Gabriel West Still the One

by Fiona Brand

  West didn't bother with the mental shrug. He had a reputation for being cold and distant—a little scary.

  He never did anything to alter that impression because the solitude suited him. He'd never been anything but a loner, and at thirty-one years of age the pattern was ingrained. He had friends, some of them as close as he was ever likely to get to actually having family, but essentially he was alone.

  He examined the tinge of gray lightening the grim canyon of the street, turned toward what passed for sunrise in this city of heat and humidity and jungle mists. In half an hour this place would be a steam bath, the sun dominating a hot, clear sky, the streets teeming with raucous life.

  He'd come close to not seeing it.

  Lambert handed him his knife. West took the blade, cleaned it on his T-shirt, then methodically slipped it back into its spine sheath. Carter tossed him a bottle of water, took his cell phone out and called in an ambulance. West tipped his head back and drank, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then tipped water over his naked torso to clean off the blood. He became aware that Lambert was surreptitiously watching him—read the repelled fascination in the man's eyes. Lambert was a rookie, ten years younger and fresh-faced—a nice boy doing a dirty job. He hadn't liked handling the knife, or the way Renwick and the woman had died.

  There was blood everywhere, still smeared across West's chest, streaking the backs of his hands. His hair was tangled around his face, sticking to his shoulders. He must look like a damn vampire...not someone Lambert, or the other two, would ever want to get comfortable with.

  A hot blast of emotion threatened to burn through his icy calm. Not someone that the majority of the human race would ever be comfortable with, come to that.

  Something of what he was feeling must have registered with the younger man. His gaze slid away, locked on the body of the woman lying on the ground. Abruptly, he wheeled and joined Sawyer and McKee in the back of the van.

  West knew what was going through Lambert's mind. Over the years he'd garnered a reputation for being lucky—of having some kind of magical immunity, so that when everything went to hell West walked away with barely a scratch. There were men who wouldn't work with him because that fact spooked them. They figured they'd be the ones to die.

  Not for the first time West worried at his own apparent good luck. The fact was he had a reckless streak—a bad, bad habit that kept him choosing risky assignments and walking the edge. In a numbers game, he'd long since played out the odds. Sometimes the way he was scared him. He'd gotten too cold, too fatalistic about dying.

  He eyed the steadily increasing glow in the east, felt the first touch of heat burning through the early-morning mists.

  He hadn't felt cold or fatalistic when he'd thought it was Tyler on the street. Fear had lashed through him. Every cell in his body had reacted.

  His jaw clenched against a replay of the panic that had shafted through him when he'd thought his wife was about to walk straight into the barrel of Ren-wick's gun. In that moment a part of him had gone wild. He hadn't cared if Renwick's bullets had slammed into his chest; all he'd wanted to do was save Tyler.

  He took another deep breath, easing the tension in his belly. Suddenly, he felt old and tired, sick of death and meanness. He wanted...home.

  Oh, yeah, he thought grimly, that would undo him. He had no business even thinking about home, or about Tyler.

  As he swung into the van and snapped the door closed, he wondered what Tyler was doing now— this very second. He hadn't so much as glimpsed her for months.

  An abrupt hunger to be with the woman he'd walked out on, but never succeeded in forgetting, ate at him, sharp and deep. Temper erupted and he swore beneath his breath.

  Carter glared at him as he started the van and reversed, disengaging from the totaled rear of Renwick's car with a squeal of torn metal. "What's wrong with you?"

  "Nothing."

  Carter changed gear and accelerated onto the street, barely missing clipping the mangled Maserati.

  "You're crazy, that's what's wrong. I shouldn't have let you walk down that street. You've got a damned death wish."

  "If anyone's got a death wish, it's the guy driving this clapped-out van." West strapped on his seat belt. When Carter was behind the wheel, he was the safest guy on the planet.

  "My driving saved your sorry ass."

