Deadly Intent

by Valerie Parv

  “If I thought going to bed with you would get you out of my system I’d say yes.”

  “You know better,” Ryan growled, unable to stay silent.

  Lifting her head, Judy gave him a troubled look. “I know. But neither am I prepared to marry you. I’m not prepared to marry anyone. It isn’t personal.”

  “The hell it isn’t. Whatever you need or want, tell me and I’ll make sure you have it.”

  “What I want is to stay single.”

  “What you want?”

  She heard the disbelief in his tone. “All right, what I need. If you truly feel about me the way you claim, you’ll try to understand.”

  “I’ll never understand,” he stated. “And I will do everything in my power to change your mind.”

  Deadly Intent

  VALERIE PARV

  Books by Valerie Parv

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Interrupted Lullaby #1095

  Royal Spy #1154

  ††Operation: Monarch #1268

  **Heir to Danger #1312

  **Live To Tell #1322

  **Deadly Intent #1336

  Silhouette Romance

  The Leopard Tree #507

  The Billionaire’s Baby Chase #1270

  Baby Wishes and Bachelor Kisses #1313

  *The Monarch’s Son #1459

  *The Prince’s Bride-To-Be #1465

  *The Princess’s Proposal #1471

  Booties and the Beast #1501

  Code Name: Prince #1516

  †Crowns and a Cradle #1621

  †The Baron & the Bodyguard #1627

  †The Marquis and the Mother-To-Be #1633

  ††The Viscount & the Virgin #1691

  ††The Princess & the Masked Man #1695

  ††The Prince & the Marriage Pact #1699

  VALERIE PARV

  With twenty million copies of her books sold, including three Waldenbooks bestsellers, it’s no wonder Valerie Parv is known as Australia’s queen of romance and is the recognized media spokesperson for all things romantic. Valerie is married to her own romantic hero, Paul, a former crocodile hunter in Australia’s tropical north.

  These days he’s a cartoonist and the two live in the country’s capital city of Canberra, where both are volunteer zoo guides, sharing their love of animals with visitors from all over the world. Valerie continues to write her page-turning novels because they affirm her belief in love and happy endings. As she says, “Love gives you wings, romance helps you fly.” Keep up with Valerie’s latest releases at www.silromanceauthors.com.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Ryan liked seeing her in a dress, Judy Logan thought as she held the garment against her and checked the bedroom mirror. He would appreciate the way the sea-foam color complemented the sky blue of her eyes and the highlights she’d had put through her ash-blond hair, newly cut in an urchin style with strands feathered around her face.

  He’d approve of the way the garment’s draping neckline made the most of her long neck and modest cleavage, the slinky short skirt skimming her legs. Privately, she thought they were her best feature, shapely and muscular thanks to an active lifestyle.

  Seeing herself as more Australian stock horse than thoroughbred, she usually threw on whatever suited her schedule, not much caring about the result.

  Realizing what she was doing, she flung the dress onto the bed, where it pooled innocently. Why did she care what Ryan thought of her appearance? He was only one of the boys her father and mother had fostered throughout most of Judy’s life.

  After she was born, they’d been unable to have more children although they’d desperately wanted a large family. Her father still treated her like fragile china, although these days he was the frail one with a heart that threatened to stop beating at any moment.

  She frowned at her mirror image. Des Logan was the reason she was going out with Ryan tonight. Not on a date, but to decide how best they could help her father. Des wouldn’t accept money, not that Ryan had much to offer. Of all the Logan foster sons, he was the least successful. He supported himself doing casual jobs on cattle stations throughout the Kimberley. Nothing wrong with that, but by Ryan’s age most men had something more substantial going for them.

  If Judy hadn’t run across Ryan unexpectedly when she flew supplies to a remote Kimberly cattle station where he’d been working, he would still be estranged from them all. He hadn’t wanted to live with the Logans in the first place, she recalled. He’d claimed he was doing fine looking after himself. According to him, losing his mother and having no idea where his father was didn’t mean he needed help to run his life.

  At the memory, Judy felt reluctant admiration sweep through her. As a boy he’d lived on his own for almost a year after his mother’s death, convincing the authorities that a friend of hers was his caregiver when, in fact, he’d had nobody. When the truth came out, he’d been dragged literally kicking and screaming into the Logan household.

  Then he and Judy had spotted each other. Like a wild buffalo transfixed by a car’s headlights, he’d stopped fighting Des and stared at his new foster sister.

  Just stared.

  He’d looked her up and down with the insolence of a grown man. Too thin from eating whatever he could rustle up, he’d been lanky and awkward, but his eyes—how she remembered those midnight blue eyes—had been alight with masculine interest. She’d known he liked what he saw long before he’d told her he was in love with her and would marry her one day.

  A shiver shook her. What had such a stripling known of love? She’d known even less. Oh, she’d been aware of the facts of life. You couldn’t grow up on a million-acre cattle station and remain ignorant for long. But the chemistry between male and female had been a compelling mystery.

