He carefully didn’t mention the idea to Regan that he thought she could be drugged. He’d know the truth when he had the stuff analyzed in Chicago; what to do then was a decision down the pike. For now, he saw no reason to scare her. He didn’t mention drugs in any way. He just looked at her as if he were suggesting conducting an intellectual experiment for the fun of it.
“Shepherd?”
“Yeah?”
“You have no idea how comforting it is to find someone who’s even more paranoid than I am,” she said softly.
Cole stashed the small bag of her vitamins and cosmetics on the plane. He spent another hour gathering his few things together and checking out the King Air. When he finished and went in search of Regan, he found her swimming laps in the pool.
She climbed out breathless and pink skinned—and half naked. Her maillot was modest enough in design, but stark wet, it clung to every curve. Her tiny nipples pressed against the fabric when she reached up to wring out her hair. “You sure you don’t want a quick swim before you go? It’s wonderfully invigorating.”
Watching her was invigorating enough. Regan swam the way she did everything else, with grace and speed and an insuppressible love for life. Cole imagined that passion for life unleashed in bed—his bed—and felt Charlie respond, fast and hard.
It was best, definitely best, that he was leaving. “No swim for me, but I do have time for a quick lunch. How about if I put something together while you catch a shower to warm up?”
“Sounds good. Especially the part about you doing KP.”
She grinned—a sassy, cheeky grin that lingered in his mind even after she disappeared through the courtyard doors into her bedroom. God, she had nerve. More unpredictable nerve and more brass than any ten women he’d known. He still didn’t believe her threat to ‘jump’ his bones if he stuck around. At the time, of course, her teasing had had the purpose of sending him on his way.
But the threat was still making him nervous.
She made him nervous.
In another hour, Cole reminded himself, that wouldn’t be a problem. He hiked toward the kitchen and produced a quick stack of tuna fish sandwiches. When she hadn’t reappeared by noon, he didn’t think that much of it. A fast shower for a woman was always longer than a fast shower for a man.
He set the sandwiches outside on the patio, and sliced lemon for two tall glasses of iced tea. Still, Regan didn’t show. Worry crept up on him like the nag of a summer gnat. She knew he planned to leave. And how long could she want to soak in a shower when she’d spent half the morning in water already?
He fidgeted with the umbrella on the patio table—desert heat was starting to bake the white cement—then realized he’d forgotten napkins, and hustled back to the kitchen for them.
By then it was past twelve-thirty, and he’d had enough. With his jaw set, he strode through the feminine bastion of her bedroom to the bathroom and determinedly knocked. “Regan? Did you forget about lunch?”
There was no answer. He couldn’t hear a sound of any kind from the other side of the door. “Princess?”
Still nothing. He turned the knob, fully expecting a tongue-lashing for his intrusion. A cloud of warm, fragrant steam assaulted him first, so thick he could barely see. The room was as humid as a jungle and heavy with the scent of jasmine. Thick, emerald green towels hung neatly on a rack; the mirror and sink were dripping moisture. A powder blue bra and panties lay on the thick white carpet. The tub, like the sink, was made of a rich malachite, almost as green as her eyes.
Cole noticed the details from his peripheral vision. His focus lanced on the small figure in the tub, and his heart stopped.
She hadn’t chosen a shower, but a bath, and before climbing in had tied her hair up in a ribbon. Tendrils had sneaked free and were floating in the water. Her cheek lay against the malachite edge, and the water level was lapping at her chin. Her limbs were submerged, her skin whiter than paper, and her eyes were closed.
Faster than he’d ever moved—and twice in the past few days, the same small blonde had caused him to move faster than sound—he surged forward. Too scared to breathe, he grabbed her hand, felt for a pulse.
The beat was slow but definitely strong. Only she didn’t move. Her hand simply splashed back in the water. He had no idea if she was unconscious or simply asleep. All he knew—all he could think—was that a few more inches of water and she would have drowned.
“Come on, come on, wake up for me.”
