by Gayle Wilson
Even in the dimness she was aware that his eyes widened. He recovered quickly, but no one could completely control that kind of involuntary physiological response. That he had reacted to the invitation at all was promising.
Promising of what? she wondered, disgusted with her near-Pavlovian response to his every action.
“Today?”
“Dinner,” she said patiently.
“Is that what’s in the sack?”
“It could be.”
“And you’re suggesting that we sit down and have dinner together?”
“It isn’t all that complicated. I’m going to fix something to eat for dinner. Do you want to join me?” she asked, still feigning patience.
That same movement she noticed before touched the corner of his mouth. “Actually, it might be better if I waited until after dark to leave. Since you’re concerned about security.”
“I’m not concerned about security. I just wondered why you aren’t.”
“I told you. I wasn’t followed.”
“Then there’s no reason to wait until after dark to leave, is there?”
This time he laughed. And again that small frisson of sexual reaction stirred deep within her lower body.
“You’re a damned ungracious hostess, Elizabeth. Whatever happened to Southern hospitality?”
“I don’t know. I’m not Southern.”
“I swear there’s a trace of an accent.”
“Hardly,” she said dismissively. “Are you staying or not?”
She could tell he was fighting another smile, which made her regret her impulsive invitation. Maybe he would refuse.
“Of course I am. I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve had a home-cooked meal.”
Chapter Two
“You never told me what you’re doing now,” she said, lifting her wineglass to rest the globe against her cheek.
It was something he had seen her do a hundred times. One of a dozen gestures that had been achingly familiar during the few short hours they had spent together.
He couldn’t explain why he’d accepted her invitation to dinner. No more than he imagined she could have explained why she’d issued it.
Curiosity, perhaps. A longing to recapture something that had been lost. And he refused, even to himself, to articulate what that was.
At least her tension, which had made the first few minutes difficult for both of them, had gradually dissipated. The wine they’d consumed while he’d watched her cook and during the course of the meal might have had more to do with that than any relaxation of the strain their long separation had caused.
After all, he rarely drank, and Elizabeth had never had a head for alcohol. It was one of the small, endearing cracks in the facade of absolute control she’d assumed while she was with the CIA.
It must have been hard being one of the few women on the team. Not that she’d ever had any reason to apologize to any of them for her femininity.
“This and that,” he said aloud. “Consulting mostly.”
“Privately?”
“Of course.”
He had no desire to be at the government’s beck and call. In his opinion, what the agency had done to Griff’s people had bordered on the criminal, which was why the idea that Steiner had been the one who had passed on the information about Jorgensen nagged at him. He didn’t buy altruistic motivations from anyone at the CIA. Not any longer.
“How about you?” he asked, lifting his own glass to finish the remaining swallow of wine it contained.
“You know what I’m doing. Why pretend that you don’t?”
He looked at her over the rim before he lowered the glass, allowing his lips to slant into a smile.
“Convention,” he suggested. “It’s not considered polite to spy on people.”
“Unless you are a spy, of course.”
“Of course,” he agreed calmly.
“So why spy on me?”
“I told you. Griff wanted you to know that the company thinks Jorgensen’s alive.”
“But you weren’t totally sure I needed to know that.”
“Because I’m totally sure he’s dead.”
“Did you kill him?”
No one else on the team would have asked him that question. Not even Griff. For a split second he considered refusing to answer it, but in some oblique way she was the one person who had a right to know.
“Yes,” he said calmly, setting his glass back on the table.
She nodded as if that confession were only what she had expected. “Did it help?”
Had it? At least the bastard wasn’t blowing people to shreds anymore.
Except, according to Steiner, he was. Or someone using his methodology was.
“There’s always someone willing to take their place.”
With the change in pronouns, he had broadened the discussion to include not only the German-born terrorist he’d killed, but all those who preyed on innocents to advance their various and sundry political causes.
“Or yours.”
“That has occurred to me.”
It took her a second, but then she had always been very bright. “You think Griff is using you? Because you were their expert on Jorgensen?”
“I think Steiner is using him.”
“Griff isn’t anyone’s fool. Not even the CIA’s.”
She put her glass back on the table without finishing her wine. Then she stood, the movement abrupt. She laid her napkin down and picked up her plate and flatware. As she reached across the table to remove his, she met his eyes.
“You aren’t going after whoever this is, are you?”
“It isn’t my job,” he said.
She completed the motion she’d begun, stacking his plate atop hers before she looked up at him again.
“There was a time when it wouldn’t have been ‘a job.’”
There had been, he thought, but it had been almost too long ago to remember what that felt like.
“There was a time when we wouldn’t be sitting here acting like a couple of strangers forced to have an uncomfortable dinner together,” he said. “Things change.”
She held his eyes a few seconds before she nodded. Then she turned, carrying the dishes into the kitchen.
