by Raye Morgan
He began to look impatient.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” he said shortly. “I gave you your options. Pick one.”
She licked her dry lips and had to try twice before she got out an actual word or two. “I…I can’t.”
“Why not?” he demanded. “I want the truth.”
She shook her head, trying to clear it. What could she possibly say that he would understand at this point? All her explanations needed too much background. Despair began to creep into her thought processes.
“I have to get up,” she told him. “If you don’t release me, I’m going to get hysterical.”
“Be serious,” he scoffed. But then he looked at her a bit closer and what he saw seemed to convince him. Reluctantly, he rolled away.
“Women,” he muttered darkly, but he let her get up, and he rose as well.
She took a deep breath and steadied herself. At least they were out from under that awful pier. The fog hid the sun, but the sand was still warm here and that was a bit comforting.
She looked up at him. He was all tanned skin and muscles, with sand sprinkled everywhere, even on his golden eyelashes. For a moment she was dazzled, but she quickly frowned and brought herself back down to earth. This was no time to let attraction take over. She had work to do.
“What’s your name?” he demanded.
“Kelly Vrosis,” she responded.
He almost smiled. That answer had been so quick, so automatic, he had no doubt it really was her name. What was going on here? Didn’t she know she was supposed to lie about these things?
“Okay,” he said. “I was nice to you. Your turn.”
She opened her eyes wide, playing dumb. “What?” she asked, shaking her head as though she didn’t have a clue what he wanted from her.
He gave her a long-suffering look. “Okay, Kelly Vrosis. No more messing around. There are only three reasons people follow me. Some want information. Some want to stop me from doing something. But most want me dead.” He pinned her with a direct stare. “So which is it?”
Chapter Two
KELLY SHOOK HER HEAD, feeling a touch of panic. “None of those. Honest.”
Joe’s hard face looked almost contemptuous. “Then what?”
She glanced up at him and swallowed hard. She’d had a cover story ready when she’d started this. It had seemed a good one at the time—something about thinking he was her college roommate’s brother—but now it just seemed lame. She had to admit this had turned out to be very different from what she’d expected or planned. Serious consequences loomed. This was scary.
“Uh, well…” she said, trying to buy time while she thought up something better. But then she stopped herself. There was no point in filling the air with nonsense just to give the impression she had something to say. He wasn’t going to buy it, anyway.
Things were happening too quickly. She needed a moment to reflect, to stand back and look at this man and make a judgment call. Was he or was he not the man she theorized he had to be?
She’d put all of her credibility on the line, coming to California and looking him up. Had she done something stupid? Or was she a genius?
Of course, she’d been crazy to get this close to him this early. She was on her own. If she got into trouble there would be no one to call.
Was she in trouble right now? Hard to tell. But it sure felt like it.
She looked him over. His blond-tipped hair was too long and sticking out at all angles. His skin was too tan. His body was too beautiful—and also too scarred to look at without wincing. He was barefoot and covered with sand. He didn’t look like any prince she’d ever seen before.
Was she crazy? What if she was completely wrong? How could she have put herself and her career out on a limb like this? Maybe she should just pull back and rethink this whole thing.
“I saw you writing in a notebook,” he said, moving toward her in a deliberate way that made her take a step backward. “It was about me, wasn’t it?”
“What? No…” But she knew her face revealed the truth.
His clear blue eyes challenged her. “I want to see it.”
Taking a deep breath, she tried for a bit of professionalism. She couldn’t just roll over for this man.
“You have no right to see it. It’s private property. My property.”
“If it’s about me, I think I have every right.”
“No, you don’t!”
“Hand it over.”
“No.”
“Never mind,” he said impatiently, reaching for her. “We’ll do it this way.”
She wasn’t certain what he had in mind, but was pretty sure she wasn’t going to like it. She took another quick step backward.
“Wait.” She put her hand to her mouth. “I think you chipped my tooth.”
His first reaction was skepticism and she didn’t blame him. It was a ploy, but she was desperate at this point.
“When?”
“When you tackled me.”
To her surprise, he actually began to look concerned. “Here, let me see.”
Moving forward and not giving her any room to maneuver, he took her face in his hands and looked down. This was a bit more than she’d bargained for. She wanted to protest, but after all, she’d set this up herself, hadn’t she? And she really did feel a sharp edge on one of her upper fronts. Now she had to go through with it to prove her point. Tentatively, she opened her mouth.
“Here.” She pointed at the place that felt sharp.
He leaned close, staring down. His hands were warm on her cheeks. His maleness overwhelmed her for a moment and she felt a bit light-headed. But his inspection didn’t last long. He touched the tooth, then pulled back.
“As far as I can see, no tooth was injured during my expertly executed preemptive strike.”
She gave him a look. “Cute,” she said, exploring again with her tongue. “It feels chipped to me.”
But while she was distracted, he was reaching to pull down the zipper of her sweatshirt, and that was another matter altogether.
“Hey,” she cried, trying to jump away from his reach. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Checking,” he said with calm confidence.
