The Honeymoon Assignment Read online

  It was impossible to imagine doing what Wiley was asking him to do now.

  “This is an important client, Sam. Could be a big thing for the agency.”

  Sam started to say he didn’t care, but the words wouldn’t come out. He did care about Cotter Investigations. And he cared about Wiley. Wiley had scraped Sam up and helped put him back together when Sam had resigned himself to being alone in the world. He owed his brother for bringing him together with the only family he had, and for finding him a job he loved.

  There weren’t many professions where an ex-drifter with a short fuse and a loner’s streak a mile wide could fit in. Sam didn’t want to lose the life he’d built here in Austin. But still—

  “Can’t you do it yourself, if it’s so all-fired important?” he demanded. “You’ve got three weeks before you quit.”

  “I can’t, Sam.” Wiley sighed and ran a hand through the dark hair that was starting to show faint streaks of gray. “You know I can’t. It took Rae-Anne and me a long time to find each other again, and even then it was a near thing. I can’t turn around and leave her now, not when we’ve just gotten back together. And especially not when this assignment means shacking up with another woman for a week.”

  He flashed Sam a faint grin. “Hell, I’m not even sure I could pretend to be married to somebody else at this point. I’m too damn happy thinking of getting married to RaeAnne.”

  This was getting worse and worse. Sam moved toward the doorway that led out into the larger office area beyond Wiley’s private office and reached up to grasp the doorframe with one hand. He leaned stiffly against his left arm, closing his eyes as he faced away from Wiley’s too-knowing gaze.

  And the instant he’d done it, he could picture her.

  She had a dancer’s grace, a dancer’s confidence in the way she moved and turned and tilted her head. Sam had always felt like a rodeo bull next to her—big and awkward and always careening out of control.

  And yet whenever he’d held her in his arms, some of her calmness had seemed to find its way into his own body, softening his rough edges, giving him a kind of peace he’d never known anywhere else.

  Her eyes were as blue as the sea on a sunny day. In his imagination, her baby-fine ash blond hair always looked as though a breeze had just ruffled it, curling its softness into a halo around her fine-boned face.

  He should open his eyes, he knew. In another two seconds—

  It was already too late.

  This happened every single time he let himself think about Kelley Landis. He would let himself be drawn into the remembered calm of her eyes, and then he would see that smile of hers starting deep down in those blue depths, swimming up at him with seductive intimacy. Waking or sleeping, dreaming or fully conscious, there was nothing in the world he could do to keep his whole body from responding to it.

  The tightening in his loins now was only the first sign that he was letting his futile memories get the better of him. In a moment his blood would start to feel warmer in his veins, and he would breathe a little more freely, and then, if he let himself go on picturing that sweet and sultry smile—

  “Hell.”

  He slammed his open palm against the doorframe and forced his eyes open. He had no right to be thinking about Kelley this way. He was no longer the lover she’d favored with that slow, enticing smile. He was the man who’d nearly wrecked her life three years ago, and he didn’t blame her for avoiding him whenever possible. He couldn’t imagine she would tolerate being assigned to spend a week with him on her own.

  “It’s out of the question,” he told Wiley firmly.

  “Is it?” Wiley leaned back in his swivel chair, clunking the heels of his expensive cowboy boots onto his desk. “You’re not the boss yet, little brother. But you will be soon. How are you planning to handle being around Kelley then?”

  That stopped him.

  Sam had asked himself the same question a dozen times. He didn’t have a good answer for it yet.

  Wiley was nodding, as though Sam’s silence was an answer. “You two aren’t going to be able to go on playing hide-and-seek around the office the way you have been for the past three years,” he said bluntly.

  “Throwing us together on a fake honeymoon is a bit extreme, don’t you think? A bit like tossing a kid into the deep end of the pool to find out if he can swim?”

  “Sorry, Sam.” Wiley sounded sincere. “The case is urgent, and I’ve got nobody else to send. And you’re going to have to work something out with Kelley sooner or later, unless one of you intends to quit the firm.”

