“Little Sammy?” He grabbed her by the shoulders, looming over her. “Where the blazin’ hell did that come from?” His eyes narrowed with sudden suspicion and he demanded hoarsely, “Oh, shit, Red. Tell me you aren’t really pregnant.”
Catherine’s chin tilted up. “Of course I’m not pregnant. Do try not to be any more ridiculous than you can help, McKade.”
“Hey, I don’t happen to find it ridiculous, lady—I find it scary. Things are bad enough as is. I sure as hell don’t need a boyfriend hot on our trail looking to make an honest woman out of you.” Then he made a rude sound. “Though that would be a challenge I’d pay to see.”
“Oh, right. Like the Tightwad of North America would ever leave off pinching his pennies long enough to actually part with one.”
Sam pulled her up onto her toes. “Damn, you’re a pisser!”
“I try.” Feigning boredom, Catherine nonchalantly picked a piece of lint from his shirt.
“Tell me where that baby business come from.”
She gave him a dirty look. “Originally I planned to tell the driver you were a white slaver transporting me across state lines for salacious purposes. The pregnancy thing just sort of came to me when you were pounding on the door with your usual savoir faire, and I decided to go with that instead. There was a chance you could’ve talked your way out of my first idea with those stupid papers of yours, but my second story was a lot harder to argue, wasn’t it?” He glowered, and she shrugged. “It seemed the expedient thing to do at the time.” Suddenly remembering the way he’d called her bluff, she rolled her shoulders uneasily, eager to dislodge his hands. “Let go of me.”
If anything, his grip tightened. She felt his chest brush her breasts with every angry breath he sucked in. “Jesus,” he said between his teeth, “you are the biggest liar I’ve ever met.”
Catherine shrugged. “You have a point?”
“My point is you’re a brat. A low-class, expensive little brat.”
Catherine yawned in his face. “Gee,” she murmured. “However will I sleep nights, knowing you hold such a low opinion of me?”
6
STARING DOWN AT her, Sam snarled with obvious frustration, “Lady, you are really starting to piss me off!”
Catherine felt downright warm and cozy. When a man started repeating himself, you knew you had him on the run. She shrugged again as best she could, given the grip he had on her upper arms. “So?”
“So, give me just one good reason why the hell I shouldn’t handcuff and gag you for the rest of this trip. And if you’re smart, Red, you’ll give it to me quick, because I’m just about out of patience.”
That knocked the amusement out of her in a hurry. What patience? And by God she was tired of his arrogant threats. Catherine’s chin jutted up, and for about five seconds as she stood nose-to-nose with him in the dusty parking lot, with the morning heat starting to shimmer up off the blacktop in visible waves, she fought an imprudent temptation to openly defy him. She’d won this round, and he couldn’t stand it, pure and simple, so he was throwing his weight around. Staring up into those narrowed eyes, her knee-jerk reaction was to say, “Go ahead then, you big bully. Bring on your handcuffs and gag if you’re so all-fired determined.”
Fortunately, the impulse passed. She hadn’t yet lost all semblance of reason, so instead she considered the question. And finally said with thoughtful slowness, “I suppose because it would make us too conspicuous, and you’d have to answer way too many questions.”
His hands tightened, lifting her up onto her toes. Then, abruptly, he released her and stepped back, all expression erased from his face. He grabbed her arm, scooped up the bags, and started walking again. “Right,” she heard him mutter. “Like you aren’t already conspicuous all on your own.”
Hah! She’d made the big, bad bounty hunter back down.
The thought brought her up short and garnered her a jerk on the arm, which got her trotting along in his wake again. Good grief, what was getting into her all of a sudden? Had she actually enjoyed matching wits with the big coyote? Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. And who said she’d made him back down from anything anyhow? For all she knew, he was simply retrenching to consider his options. This was not smart behavior on her part. Perhaps she ought to just be quiet for a while and allow him time to cool down.
Sam steamed as he hauled her down the road to the nearest cheap motel, checked them in, and let them into their room. He tossed their bags on the swaybacked mattress closest to the door, and watched as Red immediately transferred her case to the other bed, flipped it open, and began sorting through it.
