Hot As Sin

by Debra Dixon

  “When I thought you were a nun,” he said, “the way you looked fooled me. I thought you had this delicate, nunlike quality about you. But that was before I got a good look at your body.”

  To her chagrin, she felt her nipples harden as his inspection stopped just below her shoulders. She clenched her teeth to keep from fidgeting. Good Lord! How could he do this to her from across the room?

  “Emma darlin’, you look like you’ve spent more time in the gym than you have on the job.”

  An indignant huff escaped her. He’d handed her a compliment and a complaint in the same breath. “I like to keep in shape.”

  He shifted to lean against the counter instead of the refrigerator and folded his arms. “Okay, so you work out. Have you ever worked?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I have,” she snapped. Ice skating was hard, grueling even. But his insinuation that she might be lazy wasn’t the reason for her anger. Emily was angry because he could make her body respond without touching her, without asking her permission. Although she shouldn’t be surprised. This was just one more area of her life over which she didn’t have control.

  “Maybe you’ve worked,” he allowed. “But do you know what it’s like to be the least important employee in the company? To clean toilets? Punch a clock? To have someone telling you what to do every minute? Because that’s the only kind of job you can get without references.”

  Emily almost laughed, and a bitter smile lingered on her lips. Without realizing it, he’d stumbled on the two things she knew better than anything else—hard work and letting someone else run her life. She’d worked with blisters and bruises, sore tendons and muscle pulls. She’d worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. And every second she had someone telling her how she could do it better.

  “Do you think you can do that, Emma?”

  “Oh, I think I can manage. I’ve had people telling me when to breathe for twenty years.” She resented his attitude, so much that she didn’t stop to censor her words as she set him straight. “Punching a clock is no different from having to be at a rink at five in the morning, and I can’t imagine a boss any harder to please than my coaches were.”

  “Coaches?” Gabe pushed away from the counter, suddenly interested. “Rink?”

  Emily caught her breath at her mistake, and the sound of her distress only made her slip more glaring. She could see the wheels turning in Gabe’s mind.

  “Twenty years is more than a job,” Gabe said slowly. “In the navy it’s a career. You must have started young and been pretty good to have lasted so long at … skating, was it?”

  “Excuse me.” Like a coward, Emily headed for the bathroom and shut the door on his questions.

  Left standing alone in the kitchen after Emma’s vanishing act, Gabe resisted the urge to haul her out of the bathroom. Instead, he walked to the living room area and sank down in the chair that faced the bathroom. While he waited for Emma’s reappearance, he searched his mind for the information he wanted.

  The closest he got to sports was pool—eight ball, to be precise. Simple rules. One man, one stick, and sink the eight ball last. A simple game and one he understood, unlike ice skating, about which he didn’t have a clue.

  He shut his eyes and concentrated. The only names he had a prayer of remembering were Olympic gold medalists. If she hadn’t won a gold, it was pretty hopeless. On the other hand, if she hadn’t won a gold, she wouldn’t be famo—

  Gabe’s eyes snapped open. Not Emma. Emily. Emily Quinn.

  The only thing he could recall about her was that she had a bunch of world championships and had never won an Olympic gold medal. “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride” was how Skeeter Daniel put it.

  Some sailors chose Playboy models, but not Skeeter. He was an odd little fellow from Minnesota—an expert marksman and jumper who had a real talent for blowing up things. He followed ice skating in general, and Emily Quinn in particular. Thank God for Skeeter, Gabe thought, otherwise he never would have matched Emily Quinn with Emma’s face.

  And if he figured it out, then someone else sure as hell would, he reminded himself grimly. Even in a tiny speck of a town like this one. They might have already.

  Dredging up memories, he tried to compare the woman in his bathroom with Emily-the-Ice-Princess. He remembered looking at the cover of a Sports Illustrated that Skeeter had lying around, but there wasn’t the connection to her that he felt tonight.

  Because she didn’t need you then.

  As much as he hated it, being needed was a drug to him, an addiction that had been nurtured by repetition over the years. He was addicted to the instant connection forged between people in crisis. Even though he knew all too well that the bond would fade, and he’d be forgotten once the crisis was over.

  Somehow, explaining away his attraction to Emma as a conditioned response felt safer than admitting the woman got to him on a more basic level.

  While Gabe sat waiting, dawn came sneaking into the room like a coward. Gabe hated dawn and dusk. Too many shades of gray. He liked his world black or white. That’s what bothered him about Emma. She had too many shades of gray.

  When his bathroom door finally opened, Emma walked into the room wearing the pair of jogging pants he had hanging on the back of the door. They puddled on top of her feet and she held the edge of the waist as if she weren’t sure the drawstring was tight enough. She didn’t look like much of a threat to anyone. What on earth have you done to get yourself into this mess, Emma?

  “I was cold.” She tugged on the pants. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  He tilted his head toward the other chair. “I mind a lot. But not about the pants. Take a load off, Miss Quinn. Or should that be Mrs.?”

  She blanched at the sound of her last name, but sat down. “No.”

  “Good.” Gabe leaned up in the chair and braced his elbows on his knees. He clasped his hands together and gave her a look that brooked no refusal. He was done playing games. “Tell me.”