“Checking what?” She bristled with outrage.
“Don’t worry. I’ve seen it all before.” He gave her a sudden grin that just about knocked her backward on its own. “Just checking to see if you have a recorder on you. A bug. A mic.”
She moved quickly to protect the little microcassette recorder tucked in the front pocket of her sweatshirt, but his hand was already sliding in there.
“Ah-hah.” He pulled it out and waved it at her. “Just as I thought.”
“Hey,” she cried, truly indignant now, trying without success to snatch it back. “You can’t do this.”
He grinned again, eyes mocking as he dangled it just out of her reach. “Sue me.”
And while she stretched to try to claim it, his other hand shot forward into her other pocket and snagged her notebook and her tiny digital camera.
“Give me back my things,” she said, glaring at him, hands on her hips. A part of her was wincing, reminding her that she was reacting like any woman might, instead of like the intelligence agent she wanted to be. But she didn’t have time to consider that. She couldn’t let him do this!
“Okay now, this is just not fair.”
“Not fair?” He set her items on a rock and stood in front of them, so she knew she didn’t have a chance to grab them unless he let her. “Life ain’t fair, baby. Ya gotta learn to turn your lemons into lemonade.”
Despite his obviously experience based advice, she wasn’t ready to sign on to that attitude. She stuck her chin out and shot daggers at him with her eyes.
“You’re bigger than I am. You’re stronger than I am. You’ve got an unfair advantage. This isn’t a fair fight.”
He shrugged and took hold of the hood of her sweatshirt on either side of her face so she couldn’t escape
, pulling her closer and gazing down into her eyes. Strangely, his look went from mocking to dreamy in less time than it took to think it. As she gazed into his blue eyes, he grazed her cheek with one palm, touching her as though he liked the feel of her skin.
“Who says we’re fighting?” he said, his voice suddenly low and sensual.
As humiliating as it was to know that he could turn her reactions on and off like a switch, she couldn’t seem to stop them. The seduction in his voice washed over her like a wave, turning her outrage into a sense of longing she’d never known before. All the blood seemed to drain from her head, and for a moment, she actually thought she was going to faint.
Kelly closed her eyes and summoned all her strength. Whatever was going on, she wouldn’t let it happen.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, trying to make her shaky voice firm as she looked at Joe again. “You think you can manipulate me like a puppy dog, don’t you?”
He dropped his hand from her face and gave her a pained look. “I see,” he said, turning from her. “What we’ve got here is a drama queen.”
She took a step after him. “Look, you’ve taken everything I brought with me. You proved you could do it.” She put out her hand. “So can I have them back now?”
He shook his head. “Not yet.” He hesitated, gazing at her speculatively. He’d already been through her sweatshirt pockets. All that was left were the pockets in her jeans. “What I’d like to see is some ID. Where’s your wallet?”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she repeated, backing away again. “You’re not coming anywhere near these pockets.”
His mouth twisted. “I suppose that would be going a step too far,” he said with obvious regret.
“Even for you,” she added. “Besides, you have no right to do any of this.”
He shrugged. “Okay. Come on back here and sit down.” He gestured toward the rock. “Let’s take a look at what you’ve found out about me.”
He was going to look through her research notes. She frowned, not sure what to do. If she didn’t have a real need to get along with him, she would certainly be treating this invasion of her space quite differently. In fact, she might be willing to swear out a warrant right now.
“Sit down,” he said again.
“Sorry,” she said crisply. “I don’t have time. I have to go find a policeman to have you arrested.”
He looked at her for a moment, then rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Kelly, sit down.”
She gazed at him defiantly. “No.”
He gave her a world-weary, heavy-lidded look. “Do I have to tackle you again?”
She hesitated, watching as he sat on the long black rock and began to go through her things.
“Hey, you can’t look at that,” she said, stepping closer.
“I thought you were going to see if you could find a cop to stop me,” he noted casually as he flipped through the pages of her notebook. “This is quite a little document of my life for the last two days,” he noted. “But pretty boring.”
“The truth hurts,” she quipped.
His mouth twisted. That wasn’t the only thing that hurt. The leg that had taken a bullet almost a year ago still wasn’t totally healed. It ached right now. He’d been standing on it for too long.
And yet he was probably better off than he’d had any reason to hope he would be when he’d returned from overseas. He’d been torn and wounded, in soul as well as in body, and the bitterness over what had happened that last day in the Philippines still consumed him. That had always been worse than the physical pain. The bullets that had torn through the jungle that day had shattered his life, but the woman he loved had died in his arms.
Was that it? Was that what Kelly was after? Was she just another writer looking for a story? He eyed her speculatively.
At first he’d thought she must have worse things in mind. There were plenty of people from his past who might want to take him out. But he was pretty sure that wasn’t what she’d come for. She wasn’t the right type. And all this note taking suggested she was looking for information, not trying to do him actual harm. At least not at the moment.
