by JoAnn Ross
“I didn’t tell you about my folks to gain sympathy, Kate. I told you so you’ll understand where I’m coming from. Although I prefer to believe that we chart our own paths in life, I’ve also read enough pop psychology to figure my parents’ problem with commitment is undoubtedly partly why I always swore that if I ever got married, it′d be for keeps.
“I never wanted any kid of mine to go to bed at night without knowing that he could call his dad to chase away any monsters that might be lurking beneath the bed or in the closet.”
“We don’t have a child.” She didn’t admit that she’d thought about one too much these past months.
“That’s beside the point.” He lifted their joined hands and kissed her fingertips. “We said our vows before God and Merlin. Which means that like it or not, Kate, you’re my lawfully wedded wife.”
“But—”
“For better or worse. And all that jazz,” he added gruffly cutting off her attempted argument. The way he’d squared his broad shoulders reminded K.J. of a warrior getting ready to go into battle. Equally daunting was his gaze, which had turned as granite hard as his jaw. “So deal with it.”
5
DRAGGING HER EYES from his penetrating gaze, pulling Free of his scintillating touch, K.J. scooped up her own bottle. She lifted it to her lips and took a deep, thirsty swallow. Then immediately began to choke.
Alec was on his feet in a flash, coming around to stand behind her, slapping her on her back. “I probably should have warned you it was warm.”
“That—would have been—” she forced the words out between coughs “—helpful.”
“Guess I forgot.” His tone said just the opposite. When her racking coughs subsided, Alec didn’t take his hands away. Instead, he slid them up her back to her shoulders and began kneading the rigid stiffness.
“Surely you don’t really expect me to believe that?” she said testily, batting at his hands. Alec ignored her.
“I’ve never known what to expect from you, Kate.” Tied up in a painful knot of frustration, desire and, dammit, affection, he slipped his fingers beneath her hair and lightly squeezed the nape of her lithe neck. “Except for that first time I saw you and knew that there was one helluva lot of heat beneath that controlled, icy, New York career woman facade. And how, once I got it melted, we’d be perfect together.”
His fingertips skimmed a sensual trail to that sensitive spot behind her ear that he’d learned had a direct connection to other, more vital body parts. “Which, as you’ll recall, we were.”
“Alec.” His name was part protest, part plea. “Please. Don’t do this.”
“Dammit, Kate,” he complained, “you can’t just show up on my doorstep after all these months and expect me to behave as if that night—and our marriage—never happened.”
“When you put it that way, I have to admit that it sounds a little unreasonable.”
“How about a lot?” He bent his head and began nibbling at her neck, amazed to discover that the clean fresh smell of Ivory soap was actually lurking beneath the more pungent scents of Cutter insect repellent and sunscreen.
“But it still isn’t as if what we’ve had the past eleven and a half months is anywhere near a normal marriage, ” she said.
“Normal’s boring.” His teeth closed on her earlobe. “And it definitely doesn’t describe you.” He moved to the other earlobe and tugged. “Or me.” His tongue soothed the pink imprint left by his teeth. “Or us, together.”
K.J. shifted, breaking contact. “You’re right about there being a great many things we have to talk about, Alec. Things that need to be settled.”
Her fingers curled around the long brown neck of the bottle so tightly that this time it was her knuckles that turned white. Growing more thirsty by the minute, whether from nerves or dehydration, she took a more careful drink.
“But I’m really not up to an in-depth discussion of our relationship right now. I’ve had an incredibly horrendous past few days—”
“Your choice,” he noted. “Since I don’t remember inviting you here.”
“Actually, you did.” She met his challenging gaze with a level one of her own. “That next morning. Although it wasn’t exactly an invitation,” she reminded him archly. “More of an order.” This time she took a longer drink, finding the wetness more than made up for the malt taste.
“I’m sorry if I took your willingness to stand by your man for granted.” Alec’s jaw clenched. After all this time, he still couldn’t quite contain his rage at the memory of her refusal.
