He reached a shaky hand to touch her cheek. It was warm, soft, defying death even as it stiffened her body.
He bent farther, let his lips graze hers one last time. Their warmth was a mockery. Her lips were never this still beneath his. They always answered his touch, willingly or not.
He saw a tear fall on her face, and for a second was confused. It rolled down her cheek and mixed with the puddle of blood. He realized then that he was crying. It scared him. He hadn’t cried since he was a child. But now, another tear fell, and another.
Through his grief, he knew what he would have to do. She was gone. There was no way to bring her back. Her brother would be searching for her soon. She wasn’t an ordinary Negress. She was the daughter of a prominent Negro publisher, now deceased, and the widow of a prominent Negro lawyer. She had a place in their society. So, yes, she would be missed. There would be a hue and cry for vengeance if it were ever discovered that she had been murdered.
Which was why he could not let her be found.
He knew what he had to do. It wasn’t her anymore. It was just a body now. Yet, he couldn’t resist calling her name one last time.
“Rachel.”
Then he began to cry in earnest.
Tyne pushed through the sleep-cloud that fogged her mind. The dream-world still tugged at her, reached out cold fingers to pull her back. But her feet ran as fast as they could, ran toward the name hailing her, pleading with her to hurry. The name reverberated around…Rachel…Rachel…Rachel…
“Rachel…Rachel…”
The sound woke her. She slowly opened her eyes, lay there for a moment, not remembering. Gradually, disorientation gave way to familiarity. Shaking off sleep, she became aware of her surroundings. Recognized the curtains that hung at the moon-bathed window, saw the wingback chair that was a silhouette in front of it. Sometime during the night or early morning, he had retrieved her clothes and laid them neatly on the chair’s back.
He was shifting in his sleep, murmuring. Then she heard the name again, just as she had heard it in her dream. “Rachel.” He strangled on the syllables, his voice choked with emotion—with…grief, she realized. She sat up, turned. His back was to her, shuddering. He was crying…in his sleep. Was calling to a woman—a woman named Rachel. Someone he’d never mentioned before. And obviously a woman who meant a lot to him, and whose loss he freely felt in his unconscious state. So he’d lied about never having been in love. But why?
A pang of jealousy moved through her, pushed away affection, gratification. She didn’t want to be solace for some lost love he was still pining for. Didn’t want to be a secondhand replacement to someone else’s warmth in his bed. She looked over at the clock. It was almost four anyway. She might as well get home to get ready for work.
She shifted off the mattress delicately, grabbed her clothes from the chair and started for the door. She would dress downstairs to make sure she didn’t wake him. She turned at the door to look at him. The shuddering had stopped. There was only the peaceful up and down motion of deep breathing. She opened the door, shut it lightly and made her escape.
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While Georgia had holed away in the suite’s monstrous bathroom to shower, shave, shampoo, and pull on a clean pair of undies, her T-shirt and jeans, Harry had been busy. Busy doing more than getting dressed and ratcheting up the who-is-this-man-and-where-did-he-come-from stakes.
He wore serious grown-up clothes as beautifully as he wore casual, and as well as Michelangelo’s David wore his marble skin.
She’d walked out of the steamy bathroom and only just stopped herself from demanding what the hell he was doing breaking into her room before she realized her mistake. He was that amazing. And her heart was still dealing with the unexpected lust.
The man was the most beautiful thing she’d seen in forever. Her first impression, made from Finn’s truck when looking down from her window, had been right on the mark. But he was so much more than a girl’s guide to getting off.
His smile—those lips and dimples, the dark shadow of his beard—was enough to melt even the most titanic ice queen. Not that she was one or anything…
Sitting as she was now in the hotel’s salon, having her hair and makeup done, she kept sneaking looks over to where he sat waiting and reading a back issue of Cosmo. Every once in a while he’d frown, shake his head, turn the page. If she hadn’t been ordered not to move by her stylist, she might never have stopped laughing.
When Harry told her he’d arranged not only this appointment but another with the hotel boutique’s personal shopper for jewelry, shoes, and a dress, she’d asked him if he thought she was made of money.
He’d pulled out his wallet, handed her a five to pay back the tip, then reminded her she was the one donating to General Duggin’s Scholarship Foundation tonight.
Making sure she arrived looking the part of wealthy collector rather than pack rat was the least he could contribute to the cause—a cause he’d then started to dig into, asking her questions about her family and the importance of the documents Charlie had sent her to find.
Since she’d been stuck on the pack rat comment, frowning as she ransacked her duffel for the sandals she knew were there, thinking how she really had let herself go since being consumed by this quest, she’d almost answered, had barely caught herself in time.
The story of her father’s wrongful incarceration and her determination to prove his innocence had been on the tip of her tongue before she had bitten down. If Harry knew the truth of why she wanted the dossier, he would quickly figure out she had no intention of delivering it to Charlie Castro.
Then, no doubt, they’d get into an argument about the value of her brother’s life versus that of her father’s name, and he’d want to know why the hell they were going through all of this if not to save her brother.
