Lone Rider Bodyguard
Lone Rider Bodyguard
Harper Allen
A DESERTED COUNTRY ROAD, A BROKEN-DOWN CAR AND IN THE THROES OF LABOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN TYLER ADAMS HAD EVER SEEN…Tye didn't know how Susannah Bird had gotten into her current predicament, but after delivering her newborn son and holding the squirming bundle in his arms, he vowed to protect them both with his life.Accept the protection Tye offered or disappear? Susannah had to think of how best to keep her baby safe from the men who were determined to kill them both. She fought against the devil that tempted her with Tye's blue eyes and tender promises, but could the mysterious stranger be the answer to her and her son's prayers…?
“I think the devil looks just like you, Tye,” Susannah said unevenly. “That’s why he’s so dangerous.”
Just for a moment she would have sworn she saw something flash behind those eyes—something that could have been pain.
“What’s that expression about giving a dog a bad name?”
Without seeming to move at all, suddenly Tye had lessened the distance between them to no more than a few inches. Behind her, Susannah felt the hard edge of the counter pressing into her back.
“Give a dog a bad name and he’ll bite?” she ventured.
“That’s it.” He bent his head, obliterating the last of her precious buffer zone. “You can call me off anytime, Suze,” he said, his tone velvety. “But maybe you don’t want to. Maybe after a lifetime of putting the devil behind you, just this once you’d like to be tempted….”
Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,
We’ve got an intoxicating lineup crackling with passion and peril that’s guaranteed to lure you to Harlequin Intrigue this month!
Danger and desire abound in As Darkness Fell—the first of two installments in Joanna Wayne’s HIDDEN PASSIONS: Full Moon Madness companion series. In this stark, seductive tale, a rugged detective will go to extreme lengths to safeguard a feisty reporter who is the object of a killer’s obsession. Then temptation and terror go hand in hand in Lone Rider Bodyguard when Harper Allen launches her brand-new miniseries, MEN OF THE DOUBLE B RANCH.
Will revenge give way to sweet salvation in Undercover Avenger by Rita Herron? Find out in the ongoing NIGHTHAWK ISLAND series. If you’re searching high and low for a thrilling romantic suspense tale that will also satisfy your craving for adventure—you’ll be positively riveted by Bounty Hunter Ransom from Kara Lennox’s CODE OF THE COBRA.
Just when you thought it was safe to sleep with the lights off…Guardian of her Heart by Linda O. Johnston—the latest offering in our BACHELORS AT LARGE promotion—will send shivers down your spine. And don’t let down your guard quite yet. Lisa Childs caps off a month of spine-tingling suspense with a gripping thriller about a madman bent on revenge in Bridal Reconnaissance. You won’t want to miss this unforgettable debut of our new DEAD BOLT promotion.
Here’s hoping these smoldering Harlequin Intrigue novels will inspire some romantic dreams of your own this Valentine’s Day!
Enjoy,
Denise O’Sullivan
Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
Lone Rider Bodyguard
Harper Allen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harper Allen lives in the country in the middle of a hundred acres of maple trees with her husband, Wayne, six cats, four dogs—and a very nervous cockatiel at the bottom of the food chain. For excitement she and Wayne drive to the nearest village and buy jumbo bags of pet food. She believes in love at first sight because it happened to her.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Susannah Bird—On the run from her husband’s killers, can she trust the brooding stranger who helps deliver her son and find refuge at the Double B Ranch?
Tyler Adams—The bodyguard with a past will take on any risk to protect Susannah and her newborn son—but has he put his own heart in danger?
Del Hawkins—The Vietnam vet runs the Double B Ranch, a reform camp for teens in trouble—as Tye Adams had once been. But is the ranch still a refuge for those in danger…or a deadly trap?
Alice Tahe—The Navajo matriarch claims she sees an evil she calls Skinwalker threatening the Double B…and Susannah’s baby.
Vincent Rosario—The two-bit crook has a grudge against Del. He doesn’t care if he has to destroy a young mother and her child to carry out his plan.
Michael Saranno—The mobster may have had a reason for having Susannah’s ex-husband eliminated, but what about her and her child?
Paul Johnson and Kevin Bradley—Can Tye trust the Double B hired hands to keep danger away from Susannah?
Daniel Bird, John MacLeish, Zeke Harmond— Along with Del Hawkins, they were the members of the original Double B—Beta Beta Force, a covert ops organization in Vietnam that was disbanded in tragedy.
To Saint Martha and the menagerie
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter One
Whoever she was, she was in trouble.
A woman’s breathing, harsh and edged, sliced the sudden silence as Tyler Adams cut the engine of the big Harley and brought it to a halt ahead of the sedan by the side of the highway. He still couldn’t see her, but as he strode back to the car the pain-filled gasps came faster. Guilt flickered through him.
He almost hadn’t stopped. Hell, he’d kept going for another mile or so before his conscience had gotten the better of him and he’d turned back to investigate. It hadn’t been much—just a blinding sparkle coming from the far side of the sedan as he’d passed it—but the only reason he could think of for the sparkle he’d glimpsed was that the car’s back door had been open a little. Muttering under his breath, he’d turned the Harley around.
He’d been right, the back door was open. Protruding from it were two slim legs. Two bare feet dug into the hard-packed New Mexico dirt, their heels lifted and the tendons of their high arches standing out against the fine white road dust covering them. Swiftly he began to walk around the open door to get a look at the rest of her, and as he did the gasps turned into a grunt.
“Stay right there, mister.” The words sounded forced. “I—I’ve got a gun.”
Dammit, she’s been attacked. Even as he froze, the sickened thought tore through his mind. She’d been assaulted and she thought he was the bastard who’d done this to her, come back for a second sadistic round.
Tye suddenly wished he was a couple of inches shorter than six feet, instead of a few over, and a little less bulky, less broad-shouldered. Intimidating worked in his job—he’d built up the bodyguard and protection firm he headed into the agency of choice for nervous celebrities, partially on the strength of the don’t-screw-with-me impression he apparently projected—but she didn’t need big and intimidating right now.
“I’m not here to hurt you, lady.” The ground between her raised heels was darkly wet. Blood, he thought with icy anger. “Let me help you back onto the seat so I can drive you to a hospital.”
The gun thing had probably been a bluff. He stepped past the open door and got his first clear look at her.
The gun thing hadn’t been a bluff. She was holding a massive revolver in both hands, and at this distance if she pulled the trigger he’d be a goner even before he hit the ground. But the damn gun wasn’t important.
She was wearing a summery dress, white with a pattern of red cherries. There were three red buttons on the opened bodice, one of them hanging by a thread, and the ripe swell of her breasts was almost fully exposed. In the hollow between them her skin was slick with sweat.
Her hair was the pale brown of buckwheat honey, deeper by a shade than his own dark blond. It hung in damp strands to her shoulders. The hands holding the revolver were propped up on the enormous curve of her belly.
She was pregnant. Make that very pregnant, Tye told himself hollowly. She was so pregnant that any time now she wouldn’t be pregnant anymore. Any time now the baby inside her was going to start coming out.
He saw her slitted eyes lose focus for a moment, heard her breath whistle between her gritted teeth. Slowly she exhaled.
“I suspect for the next little while I’m goin’ to be too busy to be able to worry about you, mister,” she said softly. “This isn’t anything I ever thought I’d find myself doing, but you people left me no choice.”
He’d told himself the damn gun wasn’t important, but he’d been wrong about that, too. The explosion split the dusty silence like a thunderclap.
He couldn’t remember actually making the decision to hit the ground, Tyler thought a second later. But apparently he had and apparently he almost hadn’t been fast enough. The slashed shoulder of his leather jacket was evidence of that. Losing your edge, buddy, he told himself tightly. Better start getting out in the field again, sharpen up those reflexes.
“You shouldn’t have done that, mister.” The soft voice shook. “I was going for a wing shot, but if you’d jumped the other way this whole thing would have turned out bad for the both of us. I’ve got no desire to bring my baby into the world with blood on my—oh!”
The abrupt exclamation ended in a small gasp, and something about the vulnerability of that noise drove all caution from his mind. Quickly he got to his feet.
Her eyes were squeezed shut and the gun was beside her on the floor of the car. Tye seized his chance.
“Whoever you think I am, you’re wrong, lady,” he said tersely. “You need to get to a delivery room, and fast. Where are the car keys?”
“I guess the part Granny Lacey used to call the rest-and-be-thankful stage is over.” Her voice was thready. “The car broke down, mister. Did I make a mistake about you?”
“I made a couple about you, so I guess we’re even,” he answered briefly. “Just tell me if I’ve got it right. Someone’s after you, this junker isn’t going anywhere and you’re about to have a baby. That about it?” At her nod he went on, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt. “How long have you been in labor?”
“My water broke about half an hour after the car died,” she murmured. Which explained the dampness of the ground between her heels, he thought in relief. “I’m pretty sure I’m fully dilated now. My body’s telling me it’s time to start pushing.”
Tye could still remember the first foal he’d watched being born. Del Hawkins had rousted him, Connor, Riggs and Jess from their beds, only waiting long enough for them to pull on jeans and boots. The four of them had exchanged furious glances, but after a week at the Double B they’d known better than to flat-out confront the wheelchair-bound ex-Marine.
He’d been a tough and surly sixteen-year-old at the time, Tye reflected. He’d thought nothing could get to him. But at the sight of that wobbly foal scrambling up on ridiculously long legs he’d realized there was a lump in his throat. In the glow of the lantern he’d seen the others averting their faces, too.
That night had been a turning point, but he wasn’t sure it qualified him for this.
“There’s a plaid carpetbag on the front seat. I need the newspaper that’s in it.”
Her top lip was dewed with moisture and she’d closed her eyes again. The pain had to be bad, Tye thought. It had her talking crazy—although stress and fear might have something to do with that, too. Who was after her? An abusive husband, despite the fact she wore no wedding band? That seemed unlikely, since from her few cryptic remarks he’d received the impression there was more than one person looking for her, but his questions would have to go unanswered for now. Unzipping his jacket and slinging it onto the roof of the car, he bent down beside her.
“You don’t want to read the paper. If there’s something in that carpetbag I could use to boil water in I could get a fire going.”
“Newspapers are the most sterile thing you can use in an emergency like this, mister. I need it to cover the car seat for when my little one comes out.” She opened her eyes, and for the first time he saw they were almost the same color as her hair—a clear honey-gold, but with a flash of unexpected humor in them. “My Granny Lacey was a midwife, and I started attending birthings with her when I was just a teeny girl myself. I’d be beholden to you for any help you could give me, though.”
She bit her lip, the smile in her eyes disappearing. “But no matter how far along I am, if a car with out-of-state plates slows down you grab ahold of that gun. I can’t explain now, but it appears someone’s looking to bring harm to me and my baby. I—I figured you were working with them,” she added. “I’m real sorry for shooting at you, mister.”
“The name’s Adams. Tyler Adams.”
He reached over the seat for the carpetbag, oddly glad for any excuse to take his gaze from that steady golden one and surprised to find himself feeling so off balance. It was the situation, not the woman, he thought. It couldn’t be the woman, because women never made him feel off balance.
“Susannah Bird. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ad—”
Her heels were no longer dug into the earth, but braced on the edge of the seat. As he laid another section of newsprint beneath her upraised knees, her words broke off and the next moment he felt his wrist being held in an unexpectedly strong grip.
“This is it.”
The soft tones had been replaced by an effort-filled mutter. Her bent legs opened, the cherry-patterned skirt that till now had provided a tent-like decorum slipping up her thighs. Automatically he moved his gaze to her face, feeling unexpected heat mount in his own, and found himself meeting a fierce honey-gold glare.
“This isn’t no time to stand on ceremony, Tye. And if you’re the squeamish kind, I’ll thank you to leave me to handle this myself,” she ground out between cracked lips.
She was right, he thought, angry with himself. Even though he’d only met Susannah Bird moments ago, even though what she was about to go through would leave no room for modesty, it was the most basic, natural act in the world. And although there’d been a more immediate reason for his returning to New Mexico after all these years, there was no denying that in the back of his mind he’d also had the vague thought that in the place where his life had been turned around once, he might again find some kind of renewal, some kind of grounding.
Before he’d even reached his destination he’d stumbled onto the opportunity to help bring new life into the world. How much more grounded could he get?
“You don’t get rid of me as easily as that,” he said, the curtness in his voice not directed at her. “I’m no Granny Lacey, but I’m all you’ve got. I’m staying.”
Incredibly, the parched lips curved into a smile even as the harsh panting continued and her brows knitted together. For a second her grip on him slackened and he reached into the carpetbag by his feet.
Despite the climbing morning heat, the bottle of water he’d noticed was still cool. Rummaging a little deeper, he came up with a neatly-folded washcloth. Gently he ran the dampened cloth over her moisture-beaded forehead, her dry lips. Through her lashes she shot him a grateful glance.
“Feels…good,” she managed. “Baby…crowning yet, Tye?”
Crowning? What the hell was crowning? he thought in confusion, replacing the bottle’s cap with fingers that felt suddenly thick and clumsy.
Whatever it is, there’s only one place you’re going to be able to see if it’s happening, a caustic voice inside his head said. Stop warming the bench and get into the game here.
Tye hunkered down at the side of the vehicle, and not a moment too soon, he immediately realized. Crowning meant he was the first human being to lay eyes on this new little person who was emerging into the world.
“Aahh!!”
The guttural cry sounded as if it was being wrenched from Susannah’s throat. She’d propped herself up on her elbows, her head thrown back and every tendon in her neck standing out in rigid relief. She cried again, and he could see the agony etched on her contorted features.
“You’re doing fine, Suze,” he rasped, knowing as he spoke how inadequate his words were. “You’re doing great. Keep pushing, honey.”
About to check on the baby’s progress again, out of the corner of his eye he saw a large, cream-colored blur speed by. Where did that come from? he thought in sharp alarm, flicking an automatic glance at the revolver on the floor. The Cadillac receded into the distance without slowing, and he frowned.
She’d been a woman alone on the road, in an unreliable vehicle and with a baby due any time. She might have glimpsed the same car at different gas stations along the way, and out of that concocted a fearful scenario that had grown bigger in her mind with each passing mile. When she’d been at her most vulnerable he’d come along—a jeans-and-leather-clad—
His heart stopped. It started up again, crashing so hard against his ribs it felt as if it was trying to escape.
“His head’s out, Suze,” he said hoarsely. Without conscious thought, he put a swift hand beneath the small skull to support it, just as he heard another incoherent cry issue from her throat.
When he’d been fifteen he’d broken his leg wiping out in a curve on a borrowed motorcycle without a license. During his year at the Double B Ranch he’d been thrown from Chorizo, a hammer-headed Appaloosa gelding Hawkins had expressly forbidden them to ride. Last year he’d taken a bullet in the ribs.
He’d figured he knew what endurance was. But he was a male. He had no idea what toughing it out meant, Tye realized now.
The baby was coming out on its side. Instinctively he lowered the fragile head a fraction, and an incredibly tiny shoulder popped into view. Again acting on instinct and hoping desperately that his instincts were right, he raised his supporting hands slightly.
The bottom shoulder emerged, so suddenly that for one frantic moment his cautious hold almost slipped.
“Turn—turn him on his back,” Susannah gasped. “Bag. Swabs. His nose—”
The little sucker was slippery, Tye thought disjointedly. This was like trying to hang on to a wet football in the rain, and one-handed it was even harder. Groping around in the bag by his feet, his fingers came into contact with a package.
“Cotton swabs,” he muttered. “Touchdown.”
There was some kind of gunk in the little guy’s nose and in the tiny mouth. Presumably the gunk had to come out.
“Of course, you could be a girl,” he said under his breath. He willed his hand to stop shaking, and swabbed at the minute, perfectly-formed nostrils, the goldfish lips. “If you are, no offense, okay? But until we know for sure I’m going to think of you as a—”
“Granny Lacey, help me!”
Even as he heard Susannah’s high-pitched plea to a woman who wasn’t there, Tye felt the small body slide completely into his hands, and frantically he adjusted his hold on—on him, he thought, feeling a grin spreading across his features. It was a boy. They’d had a boy!
“He looks just like me,” he said stupidly. “Just like me, Suze.” He met her pain-sheened gaze, unable to stop smiling despite the moisture he could feel prickling at the back of his eyes. “I mean he’s a boy,” he amended. “We—you’ve got a brand-new baby boy.”
“Is he breathing okay, Tye?” Concern overrode the fatigue in her tone. “Rub his back.”
Apparently it wasn’t like the movies. You didn’t introduce them to the world with a hearty slap on the rump. With infinite care he rubbed the little back and the crumpled lips pursed out, as if they were trying to blow a bubble. The miniscule eyelids squeezed even more tightly shut. A weak cry, more like the mew of a kitten than anything else, came from those crumpled lips.
In the space of a heartbeat—a skipped heartbeat, Tye thought shakily—the kitten-cry became an outraged squall that seemed far too big to have come from such a tiny body.
“Oh, Tye, let me hold him.”
Susannah was propped against the back of the car seat, her arms outstretched. Carefully he leaned forward and placed the small squirming body against her opened bodice before standing back and looking down at them.
Her hair hung in strands, her face was still red from her exertions and her bottom lip had either split slightly or she’d sunk her teeth in too deeply and bitten it at some time during the past hour. The cherry-strewn dress would never be presentable again.
She was so beautiful she took his breath away.
Those hazel-gold eyes were luminous with joy as she looked upon her new son for the first time. With no self-consciousness at all, tenderly she shifted the baby in her arms to her breast. As if a switch had been turned off, the crying stopped…and suddenly everything fell into place.
This was what it all came down to, Tye thought—a mother, a baby and a man watching over them. Why hadn’t he ever figured it out before?
“I got sterile thread to tie off the cord when the afterbirth comes out,” Susannah murmured, not taking her gaze from her son. “But Granny Lacey always said it was best to wait. Isn’t he perfect, Tye? Isn’t he just the most perfect baby you ever saw?”
“He’s better than perfect, Suze.”
