Zach's Law

by Kay Hooper

  Kelsey snorted. “What guards? I moved around this place like a shadow for two days until I realized not a soul had been left on guard here. And no security devices, either.” He ran a hand through his thick hair and frowned at his boss. “You didn’t answer me. What’re you doing here?”

  Hagen was gazing around at the considerable number of stacked crates. “A slight change in plans, my boy.”

  Wincing, Kelsey muttered, “Oh, my God,” as one who had learned to beware that simple phrase.

  Hagen’s cherubic face remained bland. “An unanticipated player has entered the game.”

  Kelsey stared at him for a moment, then grinned abruptly. “Don’t tell me. That human element you were so sure you’d avoided this time? You sent Zach out alone to the back of beyond, only bad guys for company, and fate threw a wild card into his hand?”

  “Colorful metaphors,” Hagen noted, somewhat reluctantly approving. He sighed. “These men appear to have a penchant for conducting romances at the most unlikely times.”

  The men he referred to, Kelsey knew, were the reluctant agents drafted by Hagen months before, when they had stumbled onto one of his operations. Josh Long, Zach Steele, Rafferty Lewis, and Lucas Kendrick were a close-knit bunch with a habit of looking out for one another, and shared an uncanny ability to jolt Hagen out of his normally unshakable composure.

  Kelsey enjoyed watching that, no matter how many times plans had to be revised because of it. It wasn’t often that anyone got the better of the boss. But this time even he was startled by Hagen’s observation.

  “Romance? You mean, Zach managed to find a woman way out there? How on earth—”

  “I don’t know, but he destroyed her car.” Hagen sounded disgusted, unusually emotional. “And Sarah Lewis came asking questions. Raven and her bothersome husband flew back from Canada last night ahead of schedule, and Rafferty Lewis somehow managed to acquire an army helicopter this afternoon. No doubt he made use of Josh Long’s military contact—not that they would ever admit it, of course.”

  “What’s Lucas done?” Kelsey murmured.

  Hagen glared at him. “You mean, aside from going to Boston in order to reassure the girl’s sister that she was fine? Oh, not much. Except that he’s used his intelligence contacts to find out that Ryan is the one we’re after.” Parenthetically and in a tone that boded ill for someone, he added, “I’m going to plug that leak.”

  “Well,” Kelsey said, “it looks like the gang—excepting Sarah, since she wouldn’t risk the baby—is about to be all here.” He shook his head in mild disgust. “Boss, you really should have known that if you brought one of that group in, you’d get them all.”

  If Kelsey had been looking, he would have seen a tiny smile curve Hagen’s bow-shaped mouth; when he did look, however, all he saw was a disgruntled cherub.

  “A change in plans,” Hagen repeated.

  Kelsey groaned.

  Teddy was sitting just inside the cavelet, her arms around her raised knees, when Zach returned. Looking wide-awake and largely recovered from her injury, she got to her feet as he came in, and if her arm seemed a bit stiff, at least she didn’t hesitate to use it.

  “We can see the house from here,” she said.

  Zach looked at her searchingly, and the tight feeling in his chest gradually eased. She was going to be all right, he realized. For a while he hadn’t let himself believe that. He nodded in response to her comment. “We can see it. If the men inside have a pair of binoculars, they can see us as well.”

  “I thought we were hiding.”

  “No. We’ve just found a more defensible position where we can’t be surprised.”

  Teddy thought about that, sitting back down and watching as Zach dropped an armload of small sticks and branches inside the cavelet and knelt to start a fire. The sun was going down, and it was gradually getting dark.

  She remembered that Zach had approached obliquely, holding to cover whenever possible. She studied the way he had narrowed the cavelet’s entrance, noting that he was building the fire behind the shield of branches so it would be hidden from the sight of the men in the house.

  “But you’re not calling attention to us,” she said, realizing it slowly. “They know we’re up here, but we won’t be targets?”