He was determined to maintain his distance, to recoup his professionalism. After watching her for several long moments, however, curiosity got the best of him. “What the hell are you doing?”
She barely spared him a glance. “I’m going to take a shower and change into clean clothes.”
The image of soapsuds slithering down naked curves was immediately, ruthlessly suppressed. Turning his back on her, he stalked over to the window and tweaked back the curtain, squinting against the glare reflecting off the cars parked in the dingy courtyard. A warning buzzed in his brain when he heard her walk from the room, and he dropped the curtain, turning back to look at her. “Hold it right there, Red.” When she continued to walk away, he snapped, “I said wait a damn minute.”
Her back was to him as she halted, but Sam saw her shoulders move beneath the force of the impatient sigh she heaved. “Now what?” she demanded. He’d never realized two short words could be imbued with such long-suffering martyrdom.
Not bothering to reply, he moved past her and opened the bathroom door, leaning in to check the size and placement of the window. Then he stepped back and held the door open for her. “Okay. It’s all yours.”
“Gee,” she said snidely. “There’s a window in here. Aren’t you afraid I’ll jump out it?”
He gave her a thorough once-over. “Not with those hips, honey.”
The look Catherine gave him was full of sheer feminine outrage. “What’s wrong with my hips?”
Not a damn thing. But he wasn’t about to tell her that. He merely quirked an eyebrow at her.
“You think they’re fat?”
“Go take your shower, Kaylee.”
“My name is Catherine, you son of a bitch!”
Why the hell had he started this? He plowed his fingers through his hair. “Red, go take your damn shower.”
“Fine, I’m going.” Her belongings clutched to her breast, she whirled around. “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for any hot water to be left for you though, McKade.” She slammed the door behind her with a muttered, “Fat, my Aunt Beatrice.”
Sam exchanged his slacks for a pair of jeans, flopped onto his back on the bed, and stacked his hands beneath his head. He listened to the shower kick on in the other room and scowled up at the ceiling.
Kissing her in the café had been a big, big mistake. Hell, barely half an hour earlier he’d been giving himself a lecture on keeping his hands off the merchandise, and good, solid advice it had been, too. But had he then had the presence of mind to listen to it? Hell no, Brother—he’d seen an opportunity to beat her at her own game and thought himself pretty damn clever to take it. Now he knew it for what it was: one of the dumbest moves he’d made in recent history.
And God knew, he’d been making his share.
He knew her taste now—rich, smooth, like the finest blended whiskey, the kind that slid down a man’s throat real slow and easy and exploded heat everywhere it touched. It was knowledge he would sure as hell be happier without, but he’d just have to work around it. He had a job to do here.
He’d failed Gary once. Damned if he was going to let him down again. And despite his friend’s insistence that another opportunity would come along if the deal on the North Carolina lodge fell through, Sam knew whose fault such an eventuality would be. No unruly surge of hormones was going to divert him from his goal.
It’d su
re as hell help if she owned some baggy clothes, though. He resented the hint of desperation that colored the thought as he watched her emerge from the bathroom ten minutes later. But the truth of the matter was, if her clothes displayed her figure just a little less faithfully, then maybe he wouldn’t keep getting so distracted.
She had on a pair of cutoff jeans that exposed an acre of firm, creamy white skin. Her hair was wet and slicked back from her face, and the ends dripped onto her forest green skinny-knit tank top. Was she wearing a bra under that thing? Hell, he didn’t see where there was room for a bra.
“Well, you were wrong as usual,” she informed him coolly, glancing up briefly from her foray through the makeup bag. “It was my shoulders that wouldn’t fit through the window. My hips slid through slicker than butter.” She gave one of the full curves under discussion a satisfied little pat.