When had he started calling her that and when had she started calling him Tye? he wondered, before dismissing the question. It didn’t matter. All he knew was that it seemed right. Despite the fact that they’d barely touched, he’d never felt closer to any woman in his life.
No ring on her finger doesn’t mean she’s not married.
A second ago he’d felt as if he’d just drunk a whole bottle of champagne. His euphoria came crashing down to earth.
He was a stranger who’d happened to be passing by, and the bond he’d thought he sensed between them was all in his imagination. This baby was some other man’s son.
“I’m going to name him Daniel, after my daddy.” Her voice was ragged with exhaustion. “I’d like his middle name to be Tyler, if that’s all right with you. I figure you’re a big part of why he’s here in my arms, safe and sound.”
For a moment Tye couldn’t say a word. Then he pulled himself together.
“His father had a bigger part, Susannah. I’m sure he wouldn’t want his son bearing a stranger’s name instead of his own.”
“His father’s dead. And since everything else he told me was a lie, I can’t even be sure the name I knew him by was real.”
She looked away, but not before he saw a shadow cross her features. “I didn’t shame myself with Frank Barrett,” she said softly. “We were married. But even if he’d lived, I know now he wasn’t the type to raise a child—maybe because inside he’d never really grown up himself. I want my son to be proud of the name he bears.”
She raised her eyes to his. “My daddy was a man,” she said simply. “He stood up for what he believed in, he would have given his life for the ones he loved and whenever he had to make a choice between taking the easy way out or doing what he thought was right, he went with his conscience. I think you’re the same kind. I’d take it as a honor if you let me name this little one Daniel Tyler Bird.”
Less than an hour ago that steady gaze holding his had made him feel off balance, Tye thought. But it had been everything else in his life that had been spinning out of control.
Most people would say the baby in her arms had come into this world with the cards stacked against him. He didn’t have a father. His mother couldn’t be much older than twenty—far too young to take on the responsibility of raising a child alone. He’d been born in the back seat of a broken-down car at the side of a dusty road.
But Daniel Tyler Bird already had everything he would ever need. His young mother had a wisdom far beyond her years, rooted in the values and morals of the family she’d spoken of.
And Daniel Tyler was loved by Susannah Bird.
“The honor’s mine, Suze,” Tye said huskily. “I’d be proud to have your son carry my name.”
“FROM WHAT you described, sounds like both mama and baby came through the whole thing just fine.” The gray-haired man wedged between Tyler and the driver on the front seat of the ambulance shot a glance in the direction of Tye’s clenched jaw. “Me and Wesley here saw the California plates on that fancy chopper you parked outside my clinic. You in these parts scouting movie locations?”
Tye shook his head. “I’m just here to look up an old friend,” he said, not taking his eyes from the highway ahead.
He didn’t elaborate. As if sensing his preoccupation, Dr. Jennings let the subject drop, and as he and the driver fell into conversation Tye’s thoughts returned to the woman he’d left nearly an hour ago.
Susannah had nodded when he’d told her he saw no choice but to leave her and Danny while he went into Last Chance to get medical help. “That May sun’s going to turn this car into an oven, Tye,” she’d said, concern darkening her gaze. “You’re right, we can’t just hope someone’s going to come along. Except for you, there hasn’t been a vehicle go by the whole time I’ve been here.”
He hadn’t corrected her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he’d promised. “There’s nothing else left to tie off or take care of or—”
Her laughter had been low. “No, that’s it. Granny Lacey couldn’t have done a better job of cutting the cord.” She’d hesitated. “I—I’m glad it was you who stopped, Tye. And not just because of how you helped Daniel and me.”
He hadn’t told Doc Jennings anything close to the truth, Tyler thought now. He hadn’t come back to Last Chance to look up Hawkins, he’d come because Del had called him with an urgent and unprecedented request for his help. But even before Del had called he’d been trying to find some excuse to make the trip back here to New Mexico, because for the past few years everything he’d worked for, everything he’d thought he wanted out of life, had begun to seem meaningless. And when one day last month he’d looked into his shaving mirror and for a split second had seen the face of his father, he’d felt real fear.
He’d needed answers. He hadn’t really been sure what his questions were. But when he’d put Susannah Bird’s newborn son into her arms and she’d given him that glance of purest joy, all his unasked questions and unknown answers had been swept away.
“What fool would throw a jacket onto the side of the road?” Mild as it was, Jennings’s quizzical question broke into Tyler’s thoughts.
“Tourists.” At the wheel, Wesley snorted. “More money than—”
“Turn around.” At his terse command, Tye saw the driver and Jennings exchange glances. He spoke again, his tone still sharp. “I think that’s my jacket. I left it on the roof of her car.”
“I thought you said her vehicle had broken down.” As Wesley maneuvered the ambulance onto the hard-baked shoulder and began executing a cautious three-point turn, Jennings frowned. “Besides, a woman who’d just given birth couldn’t hop into the front seat and drive off, Adams.”
“I know that.” Tye felt the knot in his stomach tighten. “But this is where I left her, I’m sure of it.”
Unwilling to wait, he opened the ambulance door and jumped out. Sprinting the hundred yards or so back to the discarded leather jacket Jennings had seen, he picked it up.
It was his. High up on the right sleeve was the gaping slash where her bullet had sliced through. At his feet was a darker patch in the parched dust, and on either side of the patch were the shallow impressions where her heels had dug in.
“I can’t explain now, but it appears like someone’s looking to bring harm to me and my baby….”
Despite the heat, suddenly he felt encased in ice.
He’d left her and Daniel Tyler unprotected. And now they were gone.
Chapter Two
“Do you know what today is, little one?”
Susannah adjusted the flame of the oil lamp on the dresser until the warm glow reflected off the adobe walls just enough to illuminate the two objects hanging on their otherwise unadorned smoothness. One was a large canvas, its jewel-like colors shimmering richly. On the opposite wall hung a plain olive-wood cross. Walking to the handmade cradle by the bed, Susannah bent over her sleeping son.
“You’re a whole week old today, starshine,” she said softly. “Happy birthday, Daniel Tyler.”
She’d made the right decision, she told herself, stroking a fine curl of hair from his delicately veined temple. She and her baby had disappeared without a trace. She’d bought them time, and for now Danny was safe.
That safety had come at a cost.
“I know there’s people who don’t believe in miracles, Danny, but that’s like not believing in rain or puppies or fresh-baked bread,” she murmured. “God gives us presents every day. He gave me you. And the day you were born, two more miracles dropped into my life.”
She bit her lip, her gaze darkening. “One of them was Tyler Adams, the man who made sure you came into this world safely,” she whispered.
When he grew old enough to ask questions, what would she tell her little boy about the man whose name he bore? she wondered. That even when she’d first laid eyes on him, convinced he was working for the killers who’d been hunting her for the last nine months, she’d thought he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen? That his hair had been the color of burnished gold, his eyes bluer than the sky? That he’d been so tall and broad-shouldered he’d blocked out the sun?
He’d stood there gazing down at her, his perfectly chiselled features remote and unreadable, his skin slightly windburned. Under his unzipped leather jacket she’d seen the white of a T-shirt. There’d been an oil smear high up on one hard cheekbone, and his jeans and boots had been grimy with road dust.
He’d looked dangerous and beautiful at the same time. He’d looked like a picture she’d seen long ago in a children’s book of Bible stories, of an angel who’d fallen from grace.
She’d come close to blowing her miracle away with a .38 caliber bullet.
“I could have killed him.” In the quiet room her voice was hoarse with remembered horror. “He must have thought I was crazy—but still he stayed.”
He’d not only stayed with her, he’d delivered her baby. And when he’d gently put Daniel Tyler into her arms, he’d looked at her as if she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Unconsciously Susannah pressed her palms to her cheeks, feeling hot color rise under her fingertips. After a minute, the heat subsided and she dropped her hands to her sides.
She had to have imagined that part, she told herself.
“You were the first miracle,” she said to the tiny sleeping form in the cradle. “Tye was the second. And Greta was the third.”
“As a hard-headed Minnesota Swede, I don’t believe in miracles.” The comment came from the tall blonde in the doorway. “I certainly don’t see myself as one.”
Her stride, long-legged and elegant as she approached, was in contrast to the paint-smeared jeans and shirt she wore. Platinum strands escaped the careless braid hanging halfway down her back.
“But if I did, I’d say this angel definitely qualified.” Placing a finger on the edge of the cradle, she gave it a gentle push. “I would have liked to have had one just like you, little man. I would have traded everything else for that.”
The ice-blond braid swung forward over the denim-clad shoulder. She met Susannah’s gaze. “Instead I had ten years on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s, and when I walked away from it all I was free to devote the rest of my life to my painting.” Her smile was crooked. “I should be ashamed of myself, crying for the moon.”
“But sometimes the moon’s so pretty, isn’t it?” Unnecessarily Susannah adjusted Danny’s blanket again. “Sometimes a body just can’t help wishing she could haul it down from the sky and hold on to it for a while.”
Greta’s cat-green gaze softened. Slinging an arm over Susannah’s shoulder, she steered her toward the door. “If it really was the moon either one of us was talking about, the solution would be easy. There’s going to be a full one tonight and I thought we could sit out on the portale and watch it rise over the desert. White wine for me, guava juice for you,” she added, her perfect nose wrinkling.
As they entered the spacious, stone-flagged kitchen, she shot Susannah a glance before opening the refrigerator door. “You still feel guilty about that Adams man, don’t you?”
“He did me a kindness.” Susannah looked away. “I don’t feel right about the way I repaid him.”
“You did what you had to.” Chunking a couple of cubes of ice into a tall glass, Greta filled it to the brim with pink juice. Pouring a glass of wine for herself, she took a sip. “Salut,” she said briefly. “Let’s go smell my roses and howl at the moon.”
Startled into laughter despite herself, Susannah followed her new friend into the living room. A traditional kiva fireplace and exposed beams on the ceiling were striking focal points, as were the three unframed abstracts hanging on the walls—abstracts, she’d learned from Greta’s offhand comments, that would each bring a small fortune if they were ever placed in a New York gallery. Blocks of color danced joyfully across the canvases. Only on second look did a viewer notice the underwashes of dark blues and purples anchoring the backgrounds.
They were like their creator, she reflected. Although she had to be in her forties, Greta Hassell’s beauty was still the first thing a stranger would see, but behind that flawless facade was a compassionate woman with her own hidden pain.
Tye had been gone less than ten minutes when the pickup had pulled over and the slim blonde had gotten out. Her perfect features had paled in shock as she’d taken in the situation—Susannah, her obviously newborn baby at her breast, freezing in the act of grabbing for the revolver at her feet as she realized the newcomer was a woman. The blonde’s lips had tightened.
“You’re in trouble,” she’d said shortly. “And your baby should get out of this heat. I’m taking you to my place.”
Automatically Susannah had started to explain the situation. Then she’d stopped, her gaze going to her son.
“I—I need to disappear,” she’d said after a moment, her tone low and rapid. “Disappear completely—right down to this no-good vehicle that stranded me here. If you can help me do that I’d be obliged, ma’am.”
“There’s a tow-hitch on the back of my truck.” The emerald eyes had narrowed to slits, but Susannah had seen faint humor in them. “The deal is you tell me what this is all about when you and your baby are rested up.” The woman had leaned into the sedan, one arm going around Susannah’s shoulders to help her up. “And call me Greta, not ma’am, sweetie.”
Just like that they’d become friends, Susannah thought, entering the miniature courtyard—what Greta called the portale—attached to the house. Wrought-iron gates set into the enclosing adobe walls kept the outside world at bay, the walls themselves pierced here and there with small openings. Inside each opening sat a small flickering candle in a votive holder.
“If your little guy wakes up we’ll hear him easily enough.” Greta set Daniel’s baby monitor on the glass-topped table, two tiny lines between her brows. “You know I’ve been careful not to buy Danny’s diapers and supplies in Last Chance, Susannah, but when I ran into town yesterday to get turpentine I kept my ears open. No one was talking about a woman and a baby going missing.”
“Maybe after Tye sent the ambulance to get me he decided to continue on his journey instead of waiting around. Heaven knows he didn’t owe me any more of his time.” Susannah looked toward the house, her glance going to the window of Daniel’s room. “I guess it wouldn’t be the first time the paramedics went out on a call that didn’t pan out, so they wouldn’t have seen any need to raise a hue and cry about it. But that doesn’t change the fact I did him a wrong, Greta.”
The other woman hesitated. When she spoke again she seemed to be choosing her words with care. “I didn’t hear any gossip about strangers poking around, either,” she said quietly. “Tell me—how sure are you that someone’s after you?”
“As sure as I am of the fact that Frank Barrett was killed,” Susannah said flatly. “I identified his dead body, Greta. And a few weeks after I had him laid to rest I saw the owner of the diner where I worked killed by a bullet meant for me.”
Restlessly she stood. Through the iron lace of the gates the moon Greta had promised hung, full and orange, over the desert. “I just don’t know who’s after me or why, which is why every time I’ve gone to the police I sound like a crazy wom—”
“What is it?” Greta’s glance went to the baby monitor at Susannah’s quickly indrawn breath.
“Not Danny.” Susannah shook her head. “Someone’s coming. Were you expecting company?”
Greta was already standing, but as the headlights that had caught Susannah’s attention came closer her posture relaxed. “I know better than ever to expect Del Hawkins. Every so often the man simply shows up, and I’m fool enough to run into his arms when he does,” she said dryly. “That’s partly what was behind our little tiff last week just before he left—although he’s back a day earlier than I thought he’d be.”
She shrugged. “But I’ve bored you with that story more than once, sweetie. Do you want to meet my tough old mustang or would you feel better if he didn’t know you were here? You can trust him to keep his mouth closed about seeing you,” she added, her eyes still on the approaching truck.
He was the reason Greta had never married, and why she’d taken up residence in this remote chunk of New Mexico when she’d decided to concentrate on her painting. If only for those reasons it would be interesting to see just what kind of a man he was, Susannah thought. But even if he and Greta had been no more than acquaintances, his arrival still would have been momentous.
Because if he was the Del Hawkins she’d been looking for, her twenty-five-hundred-mile journey had just come to an end.
Her palms felt suddenly damp. Surreptitiously she pressed them against her thighs.
“Granny Lacey used to say two catbirds sound real sweet singing together, but as soon as a third one shows up the harmony’s gone.” Her smile felt wobbly. “I’m near ready for my bed, and I suspect my little mister’s going to have me up again in a few hours anyway.”
Granny Lacey had also said that not telling the whole truth was as good as a lie, Susannah thought, making her way into the house. That one she didn’t completely hold with.
“If your great-granny was still alive she’d say I was sliding down that slippery slope real quick, starshine,” she murmured to Daniel as she bent over his cradle. “But your mama had to think of something. You’d think nine whole months would have been time enough to prepare myself, but I guess I wasn’t as ready as I thought. Besides, there’s a chance it might not be him.”
She lifted her head, her brows drawing together in a frown as she heard the solid-sounding thunks of not one, but both of the truck’s doors being slammed shut. Del had brought a friend. Even if her hasty withdrawal had been for the sole purpose of allowing Greta a few minutes of privacy it would have been all for nothing, anyway.
“Someone should give that fool male a slap,” she muttered in momentary distraction, stepping to the screened window and looking out at the candle-and-moonlit patio. As she gazed at the man leaning forward to plant a casual kiss on Greta’s slightly parted lips, any last doubts about his identity fled.
He was the Lieutenant Hawkins she’d grown up hearing so much about from her grandmother—the man her father had served under during a long-ago and terrible war, one of only two men Daniel Bird had sworn he would trust with his life. Del had lost both legs in Vietnam and although Greta had told her he’d been liberated from a wheelchair ten years ago when he’d been fitted with prosthetic limbs, the cane he was holding in his left hand was obviously necessary to his balance.
“But you’re still a fine-looking man, aren’t you?” she said under her breath, watching as Hawkins lightly touched Greta’s hair before turning to introduce his companion. “And in love with her, if the look on your face is anything to go by. So why don’t you—”
Susannah froze in shock. Her eyes widened painfully as she stared at the stranger standing with Del Hawkins and Greta.
Except he wasn’t a stranger, she thought faintly. He was a fallen angel, and even while he reached for Greta’s extended hand his attention was fixed on something on the table.
Tyler Adams raised his eyes from the baby monitor, his gaze encompassing the courtyard and then going to the house itself. In the light from the candles the sweep of his lashes cut shadows on the hard ridges of his cheekbones.
And at that instant the night exploded in gunfire.
“Get down!”
There was no way he could see her—but incredibly, Tye’s hoarse shout seemed directed at her. Susannah could have sworn his eyes locked desperately on hers before he turned swiftly to his companions.
Hawkins had already started to act, one muscled forearm shooting forward to knock Greta out of the line of fire coming from the openings in the wall where the votive candles had been moments ago. Even as his arm made contact with the blonde, Susannah saw her slam against him, as if some invisible fist had driven into her chest with enough force to lift her off her feet. Del’s stricken voice rose above the cacophony of gunfire.
“Greta!”
As she slumped against his chest he dropped his cane and took her whole weight with him. His knees crashed onto the brick of the patio but, showing no reaction to the pain, he pulled her closer, his arms wrapping around her as if to shield her with his own flesh and bone.
Of course he hadn’t reacted to the pain. He hadn’t felt any. The last time Del Hawkins’s knees had felt pain had been over thirty years ago in a Mekong Delta swamp, Susannah reminded herself. Even that long-ago agony, terrible as it must have been, couldn’t have contorted his features with the anguish she now saw carved into them.
Wrenching free from the paralysis gripping her, she whirled from the window and ran to the cradle. As she bent over it Danny started to scream, his tiny fingers bunched into fists, his eyes wide with shock.
“I’m here, starshine. Mama’s here.” Scooping him into her arms, with shaking fingers she wrapped his blanket tightly around him. Terrified blue eyes stared into hers, and his screams became louder.
A terrible anger rose up in her, hot and clear, and her gaze swung to the olive-wood cross, a stark black silhouette against the shadowed wall.
