Harper Allen - Shotgun Daddy

Relief rushed through her, so sharp and intense that it felt like pain. Tears prickled at the back of her eyes and spilled over onto her lashes. “You’ll take on the job? Oh, Gabe—”

“There’s one more thing that’s going to happen, honey,” he went on. “One of these days you’re going to come to me for the third time, except it won’t be to bolster your ego or take on a hostage negotiation. It’ll be because you remember, too.”

He brought a tanned hand to her chin and tilted it upward so that she couldn’t avoid his eyes. “I know you do, princess,” he said in an edged whisper. “No matter what you said the morning after, you loved it just as much as I did, didn’t you? So one day you’re going to show up on my doorstep, and whatever reason you give for being there, I’m going to know what you want…and even if it takes every last ounce of self-control I have, I’m going to turn you down.”

She’d been on a roller coaster of emotions for the past twenty-four hours, Caro thought, her gaze trapped by the coldness in his. Since receiving the call from Jess’s kidnappers, she’d swung from fear to hope to despair, but what she was feeling right now wasn’t any of those.

It was anger. And what made it worse was that it was mixed with a flicker of desire. She pushed his hand away.

“No, you’re not,” she said, her voice as icy as she could make it. “Because you also said that when you looked at me you saw heat that could sear a brand onto a man. You might try to deny it, but I think you let yourself be branded by me that night…and I think deep down you’d give anything to feel that brand burning into you again.”

Just for an instant she saw bleak self-knowledge shadow the antagonism in his gaze, and knew that her barb had struck home. Pride prompted her to sink it in a little deeper.

“I won’t even have to say please, will I, Gabe,” she said coolly. “If the day ever comes that I want what you have to offer, I’ll just show up and all that self-control of yours will disappear like it did once before.”

Even as the unforgivable words left her mouth she wanted to call it back, but it was too late. The shotgun still at his side, one-handedly Gabe pulled her to him, his face so close to hers that his words were spoken against her lips.

“You just set the ground rules again. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say ‘please’ and mean it. One of these days you will.”

Resisting the impulse to struggle free from his grasp, Caro met his eyes. “Is that a threat?”

“A threat?” He brought his mouth down one last fraction of an inch to hers. “Hell, no.”

His kiss was immediately deep. Shock and anger lent an immediate edge to her response. Her hands flew to his chest to push him away.

Then slowly, her fingers curled into her palms, twin handfuls of Gabe’s shirt clutched tightly in them.

For eighteen months she’d told herself she’d remembered it wrong, Caro thought light-headedly—that Gabriel Riggs’s kiss couldn’t have been like summer lightning racing through her, a shower of sparks sizzling along all her nerve endings at once. But she’d remembered it right. Except memory wasn’t a substitute for the real thing.

And the real thing was impossible to resist.

Abruptly Gabe lifted his mouth from hers. As if they’d been doused with a bucket of ice water, the sparks and the summer lightning were instantly extinguished.

His eyes, so pale that for a moment they seemed lupine, blazed down at her expressionlessly. At the side of his neck a trip-hammer pulse gave the lie to his air of control.

“Not a threat, a promise.” His smile held no humor at all. “And I’m going to be right there when you keep it, princess.”

“Dammit, Caro, this Riggs character you’ve foisted on us has been hiding out in the desert for a year and a half. The man’s obviously unstable, to say the least.” Crawford Solutions’ vice president Steve Dixon’s balding head gleamed with sweat, despite the air-conditioning keeping the sticky heat of the Mexican evening outside at bay. “Right now, he’s upstairs going through Jess’s private papers and belongings instead of conferring with us. If that doesn’t point to his incompetence, I don’t know what does.”

Dixon’s objection was a variation of the same ones he’d made upon her and Gabe’s arrival at Jess’s Lazy J Ranch a few hours ago, Caro thought in frustration, when she’d informed him that Gabe was now the negotiator in charge of the case. He’d kept them up during the brief flight across the border to the Crawford Solutions’ villa here in Mexico’s Chihuahua Province, and he was still trying to persuade her to change her mind. The only difference was that now he had an ally.

With his cadre of paramilitary types milling around and a Recoveries International command post already established at the villa—in one corner of the room a technician was checking a bewildering array of wires and computer monitors hooked up to the telephone in preparation for the kidnappers’ expected phone call—it was obvious Larry Kanin didn’t intend to be replaced without a fight, as he now made clear.

“Living like a hermit didn’t drive our boy Gabriel round the bend. Fouling up the last job he did for me before I fired him was what made him snap,” Kanin drawled. “Like I told you, Steve, the man crashed a party at my Aspen chalet. I had to get physical with him before he would leave.”

The Caroline Moore who’d been Larry’s fiancée was a woman she didn’t even know anymore, Caro thought. How had she ever contemplated marrying him? Nothing about him seemed quite real, from the crisp wave in his dark brown hair to his air of concern over Jess’s abduction.

At least I never slept with the man, she told herself thankfully. If I had, I don’t think I could stand being in the same room as him. I just wish I hadn’t had to make Gabe believe the relationship had gone that far.

But then, she wished a lot of things when it came to Gabriel Riggs. Right at the top of that wish list was the futile desire that she’d come off a little better than she had in their confrontation earlier.

There were two people in the world against whom the shields she’d kept up all her life were useless. One of them was Emily, right now safely in the care of Mrs. Percy, a local woman who’d baby-sat her since her birth and who had agreed to spend tonight at the Lazy J. At the thought of her small daughter, Caro instinctively wrapped her arms around herself, as if in them she could feel the weight and warmth of a tiny body.

From the moment she’d first learned she had a new life growing inside her she’d willingly laid her heart bare to every piercing joy, every numbing fear, every emotion possible that came with the all-enveloping love she felt toward the baby she’d been blessed with. Emily was one of the two people who left her vulnerable, and that was as it should be between a mother and her child.

But Gabe Riggs was the other person she couldn’t seem to shield herself against, and that wouldn’t do at all.

She’d gone to him today determined not to let anything of what she’d felt for him in the past show in her face, her voice, her actions. But his coldness toward her had shattered all her protective barriers, and she’d struck out at him in the only way she knew how.

She’d been the ice princess he remembered her to be. And then she’d melted at his kiss the way he’d known she would. Without even trying, he’d smashed through her every defence.

Every defence except one, she thought shakily. She’d kept the facts of Emily’s parentage to herself. To make sure she continued keeping that secret safe, she would have to build her defences higher and stronger where Gabriel Riggs was concerned…even if that meant she had to be the rich bitch he’d known her as eighteen months ago.