“What kind do you want?” She looked at the plethora of chairs in front of her. They ranged from basic and short to big and bulky. In her opinion, something too big might make that room feel smaller than it already was, but something too small wouldn’t fit his body. The point of going chair shopping was to get something that fit his body and made him feel comfortable for the numerous hours he would spend in that room.
“You should let me buy you dinner.”
“What?” She said. “What does dinner have to do with a chair?”
“You haven’t eaten. I haven’t eaten. I can’t think on an empty stomach. Let’s go eat and then I’ll pick out a chair.”
She laughed. “Are you serious?”
“I’m hungry,” he grinned. She shook her head there was no way he was doing this to her now. If he were hungry he should have gone out to eat and then come back to the store to pick her up. There was a bistro down the street from her store. “I’m buying,” he restated.
“I can buy my own dinner.” She wanted him to know that while she wasn’t rich, she didn’t go for having a man “keep” her either. She was perfectly capable of taking care of her own needs—including buying her own food.
“I know you can,” he told her. “But I’d like to buy you a meal. Consider it making up for the meal you fixed me earlier.”
She hadn’t fixed him much and it hadn’t cost her much. Thinking about what they had for lunch made her think about how hungry he just might be. They hadn’t eaten a huge meal and it was getting late. He was probably starving. All the more reason he should pick a chair and take her back to her place, and then he could go home and eat alone—or at least without her.
“And you can’t pick a chair without food?”
“No,” he shook his head and she realized he wasn’t going to cave.
“There’s a Paradise Bakery down the street if you want to stop there.”
“How about Lola’s Grill,” he winked. “Best food north of Scottsdale.”
She knew where Lola’s was. She also knew it was going to take him closer to home and then he would have to waste gas just to come back. She shrugged. “Sure; why not?” They left the store. She knew full well that they probably wouldn’t get back there in time to get the chair before the store closed. Lola’s wasn’t an extravagant restaurant; it was nice, but not ritzy. Still, that didn’t mean anybody at Lola’s moved swiftly. They were likely to be there for hours with one of Lola’s full four course dinners that took forever to finish. Slow and relaxed was nice, but she really did want to get Shane that chair. Unfortunately, her brain and her heart weren’t in agreement because while she knew she should put distance between them, her heart wanted to be closer to him.
When they arrived at Lola’s, Shane took the back corner booth so that he faced the door. Unhappy with her distance in the booth he reached out, wrapped one arm around her waist and pulled her closer to him. “Now, that’s better,” he smiled as he made sure she was comfortably positioned within centimeters of his body. Was he flirting with her? She couldn’t tell, but she thought maybe he was.
“So, tell me about yourself, Shane. What do you like to do when you’re not working?”
“I go up to the high country a lot,” he skimmed over the menu, just as she did. “There are some rock formations up near Sedona that are great for climbing.”
“You climb?”
“Yeah,” he looked at her with the, “didn’t I just say that,” look. Well, no, he hadn’t. He said there were formations up there that were great for climbing, not that he climbed them. But with arms and shoulders like the ones he had, she should have known he was a climber. Men had a tendency to use their arms more in the climb, while women had a tendency to use their legs to do most of the work. Jody, her delegated climb instructor at the local rock gym, had told her it was why women sometimes made it to the top faster, because the muscles in the thighs are bigger and stronger and take the climb better. She was thankful Jody had been assigned as her partner once she decided to make the gym a permanent fixture in her schedule. She graduated from the standard group instruction, to personal one on one time and that had improved her performance significantly. It also slowed things down so she didn’t feel rushed to ascend or descend the wall. She wouldn’t know about how swiftly either gender climbed. She was still in the stages of taking her time while trying not to remember how deathly afraid of heights she was.
“You?”
“Only in the gym. I love knowing if something goes wrong there’s a nice, cushioned mat beneath me to break my fall.” She held up her hand to stop him from saying what she was sure he was about to say. She could still seriously injure herself, even in the gym. She didn’t want to hear that because she already knew that and she tried to push that thought aside every time she took to the ropes. “It’s better than impacting a rocky bottom.” She assured him. “What else do you do?”
“Clean my guns.” He said so seriously that she had to laugh.
“And that’s fun?”
“It’s a necessity,” he closed the menu, indicating he knew what he wanted already. “And I have to take care of my land. I don’t want it to go downhill, so when I’m not working on something I’m usually working around the house or the property line. I like to keep things secure.”
“Security is always on your mind, isn’t it?”
“Not always.” He looked over her facial features as if he were studying every curve, every line, every diminutive detail and committing it to memory. “What are you having?”
She blinked in confusion until she realized the waitress was standing at their table and it was time to order their food. “I’ll start with the fruit salad, and for the main course I’ll have the chicken, broccoli, potato and cheese meal.”
“Good choice,” Shane said. “I’ll have the Caesar salad, and main course the steak, well done, and potato for my first side, coleslaw for my second side.” He handed the waitress the menus. “Could you bring us some more water please?”
