by Beverly Bird
He had a gun!
Oh, God, oh, God. The room tilted and seemed to spin around her. Her emotions were too vulnerable, still too close to the surface. Her body still ached and yearned. This was crazy, like a nightmare.
He motioned that she should open the door and she finally did, her hand shaking badly. Jack heard Scorpion’s voice. There had never been any doubt in his mind that he would. He felt a sweet rush of exhilaration that his hunch had been right, that the man had made a move tonight.
I’m not washed up, just a little shaky. He was still strong enough to give this bastard a run for his money. Starting now.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Brad said quietly. “Am I interrupting something?”
“I—no,” Carly managed.
“It took you a moment to answer the door.”
“Yes, well, I—” She broke off again, taking a breath. “Did you need something?”
“I was wondering if you had any aspirin. I know you said we were supposed to bring them, but I forgot and my muscles are sore.”
She had seen aspirin in his bag. Or had that been Jack’s bag? Her head hurt. She couldn’t remember now.
“I—sure. They’re, uh, there should be some in the first-aid kit.”
Still the man hesitated. “Are you alone?” he asked finally. “There’s something else I need to ask you about.”
Not in this lifetime, buddy.
Jack pushed his gun into the back of his jeans before Carly could answer. He left his shirt untucked, doing the bottom button again fast. Then he stepped around the door into Scorpion’s view.
The man’s brows touched. It was a dangerous look.
Carly’s heart boomed. She took a quick, instinctive step away from him and turned hard and fast to look at Jack.
At first she appeared incredulous, then her temper sparked in her eyes. Jack spoke before she could.
“I was the last one out of the kitchen last night,” he said evenly. “I put the first-aid kit back in the pantry. It should be right there on the top shelf at the front.”
Scorpion hesitated only a moment longer. He’d back off and regroup, Jack thought. And when he comes back at her a second time, by God, I’ll be here then as well.
Scorpion clearly wouldn’t be happy about that, but there was nothing he could do about it without tipping his hand. When he spoke again his voice was tight and clipped with control.
“Sure,” he said finally. “Thanks.”
Jack reached over Carly’s shoulder and pushed the door shut gently. She waited only until the man’s footsteps had receded down the hall.
“What is going on here?” she cried.
Carefully and deliberately, Jack sat down on the sofa to put his gun back where it belonged, in the holster around his left ankle.
“What are you?” she went on shrilly. “Why do you have a gun?”
“Shhh!” His nape prickled. He could only pray that Scorpion was far enough down the hall that he hadn’t heard her.
He had to try to mop up this mess, he thought. Somehow. He raked a hand through his hair.
“You keep a gun,” he pointed out reasonably. “Two of them, in fact. There’s a shotgun in a rack in the cab of your truck. I also noticed a revolver in that little office in the first barn.”
It wasn’t the thing to say. Her face grew redder.
“While you were snooping about, did you happen to notice that I’m a rancher, that there are snakes and sick cows and any number of other things around here that might present an occasion where a gun is required? You, however, are a tourist!” she screeched, her nerves breaking.
She wasn’t going to be placated. His instinct that Scorpion would show up might have been on target, Jack thought, but everything had rapidly gone downhill from there. Why had he pulled the damned gun? He had never considered not drawing it, he realized. It had been instinctive, a fierce, automatic urge to protect her. But he had done it too fast, too soon, and he knew that had much less to do with what Scorpion might have done when she opened that door than the way he was starting to feel about this woman.
His gut rolled.
Carly took a deep, shaky breath. “You knew he was coming and you wanted him to know what we were doing in this room,” she accused as her brain began to clear, as she finally got her bearings again. “That’s why you stepped around the door like that.”
Jack shook his head. “No. I just didn’t think.”
“Didn’t think about what?”
“That I might be embarrassing you.”
Her jaw dropped.
Jack realized too late that he should have known that that part wouldn’t bother her. She wasn’t coy enough to simper and blush because someone had caught her giving in to a purely personal hunger. What tripped her up, what had her hot as a hornet again, was that she thought he had set her up in the first place. He wondered how many women that would have occurred to. Was she that bitter, or that astute?
“I didn’t set the stage for that guy,” he said shortly.
Her heart chugged. She thought she could accept anything, forgive anything, but his using her.
She nodded and swallowed carefully. “Okay, then. Start talking.”
He made a sudden decision to trust her…a very little bit. He wasn’t sure he had a choice any longer. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been forced to confide in a pawn, although these days he felt a little like hedging his bets. Still, sometimes it was necessary to take people into his limited confidence when he wasn’t working under deep cover. Sometimes it was necessary if he was going to make them do what he needed them to do, if he needed them to do something that would never have occurred to them otherwise.
He needed a great deal from her now.
“I’m caught up in the middle of something nasty,” he said finally, neutrally.
Carly didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but it wasn’t that. For a moment, she was only stunned. “Something nasty?” Her voice squeaked just a little.
