by Linda Howard
But they did have a stolen horse hidden away, and a big problem on their hands. She focused her thoughts, and despite the fact that she was lying helplessly pinned beneath him, she fixed him with a dark, penetrating gaze. “So why was a federal special agent mucking out my stables?”
“Trying to find out who’s been killing horses and collecting the insurance money on them—boss.” He added the last word in a dry tone, responding to her arrogant claiming of the Solomon Green stables as her own.
She ignored the not-so-subtle teasing, because she’d heard it so often from her family. What she loved, she claimed; it was as simple as that. She drew her head back deeper into the pillow and gave him a frankly skeptical look. “Insurance fraud rates a special agent?”
“It does when it involves kidnapping, crossing state lines and murder.”
Murder. So she’d been right: Someone was trying to kill them. Had this someone hit her on the head, or had she gained the goose egg by a more mundane method, such as falling?
“What brought you to Solomon Green?”
“A tip.” One corner of his mouth curved slightly. His face was so close to hers that she could see the tiny lines created by the movement, as if he smiled easily. “Law enforcement agencies couldn’t operate without snitches.”
“So you knew Sole Pleasure was in danger?” She didn’t like that. Anger began to smolder in her dark eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have been on guard without causing any suspicion. You didn’t have a right to gamble with his life.”
“All of the horses are insured. Any of them could have been targeted. Sole Pleasure should have been their least likely target, because he’s so well-known. His death would raise a lot of questions, attract a lot of attention.” He paused, watching her carefully. “And, until last night, you were on my list of suspects.”
She absorbed that, her only reaction a slight tightening of her mouth. “How did last night change your mind? What happened?” It was both frustrating and frightening, not being able to remember.
“You came to me for help. You were so angry you could barely speak, and you were scared. You said we had to get Sole Pleasure out of there, and if I didn’t want to help, you’d manage on your own.”
“Did I say who was after him?”
He gave a slight shake of his head. “No. Like I said, you were barely speaking. You wouldn’t answer any questions. I thought at the time you were too scared, and once we had the horse safe, I was going to give you a little time to settle down before I started questioning you. Then I noticed how pale and shaky you were, maybe a little shocky from the adrenaline crash. You wanted to go on, but I made you stop here. You conked out as soon as we got in the room.”
That reminded her again of both the interesting question of whether she had undressed herself or he had done it for her and his rather irritating assumption that he could make her do anything. She frowned when she realized that he could back up that assumption with action; her current position proved it. He hadn’t hurt her, but physically she was still very much under his control.
Her frown deepened as she grew more annoyed with herself than before. She was doing it again, letting her attention drift. She could keep letting herself get sidetracked by her undeniable attraction to him, or she could keep her mind on the problem at hand. Sole Pleasure’s life, and perhaps her own, depended on doing whatever she could to help this man.
There was no question which was most important.
“The Stonichers,” she said slowly. “They’re the only ones who would benefit financially from Sole Pleasure’s death, but they’d make more by syndicating him for stud, so killing him doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s another reason I didn’t think he was in danger. I was watching all the other horses. The insurance on them wouldn’t be as much, but neither would their deaths cause much of a stir.”
“How did I find you?” she asked. “Did I come to your room? Call you? Did anyone see us, or did you see anyone?” His room was one of ten, tiny but private, in a long, narrow block building the Stonichers had built specifically to house the employees who were transient and had no other quarters, as well as those who needed to be on-site. As the trainer, Maris was important enough to have her own small three-room cottage on the premises. The foaling man, Mr. Wyse, also had his own quarters, an upstairs apartment in the foaling barn, where he watched the mothers-to-be on video monitors. There were always people around; someone had to have seen them.
“I wasn’t in my room. I’d been in the number two barn, checking around, and had just gone out the back door when you rode by on Sole Pleasure. It was dark, so I didn’t think you’d seen me, but you stopped and told me I had to help you. The truck and trailer that brought in that little sorrel mare this afternoon were still sitting there, hooked up, so we loaded Sole Pleasure in and took off. If anyone saw us, I doubt they could even have seen there was a horse in the trailer, much less recognized it as Sole Pleasure.”
It was possible, she thought. The number two barn was where the mares who had been sent to the farm for breeding were stabled. Night came early in December, and the horses were already settled down, the workers relaxing or at supper. The truck and trailer didn’t belong to Solomon Green, and everyone knew they had brought in a mare that afternoon, so no one would think anything of the rig leaving, except the driver, who had decided to spend the night and start back at dawn the next day. And Sole Pleasure was exceptionally easy to load; he never made a fuss and, in fact, seemed to enjoy traveling. Loading him wouldn’t have taken more than a minute, and then they would have been on their way.
“I didn’t have a chance to call my family,” she said, “but did you call anyone while I was asleep?”
“I went out to a pay phone and let my office know what was going on. They’ll try to run interference for us, but they can’t be too obvious without blowing the operation. We still don’t know who’s involved in the ring—unless you’ve remembered something else in the past few minutes?”