In the VA hospital, there’d been a reporter who had hung around, wanting to know details, fishing for angles. He’d seen the article about the “returning heroes” that had featured Joe as well as a group of other men, and he’d sensed there was something more there. He’d wanted to write up Joe’s story, wanted to use his life as fodder for a piece of sensational journalism. He hadn’t actually known about Angie, but he’d known there had to be something.
Joe hadn’t cooperated. In fact, things had gotten downright nasty there for awhile. There was no way he would allow Angie to be grist for anyone’s mill. And anyway, the last thing guys like him needed was publicity. Something like that could destroy your usefulness, wipe out your career. If people knew who you were and what your game was, you were dead. Incognito was the way to go.
He was confronting this issue right now. His body was pretty much healed, but his mind? Not hardly. Was he going to be able to go back to work?
That was the question haunting him. He wasn’t in the military any longer, but there were plenty of contractors who were ready to pay him a lot of money to do what he was doing before, only privately. And—let’s face it—he didn’t know much of anything else. But did he still have the heart for it? Had losing the woman he loved destroyed all that?
It hardly mattered. In just a few hours, his little girl—a little girl he’d never met—was arriving on a flight from the Philippines. He should be preparing for that. Once Mei was here, Joe had no idea what his life was going to be like. Everything had been on hold for months. Now he was about to see the future.
He still had no answers. But he knew one thing: he wasn’t going to let anyone write about him. No way.
“So it was information you were aiming for after all,” he said, paging through the notebook and feeling his annoyance begin to simmer into something else.
“Well, not really,” she began, but he went on as though she hadn’t spoken.
“Too bad you weren’t around when I was smuggling contraband across the border,” he said sardonically, looking up to where she was standing. “Or when I was inviting underaged girls over to my place for an orgy. Or hiding deserters in my rec room.”
She finally slipped down to sit beside him in the rock. “I don’t believe you ever did any of those things.”
He winced. “Damn. I just can’t get any respect anymore, can I?”
She gave him a baleful look. “You’re wrong about me,” she said calmly. “I’m not trying to dig up dirt on you.”
His eyes were hooded and there was a hard line around his mouth. “No? Then what are you trying to do?”
She hesitated. What should she tell him? How much could she get away with and not let him know the truth? It was too soon to tell him everything. Much too soon. And once he knew what she was here for, she had every reason to think that he would like her even less than he did now.
He was waving her notebook at her, his knuckles white. “This is me,” he said, and to her surprise, his voice was throbbing with real anger. “You’ve taken a piece of me and you have no right to it.”
She blinked, disconcerted that he was taking this so seriously. “But it’s me, too. My writing.”
“I don’t care.” He flipped the notebook open again and ripped the relevant pages out. Looking at her defiantly, he tore them into tiny pieces.
Her heart jumped but she held back her natural reaction. Something in the strength of his backlash warned her to let it be for now. Besides, she knew she hadn’t written down anything very interesting as yet. It didn’t really matter.
He dropped the scraps into her hand. “Let’s see you try to put that back together again.”
“Don’t worry,” she said brightly. “I don’t need it. I can remember what I wrote.”
“Really. Without this?” He held up her microcassette recorder. “And without this?” He
added her tiny digital camera to the collection.
She bit her lip. Once again he was threatening to go too far. Tearing up some notes was one thing. Tampering with her electronics was another.
With a reluctant growl, he handed her back her things.
“Whatever,” he said dismissively. “Do your thing. But just stay out of my way, okay?” He turned, running fingers through his thick hair and looking for his surfboard.
She quickly stashed her things away in her front pockets again, watching him anxiously. This seemed a lot like disaster in the making. He now knew who she was, so she couldn’t very well follow him. If he found out she was questioning his neighbors, she wasn’t sure what he would do, but she knew it wouldn’t be pretty.
So she was stuck. Kelly couldn’t do anything surreptitiously. Any new research would have to be done right out in the open and to his face. And for that she needed to have a civil relationship with him. That didn’t seem to be in the cards, the way things were working out.
Without looking her way again, he began to stride off through the sand, his board under his arm.
She watched him go for a moment, watched the fog begin to swallow him up, her heart sinking. This couldn’t be all there was. This couldn’t be the end of her research. She might never know the truth now. Was he the prince or wasn’t he? She had to find out. Gathering herself together, she ran after him.
“Wait!” she called. “Joe, wait a minute. I…I’ll tell you everything.”
He kept walking.
“Wait.”
She caught up with him and managed to get him to glance at her again. “Have you ever heard of a little island country named Ambria?” she asked, searching his eyes for his reaction to her words.
He stopped in his tracks and turned, looking at her. And then he went very still. Everything about him seemed to be poised and waiting, like a cat in the jungle, preparing to strike.
“Ambria,” he said slowly. Then he nodded, his eyes hooded. “Sure. I’ve heard of the place. What about it?”
There was something there. He’d reacted. She couldn’t tell much, but there was a thread of interest in his gaze. Should she tell him what she thought she knew? She was trembling on the brink, but held back. The time wasn’t right.