To Trust a Stranger

by Karen Robards

  Of course, sleeping with Sid’s wife would be a pretty good advance payment on that payback. The trouble was, he didn’t want to sleep with Sid’s wife. He wanted to sleep with Julie. Beautiful, feisty, sexy Julie. Julie the temptress. Julie the enchantress. Julie the siren of his dreams.

  Not Julie Carlson. Just Julie.

  And that was a complication. A huge complication that he would never in a million years have foreseen.

  For almost half his life, his goal had been to find out what had happened to his brother. He was as certain as it was possible to be without actually knowing it for a fact that Daniel was dead, and was almost certain that, whatever had happened, Sid was involved. If so, he meant to see that Sid got everything that was coming to him. The difference now was that he was equally determined to keep Julie safe while he did it. She was an innocent caught up in a dirty little war she didn’t even know existed. She deserved better than to be a pawn in Sid’s game.

  Hell, she deserved better than to be a pawn in his game, too.

  Looking at her, all big eyes and lush lips and sexy curves that hid an inner sweetness that was almost more attractive to him than her very attractive outer package, Mac could almost find it in himself to forget the past; he could almost walk away, taking Julie with him as payment, and call it even.

  Almost.

  He wanted her so much that under any other circumstances in the world he would have gladly jogged barefoot over hot coals to get to her. And here she was, his for the taking, begging him to carry her off to bed. But no matter how much he wanted to, he discovered to his own disgust that he couldn’t just turn his back on the past. Daniel’s little brother was still bound by unbreakable ties of love and loyalty, even after all these years.

  There was Julie to consider, too. To take her when she trusted him, when she thought he was no more than some stray PI who had stumbled into her life by accident then stayed to help her just because she needed help, would be wrong. In its own way, it would be a betrayal almost as bad as any of Sid’s.

  If there truly was such a thing as cosmic retribution, this time it seemed to be directed right at him. If he’d been in a laughing mood it would have been almost funny: after all, the cosmic joke was now on him. But he found that under the circumstances he couldn’t summon even so much as an ironic smile.

  He wanted Julie too much. And, in good conscience, he wasn’t going to be able to take what he wanted.

  “Hell-o-o.”

  Julie’s tone brought Mac back to the present as suddenly as if she’d snapped his arm with a rubber band. He realized that he’d been lost for far too long in the labyrinthine corridors of his own private hell.

  “Remember me?” She waggled her fingers at him in a smart-alecky little wave as he blinked at her. With her legs still tucked up under her and her truly inspiring body turned sideways to face him and her black hair flowing loose over her shoulders and her big brown eyes fixed on his face, she looked like the embodiment of every sexy dream he’d ever had. “I just asked you to sleep with me.”

  God give him strength. He was going to need it.

  “I heard you,” he said with commendable coolness. “You might want to slow down and think about what you’re saying for a minute. What you’re suggesting here is basically a revenge fuck. And believe me, darlin’, if you go through with it you’ll hate yourself in the morning.”

  “No, I won’t,” she said, those eyes going all heavy-lidded and sultry on him. If Mac hadn’t been driving, he would have closed his own eyes to block out the sight. “I’ve got my life back, and from now on I’m going to do exactly what I want. And right now what I want to do is you.”

  Jesus H. Christ. If she made him any hotter he’d self-immolate right where he sat.

  “You’re a head case, you know that?” He shot her a grim look. If he slept with her, it would be even more of a revenge fuck than she knew, although it was growing harder with each passing second to keep that firmly fixed in his mind. “And you’re turning me into one, too.”

  Julie stared at him for a moment without saying anything.

  “You don’t want to? Fine.”

  She uncoiled her legs, shifted position so that she was facing forward, crossed her arms over her chest and flopped her head back against the seat. Then she closed her eyes. Silence ensued. Finally able to focus on what he was doing, Mac took a deep breath, glanced around and realized that he had turned onto the expressway and gotten almost halfway back to Charleston with no awareness whatsoever of what he was doing. He was heading toward his house, he realized, and at the same time realized why.

