Accompanying Alice (7 page)

“This won’t be a professional cut, you know,” she said suddenly.

“Alice.” His voice was thick and unsteady. “I don’t care what it’s like. Just finish it.”

Uncertainty made her pause with her hand laced deep in his hair. “Gabriel?” His name spilled off her tongue for the first time like the hushed sound of a waterfall suddenly springing up in the desert. He turned to her because he couldn’t help himself. The emotion on his face was raw, stunning. Her fingers started to tremble and burn where they touched him. Her lungs swelled, but she forgot to breathe out. As though it had a life of its own, her hand lifted, stroked his hair into place. Then she got control and snatched her hand back to herself, and her lungs released the pent up air.

Dangerous. Oh, God, he was so dangerous. Even when he didn’t hold lethal weapons. She watched him catch hold of himself and turn away.

“Do you—” she began unsteadily, but was interrupted by a knock on the front door. She started and glanced at Gabriel uneasily, afraid for him. “Should I-should you... hide?”

Gabriel ran a hand through his half-cut hair. “No. Just give me a minute—and my boots.”

Alice retrieved the filthy items from the kitchen landing where she’d set them to dry. “What do you need them for—” She stopped in the doorway on the top step, staring while
Gabriel whisked a finger quickly across each eye, then wiped it on the paper napkin in his other hand. When he looked at Alice again, his eyes were brown.

“Colored extended-wear lenses,” he said, crumpling the napkin around the contacts and dumping both in the kitchen
basket. “Useful. There’s a pair of glasses in a pocket in my left boot. Hand them to me, will you?”

After a moment’s search, Alice found the carefully constructed pocket in the boot’s seam and withdrew the light, silver-rimmed spectacles. Gabriel cleaned them with the soft cloth they’d been wrapped in, and put them on. Expressive chocolate eyes blinked and focused behind the circles of glass. “Recognize me?”

Alice shut her mouth and un-cocked her head from its incredulous tilt without telling him she doubted her pulse would ever not recognize him again. “You need the rest of your hair cut,” was all she said.

Gabriel laughed. “Anyone ever tell you you’ll never make a poker player?”

Alice, the woman who thought she couldn’t handle much of anything, especially flirting, collected herself and winked at him. “Only people who don’t know me,” she said. The smile she gave him was small and enigmatic, disturbing him in all the places she hadn’t disturbed already—in ways he could become accustomed to if he wasn’t careful. Dangerous. The kind of woman who could make a man stop and question who and what he was, who made a man feel—and emotions were a luxury he didn’t have time for. She was definitely not a woman to be taken lightly, nor one to turn his back on.

“I’ll get the door.”

She turned and dropped his boots back down the steps, and Gabriel breathed as though released from a spell. “Give yourself a minute. Don’t answer it blind. See who it is first.”

Nodding, Alice moved across to the dining room window and peered through the lace curtains at the front porch. Gabriel watched her do a double take, have a second look and
blanch. He was at her side in a flash. A woman officer in rain-speckled green army dress stood at the door beside a curly-haired, fashionable man in a distinctly Armani-looking suit. Gabriel turned to Alice without comprehension. “It’s all right, it’s just—”

Shaking her head, Alice backed away from the curtains in horror. “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “That woman—you don’t understand. You don’t know. She went to the academy. She’s real gung ho—she graduated from
The Point
. She scares me to death. She scares everyone to death. She thinks up
scenarios
and then she...makes us—makes
me
—
do
things.”

Gabriel viewed her with unadulterated disbelief. Not even
he
had scared her this much. “So don’t answer the door. Pretend you’re not home. Don’t let her in.”

“You don’t understand,” Alice repeated, retreating as far as possible into her bathrobe. “She wasn’t supposed to be home till tomorrow. I haven’t seen her in six months. I have to let her in. That’s my sister, the major.”

Chapter Three

“W
ho’s that with her?”

“Oh, God, it must be the yuppie—the investment broker.” Alice struggled to keep the “ugh” out of her voice. “I mentioned him—he went to school with The Major. He’s the one they’ve lined up to accompany me to the wedding and the rehearsal dinner. I don’t know how weddings affect your family, but with mine it’s, you know, weddings, romance, boy-girl-boy-girl, Noah’s Ark—symmetry in numbers. They wanted me to go out with him before the wedding. I was
supposed to meet him for brunch this morning, but I begged off. Told them I had to look for a job. Oh, God, I don’t want to
do
this. I’m not cut out for this. They’re making me
crazy
, always trying to fix me up, pair me off, drag me along with this man or that—usually with some
metrosexual
professional or career military man who needs a cute little homebody to arrange his life and be his hostess. Home and hearth, earth mama, that’s me. Or so they think. Dammit.”

