Never Too Late

by RaeAnne Thayne

  For one thing, he couldn’t leave Belle, especially with Tay and Wyatt leaving for their Cozumel honeymoon in the morning. Since his release, his Irish setter clung to his side like a mother hen watching her chick. Though normally calm and well-mannered, she turned into a nervous wreck if he left her alone for even a few hours.

  He wouldn’t put her through the stress of a lonely kennel for a week or two, nor was he willing to subject her to the trauma of putting her on an airplane. The one time he had taken her on a plane before his arrest, she’d been a quivering mess for a week afterward.

  He had to admit, Belle was part of the reason behind his sudden desire to drive, but she was by no means the only reason. The thought of taking off across the wide expanse of the United States with the road in front of him and Utah in his rear view mirror seemed just the thing to shake this malaise he’d suffered from since his release.

  Those months he had spent on death row sure his life would end there in that miserable prison, he used to dream about hopping on his Ducati and zooming off across the country. When he would lie awake at night in that thin, lumpy cot staring up at cement walls, he had grieved for the trips he had never found time to take, for the scenery he would never have the chance to savor.

  The Ducati would have to wait since December wasn’t the greatest time for a motorcycle trip—not to mention the minor little detail that he hadn’t yet taught Belle how to hang on behind him. But he could enjoy a cross-country trip from inside the brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee he’d bought just days before.

  What better way to celebrate his newfound freedom than loading up his dog and trekking across the country—eating in greasy diners, blasting his favorite songs on the radio at top volume, outrunning his past with every white line passing under his tires.

  He would have thought his announcement would be enough to dissuade her, but Kate didn’t seem at all fazed by his declaration. “Driving is fine. I don’t mind a road trip,” she answered.

  Damn. So much for his peaceful jaunt across the country.

  “Don’t you have to work?” he asked, not willing to give it up just yet. “I thought residents worked sixty hours a week without a day off.”

  The Christmas lights sparkled in her glossy hair as she shook her head. “I’m free until I start my new rotation on Christmas Day. That gives me two weeks of freedom. This is a perfect time for me to go. I should have thought of it myself.”

  Now what the hell was he supposed to do? He couldn’t just come out and tell her she couldn’t go. For one thing, he was oddly loathe to hurt her feelings. For another, from his admittedly limited experience with Kate, he knew she was enough like Taylor that she would push and poke at him until she pried out the reason he didn’t want her along.

  He was well and truly stuck. He should have kept his big mouth shut about the whole thing.

  It would take them a bare minimum of two days to drive to Miami. Two days alone in a car with Kate Spencer. For a man who hadn’t been sexually intimate in nearly three years, that prospect was guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster.

  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t sleep with his sister’s best friend just to slake his hunger. If he did, he would be exactly the kind of beast he’d been trying to prove to the world—and himself—that he wasn’t.

  “Look, Kate—” he started to say, but his words were lost when the door opened and Lynn McKinnon walked out onto the deck, her lovely features concerned.

  “There you are, Charlotte!” She winced and reached for Kate’s arm. “I’m so sorry, Kate. I keep forgetting. It’s just that I’ve thought of you as Charlotte for so long. But I’ll get it, I promise.”

  “It’s fine,” Kate murmured. The animation of the last ten minutes was gone from her features as she gazed at the small, energetic woman who looked so much like her.

  “You’re going to catch your death out here! Is everything all right?”

  “We were just enjoying the snowstorm.”

  “Your father is still waiting for his dance.”

  “Of course.” Even in the pale light, Hunter thought her smile looked strained. “I just need a few more minutes of air, okay? And then I’ll be in.”

  Lynn’s mouth softened as she gazed at her daughter, and Hunter thought she would have reached up and grabbed the moon for Kate if she asked for it. “Take as much time as you need, darling. Sam will be there whenever you’re ready.”

  Kate managed another smile before her mother slipped back inside, though Hunter was surprised to see a bleakness in her eyes.

  He muttered a string of curses in his mind. He couldn’t leave her here twiddling her thumbs while he went off dragon hunting. This was her life.

  Of all the people at this wedding gig, he could certainly understand her need to take back some kind of control over the circumstances that had buffeted her for the last six weeks. If finding and confronting her kidnapper would help her achieve some measure of peace—would help her move past her pain and be ready to accept the McKinnons’ love—how could he deny her that?

  Surely he was tough enough to control himself around her for a week.

  “What time are we leaving?” she asked after Lynn closed the door behind herself and returned to the festivities, leaving them once more in the still, quiet night.

  “Early. I’ll pick you up at eight. Does that work?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Was it just his imagination or did the pinched look around her mouth ease just a little?

  “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this,” she said. “Going after Brenda is a brilliant idea.”

  “Let’s see how brilliant you think it is after a week on the road.”

  This had to be the craziest idea she had ever come up with.

  Worse, even, than the time when they were second-year med students and she and Taylor had tried to break into the anatomy lab for a little extra study time working on their cadavers.