During these months of separation, Alec had had lots of time to think about Kate. Plenty of long lonely nights spent staring unseeingly at ancient maps and wondering about might-have-beens.
She’d seemed so damn enthusiastic about his work before their marriage. He could still remember the way she’d looked deep into his eyes, hanging on to every word he’d said, as if he’d possessed all the secrets of the universe.
He’d assumed that she’d be leaving for the jungle with him in the morning. She’d certainly not objected when he suggested the idea. Since love had had him feeling exceptionally generous, he’d even granted her time to go back to New York and hand her work over to some other editor at that romance novel publishing house.
“Besides,” he growled, “you agreed to come with me while we were still sitting in Lancelot’s Lounge.”
“That night I would have agreed to anything.” Remembering all too vividly how she’d felt, K.J. knew that Alec could have informed her that he’d been planning to fly to the moon on gossamer wings and she would have blissfully assured him that was her favorite thing to do.
“And did,” he reminded her softly, his voice dropping wickedly into its lowest registers, the deep baritone designed to remind her of every hot, sexy thing they’d done together. “In fact, I remember, just before dawn, when you practically begged me to—”
“I don’t need a play-by-play, Alec,” K.J. insisted. “I just need a divorce.”
“So you said.” He rubbed his jaw and studied her, realizing that in some peripheral way, he was somewhat responsible for those dark shadows beneath her eyes. Too bad. “But since I’m not exactly feeling in a real generous mood toward you right now, Kate, I have to tell you, I’m not real inclined to give you one.”
“I could file without your agreement.”
“You could—and hope to hell I wouldn’t contest it.” He took another long pull on the beer bottle. “Then again, I suppose, if you talked real sweet, we might be able to work out a compromise.”
How could she not see that the world she’d chosen for herself was so against her nature? he thought. K.J. Campbell might wear business suits that hid her curves, eat yogurt at her desk and drink coffee all day while she tried to work with a phone to her ear. He had no doubt that, as intelligent as she was, she was a hotshot editor. This trip also proved that she had one helluva lot of determination. Enough that, if she kept running along that fast track, she’d end up in the top echelons of publishing. Where she’d only be miserable.
She was a woman born to adventure. He knew enough about her famous father to know that she couldn’t deny her heritage. George Campbell would not have wanted his daughter to spend her days under fluorescent lights that gave a city pallor to her creamy complexion.
He knew she’d inherited her father’s unique eye for seeing the world in a special light. The question, Alec considered, was whether she’d be able to see herself as clearly as she could see what she’d captured so well through the lens of her camera: little girls with beaded hair bouncing as they jumped rope in a playground strewn with broken glass; a sunshine yellow flower valiantly forcing its way through a crack in a sidewalk; old men in vested suits playing chess in the park; and a trio of helium-filled balloons rising high among the canyons of the city, bright red, yellow, and purple proof that escape was, indeed, possible.
He wondered if, once she realized her own needs, she’d be brave enough to act on them.
She was eyeing him with open suspicion. “What kind of compromise?”
“I don’t know,” he said mildly, ignoring the barbwire ball of need twisting painfully in his gut. “I’ll have to give it some thought. After all, there’s no hurry.”
As an unpalatable thought suddenly occurred to him, Alec shot a quick look down at her stomach, which beneath the pleated linen trousers seemed, if anything, almost concave due to the weight she’d lost.
Still, he reached across the table, caught her chin in his fingers and firmly held her now-wary gaze. “Is there?”
Her slight hesitation spoke volumes. Fury and jealousy ripped through him like a buzz saw as he watched the movement of muscles in her throat as she swallowed.
“Is there what?”
“Any hurry?”
“No.” She bit her bottom lip as her gaze shifted to somewhere beyond his left shoulder. “Not really.”
She was a liar, he decided. But an exceptionally lovely one, even with her glistening, sunburned face, wild mass of red hair and that amazingly ugly and wrinkled suit.
