Heart Of The Hunter
Bj James
Agent: Jeb Tanner Mission: To Protect a Lady Jeb was used to tough assignments, but this latest would be the biggest challenge of his career.The prey: a ruthless murderer - and his ex-best friend.The bait: pretty Nicole Callison - the killer's sister.Jeb knew Nicole would never turn away her own brother, so he renewed their old ties… and waited. But the once-gawky teenager had grown into a seductive - yet too trusting - woman.And Jeb was powerless to resist the passion that quickly flared between them. But would her love turn to ashes when she discovered the bitter truth - that he could take her brother dead or alive?
Heart of the Hunter
BJ James
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although Kiawah truly exists and is as lovely as I’ve said, perhaps even more so, no ruin lies on its shore. No legend is told of a foolish dreamer who built a castle for his forbidden love. But those who have been to Kiawah will know, and those yet to go will discover, that such a love affair could be much more than fantasy on this enchanting island.
Enjoy, BJ
Contents
One (#uf3f975cf-5214-58f4-94dd-45c82cc0e2c1)
Two (#u50ea1b67-475b-54c1-9377-ffdd3b74646a)
Three (#u95ce1d87-c90a-5044-818e-5016efd12d70)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
One
He watched. From his quiet lair, his hard stare never wavering, he looked down on the shore.
Down at her.
In this hour after dawn, as gulls glided like shadows against the horizon and waves spilled a froth of gold over glittering sand, there was the woman.
Only the woman.
As the sun lifted above the tree line, the sky was alight with a waiting promise of the white, searing heat of a windless day. But for now, as first light turned the massive window where he stood to a luminous canvas, morning clung doggedly to a fragile cool.
Morning on the island, a collage of contrasts. As was the woman who walked in solitude.
The island was Kiawah, a sultry emerald adorning the coast of South Carolina.
The woman was Nicole Callison.
Callison.
He must not forget.
A wordless mutter ruffled a calm steeped in luxury, the low sound of tempered fury and regret echoed hollowly from cavernous heights. In his stark face, rigid lips thinned to a grim line, mirroring a struggle for discipline that could mean his life.
There was no place for anger in this, nor regret. He was the hunter; Nicole Callison his snare. He would do what he must with no recriminations.
None.
Keeping field glasses trained on her, he lifted his first cup of coffee for the day to his lips. Forgotten in singular concentration, it was tepid, as black and oily as diesel fuel. He barely noticed. He waited for the moment when she would turn, when he would see her face. The face of his quarry.
Glasses clenched hard in one hand, nails scoring pebbled leather, he turned in place, moving only as she moved, tracking her path to the ruin hunkered in the sand. As she began climbing slabs of stone stacked helter-skelter like fallen dominoes, he went utterly still. No effort was needed, now, to keep her in sight. Perhaps not ever, for he’d known her ultimate goal. A sheet of broken marble that rested at its pinnacle, the last crumbling vestige of a ballroom where a dreamer called Foley and a woman of mystery danced through the fury of a hurricane as it swept his gift of love away.
What the ancient storm consigned to the sea on that night, the shore had been a half century reclaiming. Now the ruin and its legend stood on shifting sands, an abiding testament of the pomp and grandeur of another time, of courage and frivolity and unmatched devotion. Scoffed at and revered by the islanders and history alike, Foley’s castle became Folly’s Castle, as it was left as nature would have it.
Folly or masterpiece, there was magnificence in the weather-beaten ruin gleaming dully in the sun. As there must have been in the woman bound to it by love. As there was in the woman who stood drinking in the sight of sea and sky as if there were no more perfect place.
Drawn by the light, defined by it, the line and curve of her body was etched against the backdrop of vast, glittering blue. She was small, five feet two, perhaps three. Beneath the fall of a faded T-shirt her hips were slim, her breasts shapely and free. Legs, clad in tattered shorts just visible beyond the hem of her shirt, were strong and tanned. From bare toes to the battered straw hat tugged low over her forehead, she was the complete beachcomber.
Too complete? he wondered. Through narrowed eyes he studied the subtle sophistication in her bearing, the casual dignity in every move and stride. Was she innocent, or consummate actress? Was there purpose in the role she played? A reason for her quiet existence among the revelers of the exclusive island community?
Why was she the span of a continent from her home, walking the Atlantic shore not the Pacific? What circumstances brought her to trade West for East?
Was she running? Hiding?
Waiting?
Waiting for what? For whom?
The cup he’d forgotten thudded to the table at his knee. Only half aware he’d set it aside, or that he’d caught his breath again, he watched as she faced the shore at last.
There was no elegance now, no sophistication, only the naturalness of a woman at ease with her world. With a sudden fling of her hand, her hat was spinning over the sand, the flamboyant scarf tied at its crown fluttering like the tail of a playful kite.
A shake of her head sent her close cropped hair flying and shimmering in the sun, as iridescent as the wing of a raven. He saw then, as he knew he would, as he had before, that her features had been sculpted kindly by time. Hollows and shadows of maturity made real a beauty that had been a covenant of youth. Her full lips were parted in laughter. Her nose was straight, unmarred by the scar at its bridge. Her eyes were green, sometimes gray or blue, their hue changing with the color she wore.
Today her shirt was red, fading to pink. Her eyes would be green, and were looking directly at him.
He knew it was illusion, a trick of the light. The house with the sun behind it would be no more than squares and angles in black relief against the sky. There was nothing to draw her attention to the sheets of glass that served as doors and windows for the multilevel house. Nothing that would betray him. She had no reason to suspect field glasses, carefully shielded from any telltale glare, tracked every minute detail of her morning ritual day after day. No reason to suspect this quiet routine was intimately familiar to an intruder who watched and waited.
An intruder who stared at her, lost in thoughts of another time, not truly seeing that her eyes were green, nor that the scar curved like a perfect half-moon at the bridge of her nose. For whom that which field glasses weren’t powerful enough to discern, and photos from a dossier couldn’t relate, memory provided.
This moment came each day, and always with the same effect. The measured beat of his heart thudded harder, his breath shuddered to a halt, and with a sense of déjà vu he stepped back into the past, staring into a face that time had turned to a soft, but perfect replica of another.
The face of Tony Callison, the man she’d worshiped. The man he had come here to kill, if he must.
“And now, Nicole?” The question shattered a pervasive silence. Hoarse from disuse, his voice echoed as before, a hollow sound ricocheting from towering ceilings and bare walls. “Do you worship your brother even now?”
White knuckled and grave, he moved the glasses from his eyes. He stared without seeing sea or shore or woman. His blinded sight turned inward, the coil of doubt he’d fought writhed down his spine. What if she did? What would he do if she knew what her brother had become and was a part of it? How would he deal with what must be done?
Would a split second of doubt cloud his perceptions? Would memory blunt his judgment?
“No!” Denial was fierce and low, more growl than word. Shaking aside an uncommon distraction, he turned from the window leaving the sea to break over the shore unwatched. Leaving Nicole Callison to wander in her solitude. He’d been a hunter too long for sentiment to interfere in his work. A hired gun did what was needed and walked away. This time would be no different.
Tossing the glasses on a chair, he crossed to a telephone. Stabbing out a number he waited for the gruff voice that would need no identification. One ring, two, a third was cut off in midring.
“I’ve seen enough.” He spoke without preamble, lifting his gaze to the window. All that was visible from this vantage was the horizon, where sea and sky blended into one. Listening to the voice on the telephone, he closed his eyes, imagining Nicole Callison sitting atop a tumbled castle by the sea. A siren, unaware, luring the hunted to the trap.
Taking the telephone with him, the coiled cord sliding over tile and carpet as he walked, he returned to the window. With his eyes still lifted to the horizon he nodded absently to reiterated instructions and cautions that needed no answer. When the voice with the hint of a Scots burr was finally silent, he nodded again. “I’ll make contact today.”
Another rush of instruction crackled over the line. More abrupt cautions. When they were done, the intruder smiled one last time. “Yes, sir, I’ll be careful.”
A flick of his thumb broke the connection. For a long while he watched the sea changing as the light changed, reflecting the mood of the day. When he looked again at the ruin, she was gone and the early morning had lost its innocence. The first of the promised heat was rising from the sand, marshaling its strength. Soon the temperature would soar, the air would turn sultry. But long before then, when countless sun worshipers dotted the beach with canvas chairs and gaudy umbrellas, she would be hard at work.
So would he.