When she disappeared through the doorway, he leaned back in his chair, taking a breath to relieve the sudden tightness in his chest. It wasn’t the only constriction he was aware of. Although his jeans were well worn, their fabric thin with age, they were suddenly uncomfortably restrictive.
The strength of his erection was unexpected. And unwanted. There could be few things as embarrassing as the undeniable physical evidence of how much you still wanted the woman you had walked out on.
There was a time when we wouldn’t be sitting here acting like a couple of strangers forced to have an uncomfortable dinner together.
That had been a hell of an understatement. From the day they’d met, they had both been aware of the sexual pull between them. They had later admitted knowing even then that it would eventually lead to intimacy. What neither of them had suspected was how strong that attraction would prove to be. Or how powerfully addictive it would become.
Which was why he hadn’t trusted himself to see her in all these years. If things had been different…
They hadn’t been. They weren’t now.
“I could make coffee.”
He glanced up to find her standing in the doorway. They had eaten by candlelight, something that was ritual. She had turned on the light in the kitchen when she’d carried the dishes there, and she was now silhouetted against its glow.
She had lost weight, he noticed again, although there had always been something about her figure, at least when clothed, that hinted at the slim, almost boyish fitness of a well-conditioned athlete. The short sun-streaked hair now emphasized that quality without making her seem any less feminine.
With their history, there was probably nothing that could do that. Not for him.
“
I have to go,” he said, pushing up from the table before he remembered the too revealing tightness of his jeans.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be obvious if he stayed in the candlelit dimness of the dining room. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason he should resist the urge to close the distance between them.
During dinner he had occasionally caught the faintest hint of her perfume, its fragrance released by the warmth of the sultry Mississippi night’s humidity against her skin. It had been evocative of nights when that same scent had filled his nostrils while his lips trailed kisses over the silken smoothness of her body. There was no need to add the temptation of physical nearness to the potent force of those memories.
“Thank you for bringing me Griff’s warning,” she said formally.
She raised her hand, pushing back the hair that had fallen over her forehead. The gesture was quick, hinting at nervousness. It seemed that the earlier strain was back, although her voice had been perfectly level.
Then she held the same hand out to him. He might have been amused at her offer to shake hands with him if he hadn’t still been dealing with all those other emotions. Ones that didn’t lend themselves to amusement.
It would be far better to stay on this side of the room. To ignore the proffered hand.
Better perhaps, but not possible.
He pushed his chair back and took the four or five steps that would bring him to stand directly in front of her. There was enough difference in their heights that she had to tilt her head to meet his eyes.
As she did, he took the hand she held out to him. After dealing with the assault of his own emotions, it should have been gratifying to find that her fingers were both cold and trembling.
It wasn’t. It made him want to fold them into the warmth of his or to press them against his suddenly increased heartbeat. Or, even more tempting, to use them to draw her to him. To put his arms around her and hold her close, comforting whatever made her tremble, if only for a moment.
As it always had with them, however, one thing would surely lead to another, even after six years. They had come too far to destroy whatever peace of mind either of them had achieved in that time. That wasn’t why he had come.
“Be careful,” he said without releasing her hand.
“I have been. I just didn’t know why. Not until you showed up.”
Tonight her eyes were more green than hazel, he decided, examining her face in the revealing light spilling from the kitchen. And the years had wrought remarkably few changes there. Maybe the lines at the corners of her eyes had been graven a little more deeply and the delicate curve of her cheekbone had become slightly more pronounced.
Her nose was still crooked, having been broken in some high school soccer game. There was a small patch of sunburned skin across its narrow bridge, emphasizing the freckles she never bothered to conceal with makeup.
“Thank you for inviting me to dinner,” he said.
“Thank you for staying.” This time her voice was touched with humor.
Hearing it, he smiled at her. Then, the commonplaces taken care of, neither of them seemed to know what to do next.
It had almost been easier the first time he’d walked away, he thought before he recognized that for the lie it was. There had been nothing harder than that in his life. And nothing more necessary.
He released her hand and quickly pushed past her through the doorway. It was narrow enough that his body brushed hers, his shoulder turning hers slightly.
He didn’t look back as he crossed the kitchen. As a precaution, he flicked off the light, using the switch beside the back door to plunge the room into darkness. Then he stepped out into the honeysuckle-scented night, closing behind him a door he should never have reopened.
ELIZABETH HAD STOOD in the kitchen a long time before she finally walked back into the dining room. The candles had burned long enough that they were beginning to sputter, wax pooling at the base of the holder.
In the darkness after she’d extinguished them, she put her palms flat on the surface of the table, leaning forward tiredly, her head bowed. She didn’t understand why she was so exhausted. After all, nothing had happened. Nothing at all.
