Shameless (The Contemporary Collection) (20 page)

The blow never landed.

Keith's weight suddenly lifted, dragging across her. A hoarse yell ripped from his throat as his feet hit the floor and he staggered across the room. He struck the wall, bounced off it, then sagged against it again. Cursing and crying, holding his injured ribs, he slid to the floor.

In the darkness of the room a shadow moved, lithe, powerful, with danger in every tense line. It glided toward the fallen man, bending over him.

The shadow was Reid.

REID RECOGNIZED TOO WELL THE COLD ENMITY
that held him as he stared down at the man whimpering on the floor. It was the detachment that allowed him to kill, if need be, without an excess of regret. There was an added element this time, however. He was watching in quiet anticipation for an excuse.

His contempt for men who used their superior strength to terrorize women was virulent. A man who would do that to Cammie deserved whatever came to him. He waited with a silent prayer that Keith Hutton had a weapon and would try to use it.

“Reid?”

He heard Cammie's voice as if from a great distance. She came toward him, approaching with slow steps in the dim light, using every care to remain in his line of vision. Her caution and apparent fear of him touched him with remorse, penetrating his defenses as nothing else could.

His gaze traveled slowly from the tumbled silk of her hair to the shadow made by the vivid patch of color on her cheek, and lower, to the gentle shape and movement under the thin white cotton of her nightgown. Like a fog lifting, he felt his sense of being separate from his soul leaving him. He regretted it. He didn't want, didn't need, the acute, driving sensual awareness that took its place.

She put out her hand, barely grazing his shoulder with her fingertips. He felt each single touch like a series of stabbing electric shocks. The urge to take her right then and there, to bury himself in her seductive softness and blot out the world, ripped through him with hurricane force. It stopped his breath and left him with every muscle rigid in the effort of containment.

“Don't,” she whispered.

Don't kill Keith?

Don't take her?

Don't control himself, so that he might do both?

The need to be positive of what she wanted — and why — cleared his brain. He relaxed with consummate effort and in minute degrees, easing his stance over Keith, retreating a fraction from her so that her hand fell away from his sleeve.

There were some things he would not relinquish. He was not sure when the decision was made, but he would not fight it. He did not intend to let the woman in front of him out of his sight again soon, not for hours, at least not for the rest of the night.

Bending, Reid dragged Keith to his feet. He ignored the other man's groans and curses as he frog-marched him from the room with strength fueled by brutally repressed urges. He knew Cammie followed after them, but it made no difference. Shoving her husband through the great room and out onto the porch, he used the man's body to thrust the screen door open, then ejected him into the night.

Keith stumbled forward, then caught himself. Slewing around, he planted his feet and knotted his fists. “Just who the hell do you think you are?” he yelled.

“The man who will kill you if you ever try a stunt like this again,” Reid answered evenly. He took a step forward, and was not surprised to see Keith flounder back a matching pace. In a voice suffused with hard promise, he went on, “I know where you left your Rover. I'd better hear it leave in the next five minutes, or I'll come after you.”

Cammie's husband wanted to fight, wanted passionately to prevent Reid from staying behind in possession of the field and the woman. But the man knew his limitations, and he didn't have it in him to ignore them and attack anyway. Keith Hutton stood for a moment while his face took on a distorted grimace, as if he was about to cry. Then he whirled and disappeared into the darkness.

Reid waited. After a short time there came a powerful roar as the Land Rover sprang to life. The engine was slammed into gear. Tires squealed a protest as the vehicle tore off into the night.

Reid turned then, stepping back inside the porch and latching the screen. Cammie had flipped on the light in the great room. As he turned, he saw her standing in the door, watching him. Her face was still, her eyes huge and dark. He kept his gaze fastened above her collar bones with an effort. Still he saw, with a peripheral vision that was entirely too accurate, the perfect silhouette made by her body in the white nightgown with the light behind her.

He was not fool enough to destroy his pleasure by commenting on it. Moving forward enough to improve the view but not enough to disturb it, he said in neutral tones, “I'm sorry I couldn't get here before you were hurt.”

“You were following Keith, weren't you?”

He heard the tremor, quickly stifled, in the words. He was touched by that sign of inner fortitude as by nothing in recent memory. It was his fault. If he had not been so enthralled with watching her in the moonlight earlier, he would not have lost sight of Keith. If he had kept her ex-husband in view, he would not have been forced to circle the camp house trying to find his trail, or to pick a dead-bolt lock after he realized Keith was inside with her.

He looked down at his hand, which was still curled into a fist. Concentrating on relaxing it, he said, “I saw him at Evergreen. When he discovered you weren't home, he lit out like he might have some idea where to find you. So, yes, I followed him. It wouldn't have been necessary if you had told me where you were going.”

“I didn't know I was supposed to report my movements,” she said, spinning away from him and taking a few agitated steps into the great room.

His gaze, resting on her back and hips, was intent as he followed her into the house. Closing the back door, he locked it and flipped the dead bolt into place. He thought Cammie was aware of what he was doing from the stiffening of her shoulders, but she didn't object. It was, to his mind, a victory of sorts.

“You weren't,” he said as he moved past her into the kitchen area. “And it won't matter after tonight. I've decided to stick a little closer to you from now on.”

“Am I supposed to be honored?”

He paused while taking a handful of ice cubes from the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. The expression on her face, he saw, was half annoyed, half intrigued. He said, “I'll accept mildly grateful,” and watched with grim appreciation as a flush moved slowly upward from under her scooped neckline.

“Oh, all right,” she snapped with a gesture of capitulation, “I thank you very much. I'm glad to see you. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't come charging in like the gang busters. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

He made no reply, but smiled a little in rueful self-knowledge as he searched through drawers for a plastic bag, found one, then dropped the ice cubes into it.

