“Go back in the house, Cole,” she said softly.
“Hey. You think you’re the only person on earth who likes to walk in the rain?”
“Slugger, don’t be an idiot. I’m fine. I just want to walk. And what do you want to be all wet for?”
“Maybe I like being wet.”
He paid for that lie. The green-eyed blonde who looked so fragile and frail was capable of walking forever. Tirelessly. Wetly. Until Cole figured he could have stripped naked and been drier.
It wasn’t the rain that unnerved him, though, or plodding over the sand-wet-mucked rolling hills to God knows where. It was what she said. And kept saying.
“Shepherd, did you ever lose anyone who mattered to you? Really mattered to you?”
“Yes.” His answer was gruff and unwilling. It never stopped being hard, thinking about his family.
“When my parents died, I was just nine. In the beginning it wasn’t that bad. I was so sure I would wake up one morning and they’d still be there. I don’t know at what point I suddenly realized they weren’t coming back to me.” Even in the pitch-dark, with the rain sluicing down on her, she set a pace that he could barely maintain. “I was overwhelmed, slugger. I’d not only lost my family and everything I associated with family—birthdays and holidays and the people who are part of your every day. I’d lost my life. Everything I thought was my life when I was nine years old. Can you understand?”
“Yes,” Cole said. His lungs suddenly ached with the effort to breathe. He’d initially intended to chase down Regan for the sole purpose of hauling her out of the rain. He’d never expected to share a soul-dark understanding with her.
He knew what she felt. When his father died, then his brother, and then his mother sank into depression, Cole had lost himself in the aftershocks. Friends kept telling him he’d get over the grief. To hell with the grief; his family as it existed was gone and would never be again. And Regan had had to deal with that when she was only nine years old?
She stopped, pushed the wet hair from her brow, making it stick up in silly spikes. And then started walking again. “But I had Jake. Gramps was not only there for me. He was everything to me. I never went to pajama parties when I was twelve. I never necked in the back seat of a car, never went to a prom, never got to know sixteen-year-old boys like every sixteen-year-old girl wants to know boys. I was with Jake, probably being lectured on the geological formation of gems, or maybe sitting at a dinner with gem dealers from Sri Lanka. The way I grew up was exotic, Shepherd, but it wasn’t...fun. I was lonely. A misfit. I grew up with grown men, never kids my own age or women. No way was it perfect—”
“Princess—”
Apparently they were turning back, because she suddenly whirled around to face him, her eyes a thousand times more luminous than the rain. “It wasn’t perfect, but he did his absolute best, and nobody is going to criticize my grandfather around me.”
“Nobody’s trying, honey.”
But she took off, over another blasted hill in the ceaselessly blasted rain. “I don’t care. I don’t care if he robbed banks. I don’t care what he did to Reed. I don’t care what he did to anyone, because I know who he was for me. You think that stupid journal entry changes anything?”
“I sure don’t.”
“It doesn’t change a damn thing!”
“Okay,” he said, and then snagged her wrist and grabbed her. He cupped her head and tilted it. He didn’t know he was going to kiss her, didn’t plan it, had sworn from the heart that he was never going to touch her again. It was just...She’d been hurt. A hero had let her down. And he didn’t want Regan to think about all the too-human heroes who let people down.
He kissed her once, nice and soft. She tasted like rain and wet silk, and her arms slid around his waist. She snuggled a cheek against his and he just held her...and held her, and held her. Her skin was glistening with rain and her eyelashes were all matted and dripping, her hair plastered to her scalp like some woebegone waif. He breathed in the scent of his woebegone waif, marveled at the mysteriously perfect way she fit in the snug of his body.
He felt the cradle of her pelvis against his thighs, the intimate crush of her breasts against his ribs. Charlie rose. It was hopeless to expect Charlie not to respond this close to Regan, yet Cole never changed the nature of the embrace, didn’t try, didn’t want to. He tried to remember the last time he’d simply held a woman. Or the last time anyone had held him, at least like the princess was holding on to him.