  Nevertheless, they’d both felt its power. But with him being only fourteen then and her newly into her teens, she hadn’t had a clue what her feelings signified or how to deal with them. Des Logan had solved the problem by calling Ryan into his study and ordering him to get any foolish ideas out of his head. Ryan had retorted that nobody told him how to run his life and he was going to marry Judy one day, with or without Des’s approval.

  Neither of them had been aware of Judy hunting for a tennis ball in the bushes under Des’s office window. To her, it had seemed romantic to have a young man defy her father over her. These days, she knew Des had been right. They had been mere children, their feelings the result of overactive teenage hormones, nothing more.

  Less than a year later, Ryan had run away, eluding Des’s and the authorities’ efforts to find him. Later Ryan told Judy that he’d lied about his age in order to get work as a jackeroo on remote cattle stations.

  He hadn’t stayed anywhere for long, she’d learned when they’d met again. She hadn’t been able to tell if he was pleased to see her or not. His manner had been surly and distant, although he was obviously a world away from the difficult teenager she’d once known.

  For one thing, he was all man. Taller, fuller in body and so broad-shouldered she’d had to look twice to assure herself he really was Ryan Smith. His red-gold hair and hair-trigger temper had convinced her. There couldn’t be two men with that blend of startling good looks and fiery temperament in the Kimberley.

  Since their reunion three years before, she’d persuaded him to return to Diam
ond Downs a number of times, although he’d never stayed as long as she’d hoped he would. She looked forward to his visits, but no more than those of her other foster brothers, she assured herself. She blamed the fact that Ryan’s arrival made her heart beat faster on his dynamic personality and raw masculinity, enough to turn any woman on.

  Judy wasn’t immune to male appeal. She relished her physicality, whether piloting her plane, mustering cattle on horseback or enjoying a relationship to the full, provided a man accepted that she could want him without needing him. She couldn’t imagine Ryan playing by this rule. He was the type to want more than she was prepared to give, so she kept a safe emotional distance.

  Ryan and her father got along tolerably well these days in spite of the undercurrent simmering between them. After all this time, Judy wouldn’t allow that it had anything to do with her. More likely, the mistrust mirrored two bulls in the same paddock. They were similar in temperament, neither giving an inch.

  Pleasing Ryan with feminine fripperies should be the last thing on her mind. To prove it, she cast the dress a withering look and flounced out of the homestead. Passing the bunkhouse and cottages occupied by the dwindling number of staff still on the station payroll, she found him in the hard-baked earth area used for car parking.

  The only sign of him was a pair of jeans-clad legs protruding from under the ancient car he’d jacked up and supported on blocks. Long, long legs betrayed his height as over six feet. His scuffed R. M. Williams boots were a size eleven at least, and she felt a blush starting as she remembered the supposed connection between men and large feet.

  Automatically she frowned at the sight of tools scattered over the ground. As a bush pilot, she hated to see good tools mistreated. Evidently Ryan’s drifter ways extended to the care of his equipment.

  She hunkered down in time to see him lower the transmission pan in both hands and tilt it to spill the fluid into a drain tray beside him. “Need a hand?”

  Without looking he said, “You can pass me the awl so I can get this grommet out.”

  Surveying the tangle of tools around her, she said, “What patch of dirt do you suggest I look in?”

  He angled his head to stare at her and she suppressed a shiver. Fourteen years on, his eyes still had the power to mesmerize. They were so dark and deep-set that looking into them was like looking into a bottomless pool. The sun was low and shone under the car, turning his hair to flame. The devil would look like this if she caught him working on a car, she thought.

  “By your left foot,” he said shortly.

  She blinked to banish the vision. Devil, indeed. He was nothing but a pain in the—awl. He didn’t care for anyone or anything but himself. Why he was bothering to talk about Des’s problems with her, she didn’t know. It wasn’t as if there were an inheritance at stake.

  Without telling the rest of the family, her father had mortgaged Diamond Downs to a neighbor, Clive Horvath, who’d been Des’s best friend for most of their lives. Clive had intended to forgive the debt but Des had insisted on proper documentation, never suspecting that Clive would be thrown from a horse and killed less than a year after they shook hands on the deal. Now his son Max, owned the neighboring property and had made it clear he intended to collect on the mortgage.

  It would be bad enough if Max only wanted the money, but he had his sights set on a diamond mine Judy’s great-grandfather was said to have found on Logan land. Jack Logan had disappeared before revealing the exact location of his find to anyone except the elders of the local indigenous people. Their descendants refused to talk about it, believing Jack’s spirit haunted the site.

  At considerable risk to themselves, her foster brothers, Tom and Blake, had recently narrowed down the location to an area of Cotton Tree Gorge. But both men had fiancées now, and lives they couldn’t neglect indefinitely. So it was up to her and Ryan to finish the job before their neighbor did it for them. Some sixth sense told her they were close to finding the mine. All she had to do was persuade Ryan to help her before either Max Horvath’s own financial woes spelled the end of Diamond Downs or the fast-approaching wet season made the search impossible.