Agitated, she retreated to the kitchen, putting another wall
between herself and the door. “Oh, God, why do you do this to me? I’ve been good. I haven’t done anything—lately. I hate it when they do this. I always wind up sitting in some little dark corner listening to sob stories and fending off advances because they think that since my
sisters
had to get me a date I’m either desperate or a real loser, and I’m
not.
I just... don’t like strange men. I mean, really, don’t they
think I’d get my own dates if I wanted—”

Inspiration struck in the middle of the word, and she swung around on Gabriel, eyes gleaming with it
—
and terror. “Look, I don’t count favors or call markers or whatever it is they say on those cop shows, but I’m desperate, and I’m
not
going out on any date
she’s
set me up for, and you owe me. You don’t have to say anything, just let her think—”

Ever quick on the uptake—a trait that, along with his skill at improvisation, had saved his hide more than once—Gabriel kissed her. Thoroughly. With something that began in amusement and ended in surprise. Or rather, didn’
t want to
end at all.

Shaken, he pulled away from her, touched a thumb to her lip in amazement, then loosened the belt on her robe just enough to make her look rushed.

Warmth thudded through Alice, raised the color in her cheeks, her throat, spread into the pale skin revealed by the gap in her robe. He raised a finger as though to brush away the flush, hesitated, then folded the lapels of her robe over it instead. Where the aquamarine contact lenses would have hidden his emotion, desire lay exposed in the true color of his eyes. He moved his hand, and Alice clutched the folds of her robe together at her throat. He cleared his.

“There,” he whispered. “Now you look like you’ve been too busy to answer the door.”

Alice tasted the trace of him that lingered on her lips, and some long unreleased sigh shuddered through her. “I, uh, kind of feel like I’ve been too busy to answer the door.”

She touched her mouth and offered him half a smile, and Gabriel’s gut tightened. His jaw worked. It was no good, he’d known that from the start. She touched him and he wanted her in the most elemental way possible. She surprised him. Fearful, generous, enigmatic, childlike, uncomplicated and complex
—
all of it genuine, unlike him. He wanted to convince himself he’d kissed her partly out of gratitude and partly because lying to people, acting, setting a scene to make illusion look like truth was something he did well, was what he did for a living. Seventy-five percent of making a lie work lay in making himself believe in it Ninety-five percent of doing his job right lay in never forgetting it was all a lie
—
that even while he manipulated the way someone else might feel, he himself was never supposed to feel.

A taste of rain blew in when Alice opened the front door, and he didn’t have time for the sudden recurrent loathing he’d felt too often of late for both himself and his profession.
Show time,
he thought and detoured quickly through the living room toward the bedrooms at the back of the house, having decided even as he despised himself for it how he would play Alice’s lover....

*

“Helen, how, um—”

“Come on, Allie, let us in. It’s miserable out here. Where’ve you been? We’ve been out here for ages. C’mon, woman, move! Let’s get cracking here. We’ve come to cheer you up, take you to dinner. By the way, this is Skip—” Helen wiggled one dark brow conspiratorially in a move stolen from their late father “—your date.”

“Skip?” Alice shut her eyes instead of rolling them. The investment broker looked even younger and less grandfatherly in person than she’d imagined. She hauled her robe firmly together and snugged the belt. “Helen,” she said, “it was nice of you to think of me, but I’m, um, busy. I have—”

“That’s all right, we have no plans.” When Alice still failed to invite them in, Helen pulled the storm door wide and did the honors herself. “Skip met me at the airport and this is just a spur-of-the-moment thing. You’re not dressed, you got a few things to do
—
we’ll wait, we’ll talk. We haven’t talked for a long time. Come on in, Skip, have a seat.”

“Helen, I don’t think she—”

“Nonsense.” Briskly Helen eased out of her jacket and carefully shook the rain out of it over the carpet in front of the door, then turned to hand it to Alice. “She probably—”

“Here, let me.” Gabriel hitched up his floppy pants and took the jacket from her, hung it over the back of a dining room chair and examined the green-eyed brunette with interest. Although the major was taller, heavier and more imposing than her sister, with higher cheekbones, even fairer skin and a glint of the devil in her eyes that Alice lacked on first glance, the family resemblance was unmistakable. He extended a hand. “You must be Helen. It’s nice to finally meet one of Alice’s sisters. We thought there might not be a chance before dinner Thursday. I’m Gabriel.”

“Gabriel.” Helen looked at him with astonishment, at her sister with uncertainty, at Skip-the-investment broker with discomfort. “Alice?”

“I said I was
busy
.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think that meant—I mean you’ve never—that I know of… Not since Matt...”

“Could we talk? Now.” Alice grabbed her arm and started to drag her sister toward the kitchen, thought better of the lack of privacy it provided and in mid-move switched directions and headed toward her bedroom, towing Helen behind her like a reckless speedboat towing a water skier. Gabriel and Skip eyed one another.

“Embarrassing,” Gabriel said.

“A bit,” Skip agreed.

Gabriel stuck out a hand. “Gabriel,” he said. “I hear you’re in stocks?”

“Skip. And no, it’s gold investments, actually. They never get that right—”

Alice slammed the bedroom door. “Helen, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Oooh, Alice, swearing! Don’t let Ma hear you. Gee—” she indicated the rumpled bed Alice distinctly remembered making this morning “—you have been occupied—”