Hidden Hearts

by Susan Kearney

  Yet, for some reason he wanted to share his past with Alexandra. “I dreamed of peace in Africa. I dreamed of a democratic continent where children didn’t go to bed hungry at night. A continent where AIDS didn’t decimate entire villages. A land where all people could be free of tyranny. The first step in achieving that dream had been to counter the terrorism that prevented other nations from sending help.”

  To her credit, she didn’t laugh. “You thought you could make a difference?”

  “All it would have taken was enough money. After the Cold War ended, we could have done so much.”

  “You didn’t get the money?” she guessed.

  “Less than one percent of the American budget goes to foreign countries,” he couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.

  To his surprise, she defended the congressional actions he found so inconsistent. “It’s human nature to want to help those at home first.”

  “Then what the hell were we doing over there? Why send Americans overseas to work and not give them the funding to do their jobs?”

  “Isn’t a little help better than no help at all?”

  Their conversation ended, for now, when she pointed to a sign up ahead. “That’s the cement company. What’s the plan?”

  “We find the truck, take the briefcase and leave.” She nodded her understanding. “Suppose it’s locked?”

  “I’ll pick the lock.”

  “Suppose the security guard stops us?”

  He pulled into the dusty yard and parked under a Visitor sign. This late in the afternoon many of the office workers had already left. Construction people started work early. Most of the cement trucks were parked in neat rows. “Just tell anyone who asks that you think you might have dropped an earring in the truck when you spoke to the driver earlier today.”

  “And if we run into the driver?” Alexandra asked.

  “Let me worry about him.” Roarke hoped they did. It might be unprofessional, but he’d enjoy confronting the cement truck driver who’d probably taken a bribe and almost gotten them killed.

  As soon as he and Alexandra openly headed for the cement trucks, the security guard noticed. After telling him who she was, Alexandra gave him the prepared story, and the helpful guard escorted them to the truck in question.

  Now they had a problem. Roarke hadn’t expected the guard to remain with them. They’d told the man Alexandra was in search of an earring, but if she found the briefcase instead of a piece of jewelry, he’d be suspicious.

  The guard, Alexandra and Roarke had reached the parked truck, which was halfway down a row, when the driver from this morning walked right up to them. All Roarke’s protective instincts fired at once. He stepped between Alexandra and the driver who’d betrayed them.

  The driver peered around Roarke at Alexandra, concern in his eyes. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  “No thanks to you,” Roarke muttered, already suspecting that the man had a ready excuse for his traitorous behavior.

  “It’s okay, Joe,” the driver waved away the security guard. “I’ll help our guests.”

  “Like you helped us this morning?” Roarke itched to plant his fist in the driver’s face. He didn’t care that the man was ten years older than him and out of shape. He only remembered how close he’d come to losing Alexandra due to this man’s collaboration with the enemy.

  The driver couldn’t meet Roarke’s eyes. “I’m so sorry about that. Those men threatened my wife and kids.” He twisted a battered hat in his hands. “They said if I didn’t do what they wanted…” The driver placed his hat on his head and hurried toward the cab of his truck. “I didn’t tell them about your briefcase.”

  “Is that so?” Roarke muttered. Not only didn’t he believe the driver’s claim, he looked around the cement yard with suspicion. If the driver was now lying and had told their pursuers about the briefcase, a trap could snap shut on them any moment.

  But Roarke didn’t see anything suspicious. Drivers pulled their trucks into the yard, washed them with a hose and then parked the trucks. Soon after, the drivers walked to the parking lot for their own vehicles and left by the front gate—all perfectly normal activities.

  “I was hoping you’d be back.” The driver pulled the case from under the seat and offered it to Alexandra. “Everything’s still there. I didn’t open it.”

  Alexandra took the briefcase with a warm smile for the driver. “Thanks.”

  “You won’t report me to my boss, will you, ma’am? I can’t afford to lose this job.”

  “You’re lucky she doesn’t report you to the police,” Roarke threatened, not because he intended to carry through, but because he wanted to put a good scare into the driver, unbalance him and extract information. “Did those men who hijacked us show you any identification?” Roarke asked.

  “No, sir. But they didn’t just threaten.”

  “Sure,” Roarke scoffed.

  The driver dropped his voice. “They had my wife. They let her talk to me on the phone.”

  Alexandra frowned at Roarke, clearly questioning the particulars of the driver’s story, too. “But you picked the truck, didn’t you, Roarke? How could anyone know which truck we would take?”

  Roarke realized his mistake. He hadn’t picked the driver himself. He hadn’t guessed they were being watched so closely or anticipated that his foes would guess his next move. “I asked a foreman to send over a driver.”

  “They switched trucks. This isn’t my normal vehicle,” the driver explained, again twisting the cap in his hands. “They told me I would drive any vehicle that Ms. Golden requested. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen. They told me if I warned you or did anything suspicious they would hurt my Mary.”

  “I understand.” Alexandra was more forgiving than Roarke. But at least he no longer had the urge to hurt the man. The driver might be telling the truth.

