by Terese Ramin
Acasia grimaced. "I’ve been driving like that since before I was sixteen, if you’ll recall. It makes a difference."
"Not from where I sat."
"We’re discussing you coming down here alone, not me," she pointed out piously. "I’d never have forgiven you if—" She didn’t finish, but the fingers twisting in her lap spoke volumes. "I’ve fantasized about seeing you again for years… you know, how understanding and loving and perfect you’d be." She smiled shyly. "Dumb, huh? I can see you’re not quite that drab."
Cameron grinned and slung an arm over one raised knee. "Diplomacy? Coming from you? I’d expect you to call me a bastard and be done with it. And as for scaring people—" he laughed shortly "—all I could think when you showed up was ‘Ah, hell, here she is in the middle of my fight.’ I wanted—I still want—to strangle you. I’m a big boy, Casie. I can—and do—occasionally take care of myself."
"I know."
"But you came after me anyway."
"Had to."
He looked at her fully then. They had been so close once that all they’d needed to communicate with each other was a raised brow, a lifted finger, a handful of monosyllables. Acasia’s two words explained everything. She had done what she had to do because she was who she was. Just as he’d done what he had to do. He nodded acceptance. "I suppose you did."
He stared at her. It was a long, assessing stare that made her want to hide. She hadn’t thought it possible for her to feel as many things again in her lifetime as she’d felt in this one day. Confusion curled around her brain.
Unfinished business…
The phrase coasted around the room, circling them lazily. Acasia could see Cameron think it; Cameron could see Acasia flinch away from it.
I want to make love with him, she realized, afraid of the intensity of her feelings.
I want her in bed with me, he thought without surprise. He had wanted it for years.
He moved first, and Acasia saw him as he’d been their first time together, the afternoon before her father had removed her and her brother to Switzerland. She’d planned to show him how she felt about him that day, planned to be the aggressor in their loving, if she had to. But it was Cameron who’d taken the initiative and made the first move, Cameron who’d shushed her when she’d wanted to go too fast. Cameron who’d taught her, discovered with her, how to love.
And made Fred’s suspicions, at long last, come true.
Don’t, she thought now. I can’t handle this tonight and do my job, too. Not now. Not here. Not with you. I loved you. I can’t be casual with you. I care too much what you think. You were the best ten months of my life.
She yawned deliberately and got to her feet, wary. "I’ve got to get some sleep. I’ve been up for three days. Can I get you anything before I head for bed?"
You. Cameron rose, too. "You’re running."
Acasia dropped her eyes and toyed with the hem of her shirt. "I’m tired. I still have to find Fred and see if he’s heard from my pilot, Jules, about how soon we can get out of here."
"Where’re you sleeping?"
"There are plenty of empty cots in the infirmary."
"I see." And he did. He saw fear, and that surprised him. Oh, not that she was afraid. Half of her toughness had always been to cover fear. It was that she was afraid of him. Had she always been, and had he just never realized it before?
He took a step forward, and she took one back, chewing the inside of her cheek, praying he wouldn’t ask what she wanted him to ask. She had to keep him at arm’s length, or maybe even farther, because she couldn’t offer him more than the moment. Maybe that was all he’d expect, a moment that put some sort of closure on their past, but perversity made her hope he’d want more.
She moved again, and he followed.
It wasn’t just his touch she feared; everything about him threatened her. She’d guarded herself from him for so long because she’d had to, because she’d been sure he wouldn’t understand the things she’d done. Would despise her for them if he knew. And she was afraid that if she gave him half a chance he’d be able to reach in and steal what was left of her soul. So little of it was still there—only what Lisetta had left behind.
"Casie."
Don’t ask, she thought. I need you too much to deal with you any more tonight.
She backed toward the door, and he came along, stopping to pick up her fallen gear, his expressive eyes soft with suggestion. She was going to spend the rest of the night craving him. She knew it.
