It hadn't been all silence. She'd heard some of their conversation.
You couldn't have stopped it.
What couldn't he have stopped?
she'd wondered then. She wondered now. Wondered what had made Garrett simply stand there—much as he was standing in her kitchen now—silent and alone.
Most of all alone.
That reality resounded above all others.
She must have made a sound, because his head came up suddenly. He turned and spotted her in the shadows.
What she saw in his eyes in that unguarded moment made her heart clench.
Pain.
Raw and stark.
Deep and abiding.
She might not like him, might not want him here, but she hurt for him in that moment and respected his need for solitude. She was about to turn around and leave him—and then she saw it. A thin blade of a cut, seeping blood, ran in a raw six-inch slice across the left side of his abdomen, just below his rib cage.
She gasped, then met his eyes in disbelief. "You're hurt."
He looked down at himself, looked up again, and smiled... and immediately pissed her off.
She knew exactly what was going to come out of his mouth. Gone was the living, breathing, vulnerable man—the man she had almost convinced herself she could like. Back was the catch-bullets-in-his-teeth fantasy warrior.
"Don't you dare," she hissed, unable to mask her anger. "Don't you
dare
say it's nothing ... like you're some... some macho marauder in a low-budget blood-and-guts action movie."
He looked surprised. Then amused. "Clearly, you've been watching the wrong movies. Actually, it hurts like hell." He gave her a smoldering look. "Want to kiss my boo-boo?"
She glared at him, instant outrage making her forget every generous thought she'd been stupid enough to consider. "Do I look like I want to kiss your boo-boo?"
7
What she looked like, Nolan decided,
was a woman who wanted to slug him for his juvenile attempt to make light of the knife wound. And yet he saw something else flash in her eyes—something fleeting but hot that had surprised even her. She'd given a passing thought to his suggestion... and it had shocked the shit out of her.
Well, hell. It shocked the shit out of him, too.
That
was definitely a wrinkle he didn't need. Not when just looking at her raised more than his warning flag.
Once a Ranger, always a Ranger,
he thought in disgust. Life's basics were pretty much centered around war, beer, and sex—the order subject to change with the terrain. The terrain standing in front of him in nothing but thin silk and telling eyes shuffled sex to the top of the list. Which proved another Ranger axiom: The little head did most of the thinking.
"Stay," she ordered, turned on her bare feet, and marched—or ran away from him; he couldn't tell which— back toward her bedroom. He breathed his first deep breath since he'd realized he had company. Thought about the step-by-step process of breaking down an M4 and reassembling it.
Then started all over again.
It almost worked.
He'd
almost managed to push from his mind the image of Jillian's incredible mouth kissing his boo-boo, then trailing south across his skin toward happy valley when she returned, her arms full of rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, ointment, gauze, and tape.
He steeled himself against the frazzled, almost fragile picture she made. "What, no Power Ranger Band-Aids?"
She flipped on the track lighting. "Shut up, Garrett."
Good idea.
"Yes, ma'am."
Bracing his hands on the granite on either side of his hips, he hitched himself up onto the kitchen counter and spread his legs, making room for her to move in between them and go to work on him.
Bad idea.
Her hands were small. She was way too close. Her touch was soft and burned like fire against his skin as she gingerly dabbed an alcohol-soaked cotton ball to the cut.
He hissed against the bite of the antiseptic and smelled ... her. It was like inhaling a tropical forest. Exotic flowers. Soft, clean scents that should have soothed. Erotic woman scents that heated his blood and had Skippy waking up by degrees.
He wrapped his fingers around the lip of the counter and held on.
Plastic princess,
he reminded himself.
Queen bitch of the rich and pampered.
She was an assignment. In a clingy thin nightshirt that barely covered her thighs. With sweet breasts pressing against thin silk, just begging for his mouth.
He clenched his jaw, closed his eyes. When that didn't help, he swallowed and held perfectly still. He imagined himself doing push-ups. Roping out of a helo. Parachuting out of a plane and hitting the tarmac with a bone-jarring thud that rattled his teeth and— "Ouch! Christ. Easy with the sandpaper."
Her hands stilled. And then she just stood there, like she wasn't sure what to do. Her head was down; her breath fanned his ribs. As soft and sweet as a midnight breeze, it whispered across his skin and made his nipples hard as rocks.
In that moment, he knew she was as aware of him as he was of her. And that, like him, she didn't like it or have a clue what to do about it.
Her hand wasn't quite steady when she started in on the cut again. In fact, her hands were shaking.
And he wanted, more than anything he'd wanted in too long to remember, to touch her, to bury his hands in her soft, clean hair that the track lighting cast in fiery highlights where it parted at her crown.
He tightened his grip on the lip of the counter and somehow managed to stop himself. Talk about mistakes. First rule of fiefdom: The peasant doesn't touch the princess. Not the way Nolan had in mind.
Mistake or not, he remained too aware of the night, the silence, the cocooning isolation of her penthouse, and the residual effects of the past few hours of heightened sexual awareness.
OK. Reality check. Tomorrow she'd have this all in perspective. Tonight she'd been pushed beyond the limit. Stress. Exhaustion. A delayed reaction to a violence he knew far too well but someone like her couldn't possibly understand. It had
softened her. Made her... real. Made her touchable.
Made him insane.
He couldn't help himself. Heart hammering, he lifted a hand
to her hair. And sank into a softness as silky and alive as anything he'd ever encountered.