  West couldn't argue with that. Carter had driven the van into the center of the firefight, risking his own safety to provide West with cover. The van had taken the brunt of the fire and now resembled nothing so much as a colander. The rental firm would have a hernia, and Carter had bought himself a good day's worth of paperwork and grief trying to justify the expenditure.

  Carter braked at an intersection. Cars had begun to fill the streets—early morning commuters and taxis heading for the airport to catch passengers off the red-eye flights. A truck loaded with melons shifted down a gear and eased through the intersection, heading for the markets. Port Moresby was waking up.

  An aging ambulance screamed past them, lights flashing. A cold chill chased across West's skin, twitched deep in his belly, even though the ambient temperature was warm. He lifted a hand to his face, rubbed compulsively at his temples.

  A fine tremor ran through his hands. He let out a breath. That was shaky, too.

  He was going into shock.

  Oh, jeez... damn. Tyler.

  A hot pain burst to life in the center of his chest. That's what had done it. He'd thought it was her, and now he was going to pieces.

  He closed his eyes and let his head drop back onto the cracked vinyl of the seat. The breath sifted from between his teeth. Tyler.

  He was going crazy. The psych team would chew him up, spit him out, and that was if he didn't get himself committed first.

  Lately—the last couple of months—as hard as he'd tried, he couldn't stop thinking about her.

  Chapter 2

  One month later, Auckland, New Zealand.

  Gabriel West was back in her life.

  Dr. Tyler Laine's fingers slipped on her laptop keyboard. The machine beeped, and a cartoon character popped onto the screen. A little balloon message sprang out of the side of its head, politely asking if she needed help.

  For long seconds, Tyler stared blankly at the ridiculous creature with its cheerful face, her overtired mind abruptly incapable of grasping the simple actions required to close the help file.

  She'd been making lists, staring at lists, for hours, trying to shed some light on the mystery of who had walked into her family's vault and stolen a set of ancient jade artifacts that had been under her care for the past three months, before her reputation and her career were shredded beyond redemption. She needed to make sense of a burglary that didn't make any kind of normal sense.

  The jade pieces were unique, priceless, but it wasn't so much the quality of the objects, but their age and the mystery shrouding them that had caught and held the attention of experts and collectors alike.

  Jade, like many minerals, could generally be traced to its country of origin. It was simply a matter of profiling the mineral content and then matching it up with the characteristics exhibited by jade from different countries or locations. Sometimes the jade could even be traced to the particular mine it had come from. The set of three objects had been analyzed and identified as extraordinarily high-quality nephrite, originating from the Sinkiang region in China. The objects: belt and scabbard accoutrements, and a round vessel carved in the shape of a bird, had also been dated. They were neolithic in origin and had been carved approximately three and a half thousand years ago, during the Shang dynasty. All three pieces were old enough, and rare enough, to be the jewel in any collection without the added mystery of how they had come to be included with Maori grave goods on the small island nation of Aotearoa, New Zealand, thousands of miles away from China.

  It wasn't unusual for artifacts to be stolen from museums, or looted from archeological sites. The theft of artifacts from war-torn count
ries was rife. But it was unusual for anyone to want to steal artifacts that were so world-renowned they could never hope to display them.

  Anger flickered, warming her, but even that emotion had become faded, distant, as exhaustion closed in on her, sucking the last remnants of her vitality so that she simply sat, motionless, her eyes fixed on the screen until the minute irritation of the electronic flicker made her blink.

  A fine tremor ran through her, jerking her back to an awareness of just how punchy she'd become. Her mind was functioning, barely, but her body was closing down; her pulse slow, viscid—her breathing shallow and long-drawn-out.

  She hadn't slept more than four hours in the last seventy-two, and she couldn't remember when she'd last eaten anything that could remotely pass for a square meal. She could remember taking a few bites of a sandwich in the half-hour respite she'd had between police interviews that afternoon, but she couldn't for the life of her recall what had been in the sandwich. She'd been having trouble concentrating all day, her mind blanking out for short periods of time. If she closed her eyes now, she would fall asleep in her chair.