"Plenty of room here for two. I don’t even snore. And there are at least a few dozen worse ways of ending a day and saying hello—"
She watched him, taking unsteady, shallow breaths. His eyes were dark, but strangely patient, asking, not demanding as before. His mouth was generous, framed by lines that wanted to deepen with laughter. They tightened now around a smile, and Acasia’s lips flexed in return. She hesitantly lifted one hand to stroke a few stray bits of dark hair from his brow, but she froze before completing the act.
"Do it, Casie. Let go." The soft words were out before Cameron was aware he’d said them.
If only…
The mantra, herald of lost opportunities, was back, running wistfully through Acasia’s mind. If only. If only she moved closer, he would hold her again, all of him holding all of her. And it would be heaven to be home, if only for a moment. But not here, not now.
Never compromise the job or the client for a moment of mutual pleasure. The old, self–imposed rule filtered through her mind, strengthened her resolve.
"No."
The word, spoken quietly, offered no explanations, reserved no rights. Cameron dropped the pack and the shotgun in her hands, accepting, hearing no hint of "maybe."
"Are there towels down the hall?"
Acasia nodded. "Under the sink."
Cameron moved to the door, then stopped and came back to give her a fleeting kiss. "Thanks for the lift, lady," he said softly. "Good night."
"Good night, Cam."
She didn’t want him to go. The taste, the smell, of him lingered in the heavy air, and she could hear his boots on the floorboards. A door opened and shut, and she was alone. Again. Still. She touched the light switch, and the room was drenched in darkness, except where the window let in glimpses of the moon between the passing clouds.
On leaden feet she walked back the way they had come and went in search of Fred.
Chapter 3
ACASIA WENT THROUGH the entire clinic and back into a new curtain of rain to scour the small village, but there was no sign of her brother.
She returned to the clinic and stood in the kitchen, absorbing the darkness, willing the day to seep from her bones. She was too damn tired of doing this, of skating along the edge, praying she wouldn’t get careless. She’d come close today to losing more than she was prepared to lose. Memories. If she didn’t have memories of Cameron, she would lose the last bit of hope left in her. It was stupid, perhaps, to pin so much on one man, one memory, ten months out of thirty–three years, but there it was. Her little sea of balance and stability amid constant chaos.
Why didn’t you come to meet me when you were supposed to? He hadn’t asked yet, but he would. She knew he would. And she dreaded it.
"Casie?"
She heard Cameron call her from the other side of the clinic and turned to greet him. "I’m in the kitchen. What do you need?"
"Towels. There aren’t any."
"Oh, okay. Wait a minute, I’ll have to find some. Fred must’ve washed today." She went into the nook that served as her brother’s laundry room, returned with a thick stack of well–used terrycloth and handed it to Cameron. Their fingers collided beneath the towels. "Put what you don’t use under the sink, would you?"
"Sure, thanks."
Cameron took the towels away from Acasia. The sense of contact with him clung to Acasia’s skin for a moment, Cameron’s touch imprinted by the humid air. She laced her fingers together, rubbing the feeling away.
&n
bsp; "Anything else you need?"
"I don’t think so, thanks." Cameron started for the doorway, paused, turned back. Some stray bit of light caught his eyes, making them gleam in the shadowy darkness. "Something I was wondering…" he said. Acasia waited. "You had to know I planned to come to Zaragoza almost as soon as Gianini did. You don’t think I should be here, but you didn’t try to stop me. Everyone else did. Why not you?"
"Reticence?" Acasia said. As many times as she’d confronted herself with the same question, she had yet to find an answer for it.
"Try again. Reticence was never your strong suit."
"I don’t remember it being anything you burdened yourself with, either," Acasia shot back, then stopped. She’d promised herself that whatever she did she would not pander to nostalgia. It would be too easy to get carried away, to want yesterday back too badly, to care too much. "Seriously?" she asked, and Cameron nodded. "If I’d come to you with the same arguments everyone else had already presented, would you have listened?"
