Hotter Than Wildfire (13 page)

“Here. Eat that.” He pushed the plate back to her and put command into his voice. He didn’t normally do that with women, but he made the exception with her. She needed to eat. More than that, Harry needed her to eat food he’d provided for her. “And after you’ve finished, you can tell me why you ran from us.”

She slanted him an amused look, those brilliant, uptilted eyes narrowing. “Yes,
sir!
”

Damn straight, yessir.

She ate half of what was on her plate and pushed it away again. “Before you say anything, I’d love to finish everything on the plate, it’s all delicious, but I simply can’t. My stomach is cramping.”

A hot flush of shame shot through Harry. In his zeal to see her eat, he’d completely forgotten how much Sam and Mike had had to coax him to eat when he’d first come back to San Diego a broken man. His stomach had rebelled at nearly everything. For a time there, he’d eaten with either Sam or Mike standing over him until he choked down every bite.

“Okay,” he said gently. “Now talk. Why’d you run from us?”

“It was your faces,” she said.

Harry’s brows lifted. Granted, he and Sam weren’t beauties by any stretch, but still…“Our faces?”

“When I mentioned Gerald and Bearclaw. You knew him and you knew the company, I could tell. And you looked at each other. It was quick, but I caught it. You run a security company, like Bearclaw. I thought I’d jumped straight into the frying pan.”

“Yeah, we know Montez,” Harry said grimly. “But trust me, RBK isn’t anything like Bearclaw. That fuckhead Montez—pardon my French—cost Sam four of his men in country. Bearclaw and its men are a menace. We’d love to get back at them. That’s what you picked up on.”

She paled, a long, slender hand moving up to cover her mouth. Her voice was low, shaky. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I ran for nothing. I put myself and you in danger for nothing.”

Harry couldn’t stand to see her upset. He pulled her hand away from her mouth and brought it to his own.

“You couldn’t have known,” he said softly. “It’s not your fault. Being able to react fast has kept you alive so far. You couldn’t have known that we’re Bearclaw’s enemies, not friends. But the big question is, how did they track you down? How could they be waiting for you at your hotel?”

“I used my cell phone as an excuse, but then I realized I really had left it at the hotel. It’s still there.”

“Actually—” Harry reached back to the counter and threw a plastic object onto the table. “Your cell is here.”

Ellen reacted as if he’d thrown a snake onto the table. “Oh my God! He can track us! He can tell where I am!” She was fumbling for the controls when Harry put his hand over hers to still it.

“No, he can’t track us. It’s off, and Mike removed the battery and the SIM card in your room. While I was taking a bullet out of your shoulder, Mike was removing all traces of you from the hotel room. It was just your cell and a travel toothbrush, but they’re gone. And he wiped down all surfaces with bleach. He checked the phone very briefly while in your room—Montez would know you were there anyway if he sent men to snatch you—and he saw that you’d only called one number.”

“My agent’s number. I bought a cheapie cell just to communicate with him. He didn’t really understand why I wanted to remain anonymous, thought it was some kind of PR ploy, but he played along. It’s a prepaid. No one should have been able to trace me through it unless…” Ellen’s voice died as she lost what little color she’d had.

“Unless they got to him,” Harry finished for her. He pulled out his own cell. “Let’s call him.”

“No!” She pushed his cell away, her voice rising in panic. “Oh my God, no! They’ll trace it back here. They’ll trace it to
you
! You’ll be in danger, too.”

Harry opened his cell again. God, she was worried about him. She was on the run for her life, and she didn’t want to put
him
in danger. He didn’t usually explain himself, but this time he made an effort.

“Don’t worry,” he said gently. He held his cell up. “It’s a special phone. Or rather, a special software program. The call is routed through a couple of servers and, anyone tracing it will think the call originated from a cell about fifty miles from Calgary, Canada. The cell is billed to a company we’ve set up that has two dead men as owners. It’s better than being an anonymous prepaid because it fu—er…messes with people’s heads. Anyone trying to trace it just wastes a lot of time.”

She just watched him, pale and trembling and the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

He’d memorized the number, punched it out, listened to the rings at the other end. Tried again. “Home number?” he asked quietly.

Ellen gave him the number. Another minute, listening to the phone ring and ring.

