by Gayle Wilson
He walked to the car he had rented at the Charlotte airport and climbed in without looking back. He was aware almost subliminally as he turned the wheel to pull onto the unpaved drive that Sinclair was standing in the doorway of the workshop, watching him.
And he knew, because they had once been as close as brothers, that the far-seeing gaze of those blue eyes would follow his car until it had disappeared into the twilight haze that gathered over these ancient mountains.
Some things never change.
Chapter One
The woman known as Beth Anderson lifted her hand from the key she’d just inserted into the ignition to adjust the rearview mirror of the SUV, pretending to check her makeup. As an added bit of play-acting, she touched her index finger to the small indention in the center of her top lip as if wiping away a smudge of lipstick.
Not that she could see her lip, since the mirror was focused on the line of cars behind her in the grocery store parking lot. And there was nothing suspicious about any of them. No one suspicious.
With the late-afternoon heat, there was almost no one in the parking lot at all, which made her feel more than a little foolish. It was a feeling she was becoming accustomed to.
She reached up and readjusted the mirror, putting it back into driving position. Old habits die hard, she thought. In this case, it was more like a resurrected habit. Resurrected from a life that was long dead.
She couldn’t remember making such a conscious effort to be aware of her surroundings in years. All week long, however, she’d had the sensation that someone was watching her. Maybe even following her.
In the quiet, summer sombulance of Magnolia Grove, Mississippi, that was patently ridiculous. And that was exactly what she’d been telling herself since the first flutter of that “eyes on the back of her neck” feeling had drifted along her spine.
She’d been out of the game too long for anyone to be interested in her. Her current position as the junior partner in a two-person law firm had once or twice evoked an angry response from someone she’d gone after in court. No one, including Elizabeth herself, could believe that any of her current cases might generate enough heat to cause someone to trail her around.
The whole thing was ridiculous. There wasn’t a single, solitary reason under the sun for anyone to be remotely interested in her daily routine.
Routine. The word reverberated in her consciousness, producing a nagging sense of guilt.
That was one of the first things you were taught. Never establish a routine. Vary your route to and from work. Vary the times you travel it. Vary everything in your existence so that no one can know where you’ll be or what you’ll be doing at any given moment of the day or night.
She was a little amused at the clarity of her memory. The problem with following those instructions, even if there had been any legitimate reason for doing so, was that there was only one route from her office to the bungalow she’d bought here three years ago. And she didn’t exactly set her own hours. She could vary the time she headed home, as she had today, but she was the one who opened the office every morning, promptly at nine o’clock.
She didn’t live her life by a routine, she thought, as she released the mirror to turn the key. She had slipped past routine and straight into rut. Small-town rut.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, she told herself determinedly, backing quickly out of the parking place. She had had enough excitement to last her a lifetime. All she wanted now was peace and quiet.
Not exactly all, she admitted with a touch of bitterness as she guided the car out onto the two-lane. Because after all, peace and quiet Magnolia Grove offered in abundance. As for the other…
What was it that Paul Newman had said? Why settle for hamburger when you have steak waiting at home? The analogy didn’t quite fit her situation, but she hadn’t met anyone in Magnolia Grove remotely interesting enough to compete with her memories.
And that’s a hell of a note, she acknowledged.
Maybe that’s why she’d been imagining someone following her. Loneliness. Routine. Rut. Boredom.
All of which were why she was here, she reminded herself. This place ranked at the top in the all-time boredom ratings. That’s exactly why she had chosen it. Just because she was now having some kind of midlife crisis—
Midlife? Her eyes left the road, lifting to the mirror. Although she had to shift her position in order to accomplish it, this time they examined the reflection of her face, which was reassuringly the same.
Slightly crooked nose, hazel eyes, faint chicken pox scar on her left cheekbone. And, she assessed critically, only a few more lines around her eyes than had ever been there before.
Thirty-four was hardly “midlife.” Even if this peculiar sensation of being watched was the product of some sort of dissatisfaction with her present existence, she couldn’t legitimately put it down to middle-age angst, thank God.
Her gaze returned to the blacktop stretching before her. Heat waves rose from the asphalt to shimmer and distort the horizon. There wasn’t another car in sight. A quick glance in the rearview mirror revealed there was no traffic behind her either.
Nobody was following her. Nobody was the least bit interested in anything she was doing. The idea that someone might be was probably just wishful thinking.
And that’s pretty pathetic.
Her mother used to say, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.” She had wanted peace and quiet and security. And now that she had it…
Pretty damn pathetic, she thought again, pressing her foot down on the gas pedal to take advantage of the long, deserted straightaway that stretched in front of her.
SOMETHING WAS SUBTLY different about the house. She had known it as soon as she opened the back door. Certainly by the time she’d set the groceries she’d picked up on the way home down on the counter.
