by Kay Hooper
Robin smiled, loving him very much indeed. “You were always good at explaining whenever you said or did something for that reason. Fatherly duty. When you grounded me for a month, or took away my car keys because I’d done something wrong. Or told me I couldn’t date Andrew McKay because he was a budding juvenile delinquent, and you’d be damned if you had to get your own daughter out of jail at one in the morning. It was your fatherly duty to avoid that, you said.”
“You didn’t believe me,” he said, pained.
“Oh, I believed you. I just didn’t like it. Even cops’ daughters have to go through their rebellious teenage years. Mine were no worse than anyone else’s.” She lifted an eyebrow at her father. “Besides, four sons had spoiled you. By the time I came along, you were due to be shaken up.”
Daniel continued to look pained, but there was laughter in his green eyes. “Well, dammit, nobody warned me daughters were different. Your mother tried, but I have to admit I didn’t know what she was talking about. It wasn’t until you started wearing eye shadow that it really hit me. And by then it was too late to lock you in a tower; I’d already taught you how to handle guns. All I could do was bite my nails and keep the front porch light on.”
Robin laughed, remembering dates bringing her home and walking her to the door under that bright yellow glare. Then, sobering, she said, “I’ve always heard that most fathers find it difficult to accept a man in their little girl’s life. I guess I never really thought about it, though.”
“It isn’t easy,” Daniel confessed wryly. “You think about fixing ponytails and tying shoelaces and putting Band-Aids on skinned knees …” His hand reached out for hers, holding it strongly. “And then you glance up one day, and see a beautiful young woman with hair spray and high heels and the odd run in her stocking. Looking at another man the way she used to look at you, trusting and adoring.”
Robin blinked back sudden tears. “So how are you handling it?”
He smiled, his own eyes bright. “The best way I can. By reminding myself that I raised you to think for yourself, to make your own decisions. And by admitting to myself that a man in the life of a beautiful young woman is inevitable. Just like death and taxes.” He laughed a little, shaking his head, then sobered abruptly. “In all honesty, honey, I couldn’t have picked a better man for you.”
She laughed shakily. “Then cross your fingers and hope I can pull it off.”
“I have faith in you.” He squeezed her hand and then released it. “You come from a long line of fighters, and not one of them ever gave up. You’ll get what you want.”
“I hope you’re right.” Her attention distracted by sounds from upstairs, she listened intently, then added, “I hear the shower; Michael’s awake.”
“Mmm.” Daniel nodded toward the coffee table, where a sheaf of papers lay. “You’d better read and sign your statement. Your father or not, I have to do most things by the book. And then … I need to talk to Michael alone before I go.”
“So I should take a walk on the beach?” she asked dryly, sorting her statement from the others and picking it up.
“If you wouldn’t mind. Sorry, honey, but it’s business.”
Robin was reading her typed statement, and responded absently. “It’s all right, Dad. I don’t mind.” But when she had signed the statement and moved toward the French doors leading to the deck, she hesitated and looked back at him.
He could read her expressive face easily. Quietly he said, “Your relationship with Michael is your business, honey, not mine. I won’t interfere.”
“Thanks, Dad,” she said.
A few minutes later, when Michael came down the stairs wearing only a pair of jeans, Daniel met him with a calm look. “Michael, there’s coffee in the kitchen.”
“Thanks.” He glanced around. “Robin?”
“Walking on the beach. I asked her to. I wanted to talk to you alone.”
After a slight hesitation Michael nodded and went to fix himself a cup of coffee.
On the couch Daniel gazed out at the view and waited placidly.
Robin walked a good distance up the beach, uncertain of how much time her father needed. It was almost an hour later when she neared the house again, and saw her father and Michael come out onto the deck. By the time she reached the pier, her father was waiting for her there, while out in the water and tied up across from Michael’s boat, the big Coast Guard cutter started its powerful engines.
“Come with me, Robin,” Daniel urged, his eyes intent. “We have a lot of catching up to do, you and I.”
She was a little surprised by his words, and felt vaguely uneasy. “I’ll come see you once you’ve settled into your new office, Dad.”
“I can’t persuade you to come visit now?” he asked lightly, eyes still intent.
Robin glanced toward the house, and the man standing very still and silent on the deck, watching them. Then she looked at her father. “I can’t. You know that.”
Daniel looked at her for a long minute, then sighed and hugged her tightly. “All right, dammit. I’ve told Michael I’d like you two to stick close until we get our hands on Sutton. This is as good a place as any. The girls will be well protected, and a helicopter will ferry you up to Fort Myers to see them every afternoon, if you like.”
“Isn’t that a waste of fuel?” she asked uncertainly. “We could just as easily stay in Fort Myers—”
Her father shook his head. “I’d rather it was here.” He hesitated, then shook his head and said, “Robin, Sutton hates Michael. He’s likely to come looking for him, unless we catch up to him very quickly and put him out of action. You’d be safer if you came with me.”
Robin stared at him for a moment, then glanced toward the end of the pier at the boats tied there. At, in particular, Michael’s boat. She looked back at her father and smiled, realizing what was going on. “What does Michael say?”
