He paused, and in the hissing silence Jacob felt Isabella move to his side. She took his hand and gripped so hard he could feel the imprint of each separate finger on his flesh. He squeezed back, which startled her. She looked down quickly at their joined hands, dropped the contact and stepped back. “Sorry.”
The word was no more than a whisper, but Jacob had no time to consider the touch, or its meaning, because Cooper spoke again, clearly responding to the kidnapper’s side of the conversation. “No! No, don’t do that…I’ll cooperate, I swear it.” No longer a commanding growl, his voice now edged toward pleading. “Just tell me what to do.”
Isabella linked her hands in front of her body and leaned toward the speaker. Jacob jammed his hands into his pockets and forced himself to remain still, though his body thrummed with excitement.
“Wish we’d found a way to bug the phone,” he muttered, knowing there had been no way, but jonesing to hear the other side of the conversation just the same.
Isabella nodded quickly, but didn’t take her attention off the speaker.
“Okay.” And now there was a hint of defeat, of desperation in Cooper’s voice. “Okay, I’ll be there. The old hangman’s cabin in Devil Mountain, California. Monday, noon sharp.” He paused and his voice sharpened. “Of course I’ll be there. And I get it—no cops. I heard you the first time. Just don’t—” his words broke “—don’t hurt them. I’ll be there. Alone. I swear it.”
Bingo! Excitement seared through Jacob at the information, tempered only by frustration that there hadn’t been more.
Was this a ransom drop or simply a meeting? Were the hostages being held in the cabin? Damn it, they needed more data.
But they didn’t get more. The transmitted silence lasted a long time before they heard the digital beep of a disconnect. Then a thump, as though Cooper had dropped the phone to the desk.
Then broken weeping.
“Aw, heck.” Jacob shifted uncomfortably, feeling like an intruder. Cooper’s grief tore at him, reminding him that though one of his goals was to retrieve Big Sky’s bounty, the more important facet was Hope Cooper and her daughters.
And Louis Cooper, who loved them so much he would—apparently—compromise his principles and change national policy to ensure their safety.
Love could make a man do crazy things, Jacob knew. Like give in to blackmail.
Or join the army.
Annoyed, he shoved away from the dining table that held the surveillance equipment. Away from the sound of a strong man’s sobs. “I’m going to scrounge some real food.” He glanced back at the speaker. “Can you turn that down or something?”
The words came out harsher than he’d intended, but when Isabella’s eyes flashed in irritation, he didn’t bother to explain himself. Let her think the worst of him. It was probably safer that way.
She frowned, but her tone was cool when she said, “When do we leave for California?”
For a crazy moment he thought about leaving then and there, flying them as fast as he could away from the men in the green sedan and hiding them until all this was over, someplace he could keep Isabella safe whether she liked it or not.
But that mad impulse passed as quickly as a heartbeat and he said, “We’ll leave in the morning.”
“Why not now?”
“Because I don’t fly tired,” he answered. “And because you’ve had a tough few days. We can both use the rest.”
But as he headed for the kitchen, more to escape the tension than out of real hunger, he had a pretty good idea that there would be little sleep for him this night.
Not with Isabella close enough to touch.
Chapter Eight
When Joseph phoned to say he’d find his own way back to headquarters, Isabella and Jacob decided to catch some sleep. She snagged the guest bedroom and Jacob opted to take the couch. Neither of them felt totally comfortable sleeping in Lance’s wide lake of a bed, with its satin sheets and questionable reading material on the nightstand.
But once she’d closed the door and lain down with one of Lance’s he-man paperback thrillers, Isabella remained wide-awake.
And twitchy.
She didn’t need to look far for the cause of her nerves, but she had no desire to analyze her feelings right then. She needed to blow off some steam. So she leaped out of bed, strode out into the hall…and collided with Jacob.
“Whoa there!” He reached out to steady her and his touch burned her from the point of contact to the tips of her toes and back.
Oh, yeah. That was why she was twitchy.
Jacob.
“I’m going for a run,” she announced, needing to be away from him, away from the small confines of the town house, which had started to feel like nothing more than a kitchen, a dining room and a pair of beds.
He moved to block her path. “Bad idea. Or have you forgotten about the armed jerks in the green sedan?”
No, she hadn’t forgotten. But in an insane way, they’d started to seem safer than the man who faced her little more than a breath away.
“I need to…” She blew out a frustrated breath. “I need to do something. I’m not ready for bed yet.”
Her face heated a degree at how the words combined to sound unintentionally sexual, but either he didn’t notice or he pretended not to. “Read a book.”
She lifted her chin and decided she didn’t care how it sounded when she said, “I need to do something physical.”
His eyes darkened with irritation and something else. “Fine. Come on.”
He turned and led the way downstairs. At first, Isabella thought they were headed for the garage, maybe a nighttime ride on Lance’s beloved bike since the car was shot to heck. The idea of riding double on the narrow motorcycle seat held a dangerous thrill—and a chime of warning bells.