God knew how long they stood there. Long enough for Cole to have a terrifying feeling of rightness. The emotion lacked all logic, all sanity, but it felt so good he didn’t want to let her go.
“Slugger, you’re crushing my ribs.”
“Yeah?”
“I like it. Your crushing my ribs.”
“Good.” His mouth pressed into her temples.
“Are you feeling a little better now?” she whispered.
He had to smile. The hug was obviously for her, not him. Regan was still getting things a little confused. “I’m feeling fine.”
“But you must be a little cold,” she pressed.
“A little.”
“And I don’t think you want to walk anymore.”
“I don’t.”
“Then do you think it might be okay if we got out of this rain?”
CHAPTER TEN
Both of them arrived home and headed straight for hot showers. Cole claimed he was beat and going straight to bed after that, but Regan wasn’t the least sleepy. Her mind was still spinning—emotions, thoughts, feelings—that needed sorting out before she could call it a night.
After a long soak, she wrapped herself in a long terry cloth robe and wound her wet head in a towel, turban-fashion. Hands slung in her robe pockets, she headed down the hall. When she turned the corner, she saw the single light shining in the kitchen...and hesitated.
Cole—she should have guessed—had fibbed about going right to bed. He had a bottle of bourbon and a shot glass in his hands, and he, too, had just showered. His head was still wet, his feet bare. He wore a towel around his shoulders in lieu of a shirt. Tufts of springy hair covered his sun-bronzed chest and arrowed down to the snap of his jeans. He wore no belt. He wasn’t expecting company.
Since he had pulled back from her this morning, Regan had tried to give Cole emotional space. Partly, she was unsure how he felt. Partly, her pride chafed at how much trouble she’d caused him. So she’d downplayed what had happened at the doctor’s. She hadn’t touched him. And she’d walked outside after reading Jake’s journals, specifically to avoid Cole’s realizing that she was upset.
She’d been good...but that hug in the rain had almost undone her. To Regan, expressing emotion was as natural as breathing. To hold back pain was senseless; to express tears was no weakness. To show love was no shame. But Cole lived by different rules. The hug he’d swallowed her in had been poignantly awkward. Offering comfort was unfamiliar to him and came hard...so hard that his arms had been shaky and his pulse uneven and thready.
She’d hugged him instead, although he didn’t seem to realize it. But if ever a man needed loving, it was Cole. Somewhere inside him was a wall of pain, an isolation from emotion he counted on to protect himself. She didn’t mean to crack his wall. Regan was afraid of hurting him, too afraid she was the wrong woman, it was the wrong time, that she was misreading his feelings for her.
But tarnation, he looked lonely as hell pouring that finger of bourbon.
So lonely that she couldn’t stand it. Wishing she was wearing anything but a flapping robe and a towel turban, she stepped into the light. Cole abruptly swiveled around. “I thought you were long in bed by now,” he said swiftly.
“Maybe you weren’t the only one who needed a good stiff drink before heading for bed.”
His lips twisted in a slow, puckish grin. Not his laid-back company grin, but a real one. “You want a drink? You?”
“You have a problem with that? You think I�
��m some kind of sissy? You think I don’t appreciate a good belt just like the rest of the human race?” She opened the refrigerator, took out the milk, and crouched down for a pan to heat it in.
Cole covered his eyes with a hand.
“In the cupboard just above you are the spices. I need a little nutmeg and cinnamon,” she said.
“You sure you can take the added stimulus? You’re not going to do anything crazy like dance naked on the table-top, are you?”
“Heavens, I don’t need alcohol to do that. And you can quit picking on me, slugger. It’s not my fault I have a metabolism that can’t handle hard liquor. If it were my choice, I’d always have been a degenerate, uninhibited, hard-drinking fiend.”
“I have no doubt, princess.” Humor glinted in his eyes as he handed her the nutmeg and cinnamon. She tapped the spices into the heating pan of warmed milk.