The first sunbather appeared at the surf’s edge as he turned away to make ready for his day. An hour later, when the heat was an inescapable truth, and the shore a milling kaleidoscope of half-naked bodies, he stepped from the geometric extravagance that was his temporary home.
There was no uncertainty in his cold gray eyes, no smile on his lips when he slipped into the roadster parked in his drive. In that rare, unguarded instant he bore little resemblance to the typical islander, the image he’d carefully cultivated among the island inhabitants for weeks.
He was Jeb Tanner, the intruder. The hunter.
No misgivings.
No regret.
* * *
The drive to Charleston was uneventful. The bridge spanning the Ashley river afforded a spectacular view, but he was familiar with the coastal city and, today, was unmindful of it. Driving purposefully, and as swiftly as city ordinance allowed, in a matter of minutes he arrived at the entrance of a narrow cul-de-sac. Small shops lined the way, each charming and in complete harmony with the historic atmosphere of the old seaport.
Nicole Callison Galleries lay at the end of the winding pathway.
With a bit of luck and good timing, he captured a newly vacated parking space in an unpaved lot. Sliding the powerful roadster into the narrow space, he was out of the car as the snarl of the engine died. Loose gravel crunched and scattered beneath his feet, roughing the leather of his shoes, but his step was deliberate and sure. The beginning was finally at hand and he was ready to have done with it.
As he passed them by, he squandered no glances on shop windows with ware displayed as works of art. He’d walked the street before. He’d passed them by before. Each time, as now, his attention was riveted on the shop that had only a door of dark wood and leaded glass. A massive door, the final barrier. And Jeb Tanner knew beyond question that when he stepped through it, neither his life nor Nicole Callison’s would ever be the same.
At the doorstep, before the nameplate with the gallery hours listed in curling script, he paused. His thoughts drifted to the past as he pondered what he’d been, what a life immersed in secrecy and subterfuge had made of him. And what he would be when this was finished.
A look of irritation crossed his face. He was annoyed with himself, with his questioning. The time for questions was over. He’d come to do a job that must be done, no matter what harm might come to the woman.
The woman. He’d struggled to think of her as no more than that. A warm body, a means to an end, and only incidentally female. She wasn’t Nicky. The coltish young girl, who’d tagged along behind her brother and his friend like a lonely puppy, no longer existed.
None of them did, not as they were. The girl had grown into a beautiful woman. Her brother was a brutal murderer who killed as much for pleasure as for greed.
And he had come, bringing the skills he’d been years learning, to end a rampage of terror.
“Whatever the cost.”
The brass handle curved against the palm of his hand, bits of glass glinting like rainbows darkened in his shadow, wood swung silently on oiled hinges. A bell jangled a warning peal as he took the step that set into motion a plan months in the making. The door closed at his back and in the cool interior he saw her seated at a desk a little distance away.
The gallery lights were still down. A lamp at her desk spilled a wreath of light over her wrists and hands. For an instant, with her half-averted face bent toward the glowing circle, the years were swept away, and the polished woman was the guileless girl he’d known.
With a rustle, she laid one small canvas aside and another was taken up. He watched as her gaze moved over a mélange of color, recalling a memory of the unwavering concentration of a gifted student ahead of herself in time and place. An innocent, for all her astonishing intelligence, lost and a little confused and with only her brother to cling to.
“Don’t stand there by the door rehearsing excuses I won’t believe, come on in.”
Her voice calling out to him was low, the rich, lilting contralto of a mature woman. He heard the assurance, the throb of stifled laughter, and illusion faded.
“You thought I’d forgotten you, didn’t you?” she continued. “I haven’t, so stop dawdling and come tell me what you think of these.” Intent on the canvas in her hand she seemed unconcerned that her greeting had gone unanswered. “By the way—” her laughter became a chuckle “—good morning.”
Wondering who merited the affection he heard in her scolding, Jeb crossed to the desk. As fifteen years slipped firmly back into place, his step became a stalker’s step. Light, quiet, undistinguished. The distance was short, a half pace behind her chair he stopped.
She didn’t glance away from the simple paintings. “Ashley left these on the doorstep this morning. Before you say it, I know the display is set and including them means rearranging a whole wall. But he’s finally agreed to trust us with something of his.” Laying a canvas aside, she took up another, tracing the rough edge thoughtfully, as if she would immerse herself in the sun-dappled sea drawn there. “When what he’s done is as wonderful as this, how can we not?”
Jeb’s cursory glance dismissed the paintings. Not because they weren’t moving, or beautiful, but because he couldn’t think of paintings now. Not when the woman who had fascinated and intrigued him for weeks was a touch away.
Only a touch.
With her back to him and her head bowed, her close-cropped hair fell in ringlets against the nape of her neck. Like an ebony fringe, it brushed the collar of the fawn colored jacket. Jeb wondered how it would feel to brush away cloth and ringlet and twine his hand about that fragile column. How satisfying to touch her, to capture the warmth of her flesh in his palm, taming the throb of her pulse beneath his fingertips? The need to unravel and understand every facet of this woman was so powerful his arm had lifted, his hand outstretched before he realized what he’d done. For an interminable time his fingers hovered an inch from the curve of her throat.
Like a dash of cold water, reason intruded. To touch her as a stranger would frighten her, and she must not be afraid of him. Not now. Not yet.
Moving back, he listened without hearing. As she rambled on, the scent of jasmine drifted to him. As soft as her voice. As subtle. As lovely.
There was the throb of passion in her, a kindness and innate tenderness. In the half-light he could almost believe she was too guileless to be what he feared. Innocent enough to be the Judas goat he would make of her.
“Look!” she insisted. “Tell me what you think.”
Each miniature was accentuated by the lamplight spilling over them, but their glowing colors were only a blur at the edge of his vision. As she waited, silence fell like a heavy curtain.
Sounds of a street coming lazily to life began a distant, whispered chorus. A vendor passed, the wheels of his cart clattering in rhythm with the song of his wares. Soon the life of the street would spill into the gallery and this moment of first meeting would be lost. With an effort, he forced himself to look away from her to the work she offered for inspection. To begin what he must.
“I think you’re right.” His voice was as low, as husky as hers. “They’re very beautiful.”
An indrawn breath was cut short. A canvas fell to her desk as she spun to face him. Her hand at her throat and the widening of her eyes spoke her shock as eloquently as her gasp. “J—?” The incipient recognition was cut short and rejected in disbelief. With an adamant shake of her head, she struggled to recover her composure. “Gracious! You startled me.”
“I’m sorry,” Jeb said. “The sign by the door says the gallery is open.”
“It does. We are.” A flush rushed over her cheeks. “I’m sorry. We are open, but it’s rare that anyone comes in this early. Except by appointment, of course, and I was expecting my assistant. So, naturally, when I heard the bell I assumed...”
“That I was he, or should I say she?” Jeb finished for her. He smiled down at her. Beneath the fawn colored jacket, she wore a lavender frock. A tailored concoction, fitted like a glove. Her eyes were as gray as a stormy sea.
“She.”
“Pardon?” Jeb realized he hadn’t been listening.
“She. Annabelle Devereaux. I was expecting Annabelle,” Nicole explained distractedly, her face drawn in a puzzled frown.
“So, naturally, you assumed...”
“That you were...” Her voice drifted to a whisper as she lost the thread of her conversation. With another exasperated shake of her head, she began again. “Annabelle works for me and usually she comes in like clockwork, nine minutes late.”
She was babbling. Nicole Callison never babbled—it wasn’t allowed. Except, perhaps, she amended, when attractive blond men stood smiling down at her as if she were the most amusing creature on earth. Which was ridiculous. The island and Charleston were filled with attractive blond men. Yet there was something about him, something about his smile.
With a start, Nicole realized she was staring at him. At the smile that seemed oddly familiar.
“I’m sorry, ahh...” She looked away from his mouth and from his captivating gaze. In an uncommonly nervous gesture, her hand lifted to her throat again, to the pulse that fluttered at its base. “I’m sure you didn’t come to hear any of this.” With a visible effort, her gaze returned to his. “Perhaps there’s something I can help you with, something specific I can show you?”
“No.” As she had begun to rise he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. The contact was electric and startling and over almost as it began, yet the memory would linger. Drawing away, he smiled again. A tighter, less amused version than before. “I only came to browse. I’d prefer to wander about, see what you have to offer.” His look ranged over the gallery and returned, deliberately, to her. “Then I’ll know how you can help me.”
She heard an inflection in his voice she couldn’t interpret and saw a subtle difference in the way he looked at her. He was waiting for a reaction, a response to something she didn’t understand. Which was as absurd as the entire encounter had been from the beginning. He was simply a customer, albeit from the handsome cut of his clothing and the way he wore it, one of impeccable taste. But, only a customer, nevertheless.
