"I just want to ask a few questions of our friend. Nothing important."

She was firmly escorted into the building, and she gasped as the heat hit her in the face like a blow. The tin building was a furnace, heating the air until it was almost impossible to breathe. Perspiration immediately beaded on her skin, and she felt dizzy, unable to drag in enough oxygen to satisfy her need.

Evidently Turego had been using the warehouse as a sort of base, because there was equipment scattered around. Leaving Grant under guard, Turego led Jane to the back of the building, where several small rooms connected with each other, probably the former offices. It was just as hot there, but a small window was opened and let in a measure of fresh air. The room he took her to was filthy, piled with musty smelling papers and netted with cobwebs. An old wooden desk, missing a leg, listed drunkenly to one side, and there was the unmistakable stench of rodents. Jane wrinkled her nose fastidiously. "Ugh!" she said in completely honest disgust.

"I apologize for the room," Turego said smoothly, bestowing one of his toothpaste-ad smiles on her. "Hopefully, we won't be here long. Alfonso will stay with you while I question our friend about his activities, and who hired him to abduct you."

What he meant was that she was also under guard. Jane didn't protest, not wanting to arouse his suspicions even more, but her skin crawled. She was very much afraid of the form his "questioning" would take. She had to think of something fast! But nothing came to mind, and Turego tilted her chin up to kiss her again. "I won't be long," he murmured. "Alfonso, watch her carefully. I would be very upset if someone stole her from me again."

Jane thought she recognized Alfonso as one of the guards who had been at the plantation. When Turego had gone, closing the door behind him, Jane gave Alfonso a slow glance from under lowered lashes and essayed a tentative smile. He was fairly young and good-looking. He had probably been warned against her, but still he couldn't help responding to her smile.

"You were a guard at the plantation?" she asked in Spanish.

He gave a reluctant nod.

"I thought I recognized you. I never forget a good-looking man," she said with more enthusiasm than precision, her pronunciation mangled just enough to bring a hint of amusement to Alfonso's face. She wondered if he knew what Turego was up to, or if he had been told some fabrication about protecting her.

Whatever he had been told, he wasn't inclined toward conversation. Jane poked around the room, looking for anything to use as a weapon, but trying not to be obvious about it. She kept straining her ears for any sound from the warehouse, her nerves jumping. What was Turego doing? If he harmed Grant…

How long had it been? Five minutes? Ten? Or less than that? She had no idea, but suddenly she couldn't stand it any longer, and she went to the door. Alfonso stretched his arm in front of her, barring her way.

"I want to see Turego," she said impatiently. "It's too hot to wait in here."

"You must stay here."

"Well, I won't! Don't be such a stuffed shirt, Alfonso; he won't mind. You can come with me, if you can't let me out of your sight."

She ducked under his arm and had the door open before he could stop her. With a muffled oath he came after her, but Jane darted through the door and the connecting offices. Just as she entered the main warehouse she heard the sickening thud of a fist against flesh, and the blood drained from her face.

Two men held Grant between them, holding him up by his bound arms, while another stood before him, rubbing his fist. Turego stood to the side, a small, inhuman smile on his lips. Grant's head sagged forward on his chest, and drops of blood spotted the floor at his feet.

"This silence will gain you nothing but more pain, my friend," Turego said softly. "Tell me who hired you. That is all I want to know, for now."

Grant said nothing, and one of the men holding him grabbed a fistful of hair, jerking his head up. Just before Alfonso took her arm, Jane saw Grant's face, and she jerked free, driven by a wild strength.

"Turego!" she cried shrilly, drawing everyone's attention to her. Turego's brows snapped together over his nose. "What are you doing here? Alfonso, take her back!"

"No!" she yelled, pushing Alfonso away. "It's too hot back there, and I won't stay! Really, this is too much! I've had a miserable time in that jungle, and I thought when you rescued me that I'd be comfortable again, but no, you drag me to this miserable dump and leave me in that grungy little room. I insist that you take me to a hotel!"

"Jane, Jane, you don't understand these things," Turego said, coming up to her and taking her arm. "Just a few moments more and he will tell me what I want to know. Aren't you interested in knowing who hired him?" He turned her away, leading her back to the offices again. "Please be patient, love."

Jane subsided, letting herself be led docilely away. She risked a quick glance back at Grant and his captors, and saw that they were waiting for Turego's return before resuming the beating. He was sagging limply in their grasp, unable even to stand erect.

"You are to stay here," Turego said sternly when they reached the office again. "Promise me, yes?"

"I promise," Jane said, turning toward him with a smile on her face; he never saw the blow coming. She caught him under the nose with the bridge of her hand, snapping his head back and making blood spurt. Before he could yell with pain or surprise, she slammed her elbow into his solar plexus and he doubled over with an agonized grunt. As if in a well-choreographed ballet, she brought her knee up under his unprotected chin, and Turego collapsed like a stuffed doll. Jane cast a quick thought of thanks to her father for insisting that she take all of those self-defense classes, then bent down and quickly jerked the pistol from Turego's holster.

Just as she started through the doorway again, a shot reverberated through the tin building, and she froze in horror. "No," she moaned, then launched herself toward the sound.

When Jane had hurled herself into Turego's arms, Grant had been seized by a fury so consuming that a mist of red had fallen over his vision, but he'd been trained to control himself, and that control had held, even though he had been on the edge of madness. Then the mist had cleared, and cold contempt had taken its place. Hell, what had he expected? Jane was a survivor, adept at keeping her feet. First she had charmed Turego, then Grant had stolen her from Turego and she'd charmed him as effortlessly as she had put Turego under her spell. Now Turego was back, and since he had the upper hand, it was a case of So long, Sullivan. He even felt a sort of bitter admiration for the way she had so quickly and accurately summed up the situation, then known exactly the tone to set to begin bringing Turego back to heel.

Still, the sense of betrayal was staggering, and nothing would have pleased him at that moment as much as to get his hands on her. Damn her for being a lying, treacherous little bitch! He should have known, should have suspected that her patented look of wide-eyed innocence was nothing but a well-rehearsed act.

The old instincts, only partially shelved, suddenly returned in full force. Forget about the bitch. He had to look out for himself first, then see to her. She was curling in Turego's arms like a cat, while Grant knew that his own future was nonexistent unless he did some fast thinking.

Part of the thinking was done for him when Turego put two and two together and came up with an accurate guess about Grant's identity. A year had been far too short a time for people in the business to even begin forgetting him. After he'd disappeared, his absence had probably made his reputation grow to legendary proportions. Well, let Turego think that he was after the missing microfilm, too; Grant felt no compunction about using Jane in any way he could. She'd not only used him, she'd had him dancing to her tune like a puppet on a fancy little string. If he hadn't agreed to bring her out of Costa Rica, he would have wished the joy of her on Turego, and gotten himself out any way he could. But he'd taken the job, so he had to finish it—if he came out of this alive. When he got his hands on her again she'd find that there would be no more kid glove treatment.

Turego was curious. With his hands tied behind his back, supported between two of the hired goons, Grant found out just how curious.

"Who hired you? Or are you an independent now?"

"Naw, I'm still a Protestant," Grant said, smiling smoothly. At a nod from Turego, a fist crashed into his face, splitting his lip and filling his mouth with blood. The next blow was into his midsection, and he'd have jacknifed if it hadn't been for the cruel support of his twisted arms.

"Really, I don't have the time for this," Turego murmured. "You are the one known as the Tiger; you aren't a man who works for nothing."

"Sure I am; I'm a walking charity."

The fist landed on his cheekbone, snapping his head back. This guy was a real boxer; he placed his blows with precision. The face a couple of times, then the ribs and kidneys. Pain sliced through Grant until his stomach heaved. He gasped, his vision blurred even though his mind was still clear, and he deliberately let all his weight fall on his two supporters, his knees buckling.

Then he heard Jane's voice, petulant and demanding, as he'd never heard it before, followed by Turego's smooth reassurances. The men's attention wasn't on him; he sensed its absence, like a wild animal acutely sensitive to every nuance. He sagged even more, deliberately putting stress on the bonds around his wrists, and fierce satisfaction welled in him as he felt them slip on his right hand.

He had powerful hands, hands that could destroy. He used that power against the cord that bound him, extending his hand to the fullest and stretching the cord, then relaxing and letting the cord slip even lower. Twice he did that, and the cord dropped around his fingers in loose coils.

Looking about through slitted eyes, he saw that no one was paying much attention to him, not even the boxer, who was absently rubbing his knuckles and waiting for Turego to return from wherever he'd gone. Jane was nowhere in sight, either. Now was the time.

The two men holding him were off guard; he threw them away from him like discarded toys. For a split second everyone was disconcerted, and that split second was all he needed. He grabbed a rifle and kicked its butt up under the chin of the soldier he'd taken it from, sending him staggering backward. He whirled, lashing out with his feet and the stock of the rifle. The soldiers really didn't have much of a chance; they didn't have a fraction of the training he'd had, or the years of experience. They didn't know how to react to an attacker who struck and whirled away before anyone could move. Only one managed to get his rifle up, and he fired wildly, the bullet zinging far over Grant's head. That soldier was the last one standing; Grant took him out with almost contemptuous ease. Then he hesitated only the barest moment as he waited for movement from any of them, but there was none. His gaze moved to the door at the far end of the warehouse, and a cold, twisted smile touched his bruised and bloody lips. He went after Jane.

She'd never known such terror; even her fear of the dark was nothing compared to the way she felt now. She couldn't move fast enough; her feet felt as if they were slogging through syrup. Oh, God, what if they'd killed him? The thought was too horrible to be borne, yet it swelled in her chest until she couldn't breathe. No, she thought, no, no, no!

She burst through the door, the pistol in her hand, half-crazed with fear and ready to fight for her man, for her very life. She saw a confused scene of sprawled men and her mind reeled, unable to comprehend why so many were lying there. Hadn't there been only one shot?

Then an arm snaked around her neck, jerking her back and locking under her chin. Another arm reached out, and long fingers clamped around the hand that held the pistol, removing it from her grip.

"Funny thing, sweetheart, but I feel safer when you're unarmed," a low voice hissed in her ear.

At the sound of that voice, Jane's eyes closed, and two tears squeezed out from under the lids. "Grant," she whispered.

"Afraid so. You can tell me how glad you are to see me later; right now we're moving."

He released his arm lock about her neck, but when she tried to turn to face him, he caught her right arm and pulled it up behind her back, not so high that she was in pain, but high enough that she would be if he moved it even a fraction of an inch higher. "Move!" he barked, thrusting her forward, and Jane stumbled under the force of the motion, wrenching her arm and emitting an involuntary cry.

"You're hurting me," she whimpered, still dazed and trying to understand. "Grant, wait!"

"Cut the crap," he advised, kicking open the door and shoving her out into the searing white sunlight. The transport truck was sitting there, and he didn't hesitate. "Get in. We're going for a ride."

He opened the door and half-lifted, half-threw Jane into the truck, sending her sprawling on the seat. She cried out, her soft cry knifing through him, but he told himself not to be a fool; she didn't need anyone to look after her. Like a cat, she always landed on her feet.

Jane scrambled to a sitting position, her dark eyes full of tears as she stared at his battered, bloody face in both pain and horror. She wanted to reassure him, tell him that it had all been an act, a desperate gamble to save both their lives, but he didn't seem inclined to listen. Surely he wouldn't so easily forget everything they'd shared, everything they'd been to each other! Still, she couldn't give up. She'd lifted her hand to reach out for him when a movement in the door beyond them caught her eye, and she screamed a warning.

"Grant!"

He whirled, and as he did Turego lifted the rifle he held and fired. The explosive crack of sound split the air, but still Jane heard, felt, sensed the grunt of pain that Grant gave as he dropped to one knee and lifted the pistol. Turego lunged to one side, looking for cover, but the pistol spat fire, and a small red flower bloomed high on Turego's right shoulder, sending him tumbling back through the door.

Jane heard someone screaming, but the sound was high and far away. She lunged through the open door of the truck, falling to her hands and knees on the hot, rocky ground. Grant was on his knees, leaning against the running board of the truck, his right hand clamped over his upper left arm, and bright red blood was dripping through his fingers. He looked up at her, his golden eyes bright and burning with the fire of battle, fierce even in his swollen and discolored face.

She went a little mad then. She grabbed him by his undershirt and hauled him to his feet, using a strength she'd had no idea she possessed. "Get in the truck!" she screamed, pushing him in the door. "Damn it, get in the truck! Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

He winced as the side of the seat smashed into his bruised ribs; Jane was shoving at him and screaming like a banshee, tears streaming down her face. "Would you shut up!" he yelled, painfully pulling himself inside.

"Don't you tell me to shut up!" she screamed, pushing him until he moved over. She slapped the tears from her cheeks and climbed into the truck herself. "Get out of the way so I can get this thing started! Are there any keys? Where are the keys? Oh, damn!" She dove headfirst under the steering wheel, feeling under the dash and pulling wires out frantically.

"What're you doing?" Grant groaned, his mind reeling with pain.

"I'm hot-wiring the truck!" she sobbed.

"You're tearing the damned wiring out!" If she was trying to disable their only transportation, she was doing a good job of it. He started to yank her out from under the steering wheel when suddenly she bounced out on her own, jamming the clutch in and touching two wires together. The motor roared into life, and Jane slammed the door on her side, shoved the truck into gear and let out on the clutch. The truck lurched forward violently, throwing Grant against the door.

"Put it in low gear!" he yelled, pulling himself into a sitting position and getting a tighter grip on the seat.

"I don't know where the low gear is! I just took what I could find!"

Swearing, he reached for the gear shift, the pain in his wounded arm like a hot knife as he closed his hand over the knob. There was nothing he could do about the pain, so he ignored it. "Put the clutch in," he ordered. "I'll change gears. Jane, put the damned clutch in!"

"Stop yelling at me!" she screamed, jamming in the clutch. Grant put the truck in the proper gear and she let out on the clutch; this time the truck moved more smoothly. She put her foot on the gas pedal, shoving it to the floor, and slung the heavy truck around a corner, sending its rear wheels sliding on the gravel.

"Turn right," Grant directed, and she took the next right.

The truck was lunging under her heavy urging, its transmission groaning as she kept her foot down on the gas pedal.

"Change gears!"

"Change them yourself!"

"Put in the clutch!"

She put in the clutch, and he geared up. "When I ten you, put in the clutch, and I'll change the gears, understand?"

She was still crying, swiping at her face at irregular intervals. Grant said, "Turn left," and she swung the truck in a turn that sent a pickup dodging to the side of the road to avoid them.

The road took them out of town, but they were only a couple of miles out when Grant said tersely, "Pull over." Jane didn't question him; she pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the truck.

"Okay, get out." Again she obeyed without question, jumping out and standing there awkwardly as he eased himself to the ground. His left arm was streaked with blood, but from the look on his face Jane knew that he wasn't about to stop. He shoved the pistol into his belt and slung the rifle over his shoulder. "Let's go."

"Where are we going?"

"Back into town. Your boyfriend won't expect us to double back on him. You can stop crying," he added cruelly. "I didn't kill him."

"He's not my boyfriend!" Jane spat, whirling on him.

"Sure looked like it from where I was."

"I was trying to catch him off guard! One of us had to stay free!"

"Save it," he advised, his tone bored. "I bought your act once, but it won't sell again. Now, are you going to walk?"

She decided that there was no use trying to reason with him now. When he'd calmed down enough to listen, when she'd calmed down enough to make a coherent explanation, then they'd get this settled. As she turned away from him, she looked in the open door of the truck and caught a glimpse of something shoved in the far corner of the floor. Her backpack! She crawled up in the truck and leaned far over to drag the pack out from under the seat; in the excitement, it had been totally overlooked and forgotten.

"Leave the damned thing!" Grant snapped.

"I need it," she snapped in return. She buckled it to her belt-loop again.

He drew the pistol out of his belt and Jane swallowed, her eyes growing enormous. Calmly he shot out one of the front tires of the truck, then stuck the pistol back into his belt.

"Why did you do that?" she whispered, swallowing again.

"So it'll look as if we were forced to abandon the truck."

He caught her upper arm in a tight grip and pulled her off the road. Whenever he heard an engine he forced her to the ground and they lay still until the sound had faded. Her blouse, so white and pretty only an hour or so before, became streaked with mud and torn in places where the thorns caught it. She gave it a brief glance, then forgot about it.

"When will Turego be after us again?" she panted.

"Soon. Impatient already?"

Grinding her teeth together, she ignored him. In twenty more minutes they approached the edge of the town again, and he circled it widely. She wanted to ask him what he was looking for, but after the way he'd just bitten her head off, she kept silent. She wanted to sit down to wash his bruised face, and bandage the wound in his arm, but she could do none of those things. He didn't want anything from her now.

Still, what else could she have done? There was no way she could have known he was going to be able to escape. She'd had to use the best plan she had at the time.

Finally they slipped into a ramshackle shed behind an equally ramshackle house and collapsed on the ground in the relatively cool interior. Grant winced as he inadvertently strained his left arm, but when Jane started toward him, he gave her a cold glare that stopped her in her tracks. She sank back to the ground and rested her forehead on her drawn up knees. "What are we going to do now?"

"We're getting out of the country, any way we can," he said flatly. "Your daddy hired me to bring you home, and that's what I'm going to do. The sooner I turn you over to him, the better."

Chapter Eleven

After that Jane sat quietly, keeping her forehead down on her knees and closing her eyes. A cold desolation was growing inside her, filling her, thrusting aside anxiety and fear. What if she could never convince him that she hadn't betrayed him? With the life he'd led, it was probably something that he'd had to guard against constantly, so he wasn't even surprised by betrayal. She would try again to reason with him, of course; until he actually left her, she wouldn't stop trying. But… what if he wouldn't listen? What would she do then? Somehow she just couldn't imagine her future without Grant. The emotional distance between them now was agonizing, but she could still lift her head and see him, take comfort in his physical proximity. What would she do if he weren't there at all?

The heat and humidity began building, negating the coolness of the shade offered by the old, open-sided shed, and in the distance thunder rumbled as it announced the approach of the daily rain. A door creaked loudly, and soon a stooped old woman, moving slowly, came around the side of the house to a small pen where pigs had been grunting occasionally as they lay in the mud and tried to escape the heat. Grant watched her, his eyes alert, not a muscle moving. There wasn't any real danger that she would see them; weeds and bushes grew out of control, over waist-high, between the house and the shed, with only a faint little-used path leading to the shed. The pigs squealed in loud enthusiasm when the old woman fed them, and after chatting fondly to them for a moment she laboriously made her way back into the shack.

Jane hadn't moved a muscle, not opening her eyes even when the pigs had begun celebrating the arrival of food. Grant looked at her, a faint puzzlement creeping into the coldness of his eyes. It was unlike her to sit so quietly and not investigate the noise. She knew it was the pigs, of course, but she hadn't looked up to see what was making them squeal so loudly, or even when the old woman had begun talking to them. She was normally as curious as a cat, poking her nose into everything whether it concerned her or not. It was difficult to tell, the way she had her head down, but he thought that she was pale; the few freckles he could see stood out plainly.

An image flashed into his mind of Turego bending his head to press his mouth to Jane's, and the way Jane had stood so quiescently to accept that kiss. Rage curled inside him again, and his fists knotted. Damn her! How could she have let that slime touch her? .

The thunder moved closer, cracking loudly, and the air carried the scent of rain. Wind began to swirl, darting through the shed and bringing with it welcome coolness. The air was alive, almost shining with the electrical energy it carried. The small creatures began to take shelter, birds winging back and forth in an effort to find the most secure perch to wait out the storm.

During the rain would be a good time to leave, as everyone else would take shelter until it was over, but his body ached from the beating he'd received, and his left arm was still sullenly oozing blood. They were in no immediate danger here, so he was content to rest. Night would be an even better time to move.

The rain started, going from a sprinkle to a deluge in less than a minute. The ground wasn't able to soak up that enormous amount of water, and a small stream began to trickle through the shed. Grant got up, stifling a groan as his stiff body protested, and found a seat on top of a half-rotten vegetable crate. It gave a little, but held his weight. Jane still hadn't moved. She didn't look up until the moisture began to dampen the seat of her pants; then her head lifted and she realized that a river was beginning to flow around her. She didn't look at Grant, though she moved away from the water, shifting to the side. She sat with her back to him and resumed her earlier posture, with her knees drawn up, her arms locked around her legs, and her head bent down to rest on her knees.

Grant knew how to wait; patience was second nature to him. He could hold a position all day long, if necessary, ignoring physical discomfort as if it didn't exist. But the silence and lack of motion in the shed began to grate on his nerves, because it wasn't what he'd learned to expect from Jane. Was she planning something?

Eventually the rain stopped, and the steamy heat began to build again. "Are we going to sit here all day?" Jane finally asked fretfully, breaking her long silence.

"Might as well. I don't have anything better to do. Do you?"

She didn't answer that, or ask any more questions, realizing that he wasn't in the mood to tell her anything. She was so hungry that she was sick, but there wasn't any food in her pack, and she wasn't about to complain to him. She dropped her head back to her knees and tried to seek refuge in a nap; at least then she could forget how miserable she was.

She actually managed to sleep, and he woke her at twilight, shaking her shoulder. "Let's go," he said, pulling her to her feet. Jane's heart stopped because just for that moment his touch was strong but gentle, and she had the crazy hope that he'd cooled down and come to his senses white she was napping. But then he dropped her arm and stepped away from her, his face hard, and the hope died.

She followed him like a toy on a string, right in his footsteps, stopping when he stopped, always the same distance behind him. He went boldly into the center of town, walking down the streets as if no one at all was looking for him, let alone a small army. Several people looked at them oddly, but no one stopped them. Jane supposed they did look strange: a tall blond man with a bruised, swollen face and a rifle carried easily in one hand, followed by a woman with wild tangled hair, dirty clothes and a backpack buckled to her belt and swinging against her legs as she walked. Well, everything seemed strange to her, too. She felt as if they'd gotten lost in a video game, with crazy neon images flashing at her. After a moment she realized that the images were real; a street sign advertising a cantina flashed its message in neon pink and blue.

What was he doing? They were attracting so much notice that Turego would have to hear of it if he asked any questions at all. For all Grant knew, Turego could have the local law enforcement looking for them under trumped-up charges; Turego certainly had enough authority to mobilize any number of people in the search. It was as if Grant wanted Turego to find them.

He turned down a side street and paused outside a small, dimly lit cantina. "Stay close to me, and keep your mouth shut," he ordered tersely, and entered.

It was hot and smoky in the small bar, and the strong odor of alcohol mixed with sweat permeated the air. Except for the waitress, a harried looking girl, and two sultry prostitutes, there were no other women there. Several men eyed Jane, speculation in their dark eyes, but then they looked at Grant and turned back to their drinks, evidently deciding that she wasn't worth the trouble.

Grant found them space at a small table at the back, deep in the shadows. After a while the waitress made it over to them, and without asking Jane her preference, Grant ordered two tequilas.

Jane stopped the waitress. "Wait—do you have lime juice?" At the young woman's nod, she heaved a sigh of relief. "A glass of lime juice, instead of the tequila, please."

Grant lit a cigarette, cupping his hands around the flame. "Are you on the wagon or something?"

"I don't drink on an empty stomach."

"We'll get something to eat later. This place doesn't run to food."

She waited until their drinks were in front of them before saying anything else to him. "Isn't it dangerous for us to be here? Any of Turego's men could have seen us walking down the street."

His eyes were narrow slits as he stared at her through the blue smoke of his cigarette. "Why should that worry you? Don't you think he'd welcome you back with open arms?"

Jane leaned forward, her own eyes narrowed. "Listen to me. I had to buy time, and I did it the only way I could think of. I'm sorry I didn't have time to explain it to you beforehand, but I don't think Turego would have let me call 'time out' and huddle with you! If he'd tied me up, too, there would have been no way I could help you!"

"Thanks, honey, but I can do without your sort of help," he drawled, touching his left eye, which was puffy and red.

Anger seared her; she was innocent, and she was tired of being treated like Benedict Arnold. She thought of pouring the lime juice in his lap, but her stomach growled and revenge took a distant second place to putting something in her empty stomach, even if it was just fruit juice. She sat back in her chair and sipped, wanting to make the juice last as long as possible.

The minutes crawled by, and Jane began to feel a twitch between her shoulder blades. Every second they sat there increased the danger, gave Turego a better chance of finding them. The abandoned truck wouldn't fool him for long.

A man slipped into the chair beside her and Jane jumped, her heart flying into her throat. He gave her only a cursory glance before turning his attention to Grant. He was a nondescript character, his clothing worn, his face covered by a couple of days' growth of beard, and his smell of stale alcohol made Jane wrinkle her nose. But then he said a few words to Grant, so quietly that she couldn't understand them, and it all clicked into place.

Grant had advertised their presence not because he wanted Turego to find them, but because he wanted someone else to find them. It had been a gamble, but it had paid off. He was no longer in the business, but he was known, and he'd trusted his reputation to pull in a contact. This man was probably just a peripheral character, but he would have his uses.

"I need transport," Grant said. "Within the hour. Can you manage it?"

"Si," the man said, slowly nodding his head for emphasis.

"Good. Have it sitting behind the Blue Pelican exactly one hour from now. Put the keys under the right seat, get out, and walk away."

The man nodded again. "Good luck, amigo."

That hard, lopsided smile curved Grant's lips. "Thanks. I could use some about now."

The man blended in with the crowd, then was gone. Jane slowly twirled the glass of juice between her palms, keeping her eyes on the table. "Now that you've made your contact, shouldn't we get out of here?"

Grant lifted the tequila to his mouth, his strong throat working as he swallowed the sharp tasting liquid. "We'll wait a while longer."

No, it wouldn't do to follow the other man too closely. George had always told her how important it was to make contact without seeming to. The man had taken a chance by walking up to them so openly, but then, Grant had taken a chance by making himself so available. It had probably been clear that the situation was desperate, though Grant looked as if he was thinking about nothing more important than going to sleep. He was sprawled in his chair, his eyes half-closed, and if Jane hadn't noticed that he kept his left hand on the rifle. She would have thought that he was totally relaxed.

"Do you suppose we could find a bathroom?" she asked, keeping her tone light.

"In here? I doubt it."

"Anywhere."

"Okay. Are you finished with that?" He downed the rest of his tequila, and Jane did the same with her lime juice. Her skin was crawling again; she felt that tingling on the back of her neck, and it intensified as she stood up.

They threaded their way through the tangle of feet and tables and chairs to the door, and as soon as they stepped outside Jane said, "I think we were being watched."

"I know we were. That's why we're going in the opposite direction of the Blue Pelican."

"What on earth is the Blue Pelican? How do you know so much about this town? Have you been here before?"

"No, but I keep my eyes open. The Blue Pelican is the first cantina we passed."

Now she remembered. It was the cantina with the flashing neon sign, the one that had given her such an intense feeling of unreality.

They were walking down the small side street into a yawning cave of darkness. The street wasn't paved, and there were no sidewalks, no street lights, not even one of the incongruous neon signs to lend its garish light. The ground was uneven beneath her boots, and the sour smell of old garbage surrounded her. Jane didn't think; her hand shot out, and she grabbed Grant's belt.

He hesitated, then resumed walking without saying anything. Jane swallowed, belatedly realizing that she could have found herself sailing over his shoulder again, as she had the first time she'd grabbed him from behind. What would she do if she no longer had him to cling to in the dark? Stand around wringing her hands? She'd already come a long way from the child who had sat in a terrified stupor for days, and perhaps it was time for one step more. Slowly, deliberately, Jane released her grip on his belt and let her arm drop to her side.

He stopped and looked around at her, darkness shrouding his features. "I don't mind you holding on to my belt."

She remained silent, feeling his reluctant curiosity, but unable to give him any explanation. All her milestones had been inner ones, attained only by wrenching effort, and this wasn't something she could easily talk about. Not even the frighteningly expensive child psychologist to whom her parents had taken her had been able to draw her out about the kidnapping. Everyone knew about the nightmares she'd had, and her abrupt, unreasonable fear of the dark, but she'd never told anyone the details of her experience. Not her parents, not even Chris, and he'd been her best friend long before he'd been her husband. In all the years since the kidnapping, she'd told only one person, trusted only one person enough. Now there was a distance between them that she'd tried to bridge, but he kept pushing her away. No matter how she wanted to throw herself into his arms, she had to stand alone, because soon she might have no choice in the matter.

The fear of being alone in the dark was nothing compared to the fear that she might be alone for the rest of her life.

He wove a crazy path through the town, crisscrossing, backtracking, changing their route so many times that Jane completely lost her sense of direction. She chugged along doggedly, staying right on his heels. He stopped once, and stood guard while Jane sneaked in the back of the local version of a greasy spoon. The plumbing was pre-World War II, the lighting was a single dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, and the carcass of an enormous cockroach lay on its back in the corner, but she wasn't in the mood to quibble. At least the plumbing worked, and when she turned on the water in the cracked basin a thin, lukewarm stream came out. She washed her hands and, bending over, splashed water on her face. There was no towel, so she wiped her hands on her pants and left her face to dry naturally.

When she tiptoed out of the building, Grant stepped from the shadows where he had concealed himself and took her arm. They weren't far from the Blue Pelican, as it turned out; when they turned the corner, she could see the blue and pink sign flashing. But Grant didn't walk straight to it; he circled the entire area, sometimes standing motionless for long minutes while he waited, and watched.

At last they approached the old Ford station wagon that was parked behind the cantina, but even then he was cautious. He raised the hood and used his cigarette lighter to examine the motor. Jane didn't ask what he was looking for, because she had the chilling idea that she knew. He closed the hood as quietly as possible, evidently reassured.

"Get in, and get the keys out from under the seat."

She opened the door. The dome light didn't come on, but that was to be expected. Doing a little checking on her own, she peered over the back of the seat, holding her breath in case there was actually someone there. But the floorboard was empty, and her breath hissed out of her lungs in relief.

Leaning over, she swept her hand under the seat, searching for the keys. The other door opened, and the car swayed under Grant's weight. "Hurry," he snapped.

"I can't find the keys!" Her scrabbling fingers found a lot of dirt, a few screws, a scrap of paper, but no keys. "Maybe this isn't the right car!"

"It'll have to do. Check again."

She got down on the floor and reached as far under the seat as she could, sweeping her hands back and forth. "Nothing. Try under yours."

He leaned down, extending his arm to search under his seat. Swearing softly, he pulled out a single key wired to a small length of wood. Muttering under his breath about damned people not being able to follow simple instructions, he put the key in the ignition and started the car.

Despite its age, the engine was quiet and smooth. Grant shifted into gear and backed out of the alley. He didn't turn on the headlights until they were well away from the Blue Pelican and the well-lit main street.

Jane leaned back in the musty smelling seat, unable to believe that at last they seemed to be well on their way. So much had happened since that morning that she'd lost her sense of time. It couldn't be late; it was probably about ten o'clock, if that. She watched the road for a while, hypnotized by the way it unwound just ahead of the reach of their headlights, tired but unable to sleep. "Are we still going to Limon?"

"Why? Is that what you told your lover?"

Jane sat very still, clenching her teeth against the anger that shook her. All right, she'd try one more time. "He isn't my lover, and I didn't tell him anything. All I was trying to do was to stay untied until I could catch one of them off guard and get his gun." She spat the words out evenly, but her chest was heaving as she tried to control her anger. "Just how do you think I got the pistol that you took away from me?"

She felt that was a point that he couldn't ignore, but he did, shrugging it away. "Look, you don't have to keep making explanations," he said in a bored tone. "I'm not interested—"

"Stop the car!" she shouted, enraged.

"Don't start pitching one of your fits," he warned, slanting her a hard look.

Jane dived for the steering wheel, too angry to care if she caused them to crash. He pushed her off with one hand, cursing, but Jane ducked under his arm and caught the wheel, wrenching it violently toward her. Grant hit the brake, fighting to keep the car under control with one hand while he held Jane off with the other. She caught the wheel again and pulled it, and the car jolted violently as it hit the shoulder of the road.

Grant let go of her and wrestled with the car as it slewed back and forth on the narrow road. He braked sharply, finally bringing the car to a complete halt so he could give his full attention to Jane, but even before the car had completely stopped she threw the door open and jumped out. "I'll get myself out of Costa Rica!" she yelled, slamming the door.

He got out of the car. "Jane, come back here," he warned as she started walking off.

"I'm not going another mile with you, not another inch!"

"You're going if I have to hog-tie you," he said, coming after her, his stride measured.

She didn't stop. "That's your remedy for everything, isn't it?" she sneered.

Without warning, he sprinted. He moved so fast that Jane didn't have time to run. She gave a startled cry, twisting away as he reached her; his outstretched hand caught her blouse and Jane jerked as he stopped her. It was doubly infuriating to find herself so easily caught, and with a fresh burst of rage she threw herself away from him, twisting and doubling her lithe body, trying to break his grip. He caught her wildly flailing arm and pinned it to her side. "Damn, woman, why do you have to do everything the hard way?" he panted.

"Let… go!" she shouted, but he wrapped his arms around her, holding her arms pinned down. She kicked and shrieked, but he was too strong; there was nothing she could do as he carried her back to the car.

But he had to release her with one arm so he could open the car door, and when he did she twisted violently, at the same time lifting her feet. The combination of the twist and the sudden addition of weight broke his grip, and she slid under his arm. He grabbed for her again, his fingers hooking in the low neckline of the blouse. The fabric parted under the strain, tearing away from her shoulders.

Tears spurted from Jane's eyes as she scrambled to cover her breasts, holding the ruined cloth over them. "Now look what you've done!" Turning away from him, she burst into sobs, her shoulders shaking.

The raw, hard sobs that tore from her throat were so violent that he dropped his outstretched arms. Wearily he rubbed his face. Why couldn't she cry with sedate little sniffles, instead of these sobs that sounded as if she had been beaten? Despite everything that had happened, he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her head to his chest, stroke her dark hair and whisper that everything was going to be all right.

She whirled on him, wiping her face with one hand and clutching the ruined blouse to her breasts with the other. "Think about a few things!" she said hoarsely. "Think about how I got that pistol. And think about Turego. Remember when he came up behind you with the rifle, and I warned you? Did you notice, before you shot him, that his face was bloody? Do you remember the way his nose was bleeding? Do you think it was the altitude that made his nose bleed? You big, stupid, boneheaded jackass!" she bellowed, so beside herself with fury that she was shaking her fist under his nose. "Damn it, can't you tell that I love you?"

Grant was as still as stone, not a muscle moving in his face, but he felt winded, as if he'd just taken a huge blow in the chest. Everything hit him at once, and he staggered under the weight of it. She was right. Turego's face had been bloody, but he hadn't thought anything about it at the time. He'd been so damned angry and jealous that he hadn't been thinking at all, only reacting to what had looked like betrayal. Not only had she done some quick thinking to avoid being tied up, she'd charged to his rescue as soon as she could, and when he remembered the way she'd looked when she came through that door, so white and wild—Turego's goons were probably lucky that he'd gotten free first. She loved him! He stared down at her, at the small fist that was waving dangerously close to his nose. She was utterly magnificent, her hair a wild tangle around her shoulders, her face filled with a temper that burned out of control, yelling at him like some banshee. She clutched that ridiculous scrap of cloth to her breasts with the hand that wasn't threatening his profile. Indomitable. Courageous. Maddening. And so damned desirable that he was suddenly shaking with need.

He caught her fist and jerked her to him, holding her to him so tightly that she gasped, his face buried against her hair.

She was still struggling against him, beating at his back with her fists and crying again. "Let me go! Please, just let me go."

"I can't," he whispered, and caught her chin, turning her face up to him. Fiercely he ground his mouth down on hers and, like a cornered cat, she tried to bite him. He jerked his head back, laughing, a wild joy running through him. The torn blouse had fallen away, and her naked breasts were flattened against him, their soft fullness reminding him of how good it felt when she wasn't fighting him. He kissed her again, roughly, and cupped her breast in his palm, rubbing his thumb over the velvet nipple and making it tighten.

Jane whimpered under the onslaught of his mouth, but her temper had worn itself out, and she softened against him, suddenly aware that she'd gotten through to him. She wanted to hold on to her anger, but she couldn't hold a grudge. All she could do was kiss him back, her arms sliding up to lock around his neck. His hand burned her breast, his thumb exciting her acutely sensitive skin and beginning to tighten the coil of desire deep in her loins. He had no need to hold her still for his kisses now, so he put his other hand on her bottom and urged her against him, demonstrating graphically that she wasn't the only one affected.

He lifted his mouth from hers, pressing his lips to her forehead. "I swear, that temper of yours is something," he whispered. "Do you forgive me?"

That was a silly question; what was she supposed to say, considering that she was hanging around his neck like a Christmas ornament? "No," she said, rubbing her face into the hollow of his throat, seeking his warm, heady male scent. "I'm going to save this to throw up at you the next time we have a fight." She wanted to say "for the rest of our lives," but though his arms were hard around her, he hadn't yet said that he loved her. She wasn't going to dig for the words, knowing that he might not be able to say them and mean it.

"You will, too," he said, and laughed. Reluctantly his arms loosened, and he reached up, removing her arms from his neck. "I'd like to stay like this, but we need to get to Limon." He looked down at her breasts, and a taut look came over his battered face. "When this is over with, I'm going to take you to a hotel and keep you in bed until neither of us can walk."

They got back in the car, and Jane removed the remnants of the blouse, stuffing it in the backpack and pulling on Grant's camouflage shirt that she'd put in the pack that morning. It would have wrapped around her twice, and the shoulder seams hung almost to her elbows. She rolled the sleeves up as far as they would go, then gathered the long tails and tied them at her waist. Definitely not high fashion, she thought, but she was covered.

The Ford rolled into Limon in the early hours of the morning, and though the streets were nearly deserted, it was obvious that the port was a well-populated city of medium size. Jane's hands clenched on the car seat. Were they safe, then? Had Turego been fooled by the abandoned truck?

"What now?"

"Now I try to get in touch with someone who can get us out tonight. I don't want to wait until morning."

So he thought Turego's men were too close for safety. Was it never going to end? She wished they had remained in the jungle, hidden so deeply in the rain forest that no one would ever have found them.

Evidently Grant had been in Limon before; he negotiated the streets with ease. He drove to the train station, and Jane gave him a puzzled look. "Are we going to take the train?"

"No, but there's a telephone here. Come on."

Limon wasn't an isolated jungle village, or even a tiny town at the edge of the forest; it was a city, with all of the rules of a city. He had to leave the rifle in the back of the station wagon, but he stuck the pistol into his boot. Even without his being obviously armed, Jane thought there was no chance at all of them going anywhere without being noticed. They both looked as if they'd come fresh from a battle, which, in effect, they had. The ticket agent eyed them with sharp curiosity, but Grant ignored him, heading straight for a telephone. He called someone named Angel, and his voice was sharp as he demanded a number. Hanging up, he fed more coins into the slot, then dialed another number.

"Who are you calling?" Jane whispered.

"An old friend."

The old friend's name was Vincente, and intense satisfaction was on Grant's face when he hung up. "They're pulling us out of here. In another hour we'll be home free."

"Who's'they'?" Jane asked.

"Don't ask too many questions."

She scowled at him, then something else took her attention. "While we're here, could we clean up a little? You look awful."

There was a public bathroom—empty, she was thankful to see—and Grant washed his face while Jane brushed her hair out and quickly pulled it back into a loose braid. Then she wet a towel and painstakingly cleaned the wound on Grant's arm; the bullet hadn't penetrated, but the graze was deep and ugly. After washing it with a strong smelling soap, she produced a small first-aid kit from her backpack.

"One of these days I'm going to see what all's in that thing," Grant growled.

Jane uncapped a small bottle of alcohol and poured it on the graze. He caught a sharp breath, and said something extremely explicit. "Don't be such a baby," Jane scolded. "You didn't make this much fuss when you were shot."

She smeared an antibiotic cream on the wound, then wrapped gauze snugly around his arm and tied the ends together. After replacing the kit, she made certain the pack was still securely buckled to her belt-loop.

Grant opened the door, then abruptly stepped back and closed it again. Jane had been right behind him, and the impact of their bodies made her stagger. He caught her arm, keeping her from falling. "Turego and a few of his men just came into the station." He looked around, his eyes narrowed and alert. "We'll go out a window."

Her heart pounding, Jane stared in dismay at the row of small, high windows that lined the restroom. They were well over her head. "I can't get up there."

"Sure you can." Grant bent down and grasped her around the knees, lifting her until she could reach the windows. "Open one, and go through it. Quick! We only have a minute."

"But how will you get up—"

"I'll make it! Jane, get through that window!"

She twisted the handle and shoved the window open. Without giving herself time to think about how high above the ground on the other side it might be, she grasped the bottom edge of the frame and hauled herself through, jumping into the darkness and hoping she didn't kill herself on a railroad tie or something. She landed on her hands and knees in loose gravel, and she had to bite back a cry of pain as the gravel cut her palms. Quickly she scrambled out of the way, and a moment later Grant landed beside her.

"Are you all right?" he asked, hauling her to her feet.

"I think so. No broken bones," she reported breathlessly.

He started running along the side of the building, dragging her behind him. They heard a shot behind them, but didn't slow down or look back. Jane stumbled and was saved from falling only by his grip on her hand. "Can't we go back for the Ford?" she wailed.

"No. We'll have to get there on foot."

"Get where?"

"To the pick up point."

"How far is that?"

"Not too far."

"Give it to me in yards and miles!" she demanded He dodged down a street and pulled her into the deep shadows of an alley. He was laughing. "Maybe a mile," he said, and kissed her, his mouth hard and hungry, his tongue finding hers. He hugged her fiercely.

"Whatever you did to Turego, honey, he looks like hell."

"I think I broke his nose," she admitted.

He laughed again. "I think you did, too. It's swollen all over his face. He won't forget you for a long time!"

"Never, if I have anything to do with it. We're going to tell the government about that man," she vowed.

"Later, honey. Right now, we're getting out of here."

Chapter Twelve

A helicopter came in low and fast, and settled lightly on its runners, looking like a giant mosquito. Grant and Jane ran across the small field, bent low against the wind whipped up by the rotors, which the pilot hadn't cut. Behind them people were pouring out of their houses to see what the uproar was about. Jane began to giggle, lightheaded with the triumph of the moment; by the time Grant boosted her into the helicopter, she was laughing so hard she was crying. They'd done it! Turego couldn't catch them now. They would be out of the country before he could mobilize his own helicopters to search for them, and he wouldn't dare pursue them across the border.

Grant flashed her a grin, telling her that he understood her idiotic laughter. He shouted, "Buckle up!" at her, then levered himself into the seat beside the pilot and gave him the thumbs-up sign. The pilot nodded, grinned, and the helicopter rose into the night. Grant put on the headset that would allow him to talk to the pilot, but there wasn't one in the back. Jane gave up trying to hear what they were saying and gripped the sides of her seat, staring out through the open sides of the helicopter. The night air swirled around her, and the world stretched out beyond the small craft. It was the first time she'd ever been in a helicopter, and it was a totally different sensation from being in a jet. She felt adrift in the velvet darkness, and she wished that it wasn't night, so she could see the land below.

The flight didn't take long, but when they set down, Jane recognized the airport and reached up to grab Grant's shoulder. "We're in San Jose!" she yelled, anxiety filling her voice. This was where it had all begun. Turego had plenty of men in the capitol!

Grant took off the headset. The pilot cut the rotors, and the noise began to decrease. They shook hands, and the pilot said, "Nice to see you again! Word filtered down that you were in the area, and that we should give you any assistance you asked for. Good luck. You'd better run. You have just enough time to get on that flight."

They jumped to the asphalt and began running toward the terminal. "What flight is that?" Jane panted.

"The flight to Mexico City that's leaving in about five minutes."

Mexico City! That sounded more like it! The thought lent her strength.

The terminal was almost deserted at that time of night, because the flight for Mexico City had already boarded. The ticket clerk stared at them as they approached, reminding Jane once again of how they looked. "Grant Sullivan and Jane Greer," Grant said tersely. "You're holding our tickets."

The clerk had regained his composure. "Yes, sir, and the plane," he returned in perfect English, handing over two ticket folders. "Ernesto will take you directly aboard."

Ernesto was an airport guard, and he led the way, running. Grant held Jane's hand to make certain she kept up with them. She had a fleeting thought about the pistol stuck in his boot, but they bypassed all checkpoints. Grant certainly had connections, she thought admiringly.

The jet was indeed waiting, and the smiling stewardess welcomed them aboard as calmly as if there was nothing unusual about them. Jane wanted to giggle again; maybe they didn't look as outlandish as she felt they did. After all, camouflage clothing was all the rage in the States. So what if Grant was sporting an almost black eye, a puffy lip and a bandage on his arm? Maybe they looked like journalists who had had a rough time in the field.

As soon as they were seated, the plane began rolling. As they buckled their seat belts, Grant and Jane exchanged glances. It was well and truly over now, but they still had some time together. The next stop was Mexico City, an enormous international city with shops, restaurants… and hotels. Her body longed for a bed, but even deeper than her weariness ran the tingling awareness that Grant would be in that bed with her. He lifted the armrest between their seats and pulled her over so her head nestled into the hollow of his shoulder. "Soon," he murmured against her temple. "In a couple of hours we'll be in Mexico. Home free."

"I'm going to call Dad as soon as we get there, so he and Mom will stop worrying." Jane sighed. "Do you have anyone to call? Does your family know where you were?"

His eyes took on that remote look. "No, they don't know anything about what I do. I'm not close to my family, not anymore."

That was sad, but Jane supposed that when someone was in the business Grant had been in, it was safer for his family not to be close to him. She turned her face into his neck and closed her eyes, holding tightly to him in an effort to let him know that he wasn't alone anymore. Had his nights been spent like hers, lying awake in bed, so achingly alone that every nerve in her body cried out against it?

She slept, and Grant did, too, exhaustion finally sweeping over him as he allowed his bruised body to relax. With her in his arms, it was easy to find the necessary relaxation. She nestled against him as trustingly as a child, but he could never forget that she was a woman, as fierce and elemental as wind or fire. She could have been the spoiled debutante he'd expected. It was what she should have been, and no one would have thought the less of her for being the product of her environment—no one expected her to be any more than that. But she'd risen above that, and above the crippling trauma of her childhood, to become a woman of strength and humor and passion.

She was a woman in whose arms a wary, battered, burnt-out warrior could sleep.

The sky was turning pearl pink with dawn when they landed in Mexico City. The terminal was teeming with people scurrying to catch early flights, a multitude of languages and accents assailing the air. Grant hailed a cab, which took them on a hair-raising ride through traffic that made every moment an exercise in survival—or it would have been hair-raising if Jane had had the energy to care. After what she'd been through, the Mexico City traffic looked mundane.

The city was beautiful at dawn, with its wide avenues and fragrant trees; and the white of the buildings glowed rosily in the early morning sun. The sky was already a deep blue bowl overhead, and the air carried that velvet feel that only the warmer climes achieved. Despite the odor of exhaust fumes she could smell the sweetness of orange blossoms, and Grant was warm beside her, his strong leg pressed against hers.

The desk clerk in the pristine white, high-rise hotel was reluctant to give them a room without a reservation. His black eyes kept wandering to Grant's bruised face as he rattled off excuses in rapid-fire Spanish. Grant shrugged, reached into his pocket and peeled off a couple of bills from a roll. The clerk suddenly smiled; that changed everything. Grant signed them in, and the clerk slid a key across the desk. After taking a few steps, Grant turned back. "By the way," he said easily, "I don't want any interruptions. If anyone calls or asks, we aren't here. Comprende? I'm dead tired, and I get irritable if I'm jerked out of a sound sleep."

His voice was full of silky, lazy menace, and the clerk nodded rapidly.

With Grant's arm draped across her shoulders, they walked over to the bank of elevators. He punched the button for the nineteenth floor, and the doors slid silently shut. Jane said dazedly, "We're safe."

"Having trouble believing it?"

"I'm going to get that man. He's not going to get off scot-free!"

"He won't," Grant drawled. "He'll be taken care of, through channels."

"I don't want 'channels' to take care of him! I want to do it myself!"

He smiled down at her. "You're a bloodthirsty little wench, aren't you? I almost think you enjoyed this."

"Only parts of it," she replied, giving him a slow smile.

Their room was spacious, with a terrace for sunning, a separate sitting area with a dining table and a stunningly modern bath. Jane poked her head into it and withdrew with a beatific smile on her face. "All the modern conveniences," she crowed.

Grant was studying the in-house registry for room service. Picking up the phone, he ordered two enormous breakfasts, and Jane's mouth watered at the thought. It had been almost twenty-four hours since they'd eaten.

While they were waiting for their food, she began the process of making a phone call to Connecticut. It took about five minutes for the call to go through, and Jane sat with the receiver gripped tightly in her hand, taut with the need to hear her parents' voices.

"Mom? Mom, it's Jane! I'm all right—don't cry, I can't talk to you if you're crying," Jane said, and wiped away a few tears herself. "Put Dad on the line so I can tell him what's going on. We'll blubber together just as soon as I get home, I promise." She waited a few moments, smiling mistily at Grant, her dark eyes liquid.

"Jane? Is it really you?" Her father's voice boomed across the line.

"Yes, it really is. I'm in Mexico City. Grant got me out; we just flew in a few minutes ago."

Her father made a choked sound, and Jane realized that he was crying, too, but he controlled himself. "Well, what now?" he demanded. "When are you going to be here? Where are you going from there?"

"I don't know," she said, lifting her brows at Grant and taking the receiver from her ear. "Where are we going next?"

He took the phone from her. "This is Sullivan. We'll probably be here for a couple of days, getting some paperwork straightened out. We came in here without being checked for passports, but I'll have to make some calls before we can get into the States. Yes, we're okay. I'll let you know as soon as I find out something."

When he hung up, he turned to find Jane surveying him with pursed lips. "How did we get here without being checked for passports?"

"A few people turned their heads, that's all. They knew we were coming through. I'll report our passports as being lost, and get duplicates from the American Embassy. No big deal."

"How did you manage to set all that up so quickly? I know this wasn't the original plan."

"No, but we had some inside help." Sabin had been as good as his word, Grant reflected. All the old contacts had been there, and they had all been notified to give him whatever he needed.

"Your… former business associates?" Jane hazarded a guess.

"The less you know, the better. You pick up on this too damned quickly. Like hot-wiring that truck. Had you ever done it before?"

"No, but I watched you do it the first time," she explained, her eyes full of innocence.

He grunted. "Don't waste your time giving me that wide-eyed look."

A tap on the door and a singsong voice announced that room service had arrived in record time. Grant checked through the fish-eye viewer, then unbolted the door and let the young boy in. The aroma of hot coffee filled the room, and Jane's mouth started watering. She hovered over the boy as he set the food out on the table.

"Look at this," she crooned. "Fresh oranges and melon. Toast. Apricot Danish. Eggs. Butter. Real coffee!"

"You're drooling," Grant teased, giving the boy a generous tip, but he was just as ravenous, and between them they destroyed the array of food. Every crumb was gone and the pot of coffee was empty before they looked at each other and smiled.

"I feel almost human again," Jane sighed. "Now for a hot shower!"

She began unlacing her boots, pulling them off and sighing in relief as she wiggled her toes. Glancing at him, she saw that he was watching her with that lopsided smile that she loved so much. Her heart kicked into time and a half rhythm. "Aren't you going to shower with me?" she asked innocently, sauntering into the bathroom.

She was already under the deliciously warm spray of water, her head tilted up so it hit her directly in the face, when the shower door slid open and he joined her. She turned, wiping the moisture from her eyes, a smile ready on her lips, but the smile faded when she saw the mottled bruises on his ribcage and abdomen. "Oh, Grant," she whispered, reaching out to run her fingers lightly over the dark, ugly splotches. "I'm so sorry."

He gave her a quizzical look. He was sore and stiff, but nothing was broken and the bruises would fade. He'd suffered much worse than this, many times. Of course, if Turego had been able to carry the beating as far as he'd wanted, Grant knew that he probably would have died of internal injuries. But it hadn't happened, so he didn't worry about it. He caught her chin, turning her face up to him. "We're both covered with bruises, honey, in case you haven't noticed. I'm okay." He covered her mouth with his, tasting her sweetness with his tongue, easing her against him.

Their wet, naked bodies created a marvelous friction against each other, heating them, tightening the coil of desire. The rather boring process of soaping and rinsing became a lingering series of strokes, her hands slipping over the muscles and intriguing hardness of his body, his finding the soft curves and slopes of hers, the enticing depths. He lifted her off her feet and bent her back over his arm, kissing her breasts and sucking at her nipples until they were hard and reddened, tasting the freshness of newly soaped skin and the sweetness of her flesh that no soap could ever disguise. Jane writhed against him, her legs twining with his, and heat fogged his mind as he thrust himself against the juncture of her thighs.

She wanted him, wanted him, wanted him. Her body ached and burned. The bed was suddenly too far away. Her legs parted, lifting to wrap around his waist, and with a hoarse cry he pinned her to the wall. She shuddered as he drove into her, going as deep as he could with a single, powerful thrust, as if any distance at all between them was far too much. Digging his fingers into her hair, he pulled her head back and kissed her, his mouth wild and rough, the kiss deep, his tongue twining with hers, the water beating down on them. The power of his thrusts made her consciousness dim, but she clung to him, whimpering, begging him not to stop. He couldn't have stopped, couldn't even have slowed, his body demanding release inside her. The red mists that clouded his mind blocked out everything but the hot ecstasy of the way her body sheathed him, so softly, so tightly.

She cried out again and again as the almost unbearable waves of pleasure crashed over her. She clung tightly to his shoulders, trembling and shivering, the velvet clasp of her body driving him to the edge. He poured himself into her, heaving against her, feeling that he was dying a little, and yet so intensely alive that he almost screamed from the conflict.

They barely made it to the bed. Drying off had taken all their energy, and Jane was so weak she could barely walk. Grant was shaking in every muscle of his big body. They rumbled onto the bed, not caring that their wet hair soaked the pillows.

Grant reached out for her. "Crawl up here," he rumbled, hauling her on top of him. Blissfully, her eyes closing, she made herself comfortable on the hard expanse of his chest. He adjusted her legs, parting them, and her lashes fluttered open as he eased into her. A purr of pleasure escaped her lips, but she was so sleepy, so tired… "Now we can sleep," he said, his lips moving on her hair.

The room was hot when they awoke, the Mexican sun broiling through the closed curtains. Their skin was stuck together with perspiration and made a wet, sucking noise as Grant lifted her off him. He got up and turned the air-conditioning on full blast, and stood for a moment with the cold air hitting his naked body. Then he came back to the bed and turned her onto her back.

They scarcely left the bed that day. They made love, napped and woke to make love again. She couldn't get enough of him, nor he, it seemed, of her. There was no sense of urgency now to their lovemaking, only a deep reluctance to be parted from each other. He taught her the unlimited reaches of her own sensuality, tasting her all over, making love to her with his mouth until she was shivering and shuddering with pleasure, mindless, helpless. She told him that she loved him. She couldn't keep the words unsaid, not now, when she'd already told him anyway and soon the world would intrude on them again.

Night came, and finally they left the room. Walking hand in hand in the warm Mexican night, they sought out some shops that were open late. Jane bought a pink sundress that made her tanned skin look like honey, a pair of sandals and new underwear. Grant wasn't much on shopping, so she blithely picked out jeans, loafers and a white polo shirt for him. "You might as well change," she instructed, pushing him toward the dressing room. "We're going out to eat tonight."

There wasn't any talking her out of it, either. It wasn't until he was seated across from her in a dimly lit restaurant with a bottle of wine between them that he realized this was the first time in years that he'd been with a woman in a strictly social setting. They had nothing to do but eat and talk, sip the wine, and think about what they were going to do when they got back to the hotel. Even after he'd retired, he'd kept to himself on the farm, sometimes going for weeks without seeing another human being. When the need for supplies had forced him to go into town, he'd gone straight there and back, a lot of times without speaking to anyone. He hadn't been able to stand anyone else around him. But now he was relaxed, not even thinking about the strangers surrounding him, accepting their presence but not noticing them, because his mind and his senses were on Jane.

She was radiant, incandescent with energy. Her dark eyes shone; her tanned skin glowed; her laughter sparkled. Her breasts thrust against the bodice of the sundress, her nipples puckered by the coolness of the restaurant, and desire began to stir inside him again. They didn't have much more time together; soon they would be back in the States, and his job would be finished. It was too soon, far too soon. He hadn't had his fill yet of the taste of her, the wild sweetness of her body beneath him, or the way her laughter somehow eased all the knots of tension inside him.

They went back to the hotel, and back to bed. He made love to her furiously, trying to sate himself, trying to hoard enough memories to hold him during the long, empty years ahead. Being alone was a habit deeply ingrained in him; he wanted her, but couldn't see taking her back to the farm with him, and there was no way he could fit into her world. She liked having people around her, while he was more comfortable with a wall at his back. She was outgoing, while he was controlled, secretive.

She knew, too, that it was almost over. Lying on his chest, with the darkness wrapped around them like a blanket, she talked. It was a gift that she gave him, the tales of her childhood, where she'd gone to school, her food and music preferences, what she liked to read. Because she talked, he found it easier to return the favor, his voice low and rusty as he told her about the white-haired young boy he'd been, his skin burned dark by the hot, south Georgia summers, running wild in the swamp. He'd learned to hunt and fish almost as soon as he'd learned how to walk. He told her about playing football during high school, chasing after the cheerleaders, getting drunk and raising hell, then trying to sneak into the house so his mother wouldn't catch him.

Her fingers played in the hair on his chest, aware that silence had fallen because he'd reached the point in his story where his life had changed. There were no more easy tales of growing up.

"Then what happened?" she whispered.

His chest rose and fell. "Vietnam happened. I was drafted when I was eighteen. I was too damned good at sneaking through jungles, so that's where they put me. I went home, once, for R & R, but the folks were just the same as always, while I was nothing like what I had been. We couldn't even talk to each other. So I went back."

"And stayed?"

"Yeah. I stayed." His voice was flat.

"How did you get into the secret agent business, or whatever you call it?"

"Covert activities. High risk missions. The war ended, and I came home, but there was nothing for me to do. What was I going to do, work in a grocery store, when I'd been trained to such an edge that people would be taking their lives in their hands to walk up to me and ask the price of eggs? I guess I'd have settled down eventually, but I didn't want to hang around to find out. I was embarrassing the folks, and I was a stranger to them anyway. When an old colleague contacted me, I took him up on his offer."

"But you're retired now. Did you go back to Georgia?"

"Just for a few days, to let them know where I'd be. I couldn't settle there; too many people knew me, and I wanted to be left alone. So I bought a farm close to the mountains in Tennessee, and I've been hibernating there ever since. Until your dad hired me to fetch you home."

"Have you ever married? Been engaged?"

"No," he said, and kissed her. "That's enough questions. Go to sleep."

"Grant?"

"Hmmm?"

"Do you think he's really given up?"

"Who?"

"Turego."

Amusement laced his voice. "Honey, I promise you, he'll be taken care of. Don't worry about it. Now that you're safe and sound, steps can be taken to neutralize him."

"You're using some ominous sounding phrases. What do'taken care of' and 'neutralize' mean?"

"That he's going to be spending some time in those gracious Central American jails that everyone hears so much about. Go to sleep."

She obeyed, her lips curved in a contented smile, his arms securely around her.

* * * * *

Someone had pulled strings again. It could have been her father, or the mysterious "friend" of Grant's who kept arranging things, or possibly Grant had intimidated someone at the embassy. However it happened, the next afternoon they had passports. They could have taken the next flight to Dallas, but instead they spent another night together, making love in that king-size bed, the door securely bolted. She didn't want to leave. As long as they were still in Mexico City, she could pretend that it wasn't over, that the job wasn't finished. But her parents were waiting for her, and Grant had his own life to go back to. She had to find another job, as well as take care of the little chore that had gotten her into so much trouble to begin with. There was no way they could stay in Mexico.

Still, tears burned the back of her eyes when they boarded the jet that would take them to Dallas. She knew that Grant had booked separate flights for them from Dallas; she was going on to New York, and he was flying to Knoxville. Their goodbyes would be said in the vast, busy Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, and she couldn't stand it. If she didn't get a tight hold on herself she'd be squalling like a baby, and he wouldn't want that. If he wanted more of her than what he'd already had, he'd have asked her, because she'd made it more than obvious that she was willing to give him whatever he wanted. But he hadn't asked, so he didn't want her. She'd known that this time would come, and she'd accepted it, taken the risk, grabbed for what happiness she could get. Pay up time had come.

She controlled her tears. She read the airline magazine; and was even able to comprehend what she was reading. For a while she held his hand, but she released it when the in-flight meal was served. She ordered a gin and tonic, gulped it down, then ordered another.

Grant eyed her narrowly, but she gave him a bright, glittering smile, determined not to let him see that she was shattering on the inside.

Too soon, far too soon, they landed at Dallas and filed out of the plane through the portable tunnel. Jane clutched the dirty, battered backpack, for the first time realizing that his boots and fatigues were in it along with her clothing. "I need your address," she chattered brightly, nervously. "To mail your clothes to you. Unless you want to buy a bag in the airport shop, that is. We have plenty of time before our flights."

He checked his watch. "You have twenty-eight minutes, so we'd better find your gate. Do you have your ticket?"

"Yes, it's right here. What about your clothes?"

"I'll be in touch with your father. Don't worry about it."

Yes, of course; there was the matter of payment for dragging her out of Costa Rica. His face was hard and expressionless, his amber eyes cool. She held out her hand, not noticing how it was shaking. "Well, goodbye, then. It's—" She broke off. What could she say? It's been nice meeting you? She swallowed. "It's been fun."

He looked down at her extended hand, then back up at her, disbelief edging into the coolness of his eyes. He said slowly, "The hell you say," caught her hand, and jerked her into his arms. His mouth was hot, covering hers, his tongue curling slowly into her mouth as if they weren't surrounded by curiously gawking people. She clung to him, shaking.

He set her away from him. His jaw was clenched. "Go on. Your folks are waiting for you. I'll be in touch in a few days." The last slipped out; he'd intended this to be the final break, but her dark eyes were so lost and full of pain, and she'd kissed him so hungrily, that he couldn't stop the words. One more time, then. He'd give himself one more time with her.

She nodded, drawing herself up. She wasn't going to break down and cry all over him. He almost wished she would cry, because then he'd have an excuse to hold her again. But she was stronger than that. "Goodbye," she said, then turned and walked away from him.

She barely saw where she was going; people blurred in her vision, and she stubbornly blinked her eyes to keep the tears back. Well, she was alone again. He'd said he'd be in touch, but she knew he wouldn't. It was over. She had to accept that and be grateful for the time she'd had. It had been obvious from the first that Grant Sullivan wasn't a man to be tied down.

Someone touched her arm, the touch warm and strong, a man's touch. She stopped, wild hope springing into her breast, but when she turned she found that it wasn't Grant who had stopped her. The man had dark hair and eyes, and his skin was dark, his features strongly Latin. "Jane Greer?" he asked politely.

She nodded, wondering how he'd known her name and recognized her. His grip tightened on her arm. "Would you please come with me," he said, and though his voice remained polite, it was an order, not a question.

Alarm skittered through her, jerking her out of her misery. She smiled at the man and swung the backpack by its straps, catching him on the side of the head with it and sending him staggering. From the solid'thunk' it made, she knew Grant's boots had hit him.

"Grant!" she screamed, her voice slicing through the bustle of thousands of people. "Grant!"

The man caught himself and lunged for her. Jane began running back in the direction she'd come from, dodging around people. Up ahead she saw Grant coming through the crowd like a running back, shoving people out of his path. The man caught up with her, catching her arm; then Grant was there. People were screaming and scattering, and the airport guards were running toward them. Grant sent the man sprawling, then grabbed Jane's arm and ran for the nearest exit, ducking past the milling crowds and ignoring the shouts to stop.

"What the hell's going on?" he roared, jerking her out into the bright Texas sunlight. The humid heat settled over them.

"I don't know! That man just came up to me and asked if my name was Jane Greer; then he caught my arm and told me to come with him, so I hit him in the head with the backpack and started screaming."

"Makes perfect sense to me," he muttered, flagging a cab and putting her in it, then crawling in beside her.

"Where to, folks?" the cab driver asked.

"Downtown."

"Any particular place downtown?"

"I'll tell you where to stop."

The driver shrugged. As they pulled away from the curb there seemed to be a lot of people spilling out of the terminal, but Jane didn't look back. She was still shaking. "It can't be Turego again, can it?"

Grant shrugged. "It's possible, if he has enough money. I'm going to make a phone call."

She'd thought she was safe, that they were both safe. After the two peaceful days spent in Mexico, the sudden fear seemed that much sharper and more acrid. She couldn't stop trembling.

They didn't go all the way into Dallas. Grant instructed the driver to drop them at a shopping mall. "Why a shopping mall?" Jane asked, looking around.

"There are telephones here, and it's safer than standing in a phone booth on the side of a street." He put his arm around her and hugged her briefly to him. "Don't look so worried, honey."

They went inside and found a bank of pay telephones, but it was a busy day and all the lines were in use. They waited while a teenager argued extensively with her mother about how late she could stay out that night, but at last she hung up and stormed away, evidently having lost the argument. Grant stepped in and commandeered the telephone before anyone else could reach it. Standing close by him, Jane watched as he dropped in the coins, punched in a number, then dropped in more coins. He leaned casually against the fieldstone nook that housed the telephone, listening to the rings on the other end.

"Sullivan," he finally drawled when the phone was answered. "She was nearly grabbed in DFW." He listened a moment; then his eyes flicked to Jane. "Okay, I got it. We'll be there. By the way, that was a dumb move. She could've killed the guy." He hung up, and his lips twitched.

"Well?" Jane demanded.

"You just belted an agent."

"An agent? You mean, one of your friend's men?"

"Yeah. We're taking a little detour. You're going to be debriefed. It was left up to some other people to pick you up, and they decided to pick you up after we'd parted company, since I'm no longer in the business and this doesn't officially concern me. Sabin will pin their ears back."

"Sabin? Is he your friend?"

He was smiling down at her. "He's the one." He stroked her cheekbone very gently with the backs of his fingers. "And that's a name you're going to forget, honey. Why don't you call your parents and let them know that you won't be in tonight? It'll be tomorrow; you can call them again when we know something definite."

"Are you going, too?"

"I wouldn't miss it." He grinned a little wolfishly, already anticipating Kell's reaction to Jane.

"But where are we going?"

"Virginia, but don't tell your parents that. Just tell them that you missed your flight."

She reached for the phone, then stopped. "Your friend must be pretty important."

"He's got some power," Grant understated.

So, they must know about the microfilm. Jane punched in her credit card number. She'd be glad to get the whole thing over with, and at least Grant was going to be with her one more day. Just one more day! It was a reprieve, but she didn't know if she'd have the strength for another goodbye.

Chapter Thirteen

The "Virginia countryside around the place was quiet and serene, the trees green, the flowering shrubs well-tended. It looked rather like her father's Connecticut estate. Everyone was polite, and several people greeted Grant, but Jane noticed that even the ones who spoke to him did so hesitantly, as if they were a little wary of him.

Kell's office was right where it had always been, and the door still had no name on it. The agent who had escorted them knocked quietly. "Sullivan is here, sir."

"Send them in."

The first thing Jane noticed was the old-fashioned charm of the room. The ceilings were high; the mantel was surely the original one that had been built with the house over a hundred years before. Tall glass doors behind the big desk let in the late afternoon sun. They also placed the man behind the desk in silhouette, while anyone who came in the door was spotlighted by the blazing sun, something George had told her about. He rose to his feet as they entered, a tall man, maybe not quite as tall as Grant, but lean and hard with a whipcord toughness that wasn't maintained by sitting behind a desk.

He stepped forward to greet them. "You look like hell, Sullivan," he said, and the two men shook hands; then he turned his eyes on her, and for the first time Jane felt his power. His eyes were so black that there was no light in them at all; they absorbed light, drawing it into the depths of the irises. His hair was thick and black, his complexion dark, and there was an intense energy about him that seared her.

"Ms. Greer," he said, holding out his hand.

"Mr. Sabin," she returned, calmly shaking his hand.

"I have a very embarrassed agent in Dallas."

"He shouldn't be," Grant drawled behind her. "She let him off easy."

"Grant's boots were in the pack," Jane explained. "That's what stunned him so badly when I hit him in the head."

There was the first hint in Sabin's eyes that Jane wasn't quite what he'd expected. Grant stood behind her, his arms calmly folded, and waited.

Sabin examined her open expression, the catlike slant of her dark eyes, the light dusting of freckles across her cheekbones. Then he quickly glanced at Grant, who was planted like the Rock of Gibraltar behind her. He could question her, but he had the feeling that Grant wouldn't let her be harassed in any way. It wasn't like Sullivan to get involved, but he was out of the business now, so the old rules didn't apply. She wasn't a great beauty, but there was a lively charm about her that almost made Sabin want to smile. Maybe she'd gotten close to Sullivan. Sabin didn't trust that openness, however, because he knew more about her now than he had in the beginning.

"Ms. Greer," he began slowly, "did you know that George Persall was—"

"Yes, I did," Jane interrupted cheerfully. "I helped him sometimes, but not often, because he liked to use different methods every time. I believe this is what you want." She opened the backpack and began digging in it. "I know it's in here. There!" She produced the small roll of film, placing it on his desk.

Both men looked thunderstruck. "You've just been carrying it around?" Sabin asked in disbelief.

"Well, I didn't have a chance to hide it. Sometimes I put it in my pocket. That way Turego could search my room all he wanted and he'd never find anything. All of you spy types try to make everything too complicated. George always told me to keep it simple."

Grant began to chuckle. He couldn't help it; it was funny. "Jane, why didn't you tell me you had the microfilm?"

"I thought it would be safer for you if you didn't know about it."

Again Sabin looked thunderstruck, as if he couldn't believe anyone would actually feel the need to protect Grant Sullivan. As Kell was normally the most impassive of men, Grant knew that Jane had tilted him off balance, just as she did everyone she met. Sabin coughed to cover his reaction.

"Ms. Greer," he asked cautiously, "do you know what's on the film?"

"No. Neither did George."

Grant was laughing again. "Go ahead," he told Sabin. "Tell her about the film. Or, better yet, show her. She'll enjoy it."

Sabin shook his head, then picked up the film and pulled it out, unwinding it. Grant produced his cigarette lighter, leaned forward, and set the end of the film on fire. The three watched as the flames slowly ate up the length of celluloid until it burned close to Sabin's fingers and he dropped it into a large ashtray. "The film," Sabin explained, "was a copy of something we don't want anyone else to know. All we wanted was for it to be destroyed before anyone saw it."

With the stench of burning plastic in her nostrils, Jane silently watched the last of the film curl and crumble. All they'd wanted was for it to be destroyed, and she'd hauled it through a jungle and across half a continent—just to hand it over and watch it burn. Her lips twitched; she was afraid of making a scene, so she tried to control the urge. But it was irresistible; it rolled upward, and a giggle escaped. She turned, looking at Grant, and between them flashed the memory of everything they'd been through. She giggled again, then they were both laughing, Jane hanging on to his shirt because she was laughing so hard her knees had gone limp.

"I fell down a cliff," she gasped. "We stole a truck… shot another truck…! broke Turego's nose… all to watch it burn!"

Grant went into another spasm of laughter, holding his sore ribs and bending double. Sabin watched them clinging to each other and laughing uproariously. Curiosity seized him. "Why did you shoot a truck?" he asked; then suddenly he was laughing, too.

An agent paused outside the door, his head tilted, listening. No, it was impossible. Sabin never laughed.

They lay in bed in a hotel in the middle of Washington, D.C., pleasantly tired. They had made love as soon as the door was locked behind them, falling on the bed and removing only the necessary clothing. But that had been hours before, and now they were completely nude, slipping gradually into sleep.

Grant's hand moved up and down her back in a lazy pattern. "Just how involved were you in Persall's activities?"

"Not very," she murmured. "Oh, I knew about them. I had to know, so I could cover for him if I had to. And he sometimes used me as a courier, but not very often. Still, he talked to me a lot, telling me things. He was a strange, lonely man."

"Was he your lover?"

She lifted her head from his chest, surprised. "George? Of course not!"

"Why 'of course not'? He was a man, wasn't he? And he was in your bedroom when he died."

She paused. "George had a problem, a medical one. He wasn't capable of being anyone's lover."

"So that part of the report was wrong, too."

"Deliberately. He used me as a sort of shield."

He put his hand in her hair and held her for his kiss. "I'm glad. He was too old for you."

Jane watched him with wise, dark eyes. "Even if he hadn't been, I wasn't interested. You might as well know, you're the only lover I've ever had. Until I met you, I'd never… wanted anyone."

"And when you met me…?" he murmured.

"I wanted." She lowered her head and kissed him, wrapping her arms around him, slithering her body over his until she felt his hardening response.

"I wanted, too," he said, his words a mere breath over her skin.

"I love you." The words were a cry of pain, launched by desperation, because she knew this was definitely the last time unless she took the chance. "Will you marry me?"

"Jane, don't."

"Don't what? Tell you that I love you? Or ask you to marry me?" She sat up, moving her legs astride him, and shook her dark hair back behind her shoulders.

"We can't live together," he explained, his eyes turning dark gold. "I can't give you what you need, and you'd be miserable."

"I'll be miserable anyway," she said reasonably, striving for a light tone. "I'd rather be miserable with you than miserable without you."

"I'm a loner. Marriage is a partnership, and I'd rather go it alone. Face it, honey. We're good together in bed, but that's all there is."

"Maybe for you. I love you." Despite herself, she couldn't keep the echo of pain out of her voice.

"Do you? We were under a lot of stress. It's human nature to turn to each other. I'd have been surprised if we hadn't made love."

"Please, spare me your combat psychology! I'm not a child, or stupid! I know when I love someone, and damn it, I love you! You don't have to like it, but don't try to talk me out of it!"

"All right." He lay on his back, looking up into her angry eyes. "Do you want me to get another room?"

"No. This is our last night together, and we're going to spend it together."

"Even if we're fighting?"

"Why not?" she dared.

"I don't want to fight," he said, lunging up and twisting. Jane found herself on her back, blinking up at him in astonishment. Slowly he entered her, pushing her legs high. She closed her eyes, excitement spiraling through her. He was right; the time was far better spent making love.

She didn't try again to convince him that they had a future together. She knew from experience just how hard-headed he was; he'd have to figure it out for himself. So she spent her time loving him, trying to make certain that he never forgot her, that no other woman could begin to give him the pleasure that she did. This would be her goodbye.

Late in the night she leaned over him. "You're afraid," she accused softly. "You've seen so much that you're afraid to let yourself love anyone, because you know how easily a world can be wrecked."

His voice was tired. "Jane, let it be."

"All right. That's my last word, except for this: if you decide to take a chance, come get me."

She crept out of bed early the next morning and left him sleeping. She knew that he was too light a sleeper not to have awakened some time during the shower she took, or while she was dressing, but he didn't roll over or in any way indicate that he was awake, so she preserved the pretence between them. Without even kissing him, she slipped out the door. After all, they'd already said their goodbyes.

At the sound of the door closing Grant rolled over in the bed, his eyes bleak as he stared at the empty room.

Jane and her parents fell into each other's arms, laughing and crying and hugging each other exuberantly. Her return called for a family celebration that lasted hours, so it was late that night before she and her father had any time alone. Jane had few secrets from her father; he was too shrewd, too realistic. By silent, instinctive agreement, they kept from her mother the things that would upset her, but Jane was like her father in that she had an inner toughness.

She told him how the entire situation in Costa Rica had come about, and even told him about the trek through the rain forest. Because he was shrewd, he picked up on the nuances in her voice when she mentioned Grant.

"You're in love with Sullivan, aren't you?"

She nodded, sipping her glass of wine. "You met him. What did you think about him?" The answer was important to her, because she trusted her father's judgment of character.

"I thought him unusual. There's something in his eyes that's almost scary. But I trusted him with my daughter's life, if that tells you what you want to know, and I'd do so again."

"Would you mind having him in the family?"

"I'd welcome him with open arms. I think he could keep you in one place," James said grumpily.

"Well, I asked him to marry me, but he turned me down. I'm going to give him a while to stew over it; then I'm going to fight dirty."

Her father grinned, the quick, cheerful grin that his daughter had inherited. "What are you planning?"

"I'm going to chase that man like he's never been chased before. I think I'll stay here for a week or two; then I'm going to Europe."

"But he's not in Europe!"

"I know. I'll chase him from a distance. The idea is for him to know how much he misses me, and he'll miss me a lot more when he finds out how far away I am."

"But how is he going to find out?"

"I'll arrange that somehow. And even if it doesn't work, a trip to Europe is never a waste!"

It was odd how much he missed her. She'd never been to the farm, but sometimes it seemed haunted by her. He'd think he heard her say something and turn to find no one there. At night… God, the nights were awful! He couldn't sleep, missing her soft weight sprawled on top of him.

He tried to lose himself in hard physical work. Chores piled up fast on a farm, and he'd been gone for two weeks.

With the money he'd been paid for finding Jane, he was able to free the farm from debt and still have plenty left over, so he could have hired someone to do the work for him. But the work had been therapy for him when he'd first come here, still weak from his wounds, and so tightly drawn that a pine cone dropping from a tree in the night had been enough to send him diving from the bed, reaching for his knife.

So he labored in the sun, doing the backbreaking work of digging new holes for the fence posts, putting up new sections of fencing, patching and painting the barn. He reroofed the house, worked on the old tractor that had come with the farm; and thought about doing more planting the next spring. All he'd planted so far was a few vegetables for himself, but if he was going to own a farm, he might as well farm it. A man wouldn't get rich at it, not on this scale, but he knew how to do it. Working the earth gave him a measure of peace, as if it put him in contact with the boy he'd once been, before war had changed his life.

In the distance loomed the mountains, the great, misty mountains where the ghosts of the Cherokee still walked. The vast slopes were uninhabited now, but then, only a few hardy souls other than the Cherokee had ever called the mountains home. Jane would like the mountains. They were older, wreathed in silvery veils, once the mightiest mountain range on earth, but worn down by more years than people could imagine. There were places in those mountains where time stood still.

The mountains, and the earth, had healed him, and the process had been so gradual that he hadn't realized he was healed until now. Perhaps the final healing had come when Jane had shown him how to laugh again.

He had told her to let it be, and she had. She had left in the quiet morning, without a word, because he'd told her to go. She loved him; he knew that. He'd pretended that it was something else, the pressure of stress that had brought them together, but even then he'd known better, and so had she.

Well, hell! He missed her so badly that he hurt, and if this wasn't love, then he hoped he never loved anyone, because he didn't think he could stand it. He couldn't get her out of his mind, and her absence was an empty ache that he couldn't fill, couldn't ease.

She'd been right; he was afraid to take the chance, afraid to leave himself open to more hurt. But he was hurting anyway. He'd be a fool if he let her get away.

But first there were old rifts to try to heal.

He loved his parents, and he knew they loved him, but they were simple people, living close to the earth, and he'd turned into someone they didn't recognize. His sister was a pretty, blond woman, content with her job at the local library, her quiet husband, and her three children. It had been a couple of years since he'd even seen his nephew and two nieces. When he'd stopped by the year before to tell his parents that he'd retired and had bought a farm in Tennessee, they'd all been so uncomfortable that he'd stayed for only a few hours, and had left without seeing Rae, or the kids.

So he drove down to Georgia, and stood on the weathered old porch, knocking on the door of the house where he'd grown up. His mother came to the door, wiping her hands on her apron. It was close to noon; as always, as it had been from the time he could remember, she was cooking lunch for his father. But they didn't call it lunch in this part of the country; the noon meal was dinner, and the evening meal was supper.

Surprise lit her honey-brown eyes, the eyes that were so like his, only darker. "Why, son, this is a surprise. What on earth are you knocking for? Why didn't you just come in?"

"I didn't want to get shot," he said honestly.

"Now, you know I don't let your daddy keep a gun in the house. The only gun is that old shotgun, out in the barn. What makes you say a thing like that?" Turning, she went back to the kitchen, and he followed. Everything in the old frame house was familiar, as familiar to him as his own face.

He settled his weight in one of the straight chairs that were grouped around the kitchen table. This was the table he'd eaten at as a boy. "Mama," he said slowly, "I've been shot at so much that I guess I think that's the normal way of things."

She was still for a moment, her head bent; then she resumed making her biscuits. "I know, son. We've always known. But we didn't know how to reach you, how to bring you back to us again. You was still a boy when you left, but you came back a man, and we didn't know how to talk to you."

"There wasn't any talking to me. I was still too raw, too wild. But the farm that I bought, up in Tennessee… it's helped."

He didn't have to elaborate, and he knew it. Grace Sullivan had the simple wisdom of people who lived close to the land. She was a farm girl, had never pretended to be anything else, and he loved her because of it.

"Will you stay for dinner?"

"I'd like to stay for a couple of days, if I won't be messing up any plans."

"Grant Sullivan, you know your daddy and I don't have any plans to go off gallivanting anywhere."

She sounded just like she had when he had been five years old and had managed to get his clothes dirty as fast as she could put them on him. He remembered how she'd looked then, her hair dark, her face smooth and young, her honey-gold eyes sparkling at him.

He laughed, because everything was getting better, and his mother glanced at him in surprise. It had been twenty years since she'd heard her son laugh. "That's good," he said cheerfully. "Because it'll take me at least that long to tell you about the woman I'm going to marry."

"What!" She whirled on him, laughing, too. "You're pulling my leg! Are you really going to get married? Tell me about her!"

"Mama, you'll love her," he said. "She's nuts."

He'd never thought that finding her would be so hard. Somehow he'd thought that it would be as simple as calling her father and getting her address from him, but he should have known. With Jane, nothing was ever as it should be.

To begin with, it took him three days to get in touch with her father. Evidently her parents had been out of town, and the housekeeper either hadn't known where Jane was, or she'd been instructed not to give out any information. Considering Jane's circumstances, he thought it was probably the latter. So he cooled his heels for three days until he was finally able to speak to her father, but that wasn't much better.

"She's in Europe," James explained easily enough. "She stayed here for about a week, then took off again."

Grant felt like cursing. "Where in Europe?"

"I don't really know. She was vague about it. You know Jane."

He was afraid that he did. "Has she called?"

"Yes, a couple of times."

"Mr. Hamilton, I need to talk to her. When she calls again, would you find out where she is and tell her to stay put until I get in touch?"

"That could be a couple of weeks. Jane doesn't call regularly. But if it's urgent, you may know someone who knows exactly where she is. She did mention that she's talked to a friend of yours… let's see, what was his name?"

"Sabin," Grant supplied, grinding his teeth in rage.

"Yes, that's it. Sabin. Why don't you give him a call? It may save you a lot of time."

Grant didn't want to call Kell; he wanted to see him face to face and strangle him. Damn him! If he'd recruited Jane into that gray network…!

He was wasting time and money chasing over the country after her, and his temper was short when he reached Virginia. He didn't have the clearance to go in, so he called Kell directly. "Sullivan. Clear me through. I'll be there in five minutes."

"Grant—"

Grant hung up, not wanting to hear it over the phone.

Ten minutes later he was leaning over Kell's desk. "Where is she?"

"Monte Carlo."

"Damn it!" he yelled, pounding his fist on the desk. "How could you drag her into this?"

"I didn't drag her," Kell said coolly, his dark eyes watchful. "She called me. She said she'd noticed something funny and thought I might like to know. She was right; I was highly interested."

"How could she call you? Your number isn't exactly listed."

"I asked her the same thing. It seems she was standing beside you when you called me from Dallas."

Grant swore, rubbing his eyes. "I should have known. I should have been expecting it after she hot-wired that truck. She watched me do it, just once, then did it herself the next time."

"If it's any consolation, she didn't get it exactly right. She remembered the numbers, but not the right order. She told me I was the fifth call she'd placed."

"Oh, hell. What kind of situation is she in?"

"A pretty explosive one. She's stumbled across a high rolling counterfeiter. He has some high quality plates of the pound, the franc and several denominations of our currency. He's setting up the deal now. Some of our comrades are very interested."

"I can imagine. Just what does she think she can do?"

"She's going to try to steal the plates."

Grant went white. "And you were going to let her?"

"Damn it, Grant!" Kell exploded. "It's not a matter of letting her and you know it! The problem is stopping her without tipping the guy off and sending him so deep underground we can't find him. I've got agents tiptoeing all around her, but the guy thinks he's in love with her, and his buyer has watchdogs sniffing around, and we simply can't snatch her without blowing the whole thing sky high!"

"All right, all right. I'll get her out of it."

"How?" Kell demanded.

"I'll get the plates myself, then jerk her out of there and make damned certain she never calls you again!"

"I would deeply appreciate it," Kell said. "What are you going to do with her?"

"Marry her."

Something lightened in Kell's dark face, and he leaned back in his chair, looping his hands behind his head. "Well, I'll be damned. Do you know what you're getting into? That woman doesn't think like most people."

That was a polite way of saying it, but Kell wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know. Within moments of meeting her, Grant had realized that Jane was just a little unorthodox. But he loved her, and she couldn't get into too much trouble on the farm.

"Yeah, I know. By the way, you're invited to the wedding."

Jane smiled at Felix, her eyes twinkling at him. He was such a funny little guy; she really liked him, despite the fact that he was a counterfeiter and was planning to do something that could really damage her country. He was slightly built, with shy eyes and a faint stutter. He loved to gamble, but had atrocious luck; that is, he'd had atrocious luck until Jane had started sitting beside him. Since then he'd been winning regularly, and he was now devoted to her.

Despite everything she was having fun in Monte Carlo. Grant was being slow coming around, but she hadn't been bored. If she had trouble sleeping, if she sometimes woke to find her cheeks wet, that was something she had to accept. She missed him. It was as if part of herself were gone. Without him there was no one she could trust, no one in whose arms she could rest.

It was a dangerous tightrope she was walking, and the excitement of it helped keep her from settling into depression. The only thing was, how much longer was it going to last? If she saw that Felix was finally going to make up his mind who to sell to, she would be forced to do something—fast—before the plates got into the wrong hands.

Felix was winning again, as he had every night since he'd met Jane. The elegant casino was buzzing, and the chandeliers rivaled in brilliance the diamonds that were roped about necks and dripping from ears. The men in their formal evening wear, the women in their gowns and jewels, casually wagering fortunes on the roll of the dice or the turn of a card, all created an atmosphere that was unequaled anywhere in the world. Jane fit into it easily, slim and graceful in her black silk gown, her shoulders and back bare. Jet earrings dangled to her shoulders, and her hair was piled on top of her head in a careless, becoming twist. She wore no necklace, no bracelets, only the earrings that touched the glowing gold of her skin.

Across the table Bruno was watching them closely. He was becoming impatient with Felix's dithering, and his impatience was likely to force her hand.

Well, why not? She'd really waited as long as she could. If Grant had been interested, he'd have shown up before now.

She stood and bent down to kiss Felix on the forehead. "I'm going back to the hotel," she said, smiling at him. "I have a headache."

He looked up, dismayed. "Are you really ill?"

"It's just a headache. I was on the beach too long today. You don't have to leave; stay and enjoy your game."

He began to look panicky, and she winked at him. "Why don't you see if you can win now without me? Who knows, it may not be me at all."

He brightened, the poor little man, and turned back to his game with renewed fervor. Jane left the casino and hurried back to the hotel, going straight to her room. She always allowed for being followed, because she sensed that she always was. Bruno was a very suspicious man. Swiftly she stripped off her gown, and she was reaching into the closet for a dark pair of pants and a shirt when a hand closed over her mouth and a muscular arm clamped around her waist.

"Don't scream," a low, faintly raspy voice said in her ear, and her heart jumped. The hand left her mouth, and Jane turned in his arms, burying her face against his neck, breathing in the delicious, familiar male scent of him.

"What are you doing here?" she breathed.

"What do you think I'm doing here?" he asked irritably, but his hands were sliding over her nearly-naked body, reacquainting himself with her flesh. "When I get you home, I just may give you that spanking I've threatened you with a couple of times. I get you away from Turego, and as soon as my back is turned you plunge right back into trouble."

"I'm not in trouble," she snapped.

"You couldn't prove it by me. Get dressed. We're getting out of here."

"I can't! There are some counterfeit plates that I've got to get. My room is being watched, so I was going to climb out the window and work my way around to Felix's room. I have a pretty good idea where he's hidden them."

"And you say you're not in trouble."

"I'm not! But really, Grant, we've got to get those plates."

"I've already got them."

She blinked, her brown eyes owlish. "You do? But… how? I mean, how did you know—never mind. Kell told you, didn't he? Well, where did Felix have them hidden?"

She was enjoying this. He sighed. "Where do you think he had them?"

"In the ceiling. I think he pushed up a square of the ceiling and hid the plates in there. It's really the only good hiding place in the room, and he isn't the type to put them in a safety deposit box in a bank, which is where I'd have put them."

"No, you wouldn't," he said, annoyed. "You'd have put them in the ceiling, just like he did."

She grinned. "I was right!"

"Yes, you were right." And he probably never should have told her. Turning her around, he gave her a pat on the bottom. "Start packing. Your little friend is probably the nervous sort who checks his hidey-hole every night before he goes to bed, and we want to be long gone before he does."

She dragged down her suitcases and started throwing clothes into them. He watched her, sweat popping out on his brow. She looked even better than he remembered, her breasts ripe and round, her legs long and shapely. He hadn't even kissed her. He caught her arm, swinging her around and catching her close to him. "I've missed you," he said, and lowered his mouth to hers.

Her response was instantaneous. She rose on tiptoe, moving against him, her arms coiled around his neck and her fingers deep in his hair. He'd had a haircut, and the dark blond strands slipped through her fingers to fall back in place, shaped perfectly to his head. "I've missed you, too," she whispered when he released her mouth.

His breathing was ragged as he reluctantly let her go. "We'll finish this when we have more time. Jane, would you please put on some clothes?"

She obeyed without question, pulling on green silk trousers and a matching green tunic. "Where are we going?"

"Right now? We're driving to the beach and turning the plates over to an agent. Then we're going to catch a flight to Paris, London and New York."

"Unless, of course, Bruno is waiting just outside the door, and instead we end up sailing across the Mediterranean."

"Bruno isn't waiting outside the door. Would you hurry?"

"I'm finished."

He picked up the suitcases and they went downstairs, where he checked her out. It all went like clockwork. There was no sign of Bruno, or any of the men she had dubbed "Bruno's goons." They turned the plates over to the promised agent and drove to the airport. Jane's heart was thudding with a slow, strong, powerful beat as Grant slipped into the seat beside her and buckled himself in. "You know, you never did actually tell me what you're doing here. You're retired, remember? You're not supposed to be doing things like this."

"Don't play innocent," he advised, giving her a look from molten gold eyes. "I saw your fine hand in this from the beginning. It worked. I came after you. I love you; I'm taking you to Tennessee; and we're going to be married. But you'd better remember that I'm on to your tricks now, and I know you're too slick for your own good. Did I leave anything out?"

"No," Jane said, settling back in her seat. "I think you have everything covered."

Epilogue

He lay on his back in the bed, his arms around Jane. Her dark hair was spread across his shoulder, and he stroked her head, her back, the rounded curve of her buttocks. "I couldn't sleep without you," he murmured. "I got used to you using me as a bed."

She was silent, but he knew that she wasn't asleep. They were tired, but too wound up to sleep. Once they'd arrived in Paris, going on to London and New York hadn't seemed that important. Instead they'd checked into a hotel, and the loving had been even better than before, the sensations sharpened by the time they'd spent apart.

"What would I have done if you hadn't come after me?" she whispered, and the desolation of the lonely days without him was in her voice.

"You knew I'd come."

"I hoped. I wasn't certain."

"You can be certain from now on," he said, rolling over and pinning her beneath him. "I love you. I hope you can be happy in Tennessee, because I really don't think I can live in a city, not now. That's been worrying me."

A slow smile touched her lips. "Haven't you learned by now that I'm not addicted to cities, either? I can be happy anywhere; if you're there with me. Besides, I think the country will be a good place for the kids to grow up."

"We haven't talked about that, have we? I'd like to have kids, but if you want to wait a while, I'm willing."

She traced the outline of his mouth with her fingertip. "It's a little too late now to think about waiting. If you wanted to wait, you should have stayed away from me in the jungle. And in Mexico City. And in D.C."

He swallowed, staring at her. "Are you telling me what I think you're telling me?"

"I think I am. I'm not certain yet, but all the signs are there. Do you mind?"

"Mind? God, no!"

The thick emotion in his voice warmed her all over, and she put her arms around him, closing her eyes and hugging him closely. She no longer minded the dark, because Grant was there.

Diamond Bay

ISBN 1-55.166-480-1

DIAMOND BAY

Copyright © 1987 by Linda Howington.

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

MIRA and the Star Colophon are trademarks used under license and registered in Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

Printed in U.S.A.

Chapter One

The clean golden sun still burned its heat into his flesh, all along his bare chest and long legs, even though it was near sundown. The lengthening rays threw dancing sparkles onto the tips of the waves, mesmerizing him as he stared at them. No, it wasn't the glittering water that mesmerized him, it was the fact that he had nothing more important to do than simply stare at it. He'd forgotten how peace sounded, how it felt. For a long, wonderful month of pure solitude he could relax and be only a man. He would fish when he felt like it, or cruise the warm, hypnotic waters of the Gulf if he felt restless. The water drew him on endlessly. Here it was midnight blue; there it was brilliant turquoise; over there it was a pale, shimmering green. He had money for fuel and provisions, and only two people in the world knew where he was or how to reach him. At the end of the month's vacation he would return to the gray world he'd chosen and lose himself in the shadows, but for now he could lie in the sun, and that was all he wanted. Kell Sabin was tired, tired of the endless struggle, the secrecy and maneuvering, the danger and deception of his job. It was a vitally important job, but for this month he would let someone else do it. This month was his; he could almost understand what had lured Grant Sullivan, his old friend and the best agent he'd ever had, to the quiet mystery of the Tennessee mountains. Sabin had been a top agent himself, a legend prowling the Golden Triangle and, later, the Middle East and South America, all the hot spots of the world. Now he was a department chief, the shadowy figure behind a group of crack agents who followed his directions and his training. Little was known about him; the security surrounding him was almost absolute. Sabin preferred it that way; he was a loner, a dark man who faced the hard realities of life with both cynicism and acceptance. He knew the drawbacks and dangers of his chosen career, he knew it could be dirty and vicious, but he was a realist and he had accepted all that when he took the job.

Still, it got to him sometimes, and he had to get away from it, live for a little while like a normal citizen. His private escape valve was his custom-made cabin cruiser. His vacations, like everything else about him, were highly guarded secrets, but the days and nights at sea were what kept him human, the only times when he could relax and think, when he could lie naked in the sun and reestablish his link with his own humanity, or watch the stars at night and regain his perspective.

A white gull soared overhead, giving its plaintive cry. Idly he watched it, free and graceful, framed against the cloudless blue bowl of the sky. The sea breeze brushed lightly over his naked skin, and pleasure brought a rare smile to his dark eyes. There was a streak of untamed savage in him that he had to keep under tight control, but out here, with only the sun and the wind and the water, he could let that part of himself surface. The restrictions of clothing seemed almost sacrilegious out here, and he resented having to dress whenever he went into a port for fuel, or whenever another boat pulled up beside him for a chat, as people were wont to do down here.

The sun had moved lower, dipping its golden edge into the water, when he heard the sound of another motor. He turned his head to watch the cabin cruiser, a little larger than his own, cut leisurely through the waves. That was the only way to get around out here: leisurely. The warmer the clime, the slower the time. Sabin kept his gaze on the boat, admiring the graceful lines and the smooth, powerful sound of the motor. He liked boats, and he liked the sea. His own boat was a prized possession, and a closely guarded secret. No one knew it belonged to him; it was registered to an insurance salesman in New Orleans who had no knowledge at all of Kell Sabin. Even the name of the boat, Wanda, had no meaning. Sabin knew no one named Wanda; it was simply a name that he'd chosen. But Wanda was completely his, with secrets and surprises of her own. Anyone who really knew him wouldn't have expected anything else, but only one man in the world had ever known the man behind the mask, and Grant Sullivan gave away no secrets.

The sound of the other boat's motor changed as it slowed and turned in his direction. Sabin swore irritably, looking around for the faded denim cutoffs he usually kept on deck for such situations. A voice drifted to him over the water, and he looked at the other boat again. A woman was standing at the forward rail, waving her arm back and forth over her head in a manner that held no urgency, so he guessed they were just looking for a chat and weren't having any sort of trouble. The afternoon sunlight glinted on her red hair, turning it into fire, and for a moment Sabin stared at it, his attention caught by that unusual, glowing shade of red.

A frown put furrows in his brow as he quickly stepped into his cutoffs and zipped them. The boat was still too far away for him to see her face, but that red hair had aggravated some hidden little memory that was trying to surface. He stared at her as the other boat idled toward him, his black eyes glittering with intensity. There was something about that hair….

Suddenly every instinct in Sabin shrilled an alarm and he hit the deck, not questioning that spine-tingling uneasiness; it had saved his life too many times for him to hesitate. He spread his fingers on the warm wood of the deck, acknowledging that he could be making a fool of himself, but he'd rather be a live fool than a dead wise man. The sound of the other motor dropped off, as if it had slowed even more, and Sabin made another decision. Still on his stomach, with the scent of polish in his nostrils and the scrape of wood on his bare flesh, he snaked his way over to a storage compartment.

He never went anywhere without some means of self-defense. The rifle that he pulled out of the storage compartment was powerful and accurate, though he knew it would be a temporary deterrent at best. If his instincts were wrong, then he would have no use for it at all; if his instincts were right, they would have far more firepower than this rifle, because they would have prepared for this.

Swearing under his breath, Sabin checked that the rifle was on full automatic fire and crawled back over to the rail. Coolly choosing his cover, he let the barrel of the rifle be seen, and he eased his head around just enough to let him see the other boat. It was still closing on him, less than a hundred yards away.

"That's close enough!" he yelled, not knowing if his voice would carry clearly enough to be understood over the noise of the motor. But that didn't matter, as long as they could tell he was yelling something.

The boat slowed, barely moving through the water now, seventy-five yards away. Suddenly it seemed to be swarming with people, and none of them looked like the ordinary Gulf fishermen or leisure boaters, because every one of them was armed, even the red-haired woman. Sabin scanned them quickly, his extraordinary eyesight picking up details of shape and size. He was able to identify the types of weapons without having to think about it, he was so familiar with them. It was the people he watched, and his eyes darted back to one man. Even at that distance, and even though he stood a little behind everyone else, there was something familiar about him, just as there was something familiar about the woman.

There was no doubt now, and icy, deadly calm settled over him, just as it always did in combat situations. He didn't waste time worrying about how badly outnumbered he was; instead he began weighing and discarding options, each decision made in the flash of a second.

A flat CRACK! split the twilight – the sound of rifle fire over open water. He caught the faint, warm percussion of the bullet as it split the air over his head and splintered the wood of the cabin behind him. With a motion as smooth as oiled silk Sabin took aim and fired, then pulled his head down, all in one continuous flow. He didn't need the involuntary sharp cry that pierced the air to tell him that he hadn't missed; Sabin would have been both surprised and furious if he had.

"Sabin!" The amplified voice echoed tinnily across the water. "You know you don't have a chance! Make it easy on yourself."

The accent was very good, but it wasn't quite American. The offer was only what he'd expected. His best chance was to outrun them; Wanda's speed was just one of her unusual features. But to outrun them, he had to get to the controls up top, which meant exposing himself to their fire during the climb up the ladder.

Sabin weighed the situation and accepted that he had perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of reaching the top, maybe less, depending on how surprised they were by his move. On the other hand, he had no chance at all if he simply sat there and tried to hold them off with one rifle. He had a lot of ammunition, but they would have more. Moving was a risk he had to take, so he didn't waste time worrying about his diminishing chances. He took a deep breath, held it, then exhaled slowly, coiling his steely body in preparation. He needed to get as high up the ladder with the first jump as he could. Gripping the rifle firmly, he took another breath and leaped. His finger pressed the trigger as he moved, the automatic fire making the weapon buck in his hand and forcing everyone on the other boat to take cover. His outstretched right hand caught the top rung of the ladder, and his bare feet barely touched before launching him higher. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the white bursts even as he swung himself over the top and two red-hot sledgehammers slammed into his body. Only sheer momentum and determination carried him onto the deck, and kept him from falling to the lower one. Black mist almost obscured his vision, and the sound of his own breathing was loud in his ears.

He'd dropped the rifle. "Goddammit." He'd dropped the rifle! he thought furiously. He took a deep breath, forcing the black mist away, and summoned the strength to turn his head. The rifle still lay there, clutched in his left hand, but he couldn't feel it. The left side of his body was washed with his own blood, almost black in the dwindling light. His chest heaving with his rapid breathing, Sabin reached across with his right hand and got the rifle. The feel of it in his hand made things a little better, but not much. Sweat broke out and ran off him in rivers, mixing with his blood. He had to do something, or they'd be on him.

His left arm and leg wouldn't obey the commands of his brain, so he ignored them, dragging himself over to the side using only his right arm and leg. Bracing the rifle against his right shoulder, he fired at the other boat again, letting them know he was still alive and dangerous so they wouldn't come rushing in.

Glancing down, he took stock of his injuries. A bullet had gone through the outside muscle of his left thigh, another through his left shoulder; each was serious enough on its own. After the first burning impact his shoulder and arm had gone numb, useless, and his leg wouldn't support his weight, but he knew from experience that the numbness would soon begin to fade, and with the pain he would regain some use of his wounded muscles, if he could afford to wait that long.

He risked another look and saw that the other boat was circling behind him. The upper deck was open at the rear, and they would have a clear shot at him.

"Sabin! We know you're hurt! Don't make us kill you!"

No, they would much rather have him alive, for "questioning," but he knew they wouldn't take any chances. They would kill him if they had to, rather than let him escape.

Grinding his teeth, Sabin dragged himself over to the controls and reached up to turn the key in the ignition. The powerful engine coughed into life. He couldn't see where he was going, but that didn't matter, even if he rammed the other cruiser. Panting, he slumped back to the deck, trying to gather his strength; he had to reach the throttle, and he had only a few moments left. Hot pain was spreading over his entire left side, but his arm and leg were beginning to respond now, so he figured that was a fair trade. He ignored the growing pain and levered himself up on his right arm, forcing his left arm to move, to reach, until his bloody fingers touched the throttle and shoved it into forward gear. The cruiser began sliding through the water with slowly increasing speed, and he heard the shouts from the other boat.

"That's it, girl," he panted, encouraging the boat. "Let's go, let's go." He stretched again, every muscle in his body shaking from the effort, and managed to reach far enough to push the throttle wide open. The boat leaped beneath him, responding to the surge of power with a deep-throated roar.

At full speed he had to see where he was going. He was taking another chance, but those chances were getting better with every foot of distance he put between himself and the other boat. A grunt of pain exploded from his throat as he hauled himself to his feet, and salty sweat stung his eyes; he had to keep most of his weight on his right leg, but the left one didn't buckle beneath him, which was all he asked. He glanced over his shoulder at the other cruiser. He was rapidly pulling away from them, even though they were giving chase.

There was a figure on the top deck of the other boat, and he was settling a bulky pipe onto his shoulder.

Sabin didn't even have to think to know what it was; he'd seen rocket launchers too many times not to recognize them on sight. Only a second before the flash, and barely two seconds before the rocket exploded his boat, Sabin went over the right side, into the turquoise water of the Gulf.

He went deep, as deep as he could, but he had very little time, and the percussion rolled him through the water like a child's toy. Pain seared his wounded muscles and everything went black again; it was for only a second or two, but it was enough to completely disorient him. He was choking, and he didn't know where the surface was. The water wasn't turquoise now, it was black, and it was pressing down on him.

The years of training saved him. Sabin had never panicked, and now wasn't the time to start. He stopped fighting the water and forced himself to relax, and his natural buoyancy began carrying him to the surface. Once he could tell which direction was up, he began swimming as well as he could, though he could barely move his left arm and leg. His lungs were burning when he finally bobbed to the surface and gulped the warm, salt-scented air.

Wanda was burning, sending black smoke billowing into a pearlescent sky that held only the last few moments of light. Darkness had already spread over the earth and sea, and he seized it as his only available cover. The other boat was circling the Wanda, playing its spotlight over the burning wreckage and the surrounding ocean; he could feel the water vibrating with the power of the engines. Unless they found his body – or as much of it as they could realistically expect to remain – they would search for him; they'd have to. They couldn't afford to do anything else. His priority remained the same: he had to put as much distance as he could between himself and them.

Clumsily he rolled to his back and began a one-sided backstroke, not stopping until he was well away from the glare of the burning boat. His chances weren't good; he was at least two miles from shore, probably closer to three. He was weak from loss of blood, and he could barely move his left arm and leg. Added to that were the chances that the predators of the sea would be drawn to him by his wounds before he got anywhere close to land. He gave a low, cynical laugh, and choked as a wave hit him in the face. He was caught between the human sharks and the sharks of the sea, and damned if it really made any difference which one got him, but they would both have to work for it. He didn't intend to make it easy for them. He took a deep breath and floated while he struggled out of his shorts, but his twisting efforts made him sink, and he had to fight his way back to the surface. He held the garment in his teeth while he considered the best tactics to use. The denim was old, thin, almost threadbare; he should be able to tear it. The problem was in staying afloat while he did it. He would have to use his left arm and leg, or he'd never be able to manage it.

He had no choice; he had to do what was necessary, despite the pain.

He thought he might pass out again when he began treading water, but the moment passed, though the pain didn't lessen. Grimly he chewed on the edge of the shorts, trying to get a tear started in the fabric. He forced the pain out of his mind as his teeth shredded the threads, and he hastily tore the garment up to the waistband, where the reinforced fabric and double-stitching stopped his progress. He began tearing again, until he had four loose strips of cloth attached to the waistband; then he began chewing along the waistband. The first strip came loose, and he held it in his fist while he freed the second strip.

He rolled to his back and floated, groaning as his wounded leg relaxed. Quickly he knotted the two strips together to get enough length to wrap around his leg. Then he tied the makeshift tourniquet around his thigh, making certain that the cloth covered both the entrance and exit wounds. He pulled it as tightly as he could without cutting off circulation, but he had to put pressure on the wounds to stop them from bleeding.

His shoulder was going to be more difficult. He bit and pulled until he tore the other two strips from the waistband, then knotted them together. How was he going to position this makeshift bandage? He didn't even know if he had an exit wound in his back, or if the bullet was still in his shoulder. Slowly, awkwardly, he moved his right hand and felt his back, but his water-puckered fingers could find only smooth skin, which meant that the bullet was still in him. The wound was high on his shoulder, and bandaging it would be almost impossible with the materials he had.

Even tied together, the two strips weren't enough. He began chewing again, tore off two more strips, then tied them to the other two. The best he could manage was to sling the strip over his back, bring it around under his armpit and tie it in a tight loop over his shoulder. Then he folded the remnant of his cutoffs into a pad and slipped it under the loop, positioning it over the wound. It was a clumsy bandage at best, but his head was swimming, and deadly lethargy was creeping into his limbs. Grimly Sabin pushed both sensations away, staring fixedly at the stars in an effort to orient himself. He wasn't going to give up; he could float, and he could manage to swim for short periods of time. It might take a while, but unless a shark got him, he was damned well going to make it to shore. He rolled onto his back and rested for a few minutes before he began the slow, agonizing process of swimming to shore.

It was a hot night, even for mid-July in central Florida. Rachel Jones had automatically adjusted her habits to the weather, taking it easy, either doing her chores early in the morning or putting them off until late afternoon. She had been up at sunrise, hoeing the weeds out of her small vegetable garden, feeding the geese, washing her car. When the temperature soared into the nineties she moved inside and put a load of clothes in the washer, then settled down for a few hours of research and planning for the journalism course she had agreed to teach at night in Gainesville when the fall quarter began. With the ceiling fan whirring serenely overhead, her dark hair pinned on top of her head, and wearing only a tank top and an old pair of shorts, Rachel was comfortable despite the heat. A glass of iced tea sat constantly beside her elbow, and she sipped at it as she read.

The geese honked peacefully as they waddled from one section of grass to the other, herded by Ebenezer Duck, the cantankerous old leader. Once there was an uproar when Ebenezer and Joe, the dog, got into a dispute over which one had the right to the patch of cool green grass beneath the oleander shrub. Rachel went to the screen door and shouted at her rambunctious pets to be quiet, and that was the most exciting event of the day. That was the way most of her days went during the summer. Things picked up during the fall, when the tourist season began and her two souvenir shops in Treasure Island and Tarpon Springs began doing a lively trade. With the journalism course her days would be even busier than usual, but the summers were a time for relaxing. She worked intermittently on her third book, feeling no great pressure to finish it, since her deadline wasn't until Christmas and she was well ahead of schedule. Rachel's energy was deceptive, because she managed to accomplish so much without ever seeming to hurry.

She was at home here, her roots deep in the sandy soil. The house she lived in had been her grandfather's, and the land had been in the family for a hundred and fifty years. The house had been remodeled in the fifties and no longer resembled the original frame structure. When Rachel had moved in she had renovated the inside, but the place still gave her a sense of permanency. She knew the house and the land surrounding it as well as she knew her own face in the mirror. Probably better, because Rachel wasn't given to staring at herself. She knew the tall pine thicket in front of her and the rolling grassland at her back, every hill and tree and bush. A path wound through the pines and down to the beach where the Gulf waters rolled in. The beach was undeveloped here, partly because of the unusual roughness of the shore, partly because the beachfront property was owned by people who had had it for generations and weren't inclined to see condominiums and motels rise in their faces. This was prime cattle country; Rachel's property was almost surrounded by a huge ranch, owned by John Rafferty, and Rafferty was as reluctant as she to sell any land for development.

The beach was Rachel's special haven, a place for walking and thinking and finding peace in the relentless, eternal surge of the water. It was called Diamond Bay because of the way the light splintered on the waves as they crashed over the underwater boulders that lined the mouth of the little bay. The water shimmied and glittered like thousands of diamonds as it rolled to shore. Her grandfather had taught her to swim in Diamond Bay; sometimes it seemed as if her life had begun in the turquoise water.

Certainly the bay had been the center of the golden days of her childhood, when a visit to Gramps's had been the most fun a young Rachel could imagine. Then her mother died when Rachel was twelve, and the bay became her permanent home. There was something about the ocean that had eased the sharpness of her grief and taught her acceptance. She'd had Gramps, too, and even now the thought of him brought a smile to her face. What a wonderful old man he'd been! He had never been too busy or too embarrassed to answer the sometimes awkward questions an adolescent girl could ask, and had given her the freedom to test her wings while still keeping her solidly grounded in common sense. He had died the year she'd finished college, but even death had met him on his own terms. He had been tired and ill and ready to die, and he'd done it with such humor and acceptance that Rachel had even felt a sort of peace at his going. She had grieved, yes, but the grief had been tempered by the knowledge that it was what he had wanted.

The old house had stood empty then, while Rachel pursued her career as an investigative reporter in Miami. She had met and married B. B. Jones, and life had been good. B.B. had been more than a husband, he had been a friend, and they had thought they had the world on a string. Then B.B.'s violent death had ended that dream and left Rachel a widow at the age of twenty-five. She quit her job and returned here to the bay, once again finding solace in the unending sea. She had been crippled emotionally, but time and the peaceful life had healed her. Still, she felt no urge to return to the fast-paced life she'd led before. This was home, and she was happy with what she was doing now. The two souvenir stores provided an adequate living, and she supplemented her income by writing an occasional article as well as the adventure books that had done so surprisingly well.

This summer was almost exactly like all the other summers she had ever spent at Diamond Bay, except it was hotter. The heat and humidity were almost stifling, and some days she felt like doing nothing more strenuous than lying in the hammock and fanning herself. Sundown brought some relief, but even that was relative. The night brought a light breeze from the Gulf to cool her heated skin, but it was still too hot to sleep. She had already taken a cool shower, and now she sat on the front porch swing in the dark, lazily keeping the swing moving with occasional movements of her foot. The chains squeaked in time with the chirping of crickets and the croaking of frogs; Joe lay on the porch in front of the screen door, dozing and dreaming his doggy dreams. Rachel closed her eyes, enjoying the breeze on her face and thinking of what she would do the next day: pretty much what she had done today, and the day before, but she didn't mind the repetition. She had enjoyed the old days of excitement, filled with the peculiar seductive power of danger, yet now she also enjoyed the peace of her present life.

Even though she wore only panties and a man's oversize white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up and first three buttons open, she could still feel small beads of sweat forming between her breasts. The heat made her restless, and finally she got to her feet. "I'm going for a walk," she told the dog, who flicked an ear at her but didn't open his eyes.

Rachel hadn't really expected him to join her; Joe wasn't a friendly dog, not even with her. He was independent and antisocial, backing away from an outstretched hand with his hackles raised and teeth showing. She thought he must have been mistreated before he'd shown up in her yard a few years before, but they had formed a truce. She fed him, and he filled the role of guard dog. He still wouldn't allow her to pet him, but he would come instantly to her side if a stranger drove up, and stand there glaring at the intruder until he either decided there was no danger, or the stranger left. If Rachel worked in her garden, Joe was usually close by. It was a partnership based on mutual respect, and both were satisfied with it.

He really had it easy, Rachel thought as she cut across the yard and took the path that wound down through the tall pines to the beach. He wasn't often called on as a guard; few people came to her house, except for the postman. She was at the dead end of an unpaved road that cut through Rafferty's property and hers was the only house. John Rafferty was her only neighbor, and he wasn't the type to drop in for a chat. Honey Mayfield, the local veterinarian, sometimes came by after a call at the Rafferty ranch, and they had developed a rather close friendship, but other than that Rachel was pretty much left alone, which was one reason she felt comfortable roaming around at night wearing only her underwear and a shirt.

The path sloped down a very gradual incline through the pine thicket. The stars were bright and heavy in the sky, and Rachel had walked the path since childhood, so she didn't bother with a flashlight. Even in the pines she could still see well enough to find her way. It was a quarter of a mile from the house to the beach, an easy walk. She liked walking the beach at night; it was her favorite time to listen to the ocean's power, when the waves were black except for their pearly foam tops. It was also low tide, and Rachel preferred the beach at low tide. It was at low tide that the ocean pulled back to reveal the treasures it had brought in to leave on the sand, like a love offering. She had collected a lot of sea treasures at low tide, and never ceased marveling at the wonders the turquoise Gulf brought to her feet.

It was a beautiful night, moonless and cloudless, and the stars were brighter than she had seen them in years, their light refracted on the waves like countless diamonds. Diamond Bay. It had been well named. The beach was narrow and uneven, with clumps of weeds growing along the edge, and the mouth of the bay was lined with jagged rocks that were especially dangerous at low tide, but for all its imperfections the bay created magic with its combination of light and water. She could stand and watch the glittering water for hours, spellbound by the power and beauty of the ocean.

The gritty sand cooled her bare feet, and she dug her toes deeper. The breeze gusted momentarily, lifting her hair away from her face, and Rachel inhaled the clean salt air. There was only herself and the ocean.

The breeze changed directions, flirting with her, blowing strands of hair across her face. She put up her hand to push her hair out of her eyes and paused in midmotion, her eyebrows drawing together fractionally as she stared at the water. She could have sworn she'd seen something. Just for a moment there had been a flash of movement, but now her straining eyes picked up nothing but the rhythmic surge of the waves. Perhaps it had been only a fish, or a large piece of driftwood. She wanted to find a really good piece for a flower arrangement, so she walked to the edge of the waves, pushing her hair back so it wouldn't obscure her vision.

There it was again, bobbing in the water! She took an eager step forward, wetting her feet in the foamy surf. Then the dark object moved again and took on a funny shape. The sheen of the silvery starlight made it look just like an arm, flailing weakly forward, like a tired swimmer struggling for coordination. A muscled arm, at that, and the dark bulk beside it could be a head.

Realization burst, and Rachel's entire body tingled with electricity. She was in the water before she realized it, surging through the waves toward the struggling man. The water impeded her progress, the waves pushing her back with increasing strength; the tide was just beginning to come back in. The man sank from view, and a hoarse cry burst from her throat. Wildly she splashed toward him, the water up to her breasts now, the waves crashing into her face. Where was he? The black water gave no hint of his location. She reached the spot where she had last seen him, but her frantically searching hands came up empty.

The waves would wash him toward the beach. She turned and staggered back toward shore and saw him again for a moment before his head disappeared beneath the water once more. She struck out, swimming strongly, and two seconds later her hand closed on thick hair. Fiercely she jerked his head above the water, but he was limp, his eyes closed. "Don't you die on me!" she ordered between clenched teeth, catching him under the shoulders and towing him in. Twice the incoming tide knocked her feet out from under her, and each time she thought she would drown before she could struggle free of the man's confining weight.

Then she was in water to her knees, and he sagged limply. She tugged until he was mostly out of the water, then fell on her hands and knees in the sand, coughing and gasping. Every muscle trembling with reaction, she crawled over to him.

Chapter Two

He was naked. Her mind barely registered that fact before it was pushed aside by more urgent matters. She was still gasping for air herself, but she forced herself to hold her breath while she put her hand on his chest to detect a heartbeat, or the up and down movement of breathing. He was still, too still. She could find no hint of life in him, and his skin was so cool….

Of course it was cool! She brought herself up sharply, shaking her head to clear it of the cobwebs of fatigue. He'd been in the water for God only knew how long, but he'd been swimming, however weakly, the first time she'd seen him, and she was letting precious seconds tick past when she should be acting.

It took every ounce of strength she had to roll him onto his stomach, because he wasn't a small man, and the bright starlight revealed that he was solid muscle. Panting, she straddled him and began the rhythmic push-pull action that would stimulate his lungs. That was another thing her grandfather had taught her, and taught her well. Her arms and hands were strong from the gardening and swimming she did, and she worked on the man until she was rewarded by a choking cough and a stream of water gushing out of his mouth.

"There you go," she breathed, not ceasing her efforts. He went into a paroxysm of coughing, his body heaving beneath her; then he groaned hoarsely and shuddered before going limp.

Rachel quickly rolled him onto his back again, bending anxiously over him. His breathing was audible now. It was too rapid and too ragged, but he was definitely breathing. His eyes were closed, and his head rolled to the side when she shook him. He was unconscious.

She sank back on her heels, shivering as the ocean breeze went right through the wet shirt she wore, and stared at the dark head that rested on the sand. Only then did she notice the clumsy binding around his shoulder. She reached to pull it away, thinking that perhaps it was the remnants of the shirt he'd been wearing when he suffered whatever accident had cast him into the ocean. But the wet fabric beneath her fingers was denim, too heavy for a shirt in this weather, and it had been tied into a knot. She pulled at it again, and part of the fabric came away. It had been folded into a pad and shoved under the knot, and high on his shoulder was a wound, a round, obscene mouth where there shouldn't have been one, showing black in the colorless light.

Rachel stared at the wound, her mind jolting with realization. He'd been shot! She'd seen too many gunshot wounds not to recognize one, even in the pale light of the stars that reduced everything to silvery gleam and black shadows. Her head whipped around and she stared out to sea, straining her eyes to see the telltale pinpoint of light that would warn of a boat, but there was nothing. All her senses were alert, her nerves tingling, and she was instantly wary. People didn't get shot without reason, and it was logical to assume that whoever had shot him the first time would be willing to do so again.

He had to have help, but there was no way she could throw him over her shoulder and carry him up to the house. She stood, scanning the dark sea again to make certain she hadn't missed anything, but the expanse of water was empty. She would have to leave him here, at least for as long as it would take her to run up to the house and back.

Once the decision was made Rachel didn't vacillate. Bending, she grasped the man under his shoulders and dug her heels into the sand, grunting with the effort as she pulled him far enough out of the water that the incoming tide wouldn't lap around him before she could get back. Even in the depths of unconsciousness he felt the pain she caused him by tugging on his wounded shoulder and gave a low, hoarse moan. Rachel winced and felt her eyes burn momentarily, but it was something she had to do. When she judged that he was far enough up the beach she let his shoulders down on the sand as easily as she could, muttering a breathless apology to him even though she knew he couldn't hear her. "I'll be right back," she assured him, touching his wet face briefly. Then she ran.

Normally the path up the beach and through the stand of, pines seemed like a fairly short one, but tonight it stretched endlessly ahead of her. She ran, not caring about stubbing her bare toes on exposed roots, heedless of the small branches that caught at her shirt. One such limb was strong enough to catch her shirt, halting her flight in mid-step. Rachel threw her entire weight against the fabric, too frantic to pause to untangle it. With a sodden ripping sound the shirt tore, and she was free to resume her wild plunge up the slope.

The welcoming lights of her small house were a beacon in the night, the house an oasis of safety and familiarity, but something had gone very wrong, and she couldn't shut herself inside its refuge. The life of the man on the beach depended on her.

Joe had heard her coming. He stood on the edge of the porch with his hackles raised and a low, rumbling growl issuing from his throat. She could see him silhouetted by the porch light as she sprinted across the yard, but she didn't have time to calm him down. If he bit her, he bit her. She would worry about that later. But Joe didn't even glance at her as she bounded up the steps and slammed the screen door back on its hinges. He remained on guard, facing the pines and the beach, every muscle quivering as he placed himself between Rachel and whatever had sent her flying through the night.

Rachel grabbed the phone, trying to control her breathing so she would be able to talk coherently. Her hands were shaking as she fumbled through the telephone book, looking for an ambulance listing, or a rescue squad – maybe the sheriffs department. Anyone! She dropped the book and swore violently, leaning down to grab it again. Rescue squad – they would have paramedics, and the man needed medical attention more than he needed a police report made out on him.

She found the number and was punching it out, when suddenly her hand froze, and she stared at the phone. A police report. She didn't know why, couldn't logically explain it to herself right then, but abruptly she knew she had to keep this quiet, at least for now. The instincts she had developed during her years as an investigative reporter were sending off steady warning signals, and she obeyed them now as she had obeyed them then. She slammed the receiver back onto its hook, shaking as she stood there and tried to force her thoughts into order.

No police. Not now. The man on the beach was helpless, no threat to her or anyone else. He would have no chance at all if this was more than a simple shooting, an argument that had gotten out of hand. He might be a drug-runner. A terrorist. Anything. But, dear God, he might not be any of those, and she was the only chance he had.

Even as she dragged a quilt from the top of her bedroom closet and bolted from the house again, with Joe right on her heels, jumbled scenes from her past kept skittering through her mind. Scenes of things that weren't quite right, where the glossy surface was accepted and neatly filed away, the real story forever hidden from view. There were other worlds beyond the normal, everyday life that most people lived, layers of danger and deceit and treachery that were never even suspected. Rachel knew about those layers. They had taken B.B.'s life. The man on the beach might be victim or villain, but if he was a villain she would have time to turn him in to the authorities long before he could recover from his wound; on the other hand, if he was a victim, the only time he had was what she could give him.

He was lying just as she'd left him, the tide swirling just inches from his feet. Gasping, Rachel fell to her knees in the sand beside him and put her hand on his chest, shuddering with relief when she felt the steady up and down movement that told her he was still alive. Joe stood beside her, his head lowered and his ears laid back as a low, continuous growl came from his throat, his eyes never leaving the man.

"It's all right, Joe," she said, automatically giving the dog a reassuring pat, and for once he didn't shy away from her touch. She spread the quilt on the sand, then knelt once again to brace her hands against the man's limp body. She rolled him onto the quilt. This time he didn't make a sound, and she was grateful he couldn't feel the pain she had to cause him.

It took her a few minutes to get him positioned; then she had to rest. She stared uneasily at the sea again, but it was still empty. There was no one out there, though it wasn't unusual to see the night lights of passing boats. Joe brushed against her legs, growling again, and she gathered her strength. Then she leaned down, gathered the two corners of the quilt nearest the man's head and dug her heels into the sand. She grunted with the strain; even with her entire weight thrown into the effort, it was all she could do to drag him a few feet. God, he was heavy!

Maybe when she got him off the beach and onto the slippery pine needles it would be easier. If it got much harder she wouldn't be able to budge him at all. She'd known it would be difficult, but she hadn't realized it would be almost beyond her physical capabilities. She was strong and healthy, and his life depended on her. Surely she could drag him up to her house, even if she had to do it an inch at a time!

That was almost what it amounted to. Even when she managed to get him off the beach, although the pine needles were slippery and the quilt slid over them more easily, her path was uphill. The incline wasn't steep, and she normally walked it easily, but it might as well have been vertical for the effort it took her to drag a two-hundred-pound man up it. She couldn't sustain her forward progress for any length of time at all. She lunged and lurched, falling to her knees several times. Her lungs were pumping and wheezing like bellows, and her entire body was one big ache before she had him halfway up the slope. She stopped for a moment and leaned against a pine, fighting the inevitable nausea of overexertion. If it hadn't been for the tree supporting her, she might not have been able to stand at all, because her legs and arms were trembling wildly.

An owl hooted somewhere close by, and the crickets chirped on undisturbed; the events of the night meant nothing to them. Joe hadn't left her side, and every time she stopped to rest he crowded against her legs, which was totally unlike him. But he wasn't pressing against her for protection; rather, he was protecting her, putting himself between her and the man. Rachel took a deep breath and steeled herself for another effort, patting Joe on the side and saying, "Good boy, good boy."

She reached down to take hold of the quilt again, and Joe did something extraordinary; he caught the edge of the quilt between his teeth and growled. Rachel stared at him, wondering if he'd taken it in his head to prevent her from dragging it any farther. Cautiously she braced her shaky legs, then leaned back and pulled with every ounce of strength left in her. Still growling, Joe braced his legs and pulled, too, and with his strength added to hers the quilt slid forward several feet.

Rachel stopped in amazement, staring at the dog. "Good boy," she said again. "Good boy!" Had it been a fluke, or would he do it again? He was a big, strong dog; Honey Mayfield had estimated that he weighed almost eighty pounds. If he could be coaxed into pulling with her, she could have the man up the slope in no time.

"Okay," she whispered, taking a better grip on the quilt. "Let's see if you'll do it one more time." She pulled, and Joe pulled, that low growl still rumbling in his throat, as if he disapproved of what she was doing, but would help her if she was determined to do it.

It was much easier with the dog's help, and soon they were out of the pine thicket, with only the dirt road and the small yard to cross before they reached the house. Rachel straightened and stared at the house, wondering how she would ever get him up the two steps to the porch. Well, she'd gotten him this far; she'd get him in the house, one way or another. Bending, she began tugging again.

