He looked nothing like a spit-and-polish air force officer. Even less like the college senior she’d fallen for years ago. This Luke was a stranger, intent, unsmiling, his face stamped with a hard maturity she hadn’t taken time to notice before. Or that he hadn’t let her see before.
A sensation that was three parts regret and one part pure sex speared into her belly. If this Luke had climbed the stairs to the loft last night, she might have shed more than her jogging suit.
Both the thought and the sensation brought Dayna up short. It was tough enough cooing and kissing him in public. She’d be crazy to add the complication of sex to the mix.
“I wasn’t sure about your friend’s laundry arrangements,” she said, descending the last few stairs. “I left the sheet and blanket I used on the bunk.”
“That’s good enough.”
Whoa! He sounded as rough around the edges as he looked. That might have something to do with the blanket she spotted lying in a crumpled heap beside his chair.
“Did you spend the whole night in that chair?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Hey, don’t jump down my throat. It was your choice.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you saying you wanted me to join you upstairs?”
“No, that is not what I’m saying. But I suggest you try a little attitude adjustment while I go commune with Mother Nature.”
With that tart bit of advice, she exited the front door. Cool air scented with the tang of resin and perfumed wood violets greeted her. The spectacular view of the narrow lake and the castle ruins on the opposite side of the lake soothed the feathers Luke’s gruffness had ruffled.
Lord, what a setting! Everything inside her ached to walk down to the rocky shore, launch a boat and cut those deep, still waters with the blade of a paddle. She’d have to come back here some day. Maybe after she had the Wus safely tucked away in a safe haven in the States.
Her prickly mood evaporating, Dayna took care of her most pressing concern. She still had some toilet tissue left in her pocket from last night’s commune with nature. She’d used leaves and grass often enough, though, that it wouldn’t have mattered to her one way or another.
What did that say about her? Dayna wondered ruefully as she emerged from a screen of trees. Her suite at the hotel offered all the comforts of modern living. Big-screen TV. Jacuzzi tub. Well-stocked minibar. Yet she felt more alive here, more rejuvenated than she would have imagined possible after yesterday’s scare.
That was because of Luke, a nasty little voice in her head suggested. She owed him for hustling her away from the reporters. He knew getting back to basics like this would restore her balance. He should. They’d shared so many days and nights in similar outdoor settings.
One more chit to add to her growing debt, Dayna acknowledged. She’d thanked him yesterday for helping her through the attack. She’d have to ignore his foul mood and thank him for this.
Kneeling, she dipped her hands in the stream that whooshed and rippled over rocks on its way down to the lake. Whatever gave Scotland’s waters—and subsequently its whiskey—such a sharp, clean flavor was as good as a toothbrush for swishing away all traces of overnight fuzz. She scooped up more water, sloshed it over her face and walked back to the lodge with every pore tight and tingling.
Luke was waiting with a mug in each hand. The strings dangling over the sides of the mugs told Dayna she’d have to substitute tea for her usual morning infusion of black coffee.
“Is one of those for me?” she asked when he made no move to hand over a mug.
Cursing under his breath, Luke passed her the tea. He’d used to her brief absence unravel the twisted strands of desire and protectiveness that had kept him awake for most of the night.
Yet all it took was one glimpse of her wet, spiky lashes and scrubbed face to tie him in knots again. He hated the thought of driving her back to St. Andrews. Hated, too, the prospect of being relegated to a supporting role while she plunged once more into her mission.
Oh, hell. Who was he kidding? What ate at him from the inside out was the fact that Dayna would disappear from his life again once she and Callahan hustled the Wus aboard a plane for the States. So he wasn’t particularly gratified when she cupped the mug in both hands and tipped him a friendly smile.
“Much as I hate to admit it, you were right. I wouldn’t have gotten any rest at the hotel. I needed this isolation and quiet.”
At least the quiet had worked for one of them. Luke felt like yesterday’s garbage.
“Thank you,” she said. “Again.”
“You’re welcome. Again.” He didn’t know whether it was the kink in his neck or sheer perversity that made him add a terse kicker. “Although I hope you know I don’t want gratitude from you.”
“Something tells me I should let that pass. Obviously, you got up on the wrong side of the chair this morning.” Angling her chin, she slanted him an assessing glance. “But maybe we should clear the air. Why don’t you tell me what you do want from me?”
He opened his mouth, snapped it shut. “Damned if I know.”
“Liar.”
The taunt cut through his layers of frustration and stripped away any attempt at escape or evasion. She’d asked a direct question. He would give her a direct answer.
“All right. I want you.”
Her breath left on a hiss, but he took heart from the fact that she didn’t upend her mug and dump hot tea over his head. To be safe, though, Luke removed the mug from her hand and set it aside with his.
“Just when did you reach this epiphany?” she asked with more than a touch of sarcasm.
“Last night.”
Her expression of polite disbelief goaded him into a full confession.
“I spent half the night reliving those god-awful moments when all I could do was hold you while you clutched your chest. I’ve never felt so friggin’ helpless in my life. The other half…”
Luke shoved a hand through his hair. What idiot had said confession was good for the soul?
