by Laura Gordon
“You act as though we might be here another night.” The thought occurred along with a lot of other implications that Tess didn’t want to think about.
He shrugged. “I can’t say for sure. If we have good luck and find our man right away, we could be out of here before you know it. If not...” The things he left unsaid landed squarely in the middle of Tess’s mind.
“If we don’t have some lead tomorrow, I think we should consider going to the police,” Tess said, rising and gathering their sandwich wrappers and bottles to give herself something to do other than look at him.
“You really can’t stand to be alone with me, can you, Tessa?”
His question surprised her. “Well—”
“You’d risk your cousin’s life just to get away from me that much sooner?”
Her temper flared. “Go to hell, McKenna.”
One perfect brow arched. “Been there.”
“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten, Reed McKenna, tough guy, the one with the crummy childhood and the rotten father.” She should have regretted her outburst when she saw his stare turn steely, but somehow she wasn’t able to stop herself from wanting to hurt him. All the emotion of the last two days, all the tension and the fear and the uncertainty seemed to erupt at once. “Well, I’ve got a news flash for you, McKenna,” she continued, “you weren’t the only one hurting back then. We all had our privates hells, you know?”
He was standing in front of her almost before she realized. “I’m sorry about your family, Tessa,” he said in a low voice still tinged with the anger she knew she’d sparked in him. “I’d just arrived at boot camp in Kentucky when I got the letter from a friend telling me what had happened. I didn’t know for six weeks and by then...”
“What?” she snapped. “It was too late for condolences, for a phone call?”
He glared at her, the telltale muscle working overtime in his clenched jaw before he turned away from her, grabbed his duffel bag and headed for the bathroom. “I’ll wash up first. You take the bed. I’ll take the couch.” His voice was strained with the control she could tell he was barely maintaining.
“Go ahead, Reed!” she snapped at his back. “Just walk away. After all, what else could I expect? Running away when things get hot is your style, isn’t it? When things get too tough or too complicated.”
He turned around and walked back into the room, covering the distance between them with lightning speed. His face was contorted with anger and his eyes were two black, burning coals.
“When you wouldn’t answer my letters what was I supposed to do?”
“I opened the first one, the one you left taped to my door the day you left town, the one that said you had changed your mind about marrying me. I figured there wasn’t much left to say after that.” Tess hardly recognized the bitter voice as her own.
“As soon as I was allowed the privilege, I tried to call. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was about your family, but your phone had been disconnected and I found out you’d moved to Denver—”
Why he stopped so suddenly and why the look on his face changed from one of anger to complete frustration, she couldn’t begin to understand.
“Oh, hell,” he said, running his hands through his hair before turning his back to her again. “What does it matter now, anyway?”
“It matters,” she said, her own voice so choked with emotion she could hardly speak. “It matters that you tried.”
Slowly he turned back to her, the look on his face was a mirror of her own deep, inner pain.
“You never even told me about Sean.” Her voice was no more than a ragged whisper, but he winced as though she’d shouted. “By the time I heard what had happened to him, you’d already left town. Your father said he didn’t know where you’d gone.” And that he didn’t give a damn if you ever came back, Tess added to herself. “I’m sorry, Reed. I know you and Sean were very close.”
An almost imperceptible nod told her he accepted her condolences the only way he could.
“I ran into an old high school friend last year and she told me your father died that winter in the veterans’ hospital in D.C. I didn’t know. When I lost Mom and Dad—” she swallowed hard “—and Meredith, I sort of lost track of everyone back home.”
They only thing that moved between them was the shadow of the flickering candles. The silence was filled with the soft sighs of the surf, the rustle of the breeze as it slipped past the curtains and the unspoken recriminations of the past.
“Peggy Bishop.” Reed finally muttered.
“What?”
“The high school friend, was it Peggy Bishop?” The slightest hint of a smile tugged at his full mouth.
“Why, yes...yes, it was Peggy. But how did you know?”
He shrugged and she could almost see the tension draining out of him as he stepped closer. “Because she always was the biggest gossip in town. Remember when she told her mother about the two of us skinny-dipping at Crystal Lake?” The smile bloomed at last and Tess answered it with one of her own.
“Oh, my gosh, I’d completely forgotten about that.” She couldn’t suppress a sigh as she was transported back to that clear, cold lake. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so cold in my life as I felt in that water.”
His hands were on her shoulders and he seemed to be looking for something in her eyes. “As I remember it,” he said, his voice raw and sexy, “we found a very effective way to thaw you out.”
Her hands were on his waist when his mouth started its descent toward hers. Tess felt herself involuntarily stiffening.
“You don’t trust me,” he whispered, “and there’s no reason you should. But you want me, Tessa. As badly as I want you.”
Her eyes couldn’t get enough of him, couldn’t keep from devouring that chiseled bad-boy face, with its slashing dimples, dark brows and midnight eyes—intelligent, cunning, streetwise, eyes that reflected a troubled soul that had seen too much pain and too little joy. Eyes that were burning with desire and need and with just one look melted her resistance like sugar in the rain.