“He’s only a baby, Lord!” Her protest was harshly agonized. “And that woman outside opened her home to me out of the goodness of her heart. Why are You letting this happen to us?”
The cross swam in front of her burning eyes. It seemed to waver and grow larger, and all of a sudden it was no longer a symbol but two splintered timbers crudely affixed together and set up on a lonely hill, the nine long nails pounded into it put there by human hands, not divine.
It wavered, and once again came into focus.
“I—I’m sorry,” Susannah whispered. “Men brought this evil to us, I know. But I can’t let it touch my son.”
She looked down at the baby in her arms. Bringing her face close to the frightened red one peeping from the blankets, gently she pressed a kiss to Danny’s flushed forehead. His screams subsided into a hiccuping sob.
“The man I named you for is out there protecting you, little one. I wish I could do something to help him, but you’re my first responsibility. We’ll just have to pray he stays safe.”
On the dresser by the now-extinguished oil lamp was her purse. She reached for it with her free hand, slinging its strap bandolier-style across her chest.
“Your mama’s going to get you out of here, starshine. And Lord help me, if I have to use this to do it I will.”
The revolver felt heavy in her grip as she made her way to the door. Cradled against her with her other arm and barely visible in the blanket he was wrapped in, Danny gave a burbling sigh that ended in the softest of baby snores. She risked a glance at him, her lips curving into an amazed smile.
“You’re a real little mountain man, all right,” she breathed. “Fight when you have to, sleep when you can. That lesson’s been bringing Bird males home safely since Zebediah Bird fought the British at New Orleans, Daniel Tyler.”
There was a good chance Tye had managed to arm himself, if Hawkins had told him about the vermin rifle kept in the courtyard’s gardening shed, she thought, creeping through the dark kitchen. Sightlessly she fumbled on the counter for the keys she’d seen there earlier.
Her fingers closed over them. She grabbed them up just as she heard the flat crack of a shot being squeezed off, noticeably different from the more explosive sound of the guns the intruders were using. Tye had found the rifle, she thought shakily. With any luck his first shot had found a target.
He’d seen Daniel’s baby monitor and he’d immediately realized she was here. She didn’t know how she was so sure of that, but she was. She’d felt it—the same current that had run through her when he’d placed a newly delivered Daniel into her arms a week ago.
She hadn’t imagined it then. She hadn’t imagined it tonight. And what it meant she was never going to find out.
He kept saving her. She kept leaving him.
She was going to have to leave him now, and pray he and Hawkins could hold off their attackers until help arrived, she told herself. Her hand shook so badly she could hardly turn the knob on the door in front of her.
Greta’s pickup truck was her workhorse, but the red four-by-four was her pride and joy—which was why she’d had a walk-through garage built for it, complete with an automatic door that opened onto the arrow-straight drive leading to the road. Susannah hastened to the vehicle.
“As soon as that garage door opens Mama’s going to be puttin’ the pedal to the metal, Danny Tye,” she said to the sleeping baby in her arms. “Good thing your aunt Greta bought a car seat for you. She—she said she wanted to take her favorite guy out for a drive one of these days.”
She couldn’t let herself think of Greta right now, she told herself. She couldn’t let herself think of anything or anyone but her baby. His life depended on it.
In a matter of seconds she had Daniel secured. She slid into the driver’s seat, praying that the four-by-four could outrun whatever her pursuers were driving for at least as long as it took to get to Last Chance and alert the authorities.
And to tell Dr. Jennings to get ready for an emergency surgery, she thought. She forced the tears back, her lips tightening. The garage door remote in her hand, she pointed it at the windshield and activated it as she turned the key in the ignition.
The next moment pure terror shafted through her.
“This vehicle moves an inch and the brat doesn’t see his first birthday. Hand over the keys if you want him to live.”
For nine months she’d wondered what the face of evil looked like, Susannah thought in icy fear. Now she knew.
Standing by the opened passenger-side door, with his sandy hair and average height he looked deceptively ordinary except for the ugly black automatic that fit so easily into his hand it seemed to be a deformed extension of it. The flat, compact barrel moved.
“D-don’t hurt him, please.” Her tongue felt as if it had cleaved to the roof of her mouth. The keys jingled crazily in her shaking fingers. As she dropped them into his outstretched palm she tried again, her words spilling out in a moan.
“You couldn’t live with it on your conscience. Do what you want with me, but please don’t hurt my little one.”
“Ah don’t rahtly get paid to have no conscience.” His mockery of her speech was accompanied by a thin smile. He reverted to his own toneless voice. “God, it’s been a long time since I heard cornpone as thick as that. Get out of the car, Ellie May, and don’t even think about reaching for that gun by your feet.”
Even as he spoke, the sound of a shot and then of returning fire came from the direction of the portale. Two more shots split the night, and on the heels of the second one Susannah heard a sound she’d never heard before.
A man was screaming. Tye’s rifle had found a target. As the scream broke off abruptly and she half fell, half stumbled from the vehicle, the man beside her stiffened. Then he shrugged.
“Lucky for me I won the toss and came after you. Whoever your friend is, he’s done this before, but I’m a professional, too. Kneel down on the floor and it’ll all be over in a minute.”
“Why?” Instead of complying, Susannah stood her ground, her desperate gaze holding his. “Why have you people been hunting me? Why do you want to kill me?”
“I’ll give you the same answer I gave your husband. Payback. Which reminds me—I guess I’d better take something in the way of confirmation.” Roughly pulling her purse from her, he set it on the hood of the vehicle and carelessly tipped it upside down. Her wallet spilled out first. “So that’s why it was so hard getting a line on you. No credit cards. No ATM card. Not as dumb as we figured, are you?” Unzipping an inner pocket, he drew out a folded paper.
“My wedding certificate,” she said, the fear in her voice overlaid with a thread of trembling anger. “One day Daniel’s going to ask, and I want to be able to show him his daddy and me were married when we made him.”
“Since the brat’s never going to get old enough to worry about it now, I’ll just take this for—”
“No!”
Even as she lunged at him he brought his hand up and shoved her back, with no more emotion than if he was swatting a fly. His features tightening impatiently, he turned to the passenger side of the four-by-four, but by then Susannah had regained her balance, and before he’d taken more than a step she launched herself at his back and was on him.
“Not my baby! You don’t even touch him!” The terrified order came out in a thick, clogged voice she didn’t recognize as hers. Her grasping fingers went instinctively for his face. “You don’t touch my baby!”
“What the—”
His words were a disbelieving snarl. Turning so swiftly that one of her hands almost lost its grip, he made an inarticulate sound of rage when he found she was still clinging to his back. He stumbled against the garage wall and Susannah felt the skin being abraded from her arm as it scraped along the rough concrete.
“Damn you, bitch, let go of me!” His hands, one of them still holding the gun, wrenched at her wrists and managed to break her hold. She fell from him, striking her head against the wall as she did and landing jarringly on the floor at his feet.
“Goddammit, you could have blinded me!” He thrust his scratched face into hers, his features twisted in rage. “Did you think you could stop me from sending the brat along with you—”
“Over here!”
The shout came from just past the opened garage door. As the sandy-haired man’s head jerked up and he instinctively swung his gun around, the very air seemed to tear apart with the force of a double explosion. Susannah saw his head snap back, saw the just-fired gun drop from his hand, saw him fall to the floor beside her. She caught one horrific glimpse of his blood-soaked chest and scrambled to her feet, instant nausea rising at the back of her throat.
She made it to the front bumper of the vehicle before she threw up.
“For God’s sake, did he hurt you, Suze? Where’s Danny?”
Even before the hoarsely urgent questions had left Tyler’s lips he was beside her, an arm around her hunched shoulders, a hand holding back her hair as the thin bile spilled from her. She raised her head, wiping her mouth with the back of a trembling hand. Pulling from him, she ran to the passenger side of the vehicle.
In the past fifteen minutes her baby had been taken from his bed and hastily strapped into a car, and the world had exploded around him. But there was a contented little bubble of spit at the corner of the rosebud mouth. Danny exhaled softly in his sleep, and the bubble burst.
Susannah’s eyes flooded. She started to pull the edge of the blanket up around his shoulders, but her hand was shaking too badly to complete the small task.
“He’s grown.”
Gently moving her aside, Tye adjusted the blanket. He stood for a moment looking down at the child who’d been named for him and another strong man, and Susannah stood looking at him.
The T-shirt he was wearing was ripped at the shoulder, with a dark V-shaped patch of sweat running from the neckband to the middle of that washboard stomach. One tanned bicep sported a still-bleeding gash. Dried blood mixed with dirt smeared a hard cheekbone.
And still there was a golden glow about him.
“Babies—babies do that,” she answered unevenly. “The other shooters, Tye—they could be anywhere. We should—”
“I got one. Two, I guess,” he corrected himself, his jaw tensing as he flicked a glance over his shoulder at the body in the corner of the garage. “The one I took out first got hauled away by his buddy. The speed their car was going, with any luck they’ll break an axle before they make it to a paved road and Sheriff Bannerman and his men will find them. The man I came here with, Del Hawkins, should have made the call by now,” he added.
“And Greta? I saw her get hit, Tye,” she said, her fearful gaze on his. “We’re going to have to get her to—”
“She’s beyond any help Doc Jennings can give her,” he said, his voice harsh with emotion. “Del’s getting a medical chopper out here.”
Susannah closed her eyes, unbearable pain rushing through her. “I—I brought this to her,” she whispered. “She took me and Danny in, and the men who are after me got her instead. I should have known they’d find me here, Tye! I had no right to put her at risk like this!”
“Listen to me!” His hands were on her shoulders. He gave her a small shake, sharp enough that her eyes flew open and she raised her gaze to his in shock. His face was grim.
“If anyone’s at fault, I am. I should have pushed Bannerman harder when I realized he wasn’t convinced of my story the day I found you gone. I should have guessed someone had taken you in, instead of hitting gas stations and motels asking if anyone had seen a woman with a baby who looked like she didn’t belong with whoever was transporting her. But I didn’t. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
A muscle moved at the side of his jaw. His eyes, bluer than heaven in the tan of his face, blazed down at her.
“And I’ll never forgive myself for leaving you and Daniel unprotected,” he grated. “It won’t happen again. From now on I’m not letting the two of you out of my sight.”
He kept saving her and she kept leaving him, Susannah thought again, meeting his gaze and experiencing again that almost-painful current flowing from him to her and back again. It seemed he’d decided to change the pattern.
For a moment she couldn’t identify the feeling spreading through her. Then she recognized it for what it was. For the first time in nine months she felt completely, totally safe.
And that didn’t make any sense at all.
Because something told her that looking into those blue, fallen-angel eyes was the most dangerous thing a God-fearing widow and mother could do.
Chapter Three
The grim lines bracketing Tye’s mouth bore witness to the past five tension-filled hours he and Susannah had spent waiting for news of Greta. But as he replaced the receiver on the wall-mounted telephone in Del Hawkins’s kitchen and turned to her, his expression held more than a touch of thankfulness.
“She’s finally out of surgery. Her doctor told Del she’s going to pull through.”
At his announcement, sudden moisture filled Susannah’s eyes. She made no effort to blink away the relieved tears as he went on, his shrug slightly dubious.
“The surgeon said she must have had a guardian angel watching over her. If the bullet hadn’t been deflected by her breastbone the way it was, Greta wouldn’t have stood a chance of surviving.”
“Thank God,” she said simply, sinking into one of the hoop-backed chairs ringing the massive table—a table, she’d learned from Tye on the drive here to Hawkins’s ranch, that normally seated over a dozen rowdy male teens rather than one exhausted female with a baby, since the ranch was some kind of a boot camp for wayward youths. Despite the warm glow from the brass oil lantern hanging overhead, Danny, his carry-cot sitting in the center of the polished pine surface, was sleeping peacefully. With an unsteady finger she pushed a wisp of spun-silk hair from his forehead.
“She said she didn’t believe in miracles, didn’t she, little man?” she said huskily. “Guess that didn’t make a speck of difference to Him. He just went ahead and gave her one.”
She raised her gaze to Tye. “You let Del know we’d help his hired hands look after everything here?”
“Yeah.” Rolling his shoulders as if to massage out a stiffness, Tye grimaced. “Probably Johnson and Bradley could have handled things by themselves, but I told him I still remembered how to muck out a stall, although it had been a while since he’d taught me. I’m not sure he believed me.” A ghost of a smile momentarily lifted his lips. “Damn fool said he’d get home for a few hours later today to check on things. I passed on Bannerman’s message about dropping by to give a formal statement, so he’ll do that first, but he won’t be able to tell him anything more than I could.”
He didn’t say what Susannah knew they were both thinking. Whatever Del could or couldn’t tell the sheriff wouldn’t matter, if her own interview with the lawman was anything to go by. It had been as fruitless as had all the previous interviews with the police in the past nine months—more so, in fact, since Sheriff Bannerman hadn’t even wanted to hear what she had to say. He’d taken one look at the spent shells and bullet casings littering the portale and his expression had closed.
“A partnership gone sour, that’s what I’m putting my money on. Only a drug war generates this kind of firepower,” he’d declared, rubbing his jaw. “Hassell used to be a model, didn’t she? They live a pretty fast life, from what I hear. Maybe her past caught up with her, or maybe those trips she’s always making to New York and L.A. are about selling something other than paintings.”
Beside him Tye had started to protest, and Bannerman had turned on him. “Hell, Adams, I’ve seen those daubs she calls art. Don’t tell me people are crazy enough to shell out big money for something that doesn’t even look like a real picture. I’ll arrange protection for you while we’re looking for the two shooters who got away, Miz Barrett, but I’ll wager you weren’t their primary target.”
Susannah had been close enough to Tye to see the anger in his eyes as he spoke, his words measured. “Couple things, Sheriff.” His tone had been ominously mild. “First and foremost, Susannah’s my responsibility. That’s what I do for a living, as I’ve told you.” Before Bannerman could respond he went on. “Secondly, if she wasn’t being targeted tonight why did a hit man come within seconds of taking her out, for God’s sake?”
“Miz Barrett was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When she tried to run they probably thought she was trying to get away with whatever it was they’d come for.” Bannerman’s grunt had been dismissive. “Save the convoluted deductions for those movie detectives you rub shoulders with in Hollywood, Adams. Like I told you last week when you came to me insisting I investigate Miz Barrett’s so-called abduction, things are usually a whole lot less complicated in the real world. When we get the results back on the dead man’s prints I’ll wager it turns out he worked for one of the big dealers.”
At that the older man had turned on a booted heel and strode off, the subject obviously closed as far as he was concerned. Tye hadn’t gone after him but had helped Susannah gather up a few essentials for herself and Daniel before informing a deputy that they could be reached at the Double B if Bannerman needed them.
“If we’re talking miracles you might want to send up a prayer of thanks that Del’s latest crop of bad boys left a few days ago and the next batch isn’t due till next month.”
Recalled to the present by his words, Susannah saw Tye had crossed to the old-fashioned sink, a battered tin coffeepot in his hand. “Livestock I can handle. A dozen or so juvenile delinquents with chips on their shoulders would be too much for anyone to take.” He twisted the cold-water tap and shrugged. “Anyone but Del, that is,” he added, his back to her.
Earlier this evening when he’d hustled her and Danny out of the garage and away from the body of the man he’d shot, he’d kept his arm protectively around her shoulders, as if he was afraid of letting her get too far away from him. Even when the helicopter Del had requested had touched down just beyond the devastated patio’s walls and an unconscious Greta had been carefully lifted onto a stretcher—not by hospital paramedics, Susannah had realized numbly at the time, but by figures in military uniform—Tye had left her side only long enough to exchange a few hurried sentences with Del and an officer whom she’d seen salute Hawkins as the men had loaded their precious cargo. It wasn’t until the chopper was lifting off and a wail of sirens had pierced the desert night, signalling the arrival in force of the local law, that he’d detached himself from her.
And detached was the right word, she thought unhappily now, taking in the straight line of his back and his precise movements as he set the coffeepot on the ancient cast-iron cook stove. She’d told Greta tonight—had it really been just a few hours ago? she wondered in tired amazement—that she’d done Tyler Adams a wrong. It was time to put that wrong right, if she could.
“Sugar-cured ham and sunny-side-up okay with you?” He threw the query over his shoulder as he opened the restaurant-size refrigerator and pulled out a bowl of brown eggs. “There’s not much point in going to bed now if I’m starting chores in a few hours, so I might as well make us some breakfast. Give me a second here and I’ll show you the spare first-floor bedroom. No cribs in the place as far as I know, but maybe we can rig something up with a dresser drawer for Danny to sleep in.”
“I’ll cook.” Rising from the table, she went to a hook on the wall and took down the striped cotton teacloth she’d noticed hanging there. It was big enough to serve as an apron and deftly she wrapped it around her waist, securing it with a neat knot. As Tye set a platter holding half a huge ham on the counter, she put a restraining hand on his arm.
Beneath her fingers was solid muscle. Warmth flooded through her before she tamped down the inappropriate reaction.
“Bannerman said you reported me missing. I—I’m sorry you were worried about us, Tye.” Her hand was still resting on his arm and she let it slip to her side. “I hoped you’d just put us out of your mind and continue on your way, I guess.”
This time the rush of warmth in her cheeks was shame. As her guilty gaze met his skeptical one, she shook her head.
“Oh, that’s a lie, and not even a white one,” she said, sliding her palms against the tea towel. “Granny Lacey used to say Mr. Scratch started with a body’s tongue first when he was trying to take over, and she was right. I knew you’d probably be looking for us, but when Greta showed up the way she did all I could think of was keeping Danny safe. It was like the story of baby Moses in the rush basket floating downstream out of danger,” she ended inadequately.
“Sorry, honey.” Under the once-white and now begrimed T-shirt he wore, broad shoulders lifted in a controlled shrug. “I’m far from being the Bible scholar you seem to be, so you lost me at the end there. But I’ll accept what you said about lying just now. You didn’t hope I’d forgotten you, Suze. You knew damn well I wouldn’t, just like I knew damn well you weren’t about to forget me anytime soon. Who the hell’s Mr. Scratch?”
