Sara's Surprise (2 page)

He tapped his fingers on the sleek dark side of his car, then pressed the visitor's bell again. Her hand trembling, Sara activated the gate intercom. What did you say to a man who had captured your imagination from the first moment? A man whose quiet confidence and good-natured courage had given you hope when there hadn't been any before? Sara swallowed tears. Was there anything to say to a man who had been maimed trying to rescue you?

She took a deep breath, bent close to a microphone on the console, and said as cheerfully as she could, "It's either Kyle Surprise or one of the Beach Boys dressed for a summer concert."

He smiled broadly at her greeting but didn't stick his head out the window to get closer to the intercom and camera, as most visitors did. Of course, a man who had been in Kyle's line of work had the technical expertise to know that she could hear him and see his face perfectly well right where he was.

"Telegram," he offered, making his deep southern voice sound absurdly prim.

She laughed behind the knot in her throat. "No way."

"Candygram."

"Can't accept it. I have candy in the pantry already."

"Florist?"

"I have a laboratory full of flowers."

He thought for a second. "Male stripper-gram?"

"I have" Sara faltered. She didn't have. She needed. Badly. And there had been a time when she would have encouraged Kyle Surprise to make good on his teasing. Her shoulders slumped and she covered her mouth with one hand, fighting a sound of anguish. She could never encourage him now.

"You have?" he prompted her, and a scar moved in his cheek as the muscle flexed under it.

"I don't have." She grasped the cold metal ledge of the console and hung on like a tree struggling to survive a tornado. "Tell me about your stripper act."

He continued to smile his broad, all-American smile that made her think of wheat fields and sunflowers. But something hard settled around his mouth. "Sorry, I'm not in the stripper-gram business anymore."

She hurt for him so much. The scars don't matter, she wanted to tell him. They really don't. "I like your Florida clothes," she commented in a vague attempt at normal conversation. "We never see anything so, uhmmm, cheerful, up here. Especially after the weather turns cool."

"I know why. I'm freezing." He clasped his chest and asked quaintly, "Want to invite me inside the castle to get warm?"

She stalled for time. "What are you doing so far from the beach?"

Even with the sunglasses cowering his expressive eyes she could tell that his humor was a facade. It faded now, replaced by a look of quiet determination. "Dinah asked me to come check on you. She expected you to get over this reclusive phase by now. She's worried because you won't visit her or let her visit you."

This was the kind of attention Sara had feared for months. She shut her eyes and willed thoughts of sympathy, friendship, and loneliness away. "I'm making a break with the past," she told Kyle in a low, firm voice. "I think it's the best thing to do."

He shook his head. "I understand what you're going through, but shutting yourself away from your friends isn't the way to handle it. Believe me. Dinah went through the same feelings, but Rucker wouldn't let her give in to them. Now she's doing fine."

Sadly, Sara looked at the television screen. She and Dinah McClure had been prisoners together in South America, true. They had suffered the same torments and fought back with the same bold but useless courage, true. But the aftermath of their ordeal had not been similar.

Sara bowed her head over the console's microphone. Hers was no ordinary post-hostage situation. "I'm sorry you made a long trip for nothing. I'm fine, really. Tell Dinah you spoke to me and everything's all right. Give her and Rucker and the baby my love. And tell your brother hello. Oh, and Drake Lancaster too."

"You mean you're not going to let me see you?" Despite the sunglasses and low-slung cap, his consternation was obvious.

"That's right." Sara stared hard at his image, trying to absorb every detail before she switched off the camera. Afterward she would play the tape over and over, just to look at him.

"Sara, I'm no threat to you," he said patiently. "No one is anymore."

"Everything that reminds me of those ten months in Surador is a threat."

He inhaled sharply. "I know that I'm not easy to look at. Hell, you've heard the old line." His voice became sardonic. " 'What bothers you most: when the women scream or when the children point?' I'm the walking personification of that. But, Sara"

"No." She put her head in her hands. How could she let him think he was so ugly that she couldn't bear the sight? "It has nothing to do with your scars. It has to do with mine. Thank you for making the trip. Now, please, go back to Florida."

"I can't do that, Sara." He sighed. "I rented this car at the Lexington airport. I've already agreed to keep it until the day of my flight home."

"When is that?"

"I don't know." His teasing grin appeared. "That depends on how soon you cooperate."

"Come on! I'm deep into my research. I really don't have time to play hostess!"

"Ten minutes. Give me ten minutes." He smiled tightly. "I get it. You've injected yourself with some kind of plant hormone and turned into a mutant green thing. Can I have the movie rights to your story?"

"Please go away."

He shook his head. "Ten minutes."

She noticed that he was sitting up straighter, his jaw clenched, his hand gripping the frame of the car window. Sara eyed him with alarm. "Don't even think of trying to rescue me again. I don't want to be rescued. And I have state-of-the-art security systems."

"Attack geese," he said dryly.

Sara winced. He must have talked to one of the locals, she mused. But she wasn't kidding about the system. It was designed to protect Moonspell Keep from even the most determined invader.

"Why won't you let me inside?" he asked.

"Judging by the trouble my research caused before, I think it's best that it remain completely confidential."

"I don't care about your plant research. I'm not here to peek at your lab or fondle your orchids."

"I told you, I'm putting my past behind me."

"But you haven't built much of a present or a future to take its place. We'll talk, well work out your fears"

"My only fear is that you won't go away."

"That's a valid one, then, because, lady, I'm not."

Sara recalled that his aging-Beach-Boy outfit concealed a lean, powerful body that served him well no matter what he asked of itwhich in this case might include climbing stone walls and dodging a flock of mean geese.