She really didn’t want to go there with Harry. She was having too much trouble going there with herself. Finn would understand; she knew he would. As long as he was alive to do so when this was over…
At that thought, she groaned, the sound eliciting the stylist’s concern. “What’s wrong, sweetie? Too much color? Not enough? The highlights are temporary, remember? Three washings max, you’ll be back to being a brunette.”
“Oh, no. I was thinking of something else,” Georgia assured the other woman, meeting her reflected gaze. “I hadn’t even looked…”
But now she did. And she swore the reflection in the mirror couldn’t possibly be hers. “Wow,” was the only thing she could think to say, and so she said it again. “Wow.”
“Yeah. I thought so, too.” The stylist beamed at her handiwork—and rightly so. Georgia had never in her life looked like this. The highlights in her hair gave off a coppery sheen. Her layers, too long and grown out—she was desperate for a new cut—had been trimmed, colored, and swept up into an intricate rooster tail of untamed strands.
And then her face…Was that really her face? The salon’s makeup expert had used a similar color scheme, spreading sheer terra cotta on her cheeks, a blend of copper and bronze on her eyelids, finishing off with a gorgeous cinnamon-colored glaze on her lips.
And all of it matching the beautiful ginger-hued polish on the nails of all twenty fingers and toes. She could go for this girly girl stuff. Really.
Especially when she lifted her gaze to meet Harry’s in the mirror. He stood behind the stylist, his shoulders wide in his designer suit coat, his hands jammed to his lean waist, his smile showing just a hint of teeth.
She had no idea when he’d moved from where he’d been sitting to her chair, but the look in his eyes, the fire in his eyes, and the low sweep of his lashes were enough to make her swoon.
It had been so long since a man had shown that kind of interest in her that she didn’t know what to do, how to react, to respond. Except the truth was that it wasn’t the men. It was her
.
She had refused to let any man get close enough to do more than notice her skill for ferreting out valuable antiques for years now, longer than she could remember.
But now, here came Harry into the middle of her personal catastrophe, a veritable stranger who had the body of a god and a killer smile and eyes that were telling her dangerously sexy things about wanting to get her naked. He was helping her in ways that went above and beyond.
And she still had the night to spend in his room. “Can we charge the makeup to the room? I’ll pay you back.”
“Sure.” His eyes sparkled. His smile grew wicked. “And it’s my treat.”
The stylist swept the cape from around Georgia’s shoulders and Harry offered his hand to help her from the chair. It was a Cinderella moment that she had no business enjoying, but she couldn’t help it.
She hadn’t done a single thing for herself in so long that it was impossible to brush aside this feeling of discovering someone she’d thought lost.
She was well aware of why she and Harry were together, the full extent of what was at stake. But it had been years, literally years, since she’d considered herself attractive—not to mention since she’d felt confident that someone of the opposite sex found her so.
Harry did. She didn’t doubt it for a minute. Even if it did up the nerve-wracking factor of the long evening ahead in his company.
While Harry tipped the stylist and settled the bill, she took the bag of cosmetics from the cashier, absently noticing how the attention of every woman in the salon, whether overtly or subtly, was directed toward the check-out station and the fit of Harry’s clothes.
She wanted to laugh; here she was, panicking over sleeping near him when he could crook a finger and have any of these women in his bed.
And then she didn’t want to laugh at all.
She wanted to grab him by the arm and drag him out of there, leaving a battlefield of bloody cat scratches in her wake. Like he belonged to her or something, and how ridiculous was that? He was nothing but a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, who was going out of his way to get her out of a jam.
Finn would have done the same for a woman in need. Her ex, hardly. They’d been married, and he wouldn’t have done it for her. Unless there was something in it for him…Hmm. Too bad she hadn’t snapped to that before.
Harry scrawled his signature across the bottom of the ticket then handed the pen to the cashier. Georgia cocked her head and considered what he could possibly hope to gain from helping her out. He was going to a lot of expense…and sex was the first thing, the only thing, that came to mind.
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Callie lay back against the headboard staring at the computer propped against her knees; the moon and the glow from the monitor were the only lights in the room. After her little groping session with Keefe on the front porch that ended in total humiliation, how could she sleep?
She checked her email again looking for a message from M. Perry but still no reply. She clicked back to solitaire to start another game.
She was furious with Keefe, the bastard. Getting her to respond to him just to puff up his male ego was something she never dreamed he’d do. She knew the soap set, at least she thought she did. There were the actors who were self-absorbed and thought they were the second Tom Cruise on their way to the top; the playmates who were in it for the glam, and the press hounds who loved seeing their names and pictures everywhere. But Keefe never fit into any of those categories. He seemed…real. Till tonight. Guess that put him in the Tom Cruise category. She lost at solitaire again, checked her in box again and there it was…a reply from M. Perry.
She sat up and took a deep breath, then opened the e-mail. M. Perry said the meet was a go. “Holy cow,” she whispered into the darkness. “We really did it.”