  In the cold, pale light of a December morning, what had seemed so logical the night before seemed shortsighted and foolish when faced with the cold, hard reality of spending at least a week in intimate quarters with Hunter Bradshaw.

  Kate stood at the front window of the small second-floor apartment she had moved into the month before, watching for him to pull into the driveway below.

  A quick glance at the clock on the microwave told her that even if he was obsessively punctual, he wouldn’t arrive for at least ten minutes, but she couldn’t seem to pry herself away from the window where she stood tracing the filigreed frost collecting on the other side.

  She hadn’t slept well, with her nerves on edge and her mind racing. She had finally tired of her tossing and turning a few hours before dawn and had climbed out of bed to start preparing for the trip.

  The few things she planned to take had been packed and waiting by the door for hours and she spent the rest of the morning wrapping her few Christmas presents and scrubbing her apartment. Since she barely spent any time at all here, she could find little to clean, but at least she wouldn’t be coming home to a mess.

  With all her preparations done, she had little else to do now but stand here at the window watching for him and panicking about the sheer insanity of this situation her impulsiveness had thrust her into.

  Whatever had compelled her to insist on traipsing along with Hunter Bradshaw? In what feeble-minded moment would that ever seem like a good idea?

  How could she ever have been stupid enough to think she could travel blithely across the country with him when simply finding herself in the same room with the man left her flustered and giddy?

  He had always made her insides tremble and her heart rate accelerate. She had been friends with Taylor since their first semester of medical school, more than five years ago. She could still remember the first time she met her friend’s older brother. She and Taylor had been cramming for finals their second semester and had decided to grab a midnight snack at their favorite all-night diner, a humble little place downtown tha
t served divine mashed potatoes with thick, creamy gravy.

  They had walked in and Kate had only a few seconds to register a gorgeous man sitting in a booth in the front window with a couple of uniformed cops when Taylor had let out a delighted laugh and dragged her over to meet the brother she often talked about.

  She could still remember her first impression—that the two of them shared an obviously close, affectionate relationship completely foreign to someone who had never had siblings of her own, except in a few foster families where she had been barely tolerated.

  Her second impression of Hunter Bradshaw had been far more elemental and astonishing—an intense physical awareness of him unlike anything she’d ever experienced. As she gazed into dark blue eyes while Taylor introduced them, her stomach did a long, slow roll and she felt as if something had just squeezed out every molecule of air in her lungs.

  The off-duty uniform cops had been flirtatious and charming to a couple of weary young med students and had insisted she and Taylor join them. To her growing dismay, Kate found herself squeezed next to Hunter in the red vinyl booth.

  Throughout the next hour she had been painfully aware of every movement he made—the way he leaned an elbow back on the seat cushion, how his mouth quirked up a little higher on one side than the other when he smiled, the way his dark hair curled just a little on the ends.

  Her sudden absorption with him had been as unexpected as it was mortifying.

  She had always considered herself rather cold when it came to the opposite sex. Men had never been a high priority in her life. Sometimes they hardly seemed worth the energy it took to cater to their egos and their self-absorption.

  She thought perhaps she’d been passed over on the whole libido thing because most of the kisses she had experienced in her twenty-two years on the earth to that point had been pleasant, certainly, but nothing to write home about.

  In that tired old diner looking out at neon gleaming in the wet street, with her pulse jumping every time Hunter’s long legs would brush against hers under the table or his shoulder would bump her, Kate finally started to get an inkling what all the fuss was about.

  Taylor often gave her a hard time because she rarely dated the same man more than a few times. She never told her friend this but she was always looking for that same crazy, exciting, terrifying breathlessness she experienced whenever Hunter was around.

  Not that she ever did anything about it. How could she? When she first met Hunter, he had just started dating Dru Ferrin, the ambitious, talented crime reporter at a local television station.

  A few months later, Dru had announced she was pregnant and Hunter had become totally absorbed in trying to convince Dru to marry him, in the prospect of becoming a father.

  Or so he thought, anyway. After Dru and her terminally ill mother were murdered, DNA tests proved Hunter had not fathered the eight-month-old fetus that had also died from his mother’s gunshot wound.

  She had grieved right along with him, first at the child’s death then when he found out Dru had lied to him throughout her pregnancy. And then had come the horror of his arrest and the subsequent trial and wrongful conviction.

  She had had a major crush on him. The knowledge mortified her. She was a doctor, for heaven’s sake. Twenty-six years old, well on her way to being established in her chosen career path, and she had a crush on a sexy, dangerous, unreachable male as if she were thirteen years old fantasizing about a pop star.

  How on earth would she keep her silly feelings to herself for a week or longer when it would be just the two of them alone on the road?

  She would just have to do her best to treat him like she did male colleagues and her other male friends—casual and cheerfully friendly.

  Could she pull it off? She was still trying to figure that out when she saw an SUV turn into the small parking area behind her battered six-year-old Honda.

  As usual, her stomach performed a long, slow tremble at the sight of that muscular body climbing out of a gleaming Jeep Grand Cherokee the color of a mountain forest.

