Authors: Nora Roberts
Trace leveled the gun to a point just under Abdul’s chin. “Yeah, but yours is ticking away right this minute. My finger’s starting to sweat, Abdul. You’d better move.”
He waited until the man had gotten behind the wheel and driven off before he lowered the gun. It had been close, Trace realized as he slipped the gun back into the holster strapped to his calf. He’d nearly taken his revenge there and then. Trace straightened again. When his blood was cool and his mind clear, revenge would be that much sweeter.
He spun quickly when he heard footsteps behind.
Gillian had seen that look before—when she’d told him that Forrester had been murdered. She thought she’d seen it again when her head had been jerked up by the hair. But even now, though she was seeing it for the third time, her skin prickled cold.
“I thought I told you to stay with a crowd.”
“I saw,” she began, then walked over to pick up her bag. It would sound foolish to say she’d stayed close in case he’d needed her help. “I didn’t know you had a gun.”
“You figure I was going to get your brother out with fast talk and a charming smile?”
“No.” She couldn’t meet his eyes now. She’d disliked but at least understood the world-weary, slightly grungy man she’d first met. She’d nearly liked and again had understood the cocky, smart-mouthed man she’d breakfasted with. But this one, this hard-eyed stranger who carried death within easy reach, she didn’t understand at all. “Did you … the other two men, did you … ?”
“Kill them?” He said the word simply as he took her arm and led her back to the Jeep. He’d seen both fear and revulsion in her eyes. “No, sometimes it’s better to leave people alive, especially when you know what’s left of that life is going to be hell. I didn’t get a lot out of either of them. They dropped your brother and the kid at the airport and were sent out for you. They didn’t know where he was being held.”
“How do you know they were telling you the truth?”
“Because these guys are the bottom of the food chain. They haven’t got the brains to lie, especially when they know you’ll slice off little pieces of their bodies.”
The adrenaline washed out of her. “God, then how are we going to find him?”
“I’ve got some leads. And the word is
I
, not
we
. As soon as I find a safe house for you, you’re going under.”
“You’re mistaken.” She stopped in front of the Jeep. Her face was beaded with sweat but no longer pale.
“Sure, we’ll discuss it later. Right now, I want a drink.”
“And as long as you’re working for me, you’ll drink in moderation.”
He swore, but more good-naturedly than she’d expected. “Name ten Irishmen you know who drink in moderation.”
“You, for one.” She turned to walk around to her side of the Jeep when he swore again and grabbed her. She was about to snap at him when he pulled her shirt loose from the waistband of her slacks. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“You’re bleeding.” Before she could protest, he’d yanked her slacks down enough to expose her hipbone. The cut wasn’t very deep, but it was rather long. Blood had seeped through to stain her shirt. For an instant—and an instant was often too long—the dull red haze of fury clouded his vision. “Why didn’t you tell me he’d hurt you?”
“I didn’t realize.” She bent to examine the wound clinically. “I was trying to slow him down and stumbled. He gave me a jab; I guess for incentive. It isn’t serious. Nearly stopped bleeding.”
“Shut up.” It didn’t seem to matter at the moment that the cut was shallow. It was her skin, her blood. Trace half lifted her into the Jeep, then popped open the glove compartment. “Just be still,” he ordered as he broke open a first aid kit. “I told you not to take any chances, damn it.”
“I only— For heaven’s sake, that hurts worse than the cut. Will you stop fussing?”
“I’m cleaning it, damn it, and you’re going to shut up.” He worked quickly, and none too gently, until she was cleaned and bandaged.
“Congratulations, Doctor,” she said dryly, and only smiled when he lifted angry eyes. “I never expected a man like you to get so flustered at the sight of a little blood. As a matter of fact, I would have taken bets that—”
She was cut off quickly and completely when his mouth covered hers. Stunned, she didn’t move a muscle as his hands came to her throat and passed up into her hair. This was the promise, or the threat, she had glimpsed from the top of the pyramid.
His mouth, hard and hungry, didn’t gently persuade, but firmly, unarguably possessed. The independence that was an innate part of her might have protested, but the need, the desire, the delight, overlapped and won.