  Spotting the tool he needed, she handed it to him. “I’ve never seen a car held together by rust before.”

  “It goes, that’s all I ask.”

  “Dad won’t mind if you use one of the station cars while you’re here.”

  “I’d mind.”

  “You would.” Not sure he’d heard the sotto voce comment, she watched him work the point of the tool up inside the filter neck, pushing it against the outside of the grommet. “Want a hammer to drive that in?”

  “I’ll manage, thanks.”

  At least he’d said thanks. But did such a puny gesture merit the surge of pleasure rippling through her? This would have to stop. Ryan had barely been at Diamond Downs for two days and already she could hardly think straight around him.

  She was a bush pilot, for pity’s sake. She flew solo around the outback in a single-engine plane she largely maintained herself. Turning to jelly because of the way a man looked at her was for females in frilly clothes who spent hours at the hairdresser primping to impress.

  She could write off the blond highlights as an aberration. But what about the slinky dress? Thank goodness she’d decided against wearing it tonight on their nondate.

  Ryan walked his feet out from under the car and uncoiled disturbingly close to her. For a giddy moment, she thought he meant to touch her face till she saw the oily washer clutched in his fingers. “If you want to help, how about cleaning this?” he asked.

  With an inward sigh, she accepted the magnet from the transmission pan and hunted among the tools for a scraper to clean it with. She welcomed the excuse to avoid his gaze, afraid he’d see into her soul.

  What an idiot, she thought as her fingers closed around a putty knife. By the time she straightened, Ryan was sluicing the drain pan clean, careful not to spill any of the residue onto the ground. Could his preference for an old car be on environmental grounds? she wondered.

  She was tempted to ask but he’d already slid back under the car and she heard the sound of a gasket being scraped off the bottom of the transmission.

  Glad of something to occupy her hands, she set to work scraping the magnet clean. “I’ll say this for you, you’re thorough.”

  “Might as well do the job right,” he agreed, his rich, deep voice muffled by his position. “One thing your dad taught me.”

  She replaced the magnet in the pan and pushed it under the car to him. “So you admit he did some things right?”

  “Never said he didn’t. Your folks meant well.”

  She couldn’t resist. “Am I hearing an admission that you liked being a Logan?”

  “I’m not a Logan and don’t want to be.”

  “But you just said…”

  He ducked out from under the car and swung himself upright. “You know perfectly well why I never wanted to be a Logan. That hasn’t changed.”

  Because of her, she heard it in his voice. “Everything else has,” she said, pushing away the confusing feelings the thought aroused.

  “Everything but you.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve grown up.”

  “You think I haven’t noticed?”

  She knew he had. The awareness was in every look he gave her.

  “I know you don’t think much of me,” he said. Before she could issue an empty denial, he went on, “Blake has his crocodile farm, Tom got his wish to become a shire ranger and Cade’s photos are published all over the world. While I dropped out of school, drive a beat-up old car and work where and when I can.”

  She lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “None of that matters to me.”

  “It’s who you are inside that counts,” he quoted her father. “He also said even a saint has to be able to educate his kids and put food on his family’s table.”

  At the thought of Ryan’s children, her knees softened and she rested a palm against
the sun-heated metal to steady herself. “Are you sure you’ve got things the right way around?”

  Although she’d thought about it often enough, she hadn’t meant to come out and say it. His eyes clouded as he asked, “What do you mean?”

  Too late to wish she’d never opened her mouth. “Being a no-hoper is a good excuse to avoid settling down.”

  “You think I live the way I do to avoid taking on responsibility?”

  “Don’t you?”

  He made a harshly dismissive sound deep in his throat. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

  She started to turn away. “You’re right, I don’t.” And if she were wise, she would keep it that way.

  His fingers clamped around her wrist leaving a smear of oil like a handcuff. “Such slim wrists,” he said unexpectedly. “Beats me how you pack so much muscle into such a slight body.”

  If looks could kill, he would have been ash where he stood. “Aren’t you afraid of snapping such fragile bones?”

  At her sarcastic tone, his mouth tightened. “I know precisely how much pressure I’m applying.”

  So did she. Her whole body quivered with the awareness of his touch. Trying to shake him off would only betray his effect on her, so she schooled herself to stillness. “I prefer wiry to slight.”

  He eased his thumb over her pulse point, making her wish she could slow the frantic beat by willpower alone. “Wiry, then. I like a woman with good muscle tone,” he said.

  As if she kept herself fit to please him. “You didn’t always have so much muscle of your own to throw around,” she snapped.

  Cruel, she told herself when she saw his dark lashes veil those memorable eyes. “Malnutrition does that to you,” he said.

  She placed her hand over the one holding her. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled-for. I shouldn’t have reminded you.”

  He looked down at their joined hands and an odd light flickered over his rugged features. “You didn’t have to. Some things you never forget.”

  Her sigh gusted between them. “Ryan, why do we strike such sparks off each other?”