“That’s right.”
“What, with your work?” she tried.
“Yeah.”
“What do you do?” That was one thing she hadn’t learned by rummaging through his possessions, she realized.
“I work for the government.”
“Doing what?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You can’t…” The color drained from her face. “What, you’re like a…a spy or something?”
“Or something.”
Her eyes went huge. “You have got to be kidding.” An ex-wife, my foot, she thought.
She was getting angry. Her face was still white, but Jack saw twin spots of livid color appearing on her cheeks. “Listen,” he said quietly. “Everything we say in this room has to stay right here. Okay? You can’t repeat a word of it to your sister, your brother, even to the IRS.”
“The IRS is government, too,” she pointed out.
“Doesn’t matter.”
What superseded the IRS? she thought wildly. They were one step short of God!
“So what are you doing on my ranch?”
“My job.”
She crossed to him very carefully. Suddenly she was so angry it made her blood feel hot. The color on her cheeks spread fast to the rest of her face.
“Let’s get one thing straight here, Jack. I don’t give a damn who you are or who you work for. This is my land, my ride, my life and my livelihood. This is my world. And whether I like it or not, I’m responsible for the welfare of the five other guests in this house right now, not to mention my family. So I suggest you start talking and tell me what the hell is happening here, because I don’t care if you’re the President! I have the right to know!” she finished breathlessly.
Jack shook his head. “No,” he said calmly, “you don’t.”
For a minute he thought she might actually strike him. In spite of her green eyes, in that moment she was pure Spanish fire. Instead, she curled her hands very slowly, very carefully, int
o fists at her sides. She was breathing hard. Her breasts rose and fell, making her T-shirt shift and tremble nicely.
“Listen to me, cowgirl,” he went on carefully, keeping his eyes off them. “Civilians have very few rights in situations like this. I’ve only told you what I have so far because I have no choice. I’m sorry,” he said more softly. “I genuinely am. I don’t like doing this to you. In fact, I’m doing everything I can to keep you out of it, though you may or may not believe that.”
She stared at him mutely and distrustfully. Jack rubbed at a headache behind his eyes. He’d always found it so easy to keep emotion out of his work. He’d genuinely come to believe that he didn’t have much emotion in his heart to begin with. So why was he finding this so difficult now?
“We’ve got to leave here tomorrow,” he went on, making his voice cold, “and you’ve got to forget we ever had this conversation. You’ve got to do it because you’re a civilian, and as such, you have a legal responsibility not to interfere with my work.”
“I don’t believe this,” she breathed. Then her eyes snapped with fire again. “I could really learn to hate you.”
“I pray to God that we all live long enough for you to enjoy doing it.”
She blanched once more. “Live? Long enough? Are you in that kind of danger?”
No, cowgirl, you are if your hubby gets his hands on you. If Jack knew one thing by now, it was that she was not going to want to go anywhere with Brett Peterson ever again, and when Scorpion found that out, there would be hell to pay. Which was just another reason to keep him away from her, to get them off this ranch and into Kansas, so Scorpion had to leave without her or lose all opportunity to easily do so.
“Not if I can help it,” Jack answered quietly, absently, thinking.
Carly paced away from him, going back to the window. He could see in the candlelight that she was shivering hard. Still, she was handling this remarkably well. It was a conversation very few people would ever have in their lifetime.
He thought, sourly, that this was one way to keep himself from touching her again. She wouldn’t come near him now.
“Just answer one more question,” she said tightly.
He made a sound that might have been agreement. She plunged on.
“Are you any good at what you do?”
“So they say.”
“Who says?”
Jack almost grinned. She was good, he thought. But he was better.
“My co-workers.”
She gave him a frustrated glance. “The generator. Was that part of this somehow? I thought you looked at me funny last night.” Suddenly, something else occurred to her. “Did you blow it up?” He’d known right away what the buzzing sound was, she remembered, and he’d finished with his horse long before the others. He’d had plenty of time.
“That’s two questions,” Jack pointed out.
“Did you blow up my generator?”
“No.”
Her shoulders seemed to slump. “Why me? Why my ranch? There have to be five hundred dude operations sprinkled over the West!”
“It’s just your lucky week, I guess.” At her incredulous expression, he said again, quietly, “I’m sorry,” and thought that perhaps they were the only completely true words he’d said all night.
His compassion made it a hundred times worse, she thought. She couldn’t believe she had actually started getting all worked up and needy inside over some…some kind of gun-wielding desperado who was maybe on the right side of the law. She couldn’t believe she was standing here feeling sort of sorry for him. He looked so miserable, but it was her nice, boring life that was being torn apart!
She gave a choked sound, then she thought of something else. “This has something to do with Brad, doesn’t it?” Brad, she thought, with all the price tags still on his clothing. Had she seen aspirin in his bag? Suddenly it seemed vital that she remember.
But Jack was shaking his head. “No. I thought someone else was coming.” He lied easily, out of habit. The words burned like acid in his mouth.