He turned the startled laugh that erupted into a cough. Damn. He should have known she’d give the window a try—the woman had proven to be a doer from the moment he’d first clapped eyes on her. He’d only made the remark in the first place because his nose was out of joint. It had been one of those throwaway cheap shots, feeble payback for having been bested. And he should have realized she would treat it as a personal challenge. Damn lucky thing for him that his space-relativity skills were better honed than hers were, or she’d be miles down the road by now.
He watched her through slitted eyes as she sat down on the worn chenille spread that covered the other bed and began pulling bottle after bottle of nail polish from the makeup case. She commenced to line them up on the cheap blond-laminated nightstand next to the bed, switching and shuffling them around like little tin soldiers until she had them in some aesthetic order understood only by her. Next, she propped her right ankle up on her left knee and commenced stuffing cotton balls between her toes. After considering her polish collection carefully, she looked up at him. “What do you think, McKade, should I use Satin Mauve”—she picked up a bottle and shook it in his direction—“or Renegade Red?”
Okay, he’d play the game. “Renegade Red.” That seemed fitting.
“Satin Mauve it is,” she agreed.
Should have known, fool. He grunted and pulled his gun from its holster.
Catherine’s hands flew up in surrender. “Whoa. I think the Mauve goes better with my skin tones, but if you feel that strongly about it, Samuel, all you gotta do is say so.”
“That’s real witty, Red. I can’t tell you how amused I am.” Reaching for his duffel bag, he riffled through it. He located his gun-cleaning kit and studiously kept his attention away from her as he broke down his revolver and laid the parts out on a piece of newspaper. He was nevertheless highly aware of every creak the old springs made each time she shifted her weight on the other bed. When she whispered a mild curse, he gave up the fight and glanced over at her.
And wished immediately that he hadn’t.
She was sitting with her heel pulled in close to her butt, her long white thigh supporting the weight of her upper body as she leaned forward to carefully wipe a smear of color from a cuticle. Sam’s mouth went dry at the provocative picture she made.
The frayed hem of her cutoffs brushed her firm thighs, and her breast was pressed back against the wall of her chest by the leg she hugged to it. Creamy flesh swelled above the neckline of her top, and as he watched, a droplet of water dripped from the end of her hair and rolled over her collarbone, along the swell of exposed breast, and into her cleavage. A fine dusting of goose bumps rose in its wake and the nipple not hidden behind her updrawn leg tightened, poking at the clingy material that covered it. Without missing a stroke of the polish she was meticulously applying, she shivered.
Sam’s sudden leap up off his bed caused Catherine’s hand to jerk in surprise, and polish slopped in a jagged slash across her toe.
“Hey!” Scowling, she raised her head to give him hell, only to feel her mouth drop open. She closed it with a snap but swallowed drily when she saw him staring down at her as he ripped his shirt off in three impatient movements. What on earth did he think he doing? What was he—Oh…my…Gawwwd.
Heart thudding dully, she found herself staring at his bared torso as if mesmerized, unable to look away. He was…something. Big. Muscular without being muscle-bound. His skin was a lot darker than her own, sort of a toasted brown, and the same black hair that feathered his forearms covered his chest in a fan from collarbone to the bottom of his pectorals. It then dwindled to a line that bisected his tightly muscled diaphragm and abdomen before disappearing into the waistband of his low-slung jeans.
She felt her eyes grow larger with every purposeful step he took in her direction. There was something in his amber eyes that was fierce and unsettling. When his arms suddenly lashed out toward her, she flinched back. But his white shirt merely snapped out and billowed like a sail over her head for a second before drifting to settle over her shoulders. He pulled it closed around her with a decisive tug. “You looked cold,” he muttered, as his big hands slid from the fabric. He turned away to pull a T-shirt out of his bag, and Catherine watched the muscles in his back ripple as he pulled it on over his head.
“I, um, was, a little. You must be a mind reader.” Her voice was embarrassingly hoarse, and, self-consciously, she cleared her throat. “Thank you.” Carefully returning the cap with its attached brush to the bottle of nail polish, she set it aside and slid her arms into the sleeves of the shirt. Slowly, she rolled back the cuffs.
