Pink Topaz

by Jennifer Greene

  But Cole had also seen the herbal vitamins in her purse. He’d seen the way she instantly accepted Burt Langston as a good guy. He’d watched her initiate a kiss that never occurred to her could trigger a land mine.

  And at a gut level, Cole knew damn well she was still a milk drinker.

  He expelled a harsh word in the silence. Feeling aggravated and aggrieved, he crossed the room to the telephone and dialed Chicago. Hell, he knew it was going to come to this. Yesterday he’d been a happy coward, a devoted cynic, a skilled cad. In less than twenty-four hours the woman was managing to ruin his life, but he just couldn’t desert ship on a milk drinker with the survivalist skills of a poodle...not after the day she’d had. So he’d spend one night. It wasn’t going to kill him.

  The telephone rang at the other end, and rang...and rang. Eventually the line connected. He heard the phone drop, a blurred swearing, then a groggy tenor. “This better be worth your life. Who is this?”

  “Cole.” He mentally pictured his younger brother physically propping his eyelids open, and had to smile. It was clipping toward midnight in Chicago, and likely there was someone female at Sam’s side.

  “You’re not home.”

  “Nope. Still in Arizona.”

  “Trouble?”

  “A little.” Quietly and easily, Cole related what had happened to the navigation system and asked Sam to check out whoever had been around the hangar that morning. Had his life been threatened at gunpoint, his tone would still be quiet and easy for his brother.

  Sam had been riding a ten-speed around the time of the first funeral in the family, had been a highfalutin valedictorian in high school for the second. Then he’d started drinking. He wasn’t drinking now—in fact, Sam was the only reason Cole was partnering the air freight business. Flying was more important to Sam than breathing, the momentum to stay dry for five years now, but getting the business on its feet by himself would have been heavy stress. In two more years, they’d be out of hock. Until then, Cole planned on sticking around. His younger brother was the only human being on earth that he’d take a bullet for.

  “So you’re laying over?”

  “It’s been too long a day,” Cole concurred.

  “You had a run scheduled for noon tomorrow...”

  They talked business for a few more minutes, and then Cole wound it down. “Treat her right.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I said treat her right. Georgia. I assume she’s the one next to you. And if you were asleep before midnight, I assume she wore you out.”

  Sam said something rude. Cole grinned. Across the courtyard, he saw a light flick on in the kitchen. “I’m only staying the night. Just long enough to catch a little shut-eye. Should be back in Chicago by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Okay.”

  “No way I could be later than dinnertime.” Cole wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince. The moment his brother had heard a low feminine voice in the background, Sam had hung up the phone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Cole came out of the library, he made a fast trek out to his plane. He brought a bundle of clothes under his arm and a cooler full of leftover sandwiches. The slightly soggy sandwiches turned into dinner, during which Cole yawned twice and three times casually mentioned that he was worn out, dead tired and whipped to beat the band.

  Regan had already seen the bundle of clothes. “I can’t imagine why you’re going to all this trouble trying to con me, Shepherd. If you want to spend the night, all you ever had to do was say so. I thought you were in a hurry—”

  “I was. I am. But when I started to think about any more hours in the cockpit after this long day, I figured it would make better sense to lay over.” His cool gray eyes met hers over a coffee cup. “If you don’t have a problem with that.”

  It wasn’t Regan who had the problem. Unless he flew with a copilot, Cole had invariably stayed over with her grandfather. Because the flight was a push to double back in one day, that offer of hospitality was understood. Jake not being here made no difference. To Regan.

  Amused, she watched Cole zip away the dishes, garner her admission that she was going to sleep and leave the thief’s mess for the morning, and promptly take off for the opposite side of the house and one of the spare bedrooms.

  A prize houseguest, Regan thought wryly. His marathon-quick retreat behind a closed door said it all. The only one worried about the two of them being alone together was Cole. He obviously wasn’t taking any chances that she’d go hog wild again and kiss him.

