Covert Cowboy
Covert Cowboy
Harper Allen
MISSION PROFILETHE AGENT: Conrad Burke, alias Connor DucharmeHIS MOTTO: "Always work alone."THE ASSIGNMENT–AND COMPLICATION: Team up with one headstrong, pregnant woman to catch a criminal….With a resolve as cold as steel and a thirst for vengeance, U.S. marshal-turned-Confidential-agent Conrad Burke tracked his quarry like a Wild West hero of old. Until the trail led to his downfall–the one woman he'd always loved. Marilyn Langworthy, billionaire's daughter–and after one reckless night, mother of Con's unborn child. His quest placed her in jeopardy. But although the mobster he sought took no prisoners, only Marilyn had the key to bring the man down. Now Con would move heaven and earth to keep Marilyn safe….
Colorado Confidential turns up the heat in the search for the Langworthy baby. There’s a new agent on board to shake up the case and shake down another lead—if he can handle the very cool, very pregnant Marilyn Langworthy…
“I’m pregnant. I’m not going to make a total fool of myself.”
“A fool of yourself? Why would you say that?” Con’s expression was unreadable.
“Because it would be foolish of me to believe the things you say. And I can’t afford to be foolish anymore. I’ll work with you, but that’s as far as it goes.”
“And if I want it to go further, cher?” Emerald eyes narrowed at her. “I’m out of luck is what you’re saying?”
He was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen, and to pretend she was immune to his brand of sexy Southern charm would be a lie. “A man like you is never at the end of his luck, Con,” she said softly. “I don’t think I’m going to cause you any sleepless nights.”
“You might be surprised at what keeps me awake nights,” Con drawled. “If you want to keep it business between us I’ll do my best. But I don’t guarantee anything.”
Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,
Take a very well-deserved break from Thanksgiving preparations and rejuvenate yourself with Harlequin Intrigue’s tempting offerings this month!
To start off the festivities, Harper Allen brings you Covert Cowboy—the next riveting installment of COLORADO CONFIDENTIAL. Watch the sparks fly when a Native American secret agent teams up with the headstrong mother of his unborn child to catch a slippery criminal. Looking to live on the edge? Then enter the dark and somber HEARTSKEEP estate—with caution!—when Dani Sinclair brings you The Second Sister—the next book in her gothic trilogy.
The thrills don’t stop there! His Mysterious Ways pairs a ruthless mercenary with a secretive seductress as they ward off evil forces. Don’t miss this new series in Amanda Stevens’s extraordinary QUANTUM MEN books. Join Mallory Kane for an action-packed story about a heroine who must turn to a tough-hearted FBI operative when she’s targeted by a stalker in Bodyguard/Husband.
A homecoming unveils a deadly conspiracy in Unmarked Man by Darlene Scalera—the latest offering in our new theme promotion BACHELORS AT LARGE. And finally this month, ’tis the season for some spine-tingling suspense in The Christmas Target by Charlotte Douglas when a sexy cowboy cop must ride to the rescue as a twisted Santa sets his sights on a beautiful businesswoman.
So gather your loved ones all around and warm up by the fire with some steamy romantic suspense!
Enjoy,
Denise O’Sullivan
Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
Covert Cowboy
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.
The Confidential Code
I will protect my country and its citizens.
I will stand in the line of fire between innocents and criminals.
I will back up my fellow agents without questions.
I will trust my instincts.
And most of all…
I WILL KEEP MY MISSION AND MY IDENTITY STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Marilyn Langworthy—Her nickname’s the Ice Queen, but her detached facade hides the guilt she feels over her tiny nephew’s disappearance.
Conrad Burke—He’s only working with Colorado Confidential because he’s hunting an enemy from the past.
Holly Langworthy—Marilyn’s younger half sister, she may know more about her baby’s kidnapping than she’s revealing.
Tony Corso—Nephew of a mobster, he used his position at a Langworthy-owned pharmaceutical firm to steal dangerous viral stock.
Samuel Langworthy—Marilyn’s father, he’s been estranged from her for too long.
Joshua Langworthy—Marilyn’s politically minded brother intends to be Colorado’s next governor.
Helio DeMarco—The shadowy mobster has a liking for biological weapons, and a hatred of Con Burke.
Wiley Longbottom—He suggested Con for Colorado Confidential. Now he wonders if he picked the right man for the job.
Colleen Wellesley—The head of Colorado Confidential, she doesn’t particularly like Con, and the feeling’s mutual.
To Wayne with Love
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
Epilogue
Chapter One
Nineteen days, five hours, and—
Marilyn Langworthy glanced at the diamond watch on her wrist before focusing again on the computer monitor in front of her.
—thirty-odd minutes. Still no ransom note. Still no leads. Dear God, how can anyone hide a four-month-old baby this long without drawing attention to themselves?
The figures on the monitor wavered. She squeezed her eyes shut against the cold wave of fear washing over her, but the logical part of her brain refused to shut off.
That was why there hadn’t been a demand for money. That was why no one had phoned the police to report a crying baby in a house where there hadn’t been a baby a few weeks ago, why no curious store clerk had gossiped about someone who looked like a thug or a crazy suddenly coming in on a regular basis to buy diapers and formula. Maybe her nephew’s kidnappers had panicked, maybe they’d realized too late that snatching a baby boy was one thing but keeping him concealed while they negotiated a ransom was another.
Maybe Sky was already—
“Ms. Langworthy?”
She opened her eyes. Her expression eased as she saw the older woman standing in the open doorway.
“Don’t tell me, Elva,” she said, apology tingeing her tone. “Everyone else left hours ago, right?”
Briskly her secretary entered with the same efficient energy she’d displayed hours earlier when her working day had commenced. Elva Hare had started in the typing pool at Mills & Grommett Pharmaceuticals thirty-two years ago and had worked her way up to the position of Samuel Langworthy’s personal assistant. Why she volunteered to become my secretary when I arrived from Boston to become Father’s vice president of sales I’ll never know, Marilyn thought. But I couldn’t have handled this job without her.
“I’m no shrinking violet waiting for you to tell me when it’s quitting time, so don’t worry about it,” Elva replied, laying some papers on the desk. “I wanted to pull these sales figures together for you before your meeting tomorrow.”
“God, the meeting.” Marilyn sank back in her chair. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
“Under the circumstances that’s understandable.” Beneath an iron-gray perm, Elva’s gaze was concerned. “I don’t hold with this business-as-usual policy your father’s keeping to, especially since as the sole family member involved in his company you’re the only one affected. Your brother’s canceled all but his most important speaking engagements, and Holly—”
She shook her head. “Now isn’t the time to air my opinion of your half sister’s life of leisure,” she said quietly. “No woman should have to go through what she’s had to endure these past three weeks. The police haven’t…?”
“They haven’t come up with a thing, Elva.”
Marilyn heard the hopelessness in her voice as she answered the older woman—heard it, and hated herself for it. She pulled the sheaf of papers toward her, but instead of looking at them she glanced up at her secretary.
“I went to church on Sunday,” she said softly. “I can’t remember the last time I attended. Oh, Christmas and Easter, of course, and whenever I go back to Boston to pay Mother a visit. But just an ordinary Sunday? It’s been a while.”
“I don’t need to ask what you prayed for.” Elva sighed. “I haven’t mentioned anything to the rest of the staff, since the family wants to keep a lid on the publicity, but if you hear anything, Ms. Langworthy…”
“If I hear anything I’ll let you know right away,” Marilyn promised. “Although sometimes I think you’re more in the Langworthy loop than I am.” She’d meant it as a small joke. It hadn’t come out that way, she realized in embarrassment.
Elva didn’t pretend not to understand. “Your father’s a fine man in many ways,” she said evenly. “But he doesn’t like admitting he’s capable of failure, and rightly or wrongly, he sees the breakdown of his first marriage as a failure. When your mother got custody of you and went back home to Beacon Hill, the only way he could handle it was to close off that part of his life. It helped that he was so crazy about your stepmother,” she added dryly. “And to an empire-builder like Samuel a firstborn son like Joshua is a godsend.”
“Oh, Josh was always meant to fulfill Father’s political hopes, even when he went through his rebellious phase,” Marilyn said crisply. “Running for governor is just the start, and if I was ever jealous of my golden-boy brother I got over it long ago.”
“But coming back here to Colorado reminded you of how your younger half sister took your place?” Elva probed with characteristic bluntness. Marilyn grimaced.
“I was born on a Thursday. Holly is Sunday’s child.” She shrugged. “You ever hear the old rhyme?”
“I seem to remember the child born on the Sabbath gets the whole shebang, so to speak.” The older woman’s normally businesslike tones softened. “What about Thursday’s?”
“Thursday’s child has far to go.” Marilyn’s smile was one-sided. “That’s me all over, Elva. Sometimes I feel like I just have so darn far to go before I get to where I want to be. Or to who I want to be,” she added huskily. “I’m not sure I like the person I’ve become since I moved back here, so I can’t complain when the rest of the family make it clear they’d rather I’d stayed in Boston.”
She fell silent for a moment. Then she nudged her computer’s mouse so that the floral screen-saver disappeared.
“An absolutely perfect example of what I mean.” She forced a laugh. “I’m sitting here feeling sorry for my inner child when there’s a real baby missing. You’re right, Elva—Holly must be going through hell, wondering when the authorities will get a break in this case. Somehow her situation puts my little problems into perspective, doesn’t it?”
She sighed. “But meanwhile life at Mills & Grommett goes on, complete with the Wednesday morning meetings I got too used to leaving for Tony to handle when he was here.”
“I’ll inform security you’re working late.” Easily Elva slipped back into the persona of efficient secretary. She nodded pleasantly. “Good night, Ms. Langworthy.”
“’Night, Elva.” Feeling foolishly lonely all of a sudden, Marilyn flipped open the sheaf of papers, but even as she did she realized Elva had paused in the doorway. She looked up.
“Happy birthday, Ms. Langworthy.” The older woman’s tone was tentative. “At M & G we normally order in a cake for these kinds of occasions. I knew you wouldn’t feel like celebrating today, but I didn’t want you to think no one had remembered.”
A cake. As she heard Elva’s footsteps tapping through the outer offices and listened for the thunk of the dead bolt being turned in the reception area door leading to the fortieth floor hallway, a vision of what she’d been spared flitted through Marilyn’s mind. She gave a mental shudder. It was bad enough turning thirty-one. Turning thirty-one in a staff lunchroom had root canals and bikini waxing beat hands down in the excruciatingly painful category. And as Elva had surmised, this was one July twenty-second she had no desire to celebrate.
Coming to Denver was the biggest mistake of your life.
The thought dropped into her mind with the suddenness of unwelcome certainty. Unable to continue feigning an interest in the information in front of her, she got up and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that took up one wall of her office. On the same unsettled impulse, she flicked off the overhead fluorescents so that only her desk lamp remained on. Below her the lights of the city spread out like diamonds on velvet.
Maybe coming here hadn’t been the biggest mistake, she told herself stonily. Maybe accepting her father’s far-from-enthusiastic invitation to take this position at his company had been. Or maybe breaking her own unwritten rule of not dating a co-worker took the prize—yet another reason cake in the staffroom wouldn’t have been a fun idea. Since that disastrously eye-opening final evening with Tony Corso and his abrupt resignation the next morning, she’d suspected she hadn’t been the first female at M & G he’d shown his true colors to. She had no desire to exchange girlfriend horror stories with Angie, the receptionist, or Leeza, the records clerk.
And none of that mattered a damn, Marilyn thought. Because everything else faded into insignificance beside baby Sky’s disappearance.
She’d had the chance to hold him. She’d turned Holly down. Regret, more corrosive than acid, spilled through her. As it had done a hundred times in the days since Sky’s kidnapping, the memory of the one and only occasion she’d allowed herself to visit her half sister and her newborn nephew came flooding back.
“Sweetie, it’s a Karan blouse and a Jacobs suit,” she’d said coolly. “Baby sick-up isn’t my idea of the perfect accessory. Here’s a little welcome-to-the-world gift for him, by the way. When I told the store clerk what I wanted engraved on it I’m sure he thought we were holdouts from the hippie era or something. Why would you pick Schyler as a name, when you must have known he’d be saddled with such an odd nickname?”
Holly’s only reply had been the annoyingly beatific smile Marilyn had privately told herself her half sister must have received along with the rest of the trappings of motherhood. That smile had been infuriating on more than one level, but at the very least it had been a clear indication that the status quo between them had changed, in Holly’s mind, anyway.
It had always been so easy to prick Holly’s perfect little bubble, she’d thought with a flash of irritation—easy and satisfying and…and justified. Except now it seemed her half sister’s lifelong lack of self-confidence where their father’s first daughter was concerned was gone. Incredibly, that smile seemed to indicate that Holly felt sorry for her.
“It’s beautiful, Marilee. Thank you.”
The use of the foolish pet name that had been the closest a baby Holly had been able to get to pronouncing “Marilyn” had set her teeth on edge. Her half sister had enclosed the solid-silver baby rattle in its nest of tissue paper and ribbon.
“Aren’t you going to let him play with it?” Her usual tone when speaking to Holly was a bored drawl. It had been disconcerting to hear a touch of sharpness in her voice, and she’d modulated it with a laugh. “It’s never too early to develop good taste, and hallmarked silver beats a chewed-up terry cloth toy any day. Take that disgusting rabbit thing away from him and give him the rattle.”
“That disgusting rabbit thing is Bun-Bun, I’ll have you know,” Holly had replied with a smile. “Sky frets when he can’t find him. And besides, Marilee—” Her smile had faltered. “—he’s just a baby. The rattle’s exquisite, but it’s far too heavy for him to lift.”
She’d dropped a quick kiss on the top of her son’s downy head. “I never imagined I’d feel like this,” she’d said softly. “I could just sit here all day and inhale him. Are you sure you don’t want to hold him for a minute?”
“I think I’ll pass on that thrill, sweetie.” She’d barely been able to get the words out. “I’d rather inhale something a little more fragrant, like a dry white wine, and I’m late for my lunch at Zenith with Tony.” As she’d kissed the air near Holly’s cheek the sight of her discarded gift had prompted her to add, “Next time I come a-callin’ on Mama and baby I’ll ask him along, shall I? A little boy should have at least one male figure in his life besides his uncle and grandfather, don’t you think?”
As soon as she’d launched the barb some part of her had wished she could recall it…and some part of her, she remembered now with shame, had felt a surge of satisfaction as Holly’s complacent smile had given way to a stricken look. Her half sister’s back had curved slightly, as if to protect the baby in her arms from the words that had just been uttered.
“You were jealous.” Marilyn stared sightlessly at the glittering panorama that was Denver at night. Her voice rang out too loudly in the shadowed office.
“You wished he was yours. Never mind that either his father didn’t want to stick around or Holly decided she and Sky were better off without him. You only used that because you wanted to hurt her, and you wanted to hurt her because you envied her. You were terrified of holding that baby—terrified of showing how you really felt, terrified Holly would somehow guess that you’d give anything in the world to have one of your own.”
Her reflection wavered darkly in the window in front of her, and she stared at the woman she saw standing there as if she were looking at a stranger. Pale blond hair brushed the woman’s shoulders. An expensively plain blouse tapered in at the waist and then slightly out again to skim a pencil-slim black skirt. Longish legs ended in narrow, elegant feet shod in narrow, elegant heels. She looked pulled-together, businesslike, attractive.
Marilyn flinched. The illusion shattered. The woman in the glass was a fraud and a bitch. The woman in the glass didn’t exist at all, except as a collection of possessions and poses.
The only real thing about her was the dread in her eyes.
“Holly’s out of her mind with fear,” her brother Joshua had told her curtly when he’d called to notify her of their nephew’s abduction a few hours after it had occurred. “She’s sitting by the phone clutching that damned stuffed rabbit of his, waiting for the kidnappers to call.”
“Sky frets when he can’t find him…” More than anything, that had haunted her over the past weeks, Marilyn thought—a tiny baby snatched away from everything and everyone familiar, not even allowed the comfort of a beloved toy. Trivial as it was, that knowledge had brought home to her the ruthlessness of the people who had taken Sky.
The people who had taken him, and who perhaps by now had panicked and—
The pain that had been building in her burst forth in a terrible, keening cry that felt like it was splitting her asunder. A nightmarish jumble of images flashed through her mind and her hands flew up reflexively, as if by pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes she could turn off her imagination. Still the pictures, each one more horrible than the last, seared their way into her soul.
There was only one way to blot them out. Marilyn stopped fighting the blackness and let it overtake her. Her knees buckled. The floor rushed up to meet her.
And the man who had been standing in the shadows the whole time strode forward to catch her as she fell.
HE WAS GOING to have to lie to her, U.S. Marshall Conrad Burke told himself as he carried Marilyn to the couch in the corner of her office. Against the creamy pallor of her cheeks her lashes stirred, and his self-disgust intensified. Merde. The lying was going to have to start now.
Me, I was born to hang, sure. Despite the situation he found himself in, a corner of Con’s mouth twitched upward as he remembered his great-uncle Eustache’s oft-repeated boast. But you were born to lie, boy, so make sure you do it like a Creole gentleman. Steady eye contact, and with the ladies, a small smile, no?
Dark lashes fluttered open. Eyes as blue as heaven gazed blankly up at him, and for a moment Con forgot everything Eustache Ducharme had ever taught him. He recovered smoothly.
“Not the way I meant to introduce myself, sugar,” he said with a quick, and he hoped, reassuring, smile, his gaze steady on her suddenly widened one, “but it seems I walked in just as you fainted. You feeling all right now, cher’?”
He hadn’t planned on introducing himself at all and he certainly hadn’t walked in only minutes ago, so even if you didn’t count the fact that he needed no introduction to Marilyn Langworthy, those were lies number one and two right there, Con thought, guilt rippling unfamiliarly through him. And the lady wasn’t buying them, he realized as he saw that heaven-blue gaze focus and begin to harden.
She was going to ask him how he’d gotten past security and into her locked office. He needed to plant other questions in her mind, and fast.
“New Orleans P.D.” He slipped two fingers into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and extracted a leather identification case, complete with gold badge. Deftly he flipped it open in front of her. “Detective Connor Ducharme. I’m investigating—”
“Is he safe?”
Under his open jacket he was wearing a waistcoat—what those unfortunate enough to be born north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Missouri River called a vest, he supposed. Before he’d known what she intended she’d grabbed its lapels. Slim fingers gave a surprisingly strong tug and she repeated her query, those perfect features of hers etched with strain.
“Is he safe? Have you found him? Dear God—New Orleans? Why in heaven’s name did they take him there?”
He’d needed her to ask questions. He wished now she’d asked the one he’d been trying to steer her away from.
“Cher’, I’m not here about the little one,” he said, as gently as he could. “The case I’m working involves a certain Tony Corso, wanted on fraud charges in Louisiana. I wish I had news of your nephew for you, but I don’t.”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again he saw the urgently hopeful light in them had disappeared. Her fingers slid from his lapels.
“I—I thought maybe it was all over. The nightmare, I mean. I thought Sky might be on his way home right now.”
She took a deep breath. Letting it out, she sat up on the couch. Her head bowed, she swung her legs to the floor. Looking up, she met his look with a suddenly flinty one of her own.
