by Judy Duarte
She’d meant the contact to be only one kindred spirit—because she did feel so close to him right now—offering comfort to another. There was nothing sexual intended, nothing more.
But the moment her lips touched his cheek, something more came into existence.
She blinked and drew her head back, looking at him. The next moment, she moved forward again and submerged herself once again in the kiss, but this time on his lips.
He caught hold of her shoulders, meaning to push her away. Gently but firmly.
But the intention somehow never came to fruition.
Instead, he found himself holding her to him. Holding his breath as well. And trying very hard to keep his head, his senses, from spinning out of control.
She tasted of innocence, of sweetness and of everything he’d felt he lost all those years ago, standing before that restaurant, holding on to Nick who was crying, doing his very best to be brave while everything inside of him was screaming No!
Any noble inclination Mark might have had of drawing away from this woman was aborted in the face of the sustenance she, wittingly or unwittingly, offered him. Like someone hovering above the scene he was watching, Mark cupped her face with his hands and kissed her as if the very act could somehow unaccountably save his soul.
He knew it wasn’t possible. His soul had been lost a long time ago.
He couldn’t stop kissing her anyway.
Chapter Six
The next moment, as he felt Brooke lean into him, Mark felt his restraints breaking apart one by one like so many brittle slats of a sun-bleached fence. Desire came out of nowhere, assaulting his senses, taking them completely by surprise. He hadn’t felt anything remotely like this since he’d first held Dana in his arms.
It was like coming out of a coma to discover that he hadn’t died, that he was still alive. That he could feel things that normal men felt.
And then he caught sight of his reflection in the window above the sink. Caught sight of the scar, livid and disfiguring, that zigzagged just beneath his eye.
He was a monster.
What the hell was he thinking, allowing this to happen? Was he trying to create his own version of Beauty and the Beast? If nothing else, this was unprofessional. Worse than that, it was morally wrong. Brooke was a young woman who had all of life before her, he was a jaded thirty-year-old man who, for all intents and purposes when it came to love, to home, hearth, family, had left all of that far behind him.
He had nothing to give her and she had every right to everything that life had to offer.
The sweetness of her mouth had seduced him for a moment, but only for a moment. His common sense had returned to keep him from compounding what was a grave mistake.
This time, when Mark took hold of Brooke’s shoulders, he gently pushed her away. Her eyes looked dazed at the sudden feel of air against her face. The soft lines of her lips were blurred from the imprint of his. Mark felt something tighten within his gut, but he held his ground. He had to.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”
She blinked, as if to clear her head. A smile slowly curved her lips. He found it incredibly sensual. “You didn’t. At least, not to begin with. I did.” And then a look that was a little akin to embarrassment touched her features. “Didn’t I do it right?”
“What?”
How could she possibly ask that question? The kiss had been so perfect, it had left him dazzled. If she had been older, or he younger, and not who he was…But he was who he was and too much of life had left its mark on him. There was no excuse for his allowing this to have happened. Her tongue darted along her lips, moistening them. Making something inside of him ache.
“I mean,” she began again, “I realize that you must be accustomed to women who are sophisticated and experienced—”
Mark stared at her. Was she apologizing? For perfection? How insane was that?
“That has nothing to do with it. And I’m not.” There were no women, sophisticated or otherwise, in his life and there hadn’t been, not since Dana. He made an effort to begin again. “There’s nothing wrong with the way you kiss.”
Confusion creased the brow beneath her jet-black bangs. “Then why did you stop? Why did you push me away?”
“Because—” The words wouldn’t come, wouldn’t arrange themselves into neat, precise sentences that explained everything. He fell back on the visual. That should have been enough, anyway. “Look at me, Brooke.”
She turned her face up to his, her gaze unwavering. “I am looking at you.” Unable to take it, he turned the offending part of his face from her. “Doesn’t my scar frighten you?”
“Not particularly.” She thought of their first meeting, but this time the color didn’t rise to her cheeks. This wasn’t about her reaction to him; this was, she had a feeling, about his reaction to himself. Brooke did her best to downplay the whole incident. “I admit that you did make me jump last night in the shop, but that was only because I didn’t think there was anyone else there.” Her eyes twinkled as she made an admission. “Sometimes when it’s late and I’m alone in the shop, I hear things.”
He didn’t follow her. “Things?”
She nodded. “Things that aren’t there. That go ‘bump in the night,’” she elaborated. She quickly finished washing the rest of the utensils, leaving them on the rack to dry. “I’m afraid that I have a very vivid imagination. I always have.” Turning toward him again, she took a towel and wiped her hands. “When I first saw you, I thought you were one of those people come to life.”
He tried not to notice how the light was playing across her face. How the soft wisps of her hair framed her face. How much he wanted to kiss her again and break all of his own rules.
“Those people?”
“You know the ones.” She leaned her hip against the side of the sink, her expression becoming a shade dreamy. “The romantic heroes in the classics. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.”
