by Linda Turner
But while Steve could believe that of Simon, he couldn’t of Lise. If making love to her had shown him anything, it was just how open and honest and giving she was. She would never knowingly participate in such a scheme—she wasn’t that cruel.
Deep down inside, every instinct he had told him he could trust her. She’d shown him the type of woman she was, and she was nothing like her father and never would be. He could let down his guard with her and not have to worry about her betraying him.
But even as he acknowledged all of that, he knew he couldn’t allow himself to trust Lise. Because if he did, he’d have no defenses where she was concerned. Then where the hell would he be?
In love with her.
Not letting himself go there, he immediately steered his thoughts to the matter at hand. Simon and his capture. He had to remember that, focus on that—and find a way to forget what it was like to make love to Lise.
He might as well have ordered himself not to breathe.
Muttering a curse, he dug his phone card out of his wallet and swiftly placed a call to Belinda. Like a recovering alcoholic who desperately needed to talk to his sponsor, he needed her to help ground him and get his priorities straight.
“Get me out of here!”
He’d meant to at least greet her civilly, but the words popped out of his mouth before he could stop them. For a moment, there was nothing but surprised silence, then she said sweetly, too sweetly, “Having a rough day, are we? What seems to be the problem, son?”
He almost growled at her not to call him son. She was only a year or two older than he was, dammit, and he was in no mood to stick to his cover. Not when he was having a meltdown, which never happened to him!
“The problem, Mother,” he said through his teeth, “is that I’m standing in the middle of Simon’s cabin and there’s not a damn thing here but a bunch of old furniture!”
“And that surprises you?”
Stunned that she even had to ask, he snapped, “Hell, yes, it surprises me! Dammit, this was the one hiding place he had left I hadn’t searched!”
“Who told you that?”
Confused, he frowned. “What?”
“That the cabin was the one hiding place he had left,” she repeated patiently.
“No one. Lise—”
“Is Simon’s daughter,” she interrupted quietly. “Has something happened to make you forget that?”
His response should have been an immediate, “No, of course not.” Instead, there was a long pause that spoke more clearly than words. In the echoing silence, Belinda’s voice was husky with concern. “When you said you wanted out the other day, I thought you were overreacting to the situation. Now I’m not so sure. Are you all right?”
He knew what she was asking—had he been able to carry out his orders without letting his emotions get involved? No! he almost shouted at her. Couldn’t she tell? Everything was screwed up, especially his heart, and he had no one to blame but himself. But that was about to change, he promised himself. It had to before he completely botched this assignment.
“No,” he said flatly. “I’m not all right. But I’m working on it. Talking to you has helped. Thanks.”
“I do what I can,” she said simply. “I take it you have nothing else to report?”
“Unfortunately, no. The cabin is a wash and there’s still no sign of Simon. Though he could be at the main house right now for all I know.”
“He’s not,” Belinda replied. “We’re watching the place on radar. If a plane comes in, we’ll know about it.”
That gave him some comfort, but not much. They both knew that Simon was too crafty to fly in if he thought the station was being watched. He’d drive in, and that would make him almost impossible to monitor since he could come from just about any direction. “Then all I can do for now is wait and watch,” he told her. “I’ll be in touch if I hear anything interesting. Bye, Mom.”
He hung up so quickly that Lise almost tripped over her own feet as she darted for cover around the corner of the house. Her heart pounding, she half expected Steve to come striding around the house any second and discover her, but he was obviously more interested in getting back to camp. A few seconds later, she heard the pounding of his horse’s hooves on the hard ground as he rode away from the cabin, and with a sigh of relief, she sent up a silent prayer of thanks to God for giving her the sense to tie Thunder on the opposite side of the house.
The problem, Mother, is that I’m standing in the middle of Simon’s cabin and there’s not a damn thing here but a bunch of old furniture!
His words ringing in her ears, Lise frowned as she checked to make sure the coast was clear, then stepped onto the cabin’s front porch as Steve disappeared from view. She’d arrived at the cabin just in time to hear him speaking to someone, presumably on a cell phone she hadn’t realized he had, and nothing he’d said had made sense. What did he mean, he was standing in the middle of Simon’s cabin? Who was Simon? This was her father’s place, and his name was Art. Steve knew that—he was a friend of her father’s, for heaven’s sake! Her father had given him a job. And she had told him about the cabin and how her parents had lived there for the first few years of their marriage. Why did he think the place belonged to someone named Simon? And what had he expected to find there?
Anxious to find out for herself, she closed her fingers around the doorknob and felt like a child who was about to look in the closet where the Christmas presents were hidden. This place was off-limits to not only her, but to everyone on the station. In good conscience, she knew she shouldn’t go in there.
But even as she told herself that, her fingers tightened around the doorknob and turned it. For as long as she could remember, it had been locked—she knew because she’d tried the handle out of curiosity every time she was in that area of the station—but this time, for the first time, it turned easily in her hand. Her blood thundering in her ears, she didn’t fool herself into thinking that it had been that way when Steve had arrived. He’d obviously found a way to unlock it, and out of respect for her father’s need for privacy, she should have locked it up without even looking inside.