“How did you know my nephew had been kidnapped? Since it’s not common knowledge in Denver, I can’t believe every last man-jack on the New Orleans force has been alerted.”
“Probably not.” He shrugged easily, more sure of his ground now. “But when I discovered Corso’s trail led here the local law brought me up to speed.”
He flicked a glance at her still-white face. Something prompted him to add, “From what I hear, the rest of your family’s sticking pretty close together these days. Why aren’t you with them?”
He’d gone too far, he realized immediately. She stiffened, and when her gaze locked on his he could have sworn the temperature in the room dropped several degrees.
“My personal life can’t be part of your investigation, Detective, so I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that question.”
She smoothed her skirt down her thighs and stood, and despite the perceptible chill emanating from her Con felt sudden heat slam into him. Not everything he’d told her had been a lie, he thought, trying to school his features into impassivity. He had asked questions before coming here, and the answers he’d gotten had all been the same. Marilyn Langworthy was a bitch. She was an ice queen. Nothing touched her—not the kidnapping of her tiny nephew, and certainly not the breakup of her relationship with Tony Corso.
Maybe some of what he’d heard was true, but he’d already seen enough of the woman to put the lie to at least two of the labels that had been pinned on her. She cared about the child—cared enough that she was being torn apart by Sky’s abduction, judging from what he’d witnessed moments ago. And if she was an ice queen, it was only because the right man hadn’t come along to melt her yet.
You gon’ be the one who does that, Cap?
The jeering voice inside his head held the same skepticism he’d heard from the late-night denizens of the Canal Street clubs he’d trolled when he’d been young enough that even hardened gamblers had felt a momentary pang of conscience before dealing a tough Creole urchin in on a game of five-card stud. He’d taken them and their consciences to the cleaners, Con recalled without regret. But back then all he’d been risking was money.
The stakes were higher here. And the odds were more overwhelmingly against him than they’d ever been in his life.
F’sure. One of these days I’m gonna come back here and give it my best shot, he answered the jeering voice with a determination that disconcerted even himself. But whether she knows it or not, tonight the lady just needs someone to be with her. And maybe if that someone gets her good and angry it’ll ease her pain for a few hours. Before I leave I can do that for her, at least.
“Let’s get back to the matter you say brings you here, Detective.”
Her voice was like everything else about her, he noted—crisp and unemotional on the surface, but shadowed with a hint of vulnerability that the casual observer wouldn’t catch. He wasn’t a casual observer, Con thought. Not when it came to Marilyn Langworthy. With no enthusiasm he took advantage of that vulnerability.
“Tony Corso,” he agreed. “Word is he was your—how did I hear it?—your good right-hand man, cher’,” he drawled insinuatingly. “That true?”
If she’d stiffened before, now her posture was rigid. Two warning flags of color flew high on her cheekbones, and when she answered him, five generations of Beacon Hill aristocracy on her mother’s side came through in every clipped word.
“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re just referring to his position at Mills & Grommett, Detective—” She made a show of frowning in forgetfulness. “I’m sorry. Your name again?”
“Ducharme.” He deliberately took a step onto thinner ice. “But call me Con, sugar. The other’s a mouthful.”
Even if he hadn’t been trying to goad her he wouldn’t have been able to resist letting his gaze linger on the mouth in question, he admitted. Those lips weren’t Beacon Hill at all. They didn’t go with the prim white blouse and the straight skirt she wore, and they didn’t go with the smoothly brushed hairstyle. Those lush lips went with black fishnet stockings, half-undone bustiers, bed-messy tangles of hair obscuring a gleam of blue eye. They were lightly and invisibly glossed—another Beacon Hill legacy, Con guessed. He wondered what that mouth would look like slightly smudged from his kisses.
You’re wondering way too much here, Cap, for a man who doesn’t intend to do anything about it, the voice inside his head warned. Maybe you better back off a little and—
“What is it about me, Detective?” The lips he’d been fantasizing about thinned. “Why do I seem to present a challenge to men of a certain kind, like you and Tony Corso?”
He blinked, feeling obscurely outraged. “Me and Corso, cher’, we’re not two of a kind. I’ll let you take a look at his file sometime and you’ll see just what—”
“His references were solid and when he left he certainly didn’t abscond with the company’s payroll. Whatever you’re trying to charge him with, you’ve obviously made a mistake,” she interrupted him. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I wasn’t Tony’s type, I know now. But just the fact that I wasn’t particularly interested in him when we met made him determined to get some response from me, whatever it took. Even so, his approach was nowhere near as fast and crude as yours, Detective,” she added coldly.
She tipped her head to one side. “The innuendoes, the barely veiled insults. Tell me, do you ever get results with them?”
He’d given in to a reckless impulse by coming here in the first place, Con told himself tightly. He’d compounded that recklessness when he’d revealed himself to her. About the only admirable urge he’d acted upon was his hasty decision to take her mind off her nephew’s disappearance by rousing her ire, and that mission, it was all too obvious, had been accomplished.
He’d always known enough to fold his cards and get up from the table when logic and reason told him his run of luck was about to expire. Right now logic and reason were telling him it was time to walk away from Marilyn Langworthy.
Fast and crude? he thought, a tiny spark flaring inside him. Hell, I could have left you thinking anything else of me, sugar, but not that.
“You bet I do,” he said easily. “And if you were honest, you’d admit that sometimes you wish you could slip out of that ice-water manner of yours and into a little Big Easy fast and crude yourself. If you ever feel a lapse in good taste coming on, look me up, cher’.”
“And you’ll what?” Her tone was edged. “Be my—how did you put it?—my right-hand man? I don’t see my taste lapsing that badly.”
Her gaze lasered him. “But I guess I can understand how you work it, Detective. Some women probably just see a big man with dark eyes and black hair when they look at you. Some women might go for that drawl and the riverboat gambler air you put on.”
“I was born in St. Tammany Parish, honey. We all talk like this where I come from,” Con interjected. “And I put myself through college relieving high rollers of their cash on the riverboats, so that’s legit, too. I’m not the one pretending to be something I’m not.”
He smiled into her furious eyes. “Those shoes. Killer heels, sugar, and barely-there straps. They’re your secret sexy vice, aren’t they? They’re the real Marilyn. And deep down I think the real Marilyn could go for a big man with black hair and gambler’s hands if she wasn’t so damn scared of letting loose.”
Shrugging, he turned away. “Too bad for both of us that you’re such a coward, cher’. If Corso contacts you, try to set aside your fears long enough to let me know, will you?”
He felt suddenly angry with himself. If anyone had been a coward here it had been him, Con thought as he strode toward the door. He hadn’t meant to walk into her life this way, had always known there were reasons why Marilyn Langworthy’s path and his should never cross at all. And still he hadn’t been able to resist this encounter. That was bad enough.
But lying about who he was had been worse.
Didn’t have the guts to watch your dreams die right in front of your eyes, did you? the jeering voice said. Letting her think you’re a cochon is preferable to what you know she’d feel if she ever found out who you really are.
“Is it so obvious?”
Her question was so low he almost didn’t hear it. He turned and saw she was still standing by the couch, but that was all that was unchanged from a moment ago.
The self-possession she’d exhibited during their barbed exchange was no longer in evidence. Her cool demeanor had fled. And something had replaced the anger in her gaze with total and absolute devastation.
“I keep telling myself it wasn’t my fault, Con.” She didn’t seem to realize she’d used his name. “But it was.”
“What are you talking about?”
Frowning, he crossed the distance between them and stood before her. There was something wrong here, he thought—something badly wrong. Lightly he grasped her shoulders.
“What’s your fault?”
“I should have been there the day he was kidnapped.” Her whisper was raw, her words more directed to herself than to him. “If I had been, maybe I could have prevented it. But I turned around and came home again, because I was too afraid.”
Under his palms her shoulders trembled. She turned haunted eyes to him. “It’s like you said—I’m a coward. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Sky since the time I visited him and Holly. I hadn’t expected to feel that way about a baby, but I took one look at him and I just fell in love,” she added softly. “So I decided I’d set aside my pride and call on Holly that day, put things right between us after all these years. Except I lost my nerve. That must have been just about the time they—just about the time—”
The blue of her eyes sheened over. “I might have saved Sky, Con, and it’s tearing me apart that I didn’t!”
“Don’t say that, cher’,” he began, but with a quick shake of her head she overrode him.
“It’s true. By choosing to keep myself sealed off I put a little boy in terrible danger. And God help me, if you were anyone but a complete stranger, I wouldn’t even have the courage to admit that much.”
Guilt lanced through him. It was way past time to tell her, he thought. If he left it any longer the consequences could be disastrous.
Even as he opened his mouth to speak she forestalled him.
“And maybe I wouldn’t have the courage to go through with this, either,” she said hoarsely.
Her fingers fumbled with the top button of her blouse. She slipped it free and immediately began working on the second one, her movements clumsy with urgency.
“Holly has family and friends to support her.” Her head was bent to her task as if it required her full attention. Without looking at him she continued speaking, her voice little more than a thread. “My father has his wife. Josh may not have found the woman he wants to share his life with yet but he always has someone—someone to hold, someone who can help him keep the nightmares at bay. But I’m the Ice Queen, Con. And ice queens don’t have anybody.”
He had to stop this, Con thought. Whatever she thought she was doing, it was a sure bet she’d hate herself for it before twenty-four hours had passed. His hands moved from her shoulders to grasp her wrists. The edges of her blouse gaped open to reveal a swell of creamy skin, a delicately erotic edging of lace.
Immediate desire burned through him. He swallowed, and forced his gaze to hers.
“I had no right to say what I did, cher’,” he said huskily. “I had no real right to come here at all. I should go now.”
“No!” The single word exploded from her with the desperation of a plea. The blue eyes meeting his were dark with unimaginable pain. “Don’t you get it, Detective? I need to make the nightmares go away for a few hours. Sky’s disappeared. I might have saved him. For nineteen days that knowledge has been tearing me apart, and I just want to blot it out for tonight.”
She undid the last button. His hands slipped away from her wrists, and when she shrugged out of her blouse and let it fall to the floor he made no move to stop her. Cupped by the lacy bra, her breasts rose and fell quickly.
“Take the pain away, Con.” Her whisper was raw. “Please take it away, just for tonight.”
She needed a stranger. She needed someone who would walk away without a second thought after this was over. She needed someone who wouldn’t recall her name a month from now.
And he wasn’t that someone, Con thought. He was just the man who’d loved her for as long as he could remember. If he did what she was asking, after tonight she wouldn’t only have his heart but she’d own his very soul, and any faint hope he might have had for a future with her would have to be forgotten forever.
Take the pain away, Con. Please take it away…
His arms gathered her tightly to him and his mouth came down on hers.
Chapter Two
With a frown Conrad Burke looked around the massive and rustic great room of the Royal Flush Ranch. It had been three months and two weeks since his encounter with Marilyn Langworthy, he reflected, although encounter came nowhere close to describing the conflagration that had consumed the two of them that night in her office. Three months and two weeks of burying himself in his work, of drinking too much, of falling asleep, drunk or sober, with the memory of her haunting his dreams.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t return to Colorado, but when his old friend Wiley Longbottom had come to him yesterday with a request to meet with a certain Colleen Wellesley here at her ranch, located a couple of hours outside Denver, even the fact that Wiley had refused to reveal what the meeting was about and who Wellesley was hadn’t given him pause. He’d caught a red-eye flight out of Louis Armstrong Airport, touched down in Denver, and the first damn thing he’d done after renting a vehicle had been to head for the city’s lively and upscale LoDo district. He’d parked near the corner of Blake Street and 33rd, within sight of the converted-to-lofts warehouse where he knew Marilyn lived, and had sat behind the wheel of his car all afternoon hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Only when the early November dusk had begun to fall had he left the city, taking I-285 until it hooked up with Highway 9 near Fairplay, just north of the Royal Flush.
Although apparently the house itself had been a bordello in the wild old days, to his mild surprise he’d realized when he’d arrived that the Flush was definitely a working ranch. He was willing to accept that as an excuse for the Wellesley woman’s absence so far, Con told himself, walking over to the antique portrait hanging above the gilded mirror running the length of the heavily varnished and well-stocked pine bar.
He gazed without interest at the rest of the decor, an obvious holdover from those same wild days when this room’s red velvet furnishings and saloon fittings had probably been the last word in decadent luxury for woman-hungry cowboys. Ranch duties or not, if Wiley hadn’t been there, he would have driven back to the airport, Con thought with growing impatience. And this time he wouldn’t have indulged in a foolish and futile side-trip to Marilyn Langworthy’s neighborhood.
It had ended as he’d known it would. After the third time they’d made love she’d fallen asleep in his arms on the sofa, the cashmere throw they’d been lying on pulled lightly over her hips, her head tucked into the hollow of his neck. He hadn’t slept himself, but had spent the few hours before dawn just drinking in the sight of her and breathing in her scent.
During those hours he’d hoped against hope he was wrong. As soon as she’d opened her eyes, hope had died.
Of course she regretted it. What she did with you went against everything she ever thought she was. The only way she could live with herself when she realized she’d made love with a stranger—made love with a stranger and liked it, for God’s sake—would have been to wall herself up again behind the ice that’s protected her all her life. Even before she told you to get out you knew that. Even before she started crying you knew.
So it had ended with her hating herself and hating him, he thought. And if he had it all to do over again, for the life of him he didn’t see how he could have acted differently.
She’d needed someone to love her for a few hours. What she would never realize was that with him she hadn’t had to ask.
“Ray called through to the horse barn and didn’t get an answer.” Balancing a thick china plate heaped high with a Dagwood-size sandwich and a huge dill pickle, Wiley Longbottom walked into the room. He made a beeline for the bar and set his precarious burden onto its scarred surface. “Melody insisted on fixing me a little snack, as she calls it. Not that I need it,” he said, giving his stomach a rueful pat.
“The Castillos are the ranch’s housekeeper and caretaker,” he went on. His next words were spoken around a mouthful of roast beef. “Ray said he’d try the foreman’s quarters, find out if Dex knows where the devil Colleen’s disappeared to.”
“So while we’re waiting for her to grace us with her presence why don’t you fill me in on a couple of details?” Con suggested, shooting his old friend a sharp look. “Like what the hell am I doing here in the first place? You know I don’t like the cold, Wiley, so you must have had one hell of a good reason for dragging me away from New Awlins and into the snow belt at this time of year. You’ve got mustard on your tie,” he added in irritation.
“That might be from lunch. I never was the dandy you are, with your boutonnieres and those extravagant vests.” The older man nodded with a grin at the yellow flower in Con’s lapel. Under bushy brows his gaze remained hooded. “As for my reasons for dragging you away, yeah, I’d say they’re justified, but I think it’s best if Colleen’s in on this discussion.”
“Aren’t you playing your cards a little closer than you need to?” Con kept his voice even with an effort. “Dammit, Wiley, this is me. We go back a long way, to before you were appointed director of public safety and when I was just starting out in the Marshall Service. At least give me some background on the mysterious Colleen Wellesley I’m about to meet.”
“I haven’t given her much on you,” the older man informed him with a sidelong glance. “All she knows is that in the past when I’ve run into a particularly thorny problem I’ve consulted with my ‘conscience’ to come up with a solution. She’s not aware said conscience is a reformed cardsharp who cooks up the best crawfish étouffée in the French Quarter, bar none.”
Con grinned reluctantly. “I appreciate the cover even if it isn’t one I’d have chosen myself. And even though you’ve obviously decided it’s time to blow it,” he added, more soberly. “She can be trusted, Wiley?”
“With your real identity, and a whole lot more.” His friend nodded and took another bite of his sandwich. “Wellesley started out as a cop on the Denver force and made detective in record time. She was a damn good one, too, until a bribery scandal derailed her career ten years ago.”
“Nice knowin’ you, Longbottom.” Con pulled the gold watch that had been a legacy from his great-uncle Eustache out of his pocket. “If I break the speed limit all the way back to Denver I should be able to catch a flight home tonight.” His lips tightened. “You know how I feel about dirty cops, Wiley.”
“The same way Colleen feels about them,” the other man replied testily. “She was the whistle-blower, Burke. Except she wasn’t believed, since the son of a bitch she blew the whistle on was a superior officer and the rot went a lot higher than even she’d suspected. She handed in her badge when she realized the corruption was just going to be covered up.”
Slowly Con slipped the watch back into his waistcoat pocket. “That took guts, f’sure,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “So she bought this place and took up ranching?”
“The Royal Flush was left to her when her father died,” Wiley corrected him. “She’s got a brother, Michael, but he’s just come back from time in the special forces and hasn’t been involved with the ranch. Colleen herself delegates most of the day-to-day responsibilities to Dexter Jones, her foreman. Until recently she’s concentrated her energies on running an operation in Denver called ICU, which is short for Investigations, Confidential & Undercover.”
“You taught me a long time ago always to listen for what the other fellow was leaving out,” Con observed. “If she’s been operating a private investigation firm until recently, that means she’s currently doing something else, am I right?”
“She works for us now,” Wiley said flatly. He popped the last bite of dill pickle into his mouth. “The Royal Flush is the headquarters of Colorado Confidential, and Colleen heads the operation. ICU is still operating, but it’s also a front for Confidential activity.”
Con gave a low whistle. “F’true, Cap? So those cryptic e-mails you’ve been sending me asking my advice in a case one of the Confidential organizations was working on—they’ve been about Wellesley’s outfit? I knew about the setups in Chicago and Texas, but this is the first I’ve heard that Confidential had moved into Colorado.”
“Don’t forget Montana,” the other man reminded him. “Yeah, it’s for true, Captain.” He grinned as he played back Con’s slang to him. “You know, Burke, you’re living proof that you can take the boy out of New Orleans but you can’t take the New Orleans out of the boy.”
“And you’ll only get this boy outta dat sweet Crescent City under protest,” Con told him with an answering smile. “All kidding aside, Wiley, what’s any of this got to do with—”
He stopped as if he’d been shot. Then he shook his head decisively. “It ain’t in the cards, old pal. Check with the Marshalls and see what my boss writes in his reports about me. ‘Does not play well with others,’ that’s what. No way am I interested in joining Wellesley’s merry band of undercover cowpokes, not even if our tardy hostess gets down on her knees and begs me to—”
“I’m tardy because I’ve been in the birthing shed with Dex, saving the lives of a mare and a foal who decided to come out feetfirst.”
The crisp explanation came from the slim, fortyish brunette entering the room. Walking past them to the business side of the bar, she pulled a bottle of scotch from the array in front of the antique mirror and produced a cut-glass tumbler from under the counter. Pouring a hefty shot of the amber liquor, she set the bottle down and favored Con with a piercing look.
“As for the getting on my knees and begging part, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. The members of my merry band—” her gaze frosted over even further as she quoted him “—are all solid team players. By your own admission it’s obvious you wouldn’t fit in. Can I get you men a drink?”
She raised the tumbler to her lips. Con studied her through narrowed eyes as she took a healthy swallow of her scotch.
Beneath the ranch-woman exterior of jeans and chambray shirt, Colleen Wellesley was still all cop. It showed in the spit-and-polish neatness of her attire, the no-nonsense short cut of her hair—her damp hair, he noted, realizing that she’d taken time to clean up before she’d joined them.