Daniel grimaced slightly. “That it’s up to you. He isn’t the kind of man to make the tough decisions for a woman, no matter how he feels about her.”
That had been Robin’s intuition about Michael, but she was glad to have it confirmed. Her own nature was far too independent to allow anyone else—even the man she loved—to make those “tough” decisions for her. “If I’d wanted safety, Dad, I would never have fallen in love with Michael. I’m staying here with him.”
Daniel wasn’t surprised. “That’s what I thought.” He hugged her again. “Watch yourself, honey.”
“I will. ’Bye, Dad.”
She stood there until the cutter roared off, then turned and went back to the house. Michael was still on the deck, hands in the pockets of his jeans as he watched her approach.
When she reached him, he said quietly, “You should have gone with your father, Robin.”
She met his steady gaze without flinching, even managing a smile. “Should I have? Why? Because your boat tied out there is as good as a flag in case Sutton comes looking? Because the house here is a mile or so from the Maze, and far from the girls, isolated, and a dandy place for an ambush or a trap? Is that why I should have gone with Dad?”
“The odds are against his coming here,” Michael said. “But there’s always a chance.”
“I’m staying, Michael.” She braced herself. “Unless you want me to go … for other reasons.”
After a long moment he reached out and pulled her into his arms, holding her tightly. “No, I don’t want you to go,” he said huskily. “I want you with me.”
Robin pulled back just a little and smiled up at him, content for now with the small victory. “Good. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m starved. Let’s eat.”
If Michael thought clearly at all during the next few days, it was always of Robin. He couldn’t seem to get enough of her. And it wasn’t just their lovemaking, although that grew more unbelievably explosive with every touch. And each time they made love, it was as if they each knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there would never be another time, ever, for either
of them. As if they were greedy. As if they had both learned that the only certain tomorrow was today, right now, this minute.
Still, it was more than passion Michael felt for Robin, more than simple desire. Or even complex, greedy desire. Just being with her satisfied a hunger he had never felt before. Watching her, listening to her voice, feeling the effect of her smile and her laugh. She had gotten under his skin in a way no woman ever had, and with every passing day he found it more and more difficult to guard himself from her.
But he tried, wary of feeling or inflicting pain, unwilling to hurt her or himself. He tried.
The helicopter came on schedule each afternoon to take them to Fort Myers. Robin visited the other girls but insisted Michael spend what time he could alone with Lisa. It was little enough right now, she said, and he and his sister needed each other.
He didn’t protest.
At the house they spent the remainder of their days together getting to know each other in ways they hadn’t been able to explore before. Likes and dislikes, habits and hobbies; they found out about each other in the ways people always had, by observing and asking questions.
The suddenness of their relationship had caught each of them unprepared, and the dangerous situation they’d been caught up in had provided a kind of intimacy that had forced them to accept each other more or less on faith; because of that there were few inhibitions between them, and a casual camaraderie that was a direct result of what they had been through together. Those feelings, recent but unusually strong, were a solid base for friendship; the passion between them, equally recent and more powerful than anything either had felt before, made them inevitable lovers.
But even though this shared experience of danger had drawn them close together, had even made it impossible for many of the usual barriers between virtual strangers to exist, it had created barriers of its own. And they were the kind of barriers that couldn’t be broken through; they had to be lowered, voluntarily, by each of them.
That was the hard part.
“It’s almost like paradise,” Robin said, three days after they had arrived at the house, as they stood on the deck gazing out over the ocean.
Michael, who had been automatically quartering the horizon, searching for anything threatening, looked at her for a moment and then back at the view, seeing it through her eyes. “I guess it is,” he agreed, gazing at the peaceful ocean dotted in the distance with small islands.
She smiled up at him, but said, “You don’t see paradise very often, do you?”
He turned his back to the view, leaning on the waist-high railing as he looked at her steadily. “No. But how often is it really there?”
She understood. “Always some darkness under the surface? Some shadow hanging over it?”
“Not always. But the potential is there.”
“Your life has taught you that,” she agreed.
“What about your life? What have you been taught?”
Robin took the question seriously, as it was obviously meant that way. “That paradise isn’t less than itself just because there’s a serpent or two lurking under the bushes. We always seem to want perfection in theory, but we’d be bored silly with it in reality. And bored silly without something to fight against … or for.”
Michael was smiling faintly. “Did Daniel teach you that?”
“I guess he did.” She thought about it. “By example, I suppose. We’ve never talked about it. All these years of fighting the bad guys, yet Dad never got cynical about it. He never talked the way you hear some cops talk, about being garbage men, or keepers of the zoo. He always acted and talked as if the world were a great place with just a few troublesome serpents in the bushes. No problem at all. That amazing optimism seemed to give him part of his strength. And I guess it was one of the reasons why I …”
“Had all those misconceptions about heroes?” Michael finished for her.
Robin shook her head a little bemusedly, still coming to terms with that particular demon. “Well, those serpents scared me to death. It seemed so fearless just to pick up a stick and start bashing the snakes.”
“That’s what you did on the yacht,” he reminded her.
“But I didn’t think about it—” She broke off abruptly, realizing for the first time what had happened.
