Regret slashed through him, cold and stark. They had both lost control. The danger, the adrenaline, the painful memories stirred up by the situation, all those things had contributed to the insanity that had seized them in the darkness. But the regret he felt wasn’t from what they had done. It was from the knowledge that neither of them would allow it to happen again.
Not yet,
he thought recklessly.
Just this once, we'll forget who we are. You'll smile, you'll sigh, you'll hold me...
A gull shrieked, its raucous call sounding like a mocking laugh. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the gentle, rhythmic puff of Emma’s breathing.
“Bruce?”
The voice had a first thing in the morning huskiness, sending tendrils of tension curling through his body. He blinked. Emma was looking at him, her mountain lake blue eyes probing past the barriers he hadn’t had the chance to reerect. He swallowed. He didn’t know what he wanted to say, or do. No, that wasn’t right. He knew what he wanted to do, he just wouldn’t let himself do it.
She shifted, curling her fist into the sleeping bag to hold it to her chest as she propped her other arm beneath her head. Her arm was bare, her shirt spread out to dry on the rock beside her. She glanced around the clearing before catching his gaze once more. “I guess we should leave.”
“Yeah. We should.”
“There’s a compass in the first aid kit.”
“From what I could see when I unrolled the tarp, the maps came through in good shape.” The ducks near the lily pads took off in a blur of spray and beating wings. He turned his head to follow their progress across the lightening sky. “We should wait until your boots dry out, though, or you might get blisters.”
“I thought you’d be in a hurry.”
His voice softened. “We can wait a little longer. It would be a shame to disturb any more ducks right now, wouldn’t it?”
The smile that nudged the corners of her mouth was as tentative as the mist on the lake. “Yes, it would.”
Bruce hadn’t realized how much he had missed seeing her smile. She hadn’t smiled for days, not since he had shaved off his beard and become himself. She had fought him, had cursed him and had given her body in passionate abandon, but she hadn’t smiled. He looked into her eyes, wishing he could stretch out this moment and pretend they were the only two people in existence. Hopeless wishes, mere remnants of last night’s insanity.
She tilted her head, muffling a yawn against her shoulder. “Thanks for letting me use the sleeping bag.”
“You're welcome.”
“I guess you must have been cold.”
“I folded an edge of the tarp over myself. It wasn’t all that cold during the night.” He glanced down at his shirt. It hung open in two places where Emma had ripped the buttons from their holes. “Drafty, but not cold.”
She followed his gaze and a flush darkened her cheeks. Her smile faded. She tried unsuccessfully to rake her fingers through her hair, then focused on her broken nails. “Bruce, about what happened last night...after the explosion. Between us.”
He should have known there wouldn’t be any evasiveness or morning-after denial when it came to Emma. “What about it?” he asked gently.
Her gaze lifted to his and steadied. “I'm not going to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“No, neither of us can do that.”
“And I'm not going to pretend that I'm ashamed. It was understandable, a purely physical reaction to the circumstances.”
Was it? Of course, she was right. The physical attraction had been building for days. That’s all it was. It couldn’t have been more. He wasn’t about to open himself up to the pain of loving someone again, he knew better than that. “There were some strong emotions let loose.”
“We both went a little crazy, I guess. But you know it won’t happen again.”
He sighed and rubbed his face. His beard sounded like sandpaper against his palm. “I know, Emma. I do have to ask you something, though.”
“I'm all right, if that’s what you're worried about. I'm not fragile.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. Things happened too fast for me to take any precautions.”
“Oh. That.” She was silent for a while. “It was the wrong time of the month. As you would say, the risk was minimal.”
“If you find out, later, you’d tell me?”
The silence stretched out longer this time. “Let’s not talk about later, okay?”
They lay side by side, unmoving, while the light strengthened. There was so much more to say, yet neither one of them seemed to want to break the predawn peace. The temporary truce between them had settled in as fleetingly as the dew. It was bound to burn off in the light of day.
“Bruce?”
“Mmm?”
“When you were Prendergast, were you faking your incompetence with a fishing rod?”