"It’s possible. Whatever bit of insanity I personally wanted from this trip, having you turn up on my doorstep after all this time might have given me the same jolt."
Acasia laughed without humor. "You give me too much credit. After the first ten minutes, the reunion would have gone stale. I’d state my business, and you’d jump down my throat for thinking I had a right to butt into your affairs for the sake of old times. Then we’d still wind up down here, only I’d have lost the element of surprise, you’d probably have fought me every step of the way, and my professional judgment would be even more impaired by my emotional involvement with you than it already is."
There was a moment of silence pervaded by nearness; then Cameron broke it. "You still think you know what’s best for everyone, don’t you?" he asked. "And I’d forgotten how damn arrogant you can be. What makes you think the way you see things is the only way there is to see them?"
"It’s not what I think that matters. It’s what I know. I’ve gone after too many men who’ve reached the point you’re at. They question who they are and what they’ve done and wonder if there isn’t some challenge they ought to meet, some test they ought to take to prove themselves before they hit the skids on the road to forty or fifty—or sixty. If they listen to you at all, they don’t do what you say—maybe because you’re a woman, maybe for other reasons. Then they need a tour guide to get them back to where they started from so they can live long enough to regale their peers with tales of what they did. I’ve been here before, Cam. That’s why people hire me—for my expertise."
"I didn’t realize one simple little business trip would make me a stereotype."
"If it were simple, Cam, I wouldn’t be here."
"No," he agreed, "you wouldn’t. And neither would I." He studied a patch of light that wavered on the floor, and Acasia, watching him, could almost hear him thinking. "I spent two months looking for you after that last letter of yours," he said. "It was so full of garbage that I knew you were in trouble, and I wanted to help. I located your father in Saint Tropez, on the trail of some missing piece of art or other, and he told me the last he’d heard you were alive, if not well, and that when you were able to see me you’d contact me yourself. So, like a good boy, I went home and waited. It took me nearly three years to decide you weren’t coming back. It was another five before I forgave you for it. The point is, if you’d come to me, I think I might have listened."
Emotion stung Acasia’s throat and burned behind her eyelids. "Cam, I—" Her voice came out a croak. "Two months?"
Cameron nodded. "As I recall," he said, "I loved you."
He left her standing in the darkness then, telling herself that what he’d said didn’t touch her, didn’t matter, didn’t change anything as far as she was concerned. And then she ruined the delusion by wondering why he’d said anything about love at all.
With an oath that was far from ladylike, Acasia yanked off her sweaty T–shirt and turned on the water in the sink. She filled her hands with the tepid, slightly pungent stuff, then spread it over her face, across her chest and down her back. Deliberately she forced herself to think about mundane, everyday things—like how, at this moment, she would have given a year’s pay in equal shares for a real shower, a crisp, clean blouse and water that didn’t have to be purified to be drunk. How much of the past ten or eleven years had she spent in filthy clothes and jungles—here and elsewhere—looking over her shoulder, trying to keep herself and someone else alive? Not counting the thirteen straight months she’d spent here with Fred after her stint in the military, and before she’d become partners with Paolo and Julianna, there might be as few as three years’ worth of days, as many as six. Either way, too many.
And who chose hostage retrieval as a line of work? she asked herself. Who created the position out of thin air? You, that’s who.
Sighing, she put her shirt in the sink to soak and sluiced more water over herself. One of these days she’d chuck the business. Maybe she should have done it years ago. Trouble was, if she’d gotten out, who would have come for Cam? It was not, she decided, a good line of thought.
She shut her eyes and concentrated on the water running down her back to be absorbed in the waistband of her pants. Cameron’s hand had sat there, in the small of her back, callused fingers dipping into her pants, pulling her forward, settling her against—
Stop it! she commanded herself silently.
With a violent jerk, she shut off the water. Cupboard doors slammed together as she flung them open in a blind search for the liquor that would, she prayed, put her to sleep and help her not to think. Above all else, she did not want to think!