  Take me somewhere where we can be alone. . . .

  Such was the power of suggestion—especially when he wanted what she was suggesting so much that he was going nuts trying not to think about it.

  “Feel like going for a walk?” he asked, searching for an alternative—public—destination fast. “I think we need to walk. And talk. Yeah, some talking is definitely what we need to do here.”

  She opened her eyes and shot him a look. Forget sultry. Now she looked mad.

  “I don’t want to walk. Or talk. If you want to play psychiatrist, fine. Just not with me. Forget I said anything, okay? Just take me back to the shop.”

  Great. Now she sounded—and looked—downright militant. She’d done nothing but surprise him since she’d slammed into his car in the Pink Pussycat’s parking lot. There was plenty of piss and vinegar mixed in with that innate sweetness, enough to keep any man hopping. He thought about the sugar down the gas tank, and succumbed to an involuntary inner smile even as he had the unsettling feeling that in her current state of upset she might be capable of any degree of mayhem. The best thing to do was give her time to cool off. No matter what she said, he was not letting her out of his sight. Not until he was sure she was not going to go off the deep end in some hideously self-destructive way.

  Forget the gas tank. Uneasy visions of her finding somebody else to join her in her revenge fuck danced through his head.

  “Did you hear me? I want to go back to the shop.”

  He’d just passed one of those clover-shaped exits where he could have done an easy one-eighty and headed back toward Summerville, and she had obviously noticed. Mac made a face at the windshield and kept on trucking down the expressway toward Charleston.

  A more specific destination would no doubt occur to him when he got there. Maybe the beach. . . .

  “Are you ignoring me?”

  Now she was mad at him. Mac did a mental—at least he hoped it was mental, because if she saw such a thing he knew from experience that he was liable to get bopped upside the head—eye roll. God save him from women when they were being irrational.

  God save him from women, period.

  He tried a placating tone. “Julie . . .”

  “Don’t you Julie me. You take me back to my shop. Right now.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and punctuated her words with a killing glare.

  He strove for patience, and even tried to inject a note of humor into the situation. “You wouldn’t want me to make a U-turn in the middle of the expressway, would you?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  Irrational didn’t begin to cover it. Mac’s patience was starting to fray around the edges.

  “You got a death wish, that’s your problem. Fortunately for us both, I don’t.”

  “I want you to turn this car around right now.”

  Mac discovered that his teeth were clenched. He drew in air through them as he tried once again to think the situation through. The problem was, it was difficult to think clearly when his dick was roughly the size and shape of the Washington Monument.

  Especially when his brain seemed to be in cahoots with his dick.

  “Too bad,” he said, perfectly pleasantly.

  She stiffened like someone had just shoved a poker up her sweet little ass, and gave him the kind of glare that would have reduced a lesser man to blubbering idiocy on the spot.

&nb
sp; “You know what?” She smiled at him. It didn’t take more than the briefest of sideways glances to recognize it for the crocodile smile it was. “You don’t get to make the decisions here. I do. Me, employer. You, employee.”

  Mac’s patience snapped.

  “No, it’s more like, me, sane. You, temporarily nuts. Until that changes, you’re not getting out of my sight. So live with it.”

  The exit he always took to get home was next, and Mac found himself pulling over into the appropriate lane automatically. Why not? he thought, and took it. There were many public places he could drive to from there. If not the beach, which was sure to be thick with tourists about now, then the Battery. . . .

  “Don’t you take that line with me, you—you man.” Julie’s fists were clenched and her eyes snapped. “Is that why you think you can tell me what to do? Because you’re a man? Well, I’ve got news for you: So what? All that means is that your brains are zipped up inside your pants ninety percent of the time. Men make me sick. I hate men. All men. You included.”

