“You’re wet, honey. Here, let me dry you off.”
He took the towel from her and proceeded to rub her down. That he grew hard in the process did not impede his efficiency, and Stephanie began to thaw beneath his gentle ministrations.
“Thank you,” she said between teeth that chattered slightly despite the balmy temperature of the room.
Alex wrapped her up in one of the hotel’s fluffy complimentary bathrobes.
“We’ll have to act fast,” Alex told her. “Since Natalie has already run off with a baby that they planned on selling, and isn’t about to offer up her child as a pawn in this sick game, we have to find a way of getting some incriminating evidence before another poor woman loses her baby. I hate to scare you, but I think you should know that things are heating up back home.”
Stephanie couldn’t imagine them being any warmer there than they were here. “What do you mean?”
“I spoke to Darin ibn Shakir back at the Club earlier today. He had some very bad news to relate. It seems that Dr. Birkenfeld was in police custody for a short while, but an unfortunate accident allowed him to escape. Since he’s somehow managed to elude the local authorities in Royal, I’m guessing that he’s holed up here in Vegas. He’s probably the supervisor Larry was referring to.”
Not wanting to scare her any more than was absolutely necessary to ensure her own safety, Alex didn’t add that a Dr. Birkenfeld was also likely the murderer who had killed the real Dr. Beldon. The intent of this mission was to put the entire ring out of business once and for all, and that meant getting the goods on Birkenfeld. Larry Sutter was a relatively small fish in these polluted waters.
Until then, Alex vowed to remain vigilant for any sign of Birkenfeld lurking in the shadows. He had little doubt that the man was close by. His Cattleman’s sources were operating under the assumption that Birkenfeld was running not only from the police but also from some nefarious loan sharks. The fact that Natalie had absconded with a huge chunk of the money he could have used to pay off his debts surely left him in a desperate predicament.
“If you’re telling me this to scare me, it’s working,” Stephanie admitted, glancing nervously over her shoulder. “But don’t worry. I’m as committed to seeing this whole thing out as you are. I doubt if anything could be harder on me than today’s performance. Just tell me what you want me to do tomorrow and trust me not to let you down.”
Her choice of words stung. Once their mission was over, Alex feared that he would be the one to let this amazing, brave woman down. The thought pained him. He didn’t know how exactly things had become so complicated in a relationship based on pure subterfuge, but over the course of a few days Stephanie had done something no other woman had ever managed to do before. That was to get under his skin. Leading her back to bed with the caveat that they both would need a good night’s sleep to be in top form for whatever tomorrow threw at them, he knew only that things were about to get a whole lot more complicated yet. Tomorrow, the danger would be all too real.
Eleven
The day dawned bright against the desert horizon. Stephanie hadn’t slept well, but she so loved the feeling of being in Alex’s arms that she lay awake a long time reveling in the sensation of being wrapped in the protective cocoon of his strong, masculine body. Worried that her fidgeting would needlessly awaken him, she reluctantly left the warmth of the bed and rose to sit beside the window. There she pondered her future in the silence of a heart overflowing with rare self-pity.
Come what may, their little charade was drawing to a close, and life as she knew it as Alexander Kent’s wife would be over. Stephanie twisted the ring on her finger so that it caught the rays of the morning sun and reflected them upon the walls of her gilded cage. Slipping the ring off her finger, she studied the many facets that so reminded her of Alex’s personality and the tears she was determined to keep locked deep inside.
“I want you to keep it.”
Those generous and yet cold words interrupted Stephanie’s solitude. Propped up in bed on one elbow, disheveled and unshaven, Alex looked like an advertisement utilizing the raw elements of sex appeal to shamelessly peddle a product.
“I couldn’t possibly,” she assured him.
Though her voice quivered, the smile she gave him was as calm and steady as the one painted on the Mona Lisa. What was the point of telling him that every time she looked at that ring upon her finger, she felt a fraud. Their mockery of a marriage made a mockery of her feelings for him as well. Whether the offer was inspired by generosity or guilt, such a reminder was destined to bring her only certain misery.
“Come here, sweetheart.” Alex patted the empty spot beside him. “We need to talk.”
“About what?”
“Us.”
Stephanie rose from her lonely, sunrise spot. Behind her, Vegas shimmered like a rosy mirage. Having reached her own conclusions about the impossibility of carrying forth their sham of a relationship beyond the tinsel of a town built upon fantasy, she was not about to lose the last shred of dignity to which she clung. She stood her ground a good arm’s length away from the bed that tempted her to abandon her pride altogether.
“What about us?” she asked in a voice more weary than anything else.
Silhouetted against the red rising sun, Stephanie willed her backbone to keep from collapsing.
“I’ve been thinking that there’s no reason we can’t continue like this after we return home.”
Alex’s deep voice was as thick and sweet as honey straight from the comb. Hope welled up inside Stephanie’s heart and flowed over her lips without giving any consideration to the impact it might have. Her eyes grew luminous. Her voice faltered.
“Are you proposing?”
The look of surprise that crossed Alex’s face told Stephanie all she needed to know. She winced as he backpedaled all over her tender emotions.
