by Tami Hoag
But Shane Callan wasn’t laughing when he burst in the back door of the kitchen. His gun wasn’t laughing either. He pressed the nose of it to the head of the frazzled gray-haired man he shoved into the room ahead of him. Faith and Jayne both shrieked and jumped as Callan roughly spun the man around and slammed him back against the kitchen wall, causing three copper molds to clatter to the floor.
“Who the hell are you, and what the hell were you doing under that window?” Shane growled the words in the older man’s face.
The old man sputtered right back, though he was in no position to make demands. “Let me go, ye sly devil!” he ordered in an oddly lilting voice. “Who do ye think ye are, wavin’ a gun about!”
Shane’s fist wound tighter into the knot of fabric he clutched beneath the man’s bearded chin. “I’m the man who’s going to make you very unhappy if you don’t start answering questions.”
The control on Faith’s temper snapped like a toothpick when she realized whom Shane was holding at gunpoint. Furious, without a thought as to what Callan’s reaction would be, she stormed across the room.
“For Pete’s sake, put that gun down before you hurt someone! That’s my caretaker you’re assaulting, you overgrown bully.”
Shane loosened his hold on the man’s dirty brown work jacket and half turned to glare at Faith, lowering his pistol as he did so.
“Give me that,” she snapped, snatching the gun from his slack hand. “You obnoxious jerk! You can’t just bust into my home with guns a-blazing like some kind of reincarnated John Wayne, scaring everybody half to death! You could have given poor Mr. Fitz a heart attack!”
Mr. Fitz stepped away from the wall and his captor, somehow managing to look down his hooked nose at Shane, who stood a head taller. He adjusted his jacket, which reeked of fish, like a king arranging his cloak, then stroked a smoothing hand over his shaggy gray beard.
Shane ignored the old geezer in favor of riveting Faith with a burning look. He was furious with himself for letting her take his gun. What the hell was wrong with him? Was he so off his game he could let a slip of a woman get the drop on him? Or was it just this particular woman, an annoying little voice asked him. He was acting like a green rookie, and it was all Faith Kincaid’s fault. He scowled at her.
Suddenly realizing she had his pistol in her hand, she grimaced at it as if it were a slimy dead fish and offered it back to him, holding it pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “Here. Take this awful thing and put it away,” she said in her sternest motherly tone. For added oomph she shook her finger at him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, pulling a gun on poor Mr. Fitz. He’s no killer.”
Shane holstered the pistol, an ominous frown pulling his black brows low over his eyes. Lord, she made him feel as if he were ten all over again, in trouble for throwing spit wads in school. “How was I supposed to know that? No one bothered to tell me there was a Mr. Fitz.”
Alaina stepped between them, defusing the situation with an introduction as the telephone rang in the background. “Mr. Callan, this is Faith’s caretaker, Jack Fitz. Mr. Fitz, this is Agent Callan. The government sent him to keep an eye on Faith because of that trial business.”
Mr. Fitz snorted like an infuriated billy goat, his whiskered chin set at a defiant angle. “That better be all ye keep on her, ye big rascal.”
Shane rolled his eyes and heaved a much-put-upon sigh. Half under his breath he said, “This place is unbelievable.”
“Feel free to go back to Washington to report that,” Faith said. She was still seething. She’d had it with him upsetting her household and her nervous system. A quiet life was all she wanted. “You’re not welcome here, Mr. Callan. You’re not wanted, and you’re not needed.”
“You’ve made that first part abundantly clear, Ms. Kincaid,” he said, his voice low and silky as he leaned over her.
Faith met his cool, intense stare with one of her own. Shane’s look was that of a man who could have stared down the devil himself. Perhaps he had. And underlying the anger that snapped between them like a live wire she could feel a pull, an attraction she neither wanted nor welcomed. A strange tingling raced over her skin as the moment stretched out between them.
“Faith,” Jayne called, breaking the tension. “Telephone.”
Almost weak with relief, Faith turned away from the confrontation. Her knees wobbled a bit as she crossed the room to take the receiver from Jayne.
“Hello, this is Faith Kincaid.”
“How would you like to be dead, Mrs. Gerrard?” a man’s voice questioned very softly.
Blinding, instantaneous fear lodged in Faith’s throat. She felt as if she had suddenly been encased in ice, and yet her palms were sweating as she clutched the receiver to her ear. The only thing she could think to say was ridiculous, but she said it anyway, her voice shot through with trembling threads of panic. “Who is this?”
“A friend,” the man answered, but there was nothing friendly in his voice; it held all the silky menace of a viper, dark and evil. “A friend who thinks it would be better if you didn’t testify, because I’d hate to have to kill you.”
For a long moment Faith listened to the silence after the soft click on the other end of the line. Finally she hung up and turned slowly to face the other people in the room. If she had felt weak before the call, she felt faint now, and she knew she had turned as white as the kitchen appliances. She was certain no one could feel as cold and terrified as she did and still have a red blood cell left in her body.
Everyone in the room stared at her, their faces grim with worry. They seemed miles away, even though they were in the same room.
