by Anne Stuart
She bristled immediately. “I don’t need anyone to take me home, Mr. Ryder. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of it myself. And you’re mistaken—I’m not staying here. I have a perfectly good house, and there’s no reason why anyone would have shot at me.”
“Yeah, that’s what the bullet graze on the side of your head is saying.”
“No one wants to hurt me. It’s Soledad they’re after, not me. I told you she needed protection. I’d rather have your resources spent on her than wasting your time with me.”
“And what makes you think I give a shit about your preferences?” he said.
She gave him something just short of a glare. “Then surely you can send someone else home with me if you’re suddenly smitten with concern for my welfare.”
“No one else is available,” he said with a blatant disregard for the truth. “Your waif is under lock and key, and the sooner you can get your things, the sooner I can dump you and get back to my work.”
“I’m fine on my own,” she said, and he controlled his instinctive snort of exasperation. Of course she’d be convinced she was safe, no matter what she was hiding. Her old man, Fabrizio, would make certain she was protected at all times. So much for turning her back on the family business, which was all well and good until she needed protection or a favor.
They wouldn’t provide protection from him. There was something going on with her, something inexplicable. The tension between them was palpable, but it wasn’t simply a matter of dislike. More women than he could remember despised him—some he’d wanted, some he hadn’t—but there was a hidden thread of . . . something between them, something he didn’t want to look at too closely. There was definitely more to her than met the eye. For all she looked like an auburn-haired pixie, he wasn’t fooled into thinking the surface had anything to do with the real woman inside. She had secrets, and he never trusted a woman with secrets. Especially not the daughter of one of the most corrupt political families he’d ever seen.
He didn’t have time to waste on her. She probably wasn’t a major player, and the sooner he could clear her, the sooner he could get back to business.
Giving her a deliberately impatient look, he started forward. “You coming?”
“What makes you think it’s safe to walk out the front door? Your enemies might still be out there.”
He mentally counted to ten. “We haven’t decided whether they were shooting at me or you or your supposedly endangered waif, which is why we’re holding on to both of you. Once we know she’s safe we’ll get her settled in some anonymous city, and she can go on to live the American dream. In the meantime our computer hacker is checking the surveillance tapes in the live feed. The facial-recognition software should give us an answer sooner or later, and in the meantime Jack will let us know if the coast is clear.”
“Isn’t that rather a lot for one man?” she said caustically.
“You haven’t met Jack. And you’re not about to, either. And that’s the last question I’m answering. Where are your bloody clothes?”
“I tossed them,” she said. “Soledad told me it was impossible to get blood from silk.”
Ryder paused. “What bothers me,” he said meditatively, “isn’t that she knew about field dressings and bloodstains, but why the hell should she know about silk? Hardly your common jungle wear in Calliveria.”
There was only the faintest movement of her long eyelashes, but he realized the same thing had occurred to her. No dummy was his Miss Parker.
Not his, and he sure the hell didn’t want her. He just wanted her sorted out and gone.
“If I have to be escorted home, couldn’t your computer guy take me?” she said.
“He’s busy.” Not a complete lie, but he’d sent Jack off on diddly-shit missions like this before. He could have taken care of this one with no difficulty, but Jenny Parker was his job, not Jack’s. “Look, if it makes you happy we’ll go out through the basement.”
Ms. Parker made a long-suffering sigh. “Let’s just get it over with. My head is killing me, and all I want to do is lie down in a darkened room and sleep.”
He frowned. “You think you might have a concussion?”
“No! It was just a graze, and I certainly don’t need someone hovering at my bedside, waking me up every few hours.”
“I wasn’t offering.”
She gave him that haughty look she’d perfected. Usually he liked cold women who were completely secure with who and what they were. Not Ms. Parker, but then, her self-assurance was only skin-deep. “Good,” she snapped. “Your job is to take care of Soledad, my job is to take care of myself, which involves a long nap in my own house.”
“Dream on.” He put his hands on her when she headed for the front door, and apart from yanking her arm away from him and glaring at him, she didn’t let out a peep. She didn’t even remember her waif until he’d shepherded her next to one of the sleek, low-slung cars in the basement garage.
“I didn’t say good-bye to Soledad.”
“That’s all right, one of my people will explain everything.”
“But I need . . .” She started back toward the stairs, but he simply caught her and swung her around back to the Audi.
“You don’t need anything. Everything will be explained to her, and you don’t have to worry your pretty little head about it again.”
She made a low, warning sound, like a jungle cat about to strike. “Don’t you fucking patronize me!”
“Then don’t act like a baby. You wanted to dump her on me—consider her dumped. You just come along as the booby prize. We need to find out who shot at you. Once we do, you can go home and we’ll get her settled with the job and an apartment and a new name if necessary. What more do you want?”
It almost seemed as if she were going to tell him. “To see the last of you,” she said finally.
He wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. She was lying about something, and he still couldn’t tell what. “The feeling’s mutual,” he said. The sooner she was permanently out of his life, the better. “Now get in the fucking car.”