“As you wish.” She struggled for the friendly professionalism that was her trademark. Using it as a shield, she brushed her fingers over a panel of digital switches at the side of her desk and the gallery was ablaze with light. A sweep of her hand gave him permission to wander where he would. “Please, look as long as you like. If you have a question, or see something that interests you, my associate should be in shortly and can assist you.”
With that, Nicole Callison spun her seat back to her desk, ending any conversation. When he moved away, she gathered up a ledger and to her dismay discovered the entries might be gibberish for all the sense they made.
Still, she tried. Finally, counting it wasted effort, she admitted defeat. Leaning back in her chair, she yielded to impulse and watched him.
As he moved among the displays or paused to study a painting, he appeared quite ordinary. Granted, with broad shoulders and a body that was lean and fit, he was attractive. But no more than others of his sort who had wandered through her gallery. The sea port and the resorts, on islands that dotted the coastline like sandy jewels, drew them like magnets. They came in multitudes, handsome and charismatic, sailors and athletes. Until, by virtue of their number, their uniqueness became ordinary.
Her initial unease, if her reaction could be called that, was simply that he’d caught her unaware. Towering over her as he had, the advantage had been his.
“Advantage,” she murmured, not unduly disturbed by her choice of words, or considering it unusual to think of a customer as having a controlling edge. Mollified by the rationalization, Nicole felt a bit foolish when she thought of the hard-bitten look of danger she’d imagined when she first saw him.
First opinions weren’t always right, were they? It had to be imagination. Right? If not, why hadn’t it occurred to her to be afraid? If he was truly dangerous in his quiet way, why wasn’t she afraid now?
Annoyed by the direction of her thoughts, she meant to resolve her nagging questions and dismiss him. Seeking whatever answers had eluded her, her covert stare ranged over him. From shaggy, sun-bleached hair that looked as if it wanted to curl but dared not, to the tips of his leather deck shoes, she inspected him as thoroughly as one would a stallion at auction.
Except she wasn’t buying. Not today, and not this one.
As if she’d spoken her disavowal, he looked up from a lithograph. A thoughtful smile teased the corners of his mouth, changing the planes and angles of his features, making them more than pleasant, and much, much more than attractive. And if it destroyed the myth that he was no different from so many others, it strengthened the conviction that any perception of danger in that look and that smile could only be the delusion of a mad woman.
Disconcerted that he’d caught her staring, she nodded curtly. As she resisted the temptation to sink farther into ignominy, a vague frisson of recall tugged at her memory, then flitted away.
Perhaps she was mad, after all, for there was still something about him. Something she couldn’t dismiss so easily.
“Nonsense!” The exasperated grumble accompanied a stubborn jut of her jaw as she returned to the work that waited. But work was a poor match for him. As she catalogued paintings and entered them into the ledger, a part of her resisted as another argued he was perfectly innocuous and just a customer. Summoning an elusive discipline she tried to quiet the notion there was anything familiar about him, and attend to the last details of the sale.
Five long, unproductive minutes later Annabelle Devereaux bustled in, her usual good-humored apology and bawdy explanation bursting from her before she realized Nicole was not alone.
“Oops!” She clapped a hand over her mouth, hiding a grin as she looked from one to the other. “Sorry!” she said, and was obviously anything but sorry. “The French libido isn’t exactly a proper topic with business afoot, but I didn’t realize there was business afoot already this morning.
“Wow!” She interrupted herself to lean over the desk. “What are these? No!” She warded off an answer. “Don’t tell me.” Canvases were shuffled slowly and her grin grew wider.
“Ashley!” Rising on tiptoe to shift a haunch onto the edge of the desk, she rested a stack of canvases on her knee. “You did it! Nicole Callison, you did it! Ashley Blackmon painted these, and somehow you’ve accomplished the impossible and convinced him to let us show them.”
“No,” Nicole demurred. “Ashley convinced himself.”
“Whatever. I don’t care, so long as we have them.”
“I’d like to include them in this showing.”
“You mean to sell?” Annabelle lifted an incredulous brow.
“Not this time.” Nicole shrugged. “Maybe never. Still, I’d like to include them.”
“Which means we’ll burn the midnight oil to change the exhibit.”
“One of us will.”
“Wrong!” Annabelle slipped from the desk and straightened her skirt. “Two of us will.”
Nicole laughed. “I knew I could count on you.”
If Annabelle’s grand entrance and conversation commanded Jeb’s attention, Nicole’s laughter stopped him cold. Before, it had been self-conscious and mechanical. But beyond that, he couldn’t remember ever hearing her laugh with such abandon and delight.
As he saw her now, in an element she’d created, speaking with this irrepressible woman who was clearly a trusted friend, he knew he’d never seen her as happy.
When this was finished, when he’d done what had to be done, he wondered what would be left of her life.
“Good morning,” a cheerful voice boomed out. “The boss lady suggested that there might be something I can show you.”
Jeb turned automatically toward the woman who had appeared at his side. In his millisecond of distraction she’d moved with an astonishingly quiet step after her boisterous entrance. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
“I can understand that. The wolf is beautiful.”
“The wolf?”
A dramatic gesture indicated the massive head of bronze where his clenched fist rested. “Since you’re two of a kind, it’s natural he would be one of your favorites.”
At a bit less than five feet, the woman called Annabelle was a foot shorter than he, but what she lacked in height was compensated for by unrestrained flirtation. As their gazes met, hers was flashing, unrepentantly appreciative. His was as aloof as an autumn mist. “I beg your pardon?”
“Honey.” Annabelle’s eyelids drooped in speculative appraisal. “Any man who looks as good as you, or as bad, has no need to beg anything from me.” A hearty laugh bubbled somewhere in the depths of her bosom as her shoulders shook. “At least, not too hard.”
“Good and bad?” Jeb mused. “An interesting if peculiar analogy.”
“Interesting, maybe. But not peculiar,” Annabelle declared. “Not peculiar at all. On the surface you’re good-looking in a rugged sort of way, but you can’t fool me. Underneath it you’re as wild and wily as the wolf, and twice as fascinating.”
“Wild and wily?” Jeb was chuckling now. The woman was outrageous and loved every minute of it. “Just an off-the-cuff analysis, huh? And if you had more time, you could delve a little deeper?”
“I wouldn’t mind the delving, but it isn’t necessary. Any woman worth half her salt can take one look at you and she knows.”
“But what does she know?”
A bold look moved over him again. “She knows everything.”
His chuckle turned to laughter. “I hope not. Sounds dangerous.”
“Only for the woman, sugar. But taking a crack at taming you would be worth it.” Abruptly her thoughts hopscotched in another direction. “Now that we’ve settled that, is there something special you wanted to see? Besides the wolf and me, of course.”
“Nothing, yet.” The words were hardly spoken before he recognized he’d made a tactical error. If he needed to establish himself as a regular and welcome client, he must play what was evidently a game greatly relished by this small person. Play it he would. Teasing her with a look as lecherous as her own, he grinned a lazy grin. The cool gray of his eyes became warm silver. “When I do...need help, that is, should I ask for...?”
As his voice trailed into another tantalizing pause, he saw delight flash in her eyes. Though she was short, shorter than Nicole, and much heavier, the weight was solid and perfectly distributed. With flawless, copper-hued skin and a Gypsy’s black mane tousled to perfection, she was a handsome woman. Clearly no stranger to masculine attention.
Indeed, she was handsome, but not beautiful, he decided. Not as Nicole was beautiful.
Keeping his attention focused on Annabelle, he didn’t need to glance at Nicole to make comparisons. How she looked had been burned into his brain in his study of her dossier and by weeks of surveillance.
He didn’t need to look at her to remember, nor to know that she had abandoned the pretense of working and watched him openly.
“I need to know your name,” he reminded Annabelle. “To be sure I get the right woman.”
Annabelle’s laugh set her bosoms struggling to be free of whatever superstructure confined them. “You are a devil. But you Californians usually are. Always ready to give a woman her comeuppance by reminding her there’s other fruit on the tree.”
“What makes you think I’m from California?” Jeb was a little alarmed by her astute deduction.
“I don’t think, I know. It’s the accent. You’ve been away from it long enough and trained enough that there are only little nuances of it left.”
