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Gabriel West: Still The One
Fiona Brand
Thunder rumbled and a flash of lightning briefly lit the gloom as she walked toward the stairwell of her apartment.
A footfall registered, out of sync with hers. She paused to listen, but almost instantly shook off the paranoia that gripped her. What she’d heard was probably an echo.
Another footfall sounded, this time sharply distinct. A raw flash of alarm went through her. A hand snaked out of the darkness and closed on her arm, wrenching her to a halt. Her arm jerked in automatic reflex as she spun, teeth bared, and stepped into her attacker, throwing him off balance as she snapped her elbow into a face eerily blacked out by a balaclava. He grunted with pain and released his hold.
In that instant she flung herself toward the elevator. A hand snagged at her jacket. Gritting her teeth, she jerked free. Relief flooded her as light flared across the bare expanse of concrete, spotlighting her in its beam. Gabriel West’s startled gaze locked with hers, then white light exploded in her head.
Dear Reader,
Our exciting month of May begins with another of bestselling author and reader favorite Fiona Brand’s Australian Alpha heroes. In Gabriel West: Still the One, we learn that former agent Gabriel West and his ex-wife have spent their years apart wishing they were back together again. And their wish is about to come true, but only because Tyler needs protection from whoever is trying to kill her—and Gabriel is just the man for the job.
Marie Ferrarella’s crossline continuity, THE MOM SQUAD, continues, and this month it’s Intimate Moments’ turn. In The Baby Mission, a pregnant special agent and her partner develop an interest in each other that extends beyond police matters. Kylie Brant goes on with THE TREMAINE TRADITION with Entrapment, in which wickedly handsome Sam Tremaine needs the heroine to use the less-than-savory parts of her past to help him capture an international criminal. Marilyn Tracy offers another story set on her Rancho Milagro, or Ranch of Miracles, with At Close Range, featuring a man scarred—inside and out—and the lovely rancher who can help heal him. And in Vickie Taylor’s The Last Honorable Man, a mother-to-be seeks protection from the man she’d been taught to view as the enemy—and finds a brand-new life for herself and her child in the process. In addition, Brenda Harlan makes her debut with McIver’s Mission, in which a beautiful attorney who’s spent her life protecting families now finds that she is in danger—and the handsome man who’s designated himself as her guardian poses the greatest threat of all.
Enjoy! And be sure to come back next month for more of the best romantic reading around, right here in Intimate Moments.
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
Gabriel West: Still the One
Fiona Brand
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
FIONA BRAND
has always wanted to write. After working eight years for the New Zealand Forest Service as a clerk, she decided she could spend at least that much time tying to get a romance novel published. Luckily, it only took five years, not eight. Fiona lives in a subtropical fishing and diving paradise called the Bay of Islands with her two children.
For Crazy Horse—
for the magic of who he is, his courage and spirit,
his uncanny immunity during battle. He’s my inspiration
for Gabriel West and one of my all-time heroes.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
The man walked out of the night, moving without haste, yet not dawdling, his gait fluid, smooth. He was big and sleek with muscle, his broad shoulders stretching his black T-shirt tight so that it clung like a second skin. The subtle arrogance to the tilt of his head, the gleam of light sliding over the taut swell of biceps, warned anyone who gave him so much as a passing glance that he wasn’t an easy mark. He carried no discernable firearm, but then he didn’t need an overt display of firepower; the body itself was a weapon.
The yellowish glare of a streetlamp slid over deceptively sleepy amber eyes and exotic cheekbones, a full, beautiful mouth framed by a square, stubbled jaw. A dark, masculine mane hung loose about his shoulders, accentuating the impression of danger.
The man was beautiful in the mesmerizing way of a fallen angel; the looks were a rare gift and a curse that had taught him early on to defend himself, then later, to assert enough dominance to ensure that he was left alone. The fact that his name was Gabriel was pure chance, a whim on the part of a mother who wasn’t sure which one of her paying customers had fathered him, or what had possessed her to carry the child to full term in the first place. Whichever way you looked at it, Gabriel West considered himself to have little in common with angels, fallen or otherwise.
Ahead, light slicked along metal as a car door swung open. West’s head came up, nostrils flaring, drinking in the steamy tropical scents of city and night as he deliberately let his mind drift, picking up on peripherals. A flicker of movement across the street signaled the presence of one of Renwick’s mercenaries. The inky darkness off to the left was a dead-end alley. Renwick would have placed another man there.
His lips barely moved as he relayed the information to the mobile unit that had shadowed him as far as the street corner, the dull black van blending with the night and the shabby conglomeration of buildings that lined the docks and signaled the edge of what passed for the red-light district in this town. The tiny state-of-the-art communication device masquerading as a stud in his ear gave two bursts of static in response, indicating that McKee, Sawyer and Lambert were in place.
He strolled from light into shadow, then back into light again, his gait unaltered as he passed the point of no return. He was committed.
Ahead, Renwick uncurled himself from the low-slung curves of a late-model Maserati. The door swung closed with an expensive thunk. The arms dealer was lean, dapper, ostensibly relaxed—on target for another profitable night. Everything was going to plan. Something was wrong.
Adrenaline pumped: West’s gut clenched in reflex. Renwick was alone; the absence of visible support was wrong. Somehow, in the few hours that had passed since their preliminary meeting in Renwick’s drab downtown office, the deal had gone sour.
He relayed the warning, knowing as he did so that the team would move in, poised to get him out if they could. Not that a clean rescue was probable now; he was well within Renwick’s circle of influence.
His options weren’t good. He could go for cover, and risk being pinned down, maybe even shot before the other team members could get to him, or he could keep his cool, get in close, use the car as a shield and Renwick for collateral to negotiate his ass out of there.
The cold warning increased the closer he got to Renwick, culminating in a preternatural tingle that stirred along the length of his spine and settled at his nape. He could feel the impending combat, almost taste it.
West felt the familiar shift inside, the peculiar calmness that came with battle—an altered state that freed him to act and react without conscious thought—and the odd, light-headed sensation, as if a part of him had drifted free, a cold observer to the act. He didn’t question the shift; it was as natural to him as breathing, a survival mechanism that had been in place since childhood, and one he’d consciously honed with years of meditation and martial arts. Odd as it seemed, the cold discipline required for both activities had dovetailed perfectly with the despair and savagery of his upbringing, binding the drifting, disparate parts of his being into a formidable whole. He’d learned early on to fight with everything that he had, and that included his mind. No matter how much edge he gave himself with weapons and a well-trained body, there was always someone bigger waiting to take him down.
A trickle of sweat eased down his spine. The muted thud of his boots hitting the pavement echoed dully, the sound almost instantly absorbed into the heavy press of the night.
He carried a knife in a spine sheath, another in a custom-made slot in his boot. A pocket-sized Walther was strapped to his left ankle; the small-calibre sidearm as slick a piece of hell as he’d ever handled. The meet with Renwick stipulated no firearms. Naturally, West had ignored the stipulation. Strolling into an arms deal without the benefit of a semi-automatic was about as close to naked as he ever wanted to get.
Renwick’s head lifted in a brief signal of recognition, his gaunt face taking on a yellowish hue in the glare of the sodium streetlamp, his dark gaze hooded. West noted the bulge under his left arm. He was carrying—naturally—a handgun so big it was wrecking the line of his jacket.
Grim humor dissolved the tension knotting his belly. Oh yeah, Renwick was an asshole: no style, no class.
A surge of recklessness flowered inside West, shafted through him on a hot, savage beat. His mouth curved in a slow, cold smile and he resisted the urge to close his eyes and ride out the hot feeling. That would get him killed for sure.