He could never get inside her fortified home, but he could probablyno, definitelyget inside the grounds and cause a great deal of trouble. "All right, ten minutes," she told him wearily. "But I'll walk down to the gate and talk to you there."

"Good enough. Sara, the past is over. You can relax."

She bit back an ironic laugh. Looking at his scarred face and thinking of her daughterwhom he might despise if he ever learned of her existenceSara knew that she could never relax.

Kyle got out of the car and leaned nonchalantly against the front fender, pulling a white Windbreaker over his arms as he did. Crossing his legs at sockless ankles, he stared at his baggy white trousers and white running shoes.

The sports car and the beach clothes would, he hoped, make him look a hell of a lot more jovial and carefree than he was. The last thing he wanted was to remind Sara of the last time she'd seen him.

Should he take off the sunglasses? Remove the hat? He ought to. Unlike the Windbreaker, the glasses and hat made it obvious that he wanted to hide his scars. Nothing carefree about that. Kyle realized that his throat was dry with anticipation and dread. He hesitated for a moment, then tossed the hat onto the car's hood and laid the sunglasses beside it. Running his fingers through his sun-streaked hair, he exhaled wearily and waited.

There was no sound from the other side of the massive gate. Kyle gazed at the gray steel, listening as the minutes passed. It began to dawn on him that she might have lied about the visit. He eyed the stone walls that stretched into the forest on either side, calculating ways to get through the barbed-wire shield that protruded from their outer edge. He looked closer, noting a barbless wire that wound through the others. The shield was electrified.

Dear Lord, who did she expect to fight? Ninjas? Rambo?

"Hello," a soft voice said behind him.

He whipped around, silently cursing himself for being so distracted that he hadn't heard her footsteps. She stood on the other side of the car, leaning toward him a little, her small hands pressed atop the fender as if she liked knowing the car was a barrier between them.

The world shrank, becoming only a backdrop for their silent tableau. Her shadowed green eyes never strayed from his pensive blue ones. Her jeaned legs were braced slightly apart; her chest moved raggedly under a pullover sweater striped in russet and gray. He wanted to hug her, wanted to gather this deceptively delicate-looking woman into his arms and tell her that he'd never forgotten her. Instead, he shoved his hands into his trouser pockets.

"You cut your hair," he said finally.

She blinked, thought for a moment, then nodded. "Right after I came home. As part of my starting-new program."

"Pretty dramatic."

Touching a hand to the short, feathery cap of cinnamon-red hair that had once hung to her waist, she smiled tentatively. "I guess it's a shock to you."

"I'm used to shocks. I like it."

"At least it makes me look older. Now when I see myself in a mirror I don't fight an urge to buy pom-poms and join a cheerleading squad."

He forced a jaunty grin on his face. "How old are you these days?"

"On a good day, thirty. On a bad day, about a hundred and twelve. How about you?"

"On a good day, thirty-six. On a bad day, about fourteen. I regress." She laughed, but the sound died quickly. She looked at him in bewilderment. "What's wrong?"

Kyle realized that his face was revealing a lot more than he'd planned. "I've never heard you laugh before. It's a nice sound."

She glanced away, her expression troubled. "Well, we didn't get a chance to spend much time together, before. What, an hour in Surador? A few days at the hospital in Virginia? And the situations didn't lend themselves to humor."

"I'm glad you can laugh now."

"Can you?" She watched him closely.

He nodded. "On the good days."

"Do you and your brother stay busy down in Ft. Lauderdale? With the new work?"

"As busy as two old retired men want to be."

"Well, Gramps, how does it feel to run a safe, normal import-export business?"

Kyle considered telling her the truth, but decided that it might make her more wary of him. The business was a front for a private investigations service very discreet and very far above the average P.I.'s milieu. Their clients included small foreign governments and multinational corporations. But compared to their former occupations, the work was definitely safe and normal.

"There's a lot of money in shipping and receiving European antiques," Kyle told her lightly. "And no one tries to kill you over them."

"You look good, Kyle. I mean that."

His stomach tightened. He didn't dwell on his scars. He knew exactly how awful they were, but Sara sounded very sincere. He liked the quality and gentleness of her lie. "I've had a lot of plastic surgery. I'll have more, as time goes by." He changed the subject quickly. "Where's the secret door?" He gestured toward the stone wall. "How did you get out and sneak up on me? If I give you some cereal box tops, can I have your special map and decoder ring?"

Her eyes crinkled with amusement. "The keep was designed to be mysterious. My grandfather was a creative architect. My mother added a few secret touches of her own."

"Which is a polite way of saying 'Mind your own business, nosy.' "

"I'm afraid so." Frowning, she added, "It has to be that way. If I'd been secretive about my work before, there wouldn't have been any trouble." Sorrow flickered in her eyes for an instant as her gaze swept his face; without words she showed her guilt over his own condition.

"You were doing your job," Kyle told her gruffly. "I was doing mine. We couldn't help what happened."

She shook her head. "I could have."

"How?"

"By not trusting Valdivia to begin with." Visibly shaken, she raised a hand to her throat. "That's the first time I've said his name out loud since I came home from South America. I'd prefer never to say it again."

The mention of Diego de Valdivia broke the tenuous spell Kyle had built. She stepped back, obviously on the verge of leaving. "Don't," he told her. Kyle moved toward her and held out his hands in supplication. "How could you have known that he wasn't an ordinary businessman who was just curious about your research with herbicides?"

It was no use. She looked guilty and distraught and more than a little angry. "It's over. He forced me to create something I hated, something so awful that it still makes me sick to think about it, and I don't feel any better knowing that our government has control of it now. I can't do anything about that, but I can make sure that my research never gets twisted that way again."