One glance gave him the picture. Standing in full sun, still lugging that monster purse, Regan looked straight at him as if she was trying to focus through a telescope lens. There was still that look of sneaky feminine humor in her face, and her lips were parted as if she intended to impart some more psychic vibration horse manure. Her body had another agenda. Her fanny was weaving, her silky straight hair stuck damply to her temples, and quicker than the flip of a dime her skin turned a fascinating shade of pale green.
Cole severed the few feet between them faster than he’d moved in the past five years. He caught her under the arms just as her knees buckled. Her bag dropped, its contents spilling every which way. He paid no attention.
She wasn’t out, not completely. She made a slurred, hoarse cry—something about her purse—which he ignored. He hefted her up, his hands cupping her fanny, and carried her up the steps into the plane.
Inside was no cooler, but it was shady, and the carpet was definitely a softer bed than the asphalt outside. Although there wasn’t a lot of space in the aisle to maneuver, he managed to set her down. He kept whispering, “You’re gonna be okay, you’re gonna be okay,” but he couldn’t swear he was talking to her. His heart was hammering like a mad jack.
He fumbled with the snap and zipper of her jeans and yanked both open—no easy task when her hands, weak as puppy paws, tried to bat him away. “Take it easy, princess. If I was after your virtue, believe me, you’d know it. Come on, come on, I’m just trying to give you some room to breathe....” Once her jeans were open, he folded her in two with her head between her knees. Only then she scared the holy hell out of him by going limp. “Hey. Are you still with me?”
“No.”
Her voice was shakier than a whisper, yet Cole almost grinned as he leaned over her. “If you’re alert enough to argue, you’re still with me. Although the next time you want to faint, maybe you could choose a blouse that doesn’t have ninety-seven buttons down the front.”
Again, those soft white hands defensively clutched him. For a time span shorter than a second, her heart was in the nest of his palm and his fingers lay tight between the cleft of her breasts. Cole swore under his breath, and then said softly, gruffly, “Honey, nothing’s going on here that you need to worry about. You’re as safe with me as in church. All I’m trying to do is open your shirt a little at the neck. Now dammit, let me—”
She obeyed. A miracle. He battled enough of the tiny blouse buttons to give her some air, and still holding her head down, he reached into his back pocket for a handkerchief. He came up with a rag instead. Half of it was clean, anyway. “You don’t move, you hear me?”
“Cole—”
“And don’t talk, either.” He lurched to his feet only long enough to soak down the rag in the lav, then hunkered back down in the squeezed space next to her. Eyes closed, she lifted her face for the cool, soothing feel of the cloth. He rubbed it on her face, then down her long white throat, then inside her blouse over her collarbones and upper chest. He wrecked her hair, got her blouse all wet, and the rag kept trying to tangle in those insanely long earrings. It wasn't as if he could help it. “You feel sick to your stomach?”
“I did...not so much now.”
“Well, don’t be an idiot and not tell me.” When he started sponging off her hands and wrists, she kept looking at him with those huge, blurry, sensual eyes as if he was out of some dream, and the whole damn plane was starting to reek of her perfume. It wasn’t a strong scent, just maddening—an unnameable flower, an elusive spice, a tease of something willfully feminine and forbidden. Like her.
Her blouse gaped open, revealing a pink bra strap and the shadow of a white breast that he’d already touched—and regrettably discovered was softer than any flesh on his whole body. With his jaw clenched, he finished cooling her down and then rocked back on his heels. “Still feeling dizzy?”
“Not as much. I think I’m fine now. Cole—”
“You’re not getting up yet, so don’t try to give me a hard time.” He looked her over critically, deliberately ignoring her breasts, her mouth, the scent, the open V of her jeans, and concentrating on the color of her skin. Better. Much better. She’d moved right up to paste. It was sure better than pale pea green. “Just stay there,” he repeated. “Think your stomach could handle some water?”