“I know who Heathcliff is,” he told her. It had been required reading in some high school English class he’d taken more than a decade ago. He couldn’t remember the teacher’s name, but he remembered relating to Heathcliff because the protagonist had been an introverted orphan, like him. “He didn’t have a scar.”
“Not on his face,” she allowed. “But his soul was scarred. That’s what made him do the things he did.” She looked up into his eyes. “I’ve always believed that it’s what’s inside, not outside, that counts.” She drew her courage to her, resisting the temptation to place her hand on his chest. She was a toucher by nature, but she sensed that he was just the opposite. That touching made him back away. “Is your soul scarred, Mark?”
If the words had come from anyone else, he would have said they were empty platitudes said for form’s sake. But he felt Brooke genuinely believed what she was saying to him. She was still young enough to believe in things like hope and goodness. She had yet to learn that they were myths, like Santa Claus and elves.
Mark looked at her for a long moment, weighing his answer.
Then finally he said “No,” because to say yes, to say that any human being over the age of fifteen had some kind of scarring of his soul unless he—or she—was very, very sheltered, would have led her to launch another volley of questions at him, none of which he wanted to answer. He’d already shared far too much of himself tonight.
“Brooke, are you interrogating our guest?” Mark turned to see that Derek was standing in the doorway. Had he been there long?
“No, Dad.” She lifted her head, a soft laugh escaping her lips. “Just making polite conversation.” The nod Derek sent his way told Mark the man knew better. And then he laughed as well.
“I apologize if she’s been asking things she shouldn’t. Brooke has an insatiable thirst to know everything.” There was no missing the affection that came into the man’s eyes as he looked toward his daughter. “I always told her that she would make a great private investigator, delving completely without sh
ame into places she had no right to be.”
“She was just making conversation,” Mark echoed her response.
It earned him a wink and a smile from Brooke, both of which astonished him as they homed in on and hit him right where he lived.
It was time to leave.
He didn’t want to overstay his welcome. And more than that, he needed time to pull himself together and do a little damage control. He’d committed a breach tonight, a serious breach of protocol during which he’d allowed the lines between his professional and personal life to blur. That was so wrong, he didn’t know where to begin. Because he hadn’t kissed her as the temporarily transplanted New York City would-be writer, but as himself. As Mark Banning, lost soul, veteran of the tragedies that life sometimes carelessly throws in your path, not once but as many times as it felt like it.
He was going to have to get that under control before he ventured on with this investigation. If he didn’t, there would only be trouble ahead.
Mark pretended to look at his watch. “Well, it’s getting late and I’d better get going.”
Brooke bit her lower lip. She’d frightened him off. Damn, she hadn’t meant to do that. She was going to have to work on not letting her impulses get the better of her. Still, she didn’t want to see him leave. She looked toward her father to say something, but it was obvious that to him, part of being a good host meant allowing your guest to leave when he wanted to.
So it was up to her. “But it’s not even ten o’clock yet.”
There was just a hint of a pout to her protest. Mark had a sudden urge to kiss the pout out of existence. He was leaving just in time.
“I want to get an early start in the morning.” He addressed his words to both Derek and Brooke. “I came across several sections in a couple of the books I bought that I want to digest a little more fully.” He took Der-ek’s hand, shaking it. “Mr. Moss, Brooke, thank you for your generous hospitality.”
“It’s I who should be thanking you,” Derek told him, returning his handshake. “It was a wonderful evening. You made me remember why I love this city so much.”
Brooke hooked her arm through Mark’s and began to walk him to the living room and the front door beyond. “Will you be stopping by the shop anymore?”
She was saying exactly what he wanted her to say. He felt no triumph. It was a little like the sensation he imagined fisherman felt about shooting fish in a barrel. The quota was guaranteed to be met but the feeling was far from satisfying.
“You’ve already been more than generous with your time.”
Was that a no, she wondered. Oh God, she hoped not. Brooke mentally scrambled for a way to make him return to the store.
“If you feel that way, you can dedicate the book to me,” she told him suddenly. “To me and to my father.”
The moment she uttered the words, she liked that idea even better. Her father deserved to have a book dedicated to him. He deserved to have a library’s worth of books dedicated to him. Over the years he’d done more than his share to help one struggling poet or short-story writer after another and had yet to gain any recognition for it. And he did love books so much.
Brooke opened the front door, then stopped and looked up at the somber man before her. She had a feeling that Mark Banning was not about to forget a promise he might make.
“A dedication,” he repeated. “I hadn’t thought about that. Sure, why not?” Another lie to add to the others, he thought.
Overjoyed, she had to restrain herself to keep from kissing him again.
“I really hope you decide to come back. To the bookstore,” she qualified, although if he came there, she meant to have him come to the house again, too. “I can’t begin to tell you how wonderful this has been for my father.”
The declaration surprised him. He hadn’t expected her to say that. “Your father?”
He watched as her brow furrowed ever so slightly beneath the silky black bangs. “Yes, he’s been so withdrawn lately. This evening has been wonderful for him. He’s so much more like his old self.” Taking Mark’s hands in hers, she literally beamed at him. He could all but feel the rays seeping into his being. “I can’t thank you enough.”