But a change of clothes and a few minutes under a hot shower hadn’t been enough to obliterate all evidence of what she was trying to conceal, he thought. Her lips were still slightly swollen. Although her gaze had been sharp when she’d directed it at him, as she set her glass down on the bar he caught an unguarded flash of warmth in her eyes.
Colleen Wellesley probably had been helping her foreman deliver a foal, Con decided. But their maternity ward duties had been completed a little earlier than she was admitting.
“Bourbon, if you’ve got it.” From his waistcoat pocket he extracted a silver dollar, its surface smooth from long handling. Idly he passed it under his index finger and over his middle one, then let it slip under his ring finger. The worn silver gleamed and disappeared as he lazily passed it back and forth in his hand. “He must be quite a man, cher’.”
Her head jerked up and a drop or two of the bourbon she was pouring splashed onto the bar. “I’m sorry?”
Con ignored the warning in her tone. “Your foreman,” he elaborated. He picked up his bourbon and looked blandly at her over the rim of his glass. “He must be good at what he does to have saved your mare’s life and delivered her foal safely. Breech births can be tricky, or so I hear.”
Dark eyes held his a moment longer. “Very tricky,” Colleen said finally. “And I don’t like tricky, Mr. Burke. I presume you’re Wiley’s fabled ‘conscience’?”
“Conrad Burke, Colleen Wellesley.” Wiley had been watching them during their exchange. “Why don’t the two of you start all over again, and this time let’s keep it civil. There’s a child’s life at stake here, people.”
“I hadn’t forgotten that, Longbottom,” Colleen snapped, but before she could continue Con broke in.
“A child’s life?” he demanded sharply. “Like when you’ve asked my advice about cases in the past, Wiley, your e-mails on this one just dealt with details. You never gave me the whole picture. What child?”
“Schyler Langworthy.” Wellesley barely glanced at him. “He’s the six-month-old son of Holly Langworthy, and in this state the name Langworthy carries a lot of weight. By election day I guess we’ll see just how much weight, since Holly’s brother’s running for governor against the incumbent, Todd Houghton.” She exhaled tightly. “Sky was kidnapped almost four months ago. Colorado Confidential took on the case a few weeks later, when the police and the feds ran out of leads.”
She drained her scotch. “But that’s not your problem, Burke. You and I agree you’re not team material, so don’t worry about it.”
Take the pain away…
He’d known the Langworthy baby was still missing, and his private opinion had been that Sky had been snatched by someone desperate for a child of their own. There’d never been a ransom demand. So for three months he’d tried to shut out the memory of the agony in Marilyn’s voice when she’d spoken of her kidnapped nephew, since unless and until the U.S. Marshalls were called in on the matter his hands were tied.
That was still the case, Con thought heavily. As the oldest federal law enforcement agency in America, the mandate of the Marshalls was primarily centered on federal fugitives, money-laundering prosecutions and the witness protection program. They cooperated with other levels of law enforcement, but only when specifically requested to.
He frowned. Knowing all that, why had Wiley sent for him?
“It’s got everything to do with you, Con.”
Wiley had shaken his head at Colleen’s earlier offer of a drink. Now he hesitated, and pulled the bottle of scotch toward him.
“My ulcers are going to play me hell for this,” he muttered as he poured himself a shot and swallowed it neat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But then, my ulcers have been giving me hell lately anyway. Ever since Helio DeMarco’s name cropped up in this investigation,” he added, his suddenly grim gaze fixing on Con.
“Helio DeMarco?”
Con felt as if the blood in his veins had suddenly turned to ice. He heard something strike the floor, and looking down, he saw the silver dollar had slipped through his fingers. With a swift movement he bent to pick it up, grateful for the chance to avert his face.
“You know of him?” Colleen’s tone was still barbed. His own was flat as he answered her.
“You could say that. A year ago in New Orleans a protected witness in a case the Marshalls were building against DeMarco on money-laundering charges was killed by him. Then DeMarco contacted Roland Charpentier, one of our agents, and said he wanted to cut a deal.”
“But instead the Marshalls obviously let him get away, since he’s surfaced here in Colorado,” the ex-cop said disgustedly. “Was Charpentier on the take?”
“Colleen—” Wiley began warningly, but Con didn’t let him finish.
“No, cher’, Roland wasn’t on the take,” he drawled. He met her eyes. “I’d have known if he was. Charpentier’s my best friend—in fact, I visited him earlier today, just before I caught my flight to Denver.”
Her gaze wavered. “I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions,” she muttered. “So how did the Marshalls lose Helio, or Lio, as he now calls himself?”
Instead of answering her question, Con asked one of his own. “Everyone’s heard about the Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, but do you know what our other big day is, cher’?”
Annoyance reappeared on her features. “The name’s Wellesley, Burke. And no, I don’t know. I also don’t care.”
“You should,” he informed her. “Because there’s a kind of poetic justice involved you might appreciate. Our other big observance is November the first. Today,” he added softly. “The Day of the Dead, when we visit the graves of our loved ones and remember how much they meant to us.”
He glanced down at the yellow flower in his lapel. “The custom is to lay chrysanthemums by the headstone and have a little chat with the deceased.” He shrugged. “Some families even bring a picnic lunch, make a day of it. I didn’t have time to do that so I just laid my flowers down and made the same vow I always do.”
“Charpentier’s dead, isn’t he?” Belated comprehension filled Colleen’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Burke, I didn’t know. What’s the vow you make?”
“That I’m going to take down the bastard who killed him. That I’m going to take down Helio DeMarco.”
Con flipped the silver dollar into the air. It flashed upward and then tumbled down again, throwing off glints of light before he one-handedly caught it. Slapping his palm and the coin in it flat against the pine bar, he looked at her.
“Call it,” he said tonelessly.
She raised an eyebrow. “Heads.”
He lifted his hand. “Tails. I’ll work with Colorado Confidential, cher’, but on my own terms. No boss, no partners, no rules.”
“No deal,” Colleen riposted. She turned to Wiley. “For God’s sake, Longbottom, this is the maverick you’re considering to head the New Or—”
“I think you should take him up on his offer.” Con heard a hint of steel in the DPS director’s normally mild tones. “If Burke says he’ll deliver Helio to Colorado Confidential he will. Right now that’s all that matters—especially since this whole thing could blow up in our faces if it’s not taken care of quickly.”
“How’s that?” Con frowned at his friend, but Colleen answered him before Wiley could speak.
“We think one of the Langworthys has gone over to the other side,” she said coldly. “There was always a possibility Sky’s kidnappers had help from a member of the family, and with what we’ve found out about Helio’s involvement, that now seems to be a certainty. A former intern of a certain Senator Franklin Gettys, Nicola Carson, came close to being killed by a DeMarco hit man when she discovered a link between the senator, the mobster and a mysterious chemical mist that was being tested on sheep at Gettys’s ranch, the Half Spur. Fibers found in Sky’s crib after his abduction came from the type of sheep on the Half Spur. And Gettys’s ex-wife, Helen Kouros, gave us information she copied on a disk from the Half Spur’s computer that backs up our belief that some kind of bio-weapons research is being done there.”
She paused. “But you guessed about the Q-fever virus, didn’t you? I’d forgotten—Wiley’s ‘conscience’ recommended we look into the flu that swept Silver Rapids earlier this year.”
“I told him it might be worthwhile to check out any recent influenza-like outbreaks that might have occurred in the area,” Con said. “Since I didn’t realize this investigation was centered in Colorado I wasn’t aware there’d been one in Silver Rapids. But it fits. DeMarco’s always been intrigued by nerve gas, biological weaponry, that kind of thing. He’s responsible for at least six murders I know of that were passed off as deaths from natural causes, and Roland’s was one of them.”
He hoped his voice revealed none of the pain that suddenly swept through him. A vision filled his mind of Roland’s lifeless body, slumped over his desk, his hand still gripping the silver pen that had released the deadly vapor which had instantly killed him. That pen had been given to him by Helio DeMarco, it had later been established.
He felt a muscle in his jaw tighten. With difficulty he posed his next questions.
“But where’s the connection between DeMarco and the Langworthys? And which Langworthy is under suspicion, anyway?”
“The Ice Queen.” Colleen’s voice hardened. “Marilyn Langworthy, Holly’s half sister and Sky’s aunt. Her nickname’s apt. Even pregnancy hasn’t thawed her out.”
She was pregnant.
Just for a moment Con let himself imagine how he would feel if there was any possibility that the child she was carrying could be his, and fierce joy shafted through him, so powerful and piercing it felt like pain. He wrenched himself back to reality.
She’d had his body. Whether she ever knew it or not, she had his heart and his soul. But the one thing he was incapable of giving Marilyn Langworthy or any woman was a child, he thought bleakly.
So the baby she was carrying had to be—
“We believe that the father of her child is a certain Tony Corso.” Colleen frowned. “Since you’re an expert on DeMarco, you probably know Corso’s his nephew.”
Con reached for the bottle of bourbon and poured himself a second shot, more to have something to do than because he needed another drink. He tossed it back.
Marilyn was pregnant, and by a man who’d walked out of her life. Since earlier this year his own investigation into Corso as a lead to DeMarco had failed to turn up the mobster’s nephew, he didn’t need Wellesley to fill him in on Corso’s absence, he thought grimly as she continued talking, just as he hadn’t needed her to fill him in on a number of other details. He wasn’t going to tell her that. His flying visit to Denver three months ago, including what had happened between him and Marilyn that night in her office, was none of Colorado Confidential’s business and he intended to keep it that way.
There were other aspects to his involvement with this case that he had no intention of sharing, he admitted. Wiley almost certainly knew some of them, but it seemed he hadn’t felt the need to alert Colleen Wellesley to the situation, so that was all right.
That was the only thing that was all right.
Marilyn Langworthy had had an ill-advised affair—an affair she’d later regretted, judging from her assessment of Corso that night in her office—with a man who had connections to a mobster, unbeknownst to her. She gave the impression of being standoffish and unemotional.
If Colleen Wellesley or Longbottom or anyone else associated with Colorado Confidential thought they could hang her out to dry for reasons as flimsy as those, Con thought savagely, it would be his pleasure to set them straight right now. Even as he opened his mouth to speak, Wiley put a hand on his arm.
“If that were all we had on her we’d just keep her under surveillance on the off-chance she could lead us to DeMarco. But there’s more. It’s pretty damning.”
The older man’s expression was shuttered. “Marilyn Langworthy arranged a visit to Silver Rapids with Holly just before the flu outbreak, Con. It looks as if the Ice Queen deliberately exposed her half sister to the Q-fever microbe during Holly’s pregnancy with Sky.”
Chapter Three
“Hold the elevator!”
Marilyn hoped the note of panic in her voice wasn’t as obvious to Jim Osborne and Dan Curtis, her neighbors, as it was to herself. Hastening across the gleaming heartwood floor of the loft complex’s foyer—waddling, more like, she thought despairingly—she found herself calculating the number of seconds before she reached her apartment and made it to the bathroom.
Living in a trendy converted warehouse had cachet, but there were definite drawbacks. For starters, the elevator had been originally built for freight, and it was slow. Jim and Dan would be getting off at the second floor, so their exit would tack on another ten or twenty seconds. Add thirty more for the mad dash up the industrial-style metal staircase that linked her open-concept lower floor to the upper one where the bathroom and bedrooms were, and there was a chance she wasn’t going to make it.
Everything she’d ever read about the physical side effects of pregnancy had emphasized benefits like glowing skin and silkier hair. She’d never expected to be at the mercy of a bladder that felt roughly the size of a pea.
Bad choice of word. As she scooted into the elevator she attempted to maintain a modicum of cool decorum by smiling her thanks at the two men.
“Mama’s been shopping for maternity fashions,” Dan teased, casting an eye at her parcels and releasing the elevator door. Beside him, Jim raised an eyebrow.
“I saw that look of desperation often enough on my sister’s face when she was expecting. Gotta go, sweetie?”
The Marilyn Langworthy of three months ago would have frozen him with a look, she thought. Now she felt grateful for his perception.
“Let’s just say I’ve decided to pack away my favorite CD of Handel’s Water Music until after next April,” she admitted. “There isn’t a warp speed button on that panel, is there?”
“Sorry, no.” His pleasant features crinkled into a grin. “But we’ll go straight to your floor first. Will that help?”
“You’re an angel,” she breathed fervently.
As the oversize freight doors clanged shut and the elevator began its noisy and excruciatingly slow ascent, surreptitiously she eased her left foot out of its leather flat and felt instant relief. She looked up in time to see both Jim and Dan glance politely away.
Her beloved collection of size seven Manolos were a dim memory, Marilyn thought wryly. Ditto for her wardrobe of designer suits and dresses, all of which she’d seemed to balloon out of within days of learning she was pregnant. Once upon a time she’d concentrated on the label of a garment, but now she’d acquired the habit of riffling through racks of clothes, extracting a likely looking top or skirt, and tugging ruthlessly at the waist-line to judge how much stretch it had.
Of course, her shopping expedition today had been only a cover. She’d needed to get away from the office and come to some hard decisions.
She was a thirty-one-year-old expectant single mother. She’d lost her figure, her reputation and after what she’d discovered this morning, quite possibly her job. And she had to go to the bathroom like nobody’s business.
Joy soared through her, so pure and exhilarating she felt a prickling moisture behind her eyes. She was going to have a baby. She was going to have a baby.
“…bring a plate up to you later, if you’d like.”
She’d missed the beginning of Dan’s comment, but it was obvious from his expression that he hadn’t been expecting tears in reply. She mustered a shaky smile.
“Sorry, hormone overload. It’s gotten so bad lately I have to keep a box of tissues by the television in case a heartwarming advertisement comes on. What were you saying?”
“I’m making my special moussaka tonight. I thought if you didn’t feel like cooking—” He stopped as Marilyn hastily tried to erase the moue of instant nausea that had shown on her face. “Vine leaves and ground lamb not on the menu these days?”
“I’m finally over the morning sickness, thank goodness,” she said as the elevator lurched to a stop at her floor and the doors began to open. “But certain foods still seem to flick the queasiness switch with me. I’ll take a rain check on that moussaka for about six months from now, if that’s all right with you.”
Jim and Dan were good neighbors, she thought as she sped through her open-concept living area and clattered up the metal stairs. That was important, especially in an unconventional building like this. The former warehouse was divided into only three spacious loft apartments, one of which was vacant at the moment, its owners being away in Europe.
“And the best thing about them is that right from the first they were happy for me when I told them I was expecting,” she said out loud a few minutes later as she descended the staircase and bent with difficulty to pick up the shopping bags she’d dropped on her frantic way in. “Which is a whole lot more than I got from either the Langworthy or the Van Buren side of my family.”
She felt suddenly too weary even to unpack her purchases. Tossing the bags onto the sofa and dropping into an oversize velvet-upholstered club chair, she closed her eyes.
Immediately he was there, the way he always was when she let down her guard.
Sometimes she could almost persuade herself that that whole night three months ago had been a dream—an erotic, sex-charged dream, in which she’d acted with an abandon that was totally unlike her waking self. And Connor Ducharme fit the profile of a dream lover perfectly, right down to his lazy sensuality, his tall, leanly muscled build, his New Orleans drawl. If that night really had been only a dream she would have been able to handle it, Marilyn thought bleakly. But it had happened. She’d slept with a stranger—not once, but three times that night. And she’d loved it.
That was the part she found hardest to live with.
She opened her eyes. From the soaring ceiling twenty-odd feet above her swooped a perfectly balanced wire and metal mobile, its impressive span in keeping with the spaciousness of the loft but its delicate construction a counterpoint to the exposed brick and heavy wooden beams that were an indication of the building’s original function as a turn-of-the-century warehouse. A current of air caught the mobile and it swirled lightly, like a swallow changing direction in midflight.
She’d actually phoned the New Orleans police department a week later and asked for him. It had taken seven sleepless nights for her to come to that decision, and when she had she’d felt like the weakest of weak-willed females. She was well aware she’d sent him away, had told him she wanted to pretend the previous few hours had never happened, but illogically, that hadn’t mattered. She’d wanted to hear his voice. She’d found herself needing his touch. She’d craved him.
So she’d set aside her pride and phoned, and at first she’d had the terrible suspicion that he’d duped her. The desk sergeant had asked her to repeat the name of the detective she was inquiring about, and had put her on hold for what seemed an eternity. At long last he’d come back on the line, only to inform her that Ducharme wasn’t in the precinct building at the moment.
But by then she’d lost what little courage she’d had. She’d hung up without leaving her name.
She’d never attempted to contact him again, not even when she’d found out she was pregnant.
Connor Ducharme was a dangerous man. He’d seemed to know instinctively what she’d wanted that night and he’d let her believe he could give it to her. But although he’d made her melt, although his mouth, his hands, his whole body had brought her to mind-shattering ecstasy, what made Detective Ducharme so very, very dangerous was that he’d known just how much more she’d needed. He’d pretended to give her that, too.
For a few delirious hours he’d made her believe she was loved.
Marilyn closed her eyes again. Her right hand slid unconsciously to the swell of her belly, and despite the confusing ache in her heart and the problems she knew she was facing at Mills & Grommett, the beatific smile she’d once so envied on Holly’s face crept over her own.
And immediately faded.
“I thought I knew what she was going through, but before now I had no idea,” she whispered. “Sky was her whole world, and he’s still missing. I’d die if anyone tried to take my baby—”
A loud clanking, the signal that another arduous ascent had begun for the freight elevator, drowned out the rest of her words. Almost grateful for the interruption, with an effort she pushed herself out of the chair and began gathering up her shopping bags for the second time.
A visitor for Jim and Dan, she surmised as the clanking continued. She couldn’t remember the last time the elevator had stopped at her floor with a guest, and as far as she knew the Dickenson’s apartment above hadn’t yet been sublet.
She put her idle speculations aside as her gaze lit upon a fuchsia sleeve dangling from one of the bags. Heart sinking, she pulled the garment out. It was a blouse, made of some silky blend and with ruffles spilling down the low-cut front. The black pants that went with it were what the salesgirl had called a yoga style—stretchy and form-fitting, with a very slight flare at the bottom. The low-rise waistband was meant to sit below the swell of her belly.
What was I thinking? These aren’t me at all, for heaven’s sake, she thought in exasperation. For starters, I could hardly have chosen a more attention-getting top. And those pants don’t hide a thing. I might as well hang a big Baby on Board sign around my neck.
She was going to have to return them. Sighing, she began to cram them back into the bag, but then she paused.
This pregnancy, unplanned as it might have been, was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. The baby she was carrying was that most precious of all miracles, an evolving little human being. Why would she want to hide it?
“And those pants were a whole lot more comfortable than the ones I’ve got on.” She glanced down in sudden distaste at the navy suit she’d worn to the office that day. Just as suddenly, she began unbuttoning the jacket.
Moments later she was padding barefoot across the carpet to the full-length mirror by the door. She stood in front of it and took a deep breath.
The navy suit’s boxiness had made her look bulky rather than pregnant. But the clinging fabrics of the fuchsia top and the yoga pants hugged her curves—all of her curves, she realized. The ruffled V-neck of the blouse skimmed silkily over breasts that were fuller than she’d ever known them to be, and then stretched even more over her stomach. The low-rider style of the black pants made no apology for the roundness of her belly, but the lean cut also accentuated the length of her legs.
