Watching Mara stride toward the dig site, TJ wondered how she walked barefoot through the shells and pebbles, but they were her feet, he told himself. Only after she walked on a half-buried pinecone and yelped did he circle her waist again and haul her up to the platform on top of the mound.
With a purr of appreciation, she wrapped her arms around his neck.
TJ distracted his screaming libido with the awareness that she was entirely too light for a woman of her height. When he set her down, he looked her over more carefully. He was trained in observing skeletons, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see flesh. He thought if he unfastened that tempting little hook holding the bathing suit in place over her breasts, that she might not be the C-cup size she seemed to be. That realization did nothing to quench his simmering lust.
She crossed her arms, pushing her breasts higher. “Want to see more?”
“Yeah. Do you ever eat?”
She blinked in surprise, and TJ thought her lashes looked a little shorter than they had the last time she’d tried vamping him. How did she do that?
“You said the donuts were stale.” She swung away and gazed through the chain-link fence to the hole he’d dug. “What’s in those boxes?”
“Things that aren’t a natural part of the environment. A lot of it is just garbage people have strewn on the beach over the years, but some of it might be useful should I ever capture a clear picture of what I’m looking for.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Evidence of who the bones belong to and what happened to them. Come on, let’s go back to the house and fix you something to eat.” The availability of all that golden bare skin taunted him, and TJ was terrified of what he would do if he touched her again.
To his relief, she only poked around a little more, apparently reluctant to discover any more buried pine-cones with her bare toes. Her hair had come loose from her hat and spilled in blond ringlets over her tanned shoulders, but she seemed oblivious to the dishevelment while she danced back down the path they’d come. TJ wondered how those few hanks of curls could equal the enormous stack she’d been wearing every other time he’d seen her.
He could probably spend a lifetime uncovering the secrets of Mara Simon—damn his fascination with mysteries.
“If you’re not finding historical clues, what difference does it make who they were?” she called over her shoulder. “They’re long dead and gone. Why not let them stay that way?”
Because it warred with his need for justice, but TJ didn’t try to explain that. “There may be families who need to know what happened, lives built on false hopes or foundations. Aren’t you even curious?”
She shrugged and kicked at a shell. “If they’re sixty years old, who would still be alive to care? That’s what, World War II? Two drunks got in a fight and shot each other before they were supposed to ship out?”
She was quick, he’d give her that. Just like old times, her brain not only kept up with him but raced ahead to consider scenarios his limited imagination couldn’t reach.
“I only have the evidence of one bullet wound, and it could have been prior to death. I need more artifacts before I can even begin forming a scenario. All I know is that what I’ve found so far belongs to two Caucasian males. The storm did so much damage, that I can’t even determine if the hairs I found on scraps of cloth belonged to them. I’ll probably have to dig out the whole mound before I’m done.”
“Do you think they were buried on the beach?” She stopped and threw a look over her shoulder, waiting for him to catch up.
He didn’t want to catch up. He liked the view from where he was.
Slapping down his voyeurism, TJ fell into step. “It’s too hard to tell. From what I’ve learned, the island was pretty much deserted sixty years ago. The causeway hadn’t been built, and only boats could get out here. A few farmers built houses and raised cotton and goats. Cleo’s living in one of those houses. I haven’t found any record of a family cemetery though.”
She took his arm as casually as if they were in evening dress and promenading through a ballroom. “You researched the site?”
Trying to think while blood boiled his brain, TJ managed a nod. “Somewhat. But my assistant quit, and I don’t have enough hands to manage the day-to-day office stuff and the research, as well as the dig.”
“Well, if you know the skeletons are roughly sixty years old, couldn’t you just skim newspaper files? Maybe they would make note of anyone of the right age and height who disappeared back then. Or if they’d died and been buried here, they’d have that, too.”
“The local rag is a weekly. Some of it is stored on microfiche at the library, but I haven’t had time to go through all of it. The machine isn’t in the best of repair. I decided to look for more specific evidence before trying to pinpoint newspaper articles.”
“I could do that,” she offered abruptly.
“Why would you want to?” Reeling with just the possibility of Mara’s formidable mind being applied to his project, TJ reacted defensively.
“Because you might move out faster if I found the answers for you.”
“I thought you had a film to produce.” TJ tried to keep his tone noncommittal. He was having a hard enough time equating little Patsy Simonetti with this blond seductress on his arm. Picturing her as a Hollywood film producer boggled the mind. Having her work with him far exceeded his fantasies.
She shot him a sly glance. “What’s the matter, TJ? Don’t think I can do it?”
He shook his head in denial. “Even as a sixteen-year old, you could do anything you put your mind to. I’m not arguing the point. I just thought film producers stayed too busy for things like research.”
She shrugged and stopped to examine a shell that caught her eye. “I own half the company. That doesn’t make me a producer. The company pays the real guys who can round up the money men. My job is to persuade the tight-fisted to part with their cash.”
TJ didn’t have to ask how she did that. Pour her into gold lamé and add sultry perfume, and every man in her vicinity would be peeling banknotes off rolls to please her. A basic instinct inside him roared objection at this exploitation of a brilliant woman who had far more to offer than looks.