He didn’t know why in hell he’d started this. It seemed his mouth had been on hers before he’d even thought of it. It had just been. He’d been frightened when he’d seen her blood. And he wasn’t used to being frightened—not for someone else. He’d wanted to stroke and soothe, and he’d fought that foolishness back with rough hands and orders.
But, damn it, why was he kissing her? Then her lips parted beneath his, and he didn’t ask any longer.
She tasted as she smelled, of meadows and wildflowers and early sunlight on cool morning dew. There was nothing exotic here, everything was soft and real. Home … Why was it she tasted of home and made him long for it as much as he did for her?
What he’d felt at the top of the pyramid came back a hundredfold. Fascination, sweetness, bewilderment. He coated them all with a hard-edged passion he understood.
She didn’t cringe from it. She lifted a hand to his face. The echo of her heartbeat was so loud in her head that she could hear nothing else. His kiss was so demanding, she could feel nothing else. When he drew away as abruptly as he had come to her, she blinked until her blurred vision cleared.
He was going to have to get rid of her, and fast, Trace thought as he stuck unsteady hands in his pockets. “I told you to shut up,” he said briefly, and strode around the Jeep.
Gillian opened her mouth, then shut it again. Perhaps, until she could think clearly, she’d take his advice.
Trace nursed a beer. He figured that if Abdul was smart, the message would be delivered to the right people before nightfall. He intended to be out of Mexico in an hour. He gave a brief thought to warm Caribbean waters and lazy snorkeling, then picked up the phone.
“Make yourself useful and pack, will you, sweetheart?”
She turned from the window. “The name is Gillian.”
“Yeah, well, toss the stuff in the suitcase. We’re going to check out as soon as— Rory? Well, so how the devil are you? It’s Colin.”
Gillian’s brows went up. In mid-sentence his voice had changed from a lazy American drawl to a musical Irish brogue. Colin, was it? she thought, folding her arms.
“Aye. No, I’m fit. Right as rain. How’s Bridget? Not again. My God, Rory, do the two of you plan to populate Ireland by yourselves?” As he listened, Trace glanced up long enough to give her a mild look and gestured toward the bureau. With more noise than grace, Gillian began yanking out his clothes.
“I’m glad to hear it. No, I don’t know when I might be back. No, no trouble, nothing to speak of, in any case, but I wondered if you’d do me a favor.” He watched Gillian heap his clothes into the suitcase and took a pull on the beer. “I’m grateful. There was a plane, probably private, that left the airport in Cork ten days ago. I don’t want you to ask who was on board or why. Understand? That’s a lad. Just nose around and see if you can find out the destination. Lacking that, find out how many miles she was fueled for and where she might have put down to be refueled. I’ll take it from there … Important enough,” he went on after a pause, “but nothing you should take risks for … No.” And this time he laughed. “Nothing to do with the IRA. It’s more of a personal matter. No, I’m traveling. I’ll get back to you. Kiss Bridget for me, but try to keep it at that. I don’t want to be
responsible for another baby.”
He hung up and looked at the twisted, mangled clothes in his suitcase. “Nice job.”
“And what was that all about … Colin?”
“That was about finding out where your brother is. You’d better toss whatever you want to keep in there, too. We’ll deal with getting you another suitcase later.” He was up and stuffing his snorkeling gear into a tote.
“Why the accent and the false name? It sounded to me as though that man was your friend.”
“He is.” Trace went to gather up the things in the bath.
“If he’s your friend,” Gillian insisted as she tailed behind him, “why doesn’t he know who you are?”
Trace glanced up and caught his own reflection in the mirror. His own face, his own eyes. Why was it that too often he didn’t recognize himself? He dumped toothpaste and a bottle of aspirin into a travel kit. “I don’t use my name when I’m working.”
“You checked in as Trace O’Hurley.”
“I’m on vacation.”
“If he’s your friend, why do you lie to him?”
He picked up his razor and examined the blade very carefully before he dropped it in the case. “He was a kid mixed up in a bad situation a few years ago. Gunrunning.”
“That’s what you meant by the IRA?”
“You know, Doc, you ask too many questions.”
“I’m trusting the most precious things in my life to you. I’ll ask questions.”
He zipped the travel kit in one impatient movement. “I was on assignment when I ran into him, and I was using the name Colin Sweeney.”
