Never Too Late (3 page)

Surely he was tough enough to control himself around her for a week.

“What time are we leaving?” she asked after Lynn closed the door behind herself and returned to the festivities, leaving them once more in the still, quiet night.

“Early. I’ll pick you up at eight. Does that work?”

“Perfectly.”

Was it just his imagination or did the pinched look around her mouth ease just a little?

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this,” she said. “Going after Brenda is a brilliant idea.”

“Let’s see how brilliant you think it is after a week on the road.”

This had to be the craziest idea she had ever come up with.

Worse, even, than the time when they were second-year med students and she and Taylor had tried to break into the anatomy lab for a little extra study time working on their cadavers.

In the cold, pale light of a December morning, what had seemed so logical the night before seemed shortsighted and foolish when faced with the cold, hard reality of spending at least a week in intimate quarters with Hunter Bradshaw.

Kate stood at the front window of the small second-floor apartment she had moved into the month before, watching for him to pull into the driveway below.

A quick glance at the clock on the microwave told her that even if he was obsessively punctual, he wouldn’t arrive for at least ten minutes, but she couldn’t seem to pry herself away from the window where she stood tracing the filigreed frost collecting on the other side.

She hadn’t slept well, with her nerves on edge and her mind racing. She had finally tired of her tossing and turning a few hours before dawn and had climbed out of bed to start preparing for the trip.

The few things she planned to take had been packed and waiting by the door for hours and she spent the rest of the morning wrapping her few Christmas presents and scrubbing her apartment. Since she barely spent any time at all here, she could find little to clean, but at least she wouldn’t be coming home to a mess.

With all her preparations done, she had little else to do now but stand here at the window watching for him and panicking about the sheer insanity of this situation her impulsiveness had thrust her into.

Whatever had compelled her to insist on traipsing along with Hunter Bradshaw? In what feeble-minded moment would that ever seem like a good idea?

How could she ever have been stupid enough to think she could travel blithely across the country with him when simply finding herself in the same room with the man left her flustered and giddy?

He had always made her insides tremble and her heart rate accelerate. She had been friends with Taylor since their first semester of medical school, more than five years ago. She could still remember the first time she met her friend’s older brother. She and Taylor had been cramming for finals their second semester and had decided to grab a midnight snack at their favorite all-night diner, a humble little place downtown that served divine mashed potatoes with thick, creamy gravy.

They had walked in and Kate had only a few seconds to register a gorgeous man sitting in a booth in the front window with a couple of uniformed cops when Taylor had let out a delighted laugh and dragged her over to meet the brother she often talked about.

She could still remember her first impression—that the two of them shared an obviously close, affectionate relationship completely foreign to someone who had never had siblings of her own, except in a few foster families where she had been barely tolerated.

Her second impression of Hunter Bradshaw had been far more elemental and astonishing—an intense physical awareness of him unlike anything she’d ever experienced. As she gazed into dark blue eyes while Taylor introduced them, her stomach did a long, slow roll and she felt as if something had just squeezed out every molecule of air in her lungs.

The off-duty uniform cops had been flirtatious and charming to a couple of weary young med students and had insisted she and Taylor join them. To her growing dismay, Kate found herself squeezed next to Hunter in the red vinyl booth.

Throughout the next hour she had been painfully aware of every movement he made—the way he leaned an elbow back on the seat cushion, how his mouth quirked up a little higher on one side than the other when he smiled, the way his dark hair curled just a little on the ends.

Her sudden absorption with him had been as unexpected as it was mortifying.

She had always considered herself rather cold when it came to the opposite sex. Men had never been a high priority in her life. Sometimes they hardly seemed worth the energy it took to cater to their egos and their self-absorption.

She thought perhaps she’d been passed over on the whole libido thing because most of the kisses she had experienced in her twenty-two years on the earth to that point had been pleasant, certainly, but nothing to write home about.

In that tired old diner looking out at neon gleaming in the wet street, with her pulse jumping every time Hunter’s long legs would brush against hers under the table or his shoulder would bump her, Kate finally started to get an inkling what all the fuss was about.

