by Linda Howard
It was after dark when they reached Gideon’s house. There’d been no word from Charlie on Tabby’s car, but since all they had was a make and a first name that might or might not be real, it was going to take a while. Gideon pulled into the garage and killed the engine as the garage door slowly closed behind them. He didn’t immediately leave the Mustang but sat there with his gaze straight ahead and his hand resting on the steering wheel.
Hope stayed in place, too. “Do you want me to pack my stuff and leave? I know it’s not a good idea for me to move back into Mom’s apartment just yet, but I could—”
Gideon reached past the stick shift, grabbed the back of her head and pulled her in for a kiss. He didn’t kiss her like a man who wanted her to leave. In fact, she was quite sure he had never kissed her quite this way, as if he wanted to consume her gently but entirely. When he pulled his mouth away, he did not drop his hand. “Marcia Cordell told me every vile thing that bastard did to her. At first she didn’t want to talk about how she’d died, but once she got started, it seemed to do her good to get it out. She told me everything, every sick detail, and then I walk outside and the sheriff says, ‘Oh, Detective Malory’s down there over yonder, talking to Dennis Floyd.’”
Gideon called upon a deep and not entirely inaccurate drawl when impersonating the sheriff, and Hope laughed lightly. But she didn’t laugh long.
“And I couldn’t run fast enough,” he said, his voice deep and soft.
“I’m not hurt.” A few bruises, a lot of scary, but she wasn’t really hurt.
“Not this time,” he said. His thumb brushed her cheek. “But there’s going to be a next time. There’s going to be another Dennis, another struggle, another gunshot that makes my heart fly out of my chest. The protection charms will help, they give you an edge, and I can make sure you always have a fresh one to wear around your pretty neck. But they’re not bulletproof shields, and they don’t make bad guys like Dennis Floyd disappear. Dammit, Hope, I wish you’d be content to stay home and make cookies and lie on the deck under the sun and have babies and—”
“Babies?” she interrupted. “As in more than one?”
“If we’re going to get married we might as well—”
“What happened to the world being too nasty to bring a child into?” she asked, only slightly panicked by the picture Gideon was painting.
“We can’t go back and undo what’s already done. Might as well give Emma brothers and sisters.”
“Wait just a minute…”
“I didn’t ask you to marry me yet, did I?” His thumb continued to caress her cheek.
“No, you didn’t,” she whispered.
“Marry me.”
Hope licked her lips. “That’s not exactly a question. It sounds more like an order.”
A frustrated little moan escaped from deep in Gideon’s throat. She knew this wasn’t easy for him, but it wasn’t easy for her, either. He was talking about marriage and children and forever. And she hadn’t known him a week.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll do this your way. Will you marry me?”
“Can I have a little time to think it over?” she asked, terrified and excited and stunned. “This is just too fast for me.”
“No. You might as well learn now that I can be very impatient. I want an answer now.”
It would be too easy to get caught up in this, in the way Gideon made her feel, inside and out. In the kissing and the touching and the promise of more to come. In the idea of him and Emma and babies—plural. “I never really planned to, you know, settle down and have kids and do the whole mommy thing.”
“So make new plans.”
If what he said about her becoming Raintree was true—and she had no reason to think it wasn’t—she was definitely going to need a new plan.
He didn’t move away but stayed close. Too close. That hand at the back of her neck was warm and strong and comforting, but she couldn’t help but remember that just a few hours ago he’d been horrified at the idea of the life he was now presenting as a done deal. “If I actually said yes, you’d probably have a panic attack.”
“If you say yes, I’m going to make love to you right here and now.”
“In the car.”
“Yep.”
“With bucket seats.”
He murmured in the affirmative.
Hope wrapped her arms around Gideon’s neck and barely touched her lips to his. “This I gotta see.”
“I think I broke something,” Gideon said as he nuzzled Hope’s neck. She laughed at him. He loved it when she laughed at him.
“Sex among the bucket seats was your idea, not mine.”
“This is better.” This was his bed, his woman and no clothes. It was softness and passion, boldness and demure exploration. It was a quiver and a gasp. It was the way Hope swayed and moaned when he touched her. It was the way she touched him, the way she wanted him.
He spread Hope’s thighs and filled her gently. But not too gently.
“Nothing seems to be broken,” she said dreamily, eyes closed and back arched.
Since he was convinced Hope was already pregnant, they hadn’t bothered with a condom. Not in the car, not now. They were bare, heart and soul and body, and they were connected in a way he had never expected. Hope wanted to be his partner, and she was. In more ways than one. In all ways. In ways he had never dreamed to know.
Emma had said she was always his, in every lifetime. Maybe the same could be said of Hope. Was that why he’d felt such an undeniable and immediate pull toward her? Was that why she did not feel at all new or unknown to him?
They came together, and Hope pulled him deeper. The contractions of her body pumped him, squeezed him, and as everything slowed, she continued to sway her hips against his and hold him close.
“I love you,” she said, her voice displaying exhaustion and confusion, as well as the affection she had not expected.
