THE PERFECT TARGET (14 page)

He turned to look at her, sent her pulse skittering. The inches between them had seemed like plenty of distance when she slid down against the barrel. But now, with those intense dark eyes focused fully on her, she could see the candlelight flicker in his pupils, feel the rush of his breathing. All she had to do was lift her hand, and she would discover if the whiskers on his jaw were as soft as they looked.

"One day I was walking home from baseball practice," he said, and Miranda couldn't help but notice the way his mouth formed the words. Heat flashed through her as she remembered those lips against hers, those dangerous, thrilling moments when he'd broken off her cry for help and sent her world spinning.

Miranda jerked herself back from the memory, forced herself to concentrate on his story, not his mouth.

"There was this terrible screech behind me. I turned around just as a big black Mercedes skidded to a stop inches from the most pathetic, mangy dog I'd ever seen. The driver of the car honked and shouted, then swerved and kept going. But the dog never moved. It was almost like he'd wanted the car to hit him."

Miranda cringed. "Was he okay?"

Very gently, Sandro culled out a small circular section of wood. "He was starving, losing his fur to mange, covered with fleas. And when I reached out to touch him, he winced and went down low, like he thought I was going to hit him."

Another chill, this one deeper, closer to the heart. "He was abused."

"I got down on my knees and coaxed him out of the road," Sandro said. "Took him home with me. He was a lab. Yellow. About forty pounds, instead of eighty. You could literally count his ribs just looking at him. My parents were in Europe, so I took care of him myself, feeding him several small meals a day, dipping him, playing with him."

Miranda sat very still, trusting herself to neither move, nor speak. There was something unfathomable about those fragile hours when the rest of the world slept, when defenses lowered and the truth bled through. That's when lies crumbled, she'd learned, as though with the land gone dark, no one could see you bleed. It was as though the sun generated the fortresses that kept people tough, and as twilight gave way to night, illusions faded, leaving only the bare bones of the truth.

It was that truth she wanted, the part of Sandro he kept hidden from the world.

"Did he like Frisbee, too?" she asked.

"Not at first. He was so malnourished he could barely run. I'd throw the Frisbee and he'd take off, but after only a few steps his paws would buckle and he'd go down."

"Poor guy."

"He got better," Sandro said, and Miranda heard the smile in his voice before she saw it on his face. "He wanted to please so damn bad, I could see it in his eyes." Sandro eased the knife along the edge of the block. "After the fleas were gone, I let him inside. He followed me from room to room, sat at my feet while I ate dinner, slept with me, you name it."

Her throat tightened. Sandro spoke of happy times, but there was sorrow in his voice. She looked at him sitting in the shadows against the oak barrel, at the play of the candlelight against the planes of his face, the tightness of his jaw and the hard line of his mouth, and for a crazy minute, she wanted to lay her hand on his leg, touch him, pull him out of the past and back to her.

"What happened?" she asked instead. "What happened to the dog?"

And what did this story have to do with whittling?

Sandro's hands stilled. "My parents came home from Europe."

"They didn't like him?"

He stabbed the knife viciously against the wood. "Pets don't belong in or around the house, Mother said. They might break a lamp or a crystal vase. Get the furniture or carpet dirty. Or God forbid, lick one of her friends."

Miranda braced herself, but said nothing.

"I came home from school one day and Virgil, that's what I named him, was gone. Just gone. My mother had been having a garden party, and she said he must have found a way out of the backyard. But I knew he would never leave me like that." Sandro turned to look at her again, his eyes darker than before. "Two days later my grandfather and I found him at the pound, just a few hours before they were going to put him down. The guy there said my mother had brought him in, said he was a stray."

Nothing, not wisdom nor restraint nor caution, could have kept Miranda from reaching out then, settling her hand against his thigh. His muscle contracted beneath her palm, tightened. "Why would your mom do that?"

A hard sound broke from Sandro's throat. "Thinking beyond the moment, beyond herself, was never her forte. She'd had a hard childhood. Marrying into my father's world was like a dream come true. She had this image of who she was supposed to be and the life she was supposed to lead, and willful children and dirty dogs didn't fit into it."