Chapter Five
Jenny prided herself on the fact that she was practical, levelheaded, and unemotional. At that moment she found herself unaccountably close to tears. She wrapped her arms around her body—the loose T-shirt wasn’t enough in the icy blast of the air conditioner as he drove the Audi too fast through the tourist-jammed streets of New Orleans, but she said nothing. She had no intention of uttering a single word to him. If she needed to follow up on Soledad, she’d have Daisy, her paralegal, make the call. She certainly wasn’t going to give up her house for even a day. Soledad would be safe on Magazine Street, and she’d be safe in her tumbledown shotgun cottage.
Except that Daisy was a wuss, and she’d likely crumble before a bully like Ryder. And that’s exactly what he was, a big, mean, beautiful, scary bully, with gentle hands when it came to bullet grazes . . .
Shit, she was going to have to talk to him after all. “Shouldn’t we report the shooting to the police?”
“No.”
“What if my wound gets infected and I end up having to go to the hospital? They’ll be asking all sorts of questions—you’re supposed to report gunshot wounds.”
“Doctors are supposed to report them, not the people who get shot. And you won’t need a hospital or any kind of follow-up unless you’re the biggest hypochondriac in the world. It was a small graze. I cleaned it thoroughly, and the only aftereffect you’re going to suffer is a headache.”
“Oh, really? I thought that was you.”
“Funny.” His voice was flat.
Okay, now she could shut up. Snapping back at him gained too much attention—she needed to be soft and quiet and polite so he didn’t look too closely. Even though she was still burning with questions, she wasn’t going to ask him a thing. He’d just blow her off.
Could someone really have been shooting at her? Granted, Billy was upset that she wouldn’t return the cell ph
one that was right now resting in her pocket, but Billy would never hurt her. That cell phone had been part and parcel of the trouble Billy had gotten into, and he was going to need to convince her that there was nothing incriminating on it before she’d even consider returning it, and so far he’d done nothing.
So if they weren’t shooting at her, and her instincts told her Ryder wasn’t the target either, then that left Soledad, making her safety an even more important concern.
“Will you tell me if you identified the shooter?” she blurted out, then could have bit her tongue.
To her surprise he answered her. “Depends who he is. Since at first glance you’re the least likely target, I’ll probably deal with it myself. Maybe you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which you seem to make a habit of doing, if I remember correctly.”
Bastard, she thought silently, fuming. With luck she would keep her damned mouth shut until they reached her house.
And then she realized he was heading in the wrong direction, toward the mansions on the edge of the French Quarter. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m taking you home. What’s the address?”
“Now you ask,” she said grumpily. “I don’t live in the French Quarter.”
He turned to look at her, cold blue eyes full of something she couldn’t quite define.
“I did a complete background check on you, lady, right after you showed up on the container ship. You live in the French Quarter.”
“I haven’t lived there in four months. I live at the edge of the Ninth Ward.”
She managed to shock a reaction out of him. “You live where?”
“How the hell did you think I could afford a house?”
“People who wear Louboutin shoes can afford a house anywhere they want.”
He certainly knew which buttons to push. “Those were a hand-me-down from my sister-in-law—they were too big for her. And despite your narrow-minded assumptions, I’m a far cry from wealthy. I own a run-down house which I’m gradually fixing up, and I’m very proud of it.”
“I bet those shoes are real handy when you’re pulling nails,” he drawled.
She gave him a slow, considering look. “Did I run over your dog? Insult your mama? Cast aspersions on your manhood? Why do you always do your best to piss me off?”
He laughed then, but it wasn’t a warming sound. “‘Cast aspersions’? Who the hell talks like that? And trust me, my manhood can stand up to any aspersions you care to cast, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
It only took her a moment to get his pun, and she growled low in her throat, turning her face toward the window.
“Did I embarrass you, Parker? I knew you were a prude, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”
She realized belatedly that he thought she was upset about his manhood standing up, and her ire rose. “What in God’s name makes you think I’m a prude? I was born and bred in New Orleans—no one could come from the Big Easy and remain a prude. I’ve seen enough things to shock a hardened criminal.” Hardened. Good God, how had she managed to come up with that? Everything was now sounding obscene to her.
His grin made it clear he hadn’t missed the double meaning, but thankfully he didn’t comment on it. “Yeah, but you went away to school in the North from the time you were ten years old. I’m guessing your family didn’t want their darling only daughter to be tainted by their shady business dealings.”
“Not exactly. My mother died when I was ten, and my father didn’t want to be bothered raising a little girl. I was always the odd one out in my family.” Her and Billy, she thought, but she wasn’t about to even mention his name out loud. “And what makes you think everyone who spent time in the North is a prude? I assume that would include you, since you clearly don’t belong in the South. You’re the very antithesis of a Southern gentleman.”
“No sipping mint juleps on the front porch or whupping slaves in the back forty. No, Parker, I’m no gentleman at all, least of all a Southern one. I grew up in Idaho.”
