Nobody's Angel (26 page)

“Juan seems to think you have talent. Could you make a living at this?”

He snorted and tested the tackiness of the glaze on a freshly painted saucer. “Not and support my family. My mother's family would have starved if they hadn't taken outside jobs. Playing in clay is just a hobby.”

She wanted to disagree, but she'd seen how many potters lived. Supplies were hideously expensive. One badly glazed batch, a poorly heated kiln, a sudden drop in temperature,
anything could ruin a week's hard labor and a fortune in supplies. It had to be a labor of love. Art didn't pay in an industrial world.

Adrian carried out a tray of already glazed dishes ready for firing. Faith knew there were many ways of achieving color and design on stoneware. Rex had chosen one that was more labor and risk intensive. The pieces she was working on had already been fired once to produce a hard, dry bisque. She would hand paint the design, and later a transparent glaze would coat the entire piece. Then he'd fire it again. Two loads of fuel and twice the danger of the dishes cracking.

She grimaced at the dull color her brush produced, but the bright blues, reds, and yellows of the finished dishes on the table gave her hope. It might not be art, but it was useful and unique. She thought it relaxing—far better than contemplating how they would dodge Sandra and a knife-wielding thief while trying to locate a needle in a haystack.

Adrian worked more quickly than she did. While she painstakingly filled in the designs he sketched with a quick sure stroke, he glazed the painted stoneware and kept the kiln at an even temperature. In his spare moments he wielded a deft brush to finish painting the plates she hadn't completed.

She could tell he knew the business, with an inborn talent and appreciation for the clay. He was also far too intelligent and ambitious to waste his life baking dinnerware.

Finishing the last plate, she rose and stretched her back. She was limping less, but she tried to keep her weight off that knee as much as possible. She needed it to heal.

Wandering in to see what Adrian was doing in the kiln room, she nearly swallowed her tongue at the sight of him stripped half naked as he stoked the fire. Like some mighty Vulcan outlined against a fiery inferno, his bronzed back and shoulders glistened with sweat and rippled with power. The impact of all that raw male strength knocked the breath from her lungs.

Adrian swung around while her eyes were still wide and her breath hadn't returned. Using his shirt to mop the perspiration from his chest, he eyed her speculatively. His thick
black hair looked as if he'd just washed it, and the clip he used to hold it back had slipped on the slick wet strands, leaving a short piece to fall forward around his ear, accenting the high plane of his cheekbone. In the flickering light from the kiln the silver ring on his ear gleamed against his dark skin.

“See something you like?” he asked when she said nothing.

“What I like has nothing to do with anything.” Recovering some of her equilibrium, she turned to leave.
For heaven's sake, Faith
, she scolded inwardly,
you're almost thirty.
You've seen naked men. Deal with it.

“Why doesn't it?” he demanded, following her, grabbing a dry pullover golf shirt from the back of a chair. “Why can't you let yourself go, admit when you want something and go after it?”

He was too close, too raw, too physical, and too damned male. She rubbed her arms and stopped retreating at the worktable. She still didn't look at him. “That's what a child does,” she snapped. “Adults measure the cost.”

“Sex doesn't cost a damned thing.”

She could hear him pacing. She hoped he'd put his shirt on, but she wasn't certain she was even ready for that. It had never occurred to her to compare male buttocks as other women did. She'd never looked at a man and wondered what he would be like in bed. Tony had taught her sex, and she'd found it a passable duty, a wonderful example of how he needed her. So, obviously, sex was a lie.

She'd never, ever, looked at a man as she'd looked at Adrian, and imagined him naked, shoving her against a wall and pumping inside her. Her body was still weak from reaction.

“Maybe sex doesn't cost you anything,” she replied bitterly, “but it costs me far more than I can afford.”

He stalked around the table and slammed his hands down in front of her, staring into her face at eye level. “Why? It's a physical act of release, far more pleasant than tormenting ourselves like this.”

Guilty pleasure shivered under her skin at knowing he wanted her—mousy little Faith. But then, he'd been without
sex for four years and would probably make love to a chair leg at this point.

“Sex without an emotional commitment is an animal act,” she stated firmly, trying not to look too closely at the flash of his dark eyes. He had a thin, jutting patrician nose she admired entirely too well, and if she gazed at his mouth …

He jerked away from her to stalk the room again. His hair swung back and forth, and his lean hips moved with the lithe grace of a caged panther. She was shut up in a small room with a dangerous animal.

“Emotional commitment,” he spat out in disgust. “What the hell is an emotional commitment? Fury is an emotion. Frustration. Bitterness. Hell, I can give you emotion in spades. I could melt a little Nordic ice princess like you in a matter of minutes.”

That's what she was afraid of. “Adrian, we're both on edge and not thinking sensibly.” She tried to calm him, but she figured she had as much likelihood of accomplishing that as she would of dousing the kiln with words.

“We wouldn't be on edge if you'd let go and be yourself and forget all that prim and proper garbage Tony wanted from you.”

As soon as the words escaped him, Adrian threw up his hands in disgust with himself as much as her. There it was, in all its ignoble glory, the barrier that stood between them. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he swung to face her.

Her cheeks were pale and her eyes had hardened to shards of ice. While he burned like a cauldron of hot coals, she froze up tighter than any iceberg. He must be out of his mind, he thought, to think of making love to a female as frigid as this one.

Except he'd seen her on stage. She wasn't frigid.

“Sex is just a physical release,” he repeated. “Going for it on stage is a poor substitute.”

“I don't wish to continue this discussion,” she said coldly, gathering up her purse. “If you're done here, I'd like to leave.”