  Zach paused to look up at her. “Yes, I doubt Ryan will come looking. He’s on a tight schedule, and I’m betting he’ll move it up. When the stuff gets here tomorrow morning, he’ll load everything and ship it out right away.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “It’s what I’d do in his place.” He went back to building the fire.

  “And you’ll follow the shipment?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t look up.

  “Even though Ryan knows you’ll follow him?”

  “Yes.”

  Teddy bit her lip, staring at him. She felt suddenly cold and a little lonely. He was behind his armor, out of reach. Safer for him—but hell for her. Already, she thought. Already he’s putting me out of his life.

  “We’re safe up here?” She heard her own voice, as if from a great distance, and she stood up.

  “Safe enough.”

  Ignoring the throb of protest from her arm, Teddy caught the hem of her sweater and peeled it off over her head, tossing it aside. Her boots landed beside the sweater, and she tugged the tail of her shirt from inside her jeans. When Zach rose and turned, she was unbuttoning the shirt.

  He didn’t move for a moment, and even in the dimness of the cave she could see his face tighten. “Teddy—”

  She didn’t take her eyes off him, and her voice was husky when she spoke. “Hell … call it lust.”

  He made a rough sound and took two steps, catching her shoulders in his large hands. “Don’t, honey.”

  “Why not?” Teddy wondered what was in her face to make his change so; he looked as if he were in pain. “You’re going to send me away, aren’t you? If not tomorrow, then later.” The shirt hung open, and she fumbled with the snap of her jeans. “Why shouldn’t I take what I can get now? And I’m greedy, Zach; I want everything I can get from you—”

  “Don’t.” He was holding her face, turning it up, kissing her with aching tenderness. His eyes were glittering pools of darkness, and a muscle flexed in his jaw. “Just don’t. I won’t let you talk like that.”

  “Then shut me up,” she whispered, rising on her toes as her arms slid around his neck.

  The small fire crackling just a few feet away had not even begun to warm the cavelet, but neither of them noticed the chill. Their clothing fell away, dropping unnoticed to the hard dirt beneath their feet. Teddy had forgotten her injury and made him forget it, moving sensuously against him, frantic to transport them both to the only place he’d allow them to be together, to drive him so crazy that he’d forget all about sending her out of his life.

  Gritting her teeth against the hot, untamed passion that fought to control her body, Teddy kept just enough command over herself to concentrate totally on pleasing him. She explored his big body with trembling fingers and shaking lips, elated by the fiery response she could feel in him. And she felt a giddy sense of power when he leashed his own powerful strength, rolling onto his back to let her do as she wished.

  And what she wished was to please him, because in doing that she was pleasing herself. The wildness of what she felt added instinct to knowledge, and she was utterly uninhibited in loving him, until finally it was she who held him down, she whose fierce determination and hungry caresses stole from him every last shred of conscious will and made him helpless in the only way a very strong man could be made helpless—powerless to control or fight the need she had ignited in him.

  Zach groaned harshly and lifted her bodily above him, his hard hands guiding her hips until they were fully joined. Teddy gazed down at him, her eyes shimmering with amber fire. She set the tempo, enjoying his body while hers held him tightly in a velvet clasp. With lithe muscles and a sensuous grace, she moved in a slow, lazy dance of sed
uction until finally he couldn’t take any more.

  He took over, guiding her hips, his body surging beneath her. With a strength she could never match, he drove them both higher and higher, until Teddy collapsed on him with a wild moan, even as a raw cry of release was torn from his throat.

  The heat of their bodies insulated them from the chill of the cavelet, and the flickering firelight played over them both as darkness fell outside. At last Teddy lifted her head from his heaving chest, barely able to breathe herself.

  “See what you’ll be throwing away if you make me leave?” she whispered unsteadily.

  He brushed a strand of red hair from her damp face, and his own face was strained, as if he were fighting himself. “Do you realize,” he murmured, “that someone could have come in here and cut both our throats a few minutes ago? And that I wouldn’t have heard—or cared?”

  “You said we were safe.”