Her allusion to his training was so perfectly on target that Jeb’s escalating alarm flickered for a moment in his eyes. For once the little woman seemed blithely unaware and chattered smugly on. “The average person wouldn’t hear it, but people come from all over the world to visit Charleston and the islands, and more than a few of them find their way to this gallery. After a while one learns. To be less than modest, I have an exceptional ear for accents and,” she added drolly, “it doesn’t hurt that I work for a former Californian.”
“I’m beginning to think there’s a lot about you that’s exceptional, Annabelle.”
“Annabelle! You devil!” She wagged a finger at him. “You’ve known my name all along. But how?”
“The boss lady mistook me for you when I came in.”
Annabelle’s rollicking laugh soared. “That would be a little hard to do.”
“Not when there are Ashley Blackmon paintings to distract one.”
“That would tend to distract her. At least until she got a good look at you.” She leaned closer, lifting her round face to his, to whisper. “Now that she has, she can’t take her eyes off you. She’s been watching us, you know.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Unusual,” Annabelle declared succinctly. “She rarely pays even the handsome ones more than cursory attention. Now.” She was hopscotching again. “Are you going to be fair?”
“How so?”
“Running to type, I see.” She clicked her tongue and sighed. “Playing the rogue to the hilt.”
Jeb grinned. “Comes with the territory.”
“I’m sure it does, but are you going to tell me who you are? Or is it that you’re a man of mystery on a dark, secret mission?”
The woman was uncanny. He wondered if she weren’t the dangerous one. “Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no mystery. As you guessed, I’m a Californian. My name is...”
“Jeb?” Nicole had risen from her seat. Her palm rested on the top of her desk to steady herself. “Jeb Tanner?”
His heart skipped a beat and Annabelle was forgotten as he lifted his head and his gaze met the recognition in hers. She took a step, then stopped. He saw the need to believe warring with the disbelief written on her face. Gently, surprising himself at how gently, he said, “Hello, Nicky.”
“Jeb! It’s really you!” Then she was in his arms. Neither would remember later how she got there, only that she had, and that he’d held her close without speaking.
When she drew away at last, her face held a look of wonder. “I thought I’d lost my mind, or that I was dreaming. Then Annabelle said you spoke like a Californian, and everything began falling into place.”
She touched his face, brushing his hair with her fingertips. “Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me when you came in?”
“Maybe I wanted to see if you remembered,” he murmured.
“How could I forget? I had a horrendous crush on you when I was fifteen.”
“But that was also as many years ago.”
“Time doesn’t matter, a girl never forgets her first crush. Not even a girl who was a nerd.”
Jeb caught her hands in his and lifted her fingers to his lips, brushing a kiss over their tips. “You were a smart kid, ahead of herself in time and place. But never, ever a nerd.”
“That would’ve been open to debate.” Keeping her hand in his, she looked up at him in unconcealed delight. “Tell me, what on earth brought you here?”
The bell by the door jangled, a trio of chattering women paused only long enough to locate them. “Nicole, my dear, there you are.” The eldest of the trio spoke, a haughty summons in her tone. “And Annabelle, how are you, dear?”
“Never fails,” Annabelle grumbled under her breath. “The gargoyle always shows up the day before a sale, with her cronies in tow, hoping to get the scoop on everyone else. You two continue as you are, I’ll handle her.” She patted Nicole’s shoulder leaning so close their noses nearly touched. “Don’t think I’m not going to hear about this. Every little detail of it. You just don’t have a rogue like this tucked in your past and keep him hidden. Not without an explanation.
“I’ll be back,” she promised, and with a swish of her skirt, went to do battle. “Mrs. Atherton” they heard her say, as she waded into the fray. “What secrets have you come to pry out of us today?”
Nicole grimaced at her pointed jab, then smiled a half smile and stepped out of Jeb’s arms. “I’m afraid Annabelle misinterpreted this.”
“Did she?”
“You know she did.”
“So, let her enjoy herself while it lasts.” He kissed her hand again, his lips lingering longer than one kiss needed. “We’ll set her straight later. In the meantime, I’ll let you get back to work.”
The bell chimed in another customer.
Jeb lingered, her hand still in his. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”
“Yes.” Nicole agreed and could think of nothing else to say.
“I could call after the sale.”
“I’d like that.”
Releasing her, he tugged at a lock of hair that fell over her forehead. “Luck,” he whispered as he had when she was fifteen and facing a crucial exam. Leaving her, he went to the door, catching it as a patron entered, sparing them another tinny symphony.
“Nicole?”
“Yes?”
She looked at him with the same unquestioning trust of the coltish fifteen-year-old, and the weight of betrayal crashed down. He could walk away from her and from his mission before that trust was destroyed, but he knew he wouldn’t.
“It’s good to see you again,” he said softly.
As he returned to the street he knew that, no matter what lies he might tell, that much was true.
Two
Jeb stood at the window. Where he’d stood for hours. The shirt he’d pulled over running shorts as he crawled out of bed had been tossed aside. The field glasses, normally a virtual part of his hand, lay on a table halfway across the room. Beside them sat a carafe of coffee, untouched and forgotten.
Beyond the window, his shadowy canvas to the world, the turbulent sea was a caldron of colors, shifting and changing as the rising sun raced to challenge the brewing storm. When he first took up his cold-eyed vigil in the moonless predawn hours, black waves tipped with silver washed over an even blacker shore. Now shades of gold rose out of magenta.
He’d watched each change. From total darkness, to this moment when night met day, he’d noted every nuance with a troubled restlessness.
For the second night he’d tossed and tumbled until, finally counting his quest for sleep lost, he’d abandoned his bed. For the third morning the sands of the shore would be undisturbed by human footsteps.
Nicole’s absence, immediately following the sale, came as no surprise. He expected it. From her dossier he knew she kept living quarters in Charleston. A small pied-à-terre, for convenience after tiring late-night sessions in the gallery. For safety, when the drive to Kiawah would be long and desolate. The postsale uproar with its countless details to be addressed would have been such a time.
Two days more had passed. The packing and shipping and additional inventory would be long done, for Nicole worked hard, sparing herself little. Ever. The only indulgence she allowed were solitary morning walks; the only respite, lazy Sundays on the island.
“Sunday.” Jeb rapped the window with an impatient fist. “Where is she?”
His growled question was rhetorical. He knew where she was. Hank Bishop, Simon’s man in Charleston, had reported where she’d been, what she’d done and with whom, in precise detail. His last report had been that Nicole Callison was tucked safely, and alone, behind her garden wall. That was two days ago. Since then, Bishop had been as silent as the grave.
A second fist rattled the pane as lightning split the distant sky and thunder rumbled. As morning blossomed in new radiance, the darkness churning over the sea had issued its first challenge. But Jeb had stopped thinking of light and darkness and colors.
“Two days.” Hands still fisted, he fought a rising impatience. “Two damnable days and nothing!”
Maybe it was the silence that made him too edgy to sleep. Maybe it was that he wasn’t accustomed to having a part of his investigations under the jurisdiction of another.
“Maybe it’s a lot of things.” Bracing against the broad expanse of glass, head bowed, tired eyes closed, his bare chest heaved in a deep shuddering breath. He needed to see her. If she was avoiding him, he needed to know why.
He needed to know now!
Wheeling about without a backward glance at the deserted shore, he went to the telephone. An instrument he trusted little, used only carefully and sporadically, but recently his chief connection to the world outside the walls of his temporary lodging. The number he dialed rang once and, after an eternity, a second time. As Mitch Ryan answered, Jeb went straight to the point. “I’m heading for Charleston.”
Mitch Ryan had been his friend for too long, and worked with him too many times to ask why or when or to try to dissuade him. If Jeb Tanner felt the need to go to Charleston, it would be with good reason. If there were circumstances that needed discussion, it wouldn’t be over an open telephone line. “All right,” the younger man said. “But, in case you haven’t looked out your window this morning, don’t let this sunshine fool you. There’s a mother of a storm brewing out there.”
Jeb glanced out the window, really seeing what he’d stared at for hours, and for a moment his world was a polarized void of light and dark. He’d spent the better part of his life on or near the sea, and it never ceased to feel strange to stand in full sun on a beautiful day and watch a squall approach.
From the looks of it, a hell of a squall, gathering strength and staying power. Mitch Ryan and Matthew Sky, two of the best of The Black Watch, had served as his crew more than once before. Water wasn’t the natural habitat for a Louisiana street kid and a French Chiricahua Apache, but they’d taken to it like salty dogs.
They were good, better than good, but he was the captain, a sailor born and bred. The sloop and its part in this was his responsibility. “Do you anticipate any problems?”