God, he was crazy. Certifiable. Renwick was itching to use some of the second-hand Russian weaponry he’d been hawking all through Indonesia and the South Pacific, and in the next few minutes he probably would. West could die, and he was suddenly enjoying himself, so alive he could hardly bear it, the rush better than sex. If the SAS psych team ever got their hands on him they’d lock him up and throw away the key.
A door popped open midway along the stretch of pavement between West and Renwick. Light flared across the street as two women emerged from a warehouse that, at four-thirty in the morning, should have been deserted. The door swung closed, the flat sound broken by the click of high heels on concrete.
The unexpectedness of the intrusion threw West off balance; his attention was caught by the tawny swing of hair shimmering around the first woman’s shoulders, the pure line of her profile.
Tyler.
The shock of recognition hit him like a belly punch even as his mind rejected the information. Tyler couldn’t be here. She was safe in New Zealand, thousands of miles away, but the notion persisted as the woman lifted a startled hand to sweep hair from her face.
A shadowy blur of movement snapped West’s gaze back to Renwick. He caught the dull gleam of a gun in the arms dealer’s hand.
He cursed, going wild inside, even as his fingers closed on the throwing knife. The woman whirled, face swamped by shadows. The glitter of her eyes clashed with West’s as Renwick’s arm came up.
Slow. He was too damned slow.
The thought hung in West’s mind as the knife flashed through the air and he dove, taking the woman down onto the pavement with him. In that split second he registered the flat report of the gun, once, twice—Renwick crumpling.
His shoulder slammed into the pavement, but he barely noticed the shock of the fall as he rolled free of the limp weight of the woman and came up into a crouch, the Walther in his hand. He fired across the street, then into the mouth of the alley, berating himself for not following his instincts and carrying a nine-millimetre weapon. The Walther was cool, but it was strictly a close-quarters weapon—short-barreled and light, the magazine fully loaded with only six shells.
Brick exploded behind him, showering him with fragments. A high-pitched moan, more animal than human, pierced the thick heaviness of the night as the second woman scrambled for the door she’d walked out of just seconds ago. West’s stomach knotted as he snaked, belly-flat, to reach the still form of the woman, the keening moan spinning him back to his years on the streets when he’d been little more than a child, fighting to eat, sometimes fighting to breathe after he’d endured beatings that had come close to killing him.
The cloying scents of blood and fear and cheap perfume flooded his nostrils as he clamped her slight body against his and crawled to the cover of Renwick’s car. She was still alive; he could hear the sound of her breathing, faint and very rapid, laced with a liquid rattle. His stomach knotted as he eased her flat beneath the wash of the streetlamp. Renwick had fired twice. One of those bullets had hit the woman. The large-calibre round had pierced her rib-cage, shattering bone and tearing an exit wound beneath one arm.
Cursing beneath his breath, he laid his gun down and propped her upright against the car, elevating the wound in an attempt to stem the flow of blood. Her head lolled as he tore his T-shirt off and bunched it over her chest and beneath her arm, applying what pressure he could without adding to her injuries, but the tell-tale sponginess indicated massive soft-tissue damage, and that more than one rib had been broken. With every shuddering rise and fall of her chest, fluid aspirated into her lungs. She was literally drowning in her own blood.
The roar of a vehicle accelerating down the street snapped West’s head up. The van fishtailed and shunted the back of Renwick’s car, riding up on the pavement and almost hitting West in the process. Disbelief punched through West. Carter, the crazy bastard, had come to get him out.
The street erupted with gunfire. The crack of a rifle shot bounced off the stained facades of warehouses and dilapidated shop frontages. The sharp rat-tat-tat of rounds hitting metal punctuated the tortured whine of a ricochet. The stench of cordite hung in the air, an acrid contrast to the salt tang of the sea and the pervasive smell of rancid fish oil from the nearby docks.
The van door was flung wide. Carter swore, his voice gravelly as he flowed out onto the pavement and kicked the door shut with one booted foot. The moment took on a surreal quality as West pressed his fingers to the side of the woman’s throat, searched for a pulse, and didn’t find one.
A woman had just died, and Carter was bitching about who was going to pay for the van.
More gunshots sounded, followed by a flurry of automatic fire. Minutes later the street was silent, the absence of sound faintly shocking.
It was over.
West didn’t question the sense of finality that settled inside him, or the spookiness that went with knowing. To him, his gut reactions were simply an extension of the physical reflexes he’d trained into his body, and over the years he’d learned to trust in them.
Gently, he let the woman go, sat back on his heels and let out a breath.
He studied her face in the wash of the streetlight, abruptly curious. He touched her cheek. She wasn’t the wife he’d walked out on five years ago, but she was someone, and she’d taken a bullet that had been meant for him. He was covered in her blood.
Gently, he laid her flat on the sidewalk, retrieved his damp, stained T-shirt and reached for dispassion.
Carter’s hand landed on his shoulder. He heard his voice, recognized the soothing rumble. This was a job, and the lady—a hooker—had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It had been quick, one second she’d been there, panicked gaze locked on his, the next…
The crazy thing was, she hadn’t even looked like Tyler. She’d walked like her, had that long pretty hair, a certain way of holding her head. That was all it had taken and he’d lost it. Dropped the ball.
Sweet Jesus… West lurched to his feet, turned aside from the two bodies, Renwick’s still oddly elegant in death. He ran the fingers of one hand through his hair, took a deep breath, and then another, and something broke apart inside him, an essential hardness as much a part of him as flesh and bone. For years he’d walked an edge, caught between not caring, and caring too much…a hungry street kid’s recipe for survival. And like the street-smart kid he’d once been, he still reached for the cool not to feel. Feelings shoved you off balance, opened you up….
He knew what was happening—it had been creeping up on him for months. There was even a name for it: battle fatigue. He was tired, his commitment for the job gone. He was still sharp, but it was becoming more and more of an effort to maintain the level of focus and acuity required for active undercover operations. Whatever he chose to label it, the fact remained—he’d been in the military too long.
Two members of the team, McKee and Sawyer, melted out of the darkness, followed seconds later by the fifth and final member, Lambert. Lambert made brief, neutral eye contact with West. McKee and Sawyer both gave him a wide berth.
West didn’t bother with the mental shrug. He had a reputation for being cold and distant—a little scary. He never did anything to alter that impression because the solitude suited him. He’d never been anything but a loner, and at thirty-one years of age the pattern was ingrained. He had friends, some of them as close as he was ever likely to get to actually having family, but essentially he was alone.
He examined the tinge of gray lightening the grim canyon of the street, turned toward what passed for sunrise in this city of heat and humidity and jungle mists. In half an hour this place would be a steam bath, the sun dominating a hot, clear sky, the streets teeming with raucous life.
He’d come close to not seeing it.
Lambert handed him his knife. West took the blade, cleaned it on his T-shirt, then methodically slipped it back into its spine sheath. Carter tossed him a bottle of water, took his cell phone out and called in an ambulance. West tipped his head back and drank, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then tipped water over his naked torso to clean off the blood. He became aware that Lambert was surreptitiously watching him—read the repelled fascination in the man’s eyes. Lambert was a rookie, ten years younger and fresh-faced—a nice boy doing a dirty job. He hadn’t liked handling the knife, or the way Renwick and the woman had died.
There was blood everywhere, still smeared across West’s chest, streaking the backs of his hands. His hair was tangled around his face, sticking to his shoulders. He must look like a damn vampire…not someone Lambert, or the other two, would ever want to get comfortable with.
A hot blast of emotion threatened to burn through his icy calm. Not someone that the majority of the human race would ever be comfortable with, come to that.
