The Honeymoon Assignment Page 6

  “Do you have your gun?” He whispered the question urgently, and felt her nod.

  “In my suitcase. Sam—”

  He was starting to snake his way into the bedroom, but the surprising strength of her hand on his arm stopped him.

  “Don’t leave me.”

  The whispered words were like an echo out of the depths of his own secret fears. Don’t leave me… How could he turn his back on her, even for a moment, even when it was for her own safety, when she was looking up at him with such confusion in her face, such pleading in her tone?

  “I have to, sweetheart. I have to get that gun.”

  “Your shoulder—”

  Sam couldn’t bite back a groan. Was she going to touch all his sore spots at once?

  “You’re hurt.” She was struggling to sit upright now, moving against him with a gentle determination that left Sam only too aware of how thin their two layers of clothing were. “The fender slammed right into you. I saw it—”

  She stopped, and the confusion in her eyes deepened. Sam hauled in a long breath and wished his heart would stop pounding against his rib cage.

  Kelley was disoriented, drifting in time. That was obvious as her puzzled gaze met his.

  But it didn’t help to know that she was mixing this up with another dark, dangerous night they had shared, one that had left Sam’s right shoulder in pieces and their unborn child dead.

  He gritted his teeth now, fighting as hard as he could against the soft concern in her voice as she added, “Can you shoot? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m all right.” He couldn’t keep the harsh sound out of his voice, no matter how hard he tried. “I can’t aim worth a damn, but I can pull a trigger. If nothing else, it’ll let that bastard know we’re armed.”

  Damn it, he was starting to lose his grip on reality, too. It wasn’t propane that had blurred his thinking, but the agonizing memory of the last time he’d held Kelley like this, supporting her while they waited desperately for help to come.

  Help had come too late, three years ago.

  And this time Sam was determined not to rely on anyone’s help but his own. “Hang on,” he said now as he squeezed her tightly in his arms and then let her go. “And don’t move, not even an inch. I’ll be right back.”

  The air from the open door and window had cleared almost all the propane out of the bedroom. Sam could breathe normally as he groped his way to Kelley’s suitcase and found the weapon and ammunition that Wiley insisted all Cotter Investigations agents carry with them on assignments.

  Sam had ignored the rule, as he ignored any rule that didn’t suit him. What was the use of carrying a weapon when his right shoulder was too banged up for him to aim it properly?

  That had been his reasoning until tonight. Now, all of a sudden, being armed seemed like a very good idea. And Kelley, thank God, was more of a team player than Sam was. The weight of her pistol in his palm was a blessed relief.

  Relief came to an abrupt halt when he heard her shaky voice speaking to him from the bedroom door. “It’s in the closet.”

  “I figured that out, damn it! And I said to stay put!”

  “Sam—”

  He’d expected an argument. He heard a plea.

  She was staying close to floor level, as Sam was. Her eyes were wide open now, and in the dim light he could see she was aware that the shooter could be right outside the building, choosing which entrance to come in by. The open, airy cottage, so appealing in the morning sunlight, suddenly felt hideously exposed. There were too many doors, too many dark windows for a killer to look in through.

  “Sam—please don’t leave me alone again…”

  He heard her fighting her own fears, and losing.

  Sam had heard Kelley Landis sounding frightened exactly one time before this. That night in the warehouse, she’d called his name with the same rising panic in her voice. And a moment later she’d been dragged into the cab of a truck with a gun at her head.

  Sam knew he should be thinking, planning, getting a jump on whatever the hell was going on around them. But he’d only gotten as far as loading the five-round magazine into Kelley’s pistol when the soft quaver of her voice got to him. If she was going to fall apart, Sam suddenly wanted it to be in his arms and nowhere else.

  He didn’t have to issue an invitation. She was already on her way across the darkened bedroom floor. Sam was half kneeling by the bed, and Kelley moved closer to him, the way she always did in his dreams, silently, almost magically.