“Nothing the medicine man and I can’t handle.” Static crackled over the line and Mitch’s voice waffled in and out as lightning flashed again.
“The Gambler‘s secure?” The sloop, once the Moon Dancer, had been heavily damaged in another life. Reworked, repainted and refurbished, then given a new set of papers that wiped out its past, it was reborn as the Gambler.
In this mission, Mitch Ryan and Matthew Sky pulled triple duty as Jeb’s friends, crew and counterparts. A heavy load, but there was no one whose skill and judgment he trusted more. He could leave everything in their hands. But he had to be sure, and not just about the sloop.
Mitch was a step ahead of him, reading his thoughts, his silence. “The three of us will be safer than you will, Cap. Especially me—I have the medicine man, remember. Monsieur Matthew Winter Sky, the original man who sees things before they’re there, and that no one else will ever see. You just worry about yourself, not us. Take it easy on those narrow roads. If you happen to see a pretty girl along the way, kiss her for me.”
Jeb laughed then. “You don’t need any help in that department, I’ll let you do your own kissing.”
“Given my limited choices, I think I’ll pass. Matthew would knock my head off and the boat has splinters.”
A gust of wind swirled about the house and moaned about its eaves. A strafing gull flapped furiously, and sailed backward. Jeb had to go. If he hurried he could beat the worst of what was coming to the mainland. “I’ll be in touch.”
“You do that. And Cap...”
Jeb waited.
Mitch cleared his throat. Over the scratching telephone line it sounded like a chair scraping over a hollow floor.
Time was precious, but Jeb waited. This wouldn’t take long.
Mitch sighed. A vocal shrug of the shoulders to diffuse the depth of what he was feeling, what he wanted to say. Then, “Just watch your back.”
“Yeah,” Jeb agreed. “Always.” With a jab of his thumb the connection was broken and the receiver put down thoughtfully. The conversation was typical Mitch Ryan. No breach of security. No unnecessary questions asked. No unwanted advice given. Tough talk. Teasing names. Levity that fooled no one, then an oblique comment that gave him away if it had.
Mitch was worried, and not about the storm. Tony Callison had gone to ground months ago. He could be surfacing now, in Charleston. The weather would offer perfect cover. And by now he would be desperate, as only a hunted man completely alone could be.
Contradiction sliced though Jeb’s thoughts. Not completely alone. He had Nicole. A gut feeling said Simon had been right on target all along. The errant brother would come to his sister. Perhaps, contrary to Bishop’s absence of reports, he already had.
Tony Callison might be desperate, and he was dangerous, but he was cunning in the bargain. The man could move in and out of a scene as quietly as a ghost. He’d proven it time and again. Better men than Hank Bishop had been lulled into a false security, thinking the target of his surveillance was too quiet and peaceful to be at risk and in no danger.
When too quiet really meant danger was already present.
“Danger.” The word, a constant in Jeb’s life, the measure of it, was harsh on his tongue. If the telephone had been in his hand, he would have crushed it. Was Nicole in danger?
In all the hours he’d spent arguing with Simon—resisting this assignment until the absolute end; throughout the exhaustive brainstorming and planning with Mitch and Matthew; in the final stages of pouring over Nicole’s dossier—he hadn’t wanted to consider that she might become a threat to her brother and, thus, to herself.
Jeb Tanner admitted he’d tried her in his mind long ago and convicted her of one of two crimes. Complicity, or innocent naiveté. He’d nearly convinced himself there were no other choices, and if it came down to it, the lesser crime would protect her. But then he hadn’t seen her again. Hadn’t discovered the woman the child had become.
Nicole Callison might be guilty as sin, but that sin wouldn’t be naiveté.
If Tony came to her with the taint of death clinging to him; if he asked for help, an avenue of escape, a smuggler’s ticket out of the country; if she refused him, would he harm her?
Once Tony had loved her too much to let anyone or anything touch her. But that was before.
Before his sociopathic mind lost its last touch with humanity. Before the collegiate bad boy evolved into a conscienceless killer of men and women and, finally, children. Before the killing became a sadistic ritual, the bounty less important than the pleasure.
Before he became a stalking mad dog, who walked as a man.
If she got in his way, it wouldn’t matter who she was, or what she’d been to him. “He would kill her,” Jeb muttered, the horror of it, the waste, turning him sick.
Tony would kill her like all the rest.
The image that scorched Jeb’s mind sent a shudder down his back. He’d studied the forensic reports and seen the snapshots of what Tony did to his growing list of victims. Each a signature killing, and each worse than the last, until a gruesome pattern of a serial killer began emerging.
“But no more.” Jeb’s voice was the guttural voice of a stranger, as cold as his eyes. It was the threat of a serial killer with the honed skills of murder for hire that had brought Simon McKinzie and The Black Watch into the pursuit. The same threat had tipped the scales, destroying Jeb’s resistance to Simon’s plan to trade on his past—renewing one acquaintance to catch another.
With the gruesome facts laid before him, Jeb saw, not the man who had been his rival and his best friend in college, but a monster, potentially more destructive than any the world had ever known. If he were not stopped.
But he would be. And Jeb Tanner would do it.
“Before Nicole’s name is on any damn bloody list.” If he wasn’t already too late.
Dread like cold lead in his belly, Jeb took the stairs in a deliberate pace that ate up the distance more surely than frantic rushing. In the bedroom that occupied the top floor, he slid into jeans, a light shirt and moccasins. A holster was strapped to his ankle and a compact, but powerful, pistol was snapped in it before he gathered up the keys to the roadster. Then he was running down the stairs again, taking them two at a time.
The door slammed behind him on the echo of a single word.
“Please.”
* * *
The air was humid and fragrant. Shrubs crowded the walled garden walk and the courtyard, their heavy blooms and waxen leaves shimmering like old velvet. In the murky half-light the narrow corridor that bordered Nicole Callison’s Charleston home was a magical place of drifting mists and deepening shade, of muted bird song and quiet footsteps.
As she walked through the mist, Nicole reveled in these last minutes before a summer squall. When the wind lay still, city streets outside her gate were wrapped in a waiting hush, and this little part of her world was softer, sweeter. When there truly was peace before the storm.
Soon the wind would rise again, bringing with it the rain, the thunder and the lightning. But when it was done, the city would go on as before, and her garden would be rife with the promise of new life.
Nicole believed with all her being that in Charleston and Kiawah, she’d found the best of both worlds. One offered serenity embodied in a rain-swept garden. The other, the wild exhilaration and the furor of the sea. She loved them both.
She was content with her life. As she wandered this tiny space that was hers alone, she knew she was more content than she had ever hoped. But the way had been long and hard, leading, at last, to a place far away from who she was and where she’d begun. Only then had she put the past behind her.
Three days ago a part of that past had stepped back into her life, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to feel anything.
Catching a drooping blossom in her palm, she watched as moisture gathering on a creamy petal trembled like tears. The tears she’d shed over Jeb.
Jeb. She’d loved him. With every beat of her fifteen-year-old heart she’d loved him. As she’d trailed behind her brother and his best friend, she’d known his smiles were only kindness, and his kindnesses only pity. But the knowledge didn’t keep her from worshiping him.
In the days, weeks and months when classes were a grim, cliquish ordeal, when well-meaning professors singled her out and older students who perceived her as a freak shut her out, there was always Tony. But most of all there was Jeb.
When she was near him, she was even clumsier than usual. All bony knees and jutting elbows. Hair a shaggy disaster. Teeth a mass of silver wires and bands, and her tongue eternally tied to the roof of her mouth. But he never seemed to notice.
“He was just...Jeb,” Nicole murmured. He’d been kind and gentle when little else of her life was kind and gentle. Then she loved him even more. For one school year, though he never knew, he was the center of her universe. Then the end of the term came. He and Tony graduated, she became a sophomore. One more rung on the ladder of escape. She’d thought her heart would break without him, and maybe it did, but she’d survived and even flourished in a new life. And she never saw him again.
Until now.
Suddenly she was restless, petals drifted from her hand like falling snow. He had promised he would call after the sale. She wondered if it wouldn’t be better if he didn’t. She couldn’t say why, except that she was afraid. But afraid of what?
The wind stirred, nudged her gently at first, then whipped the full skirt of her dress about her knees, and tangled in her hair. She was glad of the diversion as she hurried to the piazza. She was almost at the first step when a melodic gong summoned her to the garden gate.
