He neither knew nor cared what basanite was. He just wished for a moment that she was a man and would stick to one subject at a time. “No.”
“Basanite is a bright black stone, commonly known in the jeweler’s world as a touchstone. The importance of basanite is that it was used to test gold. Real gold makes a mark on a touchstone. An alloy or fool’s gold doesn’t. So from ancient times, people have referred to a touchstone whenever they needed a sure test for truth. And that’s what I wish I had right now—a touchstone—some way to be sure what’s true, who are my enemies and friends, the total truth.”
She’d been talking a mile a minute, pacing the narrow pool edge, her hands gesturing and her eyes blazing. It all stopped in the pace of a second. She looked at him suddenly, shrewdly and with unnervingly feminine perception. “Finally, you’ve got some color back in your face. We don’t have to talk about it, slugger. I would never have pressed you. Just—don’t you dare regret this morning, because it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
And that was it. All she’d said before walking away.
It had taken him several minutes, standing in four feet of pool-cold water on a desert-cold morning, for his lungs to remember how to exhale.
He had the terrible feeling that Regan believed herself in love with him. Not only was the deep warm glow in her eyes suspicious, but she was building up some disastrously bad habits—like accepting a man on his own terms, like startling a man with her sudden perception and understanding, like trusting him. Like wanting him.
Ten years ago, Cole would have climbed Everest for a woman like her. Now, there was no point. The cold had settled in after his dad died. He’d never turned hard or mean; he was never intentionally cruel. Just cold on the inside. All he wanted was to be left alone. He’d been content alone all these years, doing just fine, as happy as he needed to be, the loneliness no big deal.
Until the princess.
And he might have stood in the pool for another hour, wondering why the hell one small woman could have him more stirred up than nettles and nails...when the rest of her conversation filtered back into his mind. Her ditsy leap between drugs and touchstones hadn’t really been so illogical—both subjects related to the trouble she was in. That trouble was real—as real as the fact that she’d nearly drowned in a bathtub some twenty-four hours ago.
He’d surged out of the pool, determined to find a doctor who’d check her over with a fine-tooth comb if he had to fly her to the Mayo.
Gray Mountain was closer. Regan had been more than willing to go, had walked into the clinic counting on the doctor for answers. Cole suspected she’d gotten quite a few answers.
Just not necessarily the ones she wanted.
She popped open the passenger door and threw in her purse as if she was jettisoning a dead varmint. “A complete waste of time. To think I could have been home, doing something constructive like reading Gramps’s journals, and instead I spent an exhausting two hours with a sadist who interned under the marquis de Sade….”
He caught both sandals—apparently she’d been wearing shoes about all that she could stand—and then she climbed in, all wound up and smelling like jasmine and talking a blue streak. “That jerk poked and pried and took half my blood. He gave me a vitamin B shot to build me up. That was okay. Only I was a little anemic so he finished off with a shot for iron. The needle was as long as this windshield. No one’s given me a shot in the fanny since I was four years old, and I swear that if you laugh, slugger, if you even crack a grin I’ll—”
She winced as she settled on her right hip. Then jerked on the seat belt as if she’d like to use it to strangle every personage in the medical community. He said tactfully, “I saw a drugstore a block down, and it’s a long drive back home. We could probably buy you a pillow.”
Regan responded with a hand gesture.
He bit hard on his cheek. She’d been through such hell. A death that still had her grieving, a thief, a plane going down in Kansas, a fruitcake who’d been playing with her mind, drugs, nothing that made any answers or sense. She’d taken it all on the chin. Threaten her life and she never lost her cool.
Apparently it took a shot in the tush. Cole cleared his throat. “We won’t discuss your sore fanny anymore—”
“You bet your sweet bippy we won’t. I want to go home.”
“And we are.” He started the engine. “But I want to know the doc’s whole verdict.” It took no concentration to negotiate Gray Mountain. The town was no more than five city blocks and a handful of dusty streets climbing the hillside. The wind was rollicking enough to swing the town’s only two traffic lights.