  In his dreams it was passion that made her quiver. Nothing had ever excited him like the way she let go of all that feminine elegance of hers and turned into a wild woman. In spite of the danger around them—in spite of everything—Sam felt himself responding to the deep tremors that he could feel running through her body.

  But he knew it wasn’t passion she was feeling. It was terror, pure and simple. He closed his arms tightly around her and pulled her against his chest, kissing her soft hair and the rapidly beating pulse at her temple.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ve got you. It’s all right.”

  He didn’t blame her for being scared. She must have half-wakened in the haze of the propane that had seeped with deadly silence into her room. And before she’d had time to start thinking clearly again, someone had started shooting at them. The marvel was not that she was shaking, but that she wasn’t shaking any harder than this.

  Her arms were wrapped around his waist. Sam could smell the faint perfume of her skin, scented with sea air now. She was clinging to him as if she was cold, but her body felt warm. And soft. And more enticing than any woman had a right to be.

  He had a feeling she was near tears, and resisting them as hard as she could. “Cry if you want to,” he whispered at her ear. “Hell, I’d cry myself if I wasn’t such a tough guy. This case was supposed to be a desk job, not a damn shooting gallery.”

  “Sam, what’s happening?” She was whispering, too. He was right about the tears, he thought. He could hear them at the edge of her voice. He leaned a little lower and tilted her face up toward his. Her mouth—the mouth that could look so poised, or so seductive—was trembling slightly.

  He knew he shouldn’t be doing this. But there was nothing he could do to stop himself.

  He was trembling, too, as he answered her. “What’s happening,” he said gruffly, “is that somebody around here has already figured out the questions we’re asking aren’t just because we’re curious.”

  “They must have thought—” She glanced up toward the big bed where she’d been sleeping alone. If they’d been real honeymooners, they would have been there together. “They must have been trying to kill both of us,” she whispered.

  He barely heard her, because he was barely listening any more. The way Kelley tilted her head brought her sweet mouth to within inches of Sam’s. She was half sitting across his thighs, and some unmistakable signals were starting to blitz through his body.

  It would be crazy to kiss her now, he thought. She wanted comfort, nothing more. And he was supposed to be protecting her, protecting both of them.

  But her softly upturned face was so hauntingly beautiful in the faint predawn light. He’d kissed her temple just a few minutes ago, and nothing earth-shattering had happened to either of them. Surely—

  He dropped his head lower and let his lips graze the angle of her chin. And then her cheekbone—that elegant, aristocratic line that drove him half-crazy whenever he looked at her. And then her jawline. The skin there was unimaginably smooth and soft.

  “Sam—”

  He didn’t know what the sound in her voice meant now. He only knew that the ache in it connected intimately to parts of himself that only Kelley Landis had ever known how to reach.

  He took her mouth with his, blindly, urgently. His own harsh moan of need shocked him. When he felt her lips parting to welcome him, he couldn’t think of any good reason for being here except to recapture—somehow— everything that
he and Kelley had lost.

  Lost…

  The word echoed in his ears. He kissed her as though he could erase the lonely sound of it. How could this be anything but right, when their bodies were responding to each other as though they’d last made love hours ago, instead of years?

  His free hand moved over her waist and up across her breasts. Through the thin fabric of her nightgown he could feel their tight centers, aroused and explicit against his palm. He groaned again as Kelley’s mouth invited him even deeper, into depths he didn’t think he could ever get tired of exploring.

  He thought of the other depths of her body, and the warm explosiveness of her lovemaking, and the way she’d rocked him all night long, leaving both of them exhausted and amazed. Those memories found their way into his kiss now. He raised his other hand to cup her face, wanting to pull them as close as a man and a woman could be, wanting this to go on until the hunger in both of them was eased.

  His hand stopped just short of her face.

  He was holding a loaded gun, for God’s sake.

  Suddenly the danger outside seemed to have invaded this darkened room. He was doing the same thing he’d done before: forgetting himself at the worst possible moment. He felt the shock of it like a fist hitting him in the small of his back.

