One Night At A Time

by Christa Conan

  “But—”

  “Stuff it, Doug. You told me I’m stuck with you, and you’re stuck with me. And when you’re done hiding, let me know.” Arielle rushed out of the room and ran up the stairs.

  He braced for the sound of the door slamming, only to hear silence filter down the stairway. He released a deep sigh before shoving a hand into his hair. Where she was concerned, everything he said and did only made matters worse.

  He wanted to escape her, but couldn’t, not with the way the just-showered scent of her lingered in the air. More, not when the taste of her hesitation, her submission, then, finally, her gentleness, remained on his tongue. Even when he’d been stripped to his most male, most elemental reaction, she’d tamed him. She’d remained strong yet feminine, the paradox that defined Arielle’s personality.

  And so different from anything Kerry had ever been.

  He’d been younger, and paid handsomely to protect Kerry. Emotions had gotten in the way. Foolishly he’d wanted to believe he was in love.

  Unfortunately, the past seemed to be repeating itself. But he knew better than to allow himself to fall in love a second time. He cared for Arielle, he was willing to admit that much. To a certain degree, it was inevitable.

  Emotions were controllable...love was something that developed if fed by the right combination of passion, caring and wanting. No doubt, he desired her. He was human, a man. But he didn’t want. Nor did he need.

  He crossed to the window again. An image of Arielle seemed superimposed on the darkness, but when he looked again, he only saw a reflection of himself. She’d reached down inside him, finding a place that hadn’t been touched in a very long time.

  Doug definitely didn’t like the fact that she possessed the ability to see inside him. It made him vulnerable. He’d vowed never again to be vulnerable.

  Which meant he needed to solve this case. Soon. Soon he’d send her and her complex psychological probings back to her safe and secure world of class plays and parent-teacher conferences. He’d untie Destiny from her slip and sail out to the sea, preferably into a sunset.

  Determinedly he strode into the office and punched in the phone number for his New York office. Yarrow answered on the second ring. “Give me something,” Doug said. “Anything.”

  “A headache?”

  “Got one.”

  “I’m gonna make it worse. Maybe you’ll want to grab a bottle of aspirin.”

  His insides churned, but to combat that, Doug propped his feet on the desk. “Besides a headache, what’ve you got for me?”

  “We’ve had a visitor. Left a couple of presents for you.”

  He’d always been a sucker for gifts. Nothing he liked more than returning them...twofold. After all, it was always better to give than to receive.

  “Our guest ransacked the place. Left a message on the filing cabinet.”

  “Semper fi?”

  “Yeah, clever little bugger painted a fire next to the word fi. Isn’t he cute?”

  “As a bug in a rug.” Doug enjoyed smashing bugs. “Did he blow up anything?”

  “Wanted to make sure you knew he still likes to play.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Insurance agent’s here now.”

  As if Doug didn’t have enough trouble, now his premiums would increase twice—once for the house, another for the office.

  “He’s saying something about cancellation. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Tell him up his—”

  “Yes?”

  “To up his rates. I’ll pay ’em.”

  Doug drummed his fingers. “I want him found.”

  “I hired a couple of your friends.”

  “Pay ’em whatever it takes.”

  “You aren’t going to like the tab.”

  As long as they didn’t want a tip, too, it’d be fine. “It’s worth it.” He leaned back in his chair. Seemed Pickins didn’t like losing. Well, neither did Doug. “Anything on Arielle’s assassin?”

  The sigh that slid down the line spoke of frustration and anger. Two things Doug related to. “Do you need extra help?” The load of two high-stress cases was enough for anyone.

  “Got it covered. Do me a favor, though, check with Arielle, see if there’s anything else she remembers. Distinguishing marks she didn’t think of when you interviewed her before. I’ll take anything, Doug.”

  “Yeah. So will I.”

  “Watch your back. Pickins didn’t find any files or anything that gives a clue to your whereabouts, but...”