“Where else can we try?”

She was trying to hide her agitation. “I’ve never known him not to pick up his cell. He lives on that damn phone. Where’s a computer?”

Harry led her into the living room, to his laptop. He switched it on, switching on the anonymizing program at the same time. No one was going to be able to trace anything back to this laptop, or the IP.

She was feverishly typing. “Oh no! He hasn’t updated his Facebook entries in a week, and he hasn’t tweeted in a week either.” She lifted troubled eyes to his. “This is so unlike him. He’s so proud of staying connected. What are we going to do?”

There wasn’t much choice. Harry had a friend in Seattle, or rather he was a friend of Mike’s—a former Marine turned SWAT member. “The only thing we can do,” he said. “Call Seattle PD.”

 
San Diego

  “Two silk shirts, three cotton sweaters, a cotton skirt, two pairs of jeans and a couple of sweat suits, one powder blue and the other hot pink. It’ll look great with your coloring,” Nicole said triumphantly, pulling clothes out of boxes. “And…” She stretched the word out, reaching behind the sofa and pulling out a beige-and-pink bag. “Voilà! La Perla,” Nicole breathed, more or less like one would say, “Voilà! The
Mona Lisa
!”

Ellen peered inside and blinked. Silk and lace and satin, in sherbet colors. Wow. Better than the
Mona Lisa
, oh yeah.

She pulled out a pale-lilac silk bra and panty set with lace inlays and held them up reverently. They were pure works of art. She was just about to hold the bra up against herself when she heard a choked sound and looked over.

The three men of RBK were seated on a sofa, happy and replete. They’d just consumed an unholy amount of food, all of it exquisite. Sam Reston and Mike Keillor were looking amused and interested.

Harry looked as if a nuclear explosion had just occurred inside his head, behind his eyes.

Ellen peered down at herself and realized that in her excitement and pleasure, she’d been a hair’s breadth from trying on underwear in front of three strange men.

Well…two strange men.

Harry didn’t feel like a stranger anymore. Harry felt…wow. She didn’t know what Harry felt like, she didn’t have any personal experience with what he was making her feel, but “stranger” wasn’t a part of it.

Maybe it was the fact that he’d spent days holding her hand. She didn’t remember much, but there had been a definite feeling of something powerful watching over her as she’d slept. A dragon guarding her. A knight defending her.

Nice feeling.

Right now, though, as she let the incredibly sexy and appealing underwear—so unlike her usual very plain white cotton bras and briefs—slip through her nerveless fingers, what Harry was making her feel wasn’t nice. It was hot.

Hot as in sex. Sex on a stick.

The three men sitting on the very long and very fashionable couch in Sam and Nicole’s very large and very elegant living room were all fit and good looking, but Sam and Mike couldn’t hold a candle to Harry.

Harry was like a god. A golden god. Sam was darkly suntanned and underneath that he was swarthy. Mike had the light-blue eyes, light skin and dark hair of the Irish. Harry had been painted by the hand of a greater god.

He was as tall as Sam Reston and as muscular, but where Sam was densely muscled, Harry’s muscles were tighter, leaner, extremely broad shoulders tapering down to that ridiculously small waist and lean hips. His hair was golden, his skin was golden, his eyes were golden. He looked like an Incan god made flesh.

There was enough heat in his eyes right now to make them glow.

“I, ah…” Ellen didn’t know what to do with her empty hands. They felt clumsy and tingly. She missed the silky feeling of the underwear that had flowed like multicolored water through her fingers, and it occurred to her in a rush of embarrassment that the only thing better than the feel of the silk and lace would be Harry’s skin.

She traced the thick line of his ash-brown eyebrows, uptilted in the center as if he were perpetually skeptical, followed the line of his whiskers down to his neck, where ash-brown chest hairs peeked out from his open-necked shirt.

She had to distract herself, do something.

First, manners.

She smiled at Nicole. “I can’t thank you enough for those clothes and for this.” She swept her hand down at herself. Nicole had lent her a dark-green linen shift that came to mid-calf. On Nicole, who was tall and willowy, it probably came to just below the knee. Ellen had nearly wept when Harry had shown up with the shift. The shift made her feel female again. Womanly. Particularly when she saw Harry’s eyes widen as she came out of the bathroom.