Something of what he was feeling must have registered with the younger man. His gaze slid away, locked on the body of the woman lying on the ground. Abruptly, he wheeled and joined Sawyer and McKee in the back of the van.
West knew what was going through Lambert’s mind. Over the years he’d garnered a reputation for being lucky—of having some kind of magical immunity, so that when everything went to hell West walked away with barely a scratch. There were men who wouldn’t work with him because that fact spooked them. They figured they’d be the ones to die.
Not for the first time West worried at his own apparent good luck. The fact was he had a reckless streak—a bad, bad habit that kept him choosing risky assignments and walking the edge. In a numbers game, he’d long since played out the odds. Sometimes the way he was scared him. He’d gotten too cold, too fatalistic about dying.
He eyed the steadily increasing glow in the east, felt the first touch of heat burning through the early-morning mists.
He hadn’t felt cold or fatalistic when he’d thought it was Tyler on the street. Fear had lashed through him. Every cell in his body had reacted.
His jaw clenched against a replay of the panic that had shafted through him when he’d thought his wife was about to walk straight into the barrel of Renwick’s gun. In that moment a part of him had gone wild. He hadn’t cared if Renwick’s bullets had slammed into his chest; all he’d wanted to do was save Tyler.
He took another deep breath, easing the tension in his belly. Suddenly, he felt old and tired, sick of death and meanness. He wanted…home.
Oh, yeah, he thought grimly, that would undo him. He had no business even thinking about home, or about Tyler.
As he swung into the van and snapped the door closed, he wondered what Tyler was doing now—this very second. He hadn’t so much as glimpsed her for months.
An abrupt hunger to be with the woman he’d walked out on, but never succeeded in forgetting, ate at him, sharp and deep. Temper erupted and he swore beneath his breath.
Carter glared at him as he started the van and reversed, disengaging from the totaled rear of Renwick’s car with a squeal of torn metal. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
Carter changed gear and accelerated onto the street, barely missing clipping the mangled Maserati. “You’re crazy, that’s what’s wrong. I shouldn’t have let you walk down that street. You’ve got a damned death wish.”
“If anyone’s got a death wish, it’s the guy driving this clapped-out van.” West strapped on his seat belt. When Carter was behind the wheel, he was the safest guy on the planet.
“My driving saved your sorry ass.”
West couldn’t argue with that. Carter had driven the van into the center of the firefight, risking his own safety to provide West with cover. The van had taken the brunt of the fire and now resembled nothing so much as a colander. The rental firm would have a hernia, and Carter had bought himself a good day’s worth of paperwork and grief trying to justify the expenditure.
Carter braked at an intersection. Cars had begun to fill the streets—early morning commuters and taxis heading for the airport to catch passengers off the red-eye flights. A truck loaded with melons shifted down a gear and eased through the intersection, heading for the markets. Port Moresby was waking up.
An aging ambulance screamed past them, lights flashing. A cold chill chased across West’s skin, twitched deep in his belly, even though the ambient temperature was warm. He lifted a hand to his face, rubbed compulsively at his temples.
A fine tremor ran through his hands. He let out a breath. That was shaky, too.
He was going into shock.
Oh, jeez…damn. Tyler.
A hot pain burst to life in the center of his chest. That’s what had done it. He’d thought it was her, and now he was going to pieces.
He closed his eyes and let his head drop back onto the cracked vinyl of the seat. The breath sifted from between his teeth. Tyler.
He was going crazy. The psych team would chew him up, spit him out, and that was if he didn’t get himself committed first.
Lately—the last couple of months—as hard as he’d tried, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Chapter 2
One month later, Auckland, New Zealand.
Gabriel West was back in her life.
Dr. Tyler Laine’s fingers slipped on her laptop keyboard. The machine beeped, and a cartoon character popped onto the screen. A little balloon message sprang out of the side of its head, politely asking if she needed help.
For long seconds, Tyler stared blankly at the ridiculous creature with its cheerful face, her overtired mind abruptly incapable of grasping the simple actions required to close the help file.
She’d been making lists, staring at lists, for hours, trying to shed some light on the mystery of who had walked into her family’s vault and stolen a set of ancient jade artifacts that had been under her care for the past three months, before her reputation and her career were shredded beyond redemption. She needed to make sense of a burglary that didn’t make any kind of normal sense.
The jade pieces were unique, priceless, but it wasn’t so much the quality of the objects, but their age and the mystery shrouding them that had caught and held the attention of experts and collectors alike.
Jade, like many minerals, could generally be traced to its country of origin. It was simply a matter of profiling the mineral content and then matching it up with the characteristics exhibited by jade from different countries or locations. Sometimes the jade could even be traced to the particular mine it had come from. The set of three objects had been analyzed and identified as extraordinarily high-quality nephrite, originating from the Sinkiang region in China. The objects: belt and scabbard accoutrements, and a round vessel carved in the shape of a bird, had also been dated. They were neolithic in origin and had been carved approximately three and a half thousand years ago, during the Shang dynasty. All three pieces were old enough, and rare enough, to be the jewel in any collection without the added mystery of how they had come to be included with Maori grave goods on the small island nation of Aotearoa, New Zealand, thousands of miles away from China.
It wasn’t unusual for artifacts to be stolen from museums, or looted from archeological sites. The theft of artifacts from war-torn countries was rife. But it was unusual for anyone to want to steal artifacts that were so world-renowned they could never hope to display them.
Anger flickered, warming her, but even that emotion had become faded, distant, as exhaustion closed in on her, sucking the last remnants of her vitality so that she simply sat, motionless, her eyes fixed on the screen until the minute irritation of the electronic flicker made her blink.
A fine tremor ran through her, jerking her back to an awareness of just how punchy she’d become. Her mind was functioning, barely, but her body was closing down; her pulse slow, viscid—her breathing shallow and long-drawn-out.
She hadn’t slept more than four hours in the last seventy-two, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten anything that could remotely pass for a square meal. She could remember taking a few bites of a sandwich in the half-hour respite she’d had between police interviews that afternoon, but she couldn’t for the life of her recall what had been in the sandwich. She’d been having trouble concentrating all day, her mind blanking out for short periods of time. If she closed her eyes now, she would fall asleep in her chair.
Her hand found the mouse, her fingers stiff and clumsy as she moved it on the pad until she located the electronic cursor on the screen, then centered it on the cartoon character.
Help.
She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “If you’ve got an FBI unit on hold…maybe.”
She clicked the mouse, bringing up the menu, then closed the file, sending the little intruder back into its hidey-hole.
Right now she could use the FBI, Interpol, the CIA, a SWAT team…whatever.
Letting out a breath, she hooked off her spectacles, sat back from the bright glow of light pooling her desk and ran a hand over her sleek knot of hair to loosen the tension.
The list of private collectors she’d been compiling from Laine’s sales records dating back for the past ten years was starkly illuminated by the bluish glow of the screen. The names could have been written in Chinese characters for all the good it did her.
Her eyelids drooped again, and a picture of West strolling toward his car as she’d left for work this morning floated into her mind and she blinked, banishing the image.
She desperately needed to work, to focus, but the fact that the husband who had walked out on her five years ago was now practically her next-door neighbor kept distracting her, so that she found herself staring into space, precious minutes out of her long working day lost.
Her stomach rumbled. Frowning, she checked her watch. Almost eight. Past time she was out of here.
“Cancel the FBI unit.” She smothered a yawn as she saved the file to a disk. “What I need is an analyst.”
The tawny gleam of light off an egg-shaped tiger’s-eye worry stone caught her eye as she waited for her computer to shut down. Absently, Tyler picked it up, her fingers smoothing the silky curves, her mind abruptly shifting back to a time, eight years ago, when she’d been mesmerized by eyes that had burned with the same intense shades of gold.