"Your father's world?" Miranda asked.

"His family came to the U.S. from Italy in the fifties and ended up doing pretty well for themselves. About the most work he and my mom had to do was hosting parties and planning trips."

"Oh." She knew about growing up in a financially secure family, and she knew about growing up among suffocating rules, but she couldn't relate to parents more interested in themselves than anything else. Her philanthropic parents were the exact opposite. Her mother always had a cause, her father an agenda.

"Gramps was different," Sandro said. "He never understood the woman his daughter became." He paused, let out a rough breath. "He took Virgil home with him, let him live in his backyard. That way, I could see him as often as possible."

A cheer rose up within Miranda. She hated the thought of Sandro and the dog he'd rescued from death being separated. Even more, she hated the thought that there'd been no one in his childhood who'd cared about what dwelled in his heart. "Did he live close?"

"Close enough." His eyes met hers, the cool air suddenly warmer. Seconds dragged by. She tried to breathe normally, but there was nothing normal about the way Sandro looked at her. They sat too close. She could feel the heat of his body, the burn of his gaze.

Something deep inside her responded, fluttering instantly, valiantly. She would never have imagined a musty wine cellar could feel so unbearably intimate, but there, surrounded by the giant casks of sleeping wine, the world beyond barely seemed to exist. For the first time she could remember, even since assuming the identity of Astrid Van Dyke, she didn't feel like the ambassador's daughter. She didn't feel like a Carrington. She felt like just a woman, alone with just a man.

The realization tightened her throat, sent her heart strumming low and deep.

Finally Sandro moved. She saw him lift his hand, felt herself brace in anticipation of his touch. Instead, he reached down to retrieve something from the pocket of his loose-fitting camouflage pants. And when he extended his hand toward her and uncurled his fingers, she cringed at the jagged cuts from when he'd taken the knife from her.

The object in his palm stalled her breath.

Chapter 7

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M
iranda just stared.

There in the darkness, on the run from men who wanted to use her as a pawn, with the hour sometime past midnight, she was again thrown back to the magical Christmas Eves of her youth, when she'd eagerly torn open packages from her grandfather.

He'd had an offbeat sense of gift-giving, one year giving her a polished rock collection, another year an assortment of pressed four-leaf clovers he'd found in his yard, still another giving her a framed series of cartoons he'd cut from the paper. But each year, it was his gifts that touched her the deepest, because she'd known they came from his heart, not some generic department store.

It hardly seemed possible that a man she'd known for less than forty-eight hours, who was more stranger than friend, mystery than confidante, could give her such a gift. But with deep certainty, Miranda knew that even though Sandro had turned his back on her confession earlier that evening, in showing her the wooden statue in his hand, the dog he carried in his pocket, he was showing her something of himself.

And that was a gift.

"It's beautiful," she said, reaching over to run her fingers along the smooth, clearly well-worn wood. It was very similar to the statue she'd found him carving.

A faint smile played at the corners of his mouth. "It's Virgil," he said. "All the way down to the slightly crooked tail, which the vet said had been repeatedly broken." Pausing, he pressed the dog into her hands. "My grandfather carved him so I'd always have him with me, even when we were apart."

And now, more than twenty years later, the lonely little boy had become a battle-scarred man, but he still carried the statue with him. "Your grandfather sounds like a wonderful man."

"He was."

Her heart snagged on the use of past tense.

"While you were curled up in your grandfather's lap listening to stories," Sandro added, "I was probably on the porch with mine, learning how to whittle."

There was a soft glow to his eyes now, a light she recognized as memory. "The two of you must have been close."

"He was the best."

There it was again. Past tense.

"The rest of your family?" she ventured, pretty sure she knew the answer. Even when he'd come on to her by the ocean, she'd sensed an isolation to him, a wall between himself and the world as tangible as the dark sunglasses he'd worn. Instinct warned there weren't many he'd truly allowed close to him.

"I was an only child."

Was.
When he spoke of his family, he used the past tense.