He wondered yet again exactly what had triggered this sudden trip to the Amazon. Surely, if all she’d wanted was a divorce, she could have filed in New York and had her attorney send the papers to his agent to forward.
He wondered if there was another man in Kate’s life now. Some staid, bookish fellow with round, wirerimmed glasses, a tweed sport coat, cashmere vest and argyle socks. A man who’d never put demands on her. In bed or out.
The way Alec saw it, if she did finally get around to admitting that another man had been the impetus for this visit, he had two choices. He could fly back to the States and kill the guy with his bare hands. Or he could take advantage of her surprise appearance in Santa Clara, seduce her into his bed and scorch any would-be rivals out of her mind.
His Scots-warrior blood was burning for the first option. Reminding himself that she was right—that times, regretfully, had changed—and deciding that murderers, even those who committed crimes of passion, probably didn’t get all that many conjugal visits in prison, Alec decided to choose option number two.
“So, can I take your denial to mean that you didn’t brave mosquitoes the size of dive-bombers, piranhas and heatstroke to inform me that you’re carrying another man’s child?”
The color drained from her face, leaving it paper pale. “Of course not.”
“Good.” Satisfied that this, at least, was not a lie, he skimmed a thumb over her top lip, pleased by the way her startled eyes softened at his touch. “Because if there was another guy, I’d have no choice but to throw him out the window of your office.” It was, of course, more fantasy than actual threat, but that little fact made the idea no less appealing.
Although he would have guessed it to be impossible, her complexion went even whiter beneath the fireengine red sunburn.
“You wouldn’t.” K.J. searched his stony face for the truth. “You couldn’t.”
His thumb lazily teased a trail around her bottom lip. “I wouldn’t bet the farm on that, Mrs. Mackenzie.”
K.J. was as surprised by Alec’s gritty threat as she’d been by his insistence that he wasn’t going to release her from her wedding vows. After all, when he hadn’t immediately followed her back to New York, stormed into her office and dragged her off by the hair to his cave—metaphorically speaking, of course—she′d come to the conclusion that he hadn’t really cared about her. Or their marriage. At the time, with her emotions still all in a tangle, she hadn’t known whether to feel relieved or disappointed.
But now, looking into hard, cold eyes that reminded her of the deadly machete the near-naked Indian had been sharpening when she’d first arrived in the village, K.J. was forced to wonder.
Could Alec, perhaps, actually love her? As she’d believed he had that magical, reckless night? Or was he merely possessive? A man who, while he might no longer want her for himself, didn’t have any intention of letting any other man have her, either? With her mind leaping back and forth between all those possibilities, she took another longer drink of the beer, which was tasting better all the time.
“When I woke up that morning,” she said slowly, momentarily forgetting her declaration that she didn’t want to discuss their ill-fated marriage until after she’d had some rest, “I realized I’d married a man I didn’t know all that well.”
She ran a trembling finger up and down her bottle, gathering up little beads of moisture from the dark brown glass. “Now I’m beginning to realize that I don’t know you at all.”
“Don’t worry.” A warrior’s smile slashed dangerously white in his darkly tanned face. “Things move a lot slower down here. There’ll be plenty of time to catch up and hash this all out.”
Because he wanted to crush his mouth to hers and drink from those wide lips that had drawn into a tight line, Alec forced himself to pull back from the quicksand trap this lovely, redheaded Campbell still represented.
“For now, we’ll put aside our problems and just kick back and enjoy the festival. Then we can talk about a divorce.”
“Festival?” She vaguely remembered the boatman saying something about a festival. And it being the reason there was literally no room at the lodge.
“Yeah.” Alec sat back down across from her and picked up his beer. Although it wasn’t cold, he hoped it would be wet enough to douse the flames of desire that had flared from ashes he was discovering had never entirely cooled. “It starts tomorrow at sundown. And although I’m not up on the specifics, apparently the ritual the tribe is going to perform dates back to Stone Age times.” He glanced across the table at the camera bag she was holding on her lap. “You’d probably get some dynamite pictures.”