  He broke off the kiss abruptly. “I must be out of my mind,” he said. His voice barely worked, but he could see in Kelley’s startled eyes that he’d gotten the point across.

  Maybe he was out of his mind. Maybe his own tormented memories had driven him there. Whatever the reason, he realized he’d been on the verge of losing himself in Kelley’s sweet kisses while in one hand he held a loaded weapon, and while somewhere, possibly just outside the cottage, was someone who had just tried—twice—to kill them.

  Gently, with muscles that shook almost as much now as Kelley’s had when he’d taken her in his arms, he extricated himself from the embrace. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “There’s just no way—”

  He couldn’t come up with the right words. He’d never been able to make words say what he was really feeling. There were people who thought he could be cruel—hell, Kelley was probably one of them—when in fact the plain truth was that Sam Cotter was scared to death of all the things he felt sometimes. And he had no idea how to say that out loud.

  Settling for distance seemed safer most of the time. It seemed a whole lot safer right now.

  “I’m going to get to the phone,” he said, glad he’d had the foresight to insist that it be installed as soon as they arrived. “A call about a prowler ought to bring the local patrol car by, and that should be enough to scare off our friend with the gun.”

  “And then what?”

  Sam refused to let himself be drawn into the soft mix of fear and curiosity and lingering desire that he heard in Kelley’s voice. “And then we keep our heads down until daylight,” he said, “at which point we start figuring out what the hell is going on around here.”

  Chapter 4

  “Well, shoot,” Wiley said.

  Sam grimaced and stubbed out his second cigarette of the day against the metal shelf under the phone. He’d come into Cairo to buy a stronger brand—he figured he deserved it, after the night he’d had—and had decided to call Wiley while he was there. The anonymity of the beachside phone booth was a bonus, even though the wind whistling across the sand made it hard to hear his brother’s deep voice.

  The last words had come through loud and clear, though. “Shoot?” Sam echoed. “That all you have to say? Somebody tries to take out two of your best agents and you just say, ‘Ah, shucks’?”

  “What do you want me to say? I’m not thrilled about it, obviously. On the other hand, it means you’re doing your job. You’ve got somebody worried, and that means there’s’ something there to find out. All you have to do is—”

  Sam cut short this little lecture, which he’d heard before. “Aren’t you missing the point here, big brother?” he asked.

  “The point being?”

  “That I was right about it being a bad idea to have Kelley along on this case.”

  The pause on the line seemed very long. Sam’s eyes traveled restlessly over the big fishing pier that jutted out into the Gulf, and the massive stones of the breakwaters that sat at both ends of the town beach. Cairo was a pretty spot, he thought, but a bit too exposed to the ocean for his own taste.

  “Why?” Wiley asked finally.

  “Why?” Sam’s frustration came to a sudden boil. “Because she’s in danger, that’s why. Because somebody tried to kill her—to kill both of us—last night. If you’d been listening—”

  It was Wiley’s turn to jump in. His voice was still even, but Sam recognized the slight edge in it that meant Wiley’s patience, like his own, was getting short.

  “Sam,” he said, “you and Kelley are both professional investigators. I don’t expect my agents to put their lives on the line every single moment of every single case, but I also don’t expect them to run away at the first sign of trouble.”

  “I never said anything about running—”

  “No,” Wiley cut in again. “And neither has Kelley. Has she?”

  Reluctantly, Sam had to admit she hadn’t. In fact, she’d been disconcertingly businesslike this morning. It was almost as though their adventures of the night before had caused some mental gear-shifting inside her. She’d spoken briskly to him over breakfast, outlining her plans for the day, and had apologized briefly for falling apart on him. She’d been confused, she said. Disoriented by the effects of the propane. It wouldn’t happen again, she promised.

  “Where is she now?” Wiley was asking.

  “At Harold and Helen Price’s, filling them in on what happened last night.”