She wouldn’t. Her skin was slippery; she must have put oil in the bath. And she was complete deadweight in the water. Cole flicked the drain, snatched the two green towels from the rack. “Come on, honey. You have to help me. We have to get you out of here.”
He bent over, soaking his sleeves as he reached under her arms to pull her up. Water sluiced down her, down him, as he wrestled her limp weight to a standing position. No help. Her eyelids fluttered once, but then she simply pitched toward his chest. “Dammit, princess...”
The towels were useless. He couldn’t dry her and hold her up at the same time. For a minute he froze in indecision—she obviously wasn’t walking anywhere, but her skin was so slick and slippery that he was terrified of carrying her for fear of dropping her. In the end, there was no choice. He scooped her up, with one hand hugging her bare bottom and the other bracing her spine.
The sudden cool air of the bedroom raised gooseflesh on her skin, but the change in temperature didn’t waken her. Nothing woke her. Not when he laid her in the smooth coral sheets of her bed, not when he awkwardly dried her skin with towels, not when he swore at her, lowly, angrily. He told her she was more trouble than fifty women put together. He told her that a lot of hero types lined up and signed up for this kind of saving-damsel action—but not him. He told her that if she’d been hurt, he would have killed her. He told her that he still might kill her—by slow strangling—if she didn’t wake up, perfectly all right. Soon.
He told her a lot of lies, aware of her soft white breasts, but not wanting to be. Aware of the nest of springy blond curls between her legs, but not wanting to be. Aware she had a tiny black mole on the inside of her right thigh, and a dimple at the cleft of her fanny. When her skin was finally dry, he tossed down the towels, rolled her onto the dry side of the bed and, still swearing, covered her with a virginal white blanket.
And then he sat.
The first time she woke was seven hours later.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Regan was hiding in a cloud. It was a sheltering place, softer than the wings of a dove, where she was free to rest without fear. No one could find her here. No one could harm her.
She didn’t want to leave her special place. There were people surrounding the cloud, people coaxingly calling her name. One of them frightened her. A man, with a false face. Behind his smile, there was evil. Behind his eyes, there was danger. In a blurry dream, she saw him lovingly hug her... and then saw his face twist when he turned away. In the dream, she told herself to go out and confront him, to pull off his false face and discover the truth...but she wasn’t ready. She was too afraid, too exhausted, and hidden in the cloud she was safe and protected and warm.
Gradually, though, something pushed her toward temporary wakefulness. A pressure in her lower abdomen. Not hurtful. Just persistent.
Her eyelids fluttered, drooped. In the vaguest way she became aware of lamplight, the tick of a clock, the cuddle of a blanket under her chin. Then, that pressure on her kidneys again.
Through weighted eyelids, her vision blurred on the familiar salmon drapes in her bedroom. It was nearly dark out, surprising her, and her white cushioned chair was in the wrong place—pushed next to her bed. And something was in it. Something huge, that jerked toward her the instant she raised her hand.
“God, do you know how scared I’ve been? Are you okay?”
She recognized the rough-timbred baritone. It made her smile. It was the same voice that had wrapped her in that warm, sensuous cloud, safe from dragons, prote
cted from harm. There was nothing she couldn’t tell that voice, nothing she couldn’t share. “Need...”
“Okay. Just tell me. Water? You want water? Are you thirsty?”
Her lips tried to form the words, but her tongue was so sleepy. “Need...”
“Food? You need food? Are you cold? Hot? Dammit, don’t go out on me again—”
“Need... bathroom.”
“What? Oh.” Cole scraped a hand through his hair. His head whipped around the room, searching for a robe or shirt to cover her. Nothing in sight. He jogged toward the closet and immediately spotted something white.
By the time he’d grabbed the scrap of robe and turned around—it couldn’t have been seconds—he was facing her small white fanny disappearing into the bathroom. He chased as far as the doorway, then hesitated. “If you got that far, you’re awake, right? So I’m not coming in. I’m just standing close here in case you need some help. Don’t pull any stupid modesty on me, princess. If you’re dizzy, I expect you to shout out. And I’ve got a robe here, so nobody’s going to see anything—”
She walked back out, brazen and bare as a wood nymph, and blessed him with an ethereally sensual smile. She murmured seductively, “Hi, slugger.” And fell into his arms.