“If that's for me,” she said, momentarily distracted by his actions, “I don't need it.”

“Whatever you say, but you'll have a bruise to explain,” he replied, his attention on sealing the bag's zip strip.

Her lips compressed an instant, then she abandoned her resistance. She said, “You are the most infuriating man. You'd have run a mile, I swear, if I had fallen on your neck crying my thanks the minute I saw you.”

“You're probably right.” She was exactly right, though there was no point in total honesty.

“And you don't even have the decency to deny it so I can be mad.”

“Maybe I don't want you mad.”

Her eyes glittered between narrow lids. “I think you do. Or did. I think you like raising my blood pressure. Well, if you're doing it now because you consider I need distracting from a little thing like almost being raped, you can think again.”

“I think,” he said as he moved toward her and pressed the ice pack he had made to her reddened cheek, “that you're sensible enough to figure out why I do most things. And to respond accordingly.”

Her gaze somber, and centered somewhere near the second button of the camouflage shirt he wore with his jeans, she said, “I get so tired of being sensible.”

In the stillness that gripped him, he felt the soft trip of his pulse. “Are you by any chance,” he asked with care, “feeling generous in your victory?”

She lifted her gaze to meet his, and he saw her witch's multicolored eyes darken. Her lips, as they parted for her softly drawn breath, were smooth, delicately tinted with natural color, infinitely inviting. Her breasts lifted against the soft draping of thin fabric, peaking it with the slow tightening of her nipples. His every tendon contracted with response, and he steeled himself against the drawing pain.

Abruptly, she reached to take the plastic bag of ice from him, holding it to her face as she whirled and moved away. Seating herself on the couch, she crossed her other arm over her chest.

She had just proven that she understood him very well, Reid saw. It was perverse of him to wish that she hadn't. He would have liked an excuse for making love to her, any excuse. It wasn't just simple desire — if desire was ever simple — but a need to comfort, and to ease her pain. Which was the height of ego, he knew, to think his masculine essence had the power to heal.

Her voice stiff, she said, “What victory am I supposed to have won? The paralegal who found out about the divorce has left town, and the evidence that might give me the mill is missing. You're the one who's ahead now.”

“I heard; Lane, Endicott and Lane called me. You think I had something to do with this girl disappearing?”

“Who else is there with as good an excuse?”

“Any number of people, I would imagine,” he answered.

“Keith didn't know about her, otherwise he would have had no reason to come here, no reason to do what he did.”

“That's a matter of opinion,” he said, his gaze steady. “He might have been driven by something other than money.”

“I somehow doubt it.”

“Believe me,” he said, “it's possible.”

Her eyes widened a fraction as she watched him, then she looked away. “You don't seem worried that people will think you're the one who got rid of Janet Baylor — the paralegal.”

“People — or you?”

“Either one,” she said, refusing to accept his attempt to make the question personal.

His thoughts moving in another direction, Reid answered with only half his attention. “Why should I care?”

“Why shouldn't you?” Cammie replied astringently.

He met her gaze, holding it. “I have as much stiff-necked pride as the next man, maybe even more. I'd just as soon be thought guilty as to be forced to prove my innocence.”

“You expect to be taken at your own evaluation? That's all very well, but most people require something more.”

“Do you really think I'm so desperate I would do away with this woman to gain title to the mill?” he demanded. It was so long before she answered, that he felt a tight, gripping sensation in his chest.

Finally she said, “No. But I don't know why I don't.”

He was powerless to stop the slow smile that curved his mouth. “You trust me.”

“Only to a certain point,” she said quickly.

It was far enough for now. Or was it?

Standing there, watching her, he felt as needy as a small boy, yet there was nothing boyish about the desire that crashed through him in waves. There was something dark and desolate in her face as she returned his gaze, an unconscious yearning that was a reflection of the wellspring of passion trapped inside her. He had released it once, and was obsessed by the memory. He knew there were more subterranean depths he had not reached, that no man had, or perhaps could. Yet the compulsion to try was a constant ache, one he thought he would carry to his grave, and beyond.

It was possible that something of his thoughts was in his face. Her gaze flickered, falling away from his. She surged to her feet and moved away from him.

He took a quick step after her before forcing himself to stop. His words soft, and freighted with much more of what he felt than he intended, he said, “Don't be afraid. There's no need.”

Her hair shifted across her back, catching the light in iridescent gleams as she turned her head. “You prowl around my house, invading when you please. You pull strings. You want to destroy the things I hold dear. You beat up people. You appear out of nowhere in the middle of the night. Afraid? I should run screaming through the woods. God knows why I don't.”

“Courage.” After a moment he added, “Fairness.”

“I don't think so,” she said with a quick shake of her head.

“What then?”

A crooked smile tugged at the delicate curves of her mouth. “Curiosity. Isn't that the sin Eve was banished from Eden for when all is said and done?”

He felt an arrested expression congealing his features, but could not prevent it. He swung from her and began searching through the cabinets once more. Finding what he sought, he took down two glasses and poured a measure of twelve-year-old scotch in each one. He drank a hefty swallow of his before walking toward her and pressing the extra glass into her hand.

Only then did he dare ask, “Are you satisfied? Your curiosity, I mean?”

She didn't answer at once. It wasn't that she didn't know what to say, he thought, but that she was suspicious of his meaning. And well she might be. He was, against all decency and reason, testing the outer limits of what lay between them.

She drank, her throat moving in a smooth glide as she swallowed. A small shudder shook her as the liquor hit her stomach. Abruptly, she said, “I have a few reservations.”