“I want you,” he told her again as his arms slid around her and pulled her against his long, hard body. “Tessa.” He murmured her name into her hair, his smoky voice sending ribbons of desire slipping through her.
When their mouths finally met, their kiss was the kiss of lovers too long denied. Their lips were warm, moist, open, seeking and finding, and seeking again. When his hands slid over her bottom and skimmed up under her blouse, his touch sent shivers of delight racing through her as his hands closed around her rib cage and his thumbs brushed the undersides of her breasts.
“Reed,” she breathed against his lips and slid her arms around his neck and let her fingers tangle into his thick, dark hair. A groan, primal and foreign, came from deep within her throat and warned her that she was moments from losing control.
He seemed to sense the subtle change and he dragged his mouth from hers as if it pained him. Burying his face in her neck, he whispered, “I want you, Tess,” before he took her hand and led her into the bedroom.
In the doorway, he kissed her once more. A quick, hot, breathless kiss that left them both panting. A promise. A warning. A last chance to turn and run. But Tess wasn’t running. And she only hesitated a moment before moving into his arms again, telling herself that this moment might be all they ever had. If it was, her heart told her that this one moment would be worth a lifetime of regret in the morning.
Chapter Twelve
Tess awoke alone. Forcing her sleep-clouded mind clear, she sat up in the bed and saw the bag she’d packed last night sitting on a wooden chair in the corner. Reed’s duffel bag was gone. And so was Reed.
Reaching for her oversize white shirt on the tiled floor where it had been hastily discarded last night, she felt a growing uneasiness gnawing at her.
The bedroom door was open and as she slid her arms into the shirt and swung her legs over the side of the bed, she called out, “McKenna, are you out there?” She despised t
he tentative, hopeful note she heard echoing around her.
Walking barefoot through the living room, she pulled the front door open and gazed out onto the screened porch. It was as empty as she was beginning to feel. Hurrying back inside, she took a pair of shorts and a T-shirt into the bathroom with her and quickly showered in cold water that told her Reed was not out back fixing the generator.
Ten minutes later she was dressed, with her hair still wet when she gathered it into a careless ponytail at her nape. The watch she’d left on the table beside the bed read a few minutes to ten.
Outside it was already hot, the sky pale blue and cloudless above a calm sea that sparkled as though it had been sprinkled with a million diamonds for as far as the eye could see. She called his name again, much louder this time, as her eyes swept the beach on both sides of the bungalow.
Behind the cabin a long sloping hill rose some two to three hundred feet. Tess shaded her eyes with the back of her hand and looked up, but could see no one moving on the hillside.
Feeling restless and unreasonably agitated, she decided to walk to where they’d left the Jeep parked last night. Remembering how anxious Reed had been to begin the search for the silver-eyed messenger, Tess told herself that he’d started that search without her. Perhaps he had gone into town to get started with the questions he seemed so sure would produce results.
The jog down the beach should have invigorated and restored her, but when she saw the Jeep parked under the palms, precisely where Reed had parked it last night, she felt weighted once again with worry. Judging by the tracks in the sand, the Jeep hadn’t been moved.
Apprehension rose in earnest inside her. Where was he? Last night had proved to her that he was certainly in good enough physical condition to have walked back to Bodden Town, but why? Why walk when he had the Jeep? And if he’d taken his duffel bag, didn’t that mean he wasn’t planning to return?
The answer came back to her by degrees, despite her best efforts to ignore it. He’d left the Jeep because he didn’t want to leave her stranded, because even a coward had some principles. And even though he couldn’t face her this morning, he wouldn’t leave her with no means of getting back to civilization.
Walking back to the bungalow, Tess felt alternately disappointed and enraged. Her pride had been battered, and suddenly her senses became fine-tuned as she realized what a deserted stretch of beach this really was. Every sound spooked her, the sudden squeak of a bird, the tide hissing around a rock, even the breeze rustling through the stately palms.
By the time she stepped back across the screened porch and into the house, her nerves were stretched as taut as violin strings. If Reed McKenna didn’t show up in the next hour, she vowed to drive back to Georgetown and lay the whole matter at the feet of the Cayman police, whether he approved or not.
She killed five minutes by making the bed, and another five by clearing the remnants of last night’s picnic dinner from the living room. Then, left alone with the time moving in slow motion, her mind began to whirl again with possible explanations for Reed’s absence.
She walked out onto the porch and stared at the sea as her thoughts drifted back to their lovemaking last night. Closing her eyes, she could almost imagine the warmth of his breath on her cheek, the touch of his hands on her skin.
Their lovemaking had gone from the heated urgency of lost teenage lovers, to the slow, patient reacquainting of the adults they had become. Their kisses had been soft, deep, thorough...then touching, tender. Though Reed’s body had been taut and hard, his caresses had been as sensual as fine silk.
He had held her and kissed her like a man deeply in love, and by the light of the flickering candles, she’d seen in his eyes the depth of his need. Physical. Spiritual. His soul was now as battered as his young body had once been.
When the first pink light of morning had begun to seep around the curtains at the bedroom window, they’d held each other and fallen into a deep satisfied sleep, entwined in each others’ arms, their sated bodies still moist with spent passion.