Regan peered out at the sky. “I got orders like most patients dream of. I’m to take a vacation, eat myself silly, gain ten pounds, turn off the alarm clock and sleep like a sloth. No stress. I got big instructions about no stress. We’re talking permission to lead a completely decadent life-style. Like this is tough?”
She was regaining her sense of humor, but God forbid she mention anything that might worry him. “Come on, princess. Get specific.”
“Specifically...there was no drug in my system. At least nothing that showed up in these first tests. He took some others, but I won’t have the results back for another ten days.” He heard the frustration in her voice. What she’d wanted, what she’d counted on, was a name on a drug, something to pin the devil with when she found him.
“Okay. So we have to get that another way,” he said quietly. “Back to your health—”
“I’m a little run-down. Nothing exciting.”
It was like pulling teeth. “Thorne. Talk to me. Don’t use words like a ‘little’ anemic. Are you going to be okay? Heart, liver, blood pressure, any long-term health effects?”
“I need building up. Honest, that’s all.” She hesitated, and then confessed, “The only thing he said that unnerved me was about sleep. He said there was a major difference between insomnia and a so-called sleep psychosis. An insomniac eventually sleeps...where someone forcibly deprived of sleep for a long enough period of time develops certain symptoms. Like memory blackouts, and mental confusion, and hallucinations.” She hesitated again. “There was a short time, Shepherd, when I was seeing you in neon green.”
“Honey—”
“Heaven knew you were sexy, even in neon green—”
“Honey—”
“But I don’t think I’d better take any more of those herbal vitamins in this lifetime. Whatever I was screwing around with wasn’t a joke.”
“We’ll find out what it is.”
“Yes. But it looks like the fates are against us today. I’d counted on you leaving for Chicago, but I’m afraid it’s not going to happen. There’s going to be a storm.”
Cole hadn’t mentioned that he’d already arranged for the pickup of her vitamins. Those arrangements implied that he planned to stay longer. Until she’d seen the doctor, he honestly had had no idea when or if he could leave—but now, he glanced at the sky. “Storm?” Although a whistling-high wind had picked up and streaky clouds scuttled across the sky, the day was still bright. “You’re dreaming.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I thought it never rained in the desert.”
“It rarely does.”
“How are you so sure it’s going to storm, then?”
“Magic,” she said blithely. “As I keep telling you, slugger, I’m an expert on magic.”
Lightning speared the desert sky before they were halfway home. By the time they pulled into the driveway, the wind was howling across the red rock hills and the clouds had opened in a deluge. They raced for the door through buckets of rain and rushed in soaked and gasping.
Regan hadn’t forecast the storm with a crystal ball. She simply knew how volatilely and unexpectedly the weather could change in the desert in April.
Where she needed a crystal ball was for Cole.
By ten that night, they were both settled in the library with her grandfather’s journ
als. Rain still sluiced down the windows; the eerie wind still found its way into every crack and crevice. It was a fine night for ghosts and ghouls or a long, lazy nap, which she’d already taken, right after dinner.
Regan thought fleetingly that she could get used to being spoiled rotten. Cole had installed her on the red leather couch with a pillow behind her head and another under her sore behind. On the scrolled coffee table, within reach, was a dish of nuts, a bowl of fruit and a half-finished banana milk shake with a straw. Should five minutes pass without her reaching for something, the devil sprawled on the white rug had something to say.
She lifted the third of her grandfather’s journals to her lap and thumbed it open: 1969. Cole was immersed in 1953. He had no problem concentrating.
She did. Her gaze kept straying to his ruffled dark head, to the cast of lamplight on his shoulders, to the look of his big hands on the yellowed pages. She remembered his hands on her. She remembered those hands sweeping possessively, erotically over her breasts; she remembered his earthy whispers; she remembered the lonely thirst in his kisses and the fire of excitement in his eyes. Cole had a bomb of tenderness inside him. He’d unleashed part of its power on her. It had given her a taste for how much love was inside him...and he’d almost let it go. With her. For her.