The oxford cloth retained the warmth of his body heat and carried his scent. Feeling decently covered for the first time since she’d had to relinquish her own blouse in the Greyhound depot, Catherine tugged her wet hair from beneath the shirt’s collar and gave the sleeve covering her right arm a surreptitious sniff as she watched Sam settle back onto the other bed. The shirt smelled of both laundry soap and man. Its owner, she noticed, didn’t so much as glance in her direction as he picked up a blued-steel pistol part and resumed cleaning his weapon. She reached for a cotton swab and the bottle of polish remover to clean up the mess on her toe.
Lord have mercy. She didn’t get this guy at all. He threatened her with a gag and handcuffs in one breath, then gave her the shirt off his back with the next because he thought she might be cold.
She could call it a split-personality disorder, except what did that say about her own?
She hadn’t been behaving at all like herself since he’d barged into her life. Insurrection tended to be Kaylee’s specialty—it was something Catherine generally avoided, as it only got her in trouble. Yet here she was acting with the same reckless abandon that had marked the night she and her sister had wound up with matching tattoos on their butts. And if that wasn’t a perfect illustration of bad judgment, she didn’t know what was.
Even without the permanent reminder, that was a night Catherine would never forget, if for no other reason than the rare, perfect solidarity she’d briefly shared with her sister. Rebelling against Mama’s ubiquitous lectures and buzzing on too much cheap wine that Kaylee had liberated right out from under Papa’s nose, it was Catherine who had come up with the idea of the much regretted kiss-my-ass tattoo. As an unspoken rejection of Mama’s constant warnings, the little red pursed lips had seemed so funny and fitting at the time.
Which just went to show what happened when she allowed her impulses free rein. She hadn’t been laughing when she’d awakened the next morning with a pounding head and a very sore, very permanent mark on her rear.
She reminded herself grimly that if she didn’t watch her step now, she was going to land herself in something equally unpalatable.
And yet…
Part of her liked that tattoo. And she was tired of being so proper all the time, especially if this was her reward. Besides, while she’d always found Kaylee’s lackadaisical refusal to accept responsibility irritating, she’d also harbored a secret admiration for her lack of inhibitions. She herself so often felt self-conscious. It must be very liberating just
to thrust it all out there and say to hell with those who disapproved. The closest she’d ever come was when she’d improvised on the spur of the moment to get her sister out of trouble. But that was role-playing, pretending—not the same as being comfortable having your real self on display.
It wasn’t the same thing.
Well, perhaps she’d never know that exact feeling of liberation, but damned if she wasn’t going to get something out of this debacle. She had sworn to hinder Sam’s progress to Miami in any way she could, and she still intended to do that. But this was supposed to have been her vacation, and she’d decided in the shower that she was going to derive whatever enjoyment she could squeeze out of the situation. Thus, the rosy new paint job on her toenails.
This sort of primping was more Kaylee’s bailiwick, but what the hell, she had a lot of time on her hands, not to mention all the ingredients for an entire makeover at her disposal. It was fun and such a small thing, so why not indulge herself? Catherine looked down at her newly pedicured toes, tilting her feet first left, then right, for the complete overview. They looked pretty good, if she did say so herself.
As for wrangling with Sam—well, he needed to be kept on his toes. Catherine glanced over at him, watching the twist and bunch of muscles in his brown hands as he reassembled the gun. He was way too arrogant. It wasn’t as if she enjoyed sparring with him, for heaven’s sake—she simply didn’t believe it was wise to allow him to grow too complacent. She did what she had to do to prevent him from running roughshod over her.
Really.
Looking at his hands again, big and tanned, scarred by her fingernails, and so masculine with all those hard tendons and standing veins, she felt an inexplicable clenching in her stomach, a tightening that worked its way down deep between her legs. She hastily looked away.
She just had to pick her moment, that was all, she assured herself. Until she found it, there was certainly no disgrace in indulging herself with Kaylee’s makeup kit. It would fill the minutes and hours while she watched and waited for the exact right moment: when he’d finally relax his vigilance and she could get the hell out of Dodge.
Baby, I'm Yours Page 7