The Honeymoon Assignment Read online

  But he heard Kelley’s voice, low and clear. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but he would have known that honeyed sound anywhere in the world.

  And then, as his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw who she was laughing with.

  The guy looked thirtyish, Kelley’s own age, a little younger than Sam’s thirty-six. But unlike Sam, whose lean and rangy body was pretty much the one he’d grown into twenty years ago, the stranger obviously spent a lot of time at the gym toning his muscles and trimming his physique. Sleek black hair and a dazzlingly white smile went with the rest of the impression. Whoever Kelley’s companion was, he clearly spent a lot of time checking his appearance in the mirror.

  In his old T-shirt and jeans, Sam suddenly felt scruffy by comparison. It didn’t do anything to improve his mood. And neither did the unexpected sting of jealousy he felt.

  The black-haired man had turned to say something to a waiter as Sam approached, so only Kelley noticed him heading their way. And the moment her eyes met his, she shot him a wide, welcoming smile that almost stopped him in his tracks.

  Was she really glad to see him, as the sudden warmth in her face seemed to say? Or was she just acting, for the benefit of the people around them? Sam cursed under his breath, angered all over again by the way Kelley’s presence was making this case so much more complicated than it needed to be.

  Well, if he had to play the jealous husband, at least he was in the right frame of mind for it. Without waiting to be invited, he slid onto the bench next to Kelley.

  “Hi, honey,” he said, draping an arm across her shoulders. “I was wondering where you’d gotten to.”

  The way she eased into the shelter of his arm almost undid him. Damn it, she felt so right there. Suddenly it was hard to remember that it had been three long years since they’d been lovers.

  The look in her eye was almost as startling. There had always been moments, especially when they’d been working together, when Sam had been able to meet Kelley’s eyes and know exactly what she was thinking.

  This was one of those moments. She was glad to be rescued, he realized, as he caught the quick, grateful flash of her gaze. And yet she hadn’t walked out on this guy. There was some reason why she was putting up with his company.

  Was she investigating on her own, nosing around in what Sam had plainly told her was none of her business? He frowned at her, trying to figure out what was going on, but by then the man across the table had finished his conversation with the waiter and turned his attention to Sam and Kelley.

  The guy looked disappointed, and Sam didn’t blame him. Basking in Kelley’s undivided attention was a treat Sam himself would have fought for at one time. “Sam Cotter,” he said, reaching across the table to shake the other man’s manicured hand. “And you are—?”

  “This is Wayland Price,” Kelley put in. “Harold and Helen’s son. He’s been telling me all about spending his childhood summers here in Cairo.”

  Sam hadn’t known that Harold and Helen had a son, much less that the man lived at Windspray. His frown deepened.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said to Wayland, aware that he sounded anything but pleased. “I was beginning to wonder what had become of my wife.” It took an effort to get the words “my wife” out, and he hoped Wayland would chalk the grimness of Sam’s tone up to simple possessiveness.

  Fortunately that seemed to be the message Wayland was getting. And the guy was smooth, Sam had to hand it to him. He took in the situation in a glance and widened his perfect smile to include Sam, too.

  “I’ve been trying to convince Kelley to come out for a sail on my parents’ boat one evening this week,” he said. “It’s a great way to see the sunset. Stop by my cottage anytime if you decide you want to do it—I’m always looking for excuses to get out on the water.”

  After a few minutes of polite chat, Wayland seemed anxious to leave, and Sam and Kelley followed him out of the restaurant. Kelley let her breath out in a sigh of relief as she watched his slickly combed black head disappearing into the white sports car parked beside the building.

  “I thought I was going to be stuck with him all evening,” she said. “Thanks for bailing me out, Sam.”

  So he’d been right. But still—

  “If you’re as competent as you say you are, you could have found a way to walk out on your own,” he told her.