She didn’t turn to her friends. Her gaze went directly, instinctively to Shane Callan and locked on him desperately, as if she could somehow draw strength from merely looking at him. Faith didn’t question her reaction; fear had stripped away the ability to question and reason.
Managing to draw a shaky breath into her lungs, she said, “It would seem I was a bit hasty in saying you aren’t needed here.”
THREE
HE COULDN’T SLEEP. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how detached he claimed to be, he couldn’t blank the image from his mind. Every time he closed his eyes all he could see was Faith Kincaid, looking small and terrified, her face washed of color, her dark eyes staring up at him, wide and shining with tears of fear.
She had looked to him in that instant, and his first and strongest instinct had been to take her in his arms and hold her.
Shane swore softly, exhaling a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. What the hell was the matter with him?
Lurking not so far in the back of his mind was the fear that after sixteen years on the job, maybe it was time to move on to something else. But when he tried to see the future, it simply stretched before him, a barren gray plain. His dedication to duty had distanced him from everyone and everything he had ever cared about. Now he had nothing to move on to.
Without turning on the light he sat up and reached for the tumbler on the nightstand and took a swallow of velvet-smooth whiskey.
Banks had wanted him to take R and R after the Silvanus case. Correction, Shane thought with a wry smile, as he took another long drag on his cigarette, Banks had ordered him to take R and R after the Silvanus case. He probably should have listened. Instead, he’d picked one hell of a fight with his boss, and now he was stuck here. This was Banks’s way of punishing him. When Shane thought of the woman lying in bed just across the hall from him, and his blood surged hot in his veins, he had to say it was cruel and unusual punishment.
What a pretty little bundle of trouble Faith Kincaid was. In the first place he wanted to believe she was as guilty as her ex-husband where DataScam was concerned. That alone should have kept him from feeling this damnable attraction. Under the tarnish of cynicism he was still a patriot. And if she really was as innocent as those big brown eyes of hers claimed, she was a civilian under his protection. That meant hands off.
But,
oh, how he’d wanted to touch her when she had hung up that phone and turned to him. He had felt every facet of her fear, had known she was looking to him for strength, for protection. The protection she had been so certain she didn’t need.
Shane told himself his job was keeping Faith safe and sound until the trial. He had men stationed at strategic points on the property, well hidden from view. Tomorrow Del Matthews would arrive to tap the phones. They would construct a safety net around Faith, hoping to catch whoever was after her rather than simply frighten them away.
He stubbed his cigarette out in the little porcelain dish that was intended for bedtime mints and rubbed the back of his neck. Everything was under control. Repeating that in his head, he lay back down on the rumpled sheets and tried to relax. Everything was under control.
Everything had been under control in the Silvanus case. All the players in the Silvanus operation were now either dead or under indictment. Except Strauss. It haunted Shane that the most lethal of Silvanus’s cohorts had escaped, but that case was over. Here and now, everything was under control.
Everything had been under control at Quantico ten years ago too. Still, Ellie was dead.
Cold swept over him in a sheen of damp sweat. Where had that memory come from? He had buried it along with Ellie. Why had it surfaced now?
The image of Faith Kincaid floated through his mind, but Shane stubbornly ignored the clue and hauled himself out of bed to pace naked back and forth across the width of the small room. With a strength of will few men possessed, he pushed the memories out of his mind. This wasn’t Quantico. Nobody was going to get to Faith Kincaid because it was his job to keep her safe. End of story.
As those words branded themselves in his mind, a sound penetrated his thoughts, snatching hold of his attention. It was faint, overhead on the second or third floor, but it was distinct. Ker-thump … ker-thump … ker-thump …
Hastily he pulled on a pair of pants, grabbed his gun, and slipped from the room.
She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t begin to relax, not even after her friends had forced a glass of brandy on her. The one instant she had finally begun to doze off she had been awakened by an itching sensation on her chest where the pendant of her necklace lay.
Great. Not only were there killers after her, she was developing an allergy as well, Faith thought, as she sat up and switched the bedside lamp on.
In the soft light she studied the delicate gold filigree heart as she often did. The intricate lacework of the piece had always enchanted her. When Bryan had given her the necklace as a graduation present, he had claimed there was magic in it. Of course, for her friend Bryan Hennessy there was magic in everything. Where was the magic now, Faith wondered, now that she and Lindy were in danger.
Trembling, she pulled the covers up even though she wasn’t cold. She had felt so safe here. All it had taken to shatter that sense of well-being was a phone call. That easily, evil had violated her home, her peace. The overwhelming sense of vulnerability that swept through her at the thought was frightening. And with the helplessness came anger. She had always taken care of her own problems. This was one she couldn’t begin to handle on her own.
Shane Callan, a presence she had wanted removed from her life earlier in the day, had suddenly become her savior. It made little sense. She hardly knew him, yet she had immediately turned to him. The whole episode had taken on a surrealistic quality in her memory. Had she really seen concern in his translucent gray eyes, or had she imagined it? Had she imagined the softer quality in his low voice as he had questioned her, or had that been genuine?
All she was really certain of was that her world had been turned upside down yet again. How could such an ordinary person find herself constantly thrown into extraordinary circumstances, she wondered. She was just a girl from the farm country of Ohio. What did she know of spies and assassins?
