Pink Topaz

by Jennifer Greene

  His clean clothes were lying in a wrinkled heap on the floor. He tugged on jeans and a green T-shirt. A picture had lodged in his dreams with the tenacity of a persistent headache. A picture of the green-eyed blonde right after she’d turned on the kitchen lights. Her skin had been paler than pearls, her hair swept flyaway-silky behind her ears, her eyes vulnerable with a woman’s yearning and tentative invitation. Even the scent of her was branded in his mind.

  Cole stepped out into the courtyard and winced. The storm was long over. The sun was killing bright, the air pure, the sky an endless sweep of innocent pale blue. It was no wonder he couldn’t think straight. You need some crime around you, Shepherd. You need some smog and some sirens and a long night in a smoky bar with the kind of woman who doesn't give a damn about you. You get back to Chicago and everything’ll be nice and normal again.

  He heard the first ring of the telephone just as he tugged open the living-room door. The closest extension was the red hanging wall receiver in the kitchen. Regan was nowhere in sight—he assumed she was still sleeping—so he jogged the open obstacle course of couches and tables toward the kitchen phone.

  Everything was just as they’d left it, his bottle of bourbon still on the counter, her milk glass peeking upside down from the open dishwasher. No gems. Before chasing Regan off to bed, he’d made her lock that little pouch of unsettling stones back in the safe.

  It was okay by Cole if he never saw another gemstone again in his lifetime.

  He didn’t know what Regan had done to make that big pink rock glow in the dark, and he didn’t care. The princess had started out having fun playing magician. At some point in the darkness, she’d stopped playing. When her hand rubbed the stone along his skin, her voice had changed texture. The beat of nerves and awareness affected her pulse. Her eyes had sought his in the darkness with a telling brilliance. She believed what she was telling him. She believed in him. In love.

  The telephone jangled a second time. In his hurry to reach it, he stubbed his toe on the kitchen table leg and swore. Damn table. Damn phone. Damn life.

  Regan had been under intense and relentless tension for weeks. No letup, no rest and very likely drugs involved. Was it any wonder that she still had a problem separating illusion from reality? She didn’t really believe in magic. And she couldn’t be in love with him.

  The telephone rang a third time before he reached it. He grabbed the receiver and would have barked a greeting...if he hadn’t immediately realized that Regan had picked up another extension.

  “Regan? I tried telephoning you all yesterday afternoon. I became concerned when I didn’t reach you.”

  Cole should have hung up. He would have hung up if he hadn’t recognized her caller’s voice. The sonorous, pedantic tone immediately called to mind an image of dark suits and dignity. Reed had always reminded Cole of an innocuously pompous, balding undertaker. Until yesterday. A journal entry wasn’t enough to condemn the bastard in a court of law—but it was enough to make Cole wish he had a shotgun that could blast straight through the phone lines.

  “Regan? Why aren’t you answering me? Where were you yesterday?”

  “I...we...were just out in the country for the afternoon.” Cole could hear Regan’s breath swallow as if a thick lump had lodged in her throat. It made him sick. Last night she’d been a nerve-racking cross between an imp and a siren, but he didn’t want her afraid.

  “We? That pilot isn’t still with you, is he?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  There was a pause. Was it Cole’s imagination, or did that sonorous voice suddenly have a darker undertone? “Regan, I really don’t think it’s wise for you to have anyone around who isn’t family, particularly when you’ve been so...nervous. In fact, we all feel there are compelling reasons why you should return home. Did the local authorities apprehend your burglar?”

  Again, Cole heard her breath catch. Tell him the cops are following up a dozen clues. Tell them they're watching your house day and night. Come on, princess, show me how smart you are....

  “No, Reed. The last time I spoke with the deputy, he admitted that he just didn’t have anything to go on—”

  “All the more reason for you to come home where we could watch over you. My dear, has there been any change in your...state of health?”

  Cole’s palms started sweating. Dammit, Regan, don't give anything away. Don't trust him. “I’m feeling...a little better. I don’t want you to worry about me.”