Her eyes sought the light on the answering machine first, but there were no messages. Even if there had been, that wouldn’t have triggered whatever she was feeling.
She was sensitive to atmosphere, as most women were, but she certainly didn’t claim to be clairvoyant. Whatever change she sensed here was physical. Something had been moved, perhaps, so that its being out of place made the room feel strange. Or maybe it was a smell. Something that was different from the normal aromas of her home, so familiar that usually they would go unnoticed.
Her gaze traveled slowly around the room. She had opened the kitchen curtains before she’d left for work this morning. Late-afternoon sunlight spilled through the windows over the sink, slanting across the checkerboard pattern of the black-and-white tile floor. Its brightness seemed to belie her uneasiness, which despite any tangible cause was increasing by the second.
She glanced through the doorway that led into the dining room. It was darker in there, at least beyond the reach of the sunlight pouring into the kitchen. Its reflection made the worn hardwood floor just beyond the open doorway gleam.
Nothing in the dining room seemed out of order. No more than it had in here.
She laid her car keys down beside the sack of groceries and took a step toward the front of the house. As she did, it occurred to her that the smart thing to do would be to go outside, to get into her car and to drive back into town to the sheriff’s office.
And tell him what? Something isn’t right at my house. I don’t like the way it feels.
She could imagine what a charge the deputies would get out of retelling that story. The sheriff would probably send someone back with her, and when they discovered there was nothing here…
She made her feet take another step and then another, crossing the kitchen with determination if not alacrity. There was no reason for this apprehension, she reiterated doggedly. It was ridiculous. No one knew she was here. And no one here knew who she was.
She had changed her name. Changed her appearance. Changed her life. She wasn’t about to go through any of that again because something about this place was suddenly giving her t
he willies.
She stopped at the dining room door, reaching out to flick the switch for the overhead light. As it scattered the darkness to the periphery of the room, nothing out of the ordinary was revealed.
She took a deep, calming breath. The comforting smell of lemon oil surrounded her. And underlying that—
Her eyes found her collection of antique decanters on the sideboard. One of them was open. Its crystal stopper lay on the polished surface of the buffet. And a tumbler was missing from the silver tray beside it.
At least now she had a rational explanation for what she had been feeling since she’d entered the house. Someone had been here. Or was here.
And judging by his choice of that particular decanter, she knew who. Maybe she had changed everything else about her life, but she still kept the best whiskey she owned in the Waterford. Routine.
“What the hell are you doing here, Rafe?” she asked, not bothering to raise her voice. Wherever he was, he would have been watching her since she’d entered the kitchen.
“You’ve cut your hair.”
He always noticed things like that. Maybe too much. Still, the fact that he had noticed, that it mattered enough to him to mention it, caused an unwanted thickness in her throat.
She had spent a very long time without anyone around to notice those things. Not her hair or her clothes or the condition of her soul.
From force of habit, her hand lifted, fingers spread, to rake the chin-length hair back from her face. When she realized what she was doing, she forced her hand down, away from the strands that had once been long enough to tangle around his bare, sweating shoulders as they made love. Long enough to occasionally catch in his early-morning whiskers, the feel of them so sweetly abrasive against her skin.
At the memory, a jolt of sexual heat seared mercilessly along nerve pathways that had seemed atrophied. They weren’t. Painfully, unexpectedly, she knew that now.
“What are you doing here?” she asked again, ignoring those unsettling emotions.
He always managed to suck her in that way. Noticing. Caring. Being aware.
So damn aware. Aware of every aspect of her existence, as no one in her entire life before she’d met him had ever been.
Steeling herself to face him, she walked across the dining room and through the wide double doorway that separated it from the living room. She always kept the French doors open between the two, so that they were really one.
Which meant, she supposed, that after more than five years, she was once more in the same room with Rafe Sinclair. Something she had thought would never happen again.
“And you’ve lost weight,” he added softly.
His voice had come from the shadows near the fireplace. He was standing in the darkest corner of the room, and with the drapes pulled against the force of the afternoon heat, it was very dark indeed.
His left arm was lying along on the top of one of the built-in bookcases that flanked the small fireplace. Sometime in the past a tenant had painted them a glossy white. That paleness provided a stark contrast to the dark gray shirt he wore. It was long-sleeved, buttoned at the cuff, despite the heat.
As her eyes gradually adjusted to the room’s dimness, she was able to discern other details. In his left hand, the one resting atop the bookcase, he held the tumbler that had been missing from the sideboard. It was still half-full.
His right arm hung loosely at his side, the fingers of the hand curled slightly inward. He seemed perfectly relaxed, exuding the same aura of confidence that had always been such a part of him.
She hadn’t found the courage yet to look at his face. She would have to, of course, but she needed a few seconds to prepare.