He hadn't made a sound since that one groan on the beach, not even when they pulled him across exposed roots or the loose rocks on the dirt road. Rachel let the quilt drop and bent over him again, crouching on the cool, damp grass beside him. He was still breathing; after what she'd put him through, she didn't suppose she could ask for anything more. She stared at the two steps again, a frown puckering her forehead. She needed a conveyor belt to get him up those steps. A growing sense of urgency gnawed at her. Not only did he need attention, but the sooner she got him hidden inside, the better. She was isolated out here at Diamond Bay, so chance visitors weren't likely, but anyone who came looking for the man wouldn't be a chance visitor. Until he was conscious, until she knew more about what was going on, she had to hide him.

The only way she had of getting him up the steps was to catch him under the arms and pull him up them, just as she'd pulled him out of the sea. Joe couldn't help now. She would have to lift the man's head, shoulders and chest – the heaviest part of his body.

She'd gotten her wind back, and sitting there in the grass wasn't going to get anything accomplished. But she was so tired, as if her legs and arms were weighted down with lead; they were sluggish, and she staggered a little when she climbed to her feet. Gently she wrapped the quilt around the man, then positioned herself behind him and slid her hands under his shoulders. Straining, fighting for every bit of leverage, she raised him to a half-sitting position, then quickly propped him up on her legs. He started to fall over, and with a cry Rachel caught him around the chest, looping her arms tightly and locking her hands together. His head fell forward, as limply as a newborn's. Joe worried at her side, growling when he couldn't find a place to catch hold of the quilt.

"It's all right," she panted. "I've got to do it this way now." She wondered if she was talking to the dog or the man. Either was ridiculous, but both seemed important.

The steps were at her back. Keeping her legs under her and her hands tightly locked around the man's chest, Rachel thrust herself backward; her bottom landed on the first step with a jarring thud, and the edge of the top step scraped a raw strip down her back, but she'd managed to lift the man a little. Hot pain seared her back and legs from the strain she was putting on her muscles. "Oh, God," she whispered, "I can't collapse now. In a little while I'll rest, but not now."

Grinding her teeth, she got her feet under her again, using the stronger muscles of her thighs rather than her more vulnerable back muscles. Once more she lunged up and back, pushing with her legs, hauling the man up with her. She was sitting on the top step now, and tears of pain and effort were stinging her eyes. The man's torso was on the steps, his legs still out in the yard, but if she could get his upper body on the porch the rest would be easy. She had to do the agonizing maneuver one more time.

She didn't know how she did it, where she found the strength. She gathered, lunged, pushed. Suddenly her feet went out from under her and she fell heavily on her back on the wooden porch, the man lying on her legs. Stunned, she lay there for a moment, staring up at the yellow porch light with the tiny bugs swarming around it. She could feel her heart pounding wildly inside her rib cage, hear the wheezing sobs as she tried to suck enough oxygen into her lungs to meet the demand being made by overworked muscles. His weight was crushing her legs. But she was lying full-length on the porch, so if he was lying on her legs, that meant she'd done it. She'd gotten him up the steps!

Groaning, crying, she pushed herself into a sitting position, though she thought the planks beneath her made a wonderful bed. It took her a moment to struggle from beneath his confining weight, and then it was more than she could do to stand. She crawled to the screen door and propped it open, then scrambled back to the man. Just a few more feet. Inside the front door, angle to the right, then into her bedroom. Twenty, thirty feet. That was it, all she would ask of herself.

The original method of catching the edge of the quilt and pulling it seemed like a good idea, and Joe was willing to lend his strength again, but Rachel had precious little strength herself, and the dog had to do most of the work. Slowly, laboriously, they inched the man across the porch. She and Joe couldn't get through the door at the same time, so she went first and knelt to reach for a new grip on the quilt. Growling, his husky body braced, Joe pulled back with all his strength, and man and quilt came through the door.

It seemed like a good idea to keep on going while they had him moving; she angled him toward her bedroom, and a scant minute later he was lying on the floor beside her bed. Joe released the quilt as soon as she did and immediately backed away from her, his hackles raised as he reacted to the unfamiliar confines of a house.

Rachel didn't try to pet him now; she'd already asked so much of him, trespassed so far past the set boundaries, that any further overtures would simply be too much. "This way," she said, struggling to her feet and leading him back to the front door. He darted past her, anxious for his freedom again, and disappeared into the darkness beyond the porchlight. Slowly she released the screen door and closed it, slapping at a gnat that had entered the house.

Methodically, her steps slow and faltering, she locked the front and back doors and pulled the curtains over the windows. Her bedroom had old-fashioned Venetian blinds, and she closed them. That done, the house as secure as she could make it, she stared down at the naked man sprawled on her bedroom floor. He needed medical attention, skilled medical attention, but she didn't dare call a doctor. They were required to report all gunshot wounds to the police.

There was really only one person who could help her now, one person she trusted to keep a secret. Going to the kitchen, Rachel dialed Honey Mayfield, keeping her fingers crossed that some emergency hadn't already called Honey out. The telephone was picked up on the third ring, and a distinctly drowsy voice said, "This is Mayfield."

"Honey, this is Rachel. Can you come out?"

"Now?" Honey yawned. "Has something happened to Joe?"

"No, the animals are fine. But…can you bring your bag? And put it in a grocery sack or something, so no one can see it."

All traces of drowsiness had left Honey's voice. "Is this a joke?"

"No. Hurry."

"I'll be there as soon as I can."

Two receivers were hung up simultaneously, and Rachel went back to the bedroom, where she crouched beside the man. He was still unconscious, and the handling he had received should have been enough to wake the dead, unless he had lost so much blood that he was in deep shock and near death himself. Sharp, piercing anxiety seized her, and she touched his face with trembling hands, as if she could pass the essence of life to him with her touch. He was warmer now than he had been, and he was breathing with slow, heavy movements of his chest. The wound on his shoulder was sullenly oozing blood, and sand clung to him, even matting his hair, which was still dripping seawater. She tried to brush some of the sand out of his hair and felt something sticky beneath her fingers. Frowning, she looked at the watery redness that stained her hand; then awareness dawned. He had a head injury, as well! And she had dragged him up that slope, then literally manhandled him up the steps and onto the porch! The wonder was that she hadn't killed him!

Her heart pounding, she ran to the kitchen and filled her biggest plastic mixing bowl with warm water, then returned to the bedroom to sit on the floor beside him. As gently as possible, she washed as much blood and sand out of his hair as she could, feeling the thick strands come unmatted between her fingers. Her fingertips found a swelling lump on the right side of his head, just past the hairline at his temple, and she pushed the hair aside to reveal a jagged tear in the skin. Not a gunshot wound, though. It was as if he'd hit his head, or been hit with something. But why was he unconscious now? He had been swimming when she'd first seen him, so he'd been conscious then, coming in on the surge of the tide. He hadn't lost consciousness until he was already inside the mouth of Diamond Bay.

She pressed the cloth to the lump, trying to clean sand out of the cut. Had he hit his head on one of the huge, jagged rocks that lined the mouth of the bay? At low tide they were just under the surface of the water and difficult to avoid unless you knew exactly where they were placed. Knowing what she did about the bay, Rachel decided that that was exactly what had happened, and she bit her lip at the thought of dragging the man around the way she had when he was probably suffering from a concussion. What if her imagination was running wild with her, and she caused the man's death with her fears and hesitation? A concussion was serious, and so was a gunshot wound. Oh, God, was she doing the right thing? Had he been shot by accident and fallen overboard at night, then lost his bearings from pain and confusion? Was someone frantically searching for him right now?

She stared blindly down at him, her hand moving to touch his shoulder as if in apology, her fingers stroking lightly over his warm, darkly tanned skin. What a fool she was! The best thing she could do for this man would be to call the rescue squad immediately and hope that she hadn't done any additional damage to him with her rough handling. She started to get to her feet, to forget her crazy fancies and do the sensible thing, when she realized that she had been staring at his legs, and that the left one had a knotted strip of denim tied around it. Denim. He'd had denim tied around his shoulder, too. Her spine tingled warily, and she left her position by his head to crawl down to his leg, already afraid of what she would find. She couldn't untie the knot; it was pulled too tightly, and the water had only tightened it.

She got a pair of scissors out of her sewing basket and neatly sliced the fabric. The scissors slipped from her suddenly nerveless fingers as she stared down at his thigh, at the ugly wound in the outer muscle. He'd been shot in the leg, too. She examined his leg almost clinically; there were both entry and exit wounds, so at least the bullet wasn't still inside him. He hadn't been so lucky with his shoulder.

No one was shot twice by accident. Someone had deliberately tried to kill him.

"I won't let it happen!" she said fiercely, the sound of her own voice startling her. She didn't know the man who lay on the floor, unmoving and unresponsive, but she crouched over him with all the protectiveness of a lioness for a helpless cub. Until she knew what was going on, no one was going to get a chance to hurt this man.

Her hands gentle, she began washing him as best she could. His nudity didn't embarrass her, under the circumstances she felt it would be silly to flinch from his bare flesh. He was wounded, helpless; had she walked up on him sunbathing in the nude, that would have been a different kettle of fish entirely, but he needed her now, and she wasn't about to let modesty prevent her from helping him.

She heard the sound of a car coming down her road and got hastily to her feet. That should be Honey, and though Joe normally wasn't as hostile to women as he was to men, after the unusual events of the night he might be on edge and take it out on the vet. Rachel unlocked the front door and opened it, stepping out on the front porch. She couldn't see Joe, but a low growl issued from beneath the oleander shrub, and she spoke quietly to him as Honey's car turned into the driveway.

Honey got out and reached into the back seat for two grocery sacks, which she clutched to her as she started across the yard. "Thanks for waiting up," she said clearly. "Aunt Audrey wants you to look at these quilting squares for your shops."

"Come on in," Rachel invited, holding open the screen door. Joe growled again as Honey walked up the steps, but remained beneath the oleander.

Honey sat the two grocery sacks on the floor and watched as Rachel carefully locked the front door again. "What's going on?" she demanded, planting her strong, freckled fists on her hips. "Why am I disguising my bag as quilting squares?"

"In here," Rachel said, leading the way to her bedroom. He still wasn't moving, except for the regular motion of his chest as he breathed. "He's been shot," she said, going down on her knees beside him.

The healthy color washed out of Honey's face, leaving her freckles as bright spots on her nose and cheekbones. "My God, what's going on here? Who is he? Have you called the sheriff? Who shot him?"

"I don't know, to answer three of those questions," Rachel said tensely, not looking at Honey. She kept her eyes trained on the man's face, willing him to open his eyes, wishing he could give her the answers to the questions Honey had asked. "And I'm not going to call the sheriff."

"What do you mean, you're not going to call?" Honey fairly shouted, shaken out of her usual calm capability by the sight of a naked man on Rachel's bedroom floor. "Did you shoot him?"

"Of course not! He washed up on the beach!"

"All the more reason to call the sheriff!"

"I can't! Rachel lifted her head, her eyes fierce and strangely calm. "I can't risk his life that way."

"Have you lost your sense of reason? He needs a doctor, and the sheriff needs to investigate why he was shot! He could be an escaped felon, or a drug runner. Anything!"

"I know that." Rachel drew a deep breath. "But the shape he's in, I don't think I'm taking that much of a risk. He's helpless. And if things aren't that…cut and dried…he wouldn't stand a chance in a hospital where someone could get to him."

Honey put her hand to her head. "I don't understand what you're talking about," she said wearily. "What do you mean, 'cut and dried'? And why do you think someone would try to get to him? To finish the job they started?"

"Yes."

"Then it's a job for the sheriff!"

"Listen," Rachel said insistently. "When I was a reporter, I saw some things that were…strange. I was on the scene one night when a body was found. The man had been shot in the back of the head. The sheriff of that county did his report, the body was taken in for identification, but when the one-paragraph report appeared in the newspaper two days later it said that he had died of natural causes! In a way, I suppose it is natural to die of a bullet in the brain, but it made me curious, and I poked around a little, looking for the file. The file had disappeared. The coroner's office had no record of a man who had been shot in the head. Finally the word filtered down to me to stop snooping, that certain people in government had taken care of the matter and wanted it dropped."

"This doesn't make any sense," Honey muttered.

"The man was an agent!"

"What sort of agent? DEA? FBI? What?"

"You're on the right track, but go deeper."

"A spy? You're saying he was a spy?"

"He was an agent. I don't know for which side, but the entire thing was hushed up and doctored out of existence. After that I started noticing other things that weren't quite what they seemed. I've seen too much to simply assume that this man will be safe if I turn him over to the authorities!"

"You think he's an agent?" Honey stared down at him, her brown eyes wide.

Rachel willed herself to answer calmly. "I think there's a chance of it, and I think we'd be risking his life to turn him over to the sheriff. It would be a matter of public record then, and anyone hunting for him would be able to find him."

"He could still be a drug runner. You could be risking your life by protecting him."

"That's a possibility," Rachel admitted. "But he's wounded, and I'm not. He doesn't have any chance at all, except what I can give him. If the DEA has busted up a drug ring there'll be something about it on the scanner, or in the newspaper. If he's an escaped felon it'll be on the news. He's not in any condition to hurt anyone, so I'm safe."

"And if a drug deal has gone sour, and some other unsavory characters are after him? You wouldn't be safe then, from either him or the others."

"That's a chance I'll have to take," Rachel said quietly, her gray eyes level as she met Honey's worried gaze. "I know all the possibilities, and I know the risks. I may be seeing shadows where there aren't any, but think how terrible it would be for him if I'm right."

Honey drew a deep breath and tried again. "It just isn't likely that a wounded spy would wash up on your beach. Things like that don't happen to normal people, and you're still within the bounds of normalcy, even if you are a little eccentric."

Rachel couldn't believe what she was hearing, from Honey of all people, who was usually the most logical person in the state. The night's events were rattling everyone. "It isn't likely that a wounded man would wash up on my beach period, regardless of his occupation! But he did! He's here, and he needs help. I've done what I can, but he needs medical attention. He still has a bullet in his shoulder. Honey, please!"

If possible, Honey went even whiter. "You want me to take care of him? He needs a doctor! I'm a veterinarian!"

"I can't call a doctor! Doctors are required to report all gunshot wounds to the police. You can do it. No vital organs are involved. It's his shoulder and his leg, and I think he has a concussion. Please."

Honey glanced down at the naked man and bit her lip. "How did you get him up here?"

"Joe and I pulled him, on this quilt."

"If he has a severe concussion he may need surgery."

"I know. I'll handle that if it's necessary. I'll think of something."

They were both silent for a few minutes, looking down at the man who lay so still and helpless at their feet. "All right," Honey finally said, her voice soft. "I'll do what I can. Let's get him up on the bed."

That was as difficult as getting him up from the beach had been. Because Honey was larger and stronger, she got him under the shoulders, while Rachel slid one arm under his hips and the other under his thighs. As Rachel had noted before, he was a big man, and roped with muscles, which meant that he weighed more for his size than a less muscular man would have. He was also deadweight, and they had to be careful of his injuries. "Good God," Honey panted. "How did you manage to get him up that slope and into the house, even with Joe's help?"

"I had to do it," Rachel said, because that was the only explanation she had.

Finally they got him on the bed, and Rachel slumped to the floor, totally exhausted by the night's efforts. Honey bent over the man, her freckled face intent as she examined him.

Chapter Three

It was three o'clock in the morning. Honey had left half an hour before, and Rachel had held her weariness at bay long enough to take another much needed shower and wash the salt out of her hair. The heat of the day had finally abated enough that the air was comfortable, but soon it would be sunrise, and the heat would begin to build once more. She needed to sleep now, while she could, but her hair was wet. Sighing, she propped herself against the vanity and turned on the blow-dryer.

The man was still asleep, or unconscious. He was definitely concussed, but Honey hadn't thought it was severe, or that he was in a coma; rather, she'd decided that his continued unconsciousness was due to a combination of fatigue, loss of blood, shock and the blow to his head. She had taken the bullet out of his shoulder, stitched and bandaged his wounds and given him a tetanus injection and an antibiotic; then she and Rachel had cleaned him up, changed the bedding and made him as comfortable as they could. Once she had decided to help, Honey had become her usual capable, unflustered self, for which Rachel would be eternally grateful. Rachel felt that she'd strained herself to the limits physically, yet from somewhere she'd found the strength to help Honey during the nerve-racking operation to remove the bullet from the man's shoulder, then repair the damage done to his body.

Her hair dry, she put on the clean shirt she had brought into the bathroom with her. The face in the mirror didn't look like her own, and she stared at it curiously, noting the colorless skin and the mauve shadows under eyes dark with fatigue. She was punch-drunk from weariness, and she knew it. It was time to go to bed. The only problem was: where?

The man was in her bed, the only bed in the house. She didn't have a regular-sized couch, only two matching love seats. There was always the possibility of making a pallet on the floor, but she was so tired that even the thought of the effort involved was almost beyond her. Leaving the bathroom, she stared at her neat bed with its snowy white sheets, and at the man who lay so quietly between those sheets.

She needed to sleep, and she needed to be close to him so she could hear him if he awoke. She was a thirty-year-old widow, not a trembling ingenue; the most sensible thing to do would be to crawl into bed beside him so she could rest. After staring at him for just a moment longer she made her decision and turned out the lights, then went around to the other side of the bed and slipped carefully between the sheets, trying not to jostle him. She couldn't prevent a low moan as her tired muscles finally relaxed, and she turned on her side to put her hand on his arm, so she would wake up if he became restless. Then she slept.

It was hot when she awoke, and she was drenched in sweat. Alarm flared briefly when she opened her eyes and saw the dark masculine face on the pillow next to hers; then she remembered and rose on her elbow to look at him. Despite the heat he wasn't sweating, and his breathing seemed a little too fast. Quick concern rose in her, she sat up and put her hand on his face, feeling the heat there. He moved his head restlessly, away from her touch. He was feverish, which wasn't unexpected.

Quickly Rachel got out of bed, noticing that it was past noon. No wonder the house was so hot! She opened windows and turned on the ceiling fans to get some of the hot air out of the house before she turned on the air conditioner to cool things even more. She didn't use it that much, but her patient needed to be cooled down.

She had to take care of him before anything could be done. She dissolved two aspirin in a teaspoon of water, then gently lifted his head, trying not to jar him. "Open your mouth," she crooned, as if he were a baby. "Swallow this for me. Then I'll let you rest." His head lay heavily against her shoulder, his black eyelashes still resting on his cheeks. His hair was thick and silky beneath her fingers, and warm, reminding her of his fever. She put the spoon against his mouth, noting the clear-cut line of his lips; the spoon pressed down on his bottom lip, opening it just a little. "Come on," she whispered. "Open your mouth."

How many levels of consciousness were there? Did he hear her voice? Make sense of the words? Or was it just the low, tender tone that got through to him? Was it her touch? The warm, sleepy scent of her flesh? Something reached him. He tried to turn toward her, his head nuzzling against her shoulder, and his mouth opened a little. Her heart pounded in her chest as she coaxed him to swallow, hoping that he wouldn't choke. It worked so well that she managed to get three more teaspoons of water down him before he lapsed back into deeper unconsciousness.

She wet a washcloth in cold water, folded it and placed it across his brow, then turned the sheet back until it was low across his hips and began sponging him down with the cold water. Slowly, almost mechanically, she drew the wet cloth over his chest and shoulders and down his powerful arms, then to his lean, hard belly, where the hair on his chest narrowed to a thin, silky line. Rachel drew a deep breath, aware of the slight trembling in her body. He was beautiful. She had never seen a more beautiful man.

She hadn't let herself think about it the night before, when it had been important to get help for him and tend to his wounds, but she had realized even then how attractive he was. His features were even and well formed, his nose thin and straight above the mouth she had just touched. That mouth was firm and strong, with a finely chiseled upper lip that hinted of determination and perhaps even ruthlessness, while his lower lip curved with disturbing sensuality. His chin was square, his jaw firm and darkened with a stubble of black beard. His hair was like thick black silk, the color of coal and without any blue shininess to it. His skin was darkened with an allover tan, a deep, olive-bronze hue.

He was very muscular, without having the off-putting bulk of a body-builder. His were the muscles of hard work and physical exercise, the muscles of a man trained for both strength and speed. Rachel picked up one of his hands, cradling it between both of hers. His hands were long fingered and lean, the strength in them apparent even though he was completely limp. His nails were short and well tended. Lightly she felt the calluses on his palm and fingertips; and she felt something else, as well: the hardness of his flesh on the outside edge of his hand. Her breath became shorter, and wariness prickled along her spine again. Cradling his hand against her cheek, she reached out tentatively and touched the scar on his flat belly, a curving, silvery line that almost glowed against the darkness of his tan. It went across his stomach and around his right side, curving down out of view. That wasn't a surgical scar. She went cold, visualizing the terrible ferocity and viciousness of a knife fight. He must have whirled away from the blade, leaving it to slice his side and back.

A man with a scar like that, and with those tell-tale calluses on his hands, wasn't an ordinary man working an ordinary job. No ordinary man could have swum to shore wounded the way he was; that had required incredible strength and determination. How far had he swum? She hadn't been able to see any lights at sea, she remembered. She looked at his hard, lean face and shivered at the thought of the mental toughness hidden behind his closed eyelids. Yet for all his toughness, he was helpless now; his survival depended on her. She had made the decision to hide him, so it was up to her to nurse and protect him as best she could. Her instincts told her that she had made the right decision, but the uneasiness wouldn't leave her until she had some hard facts to back up her intuition.

The aspirin and sponging had lowered his fever, and he seemed to be sleeping deeply, though she wondered how to tell the difference between sleep and unconsciousness. Honey had promised to come by again that day and check him, to make certain the concussion wasn't worse than she had first thought. There was nothing else Rachel could do, except go about her normal business.

She brushed her teeth and combed her hair, then changed into khaki shorts and a sleeveless white cotton shirt. She started to change in her bedroom, as she normally did, then cast a quick glance at the sleeping man in her bed. Feeling foolish, she went into the bathroom and closed the door. B.B. had been dead for five years, and she wasn't used to having a man around, especially a stranger.

She closed the windows and turned on the air conditioning, then stepped outside. Ebenezer Duck and his band of waddling followers rushed up to her, with Ebenezer squawking his displeasure at having to wait so long for the grain she usually scattered first thing in the morning. Ebenezer was the grouchiest goose living, she was sure, but there was a certain majesty about him, so big and fat and white, and she liked his eccentricities. Joe came around the back corner of the house and stood watching as she fed the geese, keeping his distance from them as he always did. Rachel poured Joe's food in his bowl and filled his water dish with fresh water, then stepped away. He never approached while she was still near his food.

She gathered the ripe tomatoes from her small garden and checked the bean vines; the green beans would need gathering in another day or so. By that time her stomach was rumbling emptily, and she realized that it was hours past her normal breakfast time. Her entire schedule was shot, and there didn't seem to be much point in trying to regain it. How could she concentrate on writing when all her senses were attuned to the man in the bedroom?

She went inside and checked on him, but he hadn't moved. She freshened the wet cloth and replaced it on his brow, then turned her attention to her growling stomach. It was so hot that anything cooked seemed too heavy, so she settled for a sandwich of cold cuts and slices from one of the fresh tomatoes she had just picked. With a glass of iced tea in one hand and her sandwich in the other, she turned on the radio and sat down next to it to listen to the news. There was nothing unusual: the standard political maneuverings, both local and national; a house fire; a trial of local interest, followed by the weather, which promised more of the same. None of that offered even a glimmer of an explanation for the presence and condition of the man in her bedroom.

Switching to the scanner, she listened for almost an hour, but again there was nothing. It was a quiet day, the heat inducing most people to stay inside. There was nothing about any searches or drug busts. When she heard a car coming to a stop in front of her house she turned off the scanner and got up to look out the window. Honey was just getting out of her car, carrying still another grocery sack.

"How's he doing?" she asked as soon as they were inside.

"He still hasn't moved. He was feverish when I woke up, so I managed to get two aspirin and a little bit of water down him. Then I sponged him off."

Honey went into the bedroom and carefully checked his pupil responses, then examined her handiwork on his shoulder and thigh and rebandaged the wounds. "I bought a new thermometer for this," she muttered, shaking it down and putting it in his mouth. "I didn't have one for humans."

Rachel had been hovering worriedly. "How does he look?"

"His pupil responses are better, and the wounds look clean, but he's a long way from being out of the woods. He's going to be a sick man for several days. Actually, the longer he stays quiet like this, the better it is for him. He's resting his head and not putting any stress on his shoulder or leg."

"What about his fever?"

Honey counted his pulse, then took the thermometer out of his mouth and read it.

"A hundred and two. Not critical, but like I said, he's going to be very sick for a while. Give him aspirin every four hours and get as much water down him as you can. Keep sponging him off with cool water to keep him comfortable. I'll be back tomorrow, but I can't come too often or it'll look suspicious."

Rachel managed a tight smile. "Are you sure your imagination isn't running away with you, too?"

Honey shrugged. "I listened to the radio and read the newspaper. There wasn't anything to account for this guy. Maybe you're rubbing off on me, but all I can think is that only two scenarios are left. One is that he's an agent, and the other is that he's a drug runner hiding from his own people."

Looking down at him, at his tousled black hair, Rachel shook her head. "I don't think he's a drug runner."

"Why not? Do they have identifying tattoos, or something?"

She didn't tell Honey about his hands. "I'm probably just trying to reassure myself that I've done the right thing."

"For what it's worth, I think you have. Last night I didn't, but today I've thought about it, and I struck up a chat with a deputy this morning. He didn't mention anything unusual. If your guy is involved with drugs you'll have time to find out before he's in any shape to be dangerous. So, I guess you were right."

There was still another possibility, one that Rachel had thought of but had no intention of mentioning to Honey. What if he was an agent…for someone else? A drug runner, an agent – neither of those was very savory, considering what she had learned about both occupations while she'd been a reporter. Rachel had been a very good reporter, an ace, digging for the facts even in the face of danger. She knew, far more than Honey did, just how dangerous it was to hide this man, but there was something in her that was incapable of simply washing her hands of responsibility and turning him over to the sheriff, then letting events take their course. She had become responsible for him the second she had seen him feebly swimming in the Gulf, and turning him over to someone else wouldn't change that fact. As long as there was a possibility, however remote, that he was deserving of her protection, she had to offer it. It was a risk she had to take.

"How much longer will it be before he wakes up?" she murmured.

Honey hesitated. "I don't know. I'm a veterinarian, remember? With the fever, the loss of blood, the knock on his head…I just don't know. He should be hooked up to an IV, getting fluids. His pulse is weak and fast, he probably needs some blood and he's shocky, but he's coming out of it. He may wake up at any time, or it may be tomorrow. When he does wake up he may be disoriented, which isn't surprising. Don't let him get excited, and whatever you do, don't let him get up."

Rachel looked at him, at his powerfully muscled torso, and wondered if there was any way on earth she could prevent him from doing anything he set his mind on doing. Honey was taking gauze and tape out of her bag, "Change his bandages tomorrow morning. I won't be back until tomorrow night, unless you think he's getting worse and call me, and in that case you'd be better off calling a doctor."

Rachel managed a taut smile. "Thanks. I know this hasn't been easy for you to handle."

"At least you brought some excitement into the summer. I've got to go now, or Rafferty will tear a strip off me for keeping him waiting."

"Tell John I said hello," Rachel said as they stepped onto the porch.

"Depends on his mood." Honey grinned, her eyes lighting with the pleasurable prospect of battle. She and John Rafferty had been warring ever since Honey had set up practice in the area; Rafferty had made plain his opinion that a woman wasn't strong enough to handle the job, and Honey had set out to prove him wrong. Their relationship had long since evolved into mutual respect and a continuous wrangle that they both enjoyed. Since Honey had a long-standing engagement to an overseas engineer, with plans to marry during the winter when he returned to the States, she was also safe from Rafferty's legendary torn-catting, because one thing Rafferty didn't do was poach.

Joe stood just at the corner of the house, muscles tight as he warily watched Honey get in her car and drive off. Ordinarily Rachel would have spoken soothingly to him, but today she, too, was tense and wary. "Guard," she said softly, not knowing if he would understand the command. "That's a good boy. Guard the house."

She managed to work for a couple of hours on her manuscript, but she couldn't really concentrate on what she was doing when she kept listening for any sound from the bedroom. Every few minutes she went in to check on him, but each time he was lying just as he had been the time before. She tried several times to get him to drink something, but his head would loll against her shoulder whenever she lifted him, and he didn't respond at all. Late in the afternoon his fever began to rise again, and Rachel abandoned all attempts to write. Somehow she had to rouse him enough to give him more aspirin.

The fever seemed worse this time. His skin burned to the touch, and his face was flushed with hectic color. Rachel talked to him as she lifted his head, crooning and cajoling. With her free hand she stroked his chest and arms, trying to rouse him, and her efforts were rewarded when he suddenly groaned sharply and turned his face against her neck.

The sound and motion, from someone who had been still and silent, startled her. Her heart jumped wildly, and she was unable to move for a moment, simply holding him and feeling the scrape of his growing beard against her neck. It was an oddly erotic sensation, and her body quickened in remembrance. A hot flush colored her cheeks; what was she doing, reacting like that to the unconscious touch of a sick man? Granted, it had been a long time for her, but she'd never considered herself love starved, so hungry for the touch of a man that the most inadvertent contact could turn her on.

She reached for the teaspoon with the dissolved aspirin in it and held it to his mouth, touching his lips with the spoon as she had before. Restlessly he turned his head away, and Rachel followed the movement with the spoon. "No you don't," she crooned. "You aren't getting away. Open your mouth and take this. It'll make you feel better."

A frown puckered his straight black brows and he fretted, evading the spoon once more. Persistently Rachel tried again, and this time she got the bitter aspirin into his mouth. He swallowed, and while he was cooperating she spoonfed him several ounces of iced tea before he began to sink back into a stupor. Following the routine she had begun that morning, she patiently sponged him down with cool water until the aspirin began to work and the fever subsided again, allowing him to rest.

His response, fretful as it had been, gave her hope that he would soon be waking up, but that hope died during the long night. His fever soared at intervals until she could give him more aspirin and bring it under control again. What rest she got that night came in brief snatches, because she spent most of the time bending over him, patiently wiping him with a cold wet cloth to keep him as cool as she could, and doing all of the other things that were necessary for a bedridden patient.

Toward dawn he groaned again and tried to turn onto his side. Guessing that his muscles were aching from lying in one position for so long, Rachel helped him to roll onto his right side, then took advantage of the new position and sponged his back with cold water. He quieted almost immediately, his breathing becoming deep and even. Her eyes burning and her muscles sore, Rachel continued to rub his back until she was convinced that he was at last resting, then crept into bed herself. She was so tired…. She stared at his muscled back, wondering if she dared go to sleep and how she could possibly stay awake a moment longer. Her eyelids drooped heavily, and she immediately fell asleep, instinct moving her closer to his warm back.

It was still early when she awoke; the clock told her that she had slept a little over two hours. He was lying on his back again, and had kicked the cover into a twisted heap around his left leg. Disturbed that his movements hadn't awakened her, Rachel got out of bed and went around to straighten the sheet and pull it back over him, trying not to jar his left leg. Her gaze drifted over his naked body and hastily she jerked her eyes away, flushing again. What on earth was wrong with her? She knew what naked men looked like, and it wasn't even as if this were the first time she'd seen him. She had been nursing him for almost two days now; she'd bathed him and helped sew him up. Still, she couldn't stop the warm feeling that swelled inside every time she looked at him. It's just lust, she told herself firmly. Plain, old-fashioned lust. I'm a normal woman, and he's a good-looking man. It's normal to admire his body, so I've got to stop acting like a giggly teenager!

She pulled the sheet up to his chest, then coaxed him into taking more aspirin. Why hadn't he awoken by now? Was the concussion more severe than Honey had thought? Yet his condition didn't seem to be getting worse, and in fact he was a little more responsive than he had been; it was easier to get him to take the aspirin and liquids now, but she wanted him to open his eyes, to talk to her. Until then she couldn't be assured that she hadn't harmed him by making the decision to keep him hidden.

Hidden from whom? her subconscious jeered. No one had been looking for him. The jitters she had been suffering from seemed foolish on this bright, cloudless morning.

While he was quiet she fed the animals and worked in the garden, gathering the green beans and the few tomatoes that had ripened overnight. There were a few yellow squash ready to be picked, and she decided to make a squash casserole for dinner. She weeded the garden and around the shrubs, and by that time the heat had become stifling. Even the usual breeze from the Gulf was missing, and the air lay hot and heavy. She thought longingly of a swim, but didn't dare leave her patient unattended for that long.

When she checked on him again she found the sheet once again kicked down, and he was moving a little, his head turning fretfully. It wasn't time for more aspirin, but he was hot; she got a bowl of cold water and sat on the bed beside him, slowly sponging him with the cold water until he was cool and resting again. When she eased off the bed she glanced down at him and wondered if she would be wasting her time to cover him up. It was simply too hot for him, as feverish as he was, even though she'd left the air conditioning on and the house felt cool to her. Carefully she untangled the sheet from around his feet, her touch light and fleeting; then she paused and her hands returned to his feet. He had nice feet, lean and tanned, masculine and well tended, like his hands. He also had the same tough calluses on the outside ridges of his feet that he had on his hands. He was a trained warrior.

Tears burned her eyes as she pulled the sheet up to his waist and left it there, deciding to compromise. She had no reason to cry; he'd chosen his life and wouldn't appreciate her sympathy. The people who lived on the edge of danger did so because that was what they wanted; she had lived there herself, and she knew that she had freely chosen to accept the perils that came her way. B.B. had accepted the danger of his job, counting it as the price to be paid for something he thought was worth doing. What neither of them had counted on was that it would be her job that would cost him his life.

By the time Honey came that night Rachel had long since controlled herself, and a fragrant squash casserole greeted Honey's nose when she came in the door. "Umm, that smells good," she breathed. "How's our patient?"

Rachel shook her head. "Not much change. He's moving around a little, fretting, when the fever gets high, but he hasn't woken up yet."

She had just twitched the sheet up over him again a few moments before, so he was covered when Honey went in to check on him. "He's doing good," Honey murmured after looking at his wounds and checking his eyes. "Let him sleep. It's just what he needs."

"It's been so long," Rachel murmured.

"He went through a lot. The body has a way of taking over and getting what it needs."

It didn't take much to get Honey to stay for dinner. The casserole, fresh peas and sliced tomatoes did a lot of convincing by themselves. "This is a lot better than the hamburger I'd planned on," Honey said, waving her fork for emphasis. "I think our boy is out of danger, so I wasn't going to come by tomorrow, but if you're cooking again I can always change my mind."

It felt good to laugh, after the tension of the past two days. Rachel's eyes sparkled. "This is the first meal I've cooked since it got so hot. I've been living on fruit and cereal and salad, anything to keep from turning on the stove. But since I've been running the air conditioning to keep him comfortable, tonight cooking didn't seem so bad."

After they'd cleaned the kitchen Honey checked her watch. "It's not too late. I think I'll stop by Rafferty's and check on one of his mares that's due to foal. It may save a trip back out as soon as I get home. Thanks for feeding me."

"Anytime. I don't know what I'd have done without you."

Honey regarded her for a moment, her freckled face serious. "You'd have managed, wouldn't you? You're one of those people who do what has to be done, without fussing about it. That guy in there owes you a lot."

Rachel didn't know if he would see it that way or not. When she came out of the bathroom after showering she watched him intently, willing him to open his eyes and speak to her, to give her some hint of the man behind those closed lids. Every hour that passed increased the mystery that surrounded him. Who was he? Who had shot him, and why? Why was there nothing being mentioned in the news media that could apply to him? An abandoned boat found floating in the Gulf or washed up on shore would have made the news. A missing person's report would have been in the newspaper. A drug bust, a prison escape, anything, but there had been nothing that would explain why he had washed in with the tide.

She got into bed beside him, hoping for at least a few hours of sleep. He was resting better, she thought, the fever not climbing quite as high as it had at first. Her fingers closed over his arm, and she slept.

The shaking of the bed awoke her, startling her out of a sound sleep. She sat straight up in bed, her heart pounding. He was moving restlessly, trying to kick the cover away from him with only his right leg, and finally he succeeded in getting most of it off him. His skin was hot, and he was breathing too heavily. A glance at the clock told her that it was well past the time he should have had more aspirin.

She turned on the lamp beside the bed and went into the bathroom to get the aspirin and fresh water. He swallowed without fuss this time, and Rachel got him to drink almost a full glass of water. She eased his head down onto the pillow again, her fingers slow to move from his hair.

Daydreaming again! She jerked herself sharply away from the dangerous direction those daydreams were taking. He needed to be cooled down, and she was standing there fantasizing about him. Disgusted with herself, she wet a washcloth and bent over him, slowly wiping his torso with the cool cloth.

A hand touched her breast. She froze, her eyes widening. Her nightgown was loose and sleeveless, with a scooped neckline that had fallen well away from her body when she bent over him. His right hand moved slowly inside the neckline, and he brushed the backs of his lean, strong fingers insistently over her nipple, back and forth, until the small bud of flesh tightened and Rachel had to close her eyes at the sharp, unexpected pleasure. Then his hand moved lower, so slowly that her breath halted in her chest, stroking over the velvet underside of her breast. "Pretty," he murmured, his voice deep, the single word slurred.

The word echoed sharply in Rachel's mind, and her head jerked around, her eyes opening. He was awake! For a moment she stared into half-opened eyes that were so black it was as if light drowned in them; then his lashes slowly dropped and he was asleep again, his hand falling away from her breast.

She was so shaken that she could barely move. Her flesh still burned from his touch, and that instant when she had stared into his eyes was a moment that was frozen in time, so imprinted on her memory that she felt branded by his glance. Black eyes, blacker than night, without any hint of brown. They had been hazy with fever and pain, but he had seen something he liked and reached out for it. Looking down, she saw that the gaping neckline of the loose, comfortable cotton shift left her breasts completely exposed to his view, and his touch; she had unwittingly invited both. Her hands trembled as she automatically continued wiping him down with the cool cloth. Her senses were reeling, her mind scrambling to adjust to the fact that he had been awake, that he had spoken, even if it had been only one word. Somehow during the long two days when he had lain motionless, even though she had longed for him to wake, she had stopped expecting him to. She had taken care of him as totally as one would an infant, and now she was as startled as if an infant had suddenly spoken. But he was no infant; he was a man. Ail man, if the frank appreciation in that single slurred word was any measurement. "Pretty," he'd said, and her cheeks heated.

Then the implications of that single word hit her, and she jerked upright. He was American! If he'd been anything else the first word he spoke, when he was only half-conscious and burning with fever, would have been in his native language. But that one word had been in English, and the accent, though slurred, had definitely been American. Part of the slur could have come from a natural accent, a southern or western drawl.

American. She wondered at the heritage that had given him his dark coloring, Italian or Arabic, Hungarian or American Indian, maybe even Black Irish? Spanish? Tartar? The high, chiseled cheekbones and thin, hawk-bridged nose could have come from any of those bloodlines, but he was definitely from the huge American melting pot.

Her heart was still hammering in her chest with excitement. Even after she had emptied the bowl of water, turned out the lamp and crawled into bed beside him, she was quivering and unable to sleep. He had opened his eyes and spoken to her, had moved voluntarily. He was recovering! A burden lifted from her shoulders with the knowledge.

She turned on her side and looked at him, barely able to see the outline of his profile in the darkness of the room, but every pore in her skin sensed his nearness. He was warm and alive, and an odd mixture of pain and ecstasy swelled inside her, because somehow he had become important to her, so important that the tenor of her existence had been irrevocably altered. Even when he left, as practicality told her he must, she would never be the same again. Diamond Bay had given him to her, a strange gift from the turquoise waters. She reached out and trailed her fingers lightly down his muscled arm, then withdrew her touch, because the feel of his skin made her heart lurch again. He had come from the sea, but it was she who had suffered the sea change.

Chapter Four

"He's dead, I'm telling you."

A slim man, with graying brown hair and a narrow, intense face that belied the self-imposed calmness and control of his manner, gave the speaker a look of contemptuous amusement. "Do you think we can afford to assume that, Ellis? We have found nothing – I repeat, nothing – to assure us of his death."

Tod Ellis narrowed his eyes. "There's no way he could've survived. That boat went up like a fuel tank."

An elegant red-haired woman had been silently listening to the two, and now she leaned forward to put out a cigarette. "And the report from one of the men that he saw something, or someone, go over the side?"

Ellis flushed angrily. These two had deferred to him when it came to setting up the ambush, but now they were treating him like a rank amateur. He didn't like it; he was far from an amateur, and they had damned well needed him when they were after Sabin. The plan hadn't worked out exactly as they'd wanted, but Sabin hadn't escaped, and that was the most important thing. If they had thought it would be easy to capture him, then they were fools, at best. "Even if he got into the water," he said patiently, "he was wounded. We saw him get hit. We were miles out. There's no way he could have gotten to shore. He either drowned, or a shark got him. Why take the chance on drawing attention to ourselves by searching for him?"

The other man's pale blue eyes looked beyond Ellis, into the past. "Ah, but this is Sabin we're talking about, not some ordinary man. How many times has he slipped away from us? Too many for me to trust that it was so easy to kill him. We found no remains on the boat, and if, as you say, he either drowned or was attacked by sharks, there still would have been some evidence. We've patrolled these waters for two days without finding anything. The logical thing to do is to move our search to shore."

"We'll be exposing ourselves if we do."

The woman smiled. "Not if we do it right. We must simply be discreet. Our biggest danger is the possibility that he was picked up by another boat and taken to a hospital. If he's had the opportunity to talk to someone, to make some calls, we won't be able to get near him. First we must find him, though. I agree with Charles. Too much is at stake for us to simply assume that he's dead."

Ellis's face was grim. "Do you have any idea how large an area we'll have to cover?"

Charles drew a map of Florida closer. "Our position was here," he said, marking the spot with an X. "Given the distance and the tides, which I've already checked, I think we should concentrate our efforts in this area." He drew a long oval on the map and tapped it with his pen. "Noelle, check all the hospitals in the area, and also the police blotters, to find if anyone has been treated for a gunshot wound. While you're doing that we'll be searching every inch of the coastline." He leaned back in his chair and surveyed Ellis with his arctic gaze. "Can you contact your people and find out without arousing suspicions if he's called anyone?"

Ellis shrugged. "I have a reliable contact."

"Then make it. We may have waited too long as it is."

He would make the call, Ellis thought, but he was sure it would be a waste of time. Sabin was dead; these people persisted in acting as if he were some sort of superman who could disappear into thin air, then miraculously reappear. Okay, so he'd had a reputation when he was in the field; that had been years ago. He would have lost his edge since then, sitting around at a dull desk job the way he'd been doing. No, Sabin was dead; Ellis was certain of it.

Rachel sat on the front porch swing, a newspaper spread across her lap and heaped with green beans. A dishpan sat on the swing beside her, and she systematically broke the tips off the beans and peeled the string off them, then broke the pods into inch-long sections, which she dropped into the dishpan. She didn't like stringing green beans, but she liked to eat them, so it was a necessary evil. She kept the swing gently swaying and listened to a portable radio set on the windowsill. She was listening to an FM country station, but the volume was turned low because she didn't want to disturb her patient, who was sleeping peacefully.

She had spent the morning expecting him to finally wake up for good, but instead he was still alternating between periods of deep sleep, when the aspirin and sponging got his fever down, and restlessness, when his temperature soared. He hadn't opened his eyes or spoken again, though once he had groaned and held his shoulder with his right hand until Rachel loosened his grip and held his hand, soothing him with soft murmurs of reassurance.

Joe eased up from his position under the oleander bush, a rumble forming in his throat. Rachel glanced at him, then swept her gaze around the yard and toward the road, to the left, but could see nothing. It wasn't like Joe to pay any attention to squirrels or rabbits. "What is it?" she asked, unable to keep the tightness of apprehension out of her voice, and Joe responded to her tone by moving to stand directly in front of the steps. The rumble was a full-fledged growl now, and he was staring toward the pine thicket, toward the slope that led down to Diamond Bay.

Two men were coming out of the thicket.

Rachel continued to string and snap the beans as if she were totally unconcerned, but she felt every muscle in her body tense. She stared at them, openly, deciding that that would be the normal thing to do. They were dressed casually, in lightweight cotton canvas pants and pullover shirts, with loose cotton jackets. Rachel eyed the jackets. The temperature was ninety-nine degrees and it wasn't quite noon yet, so it promised to get hotter. Jackets were anything but practical – unless they were needed to hide shoulder holsters.

As the men crossed the road and approached the house Joe's growls became snarls, and he crouched, the hair along his neck lifted. The men halted, and Rachel caught the movement one man made beneath his jacket before he halted himself. "Sorry about that," she called, leisurely putting aside the beans and getting to her feet. "Joe doesn't like strangers in general, and men in particular. He won't even let the neighbor in the yard. Guess some man abused him once. Are you lost, or has your boat quit on you?" As she talked she came down the steps and laid a calming hand on Joe's back, feeling the way he shifted a little away from her.

"Neither. We're looking for someone." The man who answered her was tall and good-looking, with sandy brown hair and an open, college-boy smile that flashed whitely in his tanned face. He glanced down at Joe. "Uh, do you want to get a better hold on the dog?"

"He'll be all right, as long as you don't come any nearer to the house." Rachel hoped that was true. Giving Joe another pat, she walked past him and approached the men. "I don't think it's me he's protecting as much as his territory. Now what was it you said?"

The other man was shorter, slimmer and darker than Mr. All-American College Boy. "FBI," he said briskly, flashing a badge in front of her nose. "I'm Agent Lowell. This is Agent Ellis. We're looking for a man we think might be in this area."

Rachel wrinkled her forehead, praying she wasn't overdoing it. "An escaped convict?"

Agent Ellis's gaze had been appreciatively measuring Rachel's long, bare legs, but now his eyes lifted to her face. "No, but prison is where we're trying to put him. We think he may have come ashore somewhere in this area."

"Haven't seen any strangers around here, but I'll keep a sharp watch. What does he look like?"

"Six feet tall, maybe a little taller. Black hair, black eyes."

"Seminole?"

Both men looked startled. "No, he's not an Indian," Agent Lowell finally said. "But he's dark, sort of Indian-looking."

"Do you have a picture of him?"

A quick look passed between the two men. "No."

"Is he dangerous? I mean, a murderer, or anything like that?" A lump had formed in her chest and was rising toward her throat. What would she do if they told her he was a murderer? How could she bear it?

Again that look, as if they weren't sure what to tell her. "He should be considered armed and dangerous. If you see anything at all suspicious give us a call at this number." Agent Lowell scribbled a telephone number on a piece of paper and gave it to Rachel, who glanced at it before folding it and putting it in her pocket.

"I'll do that," she said. "Thank you for coming by."

They started to leave; then Agent Lowell paused and turned back to her, his eyes narrowed. "There are some strange marks on the beach down there, as if something has been dragged. Do you know anything about them?"

Rachel's blood froze in her veins. Fool! she told herself numbly. She should have gone down to the beach and obliterated all those marks. At least the tide would have washed away any blood and other signs that had been left where he had fallen. Deliberately she wrinkled her forehead, giving herself time to think, then let her face clear. "Oh, you must mean where I collect shells and driftwood. I pile them all on a tarp and haul it up here. That way I can get it all up the slope with just one trip."

"What do you do with them? The shells and driftwood."

She didn't like the way Agent Lowell was looking at her, as if he didn't believe a word she said. "I sell them," she said, and it was the truth. "I own two souvenir shops."

"I see." He smiled at her. "Well, good luck in your shell hunting." They turned to leave again.

"Do you need a lift?" she asked, raising her voice. "You look hot now, and it's going to get hotter."

Both of them looked up at the blistering sun in the cloudless blue bowl of the sky; their faces were shiny with perspiration. "We came by boat," Agent Ellis said. "We're going to check along the beach some more. Thanks, anyway."

"Anytime. Oh, watch out if you go north. It gets swampy."

"Thanks again."

She watched them disappear into the pines and down the slope, and chills prickled her skin despite the heat. Slowly she returned to the porch and sat down on the swing, automatically returning to the task of breaking the beans. Everything they had said swirled in her mind, and she tried to sort it all out, to get her thoughts in order again. FBI? It was possible, but they had flashed their badges so swiftly she hadn't been able to examine them. They knew what he looked like, but they didn't have any photographs of him; she thought it would be reasonable that the FBI would have some likeness, even if it was just a drawing of someone they were trying to find. And they had sidestepped the question when she asked what he had done, as if they hadn't anticipated that and didn't know how to answer. They had said he should be considered armed and dangerous, but instead he was naked and helpless. Didn't they know he'd been shot? Why hadn't they said something about that?

But what if she were harboring a criminal? That had always been one of the possibilities, though she had discounted it. Now it swarmed back into her mind, and she felt sick.

The beans were finished. She took the pan into the house and set it in the sink, then returned to gather up the paper with the strings and broken ends on it. As she carried it to the kitchen to stuff it in the trash can she cast an apprehensive look at her open bedroom door. She could just see the head of the bed and his black hair on the pillow… her pillow. When he woke up again, and she looked into those night-black eyes, would she be looking into the eyes of a criminal? A killer?

Swiftly she washed her hands and flipped through the telephone book, then punched the number. It rang only once before a harried male voice said, "Sheriffs Department."

"Andy Phelps, please."

"Just a minute."

There was another ring, but this time the answer was absentminded, as if the person had other things on his mind. "Phelps."

"Andy, this is Rachel."

Immediately his voice warmed. "Hi, honey. Everything okay?"

"Fine. Hot, but fine. How are Trish and the kids?"

"The kids are doing okay, but Trish is praying for school to start."

She laughed, sympathizing with Andy's wife. Their boys carried rowdiness to new heights. "Listen, two guys just stopped by the house. They walked up from the beach."

His voice sharpened. "They give you any trouble?"

"No, nothing like that. They said they were FBI, but I didn't get a good look at their badges. They're looking for some man. Are they legitimate? Has your department been notified of anything? I may be paranoid, but I'm out here at the end of the road, and Rafferty's miles away. After B.B…." Her voice trailed away with the sudden pain of the memory. It had been five years, but there were still times when the loss and regret seared her, when the emptiness got to her.

Like no one else on earth, Andy understood. He had worked with B.B. in the DEA. The memory roughened his tone. "I know. You can't be too careful, honey. Look, we've had orders come down to cooperate with some guys who are looking for a man. It's all hush-hush. They're not the local FBI people. I doubt that they're FBI at all, but orders are orders."

Rachel's hand tightened on the receiver. "And an agency is an agency?"

"Yeah, something like that. Keep quiet about it, but keep your eyes open. I'm not real comfortable with the feel of this."

He wasn't the only one. "I will. Thanks."

"Sure thing. Listen, why don't you come to dinner some night soon? It's been a while since we've seen you."

"Thanks, I'd love to. Have Trish call me."

They hung up, and Rachel drew a deep breath. If Andy didn't think the men were FBI, that was good enough for her. Going into the bedroom, she stood beside the bed and watched the man sleep, his deep chest slowly rising and falling. She had kept the blinds closed since the night she had brought him into the house, so the room was dim and cool, but a thin ray of sunlight crept between two of the slats and slanted across his stomach, making that long, thin scar glow. Whoever he was, whatever he was involved in, he wasn't a common criminal.

They played lethal games, the men and women who peopled the shadowy world of intelligence and counterintelligence. They lived their lives balanced on the razor's edge of death; they were hard and cold, intense but casual. They weren't like other people, the people who worked at the same job every day and went home to their houses, to their families. Was he one of those for whom a normal life was impossible? She was almost certain of it now. But what was going on, and who could she trust? Someone had shot him. Either he had escaped, or he had been dumped in the ocean to drown. Were those two men hunting for him to protect him, or to finish off the job? Did he possess some highly sensitive information, something critical to defense?

She trailed her fingers over his hand, which was lying limply on top of the sheet. His skin was hot and dry; fever still burned inside him as his body tried to mend itself. She had been able to spoon enough sweetened tea and water into him to keep him from becoming dehydrated, but he had to begin eating soon, or she would be forced to take him to a hospital. This was the third day; he had to have nourishment.

Her brow furrowed. If he could swallow tea, he could swallow soup. She should have thought of that before!

Briskly she went into the kitchen and opened a can of chicken noodle soup, ran it through the blender until it was liquified, then put it on the stove to simmer. "Sorry it isn't homemade," she muttered to the man in the bedroom. "But I don't have any chicken in the freezer. Besides, this is easier."

She watched him closely, checking on him every few minutes; when he began to stir restlessly, moving his head back and forth on the pillow and kicking at the sheet, she prepared a tray for his first "meal," such as it was. It didn't take her long, less than five minutes. She carried the tray into the bedroom and almost dropped it when he suddenly heaved himself up on his right elbow, staring at her with those piercing, fever-bright black eyes.

Rachel's entire body tensed as desperation flooded her. If he fell off the bed she wouldn't be able to get him back on it without help. He was weaving back and forth on his precarious prop, still staring at her with burning intensity. She plunked the tray down on the floor where she stood, sloshing some of the soup over the side of the bowl, then darted to the side of the bed to catch him. Gently, supporting his head and trying not to jostle his shoulder, she put her arm around his back and eased his head onto her shoulder, bracing herself against his weight. "Lie down," she said in the calm, soothing tone she always used for him. "You can't get up yet."

A frown laced his black eyebrows together, and he resisted her efforts. "It's time for the party," he muttered, his words still drunkenly slurred.

He was awake, but certainly not lucid, drifting in a fever-induced dream world. "No, the party hasn't started yet," she reassured him, catching his right elbow and pulling it forward so he wouldn't be able to prop himself up on it.

His weight fell heavily on her supporting arm as she lowered him back onto the pillow. "You have time for a nap." He lay there, breathing heavily, his brow still furrowed as he stared at her. His gaze didn't flicker as she retrieved the tray from the floor and placed it on the bedside table; his attention was locked on her, as if he were trying to make sense of things, to fight his way out of the mists that clouded his mind. She talked quietly to him as she propped him up on her extra pillows; she didn't know if he understood what she was saying, but her voice and touch seemed to calm him. Sitting on the side of the bed, she began to feed him, talking to him all the while. He was docile, opening his mouth whenever she put the spoon to his lips, but soon his eyelids began to droop as he tired. Quickly she gave him aspirin, elated at how easy it had been to feed him.

As she supported his head and pulled the extra pillows from behind him so he could lie flat again, she had an idea. It was worth a try. "What's your name?"

He frowned, his head jerking restlessly. "Whose?" he asked, his deep voice full of confusion.

Rachel remained bent over him, her hand under his head. Her heart was beating faster. Maybe she could begin getting some answers! "Yours. What's your name?"

"Mine?" The questions were making him fretful, agitated. He stared hard at her as he tried to concentrate, his gaze slipping over her face, then moving lower.

She tried again. "Yes, yours. What's your name?"

"Mine?" He drew a deep breath, then said it again. "Mine." The second time it was a statement, not a question. Slowly he moved, lifting both hands, wincing at the pain in his shoulder. He molded his hands over her breasts, cupping them warmly in his palms and rubbing her nipples with his thumbs. "Mine," he said again, stating what he plainly considered to be his ownership.

For a moment, just for a moment, Rachel was helpless against the unexpected pleasure burning her flesh at his touch. She was frozen in place, her nerve endings going wild, her body flooding with warmth as his thumbs turned her nipples into hardened nubs. Then reality returned with a thud, and she jerked away from him, bolting off the bed. Exasperation at him – and anger at herself – filled her. "That's what you think," she snapped at him. "These are mine, not yours!"

His eyelids drooped sleepily. She stood there glaring down at him. Evidently the only things on his mind were partying and sex! "Damn it, you have a one-track mind!" she angrily accused, half under her breath.

His eyelashes fluttered open, and he looked at her again. "Yes," he said clearly, then closed his eyes and went to sleep.

Rachel stood beside the bed with clenched fists, torn between laughing and swatting him. It was doubtful that he had understood anything she'd said; that last provocative word could have been in answer to her accusation, or to some question that existed only in his own foggy consciousness. Now he was sleeping heavily again, totally relaxed and oblivious to the upheaval he had left behind.

Shaking her head, she picked up the tray and quietly left the room. Her insides were still quivering with mingled indignation and desire. It was an uncomfortable combination, uncomfortable because she wasn't one to delude herself, and she couldn't deny that she was attracted to him more powerfully than she could ever have imagined. Touching him was a compulsion; her hands wanted to linger on his warm skin. His voice made her shiver deep inside, and one look from those black eyes made her feel electrified. And his touch…his touch! Twice now he had put his hands on her, and each time she had turned molten with uncontrollable pleasure.

It was insane to feel so intensely about a man she didn't know, but no amount of self-lecturing could change her response. Their lives had become linked from the moment she had dragged him out of the surf; in assuming responsibility for his safety, she had committed herself to him on a level that went so deep she was only now beginning to realize its reaches. And he had become hers, as if that act of mercy had created a marriage of their lives, binding them together regardless of their wishes or wants.

Though he was a stranger she already knew a lot about him. She knew that he was hard and fast and well trained; he would have to be, to survive in the world he had chosen. He also possessed a tough-mindedness that was awesome in its intensity, a steely determination that had kept him swimming in the night-dark ocean with two bullet wounds in his body, when a lesser man would have drowned almost immediately. She knew that he was important to the people who were hunting him, though she didn't know if they wanted to protect him or kill him. She knew that he didn't snore and that he had an extremely healthy libido, despite his physical incapacitation. He was still when he slept, except when his bones and muscles ached from his flaring fever; that stillness had bothered her at first, until she realized that it was natural to him.

He also answered no questions, even in his delirium, not even one as elemental as his name. It could be the fever-induced confusion, but it was also more than possible that his training was so deeply ingrained in his subconscious that even illness or drugs couldn't override it.

Soon, tomorrow or the next day, or perhaps even during the coming night, he would wake up and be in full possession of his senses. He would require clothing, and answers to his questions. She wondered what those questions would be, and thought of her own questions, though she was beginning to wonder if he would provide any answers. She couldn't prepare for what he might or might not say, because she felt it would be useless to try to predict his actions. Clothing, however, was a problem she could do something about. She had nothing there that would fit him; though she often wore men's shirts she had bought them specifically for herself, and they would be far too small for him. She hadn't kept any of B.B.'s clothing, though that would have been useless in any case, as B.B. had weighed a good thirty pounds less than this man.

Mentally she made a list of the things he would need. She didn't like leaving him alone for the length of time it would take her to drive to the nearest discount store, but it was either that or ask Honey to do the shopping and bring the things out. She considered that. It was tempting, but the arrival of the two men that morning made her reluctant to involve Honey any deeper in the situation. It should be safe to leave him alone for an hour. She would do her shopping early the next morning, which would give those men time to move out of the immediate area.

She carefully locked the house when she left, and told Joe to stand guard. Her patient was sleeping quietly; she had just gotten him settled, so he should sleep for several hours. Her gun-metal Regal ate up the miles as she pushed her speed as fast as she could, anxiety gnawing at her. It should be all right to leave him alone, but she wouldn't breathe easy until she was back home and could see that for herself.

Though it had just opened for the morning, the local K mart was already swarming with customers who had all decided to do their shopping before the worst heat of the day was upon them. Rachel got a shopping cart and maneuvered it through the crowded aisles, dodging the darting preschoolers who had managed to escape their mothers and were headed, one and all, for the toy department. She steered around browsers, idled behind a frail white-haired woman who walked with a cane, then spotted a clear aisle and broke to the right.

A package of underwear, a few pairs of socks and a pair of jogging shoes, size ten, went into the cart. She had measured his feet that morning, so she was fairly certain the shoes would fit. Two button-up shirts and a cotton terry pullover shirt were piled on top of the shoes. She was uncertain of what size pants to get, but finally selected a pair of jeans, a pair of black denim cutoffs in case the jeans were too uncomfortable on his leg and a pair of khaki chinos. She was ready to head for the checkout counter when a tingle ran up her spine, and her head lifted. Glancing around, she saw a man casually examining some sale items, and the tingle became a fullfledged chill. It was Agent Lowell.

Without breaking stride, she diverted her path to the women's section. The men's clothes, though androgynous enough that they couldn't be recognized as men's unless the sizes were examined, would be a dead giveaway under close scrutiny. Unfortunately Agent Lowell was exactly the type to subject everything to just such an examination. The undershorts, socks and shoes, beneath the pants and shirts, could have no logical explanation.

Ruthlessly she went through the underwear section. Several pairs of panties, all lace and satin, were thrown on top of the pile. A frothy confection of a bra and a matching half-slip were added; she hoped she could trust in the normal male's aversion to handling female lingerie in a public place to keep Agent Lowell from examining the contents of her shopping cart. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him casually moving closer, pausing every so often to examine certain items with absent interest. He was good; he slid through the crowds without attracting notice. He tracked, while giving no appearance of being a hunter.

A grim look entered Rachel's eyes. He would have to be determined indeed to get to the bottom of her cart. Wheeling around, she headed for the drug-and-health section. Intimate female items, some of which she never used but chose now for their conspicuous packaging, were thrown into the cart. If he dared reach for anything she would accuse him of being a pervert in a voice loud enough to bring every store security guard at a run.

He was closing in again. Rachel chose her moment, then turned her cart and all but rammed it into his knee.

"Oh, my goodness, I'm sorry!" she gasped in apology. "I didn't see you – oh," she said again, startled recognition in her voice. "Ag – " She stopped, looked around, then lowered her voice to little more than a whisper. "Agent Lowell."

It was an Academy Award-winning performance, but it might have been wasted on Agent Lowell, who was preoccupied with rubbing his knee. He straightened, a look of pain still in his eyes. "Hello again, Ms….I don't believe I got your name yesterday."

"Jones," she said, holding out her hand. "Rachel Jones."

His hand was hard, but his palm was a little moist. Agent Lowell wasn't quite as relaxed as he appeared.

"You're out early," he commented.

"With the heat the way it is, it's best to either get out early or wait until after sundown. You really should wear a hat if you're going to be walking around today the way you were yesterday." His face was already sunburned, so her advice was too late.

His expressionless eyes drifted down to the contents of the cart, then jerked back up abruptly. Rachel felt a moment's grim satisfaction at her choices. His presence could be pure coincidence, or it could be deliberate, but he was automatically curious; it was part of his job. She sensed that he had been less disarmed by her studied nonchalance and innocence than the other agent had been.

"You, uh, may have to float a loan to pay for all that," he said after a slight pause.

She ruefully examined the cart. "You may be right. Every time I go off on a trip it seems as if I never have what I need."

His eyes sharpened with interest. "You're going on a trip?"

"In a couple of weeks. I'm doing some research on the Keys, and it always helps to see an area firsthand."

"Research?"

She shrugged. "I dabble in several things. I have my souvenir shops. I do a little writing, teach a few night courses. It keeps me from getting bored with myself." Looking at the checkout counters, where the lines were growing, she said blithely, "I'd better get in line before everyone in the store gets ahead of me. Oh – did you find anything yesterday?"

His face was a blank mask, though his eyes were once again peering at her cart. "No, nothing. It may have been a false lead."

"Well, good luck. Remember to get a cap or something while you're here."

"Sure. Thanks."

She joined one of the lines at the row of checkout counters and selected a magazine to flip through while she waited, gradually nudging the cart forward. He had moved to the side and was looking at paperback books. Damn, would he never leave? When it came her time, she unloaded the cart and tried to keep her body between Lowell and the counter. The clerk picked up the package of undershorts and held them in front of her while she punched in the code number on the computerized cash register. Rachel shifted to that side, and when the clerk set the package down she pushed a shirt over it. Lowell was moving closer.

"One-forty-six eighteen," the clerk said, reaching for a large bag.

Rachel checked her wallet, inwardly grimacing. She seldom carried that much cash, and this was no exception. Disgruntled, she plunked down a plastic credit card and the clerk ran it through the imprinting machine, then called to get an okay on the amount. Lowell had walked around to the front of the store and was coming down in front of the checkout counters. Rachel grabbed the bag the clerk had laid on the counter and began shoving her purchases into it.

"Sign here," the clerk said, pushing the credit slip toward her. Rachel scribbled her name and a moment later the bag was stapled shut. She loaded it in the cart and began wheeling it out of the store.

"Need any help?" Lowell asked, falling into step beside her.

"No, rolling it in the cart is easier than carrying it. Thanks, anyway."

The humid heat settled on them like a suffocating blanket as soon as they left the cool confines of the store, and Rachel squinted her eyes against the almost painful brightness. After opening the trunk of the car she dumped the bag in and slammed the lid shut, agonizingly aware of Lowell's acute interest.

She pushed the cart to a buggy-return stand, then walked back to the car. "Goodbye," she said casually.

He was still watching as she drove out of the lot. Rachel wiped the perspiration off her face, aware that her heart was thudding in a panicky rhythm. She was out of practice for this! She only hoped he hadn't been too suspicious.

Chapter Five

The dreams were still so vivid that it was several minutes before he realized he was awake, but awareness did not necessarily bring understanding. He lay quietly, looking around the cool, dim, unfamiliar room and groping for any details in his mind that would give him a hint of what was going on and where he was. There seemed to be no connection between his only memories and this silent room. But were they memories, or dreams? He had dreamed of a woman, a warm and pliant woman, with eyes as clear and gray as a highland lake under cloudy skies, her hands tender as she caressed him, her velvety breasts swelling against his palms. His fingers twitched on the sheets; the dream was so real he almost ached to feel her under his hands.

Still, that had been only a dream, and he had to deal with reality. He lay there until certain things began to return, and he knew that they weren't dreams. The attack on his boat; the endless, agonizing swim in the dark, driven on by his own sheer inability to give up. Then, after that… nothing. Not even a glimmer of what had happened.

Where was he? Had he been captured? They would give almost anything, risk almost anything, to take him alive.

He moved cautiously, his mouth setting grimly at the amount of effort it took. There was pain in his left shoulder and lacing through his left thigh, and he had a dull headache, but both his leg and arm obeyed his mental command to move. Awkwardly using his right hand, he threw the sheet back and struggled to a sitting position. Dizziness assailed him, but he gripped the side of the bed until the feeling subsided, then he took stock once again. A pristine bandage was wrapped around his thigh, thickly padded over the wounds. The same treatment had been given to his shoulder; gauze had been wrapped around it, then anchored around his chest. He was totally naked, but that didn't bother him. His first priority was to establish his mobility; his second was to find out where the hell he was.

He stood, the wounded muscle in his thigh quivering in outrage at being forced into motion. He wavered, but didn't fall, merely stood there until the room stopped swaying and his leg was steady under him. Despite the coolness of the room a fine sheen of sweat began to form on his body.

There was no sound except for the gentle whir of a ceiling fan that hung over the bed and the distant mechanized sound of an air conditioner. He listened intently, but could detect nothing else. Keeping his right hand braced against the bed, he took a step toward the window, grinding his teeth together at the searing pain in his leg. The closed slats of the old-fashioned blinds drew him. Reaching the window, he used one finger to lift a slat and peer through the crack. A yard, a vegetable garden. Nothing unusual, but nothing in sight, either, human or animal.

An open door was in front of him, revealing a bathroom. Slowly he moved to the doorway, his black eyes taking note of the items on the vanity. Hair spray, lotions, cosmetics. A woman's bathroom, then. Perhaps the red-haired woman who had been on the boat? Everything was neat, impeccably clean, and there was a certain spare luxury to both the bath and bedroom, as if everything had been chosen for maximum comfort while still leaving a lot of what was simply bare space. The next door over was a closet. He pushed racks aside and checked sizes. Again, everything was for a woman, or a small, very slender man of undecided sexuality. The clothes ranged from remarkably ragged to sleekly sophisticated. A disguise?

Cautiously he opened the next door slightly, putting his eye to the small crack to make certain there was no one out there. The small hallway was empty, as was the room he could see beyond it. He eased the door open, balancing himself with a hand on the frame. Nothing. No one. He was alone, and that made no sense at all.

Damn, he was weak, and so thirsty that the fires of hell seemed to be in his throat. Limping badly, occasionally staggering, he made his way through the empty living room. A small, sunlit alcove was next, and the glaring sun streaming through the windows made him blink as his eyes adjusted to the sudden excess of light. Next was a kitchen, small and sunny and extremely modern. A colorful array of fresh vegetables lay on a counter, and there was a bowl of fresh fruit sitting on the center work island.

Cotton lined his mouth and throat. He groped toward the sink, then opened cabinet doors until he found the glasses. Turning on the cool tap water, he filled a glass and turned it up, pouring the water into his mouth so thirstily that some of it spilled down his chest. With that first terrible urgency satisfied, he drank another glass of water and this time managed to get it all in his mouth.

How long had he been here? The blanks in his memory made him furious. He was vulnerable, uncertain of where he was or what had happened, and vulnerability was one thing he couldn't afford. But he was starving, too. The bowl of fresh fruit beckoned, and he wolfed down a banana, then half an apple. Abruptly he was too full to eat another bite, so he tossed both the banana skin and the half-eaten apple into the trash.

Okay, he could get around. Slowly, but he wasn't helpless. His next priority was to find some means of self-defense. The most available weapon was a knife, and he examined the kitchen knives before choosing the one with the sharpest, strongest blade. With that in his hand he began a slow, methodical search of the house, but there were no other weapons of any sort to be found.

The outside doors all had extremely strong dead-bolt locks on them. They weren't fancy, but they would damned sure slow down anyone trying to get in. He looked at them, trying to remember if he had ever seen any locks exactly like them, and decided that he hadn't. They were locked, but what sense did it make to put the locks on the inside, where he could get to them? He turned the lock, and it opened with a smooth, almost silent movement. Warily he reached for the knob and opened the door a little, again checking through the crack to see if anyone was in view. The door was heavy, too heavy to be an ordinary door. He opened it a little more, running his fingers along the edge. Steel reinforced, he guessed.

It was a snug little prison, but the locks were on the wrong side of the doors, and there were no wardens.

He opened the door completely, looking out through a screen door at a neat little yard, a tall pine thicket and a flock of fat white and gray geese searching for insects in the grass. The heat coming through the screen door was thick and heavy, hitting him like a blow. A dog appeared as if by magic from beneath a bush, leaping up onto the porch and staring at him with unblinking eyes as its ears went back and snarls twisted the canine muzzle.

Dispassionately he examined the dog, weighing his chances. A trained attack dog, German shepherd, weighing eighty or ninety pounds. In his weakened condition he didn't have a chance against a dog like that, even with a knife in his hand. He was effectively caged, after all.

His leg would barely support his weight. He was naked, weak, and didn't know where he was. The odds weren't in his favor, but he was alive and filled with a cold, controlled rage. Now he also had the advantage of surprise, because whoever had brought him here wouldn't be expecting him to be up and armed. He closed the door and locked it again, then watched the dog through the window until it left the porch and resumed its position beneath the bush.

He had to wait.

An enormous, purplish-black thunderhead was looming in the sky when Rachel turned into the driveway. She eyed it, wondering if it would dump its load of rain out at sea or hold it until it was over land. The rain would be torrential, and the temperature would drop sharply, but as soon as the cloud had passed the heat would rise again, and the rain would evaporate in a suffocating cloud of steam. Ebenezer Duck and his flock scattered, honking irritably, as she pulled the car under the shade of the oak tree where they had been lazily pecking at the grass. Joe lifted his head to look at her, then returned to his snooze. Everything was calm, just as it had been when she'd left. Only then did she feel an easing of the tight constriction in her chest.

She got the bag out of the trunk, unaware of the sharp black eyes that followed her every move. Holding the bag in one arm and the keys in the other hand, she climbed the steps to the porch, paused to shove her sunglasses on top of her head, then held the screen door open with her hip while she unlocked the door and pushed it open. The air-conditioned coolness was such a shocking contrast to the searing heat outside that goose bumps rose on her flesh, and she shivered. Taking deep breaths, she dropped the bag and her purse on one of the love seats and went to check on her patient.

Just as her hand touched the doorknob a hard arm circled her throat and she was jerked backward, her neck arched unnaturally. A brightly gleaming knife was held in front of her face. She had been too stunned to react, but now sheer terror flooded her as her gaze locked on the knife. How had they gotten in? Had they already killed him? The anguish that rose in her was wild and ferocious, consuming her.

"Don't fight and I won't hurt you," a deep voice murmured in her ear. "I want some answers, but I won't take any chances. If you make a wrong move – " He didn't finish the sentence, but he didn't have to. How calm the voice was, as cool and unemotional as stone. It made her blood congeal.

The arm under her chin was choking her, and she automatically raised both hands, clutching at him. The knife moved menacingly closer. "No, none of that," he whispered, his mouth close to her ear. Rachel shrank from the knife, her head digging into his shoulder, her body crowding frantically against his in an attempt to put distance between herself and that shining blade. Every detail of his body was imprinted against her, and suddenly her dazed senses realized what she was feeling. He was naked! And if he were naked, then it had to be…

Sharp, piercing relief, as painful in its own way as the fear and anguish had been, made her muscles suddenly tremble as the tension left them. Her hands relaxed on his forearm.

"That's better," the low voice growled. "Who are you?"

"Rachel Jones," she said, her voice breathless because of the pressure he was putting on her throat.

"Where am I?"

"In my house. I pulled you out of the surf and brought you here." She could feel him hesitate, though perhaps it was simply that he was growing weaker. His strength was astonishing under the circumstances, but he had been very ill, and his stamina must be wavering. "Please," she whispered. "You shouldn't be out of bed."

That was the truth, Sabin thought grimly. He was exhausted, as if he'd run a marathon; his legs felt as if they would give out on him at any moment. He didn't know her, and he couldn't trust her; he had only this one chance, and a wrong guess could cost him his life, but he didn't have much choice. Damn, he was weak! Slowly he relaxed his right arm from around her throat and let his left hand, the one holding the knife, drop to his side. His shoulder throbbed, and he doubted that he would be able to lift his arm again.

Rather than jerking away from him, she turned cautiously, as if afraid of startling him into an attack, and wedged her shoulder under his right arm, while her arms went around him and supported him. "Lean on me before you fall," she said, her voice still a little breathless. "It would be a mess if you tore all those stitches out."

He didn't have much choice except to drape his arm over her slender shoulders and lean heavily on her. If he didn't either sit down or lie down – soon – he was going to fall, and he knew it. Slowly she helped him into the bedroom, supporting him as he virtually collapsed onto the edge of the bed, then holding his head in the crook of her left arm as she lowered him into a supine position while she reached around him with her other hand to arrange the pillow. Sabin drew a deep breath, his senses automatically reacting to her warm female scent and the softness of her breast against his cheek. He had only to turn his head to press his mouth against her nipple, and the image teased at him with a curious urgency.

He lay with his eyes closed, breathing rapidly in exhaustion, while she lifted his legs onto the bed and pulled the sheet up to his waist. "There," she said softly. "You can rest now." She stroked her hand over his chest, as she had done so many times in the past few days, an action that had become automatic because it seemed to calm his restlessness. He was much cooler; the fever had finally lost its grip on him. The knife was still clutched in his left hand, and she reached to take it, but his fingers tightened at her touch, and his eyes flew open, his gaze black and fierce.

Rachel kept her hand on the knife, levelly meeting his eyes. "Why do you need it?" she asked. "If I meant you any harm I've had a lot of opportunities to do something about it before now."

Her eyes were gray, completely so, without any hint of blue. They were almost charcoal in color, but warm, and with an utter clarity that made them seem fathomless. He felt a shock of recognition. The eyes, and the woman, had filled his recent dreams with a tender eroticism that made his loins tighten. But… were they dreams? The woman wasn't a dream. She was real, warm and firm of flesh, and her hands had moved over him with the ease of familiarity. She didn't act like a guard, but he couldn't afford to take the chance. If he relinquished the knife he might not be able to get it back. "I'll keep it," he said.

Rachel hesitated, wondering if she should press the issue, but there was something in his quiet, flat tone that made her decide to let it go. Even though he was weak and barely able to get around on his own, there was something about him that told her he couldn't be pushed. He was a dangerous man, this stranger sleeping in her bed. She moved her hand from his.

"All right. Are you hungry?"

"No. I ate a banana and an apple."

"How long have you been awake?"

He hadn't checked a clock, but he didn't need a clock to give him a sense of time. "Almost an hour." His gaze hadn't wavered from her. Rachel felt as if he could see through her, as if he were probing her mind.

"You woke up a couple of times before, but you were still feverish and talking nonsense."

"What kind of nonsense?" he asked sharply.

Rachel regarded him calmly. "No state secrets or anything like that. You thought you were going to a party."

Was there a double meaning to that crack about state secrets? Did she know anything, or had that just been a coincidence? Sabin wanted to question her, but he hardly had the upper hand at the moment, and his exhaustion was changing into acute sleepiness. As if she knew, she touched his face, her fingers cool and light. "Go to sleep," she said. "I'll still be here when you wake up."

It was, ridiculously, the reassurance he needed to let him relax into sleep.

Quietly Rachel left the room and went to the kitchen, where she leaned weakly against the work island. Her legs were shaking, her insides quivering like gelatin, in reaction to all that had happened to her already… and it wasn't even noon yet! Nor did she have any of the answers she had promised herself she would get as soon as he woke up; rather than asking questions, she had been answering his. She hadn't been prepared for the intensity of his gaze, so piercing that it was difficult to meet his eyes for any length of time. Warlock's eyes… She certainly hadn't been prepared for having a knife held to her throat! And she had been helpless, unable to do anything against a strength that was far superior to hers, even though he was undoubtedly weak from his wounds and illness.

The terror that had held her in its icy grip for those few moments had been worse than she had ever imagined. She had been frightened before, but not to that degree. She was still shaking in reaction, and her eyes burned with tears that she refused to let fall. Now wasn't the time for tears; she had to get herself under control. He might sleep for half a day, or he might wake up in an hour, but she was going to be in complete command of herself whenever he woke. He would also need feeding, she thought, seizing gratefully on something practical to do. Banana and apple notwithstanding, his system would probably demand frequent feedings until he had recovered.

Her movements jerky, she set beef tips simmering for beef stew and began dicing potatoes, carrots and celery. Maybe the meal would be ready by the time he awoke; if not, he could settle for soup and a sandwich. When everything was in the pot she darted out to the vegetable garden and gathered the ripe tomatoes, then ignored the heat and began pulling up weeds. It wasn't until she finally fell to her knees on a wave of dizziness that she realized how erratically she had been behaving, spurred on by the overdose of adrenaline her system had absorbed that morning. It was insanity to work out in the broiling sun, especially without a hat!

She went inside and washed her face with cold water; she felt calmer now, though her hands were still trembling slightly. There was nothing to do but wait: wait until the stew was ready; wait until he woke up; wait until she got some answers… wait.

It was a tribute to her self-possession and concentration that she was actually able to do some research for the course she would be teaching in the fall. Like a manuscript, the course would require pacing and plotting to hold the students' interest, to make them stretch. Yet even though she was deeply involved in her reading and notes, she was so attuned to him that she heard the slight rustle made by the bedcovers when he moved, and she knew he was awake. Checking her watch, she saw that he had slept for a little over three hours; the stew would be ready, if he was hungry.

He was sitting up, yawning and rubbing his bearded face, when she entered the bedroom. Instantly she felt his attention settle on her like a beam of pure energy, tingling on her skin.

"Are you hungry now? You've slept for three hours."

He considered that, then gave a brief nod. "Yes. I need a bathroom, a shower and a shave first, though."

"Sorry, the shower is out while you still have stitches," she said, hurrying to his side as he threw back the sheet and eased his feet to the floor, wincing in pain and holding his left thigh. Rachel put a supporting arm around him until he was steady on his feet. "I'll put a new blade in my razor for you, though." Sensing that he preferred to get across the room on his own power, she let her arm drop and watched anxiously as he took each painful step. He was a loner; he wasn't accustomed to aid and didn't welcome it, though he had to know that he simply wasn't capable of some things right now. He would let her help him only when it was necessary. Still, she felt compelled to ask. "Shall I shave you, or do you think you're steady enough to do it yourself?''

He paused at the door to the bathroom and glanced over his shoulder at her. "I'll do it."

She nodded and started toward him. "I'll just put the new blade – "

"I'll find them," he said quietly, stopping her before she could reach him. Rachel accepted her dismissal, turning instead toward the other door.

It hurt to have him reject her help after the days he had been totally helpless and dependent on her for everything, after the nights she had spent leaning over him, sponging him down to keep him cool, and especially after the mental strain she had endured. As she set the table she tried to deal with that hurt, to push it away. After all, she was even more of a stranger to him than he was to her, and it was only natural that he would try to regain control of himself as soon as possible. To a man like him, control would be vital. She had to stop hovering over him like a mother hen.

It was easy to tell herself that, but when at last she heard the water cut off in the bathroom she hesitated for only a moment before giving in to the compulsion to check on him. He was standing in the middle of the bedroom floor, looking around as if considering his options. A towel was knotted low on his lean hips, and contrary to logic it made him seem even more naked than when he had been completely unclothed. Rachel's pulse leaped. Even with the stark contrast of the white bandages on his leg and shoulder, he still seemed immensely powerful, and so male that she felt her mouth go dry.

He had shaved, and the clean line of his jaw made her fingers twitch with the urge to stroke it – another gesture he wouldn't appreciate.

"Is there anything I could wear, or do I just go around naked?" he finally asked, when Rachel made no move either to approach him or to speak.

She groaned as she remembered and hit the heel of her palm against her forehead. "I have something for you to wear. That's where I was this morning, picking up some things you would need." The shopping bag still lay where she had dropped it in the living room; she grabbed it and carried it into the bedroom, where she deposited it on the bed.

He opened the bag and a curious expression crossed his face; then he pulled out a lacy pair of panties and held them up to examine them before Rachel could explain. "Size five," he commented, and looked at her as though measuring her for the fit. The scrap of lace and nylon dangled from one finger. "Nice, but I don't think they'll fit me."

"They weren't meant to," Rachel said calmly, still tingling from the once-over he'd given her. "They were camouflage, that's all. Anything you find in there that you don't ordinarily use, put back in the bag." She refused to be embarrassed, since she had only done what had seemed necessary. The "camouflage" had been darned expensive, too! Leaving him to dress in whatever he chose, she returned to the kitchen and popped buttered fresh bread into the oven, then ladled up the stew and poured tea into tall glasses full of ice.

"I need help with the shirt."

She hadn't heard him approach, and she whirled, startled by both his nearness and what he'd said. He was standing right behind her, clad in the black denim cutoffs and holding the terry-cloth pullover in his hand. His chest filled her vision, tautly powerful muscles covered with black, curling hair and the white bulk of the bandage wrapped around his left shoulder. How long had he struggled with the shirt before admitting that he couldn't manage it by himself? She was astonished that he hadn't simply exchanged it for one that buttoned, so he wouldn't have to ask for her help.

"Sit down so I can reach you better," she said, taking the shirt from his hand. He held the corner of the cabinets for support as he slowly limped to the table in the dining alcove and eased himself down onto one of the chairs. Rachel carefully worked the shirt up his arm, a look of intent concentration on her face as she tried not to jostle his shoulder. When she had it in place she said, "Put your other arm in the sleeve while I keep it from pulling on your shoulder."

Without a word he did as she directed, and together they pulled the shirt over his head. Rachel tugged it into place, much as a mother would dress a toddler, but the man sitting motionless under her ministrations was no child in any sense she could imagine. She didn't linger over the chore, well aware of his dislike for having to rely on her aid. Briskly she got the bread out of the oven and put it in the napkin-lined breadbasket, then placed the basket on the table and took her own chair. "Are you left-handed or right-handed?" she asked, not looking at him, even though she could feel the burning energy of his gaze on her face. "Ambidextrous. Why?"

"The spoon could be difficult for you to handle if you were left-handed," she replied, nodding at the stew. "Would you like bread?"

"Please."

He was very good at one-word sentences, she thought as she put the bread on his plate. Actually, she should have thought of asking him if he could handle the razor, too, but his clean-shaven face said that he evidently could. They ate in silence for a few moments, and he really did justice to the stew. She hadn't expected his appetite to be so good so early in his recovery.

The bowl was nearly empty when he put his spoon down and pinned her with the ebony fire of his eyes. "Tell me what's going on."

It was a demand that Rachel didn't feel like meeting. Carefully she put her own spoon down. "I think it's my turn to ask a few questions. Who are you? What's your name?"

He didn't like the counterdemand. She sensed his displeasure, though his expression didn't flicker. The hesitation lasted for barely a second, but she noticed it and had the immediate impression that he wasn't going to answer. Then he drawled, "Call me, 'Joe'."

"I can't do that," she replied. "'Joe' is what I call the dog, because he wouldn't tell me his name, either. Make up another one." Driven by the electric surge of tension in the air she began clearing off the table, moving swiftly and automatically. He watched her for a moment, then said quietly, "Sit down."

Rachel didn't pause. "Why? Do I have to be sitting down to listen to more lies?"

"Rachel, sit down." He didn't raise his voice, didn't change the calm, dead-level inflection of his tone, but suddenly it was a command. She stared at him for a moment, then lifted her chin and returned to her chair. When she merely waited in silence, looking at him, he gave a little sigh.

"I appreciate your help, but the less you know, the better it is for you."

Rachel had always hated it when anyone presumed to know what was best for her and what wasn't. "I see. Was I not supposed to notice that you had two bullet holes in you, when I pulled you out of the surf? Was I supposed to turn my head when two men pretending to be FBI agents came looking for you, and just turn you over to them? Was it supposed to pass my notice that you held a knife to my throat this morning? I'm a little curious, I admit! I've nursed you for four days, and I really would like to know your name, if that isn't too much to ask!"

One level black brow lifted at her sarcasm. "It could be."

"All right, forget it. Play your little games. You don't answer my questions and I won't answer yours. Deal?"

He watched her for a little longer, and Rachel kept her gaze level, not backing down an inch. "My name is Sabin," he finally said, the words slowly drawn out of him, as if he begrudged every syllable.

She absorbed the name's sound, her mind lingering over the feel and form of it. "And the rest of it?"

"Is it important?"

"No. But I'd like to know, anyway."

He paused only a fraction of a second. "Kell Sabin."

She held out her hand. "Glad to meet you, Kell Sabin."

Slowly he took her hand, his callused palm sliding against her softer one and his hard, warm fingers wrapping around hers. "Thank you for taking care of me. I've been here four days?"

"This is the fourth day."

"Fill me in on what's happened."

He had the manner of a man accustomed to command; rather than requesting, he ordered, and it was clear that he expected his orders to be obeyed. Rachel pulled her hand from his, disturbed by his warm touch and the shivery way it affected her. Clasping her fingers together to dispel the tingling in them, she rested her hands on the table. "I pulled you out of the water and brought you here. I think you hit your head on one of the rocks that line the mouth of the bay. You had a concussion and were in shock. The bullet was still in your shoulder."

He frowned. "I know. Did you take it out?"

"Not me. I called the vet."

At least something could startle him, though the expression was quickly gone. "A veterinarian?"

"I had to do something, and a doctor has to report all gunshot wounds."

He eyed her thoughtfully. "You didn't want it reported?"

"I thought you might not want it reported."

"You thought right. What happened then?"

"I took care of you. You were out of it for two days. Then you started waking up, but the fever had you out of your head. You didn't know what was going on."

"And the FBI agents?"

"They weren't FBI. I checked."

"What did they look like?"

Rachel began to feel as if she were being interrogated. "The one who calls himself Lowell is thin, dark, about five foot ten, early forties. The other one, Ellis, is tall, good-looking in a toothpaste-ad sort of way, sandy-brown hair, blue eyes."

"Ellis," he said, as if to himself.

"I played dumb. It seemed the safest thing to do until you woke up. Are they friends of yours?"

"No."

Silence fell between them. Rachel studied her hands, waiting for another question. When none came she tried one of her own. "Should I have called the police?"

"It would have been safer for you if you had."

"I took a calculated risk. I figured the odds were more in my favor than yours." She took a deep breath. "I'm a civilian, but I used to be an investigative reporter. I saw some things in those days that didn't add up, and I did a little digging, found out some things before I was warned not to go any deeper. You could have been a drug runner or an escaped convict, but there wasn't any hint of anything like that on the scanner. You could also have been an agent. You had been shot twice. You were unconscious and couldn't protect yourself or tell me anything. If… people…were hunting you, you wouldn't have had a chance in a hospital."

His lashes had dropped, shielding his expression. "You've got quite an imagination."

"Haven't I," she agreed mildly.

He leaned back in his chair, wincing a little as he tried to get his shoulder comfortable. "Who else knows I'm here, other than the vet?"

"No one."

"Then how did you get me up here? Or did the vet help you? You're not Superwoman."

"I put you on a quilt and dragged you up here, with help from the dog. Maybe he thought it was a game." Her gray eyes darkened as she thought of the Herculean effort she had made to get him inside the house. "When Honey got here, we lifted you onto the bed."

"Honey?"

"The vet. Honey Mayfield."

Sabin watched her quiet face, wondering at what she wasn't saying. How far had she dragged him? How had she gotten him up the steps to the porch? He had carried wounded men out of battle, so he knew how difficult it was, even with his strength and training. He outweighed her by at least eighty pounds; there was no way she could have lifted him. She could be lying about not having anyone else help her, but there wasn't any reason for her to do so; all he could do was read between the lines. Almost anyone would have called the police immediately on finding a man unconscious on their beach, but she hadn't. Few people would ever have considered the options and circumstances that had occurred to her. People just didn't think about such things. It wasn't a part of their normal lives; it only happened in movies and books and therefore wasn't real. What life had she led that would make her so cautious, so aware of something that should have been beyond her experience?

They both heard the approaching car at the same time. Instantly she was out of her chair, her hand on his shoulder. "Go to the bedroom and close the door," she said evenly, not noticing the way his eyebrows lifted at her order. She went to the window and looked out; then the tension visibly left her body.

"It's Honey. Everything's okay. I guess she stayed away as long as her curiosity would let her."

Chapter Six

"How's the headache?" the veterinarian asked, peering into his eyes. She was a big, strong-boned woman with a friendly, freckled face and a light touch. Sabin decided that he liked her; she had a good bedside manner.

"Hanging in there," he grunted.

"Help me get his shirt off," she said to Rachel, and the two women gently and efficiently stripped him. He was glad that he'd chosen to wear the cutoffs, or they would have had his pants off, too. He didn't have any modesty to worry about, but it still disconcerted him to be handled like a Barbie doll. He dispassionately observed the purpled, puckered skin around the stitches in his leg, wondering about the extent of the muscle damage. It was essential that he be able to do more than hobble, and soon. The damage to his shoulder, with its complex system of muscle and tendons, was likely to be more permanent, but mobility was his greatest concern at the moment. Once he had decided what course of action to take he would need to move fast.

Fresh bandages were applied, and he was put back inside his shirt. "I'll be back in a couple of days to take out the stitches," Honey said, repacking her bag. It struck Sabin that not once had she asked his name or any other question that didn't deal with his physical well-being. Either she was remarkably incurious or she had decided that the less she knew, the better. It was a view that he wished Rachel shared. Sabin had always made it a rule not to involve innocent citizens; his work was too dangerous, and though he knew the risks of his job and accepted them, there was really no way Rachel could comprehend the extent of the risk she was taking in helping him.

Rachel went out with Honey, and Sabin hobbled to the door to watch as they stood by Honey's car, talking in low voices. The dog, Joe, took up a position at the foot of the steps, a low growl working in his throat as he turned first to watch Sabin at the door, then back to Rachel, as if he couldn't decide where to place his attention. His foremost instinct was to guard Rachel, but those same instincts couldn't allow him to ignore Sabin's alien presence at the door.

Honey got in the car and drove off, and after a final wave Rachel walked back to the porch. "Calm down," she admonished the dog softly, daring to give him a swift touch on the neck. His growl intensified, and she looked up to see Sabin coming out on the porch.

"Don't come too close to him," she warned. "He doesn't like men."

Sabin regarded the dog with remote curiosity. "Where did you get him? He's a trained attack dog."

Astonished, Rachel looked down at Joe, standing so close by her leg. "He just wandered up one day, all skinny and beat-up. We reached an understanding. I feed him, and he stays around. He's not an attack dog."

"Joe," Sabin said sharply. "Heel."

She felt the animal quiver as if he'd been struck, and blood-chilling snarls worked up from his throat as he stared at the man, every muscle in his big body quivering as if he longed to launch himself at his enemy but was chained to Rachel's side. Before she thought of the danger she went down on one knee and put her arm around his neck, talking softly to him in reassurance. "It's allright," she crooned. "He won't hurt you, I promise. Everything's all right."

When Joe was calmer Rachel went up on the porch and deliberately stroked Sabin's arm, letting the dog see her. Sabin watched Joe, unafraid of the dog, but not pushing him, either. He needed to have Joe accept him, at least enough to let him leave the house without attacking.

"He was probably abused by his owner," he said. "You're lucky he didn't have you for breakfast the first time you walked out of the house."

"I think you're wrong. It's a possibility that he was a guard dog, but I don't think he was trained to attack. You owe him a lot. If it hadn't been for him, I couldn't have gotten you up from the beach." Suddenly she realized that her hand was still on his arm, slowly moving up and down, and she let her arm fall to her side. "Are you ready to go back inside? You must be tired by now."

"In a minute." He slowly surveyed the pine thicket to the right and the road that curved away to the left, committing distances and details to memory for future use. "How far are we from a main road?"

"About five or six miles, I guess. This is a private road. It joins the road from Rafferty's ranch before it runs into U.S. 19."

"Which way is the beach?"

She pointed to the pine thicket. "Down through the pines."

"Do you have a boat?"

Rachel looked at him, her gray eyes very clear. "No. The only means of escape are on foot or driving."

The faintest smile lifted one corner of his mouth. "I wasn't going to steal your car."

"Weren't you? I still don't know what's going on, why you were shot, or even if you're a good guy."

"With those doubts, why haven't you called the police?" he returned, his voice cool. "I obviously wasn't wearing a white hat when you found me."

He was going to stonewall it to the end, the ultimate professional, alone and unemotional. Rachel accepted that she wasn't entitled to full knowledge of his situation, even though she had saved his life, but she would very much like to know that she had done the right thing. Though she had acted on her instincts, the uncertainty was gnawing at her. Had she saved a rogue agent? An enemy of her country? What would she do if it turned out to be that way? The worst part of it was the undeniable and growing attraction she felt for him, even against her own better judgment.

He didn't say anything else, and she didn't respond to his provoking mention of his lack of clothing when she'd found him. She glanced at Joe and turned to open the screen door. "I'm getting out of this heat. You can take your chances with Joe if you want to stay out here."

Sabin followed her inside, measuring the unyielding straightness of her back. She was angry, but she was also disturbed. He would have liked to reassure her, but the hard truth was that the less she knew, the safer she was. He had no way of protecting her in his present condition and circumstances. The fact that she was protecting him, willingly endangering herself even though her guesses ranged uncomfortably close to the truth, did something unwanted to his insides. Hell, he thought in disgust at himself, everything about her did something to his insides. He was already familiar with the scent of her flesh and the tender, startlingly intimate touch of her hands. His body still felt the press of hers against him, making him want to reach out and pull her back. He had never needed another human being's closeness, except for the physical closeness required for sex. He eyed her bare, slender legs and softly rounded buttocks; the sexual urge was there, all right, and damned strong, considering his general physical condition. The dangerous part of it was that the thought of lying in the darkness with her and simply holding her was at least as attractive as the thought of taking her.

He leaned in the doorway and watched as she efficiently finished cleaning the dishes. There was a brisk, economical grace to her movements, even while she was doing such a mundane task. Everything was organized and logical. She wasn't a fussy woman. Even her clothing was plain and unadorned, though her beige shorts and simple blue cotton shirt didn't need any adornment other than the soft feminine curves beneath them. Again he was aware of the tantalizing image of those curves, just as if he knew how she looked naked, had already had his hands on her.

"Why are you staring?" she asked without looking at him. She had been as aware of his gaze as she would have been of his touch.

"Sorry." He didn't explain, but, then, he doubted that she would really want to know. "I'm going back to bed. Will you help me with the shirt?"

"Of course." She wiped her hands on a towel and went ahead of him to the bedroom. "Let me change the sheets first."

Fatigue pulled at him as he leaned against the dresser to ease the strain of his weight on his left leg. His shoulder and leg throbbed, but the pain was to be expected, so he ignored it. The real problem was his lack of strength; he wouldn't be able to protect Rachel or himself if anything happened. Did he dare remain here while he healed? His brooding gaze remained fixed on her as she put fresh linens on the bed, his available options running through his mind. Those options were severely limited. He had no money, no identification, and he didn't dare call to be picked up, because he had no idea of the extent to which the agency had been compromised, or who he could trust. He wasn't in any shape to do anything anyway; he had to recuperate, so it might as well be here. The small house had its advantages: the dog outside was a damned good defense; the locks were strong; he had food and medical care.

There was also Rachel.

Looking at her was easy; it could become an uncontrollable habit. She was slim and healthy-looking, with a honeyed tan that made her skin look luscious. Her hair was thick and straight and shiny, a dark ash-brown so completely lacking in any warm highlights that it almost had a silvery sheen. It went well with her wide, clear, lake-gray eyes. She wasn't tall, less than medium height, but she carried herself so straight that she gave the impression of being a tall woman. And she was soft, with rounded breasts that nestled into his palms….

Damn! The image was so real, so strong, that it kept creeping back. If it was only a fever-induced dream, it was the most realistic he had ever known. But if it had really happened, when and how? He had been unconscious most of the time, and out of his head with fever even when he'd been awake. Yet he kept reliving the sensation of her hands on him, stroking gently, with the open intimacy of lovers, and he had either had his hands on her or his imagination had lurched into overdrive.

She plumped the pillows and turned to him. "Do you want to sleep in your shorts?"

For an answer he unsnapped the cutoffs and let them drop, then sat down on the bed so she could work the shirt off his shoulder. The warm, faintly floral scent of her enveloped him as she leaned close, and he instinctively turned his head toward it, his mouth and nose pressing into her shoulder. She hesitated, then quickly freed him from the shirt and moved away from his touch. The moist warmth of his breath had heated her skin through the fabric of her shirt and played havoc with the even rhythm of her heartbeat. Trying not to let him see how his nearness had affected her, she neatly folded the shirt and placed it on a chair, then picked up his cutoffs and placed them on top of the shirt. When she looked at him again he was lying on his back, his right leg bent at the knee and raised, his right arm resting across his stomach. His white briefs contrasted sharply with his bronzed skin, reminding her that he didn't have any tan lines on his body. She groaned inwardly. Why did she have to think about that now?

"Do you want the sheet over you?"

"No, the fan feels good." He lifted his right hand from his stomach and held it out to her. "Sit here for a minute."

Her mind told her that it wasn't a good idea. She sat down, anyway, just as she had done so many times since he'd been in her bed, her body angled to face him and her hip against his side. He draped his arm over her thighs, his hand cradling the curve of her hip as if to keep her nestled against him. His fingers, curving around to her buttock, began to move caressingly, and her heart started pounding again. She looked up to meet his eyes and was unable to look away, caught by the mesmerizing black fire.

"I can't give you all the answers you want," he murmured. "I don't know them myself. Even if I tell you I'm a good guy, you'd still only have my word for it, and why would I cut my own throat by telling you anything else?"

"Don't play devil's advocate," she said sharply, wishing she could find the will to break away from the seductive power of his gaze and touch. "Let's deal in facts. You were shot. Who shot you?"

"I was ambushed, set up by one of my own men – Tod Ellis."

"Bogus-FBI-agent Ellis?"

"The same, from the description you gave."

"Then make a call and turn him in."

"It isn't as simple as that. I'm on a month's vacation from the agency. Only two men knew my location, both of them my superiors."

Rachel sat very still. "One of them betrayed you, but you don't know which one."

"Perhaps both of them."

"Can't you contact someone higher up?"

Something cold and furious flashed in his eyes. "Sweetheart, you can't get much higher. I'm not even certain I can get through. Either one of them has the power to declare me an outlaw, and calling from here would endanger you."

Rachel felt the icy power of his rage and shivered inside, thankful that she wasn't the one who had crossed him. The look in his eyes was in direct contrast to the touch of his fingertips on her hip. How could his touch remain so gentle, while the wrath of hell glittered in his eyes?

"What are you going to do?"

His fingers trailed down her hip to her thigh and rubbed across the hem of her shorts, then gently glided beneath it. "Recuperate. I can't do a damned thing right now, including dress myself. The problem is that I'm putting you in danger just by being here."

She couldn't control her breathing, or her pulse rate. Heat was building inside her, destroying her ability to think and leaving her to operate purely on her senses. She knew she should move his hand, but the rasp of his rough fingertips on her thigh was so pleasurable that all she could do was sit there, quivering slightly like a leaf in a soft spring breeze. Did he normally treat women as if they were his to touch as he wished, or had he picked up on her uncontrollable responses to him? She thought she had disguised them well, kept them to herself, but perhaps his job had made his senses and intuitions more acute. Desperately she made herself move, putting her hand on top of his to prevent it from moving any higher.

"You didn't put me in danger," she said, her voice a little hoarse. "I made the decision without your help."

Despite her controlling hand, his fingers moved higher and found the edge of her panties. "I have a question that's been driving me crazy," he admitted in a low voice. He moved his hand again, delving beneath the elastic leg of her panties and curving his fingers over the cool bareness of her buttock.

A whimper escaped her before she bit her lip, controlling the wild little sound. How could he do this to her with just his touch? "Stop," she whispered. "You have to stop."

"Have we been sleeping together?"

Her breasts had tightened painfully, begging for that touch to be transferred to them, for him to claim them as he had before. His question destroyed what little concentration she had left. "This… there's only this one bed. I don't have a couch, only the love seats – "

"So we've been in the same bed for four days," he interrupted, stopping a flow of words that she had felt edging toward incoherency. His eyes were glittering again, but this time with a different fire, and she couldn't look away. "You've been taking care of me."

She drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Yes."

"All alone?"

"Yes."

"You've been feeding me."

"Yes."

"Bathing me."

"Yes. Your fever – I had to sponge you with cool water to keep it down."

"You did everything that had to be done, took care of me like a baby."

She didn't know what to say, what to do. His hand was still on her, his palm warm and hard against the softness of her flesh.

"You touched me," he said. "All over."

She swallowed. "It was necessary."

"I remember your hands on me. I liked it, but when I woke up this morning I thought it was a dream."

"You did dream," she said.

"Have I seen you naked?"

"No!"

"Then how do I know what your breasts look like? How they feel in my hands? It wasn't all a dream, Rachel. Was it?"

A hot, wild blush colored her face, giving him an answer even before she spoke. Her voice was stifled, and she looked away from him, her embarrassment at last freeing her from his gaze. "Twice, when you woke up, you… uh…grabbed me."

"Helped myself to the goodies?"

"Something like that."

"And I saw you?"

She made a helpless gesture toward her neck. "My nightgown drooped when I bent over you. The neckline was hanging open…."

"Was I rough?"

"No," she whispered.

"Did you like it?"

This had to stop, right now, though she had a feeling that it was already too late, that she should never have sat down on the bed. "Move your hand," she said, trying desperately to put some strength into her voice. "Let me go."

He obeyed without hesitation, triumph stamped on his hard, dark face. She shot up from the bed, her face on fire. What an utter fool she had made of herself! He probably wouldn't be able to sleep for laughing at her. She was at the door before he spoke, his voice momentarily freezing her to the spot.

"Rachel."

She didn't want to turn, didn't want to look at him, but the way he said her name was a command that pulled at her like a magnet. Lying down didn't diminish his power; being wounded didn't diminish it. He was a man born to dominate, and he did it effortlessly, with the sheer strength of his will.

"If I could, I'd come after you. You wouldn't get away."

Her voice was as quiet as his, rising only slightly above the whir of the ceiling fan in the cool, dim room. "I might," she said, and closed the door gently behind her as she left the room.

She wanted to cry, but she didn't, because crying never solved anything. She hurt inside, and she felt restless. Lust. She had identified it almost immediately, had properly labeled the source of her undeniable and, evidently, uncontrollable attraction to him. She could have handled it if it had remained merely lust, for lust was a human appetite, the perfectly normal reaction of one sex to another. She could have acknowledged it, then ignored it. What she couldn't ignore was the growing emotional impact he had on her. She had sat there on the bed and let him fondle her, not because she was physically attracted to him, though God knew that was the truth, but because he had rapidly become far too important to her.

Rachel's refuge was work; it had saved her when B.B. died, and she sought it instinctively now. Her study was small and cluttered with both her work and memorabilia: books, magazines, clipped articles and family photographs crowded together on every available space. It was comfortable for her; it was here that she immersed herself in her interests, and despite the clutter she knew where everything was. It wasn't until her eyes fell on her favorite picture of B.B. that she realized she wasn't going to find the comfort she sought in this room. There couldn't be any hiding from herself; she had to face it, and face it now.

Slowly her fingers traced B.B.'s smiling face. He had been best friend, husband and lover, a man whose cheerful manner had hidden a strong character and firm sense of responsibility. They had had so much fun together! There were still times when she missed him so much that she thought she would never get over the sense of loss, even though she knew that wasn't what B.B. would have wanted. He would have wanted her to enjoy her life, to love again with all the passion she was capable of, to have children, to pursue her career, to have everything. She wanted that, too, but somehow she had never been able to imagine having it without B.B. and he was gone.

They had both known and accepted the risks of their jobs. They had even talked about them, holding hands in the night and discussing the danger they faced, as if by bringing it out in the open they could hold it at bay. Her job as an investigative reporter had made it inevitable that she would step on toes, and Rachel was very good at anything she chose to do. B.B.'s job with the Drug Enforcement Administration was inherently dangerous.

Perhaps B.B. had had a premonition. His hand strong around hers in the darkness, he had once said, "Honey, if anything ever happens to me, remember that I know the possibilities and I'm willing to take the risks. I think it's a job worth doing, and I'm going to do my best at it, the same way you won't back down from a story that's getting too hot for comfort. Accidents happen to people who never take any risks at all. Playing it safe isn't a guarantee. Who knows? With the noses you put out of joint, your job may turn out to be more dangerous than mine."

Prophetic words. Within the year B.B. was dead. An investigation Rachel was making into a politician's background had turned up a connection with illegal drugs. She didn't have any proof, but her questions must have been making the politician itchy. One morning she had been late to catch a flight to Jacksonville and her car had been low on gas. B.B. had tossed her the keys to his. "Drive mine," he'd said. "I have plenty of time to get gas on the way to work. See you tonight, honey."

But he hadn't. Ten minutes after her flight left the ground B.B. started her car and a bomb wired to the ignition killed him instantly.

Haunted by grief, she had finished the investigation, and now the politician was serving a life sentence without parole for both his drug dealings and his part in B.B.'s death. Then she had given up investigative reporting and returned to Diamond Bay to try to find again some sense of life for herself. Peace, hard won but finally hers, had let her find pleasure in work again, and in the quiet tenor of life here on the bay. She had contentment, peace and pleasure, but hadn't come close to loving again; she hadn't even been tempted. She hadn't wanted to date, hadn't wanted a man's kiss, or touch, or company.

Until now. Her forefinger gently touched the glass that covered B.B.'s crooked grin. It was incredibly painful and difficult to fall in love. What an apt phrase it was! "Falling in love." She was definitely falling, unable to stop her whirling, headlong plunge, even though she wasn't certain she was ready for it. She felt like a fool. After all, what did she know about Kell Sabin? Enough for her emotions to go wildly out of control, that was for certain! She had somehow started loving him from the first, her intuition sensing that he would be important to her. Why else had she fought so desperately to hide him, to protect him? Would she have taken the risk of caring for any other stranger? It would be romantic of her to assume that it was predestination; another explanation was an ancient one, that a life belonged to the one who saved it. Was it a primitive predilection, a sort of bonding forged by danger?

At that point in her thoughts Rachel gave a wry laugh at herself. What difference did it make? She could sit there all night thinking of plausible and implausible explanations, but they wouldn't change a thing. She was, regardless of will and logic, already half in love with the man, and it was getting worse.

He was trying to seduce her. Oh, he wasn't in any physical shape for it, but given his superb conditioning and strength he would probably recover much faster than an ordinary person. Part of her shivered in excitement at the thought of making love with him, but another part, more cautious, warned her not to let herself become that involved with him. To do so would be to take an even larger risk than hiding him and nursing him back to health had been. She wasn't afraid of the physical risk, but the emotional price she might have to pay for loving such a man could be crippling.

She took a deep breath. She couldn't limit her emotions and responses to carefully measured dollops, like following a recipe. Her nature wasn't that controlled and unemotional. All she could do was accept the fact that she loved him, or was growing to love him, and deal with it from there.

B.B.'s photographed gaze looked back at her. It wasn't a betrayal to love someone else; he would want her to love again.

It was wrenching to accept the idea; Rachel didn't love lightly. When she gave herself it was with all the passion of her emotions, which wasn't an easy or casual way to love. The man in her bed wouldn't welcome her devotion; it didn't take a crystal ball to tell that he was one of those men who combined icy unemotionalism with fiery sensuality. He lived for the danger of his job, and it was a job that didn't encourage emotional ties. He could take her with raw, hungry passion, then calmly walk away and return to the life he had chosen.

Wryly she looked around the study; she wasn't going to be able to work, after all. Her emotions were too turbulent to allow her to sink into either planning her class or working on her manuscript. She had gotten her hero into a sticky situation, but could it be any stickier than the one she found herself in? Actually, she could use some practical advice. A smile suddenly lit her face. She had an expert in her bedroom; why not use his knowledge while he was there? If nothing else, it would help occupy his time. To occupy her time, she could finish weeding the garden now that it was late afternoon and the sun's ferocious heat had abated somewhat. She might as well do something practical.

The twilight was rapidly fading and she had almost finished her chore, when she heard the simultaneous creak of the screen door at the back steps and Joe's explosive, furious spring from his position at the end of the row where she was working. Rachel screamed Joe's name as she jumped to her feet, knowing that she'd never be able to reach the dog in time to stop him.

Sabin didn't retreat. Joe hesitated when Rachel screamed at him, his attention momentarily split, and Sabin used the interval to ease himself down into a sitting position on the steps. It left him vulnerable, but it also took him out of a threatening position. Joe stopped four feet away, his face contorted, the fur on his neck raised as he crouched.

"Stay back," Sabin said evenly as Rachel approached from the side, trying to put herself between Sabin and the dog. She was far too willing to use herself as a shield; he didn't think the dog would intentionally hurt her, but if the dog attacked and Rachel tried to protect him… He had to reach an understanding with Joe, and it might as well be now.

Rachel stopped as he'd directed, but she spoke softly to the dog, trying to calm him. If he attacked she wasn't strong enough to wrestle him off of Sabin. What was he thinking of, coming out like that, when he knew Joe didn't like men?

"Joe, heel," Sabin said firmly.

Just as it had earlier, the command sent Joe into a paroxysm of rage. She edged closer, ready to leap if Joe made any move to attack. Sabin gave her a warning glance.

"Joe, heel." He repeated the command over and over, always in a quiet, level voice, and Joe made a lunge that brought his sharp teeth within inches of Sabin's bare foot. Rachel gasped and threw herself at the dog, wrapping her arms around his neck. He was quivering in every muscle of his body. He ignored her, his attention locked on the man.

"Turn him loose and back away," Sabin instructed.

"Why don't you just go back in the house while I hold him?"

"Because I'm a prisoner as long as he doesn't accept me. I may need to leave in a hurry, and I don't want to have to worry about the dog."

Rachel crouched by Joe, her fingers buried in his fur and gently rubbing. Already Sabin was planning to leave, but, then, she had known how it would be. Slowly she released the dog and stepped back. "Joe, heel," Sabin said again.

Rachel held her breath, waiting for another violent reaction. She could see Joe shake, and his ears went back. Sabin repeated the command. For a moment the dog quivered on the verge of attack, then, abruptly, he went to Sabin's side and took up the heeling position.

"Sit," Sabin said, and Joe sat.

"Good boy, good boy." Stiffly he moved his left arm to pat the dog's head. For a moment Joe's ears went back and he snarled softly, but he made no move to bite. Rachel slowly released her pentup breath, relief making her legs wobble.

Sabin slanted her a quick glance from his midnight eyes. "Now you come sit beside me."

"Just like the dog?" she quipped, sinking gratefully onto the step beside him. At her action Joe sprang up and moved to stand in front of them, his ears going back again.

Sabin put his right arm around her shoulders and hugged her against his bare chest, carefully watching the dog. Joe didn't like it at all; a growl began rumbling in his chest.

"He's jealous," Sabin observed.

"Or he thinks you might hurt me." His arm around her was interfering with her breathing, and to take her mind off it she held her hand out to Joe. "It's all right. Come here, boy. Gome on."

Warily Joe came closer. He sniffed at Rachel's outstretched hand, then Sabin's knee. After a moment he dropped to the ground at their feet and put his head on his paws.

"It's a shame someone abused him. He's an intelligent, expensive animal, and he isn't old. He's about five."

"That's what Honey thinks."

"Have you always had a penchant for taking in strays?" he asked, and she knew he wasn't just talking about Joe.

"Only the interesting ones." She could hear the tightness creeping into her voice and wondered if he could hear it, too, if he could guess what caused it. His right hand was lightly rubbing her bare arm, an innocent touch if it hadn't been for the warm pleasure it gave her. A flash of lightning in the darkening sky made her look up, glad for an interruption.

"It looks like there's a chance of rain. A thunderhead passed right over us this morning and didn't leave a drop." Right on cue, thunder rumbled and a few fat drops of rain splashed down on them. "We'd better go in the house."

Sabin let her help him to his feet, but he negotiated the steps on his own. Joe got up and took shelter under the car. Just as Rachel latched the screen door thunder cracked deafeningly directly overhead, and the heavens opened to release a deluge of rain. The temperature plummeted while they stood there, the rain fresh and cool, and the wind blew a fine mist through the screen door. Laughing, Rachel shut the wooden door and locked it, then turned to find herself in Sabin's arms.

He didn't say anything. He simply closed his fist in her hair and held her head back, and his mouth came down on hers. Her world shuddered, then tilted off-balance. She stood there, her hands on his bare chest, and let him have her mouth as he pleased, unable to do anything except give him what he wanted. His mouth was hard, as she had known it would be. Hungry, as she had known it would be. He kissed her with the slow, hot skill of experience, his tongue on hers, the roughness of his faint beard scraping her softer skin.

The exquisite pleasure stunned her, and she jerked her mouth from his, her eyes wide as she stared up at him.

His fist tightened in her hair. "Are you afraid of me?" he asked roughly.

"No," she whispered.

"Then why did you pull away?"

She couldn't do anything but give him the truth, staring up at him in the growing darkness while the storm raged over their heads. "Because it was too much."

There was a storm in his black eyes, glittering and snapping with hot fire. "No," he said. "It wasn't enough."

Chapter Seven

Tension was coiling tightly inside Rachel; it had been increasing as the night wore on. He hadn't kissed her again, hadn't touched her again, but he had watched her, and in some ways that was worse. The power of his gaze was like a physical touch, stroking and burning. She couldn't make small talk to lessen the tension, because every time she looked up at him, he was watching her. They ate; then she turned on the television for diversion. Unfortunately the programs weren't very diverting, and he watched her, instead, so she turned the set off again. "Do you want something to read?" she finally asked in desperation.

He shook his head. "I'm too tired, and this damned headache is worse. I think I'll go back to bed."

He did look tired, but that wasn't surprising. He had been on his feet a lot, considering that he had just recovered full consciousness that morning. She was tired, too, the events of the day having sapped her energy. "Let me take a shower first. Then I'll help you get settled," she said, and he nodded in agreement.

She hurried through her shower and pulled on her most modest nightgown, then belted a light robe around her. He was waiting in the bedroom when she left the bath, and the rest of the house was dark. "That was fast," he said, smiling faintly. "I didn't know a woman could get out of a bathroom in less than half an hour."

"Chauvinist," she said mildly in reply, wondering if his smiles ever reached his eyes.

He unfastened the cutoffs and let them drop, then stepped out of them and limped into the bathroom. "I'll wash what I can reach, then call you to do the rest, all right?"

"Yes," she said, her throat tightening at the thought of feeling his body under her hands again. It wasn't as if she hadn't washed him before, but he was awake now, and he had kissed her. It was her own response to him that was making her nervous, not worrying over anything he might do. He was still too much of an invalid to make any serious advances.

There was no need for her to sleep with him now; it would be easier on both of them if she didn't make a big deal out of it and simply made a pallet before he came out of the bathroom. Thinking that, she took a couple of quilts from the top of the closet and unfolded them on the floor, then dragged a pillow from the bed and tossed it down. She wouldn't need a cover; her robe would be enough.

After twenty minutes he opened the door. "I'm ready for the reinforcements."

He wore only a towel knotted around his lean waist, and he was literally weaving on his feet. Rachel looked at him closely, concern driving away her nervousness. He was pale, the skin stretched tautly over his high cheekbones, but his lips were very red. "I think you're feverish again," she said, laying her hand against his cheek. He was too warm, but the fever wasn't nearly as high as it had been before. Quickly she lowered the lid on the toilet and helped him to sit down, then gave him two aspirin and a glass of water before she finished washing his torso, working as fast as she could. The sooner he was in bed, the better. She should have been looking for the fever to flare again after the way he'd pushed himself that day.

"Sorry about this," he muttered as she dried him. "I didn't intend to give out on you this way."

"You're not Superman," Rachel told him briskly. "Come on, let's get you in bed."

She helped him to stand, and he said, "Wait." Removing his right arm from around her shoulders, he tugged the towel loose from his waist and draped it over one of the towel racks. Totally and unconcernedly nude, he put his arm back around her shoulders and leaned on her heavily as she helped him walk to the bed. Rachel didn't know if she should laugh or get huffy with him, but in the end she decided to ignore his lack of clothing. It wasn't as if she hadn't seen him before, and if it didn't bother him, it shouldn't bother her.

Even though he was feverish and exhausted, nothing escaped his notice. He saw the pallet at the foot of the bed, and his dark, level brows lowered as his eyes narrowed. "What's that?"

"My bed."

He looked at it, then at her. His voice was quiet. "Get that damned thing up from there and get in bed with me, where you belong."

She gave him a long, cool look. "You're presuming a lot on the basis of one kiss. You're a lot better now. I won't need to get up with you during the night, so I don't need to sleep with you."

"After sleeping with me that many times, why stop now? God knows it can't be modesty at this stage, and sex is out of the question. Any pass I made would be false advertising, and you know it."

She didn't want to laugh, didn't want him to know that his logic seemed very… logical. It wasn't the thought of what he might do that made her wary of sleeping with him now, but rather the knowledge of what it would mean to her to lie beside him in the night, to feel his weight and warmth in the bed next to her. She'd gotten used to sleeping alone, and it was painful to rediscover the subtle but powerful pleasure of sharing the dark hours with a man.

He put his hand on her throat, his callused thumb rubbing the sensitive tendons running down to her shoulder and making her shiver. "There's another reason why I want you to sleep with me."

She didn't know if she wanted to hear it. That cold, lethal expression was in his eyes again, the look of a man for whom there were no illusions, who had seen the worst and not been surprised. "I'll be right there, at the foot of the bed," she whispered.

"No. I want you at hand, so I'll know exactly where you are at all times. If I have to use the knife I want to make certain you don't accidentally get in the way."

She turned her head and looked at the knife, still lying there on the table beside the bed. "No one can break in without waking us."

"I'm not taking that chance. Get in the bed. Or we'll both sleep on the floor."

He meant it, and with a sigh she gave in; there was no use in both of them being uncomfortable. "All right. Let me get my pillow."

His hand dropped to his side, and Rachel retrieved her pillow, tossing it into place on the bed. Gingerly he eased between the sheets, and a low groan escaped him as he lay back, putting strain on his shoulder. She turned out the light and got into bed on the opposite side, pulling the sheet up over both of them and curling up in her usual position, just as if they had done this for years, but the casual pose was completely superficial. She was tightly knotted inside; his caution was catching. She doubted that he really expected the men who were hunting him to break into the house in the middle of the night, but he prepared himself, anyway.

The old house settled around them with comfortable squeaks and groans; in the evening silence she could hear the crickets chirping outside the window, but the familiar noises didn't reassure her. Her thoughts roamed restlessly, trying to piece her snippets of information into a coherent picture. He was on vacation, but he'd been ambushed? Why were they trying to get rid of him? Had he learned something they wanted suppressed? She wanted to ask him, but his quiet, even breathing told her that he had already gone to sleep, worn out from the day.

Without thinking, she reached out and put her hand on his arm. It was a purely automatic gesture, left over from the nights she had needed to be aware of his every movement.

There was no warning, only the lightning-fast strike of his right hand as his hard fingers clamped around her wrist with a force that bruised and twisted. Rachel cried out, in fear as much as pain, every nerve in her jolted by his attack. The hand that held her wrist slackened a little, and he muttered, "Rachel?"

"You're hurting me!" The involuntary protest was wrung from her, and he released her completely, sitting up in the bed and swearing softly under his breath.

Rachel rubbed her bruised wrist, staring up at the faint outline of his body against the darkness. "I think the pallet would be safer," she finally said, trying for lightness. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to touch you. It just… happened."

His voice was rough. "Are you all right?"

"Yes. My wrist is bruised, that's all."

He tried to turn toward her, but his injured shoulder stopped him, and he swore again, halting the movement.

"Climb over on this side, so I can sleep on my right side and hold you."

"I don't need holding, thank you." She was still feeling a little shaken by the way he'd reacted, as violently and swiftly as a snake striking. "You must have a hard time keeping bed partners."

"You're the only woman I've slept with, in the literal sense, in years," he snapped. "Now do you want to take your chances on startling me again, or are you going to crawl over here?"

She got out of bed and walked around to the other side, and he slid over enough to make room for her. Without a word she lay down, turned her back to him and pulled the sheet up to cover them. In equal silence he positioned himself against her like a spoon, his thighs against the backs of hers, her bottom snuggling his loins, her back against his hard, broad chest His right arm went under her head, and his left one curved around her waist, anchoring her in place. Rachel closed her eyes, branded by his heat and wondering how much of it was fever. She'd forgotten how it felt to lie like this with a man, to feel his strength wrapped around her like a blanket. "What if I bang against your shoulder or leg?" she whispered.

"It'll hurt like hell," he replied dryly, his breath stirring her hair. "Go to sleep. Don't worry about it."

How could she not worry about hurting him, when she would rather die than cause him pain? She nestled her head into the pillow, feeling the iron hard strength of his arm beneath it; her hand slid beneath the pillow and lightly closed over his wrist, a touch that she had to have now. "Good night," she said, sinking into his warmth and letting drowsiness take over.

Sabin lay there, feeling her softness in his arms, the female sweetness of her scent in his nostrils and the remembered taste of her on his tongue. It felt too good, and that made him wary. It had been years since he'd actually slept with anyone; he had trained to such a fine, sharp edge that he hadn't been able to tolerate anyone close to him while he slept, including his ex-wife. Even while he'd been married he had still been essentially alone, both mentally and physically. It was odd that he could feel so comfortable now, with Rachel sleeping in his arms, as if he didn't need to be distant with her. He was innately cautious and solitary, on guard with everyone, including his own men; that trait had saved his life more than once. Maybe it was because he was already subconsciously accustomed to sleeping with her, to touching her and being touched by her, though that light touch on his arm had startled him into a violent reaction before he could catch himself.

For whatever reason, it felt good to hold her, to kiss her. She was a remarkably dangerous woman, because she tempted him in ways he'd never been tempted before. He thought of having sex with her. Every muscle in his body tightened, and he began to harden. Too bad he wasn't able to roll her onto her back and do all the things to her he wanted to do, but that would have to wait. He would have her, but he'd have to be very careful that it didn't become anything more than a good time. He couldn't afford to let it be anything else, for both of them.

Rachel woke slowly, so completely comfortable she was loath to open her eyes and start the day. She was normally an early riser, wide-awake as soon as her feet hit the floor, and she really liked the morning. But on this particular morning she had burrowed deeply into her pillow, her body warm and relaxed, and she was aware of having slept better than she had in years. But where was Kell? She was immediately aware that he wasn't in the bed; her eyes popped open, and she was out of bed before the thought was even completed. The bathroom door was open, so he wasn't in there. "Kell?" she called, hurrying out of the bedroom.

"Out here."

The answering call came from the back, and she almost ran to the rear door, which was standing open. He was sitting on the steps, wearing only the denim shorts, and Joe was lying on the grass at his feet. Ebenezer Duck and his faithful flock were waddling around the backyard, peacefully hunting insects. The rain the night before had left everything so fresh it almost hurt to look at it, and now the sun lit a dark-blue sky that didn't have a cloud in sight It was a remarkably peaceful morning, warm and sweet.

"How did you get out of bed without waking me?"

Bracing his hand on the step, he pushed himself to a standing position; she noticed that he seemed to be moving more easily than he had the day before. He faced her through the screen. "You were tired after taking care of me for four days."

"You're getting around better."

"I feel stronger, and my head isn't hurting." He opened the screen door and hesitated for a moment, his black eyes swiftly running down her body. It was all she could do to keep from folding her arms across her chest, but she knew that the gown she'd chosen didn't reveal anything, so the gesture would have been futile. She probably looked a mess, with her hair uncombed, but she'd seen him at his worst, so she wasn't going to worry about that, either.

"I'm too used to playing mother hen," she said, laughing a little. "When you weren't in the bed I panicked. But since you're all right, I'll go get dressed and make breakfast."

"Don't get dressed on my account," he drawled, a comment she ignored as she walked away. Kell watched until she was out of sight, then slowly made his way back up the steps and inside. He latched the screen door behind him. She didn't play games by wearing slinky nightgowns and then pretending to be embarrassed by what was revealed, but she didn't have to. With that pink flowered nightgown and her tousled hair, she looked warm and sleepy and so damned soft a man could sink into her. That was exactly what he'd wanted to do when he awoke to find that her nightgown had ridden up during the night and he was pressed against her bare thighs, with only the thin nylon of her panties keeping him from her. He'd become so aroused that he'd had to get out of bed, to remove himself from the temptation of her body. He swore impatiently at his own physical disability, because it kept him from taking her the way he wanted to take her, hard and fast and deep.