  He leaned forward, a headache gaining force behind his eyes. “Don’t worry about Pickins, find the damn assassin.”

  “I’ve been on the streets, in every fleabag hotel, every roach-infested bar.”

  Inactivity gnawed at Doug. “Find him.” Doug slammed the receiver into the cradle, and the plastic phone vibrated with an offended jingle. He had three problems, an assassin on the loose, an explosives expert who enjoyed watching things go boom, and a woman—a client—who refused to talk to him. Couldn’t get much worse. Unfortunately, out of the three, only one thing was remotely within his control.

  Arielle.

  He who never hesitated didn’t have a clue what to do about Arielle. Go after her? Let her cool off? The second sounded better, more appealing to his masculine sense of conflict resolution. It also screamed of cowardice. He’d learned long ago that only courage combated cowardice.

  He’d squared his shoulders and coldly stared at death, at torture, at despair. So why now did he prefer to cut open his chest and expose his heart, rather than face Arielle and her painfully accurate accusations?

  Stalling, and knowing that was exactly what he was doing, he did another security check...finding not even a twig out of place.

  A shroud of gray clouds hung across dark velvet skies, obliterating the moon. Tree branches shivered in the wind, and pine needles whispered of winter. Nature swirled and stormed, with Doug standing in the middle.

  A matching restlessness churned inside him. He wished there was an alternative to sitting here, waiting, wondering.

  He slammed a fist into his open palm. The need for action struggled with a sense of hopelessness. They were safer in Colorado than anywhere else. Obviously, Pickins was still in New York, and so, most likely, was the man hired to kill Arielle. Brian and Rhone were on the job, along with a host of Doug’s colleagues. He was equipped with a cache of weapons and a state-of-the-art security system, as well as a remote, private location.

  A snowflake sank onto his nose. And he’d thought things couldn’t get much worse. Maybe it would be a dusting. With his luck, though, they’d be snowbound in hours. At least tracks stood out sharply in freshly fallen snow, he told himself. A silver lining.

  He pulled in a deep draw of crisp air, then reentered the house. Warmth from the furnace blasted over him, making him realize that his rounds had taken longer than he thought. The scent of spices lured him to the kitchen, as if he were a condemned man walking inevitably to his doom.

  Arielle looked up at him from where she sat at the kitchen table. She didn’t say a word. Not that she needed to. Her eyes held a wary distance, and her arms were folded protectively across her chest. The unspoken warning to tread lightly came through loud and clear. “Smells good,” he said.

  “You can thank Betsy.”

  A pan simmered on the stove, the rising steam bathing the nearby window, and still the temperature seemed to drop a dozen degrees when he walked past her and reached for the coffeepot. Cold. No surprise there. Reluctantly he replaced the carafe.

  “Did you make enough for two?” he asked, stirring the pot, then turning to face her.

  Her eyes, her most readable feature, remained blank. “It would have been rude not to.”

  “And that’s the one thing you never are,” he said. “Rude.”

  “Rarely.”

  “But occasionally.”

  “Only when politeness fails.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I see.”
But he wondered if he really did.

  She released a soft sigh. “What do you want from me, Doug?”

  “Nothing,” he admitted. He had no idea what he wanted or if he had, how to go about getting it.

  “You know, I haven’t asked you for anything that I haven’t already given myself.”

  Like a good commander. His respect for her nudged upward, along with his discomfort.

  The buzzer sounded on the timer and she moved toward the stove, pulling on an oven mitt. “If you’ll excuse me?”

  When he didn’t move, she smiled—a practiced little gesture that could have turned falling rain into an icicle.

  “You’re in my way,” she said, the words packaged as a pretty, polite present.

  Wisely he moved. Doug served the chicken and rice while she removed rolls from the cookie sheet. Unfortunately, those same biscuits remained untouched when she cleared the table after dinner, without having said another word.

  While he brewed decaf and loaded the dishwasher, she went into the living room.