  “I sure as hell don’t intend to quit.”

  “Well, neither does Kelley. She’s worked damn hard to get where she is. She gets along with everybody here—everybody except you. And she’s already agreed to take on the counterfeiting case. She’s home packing right now.”

  “She’s what?”

  “I called her this afternoon as soon as I got off the phone with the client. She’ll be ready to go as soon as you are.”

  Sam looked hard at his older brother. Beneath the concern, beneath the professionalism, right at the back of Wiley’s watchful expression, Sam wondered if he was catching a glimpse of something like satisfaction.

  “You’d better not even remotely be thinking about matchmaking, big brother,” he warned. “If you and RaeAnne have been putting your heads together about this—”

  Wiley snorted and let his boot heels clunk back down onto the floor. “Matchmaking?” he said. “Don’t kid yourself. I’d sooner wrestle a pair of alligators with my hands cuffed. This is a business decision, pure and simple.”

  Nothing was either pure or simple for Sam where Kelley Landis was concerned. And his reaction to Wiley’s words now just proved it.

  He should be following Wiley’s lead and forcing himself to think of this as just another assignment, nothing more.

  He should be admitting to himself that Wiley was right: Sam was going to take over at Cotter Investigations, so he was going to have to find a way to work with Kelley Landis, and the sooner the better.

  But he wasn’t thinking about those things. He was picturing eyes as blue and inviting as a summer sea, and feeling—

  Disappointed.

  And excited.

  And scared.

  It was crazy to feel disappointed simply because Wiley was pointing out that this was nothing more than a business matter. It was even crazier to be excited at the prospect. It was a case, nothing more, and they needed to get started on it pronto or lose a potentially lucrative account.

  As for the part of him that was scared…

  “How did Kelley react to the idea of spending a week with me?”

  The question came out almost involuntarily. This was disturbing in itself. Sam, like his brothers Wiley and Jack, an FBI agent, had had long years of practice at keeping his thoughts to himself. But despite this long-ingrained habit, even the mention of Kelley’s name seemed to be enough to toss all his usual rules right out the window.

  “She said she obviously wasn’t thrilled, but she could see the reasons for it. She said she wouldn’t let her feelings get in the way of doing her job.”

  Sam wasn’t quite ready for the sharp sting that rippled through him. It seemed to settle in his right shoulder, the one that had been torn apart and rebuilt after the accident at the warehouse. Unconsciously he reached up his other hand to cover the part of him that hurt.

  He could vividly recall warning himself, just minutes before all hell had broken loose back at that warehouse, that he’d let his mind be distracted from the job he was supposed to be doing. He still hadn’t come to terms with how much his own lapse had cost Kelley, or himself. The lingering pain in his shoulder was the least of it.

  And here he was on the verge of doing exactly the same thing all over again. And Kelley, damn the woman, seemed to be able to muster all the professionalism she needed with no effort at all. Sam forced himself back into the small inner office and sat down, silently cursing the
confused tangle of memories snarling around him.

  There was no way of knowing whether Kelley had sorted out her own memories or whether she was just masking her feelings. It didn’t matter—the point was, she had faced the inevitable with far more grace than Sam himself was showing.

  Well, grace was one of the things he’d loved about her, after all.

  One of so many things…

  “All right,” he said gruffly to Wiley, who’d been waiting through Sam’s silence. “Let’s get this over with. I need names, bank account numbers, employment histories, everything you can give me. And I don’t want to talk any more about Kelley Landis, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Wiley’s quick shrug assured him that the subject was closed. But that faint look of concern lingered on his face as they got back to work. Wiley already knew, it was clear, what Sam was just figuring out: that this could very well seem like the longest week of his entire life.

  He was refusing to meet her eyes.