“You’ll not find many moneylenders out here.” He tried not to sound angry, but from her expression, he figured he’d failed.
“I dated a set designer before I met Sid,” she answered, as if that related. “I like camouflaging flaws and creating magic out of nothing. I’ve got a really tight budget on this film, and the director would haul in seventy-five royal palms and landscape the whole jetty if I let him loose on his own. With a little film magic and some cheap plastic palms, I can do the same thing and save a lot of money.”
Even though there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, TJ’s day brightened. “Brains and creativity, too. I always knew you’d be a dangerous woman.”
She beamed at him. “So, can I do your research?”
He narrowed his eyes at her in return. “I just said I know you’re a dangerous woman. Why should I let you anywhere near my project?”
She shrugged and skipped off down the sand again. “Because you also know I’m an honest one.”
He knew she used to be an honest one. But he didn’t know this woman with the dyed hair and bobbed nose. He’d learned the hard way to suspect everyone and everything. If it looked too good to be true, it usually was.
But damn, he’d love to have her brilliance on his side.
***
Mara felt TJ stiffen beside her as they approached the beach cottage. She eyed the visitor lounging on the steps. He was tall and out of shape, with male-pattern baldness badly concealed by a crew cut. Not bad looking in a nondescript sort of fashion. She smelled reporter a mile away.
A reporter TJ obviously knew and didn’t want around. Her vivid imagination kicked into gear.
“Roger,” TJ acknowledged. “What brings you to these parts?”
Mara tugged her shi
rt over her bathing suit when the man’s gaze turned to her. She liked the media noticing her only when she wanted something from them.
“A story,” the reporter responded laconically, returning his gaze to TJ, “although I may have been steered wrong, from the looks of things.”
“Mara, this is Roger Curtis, special correspondent for the Post. We met on assignment in the Balkans a few years ago. Roger, Mara Simon.”
She waited to see if the reporter recognized her name, but apparently he didn’t. Amused, she played her dumb- blonde role, batted her lashes, and smiled. The reporter raised his eyebrows and nodded, but it was obvious she wasn’t the focus of his interest. Very odd.
“Guess I caught you at a bad time. I couldn’t find a room around here so I thought I’d just stop by.” Roger reluctantly unfurled from the steps. “Maybe I can give you a call later, after I check in over at Charleston.”
“You’re wasting your time, Rog,” TJ said enigmatically. “I’m here visiting my family and working a dig of personal interest. Nothing to write home about.”
“Then we’ll just catch up on old times over a drink. Talk to you later.” He nodded appreciatively at Mara. “Good meeting you, Miss Simon.” He strode off across the beaten path to the sandy road the hurricane had cut off.
“Should I have disappeared and left you with your friend?” Mara demanded when TJ didn’t immediately enter the house.
He shook his head and stepped onto the porch. “Nope. Eggs and bacon?”
“Yogurt and bagels.” She followed him inside. Tim’s compulsive neatness spilled over into his home, it seemed. She couldn’t find a sign of his habitation anywhere. “Are you sure you live here?”
He looked at her in puzzlement, gazed around the empty room, and shrugged. “I sleep here. I don’t require much.”
Mara suspected that was an understatement. She’d spent these last years in a culture that acquired things faster than they could be produced. TJ apparently existed on whatever anyone handed him. She watched in amazement as he fried bacon in the same battered iron skillet in which he scrambled eggs—with a fork. He prepared toast by buttering bread and holding it over an electric burner.
He didn’t give her yogurt or bagels.
It smelled so mouthwateringly good, she ate what he set in front of her.
“Do you even own your own home?” she asked in curiosity a little while later, shoveling up the last bit of egg with her toast.
Carefully smearing jam over his toast, TJ looked surprised at the question. “Nope. Wouldn’t ever be there, so what’s the point?”
“How can you live like this?” She couldn’t even conceive of it. She needed her own space, a place for her things, a place where she could relax and be her own person. She’d carried her photographs and pillows and books with her to the B&B so she could pretend it was home.
She’d rented the whole inn so she could call it hers. One of the biggest regrets of her divorce from Sid was losing the Beverly Hills house she’d personally decorated. “Don’t you ever want your own space, where you can sleep in your own bed?”
“I don’t know.” He wrinkled his forehead in thought before carrying his empty dish to the sink and turning on the hot water. “I’ve thought about it, but there never seemed much reason.”
“Are you planning on spending the rest of your life globetrotting?” she demanded incredulously, carrying her plate to the sink and shoving him aside with her hip. “You cooked, I wash.”
He didn’t argue but dug a towel from a drawer. “It’s what I do.”
Standing there domestically washing dishes together, feeling awareness rising between them, Mara thought it a damned shame to waste a man like TJ to a footloose lifestyle. But then, she supposed men like him weren’t sufficiently domesticated for her pampered existence. He might know how to wash dishes and cook his own meals, but if her instincts were correct, his mind was already on another continent. Did the man ever live in the here and now?