  Mac had to admit, in all honesty and in light of his own situation, that there was at least a grain of truth in what she said. But in the interests of retaining what was left of his cool and keeping a lid on the situation, he didn’t reply. Instead, he watched from the corner of his eye as Josephine, obviously having finished her dog biscuit, hopped up on the console from the backseat. Long strips of what looked like noodles hung from her mouth. White plastic noodles . . .

  Mac’s jaw dropped.

  “She ate my sign!”

  “Red light!” Julie yelled.

  Glancing around, Mac saw that she was right and stood on the brake. The Blazer stopped with a lurch and a squeal of tires. Mac took a deep breath, looking at the rush of traffic charging past. During the day, this was one of the busiest intersections in Charleston—he knew, because his house and the office of McQuarry and Hinkle were approximately three blocks to the north and he had to fight through this mess every day—and, if it hadn’t been for Julie, he would have plunged right into the middle of it.

  The consequences wouldn’t have been good.

  Damn dog, he thought, giving Josephine an evil look. If he’d been into crediting animals with humanlike emotions, he would have sworn she smiled at him, plastic noodles and all.

  Then his attention was abruptly, forcibly refocused. There, at the corner of a four-way intersection refereed by a posse of traffic lights, with cars lined up impatiently on two sides and rushing bumper to bumper across the middle in an impenetrable line, Julie simply opened the door and got out.

  For a moment Mac couldn’t believe it. One second she was making outraged noises in the seat beside him, and the next she was out the door, slamming it behind her so hard the car shook, then stalking with her back ramrod straight and her head held high between two idling cars as she headed toward the sidewalk.

  “May God damn all female creatures to hell for all eternity,” Mac said bitterly to Josephine, who didn’t seem impressed. Then he shoved the car into park and got out.

  Feeling like the biggest fool alive, furious enough to twist nails into pretzels with his bare hands if he’d been handed any, Mac went after her.

  When he caught up to her, after making an end run around throngs of tourists and shoppers and what seemed to be a whole bus full of kids on a field trip, most of whom were armed with drippy ice-cream bars, she was still marching along at a pretty good clip.

  “Just hold it right there,” he said through his teeth, grabbing her arm.

  She stopped dead, and whirled to face him.

  Her whole body was quivering with temper. Her head was high. Her eyes were enormous and shooting sparks.

  And tears were tracing bright paths down her cheeks.

  “Fuck,” Mac said, and meant it.

  “Fuck you,” she snapped, trying without success to pull her arm from his grasp. She then ruined the whole touch-me-and-die thing she had going on by sniffling. He stared down at her, feeling as if he had just taken a punch to the stomach. She looked furious and pathetic and so gorgeous that she stole his breath, all at the same time. When he didn’t say anything more, her eyes flashed dangerously, and she opened her mouth to yell at him—he could tell that was what she had in mind, her eyes telegraphed her intention and she was still bristling with rage—so he did the only thing any sane man faced with such circumstances could do.

  He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

  And even as he did it realized that he had just done a swan dive out of the frying pan straight into the sizzling heart of the fire.

  20

  THE SOUND OF BLARING HORNS penetrated Julie’s consciousness slowly. Before she had quite registered exactly what she was hearing, Mac lifted his head and seemed much struck by the cacophonous sounds.

  “Fuck,” he said again, glancing around, then focused on her. Those beautiful blue eyes narrowed with some emotion she couldn’t quite put a name to as they ran over her face. His mouth compressed into a thin hard line. She was in his arms, her body plastered to his, her hands locked behind his neck, her face tilted toward his, blinking up at him with some bemusement. The cause of her tears—indeed, the tears themselves—was forgotten for the moment. The sun reflected blindingly off the shop-windows and the roofs of cars cruising past, the smell of exhaust hung heavy in the muggy air, and Mac felt hard and strong and absolutely right against her.

  Julie realized that once again she was just exactly where she wanted to be. Except, of course, for the blaring horns.