Gabriel.
Dispassionately, she examined the tension that held her motionless when all she wanted to do was leave the office, drive home, ransack the fridge for a snack, then crawl into bed and forget that the world she’d so carefully constructed around herself since she was eight years old was coming apart.
She was crazy even to examine the past. Five years ago she’d asked West to leave, and the husband she’d never been able to tame had packed his bags and walked, leaving for another secret assignment in some foreign country—preferring the edgy danger of the SAS, the hardship and the uncertainties—maybe even a bullet in the dark—to spending time with her.
For months she’d clung to the fantasy that he’d come back.
Well, he had come back. She just hadn’t ever imagined it would be five years later, and that they’d be neighbors.
Jerkily, Tyler set the tiger’s-eye stone down. The gleam of the worry stone continued to draw her eye as she slipped the disk into a side pocket in her handbag, unplugged her laptop and placed it into her briefcase along with the notes she’d made. She snapped the case closed and picked it up by the grip, hooked her handbag over her shoulder and rose to her feet.
She should have gotten rid of the tiger’s eye years ago. She must have thrown it away a dozen times, only to pull it out of the bin and dust it off. The problem was that it was irritatingly beautiful. The hot flashes of gold and copper always caught at her and she just couldn’t bring herself to chuck something so elegant and enduring away.
Her problem was she never could let go, never could throw away something she’d cherished, even if the cherishing was well in the past. Once she loved someone or something, she hung on for grim death. When it came to relationships, her loyalty wasn’t in question, just her sanity.
Which was probably why she’d never quite been able to cut West out of her life.
The thought hit her square in the chest, literally stopping her in her tracks. The possibility—however remote—that West could still have some call on her emotions.
Uh-oh. No way. She didn’t still care for West.
There were lots of reasons why she shouldn’t even like him…if she ever thought of him at all, although the last few months, crazy as it seemed, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. It was as if her mind had been caught up in some kind of loop. She’d even dreamed about him, which was beyond strange, because she hadn’t glimpsed him more than a handful of times in as many years.
She’d attributed the phenomena to stress and a ticking biological clock. She was twenty-eight, alone, and still tied to a marriage with West for the simple reason that neither of them had bothered to dissolve it.
Maybe it was cowardly, but she’d become used to living in relationship limbo, and had even welcomed it at times because it was a convenient shield when all she’d wanted to do after West had left was crawl into a dark hole and hide. It had taken her months to feel even remotely normal, and then she’d made sure she was too busy with study and work and establishing her career to think about him or the shipwrecked marriage—or to want the turmoil of falling in love again.
The thought that she’d clung to the legalities of her marriage because some remote part of her still wanted West made her go still inside, but she refused to yield to the possibility. She wasn’t that needy.
West still affected her, she was big enough to admit that, but any woman with red blood pumping through her veins would find it hard to ignore him.
She stepped out of her office and pulled the door closed behind her. Stop thinking about him.
There was absolutely no point. Like the jades and artifacts she worked with, Gabriel West was past history—way in the past. She had wanted forever, and he hadn’t. End of story. Getting close to West had been beyond what she could achieve. She simply hadn’t had what it took to unlock whatever had passed for his heart.
She strolled slowly along the deserted, darkened corridor, shoes sinking into thick soft carpet as she passed the open double doors to one of the main display rooms. The musical ripple of water from a fountain almost masked the faint click of a door closing.
She froze. A chill swept down her spine. Someone was in the building with her.
Gently, she opened her briefcase, extracted her cell phone and pressed the short dial that would put her through to the night watchman. No alarms had gone off, the security system hadn’t been breached, but that didn’t mean safety. The stolen artifacts had disappeared without one alarm being tripped.
It could be the night watchman, or a staff member working late, as she was. The auction house was huge, and dealt in art, antiques and estate jewelry as well as Asian and Pacific-Rim artifacts. A number of Laine’s staff had clearance to be in the building, although after the theft had been discovered three days ago they’d clamped down on security, and most of the keys had been handed in and security clearances revoked.
Before the call could be picked up, the night watchman, Charlie Watson, stepped through a side door.
“Everything all right, Miss Laine?”
Tyler let out a breath and disconnected the call. “I heard a noise and got spooked. I was just ringing you to check if there was anyone else in the building.”
Charlie’s gaze lacked its usual warmth and slid away too quickly. “It was probably Mr. Laine you heard. He just left.”
Mr. Laine. Last week Charlie would have referred to her adoptive brother as Richard. Tyler’s stomach tightened at the loss of Charlie’s easy manner. Everyone at Laine’s was on edge; the police investigation and the intense media speculation had seen to that. But now that the first shock of the theft had passed, an uncomfortable speculation had set in—the kind of speculation Tyler should have been prepared for.
She had worked hard for Laine’s—she’d worked even harder to be a part of her family—but there was no getting past the fact that she had been adopted into the wealthy jeweler family, not born into it. Pretty clothes and an exclusive education aside, she was the cuckoo in Laine’s nest, with a murky past the media had latched on to like a starving dog closing its jaws on a juicy bone. She didn’t need it spelled out that Charlie, who had always gone out of his way to be pleasant to her before, thought it was more than likely that she had had something to do with the theft.
He strolled past her into the display room. “Guess we’re all a little jumpy since the theft.”
He cast his eye over a glassed-in display of ivory that Tyler had catalogued and put together just before the jade had disappeared from a vault that had ten-inch steel walls, twenty-four-hour computer and camera surveillance, and a time lock that sealed it shut from five-thirty at night until eight in the morning.
A wave of weariness washed through Tyler as she slipped the cell phone back into her briefcase. “What do you think of the ivory?”
Charlie shoved his hands in his pockets and stared assessingly at the exquisitely carved set of Indonesian amulets. His gaze studiously avoided hers. “Not as pretty as the jade.”
In Tyler’s mind, as outwardly plain and workman-like as the jade was, nothing was as “pretty.”
When she’d first held the scabbard accoutrement she’d been filled with an inexplicable excitement that had gone beyond the thrill of finding artifacts that had been made and used by people not just centuries ago, but milleniums. Her palms had tingled, and heat had swept through her. She’d lost long minutes while she’d sat, the piece held loosely cupped in the palms of her hands—her mind oddly disconnected. It had taken the persistent buzz of the phone on her desk to pull her back to the present, and even then the subtle, tingling flow had continued, as if the crystalline grains contained within their cool green matrix the fiery imprint of life. The belt ornament and the carved bird had both felt similar, but neither was as powerful as the scabbard accoutrement, which was a warrior’s piece, worn thin with time—smooth and uncomplicated—designed to encircle the sheath of a sword and proclaim, in this instance, not the warlord the warrior fought for, but his faith.
It was possible the warrior had either been a warlord himself, with no further insignia other than the solar symbol required, or he could have been one of the early warrior monks, predating the Shaolin.
The mystery of who had owned and used the jade, and how Chinese artifacts had come to be entombed in a Maori burial cave aside, the pieces had grabbed her at a deeper level than any other artifacts ever had. She’d experienced moments of connection with other objects before, as if the artifact in some strange way held the essence of a different time or place, or even a person, but never as strongly as this.
When the jade had been stolen, she’d felt a sense of violation out of all proportion to what she should have felt—as if the thief had walked into her home and taken a very private possession.
Despite the fact that her only link with the jade was a purely business one, and that the possession of the pieces was open to public debate, in a strange way, on a very personal level, the jade had belonged to her.
