Angel of Desire (14 page)

The name on Shade's forged papers was John Savage. From the murderous expression that darkened his features whenever they talked about the general, Rachel had decided the alias definitely fit. Her own papers bore her real name. When she'd failed to show up in any international police agencies' files. Shade had decided against changing it.

"I don't intend to try to fool the guy," Shade allowed. "You're right. The general and I have had enough run-ins in the past, he'd recognize me immediately." Unless the bastard had tortured so many men they'd all melded together in his criminal mind, Shade tacked on silently.

"So, I'm going to tell him that after I returned stateside with my injuries—"

"Which his men inflicted," she murmured, thinking back on that horrible time when she'd been able to save his life but had lacked the power to prevent his pain. There was a great deal of predestination involved in the business of life, Joshua had reminded her at the time. Sometimes one just had to allow events to take their course.

Damn
. Shade regretted having told Rachel about the seemingly endless torture, during one of his uncharacteristic moments of openness. "Yeah. While the general got off by watching."

His jaw hardened at the memory. The general was going to die. And Shade was going to enjoy being the one to send the bastard directly to the lowest circle of hell.

"Anyway, my cover story is going to be that our government had no further use for me. So now, forced to make a living, I had no choice but to turn mercenary. I've also got a lucrative little black-market arms business going on the side."

"Considering the fact that the general is a thoroughly corrupt man, he should accept that story," Rachel agreed.

"In a minute. Especially when I offer him one helluva deal on some ground-to-air missiles recently liberated from one of our German bases. The trick will be getting him to release Conlan as part of the deal."

Rachel knew all too well the reason for the general taking Conlan O'Donahue hostage in the first place. She'd wanted to warn Shade for days, but afraid such knowledge might make him even more suspicious about her intentions, causing him to refuse to let her accompany him to Yaznovia, she'd held her tongue.

Now, having gotten this far, she decided it was time to broach the subject. "Have you considered the possibility," she began carefully, "that the general might be setting a trap for you?"

Shade shrugged. "Sure."

"Aren't you concerned?"

She was an intriguing, sexy, highly intelligent woman. There were also times when she was as transparent as glass. Shade looked down into her troubled eyes, tried to remember the last time anyone other than Conlan or Marianne had worried about him, and came up blank. Her obvious concern moved him in ways he did not want to be moved.

"I've got all the bases covered."

"What does that mean?" Baseball lexicon was not part of Rachel Parrish's world.

Giving in to impulse, and because it had been four very long days and three frustratingly lonely nights since he'd tasted Rachel's sweet lips, Shade bent his head and kissed her. A brief, sweet kiss that nevertheless shook her all the way to her toes.

"It means, don't worry."

But she did. Horribly. Because she was already living on borrowed time. And she still hadn't figured out a way to save Shade from himself.

As it was, she half expected Joshua to pop up at any moment with orders for her to return home. What, she wondered wretchedly, was she going to do?

Shade watched the frown move across her luscious lips, saw the shadow darken her eyes and wondered yet again how her thoughts could be so obvious one minute, then prove frustratingly unfathomable seconds later.

He would give anything to know what the hell she was thinking when she drifted away from him as she was doing now. He was going crazy trying to read the secret she held just behind her eyes.

Shade had always considered himself a good judge of character. In his line of work, a guy had to be or he wouldn't last long enough to earn his first anniversary letter from the director. Yet, as much as he hated to admit it, Rachel Parrish, or whoever she was, had him stumped.

He'd tried taking all the facts—the few he knew—about her and comparing them to what he felt about her. The problem was, nothing lined up.

Was she the secretive Mata Hari that Liz McGee kept insisting she was? Or the dedicated woman who was risking her own life to save the life of someone she loved? Was she, perhaps, that passionate, strangely vulnerable young woman who felt so right in his arms?

Or, perhaps she was all three.

Which was real? Which was an act?

He wanted to believe the best of Rachel, but he'd taken off the rose-colored glasses years ago and knew that the world was a cruel place.

life could be petty, violent, cruel and unpredictable. In that respect, it was a lot like women, he re-fleeted, vowing to solve the frustrating puzzle that was Rachel Parrish before this shared adventure was over.

