by Diana Palmer
“Nothing personally. In fact, some of my best friends eat them.” He leaned forward. “It’s the name. Reminds me of pulverized gravel.”
She grinned at him.
He stopped eating and just looked at her. She was incredibly beautiful.
She shifted self-consciously.
“Sorry, was I staring?” he teased. “Can’t help myself. You’re the prettiest woman here, and you’re sitting with me.”
“You’re not bad yourself,” she mused.
He chuckled. “Ya, me and my gimpy eye.”
She studied him over a sip of coffee. “I never think of it as gimpy.”
He searched her eyes. “I know. You took off the eye patch and kissed me there.” His face hardened. “You’re one of a kind, Tat. Beautiful inside and out.”
She was sitting very still. Her blue eyes widened. “You remembered that?” she asked huskily.
He scowled. “Yes.” He stared at her. “I never told you how it happened. You sat with me in the hospital at Nairobi, nursed me even when I growled at you and told you to go home. But I never spoke of it.”
“I know.”
He looked down at his plate. “It was just after your mother told me...what she did. I had plans, Tat,” he said with a wistful smile. “It was never what she thought. I was thinking about a house and kids...”
She winced.
“So when she told me...what she told me, I went on a job and got careless. In fact, I didn’t care if I came back. I had nothing left, nothing I cared about. When I lost you, as I thought I must, life held no further joy for me. I walked into an ambush.” He didn’t look at her. “I did it...deliberately.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks. She grabbed for a napkin and dabbed at them, but they wouldn’t stop.
“Here, now, don’t do that,” he said huskily. “Tat!”
He left his plate, got up, took her by the hand and led her onto the dance floor. He pulled her close and held her, rocked her to the slow rhythm of the music, his face buried in her throat while she fought tears.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never should have told you...!”
“I know she meant well,” Clarisse wept. “But why? Why?”
His arms contracted. “I don’t know, baby,” he whispered. “Sometimes bad things happen, and we never really understand them. Jake has this philosophy, about life being all lessons and we undergo trials to learn.” He sighed. “Maybe he’s right.”
She pressed closer to him, still dabbing at her eyes.
His lips brushed over her forehead. “Have to stop doing that, or you’ll have me in tears, too. What would people think?”
She drew in a shaky breath.
He lifted his head and looked down into her red eyes. “We can’t go back. We can only go forward. If you think you can forgive all I’ve done to you.”
The tears came back, in a flood.
“Damn it, woman, there’s Tippy over there searching for an iron skillet! You’re going to get me killed if you don’t stop crying! She’ll think I’m at you again!”
She laughed, dabbing at the tears once more. “Sorry.”
He lifted his head. “No. I’m sorry. For it all. For everything.” He bent and brushed his mouth slowly over her soft lips. “So...very...sorry...!”
After a minute she drew back a little red-faced and hid her forehead against his soft cotton shirt. “People are staring,” she laughed.
He chuckled wickedly. “Then let’s give them a reason to stare.” He lifted his head, caught the bandleader’s eye and signaled him. The band stopped playing its blues tune and broke into a tango.
“Hey, Grier, challenge!” Rourke called to Cash.
“Taken!” came the laughing reply. “We’ve been practicing!” he added as he led Tippy onto the floor.
“Hold on, there. You’re not leaving us out!” Matt Caldwell led his pretty wife, Leslie, onto the floor, too. “I invented the tango,” he added haughtily with a smug look at the other two men.
“Do your worst there, Caldwell,” Rourke invited. He grinned. “And may the best man win!”
Clarisse laughed out loud.
15
It was a very close contest, but most people agreed that Rourke and Clarisse outclassed the other two couples. Temporarily at least.
“We’ll have a rematch one day,” Matt said drily. “So don’t gloat too much.”
Rourke just grinned.
Clarisse was talking to Tippy at the snack table when Rourke’s phone rang. He excused himself and went outside to answer it.
“Ya,” he said curtly, all business. “What’s up?”
The caller on the other end relayed the latest information they’d been able to glean in their surveillance. Things were coming to a head. There had been some chatter on an open line that led them to believe Sapara’s man was ready to make his move.
“You keep him in sight,” Rourke told him firmly. “If anything goes wrong, there won’t be a place on the planet where I won’t find you.”
The other man assured him that he was on the ball.
“Just don’t get careless,” Rourke said quietly. “More is at stake here than I can even tell you. Keep your eyes open.”
He hung up. Then he scrambled the line and called Chet Billings at Cash’s house.
“What are you doing back?” Chet asked, surprised.
“I came over to challenge Cash to a tango contest,” came the facetious reply. “No, I’m on a job, mate. Anything going on there that I should know about?”
“Yes.”
“What?” Rourke asked, worried.
“Cash’s brother-in-law just creamed Kilraven in a battleground,” Chet said.
“Kilraven? Well! I’ll have to tell Cash. It will make his evening.”
“I don’t doubt it. These guys and their video games. Waste of time if you ask me. Takes away time from hard drinking and gun swapping.”