  “Not without offending him.” Her smile had dimmed visibly at his tone. “Wayland thinks he’s God’s gift, in case you hadn’t figured that out for yourself. But I wanted to hear what he had to say.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was at Windspray when both those bad bills were passed. In fact, the first one showed up right after he arrived.” She looked closely at Sam, pushing one loose strand of hair back from her face. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

  Sam’s voice was tight. “He wasn’t on the list Harold Price gave to Wiley.”

  Kelley nodded. “It apparently didn’t occur to Harold to list his own son as a possible suspect,” she said.

  Sam didn’t know which was worse, the feeling that he didn’t have all the cards he needed to play his hand, or the realization that Kelley had gotten a step ahead of him already.

  She was literally ahead of him now, too, climbing the grassy hill in the center of the circle of cottages. The little knoll gave a view of the beach and the ocean, and Kelley paused for a moment before starting down the other side toward their own cottage. Sam was frowning again as he caught up with her.

  “Wayland said this all used to be wild,” she said, lifting her chin toward the windswept dunes between the cottages and the water. “He sounded a bit sorry that his father had developed it, although I think he likes having a rent-free oceanfront place to live.”

  “He lives at Windspray?”

  She nodded. “According to Susan, it suits his life-style to hang around down here.”

  “Susan who?”

  God, he hated having to grope for answers like this. It wasn’t made any easier by the intelligent gleam in Kelley’s blue eyes. Was it possible that she was doing this on purpose, pointing out to him that there were things he didn’t know?

  “Susan Gustaffson,” she told him matter-of-factly. “She and her husband Jon have the cottage two doors down—”

  “I know that.” And he knew the Gustaffsons’ names were on the list Wiley had given him, too.

  “I ran into Susan at the health club. She’s a friendly type, so I stuck with her for a while. I got some good leads out of our conversation.”

  Sam clenched his jaw. “You’re not going to stay out of this, are you?” he demanded roughly.

  “Can you think of a good way to stop me?”

  Short of roping her to a chair, he couldn’t. And even then she would probably find a way to wriggle free. In that quiet way of hers, Kelley was the most persistent woman he’d ever known.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Three years ago, her persistence had launched her into a situation that had nearly cost her her life. And Sam had been powerless to stop her then, too. He didn’t like the feeling that where Kelley Landis was concerned, his own stubborn strength simply wasn’t enough.

  “You should be happy to have me along,” she told him as she led the way down the far side of the grassy slope. “Wayland may be a bit slimy where women are concerned, but at least he likes talking to them. Somehow I can’t see him sitting down and chatting with you for an hour at a stretch.”

  “It was more like two.”

  He thought she shuddered slightly. “It only seemed like more,” she said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I can move this investigation forward. I can help wrap it up sooner. We both want that. And you know I’m right about this. Why go on fighting about it?”

  She sounded so calm, so reasonable. Her steady pace didn’t falter as she crossed the backyard of their cottage and headed toward the shallow wooden steps that led up to the deck.

  It was only in Sam’s imaginatio
n that she was staggering, dragged along by a frenzied swindler with a loaded gun in his hand. The memory of it slammed into him as it did every time he let himself picture that nightmarish scene at the warehouse.

  Kelley had reached the first step now, but Sam reached out for her, taking her elbow and turning her abruptly to face him.

  “I’m fighting about it because every single time I’ve tried to do anything with a partner in my life, things have blown up in my face, that’s why.” He knew he sounded harsh, but he didn’t care, as long as she listened.

  Her face was thoughtful, watching him. He could practically feel the intelligence and concern in her eyes. The serenity of her blue gaze felt like a balm for everything that had ever hurt him in his life.

  Except that it wasn’t. He’d tried to trust that serenity once, tried to accept the sweet comfort Kelley had offered him. And it had ended in heartache for both of them.

  He let go of her elbow and waited for her answer. With luck, she would be recalling that scene at the warehouse, too, and realizing that he had good reasons for acting this way.