“He must be a very good friend to agree to do you this kind of a favor without any questions.”
Trace had saved his life, but he didn’t want to think about that. He’d saved lives, and he’d taken them. He didn’t want to think about either at the moment. “That’s right. Now can we finish packing and get out of here before someone pays us a visit?”
“I have another question.”
He let out a little laugh. “Am I surprised?”
“What was the name you gave that man this afternoon?”
“Just a nickname I picked up a few years back in Italy.” He stepped forward, but she didn’t move away from the door.
“Why did you give it to him?”
“Because I wanted whoever gives the orders to know who was coming for him.” Brushing past her, he dumped the rest of his things into the suitcase and snapped it shut. “Let’s go.”
“What does it mean?”
He walked to the door and opened it before turning back to her. There was a look in his eyes that both frightened and fascinated. “Cat. Just cat.”
* * *
He’d known some day he would go back to the States. There had been times in a jungle or a desert or a grimy hotel room in a town even God had forgotten when he’d imagined it: The prodigal son returns, brass band included. But that was the theatrical blood in him.
Other times he’d imagined slipping quietly into the country, the way he’d slipped out a million years before.
There were his sisters. At the oddest times he would think of them, want to be with them so badly he’d book a flight. Then he’d cancel it at the last minute. They were grown women now, with lives of their own, and yet he remembered them as they’d been the first time he’d seen them. Three scrawny infants, born in one surprising rush, nestled in incubators behind a glass nursery wall.
There had been a bond between them, as he supposed was natural between triplets, and yet he’d never felt excluded. They’d traveled together from the time they’d been born until he’d stuck out his thumb on a highway
outside Terre Haute.
He’d seen them only once since then, but he’d kept track. Just as he’d kept track of his parents.
The O’Hurleys had never been the huge commercial success his father had dreamed of, but they’d gotten by. They were booked an average of thirty weeks of the year. Financially they were solvent. That was his mother’s doing. She’d always had a knack for making five dollars stretch into ten.
It was Molly, he was certain, who had tucked a hundred dollars in fives and tens into the pocket of his suitcase a dozen years before. She’d known he was going. She hadn’t wept or lectured or pleaded, but she had done what she could to make it easier for him. That was her way.
But Pop … Trace closed his eyes as the plane shuddered a bit with turbulence. Pop had never, would never, forgive him—not for leaving without a word, but for leaving.
He’d never understood Trace’s need to find something of his own, to look for something other than the next audience, the next arrangement. Perhaps in truth he’d never been able to understand his son at all, or in understanding, hadn’t been able to accept.
The only time Trace had gone back, hoping perhaps to mend a small portion of his fences, Frank had greeted him with tight-lipped disapproval.
“So you’ve come back.” Frank had stood icily rigid in the tiny dressing room he’d shared with Molly. Trace hadn’t known that his presence had made Frank see it for what it was. A dim little room in a second-rate club. “Three years since you walked out, and only a letter now and again. I told you when you left, there’d be no fatted calf for you.”
“I didn’t expect one.” But he’d hoped for some understanding. Trace had worn a beard then, part of an affectation he’d grown for an assignment. The assignment had taken him to Paris, where he’d successfully broken up an international art fraud. “Since it was Mom’s birthday, I thought … I wanted to see her.” And you—but he couldn’t say it.
“Then run off again so she can shed more tears?”
“She understood why I left,” Trace had said carefully.
“You broke her heart.” And mine. “You’re not going to hurt her again. You’re either a son to her, or you’re not.”
“Either the son you want me to be or nothing,” Trace had corrected, pacing the cramped little room. “It still doesn’t matter to you what I need or feel, or what I am.”
“You don’t know what matters to me. I think you never did.” Frank had to swallow the obstruction in his throat that was part bitterness and part shame. “The last time I saw you, you told me what I’d done for you hadn’t been good enough. That what I could give you never would be. A man doesn’t forget hearing that from his son.”
He was twenty-three. He’d slept with a whore in Bangkok and gotten roaring drunk on ouzo in Athens, and he had eight stitches in his right shoulder from a knife wielded by a man he’d killed while serving his country. Yet at that moment he felt like a child being scolded without justice or cause.