In only a few minutes she came back into the kitchen, her hair brushed out and pulled up on each side of her head with a wine-red butterfly clip. She was still barefoot, and she wore denim shorts so old that they were almost white, along with an oversize maroon jersey with the tail knotted at her waist. Her tanned face was completely free of makeup. She was comfortable with herself, he realized. She could probably stop traffic when she did deck herself out in silk and jewels, but she would do so only when she felt like it, not for someone else's benefit. She was self-assured, and Kell liked that; he was so dominant that it took a strong woman not to be completely overpowered by him, not to shrink from him both in bed and out.

Working with an economy of motion, she put on the coffee and started the bacon frying. Until those twin aromas started filling the air he hadn't been aware of how hungry he was, but abruptly his mouth began watering. She put biscuits in the oven, whipped four eggs for scrambling, then peeled and sliced a cantaloupe. Her clear gray eyes turned toward him. "This would be easier if I had my best knife."

Sabin seldom laughed or was even amused, but the dry, chiding tone of her voice made him want to smile. He leaned against the work island to take the weight off his injured leg, unwilling to argue. He needed a means of self-defense, even if it was just a kitchen knife. Both logic and instinct insisted on it. "Do you have any sort of gun around here?"

Rachel deftly turned the bacon. "I have a .22 rifle under the bed, and a .357 loaded with ratshot in the glove compartment of the car."

Swift irritation rose in him; why hadn't she said anything about them the day before? Then she gave him another of those long, level looks, and he knew she was just waiting for him to say something. Why should she give a gun to a man who had held a knife on her? "What if I'd needed them during the night?"

"I don't have any shells for the .357 other than ratshot, so I discounted it," she replied calmly. "The .22 was within reach, and I not only know how to use it, I have two good arms as opposed to your one." She felt safe at Diamond Bay, but common sense dictated that she have some means of protection; she was a woman who lived alone, without close neighbors. Both the weapons she had were for what her grandfather had called "varmints," though anyone looking down the barrel of the .357 wouldn't know that it was loaded with ratshot. She had chosen both for self-protection, not for killing.

He paused, his black eyes narrowed. "Why tell me now?"

"One, because you told me who you are. Two, because you asked. Three, even without the knife, you weren't unarmed. Handicapped, but not helpless."

"What do you mean?"

She looked down at his hard, brown bare feet. "The calluses on the outside edges of your feet, and on your hands. Not many people have them. You work out barefoot, don't you?"

When he spoke his voice was quiet and silky, and it raised a chill along her spine. "You notice a lot, honey."

She nodded in agreement. "Yes."

"Most people wouldn't think anything about calluses."

Just for a moment Rachel hesitated, her gaze turned inward, before she resumed setting the table and checking the food. "My husband took extra training. He had calluses on his hands, too."

Something tightened inside him, twisting, and his fingers slowly curled. He darted a quick glance at her slim, tanned, ringless hands. "You're divorced?"

"No. I'm a widow."

"I'm sorry."

She nodded again and began dishing up the eggs and bacon, then checked the biscuits in the oven. They were just right, golden brown on top, and she quickly turned them out into the breadbasket. "It's been a long time," she finally said. "Five years." Then her voice changed and became brisk again. "Wash up before the biscuits get cold."

She was, he reflected a few minutes later, a damned good cook. The eggs were fluffy, the bacon crisp, the biscuits light, the coffee just strong enough. Homemade pear preserves dripped golden juice over the biscuits, and the yellow cantaloupe was ripe and sweet. There was nothing fancy about it, but it all fit together, and even the colors were harmonious. It was simply another facet of her competent nature. Just as he was savoring his third biscuit she said serenely, "Don't expect this every day. Some mornings I have cereal and fruit for breakfast. I'm just trying to build up your strength." Her manner hid the satisfaction she felt in watching this coldly controlled man eat with such obvious enjoyment.

He leaned back in his chair, taking his time as he examined the twinkle in her eyes and the smile that was barely hidden by the coffee cup she held in her elegant hands. She was teasing him, and he couldn't remember the last time anyone had actually dared to tease him. Probably back in high school, some giddy, giggling teenage girl trying out her newfound powers of seduction and daring to use them on the boy even the teachers considered "dangerous." He'd never actually done anything to make them think that; it had simply been the way he looked at them, with that cold, level gaze as black as a night in hell. Rachel dared to tease him because she was certain of herself, and because of that certainty she met him as an equal. She wasn't afraid of him, despite what she knew, or had guessed.

In time. He'd have her, sooner or later.

"You're going about it the right way," he said, finally responding to her teasing statement. Rachel wondered if he did it deliberately, waiting so long before answering. He could either be thinking about what he wanted to say, or those long pauses could be designed to tilt the other person a little off-balance. Everything he did was so controlled that she didn't think it was a habit; it was a deliberate tactic.

There could be a double meaning to his words, but Rachel chose to take them at face value. "If that's a bribe to keep me cooking like this, it won't work. It's too hot to eat a big meal three times a day. More coffee?"

"Please."

As she poured the coffee she asked, "How long are you planning to stay?"

He waited until she had set the pot back on its warming pad and returned to her seat before he answered. "Until I get over this, and can walk and use my shoulder again. Unless you want me gone, and then it's up to you when you throw me out."

Well, that was plain enough, Rachel thought. He'd stay while he was recuperating, but that was it. "Do you have any idea what you're going to do?"

He leaned his forearms on the table. "Get well. That's the first item on the list. I have to find out how deeply we've been compromised. There's still one man I can call when I need him, but I'll wait until I've recovered before I do anything. One man alone won't stand much of a chance. I have three weeks left of my vacation. Three weeks that they'll have to keep this quiet, unless my body just 'happens' to wash up somewhere. Without my body they're stalled. They can't make any moves to replace me until I'm officially dead, or missing."

"What happens if you don't turn up at work in three weeks?"

"My file will be erased from all records. Codes will be changed, agents reassigned, and I will officially cease to exist."

"Presumed dead?"

"Dead, captured, or turned."

Three weeks. At the most she would have three weeks with him. The time seemed so pitifully short, but she wasn't going to ruin it by moaning and sulking because things weren't turning out just the way she wanted. She had learned the hard way that "forever" could be heartbreakingly brief. If these three weeks were to be all she had with him, then she would smile and take care of him, even argue with him if she felt like it, help him in any way she could… cherish him…  then wave goodbye to this dark warrior and keep her tears for herself, after he had gone. It didn't give her much comfort to know that women had probably been doing that exact thing for centuries.

He was thinking, his lashes lowered over his eyes while he stared into his coffee cup. "I want you to make another shopping trip."

"Sure," Rachel said easily. "I meant to ask you if the pants were the right size."

"Everything's the right size. You have a good eye. No, I want you to get hollowpoint ammunition for that .357, a good supply of it. The same for the rifle. You'll be reimbursed."

Being reimbursed was the last of Rachel's worries, and she felt a flare of resentment that he'd even mentioned it. "Are you sure you don't want me to buy a couple of deer rifles while I'm at it? Or a .44 Magnum?"

To her surprise he took her sarcasm seriously. "No. I don't want you on record as having purchased any type of weapon since the date I disappeared."

That startled her, and she leaned back. "You mean records of this sort that are likely to be checked?"

"For anyone in this area."

Rachel looked at him for a long, long time, her gray eyes drifting over the hard planes of his face and the closed expression in his eyes, eyes that were older than time. At last she whispered, "Who are you, that anyone would go to such lengths to kill you?"

"They'd rather take me alive," he replied dryly. "It's my job to make certain that never happens."

"Why you?"

One corner of his mouth quirked upward in what passed for a smile, though it was totally humorless. "Because I'm the best at what I do."

It wasn't much of an answer, but then he was good at answering questions without giving any information. The details that he'd told her had been carefully considered, chosen to exact the response from her that he wanted. It wasn't necessary; Rachel knew that she would do whatever she could to help him.

She drained the last of her coffee and stood up. "I have chores to do before it gets too hot; the dishes can wait until later. Do you want to come outside with me, or stay in here and rest?"

"I need to move around," he said, getting up and following her outside. He slowly limped around the yard, taking in every detail, while Rachel fed Joe and the geese, then set to work gathering the ripe vegetables from the garden. When he tired, Kell sat down on the back steps and watched her work, his eyes narrowed against the sun.

Rachel Jones had a comfortable way about her that made him feel relaxed. Her life was peaceful, her small house cozy, and that hot Southern sun burned down on his skin…. Everything here was seductive, in one way or another. The meals she cooked and shared with him brought up stray thoughts of what it would be like to have breakfast with her every day, and those thoughts were more dangerous to him than any weapon.

He'd tried to have a normal private life once, but it hadn't worked out. Marriage hadn't brought the intimacy he'd expected; the sex had been good, and regular, but after the act was finished he'd still been solitary, set apart by nature and circumstance from the rest of the world. He'd been fond of his wife, as far as it went, but that was it. She hadn't been able to scale the barriers to reach the inside man; maybe she'd never even realized he existed. Certainly she either hadn't realized or hadn't wanted to face the true nature of his job. Marilyn Sabin had looked on her husband as merely one of the thousands of men who held civil service desk jobs in Washington, D.C. He went to work in the mornings and he returned – usually – at night. She was busy with her own growing law practice and often had to work late hours, so she understood. She was a fastidious woman, so Kell's cool, distant character had suited her perfectly, and she'd never made any effort to see beyond the surface to the complicated man beneath.

Kell turned his face up to the sun, feeling everything in him loosen up and slow down. Marilyn… it had been years since he'd even thought of her, an illustration of how shallowly she had touched him. The divorce hadn't elicited any response from him other than a shrug; hell, she would have been crazy to have stayed with him after what happened.

The attempt on his life had been clumsy, not well planned or well executed at all. He and Marilyn had been out to dinner, one of the few times in their married life that they had been out together socially, and never to one of the ritzy in places that Marilyn loved so dearly. Kell had seen the sniper as soon as they left the restaurant and acted immediately, shoving Marilyn down and rolling for cover himself. His action had saved Marilyn's life, because she had kept walking and ended up between Kell and the sniper, who had fired almost simultaneously with Kell's shove, wounding Marilyn in the right arm.

That night had forever changed the way Marilyn viewed her husband, and she hadn't liked the new view at all. She'd seen the cool way he had tracked and cornered his assailant, seen the short, vicious fight that left the other man unconscious on the ground, heard the biting authority in Kell's voice as he gave orders to the men who arrived shortly and took over. One of those men took her to a hospital, where she was treated and kept overnight, while Kell spent the night piecing together how the sniper had learned where he would be that evening. The answer, obviously, had been Marilyn. She saw no reason to be secretive about her movements or the fact that she would be dining with her husband that night, or where; she'd truly had no idea how dangerous and highly classified her husband's job was, nor had she been interested in learning.

By the time Kell collected her at the hospital the next day their marriage was over in every way except legally. The first words Marilyn had said to him, very calmly, were that she wanted a divorce. She didn't know what it was he did, didn't want to know, but she wasn't going to risk her own life being married to him while he did it. It might have piqued her vanity a bit when Kell agreed so easily, but he'd been doing some thinking during the night, too, and had reached basically the same conclusion, though for different reasons.

Kell didn't blame her for getting a divorce; it had been the wise thing to do. The close call had shaken him, because it had illustrated how easily he could be reached through the very person who was supposed to be closest to him. It had been a mistake for him even to attempt to have a normal private life, considering who he was and what he did. Other men could manage it, but other men weren't Kell Sabin, whose particular talents put him on the leading edge of danger. If there was any one man in intelligence whom other agencies wanted to take out of commission, it was Kell Sabin. Because he was a target, anyone close to him was automatically a target, too.

It had taught him a lesson. He had never again let anyone get close enough to him that they could be used against him, or hurt in an effort to get to him. He had chosen his life, because he was both a realist and a patriot, and he was willing to pay whatever price he had to, but he was determined to never again involve an innocent, a civilian, one of the very people whose lives and freedom he was sworn to protect.

He'd never been tempted to marry again, or even to take a mistress. Sex was casual, never on a regular basis with the same woman, and he always carefully limited the number of times he saw anyone in particular. It had worked out well.

Until Rachel. She tempted him. Damn, how she tempted him! She was nothing like Marilyn; she was comfortable and casual, where Marilyn had been fastidious and chic. She knew – somehow, she knew – too much about his way of life in general, while Marilyn hadn't realized even a fraction that much about him in the years they were married.

But it simply wouldn't work. He couldn't allow it to work. He watched Rachel as she worked in her small garden, content with her chores. Sex with her would be hot and long, writhing on that bed with her, and she wouldn't worry if he mussed her hair or smeared her makeup. To protect her, he had to make certain that sex was all it ever was. When he walked out of her life it would be for good, and for her own good. He owed her too much to risk any harm coming to her.

She straightened from her bent position and stretched, reaching her arms high in the air; the movement thrust her breasts upward against the thin fabric of her shirt. Then she picked up her basket and picked her way across the rows of vegetables toward him; Joe left his position at the end of the row and followed her to find shade under the back steps. There was a smile on Rachel's face as she approached Kell, her gray eyes warm and clear, her slim body moving gracefully. He watched her approach, aware of her in every cell of his body. No, there was no way he'd endanger her by staying any longer than was necessary; the real danger was that he was so hungry for her that he might be tempted to see her again, something he couldn't let happen.

Chapter Eight

The next few days were slow, hot and peaceful. Now that Kell was on the mend and didn't require her constant attention Rachel resumed her normal work schedule; she finished planning her course and began working on her manuscript again, as well as tending the garden and doing all the other small chores that never seemed to end. She got the requested hollowpoint bullets for Kell, and the .357 was never far from his hand. If they were inside he sometimes placed it on the table in the bedroom, but usually he kept it stuck into his waistband at the small of his back, instantly accessible.

Honey came to take the stitches out of his wounds and professed to be amazed at how well he had healed. "Your metabolic rate must be something else," she said admiringly. "Of course, I did a terrific job on you. The muscle in your leg was a mess, but I did some repair work, and I think you're going to come out of this without even a limp."

"You did a helluva job, doc," he drawled, smiling at her.

"I know," Honey returned cheerfully. "You were just plain lucky on your shoulder. You may lose some of your rotation ability, but not much, I don't think. Take it easy on both the leg and shoulder for another week or so, but you can start working the stiffness out if you're careful."

He had already been working the stiffness out; Rachel had seen him exercising his shoulder and arm carefully, as though testing the limits of the stitches. He hadn't put any weight on either his leg or shoulder, but he had been doing exercises to ease his movements, and as a result his limp was much better, no worse than if he'd had a sprained ankle.

Honey hadn't even blinked when he removed the pistol from his waistband and placed it on the table while he took off his khaki pants and blue cotton shirt. Wearing only his briefs, he'd sat at the table and observed expressionlessly while she removed the stitches and Rachel leaned over to watch. Then he put his clothes back on and returned the heavy pistol to its accustomed place at the small of his back.

"Stay for lunch," Rachel invited. "Tuna salad and fresh tomatoes, light and cool."

Honey made it a practice never to refuse one of Rachel's invitations. "Done. I've been craving a fresh tomato."

"Southerners serve tomatoes with almost everything," Kell observed.

"That's because almost everything tastes better with a tomato," Honey defended. She was from Georgia, and passionately fond of tomatoes.

"Love apples," Rachel said absently. "Tomatoes, that is. Though I don't know why they were called that, since most people thought they were poisonous because they're a member of the nightshade family, like belladonna."

Honey chuckled. "Oh, ho! You've been reading up on old poisons, haven't you? Is someone in one of your books going to kick the bucket from an overdose of belladonna?"

"Of course not. I don't write whodunits." Not at all perturbed by Honey's teasing, Rachel glanced at Kell as she set the table. "You're not a Southerner, are you? You have a drawl, but it isn't Southern."

"Most of it comes from spending a lot of time with a man from Georgia. We were in Vietnam together. I was born in Nevada."

That was probably the limit of the personal information he would give about himself, so Rachel didn't ask any more questions. They ate the simple meal, with Kell sitting between the two women, and though he ate well as always and kept up with the conversation, she noticed that he sat where he could watch both the window and the door. It was habit with him; he did it at every meal, even though he knew no one could approach the house without Joe giving warning.

As Honey was leaving she smiled at Kell and held out her hand. "If I don't see you again, goodbye."

He took her hand. "Thanks, doc. Goodbye." Rachel noticed that he made no pretense about staying.

Honey eyed him consideringly. "I'm literally bursting with questions, but I think I'm going to follow my own good advice and not ask them. I don't want to know. But be careful, you hear?"

He gave his crooked half smile. "Sure thing."

She winked at him. "If anyone asks, I don't know a thing."

"You're a smart woman, doc. After I'm gone Rachel can fill you in on the details."

"Maybe. But maybe I'll just make up my own answers. That way I can get as wild and romantic as I want but still play it safe."

Probably Honey's outlook was the best, Rachel thought after she and Kell were alone. Honey allowed herself to be wild and romantic in her fantasies, but in real life she opted for safety. Honey would never do anything as risky as falling in love with a man like Kell Sabin. She would clean the kitchen, just as Rachel was doing, and forget about the rest. Rachel turned and found him watching her in that steady, unnerving way of his. Her chin lifted. "What is it?"

For answer he walked up to her and cupped her chin in his hand, then bent and covered her mouth with his. Surprise held Rachel motionless for a moment; he hadn't kissed her after that first time, though she sometimes thought there was a touch of possessiveness in the way he held her at night. She hadn't betrayed the pleasure she felt in sleeping in his arms, but there was no way she could hide the heavy surge of desire that made her respond to his mouth, her lips parting at the pressure of his, her hands sliding up the hard, warm wall of his chest. His tongue curled against hers, and she made a sound deep in her throat, her breasts and loins tightening as if he had touched them.

Slowly Kell moved forward, backing her up until she was jammed against the cabinets. Rachel freed her mouth and gasped, "What brought this on?"

His mouth moved down to the curve of her jaw and explored the soft skin below her ear. "Must be all those love apples you've been feeding me," he murmured. "Stop turning your head away. Kiss me. Open your mouth." She did, her hands clenching his shirt, and he took her mouth in a long, deep, minddrugging way that went on forever and had her standing on tiptoe to press against him. His hands slid down to her buttocks and cupped them, lifting her into even more intimate contact.

The kiss stripped away all pretense and left them clinging together in open passion, hungry for each other, straining to get even closer. Their passion had been building for days, feeding on the memory of intimate touches between them that normally would have come after the first questing kisses, but they had been thrown together in circumstances that had gotten the order mixed. She had seen and touched his hard, beautiful body while caring for him and soothing him. He had felt her in his hands and gotten used to the particular sweet scent of her even before he'd known her name. He had slept with her in his arms for four nights now, and their bodies had grown accustomed to each other. Nature had circumvented all the natural barriers that people threw up to protect their sense of privacy, forcing the two of them together in a hothouse atmosphere forged by circumstance.

The force of what she was feeling frightened her a little, and again she tore her mouth away from his, hiding her face in the warm curve of his throat. She had to slow this down before she went out of control. "You're a fast man," she gulped, trying to steady her voice.

He moved his hands from her buttocks to slide them up her back, holding her tightly. His mouth nuzzled her ear, and his voice was warm and dark. "Not as fast as I wanted to be."

Uncontrollable shivers were vibrating through her entire body, and her nipples were so tight that they ached. He held her even more tightly, crushing her breasts against his hard, muscle-layered body and rubbed his cheek against the top of her head, but the tender caress didn't last long against his hungry need for more. He dug his fingers into her hair and tilted her head back, his mouth once again taking hers, his tongue moving in the rhythm of making love. Rachel's entire body jolted when his other hand covered her breast, sliding inside her blouse to cup her warmly in his paim so he could rasp his callused thumb over her hardened nipple, simultaneously soothing the ache and creating a deeper one.

"I want to be inside you," he murmured, lifting his head to watch the way her nipple rolled under his thumb. "I've been going crazy, wanting you. Will you let me have you for the time we have left together?"

God, he was honest, and she had to swallow hard to keep from crying out at the pain. Even now, with their bodies fevered with need, he didn't make sweet promises he had no intention of keeping. He would be leaving; the best they could have would be temporary. Still, it would be so simple if she could just forget about the future and go with him now into her bedroom, but his honesty reminded her that she had to think about the future and the day when he would leave her.

Slowly she pushed against him, and he moved back, giving her the space she needed. With a shaking hand she pushed her hair back from her face. "It isn't something that's easy for me," she tried to explain, her voice shaking just like her hand. "I've never had a lover… only my husband."

His eyes were sharp, watchful, and he waited.

She made a helpless gesture. His honesty deserved her own. "I… care about you."

"No," he said sharply, deliberately. "Don't let it happen."

"Is it something I'm supposed to turn off, like a water faucet?" Rachel faced him, her gaze level.

"Yes. This is sex, nothing else. Don't fool yourself into thinking there can be anything more, because even if there were, there'd still be no future in it."

"Oh, I know that." She gave a tight little laugh and turned to look out the window over the sink. "When you walk out of here, that's when it ends."

She wanted him to deny it, but again that brutal honesty destroyed her hopes.

"That's it. That's the way it has to be."

It would be useless to argue with him on that point; she had known all along that he was solitary, a lone wolf. "It's that way for you, but I don't have that sort of emotional control. I think I love you – oh, damn, why try to hedge my bets?" Her voice was filled with helpless frustration. "I started loving you the minute I dragged you out of the ocean! It doesn't make sense, does it? But it won't stop just because you leave."

He watched her, accurately reading the tension in her slender back, the tightness of her hands. What had it cost her to confess that? She was the most direct woman he'd ever known, with no use for games or subterfuge. She was the only woman in all these years that he regretted leaving; just the thought of it twisted his guts, but he could handle that a lot easier than the knowledge that keeping her with him would jeopardize her life. She was too fine for him to carelessly endanger her for his own enjoyment.

He put his hands on her shoulders, kneading the tension from them. "I won't pressure you," he murmured. "You have to do what's best for you, but if you decide you want me, I'm here."

Decide she wanted him? She ached with wanting him! But he was giving her the space to decide for herself, rather than seducing her into bed as he knew he easily could; she had no illusions about her self-control where he was concerned. She put her hand on his, and their fingers entwined.

There was a thump as Joe left the shade under the steps and tore around the side of the house, and Kell's hand stiffened under hers, his head snapping around. Rachel went still, then shook herself and moved swiftly to the front door. She didn't have to tell him to stay out of sight; she knew that if she looked around he would already be hidden from view, moving silently through the house.

She opened the door and stepped out onto the front porch, and only then did she remember that Kell had partially unbuttoned her blouse. She rebuttoned it swiftly, looking around for whatever had set Joe off. Then she heard the car approaching down the private road; it wouldn't be Honey, since she had just left, and on the rare times Rafferty visited he rode his horse over rather than driving.

The car that pulled to a stop in front of the house was a pale-blue Ford, a government car. Joe was crouched facing it, snarling, his ears back. "Steady, steady," Rachel murmured to him, trying to see who was in the car, but the sun was glaring on the window and blocked her vision. Then the car door opened and a tall man got out, but he remained in the open door, looking at her over the top of the vehicle. Agent Ellis, his jacket off and dark sunglasses shading his eyes.

"Oh, hello," Rachel called. "Nice to see you again." The Southern ritual of greeting had its advantages, giving her time to gather her thoughts. Why was he here again? Had Kell been seen when he'd been outside? They had been careful, trusting Joe to warn them if anyone was near, but someone with binoculars might have seen him.

Tod Ellis gave her his bright college smile. "It's nice to see you again, Ms. Jones. I thought I'd check in with you, make sure everything's okay."

It was a pretty weak excuse for driving miles out of his way. Rachel stepped around Joe and walked out to the car in an effort to keep Ellis from looking toward the house. It wasn't likely that Kell would let himself be seen, but she didn't want to take any chances. "Yes, everything's okay," she said cheerfully, going around the car and standing at the door so he had to turn his back to the house in order to face her. "Hot, but okay. Did you ever find that man you were hunting?"

"No, not a trace. You haven't seen anything?"

"Not even at a distance, and Joe always lets me know if anyone's around."

The mention of the dog made Ellis jerk his head around for a quick look as if to check Joe's location; the dog was still standing in the middle of the yard, his eyes locked on the intruder, low growls still rumbling in his chest. Ellis cleared his throat, then turned back to Rachel. "It's a good thing you've got him, living way out here by yourself. You can't be too careful."

She laughed. "Well, actually you can. Look at Howard Hughes. But I feel safe with Joe guarding the place."

She couldn't be certain, because of the dark glasses shading his eyes, but she thought he kept looking at her legs and breasts. Alarm skittered through her, and she had to fight down the urge to check her buttons; had she buttoned the blouse straight? If not, it was too late now, and he had no reason to think she had been in the house, kissing the very man he was hunting.

Then abruptly he laughed, too, and took off his sunglasses, dangling them from his fingers. "I didn't come out here, to check on you." He leaned his forearm on top of the open car door, his posture relaxed and confident. With his clean-cut good looks he was accustomed to approval from women. "I came to ask you out to dinner. I know you don't know me, but my credentials are respectable. What do you say?"

Rachel didn't have to fake her confusion; it was real. She had no idea how she should answer him. If she went out with him it would go a long way toward convincing him she knew nothing about Kell, but on the other hand, it might encourage Agent Ellis to come around again, and she didn't want that. Why were they still here, anyway? Why hadn't they moved farther down the coast in their search for Kell?

"Why, I don't know," she replied, stammering a little. "When?"

"Tonight, if you don't have other plans."

God, this was making her paranoid! If they had seen Kell, then this could be a ploy to get her out of the house so there would be no witnesses. If not, she might make him suspicious if she acted too suspicious. All this second-guessing could drive her crazy. Finally she went on her instincts. Agent Ellis hadn't tried to hide his male admiration for her the first time they'd met, so she was going to take his invitation at face value. If nothing else, she might be able to get some information from him.

"I think I'd like that," she finally said. "What did you have in mind? I'm not much of a party person."

He gave her his boyish grin again. "You're safe. I'm not into the punk scene, either. I'm too squeamish to stick safety pins through my cheeks. What I had in mind was a quiet restaurant and a good, thick steak."

And a roll in bed afterward? He'd be disappointed. "You're on," Rachel said. "What time?"

"Say, eight o'clock? It'll be sundown by then and cooling off, I hope."

She laughed. "I would say you get used to it, but all you do is learn to cope with it. The humidity is what gets you. All right, eight o'clock it is. I'll be ready."

He gave her a little salute and folded himself back under the steering wheel. Rachel walked back into the yard so she wouldn't get covered with dust when he drove off, and watched until the blue Ford was out of sight.

Kell was waiting for her inside, his eyes narrow and cold. "What did he want?"

"To ask me out to dinner," she replied slowly. "I didn't know what to say. Going out with him might keep him from being suspicious, or he could be asking me out just to get me out of the house. Maybe they've seen you. Maybe they just want to search."

"They haven't seen me," he said. "Or I wouldn't still be alive. What excuse did you give him?"

"I accepted."

Rachel had known he wouldn't be pleased, but she hadn't expected the reaction she got. His head snapped around, and his eyes burned with black fire, his usual cool remoteness shattered. "Hell, no, you're not. Get that idea out of your head, lady."

"It's too late. It might really make him suspicious if I made some weak excuse now."

He shoved his hands into his pants pockets, and in petrified fascination Rachel watched them ball into fists. "He's a murderer and a traitor. I've been doing a lot of thinking since I recognized him before they blew up my boat, tying together some details about things that went wrong when they shouldn't have, and Tod Ellis is connected in some little way to every one of those plans. You're not going out with him."

Rachel didn't back down. "Yes," she said. "I am. If nothing else, I may be able to pick up some information that will help you – "

She broke off with a gasp; he had jerked his hands out of his pockets and reached for her so rapidly that she hadn't had time to move back. His hard fingers closed on her shoulders in a grip that bruised, and he shook her slightly, his face hard and set with rage.

"Damn you," he whispered, the words barely audible as he pushed them between his clenched teeth. "When will you learn that this isn't something for amateurs to play with? You're in way over your head, and you don't have the sense to realize it! You aren't still in college playing a game of Assassination, sugar. Get that through your skull! Damn it," he swore again, releasing her shoulders and running his hand through his hair. "You've been lucky so far that you haven't blundered around and really screwed things up, but how long do you expect that luck to last? You're dealing with a cold-blooded professional!"

Rachel stepped back from him, putting her hand up to rub her aching shoulder. Something inside her had gone very still at his attack; that stillness was reflected on her face. "Which one?" she finally asked quietly. "Tod Ellis… or you?"

She turned and walked away from him, going into the bathroom and closing the door; it was the one place in the house where he wouldn't follow. She sat down on the rim of the tub, shaking; she had wondered occasionally what it would be like if he slipped the tight rein of his control, but she hadn't wanted to find out like that. She had wanted him to lose control when he kissed her, touched her. Wanted him to shake with need and desire and bury his face against her. She hadn't wanted him to lose control in anger, hadn't wanted to hear what he really thought of her efforts to help. She had been terrified all along of doing something wrong that might jeopardize him; she had agonized over every decision, and he had dismissed her from the start as a bumbling amateur. She knew she didn't have his knowledge or expertise, but she had done the best she could.

It was doubly painful after the way he had kissed her and touched her, but now she remembered that even then he had retained his steely control. It had been she who trembled and yearned, not him. He hadn't even lied to her; he'd told her plainly that it was nothing more to him than casual sex.

Taking a deep breath, Rachel gathered herself together. Since she was in the bathroom she might as well shower now; that would give her straight, heavy hair time to dry naturally and she wouldn't have to do anything to it except give it lift and curve with the curling iron. She might be going out with Tod Ellis with all the enthusiasm of attending an execution, but she wouldn't let him think that she looked on it as anything other than a real date, and that meant taking pains with her appearance.

She stripped off and got in the shower, briskly shampooing her hair and bathing, not allowing herself the luxury of brooding. Selfpity wouldn't accomplish anything except wasting time, time that would be better spent considering how to conduct herself that night, how to be friendly without being encouraging. The last thing she wanted was for Ellis to ask her out again! If he did, she'd have to make up some excuse. She'd told Agent Lowell she was making a trip to the Keys; it had been pure fabrication, but perhaps she could use the lie as an excuse for packing, planning and so on.

She turned off the water and dragged a towel off the top of the shower door, then wrapped it around her head. Just as she started to slide the door open and step out of the tub she caught sight of Kell's blurred image through the frosted door, and she jerked her hand back from the door as if it had burned her.

"Get out of here," she breathed sharply, snatching the towel off her head and wrapping it around her body, instead. The frosted surface of the doors gave her some protection, but if she could see him, he could see just as much of her. Knowing that he had watched her bathe made her feel terribly vulnerable. How long had he been there?

She saw his hand reaching out, and she moved back against the shower wall as he slid the door open on its track. "You didn't answer when I called you," he said curtly. "I wanted to make certain you were okay."

Rachel lifted her chin. "That's not much of an excuse. As soon as you saw I was taking a shower, you should have left."

His eyes raked over her, from her wet, tangled hair to her glistening shoulders and down to her slim, bare legs, which had rivulets of water running down them. The towel covered her from breast to thigh, but it would take only a tug to bare her completely, and his black, searching eyes had a way of making her feel even more exposed than she was.

"I'm sorry," he said abruptly, finally lifting his gaze to her face. "I didn't intend to imply that you haven't been a help."

"You didn't imply any such thing," Rachel returned, her voice sharp. "You came right out and said it." She felt both insulted and hurt, and she wasn't in the mood to forgive him. After what he had said, he had a lot of nerve to stand there eyeing her the way he was doing!

Suddenly he moved, hooking his right arm around her waist and lifting her out of the tub. Rachel gasped, clutching at him for balance. "Watch out! Your shoulder – "

He stood her on the fuzzy bath mat, his face hard and unreadable as he looked down at her, his right arm still locked around her waist. "I don't want you going out with him," he finally rasped. "Damn it, Rachel, I don't want you taking any risks on my account!"

The towel was slipping, and Rachel grabbed for the ends to anchor it more securely. "Why can't you give me any credit for being an adult, able to accept responsibility for my own actions?" she cried. "You told me Tod Ellis is a traitor, and I believe you. Don't you think I have a moral responsibility to do what I can to stop him and to help you? I think the situation is critical enough to warrant the risk! It's my decision, not yours."

"You never should have been involved."

"Why not? You said yourself that you'll have to have help. You've sent other people into dangerous situations, haven't you?"

"They were trained agents," he snapped, goaded. "And, damn it to hell, I never lay awake at night burning to make love to any of them."

She fell silent, her eyes wide as they searched his. His expression gave away nothing but anger and a faintly startled look, as if he hadn't meant to say that. The arm around her waist had her arched against him, though she had wedged her arm between their bodies in an effort to hold the towel. Only her toes touched the mat. Her thighs were inside his slightly spread legs, his growing hardness nestled against the soft mound at the top of her thighs.

They said nothing, both of them very aware of what was happening. Their chests expanded and fell rapidly as their breathing quickened, and Rachel's knees grew weak as she felt him grow stronger and bolder.

"I'd kill him before I let him touch you," he muttered, the words wrenched from him.

She shuddered at the thought. "I wouldn't let him. Never." Staring up at him, she shuddered again, as if she'd been struck between the eyes. Tod Ellis had made her realize anew how much danger stalked Kell's heels. She wasn't guaranteed three weeks with him; she wasn't guaranteed tomorrow, or even tonight. For men such as Kell Sabin there was no tomorrow, only the present; it was the brutal truth that he could be killed, that tragedy and terror could strike without warning. She had already learned that lesson once; how could she have been so stupid as to forget? She had wanted things to be perfect, wanted him to feel as she felt, but life was never perfect. It had to be taken as it was, or it passed by without a second glance. All she had with Kell was right now, the eternal present, because the past is always gone and the future never comes.

His hands were flexing on her flesh, his fingers kneading her as if he were barely able to restrain himself from doing more. His face was rock hard as he stared down at her, his voice raw when he spoke. "I let you back away in the kitchen. By God, I don't think I can do it again. Not now."

Rachel's breath left her lungs at the look in his midnight eyes, the hard, almost cruel look of savage arousal. The skin was pulled tight over his high, prominent cheekbones, and his jaw and mouth were set. Her heart gave a sudden leap as she realized that he meant exactly what he'd said, and fear and excitement rushed through her veins in a dizzying mixture. Control was impossible for him now, and the primitive force of his hunger was burning in his eyes.

Her hands trembled on his chest as her entire body began quivering in reaction to the fiercely male intent that was plain on his face, the look of a predator who had scented female. Heat. Heat was rising in her body, melting her insides, turning them liquid. His hand at her back clenched the towel and pulled it free from the tuck at her bosom. It dropped to the floor in a damp heap. Naked, Rachel stood in his grasp, shaking and yearning and gasping for breath that wouldn't seem to go deep enough.

He looked down at her, and a low rumbling sound started in his chest, working up to the back of his throat. Rachel's thighs turned to water, and she swayed, her throat tight, her heart pounding. Slowly he lifted his hand and touched her breasts, high and round, soft, with small, tight brown nipples, filling his palm with her to discover anew the warm, velvety texture of her flesh. Then, just as slowly, his hand drifted downward, smoothing over the sleek delta of her stomach and the slope of her lower abdomen, his fingers at last sliding into the dark curls of her womanhood. She hung there, shaking wildly and unable to move, paralyzed by the hot river of pleasure that followed his questing touch. One finger made a bolder foray. Her body jerked wildly, and she whimpered as he touched and teased and explored.

His gaze lifted from the gut-wrenching contrast of his hard, sinewy hand cupping the soft, exquisitely female mound and drifted back up to her pretty breasts, then to her face. Her eyes were half closed, glazed with desire; her lips were moist and parted, her breath rushing in and out in gasps. She was a woman on the verge of complete satisfaction, and her look of sweet carnality exploded the slim hold he still had on himself. With a wild, deep sound he bent and hoisted her over his right shoulder, the blood pounding so wildly in his ears that he didn't hear her startled cry.

He made it to the bed in five long steps and dropped her across it, following her down, spreading her thighs and kneeling between them before she had recovered. Rachel reached for him, almost sobbing with need. He tore off his shirt and tossed it to the floor, then jerked at his pants until they were open, and he lowered himself onto her.

Her body arched in shock as he thrust into her, and she cried out at both the moment of pinching discomfort and the jolt to her senses and flesh as he filled her. He was… oh…

"Take it all," he groaned, demanded, pleaded. He hung over her, his face shiny with sweat, his expression at once tortured and ecstatic. "All of me. Please." His voice was hoarse with need. "Let yourself relax – yes. Like that. More. Please. Rachel. Rachel! You're mine you're mine you're mine…."

The rawly primitive chant washed over her, and she cried out again as he moved in and out of her, powerfully, their bodies writhing together. It had never been like this for her, so painfully intense that it was unbearable. She had never loved like this, knowing that the breath would still in her lungs and her heart stop beating in her chest if anything ever happened to him. If this was all he wanted of her, then she would give herself to him freely and fervently, branding him with the sweet burning of her own passion.

He rolled his hips against her with a heavy surge, and it was abruptly too much for her to bear, making her senses crest and shatter. She gasped and cried out, writhing beneath him in a shimmer of pure heat that went on and on until it caught him, too. She couldn't see, couldn't breathe, could only feel. She felt the heavy pounding of his thrusts as he drove himself into her, then the convulsive heaving of his body in her arms. His hoarse wild cries filled her ears, then became rough moans. Slowly he stilled, became silent. His body relaxed, and his heavy weight bore down on her, but she cradled him gladly, her hands still clutching his back.

Concern began to nudge her as sanity returned, bringing remembrance of the way he had lifted her onto his shoulder and the unrestrained wildness of his lovemaking. His head lay on her shoulder, and she twined her fingers into his coal-black hair, managing only a husky murmur as she said, "Kell? Your shoulder…are you okay?"

He levered himself onto his right elbow and looked down at her. Her clear gray eyes were dark with concern – for him, after he'd taken her with all the care and finesse of a bull in rut! There were her soft, trembling lips, but he hadn't kissed them, nor had he caressed her pretty breasts and sucked them as he'd done in his dreams. Love was in those eyes, love so pure and shining that it knotted his insides with pain and shattered a wall somewhere deep in his mind and soul, leaving him vulnerable in a way he'd never been before.

Now he knew what hell was. Hell was seeing heaven, bright and tender, but being on the outside of the gates, unable to enter them without risking the destruction of what you most treasured.

Chapter Nine

"Just who is this woman Ellis has gone so mad over?" Charles asked calmly, his pale-blue eyes never wavering as he watched Lowell. As always, Charles's manner was detached, but Lowell knew that he missed nothing.

"She lives in a little house close to the beach. Deserted area, nothing around for miles. We questioned her when we first started looking for Sabin."

"And?" The voice was almost gentle.

Lowell shrugged. "And nothing. She hadn't seen anything."

"She must be out of the ordinary to capture Ellis's attention."

After considering it a minute Lowell shook his head. "She's good-looking, but that's all. Nothing fancy. No makeup. Outdoorsy type. But Ellis hasn't stopped talking about her."

"It seems our friend Ellis doesn't have his mind completely on the job at hand." The comment was deceptively casual.

Again Lowell shrugged. "He thinks Sabin died when the boat blew up, so he's not putting a lot of effort into hunting him."

"What do you think?"

"It's a possibility. We haven't found any trace of him. He was wounded. Even if by a miracle he'd made it to shore, he'd have needed help."

Charles nodded, his eyes thoughtful as he waved Lowell away. He had worked with Lowell for many years now and knew him as a steady and competent, if uninspired, agent. He had to be competent to have survived. Lowell was no more convinced of Sabin's survival than Ellis was, and Charles wondered if he had allowed Sabin's reputation to override his own common sense. Common sense would certainly seem to indicate that Sabin had died in the explosion or immediately thereafter, drowning in the warm turquoise waters to become food for the denizens of the sea. No one should have survived that, but Sabin… Sabin was one of a kind, except for that blond devil with the golden eyes, who had disappeared and was rumored to be dead, despite the disquieting talk that had floated out of Costa Rica the year before. Sabin was more shadow than substance, instinctively cunning and damnably lucky. No, not lucky, Charles corrected himself. Skilled. To call Sabin "lucky" was to underestimate him, a fatal mistake too many of his colleagues had made.

"Noelle, come here," he called, barely raising his voice, but he didn't need to. Noelle was never far from him. It gave him pleasure to look at her, not because she was extraordinarily beautiful, though she was, but because he enjoyed the incongruity of such lethal skill housed in such a lovely woman. Her job was twofold: to protect Charles and to kill Sabin.

Noelle came into the room, walking with the grace of a model, her eyes sleepy and soft. "Yes?"

He waved his thin, elegant hand to indicate a chair. "Sit, please. I have been discussing Sabin with Lowell."

She sat, crossing her legs to best display them. The gestures that attracted unsuspecting males came naturally to her; she had studied and practiced too long for them to be anything else by now. She smiled. "Ah, Agent Lowell. Sturdy, dependable, if a little shortsighted."

"Like Ellis, he seems to think we're wasting our time in searching for Sabin."

She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, then blew smoke through her shapely lips. "It doesn't matter what they think, does it? Only what you think."

"I wonder if I am bestowing superhuman powers on Sabin, if I'm so wary of him that I can't accept his death," Charles mused.

Her sleepy eyes blinked. "Until we have proof of his death we can't afford to assume otherwise. It's been eight days. If he somehow survived, he would now be recovered enough to start moving around, which should increase our chances of finding him. The most logical thing would be to intensify our search, rather than slacken it."

Yes, that was indeed logical; on the other hand, if Sabin had survived the explosion and somehow made it to shore, something that seemed impossible, why hadn't he contacted his headquarters for aid? Ellis' s contact in Washington was completely certain that Sabin hadn't attempted to get in touch with anyone. That simple fact had convinced almost everyone that Sabin was dead… yet Charles couldn't convince himself. It was sheer instinct that prompted him to keep his men searching, waiting, poised to strike. He could not believe that it had been so easy to kill Sabin, not after all these years when attempt after attempt had failed. It was impossible to have too much respect for his capabilities. Sabin was out there, somewhere. Charles could feel it.

He was abruptly brisk. "You're right, of course," he told Noelle. "We will intensify the search, re-cover every inch of ground. Somehow, somewhere, we have missed him."

Sabin prowled the house, his savage mood reflected on his face. He'd done some hard things in his life, but none of them had been as difficult as having to watch Rachel get ready to go out with Tod Ellis. It went against every instinct he had, but nothing he'd said could change her mind, and he was helpless, handcuffed by circumstance. He couldn't afford to do anything that would focus attention on her; it would merely increase the danger she was in. If he'd been ready to move he would have gone that night rather than expose her to Ellis, but again he was stymied. He wasn't ready to move, and to move before he was prepared could mean the difference between success and failure, with his country's security at stake. He'd been trained for half his lifetime to put his country first, even at the cost of his own life. Sabin could have sacrificed himself without hesitation or even regret if it had been necessary, but the simple, terrible truth was that he couldn't sacrifice Rachel.

He had to do whatever he could to keep her safe, even if it meant swallowing his pride and possessive instincts. She was safe enough with Ellis as long as he had no reason to suspect her of anything. To jerk her out of the house and take her away before Ellis arrived to pick her up, as Kell had badly wanted to do, would arouse the man's suspicions. Kell knew the agent, knew that he was damned good at his job…too good, or he'd never have been able to hide his other activities for so long. He also had a good-sized ego; if Rachel stood him up it would make him furious, and he wouldn't let it pass. He would be back.

Patience, the ability to wait even in the face of great urgency, was one of Sabin's greatest gifts. He knew how to wait, how to pick his moment for optimum success, how to ignore danger and concentrate solely on timing. He could literally disappear into his surroundings, waiting, so much a part of the earth that the wild creatures had ignored him and the Vietcong had at times passed within touching distance of him without ever seeing him. His ability to wait was enhanced by his instinctive knowledge of when patience was useless; then he exploded into action. He explained it to himself as a well-developed sense of timing. Yes, he knew how to wait… but waiting for Rachel to come home was driving him crazy. He wanted her back safe in his arms, in bed. Damn, how he wanted her in bed!

He didn't turn on any lights in the house; he didn't think it likely that the house was being watched, but he couldn't take the chance. Rachel and Ellis might return early, and a lit house could trigger Ellis's suspicions. Instead he moved silently through the darkness, unable to sit still despite the ache in his shoulder and leg. His shoulder had been giving him hell since the afternoon, and he absently massaged it A humorless smile quirked his lips. He hadn't felt a thing while he'd been making love to Rachel; his senses had been centered completely on her and the unbearable ecstasy of their bodies linked together. But since then the shoulder had been painfully reminding him that he was a long way from being healed; he'd been lucky he hadn't torn it open again.

Abruptly he swore and limped through the kitchen to the back door, so agitated that he couldn't remain inside the confines of the house any longer. As soon as Kell opened the back door he sensed Joe leaving his stakeout under the oleander bush, silently moving through the shadows, and he softly called to the dog in reassurance. Kell no longer feared being attacked; Joe had warily accepted his residency, but Kell didn't trust him enough to refrain from identifying himself before going down the back steps.

Automatically keeping himself in the shadows, Kell circled the house and investigated the pines, assuring himself that the house wasn't under surveillance. Joe padded along about ten feet behind him, stopping when Kell stopped and advancing when Kell moved on.

A new moon was just rising, a thin sickle of light on the horizon. Sabin looked up at the clear sky, so clear, like Rachel's eyes, that infinity seemed within his reach.

His heart twisted again, and his hand clenched into a fist. He whispered a curse into the night. She was too gallant, too strong, for her own good; why couldn't she play it safe and let him take all the risks? Didn't she know what it would do to him if anything happened to her?

No, how could she know? He'd never told her, and he never would, not at the expense of her safety. He'd protect her if it killed him. His mouth twisted wryly; it probably would kill him, not physically, but deep inside where he'd never let anyone touch him… until Rachel had slipped past all his defenses and seared herself into his mind and soul.

Of course, there was always the possibility that he wouldn't get out of this alive, anyway, but he didn't dwell on that. He had thought a lot in the past few days, considering and discarding options. His plans were made. Now he was waiting: waiting for his wounds to heal more completely; waiting until he was physically ready; waiting for Ellis and his pals to make some little mistake; waiting until he sensed the time was right… waiting. When the time came he would call Sullivan, and the plan would be put into action. He would rather have Sullivan with him than any ten other men. No one would ever be expecting the two of them to be working together again.

No, his only uncertainty was because of Rachel. He knew what he had to do to protect her, but for the first time in his life he dreaded it. Letting her go was one thing; living without her was another.

He stood there in the night and cursed whatever it was that made him different from other men: the extraordinary skill and cunning, the acute eyesight and athletic body, the extreme coordination between mind and muscle that, all combined, made him a hunter and a warrior. When his emotional aloofness was added to that it had made him a natural for the job he held, the perfect, emotionless soldier in the cold gray shadows. He couldn't remember ever being any different. He hadn't been a noisy, laughing child; he'd been silent and solitary, holding himself aloof even from his parents. He'd always been alone deep inside himself and had never wanted it any other way; perhaps he'd known, even as a child, how much it would hurt to love. There. He'd let the words form in his thoughts, and even that was so painful that he flinched. He was too intense ever to love casually, lightly, to play the game of romance over and over. His emotional distance had been a defense, but Rachel had shattered it, and it hurt. God, how it hurt.

Rachel sat across from Tod Ellis, smiling and chatting and forcing herself to eat her seafood as if she enjoyed it, but it chilled her every time he gave her that toothpaste-ad smile. She knew what that smile concealed. She knew that he had tried to kill Kell; he was a liar, a murderer and a traitor. It took all her strength to continue acting as if she were having a pleasant time, but nothing could keep her thoughts from slipping back to Kell.

She had wanted nothing more than to continue lying in his arms that afternoon, her body limp and throbbing from his rough, fast, but intensely satisfying possession. She had forgotten what it was like… or perhaps it had never been like that before. Being married to B.B. had been warm and fun and loving. Being Sabin's woman would be like burning alive every time he touched her, going soft, hot and moist at his glance, his lightest touch. He wasn't easygoing and cheerful. He was a hard, intense man, the force of his personality radiating from him. He wasn't playful; she'd never heard him laugh, or even seen his rare smiles reach his eyes. But he had reached for her with such desperate, driving need that everything in her had responded immediately, and she had been ready for him, wanting him.

No, Kell wasn't a comfortable man to be around, or an easy man to love, but she didn't waste time railing against fate. She loved him, and accepted him for what he was. She looked at Tod Ellis and her eyes narrowed a little, because Kell was a lion surrounded by jackals, and this man was one of the jackals.

She put down her fork and gave him a bright smile. "How much longer will you be around here, do you think? Or are you permanently assigned to this area?"

"No, I move around a lot," he said, responding to her direct attention by flashing his smile once again. "I never know when I'll be reassigned."

"Is this sort of a special assignment?"

"It's more of a wild-goose chase. We've been wasting our time. Still, if we hadn't been searching the beach I never would have met you."

He'd been throwing out lines like that since he'd picked her up, and Rachel had been determinedly skirting them. He evidently thought he was a modern day Don Juan, and probably a lot of women found him attractive and charming, but, then, they didn't know what Rachel did about him.

"Oh, I'm certain you aren't hurting for casual dates," she said in an offhand manner.

He reached across the table and put his hand on hers. "Maybe I don't consider this a casual date."

Rachel smiled and removed her hand to pick up her wineglass. "I don't see how you could consider it anything else, considering you may be reassigned at any time. Even if you aren't, I'll be leaving on vacation soon and probably won't be back for the rest of the summer."

He didn't like that; it put a small dent in his ego that she wasn't willing to hang around for as long as he was there. "Where are you going?"

"The Keys. I'm going to stay with a friend and do some research in the area. I was planning to stay there until I have to come back to teach a night course in Gainesville when the fall quarter starts."

Anyone else would have asked her about the course she was teaching; Ellis scowled at her and said, "Is your friend male or female?"

Just for a moment she entertained the appealing idea of telling him to take a long walk off a short pier, but it wasn't her plan to antagonize him, not yet. She still wanted to get some information out of him if she could. So instead she gave him a cool look that told him he'd gone too far and said calmly, "A woman, an old college friend."

He wasn't stupid. Arrogant and conceited, but not stupid. He grimaced in a way that was meant to be charming, but left her cold. "Sorry. I overstepped myself, didn't I? It's just that – well, from the moment I saw you, I was really attracted, and I want to get to know you better."

"There doesn't seem to be much point in it," Rachel pointed out. "You would be leaving soon, anyway, even if I hadn't planned my vacation."

He looked as if he'd like to refute that, but he'd told her himself that he moved around a lot. "We may be around for another couple of weeks," he said sulkily.

"Tying up loose ends?"

"Yeah, you know how it is. Paperwork."

"Is it just you and Agent Lowell?"

He hesitated, habit too deeply ingrained in him to make it easy for him to talk in any detail about his work. Rachel held her breath, wondering if his ego would prompt him to try to make up for the ground he had lost by being too personal. After all, it was inherently flattering when someone asked about your work. It was a way of getting better acquainted, of asking innocent questions that still denoted interest. She was interested, all right, but not in Ellis.

"There are nine of us actively investigating," he finally said. "We were all chosen especially for this job."

Because they were unscrupulous? She gave him a wide-eyed, ego-stroking look. "It must be really big to have that many men working on it."

"As I said, we're the active investigators. We can call on about twenty other men for backup if necessary."

She looked suitably impressed. "But you think it's a dead end?"

"We haven't turned up anything, but the top man isn't satisfied yet. You know how it is. People behind a desk think they know more than the men in the field."

She sympathized with him and even made up a few tales to reciprocate, edging the conversation away from his work. If she probed too directly and too often it could rouse his suspicions. Talking to him made her feel unclean and anxious to get away from him, as far away as she could. The knowledge that he would try to kiss her, probably even try to talk her into bed, filled her with sick horror. There was no way she could tolerate his mouth on hers even for a moment. Even if he wasn't a total snake, which he was, she couldn't have kissed him; she was Kell Sabin's woman, a fact that had nothing to do with will or determination. It simply was.

She forced herself to chat for another hour, smiling at the appropriate moments and forcing down the increasing urge to gag. He was almost more than she could tolerate. Only the thought that Kell could use any information she got out of Ellis gave her the will to stay. When their dishes had finally been cleared away and they were taking their time over coffee, she put out another feeler. "Where are you staying? This isn't a tourist area, and motel rooms can be hard to find."

"We're actually spread out down the coast," he explained. "Lowell and I are sharing a room at this dinky little motel, Harran's."

"I know where it is," she said, nodding.

"We've been living off fast food since we got here. It's a relief to get a decent meal for a change."

"I imagine so." She pushed her coffee cup back and looked around the restaurant, hoping he'd get the message that she was ready to go. The sketchy details she'd gotten would have to be enough; she simply couldn't sit there with him any longer and pretend that she liked him. She wanted to go home and lock the door behind her, closing Tod Ellis and his cohorts out of her life. Kell was there, waiting for her, and she wanted to be with him, even though she was uneasy about his mood. He had been coldly silent when she left, his rage barely controlled. He had wanted her to play it safe and let all the risk fall on him, but Rachel could quit breathing more easily than she could stand by without doing anything while he was in danger. He wasn't used to his commands being ignored, and he didn't like it one little bit.

For his own reasons Ellis wasn't loath to leave a little early. Rachel imagined that he thought the remainder of the evening would be spent in a more physical manner. He would be disappointed.

She didn't talk much on the way home, both reluctant to have any more to do with Ellis than necessary and because her thoughts were increasingly taken with Kell, though he'd never been far from her mind all evening. Her heartbeat suddenly lurched and her blood skittered through her veins, making her feel flushed and dizzy. The fierce lovemaking they'd shared that afternoon should have clarified their relationship, even if only on that basic level, but it hadn't. Kell had looked at her so oddly afterward, as if she wasn't what he'd expected. Despite his anger with her when she refused to do what he told her, on some deep level he had seemed even more self-contained than ever. He was a difficult, unusual man, but she was so acutely sensitive to him that every faint nuance of his expression, which most people wouldn't notice at all, seemed to shout at her. Why had he looked at her like that, then withdrawn? Why did she feel farther from him now than she had before they had lain locked together in writhing heat?

Ellis turned onto the private road that ended at her house and a few minutes later pulled the car to a stop in front. The house was dark, but she hadn't really expected it to be any other way. Kell wouldn't advertise his presence by turning on lights.

They got out of the car, and as Ellis came around to her side they heard that low snarl. Joe, bless him, didn't miss anything.

Ellis visibly jerked, the sudden alarm starkly etched on his face in the ghastly light from the car's open door. He stopped in his tracks. "Where is he?" he muttered.

Rachel looked around but couldn't see the dog. He was black and tan, with the classic markings of a German shepherd, so his darkness made it difficult to see him. The snarls placed him slightly to her left, close to Ellis, but she still couldn't make him out.

Quickly she seized the opportunity. "Look, you stand still while I walk into the yard. He's behind you, so don't move any closer to him. When I'm out of the way, get in the car on this side and he probably won't bother you."

"That dog's vicious. You should have him chained," Ellis snapped, but he didn't argue with her instructions. He stood absolutely still while Rachel walked up into the yard, then sidled toward the open door on the passenger side of the car.

"I'm sorry," she apologized, hoping he couldn't hear the insincerity in her voice. "I didn't think. Still, he's good protection. He's never yet let a stranger walk into the yard."

Joe moved then, the movement betraying his position. Snarling steadily, he planted himself between Rachel and Ellis.

She wanted to laugh. There was no chance of even a good night kiss now, and from the look on Ellis's face he wanted nothing more than to be inside the car, with solid steel between him and the dog. Hastily he slid inside and slammed the door, then rolled the window down partway.

"I'll call you, okay?"

She made herself hesitate, rather than shouting out the "No!" she wanted to voice. "I'll be busy getting ready for my vacation. I have some work I have to finish before I leave. I really won't have much free time."

Now that he was safe from the dog his cockiness was returning. "You have to eat, don't you? I'll call you for lunch or something."

She planned on being busy, but she could handle him over the telephone. She didn't want him showing up here unannounced, but that wasn't likely as long as Joe was in residence.

She stood in the yard, watching the taillights as he drove off, then said, "Good boy," to Joe with obvious approval in her voice. Turning toward the house, she wondered why Kell didn't turn on a light for her now that Ellis was out of sight. She started to walk up to the porch but hadn't taken a full step, when a hard arm passed around her waist and jerked her backward.

"Have fun?" a low, angry voice whispered in her ear.

"Kell." She relaxed against him, pleasure flooding warmly through her at even this touch, despite his anger.

"Did he touch you? Kiss you?"

She had expected questioning, but not primarily about that. Kell's voice was rough, almost savage.

"You know he didn't," she replied steadily. "After all, you were out here watching."

"What about before?"

"No. Not at all. I couldn't stand the thought."

A great shudder passed through his body, an extraordinary response in a man as controlled as he normally was, but when he spoke his voice was level again. "Let's go inside."

He locked up while she went into the bedroom to put away her purse and slip out of her shoes; then he joined her in the bedroom. His black eyes were expressionless as he watched her slip the earrings out of her pierced lobes and put the jewelry away in a velvet-lined box. He'd been right; she slipped into stylish sophistication as easily as she puttered barefoot in the garden, and she was gut-wrenchingly sexy in either case.

His silent, unwavering stare was making her uneasy. "I did get some information," she finally offered, taking a nightgown from the dresser and darting a quick look at him. He looked… furious, somehow, though his face was rock hard and his eyes expressionless. His arms were folded across his bare chest; he wore only his jeans and running shoes, and he looked formidable.

He didn't ask, but she condensed it for him, anyway. "There are nine of them actively searching for you, but Ellis let it slip that they have a backup of about twenty more if needed. They're scattered, looking up and down the coast. Ellis and Lowell are staying at Harran's Motel. He thinks you're dead and that they're wasting his time, but the head man on the operation won't give up."

That would be the mysterious "Charles." Sabin had known who had to be behind things from the moment he had recognized the red-haired woman, Noelle, on the boat. He had known it would be only a matter of time until they locked horns again. Charles was the head of an international terrorist organization that had been growing bolder and more challenging, while at the same time Charles himself had kept at a safe distance, protected by a web of technicalities and politics. Now he had come out into the open, to get Sabin. But he'd made one big mistake: his first attempt hadn't succeeded, and now Sabin knew that his own organization had been infiltrated. Charles couldn't afford to stop the search until Sabin was found, dead or alive.

When Kell didn't ask any questions Rachel shrugged and went into the bathroom to take off her makeup and change into her nightgown. His silence was unnerving; he probably used it as a weapon, to shake people off-balance and put them on the defensive. Well, she wasn't one of his minions; she was a woman who loved him.

Five minutes later she left the bathroom, her clothing draped over her arm. Sabin was sitting on the side of the bed, taking off his shoes. He kept his eyes on her while she hung her things in the closet, not looking away even when he stood to unzip his jeans.

"The nightgown is a waste of time," he drawled. "You might as well pull it off and put it back in that drawer."

Startled, Rachel looked around at him. He was standing by the bed, his hands on the fly of his jeans, and he was watching her with the concentrated attention with which a cat watches a mouse. The air around her suddenly sizzled with tension, and her throat went dry, forcing her to swallow. Slowly he slid down the zipper on his jeans, the denim spreading open in a vee to reveal bronzed skin and the vertical line of downy hair that arrowed down his lower abdomen into the thicker growth of hair just visible in his opened pants. The thick bulge beneath the denim clearly demonstrated his intention.

Her body leaped into immediate response, her heart beating faster and her breath racing in and out of her lungs. It had been like that from the beginning, and she had no more control over it now than she'd had then. He wanted her; that was more than obvious. But he didn't want to want her, and the knowledge hurt.

She swallowed again, pushing the closet door shut and leaning against it. "It's silly," she said, trying for a wry tone but failing miserably. Her voice was taut and shaking. "After this afternoon you'd think I'd be more comfortable about going to bed with you, but I'm not. I don't know what… what we have, if anything. I thought it would be clearer, but it isn't. What do you want from me?" She made a brief, dismissive gesture. "Other than sex."

Silently Kell swore. He was so good at holding people away from him that now, when he desperately wanted Rachel as close as he could get her for what time they had left, she still thought he was pushing her away. They had so little time together that the thought of not grabbing for every moment with her was unbearable, and he didn't know how to make her see that. Perhaps it was better if she didn't see it; perhaps it would be easier for her if she never knew how tempted he was to forget all his rules and priorities. But he had to have her, had to stockpile memories against the empty days in the future when she wouldn't be there. Even now she wasn't playing games, wasn't trying to hide behind lies to protect her pride. She was so honest that she deserved at least a fraction of the same honesty from him, no matter how it hurt. But the pain wasn't only hers.

He looked at her and said, "Everything. That's what I want. But I can't have it."

She quivered, and tears welled in her eyes. "You know you can have anything you want. All you have to do is reach out and take it."

Slowly he walked up to her and put his hand on her shoulder, sliding his fingers under the strap of her nightgown and stroking his rough fingertips over her warm, satiny skin. "At the risk of your life?" he asked in a low voice. "No. I couldn't live with that."

"You make it sound like a concrete fact that anyone close to you is a target. Other agents – "

"Other agents aren't me," he interrupted quietly, his black eyes level on hers. "There are several renegade governments and terrorist groups that have a bounty on my head. Do you think I'd ask any woman to share that sort of life with me?"

She managed to smile through her tears. "Don't try to tell me you live like a monk. I know there have been women – "

"No one close. No one special. No one who could be used or threatened in an attempt to get at me. I've tried it, honey. I was married, years ago before it got as bad as it is now. She was wounded in an attempt on my life. Being a smart woman, she got the hell away from me as fast as she could."

Not so smart, Rachel thought. She knew that she never would have let that drive her away from him. Her throat was so tight that she was almost choking on her words as she stared up at him, the tears finally overflowing and rolling down her cheeks. "It would be worth it, to be with you," she whispered. "I'd take the chance."

"No," he said, shaking his head. "I won't let you. I won't take the chance, not with your life." With one thumb he rubbed away the tears tracking her face.

"Isn't that my decision to make?"

He moved both his hands up to cup her face, sliding his fingers into her thick straight hair and tilting her face closer to his. "Not when you don't have any real idea of the danger involved. You pulled a little stint as an investigative reporter, and you notice more than is good for you, but you're as innocent as a baby when it comes to knowing what my work is really like. There are agents who live fairly normal lives, but I'm not one of them. I'm one of a very small minority. My existence isn't even admitted publicly."

She had gone pale, her face very still. "I know more about the risks involved than you think."

"No. You know the movie versions, the cleaned up, romanticized, glamorized crap."

Rachel suddenly jerked her head away from his touch, her hands clenched into fists. "You think so?" she rasped, her voice rough with pain. "My husband was killed by a car bomb meant for me. There was nothing cleaned up, romanticized, or glamorous about that. He died in my place! Ask me what I know about someone else paying the price for a risk I chose to take!" Tears began falling again, and she dashed them away, glaring fiercely at him. "Damn you, Kell Sabin! Do you think I want to love you? But at least I'm willing to take the chance, rather than run away from it the way you do!"

Chapter Ten

She was crying, and it was like taking a punch in the gut to watch her. Rachel simply wasn't a weepy person, and she was trying hard not to cry, but the tears kept rolling down her face as she faced him, and she kept angrily dashing them away. Slowly Kell reached out and brushed her hair away from her damp face, then eased her into his arms and pressed her head against his uninjured shoulder. "Whatever happens, I can't risk you," he said in a low, tortured voice.

Hearing the finality in his voice, she knew that there was no convincing him otherwise. He would go, and when he did it would be forever. Desperately she clung to him, inhaling deeply to draw the scent of him into her body, her hands trying to memorize the way it felt to touch him. All she had was this.

He tilted her chin up and bent his head then slanted his mouth over hers, the pressure hard and hungry, even a little angry, because they had so little time when forever wouldn't suffice. She sighed and opened her mouth to his probing tongue, her fingers flexing on his muscular back, and as always there was that strong, immediate response to him that tightened her breasts and sent twinges of pleasure through her loins. He sensed it, cupping her bottom in his rough hands and lifting her into grinding contact with his own throbbing flesh while his mouth continued to take hers.

He wanted to wipe out the pain he'd seen in her eyes; he wanted to savor her, take his time with her, as he'd been unable to do that afternoon. Sabin couldn't remember ever before losing control like that, not even when he'd been a young boy on the prowl, driven by a rapacious sexuality. But with Rachel his responses were so extreme that he'd exploded only moments after entering her; she had reached her peak, too, but he knew that he'd rushed her, hurt her with his too-powerful penetration. She was so tight that accommodating him hadn't been easy for her. He wasn't going to let it be that way again; he was going to take his time with her, until she was truly ready for him and trembling on the brink.

She was trembling in his arms, the salty taste of her tears on his tongue. Silently he led her to the bed, leaving the light on because he wanted to see every nuance of her expression while he made love to her. He paused to push his jeans off, and Rachel watched him, her hands automatically lifting to her nightgown.

Quickly he stayed them. "No, leave your gown on for now." Perhaps it would be easier for him if he couldn't see her stretched out naked and waiting for him. He was caught in his own delicious dilemma, wanting to watch her as he made love to her, as he made her ready to receive him, yet knowing that the sight of her naked body would push him closer to the edge than he wanted to be right now. Just thinking about her was torture enough. His loins were heavy and throbbing, his all-too-accurate memory reminding him just how it had felt to be sheathed inside her.

"Why?" Rachel asked huskily when they were lying on the bed and he was leaning over her with an expression on his face that would have frightened her if she hadn't trusted him completely.

He smoothed his hand over her breasts, the motion deliberately slow as the thin cotton slid across her nipples, bringing them to tingling prominence. "Why the gown?" he clarified. It was hard to talk when her breath kept catching.

"Yes."

"Because I'm inciting myself to riot."

No, it was she who was being incited, tantalized. Everywhere his lightly trailing fingers went they left behind a delicious tingle as her aroused nerve endings pleaded for more. Sometimes he merely brushed her with his fingertips, while at others he stroked her with the flat of his palm, the contact almost hard. And he kissed her: her mouth, her ears, the line of her jaw, the arch of her throat, the exquisitely tender hollow above her collarbones. Finally her breasts knew the warm, moist pressure of his mouth and the probing of his tongue. It was all the more maddening because he didn't remove her gown; even when his mouth closed hotly on her extended nipple and sucked at it with a strength that made her cry out, it was with the thin barrier of cotton between his mouth and her flesh. In frustration she tried to unbutton the two buttons that closed the top of the gown, to give him access to her bareness, but he stopped her and captured her hands, pinning them to the pillow above her head and anchoring them there with his strong right hand.

"Kell!" she protested, writhing to escape, but he was incredibly strong, despite his half-healed wounds, and she couldn't wrest herself free. "You've got a cruel streak in you!"

"No," he murmured against her breast, licking her nippie through the wet fabric. "I only want to make you feel good. Don't you like this?"

There was no way she could deny it; he could easily read the signs of arousal in her body. "Yes," she admitted, panting. "But I want to touch you, too. Let me – "

"Umm, not yet. You make me feel too much like a teenager, ready to go off like a Fourth of July rocket. I'm going to make it good for you this time."

"It was good before," she said, and moaned as his left hand trailed down to the juncture of her thighs, rubbing delicately. Rachel's breath caught, and her hips lifted blindly to his hand.

"I was too rough, too fast. I hurt you."

She couldn't deny it, but the discomfort hadn't been unexpected, and pleasure had swiftly followed. She started to tell him that, but the words were strangled in her throat. The gown had been pushed between her legs by his exploring hand, stretched tightly across her femininity. With one finger he probed the soft cleft, found and stroked her most sensitive flesh. Rachel's body jolted with pleasure, and a low whimper came from her throat.

His touch was firm but tender, with just the right amount of pressure. Slowly her head rolled back and forth on the pillow between the frame of her arms, and her back arched. If he had tantalized her before, this was torture, the sweetest torture imaginable. Hot coils wound inside her, heat spreading throughout her body until she was flushed and damp. Her breasts were so tight that they ached. Kell knew exactly when she couldn't stand it any longer and bent to suck strongly at her nubbed flesh, wringing another soft, wild sound from her throat.

Then his hand was on her bare thigh, under the nightgown, and the relief of feeling skin on skin was so intense that she jerked again.

"Easy," he breathed, and she held herself as still as she could while his warm, hard hand slowly moved upward, stroking her thigh. Her legs were parted already, in aching need, and she strained toward him.

His palm barely brushed her, then moved to her other thigh and stroked until she thought she would go mad. "You just wait!" she both threatened and promised, hissing the words through her tightly clenched teeth.

He laughed aloud, a low, rough sound of masculine triumph. Dimly she realized that it was the first time she'd heard him laugh. "I'm looking forward to it," he said, his voice strained. He was hot and damp, too, his eyes glittering with barely controlled passion, his face taut, with hectic color on his cheekbones and his lips. "Are you ready, love? Let me see." He touched her, and then the light, teasing touches ceased completely. He parted her soft flesh and slid two long fingers into her. Rachel gave a thin, high cry, her hips heaving as she trembled on the verge of ecstasy.

"Not yet," he breathed. "Not yet. Hold on, honey. I'm not going to let you go just yet. Not until I'm inside you."

His low, rough words washed over her shaking, twisting body. Crying a little, tormented by those long, probing fingers as he brought her to moist readiness, she tried again to free her hands, and this time he let them go.

"Now," he crooned, pulling the nightgown up. Rachel lifted herself up to aid in the removal of the frustrating garment, pulling it over her head herself and throwing it across the room. Kell's face tightened even more as he stared down at her naked body, at her flushed, glowing skin. Briefly his eyes closed, and he ground his teeth together as a heavy surge in his loins threatened his self-control.

Carefully he rolled to his back, favoring his shoulder, and guided her astride him. "Slow and easy," he muttered, his eyes glittering like black fire as he positioned himself for her. "Let's go easy, a little at a time."

"I love you," Rachel whispered achingly, closing her eyes at the probing of his flesh against her. She braced her hands on his chest, her fingers flexing in the mat of curly hair, and slid onto him. He made a guttural sound and arched beneath her, his hands clenching on the sheet. "I love you," she said again, and another low animal sound came from him as his control shattered and he grabbed for her hips, grinding her in a rotating motion against him.

"Rachel," he groaned, shaking. His body was taut and straining beneath her.

She moved on him, rising, sliding, falling. Now it was her turn, and she did a primeval dance of passion, slowing whenever it seemed that her motions would take either of them past the point of no return. She was no longer so painfully empty; she was filled with him, an intense satisfaction in itself. Time became elastic, expanded, then disappeared altogether. She forgot everything but Kell, and she gave herself to him in a way she'd never known would be possible. He had become irrevocably hers when she pulled him from the surf, and she was irrevocably his, perhaps by the same power. For as long as she lived, she would be his.

She was crying again, but this time she was oblivious to the tears raining down her face. "I love you," she choked, then abruptly she crested, surging against him while her soft inner quivering made the world explode, then fade away and there were only the two of them, straining together, until he cried out hoarsely and heaved beneath her. Later, as she slept in his arms, he lay awake staring into the night, and though his face was as blank as usual, there was a look of desperation in his eyes.

"Let's drive into town," he said the next morning after breakfast.

She drew a deep breath, her hands stilling for a moment before she resumed washing the last plate. She handed it to him to dry, feeling the dread rising in her chest to choke her. "Why?"

"I need to make a phone call. I'm not going to do it from here."

Her throat was so tight she could scarcely speak. "You're going to call the man you think you can trust?"

"I know I can trust him," Kell replied briefly. "I'm staking my life on it." Even more than that, he was staking Rachel's life. Yes, he trusted Sullivan completely.

"I thought you were going to wait until you had recuperated." When she turned to look at him, her eyes were shadowed with a stark pain that twisted the knife inside him once more.

"I was, until Ellis came around again. It'll take Sullivan a few days to check out some things for me and get things organized. I don't want to push it any longer than that."

"Sullivan? That's the man?"

"Yes."

"But you just got your stitches out yesterday," she protested urgently, lacing her fingers together to keep from wringing her hands. "You're still weak, and you can't–" She bit her lip, halting her own desperate flow of words. Arguing wouldn't change his mind. And how could she tell him he was too weak, when he had made love to her twice during the night and woken her that morning when he slid into her again? She was both stiff and sore, and every step she took reminded her of his strength and endurance. He wasn't at his own personal peak of strength, but even so, he was probably stronger than most men.

She closed her eyes, hating her own weakness for trying to hold on to him when she'd known from the first that she couldn't. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "Of course you can. We'll go now, if you want."

Kell watched her silently; if there was any one moment that revealed the strength of the woman, it was now, and it only made the leaving harder. He didn't want to call Sullivan; he didn't want to hurry the day when this would have to end. He wanted to stretch time to its utmost limits, to spend the hot, lazy days lying on the beach with her, getting to know every minute facet of her personality and making love to her whenever they wanted. And the nights…those long, warm, fragrant nights, spent tangled together on the damp, twisted sheets. Yes, that was what he wanted. Only the sure knowledge that she was in increasing danger could force him to make that call to Sullivan. His instinct told him that time was running out.

He was silent so long that Rachel opened her eyes and found him looking at her with that intent way of his. "What I want," he said deliberately, "is to make love again."

That was all it took, just that look of his and the words, and she felt herself growing warm and moist as her body automatically tightened, but she knew that she wouldn't be able to comfortably accept him. She looked at him with poignant regret. "I don't think I can."

He touched her cheek, his hard, rough fingers stroking the contours of her face with incredible tenderness. "I'm sorry. I should have realized."

She gave him a smile that wasn't as steady as she wished. "Let me change clothes and brush my hair, and we'll leave."

Because she wasn't the type to linger in front of a mirror, they were on their way in five minutes. Sabin was alert, his dark eyes noting every detail of the countryside and examining every car they met. Rachel found herself watching the rearview mirror in case they were being followed.

"I need a phone booth off the main drag. I don't want to be seen by six hundred people on their way to buy groceries." The words were terse, his attention on the traffic.

Obediently she searched out a phone booth next to a service station on the edge of town and parked the car next to it. Kell opened the door, then shut it again without getting out. He turned to her with a smile of real amusement on his lips. "I don't have any money."

His smile relieved the tension inside her, and she chuckled as she reached for her purse. "You could use my credit card number."

"No. If anyone checked it could lead them to Sullivan."

He took the handful of change she gave him and went into the phone booth, closing the door behind him. Rachel watched as he fed coins into the slot, then looked around to see if anyone else was watching him, but the only other person in sight was the man at the service station, and he was sitting in a chair in the front office, leaning back against the wall with the front legs of the chair off the ground while he read a newspaper.

Kell was back in only a few minutes, and Rachel started the car as he slid onto the seat and slammed the door. "That didn't take long," she said.

"Sullivan doesn't waste words."

"He'll come?"

"Yeah." Suddenly he smiled again, that rare, true smile. "His biggest problem is getting out of the house without his wife following him."

The humor, on that particular subject, was unexpected. "She doesn't understand about his job?"

He snorted. "It isn't his job – he's a farmer. And it'll make Jane madder than hell that he didn't take her with him."

"Farmer!"

"He retired from the agency a couple of years ago."

"Was his wife an agent, too?"

"No, thank God," he said with real feeling.

"Don't you like her?"

"It's impossible not to like her. I'm just glad Sullivan has her under control on that farm."

Rachel gave him a dubious glance. "Is he any good? How old is he, anyway?"

"He's my age. He retired himself. The government would have been glad to keep him another twenty years, but he got out."

"And he's good?"

Kell's dark eyebrows lifted. "He's the best agent I ever had. We trained together in Nam."

That reassured her; even more than her dread at his leaving, she feared the danger he would have to face. Not a hint of it would ever surface in any newspaper, but there would be a small war in the nation's capital. Kell wouldn't rest until his section was clean again, even at the cost of his own life. The knowledge ate at her. If she could, if he would let her, she would go with him and do whatever she could to protect him.

"Stop at a drugstore," he instructed, swiveling in his seat to check behind them.

"What do you want at a drugstore?" She looked at him again and found him watching her with faint amusement.

"Birth control. Or haven't you realized what a chance we've been taking?"

"Yes, I'd realized," she admitted in a low voice.

"You weren't going to say anything or do anything about it?"

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel until the knuckles were white, and she concentrated on the traffic. "No."

Just that one, calmly uttered word had the power to jerk his head up, and she felt his gaze burning on her. "I don't want to get you pregnant. I can't stay, Rachel. You'd be alone, with a baby to raise."

She braked for a red light and turned her head to meet his gaze. "It would be worth it, to have your baby."

His jaw tightened, and he swore under his breath. Damn, he was hard again just at the thought of getting her pregnant, of her bearing his child and nursing it at her pretty breasts. He wanted to. He wanted to take her with him and go home to her every night, but he couldn't turn his back on his job and his country. Security was critical, now more than ever, and his services were invaluable. It was something he had to do; endangering Rachel was something he couldn't do.

Her gray eyes were dark with mingled love and pain. "I won't make it easy for you to leave me," she whispered. "I won't hide what I feel and wave you off with a smile."

His profile was hard and unreadable as he turned back to watch the road; he didn't answer, and when the light changed to green again she drove carefully to the nearest drugstore. Without speaking, she took a twenty from her purse and handed it to him.

His hand clenched on the crisp bill, and he looked like murder. "It's either this or abstinence."

She drew a deep breath. "Then I suppose you'd better go in, hadn't you?"

No, she wasn't making it any easier; she was making it so difficult that it was tearing him apart. Damn it, he'd give her a baby every year if things were different, he thought savagely as he went into the drugstore and made his purchase. Maybe he was too late; maybe she was already pregnant. Only the naive or the careless could discount the possibility.

He left the cash register and had started for the door, when Rachel came through it, her face strained, her eyes wide and urgent. Without hesitation he turned and walked several aisles over to intently examine a high stack of insulated beverage coolers. Rachel walked past, to the cosmetic department. Sabin waited, and a moment later the door opened again. He caught a glimpse of sandy hair and ducked his own head down, automatically reaching behind his back for the pistol, but his waistband was empty. The pistol was in the car. His eyes narrowed, and a cold, deadly look settled over his features; moving silently, he began trailing Ellis.

Rachel had seen the blue Ford driving down the street and had known immediately that it was Ellis; her only thought had been to warn Kell before he walked out of the drugstore and let Ellis see him. If Ellis had been following them it was already too late, but she was fairly certain that wasn't the case. This was just an unhappy coincidence; it had to be. She had pretended not to see him, getting out of the car and walking into the drugstore as if she'd just driven up herself. She had heard a car door close behind her just as she went inside, and she knew Ellis would be there in a few seconds. Kell had taken one look at her face and detoured; now all she had to do was get rid of Ellis, even if she had to get back in the car and drive away without Kell. She could circle back to pick him up.

"I thought it was you. Didn't you hear me call?" Ellis asked behind her as she surveyed the array of lipsticks.

She jerked around, pretending that he'd startled her. "Tod! You scared me!" she gasped, holding a hand to her chest.

"Sorry. I thought you knew I was behind you."

He seemed to be thinking a lot this morning; she hoped it didn't strain him too much. She gave him an abstracted smile. "I've got so much on my mind I'm just walking around in a daze. I'm trying to get everything together for my trip, but I left my shopping list at home, and it's driving me crazy trying to remember everything."

He looked at the display, his easy grin flashing. "I guess lipstick is essential."

"No, but lip balm is, and I thought it would be here." Condescending mongrel! She wondered how he'd look if she told him to shove off. The problem with someone with an enormous ego was that any slight sent them around the bend, hell-bent on revenge. Still, she couldn't keep the tartness out of her voice, and he looked at her in surprise.

"Is something wrong?"

"I've got a vicious headache," she muttered. She caught sight of Kell, moving just behind Ellis; his face was set, his eyes narrowed and cold, and he moved like a stalking panther. What was he doing? He was supposed to stay out of sight until she got rid of Ellis, not attack the man! All the color drained from her face as Ellis peered at her.

"You do look sick," he finally admitted.

"I think it was too much wine last night." She turned on her heel and marched down the aisle, away from Kell. Damn the man! If he wanted to jump Ellis, he'd have to chase him down to do it! She didn't stop until she got to the insect repellent section; she grabbed a bottle and scowled as she read the directions on the back.

Ellis was still right behind her. "Do you think you'd feel like going out tonight?"

Rachel ground her teeth in frustration. She couldn't believe he was that thick-skinned. It was an effort to take a deep breath and answer calmly. "I don't think so, Tod, but thanks for asking. I really feel rotten."

"Sure, I understand. I'll call you in a day or so."

From somewhere she dredged up enough control for a wan smile. "Yes, do that. Maybe I'll feel better then, unless this is some sort of virus."

Like most people, he backed off a little at the mention of anything contagious. "I'll let you get back to your shopping, but you really should go home and take it easy."

"That's good advice. I just might do that." Would he never leave?

But still he lingered, chatting, being so obviously charming that she wanted to gag. Then she saw Kell again, silently working his way around behind Ellis, his eyes never wavering from his prey. Desperately she grabbed her stomach and said clearly, "I think I may throw up."

It was really amazing how fast Ellis retreated, looking at her warily. "You'd better go home," he said. "I'll call you later." The last words were said as he went out the door. She waited until he got in the Ford and drove off before she turned to look at Kell as he walked up to her.

"Stay in here," she said curtly. "I'll drive around the block to make certain he's gone."

She walked off before he could say anything. She was seething, and driving around the block would give her time to cool down. It made her furious that he would take that sort of risk right now, when he wasn't a hundred percent physically fit. When she was in the car she leaned her head on the steering wheel for a moment, shaking. What if Ellis had seen Kell go into the drugstore and had just been playing it cool, making sure it was Kell so he could report back to his superiors? She didn't think so, unless Ellis was much more cunning than she'd given him credit for, but even the possibility was horrifying.

Shaking, she started the car and circled the block, looking up and down all the streets for a blue Ford parked anywhere. She didn't just have to look for Ellis; she had to look for Lowell, too, and she had no idea what he might be driving. And how many other men were in this area now?

Returning to the drugstore, she pulled up close to the door and Kell came out, sliding into the car beside her. "See anyone?"

"No, but I don't know what kind of cars the others might have." She pulled into traffic, heading in the opposite direction from the one Ellis had taken. That wasn't where she wanted to go, but she could always cut back.

"He didn't see me," Kell said quietly, hoping to ease some of the tension evident in her face.

"How do you know? He could have decided to report you and wait for backup, catch you out later rather than trying something in the middle of a crowded drugstore."

"Relax, honey. He's not that smart. He'd try to take me himself."

"If he's so stupid, why did you hire him?" Rachel shot back.

He looked thoughtful. "I didn't. Someone else 'acquired' him."

Rachel glanced at him. "One of the two men who knew where you were?"

"That's right," he said grimly.

"That narrows it down for you, doesn't it?"

"I wish it did, but I can't afford to take that for granted. Until I know for certain, both of them are suspects."

It made sense; if he had to err, it would be on the side of caution. He couldn't afford even one mistake.

"Why were you trailing him like that? Why didn't you just stay out of sight until I'd gotten rid of him?" she demanded, her knuckles showing white again.

"If he had seen me, it could have been his plan to grab you for bait, to draw me out. I wasn't going to let that happen." The quiet, calm way he said it made Rachel shiver, as if the air had suddenly turned cold.

"But you aren't up to something like that yet! Your leg could give out on you, and your shoulder is so stiff you can barely move it. What if you'd torn everything open again?"

"It didn't happen. Anyway, I didn't anticipate a fight, just one good crack at him."

His male arrogance made her want to scream; instead she ground her teeth together. "It didn't occur to you that something could have gone wrong?"

"Sure, but if he'd grabbed you, I wouldn't have had any choice, so I wanted to be in position."

And he was willing to do whatever was necessary, despite his stiff shoulder and lame leg. He was one of a rare breed, able to see the cost and still be willing to pay it, though he would do everything he could to tip the scales the other way.

She was still pale, her eyes shadowed, and he reached over to slide his hand down her thigh. "It's all right," he said gently. "Nothing happened."

"But it could have. Your shoulder – "

"Forget my damned shoulder, and my leg. I know how far I can push them, and I don't go into anything unless I think I can win."

She was silent for the remainder of the drive, until she parked the car under the tree. "I think I'll go for a swim," she said tightly. "Want to come along?"

"Yes."

Joe came up to her car door as always, his dark eyes trained on her even though he remained just out of touching distance, and he walked beside her as she went up the steps to the porch. He accepted Kell, but if the two of them were outside he was never far from Rachel. He was one warrior who was content to stay, she thought wistfully, then resolutely pushed away the creeping self-pity. Life would go on, even if it was without Kell. It hurt to think about it, and she didn't want to, but she knew that she would survive somehow, though her life had been irrevocably changed by the time she had spent with him, quiet days punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

She changed into her sleek black bathing suit and Kell put on his denim shorts, and after grabbing a couple of towels, they walked through the pines down to the beach. Joe followed them and lay down in the scant shade of a clump of sea oats. Rachel dropped the towels on the sand and pointed out to the bay, where the water was rising and breaking over the submerged rocks. "See the line where the water breaks? That's where the rocks are. I'm pretty sure you hit your head on one of them that night. The tide was just starting to come in, so the water was low." She pointed again. "I dragged you out here."

Kell looked at the beach, then turned and stared up the slope, where the pines were standing tall and straight, a thicket of wooden sentinels. She had somehow dragged him up that slope and gotten him into the house, a feat that he couldn't imagine when he looked at her slender body. "You damn near killed yourself getting me up there, didn't you?" he asked quietly.

She didn't want to think about that night, or what it had cost her physically. Part of it had already been blocked from her brain; she remembered that she'd been in pain, but the exact nature of the pain escaped her. Perhaps adrenaline was responsible for both her strength that night and the selective amnesia that followed. She looked at him for a long moment, then turned and walked into the sea. He watched until the water reached her knees, then pulled the pistol out of his waistband and carefully laid it on a towel, covering it with the other to keep the blowing sand out of it. Then he dropped his shorts and walked naked into the water after her. Rachel was a strong swimmer, having spent most of her life living on the Gulf, but Kell stayed even with her despite his stiff shoulder. At first, when she realized he was in the water, she had started to protest that he shouldn't get his wounds wet, but she swallowed the words. After all, he had swum with open wounds, and the exercise would be good therapy. They swam in the bay for half an hour before he decided that he'd had enough, and Rachel returned to the beach with him. It wasn't until the water reached his waist that she realized he was nude, and the familiar quiver shook her insides as she watched him wade out of the water. He was so lean and hard and perfect, darkly tanned and roped with muscle, even his tight buttocks. She watched as he moved the pistol and lay down on one of the towels, his glistening body offered to the sun.

She left the water, too, bending over to wring out her hair. When she straightened again she found him watching her. "Take off the bathing suit," he said softly.

She looked out to sea, but there were no boats in sight. Then she looked at him again, lying there like a bronzed, naked statue, except that she'd never seen a statue in a state of arousal. Slowly she reached up for the straps on her shoulders and drew them down, and immediately she felt the heat of the hot sun kissing her wet breasts. A slight breeze suddenly kicked up, whispering across her nipples and making them pucker. Sabin's breath caught in his chest, and he held his hand out to her. "Come here."

She pushed the bathing suit down and off, then walked to the towels. He sat up and reached for her, drawing her down beside him and stretching her out. Amusement was twinkling in his dark eyes as he looked down at her. "Guess what I forgot to bring."

She began to laugh, the sound pure and deep in this world where only the two of them existed.

"Ah, well, you're too sore for that, anyway," he murmured sliding his hand over her breasts and bringing her nipples to tingling awareness. "I'll just have to…  improvise "

He leaned over her, his shoulders so broad that they blocked out the sun, and his mouth burned on hers, then down on her body.

He was very good with improvisations. He lingered over her as if she were a willing, sun-kissed sacrifice offered up for his delectation, until her body finally arched to his rapacious mouth and she cried out in intolerable pleasure, her cry rising to the white inferno of the sun.

Chapter Eleven

Rachel didn't let herself think about time, though she knew they had only a few more days at the most, however long it took this Sullivan to make his arrangements and travel down to meet Kell. She lived completely in the present, reveling in his company whatever they were doing. He began helping her gather the vegetables from the garden, and he worked some with Joe, gaining more of the dog's trust and showing Rachel how highly trained Joe was. After the first swim they also spent a lot of time down at the bay; they swam every morning and again in the afternoon, after the worst of the heat was over. It was marvelous therapy, and every day he got stronger, his shoulder more flexible and his limp improving. He also did other exercises, continually working to bring his body back up to par, and she could only watch in amazement. She was athletic and strong herself, but her endurance was nothing compared to his. He was often in pain; she sensed it, even though he never said anything, but he ignored it as if it weren't there. Ten days after she'd found him he was gingerly jogging around the house, his thigh tightly wrapped to brace the injured muscle. After a moment of anger Rachel joined him and jogged along beside him, ready to catch him if his leg gave out and he fell. It wouldn't have done any good to yell at him, because it was important for him to be able to meet whatever demands might be placed on him when he left.

And whatever they did, they talked. He was reticent about himself, both naturally and as a result of his training, but he did have a lot of fascinating inside details about the political and economic considerations of governments around the world. He probably also knew more than anyone would want him to know about military forces and capabilities, but he didn't talk about those. Rachel learned as much about him from his omissions as she did from the subjects he would talk about.

No matter what they did, whether weeding the garden, jogging around the house, cooking a meal or arguing politics, desire ran between them like an invisible current, linking them together in a state of heightened awareness. Her senses were filled with him; she knew his taste, his smell, his touch, every nuance of his deep voice. Because he was normally so expressionless she watched him closely for each small movement of his brows or twitch of his lips. Even though he was relaxed with her and smiled more often, sometimes teasing her, his laughter was rare, and therefore doubly treasured, the occasions pressed into her memory. Their desire couldn't be quenched by lovemaking, because it was more than a physical need. She immersed herself in him, knowing that she had only the present.

Still, physical desire couldn't be denied. Rachel had never been so thoroughly enjoyed before, even in the early days of marriage. Kell had a strong sexual appetite, and the more he made love to her, the more they both wanted it again. He was exquisitely careful with her until she became more accustomed to him, his lovemaking both sophisticated and earthy. There were times when they lingered, savoring each sensation like sexual gourmets until the tension was so strong that they exploded together. There were also the times when their loving was fast and hard, when there was no foreplay because their need to be together was too urgent.

The third day after he'd called Sullivan, Kell made love to her with barely controlled violence, and she knew that he was thinking this might be the last day they had together. She clung to him, her arms tight around his neck when he lay on her in heavy, damp exhaustion. A lump lodged in her throat, and she squeezed her eyes tightly shut in an effort to deny the march of time. She couldn't bear to let him go.

"Take rne with you," she said thickly, unable to let it lie, to simply let him walk away from her. Rachel was too much of a fighter to let him go without trying to change his mind.

He stiffened, then withdrew from her to lie on his back beside her, his forearm thrown up to cover his eyes. The ceiling fan whirred overhead, wafting a cool breeze across their overheated skin and making her feel a little chilled without the heat of his body pressed over her. She opened her eyes to stare at him, her gaze burning with desperation.

"No," he finally said, and left it at that, the single word filled with a finality that almost broke her heart.

"Something could be worked out," she pressed. "At worst we could see each other occasionally. I'm mobile. I can work anywhere–"

"Rachel," he interrupted tiredly. "No. Leave it." He took his forearm down from his eyes and looked at her. Though his expression changed very little, she could tell that he was annoyed by her persistence.

She was too desperate to stop. "How can I leave it? I love you! This isn't a game I'm playing, that I can just pick up my marbles and go home when I get tired of it!"

"Damn it, I'm not playing games, either!" he roared, bolting upright in the bed and seizing her arm to shake her, finally goaded past his limits. His eyes were hot and narrowed, his teeth clenched. "You could be killed because of me! Didn't it teach you anything when your husband died?"

She went pale, staring at him. "I could be killed driving into town," she finally said shakily. "Would that make me any less dead? Would you grieve any less?" Suddenly she stopped, wrenching her arm free and rubbing it where his fingers had bitten into her flesh. She was so white that her eyes burned darkly in her colorless face. Finally she said with an attempt at lightness, "Or would you grieve at all? I'm being rather presumptuous, aren't I? Maybe I'm the only one involved here. If so, just forget everything I've said."

Silence stretched between them as they faced each other on the bed; her face was strained, his grim. He wasn't going to say anything. Rachel inhaled sharply at the pain squeezing her insides. Well, she'd asked for it. She'd pushed him, fighting to change his mind, to get a commitment from him, and she had lost… everything. She had thought that he cared for her, loved her, even though he'd never said anything about love. She had put it down to his natural reticence. Now she had to face the unpleasant truth that it was his brutal honesty that had kept him from saying he loved her. He wouldn't spout pretty words that he didn't mean just to soothe her feelings. He liked her. She was a reasonably attractive woman, and she was convenient; he was highly sexed. The reason for his attentions was obvious, and she'd made a complete fool of herself.

The worst of it was that even facing the hard, unpalatable reality didn't stop her from loving him. That was another reality, and she couldn't wish it away.

"Sorry," she mumbled, scrambling off the bed and reaching for her clothes, suddenly embarrassed by her nudity. It was different now.

Sabin watched her, every muscle coiled tightly. The look on her face ate at him, the abrupt embarrassment, the sudden extinguishing of the light in her eyes as she fumbled with her clothing in an attempt to cover herself. He could let her go. She might get over him more easily if she thought he had just used her sexually, without returning any of her emotion. Emotion made Sabin uneasy; he wasn't accustomed to it. But damned if he could stand that look on her face! Maybe he couldn't give her much, but he couldn't leave with her thinking she'd been nothing more than a sexual convenience.

Rachel was out of the room before he could catch her, and then he heard the screen door slam. Going to the door, he saw her disappearing into the pines with Joe right beside her, as usual. He cursed steadily as he jerked on his pants and started after her. She wasn't going to be inclined to listen to him now, but listen she would even if he had to hold her down.

When Rachel reached the beach she kept walking, wondering how she was going to find the courage to go back to the house and act as if everything were normal, as if she weren't a shriveled knot of pain inside. Still, it was probably only for one more day; she could manage that. She could endure it for twenty-four hours. Part of her was glad that it could be measured in hours; then she could forget about a stiff upper lip and cry until the tears were all gone. But the rest of her screamed silently at the thought of not seeing him again, no matter what he felt – or didn't feel – for her.

A pastel pink shell was half-hidden by a clump of seaweed, and she paused to push the seaweed aside with her foot, hoping to find something beautiful to lighten her heart.

But the shell was broken, most of it gone, and she kept walking. Joe left her side, trotting up the beach to do his own exploring; he had been changed by Kell's arrival, too, for the first time allowing a man to touch him and learning to accept someone other than Rachel. She watched the dog, wondering if he would miss Kell, too.

A warm hand closed on her shoulder, bringing her to a halt. Even without looking around she knew it was Kell; she knew his touch, the rasp of his roughened fingertips. She felt him at her back, tall and warm, so intense that her skin tingled whenever he was near. All she had to do was turn around and her head would fit right into the hollow of his shoulder, her body would fit into his arms, but he wouldn't allow her to fit into his life. She didn't want to treat him to tears and hysterics, and she was very much afraid she would if she turned around, so she kept her back to him.

"This isn't easy for me, either," he said roughly.

"I'm sorry," she broke in, wanting to make a quick end to it. "I didn't mean to start a scene, or put you on the spot. Just forget it, if you can."

His hand tightened on her shoulder, and he turned her around, sliding his other hand into her hair and tilting her face up so he could see her eyes. "Don't you see that it couldn't work between us? I can't leave my job. What I do… it's hard and it's ugly, but it's necessary."

"I haven't asked you to give up your job," she said, her face proud.

"It's not the damn job I'm worried about!" he shouted, his dark face furious. "It's you! God, it would tear my guts out if anything happened to you! I love you." He paused, took a deep breath, and continued more quietly. "I've never said that to anyone before, and I shouldn't be saying it now, because there's no use in it."

The wind whipped her hair around her face as she stared up at him, her gray eyes fathomless. Slowly his fist loosened in her hair and he moved his hand down to her neck, rubbing his thumb over the fluttering pulse at the base of her throat. Rachel swallowed. "We could try it for a little while," she whispered, but he shook his head.

"I want to know that you're safe. I have to know that, or I can't function the way I should. I can't make a mistake, because if I did it could mean that people died, good men and women. And if you were kidnapped–" He stopped, his face almost savage. "I'd sell my soul to keep you safe."

Rachel felt herself shattering on the inside. "No, it can't be like that. No negotiation–"

"I love you," he said harshly. "I've never loved anyone before in my life, not my parents, any of my relatives, or even my wife. I've always been alone, different from everyone else. The only friend I've ever had is Sullivan, and he's as much of a lobo as I am. Do you really think I could sacrifice you? Sweet hell, woman, you're my one chance in a lifetime–" He broke off, a muscle in his jaw twitching as he stared at her. "And I don't dare take it," he finished quietly.

She understood, and she wished she didn't. Because he loved her, he didn't trust himself not to betray his country if she were kidnapped and used as a weapon against him. He wasn't like people who had loved before and would love again; he was too remote, too chillingly alone. For whatever reason, whatever particular chemistry and circumstance, he loved her, and it was the only time in his life he would ever love a woman. Living with him would make her vulnerable to attack; merely loving her would make him vulnerable, because for a man such as he, love was something both wonderful and terrible.

He took her hand, and they walked silently back to the house. It was time for lunch; Rachel went into the kitchen with the intention of trying to busy herself cooking so she wouldn't be able to think. Kell leaned against the cabinets and watched her, his black eyes burning her flesh. Suddenly he reached out and caught her hand, removing the pot from her grasp and setting it back on the countertop. "Now," he said gutturally, pulling her toward the bedroom.

He stripped down her shorts but didn't take the time to remove her shirt; nor did he take the time to shed his pants, merely opening them and shoving them down. They didn't make it to the bed. He took her on the floor, so desperate to be inside her, to sheathe himself in her and eliminate all distance between them, that he couldn't wait. Rachel clung to him as he pounded into her, every inch of her flesh, every cell, branded by his possession. And even then they both knew it wouldn't be enough.

Late that afternoon she walked out to the garden to gather a few fresh peppers to add to the spaghetti sauce she was cooking. Kell was taking a shower, and Joe, oddly, was nowhere in sight. She started to call him, but decided that he must be asleep under the oleander bush, taking refuge from the heat. The temperature had to be pushing a hundred, and the humidity was high, prime conditions for a thunderstorm. With her hand full of peppers she crossed the small backyard to the house. Later she could never decide where he came from; there had been no one in sight, and no place for him to hide. But as she went up the back steps he was suddenly there behind her, his hand clamping over her mouth and jerking her head back. His other arm went around her in almost exactly the same movement Kell had used when he had jumped her from behind, but instead of a knife this man carried a gun clutched in his fist; it glinted in the sun with a dull blue sheen.

"Don't make a sound and I won't hurt you," the man murmured in her ear, his voice easy on consonants and pure liquid on the vowels. "I'm looking for a man. He's supposed to be in this house."

She clawed at his hand, trying to scream a warning even though Kell might still be in the shower and wouldn't be able to hear her. But what if Kell did hear her? He could be shot trying to help her. The thought paralyzed her, and she sagged against the man, struggling to organize her mind and think of something she could do. "Shhh, that's right," the man said in that low, soft voice that made chills run over her body. "Open the door now, and we'll go in nice and easy."

She didn't have any choice but to open the screen door. If he had wanted to kill her he already would have, but he could still easily knock her unconscious, and the end result would be the same: she would be unable to help Kell if the opportunity arose. The man pushed her up the back steps with his big body, holding her so securely against him that she couldn't struggle. She stared at the gun in his hand. If he tried to shoot Kell, she could hit his arm, throw off his aim. Where was Kell? She tried to listen for the shower, but her thundering heartbeat made a roaring in her ears that blotted out sound. Was he dressing? Had he heard the back door close? Even if he had, would he think anything of it? They relied on Joe to let them know if anyone was close by. Hard on the heels of that thought came another one, and pain welled in her again. Had he killed Joe? Was that why the dog hadn't come around the house when she went out to the garden?

Then Kell walked out of the bedroom, wearing only his jeans and carrying his shirt in his hand. He stopped, his face very still as he looked first at the man holding her, then at her terrified eyes above the hand clamped over her mouth. "You're scaring her to death," he said in a cool, controlled tone.

The hand over her mouth loosened, but the man didn't completely release her. "Is she yours?"

"She's mine."

Then the big man let her go, gently setting her away from him. "You didn't tell me anything about a woman, so I wasn't taking any chances," he said to Kell, and Rachel realized who he was.

She held herself very still, fighting for control and taking slow, deep breaths until she thought she could speak without her voice trembling. "You must be Sullivan," she said with admirable calm as she gradually relaxed her clenched hands.

"Yes, ma'am."

She didn't know what she'd expected, but it wasn't this. He and Kell were so much alike that it staggered her. It wasn't the way he looked, but they both had the same stillness about them, the same aura of power. He had sun-streaked, shaggy hair, and his eyes were as piercing and golden as an eagle's. A scar cut across his left cheekbone, testimony to some past battle. He was a warrior, lean and hard and dangerous… like Kell.

While she had been looking at him, he'd been giving her the same treatment, studying her while she struggled for control. One corner of his mouth kicked up in an almost-smile. "Sorry for scaring you, ma'am. I admire your self-control. Jane would've kicked me in the shins."

"She probably did," Kell commented, his tone still cool, but now with an undercurrent of amusement.

Sullivan's dark brows snapped down over his golden eyes. "No," he said dryly. "That wasn't where she kicked me."

That sounded like a fascinating story, but though Kell still looked amused, he didn't pursue it. "This is Rachel Jones," he said, holding out his hand to her in a quiet command. "She dragged me out of the ocean."

"Glad to meet you." Sullivan's drawl was soft and raspy as he watched Rachel immediately go to Kell in response to his outstretched hand.

"I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Sullivan… I think."

Kell gave her a brief, comforting touch, then began pulling on his shirt; it was an action that still caused him some difficulty, as his shoulder was stiff and sore. Sullivan looked at the tender, red, newly formed scar tissue where the bullet had torn into Rell's shoulder. "How much damage?"

"I've lost some flexibility, but there's still some swelling. Part of it may return as the swelling goes down."

"Did you get it anywhere else?"

"Left thigh."

"Will it hold up?"

"It'll have to. I've been jogging, loosening it up."

Sullivan grunted. Rachel sensed the man's reluctance to talk freely in front of her, the same ingrained caution that characterized Kell. "Are you hungry, Mr. Sullivan? We're having spaghetti."

That wild-animal gaze turned on her. "Yes, ma'am. Thank you." The soft slurring of his drawl and the grave courtesy of his manners made such a contrast to the fierceness of his eyes that she felt off-balance. Why hadn't Kell warned her?

"I'll finish while you two talk, then. I must have dropped the peppers when you grabbed me," she said. She started toward the door, then turned back, distress in her eyes. "Mr. Sullivan?"

He and Kell were walking into the living room, and Sullivan stopped, looking back at her. "Ma'am?"

"My dog," she said, a faint trembling in her voice. "He's always there when I go outside. Why didn't he – "

Understanding was in those wild golden eyes. "He's all right. I've got him tied up in that pine thicket. Had a helluva time outsmarting him. That's a nice animal."

Relief made her weak. "I'll go untie him, then. You didn't…hurt him in any way?"

"No, ma'am. He's about a hundred yards down, just to the left of that little trail."

She ran down the trail, her heart thudding; Joe was right where Sullivan had said he would be, tied securely to a tall pine, and the dog was furious. He even snarled at Rachel, but she talked softly to him and approached him at a slow, measured pace, calming him before she knelt beside him to untie the rope around his neck. Even then she kept talking, giving him small, quick pats, and the snarls diminished in his throat. Finally he accepted a hug from her, and for the first time gave her a welcoming lick. A lump rose in her throat. "Come on, let's go home," she said, getting to her feet.

She collected the peppers from where she had dropped them on the back steps and left Joe prowling around the house. She washed her hands and began preparing the sauce, listening to the quiet rumble of the men's voices from the living room. Now that she had met Sullivan she understood Kell's confidence in him. He was… incredible. And Kell was even more so. Seeing them together made her realize anew the caliber of the man she loved, and she reeled under the shock of that realization.

It was almost an hour before she called them to the table, and the sun was a fierce red ball low on the horizon, a reminder that now her time with Kell was truly running out. Or was it already gone? Would they be leaving soon?

Deliberately, to get her mind off her fears, she kept the conversation going. It was remarkably difficult, with both men being the way they were, until finally she hit on the right subject. "Kell told me that you're married, Mr. Sullivan."

He nodded, a curious lightening of his expression making him seem less formidable. "Jane is my wife." He said it as if everyone knew Jane.

"Do you have any children?"

There was no mistaking the look of intense pride that came over the hard, scarred face. "Twin sons. They're six months old."

For some reason Kell was looking amused again. "I didn't know twins ran in your family, Grant."

"They don't," Sullivan growled. "Or in Jane's, either. Even the damn doctor didn't know. She took everybody by surprise."

"That's not unusual," Kell said, and they looked at each other, grinning.

"The hell of it is, she went into labor two weeks early, in the middle of a snowstorm. All the roads were closed, and I couldn't get her to a hospital. I had to deliver them." For a moment there was a look of desperation in his eyes, and a faint sheen of perspiration broke out on his forehead. "Twins," he said faintly. "Damn. I told her not to ever do that to me again, but you know Jane."

Kell laughed out loud, his rare deep laugh making pleasure shimmer through Rachel. "Next time she'll probably have triplets."

Sullivan glared at him. "Don't even think it," he muttered.

Rachel lifted a forkful of spaghetti to her mouth. "I don't think it's Jane's fault that she had twins, or that it snowed."

"Logically, no," Sullivan admitted. "But logic flies out the window when Jane walks in the door."

"How did you meet her?"

"I kidnapped her," he said offhandedly, leaving Rachel gasping, because he offered no other explanation.

"How did you get away from her?" Kell asked, provoking another glare.

"It wasn't easy, but she couldn't leave the kids." Sullivan leaned back in his chair, an unholy light entering his eyes. "You're going to have to go back with me to explain."

Kell looked alarmed, then resigned; finally he grinned. "All right. I want to see you with these babies."

"They're already crawling. You have to watch where you step," the proud father said, grinning in return. "Their names are Dane and Daniel, but beats the hell out of me which one is which. Jane said we can let them decide when they get older."

That was it. The three of them looked at one another, and Rachel gulped helplessly. Kell made a rough choking sound. In a perfectly choreographed move three forks were laid down on the table and three people held their heads and laughed until they hurt.

Charles read the hastily gathered intelligence report on Rachel, frowning as he rubbed his forehead with one thin finger. According to both Agents Lowell and Ellis, Rachel Jones was a good-looking but otherwise ordinary woman, even though Ellis was enamored of her. Ellis was enamored of women in general, so that wasn't unusual. The problem was that the report painted her as anything but ordinary. She was a well educated, well traveled, multitalented woman, but again the problem went even deeper than that. She had been an investigative reporter of extraordinary talent, nerve and perseverance, which meant that she was more knowledgeable than the ordinary person about things that were usually kept from public knowledge. According to her record she had been very successful in her field. Her husband had been murdered by a car bomb meant for her when she began investigating a powerful politician's connection with illegal drugs; rather than backing down, as many people would have done, this Rachel Jones had kept after the politician and not only proved that he was involved with drug smuggling and dealing, she had proved that he was behind her husband's death. The politician was now serving a life sentence in prison.

This wasn't the rather unsophisticated woman Lowell and Ellis had described. What particularly troubled Charles was why she had projected such an image; she had to have a reason, but what was it? Why had she wanted to deceive them? For amusement, or had there been a more serious motivation?

Charles wasn't surprised that she had lied; in his experience most people lied. In his profession it was necessary to lie. What he didn't like was not knowing why, because the why of something was the heart of it.

Sabin had disappeared, possibly dead, though Charles couldn't convince himself of that. No trace of him had been found, not by Charles's men, a fishing trawler, a pleasure boater, or any law enforcement agency. Even though Sabin's boat had exploded there should have been some identifiably human remains – if Sabin had been on the boat. The only explanation was that he had gone overboard and swum for shore. It almost defied belief to think that he could actually have made it in his wounded condition, but this was Sabin, not some ordinary man. He had made it to shore, but where? Why hadn't he surfaced yet? No one had found a wounded man; no unaccounted for gunshot wounds had been reported to the police; he hadn't been admitted to any of the hospitals in the area. He had simply disappeared into thin air.

So, on the one hand he had Sabin, who had vanished. The only possibility was that someone was hiding him, but there were no clues. On the other hand, there was this Rachel Jones, who, like Sabin, was not ordinary. Her house was in the prime search area, the area where Sabin would have most likely made it to shore. Neither Lowell nor Ellis thought she had anything to hide, but they didn't know everything about her. She had projected a false image; she was more familiar than could have been suspected with undercover agents and tactics. But what reason could she have for acting like less than what she was… unless she had something to hide? More to the point, did she have someone to hide?

"Noelle," he said softly. "I want to talk to Lowell and Ellis. Immediately. Find them."

An hour later both men were sitting across from him. Charles folded his hands and smiled absently at them. "Gentlemen, I want to discuss this Rachel Jones. I want to know everything you can remember about her."

Ellis and Lowell exchanged looks; then Ellis shrugged. "She's a good-looking woman–"

"No, I am not interested in her looks. I want to know what she has said and done. When you searched the beach in her area and went up to her house, did you go inside?"

"No," Lowell replied.

"Why not?"

"She's got this damned big guard dog who hates men. He won't let a man in the yard," Ellis explained.

"Even when you took her out to dinner?"

Ellis looked discomfited, as if he disliked admitting that a dog had scared him off. "She came out to the car. When I took her home the dog was there waiting, ready to take my leg off if I moved in the wrong direction."

"So no one has been inside her house."

"No," they both admitted.

"She denied any knowledge of seeing a man, a stranger?"

"There's no way Sabin could have gotten anywhere near that house without the dog having him for breakfast," Ellis said impatiently, and Lowell nodded in agreement.

Charles tapped his fingertips together. "Even if she took him into the house herself? What if she found him? She could have tied the dog up, then gone back for Sabin. Isn't this possible?"

"Sure, it's possible," Lowell said, frowning. "But we didn't find any sign of Sabin making it to shore, not even a footprint. The only thing we noticed was where she dragged shells up from the beach on a tarp–" He stopped, his eyes meeting Charles's.

"You fools!" Charles hissed. "Something had been dragged up from the beach and you didn't check it out?"

They looked uncomfortable. "She said it was shells," Ellis muttered. "I noticed that she did have some shells on the windowsills."

"She didn't act like she had anything to hide," Lowell put in, trying to gloss things over. "I ran into her the next day while she was shopping. She stopped to talk, about the heat and things like that…"

"What did she buy? Did you look in her cart?"

"Ah, underwear and, uh, women's things. When she checked out I saw a pair of jogging shoes. I noticed them because–" Suddenly he went a sickly shade.

"Because?" Charles prompted dryly.

"Because they looked too big for her."

Charles glared at them, his eyes cold and deadly. "So. She dragged something up from the beach, something you didn't investigate. Neither of you has been inside the house. She was buying shoes that were too big for her, possibly men's shoes. If Sabin has been under our noses all this time and he's escaped due to your bungling, I personally promise you that your future won't be pleasant! Noelle!" he called.

She appeared immediately in the door. "Yes, Charles?"

"Call everyone in. We may have found Sabin."

Both Lowell and Ellis looked sick, and both fervently hoped that this time they didn't find Sabin.

"What if you're wrong?" Ellis asked.

"Then the woman may be frightened and upset, but nothing more. If she doesn't know anything, if she hasn't helped Sabin, then we have no reason to harm her."

But Charles smiled when he said it, his eyes cold, and Ellis couldn't believe him.

The sun had set, and twilight had brought out a loud chorus of frogs and crickets. Ebenezer Duck and his flock waddled around the yard, reaping the late afternoon harvest of insects, and Joe lay on the porch. Kell and Sullivan were now at the table, drawing diagrams and discussing plans; Rachel tried to work on the manuscript, but her mind kept wandering. Kell would be leaving soon, and dull misery throbbed inside her.

The flock of geese suddenly scattered, honking wildly, and Joe gave a single bark before he lunged off the porch. Kell and Sullivan acted as one, ducking away from the table and running soundlessly, on the balls of their feet, to the living room windows. Rachel bolted out of her office, her face pale, though she tried to be calm.

"It's probably just Honey," she said, going to the front door.

"Honey?" Sullivan asked.

"The veterinarian."

A white sedan pulled up in front, and a woman got out. Sullivan peered out the window and all the color washed out of his face. Resting his head on the wall, he swore quietly and at length. "It's Jane," he groaned.

"Hell," Kell muttered.

Rachel opened the door to dart out and catch Joe, who was planted in the middle of the yard. But before Rachel could get out the door, Jane had walked around the car and into the yard. "Nice doggie," she said cheerfully, patting Joe on the head as she passed.

Sullivan and Kell came out on the porch behind Rachel. Jane put her hands on her hips and glared at her husband. "Since you wouldn't bring me with you, I decided to follow you!"

Chapter Twelve

Rachel liked Jane Sullivan on sight. Anyone who calmly petted Joe, then faced Grant Sullivan's fury without blinking an eye, was someone Rachel would like to know. The two women introduced themselves, while Sullivan stood with his arms folded across his chest, his golden eyes shooting fire as he watched his wife from beneath lowered brows. "How did you find me?" he rasped, his voice low and almost soundless. "I made sure I didn't leave a trail."

Jane sniffed at him. "You didn't, so I did the logical thing and went where you weren't, and found you." Turning her back on him, she welcomed Kell with an enthusiastic hug. "I knew it had to be you. No one else could have dragged him away. Are you in trouble?"

"A little," Kell said, his black eyes filled with amusement.

"I thought so. I came to help."

"I'll be damned," Grant snapped.

Jane gave him a cool look. "Yes, you may be. Sneaking out and leaving me with the babies – "

"Where are they?"

"With your mother. She thinks I'm doing her a favor. Anyway, that's what took me so long to get here. I had to take the twins to her. Then I had to figure out what you'd do if you were trying to keep anyone from knowing where you were."

"I'm going to turn you over my knee," he said, and he looked as if the thought gave him immense satisfaction. "You're not getting out of it this time."

"You can't," she said smugly. "I'm pregnant again."

Rachel had been enjoying the spectacle of Grant Sullivan driven to frustration by his pretty, darkeyed wife, but now she felt almost sorry for him. He went pale.

"You can't be."

"I wouldn't bet on that," Kell put in, enjoying this turn of events as much as Rachel.

"The twins are just six months old," Grant croaked.

"I know that!" Jane replied, her face indignant. "I was there, remember?"

"We weren't going to have any more for a while."

"The thunderstorm," she said succinctly, and Grant closed his eyes. He was really white by now, and Rachel was moved to pity.

"Let's go inside, where it's cooler," she suggested, opening the screen door. She and Kell went inside, but no one followed them. Rachel peeked out the door; Jane was wrapped in her husband's muscular arms, and his blond head was bent down to her dark one.

Oddly, that sight added a little more to Rachel's inner pain. "They made it," she whispered.

Kell's arms slid around her waist, and he pulled her back against him. "He isn't in it now, remember? He was retired before they ever met."

Rachel wanted to ask why he couldn't retire, as well, but kept herself from voicing the question. What had been right for Grant Sullivan wasn't right for Kell Sabin; Kell was one of a kind. Instead she asked, "When do you leave?" She should have been proud that her voice was so steady, but pride didn't mean anything to her at this stage. She would have begged him on her knees if she thought it would work, but his dedication was more than lip service.

He was silent for a moment, and she knew she wouldn't like the answer, even though she was expecting it. "Tomorrow morning."

So she had one more night, unless he and Sullivan planned to spend most of it working out the details of their objective.

"We're turning in early," he said, touching her hair, and she twisted in his arms to meet his midnight eyes. His face was remote, but he wanted her; she could tell it by his touch, by something fleeting in his expression. Oh, God, how could she ever stand to watch him leave and know that she'd never see him again?

Jane and Grant came inside, and Jane's face was radiant. Her eyes widened with delight when she saw Rachel in Kell's arms, but something in their expressions kept her from saying anything. Jane was nothing if not intuitive. "Grant won't tell me what's going on," she announced, and crossed her arms stubbornly. "I'm going to follow you until I find out."

Kell's black brows lifted. "And if I do tell you?"

Jane considered that, looking from Kell to Grant, then back to Kell. "You want to negotiate, don't you? You want me to go back home."

"You are going back home," Grant said quietly, steel in his voice. "If Sabin wants to fill you in, that's up to him, but this new baby gives me twice the reason to make sure you're safe on the farm, instead of risking your neck chasing after me."

There was a glint in Jane's eyes that made Rachel think Sullivan would have a fight on his hands, but Kell forestalled that by saying, "All right, I think you deserve to know what's happened, since Grant's involved in it now. Let's sit down, and I'll fill you in."

"On a 'need to know' basis," Jane guessed accurately, and Kell gave her his humorless smile.

"Yes. You know there are always details that can't be discussed, but I can tell you most of it."

They sat around the table, and Kell sketched in the main points of what had happened, the implications and why he needed Grant. When he had finished Jane looked at both the men for a long time, then slowly nodded. "You have to do it." Then she leaned forward, planted both hands on the table and bent an uncompromising look on Sabin, who met it squarely. "But let me tell you, Kell Sabin, that if anything happens to Grant, I'll come after you. I didn't go through all that trouble to get him for anything to happen to him now."

Kell didn't respond, but Rachel knew what he was thinking. If anything happened it wasn't likely that he would survive, either. She didn't know how she knew what was in his mind, but she did. Her senses were locked on Kell, and his slightest gesture or change of tone registered on her nerves with the force of an earthquake on the most sensitive seismograph.

Grant stood up, drawing Jane up to stand beside him. "It's time we got some sleep, since we're leaving so early in the morning. And you're going home," he said to his wife. "Give me your word."

Now that she knew what was involved, Jane didn't argue. "All right. I'll go home after I pick up the twins. What I want to know is when I can expect you back."

Grant glanced at Kell. "Three days?"

Kell nodded.

Rachel got to her feet. In three days it would be over, one way or the other, but for her it would end in the morning. In the meantime she had to make sleeping arrangements for the Sullivans, and she was almost grateful to have something that would occupy her time, if not her mind.

She apologized to Jane for the lack of an extra bed, but it didn't seem to bother Jane at all. "Don't worry about us," Jane soothed. "I've slept with Grant in tents, caves and sheds, so a nice living room floor isn't any hardship to us."

With Jane's help Rachel gathered quilts and extra pillows for a pallet, taking them from the top of her closet and stacking them on Jane's arms. Jane eyed her shrewdly. "You're in love with Kell, aren't you?"

"Yes." Rachel said the one word steadily, not even thinking of denying it. It was a fact, as much a part of her as her gray eyes.

"He's a hard, unusual man, but top quality steel has to be hard to be top quality. It won't be easy. I know. Look at the man I chose."

They looked at each other, two women with a world of knowledge in their eyes. For good or ill, the men they loved were different from other men, and they would never have the security most women could expect.

"When he leaves tomorrow, it's over," Rachel said, her throat tight. "He won't be back."

"He wants it to be over," Jane clarified, her brown eyes unusually somber. "But don't say that he won't be back. Grant didn't want to marry me. He said it wouldn't work, that our lives were too different and I'd never fit into his world. Sound familiar?"

"Oh, yes." Her eyes and voice were bleak.

"I had to let him go, but in the end he came after me."

"Grant was already retired. Kell won't retire, and the job is the problem."

"It's a big problem, but not insurmountable. Loving someone is hard for men like Grant and Kell to accept. They've always been alone."

Yes, Kell had always been alone, and he was determined to keep it that way. Knowing and understanding his reasons didn't make living with them any easier. She left Jane and Grant to bed down in the living room, and Kell followed her into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. She stood in the middle of the room with her hands tightly clenched, her eyes shadowed as she watched him.

"We should have left tonight," he said quietly. "But I wanted one more night with you."

She wouldn't let herself cry, not tonight. No matter what happened she would wait until tomorrow, until he was gone. He turned out the light and came to her in the darkened room, his rough hands closing on her shoulders and pulling her against him. His mouth was hard, hungry, almost hurting her as he kissed her with savage need. His tongue probed at hers, demanding a response that was slow in coming, because the pain was so great inside her. He kept on kissing her, sliding his hands over her back and hips, cradling her against the warmth of his body, until finally she began to relax and yield to him.

"Rachel," he whispered, unbuttoning her shirt to find her naked breasts and cup them in his warm palms. Slowly he circled her nipples with his thumbs and enticed them to hardness; the warmth, the tightening sense of excitement and anticipation began to intensify inside her. Her body knew him and responded, growing heavy and moist, readying her for him because she knew he wouldn't leave her unsatisfied. He slid the shirt off her shoulders, pinning her arms to her sides with the fabric while he lifted her, arching her over his arm and thrusting her breasts up to him. Deliberately he put his mouth over her nipple and sucked at her, the strong motion drawing hot tingles from her sensitive flesh. She made a faint, gasping sound of pleasure as the sensations swept from her breasts into her lower abdomen, where desire was pulling at her.

Her head swam, and she had the sudden sensation of falling, which made her clutch at his waist. It wasn't until she felt the coolness of the bed beneath her that she realized he had been lowering her to its surface. Her shirt was caught beneath her, with the sleeves trapped and twisted midway between her elbows and wrists, effectively pinning her arms while her upper torso lay bare for his marauding lips and tongue to savor. He looked down at her with a tortured, hungry expression in his eyes, then bent and buried his face between her breasts, his hands squeezing them together around his face as if he wanted to lose himself in the scent and feel of her satiny flesh.

She moaned as her body throbbed in need, and tried futilely to wrest her arms free. "Kell." Her voice was high, strained. "Let me get my arms out."

He lifted his head and appraised the situation. "Not yet," he murmured. "Just lie there and let me love you until you're ready for me."

She made a rough sound of frustration, trying to roll to one side so she could free herself, but Kell subdued her, his hard hands holding her flat on her back. "I am ready," she insisted before his mouth came down on hers and stifled any further protests.

When he raised his head again it was with hot satisfaction stamped on his taut features. "Not like you will be." Then he bent to her breasts again, not stopping until they were wet and gleaming from his mouth and her nipples were red and achingly tight. Gently he bit the undercurve of her breast, using his teeth just enough to let her feel them but not enough to bring pain.

"Let's get you out of these." The strain was evident in his voice, too, as he tugged at the fastening of her shorts. It came free, and the zipper rasped quietly as he slid it down. His hand went inside the opened shorts, burrowing under her panties to find the warm, moist, aching flesh he sought. "Ah," he said in quiet satisfaction as his fingers explored her and found her ready, indeed. "You liked that, didn't you?"

"Yes." All she could do was whimper the word.

"You'll like it better when I'm inside you," he promised huskily, and slid her panties and shorts down her hips and thighs, but not off. He left them just above her knees, and her legs were trapped as effectively as her arms. Slowly he ran his hand over her, from her breasts down over her flat belly, to linger at her naked loins.

She writhed under his probing fingers, her heart thundering in her chest and interfering with the rhythm of her breathing. "Don't you even think it," she cried, her hands clutching at the sheet beneath her. He was looking at her in a way that told her he liked holding her helpless while he teased her and enjoyed her body. He was more than a little uncivilized, his instincts swift and primeval.

He gave a low, rough laugh. "All right, love. You don't have to wait any longer. I'll give you what you want." Swiftly he stripped her, even of the shirt that bound her arms, and took off his own clothes, then settled his weight onto her. Rachel accepted him with a sigh of painful relief, her arms wrapping around him as he spread her legs and entered her. She reached her peak quickly, convulsing in his arms, and slowly he built her to pleasure again. He couldn't get enough of her that night, returning to her over and over, as if time slowed when they were locked together in love.

It was shortly before dawn when she woke up for the last time, lying on her side with her back to him, snuggled into the warm curve of his chest and thighs, just as they had slept every night since he'd regained consciousness. This was the last time he would hold her like this, and she lay very still, not wanting to wake him.

But he was already awake. His hand moved slowly over her breasts, then down to her thighs. He raised her leg, draping it over his thigh, and slid into her from behind. His hand flattened against her stomach to brace her as he began moving in and out of her. "One last time," he murmured into her hair. Dear God, it was the last time, and he didn't think he could stand it. If he had ever been happy in his life it had been during these too short days with Rachel. This would be the last time her soft body would sheathe his hardness, the last time her breasts would fill his hands, the last time he would ever see the misty look of passion in her lake-gray eyes. She trembled beneath his hands, biting her lips to keep from crying out as the pleasure built within her. When the time came he clasped her to him, holding himself deep within her while she turned her face into the pillow to stifle the sounds she made, then he thrust deep and hard and shuddered with his own release.

The room was growing light now, the sky glowing with the pink pearl of approaching sunrise. He sat up in the bed and looked down at her, her body damp and glowing like the sky. Perhaps this last time had been a mistake, because he hadn't taken his usual precautions, but he couldn't regret it. He couldn't have tolerated any separation of their bodies.

Rachel lay exhausted on the pillows, watching him with her heart in her eyes. Her body still throbbed from his lovemaking, and her pulse was only gradually slowing. "You may never come back," she whispered. "But I'll wait here for you, anyway."

Only the slight jerking of a muscle beside his mouth revealed his reaction. He shook his head. "No, don't waste your life. Find someone else, get married and have a houseful of kids."

Somehow she managed a smile. "Don't be a fool," she told him with aching tenderness. "As if there could be anyone else after you."

They were ready to leave, and Rachel was so stiff inside that she thought she would shatter if anyone touched her. She knew there would be no goodbye kisses, no final words to burn into her memory. He would simply leave, and it would be finished. He wasn't even taking the pistol with him, which would give him an excuse to contact her again to return it. The pistol was registered to her; he didn't want anything that could be traced back to her in case things didn't go as planned.

Sullivan had hidden his rental car somewhere down the road; Jane was going to drive them to it, then return to their farm. Rachel would be left alone in a house that echoed with emptiness, and she was already trying to think of ways to fill the time. She would work in the garden, mow the lawn, wash the car, maybe even go swimming. Later she would go out to eat, see a movie, anything to postpone coming back. Perhaps by then she would be so tired she would be able to sleep, though she didn't hold out much hope for that. Still, she'd get by, because she had no choice.

