Uncut Bundle

by Susan Stephens

  The adrenaline, remember? That’s what it was. And, just in case there was any doubt, you gave her a dose of the real world. “We had sex, lady,” you said. “Sex. Don’t confuse it with love.”

  Cam kicked a stone aside.

  Okay. Good. She’d never loved him. Hell, he never believed she had. But he’d saved her life…

  For God’s sake, man, are you back to that? That’s pathetic. Besides, the life you were saving was your own. She just happened to be along for the ride.

  No. Not true. At the end, his life hadn’t mattered. Her life was all he’d cared about.

  Damn it, he wanted answers!

  Cam yanked his cell phone from his pocket. As usual, the miserable thing didn’t work but this time all it took was a jog back to the road to make it light up like Broadway at night.

  He punched in the P.I.’s number. Told him what he wanted. The name of a dancer with the ballet company performing at the Music Hall.

  Could Mr. Knight narrow things down a bit? the P.I. asked. He had that sketch the police artist had done, but…

  A day ago, Cameron would have identified Salome as the most beautiful woman in the world, but things had changed.

  “She’ll be simple to identify,” he told the detective. “She’s the only blonde. And I need to know where I can find her. She’s got to be staying somewhere. An apartment. A hotel. I need the name.”

  “Fine, Mr. Knight. When do you need this information, sir?”

  Cam narrowed his eyes. Hadn’t the Music Hall’s program said something about a limited run? For all he knew, tonight was Salome’s last in Dallas.

  “I needed it an hour ago,” he said sharply.

  The Porsche’s tires screamed in protest as he put the car into a tight U-turn and headed for home.

  The audience was still applauding. The corps de ballet was still onstage, but Leanna slipped away to the dressing room.

  She couldn’t wait to change into street clothes and get back to the hotel. One more night, and she’d leave Dallas behind.

  Her hands shook as she tore the pins from her hair and shook it loose.

  The week had been horrible, thinking about Cam all the time, seeing his face in every shadow.

  And then last night—last night, she’d been sure he was in the theater. Crazy, of course, but she’d felt his presence, ridiculous as that sounded. Felt him looking at her.

  She hadn’t dared lift her head.

  The company made only one brief appearance in this show, dancing a piece from Swan Lake.

  “Eyes down,” Nikolai had told them. During rehearsal, when one girl glanced up, he’d stomped and shouted that they were cows and if it happened again, he’d work them until they dropped.

  They were all close enough to dropping as it was, Leanna especially, thanks to her stay in the hospital while she’d battled the infection in her foot. Dutifully she’d kept her eyes down as she’d danced.

  Besides, if she’d looked up and seen Cam in the audience last night, she’d probably have—she’d probably have…

  The truth was, she didn’t know what she’d have done.

  She’d almost lost her mind when she’d looked at the company’s schedule.

  “Dallas?” she’d said to Ginny, who roomed with her on the road. “Dallas?”

  “Um,” Ginny had replied. “Last-minute change in plans.”

  “No,” Leanna had said, trying to stay calm. “I can’t go to Dallas.”

  “Oh, it’s a great city.” Ginny had glanced up and smiled. “Lots of terrific restaurants. Good shopping. And, oh boy, the men…”

  “I can’t go there,” Leanna had repeated.

  Ginny’s brows had lifted. “What’s the problem?”

  What, indeed? What could she have said that wouldn’t give everything away? Nobody knew about her and Cam. Nobody needed to know. It was bad enough she had to live with the memories of the time they’d been together.

  So she’d muttered some foolish excuse about being in Texas before and hating the heat, and Ginny’s brows had shot up again.

  “It’s winter, Lee. It’s gonna be cold in Dallas.”

  “Oh,” Leanna had replied. “Oh, of course.”

  So she’d gone to Dallas. What choice did she have? She needed her job. She was still amazed the company had kept a spot open for her, after all the time she’d been out, first because of the kidnapping and then because she’d been ill.

  She’d gone to Dallas, and lived through a week of hell.

  Cam, she’d kept thinking, Cam was here.

  How many times had she almost done something stupid? Too many to count, but she’d come close. Oh, so close! She’d looked up his name in the phone book. His home address wasn’t listed but his firm was. Knight, Knight and Knight. Risk Management Specialists. Not that she’d do anything about it, she’d told herself…

  But she’d taken a cab, gone to the address, stood staring at a tower of glass and steel while she came up with all the reasons it would be logical to just walk in and ask to see Cameron Knight.

  After all, he’d saved her life.

  Thank you, she’d say, oh, and by the way, you were right, that stuff back on the other side of the world was just silliness.

  She hadn’t done it.

  She still had some pride left.

