The Baby Chase

by Jennifer Greene

  Even as he devoured dinner, though, his eyes were on her. She thought he might be just a teensy bit afraid she’d swing from the chandeliers at any time if he didn’t watch her—even though the room didn’t have any chandeliers. Her room was down the hall from his. No chandeliers there, either. Gabe had set her up in the same hotel he was staying at, specifically in a room on the same floor, and then suggested they have dinner together via room service. With any other man, she’d at least have considered that he might want to make something of that situation.

  Gabe rolled his eyes as she spooned in another gooey mouthful, and she thought, No. If Gabe even remembered they’d shared a kiss hot enough to cause spontaneous combustion, it didn’t show. He was treating her no different than if she were a pesky younger sister—with chicken pox.

  When he finished eating, he crossed over to the locked minibar by the bed, turned the key and pulled out a tiny bottle of Scotch. “Do you want anything to drink?”

  “I’d love a glass of wine, if it’s in there,” she admitted.

  “Wine? On top of a hot fudge sundae?” He shuddered.

  “I’ve got a cast-iron stomach. More to the point, I’m afraid if I have coffee, I’ll be too keyed up to sleep. But it’s no big deal, if there’s no wine in there—”

  “There is.” He rummaged around in the extravagant goodies and pulled out a wine carafe, about large enough to hold two glasses’ worth. “I have no idea if it’s any good, though.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Coming from the Fortune family, you’d think I’d know the difference between a screw-top and a cork quality of wine. But all any alcohol does is make me sleepy,” she admitted wryly. “Gabe…what do you think is the connection between Monica Malone and this Tammy?”

  “So far, I haven’t found one. Monica had a long history of going after whatever she wanted, by fair means or foul, so her tie to this woman could be anything. But I admit I’ve wondered if their relationship was somehow linked to your family.”

  Rebecca blinked. “You think that’s likely?”

  “I think the one consistent thread in Monica’s life was a long, personal vendetta against your family. She was obsessed with your father for years, to the point of kidnapping his son when she couldn’t have a child by him herself. She was behind the theft of the secret youth formula—we know she hired people to break into the lab, know she was actively involved in Allie’s stalker. There just sems no limit to her neurotic obsession and jealousy of your family.”

  “Then your brother is accused of murder where this woman’s name suddenly pops up…it seems like a lot of coincidences. But so far I know of no tie. From the computer records we’ve picked up so far, I’d guess this Tammy is pretty familiar with living on the edge. Her name shows up out of nowhere, yet there’s no employment record, no steady address, and somehow she’s coming up with sudden influxes of money and credit. Reads like the résumé of a scam artist to me.”

  “That would make sense. Especially considering the contents of that letter. Something had Monica ticked off. Maybe this Tammy was trying to blackmail her about something. And darn it, something about her name keeps ringing bells for me, but I can’t place what it is.”

  “Well, I’ve got staff working on the Tammy Diller name at home. Her past will surface. It always does. Secrets never stay buried, especially if they’re dirty ones. It just may take some time to come up with more information.”

  And time was the one thing they were short of, Rebecca thought. She plopped the empty sundae bowl on the serving tray and curled back up with her wineglass. “So…when are we going to Las Vegas?”

  “We aren’t going anywhere, shorty.”

  “Hey! Did I find the clue leading us to Tammy? Did I find the next lead locating her in Las Vegas? Hello? Did anyone notice I’ve been more than a little useful so far? Speaking for myself, love bug, I can travel alone. But it seems pretty silly not to team up, when we’re both trying to dig up the same information.”

  Gabe poured the Scotch into the hotel’s water glass and slugged it down, his eyes on her face like a blanket on a bed. “This Tammy may not have a criminal record, but everything I’ve picked up on her so far indicates she’s just been lucky about not getting caught. She’s fishier than a trout, Red.”

  “Yeah? So what’s your point? Technically, that’s good news—or least helpful news. She sounds more and more like a serious suspect in Monica’s murder to me, even if we don’t have hard facts yet.”