Taylor often gave her a hard time because she rarely dated the same man more than a few times. She never told her friend this but she was always looking for that same crazy, exciting, terrifying breathlessness she experienced whenever Hunter was around.

Not that she ever did anything about it. How could she? When she first met Hunter, he had just started dating Dru Ferrin, the ambitious, talented crime reporter at a local television station.

A few months later, Dru had announced she was pregnant and Hunter had become totally absorbed in trying to convince Dru to marry him, in the prospect of becoming a father.

Or so he thought, anyway. After Dru and her terminally ill mother were murdered, DNA tests proved Hunter had not fathered the eight-month-old fetus that had also died from his mother’s gunshot wound.

She had grieved right along with him, first at the child’s death then when he found out Dru had lied to him throughout her pregnancy. And then had come the horror of his arrest and the subsequent trial and wrongful conviction.

She had had a major crush on him. The knowledge mortified her. She was a doctor, for heaven’s sake. Twenty-six years old, well on her way to being established in her chosen career path, and she had a crush on a sexy, dangerous, unreachable male as if she were thirteen years old fantasizing about a pop star.

How on earth would she keep her silly feelings to herself for a week or longer when it would be just the two of them alone on the road?

She would just have to do her best to treat him like she did male colleagues and her other male friends—casual and cheerfully friendly.

Could she pull it off? She was still trying to figure that out when she saw an SUV turn into the small parking area behind her battered six-year-old Honda.

As usual, her stomach performed a long, slow tremble at the sight of that muscular body climbing out of a gleaming Jeep Grand Cherokee the color of a mountain forest.

He wore jeans and a suede jacket that did nothing to hide his powerful build. His years in prison had turned what had already been a sexy, muscled build into something potent and dangerous.

Kate huffed out a breath, heat crawling across her cheeks. Not the kind of thing she should be noticing. She would never survive riding in such close quarters with him if she couldn’t shove those kinds of thoughts completely out of her head.

She was a doctor who had seen more than her share of men’s bodies, both muscled and otherwise. It might require a great deal of effort on her part but she needed to treat Hunter Bradshaw with the same courteous, impersonal distance she treated her patients.

The man was doing her a huge favor by helping her trace her past. The last thing he probably wanted was for her to go all gooey over him.

The doorbell chimed through her apartment and Kate pressed a hand to her stomach, where a whole brigade of butterflies were doing their thing.

After a few deep, cleansing breaths, she pasted on a polite smile and opened the door.

“Good morning,” she said.

He returned her attempt at a smile with one of those shuttered looks he excelled at and she could feel more heat crawl across her cheeks.

“I’m all ready.” She gestured to the few bags by the door—one suitcase, her laptop case and the emergency medical kit she always carried with her.

He blinked a few times at her meager luggage. “This is all you’re taking? We might be gone a while.”

“I don’t need much. A few pairs of jeans and a toothbrush and I’m set.”

He looked even more surprised by that piece of information. She wondered why, until she remembered his most recent experience with females, not counting his sister, had been Dru Ferrin—a girlie-girl if Kate had ever met one.

Dru probably wouldn’t even have driven to the all-night grocery store at 3:00 a.m. unless she’d worn full battle armor. Kate doubted if Dru Ferrin could have gone anywhere without a footlocker full of makeup.

As soon as the thought flitted across her mind, she felt small and catty. She hadn’t much liked Dru Ferrin, but the woman had died a horrible death. She deserved better than to be the object of malicious spite, simply because Kate was jealous that Hunter had loved her.

She made a face at herself and her own small-mindedness but Hunter must have misinterpreted the reason behind it.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked quickly. “I can go by myself. It’s not too late if you want to back out.”

For just one moment she was tempted—horribly tempted—to do just that, especially when a hint of his aftershave wafted to her. He smelled divine, something leathery and outdoorsy and male, and for a moment she wanted to stand right here in her tiny living room just sniffing him.

She could handle this. Yes, she was attracted to the man but that was nothing new. She’d been dealing with that for five years now and had never done anything about it. A few more days wouldn’t make much difference in the scheme of things, especially if she could keep the purpose for the whole trip uppermost in her mind.