Fifteen minutes later, Tyler drove into the underground entrance of her apartment building, escaping the leading edge of a tropical storm front that had swept down from the north.
She parked in her space, gathered her briefcase, and locked the car, shivering as a damp blast of air tugged at her lightweight jacket and skirt, and frowning because the garage was close to pitch-black. Several of the lights must have died at once, or else the storm had knocked them out, leaving only the lights above the elevator and those in the stairwell shining.
Thunder rumbled and a flicker of lightning briefly lit the gloom as she walked toward the stairwell. Her apartment was on the ground floor—a luxury she’d been happy to afford for herself because the gardens around the apartment block were so beautiful. When she came home from work, she liked nothing better than to sit out on her tiny sun-drenched terrace, surrounded by cool, glossy green rhododendrons and nikau palms and fall asleep on her lounger reading a book.
A footfall registered, out of sync with hers. She paused to listen, but almost instantly shook off the paranoia that gripped her. No other vehicle had entered the garage since she’d arrived. What she’d heard had probably been an echo of her own step bouncing off the concrete walls.
Lately, she’d been jumping at her own shadow. A few odd things had happened, including several phone calls from someone who’d hung up as soon as she’d answered. On a couple of occasions she’d been certain that she’d been followed, even though she hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of anyone.
Another footfall sounded, this time sharply distinct. A raw flash of alarm went through her and her step quickened. She threw an assessing glance around the gloomy cavern of the garage.
A hand snaked out of darkness and closed on her arm, wrenching her to a halt. Adrenaline flooded her system, almost stopping her heart. Her arm jerked in automatic reflex as she spun, teeth bared, and stepped into her attacker, throwing him off balance as she snapped her elbow into a face that was eerily blanked out by a balaclava. He grunted with pain and released his hold. A second man materialized out of the smothering blackness and ripped the briefcase from her.
Fear and rage and the sharp instincts of a child who’d spent more time defending herself than she’d ever spent with tea sets or dolls burst hotly through her. With her right hand now free, she swung, fingers bunched into a tight fist, and connected with the solid bone of a jaw, snapping her attacker’s head back. A strangled sound burst from his mouth, and the balaclava was knocked askew, giving her a glimpse of dark skin and high, slanted cheekbones as she wheeled, holding her handbag to her chest so that there was nothing trailing for either man to grab, and flung herself toward the elevator.
A hand snagged at her jacket. Gritting her teeth, she wrenched free. Hair spilled around her face, half blinding her, and in that moment the doors of the elevator slid open. Relief flooded her as light flared across the bare expanse of concrete, spotlighting her in its beam so that she felt like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights. West’s startled gaze locked with hers, then white light exploded in her head.
Chapter 3
West reached Tyler a split second after she crumpled.
After the initial kick of surprise, he was rock steady, breathing controlled. His mind shifted smoothly through his options, the change from civilian to soldier instantaneous.
Aside from the light pouring from the elevator and the stairwell, the car park was abnormally dark. Someone had knocked the lights out, which meant that the attack was planned. West eased forward to crouch over Tyler, at the same time straining to listen, to get some idea of the direction in which the two men had gone, but the rumble of the storm and the heavy drumbeat of rain effectively muffled sound.
A faint scrape of metal on metal jerked West’s head around. He probed the silent reaches of the underground car park, systematically examining the ranks of vehicles, his mind loose, open to peripheral data he might otherwise miss, open to that other sense that was as much a part of him as breathing. An icy calmness gripped him like a cold hand at his nape. The men who had attacked Tyler were still here.
A flash of movement drew his eye. The cough of a car starting bounced off the walls, and lights swept the gloom as the vehicle spun and accelerated toward the exit. Abruptly, the roar of the engine cut out as the car took the ramp up onto the street.
West switched his attention back to Tyler. A disorienting sense of dГ©jГ vu transported him back to a night one month ago and the disastrous meet with Renwick.
She was lying on her side, still and painfully exposed in the wash of light from the elevator, tawny hair a silky pool around her face, the short skirt of her tailored suit revealing a tanned length of elegant leg that made her seem both exotic and fragile against the grim crudity of the underground car park.
At first glance he couldn’t see any blood. West gently turned her on her back, as he searched for the wound. His heart slammed in his chest when he found the goose egg on the side of her head and felt the dampness of blood.
“West?” Tyler blinked, and lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the multi-hued glare of light that shifted across her vision. She felt sluggish and sick, and her head felt strange—hot and cold, and prickling—and she was having trouble focusing. There were two of West, and in her opinion, one had always been more than enough.
The chill of the dusty concrete struck through the crumpled cotton of her suit, making her shiver. Awkwardly, she pushed herself into a sitting position, ignoring his sharp demand that she stay where she was. She needed to get up, get moving.
Her mind flinched from the fact that she’d been hit on the head, but there was no other explanation for her to be lying on the garage floor. Her right hand was numb, and her arm and shoulder hurt, but she managed to wobble onto her knees. She heard West’s soft curse, then his hands closed on her arms, steadying her, and she didn’t complain because she was having trouble orienting herself at all.
He cupped her chin, his fingers startlingly hot against her skin, and abruptly his face snapped into focus.
He stared intently into her eyes. “What’s your name?”
Bemused, Tyler answered.
“Today’s date?”
Pinpointing the date was more difficult, but that was mostly because she hadn’t paid much attention to dates lately. She repeated the date. “I don’t have any memory loss.”
As disoriented as she felt, she knew she’d been mugged and knocked out. The sequence of events was burned into her mind like a series of freeze frames. She could remember the moment her briefcase had been wrenched from her grip, the flash of light when she’d been hit.
A car swept into the underground garage and she tensed, her breath coming in sharply.
“Don’t hit me,” West murmured, and for the first time she focused directly on his face: hot gold eyes, tanned olive skin, black hair tumbled and loose around his shoulders—the glitter of a silver stud in his ear.
He looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed, sleepy and unkempt, as alert as a cat, and through the throbbing whirl of nausea and exhaustion she wondered—and not for the first time—if he slept alone.
Something grabbed in her throat, her heart, a hot pulse of emotion that shook her to the core.
Hit West? Now there was a fantasy…. She just needed her head to stop spinning first.
His fingers closed warmly around her clenched fist, making her aware of the numbing ache in her knuckles, the symphony of pain that stretched from her fingertips all the way to her shoulder, skipping her face, then throbbing somewhere deep in her skull.
“Let me see,” he demanded softly. “Open your hand.”
For the craziest moment she thought he’d said, “Open your heart.”
She couldn’t help the bemused smile that twitched at her lips. The pain aside, she felt ridiculous—giddy—like a drunk on a bender. “Last time I heard, you weren’t a medical doctor.”
His mouth curved in a quick, hard smile. “I’ve been called a lot of names, but never that.”
Reluctantly, she uncurled her fingers. God, she hated it when she got hurt—hated to look at the damage. She heard his rough intake of breath.
“Oh, jeez, you belted him. Where in hell did you learn to hit like that?”
She ignored his question in favor of surveying her swollen knuckles, and the grazes decorating them. “I broke his jaw,” she said with satisfaction. “I felt it go.”
“Are you hurt anywhere else?”
She glanced around and saw her handbag lying beside her. With an effort of will, she snagged the strap. At least she still had her credit cards and her driver’s license, and they hadn’t gotten her car keys. “Yeah, in my heart. They took my laptop. The bastards took my laptop.”
She thought he said, “When did you get so tough?” then a wave of dizziness caught her.
She leaned into his shoulder and gulped down a deep breath, which didn’t do much to alleviate the dizziness or the pain, then wound an arm around his neck, searching for the leverage to get to her feet. It struck her that in the last five years West had never been so useful.
