The cop with the notebook patted me down in an impersonal, professional manner.
“Can I ask why you’re doing this?” I asked as soon as he was finished.
“We’ve had reports of a woman casing the area. Name?”
Reluctantly, I told him.
“You’re American? Do you have your passport?”
“No, I left my purse behind,” I said, realizing just how lame that sounded. “I don’t have anything with me.”
“Just so.” He pulled a plastic zip handcuff from a pocket and moved behind me, taking my hands with him. “Have you had any alcohol or drugs tonight, Kiera?”
“No,” I said miserably. I was so tired, so exhausted and hungry and thirsty, that the fight was gone out of me. Misha had won. I just hoped the police would let me write a letter to Theo before Misha got ahold of me.
“Are you willing to take a sobriety test?”
“Why not?” I said.
The second policeman said something about them arresting me for suspicion of loitering with intent to perform a felony, and hustled me into a car, driving me through the streets I’d so carefully crept along.
I was fingerprinted, photographed, tested for alcohol and drugs, and finally interviewed about what I was doing before being informed that since I had no ID, I would be held.
“There’s also the matter of this,” the policeman interviewing me said, sliding across a picture of a car.
I blinked at it, wondering if my brain was so far shot that I was hallucinating.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the car you stole this evening.”
“I what?” What fresh hell was this?
“Mr. Papaioannou said he did not give you permission to take the car, and as it’s worth a good deal of money, I’m afraid this will be considered a felony.” The policeman looked over the top of his glasses at me. “That doesn’t look good given your current warrant.”
“Theo said I stole his car? He doesn’t have a car.”
“On the contrary, he purchased this car”—he consulted another sheet of paper—“yesterday.”
I put my hand to my head, my brain whirling with one horrendous thought after another. Theo said I stole his car? How could he do that to me? Was every man I met going to accuse me of stealing something? A few tears leaked out as I said, “I don’t understand any of this. I didn’t take a car. If I had, do you think I’d be running around on foot?”
“Cars such as this sell on the black market for a good deal of money.” He tapped the paper with his pen. “It appears from this warrant that you have dealings with a known member of organized crime.”
I slumped in my chair, beaten. There was nothing more I could do. Theo had put the police on to me knowing that Misha had a contact here. He did it deliberately.
Pain laced me so deeply, it made me gasp. Everything I believed was wrong. The world wasn’t a place of handsome men who murmured soft words in my ears and meant them—it was a place of pain and betrayal, and never-ending despair.
I was escorted to a holding cell. I entered it exhausted, feeling battered, bruised, and beyond the reach of hope.
Two other women occupied the cell, but both were obviously sleeping off indulgences. I took a free bunk, and curled up into a fetal ball, crying silently while I willed myself into oblivion.
ELEVEN
Theo entered the police station in a red haze of fury. “Five hours? She’s been here for five hours and you didn’t bother to tell me?”
The officer who had met him at the door had obviously been told by the commissioner to suck up to him, no doubt helped by the generous donation to the commissioner’s pet charity that Theo had made the night before. “I’m sorry, Mr. Papaioannou, but it’s our policy to process people in the morning—”
“Get her,” he snarled, stopping by a desk, his gaze moving around the station. He knew he was being an ass, but after the night he’d had, filled with images of the most horrendous variety, most of which involved finding Kiera’s body broken and destroyed, not to mention a few particularly cruel ones detailing acts so vicious that they destroyed her sanity, leaving her body intact but her mind wandering paths he couldn’t reach.
He’d never wanted to actively kill a person before, but he did now, and it was all he could do to not demand the police fetch the bastard who had taken his fragile little gazelle, but pleading calls by his lawyer not to do anything foolish had, in the end, allowed him to regain control of his temper. He had Peter and Kiera to think of. If he was in jail for assaulting or killing the bastard Mikhail, care of them would fall to Jake, and he’d never hear the end of that. No, he had to stay sane for their—
The words dried up in his mind when a policewoman escorted Kiera from the holding area. She had a resigned look, one that said she was past caring what happened to her. His heart broke at the sight of it, but a second later, he wanted to shout with joy. She caught sight of him and instantly, her shoulders straightened, her chin went up, and her eyes blazed with emotion.
She was furious, clearly angry with him at the ploy he’d used to get the police searching for her before the monster found her, and although he knew it would take some time for her to overcome the loss of trust such an act would cause, he was confident that with time, he would make her understand that he had done the only thing he could. He had needed as many eyes on the street looking for her as he could muster, and she’d just have to understand that this was the only way he could achieve that goal.
An almost overwhelming sense of happiness filled him at the sight of her. Happiness wasn’t the right word, though. ... Love, now that felt like a good word. What he felt when he thought of her was a warmth that seemed to glow inside of him, a connection with her whole being that went beyond mere sexual desire. He realized with surprise that even if he never had sex with her again, he would be content to simply have her in his life, to be saying delightfully unexpected things to him, to make him feel like a hero because he could protect her from the things that upset her, and to have her annoyed at him because she loved his chest so much. He wanted to tell her about his day when they were apart. He wanted to tell her what he was thinking, sharing with her everything from the amusing comment his assistant made, to the design for a new house he wanted to build for her. He wanted her to share herself with him without inhibition. He just wanted her in his life, and if that wasn’t love, he didn’t know what was.