“With lemon?” Alyssa added. She turned to look at Shane. “Thank you for dinner.”
“You’re welcome. Thank you for joining me.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled before trying to find something to focus her attention on, something other than the incredibly gorgeous man sitting next to her. His eyes were so deep she could drown in them, but his gaze, the way he looked at her, nearly set her on fire. She really, really liked this man. And she shouldn’t. She had given up on relationships, why was she starting to change her mind on the matter now? What was it about Shane Maxwell that made her want to take a chance again? The man was there as a favor to a friend. Eventually he would leave and then where would that leave her? Where would that leave them? She resolved not to worry about any of that tonight. Tonight, she was just going to enjoy a nice night out with a good man, and then tomorrow they would go back to their standard business and professional relationship. That was what she had told herself anyway, but somehow, looking at the man next to her, she wasn’t sure they would be able to not explore the attraction they had to each other. Because she was sure he felt something, even if only lust, he felt something. He was too busy working hard trying to make sure she felt it too, for him not to have some thoughts of them as a couple on his mind. The more she thought about the possibility, the more she told herself not to go there. She couldn’t go there, no matter how much she wanted to.
Nevin DuPont looked at the photos on his wall. “Dove Team,” he snarled. They thought they were better than everybody, better than him. They would all soon learn that they were nothing, that he was the master of his craft and they, they were just a bunch of spineless dick heads hiding behind the crest of the elite team.
He had already killed one of them. He made sure it looked like an accident—for now anyway—because he didn’t want to alert the entire team and if it looked like anything other than an accident they would all go on high alert before he was ready for them to. “Brakes gone bad,” he chuck
led to himself. He had got David Killinger first, right down there in New Orleans. He had made sure to empty just enough of his brake fluid and put a little hole to make the rest leak out. He fiddled with the censor so it wouldn’t show and he waited. He waited patiently for the man to be in that truck when the breaks gave way. He hadn’t expected his pregnant daughter to be in there with him when the accident happened, but she had been. Too bad for her because when his truck rolled over on the highway and then went “boom” she had gone out with him. “Oh well,” he shrugged. “Casualty of war,” he excused the extra loss of life.
It had been seven months since his last kill and he had spent those seven months preparing for the subsequent ones to follow it. He had them all planned out, but he knew, with his next kill, they might start to get suspicious. Maybe they wouldn’t, but if they were as smart as they tried to claim they were, they might at least start to wonder why two of their comrades had fallen in accidental deaths. This next one would be fun for him. Larry Bessler was a smoker. He already knew how he was going to use that against him. How many people fell asleep with a lit cigarette, or in his case, cigar, in their hand? Well, this one would. He was sure of it. Slowly, but ever so surely, he was going to wipe out the entire team. He was working his way west. This next one was in Round Rock, Texas. Then he would have a stop in Arizona before working his way on up to Washington. The last four were between Oregon and Washington and he was going to have to work quickly for them. They would be a challenge, but a fun one. He was going to take out the “elite” Dove Team all by himself.
Chapter Four
Two weeks, that’s how long Shane had been working for her and for two weeks she had been seriously lusting after the man. It didn’t matter if he was behind the closed door, now locked and secured, security room. He was there and she knew he was there and she felt him, felt his presence as if he were right out there in the store with her. And every lunch hour he spent it in her apartment, eating lunch with her. She wondered if the man didn’t bring his own lunch just so he could come up and eat at her place. He didn’t go out to eat, even though there was a bistro down the street with really good food.
She smiled to herself. Those lunch hours with Shane had been some of the best lunch hours of her life. The thought scared her, but it was true. Normally she just ate a sandwich, did a little work on one of her pieces and found her way back into the store within a half hour. But with Shane there, she ate, had great conversations about his travels around the world, her life growing up, and family—her family because he seemed to shy away from talking about his. She had deduced that he was the only child, no brothers or sisters to go home to. They had spent an hour each day up there. She never closed for that long and she wasn’t sure it was good that she was closing for that long now, but the more she talked to him, the less she wanted the moment to end. God, she really liked this guy. They weren’t dating, not technically. That night at the restaurant wasn’t a technical date either since it was just two people who worked together going out for a meal. She nearly laughed at her own reasoning. It was a date—mostly, whether either of them called it as much or not. But since neither had labeled it a date she was free to keep denying what it was and covering it for something it really wasn’t. There was nothing platonic about their feelings. There was nothing business as usual about what they felt for each other, yet she kept trying to pretend that was all it was, and for some reason he seemed content to let her do so.
Before he had changed the lock, or more like installed a lock, on the security room door she had accidently walked in on him while he was changing his shirt. Craig had brought her coffee once again and she was just getting ready to tell him she didn’t like coffee when she realized that she might hurt his feelings. So instead of going straight for the, “please stop because I hate coffee,” statement she decided that it was only his second time and that she would try a different tactic. “Wow,” she had said. “This is a really big cup of coffee. Being a one woman shop here I don’t tend to drink anything while I’m down here.” That was code for stop bringing me coffee, but he didn’t hear it that way.