“Listen, you could use a sweet little woman to reform you,” Rourke mused. “Someone young and pretty...”
“I don’t want someone young and pretty. Or old and ugly. I like living by myself. Nobody tries to take the TV controller away from me,” he added firmly.
“Okay. But you don’t know what you’re missing.”
“We heard you were on a job up in San Antonio,” Chet said.
“Ya. Something boring,” he added, just in case the line was being monitored. You could never tell. “I’ll be on my way back home in a few more days.”
There was a pause. “Mrs. Carvajal will miss you,” Chet said surprisingly.
Rourke’s heart jumped. Of course she would. But, then, he wasn’t leaving. Not unless he could persuade her to go home with him. It was early days. Still, she loved kissing him. Amazing that she didn’t hate him, after what he’d put her through. He thought of making a home with her and his son, having other kids, growing old together. It made him feel warm inside.
“Listen, if you stay with her, you need to think seriously about getting out of fieldwork,” Chet said abruptly. “Women don’t like the constant upset. They worry. Especially when they know what you do for a living.”
Rourke chuckled. “Oh? Somebody worrying about you, is there?”
There was a pause. “Somebody who wants to. She’s just a kid, though.”
“It’s the mileage, mate, not the age,” came the quiet reply. “Keep your eyes peeled. I don’t know much, but I really am expecting trouble. It may come unexpectedly, and not in the form I’m thinking about.”
“I’m always expecting trouble,” Chet replied.
“That makes two of us. I’ll talk to you again before I leave for home.”
“Sure. See you.”
Rourke hung up. Then he made one l
ast call. “I want you to check something out for me,” he said, and fell into Norwegian as he outlined the information he wanted from his contact.
“How did you know I spoke Norwegian?” the man asked.
“Don’t kid me. You specialized in languages. I happen to know you’re fluent in about eight of them, and that’s one.”
There was an amused chuckle. “Well, in my business it does pay to throw the enemy off track. Okay. What do you want to know?”
Rourke told him.
“Good God, not in the States!” came the shocked reply. “Surely not!”
“He isn’t here. But his assassin is. I had a contact working on this info, but he hasn’t come through. I need to know if the man has other contacts, ones that aren’t obvious. And I need to know quickly. Lives are at stake. That’s no bull, mate. That’s fact.”
“Give me ten minutes. I’ll call you back.”
“Use this number. I’m carrying a throwaway phone.” He called out the number.
“You really don’t trust anybody, do you?”
“Comes from years of working covertly,” Rourke chuckled. “We get cautious.”
“Indeed we do. I’ll get back in touch as soon as I can find that information for you.”
“I owe you one.”
“Yes, you do,” came the thoughtful reply. “I won’t forget that, either.”
Rourke sighed. “Feel free,” he said. “You pirate.”
There was another chuckle and the line went dead.
* * *
The last dance was a slow, bluesy tune about lost love. Rourke drew Clarisse close to him and linked her small hand with his.
“All those years we’ve known each other, and we never danced together,” he whispered.
She didn’t dare tell him that they had, those magic days in Manaus. “You thought I didn’t know how, I expect,” she laughed shyly.
He lifted his head and his pale brown eye looked into hers. “I didn’t want you to know how vulnerable I was,” he corrected, and his expression was solemn. “Just looking at you could arouse me, Tat,” he confessed. “It’s still that way, all these years later.”
Her high cheekbones colored delicately.
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” he said at her lips. “You’re quite beautiful. It’s a normal reaction.”
“Oh.”
His arm contracted around her. “That could have been put better,” he said with a soft sigh. “Listen, I was a rounder in my teens and early twenties,” he said gently. “I never dated the same woman twice. I was damned lucky that I didn’t catch some social disease that would make me untouchable, or even something that could have killed me.” His hand smoothed up and down her spine. “But that all ended one Christmas Eve in Manaus,” he said, his voice husky with feeling. “I have never wanted anyone the way I wanted you that night. Never, Tat.”
She bit her lower lip. “That’s just desire...”
He shook his head, very slowly. “No. It’s not.” His fingers teased their way between hers and he drew her even closer as he made a sharp turn. He felt her shiver at the almost-intimate contact. “I want you very badly. But it’s a hell of a lot more than a physical hunger.”
She drew in a long breath. “I don’t know very much about men,” she faltered. Then she flushed, because she’d been married and Rourke thought Joshua was Ruy’s son.
“Look at me.”
The quiet authority in his deep voice brought her eyes up.
“I know more than you think I do, Tat,” he said very quietly. “And when this job is done, and I have time to sit down and talk to you, we’re going to make some decisions together.”
“What...sort of decisions?”
He bent and brushed his mouth tenderly over her soft lips. “Permanent decisions,” he murmured. “Very permanent.”
Her heart began to race. “There are things you don’t know,” she began sadly.
“And none of them matter.” He drew her close, stopped dancing and bent to kiss the breath right out of her. “I am never leaving you again. Not as long as I live.” His pale brown eye was flashing with feeling. “My job can go to hell. I’ve already paid too high a price for it.”