Gratitude always made him feel uncomfortable. And misplaced gratitude did the job that much more so. “There’s no need.”
“Oh, but there is,” she insisted.
She couldn’t remember when she’d last met a man as humble as this one. The flesh-and-blood heroes of her world were the poets and writers who came to give readings at the store, and, to a man, they were all full of themselves. This man was an incredible breath of fresh air.
“I believe that everyone should know when they’ve done something exceptional.” Afraid of being overheard, she slipped outside with Mark and pulled the door closed behind her. “Until you came along, my father had transformed from a sweet, brilliant, outgoing man to someone who spent hours just staring out the window. It was as if his soul had been stolen from him. As if he was waiting for something to return to him.”
That would be in keeping with the profile he’d mentally sketched out of his quarry. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Every time I tried to talk to him about it, to get him to tell me what was wrong, he would just put me off or say that I was imagining things again. But I wasn’t,” she insisted. “I know what I saw, and I didn’t see my father, just an empty shell he’d left behind.” And then she smiled again, her serious moment passing. He found the transformation almost hypnotic. “But you brought him back. You got him talking about what he loves. Thanks to you, he looks alive again.”
“It would have happened anyway,” he told her. And then he paused, his eyes on hers, another salvo of guilt threatening to hit him. This was his job, he reminded himself. There were a great many questions left that needed to be answered. He’d played roles before, taking on the guise of a friend, a confessor. This was no different, he insisted silently. “Any idea what might have made him change like that?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I know it has something to do with the funeral he went to.”
How much did she know, he wondered. She seemed too open to keep anything back if he asked. “Do you know whose?”
Brooke shook her head. Again that helpless, frustrated look came into her eyes. “He wouldn’t tell me. Said he would someday, when he could talk about it, but that I should give him a little time.” It seemed as if she was silently appealing to him for help. He grew more uncomfortable. “My father’s never talked like that before, either. I was always the first one he turned to, the first one to know whatever he knew. He shared everything with me.”
Brooke paused. She saw the hint of a grin on Mark’s lips. It had a way of blotting out all traces of the scar he was so self-conscious about. Had she said something funny? “What?”
Maybe it was the language of families, Mark thought. “You sound like someone I met recently.”
He’d almost said client. It had been a runaway case. A sixteen-year-old boy had asserted his independence, as well as his shortsightedness, and run away from home. It had taken Mark over three weeks of nonstop tracking to finally corner the boy in Dearborn, Michigan, more than a thousand miles from home. Broke, hungry and lost, the boy was ready to admit that independence on its own wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“She was saying the exact same things,” he told Brooke, “except that she was saying them about her teenage son.”
She supposed it did sound a little like that. Brooke lifted a shoulder, letting it drop carelessly.
“Maybe this is my father’s second childhood,” she allowed, then thought better of it, “but I really don’t think so. Something has him upset, very upset. He’s even letting the business slide, and he’s never done that before.”
“Maybe he thinks you’re old enough to handle it for him now.”
Maybe, but that wasn’t the point. “But tonight, dinner here with you was like old times.” She made an appeal to him, not like a
dreamy-eyed woman smitten with a handsome, mysterious stranger, but a daughter who loved her father and wanted him back again. “I don’t want to lose that, Mark.”
She was holding his hand, as if trying to seal him to a bargain. There was no way he could have refused her, even if the plan hadn’t been to turn up at the bookstore tomorrow to leech more information out of them, out of Derek, as he pretended to have more questions about this city of the seven hills that Brooke and her father were so passionate about.
That was another connection between Derek Ross and Derek Moss, Mark mused. Ross had been born here. He’d had family here. Granted there had been a twenty-five-year mysterious rift, but it would stand to reason that he would want to remain close by, in case there was ever an opportunity to mend that rift.
Mark eased into his own opportunity. He was beginning to think he should reduce the fee he was charging Tyler. Brooke was making it almost too easy for him. “Then you won’t mind if I come by the bookstore tomorrow and continue to browse around some more?”
“Mind?” she laughed. “I’ll even bring the coffee and cake.” It was a tradition her father had begun at Buy the Book long before the book chains had decided to incorporate small, trendy coffee shops beneath the roofs of their stores.
“I don’t need coffee and cake,” he told her. “Just make sure the books are there.” And then, because the look in her eyes required it, he added, “And you,” hating himself for doing it.
Because while it was true, while he did look forward to seeing her, he shouldn’t. He was leading her on. Once this case was solidly locked up, once he was certain that Derek Moss was Derek Ross and delivered him to Tyler, most likely he would never see Brooke again.
And she would be a little less innocent for it, discovering that men could lie for their own ends. Even to a face as pure, as compellingly beautiful and fresh as hers.
“I’ll be there,” she promised.
She slid the tip of her tongue along her lips, an unabashedly hopeful look in her eyes. He knew what she wanted. What he wanted, as well. But because he wanted it, he kept a tight rein on himself. So he leaned forward and brushed a fleeting kiss to her lips, then forced himself to walk away before anything more could come of the moment.