“No,” she said regretfully. “My last clear memory is of walking down to the stables yesterday afternoon. I know it was after lunch, but I don’t know the exact time. What little else I remember is just flashes of being angry, and scared, and running to Pleasure’s stall.”
“If you remember anything else, even the smallest detail, tell me immediately. By taking the horse, we’ve given them the perfect opportunity to kill him and blame it on us, or at least they’ll see it that way, since they don’t know I’m FBI. They’ll be after us hot and heavy, and I need to know who to expect.”
“Where’s Pleasure now?” she asked in alarm, putting her hands on his shoulders and pushing. She squirmed under him, trying to slip free of his weight so that she could get up, get dressed and get to the horse. It wasn’t like her to be so lax about a horse’s comfort and security, and though she had watched MacNeil enough to know that he was conscientious with the animals, the final responsibility was hers.
“Calm down. He’s all right.” MacNeil caught her hands, once more holding them down on the pillow. “I’ve got him stashed in the woods. No one’s going to find him. I couldn’t make it easy for them. Leaving him in the parking lot, where anyone could get at him, would have made even a fool suspicious. They’re going to have to come to us in order to find him.”
She relaxed against the pillows, reassured about Pleasure’s safety. “All right. What are we going to do now?”
He hesitated. “My original plan was to find out what you knew, then put you somewhere safe until we had everything settled.”
“Where were you going to put me, in the trailer with Pleasure?” she asked, a slight caustic edge to her voice. “Well, too bad. I can’t tell you what I know, and you need to keep me handy in case I do remember something. You’re stuck with me, MacNeil, and you aren’t putting me anywhere.”
“There’s only one place I’d like to put you,” he said slowly. “And I already have you there.”
Chapter 4
It wasn’t a surprise, given all the evidence at hand.
Pure male possessiveness was in Alex MacNeil’s attitude, in every line of his body, staring plainly down at her from those sharp blue eyes.
Maris knew she wasn’t mistaken about that look. She had grown up seeing it in her father’s eyes every time he looked at her mother, seen the way he stood so close to her, touched her, a subtle alertness in every muscle of his body. She had also seen it innumerable times in her five brothers, first with their girlfriends and later, for four of them, with their wives. It was a look of desire, heated and potent.
It was both scary and exhilarating, startling her, and yet at the same time it was as if she had known, from the moment she first saw him, that there was something between them and eventually she would have to deal with it.
That was why she’d been at such pains to avoid him, not wanting the complication of an involvement with him, or having to endure the resultant gossip among the other employees. She had dated, some, but she had instinctively shied away whenever a boy or man showed signs of becoming too involved, possessive. She’d never had much time or patience for anything that interfered with her concentration on her horses and her career, nor had she ever wanted to let anyone that close to her.
She had a strong private core that she’d never let anyone touch, except for her family. It seemed to be a Mackenzie trait, the ability to be alone and be perfectly content, and even though all her brothers except Chance had eventually married and were frighteningly in love with their wives, they had married because they were in love. Maris had always been content to wait until that once-in-a-lifetime love happened to her, too, rather than waste time by flinging herself without thought into a brief affair with any man who just happened to have the right physical chemistry with her.
The chemistry was there with MacNeil, all right. The proof of it, on his part, was pressing urgently against the soft notch of her legs, tempting her to open her thighs wider and allow herself to feel that rigid length full against her loins. The fact that she wanted to do so was proof of the right chemistry on her part. She should move away, she knew she should, but she didn’t. There wasn’t a cell in her body that wanted to move, unless it was closer into his embrace.
She stared up into his beard-stubbled face, into blue eyes that were hard and darkened by sharp desire, a desire he was ruthlessly containing. Her own eyes were dark, bottomless pools as she met that sharp gaze. “The question is,” she said slowly, “what are you going to do about it?”
“Not very damn much,” he muttered, shifting restlessly against her. His jaw tightened at the sensations resulting from that movement, and his breath sighed out between his teeth. “You have a concussion. You have a killer headache. We have an unknown number of unknown people looking for us, so I have to keep my mind on the situation, instead of thinking about getting into your little panties. And even if you said yes, damn it, I’d have to say no, because the concussion could be causing mental impairment!” The last sentence was raw with frustration, ground out as if every word hurt him.
She lay very still beneath him, though her instinct was to part her thighs and cradle him against her, pulling him into her soft heat. Her eyes went as dark as night, softening, something mysterious and eternal moving there. “My headache is better.” Her voice was low, her gaze drawing him in. “And I’m not mentally impaired.”
“Oh, God,” he groaned, resting his forehead against hers and closing his eyes. “Two out of four.”
Maris moved her hands, and he immediately freed them. She laid her palms against his shoulders, and he tensed, waiting for her to push him away, knowing it was for the best but dreading the loss of contact. She didn’t push. Instead, she curved her hands over the powerful muscles that cushioned the balls of his shoulder joints, trailed her fingers over the curve of his collarbone and finally flattened her hands against the hard planes of his chest. His crisp black chest hair tickled her palms. His tiny flat nipples hardened to pinpoints, intriguing her. His heartbeat was hard and strong, throbbing beneath her touch.