She pushed against his shoulder, but a warm palm cupped her nape, effectively holding her in place and making her feel as weak as a day-old kitten.
“Don’t you ever give up? Stay still. You’ve got a head wound and you’re bleeding. I’m going to check you out a bit more, then get you to a hospital.”
“I’m not going to a hospital. I hate hospitals.”
“That’s one thing we’ve got in common.”
As he shrugged out of his leather jacket and draped it around her shoulders, swamping her in heavy, soft warmth, the rich scent of leather, she worried at the oddness of the terse comment. As far as she was concerned the only thing they actually had in common was a marriage certificate. Blinking, she resisted the urge to let her forehead rest on his shoulder again, or even worse, snuggle into the curve of his neck. She wasn’t a leaner—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d leaned on anyone—but right now the temptation was almost too much. She’d been exhausted before the attack; now she felt as though she was swimming through molasses. “I feel…strange—”
“Stay awake.”
She felt his fingers moving gently over her scalp. He found a tender spot and she winced.
His breath stirred in her hair. “Oh yeah, he hit you good. You’ve got a lump, and a cut that’s going to need stitching. Go to sleep and I’ll tan your hide.”
The unexpected humor would have made her smile if she hadn’t felt so startled and so sick. “Promises,” she muttered, then everything receded, slipping into blackness again.
A hoarse curse scraped from West’s throat as Tyler sagged into his chest. He caught her hard against him, lowered her to the concrete, then on another soft curse, jerked his T-shirt over his head, tore a strip of white interlock off and bandaged the seeping cut on the side of her head. When he lifted her into his arms, her head lolled against his shoulder and fear shafted through him. Head wounds were dicey things, she’d wake up with the mother of all headaches at the very least. He refused to think about other possibilities.
Seconds later he strapped Tyler into the passenger seat of his car, slid behind the wheel and searched one-handed for his cell phone as he took the ramp out of the underground garage.
He found the phone, pressed the emergency code, and waited for the operator to put him through to Accident and Emergency. When the hospital had all the details, he settled down to driving, the damp night air chill on his bare skin as he shoved the car through traffic. Rain continued to stream down in a light, steady drizzle that rose up off the slick streets as a thin mist, wreathing the fast-moving, raucous flow of inner-city traffic.
West’s heart was pounding, his belly tight with apprehension. He felt savage, wary and electrified by what had just happened. His mind fastened on the moment when the elevator doors had opened and Tyler’s dark gaze had found his, hooked somewhere deep inside him and clung. That moment had almost stopped his heart.
He’d moved into the apartment in Tyler’s building with the specific purpose of getting close to his wife, but a part of him hadn’t believed Tyler would ever allow him close again.
Just minutes ago she’d all but crawled inside his skin.
The lights ahead flashed red. He swore beneath his breath, considered running the light, then braked.
The abrupt jolting motion sent a shaft of pain through Tyler’s head. She winced and opened her eyes, for a moment disoriented by the glare of lights off rain-slick roads, and West sitting beside her, his torso bare. The last thing she remembered she’d been kneeling on cold concrete, leaning on West, and he’d been wearing a T-shirt.
The lights changed. West accelerated and, gingerly, she straightened, keeping her head as still as possible. The second she moved, she felt the touch of West’s gaze as powerfully as if he’d reached out and physically touched her. “How long have I been out?”
“Five minutes. We’ll be at the hospital in two. And don’t argue. Aside from needing stitches you’ve probably got a concussion.”
“That’s a safe bet.” Her head throbbed with a deep, frightening ache and she was seeing colors. That was the clincher. The only other time she could remember seeing colors had been when she’d been thrown from a horse at age thirteen, without the benefit of a protective helmet.
West turned into a car-park entrance and pulled into a space. Tyler recognized the A&E entrance of Auckland Hospital.
She reached up to touch the bandage that was wound around her head, and somehow managed to misjudge the distance so that her fingers connected with her head more violently than she’d intended. Hot pain flashed through her skull, and her stomach rolled.
She sucked in a shallow breath, then another, and groped for the door handle. “I’m going to be sick.”
Instead of the door releasing she must have hit the window button because glass slid down and damp air flowed across her face. She heard a soft imprecation. Seconds later her door swung open and West leaned in, released her seat belt, and she found herself hauled out into the rain. His arms came around her as her stomach cramped painfully, anchoring her against him as she emptied the meagre contents of her stomach into the shrubbery bordering the car park.
When she was finished she sagged against him, uncaring that it was raining and that they were both getting wet. An odd peacefulness settled over her at his silent support, his heat and strength engulfing her. All of the issues that existed between them aside, she was too needy, in too much pain, and too disoriented to do anything but accept his help.
The thought drifted into her mind that West might have broken her heart, but he had never broken her trust.
As crazy as it seemed, it was true. He had made promises, and he had kept them, and she’d married him knowing that their relationship would be constantly sidelined by SAS operations. If she was honest, in that sense, she had let him down.
A car cruised past. The bright gleam of headlights scythed the drizzle and broke the fragile peace.
“Are you ready to make a move?” West’s voice was low, with that calm note that said he would stay here holding her in the rain if that was what she wanted.
She’d forgotten that about him—that still, quiet quality. Years ago it had intrigued her. She’d fallen in love with his dark, soft voice, but somewhere along the way, the very qualities that had drawn her so powerfully had started to grate.
He had been too controlled, too patient, and she hadn’t had enough of either quality.
“Can you walk?” His voice was close to her ear.
“Just.”
He left her leaning against the car while he closed the window and collected her bag and the leather jacket. She heard the gentle thunk of locks engaging, then he draped the jacket over her shoulders, wrapped his arm around her waist and urged her toward the brightly lit entrance of A&E.
The rain eased off as they approached the steps, leaving the night still and sodden and heavy with the scents of car exhaust and bitumen.
Tyler lifted her head and caught her reflection in the glass doors, then wished she hadn’t. Her face was as white as the makeshift bandage around her head; her hair was straggling around her shoulders and what she could see of her suit beneath the jacket was wrinkled and sticking clammily to her skin.
West, in stark contrast, looked fresh and sharp and gorgeous, his bronzed shoulders sleek and glistening under the lights. The fact that he had no shirt didn’t seem to affect him. “You know, West, I had this fantasy of how in control I’d be the next time I bumped into you. This isn’t it.”
“Tell me about it.” He paused on the steps and produced a clean handkerchief so she could wipe her face.
Groggy as she was, she noticed it was monogrammed. “You get your handkerchiefs monogrammed?”
“Don’t crucify me over it. They were a gift from a friend.” An offbeat smile flitted across his mouth. “Roma McCabe gives them to me at Christmas just to tick me off.”
The humor in his voice, the sheer intimacy of the gift threw Tyler off balance. Numbly, she wiped her face and blew her nose. She knew who Roma McCabe was—the only daughter of the wealthy and powerful Lombard family. She was also aware of West’s business connections with that family, and that Roma had married one of West’s friends, Ben McCabe, but somehow the closeness of the connection had never sunk in. She had always considered West to be a loner—a man no one could ever truly get close to—most especially not a woman.
It registered that despite having lived with West for three years, she didn’t know him at all.
It also registered that against all the odds she was jealous.
The wail of an arriving ambulance went through West like a knife as the doors to the brightly lit waiting room slid open, flooding his nostrils with the smells of antiseptics and cleaners, the stale miasma of too many people. The abrupt sensory overload briefly spun him back to his childhood and early teens, to broken ribs and pain and, once, the wrong end of a knife. The proximity of sick, hurt people—the hospital itself—closed around him, made the back of his throat tighten. He dipped and nuzzled the top of Tyler’s head, breathed in her pretty, subtle scents, at once taking refuge in the woman in his arms, and conferring protection. If he’d had any doubts before about walking back into Tyler’s life, they were gone.