She looked pregnant…and in what she was wearing, pregnant looked sexy. In the mirror she saw faint heat touch her cheeks, and hastily she turned away.
The elevator clanged to a halt outside her apartment.
“Oh, no,” she muttered, aghast. She whirled back to the mirror and her reflection, but even as she fluffed the petal-like ruffles toward the vee of the blouse’s neckline the door buzzer sounded.
The ruffles fell back into place. Exasperated, she gave it up as a bad job, and jabbed the intercom button with her thumb.
“Who is it?”
Marilyn found herself hoping her unanticipated caller was her brother, Josh. Throwing his hat into the political ring seemed to have brought out the stuffed shirt in him and although his recent engagement had loosened him up a little, she was pretty sure the gubernatorial hopeful for the State of Colorado would be none too thrilled with his sister’s pregnancy being flaunted front and center where the electorate couldn’t help but see it.
Except her mystery guest wasn’t Joshua. Even though he didn’t identify himself, she’d heard those burnt brown sugar tones often enough in her dreams these past three months to recognize them immediately.
“Let me in, cher’,” the voice on the other side of the door drawled. “That way you get to tell me to go to hell to my face.”
She’d been planning to contact Connor Ducharme tonight, she thought hollowly. It seemed now she wouldn’t have to.
TRUST HER Beacon Hill upbringing, Marilyn told herself ten minutes later. Grandmother Van Buren had always haughtily held that a real lady never admitted to an awkward situation, and it seemed her lesson had sunk in. On the sofa across from her, Con balanced the bone-china cup of tea she’d offered him on a carelessly crossed knee, and so far neither one of them had been crass enough to tell the other to go to hell.
But she had no illusions. She’d seen the flicker of reaction in his eyes when she’d opened the door and he’d seen she was pregnant. Beneath the veneer of civility they were like two prizefighters circling cautiously, each waiting for the starting bell to ring.
No matter what his original reason for coming here, the possibility that he could be the father of the child she was so obviously carrying had to be in his mind. She needed to dispel that idea before it took root. She knew next to nothing about the man, but it wasn’t inconceivable that he might be attracted to the notion of playing daddy on a part-time basis, and she had no intention of standing by and letting that happen.
No child of mine is going to grow up caught between two worlds, and never fitting fully into either one, Marilyn vowed fiercely. Grandmother Van Buren’s rules of etiquette be damned, it’s time to get a few things clear here.
But she’d left it too late. Before she could speak he beat her to it.
“You once told me you were a coward, cher’.” Leaning forward, he set his cup and saucer on the large Moroccan leather hassock she used as a coffee table. Under dark brows his green gaze held hers and his mouth quirked up wryly.
“Truth is, it’s me you should pin that label on. No matter what you said you wanted at the time I shouldn’t have left things the way I did between us, but every time I thought about contacting you I lost my nerve. I took advantage of the situation that night. It wasn’t anything I felt too proud about the next day, and I figured you’d have every right to slam the phone down on me if I called.”
His self-deprecating honesty took her by surprise. “We both know it wasn’t that simple,” she said slowly. “I pretty much threw myself at you that evening in my office. I accept half the responsibility for what happened.”
She hesitated, and then went on, her heart in her mouth. “This—” she spread her fingers wide over her belly “—isn’t a result of what we did together, in case you were wondering. I know we were insane enough not to take precautions that third and final time, but the dates don’t work out. I would have already been pregnant when we—when we—”
She floundered to an halt.
“When we made love, cher’?” Taking her by surprise again, he shook his head. “Hell, I know I’m not the father, sugar. Tony Corso is, isn’t he?”
Her brother had asked her that same question, but in a furious tone of voice. She’d refused to give him an answer, knowing full well that her silence would seem to him to be confirmation of his suspicions, and since she’d had no intention of telling Josh that she’d slept with a stranger his assumptions had suited her just fine.
As Connor Ducharme’s same assumption should, she told herself. She didn’t want him to wonder if he was the father of her baby, so why should she feel even the slightest pinprick of disillusion that he was so easily bowing out from the position?
“Tony’s the father,” she agreed tartly. “But what made you so sure you weren’t in the running even before I told you, Detective? Was it a smidge of relief on learning that if anyone’s going to get slapped with a paternity suit, it’s not going to be you?”
The green eyes across from her darkened. As if he felt suddenly restless, Con got to his feet and took a few steps into the middle of the room before halting beneath the mobile swaying gently above. His hands in his pockets, he tipped his head back to look at it.
“I never understood men who needed to get their asses hauled into court before they’d pay support, honey,” he said softly. “I always saw children as a gift. I’d like a whole houseful of them, with a mama to go along with them.”
Still looking up at the mobile he went on, his tone devoid of emotion. “But that’s not in the cards for me. I know I’m not in the running, cher’, because I can’t be in the running. An illness when I was a boy took care of that particular possibility for me.”
She stared at him. “But how can that be?” she began unguardedly. Before she could continue he turned to her.
“Just the luck of the draw, I guess,” he said, his jaw tight and his gaze unreadable. “From what I’ve been told, the consequences could have been a lot more serious. Does Corso know he’s going to be a father?”
There was an added watchfulness in his gaze as he waited for her answer. This was the reason he’d sought her out, Marilyn realized suddenly. He was still hunting Tony Corso. This was an official visit.
But of course it was, she told herself a heartbeat later. What had she expected—that he’d brokenly confess she’d haunted his sleepless nights, that his search for Corso was just an excuse to see her again, that he’d fallen hopelessly in love with her during those few hours they’d spent together and he hadn’t been able to stay away?
She was a damn lead in his investigation. Their unplanned tryst in her office had been an unforeseen perk to him, nothing more.
She didn’t owe Con Ducharme anything.
“Tony and I slept together once,” she said flatly. “He wasn’t the love of my life and I obviously wasn’t his, since the next day I found he’d not only walked out on me but on his job at Mills & Grommett. No, he doesn’t know I’m pregnant, and if I knew where to find him, I still don’t think I’d tell him. But Tony’s not planning on being found, Detective.”
“Something’s happened.” His gaze narrowed. “When I first came to you asking about Corso you made it clear that you didn’t believe he was guilty of any criminal conduct. Now I get the feeling you wouldn’t put anything past him. When did your opinion change?”
Why couldn’t the man have stayed in New Orleans? Marilyn thought hopelessly. What she was about to tell him would have been hard enough over the phone as she’d planned. She wasn’t sure if she could go through with it in person.
But she had to.
“Today,” she said. She looked down at her lap, not wanting to meet his eyes. “Because today I realized beyond a doubt that when Tony left Mills & Grommett so hastily he helped himself to a severance bonus from the company…except what he took from M & G went way beyond the fraud you told me he’d committed in Louisiana.”
“That fraud I told you about—” he began, but she didn’t let him finish. The next sentence was going to be the worst, she knew. Best to get it out as soon as possible.
“He stole viral stock.” Even to her own ears her voice sounded strained. “We’re a pharmaceutical firm. That’s one of the things our research department works with—viruses, some of them deadly. And somehow Corso got into my computer and authorized the transfer of a batch to a nonexistent company.”
Now she did meet his eyes. “Either he intends to sell it on the black market, or…” She’d been wrong, Marilyn thought sickly. This was the sentence too terrible to finish.
But the dark-haired man in front of her seemed to have no qualms. “Or he’s got his own plans for the stuff,” Con said.
He held her gaze, his features so grim they seemed carved. Like emeralds on fire, his eyes blazed with some incendiary emotion in the tan of his face.
That emotion was hatred, Marilyn realized with a sudden chill—a hatred so deep and all-encompassing that it seemed almost an entity in itself. If Con Ducharme’s hatred didn’t consume his enemy, she thought slowly, it would end up not only consuming him but everything he held precious.
Fear ran through her. Her hand spread protectively over the child growing inside her.
“You know what that plan is, don’t you?” Her voice cracked. “You know what Tony used me for.”
Just for a second the emotion in those green eyes darkened to compassion. Then it blazed up again, and when Con answered her his tone was devoid of any feeling at all.
“It’s not his plan, cher’, it’s his mobster uncle’s. And Helio DeMarco would only want to get his hands on experimental viral stock for one reason.” He gave a humorless smile.
“DeMarco intends to use it as a weapon against whoever gets in his way. And that includes anyone who might be too close to discovering what he’s done with your nephew, Sky Langworthy.”
Chapter Four
“You never wanted Tony at all, did you?” Marilyn looked up at Con in dawning comprehension. “The mobster’s the one you’re really after.”
“Helio DeMarco.” He’d drawn something from his pocket, she saw. It gleamed between his fingers as he passed it back and forth, and she realized it was a silver coin. He smiled tightly as he noticed her watching him. “You’re right. I’ve been hunting the bastard for eight months now, ever since he killed a friend of mine. One of these days I’m going to find him, and then—”
The silver dollar flashed upward as he tossed it carelessly into the air. It came down, and he caught it. He spread his palms wide for her inspection, and she inhaled sharply as she realized the coin was nowhere to be seen.
“And then Helio DeMarco’s going to disappear, just like that,” Con said softly. “That’s New Orleans justice, cher’.”
Something in his tone shook her. “Where I come from that’s vengeance,” she said unevenly. “No police force would countenance one of their own taking revenge like that.” Her gaze widened with swift doubt. “Unless that was a lie, too. Are you really a detective with the New Orleans Police, Con?”
For a moment she wondered if he was going to answer her. Then he grinned with real amusement. “Does this sound like a Minnesota accent, sugar?” he drawled. “Sure I’m with the New Awlins authorities, cher’. But I’ll bet you checked me out already, didn’t you?”
“As a matter of fact, I—”
Marilyn stopped, the words dying in her throat. That grin. It was absolutely devastating. And why hadn’t she noticed before that instead of being completely green, in a certain light those emerald eyes of his seemed sparked with gold? He was definitely too much, of course, with one wayward strand of raven-black hair falling across his brow and thick lashes casting shadows on those hard-cut cheekbones. Even his choice of attire, austere as his dark suit and white shirt seemed at first glance, was a world away from both Boston and Denver. His vest was a black on black brocade. His shirt wasn’t cotton, but creamy linen.
He was a throwback. Even as the thought occurred to her she knew she’d hit upon the key to the man. Con Ducharme was pistols at dawn, bourbon on the verandah, a risky dalliance with another man’s wife in a jasmine-scented and moonlit garden. He was a quick temper flaring over a card game. He was heated hours entwined in satin sheets.
He was wearing a gun.
Hard reality returned in a rush as she glimpsed the sliver of worn leather briefly revealed under his jacket. He’d as much as confessed to her that he intended to kill a man. That lazy charm camouflaged a resolve as cold as bare steel.
“As a matter of fact, I did check up on you,” she said slowly. “But tell me, aren’t you a little out of your jurisdiction? You said it yourself—it’s New Orleans justice you’re dispensing, and Denver’s a long way from the Big Easy.”
“I had some time coming to me. I took it. This is a private hunt, not an official one.” He looked away. “You’re right, from the first I was only after Corso because I hoped he’d lead me to DeMarco, and when I found out he’d left his position at your company I got a real bad feeling. When I learned that Mills & Grommett dealt with viral material and that the family who owned the company had just had a child kidnapped, the bad feeling got worse.”
He met her confused gaze, his own shadowed. “But I needed a solid link between his nephew’s disappearance and Sky’s abduction before I could know for sure he was involved, and there didn’t seem to be one until this week when the Denver police forwarded the reports I’d requested on the kidnapping. I’d told them it sounded similar to an unsolved case I’d worked on years ago,” he added.
And why did you feel you needed to give me that information? Marilyn wondered, watching as he looked briefly away again and then back at her, his gaze once more steady and clear. He was lying, she thought with sudden certainty. Not about everything, maybe not about anything important, but it hadn’t happened the way he was telling her.
Still, he was a police detective talking about a case, whether it was officially sanctioned or not. Maybe he was holding back details he couldn’t—
“Denver CSI found traces of eggshells in Sky’s crib.” His words ran through her like an electric shock, driving all else from her mind. He took in her reaction. “Apparently that means the same thing to you as it did to me.”
“I’ve visited M & G’s research facilities often enough to know that one method of cultivating viral stock is to inject it into eggs.” Too agitated to remain seated any longer, she got to her feet and faced him. “I assume you’ve already informed the local police that you suspect Helio DeMarco’s involved in Sky’s kidnapping, but with what I found out today about the missing viral stock, it’s obvious they should widen their investigation to include Corso.”
She swallowed. “I—I’m willing to provide a statement to the Denver P.D. as soon as you can arrange it with them. Just give me a few minutes to compose a notice of resignation from my position at Mills & Grommett. It could save the company some embarrassment when this all comes out, and it might lessen the impact on Josh’s campaign.”
She placed a hand on the back of the sofa for support against the dizziness that swept over her. “Governor Houghton’s people are going to make political hay with this as it is. My brother’s run his platform on the premise that biological weapons research and testing should continue to be restricted, and Houghton is all for opening up the field and bringing a new lab facility to Colorado. Josh won’t have a leg to stand on when the public learns his own sister allowed potentially lethal stock to be stolen right out from under her nose.”
“The public isn’t going to know that.” Dark brows knitted together in a scowl, and without warning he strode to her side. She felt him take her arm in a firm grasp. “Dammit, cher’, when did you last eat?”
His unforeseen change of subject startled her. “Lunch?” she ventured. She passed a shaky hand across her forehead. “I know I had an apple this afternoon.”
“Merde, it’s no wonder you look like you’re about to take another header on me,” Con muttered ungallantly. “What the hell were you thinking, going without food for so long when you’re supposed to be eating for two?”
“I was about to order in a pizza or something when you showed up on my doorstep.” Marilyn’s dizziness subsided. She tried to pull her arm away but he didn’t relinquish it. “And for your information, women aren’t encouraged to eat for two anymore when they’re pregnant.”
“When they start out as scrawny as you were three months ago they should. Show me what you’ve got in the fridge and I’ll make you a meal.”
Releasing her arm, he shrugged out of his suit jacket and slung it over the back of the sofa. He looked down at the leather shoulder holster he was wearing as if he’d forgotten it was there, made a low sound of annoyance, and slipped out of it, too, laying it beside his jacket.
Her first annoyed impulse was to take him up on his scrawny remark. She was going to have to let it go, Marilyn admonished herself edgily. They’d gotten way off track here, and—
She jerked her head up. “What do you mean, the public isn’t going to know?”
“Just what I said. The public isn’t going to know, the police aren’t going to know, Mills & Grommett isn’t going to know. What you told me tonight about Corso stealing viral stock is our ace in the hole and I don’t intend to lay it on the table just yet.” He looked surprised. “You didn’t think I was going to let you take the heat for this, did you, cher’?”
“But I deserve to.” She pressed her lips together. “We can’t just keep this information to ourselves, Con.”
“I’ll make sure the right people are informed.” He grimaced. “But in this case, the local authorities aren’t the right people. I’m pretty sure DeMarco’s bought off some of the boys in blue, and although I’d be willing to trust the rest of the department with my life there’s no way of knowing right now who’s dirty and who’s not. If one of his paid informants gets word to him that we’re on his nephew’s trail, both Corso and DeMarco will sink out of sight as completely as an old she-gator and her pup in a swamp.”
He smiled tightly. “And as a born-and-bred Louisiana boy like me knows, it’s the gator you don’t see that’s most dangerous. No, we’re going to let them keep thinking they’re safe. Meanwhile, we’ll be gator-hunting. And baby-hunting, too,” he added in a softer tone. “I don’t know what DeMarco wants with your half sister’s baby, but I know he’s definitely behind the kidnapping.”
I have a chance to save Sky. Marilyn felt as if a crack of light had just pierced the clouds that had shadowed her world for the past four months. Tremulous hope leaped in her.
“Oh, Con, I’d give anything to bring him home safely! You don’t know what a nightmare it’s been since the day Josh phoned me and told me he’d been taken.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’ve been going through.” He hesitated, and then his hands came up to lightly clasp her shoulders. “And I know that night in your office never would have happened if you’d been able to turn to your family for support.”
She shook her head in sharp negation. “That night in my office never would have happened if you hadn’t been a stranger. Right now wouldn’t be happening—I couldn’t go to anyone in my family about how I provided the opportunity for Tony to get his hands on that virus.”
She frowned, wondering how she could make him understand. It was important that he understand, she realized in faint surprise. She didn’t know why, but it was.
“My father divorced my mother and remarried when I was just a little girl,” she said slowly. “He insisted on retaining custody of Josh, and didn’t contest it when Mother decided to move back to Boston with me. I was only five years old and I adored my father, so instead of blaming him I blamed his new wife. I decided she’d been the one who’d persuaded him he didn’t need me anymore.”
“That’s Celia Langworthy?” Con’s gaze was shadowed. “I remember reading her name in one of the police reports.”
“Celia Grace Langworthy.” Marilyn tried to keep the censure from her voice. “I don’t think I’ll ever fully forgive her. Who knows, my parents might have gotten back together again if she hadn’t come along.”
She shrugged. “I’m not a little girl anymore and I’ve even come to see that she makes my father happier than my mother ever did, but I still can’t feel close to the woman. She’s an ex-southern belle type—fussy and fluttery. And I guess I’ve always felt it would be disloyal to Mother to forget that Celia replaced her. So I became an outsider in my own family, never feeling I could be myself with them, always knowing there was a barrier between us. Now I almost prefer it that way.”
“I’d better stay a stranger, then.” A corner of his mouth lifted in wry appraisal. “If we’re going to be working together and living in the same building for the next little while, I’d like the barriers to stay down.”
“Living in the same building?”
“I’ve taken the loft upstairs on a short lease,” Con said offhandedly. “I like what you’ve done with your place better, especially that mobile. Who’s the artist?”
She was beginning to know the way the man operated, Marilyn thought. He was a master at distraction, not only when he was performing some baffling piece of sleight-of-hand, but in any conversational confrontation, too. Except this time she wasn’t going to allow herself to be distracted.
“A local. The LoDo area’s an artistic haven,” she said firmly. “Which as a new resident you might find interesting, Ducharme. Why did you sublet the Dickenson’s loft?”
“I needed a base of operations for while I was in Denver. I wanted that base to be near you.” He fixed her with the same steady gaze as before, but this time she instinctively felt he was telling her the truth. “DeMarco isn’t a cute movie gangster, sugar. He’s the real deal, and as cold-blooded as they come. From the moment you became pregnant with his nephew’s baby you were in danger, because that made you the link between him and the Langworthys—and if he finds out that Corso’s theft from Mills & Grommett’s been discovered, he’ll want to sever that link.”
His grip on her shoulders tightened. “DeMarco took one person away from me. I won’t give him the chance to do it a second time, cher’.”