  The notion was tempting. The embrace they’d shared had alternately fascinated, tantalized and disturbed her. Kissing Cole had a lot in common with a raft trip down the Snake, skydiving in the Rockies, hang-gliding over Manhattan. She’d never kissed a man before who made her feel...dangerous. Reckless. Maybe what she’d seen in his eyes had been illusion but without a second sample, she’d never know for sure.

  The notion teased her imagination for several minutes, then disappeared like a leaf in high wind. As Regan could easily have reassured Cole, he couldn’t be more safe in a convent. Once the lights were out, the last thing on her mind was passion.

  She had a night to get through.

  Even exhausted, she followed a certain set of rituals. Since there was no milk in the house to warm up, she sipped a mug of herbal tea, then ran a bath to further relax her. Her bedside clock read ten-thirty when she sank onto the pillow and closed her eyes. The most important ritual—the one that worked if anything was going to work—was to empty her head of everything except for a single gem. A topaz. A brilliant, soft, endlessly faceted topaz. And a pink tonight, because the rare deep-rose topaz had always been her favorite.

  She mentally pictured the rose-pink jewel and let her mind drift to all the hauntingly romantic lore linked to the gem. Topaz was wonderfully easy to meditate on. Mystics from the Far East had always believed that topaz had healing powers to lighten stress and depression and cure a troubled spirit. Those who sought deeper truth wore the gem in an amulet. The ancient Egyptians believed that topaz emanated from a fog-shrouded island in the Red Sea, which sailors only discovered because the gems shone so brightly at night. And then there was love. Spanning continents, through history, true topaz had always been a symbol for great strength of love...and the rare pink topaz invoked the special promise of enduring love.

  The legends and stories and lore soothingly blurred in her mind. Regan dropped into a deep, restful sleep, dreaming of fog-shrouded islands and a hypnotizing rose-pink jewel and peace.

  The peace lasted forty minutes.

  She woke on the edge of a scream and bolted upright in bed, shaking in every bone in her body. Terror gripped her heart. The topaz in her dream had disappeared in fog, and the fog was chasing after her, wrapping around her, choking her. An illusion.

  And pure idiocy. She pushed trembling fingers through her hair. Shadows were cavorting around her room—ax murderers and dragons and ghosts. She heard a dozen eerie sounds in a house that was completely quiet. More idiocies. And unfortunately familiar ones.

  Just your average psychotic behavior, duckie. Nothing new. Groggy, stumbling-tired and exasperated, Regan threw off the covers. Any other night she would have tried—at least one more time—going back to sleep. But Cole was in the house. She knew from experience that the nightmares only worsened through the night. Somehow she didn’t think slugger would appreciate being wakened by the sound of a screaming banshee.

  And it wasn’t as if she couldn’t find something to do.

  Working tiptoe quiet, she started with her grandfather’s room and then slowly tackled the burglar’s messes in the rest of the house. It took a while before her heart stopped pounding and her hands stopped trembling, but the annoying weakness eventually passed. It always did. The bandage on her hand was a different nuisance; although the cuts in her palm throbbed, Cole had swathed on enough yards of gauze to make a road.

  She unwound the gauze, took a look at the unimpressive cuts a
nd stuck on a couple of Band-Aids.

  The work went easier after that. By four in the morning she had every room restored to order.

  By five she’d slipped out into the courtyard and opened the hose on the reservoir to fill the swimming pool.

  By six she’d taken a shower, washed her hair, donned white slacks and a loose green top, and was prowling the kitchen barefoot for something to eat. She wanted milk, fruit, cheese. Until she had a chance to shop, unfortunately, the refrigerator was bare of fresh foods. She settled for making frozen orange juice and mixing nuts and raisins together in a bowl.

  Stashing the lot on a tray, she added her herbal vitamins and a couple of napkins, and carted it out to the white wrought-iron table by the pool. Her hands were starting to tremble again as she took a vitamin and washed it down with juice.