“Hello, sweetheart.” The woman of his dreams marched up to him, her hair, normally a long, glossy auburn, poking out of a knot she’d evidently tied on the top of her head, making it look like she had a small auburn porcupine mounted up there. Dirt smudged her cheek. Her shirt was wrinkled and filthy, and pulled more out of shape than was normal. He braced himself for either a punch from her fisted hands or a slap. She could go either way. “You look like hell.”
“Theo,” she snarled; then to his amazement, to his complete stupefaction, she grabbed his hair with both hands and pulled his face down to hers, her body moving against him in a way that was probably illegal when performed in a police station. Her mouth was hot and demanding, and before he could take charge of the kiss, her tongue charged into his mouth, teasing his, twining around in it a way that instantly made him hard.
He fought a battle but managed to keep from grabbing her ass and pulling her up higher. Instead, he contented himself with holding her hips, trying to stop the dance they were making against his cock. When she allowed him to reciprocate the kiss, her mouth had softened, her body molding itself around his. It took an almost superhuman effort, but he managed to pull back out of the kiss.
He looked down at her, smugly pleased with himself at the heat that shimmered in her eyes. “Does that mean you’ve forgiven me?”
Genuine confusion filled her face. Her lovely, freckled face, the one with dirt everywhere. “Forgiven you for what?”
“For having you arrested.”
The look she gave him was pure scorn. “I was frightened,
Theo, not suddenly rendered stupid. I realized right away that you’d set the police to find me so Misha couldn’t.”
He smiled, his admiration of her rising to new levels. “I had hoped that would occur to you. Er ... you knew that right away?”
“Of course.” She took his hand, and gave a little lift of her chin to the officer manning the desk when Theo escorted her out of the station. “Well, almost immediately.”
He raised one eyebrow.
“All right, it wasn’t until I saw you standing there with your hair all angry that I knew you must have been up all night, too. Were you?”
“Up all night? Yes.” He smoothed a hand over his hair. “I’m glad you realized that I would never, in any way, ever hurt you. Do you have any plans this morning?”
“Huh?” She blinked at him as she got into the back of a car that was waiting for them. “Plans? Other than shower and eat and drink a gallon of water, and maybe sleep for a day?”
“How about if we both do all of that in”—he consulted his watch—“an hour?”
“All right, but what do you intend on doing until then?”
“I believe we have a wedding to attend,” he said, damning safety laws and pulling her up against his side as he gave the driver the order to go.
“Theo, you can’t!” she said, giggling when he whispered into her ear what he wanted to do to her in the shower. “We can’t! I didn’t get a dress, and I haven’t brushed my teeth, or my hair for that matter, and I think there was mouse poop in the shed I slept in, because I keep getting whiffs of something from my back.”
“Nonetheless, we shall get the damned ceremony over so that we can get on with the wedding night.” He kissed her temple, content for a moment to just hold her. He’d come so close to losing her, he didn’t think he’d be able to survive that. Not now that he knew he loved her.
“But Anne wanted to be there. And we should have Peter. I assume he’s with the Darts?”
“Yes. Anne and Melanie took him home after they saw a man chasing you down the street.” He pulled back to give her a half smile. “Anne said you outran the bastard like he was standing still. You really are a gazelle, aren’t you?”
“No, but I did have six years of track.”
“Really,” he drawled, thinking of his own time on the track team. He’d been a long-distance runner in high school, but had lost his edge midway through college, when he started staying up all night drinking. “We’ll have to have a race sometime.”
She slid him an odd look. “Why?”
“Just, you know, to see if my time is better than yours.” He tried to look nonchalant, but knew she saw through it immediately.
“Uh-huh. Could it be that you, too, were on a track team?”
“Perhaps.” He smiled, pleased he’d distracted her from fretting over the wedding. “We should make a wager. Something ... fun.”
She moved away from him so that she could better see him. “Like what?”
“Well ...” He pretended to think about it. “Like if I win, you have to accept a piece of jewelry of my choice.”
“I’m letting you give me a wedding ring. That’s jewelry.”
“That is functional, or at least symbolic. This would be something frivolous, purely for decoration.”
“Hmm. And what do I get if I win?”
“The jewelry?” he asked, hopeful.
“No.” Her eyes narrowed on him as she thought. “How about you have to go to work for a week solid without looking like a GQ businessman. You have to let me rumple your hair before you go, wear jeans or that ratty old pair of shorts that has a hole in the butt, and a shirt that has never seen an iron, no matter how many meetings you have, or other important businesspeople you have to see.”
“Deal,” he said. “Although my favorite lucky fishing shorts are not ratty. They work magic when I go out on the water. Their appearance is at the cost of all the times they have provided food for my table.”
“Mm-hmm. I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“Kiera?” he said, pulling her hand to his mouth so he could kiss her fingers.
“What?”
“We’re here. Shall we get married?”
