Before Sunrise (10 page)

With a little sob of pleasure, she relaxed in his arms and her lips parted. Her hands went to his lean face and her fingers tangled into the long, thick, clean strands of his black hair. The past and the present merged. She kissed him back with something like anguish.

But after a few insane seconds she managed to get her brain to work again. She heard voices in the distance. They weren't speaking Cherokee. They were giggling.

She drew her lips from under the devouring crush of his mouth. “Jeremiah…do you remember…that the upper part of my office door…is glass?” she got out.

He blinked, his own mind whirling. “Is that relevant?”

She turned her head toward the door. His followed. Outside were a host of little grinning faces and fingers looking back. Over their heads was Marie's pop-eyed expression. Behind her, five total strangers, including a well-dressed blond woman, were also getting an eye full.

Cortez cleared his throat and quickly moved Phoebe back into an upright position. He steadied her before he removed his hands and stepped back, but with his own back carefully turned toward the glass part of the door. He was reciting multiplication tables in a furious attempt to relax his aching body. His sunglasses had fallen out of his pocket onto the floor. He bent slowly to scoop them up and tuck them back into the pocket.

Phoebe smoothed the jacket of her pantsuit and put a nervous hand to her hair. Her mouth felt swollen. She was glad there wasn't a mirror.

Their audience melted away in a dull buzz of giggles. They were alone again.

“How could you do that?” she demanded. “You're married!” she choked.

“I am not!” he replied shortly. “I was widowed over two years ago.”

She was still trying to breathe normally. It wasn't easy. Her knees shook. She dropped down into her desk chair with the last dignity she could summon. “Oh.”

He was able to relax, too, finally. He perched himself on the edge of her desk facing her. His face was solemn. “I'll tell you all about it one day, when you're ready to listen.”

“Don't hold your breath,” she bit off.

“I told you once that I never do anything unless I've considered all the consequences,” he replied. “I thought…hating me might spare you any sadness.”

“Why should I have been sad?” she asked in what she hoped was a normal voice. “We were friends.”

He shook his head. “More than that.”

“No.”

Her mutinous expression said it all. She wasn't giving in, no matter how passionately he tried to convince her that he still cared. He had to bide his time.

She'd kept the newspaper clipping. That registered. Then his eyes went past her to the open desk drawer and he saw the charm his father had made for her three years ago. She still had it!

She saw where his eyes were looking and she closed the drawer abruptly.

“Do you remember what I wrote you about it?” he asked. “My father said to keep it with you always. I didn't understand why. He said it would save your life one day.”

She shifted in the chair. “You said he was a medicine man.”

“Yes. He still practices. He mentioned that charm again when I told him I'd found you.”

The wording was odd. She lifted her eyes to his. “Found me?”

He averted his gaze. “Bad choice of words. Met you again,” he corrected. “He said that you must put the charm in your pocket, and put these behind it. You must do this every time you go out alone.”

He drew two large Mexican peso pieces out of his hip pocket and handed them to her. They were heavy and still warm from his body.

She felt the weight and thickness. “What are these?”

“Very old, Mexican pesos that have been in my family for a long time,” he said. “My father was very specific about where you keep them, too—in your right slacks pocket or a fanny pack.”

She traced the heads on the heavy coins, touched
by his father's concern. “Why does he think these will save my life?”

“He has visions,” he told her. “A psychiatrist would call them delusions or the aura from migraine headaches—which he also has. But he knows things. He has two brothers. One is disgustingly normal and lives in California. The other lived with his Apache wife in Arizona until her death, and stayed on there to raise his son. He has the same gift of precognition that my father has. His son is in the CIA. He always knows when something's wrong with him.”

“I've known people with that gift,” she confessed, meeting his dark gaze. “Your father knew I was in danger before you came here!” she said suddenly, as the thought occurred to her.

He nodded. “He gave me those coins a month ago. He said I was going to see you when I came to North Carolina.”

“Did he know…that you were coming to North Carolina?”

He glanced down at the big coins in her hand. “Yes. God knows how. I was working out of Oklahoma until this summer. But because I'm Native American, and they're starting this new organization, I've been attached to the Indian Country Crime Unit. They sent me here when they got the news of the homicide on the Yonah
Reservation this week.” He hesitated. “I took a week off back in the summer and went to Charleston.”

Her lips parted. “I haven't been to Charleston in three years,” she blurted out.

His expression was hard to describe. “I know,” he said with feeling.

“You…were looking for me.”

His face gave away nothing.

“But you never wrote,” she bit off.