  The emotional need to put her house back in order had been its own momentum, but her body had been running on adrenaline alone. Exhaustion caught up with her, and she sank into the ribbed chaise longue. She heard the rhythmic hum of the pool’s pump, and promised herself that tomorrow would be different. The pool would take all day to fill, but by tomorrow she could be doing laps. Lots of laps, lots of vitamins, lots of good food, absolutely nothing to do but immerse herself in the history of Gramps’s gems, and restful nights of sleep would surely follow.

  Any lingering tension seeped away as she leaned back and half closed her eyes. No sounds of traffic intruded; no clocks ticked to the mad race of city life. The sky was lit up with the mellow pastels of a desert sunrise, and the dry, fine air filled her lungs. Fresh. Everything she could smell was fresh. The promise of soporific heat was already in the air, and the tranquil stillness of the morning washed over her.

  Behind her, she heard glass doors sliding open. That was it for the tranquillity.

  Cole sauntered out in jeans and an untucked black T-shirt, his feet bare and his hair still wet from a shower. A huge, noisy yawn announced his presence—unnecessarily. Regan had the sneaky feeling that blindfolded in a black room, she would have sensed Cole. At his sleepiest, at his laziest, he was a jolting male charge of electricity.

  Regan drew up her knees and felt herself bracing. She needed her wits around slugger, and it wasn’t easy to call up wits when catnaps were the only rest she’d had in weeks. Looking at Cole, she recalled everything that had happened yesterday...including a kiss that she remembered far too clearly.

  “Morning.” He rolled his shoulders, as if stretching out the last kinks of a deep restful night of dreams. If he was suffering any postmortem stress, it didn’t show. Heck. If he had experienced stress in his lifetime, it didn’t show.

  “Morning,” she echoed. As Cole wandered past her, Regan caught a waft of scents—soap, shampoo, toothpaste, shaving cream. The last scent made her cock her head for a second look. “Ye gods, you’ve shaved,” she murmured in the awed tone of one witnessing a miracle. “I had no idea you knew how.”

  Cole grinned, an unrepentant, irreverent grin that helped her relax. “If you’re gonna start on me this early, I’m going inside to sulk over a cup of coffee in peace.”

  “I wasn’t teasing you,” Regan protested. “I was just expressing amazement and shock. Who would have guessed you had a face under all those whiskers?”

  He chuckled. “Obviously it’s business as usual with you this morning, princess.”

  Regan was glad he thought so, and even more relieved that their mutually enjoyable slanging matches were still possible. So many disturbing things had happened in the past twenty-four hours that she was afraid Cole would never feel natural with her again. She watched him prop his hands loosely on his hips as he glanced into the slow-filling pool. “Don’t say it.”

  His head turned. “Don’t say what?”

  “Don’t say that a swimming pool in the desert is an unforgivable luxury. The water for it is cycled in a separate reservoir, and Gramps put in a well that cost the moon. It isn’t taking away from anybody else’s water.”

  “Honey, that’s the kind of thing you'd worry about. Me, now, I’m inclined to enjoy luxuries tossed my way and not ask too many questions.” He scratched his chest. “I vaguely recall Jake complaining through one entire five-hour flight. He told me three months—three months you’d been hounding him to put in that pool. I knew your grandfather fairly well by then. Not you. I had you figured for a terrible nag.”

  “You had me figured right,” Regan demurely agreed. “And it was four months, not three.”

  “Pretty mean, waging war on an old man who’d just had a heart attack.”

  “Very mean.” She smiled. For weeks people had been tiptoeing around her, avoiding the subject of her grandfather as if expecting her to burst into tears at any mention of Jake. They meant to be kind, but Cole’s attitude was a breath of fresh air. No one else had simply naturally talked about Jake, and the memories Cole had invoked were all good ones.

  Gramps had been as miserable as a trapped bear after his first heart attack. All his life he’d been an adventurer, a physically active, dynamic man who thrived on excitement. The forced inactivity had driven him crazy, and swimming had been one of the few exercises approved by the doctors.

  Jake had taken to the pool—once she’d gently coaxed him into it—like a six-foot-two, seventy-year-old porpoise. How many millions and zillions of hours had they done laps together?