"Is there someone special waiting for you, Sandro?" she asked, returning Virgil to his owner. "A dog, maybe?"

He stared down at the dog in his hand. "What?"

"I was wondering if you have a dog, if
somewhere a four-legged friend is waiting for his daddy to come home." For some crazy reason, she hoped there was.

"No."

The finality of that one word chilled more deeply than the floor, the walls. "Why not? Don't you still want one?"

Abruptly, he returned Virgil to his pocket. "A man in my line of work learns not to want what he can't have. There's no faster way to lose your edge, to make a mistake that could get people killed."

And just like that, the commando was back. Miranda shivered. A smart woman would accept the finality of his words and return to her pallet, shut her eyes, dream of the moment she could walk unabashedly in the sunshine without worrying about some lunatic who wanted to turn her into a pawn. A smart woman would leave the wounded animal in his dark little den, not try to lure him out. A smart woman would ignore the ache in her chest, the tightness of her throat.

"What happened to that little boy, Sandro? The one who went after what he wanted, even when it looked impossible? How did he grow up to turn into a yes-man?"

The knife clattered to the stone floor. "A yes-man?" Miranda swallowed hard. His tone, the hard look in his eyes, told her he hadn't appreciated her choice of words. But she neither liked nor understood how a man such as Sandro could abandon his hopes and his dreams, the core of himself, to crawl into the back seat of someone else's life.

"One of my father's men," she clarified, "someone who takes orders, rather than making his own decisions, carving his own path."

The lines around his mouth hardened. "You make it sound black or white."

"Isn't it? You're letting my father dictate what you do and don't do, just like your mother wouldn't let you have a dog."

Wincing, he swore softly and stood, turned his back to her.

Miranda pushed to her feet, ignoring the sharp pain in her right leg, which had fallen brutally asleep. No way was she letting Sandro shut her out again, walk away, pretend.

"Are you really going to stand here and tell me there's nothing in this world that you want? That everything in your life is exactly the way you want it to be? That you don't still want a dog, a living, breathing companion to—"

He spun toward her. "I'm not telling you any such thing," he practically growled. In the glow of the candlelight he looked combat-ready, eyes on fire, hands curled into fists. "I want plenty,
bella,
trust me. When it's right, neither hell nor high water gets in my way. But when it's wrong…" He hesitated, letting the word linger between them. "When it's wrong, I do whatever it takes to resist."

Miranda stepped toward him, prompting him to step back. "What then?" she asked, smiling slyly when she realized an oak barrel prevented him from retreating. "What do you want?"

He didn't try to sidestep her like she'd expected. "You sure you want me to answer that?" he asked very softly.

Her mouth went dry. The momentary thrill of backing him into a corner gave way to the realization that he'd skillfully, deliberately, managed to turn the tables. She was the one now poised between the bluff she was trying to call and the dare glimmering in his smoky gaze.

Heat streaked through her. Caution demanded she turn and walk away, but Miranda had never been much on caution. Life offered no guarantees. After tomorrow, she might never see this man again. These hours together in the wine cellar might be all they had.

"Yes," she said, simultaneously taking a leap of faith and bracing herself. "Yes."

* * *

Sandro swore silently. The shadows had always been his friends, but the way they played across Miranda's face made him itch to throw on every light he could find. Her skin looked softer, her gypsy eyes even more provocative. The soft brown hair played against her cheekbones and curved beneath the chin she'd lifted in clear, utter, foolish defiance.

The stupidity of his mistake, his miscalculation, burned. He'd meant to back her into a corner, not himself. He'd meant to send her scurrying to her cozy pallet, not to instigate a game his body burned to finish. Clearly Miranda Carrington had never learned what happened when you played with fire.

He had.

Silence gathered, exposing the minutest of sounds, the thrumming of his heart, the blood roaring through his veins, the scratch of a tree limb outside, the drip of a leaky pipe. But the ambassador's daughter didn't look away, didn't so much as blink. She just looked up at him with those devastatingly slumberous eyes of hers, daring him to answer her question.