But at the end of the downstairs hallway, Jacob didn’t reach for the door on the right, the one that led to the garage. He headed to the left.
And Isabella stopped dead. “Oh, no. Bad idea.”
Very bad idea.
“You know what’s down there?” he asked with a raised brow.
“Of course I do,” she snapped, tension forming a tight not in her chest.
She was an agent. Naturally she’d taken a quick look around the town house when she began plant-sitting. It was instinctual for her to note the possible exits, the possible weak spots, just as Jacob had apparently scoped the place out while she’d showered.
Lance’s place took up three levels, with the bedrooms on the top floor, the kitchen and living room on the middle floor, and the garage taking up most of the ground level. But not all of it. A small strip of space ran the width of a generous hallway, the length of the entire town house. Most owners in the development probably used it for storage.
Lance had hung a regulation dart board and measured off the lines.
Jacob opened the door. “You said you needed to work off some steam. Come on. What are you afraid of?”
But the look in his eyes said he knew exactly what had her backing off. They’d met over a dart game at Smiley’s Pub. She’d hustled Jacob and thrashed him in the first game they’d played, then he’d kicked her butt in the second. By the time they’d played three more, they’d attracted a crowd. Last call came in the middle of their sixth game, leaving them tied at three on the night.
From there, they’d gone back to her place and she hadn’t come up for air until three months later, when he’d gone out for a beer and come home with a blonde.
“Are you challenging me,” she asked quietly, “or challenging yourself?”
A wry smile tickled the edges of his sensual mouth. “A little bit of both.”
She nodded once. “So be it. I think we both have something to prove to ourselves.” That as adults, they were stronger than lust, stronger than hormones and flame.
Stronger than need.
But as she followed Jacob down the short flight of carpeted stairs and caught a hint of his male scent in the close air, Isa
bella wondered whether she was stronger, after all.
He clicked on the overhead lights, revealing what Isabella thought of as “Lance’s guy room.” The walls were paneled in inexpensive laminate that tried to convey the image of old wood and smoke. A small bar stood at one end of the narrow space. The neon sign above a wide mirror was unlit and Jacob kept it that way.
Isabella was thankful. The place already brought back too many memories.
“Flip for firsties?” he asked, reminding her of that first game they’d played, when they’d shot for who would go first and she’d intentionally flubbed the throw to lull him into a false sense of security.
Eventually they’d moved to flipping a coin for firsties, because it could take twenty or thirty shots for one of them to miss the bullseye.
Now, he held a quarter in front of her.
She nodded. “I’ll call it.”
She won the toss, and walked to the end of the nar row room to retrieve the darts Lance had left carelessly strewn in the high-quality board. A scattering of plug marks on the wall suggested he missed the board often. As she pulled the darts free, Isabella fought intense self-consciousness. She could feel Jacob watching her, felt a blush climb her body.
How often had they used a game of odds-’n-evens as a prelude to lovemaking?
Sex, she reminded herself. It had been sex. The love had been more on her side than his.
Squaring her shoulders, she walked to her place behind the painted line. “You call the game.”
“Have you kept up your throwing?” Jacob’s voice sounded thick.
A knot tightened in her shoulders. In her stomach. She flashed a look over her shoulder. “Yeah, I’ve kept throwing.”
Let him think she still went to Smiley’s, or that she played in one of the leagues in town. There was no need to tell him that she threw at home, alone, dart after dart until the restless energy was burned off, until the craziness was held at bay.
Some agents went to the shooting range. She stayed home and threw.
“Then you pick the game.”
They played for an hour, giving and taking points, winning and losing games until it was clear that they’d both kept their college skills honed, and then some.
The tension between them ebbed and flowed with the games. One moment Isabella could almost believe that she was playing with a co-worker. A friend she traded barbed comments with, someone who hated to lose just as badly as she did. Then they would come too near each other in passing, or brush fingers when they traded darts, and the banked heat would flash into flame, into the greedy sizzle of want.
Each time, one of them would back off. Sometimes, they both stepped away in silent accord.
This wasn’t about seduction. It was about killing time. Killing energy.
Too bad the energy between them refused to be killed.
When they were tied at four games a piece, Jacob glanced at her. “New game?”
“Sure.” They both knew they could trade games all night long. Easily falling back into a decade-old rhythm, she asked, “Winner takes all?”
He nodded.
“What’s the game?”
“Bull.”
She tilted her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s something we invented at Big Sky.” He leaned back against the bar. “Five tosses, five bullseyes. You miss the bull, you lose. You miss the board entirely, you owe your opponent a future claim.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What sort of future claim?”
“Could be anything.” He shrugged. “At the cabin, we’ve had claims ranging from barn chores to switching bounties. As long as the Colonel okays the trade, anything goes.”
“Hmm.” Despite a host of misgivings nagging at the back of her skull, Isabella was intrigued. “What are the rules?”