"Oh!" An alabaster palace with tall, wedding-cake spires suddenly appeared through the silvery fog, reminding her of Brigadoon rising from the mists. "Isn't that absolutely lovely!"

"The most beautiful sight I've ever seen," he agreed.

But Shade was not looking at the palace situated on the island in the middle of the lake. He was looking down at Rachel.

She blushed. Her heart began drumming. Too fast and too hard. Her blood warmed. Too fast and too hot.

"You shouldn't talk to me that way," she protested softly.

"Afraid I'll get too close?" He ran a hand down her wind-tousled hair. He liked the fact that she'd stopped tying it back in that ugly bun. It was wet with mist; the fog droplets glistened like diamonds strewn over polished gold.

"Yes." She shook her head. "I mean, no."

He slipped his arms around her waist and felt her body begin to quiver. "Which is it?" He touched his lips to her temple. "Yes?" Her cheek. "Or no?" He nipped lightly at her lower lip, felt her sigh, then soothed the faint pain with his tongue.

"Both." She closed her eyes and leaned into the embrace, allowing herself the stolen pleasure. "It's not right, this way you make me feel."

"Not right for either one of us," Shade agreed. There was no use denying, even to himself,
especially
to himself, that she'd gotten to him. "But that doesn't change the fact that I want you."

And I want you
, she could have said but didn't.

"I'm afraid of you," Rachel said instead. She felt his hands moving up and down her back and tried not to think that they felt as if they belonged there. "Of myself ." She lifted her own hands to his shoulders. "Of us."

"Join the club." His hands drifted below her waist, settling on her hips, drawing her closer.

She tilted her head back and looked up at him. "Are you saying—"

"I'm afraid of us, too," he revealed, every bit as surprised to hear himself saying the words as she was to be hearing them.

"You are?"

Rachel, who thought she'd known everything about Shade, was surprised. She'd not have thought he could ever fear anything. She lifted a hand to his cheek.

"I never imagined—"

"I dream of you, dammit!" The frustration had been building for days. Shade could no longer rein it in. He grabbed hold of her slender wrist, then found, to his distraction, that he could not toss it aside. "Not just at night, but during the day.

"I think of you when I should be thinking of how I'm going to get into that damn prison. I look at the blueprints, and instead of stones and tunnels and iron bars, I see your exquisite face.

"If that isn't bad enough, I lie awake nights, thinking of your scent, your taste—like cooling rain one minute, heated honey the next—the touch of your satiny skin."

As if to underscore his words, he stroked the inside of her wrist before finally dropping her hand, but not before she'd felt his fingers tremble.

"Although it's dangerous, though I can't afford any distractions right now, I can't stop wondering what it is about you that's gotten under my skin. What secret you possess that makes you so different from any woman I've ever known. Or ever wanted. I just don't know what the hell it is."

Frustrated, angry and filled with self-disgust at showing Rachel his weakness, he dragged his hand through his hair.

The heated, obviously unplanned declaration took Rachel's breath away. Warning bells tolled. Knowing it would be one more serious infraction she would eventually have to answer for, she ignored them.

"Why do you have to know?" she asked quietly. She gave him a long, searching look. "Isn't it enough just to feel?"

"Not for me, dammit!" He took her shoulders, stopping himself short of shaking her. "You just don't get it, do you?"

Rachel refused to cower under his furious gaze. She'd faced far worse in her lifetime without succumbing to feminine vapors; she refused to flinch just because Shade was having problems dealing with title tender, generous side of his nature she'd always known he possessed. And he'd always denied.

"Get what?" she inquired calmly.

"I don't
want
to feel anything. I don't want to think of you. I don't want to worry about keeping you safe after we cross the border tomorrow morning and I damn well don't want to want you."

His fingers tightened, digging into the flesh beneath her scarlet sweater in a way she knew would leave bruises. "I don't want any part of you, Sister Rachel. I want you out of my head. Out of my life."