  He wore jeans and a suede jacket that did nothing to hide his powerful build. His years in prison had turned what had already been a sexy, muscled build into something potent and dangerous.

  Kate huffed out a breath, heat crawling across her cheeks. Not the kind of thing she should be noticing. She would never survive riding in such close quarters with him if she couldn’t shove those kinds of thoughts completely out of her head.

  She was a doctor who had seen more than her share of men’s bodies, both muscled and otherwise. It might require a great deal of effort on her part but she needed to treat Hunter Bradshaw with the same courteous, impersonal distance she treated her patients.

  The man was doing her a huge favor by helping her trace her past. The last thing he probably wanted was for her to go all gooey over him.

  The doorbell chimed through her apartment and Kate pressed a hand to her stomach, where a whole brigade of butterflies were doing their thing.

  After a few deep, cleansing breaths, she pasted on a polite smile and opened the door.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  He returned her attempt at a smile with one of those shuttered looks he excelled at and she could feel more heat crawl across her cheeks.

  “I’m all ready.” She gestured to the few bags by the door—one suitcase, her laptop case and the emergency medical kit she always carried with her.

  He blinked a few times at her meager luggage. “This is all you’re taking? We might be gone a while.”

  “I don’t need much. A few pairs of jeans and a toothbrush and I’m set.”

  He looked even more surprised by that piece of information. She wondered why, until she remembered his most recent experience with females, not counting his sister, had been Dru Ferrin—a girlie-girl if Kate had ever met one.

  Dru probably wouldn’t even have driven to the all-night grocery store at 3:00 a.m. unless she’d worn full battle armor. Kate doubted if Dru Ferrin could have gone anywhere without a footlocker full of makeup.

  As soon as the thought flitted across her mind, she felt small and catty. She hadn’t much liked Dru Ferrin, but the woman had died a horrible death. She deserved better than to be the object of malicious spite, simply because Kate was jealous that Hunter had loved her.

  She made a face at herself and her own small-mindedness but Hunter must have misinterpreted the reason behind it.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked quickly. “I can go by myself. It’s not too late if you want to back out.”

  For just one moment she was tempted—horribly tempted—to do just that, especially when a hint of his aftershave wafted to her. He smelled divine, something leathery and outdoorsy and male, and for a moment she wanted to stand right here in her tiny living room just sniffing him.

  She could handle this. Yes, she was attracted to the man but that was nothing new. She’d been dealing with that for five years now and had never done anything about it. A few more days wouldn’t make much difference in the scheme of things, especially if she could keep the purpose for the whole trip uppermost in her mind.

  “I need to do this, Hunter. I realized during the night that I have to try to make some kind of peace with my past. I can’t spend the rest of my life being eaten alive by my anger.”

  “You think finding the woman you thought was your mother will help you find that peace?”

  “I can only hope. I won’t know for sure until I find her, will I?”

  He studied her for a moment then shrugged. “Let’s go, then.”

  He reached down and picked up her luggage effortlessly, then headed back down the stairs.

  With an odd, tingly feeling in her toes like she teetered on the brink of something precarious and shaky, Kate made one last check of her apartment to ensure she had turned everything off, grabbed her coat, then locked the door behind her and followed him down the stairs.

  Chapter 3

  Hunter was stowin
g her suitcase in the cargo area of his new SUV next to Belle’s travel crate when Kate walked down the steps of the old Victorian that had been split into three or four apartments.

  “All set,” she said. “Everything’s turned off and locked tight.”

  He wondered if she realized her chipper tone seemed as forced as her smile—and about as enthusiastic as he felt about this whole thing.

  Was she as apprehensive as he was about this whole road trip? He ought just to back out right now, let her fly down to Florida by herself on this quest of hers.

  He couldn’t do that, though. If he hadn’t opened his big mouth and suggested it, she wouldn’t even have grabbed onto the idea.

  No, he had started this and he would see it through. He had offered to help her, had made a commitment, and he was a man who honored his promises, no matter how difficult.

  How tough could it be anyway? All he had to remember was that those columbine-blue eyes and that honey-blond hair and those lush delectable lips were off-limits. No worries.

  To his surprise, Kate immediately opened the back door of the Jeep to greet Belle.

  His setter barked in greeting and jumped from the vehicle, writhing around Kate with her tail wagging like crazy. Hunter was about to apologize and order Belle to settle down but before he could, Kate knelt down and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck.

  “Oh, I’ve missed you, sweetie. How’ve you been?”

  She didn’t seem to mind Belle’s slobbery greeting or the dog’s enthusiastic licking of her face, or the hair she was undoubtedly depositing on Kate’s gray sweater.

  He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by their happy reunion. While he had been locked up, Belle had lived with his sister and her roommate and best friend. Kate.

  In truth, Belle had probably spent more time with Kate than she had with him. She was really more theirs than his. Belle had only been a few years old at the time he had been arrested.

  His dog certainly hadn’t suffered at all under their care. By the looks of things, the Irish setter adored Kate as much as him.