Kate frowned. “But you’re rich.”
Shaw laughed nastily. “I had something to prove. The best part is, I never broke the law making my fortune. And he hates me for it.”
“So D’Amato would hurt Lucky and Chance to get back at you?”
“Not in the way you’re probably thinking. But right now, he doesn’t have anyone to inherit his business. He didn’t succeed with me, but he might see the twins as possible heirs. And I don’t intend to give him the satisfaction.”
“Oh, my God.”
The fire was suddenly too warm. Kate moved away from the heat—away from Shaw—to sit on the couch. “So this is a game between you and your father, and we’re the pawns?”
“Maybe I want to keep those two trusting boys from being victimized like I was.”
“And maybe you just want to keep D’Amato from winning the game,” Kate accused.
“Think what you like. You’re here now, where I know you’re safe.”
He was too close. Too overpowering. Too tempting. She rose again and paced to the row of shelves containing a collection of Native American artifacts. With the distance of the room between them she turned and said, “I’m not going to sleep with you, Shaw.”
“I doubt either one of us will get much sleep,” he said with a lazy grin, as he sat on the arm of the couch.
“I don’t find that the least bit amusing,” she snapped. “This is a big house. I’m sure you have another bedroom I could use.”
“Actually, I do.”
Kate sighed with relief. “Good. Just point me in the right direction.”
When Shaw stood, Kate thought he’d given in gracefully. But instead of directing her to another bedroom, he crossed to the shelves where she was standing and ran his fingers over the intricate beading on a pair of buckskin moccasins. Then he turned to her and said, “How about a little experiment before we go our separate ways?”
Kate was instantly wary. “What did you have in mind?”
“A kiss.”
“No. Not just no, but hell no.”
“What are you afraid of, Kate?”
“I’m not in the habit of kissing men I hardly know.”
He raised a sardonic brow.
She flushed. “I was out of my mind with anger at J.D. the night you and I met.”
“And yet you stayed with him for eight more years.”
“He threatened to take my sons away from me if I tried to divorce him,” she shot back. “I couldn’t take that chance.”
“There wasn’t a night I didn’t think of you,” he said as he closed the distance between them, “and imagine where you were. What you were doing.”
“I don’t believe you,” Kate said, refusing to back away.
“I wondered if our night together was as transcendent for you as it was for me.”
Kate gave an unladylike snort. “Transcendent? It was just damned good sex.”
His eyes narrowed in anger and a muscle worked in his jaw.
So what if she’d made him mad? She had to belittle his memories. Otherwise, he might realize that she’d experienced the same thing: something rare and remarkable. And that knowledge would give him too much power over her.
One word from her about how transcendent their evening had been and Shaw would realize how vulnerable she still was to his animal magnetism. When she was anywhere near the man, she experienced an undeniable—and inexplicable—carnal response. It had to be some sort of evolutionary anomaly that made her extraordinarily susceptible to him sexually. To misquote a phrase, “His pheromones had her surrendering at hello.”
As far as she was concerned, their transcendent night together was nothing more than a case of nature run amok.
Shaw was standing so close she could feel the heat of him, smell the alluring male musk that had filled her nostrils nine years ago. Those damned sexy pheromones! She closed her eyes and inhaled.
He made a guttural sound of need deep in his throat.
Kate felt her body come alive, every nerve ending poised in expectation of his touch. She hungered for it. Had imagined it a hundred thousand times since the night they’d spent together. Would it—could it—possibly be as magical as she remembered?
She opened her eyes and looked up. His heavy-lidded gaze was focused on her, his gray eyes dark with barely tethered desire. She gasped as he roughly grasped her hair in his fist, angled her head back and captured her mouth with his.
It was a kiss of domination. And possession.
She could feel his need, taking her deep. An iron band circled her hips, and he held her captive as he plundered her mouth. She welcomed the rush of sensation that took her under. Her fingernails dug crescents in his shoulders as she held on for dear life.
Waves of feeling crashed over her, overwhelming rational thought. She was sucked down by a riptide of emotion that held her under for long, terrifying moments. She was afraid she would drown if she didn’t claw her way back to the surface.
Shaw broke the kiss, and Kate gasped life-giving air. And then he took her under again.
She wasn’t sure who reached for whose belt buckle first. She worked frantically on Shaw’s while he yanked her belt free. They shoved off shoes as zippers slid down. Hands tore past layers of clothing searching for naked flesh.
Shaw stepped away from his clothes as he backed her against the wall. She kicked her jeans and underwear away, then wrapped her arms around his neck and latched on to his shoulder with her teeth as he lifted and impaled her. It took only a few thrusts before she felt herself cresting on a high wave of passion. She buried a cry of exultation against his throat and heard his guttural sound of satisfaction as he spilled his seed.
They clung to each other to keep from falling down, his lungs heaving like bellows, hers gasping for air. Then he eased her legs back down from where she’d wrapped them around his hips. Her legs were so boneless she might have slid down the wall if he hadn’t held her upright with an arm around her shoulder.
Kate suddenly felt cold, as a draft of air-conditioning reached the sweat that dotted her skin. She raised a trembling hand to Shaw’s stubbled cheek, but before it got there, he turned his head and kissed her palm.