Her eyes possessed a hard brightness, but there was no filming of tears. She felt sorrow for the little boy who'd experienced so much pain; she felt anger for the man who stubbornly refused to see the truth.

"Caring for someone isn't such a bad thing, Shade."

"That goes to show how much you know."

Caring made you vulnerable, something Shade had vowed at a young age never to be again. His mind flashed back to his mother, who, when he was seven years old, dropped him off at the movie theater one wintry Saturday morning, promising to come back and get him.

The movie, he remembered with vivid, unrelenting clarity, had been
The Sound of Musk
, about a large, loving family so far removed from his own bleak experience it could have been set on Mars.

He'd sat through every showing, watched the Roadrunner outsmart the coyote over and over again and suffered innumerable suggestions that nirvana, in the form of unaffordable popcorn, candy and Coca-Cola, was available in the lobby.

When his mother still hadn't returned by the time the theater closed for the night, Shade had gone looking for her, afraid he was going to find her sick. Or passed out. Again.

He'd diligently made the rounds of all the bars he knew she frequented. Then he'd gone back to their apartment, hoping to find her in bed with one of her boyfriends.

But instead he'd found the apartment empty. More than empty. It had been stripped. Every single thing belonging to his mother was gone. The only things that remained were his extra pair of jeans and two worn and faded New England Patriots T-shirts. The cupboards and the refrigerator, which never were all that well stocked, were empty. Even his toothbrush had disappeared.

The following morning, he'd sat on the floor, trying to figure out where he was going to get enough money. to buy some food—with the exception of a package of red licorice whips, he hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours—when the landlady showed up with the social services people in tow.

He'd never seen his mother again.

Rachel watched the scowl cross his face and suspected that this was one time she knew exactly what Shade was thinking. She was afraid that she'd been overly optimistic when she vowed that before her time on earth was up, she'd teach Shade to trust.

Because, unfortunately, life had already provided its own harsh lesson. Again and again.

"I'm not asking you for anything, Shade." She touched her fingers to his cheek and felt his face harden, muscle by muscle. "Nothing at all."

That was, Shade considered grimly, part of the trouble. If she didn't ask for a future, how the hell was he going to tell her that it just wasn't in the cards? How could he give her all the reasons, sane, logical reasons, why it wouldn't work? He'd always avoided discussions about relationships, finding them a great deal like skating on the thin ice of a frozen lake. One false move and you could be trapped, over your head in the freezing water, with no way to escape.

He was saved from responding by the arrival of the boat at the dock. "We're here."

"Yes." She followed his gaze to the limousine waiting at the pier. "I wish I'd thought to brush up on my curtsy."

He ran his hand down her hair, loving the feel of the honey-hued silk against his palm. "You'll do fine."

"I hope so. I'd hate to create an international incident." Her smile touched her eyes, giving her a sweetness, a gentleness, that once again pulled an unwelcome chord inside Shade.

Temptation stirred. As he helped Rachel off the boat, Shade forced it down.

Rachel needn't have worried about royal protocol. The royal family immediately put her at ease. Upon arriving at the fairy-tale palace, she was introduced to Prince Burke, the regent of Montacroix, the man who had, before his wedding to the former Sabrina Darling last year, been declared the most eligible bachelor in the world.

The prince was the requisite tall, dark and handsome, with a lean, intelligent face and dark eyes that looked as if they never missed a thing. His American actress bride, with her striking palomino fall of pale blond hair, was equally beautiful.

Also on hand to greet their visitors were Prince Burke's father, Prince Eduard and his mother, Jessica Giraudeau. Like her daughter-in-law, Jessica had also been an acclaimed American actress. Unlike Sabrina, who continued to work at her craft, Jessica had willingly turned her back on a very successful film career for a life with the man she loved.

Standing on the oilier side of Prince Burke was his still-unmarried sister, the Princess Noel, a lovely, Grace Kelly type of blonde. The genuine welcome in her greeting and the warmth in her violet-blue eyes belied her cool appearance.