"I'll let you know," Jane whispered, hugging Rachel.

Rachel's eyes burned. "Thank you."

Grant opened the door and walked out onto the porch, which brought Joe to his feet, and snarls filled the air. Calmly Grant surveyed the dog. "Well, hell," he said mildly.

Jane snorted. "Are you afraid of that dog? He's as sweet as can be."

Kell followed them onto the porch. "Joe, sit," he commanded.

There was the peculiar, high-pitched CRACK! of a rifle being fired and the wood exploded on the post not two inches from Kell's head. Kell turned and dove for the open door just as Rachel leaped for him, and he knocked her sprawling. Almost simultaneously Grant literally threw Jane through the door as another shot exploded, then he covered her with his body.

"Are you all right?" Kell asked through clenched teeth, anxiously looking Rachel over even as he lashed out with one foot and kicked the door shut.

She'd banged her head on the floor, but it wasn't anything serious. Her face white, she clutched at him. "Yes, I'm f-f-fine," she stammered.

He rolled to his feet, crouching to stay below the windows. "You and Jane lie down in the hall," he ordered tersely, getting the pistol from the bedroom where he'd left it.

Grant had helped Jane to a sitting position, brushing her hair out of her face and giving her a swift kiss before he pushed her toward Rachel. "Go on, move," he snapped, drawing his own pistol from his belt.

There was another shot, and the window closest to Grant shattered, raining shards of glass all over him. He cursed luridly.

Rachel stared at them, trying to gather her thoughts. They were armed only with pistols, while whoever was shooting at them had a rifle, stacking the deck against Kell and Grant. A rifle had the advantage of accuracy over a greater distance, allowing their assailant to shoot from outside the range of the pistols. Her .22 rifle didn't have much power, but it did have a greater range and accuracy than the pistols, and she crawled into the bedroom to get it, as well as what ammunition she had. Thank God Kell had told her to buy those shells!

"Here," she said, crawling back into the living room and sliding the rifle toward Kell. He glanced around, his fist closing over the weapon. Grant was moving through the house, checking to make certain no one was coming up on them from behind.

"Thanks," Kell said briefly. "Get back in the hall, honey."

Jane was crouched there, staring at her husband with an odd fury in her chocolate eyes. "They shot at you," she growled.

"Yep," he confirmed.

She was fuming like a volcano about to blow, muttering to herself as she dragged the nylon overnighter she'd brought to her, unzipping it and throwing clothing and makeup to one side. "I'm not putting up with this," she said furiously. "Damn it, they shot at him!" She produced a pistol and shoved it into Rachel's hand, then dug back into the bag. She dragged a small case out of it, about the size of a violin case, and threw it at Grant. "Here! I don't know how to put the thing together!"

He opened the case and glared at Jane even as he began snapping the rifle together with swift, practiced movements. "Where the hell did you get this?"

"Never mind!" she barked, tossing a clip of ammunition to him. He fielded it one-handed and snapped it into place. Kell glanced over his shoulder. "Got any C-4 or grenades in there?"

"No," Jane said regretfully. "I didn't have time to get everything I wanted."

Rachel crawled to the side window, cautiously lifting her head to peek out. Kell swore. "Get down," he snapped. "Stay out of this. Get back in the hall, where it's safer."

She was pale, but calm. "There are only two of you, and four sides to the house. You need us."

Jane grabbed Grant's discarded pistol. "She's right. You need us."

Kell's face was set like granite. This was exactly what he'd wanted most to avoid, one of his worst fears coming true. Rachel's life was being threatened because of him. Damn! Why hadn't he left last night, as he should have? He'd let sexual desire override his common sense, and now she was in danger.

"Sabin!" The voice came from the pine thicket.

He didn't answer, but his eyes narrowed as he surveyed the thicket, trying to find the speaker. He wasn't going to answer and reveal his position; let them find out the hard way.

"Come on, Sabin, don't make it any harder than it has to be!" the voice continued. "If you surrender, I give you my word none of the others will be harmed!"

"Who is that joker?" Grant grunted.

"Charles Dubois, alias Charles Lloyd, alias Kurt Schmidt, alias several other names," Kell murmured.

The names meant nothing to Rachel, but Sullivan's brows lifted. "So he finally decided to come after you himself." He looked around. "We're not in a good position. He's got men all around the house. There aren't that many of them, but we're hemmed in. I checked the phone – it's dead."

Kell didn't have to be told that their situation wasn't good. If Dubois used the rockets on the house, as he had on the boat, they were all as good as dead. But then again, he was trying to take Kell alive. Alive, he was worth a lot of money to a lot of people who would pay anything to get their hands on him.

He tried to think, but the cold fact was that there was no way out of the house. Even if they waited until nightfall and tried to sneak out, there was little available cover to use except for the bushes, which were right against the house. Away from the house, it was open for a good distance in all directions. That meant it would be difficult for anyone to catch them unawares, but it also meant the same thing in reverse. Even if he walked out and surrendered, it wouldn't save the others. There was no way Dubois would let any witnesses live. He knew it, and Sullivan knew it; he could only hope Rachel and Jane didn't realize quite how hopeless the situation really was.

A glance at Rachel dispelled that idea. She knew, all right. That had been the problem from the first; she was too aware, with no veil of ignorance to shield her. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her head on his shoulder, assure her that it would be all right, but with those clear, level gray eyes on him, he couldn't lie to her, even to give her momentary comfort. He never wanted any lies between them.

There was a shot from the bedroom, and all the color washed out of Grant's face, but before he could move Jane called him. "Grant! Is the kneecap where I'm supposed to shoot these people?"

If anything, he went even whiter, swearing long and low.

"Well, it doesn't matter," she added philosophically. "I missed, anyway. But I hit his gun, if that counts."

"Sabin!" the man yelled again. "You are testing my patience! This cannot go on much longer. It would be such a pity if the woman was harmed."

"Woman," instead of "women." Then Kell realized that Rachel hadn't gone out on the porch; they had seen Jane and thought she was Rachel. They were both slim and had dark hair, though Jane was taller and her hair was a little longer, but at a distance no one would have noticed.

It didn't give him much of an advantage, but it might help that Dubois would be underestimating the number of armed people.

"Sabin!"

"I'm thinking!" Kell yelled, keeping his head away from the window.

"Time is a luxury you can't afford, my friend. You know you can't win. Why not make it easy on yourself? The woman will go free, I promise you!"

Dubois's promises weren't worth the air it took to make them, and Kell knew it. Time. Somehow he had to buy a little time. He didn't know what he was going to do, but every extra second gave chance an opportunity to step in. Timing was always critical, and if he could stall Dubois it might throw the man off in some way.

"What about my other friend?" he yelled.

"Of course," Dubois lied smoothly. "I have no quarrel with him."

Grant's lips twisted back in a feral grin. "Sure. There's no way he didn't recognize me."

What a coup it would be for Dubois to capture both Sabin and the Tiger, the big tawny warrior with the wild, golden eyes who had ranged the jungle with Sabin and later been his prime agent. Each was legendary in his own right; together they had been incredible, so attuned that they acted as one man. Sullivan had had a run-in with some of Dubois's men a few years back; no, Dubois wouldn't have forgotten that, considering how Sullivan had made a fool of him.

A movement in the trees suddenly caught Kell's attention, and his black eyes narrowed. "See if you can get him to say something else," he told Grant, sliding the barrel of the .22 just a fraction of an inch outside the broken window and keeping his eyes fixed on the spot in the trees.

"Come on, Dubois," Grant yelled. "Don't play games. I know you recognized me."

Kell's finger tightened slightly on the trigger as silence reigned; was Dubois really surprised to find out they knew who he was? It was true that he had always operated from the background rather than risk his own safety, but Kell had been after him for years now, ever since Dubois had begun selling his services as a terrorist.

"So it is you, Tiger."

There it was again, that slight movement. Kell sighted down the barrel and gently squeezed the trigger. The report of the rifle echoed in the small house, drowning out any cry of pain, but Kell knew he hadn't missed. He also didn't know if he'd hit Dubois or someone else.

A hail of bullets tore into the house, shattering all the windows and gouging long splinters out of the walls and window frames, but the steel reinforced doors held. "Guess he didn't like that," Kell muttered.

Grant had ducked to the floor, and now his head came up. "You know, I never liked that nickname worth a damn," he drawled, then swung his rifle up. It was an automatic, and he fired it in the three-shot bursts of a well-trained soldier, making good use of his firepower without wasting his ammunition. Pistol shots came from both the bedroom and Rachel's office; then all hell broke loose again. They were tearing the house up, and cold fear filled him, because Rachel was caught in this barrage.

"Rachel!" he yelled. "Are you all right?"

"I'm okay," she answered, and her calm voice made him ache.

"Jane!" Grant yelled. No answer. "Jane," he yelled again, his face gray as he started for the bedroom.

"I'm busy!"

Grant looked as if he might explode, and despite everything Kell found himself grinning. Better Grant than him. Still, Jane's life was in jeopardy, too, and the thought of anything happening to her was almost as hard to bear as the thought of anyone hurting Rachel.

There was another lull, and Grant pulled out his empty clip and slapped another one into place.

"Sabin, my patience is at an end," Dubois called, and Kell grimaced. Damn, it hadn't been Dubois he'd hit.

"You haven't made the right offer yet," he yelled in return. Anything to buy time.

Jane crawled out of the bedroom, her hair all mussed and her eyes big. "I think the cavalry is coming," she said.

The two men ignored her, but Rachel scrambled to her side. "What?" she asked.

"Men on horseback," Jane said, waving her hand toward the bedroom. "I saw them, coming from that way."

Rachel felt like crying or laughing, but she couldn't make up her mind which. "It's Rafferty," she said, and now she had their attention. "My neighbor. He must have heard the shots."

Grant crouched low and ran through the kitchen to the back, where he could see. "How many?" Kell asked.

"Twenty or so," Grant said. "Damn, they're riding right into automatic fire. Start shooting and draw Dubois's fire!"

They did. Rachel crept up to a window, held the heavy pistol out it and fired until it was empty, then reloaded with shaking hands before emptying it again. Kell was making judicious use of the .22, and Jane was revealing remarkable skill herself. Had they given Rafferty enough time to get behind Dubois and his men? If they kept shooting, they might hit their rescuers.

"Hold it," Kell ordered. They lay flat on the floor with their heads covered while the walls were shredded by bullets. The light fixture crashed to the floor, sending glass flying. Grant cursed, and they looked over to see blood streaming down his face from a cut on his cheek. Jane gave a thin, high cry and made a move toward him, despite the continuing gunfire; Kell grabbed her and wrestled her to the floor.

"I'm all right," Grant yelled. "It's just a little cut."

"Stay close to the floor," Kell told Jane, then let her go, knowing that she'd fight him like a wildcat if he tried to keep her from Grant.

Then, suddenly, it was quiet except for a few scattered shots, and they were abruptly halted, too. Rachel lay on the floor, hardly daring to breathe, the acrid smell of burned gunpowder filling her nostrils and even her mouth. Kell put his hand on her arm, his black eyes drifting over her pale features as if he would burn her into his memory.

"Hey!" a deep voice roared. "Rachel, are you in there?"

Her lips trembled, and tears suddenly blurred her eyes. "It's Rafferty," she whispered, then lifted her head to call, "John! Is it all right?"

"Depends," the answer came. "These bastards here don't think it's all right."

Kell slowly climbed to his feet and pulled Rachel to hers. "He sounds like my kind of man."

Rachel felt like the survivor of a shipwreck as she walked out on the porch with Kell supporting her. Grant and Jane followed, with Jane dabbing at the cut on Grant's cheek, crying a little as she fussed at him. Without the arm around her waist, Rachel was sure she wouldn't have been able to stand.

She gave a ghostly cry when she saw three of the geese lying in the yard, blood on the white of their feathers, but there was no way she could make a sound when she saw Joe lying on his side at the edge of the porch. Kell turned her into his arms, pressing her face into his shoulder.

Big John Rafferty, armed with a hunting rifle and surrounded by his men, who were likewise armed, herded about fifteen men before him. Rafferty's eyes were fierce and narrow under his dark brows as he prodded a slim, gray-haired man before him. "We heard the shooting and came to see what was going on," John drawled. "I don't like riffraff shooting at my neighbor."

Charles Dubois was white with rage, his eyes fastened on Sabin. Beside him was Noelle, her beautiful eyes full of boredom.

"It isn't over, Sabin," Dubois hissed, and Kell gently put Rachel aside, handing her over to Grant. Kell had business to attend to, and explaining it to the law, then keeping it quiet would take some doing.

"It's over as far as you're concerned," he said briefly.

Beside Charles, Noelle smiled her slow, sleepy smile, then suddenly wrenched free; because she was a woman, the cowhand behind her hadn't been holding her securely. And, somehow, she had a gun in her hand, a small, ugly revolver.

Rachel saw it, and everything moved in slow motion. With a cry she tore free of Grant's arm, hurling herself toward Kell. A man grabbed for Noelle's arm, and the pistol exploded just as Rachel hit Kell, knocking him away. She cried out again at the burning pain in her side; then there was only blackness filling the world.

Chapter Thirteen

Sabin leaned against the wall in the hospital waiting room, his nostrils filled with the sharp smell of antiseptic and his dark face cold and remote, even though there was screaming hell in his eyes. Behind him were Jane and Grant, waiting with him. Jane was huddled over, her expressive face pale and full of misery; Grant prowled the confines of the room like some great cat.

No matter how he tried, Kell couldn't get the picture of Rachel, lying on the ground awash in her own blood, out of his mind. She had looked so small and fragile, her eyes closed and her face paper white, crumpled like a child's discarded doll, one slender hand lying palm up. He'd fallen to his knees beside her, oblivious to the scuffle and shots going on behind him, and a low, rough sound had exploded from his chest. Her name had echoed in his mind, but he hadn't been able to voice it.

Then, incredibly, her eyes had opened. She was dazed and in pain, but those clear, clear eyes had fastened on him as if he were her lifeline, and her trembling lips had fashioned his name. It wasn't until then that he'd realized she was alive. Seeing her take the bullet meant for him had been a nightmare come true, and he still hadn't recovered. He didn't expect ever to recover.

Yet he had managed to rip her clothing away from the ugly wound in her side and apply rough first aid, with Jane kneeling beside him and helping. Grant had taken over with the others, doing what was necessary, making certain that no hint of what had happened was leaked.

Dubois was dead, Noelle critically wounded and not expected to survive. Ironically, it had been Tod Ellis who had shot them. During the ensuing scuffle after Noelle had shot Rachel, Ellis had pulled free and grabbed a rifle. His motives were murky. Perhaps he had wanted to get rid of Dubois so no one would know the extent to which Ellis had helped him; perhaps, in the end, he hadn't been able to stomach what he'd done. Or perhaps it had been because of Rachel. Sabin could identify with that last reason; he could gladly have killed Dubois and that treacherous bitch with his bare hands for what they'd done to Rachel.

Honey Mayfield had been fetched to take care of Joe, and she thought he would make it. Rachel would need something, someone to hold on to, even if it was just a dog. Her house had been so badly damaged that it would take weeks to restore it; her pets had been shot, her life turned upside down, she herself wounded, and the man she loved was the cause of it all. Cold, piercing agony filled his chest. He'd nearly cost her her life, when he would have died himself rather than have her suffer this. He'd known the danger, yet he'd stayed, unable to tear himself away from her. This once he'd let his heart overrule his mind, and it had almost killed her. Never again. God in heaven, never again.

He would stay only until she was out of surgery and he knew she would be all right; there was no way he could leave until he knew, until he'd seen her again and touched her. But then he and Grant would have to leave. The situation was critical; he had to get to Washington before the news of this leaked back and the traitor, or traitors, could cover their tracks.

"Jane," he said quietly, not turning around. "Will you stay?"

"Of course," she responded without hesitation. "You know you didn't have to ask."

It had been all he could do to get the local authorities to cooperate; if it hadn't been for one of the deputies, a man named Phelps, who knew Rachel, the whole thing would have blown sky-high. But Phelps had known what to do, and he'd done some long, hard talking to get the lid put on this. Rafferty had guaranteed the silence of his men, and Kell doubted that there was a one of them who would dare cross Rafferty.

The surgeon entered the waiting room, his lined face tired. "Mr. Jones?"

Kell had identified himself as Rachel's husband and signed the release forms for her to be treated to speed things up. Legality be damned. Every minute had meant the loss of more blood for her. He straightened away from the wall, his entire body taut. "Yes?"

"Your wife is doing fine. She's in recovery now. The bullet nicked her right kidney. She lost a lot of blood, but we got some back in her, and her condition is stabilizing. I had doubts about saving the kidney, but there was less damage than I'd anticipated. Barring complications, I don't see any reason she won't be home in about a week."

The relief was so great that all he could do was croak, "When can I see her?"

"Probably in about an hour. I'm going to keep her in ICU overnight, but it's just precautionary. I don't think that kidney's going to start bleeding again, but if it does, I want her there. I'll have a nurse come for you when they get her moved."

Kell nodded and shook the doctor's hand; then he stood rigidly, unable to relax even now. Jane came to stand beside him, slipping her hand into his bigger one and squeezing it comfortingly. "Don't tear yourself apart over this."

"It was my fault."

"Really? When were you put in charge of the world? I must have missed the headlines."

He sighed wearily. "Not now."

"Why not now? If you don't snap out of this you're not going to be in any shape to do what needs doing."

She was right, of course. Jane might not get where she was going by the same route the rest of the world would take, but in the end she was usually right on the money.

When at last they let him see Rachel, he was braced for the shock; he'd seen too many wounded people not to know that the paraphernalia of hospitals often made it seem worse. He knew about the machines that would be hooked up to her, monitoring her vital signs, and he knew there would be tubes running into her body. But nothing could have prepared him for the blow of walking into the room – and then she opened her eyes and looked at him.

Incredibly, a weak smile spread over her bloodless lips, and she tried to hold out her hand to him, but her arm was anchored to the bed with tape, while an IV needle fed a clear liquid into her vein. For a moment Kell was frozen in place, and his eyes closed on the burning sensation that filled them. It was almost more than he could do to walk around the bed and lift her other hand to his cheek.

"It… isn't that bad," she managed, her voice almost soundless. "I heard… the doctor… say so."

God, she was trying to reassure him! He choked, rubbing her hand against his temple. He'd have given his own life to have spared her this, and he was the cause of it. "I love you," he muttered hoarsely.

"I know," she whispered, and went to sleep. Sabin hung over her bed for several more minutes, memorizing every line of her face for the last time. Then he straightened, and his face settled into its usual hard, blank mask. Walking briskly from the room and down the hall to where Grant and Jane waited, he said tersely, "Let's go."

Rachel walked the beach as she did every afternoon, her eyes on the sand as she automatically looked for shells. Joe roamed in front of her, periodically coming back as if to check on her, then going off on his own pursuits again. For weeks after she'd collected him from Honey, Joe had been almost paranoid about letting her out of his sight, but that stage had long passed. For Joe, it was as if the events of the summer had never happened.

It was early in December, and she wore a light jacket to protect her from the cool wind. The fall quarter at the college in Gainesville was finished except for the final exams, but she had enough to keep her busy. She'd worked like a Trojan in the months since July, finishing her manuscript well ahead of schedule and immediately diving into another one. There had been the class to teach, and the increasing number of tourists after the slow days of broiling summer heat had kept the two souvenir shops doing a booming business, which meant she had to drive down at least twice a week, sometimes three times.

The scar on her right side was the only reminder of what had happened in July. That, and her memories. The house had been repaired, new Sheetrock hung and painted because the damage had been too great to simply plaster over. The windows had new frames, and she had a new light fixture in the living room, as well as new furniture and new carpeting, because she'd given up hope of ever getting the glass out of the old. The house looked normal, not as if anything had ever happened that had taken weeks to repair.

Her recovery had been uneventful, and relatively short.

Within a month she had been going about her normal activities, trying to salvage some of the vegetables in the garden, which had become overgrown from neglect. Still, the pain from her wound had given her some idea of what Kell had gone through exercising his leg and shoulder to regain his mobility, and it staggered her.

She hadn't heard from him, not a word. Jane had stayed with her until she was released from the hospital, and had relayed the information that things had gone well in Washington. Rachel didn't know if Jane knew more but wasn't saying, or if that was all she'd been told. Probably the latter. Then Jane had left, too, to collect the twins and rejoin Grant at the farm. By now she would be round with pregnancy. For a time Rachel had thought she might be pregnant, too, from that last time Kell had taken her, but it had turned out to be a false alarm. Her system had simply gone awry from shock.

She didn't even have that. She had nothing but her memories, and they never left her alone.

She had survived, but it was only that: survival. She had gotten through each day without finding any joy in it, though she hadn't expected joy. At best, she would eventually find peace. Maybe.

It was as if part of her had been torn away. Losing B.B. had been terrible, but this was worse. She had been young then, and perhaps she hadn't been as capable of loving as deeply as she was now. Grief had matured her, had given her the depth of feeling with which she loved Kell. There wasn't a minute of the day that she didn't miss him, that she didn't live with pain because he wasn't there. She couldn't even find out about him from Jane; no information was available on Kell Sabin, ever. He had returned to his gray world of shadows and been swallowed up by them, as if he'd never been. Something could happen to him and she would never know.

That was the worst, the not knowing. He was there, but unreachable.

Sometimes she wondered if she'd dreamed it, that he'd come to her in the hospital and bent over her with his heart in his eyes as she'd never seen him before and whispered that he loved her. When she had awoken again she had expected to see him, because how could a man look like that and then walk away? But he had done exactly that. He'd been gone.

Sometimes she almost hated him. Oh, she knew all his reasons, but when she thought about it, they just didn't seem good enough. What gave him the right to make decisions for her? He was so damn arrogant, so certain that he knew best, that she could have shaken him until his teeth rattled.

The fact was that she had recovered from her wound, but she wasn't recovering from losing Kell. It ate at her day and night, taking away her joy in living and extinguishing the light in her eyes.

She wasn't pining away – she was too proud to let herself do that – but she was merely existing in limbo, without plans or anticipation. Walking the beach, staring out at the incoming waves, Rachel faced the fact that she had to do something. She had two options: she could try to reach Kell, or she could do nothing. To simply give up, to do nothing, went against her grain. He had had time to change his mind and come back, if he'd been going to, so she had to accept that he wasn't going to do it… not without incentive. If he wouldn't come to her, she'd go to him.

Just making that decision made her feel better than she had in months, more alive. She called to Joe, then turned and walked briskly up the beach toward her house.

She had no idea how to reach him, but she had to start somewhere, so she called telephone information to get the number of the agency in Virginia. That was easy enough, though she doubted it would be that simple to get put through to Kell. She called, but the operator who answered the phone denied that anyone by that name worked there. There was no listing for him. Rachel insisted on leaving a message, anyway. If he just knew she had called, perhaps he'd call back. Maybe curiosity wouldn't let him ignore the message.

But days went by and he didn't call, so Rachel tried again and received the same answer. There was no record of a Kell Sabin. She began contacting all the people she had done business with years ago when she was a reporter, asking for advice on how to get through to someone protected by the secrecy of the intelligence network. She sent messages to him through five different people, but had no way of knowing if any of them actually reached him. She continued to call, hoping that eventually the operator would get so frustrated that she'd hand the message on to someone.

For a month she tried. Christmas came and went, as well as the New Year celebrations, but the focus of her life was on somehow contacting Kell. It took a month for her to admit that either there was no way of getting a message to him, or he'd gotten them and still hadn't called.

To give up again, after trying so hard, hurt almost more than she could bear. For a while she'd had hope; now she had nothing.

She hadn't let herself cry much; it had seemed pointless, and she had really tried to pick herself up and keep going. But that night Rachel cried as she hadn't cried in months, lying alone in the bed she'd shared with him, aching with loneliness. She had offered him everything she had and was, and he'd walked away. The long night hours crawled by, and she lay there with her eyes wide and burning, staring at the darkness.

When the phone rang the next morning she still hadn't slept, and her voice was dull when she answered.

"Rachel?" Jane asked hesitantly. "Is that you?"

With an effort Rachel roused herself. "Yes. Hello, Jane, how are you?"

"Round," Jane said, summing it up in one word. "Do you feel like coming up for a visit? I warn you, I have ulterior motives. You can chase the boys while I sit with my feet up."

Rachel didn't know how she could bear to see Jane and Grant so happy together, surrounded by their children, but it would have been small of her to refuse. "Yes, of course," she forced herself to reply.

Jane was silent, and too late Rachel remembered that nothing got by Jane. And being Jane, she went right to the heart of the matter. "It's Kell, isn't it?"

Rachel's hand tightened on the receiver, and she closed her eyes at the pain of just hearing his name spoken. So many people had denied his existence that it stunned her for Jane to bring up the subject. She tried to speak, but her voice broke; then suddenly she was weeping again. "I've tried to call him," she said brokenly. "I can't get through. No one will even admit that they know him. Even if they're giving him my messages, he hasn't called."

"I thought he'd give in before now," Jane mused.

By that time Rachel had gotten herself under control again, and she apologized to Jane for crying all over her. She bit her lip, promising herself that it wouldn't happen again. She had to accept his loss and stop mourning.

"Look maybe I can do something," Jane said. "I'll have to work on Grant. Talk to you later."

Rachel hung up the phone, but she didn't let herself dwell on what Jane had said. She couldn't. If she got her hopes up again only to have them dashed, it would destroy her.

Jane went in search of Grant, and found him in the barn, working on the tractor. It was cold, but despite the chill he was working in only his shirt sleeves, and they were rolled up to his elbows. Two chubby little boys with white-blond hair and amber eyes, snugly bundled against the chill, played at his feet. Grant had started taking them out with him, now that she was so big with pregnancy that it was hard for her to chase after two rambunctious toddlers.

When he saw her he straightened, a wrench in his hand. Swiftly his gaze went over her, and despite her bulk a certain gleam entered his eyes.

"How do I get in touch with Kell?" she asked, getting right to the point.

Grant looked wary. "Why do you want to get in touch with Kell?"

"For Rachel."

Consideringly, Grant eyed his wife. Kell had had his private phone number changed soon after he'd returned home, and Grant had made certain Jane hadn't discovered it since then. It was too dangerous for her to know things like that; she had a positive genius for attracting trouble.

"What about Rachel?"

"I just talked to her. She was crying, and you know Rachel never cries."

Grant looked at her in silence, thinking. Not many women would have done what Rachel had. She and Jane weren't ordinary women, and though they went about things differently, it was the basic truth that they were both strong women. Then he looked down at the little boys playing happily in the hay, crawling over his feet. Slowly a grin cracked his hard face. Kell was a good man; he deserved some of this happiness.

"All right," he said, putting the wrench aside and leaning down to scoop the twins into his arms. "Let's go into the house. I'll put the call through. There's no way in hell I'm letting you get his number."

Jane stuck her tongue out at him, but followed him to the house with a big grin on her face.

Grant didn't take any chances; he made her wait in the next room while he made the call. When he heard the line ringing he called her, and she raced in to grab the receiver from his hand. It took three more rings before the phone was picked up on the other end and a deep voice said, "Sabin."

"Kell," she said cheerfully. "This is Jane."

There was dead silence for a moment, and she stepped into the breach. "It's about Rachel."

"Rachel?" His voice was guarded.

"Rachel Jones," Jane said, rubbing it in. "Don't you remember her? She's the woman in Florida–"

"Damn it, you know I remember. Is something wrong?"

"You need to go see her."

He sighed. "Look, Jane, I know you mean well, but there's no point in talking about it. I did what I had to do."

"You need to go see her," Jane repeated.

Something in her voice got through to him, and she heard the sudden sharpness that edged into his tone. "Why? Is something wrong?"

"She's been trying to get in touch with you," Jane said evasively.

"I know. I got the messages."

"Then why haven't you called her?"

"I have my reasons."

He was the most stubborn, noncommittal man she'd ever met, except for Grant Sullivan; they were two of a kind. Still, even stone could be worn away by dripping water, so she didn't give up. "You should have called her."

"It wouldn't do any good," he said sharply.

"If you say so," Jane returned just as sharply. "But at least Grant married me when he found out I was pregnant!" Then she slammed the phone down with a satisfying bang, and a pleased smile spread over her face.

Kell paced his office, running his hand through his black hair. Rachel was pregnant, carrying his baby. He counted the months; she would be six months along, so why had she waited so long before trying to contact him? Had something gone wrong? Was she sick? In danger of losing the child? Was something wrong with the baby?

The worry ate at him; it was even worse than what he'd gone through every day since he'd left her in the hospital. The want and need hadn't lessened; if anything, they had grown stronger. But every time the temptation to call her began undermining his common sense, his memory would dredge up the picture of her lying on the yard with her blood soaking her clothing, and he knew he couldn't live if his very presence put her in that sort of danger again. He loved her more than he'd known a human being could love; he'd never loved before, but when he'd fallen, he'd gone over hard. It pervaded his bone and tissue; he was never allowed to forget even for a moment. When he slept it was with the memory of holding her in his arms, but more often he lay awake, his body hard and aching for her softness to surround him.

He couldn't sleep; his appetite had suffered; his temper was shot to hell. He couldn't even have sex with other women, because the simple fact was that other women didn't even tempt him enough to arouse him. When he closed his eyes at night he saw Rachel, with her straight dark hair and clear, lake-gray eyes, and he tasted her on his tongue. He remembered her directness, her honesty, and the games played by women who tried to attract him did nothing other than turn him off.

She was going to have his baby.

The messages he'd been getting had been driving him crazy, and a dozen times he'd reached for the telephone. The messages had all been the same, short and simple. "Call me. Rachel." God, how he'd wanted to, just to hear her voice again, but now those messages took on more meaning. Had she just wanted to let him know that he was going to be a father, or was it more urgent than that? Was something wrong?

He reached for the telephone and actually dialed the number, but slammed the receiver down before her phone could begin ringing. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He wanted to see her, to make certain that everything was all right. He wanted to see her, just once, heavy and rounded with his child, even if he was never given anything else in this life.

It was raining the next day when he drove down the narrow private road that led toward the beach and Rachel's house. The sky was low and gray, sullenly pouring rain as if it would never stop. The temperature was in the forties, but that seemed almost warm after the twenties he had left behind in Virginia, and the weather report on the radio had promised clear skies and a warming trend for the next day.

He had arranged for a flight to Jacksonville, then caught a commuter plane to Gainesville, where he rented a car. It was the first time he'd ever walked out of the office like that, but after what had happened last summer, no one questioned him. It wouldn't have done much good if they had; once Sabin decided to move, he moved.

He stopped the car in front of the house and got out, ducking against the rain. Joe was braced in front of the steps, snarling, and it was so much like before that a tight smile tugged at Rell's mouth. "Joe, heel," he said. The dog's ears perked forward at that voice and the command, and with a small bark he bounded toward Kell, his tail actually wagging.

"That's quite a greeting," Kell murmured, leaning down to rub the dog's head. "I just hope Rachel is as glad to see me." After he'd ignored all of her messages she might well slam the door in his face. Despite the chill he felt himself starting to sweat, and his heart was slamming against his ribs. He was so close to her; she was just on the other side of that door, and he was shaking with anticipation, his loins hardening. Damn, that was just what he needed.

He was getting soaked, so he sprinted across the yard and leaped onto the porch with one bound, disdaining the steps. He knocked on the frame of the screen door, then impatiently did it again, harder.

"Just a minute."

He closed his eyes at her voice, then heard her footsteps approaching the door, and opened them again, not wanting to miss even a second of looking at her. She opened the door, and they faced each other silently through the screen. Her lips moved, but no sound emerged. He tried to see her through the screen, but there were no lights on in the living room, and the dim, gray day didn't help much. All he could really see was the pale oval of her face.

"May I come in?" he finally asked quietly.

Without a word she pushed the screen door open and moved back for him to enter. He stepped inside, closed the wooden door behind him and reached to flip the light switch, flooding the room with light. She stood before him, small and fragile and very slim. She was wearing tight jeans and a baggy black sweatshirt; her hair was longer and pulled back from her face on each side with two big tortoiseshell clips. She was pale, her face strained.

"You're not pregnant," he said in a tight voice. Had she lost the baby?

She swallowed, then shook her head. "No. I'd hoped I would be, but it didn't happen."

Her voice, so low and well remembered, made him shudder inside with pleasure, but her words brought him up short. "You haven't been pregnant?"

Now she looked confused. "No."

His fists knotted. He didn't know which was worse, the realization that Jane had lied to him, or disappointment that Rachel wasn't pregnant, after all. "Jane told me you were pregnant," he ground out, then abruptly remembered her exact words, and a bark of laughter burst out even through his anger. "Hell, no, she didn't. What she said was 'At least Grant married me when he found out I was pregnant!'" he told her, mimicking Jane. "Then she hung up on me. She's so slick that I didn't catch it until now."

Rachel had been watching him, not even blinking as she drank in his appearance. He was thinner, harder, that black fire of his even more intense. "You came because you thought I was pregnant?"

"Yes."

"Why bother now?" she asked, and bit her lip to stop it from trembling.

Well, he'd asked for that. He looked at her again. She had lost weight, and her eyes were listless. It startled him, hit him hard. She didn't look like a happy woman, and all he'd ever wanted was for her to be safe and happy. "How are you?" he asked, concern deepening his voice to a rumble.

She shrugged. "Well enough, I suppose."

"Does your side bother you?"

"No, not at all." She turned away, going toward the kitchen. "Would you like a cup of hot chocolate? I was just going to make some."

He took off his coat and tossed it over a chair before following her. It gave him an overpowering sense of deja vu to lean against the cabinets and watch her fiddle with pots and measuring cups. Abruptly she stopped and bent her head down to rest it against the refrigerator door.

"It's killing me without you," she said in a muffled voice. "I try, but I just don't care anymore. One day with you is worth more to me than a lifetime without you."

His fists clenched again. "Do you think it's easy for me?" His voice rasped the air like a rusty file. "Don't you remember what happened?"

"I know what can happen!" she screamed, whirling on him. "But I'm an adult, Kell Sabin! The risk is mine to take if I think it's worth it! I accept that every time I get in my car and drive to town. A lot more people are killed on the highways every year than by terrorists or assassins. Why don't you forbid me to drive, if you really want to protect me?"

His eyes burned on her, but he didn't say anything, and his remote silence goaded her. "I can live with the risks you take in your job," she continued. "I don't like it, but that's your decision to make. If you can't give me the same right, then why are you here?"

Still he stared at her, frowning. The hunger for her was growing in him, like an obsession. He wanted her, more than he wanted his next breath. He could either live with her, or live without her, and the past six months had shown him just how poor the quality of life was without her. The flat, unvarnished truth was that life wasn't worth living if he couldn't have her. Once he accepted that, his thoughts moved ahead. He'd have to take steps to make certain she was safe; he'd have to make changes and adjust, something he hadn't done before. It was odd how simple it looked all of a sudden, just because he admitted to himself that he had to have her. God bless Jane for getting his attention and giving him an excuse for coming down; she had known that once he saw Rachel again he wouldn't be able to leave.

He faced Rachel across the kitchen. "Can you really take it, the risks I take and the times I'll be gone when you won't know where I am or when to expect me?"

"I already have," she said, lifting her chin. "What I need to know is that you'll come back to me when you can."

Still he watched her, his eyes narrow and piercing. "Then we might as well get married, because God knows I've been a wreck without you."

She looked stunned; then she blinked. "Is that a proposal?"

"No. It was basically an order."

Slowly tears filled her gray eyes, making them glitter like diamonds, and a smile began to brighten her face. "All right," she said simply.

He did what he'd been hungering to do; he crossed the floor to her and took her in his arms, his mouth fastening hungrily on hers while his hands rediscovered the sleek curves of her body. Without another word he lifted her and carried her into the bedroom, tossing her across the bed just as he'd done the first time he'd made love to her. Swiftly he pulled her jeans down and off, then shoved the sweatshirt up to reveal her pretty round breasts. "I can't take it slow," he whispered, jerking his pants open.

She didn't need for him to take it slow. She needed him, and she held her arms out to him. He spread her thighs and mounted her, controlling himself just long enough to slow his entry so he wouldn't hurt her, and with a low cry of pleasure Rachel took him into her body.

They lay in bed the rest of the day, making love and talking, but mostly just holding each other and reveling in the other's nearness. "What happened when you got back to Washington?" she asked sometime during the afternoon.

He lay on his back with one muscular arm thrown above his head, drowsy after making love, but his eyes opened at her question. "I can't tell you too much," he warned. "I won't ever be able to talk a lot about my work."

"I know."

"Tod Ellis talked, and that helped. Grant and I set a trap, and one of my superiors walked into it. That's about all I can tell you."

"Were there others in your department?"

"Two others."

"They almost had you," she said, shuddering at the thought.

"They would have had me, if it hadn't been for you." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her; the glow was back in her eyes, the glow that only he could produce. He never wanted to see that light go out. He reached out to touch her cheek. "I was disappointed that you weren't pregnant," he said softly.

She laughed. "I may be after today."

"Just in case," he murmured, rolling onto her.

She caught her breath. "Yes, by all means, just in case."

Epilogue

They sat on the porch of the big farmhouse where Grant and Jane lived, enjoying the warmth of the late summer sunshine. Kell was leaning back in his chair, his booted feet propped on the railing, and Grant was sprawled in a position of total relaxation. Both men looked sleepy after the heavy meal they had just eaten, but nevertheless two pairs of alert eyes monitored the children playing in the yard while Rachel and Jane were in the house. Presently the two women joined their husbands on the porch, sitting down in big rockers.

Kell straightened abruptly as Jamie, who was no more than a toddler, fell down in the yard, but before he could open his mouth the four little boys crowded around her, and Dane – or Daniel? – helped her up, brushing the dirt from her chubby little legs. The five children looked unusual together, with the three Sullivan boys almost white haired, they were so blond, while both Brian and Jamie were dark, with black hair and eyes. Jamie was the queen of that particular crowd, ruling everyone with her big eyes and dimples. She was going to be small, while Brian had his father's build.

The children ran shrieking toward the barn, with Dane and Daniel each holding one of Jamie's hands, and Brian and Craig behind them. The four adults watched them go. "Can you believe," Kell said thoughtfully, "that we're in our forties and have five preschoolers between us?"

"Speak for yourself," Rachel returned. "Jane and I are still young."

Kell looked at her and grinned. He still didn't have any gray in his hair, and neither did Grant. They were both hard and lean, and more content with their lives than they had ever been before.

It had all worked out rather well. Married to Rachel, and quickly aware that there was indeed a baby on the way, Kell had accepted a promotion and was no longer such a prime target. He was still in a position to use his knowledge and expertise, but at much less risk to himself. It had been a trade-off, but one that was worth it. He glanced over at Rachel. Oh, yes, it had definitely been worth it.

"You never did tell me," Jane said idly, rocking in her chair as if she hadn't a care in the world. "Did you forgive me for lying to you about Rachel being pregnant?"

Grant chuckled, and Kell stretched out even more, closing his eyes. "It wasn't much of a lie," Kell said peacefully. "She was before the next day was out. By the way, how did you get my number?"

"I called you for her," Grant confessed, putting his booted feet up on the railing, too. "I thought some of the good life was just what you needed."

Rachel's eyes met Kell's, and they smiled at each other. It was nice to have such good friends.

White Lies

Chapter One

In ranking the worst days of her life, this one probably wasn't number one, but it was definitely in the top three.

Jay Granger had held her temper all day, rigidly controlling herself until her head was throbbing and her stomach burning. Not even during the jolting ride in a succession of crowded buses had she allowed her control to crack. All day long she had forced herself to stay calm despite the pent-up frustration and rage that filled her, and now she felt as if she couldn't relax her own mental restraints. She just wanted to be alone.

So she silently endured having her toes stepped on, her ribs relocated by careless elbows, and her nostrils assailed by close-packed humanity. It began to rain just before she got off the last bus, a slow, cold rain that had chilled her to the bone by the time she walked the two blocks to her apartment building. Naturally she didn't have an umbrella with her; it was supposed to have been a sunny day. The clouds hadn't cleared all day long.

But at last she reached her apartment, where she was safe from curious eyes, either sympathetic or jeering. She was alone, blessedly alone. A sigh of relief broke from her lips as she started to close the door; then her control cracked and she slammed the door with every ounce of strength in her arm. It crashed against the frame with a resounding thud, but the small act of violence didn't release her tension. Trashing her entire office building might help, or choking Farrell Word-law, but both those actions were denied her.

When she thought of the way she had worked for the past five years, the fourteen- and sixteen-hour days, the work she had brought home on the weekends, she wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something. Yes; she definitely wanted to choke Farrell Wordlaw. But that wasn't appropriate behavior for a professional woman, a chic and sophisticated executive in a prestigious investment-banking firm. On the other hand, it was entirely appropriate for someone who had just joined the ranks of the unemployed.

Damn them.

For five years she had dedicated herself to her job, ruthlessly stifling those parts of her personality that didn't fit the image. At first it had been mostly because she needed the job and the money, but Jay was too intense to do anything by half measures. Soon she had become caught up in the teeming rat race—the constant striving for success, for new triumphs, bigger and better deals—and that world had been her life for five years. Today she had been kicked out of it.

It wasn't that she hadn't been successful; she had. Maybe too successful. Some people hadn't liked dealing with her because she was a woman. Realizing that, Jay had tried to be as straightforward and aggressive as any man, to reassure her clients that she would take care of them as well as a man could. To that end she had changed her habits of speech, her wardrobe, never let even a hint of a tear sparkle in her eyes, never giggled, and learned how to drink Scotch, though she had never learned to enjoy it. She had paid for such rigid control with headaches and a constant burning in her stomach, but nevertheless she had thrown herself into the role because, for all its stresses, she had enjoyed the challenge. It was an exciting job, with the lure of a fast trip up the corporate ladder, and for the time being, she had been willing to pay the price.

Well, it was over, by decree of Farrell Wordlaw. He was very sorry, but her style just wasn't "compatible" with the image Wordlaw, Wilson & Trusler wanted to project. He deeply appreciated her efforts, et cetera, et cetera, and would certainly give her a glowing reference, as well as two weeks' notice to get her affairs in order. None of that changed the truth, and she knew it as well as he. She was being pushed out to make room for Duncan Wordlaw, Farrell's son, who had joined the firm the year before and whose performance always ranked second, behind Jay's. She was showing up the senior partner's son, so she had to go. Instead of the promotion she'd been expecting, she'd been handed a pink slip.

She was furious, with no way to express it. It would give her the greatest satisfaction to walk out now and leave Wordlaw scrambling to handle her pending work, but the cold, hard fact was that she needed her salary for those two weeks. If she didn't find another well-paying job immediately, she would lose her apartment.

She had lived within her means, but as her salary had gone up so had her standard of living, and she had very little in savings. She certainly hadn't expected to lose her job because Duncan Wordlaw was an underachiever!

Whenever Steve had lost a job, he'd just shrugged and laughed, telling her not to sweat it, he'd find another. And he always had, too. Jobs hadn't been that important to Steve; neither had security. Jay gave a tight Tittle laugh as she opened a bottle of antacid tablets and shook two of them into her hand. Steve! She hadn't thought about him in years. One thing was certain, she would never be as uncaring about unemployment as he had been. She liked knowing where her next meal was coming from; Steve liked excitement. He'd needed the hot flow of adrenaline more than he'd needed her, and finally that had ended their marriage.

But at least Steve would never be this strung out on nerves, she thought as she chewed the chalky tablets and waited for them to ease the burning in her stomach. Steve would have snapped his fingers at Farrell Word-law and told him what he could do with his two weeks' notice, then walked out whistling. Maybe Steve's attitude was irresponsible, but he would never let a mere job get the best of him.

Well, that was Steve's personality, not hers. He'd been fun, but in the end their differences had been greater than the attraction between them. They had parted on a friendly basis, though she'd been exasperated, as well. Steve would never grow up.

Why was she thinking of him now? Was it because she associated unemployment with his name? She began to laugh, realizing she'd done exactly that. Still chuckling, she ran water into a glass and lifted it in a toast. "To the good times," she said. They'd had a lot of good times, laughing and playing like the two healthy young animals they'd been, but it hadn't lasted.

Then she forgot about him as worry surged into her mind again. She had to find another job immediately, a well-paying job, but she didn't trust Farrell to give her a glowing recommendation. He might praise her to the skies in writing, but then he would spread the word around the New York investment-banking community that she didn't "fit in." Maybe she should try something else. But her experience was in investment banking, and she didn't have the financial reserves to train for another field.

With a sudden feeling of panic, she realized that she was thirty years old and had no idea what she was going to do with her life. She didn't want to spend the rest of it making deals while living on her nerves and an endless supply of antacid tablets, spending all her free time resting in an effort to build up her flagging energy. In reacting against Steve's let-tomorrow-take-care-of-itself-while-I-have-fun-today philosophy, she had gone to the opposite extreme and cut fun out of her life.

She had opened the refrigerator door and was looking at her supply of frozen microwave dinners with an expression of distaste when the doorman buzzed. Deciding to forget about dinner, something she'd done too often lately, she depressed the switch. "Yes, Dennis?"

"Mr. Payne and Mr. McCoy are here to see you, Ms. Granger," Dennis said smoothly. "From the FBI."

"What?" Jay asked, startled, sure she'd misunderstood.

Dennis repeated the message, but the words remained the same.

She was totally dumbfounded. "Send them up," she said, because she didn't know what else to do. FBI? What on earth? Unless slamming your apartment door was somehow against federal law, the worst she could be accused of was tearing the tags off her mattress and pillows. Well, why not? This was a perfectly rotten end to a perfectly rotten day.

The doorbell rang a moment later, and she hurried to open the door, her face still a picture of confusion. The rather nondescript, modestly suited men who stood there both presented badges and identification for her inspection.

"I'm Frank Payne," the older of the two men said. "This is Gilbert McCoy. We'd like to talk to you, if we may."

Jay gestured them into the apartment. "I'm at a total loss," she confessed. "Please sit down. Would you like coffee?"

A look of relief passed over Frank Payne's pleasant face. "Please," he said with heartfelt sincerity. "It's been a long day."

Jay went into the kitchen and hurriedly put on a pot of coffee; then, to be on the safe side, she chewed two more antacid tablets. Finally she took a deep breath and walked out to where the two men were comfortably ensconced on her soft, chic, gray-blue sofa. "What have I done?" she asked, only half-joking.

Both men smiled. "Nothing," McCoy assured her, grinning. "We just want to talk to you about a former acquaintance."

She sank down in the matching gray-blue chair, sighing in relief. The burning in her stomach subsided a little. "Which former acquaintance?" Maybe they were after Farrell Wordlaw; maybe there was justice in the world, after all.

Frank Payne took a small notebook out of his inner coat pocket and opened it, evidently consulting his notes. "Are you Janet Jean Granger, formerly married to Steve Crossfield?"

"Yes." So this had something to do with Steve. She should have known. Still, she was amazed, as if she'd somehow conjured up these two men just by thinking of Steve earlier, something she almost never did. He was so far removed from her life now that she couldn't even form a clear picture in her mind of how he'd looked. But what had he gotten himself into, with his driving need for excitement?

"Does your ex-husband have any relatives? Anyone who might be close to him?"

Slowly Jay shook her head. "Steve is an orphan. He was raised in a series of foster homes, and as far as I know, he didn't stay in touch with any of his foster parents. As for any close friends—" she shrugged "—I haven't seen or heard from him since our divorce five years ago, so I don't have any idea who his friends might be."

Payne frowned, rubbing the deep lines between his brows. "Would you remember the name of a dentist he used while you were married, or perhaps a doctor?"

Jay shook her head, staring at him. "No. Steve was disgustingly healthy."

The two men looked at each other, frowning. McCoy said quietly, "Damn, this isn't going to be easy. We're running into one dead end after another."

Payne's face was deeply lined with fatigue, and something else. He looked back at Jay, his eyes worried. "Do you think that coffee's ready yet, Ms. Granger?"

"It should be. I'll be right back." Without knowing why, Jay felt shaken as she went into the kitchen and began putting cups, cream and sugar on a tray. The coffee had finished brewing, and she transferred the pot to the tray, but then just stood there, staring down at the wafting steam. Steve had to be in serious trouble, really serious, and she regretted it even though there was nothing she could do. It had been inevitable, though. He'd always been chasing after adventure, and unfortunately adventure often went hand in hand with trouble. It had been only a matter of time before the odds caught up with him.

She carried the tray into the living room and placed it on the low table in front of the sofa, her brow furrowed into a worried frown. "What has Steve done?"

"Nothing illegal, that we know of," Payne said hastily. "It's just that he was involved in a... sensitive situation."

Steve hadn't done anything illegal, but the FBI was investigating him? Jay's frown deepened as she poured three cups of coffee. "What sort of sensitive situation?"

Payne looked at her with a troubled expression, and suddenly she noticed that he had very nice eyes, clear and strangely sympathetic. Gentle eyes. Not at all the kind of eyes she would have expected an FBI agent to possess. He cleared his throat. "Very sensitive. We don't even know why he was there. But we need, very badly, to find someone who can make a positive identification of him."

Jay went white, the ramifications of that quiet, sinister statement burning in her mind. Steve was dead. Even though the love she'd felt for him had long since faded away, she knew a piercing grief for what had been. He'd been so much fun, always laughing, his brown eyes lit with devilish merriment. It was as if part of her own childhood had died, to know that his laughter had been stilled. "He's dead," she said dully, staring at the cup in her hand as it began to shake, sloshing the coffee back and forth.

Payne quickly reached out and took the cup from her, placing it on the tray. "We don't know," he said, his face even more troubled. "There was an explosion; one man survived. We think it's Crossfield, but we aren't certain, and it's critical that we know. I can't explain more than that."

It had been a long, terrible day, and it wasn't getting any better. She put her shaking hands to her temples and pressed hard, trying to make sense of what he'd told her. "Wasn't there any identification on him?"

"No," Payne said.

"Then why do you think it's Steve?"

"We know he was there. Part of his driver's license was found."

"Why can't you just look at nun and tell who he is?" she cried. "Why can't you identify the others and find out who he is by process of elimination?"

McCoy looked away. Payne's gentle eyes darkened. "There wasn't enough left to identify. Nothing."

She didn't want to hear any more, didn't want to know any of the details, though she could guess at the horrible carnage. She was suddenly cold, as if her blood had stopped pumping. "Steve?" she asked faintly.

"The man who survived is in critical condition, but the doctors are what they call 'cautiously optimistic.' He has a chance. Two days ago, they were certain he wouldn't last through the night."

"Why is it so important that you know right now who he is? If he lives, you can ask him. If he dies—" She halted abruptly. She couldn't say the words, but she thought them. If he died, it wouldn't matter. There would be no survivors, and they would close their files.

"I can't tell you anything except that we need to know who this man is. We need to know who died, so certain steps can be taken. Ms. Granger, I can tell you that my agency isn't directly involved in the situation. We're merely cooperating with others, because this concerns national security."

Suddenly Jay knew what they wanted from her. They would have been glad if she could have helped them locate any dental or medical records on Steve, but that wasn't their prune objective. They wanted her to go with them, to personally identify the injured man as Steve.

In a dull voice she asked, "Can't they tell if this man matches the general description of any of their own people? Surely they have measurements, fingerprints, that sort of thing?"

She was looking down, so she didn't see the quick wariness in Payne's eyes. He cleared his throat again. "Your husband—ex-husband—and our man are... were.. .the same general size. Fingerprints aren't possible; his hands are burned. But you know more about nun than anyone else we can find. There might be something about him that you recognize, some little birthmark or scar that you remember."

It still confused her; she couldn't understand why they wouldn't be able to recognize their own man, unless he was so horribly mutilated... Shivering, she didn't let herself complete the thought, didn't let the picture form in her mind. What if it was Steve? She didn't hate him, had never hated him. He was a rascal, but he'd never been cruel or meanhearted; even after she had stopped loving him, she had still been fond of him, in an exasperated way.

"You want me to go with you," she said, making it a statement instead of a question.

"Please," Payne replied quietly.

She didn't want to, but he had made it seem like her patriotic duty. "All right. I'll get my coat. Where is he?"

Payne cleared his throat again and Jay tensed. She'd already learned that he did that whenever he had to tell her something awkward or unpleasant. "He's at Bethesda Naval Hospital in D.C. You'll need to pack a small suitcase. We have a private jet waiting for us at Kennedy."

Things were moving too fast for her to understand; she felt as if all she could do was follow the path of least resistance. Too much had happened today. First she had been fired, a brutal blow in itself, and now this. The security she had worked so hard to attain for herself had vanished in a few short minutes in Farrell Wordlaw's office, leaving her spuming helplessly, unable to get her feet back on the ground. Her life had been so quiet for the past five years; how could all this have happened so quickly?

Numbly she packed two dresses that traveled well, then collected her cosmetics from the bathroom. As she shoved what she needed into a small zippered plastic bag, she was stunned by her own reflection in the mirror. She looked so white and strained, and thin. Unhealthily thin. Her eyes were hollow and her cheekbones too prominent, the result of working long hours and living on antacid tablets. As soon as she returned to the city she would have to begin looking for another job, as well as working out her notice, which would mean more skipped meals.

Then she felt ashamed of herself. Why was she worrying about a job when Steve—or someone—was lying in a hospital bed fighting for his life? Steve had always told her that she worried too much about work, that she couldn't enjoy today because she was always worried about tomorrow. Maybe he was right.

Steve! Sudden tears blurred her eyes as she stuffed the cosmetic bag into her small overnighter. She hoped he would be all right.

At the last moment she remembered to pack fresh underwear. She was rattled, oddly disorganized, but finally she zipped the case and got her purse. "I'm ready," she said as she stepped out of the bedroom. •

Gratefully she saw that one of the men had carried the coffee things into the kitchen. McCoy took the case from her hand, and she got her coat from the closet; Payne silently helped her into it. She looked around to make certain all the lights were off; then the three of them stepped into the hallway, and she locked the door behind her, wondering why she felt as if she would never be back.

* * *

She slept on the plane. She hadn't meant to, but almost as soon as they were airborne and she relaxed in the comfortable leather seat, her eyelids became too heavy to keep open. She didn't feel Payne spread a light blanket over her.

Payne sat across from her, watching her broodingly. He wasn't quite comfortable with what he was doing, dragging an innocent woman into this mess. Not even McCoy knew how much of a mess it was, how complicated it had become; as far as the other man knew, the situation was exactly the way he'd outlined it to Jay Granger: a simple matter of identification. Only a handful of people knew that it was more; maybe only two others besides himself. Maybe only one other, but that one carried a lot of power. When he wanted something done, it was done. Payne had known him for years, but had never managed to be comfortable in his presence.

She looked tired and oddly frail. She was too thin. She was about five-six, but he doubted she weighed much over a hundred pounds, and something about her made him think such thinness wasn't normal for her. He wondered if she was strong enough to be used as a shield.

She was probably very pretty when she was rested, and when she had some meat on her bones. Her hair was nice, a kind of honey brown, as thick and sleek as an otter's coat, and her eyes were dark blue. But now she just looked tired. It hadn't been an easy day for her.

Still, she had asked some questions that had made him uncomfortable. If she hadn't been so tired and upset she might have pinned him down on some things he didn't want to discuss, asked questions in front of McCoy that he didn't want raised. It was essential to the plan that everything be taken at face value. There could be no doubt at all.

* * *

The flight from New York to Bethesda was a short one, but the nap refreshed her, gave her back a sense of balance. The only thing was, the more alert she felt, the more unreal this entire situation seemed. She checked her watch as Payne and McCoy escorted her off the private jet when they landed at Washington National and into a government car waiting on the tarmac for them, and was startled to see that it was only nine o'clock. Only a few hours had passed, yet her life had been turned upside down.

"Why Bethesda?" she murmured to Payne as the car purred down the street, a few flakes of snow drifting down like flower petals on a light breeze. She stared at the snowflakes, wondering absently if an early-winter snowstorm would keep her from getting home. "Why not a civilian hospital?"

"Security." Payne's quiet voice barely reached her ears. "Don't worry. The best trauma experts were called in to work on him, civilian and military. We're doing the best we can for your husband."

"Ex-husband," Jay said faintly.

"Yes. Sorry."

As they turned onto Wisconsin Avenue, which would eventually take them to the Naval Medical Center, the snow became a little heavier. Payne was glad she hadn't asked any more questions about why the man was in a military hospital instead of, say, Georgetown University Hospital. Of course, he'd told her the truth, as far as it went. Security was the reason he was at Bethesda. It just wasn't the only reason. He watched the snow swirling down and wondered if all the loose threads could possibly be woven into a believable whole.

When they reached the medical center, only Payne got out of the car with her; McCoy nodded briefly in farewell and drove away. Snowflakes quickly silvered their hair as Payne took her elbow and hurried her inside, where the welcome warmth just as quickly melted the lacy flakes. No one paid them any attention as they took an elevator upward.

When the elevator doors opened, they stepped out into a quiet corridor. "This is the ICU floor," Payne said. "His room is this way."

They turned to the left, where double doors were guarded by two stern young men in uniform, both of whom wore pistols. Payne must have been known on sight, for one of the guards quickly opened a door for them. "Thank you," Payne said courteously as they passed.

The unit was deserted, except for the nurses who monitored all the life-support systems and continually checked on the patients, but still Jay sensed a quiet hum that pervaded every corner of the unit—the sound of the machines that kept the patients alive or aided in their recovery. For the first time it struck her that Steve must be hooked up to one or more of those machines, unable to move, and her steps faltered. It was just so hard to take in.

Payne's hand remained under her elbow, unobtrusively providing her with support. He stopped before a door and turned to her, his clear gray eyes full of concern. "I want to prepare you a little. He's badly injured. His skull was fractured, and the bones in his face were crushed. He's breathing through a trach tube. Don't expect him to look like the man you remember." He waited a moment, watching her, but she didn't say anything, and finally he opened the door.

Jay stepped into the room, and for a split second both her heart and lungs seemed to stop functioning. Then her heart lurched into rhythm again, and she drew a deep, painful breath. Tears sprang to her eyes as she stared at the inert form on the white hospital bed, and his name trembled soundlessly on her lips. It didn't seem possible that this... this could be Steve.

The man on the bed was almost literally a mummy. Both legs were broken and encased in pristine plaster casts, supported by a network of pulleys and slings. His hands were wrapped in bandages that extended almost to his elbows. His head and face were swathed in gauze, with extra thick pads over his eyes; only his lips, chin and jaw were visible, and they were swollen and discolored. His breath whistled faintly but regularly from the tube in his throat, and various other tubes ran into his body. Monitors overhead recorded every detail of his bodily functions. And he was still. He was so still.

Her throat was so dry that speaking was painful. "How can I possibly identify him?" she asked rawly. "You knew I couldn't. You knew how he looks!"

Payne was watching her with sympathy. "I'm sorry, I know it's a shock. But we need for you to try. You were married to Steve Crossfield. You know him better than any other person on earth. Maybe there's some little detail you remember, a scar or a mole, a birthmark. Anything. Take your time and look at him. I'll be just outside."

He went out and closed the door behind him, leaving her alone in the room with that motionless figure and the quiet beeping of the monitors, the weak whistle of his breathing. Her hands knotted into fists, and tears blurred her eyes again. Whether this man was Steve or not, a pity so acute it was painful filled her.

Somehow her feet carried her closer to the bed. She carefully avoided the tubes and wires while never looking away from his face—or as much of his face as she could see. Steve? Was this really Steve?

She knew what Payne wanted. He hadn't actually spelled it out, but he hadn't needed to. He wanted her to lift the sheet away and study this man while he lay there unconscious and helpless, naked except for the bandages over his wounds. He thought she would have a wife's intimate knowledge of her husband's body, but five years is a long time. She could remember Steve's grin, and the devilish sparkle in his chocolaty brown eyes, but other details had long since faded from her mind.

It wouldn't matter to this man if she stripped back the sheet and looked at him. He was unconscious; he might well die, even now, with all these miracle machines hooked up to his body. He would never know. And as Payne would say, she would be doing her country a service if she could somehow identify this man as Steve Crossfield, or as definitely not.

She couldn't stop looking at him. He was so badly hurt. How could anyone be injured this critically and still live? If he were granted a lucid moment, right now, would he even want to live? Would he be able to walk again? Use his hands? See? Think? Or would he take stock of his injuries and tell the doctors, "Thanks, guys, but I think I'll take my chances at the Pearly Gates."

But perhaps he had a tremendous will to live. Perhaps that was what had kept him alive this long, an unconscious, deep-seated will to be. Fierce determination could move mountains.

Hesitantly she stretched out her hand and touched his right arm, just above the bandages that covered his burns. His skin was hot to the touch, and she jerked her fingers back in surprise. Somehow she had thought he would be cold. This intense heat was another sign of how brightly life still burned inside him, despite his stillness. Slowly her hand returned to his arm, lightly resting on the smooth skin just below the inside of his elbow, taking care not to disturb the IV needle that dripped a clear liquid into a vein.

He was warm. He was alive.

Her heart was pounding in her chest, some intense emotion welling up in her until she thought she would burst from the effort of trying to control it. It staggered her to think of what he had been through, yet he was still fighting, defying the odds, his spirit too fierce and proud to just let go. If she could have, she would have suffered the pain in his place.

And his body had been invaded enough. Needles pierced his veins; wire and electrodes picked up and broadcast his every heartbeat. As if he didn't have enough wounds already, the doctors had made more to insert drainage tubes in his chest and side, and there were other tubes, as well. Every day a host of strangers looked at him and treated him as if he were nothing but a slab of meat, all to save his life.

But she wouldn't invade his privacy, not in this manner. Modesty might not mean anything to him, but it was still his choice to make.

All her attention was focused on him; nothing else in the world existed in this moment except the man lying so still in the hospital bed. Was this Steve? Would she feel some sense of familiarity, despite the disfiguring swelling and the bandages that swathed bun? She tried to remember.

Had Steve been this muscular? Had his arms been this thick, his chest this deep? He could have changed, gained weight, done a lot of physical work that would have developed his shoulders and arms more, so she couldn't go by that. Men got heavier in the chest as they matured.

His chest had been shaved. She looked at the dark stubble of body hair. Steve had had chest hair, though not a lot of it.

His beard? She looked at his jaw, what she could see of it, but his face was so swollen that she couldn't find anything familiar. Even his lips were swollen.

Something wet trickled down her cheek, and in surprise she dashed her hand across her face. She hadn't even realized she was crying.

Payne reentered the room and silently offered her his handkerchief. When she had wiped her face he led her away from the bedside, his arm warm and comforting around her waist, letting her lean on him. "I'm sorry," he finally offered. "I know it isn't easy."

She shook her head, feeling like a fool for breaking down like that, especially in light of what she had to tell him. "I don't know. I'm sorry, but I can't tell if he's Steve, or not. I just... can't."

"Do you think he could be?" Payne asked insistently.

Jay rubbed her temples. "I suppose so. I can't tell. There are so many bandages—"

"I understand. I know how difficult it is. But I need something to tell my superiors. Was your husband that tall? Was there anything at all familiar about him?"

If he understood, why did he keep pushing? Her headache was getting worse by the second. "I just don't know!" she cried. "I guess Steve is that tall, but it's hard to tell when he's lying down. Steve has dark hair and brown eyes, but I can't even tell that much about this man!"

Payne looked down at her. "It's on his medical sheet," he said quietly. "Brown hair and brown eyes."

For a moment the import of that didn't register; then her eyes widened. She hadn't felt any sense of recognition for the man at all, but she was still dazed by the storm of emotion he had caused in her: pity, yes, but also awe, that he was still alive and fighting, and an almost staggering respect for the determination and sheer guts he must have.

Very faintly, her face white, she said, "Then he must be Steve, mustn't he?"

A flash of relief crossed Payne's face, then was gone before she could be certain it was there. He nodded. "I'll notify our people that you've verified his identity. He's Steve Crossfield."

Chapter Two

When Jay awoke the next morning she lay very still in the bed, staring around the unfamiliar hotel room and trying to orient herself. The events of the previous day were mostly a blur, except for the crystal-clear memory she had of the injured man in the hospital. Steve. That man was Steve.

She should have recognized him. Even though it had been five years, she had once loved him. Something about him should have been familiar, despite the disfiguring bruises and swelling. An odd feeling of guilt assailed her, though she knew it was ridiculous, but it was as if she had let bun down somehow, reduced nun to the level of being too unimportant in her life for her to remember how he looked.

Grimacing, Jay got out of bed. There she went again, letting things matter too much to her. Steve had constantly told her to lighten up, and his tone had sometimes been full of impatience. That was another area where they had been incompatible. She was too intense, too involved with everyday life and the world around her, while Steve had skated blithely on the surface.

She was free to return to New York that morning, but she was reluctant to do so. It was only Saturday; there was no hurry as long as she returned in time to go to work Monday morning. She didn't want to sit in her apartment all weekend long and brood about being unemployed, and she wanted to see Steve again. That seemed to be what Payne wanted, too. He hadn't mentioned making arrangements for her return to New York.

She had been so exhausted that for once she had slept deeply, and as a result the shadows beneath her eyes weren't as dark as they usually were. She stared into the bathroom mirror, wondering if being fired might have been a blessing in disguise. The way she had been pushing herself had been hard on her health, burning away weight she couldn't afford to lose, drawing the skin tightly over her facial bones so that she looked both haggard and emaciated, especially without makeup. She made a face at herself in the mirror. She'd never been a beauty and never would be, but she had once been pretty. Her dark blue eyes and swath of sleek, heavy, golden-honey-brown hair were her best features, though the rest of her face could be described as ordinary.

What would Steve say if he could see her now? Would he be disappointed, and bluntly say so?

Why couldn't she get him out of her mind? It was natural to be concerned about him, to feel sharp sympathy because of his terrible injuries, but she couldn't stop herself from wondering what he would think, what he would say, about her. Not the Steve he had been before, that charming but unreliable will-o'-the-wisp, but the man he was now: harder, stronger, with the fierce will to survive that had kept him alive in the face of overwhelming odds. What would that man think of her? Would he still want her?

The thought made her face flame, and she jerked away from the mirror to turn on the shower. She must be going mad! He was an invalid. Even now, it wasn't by any means certain that he would survive, despite his fighting nature. And even if he did, he might not function as well as he had before. The surgery to save his sight might not have worked; they wouldn't know until the bandages came off. He might have brain damage. He might not be able to walk, talk or feed himself.

Helplessly she felt hot tears begin to slide down her cheeks again. Why should she cry for him now? Why couldn't she stop crying for him? Every tune she thought of him she started crying, which was ridiculous, when she hadn't even been able to recognize him.

Payne was calling for her at ten, so she forced herself to stop crying and get ready. She managed that with plenty of time to spare, then found, surprisingly, that she was hungry. She usually didn't eat breakfast, sustaining herself with an endless supply of coffee until lunch, when her stomach would be burning and she wouldn't be able to eat much. But already the strain of her job was fading away, and she wanted food.

She ordered breakfast from room service and received it in a startlingly short length of time. Falling on the tray like a famine victim, she devoured the omelet and toast in record time; when Payne knocked on her door, she had been finished for almost half an hour.

Without seeming to, Payne studied her face with sharp eyes that noted and analyzed every detail. She'd been crying. This was really getting to her, and though that was exactly what they wanted, he still regretted that she had to be hurt. She also looked immeasurably better this morning, with a bit of color in her face. Her marvelous eyes were bigger and brighter than he had remembered, but part of that was the result of her tears. He only hoped she wouldn't have to shed too many more.

"I've already called to check on his condition," he reported, taking her arm. "Good news. His vital signs are improving. He's still unconscious, but his brain waves are increasing in activity and the doctors are more optimistic than they've been. He's really done better than anyone expected."

She didn't point out that they had expected him to die, so anything was better than that. She didn't want to think about how close he had come to dying. In some way she didn't understand, Steve had become too important to her during those minutes when she had stood beside his bed and touched his arm.

The big white naval hospital was much busier that morning than it had been the night before, and two different guards stood at the doors to the ICU wing where Steve's room was located. Again they seemed to know Payne on sight. Jay wondered how many times he had been here to see Steve, and why he would have felt it necessary to be there at all. As he had that morning, he could have checked on Steve's condition by phone. Whatever Steve had gotten himself into must be extremely important, and Payne wanted to be on hand the instant he recovered consciousness, if ever.

Payne left her to enter the room on her own, saying he wanted to talk to someone. Jay nodded absently, her attention already focused on Steve. She pushed open the door and walked in, leaving Payne standing in the hall practically in midsentence. A wry, faintly regretful smile touched his mouth as he looked at the closed door; then he turned and walked briskly down the hall.

Jay stared at the man in the bed. Steve. Now that she was seeing him again, it was a little hard to accept that he was Steve. She had known Steve as vibrant, burning with energy; he was so still now that it threw her off balance.

He was still in the same position he'd been in the night before; the machines were still quietly humming and beeping, and fluids were still being fed into his veins through needles. The strong scent of hospital antiseptic burned her nose, and suddenly she wondered if, in some corner of his mind, he was aware of the smell. Could he hear people talking, though he was unable to respond?

She walked to the bed and touched his arm as she had the night before. The heat of his skin tingled against her fingertips despite the coolness of the controlled temperature. The mummylike expanse of bandages robbed him of individuality, and his lips were so swollen they looked more like caricatures than the lips of the man she had once kissed, loved, married, fought with and finally divorced. Only the hot bare skin of his arm made him real to her.

Did he feel anything? Was he aware of her touch?

"Steve?" she whispered, her voice trembling. It felt so funny to talk to a motionless mummy, knowing that he was probably so deep in his coma that he was unaware of everything, and that even if by some miracle he could hear her, he wouldn't be able to respond. But even knowing all that, something inside compelled her to try. "I.. .it's Jay." Sometimes he'd called her Jaybird, and when he'd really wanted to aggravate her he'd called her Janet Jean. Her nickname had evolved when she'd been a very young child. Her parents had called her Janet Jean, but her elder brother, Wilson, had shortened it to J. J., which had naturally become Jay. By the time she'd started school, her name was, irrevocably, Jay.

"You've been hurt," she told Steve, still stroking his arm. "But you're going to be all right. Your legs have been broken, and they're both in casts. That's why you can't move them. They have a tube in your throat, helping you to breathe, and that's why you can't talk. You can't see because you have bandages over your eyes. Don't worry about anything. They're taking good care of you here."

Was it a lie that he was going to be all right? Yet she didn't know what else to tell him. If he could hear her, she had to reassure him, not give him something else to worry about.

Clearing her throat, she began telling him about the past five years, what she'd been doing since the divorce. She even told him about being fired, and how badly she'd wanted to punch Farrell Wordlaw right in the nose. How badly she still wanted to punch him in the nose.

The voice was calm and infinitely tender. He didn't understand the words, because unconsciousness still wrapped his mind in layers of blackness, but he heard the voice, felt it, like something warm touching his skin. It made him feel less alone, that tiny, dim contact.

Something hard and vital in him focused on the contact, yearning toward it, forcing him upward out of the blackness, even though he sensed the fanged monsters that waited for him, waiting to tear at his flesh with hot knives and brutal teeth. He would have to endure that before he could reach the voice, and he was very weak. He might not make it. Yet the voice reached out to him, pulling at him like a magnet, lifting him out of the deep senselessness that had held him.

"I remember the doll I got for Christmas when I was four years old," Jay said, talking automatically now. Her voice was low and dreamy. "She was soft and floppy, like a real baby, and she had curly brown hair and big brown eyes, with inch-long lashes that closed when I laid her down. I named her Chrissy, for my very best friend in the world. I lugged that doll around until she was so ragged she looked like a miniature bag lady. I slept with her, I put her on the chair beside me when I ate, and I rode miles around and around the house on my tricycle with her on the seat in front of me. Then I began to grow up, and I lost interest in Chrissy. I put her on the shelf with my other dolls and forgot about her. But the first time I saw you, Steve, I thought, 'He's got Chrissy eyes.' That's what I used to call brown eyes when I was little and didn't know my colors. You have Chrissy eyes."

His breathing seemed to be slower, deeper. She couldn't be certain, but she thought there was a different rhythm to the rise and fall of his chest. The sound of his breathing whistled in and out through the tube in his throat. Her fingers gently rubbed his arm, maintaining the small contact even though something inside her actually hurt from touching his skin.

"I almost told you a couple of times that you have Chrissy eyes, but I didn't think you'd like it." She laughed, the sound warm in the room filled with impersonal, humming machines. "You were always so protective of your macho image. A devil-may-care adventurer shouldn't have Chrissy eyes, should he?"

Suddenly his arm twitched, and the movement so startled her that she jerked her hand away, her face pale. Except for breathing, it was the first time he'd moved, even though she knew it was probably an involuntary muscle spasm. Her eyes flew to his face but there was nothing to see there. Bandages covered the upper two-thirds of his head, and his bruised lips were immobile. Slowly she reached out and touched his arm again, but he lay still under her touch, and after a moment she resumed talking to him, rambling on as she dragged up childhood memories.

Frank Payne silently opened the door and stopped in his tracks, listening to her low murmurings. She still stood by the bed; hell, she probably hadn't moved an inch from the man's side, and she had been in here—he checked his watch—almost three hours. If she had been the guy's wife, he could have understood it, but she was his ex-wife, and she was the one who had ended the marriage. Yet there she stood, her attention locked on him as if she were willing him to get better.

"How about some coffee?" he asked softly, not wanting to startle her, but her head jerked around anyway, her eyes wide.

Then she smiled. "That sounds good." She walked away from the bed, then stopped and looked back, a frown knitting her brows together. "I hate to leave him alone. If he understands anything at all, it must be awful to just lie there, trapped and hurting and not knowing why, thinking he's all alone."

"He doesn't know anything," Payne assured her, wishing it was different. "He's in a coma, and right now it's better that he stays in it."

"Yes," Jay agreed, knowing he was right. If Steve were conscious now, he would be in terrible pain.

That first faint glimmer of awareness had faded; the warm voice had gone away and left him without direction. Without that to guide him, he sank back into the blackness, into nothingness.

Frank lingered over the bad cafeteria food and the surprisingly good coffee. It wasn't great coffee; it truly wasn't even good coffee, but it was better than he'd expected. The next batch might not be as good, so he wanted to enjoy this one as long as he could. Not only that, he didn't know exactly how to bring up the subject he'd been skating around all during lunch, but he had to do it. The Man had made it plain: Jay Granger had to stay. He didn't want her to identify the patient and leave; he wanted her to become emotionally involved, at least enough to stay. And what the Man wanted, he got.

Frank had sighed. "What if she falls in love with him? Hell, you know what he's like. He has women crawling all over him. They can't resist him."

"She may be hurt," the Man had conceded, though the steel never left his voice. "But his life is on the line, and our options are limited. For whatever reason, Steve Crossfield was there when it went down. We know it, and they know it. We don't have a list of possibilities to choose from. Crossfield is the only choice."

He hadn't needed to say more. Since Crossfield was the only choice, his ex-wife was also the only choice by reason of being the only person who could identify him.

"Did McCoy buy it?" the Man had asked abruptly.

"The whole nine yards." Then Frank's voice had sharpened. "You don't think Gilbert McCoy is—"

The Man interrupted. "No. I know he isn't. But McCoy's a damned sharp agent. If he bought it, that means we're doing a good job of making things look the way we want."

"What happens if she's with him when he wakes up?"

"It doesn't matter. The doctors say he'll be too confused and disoriented to make sense. They're monitoring him, and they'll let us know when they start bringing him out of it. We can't keep her out of his room with-' out it looking suspicious, but watch it. If he starts making sense, get her out of the room fast, until we can talk to him. But there's not too much danger of that happening."

"You're stirring that coffee to death." Jay's voice broke in on his thoughts, and he looked up at her, then down at the coffee. He'd been stirring it so long that it had cooled. He grimaced at the waste of not-bad coffee.

"I've been trying to think of how to ask something of you," he admitted.

Jay gave him a puzzled look. "There's only one way. Just ask."

"All right." He took a deep breath. "Don't go back to New York tomorrow. Will you stay here with Steve? He needs you. He's going to need you even more."

The words hit her hard. Steve had never needed her. She had been too intense, wanting more from him, from their relationship, than he had in him to give. He'd always wanted a slight distance between them, mentally and emotionally, claiming that she "smothered" him. She remembered the time he'd shouted those words at her; then she thought of the man lying so still in the hospital bed, and again she felt that unnerving sense of unreality.

Slowly she shook her head. "Steve is a loner. You should know that from the information you have on him. He doesn't need me now, won't need me when he wakes up, and probably won't like the idea of anyone taking care of him, least of all his ex-wife."

"He'll be very confused when he wakes up. You'll be a lifeline to him, the only face he knows, someone he can trust, someone who'll reassure him. He's in a drug-induced coma... the doctors can tell you more about it than I can. But they've said he'll be very confused and agitated, maybe even delirious. It'll help if someone he knows is there."

Practicality made her shake her head again. "I'm sorry, Mr. Payne. I don't think he'd want me there, but I wouldn't stay anyway, if I could. I was fired from my job yesterday. I have two weeks' notice to work out. I can't afford not to work those two weeks, and I have to find another job."

He whistled through his teeth. "You had a bitch of a day, didn't you?"

She had to laugh, in spite of the seriousness of the situation, "That's a good description of it, yes." The longer she knew Frank Payne, the more she liked him. There was nothing outstanding about him: he was of medium height, medium weight, with graying brown hair and clear gray eyes. His face was pleasant, but not memorable. Yet there was a steadiness in him that she sensed and trusted.

He looked thoughtful. "It's possible we can do something about your situation. Let me check into it before you book a flight back. Would you like a chance to tell your boss to go take a flying leap?"

Jay gave him a very sweet smile, and this time he was the one who laughed.

It wasn't until later that she realized the request meant they were certain Steve would live. She was back in Steve's room, standing by his bed, and she gently squeezed his arm as relief filled her. "You're going to make it," she whispered. It was almost sundown, and she had spent most of the day standing beside his bed. Several times a nurse or an orderly had requested that she step outside, but except for that and the time she had spent with Frank at lunch, she had been with Steve. She had talked until her throat was dry, talked until she couldn't think of anything else to say and silence had fallen again, but even then she had kept her hand on his arm. Maybe he knew she was there.

A nurse came in and gave Jay a curious look but didn't ask her to leave the room. Instead she checked the monitors and made notes on a pad. "It's odd," she murmured. "But maybe not. Somehow I think our boy knows when you're here. His heartbeat is stronger and his respiration rate settles down if you're here with him. When you left for lunch his vital signs deteriorated, then picked back up when you returned. I've noticed the same thing happen every time we've asked you to leave the room. Major Lunning is going to be interested in these charts."

Jay stared at the nurse, then at Steve. "He knows I'm here?"

"Not consciously," the nurse said hastily. "He isn't going to wake up and talk to you, not with the barbiturate dose he's getting. But who knows what he senses? You've been talking to him all day, haven't you? Part of it must be getting through, on some level. You must be really important to him, for him to respond to you like this."

The nurse left the room. Stunned, Jay looked back at Steve. Even if he somehow sensed her presence, why would it affect him like that? Yet she couldn't ignore the nurse's theory, because she had noticed herself that the rhythm of his breathing had changed. It was almost impossible for her to believe, because Steve had never needed her in any way. He had enjoyed her for a time, but something in him had kept her at a small but significant distance. Because he couldn't return love of any depth, he hadn't allowed himself to accept a deep love. All Steve had ever wanted was a superficial sort of relationship, a light, playful love that could end with no regrets. Theirs had ended in just that way, and she had seldom thought of him after they had parted. Why should she be important to him now?

Then she gave a low laugh as understanding came to her. Steve wasn't responding to her, he was responding to a touch and a voice meant for him personally, rather than the impartial, automatic touches and words of the healers surrounding him. Anyone else would have done just as well. Frank Payne could have stood there and talked to him with the same result.

She said as much an hour later, when Major Lunning studied the charts and stroked his jaw, occasionally glancing at her with a thoughtful expression. Frank stood to one side, careful to keep his face blank, but his sharp gaze didn't miss anything.

Major Limning was one of the top military doctors, a man devoted to both healing and the military. He wasn't stationed at Bethesda, but he hadn't questioned the orders that had gotten him up in the middle of the night and brought him there. He and several other doctors had been given the task of saving this man's life. At the time they hadn't even known his name. Now there was a name on his chart, but they still had no inkling why he was so important to the powers that be. It didn't make any difference; Major Lunning would use whatever weapon or procedure he could find to help his patient. Right now, one of those weapons was this too-thin young woman with dark blue eyes and a full, passionate-looking mouth.

"I don't think we can ignore the pattern, Ms. Granger," the Major said frankly. "It's your voice he responds to, not mine, not Mr. Payne's, not any of the nurses'. Mr. Crossfield isn't in a deep coma. He's breathing on his own and still has reflexes. It isn't unreasonable to think that he can hear you. He may not understand and he certainly can't respond, but it's entirely possible that he hears."

"But I understood that his coma is drug-induced," Jay protested. "When people are drugged, aren't they totally unconscious?"

"There are different levels of consciousness. Let me explain his injuries more completely. He has simple fractures of both legs, nothing that will prevent him from walking normally. He has second-degree burns on his hands and arms, but the worst of the bums are on his palms and fingers, as if he grabbed a hot pipe, or perhaps put his hands up to shield his face. His spleen was ruptured, and we removed it. One lung was punctured and collapsed. But the worst of his injuries were to his head and face. His skull was fractured, and his facial bones were simply shattered.

"We performed surgery immediately to repair the damage, but to control the swelling of the brain and prevent further damage, we have to administer large doses of barbiturates. That keeps him in a coma. Now, the deeper the coma, the less the brain functions. In a deep coma the patient may not even be able to breathe for himself. The level of the coma depends in part on the patient's tolerance for the drugs, which varies from person to person. Mr. Crossfield's tolerance seems to be a bit higher than usual, so his coma isn't as deep as it could be. We haven't increased the dosage, because it hasn't been necessary. In time we'll gradually decrease the dosage and bring him out of the coma. He's going to make it on his own, but I'll tell you frankly, he definitely does better when you're with him. There's still a lot we don't know about the mind and how it affects the body, but we know it does."

"Are you saying he'll get well faster if I'm here?"

The Major grinned. "That's it in a nutshell."

Jay felt tired and confused, as if she'd spent hours in a house of mirrors trying to find her way out but instead finding only one deceitful reflection after another. It wasn't just these people, all insisting that she stay; part of it was inside. Something happened when she touched Steve, something she didn't understand. She certainly hadn't felt it before, even when they'd been married. It was as if he were more than he had been, somehow different in ways she sensed but couldn't define.

She wished they hadn't put this responsibility on her. She didn't want to stay. This strange feeling she had for Steve made her feel threatened. If she left now, it wouldn't have a chance to develop. But if she stayed... She hadn't been devastated by their divorce, five years earlier, because their love had never grown, never gone any deeper. In the end it had simply faded away. But Steve was different now; he'd changed in those five years, into a man whose power she could feel even when he was unconscious. If she fell in love with him again, she might never get over it.

But if she left, she would feel guilty because she hadn't helped him.

She needed to find another job. She had to get back to New York and begin doing something to keep her life from disintegrating. But she was tired of the frantic pushing and maneuvering, the constant dealing. She didn't want to go, but she was afraid to stay.

Frank saw the tension in her face, felt it vibrating through her. "Let's walk down to the lounge," he said, stepping forward to take her arm. "You need a break. See you later, Major."

Major Lunning nodded. "Try to talk her into staying. This guy really needs her."

Out in the hall, Jay murmured, "I hate it when people talk around me, as if I'm not there. I'm tired of being maneuvered." She was thinking of her job when she said that, but Frank gave her a sharp look.

"I don't mean to put you in a difficult position," he said diplomatically. "It's just that we badly need to talk to your husband... sorry, ex-husband. I keep forgetting. At any rate, we're willing to do whatever is possible to aid in his recovery,"

Jay put her hands in her pockets, slowing her steps as she considered something. "Is Steve going to be arrested because of what he was doing, whatever it was?"

Frank didn't have any hesitation on that score. "No," he said with absolute certainty. The man was going to get nothing but the best medicine and best protection his country could provide him; Frank only wished he could tell Jay why, but that wasn't possible. "We think he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, an innocent bystander, if you will. But given his background, we think it likely he would have picked up on the situation. It's even possible he was trying to help when everything blew up in his face."

"Literally."

"Yes, unfortunately. Anything he can remember will help us."

They reached the lounge and he opened the door so she could precede him. They were alone, thank heavens. He went over to the coffee machine and fed coins into it. "Coffee?"

"No, thank you," Jay replied tiredly as she sat down. Her stomach was blessedly calm, and she didn't want to upset it now with the noxious brew that usually came from those machines. She hadn't noticed before how tired she was, but now fatigue was washing over her in great waves that made her feel giddy.

Frank sat down opposite her, cradling the Styrofoam cup in his hands. "I talked to my superior, explained your situation," he began. "Would you stay if you didn't have to worry about finding another job?"

She let her eyelids droop as she rubbed her forehead in an effort to force herself to concentrate on what he'd said. She couldn't remember ever having been as tired as she was now, as if all energy had drained from her. Even her mind felt numb. All day long she had focused so fiercely on Steve that everything else had blurred, and now that she had let herself relax, exhaustion had crashed in on her, a deep lassitude that was mental as well as physical.

"I don't understand," she murmured. "I have to work at a job to make money. And even if you've somehow lined one up for me, I can't work and stay here, too."

"Staying here would be your job," Frank explained, wishing he didn't have to push her. She looked as if it were all she could do to sit erect. But maybe she would be more easily convinced now, with fatigue dulling her mind. "We'll take care of your apartment and living expenses. It's that important to us."

Her eyelids lifted and she stared at him incredulously. "You'd pay me to stay here?"

"Yes."

"But I don't want money to stay with him! I want to' help him, don't you understand that?"

"But you can't, because of your financial position," Frank said, nodding. "What we're offering to do is take care of that for you. If you were independently wealthy, would you hesitate to stay?"

"Of course not! I'll do whatever I can to help him, but the idea of taking money for it is ugly."

"We aren't paying you to stay with him, we're paying you so you can stay with him. Do you see the difference?"

She had to be going mad, because she did see the difference between the two halves of the hair he had just split. And his eyes were so kind that she instinctively trusted him, even though she sensed a lot going on that she didn't understand.

"We'll get an apartment for you close by, so you can spend more time with him," Frank continued, his voice soothing and reasonable. "We'll also keep your New York apartment for you, so you'll have that to go back to. If you give me the word now, we can have a place here ready for you to move into on Monday."

There had to be arguments she could use, but she couldn't think of any. Frank was sweeping all obstacles out of the way; it would make her feel mean and petty if she refused to do what he wanted, when he had gone to so much trouble and they—whoever they were—so badly wanted her to remain.

"I'll have to go home," she said helplessly. "To New York, that is. I need more clothes, and I'll have to quit my job." Suddenly she laughed. "If it's possible to quit a job you've already been fired from."

"I'll make the travel arrangements for you."

"How long do you think I'll be here?" She was estimating a two- or three-week stay, but she wanted to be certain. She would have to do something about her mail and utilities.

Frank's gaze was level. "A couple of months, at least. Maybe longer."

"Months!"

"He'll have to have therapy."

"But he'll be conscious then. I thought you only wanted me to stay until the worst was over!"

He cleared his throat. "We'd like you to stay until he's dismissed from the hospital, at least." He had been trying to break the idea to her gradually, first by just getting her here, then convincing her that Steve needed her, then talking her into staying for the duration. He only hoped it would work.

"But why?"

"He'll need you. He'll be in pain. I haven't told you before, but he needs more surgery on his eyes. It will probably be six to eight weeks before he'll get the bandages off his eyes for good. He's going to be confused, in pain, and they'll put him through more pain in therapy. To top it all off, he won't be able to see. Jay, you're going to be his lifeline."

She sat there numbly, staring at him. It looked as if, after all this time and now that it was too late, Steve was going to need her more than either of them had ever thought.

Chapter Three

It felt strange to be back in New York. Jay had flown back on Sunday afternoon and had spent the hours packing her clothes and other personal possessions, but even her apartment had felt strange, as if she no longer belonged there. She packed automatically, her mind on the hospital room in Bethesda. How was he doing? She had spent the morning with him, constantly talking and stroking his arm, yet she felt frantic at spending such a long time away from him.

On Monday morning she dressed for work for the last time, and was conscious of a deep sense of relief. Until it had been lifted, she hadn't been aware what a burden that job had been, how desperately she had been driving herself to compete. Competition was a fine thing, but not at the expense of her health, though part of it could be blamed on her own intensity. She had channeled all her temper, interests and energy into that job, leaving nothing as an escape valve. She was lucky she hadn't developed an ulcer, rather than the less severe stress symptoms of a nervous stomach, constant headaches and disturbed sleep.

When she reached her office in the high-rise office building that housed many such firms, she scrounged around until she located a cardboard box, then swiftly cleaned out her desk, depositing all her personal items in the carton. There weren't many: a tube of lipstick, an extra pair of panty hose, a small pack of tissues, an expensive gold ballpoint pen, two small prints from the wall. She had just finished and was reaching for the phone to call Farrell Wordlaw to request a meeting when the intercom buzzed.

"Mr. Clements with EchoSystems on line three, Ms. Granger. "

Jay depressed the button. "Please transfer all my calls to Duncan Wordlaw."

"Yes, Ms. Granger."

Taking a deep breath, Jay dialed Farrell on the interoffice line. Two minutes later she walked purposefully into his office.

He smiled benignly at her, as if he hadn't cut4ier off at the knees three days before. "You're looking well, Jay," he said smoothly. "Is something on your mind?"

"Not much," she replied. "I just wanted to let you know that I won't be able to work out the two weeks' notice you gave me. I came in this morning to clean out my desk, and I left instructions for all my calls to be transferred to Duncan."

It gave her a measure of satisfaction to see him blanch. "That's very unprofessional!" he snapped, surging to his feet. "We were counting on you to tie up the loose ends—"

"And train Duncan how to do my job," she interrupted, her voice ironic.

His tone was threatening. "Under these circumstances, I don't see how I can give you the positive recommendation I had planned. You won't work again in investment banking, not without a favorable reference."

Her dark blue eyes were steady and cold as she stared at him. "I don't plan to work in investment banking, thank you."

From that he decided she must already have another job, which took away the leverage he had been planning to use on her. Jay watched him, practically seeing the wheels turning as he considered his options. She was really leaving them in the lurch, and it was his fault, because he had fired her. "Well, perhaps I was too hasty," he said, forcing his voice to show warm paternalism. "It will certainly leave a black eye on this firm, and on you, if the matters on your desk aren't handled properly. Perhaps if I add two weeks' salary as severance pay, you'll reconsider leaving us so precipitately?"

She was supposed to fall back in line when he waved the magic carrot of money in front of her nose. "Thank you, but no," she declined. "It isn't possible. I won't be in town."

Panic began to edge into his face. If the deals she had been handling fell through, it would cost the firm millions of dollars in fees. "But you can't do that! Where will you be?"

Already Jay could imagine panicky phone calls from Duncan. She gave Farrell a cool smile. "Bethesda Naval Hospital, but I won't be accepting any calls."

He looked absolutely stunned. "The...the naval hospital?" he croaked.

"It's a family emergency," she explained as she walked out the door.

When she was outside again with the small cardboard box tucked under her arm, she laughed out loud from the sheer joy of being unemployed, of being able to put that look of panic in Farrell Wordlaw's eyes. It was almost as good as if she had been able to strangle him. And now she was free to return to Steve, drawn by the powerful compulsion to be with him that she could neither understand nor resist.

She had come up on a commuter flight, but because of the amount of luggage and personal furnishings she was taking back to D.C., Frank had arranged for her to take a charter flight back, and she was pleasantly surprised when he met her at the airport. "I didn't know you were going to be here!" she exclaimed.

He couldn't help smiling at her. Her eyes were sparkling like the ocean, and the lines of tension were gone from her face. She looked as if she had thoroughly enjoyed walking out of her job, and he said as much.

"It was...satisfying," she admitted, smiling at him. "How is Steve today?"

Frank shrugged. "Not as well as he was before you left." It was damned strange, but it was true. His pulse was weaker and faster, his breathing shallow and ragged. Even though he was unconscious, the man needed Jay.

Her eyes darkened with worry and she bit her lip. The urge to get back to Steve grew more intense, like invisible chains pulling at her.

But first she had to get settled in the apartment Frank had gotten for her, something that took up too much time and ate at her patience. The apartment was about half the size of her place in New York, really only two rooms—the living room and bedroom. The kitchen was a cubbyhole in a corner, and there was a crowded little alcove for dining. But the apartment was comfortable, especially since she planned to spend most of her time at the hospital, anyway. This was simply a place to sleep and have a few meals.

"I've arranged for you to have a car," Frank said as he carried in the last case. He grinned at her surprised look. "This isn't New York. You'll need a way to get around." He produced the keys from his pocket and dropped them on the table. "You can come and go at the hospital as you like. You have clearance to see Steve at any hour. I won't be around all the time, the way I have been, but whenever I'm gone another agent will be on hand."

"Are you going to the hospital with me now?"

"Now?" he asked, looking surprised in turn. "Aren't you going to unpack?"

"I can unpack later tonight. I'd rather see Steve now."

"All right." Privately he thought the plan was working a little too well, but that couldn't be helped. "Why don't you follow me in your car, so you can get used to the streets and learn the way to the hospital? Uh...you do drive, don't you?"

Smiling, she nodded. "I've only lived in New York for the past five years. Everywhere else I've lived, I needed a car. But I warn you, I haven't driven very much in that time, so give me a chance to get used to it again."

Actually, driving a car was a lot like riding a bicycle: once you had learned, the skill wasn't forgotten. After taking a moment to familiarize herself with the instrumentation, Jay followed Frank's car without difficulty. She had always been a steady, deliberate driver; Steve had been the daredevil, driving too fast, taking chances.

It wasn't until she stepped into his hospital room and approached the bed that she felt a knot of tension deep inside begin to loosen. She stared down at his bandaged head, with only his bruised, swollen lips and jaw visible, and her heart slammed painfully against her ribs. With infinite care she laid her fingers on his arm and began talking.

"I'm here. I had to go back to New York yesterday to pack my things and quit my job. Remind me to tell you about that someday. Anyway, I'm going to be staying here with you until you're better."

The voice was back. Slowly it penetrated the black layers that shrouded his mind, forming a tiny link with his consciousness. He still didn't understand the words, but he wasn't aware that he didn't understand. The voice simply was, like light where before there had been nothing. Sometimes the voice was calm and sometimes it rippled with amusement. He wasn't aware of the amusement, only of the change in tone.

He wanted more. He needed to get closer to the sound, and he began trying to fight his way out of the dark fog in his mind. But every time he tried, a vicious, burning pain that permeated his entire body began gnawing at him, and he would withdraw, back into the protecting blackness. Then the voice would lure him out again, until the beast attacked once more and he had to retreat.

* * *

His arm twitched the way it had once before, and again the movement startled Jay into jerking her hand away. She stopped talking and stared at him. Then, with only a slight pause, she replaced her hand on his arm and resumed what she had been saying. Her heart was pounding. It had to be an involuntary twitching of muscles forced into one position for too long. He couldn't be trying to respond, because the barbiturates they were feeding him literally shut down most of his brain functions. Most, but not all, Major Lunning had said. If Steve was aware of her, could he be trying to communicate?

"Are you awake?" she asked softly. "Can you twitch your arm again?"

His arm was motionless under her fingers, and with a sigh she again took up her rambling discourse. For a moment the feeling had been so strong that she had been convinced he was awake, despite everything they had told her.

She was back at the hospital the next morning before the sun was little more than a graying of the eastern sky. She hadn't slept well, partly because of the unfamiliar surroundings, but she couldn't place all the blame on being in a strange apartment. She had lain awake in the darkness, her mind churning as she tried to analyze and diminish her absurd conviction that, for a moment, Steve had actually been trying to reach out to her in the only way he could. But, for all her analyzing, logic meant nothing whenever she remembered the feeling that had burned through her.

Stop it! she scoffed at herself as she rode the elevator up to the ICU. Her imagination was running away with her, fueled by her own characteristic tendency to totally immerse herself in her interests. She had never been one of those cool, aloof people who could dole out their emotions in careful measure, though she had nearly wrecked her health by trying to be that way. Because she so badly wanted Steve to recover, she was imagining responses where there were none.

His room was bright with lights, despite the hour, since light or darkness hardly mattered to him in his condition. She supposed the nurses left the lights on for convenience. She closed the door, enclosing them in a private cocoon, then walked to his bed. She touched his arm. "I'm here," she said softly.

He drew a deep breath, his chest shuddering slightly.

It hit her hard, jerking at her like a rope that had suddenly been pulled taut. That deep sense of mutual awareness stretching between them, a communication that went beyond logic, beyond speech, was there again, stronger this time. He knew she was there. Somehow he recognized her. And he was fighting to reach her.

"Can you hear me?" she whispered shakily, her eyes locked on him. "Or do you somehow sense my touch? Is that what it is? Can you feel it when I touch your arm? You must be scared and confused, because you don't know what happened and you're trying to reach out, but you can't seem to make anything work. You're going to be all right, I promise you, but it's going to take time."

The voice. Something in it drew him, despite the pain that waited to claw him whenever he left the darkness. He feared the pain, but he wanted the warmth of the voice more. He wanted to be closer to it... to her. At some point too dim for him to remember or even comprehend, he had realized it was a woman's voice. It held tenderness and the only hint of security in the black swirling emptiness of his mind and world. He knew very little, but he knew that voice; some primal instinct in him recognized it and yearned for it, giving him the strength to fight the pain and the darkness. He wanted her to know he was there.

His arm twitched, the movement somehow too slow to be an involuntary spasm of cramped muscles. This time Jay didn't jerk her hand away. Instead she rubbed her fingertips over his skin, while her eyes fastened on his face.

"Steve? Did you mean to jerk your arm? Can you do it again?"

Odd. Some of the words made sense. Others made no sense at all. But she was there, closer, the voice clearer. He could see only darkness, as if the world had never been, but she was much nearer now. Pain racked his body, great waves of it that made sweat bead on his skin, but he didn't want to let go after getting this far, didn't want to fall back down into the black void.

His arm? Yes. She wanted him to move his arm. He didn 't know if he could. It hurt so damned bad he didn 't know if he could hold on, if he could try anymore. Would she go away if he didn't move his arm? He couldn't bear being left alone again, where everything was so cold and dark and empty, not after getting this close to her warmth.

He tried to scream, and couldn't. The pain was incredible, tearing him apart like a wild animal with fangs and claws, ripping at him.

He moved his arm.

* * *

The movement was barely there, a twitch so light she would have missed it if her hand hadn't been on his arm. He had broken out in a sweat, his chest and shoulders glistening under the bright fluorescent lights. Her heart was pounding as she leaned closer to him, her gaze riveted on his lips.

"Steve, can you hear me? It's Jay. You can't talk because you have a tube in your throat. But I'm right here. I won't leave you."

Slowly his bruised lips parted, as if he were trying to form words that refused to take shape. Jay hung over him, breathing suspended, her chest aching, as he struggled to force his lips and tongue through the motions of speech. She felt the force of both his desperation and dogged determination as, against all logic, he fought pain and drugs to be able to say one word. It was as if he couldn't give up, no matter what it cost him. Something in him wouldn't let him give up.

Again he tried, his swollen, discolored lips moving in agonized deliberation. His tongue moved, doing its part to shape the word that would remain soundless:

"Hurt."

The pain in her chest became acute, and abruptly she gulped in deep breaths of air. She didn't feel the tears sliding down her cheeks. Gently she patted his arm. "I'll be right back. They'll give you something so you won't hurt any longer. I'm only leaving you for a minute, and I promise I'll be back."

She flew to the door and jerked it open, stumbling into the hall. She must have been there a lot longer than it seemed, because the third shift had gone home and the first shift was back on duty. Frank and Major Lun-ning were standing at the nurses' station, talking in low, urgent voices that didn't carry; both men looked up as she ran toward them, and a sort of disbelieving horror filled Frank's eyes.

"He's awake!" she choked. "He said that he hurts. Please, you have to give him something—"

They bolted past her, practically shoving her to the side. Frank said, "This wasn't supposed to happen," in a voice so hard she wasn't certain it was his.

But it had to be, even though the words didn't make any sense. What wasn't supposed to happen? Steve wasn't supposed to wake up? Had they lied to her? Had they expected him to die after all? No, that couldn't be it, or Frank wouldn't have gone to so much trouble to get her to stay.

Nurses were scurrying into Steve's room, but when Jay tried to enter she was firmly escorted back into the hallway. She stood outside, listening to the muted furor of voices inside, chewing on her bottom lip and wiping the slow-welling tears from her cheeks. She should be in there. Steve needed her.

Inside the room, Frank watched as Major Lunning swiftly checked Steve's vital signs and brain-wave activity. "No doubt about it," the major confirmed absently as he worked. "He's coming out of it."

"He's on barbiturates, for God's sake!" Frank protested. "How can he come out of it until you lessen the dosage?"

"He's fighting it off. He's got one hell of a constitution, and that woman out there in the hall has a strong effect on him. Adrenaline is a powerful stimulant. Enough of it, and people perform superhuman feats of strength and endurance. His blood pressure is up and his cardiac output has increased, all signs of adrenaline stimulation."

"Are you going to increase the dosage?"

"No. The coma was to keep his brain from swelling and causing more damage. I was almost ready to begin bringing him out of it anyway. He's just moved up the timetable a little. We'll have to keep him on drugs for the pain, but he won't be in a coma. He'll be able to wake up."

"Jay thought he said that he hurt. Can he feel pain, as drugged as he is?"

"If he was conscious enough to communicate, he was conscious enough to feel pain."

"Can he understand what we're saying?"

"It's possible. I'd say he definitely hears us. Understanding is something else entirely."

"How long will it be before we can question him?"

Major Lunning gave him a severe look. "Not until the swelling in his face and throat subside enough for me to remove the trach tube. I'd say another week. And don't expect him to be a fount of information. He may never remember what happened to him, and even if he eventually does, it could be months in the future."

"Is there any danger that he might reveal some classified information to Jay?" Frank didn't want to say too much. Major Lunning knew that Steve was a very important patient, but he didn't know any of the details.

"It isn't likely. He'll be too dazed and confused, maybe even delirious, and at any rate, he still isn't able to talk. I promise you, you'll be the first to see him when we take the trach tube out."

Frank stared at the still form on the bed; he had been unconscious for so long, it was hard to accept that he could hear or feel, that he had even made an attempt to communicate. But knowing what he knew about the man, Frank realized he should have been prepared for something like this. The man never gave up, never stopped fighting, even when the odds were so strong against him that anyone else would have walked away, and because of that he had survived in many instances when others wouldn't, just as he had this time. Most people never saw past the easy grin to that enormous, fearsome determination.

"What's the likelihood of permanent brain damage?" he asked quietly, remembering that Steve could hear, and there was no way of telling how much he could understand.

Major Lunning sighed. "I don't know. He received excellent, immediate care, and that counts for a lot. It may be so minimal that you won't be able to tell the difference, but I wouldn't put my money on anything right now. I simply can't tell. The fact that he woke up and responded to Ms. Granger is totally out of the expected range. He leapfrogged over several stages of recovery. I've never seen anything like it before. Normally the stages are stupor, where it would take vigorous stimulation to rouse him at all, then delirium and extreme agitation, as if the electrical processes of his brain had gone wild. Then he would become quieter, but he'd be very confused. In the next stage he would be like an automaton. He'd be able to answer questions, but unable to perform any but the simplest physical tasks. The higher brain functions return gradually."

"And the stage he's at now?"

"He was able to communicate, as if he were in the automaton stage, but I think he's lapsed back now. It must have taken a tremendous effort for him to do that much."

"As you cut down on the barbiturates, he'll be able to communicate more?"

"Perhaps. This one incident may not be repeated. He may revert to the more classical stages of recovery."

Exasperated, Frank said, "Is there anything you're certain of?"

Major Lunning gave him a long, level look. "Yes. I'm certain that his recovery depends on Ms. Granger. Keep her around. He'll need her."

"Is it safe for her to be with him while you bring him off the drugs?"

"I insist on it. She may keep him calm. I sure as hell don't want him thrashing around with that tube in his chest. Will she be able to take it?"

Frank lifted his brows. "She's stronger than she looks." And Jay was oddly devoted to Steve in a way that he hadn't expected and could not quite understand. It was as if something pulled her to him, but there wasn't any basis for that kind of attraction. Maybe later, when he was awake—his effect on women had always had his superiors shaking their heads in disbelief. But he was little more than a mummy now, unable to use the charm for which he was famous, so it had to be something else.

He had to let the Man know what had happened.

Suddenly the door was shoved open and Jay entered, giving them a hard, bright look that dared them to throw her out again. "I'm staying," she said flatly, moving to Steve's side and putting her hand on his arm. Her chin lifted stubbornly. "He needs me, and I'm going to be here."

Major Lunning looked from her to Steve, then at Frank. "She's staying," he said mildly, then consulted the file in his hand. "Okay, I'm going to begin decreasing the barbiturates now, to completely bring him out of the coma. It will take from twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and I don't know how he's going to react, so I want him under full-time observation." He glanced up at Jay. "Ms. Granger—may I call you Jay?"

"Please," she murmured.

"A nurse will be in here with him most of the time until he's completely off the drugs. His reaction may be unpredictable. If anything happens, it's important that you move away from the bed and not hinder anything we have to do. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Can I trust you not to faint and get in the way?"

"Yes."

"All right. I'll hold you to that." His stern military gaze measured her, and he must have been reassured by what he saw, because he gave an abrupt nod of approval. "It won't be easy, but I think you'll hold up."

Jay turned her attention back to Steve, dismissing everyone else in the room as if they no longer existed. She couldn't help it. He crowded everyone else out of her consciousness, flattening them into one-dimensional cartoon characters. Nothing mattered except him, and since his agonized attempt to talk to her, the feeling was even stronger than before. It shattered her and terrified her, because it was so far outside her previous experience, but she couldn't fight it. It was so strange; Steve was exerting far more power over her now than he ever had before, when he'd had full use of his senses and body, and his full range of charm. He was motionless and, for the most part, insensate, but something deep and primal pulled her to him. Just being in the same room with him made her heart settle into a stronger rhythm, heating her flesh as her blood raced through her veins, energizing her.

"I'm back," she murmured, touching his arm. "You can go to sleep now. Don't worry, don't fight the pain...just let it go. I'm here with you, and I won't leave. I'll watch over you, and I'll be here when you wake up again."

Slowly his breathing settled into an easier rhythm and his pulse rate dropped. His blood pressure lowered. Air hissed from the tube in his throat in what would have been a faint sigh had the tube not been in place. Jay stood by his bed, her fingers lightly stroking his arm as he slept.

Where are you? He came awake, screaming silently as he clawed his way through the shrouding darkness and pain into an even greater horror. The pain was like being eaten alive, but he could bear that because despite its force, it was secondary to the horrible emptiness. God, was he buried alive? He couldn't move, couldn't see, couldn't make a sound, as if his body had died but his mind had remained alive. Terrified, he tried again to scream and couldn't.

Where was he? What had happened?

He didn't know. God help him, he didn't know!

"I'm here," the voice crooned soothingly. "I know you're frightened and don't understand, but I'm here. I'll stay with you."

The voice. It was familiar. It had been in his dreams. No, not dreams. Something deeper than that. It was in his guts, his bones, his cells, his genes, his chromosomes. It was part of him, and he focused on it with an intense, almost painful recognition. Yet it was oddly alien, connected to nothing his conscious mind could produce.

"The doctors say you're probably very confused," the voice continued. It was a calm, tender voice, with a slightly husky catch in it, as if she had been crying. She. Yes. It was definitely a woman. He had a vague memory of that voice calling to him, pulling him out of a strange, suffocating darkness.

She began reciting a litany of injuries, and he listened to her voice with fierce concentration, only gradually realizing that she was talking about him. He was injured. Not dead, not buried alive.

The tidal wave of relief exhausted him.

She was still there the next time he surfaced, and this time the initial terror was of shorter duration. Fractionally more alert, he decided she was hoarse rather than teary.

She was always there. He had no concept of time, only of pain and darkness, but gradually he became aware that there were two darknesses. One was in his mind, paralyzing his thoughts, but he could fight it. Slowly that darkness was becoming less. Then there was the other darkness, the absence of light, the inability to see. Again he would have panicked if she hadn't been there. Over and over she explained, as if she knew he would only gradually comprehend her words. He wasn't blind; there were bandages over his eyes, but he wasn't blind. His legs were broken, but he would walk again. His hands were burned, but he would use them again. There was a tube in his throat to help him breathe; soon the tube would be removed and he would talk again.

He believed her. He didn't know her, but he trusted her.

He tried to think, but words boomeranged around in his head until he couldn't make sense of them. He didn't know... There was so much he didn't know. He didn't know anything. But he couldn't catch the words and arrange them in proper order so he'd know what it was he didn't know. It just didn't make sense, and he was too tired to fight.

Finally he woke to find that his thoughts were clearer, the confusion different, because the words made sense even though nothing else did. She was there. He could feel her hand on his arm, could hear her slightly hoarse voice. Did she stay with him all the time? How long had it been? It seemed forever, and it nagged at him, because he felt as if he should know exactly.

There was so much he wanted to know, and he couldn't ask. Frustration ate at him, and his arm flexed beneath her fingers. God, what would happen to him if she left? She was the one link he had to the world outside the prison of his own body, his link to sanity, the only window in his world of darkness. And suddenly the need to know coalesced inside him into a single thought, a single word: Who?

His lips formed the word and gave birth to it in silence. Yes, that was the word he'd wanted. Everything he wanted to know was summed up in that one small word.

Jay gently laid her fingers over his swollen lips. "Don't try to talk," she whispered. "Let's use a spelling system. I'll recite the alphabet, and whenever I get to the letter you want, twitch your arm. I'll do the alphabet over and over until we've spelled out whatever you want to say. Can you do that? One twitch for yes, two twitches for no."

She was exhausted; it had been two days since the first time he had woken up, and she had been with him for most of that time. She had talked until her voice was almost gone, her words giving him a bridge out of his coma into reality. She knew when he was awake, sensed that he was terrified, felt his struggle to understand what had happened. But this was the first time his lips had moved, and she was so tired she hadn't been able to grasp what he'd been trying to say. The alphabet game was the only way she could think of for them to communicate, but she didn't know if he'd be able to concentrate enough for it to work.

His arm twitched. Just once.

She drew a deep breath, forcing her exhaustion away. "All right. Here we go. A... B...C...D..."

She began to give up hope as she slowly ran through the alphabet and his arm lay motionless under her hand. It had been a long shot, anyway. Major Lunning had said it could be days before Steve's mind would -be clear enough for him to really understand what was going on around him. Then she said "W," and his arm twitched.

She stopped. "W?"

His arm twitched. Once, for "Yes."

Joy shot through her. "Okay, W is the first letter. Let's go for the second one. A... B..."

His arm twitched on the H.

And again on the O.

He stopped there.

Jay was astounded. "Who? Is that it? You want to know who I am?"

His arm twitched. Yes.

He didn't know; he really didn't know. She couldn't remember if she had mentioned who she was, except when she had first begun talking to him. Had she thought he would remember her voice after not seeing her for five years?

"I'm Jay," she said gently. "Your ex-wife."

Chapter Four

He was very still. Jay had the impression that she could feel him withdrawing, though he didn't move a muscle. A surprisingly sharp pain bloomed inside, and she chided herself for it. What had she expected? He couldn't get up and hug her, he couldn't speak, and he was probably exhausted. She knew all that, yet she still had the feeling that he was pulling back from her. Did he resent being so dependent on her? Steve had always been aloof in a curious sort of way, holding people away from him. Or maybe he resented the fact that she was here with him now, rather than some impersonal nurse. After all, a certain degree of independence remained when the service was detached, done because it was a job. Personal service carried a price that couldn't be paid in dollars, and Steve wouldn't like that.

She schooled her voice to a calmness she didn't feel. "Do you have any more questions?"

Two twitches. No.

She had been pushed away so many times that she recognized it now, even as subtle and unspoken as the message was. It hurt. She closed her eyes, fighting for the control that would let her speak again. It was a moment before she managed it. "Do you want me to stay in here with you?"

He was still for a long moment. Then his arm twitched. And twitched again. No.

"All right. I won't bother you again." Her control was shot, her voice thin and taut. She didn't wait to see if he made any response, but turned and walked out. She felt almost sick. Even now, it was an effort to walk out and leave him alone. She wanted to stay with him, protect him, fight for him. God, she would even take his pain on herself if she could. But he didn't want her. He didn't need her. She had been right all along in thinking that he wouldn't appreciate her efforts on his behalf, but the pull she thought she had felt between them had been so strong that she had ignored her own good sense and let Frank talk her into staying.

Well, at least she should let Frank know that her sojourn here was over, and that she would be leaving. Her problems hadn't changed; she still had to find a new job. Digging a coin out of her purse, she found a pay phone and called the number Frank had given her. He hadn't spent as much time at the hospital these past two days as he had before; in fact, he hadn't been there at all that day.

He answered promptly, and hearing his calm voice helped. "This is Jay. I wanted you to know that my job is over. Steve doesn't want me to stay with him anymore."

"What?" He sounded startled. "How do you know?"

"He told me."

"How in blue blazes did he do that? He can't talk, and he can't write. Major Lunning said he should still be pretty confused, anyway."

"He's a lot better this morning. We worked out a system," she explained tiredly. "I recite the alphabet, and he signals with his arm when I get to the letter he wants. He can spell out words and answer questions. One twitch means 'Yes' and two twitches means 'No.'"

"Have you told Major Lunning?" Frank asked sharply.

"No, I haven't seen him. I just wanted to let you know that Steve doesn't want me with him."

"Have Lunning paged. I want to talk to him. Now."

For such a pleasant man, Frank could be commanding when he chose, Jay thought as she went to the nurses' station and requested that Major Lunning be paged. It was five minutes before he appeared, looking tired and rumpled, and dressed in surgicals. He listened to Jay, then, without a word, walked to the pay phone and talked quietly to Frank. She couldn't make out what he was saying, but when he hung up he called a nurse and went directly into Steve's room.

Jay waited in the hallway, struggling to handle her feelings. Though she knew Steve and had expected this, it still hurt. It hurt more now than it had when they had divorced. She felt oddly.. .betrayed, and bereft, as if she had lost part of herself, and she hadn't felt that way before. She hadn't felt so strongly connected to him before. Well, this was just another classic example of her own intensity leading her to read things into a situation that simply weren't there. Would she ever learn?

Major Lunning was in Steve's room a long time, and a phalanx of nurses came and went. Within half an hour Frank arrived, his face taut and set. He squeezed Jay's arm comfortingly as he went past, but he didn't stop to talk. He, too, disappeared into Steve's room, as if something dreadfully important were going on in there.

Jay moved to the visitors' lounge, sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap while she tried to plan what she should do next. Return to New York, obviously, and get a job. But the idea of hurling herself back into the business world left her cold. She didn't want to go back. She didn't want to leave Steve. Even now, she didn't want to leave him.

Almost an hour later Frank found her in the lounge. He looked at her sharply before going to the coffee machine and buying two cups. Jay looked up and managed a smile for him as he approached. "Do I really look as if I need that?" she asked wryly, nodding toward the coffee.

He extended a cup toward her. "I know. It tastes worse than it looks. Drink it anyway. If you don't need it now, you will in a minute."

She took the cup and sipped the hot liquid, grimacing at the taste. It was a mystery how anyone could take simple water and coffee and make them taste so horrible. "Why will I need it in a minute? It's over, isn't it? Steve told me to go away. It's obvious that he doesn't want me here, so my presence will only upset him and slow his recovery."

"It isn't over," Frank said» looking down at his own coffee, and his flat tone made Jay look at him sharply. He looked haggard, with worry etching new lines into his face.

A cold chill ran down her spine and she sat up straight. "What's wrong?" she asked. "Has he relapsed?"

"No."

"Then what's wrong?"

"He doesn't remember," Frank said simply. "Anything. He has amnesia."

Frank had been right; she did need the coffee. She drank that cup, then got another one. Her head was reeling, and she felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach. "What else can go wrong?" she asked, talking mostly to herself, but Frank knew what she meant.

He sighed. They hadn't counted on this. They had needed him awake, able to talk, able to understand what needed to be done. This latest development had thrown a monkey wrench into the whole plan. He didn't even know who he was! How could he protect himself if he didn't know who he had to be on guard against? He couldn't recognize friends or enemies.

"He's been asking for you," Frank said, taking her hand. She started, already rising to her feet, but he tugged on her hand and she sank back into her chair. "We've been asking him a lot of questions," he continued. "We used your system, though it takes a while. When you told him you were his ex-wife, it confused him, scared him. He couldn't remember you, and he didn't know what to do. Remember, he's still easily confused. It's hard for him to concentrate, though he's getting better fast."

"Are you certain he's asking for me?" Jay asked, her heart pounding. Out of everything he had said, her emotions had centered on his first sentence.

"Yes. He spelled out your name over and over."

The instinct to go to him was so strong it was almost painful. She forced herself to sit still, to understand more. "He has total amnesia? He doesn't remember anything?"

"He doesn't even know his own name." Frank sighed again, a heavy sound. "He doesn't remember anything about the explosion or why he was there. Nothing. A total blank. Damn it!" The last expressed his helpless frustration.

"What does Major Lunning think?"

"He said total amnesia is extremely rare. More often it's a sort of spot amnesia that blocks out the accident itself and anything that happened a short while before it. With the head trauma Steve suffered, amnesia wasn't that unexpected, but this..." He made a helpless gesture.

She tried to think of what she had read about amnesia, but all that came to mind was the dramatic use often made of it on soap operas. Invariably the amnesiac recovered his full memory during a highly dramatic moment, just in time to prevent a murder or keep from being murdered himself. It was good melodrama, but that was all it was.

"Will he regain his memory?"

"Probably. Part of it, at least. There's no way to be certain. It might start coming back almost immediately, or it could take months before he begins remembering anything. Major Lunning said that his memory will come back in bits and pieces, usually the oldest memories first."

Might. Probably. Could. Usually. What it all added up to was that they simply didn't know. In the meantime Steve lay in his bed, unable to talk, unable to see, unable to move. All he could do was hear and think.

What would it be like to be so cut adrift from everything familiar, even himself? He had no point of reference for anything. The thought of the inner terror he must be feeling squeezed her heart.

"Are you still willing to stay?" Frank asked, his clear eyes filled with concern. "Knowing that it might take months or even years?"

"Years?" she echoed faintly. "But you only wanted me to stay until the surgery on his eyes was completed."

"We didn't know then that he wouldn't remember anything. Major Lunning said that being around familiar things and people would help stimulate his memory, give him a feeling of stability."

"You want me to stay until he regains his memory," Jay stated, putting it into words. The idea frightened her. The longer she stayed with Steve, the more strongly she reacted to him. What would happen to her if she fell in love with him far more deeply than she had the first time, only to lose him again when he returned to his footloose life? She was afraid that she already cared too much to simply walk away. How could she walk away when he needed her?

"He needs you," Frank said, echoing her thoughts. "He's asking for you. He responds to you so strongly that he keeps confounding Major Lunning's predictions. And we need you, Jay. We need you to help him in any way you can, because we need to know what he knows."

"If sentiment won't get me, try patriotism?" she asked tiredly, leaning her head back against the padded orange vinyl chair. "It wasn't necessary. I won't leave him. I don't know what's going to happen, or how we'll handle it if he doesn't get his memory back soon, but I won't leave him."

She got up and walked out, and Frank sat there for a moment staring at the cup still in his hands. From what she'd just said, he knew that Jay sensed she was being manipulated, but she was willing to let them do it because Steve was so important to her. He had to talk to the Man about this latest development, and he wondered what would happen. They had counted on Steve's willing participation, on his talents and skills. Now they had to let him walk out on the streets as helpless as a baby because he couldn't recognize the dangers, or take the risk of telling him things that could set back his recovery. Major Lunning had been adamant that upsetting him would be the worst thing they could do. He needed quiet and tranquillity, a stable emotional base; his memory would return faster under those conditions. No matter what decision the Man reached, Steve was at risk. And if Steve was at risk, so was Jay.

It was hard for Jay to enter Steve's room after the emotional battering she had taken. She needed time to get herself under control, but she felt the pull between them again; it was growing so strong she no longer had to be in the room with him, touching him. He needed her right now, far more than she needed time. She opened the door and felt his attention center on her, though not even his head moved. It was as if he were holding his breath.

"I'm back," she said quietly, walking to his bed and putting her hand on his arm. "It seems I can't stay away."

His arm twitched urgently, several times, and she got the message. "All right," she said, and began reciting the alphabet.

Sorry.

What could she say? Deny that she'd been upset? He would know better. He felt the pull just as she did, because he was on the other end of that invisible rope. He turned his face slightly toward her, his bruised lips parted as he waited for her answer.

"It's all right," she said. "I didn't realize what a shock I had just given you."

Yes.

It was odd how much expression he could put in a single motion, but she felt his wryness and sensed that he was still shocked. Shocked, but in control. His control was astounding.

She began spelling again.

Afraid.

The admission hit her hard; it was something the old Steve never would have admitted, but the man he had become was so much stronger that he could admit it and lose nothing of his strength. "I know, but I'll stay with you as long as you want me," she promised.

What happened? He made it a question by a slight upward movement of his arm.

Keeping her voice calm, Jay told him about the explosion but didn't give him any of the details. Let him think that he'd simply been in an accident.

Eyes?

So he hadn't understood everything she'd told him before and needed reassuring. "You'll have more surgery on your eyes, but the prognosis is good. You'll see again, I promise."

Paralyzed?

"No! You've broken both legs and they're in casts. That's why you can't move them."

Toes.

"Your toes?" she asked in bewilderment. "They're still there."

His lips moved in a very slight, painful smile. Touch them.

She bit her lip. "Okay." He wanted her to touch his toes so he'd know he still had feeling in them, as a reassurance that he wasn't paralyzed. She walked to the foot of the bed and firmly folded her hands over his bare toes, letting his cool flesh absorb the heat from her palms. Then she returned to his side and touched his arm. "Did you feel that?"

Yes. Again he gave that painful fraction of a smile.

"Anything else?"

Hands.

"They're burned, and in bandages, but they're not third-degree burns. Your hands will be fine."

Chest. Hurts.

"You have a collapsed lung, and a tube in your chest. Don't do any tossing around."

Funny.

She laughed. "I didn't know anyone could be silent and sarcastic at the same time."

Throat.

"You have a trach tube because you weren't breathing well."

Face broken?

She sighed. He wanted to know, not be protected. "Yes, some bones in your face were broken. You aren't disfigured, but the swelling made it hard for you to breathe. As soon as the swelling goes down, they'll take the trach tube out."

Lift the sheet and check my—

"I will not!" she said indignantly, halting her spelling when she realized where his words were heading. Then she had to laugh because he actually managed to look impatient. "Everything is still there, believe me."

Functional?

"You'll have to find that out on your own!"

Prissy.

"I'm not prissy, and you behave or I'll have a nurse change your tube. Then you'll find out the hard way what you want to know." As soon as she said the words she felt herself blushing, and it didn't help that he was smiling again. She hadn't meant to sound the way she had.

The effort of concentrating for so long had tired him, and after a minute he spelled Sleep.

"I didn't mean to tire you out," she murmured. "Go to sleep."

Stay?

"Yes, I'm staying. I won't go back to my apartment without telling you." Her throat felt thick at his need for reassurance, and she stood by the bed with her hand on his arm until his breathing changed into the deep, steady rhythm of sleep.

Even then she was reluctant to take her hand away, and she stood beside him for a long time. A smile kept curving her lips. His personality was so strong that it came through despite his limited means of communication. He wanted the truth about his condition, not vague promises or medical double-talk. He might not know his name, but that hadn't changed the man he was. He was strong, much stronger than he had been before. Whatever had happened to him in the past five years had tempered him, like steel subjected to the hottest fires. He was harder, stronger, tougher, his willpower so fierce it was like an energy field emanating from him. Oh, he had been a charming rascal before, devilishly reckless and daring, with a glint in his eye that had turned many feminine heads. But now he was... dangerous.

The word startled her, but when she examined it, she realized that it described exactly the man he had become. He was a dangerous man. She didn't feel threatened by him, but danger didn't necessarily constitute a threat. He was dangerous because of his steely, implacable will; when this man decided to do something, it wasn't safe to get in his way. At some time in the past five years, something had drastically changed him and she wasn't sure she wanted to know what it was. It must have been something cataclysmic, something awful, to have so focused his character and determination. It was as if he had been stripped down to the bare essentials of human existence, forced to discard all his personality traits that weren't necessary to survival and adopt new ones that were. What was left was hard and pure, unbreakable and curiously resilient. This was a man who wouldn't admit defeat; he didn't know what it was.

Her heart was beating heavily as she stood looking down at him, her attention so focused on him that they might have been the only two people in the world. He awed her, and he attracted her so strongly that she jerked her hand away from his arm as soon as the thought formed. Dear God! She would be a fool to let herself get caught in that trap again. Even more now than before, Steve was essentially alone, his personality so honed that he was complete unto himself. She had walked away relatively unscathed before, but what would happen to her this time if she let herself care too much? She felt scared, not only because she was teetering on the edge of heartbreak, but because she was even daring to think of getting too close to him. It was like watching a panther in a cage, standing outside the bars and knowing you were safe, but feeling the danger that was barely restrained.

Making love with him before had been... fun, passionate in a playful way. What would it be like now? Was the playfulness gone? She thought it must be. His lovemaking would be intense and elemental now, as he was, like getting caught up in a storm.

She became aware that she could barely breathe, and she forced herself to walk away from his bed. She didn't want him to mean that much to her. And she was very much afraid that he already did.

"What do we do?" Frank asked quietly, his clear eyes meeting shuttered black ones.

"We play out the hand," the Man answered just as quietly. "We have to. If we do anything out of the ordinary now, it could tip someone off, and he isn't able to recognize his enemies."

"Any luck in tracing Piggot?"

"We lost him in Beirut, but we know he hooked up with his old pals. He'll surface again, and we'll be waiting."