* * *
In the tiny bathroom that boasted barely enough empty space to turn around in, Cameron stripped off his clothes, stepped into the shower and tried to will the tension from his body. The day had given him too much to think about, too much to absorb. What had he done by coming here? What can of worms had he opened without intending to? He’d come down here to escape himself and, paradoxically, to find himself. Seeing Acasia again had flung him headlong into himself, into fantasies dreamed at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, of who he’d be, and what. She was a rude reawakening, salt rubbed into a raw wound, reminding him of promises he’d made to himself, to her, the all–or–nothing vows of youth.
At seventeen, she’d given him the best ten months of his life. She’d been a piece of forbidden fruit made more tempting by the fact that his Boston Brahmin parents found the daughter of a former jewel thief and a self–proclaimed Welsh witch unsuitable company for their sheltered, shy, genius son. Once apprised of the situation, Acasia, never a stranger to either trouble or rebellion, had thrown herself with joyful abandon into Cameron’s war for independence. He’d fallen in love with her because she was everything he wasn’t: unconstrained, sophisticated, ready for anything and entirely lacking in the inconvenient inhibitions that prevented Cameron from doing the things he’d most wanted to do.
He’d loved Acasia passionately and without reserve. On their last day together, she’d become his first lover and he’d become hers. Cameron remembered the moment in acute detail, with wonder and satisfaction, with a sudden hard sting of desire.
You never forget your first. Wasn’t that what they said?
He lifted his face to the shower’s spray and the water beat down, awakening him, bringing his blood down from a boil to a simmer. It’s been too long, he thought, too many miles. It’s too late, but I want…
He turned, rubbing water violently through his hair, attempting to marshal his wayward thoughts. He deliberately reminded himself of her faults, especially the way she’d walked away from things—from him—without looking back. He thought he’d finally closed the book on her on New Year’s Day thirteen years ago with the aid of a navy commander who hadn’t taken kindly to his computer specialist going AWOL for a week and returning so drunk that four days in the brig had barely begun to sober him up. It had taken a week more of intensive staring at tw
o–tone gray walls and the coverless john in the corner to convince Cameron that if Acasia had still loved and wanted him, she would have made their rendezvous in London.
In the last sixteen years she’d flitted in and out of his thoughts at odd intervals, always unexpectedly, just when he thought he was ready to make a lifelong commitment to another woman. She’d ruined four perfectly satisfying relationships for him, because he couldn’t help but wonder if loving her again would be as good as he remembered.
He picked up a cake of soap and began to work up a lather in his hands. Everything he’d felt today for Acasia Jones might be only some long–repressed remnant of the past startled out of him by the intensity of the day.
Or it might not.
He worked the soap across his chest, over his belly and down through the bristly, dark triangle between his thighs. She had touched him. He’d felt her. And there was still so much heat!
He rinsed, letting the water cool him a bit, then stood listening to it trickle down the drain. A single swipe of his hand wiped the moisture from his face and slicked the hair back on his head before he stepped from the stall. It had been a long and completely unexpected day, and he wanted sleep, love, rest, calm, love….
He stopped. Hell, he just wanted.
He picked up the fluffy yellow towel from the rack where he’d left it. It had no business being in this misbegotten Third World niche. Acasia, not Fred, would have supplied it, he was sure. She had never been opposed to roughing it, but she had liked her little luxuries. He found it oddly comforting that here, amid the tangle of past and present, something so small hadn’t changed.
Unhurriedly he blotted himself dry. The shower had revitalized him just enough so he’d be able to sleep—except that sleep seemed like such a waste of precious time. He’d made contact with the one person from his past who had done more to mold and shape him into who and what he was than everyone else combined. He wanted to explore her, to absorb her. She bewildered him. She’d been there today when he’d needed her, but then she’d backed away from him even when her eyes had told him that she wanted desperately to stay. He was intrigued; he felt compelled to know why. There were so many questions in need of answers. Hours of them, years of them.