“You swear too much.” Even as the automatic comment left her lips Susannah knew it was more of a defense than a reproof. Was it was her imagination or had the space between them, slight as it had been in the first place, lessened somehow? She took a step away from him, all her earlier misgivings suddenly flooding back.
Could you call a man beautiful? she asked herself, forcing a deep breath into her lungs in an attempt to dispel the unfamiliar edginess that was electrifying all her nerve endings. But breathing was a mistake. As she inhaled, the very scent of him seemed to rush into her—a scent compounded of cordite and skin salt and the faintest trace of the soap he’d presumably used earlier this evening.
He was beautiful. He was beautiful the way a stallion was beautiful, beautiful the way a timber wolf standing over its prey could be beautiful, beautiful because he was a perfectly built male animal.
And that overpowering maleness could make even someone like her forget everything else except the basic fact that she was a female.
“Mr. Scratch is the devil,” she said, making herself turn back to face him. “Bible scholar or not, you must have heard of him.”
“Red tail and horns, pointed beard?” He hacked off a couple of slices of ham, his question disinterested, and something about the careless tone of his voice roused a tiny spark of anger in her.
“I don’t think that’s what he looks like at all,” she said. “If he did we’d be able to recognize him, and he couldn’t do us any harm. If you’ll show me where Del keeps his skillets I’ll take over from here, Tye. I’m not partial to having a man in the way when I’m cooking.”
She started to move past him toward the stove, her posture rigid, but even as she took a second step he was in front of her, barring her way.
“Okay, so tell me, Suze,” he said, his tone edged. “How do you know him when you see him? What exactly does he look like, your Mr. Scratch?”
His hands were on her shoulders, and suddenly the worn cotton of her dress felt as insubstantial as shattered silk. He tightened his grip by a fraction, and at the barely noticeable adjustment she felt the fabric of her bodice tautening against the swell of her breasts. Instant heat suffused her, and this time when she tried to breathe she found she couldn’t. She stared up at him, her gaze painfully wide.
Steal the blue from the most perfect summer sky on the most perfect summer’s day and you’d have his eyes, she told herself. A woman could fall into that blue—fall straight in and never want to come out again. What would it be like to let those eyes see every inch of you, to feel that mouth everywhere on your skin, to forget everything you’d ever been taught and give yourself for just one sinful night to the de—
The breath she’d been trying to take slammed into her with the force of an arctic gale, sweeping away all heat and replacing the lassitude that had gripped her with cold awareness. She swallowed past the dryness in her throat, and he released his grip on her.
“I—I think he looks just like you, Tye,” she said unevenly. “That’s why he’s so dangerous.”
Just for a moment she would have sworn she saw something flash behind those eyes—something that could have been pain. Before she could identify the emotion it was gone.
Or maybe it hadn’t been there in the first place. A crooked smile lifted a corner of his mouth.
“What’s that expression about giving a dog a bad name?” This time it wasn’t her imagination. Without seeming to move at all, suddenly he’d lessened the distance between them to no more than a few inches. Behind her she felt the hard edge of the counter pressing into her back.
“Give a dog a bad name and he’ll bite?” she ventured. “Tye, I—”
“That’s it.” He bent his head, obliterating the last of her precious buffer zone. “You can call me off anytime, Suze,” he said, his tone velvety. “But maybe you don’t want to. Maybe after a lifetime of putting the devil behind you, just this once you’d like to be tempted.”
His last words were murmured against her lips. For the space of a heartbeat his gaze held hers, and during that heartbeat Susannah knew she should step away from him.
Her lips parted. Her veins felt suddenly as if they were filled with something much thicker than blood, something so heavy and hot she found it impossible to move her limbs. An identical heat pooled in the pit of her stomach and seemed to spill downward toward her thighs.
She heard herself sigh, the sound so light and insubstantial it was barely audible. His mouth came down onto hers before the soft exhalation was completed.
Tye’s tongue moved past her lips, past her teeth, and without conscious volition she felt herself opening up to him, her startled reaction based on instinct rather than experience. The next moment his palms were on either side of her face, pulling her closer to him and steadying her. His tongue went a little deeper, as if it were trying to coax her very soul from her, and some last spark of self-preservation flared desperately inside her.
With the half-formed intention of pushing him away she brought her hands up, but even as her fingers spread against the solidity of his chest he lifted his head.
“You don’t have to do that. I said you could call me off anytime.” His whisper was hoarse, his breath warm on her lips. “But you don’t trust the devil, do you? Is that why you ran from me the day you disappeared, Suze—because you were afraid of what I was?”
Dazedly she shook her head, her gaze locked on his. “I don’t think so.” The heat that had been spreading through her was now a searing ache. Her throat felt scratchy and raw as she forced the words out. “I don’t think that was it at all. I think I ran because I was afraid of what I was, Tye. Or of what I wanted to be, from the first moment I saw you,” she ended, her voice low.
His gaze darkened to indigo. “I don’t get it. What did you want to be?”
She didn’t reply immediately. Instead she allowed herself to drink in the sight of him, needing every detail her gaze lingered on to be imprinted in her mind—the tanned cheekbones, the thick and incongruously dark lashes half veiling his eyes, the chiselled cut of his mouth. A muscle moved at the side of his jaw. She attempted a smile, and knew her attempt had failed.
“Why, everything I wasn’t, of course,” she said softly. “Beautiful and sophisticated and—and sexy, the kind of woman a man like you would be used to.”
She stepped away from him, staring down at the tea towel around her waist. She blinked, and tightened the loosened knot. Although this time her lips curved as she wanted them to, she felt a stinging moisture behind her eyes.
“When I looked at you I didn’t want to be me. And I knew that was wrong.”
Susannah glanced toward the table, where Danny was still fast asleep in his carry-cot. She took a deep breath. “He’s my world, Tye. I can’t let anything get in the way of keeping him safe, and no matter what Sheriff Bannerman thinks, those men showed up tonight looking to find me. So even if you’re right and I knew I wasn’t going to forget you when Greta stopped to help me that day, I couldn’t let myself think about that. I still can’t.”
Tye held her gaze for a second longer. Then he looked away, his shoulders lifting again in that half shrug she’d seen him give before, as if he were unconsciously trying to adjust the weight of a burden he couldn’t rid himself of. When he spoke there was a harsh edge to his voice.
“Want to hear something funny, Suze? When I looked at you I didn’t want to be me, either. And just for a while I persuaded myself there was a chance I could change.”
He exhaled tightly. “Bannerman might have taken your disappearance more seriously if anyone but me had reported it. I should have known I couldn’t wipe the past out by coming back here. Like Greta, I’ve never believed in miracles, so I don’t know why I let myself hope I’d been handed one.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, troubled by the bleakness in his words. A moment ago the man in front of her had been holding her so closely she’d been afraid she was in danger of losing herself in him. Now he seemed once again to be separated from her by an insurmountable wall—a wall not only isolating him from her, but from everything else around him. He turned to face her, his smile humorless.
“You don’t have to understand. All you have to know is that what just happened between us was a one-time only thing. For what it’s worth, you’ve got my word I won’t cross the line again.” He scrubbed his jaw with a weary hand. “I think it’s time you filled me in on the details. Do you have any idea who those men were or what they wanted from you?”
His change of subject was briskly abrupt, but probably that was for the best, she thought. Out of some sense of responsibility for her and the baby he’d helped deliver, Tye Adams had appointed himself her temporary protector, but that was as far as their relationship could go. From the start she’d known they came from two different worlds and although some part of her had fleetingly yearned to fit into his, she was too much Lacey Bird’s granddaughter ever to attempt to be something she wasn’t.
She had no idea why he’d kissed her. She frowned at the platter of ham and reached for the carving knife beside it before answering his question.
“I’ve never known who they are. As for what they want, the man who tried to kill me tonight said it was payback.” Carefully she concentrated on evening up the hacked surface of the meat and cutting two perfect slices. “After he was killed the police told me Frank hadn’t been a photojournalist like he’d always said, but a gambler and a small-time scam artist whose real name was probably Jerry Corning—although he’d used so many different aliases over the years they weren’t even sure of that. I guess one of his scams backfired on him in the end. Obviously not all of his marks were as gullible as I was.”
On her last sentence her voice wavered and to her chagrin the knife slipped in her hand, almost nicking her. Immediately Tye took the implement.
“Forget the damned cooking, I’ll rustle us up something.” Briskly he opened one of the lower cupboards and pulled out a cast-iron frypan. “I did KP duty here in my day, and while I never was the cook Jess or Connor was, I was a hell of a lot better than Riggs.”
He shot her a glance. “That’s right, honey. I was one of Del’s hell-raisers when I was a teen. I think that might have had something to do with Bannerman’s attitude tonight, since during our year at the ranch the four of us weren’t exactly popular with him.”
The man was impossible to read, Susannah thought helplessly. He had the good looks of a movie star, but from what he’d said he’d built up a business providing physical security for celebrities instead of becoming one himself. The privileged aura he unconsciously projected could only have come from a background of money and power so well entrenched he’d grown up taking it for granted, and yet apparently he’d come close to throwing it all away when he’d been younger.
Earlier tonight he’d been put into the position of having to kill a killer. If he felt any regret for taking a life, whatever the circumstances, he’d given no sign. But just now he’d brought up the subject of his past for the sole reason, she suspected, of distracting her from her own unhappy memories.
She smiled shakily at him. “I think my sympathies are with Sheriff Bannerman. You and your bad-boy friends must have torn up the county. No, Tye—” Firmly she took the pan from him. “I’d rather have something to do while I’m telling you my story, and kitchen work’s always been more of a comfort than a chore for me. Besides, that ham needs red-eye gravy, and I’ll bet a dollar a Californian like you doesn’t know the first thing about making it.”
“You’d win that dollar.” A corner of his mouth lifted. “All right, Suze, you get to cook. Do you trust me to get Dan the Man into something a little more like a real bed?”
“Dan the—” A few minutes ago she hadn’t imagined she would be capable of laughing, but the sound bubbling up from her throat definitely was a laugh, Susannah realized. And although she’d even had foolish, first-mama nerves when Greta had asked once or twice if she could put Danny to bed, for some reason she had no qualms about Tye’s competence in tucking her baby in. Well, almost no qualms, she admitted.
“Line the dresser drawer with something padded,” she said as he lifted the carry-cot and its tiny occupant from the table. “And Tye—he likes his blanket up to his chest, no farther. But don’t cover his hands, because then he’ll wake up for sure and start fretting—”
“Wonder where he gets that from?” His question was accompanied by the slightest of smiles. “Hey, lady—don’t forget I was the first one to hold the little guy. As I recall, I didn’t give you any static when you asked me to hand him over for a while.”
“That’s true.” A second soft bubble of laughter rose up in her. With exaggerated deliberation, she turned away, reaching for the bowl of eggs as she slid the pan on the burner.
“Suze?”
At the unexpectedly tentative note in his voice her pose of unconcern fled. Glancing quickly at him, she saw that he’d paused in the doorway. His gaze met hers, the humor that had lit his eyes only a moment ago no longer in evidence.
“Were you very much in love with him?” he asked softly. Even as the words left his lips he frowned impatiently. “Sorry, stupid question. Of course you were—the man was your husband, for God’s sake.” He turned toward the hall, but before he could take a second step, Susannah spoke, her own tone as low as his had been.
“Yes, Frank Barrett was my husband. And twelve hours after I became his wife I was a widow.”
Blindly she extracted an egg from the bowl, finding its cool, spherical surface somehow comforting.
“He was killed the morning after our wedding night, while I was out walking along the beach wondering if there was any way I could undo the mistake I’d made in marrying him.”
Chapter Four
“For a while after Granny Lacey died I felt like I’d been cast adrift. She’d been my anchor all my life, and suddenly she was gone. I think Frank sensed that.”
Neatly, Susannah laid her knife and fork at the edge of her plate and pressed a corner of the red-and-white checked napkin to her lips. Across the table from her Tye took a last mouthful of ham. “More coffee?” she asked, half rising from her chair.
But already he was up, and waving her back into her seat. “I’ll get it. Did the police ever catch the hit-and-run driver who killed her?”
“No.”
Falling silent as he hefted the blue-enamelled coffeepot from the stove, she allowed herself to watch him through her lashes. For all his height and breadth there was an easy grace to the most casual of his movements, but it was a controlled grace, as if on some level he held himself ready to react instantaneously to any given situation. He’d changed out of the begrimed T-shirt into a faded chambray shirt. The garment was obviously work attire, Susannah conceded, but even coming upon him dressed the way he was and pumping gas at a service station there was no way anyone would mistake Tyler Adams for hired labor.
It wasn’t the first time since Frank’s death she’d had to relate the facts of her brief marriage and sudden widowhood, and she’d grown to dread the shocked sympathy and carefully phrased condolences that invariably resulted. She hadn’t wanted that from Tye—hadn’t wanted, even for a moment, to mislead him as to how it had really been. After telling him what she’d never told anyone else she’d looked down at the egg in her hand, half surprised to see it was still intact. His response had been immediate.
“The guilt’s been the hardest to bear, right?” he’d said shortly. “Been there, done that, Suze. Let’s put this talk off until you get some hot coffee and food inside you. All things considered it’s been a crappy night all around for you and the way I acted a while ago was part of that, I’m sure.”
He’d understood up to a point, she thought now. But that point had stopped short of realizing that for the few moments he’d held her in his arms the rest of what had happened tonight had faded from her consciousness. He certainly couldn’t suspect that if he’d held her for a single second longer, Frank Barrett’s widow and little Daniel Tyler’s mother might not only have given in to temptation, as he’d suggested, but would have done her level best to tempt him.
Which would have been about as out of place as a mule trying to outpace Dan Patch, she chastised herself mentally. Thank the Lord you didn’t totally forget yourself with the man.
“Did the authorities say anything that made you think they suspected—” Stopping in midsentence, Tye refilled her coffee cup and then his before he sat down. He caught her inquiring glance and shook his head dismissively. “I’m jumping the gun here. You said your grandmother had been your anchor. What happened to your parents?”
“By the time I was five they were both dead,” she said simply. “Granny Lacey never liked to talk about it much, and about all she’d ever say was that my mama might have lived if she’d had a stronger heart, but that she never would have been the same after. My grandmother’s sister died of a fever, so I guess having her daughter-in-law go the same way hit her hard.”
She took a sip of her coffee. “Hit my daddy hard, too, from all accounts,” she added softly. “I don’t remember much about that time, but I recall the last time I saw him. I think it must have been a few months after Mama passed away, because Granny Lacey was living with us and looking after me. Daddy came into my bedroom to hear me say my prayers, and he asked me to say one specially for him. I felt his hand on my head just as I was finishing, but by the time I got off my knees and hopped into bed he’d gone. He was killed in a car accident that night, and within a week Granny Lacey had packed up everything we owned and she and I left Fox Hollow for good.”
“Tough for her, with a granddaughter to care for and raise all by herself,” Tye commented. Susannah looked up in surprise.
“She never felt she was carrying the burden alone—just like I know I’m not raising Danny all by myself.” She saw belated comprehension touch his features, followed almost immediately by discomfort, and she shot him a mischievous smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t start leaving religious tracts around for you to read, Tye. But even though I haven’t been back for sixteen years I’ll always be a Fox Hollow girl, and folks in Fox Hollow are pretty rock solid in the Word.”
“I don’t believe in much of anything,” he said dryly. “But we’re straying from the subject. Lacey Bird took her granddaughter and moved to New Jersey, of all places? That jalopy you were driving had Garden State plates,” he added.
“Goodness, that wasn’t the first place we lived after pulling up stakes.” Frowning, Susannah spread out the fingers of one hand and started ticking them off. “I started school in Ohio, I remember, and I got to grade four before Granny Lacey was asked by a women’s center in Indiana to give midwifery training there. For a time she worked with a group of Amish midwives in Pennsylvania and then I think we moved to upper New York—no—” she corrected herself thoughtfully “—we stayed in Kentucky that summer. I was old enough to take a part-time job at the Dairy Queen and start helping with the money. We never had much but we always got by.”
“On delivering babies.” There was a slightly skeptical note in his voice. She didn’t take offense.
“On delivering babies, on taking in sewing, on the waitressing jobs I got when I finished my schooling,” she agreed. “I made good grades but I wasn’t scholarship material so college wasn’t an option, and although Granny said we could manage some kind of training for me if I wanted, I liked working in restaurants. I liked it that people came in hungry and left full. Does that sound foolish?”
“No.” A corner of Tye’s mouth quirked upward. “But it’s a different attitude from the one I’m used to hearing. Most of my clients are on a permanent diet. Why did you end up in New Jersey?”
“Granny Lacey felt she’d been called to go there.” On the heels of his diet remark as it was, her answer came out more snappishly than she’d intended. She went on less briskly. “Five months after we moved to Atlantic City she was walking home one night from the bus stop after delivering a baby. A car mounted the curb and struck her, killing her instantly. I still hadn’t really gotten over her death when Frank started coming into the diner where I worked and asking me out.”
Tye seemed to pick his next words with care. “From what you said earlier I get the impression it wasn’t love at first sight on your part, Suze.”
“So why did I go out with him, you mean?” She looked down at her hands. “I was lonely. And Frank made me laugh.”
She glanced swiftly up at him, but his face was impassive. “I’d been on church outings with groups and there’d been a pastor’s son who’d accompanied me to an organ recital once, but I’d never really dated before. Heavens, it wasn’t until I was nineteen that I bought my first lip gloss, and although she didn’t say anything I could tell Granny Lacey considered it pretty racy on my part. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I had an old-fashioned upbringing. I’m not sorry I did, but maybe it didn’t equip me that well when I suddenly found myself on my own. He was in his thirties and good-looking. I—I was flattered by his interest in me.”