But all the remembered tenderness and ecstasy of last night could not dispel the hard reality of the morning that Tess stood facing alone. And although she fought to resist it, a single thought repeated itself over and over in her mind: he left you again. He could not face her, could not face the adult demands he imagined she might make on him after last night’s intimacies.
Tess berated first herself and then him as she tossed her clothes into her bag and proceeded to search for the keys to the Jeep.
Eventually she found them under the bed, where she figured they must have fallen from Reed’s pocket when she’d undressed him last night. Her humiliation and rage rose like a geyser at the thought that he’d been in such a rush to leave her this morning that he hadn’t taken the time to look for the keys.
By the time she heard the motorcycle pull up in front of the bungalow, she was already across the porch, propelled by a head of angry steam that would not be quelled. Her whole body was shaking with the unspoken accusations that she longed to hurl at him. And when she saw him riding toward her, shirtless, his tanned chest glistening in the morning sun, his dark hair shining and tousled by the breeze, his easy smile carving dimples in his cheeks, she felt her heart breaking.
* * *
THE FIRST THING he saw when he shut off the engine was her bag and the keys to the Jeep clutched in her hand. The next thing he noticed, besides her slightly swollen lower lip and the tantalizing way she looked standing in snug-fitting blue-jean shorts and bare feet, was the look on her face. The expression she wore was one of blatant anger, a look of sheer rage that he couldn’t begin to understand.
“Where are you going, Tessa?”
“What the hell do you care?” Her eyes had turned a deeper blue and her face was flushed with crimson.
“Hey, what’s going on? What’s happened?” he asked, placing a hand on each shoulder, only to feel her go rigid beneath his touch.
“That might be a more appropriate question for me to be asking, don’t you think, Reed? I’ve been shot at and chased. I’ve been the target of an explosion that killed at least one innocent man. I’m standing here in the middle of nowhere with my only living relative missing, at the mercy of cold-blooded gangsters, and you have the gall to ask me what’s going on?” She stopped only long enough to drag in a lungful of air. “And as if all of that isn’t bad enough, I wake up this morning to find you gone, God knows where, without a word. The man who just last night asked me to trust him, despite the fact that he not only left me at the altar, but betrayed me in the most heartless way—” The tears welled, but she refused to let them fall.
“Betrayed you? Tessa, I—”
She swiped savagely at her eyes and shoved past him. “Get out of my way, McKenna. I’m going back to Georgetown and straight to the police, which is where I should have gone when I first discovered Selena was missing.”
He grabbed her arm, but she shrugged away from him. “Get out of my way, McKenna,” she repeated. “And don’t try to stop me from doing what I know now I have to do.”
“I won’t try to stop you from doing anything, but I think I deserve some kind of an explanation for why you shared my bed last night, and this morning I’ve suddenly become your enemy again.”
Her eyes were dry, the tears gone, replaced by an expression of bitterness that caused his heart to constrict painfully in his chest. “You want an explanation?” she gasped, her indignation a formidable presence between them. “You know, Reed, coming from you that’s almost funny, from the man famous for his walking act, for disappearing just when he’s most needed.”
He felt his own anger rising at the need to explain himself, but he fought to control his temper. “This morning when the leasing agent came by, I didn’t want to wake you. I rode back into town with him to pick up gasoline for the generator. I rented this bike, figuring we could cover more ground if we split up today to question the locals.”
Her eyes flicked to the me
tal gas can strapped to the back of the bike. “I didn’t leave you, Tessa.”
“No,” she admitted, “you didn’t leave me...not this time. But the point is, you could have. And the problem is, I’d care if you did!” She turned to stare out over the water, crossing her arms protectively over her heart. “I can’t let myself believe in you, McKenna. This morning, waking up alone...” Her voice caught and she swallowed hard before continuing. “Well, it just all came back, that’s all,” she said quietly. “I know I have no right to expect anything from you, to hope for anything. You haven’t made any promises and neither have I.”
He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Tessa.” He could almost feel the past coming between them again.
They’d started planning the wedding that January. The date had been set for mid-June. The invitations had been ordered and she’d even picked out a dress. But then Sean had been killed.
“When Sean died I felt responsible.” Just saying the words twisted a knot in his heart. “I let him down. He thought I’d always be there for him. I couldn’t take the chance that I’d do the same thing to you.” He’d admitted more to her in thirty seconds than he’d ever admitted to anyone, including himself, in eight years.
“Running away, enlisting...it was a cowardly thing to do, I know that now. And I admit it. I’m sorry. You deserved better. Much better than I could ever give you.” He let his hands fall away from her shoulders, but she didn’t walk away. At least she was willing to hear him out and that alone was something, he told himself as he continued trying to reach her.
“I was young, stupid, a coward—all the things you thought about me and more were true. But damn it, Tess, young people break engagements every day. To hate me for so long, to carry around all this bitterness... Tess, how could you hate me for so long?”
When her eyes met his again, they were accusing.
“I don’t know how you can stand there and pretend not to know.”
He had no answer for something he didn’t understand.