He curled his hands into fists. The universe was testing him; that’s what it was. There was no other explanation.
“Here you go.” Jade pulled back the comforter and patted the mattress in an invitation his eighteen-year-old self would’ve killed to get.
Harley swallowed hard and made his way around the bed to his side. She was right. It was a big bed, and there was plenty of space. He just knew there wasn’t a bed big enough for it not to be a temptation with her so close by.
“Thank you,” he said, as he slipped under the blankets. Her sheets were butter-soft and smelled like lavender, just as she always did. It was almost enough to lure him into a state of comfort that would allow him to forget where he was and who was beside him.
Almost.
As it was, he lay on his back, every inch of him stiff as a board. He didn’t want to relax enough that he might brush against her under the sheets. He closed his eyes and tried to will himself to sleep.
Moments later, in the dark stillness of her bedroom, he heard Jade’s soft voice from beside him. “You know, I never thought I’d share a bed with you, Harley.”
His eyes fluttered open, but he kept them pinned on her ceiling fan as he chuckled. “No, me, neither. If I’d kept you out past eleven your father would’ve had me arrested. Keeping you overnight... I’d be dead.”
Jade laughed, too, the melodic sound bringing back memories of them in the back of his pickup truck, looking at the stars. He remembered lying there, gazing into those big doe eyes and feeling his heart slipping away to the smartest girl in school.
Against his better judgment he rolled onto his side now and looked at her. Even in the darkness he could see her facing him, her white-blond hair sprawled across her pillowcase. Her head was resting on her hands as she watched him with curiosity in her eyes. He longed to reach out and cup her cheek and let his thumb drag gently across her bottom lip. Instead, he balled his fists beneath his pillow.
“It was a mistake, you know.”
Harley frowned at her. “What was?”
“Choosing Lance.”
“I read about what happened with him, and his drug problem. I’m sorry about all that.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean that I hurt you, and I never wanted to do that.”
Harley wasn’t expecting an apology and he wasn’t sure how to accept it. “It was for the best.” He said the words, but didn’t believe them.
“Maybe so. Perhaps things happen the way they’re intended to. But lying here next to you after all this time makes me wish I’d gotten one last kiss before I let you go. I probably regret that more than anything else.”
Without thinking, Harley surged forward and pressed his lips to hers. He’d had those regrets, too, and now, having her so near, he couldn’t fight it anymore. He had to touch her, taste her, even if it was just to convince himself that his memories of her were wrong. She couldn’t possibly be everything he’d built her up to be in his mind. She’d become a fantasy because he couldn’t have her. The reality would no doubt disappoint him. He hoped that once the kiss was done he could put aside his attraction to her and focus on the case.
He couldn’t have been more wrong. Jade melted into his arms, moaning softly against his mouth. She wrapped her body around him, pulling him close to her. He could feel every inch of her curves as they pressed against him beneath the thin cotton of that nightgown. As one of his hands held her face to his, the other drifted down her side, stopping just as it reached the lacy edge of her pajamas. If he crossed that line, he knew there was no going back.
She was everything he remembered and more, his impulsive experiment backfiring in spectacular fashion. It took all he had to realize it and pull away.
The moment their lips parted, Harley felt reality start to close in on him. What the hell was he doing? He was here to protect Jade and find out what had happened at the hospital. Not to manhandle her and start something up between them that he might regret. Yes, it was just a kiss, but he could feel his grip on his self-control slipping away. The way she responded, the soft noises she made... He had to put some distance between them or things were going to go too far. He rolled away, grabbed his pillow and climbed out of bed.
“Where are you going?” Jade asked breathlessly.
“To the couch.”
Her face wrinkled with displeasure as she looked up at him from the bed. Everything about her beckoned him to come back. To cross the line. “It was just a kiss. You don’t have to go.”
Harley had been waiting for an invitation and this was it. If he could accept it. Instead, he shook his head and walked around the foot of the bed to the door. “Yes, I do.”
Without looking back at her, he marched down the hallway to the living room. He wrapped himself in the blanket and curled up on the couch so he would fit. With a sigh, he closed his eyes and wished for sleep.
The universe was definitely testing him. And it could kiss his ass.
Five
That kiss was a recipe for insomnia.
Jade was a fool for letting it happen, a fool for wanting it. But she did. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have started that ridiculous conversation. She would’ve closed her eyes and gone to sleep, keeping her hands to herself the way she’d promised. No, instead she’d pushed him until he broke, and it was everything she’d imagined a kiss with him could be. The reward was short-lived, though, as moments later she was alone in bed with a pounding heart and a liquid center.
Once Harley left for the couch, Jade had lain there staring up at the ceiling fan and trying to figure out what the hell she was doing. She was the one who’d broken it off back then. Teasing Harley with the goods she’d once deprived him of was cruel to them both. They had no business kissing, much less doing anything else. They’d both moved on from their high school days. A physical relationship between them would be nothing more than a complication she couldn’t afford, with him around 24/7 trying to protect her.