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Harper Allen
A DESERTED COUNTRY ROAD, A BROKEN-DOWN CAR AND IN THE THROES OF LABOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN TYLER ADAMS HAD EVER SEEN…Tye didn't know how Susannah Bird had gotten into her current predicament, but after delivering her newborn son and holding the squirming bundle in his arms, he vowed to protect them both with his life.Accept the protection Tye offered or disappear? Susannah had to think of how best to keep her baby safe from the men who were determined to kill them both. She fought against the devil that tempted her with Tye's blue eyes and tender promises, but could the mysterious stranger be the answer to her and her son's prayers…?
“I think the devil looks just like you, Tye,” Susannah said unevenly. “That’s why he’s so dangerous.”
Just for a moment she would have sworn she saw something flash behind those eyes—something that could have been pain.
“What’s that expression about giving a dog a bad name?”
Without seeming to move at all, suddenly Tye had lessened the distance between them to no more than a few inches. Behind her, Susannah felt the hard edge of the counter pressing into her back.
“Give a dog a bad name and he’ll bite?” she ventured.
“That’s it.” He bent his head, obliterating the last of her precious buffer zone. “You can call me off anytime, Suze,” he said, his tone velvety. “But maybe you don’t want to. Maybe after a lifetime of putting the devil behind you, just this once you’d like to be tempted….”
Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,
We’ve got an intoxicating lineup crackling with passion and peril that’s guaranteed to lure you to Harlequin Intrigue this month!
Danger and desire abound in As Darkness Fell—the first of two installments in Joanna Wayne’s HIDDEN PASSIONS: Full Moon Madness companion series. In this stark, seductive tale, a rugged detective will go to extreme lengths to safeguard a feisty reporter who is the object of a killer’s obsession. Then temptation and terror go hand in hand in Lone Rider Bodyguard when Harper Allen launches her brand-new miniseries, MEN OF THE DOUBLE B RANCH.
Will revenge give way to sweet salvation in Undercover Avenger by Rita Herron? Find out in the ongoing NIGHTHAWK ISLAND series. If you’re searching high and low for a thrilling romantic suspense tale that will also satisfy your craving for adventure—you’ll be positively riveted by Bounty Hunter Ransom from Kara Lennox’s CODE OF THE COBRA.
Just when you thought it was safe to sleep with the lights off…Guardian of her Heart by Linda O. Johnston—the latest offering in our BACHELORS AT LARGE promotion—will send shivers down your spine. And don’t let down your guard quite yet. Lisa Childs caps off a month of spine-tingling suspense with a gripping thriller about a madman bent on revenge in Bridal Reconnaissance. You won’t want to miss this unforgettable debut of our new DEAD BOLT promotion.
Here’s hoping these smoldering Harlequin Intrigue novels will inspire some romantic dreams of your own this Valentine’s Day!
Enjoy,
Denise O’Sullivan
Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
Lone Rider Bodyguard
Harper Allen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harper Allen lives in the country in the middle of a hundred acres of maple trees with her husband, Wayne, six cats, four dogs—and a very nervous cockatiel at the bottom of the food chain. For excitement she and Wayne drive to the nearest village and buy jumbo bags of pet food. She believes in love at first sight because it happened to her.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Susannah Bird—On the run from her husband’s killers, can she trust the brooding stranger who helps deliver her son and find refuge at the Double B Ranch?
Tyler Adams—The bodyguard with a past will take on any risk to protect Susannah and her newborn son—but has he put his own heart in danger?
Del Hawkins—The Vietnam vet runs the Double B Ranch, a reform camp for teens in trouble—as Tye Adams had once been. But is the ranch still a refuge for those in danger…or a deadly trap?
Alice Tahe—The Navajo matriarch claims she sees an evil she calls Skinwalker threatening the Double B…and Susannah’s baby.
Vincent Rosario—The two-bit crook has a grudge against Del. He doesn’t care if he has to destroy a young mother and her child to carry out his plan.
Michael Saranno—The mobster may have had a reason for having Susannah’s ex-husband eliminated, but what about her and her child?
Paul Johnson and Kevin Bradley—Can Tye trust the Double B hired hands to keep danger away from Susannah?
Daniel Bird, John MacLeish, Zeke Harmond— Along with Del Hawkins, they were the members of the original Double B—Beta Beta Force, a covert ops organization in Vietnam that was disbanded in tragedy.
To Saint Martha and the menagerie
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter One
Whoever she was, she was in trouble.
A woman’s breathing, harsh and edged, sliced the sudden silence as Tyler Adams cut the engine of the big Harley and brought it to a halt ahead of the sedan by the side of the highway. He still couldn’t see her, but as he strode back to the car the pain-filled gasps came faster. Guilt flickered through him.
He almost hadn’t stopped. Hell, he’d kept going for another mile or so before his conscience had gotten the better of him and he’d turned back to investigate. It hadn’t been much—just a blinding sparkle coming from the far side of the sedan as he’d passed it—but the only reason he could think of for the sparkle he’d glimpsed was that the car’s back door had been open a little. Muttering under his breath, he’d turned the Harley around.
He’d been right, the back door was open. Protruding from it were two slim legs. Two bare feet dug into the hard-packed New Mexico dirt, their heels lifted and the tendons of their high arches standing out against the fine white road dust covering them. Swiftly he began to walk around the open door to get a look at the rest of her, and as he did the gasps turned into a grunt.
“Stay right there, mister.” The words sounded forced. “I—I’ve got a gun.”
Dammit, she’s been attacked. Even as he froze, the sickened thought tore through his mind. She’d been assaulted and she thought he was the bastard who’d done this to her, come back for a second sadistic round.
Tye suddenly wished he was a couple of inches shorter than six feet, instead of a few over, and a little less bulky, less broad-shouldered. Intimidating worked in his job—he’d built up the bodyguard and protection firm he headed into the agency of choice for nervous celebrities, partially on the strength of the don’t-screw-with-me impression he apparently projected—but she didn’t need big and intimidating right now.
“I’m not here to hurt you, lady.” The ground between her raised heels was darkly wet. Blood, he thought with icy anger. “Let me help you back onto the seat so I can drive you to a hospital.”
The gun thing had probably been a bluff. He stepped past the open door and got his first clear look at her.
The gun thing hadn’t been a bluff. She was holding a massive revolver in both hands, and at this distance if she pulled the trigger he’d be a goner even before he hit the ground. But the damn gun wasn’t important.
She was wearing a summery dress, white with a pattern of red cherries. There were three red buttons on the opened bodice, one of them hanging by a thread, and the ripe swell of her breasts was almost fully exposed. In the hollow between them her skin was slick with sweat.
Her hair was the pale brown of buckwheat honey, deeper by a shade than his own dark blond. It hung in damp strands to her shoulders. The hands holding the revolver were propped up on the enormous curve of her belly.
She was pregnant. Make that very pregnant, Tye told himself hollowly. She was so pregnant that any time now she wouldn’t be pregnant anymore. Any time now the baby inside her was going to start coming out.
He saw her slitted eyes lose focus for a moment, heard her breath whistle between her gritted teeth. Slowly she exhaled.
“I suspect for the next little while I’m goin’ to be too busy to be able to worry about you, mister,” she said softly. “This isn’t anything I ever thought I’d find myself doing, but you people left me no choice.”
He’d told himself the damn gun wasn’t important, but he’d been wrong about that, too. The explosion split the dusty silence like a thunderclap.
He couldn’t remember actually making the decision to hit the ground, Tyler thought a second later. But apparently he had and apparently he almost hadn’t been fast enough. The slashed shoulder of his leather jacket was evidence of that. Losing your edge, buddy, he told himself tightly. Better start getting out in the field again, sharpen up those reflexes.
“You shouldn’t have done that, mister.” The soft voice shook. “I was going for a wing shot, but if you’d jumped the other way this whole thing would have turned out bad for the both of us. I’ve got no desire to bring my baby into the world with blood on my—oh!”
The abrupt exclamation ended in a small gasp, and something about the vulnerability of that noise drove all caution from his mind. Quickly he got to his feet.
Her eyes were squeezed shut and the gun was beside her on the floor of the car. Tye seized his chance.
“Whoever you think I am, you’re wrong, lady,” he said tersely. “You need to get to a delivery room, and fast. Where are the car keys?”
“I guess the part Granny Lacey used to call the rest-and-be-thankful stage is over.” Her voice was thready. “The car broke down, mister. Did I make a mistake about you?”
“I made a couple about you, so I guess we’re even,” he answered briefly. “Just tell me if I’ve got it right. Someone’s after you, this junker isn’t going anywhere and you’re about to have a baby. That about it?” At her nod he went on, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt. “How long have you been in labor?”
“My water broke about half an hour after the car died,” she murmured. Which explained the dampness of the ground between her heels, he thought in relief. “I’m pretty sure I’m fully dilated now. My body’s telling me it’s time to start pushing.”
Tye could still remember the first foal he’d watched being born. Del Hawkins had rousted him, Connor, Riggs and Jess from their beds, only waiting long enough for them to pull on jeans and boots. The four of them had exchanged furious glances, but after a week at the Double B they’d known better than to flat-out confront the wheelchair-bound ex-Marine.
He’d been a tough and surly sixteen-year-old at the time, Tye reflected. He’d thought nothing could get to him. But at the sight of that wobbly foal scrambling up on ridiculously long legs he’d realized there was a lump in his throat. In the glow of the lantern he’d seen the others averting their faces, too.
That night had been a turning point, but he wasn’t sure it qualified him for this.
“There’s a plaid carpetbag on the front seat. I need the newspaper that’s in it.”
Her top lip was dewed with moisture and she’d closed her eyes again. The pain had to be bad, Tye thought. It had her talking crazy—although stress and fear might have something to do with that, too. Who was after her? An abusive husband, despite the fact she wore no wedding band? That seemed unlikely, since from her few cryptic remarks he’d received the impression there was more than one person looking for her, but his questions would have to go unanswered for now. Unzipping his jacket and slinging it onto the roof of the car, he bent down beside her.
“You don’t want to read the paper. If there’s something in that carpetbag I could use to boil water in I could get a fire going.”
“Newspapers are the most sterile thing you can use in an emergency like this, mister. I need it to cover the car seat for when my little one comes out.” She opened her eyes, and for the first time he saw they were almost the same color as her hair—a clear honey-gold, but with a flash of unexpected humor in them. “My Granny Lacey was a midwife, and I started attending birthings with her when I was just a teeny girl myself. I’d be beholden to you for any help you could give me, though.”
She bit her lip, the smile in her eyes disappearing. “But no matter how far along I am, if a car with out-of-state plates slows down you grab ahold of that gun. I can’t explain now, but it appears someone’s looking to bring harm to me and my baby. I—I figured you were working with them,” she added. “I’m real sorry for shooting at you, mister.”
“The name’s Adams. Tyler Adams.”
He reached over the seat for the carpetbag, oddly glad for any excuse to take his gaze from that steady golden one and surprised to find himself feeling so off balance. It was the situation, not the woman, he thought. It couldn’t be the woman, because women never made him feel off balance.
“Susannah Bird. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ad—”
Her heels were no longer dug into the earth, but braced on the edge of the seat. As he laid another section of newsprint beneath her upraised knees, her words broke off and the next moment he felt his wrist being held in an unexpectedly strong grip.
“This is it.”
The soft tones had been replaced by an effort-filled mutter. Her bent legs opened, the cherry-patterned skirt that till now had provided a tent-like decorum slipping up her thighs. Automatically he moved his gaze to her face, feeling unexpected heat mount in his own, and found himself meeting a fierce honey-gold glare.
“This isn’t no time to stand on ceremony, Tye. And if you’re the squeamish kind, I’ll thank you to leave me to handle this myself,” she ground out between cracked lips.
She was right, he thought, angry with himself. Even though he’d only met Susannah Bird moments ago, even though what she was about to go through would leave no room for modesty, it was the most basic, natural act in the world. And although there’d been a more immediate reason for his returning to New Mexico after all these years, there was no denying that in the back of his mind he’d also had the vague thought that in the place where his life had been turned around once, he might again find some kind of renewal, some kind of grounding.
Before he’d even reached his destination he’d stumbled onto the opportunity to help bring new life into the world. How much more grounded could he get?
“You don’t get rid of me as easily as that,” he said, the curtness in his voice not directed at her. “I’m no Granny Lacey, but I’m all you’ve got. I’m staying.”
Incredibly, the parched lips curved into a smile even as the harsh panting continued and her brows knitted together. For a second her grip on him slackened and he reached into the carpetbag by his feet.
Despite the climbing morning heat, the bottle of water he’d noticed was still cool. Rummaging a little deeper, he came up with a neatly-folded washcloth. Gently he ran the dampened cloth over her moisture-beaded forehead, her dry lips. Through her lashes she shot him a grateful glance.
“Feels…good,” she managed. “Baby…crowning yet, Tye?”
Crowning? What the hell was crowning? he thought in confusion, replacing the bottle’s cap with fingers that felt suddenly thick and clumsy.
Whatever it is, there’s only one place you’re going to be able to see if it’s happening, a caustic voice inside his head said. Stop warming the bench and get into the game here.
Tye hunkered down at the side of the vehicle, and not a moment too soon, he immediately realized. Crowning meant he was the first human being to lay eyes on this new little person who was emerging into the world.
“Aahh!!”
The guttural cry sounded as if it was being wrenched from Susannah’s throat. She’d propped herself up on her elbows, her head thrown back and every tendon in her neck standing out in rigid relief. She cried again, and he could see the agony etched on her contorted features.
“You’re doing fine, Suze,” he rasped, knowing as he spoke how inadequate his words were. “You’re doing great. Keep pushing, honey.”
About to check on the baby’s progress again, out of the corner of his eye he saw a large, cream-colored blur speed by. Where did that come from? he thought in sharp alarm, flicking an automatic glance at the revolver on the floor. The Cadillac receded into the distance without slowing, and he frowned.
She’d been a woman alone on the road, in an unreliable vehicle and with a baby due any time. She might have glimpsed the same car at different gas stations along the way, and out of that concocted a fearful scenario that had grown bigger in her mind with each passing mile. When she’d been at her most vulnerable he’d come along—a jeans-and-leather-clad—
His heart stopped. It started up again, crashing so hard against his ribs it felt as if it was trying to escape.
“His head’s out, Suze,” he said hoarsely. Without conscious thought, he put a swift hand beneath the small skull to support it, just as he heard another incoherent cry issue from her throat.
When he’d been fifteen he’d broken his leg wiping out in a curve on a borrowed motorcycle without a license. During his year at the Double B Ranch he’d been thrown from Chorizo, a hammer-headed Appaloosa gelding Hawkins had expressly forbidden them to ride. Last year he’d taken a bullet in the ribs.
He’d figured he knew what endurance was. But he was a male. He had no idea what toughing it out meant, Tye realized now.
The baby was coming out on its side. Instinctively he lowered the fragile head a fraction, and an incredibly tiny shoulder popped into view. Again acting on instinct and hoping desperately that his instincts were right, he raised his supporting hands slightly.
The bottom shoulder emerged, so suddenly that for one frantic moment his cautious hold almost slipped.
“Turn—turn him on his back,” Susannah gasped. “Bag. Swabs. His nose—”
The little sucker was slippery, Tye thought disjointedly. This was like trying to hang on to a wet football in the rain, and one-handed it was even harder. Groping around in the bag by his feet, his fingers came into contact with a package.
“Cotton swabs,” he muttered. “Touchdown.”
There was some kind of gunk in the little guy’s nose and in the tiny mouth. Presumably the gunk had to come out.
“Of course, you could be a girl,” he said under his breath. He willed his hand to stop shaking, and swabbed at the minute, perfectly-formed nostrils, the goldfish lips. “If you are, no offense, okay? But until we know for sure I’m going to think of you as a—”
“Granny Lacey, help me!”
Even as he heard Susannah’s high-pitched plea to a woman who wasn’t there, Tye felt the small body slide completely into his hands, and frantically he adjusted his hold on—on him, he thought, feeling a grin spreading across his features. It was a boy. They’d had a boy!
“He looks just like me,” he said stupidly. “Just like me, Suze.” He met her pain-sheened gaze, unable to stop smiling despite the moisture he could feel prickling at the back of his eyes. “I mean he’s a boy,” he amended. “We—you’ve got a brand-new baby boy.”
“Is he breathing okay, Tye?” Concern overrode the fatigue in her tone. “Rub his back.”
Apparently it wasn’t like the movies. You didn’t introduce them to the world with a hearty slap on the rump. With infinite care he rubbed the little back and the crumpled lips pursed out, as if they were trying to blow a bubble. The miniscule eyelids squeezed even more tightly shut. A weak cry, more like the mew of a kitten than anything else, came from those crumpled lips.
In the space of a heartbeat—a skipped heartbeat, Tye thought shakily—the kitten-cry became an outraged squall that seemed far too big to have come from such a tiny body.
“Oh, Tye, let me hold him.”
Susannah was propped against the back of the car seat, her arms outstretched. Carefully he leaned forward and placed the small squirming body against her opened bodice before standing back and looking down at them.
Her hair hung in strands, her face was still red from her exertions and her bottom lip had either split slightly or she’d sunk her teeth in too deeply and bitten it at some time during the past hour. The cherry-strewn dress would never be presentable again.
She was so beautiful she took his breath away.
Those hazel-gold eyes were luminous with joy as she looked upon her new son for the first time. With no self-consciousness at all, tenderly she shifted the baby in her arms to her breast. As if a switch had been turned off, the crying stopped…and suddenly everything fell into place.
This was what it all came down to, Tye thought—a mother, a baby and a man watching over them. Why hadn’t he ever figured it out before?
“I got sterile thread to tie off the cord when the afterbirth comes out,” Susannah murmured, not taking her gaze from her son. “But Granny Lacey always said it was best to wait. Isn’t he perfect, Tye? Isn’t he just the most perfect baby you ever saw?”
“He’s better than perfect, Suze.”
When had he started calling her that and when had she started calling him Tye? he wondered, before dismissing the question. It didn’t matter. All he knew was that it seemed right. Despite the fact that they’d barely touched, he’d never felt closer to any woman in his life.
No ring on her finger doesn’t mean she’s not married.
A second ago he’d felt as if he’d just drunk a whole bottle of champagne. His euphoria came crashing down to earth.