  Her hand found the mouse, her fingers stiff and clumsy as she moved it on the pad until she located the electronic cursor on the screen, then centered it on the cartoon character.

  Help.

  She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. "If you've got an FBI unit on hold...maybe."

  She clicked the mouse, bringing up the menu, then closed the file, sending the little intruder back into its hidey-hole.

  Right now she could use the FBI, Interpol, the CIA, a SWAT team...whatever.

  Letting out a breath, she hooked off her spectacles, sat back from the bright glow of light pooling her desk and ran a hand over her sleek knot of hair to loosen the tension.

  The list of private collectors she'd been compiling from Laine's sales records dating back for the past ten years was starkly illuminated by the bluish glow of the screen. The names could have been written in Chinese characters for all the good it did her.

  Her eyelids drooped again, and a picture of West strolling toward his car as she'd left for work this morning floated into her mind and she blinked, banishing the image.

  She desperately needed to work, to focus, but the fact that the husband who had walked out on her five years ago was now practically her next-door neighbor kept distracting her, so that she found herself staring into space, precious minutes out of her long working day lost.

  Her stomach rumbled. Frowning, she checked her watch. Almost eight. Past time she was out of here.

  "Cancel the FBI unit." She smothered a yawn as she saved the file to a disk. "What I need is an analyst."

  The tawny gleam of light off an egg-shaped tiger's-eye worry stone caught her eye as she waited for her computer to shut down. Absently, Tyler picked it up, her fingers smoothing the silky curves, her mind abruptly shifting back to a time, eight years ago, when she'd been mesmerized by eyes that had burned with the same intense shades of gold.

  Gabriel.

  Dispassionately, she examined the tension that held her motionless when all she wanted to do was leave the office, drive home, ransack the fridge for a snack, then crawl into bed and forget that the world she'd so carefully constructed around herself since she was eight years old was coming apart.

  She was crazy even to examine the past. Five years ago she'd asked West to leave, and the husband she'd never been able to tame had packed his bags and walked, leaving for another secret assignment in some foreign country—preferring the edgy danger of the SAS, the hardship and the uncertainties—maybe even a bullet in the dark—to spending time with her.

  For months she'd clung to the fantasy that he'd come back.

  Well, he had come back. She just hadn't ever imagined it would be five years later, and that they'd be neighbors.

  Jerkily, Tyler set the tiger's-eye stone down. The gleam of the worry stone continued to draw her eye

  as she slipped the disk into a side pocket in her handbag, unplugged her laptop and placed it into her briefcase along with the notes she'd made. She snapped the case closed and picked it up by the grip, hooked her handbag over her shoulder and rose to her feet.

  She should have gotten rid of the tiger's eye years ago. She must have thrown it away a dozen times, only to pull it out of the bin and dust it off. The problem was that it was irritatingly beautiful. The hot flashes of gold and copper always caught at her and she just couldn't bring herself to chuck something so elegant and enduring away.

  Her problem was she never could let go, never could throw away something she'd cherished, even if the cherishing was well in the past. Once she loved someone or something, she hung on for grim death. When it came to relationships, her loyalty wasn't in question, just her sanity.

  Which was probably why she'd never quite been able to cut West out of her life.

  The thought hit her square in the chest, literally stopping her in her tracks. The possibility—however remote—that West could still have some call on her emotions.

  Uh-oh. No way. She didn't still care for West.

  There were lots of reasons why she shouldn't even like him.. .if she ever thought of him at all, although the last few months, crazy as it seemed, she hadn't been able to stop thinking about him. It was as if her mind had been caught up in some kind of loop. She'd even dreamed about him, which was beyond strange, because she hadn't glimpsed him more than a handful of times in as many years.

