“You’re lying,” he said, staring down at her peaked nipples.
“I’m cold,” she snapped.
“I’m not.” He let her see the heat she created in him and watched her throat and cheeks flush with warmth.
“When are you going to give up?” she said, exasperated.
“Not until you give in.”
17
Kate was determined to keep her distance from Shaw the rest of the afternoon. To her chagrin, he never came near her. He focused his attention entirely on the twins.
The three of them seemed to have a wonderful time playing word games while they consumed the chunky peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches—how had he known that was the twins’ favorite?—he’d brought for their lunch. She’d been faced with the choice of either joining in the fun or sitting on the blanket like a lump, and she wasn’t that much of a spoilsport.
The result was an afternoon that felt far too much like a happy family outing. In fact, she would have enjoyed herself tremendously if she hadn’t known Shaw had an agenda.
He’d already succeeded in seducing Lucky and Chance, who admired and respected him and sought his approval. There was nothing wrong with the boys liking their biological father. She just didn’t want them getting too attached, because despite Shaw’s hopes and plans, this situation wasn’t permanent. She didn’t want her sons to be hurt when Jack replaced Shaw in their lives.
Won’t they be hurt when they find out that Shaw is their biological father, and that you took them away from him? They’ve attached themselves to Shaw in a way they never did with Jack. Why is that? Is it something Shaw is doing? Or something Jack didn’t?
“Kate? Are you ready to go?” Shaw asked.
Kate had been so caught up having fun, she hadn’t noticed how much time had passed. She only realized the sun was headed down when Shaw said, “We need to get started, or it’ll be dark before we get back.”
On the ride home, she stayed at Chance’s side, forcing Shaw to ride with Lucky behind them on the narrow trail. She could feel his eyes focused on her almost like a caressing hand.
She felt aware and alive. And aroused. And angry because Shaw knew what he was doing to her.
She was the “other half” of his agenda.
Kate refused to be captivated by Shaw as her sons had been. She’d refused his sexual advances throughout the day, which hadn’t been easy. She’d made it as plain as she could that she was in love with another man. She didn’t know what else she could do to convince the stubborn fool that she would never—could never—fall in love with him.
It had very little to do with whether Shaw was a person she could love. He had a number of admirable qualities, among which was the amazing rapport he’d managed to develop with their sons in such a short time.
She wasn’t going to deny that she found him physically attractive. He was and she did.
His wealth was evidence of his intelligence, his inventiveness and his integrity—if he wasn’t lying about being an honest businessman, she thought cynically.
And Kate could appreciate Shaw’s determination to do whatever was necessary to get what he wanted: the woman he’d spent the night with nine years ago.
But he was fighting a battle he couldn’t win. Because that woman no longer existed.
Kate had given her heart to Jack McKinley when she was only nineteen and had it handed right back to her. It had been broken during her marriage, challenged by her single night of sin and eviscerated during the year she’d spent as a widow. There was hardly enough left of it to give to anyone.
But what there was, she had offered to Jack. She wasn’t about to rip it out of his grasp and offer it to anyone else. Especially not to some rogue who laughed with relish while he did his best to steal it from her.
She was done playing Shaw’s game, because it was a contest neither of them could win.
When they arrived back at the stable, she unsaddled her horse without help from Shaw. She ate what was put in front of her on the dining room table and made sure she and the boys helped with the dishes. She got the twins ready for bed on her own, although Shaw came to bid them good night.
She didn’t allow him to make a battle out of where she would sleep. She simply put on her most concealing nightgown, pulled down the covers of his bed and hopped into the side she’d slept on last night.
She brought a book to bed with her, a Regency-era romance novel, where the Duke of Whatever was a blackguard, until the heroine reformed him. Kate had known from page one that, after a great many trials and tribulations, the duke and his new duchess would live happily ever after. Kate desperately needed the fantasy because her own experience was so far from it.
Once again, Shaw undressed without a thought to her modesty, showing off his splendid physique in the soft light from the lamps on either side of the bed.
She reread the same paragraph three times because the hero in her book didn’t have abs or a flat stomach or lean hips that could compete with Shaw’s. She finally gave up and snapped, “Put on some clothes!”
He grinned and sauntered over to his wardrobe. He pulled on a pair of black, thigh-length briefs that did absolutely nothing to hide any of the assets she was trying not to admire.
He laughed. The blackguard.
Kate was fuming by the time he joined her in bed. She was expecting another fight, but he surprised her by switching off the light on his side of the bed, turning his broad and impressively muscular back to her, and saying, “Good night. Sleep tight.”
She absolutely, positively refused to say the rest.
She heard him chuckle and whisper, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Actually, it was a pretty good exit line. At least, it left her with nothing to say.
Kate doggedly kept reading the same paragraph, frustrated by her awareness of the man pretending to sleep next to her. Pretending because she could tell by the uneven rhythm of his breathing that he was faking it.
He’d left her itching for a fight, which she refused to provoke, because she knew that was exactly what he wanted.
It dawned on her that she hadn’t spoken with Jack today. She should call and ask him how the move had gone yesterday and how he was getting along with his pregnant wife.
