Nancy Gideon - Warrior Without A Cause

Because she was Robert D’Angelo’s daughter and odds didn’t matter when justice was the reward.

What made a woman like Tessa D’Angelo tick? Jack wondered as she wound her lithe body through his obstacle course. Seeing her at Jo’s, trembling like a fragile flower on the end of a delicate vine, he was sure she’d wilt before the end of the first day at his Wolf’s Den. She belonged in a world of expensive silk suits, high heels and perfumed evenings, not grunting and sputtering her way through a break-of-dawn run or sweating to calisthenics that would have a made a newbie marine falter.

Tougher than she looks. No kidding.

And he was kidding himself if that didn’t impress him out of his usual detachment.

He frowned as his gaze followed her graceful crossing of the balance beam. Even though she must have been exhausted from the morning run, she managed to move with the agile strength of a dancer, arms seesawing in fluid sweeps as she hurried across the narrow plank. With a hopping dismount, she sped without hesitation toward the tires and tiptoed through them like a child playing hopscotch. Her pale blond ponytail bobbed with girlish energy but there was nothing childish in the bounce of her breasts beneath her zippered jacket. He glanced at the stopwatch in his hand to give his imagination a time-out.

Everything about Tessa nudged uncomfortably against the barriers he’d created to keep the outside world at bay. Her determination combined with the wounded-bird protectiveness she’d stirred the moment she peeled down her sunglasses to bare an unwavering stare above all those assorted bruises convinced him to take her under his wing. And that made her a threat. A threat to all he’d built here in his isolated, insulated wilderness. A threat to his “Don’t involve me” motto.

He hated causes, knowing that starry-eyed do-gooders like Tessa and her father often fell victim to them. He could have told her that her father was probably guilty of everything the papers accused. He knew, firsthand, that good men sometimes got mixed up in bad things through no fault of their own. But it wasn’t his job to educate the mulish and high-minded Ms. D’Angelo in that area. Her unrealistic ideals were not his problem.

Whatever information Stan was bound to discover once he put his nose to the ground wasn’t going to clear Robert D’Angelo’s good name. It was going to show his naive daughter an ugly truth, that when he was pressed into a situation he couldn’t escape, the D.A. had taken the coward’s way out by putting a gun to his head, leaving his family to clean up the mess.

Well, who was he to condemn D’Angelo? Hadn’t he done the same thing on a less fatal level?

Tessa swung across the ladder, going rung to rung like a twenty-first-century Jane in his own private jungle.

Coward, she had called him. Who was he to argue? As long as she believed him to be a man without honor, a coward who trained then sent others to carry out deeds he refused to champion, she would keep a safe distance. Stan would ferret out the facts and make her face them. Then she’d be gone to piece her world back together and he could go on living day to day in his. Without complications. Without risk. And he’d be happy as a clam about it, closed up in his impenetrable shell.

Tessa D’Angelo and her cause was not his concern.

He clicked the stem on the watch as she sprinted past him. Purposefully he didn’t look her way as she bent over, hands braced on her knees, her sweet little derriere pointed in his direction. He was glowering when she came over to peer down at the sheet tacked to his clipboard.

“How’d I do, coach?”

Her voice was breathy, slightly ragged, the way he’d imagine it would be after an exuberant bout of sex. His own growled in response.

“Better by five point two seconds.”

She looked ridiculously pleased at that, as if she’d won some prestigious court case or the lottery.

“But don’t start booking your Olympic berth just yet.”

Even his surly retort couldn’t dim the sudden flash of her smile.

His gut twisted.

Then her bright, curious eyes lifted to a spot past his shoulder and her tawny brows arched in unspoken question. He glanced behind him to see Constanza carrying linens across the footbridge to the barracks. Even before she asked, he suddenly realized the conclusion Tessa had drawn.

“Are she and the little girl—”

Jack cut her off. “What they are, is none of your business. You were not invited here as a guest and I’ll allow for no intrusions into my private life. Clear?”

She blinked, startled and hurt, but the fiery pride was quick to resurface. Her tone was equally chilled. “Like my mother’s fine crystal.”

She caught the book he tossed her way without checking the cover. Her gaze still skewered his, letting him know how unforgivably rude he’d just been.

Knowing she was right didn’t improve his mood.

“Homework. Read lessons one through four. We’ll be going over them at fourteen hundred hours. And I don’t mean in a lecture hall.”

She rolled the self-defense manual in her grip and, without another word, started for the barracks. As she passed the South American woman at the bridge, Tessa never acknowledged her with so much as a glance.

A long, hot shower helped unknot Tessa’s muscles but did little for the tension twisting through her. With a towel turbaned around her damp hair, she reclined on her bunk against a brace of pillows borrowed from the empty rooms and flipped open the manual that she noted was written by a former SEAL. Poet laureates didn’t teach unarmed combat.

While Tinker leaned into her hip to fastidiously wash his hind leg, Tessa began to study with the concentration she’d applied to her bar exam. Taking notes in a spiral pad, she jotted down the essentials of stance, footwork, making a proper fist and basic hand techniques for pummeling your assailant. Tinker paused to glare at her as she practiced the rudiments of the jab-punch, hook-and-elbow strike. She smiled faintly. Okay, a little like her Tae-Bo classes. She could do this. She continued through the detailed mechanics of knee strikes and round kicks, picturing Jackie Chan then, annoyingly, Jack Chaney, illustrating the moves in her mind’s eye. Thinking of Chaney inspired her to restless movement.

With the book open on her bedspread, Tessa ran through the drills, combining punches and kicks with swift, potentially lethal intent. She pictured Jack’s carved-in-stone features as he told her not to intrude in his personal life. Pow. Right jab. As if she’d find anything fascinating there.

He could keep his oh-so-important secrets. Chaney’s life, no matter how intriguing, was not the reason she was here—here in the bunkhouse as a student, not in the main house as a guest, where the mysterious woman and child who may or may not belong to him lived.

A sudden surge of melancholy stole her aggressive thunder. He didn’t have to be so mean about it.

Closing the book, she flopped down on the bed and gathered a briefly resistant Tinker up in her arms. As she stroked his scarred head, he magnanimously issued his rumbling purr of approval.

Even in the daytime it was quiet. She was a city girl, born and bred, used to the city’s vibrant, jarring cadences. It was the music that scored her daily activities. She’d always been in a hurry, darting from the office to the court to dinner meetings and social galas. Working, always working, even in her pajamas late at night, curled on the couch in front of “David Letterman,” a volume of appellate law on her lap, absently shooing Tinker out of her bowl of Frosted Cheerios.

Her planner was always full, her voice message light blinking and her bathroom mirror covered with multicolored sticky notes reminding her of errands to be prioritized. And what fueled most of her hours, nearly 24/7, was her father. Arranging his schedule, proofing his speeches, writing his motions, picking up his dry cleaning, always busy behind the scenes so he would look together and unharried. What was she going to do without him in her life to provide that driving force? Even now she couldn’t believe she would never hear his voice over the intercom asking if she knew where to find the Pellingham brief. Her days, her nights, her focus all funneled into Robert D’Angelo and his charismatic climb from prosecutor to D.A. and on into a political arena. Phones ringing, cabs honking, file cabinet doors rattling open, the constant gurgle of coffee being brewed. Those were the sounds that had filled her life with meaning.