But even though she knew that was the right thing to do, she couldn’t. The cabin wasn’t just her father’s—her mother had lived there, too. Some of her things were still there, things that were Lise’s last link to her. And she desperately needed to see them. Without another thought, she pushed open the door and stepped inside.
In the past, whenever she’d thought about the cabin, she’d always thought that if she ever got the chance to go inside, she would immediately feel the presence of her mother and her love. Instead, she felt nothing but curiosity. There was no special aura to the place, nothing that really touched her heart. The furniture was inexpensive and old, but it was in excellent condition and was, no doubt, arranged the way her mother had liked it.
All too easily, Lise could picture her father there, sitting on the sofa, his face lined with grief, shutting out the world, shutting out her. And it hurt. When her mother had died, it seemed like her father had died, too, and it shouldn’t have been that way. Their grief should have drawn them together—instead, it had done the exact opposite, at least on her father’s part. He’d withdrawn into himself, into the cabin, and there’d been no place for her there or anywhere else in his life.
And that hadn’t changed with the passage of time. She didn’t belong there, wasn’t wanted there—over the years, her father had made that abundantly clear. He’d kept the place under lock and key, for heaven’s sake, to keep her out! And she didn’t go where she wasn’t wanted.
Her pride urging her to leave, she turned to go only to remember Steve’s frustrated phone conversation. Frowning, she glanced around, trying to figure out what he’d been looking for. But if he’d searched the place, she had to admit that he’d done it well. Nothing was out of place—everything was neat as a pin, just as her father had probably left it. So what had Steve been looking for? Money? Jewelry? In a deser
ted cabin no one had lived in for thirty years? She didn’t think so.
This is the only hiding place he had left I hadn’t searched…all I can do now is wait and watch…I’ll be in touch if I hear anything interesting.
Snippets of his phone conversation came back to her, taunting her, confusing her. What had he meant when he said he’d searched all the other hiding places? Even if there’d been any—which there weren’t!—being a hired hand on a station was hard work. They worked from sunup to sundown and had little time for anything but a game or two of poker at the end of the day. So when had he had time to search for anything?
Are you using the computer tonight? I still haven’t found a treatment for my father….
Memories of all the times he’d used the computer in her father’s study over the past week came rushing back, and the truth hit her right in the face. Dear God, how could she have been so naive? There was no mysterious illness—his father probably wasn’t even sick! Steve had just come up with that excuse to get into the study and search it, and like an idiot, she’d fallen for it. The bastard!
Who was he? she wondered furiously. He obviously wasn’t a friend of her father’s. How could he be? He didn’t know anything about Art Meldrum! From the moment he’d arrived at the station, he’d done nothing but ask questions about the station, her childhood, her father’s comings and goings. She’d thought he was just curious, being a Yank and new to the country, but that obviously wasn’t the case. Cringing, she wondered how she could have been so blind. Nothing about the man added up.
Which brought her back to square one. Who was he and what did he want?
The answer came far too quickly and drained the blood from her cheeks. From the time she was old enough to understand, her father had told her about the serious enemies he’d made when he worked in the mining business before he met and married her mother. He’d been trapped in a mining shaft and set on fire, and he’d been lucky to get out alive. To this day, his face was disfigured with scars from the burns and he wore a glass eye.
Because the men who’d tried to kill him had never been caught, he’d always warned her to be wary of strangers. There were dangerous men in the world who wanted to bring him down, and she shouldn’t trust anyone at first meeting, regardless of who she thought they were.
Caution had been ingrained in her for as long as she could remember. So what had she done? She’d not only trusted Steve with the ranch records that were on the computer, but she’d also given him her innocence. Talk about a fool! She’d actually let him convince her that he teased and flirted and made love to her because he was attracted to her. What a joke. From the very beginning, it was her father he’d been interested in, her father he had some sort of twisted vendetta against. If she was the one who got hurt, then that, apparently, was just too damn bad. He had his own agenda, and he’d do whatever he had to, use whomever he had to, including her, to carry out the plans that had brought him to Pear Tree Station.
The hell he would! she fumed. If he thought she was going to stand by and let him bring her father down, he could think again. Two could play at his game. If he could spy on her father, she could do the same to him. She’d check him out, find out everything she could about him, then report to her father. Then Steve would be the one who was brought down, and it would be no more than he deserved. No one hurt her or her family and got away with it.
Satisfied that she would never let him hurt her again, she stepped out of the cabin and shut the door behind her, testing it to make sure it was locked. Still tied to the bush where she’d left him behind the cabin, Thunder greeted her with a soft whinny. Normally, she would have grinned and rewarded him with a rub on the nose and a treat, but not this time. All business, she untied him and stepped into the stirrup. “Let’s go, boy,” she said grimly. “We’ve got a rat to catch.”