  Cole glanced over the courtyard. “Pool or no pool, you two set up a pretty nice hideaway here. Not as nice as the mountain country around Cripple Creek in Colorado, but if you’re stuck with desert...this isn’t so bad.”

  “I didn’t know you liked the mountains.”

  “All day, any day. In a couple more years my younger brother will be on his financial feet, and then I plan on hitting the unemployment rolls. Already have my name on a patch of land in C.C. No big thing, just a place to raise a few horses and do as little work as possible.”

  “Sounds...lazy.”

  “I am lazy.”

  “Sure you are, slugger,” Regan murmured dryly...and abruptly caught her breath.

  The easy conversation had disarmed her into relaxing—until Cole pivoted around with a sudden frown. His gaze skidded the length of her like a rake through autumn leaves, catching in spots. For Cole not to notice a woman’s breasts, hips and legs was like expecting the Arctic to melt. Possible. Just not realistic.

  It was when their eyes met, though, that Regan felt a fringe of nerves. His shrewd gaze inspected her as intimately as a cop frisking a suspect...or a man who knew women. Too well. His eyes narrowed on the color in her cheeks—achieved with a blush brush after her shower—then on the light touch of foundation guaranteed to conceal dark circles, then rested a long time on her serene, rested, confident smile.

  “So...did you sleep five minutes during the whole damned night?” he asked peaceably.

  Regan looked at him, and then sighed. “I have a tiny problem with insomnia lately.”

  “From an outsider’s viewpoint, it would seem you have a lot of tiny problems lately. Of course, some people would consider living next to a leaking nuclear reactor as a tiny problem. What’s this?” He motioned to the tray on the patio table.

  Relieved at the diversion, she said swiftly, “Orange juice. And breakfast—or what has to pass for breakfast, since there isn’t any fresh food in the house yet. I thought you might be hungry when you woke up, and I knew you had to leave early this morning.”

  “I do,” he agreed and, ignoring the orange juice, filched the bowl of nuts and raisins. He scraped up a patio chair, winged it next to her chaise and straddled it backward. “I didn’t spend the night because I was too tired to fly,” he mentioned.

  “Cole, I guessed that.”

  He scooped up a palmful of breakfast—selfishly, she noted, picking out the cashews—and nodded. “I felt guilty about leaving you alone. Did you guess that, too?”

  “I told you I would be all right.”

  “Yeah, I know what you told me. But I’d ha
ve felt like a bastard and a yellow-bellied snake if I’d walked out on you after the day you had.” He wagged a salt-tipped finger at her. “Now the truth, princess, is that I have a lot of yellow-bellied bastard in me. And Truth Two is that I have to go home. So you would considerably relieve my conscience—such as it is—if you wouldn’t mind answering a question or two.”

  So bad, she thought. She’d never seen a man so hard at presenting himself in a negative light. Heaven forbid she should get the idea that he was concerned. “You can ask me anything you want,” she said honestly.

  He popped another palmful of breakfast. “First off, do you happen to have a current man friend in your life...preferably someone with the handy heroic characteristics of Rin Tin Tin?”

  Her eyebrows arched in quizzical humor. “Is that a trick question? I don’t date dogs, slugger.”

  “Don’t get sassy. Come on, there have to be some men in the wings.”

  “Sure. I work with lots of them. And there are friends I have dinner with. But I have the feeling you’re trying to subtly ask me if I have a lover right now—and that answer’s no.” The answer didn’t seem to please him. In fact, his jagged brows abruptly squinched together. “Ah...Cole? I’m pretty sure I never gave you any particular reason to think I had lovers strewn all over the greater Chicago area.”

  “No. But I’d hoped. You may be holding out for a hero, Ms. Pollyanna, but I figured you might have auditioned a few along the way. Preferably recently. Preferably someone about six foot four, maybe 225 pounds, with an inherited gun collection that includes an Uzi.”

  Although his tone was light, Regan guessed that Cole’s mentioning other men was deliberate—a way to show her that an accidental, unintentional embrace changed nothing between them. Hadn’t she already warned herself that his response had been only an illusion?