“Now who?” she questioned as she retraced her steps over the patterned brick walk. Not a delivery, certainly. Bouquets and gifts wishing her well with the sale would’ve arrived days ago and at the gallery, not here. Friends and customers had already called in droves, afterward, celebrating her success, until even the most obtuse realized she needed rest and time to herself. Graciously they’d given her exactly that. Time and rest.
So one had decided it was time her self-imposed exile be ended.
Annabelle, of course. Only she would risk a drenching on such a Quixotic mission. Nicole smiled as she imagined the shapely little woman struggling with her voluminous skirt in the wind and weather. But not too hard. Annabelle believed with all her heart that a glimpse of a well-turned ankle, or thigh and maybe a bit of sexy lace was good for the soul. Hers, and what ever kindred souls were nearby. Masculine souls, naturally.
Nicole’s amusement lingered as she hurried down the walk that narrowed to a single lane as it neared the street. She hadn’t realized before, but, given the turn of her thoughts, Annabelle was exactly what she needed. It was impossible to be moody, or sad or even afraid when she was near.
Lightning flickered overhead. One small flash across a darkened sky, and then another. But long enough to burn the image of her caller into her mind and send it reeling again into the past.
Stopping abruptly a pace away from the gate, Nicole grasped an iron spire as she stared through it to the sidewalk. With graceful spirals and swirls imbued with the strength created by a master ironworker a century before, the gate offered physical protection, but no visual restraint. The man who waited beyond it was clearly visible and unmistakably as handsome as she remembered.
When he smiled at her she was fifteen all over again. With a pounding heart and a tongue that struggled for words.
“Jeb,” she managed to say at last. “I didn’t expect you.” Then, foolishly, “You didn’t call.”
“No.” He shook his head. There were creases across his forehead, from the sun. They weren’t there before.
“What are you doing here?” She hated sounding for all the world as if she were still a gawky kid.
“A spur-of-the-moment impulse.” Jeb’s gaze swept over her windblown hair, the uncertain smile, the simple dress that left her shoulders bare and hid the cleft of her breasts with lace. His gaze moved on, past her to the garden and the shadowed piazza. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Interrupting?” Nicole frowned and brushed a tangle of bangs from her eyes. “No. Of course not. I’m alone. I, uh...would you like to come in?” She was babbling.
Grimly stepping to the gate, with a twist of the wrist she disarmed the lock and drew it back. “Please.” She gestured as a sharp gust sent a crape myrtle swaying and scattered scarlet petals over the grass. “Come in before you’re soaked.”
Jeb hadn’t missed the frown, nor the hesitance in her voice. “A little rain won’t hurt me, so maybe another time would be better.”
If she agreed, taking the excuse he offered, he would have to find another way in. A secret way.
But she didn’t take the excuse. Instead, she caught up his hand, tugged him inside. “Don’t be silly. I was distracted, that’s all. I’m glad you’ve come. I think it’s good that you have.”
Jeb’s eyes narrowed, suspicion skittered like a serrated knife over raw nerves. But when he spoke his tone was a teasing drawl at odds with the truth. “Do you now?”
“Yes, I do.”
A thumb and forefinger at her chin lifted her face to his. He’d looked into this face countless times in the past weeks. He’d seen her smile and laugh. He’d seen her frown. Once, when she’d found a kitten washed on shore from God knew where, he could’ve sworn he saw her cry. He thought he knew every mood, but he’d never seen her as she was now. Solemn, restive, her eyes fathomless.
Was it fear he saw? Excitement? Danger?
Did Tony Callison wait beyond the gate for him? For both of them?
“Why, Nicky?” he asked, using the name only he had used in the days when they were friends. When he hadn’t watched her for any nuance of guilt or warning. When, as now, he’d seen only innocence.
Absently he stroked her chin, a knuckle gliding over skin like pearls. “Tell me,” he insisted in a voice as low as a whisper. “Tell me why you’re glad I’ve come.”
“Because...” Nicole clenched her teeth, holding back words he mustn’t hear. She needed to think, needed to be rational. But she couldn’t. Not when he looked at her with such burning intensity that she felt he was trying to see into her soul. Not when he touched her, and his touch was madness.
With a shiver she barely hid, she moved away, and a semblance of reason returned. She couldn’t tell him that after spending a weekend hiding from herself and from him, she’d discovered with one glance that hiding was futile. She couldn’t tell him that he’d been the love of her young life, and when he left, he’d taken her heart with him. She couldn’t in a lifetime tell him how much she’d hurt, and how long.
She couldn’t tell him. She’d thought for years that it was all behind her, but now, she wasn’t sure. She knew now what she’d been afraid of. What frightened her still—that she would love him again, or that she’d never stopped, and might not survive losing him again.
She couldn’t tell him she was glad when she saw him at her gate, because hiding was truly not her way. She was a fighter. No matter how fierce or how frightening, she’d learned to face her problems. Those she couldn’t conquer, she lived with in peace.
She couldn’t tell him that when he smiled at her, she wondered if there would ever be peace in her life again.
No, she couldn’t tell him.
Drawing a long breath, with a wobbly smile, she took his hand. “I’m glad you’re here, because you were the best friend I ever had, and I’ve missed you.”
She didn’t wait for a reply as she led him down the walk.
With his hand in hers, Jeb went warily with her to her home. Hoping she was as innocent as she seemed, but brutally conscious it could mean his life, if she weren’t.
There was caution in every guarded step he took, his darting gaze probing, seeking, finding nothing. The courtyard was small and open and, even filled with plants, it offered no place to hide. Like the courtyard, the piazza was capable of no surprises. The house, a Charleston single, so called because its rooms were arranged in a single row with one opening into the next, was a different matter.
Guardedly, hand itching for the pistol holstered at his ankle, he stepped into the welcoming cool of the first room. The door, another creation of wood and leaded glass, and as striking as that of the gallery, closed at his back with a muted thud. At that moment, as if minding its manners and waiting for a cue, the storm broke with the pent-up fury of a rabid animal.
Ready to move if he must, however he must, Jeb stood barely inside, eyes searching corners of the room and peering through an open door to the next. Watching for shadows that were more than shadow. Listening for sounds of treachery masked by the clatter of rain on the copper clad roof.
Body taut, shoulders rigid, he waited for an attack that never came.
At her look of askance at his stillness, his strange silence, he shrugged and tried to ignore the sweat on his palm, the burning spot in the center of his chest. “Sorry.” His lips quirked in a lazy grin, his eyes were flat, watchful. “I was admiring the room. I don’t know what I expected, but I like it. It’s pleasing, comfortable. You must enjoy it.”
That much was true. Nicole had blended antique furnishings with modern, light woods with dark. Another time, under different circumstances, the effect would’ve, indeed, been pleasing, a comfort when one needed it. Only someone who loved it could have made it so perfect.
“I’ve read about the Charleston single, its history, the practicality of its architecture, but I’ve never seen one.” He lifted an apologetic brow, as if he were hesitant to ask. But one way or another, he would see the rest of the house. He had to be certain Tony Callison did not lie in wait for either of them. “May I?”
Nicole was bewildered by the request. Jeb’s field in college had been history, but he’d been an indifferent student, far more interested in the height of the surf than his studies. But that was a long time ago, a lot had changed, and she knew very little about him now. What he’d done with his life. What profession he’d finally chosen, and what circumstances brought him to the Carolina coast and Charleston.
“Of course.” She heard the hint of surprise in her voice, and chided herself that, indifferent or not, history had been his interest, and what place was more deeply steeped in it than Charleston? “This is a typical single, though a bit small if one considers the number of rooms, rather than their size. At the moment there are only three in use. This one, the bedroom, beyond it a study with bath and dressing room incorporated. The upstairs is storage for the gallery.”
As she spoke, she led him through the house, explaining the lack of closets, the towering ceiling. One room after another, upstairs and down, never more than a pace behind, Jeb rifled her home with his searing gaze.
When the tour was ended, he knew she hadn’t lied. She was alone. Tony Callison had not hidden in a murky corner, beneath stacks of stored paintings, nor in the crowded antique chifforobe. Only a mouse could have hidden in the uncomplicated house, and from the gleaming orderliness, he doubted a sensible mouse would be tempted.
“As you’ve probably discovered, the Charleston single was primarily situated so the doors could be opened to the ocean, to let its breezes pass directly through. In our era of air-conditioning, position wouldn’t matter so much.” Nicole faltered in her stilted, impromptu lecture. Throughout the tour she suspected he wasn’t listening. That his mind was on something else, not the house in which he’d professed such interest. “Jeb, are you sure you really wanted to see and hear all this?”