“The other half,” he continued roughly, “I spent battling the urge to climb those stairs, strip you naked and wipe out any memory but the feel of your mouth and hips locked with mine.”
Her lip curled. “So you wanted sex?”
“I wanted you. I wanted to bury my face in your hair. I wanted to roll you over and kiss the birthmark at the small of your back. I wanted to hear those little grunts you make when you’re about to climax.”
“I don’t grunt.”
“Yeah, you do, Pud. And you send me right over the edge every time.”
Yielding to the need that had clawed at him since she walked through the door a few minutes ago, Luke brushed a knuckle over the smooth curve of her cheek. She flinched, but didn’t draw away.
“Whatever else we did wrong,” he said with an edge to his voice, “we did that right.”
Dayna knew she should end this discussion, right here, right now. The problem was, she didn’t want to end it. The memories he stirred were too intense and too erotic to shove out of her head. She could almost feel his hands on her naked hips, hear the rustle of the sheets if he rolled her over as he’d just described.
The sensations that had stabbed into her when she’d come downstairs and seen Luke crouched by the fire returned with a vengeance. Her belly tightened. Her vaginal muscles contracted in a tight spasm.
“What if…?” She licked her lips, telling herself this was crazy, willing herself to stop this insanity. “What if I tell you I’ve been thinking about how good we were in bed, too?”
The light that leapt into his eyes had her planting a quick hand against his chest.
“In bed,” she reiterated. “Only in bed. As you said, we screwed up the rest of it.”
“We can do better this time,” he predicted with a confidence she didn’t share.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
She’d offered him her heart once. She wasn’t going to lay it out there again. But the strong, fast drum
of his heart under her fingertips was muddling her thoughts.
“If…and that’s a big if…we decided to up ante in this pretend relationship of ours, I’d want to play it the way we sold it to the press. One step at a time.”
“Agreed.”
He reached for her. Dayna stiffened her arm and held him at bay.
“It would just be sex, Harper. No commitment. No promises.”
His eyes narrowed, and for a moment she thought he was going to break off negotiations.
“All right,” he conceded after a pause. “We drive back to town. We get you to the cardiologist for your tests. We meet with Hawk. We take care of whatever business needs doing with Wu Kim Li. We deal with the media. Then we have sex. No frills. No hearts and flowers. No promises.”
It didn’t sound so great fed back to her like that, but Dayna dipped her chin. “Agreed.”
When he reached for her again, she folded her arm and got it caught between his chest and hers.
“Just to seal the bargain…” he said, burying his hands in her hair.
This was no kiss staged for the cameras, no skilled performance. This one was raw, elemental. He ground his mouth over hers. The bristles on his cheeks and chin scraped her skin, marking her.
Dayna returned the kiss, holding nothing back. They’d agreed to the terms. Each understood the new rules of the game. She could let go, unleash her hunger for his touch and his taste and his scent. Then count the hours until they made good on their bargain.
The deal they’d struck occupied a big slice of her thoughts during the drive back to St. Andrews.
It was still early enough that they hit the morning rush hour—such as it was. Vehicles were queued up to cross the stone bridge linking the towns of Leuchars and St. Andrews. The tide was on its way in, churning and eddying the waters of the River Eden as it pushed up the channel. No fishermen or boaters risked the treacherous tidal currents, Dayna noted.
She would have preferred to detour to the hotel to shower and change before her treadmill test but wasn’t up to running a gauntlet of inquisitive reporters. Luke delivered her to a side entrance of the hospital, parked the car and talked his way in on her interview with the cardiologist.
“Have you had a nuclear treadmill test before, Ms. Duncan?” the doctor asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
“It’s a quite simple procedure, really. We measure your heart rate and blood pressure at rest, insert an intravenous plug in your forearm and we start you walking. Moderately at first, then with gradually increasing speed and incline.”
He paused to hack for a moment. The cough and the pipe stem protruding from his pocket suggested the doc didn’t adhere to a healthy lifestyle himself.
“About one to one and a half minutes before you finish exercising, we inject a low-grade radioactive isotope into the plug and flush it with a saline solution to make sure it washes through your blood.”
Oh, great, Dayna thought. First she went down like the Berlin Wall. Now she would glow in the dark.
“We’ll then place you under a scanning camera to take pictures of your heart,” the cardiologist continued. “The images are fed into a computer, which reconstructs them as three-dimensional ‘slices.’ We let you rest for an hour, and take another series of pictures for comparison purposes. The entire procedure will take approximately two hours.”
She didn’t doubt her ability to maintain a steady pace, but she wasn’t a jogger or long-distance runner. “How long will I actually be on the treadmill?”
“Normally nine to ten minutes, but we’ll take you off immediately if you experience chest pains or other discomfort. Shall we proceed?”
Dayna had never thought of herself as a coward. She’d plunged through river gorges, chased a vicious killer through the back alleys of Istanbul and had once fended off an attack by Filipino terrorists. But the prospect of precipitating another bout of agony like the one she’d experienced yesterday made her throat go dry.