  “How could I not? Did you forget that I was the one you called at four in the morning, so mixed up that you didn’t know your own name? Or the condition you were in the night of our dinner? My dear child, you’re in no shape to be alone—or with strangers. I want you to get rid of that pilot, do you hear me?”

  “Yes, I hear you.”

  “And I want you to reconsider obtaining some professional help, Regan. You know we’ve researched this for you. All you have to do is say the word. We’d get you home and—”

  “Reed, I’ll come home. Soon. But not yet.”

  “Well, I can’t force you to listen. But I’ll call again tomorrow or the next day. If anything happens—anything at all—you know where to reach me. In the meantime, do the best to take care of yourself. And Regan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take your vitamins, dear.”

  Cole heard the phone hang up—one telephone, not two. From where—her bedroom? The library? He heard her gulp. When Regan severed the connection, the extension clattered down as if she’d dropped the phone on the receiver.

  If it’d been him, he would have slammed it. Bile rose in his throat. Take your vitamins. Why, you son of a bitch.

  He hurried down the hall, worried, sure he was going to find her all rattled and shook-up.

  He found her in bed, sitting against the headboard with her knees drawn up under a wild heap of bedcovers. She was wearing a Chicago Cubs T-shirt so big it sloped down over her collarbones and dragged at her elbows. The phone call must have woken her. She obviously hadn’t been out of bed yet; her hair was all tangled and her eyes looked bruise-soft.

  When she noticed him in the doorway, she was pensively chewing on a thumbnail. “I feel like I’m in the middle of a foreign movie. I can’t make sense of the plot or actors, because nothing’s happening that I can understand. And you should know better than to eavesdrop on other people’s phone conversations, slugger. Shame on you.”

  “Don’t make jokes. Hell, did you hear him? Take your vitamins.”

  She admitted. “I heard him.”

  “He’s one calculating bastard.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not maybe.”

  She said quietly, thoughtfully, “I know he’s stiff and a little pompous and not a warm man, Cole. But when I was fifteen, I got my driver’s permit. Jake threw up his hands trying to teach me to drive. It was Reed who took me on the roads, afternoon after afternoon, pointing out—always politely—when I ran over curbs or slammed on the brakes. I crumpled the back end of his Lincoln. He took my side when Gramps would have grounded me for the rest of my life. Reed was there for me when my parents died. He was there for me both times Jake was in the hospital. Are you hearing me? It’s just not that easy to believe that Reed would ever hurt me….”

  But it was there in her eyes. Fear that hadn’t existed before she learned about the tsavorite. Doubt in the soundness of her judgment. She had trusted Jake completely. She had trusted Reed.

  Cole crossed the room, thinking that the damn woman persisted in trusting him, too. She didn’t blink, didn’t object, didn’t even show surprise when he climbed into the bed behind her. He pushed her head down, laid aside a swath of silky hair and started rubbing. Her slender nape was white and warm and all knotted up.

  The whole bed smelled like her sleepy warm skin. Being anywhere near her bed was begging trouble. Touching her was begging torture. He was afraid Regan never had, never would, develop any sense of danger. She just kept talking.

  “And it�
��s not just that I know him. It’s that there are honestly two ways of interpret that phone call. Maybe a calculating rat was calling to make sure his prey was still doped up.” Her spine arched for the massage of his thumbs down her vertebrae. “But it’s just as possible that a friend was calling to naturally express concern. You don’t know how I was for the last six weeks, Shepherd. You weren’t around me. Especially when things first started happening, I was freaked. I didn’t like waking up to every appliance banging and jangling and screaming at four in the morning. I didn’t like losing whole pockets of time. Half the time he saw me, I was a shook-up cookie. And when I consider the phone call from that perspective...nothing Reed said was anything but caring.”

  Cole heard her. Regan was always going to think things out with perception and sensitivity. Her emotional priority was to know the truth about who she could and couldn’t trust.

  His perspective was a tad less esoteric. Some jerk out there had Regan picked out for prey. Her protection was the only bottom line that mattered.