  Mac had to raise his voice to be heard over them. “Look, I apologize, okay? Anything I said to upset you, I take it back.” But, she thought, frowning, he didn’t sound too happy about it. “Now, could we please get back in the car before the police show up?”

  Comprehension caused Julie’s eyes to widen. The honking, the shouts—Mac had abandoned the Blazer in the middle of the street. Before she had time to say anything, or even to fully surface from that soul-shaking kiss, he stepped back from the embrace, locked a hand around her wrist and strode back toward the car with her in tow, apparently taking her assent for granted.

  Julie sniffed and wiped what was left of the moisture from her cheeks as she practically ran in her high-heeled sandals in his wake, not sure how she felt about being treated so cavalierly. The only thing she was sure of was, she wasn’t ready to walk away from Mac again just yet.

  This was getting interesting.

  “Lady, do you need any help?” A paunchy man in a business suit turned to watch as she was hustled past. Julie realized that she and Mac were the cynosure of all eyes. Even preteens with their faces full of ice cream were staring with interest.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” she called back with a wave. Mac threw her an assessing glance over his shoulder as he pulled her after him into the street. The deafening honking had died down some. Julie realized that traffic on their side of the light was stopped again, and that at least one and possibly more traffic cycles had passed since she had gotten out of the Blazer. Cars were out of alignment in both lanes as those vehicles behind the Blazer that had tried to maneuver around it had been frozen in awkward place by the changing of the light.

  Everybody inside every car that Julie could see looked mad as hornets. She waved at them feebly. More horns blared.

  For his part, Mac ignored them all, heading straight toward the marooned Blazer. Just as he reached it, a woman popped up on the driver’s side. Obviously a tourist, in a neon-green floral blouse and a big straw hat, she waggled a finger at Mac across the hood.

  “Don’t you know better than to leave a dog in a car?” she said in a scolding tone. “Especially on a hot day like this?”

  Mac groaned, jerked open Julie’s door, thrust her inside, and said something like give me a break to the woman as he shut the door again. Julie, tenderly wiping the remnants of Mac’s sign from Josephine’s mouth as the poodle settled down in her lap, missed the rest of the conversation, but Mac looked thoroughly teed of
f as he slid behind the wheel.

  The woman, mouth still working, bent down to look in Mac’s window. He ignored her, except to shoot her a scowl as she tapped imperatively on it. The light changed. The Blazer moved into the intersection, where they took a left. As quick as that they were anonymous again, for which Julie was thankful.

  “So, you want to tell me why you were crying?”

  Julie’s chin lifted defiantly. That she had succumbed to tears embarrassed her—but she hadn’t expected him to see them, and, hey, she was having a really bad day.

  “It’s my divorce. I can cry if I want to.”

  “Good point.”

  “If we’re playing twenty questions, why did you kiss me?”

  “Because I’m as nuts as you are?”

  Julie bristled anew. “I am not nuts.”

  Mac opened his mouth as if to reply, seemed to think better of what he’d been going to say, and shot her an exasperated look.

  “Do me a favor: Just sit there and don’t say or do anything until we get out of the car, okay?”

  “Fine.” Julie settled back in the seat, not too unhappily, content to wait on events. That searing kiss had said volumes, even if he was inexplicably grumpy now.

  The Blazer turned down a residential street, then another. The houses in this neighborhood were nothing like her own, Julie thought. These houses were older, small, with neat green postage-stamp yards punctuated by the occasional palmetto. Julie realized that this particular street was familiar just as Mac pulled to the curb and stopped.

  She glanced around and began to smile. The last time she’d been here it had been the middle of the night, but she didn’t think she was mistaken: Mac had brought her to his house.

  Life was looking up.

  Josephine apparently realized where she was, too, because she stood up in Julie’s lap and yapped excitedly. Mac eyed the two of them with disfavor as he pulled the key from the ignition. When he opened his door, Josephine scrambled across his lap and hopped out.