It was the gesture of a lover for his beloved.
But this wasn’t the man she loved.
She wondered if her eyes showed the despair she felt. She swallowed over the knot of misery and guilt in her throat and said, “I don’t know why this happens with you. It isn’t love. It can’t be anything good, because—”
“Because I’m a bad man?”
“Let go of me,” she said. “I want to get dressed.”
Instead, he scooped her up in his arms. “There’s no sense putting on clothes, when I’ll just want to take them off again.”
Kate knew she should kick and scratch. She should shriek and rage. But she lay her head on his muscular shoulder and let him carry her down the hall to his bedroom. For the second time after making love to this man, tears brimmed in her eyes and slipped onto her cheeks.
She’d tried to resist him. And failed. Tomorrow would be soon enough to begin the fight again.
10
Jack tried several times to reach Kate by phone as he drove the two hundred or so miles from San Antonio to Houston Friday night. Before he’d left the house that afternoon, she’d mentioned she wanted to talk to him, so he was surprised that she hadn’t answered his calls. He’d left three messages on her answering machine, one each hour of his drive.
He had some things he wanted to ask her. Like why Wyatt Shaw had turned up on her front doorstep. It was possible she’d met the billionaire at some charity function sponsored by her family. Her grandfather, Jackson Blackthorne, had his fingers in a great many pies. But if so, why hadn’t she mentioned her acquaintance with such a notorious man?
He was also sure Kate was going to want an explanation of what he was doing for Dante D’Amato, since Shaw had insinuated he worked for his father. Jack hadn’t yet figured out what he
could—or should—safely say to explain his connection to the mob.
Jack tried to imagine why Kate might still be out of the house at half past ten. Maybe she or one of the boys had been hurt and she was at a 24-hour clinic. Or maybe her mother, Libby, was in labor with the late-in-life baby she was expecting. Kate had promised to travel to Austin to take care of her much younger siblings, Houston and Dallas, while her father, Federal District Court Judge Clay Blackthorne, was at the hospital with her mother.
Once Jack reached the small apartment that he kept for work on the outskirts of Houston, he left three more messages on Kate’s cell phone, one every half hour, the last one at midnight, all of which went directly to voice mail. Where the hell was she?
He was tempted to call her father, but if Kate’s mother wasn’t in an Austin hospital delivering the baby, there was no sense putting her parents in a panic. Kate might have gone out to get ice cream with the boys, or maybe she’d been in the shower, or maybe she’d gone to bed early and silenced her cell phone, and now it was too late to call her home phone without waking up the twins.
He couldn’t help being worried about what might have happened after he’d left her alone with Wyatt Shaw. He’d had no choice. It would have been worse if he’d hung around. The less Shaw—and Kate—knew about what he was doing for Dante D’Amato, the better.
For almost twenty years Jack had been hunting the party responsible for demanding that he shave points in the Super Bowl. His foolhardy father had amassed gambling debts in the amount of $321,800, with no hope of repaying such an amount. The syndicate holding his father’s markers wouldn’t take cash in payment from Jack. They wanted the Super Bowl fixed instead.
No one could prove Jack had cheated to keep his father’s throat from being cut by the mob. In fact, he’d refused to cooperate.
But he’d fumbled the ball on the opposing team’s five-yard line. He’d gotten an intentional grounding call on fourth and short. He’d thrown an interception in a spot where he had no receiver within a dozen yards.
And they’d lost the game.
His teammates had refused to play with him. He’d been forced from the game of football, and his name had been forever blackened.
After his professional football career was destroyed, Jack had sworn he was done rescuing his father, who’d gambled away every penny he’d ever earned and more, for as long as Jack could remember. Every time they lost their home, his father had wept and promised he would quit gambling. But he never had. Jack had hated his old man for so long he didn’t know what it was like to feel any other way.
But his mother had refused to walk away, and Jack was sure that if the bookmakers ever came after his father again, they wouldn’t leave any witnesses. So last October, when his mother had called him because his father was crying and ashamed and in trouble again, Jack had come.
When he’d arrived at the tiny house where his parents lived, he’d found his father locked in the bathroom. When he finally got him to open the door, his old man had stared at him from haunted brown eyes and said, “They’re threatening to slice me in half from eyebrows to balls, Jack, if you don’t back off of your investigation.”
For the second time in his life, Jack had seen himself losing everything—losing himself—if he gave in to extortion.
So he’d packed up his parents and safely parked them at Twin Magnolias, the ranch west of Austin he’d invested in with Kate’s uncle, FBI Special Agent Breed Grayhawk, giving him the freedom to finish what he’d started.
And then, out of the blue, Governor Pendleton had arranged for him to be taken off the case he was working and assigned as a bodyguard for her grandkids. Making it look, once again, like he’d kowtowed to the mob.
Jack had been furious and frustrated. But there was nothing he could do.
A surprising amount of good had come out of that transfer. Most importantly, he and Kate had been thrown back together.
