by Harper Allen
It didn’t change the fact that whatever they had would be temporary…it just made it possible for her to forget that fact for a while.
“I’m not made of stone, either, Gabe,” she said. “We’ve got a night ahead of us to tease each other, but right now I don’t think I can wait another minute to have you. I—I want to see what those diamonds look like when I’m lying in your bed and you’re making—”
The heavy muscles of his arms flexing as he pulled her to him, Gabe didn’t give her a chance to finish. “God help me, but I don’t think I can wait, either,” he said huskily, his hands slipping under her lace-trimmed top and encircling her waist. “Like I said, in the desert I replayed our one night together over and over again in my mind, but it never came close to the real thing, and I knew it. I need the real thing again. I need to feel you under me and on top of me, and I need you touching me everywhere I remember you touching me before.”
This time his kiss was slow and deep, and at some point during it, Caro dimly realized he’d lifted her completely off her feet. Her arms twined around his neck as she felt him lower her to the bed.
“You wanted to see what the stars looked like from here. I want to see what they look like shining down on you,” he murmured, deftly undoing the few tiny buttons that marched down the front of her top.
The next moment his head bent to her, and a wave of pure pleasure washed over her as the tip of his tongue flicked against the peak of first one breast, and then the other. Sensation mounted as his palms encompassed her and his thumbs traced soft twin curves, but it wasn’t until she felt the heat of his mouth burning a line past her rib cage, her stomach, to the tops of her thighs, that Caro felt herself losing control.
He was the only man who’d ever done this to her, she thought dizzily. He was the only man she ever wanted doing this to her. He seemed to know unerringly just how much exquisite torment she could take before giving her the briefest of reprieves, and then bringing her even closer to the edge the next time.
“Please, Gabe,” she managed to say breathlessly. “Please, it’s—”
All possibility of rational speech disappeared as the heat that had been building in her suddenly burst into searingly consuming flames. A series of convulsive shudders ran through her, and even as they did she heard Gabe’s hoarse whisper against her ear, felt his palms smoothing back her hair.
“I love it when you melt, snow princess.” There was a ragged edge to his tone, and even in her dazed state she understood that he’d come almost as close to losing himself as she had. “Tell me you like it, too.”
“I—I love it, Gabe.” A final shudder turned her sentence to a sigh, and she pressed herself closer to him, feeling the hard evidence of his own unfulfilled need against her. “I love it so much I want it all over again,” she murmured, sliding her hands lightly down to the last secured button on his jeans. “Except this time I want you with me all the way.”
All the way, and over and over again, Caro thought as she watched Gabe step out of his jeans a few minutes later and turn to her, the familiar turquoise and silver cuff on his left wrist all the more striking because it was the only thing he was wearing.
Right up until dawn takes our diamonds from the sky, Gabe. That’s what I wished on the first shooting star, and it looks like that wish is about to come true. But my second wish was even more important. Maybe someday I’ll be able to tell you what it—
Gabe’s mouth came down on hers. Forgetting everything else, Caro gave herself up to the man and the night and the desire flaming through her.
Chapter Ten
“Sometimes I’m glad I never learned to use computers.”
Del’s wife, Greta, elegant even in a pair of paint-smeared jeans and with her hair bound into a braid, strolled into the bookshelf-lined room. Caro, sitting at the oak library table, computer monitor and keyboard in front of her and Emma napping in a carry-cot on the floor beside her, gave a weary smile.
“Right now I wish I’d never learned, either, believe me.”
Greta’s laugh was easy. “You need a break. John MacLeish and Daniel are still out checking the perimeter fence for repairs with Gabe, and Del’s watching the house and the yard from the lookout post by the barn, so I set a pitcher of iced tea on the porch for us girls. I’m just dying to plop Miss Cutie-Pie on my lap and hold her for a while anyway.”