“So what’s on your mind?” she asked casually.
“Who said anything was on my mind?”
“It’s almost midnight.” Finally she identified the muffled background noise coming from the utility wing. “Even if you were out of clean shirts, it’s pretty late to throw in a load of wash—unless you were planning to be up for a while. And when I walked in, you looked like you were mulling the world’s problems.”
“Not the entire world’s. Just the few tiny problems generated by your grandfather’s diaries. Specifically I was thinking about Jake’s partner, Reed.” He studied her face. “Which is probably the last thing you want to think about right now.”
“No, it’s okay.” Somehow she had to break Cole’s habit of thinking of her as breakable. “When I read what Gramps did to Reed, I reacted...emotionally. You may have noticed?” she asked lightly.
He didn’t smile. “Honey, you had reason to feel upset.”
She nodded. “But when the first storm passed, I started thinking. Jake chose to leave me those stones. If he never wanted me to learn certain truths, he could have buried those gems, burned the darned diaries years ago. Because he didn’t, I have to believe there are certain things he wanted me to know. And I decided to try and not make decisions or judgments until I have the whole picture. We haven’t read all the diaries. There are still three gems we know nothing about.”
Cole swirled the amber liquid in his glass. “Those diaries opened up a kettle of worms.”
“Maybe. But I think my answers are in them.” She poured the warm milk into a mug and set the pan in the sink to soak. “Even days ago I had to face that I wasn’t dealing with a stranger—or your basic, average thief. If he was hot for gems, any thief with a brain would have ripped off a nice big jeweler’s. So this guy has to have other motivations than greed. And he has to know me personally—where I live, how I live, what I do—or he couldn’t have pulled off the things he’s done.”
Regan didn’t say it had to be someone she loved, someone she had probably trusted forever, but it was in her eyes. Cole said, “We’re not going to talk about this if it’s going to upset you.”
“The only thing that’s going to upset me is not finding out the truth. And you started this conversation asking something about Reed. What was on your mind?”
Cole hesitated. “When I first read the diary, I was thrilled as hell that you finally had a name. Someone who knew about the stones, someone with a motive, someone close enough to you to have opportunity. Only you told me Reed had money.”
“He does.” She sipped her milk. “So do all the partners.”
“So he’s not hurting for bread, and his whole business is gems—and that’s where I got confused. Even if he thought he was cheated out of this tsavorite twenty years ago, why should it make so much difference to him? It’s just one gem. Even if the damn stone is worth a small fortune, he’s surely had hundreds of equally valuable gems pass through his hands over the years. So what could possibly be such a big deal about this tsavorite?”
Regan looked at Cole with a wry expression. “I can give you an answer for that, but you won’t like it.”
“What?”
“I tried to talk to you about magic the other night, but you wouldn’t believe me. People really can—and do—become obsessed with individual stones. I don’t know that that’s true of Reed, but I know it can happen. I’ve seen it. People can develop a relationship with a gem, identify with it, believe in its powers over good luck and bad until they need that stone, and it becomes a driving need to possess it.”
“For cripes sakes, princess, I’m trying to talk about black-and-white reality. Facts.”
“So am I.” She looked at him again and suddenly smiled. Impulsively she set down her glass and whipped the towel off her head. “Sit down, slugger. You’re so positive that you could never be taken in by superstition or magic? Well, I’m about to show you just how easy it is. Free of charge, you’re about to get a fast lesson in the reality of magic—the magic in gems.”
“Regan...”
But when Cole’s eyes rolled with humor, Regan knew this was a good idea. There was no way anything could be resolved about her situation tonight. And all day—all week—he’d been embroiled in her problems. A break from tension was just what the doctor ordered. “No arguments allowed from the peanut gallery. Just wait. And prepare to be amazed.”