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Harper Allen
MISSION PROFILETHE AGENT: Conrad Burke, alias Connor DucharmeHIS MOTTO: "Always work alone."THE ASSIGNMENT–AND COMPLICATION: Team up with one headstrong, pregnant woman to catch a criminal….With a resolve as cold as steel and a thirst for vengeance, U.S. marshal-turned-Confidential-agent Conrad Burke tracked his quarry like a Wild West hero of old. Until the trail led to his downfall–the one woman he'd always loved. Marilyn Langworthy, billionaire's daughter–and after one reckless night, mother of Con's unborn child. His quest placed her in jeopardy. But although the mobster he sought took no prisoners, only Marilyn had the key to bring the man down. Now Con would move heaven and earth to keep Marilyn safe….
Colorado Confidential turns up the heat in the search for the Langworthy baby. There’s a new agent on board to shake up the case and shake down another lead—if he can handle the very cool, very pregnant Marilyn Langworthy…
“I’m pregnant. I’m not going to make a total fool of myself.”
“A fool of yourself? Why would you say that?” Con’s expression was unreadable.
“Because it would be foolish of me to believe the things you say. And I can’t afford to be foolish anymore. I’ll work with you, but that’s as far as it goes.”
“And if I want it to go further, cher?” Emerald eyes narrowed at her. “I’m out of luck is what you’re saying?”
He was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen, and to pretend she was immune to his brand of sexy Southern charm would be a lie. “A man like you is never at the end of his luck, Con,” she said softly. “I don’t think I’m going to cause you any sleepless nights.”
“You might be surprised at what keeps me awake nights,” Con drawled. “If you want to keep it business between us I’ll do my best. But I don’t guarantee anything.”
Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,
Take a very well-deserved break from Thanksgiving preparations and rejuvenate yourself with Harlequin Intrigue’s tempting offerings this month!
To start off the festivities, Harper Allen brings you Covert Cowboy—the next riveting installment of COLORADO CONFIDENTIAL. Watch the sparks fly when a Native American secret agent teams up with the headstrong mother of his unborn child to catch a slippery criminal. Looking to live on the edge? Then enter the dark and somber HEARTSKEEP estate—with caution!—when Dani Sinclair brings you The Second Sister—the next book in her gothic trilogy.
The thrills don’t stop there! His Mysterious Ways pairs a ruthless mercenary with a secretive seductress as they ward off evil forces. Don’t miss this new series in Amanda Stevens’s extraordinary QUANTUM MEN books. Join Mallory Kane for an action-packed story about a heroine who must turn to a tough-hearted FBI operative when she’s targeted by a stalker in Bodyguard/Husband.
A homecoming unveils a deadly conspiracy in Unmarked Man by Darlene Scalera—the latest offering in our new theme promotion BACHELORS AT LARGE. And finally this month, ’tis the season for some spine-tingling suspense in The Christmas Target by Charlotte Douglas when a sexy cowboy cop must ride to the rescue as a twisted Santa sets his sights on a beautiful businesswoman.
So gather your loved ones all around and warm up by the fire with some steamy romantic suspense!
Enjoy,
Denise O’Sullivan
Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
Covert Cowboy
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.
The Confidential Code
I will protect my country and its citizens.
I will stand in the line of fire between innocents and criminals.
I will back up my fellow agents without questions.
I will trust my instincts.
And most of all…
I WILL KEEP MY MISSION AND MY IDENTITY STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Marilyn Langworthy—Her nickname’s the Ice Queen, but her detached facade hides the guilt she feels over her tiny nephew’s disappearance.
Conrad Burke—He’s only working with Colorado Confidential because he’s hunting an enemy from the past.
Holly Langworthy—Marilyn’s younger half sister, she may know more about her baby’s kidnapping than she’s revealing.
Tony Corso—Nephew of a mobster, he used his position at a Langworthy-owned pharmaceutical firm to steal dangerous viral stock.
Samuel Langworthy—Marilyn’s father, he’s been estranged from her for too long.
Joshua Langworthy—Marilyn’s politically minded brother intends to be Colorado’s next governor.
Helio DeMarco—The shadowy mobster has a liking for biological weapons, and a hatred of Con Burke.
Wiley Longbottom—He suggested Con for Colorado Confidential. Now he wonders if he picked the right man for the job.
Colleen Wellesley—The head of Colorado Confidential, she doesn’t particularly like Con, and the feeling’s mutual.
To Wayne with Love
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
Epilogue
Chapter One
Nineteen days, five hours, and—
Marilyn Langworthy glanced at the diamond watch on her wrist before focusing again on the computer monitor in front of her.
—thirty-odd minutes. Still no ransom note. Still no leads. Dear God, how can anyone hide a four-month-old baby this long without drawing attention to themselves?
The figures on the monitor wavered. She squeezed her eyes shut against the cold wave of fear washing over her, but the logical part of her brain refused to shut off.
That was why there hadn’t been a demand for money. That was why no one had phoned the police to report a crying baby in a house where there hadn’t been a baby a few weeks ago, why no curious store clerk had gossiped about someone who looked like a thug or a crazy suddenly coming in on a regular basis to buy diapers and formula. Maybe her nephew’s kidnappers had panicked, maybe they’d realized too late that snatching a baby boy was one thing but keeping him concealed while they negotiated a ransom was another.
Maybe Sky was already—
“Ms. Langworthy?”
She opened her eyes. Her expression eased as she saw the older woman standing in the open doorway.
“Don’t tell me, Elva,” she said, apology tingeing her tone. “Everyone else left hours ago, right?”
Briskly her secretary entered with the same efficient energy she’d displayed hours earlier when her working day had commenced. Elva Hare had started in the typing pool at Mills & Grommett Pharmaceuticals thirty-two years ago and had worked her way up to the position of Samuel Langworthy’s personal assistant. Why she volunteered to become my secretary when I arrived from Boston to become Father’s vice president of sales I’ll never know, Marilyn thought. But I couldn’t have handled this job without her.
“I’m no shrinking violet waiting for you to tell me when it’s quitting time, so don’t worry about it,” Elva replied, laying some papers on the desk. “I wanted to pull these sales figures together for you before your meeting tomorrow.”
“God, the meeting.” Marilyn sank back in her chair. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
“Under the circumstances that’s understandable.” Beneath an iron-gray perm, Elva’s gaze was concerned. “I don’t hold with this business-as-usual policy your father’s keeping to, especially since as the sole family member involved in his company you’re the only one affected. Your brother’s canceled all but his most important speaking engagements, and Holly—”
She shook her head. “Now isn’t the time to air my opinion of your half sister’s life of leisure,” she said quietly. “No woman should have to go through what she’s had to endure these past three weeks. The police haven’t…?”
“They haven’t come up with a thing, Elva.”
Marilyn heard the hopelessness in her voice as she answered the older woman—heard it, and hated herself for it. She pulled the sheaf of papers toward her, but instead of looking at them she glanced up at her secretary.
“I went to church on Sunday,” she said softly. “I can’t remember the last time I attended. Oh, Christmas and Easter, of course, and whenever I go back to Boston to pay Mother a visit. But just an ordinary Sunday? It’s been a while.”
“I don’t need to ask what you prayed for.” Elva sighed. “I haven’t mentioned anything to the rest of the staff, since the family wants to keep a lid on the publicity, but if you hear anything, Ms. Langworthy…”
“If I hear anything I’ll let you know right away,” Marilyn promised. “Although sometimes I think you’re more in the Langworthy loop than I am.” She’d meant it as a small joke. It hadn’t come out that way, she realized in embarrassment.
Elva didn’t pretend not to understand. “Your father’s a fine man in many ways,” she said evenly. “But he doesn’t like admitting he’s capable of failure, and rightly or wrongly, he sees the breakdown of his first marriage as a failure. When your mother got custody of you and went back home to Beacon Hill, the only way he could handle it was to close off that part of his life. It helped that he was so crazy about your stepmother,” she added dryly. “And to an empire-builder like Samuel a firstborn son like Joshua is a godsend.”
“Oh, Josh was always meant to fulfill Father’s political hopes, even when he went through his rebellious phase,” Marilyn said crisply. “Running for governor is just the start, and if I was ever jealous of my golden-boy brother I got over it long ago.”
“But coming back here to Colorado reminded you of how your younger half sister took your place?” Elva probed with characteristic bluntness. Marilyn grimaced.
“I was born on a Thursday. Holly is Sunday’s child.” She shrugged. “You ever hear the old rhyme?”
“I seem to remember the child born on the Sabbath gets the whole shebang, so to speak.” The older woman’s normally businesslike tones softened. “What about Thursday’s?”
“Thursday’s child has far to go.” Marilyn’s smile was one-sided. “That’s me all over, Elva. Sometimes I feel like I just have so darn far to go before I get to where I want to be. Or to who I want to be,” she added huskily. “I’m not sure I like the person I’ve become since I moved back here, so I can’t complain when the rest of the family make it clear they’d rather I’d stayed in Boston.”
She fell silent for a moment. Then she nudged her computer’s mouse so that the floral screen-saver disappeared.
“An absolutely perfect example of what I mean.” She forced a laugh. “I’m sitting here feeling sorry for my inner child when there’s a real baby missing. You’re right, Elva—Holly must be going through hell, wondering when the authorities will get a break in this case. Somehow her situation puts my little problems into perspective, doesn’t it?”
She sighed. “But meanwhile life at Mills & Grommett goes on, complete with the Wednesday morning meetings I got too used to leaving for Tony to handle when he was here.”
“I’ll inform security you’re working late.” Easily Elva slipped back into the persona of efficient secretary. She nodded pleasantly. “Good night, Ms. Langworthy.”
“’Night, Elva.” Feeling foolishly lonely all of a sudden, Marilyn flipped open the sheaf of papers, but even as she did she realized Elva had paused in the doorway. She looked up.
“Happy birthday, Ms. Langworthy.” The older woman’s tone was tentative. “At M & G we normally order in a cake for these kinds of occasions. I knew you wouldn’t feel like celebrating today, but I didn’t want you to think no one had remembered.”
A cake. As she heard Elva’s footsteps tapping through the outer offices and listened for the thunk of the dead bolt being turned in the reception area door leading to the fortieth floor hallway, a vision of what she’d been spared flitted through Marilyn’s mind. She gave a mental shudder. It was bad enough turning thirty-one. Turning thirty-one in a staff lunchroom had root canals and bikini waxing beat hands down in the excruciatingly painful category. And as Elva had surmised, this was one July twenty-second she had no desire to celebrate.
Coming to Denver was the biggest mistake of your life.
The thought dropped into her mind with the suddenness of unwelcome certainty. Unable to continue feigning an interest in the information in front of her, she got up and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that took up one wall of her office. On the same unsettled impulse, she flicked off the overhead fluorescents so that only her desk lamp remained on. Below her the lights of the city spread out like diamonds on velvet.
Maybe coming here hadn’t been the biggest mistake, she told herself stonily. Maybe accepting her father’s far-from-enthusiastic invitation to take this position at his company had been. Or maybe breaking her own unwritten rule of not dating a co-worker took the prize—yet another reason cake in the staffroom wouldn’t have been a fun idea. Since that disastrously eye-opening final evening with Tony Corso and his abrupt resignation the next morning, she’d suspected she hadn’t been the first female at M & G he’d shown his true colors to. She had no desire to exchange girlfriend horror stories with Angie, the receptionist, or Leeza, the records clerk.
And none of that mattered a damn, Marilyn thought. Because everything else faded into insignificance beside baby Sky’s disappearance.
She’d had the chance to hold him. She’d turned Holly down. Regret, more corrosive than acid, spilled through her. As it had done a hundred times in the days since Sky’s kidnapping, the memory of the one and only occasion she’d allowed herself to visit her half sister and her newborn nephew came flooding back.
“Sweetie, it’s a Karan blouse and a Jacobs suit,” she’d said coolly. “Baby sick-up isn’t my idea of the perfect accessory. Here’s a little welcome-to-the-world gift for him, by the way. When I told the store clerk what I wanted engraved on it I’m sure he thought we were holdouts from the hippie era or something. Why would you pick Schyler as a name, when you must have known he’d be saddled with such an odd nickname?”
Holly’s only reply had been the annoyingly beatific smile Marilyn had privately told herself her half sister must have received along with the rest of the trappings of motherhood. That smile had been infuriating on more than one level, but at the very least it had been a clear indication that the status quo between them had changed, in Holly’s mind, anyway.
It had always been so easy to prick Holly’s perfect little bubble, she’d thought with a flash of irritation—easy and satisfying and…and justified. Except now it seemed her half sister’s lifelong lack of self-confidence where their father’s first daughter was concerned was gone. Incredibly, that smile seemed to indicate that Holly felt sorry for her.
“It’s beautiful, Marilee. Thank you.”
The use of the foolish pet name that had been the closest a baby Holly had been able to get to pronouncing “Marilyn” had set her teeth on edge. Her half sister had enclosed the solid-silver baby rattle in its nest of tissue paper and ribbon.
“Aren’t you going to let him play with it?” Her usual tone when speaking to Holly was a bored drawl. It had been disconcerting to hear a touch of sharpness in her voice, and she’d modulated it with a laugh. “It’s never too early to develop good taste, and hallmarked silver beats a chewed-up terry cloth toy any day. Take that disgusting rabbit thing away from him and give him the rattle.”
“That disgusting rabbit thing is Bun-Bun, I’ll have you know,” Holly had replied with a smile. “Sky frets when he can’t find him. And besides, Marilee—” Her smile had faltered. “—he’s just a baby. The rattle’s exquisite, but it’s far too heavy for him to lift.”
She’d dropped a quick kiss on the top of her son’s downy head. “I never imagined I’d feel like this,” she’d said softly. “I could just sit here all day and inhale him. Are you sure you don’t want to hold him for a minute?”
“I think I’ll pass on that thrill, sweetie.” She’d barely been able to get the words out. “I’d rather inhale something a little more fragrant, like a dry white wine, and I’m late for my lunch at Zenith with Tony.” As she’d kissed the air near Holly’s cheek the sight of her discarded gift had prompted her to add, “Next time I come a-callin’ on Mama and baby I’ll ask him along, shall I? A little boy should have at least one male figure in his life besides his uncle and grandfather, don’t you think?”
As soon as she’d launched the barb some part of her had wished she could recall it…and some part of her, she remembered now with shame, had felt a surge of satisfaction as Holly’s complacent smile had given way to a stricken look. Her half sister’s back had curved slightly, as if to protect the baby in her arms from the words that had just been uttered.
“You were jealous.” Marilyn stared sightlessly at the glittering panorama that was Denver at night. Her voice rang out too loudly in the shadowed office.
“You wished he was yours. Never mind that either his father didn’t want to stick around or Holly decided she and Sky were better off without him. You only used that because you wanted to hurt her, and you wanted to hurt her because you envied her. You were terrified of holding that baby—terrified of showing how you really felt, terrified Holly would somehow guess that you’d give anything in the world to have one of your own.”
Her reflection wavered darkly in the window in front of her, and she stared at the woman she saw standing there as if she were looking at a stranger. Pale blond hair brushed the woman’s shoulders. An expensively plain blouse tapered in at the waist and then slightly out again to skim a pencil-slim black skirt. Longish legs ended in narrow, elegant feet shod in narrow, elegant heels. She looked pulled-together, businesslike, attractive.
Marilyn flinched. The illusion shattered. The woman in the glass was a fraud and a bitch. The woman in the glass didn’t exist at all, except as a collection of possessions and poses.
The only real thing about her was the dread in her eyes.
“Holly’s out of her mind with fear,” her brother Joshua had told her curtly when he’d called to notify her of their nephew’s abduction a few hours after it had occurred. “She’s sitting by the phone clutching that damned stuffed rabbit of his, waiting for the kidnappers to call.”
“Sky frets when he can’t find him…” More than anything, that had haunted her over the past weeks, Marilyn thought—a tiny baby snatched away from everything and everyone familiar, not even allowed the comfort of a beloved toy. Trivial as it was, that knowledge had brought home to her the ruthlessness of the people who had taken Sky.
The people who had taken him, and who perhaps by now had panicked and—
The pain that had been building in her burst forth in a terrible, keening cry that felt like it was splitting her asunder. A nightmarish jumble of images flashed through her mind and her hands flew up reflexively, as if by pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes she could turn off her imagination. Still the pictures, each one more horrible than the last, seared their way into her soul.
There was only one way to blot them out. Marilyn stopped fighting the blackness and let it overtake her. Her knees buckled. The floor rushed up to meet her.
And the man who had been standing in the shadows the whole time strode forward to catch her as she fell.
HE WAS GOING to have to lie to her, U.S. Marshall Conrad Burke told himself as he carried Marilyn to the couch in the corner of her office. Against the creamy pallor of her cheeks her lashes stirred, and his self-disgust intensified. Merde. The lying was going to have to start now.
Me, I was born to hang, sure. Despite the situation he found himself in, a corner of Con’s mouth twitched upward as he remembered his great-uncle Eustache’s oft-repeated boast. But you were born to lie, boy, so make sure you do it like a Creole gentleman. Steady eye contact, and with the ladies, a small smile, no?
Dark lashes fluttered open. Eyes as blue as heaven gazed blankly up at him, and for a moment Con forgot everything Eustache Ducharme had ever taught him. He recovered smoothly.
“Not the way I meant to introduce myself, sugar,” he said with a quick, and he hoped, reassuring, smile, his gaze steady on her suddenly widened one, “but it seems I walked in just as you fainted. You feeling all right now, cher’?”
He hadn’t planned on introducing himself at all and he certainly hadn’t walked in only minutes ago, so even if you didn’t count the fact that he needed no introduction to Marilyn Langworthy, those were lies number one and two right there, Con thought, guilt rippling unfamiliarly through him. And the lady wasn’t buying them, he realized as he saw that heaven-blue gaze focus and begin to harden.
She was going to ask him how he’d gotten past security and into her locked office. He needed to plant other questions in her mind, and fast.
“New Orleans P.D.” He slipped two fingers into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and extracted a leather identification case, complete with gold badge. Deftly he flipped it open in front of her. “Detective Connor Ducharme. I’m investigating—”
“Is he safe?”
Under his open jacket he was wearing a waistcoat—what those unfortunate enough to be born north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Missouri River called a vest, he supposed. Before he’d known what she intended she’d grabbed its lapels. Slim fingers gave a surprisingly strong tug and she repeated her query, those perfect features of hers etched with strain.
“Is he safe? Have you found him? Dear God—New Orleans? Why in heaven’s name did they take him there?”
He’d needed her to ask questions. He wished now she’d asked the one he’d been trying to steer her away from.
“Cher’, I’m not here about the little one,” he said, as gently as he could. “The case I’m working involves a certain Tony Corso, wanted on fraud charges in Louisiana. I wish I had news of your nephew for you, but I don’t.”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again he saw the urgently hopeful light in them had disappeared. Her fingers slid from his lapels.
“I—I thought maybe it was all over. The nightmare, I mean. I thought Sky might be on his way home right now.”
She took a deep breath. Letting it out, she sat up on the couch. Her head bowed, she swung her legs to the floor. Looking up, she met his look with a suddenly flinty one of her own.
“How did you know my nephew had been kidnapped? Since it’s not common knowledge in Denver, I can’t believe every last man-jack on the New Orleans force has been alerted.”
“Probably not.” He shrugged easily, more sure of his ground now. “But when I discovered Corso’s trail led here the local law brought me up to speed.”
He flicked a glance at her still-white face. Something prompted him to add, “From what I hear, the rest of your family’s sticking pretty close together these days. Why aren’t you with them?”
