Heart of a Hero

by Marie Ferrarella

  She leaned over the table, her hand resting on his wrist. “So now you have all of it. Will you help me?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she figured she had her answer. Rallying, she made the best of it.

  Always move forward, Dee. Otherwise, you slide backward.

  “I’ll understand if you say no,” she told him, thinking that his silence had already said it for him. “Vincent Del Greco isn’t just some annoying, angry grandfather. He’s very powerful and ruthless, and he has a long reach.”

  It took Rusty a second to realize that she was writing him off. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  She looked at him, afraid to grasp at hope. “What were you thinking about?”

  “About how you must have felt, standing in that bridal store, listening to the radio and finding out that your baby’s father was dead.”

  A small smile rose to her lips. “It was a maternity shop,” she corrected. “I wasn’t going to be one of those vain women who was going to pretend her belly wasn’t out to here while she walked down the aisle.” That had been an incredibly sensitive thing for him to say. Most men wouldn’t have even taken that part of the story in. “Are you for real?”

  Since Dakota wasn’t eating her salad, he figured he didn’t have to pretend to eat his. Rusty retired his fork and pushed back his plate. “What makes you ask that?”

  “No man is that sensitive.” And then it came to her. Her eyes widened just the slightest bit. “Unless, of course you’re—”

  “There’s no ‘unless of course,’” he cut in. “My sister raised me.” There was more to it than that. “My sister taught me.” By example as well as by word. He figured he could have done a whole lot worse than to have Megan as his teacher.

  His sister sounded like the kind of family she would have wanted, if she could have put in an order for one. Instead of losing both her parents when she was fourteen. “I think I’d like to meet her sometime.”

  “Sure. Why not?” Maybe meeting Megan might help her lose that chip on her shoulder. “Right after I get Vinny back.”

  Dakota rose from the table, the untouched plates of salad in her hand. “We,” she corrected, dumping the contents of each plate into the garbage. “After we get Vinny back.”

  Rising, he crossed to the sink where she was standing. He figured he’d start by taking the simplest interpretation of her words, though he had a hunch that wasn’t what she meant. “Well, sure, he’s your son—”

  “No, I mean I’m going to go with you.” She dropped each plate into the dishwasher rack and shut the door. She stood and faced him squarely. “Wherever this goes, I have to follow it.” He looked as if he was going to say something to talk her out of it and she quickly said, “I sat home today and thought I was going to go out of my mind. I can’t do that until you get back. I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to help find him.”

  He noticed that she was no longer doubting that he would find her son. They’d made a great deal of progress over the inedible salads. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” The easy victory left her surprised and suspicious. “You’re not going to try to talk me out of it?”

  He looked into her eyes. “Would it do any good?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged good-naturedly, her answer a foregone conclusion as far as he was concerned. Besides, he wouldn’t have been able to find it in his heart to tell her she couldn’t come with him. “Then I won’t waste the effort.”

  She searched his face, looking for some sign that he was putting her on. She didn’t find it. “You know, I think I’m going to like you, Andreini.”

  Rusty’s grin widened. “That’ll make things a whole lot easier in the long run. I need to make a few calls, make arrangements and get tickets for us. Tomorrow morning all right with you?”

  Since he wasn’t giving her any trouble about coming along, she became eager and was honest in her reply. “Now would be better.”

  He glanced at his watch. It was after six. “I’m not sure we can get a flight out on such short notice.”

  She caught his arm, hooking hers through it. “Try.”

  The sudden physical contact was nice. There had to be some flight out tonight, he reasoned. As for the calls he needed to make, there were phones in Vegas, as well.

  “All right, John Wayne Airport is just down the road. I’ll go upstairs and throw a few things into a suitcase and be back for you in twenty minutes.”

  Maybe her luck was finally going to change, after all, she thought. Maybe this man who’d come running in response to her scream really was that white knight they wrote stories about.

  She smiled at him. “Thank you.”

  He paused at the door. He wasn’t sure what compelled him to break protocol; maybe it was the pain in her eyes that reached out to him. But whatever it was, he felt himself moved and he touched her face.

  “Just doing my job,” he said softly.

  But Andreini wasn’t just doing his job, she thought, he was doing more. Much more. He was giving her something to hang on to, something she hadn’t really had a few minutes earlier. Relief combined with hope surged through her.

  Before she realized what she was doing, Dakota threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  Chapter 6

  Few things actually managed to catch Rusty completely off guard. As a very young boy, because of his brother’s abduction, he’d been exposed to the more serious, sadder side of life and, although it had never affected his naturally optimistic outlook, he knew the curves that life could throw without warning, knew that it was best to be prepared for whatever might come his way.

  He wasn’t prepared for this.

  Not the kiss and not the effect it produced, not his reaction to it, although maybe he should have been. It felt as if there was a meteor shower going on within him in reverse, with bright lights shooting off in all directions and traveling heavenward, pulling him upward.

  Ingrained reflexes rather than any conscious thought had him closing his arms around the supple form pressed against him, holding her to him as the kiss demanded deepening.

  He willingly obliged.