  “Every time you’ve worked with a partner…” She was repeating his words, puzzled, it seemed. “I didn’t know there were other times.”

  He didn’t want to talk about that. Damn it, he didn’t really want to talk about any of this.

  But Kelley was pushing him. “Sam?” she asked, looking up at him with that open blue gaze that always made him want to shake her, or kiss her.

  He couldn’t do either one. The first was out of character for the role he was supposed to be playing, and the second was just plain dangerous. “It doesn’t matter,” he growled. “Let’s focus on the problem at hand, all right? If I can’t concentrate on what I’m supposed to be doing—”

  The slam of a screen door startled both of them, and they turned to see Steve Cormier, the red-haired maintenance man who had installed their phone earlier in the day. Sam cursed under his breath, realizing that the guy must have been inside their cottage all along.

  Could he have heard their argument? Sam tried to push all of his own confused emotions out of the way, wondering if they’d said anything that might give away their real reason for being here.

  “Just testing your phone line,” Cormier was saying. “Couldn’t get it to work earlier. Seems to be okay now.”

  “Good.” Sam could see by Kelley’s expression that she, too, was backtracking through their conversation, wondering what the handyman might have overheard.

  “You married, Steve?” he asked abruptly.

  The redheaded man looked surprised. “Never had the pleasure,” he replied.

  “Good.” Sam reached one arm out for Kelley in what he hoped looked like a fond but weary gesture. “Smart man. Kelley and I have been living together, perfectly happy, for years. And then we decide to get married, and all of a sudden we’re arguing all the time. We came down here to get away from it all and end up talking about nothing but financial investigations at work, like we’re still in Austin.”

  The handyman grinned. “A week of sea air’ll fix that,” he assured them. “I won’t be bothering you folks again, now that the phone’s fixed. Although it sounds like you might be smarter to unplug it, if you’re really trying to have a honeymoon.”

  If you’re really trying to have a honeymoon. The words nagged at Sam all evening. Did Steve Cormier suspect that Sam and Kelley weren’t the vacationing newlyweds they claimed to be? Cormier had happened to be around twice today while they were arguing about how to conduct their investigation.

  Or had he just “happened” to be around? All of Sam’s cautious instincts were operating by now, and he insisted on thoroughly checking over the cottage—twice—before he risked lifting his voice above a gravelly whisper again.

  “Looking for bugs?” Kelley’s voice was low, too, as she watched him feeling along the baseboards behind the living room sofa and chairs.

  Sam nodded.

  “Cormier’s on that list of possible suspects, isn’t he?”

  Sam nodded again. He still wasn’t sharing this case with her, he told himself firmly. It was just that this was easier than launching back into all the arguments that still hung in the air between them like a string of summer thunderstorms.

  When he’d satisfied himself that the handyman hadn’t planted any listening devices in their cottage, Sam felt freer to talk again. But by then Kelley seemed to have run out of things to say. The evening was nearly silent, punctuated only by a brief debate about who was spending the night where.

  It ended with Sam sleeping on the couch, at his own insistence, and Kelley settling into the big bed alone, just one thin wall away from him. The thought of her there, warm and silky among the smooth white sheets, was enough to keep Sam tossing restlessly in the living room until well after midnight. When he finally did get to sleep, his dreams were even more disturbing than his waking thoughts had been.

  It turned out that that was a very good thing.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what woke him, or whether he’d really been asleep at all. Kelley’s soft voice seemed to come out of the distance, so muffled that at first he wasn’t sure he’d heard it.

  “Sam…”

  It didn’t sound like her. There was none of the sweet richness in her tone to match the sleeping fantasies he’d just been having about her.

  But something had wakened him just now. Sam dragged a hand across his eyes and propped himself up on his good arm, listening hard.

  Not far off, at the end of the sandy point, he could hear the sound of surf pounding the sand. No birds were singing at this late hour, and there wasn’t enough wind to stir the low shrubs around the edge of their deck.