His eyes closed. “How could I? What could I have said that would undo the pain, Phoebe?”

She refused to think of the past. It was too painful. She took a deep breath. At least he didn't know how far she'd gone over the edge when she got that newspaper clipping. It spared her pride.

“It was all a long time ago,” she said primly. “Water under the bridge.”

He traced a pattern on one clean, flat fingernail. “Come tracking.”

She looked at him, aghast. “I'm the curator,” she began.

“Give yourself two hours off.”

This was nuts, she told herself. “I'm not dressed for outings.”

“I'll drive you by your house to change.”

“I can't,” she began.

There was a perfunctory knock on the door, and Marie peered in. “Sorry,” she said. She moved closer to Phoebe, nodding toward a well-dressed blond woman who was standing with another adult near a group of children. “There's a schoolteacher out here. She was looking in the window a few minutes ago. She says she wants to talk to you about the deportment of the staff.” She grinned.

Phoebe cleared her throat. She felt a blush flaming on her cheeks. “I'm sorry, I can't do it right now. I'll be out of the office for two hours,” she told Marie at once. “Tell her to speak to Harriett.”

“Harriett said you'd say that. And she said to tell you that you'll have to buy a doughnut in the morning. Coffee, too.”

Phoebe stood up. “She can have two doughnuts. Tell her that I'm assisting the FBI.”

Marie's eyes twinkled. “Is that what it's called?” she asked with raised eyebrows.

Red-faced, Phoebe squeezed by Cortez, grabbed her purse and rushed out the door.

Cortez paused long enough to reach in her desk drawer and retrieve the charm before he followed her. As he passed Marie, he didn't crack a smile. But he winked before he slid the dark glasses back into place.

Marie stood at Phoebe's door, waving her hand in front of her face to cool it. He might have a bad temper, but he was the most dashing man she'd ever seen, and he was bristling with charm and good looks. Poor Phoebe wouldn't stand a chance.

 

I
T WAS LIKE OLD TIMES
. Cortez pulled up in front of her house and sat in the car while she rushed in past a barking Jock to change into jeans and boots. When she came back out, with sunglasses perched over her nose, it was like a glimpse into time past. She wore reading glasses, but she didn't need vision correction for distances.

Cortez got out to open the door for her. She climbed in and fastened her seat belt before he slid in under the wheel and did the same.

“Nice manners,” she murmured.

“My mother was a stickler for them. Isaac never listened. I did.”

Isaac. His brother. She heard an odd note in his voice and stared at him curiously. “How is he?”

“He's dead,” he said shortly. He started the car and put it in Reverse.

She folded her hands in her lap and looked out the window, uncertain about whether or not to press the issue. “Recently?” she asked.

“Three years ago.”

Three years ago he'd married another woman. There was a child. She was feeling sick. What if…?

She turned toward Cortez with wide, curious eyes.

“She was three months pregnant with Joseph,” he choked out as he headed down the driveway toward the highway. “Her parents wanted a termination. My mother had a heart attack over it. Isaac was dead.”

“So they sacrificed you to save the child.”

His eyes closed for an instant on a wave of pain. She was as perceptive as he remembered.

“Joseph,” she persisted. “Not your son. Your nephew!”

There was a long pause. He drew in a harsh breath. “My nephew.”

She turned her attention out the window again, feeling numb all over. “You couldn't have managed to put that in a letter? Even four lines would have done it.”

“I was married.”

“You said you were widowed…”

He stopped the car at the road, threw it out of gear and turned off the engine. He turned to her, ripping off the sunglasses. “A month after Joseph was born, she left him with me so she could take a walk. She needed to be alone, she told me. I was on the Internet on a case, and
I didn't realize how long she'd been out. Three hours later, I thought she'd been gone long enough. Joseph was hungry and I was still new to formula and bottles. I left him in his crib and went outside to find her.” His face tautened. “She'd gotten the extra rope from the barn and tied it to the rafter on the back porch. I found her hanging there. Dead.”

She put a hand to her mouth.

“I didn't love her. She was Isaac's girl. She loved him. She grieved for him. It would never have been a real marriage, if we'd been together ten years. She couldn't live without him.”

She almost told him she knew how that felt.

“I know how she felt.”

The words echoed in the car, but in his voice—not hers.

She looked back at him with wide, anguished eyes in a white face.