"We just have to keep our guy alive until we can neutralize Piggot," Frank said, his tone turning glum.

"We'll do it. One way or the other, we have to keep Piggot's cutthroats from getting their hands on him."

"When he gets his memory back, he isn't going to like what we've done."

A brief smile touched the Man's hard mouth. "He'll raise mortal hell, won't he? But I'm not taking any chance with the protected-witness program until he's able to look out for himself, and maybe not even then. It's been penetrated before, and could be again. Everything hinges on getting Piggot."

"You ever wish you were back in the field, so you could hunt him yourself?"

The Man leaned back, hooking his hands behind his head. "No. I've gotten domesticated. I like going home at night to Rachel and the kids. I like not having to watch my back."

Frank nodded, thinking of the time when the Man's back had been a target for every hit man and terrorist in the business. He was safe now, out of the mainstream ... as far as was generally known. A very small group of people knew otherwise. The Man officially didn't exist; even the people who followed his orders didn't know the orders came from him. He was buried so deeply in the bowels of bureaucracy, protected by so many twists and turns, that there was no way to connect him to the job he actually did. The President knew about him, but Frank doubted the vice president did, or any department secretary, the Chiefs of Staff or the head of the agency that employed him. Whoever was President next might not know about him. The Man decided for himself whom he could trust; Frank was one of those people. And so was the man in Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Two days later, they took the tube out of Steve's chest because his collapsed lung had healed and reinflated. When they let Jay into his room again she hung over the side of his bed, stroking his arm and shoulder until his breathing settled down and the fine mist of perspiration on his body began to dry.

"It's over, it's over," she murmured.

He moved his arm, a signal that he wanted to spell, and she began reciting the alphabet.

Not fun.

"No," she agreed.

More tubes?

"There's one in your stomach, for feeding you." She felt his muscles tense as if in anticipation of the pain he knew would come, and he spelled out a terse expletive. Her hand moved over his chest in sympathy, feeling the coarseness of his hair as it grew out, and avoiding the wound where the tube had entered his body.

He took a deep breath and forced himself to slowly relax. Raise head.

It took her a few seconds to figure that one out. He must be incredibly sore from lying flat for so long, unable to shift his legs or lift his arms. The only time his arms were moved was when the bandages were changed. She pressed the control that raised the head of the bed, lifting him only an inch or so at a time, keeping her hand on his arm so he could signal her when he wanted her to stop. He took several more deep breaths as his weight shifted to his hips and lower back, then moved his arm to halt her. His lips moved in silent curse, his muscles tightening against the pain, but after a moment he adjusted and began to relax again.

Jay watched him, her deep blue eyes mirroring the pain he felt, but he was improving daily, and seeing the improvements filled her with heady joy. The swelling in his face was subsiding; his lips were almost normal again, though dark bruises still stained his jaw and throat.

She could almost feel his impatience. He wanted to talk, he wanted to see, he wanted to walk, to be able to shift his own weight in the bed. He was imprisoned in his body and he didn't like it. She thought it must be close to hell to be cut off from his own identity as he was, as well as being so completely constrained by his injuries. But he wasn't giving in; he asked more questions every day, trying to fill the void of memories by making new ones, maybe hoping that some magic word would take him back to himself. Jay talked to him even when he didn't ask questions, idle conversation that, she hoped, gave him basic information and perspective. Even if it just filled the silence, that was something. If he didn't want her to talk he would tell her.

A movement of his arm alerted her, and she began the alphabet.

When married?

She caught her breath. It was the first personal question he'd asked her, the first time he'd wanted to know about their past relationship. "We were married for three years," she managed to say calmly. "We divorced five years ago."

Why?

"It wasn't a hostile divorce," she mused. "Or a hostile marriage. I guess we simply wanted different things out of life. We .grew apart, and finally the divorce seemed more like a formality than any wrenching change in our lives."

What did you want?

Now that was a twenty-thousand-dollar question. What did she want? She had been certain of her life up until the Friday when she had been fired and Franlc Payne had brought Steve back into her life. Now she wasn't certain at all; too many changes had happened all at once, jolting her life onto a different track entirely. She looked at Steve and felt him waiting patiently for her answer.

"Stability, I guess. I wanted to settle down more than you did. We had fun together, but we weren't really suited to each other."

Children?

The thought startled her. Oddly, when they had been married, she hadn't been in any hurry to start a family. "No, no children." She hadn't been able to visualize having Steve's children. Now... oh God, now the idea shook her to the bones.

Remarried?

"No, I've never remarried. I don't think you have, either. When Frank notified me of your accident, he asked if you had any other relatives or close friends, so you must have stayed single."

He'd been listening closely, but his interest suddenly sharpened. She could feel it, like a touch against her skin. No family?

"No. Your parents are dead, and if you had any relatives, I never knew about them." She skated around telling him that he'd been orphaned at an early age and raised in foster homes. Not having a family seemed to disturb him, though he'd never given any indication that it bothered him while they had been married.

He lay very still and the line of his mouth was grim. She sensed there was a lot he wanted to ask her, but the very complexity of his questions stymied him. To get his mind off the questions he couldn't ask and the answers he wouldn't like, she began to tell him about how they had met, and slowly his mouth relaxed.

"...and since it was our first date, I was a little stiff. More than a little stiff, if you want the truth. First dates are torment, aren't they? It had been raining off and on all day, and water was standing in the streets. We walked out to your car, and a passing truck hit this huge puddle just as we reached the curb. We were both drenched, from the head down. And we stood there laughing at each other like complete fools. I don't even want to think what I looked like, but you had muddy water dripping off your nose."

His lips were twitching, as if it hurt him to smile but he couldn't stop the movement. What did we do?

She chuckled. "There wasn't a lot we could do, looking the way we did. We went back to my apartment, and while our clothes were washing we watched television and talked. We never did make it to the party we'd been going to. One date led to another, and five months later we were married."

He asked one question after another, like a child listening to fairy tales and wanting more. Knowing that he was reaching for the part of himself that was lost due to the blankness of his memory, she tirelessly recounted places they had gone and the things they'd done, people they had known, hoping that some little detail would provide the spark needed to bring it all back. Her voice began to grow hoarse, and finally he managed a small shake of his head.

Sorry.

She pressed his arms, understanding. "Don't worry," she said softly. "It will all come back. It will just take time."

But the days passed and still his memory didn't return—not even a glimmer of a link to the past. She could feel his intense concentration on every word she uttered, as if he were willing himself to remember. Even now, his control was phenomenal; he never allowed himself to become frustrated or lose his temper. He just kept trying, keeping his feelings under control as if he sensed that any emotional upheaval could set his recovery back. Total recovery was his aim, and he worked toward it with a single-minded concentration that never wavered.

Frank was there the day they took the trach tube from Steve's throat, and he waited in the hall with Jay, holding her hand. She looked at him questioningly, but he merely shook his head. Several minutes later a hoarse cry of pain from Steve's room made her jerk, and Frank's hand tightened on hers. "You can't go in there," he said softly. "They're removing his stomach tube, too."

The cry had been Steve's; the first sound he'd made had been one of pain. She began to tremble, every instinct she had screaming at her to go to him, but Frank held her still. There were no other sounds from the room, and finally the door opened and the doctors and nurses exited. Major Lunning was last, and he paused to talk to Jay.

"He's all right," he said, smiling a little at her tense face. "He's breathing just fine, and talking. I won't tell you what his first words were. But I want to warn you that his speaking voice won't be the way you remember it; his larynx was damaged, and his voice will always sound hoarse. It will improve some, but he'll never sound the way he did before."

"I'd like to talk to him now," Frank said, looking down at Jay, and she understood that there were things he wanted to tell Steve, even though Steve didn't remember what had happened.

"Good luck," Major Lunning said, smiling wryly at Frank. "He doesn't want you, he wants Jay, and he was pretty autocratic about it."

Knowing just how autocratic he could be, Frank wasn't surprised. But he still needed to ask Steve some questions, and if this was his lucky day, the questions just might trigger some return of memory. Patting Jay's hand again, he went into Steve's room and firmly closed the door behind him.

Less than a minute later, he opened the door and looked at Jay, his expression both frustrated and amused. "He wants you, and he isn't cooperating until he gets you."

"Did you think I would?" a raspy voice demanded behind him. "Jay, come here."

She began trembling again at the sound of that rough, deep voice, so much rougher and deeper than she remembered. It was almost gravelly, and it was wonderful. Her knees felt rubbery as she crossed the room to him, but she wasn't aware of actually walking. She was just there, somehow, clinging to the railing of his bed in an effort to hold herself upright. "I'm here," she whispered.

He was silent a moment; then he said, "I want a drink of water."

She almost laughed aloud, because it was such a mundane request that could have been made of anyone, but then she saw the tension in his jaw and lips and realized that, again, he was checking out his condition, and he wanted her with him. She turned to the small Styrofoam pitcher that was kept full of crushed ice, which she used to keep his lips moist. The ice had melted enough that she was able to pour the glass half full of water. She stuck a straw into it and held it to his lips.

Gingerly he sucked the liquid into his mouth and held it for a moment, as if letting it soak into his membranes. Then, slowly, he swallowed, and after a minute he relaxed. "Thank God," he muttered hoarsely. "My throat still feels swollen. I wasn't sure I could swallow, and I sure as hell didn't want that damned tube back."

Behind Jay, Frank turned a smothered laugh into a cough.

"Anything else?" she asked.

"Yes. Kiss me."

Chapter Five

When she opened the door to Steve's room the next morning, he turned his head on the pillow and said, "Jay." His voice was harsh, almost guttural, and she wondered if he'd just awakened.

She paused, her attention caught as she stared at his bandaged eyes. "How did you know?" The nurses were in and out, so how could he have guessed her identity?

"I don't know," he said slowly. "Maybe your smell, or just the feel of you in the room. Maybe I recognize the rhythm of your walk."

"My smell?" she asked blankly. "I'm not using perfume, so if you smell me from that distance something's wrong!"

His lips curved in a smile. "It's a fresh, faintly sweet smell. I like it. Do I get a good-morning kiss?"

Her heart gave a giant leap, just as it had the day before when he'd demanded that she kiss him. She had given him a light, tender kiss, barely brushing her lips against his, while Frank, in the background, had pretended to be invisible; but it had taken her pulse a good ten minutes to settle down afterward. Now, even while her mind shouted at her to be cautious, she crossed the room to him and bent down to give him another light kiss, letting her lips linger for only a second. But when she started to draw away, he increased the pressure, his mouth molding itself to hers, and her heart slammed wildly against her rib cage as excitement shot through her.

"You taste like coffee," she managed to say when she finally forced herself to stand upright again, breaking the contact.

His lips had been slightly parted, with a disturbing sensuality, but at her words they took on a smug line. "They wanted me to drink tea or apple juice—" he made it sound like hemlock "—but I talked them into letting me have coffee."

"Oh?" she asked dryly. "How? By refusing to drink anything until you had your coffee?"

"It worked," he said, not sounding at all repentant. She could imagine how helpless the nurses were against his relentless will.

Despite the fact that she no longer needed to communicate with him in their old way, her hand went to his arm in habit, and she was so used to the contact that she didn't notice it. "How are you feeling?" she asked, then winced at the triteness of the question, but she was still rattled from the effects of his kiss.

"Like hell."

"Oh."

"How long have I been here?"

To her surprise, she had to stop and count the days. She had become so involved with him that time had ceased to mean anything, and it was difficult to recall. "Three weeks."

"Then I have three more weeks in these casts?"

"I think so, yes."

"All right." He said it as if giving his permission, and she felt that he would give them three weeks and not one day longer, or he would take the casts off himself. He lifted his left arm. "I'm minus a couple of needles today. They took the IVs out about an hour ago."

"I hadn't even noticed!" she exclaimed, smiling a little at the note of pride in his ruined voice. She wondered if she would ever get used to its harshness, but at the same time tiny shivers went down her spine every time she heard it.

"And I refused the pain medication. I want my head clear. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask before, but it took so much time and effort, and my brain was so foggy from the drugs, that it was just too much trouble. Now I want to know what's going on. Where am I? I've heard you call the doctor Major, so I know I'm in a military hospital. The question is, why?"

"You're in Bethesda," she said.

"A naval hospital?" Astonishment roughened his voice even more.

"Frank said you were brought here for security reasons. There are guards posted at every entrance to this wing. And this was a central location for all the surgeons they pulled in for you."

"Major Lunning isn't navy," he said sharply.

"No." It was astonishing that he could lose the most basic of memories, those of himself, yet retain the knowledge that Bethesda was a naval hospital and that major wasn't a navy rank. She watched the stillness of his mouth as he studied the implications of what she had just told him.

"Then someone with a lot of influence wanted me here. Langley, probably."

"Who?"

"Company headquarters, baby. CIA." She felt a chill of dread as he continued, "Maybe the White House, but Langley is the most likely bet. What about Frank Payne?"

"He's FBI. I trust him," she said steadily.

"Damn, this is getting deep," he muttered. "All these different departments and military branches coordinating just isn't normal. What's going on? Tell me about the explosion."

"Didn't Frank tell you?"

"I didn't ask for or volunteer any information. I didn't know him."

Yes, that was like Steve. He had always held back, watching cautiously, though she had already married him before she began noticing that particular trait. He used his charm like a shield, so that most people would have described him as outgoing and spontaneous, when in fact he was just the opposite. He had held people away, not trusting them and not allowing anyone close to him, but they never noticed, because he was such an actor. Now she sensed that the shield was gone. People could take him as he was or leave him; he didn't care. It was a hard attitude, but she found that she liked it better. It was real, without pretense or subterfuge. And for the first time, he was letting her get close to him. He needed her, trusted her. Perhaps it was only because of the extenuating circumstances, but it was happening, and it stunned her.

"Jay?" he prompted.

"I don't know exactly what happened," she explained. "I don't know why you were there. They don't know either."

"Who is 'they'?"

"Frank. The FBI."

"And whoever else he's working for," he added dryly. "Go on."

"Frank told me that you weren't doing anything illegal that they know of. Perhaps you were only an innocent bystander, but you have a reputation for sniffing out trouble, and they think you might know something about what happened to their operation. They had set up a sting, or whatever you want to call it, but someone had planted a bomb at the meeting site. You were the only survivor."

"What kind of sting?"

"I don't know. All Frank has said is that it involved national security."

"And they're afraid their guy's cover was blown, but they don't know, because the players on the other side were disintegrated, too," he said, as if to himself. "It could have been a double double-cross, and the bomb was meant for the others. Damn! No wonder they want me to get my memory back! But all that doesn't explain one thing. Why are you involved?"

"They brought me here to identify you," she said, absently stroking his arm as she had for so many hours.

"Identify me? Didn't they know?"

"Not for certain. Part of your driver's license was found, but they still weren't certain if you were... you, or their agent. Apparently you and the agent were about the same height and weight, and your hands were burned, so they weren't able to get your fingerprints for identification." She paused as something nagged at her memory, but she couldn't bring the elusive detail into focus. For a moment it was close; then Steve's next question splintered her concentration.

"Why did they ask you? Wasn't there anyone else who could identify me? Or did we stay close after our divorce?"

"No, we didn't. It was the first tune I'd seen you in five years. You've always been pretty much a loner. You weren't the type for bosom buddies. And you don't have any family, so that left me."

He moved restlessly, his mouth drawing into a hard line as he uttered a brief, explicit curse. "I'm trying to get a handle on this," he said tersely. "And I keep running into this damned blank wall. Some of what you tell me seems so familiar, and I think, yeah, that's me. Then part of it is as if you're telling me about some stranger, and I wonder if I really know. Hell, how can I know?" he finished with raw frustration.

Her fingers glided over his arm, giving him what comfort she could. She didn't waste her breath mouthing platitudes because she sensed they would only make him furious. As it was, he had already used up his small store of energy with the questions he had asked her, and he lay there in silence for several minutes, his chest rising and falling too quickly. Finally the rhythm of his breathing slowed, and he muttered, "I'm tired."

"You've pushed yourself too far. It's only been three weeks, you know."

"Jay."

"What?"

"Stay with me."

"I will. You know I will."

"It's... strange. I can't even picture your face in my mind, but part of me knows you. Maybe biblical knowledge goes deeper than mere memory."

His harsh voice gave rough edges to the words, but Jay felt as if an electrical charge had hit her body, making her skin tingle. Her mind filled with images, but not those of memory; her imagination manufactured new ones—of this man with his harder soul and ruined voice, bending over her, taking her in his arms, moving between her legs in a more complete possession than she had ever known before. Her own breath shortened as her breasts grew tight and achy, and her insides turned liquid. Another tingle jolted her, making her feel as if she were on the verge of physical ecstasy, and merely from his words, his voice. The violence of her response shocked her, scared her, and she jerked away from his bed before she could control the motion.

"Jay?" He was concerned, even a little alarmed, as he felt her move away from him.

"Go to sleep," she managed to say, her voice almost under control. "You need the rest. I'll be here when you wake up."

He lifted his bandaged hand. "How about holding my hand?"

"I can't do that. It would hurt you."

"It would blend in with all the other pain," he said groggily. He was losing strength rapidly. "Just touch me until I go to sleep, all right?"

Jay felt his request go straight through her heart. That he should ask anything of her still staggered her, but his need to be touched was almost more than she could bear. She stepped back to the bed, folding her hand over his arm. At the first touch she felt him begin to relax, and within two minutes he was asleep.

She stepped outside, feeling the need to escape, though she wasn't certain exactly what she was escaping from. It was Steve, and yet it was something else, something inside her that was growing more and more powerful. It scared her; she didn't want it, yet she was helpless to stop it. She had never responded to him like that before, not even in the first wild, heady days of their marriage. It's just the situation, she told herself, trying to find comfort in the thought. It was just her tendency to throw herself wholly into something, concentrating on it too intensely, that made her feel like this. But comfort eluded her and despair welled in her heart, because analyzing her emotions didn't change them. God help her, she was falling in love with him again, with even less reason than she'd had the first time. For most of the past three weeks he'd been little more than a mummy, incapable of movement or speech, yet she had felt drawn to him, tied to him; and loving him now was much more dangerous than it had been before. He was a different, stronger, harder man. Even when he'd been unconscious, she had felt his fierce inner power, and her need to know what had happened to him to cause that change was so strong it almost hurt.

A nurse, the one who had first noticed Steve's unconscious reaction to Jay's presence, stopped beside her. "How is he? He refused his pain medication this morning."

"He's asleep now. He tires very easily."

The nurse nodded, her bright blue eyes meeting Jay's darker ones. "He has the most incredible constitution I've ever seen. He's still in a great deal of pain, but he just seems to ignore it. Normally it would be at least another week before we began tapering off the pain medication." Admiration filled her voice. "Did the coffee upset his stomach?"

Jay had to laugh. "No. He was rather smug about it."

"He was certainly determined to get that coffee. Maybe we can start him on a soft diet tomorrow, so he can begin regaining his strength."

"Do you know when he'll be transferred out of intensive care?"

"I really don't know. Major Lunning will have to make that decision." The nurse smiled as she took her leave, returning to the central station.

Jay walked to the visitors' lounge to buy a soft drink, and she took advantage of the room's emptiness to give herself some much-needed privacy. She was filled with a vague uneasiness, and she couldn't pinpoint the reason. Or reasons, she thought. Part of it was Steve, of course, and her own unruly emotional response to him. She didn't want to love him again, but she didn't know how to fight it, only that she had to. She could not love him again. It was too risky. She knew that, fiercely told herself over and over that she wouldn't allow it to happen, even as she acknowledged that it might already be too late.

The other part of her uneasiness was also tied to Steve, but she wasn't certain why. That aggravating sense of having missed something kept nagging at her, something that she should have seen but hadn't. Perhaps Steve sensed it too, judging by all the questions he'd asked; he didn't quite trust Frank, though she supposed that was to be expected, given Steve's situation. But Jay knew that she would trust Frank with her life, and with Steve's. So why did she keep feeling that she should know more than she did? Was Steve in danger because of what he had witnessed? Had Steve actually been involved in the deal? She would have had to be naive not to realize that the vast majority of the facts had been kept from her, but she didn't expect Frank to spout out everything he knew. No, it wasn't that. It was something that she should have seen, something that was obvious, and she'd missed it entirely. It was some little detail that didn't fit, and until she could pinpoint what it was, she wouldn't be able to get rid of that nagging uneasiness.

Steve was taken out of intensive care two days later and moved to a private room, and the navy guards shifted location. The new room had a television, something the ICU room had lacked, and Steve insisted on listening to every news program he could, as if he were searching for clues that would tie all the missing pieces together for him again. The problem was that he seemed to be interested in all the world situations and could discuss the politics of others nations as easily as domestic issues. That disturbed Jay; Steve had never been particularly political, and the depth of his current knowledge revealed that he had become deeply involved. Given that, it became more likely that he had also been more involved in the situation that had nearly killed him than perhaps even Frank knew. Or perhaps Frank did know, after all. He had had several long, private conversations with Steve, but Steve remained guarded. Only with Jay did he lose his wariness.

His various injuries kept him bed-bound much longer than he should have been, but he wasn't able to negotiate with crutches due to his burned hands. His physical inactivity ate at him, eroding his patience and good humor. He quickly decided which television shows he liked, discarding all game shows and soap operas, but even the ones he liked lacked something, since so much of the action was visual. Merely being able to listen frustrated him, and soon he wanted the set on only for the news. Jay did everything she could think of to entertain him; he liked it when she read the newspaper to him, but for the most part he just wanted to talk.

"Tell me what you look like," he said one morning.

The demand flustered her. It was oddly embarrassing to be asked to describe oneself. "Well, I have brown hair," she began hesitantly.

"What shade of brown? Reddish? Gold?"

"Gold, I guess, but on the dark side. Honey-colored."

"Is it long?"

"No. It's almost to my shoulders, and very straight."

"What color are your eyes?"

"Blue."

"Come on," he chided after a minute when she didn't add anything. "How tall are you?"

"Medium. Five-six."

"How tall am I? Did we fit together well?"

The thought made her throat tighten. "You're six feet, and yes, we did dance well together."

He turned his bandaged eyes toward her. "I wasn't talking about dancing, but so what? When I get out of these casts, let's go dancing again. Maybe I haven't forgotten how."

She didn't know if she could stand being in his arms again, not with her responses running wild every time she heard his harsh, cracked voice. But he was waiting for her to answer, so she said lightly, "It's a date."

He lifted his hands. "The bandages come off tomorrow. Next week I have the final surgery on my eyes. The casts come off in two weeks. Give me a month to build up my strength. By then the bandages should be off my eyes, and we'll do the town."

"You're only giving yourself a month to get your strength back? Isn't that a little ambitious?"

"I've done it before," he said, then went very still. Jay held her breath as she watched him, but after a minute he swore softly. "Damn it, I know things, but I can't remember them. I know what foods I like, I know the name of every head of state of every nation mentioned in the news, I can even recalj what they look like, but I don't know my own face. I know who won the last World Series, but not where I was when it was played. I know the smell of the canals in Venice, but I can't remember ever being there." He paused a minute, then said very quietly, "Sometimes I want to take this place apart with my bare hands."

"Major Lunning told you what to expect," Jay said, still shaken by what he'd said. How deeply had he involved himself in the gray world Frank had hinted at? She was very much afraid that Steve was no longer an adventurer, but a player. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. He said your memory would probably come back in dribbles."

A slow grin touched his lips, deepening the lines that bracketed his mouth and drawing her helpless, fascinated gaze. His lips seemed firmer, fuller, as if they were still slightly swollen, or perhaps it was because his face was thinner and older. "Sorry," he said. "I'll have to watch that."

His wry humor, especially when he had good reason to occasionally feel sorry for himself, only reminded her again of his hard inner strength and was one more blow against the shaky guard she had set up around her heart. She had to laugh at him, just as she had years before, but there was a difference now. Before, Steve had used humor as a wall to hide behind; now the wall was gone, and she could see the real man.

She was with him the next morning when the bandages came off his burned hands for good. She had been in there before when the bandages were changed, so she had seen the raw blisters on his palms and fingers when they had looked much worse than they did now. Patches of reddened skin were still visible all the way to his elbows, but his hands had caught the worst of it. Now that the danger of infection was past, the new, tender skin would heal faster without the bandages, but his hands would be too painful for him to use them much for a while.

When she compared how he looked now to the way he had looked the first time she had seen him, hooked to all those machines and monitors, with so many tubes running into his body, it seemed nothing short of a miracle. It had been only four weeks, but he had been little more than a vegetable then, and now he exerted the force of his personality over everyone who entered his room, even the doctors. His face had been swollen and bruised before; now the hard line of his jaw and the precise cut of his lips fascinated her. She knew that plastic surgeons had rebuilt his shattered face, and she wondered about the changes she would see when the bandages were completely gone and she was able to truly see him for the first time. His jaw was a little different, a little squarer, leaner, but that was to be expected, since he had lost so much weight after he'd been injured. His beard seemed darker, because he was so pale. She was very well acquainted with his jaw and beard, since she had to shave him every morning. The nurses had done it until he became conscious and made it known he wanted Jay to shave him, and no one else.

He no longer had a thick swath of gauze wrapped around his skull. There was a big, jagged white scar that ran diagonally from the top of his head, at a point directly above his right ear, to the back and left of his skull, but his hair was already longer than that of the average military recruit in boot camp, and it was beginning to cover the scar. The new hair was dark and glossy, having never been exposed to the sun. His eyes were still covered with bandages, but though the gauze pads and wrapping were much smaller now than they had been before, the upper bridge of his nose and the curve of his cheekbones were still covered. The bandages tantalized her; she wanted to see his new face, to judge for herself how well the plastic surgeon had done his job. She wanted to be able to apply his identity to his face, to look into his dark eyes and see all the things she'd looked for in their marriage and hadn't been able to find.

"Your hands are tender," the doctor who'd been caring for Steve's burns said as he cut away the last of the bandages and signaled for a nurse to clean them. "Be careful with them until all this new skin has toughened. They're stiff right now, but use them, exercise them. You don't have any tendon or ligament damage, so in time you'll have full use of them again."

Slowly, painfully, Steve flexed his fingers, wincing as he did so. He waited until the doctor and nurses had left the room, then said, "Jay?"

"I'm here."

"How do they look?"

"Red," she answered honestly.

He flexed them again, then cautiously rubbed the fingers of his right hand over his left one, then reversed the procedure. "It feels strange," he said, smiling a little. "They're damned tender, like he said, but the skin feels as smooth as a baby's butt. I don't have any calluses now." The smile faded abruptly, replaced with a frown. "I had callused hands." Again he explored his hands, as if trying to find something familiar in the touch, slowly rubbing his fingertips together.

She laughed softly. "One summer, you played so much sandlot baseball that your hands were as tough as leather. You had calluses on your calluses."

He still looked thoughtful; then his mood changed and he said, "Come sit by me, on the bed."

Curious, she did as he said, sitting facing him. The head of his bed had been raised to an upright position, so he was sitting erect and they were on the same level. Abruptly she noticed how much she had to look up at him. His bare shoulders and chest, despite the weight he had lost, still dwarfed her, and again she wondered what sort of work he had done that had developed his torso to that degree.

Tentatively he reached out, and his hand touched her hair. Realizing why he had wanted her to sit there, she remained still while his fingers sifted through the strands. He didn't say anything. He lifted his other hand, and his palms cupped her face, his fingers gliding lightly over her forehead and brow, down the bridge of her nose, over her lips and jaw and chin before sliding down the length of her throat.

Her breath had stopped, but she hadn't noticed. Slowly he laced his fingers around her neck as if measuring it, then traced the hollows of her collarbones out to her shoulders. "You're too thin," he murmured, cupping the balls of her shoulders in his palms. "Don't you eat enough?"

"Actually, I've gained a little weight," she whispered, beginning to shake at his warm touch.

Calmly, deliberately, he moved his hands down to her breasts and molded his fingers over them. Jay inhaled sharply, and he said, "Easy, easy," as he stroked the soft mounds.

"Steve, no." But her eyes were closing as warm pleasure built in her, her blood beating slowly and powerfully through her veins. His thumbs rubbed over her nipples and she quivered, her breasts beginning to tighten.

"You're so soft." His voice roughened even more. "God, how I've wanted to touch you. Come here, sweetheart."

He ignored the pain in his hands as he pulled her against him, and he wrapped his arms around her as he had dreamed of doing so many times since her voice had charmed him out of the darkness. He felt her slender-ness, her softness, her warmth, and the gut-wrenching pleasure of her breasts flattening against the hard planes of his chest. He smelled the sweetness of her skin, felt the thick silk of her hair, and with a harsh, muffled sound of want, of need, he sought her mouth.

He already knew her mouth. He would beg, cajole, insist until she would give him a kiss in the morning and again at night before she left. He knew it was wide and full and soft, and that her lips trembled each time she kissed him. Now he slanted his mouth to cover hers, pressing hard until her lips parted and gave him the entrance he sought. He could feel her shaking in his arms as he moved his tongue into her mouth and tasted her sweetness. Damn, how had he been fool enough to let her get away from him five years before? Not being able to remember making love to her made him furious because he wanted to know what she liked, how it felt to be inside her, if they had been as good together as every instinct he possessed told them they would be. She belonged to him; he knew it, felt it, as if they were tied together. He deepened the kiss, forcing her to respond to him the way he knew she could, the way he knew she wanted to. Finally she shivered convulsively, and her tongue met his as her arms crept up around his neck.

He shouldn't be this strong, Jay thought dimly, not after all he's been through. But his arms were hard, and so tight around her that her ribs were being squeezed. Steve had never been this aggressive before; he certainly hadn't been a passive man, but now he was kissing her with naked demand, forcing their relationship into an intimacy that frightened her. He wanted her more than he ever had during their marriage, but now his attention was intensely focused on her because of the circumstances.

"We shouldn't do this," she managed to say, turning her head aside to free her mouth from the hungry pressure of his. She brought her hands down and pushed lightly at his shoulders.

"Why not?" he murmured, taking advantage of the vulnerability of her throat with slow kisses. His tongue touched the sensitive hollow below her ear, and her hands tightened on his shoulders as wonderful little ripples of pleasure radiated over her skin. His lack of sight didn't hinder him; he knew his way around a woman's body. Instinct went deeper than memory.

Both conscience and her sense of self-protection made Jay push at his shoulders again, and this time he slowly released her. "We can't let ourselves get involved again," she said in a low voice.

"We're both free," he pointed out.

"As far as we know. Steve, you could have met someone in the past five years who you really care about. Someone could be waiting for you to come home. Until you get your memory back, you can't be certain that you're free. And... and I think we should be cautious about jumping back into a relationship without knowing more than we do."

"No one's waiting for me," he said with harsh certainty.

Her movements were jerky with agitation as she slid off the bed and walked to the window. The morning sky was a leaden color, and snow flurries were drifting aimlessly on the light wind. "You can't know that," she insisted, and turned back to look at him.

His face was turned toward her even though he couldn't see her, and the hard line of his mouth told her he was angry. The sheet was around his waist, baring his broad shoulders and chest, as he had disdained both pajamas and a hospital gown, though he had finally consented to wear the pajama bottoms with the legs cut off and the seams slit so they would fit over the casts on his legs. He was thin, pale and weak from what he'd been through, but somehow the impression he gave was one of power. Nor was he all that weak, not if the strength she had just felt in him was any measure. He must have been incredibly strong before the accident. Those five years when she hadn't seen him were becoming even more of a mystery.

"So you've stayed here with me all this time just because you have a Florence Nightingale complex?" he asked sharply. It was the first time she had refused him anything, and he didn't like it at all. If he could have walked, he would have come after her, sightless or not, weak or not, even though he was still in pain most of the time. None of that would have stopped him, and for the first time she was grateful for his broken legs.

"I never hated you," she tried to explain, knowing that she owed him at least the effort. "I don't think we were all that deeply in love, certainly not enough to make our marriage work. Frank asked me to stay because he thought you would need me, given your condition. Even Major Lunning said it would help if you were around someone familiar, someone you knew before the accident. So... I stayed."

"Don't give me that crap." Her attempt to explain had made him even more furious, and it was a type of anger she hadn't seen before. He was very still and controlled, his guttural voice little more than a whisper. Chills ran up her spine because she could feel his temper like both ice and fire, lashing out at her even though he hadn't moved. "Do you think that because I can't see, I couldn't tell you were turned on just now? Try again, sweetheart."

Jay began to get angry at the harsh demand in his voice. "All right, if you want the truth, here it is. I don't trust you. You were always too restless to settle down and try to build a life together. You were always leaving on another of your 'adventures,' looking for something I couldn't give you. Well, I don't want to go through that again. I don't want to get involved with you again. You want me now, and you may need me a little, but what happens when you're well? Another pat on the head and a kiss on the cheek while I get to watch you ride off into the sunset? Thanks, but no thanks. I have more sense now than I did before."

"Is that why you start shaking every time I touch you? You want to get involved again, all right, but you're afraid."

"I said I don't trust you. I didn't say I was afraid of you. Why should I trust you? You were still looking for trouble when that explosion almost killed you!"

Abruptly she realized that she was all but yelling at him, while his voice hadn't risen at all. She turned and walked out, then leaned against the wall outside his door until both the temper and the shaking subsided. She felt sick, not because of their argument, but because he was right. She was afraid. She was terrified. And it was too late to do anything about it, because she was in love with him again, despite all her warnings and lectures to herself against it. She didn't know him anymore. He had changed; he was harder, rougher; far more dangerous. He was still a leaver, probably far more involved in the situation than Frank had wanted her to know.

But it didn't make any difference. She had loved him before when it had gone against her better judgement, and she loved him now when it made even less sense. God help her, she had left herself wide open for a lot of pain, and there was nothing she could do.

Chapter Six

Steve lay quietly, forcing the lingering cloudiness of anesthesia from his mind. He was instinctively still, like an animal in the jungle, until he was aware enough to know what was going on. A man could lose his life by moving before he knew where his enemies were. If they thought he was dead, he gained the advantage of surprise by lying still and not letting them know he was still alive until he could recover enough to make his move. He tried to open his eyes, but something covered them. They had him blindfolded. But that didn't make sense; why blindfold someone they thought was dead?

He listened, trying to locate his captors. The usual jungle sounds were absent, and gradually he realized that he was too cold to be in a jungle. The smell was all wrong, too; it was a sharp, medicinal odor, like disinfectant. This place smelted like a hospital.

The realization was like a curtain going up, and abruptly he knew where he was and what had happened, and at the same time the hazy recollection of the steamy jungle swiftly faded. The final surgery on his eyes was over, and he was in Recovery. "Jay!" It took an incredible amount of effort to call for her, and his voice sounded strange, even worse than usual, so deep and hoarse it was almost like an animal's cry. " Jay!"

"Everything's all right, Mr. Crossfield," a calm voice said soothingly. "You've had your surgery, and everything is just fine. Lie still, and we'll have you back in your room in a few minutes."

It wasn't Jay's voice. It was a nice voice, but it wasn't what he wanted. His throat was dry; he swallowed, and winced a little because his throat was so raw and sore. That's right; they'd had a tube down it. "Where's Jay?" he croaked, like a frog.

"Is Jay your wife, Mr. Crossfield?"

"Yes." Ex-wife, if they wanted to get technical. He didn't care about the labels. Jay was his.

"She's probably waiting for you in your room."

"Take me there."

"Let's wait a few more minutes—"

"Now." The single word was guttural, the steely command naked. He didn't try to dress it up in polite phrases, because it was all he could do to say a few words at a time. He was still groggy, but he fixed his thoughts on Jay with single-minded determination. He began groping for the rail on the side of the bed.

"Mr. Crossfield, wait! You're going to pull the IV out of your arm!"

"Good," he muttered.

"Calm down, we're going to take you to your room. Just lie still while I get an orderly."

A minute later he felt the bed begin to move. It was a curiously relaxing movement, and he began to go to sleep again but forced himself to stay alert. He couldn't afford to relax until Jay was with him; there was damned little he knew about who he was or what was going on, but Jay was the one constant in his life, the one person he trusted. She had been there from the beginning, as far back as his memory reached, and further.

"Here we are," the nurse said cheerfully. "He couldn't wait to get back to his room, Mrs. Crossfield. He was asking for you and kicking up a fuss."

"I'm here, Steve," Jay said, and he thought she sounded anxious. He noticed that she didn't correct the nurse about her name, and fierce satisfaction filled him. The name didn't mean much to him, but it was a name he'd once shared with Jay, one of the links that bound her to him.

He was lifted onto his bed, and he could feel them fussing around him for a few more minutes. It was getting harder to stay awake. "Jay!"

"I'm here."

He reached out with his left hand toward her voice, and her slim, cool fingers touched him. Her hand felt so small and fragile in his.

"The doctor said everything went perfectly," she said, her voice somewhere above him in the darkness. "You'll get the bandages off for good in about two weeks."

"Then I'm outta here," he murmured. His hand tightened around hers, and he gave in to the lingering effects of the anesthesia.

When he woke again, it was without the initial confusion, but he was still groggy. Impatiently he forced his mind out of lethargy, and it was so habitual now to ignore the pain in his mending body that he truthfully didn't even notice it. At some unknown point in his life he had learned that the human body could be forced to superhuman feats if the brain knew how to ignore pain. Evidently he had learned that lesson so well that it was second nature to him now.

Now that he was more awake, he didn't have to call for Jay to know she was in the room. He could hear her breathing, hear the pages of a magazine turning as she sat by the bed. He could smell the faint, sweet scent of her skin, a scent that identified her immediately to him whenever she entered the room. Then there was that other awareness, the physical awareness that was like an electrical charge, making his skin tingle with pleasure and excitement at her closeness, or even at the mere thought of her.

He hadn't kissed her since their argument the week before, but he was only biding his time. She had been upset, and he didn't want that, didn't want to push her. Maybe he hadn't been much of a prize before, but she still felt something for him, or she wouldn't be here now, and when the time came he would capitalize on those feelings. She was his; he knew it with a bone-deep sense of possession that overrode everything else.

He wanted her. The strength of his sexual need for her surprised him, given his current physical condition, but the stirring in his loins every time she touched him was proof that certain instincts were stronger than pain. Every day the pain was a little less, and every day he wanted her a little more. It was basic. Whenever two people were attracted to each other, the urge to mate became overwhelming; it was nature's way of propagating the species. Intense physical desire and hot, frequent lovemaking reinforced the bond between two people. They became a couple, because back in the human species' first primitive days, it took two people to provide care for their helpless young. In current times one parent could raise a child quite well, and modern medicine had made it possible for a woman not to become pregnant if she didn't want to, but the old instincts were still there. The sexual drive was still there, a man's need to make love to his woman and make certain she knew she was his. He understood the basis of the biological need programmed into his genes, but understanding didn't lessen its power.

Amnesia was a curious thing. When he examined it unemotionally, he was interested in its oddities. He had lost all conscious knowledge of whatever had happened to him before he'd come out of the coma, but a lot of unconscious knowledge evidently hadn't been affected. He could remember different World Series and Super Bowls, and how Niagara Falls looked. That wasn't important. Interesting, but not important.

Equally interesting, and far more important, were the things he knew about both obscure Third World nations and major powers without remembering how he came by the knowledge. He couldn't bring his own face to mind, but somehow that didn't negate what he knew was fact. He knew the desert, the hot, dry heat and blood-sizzling sun. He also knew the jungle, the stifling heat and humidity, the insects and reptiles, the leeches, the shrieking birds, the stench of rotting vegetation.

Taking those bits and pieces of himself that he could recognize, he was able to piece together part of the puzzle. The jungle part was easy. Jay had told him that he was thirty-seven; he was just the right age to have been in Vietnam during the height of the war in the late sixties. The rest of it, all added together, could have only one logical explanation: he was far more involved in the situation than Jay had been told.

He had wondered if scopolamine or Pentothal would be successful on an amnesia victim, or if the amnesia effectively sealed off his memories even from the powerful drugs available today. If what he might know was important enough for him to warrant this kind of red-carpet treatment, then it would have been worth Frank Payne's effort to at least have tried the drugs. They hadn't tried, and that told him something else: Payne knew Steve had been indoctrinated to resist any chemical prying into his brain. Therefore he must be a trained field operative.

Jay didn't know. She really thought he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had said that when they had been married, he had constantly been taking off on one "adventure" after another, so he must have kept her in the dark and just let her think that he was footloose, rather than worrying her with the knowledge of just how dangerous his work was, and that the odds were even he wouldn't return from any given trip.

He had fitted that many pieces of the puzzle together, but there were still a lot of little things that didn't make sense to him. He had noticed, as soon as the bandages were taken off his hands, that his fingertips were oddly smooth. It wasn't the smoothness of scar tissue; his hands were so sensitive, with their new, healing skin, that he could tell the difference between the burned areas and his fingertips. He was positive his fingertips hadn't been burned; rather, his fingerprints had been altered or removed altogether, probably the latter. Recently, too, most likely here in this hospital. The question was: Why? Who were they hiding his identity from? They knew who he was, and he was evidently on good terms with them, or they wouldn't have gone to such extraordinary lengths to save his life. Jay knew who he was. Was someone out there hunting for him? And, if so, was Jay in danger simply because she was with him?

Too many questions, and he didn't know the answers to any of them. He could ask Payne, but he wasn't certain he'd get a straight answer from the man. Payne was hiding something. Steve didn't know what it was, but he could hear a fault note of guilt in the man's voice, especially when he spoke to Jay. What had they gotten Jay involved in?

He heard the door to his room open and he lay motionless, wanting to know the identity of his visitor without them knowing he was awake. He had noticed that cautiousness in himself before; it fit in with what he had deduced.

"Is he awake yet?"

It was Frank Payne's quiet voice, and that special note was there again, the guilt and the... affection. Yeah, that's what it was. Payne liked Jay and worried about her, but he was still using her. It made Steve feel even less inclined to cooperate. It made him mad, to think they could be putting Jay in any danger.

"He went to sleep as soon as they got him in bed, and he hasn't stirred since. Have you talked to the doctor?"

"No, not yet. How did it go?"

"Wonderfully. The doctor doesn't think there's any permanent damage. He has to lie as quietly as possible for a few days, and his eyes may be sensitive to bright light after the bandages come off, but he probably won't even need glasses."

"That's good. He should be leaving here in another couple of weeks, if everything goes all right."

"It's hard to think of not coming here every day," Jay mused. "It won't seem normal. What happens when he's released?"

"I need to talk to him about that," Payne answered. "It can wait a few days, until he's more active."

Steve could hear the worry in Jay's voice and wondered at it. Did she know something, after all? Why else would she worry about what happened to him when he left the hospital? He had news for her, though; wherever she went, that was where he intended to go, and Frank Payne could take those ideas of his and become real friendly with them.

Two more weeks of biding his time. He didn't know if he could do it. It was hard to force himself to exercise the patience he needed to allow his body to heal, and there were still weeks of rehabilitation ahead before he regained his full strength. He'd have to push himself harder than the therapists would, but he could sense his own limits, and he knew they were more elastic than the therapists could guess. It was just one more piece of the puzzle.

He decided to let himself "wake up" and began shifting restlessly. The IV needle tugged at his hand. "Jay?" he called in a groggy tone, then cleared his throat and tried again. "Jay?" He never quite got used to hearing his own voice the way it was now, so harsh and strained, gravelly in texture. Another little oddity. He couldn't remember his own voice, but he knew this one wasn't right.

"I'm here." Her cool fingers touched his arm.

How many times had he heard those two words, and how many times had they provided him with a link to consciousness? They seemed embedded in his mind, as if they were his one memory. Hell, they probably were. He reached for her with his free hand. "Thirsty."

He heard the sound of water pouring; then a straw touched his lips and he gratefully sucked the cold liquid into his dry mouth and down his raw throat. She took the straw away after only a couple of swallows. "Not too much at first," she said in that calm way of hers. "The anesthesia may make you sick."

He moved his hand and felt the needle tugging at it again. Swift irritation filled him. "Get a nurse to take this damned needle out."

"You need glucose after surgery to keep from going into shock," she argued. "And it probably has an antibiotic in it—"

"Then they can give me pills," he rasped. "I don't like being restricted like this." It was bad enough that his legs were still in casts; he'd had enough of having to lie still to last him a lifetime.

She was silent for a moment, and he could sense her understanding. Sometimes it was as if they didn't need words, as if there were a link between them that transcended the verbal. She knew exactly how frustrated it made him to have to lie in bed day after day; it was not only boring, it went against every survival instinct he possessed. "All right," she finally said, her cool fingers drifting against his arm. "I'll get a nurse."

He listened as she left the room, then lay quietly, waiting to see if Frank Payne would identify himself. It was a subtle game; he didn't even know why he was playing it. But Payne was hiding something, and Steve didn't trust him. He'd do anything he could to gain an edge, even if it was something so trivial as pretending to sleep while he eavesdropped. He hadn't even learned anything, other than that Payne had "plans" for him.

"Are you in any pain?" Frank asked.

Steve cautiously turned his head. "Frank?" Another part of the game, pretending he didn't recognize the other man's voice.

"Yes."

"No, not much pain. Groggy." That much was true; the anesthesia made him feel limp and sleepy. But he could force himself to mental alertness, and that was the important part. He would rather be in pain than be so doped up he didn't know what was going on around him. The barbiturate coma had been a nightmare of darkness, of nothingness, which he didn't want to experience again, even in a mild form. Even amnesia was better than that total lack of self.

"That's the last of it. No more surgery, no more tubes, no more needles. When the casts come off your legs, you can start getting back to your old shape." Frank had a quiet voice, and there was often a note of familiarity in it, as if they had known each other well.

His words touched a chord of recognition in Steve; his old shape hadn't been bulky muscles, but rather speed and stamina, a steely core of strength that kept him going when other men would have collapsed.

"Is Jay in any danger?" he asked, cutting through the cautious maneuvering to what was most important to him.

"Because of what you may have seen?"

"Yes."

"We don't anticipate any danger," Frank replied, his voice cautious. "You are important to us only because we need to know exactly what happened, and you might provide us with some answers."

Steve smiled wryly. "Yeah, I know. Important enough to cut through red tape and coordinate two, maybe three, separate agencies, as well as pulling in people from different branches of the service and from the private sector. I'm just an innocent bystander, aren't I? Jay may buy that, but I don't. So cut the crap and give me a yes or no answer. Is Jay in any danger?"

"No," Frank said firmly, and after a second Steve gave a fractional nod, all he could manage. Regardless of what Frank was hiding, he was still fond of Jay and protective of her. Jay was safe enough. Steve could deal with the rest later; Jay was what mattered now.

His legs were thin and weak after having been encased in plaster for six weeks; he ran his hands down them, getting himself accustomed to their peculiar lightness. He could move them, but his movements were jerky and uncontrolled. For the past couple of days he had been sitting in a wheelchair or in the bedside chair, letting his body adjust to movement and different postures. His hands had healed enough that he had been able to stand, using a walker for support, for a few minutes each day. His store of knowledge was increasing all the time. He now knew that even when he was bent forward to hold the walker, he was several inches taller than Jay. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her against him, to feel her soft body adjust to his size as he bent his head to kiss her. He'd been holding off, taking it slow, but now that was at an end.

Jay watched him massage his thighs and calves, his long fingers kneading the muscles with sure strokes. He was scheduled for a session in physical therapy that afternoon, but he wasn't waiting for someone else to do the work for him. He had been like a coiled spring since the surgery on his eyes: tense, waiting, but under iron control. It had been a month and a half since the explosion, and perhaps lesser people would still have been lying in bed and taking pills for the pain, but Steve had been pushing himself from the moment he'd regained consciousness. His hands had to be tender, but he used them and never winced. His ribs and legs had to hurt, but he didn't let that stop him. He never complained of a headache, though Major Lunning had told Jay he would probably have headaches for several months.

She glanced at her watch. He'd been massaging his legs for half an hour. "I think that's enough," she said firmly. "Don't you want to go back to bed?"

He straightened up in the wheelchair and his teeth flashed in a grin. "Baby, I'm so tired of that bed, the only way you could get me back in it would be if you crawled in there with me."

He looked so wickedly masculine that she felt herself weakening even as she tried to warn herself against his charm. He wasn't above using his appeal as a wounded warrior to get to her, blast his hide. She couldn't even look at him without getting wobbly kneed, and sometimes the way she felt about him welled up in her like a flood tide, pleasure and pain so sharply mingled that she would almost moan aloud. Every day he was stronger; every day he conquered new territory, exerted his will over another aspect of his life. It was both amazing and frightening to watch him and to realize the extent of his willpower as he dealt with his situation. He was so fiercely controlled and determined that it was almost inhuman, but at the same time he let her see how very human he was; he depended on her now more than she had ever imagined possible, and the vulnerability he revealed to her was all the more shattering because she knew how rare it was.

"Get the walker for me," he ordered now, turning his bandaged eyes toward her expectantly, as if waiting for her to protest.

Jay pursed her lips, looking at him, then shrugged and placed the walker in front of him. If he suffered a setback, it would be his own fault for refusing to accept his limitations. "All right," she said calmly. "Go ahead and fall. Break your legs again, crack your head open again and spend a few more months in here. I'm sure that will thrill the nurses."

He chuckled at her acerbity, a reaction that was becoming more frequent as he healed. He regarded it as a measure of his recovery; while he had been ill and helpless, she hadn't refused him anything. He liked finding this bite to her personality. A passive woman wouldn't suit him at all, but Jay suited him in every way, at all times.

"I won't fall," he assured her, levering himself into an upright position. He had to support most of his weight on his arms, but his feet moved when he told them to. Jerkily, true, but on command.

"And heee's offf aaand stumbling!" Jay cried in dry imitation of a racetrack announcer, her irritation plain.

He gave a shout of laughter and did stumble, but caught himself with the walker. "You're supposed to guide me, not make fun of me."

"I refuse to help you push yourself too hard. If you fall, it will be your own fault."

A crooked smile twisted his lips and her heart speeded up at the roguish charm it gave his face. "Ah, baby," he cajoled. "I'm not pushing too hard, I promise. I know how much I can do. Come on, guide me down the hall."

"No," she said firmly.

Two minutes later she was walking slowly by his side as he maneuvered the walker, and his reluctant legs, down the hall. At the end of the corridor, the Navy guard watched alertly, examining everyone and everything. It was like that every time Steve left his room, though he didn't realize he was guarded so closely. Jay felt a chill as her eyes met those of the guard and he nodded politely; no matter how calm everything seemed, the guards' presence reminded her that Steve had been involved in something highly dangerous. Wouldn't his amnesia put him in even more danger? He didn't even know he was being threatened or by wtipm. No wonder those guards were necessary! But realizing just how necessary they were terrified her. This was all part of the large gray area Frank hadn't explained, but she knew it was there.

"This is far enough," Steve said, and cautiously turned around. He turned exactly 180 degrees and took two steps before stopping, his head turning back to her. "Jay?"

"Sorry." Hastily she moved to his side. How had he known how far to turn? Why wasn't he more uncertain of his movements? He walked slowly, still supporting most of his weight on his arms and hands, but he seemed deliberate and sure. He was slowed by his injuries but not thwarted. He wouldn't let himself give in; he didn't look on his injuries as something to be recovered from, but rather as something to be conquered. He would handle this on his own terms, and win, because he wouldn't accept anything less.

She saw even more of his determination in the following days as he sweated through physical therapy. The therapist tried to restrain him but Steve insisted on setting his own pace. He swam laps, guiding himself by Jay's voice, and walked endlessly on a treadmill. By the third day of therapy he had discarded the walker permanently and replaced it with Jay. Grinning as he put his arm around her shoulder, he explained that at least she'd cushion him if he fell.

He had gained weight rapidly since the tube had been taken out of his throat, and now he regained his strength just as rapidly. Jay felt as if she could see a difference in him from one day to the next. Except for the bandages over his eyes, he seemed almost normal, but she knew every scar hidden by the comfortable sweats Frank had brought him to wear. His hands were still pink from the burns, and his ruined voice would never be much better. Nor was his memory showing any sign of returning. There were no flashes of memory or glimmers of recognition. It was as if he had been born when he had fought his way out of unconsciousness to respond to her voice, and nothing existed before that.

Sometimes, watching him as he exercised with that frightening relentlessness of his, she caught herself hoping that his memory wouldn't return, and then guilt would eat at her. But he depended on her so much now, and if he began to remember, the closeness between them would fade. Even as she tried to protect herself from that closeness, she treasured every moment and wanted more. She was caught on the horns of her own dilemma and couldn't decide how to get free. She could protect herself and walk away, or she could grab for whatever she could get, but she couldn't decide to do either. All she could do was wait, and watch over him with increasing fierceness.

The day the bandages were supposed to come off his eyes, he got up at dawn and prowled restlessly around the hospital room. Jay had gotten there early, feeling as anxious as he did, but she forced herself to sit still. Finally he turned on the television and listened intently to the morning news, a frown knitting his brow.

"Why the hell doesn't that damn doctor hurry up?" he muttered.

Jay looked at her watch. "It's still early. You haven't even had breakfast yet."

He swore under his breath and raked his fingers through his hair. It was still shorter than was fashionable, but long enough to cover the scar that bisected his skull, and it was dark and shiny, undulled by sunlight, and beginning to show a hint of waviness. He prowled some more, then stopped by the window and drummed his fingers on the sill. "It's a sunny day, isn't it?"

Jay looked out the window at the blue sky. "Yes, and not too cold, but the weather forecast says we could have some snow by the weekend."

"What's the date?"

"January 29."

His fingers continued to tap against the sill. "Where are we going?"

Jay felt blank. "Going?"

"When they release me. Where are we going?"

She felt a shock like a slap in the face as she realized he would be released from the hospital within a few hours if everything was all right with his eyes. The apartment Frank had rented for her was tiny, only one bedroom, but that wasn't what alarmed her. What if Frank intended to whisk Steve away from her? Granted, he had once said something about her staying with Steve until his memory returned, but it hadn't been mentioned since. Was that still his plan? If so, where did he intend for Steve to live?

"I don't know where we'll go," she replied faintly. "They may want to send you somewhere...." Her voice trailed off into miserable silence.

"Too damn bad if they do." He turned from the window, and there was something lethal in his movement, a predator's grace and power. She stared at him, silhouetted against the bright window, and her throat contracted. He was so much harder than he had been that it almost frightened her, but at the same tune, everything about him excited her. She loved him so much that it hurt, deep inside her chest, and it was getting worse.

A nurse brought in his breakfast tray, then winked at Jay. "I noticed you were here early, so I had an extra tray sent up. I won't tell if you won't." She brought in another breakfast tray, smiling as Jay thanked her. "This is the big day," the nurse said cheerfully. "Call this a sort of precelebration meal."

Steve grinned. "Are you that anxious to get rid of me?"

"You've been an absolute angel. We're going to miss those buns of yours, but hey, easy come, easy go."

A slow flush reddened Steve's cheeks, and the nurse laughed heartily as she left the room. Jay snickered as she unwrapped his silverware and arranged everything on the tray as he was accustomed to finding it.

"Bring your gorgeous buns over here and eat your breakfast," she ordered, still snickering.

"If you like them, get a good view," he invited, turning around and lifting his arms so she did indeed have an excellent view of his tight, muscular buttocks. "I'll even let you touch."

"Thank you, but food wins out over your backside. Aren't you hungry?"

"Starved."

They made short work of the meal, and soon he was again prowling about the small room, his restlessness making it seem even smaller. His impatience was a palpable force, bristling around him. He had spent too many weeks flat on his back, totally helpless and blind, unable even to feed himself. Now he had his mobility back, and in an unknown number of minutes he'd know if his sight had been restored. The doctor was certain of the surgery's success, but until the bandages were off and he could actually see, Steve wouldn't let himself believe it. It was the waiting and the lack of certainty that ate at him. He wanted to see. He wanted to know what Jay looked like; he wanted to be able to put a face to the voice. If he never saw anything else, he needed to see her face, if only for a moment. Every cell in his body knew her, could sense her presence; but even though she had described herself to him, he needed to have her face in his mind. The rest of his vanished memory didn't haunt him nearly as much as the knowledge of Jay that he'd lost, and the most piercing of all was that he couldn't remember her face. It was as if he'd lost a part of himself.

His head came up like a wary animal's as he heard the door open, and the eye surgeon laughed. "I half expected you to have taken the bandages off yourself."

"I didn't want to steal your thunder," Steve said. He was standing very still.

Jay was just as still, tension coiling in her as she watched the surgeon, a nurse, Major Lunning and Frank all enter the room. Frank was carrying a bag with the name of a local department store on it, and he placed it on the bed. Without asking, Jay knew it contained street clothes for Steve, and she was vaguely grateful to Frank for thinking of it, because she hadn't.

"Sit down here, with your back to the window," the surgeon said, directing Steve to a chair. When Steve was seated, the doctor took a pair of scissors, cut through the gauze and tape at Steve's temple and carefully removed the outer bandage in order not to disturb the pads over his eyes or let the tape pull at his skin. "Tilt your head back a little," he instructed.

Jay's nails were digging into her palms and her chest hurt. For the first tune she was seeing his face without bandages; even the relatively small swathe of gauze that had anchored the pads to his eyes had covered his temples and eyebrows, as well as his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. He had been a handsome man, but he wasn't handsome any longer. His nose wasn't quite straight, and they had made the bridge a little higher than it had been before the explosion. His cheekbones looked more prominent. All in all, his face had more angles than it had before; the battering he'd taken was evident.

Slowly the doctor removed the gauze pads, then wiped Steve's eyes with some sort of solution. Steve's lids looked a little bruised and his eyes were deeper set than before.

"Pull the curtains," the doctor said quietly, and the nurse pulled them across the window, darkening the room. Then he turned on the dim light over the bed.

"All right, now you can open your eyes. Slowly. Let them get accustomed to the light. Then blink until they focus."

Steve opened his eyes to mere slits and blinked. He tried it again.

"Damn, that light's bright," he said. Then he opened his eyes completely, blinked until they were focused and turned his head toward Jay.

She sat frozen in place and her breath stopped. It was like looking into an eagle's eyes, meeting the fierce gaze of a raptor, a high-soaring predator. They were the eyes of the man she loved so much she ached with it, and terror chilled her blood. She remembered velvety, chocolate-brown eyes, but these eyes were a dark yellowish brown, glittering like amber crystal. An eagle's eyes.

He was the man she loved, but she didn't know who he was, only who he wasn't.

He wasn't Steve Crossfield.

Chapter Seven

His heart almost stopped in his chest. Jay. The face to go with the name and the voice, the gentle touch, the sweet and elusive scent. Her description of herself had been accurate, yet it was far from reality. The reality of Jay was a heavy mane of honey-brown hair, eyes of deep-ocean blue and a wide, soft, vulnerable mouth. God, her mouth. It was red and full, as luscious as a ripe plum. It was the most passionate mouth he'd ever seen, and thinking of kissing it, of having those lips touch his body, made a hard ache settle in his loins. She was immobile, her face colorless except for the deep pools of her eyes and that wonderful, exotic mouth. She stared at him as if mesmerized, unable to look away.

"How does everything look?" the surgeon asked. "Do you see halos of light, or are the edges fuzzy?"

He ignored the doctor and stood, his gaze never wavering from Jay. He would never get enough of looking at her. Four steps took him to her, and her eyes widened even more in her utterly white face as she stared up at him. He tried to make his hands gentle as he caught her arms and pulled her to her feet, but anticipation and arousal were riding him hard, and he knew his fingers bit into her soft flesh. She made an incoherent sound; then his mouth covered hers and the erotic feel of her full lips made him want to groan. He wanted to be alone with her. She was shaking in his arms, her hands clutching the front of his shirt as she leaned against him as if afraid she might fall.

"Well, your sense of direction is good," Frank said wryly, and Steve lifted his head from Jay's, though he kept her tight against him, her head pressed into his shoulder. She was still trembling violently.

"I'd say his priorities are in order, too," Major Lunning put in, grinning as he looked at his patient with a deep sense of satisfaction. It hadn't been too many weeks since he'd had serious doubts that Steve would live. To see him now, like this, was almost miraculous. Not that he was fully recovered. He still hadn't regained his full strength, nor had his memory shown any signs of returning. But he was alive, and well on the road to good health.

"I can see everything just fine," Steve said, his voice raspier than usual as he looked around the hospital room that had been home to him for more days than he cared to remember. Even it looked good. He'd disciplined himself to picture everything in his mind, to form a sense of spatial relations so that he always knew where he was in the room, and his mental picture had been remarkably correct. The colors were oddly shocking, though; he hadn't pictured colors, only physical presences.

The surgeon cleared his throat. "Ah... if you could sit down for a moment, Mr. Crossfield?"

Steve released Jay, and she shakily sat down, gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that her knuckles were white. They were wrong! He wasn't Steve Cross-field! Shock had kept her mute, but as she watched the surgeon examine Steve—no, not Steve!—control returned and she opened her mouth to tell him what a horrible mistake had been made.

Then Frank moved, tilting his head to watch the surgeon, and the movement caught her attention. Ice spread in her veins, freezing her brain again, but one thought still formed: if she told them that she'd made a mistake, that this man wasn't her ex-husband, they would have no use for her. He would be whisked away, and she would never see him again.

She began to shiver convulsively. She loved him. She didn't know who he was but she loved him, and she couldn't give him up. She needed to think this through, but she couldn't right now. She needed to be alone, away from watching eyes, so she could deal with the shock of realizing that Steve... dear God, Steve was dead! And this man in his place was a stranger.

She stood so abruptly that her chair tilted back on two legs before clattering forward again. Five startled faces turned to her as she edged toward the door like a prisoner trying to escape. "I... I just need some coffee," she gasped in a strained voice. She darted out the door, ignoring Steve's hoarse call.

He wasn't Steve. He wasn't Steve. The simple fact was devastating, rocking her to the core.

She ran down the hall to the visitors' lounge and huddled on one of the uncomfortable seats. She felt both cold and numb, and faintly sick, as if she were on the verge of throwing up.

Who was he? Taking deep breaths, she tried to think coherently. He wasn't Steve, so he had to be the American agent Frank had been so concerned about. That meant he had been deeply embroiled in the situation, the one man in the world who knew what had happened, if only he regained his memory. Could he be in danger if anyone—perhaps the person or persons who had set off the explosion that had already almost killed him—knew he was still alive? Until he recovered his memory, he couldn't recognize his enemies; his best protection now was the false identity he wore. She couldn't put him in more danger, nor could she give him up.

It was wrong to pretend he was someone he wasn't. By keeping this secret she was betraying Frank, whom she liked, but most of all she was betraying Steve... damn, she hated calling him that, but what else could she call him? She had to continue thinking of him as Steve. She was betraying him by putting him in a life that wasn't his, perhaps even hindering his complete recovery. He would never forgive her when he knew, if he ever regained his memory. He would know she had lied to bun, that she had forced him to live a lie by putting him in her ex-husband's place. But she couldn't put him at risk. She just couldn't. She loved him too much. No matter what it cost her, she had to lie to protect him.

"Jay."

It was his voice, the raw, gravelly voice that haunted her at night in the sweetest of dreams. Numbly she turned her head and looked at him, still so shocked that she couldn't guard her expression. She loved him. Loving Steve, with his need for excitement that she couldn't give him, had been bad enough; what had she done, letting herself love this man whose life consisted of danger? She had walked off an emotional cliff and was now in a free fall, unable to help herself.

He filled the doorway of the lounge. Now that she knew, she saw the differences. He was a little taller than Steve had been, broader of shoulder and deeper of chest, more muscular. His jaw was squarer, his lips fuller. She should have known just by his mouth, the shape of which hadn't been changed by surgery. A funny kind of pain filled her as she realized that she didn't know what he had looked like before. Had his cheekbones been that high and prominent, his eyes that deep set, his nose slightly off center? His face was battered and rough now, but had it been drastically changed?

"What's wrong, baby?" he asked in a low tone, squatting down in front of her and taking her hands in his. His thick, level brows descended in a frown as he felt the iciness of her fingers.

She swallowed, and fine tremors shook her body. Even hunkered down, he was on a level with her. The sense of power, of danger, about him was overwhelming. It had been partially disguised while his eyes had been bandaged, but now, with his fierce will glittering in those yellow-brown eyes, she felt the full force of his personality.

"I'm all right," she managed to say. "It just got to me all of a sudden. I've been so worried."

He released her hands and slid his palms up her arms. "I wanted to see you so badly I didn't have time to worry," he murmured. The stroking of his big hands warmed her arms, and she felt the heat of his legs as they pressed against hers. "You told me about your blue eyes, but you didn't tell me about your mouth."

He was looking at her mouth. She felt her lips begin to tremble. "What about my mouth?"

"How erotic it is," he said under his breath, and leaned forward. This time his kiss was hard, seeking, forcing her to give way under his onslaught and open her lips for his tongue. Pleasure shuddered through her muscles even though a dim alarm began to sound. While he had been recovering and needed her support so badly, he had been supplicant, asking for her kisses and the intimacy of her touch. Now he wasn't asking, and she realized that he had been holding back all along. He wanted her, and he was coming after her with the full intention of getting what he wanted.

He stood, his strong grip drawing her up, too, without breaking contact with her mouth. He kissed her with the forceful intimacy of a man who intends to take his woman to bed, loosening the reins of control, demanding more. Jay clung to his shoulders, her senses swimming at the hard pressure of his body against hers. He moved his hips, seeking the cradle of hers, and groaned harshly in his throat when his swollen flesh found the warm notch at the apex of her thighs. She would have groaned, too, if she'd had the breath. A wild, hot madness was swirling through her veins, tempting her to forget everything in the demanding urge to satisfy the longings he'd aroused.

A man and woman entered the lounge; the man walked past without more than a sidelong look, but the woman stopped and blushed before looking away and hurrying past. Steve lifted his head, his hands loosening as a crooked smile quirked his mouth. "I think we need to go home," he said.

She panicked all over again. Home? Were they expecting her to take him to the small one-bedroom apartment she'd been using for the past two months? Or would they take him away from her after all, to finish recuperating in some unknown place?

They left the lounge to find Frank leaning patiently against the wall, waiting for them. He straightened and smiled, but his eyes were sympathetic as he looked at Jay. "Feeling better now?"

She took a deep breath. "I don't know. Tell me what's going to happen, then I'll tell you how I feel."

Steve put his arm around her waist. "Don't worry, sweetheart. They're not sending me anywhere without you. Are you, Frank?" He asked the question mildly, but there was steel underlying his tone, and his yellow-brown eyes narrowed.

Frank looked back at him with wry humor. "It never even crossed my mind. Let's step back into your room and we'll talk."

When they were once again behind a closed door, Frank walked over to the window, opened the curtains and looked out, blinking a little at the brightness of the winter sun. "First, you have to let the surgeon finish his examination of your eyes," he said, and glanced back at Steve. "And you'll need a follow-up exam next week, but I'll arrange that."

Steve made an impatient gesture, one that Frank read perfectly. He held up both hands, palms out in a delaying motion. "I'm getting to that. We'd like to keep you safe, but accessible to us. If you agree, we plan to move you to a safe house in Colorado."

Jay's head spun, and she sat down abruptly. Colorado? Her life had been turned upside down in the past two months, so the thought of such a drastic change shouldn't have stunned her, but it did. How could she go off to Colorado? Then she looked at Steve and knew she would go anywhere if it meant she could be with him. It was ironic. When she had been married, the most important thing in her life had been to establish some sort of stability on which to build her relationship with Steve, and the marriage hadn't survived. Now she had to pretend this man was Steve, but she was willing to walk away from everything and everyone she knew just to be with him. Painful sadness filled her, because this pointed out so clearly that she hadn't truly loved the real Steve Crossfield, though she had wanted to. He had held her away, walked his path alone and died alone without anyone ever really being close to him.

"Denver?" Steve guessed.

"No. The closest town is forty miles from the cabin by road, about fifteen air miles. It's a quiet, peaceful place, with no one to put any pressure on you."

"It's really nice of you folks to do all of this, just for the chance to talk to me when I get my memory back," he drawled, watching Frank with a hard gleam in his eyes.

Frank laughed, thinking that some things never changed. Even without his memory, he was so sharp he'd already put part of the puzzle together. "Why don't you go to the apartment and start packing?" Frank suggested to Jay, then lifted his brows in question. "If you want to go, that is."

"She's going," Steve said flatly, crossing his arms as he leaned against the bed. "Or I don't go."

Because she desperately needed the chance to be alone and think, Jay said yes. She slipped from the room without looking at either man, afraid they would see the terror in her eyes.

Steve regarded Frank in silence for a moment before growling, "You told me there wasn't any danger. Why the safe house?"

"So far as we know, you aren't in any danger—"

"Look, you can cut the crap," he interrupted. "I was an agent. I know all of this—" he gestured at the hospital surrounding him "—wasn't done out of the goodness of the government's heart. I know those guards aren't out there for decoration. I also know you wouldn't go to the expense of hiding me away in a safe house unless there was some threat to me, and unless you very badly need some information I may have."

Frank looked interested. "How did you know the guards were there?"

"I heard them," Steve replied shortly.

Now what? Frank looked at the man who had been his friend for over a decade and wondered how much to tell him. Not all of it, for damned certain. Until the Man nailed Piggot, the masquerade had to continue because it was Steve's best protection against any more attacks on his life. He knew too much for them to leave anything about his security to chance, and for the masquerade to be complete, it had to include Jay. The Man didn't take chances with his agents, or his friends, and Steve was both.

"You're right," Frank said. "You're an agent. A very highly trained agent, and we think the information you got on your last assignment is critical."

"Why the safe house?" Steve asked again, not letting up.

"Because the guy who tried to blow you to kingdom come went underground and hasn't surfaced yet. Until we get him, we want to make certain you're safe."

Like a burst of lightning, fury turned his eyes to yellow. "And you dragged Jay into this?"

Frank watched him warily, knowing how fast he could move. "Piggot doesn't know anyone survived the explosion. We just don't want to take any chances with you."

The yellow eyes flickered at the mention of Piggot's name. "Piggot. What's his first name?"

"Geoffrey."

Again there was that flicker in Steve's eyes and Frank watched closely, wondering if the mention of Piggot's name would trigger any real memory. But if it did, Steve kept it to himself. "I want to see the file you have on him," he said.

"I'll see if I can get clearance."

"But don't expect it, right? I'm a security risk now."

"That's the way it's played."

"Yeah. Now tell me why you had to bring Jay into the game. She doesn't know I'm an agent, does she?"

"No. We brought her in to identify you. It's as simple as that. And once she was here... you responded to her voice so strongly that the doctors decided it would help you to have her around. So she stayed." That was the truth, as far as it went. Frank just hoped Steve wouldn't ask too many more questions. He'd told him about all he could without clearance from the Man.

Steve rubbed his jaw as he mentally cataloged what Frank had told him. If he'd felt his presence was endangering Jay, he would have walked away from her that minute, but he felt Frank's sincerity. The other man thought they were safe enough. The deciding factor was the thought of living in an isolated house with Jay, just the two of them. He would have another chance. He would learn again what pleased her, and what made her angry. They would have another first time together. After he got all his strength and stamina back, they would lie in bed on cold, snowy mornings and make love until their bodies were damp with sweat even in the chilled air, and she would give him all the fiercely passionate love he could sense inside her. She presented a calm, controlled facade to the world, but perhaps because he hadn't been able to see her and had been forced to rely on his other faculties, he'd sensed the depth of her emotions behind that cool control. Maybe he'd been fool enough to let her slip away from him before, but not again.

"Okay," he said, exhaling slowly. "So we go to this safe house. What kind of security and communications does it have?"

"Bulletproof windows, reinforced steel doors. The cabin is isolated, built on a high meadow. There aren't any roads going up there, so a four-wheel-drive vehicle will be made available to you. The cabin has its own generator, so there aren't any public utility records. You're connected to a satellite-dish antenna for communication and entertainment, with both computer and radio-sending capabilities."

Steve's expression was remote as he concentrated, considering the angles. "Are there any active security systems, or just the passive precautions?"

"Just the passive."

"Why not thermal or motion sensors?"

"To begin with, this cabin is so safe it isn't even on file. And there's a lot of wildlife in the area, which would constantly trigger the alarms. We could set up a perimeter of thermal sensors and program the system to sound the alarm only at a large heat source, but a deer would still set it off."

"How inaccessible is this place?"

"There's just one track leading to it, and I'm being kind by calling it a track. It winds from the cabin across the meadow and down a mountain before it hits a dirt road, then it's twenty more miles before the dirt road runs into a paved secondary road."

"Then a laser across the track would alert us to most visitors, while almost eliminating alarms triggered by wildlife, by covering only a thin strip of the track."

Frank grinned. "You know, don't you, that a bunny is going to hop through that light beam and set off the alarm? All right, I'll have a laser alarm system set up. Do you want an audible or visual alarm?"

"Audible, but a quiet one. And I want a portable beeper to carry with me when we have to leave the house."

"For someone with amnesia, you sure remember a lot," Frank murmured as he took a small pad from his inside coat pocket and began making notes.

"I remember the names of the heads of state of just about every country in the world, too," Steve replied. "I've had a lot of time to play mind games with myself, putting together pieces of the puzzle by cataloging a lot of the things related to my job."

"Your job meant a lot to you. It does that, sometimes, takes over so much that the personal side of life kind of fades away."

"Has it done that for you? "

"It did once, a long time ago. Not now."

"How did you get involved in this? You're FBI, and this sure as hell isn't a Bureau operation."

"You're right about that. A lot of strings were pulled, but there are a few people with the power to manage it."

"Very few. So I'm CIA?"

Frank smiled. "No," he said calmly. "Not exactly."

"What the hell does that mean, 'not exactly'? I'm either CIA or I'm not. There's a shortage of alternatives."

"You're affiliated. That's all I can say, other than to assure you that you're perfectly legal. When you recover your memory you'll know why I can't say more."

"All right." Steve shrugged his acceptance. It didn't really matter. Until he regained his memory, the knowledge wouldn't do him any good.

Frank indicated the bag he had brought in with him. "I brought street clothes for you to change into, but first let me get the surgeon in here to finish your exam. After that, I guess you'll be released."

"I'll need more clothes before we go to Colorado. By the way, where did I live?"

"You have an apartment in Maryland. I've arranged for your clothes to be packed and carried to the plane, but they won't fit until you've gained back the weight you've lost. You'll need new clothes until then."

Steve grinned, feeling suddenly light-spirited. "Jay and I will both need new clothes. The snow in Colorado is probably ass-deep to a giraffe."

Frank threw back his head and laughed.

Jay sat on the bed in the cramped apartment she’d been using for the past two months. Her heart was pounding and chills kept racing up and down her spine.

The implications, and complications, of the situation terrified her.

Now she knew what it was that had been bothering her off and on for two months; what she had never been able to put her finger on before. When she had been brought here and asked to identify the man in the bed, she hadn't been able to positively say he was Steve Crossfield. Then Frank had said that the man had brown eyes, and she had based her identification on that, because Steve had had dark, velvety eyes, "Chrissy eyes." Probably to a man, or on a vital statistics sheet, brown eyes were simply brown eyes. They didn't allow for chocolate brown, hazel brown or fierce yellow-brown. But Frank had known that the man had brown eyes!

She pressed her hands to her temples and closed her eyes. Frank must have known the color of his own agent's eyes, and he had known that Steve's eyes were brown, so it followed that Frank had also realized she couldn't base her identification simply on eye color, yet he had led her to do exactly that. She realized now that he had gently maneuvered her into declaring the man to be Steve Crossfield. He must have known there was at least a fifty-percent chance that the man wasn't Steve, so why had he done it?

The only answer she could come up with, and the one that terrified her, was that Frank had known all along that the man was the American agent and not Steve. He had taken Steve's identity and given it to the man, and given the tale substance by having Steve Crossfield's ex-wife confirm the identity, then maneuvered her into a bedside vigil that would have convinced anyone.

So Steve, the real Steve, was dead, and the agent had been given his identity for... protection?

It all fit. The plastic surgery on his face to alter his appearance; the bandaged hands to prevent fingerprints being taken. Had they done surgery to alter his fingerprints, too? Horrible thought: had they also deliberately damaged his larynx to change his voice? No, surely not. She couldn't believe that. All the doctors had fought so hard for his life, and Frank had been so anxious. No wonder. The man was probably Frank's friend!

But was the amnesia real? Or was the man faking it so he wouldn't have to "remember" any of the details of their supposed life together? Amnesia would be a convenient excuse.

She had to believe the amnesia was real, or she would go mad. She had to believe that "Steve" was as much in the dark as she was, maybe even more so. And Frank had been sincerely distressed when Major Lunning had told them about the amnesia.

So that left her back at the beginning. If she told Frank she knew Steve wasn't really Steve, the game would be up and they would have no more use for her. She was a screen, useful only to provide incontrovertible proof that the man who had survived the explosion was Steve Crossfield.

So she had to go along with the deception and continue pretending he was Steve, because she loved him. She had fallen in love with him before she even knew what he looked like; she had loved his relentless will, his refusal to give in to pain, to stop fighting. She loved the uncomplaining way he went about recovery and rehabilitation. Except for occasional frustration at his lack of memory, he hadn't let anything get him down. She had fallen in love with the man while he was stripped down to his basic character, without any of the camouflaging layers added by society.

She couldn't give him up now. Yet neither could she take him as hers; she was as caught in the web of circumstance as he was. He trusted her, but she was being forced to lie to him about something as basic as his identity. She knew the man, but she still knew nothing about his life. Dear God, what if he were married?

No, he couldn't be. Whatever game they were playing, they wouldn't tell a woman that she was now a widow, then give her husband another identity. Jay simply couldn't believe that of Frank. But there could still be a woman in Steve's life, someone he cared for, someone who cared for him, even though they weren't married. Was there such a woman waiting for him now, weeping because he'd been gone for so long, and she was terrified that he would never come back?

Jay felt sick; her only choices were twin prongs of the devil's pitchfork, and either would be pure torment. She could either tell him the truth and lose him, very possibly throwing him into danger, or she could lie to him and protect him. For the first time in her life she loved someone with the full force of her nature, with nothing held back, and her emotions propelled her toward the only choice she could make. Because she loved him, she could do nothing but protect him, no matter what the cost to herself.

Finally she got up and threw her clothing haphazardly into suitcases, not caring about wrinkles. Two months ago she had stepped into a hall of mirrors, and she had no way of knowing if the reflections she saw were accurate or a carefully constructed illusion. She thought of her chic apartment in New York and how much she had worried about losing it when she'd lost her job, but she couldn't think now why it had seemed so important to her. Her entire life had been thrown off kilter, and now it rotated on a different axis. Steve was the center of her life, not an apartment or a job, or the security she had fought so hard to win. After years of struggle she was throwing it all away just to be with him, and she had no regrets or moments of longing for that life. She loved him. Steve, yet not Steve. His name, but another man. Whoever he was, whatever he was, she loved him.

She found a box and dumped into it the few personal articles such as books and pictures that she'd brought to Washington. It had taken her less than an hour to get ready to leave forever.

As she went back and forth, loading things into the car, she looked around carefully, wondering if any of the people she could see supposedly going about their own business were in reality watching her. Maybe she was getting paranoid, but too much had happened for her to take anything for granted, even the appearance of normalcy. That very morning she had looked into fierce, golden eyes and realized that everything that had happened during the past two months had been a lie. The blinders of trust had been stripped from her eyes, making her wary.

Suddenly she felt a driving need to be with him again; uncertainty made her desperate for him. He was no longer a patient in need of her care and attention, but a man who, in spite of his memory loss, would be more surefooted than she was in this world of shifting reality. The instincts and reactions she had wondered about were now explained, as was the scope of his knowledge of world politics. He had lost his identity, but his training had remained with him.

He and Frank were lounging in the hospital room, patiently waiting for her. Jay barely managed a greeting for them; her eyes were on Steve. He had changed into khaki pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back over his forearms. Even as lean as he was, he still gave the impression of power. His shoulders and chest strained at the cotton shirt. With the bandages gone from his eyes, he had shed the last semblance of being in need of care. He looked her over from head to foot and his eyes narrowed in a look of sexual intent as old as time. Jay felt it like a touch, stroking over her body, and she felt both warm and alarmed.

He got to his feet with lazy grace and came to her side, sliding his arm around her waist in a possessive gesture. "That was fast. You must not have packed much."

"It wasn't actually packing," she explained ruefully. "It was more like wadding and stuffing."

"You didn't have to be in such a hurry. I wasn't going anywhere without you," he drawled.

"Both of you have to go shopping, anyway," Frank added. "I didn't think of it, but Steve pointed out that neither of you has clothes suited to a Colorado winter."

Jay looked at Frank, at his clear, calm eyes and friendly face. He'd been a rock for her to lean on these past two months, smoothing the way for her, doing what he could to make her comfortable, and all the time he'd been lying to her. Even knowing that, she simply couldn't believe he'd done it for any reason other than to protect Steve, and because of that she forgave him completely. She was willing to do the same thing, so how could she hold it against him?

"There's no point in shopping here," Steve said. "Or even in Denver. If we go to a city, we'll have to get what some department-store buyer thinks is stylish for a winter vacation. We'll stop at some small-town general store and buy what the locals buy, but not at the town closest to the cabin. Maybe one about a hundred miles from it."

Frank nodded at that impeccable logic, as well as the ring of command in Steve's raspy voice. He was taking over the show, but then, they hadn't expected anything else; amnesia didn't change basic character traits, and Steve was an expert at logistics. He knew what to do and how to get it done.

Jay didn't exhibit any surprise at the precautions. Her deep blue eyes were calm. Having made her decision, she was ready for whatever happened. "Will we need any sort of weapon?" she asked. "After all, we'll be pretty isolated." She had the urbanite's distaste for guns and violence, but the thought of living on a remote mountain put things in a different light. There were times when guns were practical.

Steve looked down at her, and his arm tightened around her. He'd already discussed weapons with Frank. "A rifle wouldn't be a bad idea."

"You'll have to show me how to shoot. I've never handled a gun."

Frank checked the time. "I'll make a call and we'll get started. By the time we get to the airport, the plane will be ready."

"Which airport are we using?"

"National. We'll be flying in to Colorado Springs, then driving the rest of the way." Satisfied with the way things had turned out, Frank went to make his call. Actually he had to make two calls: one to the airport to have the plane readied, and another to the Man to bring him up-to-date.

Chapter Eight

After a series of small delays, it was midafternoon before the private jet actually took off from Washington National Airport, and the sun was already low in the pale winter sky. There was no way they could make it to the cabin that night, so Frank had already made arrangements for them to stay overnight in Colorado Springs. Jay sat by a window, her muscles tense as she looked down at the monochromatic scenery without really seeing it. She had the sensation of stepping out of one life and into another, with no bridge by which to return. She hadn't even told her family where she was going; though they weren't a close-knit group, they did usually know everyone's location. She hadn't seen any of them at Christmas because she had remained at the hospital with Steve, and now it was as if a tie had been severed.

Steve sat beside her, his long legs stretched out as he lounged in the comfortable seat and pored over several current news magazines. He was totally absorbed, as if he'd been starved for the written word. Abruptly he snorted and tossed his magazine aside. "I'd forgotten how slanted news coverage can be," he muttered, then gave a short laugh at his own phrasing. "Along with everything else."

His wry tone splintered her distracted mood and she chuckled. Smiling, he turned his head to watch her, rubbing his eyes to focus them. "Unless my vision settles down, I may need glasses to read."

"Are your eyes bothering you?" she asked, concerned. He'd worn sunglasses since leaving the hospital, but had taken them off when they had boarded the plane.

"They're tired, and the light is still too bright. It's a little hard to focus on close objects, but the surgeon told me that might clear up in a few days."

"Might?"

"There's a fifty-percent chance I'll need reading glasses." He reached over and took her hand, rubbing his thumb over her palm. "Will you still love me if I have to wear glasses?"

Her breath caught and she looked away. Silence thickened between them. Then he squeezed her hand and whispered roughly, "All right, I won't push. Not right now. We'll have time to get everything settled."

So he intended to push later, when they were alone in the cabin. She wondered exactly what he wanted from her: an emotional commitment, or just the physical enjoyment of her body? After all, it had been at least two months since he'd had sex. Then she wondered who had been the last woman to lie in bed with him, and jealousy seared her, mingled with pain. Did that woman mean anything to nun? Was she waiting for him, crying herself to sleep at night because he didn't call?

They spent the night at a motel in Colorado Springs. Jay was surprised to find there was only a light dusting of snow on the ground, instead of the several feet she had expected, but random flakes were swirling softly out of the black sky with the promise of more snow by morning. The cold pierced her coat, and she shivered as she turned the collar up around her ears. She would be glad to get something more suitable to wear.

Steve was tired from his first day out of the hospital, and she was exhausted, too; it had been a hard day for both of them. She lay down across the bed in her room and dozed while Frank went to get hamburgers for dinner. They ate in Frank's room, and she excused herself immediately afterward. All she wanted was to relax and gather her thoughts. To that end she took a long, hot shower, letting the water beat the tension out of her muscles, but it was still hard to think coherently. The risk she was taking frightened her, yet she knew she couldn't go back. Couldn't—and wouldn't.

She tied the belt of her robe securely and opened the bathroom door, then froze. Steve was stretched out on her bed, his arms behind his head as he stared at the television. The picture was on, but the sound was off. She looked at him, then at the door to her room, her brows puckered in confusion. "I thought I locked the door."

"You did. I picked the lock."

She didn't move any closer. "A little something you remembered?"

He looked at her, then swung his legs off the bed and sat up. "No, I didn't remember it. I just knew how to do it."

Good Lord, what other suspicious talents did he have? He looked lean and dangerous, his battered face hard, his yellow eyes narrow and gleaming; he was probably capable of things that would give her nightmares, but she didn't fear him. She loved him too much; she had loved him from the moment she had first touched his arm and felt his will to live burning in him. But her nerves jangled as he stood and took the few steps he needed to reach her. He was so close now that she had to look up to see his face; she could feel the heat emanating from his body, smell the warm, musky male scent of his skin.

He cupped her cheek in his palm, his thumb rubbing lightly over the shadows fatigue had smudged under her eyes, making their blueness seem even deeper. She was pale and jittery, her body trembling. She had taken care of him for months, spending all day, every day, at his bedside, willing him to live and pulling him out of the darkness. She had filled his whole life to the point that even the shock of having amnesia paled in comparison. She had gotten him through hell. Now the strain was telling on her, and he was the stronger one. He could feel the tension in her, vibrating like a string at the point of breaking. He slid his arm around her waist and pulled her forward until her body rested against his. His other hand moved from her cheek into her heavy brown hair, exerting just enough pressure to bring her head against his shoulder.

"I don't think this is a good idea," she whispered, the sound muffled in his shut.

"It feels like a damned good idea," he muttered. Every muscle in his body was tightening, his loins growing heavy with desire. God, he wanted her. His hands moved over her slender body. "Jay," he whispered roughly, and bent his head to hers.

The hot, needful pressure of his mouth made her dizzy. The stroking of his tongue against hers made her tighten inside with pleasure so piercing it was almost unbearable. Her hands lifted to the back of his neck, clinging as all strength washed out of her legs. She barely noticed as he turned with her still in his arms and forced her backward until the bed nudged against the backs of her knees. She lost her sense of balance, but his arms supported her as she fell back, and then his hard weight came down on top of her.

She had forgotten how the pressure of a man's body felt, and she inhaled sharply as quick response flooded her veins. The wide expanse of his chest flattened her breasts, and the swollen ridge of his manhood pushed against her feminine mound, his thighs controlling the restless movement of her legs. He kissed her again and again, barely letting her catch her breath before his mouth returned to take it away once more. Feverishly they strained together, wanting more. He pulled at the belt of her robe until the knot gave and the fabric parted, exposing the thinner fabric of her nightgown. He made a rough sound of frustration at this additional barrier, but for the moment he was too impatient to deal with it. His hand closed over her breast, kneading the soft flesh, his thumb making circles on her nipple until it tightened into a nub.

She whimpered softly into his mouth. "We can't," she cried, desperation and desire tearing her apart.

"The hell we can't," he rasped, taking her hand and moving it down his body to where his flesh strained at the fabric of his pants. Her fingers jerked at the contact; then a spasm of pain crossed her pale face, and her hand lingered involuntarily, exploring the dimensions of his arousal. He caught his breath. "Jay, baby, don't stop me now!"

She was stunned at how quickly passion had exploded between them; one kiss and they were falling on the bed. Her lips trembled as she stared up at him. She didn't even know his name! Tears burned her eyes and she blinked them away.

He groaned at the liquid sheen welling in her eyes and kissed her again with rough passion. "Don't cry. I know this is fast, but everything's going to be okay. We'll get married as soon as we can, and this time we'll make a go of it."

Shocked, she swallowed convulsively and barely managed to speak. "Married? Are you serious?"

"As serious as a heart attack, baby," he said, and grinned roguishly.

The tears burned again, and again she forced them back. Misery filled her. She wanted nothing more than to marry him, but she couldn't. She would be marrying him under false pretenses, pretending he was someone he wasn't. Such a marriage probably wouldn't even be legal. "We can't," she whispered, and a tear rolled out the corner of her eye before she could catch it.

He rubbed the wetness from her temple with his thumb. "Why can't we?" he asked with rough tenderness. "We did it before. We should be able to do better this time around, with our prior experience."

"What if you've remarried?" She gulped back a sob as she frantically thought up excuses. "Even if you haven't, what if there's someone else? Until you get your memory back, we won't know!"

He froze above her; then, with a sigh, he rolled off her to lie on his back, staring at the ceiling. He swore with a precise, Anglo-Saxon explicitness that was all the more jarring for the control in his voice. "All right," he finally said. "We'll get Frank to check it out. Hell, Jay, he's already checked it out! Isn't that why they had to get you to identify me?"

Too late she saw the trap, and saw also that he wasn't going to give up; with his usual steamroller determination, he was flattening the obstacles in his path. "You could still have some... someone who loves you, someone waiting for you."

"I can't promise you I don't," he said, turning his head to watch her with his predatory golden eyes. "But that's not a legal deterrent. I won't let you get away from me because some unknown woman somewhere may be in love with me."

"Until you get your memory back, you can't know that you aren't in love with someone else!"

"I know," he snapped, propping himself up on his elbow and leaning over her. "You keep coming up with excuses, but the real reason is that you're afraid of me, aren't you? Why? Damn it, I know you love me, so what's the problem?"

He was so arrogantly sure of her devotion that her own temper flared, but only for a moment. It was true. She had revealed it in a thousand different ways. She admitted shakily, "I do love you." There was nothing to be gained from denying it, and actually saying it aloud held its own painful sweetness.

His face softened and he put his free hand on her breasts, gently cupping them. "Then why shouldn't we get married?"

It was hard to concentrate with his palm burning her flesh through the thin cotton of her gown, and her body quickened again. She wanted him just as much as he wanted her, and denying him was the hardest thing she'd ever done, but she had no choice. Until his memory returned, she was in limbo. She couldn't take advantage of him now by marrying him under false pretenses.

"Well?" he demanded impatiently.

"I love you," she said again. Her lips trembled. "Ask me again when your memory has returned, and I'll say yes. Until then, until we're both certain it's what you want, I... I just can't."

His face hardened. "Damn it, Jay, I know what I want."

"We've been thrown together because of the circumstances! We don't know each other under normal conditions. You're not the same man I married—" how true that was! "—and I'm not the same woman. We need time! When your memory returns—"

"That's not guaranteed," he interrupted, his voice harsh with frustration. "What if my memory never returns? What if there's permanent brain damage? Then what? Are you still going to be saying no this time next year? Five years from now?"

"I don't think you have brain damage," she said shakily. "You recovered your speech and motor functions too easily."

"That's beside the damned point!" He was furious. Before she could move, he rolled onto her and pinned her hands to the bed. He was so close that she could see the yellow flecks in his irises, his curling black lashes, and a tiny scar in his left eyebrow she hadn't noticed before. He took a deep breath and slowly relaxed, the anger fading from him as he moved against the softness of her body, letting her feel his hardness. "I won't wait forever," he said in soft warning. "I'm going to have you. If not now, then later."

Then he rolled off her and was gone, moving with a peculiar silent grace that had become far more evident since the bandages had been removed from his eyes. There had been signs of it before, manifested in the superb control he had over his movements, but now it was striking. He didn't just move, he flowed, his muscles rippling with liquid power. Jay lay quietly on the bed, her body burning from frustration and the lingering sensation of contact with his, her eyes on the door he had closed behind him.

Who was he? Terror washed over her again, but it was terror for him. He was an agent, obviously, but not just any agent. He had clearly had extensive training; he was valuable enough that the government was willing to spend a fortune protecting him, as well as setting up this elaborate charade with her as an unsuspecting partner. If it hadn't been for his eyes, she might never have suspected a thing. But if he was that valuable to his own government, then logic told her he was of at least equal value to his enemies. All things were in proportion; whatever lengths had been taken to protect him, his enemies would be willing to go to equal lengths to find and destroy him.

As each new part of him was revealed, the stakes seemed to get higher. Now she knew that he was skilled at clandestine forced entry. She had picked up some of the lingo at Bethesda; what had she heard it called?

Light entry? No, soft entry. They called it a soft entry. Going in hard was an attack with weapons. Maybe the lock on the motel door wasn't the sturdiest model available, but she knew that picking it was beyond the average citizen. A good burglar wouldn't have any trouble with it, though... or a good agent.

And the way he moved. He was as controlled and graceful as a dancer, but a dancer's moves were poetic, while Steve's were evocative of silent danger.

His mind. No detail escaped him. He was trained to notice and use everything. Already Frank was deferring to htm, another sign of his importance.

And he was in danger. Perhaps not immediate danger, but she knew it was there waiting for him.

The phone rang at two in the morning in Frank's room, and he muttered a sleepy curse as he fumbled for the receiver. It was second nature to him not to turn on a light, which could alert any outside observers that he was awake. Nor did he have to ask who it was, because only one man knew where they were.

"Yes," he said, and yawned.

"Piggot surfaced," the Man said. "East Berlin. We couldn't get to him in time, but we did find out that he's learned there was a survivor of the explosion and has made inquiries."

"Did the cover hold?"

"If Piggot asked at all, there has to be some doubt. Make certain your trail is covered. I don't want anyone other than the two of us to know where they are. How is he doing?"

"Better than I would have, if this had been my first day out of the hospital in two months. He's stronger than I expected. One other thing: I never would have believed it, but I think he's falling in love with her. It isn't just that he's been dependent on her, I think he's really serious."

"Good God," the Man said, startled. He laughed. "Well, it happens to the best of us. I have the final medical report on him here. His brain damage, if any, is minimal. He's a walking miracle, especially the speed of his recovery. He should regain his full memory but it may take a trigger of some sort to release it. We may have to bring his family in, or take him home, but not until we find Piggot. Until then, he stays hidden."

"The day we get Piggot, we tell him—and Jay— what's going on?"

The Man sighed. He sounded tired. "I hope he's recovered his memory by then. Damn it, we need to know what happened over there, and what he found out. But with his memory or without it, he has to stay there until we get Piggot. He has to be Steve Crossfield."

Steve woke early and lay in bed, feeling the fatigue that still weighted his body, as well as the sexual frustration that had been plaguing him for several weeks. He had tried, but even the rigorous exercise he'd been taking hadn't rebuilt his strength to the point he would have liked. Yesterday had exhausted him. He grinned sourly, thinking that it had probably been a good thing Jay had turned him down, because there was a good chance he would have collapsed on her in the middle of making love. Damn it.

He didn't intend to let her refusal stand in his way, but his lack of strength was something else. He had to get back in shape. It wasn't just that he was dissatisfied with his lack of strength and his physical limitations; he had a nagging feeling that he needed to be in top shape just in case... what? He didn't know what he expected to happen, but he had an uneasy feeling. If anything came up, he had to be in shape to protect Jay and handle the situation.

After getting out of bed, he first took the pistol that had been on the bedside table and placed it on the floor, within easy reach. Then he dropped down and began doing push-ups, counting silently. Thirty was his limit. Already panting, he rolled over and hooked his feet under the bed, his hands behind his head, and did sit-ups. The new scars on his abdomen throbbed at the strain he was putting on them, and sweat broke out on his brow. He had to stop at seventeen. Swearing in disgust, he looked down at his body. He was in pitiful shape. Before, he'd been able to do a hundred push-ups and sit-ups without even breathing hard— He went still, waiting for the half memory to become full-blown, waiting for the mental door to open, but nothing happened. Just for a second he'd had a glimpse of what his life had been before; then the door had closed again. The doctor had told him not to try to force it, but that blank door taunted him. There was something he needed to know, and rage built inside him because he couldn't force his way past the block.

Suddenly he heard footsteps outside the room, and he rolled, grabbing the pistol as he did so. Stretched out prone on the carpet, he aimed the pistol at the door and waited. The footsteps halted and a grumpy voice said, "June, come on. We need to get an early start and you've wasted enough time."

"Will the town be gone if we get there at four instead of three?" an equally grumpy female voice returned.

Steve let out his breath and climbed to his feet, staring at the pistol in his hand. It fit his palm as if he'd been born holding it. It was a Browning automatic, high caliber, and loaded with hollow-tip bullets that would make a hell of a hole going in and an even bigger one coming out. Frank had given it to him at the hospital while they were waiting for Jay to return and had told him to keep it on him, just as a precaution. When Steve had reached to take it, it was as if part of him had slipped back into focus. He hadn't realized how unusual it had been not to be armed, until the pistol was in his hand.

His reactions just now said a lot about the type of life he'd been living; it had been second nature for him to place the pistol within reach even while exercising, and second nature to regard those approaching footsteps as a possible danger. Maybe Jay had been smart to divorce him the first time. Maybe he wasn't doing her a favor by forcing his way back into her life, considering the dangers of his.

The pistol in his hand was a fine piece of hardware, but it couldn't compare to the feel of Jay's body. If he had to choose between Jay and his work, the job had just lost. He'd been a damned fool the first time, but he wasn't going to foul up this second chance. Whoever he worked for would just have to reassign him, bring him in, or he'd get out completely. No more clandestine meetings, no more assassins after him. Hell, it was time he settled down and let the Young Turks have their chance. He was thirty-seven, long past the age when most other men had wives and families.

But he wouldn't tell him until his memory returned, he thought cynically as he showered. Until then, he couldn't afford to totally trust anyone, except Jay.

* * *

They bought boots, socks and insulated underwear in Colorado Springs, jeans and flannel shirts in another town, hats and shearling coats in another. Jay also bought a thick down jacket with a hood, and a supply of long flannel gowns. The two vehicles Frank had obtained were four-wheel-drive Jeeps with snow tires, so they made good time, even though the snow became deeper the farther west they went.

Frank drove the lead Jeep, with Steve and Jay in the one behind. Jay had never driven a stick shift before, so the driving was left up to Steve. At first Jay worried about his legs, but he didn't seem to have any difficulty with the clutching and braking, so after a time she stopped worrying and began paying attention to the magnificent scenery as they drove west on U.S. 24. The sky, which had been clear, gradually became leaden with clouds, and occasional snowflakes began to drift down. The weather didn't worsen beyond that, and they continued to make good time even after they turned off onto a state highway. Then they left the state highway for a secondary road with much less traffic and a lot more snow, necessitating a slower speed. After that Frank took a dirt road that wound through the mountains for what seemed like hours, and finally he made another turnoff. Jay could see no discernible road or even a trail; they were simply driving up a mountain by the route of least resistance.

"I wonder if he knows where he's going," she muttered, clinging to the seat as the Jeep jolted to one side.

"He knows. Frank's a good agent," Steve returned absently, downshifting to climb a particularly steep rise. Once they reached the top, they seemed to be in a high, wide meadow that stretched and dipped for miles in front of them. They drove along the edge of the tree line until the meadow abruptly ended, and then they descended sharply down the side of the mountain. Next they climbed up another mountain, where there was a stretch of track barely wide enough to accommodate the Jeeps. On one side was the rock face, and on the other, nothing but an increasing distance to the bottom. Then they crested that mountain, too, and reached another rolling meadow. As the sun dipped behind the western peaks, Steve squinted his eyes at the tree line to their left. "That must be the cabin."

"Where?" Jay asked, sitting up eagerly. Just the thought of being able to get out of the Jeep and stretch her legs was pure heaven,

"In that stand of pines, just to the left."

Then she saw it and sighed in relief. It was just an ordinary cabin, but it was as welcome as a luxury hotel. It was tucked just under the trees, visible only from the front. Because it was built on a slope, the front was higher than the back; there were six wooden steps leading up to a porch that ran all the way across. Built onto the cabin at the back was a lean-to for the Jeeps, and thirty yards to the rear was a shed.

They parked under the lean-to and stiffly got out, arching their backs to stretch aching muscles. The air was so cold and crisp that it almost hurt to inhale, but the setting sun was painting the snowy peaks and ridges in shades of red, gold and purple, and Jay stood motionless, entranced, until Steve nudged her into motion.

It took several trips to carry everything in; then Frank took Steve to the shed to show him how the generator worked. Evidently someone had already been up to turn it on, because the electric lights worked and the refrigerator was humming. Jay checked the small pantry and refrigerator, and found them fully stocked with canned goods and frozen meats.

She gave herself a short tour of the cabin. Next to the kitchen was a small utility-mudroom with a modern washer and dryer. There was no dining room, only a round wooden table and four chairs in one corner of the kitchen. The living room was comfortably furnished in sturdy Early American, with brown corduroy upholstery. A brown-and-blue hooked rug covered the wooden floor, and one wall was almost entirely taken up by an enormous rock fireplace. There were two bedrooms of equal size, connected by the cabin's lone bathroom. Jay stared at the connecting door, her heart beating a little faster at the thought of sharing a bathroom with him. She knew the intimacy of damp towels hanging side by side, toiletries becoming jumbled together, a shared tube of toothpaste. His whiskers would be in the sink, his razor on the side. The small details of living together were at least as seductive as physical intimacies, meshing their lives at every moment of the day.

The back door slammed, and Steve called, "Where are you?" His rough voice was even raspier than usual from breathing the cold air.

"Exploring," she replied, leaving the bathroom and crossing to the bedroom door. "Any objections if I take the front bedroom? It has the best view."

A fire had already been laid in the fireplace. He bent down and struck a match on the hearth, then held it to the paper and kindling under the logs, not answering until he'd straightened. "Let me look at them."

Vaguely surprised, Jay stepped aside and let him enter. He examined the location of the windows and their locks, opened the closet and looked at it, then stepped into the adjoining bath.

"It's a connecting bath," she pointed out.

He grunted and opened the door into the second bedroom. The windows in both rooms were on the side walls, but because the rear of the cabin was closer to the ground than the front was, the windows in the second bedroom were more accessible from the outside. "All right," he said, checking the locks on his windows, too. "But I want it understood that if you hear anything at all during the night, you wake me. Okay?"

"Yes," she said, her throat constricting. All this was second nature to him. He must think there was some danger, too, despite all the precautions Frank had taken. She had wanted to think they were safe here, but perhaps they weren't. The best thing she could do was not argue with him.

He glanced at her, and his rough face softened a bit. "Sorry. I guess I'm overreacting to a strange situation. I didn't mean to scare you." Because the tension didn't fade from her eyes, he walked over to her, cupped her face in his hands, then kissed her. Her wonderfully full, lush, exotic mouth opened for him and his tongue teased at hers. Jay put her hands on his shoulders and luxuriated in the heat of his body against her. The cabin wasn't icy, but it was far from warm.

He held her against him for a moment, then reluctantly let her go. "Let's see what this place has in the way of grub. If I don't eat soon, I'm going to fall down." He wasn't exaggerating, she realized. She could feel a faint tremor in his muscles, a sign of the enormous strain he'd put on his body that day.

Casually she put her arm around his waist as they walked back to the living room. "I've already checked the food. We can have almost anything our hearts desire, as long as our hearts desire plain cuisine. If you want lobster or truffles, you're out of luck."

"I'd settle for a can of soup," he said tiredly, and groaned as he sank down into one of the comfortable chairs. He stretched his legs out, absently rubbing his thighs.

"We can do better than that," Frank said as he brought in an armload of wood, having caught Steve's last comment. He stacked the wood on the hearth and dusted his hands. "I think. I'm not much of a cook." He looked hopefully at Jay, and she laughed.

"I'll see what I can do. I'm a real whiz with microwave dinners, but I didn't see a microwave oven, so I'm a little lost."

She was too tired to do much, but it didn't take a tot of effort to open two large cans of beef stew and heat them, or to brown buttered rolls in the gas oven. They were almost silent as they ate, and after Frank had helped her clean up the few dishes, they all took turns in the shower. By eight o'clock they were asleep, Jay and Steve in their respective bedrooms and Frank rolled in a blanket on the couch.

They rose early the next morning, and after a hearty breakfast Frank and Steve walked around in the snow. The gas stove and hot-water heater operated on butane gas, and the large tank had been filled; it shouldn't need refilling until spring. The fuel tank for the generator would need replenishing, but all Steve had to do was contact Frank by computer, and fuel would be brought in by helicopter. They didn't want a delivery to the cabin by any commercial business or utility, and, at any rate, the cabin was too difficult for an ordinary fuel truck to reach. It was a complicated setup, but it was meant to be an ultrasafe lodging, unlisted in any files. All in all, the place was stocked for a long-term stay, though Frank couldn't help wishing Steve would recover his memory soon and put an end to all this, or that Piggot would be caught.

"The nearest town is Black Bull, population one hundred thirty-three," Frank said. "Go down to the dirt road and turn right, and you'll eventually get there. It has a general store for basic food and supplies. If you want anything fancier, you'll have to find a larger town, but keep a low profile. You should have enough cash to last a couple of months, but let me know if you need more."

Steve looked out over the white meadow. The air was so clear, the early-morning sun so bright on the spotless snow, that it hurt his eyes. The cold burned his lungs. The land was so damned big and empty that it gave him an eerie feeling, but at the same time he was almost content. He was impatient for Frank to leave so he would finally be alone, completely alone, with Jay.

"You're safe here," Frank added. "The Man uses it sometimes." He glanced up at the cabin. "I wouldn't have brought Jay here if it wasn't safe. She's a civilian, so take good care of her, pal."

A tingle, a heightened awareness, had seized Steve when Frank mentioned the Man. It wasn't a sense of danger but a sort of excitement. The memory was there, but blocked from his consciousness by the lingering effects of the explosion. The Man was another piece of the puzzle.

He shook Frank's hand, and their eyes met in the comradeship of men who have been in danger together. "You probably won't see me again until this is over, but I'll be in touch," Frank said. "I'd better get moving. It's supposed to start snowing again this afternoon."

They went inside and Frank got his gear, then told Jay goodbye. She hugged him, her eyes suspiciously bright. Frank had been her rock for two months, and she would miss him. He had also been a buffer between her and Steve; when he left, there would be only the two of them.

She glanced at Steve, to find him watching her intently. His pale brown eyes were glowing, yellower than they had moments before, like those of a raptor that had sighted its prey.

Chapter Nine

Jay had expected Steve to pounce on her, but to her relief he seemed to have other things on his mind. For the next week he spent the daylight hours prowling around the cabin and shed and exploring their high meadow, as tense and wary as a cat in unfamiliar surroundings. The hours passed tromping through the snow tired him, and as often as not he would go to sleep soon after eating dinner. Jay worried, until she realized that it was a natural part of his recovery. The rehabilitation he'd had in the hospital had given him a start, but he was still a long way from full strength, and the many hours of walking served two purposes: to acquaint him with his new territory, and to rebuild his stamina. It was the end of the week before he began to relax, but every day he still walked a perimeter around the cabin, watching, checking for any intrusion.

They seemed so isolated that she couldn't understand his caution, but she supposed it was ingrained in him. Watching him gave her an even greater insight into the man he was. He was so superbly suited to his occupation! He knew what to do by instinct, without needing to rely on memory.

When he was stronger, he began chopping wood to keep a good supply for the fireplace. They used the hearth for most of their heat, to conserve fuel. The cabin was so snugly built and insulated that it held heat well, and a good fire was sufficient to keep the entire place comfortable. At first his hands were sore and blistered, despite the gloves he wore, but gradually they toughened. After a while he added jogging to his activities, but he didn't jog in the meadow, where it was clear. He ran through the trees, up and down the hills, deliberately picking the roughest path, and every day his legs were a little stronger, his breathing a little easier, so he would push himself further.

Jay loved those first days in the cabin, high in the vast, silent meadow. Sometimes the only sound was that of the wind stirring the trees. Having been accustomed her entire life to the bustle of cities, the space and silence made her feel as if she'd been reborn in a new world. The last remnants of tension from her old life relaxed and faded away. She was alone in the mountains with the man she loved, and they were safe.

He began teaching her how to drive a stick shift. To Jay, it was fun, bouncing in the Jeep over the meadow. To Steve, it was a precaution, against the possibility that something could happen to him and Jay would have to do the driving. It might come down to a matter of saving her life.

There was a heavy snow the third week they were there. Jay woke early to a world where every sound had been muffled. She got up to peek out the window at the deep drifts of new snow, then tumbled back into her warm bed and fell instantly asleep again. When she woke the second time it was almost ten, and she felt wonderfully rested, as well as starving.

She dressed hurriedly and brushed her hair, wondering why the cabin was so silent. Where was Steve? She looked into his room, but it was empty. There was a pot of coffee in the kitchen, and she drank a cup while standing at the window, searching the tree line for some sign of him. Nothing.

Curious, she finished the coffee and returned to her room to stamp her feet into warm boots; then she put on her shearling coat and pulled a thick knit cap over her hair. It was unusual for Steve to go out without telling her where he would be and how long he'd be gone. She wondered what he was doing, and why he hadn't woken her. Could he have hurt himself?

Anxious now, she went down the back steps. "Steve?" she called softly, a little afraid to raise her voice. The meadow was so silent, and for the first time its isolation felt threatening, instead of safe. Was there someone else out there?

His footprints were plainly visible in the new snow. He'd evidently made several trips to the woodpile to replenish the supply in the house, because there was a worn trail between them; then he'd walked up the slope into the forest. Jay dug her gloves out of her coat pocket and put them on, and wished she'd wrapped a scarf around her nose and mouth. It was so cold that the air felt brittle. She turned the collar of the coat up around her neck and began following Steve's trail, carefully stepping in his tracks because that was easier than breaking through the snow herself.

The snow wasn't as deep under the trees, making the walking easier, but Jay kept to the prints Steve had made. The thickly-growing evergreens, their branches weighted down with snow, blanketed noise and muffled it out of existence. She could barely hear herself breathe or the snow crunching under her boots. She wanted to call Steve's name again but somehow didn't dare, as if it would be sacrilege in this silent white, black and green cathedral.

If anything, she tried to be even quieter, picking her way from tree to tree, trying to become part of the forest. Then, suddenly, she lost Steve's tracks. She stood under the drooping limbs of a spruce and looked around, but there were no more tracks to follow. It was as if he'd vanished. It was impossible to walk in the snow without leaving tracks! But there were no tracks under the trees. She looked up, wondering if he'd climbed a tree and was sitting there laughing at her. Nothing.

Common sense told her that he'd played some sort of trick, but his tracks would have to pick up somewhere. She thought a minute, then began walking in a slow, constantly enlarging circle. She would have to cross his path somewhere.

Fifteen minutes later, she was angry. Damn him! He was playing games with her, unfair games, considering his training. She was getting cold, and she was already starving. Let him play Daniel Boone; she was going back to the cabin to cook breakfast—for one!

Just to be perverse, she backtracked as cautiously as she'd come; maybe she could leave him in here, sneaking around and hiding from her while she was already back at the cabin, snug and warm and eating a hot breakfast. He'd show up after a while, all innocence, and he could damn well cook his own breakfast! Show-off!

She crept back toward the cabin, sidling as close to the tree trunks as she could, stopping often to listen for any betraying sound before moving to the next tree, and looking in all directions before moving again. Her indignation grew, and she began to think what she could do in the way of revenge, but most of her ideas seemed both petty and paltry. What she really wanted to do was hit him. Hard. Twice.

She had just begun to creep around a tree when the skin on the back of her neck prickled and she froze, her heart leaping in fear at the ancient warning of danger. She couldn't hear or see anything, but she could feel someone, or something, close by. Were there wolves in the mountains? Or bears? Motionless except for her eyes, she looked around for something to use as a weapon, and finally she saw the outline of a sturdy-looking stick, buried under the snow. A fraction of an inch at a time, she bent to reach for the stick, her senses raw and screaming.

Something hard and heavy hit her in the middle of the back, and another blow numbed her forearm. She was knocked facedown in the snow, her lungs straining for air, her arm useless. She couldn't even scream. She was jerked roughly onto her back, and there was a flash of shiny metal as a knife was laid against her throat.

Stunned, terrified, unable to breathe, she stared up into narrowed, deadly eyes as yellow as an eagle's.

His eyes widened as he recognized her, then narrowed again with rage. He jabbed the wicked-looking knife back into its scabbard and took his knee off her chest. "Damn it, woman, I could've killed you!" he roared, his voice like rusty metal. "What in hell are you doing?"

Jay could only gasp and writhe on the ground, wondering if she might die from lack of air. Her entire chest was burning and her vision was wavering.

Steve jerked her to a sitting position and whacked her on the back several times, hard enough to hurt, but at least the air rushed back into her body. She almost choked as her lungs expanded again, and tears sprang to her eyes. She gagged and coughed, and Steve patted her on the back but his tone was hard: "You'll be all right. It's less than you deserve, and a hell of a lot less than what could have happened."

She didn't plan it. She saw the stick out of the corner of her eye, the one she'd been reaching for when he'd hit her, and the next thing she knew it was in her hand. Red mist fogged her vision as she swung at him with all the strength her fury had given her. He dodged under the first blow, cursing, and leaped back to escape the second one. She moved to the left, trying to back him against a tree so he wouldn't be able to escape so easily, and swung again. He tried to grab the stick, and she caught him on the wrist with a solid thunk! then wound up for another blow. Cursing again, he bent low and rushed her. She hit him on the back with the stick just as his shoulder jammed into her stomach with enough force to knock her sprawling again.

"Damn it!" he yelled, kneeling astride her and pinning her wrists to the ground. "Settle down! Damn it, Jay! What in hell's wrong with you?"

She twisted and bucked beneath him, trying to throw him off. He tightened his knees on her sides, forestalling that effort, and his hands bit into her wrists so tightly there was no way she could free them. Finally she stopped struggling and glared impotently at him, her eyes like blue fire. "Get off me!"

"So you can brain me with that damn stick? Fat chance!"

She took a deep, shuddering breath and forced her voice to a relatively calm tone. "I won't hit you with the stick."

"Damn straight you won't," he grunted, releasing her hand to grab the stick and hurl it away from them. Jay used her free hand to wipe the snow out of her face, and slowly Steve eased his weight off her chest. She sat up and pulled the knit cap off her head to shake it free of snow.

Kneeling on one knee beside her, Steve brushed off her back. "Now suppose you explain just what you thought you were doing," he snapped.

Fury burst in her again and she swung at him. He jerked his head back in time to escape her fist, but the wet cap she held in her hand swiped his face with enough force to sting. Like a stroke of lightning she was flat on her back again. From between gritted teeth he said, "One more time and you'll eat standing up for a month!"

She blazed back at him: "You just try it! When I woke up and couldn't find you, I was worried you might be hurt, so I came looking for you. Then you started showing off with your Super Spy tricks, not letting me find you, until I got fed up and started back to the cabin. Then you knocked me down and pulled a knife on me, and yelled at me! You deserved to get hit with a stick! "

He glared down at her, taking in her tumbled hair and fierce blue eyes, and the stubborn set of those luscious lips. He swore under his breath and thrust his fingers into the honey-brown strands, holding her still while he ground his mouth against hers. His kiss was half angry and half starving. He was suddenly wild to feel her lips, to put his tongue inside her mouth and taste her. She kicked at him, and he moved swiftly, kneeing her legs apart and settling himself between them, his weight crushing her into the snow.

Jay groaned, and his tongue thrust into her mouth. Suddenly she felt on fire, as her fury turned into a different, white-hot passion. Her hands were in his hair, digging into his scalp as she returned his kiss as fiercely as he gave it. His hips rubbed against her in primal rhythm, thrusting as if to deny the sturdy denim between them, and her blood felt like lava.

Roughly he opened her thick coat and shoved the edges aside, his hands covering her breasts, but still she was protected from him by her shirt and bra, and the contact wasn't enough. He jerked at her shirt, popping three of the buttons off to be lost in the snow, and opened it, too. The cold air rushed at her and she cried out, but the sound was caught in his mouth. Her bra had a front hook; he handled it easily and peeled the thin cups away from her white, swollen breasts. Her nipples were hard and tight from the cold, stabbing into his palms when he put his hands over them.

He lifted his head. "Let me inside you," he rasped. "Now." The need was riding him hard, just the way he wanted to ride her. He put his hot mouth over a pouting nipple and sucked strongly at it, rolling it around with his tongue and listening to the incoherent sounds of pleasure she made.

Jay thought she might die from wanting him, even though he had scared her and hurt her; even though he'd made her angrier than she could ever remember feeling at another human being. He'd loosed the passion that had always been in her nature, torn it out of her control. Her hands were shaking, her entire body was shaking, and she wanted more.

He lifted his mouth from her breast, and the shock of the cold air on her wet flesh was so painful she whimpered. Their eyes met, hers wide and dazed with the sudden passion, his narrow and burning, and she knew what he wanted, knew he was silently waiting for her permission. She knew that if she made the slightest sign of acquiescence he would take her there, in the cold and snow, and her entire body throbbed with the need to let him do just that. She started to whisper his name; then terror washed over her like freezing water and she stared up at his hard face as he waited for her answer. She didn't know his name! She could call him Steve, but he wasn't Steve. His face wasn't Steve's. She knew him and loved him, but he was a stranger.

He found his answer in the sudden rigidity of her body beneath him. He swore viciously as he got to his feet, one hand rubbing the back of his neck as if that could relieve his physical tension. Jay fumbled with her shirt, trying to draw the edges together, but the buttons were gone and her hands were shaking too badly, so finally she just fastened her coat and got to her feet. She had been burning up only moments before, but now she was freezing. She was covered with snow. She shook it out of her hair and dusted it off her jeans and coat as best she could, then retrieved her knit cap, but it had snow on it both inside and out, and would be worse than wearing nothing at all. Without a word, unable to look at him, she started toward the cabin.

He caught her roughly by the shoulder and swung her around. "Tell me why, damn it," he rasped.

Jay swallowed. She hadn't meant to stop him, and she couldn't explain the dreadful fear she lived with every moment, every day. "I've told you before," she finally managed. "They're good reasons." A single tear tracked down her cheek and formed frozen salt crystals before it reached her chin.

His face changed, some of the angry frustration leaving him, and he wiped at the tear with his gloved hand. "Are they? Your reasons don't make much sense to me. It's natural to want each other. How much longer do you think I can live like a monk? How much longer can you live like a nun? That's not my calling, baby, and damn it all to hell and back in a little red wagon, it's not as if it'll be the first time!"

She thought she would scream. She wanted to cry and she wanted to laugh, but neither would make sense. She wanted to tell him the truth, but the biggest fear she had was of losing him. So finally she did tell him the truth, or at least part of it. "It will be the first time," she croaked, strangling on the words. "This time. And it scares me."

She walked away again, and he let her go. She was shaking with cold by the time she got back to the cabin, and she took a long hot shower, then dressed in dry clothing. The smell of fresh coffee came from the kitchen, and she followed her nose to find him frying bacon and whipping eggs in a bowl. He had changed clothes, too, and she faltered under both his physical impact and a sudden realization. He was tall and muscular, as powerful as a puma, his shoulders and chest straining the seams of his shirt. In the weeks they had been there he'd gained weight and muscle, and his hair had grown enough that now it was a trifle long. He looked uncivilized and dangerous, and so utterly male that she quivered instinctively. He was no longer a patient. He had recovered both his health and his strength. She had followed him because she had been worried, but in her mind he had still been a wounded warrior. Now she knew that he wasn't. Her subconscious had recognized it earlier, when she had fought him. She never would have done that before.

He looked up at her, Ms gaze assessing. "I made fresh coffee. Drink a cup. You still look a little shaky. Does the thought of making it with me scare you that much?"

"You scare me." She couldn't stop the words. "Who you are. What you are."

An icy motionlessness seized him as he realized that she had guessed. "You said I was using Super Spy tricks."

"Yes," she whispered, and decided she did need that cup of coffee. She poured it and watched the steam rise for a moment before sipping. Why had she said that? She hadn't meant to. She was in agony, afraid that it would trigger his memory and he would leave, and equally afraid that he might never get his memory back. She was caught, trapped, because she couldn't call him hers until he regained his memory and chose her. If he would. He might just walk away, to his real life.

"I didn't think you knew," he said flatly.

Her head jerked up. "Do you mean you did?"

"There had to be more to it than the possibility that I had seen something before the explosion. The government doesn't work that way. I guessed, and Frank confirmed it."

"What did he say?" Her voice was thin.

His smile was equally thin, and a little savage. "That's about it. He can't tell me more because of the circumstances. I'm a security risk right now. How did you guess?"

"The same. There just had to be more to it."

"Is what I am the real reason you turned me down?"

"No," she whispered, an aching, needing expression in her eyes as she watched him. How could loving a man hurt so much? But it did, when the man was this one.

His entire body was taut, his mouth twisted. His voice was harsh. "Stop looking at me like that. It's all I can do to keep myself from pulling your pants off and laying you down on that table, and that isn't the way I want to take you. Not this time. So stop looking at me i as if you'd melt if I touched you."

But I would, she thought, though she turned her eyes away. His words made her feel hot and shivery, thinking of the act he'd described, the scene forming in her mind. It would be raw and hot, and purely sexual. If he touched her, they would burn each other up.

He spent most of the day outside, but the tension between them didn't ease; it hung there, as thick and heavy as fog. When darkness finally drove him inside, his eyes burned her every time he looked at her. Instincts she hadn't known she possessed pulled her toward him, despite the reasons her mind presented for not letting their relationship progress. She lay alone in her bed that night, aching with the need to go to him and spend the long, dark hours in his arms. He was right; what did her reasons matter? It was already too late. She already loved him, for good or bad. That was the real danger, and it had been too late for a long time now. Keeping herself from him wouldn't lessen the pain if the worst happened and she lost him.

But she didn't go to him. Things often seemed different in daylight than when lying alone in the darkness, but caution wasn't what kept her in her own bed. Circumstances were hard enough; she had to call him by a name that wasn't his own, had to pretend he was someone else, but she wanted to be able to see his eyes when they made love. More than anything she wanted to know his real name, to be able to call him by it in her heart; failing that, she wanted to see his eyes, for they were his own.

A chinook blew in during the night, chasing away the weather system that had covered them with new snow. Mother Nature must have chuckled to herself as she promptly began melting the high white drifts with her hot winds, teasing them with a hint of a spring that was still over a month away. The melting snow dripped from the trees with a sound like rain, and there were crashes in the night as limbs dropped their white burdens.

The rise in temperature made Jay even more restless, and she was up at dawn. She could barely believe what she saw when she looked out. The hot wind had turned their winter wonderland into a wet, brown meadow dotted with shrinking patches of snow. The melting snow still dripped off the roof, and the heated air made her feel as if her skin would explode. How could it have happened so fast?

"A chinook," Steve said behind her, and she whirled, her heart jumping. She hadn't heard him approach, but he moved like a cat. He looked so ill-tempered that she almost stepped back. His eyes were hard and frosty, and a day's growth of beard darkened his jaw. He glanced, from ner to the window. "Enjoy it while you can. It'll feel like spring while we have it, and then it'll be gone, and the snow will come back."

They ate breakfast in silence, and he left the cabin immediately afterward. Later on in the morning, Jay heard the solid bite of the ax into wood, and she peeked out at him from the kitchen window. He had taken off his coat and was working in his shirt sleeves, which were rolled up over his forearms. Incredibly, sweat had left dark stains under his arms and down the center of his back. Was it that warm?

She walked out onto the front porch and lifted her face to the warm, sweet wind. It was incredible! Her skin tingled. The temperature was at least forty degrees higher than the day before, and the sun burned down from a cloudless blue sky. Suddenly her jeans and flannel shirt were much too heavy, and her skin began to glisten with moisture.

Like a child made giddy by spring, she hurried to her bedroom and stripped off her heavy, restricting clothes. She couldn't stand them another minute. She wanted to feel the air on her bare arms; she wanted to feel fresh and free, like the chinook. So what if winter could come back at any time? Right now, it was spring!

She pulled her favorite sundress from the closet and slipped it on over her head. It was white cotton, sleeveless, with a scoop neck, and far too flimsy for the temperature, which was probably only in the fifties, but it suited her mood perfectly. Some things were just meant for celebrating; this chinook was one of them.

She hummed as she began the preparations for lunch; it was a while before she noticed that Steve was no longer at the woodpile. If he'd gone off just at lunch-time, she would eat alone and he could do without! She still hadn't quite forgiven him for the day before.

Then she heard a slight noise from out front, and she removed the soup from the stove before walking to the front door. He'd pulled the Jeep around and was washing it. It was such a domestic scene that it lured her onto the porch, and she sat down on the top step to watch him.

He glanced up at her, and his eyes flickered over the dress. "Pushing it a little, aren't you?"

"I'm comfortable," she said, and she was. The crisp air was both chilly and warm, and the sun beating down on her was a delicious sensation. He'd given in to the rising temperature, too, by unbuttoning his shirt and pulling it out of his jeans.

She watched as he alternately scrubbed and rinsed, each time having to stop washing to take up the hose and spray the soap off the Jeep. Finally she went down to pick up the hose from where he'd dropped it. "You wash, I'll rinse."

He grunted. "Do you expect the same deal with the dishes?"

"Sounds fair to me. After all, I'm doing the cooking."

"Yeah, but I'm having to eat all that food so it won't goto waste."

She gave him an awful look. "Poor baby. I'll see what I can do to take that burden off you."

"Just like a woman. Tease her a little bit and she turns nasty. Some people just can't take a joke."

Jay turned the hose on the section of Jeep he'd just washed, but he didn't have time to step back, and the water hit the Jeep full blast, spraying back into his face and onto his clothes. He leaped back, swearing. "Damn it, watch what you're doing!"

"Some people just can't take a joke," Jay said sweetly, and turned the hose on him.

He yelled from the shock of the cold water hitting him and started toward her, holding his hands up to deflect the stream from his face. Jay chortled and darted around the Jeep, then got him again when he looked around at her.