Rafe had been given a message for her from Griff, and he had delivered it. Other than his comment about a couple of strangers forced to have an uncomfortable dinner together there had been almost nothing of a personal nature in their conversation.
Not unless you considered her question about whether he had killed Jorgensen personal. He hadn’t seemed to. He had reacted to that exactly as he had to everything she’d said the last time she’d talked to him. Contained. Controlled. Cold.
That coldness had been one of the things that had been so hard to accept. She could understand his anger with the agency, but not why it had also been directed at her. As she’d reminded him tonight, she’d had nothing to do with Gunther Jorgensen.
She straightened, the same questions that had circled endlessly through her brain all those years ago there again. She had found no explanation for what he had done then. Nor was she likely to now.
Why the hell had he shown up here now? she thought with a surge of fury. And why the hell had she invited him to dinner? It seemed that in the silent darkness she could still feel him, just as she had been aware of him watching her all week without understanding what she was feeling.
Now the sense of him was here. Inside her home, her sanctuary. A physical invasion that stirred more memories than she was prepared to deal with.
She turned her head, looking across the dark kitchen to the back door, reminding herself of the reality of his departure. She walked over to that door, turning the latch and hooking the chain into its slot.
She didn’t look out into the night revealed through the panes of glass that comprised the door’s top half. Rafe had known as well as she did that if he had wanted to stay, she wouldn’t have refused.
He hadn’t wanted to. And that in itself should be a sufficient answer for all the questions she had wrestled with since the last time he’d left her.
“DAMN IT TO HELL,” she said, the expletive muttered under her breath. Not that there was anyone to hear if she had shouted it, which was what she felt like doing.
She’d overslept. Considering the number of hours she’d spent tossing and turning before she’d fallen asleep, that was hardly surprising. On top of that, she had forgotten to set the alarm. And now she was faced with the nearest thing to a morning rush hour Magnolia Grove had to offer.
A logging truck had pulled out onto the two-lane just ahead of her. The red flag at the end of the longest trunk it carried fluttered directly in front of her car as the heavily ladened truck slowed to pull the grade. She glanced at her watch, realizing that despite how much she had hurried to get dressed and out of the house, she was going to be at least a quarter of an hour late in opening the office.
No big deal, she told herself.
Unless he was in court, Darrell never showed up before ten or eleven, his summer seersucker already rumpled from the twenty-mile drive in from the antebellum home the Connell family had lived in since it had been built. Neither of them had any appointments scheduled for this morning. There would be no one waiting for her, so she couldn’t quite figure out why she was so upset by the idea that she was going to be late.
Maybe because Rafe Sinclair could simply waltz back into her life after six years and throw everything about her well-ordered existence into disarray. Not only emotionally, but professionally as well. She didn’t like admitting he had the power to do that.
She eased across the center line, trying to see if she could pass the truck on the straightaway leading down the other side of the rise they’d just topped. Typical of her morning, there was a line of cars approaching from the opposite direction.
She moved the SUV back into position behind the dangling logs, reconciling herself to the reality of the situation. She was going to be late, and it was ridiculous to let it upset her.
It woul
dn’t have, she admitted, if she hadn’t already been thrown by last night. And she couldn’t understand why she had been. It wasn’t as if they’d spent the meal talking about old times. That was something they had seemed to agree on—tacitly, of course. There was no point in dredging up the past, not even the good parts of it.
There had been plenty of those, she admitted. Enough that what had followed had been painful in the extreme.
After the embassy bombing in Amsterdam, Rafe had been furious with the government’s restraint in going after the people responsible. Since he had been on the scene of the attack, dealing with the cost of that particular act of terrorism up close and very personally, she certainly couldn’t blame him. None of them did.
Not even for his decision to disassociate himself from an agency that refused to let him track down the killers of those dozens of people. Griff had tried to reason with him, arguing that despite the agency’s restrictions in this case, he could do more by working with the team, which had been expressly created to deal with those problems, than from without.
Nothing Cabot could say had changed Rafe’s mind. And she had never blamed him for that decision. It was the one that followed that she’d never been able to understand or to forgive. The one to disassociate himself from her as well.
It made no sense. It hadn’t then, and it didn’t now. She had even offered to leave the CIA with him, something which, looking back on that time from a distance of several years, caused a wave of humiliation to wash over her.
That offer had been against every principle she’d ever thought she held. After all, it hadn’t been easy reaching the level she had attained in that male-dominated agency. She had been one of the few women Griff tapped for the team, and she had proposed to give it all up to be with a man.
A man who had thrown the proffered sacrifice back in her teeth, disappearing without any explanation of why he didn’t want her to come with him. And apparently without any regret.
She took a breath, deliberately loosening the death grip her fingers had taken around the wheel. Water over the dam. Over and done with a long time ago.