  “Before this phone call, princess, did Reed know I was still here? Did he ask?”

  “I don’t remember….” Her head flopped down, limp as a kitten, when he kneaded her shoulders. “But I’m sure I told Trafer you were here. He and Dorinsky have been calling as often as Reed, and they talk with each other every day. Why? Is there some reason I shouldn’t have told them?”

  “No.” But Regan remembered her saying that hardly a day had passed without some kind of crisis, right up until the break-in of the desert home. Since then, he’d been with her. The incidents had stopped. The creep had been damned good at preying on Regan when she was alone and vulnerable. She wasn’t such easy prey when another body was around.

  Like his.

  “Cole? What are you thinking?”

  He cupped and molded and rubbed her supple skin, thinking that he was aroused as hell. That being anywhere near Regan was dangerous to his physical and mental health. That he hadn’t flown in days, that he hadn’t given his life in Chicago a thought, and that sticking around here any longer involved risk. The kind of risk he hated. The kind of risk he never took. The kind of risk he’d never wanted.

  But damned if he could see another choice. Regan was trapped in a no-man’s land. What was she supposed to do? Take some thirty-year-old journal to the cops and expect them to act? Head back to Chicago, where there were three old codgers prepared to tell anyone that she was an unbalanced kook? Who would listen to her? Right now, she had proof of absolutely nothing.

  “Regan,” he said tactfully, “it would take you half the time to read the rest of the journals if two people were doing it.”

  “True.”

  “There’s no way Sam could get back with a report from the lab for a few more days. And my deck’s been cleared for a short stretch. I could stay. If it would be all right with you.”

  Her head was down. He couldn’t see her expression. It made him uneasy when he couldn’t see her expression, because she was hard enough to figure out when he could. Cole cleared his throat, but his voice still came out as if his tongue was wrapped in gravel. “No funny business implied, princess. I’ve been teasing you for five years about expanding your sex life. I’m not teasing you now. You stick with your white knights. The best I can be is a friend. Nothing would happen. I’ll guarantee it.”

  Finally she spoke. “You’re sure that’s how it will be?”

  “I’m positive,” Cole said reassuringly.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Hey. Remember what the doc said? You’re supposed to rest. You’re supposed to be tired. You’re supposed to be weak and frail and anemic.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you need a break, Shepherd?”

  “I’m trying to tell you that I’m dying of heat, thirst, sore feet and general exhaustion.”

  “Poor baby,” Regan crooned sympathetically. The bully responded by shoving her canvas hat over her eyes.

  When she pushed up the hat, Cole flopped in the dust beside her. He took a long draft of water from a canteen, wiped his mouth on the edge of his sleeve and handed her the container. “You can either sit down for a few minutes or I can sit on you.” He offered both alternatives companionably.

  “Actually, this is the place we were headed for.”

  “You mean we don’t have to hike another ninety-seven miles this morning?”

  “Quit complaining, you lazy cretin, and take a look.”

  From the top of the knoll, the vista around them was breathtaking. The sun shone on the striated color of the distant hills—an artist’s palette of blues and greens, violets and reds and yellows. The colors were sharp and true this early in the day. By sunset they would appear as muted, softened pastels. On a cloudy day they could disappear altogether. No day was the same in the Painted Desert. It was partly why she loved it.

  Over the past three days, she’d shown Cole all the secret things she loved about the desert. The humor of a floppy-tailed ground cuckoo, scuttling across the red sand. The race of a sparrow hawk on a morning flight. Mule deer and jackrabbits and horned lizards so ugly they could star in a grade-B science-fiction movie.

  She’d shown him a delicate white primrose hiding on the side of a rock. She’d shown him the marvel, the magic, of the big soft orange flowers that grew incomprehensibly on a bed of sharp spines—prickly pear cactus. After the rain, lupine and Indian paintbrush had just exploded with color.

  “How can you not love it?” she scolded him.

  “I never said I didn’t love it. If you can’t have mountains, this is pretty nice.”