Regan nodded and he bounced to his feet, filled a Dixie cup half full and brought it back. It took her two hands to handle that little whopper, but she wasn’t shaking half as badly as before. Cole let out a gusty sigh. “I guessed this was going to happen. I knew it. You were taking it too calmly, playing it out like we were on a Sunday school picnic, when I knew you were scared. Regan, I told you we weren’t going to crash. I told you there was no danger—”
“And I believed you.” Her voice was husky as she handed him the empty cup. “I wasn’t afraid. Although I’m sure it sounds crazy, this afternoon was the easiest thing I’ve had to deal with in a long time. At least the problem with your plane really happened. It was real, and the magnet was real, and you're right here with me so I know it wasn't something I imagined—”
She suddenly got this look in her eyes—a lost look, a sick-with-fear look—and he thought he was losing her again. Snatching the rag again, he pushed aside the silky curtain of hair and pressed the damp cloth to her nape.
“Please don't misunderstand. It's not that I was happy that something happened to your plane. It's just that it's so easy to handle something that is probably real. Truth, not illusion. Nothing in my life has made sense in so long.”
Her voice was muffled, since she was talking into her knees. Frowning, Cole leaned closer so he could hear. “I don't understand. Like what hasn't made sense?”
“Everything. My whole life. Since Gramps died. We're talking the material of a very bad made-for-TV sitcom.” She gave a shaky little laugh. The sound made his muscles freeze. It had the same sick-with-fear overtones as the glaze in her eyes. “I wake up at two in the morning to find my lights on. Only I don't remember turning them on. I come home from work to find my couches rearranged. Only I don't remember moving the furniture around. People tell me I missed meetings that I was told about. Twice, I found myself driving in the middle of the night—on a road I've never seen before, for reasons I can't remember for the life of me. Once I nearly crashed. I hear people talking at three in the morning. My CD starts playing Beethoven at five. Are you getting the general picture?”
She was trying to make it sound really funny. Cole was getting ‘the general picture’. Nothing in the picture was the stuff of comedy; he was beginning to comprehend why Regan looked so whipped, and it wasn’t as though he could shut her up. A finger in a dike wasn't going to stop a pent-up dam.
“The guys—”
“Honey, what guys?”
“Gramps’s partners. Reed, Dorinsky, Tra—”
“Those guys. Okay, what about them?”
“They’ve always been good to me—kind of like adopted family—but since Gramps died...They’ve done everything for me from throwing in a load of wash to making runs to the drugstore. All three of them have been as close as shadows, but how much help can you give your average lunatic? And last week was the last straw for even them. They showed up for dinner, all dressed in their Sunday best, and guess what?”
“What?”
She rolled out the punch line. “I had no idea I’d invited them for dinner. You ever try to stretch a TV dinner for four?”
“Regan—”
“The dinner clinched it. They made reservations for me at an inn. That’s what they were tactfully trying to call it. An inn. One of those places with a lot of grass, a lot of quiet and lots of itsy-bitsy bars on the windows.”
She laughed again, inviting him to share the joke. Cole hurled the rag down the aisle and then twisted her around so he could see her face. What he saw made a litany of cuss-words run through his mind, ripe enough to make a sailor blush. She had on her vixen smile, but the emotion swimming in her
eyes was pure liquid desperation. “So...you think you’re going nuts, princess. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“There’s sure lots and lots of evidence pointing in that general wacko direction.”
“I don’t know about all that stuff you said, but I know you just lost the old man—the only family you had. It seems to me there’s no way you wouldn't be going through a hard time.”
She nodded wearily. “Thanks, slugger, but you’re at the end of that line. I’ve had everyone from doctors to psychologists give me that excuse, and Lord, I’m sorry I brought this up. Let’s just forget it—”
“We will. In a minute, but since the ball’s on the table you might as well hear my two cents. I’ve known you for a while. Not well, but definitely for a while. And it’s always been my considered opinion that upstairs—” he tapped his head “—we’re talking problems. Serious problems. You think more like a woman than any woman I ever met. You’ve got a lot of screwy ideals and you’re looking for a breed of guy that died out in the Middle Ages. You’re a flag-waving dreamer—hey, wipe off that smile. This is a serious discussion.”
