by Heidi Rice
She hefted the box under her arm, which had begun to feel as if it weighed several tons about a mile and ten thousand blisters ago. At least she still had her paints.
But she’d discovered today she had a lot to learn about personal safety and not being an easy mark. If only she’d been less absorbed in her watercolor of the cove and more alert when Pinky and Perky had appeared from nowhere, maybe they wouldn’t have managed to hot-wire her scooter, wrestle her pack off her and then disappear in a cloud of dust and victorious whoops in the space of approximately twenty-five seconds.
How come I always have to learn everything the hard way?
She forced herself to keep going, even though her feet hurt from tiptoeing over the rocky path and her head was pounding as if someone had sideswiped her with her own pack. Probably because they had.
She tested the knot forming on her forehead with her fingertips.
If she ever caught up with Pinky and Perky, she was going to stab them both through the heart with a well-sharpened artist’s pencil. And then roast them like bacon.
The hum of an engine cut into her barbeque fantasies and a low-slung car appeared ahead of her, driving past the ruins of an old farmhouse. Or rather bouncing toward her on the uneven track.
Her breath gushed out, the wave of relief so extreme she felt nauseous. Maybe she could hitch a ride to Sorrento.
The sleek convertible was brand new and expensive. Apprehension cut off her optimism. What was this guy doing destroying his suspension on a farm track?
She brushed her hair over the bruising on her forehead and gripped the box in her arms, prepared to use it as a lethal weapon if her rescuer turned out to have the same moral compass as Pinky and Perky.
The car stopped a few yards ahead and a man stepped out. With the sun sinking, it was hard to make out more than a silhouette. But her heartbeat began to kick her ribs like a carthorse as he strolled toward her. His stride, leisurely and yet filled with purpose, looked familiar. And not in a good way.
Jared Caine? How the hell...?
The man stopped in front of her and his head dipped, as if he were checking her over.
The hum that started low in her abdomen was also disturbingly familiar.
It can’t be Caine. I must be hallucinating. Or seriously concussed. Or both.
“Hello, Katherine.” The deep voice, curt and businesslike, hauled her back to one of the lowest points in her life—even lower than this one, and that was saying something.
“What are you doing here?” she managed, still hoping she’d conjured him up from the depths of her sunstroke.
But then the shifting sunset glinted off the dark waves of his hair—no longer subdued by the buzz cut of five years ago—and cast a golden glow over his rugged features for the first time. A jolt of awareness hit her insides like a lightning strike, frying the tight knots of tension in her gut.
“Rescuing you,” he said, with only the barest hint of sarcasm. “Now, get in the car before you fall on your face.”
* * *
Jared Caine watched the horrified shock widen Katherine Whittaker’s emerald-green eyes as he searched her slender frame for any signs of injury.
She looked grubby and tired but otherwise okay—the sight of him more distressing than whatever had happened to have her sending her sister a garbled text about being in a spot of trouble hours ago.
It looked like more than a spot to him.
He forced himself to take a deep breath.
You’ve found her. She’s okay. Now all you have to do is get her on a plane back to New York and you can forget about her again.
The tension which had been grinding in the pit of his stomach since noon—and during the long hours of the afternoon, as he and a team of his men had combed the five square miles to where his IT guys had managed to triangulate her phone signal—began to ease. At least he’d found her before dark.
“I don’t need rescuing,” she said, her dazed expression hardening with animosity.
The fist which had been tightening around his throat for the last twenty minutes as he watched the sun head for the horizon thumped his larynx with a one-two punch.
“You’re kidding, right?” His gaze drifted over her, taking in the butt-hugging cut-offs, the dusty shirt, the tank top showing the subtle curve of her breasts, the filthy feet which... Where the heck were her shoes?
She planted one fist on her hip, the other one clinging to a carved wooden box that looked almost as heavy as she was. “No, I’m not kidding.”
She puffed with indignation, but the sweat-soaked hair stuck to her forehead stayed firmly in place. Unfortunately it did nothing to disguise her high cheekbones, the full, mobile mouth or the sunburnt patch on her nose. Or the exhaustion shadowing her mermaid-green eyes.
“I’m good,” she said, her arms tightening on the wooden box and her chin jutting out. “I don’t know how you found me, but you can just unfind me again. Okay?”
“No, that’s not okay.”
Frustration and extreme irritation twisted his insides.
It was a reaction he recognized. From the last time Dario had asked him to ride herd on his kid sister-in-law—and the single heartbeat of madness when he’d reacted without thinking to the sharp, spicy taste of that mouth.
“I’m not unfinding you,” he said. “And I’m not leaving you here. Dario wants you on a flight back to New York as soon as you’re found.”
Her eyebrows launched up her forehead. “I’m not going back to New York,” she said, sounding adamant for a woman who looked as if she was about to collapse. But then the box she was holding slipped. She struggled to regain it, stumbled, and then yelped as her bare foot landed on a rock.
“Okay, this conversation’s over,” he said.
Stepping forward, he scooped her and the box into his arms.
She gasped and went rigid. “Put me down.” The angry glare infused the rest of her face with a shade of red to match her sunburn.