  There was nothing very startling about that. Over the past three years Sam had made an art form out of avoiding her. And Kelley hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to be around him, either. But still—

  “I wasn’t counting, but it seemed like you said about twenty words on the trip down here,” she said as they set their suitcases down in the middle of the living room floor. “If we want people to believe we’re really honeymooners, maybe we should start talking to each other.”

  No one had ever hurt her the way Sam Cotter had. And he’d done it without a single angry word—almost without a word at all. He’d simply withdrawn from their love as though it had never happened, retreating into some lonely place inside himself that Kelley couldn’t reach.

  His first comment to her when they’d met in Austin this morning had echoed with the coldness of that solitary place. “This wasn’t my idea,” he’d told her bluntly, as he hoisted her suitcase into his old black pickup truck. The bitterness in his voice had made Kelley flinch.

  She’d spent the rest of the three-hour trip telling herself that the coming week was going to be a golden opportunity to get Sam Cotter out of her system once and for all. By the time they finally arrived at the Windspray Community, she felt a little more in control of herself and the situation.

  But she still couldn’t get Sam to look her in the eye.

  “You’re right.” He was stalking around the cottage now, looking into the bedroom, the open kitchen and dining area, the spacious deck that surrounded the building on three sides.

  “I mean, we need to agree on some kind of cover story,” Kelley went on, glancing into the bedroom as Sam came out of it. She didn’t know which was more disturbing, the realization that the queen-size bed was the only place to sleep, or the familiar clunking of Sam’s boot heels as he made his way around the cottage.

  She’d always found his long-legged gait one of the sexiest things about him. Something in the slow rhythm of his heels thudding on the floor seemed to find its way into her bloodstream, making it hard to breathe calmly.

  Sam was opening the cupboards now, inspecting the fully stocked kitchen with professional detachment. “I’ve already come up with a story,” he said. “We’ll say I’m a financial analyst in Austin, and you’re a bank loan officer. It’s always better to—”

  “Use a cover story that’s close to the truth. Believe it or not, I actually do remember some of what you taught me, Sam.”

  Her mocking tone seemed to surprise him. He glanced over his shoulder at her, stopping just short of meeting her gaze.

  Sam was a financial analyst of a kind. He seemed to have a natural genius for sniffing out scams involving money. It was his specialty at Cotter Investigations. And Kelley really had been a loan officer at an Austin bank, before she’d gotten intrigued by an inquiry the Cotter brothers had conducted in her department, and had decided to switch occupations.

  “So when did we get married, if anybody asks?” It was hard work to keep her voice light, but she managed it.

  “Saturday.” It was Tuesday now, a warm but blustery early November day.

  “Big wedding?”

  “Nope.” Sam shook his head, then pushed back the unruly dark brown hair that still—no matter what he did with it—always got in his eyes. “Registry office. Just our immediate families—your parents, your brothers, my brothers.”

  That was exactly how they’d planned to be married, three years before. Apparently Sam was untouched by that fact, if in fact he even remembered it.

  Kelley nodded, trying to match his tone in spite of the quiet hurt that kept pushing at her. “And Harold and Helen Price are friends of friends, which is why we chose this place for our honeymoon,” she finished.

  “Right.”

  Harold and Helen Price were Wiley’s clients, a wealthy couple straight out of Houston’s upper crust. Kelley had seen their names in the society columns for years, and had known, even before she’d read Wiley’s case notes, that Harold had largely retired from the oil business to launch various investment projects of his own.

  The Windspray Community, in the tiny Gulf Coast town of Cairo, was the latest, and, according to Wiley, the most ambitious of Harold’s schemes. Sam and Kelley were staying in one of the dozen or so luxury cottages that curved around a secluded road at the tip of a westerly-facing point. A health club and restaurant occupied the main building at the entrance to the community, and there was a new pier with boat slips and fishing facilities around the tip of the point.

  “Cairo’s practically a ghost town,” Wiley had told her, “but the Windspray Community could turn that around, if things go the way Harold plans.”