She was amazed, a little taken aback, by the intensity of the desire that shook her. No, not just desire—need. Need, hot and strong. She had seen sexual attraction all her life, at the most basic level in her horses and the other animals on the ranch, and in her own family as something powerful and tender and somehow both straightforward and complicated at the same time. She didn’t underestimate the compelling power of sex. She had seen it, but she’d never before felt it, not this heat and ache, this emptiness that could be filled only by him, this melting sensation deep inside. She had always thought that if she ever felt this way it would be associated with love, and love was impossible here, because she didn’t know him, not really. She knew his name and his occupation, but nothing about the type of person he was, and it was impossible to love a stranger. Be attracted, yes, but not love.
But her sister-in-law Barrie had once said that within five minutes of meeting Zane she had known the kind of person he was, and loved him. They had been strangers, but extraordinary circumstances had forced them into an intimate situation and shown them facets of each other’s characters that otherwise would have taken months for them to discover.
Maris considered her own situation and the stranger who was so intimately sharing it with her. What had she learned about him since awakening—or regaining consciousness—in his arms?
He wasn’t pushing her. He wanted her, but he wasn’t pushing. The circumstances weren’t right, so he was waiting. He was a patient man, or at least a man who knew how to be patient when he had to be, something that was entirely different. He was intelligent; she would have seen that days—weeks—ago, if she had let herself study him. She wasn’t certain, but she thought that an FBI special agent had to have a law degree. He had some working medical knowledge, at least about concussions. He was evidently strong-willed enough to have gotten her to do something she didn’t want to do, though, of course, with a concussion she wouldn’t have been at her best. He had taken care of her. And most of all, despite the fact that she had slept almost naked in his arms, he hadn’t taken sexual advantage of her.
That was quite a list. He was patient, intelligent, educated, strong-willed, caring and honorable. And there was something else, the subtle quality of danger and controlled power. She remembered the quiet, authoritative tone of his voice, the utter confidence that he could take care of any problem that might arise. In that he was like her brothers, particularly Zane and Chance, and they were two of the most dangerous men she could imagine.
She had always known that one of the reasons she’d never fallen in love was that so few men could compare favorably with the men in her family. She had been content to dedicate herself to her career, unwilling to settle for less than what she knew a man could be. But Alex MacNeil was of that stamp, and her heart lurched. Suddenly, for the first time in her life, she was in danger of falling in love.
And then, looking into those eyes so blue it was like drowning in the ocean, she knew. She remembered the change inside herself, the quiet recognition of her mate.
“Oh, dear,” she said softly. “I have a very important question to ask you.”
“Shoot,” he said, then gave a wry shrug of apology at his word choice.
“Are you married, or otherwise involved with anyone?”
He knew why she was asking the question. He would have had to be dead not to feel the electricity between them, and his state of arousal proved that he was far from it. “No. No involvements, period.” He didn’t ask the same question of her; the background check he’d run on all the employees at Solomon Green had given him the basic information that she was single and had no record of prior arrests. In the time he’d worked at the farm, from the questions he’d asked, he had also found out that she didn’t date any one man on a steady basis. The other guys had kidded him about having the hots for the boss, and he’d gone along with the idea. Hell, it was true, so why not use it as part of hi
s cover?
Maris took a deep breath. This was it, then. With the directness with which she faced life, and the fey quality with which she saw things so clearly, she gave him a tiny smile. “If you aren’t already thinking of marrying me,” she said, “you’d better get used to the idea.”
Mac kept his expression still, not allowing it to betray the shock that was reverberating through him. Marriage? He hadn’t even kissed her yet, and she was talking marriage!
A sane man would get up and get his mind back on the business at hand, which included keeping them alive through the next few hours. A sane man wouldn’t continue to lie here with this woman in his arms, not if he wanted to preserve his enjoyable single state.
He wanted her, no doubt about that. He was familiar with desire, having indulged that particular urge since the age of fourteen, and knew how to ignore it when indulgence would interfere with work. The work was absorbing, and he’d thrown himself into it with the cool, incisive intelligence that he also used to govern his personal life. He’d always been the one in control in his relationships, the one who called an end to things whenever he thought a woman was beginning to cling, to expect more from him than he was willing to give. It wasn’t fair to string a woman along and let her hope when there was no hope, so he always simply ended the affair before it got to the tears-and-recriminations stage.
But then, he’d never met Maris Mackenzie before.
He didn’t get up. More disturbing, he didn’t laugh and say the concussion must have impaired her mentally after all. She was small, delicately built, even fragile, so it was ridiculous for him to dread making her angry or, even worse, hurting her feelings. He wanted to continue holding her, wanted to cradle her close to him and protectively cover her, keep her safe from the danger that would erupt around them within the next couple of hours, shield her from everything—except himself. He wanted her open to him, vulnerable, naked, completely at his disposal. He wanted to sink into those beguiling, mysterious black eyes and forget everything but the feverish delight of thrusting into her.