  “Safe enough, considering we’re in a war.”

  Her chin became stubbornly firm as she heard what he was telling her. In a voice that hardly repressed anger, she told him, “I hate that woman for what she did to you.”

  “Teddy …”

  “I love you, Zach. Why won’t you believe that?”

  “Because I can’t.” His voice was harsh, but his hands were gentle when he lifted her off him.

  “Zach—”

  Leaving her, he reached for his clothes and began dressing. “We’re good in bed together, Teddy, and that’s all.” He was struggling to lock his own feelings away inside him, cold with the knowledge that they could have been in danger and he wouldn’t have been able to react fast enough. This had to stop; it had to stop now. “For God’s sake, let it be.”

  “No.” She rose on her knees, glaring up at him. “Maybe you can’t love me back, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you send me away knowing you don’t believe I love you. Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I don’t know the difference between love and—and propinquity?”

  Zach gathered her clothes and tossed them to her without looking at her. His face was hard again. He had to close her out. He couldn’t protect her while she was so close. His chest was aching again. “Propinquity? Well, I guess that’s as good a word as any. You’re just confused, Teddy. Anybody would be.”

  “Confused?” She made the word sound like a curse. “Confusion doesn’t tear me up inside, Zach. Confusion doesn’t make me so hungry that I know I’ll never be full—”

  Deliberately prosaic and unemotional, he said, “You haven’t eaten since morning.”

  For the first time in her life, Teddy understood the expression “tearing out her hair.” She wanted to tear hers out in sheer frustration. “Damn you, Zach.”

  He didn’t respond to the tired curse. Instead, he said, “I’ll fix something,” and knelt to rummage in the duffel bag.

  In silence Teddy dressed, and in silence she ate the packaged soup he heated over the fire. Time was running out for her, and she was all too aware of that. And all her instincts warned her that if she didn’t at least convince Zach that she loved him, she’d never see him again.

  But how to convince him when he was blindly convinced that what she felt was unreal?

  He went outside several times during the next hours, and each time Teddy waited unquestioningly by the small fire. He had fixed a pot of coffee, and she sipped that, aware at one point of the absurdity of crying because he’d never make coffee for her again.

  When he returned that time, her eyes were dry.

  Sometime after midnight, Zach grew increasingly restless, going several times to the entrance to listen intently.

  “What?” she asked, startled by the sound of her voice in the stillness.

  Zach returned to the fire, frowning. “I could have sworn I heard a helicopter a while ago.”

  “Hagen moving in early?” she asked, but without much interest.

  “No, I doubt that. He wouldn’t risk it.”

  Teddy had been filling her coffee cup again and nearly dropped the pot as she suddenly remembered what she had done so many hours before. She sent Zach an oblique glance, chewing on her bottom lip worriedly. “Zach?”

  “What?” Without waiting for a response, he rose again and went to the entrance to stand, listening.

  Teddy opened her mouth to confess, but her heart leapt into her throat when he moved suddenly, reaching for the gun he wore. But the movement was never completed. Zach froze, his hand gripping the gun but leaving it holstered, and his nostrils flared. Then he relaxed completely and spoke in a normal voice. To someone outside.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  And from outside, a deep male voice responded, “What gave me away?”

  Zach grunted, releasing his gun and moving back to the fire. “The stuff that French countess had concocted for you about five years ago. You’re upwind.”

  “The cologne?” Joshua Long stepped into the cavelet, dressed as ruggedly as Zach but looking more like a country gentleman. His handsome face was mildly annoyed. “I’ll have to do something about that,” he said in a disgusted tone.

  “Raven probably will when the next yearly shipment arrives,” Zach told him.

  Josh didn’t seem disturbed by the prospect. “True.”

  “I set snares,” Zach said.

  Josh nodded. “I almost fell into one of them. Almost.” He followed Zach’s example in hunkering down by the fire, and his cool blue eyes warmed when they found Teddy. “Hello, Teddy. It’s been a long time.”