But at that moment, none of that had mattered. All she’d wanted was a kiss. A touch. To feel desired again after years of thinking she wasn’t enough for a man. Lance had stopped touching her after his car accident. It had been pretty serious, resulting in back surgery that would never really fix the problem or get rid of the pain. Months later, when she’d hoped perhaps they could get back to the way things were, he’d decided the rush of popping a roxy was better. He hadn’t told her that, though. He’d said he hurt, or just plain avoided the subject. He’d stayed up late, knowing she went to bed early. He’d pulled away whenever she came too close.
It might’ve been a stupid thing to do, but last night had felt damn good. It had made her feel like a desirable woman for the first time in a long while.
This morning, she was a sleepy desirable woman.
Normally she went straight to the shower, but she needed some caffeine first. Jade pulled on her chenille robe and nearly crawled from the bed to the living room, where she found Harley on the couch, already awake. He actually looked as though he was well into his day. He was fully dressed, in a pair of pressed khaki pants and a dark blue shirt, and surrounded by paperwork he was reading through. There was an empty coffee mug in front of him on the table and his blanket was folded neatly over the back of the couch. Apparently he hadn’t slept much, either.
“Good morning,” she said, as she moved past him into the kitchen.
“Good morning.”
Jade poured herself a cup of coffee. When she turned around, Harley was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She eyed the fully dressed man who dominated the room with his presence. “Did you not sleep at all? That couch is miserable, I told you.”
“I slept enough for me. I’m usually awake by four, anyway. If I can get four or five hours a night, I’m good. I’ve survived on less.”
Jade shook her head. “I’m jealous. If I don’t get eight, I’m a zombie
.”
“You didn’t get eight last night,” he noted. “That’s my fault.”
“It’s the sofa bed’s fault.” She took a sip of her coffee and tilted her head back. “You’ll notice these dark circles under my eyes. That’s a sure sign of my undead state.”
He studied her face for a moment and shook his head. “I don’t see anything. You look beautiful, as always.”
“You must still be half-asleep,” Jade argued. “I just stumbled out of bed, I’ve got crazy hair and I’m wearing a bathrobe. Nothing about that is beautiful.”
“Nope. I’ve gone on a four-mile run, taken a shower, had coffee, read through some paperwork and cleaned my gun. I’m very much awake. You’re just stubborn.”
“Stubborn?” She set down her coffee in surprise.
“Yes. I’m not sure what happened between you and Lance. I only know how it ended. But what I do know is that he didn’t take the opportunity he had. If he had appreciated the gift you’d given him by being in his life, he would’ve cherished it. He would’ve told you how beautiful and smart and amazing you are. Then you would believe someone when they gave you a compliment instead of arguing with them about it. It’s a shame, really.”
Jade was stunned by his words. She hadn’t really thought about it that way, but he was onto something. She shouldn’t let Lance’s influence take over her new life, too. “You’re right. Let’s start over. Tell me I’m beautiful again.”
Harley smiled. “Now you’re just fishing for compliments, but okay. You look beautiful this morning.”
Jade did her best to return his smile with a genuine one of her own. “Thank you.”
“See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Me accepting a compliment is like you following the rules. We can do it when we’re put on the spot, but it’s not instinctual.”
“I can follow rules,” he said, with a frown lining his forehead.
That made Jade laugh out loud. “Sure you can. That’s why you were always in detention.”
“That was before the navy. In the military, you follow the rules or you get punished. You obey the chain of command or someone gets hurt.”
“So you’re saying your bad boy days are behind you?” Jade asked curiously.
A wicked grin spread across his face, one that made Jade want to melt into his arms. He leaned in and pinned her with his baby blues. “Once a bad boy, always a bad boy, Jade. That doesn’t change. These days I’m just better at knowing when the punishment is worth the payoff. It usually is.”
Her eyes widened as he grew closer, his gaze drifting to her lips. It was enough to make her clutch her coffee mug for dear life. If she had her hands free, who knew what she might do. Reach for him? Touch him? Bad boys certainly had their appeal. She wished they didn’t. Things would be easier in her life.
“Today, I work until four,” she said, abruptly changing the subject. She turned away from him, fished into the junk drawer and pulled out a spare key to the house. “I’m not sure what’s on your agenda, but since you refuse to go to your hotel and sleep in a comfortable bed with room service, here’s a key.”
Harley reached out and plucked the object dangling from her hand. Jade noticed he did it without touching her, even after leaning in to tease her the moment before. It made her wonder if it was deliberate on his part. Touching each other seemed to lead down a path neither of them were eager to travel.
“Just so you know, I’m not staying at a hotel. I’ve been staying with Mom while I’m in town. It’s a bit out of the way, though, so your place is more convenient. Thanks for the key. I’ll be out and about today, but I will make a point of being back by the time you get home.”