“That is an appealing prospect.” She wondered if National Geographic might be interested. They’d published her father’s photos several times. Although her grandmother had thrown away her treasured copies, after spending years of weekends running around to tag sales, K.J. had managed to find most of the issues.
“A friend of mine who’s more up on the culture than I am tells me that the high point of the festivities is a reenactment of an ancient fertility rite.”
“Oh.” Well, she definitely wasn’t pale any longer. Alec watched the color flood into her cheeks as anxiety and reluctant curiosity warred in her incredible eyes. “So many Stone Age tribes have been discovered these past years, there have been a lot of such photographs published. Perhaps I’ll just pass.”
“What’s wrong?” he taunted softly. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid to attend with your husband a ritual centered around sex?”
He had to give her credit when she lifted her foxy, argumentative chin again. “Not at all. I’m just not sure I’ll be staying that long—”
“Oh yes, you will.”
“You’re so certain of that?”
“I’m damn certain that there isn’t a man in this village who’ll take you back upriver without my permission.”
“Permission?” Her fingers began tapping dangerously on the scarred tabletop. “May I remind you again, in case you haven’t noticed, Alec, that we’re on the brink of the twenty-first century—”
“Not out here,” he interrupted.
Damn. She suspected, from what she’d seen this far, that he might be right. Nevertheless, she wasn’t about to just let him steamroll right over her. He may think himself some evolutionary product of a Scots warrior, but her own gene pool was awash in stiff-backed, equally stubborn women who didn’t kowtow to any male. Not even their husbands.
“Point taken.” Her own voice was as sharp as a newly honed knife blade. “However, we’re all products of our environment, and you and I live in modern times. There’s no way you could get away with keeping me prisoner here.”
“That’s a harsh word, darling. And a bit of an exaggeration.” His lips curved. “Why don’t you just think of yourself as my honored guest?”
“Where have I heard that before?” she murmured. She did not o
ften resort to sarcasm; unfortunately, Alec seemed to bring out the worst in her. “Ah yes, isn’t that how Saddam Hussein referred to his human shields?”
“Now I’m truly wounded to the quick,” Alec said, his mild tone and the bedeviling smile in his eyes saying just the opposite.
His seeming refusal to take her seriously caused her to unconsciously curl the fingers of her right hand into a tight fist. “If I wanted to leave, you couldn’t stop me.”
The smile faded from his sexy lips; his eyes turned hard. “I wouldn’t put it to the test. Because you’d lose, big time.” He glanced down at her hand. “And if you’re thinking of slugging me, I’ve got to warn you, K.J., I’m not one of your prissy little prep-school boyfriends. I just may hit back.”
K.J. didn’t believe his threat. Not for a single second. What she did find frightening, however, was the way he could change from warmly amused to hard and dangerous in a blink of those riveting gray eyes.
And amazingly, he wasn’t the only one capable of fast and wide mood swings. What was it about this man, she wondered distractedly, that kept her emotions in such turmoil?
“You wouldn’t hit me,” she said, straightening her clenched fingers. It just happened to be the only thing she was certain about where Alec was concerned.
“You’re probably right on that one.”
“Of course I am. And if I really wanted to leave, right now, on my own—”
“It’d be the stupidest damn thing you’ve ever done. And believe me, Kate, from what I’ve seen so far, that’s saying something.”
She exhaled a frustrated breath. “Do you think I could please finish a thought here?”
He waved the beer bottle in a be-my-guest gesture.
“Thank you.” She nodded, opting to be satisfied by any small concession she might win at this point. “As I was saying, if I did choose to head back upriver on my own, short of tying me up, you couldn’t stop me.”
“Now, there you go again,” he complained with a sexy, mocking grin. “Tempting me. Because let me tell you, sweetheart, tying you up has a certain edgy, albeit kinky, appeal.”