  “Good.” Wiley sounded grimly satisfied, and Sam couldn’t help wondering if Kelley had been right yesterday. Was it possible that his big brother was trying to teach Sam some kind of backhanded lesson here?

  If he was, Wiley was keeping it to himself. “What about the rest of the day?” he was asking.

  “The Prices and their son and a couple of the people on Harold’s list are going on some kind of sailing trip. We’re invited.”

  “Better yet.” Wiley sounded pleased to hear the news, although he knew Sam hated boats and everything that went with them. “You can tell Kelley from me,” he added, “that she knows she can call it quits any time she thinks things have gotten out of hand. And that goes for you too, little brother.”

  As if he’d leave Kelley here on her own! Sam almost laughed at the thought, except that he was too annoyed to laugh. He hung up wondering if Wiley would be so cavalier if it was his beloved Rae-Anne that somebody was shooting at.

  Of course, Wiley was in love with Rae-Anne. Openly, admittedly, head over heels in love. Whereas Sam wasn’t in love with Kelley Landis. Not anymore.

  He didn’t stop to dwell on that thought as he lit another cigarette and stalked back to where he’d parked his truck.

  “Honey, I want to talk to you.”

  Susan Gustaffson joined Kelley at the railing of the big white sailboat, tilting the rim of her baseball cap down so that it shaded her eyes from the early-afternoon sun.

  “Sure.” Kelley shifted her position to make room for the other woman, feeling the deck under her feet rising and falling as the boat cut through the waves.

  Harold and Helen’s sailboat was a beauty, a forty-fivefooter with room for six in the sleeping quarters below and plenty of space for the seven people who occupied the deck now. She and Sam, along with Susan and Jon Gustaffson and the three Prices, were taking a lunchtime cruise along the coast east of Cairo, heading for a secluded bay that Helen said was perfect for picnicking.

  And for information gathering, Kelley hoped. She’d accepted the Prices’ offer because it seemed like a good opportunity to see both the Gustaffsons and Wayland. The first part of the trip had been occupied in touring the boat and watching as Harold—a former World Cup crew member, his wife
proudly pointed out—expertly piloted the big craft out of the boat slip in Cairo and onto the open water.

  Now, as they neared their destination, Kelley was glad to see Susan Gustaffson approaching—at least until she heard what Susan had on her mind.

  “I’m a little worried about you, Kelley,” the petite blond woman said. “I mean, I asked that gorgeous husband of yours if he was enjoying his honeymoon and he looked at me like I’d asked if he enjoyed rattlesnake handling. Honey, are the two of you having problems?”

  Good going, Sam, Kelley thought grimly. She glanced over to where he stood now, leaning against the railing in the cockpit. Trust him to find the part of the boat that pitched and rolled most dramatically, and then plant himself there like grim death.

  And trust him to look gorgeous, too, just as Susan had said. He should have been nondescript in those beat-up navy cotton shorts and half-unbuttoned white shirt, especially compared to Wayland Price in his slick white outfit and Jon Gustaffson, who wore a bright red swimsuit and matching windbreaker.

  But there was something impossible to ignore about Sam, something that smoldered down deep in his blue eyes and made itself felt in that trademark slouch of his, the one that said “Leave me out of this” but drew attention to his long, rangy legs and hard muscular torso just the same.

  He hadn’t been happy about this boat trip. But his displeasure hadn’t been enough to kill that old watchful gleam in his eyes. Kelley had noticed him taking whatever opportunities came his way to chat with the other passengers.

  Except Kelley, of course.

  And Susan Gustaffson hadn’t missed it. Kelley resisted a sigh.

  “We’ve both been working too hard lately,” she said, falling back on the excuse Sam had used with the intrusive handyman yesterday. “It may take us a few days to unwind.”

  Susan nodded sympathetically. “Boy, I know how that feels,” she said. “My firm was having a tough time a couple of years ago, and I was working one seventy-hour week right after another. That’s why Jon and I decided to buy the cottage, so we could at least get away on the weekends.”