Sara hurriedly carried the baby through a set of swinging doors at the back of the restaurant. Kyle stirred restlessly, hating the discomfort this first outing had caused her and hoping that she'd stop worrying so much.
"You p-plan on stayin' at Moonspell Keep f-for a while?" Lucy inquired.
"Awhile."
Tom's angular face registered awe. "You must be a rich feller. You're takin' a long vacation from your job. You helpin' Miz Sara with her work?"
Tom and Lucy's questions were beginning to strike an odd chord in Kyle's mind. Suddenly alert, he gazed into Tom's carefully shuttered eyes and wondered what they hid. At the same time, Kyle grimaced at his cynical suspicions. Perhaps he'd let Sara's nervousness get to him. He gave the couple a trademark Surprise smile. It revealed nothing but good humor. "I'm just a friend of Sara'sjust helping her with the new baby."
Tom studied him intently. "Well, we look forward to seein' more of you."
Kyie nodded pleasantly, wishing like hell that they'd go away. Lucy craned her head around her husband's shoulder. "Sure do want to see more of you and that baby. But for now we best be goin'."
"Didn't you come in to eat?"
"Changed our minds." Tom told him.
Lucy grinned. "You tell Sara we said good-bye."
She had lost her stutter
. A warning, almost like a premonition, began to hammer inside Kyle's head. "I will."
They turned to leave. Casualty Tom looked back. "Oh. Audubon says hello."
"Yes." Lucy added. "He hopes that you'll come to visit soon. Very soon."
Shock made a great stillness grow inside Kyle as he watched them leave the restaurant. Now he knew why his instincts had told him from the first that something wasn't quite right about Tom and Lucy Wayne;'they were too odd. They were fakes.
Suddenly all his reassurances to Sara seemed foolish. Something was going on that he didn't understand. He could either tell her what had just happened and destroy her fragile confidence, or he could keep quiet until he knew more.
She came back from the rest room, toting a cleaned-up Noelle. who reached out to him with both arms. "She missed you," Sara said, smiling. Kyle made a great show of talking to the baby, while he silently began making plans. Audubon undoubtedly wanted to know whatever he knew about Sara, and that information must be more important than Kyle had ever imagined. Noelle's appearance was some kind of turning point. Why?
"Where are Tom and Lucy?" Sara asked, settling into a chair beside him.
"They changed their minds about eating."
She sighed with relief. "Good. Their questions made me squirm. I'm sorry about the adoption story. I just can't get over the feeling that the less anyone knows about Noelle, the better." She shook her head and looked at him with green eyes full of apology. "Do you think I'm hopelessly silly?"
Kyle grabbed her hand and brought it to his lips. "Not at all," he said.
Kyle had been quiet since their lunch at the restaurant, and Sara began to worry about his unusual brooding. She told herself that he was just exhaustedafter all, she'd hardly given the poor man much chance to rest over the past few days, and she was tired too. They curled up on her queen-size bed with Noelle between them and napped all afternoon, but when Sara woke up she found Kyle standing at her bedroom window, gazing into the autumn dusk, lost in thought.
He wasn't interested in fixing supper; for the first time he let her cook. She made her gourmet specialty hot dogs and canned soup. Afterward they sat in front of the fireplace and took turns reading an old National Geographic to Noelle, who snuggled next to Daisy on the rug. Noelle fell asleep in the middle of "Great Whales of the Pacific," with her head on Daisy's golden side.
"I need to make a business call to Jeopard," Kyle said. "Would you mind if I use the phone in the kitchen? I need to sit at the kitchen table, where I can take notes."
Sara hid a feeling of dismay. He seemed secretive, and that wasn't typical of him. But she shrugged casually. "Sure. I'll put Noelle to bed and go get a couple of orchid blossoms from the greenhouse." Every night she put the orchid and milk blend on his scars. So far it had produced no effect; Sara told him to be patient, though her own results with the mixture had begun to show up more quickly.
"I won't be long," he promised, and headed for the kitchen.
Sara gave him his privacy, taking longer than necessary to get Noelle and Daisy settled in the nursery, then dawdling in the greenhouse. By the time she returned to the great room he was standing in front of the fireplace, his hands shoved into the pockets of faded jeans, his shoulders hunched under a white sweater, as if he were cold.
"Is everything okay?" she asked, going to him and slipping one arm around his waist.
He studied her so intensely that she shivered inside. "When I look at you, everything's fantastic," he said vaguely. He pulled her close. "Yes."
"You're crushing my orchids," Sara protested, chuckling. She held them up. "Ready for another treatment?"
"Ready for anything. If you're involved." He kissed her with an intensity that bordered on desperation, and his sweet wildness ignited the heat that always simmered between them.
When he stopped she looked at him groggily, her mouth feeling deliclousty hot and swollen, her body flushed with expectation. "We better take care of the orchid treatment first," she whispered. "Otherwise I'm sure well forget."
He tilted his head toward the hearth rug. "Here, as usual?"
"Yes."
She hurried to the kitchen and blended the concoction. He had removed his sweater by the time she returned. Standing very still in front of the firelight, he was backlit in a way that made her think of an exquisite statuea visual feast designed to arouse women during some primitive dance of fertility. Without a word he sat down on the rug; she knelt, facing him, and set the bowl of liquid to one side.
Sara dipped her fingers into the mixture and gently touched his face, stroking the worry lines on his brow as well as the scars. He sat silently, his blue eyes watching her the whole time that she smoothed her hands over his face and torso.
Sara reveled in the restrained passion they shared. She leaned forward and brushed her lips across his, then moved around behind him. His back muscles flexed and relaxed under her fingers, and she remembered how they had flexed at other times, when his whole body was moving and her hands were urging the motion.