  FIVE

  “Where do you want me to start?” Emily asked.

  “Let’s start with how you know Patrick.”

  She tried not to tense up, but he began with the question she was least prepared to answer. She forced herself to meet his gaze and not look away while she told as much of the truth as possible. “He was assigned to me for a while.”

  “You’re a witness.” It was a statement, not a question. He could have been conducting a military debriefing for all the emotion he showed in his face.

  “Not anymore.”

  “But you were.”

  “Yeah. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m in this mess because I saw a man put a gun in a trash can.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s like corroborating evidence. I didn’t see him pull the trigger, but I can place him at the scene with the murder weapon in his hand. Afterward the marshals said it was one in a million. The hit man had one of those plastic guns you can get through X ray. The marshals told me the hit was supposed to be done in the men’s room; seems the victim always made a detour into the bathroom before boarding a plane.”

  “But this time he didn’t make that pit stop.”

  “No, he went straight to the gate and sat off in a corner. And that’s where he quietly died, with his baseball cap pulled over his eyes like he was trying to sleep.”

  “I assume the hit man used a silencer?”

  “They said so. I didn’t hear the shot. I looked up and saw a man put what looked like a gun in the trash can. It took a couple of seconds to register. Someone hollered that a guy had been shot and then it clicked. I yelled, ‘He did it! He had a gun!’ in the middle of the Los Angeles airport.

  “Everyone hit the deck when they heard ‘gun,’ but some young Nebraska-corn-fed security giant with more guts than brains was standing right next to him when I pointed. He tackled the guy, wrestled him to the ground, and sat on him. Between the two of us, we managed to blunder our way into appreh
ending a bona fide wiseguy—Joseph Bookman. It was one of those freak accidents. A split second in time.”

  He pondered that for a moment, made calculations in his head, and asked, “When was this?”

  “Three months ago.”

  “This wouldn’t have gone to trial already.”

  “No.” She shifted uneasily in her chair. She knew where he was going with this.

  “That means you haven’t testified yet, Emma.”

  “I’m not going to testify. I’m not cooperating any longer.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. You don’t just ‘decide’ not to cooperate.”

  Emily bit her tongue on the truth and told a half-truth in its place. “The price for their protection is too high. They want me to have plastic surgery to change my face.”

  Expelling a displeased breath, Gabe said, “Silly me. I was hoping I had exaggerated your celebrity.”

  Shaking her head, she said, “The commercial started about three months ago. The marshals said in five years it might not be a problem, but right now they wouldn’t guarantee my safety unless I had the surgery.”

  “Whoa. Go back. What commercial?”

  “I forgot. You’re the man who doesn’t open his newspapers and doesn’t have a television.” Emily paused. “You don’t even have one in the bar?”

  “Nope. Wasn’t one there when I bought the place. No money for it since then.”

  “Well, if you had one, you’d have seen the commercial for the mascara—it’s a great close-up of this face—and you’d also know that for the last year every sports program and news tabloid wanted to relive the end of my career. They explained in excruciating detail their version of why I never got the gold medal. If I didn’t give them a story or if they thought my story was too dull, they made one up.

  “For the record, I didn’t retire because of a nervous breakdown after my parents’ death. I didn’t retire because my coach was sexually harassing me. I didn’t retire because I was too old. I am not bulimic, have not had a sex change, and I did not retire to have Elvis’s baby.”

  Gabe had to fight a smile. “Was it really that bad?”

  “Close.” He detected a hint of sadness in her voice as she continued. “Most of them went with the sympathy angle on my parents’ death. Hank and Rosalie were older than you’d think. I didn’t come along until they had retired from skating and performing. They went in their sleep, one right after the other.”

  She pulled up her pants leg and pointed out the fading surgery scars.

  “Car accident. The real truth behind my retirement is that the ankle just never healed. It’s the nerve damage. I can’t feel the ice well enough to take off or land the jumps anymore. Emily Quinn, the American ice princess, retired because her foot won’t do what she tells it to sometimes.” She shrugged. “But Emily still has a really high recognition rating with the average television viewer and a whole fistful of endorsement contracts.”

  She let the fleece material drop back down over her ankle and drew her legs up. Wrapping her arms around them, she stared down at nothing in particular. “Before my retirement there was the shock of my parents’ unexpected death. That made the news because we were supposed to be the founding of a dynasty. They were pairs skaters—silver medalists—which is pretty damn good for an American pair. They were supposed to be around when I brought home the gold. There’s another Kodak moment shot to hell.”

  Looking up at him, she said, “I’ve decided that instant camera moments are good only for reminding us of what is gone and will never come again.”

  “Pretty cynical.”

  “Blame it on the year. It’s been a nail-biter from day one. Before my parents died, there was the car accident that screwed up my ankle.”

  “And then you ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Yeah, I finally had financial security and no place to be at five in the morning. And then I cause the arrest of a very nasty man whose associates would like to see me dead.”

  “So, why not change your face and start over? The endorsement contracts? Do you need the money?”