Kate’s fascination with him—and his with her—had begun ten years ago when she was a nineteen-year-old University of Texas student, and he was a thirty-two-year-old former pro football player trying to put his life back together. He’d been friends with her uncle North, who’d asked him to keep a watchful eye on Kate during the high-profile “Bomber Brown” trial her father was adjudicating.
Jack had known Kate liked him, maybe even thought she loved him. But he wasn’t about to inflict himself and all his dirty linen on someone as lovely and innocent as she was then.
Ten years had changed a lot of things. Their attraction had flickered back to life at a time when she was supposedly a widow and his marriage seemed to be at an end.
At about the same time, Jack had been approached by a representative of Dante D’Amato. The mobster apparently believed, because of Jack’s behavior on two previous occasions when extortion appeared to have worked, that he could be bribed or bought.
“Mr. D’Amato hopes you will be useful in helping him to solve a little problem,” D’Amato’s attorney said. “He is willing to pay you well for your trouble. And of course,” the lawyer continued, “your father’s debts would be forgiven, and there would be no reason for any further action against him. The utmost discretion will be required. Are you interested?”
Jack was incensed and insulted. But he’d quickly realized the value of going to work for the very man he’d been investigating. He’d told the lawyer, “I’m interested.”
Then he’d gone to his Ranger captain. They’d agreed to keep what Jack was doing strictly between the two of them, since D’Amato was known to have long tentacles that reached into every area of law enforcement and the courts.
“It’s going to be dangerous enough working for D’Amato,” his captain had said, “without him finding out that your main goal is still to put him behind bars.”
“He’s likely to suspect that anyway,” Jack said.
“Just make sure he doesn’t catch you sniffing around where you don’t belong,” his captain warned.
“Shouldn’t we tell the FBI what’s going on?”
“I’m sure the FBI has someone of their own on the inside that we don’t know about. Better to do it this way,” his captain said. “That way there are no ‘accidental’ leaks. The FBI will be happy to make use of whatever evidence you collect.”
Jack had insisted on meeting D’Amato in person, and the lawyer arranged it. Jack showed up at the lawyer’s office in a mirrored high-rise in downtown Houston and found D’Amato waiting for him in a wood-paneled conference room lined with legal tomes.
He’d been surprised at how unthreatening Dante D’Amato looked. He stood nearly as tall as Wyatt Shaw but his body was reedlike. His receding hair was silver, his heavy brows black. His eyes were a piercing blue, set deep in a narrow, wrinkled face. He had arthritis in his fingers, with knobs at every joint. Jack doubted he could curl his index finger around a trigger.
But mob bosses didn’t usually have to do their own killing. D’Amato had surrounded himself with a half-dozen brutes of various shapes and sizes who were clustered near the coffee urn and pastries at the other end of the room. Jack was glad when the mob boss sent all but one of them from the room.
D’Amato gestured Jack into a swivel chair, then took a seat himself at the head of the table, while the remaining man, thick-chested and stocky-legged, with a significant bulge under his jacket, stood sentinel near the door.
“I always wondered if you threw that game, or just played badly,” he said. “Which was it?”
If the man’s point had been to disconcert Jack, he’d succeeded. “It hardly matters now.”
“I would like to know.”
Jack debated whether to tell D’Amato the truth. Finally he said, “I didn’t plan to lose. I just…”
“Made a few too many mistakes?”
Jack shrugged uncomfortably.
“The subconscious mind is more powerful than we imagine. You did what was necessary to save your father. That sort of devotion is hard to find these days.�
��
Jack bit his cheek to keep himself from saying he hated his old man. “What is it you want me to do?”
“I’m looking for someone who took something from me. He faked his death and disappeared. I need you to find him. And I need you to find what he stole from me.”
“That sounds like something any competent private investigator could do. Why do you need me?”
“Because you have special access to this man’s home. And to his wife and children. I’m speaking of J.D. Pendleton.”
Jack hissed in a breath. He’d known that J.D. was alive, because Kate had told him her husband had shown up in her kitchen last fall. But he was appalled to discover J.D.’s connection to D’Amato.
D’Amato pressed the balls of his fingers together and said, “That son of a bitch stole a package from me worth twenty million dollars. The California party involved in this transaction is holding me accountable for both the money and the package.”
Jack had a pretty good idea who the “California party” was. The FBI had evidence that D’Amato was involved in drug trafficking with the Mexican Mafia, which had started as a California prison gang and morphed into a ruthless and violent nationwide drug trafficking, auto theft and gambling operation. But no witness had ever hung around, or lived long enough, to testify against D’Amato.
“So, this other party wants forty million from you?”
“They’ll settle for twenty million and the bastard who stole the package. I want you to find J.D. Pendleton. And I want you to find the package.”
“Are we talking drugs?”
D’Amato laughed softly. “Sergeant McKinley, I’d hardly be likely to admit to a Texas Ranger that I’m looking for twenty million dollars’ worth of heroin. Even if that Ranger had accepted a great deal of cash to work for me.”
Jack realized he needed to find J.D. before D’Amato did. Once in protective custody, and with desertion and drug trafficking charges looming, Kate’s husband just might be the witness the FBI needed to take the mob boss down.
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