Kayla—Liam’s fiancée? No, not fiancée. Liam had asked a girl to marry him—he’d told Cal about it right before he’d left on his last trip—but she’d never agreed, never said yes. Apparently she hadn’t cared enough even to show up for the kid’s memorial service. Why the hell would she show up now?
“You’re sure she mentioned Liam?” Cal asked. Maybe the town doctor misheard. The girl his little brother had fallen for was named Michelle or something like that. Not Kayla.
“Absolutely. She was wearing his rodeo ring on a chain around her neck,” Doc said. He chuckled. “Remember that big old thing with the inset garnet the size of Butte? Remember when he won that—damn near scared you to death. He was only sixteen at the time.”
Cal nodded. He remembered. He’d searched for the ring among Liam’s things that had been shipped back from Boston. He’d never found it.
“I better get home.” He climbed into the truck, praying that Doc was wrong, praying that it wouldn’t be Kayla waiting there for him.
Doc waved, and Cal started the engine with a roar. As he drove the bumpy road back to his ranch, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew exactly what he was going to find when he got home. He was going to find Kayla’s car parked alongside his house, with Kayla sitting in the sun, on the hood.
He pulled into his dirt driveway, his tires scrambling for traction in the mud.
Please, God, let me be wrong.
Kayla.
The sun gleamed off her golden hair as she sat on the steps leading up to his porch, Thor’s head on her lap. Thor scrambled to his feet as the truck approached, and Kayla straightened up too, encircling her knees with her arms.
The very last of the promise and anticipation Cal had been feeling earlier that morning vanished in a wave of disappointment and anger. He braked to a stop in front of the house, and the bag that held his new shirt skidded off the seat and onto the floor. Cal didn’t bother to pick it up.
Kayla didn’t say a word. She just watched him as he climbed out of the truck, as he crossed around to stand in front of her.
“Your name isn’t really Kayla,” he said. His voice didn’t come out as even and calm as he might have wished. His throat was raspy and he sounded a touch hoarse. He crossed his arms and cleared his throat.
“It’s a nickname,” she admitted. “Short for Mikayla.”
Mikayla. That was it. Mikayla Grey. Cal remembered now. “You…knew my brother.”
Kayla nodded. “Yeah, I did.”
She was wearing Liam’s old rodeo ring around her neck on a thick gold chain, just as Doc described. She hadn’t been wearing it the night before. Cal wouldn’t have missed it. He couldn’t have.
Cal climbed the steps to the porch. “You were his girlfriend. He wanted to marry you. And you didn’t even bother to see him buried.”
He knew she could clearly read the anger in his eyes. Her face looked pale, her own eyes wide, her lips set. Still, she managed to look impossibly pretty.
“You didn’t see him buried either,” she countered, her chin held high. “There was nothing left to bury.”
“It was a ceremony,” Cal retorted. “A ritual designed for the survivors to pay respect to the dead.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Kayla said. Her green eyes were swimming in tears. Cal had to turn away. “It was too soon.” There was a catch in her voice, and Cal knew that her tears had slipped down her face. “I couldn’t believe that he was really gone. I felt if I’d come out here, to his memorial service, I would somehow be betraying him. And that would have been the ultimate disrespect.”
Cal sat down heavily on the steps, pushing back his hat and rubbing his forehead with one hand. That was some eloquent excuse. Betrayal. Disrespect. The real truth was that she hadn’t had the time or inclination to travel halfway across the country to say good-bye to a man who had loved her enough to want to marry her.
Whimpering softly, Thor pushed his head up and into Cal’s other hand. Tiredly rubbing the dog’s ears, Cal glanced at Kayla. She was wiping her face with the heels of her hands, as if she didn’t want him to see her tears. His heart clenched as he gazed at her, and he honestly had to ask himself whether his anger truly was derived from his displeasure that Kayla—Mikayla Grey—hadn’t attended Liam’s funeral, or because this girl that he wanted so very badly had once belonged, heart, body, and soul, to Liam.
Whether she deserved it or not, she’d been his brother’s beloved.
Somehow that knowledge made Cal’s own desire and his intense physical attraction to her seem lewd and much less than pristine.
Liam was dead, and Cal had spent much of the night before and all of that day dreaming up ways to get his brother’s lover into his own bed. Damn, but that made him mad. Mad at himself—mad at her, too, for making him want her. And mad at the kid for going and dying in the first place.
Cal took out his checkbook. “How much do you want?” he asked flatly.
“Excuse me?” She stared at him—as if she didn’t know damn well what he was talking about.
“Money,” he said. “You’re here for money, right? How much do you need?”
Her gaze narrowed. “God, you’re a bastard.”
“Round it up to the nearest thousand,” Cal told her bluntly. “Then take the damn check and get the hell off my land.”
Kayla stood up. “I’m not here for your lousy money!”
“Then why the hell are you here?!”
“Because I need your help,” she spat back at him. “Because I think that Liam might still be alive.”
4
Kayla saw pure, molten rage in Cal Bartlett’s pale gray eyes, and for one terrifying second she thought the man was going to raise his hand and strike her. But then the light in his eyes flickered and went out, taking with it all the emotion on his face.