She hadn’t had much to work with, but she always carried bobby pins in her purse and had put up her hair and put on some lipstick. You’d think from his look that she was ready for the red carpet at Oscar time. He’d actually held out his arm like some nineteenth-century romance hero and they’d walked into Sam and Nicole’s huge apartment arm-in-arm.

The dinner had been fun, relaxed and relaxing. Sam and Nicole were a great couple, obviously deeply in love. Even though Nicole had an almost intimidating level of beauty, the kind that turned heads, she was so friendly that after five minutes Ellen almost forgot how gorgeous she was.

Her husband never did, though. His eyes were locked on to his wife and he rarely let go an opportunity to touch her, even if only to lay a big hand on her shoulder or a quick caress to her cheek. Nicole was just as much in love as he was and smiled at him often.

It was new to Ellen, this degree of marital devotion. Her mother had specialized in either pathetic drunks or manipulating womanizers. Sometimes both at once. She’d had dozens of lovers throughout Ellen’s childhood, and not once had a man ever looked at her mother with love.

Mike was much shorter than the other two but looked almost twice as broad. He was fun and had coaxed her into eating more than she wanted. He behaved like a big brother—lighthearted and teasing.

Only Harry had sat throughout dinner silent and brooding, his eyes never leaving her.

All of them had made a huge effort for her.

She turned to Nicole, who was folding the underwear, placing the pretty, delicate items back into the thin wrapping paper and putting them back in the elegant bag.

“Thanks so much, Nicole. Of course I’ll pay you back, just as soon as I can access my money.”

Nicole waved an elegant hand. “Absolutely not, my dear. I can’t tell you the fun I had this afternoon, shopping for you. I’m getting out of the habit of nice underwear, unfortunately.” She smiled and rubbed her belly. “I’m getting as big as a whale. Pretty soon I’ll just dress in sheets. Who knows if I’ll remember what nice underwear is like after giving birth?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re not as big as a whale,” he growled. “You’re
pregnant
. There’s a difference.” He lay his big hand over her belly, nearly covering it entirely. “And you’re more beautiful than ever.” She smiled into his eyes and silence descended on the room. Ellen could tell that she’d disappeared for Sam and Nicole. They were wrapped up in their own world.

Mike broke the silence. “Whoa.” He held his broad, callused hands up in a time out sign. “Major mush alert. Cut it out, you two. Come back to earth.” He turned to Ellen. “Okay, Nicole doesn’t want your money, but I know how you can pay her back.”

Harry glared at him. “Mike…”

“Shut up.” He smiled at Ellen. “Sing for us.”

“What?”

“Sing for us. And you can play, right? There’s a piano in the library. You’re this big-shot singer, right? I don’t know anything about music, but Harry here listened to you for about forty-eight hours a day, day in day out. So you’ve got to be good.”

Ellen looked around at everyone except Harry. If she looked at him, she’d just drop right down into his golden gaze and never come up for air. “Nicole? Sam? Is that what you want?”

“Oh, yeah.” Nicole smiled. “I didn’t have the nerve to ask. It’s a good thing that Mike doesn’t know the meaning of the word
embarrassment
. But now that he’s asked…yes. We have a piano in the library. It was my mother’s, and we had it tuned a couple of months ago. I took lessons on that piano for ten painful years and all I have to show for it is the ability to play a truly awful ‘Für Elise’ on it. And I need a metronome to do it.” She beamed at Ellen, her smile lighting up the room. “Please,” she said softly, glancing at her husband, at Mike and at Harry. “We’d love it. Even Harry, who has forgotten how to talk.” He switched his glare to her and she laughed.

You could cut a steak with Harry’s jawline.

“She’s been wounded,” he said tightly. “She’s just out of bed. I don’t think it’s fair to ask her—”

“I’d love to,” Ellen interrupted. She rolled her shoulder. She couldn’t even feel the stitches. “I’m a little stiff in the arm but my hands are okay. And presumably you guys are not going to throw me off the island for a missed note, right?”

These people had taken her in unquestioningly, Nicole had put herself out, shopped for her. Singing for them in return was nothing.