  “The point,” Gabe said in his patient-maestro voice, “is that I want you to go home. I think she’s bad news. And I think if there’s the slightest prayer she’s involved in Monica’s murder, she isn’t going to appreciate anyone asking questions or poking in her past. You’d be better off going home and concentrating on book-writing and babies.”

  “I would…in fact, I’d be thrilled to do just that…if my brother weren’t still sitting in a jail cell.” Quietly she set down the wineglass. She’d expected this lecture, figured he’d never have invited her in for dinner—with him, alone—if he didn’t feel obligated to have this private talk. She struggled again to honestly explain her feelings to him. “Gabe, I was petrified this afternoon. Scared of everything I saw on Randolph Street. Scared of Snark, and yeah, that was going okay, but don’t think I didn’t appreciate your showing up when you did. I was in way, way over my head.”

  “Dammit, red, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  She nodded…and then gently, firmly, continued. “But Jake is my brother. He’s family. And I don’t care what I have to do—or what I’m scared of. Until his name is cleared, there is nothing and no one that could keep me from trying to help him.”

  Gabe listened, she mused. He just didn’t seem to get it. A strange, silvery-soft feeling clutched at her heart as she thoughtfully studied him. She cared about him. Personally cared, in a way that had nothing to do with her brother, nothing to do with the odd “bedmates” they made as far as working together. Before, of course, she never had a chance to really get to know him.

  He was tired, she realized. Those dramatic dark eyes seemed almost hauntingly black when he was exhausted. It was the first time she’d ever seen him even close to relaxed, sprawled in a chair, his hair rumpled, his chin with a shadow of whiskers. Even when he was dead beat, that jaw had a stubborn thrust—he was undoubtedly marshaling another argument to convince her to leave. She tried another tack—she hungered to learn more about him, anyway. “Gabe, you don’t have a brother yourself? Or family that you feel that way about?”

  He answered her easily enough. “I have family. I just grew up in a different world than you did. I came from the rough side of New Orleans. My parents fought like pit bulls. My oldest brother took the road of petty crime. The next one split from home as soon as he could, and never came back. I escaped by joining the army. From everything I saw growing up, people who claim to love each other do more to destroy than any battle scenes I’ve ever been part of—and I’ve been part of a few. So, no. I don’t have family I ‘feel that way’ about.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  He looked startled at her response. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

  Rebecca thought there was. She’d often brought up babies because it was such a predictable way to get a rise out of Gabe. From the start, they’d bantered and bickered about her idealism versus his “more realistic” view of life. Teasing him for being such a hard-core cynic was fun…but she hadn’t known about his upbringing before. It sounded loveless and harsh and lonely.

  She’d always believed in love and family and children, and, yeah, even in the core goodness of mankind. She had never considered her values idealistic or altruistic, but simply the gut core of everything that mattered in life. And she couldn’t help aching for Gabe, who’d been deprived of them.

  “Now what are you looking at me like that for?” he asked suspiciously.

  “No reason. I was just wondering if you hadn’t found someone to
love in all this time.”

  “I’ve found plenty to love, shorty. I just never had rose-colored glasses about expecting any kind of ‘romantic love’ to last. Life’s treated me damn well. I never needed illusions to make it prettier.” He abruptly frowned, as if he were confounded by how the conversation had gotten sidetracked in such an irrelevant direction. “Back to the subject of your going home on the next flight out—”

  She uncoiled from the chair and stood up. The effect of the long day—and that huge dinner—suddenly hit her with the power of a sedative. She’d snatched only a few hours’ sleep in the past forty-eight hours, and bruises and stress were making her feel more battered than a whipped dog.

  “Now, Gabe,” she said lightly, “Don’t get your liver in an uproar, but I’m not taking the first flight out tomorrow—going anywhere. As fast as my head hits a pillow, I plan to be comatose for the next twelve hours.”

  He lurched out of his chair, too, so swiftly that she suspected he was downright thrilled to end this tête-à-tête. “Sleep’s a good idea. You really look whipped.”

  “Please. I can’t take any more extravagant compliments. They go straight to my head.”