Cole checked her pulse on the hour, every hour. It was slow and steady. Her temperature was normal. The texture of her skin was warm and dry, and the color pink. He had enough pilot’s first aid training to recognize the signs of shock. She had none. He checked her eyes—the pupils hadn’t rolled back. Regan wasn’t unconscious.
She was just sleeping. Sounder and harder than rock—as if she hadn’t slept in a month, as if her body were desperate for rest. And Cole couldn’t stop remembering that this morning was the first that she hadn’t taken one of those vitamins. He couldn’t stop remembering the look of her porcelain-white face against the malachite bathtub. He couldn’t stop thinking, she could have drowned.
Through the early-evening hours, the telephone drove him crazy. Hannah called, wanting to know how long Regan planned to stay and if she wanted the house caretaken after she left. Cole had no idea. Reed called, then Trafer. Both, on reaching him instead of Regan, tried to quiz him on her ‘state of mind’. By then Cole wasn’t about to trust her Dutch uncles—hell, he wouldn’t have trusted her own mother. He told them both that Regan was hunky-dory and hung up.
Sam was the last call. His brother, not surprisingly, wanted to know why he wasn’t home. Although it went against his grain to worry Sam, Cole had no choice but to lay out the whole picture—the gems, the journals, the thief, his fear that the King Air had been deliberately delayed to give the thief time, her behavior, his paranoid suspicion that she was being drugged that turned out now not so paranoid. It came out a-tumble. But it had to come out. Cole couldn’t forecast whether he was going to be home in a matter of hours or whole days. There was no leaving until Regan’s health was assured, but getting her vitamins analyzed in a lab was too critical to wait. He wanted to send them air express to Sam, and in the meantime the King Air was still sitting here.
Sam kept saying, “Good God.” And then, “Forget the air express. I’ll have either Richardson or Samuels fly down the Piper tomorrow. That’ll leave you wings. Just have the package on board the King Air. Then it won’t matter if you’re not around. And you know I’ll take care of the lab. I’ll call some old contacts of Dad’s.” And then, “What on earth have you gotten yourself into?”
Sam’s was the last phone call. After that the house was quieter than a tomb.
Cole set up shop in the chair next to the bed. Long past midnight, he was still as tense as a spring-loaded trigger. Fear kept him awake. The look of her face in that bathtub was tattooed in his mind like a scar. What would have happened if he hadn’t been there? And what kind of bastard would have drugged her—her, Regan, who wouldn’t willingly hurt a soul? Rats motivated by greed were part of life, but this guy crossed into another dimension if he’d mickey with her mind, and why? For God’s sake, what was she dealing with here?
Fear kept him awake, but frustration slowly festered inside him, too. Every question that speared through his mind had the same bottom line. Somehow Regan had become his problem. Somehow he had become...involved.
Even the word alone raised dark, angry emotions in Cole that he thought were dead and buried. No one, in years, had had to warn him to be careful. He’d made caution into a life-style. That lesson had begun years before, when his father had played Good Samaritan to a stranger...and been gunned down in the street. Then his older brother, off duty, had stopped to help a little old woman with car trouble. The woman had been psychotic and slashed him to ribbons. Because no one else in the family could conceivably face it, Cole had made both identifications.
The first time had ripped out his soul. Not the second. By the second time, Cole had measured what honor was worth. The price was paid quickly for the players involved—they were dead. Unfortunately, they left people who were still alive. People who hurt, people who were blowing apart, people who didn’t know what to do with that much pain.
Except bury it.
At four in the morning she turned over and slowly, languidly stretched. Cole jammed down the mug of cold coffee he’d been sipping and leaned forward. “It’s about time.”
The fringe of pale lashes gradually lifted. Dewy green eyes focused on him. “Hi.”