He’d gone too far, he realized immediately. She stiffened, and when her gaze locked on his he could have sworn the temperature in the room dropped several degrees.
“My personal life can’t be part of your investigation, Detective, so I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that question.”
She smoothed her skirt down her thighs and stood, and despite the perceptible chill emanating from her Con felt sudden heat slam into him. Not everything he’d told her had been a lie, he thought, trying to school his features into impassivity. He had asked questions before coming here, and the answers he’d gotten had all been the same. Marilyn Langworthy was a bitch. She was an ice queen. Nothing touched her—not the kidnapping of her tiny nephew, and certainly not the breakup of her relationship with Tony Corso.
Maybe some of what he’d heard was true, but he’d already seen enough of the woman to put the lie to at least two of the labels that had been pinned on her. She cared about the child—cared enough that she was being torn apart by Sky’s abduction, judging from what he’d witnessed moments ago. And if she was an ice queen, it was only because the right man hadn’t come along to melt her yet.
You gon’ be the one who does that, Cap?
The jeering voice inside his head held the same skepticism he’d heard from the late-night denizens of the Canal Street clubs he’d trolled when he’d been young enough that even hardened gamblers had felt a momentary pang of conscience before dealing a tough Creole urchin in on a game of five-card stud. He’d taken them and their consciences to the cleaners, Con recalled without regret. But back then all he’d been risking was money.
The stakes were higher here. And the odds were more overwhelmingly against him than they’d ever been in his life.
F’sure. One of these days I’m gonna come back here and give it my best shot, he answered the jeering voice with a determination that disconcerted even himself. But whether she knows it or not, tonight the lady just needs someone to be with her. And maybe if that someone gets her good and angry it’ll ease her pain for a few hours. Before I leave I can do that for her, at least.
“Let’s get back to the matter you say brings you here, Detective.”
Her voice was like everything else about her, he noted—crisp and unemotional on the surface, but shadowed with a hint of vulnerability that the casual observer wouldn’t catch. He wasn’t a casual observer, Con thought. Not when it came to Marilyn Langworthy. With no enthusiasm he took advantage of that vulnerability.
“Tony Corso,” he agreed. “Word is he was your—how did I hear it?—your good right-hand man, cher’,” he drawled insinuatingly. “That true?”
If she’d stiffened before, now her posture was rigid. Two warning flags of color flew high on her cheekbones, and when she answered him, five generations of Beacon Hill aristocracy on her mother’s side came through in every clipped word.
“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re just referring to his position at Mills & Grommett, Detective—” She made a show of frowning in forgetfulness. “I’m sorry. Your name again?”
“Ducharme.” He deliberately took a step onto thinner ice. “But call me Con, sugar. The other’s a mouthful.”
Even if he hadn’t been trying to goad her he wouldn’t have been able to resist letting his gaze linger on the mouth in question, he admitted. Those lips weren’t Beacon Hill at all. They didn’t go with the prim white blouse and the straight skirt she wore, and they didn’t go with the smoothly brushed hairstyle. Those lush lips went with black fishnet stockings, half-undone bustiers, bed-messy tangles of hair obscuring a gleam of blue eye. They were lightly and invisibly glossed—another Beacon Hill legacy, Con guessed. He wondered what that mouth would look like slightly smudged from his kisses.
You’re wondering way too much here, Cap, for a man who doesn’t intend to do anything about it, the voice inside his head warned. Maybe you better back off a little and—
“What is it about me, Detective?” The lips he’d been fantasizing about thinned. “Why do I seem to present a challenge to men of a certain kind, like you and Tony Corso?”
He blinked, feeling obscurely outraged. “Me and Corso, cher’, we’re not two of a kind. I’ll let you take a look at his file sometime and you’ll see just what—”
“His references were solid and when he left he certainly didn’t abscond with the company’s payroll. Whatever you’re trying to charge him with, you’ve obviously made a mistake,” she interrupted him. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I wasn’t Tony’s type, I know now. But just the fact that I wasn’t particularly interested in him when we met made him determined to get some response from me, whatever it took. Even so, his approach was nowhere near as fast and crude as yours, Detective,” she added coldly.
She tipped her head to one side. “The innuendoes, the barely veiled insults. Tell me, do you ever get results with them?”
He’d given in to a reckless impulse by coming here in the first place, Con told himself tightly. He’d compounded that recklessness when he’d revealed himself to her. About the only admirable urge he’d acted upon was his hasty decision to take her mind off her nephew’s disappearance by rousing her ire, and that mission, it was all too obvious, had been accomplished.
He’d always known enough to fold his cards and get up from the table when logic and reason told him his run of luck was about to expire. Right now logic and reason were telling him it was time to walk away from Marilyn Langworthy.
Fast and crude? he thought, a tiny spark flaring inside him. Hell, I could have left you thinking anything else of me, sugar, but not that.
“You bet I do,” he said easily. “And if you were honest, you’d admit that sometimes you wish you could slip out of that ice-water manner of yours and into a little Big Easy fast and crude yourself. If you ever feel a lapse in good taste coming on, look me up, cher’.”
“And you’ll what?” Her tone was edged. “Be my—how did you put it?—my right-hand man? I don’t see my taste lapsing that badly.”
Her gaze lasered him. “But I guess I can understand how you work it, Detective. Some women probably just see a big man with dark eyes and black hair when they look at you. Some women might go for that drawl and the riverboat gambler air you put on.”
“I was born in St. Tammany Parish, honey. We all talk like this where I come from,” Con interjected. “And I put myself through college relieving high rollers of their cash on the riverboats, so that’s legit, too. I’m not the one pretending to be something I’m not.”
He smiled into her furious eyes. “Those shoes. Killer heels, sugar, and barely-there straps. They’re your secret sexy vice, aren’t they? They’re the real Marilyn. And deep down I think the real Marilyn could go for a big man with black hair and gambler’s hands if she wasn’t so damn scared of letting loose.”
Shrugging, he turned away. “Too bad for both of us that you’re such a coward, cher’. If Corso contacts you, try to set aside your fears long enough to let me know, will you?”
He felt suddenly angry with himself. If anyone had been a coward here it had been him, Con thought as he strode toward the door. He hadn’t meant to walk into her life this way, had always known there were reasons why Marilyn Langworthy’s path and his should never cross at all. And still he hadn’t been able to resist this encounter. That was bad enough.
But lying about who he was had been worse.
Didn’t have the guts to watch your dreams die right in front of your eyes, did you? the jeering voice said. Letting her think you’re a cochon is preferable to what you know she’d feel if she ever found out who you really are.
“Is it so obvious?”
Her question was so low he almost didn’t hear it. He turned and saw she was still standing by the couch, but that was all that was unchanged from a moment ago.
The self-possession she’d exhibited during their barbed exchange was no longer in evidence. Her cool demeanor had fled. And something had replaced the anger in her gaze with total and absolute devastation.
“I keep telling myself it wasn’t my fault, Con.” She didn’t seem to realize she’d used his name. “But it was.”
“What are you talking about?”
Frowning, he crossed the distance between them and stood before her. There was something wrong here, he thought—something badly wrong. Lightly he grasped her shoulders.
“What’s your fault?”
“I should have been there the day he was kidnapped.” Her whisper was raw, her words more directed to herself than to him. “If I had been, maybe I could have prevented it. But I turned around and came home again, because I was too afraid.”
Under his palms her shoulders trembled. She turned haunted eyes to him. “It’s like you said—I’m a coward. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Sky since the time I visited him and Holly. I hadn’t expected to feel that way about a baby, but I took one look at him and I just fell in love,” she added softly. “So I decided I’d set aside my pride and call on Holly that day, put things right between us after all these years. Except I lost my nerve. That must have been just about the time they—just about the time—”
The blue of her eyes sheened over. “I might have saved Sky, Con, and it’s tearing me apart that I didn’t!”
“Don’t say that, cher’,” he began, but with a quick shake of her head she overrode him.
“It’s true. By choosing to keep myself sealed off I put a little boy in terrible danger. And God help me, if you were anyone but a complete stranger, I wouldn’t even have the courage to admit that much.”
Guilt lanced through him. It was way past time to tell her, he thought. If he left it any longer the consequences could be disastrous.
Even as he opened his mouth to speak she forestalled him.
“And maybe I wouldn’t have the courage to go through with this, either,” she said hoarsely.
Her fingers fumbled with the top button of her blouse. She slipped it free and immediately began working on the second one, her movements clumsy with urgency.
“Holly has family and friends to support her.” Her head was bent to her task as if it required her full attention. Without looking at him she continued speaking, her voice little more than a thread. “My father has his wife. Josh may not have found the woman he wants to share his life with yet but he always has someone—someone to hold, someone who can help him keep the nightmares at bay. But I’m the Ice Queen, Con. And ice queens don’t have anybody.”
He had to stop this, Con thought. Whatever she thought she was doing, it was a sure bet she’d hate herself for it before twenty-four hours had passed. His hands moved from her shoulders to grasp her wrists. The edges of her blouse gaped open to reveal a swell of creamy skin, a delicately erotic edging of lace.
Immediate desire burned through him. He swallowed, and forced his gaze to hers.
“I had no right to say what I did, cher’,” he said huskily. “I had no real right to come here at all. I should go now.”
“No!” The single word exploded from her with the desperation of a plea. The blue eyes meeting his were dark with unimaginable pain. “Don’t you get it, Detective? I need to make the nightmares go away for a few hours. Sky’s disappeared. I might have saved him. For nineteen days that knowledge has been tearing me apart, and I just want to blot it out for tonight.”
She undid the last button. His hands slipped away from her wrists, and when she shrugged out of her blouse and let it fall to the floor he made no move to stop her. Cupped by the lacy bra, her breasts rose and fell quickly.
“Take the pain away, Con.” Her whisper was raw. “Please take it away, just for tonight.”
She needed a stranger. She needed someone who would walk away without a second thought after this was over. She needed someone who wouldn’t recall her name a month from now.
And he wasn’t that someone, Con thought. He was just the man who’d loved her for as long as he could remember. If he did what she was asking, after tonight she wouldn’t only have his heart but she’d own his very soul, and any faint hope he might have had for a future with her would have to be forgotten forever.
Take the pain away, Con. Please take it away…
His arms gathered her tightly to him and his mouth came down on hers.
Chapter Two
With a frown Conrad Burke looked around the massive and rustic great room of the Royal Flush Ranch. It had been three months and two weeks since his encounter with Marilyn Langworthy, he reflected, although encounter came nowhere close to describing the conflagration that had consumed the two of them that night in her office. Three months and two weeks of burying himself in his work, of drinking too much, of falling asleep, drunk or sober, with the memory of her haunting his dreams.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t return to Colorado, but when his old friend Wiley Longbottom had come to him yesterday with a request to meet with a certain Colleen Wellesley here at her ranch, located a couple of hours outside Denver, even the fact that Wiley had refused to reveal what the meeting was about and who Wellesley was hadn’t given him pause. He’d caught a red-eye flight out of Louis Armstrong Airport, touched down in Denver, and the first damn thing he’d done after renting a vehicle had been to head for the city’s lively and upscale LoDo district. He’d parked near the corner of Blake Street and 33rd, within sight of the converted-to-lofts warehouse where he knew Marilyn lived, and had sat behind the wheel of his car all afternoon hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Only when the early November dusk had begun to fall had he left the city, taking I-285 until it hooked up with Highway 9 near Fairplay, just north of the Royal Flush.
Although apparently the house itself had been a bordello in the wild old days, to his mild surprise he’d realized when he’d arrived that the Flush was definitely a working ranch. He was willing to accept that as an excuse for the Wellesley woman’s absence so far, Con told himself, walking over to the antique portrait hanging above the gilded mirror running the length of the heavily varnished and well-stocked pine bar.
He gazed without interest at the rest of the decor, an obvious holdover from those same wild days when this room’s red velvet furnishings and saloon fittings had probably been the last word in decadent luxury for woman-hungry cowboys. Ranch duties or not, if Wiley hadn’t been there, he would have driven back to the airport, Con thought with growing impatience. And this time he wouldn’t have indulged in a foolish and futile side-trip to Marilyn Langworthy’s neighborhood.
It had ended as he’d known it would. After the third time they’d made love she’d fallen asleep in his arms on the sofa, the cashmere throw they’d been lying on pulled lightly over her hips, her head tucked into the hollow of his neck. He hadn’t slept himself, but had spent the few hours before dawn just drinking in the sight of her and breathing in her scent.
During those hours he’d hoped against hope he was wrong. As soon as she’d opened her eyes, hope had died.
Of course she regretted it. What she did with you went against everything she ever thought she was. The only way she could live with herself when she realized she’d made love with a stranger—made love with a stranger and liked it, for God’s sake—would have been to wall herself up again behind the ice that’s protected her all her life. Even before she told you to get out you knew that. Even before she started crying you knew.
So it had ended with her hating herself and hating him, he thought. And if he had it all to do over again, for the life of him he didn’t see how he could have acted differently.
She’d needed someone to love her for a few hours. What she would never realize was that with him she hadn’t had to ask.
“Ray called through to the horse barn and didn’t get an answer.” Balancing a thick china plate heaped high with a Dagwood-size sandwich and a huge dill pickle, Wiley Longbottom walked into the room. He made a beeline for the bar and set his precarious burden onto its scarred surface. “Melody insisted on fixing me a little snack, as she calls it. Not that I need it,” he said, giving his stomach a rueful pat.
“The Castillos are the ranch’s housekeeper and caretaker,” he went on. His next words were spoken around a mouthful of roast beef. “Ray said he’d try the foreman’s quarters, find out if Dex knows where the devil Colleen’s disappeared to.”
“So while we’re waiting for her to grace us with her presence why don’t you fill me in on a couple of details?” Con suggested, shooting his old friend a sharp look. “Like what the hell am I doing here in the first place? You know I don’t like the cold, Wiley, so you must have had one hell of a good reason for dragging me away from New Awlins and into the snow belt at this time of year. You’ve got mustard on your tie,” he added in irritation.
“That might be from lunch. I never was the dandy you are, with your boutonnieres and those extravagant vests.” The older man nodded with a grin at the yellow flower in Con’s lapel. Under bushy brows his gaze remained hooded. “As for my reasons for dragging you away, yeah, I’d say they’re justified, but I think it’s best if Colleen’s in on this discussion.”
“Aren’t you playing your cards a little closer than you need to?” Con kept his voice even with an effort. “Dammit, Wiley, this is me. We go back a long way, to before you were appointed director of public safety and when I was just starting out in the Marshall Service. At least give me some background on the mysterious Colleen Wellesley I’m about to meet.”
“I haven’t given her much on you,” the older man informed him with a sidelong glance. “All she knows is that in the past when I’ve run into a particularly thorny problem I’ve consulted with my ‘conscience’ to come up with a solution. She’s not aware said conscience is a reformed cardsharp who cooks up the best crawfish étouffée in the French Quarter, bar none.”
Con grinned reluctantly. “I appreciate the cover even if it isn’t one I’d have chosen myself. And even though you’ve obviously decided it’s time to blow it,” he added, more soberly. “She can be trusted, Wiley?”
“With your real identity, and a whole lot more.” His friend nodded and took another bite of his sandwich. “Wellesley started out as a cop on the Denver force and made detective in record time. She was a damn good one, too, until a bribery scandal derailed her career ten years ago.”
“Nice knowin’ you, Longbottom.” Con pulled the gold watch that had been a legacy from his great-uncle Eustache out of his pocket. “If I break the speed limit all the way back to Denver I should be able to catch a flight home tonight.” His lips tightened. “You know how I feel about dirty cops, Wiley.”
“The same way Colleen feels about them,” the other man replied testily. “She was the whistle-blower, Burke. Except she wasn’t believed, since the son of a bitch she blew the whistle on was a superior officer and the rot went a lot higher than even she’d suspected. She handed in her badge when she realized the corruption was just going to be covered up.”
Slowly Con slipped the watch back into his waistcoat pocket. “That took guts, f’sure,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “So she bought this place and took up ranching?”
“The Royal Flush was left to her when her father died,” Wiley corrected him. “She’s got a brother, Michael, but he’s just come back from time in the special forces and hasn’t been involved with the ranch. Colleen herself delegates most of the day-to-day responsibilities to Dexter Jones, her foreman. Until recently she’s concentrated her energies on running an operation in Denver called ICU, which is short for Investigations, Confidential & Undercover.”
“You taught me a long time ago always to listen for what the other fellow was leaving out,” Con observed. “If she’s been operating a private investigation firm until recently, that means she’s currently doing something else, am I right?”
“She works for us now,” Wiley said flatly. He popped the last bite of dill pickle into his mouth. “The Royal Flush is the headquarters of Colorado Confidential, and Colleen heads the operation. ICU is still operating, but it’s also a front for Confidential activity.”
Con gave a low whistle. “F’true, Cap? So those cryptic e-mails you’ve been sending me asking my advice in a case one of the Confidential organizations was working on—they’ve been about Wellesley’s outfit? I knew about the setups in Chicago and Texas, but this is the first I’ve heard that Confidential had moved into Colorado.”
“Don’t forget Montana,” the other man reminded him. “Yeah, it’s for true, Captain.” He grinned as he played back Con’s slang to him. “You know, Burke, you’re living proof that you can take the boy out of New Orleans but you can’t take the New Orleans out of the boy.”
“And you’ll only get this boy outta dat sweet Crescent City under protest,” Con told him with an answering smile. “All kidding aside, Wiley, what’s any of this got to do with—”
He stopped as if he’d been shot. Then he shook his head decisively. “It ain’t in the cards, old pal. Check with the Marshalls and see what my boss writes in his reports about me. ‘Does not play well with others,’ that’s what. No way am I interested in joining Wellesley’s merry band of undercover cowpokes, not even if our tardy hostess gets down on her knees and begs me to—”
“I’m tardy because I’ve been in the birthing shed with Dex, saving the lives of a mare and a foal who decided to come out feetfirst.”
The crisp explanation came from the slim, fortyish brunette entering the room. Walking past them to the business side of the bar, she pulled a bottle of scotch from the array in front of the antique mirror and produced a cut-glass tumbler from under the counter. Pouring a hefty shot of the amber liquor, she set the bottle down and favored Con with a piercing look.
“As for the getting on my knees and begging part, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. The members of my merry band—” her gaze frosted over even further as she quoted him “—are all solid team players. By your own admission it’s obvious you wouldn’t fit in. Can I get you men a drink?”
She raised the tumbler to her lips. Con studied her through narrowed eyes as she took a healthy swallow of her scotch.
Beneath the ranch-woman exterior of jeans and chambray shirt, Colleen Wellesley was still all cop. It showed in the spit-and-polish neatness of her attire, the no-nonsense short cut of her hair—her damp hair, he noted, realizing that she’d taken time to clean up before she’d joined them.
But a change of clothes and a few minutes under a hot shower hadn’t been enough to obliterate all evidence of what she was trying to conceal, he thought. Her lips were still slightly swollen. Although her gaze had been sharp when she’d directed it at him, as she set her glass down on the bar he caught an unguarded flash of warmth in her eyes.