“Nope.” The spicy scent of lemon, sea salt and female sweat tightened the screaming tension in his gut as he marched up the track toward his car.
“What do you mean no? I... Oof!”
He dumped her unceremoniously into the passenger seat and slammed the door. After striding around the front of the muscle car, he climbed into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. “This isn’t a negotiation.”
Placing his arm across the back of her seat, he began to reverse down the track, wincing when he heard the muffler bounce off another rock.
“I see you still get off on ordering women about,” she said, but the insult lacked heat.
He slipped his sunglasses on and ignored her. From their sparring matches five years ago, he knew her default position was mouthy and it was better not to engage.
Katherine Whittaker had always been a piece of work. But, if the tabloid press was to be believed, her behavior had gotten a whole lot worse in the years since her old man’s trial and their aborted kiss in her housekeeper’s Brooklyn apartment. She’d dropped off the radar for the past few months, but according to Dario that was only because she’d left Manhattan and had been bumming around Europe on her own, freaking her sister out. So, basically, Katherine Whittaker had just spent the last few months causing trouble incognito.
He backed onto the coast road, slotted the transmission into drive and hit the gas. He could feel her angry glare but didn’t trust himself to speak.
This woman had everything—a lavish home, a family who loved her and the smarts to make something of herself. Instead of which, she’d chosen to thumb her nose at it all and behave like a kid in a candy store for years, probably all on Dario’s dime.
“I don’t know where you think you’re taking me, but you can’t make me do anything,” she said.
He glanced across the console. Her tip-tilted eyes had gone squinty around the corners.
“I’m not nineteen years old anymore,” she added. “And I don’t take orders from anyone, least of al
l you.”
He turned back to the road, but not before he’d noticed the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the soft cotton of her tank top.
“You want to get out and walk some more?” he asked, calling her bluff.
She glared at him but then swung her face away.
I didn’t think so.
Her slim shoulders slumped against the seat—reminding him of the troubled nineteen-year-old with a big mouth and a crush on him he’d taken great pains to ignore, until she’d gotten under his guard for a few gut-wrenching seconds.
The dying sunlight caught the gold in her hair and made the sweat misting the slopes of her breasts glimmer. Reaction kicked him hard in the gut.
Sometime in the last five years, the gawky duckling with the smart and way too tempting mouth had turned into a long-legged and stunningly beautiful swan, even under the layer of dirt, sweat and animosity.
He punched the gas to pass a truck laden with fruit trees. The sooner he got rid of Katherine Whittaker, the better.
“Why are you even in Italy?” she murmured. “Please tell me you didn’t come all this way just to get in my face?”
He let the snotty comment go, because even the hostile tone couldn’t disguise the weary resignation.
“I’m staying on Capri until Monday,” he said. “The company’s running security for the press opening of the new Venus resort. Dario contacted me to coordinate the search when you texted Megan this morning.”
“How fortuitous,” she said, the bite of sarcasm dulled by fatigue.
Not that fortuitous, really. The Venus project was a major contract, but Jared hadn’t planned to attend the event in person—despite all the noise from his PR department about the great publicity it would generate in the European market if he showed up for the four-day press launch. But his plans had changed this morning when Dario’s call had come in from New York, interrupting him in Naples during a meeting where he’d been finalizing the takeover of a small tech-security firm.
The urgency in Dario’s voice had hit first, then the wave of shame at the mention of a girl he had tried very hard to forget in the last five years.
When he’d discovered that Katherine was missing on the Amalfi Coast somewhere, that her sister Megan was freaking out big time and that they hadn’t been able to contract her, Jared hadn’t hesitated.
He’d redirected a team of his men from the Venus project to kick-start the search, and then taken a helicopter to Sorrento.
He tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel. He still didn’t know where that impulse had come from. Probably just his loyalty to Dario. It was true he’d never quite been able to forget Katherine Whittaker—and the desolation in her eyes after that aborted kiss—but he never got sentimental about women. Especially not women as troublesome as this one.
“How did you end up lost in Campania barefoot?” he asked, attempting to defuse the situation and get some answers. Although he suspected he already knew what had happened.
The Amalfi Coast was a mecca for billionaire property development and high-end tourism but, when you factored in the deprivation in Naples’ slums less than thirty miles away, opportunistic robberies weren’t uncommon.
“I’m not lost,” she said, snapping his olive branch in two. “I know where I am. And where I want to go. And it’s not back to New York.”
Yeah, it was. But he’d deal with the problem of getting her on a plane once they got to the airport. First he needed to swing by wherever she was staying so she could wash up and they could grab her luggage and travel documents.
Once she was on her way home, he’d follow up with the police on the investigation. Even if she hadn’t been hurt, he wanted the little bastards who had done this to her caught and prosecuted.
“So, where were you headed with no transport and no shoes?”
“Sorrento. If you could drop me there, that would be terrific. Then you can tell Dario you’ve done your bit.”
“Is that where you’re based? In Sorrento?” he asked.
She cleared her throat. “Not exactly.”
He glanced at her. The rosé blush was heading for her hairline at an alarming rate.