  Damn, this wasn’t professional, but it felt like the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  With her emotions in complete upheaval, feeling cornered, not knowing who to trust or where to turn, having this larger-than-life gentle hero appear from nowhere, promising to make things right even when she snapped his head off, temporarily unraveled Dakota. Unraveled her, and yet made her whole. She wasn’t very good at expressing her gratitude, wasn’t good at allowing people to get close to her. She couldn’t even bring herself to leave an opening through which they could slip in. But she had to thank him somehow.

  Still, her own response to his words had caught her off guard. But it was as if it were somehow preordained that this was the way she was to show him her gratitude. To kiss him rather than say the words.

  Somehow, it seemed natural.

  Until the kiss took possession of her.

  Dakota hadn’t expected to do anything other than press her mouth to his. Quickly, neatly, then step back. Nothing more than that.

  But she wasn’t stepping back. Wasn’t moving at all, except perhaps to sway into his tall, lean body. To pull some of the energy from it and cocoon herself in it.

  His body felt a great deal harder than it appeared to be at first glance. The man felt like an entire sheet of muscle from head to toe. Muscle with the power to completely undo her.

  She had to be careful, very, very careful.

  In a minute.

  When she finally pulled back, Dakota wasn’t entirely certain there wasn’t steam seeping from her ears. The rest of her certainly felt overheated. Overheated in the most arousing, delicious sort of way.

  With a jolt, she recognized it for what it was. Desire.

  Dakota blinked not once but twice, trying to focus on his face, to pull herself together. Not knowing if she could form coherent words—on her lips or even i
n her mind. He’d managed to scramble every part of her.

  Deceptive, that was the word for it. For him. There was a great deal more going on just below the surface than she had first thought. If she’d spared a single thought about it, her first impression would have labeled Andreini a good kisser, but not a great one. The man knocked the word “great” right off the chart.

  Taking a deep breath, she released it slowly before she trusted her voice to not crack and utterly embarrass her. “I bet you’re really great undercover.”

  The wisecrack made no sense to him, but then, his brain felt a little fuzzy around the edges. As did the rest of him. He’d had a few girlfriends and there’d been one a couple of years ago that he’d gotten serious with for a while, but right now it felt as if all the girls he’d ever known before had been only light comic-book fare while Dakota Armstrong was Tolstoy. Multilayered, with substance. And he really wanted substance.

  He replayed her remark in his head, striving to not appear like a complete idiot in her eyes. “Because I look younger than I am?” he guessed.

  Without thinking, she ran her tongue along her lips. She could taste him there. A shiver raced along her spine and she had to assume military posture to keep from giving herself away.

  “Something like that,” she murmured.

  When was the room going to stop tilting? She was a woman in the middle of crisis, for heaven’s sake, why was she reacting this way to a man she didn’t know, now of all times? She bit back her annoyance with herself, with him for making her feel this way.

  If he didn’t get moving, Rusty warned himself, he was going to do something stupid. Such as take her back into his arms and kiss her again and then they’d never get out of here. He had an incredible weakness for strawberry ice cream and she made him think of a delicious strawberry sundae with rich whipped cream piled on top. He knew what happened when he came in contact with strawberry ice cream. One bite would lead to another and then another. It was best not to begin.

  Except that he already had.

  Squaring his shoulders and his resolve, Rusty moved back and gripped the doorknob before turning around.

  There was an odd expression on his face. She told herself it didn’t matter, none of it mattered, but she had to ask. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Strawberry ice cream,” he said just before he closed the door behind him.

  “Strawberry ice cream?” she echoed quietly. What did that mean?

  Dakota stared at the closed door for several minutes, shaken by what she’d just done. Shaken by what she’d just felt.

  Felt.

  It surprised her to feel anything at all. She’d spent most of her adult life numb, inwardly isolated from the rest of the world. By accident at first, by choice later. Her parents’ death had left her alone and devastated. Each had been an only child, so there were no aunts or uncles from either side to take her on. Only Social Services, with their practical shoes and their mounds of paperwork. The parade of foster homes and the consequences that eventually came in the wake of her orphaning merely hardened the exterior she’d quickly learned to build up around herself.

  Only Vincent had managed to crack that exterior, and look where that had gotten her. Another broken heart. At his funeral, she’d sworn to herself that she would never, ever feel anything for anyone again except for the child she was carrying.

  It hadn’t been a difficult promise to keep. Even if she tried, she couldn’t react to anything except with anger. Anger had been both her savior and her cross.

  But what was going on inside her right now had nothing to do with anger. The physical ache that had suddenly sprung up reminded her that she wasn’t really meant to live out her life like some Tibetan monk.

  “This isn’t the time…not the time,” she muttered to herself, annoyed that her libido would perversely pick now of all times to spasmodically show signs of life.

  She needed to think of Vinny, only of Vinny. Shifting her focus from her son, even slightly, could be a fatal mistake. For all of them. She couldn’t afford to make it.

  Dakota hurried to her bedroom to pack.