Oh, hell, he didn't know why he'd tried. Or he did know. That wide-eyed look of admiration in her spectacular eyes
had shot straight to his groin, and he'd turned rock hard in an instant like any adolescent. But he knew better than to listen to hormones.

He checked his watch. “Rex should be back shortly. Let me see if the temperature is holding steady, then we can leave.”

He damned well wanted her more than anything he'd wanted in his life. Right now he'd give up his law degree and his search for the evidence of his innocence if he could have this woman in his bed for a week.

He left her standing there, pale and shaken, while he checked on the fire. He
knew
better than to come at her that way. She didn't deserve his rage. But he was rapidly reaching the limit of rationality.

Returning to the workroom to find her examining Rex's god-awful tea sets, he put a hand to her spine and steered her toward the door. Even that contact shot steam through his ears.

“Come on. Cesar should have your things back from Knoxville now. You can dress like yourself again.”

In the familiar comfort of her navy blazer and cream silk slacks, Faith tucked her chignon into combs and wrapped confidence around herself once again. Cesar's tiny bathroom mirror told her she looked like Faith Hope, businesswoman, and not the shattered, ridiculous female Adrian had made her feel yesterday.

She didn't need sex or any man to make her whole. She was quite happy as herself. She'd be even happier once they found the money and the books and she could go home.

Returning her makeup kit to the tiny bedroom, she glanced in admiration at the vase she'd removed from the cardboard box in which Adrian had packed her storage items. She should never have hidden a thing of such beauty just because Tony had given it to her. She couldn't blame the vase for what Tony had done. When she returned home, she would put it in her window and redecorate.

Picking up her nearly empty purse, she joined Adrian in the kitchen. He was leaning against the kitchen sink, eating cereal. He looked up as she entered, but his gaze stayed shuttered, hiding the inferno he'd revealed yesterday.

“You talked to Annie?” he asked curtly.

“She called the Charlotte shelter,” she said. “They'll cash a trust fund check in exchange for a donation. Once this is all settled, I'll personally make good the difference.”

“
I
will,” he corrected, setting down the empty bowl.

She eyed him skeptically, but he stared at her with the pride of an arrogant aristocrat, and she didn't argue.

“We'll need good quality paper to print the letters,” she reminded him. “It could take us all week to scout the banks between here and Raleigh. I can't stay away that long.”

Politely, he didn't bother reminding her of the burglar. She didn't want to think of the violation of her home and shop right now. She was placing her bets on finding Tony's books in Charlotte, turning them over to the D.A., and returning to the business of living.

Sending letters to every bank in the state and waiting for their return would take far longer than she was prepared to wait. “You have the box keys?” she asked.

Adrian silently produced them from his pocket—his ticket to paradise.

They rode in silence to the shelter to cash the trust fund check, stopped at an office supply for the letterhead, then steered into traffic bound for the first bank on Faith's list.

“How can we tell if anyone is following us?” Nervously, she clasped her hands and watched the sideview mirror.

“We can't, not in this traffic.” Adrian expertly steered into a gap in the fast lane. “But unless someone knows where we're staying, they couldn't find us to follow us.”

That made sense. If someone knew where they were staying, they wouldn't
need
to follow them. They could have broken in during the night or anytime. Somehow, she didn't feel reassured.

“Could someone have followed Cesar from my apartment?”

“Going ninety miles per hour down those mountains at night when all anyone can see is headlights? They'd have to be crazy.”

He glanced over at her, and she tried to look composed. He was right. Knoxville was hours of heavy traffic away.

“We'll think of something,” he said soothingly. “For all we know, one of your bar admirers decided to stalk you. The burglaries might have nothing to do with any of this.”

That wasn't any more reassuring, and she knew better than to believe in coincidence. “I have new locks now. They can't get in. I'll be fine. I'd just like to find those books and get this over with.”

Maybe sometime in the next million years she'd rid herself of the vision of Adrian, nearly naked. Only right now, the vision grew clearer and more graphic every time she looked at him.

She didn't know if she was more afraid of him or the bad guy.

“Here's our first exit. Are you ready?” He asked it calmly, as if he had nothing riding on their success.

“I'm ready.” Far more ready than she had been last time. It was a miracle how her own clothes made a difference. She was Tony's wife in these clothes, the SouthPark matron who hobnobbed with the CEOs who commanded thousands of these tiny little branch banks. She fondled the strand of pearls at her throat, the symbol of the power and wealth she'd once possessed. She hadn't realized what a crutch money had been.

They had no luck at the first bank, or the second. Every exit was littered with branches from a dozen different financial institutions. If Tony had stuck with just one bank, the task would have been immensely easier.

By the time they reached the eighth or ninth brick box with columns, they had their routine perfected, right down to their polite smiles of regret at disturbing the manager with their request for a box that didn't exist.

“We knew it wouldn't be easy,” Adrian reminded her as they returned to the car after still another defeat. “Let's get some lunch.”

Well, at least they had some cash for food, thanks to the trust fund. Faith figured she should be grateful for what she had.

Instead, she simply wanted to kill Tony all over again.

“There are probably more banks in the Lake Norman area than there are in the whole world,” she grumbled as he headed for a nearby fast food outlet. She hadn't sampled so many different kinds of fast food since she was a kid in school. She'd already concluded half of America must subsist on grease and mayonnaise.

“I figure there's more in the south end. You still have a lot of farmland out here.”

Faith raised an eyebrow at a mile of brick and concrete shopping centers and offices. “Money is a crop these days?”

He grinned and accepted the greasy bag from the drive-through window. “I can see I'd better take you out of all this for a while. You get mean when frustrated.”