She raised her head and met his eyes. And there, in her shadowed kitchen where he didn't belong and didn't want to be, awareness shifted to uncharted territory. Altered yet again
when in a gesture that told how incredibly vulnerable she truly was at this moment, she turned her face into the pulse at his wrist.
Heat. Softness. Incredible vulnerability.
He almost lost it then. Almost forgot everything he knew, about right, about wrong, about who she was and who he wasn't. He almost tipped her face up to his to see if that amazing mouth tasted the way he knew it would. Of sex and hunger and a salvation a man like him had no business seeking from a woman like her.
The need of it shot through his blood like a bullet. The wrongness of it prowled in the background like a jailer. And when be saw in her eyes that she wasn't going to be the one to stop something really, truly, royally stupid from happening, he dug deep and put on the skids himself.
He abruptly dropped his hand.
"I'm sorry," he said, and heard a gruff tenderness in his voice that shocked him. "I shouldn't have dragged you to Nirvana. I should have taken you to your father."
She blinked, seemed to focus, then grasp what had almost happened. She swallowed hard and he realized she was fighting tears. "I wouldn't have gone."
"Yeah. That's what I figured."
Silence settled, heavy and thick. It was time to scramble before he dived back into big trouble.
He pried the antiseptic cream from her trembling fingers. "I can finish this up. It really is just a scratch, Jillian. Nothing to get twisted up about."
She backed away as if he'd slapped her. "Nothing to get twisted up about? In your reality, maybe. Not in mine." She lifted a hand, a gesture of abject bafflement mixed with horror. "This is your
life?"
Her eyes were big and round; her voice had risen and he could see that exhaustion and shock had pushed her dangerously close to hysteria. She hugged her arms around her waist like she was holding herself together and leaned back against the opposite counter as if she needed it to give her balance.
"This is really what you do?" Disbelief knotted with revulsion. "You sneak into people's homes, violate their sense of safety, get into bar fights, and put yourself at risk?"
He shot her a glance and slid off the countertop, "Yeah, well, it's a dirty job, but—"
"Stop it! Just stop with the wiseass remarks."
He watched her warily as she dragged a hand through her damp hair, glared at him, then looked away.
"I don't want to be a part of this," she said, her voice so soft he barely heard her. When she met his eyes again, hers were filled with a fiery fear that it was apparent, she hated, really hated, to let him see. "I don't want to be someone who has to look over my shoulder or have someone watch my back."
She glanced from the angry slash on his abdomen to the bruise on his cheek. "I don't want to be responsible for someone getting hurt. I want this to be over."
He stared from her face to the antiseptic cream, then back to her face again. "With some luck, it
will
be over. Soon. The police will nail it down and put whoever's doing this away. In the meantime, I'm just here to run a little interference, OK?"
"Interference? That's what? A tactical word for dodging bullets?"
Downplaying the repugnance in her tone by ignoring it, he spread the soothing cream on a strip of gauze, then plastered the gauze against his cut. "It won't come to that."
"You're damn right it won't. Because you aren't going to be here tomorrow."
His head came up.
"When I tell my father about the little stunt you pulled, dragging me into the middle of a biker bar fight, you'll be off the
payroll before you can say 'Harley hog.'"
He gave her a considering look, shrugged. "You want to tattle to Daddy? Be my guest. I'm sure you're right—but if you think I'll shed any tears over it, think again."
He tore off a piece of tape with his teeth, then secured it over the gauze. "You might also want to think about this. He'll just send someone to replace me."
For the space of several moments he let her digest that bit of reality.
"So it seems to me, you've got a choice here, princess." He felt nasty again suddenly. He didn't know why, but he did know he wanted to take it out on her. "You can stick with the devil you know or take a chance on the one you don't know. Now if you'll excuse me, it's been a bitch of a day. I'm hitting the rack."
He left her standing in the kitchen. Before he did something really stupid. Like wrap his hand around the back of her head, drag her up against him, and massage her tonsils with his tongue.
He closed the bedroom door behind him and leaned back against it.
What the hell was he doing?
Why hadn't he just dialed Daddy's number, handed her the phone, and let her tattle her regal little heart out? It would have been his ticket out of here.
It's what he wanted. To be rid of her. To go back to his boat. Back to his booze and back to a fast track to oblivion.
He stripped off his jeans and lay back on the bed. If what he really wanted was to be gone, why had he just made a half-assed attempt to convince her he should stay?
For the same reason he'd taken care about Wilson. He was a team player. He finished the job. It came with the Ranger territory.
Or maybe, for some twisted reason he might actually want to stay.
Want to kiss my boo-boo?
Christ. He watched the overhead fan spin slow shadows across the ceiling.
He was playing with fire... and against all odds, he wanted to feel the burn.
So she was hot. Palm Beach was full of hot women. Women who could
heat his pool
a whole hell of a lot faster than
Jillian Kincaid.
So why was he letting her get to him? It didn't compute. It was like he had this constant compulsion to bait her. Earlier he'd taken the "surprise" in her bathroom much further than necessary to make his point. He could have assured her that he wasn't a threat but that the bad guys were and she wasn't safe from them. Point made.
But he hadn't.
He'd pushed. And as she'd so aptly put it, he'd been a sonofabitch about it.
He'd been pushing ever since. Wanting her to break. When she hadn't even buckled, he'd pushed a little harder. Dragged her down to Nirvana just to show her what she'd gotten hooked up with when a call would have brought Ethan running to babysit until he finished his business with Plowboy.
Yeah. He'd pushed. Because she'd surprised him.
She kept surprising him. Just like she'd impressed him. He hadn't expected or wanted to be either.