Michael nodded. “That’s right. You didn’t think about it. You just did it. You had a job to do, and you did what it took to get the job done. You didn’t freeze up; you didn’t let fear paralyze you. What you were most afraid of never happened, Robin. And it never will.”
Since that day on the yacht, there had quite literally been no time to think about her almost lifelong fear of freezing up, of getting someone killed because she was paralyzed with fear. Robin had been preoccupied with her growing feelings for Michael, and although she’d told her father about those fears, she hadn’t had a chance to re-examine them since the assault on the yacht.
She looked up at Michael, realizing something else suddenly. “That’s why you never protested when I said I’d go with you and Dane. Even though I was a liability—”
“No, you weren’t a liability. You had the skills, the training, and the will to get the job done. I knew that, honey. But you didn’t. And it was something you had to find out for yourself.”
“You took an awful chance,” she whispered. “Those girls … Lisa. I could have frozen, I could have—”
“But you didn’t. And I knew you wouldn’t. I’ve spent too much of my life weighing people not to know strength and courage when I see it.”
Before Robin could say anything, he was going on, his voice roughening a bit.
“I didn’t want you on that boat, Robin. I didn’t want you in danger. The hardest thing I’ve ever done was to watch you disappear down those stairs. But I had to. Knowing you were capable and skilled, knowing you wanted to—and had to—took that choice out of my hands.”
“You had to fight your own … chivalry?” she managed unsteadily.
He looked into those heartbreaking green eyes, and had to swallow hard before he could answer. “No. No, it wasn’t chivalry. I’ve sent women into dangerous situations before. This business teaches you to value skill and ability irrespective of sex. Professionally I had no qualms.”
“And personally?” Robin was almost holding her breath, knowing that this was it. She hadn’t dared push, hadn’t dared question, but if Michael was still unwilling to lower that final barrier after these last days together, then she had lost.
“Personally …” He closed his eyes for a brief moment, then straightened abruptly away from the railing. His hands reached to grasp her shoulders hard, and his voice grated over the words. “The last thing I wanted was to watch the woman I loved going into danger.”
For a moment Robin couldn’t move or speak. She stared up into gray eyes that burned in a way she’d never seen before—unshuttered, raw. And then she went into his arms with a sound of joy that was almost a sob.
“I bet on the long shot, honey,” Michael said huskily, holding her tightly against him. “You were one bet I couldn’t find a way to hedge.”
“I love you,” she whispered, her arms around his lean waist, feeling his heart pounding against her.
“I love you, Robin.” He swept her up into his arms, carrying her through the open French doors and up the stairs to their bedroom as easily as if she weighed nothing. The admission of love had broken something in Michael, that final wall, crashing it into rubble. And though that inner destruction seemed a violent thing, what it freed in Michael was a depth of tenderness he hadn’t guessed he was capable of.
He set her gently on her feet by the bed and began unbuttoning her blouse, concentrating fiercely on the task. He wanted her as wildly as he always did, yet this time some compulsion drove him to rein that primitive desire. And Robin seemed to sense that in him, seemed to understand; though always instantly responsive and quick to reach for buttons herself, this time she stood perfectly still, her wondering eyes fixed
on his face.
He pushed the brightly colored blouse off her shoulders, catching his breath as the late afternoon sunlight painted her bare breasts in gold and shadows. She had gotten used to not wearing a bra, she’d told him, and the frilly things in her reclaimed luggage had remained packed. His hands found her narrow waist, and he bent slowly, trailing his lips down her throat and between her breasts. He eased his weight down on the bed and drew her a step closer, until she stood between his knees, trembling, her breath coming quickly.
He was fascinated by the play of the sun on her, by the silky texture of her flesh, by the contrast of dark nipples against creamy pale skin. His hands cupped her breasts, his senses flaring at the sensual weight. The rough pads of his thumbs brushed her tightening nipples rhythmically while his tongue stroked the shadowed valley slowly. He could feel her hands tangle in his hair, and in his hands her breasts swelled, filling with the blood of passion.
His hands slid down over her rib cage, her waist, finding the rough material of her cutoff jeans, and his mouth moved slowly over a quivering mound until he captured a hard nipple and drew it strongly inward. He could feel her shiver, hear the low, throaty moan that escaped her lips. He was hungry, filled with a want that could never be completely satisfied, and the taste of her just sharpened the craving.
He found the snap of her jeans and opened it blindly, his mouth moving slowly from one breast to the other. The shorts were pushed down over her hips and slipped to the floor, and his fingers delighted in the slippery friction of her silken panties between his flesh and hers. Then they were brushed gently down her hips, and pooled with the shorts around her ankles, until Robin automatically stepped free of them.
Michael’s hands slid over her rounded buttocks, shaped the slim hips, trailed down trembling thighs. His lips remained at her breasts, nipping gently with his teeth, soothing with his tongue, sucking the hard, aching nipples until Robin could hardly bear it. Her shaking legs refused to support her any longer, and she slumped against him with a whimper. Instantly he lifted her until she was astride him, her knees on either side of him on the bed, and the heavy material of his jeans was a rough caress against her sensitive inner thighs.