The question brought back that memorable day in Emma’s canoe and he smiled. “Why?”
“Considering the fact that we're facing more than a day’s hike through the bush, I’d like to know what kind of outdoor experience you have. Ever been camping? Do you know how to build a fire, snare a rabbit, keep from walking in circles?”
“I've never been much of a fisherman, but I know how to build a fire. And as long as I have a compass and a good map, I won’t get lost.”
“That’s a relief. Are they teaching survival training along with those disguise courses at the police academy these days?”
“You could say I had on-the-job training. I worked with some park rangers out in Alaska one fall to crack a ring that was killing bears for their gall bladders.”
She scowled. “That kind of thing is disgusting. I hope you caught them.”
“Uh-huh. Eventually. The stakeouts on that job didn’t involve reading books in front of a crackling fire, though.”
“I bet.”
“What about you? Did they teach fishin' and huntin' at your fancy private school? How did a rich society princess end up owning a pair of broken-in leather hiking boots?”
She rolled onto her back, raising her arms to lace her fingers under her head. “From the time I was a kid, my father used to take me hunting with him. We would spend two weeks a year tramping through the most remote and beautiful areas on the continent, pretending that we were actually trying to bag a trophy, but the point of the trip was the trip itself. We usually came back empty-handed.”
“You and your father must have been very close. You miss him a lot, don’t you?”
“He was lost to me long before he died in that stupid accident. I should have known he wasn’t in any shape to go hunting alone, but I had hoped that it meant he was starting to turn things around, to give up the bottle.” She paused. “No matter what your research might have said, it really was an accident. The insurance companies were the only ones who tried to imply my father’s death was a suicide.”
“They wanted to avoid paying up, right?”
“You guessed it. The media made it into another scandal—the Duprey name has sold a lot of papers over the years. The reporters crossed the line that time, though.”
“What happened?”
“They wouldn’t leave us alone. They staked out the house, they followed us around. Then some vulture of a photographer started snapping pictures of Simon and me at the graveside. They've got no respect, no compassion, no sense of privacy or decency. The scum deserved what he got when Simon took his camera and—” She stopped abruptly.
“Emma? What did Simon do to that reporter?”
“Nothing.”
He frowned, sitting up so that he could face her. “Did Simon hit him?”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “No, I did.”
He braced his hands on either side of the sleeping bag and leaned closer. “Emma, look at me. Don’t you think that after last night we could be honest with each other?”
She rolled to her side away from him. “Is my shirt dry? I think I'll get up.”
“It’s got dew on it but it’s drier than it was when you took it off. Stop trying to change the subject. You were charged with assault three years ago, right after your father’s funeral. It was that reporter, wasn’t it? Simon was the one who struck him, but you took the blame, didn’t you?”
“Get off me, Bruce. I want to get dressed. It’s too early in the morning for a police interrogation.”
Sighing, he pushed away from her. “So we're back to that, are we?”
She inched the bag over and reached out to snag her shirt. Keeping her back toward him, she thrust her arms into the sleeves and started fastening the buttons. “Did we ever get away from it?”
“You know we did. This is just between you and me. That assault case is over and done, you settled it out of court, so I'm not asking officially, I'm asking for me.”
“Just because we shared our bodies doesn’t mean we share everything else.”
He knew she was right. Neither one of them wanted the intimacy to go further, and yet... He glanced at the horizon. Dawn was a breath away. Quickly he stretched out his arm until his palm hovered above her shoulder. “Emma, please.”
“Why?”
“Why? I want to know the truth, that’s all. I'm sick of lies. There always seems to be a good reason for them, but after a while the layers of dishonesty get so thick they can choke you.” He completed his motion and let his fingers come to rest on the damp cotton. The contact triggered a wave of warmth through his body. He hadn’t touched her since last night. He was surprised by how much he still needed to touch her. “I know what it’s like. With the job I have, going deep undercover for months at a stretch, sometimes I live a lie every day. It gets to you, that constant need to suppress what you feel and who you are. It’s confusing, and frustrating, and you risk losing yourself.”