She also remembered the look on his face after he dove into the pool—the harsh lines of anxiety, the defensive tightness around his mouth. Then, and now, Regan had the craziest feeling that slugger needed protecting far more than she did.
She rubbed two fingers on her temple. Her whole world had changed since waking this morning. The fog in her mind was good and gone—and Lord, she was thankful—yet life hadn’t suddenly turned easier. The confusing events since her grandfather’s death replayed in her mind, over and over, ruthlessly reminding her that she had to find the truth. How could she choose a course of action without knowing the most basic who, what and why answers?
And those were her problems, not Cole’s. All day she’d told herself that was the reason he’d run, the reason he hadn’t fully made love with her. Who’d want to be involved with a woman who had the track record of the plague?
Any man would have skedaddled by now, but this one more so. Cole, being Cole, should have wanted a couple of continents between them. Slugger gagged on words like honor and responsibility; he valued nothing more than his own skin; entanglements made his skin itch and he certainly wasn’t involved. So he’d said. Several times.
Only Regan could hardly miss noticing that he was still here. Unshakable as glue all day—she’d felt lucky he didn’t go into the doctor’s examination room with her. And when they’d come home from Gray Mountain, she’s seen that the big King Air was missing and a pretty little Piper was sitting in its place. Cole had explained about sending the vitamins to his brother. That was fine, only it was the first Regan knew that he’d made specific and complicated plans to stay. With her. The plague.
What am I supposed to think, slugger? What? I’m trying not to love you, I'm trying not to involve you...but you aren't making it any easier. How many times had she tried to free him? She’d plotted and fibbed and staged whole scenarios to convince him that he was free to go. She hated feeling like a noose around his neck.
A cold bare foot nudged her knee. “Hey. Eat.”
She saw the foot. She also saw the imperious royal finger pointing to the milk shake. Dark eyes lifted briefly from the journal. For a man who should have resented her, Regan could have sworn he was having a wonderful time in his current role as boss and bully. “Shepherd, I’m as stuffed as a whale now. I can't eat any more.”
“Sure you can. The doc told you to gain ten pounds—”
“I don’t think he expected me to do it all in one night.”
“Less sass. More milk shake.”
She couldn’t help a chuckle. “Are you finding anything interesting?”
“Who knows? Jake’s handwriting is worse than a spider’s scrawl. He sure got around the world, though, didn’t he?”
“Everywhere.” Regan took another rich sip of milk shake, licked a trace of foam from her upper lip—Lord, did he make good milk shakes—and then abruptly set down the glass. She’d spotted the word tanzanite in the journal.
“What’d you find?” Cole asked.
“I’m not sure yet. Just a minute....” She quickly scanned the entry. Reed and her grandfather spent six months in Africa in 1969, beginning in the country around Mount Kilimanjaro. Most precious gems were long discovered before the twentieth century, but two—tanzanites and tsavorites—were new finds in the late sixties.
The two men were searching for tanzanites, and both fell in love with the stone. It had the same violet-blue color and radiant fire as a sapphire, but unfortunately it existed only in that one location and in limited supply, making the stone important to collectors but too rare to be viable in the marketplace.
Regan summarized the story for Cole. “Jake kept a stone. He said the gem had a presence like none other...peace and inner serenity and beauty from the inside...a stone for a dreamer—” Her breath caught, and she felt engulfed with a wave of love for her grandfather. “He planned to save it for me.”
Cole’s voice gentled to a burr. “And he did, princess. And now you have one of those answers that was so important to you.”
She raised her eyes. “One out of five. And there’s no mystery in this one.”
“There’s no guarantee we’ll come up with any mysteries. Just keep reading.”
Regan did...and then wished she hadn’t.