He chuckled. She lit three fat candles at the kitchen table and disappeared. Minutes later she returned with a strip of white felt and the black pouch of gems from her grandfather’s safe. She tipped the gems onto the felt and then pulled off the cat’s-eye ring from her little finger.
“You might want another drink. This is going to be a lot for you to handle,” she warned him.
“I’m pretty sure I can bear up.”
“We’ll see, hotshot.” She drew up the chair next to him and picked up the ring. “Cat’s-eye magic is pretty basic, but I thought we’d start with that because I didn’t want to overwhelm you too quickly. Way back, the ancient Greek physicians used to carry cat’s-eye because of the stone’s ability to diagnose illness. Sound pretty hoaxy?”
“It sounds sillier than Santa Claus.”
“So you think now, Mr. Skeptic. But look at the stone.” She leaned closer, angling the ring so he could see the three streaks of light caught in the gem. “If you have a fever, those streaks will dim and the stone will look dull. I can’t prove that, because you don’t have a fever. But I can prove that the stone will change when it touches you.”
She turned his arm to reveal his wrist, and gently laid the stone against his pulse. For the tick of a second, their eyes met. For the beat of a heart, she forgot the parlor trick she was trying to show him because the warmth of his eyes—and sexual awareness—was far more potent than any magic. Rain silvered down the window. Somewhere a clock ticked. “Look,” she said softly.
“I am.”
“Look at the stone, Shepherd.” Again she lifted the ring to the light...and watched his eyebrows pucker in a frown. The cat’s eye truly looked completely different, wet and radiant and richly luminous.
“You switched stones.”
“No. It’s just the magic of a cat’s-eye. It bonded personally with you, reacted to your heartbeat.”
“Honey, it’s just a stone. A piece of rock. That’s impossible.”
“Still a nonbeliever? You’d better see what the yellow sapphire can do, then.” Regan surged to her feet and filled a glass with water. She flicked off the overhead to cut down on extraneous reflections but left the three candles burning. “A sapphire has the power to raise your consciousness and bring its owner good karma by creating its own inner light—which is easier to show you if you’ll pop the gem in the water.” She motioned. Cole dropped it into the glass. Immediately, the stone emitted strong, bright, electrical rays of light that shot into every dark corner of the room.
Cole dove for the stone and dug it out. “They’re just stones,” he repeated. “You’re doing some kinds of tricks.”
“I’m not doing anything that you can’t see. Or that other people ha
ven’t seen in gemstones since the beginning of time. People used to believe that moonstone was a love charm, that the source of amber was the tears of a seabird….” She raised up to blow out the candles.
“Hell. What are you doing now?”
“I need total darkness to show you the most powerful magic of all. The pink topaz is my favorite stone, I told you, because it’s always been a gem for lovers. Although I have to confess that it takes believing in love to make this particular magic to work.”
The room wasn’t blackout dark, because crystal rivulets of rain still reflected from the windowpanes. She easily found Cole in the ebony shadows. As she leaned toward him, she felt his eyes on her face. Although she couldn’t read his expression, she could guess it. Slugger had a familiar way of looking at her...as if he had landed himself in a cage with an unmanageable, unpredictable and regrettably uncontrollable baby tigress. There was endurance in his eyes. Endurance, patience, wariness and very definitely humor. At first.
Slowly, surely, she trailed the smooth-faceted edge of the topaz down his throat, over his collarbone, drifting down over the hard ridge of chest to his heart. The whole house was suddenly silent. She heard him suck in his breath. She felt his skin warm with sudden heat. She tasted the emotion igniting between them, as real as her own heartbeat, and it had absolutely nothing to do with any gemstone. But was it equally real for Cole?
She pressed the stone for one last moment against his palm, and then raised it to his eye level. The topaz was flashing with phosphorescent fire in the darkness.
“Heavens. It’s only supposed to glow for lovers,” she murmured. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t believe in love, slugger?”
Nervous. Cole climbed out of bed the next morning feeling edgy and nervous, which was the exact same condition in which he’d gone to bed the night before.
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