Colleen Wellesley probably had been helping her foreman deliver a foal, Con decided. But their maternity ward duties had been completed a little earlier than she was admitting.
“Bourbon, if you’ve got it.” From his waistcoat pocket he extracted a silver dollar, its surface smooth from long handling. Idly he passed it under his index finger and over his middle one, then let it slip under his ring finger. The worn silver gleamed and disappeared as he lazily passed it back and forth in his hand. “He must be quite a man, cher’.”
Her head jerked up and a drop or two of the bourbon she was pouring splashed onto the bar. “I’m sorry?”
Con ignored the warning in her tone. “Your foreman,” he elaborated. He picked up his bourbon and looked blandly at her over the rim of his glass. “He must be good at what he does to have saved your mare’s life and delivered her foal safely. Breech births can be tricky, or so I hear.”
Dark eyes held his a moment longer. “Very tricky,” Colleen said finally. “And I don’t like tricky, Mr. Burke. I presume you’re Wiley’s fabled ‘conscience’?”
“Conrad Burke, Colleen Wellesley.” Wiley had been watching them during their exchange. “Why don’t the two of you start all over again, and this time let’s keep it civil. There’s a child’s life at stake here, people.”
“I hadn’t forgotten that, Longbottom,” Colleen snapped, but before she could continue Con broke in.
“A child’s life?” he demanded sharply. “Like when you’ve asked my advice about cases in the past, Wiley, your e-mails on this one just dealt with details. You never gave me the whole picture. What child?”
“Schyler Langworthy.” Wellesley barely glanced at him. “He’s the six-month-old son of Holly Langworthy, and in this state the name Langworthy carries a lot of weight. By election day I guess we’ll see just how much weight, since Holly’s brother’s running for governor against the incumbent, Todd Houghton.” She exhaled tightly. “Sky was kidnapped almost four months ago. Colorado Confidential took on the case a few weeks later, when the police and the feds ran out of leads.”
She drained her scotch. “But that’s not your problem, Burke. You and I agree you’re not team material, so don’t worry about it.”
Take the pain away…
He’d known the Langworthy baby was still missing, and his private opinion had been that Sky had been snatched by someone desperate for a child of their own. There’d never been a ransom demand. So for three months he’d tried to shut out the memory of the agony in Marilyn’s voice when she’d spoken of her kidnapped nephew, since unless and until the U.S. Marshalls were called in on the matter his hands were tied.
That was still the case, Con thought heavily. As the oldest federal law enforcement agency in America, the mandate of the Marshalls was primarily centered on federal fugitives, money-laundering prosecutions and the witness protection program. They cooperated with other levels of law enforcement, but only when specifically requested to.
He frowned. Knowing all that, why had Wiley sent for him?
“It’s got everything to do with you, Con.”
Wiley had shaken his head at Colleen’s earlier offer of a drink. Now he hesitated, and pulled the bottle of scotch toward him.
“My ulcers are going to play me hell for this,” he muttered as he poured himself a shot and swallowed it neat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But then, my ulcers have been giving me hell lately anyway. Ever since Helio DeMarco’s name cropped up in this investigation,” he added, his suddenly grim gaze fixing on Con.
“Helio DeMarco?”
Con felt as if the blood in his veins had suddenly turned to ice. He heard something strike the floor, and looking down, he saw the silver dollar had slipped through his fingers. With a swift movement he bent to pick it up, grateful for the chance to avert his face.
“You know of him?” Colleen’s tone was still barbed. His own was flat as he answered her.
“You could say that. A year ago in New Orleans a protected witness in a case the Marshalls were building against DeMarco on money-laundering charges was killed by him. Then DeMarco contacted Roland Charpentier, one of our agents, and said he wanted to cut a deal.”
“But instead the Marshalls obviously let him get away, since he’s surfaced here in Colorado,” the ex-cop said disgustedly. “Was Charpentier on the take?”
“Colleen—” Wiley began warningly, but Con didn’t let him finish.
“No, cher’, Roland wasn’t on the take,” he drawled. He met her eyes. “I’d have known if he was. Charpentier’s my best friend—in fact, I visited him earlier today, just before I caught my flight to Denver.”
Her gaze wavered. “I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions,” she muttered. “So how did the Marshalls lose Helio, or Lio, as he now calls himself?”
Instead of answering her question, Con asked one of his own. “Everyone’s heard about the Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, but do you know what our other big day is, cher’?”
Annoyance reappeared on her features. “The name’s Wellesley, Burke. And no, I don’t know. I also don’t care.”
“You should,” he informed her. “Because there’s a kind of poetic justice involved you might appreciate. Our other big observance is November the first. Today,” he added softly. “The Day of the Dead, when we visit the graves of our loved ones and remember how much they meant to us.”
He glanced down at the yellow flower in his lapel. “The custom is to lay chrysanthemums by the headstone and have a little chat with the deceased.” He shrugged. “Some families even bring a picnic lunch, make a day of it. I didn’t have time to do that so I just laid my flowers down and made the same vow I always do.”
“Charpentier’s dead, isn’t he?” Belated comprehension filled Colleen’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Burke, I didn’t know. What’s the vow you make?”
“That I’m going to take down the bastard who killed him. That I’m going to take down Helio DeMarco.”
Con flipped the silver dollar into the air. It flashed upward and then tumbled down again, throwing off glints of light before he one-handedly caught it. Slapping his palm and the coin in it flat against the pine bar, he looked at her.
“Call it,” he said tonelessly.
She raised an eyebrow. “Heads.”
He lifted his hand. “Tails. I’ll work with Colorado Confidential, cher’, but on my own terms. No boss, no partners, no rules.”
“No deal,” Colleen riposted. She turned to Wiley. “For God’s sake, Longbottom, this is the maverick you’re considering to head the New Or—”
“I think you should take him up on his offer.” Con heard a hint of steel in the DPS director’s normally mild tones. “If Burke says he’ll deliver Helio to Colorado Confidential he will. Right now that’s all that matters—especially since this whole thing could blow up in our faces if it’s not taken care of quickly.”
“How’s that?” Con frowned at his friend, but Colleen answered him before Wiley could speak.
“We think one of the Langworthys has gone over to the other side,” she said coldly. “There was always a possibility Sky’s kidnappers had help from a member of the family, and with what we’ve found out about Helio’s involvement, that now seems to be a certainty. A former intern of a certain Senator Franklin Gettys, Nicola Carson, came close to being killed by a DeMarco hit man when she discovered a link between the senator, the mobster and a mysterious chemical mist that was being tested on sheep at Gettys’s ranch, the Half Spur. Fibers found in Sky’s crib after his abduction came from the type of sheep on the Half Spur. And Gettys’s ex-wife, Helen Kouros, gave us information she copied on a disk from the Half Spur’s computer that backs up our belief that some kind of bio-weapons research is being done there.”
She paused. “But you guessed about the Q-fever virus, didn’t you? I’d forgotten—Wiley’s ‘conscience’ recommended we look into the flu that swept Silver Rapids earlier this year.”
“I told him it might be worthwhile to check out any recent influenza-like outbreaks that might have occurred in the area,” Con said. “Since I didn’t realize this investigation was centered in Colorado I wasn’t aware there’d been one in Silver Rapids. But it fits. DeMarco’s always been intrigued by nerve gas, biological weaponry, that kind of thing. He’s responsible for at least six murders I know of that were passed off as deaths from natural causes, and Roland’s was one of them.”
He hoped his voice revealed none of the pain that suddenly swept through him. A vision filled his mind of Roland’s lifeless body, slumped over his desk, his hand still gripping the silver pen that had released the deadly vapor which had instantly killed him. That pen had been given to him by Helio DeMarco, it had later been established.
He felt a muscle in his jaw tighten. With difficulty he posed his next questions.
“But where’s the connection between DeMarco and the Langworthys? And which Langworthy is under suspicion, anyway?”
“The Ice Queen.” Colleen’s voice hardened. “Marilyn Langworthy, Holly’s half sister and Sky’s aunt. Her nickname’s apt. Even pregnancy hasn’t thawed her out.”
She was pregnant.
Just for a moment Con let himself imagine how he would feel if there was any possibility that the child she was carrying could be his, and fierce joy shafted through him, so powerful and piercing it felt like pain. He wrenched himself back to reality.
She’d had his body. Whether she ever knew it or not, she had his heart and his soul. But the one thing he was incapable of giving Marilyn Langworthy or any woman was a child, he thought bleakly.
So the baby she was carrying had to be—
“We believe that the father of her child is a certain Tony Corso.” Colleen frowned. “Since you’re an expert on DeMarco, you probably know Corso’s his nephew.”
Con reached for the bottle of bourbon and poured himself a second shot, more to have something to do than because he needed another drink. He tossed it back.
Marilyn was pregnant, and by a man who’d walked out of her life. Since earlier this year his own investigation into Corso as a lead to DeMarco had failed to turn up the mobster’s nephew, he didn’t need Wellesley to fill him in on Corso’s absence, he thought grimly as she continued talking, just as he hadn’t needed her to fill him in on a number of other details. He wasn’t going to tell her that. His flying visit to Denver three months ago, including what had happened between him and Marilyn that night in her office, was none of Colorado Confidential’s business and he intended to keep it that way.
There were other aspects to his involvement with this case that he had no intention of sharing, he admitted. Wiley almost certainly knew some of them, but it seemed he hadn’t felt the need to alert Colleen Wellesley to the situation, so that was all right.
That was the only thing that was all right.
Marilyn Langworthy had had an ill-advised affair—an affair she’d later regretted, judging from her assessment of Corso that night in her office—with a man who had connections to a mobster, unbeknownst to her. She gave the impression of being standoffish and unemotional.
If Colleen Wellesley or Longbottom or anyone else associated with Colorado Confidential thought they could hang her out to dry for reasons as flimsy as those, Con thought savagely, it would be his pleasure to set them straight right now. Even as he opened his mouth to speak, Wiley put a hand on his arm.
“If that were all we had on her we’d just keep her under surveillance on the off-chance she could lead us to DeMarco. But there’s more. It’s pretty damning.”
The older man’s expression was shuttered. “Marilyn Langworthy arranged a visit to Silver Rapids with Holly just before the flu outbreak, Con. It looks as if the Ice Queen deliberately exposed her half sister to the Q-fever microbe during Holly’s pregnancy with Sky.”
Chapter Three
“Hold the elevator!”
Marilyn hoped the note of panic in her voice wasn’t as obvious to Jim Osborne and Dan Curtis, her neighbors, as it was to herself. Hastening across the gleaming heartwood floor of the loft complex’s foyer—waddling, more like, she thought despairingly—she found herself calculating the number of seconds before she reached her apartment and made it to the bathroom.
Living in a trendy converted warehouse had cachet, but there were definite drawbacks. For starters, the elevator had been originally built for freight, and it was slow. Jim and Dan would be getting off at the second floor, so their exit would tack on another ten or twenty seconds. Add thirty more for the mad dash up the industrial-style metal staircase that linked her open-concept lower floor to the upper one where the bathroom and bedrooms were, and there was a chance she wasn’t going to make it.
Everything she’d ever read about the physical side effects of pregnancy had emphasized benefits like glowing skin and silkier hair. She’d never expected to be at the mercy of a bladder that felt roughly the size of a pea.
Bad choice of word. As she scooted into the elevator she attempted to maintain a modicum of cool decorum by smiling her thanks at the two men.
“Mama’s been shopping for maternity fashions,” Dan teased, casting an eye at her parcels and releasing the elevator door. Beside him, Jim raised an eyebrow.
“I saw that look of desperation often enough on my sister’s face when she was expecting. Gotta go, sweetie?”
The Marilyn Langworthy of three months ago would have frozen him with a look, she thought. Now she felt grateful for his perception.
“Let’s just say I’ve decided to pack away my favorite CD of Handel’s Water Music until after next April,” she admitted. “There isn’t a warp speed button on that panel, is there?”
“Sorry, no.” His pleasant features crinkled into a grin. “But we’ll go straight to your floor first. Will that help?”
“You’re an angel,” she breathed fervently.
As the oversize freight doors clanged shut and the elevator began its noisy and excruciatingly slow ascent, surreptitiously she eased her left foot out of its leather flat and felt instant relief. She looked up in time to see both Jim and Dan glance politely away.
Her beloved collection of size seven Manolos were a dim memory, Marilyn thought wryly. Ditto for her wardrobe of designer suits and dresses, all of which she’d seemed to balloon out of within days of learning she was pregnant. Once upon a time she’d concentrated on the label of a garment, but now she’d acquired the habit of riffling through racks of clothes, extracting a likely looking top or skirt, and tugging ruthlessly at the waist-line to judge how much stretch it had.
Of course, her shopping expedition today had been only a cover. She’d needed to get away from the office and come to some hard decisions.
She was a thirty-one-year-old expectant single mother. She’d lost her figure, her reputation and after what she’d discovered this morning, quite possibly her job. And she had to go to the bathroom like nobody’s business.
Joy soared through her, so pure and exhilarating she felt a prickling moisture behind her eyes. She was going to have a baby. She was going to have a baby.
“…bring a plate up to you later, if you’d like.”
She’d missed the beginning of Dan’s comment, but it was obvious from his expression that he hadn’t been expecting tears in reply. She mustered a shaky smile.
“Sorry, hormone overload. It’s gotten so bad lately I have to keep a box of tissues by the television in case a heartwarming advertisement comes on. What were you saying?”
“I’m making my special moussaka tonight. I thought if you didn’t feel like cooking—” He stopped as Marilyn hastily tried to erase the moue of instant nausea that had shown on her face. “Vine leaves and ground lamb not on the menu these days?”
“I’m finally over the morning sickness, thank goodness,” she said as the elevator lurched to a stop at her floor and the doors began to open. “But certain foods still seem to flick the queasiness switch with me. I’ll take a rain check on that moussaka for about six months from now, if that’s all right with you.”
Jim and Dan were good neighbors, she thought as she sped through her open-concept living area and clattered up the metal stairs. That was important, especially in an unconventional building like this. The former warehouse was divided into only three spacious loft apartments, one of which was vacant at the moment, its owners being away in Europe.
“And the best thing about them is that right from the first they were happy for me when I told them I was expecting,” she said out loud a few minutes later as she descended the staircase and bent with difficulty to pick up the shopping bags she’d dropped on her frantic way in. “Which is a whole lot more than I got from either the Langworthy or the Van Buren side of my family.”
She felt suddenly too weary even to unpack her purchases. Tossing the bags onto the sofa and dropping into an oversize velvet-upholstered club chair, she closed her eyes.
Immediately he was there, the way he always was when she let down her guard.
Sometimes she could almost persuade herself that that whole night three months ago had been a dream—an erotic, sex-charged dream, in which she’d acted with an abandon that was totally unlike her waking self. And Connor Ducharme fit the profile of a dream lover perfectly, right down to his lazy sensuality, his tall, leanly muscled build, his New Orleans drawl. If that night really had been only a dream she would have been able to handle it, Marilyn thought bleakly. But it had happened. She’d slept with a stranger—not once, but three times that night. And she’d loved it.
That was the part she found hardest to live with.
She opened her eyes. From the soaring ceiling twenty-odd feet above her swooped a perfectly balanced wire and metal mobile, its impressive span in keeping with the spaciousness of the loft but its delicate construction a counterpoint to the exposed brick and heavy wooden beams that were an indication of the building’s original function as a turn-of-the-century warehouse. A current of air caught the mobile and it swirled lightly, like a swallow changing direction in midflight.
She’d actually phoned the New Orleans police department a week later and asked for him. It had taken seven sleepless nights for her to come to that decision, and when she had she’d felt like the weakest of weak-willed females. She was well aware she’d sent him away, had told him she wanted to pretend the previous few hours had never happened, but illogically, that hadn’t mattered. She’d wanted to hear his voice. She’d found herself needing his touch. She’d craved him.
So she’d set aside her pride and phoned, and at first she’d had the terrible suspicion that he’d duped her. The desk sergeant had asked her to repeat the name of the detective she was inquiring about, and had put her on hold for what seemed an eternity. At long last he’d come back on the line, only to inform her that Ducharme wasn’t in the precinct building at the moment.
But by then she’d lost what little courage she’d had. She’d hung up without leaving her name.
She’d never attempted to contact him again, not even when she’d found out she was pregnant.
Connor Ducharme was a dangerous man. He’d seemed to know instinctively what she’d wanted that night and he’d let her believe he could give it to her. But although he’d made her melt, although his mouth, his hands, his whole body had brought her to mind-shattering ecstasy, what made Detective Ducharme so very, very dangerous was that he’d known just how much more she’d needed. He’d pretended to give her that, too.
For a few delirious hours he’d made her believe she was loved.
Marilyn closed her eyes again. Her right hand slid unconsciously to the swell of her belly, and despite the confusing ache in her heart and the problems she knew she was facing at Mills & Grommett, the beatific smile she’d once so envied on Holly’s face crept over her own.
And immediately faded.
“I thought I knew what she was going through, but before now I had no idea,” she whispered. “Sky was her whole world, and he’s still missing. I’d die if anyone tried to take my baby—”
A loud clanking, the signal that another arduous ascent had begun for the freight elevator, drowned out the rest of her words. Almost grateful for the interruption, with an effort she pushed herself out of the chair and began gathering up her shopping bags for the second time.
A visitor for Jim and Dan, she surmised as the clanking continued. She couldn’t remember the last time the elevator had stopped at her floor with a guest, and as far as she knew the Dickenson’s apartment above hadn’t yet been sublet.
She put her idle speculations aside as her gaze lit upon a fuchsia sleeve dangling from one of the bags. Heart sinking, she pulled the garment out. It was a blouse, made of some silky blend and with ruffles spilling down the low-cut front. The black pants that went with it were what the salesgirl had called a yoga style—stretchy and form-fitting, with a very slight flare at the bottom. The low-rise waistband was meant to sit below the swell of her belly.
What was I thinking? These aren’t me at all, for heaven’s sake, she thought in exasperation. For starters, I could hardly have chosen a more attention-getting top. And those pants don’t hide a thing. I might as well hang a big Baby on Board sign around my neck.
She was going to have to return them. Sighing, she began to cram them back into the bag, but then she paused.
This pregnancy, unplanned as it might have been, was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. The baby she was carrying was that most precious of all miracles, an evolving little human being. Why would she want to hide it?
“And those pants were a whole lot more comfortable than the ones I’ve got on.” She glanced down in sudden distaste at the navy suit she’d worn to the office that day. Just as suddenly, she began unbuttoning the jacket.
Moments later she was padding barefoot across the carpet to the full-length mirror by the door. She stood in front of it and took a deep breath.
The navy suit’s boxiness had made her look bulky rather than pregnant. But the clinging fabrics of the fuchsia top and the yoga pants hugged her curves—all of her curves, she realized. The ruffled V-neck of the blouse skimmed silkily over breasts that were fuller than she’d ever known them to be, and then stretched even more over her stomach. The low-rider style of the black pants made no apology for the roundness of her belly, but the lean cut also accentuated the length of her legs.
She looked pregnant…and in what she was wearing, pregnant looked sexy. In the mirror she saw faint heat touch her cheeks, and hastily she turned away.
The elevator clanged to a halt outside her apartment.