He was a stranger who’d happened to be passing by, and the bond he’d thought he sensed between them was all in his imagination. This baby was some other man’s son.
“I’m going to name him Daniel, after my daddy.” Her voice was ragged with exhaustion. “I’d like his middle name to be Tyler, if that’s all right with you. I figure you’re a big part of why he’s here in my arms, safe and sound.”
For a moment Tye couldn’t say a word. Then he pulled himself together.
“His father had a bigger part, Susannah. I’m sure he wouldn’t want his son bearing a stranger’s name instead of his own.”
“His father’s dead. And since everything else he told me was a lie, I can’t even be sure the name I knew him by was real.”
She looked away, but not before he saw a shadow cross her features. “I didn’t shame myself with Frank Barrett,” she said softly. “We were married. But even if he’d lived, I know now he wasn’t the type to raise a child—maybe because inside he’d never really grown up himself. I want my son to be proud of the name he bears.”
She raised her eyes to his. “My daddy was a man,” she said simply. “He stood up for what he believed in, he would have given his life for the ones he loved and whenever he had to make a choice between taking the easy way out or doing what he thought was right, he went with his conscience. I think you’re the same kind. I’d take it as a honor if you let me name this little one Daniel Tyler Bird.”
Less than an hour ago that steady gaze holding his had made him feel off balance, Tye thought. But it had been everything else in his life that had been spinning out of control.
Most people would say the baby in her arms had come into this world with the cards stacked against him. He didn’t have a father. His mother couldn’t be much older than twenty—far too young to take on the responsibility of raising a child alone. He’d been born in the back seat of a broken-down car at the side of a dusty road.
But Daniel Tyler Bird already had everything he would ever need. His young mother had a wisdom far beyond her years, rooted in the values and morals of the family she’d spoken of.
And Daniel Tyler was loved by Susannah Bird.
“The honor’s mine, Suze,” Tye said huskily. “I’d be proud to have your son carry my name.”
“FROM WHAT you described, sounds like both mama and baby came through the whole thing just fine.” The gray-haired man wedged between Tyler and the driver on the front seat of the ambulance shot a glance in the direction of Tye’s clenched jaw. “Me and Wesley here saw the California plates on that fancy chopper you parked outside my clinic. You in these parts scouting movie locations?”
Tye shook his head. “I’m just here to look up an old friend,” he said, not taking his eyes from the highway ahead.
He didn’t elaborate. As if sensing his preoccupation, Dr. Jennings let the subject drop, and as he and the driver fell into conversation Tye’s thoughts returned to the woman he’d left nearly an hour ago.
Susannah had nodded when he’d told her he saw no choice but to leave her and Danny while he went into Last Chance to get medical help. “That May sun’s going to turn this car into an oven, Tye,” she’d said, concern darkening her gaze. “You’re right, we can’t just hope someone’s going to come along. Except for you, there hasn’t been a vehicle go by the whole time I’ve been here.”
He hadn’t corrected her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he’d promised. “There’s nothing else left to tie off or take care of or—”
Her laughter had been low. “No, that’s it. Granny Lacey couldn’t have done a better job of cutting the cord.” She’d hesitated. “I—I’m glad it was you who stopped, Tye. And not just because of how you helped Daniel and me.”
He hadn’t told Doc Jennings anything close to the truth, Tyler thought now. He hadn’t come back to Last Chance to look up Hawkins, he’d come because Del had called him with an urgent and unprecedented request for his help. But even before Del had called he’d been trying to find some excuse to make the trip back here to New Mexico, because for the past few years everything he’d worked for, everything he’d thought he wanted out of life, had begun to seem meaningless. And when one day last month he’d looked into his shaving mirror and for a split second had seen the face of his father, he’d felt real fear.
He’d needed answers. He hadn’t really been sure what his questions were. But when he’d put Susannah Bird’s newborn son into her arms and she’d given him that glance of purest joy, all his unasked questions and unknown answers had been swept away.
“What fool would throw a jacket onto the side of the road?” Mild as it was, Jennings’s quizzical question broke into Tyler’s thoughts.
“Tourists.” At the wheel, Wesley snorted. “More money than—”
“Turn around.” At his terse command, Tye saw the driver and Jennings exchange glances. He spoke again, his tone still sharp. “I think that’s my jacket. I left it on the roof of her car.”
“I thought you said her vehicle had broken down.” As Wesley maneuvered the ambulance onto the hard-baked shoulder and began executing a cautious three-point turn, Jennings frowned. “Besides, a woman who’d just given birth couldn’t hop into the front seat and drive off, Adams.”
“I know that.” Tye felt the knot in his stomach tighten. “But this is where I left her, I’m sure of it.”
Unwilling to wait, he opened the ambulance door and jumped out. Sprinting the hundred yards or so back to the discarded leather jacket Jennings had seen, he picked it up.
It was his. High up on the right sleeve was the gaping slash where her bullet had sliced through. At his feet was a darker patch in the parched dust, and on either side of the patch were the shallow impressions where her heels had dug in.
“I can’t explain now, but it appears like someone’s looking to bring harm to me and my baby….”
Despite the heat, suddenly he felt encased in ice.
He’d left her and Daniel Tyler unprotected. And now they were gone.
Chapter Two
“Do you know what today is, little one?”
Susannah adjusted the flame of the oil lamp on the dresser until the warm glow reflected off the adobe walls just enough to illuminate the two objects hanging on their otherwise unadorned smoothness. One was a large canvas, its jewel-like colors shimmering richly. On the opposite wall hung a plain olive-wood cross. Walking to the handmade cradle by the bed, Susannah bent over her sleeping son.
“You’re a whole week old today, starshine,” she said softly. “Happy birthday, Daniel Tyler.”
She’d made the right decision, she told herself, stroking a fine curl of hair from his delicately veined temple. She and her baby had disappeared without a trace. She’d bought them time, and for now Danny was safe.
That safety had come at a cost.
“I know there’s people who don’t believe in miracles, Danny, but that’s like not believing in rain or puppies or fresh-baked bread,” she murmured. “God gives us presents every day. He gave me you. And the day you were born, two more miracles dropped into my life.”
She bit her lip, her gaze darkening. “One of them was Tyler Adams, the man who made sure you came into this world safely,” she whispered.
When he grew old enough to ask questions, what would she tell her little boy about the man whose name he bore? she wondered. That even when she’d first laid eyes on him, convinced he was working for the killers who’d been hunting her for the last nine months, she’d thought he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen? That his hair had been the color of burnished gold, his eyes bluer than the sky? That he’d been so tall and broad-shouldered he’d blocked out the sun?
He’d stood there gazing down at her, his perfectly chiselled features remote and unreadable, his skin slightly windburned. Under his unzipped leather jacket she’d seen the white of a T-shirt. There’d been an oil smear high up on one hard cheekbone, and his jeans and boots had been grimy with road dust.
He’d looked dangerous and beautiful at the same time. He’d looked like a picture she’d seen long ago in a children’s book of Bible stories, of an angel who’d fallen from grace.
She’d come close to blowing her miracle away with a .38 caliber bullet.
“I could have killed him.” In the quiet room her voice was hoarse with remembered horror. “He must have thought I was crazy—but still he stayed.”
He’d not only stayed with her, he’d delivered her baby. And when he’d gently put Daniel Tyler into her arms, he’d looked at her as if she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Unconsciously Susannah pressed her palms to her cheeks, feeling hot color rise under her fingertips. After a minute, the heat subsided and she dropped her hands to her sides.
She had to have imagined that part, she told herself.
“You were the first miracle,” she said to the tiny sleeping form in the cradle. “Tye was the second. And Greta was the third.”
“As a hard-headed Minnesota Swede, I don’t believe in miracles.” The comment came from the tall blonde in the doorway. “I certainly don’t see myself as one.”
Her stride, long-legged and elegant as she approached, was in contrast to the paint-smeared jeans and shirt she wore. Platinum strands escaped the careless braid hanging halfway down her back.
“But if I did, I’d say this angel definitely qualified.” Placing a finger on the edge of the cradle, she gave it a gentle push. “I would have liked to have had one just like you, little man. I would have traded everything else for that.”
The ice-blond braid swung forward over the denim-clad shoulder. She met Susannah’s gaze. “Instead I had ten years on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s, and when I walked away from it all I was free to devote the rest of my life to my painting.” Her smile was crooked. “I should be ashamed of myself, crying for the moon.”
“But sometimes the moon’s so pretty, isn’t it?” Unnecessarily Susannah adjusted Danny’s blanket again. “Sometimes a body just can’t help wishing she could haul it down from the sky and hold on to it for a while.”
Greta’s cat-green gaze softened. Slinging an arm over Susannah’s shoulder, she steered her toward the door. “If it really was the moon either one of us was talking about, the solution would be easy. There’s going to be a full one tonight and I thought we could sit out on the portale and watch it rise over the desert. White wine for me, guava juice for you,” she added, her perfect nose wrinkling.
As they entered the spacious, stone-flagged kitchen, she shot Susannah a glance before opening the refrigerator door. “You still feel guilty about that Adams man, don’t you?”
“He did me a kindness.” Susannah looked away. “I don’t feel right about the way I repaid him.”
“You did what you had to.” Chunking a couple of cubes of ice into a tall glass, Greta filled it to the brim with pink juice. Pouring a glass of wine for herself, she took a sip. “Salut,” she said briefly. “Let’s go smell my roses and howl at the moon.”
Startled into laughter despite herself, Susannah followed her new friend into the living room. A traditional kiva fireplace and exposed beams on the ceiling were striking focal points, as were the three unframed abstracts hanging on the walls—abstracts, she’d learned from Greta’s offhand comments, that would each bring a small fortune if they were ever placed in a New York gallery. Blocks of color danced joyfully across the canvases. Only on second look did a viewer notice the underwashes of dark blues and purples anchoring the backgrounds.
They were like their creator, she reflected. Although she had to be in her forties, Greta Hassell’s beauty was still the first thing a stranger would see, but behind that flawless facade was a compassionate woman with her own hidden pain.
Tye had been gone less than ten minutes when the pickup had pulled over and the slim blonde had gotten out. Her perfect features had paled in shock as she’d taken in the situation—Susannah, her obviously newborn baby at her breast, freezing in the act of grabbing for the revolver at her feet as she realized the newcomer was a woman. The blonde’s lips had tightened.
“You’re in trouble,” she’d said shortly. “And your baby should get out of this heat. I’m taking you to my place.”
Automatically Susannah had started to explain the situation. Then she’d stopped, her gaze going to her son.
“I—I need to disappear,” she’d said after a moment, her tone low and rapid. “Disappear completely—right down to this no-good vehicle that stranded me here. If you can help me do that I’d be obliged, ma’am.”
“There’s a tow-hitch on the back of my truck.” The emerald eyes had narrowed to slits, but Susannah had seen faint humor in them. “The deal is you tell me what this is all about when you and your baby are rested up.” The woman had leaned into the sedan, one arm going around Susannah’s shoulders to help her up. “And call me Greta, not ma’am, sweetie.”
Just like that they’d become friends, Susannah thought, entering the miniature courtyard—what Greta called the portale—attached to the house. Wrought-iron gates set into the enclosing adobe walls kept the outside world at bay, the walls themselves pierced here and there with small openings. Inside each opening sat a small flickering candle in a votive holder.
“If your little guy wakes up we’ll hear him easily enough.” Greta set Daniel’s baby monitor on the glass-topped table, two tiny lines between her brows. “You know I’ve been careful not to buy Danny’s diapers and supplies in Last Chance, Susannah, but when I ran into town yesterday to get turpentine I kept my ears open. No one was talking about a woman and a baby going missing.”
“Maybe after Tye sent the ambulance to get me he decided to continue on his journey instead of waiting around. Heaven knows he didn’t owe me any more of his time.” Susannah looked toward the house, her glance going to the window of Daniel’s room. “I guess it wouldn’t be the first time the paramedics went out on a call that didn’t pan out, so they wouldn’t have seen any need to raise a hue and cry about it. But that doesn’t change the fact I did him a wrong, Greta.”
The other woman hesitated. When she spoke again she seemed to be choosing her words with care. “I didn’t hear any gossip about strangers poking around, either,” she said quietly. “Tell me—how sure are you that someone’s after you?”
“As sure as I am of the fact that Frank Barrett was killed,” Susannah said flatly. “I identified his dead body, Greta. And a few weeks after I had him laid to rest I saw the owner of the diner where I worked killed by a bullet meant for me.”
Restlessly she stood. Through the iron lace of the gates the moon Greta had promised hung, full and orange, over the desert. “I just don’t know who’s after me or why, which is why every time I’ve gone to the police I sound like a crazy wom—”
“What is it?” Greta’s glance went to the baby monitor at Susannah’s quickly indrawn breath.
“Not Danny.” Susannah shook her head. “Someone’s coming. Were you expecting company?”
Greta was already standing, but as the headlights that had caught Susannah’s attention came closer her posture relaxed. “I know better than ever to expect Del Hawkins. Every so often the man simply shows up, and I’m fool enough to run into his arms when he does,” she said dryly. “That’s partly what was behind our little tiff last week just before he left—although he’s back a day earlier than I thought he’d be.”
She shrugged. “But I’ve bored you with that story more than once, sweetie. Do you want to meet my tough old mustang or would you feel better if he didn’t know you were here? You can trust him to keep his mouth closed about seeing you,” she added, her eyes still on the approaching truck.
He was the reason Greta had never married, and why she’d taken up residence in this remote chunk of New Mexico when she’d decided to concentrate on her painting. If only for those reasons it would be interesting to see just what kind of a man he was, Susannah thought. But even if he and Greta had been no more than acquaintances, his arrival still would have been momentous.
Because if he was the Del Hawkins she’d been looking for, her twenty-five-hundred-mile journey had just come to an end.
Her palms felt suddenly damp. Surreptitiously she pressed them against her thighs.
“Granny Lacey used to say two catbirds sound real sweet singing together, but as soon as a third one shows up the harmony’s gone.” Her smile felt wobbly. “I’m near ready for my bed, and I suspect my little mister’s going to have me up again in a few hours anyway.”
Granny Lacey had also said that not telling the whole truth was as good as a lie, Susannah thought, making her way into the house. That one she didn’t completely hold with.
“If your great-granny was still alive she’d say I was sliding down that slippery slope real quick, starshine,” she murmured to Daniel as she bent over his cradle. “But your mama had to think of something. You’d think nine whole months would have been time enough to prepare myself, but I guess I wasn’t as ready as I thought. Besides, there’s a chance it might not be him.”
She lifted her head, her brows drawing together in a frown as she heard the solid-sounding thunks of not one, but both of the truck’s doors being slammed shut. Del had brought a friend. Even if her hasty withdrawal had been for the sole purpose of allowing Greta a few minutes of privacy it would have been all for nothing, anyway.
“Someone should give that fool male a slap,” she muttered in momentary distraction, stepping to the screened window and looking out at the candle-and-moonlit patio. As she gazed at the man leaning forward to plant a casual kiss on Greta’s slightly parted lips, any last doubts about his identity fled.
He was the Lieutenant Hawkins she’d grown up hearing so much about from her grandmother—the man her father had served under during a long-ago and terrible war, one of only two men Daniel Bird had sworn he would trust with his life. Del had lost both legs in Vietnam and although Greta had told her he’d been liberated from a wheelchair ten years ago when he’d been fitted with prosthetic limbs, the cane he was holding in his left hand was obviously necessary to his balance.
“But you’re still a fine-looking man, aren’t you?” she said under her breath, watching as Hawkins lightly touched Greta’s hair before turning to introduce his companion. “And in love with her, if the look on your face is anything to go by. So why don’t you—”
Susannah froze in shock. Her eyes widened painfully as she stared at the stranger standing with Del Hawkins and Greta.
Except he wasn’t a stranger, she thought faintly. He was a fallen angel, and even while he reached for Greta’s extended hand his attention was fixed on something on the table.
Tyler Adams raised his eyes from the baby monitor, his gaze encompassing the courtyard and then going to the house itself. In the light from the candles the sweep of his lashes cut shadows on the hard ridges of his cheekbones.
And at that instant the night exploded in gunfire.
“Get down!”
There was no way he could see her—but incredibly, Tye’s hoarse shout seemed directed at her. Susannah could have sworn his eyes locked desperately on hers before he turned swiftly to his companions.
Hawkins had already started to act, one muscled forearm shooting forward to knock Greta out of the line of fire coming from the openings in the wall where the votive candles had been moments ago. Even as his arm made contact with the blonde, Susannah saw her slam against him, as if some invisible fist had driven into her chest with enough force to lift her off her feet. Del’s stricken voice rose above the cacophony of gunfire.
“Greta!”
As she slumped against his chest he dropped his cane and took her whole weight with him. His knees crashed onto the brick of the patio but, showing no reaction to the pain, he pulled her closer, his arms wrapping around her as if to shield her with his own flesh and bone.
Of course he hadn’t reacted to the pain. He hadn’t felt any. The last time Del Hawkins’s knees had felt pain had been over thirty years ago in a Mekong Delta swamp, Susannah reminded herself. Even that long-ago agony, terrible as it must have been, couldn’t have contorted his features with the anguish she now saw carved into them.
Wrenching free from the paralysis gripping her, she whirled from the window and ran to the cradle. As she bent over it Danny started to scream, his tiny fingers bunched into fists, his eyes wide with shock.
“I’m here, starshine. Mama’s here.” Scooping him into her arms, with shaking fingers she wrapped his blanket tightly around him. Terrified blue eyes stared into hers, and his screams became louder.
A terrible anger rose up in her, hot and clear, and her gaze swung to the olive-wood cross, a stark black silhouette against the shadowed wall.
“He’s only a baby, Lord!” Her protest was harshly agonized. “And that woman outside opened her home to me out of the goodness of her heart. Why are You letting this happen to us?”
The cross swam in front of her burning eyes. It seemed to waver and grow larger, and all of a sudden it was no longer a symbol but two splintered timbers crudely affixed together and set up on a lonely hill, the nine long nails pounded into it put there by human hands, not divine.
