Diana Palmer - Desperado

“I hadn’t.” She clutched her purse and sweater close to her chest, and her eyes reflected the old sadness. “When my father died, all the laughter went out of my life. Then Mama let pneumonia take her out only two years later.”

He scowled. This was news. “When you were eight,” he guessed.

She lifted her face. “Why...no. When I was six.”

“Then where did you go until Amy fostered you? Did you have grandparents?”

She shivered. “A stepfather.” Her voice was low and soft and full of pain.

He started to ask another question when the elevator stopped. She got off ahead of him and headed toward the front, where the car was parked. He knew he wasn’t being tailed, so he wasn’t being cautious.

He followed along behind her. A stepfather. She’d apparently lived with him for two years before she’d come to Amy Barton’s house. He was full of questions, but she’d closed up like a flower. It didn’t take a mind reader to know that she wasn’t going to answer any more questions right now. Her sharp glance told him so.

“How’s the job hunt going?” he asked as they reached the expensive black sports car he drove.

“I’m working already,” she said. “Logan Deverell hired me to work for his investment firm, just temporarily. His wife, Kit, works for the Lassiter Detective Agency, in the same building. They say you know Dane.”

“I do,” he replied abruptly. He opened her door and helped her inside, before he went around and climbed in under the wheel.

But he didn’t start the car immediately. He put an arm across the back of her seat and looked at her. “Lassiter deals in dangerous cases,” he pointed out. “I don’t like the idea of your working so close to him.”

“You don’t imagine that I care what you like?” she replied with a pleasant smile.

His jaw tautened as he stared at her, his thick eyebrows drawn together at the bridge of his nose. “I’m serious. Lassiter and his wife were involved in a shoot-out not too many years ago, right in his office. It’s well-known that he takes on cases other detectives won’t touch.”

“I’m going to be in the same building with him, not in his office,” she pointed out. “I do investment counseling, not detective work. Although, a change of careers is pretty tempting right now,” she added to irritate him.

He was overreacting. He knew it, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. Maggie’s abrupt departure from the country had shaken him more than he’d realized at first. The thought of never seeing her again was unsettling. Involuntarily he reached out a lean hand and caught a strand of her long, dark hair between his fingers, testing its silkiness.

“Just being in Houston right now is dangerous for you,” he said quietly. “You’re walking into something I can’t even tell you about.”

Which she knew already, thanks to Kit. She didn’t let on.

“I’m twenty-six,” she pointed out, trying not to react to the feel of those sensuous fingers in her hair.

His eyes flashed up to meet hers. They were stormy, intimidating, full of secrets. “In some ways, you’re unbelievably naive,” he countered. “The world is a bad place. You’ve never seen how dark it can be.”

She laughed without humor. “Do you think so?” she murmured with a strange look in her eyes.

He didn’t understand her response to the statement. Maggie kept secrets. He wondered just how terrible they were. The two of them had never been confidants, because he wouldn’t let her near him emotionally. He’d pushed her away, kept her at bay, all the long, lonely years. For the first time, he regretted it. Maggie had been the one person in the world who really cared about him. Because he was afraid of loss, he resisted close contact. But soon she could be half a world away, and there would never be another human being who shared his memories, his pain, his loneliness.

“You look sad,” she remarked involuntarily.

He grimaced. “You’re the only other person alive who remembers our time with Amy,” he said slowly, “my brush with the law, Patricia’s suicide, Amy’s illness and death.”

“All the bad memories,” she remarked.

“No!” He met her eyes. “There were other things. Picnics. Birthday parties. The time she brought home a model train set for Christmas—one we knew she had to have made sacrifices to buy because she didn’t have much of her fortune left by then—and the shock on her face when you loved it as much as I did. We spent hours lying on the rug in the dark, watching the lighted train go around.”

She smiled with memory. “Yes. And I helped you make the little scale buildings that went with it. You were out of school and in college then, just before you dropped out and went with the Houston Police. Amy was devastated. So was I,” she added, dropping her eyes.

“You both thought I’d end up in a coffin after my first week,” he scoffed.

“We should have known better. You were always thorough and methodical.”

His eyes narrowed. “Except once. The night Amy died.”

She jerked back away from him, her scalp stinging as he was forced to let go of her hair or risk hurting her more. She massaged the hurt place with her fingers, avoiding his eyes. “That was a long time ago.”

“Did you ever sleep with your husband?” he asked unexpectedly.

She actually gasped. The question was so blunt that she couldn’t believe what he’d just asked.

He studied her shocked face, rigid with distaste, for a long moment. “I didn’t think so,” he said after a minute. “His second wife in the divorce decree accused him of being impotent and abusive. He pretended to be an invalid, but there wasn’t anything much wrong with him. Except extreme alcoholism, and a violent temper.”

Maggie knew her face was white. “How...?”

“I went down to the courthouse and researched him,” he said. His expression grew hard. “He had a history of arrests for drunkenness and at least two for domestic abuse. Did you know that when you married him?”

Her jaw clenched, but her lips were trembling. She averted her gaze to the windshield. Memories flooded her mind, sickening memories. “Please, don’t,” she choked.

“Did he hit you, Maggie?” he demanded.

Her hand reached for the door handle automatically. She was halfway out when he pulled her gently back inside and closed the door again. The position he was in, his body close to hers, his chest at an angle above her, made her tremble.

He looked down into her wide eyes at such proximity that she could see the black rims around his very dark brown corneas. She could see the thick, straight, short lashes on his eyelids. She could smell the coffee on his breath and the clean scent of his body and clothes.

“I never understood why you married him,” he continued, his eyes narrowing as they searched hers. “You had nothing in common and he was twenty years your senior. It was quick, too—less than a month after Amy’s death, and one of your coworkers said you barely knew him. Everybody thought it was for his money. He was rich.”

“I can’t...I won’t...talk about him,” she choked. “Cord, please...!”

He felt her hand pushing against his chest, but he ignored it. “You said he cost you something precious. What?”

Her gaze fell to his wide, hard mouth, to the chiseled look of it with perfect white teeth barely visible in its parting. She remembered the feel of it on hers. Even the memory of pain and embarrassment didn’t ease the hunger for it. She wondered if he knew?

He did. He felt the quick rush of her breath at his mouth. He could see the hammer of her pulse at the collar of her shirt. He could feel the coldness of her perfectly manicured fingers through his shirt. She wanted him. That, at least, had never ebbed.