He smiled down at her, aware that she’d led him back to her bedroom, and that it smelled of jasmine. “I really wanted to see and hear all of it.”
Nicole shook her head. This grew more and more curious. He wanted to see, yet he’d been distracted, less intent on historical characteristic than personal. She could almost think he wanted to see the house simply because it was hers. And that made even less sense.
“Why?” She asked the question she hadn’t intended. “I mean, I don’t understand your interest.”
“Don’t you, Nicole?” He took her hand in his. Her fingers were slender and smooth. When he had expected nails like rapiers, hers were short and practical. Nails that belonged on busy, useful hands. Hands that toiled.
He wondered if the plants that bloomed in summer’s profusion about the house were as much the fruition of her labor as this room. Her bedroom. A woman’s room, yet one that would welcome a man and give him comfort.
He wondered, and when he looked into her clear, lovely gaze, he wondered more.
“Does it surprise you that I would want to discover all there is to know about an old friend? What you’ve done with your life, and why. What you want for the future.” His voice sank to a murmur. “When I came to Kiawah, I didn’t expect to find such a beautiful woman there. Now that I have, I want to know everything.”
“Kiawah?” Her hand convulsed in his. “How did you know I live on Kiawah? In fact, how did you know that I was here?” By here she meant the single tucked so perfectly and unobtrusively in its quiet little alley. He’d walked only by chance into her gallery, yet he knew so much about her.
A slip, Jeb realized grimly. The sort he rarely made, but not as bad as it could have been. Next time he might not be so lucky. Next time he might lose himself completely in that exquisite gaze.
But there wouldn’t be a next time. There couldn’t.
“I know because I asked,” he answered with a casualness he didn’t feel. A deceptively straightforward answer that left out who and why. “How better to find you?”
Nicole laughed then. A lot was still unexplained, but for the first time, he sounded almost like the old Jeb. Direct, to the point, never taking refuge in social convention. Truthful to a fault.
She still wasn’t sure how she should deal with this handsome fantasy from her past. But, for the moment, she wouldn’t deal, she would simply enjoy.
A shutter caught by the wind ripped free and banged against a window. In a whirl of skirts Nicole rushed to the great room in time to see it tumble across the lawn. “Oh, dear. Annabelle will never let me forget this. She’d been reminding me for weeks that I needed to repair that shutter. But with the sale and all it entailed, I never seemed to get to it.”
Jeb moved to stand behind her, her subtle perfume filling his lungs as he looked over her shoulder to the courtyard. “Any damage?”
Nicole smoothed her hair behind her ear. “None that really matters. The window didn’t break. That’s a stroke of luck I don’t deserve. It was and, no thanks to me, still is an original set in when the house was constructed during the Antebellum Age. So you see, it survived a great deal. Even my carelessness.”
“I don’t imagine you were the first in a hundred years to forget.”
Nicole chuckled. “No, I don’t imagine so.”
Turning, she found herself close to him. Too close. His very nearness took her breath away. He was larger now. Broader, harder. The tensile strength of youth had become the rugged, overwhelming power of maturity.
Strength, power, memories—a heady combination. Dangerous. So dangerous.
Instinctively she lifted a hand to his chest. To hold him away? To brace herself? She didn’t know which. She couldn’t think. There was only his heart beating beneath her palm.
An unconscious need made her look up, into the face that had changed so much, and yet so little. There were strands of silver in his golden hair, and crinkles around his eyes. But their color was still so like the sea he loved, the dark, rich gray, when the surf would fly.
His skin was weathered, with the look of a sailor’s tan. His mouth was...
She wouldn’t let herself be fascinated by his mouth.
Taking a step back, she gained the space she needed desperately. To breathe. To gather her scattered wits. To calm her jangled nerves. A shaking hand clenched at her side as she struggled for the dignity to play the gracious hostess. Slowly, one long breath at a time, she found the grace. “I believe I would like a glass of wine, to celebrate an unbroken window.” Her smile was genial, a little mischievous, and only she knew it was complete bravado. “Would you join me?”
He wanted to reach for her, to clasp her wrists and bring her back to him, but he dared not. It was too soon, and something had disturbed her. Just when she’d begun to relax, a strange look flickered in her eyes, her wonderful changeable eyes, and she had drawn away.
She wasn’t going to be easy. But nothing about Nicole had ever been.
Jeb flexed a tired shoulder, and only then realized how tense he was. Tony Callison was nowhere around, and still he was as taut and grim as death. Was it any wonder she was disturbed? “I’d like very much to join you, Nicole.” He returned her smile ruefully. “Maybe a glass of wine is what we both need.”
She showed him to a small table that looked out at the courtyard, before folding back the screen that concealed a minuscule kitchen alcove. With nervous moves she collected a decanter and slender goblets, setting them on a tray with a plate of benne seed wafers. The day had been a roller coaster, with one sensation after another tearing at her. When she sat across from him, sipping wine the taste and color of peaches, she was still skittish. Vulnerable.
Vulnerable enough to make thoughtless mistakes, to tell the truth when she meant to lie.
“So tell me, why were you so surprised to see me today?” Jeb turned his glass on the table, his fingers spinning the delicate stem as he watched the undulations of the rosy liquid against crystal. Lifting his head, he met her gaze. “Didn’t you know I would come?”
Rain drummed on the roof and dripped from the eaves. Blooms flanking the garden wall bowed drenched heads to the ground. Lightning flashed, turning the courtyard neon bright, and the low lament of thunder faded before she answered. “I wasn’t sure you would want to, not when you had time for second thoughts.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Jeb took her glass from her, folding her hand into his.
“Have you forgotten what an awful pest I was? You could hardly turn around without tripping over me.”
“Was that you?” Jeb grimaced in mock surprise. “I thought it was my shadow.”
“Sure, with wild, shaggy hair, and glasses perched eternally on the end of her nose. Its nose.”
Jeb reached across the table to slide a finger beneath a lock of her hair, tucking it behind her ear as he’d seen her do. He remembered when he used to ruffle it to a tousled mass. Now it was sleek, smooth, silky to his touch. “Nothing this beautiful could ever have been ugly.”
“I refuse to show you the photographs that would prove you wrong.”
Ignoring her disclaimer, he tapped her nose. “I have to admit I never knew what a shame it was to hide this under those heavy glasses. And your eyes? You can’t expect me to believe I’m the first man to tell you how wonderful they are.”
“Contacts.”
“No, Nicky, not the contacts. Your eyes. You.”
Nicole muttered a derisive non sequitur and tried to take back her hand. He refused, holding her fast as he leaned back in his chair, looking at her as a man would look at a beautiful woman. As she’d always wanted him to look at her.
His thumb stroked the rushing pulse at her wrist. There was tenderness in his eyes, and in his smile.
“Friends?” he asked softly.
The rain slowed, then stopped. It was so quiet she could almost believe there was only this. A quiet little world, no fears, no demons. One woman. One man.
Jeb.
Over their linked fingers she smiled back at him, her eyes never leaving his. As softly as he, she murmured, “Yes.”
Then she laughed, a happy sound. Perhaps it was because he called her Nicky. Or the outrageous compliments. Or that he’d been kind.
Or even that for no reason at all, she simply wanted to laugh.
Three
Live oaks whispered in the wind. Somewhere across the bay a halyard rapped against an aluminum mast. Ships creaked with the tide, straining against their mooring. The marina had bedded down, the most dedicated reveler long in his bunk. Beneath the familiar clatter a profound stillness gathered in the hours that belonged to the night.
Jeb sat in the darkness, head back, eyes closed, listening to the distant crash of the surf. Below deck Mitch Ryan groused softly to himself as he finished an unexpected chore.
He would have helped with the chore, even welcomed mind-numbing labor. But Mitch had cast an appraising look over him, then said no. And Jeb was left to his thoughts.
Damnable thoughts he couldn’t escape.
“Done!” Mitch stepped onto the deck, scrubbing his hands with a cloth reeking of oil. “Good as new.” Dragging a match over a brad on his jeans, he stared at its flaring, charring head then dropped it down the globe of a hurricane lamp. In a second he was sprawled in a chair with a groan that welcomed the easing of cramped muscles.
Neither of them spoke as fire hissed and coughed, flickered, then caught the wick in a spurt of yellow flame. The light was a feeble pinpoint beneath a lightless canopy, yet enough that Jeb saw fatigue etched on the younger man’s haggard features. The utter weariness his nonchalance couldn’t mask.