The words were on his lips, but he held back. He could love her this way; he could protect her as best he could and give her babies and make sure she never wanted for anything. Yes, she was undeniably his, but that didn’t mean he was ready to lay it all on the line. He wasn’t even sure he knew what love was anymore, but he did know that this was right. That was enough. For now.
While he was still searching for something semi-appropriate to say, he heard a trill of childish ethereal laughter. A girlish giggle, followed by a sigh and a very soft, “Told you so, Daddy.” If Hope heard it, she didn’t react.
He should be outraged, or at the very least surprised. But he wasn’t.
“I think we’ve been tricked by our daughter,” he said, raking a strand of black hair out of Hope’s face.
Her eyes drifted open. “Tricked how?”
“You didn’t get pregnant last night,” he said, feeling oddly forgiving of Emma at the moment. Maybe because he was still inside Hope, satisfied and grateful and happy.
“I didn’t?”
“No. You got pregnant now. Right now. Well, soon. Conception doesn’t happen right away….”
Hope threaded her fingers through his hair and pulled him down for a deep, long kiss. Apparently she was feeling forgiving at the moment, too. “I know how it works, Raintree.”
“Still wanna marry me?”
Without hesitation, she answered, “Yeah, I do.”
Still love me? He didn’t ask that question aloud. He should probably tell her that he loved her, too, or at least toss out a casual “ditto.” But he didn’t. The time would come when the words felt right.
Hope stroked his hair and wrapped one long leg around his, twining their limbs much as they had been earlier. She ran her foot up and down his leg.
He rose up to look down at her. “I don’t want us to screw this up.”
She closed her eyes and held him close. “Than let’s not. Please.”
There wasn’t a lot to say, so they lay there, connected and touching and content. He was so rarely content.
“What you sa
id earlier today,” Hope said, her voice quick and a little shy. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
“What did I say?” So much…not enough…
She raked her fingers along his neck. “Monsters.”
“Oh.” Not what he wanted to talk about at the moment.
“If there are monsters in the world—”
“There are, and you know it,” he interrupted.
“If there are,” she said again.
Gideon nuzzled her throat and kissed it. Now was not the time to argue.
“My mother’s always talking about balance. Balance of nature, of male and female, even of good and evil. I used to dismiss that along with everything else, but she’s beginning to make sense, darn it. And when you talk about monsters, I think…if the good gives up, then where will we be?”
“What’s so good?”
“You,” she answered without hesitation. “Us. Emma. Love. I think that’s worth fighting for. I think maybe it’s worth the occasional battle with a monster.”
He fought monsters because it was his calling. His destiny. He didn’t want his family to have to fight with him, but it was apparently the price he would have to pay in order to keep them.
Tabby sat in her apartment and carefully studied the package on the counter in the kitchenette. She disliked bombs. Not only were they unpredictable, they made it impossible for her to be close enough to drink in the fear of her victims. One minute they were alive, the next they were gone. No power, no souvenirs.
But she couldn’t be picky at the moment. Time was running out.
She couldn’t fail. Maybe she’d missed Echo, but Gideon was the one Cael thought of as most important to her mission. He was next in line for Dranir, a member of the royal family. He was a powerful Raintree, and his execution was necessary. Echo would be hers soon enough.
This bomb wouldn’t kill Raintree, but it would draw him into the open. She would be waiting.
It was possible that Cael would still consider her mission a failure, since she hadn’t killed Echo first, as planned. If her cousin were anyone else in the world, she would simply run from him when the time came. She could change her looks, change her name and take up where she’d left off. Training for this assignment had been more pleasurable than she’d imagined. It was a big country, filled with lonely people who would not be missed and sadistic little men who never dared to act on their own but were wonderfully violent when prodded.
She had become very good at prodding. If Cael didn’t kill her for missing Echo, she would continue with her work after the battle was over. Maybe he would be so pleased by the act she was about to commit that he would even forgive her.
As long as she delivered Gideon Raintree’s head to Cael—figuratively speaking, unfortunately—all would be well.
When she woke in Gideon’s bed alone, Hope thought for a moment that it had all been a dream. Emma, Dennis, bucket seats and her foolishly uttered I love you. None of it was real.
But she realized soon enough that none of it had been a dream. The drapes were open, which meant Gideon was on the deck or the beach. Since it was morning, there wouldn’t be a light show of any kind. Pity.
She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and pulled on one of Gideon’s old T-shirts. It hung almost to her knees. He’d already made coffee—a quarter of the pot was gone—so she poured herself a cup and joined him on the deck. A few people were already on the beach, walking along the sand and getting their feet wet in the gentle waves.
Gideon was standing at the railing, looking out to the ocean as if he drew strength from it. Maybe he did. There was so much she didn’t know about the man she had fallen in love with. Last night in bed they had laughed and made love, but this morning Gideon was serious again. His face looked as if it could be set in stone, it was so hard and unforgiving.