It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter now. He had already lost her…and that brought emotion, the most amazing, poignant regret.
Carly blinked. He could almost see her mind working behind those beautiful green eyes. Tread carefully, he thought. He realized again that she was one smart lady. She wouldn’t be easy to use.
“Who then?” she asked finally.
“Huh?”
“Who did you think was coming, if not Brad?”
“It doesn’t matter. I thought it was someone else.”
“Someone here? Someone on my ranch?”
He couldn’t answer that. He stayed quiet, watching her. She began pacing again.
“So you’re saying that that was just a…a false alarm of some sort.”
“Yeah.”
“Jumpy, aren’t you?”
“You would be, too.”
“Under what circumstances?”
One corner of his mouth almost twitched into a smile again. “Good try, cowgirl, but I’ll take the Fifth on that one.”
Her jaw hardened. “And touching me had nothing to do with it?”
Jack let out a harsh burst of breath. So they were back to that again. But at least it was one question he could easily answer.
“Touching you was a gut reaction that’s more or less been nagging me ever since I saw you.”
She looked surprised again, then uncharacteristically flustered. She touched a hand to her hair in a purely feminine gesture that drove arousal through him all over again. This time he clamped down on it.
“This scares the hell out of me,” she said quietly.
He wondered if she was talking about what had happened between them, or what was lurking out there in her hallways. He figured it could be either one, or both.
“You can be scared, cowgirl,” he said finally, “just don’t be scared of me. I really am the good guy.”
Carly gave a halfhearted shrug. “We’re not going to pick up where we left off.”
“No,” Jack said. Now, abruptly sane again, with his head clear, he knew it was impossible. Not because of Scorpion necessarily—he supposed he’d cleared that hurdle in his own mind. And it wasn’t because he had so little to give. She was a big girl and she was doing a good job of figuring that out on her own.
It was because of the lies.
He wouldn’t make love to her under false pretenses. It would have been one thing if he had not let her into his confidence at all. Those had been lies of omission. But now…now everything had changed. Now he owed her some measure of honor. He was vaguely surprised to find that he had some pretty strong scruples after all.
Carly went to the sofa and sat with meticulous care. “You’re still not going to let me go upstairs to my room, though, either, are you?”
“No,” Jack said again.
Something in her eyes flared, some spark of her old self. “I can’t stay here with you all night. I won’t. Holly—the other guests—”
“We’ll worry about all that at dawn, before they get up,” he interrupted.
He had an answer for everything. She finally nodded and lay down with a heavy sigh. He noticed that she didn’t put her back to him.
Chapter 8
Somehow, impossibly, Carly slept. But when she woke just before the rooster, she was relatively sure that Jack hadn’t.
He was still standing by the window, where he’d been when she’d finally dozed off. She watched him without moving for a moment, not wanting to let him know she was doing it. She wanted just one candid, unguarded glimpse of him, she realized. She wanted some inkling as to who he was, what he was, outside of the careful, almost rehearsed explanations he had given her last night.
Lies. She knew instinctively that that was what they were. Bald ones.
“How long before you can get us out of here?” he asked suddenly.
Carly jolted and sat up. “How did you know I was awake?”
Jack finally l
ooked around at her. He wore a small smile. “I heard your eyes open.”
Carly gave an unladylike snort that carried at least a tinge of despair. The events of last night crashed in on her again with all their full weight.
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
“It’s five-thirty,” Jack went on with a curious lack of emotion. “How soon before we can get this show on the road?”
Carly looked at him. “I don’t remember agreeing to leave today.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
He couldn’t spend another night in this parlor with her and hold himself back from touching her again, Jack thought, or at the very least, from wanting to until he couldn’t think clearly. He’d realized that at about three o’clock this morning. He had to keep emotion and distraction out of this. It had always been easy enough before, but it was not easy now, not with this woman, so he would work on it.
“Assuming I was going to leave today, I’d need a minimum of six hours to get ready,” Carly was saying tightly. “And that’s after everyone wakes up and has breakfast.”
“No dice. Six hours is way too much.”
“Too bad. It’s a hypothetical situation anyway. I’m not leaving.”
She stood and stretched. He couldn’t help noticing the slide of her muscles beneath her skin. Her shorts left entirely too much of her legs within sight.
Carly saw the way he was watching her and she brought her arms down fast. The hunger in his gaze was finally replaced by something flinty and hard. She wasn’t sure which expression was worse.
“Am I correct in assuming that you can make me?” she asked finally.
Jack hesitated. “Not quickly enough for it to matter. By the time I pulled all the necessary strings, tomorrow would be here and you’d be willing to go anyway. I’m not going to force you at gunpoint, if that’s what you’re asking.” Not unless it was a case of ultimate, last resort, anyway, he thought bitterly. Then he would be obligated to whether he wanted to or not.
Carly’s brows went up. “And you’re telling me so?”