Nobody's Angel (28 page)

She was slim and rounded and soft in all the right places as he crushed her against him. She nestled right where he needed her as hunger consumed them both. Fire should have shot from their heads instead of the candles. Skyrockets couldn't have been more heady. If he didn't stop soon, they'd have to break out the fire extinguishers.

Gasping, Adrian set her back on her feet, although his hands couldn't quite let go. She looked as dazed as he felt, but he had word skills she didn't possess, and he used them to ease the tension. “If that's my reward for remembering, what do I get if the cake is good?”

“Fat.” Shoving her hands against his shoulders, she pushed away, but not so far that he couldn't reach out and grab her again if he wanted. She wasn't retreating. She was embarrassed.

He grinned at her response. So, her word skills were almost on a par with his. “
Feliz cumpleaños, querida.”

“I didn't even realize the date until I signed into the register at that last bank,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around herself as the band's noise died down and the others surrounded them.

“Do we all get birthday kisses?” George asked with interest.

“Not unless you want to die young.” Adrian possessively hauled Faith into his arms again. He noticed she didn't protest, although he could attribute it to her desire not to be mauled by anyone else. “Who's hoarding the champagne?”

On cue, another stagehand meandered out with a massive silver bucket of ice and a magnum bottle. The band cheered ecstatically, one clever member scaled the bar to release the champagne glasses, and the party began.

“You shouldn't have,” Faith whispered, still not fighting his embrace.

Her bottom fit snugly beneath his hips, his arm encompassed her waist with ease, and he would easily sacrifice cake and champagne to stay this way. “Rex pays me well. And a friend of Belinda's gave me a discount on the cake. I'd rather
give you something more memorable, but I was afraid you'd throw anything else at me.”

She chuckled. “You're probably right. The last time anyone remembered my birthday, Tony gave me a string of pearls and told me he had to go to D.C. for the week. That's the only time I ever returned one of his gifts. I was so mad at him for going away and not taking me on the cruise I wanted that I bought plane tickets to Mexico to visit my parents. He never even noticed I wore fakes.”

Adrian looked down at her as she smiled at the boy bringing her a glass of bubbling liquid. “You mean those pearls you wore today aren't real?”

“Nope. They were designer fakes, but they're fakes. Can you imagine living where I do and trying to hide expensive jewelry from thieves?” She took the champagne glass and held it in her hand as George made a flowery birthday speech.

“Thank God for small favors,” he breathed, accepting his glass and chugging a gulp before George finished. At the inquiring look she threw over her shoulder, he shook his head. “It will wait. Let's enjoy your party first. Belinda and Cesar wanted to be here, but I told them Mama and the kids came first and that you'd understand.”

“I don't need a party. Just being remembered is so nice.”

Tears glinted in her eyes, and Adrian heard the break in her voice. He hugged her closer. She deserved someone who could make the world beautiful for her. All he could do was make it worse.

“Blow out the candles, Faith!” the guitarist, with one arm around a girlfriend, shouted.

“You have no idea what you've started,” Faith murmured as she stepped away from Adrian's hold.

“But I know exactly how to end it,” he murmured back, following her across the stage. She shot him a look of suspicion, but he could play innocent a while longer. They were safe here for a while, and she deserved a little party.

With the cake served and another round of champagne begun, someone stuck a CD into the sound system and music poured forth. Deciding he'd watched Faith accept enough
kisses on the cheeks and hugs and inane patter from the band, Adrian drew her into his arms again and began the dancing. He knew it was a mistake, knew he should keep the entire barroom's distance between them, but he might as well cut off his tongue as to try.

“Thank you,” she murmured into his shirt front, swaying easily into his rhythm. “I know you're making the best of a bad deal, but I've …” Faith didn't know how to continue. She hadn't realized how alone she had been these last years, how hungry for a human touch, a simple acknowledgment of her presence, anything to show she was alive and not a superhuman robot. A tear trickled from the corner of her eye, and embarrassed at the stupid sentimentality, she surreptitiously tried to wipe it.

Adrian raked his hand through her hair and tilted her head back so he could press a kiss against the place she'd wiped. “I'm not making the best of a bad deal. I'm thanking you for understanding, for being better than any person I've met for a long time, for reinstating some of my faith in the human race.” He grimaced at the pun of her name.

She grinned. “For reinstating Faith
into
the human race?” she countered.

“Have you ever considered changing your name?” he grumbled, moving into a quick two-step required by the change of songs from the speaker.

“I did once, it didn't work out.” She slipped from his grasp and, ignoring the complaint from her knee, executed a tricky dip and swirl with her hands on her hips, and defied him to match her.

He did. Adrian might be out of practice, but he kept up with an innate agility that had her heart racing with admiration and glee. Tony had never danced with her like this. He'd manage a slow waltz if required, but then he'd always wander off to talk with people far more important than she, leaving her to idle her time on the sidelines. She'd never known what it was like to have a man's full attention focused on her, especially a man with a focus as intent as Adrian's. Like paper in
the hot sun under the magnifying glass of his gaze, she sizzled. She forgot her knee.

When one of the band members discovered an open keg of beer, Adrian caught Faith's hand and drew her out of the stage lights and toward the darkness near the door. “Time to go. I don't need breaking and entering on my parole record.”

She didn't object. She was exhilarated by the man and the music, not the champagne and the party. She floated after him, as high on bubbles of happiness as on champagne. She might come down with a thud in a little while, but she wasn't in a hurry. She was thirty years old today and had little of what she'd hoped to have by now, but she was all right. She would make it. The next ten years were going to be good ones. She could feel it in her bones.

She tucked her T-shirt into her jeans and grabbed the blouse she'd worn over it earlier.