  He must have been dreaming, Sam thought. His unconscious mind must have drifted back to those days when Kelley had said his name with such intimacy, such longing. And so he was starting to hear that same sound—soft, blurred by sleep—in his own dreams.

  He shifted his long body on the sofa and had his head halfway to the pillow when he heard it again.

  “Sam?”

  It was even fainter this time. Faint, and frightened. And it was definitely coming from Kelley’s bedroom. Sam was on his feet in a flash, clicking on the lamp on the table, heading into the bedroom without stopping to think.

  The smell of gas met him like a slap in the face as he pulled the door open. His senses recognized it as propane, but he didn’t stop to put a name to it, not yet.

  Damn it, he roared silently at himself as he launched himself toward the bed. He’d thought she would be safe here, in this quiet, secluded place, with him sleeping in the next room! He’d been sure that by excluding her from the case, he’d be protecting her from anything that might go wrong. But now—

  She’d tossed the covers aside and lay at the very edge of the bed, as though she’d tried to get up and found herself too groggy to move. Sam’s lungs were screaming for air, but he fought against the urge to breathe as he scooped Kelley’s nearly unconscious body into his arms and lifted her free of the sheets.

  Her nightgown was thin, leaving most of her long legs exposed to his view. Her head fell onto his shoulder, seeming to nestle comfortably against him. She felt soft and familiar, as if he’d last held her like this just hours ago, not years.

  He couldn’t think about that now. The only thing that mattered was getting her out into fresh air, into safety.

  He carried her out to the back deck and gently set her down outside the bedroom door. Then he sprinted to where the gas leak had to be—the propane tanks that stood at the back kitchen window, not far from the bedroom door.

  He cranked the shutoff valve viciously, already searching for signs that the tanks had been tampered with. In spite of the darkness, it didn’t take long to spot it: someone had monkeyed with the valve, adding an extra fitting so that a length of hose could be run not just to the stove inside, but along the doorsill and under the bedroom door, as well.

  “Damn it!” Sam saw Kelley’s head move
at his explosive words, as though the anger in them had penetrated her fog. He slammed a hand against the wood siding of the cottage and went back to where she sat, head in her hands.

  If she was sitting up on her own, she was still okay, Sam told himself. He told her the same thing, taking her hands, rubbing them briskly between his own, reassuring her that with a few more breaths of fresh air she would start coming around.

  And the whole time he was silently cursing himself, and Wiley for getting him into this, and whoever had rigged the valve on the propane tank. What if Kelley hadn’t moaned his name? What if she hadn’t wakened at all? What if…

  He could barely force himself to look at the awful possibility. What if someone had managed to kill Kelley Landis while he’d been sleeping on the living room sofa not ten yards away from her?

  He spit out a string of expletives and stood up abruptly. Kelley was lifting her head now, starting to ask dazedly what had happened.

  Sam didn’t want to tell her.

  He was still searching for the right words—I want you out of here before the sun comes up was as close as he got— when the nightmare became even worse.

  Sam was no stranger to gunfire, but the sound that split the night air was oddly muffled. At first he couldn’t imagine what it was. He saw Kelley turn confusedly toward the dark hill behind the cottage where the noise had seemed to come from. “What—” she started to ask.

  By then Sam had figured it out. He’d heard the sharp ping against the cottage wall, too damn close to them for comfort. And he’d seen the doorframe splinter under the impact of the bullet.

  Someone was shooting at them.

  Someone was serious about wanting them dead.

  He could picture the two of them, illuminated in the faint light from the lamp he’d been fool enough to switch on: Sam in a light-colored T-shirt and boxer shorts, and Kelley in her pure white nightgown. They were both easy targets.

  The second shot went wide, zinging past the corner of the building and toward the front yard. By then Sam had Kelley clasped to his side and was propelling her through the still-open cottage door and into the living room. He eased her down onto the carpeted floor and joined her there a moment later when he’d turned off the lamp.