She might not like it, but right now, she needed him.
Chapter 4
Late-morning sunlight angled through Tyler’s hospital-room window, flooding the crowded room with a brilliance that made her wince as she straightened from gathering her clothes and shoes from the small bedside locker. With careful movements, she transferred the items into the small overnight bag that was lying open on her bed.
Apart from Detective Farrell and her father’s personal assistant, Claire Wheeler, the room was full of men: her father, Harrison, and her brother, Richard, Ray Cornell, the investigating detective, and two of Laine’s key managers, Kyle Montgomery and Ashley James.
They were all here ostensibly out of concern for her welfare, but Tyler couldn’t help a spurt of cynicism at that thought. Over the past few days, after the initial storm of publicity over the theft, she’d noticed her work colleagues had begun to avoid her, and the sense of isolation stung.
Unless the business managers of Laine’s diamond house could shed light on the theft or the mugging, there wasn’t much point to the visit. With the press crucifying her for the loss of the jade, and the details of her past splashed across the front pages of all the major dailies, there was nothing much to do but pick over the carcass.
The media had dismissed her doctorate, her years of experience and her charity work. They had thrown a murky shadow over the fact that she was even in the business of buying, selling and consulting on rare jade and artifacts. They had taught the public and, it seemed, her work colleagues, to view her in a different light. She was no longer Dr. Tyler Laine, expert on Eastern and Pacific-Rim artifacts, she was the daughter of Sonny Mullane, a petty criminal with a record as long as both of his lean, sinewy arms. Aside from operating as a small-time fence, Sonny had been a thief, a safecracker, and a pimp. If there was any crime he hadn’t committed other than murder, then, as far as Tyler was concerned, that crime hadn’t yet been invented.
According to the tabloids, the fact that Sonny Mullane’s daughter had been adopted by the Laine family didn’t make her any better than she had been.
“Can you remember any other details about the people who attacked you?”
Tyler shifted her attention to Cornell. The question was delivered politely, but with a flat patience that told Tyler that no matter how devoid of emotion his light gray eyes appeared to be, Cornell wanted more from her than the scanty details she’d so far been able to supply him.
“I can’t give you any more of a description,” she said flatly. “There were two of them. It was dark and they were wearing balaclavas. One of them was olive-skinned and tanned: he looked Asian.”
She gripped the bedside table and lowered herself enough that she could perch on the edge of the bed.
Just those simple actions were enough to make her break out in a sweat. She’d protested at spending the night in hospital, but there was no getting past the fact that her head was still throbbing despite the painkillers she’d taken, and that she was still wobbly on her feet.
Aside from the initial head injury, and the damage she’d done to her right hand and shoulder when she’d thrown that punch, she’d sustained a second head injury when she’d fallen and hit her head on the concrete. The first hit had been brutal enough to concuss her; the second one hadn’t been as violent, but had compounded the first injury with the added bruising and swelling. On top of all that, she was bruised and stiff all down her left side from the fall.
Gingerly, she pushed hair away from her face. She’d managed to shower that morning and change into the jeans and cotton shirt Harrison had brought in, but her hair was still a mess, tangled and matted around the wound, and she’d left it that way. Her one attempt to drag a comb through the tangles had left her clinging to the bathroom counter, a fine film of perspiration beading her upper lip.
The doctor who’d treated her the previous evening had only needed two stitches to close the cut on her head, but the area was still swollen, her scalp so tight and sensitive that even the movement of her hair hurt.
Some time around midnight, she’d stopped seeing colors. In medical terms, the swelling in her brain had subsided to a point where it was no longer pressing on the optic nerves, thus producing the neon-bright display, but she still felt oversensitive and fragile. Colors were too bright, voices were too loud—even the surface of her skin felt oversensitive, as if several layers had been peeled away and all of her nerve endings exposed.
“You said you thought someone followed you on two separate occasions the previous week. Have you got any idea who that might have been?”
The question was clipped and businesslike, not Cornell this time, but his partner, Elaine Farrell.
Tyler lifted her chin, and spoke carefully, mostly because the answer was so obvious, but partly because the small movements of her mouth and jaw pulled at the skin of her scalp and intensified the deep ache, so that even talking hurt. “If I’d been absolutely certain that I was being followed, and had any idea who was following me I would have done something about it.”
The small buzz of conversation in the room stopped.
Cornell went down on his haunches, his gaze neutral. “Are you certain the dark-skinned man who attacked you was Chinese?”
Anger flickered at Cornell’s deliberate alteration of the facts, his subtle sidestep into the shady realms of the jade investigation. There had been some speculation that the Chinese interests could be included in the thefts, but that was mostly media generated. “I saw part of his face. I’m certain he was Asian, not that he was Chinese.”
Richard made a sound of disbelief. “Are you saying the mugging could be linked with the theft of the jade?”
Cornell didn’t acknowledge Richard’s question, or answer. All of his attention remained focused on Tyler—the pressure of his gaze like a weight.
Bitterness and an odd indifference congealed in Tyler’s stomach—a grim remnant from childhood. Cornell was questioning her in order to track down the men who’d assaulted her, but she was beginning to feel more like the offender than the victim. She could feel herself stepping back inside, divorcing herself from the legal process that was unfolding around her.
With an effort of will, she slammed the door on the temptation to simply close off and go blank. When she’d been a child she’d been an expert at the tactics—the ice-queen of eight-year-olds. She’d worked hard to leave that pattern behind; it had taken years, and she’d be damned if she would start running now. There was too much at stake, too much to lose. Her reputation, her career. Her family.
She glanced at Richard and Harrison. They were standing side-by-side—both tall, lean and tanned, with light brown hair. Except for the thirty years Harrison had on Richard and the silvery wings at his temples, the likeness was so pronounced that they could have been brothers. Their jaws were both identically set, their dark eyes cold, voices clipped, as they grilled Cornell about the possibility of a connection between the mugging and the jade theft, and for a moment, confusion and an acute sense of separation swamped Tyler. It was obvious that Harrison and Richard were father and son—also obvious that they were similar in ways that transcended the father/son relationship.
They were her family, but in subtle ways they weren’t. Harrison’s wife, Louisa, had always been the glue that had held them all together, but since her death three years before, Tyler had felt herself drifting, her connection to both Harrison and Richard increasingly more tenuous.
Richard crossed his arms over his chest, his frustration palpable. “So what the hell are we investigating? A theft, or some kind of conspiracy?”
With her as the prime suspect.
Tyler rubbed at her temples. Her mind was still fuzzy, her head throbbing despite the painkillers she’d had with breakfast. “Leave it, Richard. The guy was Asian, that’s a fact. I was mugged, that’s another fact. At this point there is nothing to connect the mugging with the theft of the jade. As for the phone calls, and being followed…” Her own frustration welled, sending a fresh stab of pain through her skull. “All of that started happening before the robbery, so how could any of it possibly be connected?”
She could feel the consensus of opinion. The theft of the jade had sent shock waves through the world of artifacts. The mystery of who had taken the jade, and how it had been stolen, when to all intents and purposes Laine’s security system had not been breached, was disturbing enough. No one wanted to believe that the theft could be more complicated than simple larceny.
But if she was cynical enough, and right now it was hard to be anything but cynical, the police, and everyone present in the room, had to be examining the possibility that she was using last night’s incident to implicate the Chinese in the jade theft. The jade was, after all, Chinese in origin.