“Come on, then.” Nicole led the way into another huge room, this one lined with bookshelves. One thing for sure, this baby was going to grow up with room to play in. Sam was right by his wife’s side, followed by Mike. Harry walked in with her.

He bent down. “Are you up to this?” He sounded tense and worried. As if she’d been asked to plow the back forty without benefit of mule instead of playing and singing, which she loved.

She smiled up at him. “Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”

He walked her to the piano and sat her down with as much formality as if she were about to sing at Carnegie Hall.

To her surprise, the piano wasn’t an old family upright but a real grand piano. A Steinway, no less, and beautifully in tune, she found, as she tried a scale from C with her right hand.

Unlike Nicole, she hadn’t had formal piano lessons. The only lessons she’d had had come from Buzz Longley, an old honky-tonk guy who’d lived with them for about eight months when she’d been twelve. He’d been an alcoholic and a skirt chaser and a deadbeat, but he knew his music. He’d have been famous if he’d been able to show up on time and sober for gigs, but he was never able to master the art of reliability, or sobriety.

For some reason, he’d taken it upon himself to teach her how to “tickle the keys,” as he put it. It hadn’t felt like lessons, but they were, she realized now. He’d casually corrected her fingering, made her do scales she hadn’t realized were scales because he kept her laughing telling bawdy stories of the Nashville circuit. But he’d taught. And she’d learned.

Buzz had been a man who traveled light: a duffel bag, his snakeskin boots and a keyboard. When he left in the middle of the night, she discovered he’d left her the keyboard.

So though she didn’t have formal training, she certainly knew how to accompany herself.

Without really thinking about it, Ellen put together a little RBK playlist. Songs that played well in a large room that didn’t have great acoustics, songs that the three men and Nicole might be familiar with and enjoy.

But first, one of her favorites, one that few people knew.

A chord, another chord, a riff, and she segued into an old Celtic song, “Home of the Heart.” Like most Celtic songs, it broke your heart, just ripped it in two. Ellen had always loved it because she suspected that the composer, like her, didn’t have a home of the heart. It wasn’t a remembrance of something lost but a dirge for something never known. Something eternally beyond your grasp.

When the last note had disappeared into the quiet room, she changed gears, plunging into the exuberant notes of “Sweet Caroline.” It wasn’t a song women sang often, so her soprano rendering took people by surprise. She’d always loved the song, loved its hopefulness and verve.

Without missing a beat, she moved into “Honky-Tonk Woman,” then “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” then a song she’d composed years ago in college, where she’d stayed in her dorm every weekend studying because she couldn’t afford to let any grades drop, while her roommates were having fun outside. It was called “Listening at the Window.” It was funny and bittersweet, with an undertone of regret. She followed that with “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “New York State of Mind,” “The River of Dreams” and then, because she loved Billy Joel so much and couldn’t get enough of his songs, “Piano Man.”

While she sang, it happened. It didn’t always happen, so she was thrilled when it did.

She lost herself completely in the music. Totally. The entire world fell away. She forgot her troubles, the danger she was in, the fact that she was on the run and had found only temporary refuge here, the loss of her old life, her loneliness and despair…all gone.

There was nothing in her head but the beautiful music, her hands playing completely on their own. She didn’t have to think of the playing at all. Buzz had called her a natural, and maybe she was. It felt as if the music flowed from her fingers like water from a natural spring. It came from her heart, sure, but it came from the sun and the earth and the very air around her.

She had no idea where she was, who was listening. It didn’t make any difference whether there was one person or a thousand or even no one. The music was hers, now and forever, and her soul took ease for the space of the songs.

She finished with her favorite song in all the world: “Stand by Me.” It had always seemed like one of those phrases that said it all. Stand by me. All you needed in this life was someone to stand by you.

She sang it slow, like a ballad, a ballad for the lost ones, for all those who’d never had a loved one stand by them, and she sang it like a requiem, because it was a world in which so few stood by anyone. Because so few people were loved.

The last note echoed in the room. She often sang with her eyes closed, completely absorbed in the music. But eventually, as all good things must, the music finished and she came slowly back into the world.

A little sadly and a little reluctantly, because the music had been like spending time in a sun-dappled garden where nothing bad could ever happen. And now she had to return to the world, the real world, full of danger and cruelty.