Actually, it was more a wan and watery curve of her lips than an outright smile, but Cole settled for what he could get.
“What I’m trying to tell you, Regan, is that in my expert opinion—and I’ve told you a hundred times that I’m an expert about women—you’re definitely a rare cut. That’s rare as in different, not rare as in nuts. You’re as sane and stable as I am, any day of the week. You hear me?”
“I hear you. Can I have a tissue?”
A tissue. Cole was sweating blood trying to find the right words to reassure her, and the woman wanted a Kleenex. Someplace on the plane, he was bound to have one. If he did, he couldn’t find it, so he carted back a rolled-up wad of toilet paper and watched her, most inelegantly, blow her nose.
“You’ve been wonderful.” Regan reached for a seat arm to try to lever herself up. “And I’ve been a complete pain in the keester—fainting all over you, then telling you tales. You didn’t sign on for this nonsense, and I’m sorry.”
“Regan—”
“I’m fine now,” she said cheerfully. “Which you can see.”
Cole could see that she’d made it to her feet more from stubborn will than strength. Strands of hair were wisping around her face, she was half undressed and she looked fragile, alone and vulnerable. Her chin was jutted forward—kind of like a tenacious bulldog. Kind of like a countess. Kind of like a woman who was going to salvage her pride if it killed her.
“Yeah,” he said, “you look fine now.”
“Do you still have things you want to check on the plane?”
“No. We can be in the air in a matter of minutes.”
Regan nodded. “I’ll help get your tools together, and—” She looked up suddenly. “My purse is somewhere outside! I have to—”
She ran flat smack into the finger he had pointed at her nose. “I’ll take care of it. You’re staying on the plane.”
“But—”
“You’re not going back out in that heat. I said I’d take care of your purse, and I will. Now stay on the plane.”
Amazingly she didn’t give him an argument, which struck Cole as the first break he’d had all day.
It was still blazing hot on the tarmac. Feeling sweat bead on his brow, he scooped all the debris back into her purse. A plastic brush. Seven tubes of lipstick. Two vials of perfume. A wallet, brushed suede. Powder. A plastic-wrapped Tampax, two brown bottles of herbal vitamins, three receipts for repairs on an Austin Healey. And last, a black velvet case.
He didn’t recognize the case, but he’d seen others like it. Because Thorne was a gem dealer, Cole had flown cross-country for the old man with no heavier cargo than a velvet case like this. He’d never asked for a look, never suckered in when Jake volunteered to ‘educate’ him. Cole liked money just fine, but he trusted cold cash. He wouldn’t know a diamond from cut glass and never could scare up an interest in a womanish field like jewelry. It always struck his sense of humor, though, that the company literally shelled out thousands of dollars to transport a cargo that never weighed more than ounces.
He shoved the case in Regan’s huge bag and snapped the catch. So she was carrying gems. That was no surprise with her background. It was what he’d encountered so far today that had been all surprises—and all of them bad. The state of Regan’s fragile health had been the first shock, particularly since the last time he saw her she’d been glowing with life, vivid and vital and crackling with feminine energy. The trouble with his plane had been the second incomprehensible puzzle. And third was the impossible spook-house tale that had spilled out of Regan when she keeled over. Ditsy was one thing, terrified another...and Cole couldn’t find a lick of sense in any of it.
He shoveled a hand through his hair. His father used to say that when too many things happened all at once, you stopped calling it coincidence and started asking why. His dad, though, had been a cop. So had his older brother. Both of them had been question-asking do-gooders with old-fashioned values like courage and honor. They were both heroes.
And because they were heroes, they were both dead.
Cole lifted Regan’s purse and straightened, feeling pain shoot to the back of his neck as sharp as a pinched nerve. The crick in his neck was a sure signal that it was time to cut and run.