“Then where’s the rest of your stuff?” he demanded.
“Probably half way to France by now on the back of my stolen Vespa, with my shoes.”
Jared’s fingers clenched on the wheel hard enough to leave an indent in the leather. “Please tell me that doesn’t include your passport,” he said.
The glare she sent him gave him the answer he didn’t want.
CHAPTER TWO
THE LAST OF the sunshine glinted off the convertible’s paintwork as it powered down the winding coast road and cast shadows over Jared Caine’s face, making him look even more forbidding than usual. The short, dark strands of his hair danced playfully in the breeze but did nothing to soften the line of his jaw—which he was clenching hard enough to crack a tooth.
His eyes were hidden behind the dark lenses of his designer sunglasses, but Katie didn’t need to look into them to know Jared Caine was angry about the latest turn of events and trying hard not to show it.
Join the club.
She looked back toward the horizon and slipped down in the seat until the car’s luxury leather upholstery cradled her. She closed her eyes, letting the well-oiled hum of the convertible’s engine drown out the deep hum in her abdomen—which had kicked off the minute Caine had stepped out of his car—and was not remotely significant.
Caine was a phenomenally good-looking guy—with a potent sexual charisma. Especially if you had a weakness for tough, take-charge, control-freaky types who demonstrated about as much empathy and sensitivity as the jagged rocks of Campania’s coastline. And apparently she did, especially when she was exhausted and traumatized and had just been mugged.
Luckily, she had previous experience of this reaction. She would get over it.
And at least he’d stopped trying to bully her into getting on a plane. She might have been able to get some grim satisfaction out of thwarting his plan but for the painful throbbing in her frontal lobe as she tried to get her head around the huge mess she was in.
The car phone buzzed loudly, making her head hurt even more.
“Hey, Dario,” Caine said, answering the call and then switching to speaker phone.
“Tell me you’ve found her, Jared?”
Katie’s heart somersaulted in her chest at the urgency in her brother-in-law’s voice and she straightened in her seat.
“I’ve got her here with me,” Caine replied. “Picked her up on a farm track five miles from Sorrento. We’re on speaker.”
Dario cursed in Italian. “Katie? Grazie Dio,” he murmured. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“I’m good, Dario. Really, it wasn’t anything major. I got robbed, but they didn’t hurt me. I didn’t want you and Meg to worry.”
“Is she okay, Jared?” Dario asked, even though she’d already answered that question.
Caine’s all-seeing gaze swept over her, assessing her condition again, the way he had when he’d first stepped out of his car. And the hum went haywire.
She pressed her hand to her head, mindful of the graze hiding behind her hair which she didn’t want either Caine or Dario to know about, because it would just give the two of them more excuses to treat her like a five-year-old.
“Other than sore feet, yes,” he said after the disturbingly thorough examination. “Just shaken up.”
“I’m sitting right here, Dario,” she pointed out, trying not to lose her cool, while being reminded of being nineteen years old again and having both Dario and Caine decide that they knew what was best for her.
The spurt of indignation died though when she heard Megan’s muffled voice and then her sister came on the line. “Katie, thank God you’re okay. I’ve been worried sick ever since we got your text and I couldn’t get through to you.”
Guilt swept through Katie at the distressed tone.
“The phone lost s
ervice right after I texted you,” Katie said, regretting sending the panicked plea in the moments after the robbery even more. Megan would have been frantic and it was all her fault, as usual. “Really, Megan, I’m fine,” she repeated. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Where are you now?” her sister asked.
“With Caine, in his car.”
Hopefully heading for Sorrento.
“We can wire you some money. How much do you need?” Megan cut back in.
Katie wanted desperately to refuse the offer, especially with Caine listening in. He’d once called her a spoiled brat and in her debilitated state the old insult felt fresh.
“Two hundred euros would be terrific,” she said. It would be just enough to stay in a hostel for a couple of nights, contact her insurance company to replenish her wardrobe and get painting. Once she’d done a few watercolors she could set up a pitch in Piazza Tasso. Sorrento’s main square was the perfect place for her to sell her work, with its arty vibe and the never-ending stream of tourists. “I’ll pay you back as soon as I—”
“Don’t be silly. That’s not enough. Let us wire you five thousand.” Megan interrupted her again, sounding desperate. “You need to pay for a plane ticket home.”
“I’m not coming home, Meg,” Katie said, trying not to sound defensive or, worse, ungrateful. But she knew she had to remain firm.
She wasn’t ready to go back. Not yet.
“You’re not?” Megan sounded devastated. “Even after this?”
“I’ll be back soon. I promise,” she said, mindful of their audience. She could feel Caine listening from across the car and judging.
Not to mention Dario, who she would bet was scowling at the phone right now, not happy about the way she was upsetting his wife.
“You’ve been away for months now,” Megan came back. “I can’t bear for...” The line crackled and Katie’s guilt began to choke her. Was Megan crying?
The hollow space in the pit of her belly got larger.
The muffled sounds finally silenced. Then a door shut and Dario’s voice came over the phone. “Megan is resting now,” he said, by way of explanation.