“Forget it. I don’t want to hear any more of those damned dreamy Hi’s. This time you stay with me. And either you take in some kind of food, or I’m throwing in the towel and we’re calling the Mounties.” He had soup ready. He’d had soup ready for hours. Campbell’s vegetable, low salt, microwaved four times now on the off chance he could catch her awake when it was hot.
Either the threat of the Mounties or the promise of food stirred her to some level of wakefulness. She pushed up against the pillows, making the sheet fall to her waist. Cole figured God was playing a joke on him. The kind of joke he’d play on a monk who’d made a vow of celibacy in a Tibetan monastery.
Worse, her eyes were starting to close before he could coax in the first spoonful. There was no time to screw around with the sheet. He had his hands full just forcing the soup in. “You’re going to a doc in the morning,” he railed at her. “I don’t care if we have to drive a hundred miles, and I don’t care if I have to tie you to the hood of the car to make you agree. You’re going.”
Maybe she was sleeping again, but she was also taking in soup. Slowly, a sip at a time. And he kept talking in a really gruff, really rough way, not caring particularly if she heard him, only trying to keep her conscious enough to keep eating.
“I’ll stick around through that, make sure you’re okay. But that’s all. I don’t need this grief. When you keeled over on that airstrip in Kansas, I lost ten years of my life. When I saw you in that bathtub, I lost another thirty years. This is not fun, babe. You’re in trouble, but I can’t help you. I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out how to help you, and I come up with zip. You need a hero. It’s sure not me. I don’t take risks for anyone, and never risks where the odds are bad. Your odds are terrible. You’re a walking time bomb. You are also not my problem, and I want out. You got it? I’m leaving.”
She finished the soup. When he framed her hands around a glass of weakened lemonade, she gulped down half of that, too. He was extremely pleased with her.
Until she smiled, one of those dreamy siren smiles, murmured, “I love you, slugger.” And tipped the last of the lemonade into his lap.
She was out for the count again.
In the last dream, the best dream, Regan was standing in the midday desert sun. When she lifted her hand and opened her fingers, the five gems lay in the heart of her palm. Although the sun was hot and brilliant, the stones shone with far brighter fire.
The tanzanite was unmounted, cut round, and the same serene, profound blue of a sunset sky. The smaller ruby had an antique filigree clasp and was a dazzling claret-red. Shafts of light reflected f
rom the emerald-green tsavorite. The yellow sapphire was a huge uncut stone, the color of the sun’s soul. And the facets of her favorite—the rose topaz—glowed with sparkle and radiance as it lit from within.
The stones shot prisms of magical color on the bleak desert landscape, yet the greater magic was when she closed her hand and felt warmth, power, light. There was no denying the stones’ healing powers. She felt a slow, steady infusion of strength. She felt suffused with energy, a vital feminine energy that seeped through her whole body.
She felt, for the first time in ages, heel-clicking, song-singing, exuberantly wonderful.
Her eyes popped open.
For how long had her vision been wrapped in haze? For how long had she been afraid that there was something wrong with her mind, something wrong with her, that she’d never see the world again with clear, sharp eyes?
The haze was gone, her perceptions alive again, every sound and sight and smell distinct and precious. Lying still, she absorbed every detail around her—the pebbly finish on the white kiva fireplace in the corner, the faint fragrance of jasmine, the texture of smooth coral sheets against her skin, the glint of gold earrings on the bedside table. The digital clock read 10:00 a.m. Had she really slept an entire day? Strangely, her white wicker chair was pushed next to the bed. And on the floor, next to it, was a tray with three empty coffee mugs and a tipped-over bottle of Bufferin. Her white silk robe was a puddle at the foot of her bed.
And a derelict pair of worn men’s L.A. Gear sneakers lay next to it.
She twisted her head, only then conscious of the weight of the body next to her. Lying flat on his stomach, Cole was fully dressed except for his bare feet, his favorite ragged black T-shirt crumpled under his ribs, his hair wildly disheveled and his chin blanketed with bristly whiskers. There’d been a pillow. He’d thrown it on the floor. And he could have shared the ample fluffy comforter. Instead, he’d thrown himself on top of it.
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