Sara finished rubbing the orchid bath into his scars. Slowly she trailed her fingertips down his spine and languidly drew circles in the small of his back. "Done," she whispered. "Just sit still and let it dry for a minute."
He laughed hoarsely. "You touch me until all I can think about is making love to you, and then you tell me not to move. This is torture."
She knelt beside him and deftly unfastened his jeans. The breath shuddered in his throat as she uncovered him. "I'll try to make your torture easier to bear," Sara murmured, and began by kissing the hot, smooth skin low on his belly.
"Sara," he said, filling her name with a shivering mixture of encouragement and control. Then, less than a minute later, "I can't take any more, sweetheart. Come here."
There was an anguished, starving sound in his voice that made her ache to soothe him, to sweetly fill him with love. Sara took his hands. "Come with me."
She led him to her suite and they undressed each other quickly. Once they were in the shower Sara caressed and held him while the warm water cascaded over them. She trembled at the raw need in his body and was caught in his strange torment.
He jerked her close under the spray, his hands parting her, sliding wet into her most feminine secrets, building her pleasure to such a fever that she sagged against him and held tightly to his shoulders.
"Believe, believe," he said against her mouth, before his tongue swept inside to command her.
"Whatever you want. I do believe you." She answered his anguish, not the puzzling words.
Kyle grasped the backs of her thighs and lifted her against his fiercely aroused body. Then he pressed her to the tiled wall and entered her in such a slow, wickedly gyrating way that she was pulsing inside before he had hardly begun to love her. The hot water coursed down their bodies, making her nipples slide through the patterns of his chest hair, being tickled and scrubbed.
Sara gasped and cried out, and as water skimmed her lips he sank his tongue inside again. She wrapped her arms around his neck and gloried in the powerful arching of his body, the fierce possession of his hands holding her legs around his hips, the tender care he gave her with his mouth.
But as he called her name she sensed again that urgency, the melancholy that she'd never heard before. Frightened, Sara held him tightly as his warmth filled her. He trembled violently with release and continued to hold her hard against the shower wall.
"What's wrong?" she begged.
"Shh." Gradually he set her down, feathering kisses across her face as he did. Sara flicked the shower controls, and the water stopped, leaving a silence punctuated by the savage rasps of her and Kyle's breath. She gazed up at him anxiously.
"Whatever it is, tell me. Are you you aren't having second thoughts about us, are you? Just say so."
He cupped her face in both hands. "Sara, no, no. My God, how could you think that?"
"You've closed yourself off from me. I don't know what to think. And you're upset about something."
He nodded. "We need to talk." He glanced down at their flushed, naked bodies. "With fewer distractions." He didn't say anything else while they dried each other off and slipped into their robes. Then he swept her into his arms and carried her to bed, where he sat down, cross-legged, in the intimate circle of light from the small lamp on her nightstand. He held her on his lap and looked down at her with troubled eyes.
"I have to leave tomorrow, on business," he told her. "I shouldn't be gone for more than two or three days."
Sara gazed at him in amazement. "Is that all that's worrying you? Of course, I wish you didn't have to go, but"
"I want you to know about my work." He paused, frowning. "For years I had to be so damned expert at telling lies, or half lies, or simply misleading people by leaving out considerable portions of the truth. Audubon encouraged his agents to have a certain dramatic flair. In other words, coming up with good disguises and good con jobs was part of my job."
She felt the blood leaving her face. "Since then you've been pretty bored running an import-export business, I suppose. I've been wondering how you could be happy in an ordinary business. But what"
"Shh. I'm getting to the what ," he told her. "Deception made my work so much easier. But then, somewhere along the way, I realized that it had taken over more than Just my work. That's what happened to Jeopard too. He created a character that had very little humanity. It scared the hell out of the people he had to deal with, which was exactly what he wanted it to do. But eventually he became that character. Thank God, now he's fallen in love with a woman who sees the man he used to be. He's going to get married, maybe even have children. I don't know if she can change him completely, but she's made a good start."
"Have you lied to me about something?" Sara asked, her throat tight. "Is that what you're saying?"
He nodded. "And you don't know how much I regret the lie." He grasped her hand. "Jeopard and I don't have an import-export business down in Ft. Lauder-dale. I guess you'd call us private investigators."
"You guess? What kind of cases do you take?"
"Hmmm. Jeopard's fiancee, Tess Gallatin, was one of our cases. You remember what I told you about her that she's a princess?"
Sara nodded blankly. "Cherokee Indian on her father's side, and her mother was the queen of Kara. Scandinavian. How could I forget a strange story like that?"
"Tess didn't know that she had a royal background. She didn't know who her real mother was until Jeopard and I investigated her case. Actually, we were hired by someone in Kara to find out if Tess was hiding a rare blue diamond that had been stolen from the queen. Jeopard was supposed to get close to her and determine whether or not she had the diamond."
"And obviously he did."
"Yeah. But she was no thief. The diamond was a legacy from the mother she'd never met. We helped her discover her background and claim her title as a princess."
Sara held his gaze angrily. "That sounds like honorable work. Why didn't you just tell me the truth about it?"
"Because I thought you'd trust me less if you knew that I was an investigator. That you'd think that I still had ties to Audubon's groupthat he'd sent me to check up on you."
Sara couldn't deny his intuition. "You were right." she muttered. Then she searched his eyes and asked bluntly, "Do you still have ties to the group?"
Tension filled the silence. His gaze became hard, as if he were steeling himself for her reaction. "Yes." When she stiffened he put both arms around her, the embrace like a capture. He was astute, Sara thought, because at the moment she felt like moving away from him.
"What kind of ties?" she asked coolly.
"You don't just walk away from a career with Audubon. If one of your old cases is reopened, you can be called back to duty, at least temporarily. And that's what happened to me. I have to go to Virginia to meet with Audubon."