Miss Cutie-Pie had to be Emma, Caro surmised with a grin. Greta had fallen head over heels in love with her, and had eagerly volunteered her baby-sitting services over the past two days while Caro had been poring over the Crawford Solutions’ finances on the computer that had been provided for her. She got to her feet and rubbed her derriere.
“A break’s definitely called for,” she agreed.
“Oh, how adorable!”
Greta’s exclamation came as Caro lifted the cot onto the library table—the table, she’d learned from Gabe, where he and the rest of the Double B bad boys had labored over homework during their stints at the ranch years ago. It had made her feel better to know she wasn’t the only one to spend interminable hours here, she’d informed him this morning when he’d looked in to see how she was progressing, but if he really wanted to ease her boredom she could think of better ways he could accomplish that.
Warmth touched her cheeks at the memory of how he’d taken her suggestions under consideration, and swiftly she switched her attention back to Greta, who was delightedly examining the minute moccasins encasing Emma’s tiny kicking feet.
“Where’d you find such small ones?”
Greta carefully lifted Emma from the cot, and when little fingers grabbed at her long braid, the artist’s cat-green eyes widened.
Caro’s heart sunk at the assessing glance Greta gave the delicate silver and turquoise bracelet around Emma’s wrist, and sunk further as that green gaze dwelt for a moment on her.
“Gabe’s a big softie when it comes to little girls, I guess,” she ventured weakly. “He bought the bracelet and the moccasins for Emma yesterday when he visited the Dinetah to talk to Joanna Tahe’s Tribal Police brother, Matt, about the attack on me the day before.”
“The Tribal Police haven’t gotten a lead on either the driver of the truck who ran you off the road or the man who pulled you from the wreckage?” Greta frowned as they made their way onto the porch and she settled into one of the rustic pine chairs, Emma on her lap.
Caro shook her head while pouring them both glasses of iced tea from the pitcher on the low table between the chairs. Her own glass in her hand, she leaned back against the porch railing. “No. That’s why Con’s in Albuquerque today, trying to persuade the FBI to take a more active part in the investigation. If I’m right and Ball Cap is Steve, he made it on and off the Dinetah without being noticed. By the time the Recoveries International men that Gabe contacted got into surveillance position around the Lazy J, he was already back there, if he’d ever left in the first place. As for my weirdo rescuer, Matt told Gabe he didn’t leave so much as a footprint in the mud.”
“The rain didn’t help,” Greta said. “Some of the Tribal Police are incredible trackers, but they can’t perform miracles. So now what?”
“So now I just keep looking for a needle in a haystack.” Caro grimaced. “To make things worse, the needle might not even be in this particular haystack.”
“You mean, if you were wrong about Steve Dixon being the man who ran you off the road and you’re going through Crawford Solutions’ financial records looking for some indication that he’s been bilking the company, when he could be totally innocent,” the other woman declared. She gave a thoughtful nod. “That’s a possibility. But as an artist I run into that same problem all the time.”
She smiled down at the little girl in her arms before meeting Caro’s puzzled gaze. “The way I see it, when I stand in front of a blank canvas, everything’s already there, just waiting to be revealed,” she explained. “I make an attempt to bring that hidden picture out, but I usually don’t get it right the
first time, so I scrape off the paint and start from scratch again.”
“Frustrating,” Caro said glumly.
Greta shook her head. “Not really. Because every time I start over again, I know I’m getting closer to the truth I’m trying to uncover. That’s how you have to look at this Steve Dixon lead. If you eventually come to the conclusion that there’s absolutely no evidence he had a motive to get rid of Jess, then we can start concentrating on someone else, like the computer genius who disappeared before Jess’s Mexico trip.”
“Andrew Scott.” Caro drained her glass and set it on the table. “I see your point, but I still wish the FBI hadn’t drawn the line at assigning their forensic accountants to this. Those people are trained to spot discrepancies in company books. I’m not.”