His pregnant wife.
Kate refused to be daunted by what now seemed to be overwhelming odds against any kind of “happily ever after” with Jack. She marked her page and set down her book, then got out of bed and located her cell phone, after a search through her purse and her overnight bag and the pockets of her jeans. She jumped back into bed, crossed her legs, plumped a pillow up behind her and called Jack.
Let Shaw pretend to sleep through this, she thought with devilish glee.
“Hi, Jack. Yes, I’m sorry to be calling so late.”
She heard the silk sheets rustle on the other side of the bed. “Yes, I’m in his bed. But I’ve run a coil of barbed wire down the center of it, a sort of no-man’s-land he’s afraid to cross for fear of losing important body parts.”
Shaw rose up the length of his arms like a waking tiger and glared at her.
She winked at him. “You’re lucky to have a room of your own,” she told Jack. “I did ask. He said no, so I’m making do.”
She pursed her lips. “Well, yes. I did kiss him again, but not because I wanted to.” She glanced at Shaw and said, “We were swimming, and he just…took it.”
Shaw muttered, “You bet I did. And I’d do it again.”
“No, I don’t think I have to worry about it happening again.”
Shaw’s eyes narrowed, and Kate knew she was walking a fine line. If she pulled the tiger’s tail too hard he was liable to whirl and pounce on her.
“How are things with you?” she asked Jack. “Ryan’s sick?” she said anxiously. “A hundred and two? Are you sure it’s just the flu?” She glanced at Shaw, sharing the worry she felt, and saw he was sitting up, listening attentively.
“Shouldn’t you take him to
the emergency room?” Kate asked. “Yes, I did forget you have a doctor in the house. Be sure to call me tomorrow and let me know he’s all right.”
She held her hand over the phone and said to Shaw, “Jack wants to know when I start work.”
“Tomorrow, if you like.”
She took her hand off the phone and said, “I start at M.D. Anderson tomorrow. I’m not sure yet where in the hospital I’ll be working.”
“With pediatric cancer patients,” Shaw said.
Kate turned and stared at Shaw with horror. “I’ve got to go, Jack. I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”
She snapped the phone closed and said, “You’ve got to be kidding! You have me working in the same department as Jack’s wife? Am I in the same building? On the same floor?”
“I have no idea. You’ll find out when you get there.”
“What makes you think I’d take a job under those conditions?”
“The amputees who need your help are kids who’ve lost a limb to osteosarcoma. The hospital is making great strides in treating bone cancer without amputation, but they’re not always successful in saving limbs.”
“Isn’t there somewhere else in the hospital I could work?”
“I thought you wanted a job similar to what you were doing with disabled vets at BAMC.”
She did. She would love the job if she wasn’t afraid of running into Holly every day. But if Holly was going to be doing research, and she was going to be doing physical therapy, and as big as M.D. Anderson was, there was a good chance they’d be working nowhere near each other.
Better to wait and see. She could always quit and find another job on her own. She carefully set down her phone and picked up her book.
“How long are you going to read?” Shaw asked. “I can’t sleep with the light on.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll be more than happy to go sleep in another bed. In another room.”
He lay back down and turned his back to her. “Just remember we all have to be ready to go tomorrow morning by seven.”
“We have to leave by seven? The boys usually wake up at seven.”
“Then it should be an interesting morning,” Shaw said.
Kate was still staring at the same page without seeing the words written on it when she heard Shaw snore. She thought he was faking it, so she gave him a little shove. He turned over and the snoring stopped, but he was clearly asleep.
She was wide-awake.
She was going to need her wits about her tomorrow, so she should try to get what sleep she could. She marked the page in her book, turned out the light, punched the feather pillow into submission and closed her eyes.
But she didn’t find any peace, because there was nothing she could actively do to end the situation she was in. She was waiting for Jack’s wife to have her baby. She was waiting for Shaw to get tired of hearing her refusals. She was waiting for J.D. to get caught.
She sighed and started counting backward from one hundred. Maybe that would work.
Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.
How had her life gotten so far out of her control?
Eight-three.
When she thought about it, every bad thing that had happened to her could be traced back to her decision to marry J.D. Pendleton.
Seventy-six.
She wondered what that son of a bitch was doing tonight.
18
J.D. was cold and scared and pissed off. His day had started well and ended badly.
His mother had loaned him his father’s two-seat Piper Cub to fly himself from the airstrip on the Pendleton Ranch to a small county airport south of San Antonio. J.D. loved flying. As a bonus, for the few hours he was in the air, he knew he was safe.
The illusion was false and fleeting. When he landed, D’Amato’s hitmen were waiting for him.
J.D. couldn’t figure out how they’d found him, unless his mother had said something to D’Amato. It was a sad state of affairs when your own mother wanted you dead. He had no intention of helping her by killing D’Amato. When he was done with his business here in Texas, which included getting rid of Shaw and that bitch wife of his, he intended to disappear for good—courtesy of the federal government and the witness protection program.