He pushed his wet hair back and his light brown eyes took on that unholy yellow gleam. "You're going to get it now," he said, beginning to grin, and with one bound leaped onto the hood of the Jeep. Jay shrieked and ran to the rear, but the hose caught on the tires as she dragged it after her. She tugged frantically as Steve jumped lightly to the ground. He laughed in a way that made her scream again, and she threw the hose down as she ran for safety.

He grabbed the hose and reversed direction, running back around the front of the Jeep, to free it. He met Jay almost head-on.

"Wait," she said, laughing and begging at the same time as she held up her hand. "It's lunchtime. I came out to tell you. The soup's ready—" A blast of water hit her in the face.

The water was almost unbearably cold. She screamed and tried to run for safety, but he was there every time she turned, and the water soaked her from head to foot. Finally her only means of defense was attack, so she ran straight at him. He was laughing like a maniac, a sound that ceased abruptly when she twisted the nozzle up so the water hit him right in the mouth. They wrestled for control of the nozzle, both of them laughing and yelling as the icy water sprayed all over them.

"Truce, truce!" she yelled, backing away. There was no way she could have gotten any wetter, but then, neither could he. She felt a sense of satisfaction that it had turned out so evenly.

"Are you giving up?" he demanded.

She hooted. "What's to give up? We're both half drowned."

He thought about that and nodded. Then he walked over to the spigot to turn it off and began coiling the hose. "You fight dirty. I like that in a woman."

"That's right, butter me up. You just want to make certain I don't stop cooking."

"The situation being what it is, I'll take anything from you I can get."

Abruptly the humor was gone from the moment. He dropped the hose and straightened, his face hard as he looked at her.

Jay felt her breath catch. He had never been more beautiful to her than he was at that moment, soaking wet, his hair plastered to his skull, badly in need of a shave, and his eyes glittering with masculine intent. Slowly he let his gaze move over her face, then down her body, taking his time as he traced the outline of her form.

Then she realized that he could see more than the outline. The white cotton dress was almost transparent, plastered to her body the way it was. She couldn't stop herself from looking down. Her nipples were hard and erect, plainly visible under the wet cotton, and the fabric was molded to her hips and thighs. With the sun shining through the material, she might as well have been naked for all the protection the dress gave her.

She looked back up at him and froze in place at the look on his face. He was staring at her with such savage male hunger that her heart leaped, making the blood surge through her veins. Her legs trembled as she felt herself begin to grow warm and moist in response, and she inhaled sharply.

His head jerked up. For another moment he was motionless. Her lips were parted slightly, trembling. Her eyes looked heavy. Her nipples were hard little circles plainly visible through the wet dress, her arms limp at her sides as she let him look. He shuddered, and his control snapped.

She couldn't move. He walked toward her without taking his gaze from her, without seeing or hearing anything else, a primal male animal intent on mating. He was breathing hard and deep, his nostrils flaring. Water dripped off him as he moved. She waited, shaking with need and fear, because he was out of control and she knew it. It was an exhilarating terror, freezing her but at the same time filling her with an anticipation so acute she was almost in pain.

Then his hands were on her, and she moaned aloud from the sudden release of tension.

She didn't have time to respond. She had expected to be swept up in his arms and carried to bed, but he had gone far beyond paying attention to niceties. Nothing mattered to him but to have her, right then. He bore her down to the cold, wet earth, which, despite the chi-nook, still held the long freeze of winter. Jay cried out at the iciness against her back, involuntarily arching upward to escape it. Steve's hard hands pressed her back, and he covered her, his weight pinning her down. He jerked at her dress, pulling the skirt to her waist. "Spread your legs," he said gutturally, though he was already kneeing her thighs apart.

Excitement speared through her. "Yes," she whispered, her hands digging into his shoulders. She wanted him so much that she didn't care where they were or how urgent he was. There would be time for seduction later, as well as worry. Right now there was only this quick, primitive mating.

There was no foreplay, no leisurely petting or stroking. For months there had been too much between them while the final intimacy had been denied, and suddenly the walls were down. He disposed of her panties by the simple means of tearing them apart, then unfastened his pants and shoved them down only as far as was necessary. He pushed her legs wider apart and lowered himself onto her.

She made a little sound of pain as he tried to enter her and couldn't. He swiftly adjusted his position and pushed again, this time sliding deep into her. Shock reverberated through her body as she tried to adjust to his girth, and this time she groaned.

He braced himself on his elbows, and Jay looked up at him dazedly. His yellowish eyes were fierce, his face hard and intent, his neck corded as he drove into her. She arched up to accept him, her heart almost exploding with love. This was what she had wanted, to see his face, to see his eagle-fierce eyes, to imprint his image on her mind and heart even as he imprinted his touch on her body. With the icy earth beneath her and the pure blue sky above, with the bright sun on his face, they were as pure and primitive as their surroundings. No matter what his name or what he did, he was her love, her man.

This was for him. She lifted her hips to meet his thrusts, her flesh quivering under his pounding force. He groaned unintelligibly and slid his arms beneath her to lift her up even more, as if he could grind their bodies so tightly together that they would mesh, then convulsed in release.

She held him tightly, her legs around his hips, her arms about his shoulders as he heaved into her, groaning and shivering. "I love you," she said over and over again, though her lips moved soundlessly and only the warm winds heard her. She closed her eyes, feeling that warm wind on her cheek and his heavy weight both on her and in her, and knew that no matter what happened when he regained his memory, this hard, fast possession had made her his in a way that could never be shattered.

Chapter Ten

They lay together, motionless, the only movement that of the wind stirring their hair, the only sound that of the trees rustling together, sighing. Jay felt dazed by what had just happened, her senses buffeted as if she had just weathered a storm. She was totally incapable of action.

Then he braced his hands and lifted his weight off her, staring down at her with an expression so fierce that she almost cringed from it, without knowing why. He swore, his voice low and gravelly, as he disengaged their bodies and shifted to a kneeling position. Uncertainty paralyzed her as her sluggish mind began trying to grasp the reason for his anger.

He pulled his pants up but didn't bother fastening them; instead he tugged her up and into his arms, lifting her from the ground and rising to his feet with a lithe grace that belied the strength necessary to do it. He climbed the steps and strode into the house without saying a word, then carried her into the bathroom. After carefully standing her on the rug, he bent to turn on the water, then straightened and turned back to her. Her dress was unfastened and gently pulled over her head, leaving her naked and shivering from both chill and reaction. She stood docilely, her arms limp at her sides, her eyes wide and dazed and a little frightened as she watched him. What was wrong?

He hurriedly stripped, then lifted her into the tub and stepped in beside her, pulling the shower door closed. Jay moved back, a little bemused by how much room he took up, and watched the rippling muscles in his back as he adjusted the water, then turned on the shower. Warm water blasted out of the shower head, immediately filling the small area with steam. Steve pulled her under the water and held her there even when she gasped a protest, because the water was stinging her cold skin.

"No, you need to get warm," he said roughly, rubbing his hands up and down her arms and shoulders. "Turn around and let me wash your hair."

Numbly she did so, realizing that they must have gotten mud all over them. His hands were gentle as he lathered and rinsed her hair, then washed her all over. She began to feel very warm from the combination of water and the stroking of his soapy hands, first over her breasts and abdomen, then her legs and buttocks, and finally between her legs. Her breathing began to hasten as heat built in her.

His touch slowed, and a spasm twitched his tight facial muscles. Her breathing halted altogether as he probed tantalizingly at the entrance to her body, his fingertips barely stroking, one finger barely entering. She caught at his shoulders, her nails digging into his sleek, wet skin. Her breasts were tight and aching as she hung there in an agony of anticipation, waiting for that small invasion, wanting so much more. She felt him hardening against her hip, and a great shudder of pleasure shook her.

He muttered something, but the sound was so rough she couldn't understand it; then she was in his arms, and his mouth was bruising hers. She yielded to his urgency, sliding her hands to the back of his neck. Their water-slick bodies rubbed together, his abrasive chest hair rasping at her nipples, his muscled stomach rippling against the softness of hers, his hardness pushing at her. "Yes," she whimpered.

"I'm sorry, baby," he said, the words rough and frantic and urgent. He slid his mouth down her throat, biting at the sensitive arch, licking the small hollow at the base, where her pulse throbbed visibly. "I didn't mean to be that rough."

So that was why he was angry, not at her, but at himself. But even that wasn't enough to keep him from having her again. She could feel the hunger in his big, powerful body, and again his loss of control thrilled her in a deeply primitive way. She had been married, but Steve had always kept his cool, kept part of himself securely locked away from her, and the passionate part of her had been hurt, because she'd needed more. The man in her arms now was savage in his hunger, driven out of control by his need for her, and his wildness matched the fierce passion of her own nature. All her life she had needed this answering intensity to balance her; without it, she had withdrawn behind a shell of rigid control, and only now was she being freed.

She clung to him like a vine, her wet body undulating against him. "I love you," she groaned, because that was the only thing she could say, the one outstanding truth in the maze of lies and subterfuges.

He lifted his mouth from her throat, his face so close to hers that his burning gaze was all she could see. "I hurt you," he growled.

She couldn't deny it. "Yes," she said, and fitted her mouth to his, her tongue delicately probing. His arms tightened so convulsively that she couldn't breathe, but breathing didn't matter. Kissing him mattered. Loving him mattered.

But finally he did find some remnant of control, enough to allow him to turn off the water and haul her out of the tub. She never released her hold on his neck as he swept her up and carried her, both of them dripping wet, to his bed. She didn't care about the sheets. All she cared about was his hot mouth on her breasts, the rasp of his slightly roughened fingertips on her silky skin, and finally his powerful invasion of her body. It was still such a shock to her senses that she cried out, instinctively trying to close her thighs. But her legs tightened on his muscled thighs and the movement only drew him deeper.

He ground his teeth together, trying to force himself to stillness when every instinct told him to move. The need was so urgent that it smothered everything else in the world except the woman he held in his arms, the woman whose slim body clasped him so tightly and pushed him to the edge of insanity. But for her sake he managed to hold still until she was more comfortable with him. Lying propped on his elbows so his weight wouldn't crush her, he looked down at her and shuddered with pleasure at the intense, absorbed look on her face as she lifted her hips slightly, tentatively, to accept all of him. A deep groan tore from his chest. He knew he'd been too rough and urgent to allow her time to enjoy it before, but this time she was with him.

Her lips parted slightly in a smile so female it took his breath away, and her deep blue eyes beckoned him, dared him. Once again her hips lifted. "What are you waiting for?" she breathed.

"For you," he answered, and even as he lost himself in the mindless ecstasy of making love to her, the truth of that remained. He'd waited for her forever.

He was a light sleeper, so much so that even in the heavy-limbed aftermath he was disturbed by the damp sheets, a discomfort they hadn't noticed before. Jay lay in his arms, exhausted and deeply asleep; he didn't want to disturb her, but neither did he want her to become chilled from the wetness. He eased from the bed and lifted her light weight in his arms, then carried her into the other bedroom to place her on the dry bed. She made a disgruntled noise as he jostled her, then relaxed again, and her breathing evened out as he stroked her back. He joined her on the bed, and she snuggled closer, into his hard, possessive embrace.

The way he felt about her was so intense it edged into pain. Even without his memory, he knew no other woman had ever shattered his control as she did. He'd never desired another woman so intensely, never would have waited as long as he'd waited for her. She overshadowed every other concern. Because of her, he hadn't dwelled on his loss of memory, beyond a peculiar irritation and a certain detached interest in the curiosities of what he had retained. His past life didn't matter, because Jay was here in the present. They were linked in a way that went beyond memory.

A slight frown creased his brow as he held her, his rough hand sliding from the curve of her hip to the warmly resilient mound of her breast. Of all the knowledge he'd kept, why wasn't any of it of Jay? Those were the memories he resented losing. He wanted to remember every minute he'd spent with her, and he wanted to remember why he'd let her slip away from him. He wanted to remember their wedding, the first time he'd made love to her, and the total lack of those memories ate at him. She was the core of his life; why hadn't something been familiar? Why hadn't he felt some deep-seated recognition of the silkiness of her skin, the rounded curves of her high breasts or the rose-brown of her small nipples? Why hadn't there been some sense of familiarity in the tight sheath of her body as he entered her?

But everything had been new.

She moved slightly against him, and he stilled his stroking hand, content to simply hold her. They would be married as soon as he could talk her into it, and now he had a very powerful weapon at his disposal:

The scene exploded in his mind. There was a laughing bride and a groom looking excited, proud, wary and impatient all at once. The groom shook his head, beaming, and the bride hugged him tightly. "You made it!" she said exultantly. "I knew you would!"

An older woman and man hugged him just as tightly. "I'm glad you're back, son," the man said, and the woman cried a little even as she smiled at him, the smile full of love. Then there was a rush of other people to shake his hand and hug him and clap him on the back, and the scene dissolved in a confusion of voices.

He lay rigidly, his jaw clenched with the effort required not to jackknife out of bed. Where in hell had that memory come from? The man had called him "son," but that could as easily have been a title of affection as one denoting a relationship. He didn't have a family, so they must have been close friends, but Jay had said he'd always been a loner. Who were they? Did they worry about him? Did Jay know anything about them?

Hell, was it even something that had really happened, or a scene from a movie he'd watched?

Movie. Just thinking the word triggered another flashback, but this one was complete with rolling credits. It was a television special on Afghanistan. Then it became another movie, starring a widely acclaimed actor. It was a good movie. Then, in slow motion, the scene shifted. He was standing on a rooftop with the same actor when the man pulled a .45 automatic and pointed it at him. Serious business, a .45. It could have a major impact on a man's future. But the guy was too close, and too rattled. Steve saw himself lash out with his foot, sending the gun flying. The actor staggered back and tripped, fell over the low wall and screamed as he dropped the full seven stories to the ground.

Steve stared at the bedroom ceiling, feeling sweat run down his ribs. Was that another movie? Of all the things he could remember, why a series of films? And why were they so realistic, as if he had stepped into the action? He'd have to ask the doctor about that, but at least it was a sign his memory was returning, just as they'd told him it probably would. He needed to make the trip anyway, to have his eyes checked; it was a real strain to read, and the strain hadn't lessened. He definitely needed glasses. Glasses...

An elderly man smiled benignly at him and removed his glasses, placing them on the desk. "Congratulations, Mr. Stone," he said.

He stifled a curse as the scene faded. This was weird; why would that old guy call him "Mr. Stone" unless he'd been using an assumed name? Yeah, that made sense, unless it was just another scene out of another movie. It could just be something he'd watched rather than something that had actually happened.

Jay stirred in his arms and abruptly woke, lifting her head to stare at him in alarm. "What's wrong?"

She had sensed his tension, just as she had from the beginning. He managed a smile and touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers, a different kind of tension taking over his muscles. "Nothing," he assured her. She looked sleepy and sensual, her eyes heavy-lidded, her luscious mouth swollen from contact with his firmer lips.

She looked around. "We're in my room," she said in bewilderment.

"Mmm. The sheets on my bed were wet, so I brought you in here."

Warm color tinted her cheeks as she thought of how the sheets had gotten so wet, but her smile was both secret and content. She lifted her hand and touched his face, much as he had touched hers; her dark blue eyes drifted over his features with aching tenderness, examining each line and plane, feeding the need in her heart. She was unaware of her expression, but he saw it, and his chest constricted. He wanted to say, "Don't love me like that," but he didn't, because it was essential to him that she love him exactly like that.

He cleared his throat. "We have a choice."

"We do? Of course we do. Of what?"

"We can get up and eat the lunch you were cooking—" he broke off to lift his head and look at the clock "—three hours ago, or we can try to wreck this bed, too."

She considered it. "I think we'd better have lunch, or I won't have the energy to help you wreck the bed."

"Good thinking." He hugged her, reluctant to get up despite his own hunger, and found his hands stroking down her sides in sensual enjoyment. Then he paused and moved his hand around to her stomach. ''Unless you want to get married this weekend, we'd better do something about birth control."

Jay's heart felt as if it had abruptly swollen so large that it filled her entire chest. For a few glorious hours she'd forgotten how hemmed in she was by this tortuous maze of deception. She wanted nothing more than to simply say "Yes, let's get married," but she didn't dare. Not until he knew who he was—and she knew who he was—and he still said he wanted to marry her. So she ignored the first part of his statement and merely answered the second. "We don't have to worry about birth control. I'm on the Pill. My doctor put me on it seven months ago, because my periods had gotten so erratic."

His eyes narrowed a little and his hand lay heavier on her stomach. "Is something wrong?"

"No. It was just stress from my job. I could probably do without them now." Then she smiled and turned her face into his shoulder. "Except for a sudden development."

He grunted. "Sudden, hell. I've been hard for two months. But we could still get married this weekend."

She cased out of his embrace and got up, her face troubled as she put on fresh underwear and got a sweater from the closet, pulling it over her head.

He watched her from the bed. His voice was very soft and raspy when he spoke. "I want an answer."

Harried, she pushed her tangled hair out of her eyes. "Steve—" She stopped, almost cringing at the necessity of calling him by that name. Now more than ever, she wanted, needed, to know her lover's name. "I can't marry you until you've gotten your memory back."

He threw the sheet back and stood, magnificently naked. Jay's pulse rate skittered as she looked at him. All the miles he'd run and the wood he'd chopped had corded his body with muscles. He didn't look as if he'd ever been injured, except for his scars. Her heart settled into a slow, heavy beat. She had cradled his weight, taken his pounding invasion, returned his fire with her own. As tender as she felt now in different parts of her body, she could still feel herself grow warm and liquid as she looked at him.

"What difference does my memory make?" he snapped, and she jerked her gaze upward, realizing that he was angry. "No other woman has a claim on me, and you know it, so don't bring up that crap again. Why should we wait?"

"I want you to be certain," she said, her voice troubled.

"Damn it, I am certain!"

"How can you be, when you don't know what's happened? I just don't want you to regret marrying me when everything comes back to you." She tried a smile, and it only wobbled a little. "We're together, and we have time. That will have to be enough for now."

Steve forced himself to be content with that, and in many ways it was enough. They lived together in the truest sense of the word, as partners, friends and lovers. It was a week before the snows came again, and in that week they explored every inch of their high meadow. He showed her the laser-beam sensor he'd installed across the trail and demonstrated how to operate both the radio and the computer. It was a relief not to have to hide from her how deeply he'd been involved in espionage, though she got a little huffy with him because all the equipment had been hidden from her in the shed and only now had he gotten around to telling her about it.

He liked making her lose her temper. It was exciting, in a primitive way, to watch those blue eyes narrow like a cat's. It was the final sign that he'd tormented her into attack. The day he'd thought she was an intruder and tracked her in the snow, then tackled her, her rage had startled him, caught him off balance, but it had excited him. Most people who knew Jay would never think she was capable of that kind of anger, or that she would physically fight anyone. It told him a lot about her, about the passionate, volatile side of her personality and about what it took to bring it out. Probably very few people could make her angry, but because she loved him, he could. And after he'd provoked her to anger, he liked to wrestle with her and love her out of her temper.

Physically she delighted him. She was still too thin, though she ate well, but he liked to watch her trim hips and rounded buttocks in her tight jeans too much to complain. Her skin was satiny, her breasts high and round, her exotic mouth full and pouty; no matter how she dressed, she turned him on because he knew what lay under those clothes. He also knew that all he had to do was reach for her and she'd turn into his arms, warm and willing. That kind of response enchanted him; there was something so new about it, as if he'd never known it before.

Then one morning they got up to find that it had snowed again during the night, and it continued snowing all during the day, not hard, just a continuous veil of flakes sifting down over the meadow. Except for trips outside to bring in more firewood, Jay and Steve spent the day in the cabin, watching old movies. That was an extra benefit of the satellite dish; they could always find something interesting to watch on television, if they were in the mood. It was perfectly suited to a lazy day when they had nothing better to do than to lie around and watch the fat snowflakes drifting down.

Just before dark, Steve left to check the area, something he always did. While he was gone Jay began cooking dinner, humming as she did so, because she was so contented. This was paradise. She knew it couldn't last; when his memory returned, even if he still wanted to marry her, their lives would change. They would leave here, find another home. She would have to find another job. Other things would take up their time. This was time set aside, out of the real world, but she meant to enjoy every minute of it. Briefly a dark thought intruded: This could be all she had. Perhaps it was. If so, these days were all the more precious.

Steve entered through the back door, slapping snow off his shoulders and shaking it out of his hair before taking off his thick coat. "Nothing but rabbit tracks." He looked thoughtful. "Do you like rabbit?"

Jay turned from the cheese she was grating for the spaghetti. "If you shoot the Easter Bunny..." she began in a threatening tone.

"It was just a question," he said, and grabbed her for a kiss, then rubbed his cold, beard-roughened cheek against hers. "You smell good. Like onion and garlic and tomato sauce." Actually, she smelled like herself, that sweet, warm, womanly scent he associated with her and no one else. He buried his cold nose against her neck and inhaled it, feeling the familiar tension growing in his loins.

"You won't get any points for telling me I smell like onions and garlic," she said, returning to her chore even though he kept his arms looped around her waist.

"Even if I tell you how crazy I am about onions and garlic?"

"Humph. You're like all men. You'll say anything when you're hungry."

Chuckling, he released her to set the table and begin buttering the rolls. "How would you like to take a trip?"

"I'd love to see Hawaii."

"I was thinking more in terms of Colorado Springs. Or maybe Denver."

"I've been to Colorado Springs," she said, then looked at him curiously over her shoulder. "Why are we going to Colorado Springs?"

"I'm assuming Frank doesn't want us returning to Washington, even briefly, so he'll fly the doctor out to check my eyes. That means, logically, either Colorado Springs or Denver, and I'm betting Colorado Springs. I'm also betting he doesn't want the doctor to know the location of the cabin, so that means we go to him."

She had known he would have to have his eyes checked again, but just talking about it brought the real world intruding into their private paradise. It would feel strange even seeing other people, much less talking to them. But reading strained his eyes, and enough time had passed for them to realize his sight wasn't going to improve. She thought of how he would look in glasses, and a warm feeling began spreading in her stomach. Sexy. She gave him a smile. "Yeah, I think I'd like to make a trip. I've been eating my own cooking for a long time now."

"I'll get in touch with Frank after dinner." He could have done it then, but filling his stomach was more important. Jay made great spaghetti, and getting in touch with Frank could be time-consuming. First things first.

After the dinner dishes had been cleaned and Steve was in the shed contacting Frank, Jay stretched out on the rug in front of the fire, for the first time thinking about the chic little apartment in New York that Frank had been keeping for her. It contrasted sharply with the rustic comfort of the cabin, but she much preferred the cabin. She would hate to leave it; it would be beautiful here during the summer, but she wondered how much longer they would be here. Surely Steve's memory would return before then, and even if it didn't, how much longer would it be before Frank told him the truth? They couldn't let him live another man's life forever. Or could they? Had that been the plan? Did they somehow know he'd never get his memory back?

The mirrors kept reflecting back different answers, different facets to the puzzle, different solutions. And none of them fit.

"Are you asleep?" he asked softly.

She gasped and rolled over, her heart jumping. "I didn't hear you come in. You didn't make any noise." He always moved silently, like a cat, but she should have heard the back door. She'd been so deep in thought that the sounds hadn't registered.

"The better to sneak up on you, my dear," he growled in his best big-bad-wolf voice. He joined her on the rug, sinking his hands into her hair as he angled her mouth up toward his. He kissed her slowly, deeply, taking his tune and using his tongue. Her breathing altered, and her eyes grew heavy lidded. Desire was a heavy warmth inside her, slowly expanding until it completely filled her.

They weren't in any hurry. It felt too good to lie there in the warmth of the crackling fire and savor their kisses. But eventually the heat was too much, and she moaned as he unbuttoned her flannel shirt, parting the edges to press his lips to the swollen curves of her breasts. He lay on top of her, his heavy legs controlling hers even though she twisted restlessly. She wanted more. Moaning again, her voice sharp with need, she turned until her nipple brushed against his mouth. Lazily he extended his tongue and licked it, then clamped his mouth over it and sucked strongly, giving her what she needed.

The firelight burnished her hair with golden lights and her skin with a rosy glow as he unfastened her jeans and pulled them off. Her mouth was red and moist, glistening with the sheen of his kisses. Abruptly he couldn't wait any longer and jerked his own clothes off. The flannel shirt still hung around her shoulders, but even that was too much. He pulled it away from her and knelt between her legs, draping her thighs over his as he bent forward to enter her, fusing their bodies as surely as their lives were fused.

They lay together for a long time afterward, too content to move. He put another log on the fire and pulled on his jeans, then put his own shirt around her to stave off any chill. She sat in the circle of his arms, her head on his shoulder, wishing nothing would ever happen to disturb this happiness.

He watched the waving yellow flames, his rough chin rubbing back and forth against her hair. "Do you want kids?" he asked absently.

The question startled her enough that she lifted her head from his shoulder. "I... think I do." she replied. "I've never really thought about it, because it just didn't seem like an option, but now..." Her voice trailed off.

"Before, we didn't have much of a marriage. I don't want it to be like that again. I want to come home every night, live a normal life." He tightened his arms around her. "I'd like to have a couple of kids, but that's a mutual decision. I didn't know how you felt about it."

"I like kids," she said softly, but guilt assailed her. They hadn't had any kind of a marriage before! He was feeling guilty for another man's acts.

"Yeah, I like them, too." He smiled, still watching the fire. "I get a kick out of watching Amy—"

Jay jerked away from him, her eyes wide with something like panic in them. "Who's Amy?"

Steve's face was hard, his mouth grim. "I don't know," he muttered. "I feel as if I just ran into a brick wall. The words just slipped out, then bam! I hit the wall and there's nothing."

Jay felt sick. Had she been so wrong in trusting that Frank wouldn't have set this up if Steve had been married? Was he a father as well as a husband?

Steve was watching her and sensed the direction of her thoughts, if not the content. "No, I'm not married and I don't have any kids," he said sharply, pulling her back to him. "It's probably just a friend's little girl. Do you know anyone with a little girl named Amy?"

She shook her head, not looking at him. The terror was back; she felt stiff with it. Was his memory returning? When it did, would he leave? Paradise could end at any time.

Steve lay awake long after they had gone to bed that night. Jay slept in his arms, as she had every night since the chinook blew, her hair streaming over his left shoulder and her warm breath sighing against his neck. Her bare, silky body was pressed all along his left side, and her slender arm was draped across his chest. She had looked so panicked for a second when he'd mentioned Amy's name, whoever Amy was. He held her closer, trying to erase that panic even from her sleep.

This would probably happen a lot, a casual remark triggering flashes of memory. He hoped they wouldn't all scare her so much. Was she truly afraid he wouldn't want her when his memory returned? God, couldn't she feel how much he loved her? It went beyond memory. It was in his bones, buried in the very depths of his existence.

Amy. Amy.

The name flashed through his mind like fire and suddenly he saw a little girl with glossy dark hair, giggling as she shoved a chubby, dimpled fist into her mouth. Amy.

His heart began pounding. His memory had actually supplied a face to go with the name. He didn't know who she was, but he knew her name, and now her face. The mental picture faded, but he concentrated and found he could recall it, just like a real memory. Just as he'd told Jay, she must be a friend's daughter, someone he'd met since their divorce.

He relaxed, pleased that the memory had solidified. His seAttal satisfaction made his body feel heavy and boneless, and his chest began to rise and fall in the deeper rhythm of sleep.

"Unca Luke, Unca Luke!"

The childish voices echoed in his head and the movie began to unwind in his mind. Two kids. Two boys, tearing across a green lawn, jumping and shrieking "Unca Luke" at the tops of their lungs as they ran.

Another scene. Northern Ireland. Belfast. He recognized it even as a tingle of dread ran up his spine. Two little boys played in the street, then suddenly looked up, hesitated and ran.

Flash. One of the first two little boys looked up with a wobbly lower lip and tears in his eyes and said, "Please, Unca Dan."

Flash. Dan Rather stacked papers at his newsdesk while the credits rolled.

Flash. A bumper sticker on a station wagon said, I'd Rather Be at Disney World.

Mickey Mouse dancing... Flash... a mouse crawling through the garbage in an alley... Flash... a grenade sailing in slow motion through the air and hitting a garbage can with a loud thump; then a louder thump and the can goes sailing... Flash... a white sailboat with sassy red-and-white striped sails tacking closer to shore and a tanned young man waves... Flash flash flash...

The scenes ripped through his consciousness, and they were truly only flashes, following each other like pages of a book being flipped through in front of his eyes.

He was sweating again. Damn, these free-association memories were hell. What did they mean? Had they truly happened? He wouldn't mind them if he could tell which ones were real and which ones were just something he'd seen on television or in a movie, or maybe even imagined from a scene in a book. Okay, some of them were obvious, like the one of Dan Rather with the credits rolling across his face. But he'd watched network news many times since the bandages had come off his eyes, so that could even be a recent memory.

But... Uncle Luke. Uncle Dan. Something about those kids, and those names, seemed very real, just as Amy was real.

He eased out of bed, being very careful not to wake Jay, and walked into the living room where he stood for a long time in front of the banked fire, watching the embers glow. Full memory was close, and he knew it. It was as if all he had to do was turn a corner and everything would be there; but turning that mental corner wasn't as easy as it sounded. He had become a different man in the months since the explosion; he was trying to connect two separate people and merge them into one.

He had been absently rubbing his fingertips with his thumb. When he noticed what he was doing, he lifted his hand to look at it. The calluses were back, courtesy of chopping wood, but his fingertips were still smooth. How much of him was left, or had his identity been erased as surely as his fingerprints had been? When he looked in the mirror, how much of it was Steve Cross-field and how much of it was courtesy of the reconstructive surgery? His face was changed, his voice was changed, his fingerprints gone.

He was new. He had been born out of the darkness, brought to life by Jay's voice calling him toward the light.

Regardless of what he did or didn't remember, he still had Jay. She was a part of him that surgery couldn't change.

The room had taken on a chill as the fire died, and finally he felt the coldness on his naked body. He returned to the bedroom and slipped under the quilt, feeling Jay's body warmth wrap around him. She murmured something, moving closer to him in her sleep, seeking her usual position.

Instantly desire fired through him, as urgent as if it hadn't been slaked only an hour or so before. "Jay," he said, his voice low and dark, and he pulled her beneath him. She woke and reached for him, her hands sliding around his neck, and in the darkness they loved each other until he had no room for memories other than those they made together.

Chapter Eleven

They left the cabin early the next morning so they could rendezvous with Frank at Colorado Springs that afternoon. Jay felt a wrench at leaving the cabin; it had been their private world for so long that, away from it, she felt exposed. Only the thought that they would be returning the next day gave her the courage to leave it at all. She knew that eventually she would have to leave it forever, but she wasn't ready to face that day right now. She wanted more time with the man she loved.

She intended to ask Frank the name of the American agent who had been "killed." He might not tell her, but she had to ask. Even if she couldn't say it aloud, she needed to know, she had to put a name to her love. She looked at him as he skillfully handled the Jeep, holding it steady even on the snow, and her heart swelled. He was big and rough-looking, not handsome at all with his rearranged features, but just one glance from those fierce yellowish eyes had the power to make her dizzy with delight. How could they ever have thought they could pass this man off as Steve Crossfield?

Their subterfuge was riddled with holes, but she hadn't seen them until she had been too deeply in love with him to care. They had relied on shock and urgency to keep her from asking the pointed questions to which they would have had no answers, such as why they didn't use blood type or their own agent's dental records to determine the identity of the patient. She had known at the tune that Frank was hiding something from her, but she had been too concerned over "Steve" to think it was anything more than protecting the details of a classified mission. The truth was that she had been misled so easily because she had wanted to be; after the first tune she had seen him lying in the hospital, so desperately wounded but still fighting with that grim determination of his that burned through unconsciousness, she had wanted nothing more than to be by his side and help him fight.

They were to stay at a different motel than the one they'd been in before, because Frank didn't want to take the chance the desk clerk might recognize them. They even used different names. When they got there, Frank had already arrived, and he'd made reservations for them under the names of Michael Carter and Faye Wheeler. Separate rooms. Steve looked distinctly displeased, but placed Jay's overnighter in her room without comment and went along to his own room. The eye specialist checked Steve's eyes immediately; then he was taken to an optometrist to be fitted for glasses, which would be ready for him the next morning. Jay remained behind, wondering what strings Frank had pulled and whose arms he had twisted to get everything done so fast.

They returned a little after dark, and Steve came immediately to Jay's room. "Hi, baby," he said, stepping inside and closing the door behind him. Before she could answer he was kissing her, his hands tight on her arms, his mouth hard and searching.

She shivered with excitement, crowding closer to his body as she dug her fingers into his cold hair. He smelled like wind and snow, and his skin was cold, but his tongue was warm and probing. Finally he lifted his head, a very male look of satisfaction stamped on his hard face. He rubbed his thumb across her lips, which were reddened from contact with his. "Sweetheart, I may freeze my naked butt off sneaking into your room tonight, but I'm not sleeping alone." "I have a suggestion," she purred. "Let's hear it."

"Leave your clothes on until you get here." He laughed and kissed her again. Her mouth was driving him crazy; it had the most erotic effect on him. Kissing her was more arousing than actually making love had been with other women—and just for a moment, before they faded away, some of those other women were in his mind.

"The doctor is already on his way back to Washington. Frank is staying until the morning, so it's the three of us again. Are you hungry? Frank's stomach is still on Washington time."

"Actually, I am a little hungry. We don't keep late hours ourselves, you know." He looked at the bed. "I know."

Jay hoped to have the chance to ask Frank about the agent's name; she couldn't take the risk of asking him in Steve's presence, because the sound of his own name might trigger his memory, and she couldn't face the possibility of that. She wanted him to remember, but she wanted it to be when they were alone in their high meadow. If the chance to talk to Frank didn't present itself, she could always call him after they'd retired to their individual rooms for the night, provided Steve didn't come straight to hers, but she didn't think he would. He'd probably take a shower first, and put on fresh clothes. She sighed, weary of having to second-guess and predict; she wasn't cut out for this business.

Steve noted the sigh, and the faint desperation in her eyes. She hadn't said anything, but that look had been there since he'd had that first flash of memory the day before. It puzzled him; he couldn't think of any reason why Jay should dread his returning memory. Because it puzzled him and because there was no logical reason, he couldn't let it go. It wasn't in his makeup. When something bothered him, he worried at it until it made sense. He never quit, never let go. His sister had often said he was at least half bulldog— Sister?

He was quiet as the three of them ate dinner at an Italian restaurant. Part of him enjoyed the spicy food, and part of him was actively involved in the easy conversation around the table, but another part of him examined the sliver of memory from every angle. If he had a sister, why had he told Jay he was an orphan? Why hadn't Frank had a record of any relatives? That was the screwy part. He could accept that he might have told Jay a different version of his life, because he didn't know what the circumstances had been at the time, but it was impossible that Frank hadn't had a list of next of kin. That was assuming he was remembering "real" things.

A sister. His logic told him it was impossible. His guts told him his logic could take a flyer. A sister. Amy. Unca Luke! Unca Luke! The childish voices reverberated in his head even as he laughed at something Frank said. Unca Dan. Unca Luke. Unca Luke Unca Luke... Luke... Luke...

"Are you all right?" Jay asked, her eyes dark with concern as she put her hand lightly on his wrist. She could feel tension emanating from him and was vaguely startled that Frank hadn't seemed to notice anything unusual.

The pounding left his head as he looked at her and smiled. He'd gladly count his past well lost as long as he could have Jay. The sensory umbilical cord linking them was as acutely sensitive as the strings on a precisely tuned Stradivarius. "It's just a headache," he said. "The drive was a strain on my eyes." Both statements were true, though the second wasn't the cause of the first. Also, there hadn't been that much strain. His problem was the precise, close-up focusing needed for reading; his distance vision was as sharp as ever, which was better than twenty-twenty. He had the vision of a jet pilot.

Jay returned to her conversation with Frank, but she was as aware of Steve's fading tension as she had been of the fact that he'd been as taut as a guide wire. Had something happened that afternoon that he hadn't told her? A feeling of dread almost overwhelmed her, and she wanted badly to be back at the cabin.

When they returned to the motel, she noted with relief that Steve went to his own room rather than stopping to talk with Frank or immediately following her to hers. She darted to the phone and dialed Frank's room. He answered on the first ring.

"It's Jay." She identified herself.

"Is something wrong?" He was immediately alert.

"No, everything's okay. It's just that something's been bothering me, but I didn't want to ask you in front of Steve."

In his room, Frank tensed. Had they failed to cover all bases? "Is it about Steve?"

"Well, no, not really. The agent who died... what was his name? It's been on my mind a lot lately, that he died and I never even heard his name."

"There's no reason you should have. You'd never met him."

"I know," she said softly. "I just wanted to know something about him. It could have been Steve. Now that he's dead, there's no reason to keep his name secret, is there?"

Frank thought. He could give her a fictitious name, but he decided to tell her at least that much of the truth. She'd know his name eventually, and it might help if she could simply think a mistake had been made. It would give her a small fact she could focus on for reference. "His name was Lucas Stone."

"Lucas Stone." Her voice was very soft as she repeated the name. "Was he married? Did he have a family?"

"No, he wasn't married." He deliberately didn't answer her second question.

"Thanks for telling me. It's bothered me that I didn't know." He'd never know how much, she thought as she quietly replaced the receiver. Lucas Stone. She repeated the name over and over in her mind, applying it to a battered face and feeling her heart begin to pound. Lucas Stone. Yes.

Only then did she realize what a mistake she'd made. If it had been difficult before to refer to him as Steve, it would be almost impossible now. Steve had been a stolen name, but one she'd used because there had been no alternative. What if the name Lucas slipped out?

She sat on the bed for a long time while she mentally flailed against the hall of mirrors that trapped her with its false reflections. The things she didn't know bound her as securely as the things she knew, until she was afraid to trust her own instincts. She wasn't made for deception; she was straightforward, which was one reason why she hadn't fitted into the world of investment banking, a world that required a certain measure of "slickery," that balance of slickness and trickery.

Finally, too tired to open any more blank doors, she took a shower and got ready for bed. When she came out of the bathroom, Lucas—Stevel she reminded herself frantically—was stretched out on the bed, already partially undressed.

She looked at the locked door. "Haven't we done this before?"

He rolled to his feet and caught her arms, pulling her to him. "With one difference. A big difference."

He smelled of soap and shaving cream, and the underlying muskiness of man. She clung to him, pressing her face into his neck to inhale that special scent. What would she do if he left her? It would be a life without color, forever incomplete. Slowly she ran her hands over his broad chest, rubbing her ringers through the crisp, curly hair and feeling the warmth of his skin, then the iron layer of muscles beneath. He was so hard that her fingers barely made an impression. Bemused, she pressed experimentally on his upper arm, watching as her fingernails turned white from the pressure but had noticeably little effect on him.

"What are you doing?" he asked curiously.

"Seeing how hard you are."

"Honey, that's not the right place."

Her face was bright with laughter as she swiftly looked up at him. "I think I know all your other places."

"Is that so? There are places, and then there are places. Some places need a lot more attention than others." As he spoke he began moving her toward the bed. He was already aroused, his hardness pressing against her. Jay moved her hand down to cover the ridge beneath his jeans.

"Is this one of the places in need of attention?"

"A lot of attention," he assured her as he levered them both onto the bed. He felt her legs move, her hips lifting to cradle him, and all amusement faded out of his eyes, leaving them fierce and narrow. It was a look that made Jay shudder in exquisite anticipation.

She looked up at him, her face soft and shining as his hands began moving tenderly on her body. "I love you," she said, and her heart echoed, Lucas.

It was different the next morning, as if the world had altered during the night, but he couldn't quite put his finger on the difference. It was an oddly familiar feeling, as if he were more at home with himself. Jay was in his arms, her sleek, golden-brown hair lying tangled on his shoulder. If they had been in the cabin he would have got up to rebuild the fire, then returned to bed for some early-morning loving. Instead he had to go to his own room to shave and dress. That damn Frank. He'd booked separate rooms knowing they needed only one. But Jay wasn't like all the other women; Jay was special, and maybe this was Frank's tribute to her specialness.

Other women. The thought nagged at him after he left Jay and returned to his own room in the biting cold of dawn. His memory was returning, not in one big, melodramatic rush, like a light switch being turned on, but in unconnected bits and pieces. Faces and names were surfacing. Instead of feeling elated, however, he was aware of a growing sense of caution. He hadn't told Frank his memory was coming back; he'd wait until it had truly returned and he'd had time to consider the situation. Wariness was second nature to him, just as he automatically checked his room to make certain no one had entered it in his absence.

He showered and shaved, but as he shaved he found himself staring at his face in the mirror, trying to find his past in the reflection. How could he recognize himself when his face had been changed? What had he looked like before? He wondered if Jay had a picture of him; it would be an old one, if she'd kept any at all. But women tended to keep mementos and their divorce hadn't been a bitter one, so maybe she hadn't destroyed whatever pictures she'd had. Maybe seeing one would give him a link to the past.

Hell, why should it? He stared at himself in disgust. He hadn't recognized Jay or Frank; why should he recognize his old face? The face he knew was the face he could see now, and it wouldn't win any prizes. He looked as if he'd played too many football games without a helmet.

Still, the sensation lingered that he was on the brink of... something. It was there, just beyond his reach.

It nagged at him in little ways, like the ease with which he slipped his shoulder holster on, and the familiarity of the gun in his hand as he checked it, then slid it into place. The ease and familiarity had been there before, but now they were somehow different, as if the link between past and present were returning. Soon. It would happen soon.

The day was uneventful, but the feeling of anticipation didn't leave him. They all met to eat breakfast; then he and Frank drove to the optical lab and picked up his glasses. On the way back he asked, "Have you found this Piggot guy yet?"

"Not yet. He surfaced a month ago, but he went underground again before we could get to him."

"Is he good?"

Frank hesitated. "Damn good. One of the best. His psychological profile says he's a psychopath, but very controlled, very professional. His jobs are a matter of pride to him. That's why he wants you. You screwed him up the way no one else ever had. You spoiled his job, killed his 'employees' and managed to hit him hard enough that he had to go underground for months to recover."

"I may have hit him hard, but it wasn't hard enough," Steve said remotely. "Do you have a picture of him?"

"Not with me. There's only one. We got him with a telescopic lens, and it's grainy. He's about five-ten, a hundred and forty-five pounds, blond, forty-two years old. His left earlobe is missing, also courtesy of you. His reputation suffered." "Yeah, well, some days I'm a little cranky." That was vintage Lucas Stone. Frank felt the shock of it like a slap, but he kept his hands steady on the wheel. "Is your memory coming back?"

"Not yet," Steve lied. He could see Geoffrey Pig-got, whiplash thin, malignant, cold. Another face to go with a name.

He was very quiet on the drive back to the cabin. Jay glanced at him, but sunglasses hid his eyes, and she could read nothing in his expression. She still sensed the tension in him, just as she had the night before, during dinner. "Do you have another headache?" she finally asked.

"No." Then he softened the bluntness of his answer by reaching over to rub the backs of his fingers against her jaw. "I feel okay."

"Did Frank say anything that's bothering you?"

Briefly he considered the disadvantages of letting someone get so close to you that they could read your moods, but then he counted that battle well lost in Jay's case, because as far as he was concerned, she couldn't get close enough to suit him. And he hadn't let her get close; it had simply happened.

"No. He told me a few things about the guy who tried to make me into beef stew—"

"Oh, gross!" she said, slapping his hand away, and he laughed at her.

''I was just thinking about him, that's all."

After a moment she curled up in the seat and rested her head against the back. "I'll be glad to get home."

He was in total agreement with that. They had been alone together for so long that this trip had almost brought on culture shock. Neon lights and traffic were a definite jolt to a system that was used to fir trees, snow and a deep, deep silence. Right now he would welcome a trip to civilization only if he and Jay were getting blood tests and a marriage license.

Blood tests.

Suddenly he felt alert, just as he'd felt a thousand times before when his life hung in the balance. Adrenaline spurted into his veins, and his heart began racing, but not as fast as his brain. A blood test. Damn it, it didn't fit. Why had they needed Jay to identify him when they had all the means at hand? He was their agent. Granted, his fingerprints were gone, he'd been unconscious and his voice damaged, but they still had his blood type and dental records. It should have been easy enough to establish his identity. It followed, then, that they hadn't needed Jay at all, but had definitely wanted her for some reason.

He went over what Jay had told him. They had wanted her to identity him because they couldn't make a positive ID, and they'd needed to know if their agent had bought the farm, because Steve and this other guy had been caught in the explosion and one of them was dead. That meant there must have been two agents on location, but it wouldn't have changed the fact that Frank had the means at hand to identify both of them. Supposedly he and this other agent had physically resembled each other, about the same height and weight, and with the same coloring. There still wasn't any problem with identification, even if he stretched coincidence and allowed that they both might have had the same blood type. That still left dental records.

Damn, he felt like a fool. Why hadn't he seen this before? They had wanted Jay in this for some reason, but identification hadn't been it. What kind of scheme was Frank running?

Think. He had to think. He felt as if he were trying to put a puzzle together without all the pieces, so no matter how he moved things around they still didn't fit. If he could just remember, damn it!

Why would Frank lie to Jay? Why concoct the story that he and the other agent so closely resembled each other? Why insist that he needed her at all?

Why did they need Jay?

Voices tumbled in on him. "Congratulations, Mr. Stone"... "I'm glad you're back, son"... "Unca Luke! Unca Luke!" Stone... son... Unca Luke... son... Luke... Stone...

Luke Stone.

His hands jerked on the steering wheel. He felt as if he'd been hit in the chest. Luke Stone. Lucas Stone. Damn Frank Payne to hell! His name was Lucas Stone!

As soon as he'd turned that mental corner, all the memories came rushing at him in a confusing flood, filling his mind with so much clatter that he could barely drive. He didn't dare stop, didn't dare let Jay know what he was feeling. He felt... God, he didn't know how he felt. Battered. His head hurt, but at the same time he was aware of an enormous sense of relief. He had his identity back, his sense of self. Finally he knew himself.

He was Lucas Stone. He had a family and friends, a past.

But he wasn't Jay's ex-husband. He wasn't Steve Crossfield. He wasn't the man she thought she was in love with.

So that was why she'd been brought in. There had been only one agent at the explosion, and he was that man. Steve Crossfield must have been there for some reason, and he had died there. Lucas tried to form his memories of the meeting, but they were blurred, fragmented. They would probably never come back. But he did remember seeing a tall, lean man walking up the street, his outline reflected on the wet pavement under the streetlight. That could have been Steve Cross-field. He didn't remember anything after that, though now he was remembering making contact, setting up the meeting with Minyard, going to the meeting site. He'd looked up, seen the man...then nothing. Everything after that was a blank, until Jay's voice had pulled him out of the darkness.

His cover had been blown, obviously. Piggot was after him; that was the reason for the charade. Pulling Jay in, duping her into thinking he was her ex-husband, having him positively identified as Steve Crossfield, was the best cover the Man could concoct for him until they could neutralize Piggot. The Man never underestimated his enemies, and Piggot was, as Frank had said, very good. The extent of the Man's deception also told Lucas that the Man suspected there was a mole in his ranks and hadn't trusted regular channels.

So they'd "buried" him, and he'd awakened to another name, another face, another life, even another man's wife.

No, damn it! Savagery filled him, and his knuckles turned white as he automatically negotiated the icy patches on the road. Maybe he wasn't Steve Crossfield, but Jay was his. His. Lucas Stone's woman.

Silently and at length, he cursed the Man and Frank for everything he could think of, ranging back over several generations of their ancestors. Not Frank so much, because he could see the Man's fine hand in this. Nobody had a mind as intricate as Kell Sabin's; that was how he'd gotten to be the Man. They had probably—no, almost certainly—saved his life, assuming there was a mole passing information to Pig-got, but they weren't the ones who had to tell Jay he wasn't her ex-husband. They didn't have to tell her that the man she loved was dead and she'd been sleeping with a stranger.

What would she say? More important, what would she do?

He couldn't lose her. He could stand anything except that. He expected, and could handle, shock, anger, even fear, but he couldn't stand it if she looked at him with hate in those deep blue eyes. He couldn't let her walk away from him.

Immediately he began examining the situation from all angles, looking for a solution, but even as he looked, he knew there wasn't one. He couldn't marry her using Crossfield's name, because such a marriage wouldn't be legal, and besides, he'd be damned if he'd let her carry another man's name. He would have to tell her.

His family probably thought he was dead, and there was no way he could let them know he wasn't without jeopardizing them. If his cover was blown, his family would be at risk if Piggot ever found out he hadn't died as planned. The way things stood now, he'd have a hard time convincing his family of his identity anyway; he neither looked nor sounded the same. His hands were tied until Piggot was caught; then he supposed Sabin would arrange for his family to be notified that a "mistake" had been made in identification, and due to extenuating and unusual circumstances, et cetera, the error had only now been corrected. The Man probably already had the telegram composed in his mind, letter-perfect.

His family would be taken care of; they would be glad to get him back despite the way he looked, or the fact that his voice was ruined.

Jay was the victim. They'd used her as the ultimate cover. How in hell could she ever forgive that?

Jay dozed, finally awakening as they turned onto the track to the meadow. "We're home," she murmured, pushing her hair back. She turned her head to smile at him. "At last."

He was tense again, surveying every detail of the track. There was new snow on the ground, filling the tire tracks they had made the day before and also obliterating any other trail that could have been made after they'd left. All his training was coming into play, and Lucas Stone didn't take chances. Unnecessary chances, that was. There had been more times than one when he'd laid his life on the line, but only because he'd had no other choice. Taking chances with Jay's life, however, was something else.

As usual, Jay picked up on his tension and fell silent, a worried frown puckering her brow.

The snow surrounding the cabin was pristine, but when Lucas parked the Jeep he put a detaining hand on Jay's arm. "Stay here until I check the cabin," he said tersely, drawing a pistol from beneath his jacket and getting out without looking at her. His eyes were never still, darting from window to window, examining every inch of ground, looking for the betraying flutter of a curtain.

Jay was frozen in place. This man, moving like a cat toward the back door, was the man she loved, and he was a predator, a hunter. He was innately cautious, as graceful as the wind as he flattened his back against the wall and eased his left hand toward the doorknob, while the pistol was held ready in his right. Soundlessly he opened the door and disappeared within. Two minutes later he stood in the back door again, relaxed. "Come on in," he said, and walked back to the Jeep to get their bags.

It irritated her that he'd frightened her for nothing; it reminded her of the morning when he'd tracked her in the snow. "Don't do that to me," she snapped as she threw open the door and slid out. The snow crunched under her boots.

"Do what?"

"Scare me like that."

"Scaring you is a hell of a lot better than walking into an ambush," he replied evenly.

"How could anyone know we're up here, and why should anyone care?"

"Frank thinks someone would care, or they wouldn't have taken the trouble to hide us."

She climbed the steps and knocked the snow off her boots before entering the cabin. It was cold but not icy, because they had left the backup heat system on. She took the bags from him and carried them into the bedroom to begin unpacking while he built a fire.

Lucas watched the yellow flames lick at the logs he'd placed on the grate, slowly catching and engulfing the wood. He couldn't tell her, not yet. This might be the only time he'd ever have with her, an indefinite period of grace while Sabin's men hunted Piggot. He'd use that time to bind her to him so tightly that he could hold her even after she found out his real name, and that Steve Crossfield was dead. She had told him she loved him, but it was Steve Crossfield she'd been saying the words to, and, oddly, it had been Steve Cross-field hearing them. He was Lucas Stone, and he wanted her for himself.

His need was fast and urgent, like a fire low in his belly. He walked into the bedroom and watched her for a moment as she bent over to remove her boots and socks. She was as slim as a reed, her skin silky soft. He caught her around the waist and tumbled her on the bed, immediately following her down to pin her to the mattress with his weight.

She laughed, her blue eyes no longer filled with irritation. "The caveman approach must be fashionable this year," she teased.

He couldn't smile in return. He wanted her too badly, needed to hear her say the words to him, not to a ghost. The yellow glitter was in his eyes as he stripped her and surveyed her nakedness. Her nipples were puckered from the chilly air, her breasts standing up round and firm. He circled them with his hands and lifted the tight nipples to his mouth, sucking at each of them in turn. She gasped, and her back arched. Her responsiveness did it to him every time, shattered his control and made him as hot and eager for her as a teenager. He could barely tolerate taking his hands off her long enough to hastily tear at his own clothing and throw it to the side.

"Tell me you love me," he said as he adjusted her slim legs around his hips and began entering her.

Jay squirmed voluptuously, rubbing her breasts against the hairy planes of his chest. "I love you." Her hands dug into his back as she felt the muscles ripple. "I love you." Slowly he pushed and slowly she accepted him, her pleasure already rising to an urgent pitch. Her body was so attuned to him that when he began the rhythmic thrust and withdrawal of love-making her sensual tension swiftly reached a crescendo. He held her until her shudders stilled, then found the rhythm anew.

"Again," he whispered.

She wanted to cry out his name, but couldn't. She couldn't call him Steve now, and she didn't dare call him Lucas. She had to bite her lips to keep his name unsaid, and a moan rose in her throat. He controlled her, his slow, deep thrusts taking her only so high and refusing to let her go any higher. She was on fire, her nerve endings exploding with pleasure.

"Tell me you love me." His voice was gravelly, the strain apparent on his face as he kept his movements agonizingly slow.

"I love you."

"Again."

"I love you."

He wanted to hear his name, but that was denied him. Sometime in the future, when this was all over, he promised himself that he would have her as he was having her now, and she would scream his name. He had to be content with knowing it himself, and with the way her eyes locked with his as she whispered the words over and over again, until his control broke and sweet madness claimed them both.

He couldn't get enough of her, ever, and knowing that he might lose her was intolerable. Physical bonds were the most basic, and instinctively he used them to strengthen the link between them. He would make himself a part of her until his name no longer mattered.

Two nights later, Frank had just gotten into bed when the telephone rang. With a sigh, he reached for it. "Payne."

"Piggot's in Mexico City," the Man said.

Forgetting about the good night's sleep he'd been anticipating, Frank sat up, instantly alert.

"Do you have a man on him?"

"Not at the moment. He's gone to ground again. It's about to unravel, and this move tells me who snipped the thread. I'll take care of that little detail, but you get Luke out of there. The cabin's location has been leaked."

"How much do you want me to tell him?"

"All of it. It doesn't matter now. It'll go down within the next twenty-four hours. Just see that they're safe." Then Kell Sabin hung up, wondering if he'd cut it too fine and endangered a friend, as well as an innocent woman.

Chapter Twelve

At the first beep from the palm-size pager lying on the bedside table, Lucas was on his feet and reaching for his pants. The tone told him it was the communications beeper, not the alarm caused by the laser beam being broken, but the very fact that Frank was contacting him in the middle of the night was alarm enough. Jay roused and reached for the lamp, but Lucas stopped her.

"No lights."

"What's going on?" She was very still now.

"I'm going out to the shed. That's the communications beeper. Frank's trying to get in touch with us."

"Then why not turn on a light?"

"He wouldn't contact us in the middle of the night unless it was an emergency. It might be too late. Piggot could already be close by, and a light would warn him."

"Piggot?"

"The guy who tried to make me into beef stew, remember?"

"I'll go with you." In a flash she was out of the bed and fumbling with her clothes in the dark. Lucas started to stop her, not wanting her to leave the safety of the cabin, but if Piggot had found them, the cabin wouldn't be safe. A hand-held rocket launcher in the hands of an expert, which Piggot was, could turn the cabin into a shattered inferno in seconds.

He stamped his feet into his boots and grabbed the pistol out of the holster, which he always kept at hand. As he left the room he lifted his jacket from the hook beside the door, then shrugged into it as he raced through the dark cabin to the back door. Jay was right behind him; she had on her jeans and his flannel shirt, her bare feet shoved into boots.

They slipped across the snow to the shed, staying in the shadows as much as possible. The ramshackle shed was a revelation; Jay had been stunned the first time Lucas had shown her what lay below its surface. He moved a bale of hay aside and revealed a small trapdoor, just wide enough to allow his shoulders through, then pressed a button on the pager that released the electronic lock. The trapdoor silently swung open. A narrow ladder extended downward, illuminated only by tiny red lights beside each step. Lucas urged her down, then he followed and closed the door, once more sealing the underground communications chamber. Only then did he switch on the lights.

The chamber was small, no more than six by eight, and crammed with equipment. There were a computer and display terminal, a modem hookup and a printer against the end wall, and an elaborate radio system on the right. That left about two and a half feet of room on the left for maneuvering, and part of that was taken up by a chair. Lucas took the chair and flipped switches on the radio. "On air."

"Get packed. Piggot has been spotted in Mexico City, and we have word the location of the cabin is no longer secure." Frank's voice filled the small chamber eerily, without the tinny sound radios normally produced, testifying to the quality of the set.

"How much time do we have?"

"The Man estimated four hours; less if Piggot has already put accomplices in the area."

"His usual method is to move people in, but keep them at a distance until he arrives. He likes to orchestrate things himself." Lucas's voice was remote, his mind racing.

Silence filled the chamber, then Frank asked quietly, "Luke?"

"Yeah," Lucas said, aware of Jay's sudden movement behind him, followed by absolute stillness. He hadn't wanted to tell her like this, but all hell would be coming down in a hurry. Four hours wasn't a lot of time, and no matter what happened, he wanted her to know his name. For four hours she would know whose woman she was.

"When?"

"A couple of days ago. Any chance of intercepting Piggot before he gets here?" That would be the best-case scenario.

"Slim. Nailing him there would be our best bet. We don't know where he is, but we know where he's going."

"He won't go through customs, so that means he's in a small plane and will land at a private airstrip, one close by. Do you have a record of them?"

"We're pulling them out of the computer now. We'll have men at all of them."

"Where's a safe place for me to stash Jay?"

Frank said urgently, "Luke, you're out of it. Don't set yourself up as bait for the trap. Get in the Jeep and drive, and call me in five hours."

"Piggot's my mess, I'll clean it up," Lucas said, still in that cool, remote tone. "If I'd taken care of him last year, this wouldn't be happening now."

"What about Jay?"

"I'll get her out of it. But I'm coming back for Piggot."

Realizing the futility of arguing with him across two-thirds of the continent, Frank said. "Okay. Contact Veasey, at this frequency, and scramble." He recited the frequency numbers only once.

"Roger," Lucas said, and flipped the switch that cut them off. Then he shoved the chair back and stood, turning to face Jay.

Her entire body felt numb as she stared at him. He knew. His memory had returned. Her time of grace had ended, the mirrors had shattered, the charade was over. The violence that had brought him into her life was about to take him out of it again.

With the return of his memory, he was truly Lucas Stone again. It was there in his eyes, in the yellow gaze of the predator. His face was hard. "I'm not Steve Crossfield," he said bluntly. "My name is Lucas Stone. Your ex-husband is dead."

She was white, frozen. "I know," she whispered.

Of all the things he'd expected her to say, that wasn't one of them. It stunned him, confused him, and irrationally angered him. He'd agonized for days over how to tell her, and she already knew? "How long have you known?" he snapped.

Even her lips felt numb. "Quite a while."

He caught her arm, his long fingers digging into her flesh. "How long is 'quite a while'?"

She tried to think. She had been caught in a web of lies for so long that it was difficult to remember. "You... you were still in the hospital."

Scenarios flashed through his mind. He'd been trained to think deviously, to keep hammering at something until it made sense, and he didn't like any of the situations that came to mind. He'd assumed from the beginning that she was an innocent blind, used by Sabin and Frank Payne to shield him, but it was more likely that she'd been hired to do the job. White-hot fury began to build in him, and he clamped down on his temper with iron control. "Why didn't you tell me?" God, for a while he'd thought he was going crazy, with all those damn memories coming back and none of them connected with the things she had told him. He might have gotten his memory back sooner if he'd had one solid fact to build on instead of the fairy tales she'd woven.

He was hurting her; his grip would leave bruises on her arm. She pulled at it uselessly, gasping as he only tightened his fingers. "I was afraid to!"

"Afraid of what?"

"I thought Frank would send me away if he knew I'd discovered you weren't Steve! Lucas, please, you're hurting me!" At last she could say his name, even though it was in pain, and her heart savored the sound.

His, grip eased, but he caught her other arm, too, and held her firmly. "So Frank didn't hire you to say I was Steve Crossfield?"

"N-no," she stuttered. "I believed you were, at first."

"What changed your mind?"

"Your eyes. When I saw your eyes, I knew."

The memory of that was crystal clear. When the doctor had cut the bandages away from his eyes and he'd looked at Jay for the first time, she had gone as white as she was now. That was odd, because he knew Sabin would never have overlooked a detail as basic as the color of his eyes.

"Your husband didn't have brown eyes?"

"Ex-husband," she whispered. "Yes, he had brown eyes, but his were dark brown. Yours are yellowish brown."

So his eyes were a different shade of brown than her husband's had been; it was almost laughable that Sabin's carefully constructed scam could have fallen apart over something as small as that. But she hadn't told them that they had the wrong man, which would have been the reasonable thing to do. She hadn't even told him, not then and not during the weeks when they'd been up here alone. Angry frustration made his voice as rough as gravel. "Why didn't you tell me? Didn't you think I'd be a little interested in who I really am?"

"I couldn't take the chance. I was afraid—" she began, pleading for understanding.

"Yeah, that's right, you were afraid the gravy train would end. Frank was paying you to stay with me, wasn't he? You were with me every day, so there was no way you could hold down a job."

"No! It isn't like that—"

"Then what is it like? Are you independently wealthy?"

"Lucas, please. No, I'm not wealthy—"

"Then how did you live during the months I was in the hospital?"

"Frank picked up the tab," she said in raw frustration. "Would you please listen to me?"

"I'm listening, honey. You just told me that Frank paid you to stay with me."

"He made it possible for me to stay with you! I'd lost my job—" Too late, she heard the words and knew how he would take them.

His eyes were yellow slits, his mouth a grim line of rage. "So you jumped at the chance for a cushy job. All you had to do was sit beside me every day and anything you wanted was given to you, while Frank paid your bills. This explains why you wouldn't marry me, doesn't it? You were happy to accept your 'salary,' but marrying a stranger was a little bit too much, wasn't it? Not to mention the fact that the marriage wouldn't have been legal. You saved yourself some sticky trouble by dragging up all those excuses."

"They weren't excuses. For all I knew you could have had someone who cared for you—"

"I do!" he yelled, his neck cording. "My family! They think I'm dead!"

Jay groped for control, managing to steady her voice. "I couldn't marry you until you'd gotten your memory back and knew for certain you wanted to marry me. I couldn't take advantage of you like that."

"That's a convenient scruple. It actually makes you look noble, doesn't it? Too bad. If you wanted the gravy train to keep running, you should have married me while you had the chance and just kept pretending I was Crossfield. Then, when I got my memory back, you could have been the poor victim and maybe I would have stayed with you out of guilt."

She shrank away from him, her eyes going blank. Somehow, during the long months she had spent with him, she had come to believe he loved her, though he had never said the words. He'd been so possessive, so tender and passionate. But now his memory had returned, and he couldn't have made it plainer that his absorption with her had ended. He didn't need her any longer, and he certainly wasn't going to renew his offer of marriage. It was over, and they weren't even going to part friends. The worst had happened; she had lied to him, kept his identity from him, and he would never forgive her for it. He thought she had done it just because the government had been willing to support her for as long as the charade had lasted.

He released her suddenly, as if he couldn't stand to touch her any longer, and she staggered back. Catching her balance, she turned toward the ladder. "Open the door," she said dully.

He clenched his fists, not ready to break off the argument. He didn't have all the answers he wanted, not by a long shot. But her movement recalled the need for urgency; he had to get her out of there before Piggot found them. The last thing he wanted was for Jay to be caught in the middle of a firefight.

"I'll go first," he said, and shouldered past her. He signaled the door open and climbed the ladder, the pistol ready in his hand. As soon as his head was above ground he looked cautiously in all directions, then climbed out and knelt on one knee by the hole to help Jay out. "All right, come on."

She didn't look at him as she crawled out, nor did she accept the hand he extended. He closed the trapdoor, then replaced the bale of hay over it. She started to just walk out of the shed, but he grabbed her and held her back. "Watch it!" he said in a furious whisper. "We go back the same way we came. Stay in the shadows." He led the way, and Jay followed him without a word.

He still wouldn't allow a light on in the cabin, so Jay stumbled to the bedroom and gathered a few clothes in the dark. He came into the bedroom as she took off his shirt to put on her own clothes, and after a moment of frozen embarrassment, she awkwardly turned her back while she struggled with her bra. Her hands were clumsy, and in the dark she couldn't manage to straighten the straps. Despairing of getting it on, she finally dropped it on the bed and simply pulled her sweater over her head.

Lucas watched her. Her pale breasts had gleamed in the fault light coming through the window, and in spite of his anger, his sense of betrayal and the need for haste, he wanted to go to her and pull her against him. Only a few hours before he had held her breasts in his hands and pushed them up to his avid mouth. He had made love to her until the building anticipation had bordered on agony, and they had writhed together on that bed. She had told him she loved him, over and over, and now she turned her back as if she had to hide her body from him.

It hit him hard, shook him. There was more to it than she'd told him, more than the mercenary motives he'd thrown at her. He needed to know what it was, but he didn't have time. Damn it. If only she didn't look so beaten and remote, as if she had withdrawn inside herself. He had to fight the urge to take her in his arms and kiss that look away. Hell, what did it matter why she had done it? Maybe money had been the reason at first, but he was damned certain it wasn't the reason now, or at least not all of it. Even if it had been, he thought ruthlessly, he wouldn't let her go. He'd get this settled between them as soon as he'd taken care of Piggot, but right now the most important thing was to make certain Jay was safe.

"Hurry," he urged roughly.

She sat down on the edge of the bed and jerked her boots off, quickly put on a pair of thick socks and put the boots on again. Then she got her purse and shearling jacket and said, "I'm ready."

He didn't see the need for her to get anything else, as they would come back to the cabin and pack after he'd taken care of Piggot, and he was pleased that she didn't insist on wasting time. Jay was a good partner, even though she was out of her depth.

He had to find a safe place to leave her. He doubted that Black Bull, the closest town, had a motel, but he didn't have the time to go any farther than that. He drove the Jeep at breakneck speed across the meadow, especially considering that he didn't dare risk turning on the headlights. But he had taken the possibility that he might have to do this into consideration and had walked the meadow over and over, mentally tracing the route he would take, estimating his fastest safe speed, noting all the rocks and ruts in his path. He edged so close to the tree line that branches scraped the side of the Jeep.

"I can't see," Jay said, her voice strained.

"I can." He couldn't see much, but it was enough. He had good night vision.

She held on to the door as they jolted across a hump, rattling her teeth. He'd have to turn on the headlights when they went down the mountainside, she thought; the track was only wide enough for the Jeep, with a steep drop on one side and vertical mountain on the other. Even in daylight she hardly dared to breathe until they had safely negotiated it. But when they made the turn that took them onto the track, he kept both hands on the wheel. The darkness in front of them was absolute.

Jay closed her eyes. Her own heartbeat was thundering in her ears so loudly that she couldn't hear anything else. There was nothing she could do. He had decided not to turn on the lights, to risk the drive in the dark, and nothing she could say would change his mind. His arrogant confidence in his own ability was both maddening and awesome; she would rather have walked down the mountain in ten feet of snow than risked this hair-raising drive, but he had simply decided to do it, and now he was.

She couldn't estimate how long the drive took. It seemed like hours, and finally her nerves couldn't bear the tension, and numbness settled in. She even opened her eyes. It didn't matter. If they went over the side, they would go whether her eyes were open or closed.

But then they were down and bumping across the second meadow. Suddenly he slammed on the brakes, swearing viciously. Jay saw what he saw: a set of headlights playing along the edge of the meadow in front of them. They were still safely out of range of the light, but she knew as well as he did what it meant. Piggot's men were drawing close, closing the net to wait for Piggot's arrival.

Lucas put the Jeep in reverse and backed the way he had come, keeping the Jeep at the tree line. When he reached the rear edge of the meadow he turned, taking the Jeep up the north edge. They were off the track now, and the snow tires dug in deep, spewing snow back behind them.

"Are we going around this way?"

"No. We won't be able to make it. The snow's too deep." He pulled the Jeep under some trees and got out. "Stay here," he ordered, and disappeared back toward the track.

Jay swiveled in her seat, straining her eyes to see what he was doing. She could barely make out his form, black against the snow; an instant later he was out of sight.

He was back in less than two minutes. He vaulted into the Jeep and slammed the door, then rolled the window down. "Listen," he hissed.

"What did you do?"

"I wiped out our tracks. There was only one vehicle. If it goes past us, we'll get back on the track and make it to the highway yet."

They listened. The sound of the other motor came plainly through the night air. The vehicle was moving slowly, the engine toiling in low gear as it cautiously made its way up the slick, snowy, unfamiliar track. The headlights stabbed the darkness, coming almost straight toward them.

"Don't worry," Lucas breathed. "They can't see us from the track. If they just don't notice where we turned and if they keep on going, we'll be okay."

Two ifs. Two big ifs. Jay's nails were digging into her palms. The headlights were close enough that their reflected light illuminated the interior of the Jeep, and for the first time she noticed that Lucas had on his thick shearling jacket, but no shirt. The odd detail struck her, and she wondered if she might be edging toward hysteria.

"Keep going," he said under his breath. "Keep going."

For a moment it seemed as if the other vehicle slowed, and the lights seemed to be coming over the slight rise straight toward them. Then they turned, and the noise of the engine slowly moved away.

She let out her breath. Lucas started the engine, knowing the sound wouldn't be heard over that of the other motor. He put the Jeep in gear and turned it around, praying they were hidden well enough that the red glow of the brake lights wouldn't reveal their position. But at least they were behind the other vehicle now. If he had to, he could make a run for the road. As rough as the track was, the chance that they would be hit by gunfire from a pursuing vehicle was small.

The Jeep lurched through the snow, and then they were on the track again. No other headlights disturbed the darkness, and they could just catch glimpses of light playing through the trees as the other vehicle moved slowly up the treacherous mountainside track.

Jay sat silently, even when they reached the road and Lucas finally turned on the headlights. She was numb again.

They reached Black Bull at two in the morning. The local populace of one hundred and thirty-three souls were all in bed. There wasn't even an all-night convenience store, and the one gas station closed at ten at night, according to the sign in the window. A county sheriffs car was parked at the side of the gas station.

Lucas stopped the Jeep. "Can you drive this well enough to get out of here?" he asked brusquely.

She looked at the gearshift, but not at him. "Yes."

"Then drive until you hit the next town big enough to have a motel. Stop there and call Frank. He'll arrange for you to be picked up. Do you have his number?"

So this was it. It was over. "No."

"Give me a pen. I'll write it down for you."

Jay fumbled in her purse and found a pen, but she didn't have even a scrap of paper for him to write the number on. Finally he grasped her hand and turned it palm up, then wrote the number on her palm.

"Where are you going?" she asked, her voice strained but even.

"I'm taking that county car right there and radioing Veasey. Then we're going to catch Piggot and end this once and for all."

She stared out the windshield, her hand clenched tightly as if to keep the number from fading off her palm. "Be careful," she managed to say, the admonishment trite but heartfelt. She wondered if Frank would even tell her the outcome, if she would ever know what happened to Lucas.

"He ambushed me once. It won't happen again." Lucas got out of the Jeep and strode over to the county car. It was locked, but that wasn't much of a deterrent. He had the door open in less than ten seconds. He looked at the Jeep, staring at Jay through the windshield. Her face was ghostly white. He wanted nothing more than to jerk her into his arms and kiss her so hard that they both forgot about this mess, but if he kissed her now, he might not be able to stop, and he had to take care of Piggot. It was just that he wanted her so badly, wanted to use the bond of the flesh to make certain she knew she was his. A sense of incompletion gnawed at him because they hadn't thrashed out the situation between them, but it would have to wait. Maybe it was better this way. In a few hours he wouldn't have to worry about Piggot any longer, and his temper would have cooled. He would be able to think clearly and not react as if she'd betrayed him. He didn't understand her reasons yet, but underneath everything, he knew she loved him.

Instead of climbing over into the driver's seat, Jay opened the door and got out to walk around. She paused in front of the Jeep, her slim body starkly outlined by the glare of the headlights. "It was the only way I could think of to protect you,'' she said, then got into the Jeep and put it in gear.

Lucas watched the taillights as she pulled out of the gas station and onto the highway. He felt stunned. Protect him? He was so used to being out in the cold, on his own by choice, that the idea of anyone protecting him was alien. What had she thought she could do?

She could keep the charade intact. She had been right; Frank would have quickly and quietly hustled her away if she'd told him there had been a mistake, that he, Lucas, wasn't her ex-husband. She didn't have his skill with weapons or in fighting, but that hadn't stopped her from literally setting herself up as his bodyguard. The charade had depended on her, so she had kept quiet, and shielded him with her presence.

Because she loved him. He swore aloud, his breath crystallizing in the frigid night air. His damned training had tripped him up, making him look for betrayal where there hadn't been any, making him question her motives and automatically assuming the worst. He had only to look to himself to understand why she hadn't said anything. Hadn't he kept quiet these past two days because he'd been afraid of losing her if she knew the truth? He loved her too much to accept even the possibility of losing her, until Piggot had forced his hand.

Swearing again, he folded his length into the county car and began the process of hot-wiring the starter.

* * *

Dawn threw rosy fingers of light across the snow, a sight Lucas has seen many times since coming to the mountains, but the scene wasn't peaceful this particular morning. The meadow was crowded with men and vehicles, the pristine snow trampled and criss-crossed by both feet and tires. Here and there the white was marred by reddish-brown stains. A helicopter sat off to the left, its blades slowly twirling in the breeze.

Ten guns snapped toward him as he stepped out from the trees, then were lifted as the men holding them recognized him. He walked steadily toward them, his own pistol held in his blood-stained hand down at his side. The stench of cordite burned his nostrils in the cold air, and a gray haze lay over the meadow, resisting the efforts of the breeze to disperse it.

There was a tall, black-haired man standing next to the helicopter, surveying the scene with grim, narrowed eyes. Lucas walked straight to him. "You took a chance, setting us up in your own cabin," he snapped.

Kell Sabin looked around the meadow. "It was a calculated risk. I had to do it to find the mole. Once the location of the cabin was leaked, I knew who it was, because access to that information is very controlled." He shrugged. "I can find another vacation spot."

"The mole blew my cover?"

"Yeah. Until then, I had no idea he was there." Sabin's voice was icy, his eyes like cold black fire.

"So why the masquerade? Why drag Jay into it?"

"To keep Piggot from finding out you were alive. Your cover was blown. He knew about your family, and he's been willing in the past to use someone's family to get to them. I was trying to buy time, to keep everyone safe until Piggot surfaced and we could get to him."

Sabin looked up at the trees behind the cabin. "I assume he won't be bothering us again."

"Or anyone else."

"That was your last job. You're out of it."

"Damn straight," Lucas agreed. "I've got better things to do, like get married and start a family."

Suddenly Sabin grinned, and the coldness left his eyes. Few people saw Sabin like that, only the ones who could call themselves his friends. "The bigger they are," he jibed, and left the rest of the old saw unsaid. "Have you told her yet?"

"She already knew. She figured it out while I was still in the hospital."

Sabin frowned. "What? She didn't say anything. How did she know?"

"My eyes. They're a different shade of brown than Crossfield's."

"Hell. A little thing like that. And she still went along with it?"

"I think she figured out that the whole thing was to protect me."

"Women," Sabin said softly, thinking of his own wife, who had fought like a tigress to save his life when he'd been a stranger to her. It didn't surprise him that Jay Granger had put herself on the line to protect Lucas.

Lucas rubbed his jaw. "She doesn't even mind this ugly mug."

"The surgeons did what they could. Your face was smashed." Then Sabin grinned again. "You were too pretty anyway."

The two men stood and watched the mopping up process, their faces becoming grim again at the loss of life. Three men were dead, counting Piggot, and four more were in custody. "I'll notify your family that you're alive," Sabin finally said. "I'm sorry they had to go through this, but with Piggot on the loose, it was safer for you, and all of them, as well, if the charade was played out. It's over now. Collect Jay from wherever you've stashed her, and we'll get the two of you out of here."

Lucas looked at him, and slowly the blood drained out of his face. "She hasn't called Frank?" he asked hoarsely.

Sabin went still. "No. Where is she?"

"She was supposed to drive to the next town, check into a motel and call Frank. Damn it to hell!" Lucas turned and ran for the shed, with Sabin right beside him. Suddenly he felt cold all over. There was a possibility Piggot could have gotten to Jay before coming here, as well as the slightly less terrifying possibility that she could have had an accident. God in heaven, where was she?

After leaving Lucas, Jay simply drove, automatically following the highway signs picked out by the headlight beams, and eventually wound up on U.S. 24, the highway that they had taken to Colorado Springs. She turned in the opposite direction. She didn't pay any attention to the tune; she just kept driving. U.S. 24 took her through Leadville, and finally she connected with I-70. She took a right, toward Denver.

The sun came up, shining right into her eyes. She was nearly out of gas. She got off at the next exit and had the tank filled.

It would be over by now.

Exhaustion pulled at her, but she couldn't stop. If she ever stopped, she would have to think, and right now she couldn't bear it. She checked her money. She didn't have much—a little over sixty dollars—but she had her credit cards. That would get her back to New York, to the only home she had left, the only refuge.

I-70 went straight to Stapleton International Airport in Denver. Jay parked the Jeep and entered the terminal, carefully noting where she had parked so she could tell Frank where to retrieve his vehicle. She bought her ticket first, and was lucky enough to get on a flight leaving within the hour. Then she found a pay phone and called Frank.

He answered in the middle of the first ring. "Frank, it's Jay." She identified herself in a numb monotone. "Is it over?"

"Where the hell are you?" he screamed.

"Denver."

"Denver! What are you doing there? You were supposed to call me hours ago! Luke is tearing the damned place up, and we have every cop in Colorado prowling the highways looking for you."

Her heart lightened, the terrible dread lifting from it. "He's all right? He isn't hurt?"

"He's fine. He took a little nick on the arm, but nothing a Band-Aid won't cover. Look, exactly where are you? I'll have you picked up—"

"Is it over?" she asked insistently. "Is it really over?"

"Piggot? Yeah, it's over. Luke got him. Tell me where you are and—"

"I'm glad." Her legs wouldn't support her much longer; she sagged against the wall. "Take... take care of him."

"My God, don't hang up!" Frank yelled, the words shrieking in her ear. "Where are you?"

"Don't worry," she managed to say. "I can get home by myself." Totally forgetting the Jeep, she hung up the phone, then went into the ladies' rest room and splashed cold water on her face. As she pulled a brush through her hair she noticed the pallor of her cheeks and the dark circles under her eyes. "You guys sure know how to show a lady a good time," she murmured to her reflection, drawing several startled glances her way.

Yogi Berra had said, "It ain't over till it's over," but this was very definitely over. Jay couldn't sleep on the flight, despite the utter exhaustion weighing down her body. Nor could she eat, though her stomach was empty. She managed to drink a cola, but nothing more. After the solitude of the meadow, New York's J.F.K. airport was bedlam. She wanted to shrink against a wall and scream at all the scurrying people to go away. Instead she got on a bus, and an hour and a half later she let herself into her apartment.

She hadn't seen it in months; it was no longer home. It had been well taken care of in her absence, as Frank had promised, but it was as empty as she was. She didn't even have any clothes with her. She laughed hollowly; clothes were the least of her worries. Frank would make certain they were shipped to her.

But there were sheets to go on the bed, and towels for the bathroom. She took a warm shower, then even summoned the strength to make up the bed. The afternoon sun was going down as she stretched out naked between the clean sheets. Automatically she turned, searching for Lucas's warmth, but he wasn't there. It was over, and he didn't want her. Acid tears stung her eyes as her heavy eyelids closed, and then she slept.

"Janet Jean. Janet Jean, wake up,"

The intruding voice pulled her toward consciousness. She didn't want to wake up. So long as she slept, she didn't have to face life without Lucas. But it sounded like his voice, and she frowned.

"Janet Jean. Jay. Wake up, baby." A hard, warm hand shook her bare shoulder.

Slowly she opened her eyes. It was Lucas, sitting on the edge of her bed, scowling at her. Those yellow eyes looked almost murderous, though his tone had been as gentle as his ruined voice would allow. He looked like hell; he badly needed a shave, his hair was uncombed, and a bloodstained bandage was wrapped around his left forearm. But at least he had on a shirt now, and his clothes were clean.

"I know I locked the door." Sleep still muddled her mind, but she knew she'd locked the door. In New York, one wasn't careless about locking the door.

He shrugged. "Big deal. Come on, sweetheart, go to the bathroom and splash some cold water on your face so you can focus your eyes. I'll make coffee."

What was he doing here? She couldn't think of any reason, and though part of her rejoiced at seeing him, no matter why, another part of her cringed at having to say goodbye to him again. She might not be able to stand it this time. At least before, she had been numb.

"What time is it?"

"Almost nine."

"It can't be. It's still daylight."

"Nine in the morning," he explained patiently. "Come on, get up." He lifted her to a sitting position, and the covers fell to her waist, exposing her bare body. Quickly Jay grabbed the sheet and pulled it over her breasts; she couldn't meet his eyes as a flush chased the pallor from her face.

His face was expressionless as he got to his feet and unbuttoned his shirt. "Here, put this on. I packed your clothes and brought them with me, but they're all tumbled together in the suitcases."

She took his shut, still warm from his body, and pulled it around her. Without another word she got up and went into the bathroom, firmly closing the door behind her. She started to lock it, but decided not to waste her tune. Locks weren't much good against him.

Five minutes later she felt much more alert, having followed his advice and splashed cold water on her face. She was very thirsty, after having gone so long without anything to drink, so she drank several cups of water. She would have felt more secure if she'd had on something more than just his shirt, but it almost swallowed her. His scent was on the fabric. She lifted it to her face and inhaled deeply, then let it drop and left the security of the bathroom.

He was lying on the bed. She stopped in her tracks. "I thought you were going to make coffee."

"You don't have any." He got to his feet, put his hands on her shoulders and shook her. "Damn you," he said in a shaking voice. "I went through hell when I found out you hadn't called Frank. Why did you run? Why did you come back here?"

Her hair had fallen over her face. "I didn't have anyplace else to go," she said, and her voice cracked.

He yanked her into his arms, reaching up behind her back to lock his fist in her hair and hold her head back. "Did you really think I'd let you get away from me that easily?" he all but snarled.

"Was what I did so bad?" she pleaded. "I didn't know any other way to protect you! When I saw your eyes, I knew you had to be the agent Frank had told me had been killed, and I knew he'd gone to an awful lot of trouble to hide you, so you had to be in danger. You had amnesia. You didn't even know who was after you! Keeping the lie going was the only way I had of keeping you safe!"

The yellowish eyes glittered. "Why should you care?"

"Because I was in love with you! Or did you think that was a lie, too?"

His touch gentled. "No," he said quietly. "I think I've always known you loved me, right from the start."

Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. "The first time I touched you," she whispered, "I felt how warm you were, and how hard you were fighting to stay alive. I started loving you then."

"Then why did you run?"

He was relentless, but then, she had always known that. "Because it was over. You didn't want me. I'd been terrified of what you would do when you found out. I was afraid you'd send me away, and you did. So I left."

"I only wanted you away from the danger, damn it! I didn't intend for you to go two thousand miles!" He picked her up and dropped her on the bed, then followed her down. "No excuses this time. We're going to get married as soon as we can legally do it."

She was as stunned as she had been the first time he'd mentioned marriage. "W-what?" she stammered.

"You told me to ask you again when I'd regained my memory. Well, I have. We're getting married."

All she could say was, "That's not asking, that's telling."

"It'll do." He began unbuttoning his shirt, uncovering her breasts.

"Is it because you think you owe me—"

His head jerked up, those eyes fierce and wild. "I love you so much I'm out of my head with it."

She was stunned again. "You never said. I thought— but then you made me leave..."

"I didn't think I could have made it any plainer how I felt," he growled.

Very simply she said, "Do you need the words?"

That stopped him. "I need the words very much."

"So do I."

He bent his head and kissed her, his hand stroking her bare body beneath the shirt. His muscled legs moved against hers, and she felt his hardness against her thigh. "I love you, Jay Granger."

The sun was exploding inside her, lighting her eyes. "I love you, Lucas Stone."

At last she could speak his name with love.

Epilogue

"Is Piggot really dead?"

"He's really dead." Lucas watched her face carefully across the breakfast table. He had gone out and bought the necessary groceries, and they had both eaten as if they were starved, which they had been. He hadn't been interested in food before, either. Finding Jay and getting her back where she belonged had been far more important. "I finished the job.'' The truth wasn't pretty, but she had a right to know that about the man she was going to marry.

She sipped at the hot coffee, then lifted those incredible dark blue eyes to his. "I'm glad he's dead," she said fiercely. "He tried to kill you."

"And came damn close to succeeding."

She shuddered, thinking of the days when his life had hung in the balance, and he reached for her hand. "Hey, sweetheart. It's over. That part is really over. This part—" he squeezed her hand "—is just getting started—if you're sure you can stand looking at this face over the breakfast table."

The smile broke over her face like sunshine. "Well, you're not good-looking, but you sure are sexy."

With a growl he grabbed for her, dragging her around the table and onto his lap. Her arms went around him even as he tilted her face up for his kiss. "By the way, I'm not an agent."

She jerked back, startled. "What?"

"Not any longer. I'm officially retired, as of yesterday. Sabin took me out of it. Once my cover was blown, there was no way I could go back without endangering my family. I've really been out of it since the explosion, but Sabin didn't make it official until Piggot was caught."

"Then I guess we'll both have to hunt for a job." He was retired! She felt like chanting hosannas. She wouldn't have to worry every time he walked out the door that she'd never see him again.

He rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip. "I already have a job, baby. I'm a businessman, in partnership with my brother in an engineering firm. I traveled all over the world. It was a good cover for the work I was doing for Sabin. Speaking of my brother, by now Sabin will have gotten the news to them that a mistake was made in identifying the victims of the explosion and I'm still alive. This is going to be a bad shock to them, especially my parents."

"You mean a good shock."

"It'll be a shock, of whatever nature. Given the changes in my face and voice, they may have trouble adjusting."

"And you're bringing a strange woman into the family," she said, concern darkening her eyes.

"Oh, that. Don't worry about that. Mom has been after me for years to settle down. It wasn't an option I had before, but that's changed." He gave her a raffish grin. "I'd already decided to retire, anyway, so I could spend my time keeping you satisfied."

He certainly did that. Jay put her head on his shoulder, absorbing his warmth and nearness. His arms tightened. "I love you," he said steadily.

"I love you, Lucas Stone." She would never tire of saying it, and he would never tire of hearing it.

He stood up with her in his arms. "Let's go make a phone call. I want to talk to my folks and let them know they're getting a daughter-in-law."

They did make the phone call, but not right away. First he kissed her, and when he lifted his head the expression in his eyes had intensified. He carried her into the bedroom, and then the mirror on the wall reflected the true image of two people entwined as they loved each other.

Stangers in the Night

Lake of Dreams

His eyes were like jewels, aquamarines as deep and vivid as the sea, burning through the mist that enveloped him. They glittered down at her, the expression in them so intense that she was frightened, and struggled briefly in his grasp. He soothed her, his voice rough with passion as he controlled her struggles, stroking and caressing until she was once more quivering with delight, straining upward to meet him. His hips hammered rhythmically at her, driving deep. His powerful body was bare, his iron muscles moving like oiled silk under his sweaty skin. The mist from the lake swirled so thickly around them that she couldn’t see him clearly, could only feel him, inside and without, possessing her so fiercely and completely that she knew she would never be free of him. His features were lost in the mist, no matter how she trained her eyes to see him, no matter how she cried out in frustration. Only the hot jewels of his eyes burned through, eyes that she had seen before, through other mists—

Thea jerked awake, her body quivering with the echo of passion . . . and completion. Her skin was dewed with sweat, and she could hear her own breathing, coming hard and fast at first, then gradually slowing as her heartbeat settled into its normal pace. The dream always drained her of strength, left her wrung out and boneless from exhaustion.

She felt shattered, unable to think, overcome by both panic and passion. Her loins throbbed as if she had just made love; she twisted on the tangled sheets, pressing her thighs together to try to negate the sensation of still having him within her. Him. Nameless, faceless, but always him.

She stared at the dim early-morning light that pressed against the window, a graying so fragile that it scarcely penetrated the glass. There was no need to look at the clock; the dream always came in the dark, silent hour before dawn, and ended at the first approach of light.

It's just a dream, she told herself, reaching for any possible comfort. Only a dream.

But it was unlike any dream she'd ever had before.

She thought of it as a single dream, and yet the individual episodes were different. They—it—had begun almost a month before. At first she had simply thought of it as a weird dream, singularly vivid and frightening, but still only a dream. Then it had come again the next night.

And the next. And every night since, until she dreaded going to sleep. She had tried setting her alarm to go off early, to head the dream off at the pass, so to speak, but it hadn't worked. Oh, the alarm had gone off, all right; but as she'd been lying in bed grumpily mourning the lost sleep and steeling herself to actually get up, the dream had come anyway. She had felt awareness fade, had felt herself slipping beneath the surface of consciousness into that dark world where the vivid images held sway. She'd tried to fight, to stay awake, but it simply hadn't been possible. Her heavy eyes had drifted shut, and he was there again . . .

He was angry with her, furious that she'd tried to evade him. His long dark hair swirled around his shoulders, the strands almost alive with the force of his temper. His eyes . . . oh, God, his eyes, as vivid as the dream, a hot blue-green searing through the clouds of mosquito netting that draped her bed. She lay very still, acutely aware of the cool linen sheets beneath her, of the heavy scents of the tropical night, of the heat that made even her thin nightgown feel oppressive . . . and most of all of her flesh quivering in frightened awareness of the man standing in the night-shadowed bedroom, staring at her through the swath of netting.

Frightened, yes, but she also felt triumphant. She had known it would come to this. She had pushed him, dared him, taunted him to this very outcome, this devil's bargain she would make with him. He was her enemy. And tonight he would become her lover.

He came toward her, his warrior's training evident in the grace and power of his every move. "You tried to evade me," he said, his voice as dark as the evening thunder. His fury rippled around him, almost visible in its potency. "You played your games, deliberately arousing me to the mindlessness of a stallion covering a mare . . . and now you dare try to hide from me? I should strangle you."

She rose up on one elbow. Her heart was pounding in her chest, painfully thudding against her ribs, and she felt as if she might faint. But her flesh was awakening to his nearness, discounting the danger. "I was afraid," she said simply, disarming him with the truth.

He paused, and his eyes burned more vividly than before. "Damn you," he whispered. "Damn both of us." Then his powerful warrior's hands were on the netting, freeing it, draping it over her upper body. The insubstantial wisp settled over her like a dream itself, and yet it still blurred his features, preventing her from seeing him clearly. His touch, when it came, wrenched a soft, surprised sound from her lips. His hands were rough and hot, sliding up her bare legs in a slow caress, lifting her nightgown out of the way. Violent hunger, all the more fierce for being unwilling, emanated from him as he stared at the shadowed juncture of her thighs.

So it was to be that way, then, she thought, and braced herself. He intended to take her virginity without preparing her. So be it. If he thought he could make her cry out in pain and shock, he would be disappointed. He was a warrior, but she would show him that she was his equal in courage.

He took her that way, pulled to the edge of the bed and with only her lower body bared, and the mosquito netting between them. He took her with anger, and with tenderness. He took her with a passion that seared her, with a completeness that marked her forever as his. And, in the end, she did cry out. That triumph was his, after all. But her cries weren't of pain, but of pleasure and fulfillment, and a glory she hadn't known existed.

That was the first time he'd made love to her, the first time she'd awakened still trembling from a climax so sweet and intense that she'd wept in the aftermath, huddled alone in her tangled bed and longing for more. The first time, but definitely not the last.

Thea got out of bed and walked to the window, restlessly rubbing her hands up and down her arms as she stared out at the quiet courtyard of her apartment building and waited for dawn to truly arrive, for the cheerful light to banish the lingering, eerie sense of unreality. Was she losing her mind? Was this how insanity began, this gradual erosion of reality until one was unable to tell what was real and what wasn't? Because the here and now was what didn't feel real to her anymore, not as real as the dreams that ushered in the dawn. Her work was suffering; her concentration was shot. If she worked for anyone but herself, she thought wryly, she would be in big trouble.

Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. Everything had been so normal, so Cleaverish. Great parents, a secure home life, two brothers who had, despite all earlier indications, grown up to be nice, interesting men whom she adored. Nothing traumatic had happened to her when she was growing up; there had been the tedium of school, the almost suffocating friendships youngsters seem to need, the usual wrangles and arguments, and the long, halcyon summer days spent at the lake. Every summer, her courageous mother would pack the station wagon and bravely set forth to the summer house, where she would ride herd on three energetic kids for most of the summer. Her father would drive up every weekend, and would take some of his vacation there, too. Thea remembered long, hot days of swimming and fishing, of bees buzzing in the grass, birdsong, fireflies winking in the dusk, crickets and frogs chirping, the plop of a turtle into the water, the mouthwatering smell of hamburgers cooking over charcoal. She remembered being bored, and fretting to go back home, but by the time summer would come again she'd be in a fever to get back to the lake.

If anything in her life was unusual, it was her chosen occupation, but she enjoyed painting houses. She was willing to tackle any paint job, inside or out, and customers seemed to love her attention to detail. She was also getting more and more mural work, as customers learned of that particular talent and asked her to transform walls. Even her murals were cheerfully normal; nothing mystic or tortured there. So why had she suddenly begun having these weird time-period dreams, featuring the same faceless man, night after night after night?

In the dreams, his name varied. He was Marcus, and dressed as a Roman centurion. He was Luc, a Norman invader. He was Neill, he was Duncan ... he was so many different men she should never have been able to remember the names, and yet she did. He called her different names in the dreams, too: Judith, Willa, Moira, Anice.

She was all of those women, and all of those women were the same. And he was always the same, no matter his name.

He came to her in the dreams, and when he made love to her, he took more than her body. He invaded her soul, and filled her with a longing that never quite left, the sense that she was somehow incomplete without him. The pleasure was so shattering, the sensations so real, that when she had awakened the first time and lain there weeping, she had fearfully reached down to touch herself, expecting to feel the wetness of his seed. It hadn't been there, of course. He didn't exist, except in her mind.

Her thirtieth birthday was less than a week away, and in all those years she had never felt as intensely about a real man as she did about the chimera who haunted her dreams.

She couldn't keep her mind on her work. The mural she'd just finished for the Kalmans had lacked her customary attention to detail, though Mrs. Kalman had been happy with it. Thea knew it hadn't been up to her usual standards, even if Mrs. Kalman didn't. She had to stop dreaming about him. Maybe she should see a therapist, or perhaps even a psychiatrist. But everything in her rebelled against that idea, against recounting those dreams to a stranger. It would be like making love in public.

But she had to do something. The dreams were becoming more intense, more frightening. She had developed such a fear of water that, yesterday, she had almost panicked when driving over a bridge. She, who had always loved water sports of any kind, and who swam like a fish! But now she had to steel herself to even look at a river or lake, and the fear was growing worse.

In the last three dreams, they had been at the lake. Her lake, where she had spent the wonderful summers of her childhood. He had invaded her home turf, and she was suddenly more frightened than she could ever remember being before. It was as if he had been stalking her in her dreams, inexorably moving closer and closer to a conclusion that she already knew.

Because, in her dreams, only sometimes did he make love to her. Sometimes he killed her.

The summer house was the same, but oddly diminished by time. Seen through a child's eyes, it had been a spacious, slightly magical place, a house where fun and laughter were commonplace, a house made for the long, glorious summers. Thea sat in her car and stared at it, feeling love and a sense of peace well up to overcome her fear at actually being here, at the scene of her most recent dreams. Nothing but good times were associated with this place. At the age of fourteen, she had received her first kiss, standing with Sammy Somebody there in the shadow of the weeping willow. She'd had a wild crush on Sammy for that entire summer, and now she couldn't even remember his last name! So much for true love.

Now she saw that the house was small, and in need of a paint job. She smiled, thinking that she could take care of that little chore while she was here. The grass was knee-high, and the swing, hanging from a thick branch of the huge oak, had come down on one side. Thea steeled herself and quickly glanced in the direction of the lake. The dock was in need of repair, too, and she tried to concentrate on that, but the expanse of blue water stretching out beyond the dock brought a sheen of sweat to her forehead. Nausea roiled in her stomach and she swallowed convulsively as she jerked her gaze back to the house and concentrated instead on the peeling paint of the front porch.

Last night, he had killed her. The expression in those aquamarine eyes had been calm and terrifyingly remote as he held her beneath the cool lake water, his arms like steel as her panicked struggles decreased in strength, until her tortured lungs had given up their last precious bit of oxygen and she had inhaled her own death.

She had awakened in the early dawn, sweating and trembling, and known that she couldn't go on like this much longer without having a nervous breakdown. She had gotten up, put on a pot of coffee, and spent the next several hours overloading on caffeine while she made her plans. She had no work going on right now, so mapping out free time for herself was easy. It probably wasn't smart, since summer was when she made the bulk of her income, but it was easy. At an hour when she could reasonably expect her parents to be awake, she'd called and asked their permission to spend a couple of weeks at the lake. As she had expected, they were delighted that she was finally going to take a vacation. Thea's brothers and their families regularly made use of the summer house, but for one reason or another, Thea hadn't been back to the lake since she was eighteen. Eleven years was a long time, but life had somehow gotten in the way. First there had been college and the need to work in the summer to finance it, then a couple of boring jobs in her chosen field that told her she had chosen the wrong field.

She had stumbled onto her career as a housepainter by accident, when she had been out of a job and desperate for anything that would bring in some money. To her surprise, despite the hot, hard work, she had liked painting houses. As time went on, more and more jobs came her way. During the winters she got some inside jobs, but she usually worked like a fiend during the summers, and simply hadn't been able to get away to join the family at any of their outings to the lake.

"But what about your birthday?" her mother asked, suddenly remembering the upcoming event. "Aren't you going to be here?"

Thea hesitated. Her family was big on birthdays. Now that her brothers were married and had children, with their wives and kids thrown into the mix, there wasn't a single month in the year when someone's birthday wasn't being celebrated. "I don't know," she finally said. "I'm tired, Mom. I really need a rest." That wasn't why she wanted to go to the lake, but neither was it a lie.

She hadn't slept good for almost a month, and fatigue was pulling at her. "How would a delayed party sit with you?"

"Well, I suppose that would be okay," her mother said doubtfully “I’ll have to let the boys know."

"Yeah, I'd hate for them to pull a birthday prank on the wrong day," Thea replied in a dry tone. "If they've already ordered a load of chicken manure to be delivered to me, they'll just have to hold it for a few days."

Her mother chuckled. "They've never gone quite that far."

"Only because they know I'd do something twice as bad to them."

"Have fun up at the lake, honey but be careful. I don't know if I like the idea of you being there all alone."

"I'll be careful," Thea promised. "Are there any supplies in the house?"

"I think there are a few cans of soup in the pantry, but that's about it. Check in when you get there, okay?"

"Check in" was code for what her father called Pick Up The Phone And Let Your Mother Know You're All Right So She Won't Call Missing Persons. Mrs. Marlow normally let her children get on with their lives, but when she said "check in" they all knew that she was a little anxious.

"I'll call as soon as I get to the grocery store."

Thea had kept her promise, calling in as soon as she arrived at the small grocery store where they'd always bought their supplies for the summer house. Now she sat in her car in front of the house, frozen with fear at the nearness of the lake, while bags of perishables slowly thawed in the backseat.

She forced herself to breathe deeply, beating down the fear. All right, so she couldn't look at the water. She would keep her eyes averted as she unloaded the car.

The screen door creaked as she opened it, a familiar sound that eased the strain in her expression. The screened front porch ran all the way across the front of the house, and in her childhood had been occupied by a collection of mismatched Adirondack, wicker, and lawn chairs. Her mother had often sat on the porch for hours, sewing or reading, and keeping an eye on Thea and the boys as they frolicked in the lake. The porch was bare now; the Adirondacks and wickers were long gone, and she'd heard her mother say that the lawn chairs were stored in the shed out back. Thea didn't know if she would bother to get them out; she certainly wouldn't be looking at the lake if she could help it.

No, that wasn't true. She had come up here to face the fear the dreams had caused. If that meant forcing herself to stare at the water for hours, then that's what she would do. She wouldn't let this nighttime madness rob her of a lifetime of enjoyment.

When she unlocked the front door, the heat and musti-ness of a closed house hit her in the face. She wrinkled her nose and plunged inside, unlocking and opening every window to let in fresh air. By the time she had carried in the groceries and stored the perishables in the refrigerator, the light breeze had gone a long way toward sweetening the air.

Out of habit, Thea started to put her clothes in the same bedroom she'd always used, but halted as soon as she opened the door. Her old iron-frame bed had been replaced by two twin beds. The room was much tinier than she remembered. A slight frown knit her brow as she looked around. The bare wood floors were the same, but the walls were painted a different color now, and blinds covered the window, rather than the ruffled curtains she'd preferred as a young girl.

The boys' room had always had twin beds—three of them, in fact—and she checked inside to see if that still held true. It did, though the number of beds had dwindled to two. Thea sighed. She would have liked to sleep in her old room, but probably her parents' room was the only one with a double bed, and she knew she'd appreciate the comfort even more. She had a queen-size bed in her apartment.

She felt like Goldilocks as she opened the door to the third bedroom, and she burst out laughing. Sure enough, here was the bed that was just right. The double bed was no more. In its place was a king-size bed that took up the majority of the floor space, leaving only enough room on either side to maneuver while making up the bed. A long double dresser occupied most of the remaining space. She would have to be careful about stubbing her toes in here, but she would definitely sleep in comfort.

As she hung her clothes in the closet, she heard the unmistakable creak of the screen door, heavy footsteps on the porch, and then two short, hard knocks on the frame of the open front door. Startled, Thea stood very still. A cold knot of fear began to form in her stomach. She had no idea who could be at the door. She had never been afraid here before—the crime rate was so low that it was almost nonexistent—but abruptly she was terrified. What if a vagrant had watched her unload the car, and knew she was here alone? She had already checked in with her mother, to let her know she'd arrived safely, so no one would expect to hear from her for another week or so. She'd told her mother that she intended to stay about two weeks. She could be murdered or kidnapped, and it might be two weeks or longer before anyone knew she was missing.

There were other houses on the lake, of course, but none within sight. The closest one, a rental, was about half a mile away, hidden behind a finger of land that jutted into the lake. Sammy What's-his-name's family had rented it that summer when she was fourteen, she remembered. Who knew who was renting it now, or if someone hadn't bothered with renting and had simply broken in.

She hadn't heard another car or a boat, so that meant whoever was on the porch had walked. Only the rental house was within realistic walking distance. That meant he was a stranger, rather than someone belonging to the families they had met here every summer.

Her imagination had run away with her, she thought, but she couldn't control her rapid, shallow breathing, or the hard pounding of her heartbeat. All she could do was stand there in the bedroom, like a small animal paralyzed by the approach of a predator.

The front door was open. There was another screen door there, but it wasn't latched. There was nothing to stop him, whoever he was, from simply walking in.

If she was in danger, then she was trapped. She had no weapon, other than one of the kitchen knives, but she couldn't get to them without being seen. She cast an agonized glance at the window. What were her chances of getting it open and climbing out without being heard? Given the silence in the house, she realized, not very good.

That hard double knock sounded again. At least he was still on the porch.

Maybe she was crazy. How did she know it was even a man? By the heaviness of the footsteps? Maybe it was just a large woman.

No. It was a man. She was certain of it. Even his knocks had sounded masculine, too hard to have been made by a woman's softer hand.

"Hello? Is anyone home?"

Thea shuddered as the deep voice reverberated through the house, through her very bones. It was definitely a man's voice, and it sounded oddly familiar, even though she knew she'd never heard it before.

My God, she suddenly thought, disgusted with herself. What was wrong with her? If the man on the porch meant her any harm, cowering here in the bedroom wouldn't do her any good. And besides, a criminal would simply open the door and come on in, would already have done so. This was probably a perfectly nice man who was out for a walk and had seen a new neighbor arrive. Maybe he hadn't seen her at all, but noticed the car in the driveway. She was making a fool out of herself with these stupid suspicions, this panic.

Still, logic could only go so far in calming her fears. It took a lot of self-control to straighten her shoulders and forcibly regulate her breathing, and even more to force her feet to move toward the bedroom door. She stopped once more, still just out of sight, to get an even firmer grip on her courage. Then she stepped out of the bedroom into the living room, and into the view of the man on the porch.

She looked at the open door, and her heart almost failed her. He was silhouetted against the bright light beyond and she couldn't make out his features, but he was big. Six-three, at least, with shoulders that filled the doorframe. It was only her imagination, it had to be, but there seemed to be an indefinable tension in the set of those shoulders, something at once wary and menacing.

There was no way she could make herself go any closer. If he made a move to open the screen, she would bolt for the back door in the kitchen. Her purse was in the bedroom behind her and she wouldn't be able to grab it, but her car keys were in her jeans pocket, so she should be able to dive into the car and lock the doors before he could reach her, then drive for help.

She cleared her throat. "Yes?" she managed to say. "May I help you?" Despite her effort, her voice came out low and husky. To her dismay, she sounded almost . . .inviting. Maybe that was better than terrified, but she was doubtful. Which was more likely to trigger an approach by a predator, fear or a perceived sexual invitation?

Stop it! she fiercely told herself. Her visitor hadn't said or done anything to warrant this kind of paranoia.

"I'm Richard Chance," the man said, his deep voice once again sinking through her skin, going all the way to her bones. "I'm renting the house next door for the summer. I saw your car in the driveway and stopped by to introduce myself."

Relief was almost as debilitating as terror, Thea realized as her muscles loosened and threatened to collapse altogether. She reached out an unsteady hand to brace herself against the wall.

"I—I'm glad to meet you. I'm Thea Marlow."

"Thea," he repeated softly. There was a subtle sensuality in the way he formed her name, almost as if he were tasting it. "Glad to meet you, Thea Marlow. I know you're probably still unpacking, so I won't keep you. See you tomorrow."

He turned to go, and Thea took a hasty step toward the door, then another. By the time he reached out to open the screen, she was at the doorway. "How do you know I'm still unpacking?" she blurted," tensing again.

He paused, though he didn't turn around. "Well, I take a long walk in the mornings, and your car wasn't here this morning. When I touched your car hood just now, it was still warm, so you haven't been here long. It was a reasonable assumption."

It was. Reasonable, logical. But why had he checked her car hood to see how hot it was? Suspicion kept her silent.

Then, slowly, he turned to face her. The bright sunlight glinted on the glossy darkness of his hair, thick and as lustrous as a mink's pelt, and clearly revealed every strong line of his face. His eyes met hers through the fine mesh of the screens, and a slow, unreadable smile lifted the corners of his mouth. "See you tomorrow, Thea Marlow."

Motionless again, Thea watched him walk away. Blood drained from her head and she thought she might faint. There was a buzzing in her ears, and her lips felt numb. Darkness began edging into her field of vision and she realized that she really was going to faint. Clumsily she dropped to her hands and knees and let her head hang forward until the dizziness began to fade.

My God. It was him!

There was no mistaking it. Though she'd never seen his face in her dreams, she recognized him. When he had turned to face her and those vivid aquamarine eyes had glinted at her, every cell in her body had tingled in recognition.

Richard Chance was the man in her dreams.

Thea was so shaken that she actually began loading all of her stuff back into the car, ready to flee back to White Plains and the dubious safety of her own apartment. In the end, though still trembling with reaction, she returned her supplies and clothes to the house and then resorted to her own time-honored remedy of coffee. What good would going home do? The problem was the dreams, which had her so on edge- that she had panicked when a neighbor came to call and then had immediately decided, on the basis of his vivid eye color, that he was the man in her dreams.

Okay, time for a reality check, she sternly told herself as she nursed her third cup of coffee. She had never been able to see Marcus-Neill-Duncan's face, because of the damn mist that always seemed to be between them. All she had been able to tell was that he had long, dark hair and aquamarine eyes. On the other hand, she knew his smell, his touch, every inch of his muscled body, the power with which he made love. What was she supposed to do, ask Richard Chance to strip down so she could inspect him for similarities?

A lot of people in the world had dark hair; most of them, as a matter of fact. A lot of dark-haired men had vivid eyes. It was merely chance that she had happened to meet Richard Chance at a time when she wasn't exactly logical on the subject of eye color. She winced at the play on words, and got up to pour her fourth cup of coffee.

She had come here with a purpose. She refused to let a dream, no matter how disturbing and realistic, destroy her enjoyment of something she had always loved. It wasn't just this new fear of water that she hated, but what the dreams were doing to her memories of the summers of her childhood. Losing that joy would be like losing the center of her being. Damn it, she would learn to love the water again. Maybe she couldn't look at the lake just yet, but by the time she left here, she swore, she would be swimming in it again. She couldn't let her stupid paranoia about Richard Chance frighten her away.

It didn't mean anything that he had said her name as if savoring it. Actually, it did mean something, but that something was connected to his sexual organs rather than to her dreams. Thea knew she wasn't a raving beauty, but neither was she blind to her attractiveness to men. She was often dissatisfied with her mop of thick, curly, chestnut hair, despairing of ever taming it into any discernible style, but men, for reasons of their own, liked it. Her eyes were green, her features even and clean-cut, and the rigors of her job kept her lean and in shape. Now that her nerves were settling down, she realized that the gleam in those memorable eyes had been interested rather than threatening.

That could be difficult, considering that she had come up here to work through some problems rather than indulge in a summer fling with a new neighbor. She wasn't in the mood for romance, even of the casual, two-week variety. She would be cool and uninterested in any invitations he might extend, he would get the hint, and that would be that

“COME. "

She turned, and saw him standing under the willow tree, his hand outstretched. She didn't want to go to him, every instinct shouted for her to run, but the compulsion to obey was a terrible need inside her, an ache and a hunger that he could satisfy.

"Come," he said again, and her unwilling feet began moving her across the cool, dewy grass. Her white nightdress swirled around her legs, and she felt her nakedness beneath the thin fabric. No matter how many layers of clothing covered her, he always made her feel unclothed and vulnerable. She knew she shouldn't be out here alone, especially with him, but she couldn't make herself go back inside. She knew he was a dangerous man, and it

didn't matter. All that mattered was being with him; the propriety that had ruled her life suddenly meant less to her than did the wet grass beneath her bare feet.

When she reached him, they stood facing each other like adversaries, neither moving nor speaking for a long moment that stretched out until she thought she would scream from the tension of it. Like the predator he was, he had been stalking her for weeks, and now he sensed, with unerring instinct, that she was within his grasp. He put his hand on her arm, his touch burning with vitality, and a smile lightly touched his hard mouth as he felt her betraying quiver. "Do you think I will hurt you?" he asked, his amusement evident.

She shivered again. "Yes," she said, looking up at him. "In one way or another. . . yes."

Inexorably he drew her closer, until her flimsily clad body rested against him and the animal heat of his flesh dispelled the chill of the night air. Automatically she put her hands up to rest against his chest, and the feel of the rock-hard sheets of muscle made her breath catch. No other man she'd ever touched was as hard and vital as this—this warrior, whose life was based on death and destruction. She wanted to deny him, to turn away from him, but was as helpless as a leaf on the wind to defy the currents that swept her toward him.

He brushed his lips against her hair in an oddly tender gesture, one she hadn't expected from such a man. "Then lie down with me," he murmured, "and I'll show you the sweetest pain of all."

Thea awoke, the echoes of her own cries still lingering in the darkness of the bedroom. He had; oh, he had. She was lying on her back, her nightgown twisted around her waist, her legs open and her knees raised. The last remnants of completion still throbbed delicately in her loins.

She put her hands over her face and burst into tears.

It was more than disturbing—it was humiliating. The damn man not only took over her dreams, he dominated her body as well. Her entire sense of self was grounded in her sturdy normality, her good common sense. Thea had always thought of herself as dependable, and suddenly that description no longer seemed to apply Because of the dreams, she had taken a two-week vacation right in the middle of her busiest time, which wasn't dependable. What was going on with her now defied common sense, defied all her efforts to understand what was happening. And it certainly wasn't normal to have frighteningly intense climaxes night after night, while sleeping alone.

Choking back her tears, she stumbled out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom, where she stood under the shower and tried to rid her body of the sensation of being touched by invisible hands. When she felt marginally calmer, she dried off and relocated to the kitchen, where she put on fresh coffee and then sat drinking it and watching the dawn progress into a radiantly sunny morning.

The kitchen was located at the back of the house, so the lake wasn't visible from the window, and Thea slowly relaxed as she watched tiny birds flitting from branch to branch in a nearby tree, twittering to each other and doing bird things.

She had to stop letting these dreams upset her so much. No matter how disturbing their content, they were still just dreams. When she looked at this rationally, the only thing about the dreams that had really affected her life was the unreasoning fear of water they had caused. She had come to the lake to work through that fear, to force herself to face it, and if she could overcome that she would be satisfied. Maybe it wasn't normal to have such sexually intense dreams, or for the same man who brought her such pleasure to kill her in some of those dreams, but she would handle it. Who knew what had triggered the dreams? They could have been triggered by her eclectic reading material, or some movie she'd watched, or a combination of both. Probably they would cease as mysteriously as they had appeared.

In the meantime, she had already wasted one day of her self-prescribed recovery period. Except for that one nauseating glance at the lake when she had first arrived, she had managed to completely ignore the water.

All right, Theadom, she silently scolded herself. Stop being such a wuss. Get off jour can and do what you came here to do.

In an unconscious gesture of preparation, she ran her fingers through her hair, which had almost dried in the time she had spent drinking coffee and postponing the inevitable. She could feel the unruly curls, thick and vibrant, taking shape under her fingers. She probably looked a fright, she thought, and was glad there was no one there to see. For this entire two weeks, she could largely ignore her appearance except for basic cleanliness, and she looked forward to the freedom.

For comfort, she poured one final cup of coffee and carried it with her out onto the porch, carefully keeping her gaze cast downward so she wouldn't spill the hot liquid. Yeah, she thought wryly, that was a great excuse to keep from seeing the lake first thing when she opened the door.

She kept her eyes downcast as she opened the front door and felt the cool morning air wash over her bare feet. She had simply pulled on her nightgown again after leaving the shower, and the thin material was no match for the chill that the sun hadn't quite dispelled.

All right. Time to do it. Firmly gripping the cup like a lifeline, she slowly raised her eyes so that her gaze slid first across the floor of the porch, then onto the overgrown grass, and then down the slight slope toward the lake. She deliberately concentrated on only a narrow field of vision, so that everything else was blurred. There was the willow tree off to the left, and—

He was standing beneath the spreading limbs, just as he had in her dream.

Thea's heart almost stopped. Dear God, now her dreams had started manifesting themselves during her waking hours, in the form of hallucinations. She tried to blink, tried to banish the vision, but all- she could do was stare in frozen horror at the man standing as motionless as a statue, his aquamarine eyes shining across the distance.

Then he moved, and she jerked in reaction as she simultaneously realized two things, each as disturbing in a different way as the other.

One, the "vision" was Richard Chance. The figure under the tree was a real human being, not a figment of her imagination.

Two, she hadn't realized it before, but last night she had been able to see her dream lover's face for the first time, and it had been Richard Chance's face.

She calmed her racing heartbeat. Of course her subconscious had chosen his features for those of the dream lover; after all, she had been startled that very day by the similarity of their eyes. This quirk of her dreams, at least, was logical.

They faced each other across the dewy grass, and a slow smile touched the hard line of his mouth, almost causing her heartbeat to start galloping again. For the sake of her circuits, she hoped he wouldn't smile too often.

Then Richard Chance held out his hand to her, and said, "Come."

What little color she had drained from Thea's face. "What did you say?" she whispered. He couldn't possibly have heard her. He was standing a good thirty yards away; she had barely been able to hear the one word he'd spoken, though somehow the sound had been perfectly clear, as if she had heard it inside herself as well as out. But the expression on his face changed subtly, to something more alert, his eyes more piercing. His outstretched hand suddenly seemed more imperious, though his tone became cajoling. "Thea. Come with me."

Shakily she stepped back, intending to close the door. This had to be pure chance, but it was spooky.

"Don't run," he said softly. "There's no need to. I won't hurt you."

Thea had never considered herself a coward. Her brothers would have described her as being a touch too foolhardy for her own good, stubbornly determined to climb any tree they could climb, or to swing out on a rope as high as they did before dropping into the lake. Despite the eerie similarity between the dream and what he'd just now said, her spine stiffened, and she stared at Richard Chance as he stood under the willow tree, surrounded by a slight mist. Once again, she was letting a weird coincidence spook her, and she was tired of being afraid. She knew instinctively that the best way to conquer any fear was to face it—hence her trip to the lake—so she decided to take a good, hard look at Mr. Chance to catalog the similarities between him and her dream lover. She looked, and almost wished she hadn't.

The resemblance wasn't just in his eyes and the color of his hair. She could see it now in the powerful lines of his body, so tall and rugged. He was wearing jeans and hiking boots and a short-sleeved chambray shirt that revealed the muscularity of his arms. She noticed the thickness of his wrists, the wrists of a man who regularly did hard physical work . . . the wrists of a swordsman.

She gasped, shaken by the thought. Where had it come from? What did she know about swordsmen? They weren't exactly thick on the ground; she'd never even met anyone who fenced. And even as she pictured the elegant moves of fencing, she discarded that comparison. No, by swordsman she meant someone who used a heavy broadsword in battle, slashing and hacking. A flash of memory darted through her, and she saw Richard Chance with a huge claymore in his hand, only he had called himself Neill... and then he was Marcus, and it was the short Roman sword he wielded—

No. She couldn't let herself think like that. The dreams were a subconscious fantasy, nothing more. She didn't really recognize anything about Richard Chance. She had simply met him at a time when she was emotionally vulnerable and off-balance, almost as if she were on the rebound from a failed romance. She had to get a grip, because there was no way this man had anything to do with her dreams.

He was still standing there, his hand outstretched as if only a second had gone by, rather than the full minute it felt like.

And then he smiled again, those vivid eyes crinkling at the corners. "Don't you want to see the baby turtles?" he asked.

Baby turtles. The prospect was disarming, and surprisingly charmed by the idea, somehow Thea found herself taking a couple of steps forward, until she was standing at the screen door to the porch. Only then did she stop and look down at her nightgown. "I need to change clothes."

His gaze swept down her. "You look great to me." He didn't try to disguise the huskiness of appreciation in his tone. "Besides, they might be gone if you don't come now."

Thea chewed her lip. The nightgown wasn't a racy number, after all; it was plain white cotton, with a modest neckline and little cap sleeves, and the hem reached her ankles. Caution warred with her desire to see the turtles. Suddenly she couldn't think of anything cuter than baby turtles. Making a quick decision, she pushed open the door and stepped out into the tall grass. She had to lift her nightgown hem to midcalf to keep it from dragging in the dew and getting wet. Carefully she picked her way across the overgrown yard to the tall man waiting for her.

She had almost reached him when she realized how close she was to the water.

She froze in midstep, unable to even glance to the right where the lake murmured so close to her feet. Instead, her panic-stricken gaze locked on his face, instinctively begging him for help.

He straightened, every muscle in his body tightening as he became alert in response to her reaction. His eyes narrowed, and his gaze swung sharply from side to side, looking for whatever had frightened her. "What is it?" he rasped as he caught her forearm and protectively pulled her nearer, into the heat and shelter of his body.

Thea shivered and opened her mouth to tell him, but the closeness of his body, at once comforting and alarming, confused her so she couldn't think what to say. She didn't know which alarmed her more, her nearness to the lake or her nearness to him. She had always loved the lake, and was very wary of him, but his automatic response to her distress jolted something inside her, and suddenly she wanted to press herself against him. The warm scent of his skin filled her nostrils, her lungs—a heady combination of soap, fresh air, clean sweat, and male muskiness. He had pulled her against his left side, leaving his right arm free, and she could feel the reassuring steadiness of his heartbeat thudding within the strong wall of his chest.

She was abruptly, acutely aware of her nakedness beneath the nightgown. Her breasts throbbed where they pressed against his side, and her thighs began trembling. My God, what was she doing out here, dressed like this? What had happened to her much-vaunted common sense? Since the dreams had begun, she didn't seem to have any sense at all. No way should she be this close to a man she'd just met the day before. She knew she should pull away from him, but from the moment he'd touched her she had felt an odd sense of intimacy, of Rightness, as if she had merely returned to a place she'd been many times before.

His free hand threaded through her damp curls. "Thea?" he prompted, some of the alertness relaxing from his muscles. "Did something scare you?"

She cleared her throat and fought off a wave of dizziness. His hand in her hair felt so familiar, as if ... She jerked her wayward thoughts from that impossible path. "The water," she finally said, her voice still tight with fear. "I—I'm afraid of the water, and I just noticed how close I was to the bank."

“Ah," he said in a slow sound of realization. "That's understandable. But how were you going to see the turtles if you're afraid of the water?"

Dismayed, she looked up at him. "I didn't think about that." How could she tell him that her fear of the water was so recent that she wasn't used to thinking in terms of what she could or couldn't do based on the proximity of water. Her attention splintered again, caught by the angle of his jaw when viewed from below. It was a very strong jaw, she noticed, with a stubborn chin. He had a fairly heavy beard; despite the evident fact that he had just shaved, she could see the dark whiskers that would give him a heavy five-o'clock shadow. Again that nagging sense of familiarity touched her, and she wanted to put her hand to his face. She wondered if he was always considerate enough to shave before making love, and had a sudden powerful image of that stubbled chin being gently rubbed against the curve of her breast.

She gave a startled jerk, a small motion that he controlled almost before it began, his arm tightening around her and pulling her even more solidly against him. "The turtles are just over here, about fifty feet," he murmured, bending his head down so that his jaw just brushed her curls. "Could you look at them if I stay between you and the lake, and hold you so you know you won't fall in?"

Oh, he was good. She noticed it in a peripheral kind of way. Whenever he did something she might find alarming—something that should alarm her, like take her in his arms—he immediately distracted her with a diverting comment. She saw the ploy, but . . . baby turtles were so cute. She thought about his proposition. It was probably a dangerous illusion, but she felt safe in his arms, warmed by his heat and wrapped up in all that muscled power. Desire began in that moment, a delicate, delicious unfurling deep inside her ... or maybe it had begun before, at his first touch, and had just now grown strong enough for her to recognize it. Why else had she thought about the roughness of his chin against her body? She knew she should go back inside. She had already made the logical decision that she had no time for even lightweight romance. But logic had nothing to do with the wild mixture of reactions she had felt since first seeing this man, fear, panic, compulsion and desire all swirling together so she never knew from one minute to the next how she was going to react. She didn't like it, didn't like anything about it. She wanted to be the old Thea again, not this nervous, illogical creature she didn't recognize.

All right, so throw logic out the window. It hadn't done her much good since the dreams had begun anyway. She looked up into watchful aquamarine eyes and threw caution to the dogs, too, deciding instead to operate on pure instinct. "Maybe that would work. Let's try it."

She thought she saw a flare of triumph in those crystalline eyes, but when she looked more closely she saw only a certain male pleasure. "Let's go a couple of steps farther away from the water," he suggested, already steering her along with that solid arm around her waist. "We'll still be able to see the turtles. Tell me if we're still too close, okay? I don't want you to be nervous."

She chuckled, and was surprised at herself for being able to laugh. How could she not be nervous? She was too close to the water, and way too close to him. "If I were wearing shoes, I'd be shaking in them," she admitted.

He glanced down at her bare feet, and the way she was having to hold up her nightgown to keep it out of the wet grass. "There might be briers," he said by way of explanation as he bent down and hooked his other arm beneath her knees. Thea gave a little cry of surprise as he lifted her, grabbing at his shirt in an effort to steady herself. He grinned as he settled her high against his chest. "How's this?"

Frightening. Exciting. Her heart was thudding wildly, and that first pressure of desire was becoming more intense. She cast a look at the ground and said, "High."

"Are you afraid of heights, too?"

"No, just of water." And of you, big guy. But far more attracted than afraid, she realized.

He carried her along the bank, taking care not to get any closer to the water, while Thea looked everywhere but at the lake. The most convenient point of focus was his throat, strong and brown, with a small vulnerable hollow beneath the solid knot of his Adam's apple. The close proximity of his bare skin made her lips tingle, as if she had just pressed them into that little hollow where his pulse throbbed so invitingly.

"We have to be quiet," he whispered, and eased the last few steps. They had left the relative neatness of the overgrown yard and were in a tangle of bushes and weeds that probably did contain briers. Given her bare feet, she was just as glad he was carrying her. The trees grew more thickly here, greatly limiting the view of the lake. "They're still here, on a fallen log lying at the edge of the water. Don't make any sudden moves. I'm going to let you down, very slowly. Put your feet on my boots."

Before she could ask why, now that she was perfectly comfortable in his arms, he withdrew his arm from beneath her legs and let her lower body slide downward. Though he took care not to let her nightgown get caught between them, the friction of her body moving over his could scarcely have been more enticing. She caught her breath, her breasts and thighs tingling with heat even as she sought his boot tops with her feet and let her weight come to rest on them. Nor was he unaffected; there was no mistaking the firm swelling in his groin.

He seemed more capable than she of ignoring it, however. He had both arms around her, holding her snugly against him, but his head was turned toward the lake. She could feel excitement humming through him, but it didn't seem to be sexual in nature, despite his semierection.

"There are seven of them," he whispered, his voice the husky murmur of a lover. "They're lined up on the log like silver-dollar pancakes with legs. Just turn your head and take a peek, and I'll hold you steady so you'll feel safe."

Thea hesitated, torn between her desire to see the little turtles and her fear of the water. Her hands were clutching his upper arms, and she could feel the hard biceps flex as he held her a little closer. "Take your time," he said, still whispering, and she felt his lips brush her curls.

She took a deep breath and steeled herself. Half a second later she convulsively buried her face against his chest, shaking, trying to fight back the rise of nausea. He cuddled her, comforting her with a slight rocking motion of his body while he murmured reassuring noises that weren't really words.

Two minutes later she tried again, with much the same result.

By the fourth try, tears of frustration were welling in her eyes. Richard tried to take her back to the house, but the stubbornness her brothers were well acquainted with came to the fore, and she refused to leave. By God, she was going to see those turtles.