“That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”
The echo of those words hung over them like a dying sprig of mistletoe left over from a Christmas holiday past.
As painful as it was to face the truth, Stephanie did not shyly avert her eyes nor choose her words in regard to softening their impact. “Let me get this straight. You want me to keep a ring symbolizing a commitment you’re not ready to make, a ring likely made of glass intended to fool the whole world into believing that we—”
A muscle in Alex’s jaw jumped.
“It’s real enough.”
“The diamond or the fidelity it’s meant to symbolize?”
“Don’t be coy,” Alex snapped, splaying a hand through his hair in a gesture that Stephanie had come to recognize as a sure sign of his frustration. “I’m talking about that rock on your hand. Regardless of how things work out between us, I want you to have it.”
Stephanie wasn’t particularly surprised that Alex would dismiss the possibility of marriage out of hand, but she was hurt that he would lump her into the same category as other women he had known who could be bought with expensive trinkets. Most would jump at the chance of sharing his bed on whatever terms he set forth.
“Without the benefit of marriage, the ring doesn’t mean much, does it?”
“You can hardly expect me to make that kind of commitment!” Alex exclaimed.
Where his words were a loud explosion of anger, Stephanie’s were soft with understanding.
“I never have expected anything from you.”
Looking as if he had just been hit over the head by a bag of wet cement, Alex strained to insert a note of patience into his voice.
“I’ve come to care a great deal for you, Stephanie, and I would very much like to continue seeing you once this job is over.”
“Seeing me on the side, you mean?”
Had Stephanie a tissue in her hand, she would have spit those ugly words into it and disposed of them in the nearest garbage can.
There was a sneer on Alex’s face as he posed the question, “I suppose you were expecting a mutually exclusive relationshi
p?”
“I already told you I’m not expecting anything from you—other than that you treat me with some dignity until we accomplish what we set out to do here.”
It came as no shock that Alex wouldn’t want to give up the carefree lifestyle he’d enjoyed before he’d known her. Stephanie was surprised, however, that he wanted to continue seeing her when their mission was completed and he was under no obligation to pretend. If she were the kind of woman who was into playing mind games, she might have tried pressing her advantage. But Stephanie was as straightforward as the arrow Cupid had shot from his bow to cleave her poor heart in two.
Unlike Alex, she was ready to give up the best thing that had ever happened to her without a protest. If he would only allow her to hold on to her pride, she could come out of this relationship with something far more valuable than a fabulous diamond ring. In exchange for her heart, Alex had given her a sense of self-respect and belief in herself that had been missing from her previous life. Whatever obstacles life put in front of her in the future, she could always fall back on her memories of the time they’d spent together.
She lifted her proud chin in the air. A woman who could transform herself into a femme fatale in less than two weeks surely was entitled to more than the bread crumbs at life’s banquet. As tempting as it was to accept any terms he offered, she would not be his mistress.
“I think it would be best if we went our separate ways once this is over,” she told him. “You have to know that it’s not going to be easy for me to pick up the threads of a life that’s so very dull in comparison to the one you’ve introduced me to. It’ll be hard enough explaining to my students, not to mention the school board and my principal, why I faked a marriage to the most notorious playboy in Texas without further jeopardizing my virtue by continuing a dead-end relationship that is ultimately just going to leave me feeling bad about myself.”
“To hell with what people think!” he snapped. “You never have to work another day in your life if you don’t want to.”
On a certain level, Stephanie was flattered that Alex wanted to keep on seeing her. On another, it was purely insulting. He reminded her of a spoiled child being denied a toy. Wishing there was some way she could make him understand how offensive his proposition was, Stephanie sat on the edge of the bed. She reached out and cupped his chin in one hand.
His morning stubble pricked her skin, making her feel soft and feminine by comparison. She placed a kiss upon his cheek, trying to memorize his natural scent.
“I can pretend to be your wife for a few days because our cause is so very worthy, but I could never agree to becoming your mistress. Surely you understand why.”
The thunderous look on Alex’s face told her that he wasn’t interested in her reasoning. It occurred to Stephanie that this was probably the closest he had ever come to offering any woman a commitment. She had never seen him so angry. Or so vulnerable.
“Because you think you can get more out of me as my wife than my lover?” he demanded. “So you can hamstring me financially and blackmail me emotionally if I were stupid enough to be the kind of man my father was—one so desperate to fill the hole that my mother left in our lives that he let a string of gold diggers try to fill it?”
Rather than drawing away from that terrible outburst, Stephanie took Alex’s magnificent head into her lap. Never before had she glimpsed the hurt little boy peeking out from behind those sharp green eyes. It had never occurred to her that Alex avoided commitment because he had been deeply wounded in the past. She had been so worried that he would discard her without a second thought that she had accepted his playboy facade at face value.
“I’m sorry,” she said, pressing for no more than he was willing to give of his own volition.
“My mother left both of us behind with less compunction than most people would abandon a couple of stray cats,” Alex told her.
After all these years, the pain was still raw in his voice. Stephanie suspected it was the first time he’d ever bared his soul like that to another human being, and it was a tribute to his faith in her that he allowed her to continue holding him.