It wavered, and once again came into focus.
“I—I’m sorry,” Susannah whispered. “Men brought this evil to us, I know. But I can’t let it touch my son.”
She looked down at the baby in her arms. Bringing her face close to the frightened red one peeping from the blankets, gently she pressed a kiss to Danny’s flushed forehead. His screams subsided into a hiccuping sob.
“The man I named you for is out there protecting you, little one. I wish I could do something to help him, but you’re my first responsibility. We’ll just have to pray he stays safe.”
On the dresser by the now-extinguished oil lamp was her purse. She reached for it with her free hand, slinging its strap bandolier-style across her chest.
“Your mama’s going to get you out of here, starshine. And Lord help me, if I have to use this to do it I will.”
The revolver felt heavy in her grip as she made her way to the door. Cradled against her with her other arm and barely visible in the blanket he was wrapped in, Danny gave a burbling sigh that ended in the softest of baby snores. She risked a glance at him, her lips curving into an amazed smile.
“You’re a real little mountain man, all right,” she breathed. “Fight when you have to, sleep when you can. That lesson’s been bringing Bird males home safely since Zebediah Bird fought the British at New Orleans, Daniel Tyler.”
There was a good chance Tye had managed to arm himself, if Hawkins had told him about the vermin rifle kept in the courtyard’s gardening shed, she thought, creeping through the dark kitchen. Sightlessly she fumbled on the counter for the keys she’d seen there earlier.
Her fingers closed over them. She grabbed them up just as she heard the flat crack of a shot being squeezed off, noticeably different from the more explosive sound of the guns the intruders were using. Tye had found the rifle, she thought shakily. With any luck his first shot had found a target.
He’d seen Daniel’s baby monitor and he’d immediately realized she was here. She didn’t know how she was so sure of that, but she was. She’d felt it—the same current that had run through her when he’d placed a newly delivered Daniel into her arms a week ago.
She hadn’t imagined it then. She hadn’t imagined it tonight. And what it meant she was never going to find out.
He kept saving her. She kept leaving him.
She was going to have to leave him now, and pray he and Hawkins could hold off their attackers until help arrived, she told herself. Her hand shook so badly she could hardly turn the knob on the door in front of her.
Greta’s pickup truck was her workhorse, but the red four-by-four was her pride and joy—which was why she’d had a walk-through garage built for it, complete with an automatic door that opened onto the arrow-straight drive leading to the road. Susannah hastened to the vehicle.
“As soon as that garage door opens Mama’s going to be puttin’ the pedal to the metal, Danny Tye,” she said to the sleeping baby in her arms. “Good thing your aunt Greta bought a car seat for you. She—she said she wanted to take her favorite guy out for a drive one of these days.”
She couldn’t let herself think of Greta right now, she told herself. She couldn’t let herself think of anything or anyone but her baby. His life depended on it.
In a matter of seconds she had Daniel secured. She slid into the driver’s seat, praying that the four-by-four could outrun whatever her pursuers were driving for at least as long as it took to get to Last Chance and alert the authorities.
And to tell Dr. Jennings to get ready for an emergency surgery, she thought. She forced the tears back, her lips tightening. The garage door remote in her hand, she pointed it at the windshield and activated it as she turned the key in the ignition.
The next moment pure terror shafted through her.
“This vehicle moves an inch and the brat doesn’t see his first birthday. Hand over the keys if you want him to live.”
For nine months she’d wondered what the face of evil looked like, Susannah thought in icy fear. Now she knew.
Standing by the opened passenger-side door, with his sandy hair and average height he looked deceptively ordinary except for the ugly black automatic that fit so easily into his hand it seemed to be a deformed extension of it. The flat, compact barrel moved.
“D-don’t hurt him, please.” Her tongue felt as if it had cleaved to the roof of her mouth. The keys jingled crazily in her shaking fingers. As she dropped them into his outstretched palm she tried again, her words spilling out in a moan.
“You couldn’t live with it on your conscience. Do what you want with me, but please don’t hurt my little one.”
“Ah don’t rahtly get paid to have no conscience.” His mockery of her speech was accompanied by a thin smile. He reverted to his own toneless voice. “God, it’s been a long time since I heard cornpone as thick as that. Get out of the car, Ellie May, and don’t even think about reaching for that gun by your feet.”
Even as he spoke, the sound of a shot and then of returning fire came from the direction of the portale. Two more shots split the night, and on the heels of the second one Susannah heard a sound she’d never heard before.
A man was screaming. Tye’s rifle had found a target. As the scream broke off abruptly and she half fell, half stumbled from the vehicle, the man beside her stiffened. Then he shrugged.
“Lucky for me I won the toss and came after you. Whoever your friend is, he’s done this before, but I’m a professional, too. Kneel down on the floor and it’ll all be over in a minute.”
“Why?” Instead of complying, Susannah stood her ground, her desperate gaze holding his. “Why have you people been hunting me? Why do you want to kill me?”
“I’ll give you the same answer I gave your husband. Payback. Which reminds me—I guess I’d better take something in the way of confirmation.” Roughly pulling her purse from her, he set it on the hood of the vehicle and carelessly tipped it upside down. Her wallet spilled out first. “So that’s why it was so hard getting a line on you. No credit cards. No ATM card. Not as dumb as we figured, are you?” Unzipping an inner pocket, he drew out a folded paper.
“My wedding certificate,” she said, the fear in her voice overlaid with a thread of trembling anger. “One day Daniel’s going to ask, and I want to be able to show him his daddy and me were married when we made him.”
“Since the brat’s never going to get old enough to worry about it now, I’ll just take this for—”
“No!”
Even as she lunged at him he brought his hand up and shoved her back, with no more emotion than if he was swatting a fly. His features tightening impatiently, he turned to the passenger side of the four-by-four, but by then Susannah had regained her balance, and before he’d taken more than a step she launched herself at his back and was on him.
“Not my baby! You don’t even touch him!” The terrified order came out in a thick, clogged voice she didn’t recognize as hers. Her grasping fingers went instinctively for his face. “You don’t touch my baby!”
“What the—”
His words were a disbelieving snarl. Turning so swiftly that one of her hands almost lost its grip, he made an inarticulate sound of rage when he found she was still clinging to his back. He stumbled against the garage wall and Susannah felt the skin being abraded from her arm as it scraped along the rough concrete.
“Damn you, bitch, let go of me!” His hands, one of them still holding the gun, wrenched at her wrists and managed to break her hold. She fell from him, striking her head against the wall as she did and landing jarringly on the floor at his feet.
“Goddammit, you could have blinded me!” He thrust his scratched face into hers, his features twisted in rage. “Did you think you could stop me from sending the brat along with you—”
“Over here!”
The shout came from just past the opened garage door. As the sandy-haired man’s head jerked up and he instinctively swung his gun around, the very air seemed to tear apart with the force of a double explosion. Susannah saw his head snap back, saw the just-fired gun drop from his hand, saw him fall to the floor beside her. She caught one horrific glimpse of his blood-soaked chest and scrambled to her feet, instant nausea rising at the back of her throat.
She made it to the front bumper of the vehicle before she threw up.
“For God’s sake, did he hurt you, Suze? Where’s Danny?”
Even before the hoarsely urgent questions had left Tyler’s lips he was beside her, an arm around her hunched shoulders, a hand holding back her hair as the thin bile spilled from her. She raised her head, wiping her mouth with the back of a trembling hand. Pulling from him, she ran to the passenger side of the vehicle.
In the past fifteen minutes her baby had been taken from his bed and hastily strapped into a car, and the world had exploded around him. But there was a contented little bubble of spit at the corner of the rosebud mouth. Danny exhaled softly in his sleep, and the bubble burst.
Susannah’s eyes flooded. She started to pull the edge of the blanket up around his shoulders, but her hand was shaking too badly to complete the small task.
“He’s grown.”
Gently moving her aside, Tye adjusted the blanket. He stood for a moment looking down at the child who’d been named for him and another strong man, and Susannah stood looking at him.
The T-shirt he was wearing was ripped at the shoulder, with a dark V-shaped patch of sweat running from the neckband to the middle of that washboard stomach. One tanned bicep sported a still-bleeding gash. Dried blood mixed with dirt smeared a hard cheekbone.
And still there was a golden glow about him.
“Babies—babies do that,” she answered unevenly. “The other shooters, Tye—they could be anywhere. We should—”
“I got one. Two, I guess,” he corrected himself, his jaw tensing as he flicked a glance over his shoulder at the body in the corner of the garage. “The one I took out first got hauled away by his buddy. The speed their car was going, with any luck they’ll break an axle before they make it to a paved road and Sheriff Bannerman and his men will find them. The man I came here with, Del Hawkins, should have made the call by now,” he added.
“And Greta? I saw her get hit, Tye,” she said, her fearful gaze on his. “We’re going to have to get her to—”
“She’s beyond any help Doc Jennings can give her,” he said, his voice harsh with emotion. “Del’s getting a medical chopper out here.”
Susannah closed her eyes, unbearable pain rushing through her. “I—I brought this to her,” she whispered. “She took me and Danny in, and the men who are after me got her instead. I should have known they’d find me here, Tye! I had no right to put her at risk like this!”
“Listen to me!” His hands were on her shoulders. He gave her a small shake, sharp enough that her eyes flew open and she raised her gaze to his in shock. His face was grim.
“If anyone’s at fault, I am. I should have pushed Bannerman harder when I realized he wasn’t convinced of my story the day I found you gone. I should have guessed someone had taken you in, instead of hitting gas stations and motels asking if anyone had seen a woman with a baby who looked like she didn’t belong with whoever was transporting her. But I didn’t. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
A muscle moved at the side of his jaw. His eyes, bluer than heaven in the tan of his face, blazed down at her.
“And I’ll never forgive myself for leaving you and Daniel unprotected,” he grated. “It won’t happen again. From now on I’m not letting the two of you out of my sight.”
He kept saving her and she kept leaving him, Susannah thought again, meeting his gaze and experiencing again that almost-painful current flowing from him to her and back again. It seemed he’d decided to change the pattern.
For a moment she couldn’t identify the feeling spreading through her. Then she recognized it for what it was. For the first time in nine months she felt completely, totally safe.
And that didn’t make any sense at all.
Because something told her that looking into those blue, fallen-angel eyes was the most dangerous thing a God-fearing widow and mother could do.
Chapter Three
The grim lines bracketing Tye’s mouth bore witness to the past five tension-filled hours he and Susannah had spent waiting for news of Greta. But as he replaced the receiver on the wall-mounted telephone in Del Hawkins’s kitchen and turned to her, his expression held more than a touch of thankfulness.
“She’s finally out of surgery. Her doctor told Del she’s going to pull through.”
At his announcement, sudden moisture filled Susannah’s eyes. She made no effort to blink away the relieved tears as he went on, his shrug slightly dubious.
“The surgeon said she must have had a guardian angel watching over her. If the bullet hadn’t been deflected by her breastbone the way it was, Greta wouldn’t have stood a chance of surviving.”
“Thank God,” she said simply, sinking into one of the hoop-backed chairs ringing the massive table—a table, she’d learned from Tye on the drive here to Hawkins’s ranch, that normally seated over a dozen rowdy male teens rather than one exhausted female with a baby, since the ranch was some kind of a boot camp for wayward youths. Despite the warm glow from the brass oil lantern hanging overhead, Danny, his carry-cot sitting in the center of the polished pine surface, was sleeping peacefully. With an unsteady finger she pushed a wisp of spun-silk hair from his forehead.
“She said she didn’t believe in miracles, didn’t she, little man?” she said huskily. “Guess that didn’t make a speck of difference to Him. He just went ahead and gave her one.”
She raised her gaze to Tye. “You let Del know we’d help his hired hands look after everything here?”
“Yeah.” Rolling his shoulders as if to massage out a stiffness, Tye grimaced. “Probably Johnson and Bradley could have handled things by themselves, but I told him I still remembered how to muck out a stall, although it had been a while since he’d taught me. I’m not sure he believed me.” A ghost of a smile momentarily lifted his lips. “Damn fool said he’d get home for a few hours later today to check on things. I passed on Bannerman’s message about dropping by to give a formal statement, so he’ll do that first, but he won’t be able to tell him anything more than I could.”
He didn’t say what Susannah knew they were both thinking. Whatever Del could or couldn’t tell the sheriff wouldn’t matter, if her own interview with the lawman was anything to go by. It had been as fruitless as had all the previous interviews with the police in the past nine months—more so, in fact, since Sheriff Bannerman hadn’t even wanted to hear what she had to say. He’d taken one look at the spent shells and bullet casings littering the portale and his expression had closed.
“A partnership gone sour, that’s what I’m putting my money on. Only a drug war generates this kind of firepower,” he’d declared, rubbing his jaw. “Hassell used to be a model, didn’t she? They live a pretty fast life, from what I hear. Maybe her past caught up with her, or maybe those trips she’s always making to New York and L.A. are about selling something other than paintings.”
Beside him Tye had started to protest, and Bannerman had turned on him. “Hell, Adams, I’ve seen those daubs she calls art. Don’t tell me people are crazy enough to shell out big money for something that doesn’t even look like a real picture. I’ll arrange protection for you while we’re looking for the two shooters who got away, Miz Barrett, but I’ll wager you weren’t their primary target.”
Susannah had been close enough to Tye to see the anger in his eyes as he spoke, his words measured. “Couple things, Sheriff.” His tone had been ominously mild. “First and foremost, Susannah’s my responsibility. That’s what I do for a living, as I’ve told you.” Before Bannerman could respond he went on. “Secondly, if she wasn’t being targeted tonight why did a hit man come within seconds of taking her out, for God’s sake?”
“Miz Barrett was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When she tried to run they probably thought she was trying to get away with whatever it was they’d come for.” Bannerman’s grunt had been dismissive. “Save the convoluted deductions for those movie detectives you rub shoulders with in Hollywood, Adams. Like I told you last week when you came to me insisting I investigate Miz Barrett’s so-called abduction, things are usually a whole lot less complicated in the real world. When we get the results back on the dead man’s prints I’ll wager it turns out he worked for one of the big dealers.”
At that the older man had turned on a booted heel and strode off, the subject obviously closed as far as he was concerned. Tye hadn’t gone after him but had helped Susannah gather up a few essentials for herself and Daniel before informing a deputy that they could be reached at the Double B if Bannerman needed them.
“If we’re talking miracles you might want to send up a prayer of thanks that Del’s latest crop of bad boys left a few days ago and the next batch isn’t due till next month.”
Recalled to the present by his words, Susannah saw Tye had crossed to the old-fashioned sink, a battered tin coffeepot in his hand. “Livestock I can handle. A dozen or so juvenile delinquents with chips on their shoulders would be too much for anyone to take.” He twisted the cold-water tap and shrugged. “Anyone but Del, that is,” he added, his back to her.
Earlier this evening when he’d hustled her and Danny out of the garage and away from the body of the man he’d shot, he’d kept his arm protectively around her shoulders, as if he was afraid of letting her get too far away from him. Even when the helicopter Del had requested had touched down just beyond the devastated patio’s walls and an unconscious Greta had been carefully lifted onto a stretcher—not by hospital paramedics, Susannah had realized numbly at the time, but by figures in military uniform—Tye had left her side only long enough to exchange a few hurried sentences with Del and an officer whom she’d seen salute Hawkins as the men had loaded their precious cargo. It wasn’t until the chopper was lifting off and a wail of sirens had pierced the desert night, signalling the arrival in force of the local law, that he’d detached himself from her.
And detached was the right word, she thought unhappily now, taking in the straight line of his back and his precise movements as he set the coffeepot on the ancient cast-iron cook stove. She’d told Greta tonight—had it really been just a few hours ago? she wondered in tired amazement—that she’d done Tyler Adams a wrong. It was time to put that wrong right, if she could.
“Sugar-cured ham and sunny-side-up okay with you?” He threw the query over his shoulder as he opened the restaurant-size refrigerator and pulled out a bowl of brown eggs. “There’s not much point in going to bed now if I’m starting chores in a few hours, so I might as well make us some breakfast. Give me a second here and I’ll show you the spare first-floor bedroom. No cribs in the place as far as I know, but maybe we can rig something up with a dresser drawer for Danny to sleep in.”
“I’ll cook.” Rising from the table, she went to a hook on the wall and took down the striped cotton teacloth she’d noticed hanging there. It was big enough to serve as an apron and deftly she wrapped it around her waist, securing it with a neat knot. As Tye set a platter holding half a huge ham on the counter, she put a restraining hand on his arm.
Beneath her fingers was solid muscle. Warmth flooded through her before she tamped down the inappropriate reaction.
“Bannerman said you reported me missing. I—I’m sorry you were worried about us, Tye.” Her hand was still resting on his arm and she let it slip to her side. “I hoped you’d just put us out of your mind and continue on your way, I guess.”
This time the rush of warmth in her cheeks was shame. As her guilty gaze met his skeptical one, she shook her head.
“Oh, that’s a lie, and not even a white one,” she said, sliding her palms against the tea towel. “Granny Lacey used to say Mr. Scratch started with a body’s tongue first when he was trying to take over, and she was right. I knew you’d probably be looking for us, but when Greta showed up the way she did all I could think of was keeping Danny safe. It was like the story of baby Moses in the rush basket floating downstream out of danger,” she ended inadequately.
“Sorry, honey.” Under the once-white and now begrimed T-shirt he wore, broad shoulders lifted in a controlled shrug. “I’m far from being the Bible scholar you seem to be, so you lost me at the end there. But I’ll accept what you said about lying just now. You didn’t hope I’d forgotten you, Suze. You knew damn well I wouldn’t, just like I knew damn well you weren’t about to forget me anytime soon. Who the hell’s Mr. Scratch?”
“You swear too much.” Even as the automatic comment left her lips Susannah knew it was more of a defense than a reproof. Was it was her imagination or had the space between them, slight as it had been in the first place, lessened somehow? She took a step away from him, all her earlier misgivings suddenly flooding back.