Ten minutes later, she still hadn't managed more than a single peek before the panic and nausea would hit her, and she was getting furious with herself. The turtles were happily sunning themselves right now, but they could be gone in the next second.

"I'm going to do it this time," she announced, her tone one of angry determination.

Richard sighed. "All right." She was well aware that he could simply pick her up and stride away at any time, but somehow she sensed that he would stand there until she was ready to give up the effort. She braced herself and began to turn her head by slow degrees. "While you're torturing yourself, I'll pass the time by remembering how I could see through your nightgown when you were walking across the yard," he said.

Stunned, Thea found herself blinking at the little turtles for two full seconds while she reeled under the impact of what he'd just said. When her head jerked back around, there was more outrage than panic in the motion. "What?"

"I could see through your nightgown," he repeated helpfully. A smile tugged at his mouth, and his crystalline eyes revealed even more amusement as he looked down at her. "The sun was shining at an angle. I saw ..." He let the sentence trail off.

She pushed at his arms in an effort to loosen them, without results. "Just what did you see?"

"Everything." He seemed to enjoy the memory. He made a little humming sound of pleasure in his throat. "You have gorgeous little nipples."

Thea flushed brightly, even as she felt the aforementioned gorgeous little nipples tighten into hard buds. The reaction was matched by one in his pants.

"Look at the turtles," he said.

Distracted, she did just that. At the same time he stroked his right hand down her bottom, the touch searing her flesh through the thin fabric, and cupped and lifted her so that the notch of her thighs settled over the hard bulge beneath his fly. Thea's breath caught in her lungs. She stared blindly at the turtles, but her attention was on the apex of her thighs. She bit back a moan, and barely restrained the urge to rock herself against that bulge. She could feel herself alter inside, muscles tightening and loosening, growing moist as desire built to a strong throb.

He was a stranger. She had to be out of her mind to stand here with him in such a provocative position. But though her mind knew he was a stranger, her body accepted him as if she had known him forever. The resulting conflict rendered her all but incapable of action.

The little turtles were indeed the size of silver-dollar pancakes, with tiny reptilian heads and stubby legs. They were lined up on the half-submerged log, the water gently lapping just below them. Thea stared at the sheen of water for several seconds before she realized what she was doing, so successfully had he distracted her.

"Richard," she breathed.

"H'mmm?" His voice was deeper, his breathing slightly faster.

"I'm looking at the turtles."

"I know, sweetheart. I knew you could do it."

"I wouldn't want to go any closer, but I'm looking at the water."

"That's good." He paused. "As you learn to trust me, you'll gradually get over your fear."

What a strange thing to say, she thought. What did he have to do with her fear of the water? That was caused by the dreams, not him. She wanted to ask him what he meant, but it was difficult to think straight when he was holding her so intimately and when his erection was thrusting against her more insistently with each passing moment.

Then something unseen alarmed the little turtles, or perhaps one of them simply decided he'd had enough sun and the others followed suit, but all at once they slid off the log and plopped into the water, one by one, the entire action taking place so fast that it was over in a second. Ripples spread out from the log, resurrecting an echo of nausea in Thea's stomach. She swallowed and looked away, and the sensual spell was broken.

He knew it, too. Before she could speak, he matter-of-factly lifted her in his arms and carried her back to the yard.

Remembering what he'd said about her nightgown, she blushed hotly again as soon as he set her on her feet. He glanced at her hot cheeks, and amusement gleamed in his eyes.

"Don't laugh," she muttered crossly as she moved away from him. Though it was probably way too late, she tried for dignity. "Thank you for showing me the turtles, and for being so patient with me."

"You're welcome," he said in a grave tone that still managed to convey his hidden laughter.

She scowled. She didn't know whether to back away or to turn around and let him get a good view of her rear end, too. She didn't have enough hands to cover all her points of interest, and it was too late anyway. She compromised by sidling.

"Thea."

She paused, her brows lifted in question.

"Will you come on a picnic with me this afternoon?"

A picnic? She stared at him, wondering once again at the disturbing blend of strangeness and familiarity she felt about him. Like the baby turtles, a picnic sounded almost unbearably tempting; this whole thing was feeling as if she had opened a book so compelling that she couldn't stop turning page after page. Still, she felt herself pulling back. "I don't—"

"There's a tree in a fallow field about a mile from here," he interrupted, and all amusement had left his ocean-colored eyes. "It's huge, with limbs bigger around than my waist. It looks as if it's been here forever. I'd like to lie on a blanket spread in its shade, put my head in your lap, and tell you about my dreams."

Thea wanted to run. Damn courage; discretion demanded that she flee. She wanted to, but her legs wouldn't move. Her whole body seemed to go numb. She let the hem of her nightgown drop into the wet grass, and she stared dumbly at him. "Who are you?" she finally whispered.

He studied the sudden terror in her eyes, and regret flashed across his face. "I told you," he finally answered, his tone mild. "Richard Chance."

"What—what did you mean about your dreams?" Again he paused, his sharp gaze still fastened on her so that not even the smallest nuance of expression could escape him. "Let's go inside," he suggested, approaching to gently take her arm and guide her stumbling steps toward the house. "Well talk there."

Thea stiffened her trembling legs and dug in her heels, dragging him to a stop. Or rather, he allowed her to do so. She had never before in her life been as aware of a man's strength as she was of his. He wasn't a muscle-bound hulk, but the steeliness of his body was evident. "What about your dreams?" she asked insistently. "What do you want?"

He sighed, and released his grip to lightly rub his fingers up and down the tender underside of her arm. "What I don't want is for you to be frightened," he replied. "I've just found you, Thea. The last thing I want is to scare you away."

His tone was quiet and sincere, and worked a strange kind of magic on her. How could a woman fail to be, if not reassured, at least calmed by the very evenness of his words? Her alarm faded somewhat, and Thea found herself being shepherded once again toward the house. This time she didn't try to stop him. At least she could change into something more suitable before they had this talk on which he was so insistent.

She pulled away from him as soon as they were inside, and gathered her tattered composure around herself like a cloak. "The kitchen is there," she said, pointing. "If you'll put on a fresh pot of coffee, I'll be with you as soon as I get dressed."

He gave her another of his open looks of pure male appreciation, his gaze sliding over her from head to foot. "Don't bother on my account," he murmured.

"Your account is exactly why I’m bothering," she retorted, and his quick grin sent butterflies on a giddy flight in her stomach. Despite her best efforts, she was warmed by his unabashed attraction. "The coffee's in the cupboard to the left of the sink."

"Yes, ma'am." He winked and ambled toward the kitchen. Thea escaped into the bedroom and closed the door, leaning against it in relief. Her legs were still trembling. What was going on? She felt as if she had tumbled down the rabbit hole. He was a stranger, she had met him only the day before, and yet there were moments, more and more of them, when she felt as if she knew him as well as she knew herself, times when his voice reverberated deep inside of her like an internal bell. Her body responded to him as it never had to anyone else, with an ease that was as if they had been lovers for years.

He said and did things that eerily echoed her dreams. But how could she have dreamed about a man whom she hadn't met? This was totally outside her experience; she had no explanation for it, unless she had suddenly become clairvoyant.

Yeah, sure. Thea shook her head as she stripped out of the nightgown and opened a dresser drawer to get out bra and panties. She could just hear her brothers if she were to dare mention such a thing to them. "Woo, woo," they'd hoot, snorting with laughter. "Somebody find a turban for her to wear! Madam Theadora's going to tell our fortunes."

She pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and stuck her feet into a pair of sneakers. Comforted by the armor of clothing, she felt better prepared to face Richard Chance again. It was a loony idea to think she'd met him in her dreams, but she knew one sure way of finding out. In every incarnation, her dream warrior's left thigh had been scarred, a long, jagged red line that ended just a few inches above his knee. All she had to do was ask him to drop his pants so she could see his leg, and she'd settle this mystery once and for all.

Right. She could just see herself handing him a cup of coffee: "Do you take cream or sugar? Would you like a cinnamon roll? Would you please remove your pants?"

Her breasts tingled and her stomach muscles tightened. The prospect of seeing him nude was more tempting than it should have been. There was something dangerously appealing in the thought of asking him to remove his clothing. He would do it, too, those vivid eyes glittering at her all the while. He was as aware as she that, if they were caught, he would be killed—

Thea jerked herself out of the disturbing fantasy. Killed? Why on earth had she thought that? It was probably just the dreams again—but she had never dreamed that he had been killed, only herself. And he had been the killer.

Her stomach muscles tightened again, but this time with the return of that gut-level fear she'd felt from the moment she'd heard his step on the porch. She had feared him even before she'd met him. He was a man whose reputation preceded him—

Stop it! Thea fiercely admonished herself. What reputation? She'd never heard of Richard Chance. She looked around the bedroom, seeking to ground herself in the very normality of her surroundings. She felt as if things were blurring, but the outlines of the furniture were reassuringly sharp. No, the blurring was inside, and she was quietly terrified. She was truly slipping over that fine line between reality and dreamworld.

Maybe Richard Chance didn't exist. Maybe he was merely a figment of her imagination, brought to life by those thrice-damned dreams.

But the alluring scent of fresh coffee was no dream. Thea slipped out of the bedroom and crossed the living room to stand unnoticed in the doorway to the kitchen. Or she should have been unnoticed, because her sneak-ered feet hadn't made any noise. But Richard Chance, standing with the refrigerator door open while he peered at the contents, turned immediately to smile at her, and that unnerving aquamarine gaze slid over her jean-clad legs with just as much appreciation as when she'd worn only the nightgown. It didn't matter to him what she wore; he saw the female flesh, not the casing, Thea realized, as her body tightened again in automatic response to that warmly sexual survey.

“Are you real?" she asked, the faint words slipping out without plan. "Am I crazy?" Her fingers tightened into fists as she waited for his answer.

He closed the refrigerator door and quickly crossed to her, taking one of her tightly knotted fists in his much bigger hand and lifting it to his lips. "Of course you're not crazy," he reassured her. His warm mouth pressed tenderly to each white knuckle, easing the tension from her hand. "Things are happening too fast and you're a little disoriented. That's all."

The explanation, she realized, was another of his ambiguous but strangely comforting statements. And if he was a figment of her imagination, he was a very solid one, all muscle and body heat, complete with the subtle scent of his skin.

She gave him a long, considering look. "But if I am crazy," she said reasonably, "then you don't exist, so why should I believe anything you say?"

He threw back his head with a crack of laughter. "Trust me, Thea. You aren't crazy, and you aren't dreaming."

Trust me. The words echoed in her mind and her face froze, a chill running down her back as she stared up at him. Trust me. He'd said that to her before. She hadn't remembered until just now, but he'd said that to her in her dreams—the dreams in which he had killed her.

He saw her expression change, and his own expression became guarded. He turned away and poured two cups of coffee, placing them on the table before guiding her into one of the chairs. He sat down across from her and cradled a cup in both hands, inhaling the rich aroma of the steam.

He hadn't asked her how she liked her coffee, Thea noticed. Nor had she offered cream or sugar to him. He drank coffee the same way he did tea: black.

How did she even know he drank tea? A faint dizziness assailed her, and she gripped the edge of the table as she stared at him. It was the oddest sensation, as if she were sensing multiple images while her eyes saw only one. And for the first time she was conscious of a sense of incompletion, as if part of herself was missing.

She wrapped her hands around the hot cup in front of her, but didn't drink. Instead she eyed him warily. "All right, Mr. Chance, cards on the table. What about your dreams?"

He smiled and started to say something, but then reconsidered, and his smile turned rueful. Finally he shrugged, as if he saw no point in further evasion. "I've been dreaming about you for almost a month."

She had expected it, and yet hearing him admit it was still a shock. Her hands trembled a bit. "I—I've been dreaming about you, too," she confessed. "What's happening? Do we have some sort of psychic link? I don't even believe in stuff like that!"

He sipped his coffee, watching her over the rim of the cup. "What do you believe in, Thea? Fate? Chance? Coincidence?"

“All of that, I think," she said slowly. "I think some things are meant to be ... and some things just happen."

"How do you categorize us? Did this just happen, or are we meant to be?"

"You're assuming that there is an 'us’" she pointed out. "We've been having weird dreams, but that isn't..."

"Intimate?" he suggested, his gaze sharpening.

The dreams had certainly been that. Her cheeks pinkened as she recalled some of the sexually graphic details. She hoped his dreams hadn't been mirrors of hers . . . but they had, she realized, seeing the knowledge in his eyes. Her face turned even hotter.

He burst out laughing. "If you could see your expression!"

"Stop it," she said crossly, fixing her gaze firmly on her cup because she was too embarrassed to look at him. She didn't know if she would ever be able to face him again.

"Thea, darling." His tone was patient, and achingly tender as he tried to soothe her. "I've made love to you in every way a man can love a woman . . . but only in my dreams. How can a dream possibly match reality?"

If reality was any more intense than the dreams, she thought, it would surely kill her. She traced a pattern on the tabletop with her finger, stalling while she tried to compose herself. Just how real were the dreams? How could he call her "darling" with such ease, and why did it sound so right to her ears? She tried to remind herself that it had been less than twenty-four hours since she had seen him for the first time, but found that the length of time meant less than nothing. There was a bone-deep recognition between them that had nothing to do with how many times the sun had risen and set.

She still couldn't look at him, but she didn't have to see him for every cell in her body to be vibrantly aware of him. The only other times she had felt so painfully alive and sensitive to another's presence were in her dreams of this man. She didn't know how, or why, their dreams had become linked, but the evidence was too overwhelming for her to deny that it had happened. But just how closely did the dreams match reality? She cleared her throat. "I know this is a strange question . . . but do you have a scar on your left thigh?"

He was silent for several moments, but finally she heard him sigh. "Yes."

She closed her eyes as the shock of his answer rolled through her. If the dreams were that accurate, then she had another question for him, and this one was far more important. She braced herself and asked it, her voice choking over the words. "In your dreams, have you killed me?"

Again he was silent, so long that finally she couldn't bear the pressure and glanced up at him. He was watching her, his gaze steady. "Yes," he said.

Thea shoved away from the table and bolted for the front door. He caught her there, simply wrapping his arms around her from behind and holding her locked to him. "My God, don't be afraid of me," he whispered into her tousled curls, his voice rough with emotion. "I would never hurt you. Trust me."

"Trust you!" she echoed incredulously, near tears as she struggled against his grip. "Trust you? How can I? How could I ever?"

"You're right about that, at least," he said, a hard tone edging into the words. "You've lowered yourself to let me touch you, give you pleasure, but you've never trusted me to love you."

She laughed wildly, with building hysteria. "I just met you yesterday! You're crazy—we're both crazy. None of this makes any sense." She clawed at his hands, trying to loosen his grasp. He simply adjusted his hold, catching her hands and linking his fingers through hers so she couldn't do any damage, and still keeping his arms wrapped around her. She was so effectively subdued that all she could do was kick at his shins, but as she was wearing sneakers and he had on boots, she doubted she was causing him much discomfort. But even knowing it was useless, she writhed and bucked against his superior strength until she had exhausted herself. Panting, unable to sustain the effort another second, she let her trembling muscles go limp.

Instantly he cuddled her closer, bending his head to brush his mouth against her temple. He kept his lips pressed there, feeling her pulse beating through the fragile skin. "It wasn't just yesterday that we met," he muttered. "It was a lifetime ago—several lifetimes. I've been here waiting for you. I knew you would come."

His touch worked an insidious magic on her; it always had. The present was blurring, mixing with the past so that she wasn't certain what was happening now and what had happened before. Just so had he held her that night when he had slipped through the camp of her father's army and sneaked into her bedchamber. Terror had beaten through her like the wings of a vulture, but she had been as helpless then as she was now. He had gagged her, and carried her silently through the night to his own camp, where he'd held her hostage against her father's attack.

She had been a virgin when he'd kidnapped her. When he had returned her, a month later, she had no longer been untouched. And she had been so stupidly in love with her erstwhile captor that she had lied to protect him, and ultimately betrayed her father.

Thea's head fell back against his shoulder. "I don't know what's happening," she murmured, and the words sounded thick, her voice drugged. The scenes that were in her head couldn't possibly be memories.

His lips sought the small hollow below her ear. "We've found each other again. Thea." As he had the first time, he said her name as if tasting it. "Thea. I like this name best of all."

"It's—it's Theadora." She had always wondered why her parents had given her such an old-fashioned, unusual name, but when she'd asked her mother had only said, rather bemusedly that they had simply liked it. Thea's brothers, on the other hand, had the perfectly comfortable names of Lee and Jason.

"Ah. I like that even better." He nipped her earlobe, his sharp teeth gently tugging.

"Who was I before?" she heard herself ask, then hurriedly shook her head. "Never mind. I don't believe any of this."

"Of course you do," he chided, and delicately licked the exposed, vulnerable cord of her arched neck. He was aroused again, she noticed, or maybe he'd never settled down to begin with. His hard length nestled against her jean-clad bottom. No other man had ever responded to her with such blatant desire, had wanted her so strongly and incessantly. AH she had to do was move her hips against him in that little teasing roll that always maddened him with lust, and he would take her now, pushing her against the castle wall and lifting her skirts—

Thea jerked her drifting mind from the waking dream, but reality was scarcely less provocative, or precarious. "I don't know what's real anymore," she cried.

"We are, Thea. We're real. I know you're confused. As soon as I saw you, I knew you'd just begun remembering. I wanted to hold you, but I knew it was too soon, I knew you were frightened by what's been happening. Let's drink our coffee, and I'll answer any questions you have."

Cautiously he released her, leaving Thea feeling oddly cold and abandoned. She turned to face him, looking up at the strong bones of his features, the intense watchfulness of his vivid eyes. She felt his hunger emanating from him like a force field, enwrapping her in a primal warmth that counteracted the chill of no longer being in his arms. Another memory assailed her, of another time when she had stood and looked into his face, and-seen the desire so plainly in his eyes. At that time she had been shocked and frightened, an innocent, sheltered young lady who had suddenly been thrust into harsh conditions, and she'd had only his dubious protection from danger. Dubious not because of any lack of competence, but because she thought she might be in greater danger from him than from any outside threat.

Thea drew in a slow, deep breath, feeling again that internal blurring as past and present merged, and abruptly she knew how futile it was to keep fighting the truth. As unbelievable as it was, she had to accept what was happening. She had spent her entire life—this life, anyway— secure in a tiny time frame, unaware of anything else, but now the blinders were gone and she was seeing far too much. The sheer enormity of it overwhelmed her, asked her to cast aside the comfortable boundaries of her life and step into danger, for that was what Richard Chance had brought with him when he had entered her life again. She had loved him in all his incarnations, no matter how she had struggled against him. And he had desired her, violently, arrogantly ignoring danger to come to her again and again. But for all his desire, she thought painfully, in the end he had always destroyed her. Her dreams had been warnings, acquainting her with the past so she would know to avoid him in the present.

Go. That was all she had to do, simply pack and go. Instead she let him lead her back to the kitchen, where their cups sat with coffee still gently steaming. She was disconcerted to realize how little time had passed since she had fled the table.

"How did you know where to find me?" she asked abruptly, taking a fortifying sip of coffee. "How long have you known about me?"

He gave her a considering look, as if gauging her willingness to accept his answers, and settled into the chair across from her. "To answer your second question first, I've known about you for most of my life. I've always had strange, very detailed dreams, of different lives and different times, so I accepted all of this long before I was old enough to think it was impossible." He gave a harsh laugh as he too sought fortitude in caffeine. "Knowing about you, waiting for you, ruined me for other women. I won't lie and say I've been as chaste as a monk, but I've never had even a teenage crush." He looked up at her, and his gaze was stark. "How could a giggling teen girl compete?" he whispered. "When I had the other memories, when I knew what it was to be a man, and make love to you?"

She hadn't had those memories until recently, but still she had gone through life romantically unscathed, the deepest part of her unable to respond to the men who had been interested in her. From the first, though, she hadn't been able to maintain any buffer against Richard. Both mentally and physically, she was painfully aware of him. He had grown up with this awareness, and it couldn't have been easy. It was difficult to picture, but at one time he had been a child, and in effect he had been robbed of a normal childhood and adolescence, of a normal life.

"As to how I found you," he continued, "the dreams led me here. The details I saw helped me narrow down the location. The dreams were getting stronger, and I knew you couldn't be far away. As soon as I saw this place, I knew this was it. So I rented the neighboring house, and waited."

"Where is your home?" she asked curiously.

He gave her an odd little smile. "I've lived in North Carolina for some time now."

She had the definite feeling that he wasn't telling her the entire truth. She sat back and studied him, considering her next question before voicing it. "What do you do for a living?"

He laughed, and there was a tone at once rueful and joyous in the sound, as if he'd expected her to pin him down. "God, some things never change. I'm in the military, what else?"

Of course. He was a warrior born, in whatever lifetime. Snippets of information, gleaned from news broadcasts, slipped into place. With her inborn knowledge of him directing her, she hazarded a guess. "Fort Bragg?"

He nodded.

Special Forces, then. She wouldn't have known where they were based, if it hadn't been for all the news coverage during the Gulf War. A sudden terror seized her. Had he been in that conflict? What if he had been killed, and she had never known about him—

Then she wouldn't now have to fear for her own life.

Somehow that didn't mitigate the fear she felt for him. She had always been afraid for him. He lived with danger, and shrugged at it, but she had never been able to do that,  "How did you get leave?"

"I had a lot of time due. I don't have to go back for another month, unless something unexpected happens." But there was a strained expression deep in his eyes, a resignation that she couldn't quite read.

He reached across the table and took her hand. His long, callused fingers wrapped around her slimmer, smaller ones, folding them in warmth. "What about you? Where do you live, what do you do?"

The safest thing would be not to tell him, but she doubted there was any point in it. After all, he had her name, and he probably had her license plate number. If he wanted to, he would be able to find her. "I live in White Plains. I grew up there; all of my family lives there." She found herself rattling on, suddenly anxious to fill him in on the details of her life. "My parents are still alive, and I have two brothers, one older and one younger. Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

He shook his head, smiling at her. "I have a couple of aunts and uncles, and some cousins scattered around the country, but no one close."

He had always been a loner, allowing no one to get close to him—except for her. In that respect, he had been as helpless as she.

"I paint houses," she said, still driven by the compulsion to fill all the gaps in their knowledge of each other. "The actual houses, not pictures of them. And I do murals." She felt herself tense, wanting him to approve, rather than express the incredulity some people did.

His fingers tightened on hers, then relaxed. "That makes sense. You've always loved making our surroundings as beautiful and comfortable as possible, whether it was a fur on the floor of the tent or wildflowers in a metal cup."

Until he spoke, she'd had no memory of those things, but suddenly she saw the pelts she had used to make their pallet on the tent floor, and the way the wildflowers, which she had arranged in a metal cup, had nodded their heads in the rush of cold air every time the flap was opened.

"Do you remember everything?" she whispered.

"Every detail? No. I can't remember every detail that's happened in this life, either; no one does. But the important things, yes."

"How many times have we ..." Her voice trailed off as she was struck once again by the impossibility of it.

"Made love?" he suggested, though he knew darn well that wasn't what she had been about to say. Still, his eyes took on a heated, sleepy expression. "Times without number. I've never been able to get enough of you."

Her body jolted with responding desire. Sternly she controlled it. It would mean her life if she gave in to the aching need to become involved with him again. "Lived," she corrected.

She sensed his reluctance to tell her, but he had sworn he would answer all her questions, and his word was his bond. "Twelve," he said, tightening his hand on hers again. "This is our twelfth time."

She nearly jumped out of her chair. Twelve! The number echoed in her head. She had remembered only half of those times, and those memories were partial. Overwhelmed, she tried to pull away from him. She couldn't keep her sanity under such an overload.

Somehow she found herself drawn around the table, and settled on his lap. She accepted the familiarity of the position, knowing that he had held her this way many times. His thighs were hard under her bottom, his chest a solid bulwark to shield her, his arms supporting bands of living steel. It didn't make sense that she should feel so safe and protected in the embrace of a man who was so much of a danger to her, but the contact with his body was infinitely comforting.

He was saying something reassuring, but Thea couldn't concentrate on the words. She tilted her head back against his shoulder, dizzy with the tumult of warring emotions. He looked down at her and caught his breath, falling silent as his gaze settled on her mouth.

She knew she should turn away, but she didn't, couldn't. Instead her arm slipped up around his neck, holding tightly to him as he bent his head and covered her mouth with his.

The taste of him was like coming home, their mouths fitting together without any awkwardness or uncertainty. A growl of hunger rumbled in his throat, and his entire body tensed as he took her mouth with his tongue. With the ease of long familiarity he thrust his hand under her T-shirt and closed it over her breast, working his fingers beneath the lace of the bra cup so his hand was on her bare skin, her nipple beading against his palm. Thea shuddered under his touch, a paroxysm of mingled desire and relief, as if she had been holding herself tightly against the pain of his absence and could only now relax. There had never been another man for her, she thought dimly as she sank under the pleasure of his kiss, and never would be. Though they seemed to be caught in a hellish death-dance, she could no more stop loving him than she could stop her own heartbeat.

His response to her was as deep and uncontrollable as hers was to him. She felt it in the quivering tension of his body, the raggedness of his breathing, the desperate need so plain in his touch. Why then, in all of their lives together, had he destroyed her? Tears seeped from beneath her lashes as she clung to him. Was it because of the force of his need? Had he been unable to bear being so much at the mercy of someone else, found his vulnerability to be intolerable, and in a sudden fury lashed out to end that need? No; she rejected that scenario, because one of her clearest memories was of the calmness in his aquamarine eyes as he'd forced her deeper into the water, holding her down until there was no more oxygen in her lungs and her vision clouded over.

A teardrop ran into the corner of her mouth, and he tasted the saltiness. He groaned, and his lips left her mouth to slide over her cheek, sipping up the moisture. He didn't ask why she was crying, didn't become anxious or uneasy. Instead he simply held her closer, silently comforting her with his presence. He had never been discomfited by her tears, Thea remembered, past scenes sliding through her memory like silken scarves, wispy but detectable. Not that she had ever been a weepy kind of person anyway; and when she had cried, more often than not he had been the cause of her tears. His response then had always been exactly what it was now: he'd held her, let her cry it out, and seldom veered from his set course, no matter how upset he'd made her.

"You've never compromised worth a damn," Thea muttered, turning her face into his shoulder to use his shirt as a handkerchief.

He effortlessly followed her chain of thought. He sighed as his fingers gently kneaded her breast, savoring the silkiness of her skin, the pebbling of her nipple. "We were always on opposite sides. I couldn't betray my country, my friends."

"But you expected me to," she said bitterly.

"No, never. Your memories are still cloudy and incomplete, aren't they? Sweetheart, you made some difficult decisions, but they were based on your own sense of justice, not because I coerced you."

"So you say." She grasped his wrist and shoved his hand out from under her shirt. "Because my memory is cloudy, I can't argue that point, can I?"

"You could try trusting me." The statement was quiet, his gaze intent.

"You keep saying that." She stirred restlessly on his lap. "Under the circumstances, that seems to be asking a bit much, don't you think? Or am I safe with you, as long as we stay away from water?"

His mouth took on a bitter curve. "Trust has always been our problem." Lifting his hand, the one that had so recently cupped her breast, he toyed with one of her wayward curls. "On my part, too, I admit. I was never certain you wouldn't change your mind and betray me, instead."

"Instead of my father, you mean." Suddenly furious, she tried to struggle out of his lap. He simply tightened his arms, holding her in place as he had many times before.

"Your temper never changes," he observed, delight breaking through the grimness of his mood.

"I don't have a temper," Thea snapped, knowing full well her brothers would instantly disagree with that statement. She didn't have a hair-trigger temper, but she didn't back down from much, either.

"Of course you don't," he crooned, cuddling her closer, and the absolute love in his voice nearly broke her heart. How could he feel so intensely about her and still do what he did? And how could she still love him so much in return?

He held her in silence for a while, his heartbeat thudding against the side of her breast. The sensation was one she had felt many times before, lying cuddled on his left arm so his right arm, the one that wielded his sword, was unencumbered.

She wanted this, she realized. She wanted him, for a lifetime. For forever. In all their previous lifetimes, their time together had been numbered in months or even mere weeks, their loving so painfully intense she had sometimes panicked at the sheer force of what she was feeling. They had never been able to grow old together, to love each other without desperation or fear. Now she had a vital decision to make: should she run, and protect her life . . . or stay, and fight for their life together? The common sense that had ruled her life, at least until the dreams had disrupted everything, said to run. Her heart told her to hold to him as tightly as she could. Maybe, just maybe, if she was very cautious, she could win this time. She would have to be extremely wary of situations involving water. With the perfection of hindsight, she knew now that going to see the turtles with him had been foolhardy; she was lucky nothing bad had happened. Probably it simply wasn't time, yet, for whatever had happened in the past to happen again.

Things were different this time, she realized. Their circumstances were different. A thrill went through her as she realized that this time could be different. "We aren't on opposing sides, this time," she whispered. "My father is a wonderful, perfectly ordinary family man, without an army to his name."

Richard chuckled, but quickly sobered. When Thea looked up, she saw the grimness in his eyes. "We have to get it right," he said quietly. "This is our twelfth time. I don't think we'll have another chance."

Thea drew back from him a little. "It would help if I understood why you did . . . what you did. I've never known. Tell me, Richard. That way I can guard against—"

He shook his head. "I can't. It all comes down to trust. That's the key to it all. I have to trust you. You have to trust me ... even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

"That's asking a lot," she pointed out in a dry tone. "Do you have to trust me to the same extent?"

"I already have." One comer of his mouth twitched in a wry smile. "The last time. That's probably why our circumstances have changed."

"What happened?"

"I can't tell you that, either. That would be changing the order of things. You either remember or you don't. We either get it right this time, or we lose forever."

She didn't like the choices. She wanted to scream at him, vent her fury at the mercilessness of fate, but knew it wouldn't do any good. She could only fight her own battle, knowing that it would mean her life if she failed. Maybe that was the point of it all, that each person was ultimately responsible for his or her own life. If so, she didn't much care for the lesson.

He began kissing her again, tilting her head up and drinking deeply from her mouth. Thea could have reveled in his kisses for hours, but all too soon he was drawing back, his breath ragged and desire darkening his eyes. "Lie down with me," he whispered. "It's been so long. I need you, Thea."

He did. His erection was iron-hard against her bottom. Still, for all the intimacy of their past lives, in this life she had only just met him, and she was reluctant to let things go so far, so fast. He saw her refusal in her expression before she could speak, and muttered a curse under his breath.

"You do this every time," he said in raw frustration. "You drive me crazy. Either you make me wait when I'm dying to have you, or you tease me into making love to you when I know damn well I shouldn't."

"Is that so?" Thea slipped off his lap and gave him a sultry glance over her shoulder. She had never given anyone a sultry glance before, and was mildly surprised at herself for even knowing how, but the gesture had come naturally. Perhaps, in the past, she had been a bit of a temptress. She liked the idea. It felt right. Richard's personality was so strong that she needed something to help keep him in line.

He glowered at her, and his hands clenched into fists. If they had been further along in their relationship, she thought, he wouldn't have taken no for an answer, at least not yet. First he would have made a damn good effort at seducing her—an effort that had usually succeeded. Whatever his name, and whatever the time, Richard had always been a devastatingly sensual lover. But he too felt the constraints of newness, knew that she was still too skittish for what he wanted.

Stiffly he got to his feet, wincing in discomfort. "In that case, we should get out of here, maybe drive into town for lunch. Or breakfast," he amended, glancing at his wristwatch.

Thea smiled, both amused and touched by his thoughtfulness. Being in public with him did seem a lot safer than staying here. "Just like a date," she said, and laughed. "We've never done that before."

it was A delightful day, full of the joy of rediscovery. After eating breakfast at the lone cafe in the small nearby town, they drove the back roads, stopping occasionally to get out and explore on foot. Richard carefully avoided all streams and ponds, so Thea was relaxed, and could devote herself to once again learning to know this man she had always loved. So many things he did triggered memories, some of them delicious and some disturbing. To say their past lives together had been tumultuous would have been to understate the matter. She was shocked to remember the time she had used a knife to defend herself from him, an encounter that had ended in bloodletting: his. And in lovemaking.

But with each new memory, she felt more complete, as the missing parts slipped into place. She felt as if she had been only one-dimensional for the twenty-nine years of her life, and only now was becoming a full, real person.

And there were new things to discover about him. He hadn't been freeze-dried; he was a modern man, with memories and experiences that didn't include her. Occasionally he used an archaic term or phrasing that amused her, until she caught herself doing the same thing.

"I wonder why we remember, this time," she mused as they strolled along a deserted lane, with the trees growing so thickly overhead that they formed a cool, dim tunnel. They had left his Jeep a hundred yards back, pulled to the side so it wouldn't block the nonexistent traffic. "We never did before."

"Maybe because this is the last time." He held her hand in his. She wanted to just stare at him, to absorb the details of his erect, military bearing, the arrogant angle of his dark head, the stubborn jut of his jaw. Panic filled her at the thought of this being the end, of losing him forever if she didn't manage to outwit fate.

She tightened her fingers on his. That was what she had to do: fight fate. If she won, she'd have a life with this man she had loved for two millennia. If she lost, she would die. It was that simple.

The next morning, Thea lay motionless in the predawn hour, her breath sighing in and out in the deep, easy rhythm of sleep. The dream began to unfold, as long-ago scenes played out in her unconsciousness.

The lake was silent and eerily beautiful in the dawn. She stood on the dock and watched the golden sun rise from behind the tall, dark trees, watched the lake turn from black to deep rose as it reflected the glow of the sky. She loved the lake in all its moods, but sunrise was her favorite. She waited, and was rewarded by the haunting cry of a loon as the lake awoke and greeted the day. Her child moved within her, a gentle fluttering as tiny limbs stretched. She smiled, and her hand slipped down to rest atop the delicate movement. She savored the feel of that precious life. Her child—and his. For five months now she had harbored it within her, delighting in each passing day as her body changed more and more. The slight swell of her belly was only now becoming noticeable. She had been in seclusion here at the lake, but soon her condition would be impossible to hide. She would face that problem, and her father's rage, when it became necessary, but she wouldn't let anything harm this child.

She still woke up aching for the presence of her lover, weeping for him, for what might have been had he been anyone else, had she been anyone else. Damn men, and damn their wars. She would have chosen him, had he given her the chance, but he hadn't. Instead he had simply ridden out of her life, not trusting her to love him enough. He didn't know about the new life he had left inside her.

The dock suddenly vibrated beneath her as booted feet thudded on the boards. Startled, she turned, and then stood motionless with shock, wondering if she was dreaming or if her longing had somehow conjured him out of the dawn. Faint wisps of mist swirled around him as he strode toward her. Her heart squeezed painfully. Even if he wasn't real, she thanked God for this chance to see him so clearly again—his thick dark hair, his vibrant, sea-colored eyes, the muscular perfection of his body.

Five feet from her he stopped, as suddenly as if he had hit a wall. His incredulous gaze swept down her body, so clearly outlined in the thin nightgown that was all she wore, with the sun shining behind her. He saw her hand resting protectively on the swell of her belly, in the instinctive touch of a pregnant woman.

He was real. Dear God, he was real. He had come back to her. She saw his shock mirrored in his eyes as he confronted the reality of impending fatherhood. He stared at her belly for a long, silent moment before dragging his gaze back up to hers. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked hoarsely.

"I didn't know," she said. "Until after you'd gone."

He approached her, as cautiously as if confronting a wild animal, slowly reaching out his hand to rest it on her belly. She quivered at the heat and vitality of his touch, and nearly moaned aloud as the pain of months without him eased from her flesh. Couldn't he sense how much he had hurt her? Couldn't he tell that his absence had nearly killed her, that only the realization she was carrying his child had given her a reason to live?

And then she felt the quiver that ran through him, too, as his hands closed on her body. Pure heat sizzled between them. She drew a deep, shaky breath of desire, her body softening and warming, growing moist for him in instinctive preparation.

"Let me see you," he groaned, already tugging her nightgown upward.

Somehow she found herself lying on the dock, her naked body bathed in the pearly morning light. The discarded nightgown protected her soft skin from the rough wood beneath her. The water lapped softly around her, beneath her, yet not touching her. She felt as if she were floating, anchored only by those strong hands. She closed her eyes, giving him privacy to acquaint himself with all the changes in her body, the changes she knew so intimately. His rough hands slipped over her as lightly as silk, touching her darkened, swollen nipples, cupping the fuller weight of her breasts in his palms. Then they moved down to her belly, framing the small, taut mound of his child.

She didn't open her eyes, even when he parted her legs., raising her knees and spreading them wide so he could look at her. She caught her breath at the cool air washing over her most intimate flesh, and the longing for him intensified. Couldn't he sense how much she needed him, couldn't he feel the vibrancy of her body under his hands? Of course he could. She had never been able to disguise her desire for him, even when she had desperately tried. She heard the rhythm of his breathing become ragged, and glowed with the knowledge of his desire.

"You're so lovely, it hurts to look at you," he whispered. She felt one long, callused finger explore the delicacies between her legs, stroking and rubbing before sliding gently inward. Her senses spun with the shock of that small invasion; her back arched off the dock, and he soothed her with a deep murmur. And then she felt him moving closer, positioning himself between her legs, adjusting his clothing, and she lay there in an agony of anticipation waiting for the moment when they would be together again, one again, whole again. Refilled her so smoothly that he might have been part of her, and they both gasped at the perfection of it. Then the time for rational thought was past, and they could only move together, cling together, his strength complemented by her delicacy, male and female, forever mated.

Thea moaned in her sleep as her dream lover brought her to ecstasy, and then became still again as the dream altered, continued.

The water closed over her head, a froth of white marking the surface where she had gone under. The shock of it, after the ecstasy she had just known with him, paralyzed her for long, precious moments. Then she thought of the baby she carried, and silently screamed her fury that it should be endangered. She began struggling wildly against the inexorable grip that was tugging her downward, away from air, away from life. She couldn't let anything happen to this baby, no matter what its father had done. Despite everything, she loved him, loved his child.

But she couldn't kick free of the bond that dragged her down. Her nightgown kept twisting around her legs, instead of floating upward. Her lungs heaved in agony, trying to draw in air. She

fought the impulse, knowing that she would inhale only death. Fight. She had to fight for her baby.

Powerful hands were on her shoulders, pushing her deeper into the water. Despairing, her vision failing, she stared through the greenish water into the cool, remote eyes of the man she loved so much she would willingly have followed him anywhere. He was

forcing her down, down, away from the life-giving air.

"Why?" she moaned, the word soundless. The deadly water

filled her mouth, her nostrils, rushed down her throat. She couldn't hold on much longer. Only the baby gave her the strength to continue fighting, as she struggled against those strong hands, trying to push him away. Her baby . . . she had to save her baby. But the darkness was increasing, clouding over her eyes, and she knew that she had lost. Her last thought in this life was a faint, internal cry of despair: "Why?"

Helpless sobs shook Thea's body as she woke. She curled on her side, overwhelmed by grief, grief for her unborn child, grief for the man she had loved so much that not even her destruction at his hands had been able to kill her feelings for him. It didn't make sense. He had made love to her, and then he had drowned her. How could a man feel his own child kicking in its mother's belly, and then deliberately snuff out that helpless life? Regardless of how he felt about her, how could he have killed his baby?

The pain was shattering. She heard the soft, keening sound of her sobs as she huddled there, unable to move, unable to think.

Then she heard the Jeep, sliding to a hard stop in the driveway, its tires slinging gravel. She froze, terror running like ice water through her veins. He was here. She should have remembered that he had the same dreams she did; he knew that she knew about those last nightmarish moments beneath the water. She couldn't begin to think what he was trying to accomplish by repeating her death over and over through the ages, but suddenly she had no doubt that, if she remained there, she would shortly suffer the same fate again. After that last dream, there was no way he could sweet-talk her out of her fear the way he had done before.

She jumped out of bed, not taking the time to grab her clothes. Her bare feet were silent as she raced from the bedroom, across the living room, and into the kitchen. She reached the back door just as his big fist thudded against the front one. "Thea." His deep voice was forceful, but restrained, as if he were trying to convince her she wasn't in any danger.

The deep shadows of early dawn still shrouded the rooms, the graying light too weak to penetrate beyond the windows. Like a small animal trying to escape notice by a predator, Thea held herself very still, her head cocked as she listened for the slightest sound of his movements.

Could she slip out the back door without making any betraying noise? Or was he even now moving silently around the house in order to try this very door? The thought of opening the door and coming face-to-face with him made her blood run even colder than it already was.

"Thea, listen to me."

He was still on the front porch. Thea fumbled for the chain, praying that her shaking hands wouldn't betray her. She found the slot and slowly, agonizingly, slid the chain free, holding the links in her hand so they wouldn't clink. Then she reached for the lock.

"It isn't what you think, sweetheart. Don't be afraid of me, please. Trust me."

Trust him! She almost laughed aloud, the hysterical bubble moving upward despite her best efforts. She finally choked the sound back. He'd said that so often that the two words had become a litany. Time and again she had trusted him—with her heart, her body, the life of her child—and each time he had turned on her.

She found the lock, silently turned it.

"Thea, I know you're awake. I know you can hear me."

She opened the door by increments, holding her breath against any squeaks that would alert him. An inch of space showed gray light coming through the slot. Dawn was coming closer by the second, bringing with it the bright light that would make it impossible for her to hide from him. She didn't have her car keys, she realized, and the knowledge almost froze her in place. But she didn't dare go back for them; she would have to escape on foot.

That might be best anyway. If she were in the car, he would easily be able to follow her. She felt far more vulnerable on foot, but hiding would be much easier.

Finally the door was open enough that she could slip through. She held her breath as she left the precarious safety of the house. She wanted to cower behind its walls, but knew that he would soon break a window and get in, or kick down the door. He was a warrior, a killer. He could get in. She wasn't safe there.

The back stoop wasn't enclosed, just a couple of steps with an awning overhead to keep out the rain. There was a screen door there, too. Cautiously she unlatched it, and began the torturous process of easing it open, nerves drawing tighter and tighter. Fiercely she concentrated, staring at the spring coil, willing it to silence. There was a tiny creak, one that couldn't have been audible more than a few feet away, but sweat dampened her body. An inch, two inches, six. The opening grew wider. Eight inches. Nine. She began to slip through.

Richard came around the side of the house. He saw her and sprang forward, like a great hunting beast.

Thea cried out and jumped backward, slamming the kitchen door and fumbling with the lock. Too late! He would come through that door, lock or not. She sensed his determination and left the lock undone, choosing instead an extra second of time as she sprinted for the front door.

The back door slammed open just as she reached the front. It was still locked. Her chest heaved with panic, her breath catching just behind her breastbone and going no deeper. Her shaking, jerking fingers tried to manipulate the chain, the lock.

"Thea!" his voice boomed, reverberating with fury.

Sobbing, she jerked the door open and darted out onto the porch, shoving the outside screen door open, too, launching herself through it, stumbling, falling to her knees in the tall, wet grass.

He burst through the front door. She scrambled to her feet, pulled the hem of her nightgown to her knees, and ran for the road.

"Damn it, listen to me!" he shouted, sprinting to cut her off. She swerved as he lunged in front of her, but he managed once again to get between her and the road.

Despair clouded her vision; sobs choked her. She was cornered. He was going to kill her, and once again she was helpless to protect herself.

She let her nightgown drop, the folds covering her feet, as she stared at him with tear-blurred eyes. The gray light was stronger now; she could see the fierceness of his eyes, the set of his jaw, the sheen of perspiration on his skin. He wore only a pair of jeans. No shirt, no shoes. His powerful chest rose and fell with his breathing, but he wasn't winded at all, while she was exhausted. She had no chance against him.

Slowly she began to back away from him, the pain inside her unfurling until it was all she could do to breathe, for her heart to keep beating. "How could you?" she sobbed, choking on the words. "Our baby . . . How could you?"

"Thea, listen to me." He spread his hands in an open gesture meant to reassure her, but she knew too much about him to be fooled. He didn't need a weapon; he could kill with his bare hands. "Calm down, sweetheart. I know you're upset, but come inside with me and we'll talk."

Angrily she dashed the tears from her cheeks. "Talk! What good would that do?" she shrieked. "Do you deny that it happened? You didn't just kill me, you killed our child, too!" Still she backed away, the pain too intense to let her remain even that close to him. She felt as if she were being torn apart inside, the grief so raw and unmanageable that she felt as if she would welcome death now, to escape this awful pain.

He looked beyond her, and his expression shifted, changed. A curious blankness settled in his eyes. His entire body tensed as he seemed to gather himself, as if he were about to spring. "You're getting too close to the water," he said in a flat, emotionless voice. "Come away from the bank."

Thea risked a quick glance over her shoulder, and saw that she was on the edge of the bank, the cool, deadly lake lapping close to her bare feet. Her tears blurred the image, but it was there, silently waiting to claim her.

The unreasoning fear of the lake gnawed at her, but was as nothing when measured against the unrelenting grief for her child. She changed the angle of her retreat, moving toward the dock. Richard kept pace with her, not advancing any closer, but not leaving her any avenue of escape, either. The inevitability of it all washed over her. She had thought she could outwit fate, but her efforts had been useless from the very beginning.

Her bare feet touched wood, and she retreated onto the dock. Richard halted, his aquamarine gaze fastened on her. "Don't go any farther," he said sharply. "The dock isn't safe. Some of the boards are rotten and loose. Come off the dock, baby. Come to me. I swear I won't hurt you."

Baby. Shards of pain splintered her insides, and she moaned aloud, her hand going to her belly as if her child still rested there. Desperately she backed away from him, shaking her head.

He set one foot on the dock. "I can't bring that child back," he said hoarsely. "But I'll give you another one. We'll have as many children as you want. Don't leave me this time, Thea. For God's sake, let's get off this dock."

"Why?" Tears were still blurring her vision, running down her cheeks, a bottomless well of grief. "Why put it off? Why not get it over with now?" She moved back still more, feeling the boards creak and give beneath her bare feet. The water was quite deep at the end of the dock; it had been perfect for three boisterous kids to dive and frolic in, without fear of hitting their heads on the bottom. If she was destined to die here, then so be it. Water. It was always water. She had always loved it, and it had always claimed her in the end.

Richard slowly stepped forward, never taking his eyes off her, his hand outstretched. "Please. Just take my hand, darling. Don't move back any more. It isn't safe."

"Stay away from me!" she shrieked.

"I can't." His lips barely moved. "I never could." He took another step. "Thea—"

Hastily, she stepped back. The board gave beneath her weight, then began to crack. She felt one side collapse beneath her, pitching her sideways into the water. She had only a blurred, confused image of Richard leaping forward, his face twisting with helpless rage, before the water closed over her head.

It was cool, murky. She went down, pulled by some unseen hand. The darkness of the dock pilings drifted in front of her as she went deeper, deeper. After all the terror and pain, it was almost a relief for it to end, and for a long moment she simply gave in to the inevitable. Then instinct took over, as irresistible as it was futile, and she began fighting, trying to kick her way to the surface. But her nightgown was twisted around her legs, pulling tighter and tighter the more she struggled, and she realized that she had caught it in the broken boards. The boards were pulling her down, and with her legs bound she couldn't generate enough energy to counteract their drag.

If she could have laughed, she would have. This time, Richard wouldn't have to do anything. She had managed to do the deed herself. Still, she didn't stop fighting, trying to swim against the pull of the boards.

The surface roiled with his dive, as he cut through the water just to her left. Visibility was poor, but she could see the gleam of his skin, the darkness of his hair. He spotted her immediately, the white of her nightgown giving away her position, and he twisted his body in her direction.

Anger speared through her. He just had to see it through; he couldn't let the lake do its work without his aid. Probably he wanted to make certain she didn't fight her way free.

She put up her hands to ward him off, redoubling her efforts to reach the surface. She was using up all her oxygen in her struggles, and her lungs were burning, heaving with the need to inhale. Richard caught her flailing hands and began pushing her down, down, farther away from the light, from life.

Thea saw his eyes, calm and remote, every atom of his being concentrated on what he was doing. She had little time left, so very little. Pain swirled inside her, and anger at the fate that was hers, despite her best efforts. Desperately she tried to jerk free of him, using the last of her strength for one final effort. . . .

Despite everything, she had always loved him so much, beyond reason, even beyond death.

That was an even deeper pain: the knowledge that she was leaving him forever. Their gazes met through the veil of murky water, his face so close to hers that she could have kissed him, and through the growing darkness she saw her anguish mirrored in his eyes. Trust me, he'd said repeatedly. Trust me . . . even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Trust me. . . .

Trust him.

Realization spread through Thea like a sunburst. Trust.

She had never been able to trust him, or in his love for her. They had been like two wary animals, longing to be together, but not daring to let themselves be vulnerable to the other. They hadn't trusted. And they had paid the price.

Trust him.

She stopped struggling, letting herself go limp, letting him do what he would. She had no more strength anyway. Their gazes still held, and with her eyes she gave herself to him, her love shining through. Even if it was too late, she wanted him to know that in the end, no matter what, she loved him.

She saw his pupils flare, felt his renewed effort as he pushed her down, all the way to the bottom. Then, without the weight of the boards dragging at her, he was able to get enough slack in the fabric of her nightgown to work it free of the entangling wood. The last bubble of air escaped her lips as he wrapped his arm around her waist and used his powerful legs to propel them upward, to the surface and wonderful oxygen, to life.

"God, please, PLEASE, oh God, please." She heard his desperate, muttered prayer as he dragged her out of the water, but she couldn't respond, couldn't move, as she flopped like a rag doll in his arms. Her lungs weren't quite working; she couldn't drag in the deep, convulsive breaths that she needed.

Richard dropped her on the grass and began pounding her on the back. Her lungs jerked, then heaved, and she coughed up a quantity of lake water. He continued to beat her on the back, until she thought he would break her ribs.

"I'm ... all ... right," she managed to gasp, trying to evade that thumping fist. She coughed some more, gagging.

He collapsed beside her in his own paroxysm of coughing, his muscular chest heaving as he fought for air.

Thea struggled onto her side, reaching for him, needing to touch him. They lay in the grass, shivering and coughing, as the first warming rays of the sun crept across the lake to touch them. Convulsively he clasped her to him, tears running down his cheeks, muttering incoherently as he pressed desperate kisses to her face, her throat. His big body was taut, shaking with a tension that wouldn't relent. He rolled her beneath him, jerking the sodden folds of her nightgown to her waist. Thea felt his desperate, furious need, and lay still as he fought with the wet, stubborn fabric of his jeans, finally getting them open and peeling them down. He pushed her legs open and stabbed into her, big and hot and so hard that she cried out even as she held him as tightly as she could.

He rode her hard and fast, needing this affirmation that they both still lived, needing this link with her. Thea's response soared out of control and she climaxed almost immediately, crying out with the joy of having him there with her as she clung to him with arms and legs. He bucked wildly, shuddered, and she felt the warm flood of his orgasm within her, then he fell onto the grass beside her.

He lay there holding her for a long time, her head cradled on his shoulder, neither of them able to stop touching the other. He smoothed back her unruly tumble of curls; she stroked his chest, his arms. He kissed her temple; she nuzzled his jaw. He squeezed and stroked her breasts; her hands kept wandering down to his naked loins. She imagined they made quite a picture of debauchery, lying there on the ground with her nightgown hiked to her waist and his jeans down around his knees, but the sun was warm and she was drowsy, her body replete with satisfaction, and she didn't much care.

Eventually he moved, kicking his legs free of the damp jeans. She smiled as he stretched out, blissfully naked. He had never been blessed with an overabundance of modesty. But then, it was almost a crime to cover up a body like his. She sighed with her own bliss, thinking of the naughty things she planned to do to him later, when they were sprawled out in that big bed. Some things required a mattress rather than grass. Though those pelts had been wonderful . . .

"All those times," she murmured, kissing his shoulder. "You were trying to save me."

His vivid eyes slitted open as he gathered her closer. "Of course," he said simply "I couldn't live without you."

But you did. The comment died on her lips as she stared at him, reading his expression. His eyes were calm, and accepting. Emotion swelled in her chest until she could barely breathe, and tears glittered in her eyes. "Damn you," she said shakily. He hadn't lived. Each time, when he had failed to save her, he had remained there with her, choosing to share her death rather than live without her. This had been his last chance as well as hers, and theirs. "Damn you," she said again, thumping him on the chest with her fist. "How could you do that? Why didn't you live?"

A slow smile touched his lips as he played with one of her curls. "Would you have?" he asked, and the smile grew when she scowled at him. No, she couldn't have left him in the water and gone on living. She would have remained with him.

"You little hellcat," he said contentedly, gathering her against his chest. "You've led me on quite a chase, but I've caught you now. We finally got it right."

Epilogue

Two days later Thea and Richard were sitting outside in the swing, which he had repaired, contentedly watching the lake. Her bare feet were in his lap and he was massaging them, saying he wanted to get in practice for when she was big with pregnancy and would need such services. Both of them were absurdly positive that their first lovemaking had been fertile, and her happiness was so intoxicating that she felt giddy.

Her fear of the water had disappeared as suddenly as it had formed. She hadn't been swimming yet, but that was more because of Richard's anxieties than her own. Whenever they walked, he still positioned himself between her and the water, and she wondered if he would ever relax his vigil.

Plans. They'd made a lot of plans for their life together. For one thing, she would be moving to North Carolina. Her warrior wasn't just "in" the Special Forces—he was a lieutenant colonel. Since he was only thirty-five, that meant he had a lot of time left to reach general, which was probably inevitable. Thea rather thought she would have to give up painting houses; it just wasn't the thing for a general's wife to do. The murals, though, were something else. . . .

For now, though, they were selfishly enjoying getting reac-quainted with each other, hugging every moment of privacy to themselves. They had cleaned up the yard, and this morning they had started preparing the house for its new coat of paint. Most of the time, though, they had spent in bed.

She tilted her face up to the sun, and gently cupped her hand over her belly. It was there. She knew it was. She didn't need either drugstore or lab test to confirm what she felt in every cell of her body. Too tiny almost to be seen, as yet, but indubitably there.

Richard's hand covered hers, and she opened her eyes to find him smiling at her. "Boy or girl?" he asked.

She hesitated. "What do you think?"

"I asked first."

"Let's say it together. You go first."

His mouth opened, then he stopped and narrowed his eyes at her. "Almost got you," she said smugly

"Smart-ass. All right, it's a boy."

She twined her fingers with his, sighing with contentment. "I agree." A son. Richard's son. The baby who had died with her had been a daughter. She blinked back tears for that child, wondering if it was forever lost, or if it too had been given another chance.

"She'll have another chance," Richard whispered, gathering Thea close. "Maybe next time. We'll know."

Yes, they would. Each night, her memory became more complete as the dreams continued. Richard still shared them, and they would awaken to find their bodies locked together, ecstasy still pulsing through them. They were linked, body and soul, the past revealed to them as it was to only a few lucky people.

They heard the cars before they could see them, and Thea sat up, swinging her feet to the ground. Richard stood, automatically moving to place himself between her and whoever approached. Thea tugged on his belt and he looked around, a sheepish look crossing his face as he realized what he'd done.

"Old habits," he said, shrugging. "Real old."

Then the three cars came into view, and Thea watched in astonishment as her entire family drove up. It took her a moment to realize. "Today's my birthday!" she gasped. "I'd forgotten!"

"Birthday, huh?" He looped an arm over her shoulders. "How about that. That makes you . . . thirty, right? I have to tell you, this is the oldest you've ever been. But you're holding up good."

"Thankyou so much." Grinning, she caught his hand and began tugging him forward. She'd see if he was so sassy after being overwhelmed by her family. Nieces and nephews were spilling out of open doors, running toward her, while adults unfolded themselves at a slower pace. Lee and Cynthia, Jason and June, and her mom and dad all approached a bit warily, as if afraid they had intruded on a romantic getaway.

"I didn't realize you'd brought company with you, dear," her mom said, looking Richard up and down with a mother's critical assessment.

Richard laughed, the sound low and easy. "She didn't," he said, holding out his hand to Thea's father. "My name is Richard Chance. I'm renting the house next door."

Her father grinned. "I'm Paul Marlow, Thea's father. This is my wife, Emily." Polite introductions were made all around, and Thea had to bite her lip to keep from laughing out loud. Though her father was perfectly relaxed, and both Cynthia and June were smiling happily at Richard, her mom and brothers were scowling suspiciously at the warrior in their midst.

Before anything embarrassing could be said, she slipped her arm through Richard's. "Lieutenant Colonel Richard Chance," she said mildly. "On leave from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And, for the record, my future husband."

The words worked a sea change in her more pugnacious relatives. Amid a flurry of congratulations and squeals, plus tears from her mother, she heard her father say reflectively, "That's fast work, you've known each other, what, four or five days?"

"No," Richard said with perfect aplomb. "We've known each other off and on for years, but the timing wasn't right. Everything worked out this time, though. I guess it was just meant to be."

Blue Moon

1

One full moon a month was bad enough, Sheriff Jackson Brody thought sourly; two should be outlawed. Nature's rule of survival of the fittest had been all but negated by humans, with advances in modern medicine and the generally held view that all life was worth saving, with the result that there were a lot of very weird, and/or stupid people out there, and they all seemed to surface during a full moon.

He was not in a good mood after working a car accident on a county road. As sheriff, his duties were not supposed to include working wrecks, but damned if every full moon he didn't find himself doing exactly that. The county was small and poor, mostly rural, and couldn't afford the number of deputies he needed, so he was always juggling schedules anyway. Add the madness of a full moon to an understaffed department, and the problems multiplied.

The accident he had just worked made him so furious he had been stretching the limits of his willpower not to cuss at the participants. He couldn't call them victims, unless it was of their own stupidity. The only victim was the poor little boy who had been in the passenger seat of the car.

It all started when the driver of the first vehicle, a pickup truck, woke up and realized he had missed his turn by about a quarter of a mile. Instead of going on and finding a place to turn around, the idiot began backing up, going the wrong way down a narrow two-lane blacktop, around a blind curve. He was an accident waiting to happen, and he hadn't had to wait long. A woman came speeding around the curve, doing over sixty miles an hour on a road with a posted speed limit of thirty-five, and plowed into the rear of the pickup. She wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Neither was the four-year-old sitting in the front seat. For that matter, neither was the driver of the pickup. It was nothing less than a miracle that all three had survived, though the little boy was severely injured and Jackson had seen enough accident victims to know his chances were no better than fifty-fifty, at best. The car had had airbags, at least, which had kept the two in the car from going through the windshield.

He had given the woman citations for reckless driving, not wearing a seatbelt, and not properly securing her child, and she began screaming at him. Had he ever tried to make a four-year-old sit down and wear a seatbelt? The blankety-blank things chafed her blankety-blank neck, and the state had no business telling people what they could do on their private property, which her car was, and the car had airbags anyway so there was no need for seat-belts, blah blah blah. There she was, with bulging eyes and unkempt hair, a living testament to the destructive power of recessive genes, throwing a hissy fit about getting traffic tickets while her screaming child was being carried away in an ambulance. Privately, Jackson thought people like her had no business having children in their care, but he made a heroic effort and kept the observation to himself.

Then the driver of the pickup, he of the bulging beer belly and breath that would fell a moose at fifty paces, added his opinion that he thought her driver's license should be taken away because this was all her fault for rear-ending him. When Jackson then gave him citations for reckless driving and driving in the wrong lane, he was enraged. This accident wasn't his fault, he bellowed, and damned if he was going to get stuck with higher insurance premiums because a stupid hick sheriff didn't know an accident was always the fault of the one doing the rear-ending. Any fool could look at where his truck was hit and tell who was at fault here.

Jackson didn't bother explaining the difference between the truck's hood being pointed in the right direction while the truck itself was going in reverse. He just wrote the tickets and in the accident report stated that both drivers were at fault, and seriously pondered whether or not he should lock these two up for the safety of the universe. Terminal stupidity wasn't on the books as a chargeable offense, but it should be, in his opinion.

But he restrained himself, and oversaw the transportation of both furious drivers to the local hospital to be checked out, and the removal of the damaged vehicles. When he finally crawled back into his Jeep Cherokee it was pushing four o'clock, long past lunch time. He was tired, hungry, and both angry and discouraged.

Generally he loved his work. It was a job where he could make a difference in people's lives, in society. Granted, it was usually scut work; he dealt with the worst of society, while having to maneuver on tippy-toes through a tangle of laws and regulations. But when everything worked and a drug dealer got sent away for a few years, or a murderer was put away forever, or a burglary gang was rounded up and an old lady on Social Security got her 19-inch television back, that made it all worthwhile.

He was a good sheriff, though he hated the political side of it, hated having to campaign for office. He was just thirty-five, young for the office, but the county was so poor it couldn't afford someone who was both good and with a lot of experience, because those people went where the pay was better. The citizens had taken a chance with him two years ago and he'd been doing his best at a job he loved. Not many people had that chance.

During full moons, however, he doubted his own sanity. He had to be a fool or an idiot, or both, to want a job that put him on the front lines during the periods of rampant weirdness. Cops and emergency room personnel could all testify to the craziness that went on during a full moon.

A nurse at the local hospital, after reading a report that the tales about full moons were just myths, that the accident rate didn't really go up, kept a record for a year. Not only did the number of accidents go up, but that was when they got the really strange ones, like the guy who had his buddy nail his hands together so his wife wouldn't ask him to help with the housework on his day off. It was obvious to them: a man couldn't very well work with his hands nailed together, now could he? The scariest thing about it was that both of them had been sober.

So one full moon a month was all Jackson felt any human should be called upon to endure. A blue moon, the second full moon in a single month, fell under the heading of cruel and unusual punishment.

And because it was a blue moon, he wasn't surprised, when he radioed in that he was finished with the accident and heading for a bite to eat, that the dispatcher said, "You might want to hold off on the food, and check in on a secure line."

Jackson stifled a groan. A couple of clues told him he really didn't want to know what this one was. For one thing, though the radio traffic was usually businesslike, for the benefit of the good citizens who listened in on their scanners, the dispatcher had fallen into a more personal tone. And they didn't bother to check in on a secure line unless there was something going on they didn't want the listeners to know about, which meant it was either something sensitive like one of the town fathers acting up, or something personal. He hoped the issue was sensitive, because he sure as hell didn't feel like dealing with anything personal, like his mother running amuck at her regular Wednesday bingo game.

He picked up his digital cell phone and checked whether or not he had service in this part of the county; he did, though it wasn't the strongest signal. He flipped the cover open and dialed the dispatcher. "This is Brody What's up?"

Jo Vaughn had been the dispatcher for ten years, and he couldn't think of anyone he would rather have on the job. Not only did she know just about every inhabitant of the small south Alabama county, something that had been a tremendous aid to him, but she also had an eerily accurate instinct for what was urgent and what wasn't. Sometimes the citizens involved might not agree, but Jackson always did.

"I've got a bad feeling," she announced. "Shirley Waters saw Thaniel Vargas hauling his flat-bottom down Old Boggy Road. There's nothing out that way except the Jones's place, and you know how Thaniel is."

Jackson took a moment to reflect. This was one of those times when growing up in west Texas instead of south Alabama was a definite handicap. He knew where Old Boggy Road was, but only because he had spent days looking at county maps and memorizing the roads. He had never personally been on Old Boggy, though. And he knew who Thaniel Vargas was; a slightly thick-headed troublemaker, the type found in every community. Thaniel was hot-tempered, a bit of a bully, and he liked his beer a little too much. He'd been in some trouble with the law, but nothing serious enough to rate more than a few fines and warnings.

Other than that, though, Jackson drew a blank. "Refresh me."

"Well, you know how superstitious he is."

His eyebrows lifted. He hadn't expected that. "No, I didn't know," he said dryly. "What does that have to do with him taking his boat down Old Boggy Road, and who are the Joneses?"

"Jones," Jo corrected. "There's just one now, since old man Jones died four—no, let's see, it was right after Beatrice Marbut's husband died in his girlfriend's trailer, so that would make it five years ago—"

Jackson closed his eyes and refrained from asking what difference it made how long ago old man Jones died. Hurrying a Southerner through a conversation was like trying to push a rope, though sometimes he couldn't stop himself from trying.

"—and Delilah's been out there alone ever since."

He took a wild stab at getting to the point of Jo's anxiety. "And Thaniel Vargas dislikes Mrs. Jones?"

"Miss. She's never been married."

The wild stab hadn't worked. "Then old man Jones

was—"

"Her father."

"Okay." He tried again. "Why does Thaniel dislike Miss Jones?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say he dislikes her. It's more like he's scared to death of her."

He took a deep breath. "Because . . . ?"

"Because of the witch thing, of course."

That did it. Some things just weren't worth fighting. Jackson surrendered and let himself go with the flow. "Witch thing," he repeated. That was twice in one minute Jo had surprised him.

"You mean you never heard about that?" Jo sounded surprised.

"Not a word." He wished he wasn't hearing about it now.

"Well, folks think she's a witch. Not that I think so, mind, but I can see where some would be uneasy."

"Why is that?"

"Oh, she keeps to herself, hardly ever comes to town. And old man Jones was strange, didn't let anyone come around. Even the mail is delivered by boat, because there's no road going out to the Jones place. The only way to get there is to hike in, or by the river." Background established, she settled into her explanation. "Now, if Thaniel was going fishing, the best fishing is downriver, not up. There's no reason he'd be launching a boat from the Old Boggy ramp unless he was going upriver, and there's nothing up there but the Jones place. He wouldn't have the nerve unless he'd been drinking, because he's so afraid of Delilah, so I think you need to go out there and make sure he's not up to no good."

Jackson wondered how many sheriffs were bossed around by their dispatchers. He wondered just what the hell he was supposed to do, since Jo had just told him the only way to get to the Jones place was by boat. And he wondered, not for the first time, whether or not he was going to survive this damn blue moon.

Well, until it killed him, he had a job to do. He assessed the situation and began solving the most immediate problems. "Call Frank at the Rescue Squad and tell him to meet me at the launch ramp on Old Boggy—"

"You don't want one of the Rescue Squad boats," Jo interrupted. "They're too slow, and the guys are all helping with the clean-up at the tractor-trailer wreck out on the big highway, anyway I called Charlotte Watkins. Her husband's a bass fisherman—you know Jerry Watkins, don't you?"

"I've met both of them," Jackson said.

"He's got one of those real fast boats. He's gone to Chattanooga on business, but Charlotte was going to hook up the boat and take it to the ramp. She should be there by the time you get there."

"Okay," he said, "I'm on my way." He pinched the top of his nose, between his eyebrows, feeling a headache beginning to form. He wished he could ignore Jo's intuition, but it was too accurate for him to doubt her. "Send some backup as soon as someone comes available. And how in hell do I find the Jones place?"

"Just go upriver, you can't miss it. It's about five miles up. The house is hard to see, it kind of blends in, but it's dead ahead and you'll think you're going to run right into it, but then the river curves real sharp to the right and gets too shallow to go much farther. Oh, and be careful of the snags. Stay in the middle of the river." She paused. "You do know how to drive a boat, don't you?"

"I'll figure it out," he said, and flipped the phone cover down to end the call. Let her stew for a while, wondering if she had made a bad mistake sending the sheriff out alone into a possibly dangerous situation, on a river he didn't know and in a piece of powerful equipment he didn't know how to operate. He'd driven a boat for the first time at the age of eleven, but Jo didn't know that, and it would do her good to realize she wasn't omnipotent.

He didn't use his lights or siren, but he did jam his boot down on the accelerator and keep it there. By his estimation he was at least fifteen minutes from Old Boggy Road, and he had no idea how far down the road the launch ramp was. In a powerful boat he could easily go sixty miles an hour, putting him at the Jones place in five minutes or less, once he was on the water. That meant it would take him at least twenty minutes to get there, probably longer. If Thaniel Vargas was up to no good, Jackson was afraid he would have plenty of time to accomplish it.

He felt a surge of adrenaline, the surge every law enforcement officer felt when going into a potentially dangerous situation. He hoped he wouldn't find anything out of the ordinary, though. He hoped like hell he wouldn't, because if he did, that would mean Miss Jones—had Jo actually said her name was Delilah?—was either hurt or dead.

Witch? Why hadn't he heard anything about this before? He'd lived here for three years, been sheriff for two, and in that time he thought he'd learned about all the county's unusual citizens. There hadn't been a peep about Delilah Jones, though, not from his deputies, not from the mayor or her secretary, who was the most gossipy person Jackson had ever met, not from the bar crowd or the women he dated, not from the blue-haired bingo circuit, not even from Jo. He hadn't missed the fact that Jo seemed well-informed on how to get to the Jones house. How would she know that, unless she'd been there? And why would she go, considering everything she'd said about the Jones woman being reclusive and her father being strange?

If anyone was practicing witchcraft in his county, he should have known about it. It was all bullshit, in his opinion, but if anyone else took it seriously then there could be trouble. From the sound of things, that was exactly what was happening.

First there was the general blue moon craziness, then the wreck between the two idiots, and now this. He was hungry, tired, and had a headache. He was beginning to get severely pissed.

2

Jackson reached Old Boggy Road in record time and churned down it, his tires digging in and throwing sand. The river was to his right so he kept an eye in that direction, looking for the launch ramp. The old road narrowed and became one rutted lane, with massive live oaks on each side intertwining their branches to form an almost solid canopy. The dense shade gave relief from the heat for about a hundred yards, then he drove out into the sunlight and there the ramp was, down a shallow slope that curved back to the right and was hidden from view by the thick trees until that moment.

He spun the wheel and headed down the slope, the rear end of the Jeep slewing around before he deftly corrected, A blue Toyota pickup, with an empty boat trailer hooked to it, was pulled to the side. Another truck, a red extended-cab Chevy, was backed onto the ramp and Charlotte Watkins was standing on the bank, one hand holding the rope to a long, sleek, red and silver fishing boat and the other hand slapping at mosquitoes as they swarmed around her bare arms and legs.

Jackson grabbed his shotgun and Kevlar vest and vaulted out of the Cherokee. "Thanks, Mrs. Watkins," he said as he took the rope from her. He put his right foot on the nose of the boat and pushed off with his left, agilely transferring his weight back to his right foot and stepping up into the boat as it floated away from the bank.

"Any time, Sheriff," she said, raising her hand to shade her eyes from the sun. "Mind the snags, now. If you get too far to the left, there are some mighty big stumps just under the water, and they'll rip the lower unit right off the boat."

"I'll watch," he promised as he carefully stowed the shotgun so it wouldn't bounce around, then slid into the driver's seat and hooked the kill switch to his shirt. As an afterthought, he tossed her the keys to his Jeep. "Drive the Cherokee home. I'll bring your truck and boat back as soon as I can."

She deftly caught the keys, but waved off any concern about the boat. "You just be careful upriver. I hope everything's all right." Worry etched her face.

Jackson turned the ignition switch and the big out board coughed into deep, rumbling life. He put it in reverse and backed away from the bank, turning the boat so he was headed upriver. Then he pushed the throttle down and the nose of the boat rose out of the water as it gained speed, before dropping down and settling on the plane, skimming across the water.

The river was slow-moving and marshy, filled with snags, shoals, and weed beds ready to snare anyone unfamiliar with its obstacles. Mindful of Charlotte Watkins's warning—another woman who seemed to know an awful lot about the way to the Jones place—Jackson kept the boat dead center and prayed as he tried to balance urgency with caution, but urgency kept getting the upper hand. Maybe Miss Jones was having a peaceful summer afternoon, but maybe she wasn't.

The rush of air cooled him, drying the sweat on his body and making the thick heat of summer feel almost comfortable. As he skimmed past the little sloughs and cuts in the river he looked at all of them, hoping to see Thaniel doing nothing more sinister than feeding worms to the fish. No such luck.

Then he rounded a bend in the river and saw a flat-bottom boat pulled up on the bank and tied to a tree. Thaniel was nowhere in sight.

Jackson didn't slow. The Jones place couldn't be much farther up the river, because it looked as if Thaniel had decided to walk the rest of the way, so he could approach unnoticed. That gave Jackson a little more time, maybe enough time to head off any trouble.

Even as he had the thought he heard the shot, a deep retort that boomed out over the water and was easily audible over the sound of the outboard motor. Shotgun, he thought. He eased up on the throttle and reached for the Kevlar vest, slipping it on and fastening the Velcro straps. Then he shoved the throttle down again, the boat leaping forward in response.

Fifteen seconds later the house was in sight, taking form dead ahead of him, just as Jo had said. The river seemed to end right there. The house was built of old, weathered wood that blended into the tall trees surrounding it, but in front of it was a short dock with an old flat-bottom tied to it, and that was what he saw first.

He had to back off the power to bring the boat into the dock. He reached for his shotgun as he did, holding it in his left hand as he steered the boat. "This is Sheriff Brody!" he bellowed. "Thaniel, you stop whatever the hell it is you're doing and get your ass out here." Not the most professional way of speaking, he supposed, but it served the purpose of announcing him and letting Thaniel know his identity wasn't a secret.

But he didn't really expect things to settle down just because he was there, and they didn't. Another shotgun blast boomed, answered by the flatter crack of a rifle.

The shots were coming from the back of the house. Jackson nosed the boat toward the dock and killed the engine. He leaped out while the dock was still a foot away, automatically looping the mooring rope around one of the posts as he did so, ingrained training taking hold so everything was accomplished while he was in motion.

He ran up the short dock, the thudding of his boots on the wood in time with the hard beating of his heart. The old familiar clarity swept over him, the by-product of adrenaline and experience. He'd felt the same thing every time he jumped out of a plane during airborne training. Lightning-fast, his brain processed the details he saw.

The front door of the old wooden house was standing open, a neatly patched screen door keeping out the insects. He could see straight through to the back door, but no one was in sight. The porch looked like a jungle, with huge potted plants and hanging baskets everywhere, but there wasn't any junk sitting around like there was at most houses, his included. He took with one leap the three steps up to the porch, and flattened himself against the wall.

The last thing he wanted was to get shot by the very person he was trying to help, so he repeated his identity. "This is Sheriff Brody! Miss Jones, are you all right?"

There was a moment of silence in which even the insects seemed to stop buzzing. Then a woman's voice came from somewhere out back. "I'm fine. I'll be even better when you get this jackass off my property."

She sounded remarkably cool for someone who was under attack, as if Thaniel was of no more importance than the mosquitoes.

Jackson eased around the corner of the wide, shady porch that wrapped around three sides of the house. He was now on the right side, with thick woods both to the right and ahead of him. He couldn't see anything out of the ordinary, not a patch of color or a rustling of bushes. "Thaniel!" he yelled. "Put your weapon down before you get your stupid ass shot off, you hear me?"

There was another moment of silence. Then came a sullen, "I didn't do nothin', Sheriff. She shot at me first."

He still couldn't see Thaniel, but the voice had come from a stand of big pine trees behind the house, practically dead ahead. "I'll decide whose fault it is." He edged closer to the back of the house, his shotgun held ready. He was safe from Miss Jones's shots, for the moment, but Thaniel would have a straight bead on him if he chose. "Now do what I told you and pitch out your weapon."

"This crazy bitch will shoot me if I do."

"No, she won't."

"I might," came Delilah Jones's calm voice, not helping the situation at all.

"See, what'd I tell you!" Thaniel's voice was high with anxiety. Whatever he had planned, it had gone sadly awry.

Jackson swore under his breath, and tried to make his tone both calming and authoritative. "Miss Jones, where exactly are you?"

"I'm on the back porch, behind the washing machine."

"Put down your weapon and go back inside, so I can have a little talk with Thaniel."

Again that little pause, as if she were considering whether or not to pay any attention to him. Accustomed to instant response, be it positive or negative, that telling little hesitation set Jackson's teeth on edge. “I’ll go in the house," she finally said. "But I'm not putting this shotgun down until that fool's off my property."

He'd had enough. "Do as you're told," he said sharply. "Or I'll arrest both of you."

There was another of those maddening moments of silence, then the back door slammed. Jackson took a deep breath. Thaniel's whiny voice floated from the pine trees. "She didn't put down the shotgun like you told her to, Sheriff."

"Neither did you," Jackson reminded him in a grim tone. He eased to the corner of the house. "I have a shotgun, too, and I'm going to use it in three seconds if you don't throw down that rifle and come out." The mood he was in, it wasn't a bluff. "One . . . two . . . th—"

A rifle sailed out from behind a huge pine tree, landing with a thud on the pine-needle cushioned ground. After a few seconds, Thaniel slowly followed it, easing away from the tree with his hands up and his face sullen. A thin rivulet of blood ran down his right cheek. The wound didn't look like anything from a shotgun, so Jackson figured a splinter must have caught him. The tree trunk sported a great raw gouge level with his chin. Miss Jones hadn't been shooting over Thaniel's head; she had been aiming for him. And, from the look of that tree, she wasn't shooting bird shot.

Immediately the back screen door popped open and Delilah Jones stepped out, shotgun held ready. Thaniel hit the ground, braying in panic. He covered his head with his hands, as if that would do any good.

God, give me strength, Jackson prayed. The prayer didn't do any good. His temper shattered and he moved fast, so fast she didn't have time to do more than glance at him, certainly not time to react. In two long steps he reached her, his right hand locking around the barrel of her shotgun and wrenching it out of her hands. "Get back inside," he barked. "Now!"

She stood as rigid as a post, staring at Thaniel, paying Jackson no more mind than if he hadn't been there at all. "You're dead," she said to Thaniel, her voice flat and calm.

Thaniel jerked as if he'd been shot. "You heard her!" he howled. "She threatened me, Sheriff! Arrest her!"

"I'm of a mind to do just that," Jackson said between clenched teeth.

"I didn't threaten him," she said, still in that flat, monotonous tone. "I don't have to. He'll die without me lifting a finger to help." She looked up at Jackson then, and he found himself caught in eyes the dark green of a woodland forest, watchful, wary, knowing eyes.

He felt suddenly dizzy, and gave a short, sharp jerk of his head. The heat must be getting to him. Everything kind of faded, except her face at the center of his vision. She was younger than he'd expected, he thought dimly, probably in her late twenties when he had expected a middle-aged, reclusive country woman, bypassed by modern inventions. Her skin was smooth, tanned, and unblemished. Her hair was a mass of brown curls, and her shorts stopped north of mid-thigh, revealing slim, shapely legs. He inhaled deeply, fighting off the dizziness, and as his head cleared he noticed that she had gone utterly white. She was staring at him as if he had two heads.

Abruptly she turned and went inside, the screen door slamming shut behind her.

Jackson took a deep breath, gathering himself before turning back to the problem at hand. He propped her shotgun against the wall and cradled his on one arm as he finally turned his attention back to Thaniel.

"Son of a bitch!"

Thaniel had taken advantage of his splintered attention. The ground where he had lain was bare, and a quick glance told Jackson the rifle was gone, too.

He jumped off the porch, landing half-crouched, the shotgun now held ready in both hands. His head swiveled, but except for a slight waving of some bushes there was no sign of Thaniel. Silently Jackson slipped into the woods close to where the bushes swayed, then stood still and listened.

Thaniel, for all his other faults, was good in the woods. It was about thirty seconds before Jackson heard the distant snap of a twig under a careless foot. He started to follow, then stopped. There was no point in chasing him through the woods; he knew where Thaniel lived, if Miss Jones wanted to file charges against him for trespass and any other charges Jackson thought were applicable.

He turned and looked back at the house, nestled among the trees and blending in so well it looked part of the woodland. He felt oddly reluctant to go in and talk to Miss Jones, a sense of things being subtly altered, out of control. He didn't want to know anything more about her, he only wanted to get in Jerry Watkins's boat and go back downriver, safely away from that strange woman with her spooky eyes.

But his job demanded he talk to her, and Jackson was a good sheriff. That was why he was here, and that was why he couldn't leave without seeing her.

The uneasy feeling followed him, though, all the way to the porch.

3

The washing machine she'd been hiding behind was an old-fashioned wringer-type model, he noticed with faint astonishment as he paused in front of the screen door. He couldn't see inside the house; there were no lights on, and the trees provided plenty of shade to keep the interior cool and dim.

He lifted his fist to knock, paused, then gave two firm taps. "Miss Jones?" "Right here."

She was near, standing in the room just beyond the door. There was a strained quality to her voice that hadn't been there before.

She hadn't asked him to come in. He was glad, because he would just as soon never set foot in that house. And then, irrationally, it annoyed him that she hadn't asked him in. Without waiting for an invitation, he opened the screen door and stepped inside.

She was a pale figure in the dim room, standing very still, and staring at him. Maybe his vision needed to adjust a bit more, but he had the impression she was downright horrified by him. She even backed up a step.

He couldn't say why that pissed him off, but it did, big time. Adrenaline was pumping through him again, making his muscles feel tight and primed for action, but damned if he knew what he could do. He had to take her statement, read her the riot act about shooting at people, and leave. That was all. Nothing there to make him feel so edgy and angry.

But that was exactly how he did feel, whether or not there was rhyme or reason to it.

Silence stretched between them, silence in which they took each other's measure. He didn't know what conclusions she drew from his appearance, but he was a lawman, accustomed to taking in every detail about a person and making snap judgments. He had to, and he had to be pretty accurate, because his and others' lives depended on how he read people.

What he saw in the dim light was a slim, toned young woman, neat in a pale yellow, sleeveless shirt that was tucked into khaki shorts, which were snugly belted around a trim waist. Her bare arms were smoothly tanned, and sleekly muscled in a feminine way that told him she was stronger than she looked, and accustomed to work. She was clean, even her bare feet—which, he noticed, sported pale pink polish on the toes; toes that were curling, digging into the floor, as if she had to force herself to stand there.

Her hair was a brown, sun-streaked mass of curls. She didn't hurt the eye, though she wasn't beauty-queen material. She was pleasant-looking, healthy, with a sweet curve to her chin. Her eyes, though . . . those eyes were spooky. He was reluctant to meet them again, but finally he did. They were her best feature, large and clear, fringed with thick dark lashes. And she was watching him now with . . . resignation?

For God's sake, what did she think he was going to do?

He didn't know how long he'd been standing there staring at her. The same thing had happened on the porch, only this time he didn't feel dizzy. He needed to take care of business and get going. The summer days were long, but he wanted to be off the river well ahead of sundown.

"Thaniel slipped away," he said, his voice unaccountably rough.

She gave a brief, jerky nod.

"Do you make a habit of shooting at visitors?"

The green eyes narrowed. "When they stop downriver and sneak the rest of the way on foot, yes, that makes me a bit suspicious about their reason for calling on me."

"How do you know what he did?"

"Sound carries a long way over water. And I don't hear many boats coming my way except Harley Whisenant's, delivering the mail. Since Harley was here this morning, I knew it wasn't him."

"You shot first."

"He was trespassing. I fired in the air the first time, as a warning, and yelled at him to scat. He shot at me then. There's a bullet hole in my washing machine, damn him. My second shot was to defend myself."

"Maybe he thought he was defending himself, too, since you shot first."

She gave him a disbelieving look. "He sneaked onto my property up to my house, carrying a deer rifle, and when I yell at him to leave he fires from cover, and that's defending himself?"

He didn't know why he was giving her a hard time, except for the edginess that had him as prickly as a cactus. "You're right," he said abruptly.

"Well, thank you so much."

He ignored the sarcasm. "I need to take a statement."

"I'm not going to press charges."

She couldn't have picked anything to say more likely to rile him. In his opinion, a good deal of additional harm was done because people declined to bring charges against criminal actions. Whatever their reasoning, they didn't want to "cause trouble," or they wanted to give the perp "another chance." In his experience all they were doing was letting a criminal go free to commit another crime. There were circumstances that called for a little mercy, but this wasn't one of them. Thaniel Vargas wasn't a teenager caught on his first misdemeanor; he was a thug who had intended serious harm to another person.

"I beg your pardon?" He said it softly, reining in his inclination to roar, giving her a chance to rethink the situation. When he'd been a sergeant in the Army, enlisted men had immediately recognized that softness for the danger sign it was.

Either Delilah Jones wasn't as attuned to his mood as his men had been, or she wasn't impressed by his authority. Whatever the reason, she shrugged. "There's no point in it."

"No point?"

She started to say something, then stopped and gave a slight shake of her head. "It doesn't matter," she said, as if to herself. She bit her lip. He had the impression she was arguing with herself. She sighed. "Sit down, Sheriff Brody. You'll feel better after you've had something to eat."

He didn't want to sit down, he just wanted to get out of here. If she wasn't going to press charges, fine. He didn't agree, but the decision was hers. There was no reason for him to stay a minute longer.

But she was moving quietly and efficiently around the old-timey kitchen, slicing what looked like homemade bread, then thick slices from a ham, and a big chunk of cheese. She dipped a glass of water from a bucket, and placed the simple meal on the table.

Jackson watched her with narrowed eyes. Despite himself, he admired the deft, feminine way she did things, without fuss or bother. She made herself a sandwich, too, though not as thick as his, and minus the cheese. She sat down across from the place she had set for him, and lifted her eyebrows in question at his hesitancy.

The sight of that sandwich made his mouth water. He was so hungry his stomach was churning. That was why he removed the Kevlar vest and set the shotgun aside, then sat down and put his boots under her table. Without a word they both began to eat.

The ham was succulent, the cheese mellow. He finished the sandwich before she had taken more than a few bites of hers. She got up and began making another one for him. "No, one was plenty—" he lied, not wanting to put her to any more trouble, not wanting to stay any longer.

"I should have thought," she said, her voice low. "I’m not used to feeding a big man like you. Pops was a skinny little thing; he didn't eat much more than I do."

In thirty seconds another thick sandwich was set down in front of him. She sat down again and picked up her own sandwich.

He ate more slowly this time, savoring the tastes. As he chewed, he took stock of his surroundings. Something about this house bothered him, and now he realized what it was: the silence. There was no refrigerator humming, no television squawking in the background, no water heater thumping and hissing.

He looked around. There was no refrigerator, period. No lamps. No overhead lights. She had dipped the water from a bucket. He looked at the sink; there were no faucets. The evidence was all there, but he still asked, "You don't have electricity?" because it was so unbelievable that she didn't.

"No."

"No phone, no way of calling for help if you need it?"

"No. I've never needed help."

"Until today."

"I could have handled Thaniel. He's been trying to bully me since grade school."

"Has he ever come after you with a gun before?"

"Not that I remember, but then I don't pay much attention to him."

She was maddening. He wanted to shake her, wanted to put his hands on those bare arms and shake her until her teeth rattled. "You're lucky you weren't raped and murdered," he snapped.

"It wasn't luck," she corrected. "It was preparation."

Despite himself, he was interested. "What sort of preparation?"

She leaned back in her chair, looking around at the silent house. It struck Jackson that she was very comfortable here, alone in the woods, without any of the modern conveniences everyone else thought they had to have. "To begin with, this is my home. I know every inch of the woods, every weed bed in the river. If I had to hide, Thaniel would never find me."

Watching her closely, Jackson saw the secret smile lurking in her green eyes and he knew, as sure as he knew his own name, that she doubted she would ever be reduced to hiding. "What about the other stuff?" he asked, keeping his tone casual.

She gave him a slow smile, and he got the feeling she was pleased with his astuteness. "Oh, just a few little things that give me advance warning. There's nothing lethal out there, unless you step on a water moccasin or fall in the water and drown."

He stared at her mouth, and felt a little jolt, like another kick of adrenaline. Despite the coolness of the house he broke out in a light sweat. God almighty, he hoped she didn't smile again. Her smile was sleepy and sexy, womanly, the kind of smile a woman gave a man after they had made love, lying drowsy on tangled sheets while the rain beat down outside and there were only the two of them, cocooned in their private world.

The sexual awareness wasn't welcome. He had to be careful in situations like this. He was a man in a position of authority, alone with a woman to whose house he had gone in an official capacity. This wasn't the time or the place to come on to her.

Silence had fallen again, silence in which they faced each other across the table. She took a deep breath, and the inhalation lifted her breasts against the thin cotton of her blouse. Her nipples were plainly outlined, hard and erect, the darkness of the aureolas faintly visible where they pressed against the fabric. Was she cold, or aroused?

The skin on her arms was smooth; no chill bumps.

"I'd better go," he said, fighting the sudden thickness in his throat, and in his pants. "Thank you for the sandwiches. I was starving."

She looked both relieved and reluctant. "You're welcome. You had that hungry look, so I—" She stopped, and waved a dismissive hand. "Never mind. I was glad to have the company. And you're right about going; if I'm not mistaken, I heard thunder just a minute ago." She got up and gathered their glasses, taking them to the sink.

He got up, too. There was something about her unfinished sentence that pulled at him. He should have let it go, should have said good-bye and got into the boat and left. He hadn't heard any thunder, though his hearing was pretty good, but that was as good an excuse as any to get the hell out of there. He knew it, and still he said, "So you—what?"

Her gaze slid away from him, as if she were embarrassed. "So I ... thought you must have missed lunch."

How would she know that? Why would she even think it? He didn't normally miss a meal, and how in hell would she know if he looked hungry or not, when she had never seen him before today? For all she knew, ill-tempered was his normal expression.

Witch. The word whispered in his mind, even though he knew it was nonsense. Even if he believed in witchcraft, which he didn't, from what he'd read it had nothing to do with telling whether or not a man had missed lunch. She had noticed he was grouchy, and attributed it to an empty stomach. He didn't quite follow the reasoning, but he'd often seen his mother ply his father with food to gentle him out of a bad mood. It was a woman thing, not a witch thing.

"Meow."

He almost jumped a foot in the air. Now was not the time to find out she had a cat.

"There you are," she crooned, looking down at his feet. He looked down too, and saw a huge, fluffy white cat with black ears and a black tail, rubbing against his right boot.

"Poor kitty," she said, still crooning, and leaned down to pick up the creature, holding it in her arms as if it were a baby. It lay perfectly relaxed, belly up, eyes half-closed in a beatific expression as she rubbed its chest. "Did the noise scare you? The bad man's gone, and he won't bother us again, I promise." She looked up at Jackson. "Eleanor's pregnant. The kittens are due any time now, I think. She showed up about a week ago, but she's obviously tame and has had good care, so I guess someone just drove into the country and put her out, rather than take care of a litter."

The cat looked like a feline Buddha, fat and content. Familiars were supposed to be black, weren't they, or would any cat do, even fat white pregnant ones?

He couldn't resist reaching out and stroking that fat, round belly. The cat's eyes completely closed and she began purring so loudly she sounded like a motor idling.

Delilah smiled. "Careful, or you'll have a slave for life. Maybe you'd like to take her with you?"

"No, thanks," he said dryly. "My mother might like a kitten, though. Her old tom died last year and she doesn't have a pet now."

"Check back in six or seven weeks, then."

That wasn't exactly an invitation to come calling any time soon, he thought. He picked up the shotgun and vest. "I’ll be on my way, Miss Jones. Thanks again for the sandwiches."

"Lilah."

"What?"

"Please call me Lilah. All my friends do." She gave him a distinctly warning look. "Not Delilah, please."

He chuckled. "Message received. I guess you got teased about it in school?"

"You have no idea," she said feelingly.

"My name's Jackson."

"I know." She smiled. "I voted for you. Jackson's a nice Texas-sounding name."

"I'm a nice Texas guy"

She made a noncommittal sound, as if she didn't agree with him but didn't want to come right out and say so. He grinned as he turned to the door. Meeting Delilah Jones had been interesting. He didn't know if it was good, but it was definitely interesting. The blue moon mojo was at full strength today. When things settled down and he had time to think things over, when he could be entirely rational about the weirdness and come up with a logical explanation, maybe he'd come back to visit—and not in any official capacity.

"Use the front door," she said. "It's closer."

He followed her through the small house. From what he could tell there were only four rooms: the kitchen and living room on one side, and each of those had another room opening off it. He figured the other two rooms were bedrooms. The living room was simply furnished with a couch and a rocking chair, arranged around a rag rug spread in front of the stone fireplace. Oil lamps sat on the mantel and on the pair of small tables set beside the couch and chair. In one corner was a treadle sewing machine. A handmade quilt hung on one of the walls, a brightly colored scene of trees and water that must have taken forever to do. On another wall a bookcase, also handmade from the looks of it, stretched from floor to ceiling, and was packed with books, both hardback and paper.

The whole house made him feel as if he had stepped back a century, or at least half of one. The only modern appliance he saw was a battery-operated weather radio, sitting beside one of the oil lamps on the mantel. He was glad she had it; both tornadoes and hurricanes were possible in this area.

He stepped out on the porch, Lilah right behind him, still holding the cat. He stopped dead still, staring at the dock. "The son of a bitch," he said softly.

"What?" She pushed at his shoulder, and he realized he was blocking her view.

"The boats are gone," he said, stepping aside so she could see.

She stared at the empty dock, too, her green eyes wide with dismay Her flat-bottom was gone, as well as Jerry Watkins's bass boat.

"He must have doubled back and cut the boats loose while we were eating. They can't have drifted far. If I walk along the bank, I'll probably find them."

"My boat had oars in it," she said. "I always have them in case I have motor trouble. He didn't have to cut them loose, he could have rowed mine out, and towed yours. That would save him the trouble of hiking back to his boat, and once he got to his boat he'd probably let the current take them. I figure they're at least a mile downstream by now, maybe more. That's if he doesn't decide to sink them."

"I'll call in—" he began, the notion so automatic that the words were out before he realized he didn't have his radio. He didn't have his cell phone. They were both in the Cherokee, which Charlotte Watkins had driven home. And Lilah Jones didn't have a phone.

He looked down at her. "I don't suppose you have a short-wave radio?"

"Afraid not." She was staring grimly at the river down which her boat had vanished, as if she could will it back. "You're stuck here. We both are."

"Not for long. The dispatcher—"

"Jo?"

"Jo." He wondered how well she knew Jo. Jo hadn't talked as if they were anything more than distant acquaintances, but Lilah not only knew who his dispatcher was, she had called her Jo instead of Jolene, which was her given name. "She knows where I am, and she was supposed to send backup as soon as some was available. A deputy should be along any time."

"Not unless he's already on his way," she said. "Look." She pointed to the southwest.

Jackson looked, and swore under his breath. A huge purplish black thunderhead had filled the late-afternoon sky. He could feel its breath now in the freshening wind that fanned him, hear its voice in the sullen bass rumble of thunder as it marched toward them.

"A thunderstorm probably won't last long." At least he hoped it wouldn't. The way things were going today, the storm's forward progress would stop just as it was on top of them.

She was staring worriedly at the cloud. "I think I'd better turn on the weather radio," she said, and went back inside, Eleanor cradled in her arms.

Jackson gave the empty river another frustrated glance. The air felt charged with electricity, raising the hair on his arms. The blade of lightning slashed down, flickering and flashing, and thunder rumbled again.

He was stuck here for at least a few hours, and maybe all night. If he had to be stuck anywhere, why couldn't it be in his own home? There was always a rash of accidents on a stormy night, and the deputies would need him.

Instead he would be here, in a house in the back of nowhere, keeping company with a witch and her pregnant cat.

4

Lilah put Eleanor on the floor and turned on the weather radio, then went into her bedroom, which opened off the living room, and pulled down the side window. The front window was protected by the wide porch, so rain wasn't likely to come in there. With an ear cocked toward the radio, she then did the same in the back bedroom. She knew that Sheriff Brody had come in from the porch, but she deliberately ignored him, doing what needed to be done. He was entirely too big for her small house, too stern, too authoritative, too . . . too male.

He disrupted her peaceful life far more than Thaniel Vargas had ever dreamed of doing. What on earth had Jo been thinking, sending him out here? But of course Jo didn't know, and she had, rightly, been worried about Thaniel.

Well, poor Thaniel wouldn't be bothering her again, and there was nothing she could do about it. If he hadn't run she might have—well, whether or not she could have helped him was a moot point, because it was too late now. Still, regret filled her. Whatever Thaniel's faults—and they were many—she didn't wish him any harm. And though she would have tried to help if... if he hadn't run away, years of painful experience had taught her there was very little she could do to alter fate.

That was why the sheriff filled her with such panic. She had known, the moment she saw him, that he was fated to destroy her safe, comfortable, familiar life. She wanted to get as far away from him as she could, she wanted to push him out of her house and lock the door, she wanted . . . she wanted to walk into his arms and rest her head on a broad shoulder, let him hold her and kiss her and do anything else he wanted to her.

In all her life she'd never met a male, boy or man, who elicited even the slightest sexual response on her part. She had always felt isolated from the rest of the world, forever alone because of what she was. The thought of spending her life alone hadn't bothered her; quite the opposite. She enjoyed her solitude, her life, her sense of completion within herself. So many people never achieved wholeness, and spent their entire lives searching for someone or something to make them whole, never realizing that the answer was within themselves. She liked her own company, she trusted her own decisions, and she enjoyed the work she did. There was nothing—nothing—in her life that she wanted changed.

But Jackson Brody changed everything, whether she wanted him to or not.

It wasn't just his aura that attracted her, though it was so rich she was almost spellbound by it. All his colors were clear: the dark red of sensuality, the blue of calm, the turquoise of a dynamic personality, the orange of power, with fluctuating spikes of spiritual purple and yellow, healing green. Nothing about him was murky. He was a straightforward, confident, healthy man.

What had so stunned her, however, was the sudden flash of precognition. She didn't have them often; her particular talent was her ability to see auras. But sometimes she had lightning bursts of insight and knowledge, and she had never been wrong. Not once. Just as she had looked at Thaniel and known he would soon die, when she first focused on Jackson Brody the wave of precognition had been so strong she had almost slumped to her knees. This man would be her lover. This man would be her love, the only one of her life.

She didn't want a lover! She didn't want a man hanging around, getting in her way, interfering with her business. He would; she knew he would. He struck her as impatient, used to giving orders, slightly domineering, and, oh my, sexy as all get out. He certainly wouldn't want to live out here, without any of the modern conveniences to which he was accustomed, while she much preferred her uncluttered life. She felt better without hustle and bustle, without electrical machines incessantly humming in the background. Nevertheless, he would undoubtedly expect her to move to town, or at least to someplace less isolated and more accessible.

Once he realized she couldn't be relocated, he would give in, but with bad grace. He'd argue that he wouldn't be able to see her as often as he could if she lived closer. He would visit whenever it was convenient for him, and expect her to drop whatever she was doing whenever he pulled his boat up to the dock. In short, he would be very inconvenient for her, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it. For all the success she'd had in evading or altering fate, she might as well strip off her clothes right now and lead him into the bedroom.

That was another worry. She was rather short on experience in the bedroom department. That hadn't been a bother before, because she hadn't felt even an inkling of desire to get that experience. Now she did. Just looking at him made her feel warm and sort of breathless; her breasts tingled, and she had to press her thighs together to contain the hot ache between her legs. So this was lust. She had wondered, and now she knew. No wonder people acted like fools when they were afflicted with it.

If Thaniel hadn't stolen the boats, the sheriff would have already been gone, and she likely wouldn't have seen him again for quite a while, if ever. She would have gone about her quiet, very satisfying life. But she should have expected that trick with the boats; how else could Fate have arranged for Jackson to stay here? And of course a storm was coming up, preventing any of his deputies from arriving. All of it was inevitable. No matter how inconceivable her visions, almost immediately there would set in motion a train of events that brought about the conclusion she had foreseen.

Not for the first time, she wished she wasn't different. She wished she didn't know things were going to happen before they did; that was asking a lot of a person. She couldn't regret seeing auras, though; her life would feel colorless and less interesting if she no longer saw them. She didn't have to speak to someone to know how he or she was feeling; she could see when someone was happy, or angry, or feeling ill. She could see bad intentions, dishonesty, meanness, but she could also see joy, and love, and goodness.

"Is something wrong?"

He was standing right behind her, and the sharpness of his tone told her she had been standing in one place, staring at nothing, for quite a while. Getting lost in her thoughts was no big deal when she was alone, but probably looked strange to others. She blinked, pulling herself back to reality "Sorry," she said, not turning to face him. "I was daydreaming."

"Daydreaming?" He sounded disbelieving, and she didn't blame him. A man had tried to kill her less than an hour ago, they were stranded, and a whopper of a storm was bearing down on them; that should be enough to keep her thoughts grounded. She should have said she was thinking, instead of daydreaming; at least that sounded productive.

"Never mind. Have there been any weather bulletins or warnings on the radio?"

"Severe thunderstorm warning until ten tonight. High winds, damaging hail."

Hours. They would be alone together for hours. He would probably be here until morning. What was she supposed to do with him, this man she was going to love but didn't yet? She had just met him, she knew nothing about him on a personal level. She was attracted to him, yes, but love? Not likely. Not yet, anyway.

Fresh, rain-fragrant wind gusted through the screen door. "Here it comes," he said, and she turned her head to watch sheets of rain sweeping upriver toward the house. Lightning speared straight downward, and a blast of thunder rattled the windows.

Eleanor meowed, and sought shelter in the cardboard box which Lilah had lined with old towels as a bed for the cat.

Jackson prowled restlessly around the small room. Lilah looked at him in exasperation, wondering if he ever just went with the flow. It was irritating to him that he couldn't affect the weather somehow, either postponing the storm or sending it speeding off, so one of his deputies could risk getting upriver to him.

She gave a mental shrug. Let him fret; she had work to do.

The first sheet of rain hit the house, drumming down on the tin roof. The late-afternoon sunlight was almost completely blotted out, darkening the rooms. She moved through the gloom to the oil lamps set on the mantel, her hand setting surely on the match box. The rasp of the match was unheard in the din of rain, but he turned at the sudden small bloom of light and watched as she lifted the globes of the lamps and touched the match to the wicks, then replaced the globes. She blew out the match and tossed it into the fireplace.

Without a word she went into the kitchen and duplicated the chore, though there were four oil lamps there because she liked more light when she was working. The fire in the stove had been banked; she opened the door, stirred the hot coals, and added more wood.

"What are you doing?" he asked from the doorway.

Mentally she rolled her eyes. "Cooking." Maybe he'd never seen the process before.

"But we just ate."

"So we did, but those sandwiches won't hold you for long, if I'm any judge." She eyed him, measuring him against the doorframe. A little over six feet tall, she guessed, and at least two hundred pounds. He looked muscled, given the way his shoulders filled out his shirt, so he might weigh more. This man would eat a lot.

He came on into the room and settled at the table, turning the chair around so he faced her, his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. His fingers drummed on the table. "This irritates the hell out of me," he confessed.

Her tone was dry. "I noticed." She dipped some water into the washbowl and washed her hands.

"Usually I can do something. Usually, in bad weather, I have to do something, whether it's working a wreck or dragging people off of flooded roads. I need to be out there now, because my deputies will have their hands full.”

So that was the cause of his restlessness and irritability; he knew his help was needed, but he couldn't leave here. She liked his sense of responsibility.

He watched in silence then as she prepared her biscuit pan, spraying it with nonstick spray. She got her mixing bowl and scooped some flour into it, added shortening and buttermilk, and plunged her hands into the bowl.

"I haven't seen anyone do that in years." He smiled as he kept his eyes on her hands, deftly mixing and kneading. "My grandmother used to, but I can't remember ever seeing my mother make biscuits by hand."

"I don't have a refrigerator," she said practically. "Frozen biscuits are out."

"Don't you want to have things like refrigerators and electric stoves? Doesn't it bother you, not having electricity?"

"Why should it? I don't depend on a wire for heat and light. If I had electricity, the power might be off right now and I wouldn't be able to cook."

He rubbed his jaw, brow furrowed as he thought. She liked the sight, she mused, eyeing him as she continued to knead. His brows were straight and dark, nicely shaped.

Everything about him was nicely shaped. She bet all the single women in town, and a few of the married ones, were hot for him. Short dark hair, bright blue eyes, strong jaw, soft lips—she didn't know how she knew his lips were soft, but she did. Oh, yeah, they were hot for him. She was a bit warm herself.

She thought of walking over to him and straddling his lap, and an instantaneous flush swept over her entire body. Warm, my foot; she thought she might break out in a sweat any minute now.

"Running a gas line would be even harder than running power lines," he mused, his mind still on the issue of modern conveniences. "I guess you could get a propane tank, but filling it would be a bitch, since there aren't any roads out here."

"The wood stove suits me fine. It's only a few years old, so it's very efficient. It heats the whole house, and it's easy to regulate." She began pinching off balls of dough and rolling them between her hands, shaping them into biscuits and placing them in the pan. If she kept her eyes on the dough, instead of him, the hot feeling cooled down somewhat.

"Where do you get your wood?"

She couldn't help it. She had to look at him, her expression incredulous. "I cut it myself." Where did he think she got it? Maybe he thought the wood fairies chopped it and piled it up for her.

To her surprise, he surged up out of the chair, looming over her with a scowl. "Chopping wood is too hard for you."

"Gee, I'm glad you told me, otherwise I'd have kept doing it and not known any better." She edged away from him, turning to the sink to wash the dough from her hands.

"I didn't mean you couldn't do it, I meant you shouldn't have to," he growled. His voice was right behind her. He was right behind her. Without warning, he reached around her and wrapped his fingers around her right wrist. His hand completely engulfed hers. "Look at that. My wrist is twice as thick as yours. You may be strong, for your size, but you can't tell me it isn't a struggle for you to chop wood."

"I manage." She wished he hadn't touched her. She wished he wasn't standing so close that she could feel the heat from his body, smell the hot man smell of him.

"And it's dangerous. What if the ax slips, or the saw, or whatever you use? You're out here alone, a long way from medical help."

"A lot of things are dangerous." She struggled to keep her voice practical, and even. "But people do what they have to do, and I have to have wood." Why hadn't he released her hand? Why hadn't she pulled it away herself? She could; he wasn't holding her tightly. But she liked the feel of his hand wrapped around hers, liked the warmth and strength, the roughness of the calluses on his palm.

"I'll chop it for you," he said abruptly.

"What!" She almost turned around; common sense stopped her at the last minute. If she turned around, she would be face to face, belly to belly, with him. She didn't dare. She swallowed. "You can't chop my wood."

"Why not?"

"Because—" Because, why? "Because you won't be here."

"I'm here now." He paused, and his tone dropped lower. "I can be again."

She went still. The only sound was the storm, the boom of thunder and wind lashing through the trees, the rain pounding down on the roof. Or maybe it was her heart, pounding against her rib cage.

"I have to be careful here," he said quietly. "I'm acting as a man, not a sheriff. If you tell me no, I'll go back to the table and sit down. I'll keep my distance from you for the rest of the night, and I won't bother you again. But if you don't tell me no, I'm going to kiss you."

Lilah inhaled, fighting for oxygen. She couldn't say a word, couldn't think of anything to say even if she had the air. She was feeling hot again, and weak, as if she might collapse against him.

"I'll take that as a yes," he said, and turned her into his arms.

5

His lips were soft, just the way she'd known they would be. And .he was gentle, rather than bruising her lips by pressing too hard. He didn't try to overwhelm her with a sudden display of passion. He simply kissed her, taking his time about it, tasting her and learning the shape and texture of her own lips. The leisurely pace was more seductive than anything else he could have done.

She sighed, a low hum of pleasure, and let herself relax against him. He gathered her up, wrapping his arms around her and lifting her onto her toes so that they fit together more intimately. The full press of his body against her made her catch her breath, and that now-familiar wave of heat swept over her again. She looped her arms around his neck, pressing even closer, shivering a little as his tongue moved slowly into her mouth, giving her time to pull away if she didn't want such a deep kiss. She did, more than she had ever thought she would want a man's kiss.

Her heart thudded wildly in her chest. Pleasure was a siren, luring her to experience more, to take everything he could give her. His erection was a hard ridge in his pants; she wanted to rub herself against it, open herself to it. Knowing herself to be on the verge of losing control, she forced herself to pull away from the slow, intoxicating kisses, burying her face instead in the warm column of his throat.

He wasn't unaffected. His pulse hammered through his veins; she felt it, there in his neck, just where her lips rested. His lungs pumped, dragging in air. His skin felt hot and damp, and he moved restlessly, as if he wanted to grind his hips against her.

He didn't say anything, for which she was grateful. Innate caution told her to slow down, while instinct screamed at her, urging her to mate with him; it was fated, anyway, so why wait? What would waiting accomplish? The outcome was the same, no matter the timetable. Torn between the two, she hesitated, not quite willing yet to take such a large step no matter what the fates said.

"This is scary," she muttered against his throat.

"No joke." He buried his face against her hair. "This must be what it feels like to get hit by that famous ton of bricks."

The knowledge that he was as rattled as she wasn't very reassuring, because she would have liked for one of them to be in control.

"We don't know each other." Neither did she know with whom she was arguing, him or herself. All she knew was that, for one of the few times in her life, she wasn't certain of herself. She didn't like the feeling. One of the foundation bricks of her life, her very self, was her knowledge of herself and other people; not to know was if that foundation was being shaken.

"We'll work on that." His lips brushed her temple. "We don't have to rush into anything."

But when he did know her, would he still want her? She worried at that, feeling, not for the first time, the weight of her differentness. She came with so much excess baggage that a lot of men would think she was more trouble than she was worth.

That thought gave her the strength to push gently at his shoulders. He released her immediately, stepping back. Lilah took a deep breath and pushed her hair out of her face, trying not to look at him, but the clear, dark red of passion emanating from him was almost impossible to ignore. "I'd better get those biscuits in the oven," she said, stepping around him. "Just sit down out of my way and I'll have supper ready in a jiffy."

"I'll stand, thank you," he said wryly.

She couldn't help it; she had to look, meeting his rueful blue gaze in perfect understanding. The dark red of his aura was still glowing hot and clear, especially in the groin area, though more blue was beginning to show through in the aura around his head.

But he did move out of her way, leaning against the wall by the door. She put the biscuits into the oven and opened a big can of beef stew, dumping the contents into a pot and placing that on top of the stove. The simple meal would have to be enough, because she wasn't about to go out into the storm to chase down a chicken for supper. The biscuits could cool, and the beef stew could simmer until he got hungry again.

He was watching her. She felt his gaze, his utter male focus on her. Being female wasn't something to which she gave a great deal of thought, but under that intent study she was suddenly, acutely aware of her body, of the way her breasts lifted with each breath, of the folds between her legs where he would enter. She didn't have to look down to know her nipples were tightly beaded, or at the front of his pants to know his erection hadn't yet subsided.

His unabashed arousal did more to turn her on than any sweet nothing he could have whispered. Something had to be done to lessen the sensual tension, or she would shortly find herself on her back. She cleared her throat, mentally searching for a neutral topic.

"How did a nice Texas boy end up in Alabama?" She
already knew; Jo had told her. But it was the only thing
she could think of, and at least the question would get
him to talking.

"My mother was from Dothan."

No further explanation followed. Deciding he needed more prodding, Lilah said, "Why did she move to Texas?"

"She met my dad. He was from west Texas. Mom and a couple of friends from college were driving to California after graduation, and they had car trouble. My dad was a deputy then, and he stopped to help them. Mom never did get to California."

That was better; he was talking. She breathed an inner sigh of relief. "Why did she come back to Alabama, then?"

"Dad died a few years ago." He settled his shoulders more comfortably against the wall. "West Texas isn't for everyone; it can be hot as hell, and pretty damn empty. She never complained while Dad was alive, but after he died, the loneliness got to her. She wanted to move back to Alabama, close to her sister and her friends from college."

"So you came with her?"

"She's my mother," he said simply. "I can be in law enforcement here as easily as I could in Texas. Mom and I don't live together, haven't since I was eighteen and went away to college, but she knows I'm nearby if she needs anything."

"It didn't bother you at all to leave Texas?" She couldn't imagine such a thing. She loved her home, knew it as intimately as she knew herself. She loved the scent of the river in the early mornings, the way it turned gold when the dawn light struck it, she loved the dramatic weather that produced violent thunderstorms and torrents of rain, the hot, humid days when even the birds seemed lethargic, and the gray winter days when a fire in the fireplace and a cup of hot soup were the best she could ask of life.

He shrugged. "Home is family, not a place. I've got some aunts and uncles in Texas, a whole herd of cousins, but no one as close to me as Mom. I can always visit Texas if I feel the need."

He loved his mother, and was unabashed about it. Lilah swallowed, hard. Her own mother had died when she was five, but she cherished the few memories she had of the woman who had been the center of life in the isolated little house.

"What about you?" he asked. "Are you from here originally?"

"I was born in this house. I've lived here all my life."

He gave her a quizzical look, and she knew what he was thinking. Most babies were born in a hospital, and had been for the last fifty years. She was obviously younger than that, but too old to have been part of the birth-at-home fashion that was making a comeback in some sections.

"Didn't your daddy have time to get her to the hospital?"

"She didn't want a hospital." Was now the time to explain that her mother had been a folk healer, like her? That she too had seen the bursts of color that surrounded people, and taught her daughter what they meant, how to read them? That she had known everything would be all right, and thus hadn't seen any purpose in spending their hard-earned money on a hospital and doctor she didn't need?

"That was one tough lady," he said, shaking his head. A small smile curved his mouth. "I delivered a baby when I was a rookie. Scared the hell out of me, and the mother wasn't too happy, either. But we got through it, and they were both okay" The smile turned into a grin. "My bedside manner must have been a tad off, though; she didn't name the baby after me. As I recall, her exact words were: 'No offense, but I never want to see you again for the rest of my life! "

Lilah threw back her head on a gusty laugh. She could just see a young, inexperienced rookie deputy, sweating and panicky, delivering a baby. "What happened? Did the baby come early, or just fast?"

"Neither. West Texas does get snow, and that was one of the times. The roads were in really bad shape. She and her husband were on the way to the hospital, but their car slid off the road into a drift not a mile from their house, so they walked back home and called for help. I was in the area, and I had a four-wheel drive, but by the time I got to their house the weather was even worse, so bad I wouldn't risk the drive." He rubbed his ear. "She cussed me, called me every name I'd ever heard before, and a few that I hadn't. She wanted something for the pain, and I was the one keeping her from getting it, so she made sure I suffered right along with her."

His grin invited her to laugh at the image his words conjured. Lilah snickered as she checked on the biscuits. "What about her husband?"

"Useless. Every time he came around he got an even worse cussing than I did, so he stayed out of sight. I'm telling you, that was one unhappy lady."

"How long did her labor last?"

"Nineteen hours and twenty-four minutes," he promptly replied. "The longest nineteen hours and twenty-four minutes in the history of the world, according to her. She swore she'd been in labor at least three days."

Under the amusement in his tone was a thread of ... joy. She tilted her head, wondering if she read him correctly. "You liked it." The words weren't quite a question.

He laughed. "Yeah, I did. It was exciting, and funny, and amazing as hell. I've seen puppies and calves and foals being born, but I've never felt anything like when that baby slid into my hands. By the way, it was a girl. Jackson just didn't seem to suit her."

His aura was glowing now with more green in the mixture, shot through with joyful yellow. Lilah no longer had to wonder when she would fall in love with him. She did in that moment, something inside her melting, growing hotter. She knew her own aura would be showing pink, and she blushed, even though she knew he couldn't see it.

She felt trembly, and had to sit down. This was momentous. She'd never thought she would love the way others did, not romantically. She loved many people and many things, but not like this. Always, mixed in with her feelings, was the knowledge that she was set apart from them, a caretaker rather than a partner. Even with Pops she'd been the rock on which he leaned. But Jackson was a strong man, both mentally and physically. He didn't need anyone to take care of him; rather, he did the caring.

If she hadn't been able to see his aura, she would eventually have loved him anyway. But she could see it, and she knew the essence of the man. That, and her own pre-cognitive recognition of him as her mate, destroyed her sense of caution. She wanted to throw herself into his arms and let him do whatever he wanted. Instead she got up and checked the biscuits.

She stood there with the oven door open, letting heat escape, staring blindly at the biscuits. Jackson came up behind her. "Perfect," he said with approval.

She blinked. The biscuits were a golden brown, perfectly risen. She had a good hand with biscuits, or so Pops had always said. She took a deep breath, and, using a dishcloth, took the hot pan out of the oven and set it on a cooling rack.

"Why does Vargas think you're a witch?"

That brought her to earth with a thud. The change in his tone was subtle, but there: He was the sheriff, and he wanted to know if anyone in his county was practicing witchcraft.

"Several reasons, I suppose." She turned to face him, her expression cool and unreadable. "I live alone out in the woods, I seldom go into town, I don't socialize. The witch rumor started when I was in fourth grade, I think."

"Fourth grade, huh?" He leaned against the cabinet, blue gaze sharp on her face. "I guess he'd been watching too many Bewitched reruns."

She lifted one eyebrow and waited.

"So you don't cast spells, or dance naked in the moonlight, or anything like that?"

"I'm not a witch," she said plainly. "I’ve never cast a spell, though I might dance naked in the moonlight, if the notion took me."

"Do tell." The gaze warmed, and moved slowly down her body. "Call me if you need a dancing partner."

“I’ll do that."

He looked up, met her eyes, and as simply as that, there was no longer any need for caution.

"Are you hungry?" he asked, moving closer, stroking one finger up her bare arm.

"No."

"So the biscuits and beef stew can wait?"

"They can."

He took the dishcloth and set the pan of stew off the eye. "Will you go to bed with me, then, Lilah Jones?"

"I will."

6

Lilah lit the lamp in her bedroom and turned it low. The storm and heavy rain made the room as dark as night, lit briefly by the flashes of lightning. Jackson seemed to fill the small room, his shoulders throwing a huge shadow over the wall. His aura, visible even in the low light, pulsated with that deep, clear red again, the color of passion and sensuality.

He began unbuttoning his shirt, and she turned back the bedcovers, neatly folding the quilt and plumping the pillows. Her bed looked small, she thought, though it was a double. It was certainly too small for him. Perhaps she should see about getting a larger one, though she wasn't certain how long he would use hers. That was the problem with the flashes of precognition; they told her facts, but not circumstances. She knew only that Jackson would be her lover, and her love. She had no idea if he would love her in return, if they would be together forever or only this one time.

"You look nervous." Despite the sharpness of his desire, which she could plainly see, his voice was quiet. His shirt was unbuttoned but he hadn't yet removed it. Instead he was watching her, his cop's eyes seeing too much.

"I am," she admitted.

"If you don't want to do this, just say so. No hard feelings—well, except for one place," he said wryly.

"I do want to do this. That's why I'm nervous." Looking him in the eye, she unfastened her shorts and let them drop, then began unbuttoning her shirt. "I've never been so ... attracted to anyone before. I'm always cautious, but—" She shook her head. "I don't want to be cautious with you."

He shrugged the shirt off and let it drop to the floor. Lamplight gleamed on his shoulders, delineating the smooth, powerful muscles, and the broad chest shadowed with dark hair. Lilah inhaled deeply through her nose, feeling the warmth of arousal spread through her. She forgot what she was doing, just stood there looking at him, greedily drinking in the sight of her man undressing.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned forward to pull off his boots. Now she could admire the deep furrow of his spine, the rippling muscles in his back. Her heartbeat picked up in speed, and she got even warmer.

The boots thunked on the wooden floor. He stood and unfastened his pants, let them drop, and pushed down his shorts. Totally naked, he stepped out of the circle of clothing and turned to face her.

Oh, my.

She must have said the words aloud, breathing them in hunger and lust and maybe even some bit of fear, because he laughed as he came to her, brushing aside her stalled hands and finishing the job of unbuttoning her shirt. He put his hands inside the shirt and smoothed them over her shoulders and down her arms, slipping the shirt off so easily she scarcely knew when it left. She wasn't paying attention to her clothing anyway, only to the jutting penis that brushed her belly when he moved.

She wrapped her hands around it, lightly stroking, exploring, delighting in the heat and hardness and textures, so different from her own body. Now it was he who sucked in a breath, his eyes closing as he stilled for a moment. Then he moved even closer, pushing his hands inside her panties and gripping the globes of her bottom as he pulled her to him. She had to release his penis and she made a sound of ... disappointment? Impatience? Both. But there was reward in the pressure of his hard, hairy chest on her breasts, in the rasping sensation to her nipples. Her entire body seemed to go boneless, melting into him, curving to fit his contours.

His breathing was ragged. "Let's get you naked so I can look at you," he muttered, releasing her bottom long enough to push her panties down her thighs. She wiggled until they dropped to her feet, and his breathing caught on a groan.

"God! You're a natural-born tease, aren't you?" He pulled her up on her toes, welding her to him.

"Am I?" She had never thought about teasing a man before, never wanted to; but if what she was doing was teasing him, then that was only fair, because she was driving herself crazy, too. The feel of their bare bodies brushing together was so delicious she wanted to moan. She kept moving against him, rubbing her nipples against his chest and turning them into hard, aching peaks.

He stroked his hands over her bottom and back, his hands so hot and rough she wanted to purr. Then one hand went lower, curving under her bottom, and his fingers dipped between her legs. She gasped, arching into him as an almost electric sensation sparked through her. One finger explored deeper, slipping a little way into her. A soft, wild noise erupted from her throat, and she all but climbed him, one leg wrapping around him as she levered herself up so he could have better access.

Panting, she buried her face in his throat, clinging for dear life while she waited in agony for him to deepen the caress. Slowly, so slowly, that big finger pressed deeper and she rocked under the impact. That wild little noise sounded again, and her hips surged, trying to take more of his finger. Pleasure and tension coiled in her, tighter and tighter, until it was pain and something more, something beyond anything she had imagined.

"Not yet," he said urgently. "Don't come yet." He turned and half-fell with her onto the bed, cradling her against the full impact of his weight as he landed on top of her. With a twist of his hips he settled between her thighs, and his erection prodded at her folds, briefly seeking her entrance before finding it and pressing inward. Her entire body contracted, tightening around that thick intrusion, though she couldn't tell whether her body's reaction was in welcome or an effort to limit the depth of his penetration.

His hips recoiled, his buttocks tightened, and he pushed deeper, deeper, until her inner resistance was gone and in one long slide he was all the way inside her.

She would have screamed, but her lungs were compressed with shock and she could barely breathe, much less scream. Her vision blurred and darkened. She hadn't realized. . . . His penis felt almost unbearably hot inside her, burning and stretching her. She ached deep inside, where he was.

He lifted up on his elbows, panting, the expression in his blue eyes both incredulous and ferociously intent. "Lilah . . . God, I can't believe this— Are you a virgin?"

"Not now." Desperately she clutched his buttocks, her back arching as she tried to take him deeper. "Please. Oh, God, Jackson, please!" She bucked her hips at him, her head thrown back as she wrestled with the almost savage pleasure that held her on the edge of release. He was still hurting her, but her entire body was throbbing with a need that overrode any pain. She wanted him deep, she wanted him hard, she wanted him to pound into her and hurl her over that edge.

He gave in to her sensual imploring. "Shhh," he soothed, though his voice was rough with his own need. "Easy, darlin'. Let me help ..." He reached between their bodies, his callused fingertips finding the bud of her clitoris and gently pinching it up. Again and again he squeezed it, catching it between two of his fingers, and with a sharp cry she imploded, her body twisting and heaving in the paroxysm of climax.

A harsh sound tore from his throat. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging into her buttocks, and thrust hard, driving into her so fiercely the bed thudded against the wall. He climaxed convulsively, grinding down on her for long seconds before collapsing, shaking, on top of her.

She wrapped her arms around his sweaty shoulders and held on tight, partly to comfort him in the aftermath and partly to anchor herself. She felt as if she would fly into a hundred pieces if she let him go. Tears burned her eyelids, though she didn't know why. Her heart still galloped in a mad race to nowhere and her thoughts swam, a kaleidoscope of impressions and wishes and disbelief.

She hadn't known making love would be so hot, so uncontrolled. She had expected something slow and sweet, building to ecstasy, not that headlong dash into the fire.

His heart pounded against her breast, gradually slowing, as did his breathing. His weight crushed her into the mattress. Her thighs were still spread to accommodate him, and he was still inside her, though smaller and softer now.

Now that the storm within was over, she became aware again of the storm without. Lightning cracked so close by that the thunder rattled the entire house, and rain drummed on the roof, but that was nothing compared to what had just gone on in her bed. Storms came and went, but her entire life had just been changed.

Finally he lifted his head. His dark hair was matted with sweat, his expression strained and empty, the expression of release. "Okay." His voice sounded rusty, as if his vocal cords didn't want to work. "When you said 'not now’ did you mean that you didn't want to talk, or that you had been a virgin until then, but now you weren't?"

She cleared her throat. "The second choice." Her own voice sounded rusty, too.

"Holy hell." He let his head drop again. "I never expected— Damn it, Lilah, that's something you should tell a man."

She moved her hands over his shoulders, closing her eyes in delight at the feel of his warm, sleek skin under her palms. "Things happened kind of fast. I didn't have a lot of time to consider the shoulds and should nots."

"There are no should nots, in this case."

"What would you have done differently, if you'd known?"

He considered that, and sighed against her shoulder. "Hell, probably nothing. There's no way in hell I would have stopped. But if I'd known, I'd have tried to slow things down, and given you more time."

"I couldn't have stood it," she said starkly. "Not one minute more."

"Yes you could. You will. And you'll like it."

If that was a threat, it failed miserably. A tingle of excitement shot through her, sending a spark of life into her exhausted muscles. She wiggled a little. "When?"

"God," he muttered. "Not right this minute. Give me an hour."

"Okay, an hour."

His head came up again and he gave her a long, level look. "Before we get carried away again, don't you think we need to talk about birth control? Specifically, our lack of it? I doubt you're on the pill, and I don't generally carry rubbers around with me."

"No, of course I'm not on the pill, but I won't get pregnant."

"You can't be sure."

"I just finished my period two days ago. We're safe."

"Famous last words."

She sighed. She knew she wouldn't get pregnant, though she didn't know how to explain to him how she knew. She wasn't certain, herself. It wasn't a flash of precognition, at least not like the usual flash. It was more a sense than a knowing, but there wasn't a pregnancy in her immediate future. Next month, maybe, but not now.

She sighed. "If you're so worried, then we won't do this again, all right?"

He regarded her for a minute, then grinned. "Some chances," he said, leaning down to kiss her, "are just meant to be taken."

7

They heard the outboard motor not long after dawn, when the sun had just turned the eastern sky a brilliant gold. The storms of the night had lasted longer than expected, until almost three o'clock in the morning, but now the morning sky was absolutely cloudless.

"Sounds like the cavalry is arriving," Lilah said, tilting her head to listen.

"Son of a bitch," Jackson said mildly. "I was hoping rescue would take a little longer." He took a sip of coffee. "Do I look like an enraged, frustrated sheriff who was left stranded by a turnip-brain two-bit thug, or a man who's had a night-long orgy and whose legs are as limp as noodles?"