Jade planted her hands on her hips. He made it seem like a bogeyman was going to leap out of a cabinet at any moment. He didn’t appear to be the kind to overreact, but one little letter had really set him on edge. “You don’t have to. You’re being paid to research the case, not babysit me.”
Harley slipped the key into his pocket and sighed. “I know what I’m being paid for. And I can have it done by four.”
“Okay,” Jade said. She wasn’t about to argue with him. It would give her some peace of mind that he was here, she had to admit. “Anything exciting on your agenda today?”
“I think I’m going to the hospital to meet with them and go over their data. They’ve pulled a lot of the records from the archives for me to search through. They weren’t digitized back then, unfortunately, so that means a lot of shuffling through old papers in someone’s abandoned cubicle.”
“Sounds like a long, boring day ahead.” She held up the coffee carafe, swirling around the last inch of black brew in the bottom. “You can finish this off.”
Harley just shrugged, holding out his mug for her to refill it. “It can’t all be tracking bad guys and apprehending suspects. Sometimes the paperwork is the most important part. That’s where the truth usually lies.”
“People don’t tell the truth?” she asked.
“They tell the truth as best they know it. Or as they believe it to be.”
That was a cynical way of looking at things. “And what about your plans for tomorrow?”
“What’s tomorrow?”
“It’s my day off. That, and Sundays. Are you going to sit around and look at me all day? Or work your case?”
Harley’s lips twisted into a frown. “I’ll have to figure that out. I wasn’t expecting you to be off during the week, but it’s my fault for not asking.”
“I could help you with your research,” Jade suggested. She was anxious to have answers and she didn’t mind doing some of the legwork.
He stiffened and shook his head briskly. “No, sorry. I can’t have you around while I’m investigating. You’re too close to the case. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Oh, so now you follow the rules. You won’t break them when it benefits me? I guess it isn’t worth the payoff in this scenario.”
That earned her a sigh and a roll of his eyes. “I don’t want any of my findings called into question, okay? I’ll figure out what to do about tomorrow tomorrow,” he said, taking his turn at changing the subject.
“Fine. Be that way. I’ve got to get ready for work.” With a shake of her head, Jade took her coffee and left the room. “I’ll see you this evening,” she called as she walked down the hall.
After reaching her bedroom, Jade flopped back on her bed and groaned aloud. He hadn’t been in her house twenty-four hours and she was already a mess. Hopefully, he was as good a detective as he was at being alluring and irritating. He’d have the answers about her birth in no time and she could get him out of her house and move on with her life. Not that she had much of one, but it was hers and she was in control of it.
She looked over at the clock and realized she had to get a start on her day. That meant a shower. And after that chat with Harley, it would be a cold one.
* * *
“Well, well, well. Mr. Jeffries didn’t warn me that he was having a meeting with Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome today.”
A sassy woman with dark, curly hair greeted Harley as he approached the receptionist’s desk. She was wearing a hot pink sweater and earrings just as brightly colored, although they were hidden within the complicated ringlets of her hair. She smiled widely, turning her full attention to him as he approached her.
Harley was startled by the woman’s bold assessment, but he tried to smile and pass it off. She appeared to be in her late fifties, and older women especially loved to flirt with him. He usually played along to give them a little boost to their day. He’d found that being sweet to the ladies could make or break an investigation. They’d trip over themselves to help him get what he needed.
“I usually just go by Harley Dalton,” he quipped.
She looked over at her computer and nodded. “Have a seat, Mr. Dalton, and Mr. Jeffri
es will be with you momentarily. Can I get you coffee or something?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. White,” he said, reading the placard on her desk as he settled into his seat.
“Oh, it’s Ms. White,” she clarified. “Although you can just call me Tina, sugar.”
Harley sat up straight in his chair and hoped that Mr. Jeffries would hurry. Because Tina meant business.
Thankfully, before long the door opened and a man he presumed was Mr. Jeffries stepped out. “Good morning. Come in, Mr. Dalton.”
He got up quickly, shaking the man’s hand and following him through the door. Before disappearing into the room, he gave a quick glance over his shoulder to confirm that Tina wouldn’t be joining them. He got a sassy wink from her, but she stayed in her seat.
As the door closed and the man gestured him toward a guest chair, Harley took a deep breath, then said, “Thanks for seeing me this morning.”
“I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to sit down with you. I’ve been tied up with other matters, but you know how that goes. Thanks for taking this case and handling it personally. I know you grew up in the area. I read all about that kidnapping case in the news not too long ago, and when we decided we needed outside help, your company was the first to come to mind. Like any hospital, we have our share of claims and malpractice suits, but this was different. Babies don’t get switched around every day, you know.”
Harley just nodded and let the man talk. “Hopefully, it won’t take long to find out what happened,” he said eventually.
“We’ve set up an office for you here, just down the hallway,” Jeffries explained. “I’ve had all the records from that time brought down from the archives and put in there for you to go through. If you need anything, just let Tina know. I’ve instructed her to make you comfortable and give you whatever you might need.”
From Mistake to Millions Page 6