  As Alexandra and Roarke walked back to the car, Roarke pulled the papers out of the briefcase and dumped the case in a trash bucket.

  “Hey, that’s leather!” Alexandra protested, her mahogany eyes burnished in the setting sun.

  “They might have a bug planted inside.”

  “But the driver said—”

  “We already know we can’t trust him.”

  “Roarke, they were threatening his wife.”

  “So he says. It’s more likely they slipped him a hundred bucks.”

  “But he didn’t give them the briefcase,” Alexandra argued, with irritating logic.

  All along he and Alexandra had believed their pursuers were after the briefcase. But their pursuers could have found the briefcase and discovered that it hadn’t contained what they wanted. They could be following Alexandra and Roarke right now, hoping they’d lead them to whatever they were ultimately after. Or the driver could have been telling the truth. Either way, he didn’t want to take chances with Alexandra’s life. “It never pays to be too careful.”

  “Especially when it’s not your briefcase in the trash.” She shook her head at him, a tiny smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

  He placed his arm over her shoulder and walked her to the car. “We need to ditch this car and find a place to hole up for the night.”

  “Let’s go someplace nice,” she suggested. “My treat.”

  AFTER THEIR ROUGH DAY, Alexandra felt as if she’d been on an emotional roller coaster. She wanted to relax over a good meal, soak in a bubble bath and consider her options. Roarke drove by a parking lot where he kept a spare vehicle.

  “How many cars have you got stashed all over town?” she asked him.

  “Several. I keep spare cash in the trunks with a gun and a few necessary tools.”

  Once again she realized how lucky she was to have Roarke helping her. He knew how the CIA operated and could outsmart them at their own game.

  They switched cars and headed toward the beach, then south along A1A. The two-lane highway wound past beachfront homes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The
area had recently become more built up, but it hadn’t lost the laid-back attitude that characterized beach communities. Teens with surfboard racks on their cars parked along the road and walked over to the beach. Families barbecued on their porches, taking advantage of the shade from their houses as the sun set over their yards.

  “Where are we heading?” Alexandra asked.

  “Eventually, St. Augustine.”

  She glanced at him, watching his face carefully for telltale reactions. “You want me out of town?”

  “St. Augustine has some excellent restaurants.”

  He was back to evading her questions again.

  “What do you mean by eventually?”

  “I wanted to leave you somewhere safe, then go back to the phone booth where we overhead those men talking.”

  “Ninth and Main? But why go back?”

  “Maybe our friends left fingerprints, although finding them after so many hours may be difficult. But the phone company might trace the calls made from that location.”

  So he planned to stash her somewhere and then go play private investigator. She’d wanted to argue but needed his full attention, which she couldn’t have while he kept driving. When she spied a few empty lots, cars parked along the road and a path leading to the beach, she stretched. “How about a walk?”

  He shot her a puzzled look, but one that said he’d humor her to keep her happy, even if he thought she was making a peculiar request. “A walk?”

  “Along the beach. To stretch our legs,” she added a smile to her invitation. He wasn’t the only one who knew how to use a smile to his best advantage.

  Roarke parked, and they strode past saw palmettos, sandspurs and crabgrass toward a softly sloping beach. Waves gently lapped the beach, leaving wet crescents in the sand. A catamaran surfed through the waves, the two teenagers aboard seemingly oblivious to anything but one another.

  While she kicked off her shoes and happily dug her toes in the sand, Roarke didn’t let down his guard for a moment. She’d glimpsed him checking his gun as he walked her across the street. He scrutinized every person on the beach—man, woman or child—with a thoroughness that led her to believe he could describe them later, if he had to, with deadly accuracy.

  She didn’t bother using small talk to lead into the topic she wanted to discuss. “Ever since I thought my father had been killed, I’ve been thinking about those documents.”

  He picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the waves. “And?”

  “I don’t want them.”

  “You don’t know what you have.”

  “Exactly. So I won’t miss them if they’re gone.” Without judging her, willing to hear her out, he turned and stared into her eyes, for once not trying to influence her with his perfect features. “What do you mean if they’re gone?”

  “Why can’t we just give the documents to the people who want them?” His eyes darkened, a muscle in his jaw clenched, but she didn’t give him time to voice an objection. “Look, you said I shouldn’t risk my life for a building, a project I’ve worked toward all my life. I’ve put my heart and soul into that steel and concrete and metal—yet, you’re right. It’s not worth my life. But neither are those papers. I vote we give them back.”

  When she paused for breath, he arched a brow. “Are you done yet?”

  “I’m making sense. I don’t want the papers. Let those guys have them.” She gestured wildly with her hands. “I don’t want to live my life looking over my shoulder. I don’t want to risk the lives of people I know. And for what? Some diary that was written before I was born.”

  “Your mother’s diary.”

  “I don’t mean to seem calloused, but I never knew her.”

  “She gave you life.”

  “My real mother, the mother I love, is vacationing on Lake George right now. And my father is happily fishing. The man who killed my biological father is back in that warehouse—dead. You can’t give me one good reason to keep running.”

  “What about the man who gave the order to kill your father? I might have taken out the hit man, but should his boss go free?”