Jake and Reed had not come home, but traveled on to Kenya that same year. Nineteen sixty-nine was the year tsavorites had been discovered in Tsavo National Park, and interest in the gem world was immediate but cautious. The deposit of tanzanites had proved too rare to be commercially viable. The hope was that this new stone—the emerald-hued tsavorite—would be found in abundance. Officials from Tiffany and Company led the first expedition to find out.
Regan frowned, reading on. Most of the diary entries were Jake’s scratched notes to himself, half sentences and fragments that were difficult to interpret. Apparently the two men had gone off in the mountains alone, which struck her as odd. The Tiffany expedition would have been authorized by the Kenya government. It was doubtful outsiders would have been allowed until that initial study was done.
The story became more confusing. The two men had a guide, who led them to a mountain village, where they were sold a bagful of uncut gems. At that time, no one could have known what the value of tsavorites would be, but all the stones were of commercial size. Only one, though, was a true treasure—a perfect stone that had the potential, cut, of four carats. And then Reed had fallen ill.
Jake had crossed out something in heavy ink. A full paragraph. Both partners were back in the States when Gramps wrote another entry; Reed was in the hospital and the one stone had disappeared. Reed accused her grandfather of keeping it for himself. Gramps claimed that it was stolen by the guide.
And that was it. The whole entry on the tsavorite. Regan sat unmoving, staring at the last page until the print blurred in front of her eyes.
In her mind she saw the lush deep green of the four-carat tsavorite locked now in the safe.
And felt sick at heart.
Cole saw Regan climb off the couch and disappear through the doorway. He thought she had a call of nature, or just needed to walk around for a few minutes. They’d been reading for more than two hours.
When she didn’t immediately return, though, he stood up, feeling restless himself. He didn’t intentionally glance at the open journal on the couch. It was just lying there.
He skimmed past the background information and honed onto the story. It didn’t take long before he sucked in a whistle. On first impact, he felt nothing but enormous relief. Reed not only knew about the tsavorite; he’d been cheated out of it. That didn’t explain why the turkey had drugged Regan—it didn’t explain a lot of things, but at least it tagged the mot
ivation for a crime. And it put a face and a name on her rat.
That was all he thought for several minutes...before he realized that Regan would have been impacted by the information in an entirely different way. She’d have walked through lions for that old man. She always thought Jake was half god.
Greed made devils out of saints. Cole lived in the real world, had seen too much life to make judgments about other people’s sins. But Regan didn’t see life that way. It was a double disillusionment for her to discover not only that Jake wasn’t the hero she believed him, but that someone else she trusted and loved—Reed—could well be her enemy.
Cole found the light on in the kitchen, but Regan wasn’t there. It never occurred to him that she’d be outside until he noticed that the back door was ajar.
The eerie wind had finally died, the lightning faded to a pale pastel crackle in the northeast. The guts had gone out of the storm, but it was still a lashing, gashing rain and the night was as black as liquid tar.
He saw her blond head on the rise of a knoll and swore.
He pushed into shoes but no jacket. He didn’t have a jacket, but then, neither did she. Ten feet outside and he was soaked through. It wasn’t freezing rain, not the stuff of hypothermia, just the warm, drenching stuff that ducks enjoyed. Cole wasn’t a duck.
He caught up with her in the vale of scrub brush near the landing strip. By the time he reached her side—and she realized he’d reached her side—he’d recovered from the stitch in his left ribs and was gasping pretty hard for air.
“What are we doing here, princess?” he asked gently.
“Just taking a walk. I like to walk in the rain.”
“Yeah?” Her hair was plastered to her scalp, water running in rivulets from her eyelashes. The green shirt-dress she wore was so wet that he could see, even in the dark, the lines of her bra and panties beneath it. She was barefoot, because the woman didn’t have the sense God gave her at birth. And there was pain in her eyes that he could see even in the darkness. Pain that tore at him.
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