Greta shrugged. “As Connor said, since the crime took place in Mexico, the Bureau’s worried the federales might see anything more than peripheral involvement as a breach of jurisdiction. When Con spoke to his Bureau contact yesterday, he got the impression he was pushing it by requesting an APB be put out on Andrew Scott.”
“And of course we can’t hire outside accountants,” Caro sighed. “I have a duty to the company not to create the kind of panic that would bring about, if it ever got out.”
“Although not a duty to stockholders, since Crawford Solutions never went public,” Greta noted. “Do you know who inherits, Caro?”
“I don’t have a clue.” She gave a wry smile. “Jess probably left everything to the Flat Earth Society, or whatever his latest enthusiasm was.” Her smile faded. “I hate to say it, but that’s another reason why it’s important that his body’s found. Until it is, he can’t legally be declared dead and his estate’s in limbo. I— I hope Tye has news for us soon,” she ended unhappily.
“I do, too. Del won’t feel right until Jess’s body is properly laid to rest beside his mother’s in the Crawford plot. He sees that as a final fulfillment of an old responsibility, I suppose,” Greta said quietly.
“Del knew Jess’s mom, Sheila, right?” Caro wrinkled her brow. “Jess mentioned that he did, but I never knew the details.”
“Sheila Crawford grew up in the same town as my old mustang—” Greta smiled “—although from the little I’ve gathered, back then Del was more of a young stallion. Captain of his high-school football team, a smooth dancer, had his own souped-up jalopy. He’s still a babe as far as this girl’s concerned, but at eighteen he must have been a heartbreaker. Sheila was only a junior at the time, and I suspect she idolized him. When he was sent to ’Nam, she wrote him on a regular basis.”
She caught Caro’s quizzical glance. “Oh, not love letters. Del told me Sheila’s letters were like getting news of home from a sister. I think they were all that kept him going sometimes, which is why he always had a soft spot for her—a soft spot that grew to include her son, since Jess’s father was never in the picture.”
Greta’s lips pressed together. “Del was one of the few who knew Sheila’s pregnancy was the result of a rape, although the incident was so traumatic that she never told Jess himself. That was another reason why Del took the boy in for a year when he got into trouble over a computer-hacking incident at school and Sheila felt he needed a firmer hand than she could provide. Jess was the only bad boy who wasn’t sent here by the authorities,” she added with a small smile, “unlike a certain hot-wirer of cars I could name who seems to have recently put his past completely behind him.”
There was a teasing note in her voice as she reverted back to their earlier subject. “A big softie when it comes to little girls? More like a big softie when it comes to little girls and their mamas. Gabe’s been a different man these last two days, and judging from the smoldering glances you and he have been giving each other when you think no one’s watching, the reason why isn’t too hard to figure out.”
As Caro sat in front of the computer monitor half an hour later, Gabe’s words from two nights ago ran through her mind for about the thousandth time since he’d uttered them. “Tomorrow no one gets to pretend it didn’t happen…” Greta was right, she thought with a blush—even the most casual observer had only to glance at the two of them together to know the exact nature of their relationship. Little things gave them away, she thought—little things like the way his gaze immediately sought hers when she walked into a room, the way she couldn’t seem to stop smiling whenever he was around, the way both of them apparently found it necessary to touch each other’s hand to make the most mundane of points during a discussion.
And of course, if that casual onlooker should ever happen to walk in on them when they were alone…
Caro tried to concentrate on the information on the monitor in front of her, but it was no use. Instant heat rose in her. He hadn’t argued that first morning when she’d insisted on returning to her own bed before the household awakened, but on the two mornings since, he’d made it clear he didn’t intend to hide the fact that he was no longer sleeping in the downstairs guest room.
“Skulking isn’t my style.” His growl had lacked its former edge, maybe because of the grin quirking up a corner of his mouth. “Besides, we’re all adults here. If Del should happen to walk out of his and Greta’s bedroom at the same time I come out of yours, I don’t think he’ll be exactly shocked.”