She pretended to study him, then shook her head. "You could use some practice on the enraged and frustrated look."

"That's what I thought." Putting his cup down on the table, he stretched his arms over his head and gave her a lazy, contented grin. "Instead of arresting Thaniel, I may give him a commendation."

"What are you going to arrest him for?" she asked in surprise. "I told you I'm not pressing charges."

"Whether or not you do, he stole two boats, not just yours. What happens depends on what he's done with Jerry Watkins's boat, and what Jerry wants to do about it. If Thaniel was smart, he left the boats at the launch ramp, but then again, if he was smart he wouldn't have taken them in the first place."

"If he left them out, the amount of rain we had last night would have sunk them," Lilah pointed out. "It takes a lot of rain to swamp a boat, but I think we had enough to do the job, don't you?"

"Probably." Getting up from the table, he walked into the living room and looked out the window. "Yep, it's the cavalry."

Lilah stood beside him and watched the boat carrying two deputies approach her small dock. The river was high and muddy after the night's storms, so high her dock lacked only a few inches being underwater. They carefully tied the boat to the post and stepped out, both wearing Kevlar vests and carrying shotguns. They cautiously looked around.

Jackson quickly bent and kissed her, his mouth warm and lingering. The look he gave her was full of regret. "I’ll come back as soon as I can," he said, keeping his voice pitched low. "I doubt it'll be today, and whether or not I can make it tomorrow depends on how much damage the storms did, and if there are any power outages or cleanup to do."

"I'll be here," she said, her manner calm. She smiled. "I have no way of going anywhere, without my boat."

"I'll either get it back, or I'll make damn certain Thaniel buys you a new one," he promised, and kissed her again. Then he picked up his vest and shotgun, which he had placed by the front door in anticipation of his "rescue," and walked out on the front porch.

Both of the deputies visibly relaxed when they saw him. "You okay, Sheriff?" the older of the two called.

"I'm fine, Lowell. But Thaniel Vargas won't be when I get my hands on him. He stole both the boat I was using, and Miss Jones's boat. But he'll wait; how much damage was there last night?"

Lilah stepped out on the porch behind him, because it would look strange if she didn't. "Good morning, Lowell." She nodded to the other deputy. "Alvin. I just made the sheriff some coffee; would y'all like a cup?" She saw Jackson's brows rise in surprise that she knew his deputies, but he didn't comment.

"No thanks, Lilah," Lowell answered. "We need to get on back. Thanks for offering, but I've drunk so much coffee since midnight I doubt I'll sleep for two days."

"The damage?" Jackson prompted, taking charge of the conversation again.

"Power was out over most of the county, but it's back on now all except for Pine Flats. A lot of trees went down, and there's roof damage to a bunch of houses, but only one actually went into a house, the LeCroy place out near Washington High School. Mrs. LeCroy was hurt pretty bad; she's in the hospital in Mobile."

“Any car wrecks?"

Lowell gave him a weary look. "More than you can count."

"Okay. Sorry I wasn't on hand to help."

"I'm just sorry it took us so long to get out here, but with the storms the way they were, only a fool would have gone out on the water."

"I didn't expect anybody to risk their lives coming after me. I was okay, just stranded."

"We weren't sure, what with Jo telling us she sent you here after Thaniel Vargas. But Thaniel seemed okay, not nervous or anything, and he played dumb, said he hadn't been up here and hadn't seen you."

"You saw him?" Jackson asked sharply.

"He helped us get a tree out of the highway. Anyway, we figured the storm had caught you. We didn't want to take any chances, since you could have run into some other kind of trouble out here, so we came looking."

Jackson shook his head. He never would have figured Thaniel capable of that much brass; maybe that thickheaded act was more of an act than fact. If so, he'd have to take Thaniel a lot more seriously than he had before. Walking down to the dock, he handed the shotgun to Alvin and stepped into the boat. "Well, let's go to work," he said. He turned and raised his hand. "Thanks for feeding me, Miss Jones."

"You're welcome," she called, smiling as she hugged her arms against the early morning chill. She waved them good-bye, a wave both deputies returned, then went back into the house.

Jackson settled onto a boat seat. "Y'all seem to know Miss Jones pretty well," he said, driven by curiosity.

"Sure." Lowell got behind the wheel. "We went to school together."

It was such a prosaic answer that Jackson felt like smacking himself in the head. Of course she had attended school; she hadn't lived her entire life marooned upriver. He had a mental image of a small, solemn Lilah sitting in that little flat-bottom boat, clutching her schoolbooks, being ferried back and forth in all kinds of weather.

Because he wanted to know, he asked, "How did she get back and forth to school?"

"Boat," Alvin said. "Her daddy brought her. He'd take her to the park ramp, closest to school. If the weather was good, he'd walk her the rest of the way. If it was raining, a teacher would meet them and give her a ride."

At least he wouldn't have to fret about that young Lilah being left alone at the boat docks, Jackson thought; her father had been concerned for her safety. Though why he would fret about something so long in the past was beyond him.

The trip downriver was much more leisurely than his risky dash up it the day before. The swollen river was full of trash, making caution necessary. Jackson hoped he'd see two boats tied to the shore when they got to the ramp, but no such luck.

"I wonder what Thaniel did with Jerry Watkins's boat," he growled.

"No telling," Lowell said. "The damn fool probably just turned it loose. Jerry will be fit to be tied; he set a store by that boat."

At least Jerry Watkins would have insurance on his boat; Jackson very much doubted Lilah would have it on hers. How would she replace it? He gave his bank account a quick mental check; one way or the other, Lilah would have another boat—by tomorrow, if he couldn't find hers. He couldn't bear the thought of her being completely stranded out there, though she was so damn competent he could see her hiking into town if necessary, even though it had to be twenty, maybe thirty miles around. But what if she got sick, or injured herself. She chopped her own wood, for God's sake. He went cold at the thought of an ax buried in her foot.

She had become more important to him, faster than anyone he had ever known. Twenty-four hours ago he hadn't known she existed. Within two hours of meeting her, he'd been in bed with her, and he'd spent the most erotic, exciting night of his life in her arms. He had climaxed so many times he doubted he'd get a hard-on for days. Then he thought of Lilah, waiting for him, and a sudden pooling of heat in his groin told him he had miscalculated. He jerked his thoughts back to the day's work before he embarrassed himself.

The Watkins truck was still sitting where Charlotte had parked it, boat trailer still hitched to it. At least a tree hadn't come down on the truck during the storms; that would be the final insult to a good deed. He looked around; there were some small branches scattered around the parking area, but nothing substantial.

Lowell eased the boat into the bank and both Jackson and Alvin climbed out. While Alvin went to the truck to back the trailer into the water, Jackson surveyed the area. Yesterday he'd been in too much of a hurry to think about details, but now his cop's eye swept the launch ramp, not missing a thing. The parking area was surprisingly large, given how isolated and little-used the launch ramp was. But . . . was it little-used? The area was free of weeds, showing that there was a good bit of traffic. The sandy dirt showed evidence of a lot of different tire tracks, more than he expected. That was strange, given what Jo had said about the best fishing being downriver.

Lowell and Alvin competently took the boat out of the water. They had come in two vehicles, one county car and then the truck pulling the boat, which Jackson assumed they had borrowed from the Rescue Squad. That made five vehicles he could count since yesterday afternoon: his, Thaniel's, Charlotte Watkins's, and now these two.

The rain had destroyed all but the deepest tracks, but he could still make out at least three more sets of tracks besides the ones he knew about.

Now, why would there be so much river traffic up here? The fishing wasn't good, and right past Lilah's the river got too shallow for boat traffic. He tried to think of a logical explanation for the tracks. Being in law enforcement, his first thought was that maybe drug dealers were meeting here, but he discarded that idea. It was too open, and though Old Boggy Road wasn't the busiest road in the world, there was occasional traffic on it. As if to prove it, at that moment a farmer drove by in a pickup truck, and he craned his neck to see what was going on.

No, drug dealers would find a place where they were less likely to attract attention. So ... who was coming here, and why?

He strolled over to Lowell and Alvin. "This little ramp gets a lot of use, doesn't it?"

“A fair amount," Lowell agreed.

"Why?"

They both gaped at him. "Why?" Alvin echoed.

"Yeah. Why does it get so much use? Only someone who doesn't know the river would come up here to fish."

To his surprise, both deputies shifted uncomfortably. Lowell cleared his throat. "I guess folks go to visit Lilah."

"Miss Jones?" Jackson clarified, wanting to make certain there wasn't another Lilah in the area.

Lowell nodded.

Looking around the area, Jackson said, "From all these tire ruts, I'd say she gets a lot of company." He tried to picture a steady stream of visitors to Lilah's isolated little house upriver, but just couldn't.

"Some," Lowell agreed. "A lot of women go to see her." He coughed. "And—uh, some men, too, I guess."

"Why is that?" A variety of wild reasons ran through his mind. Marijuana? He couldn't see Lilah growing marijuana, but the place was certainly isolated enough. He didn't let himself seriously consider that. Women didn't go to backwoods women for abortions anymore, either, so that was out. Nothing illegal, for sure, because his deputies obviously knew about whatever was going on up there, and had done nothing to stop it. The only thing he could think of that made sense was so ridiculous he couldn't believe it.

"Don't tell me she really is a witch!" He could just see it now, boat after boat making its way upriver for spells and potions. She had denied the witch thing, said she didn't know anything about spells, but in his experience people lied all the time. He dealt with serial liars on a daily basis.

"Nothing like that," Alvin said hastily. "She's kind of an old-timey healer. You know, she makes poultices and stuff."

Poultices and stuff. Healer. Of course. It was so obvious, Jackson wondered that he hadn't seen it. Relief spread through him. His imagination had been running wild, a sick feeling congealing in his gut. He had just found her, a woman who appealed to him on every level, and he couldn't bear the thought of her being involved in something shifty. He didn't know where this thing between him and Lilah was going, but he intended to follow it to the end.

"It's how she makes her living," Lowell said. "People buy herbs and things from her. A lot of folks go to her rather than a doctor, because she's so good at telling them what's wrong."

He wanted to grin. Instead he collected his vest and shotgun from the boat and said, "Well, let's go round up Thaniel Vargas. Even if we get the boats back and Jerry Watkins doesn't press charges against him, I want to scare about ten years off the bastard's life."

8

Thaniel Vargas was nowhere to be found. He had gone to ground somewhere, Jackson figured, waiting for the trouble to blow over. Because things were still kind of busy in the county, with the continuing power outage in Pine Flats and cleaning up from the storm, Jackson couldn't devote a lot of time or manpower to finding him.

More than anything, he wanted to get back upriver to Lilah's house, but it just wasn't possible that day. Besides the problems from the storm, the blue moon craziness was still in full force. At traffic court that day, a woman totally lost it and tried to get out of paying a speeding ticket by holding the judge hostage. Why anyone in her right mind would want to trade a simple fine of fifty bucks for a felony charge was beyond Jackson. Getting the courthouse settled down took several hours out of his day, hours when he needed to be somewhere else.

He got home at midnight that night, tired and disgruntled and aching with frustration. He wanted Lilah. He needed Lilah, needed the simple serenity of her, the quietness of her home that was such a contrast to his hectic days. They had known each other for such a short period of time, he wasn't certain that they had anything more than a one-night stand, brought about as much by circumstance as by mutual attraction. But he had been her first lover, her only lover; Lilah wasn't the type of woman to have a one-night stand. For her, making love meant something. It had meant something to him, too, something more than any of his other love affairs.

Lilah was special: honest, witty, with the bite of irony he enjoyed, and gutsy. She was also sexy as hell, with her well-toned, femininely muscled body and her cloud of curly hair that just begged to have his hands in it.

Though he was her first lover, she hadn't shrunk from anything he wanted to do. She had met him halfway in everything, enjoying what he did to her as much as he enjoyed doing it, and returning the favor. He couldn't imagine such uncomplicated joy ever getting boring.

Until now, his house had suited him perfectly. It was an older house, with high ceilings and cranky plumbing, but he'd had the main bathroom completely redone, and the kitchen, not that he was much on cooking. It had just seemed like a smart thing to do. His bed was big enough for him, not like Lilah's too-short, too-narrow bed. They'd had to sleep double-decker, when they slept—not a big sacrifice. He'd liked having her sprawled on top of him, when he wasn't on top of her.

But now his house felt. . . empty. And noisy. He hadn't realized until now how much noise a refrigerator made, or a water heater. The central air system blotted out the night's sounds of crickets and the occasional chirp of a bird.

He wanted Lilah.

He took a cold shower instead, and crawled into his big, cold, empty bed, where he lay awake, muscles aching, eyes burning with fatigue, and thought of that first searing, electric moment when he pushed into Lilah's body. That got him so hard he groaned, and he tried not to think about sex at all. But then her breasts came to mind, and he remembered the way her nipples had peaked in his mouth when he sucked her, and how she had moaned and squirmed when he went down on her.

Sweat sheened his body, despite the air conditioning. Swearing, he got out of bed and took another cold shower. He finally got to sleep about two o'clock, only to dream erotic dreams and wake up needing, wanting Lilah even more than before.

at eight twenty-one in the morning, Thaniel Vargas's body was found floating in the river. He was easily identified because his wallet was still stuffed in his jeans pocket, along with a can of chewing tobacco. If it hadn't been for his wallet, his own mother would have been hard-pressed to identify him, because he'd been shot in the face with a shotgun.

"I don't think he's been dead long," the coroner said, standing beside Jackson as the body was wrapped and loaded in a meat wagon. "The turtles and fish hadn't been at him much. As fast as the river's flowing, the current would have kept him on the surface, plus that dead branch his arm was tangled in gave him added buoyancy."

"How long?"

"It's just a guess, Jackson. I'd say . . . twelve hours or so. Hard to tell, when they've been in the water. But he was last seen night before last, so it couldn't have been much longer than half a day."

Jackson stared at the river, a sick feeling shredding his guts into confetti as he thought this through. He plainly remembered Lilah staring at Thaniel and saying, "You're dead," in that flat, unemotional tone that had been even more chilling than if she had screamed it at him. And now Thaniel was dead, from a shotgun blast. Lilah had a shotgun. Had Thaniel gone back to her house yesterday, or even last night? Had she made good on her threat, if it had indeed been one?

That was the best-case scenario, that Lilah had been forced to defend herself, or even that she had shot Thaniel at first sight. He didn't like it, but he could understand if a woman alone shot first and asked questions later when a thug who had been shooting at her the day before came back for more target practice. He doubted the district attorney would even indict under those circumstances.

Worst-case scenario, however, was the possibility that Lilah was lying in a pool of blood at her house, wounded or even dead. The thought galvanized him, sending pure panic racing through his bloodstream.

"Hal, I need that boat!" he roared at the captain of the Rescue Squad, referring to the boat they had used to retrieve Thaniel's body from the river. He was already striding toward the boat as he yelled.

Hal looked up, his homely face showing only mild surprise. "Okay, Sheriff," he said. "Anything I can help you with?"

"I'm going up to Lilah Jones's place. If Thaniel went back to shoot up the place again, she might be hurt." Or dead. But he didn't let himself dwell on that. He couldn't, and still function.

"If she's hurt, she'll need medical attention, and transport. I'll call for another boat and follow you." Hal unclipped the radio from his belt and rapped out instructions.

The Rescue Squad boats were built for stability, not speed, which was a good thing in the roiling river, with all the broken limbs and debris floating downstream, but Jackson still cursed the lack of speed. He needed to get to Lilah. Desperation gnawed at him, tearing at him with the knowledge that, if she had been shot, if she still lived, every second help was delayed could mean she wouldn't survive. He knew gunshot wounds; damn few of them were immediately fatal. A head or heart shot were about the only ones that could kill on contact, and that wasn't guaranteed.

He couldn't think of her lying bleeding and helpless, her life slowly ebbing away. He couldn't. And yet he couldn't stop, because his experience gave him graphic knowledge. Images rolled through his mind, an endless tape that made him sicker and sicker.

"Please. God, please." He heard himself praying aloud, saying the words into the wind.

Getting to Lilah's house took forever. He had started out much farther down the river than from the ramp on Old Boggy Road. He had to dodge debris, and a couple of times the boat shuddered over submerged limbs. The engine stalled the last time, but it restarted on the first try If it hadn't, he probably would have jumped into the river and swam the rest of the way.

At last the house came into view, nestled under the trees. Heart pounding, he searched for any sign of life, but the morning was still and quiet. Surely Lilah would have come out on the porch when she heard the outboard motor, if she was there. But where else could she be? She had no means of transportation.

"Lilah!" he yelled. "Lilah!" She had to be there, but he found himself hoping she wasn't, hoping she had gone for a walk in the woods, or borrowed a boat from some of the multitude who evidently found their way to her house for folk remedies. He hoped—God, he hoped almost anything at all had taken her away from the house, rather than think she didn't come out on the porch because she was lying somewhere dead or dying.

He nosed the boat up to the dock and tied it to the post. "Lilah!"

Boots thudding, he raced up the dock just as he had two days before, but the adrenaline burn he'd felt then was nothing compared to the inferno he felt now, as if he might burst out of his skin.

He leaped onto the porch, bypassing the steps. The windows on this side of the house were intact, he noted. He wrenched open the screen door and turned the knob of the main door; it was unlocked, and swung inward.

He stepped into the cool, dim house, his head thrown up as he sniffed the air. The house smelled as before: fragrant and welcoming, the faint odor of biscuits lingering, probably from last night's supper. The windows were up and pristine white curtains fluttered in the slight morning breeze. No odor of death hung like a miasma, nor could he detect the flat, metallic smell of blood.

She wasn't in the house. He went through it anyway, checking all four rooms. The house seemed undisturbed.

He went outside, circling the house, looking for any signs of violence. Nothing. Chickens clucked contentedly, pecking at bugs. Birds sang. Eleanor waddled out from under the porch, still fat with kittens. He stooped to pet her, his head swiveling as he checked every detail of his surroundings. "Where is she, Eleanor?" he whispered. Eleanor purred, and rubbed her head against his hand.

"Lilah!" he roared. Eleanor started, and retreated under the porch again.

"I'm coming."

The voice was faint, and came from behind the house. He jerked around, staring into the trees. The woods were almost impenetrable; he could be right on her, and not be able to see her.

"Where are you?" he called, striding rapidly to the back of the house.

"Almost there." Two seconds later she emerged from the trees, carrying a basket—and the shotgun. "I heard the outboard," she said as he reached her, "but I was a couple of hundred yards away and—uumph."

The rest of her words were lost under the fierce assault of his mouth. He hauled her up against him, unable to hold her close enough. He wanted to meld her into his very flesh, and never let her go. She was okay. She was alive, unharmed, warm and vibrant in his arms. The wind blew her soft curls around his face. He drank in her smell, fresh and soft, womanly. She tasted the same, her mouth answering his. He heard the basket drop to the ground, and the shotgun, then her arms were around him and she was clinging tightly to him.

Need roared through him like an inferno, born of his desperate fear and relief. He tore at her clothes, stripping down her jeans and panties and lifting her out of them.

"Jackson?" Her head lolled back, her breath coming in soft pants. "Let's go inside—"

"I can't wait," he muttered savagely, lifting her up and backing her against a tree. Her legs came up and locked around his hips as she automatically sought to balance herself. He wrenched his pants open, freed himself, and shoved into her. She was hot and damp and tight, her inner flesh enveloping and clasping. She wasn't ready for him; he heard her gasp, but he couldn't stop. He pulled back and thrust again and he went all the way in this time. On the fifth thrust he began coming, his body heaving against her as he spurted for what seemed like forever, until his head swam and his vision blurred and darkened, and still the spasms took a long time to die down, small bursts of sensation rocking him. He sank heavily against her, pinning her to the tree. His legs trembled, and his lungs heaved. "I love you," he heard himself muttering. "Oh, God, I was so scared."

Her hands were clasping his head, stroking, trying to soothe him. "Jackson? What's wrong? What happened?"

He couldn't speak for a minute, still in shock from what he had said. The words had just boiled out, without thought. He hadn't said those words to any woman since his high school days, when he fell in love on a regular basis.

But they were true, he realized, and that shocked him almost as much as saying them. He loved her. He, Jackson Brody was in love. It had happened too fast for him to come to terms with it, to think about it as they gradually became enmeshed in each other's lives. Logic said he couldn't possibly love her after so short a time; emotion said to hell with logic, he loved her.

"Jackson?"

He tried to pull away from that emotional brink, to function as a sheriff instead of a man. He had come here because a man had been murdered, and somewhere along the line he had forgotten that and focused, instead, on the woman at the center of the situation. But he was still inside her, still dazed from the force of his orgasm, and all he could do was sink more heavily against her, pressing her into the tree trunk. Birds sang around him, insects buzzed, the river murmured. Bright morning sunlight worked its way through the thick canopy of leaves, dappling their skin.

"I'm sorry," he managed to say. "Did I hurt you?" He knew he had entered her far too roughly, and she hadn't been aroused and ready.

"Some." She sounded remarkably peaceful. “At first. Then I enjoyed it."

He snorted. "You couldn't have enjoyed it very much. I think I lasted about five seconds." The sheriff still hadn't made an appearance; the man held full sway.

"I enjoyed your pleasure." She kissed his neck. "It was actually rather . . . thrilling."

"I was scared to death," he admitted baldly.

"Scared? About what?"

Finally, belatedly, the sheriff lifted his head. Jackson discovered he couldn't question her, or even talk about Thaniel, while in his present position. Gently he withdrew from her and eased his weight back, holding her steady while her legs slipped from around his hips and she was once more standing on her own two feet.

"We'd better hurry," he said, picking up her clothes and handing them to her, then pulling up his own pants and getting everything tucked back in place. "The Rescue Squad could be here any minute."

"Rescue Squad?" she echoed, brows lifting in surprise.

He waited until she was dressed. "I was afraid you'd been hurt."

"Why would I be hurt?" She still looked totally bewildered.

As a man, he hated having to question her. As a sheriff, he knew he had to do it or resign today. "Thaniel Vargas's body was found this morning."

A stillness came over her, and she looked at him but somehow she wasn't seeing him, her gaze turned inward. "I knew he'd die," she finally said.

"He didn't die,' Jackson corrected. "He was murdered. Shot in the face with a shotgun."

She came back from wherever she had gone, and her green eyes focused sharply on him. "You think I did it," she said.

9

“I was afraid he'd come back and y'all started shooting at each other again. I was afraid I'd find you dead, or dying." His voice was remarkably calm, considering how shaken he felt.

She shook her head. "I haven't seen Thaniel since day before yesterday but I don't have any way to prove it."

"Lilah." He gripped her shoulders, shaking her a little to get her attention. "You seem to think I'm going to take you in for murder. Baby, even if you did kill him, after what happened no D.A. would prosecute, at least not the D.A. here. But I don't think you could murder anyone, not even Thaniel, and he was one worthless jackass. If you say you didn't kill him, then I believe you." The man was speaking again. The sheriff struggled to regain his detachment, though he thought it was a losing cause. He would never be detached when it came to Lilah.

She stared at him, a sense of wonderment coming to her eyes. In a flash of intuition he knew then she hadn't believed him when he blurted out that he loved her. Why should she? Men said "I love you" all the time in the heat of passion. And they had known each other less than two days. He was acutely aware that she hadn't said anything about love in return, but that would wait.

"But one thing keeps eating at me. Day before yesterday, you looked at him and said, 'You're dead,' and damn near scared him to death right then." He didn't ask anything, didn't try to form her answer in any way. He wanted her response to come from her own thoughts.

To his surprise, she went pale. She looked away, staring at the river. "I just—knew," she finally said, her voice stifled.

"Knew?"

"Jackson, I—" She half-turned away from him, then turned back. She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. "I don't know how to explain it."

"In English. That's my only requirement."

"I just know things. I get flashes."

"Flashes?"

Again the helpless gesture. "It isn't a vision, not exactly. I don't really see anything, I just know. Like intuition, only more."

"So you had one of these flashes about Thaniel?"

She nodded. "I looked at him when I came out on the porch and all of a sudden I knew he was going to die. I didn't know he was going to get killed. Just . . . that he wasn't going to be here anymore."

He rubbed the back of his neck. In the distance he could hear the droning of an outboard motor: the Rescue Squad was getting close.

"I've never been wrong," she said, almost apologetically.

"No one else knows what you said." His voice was as somber as he felt. "Just me."

She bent her head, and he saw her worrying her lower lip. She saw his dilemma. Then she raised her head and squared her shoulders. "You have to do your job. You can't keep this to yourself, and be a good sheriff."

If he hadn't already known he loved her, that moment would have done it for him. And suddenly he knew something else. "Are these 'flashes' the reason Thaniel thought you're a witch?"

She gave him a rueful little smile. "I wasn't very good at hiding things when I was young. I blabbed."

"Scared him, huh? And all these people who come to you for treatment—you just look at them and have flashes about what's wrong with them?"

"Of course not," she said, startled. Then she blushed. "That's something else."

The blush both intrigued and alarmed him. "What kind of something else?"

"You'll think I'm a freak," she said in dismay.

"But a sexy freak. Tell me." A little bit of the sheriff was in his tone, a quiet authority.

"I see auras. You know, the colors that everyone has around them. I know what the different colors mean, and if someone's sick I can see where and know what to do, whether or not I can help them or they need to see a doctor."

Auras. Jackson wanted to sit down. He'd heard all that New Age mumbo-jumbo, but that's just what it was, as far as he was concerned. He'd never seen a nimbus of color around anyone, never seen proof such a thing existed.

"I haven't told anyone about the auras," she said, her voice shaking. "They just think I'm a ... a medicine woman, like my mother. She saw them, too. I remember her telling me, when I was little, what the different colors meant. That's how I learned my colors." She gave a quick look at the river, where the boat had come into view. Tears welled in her eyes. "You have the most beautiful aura," she whispered. "So clean and rich and healthy. I knew as soon as I saw you that—"

She broke off, and he didn't pursue it. The Rescue Squad boat had reached her dock, and the two men in it were getting out. One was Hal, who had come along himself to take charge if the Squad was needed, and the other was a tall, thin man Jackson recognized as a medic, though he didn't know his name.

Lilah did, though. She left Jackson's side and walked out of the trees into the open, her hand lifted in a wave.

Both men waved back. "Glad to see you're okay," Hal called as they started up the dock.

"Just fine, thanks. Thaniel hadn't been here, though."

"Yeah, we know." Hal looked past Lilah to Jackson. "You left about a minute too soon, Sheriff. I still can't believe it."

"Believe what?"

"Jerry Watkins drove up just as you went out of sight. We were just getting the boat in the water. I tell you, Jerry looked like hell, like he'd been on a week-long bender. He looked at the body bag in the meat wagon and just broke down, crying like a baby. He's the one killed Thaniel, Sheriff. He jumped Thaniel about his boat, and you know how Thaniel was, too stupid to know when to back down. He told Jerry he sunk the son of a bitch. Beg pardon, Lilah. Jerry set a store by that boat. The way he tells it, he lost all control, grabbed the shotgun from his truck, and let Thaniel have it."

After years in law enforcement, little could surprise Jackson. He wasn't surprised now, because dumber things had happened. And though the full moon was waning, weird things would continue to happen for another couple of days. He did feel as if he'd dropped the ball, however. He should have thought of Jerry. Everyone who knew Jerry knew how he loved that boat. Instead he'd been so focused on Lilah that he hadn't been able to see anything else.

"He sat down on the ground and put his hands on his head for your deputies to arrest him. Guess he saw that on television," Hal finished.

Well, that was that.  Thaniel's murder was solved before it had time to become a real mystery. But one little detail struck him as strange. Jackson looked at the medic. "If you knew Lilah was okay, that Thaniel hadn't been killed in a fight here, why did you come along?"

"He came to see me," Lilah said. She shook her head. "I can't help you, Cory. You've got gallstones. You're going to have to see a doctor."

"Ah, hell, Lilah, I haven't even told you my symptoms!"

"You don't have to tell me, I can see how you look. It hurts like blue blazes every time you eat, doesn't it? Were you afraid you were having heart problems, maybe?"

Cory made a face. "How'd you know?"

"Just a hunch. Go see that doctor. There's a good gas-tro specialist in Montgomery. I'll give you his name."

"Okay," he said glumly. "I was hoping it was an ulcer and you could give me something for it."

"Nope. Surgery."

"Damn."

"Well, that's taken care of," Hal said. "We'd better get back, we still got some more work to do in Pine Flats. Will you be along soon, Jackson?"

"In a little while," Jackson said. From the way Hal winked, he figured the older man had cottoned on to the fact that there was something between him and Lilah. Frankly, Jackson didn't care if the whole county knew.

He and Lilah watched the two men get back into the boat and head back downriver. Jackson squinted his eyes in the bright sun. "Auras, huh?" What the hell. If he believed she could have flashes of precognition, why not auras? If you loved someone, he thought, you accepted a lot of stuff that you never would have considered before. Privately he'd check on Cory's diagnosis from a doctor, just to make sure, but for some reason he figured Lilah had been right. Auras were as good a reason as anything.

She reached for his hand. "I told you that you have a beautiful aura. I probably would have loved you just because of what I saw in it. But I had another flash when I saw you the first time."

He closed his hand warmly around hers. "What did that one tell you?"

She gave him a somber look. "That you were going to be the love of my life."

He felt a little light-headed. Maybe it was just the culmination of a very stressful morning, but he remembered that feeling of dizziness the first time he'd seen her. "Didn't you say those flashes had never been wrong?"

"That's right." She rose on tiptoe and kissed him. "They're one-hundred-percent accurate."

He needed to get back to work. He needed to do a lot of things. But he didn't need to do them as much as he needed to hold her, so he wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, breathing in the essence of the love of his life, so happy he thought he might burst.

"We're going to do this up right," he said aloud. "The whole enchilada. Marriage. Kids."

"The whole enchilada," she agreed, and hand in hand they walked into the house.

White Out

1

It was going to snow.

The sky was low and flat, an ominous purplish gray that blended into and obscured the mountaintops, so that it was difficult to tell where the earth stopped and the sky began. The air had a sharp, ammonia smell to it, and the icy edge of the wind cut through Hope Bradshaw's jeans as if they were made of gauze instead of thick denim. The trees moaned under the lash of the wind, branches rustling and whipping, the low, mournful sound settling in her bones.

She was too busy to stand around staring at the clouds, but she was nevertheless always aware of them hovering, pressing closer. A sense of urgency kept her moving, checking the generator and making sure she had plenty of fuel handy for it, carrying extra wood into her cabin and stacking even more on the broad, covered porch behind the kitchen. Maybe her instincts were wrong and the snow wouldn't amount to any more than the four to six inches the weather forecasters were predicting.

She trusted her instincts, though. This was her seventh winter in Idaho, and every time there had been a big snow, she had gotten this same crawly feeling just before it. The atmosphere was charged with energy, Mother Nature gathering herself for a real blast. Whether caused by static electricity or plain old foreboding, her spine was tingling from an uneasiness that wouldn't let her rest.

She wasn't worried about surviving: she had food, water, shelter. This was, however, the first time Hope had gone through a big snow alone. Dylan had been here the first two years; after he died, her dad had moved to Idaho to help her take care of the resort. But her uncle Pete had suffered a heart attack three days ago, and her dad had flown to Indianapolis to be with his oldest brother. Uncle Pete's prognosis was good: the heart attack was relatively mild, and he had gotten to the hospital soon enough to minimize the damage. Her dad planned to stay another week, since he hadn't seen any of his brothers or sisters in over a year.

She didn't mind being alone, but securing the cabins was a lot of work for one person. There were eight of them, single-storied, some with one bedroom and some with two, sheltered by towering trees. There were four on one side of her own, much larger A-frame cabin, and four on the other side, the nine buildings curving around the bank of a picturesque lake that was teeming with fish. She had to make certain the doors and windows were securely fastened against what could be a violent wind, and water valves had to be turned off and pipes drained so they wouldn't freeze and burst when the power went off, which she had absolute faith would happen. Losing power wasn't a matter of if but when.

Actually, the weather had been mild this year; though it was December, there had been only one snow, a measly few inches, the remnants of which still lingered in the shaded areas and crunched under her boots. The ski resorts were hurting; their owners would welcome even a blizzard, if it left behind a good thick base.

Even the infamously optimistic slobber-hound, a golden retriever otherwise known as Tinkerbell even though he was neither female nor a fairy, seemed to be worrying about the weather. He stayed right behind her as she trudged from cabin to cabin, sitting on the porch while she worked inside, his tail thumping on the planks in relieved greeting when she reappeared. "Go chase a rabbit or something," she told him after she almost stumbled over him as she left the next to last cabin, but though his brown eyes lit with enthusiasm at the idea, he declined the invitation.

Those brown eyes were irresistible, staring up at her with love and boundless trust. Hope squatted down and rubbed behind his ears, sending him into twisting, whining ecstasy as he all but collapsed under the pleasure. "You big mutt," she said lovingly, and he responded to the tone with a swipe of his tongue on her hand.

Tink was five; she had gotten him the month after Dylan died, before her dad had come to live with her. The clumsy, adorable, loving ball of fuzz seemed to sense her sadness and had devoted himself to making her laugh with his antics. He smothered her with affection, licking whatever part of her was within reach, crying at night until she surrendered and lifted the puppy onto the bed with her, where he happily settled down against her, and the warmth of the little body in the night somehow made the loneliness more bearable.

Gradually the pain became less acute, her father arrived, and she was less lonely, and as he grew, Tink gradually distanced himself, moving from her bed to the rug beside it, then to the doorway, and finally down to the living room, as if he were weaning her from his presence. His accustomed sleeping spot now was on the rug in front of the fireplace, though he made periodic tours of the house during the night to make certain everything in his doggy world was okay.

Hope looked at Tink, and her lungs suddenly constricted, compressing as an enormous sense of panic seized her. He was five. Dylan had been dead five years! The impossibility of it stunned her, rocked her back. Hope stared, unseeing, at the dog, her eyes wide and fixed, her hand still on his head.

Five years. She was thirty-one, a widow who lived with her father and her dog, who hadn't been on a date in God, almost two years now, and there had been a grand total of only three dates anyway. There weren't any neighbors nearby, the motel kept her busy during the summer when travel was easier, and she made it a point not to get involved with any of the guests, not that she had met any with whom she wanted to get involved.

Stricken, she looked around as if she didn't recognize her surroundings. There had been moments before when the reality of Dylan's death hit hard, but this was different. This was like being kicked in the chest.

Five years. Thirty-one. The numbers kept echoing in her mind, chasing each other in circles like maddened squirrels. What was she doing here? She was living her life secluded in the mountains, so immersed in being Dylan Bradshaw's widow that she had forgotten to be herself, running the small, exclusive resort that had been Dylan's dream.

Dylans dream, not hers.

It had never been hers. Oh, she had been happy enough to come to Idaho with him, help him build his dream in the wilderness paradise, but her dream had been much simpler: a good marriage, kids, the kind of life her parents had enjoyed, piercingly sweet in its normalcy.

But Dylan was gone, his dream forever unfulfilled, and now hers was in danger too. She hadn't remarried, she had no children, and she was thirty-one.

"Oh, Tink," she whispered. For the first time she realized she might never remarry, might never have a family of her own. Where had the time gone? How had it slipped away, unnoticed?

As always, Tinkerbell sensed her mood and thrust himself closer to her, licking her hands, her cheek, her ear, almost knocking her down in his frenzy of sympathy. Hope grabbed him and regained her balance, laughing a little in spite of herself as she wiped away the slobber-hound's latest offering. "All right, all right, no more feeling sorry for myself. If I don't like what I've been doing, then change, right?"

His plumy tail wagged, his tongue lolled, and he grinned his doggy grin that said he approved of her speed in figuring out what she should do.

"Of course," she told him as she headed down the trail toward the last cabin, "I have others to consider. I can't forget Dad. After all, he sold his house and came out here because of me. It wouldn't be fair to uproot him again, to say, ‘Thanks for the support, but now it's time to move on.' And what about you, goofball? You're used to having plenty of room to roam, and let's face it, you aren't dainty."

Tink trotted after her, gamboling at her heels like an overgrown puppy, his ears pricked up as he listened to her tone. It was conversational, no longer sad, so his tail happily swished back and forth.

"Maybe I should just make an effort to get out more. The fact that I've only had three dates in five years could be my fault," Hope allowed wryly. "Let's face it, the drawback to living in a remote area is that there aren't many people around. Duhh."

Tink stopped dead, bright eyes fastening on a squirrel scampering across the path in front of them. Without even an apologetic look for abandoning her, he tore out in furious pursuit of the squirrel, barking madly. Clearing Idaho of the villainous squirrels was Tink's ambition in life; though he had never caught one, he never stopped trying. After fruitlessly trying to break him of the habit, fearing he would tangle with a rabid squirrel, Hope had given up the effort and instead made certain he always got his rabies vaccination.

The squirrel scrambled up the nearest tree and stopped just out of reach of Tink's lunges, chattering at him and spurring Tink to even more barking and jumping, as if he suspected the varmint was mocking him.

Leaving the dog to his fun, Hope went up the steps to the long front porch of the last cabin. Though the little resort had been Dylan's idea, his dream, going into one of the cabins always gave her a sense of pride. He had designed them, but she was the one who had decorated them, took care of them. The furnishings were different in each one, but similar in their simplicity and comfort. The walls were decorated with tasteful prints, rather than ratty deer heads bought at garage sales. The furniture was comfortable enough for a couple on a honeymoon and substantial enough for a hunting party.

She had tried to make each one feel like a home instead of a rented cabin, with rugs and lamps and books, as well as a fully equipped kitchen. There were radios but no televisions, because reception in the mountains was so spotty and most of the guests mentioned how peaceful their stay was without it. There was a television in Hope's cabin, but it pulled in only one station during good weather and none at all during bad. She was considering investing in a satellite dish, because the winters were terribly long and often boring, and she and her dad could play only so many games of checkers.

If she did, she thought, she might add an extra receiver or two so a couple of the cabins could have television service to offer as an option. Things couldn't stay the same; if she kept the resort, she would have to continually make changes and improvements.

Taking a wrench from her hip pocket, she turned the valve that shut off the water to the cabin, then set about draining the pipes. The cabins were heated electrically, so when the power went off, they would quickly become icy inside. Each cabin did have a fireplace, but if a blizzard came, she certainly wouldn't be able to battle her way from cabin to cabin, building fires and keeping them fed.

That accomplished, she secured the shutters over the windows and locked the door. Tink had given up on the squirrel and was waiting for her on the porch. "That's it," she told him. "All finished. Just in time too," she added, as a snowflake drifted past her nose. "C'mon, let's go home."

He understood the word "home" and leaped to his feet, panting eagerly. A snowflake drifted past his nose, and he snapped at it, then was off on another manic tear, running back and forth, jumping at snowflakes and trying to catch them. His expression invited Hope to laugh at him, and she did, then joined him in a snowflake chase that turned into a game of tag, and ended with her running and jumping through the falling snow like a five-year-old herself. By the time she reached the big cabin, she was exhausted, panting harder than Tink and giggling at his antics.

He reached the door before she did, of course, and as always he was impatient to get inside. He turned his head to bark at her, demanding she hurry and open the door. "You're worse than having a child," she said, leaning over him to turn the doorknob. "You can't wait to get out, and once you're out, you can't wait to get back in. You'd better enjoy the outdoors while you can, because if this snow gets as bad as I think it will, it'll be a couple of days before you can go for a run."

Logic made no impression on Tink. He merely wagged his tail harder, and when the door opened, he lunged through the widening crack, yipping a little as he trotted around the spacious, two-story great room, checking all the familiar scents before darting into the kitchen and out again, then coming over to Hope as if to say, "I've checked things out and everything's okay." She patted him, then shed her heavy shearling coat and hung it on the hall tree, sighing in relief at the immediate sense of freedom and coolness.

Her home was beautiful, she thought, looking around. Not grand, not luxurious, but definitely beautiful. The front of the A-frame was a wall of windows, giving a wonderful view of the lake and the mountains. A big rock fireplace soared the entire two stories, and twin ceiling fans hung from the exposed-beam ceiling, circulating the warm air that gathered at the top back to the ground floor. Hope had a green thumb, and luxurious ferns and other house-plants gave the interior of the house a lush freshness. The floor was wide wood planking, finished to a pale gold and covered with thick area rugs in rich shades of blue and green. Graceful curving stairs wound up to the second floor, and the white stair railing continued across the balcony. For Christmas she always wound lights and greenery up the stair banisters and across the balcony, and the effect was breathtaking.

There were two bedrooms upstairs—the master bed and bath and a smaller bedroom, which they had intended to use for a nursery—and a large bedroom downstairs off the kitchen. Her dad used the downstairs bedroom, saying the stairs were hard on his knees, but the truth was the arrangement gave them both more privacy. The kitchen was spacious and efficient, with more cabinet space than she would ever use, a cook island she loved, and an enormous side-by-side refrigerator-freezer that could hold enough food to feed an army. There was also a well-stocked pantry, a small laundry room, and a powder room, and after her dad had moved in, Hope had added a small full bath to connect to his bedroom.

The total effect was undeniably beautiful and comfortable, but every time the electricity went off, Hope wished they had made better decisions about what would or would not be hard-wired to the generator. The refrigerator, cooktop, and water heater were connected. To save money by buying a smaller generator, they had decided not to connect the heating unit, the lights, or any wall plugs except those in the kitchen. In a power outage, they had reasoned, the fireplace in the great room would provide enough heat. Unfortunately, without the ceiling fans working to keep the air circulated, most of the heat produced by the fireplace went straight to the second floor. The upstairs would be stifling hot, while the downstairs remained chilly. The situation was livable, but not comfortable, especially for any length of time.

Forget the satellite dish, she thought. The money would be better spent on a larger generator and some electrical rewiring.

She looked out the windows; though it was only three o'clock, the clouds were so heavy it looked like twilight outside. The snow was falling faster now, fat, heavy flakes that had already dusted the ground with white just in the short time she had been inside.

She shivered suddenly, though the house was perfectly comfortable. A big pot of beef stew would hit the spot, she thought. And if the electricity was off for a long time, well, she might get awfully tired of beef stew, but reheating a bowl of it in the microwave drained a lot less power from the generator than cooking a small meal from scratch each time she got hungry.

But maybe she was wrong. Maybe it wouldn't snow that much.

2

She wasn't wrong.

The wind began howling, sweeping down from the icy mountain-tops, and the snowfall grew steadily heavier. With nightfall, Hope could no longer see out the windows, so she opened the front door to peek out, and the savage wind slammed the door into her, almost knocking her down. Snow all but exploded into the great room. She couldn't see anything out there but a wall of white.

Panting,  she grabbed the door and braced all her

weight against it, forcing it shut. The wind seeped around

the edges in a high-pitched whine. Tink sniffed at her legs,

assuring himself she was okay, then barked at the door.

Hope pushed her hair out of her face and blew out a deep breath. That was a full-fledged blizzard, a complete white out, where the wind whipped the snow around and blotted out visibility. Her shoulder ached where the door had hit her, and snow melted on her polished floor. "I won't do that again," she muttered, going in search of a mop and towel to dry the floor.

As she was cleaning up the water, the lights dimmed, then flickered brightly again. Ten seconds later they went off.

Having expected it, she had a flashlight close to hand, and switched it on. For a moment the house was eerily silent, then the generator automatically switched on and in the kitchen the refrigerator hummed to life. Just that faint noise was enough to banish the alarming sense of being disabled.

Anticipating, Hope had put out the oil lamps. She lit the lamp on the mantel, then put the match to the dry kindling and rolled newspapers under the logs she had already laid. Small blue-and-yellow flames licked at the paper, then curled up the sticks of kindling. She watched the fire for a moment to make certain it had caught, then moved around lighting the other lamps, turning the wicks low so they didn't smoke. Normally she wouldn't have lit so many lamps, but normally she wasn't alone, either. She had never thought herself timid and she wasn't afraid of the dark, but something about being alone in a blizzard was a little unnerving.

Tink settled down on his rug, his muzzle resting on his front paws. Perfectly content, he closed his eyes.

"You shouldn't get so worked up," Hope advised the dog, and he responded by rolling onto his side and stretching out.

Television reception had been nonexistent all afternoon, and the radio was picking up mostly static. She had turned it off earlier but now switched it over to battery operation and turned it on again, hoping the reception was better. It wasn't. Sighing, she switched it off. Why, at this rate, it might be a couple of days before she learned there was a blizzard.

It was too early to go to bed; she felt as if she should be doing something, but didn't know what. Restlessly she prowled around, the shrill whistle of the wind getting on her nerves. Maybe a bath would help. She climbed the stairs, peeling out of her clothes as she went. Already the heat was intensifying upstairs, and because her bedroom door was open, that room was toasty

Instead of showering, she ran a tub of water and lolled in it, her blond hair pinned on top of her head and the mellow light of a lamp flickering over her. Her naked flesh gleamed in the water, oddly different in lamplight; the curves were highlighted and shadows deepened, so that her breasts looked more voluptuous, the hair between her legs darker and more mysterious.

It wasn't a bad body, for thirty-one, she thought as she inspected herself. In fact, it was a damn good body. Hard work kept her slim and toned. Her breasts weren't large, but they were high and well-shaped; her belly was flat, and she had a nice butt.

It was a body that hadn't had sex in five long years.

Immediately she winced away from the thought. As much as she had enjoyed making love with Dylan, on the whole she wasn't tormented by horniness. For a couple of years after his death she hadn't felt even the slightest flicker of sexual need. That had gradually changed, but not to the extent that she felt frustrated enough to do something about it. Now, however, her loins clenched with a sharp surge of need. Maybe the tub bath had been a mistake, the warm water lapping at her naked body too much like a touch, a caress.

Tears stung her eyes and she closed them, leaning back and sinking even deeper into the water, letting it envelop her. She wanted sex. Hard-thrusting, sweaty, heart-pounding sex. And she wanted to love again, to be loved again. She wanted that closeness, that warmth, to be able to reach out in the night and know she wasn't alone. She wanted a baby. She wanted to waddle around with bloated breasts and an extended belly, her bladder under constant pressure, feeling their child squirming within her.

Oh, she wanted.

She allowed five minutes for a pity party, then sniffed and briskly sat up, using her toes to open the drain. Standing, she pulled the curtains closed and turned on the shower, rinsing away both soap and the blues.

Maybe she didn't have a man, but she did have nice, thick flannel pajamas, and she put them on, reveling in their warmth and comfort. Flannel pajamas possessed the same powers of reassurance as a hot bowl of soup on a cold day, a subliminal "there, there."

After brushing her teeth and hair, moisturizing her face, and pulling on an extra-thick pair of socks, she felt considerably better. Indulging in a hot bath, the sniffles, and a bout of self-pity was something she hadn't done in a long time, and it had been way overdue. Now that the ritual was behind her, she felt ready to deal with a blizzard.

Tink was lying at the foot of the stairs, waiting for her. He wagged a greeting, then stretched out in front of the bottom step so she had to step over him. "You could move," she informed him, as she did on a regular basis. He never took the hint, assuming it was his right to lie wherever he wanted.

After the warmth of the upstairs, the downstairs felt chilly. She poked up the fire, then microwaved herself a cup of hot chocolate. With the chocolate, a book, and a small battery-operated reading light, she installed herself on the couch. Cushions behind her back and a throw over her legs added the perfect touch. Soothed, pampered, comfortable, she lost herself in the book.

The night hours drifted by. She dozed, woke, eyed the clock on the mantel: ten-fifty. She should go to bed, she thought, but getting up so she could lie down again seemed ridiculous. On the other hand, she had to get up anyway to tend the fire, which was low.

Yawning, she added a couple of logs to the fire. Tink came over to watch, and Hope scratched behind his ears. Suddenly he stiffened, his ears lifting, and a growl rumbled in his throat. He tore over to the front door and stood in front of it, barking furiously.

Something was out there.

She didn't know how Tink could hear anything over the howl of the wind, but she trusted the acuity of his senses. She had a pistol in the drawer of her nightstand, but that was upstairs and her father's rifle was much closer. Running into the bedroom, her socks sliding on the polished floor, she grabbed the rifle from its rack and the box of bullets from the shelf below it. Carrying both out into the great room where she could see, she racheted five bullets into place.

Between the wind and Tink's barking, she couldn't hear anything else. "Tink, quiet!" she commanded. "C'mere, boy." She patted her thigh, and with a worried look at the door, Tink trotted over to stand beside her. She stroked his head, whispering praise. He growled again, every muscle in his body tense as he shoved in front of her and pushed against her legs.

Was that a thump on the porch? Straining her ears, patting Tink so he would be quiet, she tilted her head and listened. The wind screamed.

Her mind raced, running through the possibilities. A bear? Normally they would be in their dens by now, but the weather had been mild. Cougar, wolf . . . they would avoid humans and a house, if possible; could a blizzard make them desperate enough for shelter that the shy, wary animals would ignore their instincts?

Something thumped against the door, hard. Tink tore away from her, charging at the door, barking his head off again.

Hope's heart was pounding, her hands sweating. She wiped her palms on her pajamas and gripped the rifle more securely. "Tink, be quiet!"

He ignored her, barking even louder as another thump came, this one hard enough to rattle the door. Oh, God, was it a bear? The door would probably hold, but the windows wouldn't, not if the animal was determined to get in.

"Help."

She froze, not certain she had heard the muffled word. "Tink, shut up!" she yelled, and the tone of her voice briefly silenced the dog.

She hurried over to the door, the rifle ready in her hands. "Is anyone out there?" she called.

Another thump, much weaker, and what sounded like a groan.

"Dear God," she whispered, transferring the rifle to one hand and reaching to unbolt the door. There was a person out in this weather. She hadn't even considered that possibility, because she was so far from a main road. Anyone who left the protection of their vehicle shouldn't have been able to make it to her house, not in these conditions.

She opened the door and something white and heavy crashed into her legs. She screamed, staggering back. The door crashed against the wall, and the wind blew snow all over the floor, then sucked the warmth from the cabin with its icy breath.

The white thing on her floor was a man.

Hope set the rifle aside and grabbed him under the arms. She braced her legs, trying to drag him across the threshold so she could shut the door, and grunted as she moved him only a few inches. Damn, he was heavy! Ice pellets stung her face like bees, and the wind was unbelievably cold. She closed her eyes against the onslaught and braced herself for another effort. Desperation gave her strength; she threw herself backward, hauling the man with her. She fell, his weight pinning her to the floor, but his legs were over the threshold.

Tink was beside himself with worry, barking and lunging, then whining. He thrust his muzzle at her face for a quick lick of reassurance, for her or himself she couldn't begin to guess; then he sniffed at the stranger and resumed barking. Hope gathered herself for one more effort, and pulled the man all the way inside.

Panting, she crawled over to the door and wrestled it shut. The wind hammered at it, as if enraged at being shut out. She could feel the heavy door shuddering under the onslaught. Hope secured the bolt, then turned her attention to the man.

He had to be in bad shape. Frantically she knelt beside him, brushing away snow and ice that crusted his clothes and the towel he had wrapped over his face.

"Can you hear me?" she asked insistently. “Are you awake?"

He was silent, limp, not even shivering, which wasn't a good sign. She pushed back the hood of his heavy coat and unwrapped the towel from his face, then used it to wipe the snow from his eyes. His skin was white with cold, his lips blue. From the waist down, his clothes were wet and coated with a sheet of ice.

As swiftly as possible, given his size and the difficulty of wrestling an unconscious man out of wet clothing that had been frozen stiff, she began undressing him. Thick gloves came off first, then the coat. She didn't take the time to inspect his fingers for frostbite, but moved down to his feet and began unlacing the insulated boots, then tugged them off. He wore two pairs of socks, and she peeled them away. His feet were icy. Moving back up, she began unbuttoning his shirt and only then noticed that he wore a deputy sheriff's uniform, the shirt stretched tight across his chest and shoulders.

Under the shirt he wore a thermal pullover, and under that a T-shirt. He had been prepared for cold weather, but not for being caught out in it. Maybe his vehicle had slid off the road, though she didn't see how he could have made his way such a distance under these drastic conditions. It was nothing less than a miracle, or sheer chance, that he'd managed to stumble onto the house. By all logic, he should be dead out in the snow. And unless she could get him warm, he might yet die.

She tossed the three shirts into a heap, then attacked his belt buckle. It was coated with ice, the belt itself frozen stiff. Even the zipper of his fly was iced over. Unable to see in the storm, he must have stepped into the lake; the wonder was that he had managed to stay on his feet and not completely submerge himself. If he had gone under and gotten his head wet, he wouldn't have been able to make it to the house; most of the body's heat was lost through the scalp surface.

She fought the stiff fabric, using sheer force to get his pants off. The thermal underwear underneath was even more difficult, because it clung. Finally he lay on her floor in a puddle of melting snow and ice, clad only in his white shorts. She started to leave them on, but they were wet too, and getting him warm was more important than preserving his modesty. She stripped them down his legs and tossed them onto the pile of wet clothes.

Now she had to get him dried off and wrapped up. She ran to the downstairs bathroom and gathered up some towels, and then stripped the blankets off her father's bed. She raced back. The man hadn't moved from his sprawled position on the floor. She dragged him out of the puddle, hastily dried him, then spread a blanket on the floor and rolled him onto it. Wrapping it around him, she then dragged him in front of the fire. Tink sniffed at him, whined, then lay down beside him.

"That's right, boy, snuggle close," Hope whispered. Her muscles were trembling with exertion, but she ran to the kitchen and stuffed one of the towels into the microwave. When she got it out, the cloth was so hot she could barely hold it.

She raced back to the great room and wrapped the hot towel around the man's head. Then, grimly, she stripped off her own clothes. She was naked beneath her pajamas, but when this man's life depended on how fast she could get him warm, she wasn't about to waste time running upstairs to put on underwear. Grabbing up the other blanket, she held it in front of the fire until it was toasty.

Throwing open the blanket wrapped around the man, she placed the warm blanket over him, tucking it around his cold feet; then she slid under it with him.

Shared body heat was the best way to combat hypothermia. Hope pressed herself close to his cold body, forcing herself not to flinch as his icy skin touched hers. Oh, God, he was so cold. She got on top of him, put her arms around him, pressed her warm face to his. She massaged his arms and shoulders, tucked his hands under her belly, cupped her hands over his ears until they warmed. She slid her feet up and down his legs, stroking away the cold, massaging the blood through his veins.

He moaned, a faint sound whispering past his parted lips.

"That's right," she murmured. "Wake up, sweetie." She stroked his face, his beard stubble scraping across her palm. His lips weren't as blue, she thought.

The towel around his head had cooled. Hope unwrapped it and slipped out from under the blanket, then ran to the kitchen and reheated the towel in the microwave. Back to the great room, put the towel around his head, crawl under the blanket with him again. He was tall, and she wasn't; she couldn't reach all of him at once. She slid down and warmed his feet with hers, curling her toes over his until his flesh caught some of her body heat.

Slithering back up his body, she lay on top of him again. He was hard with muscle, and that was good, because muscles generated heat.

He began to shiver.

3

Hope held him, murmuring to him, trying to get him to talk to her. If she could get him awake enough to drink some coffee, the heat and caffeine would go a long way toward rousing him, but trying to pour hot coffee into an unconscious man was a good way to both choke him and burn him.

He moaned again, and sucked in a quick breath. He made a sharp movement with his head, dislodging the towel. The heat had dried his hair; it was dark, glistening with bronze lights in the glow of the fire. Hope tucked the towel back around his head to keep him from losing any of the precious body heat he had gained, and stroked his forehead, his cheeks. "Wake up, honey. Open your eyes and talk to me." She whispered to him, unconsciously using endearments to both reassure him and entice him to respond. Tink's ears perked up, because he was accustomed to that sweet tone being used when she spoke to him. He moved down to the man's feet, crowding against them when he lay down again. Maybe he could feel their chill through the blanket; with his thick fur, that would feel good to him. Or maybe it was instinct that led him to warm the man. Hope talked to Tink too, telling him what a good dog he was.

The faint, occasional shivers began to intensify. They wracked the man's body, roughening his skin, contorting his muscles. His teeth clenched and began chattering.

Hope held him through the convulsive shaking. He was in pain, barely conscious, groaning and breathing hard. He tried to curl into a ball, but she held him too tightly. "You're all right," she kept telling him. "Wake up, please. Open your eyes."

Unbelievably, he obeyed. His lids half lifted. His eyes were glazed, unfocused. Then they closed again, dark lashes resting on his cheeks. His arms swept up and locked around her, desperately clinging to her warmth as he was wracked by another bout of uncontrollable shaking. His entire body was tense, shuddering.

He was as strong as an ox; his arms were like steel bands around her. She murmured soothingly to him, rubbing his shoulders, pressing as close to him as she could. His skin definitely felt warmer now. She was hot, sweating from exertion and being swaddled in the heated blanket.

She was exhausted from the effort of dragging him inside and wrestling him out of his clothes, as well as from the stress of knowing he would die if she didn't get him warm.

He relaxed beneath her, the bout of shivering over. He was breathing hard. He moved restlessly, shifting his legs, shrugging the towel away from his head. The towel seemed to annoy him, so she didn't replace it. Instead she folded it and lifted his head to slide the towel underneath, giving him more padding between his head and the hard floor.

At first he had been too cold, and the situation too urgent, for her to notice, but for some moments now she had been growing more aware of the sensations produced by his naked body against hers. He was a tall, well-built man, with a nice hairy chest and even nicer hard muscles. Good-looking too, now that his features weren't pinched and blue. Her nipples tingled from the rasping of his chest hair, and Hope knew it was time to get up. She pushed gently against him, trying to rise, but he groaned and tightened his arms, shivering again, so she let herself relax.

The shaking wasn't as violent this time. He swallowed and licked his lips, and his eyes flickered open again, just for a second. Then he seemed to doze, and because he was warm now, Hope wasn't alarmed. Her own muscles quivered from exhaustion. She closed her eyes too, resting for just a minute.

Time drifted. Half-asleep, warm, boneless from fatigue, she didn't know if a minute had passed, or an hour. His hand moved down to her bottom, curving over one rounded cheek. He shifted beneath her, muscled legs moving, sliding between her thighs. His engorged penis prodded at her exposed opening.

It happened so fast that he was inside her before she was fully awake. He rolled, pinning her beneath him on the blanket, mounting her, squeezing his penis into her and driving it deep with quick, hard shoves. After five years of chastity the penetration hurt, stretching her around his thick shaft, but it felt good too. Disoriented, unbelievably aroused, Hope arched her hips and felt him prod deeply, nudging her cervix. She cried out, gasping, her neck arching back as the sensation rocketed through her nerve endings.

There was no finesse, no lingering arousal. He simply began thrusting, his heavy weight holding her down, and she wound her arms and legs around him and met his thrusts with mindless ones of her own. In the mellow light of fire and lamp she saw his face, his eyes open now, very blue and still dazed, his expression set in the hardness of physical absorption. He was operating solely on animal instinct, his body aroused by the closeness of hers, by the naked intimacy that had been necessary to save his life. He was aware only of being warm and alive, and of her bare body in his arms.

On a purely physical level, the pleasure was more intense than any she had ever known. She had never felt more female, never been so acutely aware of her own body, or of the hard masculinity of a man's. She felt every inch of his smooth, hard shaft as he rocked back and forth inside her, felt the excited, welcoming cling of her inner flesh as each stroke took her closer and closer to climax. She was unbearably hot, her skin scorching, trembling pleasure lingering just out of reach. She grabbed his buttocks, holding him tight and grinding herself as deeply onto him as she could, crying out as the already intense pleasure became even more so. He gave a hoarse cry and convulsed, bucking, hips pumping, spurting hot semen, and Hope dissolved on an agonizing pulse of sensation.

He sank down on her, trembling in every muscle, his heart pounding violently, his breathing hard and fast. As shaken and dazed as he, she put her arms around him and held him close.

Unbelievably, they slept. Wrung out, emptied, hollowed, she felt the darkness descending on her and could do nothing to resist it. He was limp and heavy on top of her, already asleep. She managed to touch his cheek, stroke his dark hair back from his forehead, and then surrendered to the overwhelming need for rest.

the collapse OF A log woke her. She stirred, wincing as her muscles protested the hard floor beneath her, the heavy body weighing her down. Confused, at first she thought she was dreaming. This couldn't be real, she couldn't be lying naked on the floor with a strange man, who was also completely naked.

But Tink was snoozing in his accustomed place, and the howling wind, the gently flickering lamplight, recalled the blizzard. Everything clicked into place.

And just as abruptly she realized he was also awake. He was lying very still, but every muscle was tense, and the penis still nestled inside her was growing thicker and longer by the second.

If she was confused, she could only imagine how disoriented he was. Gently she touched his back, smoothing her palm up the muscled expanse. "I'm awake," she murmured, her touch telling him she was there because she wanted to be, that everything was okay

He lifted his head, and their eyes met. She felt an almost tangible shock as she stared into those blue eyes, eyes that were completely aware and revealed the sharpness of the personality behind them, as well as his comprehension of the situation.

Hope blushed. Her cheeks heated and she almost groaned aloud. What should she say to a man she was meeting for the first time, when she was lying naked beneath him and his erection was firmly lodged inside her?

He trailed one fingertip across her lips, then lightly stroked her hot cheek. "Do you want me to stop?" he whispered.

The first time had caught her unawares, but Hope was always brutally honest with herself, and she didn't allow herself to pretend she had been unwilling. This time, however, they were both fully cognizant of what they were doing. She didn't stop to analyze or question her response; she simply gave it. "No," she whispered in return. "Don't stop."

He kissed her then, a kiss as gentle and searching as if nothing had ever passed between them, as if he wasn't already inside her. He wooed her as if it were the first time, kissing her for a long time until her mouth slanted eagerly under his, until their tongues twined together. His hands were tender on her breasts, learning how she liked to be touched, teasing her nipples into tight peaks. He stroked her belly, her hips, between her legs. He licked his fingertips and stroked them over the ultrasensitive bud of her clitoris, drawing it out, make her gasp and arch her hips upward. He grunted at the resulting sensation as she took him even deeper.

She thought she would die from sensual torment before he finally began moving, but she enjoyed it so much she didn't urge him to hurry. She hadn't realized how hungry she was for this, for a man's attention, for his body, for the exquisite release of lovemaking. Even her frustration earlier, in the bath, hadn't prepared her for her total surrender to sensuality. She reveled in every kiss, every touch, every stroke. She clung to him and returned the caresses, trying to return some of the pleasure he was giving her, and judging from his groans she succeeded.

The time came when they no longer needed the gentle touches, when nothing mattered but the pounding drive to orgasm. Hope let herself get lost in the urgency of the moment, let her body drown in pure pleasure . . . and then he aroused her again, whispering, "Let me feel it again, let me feel you come."

His self-control held, barely. When the pulses of her third climax began, he made a deep, helpless sound in his throat and shuddered over her.

This time she didn't allow herself the luxury of sleep. This time he gently withdrew and collapsed on the blanket beside her. His hand sought hers, clasping her fingers against his callused palm.

"Tell me what happened," he finally said, his voice low and even. "Who are you?"

An introduction at this point seemed unbearably awkward. Hope blushed again, and cleared her throat. "Hope Bradshaw"

The blue eyes searched her face. "Tanner. Price Tanner."

The fire was getting too low. She needed to put another couple of logs on, but getting up and standing naked in front of him was somehow impossible. She looked around for her pajamas and, in an agony of embarrassment, realized she needed to bathe before putting them on.

He saw where she was looking, and he didn't suffer any such modesty. Unfolding his long length from the floor, he stepped over to the stack of wood and replenished the fire. Hope did exactly what she had been embarrassed to let him do to her, looked him over good, from head to foot. She liked what she saw, every inch of him. His muscles were delineated in the firelight, revealing the slope and curve of broad shoulders, wide chest, the long bulge of strong thigh muscles. His buttocks were round, firm. Even flaccid, his penis was intriguingly thick, and his testicles swung heavily below them. Price Tanner. She repeated his name in her mind, the syllables strong and brisk.

Tink looked a little grumpy at having had his sleep disturbed. He got up and sniffed at the stranger, and wagged his tail when the man leaned down and patted him. "I remember the dog barking," Price Tanner said.

"He heard you before I did. His name is Tinkerbell. Tink, for short."

"Tinkerbell?" He glanced at her, blue eyes incredulous. "He's gay?"

Hope sputtered with laughter. "No, he's just an eternally optimistic, goofy dog. He thinks the world is here to pet him."

"He may be right." He studied the sodden mass of his clothing, the water puddled on the floor. "How long have I been here?"

She looked at the clock. Two-thirty. "Three and a half hours." Too much had happened in such a short length of time, and yet she felt as if only an hour or so had passed instead of almost twice that. "I dragged you in and got you out of your clothes. You must have stepped into the lake, because you were wet from the waist down. I dried you off and wrapped you in a blanket."

"Yeah, I remember going into the water. I knew this place was here, but I couldn't see a damn thing."

"I don't know how you made it this far. Why were you on foot? Did you have an accident? And why were you out in this weather anyway?"

"I was trying to make it down to Boise. The Blazer slid off the road and broke out the windshield, so I couldn't stay there. Like I said, I knew this place was here, and I had a compass. I didn't have much choice except try to get here."

"You're a walking miracle," she said frankly. "Logically, you should be dead out in the snow."

"But I'm not, thanks to you." He returned to the blanket and stretched out beside her, his gaze somber. He caught a tendril of blond hair, rubbing it between his fingers before smoothing it behind her ear. "I know when you got under the blanket to get me warm, you weren't expecting me to jump you as soon as I was half conscious. Tell me the truth, Hope: Were you willing?"

She cleared her throat. "I—I was surprised." She touched his hand. "I wasn't unwilling. Couldn't you tell?"

He briefly closed his eyes in relief. "I don't have a real clear memory of anything that happened until I woke up on top of you. Or rather, I remember what I did and what I felt, but I wasn't sure you felt the same." He spread his hand on her belly and lightly stroked upward to cover her breast. "I thought maybe I'd lost my head, waking up with such a pretty, brown-eyed little blonde naked next to me."

"Strictly speaking, I wasn't next to you. I was on top of you." Her face got hot again. Damn those blushes! "It seemed the best way to get you warm."

"It worked," he said, and for the first time a smile curved his mouth.

Hope almost lost her breath. He was ruggedly attractive rather than handsome, but when he smiled, her heart did a crazy loop. It must be chemistry, she thought dazedly. She had seen many better-looking men; Dylan had been better looking, in a clean-cut, classical way. But what her eyes saw and her body felt were two different things, and she had never experienced such a strong sexual response to any other man. She wanted to make love again, and before she gave in to the need, she forced herself to remember he had been through a harrowing, physically exhausting ordeal.

"Do you want some coffee?" she asked hurriedly, getting to her feet. She carefully didn't look at him as she gathered up her pajamas. "Or something to eat? I made a big pot of stew yesterday. Or how about a hot bath? The water heater is wired to the generator, so there's plenty of hot water."

"That sounds good," he said, also standing. “All of it." He reached out and caught her arms, turning her so she faced him. Bending his head, he gave her another of those sweet, tender kisses. "I also want to make love to you again, if you'll let me."

Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Hope looked up at him. Her heart did another crazy loop, and she knew she wasn't going to call a halt to this now. For as long as the blizzard lasted, she and Price Tanner were together, and she might never have another chance like this.

"I'd like that too," she managed to say.

"Maybe on a bed instead of the floor?" He circled her nipple with his thumb, making it harden and stand erect.

"Upstairs." She swallowed. "It's warm up there, because all the heat rises. I couldn't get you up the stairs, though, so I put you in front of the fireplace."

"I'm not complaining." He tugged the pajamas from her arms and let them drop to the floor. "On second thought, let's forget the coffee and the stew. The bath too, unless you planned to be in the tub with me."

She hadn't, but it was a darn good idea. She went into his arms, forgetting everything except the earthy magic their bodies made together.

4

Hope woke beside him in the morning and lay watching him sleep, her body more deeply contented than she could remember it ever being before. She didn't wonder how or why she responded so strongly to a man about whom she knew little more than his name; she simply accepted the joy this chance encounter had brought her. The warmth of his body made the bed a cozy nest she didn't want to leave, especially since the chill in the room told her the fire in the fireplace had burned out. It had been so long since she had been able to enjoy such a simple pleasure as lying beside a sleeping man, listening to the slow, deep rhythm of his breathing. She wanted to cuddle close to him, but was reluctant to wake him. He was sleeping deeply, evidence of his exhaustion. After nearly freezing to death, he hadn't exactly spent a restful night.

One muscled arm lay draped over the pillow, and she could see the dark bruises on his wrist. On top of everything else, he had been in a car accident. The wonder wasn't that he slept now, but that he had been so energetic during the night.

She surveyed the other details available to her. He had beautiful hair, dark and thick, with streaks of bronze glinting through it as if he spent a lot of time in the sun. His face was turned toward her in his sleep, and she smiled, wanting to trace her finger along the bridge of his nose, which was high and a little crooked, maybe as the result of a fight. His mouth was wide and well-shaped, his lips soft. His jaw was angular, his chin nothing less than stubborn. Good-looking, rugged, attractive; definitely not handsome, as she had noticed before. Just looking at him made her breasts tighten.

She felt almost dizzy from the force of her attraction to him. She had forgotten how heady infatuation could be, and how powerful. If she had met him under normal circumstances, no doubt she would still have been attracted to him; but without the overwhelming physical intimacy that had been forced between them, she might not even have encouraged him. The necessary contact of their nude bodies, however, had established a link even before he had regained consciousness. She had stroked him, knew the textures of his skin, from the roughness of his beard-stubbled cheeks to the sleekness of his muscular shoulders. Her nipples had been tight from rubbing against his chest, her legs had tangled with his, and though she hadn't touched him sexually, she had inescapably felt his genitals against her own. She hadn't let herself think about it, but nevertheless she had been almost unbearably aroused.

Her sexual attraction wasn't due to simple deprivation. If she had thought it was, before, now she knew differently, because she was certainly no longer deprived and she still felt the same. Their sexual fit was devastating in its perfection. It was as if he had been born knowing exactly how to touch her, as if his body had been crafted specifically to bring her maximum pleasure.

She thought it must be the same, at least sexually, for him. As exhausted and drained as he had to have been, still he had turned to her time and again, his hands literally shaking with need as he drew her under him.

Her breath sighed gently, rapidly, between her lips.

The wind still blew, rattling the windows. She couldn't see anything beyond the glass but an impenetrable white curtain. While the blizzard raged, the world couldn't intrude, and he was hers.

What a difference one day made. Yesterday she had been panicked by the sense of time passing her by, thinking she had lost all opportunity to get out of life what she had always wanted most—a family. Then Price Tanner had blown in on a snowstorm, and abruptly the future was bright with promise.

He was a deputy. He had said he was heading to Boise, so he could be from there, but he had known the resort was here, which meant he was familiar with the area, so he might be local. She would ask him when he woke.

Despite the heady lovemaking of the night, and more she hoped to enjoy while he was here, she was afraid to automatically assume they were a couple. The circumstances that had brought them together were extreme, and once the weather cleared he might be on his way without a backward look. She had known that from the beginning, and accepted that risk. She, who had never had any lover other than her husband, had gone into this with her eyes open.

If this situation between them grew into something permanent, she would be happy beyond belief. She didn't let herself think the word "love," for how could she love someone she didn't really know? He was a tender, generous lover, and during the night she had seen signs of a sharp sense of humor, both qualities she liked, but she was too cautious to imagine either of them were in love.

The truth was, she had seized the opportunity to have a child.

Even beyond her own powerful attraction to him, the physical pleasure he had given her, she had been acutely aware of the lack of birth control. She hadn't taken birth control pills in five years, and there wasn't a condom in the house. She was a healthy, fertile woman, the odds were he was equally fertile, and the time was roughly right. He had climaxed inside her five times during the night, with no barrier—chemical, hormonal, or otherwise—between her and his sperm, and the knowledge was so erotic she trembled with need.

This morning, her head clear and the stresses of the emergency behind her, she felt guilty about what she had done. She didn't even know if he was married! He didn't wear a ring, and the thought hadn't occurred to her the night before. She cringed inside at the thought of sleeping with a married man and didn't want to think how much it would hurt if he did turn out to be an unfaithful jerk. But even assuming he was unmarried, the hard truth was she hadn't had any right to take such an enormous step without his consent. He hadn't asked about birth control, but he had been through quite an ordeal and could be excused for having other things on his mind, such as being alive.

She felt as if she had stolen his free will from him. If she did get pregnant, he might be, justifiably, very angry. If there was such a thing as unauthorized use of sperm, then she had committed the offense.

Being a single mother wouldn't be easy, assuming she had gotten pregnant. If she had given herself time to think about it, caution would have prevented her from taking the chance. But she hadn't taken the time, Price hadn't given her the time, and all she could feel now was a guilty joy that a child might be the result of their lovemaking. Her father wouldn't like it, but he loved her, and it wasn't as if she was a teenager unable to support herself or her baby. She would prefer being married, but as she had so sharply realized the day before, time was running out. She had taken the chance.

Hope slid out of bed, careful not to waken him. Her thighs trembled, and she ached deep inside her body. Her first few steps were little more than a hobble, as long unused muscles and flesh protested their treatment during the night. Silently she gathered her clothes and tiptoed out of the room.

Tink trotted from the kitchen as she came downstairs, his eagerness telling her she was late, he was hungry, but he forgave everything for the joy of her company. She poured some food into his bowl, then immediately went to rebuild the fire. It had burned down to embers, and the house was cold. She relaid the fire, the kindling catching immediately from the glowing embers, and carefully stacked three logs on the grate. Then she put on a pot of coffee and, while it was brewing, went into her father's bathroom and stepped into the shower. Thank God for hot water, because otherwise she couldn't have tolerated the cold!

The shower went a long way toward relieving her aches and pains. Feeling much better, she pulled on a pair of sweatpants and an oversize flannel shirt, put on two pairs of thick socks, and padded out to have her first cup of coffee.

Cup in hand, she went into the great room to mop up the water she had left puddled on the floor the night before and straighten Price's clothing.

The best way to dry them would be to hang them over the balcony railing, where the heat was. She hung his coat over a chair and set his boots beside the fireplace, because they needed to dry more slowly, but carried the rest of his clothes upstairs. Until Price's clothes dried, she supposed he would have to sit around naked. He was too tall for her father's clothes, and all she had left of Dylan's clothing was a couple of shirts she wore herself.

No—come to think of it, her dad had bought a pair of black sweatpants that had evidently had the wrong tag attached to them, because they were several inches too long for him. Returning them would have cost more in gasoline than the pants were worth, so he had just folded them away in the top of his closet. Buying by size being as iffy as it was, she was fairly certain she could lay her hands on an extra large sweatshirt too.

She straightened out the uniform to minimize wrinkles and, as she was doing so, noticed a tear in the left pants leg. Lifting the garment for a closer inspection, she saw the faded red stain below the tear, as if whatever had made the tear had also brought blood. But she had undressed Price, and she knew he wasn't hurt anywhere. She frowned at the stain, then mentally shrugged and draped the pants over the railing.

Something was missing. She stared at the uniform for a moment before it hit her: where was his pistol? Had he lost it somewhere? But he didn't have a holster, either, so he must have taken the gun off and . . . left it in the Blazer? That didn't make sense. He didn't have a wallet with him, either, but that was easier to understand. It could have fallen out of his pocket at any time during his hazardous trek through the blinding snow; it might even be in the lake.

Even if he had lost the pistol, would he then have removed the gun belt and holster and left them behind? They were part of his uniform. Of course, who knew what shape he had been in when he left the Blazer? He could have hit his head and not realized it, though if he had been addled, it had taken an even bigger miracle than she had thought for him to find his way here.

Well, the missing pistol was only a small mystery, and one that would wait until he woke. The house was warming, the coffee was ready, and she was hungry.

Downstairs again, she picked up the phone just to check it, but the line was dead, not even static coming through. She turned on the radio and picked up the same thing—static. Given the conditions outside, she hadn't expected anything else, but she always checked periodically during power failures, just in case.

The rifle was where she had left it, propped beside the door. She retrieved it and returned it to the rack in her father's bedroom, before Tink knocked it down with an exuberant swish of his tail.

Carrying a cup of hot coffee with her, she then tidied the great room, putting the blankets and towels she had used in the laundry room to be washed whenever power returned. She cleaned up the puddles of melted snow and ice. Tink had been back and forth through the water several times, of course, leaving wet doggy tracks all over the house. She followed his trail, crawling on the floor and blotting up pawprints.

"I thought I smelled coffee."

Her head jerked up. He was standing at the balcony railing, his hair tousled, his jaw dark with beard stubble, his eyes still heavy-lidded from sleep. His voice was hoarse, and she wondered if he was getting sick.

"I'll bring a cup up to you," she said. "It's too cold down here for you to be walking around without clothes."

"Then I think I’ll stay right here. I'm not ready to be cold again, just yet." He gave her a crooked smile, and turned to pet Tink, who had bounded up the stairs as soon as he heard a new voice.

Hope went into her dad's room and searched until she found the long sweatpants. Then she collected a pair of shorts and some thick hunting socks, but try as she might she couldn't locate the extra-large sweatshirt she knew was here, somewhere. It was a gray University of Idaho shirt, and she had worn it once with leggings, but the thing had been so big she looked as if she were lost inside it. What had she done with it?

Maybe it was in the closet of the extra bedroom upstairs. She rotated her winter and summer clothing between that closet and the one in her room, but she didn't necessarily move everything.

With the small stack of clothes in her arms, she detoured to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, then carried everything up the stairs.

The roaring fire had rapidly warmed the upstairs. The bathroom door was open, and Price was in the shower. Hope set the cup on the vanity. "Here's your coffee."

He pulled the curtain aside and stuck his head out.

Water streamed down his face. "Would you hand it to me, please. Thanks." He drank deeply, sighing as the caffeine jolted through him.

"I brought you some clothes. I hope you don't mind wearing my father's shorts."

"I don't if he doesn't." Blue eyes regarded her over the rim of the cup. "I'm glad you said they belonged to your father and not your husband. I didn't ask, last night, but I don't fool around with married women, and I sure do want to fool around some more with you."

"I'm a widow." She paused. "I had the same thoughts about you this morning. That I hadn't thought to ask if you were married, I mean."

"I'm not. Divorced, no kids." He took another sip of coffee. "So where is your father?" he asked, his tone casual.

"Visiting his brother in Indianapolis. Uncle Pete had a heart attack, and Dad flew out. He's supposed to be gone another week."

Price handed the cup back to her, smiling. "Think the blizzard will last another week?"

She laughed. "I doubt it." Both his wrists were bruised, she noticed.

"Damn. At least there's no question of leaving today, though I guess I should let some people know where I am."

"You can't. The phone lines are down too. I just checked."

"What rotten luck." The blue eyes twinkled as he pulled the shower curtain closed. "Marooned with a sexy blond." From behind the curtain came the sound of cheerful whistling.

Hope felt like whistling a tune herself. She listened to the wind blow and hoped it would be days before he would be able to leave.

She remembered something. "Oh, I meant to ask, are you hurt anywhere? I didn't see any blood last night, but your uniform is torn and has blood on it, or at least I think it's blood."

A few seconds lapsed before he answered. "No, I'm not hurt. I don't know what the stain is."

"Your pistol and holster are missing too. Do you remember what happened to them?"

Again there was a pause, and when he spoke, he sounded as if he had his face turned up to the spray. "I must have left them in the Blazer."

"Why would you have taken off your gun belt?"

"Damn if I know. Ah ... do you have any weapons here? Other than the rifle I saw last night, that is."

"A pistol."

"Where do you keep it?"

"In my nightstand drawer. Why?"

"I might not be the only person to get stranded in the storm and come looking for shelter. It pays to be careful."

5

When he was finished, he came downstairs, he was freshly shaved, with her father's borrowed razor, and he looked alert and vital in the sweat clothes she had provided. The big sweatshirt had been in the other closet after all, and it fit him perfectly, just loose enough to be comfortable.

She would normally have just eaten cereal, but with him there she was cooking a breakfast of bacon and eggs. He came up behind her as she stood at the island, turning bacon with a fork, and wrapped his arms around her waist. He kissed the top of her head, then rested his chin there. "I don't know which smells best, the coffee, the bacon, or you."

"Wow, I'm impressed. I must really smell good, if I rank up there with coffee and bacon."

She felt him grin, his chin moving on top of her head. "I could eat you right up." His tone was both teasing and serious, sensual, and a wave of heat that had nothing to do with embarrassment swept over her. She leaned back against him, her knees weak. He had a serious swelling in the groin area, and she rubbed her bottom against it.

"I think we need to go back to bed." There was no teasing at all in his voice this time.

"Now?"

"Now." He reached around her and turned off the cooktop.

Ten minutes later she was naked, breathless, trembling on the verge of climax. Her thighs were draped over his shoulders, and he was driving her, with his tongue, to absolute madness. She tried to pull him up and over her, but he pinned her wrists to the bed and continued what he was doing. She surrendered, her hips lifting, her body shuddering with completion. Only when she was limp did he move upward, covering her, sliding his erection into her with a smooth thrust that took him all the way in.

She inhaled deeply, having already forgotten how completely he filled her.

He began a gentle back-and-forth movement, gripping her shoulders, watching her face.

Guilt and her innate honesty nagged at her. "I'm not taking birth control pills," she blurted, knowing this wasn't exactly the best time to bring up her lack of protection.

He didn't stop. "I'm not wearing a rubber," he said equably. "I would stop, but that would be like closing the barn door after the horse is out, wouldn't it?"

Afterward, while she was in the bathroom, he finished dressing—again—and called out, "I'll go down and start breakfast again."

“I’ll be there in a minute." She still felt incredibly weak-kneed, and relieved. She stared at her face in the mirror, her brown eyes huge. She was going to get pregnant. She knew it, sensed it. The prospect both terrified and exhilarated her. From now on, her life would be changed.

She went out into the bedroom and collected her scattered garments, pulling them on again. After a lifetime of caution and careful behavior, taking such a deliberate risk was nerve-racking, like climbing on board a space shuttle without any previous training.

It pays to be careful, Price had said, but sometimes it paid to be careless too. And, anyway, she was doing this deliberately, not carelessly.

One of her socks had ended up between the bed and the nightstand. She got down on her knees to retrieve it, and because she was there, because she had just been remembering what Price had said, she opened the night-stand drawer to make certain the pistol was there.

It wasn't.

Slowly she stood, staring down at the empty drawer. She knew the pistol had been there. When her dad had left, she had checked to make certain it was loaded and returned it to the same place. Living in such an isolated place, where self-defense was sometimes necessary, she had learned how to use the weapon. Idaho had more than its share of dangerous wildlife, both animal and human. The ruggedness of the mountains, the isolation, seemed to be a magnet for nut groups, from neo-Nazis to drug runners. She might happen upon a bear or a cougar, but she was more worried about happening upon a human predator.

The pistol had been there, and now it wasn't. Price had asked where she kept it, not that finding it would have been that difficult. But why hadn't he simply said he wanted it close to hand? He was a cop; she understood that he was more comfortable armed than unarmed, especially when he wasn't on his own turf.

She went downstairs, her expression thoughtful. He was standing at the island, taking up the bacon. "Price, do you have my pistol?"

He slanted a quick, assessing look at her, then turned back to the bacon. "Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me you were getting it?"

"I didn't want to worry you."

"Why would I be worried?"

"What I said about other people coming here."

"I wasn't worried, but you seem to be," she said pointedly.

"It's my job to worry. I feel more comfortable armed. I'll put the pistol back if it bothers you."

She looked around. She didn't see the weapon lying on the cabinet. "Where is it?"

"In my waistband."

She felt uneasy, but she didn't know why. She herself had thought that he would feel more comfortable armed, and he had said so himself. It was just—for a moment, his expression had been . . . hard. Distant. Maybe it was because he worked in law enforcement and saw a lot of things the average person never even dreamed of seeing that he expected the worst. But for a moment, just for a moment, he had looked as dangerous as any of the scum with whom he dealt. He had been so easy and approachable until then that the contrast rattled her.

She shoved the uneasiness away and didn't say anything more about the pistol.

Over breakfast she asked, "In what county do you work?"

"This one," he said. "But I haven't been here long. Like I said, I knew this place was here, but I hadn't had time to get up here and meet you and your dad—and Tinkerbell, of course."

The dog, lying on the floor between their chairs in obvious hopes of doubling his chances of catching a stray tidbit, perked up when he heard his name.

"Table scraps aren't good for you," Hope said sternly. "Besides, you've already eaten."

Tink didn't look discouraged, and Price laughed.

"How long have you worked in law enforcement?"

"Eleven years. I worked in Boise before." His mouth quirked with amusement. "For the record, I'm thirty-four, I've been divorced eight years, I've been known to have a few drinks, and I enjoy an occasional cigar, but I'm not a regular smoker. I don't attend any church, but I believe in God."

Hope put down her fork. She could feel her face turning red in mortification. "I wasn't—"

"Yes you were, and I don't blame you. When a woman lets a man make love to her, she has a right to reassure herself about him, find out every detail right down to the size of his Fruit of the Looms."

"Jockeys," she corrected, and turned even redder.

He shrugged. "I just look at sizes, not brand names." The amusement turned into a grin. "Stop blushing. So you looked at my briefs; I looked at your panties this morning, didn't I? I bet you just hung mine over the railing to dry, instead of sniffing them the way I did yours."

He had sniffed, drawing an exaggeratedly deep breath and rolling his eyes in pretended ecstasy, making her laugh, before he had tossed the garment over his shoulder with a flourish.

"You were goofing around," she mumbled.

"Was I? Maybe I was turned on. What do you think? Was my dick hard?"

"It was hard before we went upstairs, so you can't use that argument."

"It got hard when I thought about sniffing your underwear."

She began to laugh, enjoying his teasing. She was beginning to suspect arguing with him would be like swatting at smoke.

"I do have a really bad habit," he confessed.

"Oh?"

"I'm addicted to remote controls."

"You and about a hundred million other men in America. We can pick up one station here—one—and when my dad watches television, he sits with the remote control in his hand."

"I don't think I'm that bad." He grinned and reached for her hand. "So, Hope Bradshaw, when conditions are back to normal, will you go out to dinner with me?"

"Gee, I don't know," she said. "A date, huh? I don't know if I'm ready for that."

He chuckled and started to answer, but a sunbeam fell across their hands. Startled, they both looked at the light, then out the window. The wind had stopped blowing, and patches of blue sky were visible.

"I'll be damned," he said, getting up to walk to the window and look out. "I thought the storm would last longer than this."

"So did I," Hope said, her disappointment more intense than she wanted to show. He had asked her out, after all. The clearing weather meant he would be leaving sooner than she had anticipated, but it wasn't as if she wouldn't see him again.

She went over to the window too, and gasped when she saw the amount of snow. "Good heavens!" The familiar terrain was completely transformed, disguised by drifts of snow that appeared to level out the landscape. The wind had piled snow to window level on the porch.

"It looks like at least three feet. The ski resort operators will love this, but it'll take the snowplows a while to clear the roads." He walked to the door and opened it, and the frigidity of the air seemed to suck the warmth from the room. "Jesus!" He slammed the door. "The temperature has to be below zero. No chance of any of this melting."

Oddly, the improved weather seemed to make Price uneasy. As the day progressed, Hope noticed several times that he went from window to window, looking out, though he would stand to one side as he did so. She was busy, as being confined to the house didn't mean there weren't any chores to do, such as laundry, but doing it without electricity was twice as hard and took twice as long.

Price helped her wring out the clothes she had washed by hand, then braved the cold long enough to carry in more firewood while she hung the clothes over the stair railings to dry. She checked his uniform, picking up the shirt and feeling the seams, which would be the last to dry. Another hour would do it, she thought, as hot as Price was keeping the fire. The temperature on the second level had to be close to ninety.

She started to drape the shirt over the railing again when her attention was caught by the tag. The shirt was a size fifteen and a half. That was odd. She knew Price was bigger than that. The shirt had in fact been tight on him; she remembered how strained the buttons had been last night. Of course, he had been wearing a thermal shirt underneath, which would make the uniform seem tighter than it was. But if she had been buying a shirt for Price, she wouldn't have looked at anything smaller than a sixteen and a half.

He came in with a load of wood and stacked it on the fireplace. "I'm going to clear off the steps," he called up to her.

"That can wait until the weather's warmer."

"Now that the wind isn't blowing, it's bearable for a few minutes, and that's all it'll take to clear the steps." He buttoned his heavy coat and went back outside. At least he was wearing a pair of her dad's sturdy work gloves, and if his boots weren't completely dry, at least he had on three pairs of socks. Tink went with him, glad for the chance to do his business outside instead of on a pad.

With the weather clearing, perhaps she could pick up something on the radio now. Going downstairs, she switched it on; music filled the air, a welcome relief from static, and she listened to the song as she got the beef stew out of the refrigerator to warm it up for lunch.

The weather was the big news, of course, and as soon as the song ended the announcer began running down a list of closings. Her road was impassable, she heard, and the highway department estimated at least three days before all the roads in the county were cleared. Mail service was spotty, but utility crews were hard at work restoring service.

"Also in the news," the announcer continued, "a bus carrying six prisoners ran off County Road Twelve during

the storm. Three people were killed, including two sheriff's deputies. Five prisoners escaped; two have been recaptured, but three are still at large. It is unknown if they survived the blizzard. Be alert for strangers in your area, as one of the prisoners is described as extremely dangerous."

Hope went still. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. County Road 12 was just a few miles away. She reached over and turned off the radio, the announcer's voice suddenly grating on her nerves.

She had to think. Unfortunately, what she was thinking was almost too frightening to contemplate.

Price's uniform shirt was too small for him. He didn't have a wallet. He had blown it off, but she was certain now that the stain on his pants leg was blood—and he had no corresponding wound. There were bruises on his wrists—from handcuffs? And he hadn't had a weapon.

He did now, though. Hers.

6

There was still the rifle. Hope left the stew sitting on the cabinet and went into her father's bedroom. She lifted the rifle from the rack, breathing a sigh of relief as the reassuring weight of it settled in her hands. Though she had loaded it just the night before, the lesson "always check your weapon" had been drilled into her so many times she automatically slid the bolt—and stared down into the empty chamber. He had unloaded it.

Swiftly, she searched for the bullets; he had to have hidden them somewhere. They were too heavy to carry around, and he didn't have pockets in his sweat clothes anyway. But before she had time to look in more than a couple of places, she heard the door open, and she straightened in alarm. Dear God, what should she do?

Three prisoners were still at large, the announcer had said, but only one was considered extremely dangerous. She had a two to one chance that he wasn't the dangerous one.

But he had taken her pistol and unloaded the rifle— both without telling her. He had obviously taken the uniform off one of the dead deputies. Damn it, why hadn't the announcer warned people that one of the escaped prisoners could be wearing a deputy's uniform?

Price was too intelligent to get thrown in jail over some penny-ante crime, and if by some chance he had, he wouldn't compound the offense by escaping. The common criminal was, by and large, uncommonly stupid. Price was neither common nor stupid.

Given her own observations, she now thought her estimated chance of being snowbound with an extremely dangerous escaped criminal had just flip-flopped. What could "extremely dangerous" mean other than he was a murderer? A criminal didn't get that description hung on him by taking someone's television.

"Hope?" he called.

Hastily she returned the rifle to the rack, trying to be as quiet as she could. "I'm in Dad's room," she called, "putting up his underwear." She opened and closed a dresser drawer for the sound effect, then plastered a smile on her face and stepped to the door. “Are you about frozen?"

"Cold enough," he said, shrugging out of his coat and hanging it up. Tink shook about ten pounds of snow off his fur onto the floor, then came bounding over to Hope to say hello after his extended absence of ten minutes.

Automatically she scolded him for getting the floor wet again, though bending over to pet him probably ruined the effect. She went to get the broom and mop, hoping her expression didn't give her away. Her face felt stiff from strain; any smile she attempted must look like a grimace.

What could she do? What options did she have?

At the moment, she wasn't in any danger, she didn't think. Price didn't know she had been listening to the radio, so he didn't feel threatened. He had no reason to kill her; she was providing him with food, shelter, and sex.

Her face went white. She couldn't bear having him touch her again. She simply couldn't.

She heard him in the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee to warm himself. Her hands began shaking. Oh, God. She hurt so much she thought she would fly apart. She had never been more attracted to a man in her life, not even Dylan. She had warmed him with her body, saved his life; in some primitive, basic way he was hers now. In just twelve short hours he had become the central focus of her mind and emotions, and that she didn't yet dare call it love was an effort at self-protection—too late. Part of her was being ripped away, and she didn't know if she could survive the agony. She might—dear God—she might even be pregnant with his child.

He had laughed with her, teased her, made love to her.

He had been so tender and considerate that, even now, she couldn't describe it as anything except making love. Of course, Ted Bundy had been an immensely charming man too, except to the women he raped and murdered. Hope had always thought herself a fairly good judge of character, and everything Price had shown her so far said he was a decent and likable person, the type of man who coached Little League teams and danced a mean two-step. He had even, good-humoredly, given her his "stats" and asked her out on a date, just as if he would be around for a long time, be part of her life.

Either it was just a big game to him, or he was totally delusional. She remembered the moment when his expression had suddenly altered to something hard and frightening, and she knew he wasn't delusional.

He was dangerous.

She had to turn him in. She knew it, accepted the necessity, and the pain was so sharp she almost moaned aloud. She had always wondered why women would aid their husbands or boyfriends in eluding the law, and now she knew why; the thought of Price in jail for most of his life, perhaps even facing a death penalty, was devastating. And yet she wouldn't be able to live with herself if she did nothing and someone else died because she let him go.

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was jumping to the most ludicrous conclusion of her lifetime. The radio announcer hadn't said all the deputies on the bus had been killed, but that two of them had. On the other hand, neither had he said that one of the deputies was missing, which surely would have been in the news if that was the case.

And now she was grasping at straws, and she knew it. The deputy's uniform drying on the railing was too small for Price, and there was no logical reason for him to have exchanged his own uniform for one that didn't fit. Price was one of the escaped prisoners, not a deputy.

She had to keep him from knowing she knew about the bus wreck. She didn't have to worry about anything being on the television until the electric power was restored, and the next time he went to the bathroom, she would take the batteries out of the radio and hide them. All she had to do was periodically check the phone and, when service to it was restored, wait for the opportunity to call the sheriff's department.

If she kept her wits about her, everything would be all right.

"Hope?"

She jumped, her heart thundering with panic. Price was standing in the door, watching her, his gaze sharp. She fumbled with the broom and mop and almost dropped them. "You startled me!"

"So I see." Calmly he stepped forward and took the broom and mop from her hands. Hope took an involuntary step back, fighting a sense of suffocation. He seemed even bigger in the small laundry room, his shoulders totally blocking the door. She had reveled in his size and strength when they were making love, but now she was overwhelmed by the thought of her utter helplessness in a physical match against him. Not that she had entertained any idea of wrestling him into submission, but she had to be prepared to fight him in any way possible, if necessary. Running would be the smartest thing to do, if she had the chance.

"What's wrong?" he asked. His expression was still, unreadable, and his gaze never left her face. He stood squarely in front of her, and there was no way past him, not in the narrow confines of the laundry room. "You look scared to death."

Considering how she must have looked, Hope knew she couldn't try to deny it; he would know she was lying. "I am," she confessed, her voice shaking. She didn't know what she was going to say until the words began tumbling out. "I don't... I mean, I've been widowed five years and I haven't... I've just met you, and we—I—oh, damn," she said helplessly, dwindling to an end.

His face relaxed, and a faint smile teased his mouth. "So you just had one of those moments when reality bites you on the ass, when you look around and everything hits all at once and you think, holy shit, what am I doing?"

She managed a nod. "Something like that," she said, and swallowed.

"Well, let's see. You're caught alone in a blizzard, an almost dead stranger falls in your front door, you save his life, and though you haven't had a lover in five years, somehow he ends up on top of you for most of the night. I can see how all that would be a little disconcerting, especially when you didn't use any birth control and might have gotten pregnant."

Hope felt as if there were no blood left in her face.

"Ah, honey." Gently he set the things aside and caught her arms, his big hands rubbing up and down as he eased her into his arms. "What happened, did you check the calendar and find out getting pregnant is a lot more likely than you'd thought?"

Oh, God, she thought she might faint at his touch, the combined terror and longing so intense she couldn't bear it. How could he be so tender and comforting when he was a criminal, an escaped prisoner? And how could the feel of his strong body against hers be so right? She wanted to be able to rest her head on his shoulder and forget about the rest of the world, just stay with him here in these remote mountains where nothing could ever touch them.

"Hope?" He tilted his head so he could better see her face.

She gasped for breath, because she didn't seem to be getting enough oxygen. "The wrong time—is now," she blurted.

He took a deep breath too, as if reality had just taken a nip out of his ass too. "That close, huh?"

"On the money." She sounded a little steadier now, and she was grateful. The sharp edge of panic was fading. She had already decided she wasn't in any immediate danger, so she should just stay cool instead of jumping every time he came near. That would definitely make him suspicious, given how willingly she had made love with him. She had been lucky that his insightfulness had given her a plausible reason for her upset, but at the same time she had to remember exactly how sharp he was. If he knew she had been listening to the radio, it wouldn't take him five seconds to put it all together and realize she was on to him.

"Okay." He blew out a breath. "Before, when you told me you weren't on the pill, I didn't realize the odds. So what do you want to do? Stop taking chances, or take our chances?" Suddenly, impossibly, she felt him tremble. "Jesus," he said, his voice shaking. "I've always been so fucking careful, and vice versa."

"Do you feel reality nibbling?" Hope mumbled against his chest.

"Nibbling, hell. I've got fang marks on my ass." He trembled again. "The hell of it is ... Hope—I like the idea."

Oh, God. In despair, Hope pressed her face tight against him. He couldn't be a killer, he simply couldn't, not and treat her so sweetly, and tremble at the thought of being a father. He would have to have a split personality, to be both the man she knew and the man she feared he could be.

"Your call," he said.

He was aroused. She could feel the hard bulge of his erection. Talking about the possibility of pregnancy hadn't scared him, it had turned him on, just the way she had felt earlier, knowing they were making love without protection. And her body was already so attuned to him, so responsive to his sexuality, that she felt the inner tightening of her own desire. She was shocked at herself, but helpless to kill her reaction. All she could do was refuse to satisfy her need.

Her mouth was dry from tension, and she tried to work up some saliva. "We—we should be careful," she managed to say, thankful he had given her this out. Even if he was one of the other escaped prisoners and not the one considered so dangerous, it would be criminally irresponsible of her to continue sleeping with him. She had already been irresponsible enough. She could live with what she had already done, but it couldn't continue.

"All right." Reluctantly he released her. His face was tense. "Call me when lunch is ready. I'm going to go shovel some more snow."

Hope stood where she was until she heard the door slam behind him; then she covered her face with her hands and weakly sagged against the washing machine. Please, please, she prayed, let the telephone service be restored soon. She didn't know if she could stand another hour of this, much less days. She wanted to weep. She wanted to scream. She wanted to grab him and slam him against the wall and yell at him for being stupid and getting himself in trouble to begin with. Most of all, she wanted none of this to be true. She wanted to be completely mistaken in every conclusion she had reached.

She wanted Price.

7

While the stew was warming in the microwave, Hope took the batteries out of the radio and hid them in one of her lidded saucepans. She checked the phone, but wasn't surprised when she didn't hear a dial tone. The wind had died only a couple of hours ago, so the utility crews wouldn't have had a chance yet to begin work in her area; they would have to work behind the road crews. The bus wreck, she thought, must have happened before the weather got so bad, otherwise no one would yet know about it. The authorities had had time to reach the scene and ascertain the two deputies were dead, as well as recapture two of the escaped prisoners. Price might not have eluded them if the blizzard hadn't interfered. The radio report had said the bus ran off the road during the storm, but what was reported wasn't always accurate, and the timing of events didn't really matter.

The microwave pinged. Hope checked the stew, then set the timer for another two minutes. She could hear the thud of the shovel against the wooden porch, but Price was working on a section that wasn't in view of the windows.

If she could hear the shovel, could he have heard the radio earlier?

Sweat broke out on her forehead, and she sank weakly into a chair. Was he that good an actor?

This was making her crazy. The only way she could make it through was to stop second-guessing herself. It didn't matter whether Price was a murderer or a more ordinary criminal, she had to turn him in. She couldn't torment herself wondering what he knew or guessed, she had to proceed as best she could.

She thought of the rifle again and hastily left the chair to return to her father's bedroom, to search more thoroughly for the bullets. She couldn't afford to waste any of these precious minutes of privacy.

The box of cartridges wasn't in any of the bureau drawers. Hope looked around the room, hoping instinct would tell her the most likely hiding place—or the most unlikely. But the room was just an ordinary room, without secret panels or hidden drawers, or anything like that. She went to the bed and ran her hands under the pillows and mattress, but came up empty again.

She was pushing her luck by remaining any longer, so she hurried back to the kitchen and began setting the table. She had just finished when she heard Price stomping the snow off his boots, and the door opened.

"Damn, it's cold!" he said, shuddering as he shed his coat and sat down to pull off his heavy boots. His face was red from exposure. Despite the cold he had worked up a sweat, and a frosting of ice coated his forehead. It melted immediately in the warmth of the house, trickling down his temples.

He wiped the moisture away with his sleeve, then added another log to the fire and held his hands out to the blaze, rubbing them briskly to restore circulation.

"I'll make another pot of coffee, if you want some," Hope called as she set the large bowl of stew on the table. "Otherwise, you have a choice of milk or water."

"Water will do." He took the same kitchen chair he had used earlier. Tink, who hadn't been allowed out with Price the second time, left his spot by the fire and came to stand beside Price's chair. With a hopeful look in his eyes, he rested his muzzle on Price's thigh.

Price froze in the midst of ladling a large amount of beef stew into his bowl. He looked down at the soulful brown eyes watching him, and slanted a quick look at Hope. “Am I eating out of his bowl?"

"No, he's just giving you a guilt complex."

"It's working."

"He's had a lot of practice. Tink, come here." She patted her own thigh, but he ignored her, evidently having concluded Price was a softer touch.

Price spooned some of the stew to his mouth, but didn't take the bite. He looked down at Tink. Tink looked at him. Price returned the spoon to his bowl. "For God's sake, do something," he muttered to Hope.

"Tink, come here," she repeated, reaching for the stubborn dog.

Abruptly Tink whirled away from Price, his ears pricked forward as he faced the kitchen door. He didn't bark, but every muscle in his body quivered with alertness.

Price was out of his chair so fast Hope didn't have time to blink. With his left hand he dragged her out of her chair and whirled her behind him, at the same time reaching behind his back, drawing the pistol from his waistband.

She stood paralyzed for a second, a second in which Price seemed to be listening as intently as Tink. Then he put one hand on her shoulder and forced her down on the floor beside the china cabinet, and with a motion of his hand told her to stay there. Noiseless in his stockinged feet, he moved over to the window in the dining area, flattening his back to the wall as he reached it. She watched as he eased his head to the edge of the window, moving just enough so that he could see out with one eye. He immediately drew back, then after a moment eased forward for another look.

A low growl began in Tink's throat. Price made another motion with his hand, and without thinking, Hope reached out and dragged her pet closer to her, wrapping her arms around him, though she didn't know what she could do to keep him from barking. Hold his muzzle, maybe, but he was strong enough that she wouldn't be able to hold him if he wanted to pull free.

What was she doing? she wondered wildly. What if it were law officers out there? They couldn't have tracked Price through the blizzard, but they could be searching any places where he might have found shelter.

But would deputies be on foot, or would they use snowmobiles? She hadn't heard the distinctive roar of the machines, and surely the cold was too dangerous for anyone to be out in it any length of time, anyway.

There were also two other escaped prisoners unaccounted for; would Price be as alarmed if one or both of them were out there? Had he seen anything? There might not be anything out there but a pine cone falling, or a squirrel venturing from its den and knocking some snow off a tree limb.

"I didn't check the cabins," Price muttered savagely to himself. "God damn it, I didn't check the cabins!"

"I locked them up yesterday," Hope said, keeping her voice low.

"Locks don't mean anything." He tilted his head, listening, then made another motion for her to be quiet.

Tink quivered under her hand. Hope trembled too, her thoughts racing. If anyone had stayed last night in one of the cabins, he wasn't a deputy, because a deputy would already have come to the house. That left another escapee. Praying she was right, she clamped her hand around the dog's muzzle and hugged him close to her, whispering an apology.

Tink began fighting her immediately, squirming to get free. "Hold him," Price mouthed silently, easing toward the kitchen door.

From where she crouched beside the china cabinet, Hope couldn't see the door, and she had her hands full with Tink. The door exploded inward, crashing against the wall. She screamed and jumped, and lost her grip on Tink. He tore away from her, his paws sliding on the wood floor as he launched himself toward the unseen intruder.

The shot was deafening. Instinctively she hit the floor, still unable to see what was happening, her ears ringing, the sharp stench of burned cordite stinging her nostrils. A hard thud in the kitchen was followed by the shattering of glass. Her ears cleared enough for her to hear the savage sounds of two men fighting, the grunts and curses and thuds of fists on flesh. Tink's snarls added to the din, and she caught a flash of golden fur as he darted into the fray.

She scrambled to her feet and ran for the rifle. Price knew it was unloaded, but the other person wouldn't.

With the heavy weapon in her hands, she charged back toward the kitchen. As she rounded the cabinets, a heavy body slammed into her, knocking her down. The sharp edge of the counter dug into her shoulder, making her arm go numb, and the rifle slipped from her hand as she landed hard on her back. She cried out in angry pain, grabbing for the rifle and struggling up on one knee.

Price and a stranger strained together in vicious combat, sprawled half on the cabinets. Each man had a pistol, and each had their free hand locked around the other's wrist as they fought for control. They slammed sideways, knocking over her canister set and sending it to the floor. A cloud of flour flew over the room to settle like a powdery shroud over every surface. Price's foot slipped on the flour, and he lost leverage; the stranger rolled, heaving Price to the side. The momentum tore Price's fingers from the stranger's wrist, freeing the pistol.

Hope felt herself moving, scrambling to grab the man's hand, but she felt half paralyzed with horror; everything was in slow motion, and she knew she wouldn't get there before the man could bring the pistol down and pull the trigger.

Tink shot forward, low to the ground, and sank his teeth into the man's leg.

He screamed with pain and shock, and with his other foot kicked Tink in the head. The dog skidded across the floor, yelping.

Price gathered himself and lunged for the man, the impact carrying them both crashing into the table. The table overturned, chairs broke, chunks of meat and potatoes and carrots scattered across the floor. The two men went down, Price on top. The other man's head banged hard against the floor, momentarily stunning him. Price took swift advantage, driving his elbow into the man's solar plexus, and when the man convulsed, gasping, followed up with a short, savage punch under the chin that snapped the man's teeth together. Before he recovered from that, Price had the pistol barrel digging into the soft hollow below his ear.

The man froze.

"Drop the gun, Clinton," Price said in a very soft voice, between gulps of air. "Now, or I pull the trigger."

Clinton dropped the gun. Price reached out with his left hand and swiped the weapon back toward himself, pinning it under his left leg. Tucking his own pistol in his waistband, he grabbed Clinton with both hands and literally lifted him off the floor, turning him and slamming him down on his belly. Hope saw Clinton brace his hands, and she stepped forward, shoving the rifle barrel in his face. "Don't," she said.

Clinton slowly relaxed.

Price flicked a glance at the rifle, but he didn't say anything. He wasn't going to reveal it wasn't loaded, Hope realized, but neither would she let on that she knew it. Let him assume she didn't know.

Price dragged Clinton's arms behind his back and held them with one hand, then took the pistol out of his waistband, jamming the barrel against the base of Clinton's skull. "Move one inch," he said in a low, guttural tone, "and I'll blow your fucking head off. Hope." He didn't look at her. "Do you have any thin rope? Scarves will do, if you don't."

"I have some scarves."

"Get them."

She went upstairs and searched through her dresser until she found three scarves. Her knees were trembling, her heart thudding wildly against her ribs. She felt faintly nauseated.

She held on to the railing as she shakily made her way back down the stairs. The two men didn't look as if they had moved, Clinton lying on his belly, Price straddling him. The carnage of wrecked furniture and food surrounded them. Tink was standing at Clinton's head, his muzzle down very close to the man's face, growling.

Price took one of the scarves, twisted it lengthwise, and wound it around Clinton's wrists. He jerked the fabric tight and tied it in a hard knot. Then he jabbed the pistol into his waistband once more, took Clinton's pistol from under his knee, and levered himself to his feet. Leaning down, he grabbed the collar of Clinton's coveralls and hauled him to his feet, then slammed him down into the only chair left standing upright. He crouched and secured Clinton's feet to the legs of the chair, using a scarf for each ankle.

Clinton's head lolled back. He was breathing hard, one eye swollen shut, blood leaking from both corners of his mouth. He looked at Hope, standing there pale and stricken, still holding the rifle as if she had forgotten she had it.

"Shoot him," he croaked. "For God's sake . . . shoot him. He's an escaped murderer. I'm a deputy sheriff . . . He took my uniform . . . Damn it, shoot the bastard!"

"Nice try, Clinton," Price said, straightening.

"Ma'am, I'm telling the truth," Clinton said. "Listen to me, please."

With one smooth movement Price reached out and tugged the rifle from Hope's nerveless hands. She let it go without a protest, because now that Clinton was tied up, there was no one she could intimidate with the empty weapon.

"Shit," Clinton said, closing his good eye in despair. He sagged against the chair, still breathing hard.

Hope stared at him, fighting off the dizziness that assailed her. He was almost Price's height, but not as muscular. If she was any judge of men's clothing—and after doing all the clothes shopping for first Dylan and now her dad, she had had plenty of experience—Clinton would wear a size fifteen and a half shirt.

Price wasn't unscathed. A lump was forming on his right cheekbone, his left eyebrow was clotted with blood, and his lips were cut in three separate places. He wiped the blood out of his eye and looked at Hope. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," she said, though her shoulder hurt like blue blazes where the cabinet edge had dug in, and she still wasn't at all certain she wasn't going to faint.

"You don't look it. Sit down." He looked around, spotted an unbroken chair, and set it upright. His hand on Hope's shoulder, he pressed her down onto the chair. "Adrenaline," he said briefly. "You always feel weak as hell when the scare's over."

"You broke into one of the cabins, didn't you?" Price asked Clinton. "Built a fire in the fireplace, stayed nice and warm. With the blizzard going on, we wouldn't be able to see the smoke from the chimney. When the weather cleared, though, you had to let the fire go out. Got damn cold, didn't it? But you couldn't head off into the mountains without heavier clothes and some food, so you knew you had to break into the house."

"Good scenario, Tanner," Clinton said. "Is that what you would’ve done if you hadn't stolen my uniform?" He opened his eye and flicked a look around. "Where's the old man? Did you kill him too?"

Hope felt Price looking at her, assessing her reaction to Clinton's tale, but she merely stared at the captured man without a change in her expression. Maintaining her composure wasn't difficult; she felt numb, absolutely drained. How did Clinton know about her father? Was he from the area? She was not, she thought, cut out to be an action hero.

"Hey." Price squatted in front of her, touching her cheek, folding her hands in his. She blinked, focusing her gaze on him. His brows were drawn together in a small frown, his blue eyes searching as he examined her. "Don't let him play mind games with you, honey. Everything's going to be all right; just relax and trust me."

"Don't listen to him, ma'am," Clinton said.

"You look pretty shaky," Price told her, ignoring Clinton. "Maybe you should lie down for a minute. Come on, let me help you to the couch." He urged her to her feet, his hand under her elbow. As she turned, he uttered a savage curse and hauled her to a halt.

"What?" she said, shaken by the abrupt change in him.

"You said you weren't hurt."

“I’m not."

"Your back is bleeding." His face grim, he force-marched her into her dad's bedroom. He paused to replace the rifle in the rack, then ushered her into the bathroom. After jerking open the curtains so he would have sufficient light, he began unbuttoning her shirt.

"Oh, that. I scraped it on the cabinet edge when I fell." She tried to grab his hands, but he brushed her hands aside and pulled off her shirt, whirling her around so he could examine her back. She shivered, her nipples puckering as the cold air washed over her bare breasts.

He dampened a washcloth and dabbed it on her back, just below her shoulder blade. Hope flinched at the pain.

"You’ve got a gouge in your back, and from the looks of it, a monster bruise is forming." Gently he continued washing the wound. "You need an ice pack on it, but first I'm going to disinfect that gouge and put a gauze pad over it. Where are your first aid supplies?"

"In the cabinet door over the refrigerator."

"Lie down on the bed. I'll be right back."

He guided her to the bed, and Hope willingly collapsed facedown. She was cold without her shirt, though, and tugged the cover around her.

Price returned in just a moment with the first aid box. Blood was dripping in his eye again, and he paused a minute to wash his own face. Blood immediately trickled down again, and with an impatient curse he tore open an adhesive bandage and plastered it over his eyebrow.

Then, holding the box on his lap, he sat beside Hope and gently dabbed the wound with an antibiotic ointment. As gentle as he was, even the lightest touch was painful. She bore it, refusing to flinch again. He placed a gauze pad over the wound, then covered her with one of her dad's T-shirts.

"Just lie still," he ordered. "I'll get an ice pack."

He improvised an ice pack by filling a zip-lock plastic bag with ice cubes. Hope jumped when he gently laid it on her back. "That's too cold!"

"Okay, maybe the T-shirt's too thin. Let me get a towel."

He got a towel from the bathroom, and draped it over her in place of the T-shirt. The ice pack was tolerable then, barely.

He pulled the cover up over her, because the room was chilly. "Are you too cold?" he asked, smoothing her hair. "Do you want me to carry you upstairs?"

"No, I'm fine, with the cover over me," she murmured. "I'm sleepy, though."

"Reaction," he said, leaning over and brushing a kiss on her temple. "Take a nap, then. You'll feel fine when you wake up."

"I feel like a wuss right now," she admitted.

"Never been in a fight before?"

"Nope, that was my first one. I didn't like it. I acted like a girl, didn't I?"

He chuckled, his fingers gentle on her hair. "How does a girl act?"

"You know, the way they always do in the movies, screaming and getting in the way."

"Did you scream?"

"Yes. When he kicked in the door. It startled me."

"Fancy that. Did you get in the way?"

"I tried not to."

"You didn't, honey," he said reassuringly "You kept your head, got the rifle, and held it on him." He kissed her once more, his lips warm on her cool skin. "I'd choose you for my side in any fight. Go to sleep, now, and don't worry about the mess in the kitchen. Tink and I will clean it up. He's already taken care of the beef stew."

She smiled, as he had meant her to, and he eased up from the bed. She closed her eyes, and in a few seconds she heard the quiet click of the door closing.

Hope opened her eyes.

She lay quietly, because the ice pack was easing the soreness in her shoulder. Fifteen minutes on, fifteen minutes off—if she remembered accurately how ice therapy worked. She might need all the flexibility in the shoulder she could muster, and she estimated Price wouldn't check on her for at least an hour. She had a little time to take care of herself.

She heard him moving around in the kitchen. Broken glass tinkled as he swept it up, and she heard the crackle of shattered wood when he picked up the smashed remains of some of her chairs. She didn't hear the captured Clinton utter a sound.

The flour had made quite a mess. Cleaning it up would require vacuuming and mopping, and washing it off everything else would take a lot of time.

Hope threw back the covers and eased off the bed. Silently she opened the closet door and took down one of her dad's sweatshirts, gingerly pulling it on over her head and wincing as her abused shoulder and back muscles protested the movement.

Then she began searching for the bullets.

Half an hour later, she found the box, in the pocket of one of her dad's jackets.

8

Hope had several of her dad's old, no-longer-used neckties dangling from the waistband of her sweatpants when she left the bedroom. The rifle was in her hands.

Clinton was sitting silently, exactly as she had last seen him, not that he had much choice. He opened his good eye when he heard her, the single orb widening as he saw the rifle. He gave a faint, satisfied smile and nodded at her.

Price was standing at the sink, wringing out a dishcloth. He had most of the mess cleaned up, though she was woefully short of furniture now and there were still a few surfaces dusted with flour. He looked up, and whatever he had been about to say died on his lips when she raised the rifle.

"Keep your right hand where I can see it," she said calmly. "Use your left hand to get the pistol out of your waistband. Put it on the cabinet and slide it toward me."

He didn't move. His blue eyes turned hard and glacial. "What in hell do you think you're doing?"

"Taking over," she replied. "Do what I said."

He didn't even glance at the rifle. His mouth set in a grim line, he started toward her.

"I found the bullets," Hope said quickly, before he got close enough to grab the rifle. "In a coat pocket," she added, just so he would know she really had found them.

He stopped. The fury that darkened his face would have terrified her if she hadn't had the rifle.

"The pistol," she prompted.

Slowly, keeping his right hand resting on the sink, he reached behind his back and drew out the pistol. Placing it on the cabinet, he shoved it toward her.

"Don't forget mine," Clinton said from behind her, the words slightly slurred; his damaged mouth and jaw were swelling and turning dark.

"The other one too," Hope said, not flinching from the sulfurous look Price gave her. Silently he obeyed.

"Now step back."

He did. She picked up her pistol and laid down the rifle, because the pistol was more convenient. "Okay, sit down in the chair and put your hands behind you."

"Don't do this, Hope," he said between clenched teeth.

"He's a murderer. Don't listen to him. Why would you believe him, for God's sake? Look at him! He's wearing prison coveralls."

"Only because you stole my uniform," Clinton snarled.

"Sit down," Hope told Price again.

"Damn it, why won't you listen to me?" he said furiously

"Because I heard on the radio about a bus wreck. Two deputies were killed, and five prisoners escaped." Hope didn't take her eyes off his face. She saw his pupils dilate, his jaw harden. "Because your uniform shirt is too small for you. Because you didn't have a wallet, and even though your uniform pants were torn and bloody, you weren't injured anywhere."

"Then what about the service revolver? If I took a deputy's clothes, why wouldn't I have also taken his weapon?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "Maybe you were knocked out during the wreck, and when you regained consciousness, the other prisoners had already escaped and taken the weapons with them. I don't know all the details. All I know is I have a lot of questions, and your answers don't add up. Why did you unload the rifle and hide the bullets?"

He didn't blink. "For safety reasons."

She didn't either. "Bull. Sit down."

He sat. He didn't like it, but her finger was on the trigger and her gaze didn't waver.

"Hands behind your back."

He put them behind his back. Steam was all but coming out of his ears. Staying out of his reach, in case he should whirl suddenly and try to knock the gun out of her hand, she pulled one of the neckties from her waistband and fashioned two loose loops with it. Moving in quickly then, she slipped the loops over his hands and jerked the ends tight. He was already moving, shifting his weight, but he froze in place as the fabric tightened around his wrists.

"Neat trick," he said emotionlessly. "What did you do?"

"Loops, like roping a calf. All I had to do was pull." She wrapped the loose ends between his wrists, tying off each of the loops, and then knotted the tie in place. "Okay, now your feet."

He sat without moving, letting her tie his feet to the chair legs. "Listen to me," he said urgently. "I really am a deputy sheriff. I haven't worked in this county very long and not many people know me."

"Yeah, sure," Clinton snarled, "You killed those two deputies, and you would probably have killed her before you left. Untie me, ma'am, my hands are numb."

"Don't! Listen to me, Hope. You've heard about this guy. He's from around here. That's how he knew you lived with your father. Clinton"—he jerked his head toward the other man—"kidnapped the daughter of a wealthy rancher from this area and asked for a million in ransom. They paid him the money, but he didn't keep his part of the bargain. The girl wasn't where he said he had left her. He was caught when he tried to spend the money, and he's never told where he hid the girl's body. It was all over the news. He was being transferred to a more secure jail, and we thought it was worth a try to put me in with him, maybe get him to talk about it. He can be convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence, but the parents want their child's body found. They've accepted that she's dead, but they want to give her a decent burial. She was seventeen, a pretty little girl he's got buried up in the mountains somewhere, or dumped in an abandoned mine."

"You know a lot of possibilities," Clinton charged, his tone savage. "Keep talking; tell me where you hid her body."

Hope walked into the great room and added more wood to the fire. Then she paused by the telephone, lifting the receiver to check for a dial tone. Nothing.

"What are you doing?" Clinton demanded. "Untie me."

"No," Hope said.

"What?" He sounded as if he couldn't believe what he had heard.

"No. Until the phone service is restored and I can call the sheriff to straighten this out, I figure the best thing to do is keep both of you just the way you are."

There was a stunned moment of silence; then Price threw back his head on a shout of laughter. Clinton stared at her, mouth agape; then his face flushed dark red and he yelled, "You stupid fucking bitch!"

"That's my girl," Price chortled, still laughing. "God, I love you! I'll even forgive you for this, though the guys are going to ride my ass for years about letting a sweet little brown-eyed blonde get the drop on me."

Hope looked at those laughing blue eyes, shiny with tears of mirth, and she couldn't help smiling. "I probably love you too, but that doesn't mean I'm going to untie you."

Clinton recovered himself enough to say, "He's playing you for a fool, ma'am."

" 'Ma'am'?" she repeated. "That isn't what you called me a second ago."

"I'm sorry. I lost my temper." He inhaled raggedly. "It galls me to see you falling for that sweet shit he deals out to every woman."

"I'm sure it does."

"What do I have to do to convince you he's lying?"

"You can't do anything, so you might as well save your breath," she said politely.

Half an hour later Clinton said, "I have to use the bathroom."

"Go in your pants," Hope replied. She hadn't thought about that complication, but she wasn't going to change her mind and untie either one of them. She gave Price an apologetic look, and he winked at her.

"I'm okay for right now. If the phone service isn't restored by nightfall, though, I'll probably be begging you for a fruit jar."

She would bring him one too,  she  thought.   She wouldn't mind performing that service for him at all. She glanced at Clinton. No way; she wouldn't touch his with a pair of tongs.

She checked the phone every half hour, watching as the afternoon sun sank behind the mountains. Clinton squirmed, and she had no doubt he was in misery. Price had to be uncomfortable too, but he didn't let it show. He grinned at her every time he caught her eye, though with his bruised face the grin looked more like a grimace.

Just at twilight, when she lifted the receiver, she heard a dial tone. "Bingo!" she said triumphantly, picking up the phone book to look up the number of the sheriff's department.

Price rattled off the number for her, and though she had been almost certain he was telling the truth, in that moment she knew for certain. Light broke across her face, and she gave him a radiant smile as she punched in the number.

"Sheriff's Department," a brisk male voice said.

"Hello, this is Hope Bradshaw, at the Crescent Lake Resort. I have two men here. One is Price Tanner and the other's name is Clinton. They both claim to be deputies and that the other is a murderer. Can you tell me which is which?"

"Holy shit!" the voice bellowed. "Damn! Shit, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that. You say you have both Tanner and Clinton?"

"Yes, I do. Which one is your deputy?"

"Tanner is. How do you have them? I mean—"

"I'm holding a gun on them," she said. "What does Tanner look like? What color are his eyes?"

The deputy on the line sounded nonplussed. "His eyes? Ah . . . the subject is approximately six-two, two hundred pounds, dark hair, blue eyes."

"Thank you," Hope said, thankful that law officers were trained to give succinct descriptions. "Would you like to speak with Deputy Tanner?"

"Yes, ma'am, I would!"

Picking up the phone, she carried it as far as she could, but the cord wasn't long enough to reach. "Just a moment," she said, laying down the receiver.

She dashed to the kitchen and got her paring knife. Running back to Price, she knelt and sawed through the fabric binding his wrists, then turned her attention to his ankles while he rubbed feeling back into his hands. "You need a cordless phone," he said. "Or one with a longer cord."

"I'll take care of that the next time I go shopping," she said as she freed his ankles. The kitchen phone was closer, though that cord wasn't long enough to reach either. He hobbled over to it, his muscles stiff from sitting so long in a strained position.

"This is Tanner. Yeah, everything's under control. I'll give a complete briefing when you get here. Are the roads passable yet? Okay." He hung up and hobbled toward her. "The road is still blocked, but they're going to grab a snowplow. They should be here in a couple of hours."

He hobbled past. Hope blinked. "Price?"

"Can't stop to talk," he said, speeding up his hobbling, heading straight toward the bathroom.

Hope couldn't smother her laugh. Clinton glared at her as she walked past him to hang up the phone in the great room. She still had the paring knife in her hand. She paused and looked at him consideringly, and something must have shown in her face because he blanched.

"Don't," he said as she started toward him, and then he began to yell.

"You CUT him," Price said, his tone disbelieving. "You really cut him."

"He had to know I meant business," Hope said. "It was just a teeny cut, nothing to make such a fuss about. Actually, it was an accident; I didn't intend to get that close, but he jumped."

That wasn't all Clinton had done; he had also lost control of his bladder. And then he had begun talking, babbling as fast as he could, yelling for Price, saying anything to keep her from cutting him again. Price had called the sheriff's department and relayed the information, which they hoped was accurate.

it was after midnight. They lay in bed, their arms around each other. She held an ice pack to his cheek; he held another one on her back.

"I meant it, you know," Price said, kissing her forehead, "about loving you. I know everything happened too fast, but... I know what I feel. From the minute I opened my eyes and saw your face, I wanted you." He paused. "So . . . ?"

"So?" she repeated.

"So, you 'probably’ love me too, huh?"

"Probably." She nestled more comfortably against him. "Definitely."

"Say it!" he ordered under his breath, his arms tightening around her.

"I love you. But we really should take our time, get to know each other—"

He gave a low laugh. "Take our time? It's a little late for that, isn't it?"

She had no answer, because too much had happened in too short a time. She felt as if the past day had been weeks long. Thrown together as they had been under extreme circumstances, she had seen him in a multitude of situations, and she knew her first dazed, deliriously joyous impression of him had been accurate. She felt as if she had known him immediately, primitive instinct recognizing him as her mate.

"Marry me, Hope. As soon as possible. The chances we’ve taken, we’ve probably hit the baby jackpot." His voice was lazy, seductive.

She lifted her head from his shoulder, staring at him through the darkness. She saw the gleam of his teeth as he smiled, and once again she felt that jolt of awareness, of recognition. "All right," she whispered. "You don't mind?"

"Mind?" He took her hand and carried it to his crotch. He was hard as a rock. "I'm raring to go, honey," he whispered, and his voice was trembling a little, as it had earlier when they discussed the possibility. “All you have to do is say the word, and I'll devote myself to the project."

"Word," she said, joyfully giving herself up to the inevitable.

End