Although why would anyone, let alone Chinese people, attack her when they already had the jade? A renegade bubble of humor surfaced. Unless, of course, she had somehow stumbled onto the set of a “B” grade movie, and the bad guys wanted to cut her out of the money, bump her off and dump her body.
Abruptly, the implications were too much—especially if the press decided there was a connection.
She met Richard’s gaze coolly. “If I had any idea who it is that’s been following me and doing the heavy-breathing routine over the phone, I would have tracked him down and dealt with him the same way I dealt with the guy last night.”
Richard looked momentarily perplexed.
Cornell rose to his feet and slipped his notebook in his briefcase. “She broke his jaw.”
The moment when she’d swung that punch replayed through Tyler’s mind. She hadn’t made a conscious decision to hit him—that punch had burst from deep inside and she couldn’t have pulled it if she’d tried. Even now, just thinking about it made the fury well up and sent adrenaline pumping through her veins.
“You broke his jaw?”
The question was soft, clipped. Harrison.
She had never called her adoptive father Dad, and he had never asked her to—by the time the Laine family had adopted her she had been eight going on thirty. She and Harrison had compromised with his first name.
She met his dark gaze. Surprise jolted her when she saw tenderness there. She let out a breath. “I felt the bone give.”
There was an odd silence as the new tidbit of information was digested. It was the kind of blank silence she hadn’t faced since she was eight and Louisa had found her food stash moldering in her closet, along with the wad of money she’d accumulated from selling the clothes and shoes she’d been showered with and didn’t need—which had amounted to most of them. In the world she’d come from, cash was more important than a Barbie doll wardrobe.
Harrison nodded, as if it was a perfectly normal occurrence that his daughter should break a mugger’s jaw.
“Could the other offender have been female?”
The voice was husky, female. Tyler met Farrell’s gaze. For a split second she wondered if Farrell was playing with subtleties and trying for a guilt reaction that might connect her to both crimes, then the no-nonsense tone in her voice registered. Cornell was working the tactics; Farrell was simply being thorough. It was a valid question—plenty of women committed crimes—and Farrell hadn’t etched out a career in a hard-ass, male-dominated profession by pussyfooting around unpopular issues.
She saw again the flash of a male jaw and slanted cheekbone, felt the steely grip on her arm. A memory surfaced. “They smelled male.”
She caught the instant respect in Farrell’s eyes, felt the recoil that went around the room.
Amusement caught her off balance again. So, okay, noticing the scent of the people attacking her might not be a habit cultivated in the best circles, but she had smelled them, and it was a relief to remember something else definitive when the attack had happened in a blur of shadows and adrenaline.
“They were both male,” a dark, cool voice affirmed. “That piece of information was in the statements we both gave last night.”
Tyler’s head jerked up. She winced, her eyes squeezed closed, but not before she’d glimpsed West leaning against the doorjamb, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, a sleek black jacket hugging his shoulders.
West’s gaze briefly touched on each of the people filling Tyler’s room. Anger stirred through him at the inquisition that was taking place. He knew the police had a job to do, but her family could damn well back off. Tyler was tough, a real fighter, but she was tired and practically crawling out of her skin with pain.
He didn’t know what time she had got to sleep last night, but it had been ten-thirty before a doctor had been free to stitch the cut on her head, and after midnight before the statements had been completed. West had left the hospital at around one-thirty, after Tyler had been settled in her room.
“Who in hell are you?”
West ignored the GQ mannequin asking the question. He knew a number of the people in the room: Ray Cornell and Elaine Farrell, Richard and Harrison. He recognized Ashley James, who had been Richard’s right-hand man forever, but the woman and the suit with the question were strangers. They weren’t cops, that was obvious. They were too manicured—too nervy—which meant they had to be two of Harrison’s newer employees.
Ray Cornell nodded briefly. “West.”
Amusement at Cornell’s wariness took the edge off West’s growing fury. “It’s been a while.”
West bumped into Cornell occasionally. Ray was ex-SAS, now a detective at Auckland Central. The most recent occasion they’d hooked up had been a year ago when West’s friend Ben McCabe had been shot at, and they’d spent a couple of hours at Central giving statements.
Harrison acknowledged West, as he always did, with neutrality and politeness.
As out of place with the Laine family as he’d always been, West had never felt antagonism from his father-in-law, simply a void that had shown no sign of diminishing. The gap in life experience had just been too broad for either of them to breach. Richard, on the other hand, had no problem with the void; his cold gaze said just how much he liked it, and the bigger the better. West had never had a problem with his brother-in-law’s attitude, except that it had always hurt Tyler.
West had few people in his life he had ever been able to care for, but his feelings were clean-cut and simple: he would die for them. The way he’d grown up had narrowed his perceptions to absolutes, leaving him with a bedrock that alienated most people. The way he was wasn’t easy or comfortable, but his friends understood him.
West’s gaze touched on Tyler’s tangled hair, her utter stillness claiming his attention. As hard as he’d tried to make Tyler understand how he felt, how he was inside, how difficult it was for him to change and adjust, she hadn’t wanted to listen.
Harrison softly ordered his people from the room. As James, the pretty lady executive and the suit, who answered to the name of Kyle, filed past him, relief loosened some of West’s tension.
He wanted these people out of here, ASAP, and he wanted Tyler out, too. When he’d arrived the press had been gathering downstairs. Maybe they weren’t hunting for Tyler, but he wouldn’t place any bets on it.
Farrell offered him a hand, her gaze speculative.
West recognized the look, and the curiosity. Down under, the military world meshed closely enough with civilian forces that the gossip spread. A number of Auckland detectives were ex-SAS. It was a recognized career path for military personnel to slide sideways into civilian law enforcement. A lot of them ended up on the Special Tactics Squad, or the AOS, the Armed Offenders Squad. He also knew that Farrell was one of the few women who had served on the AOS, and that she was a current member. She would know he’d resigned from the SAS, and why.
Farrell lifted a brow. “Heard you turned to the dark side.”
“Private enterprise pays more than the military.”
Cornell snapped his briefcase closed. “How long have you been out?”
West glanced at Tyler as she zipped her overnight bag closed and straightened. “Three weeks, give or take a day,” but his mind wasn’t on conversation.
Tyler’s face was white, her gaze glassy. He recognized the way she was moving, the way she was feeling, because he’d been there a couple of times with head injuries. It was a good act, but he’d seen drunks with more coordination.
He stepped around Harrison and Richard. His fingers curled around the grip of the bag. “I’ll take that.”
Her gaze locked with his, shooting green fire. He logged her almost imperceptible flinch—as if the emotion, and the light, had hurt—felt her internal battle. Tyler had always been as independent and solitary as a cat despite the satin cushion of the Laines’ wealth, and all the company that that money attracted.
Her fingers remained locked around the grip.
“Let me.”
He felt the moment when she gave in, and grimly acknowledged that this was how it was going to be. He’d always known trying to get Tyler back would be tough—he just hadn’t realized how tough.
For the past few days, he’d made it his business to be where she was around the apartment complex whenever possible. It hadn’t been easy because she’d been working long hours, and each time she’d simply walked past him, barely making eye contact. The only break he’d had had been when he’d stepped out of the elevator while she was being attacked.
Right now, Tyler needed his help, and he was ruthlessly using every advantage that came his way, but she was making it more than clear that while she did need help, she didn’t need him.
Brilliant light flashed through the room, followed by the motorized whirr of a camera.
West caught a glimpse of a dark-clad shoulder as the photographer slid through the door, and cursed beneath his breath. He made eye contact with Cornell, who was looking pissed. “When I walked through reception there were reporters camped there, plus a TV crew.”
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