This little difficulty with the engine hadn’t taken long. Not for Mitch. Never for Mitch, who knew engines—cars, boats, any sort—as well as he knew people. The problem was timing, that it had come at the close of a twenty hour day. Jeb suspected there had been and would be more such days.
“Have you slept?” he asked almost to himself, more thoughtful observation than question. “Do you ever sleep, Mitchell Ryan?”
Mitch looked up, his auburn hair stained by sweat. Eyes like sherry, strained and irritated by engine fumes, locked with gray. “Do you, Cap?” His question, as Jeb’s, was little more than a thought spoken aloud. “Have you?”
Jeb settled deeper into his chair. After a while he sighed and shrugged. He hadn’t slept. He wondered when he would again.
He’d returned from Charleston, then spent the evening searching through Nicole’s dossier looking for something he might have missed. Anything that would explain her.
An hour past midnight Simon had called, and his last hope for sleep was gone. Tony Callison had killed again.
A little girl. Thirteen, pretty, quiet. A dedicated student, a long-distance runner training for varsity track. A child much loved, with a lot to live for. Julie, who was never late. Julie, the paradigm of dependability. Julie, too kindhearted to worry her disabled father. He reported her missing at eight o’clock in the evening, two hours after she should have returned from her daily run.
An hour later a local deputy found her.
Julie Brown was dead.
Word spread. Telephones rang. Julie Brown was news.
Before the avid eyes of the world, tragedy visited the rural midwestern community. Needless tragedy, savage, cruel, the likes of which it had never known. And, if God were kind, would never know again.
Thirteen! The number echoed in Jeb’s mind. A knell of sadness for a life hardly begun, ended on a hot summer evening in a shriveling cornfield. A sweet child, tossed aside like a cast-off rag doll, with a cheap, gaudy sun-face medallion draped over a naked, pubescent breast.
The face of the sun. A celestial icon, once the cachet embraced by a close-knit band of surfers. Spoiled and arrogant college kids fancying themselves unique, the self-appointed sons of Apollo, wearing the medallion to prove it.
A symbol of self-centered indulgence and childish narcissism.
Jeb’s lay tarnishing in some forgotten box in a dusty attic.
...when I became a man, I put away childish things.
But one had not. For Tony Callison this symbol of foolish young men had become a signature for murder.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?”
“What?” Jeb jerked back from the black maw of memory.
Mitch glanced at Jeb’s clenched hands. “To lose a friend.”
“I lost him a long time ago.”
“I know.” Mitch ignored the bitterness. “But for a while, he was more than just a friend. He was a good friend.”
Jeb hesitated, then agreed. “The best.” The admission rose out of regret.
“What was he like?”
The sloop rocked with the lazy undulations of the water, a rope scrubbed against a cleat, and Jeb pondered. How did he explain Tony? Could he?
He began with the truth, as he knew it. “Tony could have been any of us, yet, at the same time he was different, one of a kind. He was wild, funny, nearly as intelligent as his sister, and a charming rogue in the bargain. Whatever he did was always on a grander scale. He was the ‘baddest’ boy, flirting with danger. Skirting the edge, closer than any of the rest of us dared, yet he was never beyond redemption. At least not until the last.
“He had the charisma bad boys do. Women and men were drawn to him. Young, old and in between, they loved him.” Jeb flexed his fingers, then closed them again into a fist. “I loved him. We were rivals and friends, and brothers. The sons of Apollo.”
A wry smile jerked his lips in a grim twist. “Sounds ludicrous now, but then, when we lived to surf and play, the one thing that was as important was our brotherhood.”
Mitch rumbled a wordless communion of empathy. The bond and trust of friendships were rare as he’d fought and clawed to survive the streets of the underbelly of New Orleans. But now he understood. The Watch had taught him. “You never saw anything?”
“To indicate what he really was?” Jeb looked down at the teakwood deck where shadows danced. “No.” With an abrupt shrug that conveyed an absolute contempt he amended, “Nothing that concerned me as much as it should have. I was too busy raising hell to be clever.”
“But there was something,” Mitch persisted. There had to be. Something to explain this self-directed guilt.
“Maybe. If you call a look or the lack of reaction something. Nicole nearly drowned trying to do something he goaded her into, and it didn’t upset him. I don’t think he cared at all. After that, when he didn’t know anyone was looking, his eyes would go flat, totally empty. Then he would laugh.”
“As if he were putting you on. Fooling the world.”
“He was. But we all thought we were. There were six of us, surfers first, thrill-seekers second. Anything else dead last. What we did was stupid, and, for the most part, innocuous. But I suppose it was inevitable there would be trouble.”
“Drugs.”
“By the grace of God, not my great common sense, I was involved only by association.”
“The rest was by the grace of Simon,” Mitch interjected.
The grace of Simon. Jeb hadn’t heard it put quite like that before. But as rough and gruff and unrelenting as Simon could be, the analogy described, perfectly, an element common to most of the stories of the men of The Black Watch.
“Tony and I were already drifting apart,” Jeb continued, and realized it was as much catharsis for himself as response to Mitch. “I can’t give a specific reason. Yet, for the first time, I wasn’t really sure of him. He was exonerated on the drug charge, but I wondered.”
A shrug pulled his denim shirt close over the muscles of his shoulders and chest. A gold bracelet flashed on his wrist as he tugged a button free. “Maybe it was just happening. The natural progression of finally growing up. Who can say? Whatever the reason, graduation and Simon delivered the coup de grace.”
Mitch chuckled, a sound at odds with the tone of their conversation. “I know the drill. He dragged you out of trouble by the scruff of your neck, damned you for a fool, slapped your wrist, then, before you knew it you were signed, sealed, recruited and committed.”
“Something like that.”
“Then The Watch became your life. No friends beyond its ranks. No lovers as important.” Mitch waved an arm toward shore. “Just this.”
He left Jeb to consider for himself the hours of work, the study, the subterfuge. A killer who had been a friend. An intriguing woman who might, or might not, be as innocent as she seemed.
Discovering there was no more to say, they sat in silence, each bound in his own thoughts of children and killers of children. Jeb knew rage seethed beneath Mitch’s laconic comment. Someone had hurt a child—no, not someone, Tony had hurt a child. Another child.
Mitch would remember, and Tony wouldn’t forget.
A trill of laughter rose from some faraway deck. The lantern gutted and died. Mitch stretched, yawned and rubbed his hand over his jaw. A gesture infinitely weary. Lurching to his feet, he yawned again. “I think I better get some shut-eye before I relieve the medicine man of his duty at the lady’s house.”
The medicine man, Matthew Sky. With his phenomenal night vision, it was without fail a foregone assumption he would take the night watch. Matthew never complained and, like Mitch, slept little.
“You gonna hang around?”
Not for the first time since he’d arrived bearing the news of Julie Brown, and battling his own sleeplessness, Jeb saw the toll the long hours had taken on his friend and colleague. Sliding back his chair, he stood, as well. “I’m heading back to the house.”
“To get some sleep?”
“Maybe.”
Mitch was too tired to argue. Three men, four if Bishop were included, made for a wretchedly small unit, spreading the duties heavily among them. It was Simon’s call. Callison was smart, as intuitive as a cat. One man too many would flag his suspicions, and they could lose him completely.
They weren’t the first of The Black Watch to work, virtually, around-the-clock. They wouldn’t be the last.
At the steps leading below deck and to his bunk, Mitch paused. “Cap?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever regretted it? What Simon did to your life, I mean.”
Jeb stroked his jaw, much as Mitch had. Two dedicated men, on the brink of exhaustion, facing truths. Perhaps for the first time. “Not often, and then not for long.”
Mitch’s head jerked in assent, a crooked smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “Neither have I, but don’t tell the old fox. Wouldn’t want him to be too cocky about it, would we?”
Jeb chuckled and waited. There was more.
“It wasn’t insomnia that brought you to the Gambler.”
No admission met the statement. No denial.
“There were things you needed to resolve about the little girl and Nicole.”
Jeb’s amusement vanished. “Some.”
“Water’s like fire, it soothes the brain and clears the mind.”
“It does that.”
“You know he killed her. Julie Brown, I mean.”
“I know.”
“Damn his black heart! A child!” Mitch’s voice was strangled. “He just picked her at random, in the most unlikely place.”
“A red herring.” The words were mild, the look on Jeb’s face was not. “He’s laying a false trail, to confuse and confound whoever might be looking for him.”
“Then you believe he’s coming?”
“Now more than ever. The last contract, Jimmy Merino’s son, shut the door to his usual contacts. Now both sides of the law want him. He has nowhere to turn but Nicole.”
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