Soft light filtered into the room, casting a halo around the man who had just asked her to do something totally against her character. That he was flawed did not compromise her love for him. His hair was dark silk beneath her fingers. His heart a broken plaything.
“Not all women are like that,” she murmured.
Stephanie couldn’t imagine a mother abandoning her child. The fact that Alexander would make such a fine father himself made her grieve for lost opportunity.
“Some women would rather die than to give up a child,” she added.
Her thoughts went to Natalie Perez. How incredibly brave she had been to steal her baby back from the dangerous men who they themselves were here to catch.
“I know you don’t want to hear it again, but it bears repeating,” Stephanie said, continuing to caress his hair. “I love you completely. I don’t have any trouble telling you that. You’re the one who can’t seem to bring yourself to tell me the same.”
When he bucked in her arms, she put her index finger to his lips and bade him hear her out.
“It would be wrong of me to ask you to say something you don’t mean, so I won’t. No one expects someone as glamorous and worldly as you to commit to someone as down-to-earth and old-fashioned as me. I can respect that.”
Alex sputtered at her choice of words, but the unshed tears in Stephanie’s eyes demanded no less of him than he allow her to finish her thoughts without interruption.
“In return, I need you to respect me. Just because other women might be happy with any arrangement you set up, you can’t expect me to jump in and out of your bed at your convenience. I know it’s an old line, but it’s true. I’m not that kind of a girl. Trust me on this, darling,” she said, pausing to place a feather-light kiss upon his forehead. “In the long run, it wouldn’t be good for either of us.”
Alex sighed in exasperation. One could hardly argue against the virtue that set Stephanie apart from every other woman who had ever tried to use him. Her lack of tears and recriminations left him at a loss to rouse the kind of righteous indignation that had served him so well in past breakups. His voice was flat and unemotional when he finally responded.
“Have it your way then. The ring is yours regardless. A souvenir, so to speak.”
Stephanie wasn’t up for arguing. She was too drained to tell him that she didn’t need anything so flashy to remind her of their time together. What she really needed was something to help her forget it. Not sure if her heart would allow her to continue living and breathing without him, she wondered if she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life.
“For what it’s worth,” Alex told her, “I’ve let a lot of women into my bed, but you’re the first one I’ve ever let into my heart.”
Stephanie turned her head away so that he would not see her tears. The admission was as close to a declaration of love as she ever expected to hear from him. It was a sweet balm for a heart left battered and bruised upon the shores of loneliness.
The sound of the telephone ringing gave Stephanie the opportunity to wipe away her tears as Alex left the bed to answer the call of duty. As he predicted, it was Larry.
“Here in the hotel lobby is perfect, but seven o’clock works better for us than six.”
Stephanie was amazed at how casual the conversation sounded. Anyone just walking into the room would think Alex was discussing the details of some legitimate business contract rather than the exchange of a baby stolen from its rightful mother and sold to the highest bidder.
“I’ll have one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars wired to me today. I understand your need to have that amount in cash. Will a briefcase suffice?”
A long pause left Stephanie wondering why fate had conspired to cast her in such a nefarious plot. Shakespeare himself would have been challenged to come up with a more twisted scheme to throw two more opposite pe
ople together.
“Since I doubt babies are allowed inside the casino, I suggest that we sign the paperwork in the hotel restaurant.”
There was another pause before Alex clarified. “Yes, the Eureka. I’ll make a reservation there for seven o’clock under my name. Will anyone else be accompanying you?”
During yet another pause, Stephanie forgot to breathe. Although this was the moment they had been so desperately hoping for, it was hard to believe it was upon them.
“All right, I’ll look for both of you then.”
With that, Alex hung up the phone. He turned to Stephanie and filled her in on the details.
“We give them the money. They give us some paperwork and hand over the baby. It’s that simple.”
Stephanie couldn’t bite back the bitter laugh that rose in her throat. “Simple,” she repeated, feeling utterly hollow.
She stared at the ring on her finger. Nothing in that phone call was any more frightening than knowing that Alex didn’t love her enough to make any but a sexual commitment to her. She offered him her heart upon a silver platter, and in return he offered nothing but baubles. That she saw the ring on her finger as nothing more than an attempt to buy her off and assuage his guilt should make it that much easier to give it up when the time came. Despite his insistence that she keep the ring, Stephanie didn’t want it.
Bullets lost their edge to hurt her any more than Alex already had. If death were to come from this ill-fated mission, Stephanie couldn’t help but feel it would be a blessing.
As hard as Alex pretended to be blasé about her decision to break off their relationship, he was secretly furious. In the past, he had treated his romantic relationships as expendable. With Stephanie it was an entirely different matter. Over the past few days his feelings for her had grown right along with his respect—exponentially. The truth was, he’d never met a more courageous, intelligent woman in his life. Her unique sense of humor could coax genuine belly laughs from him, her sincerity was as refreshing as drinking from the fountain of youth, and her sweetness both in and out of the bedroom was nothing short of addictive. Above all, Alex liked the way he felt when he was around her. Seeing himself reflected in those soft doe eyes of hers made him feel like the most wonderful man alive.
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