“Now you can have coffee,” he said. She turned around swiftly, knowing she was rolling her eyes, but not realizing she was going to walk dab smack into Shane. She spilled coffee all over his navy blue button down shirt. She had apologized profusely because now he was covered in hot coffee.
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “You hate coffee anyway.”
She smiled, even though she really was trying not to, because he had, in one breath, just told Craig what she had been trying to subtly tell him moments earlier.
After Craig left she grabbed a towel that she kept behind the counter. She usually kept two, one that she could put on the glass while showing a piece, and one that she would have as a just in case the air condition went out on one of those triple digit Arizona days. She had walked into the security room without knocking and there he stood, bare chest and completely uninhibited. She had just looked at him, letting her eyes drink in his delectable form. Angles and plains of hard muscle stretched across his chest and up his arms and shoulders like a beautiful rock formation. Solid, beautiful, completely male and she liked it—a lot.
“Yes,” he had finally said when she hadn’t bothered to say anything.
“Oh, sorry. Towel,” she handed it to him. She took one last long, hard look before exiting the room and closing the door behind her. She couldn’t resist looking just once more, even though looking was causing too many lustful thoughts to race through her mind. The next day he had the lock on the door which assured her he was very much unhappy with her perusal of his body. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. She didn’t want to create a hostile working environment, and so she took the hint and kept her distance. That didn’t mean her mind hadn’t kept its distance from the fantasy realm. She was sitting there, contemplating that maybe she should give some other guy a chance—maybe Craig, even though she didn’t find him romantically attractive maybe she was just too picky. Maybe she should take a chance.
She didn’t have time to dwell on that thought because in walked trouble—literally. A nice older woman wearing a badge served her papers and in those papers she found out she was being sued. She couldn’t believe it. One of her applicants was suing her for discrimination. He, and she couldn’t believe this, said he wasn’t hired because he was black. Was he kidding?
She was knee deep in private rants when her phone rang. She was so angry that she forgot where she was. “What?” She said instead of hello, instead of thank you for calling. “I’m sorry…um…Snowflakes in the Desert, how may I assist you.” She tried to bring in her emotions, to control the rage that was threatening to burst free. How dare he sue her over something like that? She would never use the color of somebody’s skin as a reason not to hire them. Plus, did he actually pay attention when he walked in the store? Last she checked she wasn’t exactly pale in complexion herself.
“Alyssa?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Eve. I know we haven’t talked on the phone for a month of Sundays, but my voice hasn’t changed that much.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I just…bad news.”
“What’s going on? Maybe I can help.”
“I’m being sued. Gregory Alexander Dumas is suing me because I didn’t hire him. I’m required to attend a pre-trail moderation in the judge’s chambers next week. I’m reading this and I can’t believe it. Dumas says I didn’t hire him because he’s black. Seriously!? I’m darker than he is. Now I have to call my lawyer, so there’s an added expense that I can’t afford right now. And I have to close up shop while I attend to this frivolous crap.” She nearly yelled in the phone before settling her temper. “Oh Eve,” she sighed. “Now is just not a good time. Now is just really not a good time,” she shook her head. “But enough about my troubles; how are you?”
“Don’t do that, Alyssa. Don’t play big sister and try to treat me as if I’m on unstable ground. You h
ave a problem and I’m here for you. You know that.”
“I know. But there’s nothing you can do about this. I have to just suck it up and go to this moderation thing,” she waved her hand in the air as if her sister could actually see her frustration through the phone. “If that doesn’t work I guess we’ll be in court. I’m not sure how that works. I don’t know if after speaking with the judge we’ll be going to trial by jury, or if we’ll just be in his court room with him. I should have been a lawyer,” she sighed.
“You would have hated it. You liked some aspects of law, but if memory serves me correctly, and I believe it does,” she said with conviction. “You hated the idea of spending four years post undergraduate work doing your Juris Doctorate in it. I believe when Dad suggested it you told him, in rather colorful language, that you’d rather have your brain ripped out through your nostrils.”
Alyssa laughed. She remembered that conversation. Her father wanted her to go to college. She had no desire to do it. He wanted a lawyer or a doctor in the family. His boys seemed determined to just go into the military; he wanted his girls to be the geniuses in the family. Eve was close. But even she hadn’t gone for the career their father wanted. He wanted a prestigious doctor, lawyer, professional he could brag about. Eve’s work now was worth bragging about for him, and he never let her forget it whenever they talked. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t talked much. Even at Thomas’ wedding he had taken the time to assure her that she could have done so much better. It didn’t matter that she had her own business, that she designed her own jewelry and made every piece herself on top of that. Nothing mattered to him except the fact that she wasn’t famous, or wealthy, or worth bragging about.
Betrayal of the Dove (Men of Action) Page 6