  “Nice. Nice. I give you one of the most special places on the entire earth, and you give me nice.”

  Amused, Cole leaned back on his elbows. “If you’re expecting poetry out of me, princess, you’ve got a long wait. Should you by any chance be hungry, however, I might be convinced to produce something as unpoetic and practical as a granola bar….”

  She dove for the package in his front shirt pocket before he even finished speaking.

  “Try not to eat the paper, too.”

  “Shut up, slugger.”

  “If you keep eating this way, you’re going to be three hundred waddling-fat pounds by next week. Some hero’ll come along on a famous white steed, looking for a princess. He’ll look at you and think, not her. She won’t fit on my horse.”

  Regan grinned. And kept eating. Predictably Cole, even as he warned her of more dire consequences, coaxed her to take a second granola bar before she’d finished the first.

  For the past few days, she’d be the first to admit that she’d been sleeping like a baby, eating like a pig and spending the mornings on ambling hikes or a dip in the pool. The decadently lazy schedule was paying off. Her jeans were starting to fit again. The hollows were disappearing under her cheeks. And she was regaining physical strength by leaps and bounds.

  She closed her eyes, feeling the sun on her eyelids, the stray drift of sand from a spring-warm breeze. They had to go back, and she knew it. Their days hadn’t been all play. In the heat of the afternoon, she and Cole closed up in the air-conditioned library, systematically studying the journals.

  So far, although she continued to learn about her grandfather, they’d uncovered nothing about the other three gemstones. So far, Sam hadn’t received the lab report on her vitamins, and no information had turned up on the strange sabotage problem that had affected Cole’s plane. Reed called every day, and so did Trafer and Dorinsky, all pushing for her to come home. So far, Regan didn’t know how to respond to any of them, except to pretend there’d been no change in her health and to promise she’d return ‘soon’.

  All those ‘so fars’ were beginning to chafe. She wanted answers. She wanted to know who had drugged her and why; she wanted to know what he planned to do next; she wanted to act. Only first she needed hard facts, partly because the police had no reason to believe her without proof, but also for her own peace of mind. What she’d learned about Gramps and Reed forced
her to question her whole basis of judgment, and a bullet had to be easier than this slow, insidious poison of feeling constantly suspicious. The whole situation was the pits.

  With one major exception.

  Initially, Regan mused, she had been against Cole staying. It preyed on her pride that he’d been dragged into her problems. She wasn’t a leaner. No one was responsible for Regan Thorne but Regan Thorne, and Cole mistakenly saw her as fragile. She was admittedly soft rather than tough, but so was silk—one of nature’s most enduring fabrics. She didn’t brake for a little rough road.

  He wouldn’t listen. He never listened. The Lord knew how she’d fallen in love with such a dreadfully confusing man. A woman had to be sly, tricky and evasive to successfully hide any fears from slugger. Hiding love was harder. Nothing he told her about himself had ever been true. He was everything he said he wasn’t—a good man, a natural protector, a man of values and honor and deeply felt emotions. Over the past days, he’d been wonderful to her—an easy companion and a merciless teaser, a sharer of secrets and a thoughtful friend.

  A hundred times, she saw something else in his eyes. Something dark and wanting. Something diamond bright and as fleeting as light on the facet of a gem. The air changed like mist and magic whenever they were close. She couldn’t be the only one feeling it.

  But Regan wasn’t positive. These days she had reason to doubt her judgment about men, and Cole hadn’t touched her or tried. He’d set clear rules of emotional distance. She’d already raised holy hell with his life, and she refused to cause him more.

  So she hadn’t.

  But the devil did tempt her. And this morning, the unprincipled bounder at her side was being particularly provoking.

  She saw the chocolate bar waving three inches from her nose. A Kit Kat. Since she was four years old, she’d been addicted to Kit Kat bars. She sighed, heavily and with great disgust. “If I take that, you’re going to call me a greedy pig. You’re going to make snide comments about my ravenous appetite. You’re going to make sick, subtle references to the size of the Titanic.”