  At least the week of torment was over. Tomorrow morning, she’d climb on the bus, close her eyes and when she opened them again, Dallas would be only a memory.

  Like Cam.

  Leanna dipped her fingers into a jar of cleansing cream and smeared it over her face.

  There was no sense in thinking about him. She was back in the real world and so was he, and though she’d dreamed of it happening a thousand times, he’d made no attempt to get in touch with her but then, why would he?

  He’d been brutally clear about what their relationship had meant to him. She knew he’d been deliberately blunt so she’d obey his orders, but the essence of what he’d said had been the unvarnished truth.

  What had happened between them was a fairy tale, and fairy tales never lasted.

  Leanna tissued off the cleansing cream.

  She was sweaty and exhausted. Her muscles burned and even before she got her toe shoes unlaced, she knew she’d bled into them. That was one of the things that happened when you danced en pointe. Normally she didn’t pay it much attention but after what had happened weeks ago, she knew enough to be cautious.

  She’d collapsed in the chopper that took her to Dubai.

  One second, she’d been weeping, incoherent even to herself, begging the men half-dragging her to the helicopter to let her go back to Cam. The next, the world went gray. She came to days later in a hospital bed, antibiotics pumping into her veins, an infection in her left foot and her temperature so high she was unconscious half the time.

  When she finally surfaced, the first words she heard were the doctor’s. He said she was a lucky young woman. She might have lost her foot—even died—after a couple more days without antibiotics.

  The first words she spoke were about Cam. “Is he alive?” she’d whispered.

  The doctor’s shrug had been eloquent. He didn’t know anything about someone named Cam.

  She’d begged for word of Cam, but nobody knew what she was talking about. She had no phone. “No stress,” the nurses told her, but finally she bribed an aide into smuggling in a cell phone. She called the embassy, fast-talked her way into being connected with the consul.

  He was impatient. He was, he told her, leaving on vacation.

  Leanna begged and pleaded and made such a pathetic case that he’d finally agreed to find out what he could about a man named Cameron Knight.

  An hour later, he called back. Cameron Knight was alive. He’d been airlifted to the States. To a hospital in Dallas, Texas, and really, that was all he could tell her.

  Leanna telephoned Dallas information, got the numbers of endless hospitals, called them all and finally found the right one. Yes, they had a patient nam
ed Cameron Knight. His condition was listed as stable. No, they couldn’t tell her anything more than that.

  She phoned each day, heard Cam’s condition go from stable to satisfactory. She went on phoning after she was out of the hospital. She phoned from Paris, where she had a tearful reunion with the dance troupe. She phoned from London and from Seattle, after she began dancing again.

  And then, one day, she phoned and got the operator who’d been taking most of her calls.

  “Mr. Knight has been discharged,” the woman said. “He’s doing just fine.” Then she’d lowered her voice and said, “You know, dear, you could find out more if you contacted the Knight family directly.”

  Contact the Knight family? And tell them what? That she’d slept with Cam? That she’d made a fool of herself, thinking she’d fallen in love with him? Because he was right, it hadn’t been love, it had only been infatuation.

  The dressing room door burst open and the other girls crowded in, laughing and chattering.

  “Lee, you missed it all!” Ginny bounced onto the stool beside Leanna’s. “The audience called us back three times!”

  Leanna got up, stripped off her tutu and pulled on jeans and a sweater.

  “I know. I could hear the cheers.”

  “And the most amazing thing just happened!” Ginny swung toward her, eyes bright with excitement. “A reporter wants to meet me!”

  “Gin, that’s wonderful.”

  “Isn’t it? He says he’s doing a piece on unusual professions for the Sunday section. I don’t know how I got so lucky—I mean, to have him come up with my name—but I’m thrilled.”

  “I’ll bet! But when’s the interview? If we leave tomorrow—”

  “He’s taking me out for supper in—” Ginny looked at the big wall clock and gasped. “In ten minutes!”

  “Then you’d better hurry,” Leanna said, pulling her hair back in a ponytail.

  Ginny peered into the mirror as she dabbed cream on her face. “I’ll meet you at that wine bar later. Everybody’ll be there. You know, a last night in town kind of thing.”

  “I’m going to pass.”

  “Oh, Lee! Come on, honey. You’ve got to get out a little.” Ginny looked imploringly at Leanna in the mirror. “I know what you went through must have been awful, getting kidnapped and then that stay in the hospital, but you have to get back into things, you know?”

  Leanna knew. She hadn’t gotten back into anything, except dancing. She just couldn’t seem to muster up the spirit for late-night gatherings or morning coffee, especially when everyone still had questions about what had happened to her.

  The girls taken with her talked about how they’d been taken to a souk and almost immediately rescued by the local police. Leanna only said she’d been sold to a sultan and rescued by Americans who were in Baslaam on business.

