Melissa James - Dangerous Illusion

As if she’d read his mind she put her hand out, with a bright smile as fake as her words. “Hello. My name’s Beth Silver.”

She’d put up another roadblock between them—and it was big as a boulder. It half killed him to laugh as he took her hand, but he did it—and touching her in any form was no hardship, even just the small, work-hardened hand lying in his rough palm.

Then, as he held her hand in his, a haunting sense of undone déjà vu came to him. Doubts. Shadows. Uncertainty. Something fundamental had changed from ten years before….

“It can’t be,” he muttered beneath his breath. Not Ana. He’d never met the cousin Delia claimed to be almost her double, but…no. A strong similarity in looks could only do so much for a man. This woman, and this woman alone drove him to the edge of sanity’s cliff with slamming, scorching-hot waves below—and he wanted to drown in it, bathe in the liquid fire torching a searing path between them.

She couldn’t be Ana. Obsession with a woman to the point of exclusion—being lost inside and consumed by Delia was his fact of life. Saving her was his mission, whether it was on the Nighthawks’ agenda or not. Wanting, needing to lose himself in her was his private hell, the torture he showed no one. If he could have her just once—

“Things must be bad if you’ve started to talk to yourself.”

Roused from the furnace burning his soul, he looked at her. She’d tilted her head, with a little, inquiring smile. A simple thing, sure, but a massive leap forward from the go-back-to-the-hellhole-you-crawled-out-of tone she’d kept with him since he’d tried to connect with her yesterday.

A step up in getting her and the kid out of here?

He laughed, going for common ground. “Lady, I’m from L.A.—the home base of actors, directors, plastic surgeons, walking, talking Barbie dolls and therapists. We’re all nuts, and believe me, talking to ourselves is the least of our problems.”

A little grin peeped out from behind her barriers—a genuine, honest-to-God smile that reached her eyes. Her cheeks flushed a delicate rose, and he ached, seeing the transformation. The star-queen vanished, and another being sat at her potter’s wheel. A woman of gentle, big-eyed loveliness, and her sweet shyness socked him in the guts with masculine awareness. She’d become a normal woman he could smile at, talk to, and maybe, God help him, touch…not just feed her, but explore the combusting sensuality he knew wasn’t one-sided. To have her mouth, her lush body beneath his—

“And which of the above are you?”

Keep going, just keep chipping at her barriers. Thirty-five hours and forty minutes… “Not guilty,” he returned with a wink. “I never had designs on Hollywood after living near it half my life. I can’t manage the overinflated sense of self-importance.”

Her head tilted a little more, her eyes twinkling. “You don’t want a hundred-foot trailer on set, imported water and French-milled soap to keep your manly beauty intact?”

He backed off a step, folding his arms as if she’d called his masculinity into question. “Twenty feet’s ample, and water from the tap and good old Dial soap will do me just fine. Chlorine and fluoride can’t do me any more damage than living in that crazy city did.”

She laughed. Oh, man, she laughed as if she meant it, as if she’d spent years needing to laugh again. The husky sweet music of it sucker-punched him, and sent a king hit right to his heart…because if it wasn’t quite Delia’s laugh, it was close enough. A woman’s version of the girl’s husky giggle that IDed her with ninety percent accuracy. The knowledge speared him with guilt, pity and the ruthlessness of duty.

It all added up. The food, the coffee; her reaction to hearing Danny’s real name; the fear, the security system—her laugh. Her response to him, as white-hot as his was to her. This woman was Delia de Souza, ID virtually positive, unless by some crazy quirk of fate Ana de Souza also had the same laugh, the same tastes in food…and in men.

McCall was no stranger to duty. He had only two choices now—to find solid evidence of her identity, or call Anson and tell him of his past with Delia, and his certainty that Beth Silver and Delia de Souza were one and the same.

The latter would be enough for Anson to move the equipment in tonight. The full show—mikes, cameras—a full regalia of watchers, as much to protect her as to keep her from running. This woman was the only one who could give him the irrefutable proof the Nighthawks needed to give the World Court, the only ones left who might be able to extradite Falcone from Minca bel Sol, his luxurious little bolt-hole in the Pacific—

And because Anson doesn’t know her, he’ll take me off point. And if she doesn’t trust me, how much chance have any of the other Nighthawks got, apart from forcibly abducting her and the kid? Then we’d never get the evidence—and we’ve got a snowball’s chance in a volcano of finding it. She’s too smart not to have stashed it where we’d never find it without her cooperation.

God help him, he had to keep silent, both to Beth and to Anson. He had to find physical evidence of her identity by the end of this day, or they could all go down in a hail of bullets.

The bell above the door gave a violent jangle as the door flew inward. McCall wheeled around, reaching for his weapon, training his eye on the target—but his gaze fell by two feet to find the culprit…a kid erupting into the room, a kid with a shock of thick dark hair, a thin build and intense, soulful eyes.

Danny. Maybe—almost definitely—Robbie Falcone. The resemblance to his father was uncanny.

The boy tore in, straight past McCall without noticing him, traipsing mud through the showroom, a football under his thin arm and his dark-eyed face alight with joy. “Mr. Branson says if I practice hard I might get off the reserves bench next week!”

“Oh, sweetie, that’s wonderful.”

Stuffing his Glock back in his jacket, McCall turned around to see Beth’s face, stricken pale—she’d seen the gun, all right—but she infused her voice with a happiness as strong as the boy’s, her eyes bright as the Pacific sky. “Do you want to practice again this afternoon? I can close the store early.”

The boy’s eyes fell, his thick dark lashes covering them. “Mummy, you play like a girl. Mr. Richards said I can go over now and play with him and Ethan.”

McCall smothered a grin; but any urge to smile faded when he saw the flash of panic that came and went in Beth’s eyes, so fast an untrained eye couldn’t have seen it. “Sweetie, you know I think Mr. Richards is very nice, but—”

“But we don’t know him well enough. We don’t know what he might do,” Danny said with an adult-sounding weariness that told McCall he’d said this too many times before. Was the poor kid only six? He sounded forty; and suddenly, he wasn’t “the kid” anymore. As in smuggling the dog in at night, in this, Danny Silver was a brother in arms, a little kid whose life necessitated that innocence must be shattered for survival.

Poor kid. Poor Danny.

Beth gave a swift, unreadable glance at McCall then turned away. “Exactly. Good boy.”

The boy’s face turned earnest, pleading. “But, Mummy, we know them. Mrs. Richards is your friend. And Mr. Richards, he’s not like the other guys’ dads…he goes to church.”

“Danny, I’d rather play with you myself. You know, just you and me.” Beth’s face had a haunted, hunted look to it now.

“No! I don’t wanna!” The boy stamped his foot, red-faced with fury, lapsing into childish speech. “I wanna play with Mr. Richards and Ethan! I want someone who can really play!”

Beth gave another swift glance McCall’s way. “Danny, we have a customer here. Can we wait until he’s left the showroom to continue the conversation?” Please leave, her eyes begged.