She sighed, but scooted across the seat when he got out of the car, and let him help her out. “All right, but if Peter looks back on our wedding photos twenty years from now and asks when it was you married a bag lady, you get to explain to him that I was coerced.”
He wanted to sing and dance and shout from the highest building, but instead, he took a firm grip on her hand to keep her from bolting in case nerves got the better of her, and entered the registry office.
It was over in ten minutes, and although they’d had to grab two strangers as witnesses, strangers who gave Kiera an odd look, he was pleased. She was his, truly his, and no one could take her from him.
“Did you give your lawyer the prenuptial agreement?” she asked on the way to the airport.
“Hmm?” He thought of the lovely ritual he’d had burning the agreement that she’d wanted him to sign. He’d almost set off the sprinkler in his office, but it was worth every moment of the lecture Annemarie gave him.“I don’t initiate documents I don’t intend to put into place,” he said with dignity.
“OK.” She relaxed, her hand on his leg in a proprietary move that left him damn near giddy with happiness. He had a feeling she hadn’t been this comfortable with anyone in a very long time. “You made such a big stink about it, I worried you wouldn’t turn it in, or whatever you do with them.”
“Yes, sweetheart, by signing that agreement, I have made sure you won’t get a single cent from me should we divorce.” He prayed she never found out he didn’t execute the agreement.
She nodded, adding, “Mind you, you won’t get any of my parents’ house money either, but I don’t think you have designs on my fifty grand.”
He did a little mental arithmetic, adding up his net worth. He wasn’t yet on par with Iakovos’s ten figures, but he was making good progress, and he had high hopes that with another eight years of hard work, he’d be there. “Your nest egg is safe from my poaching ways,” he said. “Is it too early to buy Peter a pony, do you think?”
She burst into laughter, the sound of it easing the last dregs of fear that had clutched him so tight when Anne had called to tell him she was missing.
Any plans he had of a wedding night that commenced before noon were delayed by Kiera insisting that she needed serious baby time to make up for her absence, and then there were explanations to be made to the Darts, and food to be consumed.
By dinner, however, he put his foot down.
“We gratefully accept your wedding present,” he said, handing over Peter’s diaper bag, the small cradle he’d bought on a whim, a large mesh bag of toys, several jars of gourmet baby food, his bath toys, and the giant kiwi bird that he knew Peter couldn’t sleep without.
“I don’t know about this,” Kiera said, standing next to him, almost wringing her hands with distress. “He’s such a good baby at night. He hardly ever wakes up.”
Anne smiled. “I have already promised three times that if he so much as sneezes, we will bring him right home.”
“No matter what time of night,” Kiera reminded her.
“No matter the time of night,” Anne said solemnly. “I feel obligated to point out that we are literally just one hundred yards away. You could lean your head out of the window and yell, and we’d hear you.”
“That reminds me,” Theo said, giving Peter’s head a kiss before making shooing motions to Melanie. She giggled as she wheeled the baby away. “You ... er ... aren’t going to want to use the pool tonight. It’ll be ... occupied.”
Richard grinned broadly, and followed the women.
Kiera eyed him with an indescribable expression. “Is that so?”
“Yes,” he said, taking her into his arms. He hadn’t been able to have the joint shower that he’d planned on the flight over to the island, but he was determined to have
the next best thing. “The minute you married me, I started a list of fantasies I wished to fulfill with you. Right now, licking water off your breasts, sliding my hands along your wet, slick flesh, and burying myself in your heat while floating in the pool is currently at the top of the list.”
She looked from him to the pool, which, due to the layout of the garden, had a decent amount of privacy. “I don’t have a swimsuit.”
“Darling,” he said in a voice made deep with desire. “What part of licking and tasting and burying myself in you makes you think the wearing of a swimsuit is necessary?”
“Right,” she said, nodding, and to his amazement peeled off the clean T-shirt she’d put on. She eyed the distance across the long stretch of green grass, to the steps leading down to the pool area. “Race you there?”
“No,” he said firmly, yelling the word as she took off. He sighed, pulling off his own shirt as he followed her at a walk. “It’s not fair you trying to take advantage of me. I can’t run with this.”
She glanced down at the front of his jeans, shimmying out of her leggings so that she could do a seductive little wiggle against him. “Mercy, Theo. Not only are you slow, and clearly are going to lose our bet—”
“Tomorrow. We’re going to run that damned race tomorrow,” he growled, kicking off his shoes and ridding himself of both jeans and underwear.
She laughed, and waggled her ass at him when she peeled off her bra, her hair swinging across her naked back as she looked over her shoulder to him. “Not only are you slow—you appear to have trouble with your manly bits. It must be very uncomfortable to have your plumbing outside, instead of tucked away nicely, like women.”
He lunged for her, growling deep in his chest, but she just laughed and did an enticing dance as she wriggled out of her underwear, throwing it to him.
He tossed it over onto the pile of clothes she’d shed, and stalked forward. “Right. You’ve impugned my speed—about which you know nothing, since you didn’t go to school in England, as I did—but now you’re telling me my cock is inferior? Prepare to defend yourself, woman. I’ll show you why outdoor plumbing is to be desired!”
Ever Fallen in Love Page 14