She knew the heart beneath that hard exterior. Hard? Sometimes. Unforgiving? Yes, when forgiveness wasn’t appropriate. Nonexistent? Never.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, leaning on the rail beside him.
He didn’t dance around the issue. “I want you to quit work, and I don’t think you will.”
“You’re right,” she said. “At least, not any time soon. I need a little time to adjust to all this. Things have happened pretty fast.”
“That’s an understatement.”
She leaned her head against his arm and rested there, her eyes on the ocean. “I’m a cop—just like you, Gideon. I’m not giving it up to have babies and knit and make cookies and wait at home while you do what you do. Cops have kids just like everyone else. We’ll make it work.”
“You’ll distract me.”
“So learn to deal with it.”
“Why should I learn to deal with it when I have more than enough money for you to quit?”
“If money had anything to do with it, you wouldn’t be doing the job, either. What we do is about more than a paycheck.”
His lips thinned slightly, and then he said, “I know you think you’re like every other cop, but you’re not. You’re mine, and I don’t want to lose you.”
“I’m tough,” she said.
“You’re fragile.”
“I am not,” she argued.
“Precious things are always fragile.”
She didn’t have an immediate response, since he’d stolen her breath away with that statement. Precious was not a word she’d thought he could ever speak, and yet he’d used it, however reluctantly.
He added, as if to turn her mind away from the subject, “In the beginning, I slept with you so you’d request a transfer.”
“I know,” she said without rancor.
“We’ve just upped the ante, Moonbeam. You can’t be my partner anymore, and I don’t trust you with anyone else.”
Hope took a sip of her coffee. “Let’s don’t fight, not today.”
His stony expression relaxed just a bit. “I thought you said I was cute when I got mad.”
She laughed. “You are. I still don’t want to fight with you today.”
“Why not?”
The truth. Nothing but the truth. “Right now I feel too good, and I don’t want to spoil it.”
He wrapped an arm around her. “There are gifts that come with giving birth to a Raintree baby, gifts that are a part of being Raintree. You’ll heal faster, live longer, be healthier. You and whatever children we make will have protection charms, I’ll see to that. And still, if I could, I would lock you up in a place where you’d always be safe. A place where no one could ever hurt you or Emma.”
“Exactly where is that place, Gideon?”
He didn’t answer, because there was no answer; there was no such place.
“Besides,” she said, “I have to help you put Frank Stiles away. Knowing is fine, but we need evidence.”
He seemed perfectly willing to turn the conversation toward business. His business of stopping monsters. “There’s not any. He burned the house down after he killed Johnny Ray Black. We’ve got no evidence.”
“Then we need a confession or a witness.”
“I haven’t been able to obtain either.”
She smiled at him. “You haven’t given me a chance to try yet. I’m very good at getting confessions.”
He almost smiled. “I just bet you are.”
She stared out at the ocean, drinking in the beauty of it as if she, too, could literally absorb its power through her skin. How could this place already feel like home? Not the house, not the beach. Gideon. Gideon Raintree was home.
It was an oddly comforting and frightening thought, very much like the prospect of motherhood and all that would come with it.
FOURTEEN
Saturday—Noon
They were getting nowhere fast with the info on the vehicle Tabby had been driving four months ago. Gideon had left Charlie following up that information, trying to wring something useful from it, and then he’d headed here.
The motel room where Lily Clark had been killed had been
sealed off. No one but the crime scene investigators had been in this room since she’d been murdered. Her spirit stood in the corner of the room, solid and angry.
Hope insisted that she didn’t have any unnatural powers of any sort, and yet she stood back and rubbed her arms as if warding off a chill on this warm day. She sensed the anger and sadness here; she still felt the violence.
“You said you were going to get her,” Lily said, so furious that her image flickered.
“I’m working on it,” Gideon said softly.
Hope stood behind him, just a few feet away, listening. He had to admit that it was nice not to have to hide what he could do. It was nice to be able to talk to Lily without tricking his partner into leaving the room or pretending to be talking to himself.
“Tabby was in this room for a long time,” Hope said gently. “Knowing she killed Lily Clark is one thing, but we need physical evidence. There has to be something. She must’ve left some kind of clue behind.”
“She’s careful,” Gideon said as he paced at the end of the bed.
“She left a hair at the Sherry Bishop scene. She left a witness at the Marcia Cordell site, and that’s downright sloppy. There must be something here as well.” Hope walked deeper into the room. “All the crime scene techs found were a few fibers that could have been here for days. Weeks, even. This isn’t exactly the cleanest motel in town. Tabby must have touched a surface she forgot to wipe down or left something behind or…”
“She took a shower after I was dead,” Lily said gently, her anger fading. “She had to, because my blood was all over her. On her face and in her hair and on her clothes…I think she liked it….”
“What did she do with her bloody clothes?” Gideon asked.
“I don’t know.”
Gideon nodded to Hope. “My cell phone is all but useless to me today.” Tomorrow was the summer solstice, and his electrical surges were coming more frequently than usual. “Call Charlie and have him get the crime scene techs in here to check the shower drain. Today,” he added forcefully.