This was a big step closer to finding Mimi. If Perry didn’t know something about Mimi the people he worked for had to have a hunch where she was, why else would they be advertising for her in Memphis? She should tell Keefe. No matter what their differences he needed to know about the note even if it was the middle of the night, actually almost morning. He should make plans and she needed to know what to write back to Perry.
Callie slid from the bed, pulled on her robe and tip-toed into the hall. She looked both ways to make sure Rory wasn’t around to get suspicious, then she opened the door to Keefe’s room and went in.
Moonlight fell across Keefe’s bare back. Did it have to be bare? She tried to resurrect her thoughts of him as a bastard, but it didn’t help to see his…skin. Lots of it. Didn’t the man ever hear of a T-shirt? The sheet just covered his butt. Eyes closed, breathing slow and steady. There was not one thing slow and steady about her right now. She should have never come. What was she thinking? She turned and started for the door and he said “Enjoying the view?”
See, bastard! She spun around. “You are the most arrogant conceited, self-important, smug, high and mighty, stuck up, vain, arrogant—”
“You already said arrogant.”
“Well, I’m saying it again because it’s doubly true.” He rolled over onto his back taking the sheet with him. Thank the lord for that! She didn’t need any more maleness to distract her; this was enough. “I came to tell you we heard from M. Perry. The meeting’s on. I thought you might like to know and what do you want me to reply?”
“So what the hell are you doing up at this hour?”
“What do you think, waiting for the darn e-mail, like I said. This is important. I need to reply.”
“Tell him to look for three guys in Atlanta Braves baseball hats. Now, what else do you need?” He winked.
“I need to beat you about the neck and shoulder.” She yanked the door open and resisted the urge to slam it as she left and crept back to her room. Her stomach churned and she ground her teeth. She was angry enough to spit nails. How could she be attracted to such a jerk? She wasn’t, it was over. Two years of ogling and daydreaming about the man officially ended tonight. Common sense had prevailed over primal lust. In fact, common sense should always prevail, especially in important matters.
And by late the next afternoon as she and Bonnie entered Slim’s, Callie was more convinced of that than ever. Sally waved her over to a table where she and Georgette sat and Callie pushed the stroller in that direction. Dinner customers occupied about half the tables including Eleanor Stick sitting in the back. Well, what brought that on?
Callie lifted Bonnie onto her lap and Sally leaned across the table. “Did you see who’s graced our presence for dinner tonight? Eleanor’s working at the hardware store. Can’t seem to find babysitting jobs anywhere, now that Keefe made a point of telling everyone on the Landing she’s way less then a great babysitter.”
Bonnie started to fuss and Callie rocked her but it didn’t help. She stood and paced and ran smack into Eleanor Stick. The old bat smirked. “Taking care of young’ns isn’t as easy as you think, is it, city-girl?” she harrumphed, then strolled off toward the door, nose in the air, shoulders back.
Bonnie yelled louder and Callie said, “Now look what she did. The woman brings out the worst in this baby.”
Georgette sighed. “Oh, good grief.” She stood and lifted Bonnie into her arms. “Crying babies make me nuts. Let me have a go at this. I worked my way through college at a day-care.” She put Bonnie to her shoulder, her cries gradually decreasing by several decibels.
Georgette slowly grinned, a real grin as if she truly enjoyed the moment. “She likes my earrings. One of my cousins was the same way, into the bling even at this age.”
Bonnie cooed as she played with the silver and gold dangles at Georgette’s ears and Sally said, “Georgette, you’re a baby genius.”
Georgette sat down. “Just doing what needs to be done.”
Callie felt her heart soften toward Georgette. This was
a genuine side of her Callie hadn’t seen before and she liked it. “Bonnie wins everyone over and maybe after tonight we’ll be a step close to getting her mama back.”
Sally huffed, “Well, I doubt it. Three men in baseball caps? What the heck kind of disguise is that? That’s what happens to men—they never play dress-up when they’re growing up. The don’t get the fantasy concept. Perry’s going to recognize Keefe, someone’s bound to know Digger, and Demar reeks cop. The man might as well have ‘I am the law’ written across his forehead. The meet’s never going to come off.”
Callie said, “But what if Keefe and his merry men don’t do the meeting. What if someone else does…like us.” Her gaze fused with Sally’s and she sat up straight.
Georgette sat down. “The guys already said it’s them and only them and we weren’t invited to the party.” Callie bit at her bottom lip. “Well, that was before I sinned.”
Georgette whispered, “Sinned as in little-white-lie or as in hold-onto-your-butt?”
“The butt one. I told M. Perry to look for three women in red boas at nine o’clock at Kerby’s. I had to keep the time the same because I mentioned it in the first note and I didn’t want to do anything to scare him off.”
Sally put her fingers over her mouth to stifle a laugh then said, “Honey, if three red boas don’t scare him off nothing will.”
BRAVA BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2006 by Kensington Publishing Corp.
“Playing Doctor” copyright © 2006 by Lori Foster
“The Lady of the Lake” copyright © 2006 by Erin McCarthy
“Hardhats and Silk Stockings” copyright © 2006 by HelenKay Dimon
When Good Things Happen to Bad Boys Page 24