  All things considered, it wasn’t exactly a lie.

  “You’re right, Gin, but I’m really beat tonight.”

  “Your poor foot, huh?”

  “Uh-huh,” Leanna said, because it was a lot easier to say that than to admit the truth.

  All that stuff she’d told herself about infatuation was a lie.

  She loved Cam. He was a brave man with no heart…and she would always love him.

  The sooner she left Dallas, the better.

  Cam was parked in his Porsche across from the hotel that housed the visiting corps de ballet.

  He’d spent the evening pacing the antique kilim carpet in his darkened study. He couldn’t stand still, couldn’t sit still. Even his deep-breathing exercises had failed him.

  When he realized he was checking his watch every thirty or forty seconds, he’d muttered an oath, grabbed his leather jacket and a couple of other things, and headed out the door.

  He’d driven aimlessly for a while, taking a road that led out of the city, putting his foot to the floor when he reached a turn-off to an abandoned stretch of highway that was supposed to lead to the interstate but actually went nowhere. The road was known mostly to cops and street-racers. He’d let the Porsche fly until the car was running flat-out.

  Then he’d eased off the gas and driven back to Dallas.

  He had a good plan. Not flawless: no plan ever was. Luck, fate, kismet, whatever you wanted to call it, was always the unknown element. For all his careful organizing, he might still come up short.

  Yeah, but the longer he sat here now, opposite the hotel, waiting for the P.I.’s call, the more he knew he had to do this.

  Cam checked his watch again, the dial glowing an eerie green inside the dark car. “Come on,” he muttered impatiently. “What’s taking so freaking long?”

  His gut was in knots. Excitement thrummed in his veins. Confronting a stranger named Leanna was all he could think about.

  Leanna DeMarco. That was her name. Born in Boston, lived in a walk-up in Manhattan, danced ballet all her life, on tour with this company for the past six months.

  The P.I. had phoned in late afternoon with all the pertinent information. Her name. Her background. The name of her hotel. Her room number.

  He’d added that she shared her room with someone.

  For a second, the world had gone dark.

  “Another dancer in the company,” the P.I. said. “Virginia Adams. She and the subject appear to be good friends.”

  Cam had let out his breath. Another girl. Yeah. Okay—except, that might present a logistics problem.

  “How good?” he said. “When the subject leaves the theater tonight, is she likely to be in the company of this Adams woman?”

  She was, the P.I. said. The two dancers commonly traveled back and forth together.

  Definitely a logistics problem, but not insoluble. Half an hour, and Cam had figured a way to deal with it. Rich Williams, a guy he’d played football with in college, was a features writer for the Dallas Register.

  A phone call. A handful of good-natured “how’s it goin’” and “remember when.” Then, finally, a request.

  “Lemme get this straight,” Rich had said. “You want me to interview a dancer in a visiting ballet company?”

  “Tonight, after the performance.”

  “Uh huh.” Rich chuckled. “Seems to me I can recall the days you didn’t need a setup like this to score points, buddy.”

  “Very funny,” Cam had replied dryly.

  “Well, you’re in luck, man. I’m doing a piece on unusual jobs. Wouldn’t hurt to add a dancer to the mix.”

  “Great. Take her out to supper. On me. Keep her busy for a couple of hours.”

  “Keep her…? You mean, the babe I’ll be interviewing isn’t the babe you’ve got your eye on?”

  “She’s her roommate,” Cam said, telling the truth but tweaking it with a just-between-us-guys attitude he knew would work. “You know how it goes with women, Rich. They travel in pairs.”

  His friend had chuckled. “Gotcha.”

  Everything was set. So, why didn’t the P.I. call? Cam glared at his cell. It was on, the battery was working and here in a nice, normal, civilized setting, all the little transmission bars were lit.

  He was good to go, and he wanted this over with.

  He knew who Salome was. Not just her name. Her. The woman. And he understood that she’d never been real.

  Funny. One of the things he and his brothers used to joke about was that most of the women they met couldn’t be called “real.”

  “Take away the makeup,” Matt would say, “the hair goop, the clothes and who the hell knows what you’d have left?”

  “A naked babe,” Alex would say solemnly, and they’d laugh.

  Turned out it wasn’t all that funny anymore.

  What you had left, Cam thought grimly, without all the froufrou, was a woman who didn’t exist. A woman who’d invented herself to suit the occasion.

  A woman who’d claimed to love him.

  What a lie.

  Fantasy was her life. He’d seen that last night. The music. The sets. The costumes. Salome—ma
ke that Leanna—danced her way through life. She was a virginal princess one day and a sorceress the next.

  She was like one of those toy ballerinas who came to life when you opened the lid of a music box.