“I need to do this, Hunter. I realized during the night that I have to try to make some kind of peace with my past. I can’t spend the rest of my life being eaten alive by my anger.”

“You think finding the woman you thought was your mother will help you find that peace?”

“I can only hope. I won’t know for sure until I find her, will I?”

He studied her for a moment then shrugged. “Let’s go, then.”

He reached down and picked up her luggage effortlessly, then headed back down the stairs.

With an odd, tingly feeling in her toes like she teetered on the brink of something precarious and shaky, Kate made one last check of her apartment to ensure she had turned everything off, grabbed her coat, then locked the door behind her and followed him down the stairs.

Chapter 3

H
unter was stowing her suitcase in the cargo area of his new SUV next to Belle’s travel crate when Kate walked down the steps of the old Victorian that had been split into three or four apartments.

“All set,” she said. “Everything’s turned off and locked tight.”

He wondered if she realized her chipper tone seemed as forced as her smile—and about as enthusiastic as he felt about this whole thing.

Was she as apprehensive as he was about this whole road trip? He ought just to back out right now, let her fly down to Florida by herself on this quest of hers.

He couldn’t do that, though. If he hadn’t opened his big mouth and suggested it, she wouldn’t even have grabbed onto the idea.

No, he had started this and he would see it through. He had offered to help her, had made a commitment, and he was a man who honored his promises, no matter how difficult.

How tough could it be anyway? All he had to remember was that those columbine-blue eyes and that honey-blond hair and those lush delectable lips were off-limits. No worries.

To his surprise, Kate immediately opened the back door of the Jeep to greet Belle.

His setter barked in greeting and jumped from the vehicle, writhing around Kate with her tail wagging like crazy. Hunter was about to apologize and order Belle to settle down but before he could, Kate knelt down and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck.

“Oh, I’ve missed you, sweetie. How’ve you been?”

She didn’t seem to mind Belle’s slobbery greeting or the dog’s enthusiastic licking of her face, or the hair she was undoubtedly depositing on Kate’s gray sweater.

He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by their happy reunion. While he had been locked up, Belle had lived with his sister and her roommate and best friend. Kate.

In truth, Belle had probably spent more time with Kate than she had with him. She was really more theirs than his. Belle had only been a few years old at the time he had been arrested.

His dog certainly hadn’t suffered at all under their care. By the looks of things, the Irish setter adored Kate as much as him.

He let Belle work out a little of her energy by dancing around Kate a few times, then opened the door of her crate.

“Belle. Kennel.”

With one last enthusiastic lick of Kate’s hand, the dog leaped into her travel crate and settled in.

“It’s safer for her to ride back here,” he explained. “For her sake and for the driver’s. Belle’s a good traveler but she can be a distraction.”

“I know. Once she tried to attack the rear windshield wiper in Taylor’s Subaru—from the inside of the vehicle, of course. She spent about ten minutes trying to figure out why she couldn’t wrap her teeth around the thing.”

Her smile looked more natural, a little less forced, and he had forced himself to look away, focusing instead on the clouds hanging heavy and dark in the December sky.

“We’d better get going,” he said brusquely.

“Right,” she said after an awkward moment, then headed for the passenger door of the SUV.

He beat her to it and held it open for her, earning himself an odd look, as if she weren’t quite sure how to react to that small courtesy.

As he walked around the Jeep, he couldn’t help thinking about the somewhat old-fashioned lessons his father had constantly drilled into his head about how to treat a woman. With respect and civility and basic human courtesy.

He and his father had certainly had their differences but he could never fault the Judge in that regard. His father’s example had been lesson enough. Even when his mother had been at her most difficult—days when she had been barely coherent and had raged at everything in sight—Hunter never saw his father treat her with anything but dignity.

He doubted the Judge would find anything courteous about the thoughts he was entertaining about this particular woman. Like how the ivory December morning light gave her skin the soft delectability of a bowl of fresh apricots and how that full mouth begged to be devoured.

He paused outside the driver’s side for one more last-minute lecture to himself. He had to send those kinds of thoughts right out of his head.