  She got quiet, and unfolded her legs as Wart meowed and jumped onto the arm of her chair. He straddled it like a doily with his legs dangling lifelessly over each side. She stroked him behind the ears for a minute and then said, “No.”

  “So, why?” he pressured her.

  Emily looked up from the cat and met his gaze. “I don’t want to change my face because it’s the only thing I have left that’s truly mine. The only family album I have, the only momento of the past, is the one I see when I look in the mirror.”

  Emotions Gabe didn’t want to face welled up inside him. His mirror had been his family album for a long time too. He wasn’t sure which was worse—having your security ripped away when you were six or having your world explode when you were grown. Dealing with Emma objectively was difficult enough without empathy getting in the way and sidetracking him.

  Unable to sit still any longer, Gabe stood up, hoping physical action could help him shake off even older, less charming memories that threatened to surface. He grabbed some wood to replenish the stove and shoved it in harder than necessary. While he worked at rebuilding the fire, he kept after the part of her story that bothered him.

  “Why not cut your hair or color it? Or both? Why not use colored contact lenses? When there were so many other options, why would the government let you walk away?”

  The door of the cast iron wood stove clanked shut as he swung around to face her and answered his own question. “They wouldn’t. Which means Patrick’s career is on the line because he let you walk away.” She saw something like guilt shadow Gabe’s expression, but it turned to anger too quickly to be sure. “You kiss him too, Emma? Did you make him promises with that body of yours to get what you wanted?”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Emily couldn’t stand the way he was looking at her, as if she’d done something terrible. Which she had. Shaking off the memories, she got up, inexplicably drawn to the pool table. “You don’t understand. We were close, that’s all.”

  “Darlin’,” he whispered, joining her by the table and leaning close to her ear, “you don’t have to tell me how close … how intimate two people can get if they’re thrown into a dangerous situation. I think I had that all figured out when you kissed me. I just want to know if you kissed Patrick.”

  When he pulled back, her shoulders did a little dance as a shiver hit her unexpectedly. She brushed the backs of her fingers across her ear, trying to rub away an unsettling sensation left by the feel of his breath and lips against her skin. “I didn’t kiss Patrick.” She leveled a cold gaze at him. “And I didn’t kiss you.”

  “I could have sworn that was a kiss.”

  Narrowing her eyes, Emily warned him not to push it. “That kiss was your idea, not mine. You listen carefully, because I’m going to say this only one last time. Patrick was my friend. Nothing more.”

  When she pushed away from the pool table, Gabe stopped her with a question, all the teasing gone from his voice. “Then why did he give you the dog tag?”

  “He was reassigned,” Emily lied, forcing out the words as they stuck in her throat. She spun the pretty web of half-truths she’d rehearsed in the bathroom. “But he knew how afraid and alone I was, so when he … when he found out he wouldn’t be around to protect me anymore, he gave me the dog tag and told me where I could find you if I needed someone.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Gabe drew her closer, locking his gaze with hers. “He gave you the dog tag because he got pulled off your detail for this other assignment? Sort of like insurance to make you feel better until he got back?”

  “Yeah, that’s why he gave it to me. Just in case something went wrong.”

  Oh, hell, thought Gabe as he leaned back on the edge of the pool table, suddenly tired. This was finally beginning to make a wicked sort of sense. And none of it good news.

  His buddy had parted with the tag so easily
because he never thought Emily would actually use it! Good old Patrick loved grand gestures. Probably figured he’d get the dog tag back soon enough with no harm done, and look like a fine fellow in the process. Only something bad happened in the meantime, and now Gabe was left to pick up the pieces until Patrick surfaced. “So, what went wrong, Emma?”

  “No. You can’t have it. My finger is still on the card. I’ve changed my mind.” Emily pleaded desperately with Patrick, who answered with a sinful grin and a shake of his head.

  “Baby, as soon as it touched the discard stack, it belonged to me.”

  He didn’t give her any breaks. Not when they played cards. He played cut-throat gin for a penny a point. So far she owed him twenty-three dollars and seventy-one cents.

  “Fine.” She let go of the card and motioned for him to take it. “I’m going to beat you in a second or two anyway.”

  “Now, there’s an empty threat if I ever heard one.” He perused his cards. “Unless you got Danny-boy peeking at my cards through the window and giving you hand signals.” He grabbed his radio even though no one could possibly see through the drawn shades. “Dano, are you working for the enemy? You telling this woman about my cards?”

  The silence erased all Patrick’s good-natured humor. He keyed the radio again.…

  “What went wrong?” Gabe repeated, forcing her to look at him.

  Emily knew the answer to that question would be the biggest lie of all. What made the lies worse for her was that she’d somehow ended up standing in Gabe’s arms, in the cradle of his thighs. She was drawing the strength to lie to him from him. Her clasped hands were centered on his chest, as if this were the most natural posture for a conversation between strangers.

  But she didn’t pull back. If she had to relive that night, she couldn’t think of a better place to do it than in the safety of Gabe’s arms. She forced herself to tell as much of the truth as possible, changing the names and omitting her last conversation with Patrick—the one about finding Gabe. Even as she told the carefully edited version, the original played in her mind in living color. Just as real as it had been four days before.