Jennifer Greene - The Baby Chase

Until she came to the letter. Adrenaline pumped through her veins as she read, then reread, the last missive.

It was a carbon copy of a letter, written not to Monica, but by Monica. Although the message contained only a few short lines, it was dated ten days before her death, threatening a woman named Tammy Diller about “showing up for their meeting” or risking “more trouble than you ever dreamed of.”

Pay dirt.

Elation thrummed through Rebecca’s pulse. Something about the woman’s name struck a vague chord in her memory, but she couldn’t place it…and that didn’t immediately matter, anyway. The letter itself was enough. Maybe the missive was no proof that her brother was innocent. Maybe it wasn’t proof this Tammy woman had done anything, either. But it was sure proof that another person had been in the picture around the time of Monica’s death…and their relationship hardly sounded amicable.

Ignoring every ache and pain, Rebecca scrambled to her feet. Handling the letter as if it were precious china, she jogged out of the bedroom and into the hall, yelling loudly for Gabe.

Later it occurred to her that her screaming might have aroused his alarm and made him think she’d done something to half kill herself, because she saw him fly up the winding front stairs three at a time. Just then, the only things on her mind were elation and relief and excitement that she’d found something real and concrete that could link someone else to Monica’s murder besides her brother.

When Gabe flew toward her, she flew straight at him.

It was perfectly logical to throw her arms around him. Any woman would have understood the perfectly natural, emotional impulse.

Gabe, though, didn’t quite seem to see it that way.

The way Rebecca was charging down that hall, Gabe naturally assumed demons or monsters were after her—or a killer. Maybe he’d been retired from the Special Forces for the past seven years, but certain responses were as well-honed as instincts for him. He was braced to yank her behind him, out of harm’s way, and protect her. He was braced to confront serious danger.

He was braced for just about anything but the damn fool woman throwing her arms around him. The exuberant hug was so sudden. And maybe she aimed that sassy smack for his cheek, but it collided an inch short. On his mouth. With the impact of a bullet.

Gabe had been shot. Twice. The experience was something a man never forgot, although it hadn’t hurt either time—not at the instant of impact. It had felt more like a sudden burn, a burst of stunning heat.

Bullets had nothing on Rebecca.

He’d known she was trouble. Known at some gut-instinct level that keeping his hands off her could avert the core source of that trouble. But initially he grabbed her because his brain was responding to the threat of danger. Initially adrenaline was pumping through his veins at the speed of light. A millisecond later, that adrenaline rush was sabotaged by the flooding pump of straight testosterone.

The long hall was dim and dark, so empty that his heartbeat echoed loudly, bouncing off the silence. Whyever in hell she’d hugged him, her head suddenly reared back. Velvet green eyes connected with his. The huge smile curving her lips suddenly faded, softened. She didn’t drop her arms. She didn’t do anything any sane, normal, rational woman would do. She lifted up on tiptoe, not unlike a kitten hell-bent on being curious, and kissed him.

She tasted like spring winds and innocence. She tasted like nothing that had been in Gabe’s life for a long, long time…nothing he’d missed or even wanted, dammit. Until that moment. Her mouth was softer than a baby’s behind, the scent of her skin as wholesome as Ivory soap, and something was in one of the hands that scratched his neck. Paper? But her other hand suddenly clutched the dark hair at his nape, and her small breasts flattened against his chest, and suddenly Gabe couldn’t breathe.

All right, he tried telling himself. It’s all right. There was nothing happening here but a little overflow of testosterone. Just hormones. He’d been celibate for a while, and he damn well hated being celibate, and even if Rebecca drove him nuts, she was two-hundred-percent female. The sizzle of desire bolting through his system was natural. Simple biology.

Nothing seemed real simple at that moment, though. His fingers found their way into that messy tangle of red hair, so silky, so soft, and her mouth opened under the pressure of his. Her tongue was wet, as small as a secret, and if that woman had a repressive instinct in her, it didn’t show. She kissed with abandon. She kissed like pure, untouched emotion. She kissed like she’d never been on a roller-coaster ride before and was utterly captivated by the whole experience.

Rebecca could totally immerse a man in quicksand in three seconds flat—if he let her.

Gabe twisted his mouth free, and sucked in a lungful of oxygen. Then tried sucking in another lungful. Then tried a more intelligent move—like removing his hands from her body and swearing.

Swearing worked. She opened her eyes, staring at him as if her vision were submerged in a fog, but her hands slowly dropped from his shoulders. It seemed a year or two later before she got around to rocking back on her heels. “Well,” she murmured.

He didn’t like the way she said that “Well.” He didn’t trust the way her right eyebrow suddenly arched, either.

“If I’d known you kissed like that, cutie pie, I’d have pressed for a sample long before this,” she announced.

God give him strength. “It was an accident.”

“I know.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“The wonder was that it happened at all. Every time I’ve been around you before, I was pretty sure you were more tempted to kill me than kiss me.”

“I was. I am. And if you hadn’t been living a sheltered life hunched over a keyboard, you’d have known the chemistry was there. Where I come from, you don’t wake up a sleeping lion. Now I assume, five miles back, you must have had some reason for throwing your arms around me?”

“Reason?” She said the word like it was alien. With Rebecca, that was certainly possible. For one long, horrifying minute, her soft green eyes stayed glued to his face, studying him, making him feel aggravatingly…naked. But then she blinked, and abruptly lifted her hand, as if just then remembering she was holding a piece of paper. “Of course I had a reason. A superb reason. Gabe! You won’t believe what I found!”

Well, she was diverted from talking about all that touchy, tricky chemistry business, but calming Rebecca down when she was excited had a lot in common with containing a rumor in Washington.

Gabe saw the letter, read the letter, was dragged into Monica’s bedroom closet, where she’d found the letter, but even after they headed back downstairs, she was prancing with energy—and trying hard to make him eat crow.

“Did I tell you I’d find something? Did I?”

“Now listen, shorty, you’re getting your hopes sky-high. This really isn’t proof of anything—”

“It’s proof that there could have been another factor involved in Monica’s murder. It’s proof that someone besides my brother was butting heads with Monica in the same general time period around her death.”

Yeah, he saw it that way, too. And it burned his butt that an idealistic, altruistic hopeless dreamer of a mystery writer had managed to find the clue instead of him—especially since he’d turned the damn mansion upside down himself three times now, and come up with nada.

Because Gabe wasn’t born yesterday, he carefully sneaked the letter away from her and folded it neatly in his pocket. A Los Angeles address for this Tammy Diller had been on it, an address Rebecca had certainly seen—but hopefully wouldn’t remember. The back of his mind was already clicking with plans. As soon as he got home, he could probe the data bases on the computer for info on that name and address. If anything panned out, he’d need to make travel arrangements for a trip to L.A.