He had had that time. He had obviously been watching her since she’d come in through the back door. The place where he was standing gave him the perfect vantage point to do so.
His position had been carefully thought out. That was a lesson he had taught her—to use every advantage your adversary allows. He had given himself both time and opportunity to study her, while she had been completely unaware of him. Unaware and unprepared.
Except she hadn’t been. He had at least played fair in that respect.
That’s why he’d poured the whiskey. Why he’d left the decanter unstopped. To let her know he was here. She just hadn’t figured it out as quickly as she should have.
Out of practice, she acknowledged.
“I asked you a question,” she said instead of responding to his comments about her appearance.
That was certainly none of his business, but that wasn’t why she didn’t respond. There was something too personal about discussing those things with him. Too near an intimacy neither of them wanted.
“Griff came to see me.”
Of all the things he might have said to her, that was the last she would have expected. Rafe had made it as clear to Cabot as he had to her that the part of his life that had included them was over and done. She had gotten the message. Maybe Griff had a thicker skin.
“About what?” she asked, beginning to get her equilibrium back.
Her first reaction to his presence had been strictly visceral. Given their history, that was probably inevitable. It didn’t mean she couldn’t bring her intellect to bear on the reason he was here.
All she needed was a bit of detachment. Surely after nearly six years that would be possible.
“Someone at the agency passed along a security alert. They think Jorgensen may still be alive.”
She tried to decide from his tone what he felt about that. As always, it was impossible to read anything from what he’d said. Not unless he wanted her to.
“Griff thought you should be made aware of the possibility,” he continued.
Griff thought you should be made aware…
“So why didn’t he call me?”
“I assume because he doesn’t know how.”
“You did.”
There was no answer. In the dimness she watched as he brought the glass to his lips and took a long swallow of her whiskey. She wondered, feeling slightly vindictive, if he needed it.
“So how did you know how to find me?”
The more important question was, of course, why would you still know how to find me?
“I know how your mind works.”
She thought about that for maybe ten seconds. “That’s not an answer.”
“I trained you.”
“Don’t you think I might have learned anything after you left?”
There was a small movement at the corner of his mouth. “Probably not.”
She resisted the urge to tell him to go to hell. At least she had learned when he was deliberately goading her.
“Okay, so now I’m aware that the company thinks Jorgensen could be alive,” she said. “Anything else?”
“I like your house.”
“A little place in the suburbs. Isn’t that what we all dreamed of?”
“Is it? What you dreamed of, I mean.”
You’re what I dreamed of. As much as she hated admitting that, she could no more have stopped the thought from forming than she could have stopped herself from entering this room once she had known he was here.
“I guess that would have depended on which day you asked me,” she said.
“How about today?”
Inexplicably the tightness in her throat was back. She couldn’t think of a single sufficiently cutting thing to say to him.
“I have to put my groceries away,” she said instead, the suggestion that he should leave so she could get on with it obvious.
He let the silence lengthen a moment before he broke it.
“They’re wrong, but don’t take any chances. This may be someone copycatting Jorgensen’s agenda. Which might mean they are also targeting his enemies.”
“Then why should he be interested in me? I didn’t have anything to do with Jorgensen.”
“I did. That would have been enough for him. Whoever this is—”
�
��Couldn’t have found me,” she broke in. “Not if Griff couldn’t. And if you’re so concerned, why take a chance on leading him to me?”
“I wasn’t followed.” He was obviously amused by the idea.
That wasn’t based on arrogance, but experience, and as such, she accepted it. Actually she hadn’t been worried about Rafe leading him—whoever he might be—to her. She was more curious about why he had come, especially in person. Despite the excuse he had just offered, there must be something more to this visit.
Wishful thinking? She denied that idea, too, as soon as it was born. She had a perfect right to be curious about why Rafe Sinclair would all of a sudden show up on her doorstep after an absence of nearly six years.
“So what are you doing now?” she asked. “Working for Griff?”
“You know about the Phoenix?”
“Rumors,” she said, choosing the word with care. She didn’t want her feelings about that to be evident.
“They invited you to join.”
They hadn’t, but since he didn’t seem to know they hadn’t, she couldn’t see any point in telling him.
“Did you?” she countered.
He laughed. The sound, low and pleasant and so damned familiar, evoked more memories.
“I think I’m too old to play hero. Somewhere along the way it all seemed to lose its charm.”
Somewhere along the way. And she knew exactly where that had been.
“I’ll let you get back to your groceries,” he said.
In spite of the fact that she had made that suggestion only seconds ago, perversely she had discovered she wasn’t ready for him to leave. Not yet ready to let him walk out of her life for perhaps another six years. Perhaps forever.
That would be the smart thing to do, of course. Just let him walk away. Where Rafe Sinclair was concerned, however, she had never managed to do the smart thing. Why start now?
“Have you eaten?”