Okay, so he’d been a long time without a woman. He could have remedied that anytime these last six weeks if he’d chosen, but he hadn’t and now it was too late. It was his own damn fault if he found himself in a near-constant state of arousal for the next few days.

With a heavy sigh, he opened the driver’s side door and immediately wished he hadn’t. He felt invaded. Overwhelmed. Instead of the comfortably male scent of leather and new car he expected, he smelled
Kate
—that subtle, alluring scent of shampoo and woman and the vanilla sugar that always clung to her. The smell seemed to slide over him like silk and he wanted to close his eyes and sink into it.

He gritted his teeth and climbed into the SUV.

They drove in silence for a block or so before he dared unclench his teeth to speak. “Your apartment seems comfortable.”

She looked a little nonplussed by his comment coming out of nowhere. Okay, so he was a little rusty at making small talk. His companions for the past two years had been the other inmates on death row, who weren’t exactly big on social chitchat. He was going to have to work on it, though, or this trip with Kate would be excruciating.

“Thanks,” she said after a moment. “I had to find something in a hurry and this was one of the first places I looked at. I thought it was a graceful old house and I liked the fact that it was an established neighborhood. That was one of the things I enjoyed most about sharing Taylor’s house in the Avenues, having neighbors who actually knew your name.”

Guilt pinched at him and he felt like he had shoved her out onto the street. “You had to find somewhere else in a hurry because of me, right? I’m sorry about that.”

“I’m not. You were coming home and that was the important thing. Anyway, the house in Little Cottonwood Canyon was yours. Taylor and I were only staying there temporarily after her cottage burned.”

“After it was torched, you mean.”

Her mouth tightened at the reminder. “Right. I was always planning on finding somewhere else. You and Taylor deserved some time alone without me hanging around.”

“You could have stayed. There was plenty of room.”

She laughed a little. “Right. The roommate who would never leave. That’s me. Don’t worry about me, Hunter. I like my new place, even if I don’t expect to be there long. I only signed a six-month lease—I imagine when my residency is over and I start my own family-medicine practice somewhere, I’ll buy a house somewhere.”

Her words reminded him of his own aimlessness since his release. He needed to give some serious thought to what he was going to do with the rest of his life, now that it had been handed back to him. Maybe with the open road stretching out ahead of him, he might find inspiration.

“I do like my apartment,” Kate went on, “but this is the first time I’ve ever lived alone and I have to admit I’m finding it a little odd.”

“You’ve always had roommates?” There. That sounded just right. Casual and interested but not too inquisitive. They were almost having a normal conversation.

She nodded. “I’ve been a struggling med student, remember? I found it hard enough to make ends meet. Sharing the rent helped ease the financial strain a little.”

She lifted one shoulder. “Maybe by my second or third year I would have decided I’d had enough of roommates and moved out on my own but then Taylor bought her house and asked me if I wanted to share it. I couldn’t say no.”

Hunter had to admit, that decision of his sister’s to take on a roommate had come as a surprise to him. Taylor had bought her little cottage in the Avenues outright with her inheritance from their father. She certainly hadn’t needed a roommate to share expenses but she had taken one anyway for the company.

Taylor wasn’t like him in that respect, he reminded himself. He had never been much of a pack animal, but his sister loved having people around her. He knew she had been lonely those first few months after she’d bought her house and she’d been eager for Kate to move in.

Kate seemed to be waiting for him to respond, so he fished around in his mind until he found an appropriate question. “So do you miss having a roommate?”

She gazed out the windshield, at the minimal Sunday-morning traffic, then finally looked back at him. “I miss Taylor,” she admitted. “That sounds silly, I know, but she was more than just a roommate. She was my best friend. The closest thing I had to a sister.”

“You’ll still be close.”

“It’s not going to be the same. I understand that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled for her and Wyatt. They’re perfect for each other, I could see that right away.”

“Your brother is a good man.”

“I know. Wyatt is strong and smart and funny. Just the kind of man Taylor needs.”

What kind of man do you need?
he almost asked but stopped himself just in time. None of his business. That kind of question would lead their fledgling conversation in a direction he absolutely didn’t want it to go.