“Where's the egg?” she asked, buttoning up as they emerged onto the night street and no familiar vehicle waited. The evening was cool, and she hugged the blouse around her.

“Cesar has it. Maybe we should take you car shopping in the morning. You'll have to call Annie and see if the insurance check is in the mail.” He steered her down the street, avoiding the streetlights.

She liked the solid feel of his hand at her back. Adrian had amazingly strong hands.

“I don't suppose the bug was worth enough to buy a Miata,” she mourned, still not feeling any pain.

“Not unless it was classified as an antique vehicle,” he said dryly, pushing her into a dark alley after the next building. “If we don't find Tony's books, we could always take his ill-gotten gains and buy you one.”

“And let his fellow lawyers pay for his crime. That's only fair,” she agreed, trying not to stumble in the darkness. She'd worn comfortable shoes, but Adrian was proceeding entirely too fast. “Where are we going? Are we walking home?”

“I have Cesar's van. That should confuse them a little while longer until I can come up with a better idea.” He peered around the corner of the next building, and apparently finding
it all clear, pulled her into a darkened parking lot where the looming shadow of the van waited.

He threw open the door and all but pushed her in. Confused, Faith bumped her sore knee, cursed, and clambered into the high seat as the door slammed behind her. The champagne high was rapidly fizzling into something less pleasant.

“What's going on?” she demanded as Adrian yanked open the driver's door and slid in.

“Nothing we can't handle,” he assured her. “Let's just pretend it's all part of your birthday celebration.”

She'd like to pretend that, but she had a sneaking suspicion that Adrian didn't play games lightly. She sat silently as he maneuvered the van out of the alley, into the street, and turned toward the interstate instead of Cesar's apartment. “I never liked Blind Man's Bluff, and this is beginning to feel like Pin the Tail on the Donkey. I think maybe you'd better explain the rules.”

In the faint light from the dash she could see his jaw tighten. She knew she wasn't going to like this. A streetlight glinted against the ring in his earlobe, and she took a deep breath. He looked more like a pirate than ever.

“Someone's been through the apartment. They tossed your suitcase and my duffel. They took Cesar's laptop. That means they'll have those letters you wrote and know what we're doing.” His hands clenched on the wheel as he glanced over at her. “They took that little bag of jewelry you had, with the pearls in it.”

Faith forced herself to face the facts calmly. “It's all costume jewelry. Admittedly, the pearls cost a couple hundred, but they're not worth crying over. What about my vase and photos?” she asked anxiously.

He jerked his head toward the back. “I picked them up and put them back there with our clothes.”

“Then it could be just a regular thief, a crack addict looking for quick cash?”

“It's possible. I don't think it's likely. They tore through everything as if they were looking for something. I'll admit,
you relieved me tremendously when you said the pearls were fake. I didn't know how I would replace a fortune in pearls.”

He was doing the same thing as she, trying to sound normal. He was probably doing a better job of it, but then, he'd had more time to accept this new violation. She tried to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle flitting around, but champagne bubbles and weariness and panic kept careening off each other and colliding with the walls of her mind.

“We could always live out of the van, I suppose.” Adrian interrupted her tired struggle to think. “I'd rather trap the bastard and wring his neck.” He took an exit ramp and seemed to be aiming for a well-lighted hotel.

When he steered into the turn lane and bumped into the parking lot, Faith clutched the purse in her lap. “Why are we going here?”

“Because it's your birthday, and I'm not taking you to a cheap motel this time.”

That made about as much sense as anything. She said nothing as he parked in front of the office and climbed out, leaving her behind. They didn't have credit cards. He'd have to use cash. Did hotels still take cash?

Her mind was wandering, avoiding the memory of that star-spangled kiss of earlier, of the teasing laughter, the warm looks, the hot dancing. Adrian could not be thinking what she was thinking. She had made herself perfectly clear on the matter. Surely he could find a room with two double beds in a place like this. They would take the night to think about what to do next.

But the deep dark recesses of her brain didn't buy any of this. In the fermenting murk of her fertile mind, other ideas coalesced, frothed, and emerged like little amoebas from the river of life. This was her birthday. Adrian would give her anything she wanted. She wanted a child.

That was the one thing he would refuse to give her, for very good reasons.

As Adrian emerged from the office carrying a key card, Faith fought the war between need and honor, but paranoia won. She didn't want sex unless she could have a child.

Adrian would never let her walk out carrying a child of his, and just the thought of Adrian permanently in her life had her staring over the brink into insanity.

Faith gaped at the king-size bed dominating the center of their assigned room.

“They didn't have anything else?” she asked, incredulous.

“That's what I asked for.” Adrian locked and bolted the door, then yanked the draperies closed. “I'm relieving you of any need to make a decision by kidnapping you. This is my pirate's cabin, the ship's set sail, and you're mine to do with as I will. I distinctly remember you telling me that's what it would take.”

Faith tried to absorb his words while staring at the bed. Her insides were tumbling in nervous flips and she didn't dare look at him. “Pirate's cabin?” Her voice quavered in disbelief, but she had a vague recollection of telling him that it would take a pirate and a ship to persuade her into bed with him. She didn't know which one of them was crazier—she for saying it, or he for remembering.

“Yup.” He turned on a lamp and glanced at her. “You either share my bunk or I'll throw you to my men.”

Faith glanced at the “bunk”— a huge bed that would easily contain Adrian and six other people. She gulped and turned to meet dark eyes smoldering with desire. Instead of the pragmatic lawyer she was starting to know, he looked every bit the dangerous pirate captain with silver earring, beard-stubbled jaw, and ponytail. Her subconscious had worked overtime when she'd handed him that suggestion. As she watched, Adrian yanked open his shirt buttons.