A delicate tremor traveled through her shoulders. “I've lived a lie for three years.”
He knelt behind her and shifted his hand to the back of her head. His need to touch her was more than sexual. He moved his palm, focusing on the way her hair twined over his fingers. Slowly, tenderly, he began to stroke the tangled locks. “You did it to protect your brother, didn’t you?”
“This isn’t an official question?”
“No, Emma. Like I said, this is for me.”
Emma closed her eyes and soaked up his soothing touch. Last night his grip had been hard and uncompromising when he’d pulled her out of the plane and again when he’d forced her to safety. And afterward, his hands had been rough and urgent. This tender, quiet, early morning gentleness was something new, something she’d never known. With anyone. It made her remember all the old dreams of having someone who would be there to wake up with, to share sunsets with, to hold her while she cried. Someone she could trust, maybe even love.
But she knew that someone couldn’t be Bruce. They didn’t love each other. They couldn’t. Want, need, those were the words that applied. Soon the sun would come up and with it would come all the reasons why he shouldn’t be touching her and she shouldn’t be letting him. Daylight and reality would find them, and they would once more be the two people they had been the day before. But for now, for this stolen instant, she would seize the pleasure he was giving her. She sighed. “Yes. I took the blame for Simon.”
He worked his fingers toward her scalp, easing apart a snarl of auburn-streaked hair. “It makes sense, Emma. I know you have a hell of a temper, but you're too smart to get caught punching out a reporter, no matter what the provocation.”
“There was plenty of provocation,” she said. “It was the reporter’s idea to bring the charges against me instead of Simon, though—I’d always done my best to shelter Simon from the publicity our family went through over the years, so he wouldn’t have made as spectacular a target. I guess the reporter figured I’d be worth more, maybe sell more copies of his paper. He was happy enough with the money my lawyers settled on him.”
“No wonder you tried to intimidate me with that bow when you thought I was a reporter.”
“You don’t intimidate easily, do you?”
“Nope. Neither do you.”
She tipped her head forward as he combed his fingers down to her nape. “I was tired of it, Bruce. I just wanted some peace. That’s why I bought the cabin and changed my name. The local people still don’t know who I am, and I like it that way.”
Carefully he separated the last of the knots that the dunking in the lake and the wild night had left in her hair. When he was done, he settled his hands lightly on either side of her neck. “Your mother died of a drug overdose, didn’t she?”
“Tranquilizers and vodka. Why?”
He dropped his hand and moved in front of her, his knees on the edge of the sleeping bag. “Why are you working for McQuaig, Emma? What’s the real reason?”
The question wasn’t entirely unexpected, yet she had hoped that he might have waited a little longer, might have touched her a little more, maybe smiled and talked about unimportant things like jazz and books and chocolate.
“If you were doing this smuggling in order to thumb your nose at the law, you wouldn’t be running drugs. It would be anything but drugs. And if you moved out to the cabin for peace, why would you get yourself mixed up with a group like McQuaig’s? You're not stupid. You would know what you were getting involved with.” He leaned forward, his eyes vibrant, his gaze intense. “And there’s the way you love to fly, but you hated every minute of that flight last night. I saw it on your face.”
The sun burst over the horizon with the finality of a thunderclap. The night, and the fleeting truce, was at an end. Emma wriggled out of the sleeping bag and tugged the tail of her shirt over her thighs. Keeping her gaze on Bruce, she backed toward her discarded jeans. “You're not asking just for you anymore, are you?”
“Does it make a difference?”
“You know it does.”
His face had already lost the soft sleepiness of the man who had watched the wood ducks. “I guess I can’t separate it, can I? I can’t even share in some harmless pillow talk without remembering who I am. My job is still my life.”
She pulled on the rest of her clothes. An awkward silence descended. She walked across the rock point to retrieve her boots, then sat down and tugged them on. It was difficult to see the laces through the tears she didn’t want to acknowledge. “What we did together doesn’t change who we are, Bruce.”