When he spoke, he matter-of-factly uttered a crude, anatomically impossible phrase that told her with absolutely no doubt exactly what she should do. “Get off my ranch,” he added with almost no inflection in his voice.
He turned and went inside the house.
Kayla followed, pulling open the screen door and stepping into the cool dimness of the front hallway. She needed his help. She needed him to understand. She needed him, whether he liked it or not. “Look, Cal, I know I’ve caught you by surprise,” she said quietly. “All I ask is that you hear me out.”
Cal had gone into a cheerily decorated living room, the couch and easy chairs covered with blue gingham, bright paintings covering the walls. A huge window let in both the sunlight and a breathtaking view of the mountains. The room was large, with exposed beams and a huge fireplace at one end. He stood there now, hands braced against the heavy wooden mantel, staring at an array of framed pictures that lined its surface.
The pictures were of Liam. They, like the faded and worn gingham upholstery, were dated, relics from a happier time.
When Cal spoke, his voice was soft and still so oddly expressionless. “I loved him. Hell, I love him still. But he’s dead.”
“No, he’s n—”
“Take my money,” he said, louder now, turning to face her, a flare of sudden emotion lighting his eyes and heating his voice. “Take my truck. Take whatever the hell you want. Just don’t make me believe something that can’t possibly be true. If you’re going to rob me blind, do it now and get it over with, but do it without tearing out my heart.”
Kayla’s own heart clenched. Dear God, if she were wrong, she would be torturing this man. But if she were right…Even if the chance was only one in a thousand that she might be right, she had to take it. For Liam’s sake.
“They told you he died in an explosion on a bus,” she said. “Right?”
Cal dropped his head in a gesture of defeat. “Please, don’t do this—”
“They told you countless witnesses saw him board that bus in the city of Puerto Norte,” she continued. “But every single piece of your information came from the same source—the San Salustiano government
officials, right?”
He didn’t say a word. He just stood there, looking out at the mountains, his eyes once again flat, his face expressionless.
“Right?” she repeated, but still he didn’t move. “I know, because I got the same explanations, the same official letters. But what if it’s a cover-up? What if he didn’t really die? What if he’s being held hostage or prisoner? What if they only want us to believe that he’s dead? He wasn’t in San Salustiano to write a travelogue, you know. He was there to dig up dirt about the recent political and civil unrest. What if he found out something that their government didn’t want the rest of the world to know?”
Calvin Bartlett turned and walked away.
She followed him into the kitchen. “His body was never recovered—”
He spoke matter-of-factly as he took a coffee mug down from the cabinet. “Because there was nothing of him left. Because he was blown to pieces.”
“Conveniently blown to pieces. Or so they claimed.”
Cal laughed, but it was a dry, humorless sound. He filled the mug of water from the tap and put it into a microwave oven.
“None of his jewelry was ever recovered,” Kayla persisted. “His journalism award ring—what happened to it? He never took it off. If he really did get on that bus, then he was wearing that ring. So where did it go?”
He stared at his mug of water spinning round and round on the microwave’s carousel as it heated. “It was probably fired out of that bus like a piece of shrapnel when that bomb went off.”
“Unless he wasn’t on that bus.”
Cal turned and looked at Mikayla Grey. His brother’s lover. The woman who had smiled at him and sighed with him all last night in his intensely erotic dreams. She was gazing at him so fiercely now. Her green eyes were blazing as if she were trying to burn her way into his brain to read his very thoughts.
She would have been shocked. Hell, he was shocked at the direction his mind continued to wander. He still wanted her. Badly.
She was wearing a pair of cutoff black jean shorts, with a clingy T-shirt made of some kind of sweater material on top. She had those funky black boots on her feet, and sure enough, Liam’s enormous rodeo ring on a chain around her neck. Her face was pale, several distinct freckles standing out on her nose. Her eyes seemed too big for her face.
Maybe she was a con artist. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was just plain crazy. Either way, Liam had loved her. And here he was, unable to look at her without wanting to kiss her sweet lips again, without wanting to touch and taste the soft skin he knew was underneath that sweater and those shorts.
He hated himself for it, hated himself for being the brother who had survived.
“I work at a crisis center for abused women in Boston,” Kayla told him softly, and he knew that somehow he was able to hide everything he was thinking and feeling. “I’d been working on my Spanish—it helps to be bilingual in a job like that. But you can’t learn in a classroom the kind of Spanish I need to be able to speak, so I started going down to an inner-city church where there’s a soup kitchen and a shelter. I figured I could help out and learn something at the same time.”
She took a deep breath. “A lot of the people who came in were illegals, many of them refugees, some from San Salustiano. I heard some real horror stories about the war—you wouldn’t believe what some of these people have been through. And then I started hearing about some kind of secret military prison hidden up in the mountains, where there was rumored to be a blond Americano being held against his will.”
“Rumored.”
Cal’s voice was flat, implying disbelief, but Kayla felt a rush of relief. He was listening. At least he was listening.