  The devil had an unrepentant grin. “I wasn’t insulting you—”

  She corrected him dryly. “You’re always insulting me.”

  “Well, you do look tired. And I think the only thing that went straight to your head was that half glass of wine. Where’d you put your shoes? And have you got your room key?”

  “They’re around here somewhere.” She glanced around, but somehow ended up searching his face instead of the room. Somehow, before, she’d mistaken the depths in those dark eyes for coldness, in stead of loneliness. Gabe believed in honor, responsibility, duty. Even when he was weary, his posture was contained, formal, and as rigid as a soldier’s, reflecting the values he’d found in life to sustain him. He’d found values. It just didn’t sound to Rebecca as if he’d ever found love.

  She meant to bend down to pick up her shoes, and yet somehow found her arms raising up instead of going down. Because he’d plucked her room key from the table to hand it to her, he was physically close at that instant. Close enough to hug, and the impulse to hug him was suddenly irresistible. Her heart lined up a set of fine excuses. She hated to think about his growing up, trapped in such an angry and lonely and violent environment. And even if he drove her nuts with his chauvinistic tendency to protect any woman in his path, he’d been there for her over the past few days. And…

  Well, damn. None of those reasons were more than spinning wheels. She needed to hug him. There was really nothing more complicated about it than that.

  Two seconds after she wrapped her arms around his neck, the room’s air-conditioning suffered a massive malfunction. The temperature rose at least thirty degrees. The tropics couldn’t be any hotter than the heat spontaneously combusting between them. It couldn’t possibly have been generated by her. She’d never intended anything but an innocent, impulsive, instinctive hug.

  When his mouth latched on to hers, fused on hers, all innocent thoughts scattered like wind. Nothing innocent could possibly be this much fun. Or this much danger.

  She wasn’t precisely sure how a hug turned into a kiss. She definitely couldn’t analyze what happened after that. He tasted like that warm Scotch—not nice, not sweet, but tangy and potent and heady. She tasted a slam of hunger. She tasted a man trying to warn her, thoroughly and explicitly, that a grown man never anted in a poker game for anything as tame as kisses…and she was sure as hell old enough to know better than to tease a tiger.

  She wasn’t teasing. Maybe she should have remembered the drowning-danger sensation from their first embrace, but this was so different. Maybe no one had kissed this tiger in a long time—at least not a kiss with caring and emotion invested in it—because her Gabe just seemed to explode. Not with roughness. But with responsive need.

  His hands roamed her sides and back, clutching, stroking, sliding over the silk of her dress as if he could inhale her closer to him. Her breasts crushed against his harder chest, molding against his contours. He smelled like hot sun and a wild natural wind and like soap that swept clean any illusions she’d had about men before. Gabe was like no other man she’d ever known. Her feelings were like nothing she’d ever experienced.

  She’d never had a submissive bone in her whole body, yet this yielding feeling wasn’t like submitting. It was like belonging, like her bones were supposed to turn liquid for Gabe, like all the strength she valued in herself as a woman was important…but not with him.

  One of his hands climbed up, tangled and fisted in her hair. She tasted his tongue. Her neck began to ache from the pressure of his kisses, yet his tongue was like wet velvet, intimate, seeking, treasuring the dark secrets he found in her mouth. Somewhere she heard a faucet dripping. Somewhere she saw city lights flash from a slit in the curtains. Somewhere she felt his arousal, pulsing, alive, growing hard and hot against her abdomen.

  She couldn’t breathe. Didn’t want to. This wasn’t wrong. Her whole life, she’d trusted her instincts over facts. Her whole life, she’d believed when an instinct promised her that something was right. Heat surged through her veins, and desire more powerful than she was prepared for or understood, yet her thundering heart kept making her the insane promise that it was okay, with Gabe, that even admitting to fear was right with him.