“He makes her happy,” she said. “When it comes down to it, that’s all that matters.”

“Right,” he murmured. He had to admit, he enjoyed seeing Taylor find some happiness. She deserved it. Both she and Wyatt did.

If not for the efforts of his sister and of Wyatt McKinnon, he would still be in that prison, feeling his soul shrivel more each day. Taylor had worked tirelessly to free him. She had put her dream of becoming a doctor like Kate on hold, switching instead to law school so she could fight for his appeal. Taylor had finally enlisted the help of Wyatt, who had been writing a book about Hunter’s case.

In the process of trying to free him, she had been threatened, her house set ablaze, and finally had faced down death for his cause. He hadn’t wanted her to sacrifice her dreams for him—or, heaven forbid, her life—and Hunter knew he could never repay his sister for all that she had done.

He supposed that was another of the reasons he was driving through the sparse Sunday-morning traffic heading south on I-15. He owed Taylor and Wyatt everything for all they had risked. Maybe by turning around and helping Kate—someone both of them cared about—he could start to check off a little of that debt.

“You’re not taking I-80?” Kate asked as he passed the interchange—the Spaghetti Bowl, as the locals called it, for the various lanes twisting off in every direction like pasta in a dish.

He shook his head. “The weather report said that light snow we had last night gathered strength as it headed east and was due to hit Wyoming with a vengeance today. I figured if we head south now, down through Albuquerque and Amarillo, we’ll escape the worst of it.”

“Good thinking.”

They encountered no delays traveling south across the Salt Lake Valley and, all too soon, they reached Bluffdale where the Point of the Mountain state prison sprawled out to the west of the highway, its buildings squat and depressing.

This was the first time he’d been this way since his release, Hunter realized. Perhaps he had made a point of staying north of the area without even realizing it.

If he had come this way before, he might have been prepared for the rush of anger and hatred rising like bile in his throat.

His hands tightened on the steering wheel. Sunday mornings were relatively quiet at the prison. Many prisoners chose to sleep the day away, while others attended the various religious services offered.

Hunter had quite deliberately chosen to stay in his cell reading. By the time he’d found himself on death row, he had lost whatever faith might have lingered in his soul.

He had been less than nothing in prison. Inhuman, like a dog locked up in a cage at the pound. He had been out for six weeks and he wondered if that feeling would ever go away.

“It’s hard for you to see the prison, isn’t it?”

It seemed a sign of weakness to admit the truth. It was just a cluster of buildings, after all. A part of his life that was over forever.

He opened his mouth to deny he was at all affected by the sight but somehow the lie caught in his throat.

“I lost two and a half years of my life to that bastard Martin James. Three lives were lost while he tried to protect his web of lies and deceit. Who knows how many more he would have taken? It’s a little hard to get past that.”

Her blue eyes softened with understanding and she reached a hand across the width of the SUV and touched his arm with gentle fingers. “I’m so sorry, Hunter.”

Despite his grim thoughts, heat scorched him where she touched his arm and he was suddenly aware of a wild, terrible hunger to drown in that heat and softness, to lose some of this rage always seething just under the surface.

He jerked his arm away, just firmly enough to be obvious. “I’m sorry enough for myself. I don’t need your pity, too.”

She paled as if he had slapped her—which he guessed he had done, verbally at least—and quickly pulled her hand away.

“Right. Of course you don’t.”

He opened his mouth to apologize for his rudeness, then closed it again. Maybe it was better this way. They weren’t buddies. It was going to be tough enough for him to stay away from her on this journey without having to endure shared confidences and these casual touches that would destroy him.

He had been without any kind of physical affection since his arrest and he hungered for gentleness and softness as much as for sex.

It was a grim realization, one that certainly didn’t make their situation any easier.

She had two choices here, Kate thought as his blatant rejection burned through her like hydrochloric acid. She could let herself be hurt and pout for the rest of the day. That was the course that appealed to her most, but what would that accomplish?

Yes, her feelings had been hurt. All she had been trying to do was offer comfort and he had slapped her down like she was one of those inflatable punching bags she used to beat the heck out of when she was in foster care, angry at the world and unsure of her place in it.