“I bet there are just as many prudes in Idaho. And I’m not a goddamn prude!” she added belatedly.
“Would you like me to tell you what a prude you are?” His voice was silky with a kind of menace. “You wouldn’t imagine the kinds of things I know about you. What you like, what you don’t like. What you’re willing to do, what you refuse to do. I know the name of every lover you’ve ever had.”
Ha! She could call his bluff on that one. The only lover she’d had, apart from her husband, Greg, was the fumbling college student who’d taken her virginity one unpleasant night up north, and even she had blanked on his name. He made it sound like he thought there were dozens.
“Name them all,” she taunted him, secure in her bluff. “Don’t leave out a single one of them.”
“That would be hard to do.” There was just the fainted caress of the word hard, and she ground her teeth. “Gregory Parker and Ricky Turnbull, who died in a car accident about five years ago, by the way. I realize you two had lost touch.”
She could feel the color drain away from her face. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She knew his mysterious organization had some of the most advanced intel-gathering abilities in the world. Of course he could find out anything he wanted to know. The question was, why did he want to know it?
The last thing she was going to do was ask him. She’d dug herself into a very uncomfortable hole, and she wasn’t going to make it worse. “Turn left up ahead,” she said abruptly. A thought struck her, and she decided, what was another foot or two? “How come you know all about my absolutely useless sexual history, and you don’t know where I live?”
“It’s your past I check on. Remy had already vetted your present, and I wasn’t particularly interested in the details.”
No, another foot or two in that hole was worse. “Then you can find the house on your own,” she said stubbornly, leaning back, prepared to ignore him. “Ask your friend Remy for the address.”
“Already got it.”
She wanted to beat her head against the dashboard in frustration, but she managed to keep her expression distant and stony. “Then we have nothing more to say to each other.”
“Nothing more,” he agreed.
Damn, her head hurt. She needed to get away from him, grab a couple of Tylenol to beef up the ibuprofen, and then retire to her dark bedroom with an ice pack. Assuming she could find her way to the bed without breaking her neck on the pile of lumber she had stacked in the hallway in preparation for reframing the back porch. So he knew she was lousy at sex and came from a family of criminals. Did he know she could frame a wall, tape and spackle drywall, do simple electricity and plumbing, and even manage a bit of finish carpentry? Of course not—he just wanted to know all the bad, stupid things about her.
Well, fine. The only bad, stupid thing she knew about him was that he was a royal bastard, and that was enough. As long as she kept away from him she’d be fine. There was only one problem with that plan. She didn’t want to.
It took her a moment to realize he’d already pulled up in front of the small house that was her pride and joy. He’d even turned off the car, and he was watching her out of hooded eyes. “You just going to sit there?” he said. “Or were you waiting for me to open your door for you? I thought we established I wasn’t a gentleman.”
“I never had any doubts,” she said, reaching for the door handle. To her horror he climbed out as well, slamming the door behind him, and she stared at him across the top of the Audi. “What are you doing?”
“Seeing you to your door.”
“Oh, good God,” she said crossly. “I’m home, I’m safe. Just go away—you’re making my headache worse.”
“My heart’s breaking for you,” he said, moving ahead of her up the front stairs that led to the narrow porch. New lumber gleamed from the places where she’d already replaced rotting floorboards, but he didn’t bother to look down and admire her work. Of course he didn’t. “I doubt that anyone was
gunning for you today, but just in case, I intend to check over the place before we leave here.”
“For Christ’s sake,” she said, pushing ahead of him and opening the door. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not coming back to Super Spy Central?”
“You have any idea how annoying that is?” he said, shouldering past her, and she found herself shrinking away from him, skittish as always. He stalked down the center of her house, his eyes sweeping each room as he went. She waited a moment, and then followed him, nervous with him in her precious house. It was like having a tiger loose in a bedroom.
“I love shotgun cottages,” she said, knowing she was babbling. “The way one room leads into another makes it feel like my own hobbit home.” Hobbit home? What a stupid fucking thing to say!
Fortunately he seemed to be ignoring her, searching through her front parlor, looking behind the curtains she’d hung to shut out some of the midday sun, then the unfinished kitchen, the microwave and hot plate and dorm-size refrigerator the sum total of her current culinary abilities. He scouted around the functional bathroom, into the first bedroom, and on into the second, with her unmade bed, her clothes on the floor.
She needed him out of her half-renovated house. He was too big, too intense, too there. If she had any white sage she would have burned it after he left, because she had a sense she was going to feel his presence here long after he was gone.
“What’s out back?” He jerked his head toward the flimsy back door that she had yet to replace. “Because if you’re relying on that door to keep you safe from predators, you’re even more naïve than I thought.”
“I’m not the slightest bit naïve.” And that was a lie, she thought. “I was born in this city, remember? There’s a tall, locked fence all around the backyard. Besides, there are some advantages to being a Gauthier. People think twice about interfering with Fabrizio Gauthier’s only daughter.”