At the question, he straightened away from the bar and crossed to her. Stood too close and looked down at her. Voice low, he said, “There are no rules.” The heat climbed suddenly between them, simultaneously binding and separating them. She planted her feet, refusing to fall back though every cell in her body yammered for retreat when he asked, “You game?”
Instead of retreating she nodded. “Yeah. I’m game.”
And the battle was on. It wasn’t that they forgot about the danger, Isabella knew. The specter of the green sedan haunted them in the tense set of Jacob’s shoulders and the quick jolt of attention each time a car’s headlights splashed in the window from the road outside. The memory of Cooper’s broken weeping settled on Isabella’s heart like a limitless weight. They both knew that the hunt would be on again the next morning.
But this moment, this hour in a narrow dart room, was about the two of them.
“You want to go first?” Jacob offered the darts, his attention seeming focused on her, though she knew he must be as scattered as she felt. One part of her yearned for action, while another longed for distance, for a quiet place to hide from temptation. And still another part of her had found the upstairs bedroom too confining, and had brought her down here. To Jacob.
She could handle this. She was a professional, not some green college kid who thought that a split level in the ’burbs and two-point-four kids equaled the stability her traveling salesman father and bipolar mother had never managed to give her.
So she gritted her teeth and nodded. “Sure.”
She took the darts from him, steeling herself against the inner buzz when their fingers brushed ever so slightly, a faint rub of fingerprint against fingerprint, identity against identity.
The words no rules echoed in her head as she took her position behind the painted line.
His voice spoke behind her. “Do you remember the night we met?”
“Of course. I also remember the night you went home from a graduation party with someone else.” She aimed and threw.
Bullseye.
He pulled the dart from the board to free up the tiny target, and continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “You were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Not soft-pretty, but fiery and a little bit edgy, a little bit vulnerable.” He paused. “Back then, I never would’ve guessed you’d end up an agent. But it looks good on you. Real good.”
Pressure built behind her eyes, a scream, maybe, or tears. But she shook her head. “Don’t mess with me, Powell. You’re not going to make me miss.”
She proved it by burying her next dart in the bullseye, all the way to the shaft. The power of the throw sang up her arm like madness.
“I’m not messing with you,” he said quickly, then rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “Okay, maybe I am. But what if I wasn’t? What if I was trying to tell you that I haven’t gone a year without thinking of you, haven’t met a woman without comparing her to you? That I’m sorrier than I can say about how I left things, about how I handled things.”
“You’ve already apologized for that. Apology accepted.” Isabella steadied her hand when it wanted to tremble in synchrony with the ache in her chest. “As for the other stuff, I don’t believe a word of it. You’re just playing the game to win. No rules, remember?” She threw with a quick, vicious twist of her wrist.
The dart hit the edge of the bullseye and quivered there as though wanting to leap away, but stayed put.
“Damn it, don’t be thickheaded.” Jacob shoved his hands into his pockets and pushed away from the bar. “I’m trying to be serious here. This isn’t part of the game. No,” he corrected himself, “maybe it is part of the game, or maybe I suggested this game so I’d have an excuse to say some of these things. Maybe I was looking for an opportunity to tell you that whatever was between us back then…it was better than I knew.” He turned to face the window, so he had his back to her when he said, “And it’s not gone yet, at least not for me.”
Isabella let her remaining darts fall to her side. “This is a trick, right? Part of your strategy?”
Never in her life would she have expected to hear such things from him. She’d never even considered it. Su
re, she’d kept half an eye on his career, she’d known generally where he was, but that was more self-flagellation than anything, a reminder of what happened when she didn’t guard herself, didn’t keep herself under control.
It wasn’t because she’d retained feelings for him. At least, not fresh, living feelings.
Not like the feelings that ricocheted through her chest when he turned back to her, eyes hot and dark. “What if it isn’t a strategy? What if seeing you again has brought it all back? What if I’m starting to wonder if I like this feeling? If I need it?”
“And what if you keep asking these questions of me because you’re not sure yourself?” she replied, realizing that all his what-if questions were nothing more than defense.
She expected another question in return, or an evasion. So she was unprepared when he dropped all pretenses and looked at her with raw, naked hunger. With all the emotions she remembered from before, magnified tenfold for each year they’d been apart, for each lesson they’d learned separately.
She handed him the darts. “Your turn.”
Perhaps a stronger woman would have suggested they go upstairs and face each other across the wide glass coffee table for a discussion. But Isabella wasn’t that strong. She wanted the structure of the game, the activity they’d chosen to blow off some steam that had created more instead.
When he took the darts, their fingers brushed in a slow slide, an almost sensual touch of ridge and valley, callus and softness.
The not-quite-caress rocked straight to Isabella’s core.
They moved apart in unison and Jacob took his place behind the line. Isabella leaned against the wood-and-chrome bar, her elbows on the polished surface. She imagined she could feel a trace of lingering warmth from Jacob’s body.
Headlight beams speared through the single window and they both eased out of the line of sight to watch the car pass without pausing.
Instead of diffusing the tension between them, the reminder of danger heightened the crackle in the air as Jacob aimed and threw.
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