  She'd attributed the phenomena to stress and a ticking biological clock. She was twenty-eight, alone, and still tied to a marriage with West for the simple reason that neither of them had bothered to dissolve it.

  Maybe it was cowardly, but she'd become used to living in relationship limbo, and had even welcomed it at times because it was a convenient shield when all she'd wanted to do after West had left was crawl into a dark hole and hide. It had taken her months to feel even remotely normal, and then she'd made sure she was too busy with study and work and establishing her career to think about him or the shipwrecked marriage—or to want the turmoil of falling in love again.

  The thought that she'd clung to the legalities of her marriage because some remote part of her still wanted West made her go still inside, but she refused to yield to the possibility. She wasn't that needy.

  West still affected her, she was big enough to admit that, but any woman with red blood pumping through her veins would find it hard to ignore him.

  She stepped out of her office and pulled the door closed behind her. Stop thinking about him.

  There was absolutely no point. Like the jades and artifacts she worked with, Gabriel West was past history—way in the past. She had wanted forever, and he hadn't. End of story. Getting close to West had been beyond what she could achieve. She simply hadn't had what it took to unlock whatever had passed for his heart.

  She strolled slowly along the deserted, darkened corridor, shoes sinking into thick soft carpet as she passed the open double doors to one of the main display rooms. The musical ripple of water from a fountain almost masked the faint click of a door closing.

  She froze. A chill swept down her spine. Someone was in the building with her.

  Gently, she opened her briefcase, extracted her cell phone and pressed the short dial that would put her through to the night watchman. No alarms had gone off, the security system hadn't been breached, but that didn't mean safety. The stolen artifacts had disappeared without one alarm being tripped.

  It could be the night watchman, or a staff member working late, as she was. The auction house was huge, and dealt in art, antiques and estate jewelry as well as Asian and Pacific-Rim artifacts. A number of Laine's staff had clearance to be in the building, although after the theft had been discovered three days ago they'd clamped down on security, and most of the keys had been handed in and security clearances revoked.

  Before the call could be picked up, the night watchman, Charlie Watson, stepped through a side door.

  "Everything
all right, Miss Laine?"

  Tyler let out a breath and disconnected the call. ''I heard a noise and got spooked. I was just ringing you to check if there was anyone else in the building."

  Charlie's gaze lacked its usual warmth and slid away too quickly, "It was probably Mr. Laine you heard. He just left."

  Mr. Laine. Last week Charlie would have referred to her adoptive brother as Richard. Tyler's stomach tightened at the loss of Charlie's easy manner. Everyone at Laine's was on edge; the police investigation and the intense media speculation had seen to that. But now that the first shock of the theft had passed, an uncomfortable speculation had set in—the kind of speculation Tyler should have been prepared for.

  She had worked hard for Laine's—she'd worked even harder to be a part of her family—but there was no getting past the fact that she had been adopted into the wealthy jeweler family, not born into it. Pretty clothes and an exclusive education aside, she was the cuckoo in Laine's nest, with a murky past the media had latched on to like a starving dog closing its jaws on a juicy bone. She didn't need it spelled out that Charlie, who had always gone out of his way to be pleasant to her before, thought it was more than likely that she had had something to do with the theft.

  He strolled past her into the display room. "Guess we're all a little jumpy since the theft."

  He cast his eye over a glassed-in display of ivory that Tyler had catalogued and put together just before the jade had disappeared from a vault that had ten-inch steel walls, twenty-four-hour computer and camera surveillance, and a time lock that sealed it shut from five-thirty at night until eight in the morning.

  A wave of weariness washed through Tyler as she slipped the cell phone back into her briefcase. "What do you think of the ivory?"

  Charlie shoved his hands in his pockets and stared assessingly at the exquisitely carved set of Indonesian amulets. His gaze studiously avoided hers. "Not as pretty as the jade."

  In Tyler's mind, as outwardly plain and workmanlike as the jade was, nothing was as "pretty."