  Alexandra groaned and dropped to the sand. She sat facing the ocean, letting the setting sun warm her back, her face lifted into the salt breeze. She should have felt peaceful. Instead her stomach roiled with unanswered questions. “You don’t know that the man on the other end of the phone gave the order.”

  Roarke squatted beside her, still alert, still scanning the beach for any possibility of danger. “I’ll have a better idea who we’re up against after I get the phone company’s records and dust the phone for prints.”

  She groaned again. Talk about a one-track mind. The man didn’t have the word quit in his vocabulary. “You think it’s safe to backtrack?”

  “That’s why…”

  “You wanted to leave me.” She dusted some loose sand off her hands. “Well, that’s not going to happen. My brother hired you to protect me, and you can’t do that unless you’re close. Real close,” she repeated his own words back to him and watched his eyes change from surprise to annoyance to a hot blue flame of desire.

  Desire? Surely she had to be mistaken. She must look a wreck. Cement dust clung to her clothes. She’d torn her blouse, hadn’t reapplied her makeup in…she glanced his way again to check him out.

  He looked sexy as hell in his slacks and shirt. In the fading light, his features looked darker, his bluest of blue eyes even brighter. She decided he’d look good wearing rags. And even better in nothing at all.

  “I’ll stay as close as you want me to be,” he agreed with a predatory gleam in his eyes that would have rocked her back on her heels if she’d been standing. Since she was sitting, she simply swayed against him and knocked him from his comfortable squat onto his butt.

  “You aren’t taking me seriously,” she complained.

  His smooth voice turned husky. “How seriously do you want me to take you?”

  “Would you stop? Just stop.”

  “What?”

  “Making everything I say into some kind of sexual innuendo.”

  “I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable,” he sounded sincere and yet she sensed him holding back a chuckle.

  “I’m not uncomfortable. Annoyed would be a better adjective for how I feel about you.”

  “Then you won’t mind if—” with a proprietary gesture, he placed his arm over her shoulder “—I do this.”

  She damn well did mind. Her pulse rate increased by at least ten beats per minute. And her temperature had to be up with all the heat he sent through her.

  How like a man to stop a serious conversation by sidestepping the issue and flirting. How like him to distract her with his over-the-top sensuality.

  His hand made tiny, torturous circles along her arm, shooting another flare of heat to the back of her neck. He started edging it slowly toward her breast, and her breasts swelled longingly. She could no longer tell herself she didn’t trust this man. She could no longer hold his good looks against him. She could no longer hold back her own needs and wants and desires.

  She cocked her head up at him, letting him see the invitation in her eyes. “I think we should find a hotel.”

  Chapter Ten

  “First, we need to find that phone booth,” Roarke replied, finding the enticement in her voice irresistible. Almost.

  He had to get a grip on his emotions. Now, when they might find some clues if he kept his mind on work, was not the time to let her distract him. So why couldn’t he cease thinking about how good it would feel to pull Alexandra into his arms and kiss her senseless, or how incredible she made him feel when she looked at him so trustingly, or how much he felt like a spark on one of those Fourth of July bottle rockets?

  Keeping his brain focused on business had never been so difficult. When they’d left the cement yard, he should have driven straight to the phone booth. His protective instincts kept battling with his need to solve this case. However, he had to focus on his primary job�
�protecting Alexandra had to be his first priority. She wouldn’t be safe until he learned who was after those papers and why, and letting her tag along while he investigated was too dangerous. So he’d wanted to hide Alexandra and return to search for clues.

  Clearly, she didn’t want to be left behind. And, in truth, she might be safer with him. Then again, that he wanted to keep her with him might be influencing his judgment. And a man in the field couldn’t start second-guessing himself.

  Roarke needed a clear mind right now. But how could he think clearly when all he wanted was to take off Alexandra’s clothes, piece by piece, and explore every inch of her? Slowly. Ever so slowly, he wanted to make her melt.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked as she brushed the sand from her palms and stood.

  “Why?” he asked, having no intention of telling her that his mind had strayed so far from business.

  She arched one delicate brow, her eyes filled with curiosity. “You had this really awesome gleam in your eyes. As if relishing the challenge ahead.”

  Her ambiguous words could refer to the challenge of winning her trust enough so she’d allow him to make love to her until dawn. Or she could have referred to the task ahead. He had no trouble choosing which topic he preferred to talk about. “I need to find another pay phone.”

  “Some day, you’re going to answer my questions,” she muttered in frustration, and her words brought a small grin to his lips.

  A grin he didn’t dare let her see. She was already much too good at guessing the direction of his thoughts. She didn’t need any extra hints from him.

  Roarke headed back toward the city and stopped the car at the next pay phone to call a friend in the FBI. “Hey, Carleton. How’d you like an opportunity to do some field work?”

  Carleton groaned. “My wife just fixed my favorite dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy and fresh asparagus.”

  “So I’ll owe you one.”

  “You already owe me ten. For that sheik in Baghdad. The politician in Panama. Hey, do you think I’ve forgotten about that Irish—”