“I, uh…”
Luke’s hand threaded through hers. Ashamed to admit the comfort she derived from his warm grip, Dayna nodded.
“I’m ready.”
After an hour of prep and nervous anticipation, the ten minutes on the treadmill barely raised a sweat. The hardest part of the test, Dayna discovered, was lying absolutely still while the camera made excruciatingly slow passes back and forth across her chest.
After the first series of images, she breezed out of the camera room with a wide grin. Heads turned in the crowded waiting room. Recognition flickered on several faces. Dayna didn’t care. She had eyes for only one person.
“Piece of cake,” she exulted to a visibly relieved Luke.
“Do you have the results already?”
“Not yet.” She plopped into the chair beside his. “They have to shoot the resting images for comparative purposes, but the doc said everything looks good so far. Very good.”
“Way to go, Pud.”
Immensely relieved, Dayna settled back in the chair. She wasn’t home-free yet, she reminded herself. That vicious pain had stemmed from something. Or someone. But she felt more certain by the moment her heart hadn’t buckled in on itself.
After studying the various test results, the cardiologist confirmed her self-diagnosis. Dayna left the hospital feeling like a condemned woman who’d just received a pardon.
She was back in the game!
She delivered the news to Hawk after she and Luke arrived at his suite via the hotel’s kitchen entrance and service stairs.
“No arterial constriction or aortal anomaly they can determine,” she reported crisply. “They’d have to do an arteriogram to assess damage to the actual heart muscle, but the cardiologist is ninety-nine percent confident I didn’t sustain any. He wants me to follow up with my doctor at home, though, to try to determine the cause of the attack.”
“I think we have it,” Hawk replied. “The Edinburgh forensics lab confirmed the presence of a foreign substance in the champagne.”
“I knew it!”
“They haven’t pinned down the exact substance yet,” he advised, his face grim. “They think it’s an extract of oil from a rare species of orchid.”
“I was KO’d by a plant?”
“Not just any plant. This one has a name a mile long and only grows in a remote corner of Burma. Oil extracted from its leaves is very rare, very lethal when ingested and completely unobtainable in the U.K.”
“Burma, huh?” Her glance shot to Luke, zinged back to Hawk. “Doesn’t Burma border China? Which in turns borders North Korea.”
“Correct on both counts.”
An image flashed into Dayna’s mind of the masseuse, backed by her array of exotic oils.
“I think I know who might have brought that extract into the U.K.” Dayna’s mouth hardened. “If I’m right, sumo-mama is going down.”
“Sumo-mama?”
“Kim Li’s personal masseuse. She looks like a pregnant sumo wrestler on steroids. The woman is right there in the locker room at the clubhouse, waiting for Kim Li after every round with her table all set up. She always has a selection of exotic oils close at hand.”
“Looks like we’d better obtain a sample of those oils,” Hawk said.
Dayna thought fast. “The first round of the finals kicks off tomorrow. Sumo-mama should set up as usual and wait for Kim Li to finish her round. One pull of the fire alarm will clear the clubhouse long enough for us to gather some samples. Before we do that, though, we should review the hotel’s security tapes and talk to people in the kitchen. See if they can verify who had access to the champagne. The director of security…What was his name?”
“Woodhouse,” Luke supplied.
“Woodhouse can set up the interviews and tapes.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Hawk said, then pulled up short. “Oh, hell! Gillian’s due to arrive in a half hour. I need to meet her, explain you’re back on the job and put her on a flight back to the States.”
Yeah, right. Like Jilly was going to let that happen. Wishing she could be there to see the fireworks, Dayna waved him off.
“You take care of Gillian. We’ll handle things at this end.”
She didn’t realize she’d automatically included Luke in that “we” until he nodded in agreement.
“Go, Callahan. I’m sticking like glue to Dayna.”
Chapter 10
When Dayna and Luke let themselves into her suite, she went straight to the phone.
The message light was flashing. Reporters, she bet, eager to learn the details of her trip to the E.R. Ignoring the flashing red light, she asked to speak to the hotel’s director of security.
Woodhouse promised to verify who had uncorked and/or delivered the champagne and make that person available to speak with her. He also promised to review yesterday’s surveillance tapes of the kitchen, the wine cellar and the hallway outside her room.
“It might take an hour or two,” he cautioned. “The digitized images are fed to our corporate headquarters for storage. I’ll have to retrieve them from the server before I can run through them.”
“Give me a call when you do.”
“I will. And may I say, Ms. Duncan, we’re quite relieved to have you back with us.”
“I’m pretty happy about that myself.”
That done, Dayna dialed for her messages. She had twenty-seven stacked and waiting for her. She listened to the first five or six—all from reporters wanting to know what was behind her trip to the hospital yesterday and why she’d opted out of today’s events. Knowing she had to face them eventually, Dayna called the tournament’s public-relations director and set up a media conference at 4:00 p.m.
Since it was now only a little past one, that would give her plenty of time to meet with Woodhouse and to take care of the next items on her agenda. They included a shower, a change of clothes and sustenance, not necessarily in that order. Having missed breakfast, her stomach had begun making whiny noises.
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