Her face colored with faint shock. She looked up at him, all eyes, her heart in her eyes, her young body very still. Did he remember that he’d left her to do one last job, one that nobody else apparently could do? Had his memory returned?
She wanted so badly to ask him. But the music stopped and couples started walking off the dance floor.
He smiled softly. “Time enough for discussions later,” he said, kissing the tip of her nose. “Right now, we need to go get Joshua and take you home. You’re wilting, my love.”
She laughed softly. “I suppose I am.”
“You still tire easily,” he said. “And you’re very thin. We’ll work on all that, when I get this job done.”
“The job, it isn’t dangerous, Stanton?” she worried aloud.
His fingers smoothed over her soft cheek. “No,” he lied. “Just intelligence work. We’re trying to shut down a human trafficker, that’s all. No guns, love,” he added, stretching the truth like taffy between two vises. It was all for her own good, of course. He didn’t dare tell her the truth, that she was in far more danger than he was right now. “Let’s go get your son and get you both to bed, okay?”
She smiled sleepily. “Okay, Stanton.”
* * *
They drove to Cash’s house and picked up the baby. Mariel sat with him in the backseat, cooing at him in his baby carrier after it was strapped in.
“Did you have fun?” Clarisse asked the woman.
“It was very nice,” she replied. “I can’t remember the last time I danced.”
“I’m surprised that Jack wasn’t there,” Clarisse said on the way home, frowning. “I’m sure he told me he’d planned to come. I saw him in the grocery store yesterday. Mariel, you remember—you went with me.”
“Yes, he did say he was coming. Perhaps he had a date, yes?” Mariel teased.
“Perhaps so. I had a lovely time,” she told Rourke.
He glanced at her warmly. “So did I.”
“The two of you dance so beautifully together,” Mariel sighed. “I have two left feet.”
“You cook like a French chef,” Clarisse told her warmly. “We all have things that we’re good at.”
“True.”
Rourke carried the baby inside in the carrier and lifted him out, pausing to kiss one chubby little cheek before he put him down in the crib for his mother.
The baby was still asleep, after all the jostling. Rourke looked down at him with muted hunger. His son. His child. He had to hide the pride and sadness the child kindled in him. It made his face look very somber.
Clarisse turned Joshua on his side and pulled a light blanket over him. Beside her, Rourke was oddly distracted. He’d had a phone call just as Clarisse went in Cash’s house with Mariel to get Joshua. Ever since, he’d had a worried expression.
“Is something wrong?” Clarisse asked him when they were on the porch and he was starting to leave.
He touched her cheek gently. “Nothing much. Just something connected with the job. Going to kiss me good-night?” he asked softly.
She flushed. “Don’t tease.”
“I’m not teasing, baby.” He drew her to him hungrily and bent to her mouth. “I’m dead serious...”
The kiss was long, hard, ardent. He wrapped her up against him and groaned. She felt it, too, the anguished hunger for something far more violent, more passionate than the kiss, even if it was as hot as chili peppers.
His hands slid down her back and drew her hips hard against his. “I’m dying for you,” he said huskily. “Can you feel it?” he whispe
red against her soft mouth as he let her feel the power of his arousal.
“I can...feel it,” she whispered, a little shy even now with him.
“Oh, God, I want you!” he managed roughly as the kiss grew more insistent.
She shivered as the passion danced through her slender body and made it shiver. “We can’t, Stanton,” she moaned. “It’s a small town. People gossip...”
“I saw a very pretty ring in a jewelry store downtown,” he said against her mouth. “I’ll bet it’s just your size, too.”
She was surprised. “A ring?”
“Two rings,” he murmured, still kissing her. “Diamonds and sapphires. Blue stones, like your beautiful eyes, Tat.”
She stared up at him. “You mean get married?” she faltered. “You want to...marry me?”
He nodded solemnly. “Yes. Get married. It’s far too late, at that. It should have happened when you were seventeen. But better late than never.”
“You really want to marry me?”
“With all my heart!” He folded her against him and rocked her in his arms, his face buried in her soft throat. A shudder ran through him at the prospect of being her husband, being Joshua’s father, raising a family with her. “We can live here, since we have so many friends in town. But we can spend summers at the compound next door to K.C. near Nairobi. The baby can play with my lion.” He chuckled. “Well, after he’s a bit older anyway.”
She was dumbfounded. All her dreams were coming true. “But, you don’t remember the past few months...”
He lifted his head. His pale brown eye looked steadily into her blue ones. “I remember that you’re my whole world,” he said quietly. “That’s really all I need to remember. I have no life without you. I have nothing without you!” He brushed his mouth hungrily over hers. “Will you marry me, Tat?” he asked huskily.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Yes,” she choked. “Oh, yes...!”
He looked down at her with an expression that said far more than words. There was such joy, such hunger in it that he looked like a man who’d won the lottery. He lifted her against him and kissed her until her mouth was sore, and then he kissed her again. His body was in torment. He had to leave or explore alternatives.