J.D. had a certain video of a certain mobster committing a certain crime, which he intended to use to start a new life. Of course, he still had the twenty million dollars in heroin that hadn’t really gone overboard, which would make his life in witness protection more comfortable.
Somehow, he’d stayed one step ahead of D’Amato’s men at the airport. He’d pulled the Piper Cub in behind the hangar, slipped into the back of one of the delivery trucks supplying materials for a building under construction on the site and made an ignominious escape.
The truck had made a delivery stop at the Hilton Palacio del Rio on the River Walk in the middle of downtown San Antonio, a couple of blocks from the Alamo. He’d remained hidden behind a stack of boxes until the deliveryman headed inside with his load and simply walked away.
Enough tourists thronged the River Walk, restaurants and shops along the San Antonio River that were recessed below street level, that J.D. felt comfortable blending into the crowd. He sat down at one of the riverside café tables shaded by a brightly colored umbrella and had an enormous lunch of his favorite Mexican foods—flautas, chalupas, tacos, rice and beans, with some sopapillas doused in cinnamon and soaked with honey for dessert.
He also consumed a king-size frozen margarita, which helped to slow down his ratcheting heartbeat. The alcohol buzz kept him sitting longer than he probably should have. He got antsy and started making note of the people walking by. He saw a lot of men and women wearing military uniforms, not really surprising when San Antonio was home to five military bases, both army and air force.
Some of the soldiers had visible prosthetic limbs, also not surprising when Brooke Army Medical Center had a whole floor devoted to patients with appendages severed by IEDs—improvised explosive devices.
Thinking of soldiers with severed limbs reminded J.D. of his wife, who worked giving physical therapy to disabled vets at BAMC.
J.D. set down his frozen drink. And smiled.
IEDs. And his wife.
Why not use an IED to take out his bitch wife and her lover? He could simply plant a powerful IED on the roadside where he knew Shaw and the bitch would be traveling and detonate it remotely.
He would have to make sure the kids weren’t in the car with them. Lucky and Chance were the only ones who knew where his “extra insurance”—a cell phone video of D’Amato killing a hireling who’d double-crossed him—was hidden.
A friend of J.D.’s in the Mexican Mafia, Lou Ferme, had sent J.D. the cell phone for safekeeping. The video showed D’Amato personally executing the man by shooting him in the back of the head.
Before he left for Afghanistan, J.D. had given a small box containing the cell phone to his sons and told them to bury it. His life depended on keeping the location of the box a secret, he’d told them seriously. They were not to tell anyone but him where it was. And he didn’t want to know where they’d hidden it until he came home from the war.
While J.D. was in Afghanistan, Lou flapped his mouth, and D’Amato discovered the existence of the video. D’Amato’s enforcer, Roberto, tortured Lou—toenails and testicles were both involved—until he confessed that he’d given the cell phone to J.D.
D’Amato had demanded that J.D. give up the video if he wanted to live. Of course, J.D. was certain that the instant he handed over the cell phone with the incriminating evidence, he was a dead man. Which was when he’d come up with the brilliant idea of stealing the twenty million dollars in smack, faking his death and disappearing.
As far as the kids knew, he was dead. They might already have dug up the box. But he knew they hadn’t given it to Kate, because if they had, she would already have turned it over to that Texas Ranger she’d been kissing when he’d shown up in her kitchen last fall.
Maybe
having the kids hide the cell phone hadn’t been the smartest move he’d ever made. But at least he could get to it without D’Amato’s guys following him to a bank safe deposit box. Just thinking about the condition Lou was in when Roberto was done with him had J.D.’s heart hammering hard in his chest. So far, he hadn’t been caught by D’Amato’s wise guys. But if his luck ran out, he was going to need that cell phone to buy his life.
J.D. felt eyes on him and trusted his instincts enough to throw some money on the table and head back up the stairs to the world above. Looking down from the waist-high stone wall at street level, he saw the hitmen moving along the River Walk below him, showing his picture to waiters and waitresses.
He hailed a taxi and got a ride up Broadway to a used car dealership, where he paid cash for a white Lexus SUV. Then he headed north to the I-410 beltway around the city.
J.D. had stolen munitions all during his tour in the Texas National Guard and shipped a few more home from Afghanistan, all of which he kept in one of the thousands of storage units located along I-410 North used by transient military families.
He had plenty of explosives to build an IED. He just wasn’t sure it was absolutely safe to retrieve them.
J.D. was almost certain D’Amato didn’t know about the storage unit. He’d used a fellow soldier’s name—the man he’d traded places with when he’d faked his death, actually—and paid cash in advance each year for the unit.
He’d chosen an unattended storage facility, with no surveillance video camera, where all he had to do was key in a code and a metal gate would open, allowing him access to the outdoor storage unit.
Today he found something new, and therefore suspicious.
The discreetly located video camera was focused on the entrance, where it would get a picture of both the car tag and the face of the driver.
J.D. stopped his Lexus out of range of the camera. The last time he’d been to his storage unit was six months ago, when he’d dropped off the twenty million dollars of heroin, before he left for Brazil.
Maybe the storage company had installed the camera since then to deter theft.
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