  A few minutes later, hot cup of coffee in hand, he stood at the entrance to the living room, watching her. She sat on the floor in front of the fire’s remains, chin resting on her knees, with her hands wrapped around her legs.

  He took it as a good sign that she hadn’t rushed up to her room. Then again, that might mean she wanted to finish their conversation. That thought sent chills down his spine.

  Still, they couldn’t continue this way. The tension grew with each minute. If it got much thicker, he’d need a hoist to lift the atmosphere.

  Embers sighed in the fireplace, and wood chips simmered. He drank his coffee in the near silence, waiting for her to say something, anything. When, five full minutes later, she hadn’t, he acted, moving across the room and sliding his empty mug onto the mantel above her.

  “I need to ask you a few questions about your case.” He didn’t want to drag her into the past, but at least it was conversation, and at best she would provide the answers he needed.

  She nodded warily.

  “Brian’s picked clean all the bones he found. He needs something new to go on. I know we’ve been over this, but I need to know, were there any distinguishing marks on the man you hired? Scars? Anything you didn’t remember before?”

  “I didn’t see much.”

  Doug nodded.

  “He had on dark green fatigues, I think. The sleeve was rolled up, like to his elbow. I was scared. I’d never done anything like that before.”

  “You’re doing fine.”

  She swallowed. “Wait. He was missing a fingernail, I remember that.”

  Basically the same things he’d gotten from her before. The fingernail was new.

  “Wait. There’s something else....” She gnawed on her lower lip.

  He waited.

  “He might have had a tattoo, but I’m not sure. I just can’t remember.” She sighed deeply, the sound one of total frustration. “I’ve been trying, but I can’t.”

  “It’s okay,” he assured her. “Let it come naturally.” He wished he had access to a hypnotist—not that he was convinced it would do much good, but he was a desperate man. “Tell me if it comes to you.”

  She nodded, seemingly lost again. The same uncomfortable silence fell over them again, unsettling him. He had danced around what happened earlier, hadn’t confronted it. Didn’t much feel like it now, either.

  “Time for another stroll outside before turning in—”

  “I was thinking, when you came in earlier,” she said, interrupting him, her voice barely audible above the gentle sizzle of charred logs. “About something you said.” He remained rooted to the spot. She hadn’t looked up at him, and suddenly he wanted to go to her, wrap his arms around her and hold her tight. He wanted to see her eyes, read the emotion her voice concealed.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Sorry? She was sorry?

  “I had no right to push you. Your past is your business. You told me to leave it alone.” She twisted her hands together, but finally looked up, meeting his gaze clearly. “I should have listened to you.”

  He exhaled, slowly and completely. He had been the one who was wrong, not her.

  “I won’t pry into your life again.”

  That was what he wanted, right? Doug folded his arms across his chest, as if that might offer some measly protection for his heart. “I apologize for kissing you like I did.”

  “Don’t. Your reaction was honest. That’s more than most men have been with me.”

  He winced. So willing to accept his human failings, she humbled him. She made him want to live up to the unreal expectations she had of him, made him want to be a hero. “You didn’t deserve that from me.”

  “Is it so very difficult for you?”

  He frowned.

  “Being human?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted.

  She started to stand, and he offered his hand. For the pulse of a few seconds, he didn’t think she’d accept. The last time he touched her, it had been with anger. He wouldn’t blame her for politely refusing. Instead, she slipped her palm into his, her touch sending waves of awareness through him. It transcended the physical and cut into his heart.

  Arielle trailed the fingers of her free hand down his face, lighting on his cheekbone, then outlining his chin. She paused, looking at him. “We’re all human. Every one of us has faults and failings. It makes us real.”

  “Is that the teacher or the psychologist speaking?”

  “Neither. It’s the woman.”

  It was Arielle he wanted in his arms, in his bed—the teacher, the psychologist, the woman.