  She avoided Zach’s sudden stare. “Josh. Yes, two years or so ago, wasn’t it? That business party Daddy gave while you were in San Francisco?”

  “I remember it well.” He stretched his hands out to the fire, and the gold of his wedding band caught the light and gleamed brightly. He shook his head slightly. “You had a leopard on a leash, and it was as tame as a kitten around you.”

  “Uh-huh.” Teddy cleared her throat, wondering a bit wildly when the small talk would be over and they would get down to the business of Zach strangling her.

  Despite his offhand attitude, Josh was gazing beneath his lashes at each of them thoughtfully, fully aware of the tension between them. He had weighed too many executives across too many boardroom tables over the years to fail now in reading these two guarded, wary people. Still casual, he told the other man, “I found your Jeep and parked there. Lucas is watching the house, and Rafferty has a chopper standing by. Raven went to find Kelsey.”

  In a voice totally devoid of emotion Zach said, “I gather you two know each other?”

  It was Josh who answered. “We’ve met a few times. Her father’s Justin Tyler. You’ve met him yourself.”

  Zach remembered the tall, silver-haired industrialist who had joined Josh in a few business ventures several years back. And it was sheer chance Zach hadn’t been at the party Josh had mentioned; he often attended those business affairs. So Teddy was the fascinating girl with the leopard on a leash Josh had told him about. What would have happened, Zach wondered, if they had met then, under normal circumstances? He forced himself to listen as Josh went on calmly.

  “We’d found out you were here in Colorado, of course, but we wouldn’t have known where to look if Teddy hadn’t gotten in touch this morning.”

  “You didn’t tell me you knew anything about computers,” Zach said mildly to Teddy.

  She was hugging her raised knees, her chin resting on them as she gazed steadfastly into the fire. “You didn’t ask.”

  “The access codes?”

  She managed a shrug. “I paid attention when you called.”

  Zach drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Ignoring her, he looked at Josh. “You can help me by getting out of here, Josh. And by taking her with you.”

  Teddy stiffened but still refused to look at him. She wished she could hate him. Hate couldn’t hurt worse than this, it couldn’t.

  Josh drew out a gold cigarette case and didn’t reply until his cigarette was lighted. Th
en, completely calm, he said, “I seem to recall a few occasions when you tagged along against my wishes to make certain I didn’t shoot myself, Zach. We’re staying.”

  “Dammit, it’s Clay Ryan.”

  Josh’s blue eyes flickered and his lean face hardened, but his voice remained undisturbed when he spoke. “Yeah, I know. Lucas found that out. All the more reason.”

  “Josh—”

  “We all know what’s involved,” Josh told him. “When the shipment goes out, we can take turns following so they’ll never know they’re being tailed.”

  Zach looked at Teddy again. “You certainly didn’t leave anything out,” he said coldly.

  With equal coldness she said, “I believe in detail.”

  Zach rose with an almost uncontrolled motion. “I’ll go talk to Lucas.”

  “You won’t convince him, either,” Josh murmured.

  Zach said something violently explicit that would have had most employers’ hair standing on end, and stalked from the cavelet.

  Josh flicked a bit of ash from his cigarette into the fire and said musingly, “He’s more than usually touchy. I haven’t seen him like this in years.”

  Teddy didn’t ask when. Instead, she said, “He told me he didn’t have a kind bone in his body.”

  After a moment Josh said thoughtfully, “Well, actually, he doesn’t.”

  “I thought you were his friend.”

  Josh looked at her, and his hard, handsome face softened in an expression of gentleness that few ever saw. In a tone to match his expression he said, “Teddy, people do brutal things to each other, and Zach’s spent too many years watching that. He’s been through a hellish war and a great many battles. He’s a strong man, and strong men don’t fall apart when they’re hurt. They just keep getting tougher. He isn’t kind. He’s the best man I know, but he isn’t kind.”

  Staring at him, Teddy slowly began to understand. “But … if he does something that’s kind?”