Could you call a man beautiful? she asked herself, forcing a deep breath into her lungs in an attempt to dispel the unfamiliar edginess that was electrifying all her nerve endings. But breathing was a mistake. As she inhaled, the very scent of him seemed to rush into her—a scent compounded of cordite and skin salt and the faintest trace of the soap he’d presumably used earlier this evening.
He was beautiful. He was beautiful the way a stallion was beautiful, beautiful the way a timber wolf standing over its prey could be beautiful, beautiful because he was a perfectly built male animal.
And that overpowering maleness could make even someone like her forget everything else except the basic fact that she was a female.
“Mr. Scratch is the devil,” she said, making herself turn back to face him. “Bible scholar or not, you must have heard of him.”
“Red tail and horns, pointed beard?” He hacked off a couple of slices of ham, his question disinterested, and something about the careless tone of his voice roused a tiny spark of anger in her.
“I don’t think that’s what he looks like at all,” she said. “If he did we’d be able to recognize him, and he couldn’t do us any harm. If you’ll show me where Del keeps his skillets I’ll take over from here, Tye. I’m not partial to having a man in the way when I’m cooking.”
She started to move past him toward the stove, her posture rigid, but even as she took a second step he was in front of her, barring her way.
“Okay, so tell me, Suze,” he said, his tone edged. “How do you know him when you see him? What exactly does he look like, your Mr. Scratch?”
His hands were on her shoulders, and suddenly the worn cotton of her dress felt as insubstantial as shattered silk. He tightened his grip by a fraction, and at the barely noticeable adjustment she felt the fabric of her bodice tautening against the swell of her breasts. Instant heat suffused her, and this time when she tried to breathe she found she couldn’t. She stared up at him, her gaze painfully wide.
Steal the blue from the most perfect summer sky on the most perfect summer’s day and you’d have his eyes, she told herself. A woman could fall into that blue—fall straight in and never want to come out again. What would it be like to let those eyes see every inch of you, to feel that mouth everywhere on your skin, to forget everything you’d ever been taught and give yourself for just one sinful night to the de—
The breath she’d been trying to take slammed into her with the force of an arctic gale, sweeping away all heat and replacing the lassitude that had gripped her with cold awareness. She swallowed past the dryness in her throat, and he released his grip on her.
“I—I think he looks just like you, Tye,” she said unevenly. “That’s why he’s so dangerous.”
Just for a moment she would have sworn she saw something flash behind those eyes—something that could have been pain. Before she could identify the emotion it was gone.
Or maybe it hadn’t been there in the first place. A crooked smile lifted a corner of his mouth.
“What’s that expression about giving a dog a bad name?” This time it wasn’t her imagination. Without seeming to move at all, suddenly he’d lessened the distance between them to no more than a few inches. Behind her she felt the hard edge of the counter pressing into her back.
“Give a dog a bad name and he’ll bite?” she ventured. “Tye, I—”
“That’s it.” He bent his head, obliterating the last of her precious buffer zone. “You can call me off anytime, Suze,” he said, his tone velvety. “But maybe you don’t want to. Maybe after a lifetime of putting the devil behind you, just this once you’d like to be tempted.”
His last words were murmured against her lips. For the space of a heartbeat his gaze held hers, and during that heartbeat Susannah knew she should step away from him.
Her lips parted. Her veins felt suddenly as if they were filled with something much thicker than blood, something so heavy and hot she found it impossible to move her limbs. An identical heat pooled in the pit of her stomach and seemed to spill downward toward her thighs.
She heard herself sigh, the sound so light and insubstantial it was barely audible. His mouth came down onto hers before the soft exhalation was completed.
Tye’s tongue moved past her lips, past her teeth, and without conscious volition she felt herself opening up to him, her startled reaction based on instinct rather than experience. The next moment his palms were on either side of her face, pulling her closer to him and steadying her. His tongue went a little deeper, as if it were trying to coax her very soul from her, and some last spark of self-preservation flared desperately inside her.
With the half-formed intention of pushing him away she brought her hands up, but even as her fingers spread against the solidity of his chest he lifted his head.
“You don’t have to do that. I said you could call me off anytime.” His whisper was hoarse, his breath warm on her lips. “But you don’t trust the devil, do you? Is that why you ran from me the day you disappeared, Suze—because you were afraid of what I was?”
Dazedly she shook her head, her gaze locked on his. “I don’t think so.” The heat that had been spreading through her was now a searing ache. Her throat felt scratchy and raw as she forced the words out. “I don’t think that was it at all. I think I ran because I was afraid of what I was, Tye. Or of what I wanted to be, from the first moment I saw you,” she ended, her voice low.
His gaze darkened to indigo. “I don’t get it. What did you want to be?”
She didn’t reply immediately. Instead she allowed herself to drink in the sight of him, needing every detail her gaze lingered on to be imprinted in her mind—the tanned cheekbones, the thick and incongruously dark lashes half veiling his eyes, the chiselled cut of his mouth. A muscle moved at the side of his jaw. She attempted a smile, and knew her attempt had failed.
“Why, everything I wasn’t, of course,” she said softly. “Beautiful and sophisticated and—and sexy, the kind of woman a man like you would be used to.”
She stepped away from him, staring down at the tea towel around her waist. She blinked, and tightened the loosened knot. Although this time her lips curved as she wanted them to, she felt a stinging moisture behind her eyes.
“When I looked at you I didn’t want to be me. And I knew that was wrong.”
Susannah glanced toward the table, where Danny was still fast asleep in his carry-cot. She took a deep breath. “He’s my world, Tye. I can’t let anything get in the way of keeping him safe, and no matter what Sheriff Bannerman thinks, those men showed up tonight looking to find me. So even if you’re right and I knew I wasn’t going to forget you when Greta stopped to help me that day, I couldn’t let myself think about that. I still can’t.”
Tye held her gaze for a second longer. Then he looked away, his shoulders lifting again in that half shrug she’d seen him give before, as if he were unconsciously trying to adjust the weight of a burden he couldn’t rid himself of. When he spoke there was a harsh edge to his voice.
“Want to hear something funny, Suze? When I looked at you I didn’t want to be me, either. And just for a while I persuaded myself there was a chance I could change.”
He exhaled tightly. “Bannerman might have taken your disappearance more seriously if anyone but me had reported it. I should have known I couldn’t wipe the past out by coming back here. Like Greta, I’ve never believed in miracles, so I don’t know why I let myself hope I’d been handed one.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, troubled by the bleakness in his words. A moment ago the man in front of her had been holding her so closely she’d been afraid she was in danger of losing herself in him. Now he seemed once again to be separated from her by an insurmountable wall—a wall not only isolating him from her, but from everything else around him. He turned to face her, his smile humorless.
“You don’t have to understand. All you have to know is that what just happened between us was a one-time only thing. For what it’s worth, you’ve got my word I won’t cross the line again.” He scrubbed his jaw with a weary hand. “I think it’s time you filled me in on the details. Do you have any idea who those men were or what they wanted from you?”
His change of subject was briskly abrupt, but probably that was for the best, she thought. Out of some sense of responsibility for her and the baby he’d helped deliver, Tye Adams had appointed himself her temporary protector, but that was as far as their relationship could go. From the start she’d known they came from two different worlds and although some part of her had fleetingly yearned to fit into his, she was too much Lacey Bird’s granddaughter ever to attempt to be something she wasn’t.
She had no idea why he’d kissed her. She frowned at the platter of ham and reached for the carving knife beside it before answering his question.
“I’ve never known who they are. As for what they want, the man who tried to kill me tonight said it was payback.” Carefully she concentrated on evening up the hacked surface of the meat and cutting two perfect slices. “After he was killed the police told me Frank hadn’t been a photojournalist like he’d always said, but a gambler and a small-time scam artist whose real name was probably Jerry Corning—although he’d used so many different aliases over the years they weren’t even sure of that. I guess one of his scams backfired on him in the end. Obviously not all of his marks were as gullible as I was.”
On her last sentence her voice wavered and to her chagrin the knife slipped in her hand, almost nicking her. Immediately Tye took the implement.
“Forget the damned cooking, I’ll rustle us up something.” Briskly he opened one of the lower cupboards and pulled out a cast-iron frypan. “I did KP duty here in my day, and while I never was the cook Jess or Connor was, I was a hell of a lot better than Riggs.”
He shot her a glance. “That’s right, honey. I was one of Del’s hell-raisers when I was a teen. I think that might have had something to do with Bannerman’s attitude tonight, since during our year at the ranch the four of us weren’t exactly popular with him.”
The man was impossible to read, Susannah thought helplessly. He had the good looks of a movie star, but from what he’d said he’d built up a business providing physical security for celebrities instead of becoming one himself. The privileged aura he unconsciously projected could only have come from a background of money and power so well entrenched he’d grown up taking it for granted, and yet apparently he’d come close to throwing it all away when he’d been younger.
Earlier tonight he’d been put into the position of having to kill a killer. If he felt any regret for taking a life, whatever the circumstances, he’d given no sign. But just now he’d brought up the subject of his past for the sole reason, she suspected, of distracting her from her own unhappy memories.
She smiled shakily at him. “I think my sympathies are with Sheriff Bannerman. You and your bad-boy friends must have torn up the county. No, Tye—” Firmly she took the pan from him. “I’d rather have something to do while I’m telling you my story, and kitchen work’s always been more of a comfort than a chore for me. Besides, that ham needs red-eye gravy, and I’ll bet a dollar a Californian like you doesn’t know the first thing about making it.”
“You’d win that dollar.” A corner of his mouth lifted. “All right, Suze, you get to cook. Do you trust me to get Dan the Man into something a little more like a real bed?”
“Dan the—” A few minutes ago she hadn’t imagined she would be capable of laughing, but the sound bubbling up from her throat definitely was a laugh, Susannah realized. And although she’d even had foolish, first-mama nerves when Greta had asked once or twice if she could put Danny to bed, for some reason she had no qualms about Tye’s competence in tucking her baby in. Well, almost no qualms, she admitted.
“Line the dresser drawer with something padded,” she said as he lifted the carry-cot and its tiny occupant from the table. “And Tye—he likes his blanket up to his chest, no farther. But don’t cover his hands, because then he’ll wake up for sure and start fretting—”
“Wonder where he gets that from?” His question was accompanied by the slightest of smiles. “Hey, lady—don’t forget I was the first one to hold the little guy. As I recall, I didn’t give you any static when you asked me to hand him over for a while.”
“That’s true.” A second soft bubble of laughter rose up in her. With exaggerated deliberation, she turned away, reaching for the bowl of eggs as she slid the pan on the burner.
“Suze?”
At the unexpectedly tentative note in his voice her pose of unconcern fled. Glancing quickly at him, she saw that he’d paused in the doorway. His gaze met hers, the humor that had lit his eyes only a moment ago no longer in evidence.
“Were you very much in love with him?” he asked softly. Even as the words left his lips he frowned impatiently. “Sorry, stupid question. Of course you were—the man was your husband, for God’s sake.” He turned toward the hall, but before he could take a second step, Susannah spoke, her own tone as low as his had been.
“Yes, Frank Barrett was my husband. And twelve hours after I became his wife I was a widow.”
Blindly she extracted an egg from the bowl, finding its cool, spherical surface somehow comforting.
“He was killed the morning after our wedding night, while I was out walking along the beach wondering if there was any way I could undo the mistake I’d made in marrying him.”
Chapter Four
“For a while after Granny Lacey died I felt like I’d been cast adrift. She’d been my anchor all my life, and suddenly she was gone. I think Frank sensed that.”
Neatly, Susannah laid her knife and fork at the edge of her plate and pressed a corner of the red-and-white checked napkin to her lips. Across the table from her Tye took a last mouthful of ham. “More coffee?” she asked, half rising from her chair.
But already he was up, and waving her back into her seat. “I’ll get it. Did the police ever catch the hit-and-run driver who killed her?”
“No.”
Falling silent as he hefted the blue-enamelled coffeepot from the stove, she allowed herself to watch him through her lashes. For all his height and breadth there was an easy grace to the most casual of his movements, but it was a controlled grace, as if on some level he held himself ready to react instantaneously to any given situation. He’d changed out of the begrimed T-shirt into a faded chambray shirt. The garment was obviously work attire, Susannah conceded, but even coming upon him dressed the way he was and pumping gas at a service station there was no way anyone would mistake Tyler Adams for hired labor.
It wasn’t the first time since Frank’s death she’d had to relate the facts of her brief marriage and sudden widowhood, and she’d grown to dread the shocked sympathy and carefully phrased condolences that invariably resulted. She hadn’t wanted that from Tye—hadn’t wanted, even for a moment, to mislead him as to how it had really been. After telling him what she’d never told anyone else she’d looked down at the egg in her hand, half surprised to see it was still intact. His response had been immediate.
“The guilt’s been the hardest to bear, right?” he’d said shortly. “Been there, done that, Suze. Let’s put this talk off until you get some hot coffee and food inside you. All things considered it’s been a crappy night all around for you and the way I acted a while ago was part of that, I’m sure.”
He’d understood up to a point, she thought now. But that point had stopped short of realizing that for the few moments he’d held her in his arms the rest of what had happened tonight had faded from her consciousness. He certainly couldn’t suspect that if he’d held her for a single second longer, Frank Barrett’s widow and little Daniel Tyler’s mother might not only have given in to temptation, as he’d suggested, but would have done her level best to tempt him.
Which would have been about as out of place as a mule trying to outpace Dan Patch, she chastised herself mentally. Thank the Lord you didn’t totally forget yourself with the man.
“Did the authorities say anything that made you think they suspected—” Stopping in midsentence, Tye refilled her coffee cup and then his before he sat down. He caught her inquiring glance and shook his head dismissively. “I’m jumping the gun here. You said your grandmother had been your anchor. What happened to your parents?”
“By the time I was five they were both dead,” she said simply. “Granny Lacey never liked to talk about it much, and about all she’d ever say was that my mama might have lived if she’d had a stronger heart, but that she never would have been the same after. My grandmother’s sister died of a fever, so I guess having her daughter-in-law go the same way hit her hard.”
She took a sip of her coffee. “Hit my daddy hard, too, from all accounts,” she added softly. “I don’t remember much about that time, but I recall the last time I saw him. I think it must have been a few months after Mama passed away, because Granny Lacey was living with us and looking after me. Daddy came into my bedroom to hear me say my prayers, and he asked me to say one specially for him. I felt his hand on my head just as I was finishing, but by the time I got off my knees and hopped into bed he’d gone. He was killed in a car accident that night, and within a week Granny Lacey had packed up everything we owned and she and I left Fox Hollow for good.”
“Tough for her, with a granddaughter to care for and raise all by herself,” Tye commented. Susannah looked up in surprise.
“She never felt she was carrying the burden alone—just like I know I’m not raising Danny all by myself.” She saw belated comprehension touch his features, followed almost immediately by discomfort, and she shot him a mischievous smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t start leaving religious tracts around for you to read, Tye. But even though I haven’t been back for sixteen years I’ll always be a Fox Hollow girl, and folks in Fox Hollow are pretty rock solid in the Word.”
“I don’t believe in much of anything,” he said dryly. “But we’re straying from the subject. Lacey Bird took her granddaughter and moved to New Jersey, of all places? That jalopy you were driving had Garden State plates,” he added.
“Goodness, that wasn’t the first place we lived after pulling up stakes.” Frowning, Susannah spread out the fingers of one hand and started ticking them off. “I started school in Ohio, I remember, and I got to grade four before Granny Lacey was asked by a women’s center in Indiana to give midwifery training there. For a time she worked with a group of Amish midwives in Pennsylvania and then I think we moved to upper New York—no—” she corrected herself thoughtfully “—we stayed in Kentucky that summer. I was old enough to take a part-time job at the Dairy Queen and start helping with the money. We never had much but we always got by.”
“On delivering babies.” There was a slightly skeptical note in his voice. She didn’t take offense.
“On delivering babies, on taking in sewing, on the waitressing jobs I got when I finished my schooling,” she agreed. “I made good grades but I wasn’t scholarship material so college wasn’t an option, and although Granny said we could manage some kind of training for me if I wanted, I liked working in restaurants. I liked it that people came in hungry and left full. Does that sound foolish?”
“No.” A corner of Tye’s mouth quirked upward. “But it’s a different attitude from the one I’m used to hearing. Most of my clients are on a permanent diet. Why did you end up in New Jersey?”
“Granny Lacey felt she’d been called to go there.” On the heels of his diet remark as it was, her answer came out more snappishly than she’d intended. She went on less briskly. “Five months after we moved to Atlantic City she was walking home one night from the bus stop after delivering a baby. A car mounted the curb and struck her, killing her instantly. I still hadn’t really gotten over her death when Frank started coming into the diner where I worked and asking me out.”
Tye seemed to pick his next words with care. “From what you said earlier I get the impression it wasn’t love at first sight on your part, Suze.”
“So why did I go out with him, you mean?” She looked down at her hands. “I was lonely. And Frank made me laugh.”
She glanced swiftly up at him, but his face was impassive. “I’d been on church outings with groups and there’d been a pastor’s son who’d accompanied me to an organ recital once, but I’d never really dated before. Heavens, it wasn’t until I was nineteen that I bought my first lip gloss, and although she didn’t say anything I could tell Granny Lacey considered it pretty racy on my part. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I had an old-fashioned upbringing. I’m not sorry I did, but maybe it didn’t equip me that well when I suddenly found myself on my own. He was in his thirties and good-looking. I—I was flattered by his interest in me.”
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Harper Allen
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A DESERTED COUNTRY ROAD, A BROKEN-DOWN CAR AND IN THE THROES OF LABOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN TYLER ADAMS HAD EVER SEEN…Tye didn′t know how Susannah Bird had gotten into her current predicament, but after delivering her newborn son and holding the squirming bundle in his arms, he vowed to protect them both with his life.Accept the protection Tye offered or disappear? Susannah had to think of how best to keep her baby safe from the men who were determined to kill them both. She fought against the devil that tempted her with Tye′s blue eyes and tender promises, but could the mysterious stranger be the answer to her and her son′s prayers…?