  As good as his word, Rusty returned not within twenty minutes, but eighteen. He’d learned to never unpack completely from one trip to the other. His line of work kept him on the road more than twenty-five percent of the time. He didn’t mind, as long as he remained successful. It was a good trade-off.

  He would have been down sooner, but he’d had to stop to make just one call. To Chad, asking him if he would come by the airport to pick up his car in the morning. Since Chad lived closer to the airport than Megan, it wasn’t putting his brother out very much.

  Besides, the Mustang was his baby. He really didn’t like the idea of leaving it unattended in the lot for the next few days. The airport had a high level of security and an accompanying low level of crime, but a car such as his attracted admirers, not all of whom wanted only to look. Better a little paranoid than sorry was the way he saw it.

  Dakota opened the door before his finger had a chance to leave the buzzer. There was a suitcase on the floor beside her. And a stuffed animal under her arm, a droopy-looking teddy bear that had seen far better days.

  Rusty didn’t bother suppressing the grin that curved to his lips. “You always travel with a teddy bear?”

  Rushing to get ready, she’d plucked the teddy bear out of Vinny’s crib and tucked it under her arm so she wouldn’t forget and leave it behind. Dakota glanced at it now, shifting it so that she held it in one hand.

  “It’s Vinny’s. It’s his favorite.” Why couldn’t she say that without feeling as if her throat was closing up? What was wrong with her? She wasn’t a crier, she was a doer. Dakota pressed her lips together, willing her tears back to where they’d been. “I want to have it with me when we find him.”

  Rusty understood. Leaning over, he gave the bear a closer once-over. The once-champagne fur was now merely a dirty beige. There was more than one set of stitches running through the toy’s somewhat lumpy body and if he didn’t miss his guess, the bear had seen his share of spin cycles in the washing machine.

  “Good idea,” he agreed, straightening. “It’ll help give your son a sense of security and continuity.” Turning, he indicated his car. It was parked directly in front of her apartment. “I’m right out here.”

  “So you’re the one who belongs to that car.” It had caught her eye more than once. It wasn’t the kind of vehicle that went unnoticed.

  He got a kick out of phrasing. “Yup, I’m the one.”

  Picking up her suitcase, Rusty led the way. She was surprised when he stopped to open the passenger door for her. Politeness and chivalry were far from a given in her world.

  “Thanks,” she muttered.

  Depositing her suitcase next to his in the rear seat, Rusty rounded the trunk and got in on the driver’s side. He glanced at her as he put on his seat belt. Hers was still in its original position.

  “Buckle up.”

  Looking down at the teddy bear she was holding and lost in thought, Dakota only half heard him. “What?”

  “Your seat belt,” he prompted, pointing. “Fasten it. Didn’t anyone ever teach you to buckle up?”

  She shrugged. “Not exactly high on my list of things to pay attention to.” At least as far as she was concerned. There was a child’s seat in her car for Vinny and she never went anywhere without making sure he was securely strapped in. Somehow, taking the same precautions for herself hadn’t seemed nearly as important.

  The car remained idling as he looked at her expectantly. With a sigh, she pushed the metal tongue into the slot. It clicked into place.

  “Happy?”

  “As a clam,” he told her, shifting the car into drive.

  Dakota chewed on her lower lip, debating. But she had never been one to hesitate. She’d hadn’t had the luxury. She needed to straighten things out between them. Now, before it led to anything else.

  “Look, about what happened earlier, I
don’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

  A smile played on Andreini’s lips. She could see it even though he remained facing forward. “And just what would the wrong idea be?”

  Obviously he wasn’t going to make this easy. “That I’m willing to take what happened even further—I’m not. That you can do anything you want with me because you’re helping me find my son—you can’t,” she emphasized.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he pointed out mildly, pulling out of the complex and melding into the evening flow of traffic. “You kissed me.”

  Was he saying that she was trying to instigate something? She’d been governed by momentary, impetuous impulse, nothing more. And he had kissed her back. Enough so that she felt the bottom of her feet growing hot. “I wasn’t alone there.”

  He laughed, turning left at the first major intersection. A sea of headlights converged all around him. People were coming home from work. Or leaving their jobs late.

  “If you’d kissed a dead man like that, you wouldn’t have been alone.” He took the image a little further. “It would have been the first miraculous raising of the dead documented in the last two millennia.” The light two car lengths ahead of them turned red. He put his foot on the brake and spared her a glance. “You and I have a business arrangement. You’re paying the agency by check, not in trade. I thought that was understood.”

  Rusty’s tone of voice, leaving no room for misunderstanding, almost made her feel foolish for her uneasiness. “Yes, well…” She shrugged, looking away.

  The light changed. He stepped on the accelerator again. He was going to put in a call to Savannah first thing in the morning. There were things he needed to know, things about Dakota he couldn’t ask outright. Yet. But he did venture one question. “A lot of people go back on their word with you?”

  She didn’t like having the conversation turned back around to her this way. Dakota tightened her hold on the teddy bear, trying not to let any of the memories in. “Enough.”

  Whether she realized it or not, there was a great deal of emotion packed into the single word. He looked at her before turning his eyes back to the road. “I won’t.”