It had taken him years to master the art of cutting and running, years to void out the values he’d been raised with...but certain things had made those lessons come easily. He’d blown apart when his dad died. So had the rest of the family. His mother had broken, sure as a snapped reed, and only lasted a year after the second funeral. And Sam, young and brash and bright as a silver dollar, had nearly lost it to a bottle before he was even old enough to buy liquor.
Cole could remember pain so rough he couldn’t climb out from under it. And enough was enough. He didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. There were going to be no more heroes in the Shepherd family. After years of practice, he finally had cowardice down to a science.
Occasionally, he had a rare twinge of conscience. Occasionally, it wasn’t all that easy to walk away. Once in a blue moon, for instance, he might run across a woman who was trying so hard to be funny when the whole world was crashing around her, and she looked scared and alone, and the instinct to wrap his arms around her was damn near paralyzing.
A gentleman, likely, would have given into that very bad, very stupid, very dangerous urge.
Not Cole.
He hefted her purse in the door, headed for his tools and then anticipated a quick goodbye to Hiram, the airfield’s owner. Really quick. In a matter of hours—with any luck—he planned to have dropped his cargo off in Arizona and have the King Air winging for home.
The bad luck running through his day so far had only one source. Regan was trouble of the capital T, complicated and tangling variety. Worse than that, Cole had the nasty suspicion that she was in trouble, to boot.
Thank heavens she was none of his business.
CHAPTER THREE
The plane’s wing dipped in silver when Cole turned into the sun. Regan leaned sideways, straining against the seat belt. Below, there seemed nothing but scrub-brushed hills, steep-sided mesas and a long, rough expanse of red desert. In startling contrast to the primitive landscape, though, the thin white ribbon of the landing strip appeared far ahead.
“Hey, princess?”
“Hmm?”
“If I’d known you were going to get this excited about a patch of desert, I’d have offered—years ago—to show you my bedroom in the dead of summer when the air-conditioning’s on the fritz.”
She kept her nose pressed to the glass. “Believe me, my heart races at the thought of seeing your bedroom, slugger. Next time you have a fresh roll of film, don’t hesitate to send me a photograph.”
Even without looking, she could feel Cole’s grin. “One of these times I’m going to catch you without a fast come-back.�
��
Regan hoped not. For the last hour of the flight, she’d worked harder than a ditch-digger to keep up with Cole’s nonsense. The steady barrage of sexual innuendos was pure decoy, she suspected. He was testing her. And she’d done her absolute best to act perky and quick and above all, convincingly normal.
Cole seemed to be nicely fooled.
Fooling herself was a trickier proposition. Her ditsy state of mind had become a familiar albatross, but her state of emotions had always been dependable. Yet this afternoon, on a godforsaken airstrip in Kansas, a sweating, swearing pilot had rocked her emotions in a way she still couldn’t believe.
Until his complete attention focused on the job of landing, Regan didn’t risk looking at him. Then she rested her cheek against the headrest and musingly studied her fill. Before leaving Kansas, Cole had exchanged his sweat-soaked black T-shirt for a green one with the sleeves cut off. Appropriate attire for a heathen and a hedonist. His right arm was a sleek, smooth ridge of tanned muscle, his hands big and dusted with crisp dark hair. There wasn’t a soft plane on his body. Between the dark aviator glasses, snug jeans and don’t-give-a-damn slouch, Cole looked like the prime example of the kind of man all mothers lectured their daughters about.
I don't understand you, Cole Shepherd.
Regan had grown up with men, worked with men, had learned early in life to handle herself around the male of the species. None of the rules she knew seemed to apply for Cole—or they hadn’t earlier this afternoon. She had given herself the obvious excuses for confessing her troubles to a relative stranger. She’d been sick, impossibly weak, exhausted and scared—six weeks of pent-up scared.
Those excuses were all true, just not the complete truth. She’d been shook-up. But she’d been far more shaken by Cole than any dizzy spell. Slugger was like turning over a sharp, jagged piece of volcanic kimberlite...and discovering a rough diamond.
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