He hadn’t used the word love. He hadn’t alluded to the possibility of any kind of a future with her once Jess’s killer had been captured. Maybe she was reading way more into their relationship than Gabe intended.
Which is why I haven’t told him Emily’s his, she thought with a pang. And until I know for sure that he feels the same way I do, I can’t risk telling him. He adores her, that’s obvious. But having a father who showers her with presents when he shows up once every six months and then goes off to live his own life the rest of the year isn’t what I want for my little girl. Emily deserves a father who’s there for her all the time, not a sexy loner who shares her mom’s bed on a part-time basis.
And right now, Caro reminded herself with a sigh, Emily deserved a mother who was able to concentrate on the matter at hand. With an effort she shut out her worries and hopes about Gabe and forced herself to focus on the columns of figures on the screen.
“Same old, same old,” she muttered. “X amount of dollars for one expense, Y amount for another, except these outlays are for the construction of the new plant in Mexico. Architect’s fees, contracting, materials…”
She lifted her shoulders in frustration. Even if Steve had been diverting monies meant for the new plant to himself under a false company name, how would she know? Milagro Construction could be a legitimate firm, or it could be the cover alias for a Swiss bank account. Same with the rest of the companies—Diego Truss and Roofing, Sandoval Concrete—
She froze, her stunned gaze fixed on a familiar name buried halfway down the list. Then she almost jumped out of her chair as a hand dropped lightly onto her shoulder.
“I know, I know. I have to stop giving you heart attacks.” As she looked up to meet Gabe’s rueful smile, he went on contritely, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I met Del and Greta outside and told Del I’d take over guard duty on the house if he wanted to check out the wolf tracks I saw while I was mending the perimeter fence with Mac and Daniel. Greta went with him, so for once we’ve got the place to ourselves.” He grinned. “Well, except for Emily. Where is she?”
“Upstairs having a nap,” Caro said numbly. “Gabe, I—”
But already he was frowning and drawing her to her feet. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s the matter?”
“You’ve hit the nail right on the head,” she answered, her voice muffled against his chest as he held her. Pulling slightly away, she dipped her head toward the monitor. “I have seen a ghost, Gabe…the same ghost that’s materialized before in this case. Take a look at the name of that electrical supply firm—it’s the largest payout on the screen.”
Frowning, he put her from him and drew closer to the monitor. Under his
chambray shirt, his shoulders tensed at the same time as she heard his quickly indrawn breath.
“Dos Abejas Electronics Company,” Caro said, the momentary unevenness gone from her voice, leaving it steady and cold. “Two Bees, as in Bravo Bravo, as in the name on the side of the truck where Jess was killed, as in the Double B. As I say, Gabe, either a ghost from the past is back and walking again, or—” She paused and met his eyes.
“Or someone’s going to a hell of a lot of trouble to make us think so,” he finished grimly for her. “You know, honey, I think it’s time we had ourselves a little talk with Mr. Steve Dixon.”
“ABDUCTION. ASSAULT. Terror tactics, for God’s sake!”
One of the men flanking the Crawford vice president in the kitchen of the Double B raised an eyebrow at this last, but remained silent as Dixon went on, his voice climbing even higher.
“Not to mention that your thugs have apparently been staked out around the Lazy J to watch my comings and goings over the past few days, Riggs. When I’m finished with you, you won’t be allowed to negotiate the release of a stray dog from the city pound, damn you!”
“We handled him with kid gloves, just like you said to, Gabe.” The speaker was one of the men standing beside Dixon. “Told him he had the choice of being escorted here to answer some questions about monies diverted from his late boss’s pocket to his or having us take him to the nearest police station to be charged with embezzlement, for starters. I’m not real sure where the terror tactics came in.”
“He wanted time to change his clothes and make a few phone calls,” the second man flanking Dixon said laconically. “We advised him that wasn’t in the game plan. Maybe that was it.”