  The problem was that Harold hadn’t planned on a recession, or on having half his newly built resort homes sit empty. He hadn’t been happy about the news that a phony twenty-dollar bill, then a second one, had turned up in the Windspray bank deposit.

  “Harold’s getting ready to do a big publicity blitz, trying to sell the rest of his cottages,” Wiley had said. “He wants people to think of Cairo as the new hot Gulf Coast vacation spot, not as the place where somebody’s printing funny money.”

  Enter Cotter Investigations, Kelley thought. Enter Sam Cotter and Kelley Landis, trying their best to pretend they were blissful honeymooners spending a week on the coast.

  “Anything else we should get straight before we meet Harold and Helen Price?” she asked.

  Every long step Sam took drew her eyes to the faded, familiar crease lines in his jeans. When he paused to stare out toward the beach, hooking his thumbs into his belt loops, Kelley had to close her eyes against a wave of memory that suddenly crashed right through her, sweeping her into the remembered sensations of Sam’s hips leaning close against her, and his hands—those beautiful hands, so sure and strong—touching her skin.

  Apparently he wasn’t sharing her thoughts. His face, when he turned toward her, was set and hard.

  “Yeah,” he said. “There is one more thing.” His gaze flickered to hers for the merest instant, then moved away. “I don’t want you getting any ideas about us being partners again. We may be stuck working together, but this case is mine to run. You’re only here as a part of the cover. Have you got that?”

  It was as if he’d thrown something heavy at her without warning. Kelley half laughed, then realized she was having a hard time getting her breath back.

  “If you think I’m incompetent, Sam, why not just come out and say so?”

  He seemed suddenly fascinated by the sliding glass doors leading onto the deck. His gaze was riveted there, unmoving.

  “I don’t think you’re incompetent,” he said. “You’re just—less experienced at this kind of case than I am.”

  And it was her inexperience that had cost them their love—and their child—three years ago. He might as well be saying it out loud. She saw it written in the taut set of his jaw, and in his stance, hands on his hips, feet planted wide as if braced to defend himself, dark brows lowered over turbulent blue eyes tha
t still refused to meet her own.

  Three years ago she’d sat at the foot of Sam Cotter’s hospital bed racked by a sympathy he didn’t seem to want and a grief he didn’t seem to share. He’d been wearing the same expression then—the one that said None of this means a damn thing to me. The disdain in his face now made Kelley want to wrap her arms around herself, holding in everything she felt but couldn’t make Sam understand.

  But she made herself stand still, hands at her sides. There was nothing—nothing in the world, she told herself—that could induce her to open her heart up to Sam Cotter a second time. She’d survived his indifference once before, and she could do it again.

  She’d survived the first time by pulling the pieces of her professional pride around her, working as hard as she knew how to become the best investigator she could. And she refused to let Sam take that away from her.

  “This isn’t like the last time, Sam,” she said. “I’m not as green as I was. I’ve—” “I don’t want to talk about the last time.” And he finally swung his eyes around to meet hers. She hadn’t expected the pain in those dark blue depths. Sam’s eyes could be as cold as gunmetal when he wanted to keep someone at a distance, and it was clear that that was what he was trying to do now. But underneath the steeliness of his glare, at the very back of the blue eyes that had once looked at her with such love, Kelley could see a half-buried anguish that shocked her.

  Sam’s rejection of her had been so abrupt, so total. And over the past three years he’d barely bothered to glance in her direction. Then why—

  She shook her head. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—respond to whatever pain Sam might still be dealing with. Coping with her own feelings was more than enough at the moment. She refused to let herself be drawn back into the walking enigma that was Sam Cotter.

  Fortunately he’d already torn his gaze away again and was frowning out at the Gulf of Mexico. Kelley forced her thoughts away from the defiant slope of his hips as he leaned against the counter. She knew she should be coming up with an answer to his ridiculous edict about letting him handle this investigation on his own, not letting her mind wander to all the things she’d once found so irresistible about him.