She took a step toward him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I went to see a woman who claimed she’d actually seen this man. I talked to her, Cal. And she described Liam so exactly. The way he walked. The way he laughed. And then I showed her a picture of Liam, and she said he was the one—the Americano.”
“And she just happened to wander into some high security, top secret military prison and get a look at the prisoners?”
“She said she went inside to deliver clean laundry for her sister-in-law, who couldn’t make the normal delivery run because her baby was sick. She said while she was there, they brought Liam out into the courtyard and…” Her voice faltered. “They beat him.”
There was only the faintest flicker of reaction in Cal’s flinty eyes.
“She told me they tied him up and whipped him. She said it was clear that this wasn’t the first time—his back was already raw and what wasn’t raw was badly scarred.” Kayla held Cal’s gaze as she dropped her bomb. “She told me that the entire time they beat him, he sang Christmas carols. It was the beginning of the summer. It was a hundred degrees in the shade, and the blond-haired prisoner was singing Christmas songs.”
Cal moved to the kitchen table and sat down, raking his thick hair back with one hand.
“He sang in English, and he sang in Spanish,” she told him quietly. “The harder they hit him, the louder he sang. And she said when they untied him and dragged him back to his cell, he could barely walk, but he still held his head up high. She told me he saw her watching him and he smiled at her.”
Cal looked up at her, directly into her eyes, and Kayla knew that she had won. He believed her. He believed that the man the San Salustiano woman had seen was his brother.
“How long ago did she see him there?” he asked, his voice rough.
“It was a little more than three months ago. The end of May.”
He gripped the edge of the table. “My God.”
She sat down across from him. “I know. It seems impossible, but…It’s got to be him.”
“Christmas carols…”
“I know. He sang them all the time. Any time of year. It drove me nuts. He claimed they were the only songs he knew all the words to. It’s got to be him.”
“But he doesn’t speak Spanish.”
“I guess he’s had the time to learn, because it sounds like he speaks it now.”
“My God. Two years…” Cal shook his head. “He was never that strong. This woman who told you this story could be mistaken.”
Kayla gazed at him levelly. “She could be. But I have to find out for sure. And if it really is Liam…”
If it really was Liam, she would find a way to free him and bring him home.
“I need your help,” she told Cal Bartlett. “I want to go to San Salustiano, and I need you to come with me.”
She would be safer traveling with a man. Kayla didn’t like it, but knew it was true. She had spoken to workers at the San Salustiano consulate in New York City who had warned her that the political situation on the tiny island country was volcanic—with the threat of civil war continuously simmering beneath the surface. And despite the San Salustiano government’s attempts to convince the world that all was well, and to restore the tourist trade, a woman—particularly an American woman traveling alone—would bring undue attention to herself.
She gazed across the table at Cal, waiting for him to say something, anything.
“If you think Liam is still alive, then what the hell were you doing kissing me last night?”
Of all the things she’d expected him to say, that was not on the list.
But he was the one who kissed her first. The childish, blame-pointing words leapt to her tongue, but she kept her lips tightly shut. Yes, he’d certainly kissed her first, but she’d kissed him back with equal enthusiasm.
Her gaze dropped to the hard line of his mouth as she remembered how soft and sweet his lips had been. When she looked up into his eyes, she knew he’d clearly followed the direction of her thoughts.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “You saved my life. You’re different from anyone I’ve ever met. You look great in firelight. I don’t know. I can come up with a hundred different excuses, but the truth is, I don’t have an excuse.”
Cal stood up, pushing h
is chair back from the table. “It never happened,” he said. “As of right now, we don’t talk about it, we don’t think about it. Is that clear?”
Kayla had to look away from the icicle blueness of his eyes. She didn’t like what he was saying, but she nodded. She needed his help, so she’d play by his rules. For now, anyway.
“Go on back to the boardinghouse, collect your things, and meet me back here,” he ordered tersely. “We’ll take my plane down into the city, catch a flight from there to San Salustiano.”
He turned his back on her to dial the phone, and she stood there for a moment before realizing she’d been dismissed.
“Yeah,” she heard him say in his soft western drawl as she let herself out the front door. “Flying out of Billings. Or Great Falls. It doesn’t matter which. I need two seats on the next flight leaving for the Caribbean.”
They were on their way.
5
This had to be the longest flight in the history of the world. Cal shifted in his seat, trying to find a comfortable position. His leg bumped Kayla’s and she glanced up from the book she was reading.
“Sorry,” he murmured.
She pushed up the armrest that separated them and pulled her legs up onto the seat, tailor-style. “Stretch your legs over this way,” she told him, gesturing toward the open space in front of her seat.
He didn’t want to do it. It would mean that her knee would rest tantalizingly on top of his thigh. But if he didn’t do it, he wasn’t going to be able to walk by the time this damned plane landed in the city of Puerto Norte.
He stretched out his legs. She settled back, her own leg lightly resting against his.
The place where she was touching him seemed to burn, and try as he might, he couldn’t think about anything but the fact that they were sitting too damned close.
It never happened, he’d told her about those powerful kisses they’d shared just the night before. As of right now, we don’t talk about it, we don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it. Right. He’d been able to think of little else from the moment he’d uttered those words.
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