“Oh, no,” she muttered, aghast. She whirled back to the mirror and her reflection, but even as she fluffed the petal-like ruffles toward the vee of the blouse’s neckline the door buzzer sounded.
The ruffles fell back into place. Exasperated, she gave it up as a bad job, and jabbed the intercom button with her thumb.
“Who is it?”
Marilyn found herself hoping her unanticipated caller was her brother, Josh. Throwing his hat into the political ring seemed to have brought out the stuffed shirt in him and although his recent engagement had loosened him up a little, she was pretty sure the gubernatorial hopeful for the State of Colorado would be none too thrilled with his sister’s pregnancy being flaunted front and center where the electorate couldn’t help but see it.
Except her mystery guest wasn’t Joshua. Even though he didn’t identify himself, she’d heard those burnt brown sugar tones often enough in her dreams these past three months to recognize them immediately.
“Let me in, cher’,” the voice on the other side of the door drawled. “That way you get to tell me to go to hell to my face.”
She’d been planning to contact Connor Ducharme tonight, she thought hollowly. It seemed now she wouldn’t have to.
TRUST HER Beacon Hill upbringing, Marilyn told herself ten minutes later. Grandmother Van Buren had always haughtily held that a real lady never admitted to an awkward situation, and it seemed her lesson had sunk in. On the sofa across from her, Con balanced the bone-china cup of tea she’d offered him on a carelessly crossed knee, and so far neither one of them had been crass enough to tell the other to go to hell.
But she had no illusions. She’d seen the flicker of reaction in his eyes when she’d opened the door and he’d seen she was pregnant. Beneath the veneer of civility they were like two prizefighters circling cautiously, each waiting for the starting bell to ring.
No matter what his original reason for coming here, the possibility that he could be the father of the child she was so obviously carrying had to be in his mind. She needed to dispel that idea before it took root. She knew next to nothing about the man, but it wasn’t inconceivable that he might be attracted to the notion of playing daddy on a part-time basis, and she had no intention of standing by and letting that happen.
No child of mine is going to grow up caught between two worlds, and never fitting fully into either one, Marilyn vowed fiercely. Grandmother Van Buren’s rules of etiquette be damned, it’s time to get a few things clear here.
But she’d left it too late. Before she could speak he beat her to it.
“You once told me you were a coward, cher’.” Leaning forward, he set his cup and saucer on the large Moroccan leather hassock she used as a coffee table. Under dark brows his green gaze held hers and his mouth quirked up wryly.
“Truth is, it’s me you should pin that label on. No matter what you said you wanted at the time I shouldn’t have left things the way I did between us, but every time I thought about contacting you I lost my nerve. I took advantage of the situation that night. It wasn’t anything I felt too proud about the next day, and I figured you’d have every right to slam the phone down on me if I called.”
His self-deprecating honesty took her by surprise. “We both know it wasn’t that simple,” she said slowly. “I pretty much threw myself at you that evening in my office. I accept half the responsibility for what happened.”
She hesitated, and then went on, her heart in her mouth. “This—” she spread her fingers wide over her belly “—isn’t a result of what we did together, in case you were wondering. I know we were insane enough not to take precautions that third and final time, but the dates don’t work out. I would have already been pregnant when we—when we—”
She floundered to an halt.
“When we made love, cher’?” Taking her by surprise again, he shook his head. “Hell, I know I’m not the father, sugar. Tony Corso is, isn’t he?”
Her brother had asked her that same question, but in a furious tone of voice. She’d refused to give him an answer, knowing full well that her silence would seem to him to be confirmation of his suspicions, and since she’d had no intention of telling Josh that she’d slept with a stranger his assumptions had suited her just fine.
As Connor Ducharme’s same assumption should, she told herself. She didn’t want him to wonder if he was the father of her baby, so why should she feel even the slightest pinprick of disillusion that he was so easily bowing out from the position?
“Tony’s the father,” she agreed tartly. “But what made you so sure you weren’t in the running even before I told you, Detective? Was it a smidge of relief on learning that if anyone’s going to get slapped with a paternity suit, it’s not going to be you?”
The green eyes across from her darkened. As if he felt suddenly restless, Con got to his feet and took a few steps into the middle of the room before halting beneath the mobile swaying gently above. His hands in his pockets, he tipped his head back to look at it.
“I never understood men who needed to get their asses hauled into court before they’d pay support, honey,” he said softly. “I always saw children as a gift. I’d like a whole houseful of them, with a mama to go along with them.”
Still looking up at the mobile he went on, his tone devoid of emotion. “But that’s not in the cards for me. I know I’m not in the running, cher’, because I can’t be in the running. An illness when I was a boy took care of that particular possibility for me.”
She stared at him. “But how can that be?” she began unguardedly. Before she could continue he turned to her.
“Just the luck of the draw, I guess,” he said, his jaw tight and his gaze unreadable. “From what I’ve been told, the consequences could have been a lot more serious. Does Corso know he’s going to be a father?”
There was an added watchfulness in his gaze as he waited for her answer. This was the reason he’d sought her out, Marilyn realized suddenly. He was still hunting Tony Corso. This was an official visit.
But of course it was, she told herself a heartbeat later. What had she expected—that he’d brokenly confess she’d haunted his sleepless nights, that his search for Corso was just an excuse to see her again, that he’d fallen hopelessly in love with her during those few hours they’d spent together and he hadn’t been able to stay away?
She was a damn lead in his investigation. Their unplanned tryst in her office had been an unforeseen perk to him, nothing more.
She didn’t owe Con Ducharme anything.
“Tony and I slept together once,” she said flatly. “He wasn’t the love of my life and I obviously wasn’t his, since the next day I found he’d not only walked out on me but on his job at Mills & Grommett. No, he doesn’t know I’m pregnant, and if I knew where to find him, I still don’t think I’d tell him. But Tony’s not planning on being found, Detective.”
“Something’s happened.” His gaze narrowed. “When I first came to you asking about Corso you made it clear that you didn’t believe he was guilty of any criminal conduct. Now I get the feeling you wouldn’t put anything past him. When did your opinion change?”
Why couldn’t the man have stayed in New Orleans? Marilyn thought hopelessly. What she was about to tell him would have been hard enough over the phone as she’d planned. She wasn’t sure if she could go through with it in person.
But she had to.
“Today,” she said. She looked down at her lap, not wanting to meet his eyes. “Because today I realized beyond a doubt that when Tony left Mills & Grommett so hastily he helped himself to a severance bonus from the company…except what he took from M & G went way beyond the fraud you told me he’d committed in Louisiana.”
“That fraud I told you about—” he began, but she didn’t let him finish. The next sentence was going to be the worst, she knew. Best to get it out as soon as possible.
“He stole viral stock.” Even to her own ears her voice sounded strained. “We’re a pharmaceutical firm. That’s one of the things our research department works with—viruses, some of them deadly. And somehow Corso got into my computer and authorized the transfer of a batch to a nonexistent company.”
Now she did meet his eyes. “Either he intends to sell it on the black market, or…” She’d been wrong, Marilyn thought sickly. This was the sentence too terrible to finish.
But the dark-haired man in front of her seemed to have no qualms. “Or he’s got his own plans for the stuff,” Con said.
He held her gaze, his features so grim they seemed carved. Like emeralds on fire, his eyes blazed with some incendiary emotion in the tan of his face.
That emotion was hatred, Marilyn realized with a sudden chill—a hatred so deep and all-encompassing that it seemed almost an entity in itself. If Con Ducharme’s hatred didn’t consume his enemy, she thought slowly, it would end up not only consuming him but everything he held precious.
Fear ran through her. Her hand spread protectively over the child growing inside her.
“You know what that plan is, don’t you?” Her voice cracked. “You know what Tony used me for.”
Just for a second the emotion in those green eyes darkened to compassion. Then it blazed up again, and when Con answered her his tone was devoid of any feeling at all.
“It’s not his plan, cher’, it’s his mobster uncle’s. And Helio DeMarco would only want to get his hands on experimental viral stock for one reason.” He gave a humorless smile.
“DeMarco intends to use it as a weapon against whoever gets in his way. And that includes anyone who might be too close to discovering what he’s done with your nephew, Sky Langworthy.”
Chapter Four
“You never wanted Tony at all, did you?” Marilyn looked up at Con in dawning comprehension. “The mobster’s the one you’re really after.”
“Helio DeMarco.” He’d drawn something from his pocket, she saw. It gleamed between his fingers as he passed it back and forth, and she realized it was a silver coin. He smiled tightly as he noticed her watching him. “You’re right. I’ve been hunting the bastard for eight months now, ever since he killed a friend of mine. One of these days I’m going to find him, and then—”
The silver dollar flashed upward as he tossed it carelessly into the air. It came down, and he caught it. He spread his palms wide for her inspection, and she inhaled sharply as she realized the coin was nowhere to be seen.
“And then Helio DeMarco’s going to disappear, just like that,” Con said softly. “That’s New Orleans justice, cher’.”
Something in his tone shook her. “Where I come from that’s vengeance,” she said unevenly. “No police force would countenance one of their own taking revenge like that.” Her gaze widened with swift doubt. “Unless that was a lie, too. Are you really a detective with the New Orleans Police, Con?”
For a moment she wondered if he was going to answer her. Then he grinned with real amusement. “Does this sound like a Minnesota accent, sugar?” he drawled. “Sure I’m with the New Awlins authorities, cher’. But I’ll bet you checked me out already, didn’t you?”
“As a matter of fact, I—”
Marilyn stopped, the words dying in her throat. That grin. It was absolutely devastating. And why hadn’t she noticed before that instead of being completely green, in a certain light those emerald eyes of his seemed sparked with gold? He was definitely too much, of course, with one wayward strand of raven-black hair falling across his brow and thick lashes casting shadows on those hard-cut cheekbones. Even his choice of attire, austere as his dark suit and white shirt seemed at first glance, was a world away from both Boston and Denver. His vest was a black on black brocade. His shirt wasn’t cotton, but creamy linen.
He was a throwback. Even as the thought occurred to her she knew she’d hit upon the key to the man. Con Ducharme was pistols at dawn, bourbon on the verandah, a risky dalliance with another man’s wife in a jasmine-scented and moonlit garden. He was a quick temper flaring over a card game. He was heated hours entwined in satin sheets.
He was wearing a gun.
Hard reality returned in a rush as she glimpsed the sliver of worn leather briefly revealed under his jacket. He’d as much as confessed to her that he intended to kill a man. That lazy charm camouflaged a resolve as cold as bare steel.
“As a matter of fact, I did check up on you,” she said slowly. “But tell me, aren’t you a little out of your jurisdiction? You said it yourself—it’s New Orleans justice you’re dispensing, and Denver’s a long way from the Big Easy.”
“I had some time coming to me. I took it. This is a private hunt, not an official one.” He looked away. “You’re right, from the first I was only after Corso because I hoped he’d lead me to DeMarco, and when I found out he’d left his position at your company I got a real bad feeling. When I learned that Mills & Grommett dealt with viral material and that the family who owned the company had just had a child kidnapped, the bad feeling got worse.”
He met her confused gaze, his own shadowed. “But I needed a solid link between his nephew’s disappearance and Sky’s abduction before I could know for sure he was involved, and there didn’t seem to be one until this week when the Denver police forwarded the reports I’d requested on the kidnapping. I’d told them it sounded similar to an unsolved case I’d worked on years ago,” he added.
And why did you feel you needed to give me that information? Marilyn wondered, watching as he looked briefly away again and then back at her, his gaze once more steady and clear. He was lying, she thought with sudden certainty. Not about everything, maybe not about anything important, but it hadn’t happened the way he was telling her.
Still, he was a police detective talking about a case, whether it was officially sanctioned or not. Maybe he was holding back details he couldn’t—
“Denver CSI found traces of eggshells in Sky’s crib.” His words ran through her like an electric shock, driving all else from her mind. He took in her reaction. “Apparently that means the same thing to you as it did to me.”
“I’ve visited M & G’s research facilities often enough to know that one method of cultivating viral stock is to inject it into eggs.” Too agitated to remain seated any longer, she got to her feet and faced him. “I assume you’ve already informed the local police that you suspect Helio DeMarco’s involved in Sky’s kidnapping, but with what I found out today about the missing viral stock, it’s obvious they should widen their investigation to include Corso.”
She swallowed. “I—I’m willing to provide a statement to the Denver P.D. as soon as you can arrange it with them. Just give me a few minutes to compose a notice of resignation from my position at Mills & Grommett. It could save the company some embarrassment when this all comes out, and it might lessen the impact on Josh’s campaign.”
She placed a hand on the back of the sofa for support against the dizziness that swept over her. “Governor Houghton’s people are going to make political hay with this as it is. My brother’s run his platform on the premise that biological weapons research and testing should continue to be restricted, and Houghton is all for opening up the field and bringing a new lab facility to Colorado. Josh won’t have a leg to stand on when the public learns his own sister allowed potentially lethal stock to be stolen right out from under her nose.”
“The public isn’t going to know that.” Dark brows knitted together in a scowl, and without warning he strode to her side. She felt him take her arm in a firm grasp. “Dammit, cher’, when did you last eat?”
His unforeseen change of subject startled her. “Lunch?” she ventured. She passed a shaky hand across her forehead. “I know I had an apple this afternoon.”
“Merde, it’s no wonder you look like you’re about to take another header on me,” Con muttered ungallantly. “What the hell were you thinking, going without food for so long when you’re supposed to be eating for two?”
“I was about to order in a pizza or something when you showed up on my doorstep.” Marilyn’s dizziness subsided. She tried to pull her arm away but he didn’t relinquish it. “And for your information, women aren’t encouraged to eat for two anymore when they’re pregnant.”
“When they start out as scrawny as you were three months ago they should. Show me what you’ve got in the fridge and I’ll make you a meal.”
Releasing her arm, he shrugged out of his suit jacket and slung it over the back of the sofa. He looked down at the leather shoulder holster he was wearing as if he’d forgotten it was there, made a low sound of annoyance, and slipped out of it, too, laying it beside his jacket.
Her first annoyed impulse was to take him up on his scrawny remark. She was going to have to let it go, Marilyn admonished herself edgily. They’d gotten way off track here, and—
She jerked her head up. “What do you mean, the public isn’t going to know?”
“Just what I said. The public isn’t going to know, the police aren’t going to know, Mills & Grommett isn’t going to know. What you told me tonight about Corso stealing viral stock is our ace in the hole and I don’t intend to lay it on the table just yet.” He looked surprised. “You didn’t think I was going to let you take the heat for this, did you, cher’?”
“But I deserve to.” She pressed her lips together. “We can’t just keep this information to ourselves, Con.”
“I’ll make sure the right people are informed.” He grimaced. “But in this case, the local authorities aren’t the right people. I’m pretty sure DeMarco’s bought off some of the boys in blue, and although I’d be willing to trust the rest of the department with my life there’s no way of knowing right now who’s dirty and who’s not. If one of his paid informants gets word to him that we’re on his nephew’s trail, both Corso and DeMarco will sink out of sight as completely as an old she-gator and her pup in a swamp.”
He smiled tightly. “And as a born-and-bred Louisiana boy like me knows, it’s the gator you don’t see that’s most dangerous. No, we’re going to let them keep thinking they’re safe. Meanwhile, we’ll be gator-hunting. And baby-hunting, too,” he added in a softer tone. “I don’t know what DeMarco wants with your half sister’s baby, but I know he’s definitely behind the kidnapping.”
I have a chance to save Sky. Marilyn felt as if a crack of light had just pierced the clouds that had shadowed her world for the past four months. Tremulous hope leaped in her.
“Oh, Con, I’d give anything to bring him home safely! You don’t know what a nightmare it’s been since the day Josh phoned me and told me he’d been taken.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’ve been going through.” He hesitated, and then his hands came up to lightly clasp her shoulders. “And I know that night in your office never would have happened if you’d been able to turn to your family for support.”
She shook her head in sharp negation. “That night in my office never would have happened if you hadn’t been a stranger. Right now wouldn’t be happening—I couldn’t go to anyone in my family about how I provided the opportunity for Tony to get his hands on that virus.”
She frowned, wondering how she could make him understand. It was important that he understand, she realized in faint surprise. She didn’t know why, but it was.
“My father divorced my mother and remarried when I was just a little girl,” she said slowly. “He insisted on retaining custody of Josh, and didn’t contest it when Mother decided to move back to Boston with me. I was only five years old and I adored my father, so instead of blaming him I blamed his new wife. I decided she’d been the one who’d persuaded him he didn’t need me anymore.”
“That’s Celia Langworthy?” Con’s gaze was shadowed. “I remember reading her name in one of the police reports.”
“Celia Grace Langworthy.” Marilyn tried to keep the censure from her voice. “I don’t think I’ll ever fully forgive her. Who knows, my parents might have gotten back together again if she hadn’t come along.”
She shrugged. “I’m not a little girl anymore and I’ve even come to see that she makes my father happier than my mother ever did, but I still can’t feel close to the woman. She’s an ex-southern belle type—fussy and fluttery. And I guess I’ve always felt it would be disloyal to Mother to forget that Celia replaced her. So I became an outsider in my own family, never feeling I could be myself with them, always knowing there was a barrier between us. Now I almost prefer it that way.”
“I’d better stay a stranger, then.” A corner of his mouth lifted in wry appraisal. “If we’re going to be working together and living in the same building for the next little while, I’d like the barriers to stay down.”
“Living in the same building?”
“I’ve taken the loft upstairs on a short lease,” Con said offhandedly. “I like what you’ve done with your place better, especially that mobile. Who’s the artist?”
She was beginning to know the way the man operated, Marilyn thought. He was a master at distraction, not only when he was performing some baffling piece of sleight-of-hand, but in any conversational confrontation, too. Except this time she wasn’t going to allow herself to be distracted.
“A local. The LoDo area’s an artistic haven,” she said firmly. “Which as a new resident you might find interesting, Ducharme. Why did you sublet the Dickenson’s loft?”
“I needed a base of operations for while I was in Denver. I wanted that base to be near you.” He fixed her with the same steady gaze as before, but this time she instinctively felt he was telling her the truth. “DeMarco isn’t a cute movie gangster, sugar. He’s the real deal, and as cold-blooded as they come. From the moment you became pregnant with his nephew’s baby you were in danger, because that made you the link between him and the Langworthys—and if he finds out that Corso’s theft from Mills & Grommett’s been discovered, he’ll want to sever that link.”
His grip on her shoulders tightened. “DeMarco took one person away from me. I won’t give him the chance to do it a second time, cher’.”
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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: MISSION PROFILETHE AGENT: Conrad Burke, alias Connor DucharmeHIS MOTTO: «Always work alone.»THE ASSIGNMENT–AND COMPLICATION: Team up with one headstrong, pregnant woman to catch a criminal….With a resolve as cold as steel and a thirst for vengeance, U.S. marshal-turned-Confidential-agent Conrad Burke tracked his quarry like a Wild West hero of old. Until the trail led to his downfall–the one woman he′d always loved. Marilyn Langworthy, billionaire′s daughter–and after one reckless night, mother of Con′s unborn child. His quest placed her in jeopardy. But although the mobster he sought took no prisoners, only Marilyn had the key to bring the man down. Now Con would move heaven and earth to keep Marilyn safe….