  His hands roamed, caressing, claiming and learning her through the slippery silk fabric, roamed farther down. He cupped her fanny, ground her into him intimately, the caress more intimate, more bluntly sexual, than…

  She yelped. Undoubtedly startling herself more than him. The yelp was certainly no sensible objection to how fast this forest fire was spinning way, way out of her control. But she had a mortifying-size bruise on her fanny, from the fall in Monica’s house. And when he pressed on that spot, she couldn’t stop her involuntary response.

  Gabe reared back. “I hurt you?”

  “No. That is, yes. But not like you’re thinking.” There were so many lush sensations swirling in her mind that she couldn’t seem to say anything coherent. “I’m fine. You just accidentally touched a bruise.”

  “I just deliberately touched a hell of a lot more than a bruise.” And he dropped his hands faster than if he’d been handling hot potatoes. His voice was hoarse, his breathing labored, and the look in his eyes was pure black fire. “Dammit, Rebecca.”

  “Dammit, Gabe,” she echoed, but her voice was soft. She wanted to make him smile. “You’re one heck of a kisser, love bug. Don’t blame me for enjoying it.”

  “I’m not blaming you for anything. Neither of us asked for the chemistry. I just think we both know that letting this go any farther—or happen again—is a real bad idea.”

  “We’re not exactly alike,” she murmured.

  “We have as much in common as a butterfly and a rock.” Swiftly he located her room key again, wrapped her fist around it, then forced the straps of her heels in her other hand. “I’m walking you to your room,” he said curtly.

  He walked her to her room and saw her inside, with no conversation and a dark gloom of a scowl that warned her away from trying any. Once inside, she tossed her shoes and key on the bed, then leaned back against the closed door and let loose an uneasy and rattling-huge sigh.

  Gabe was right about their having nothing in common. His reasons for being antifamily were clearer now, but understanding his background didn’t change anything. She wanted babies. She wanted a family. She wanted real love—or nothing—and there was no purpose in involving herself with a man who didn’t value families and commitment as she did.

  Yet her body was still shivery, still alive and awake, from those wild, wanton kisses with him. Her pulse was still racing; her knees still felt liquid.

  Maybe it was just sex. Maybe she was so shook up only because she’d never had a man charge her hormones anything like this before. And Gabe had persisted in being bluntly honest with her. He was the
wrong man for her to get involved with.

  But that didn’t make these winsome, wild feelings disappear. And until her brother’s name was cleared, spending more time with Gabe was inevitable. Rebecca couldn’t remember ever feeling so lost and unsure. She was painfully afraid that she could get over her head real, real quickly with Gabe, unless she was very careful.

  Five

  Some might find the situation ironic, Gabe thought. He’d wanted Rebecca on the first flight leaving home for Minnesota, and instead, he was the one on that flight—alone.

  Dawn was just peeking over the horizon when he exited the airport in Minneapolis–St. Paul, lugging his laptop and a travel tote, his mood full of spit and vinegar. He never needed much sleep, and the catnap on the flight had revived him. He’d considered waking Rebecca when he made the travel arrangements, but she’d been so exhausted that he strongly suspected she would snooze the clock around. She was safe enough in that L.A. hotel. He’d slipped a note under the door so that she’d know he was gone, but where was definitely none of that redhead’s business.

  It was her mama’s business, though.

  Less than an hour later, he’d retrieved his black Lexus—no way he’d have abandoned his antique Morgan in a riffraff airport parking lot—copped some fast-food breakfast, and was winging through the lobby of the Fortune Cosmetics offices. A security guard cleared his ID before allowing him access to the private elevator—the one shooting up to the floor with the testing labs, and Kate Fortune’s personal office.

  Technically, Jake Fortune was paying the bills for this investigation job, and while Jake was being held without bail for this murder charge, the checks were signed by Sterling Foster, the family retainer. Gabe was expected to report information and results to both of them. And did. But working with the Fortunes was never simple, and Gabe always understood who held the real power and control cards in the family.

  Kate Fortune expected to know anything and everything that affected her offspring. She preferred regular face-to-face contact, couldn’t stand phones, and if that was an inconvenient nuisance, she paid handsomely for the expense of having things done her way. Gabe would have catered to her, expenses or no expenses.