  And he owed her. If nothing else, he owed her the honesty she’d given to him. Confession wasn’t a conscious decision, but rather an inevitable one. Reaching up, he cupped his hand around hers. “You asked about Kerry.”

  Arielle blinked. “Kerry?”

  “Yeah. The woman I cared for.”

  “You loved her.”

  Doug nodded. “I was young, invincible, and head over heels.”

  Quietly, she waited. Her fingers warmed his skin, her touch projected light on the darkness of his past.

  He’d been interrogated before, under the worst of conditions. He hadn’t cracked. Not even when they brought out the syringe.

  What she wanted from him, though, was worse than an enemy cajoling secrets with a cattle prod. Try as he might, he didn’t see her as the enemy, and that made her that much more dangerous. During his life, he’d been hurt by only three people. The three people he’d loved.

  He told himself he didn’t care about Arielle, that she was a client, nothing more. Maybe if he told himself that another dozen times, he’d actually believe it. “It was a long time ago.”

  With her free hand, she feathered blond strands back from her face, tucking them behind her ear. “Doug, I appreciate your willingness to talk, but I respect your privacy. You don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes,” he said as he released her hand, “I do.”

  Without saying anything, Arielle gently pressed her palms together and regarded him, the pale blue of her eyes offering a silent, sincere serving of compassion.

  That compassion undid him. Pivoting, he strode to the far end of the room. Distance didn’t help. Her presence went with him, the scent of her clinging to him, her warmth lingering on his face.

  Turning toward her, he took a deep breath. “I was paid an ungodly amount of money to protect her. Her father was a businessman, dealing in as many illegal shipments as legitimate ones. Seems he messed with the wrong people. They went after his daughter to assure Daddy dearest didn’t make any more mistakes.

  “I guess people can be a little testy when coke turns out to be talcum powder. They wanted to powder their noses, not their behinds.”

  She smiled slightly, and the simple gesture sapped some of the chill from the murkiness of memory. Odd how she possessed that ability, that of shedding sunshine and scattering shadows.
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  “I took the assignment.” He rested his hand on the phone stand, drumming his fingers near the enviable picture of Rhone with his family.

  After a couple of seconds in which silence pulsed with expectancy, punctuated by his motions, he continued, “She needed to be protected, I needed the money. I’d just opened my own agency. I was an expert at everything, a kid who knew it all. I could protect her from a few thugs. Hell, I had already sent Pickins to jail. I’d dealt with every weapon known to man. Like I said, an expert.”

  “This was after the Marines?”

  “And before Central America.”

  She shuddered, sinking into the couch. “Kerry’s the reason you went to Central America.”

  “A death wish,” he admitted, not surprised that Arielle had surmised what had remained unspoken. “I didn’t care if I never came back. There was nothing to live for.”

  “She obviously meant the world to you.”

  “She was my fiancée.”

  He watched Arielle suck in a shallow drink of oxygen, followed quickly by another.

  “We’d been engaged barely a week when her brother was executed, less than two weeks when they came looking for her.” His hand formed a fist, and his knuckles whitened. “Less than a month later, I went to Mexico and worked my way south.”

  Arielle bunked—getting more than she’d bargained for, he’d have bet. He wondered whether his sordid past repulsed her as much as it disgusted him.

  “It started as revenge. And it ended as with Rhone—a Colombian prison, and the government bailing me out in exchange for certain services.”

  She swallowed. “You said it started as revenge.”

  He admired guts. Arielle had them, more so than he. “I wouldn’t rest till the guy that got Kerry was six feet under with worms as company.”

  “He...he got her?”

  “Yeah.” His next words burned the back of his throat, searing with a bitterness not dulled by the intervening decade. “Kerry died while she was under my protection.”

  “Oh, God, Doug...”

  Arielle’s hand covered her heart, as if she felt his pain, experienced it and took it in. It went beyond compassion, went deeper than anything any woman had ever felt for him.