He didn’t even make a pass at her after they finished the dishes. Feeling disembodied and dazed from all the hormones zinging around, Mara followed him back to his car and sat in disbelief as he drove her back to town.
He even let her keep the Times.
Something was definitely not right. The TJ she knew seethed and boiled beneath a thin veneer of civilization. This TJ had gone stone-cold dead, and she thought the reporter had something to do with it.
Out of curiosity, Mara didn’t immediately climb out of the car when it rolled up in front of the inn. Just to see if the man she knew still existed, she leaned over and kissed his craggy cheek.
Wordlessly regarding her through deep-set eyes that scorched her to the bone, TJ caught her chin, captured her mouth with his, and set her blood afire with a kiss so deep and heated that she almost came right there. Not dead, then, but hot lava buried under cold stone.
He let her go, threw open the car door, and escorted her to the B&B, leaving her on the doorstep without a word.
Watching him drive off, Mara decided she most certainly did not need a volatile, inscrutable man like TJ McCloud in her life. She was a mess enough without him.
But she tingled in places she’d thought long dead, and her errant heart wept wistfully for the innocent love they’d once shared, and could never share again.
Crying on the front porch wasn’t a smart move, even if she wasn’t wearing mascara.
Brushing her cheek, she spun on her heel and stalked inside. If she didn’t apply her mind to more important matters, she’d be as homeless as TJ in a few short months.
Chapter Nine
After dropping Mara off at the B&B, TJ drove to the office, his thoughts churning. Mara’s kiss had steamed the few brain cells that had survived their morning together.
He’d spent these last years attempting to forget Patsy and rebuild the same kind of relationship with someone else, but one morning had shown him the impossibility. Only one spontaneous, brainy, intriguing female existed in this world for him, and right at the moment, she was no doubt lining up all that creativity against him.
Somehow he’d have to pry Mara out of his head and concentrate on outmaneuvering Roger.
Roger had been with him in the Balkans, was aware TJ and Martin had worked together there. TJ knew damned well the reporter was after a story, but he couldn’t give it to him—wouldn’t give it to him. They both owed Martin their lives. They’d never have escaped that sniper outburst outside Kosovo if Martin hadn’t risked his neck by careening in with his jeep, Uzi blasting.
Roger might not believe he owed the colonel for that act, but TJ did. He respected Martin enough to believe him incapable of corruption, and he was loyal enough not to act hastily or without careful thought. Journalists were sensationmongers these days. Selling newspapers was more important than accuracy. TJ refused to add fuel to the fire until he was certain the evidence was damning.
He detested even the need to continue going through the boxes stored in his office. He ought to trust the colonel’s word and shred them, as he’d been told to do.
But his own integrity was now in question. If there was evidence of the colonel’s corruption in those boxes, his sense of justice would never support a criminal, no matter how much he owed or respected him.
The warring factions of his psyche were tearing him apart.
Setting aside the box he’d already worked through, TJ methodically lined up the remaining cardboard bank boxes across the lab floor. Slitting the tape on the unopened ones, he scanned them for some order in the contents. Several contained files brimming with invoices and correspondence. A couple more contained steno notebooks of not easily translated chicken scratching.
He’d already skimmed through the typed transcripts of translations from interviews with Balkan residents. He found another with similar files. He didn’t know who had gathered all the material or why, but his cursory glance at the notebooks revealed incendiary accusations of a Mafia-like protection scam—exactly what the medi
a was screaming. Somebody was guilty of releasing accused criminals without trials, undoubtedly in exchange for large sums of money.
He didn’t want to believe it was Colonel Martin.
Flipping through files revealed nothing riveting. No piece of paper yelled in big black letters: Martin is guilty. It could take weeks to filter through this stuff, and he might still never understand the implications. He wasn’t a lawyer. He knew bones, not bits of paper.
He wasn’t suited to be Martin’s judge and jury. He ought to hand the boxes over to someone more objective. Or believe Martin and shred them. Shit.
If he quit working on his excavation to work on the boxes, Mara would lose her film.
He hated his life right now.
Figuring the transcript box would be easiest to study, he returned it to the closet where he could get at it easily, and locked the door. He resealed the others, deciding to store them somewhere safer than a flimsy closet. If Roger knew enough to question him about the colonel, it was only a matter of time before others would hunt him down—if the Defense Department didn’t send spooks to search his rooms first.
He’d start a more thorough reading of the transcripts tonight. Somewhere in there should be the proof of Martin’s innocence. Or guilt.
TJ carried the other boxes to the trunk and back seat of his Taurus. He’d find an anonymous storage unit and install a strong lock. That should be safe enough.
Returning to the office, he grimaced at the blinking answering machine light. Next, he needed to hire an assistant, or at the very least, a secretary, or he could spend his nights answering mail and phone calls.
Sorting through the junk on his desk, he located a clean sheet of paper and a pen. He punched the machine’s button and waited for the first message, pen poised.
“This is Senator...” TJ hit the message delete and waited for the next call.
“Carlton here. Give me a call at...”
“This is Congressman’s Throckwaite’s office. If you would...”
McCloud's Woman Page 8