Heading to camp, she wasn’t surprised to discover that Steve was still collecting the clothes and other items the storm had blown into the bush. Anger simmering in her as she watched him from a distance, she was tempted to ride out to him and tell him exactly what she thought of him. But that would only tip him off to the fact that she was on to him, and she had no intention of doing that. Not yet. Not until she knew who and what he was and could blast him with that. Then she’d throw him off the station for good.
Just thinking about that should have given her an immense amount of satisfaction. Instead, it did the exact opposite. Her heart hurt, and that only made her angrier. Her lips pressed into a flat line, she turned away, determined to ignore him until she had her emotions under control.
With so much work to do, that wasn’t difficult. It took hours to set the camp up, then there was lost time to be made up rounding up the cattle and checking the area watering holes and fences. Work took them in opposite directions, and Lise didn’t see Steve for the rest of the day.
By the time everyone returned to camp for dinner, they were hot and tired and dirty, and tempers were short. It had been a long day, and not surprisingly, no one was in the mood to talk. Silence hung over the camp like a shroud as everyone tiredly dug into the chicken Cookie had grilled over the campfire.
Every bone in her body aching with weariness and her appetite nonexistent, Lise knew she should wait until tomorrow to begin investigating Steve. She’d stewed over him all day and still couldn’t quite control her hostility. But as she watched him lounge on a camp stool and eat dinner like he didn’t have a care in the world, something in her snapped. Damn him, he had no right to look so comfortable when all she wanted to do was go off in a corner and cry!
“Hey, Steve,” she called, forcing a tight smile that never reached her eyes, “how do you like your first bush roundup so far? Is it hot enough for you?”
“I’m getting by,” he said easily. “It’s not much different than Arizona and west Texas in the heat of the summer.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” she said, pretending to just now remember the stories he’d told her about his past. “You’ve worked in a lot of different places, haven’t you?”
He shrugged. “I like to move around.”
“Is that how you met my father? By moving around?”
It was a natural question, one that Steve had expected her to ask the first day he arrived at the station. She hadn’t. So why, he wondered, was she asking him now? Had something happened to make her suspicious of him? Had she somehow discovered that he’d checked out the cabin?
Alarm bells clanging in his head, he studied her through narrowed eyes, but if she had doubts about him, she gave no sign of it. Her smile quizzical, she met his gaze head-on and waited patiently for his answer.
“Actually, we never met face to face,” he finally said honestly, and wondered if he was being paranoid. She seemed fine. If she was asking questions he hadn’t expected at this stage in the mission, it was probably because she was still coming to grips with what happened between them in the cave during the storm. She’d never made love before; she had to be feeling more than a little vulnerable right now. Considering that, he couldn’t blame her for needing some answers about who he was.
So sticking to the truth as closely as possible in case Simon had already told her how they’d come to know each other, he gave her what answers he could that wouldn’t blow his cover. “I did some work for him through a friend, and when he heard I was looking for a job, he told me about the station and that you could always use a good hand. I’d never been to Australia, and I was looking for a change. This was it.”
“But your father was sick. Didn’t you have any reservations about going halfway around the world and leaving your mother to deal with that alone?”
“He wasn’t sick when I left,” he replied patiently. “And my mother didn’t tell me how bad his condition was until he was doing better. By then, she didn’t need me to come home, just help find a new treatment for him.”
Braced for more unwanted questions, he half expected her to grill him about the exact nature of his father’s diseas
e and the available treatment for it. If pressed, he could have provided a halfway decent explanation, but something he said must have satisfied her curiosity. In the blink of an eye, her mood, which seemed more than a little hostile, changed.
“That must have been difficult for you, being so far away from home and unable to do anything,” she said quietly. “If my father was that sick and in the States, I’d probably be a nervous wreck. How do you stand it?”
He shrugged. “Work helps.” Especially since his father was safe and sound and healthy as a horse in Wisconsin.
That returned the discussion to work and all that hadn’t gotten done because of the dust storm. Listening to Lise question the rest of the men about the condition of the cattle they’d been able to round up, Steve breathed a silent sigh of relief. Obviously she believed him, or she never would have accepted his answers.
He was lying through his teeth.
The thought nagged at Lise all that evening and through the night, tying her in knots. Now that she’d had time to think about it some more, she was convinced she couldn’t believe anything he’d said to her—not about his childhood, his parents, the kind of man he was. If he’d misled her about one thing, he could have lied to her about everything—especially about how he felt about her.
Pain squeezing her heart, she lay in her tent long after the rest of the camp had gone to sleep and couldn’t stop herself from replaying those heated moments in the cave when he’d made love to her with so much tenderness. How much of that had been a lie? Which touch, which kiss had been real and which ones were designed to seduce her into giving him whatever information he wanted? Was he even attracted to her?
Tears stinging her eyes, she silently ordered herself not to go there, but it was already too late. The doubts she’d had her entire life about her own attractiveness washed over her, swallowing her whole and engulfing her in an old, familiar pain. And though she tried not to, she couldn’t help but wonder if Steve would have done this to her if she’d been delicate and petite like her mother.