Needing to do something that was comforting in its normalcy, she tossed the covers aside, slipped out of bed, and padded barefoot across the rug to the door that connected her room to Lindy’s. She looked in on her daughter and frowned. Lindy was tossing and turning too, but at least she was asleep. Faith doubted she was going to get any rest at all.
She pulled a light blue robe on over her nightgown and quietly slipped out of her room, intending to go to the library to find something to read. Then she heard it. Ker-thump … ker-thump … ker-thump …
“Never misses a night,” she murmured, a faint smile turning her lips.
Instead of going to the library, she turned and crept up the grand staircase.
She barely glimpsed the dark figure that bolted out from behind the drapes flanking the Palladian window on the second-floor landing. Before she could scream, she found herself pressed back against the wall with a large hand clamped over her mouth, a gun pressed to her temple, and a hard male body pressed along the length of her. Terror surged through her, pebbling the texture of her skin and drawing her nipples into tight knots.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Shane uttered the words through clenched teeth. He slid his hand from her mouth to the wall beside her head. His eyes looked cold and silvery in the moonlight that fell through the arched window.
Faith pulled a shaking breath into her lungs. “This is my house,” she whispered. “I’m free to roam it at will, aren’t I?”
“That depends on why you’re roaming.”
She made a face. There was no way he was going to believe her if she told him the truth, so she settled on half of it. “I couldn’t sleep. What’s your excuse?”
“I don’t need one.”
Faith frowned at him. “You’re an absolute menace, sneaking around, manhandling people, holding that awful gun to their heads. You’re liable to end up killing somebody.”
Shane never took his eyes off her as he tucked his pistol into the back of his pants. Nor did he move, keeping her pinned against the wall with his own weight. She was soft against him, trembling. Her nipples seemed to burn him through the sheer silky fabric of her nightgown.
Anger swelled inside him, right along with desire. Dammit, she was trouble. He could keep only half his mind on the job. The other half was preoccupied savoring the feel of her against him, wondering what it would be like to have her warm and willing beneath him. He had to fight to keep from staring at her sweet, full mouth just inches below his.
“Who am I liable to kill up here?” he asked. “No one has a room in this part of the house … unless there’s someone else you neglected to mention to me. Is there, Faith?”
“No,” she murmured.
Why didn’t he back off and give her some room? Being wedged between the wall and his body was having a devastating effect on her mind. Her eyes kept drifting to the bare width of his shoulders and chest. A sculptor couldn’t have carved a more artistic representation of the male animal. His muscles flexed and rippled in the moonlight. A square pad of white gauze was taped to his left shoulder, but it didn’t detract from his masculine beauty; it only emphasized the fact that he was a dangerous man.
“Then there’s nothing to worry about if I decide to go upstairs, is there?” he said.
Faith felt she had plenty to worry about—the coil of desire tightening inside her, the feel of Shane’s rock-hard thighs imprisoning her, the fact that she seemed to want to stare at the sharp, firm lines of his mouth. At the moment she was more afraid of this immediate threat than the one she had received over the phone.
“No,” she whispered, not certain whether she was answering his question or denying the sudden ache of needs long neglected.
“No,” Shane echoed, very aware of what he was denying. He could feel himself growing heavy and hard against the pillow of Faith’s body as she stared at his mouth. It was a toss-up as to whether he was angrier with her for tempting him or with himself for knowing he was about to give in to that temptation.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said in a low, rough voice, “unless this is what you came looking for.�
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It was more an assault than a kiss. Shane’s mouth slanted across Faith’s, angry and demanding. His fingertips dug into her shoulders, pulling her even more firmly against his bare chest. She bent back like an archer’s bow under the pressure, her hips arching into his in a way that made his state of arousal very apparent.
Faith’s first instinct was to get away from him, but that response was almost immediately overtaken by another, more powerful instinct she seemed to have no control over—the instinct to give in to him. The desire was so strong that she sagged against him and her lips softened beneath his, allowing his tongue access to her mouth. Pure fire seared her veins at the intimate invasion, at the heady taste of him.
When Shane’s right hand slipped inside her open robe to cup her breast, she nearly cried out, the pleasure was so intense. His long fingers explored her through the silky fabric of her gown, his thumb flicking across the nipple that was already hard and aching. All the while his tongue plunged and receded in the warmth of her mouth, his message more than clear. He wanted her.
He wanted her. He didn’t respect her. He didn’t seem particularly fond of her. In fact, he had insinuated she was a criminal.
Then what in the world was she doing kissing him, Faith asked herself as common sense returned in a painful rush. It was accompanied by a sharp dose of self-loathing. What was wrong with her that she could feel attracted to this man who thought so little of her? Lord, he had all but said she’d come upstairs looking for this!
Tearing her mouth from beneath his, she jerked out of his arms and slapped him hard. The sound was like a shot in the still of the night. Shane stared at her, his expression a mix of anger, surprise, and thwarted passion.
Faith cursed herself again at the rush of desire she felt looking at him. He was only half-dressed. With his black hair tousled and his features outlined in the moonlight, he looked like an elegant savage.