“Three years,” he said heavily. “I could only imagine how badly I'd hurt you. I would have tried, even then, to explain. But my mother had a second heart attack. She'd been taking care of Joseph, while I worked out of Oklahoma City, and my father couldn't cope. I'd already had to give up my job as a federal prosecutor, because I was needed at home so badly. I'd phoned my old boss at the FBI. He's high up these days. He gave me a job
and pulled strings to get me assigned as close to Lawton as he could.”

“Lawton?”

“It's in Comanche County, Oklahoma,” he explained. “I was within easy driving distance of home, so that I could commute to the field office to work. After my mother died, I tried again to find you. I thought if I could get assigned to the southeast, I might eventually catch you at Derrie's apartment in Charleston. But you weren't there. I gave up the idea and went home after my vacation.”

“I came here,” she explained. “I couldn't stay in Charleston. Too many bad memories.” She hesitated to ask the question, but it was killing her not to.

“You want to know why I didn't ask Derrie for your address,” he guessed.

She nodded.

He drew in a long breath. “I did. She said that you told her never to give it to me. She said that you'd go to your grave hating me.” He shrugged. “I wasn't giving up, even so. It's taken a hell of a long time to find you…but I finally succeeded.”

“How did you end up here in the FBI?” she wanted to know.

“Because of the new Indian Country Crime Unit I'm in, I've had assignments all over the southeast—even
down into Seminole country.” He smiled slowly. “When my old boss knew about this homicide, and remembered that I'd told him you moved here, he got me assigned to the case. It's a good job, and I'm happy doing it. But it's been a long three years, Phoebe.”

“You knew I was here?” she asked.

He nodded.

“How?” she exclaimed.

“Y
OU WON'T BELIEVE ME
if I tell you,” he said.

“Try me.”

“My father told me. I don't know how he knew,” he added. “But in addition to amazing psychic skills, he does have a number of friends in high places. Even in law enforcement. But he knew.” He stared at her hungrily.

She stared back at him with uncertainty plain on her face. He was here. She'd grieved long and hard for him. But she didn't—couldn't—trust him. He'd walked out on her without a word three years ago.

He sighed. “I can see the wheels going around in your mind. I almost know what you're thinking. It's going to take time for you to ever trust me again.” He gnawed on the tip of the earpiece of his sunglasses in deep
thought. “Suppose we pretend we've just met. I'm a widower with a child. You're an attractive museum curator. We're working together on a case. No complications. No recriminations. We're just friends.”

She gave him a suspicious look. “Just friends? You bent me back over my desk in my own office!” she pointed out, trying to hide the heat that memory generated. “And now I'm going to be in deep trouble with the board of trustees if that schoolteacher files a complaint!”

“If she does, I'll talk to the trustees. I'll tell them you stopped breathing and I was giving you CPR,” he promised dryly. “You can faint while they're in your office and I'll demonstrate how.”

She didn't want to laugh, but he had the most wicked look on his face. She smothered the laugh and cleared her throat. “You said we were going tracking. What are we looking for?”

“I'm not sure,” he said, his expression lighter as he started the car. “But if we find it, I'll know.”

As they pulled out onto the highway, she glanced where the SUV had been parked the morning she took the information about the murder victim to Drake. She almost mentioned it to Cortez, but there was no reason to. After all, it probably had only been a lost motorist. She put it out of her mind.

 

T
HEY DROVE ALONG
in a companionable silence to the caves at the Bennett construction site. Cortez parked the car, pausing to take his .45 caliber automatic in its leather holster out of the pocket of the car and stick it in his belt.

Phoebe gave it a worried look.

“I have credentials,” he reminded her. “I work for the government, and I know how to shoot a gun if I have to.”

She grimaced. “So do I, but I don't want to have to.”

“That's why Drake had you out practicing. If it's instinctive…”

“I can't kill someone, Jeremiah,” she said miserably. “Not even to save my own life.”

He studied her in a tense silence. “It may come to that. Whoever killed the professor isn't going to stop if there's a real threat to his income. I've seen people murdered for less than fifty dollars by people who were very surprised to find how little money their victims had on them. We aren't talking about rocket scientists.”

She looked at him with what she hoped was veiled hunger. He was still the sexiest man she'd ever known. He was beautiful, in a masculine sort of way.

“No time for that now,” he said, deadpan.

“You have no idea what I was thinking!” she retorted.

He made a sound deep in his throat that set her hair
on end before he got out. She extricated herself before he had time to come around the car.

“I thought you liked my nice manners,” he accused.

She flushed. “I can open my own doors.”

He didn't comment. “Go that way,” he indicated the worn ruts in the road. “Look for a car track that comes to a stop and then backs up in its own space.”

“There are a lot of tracks here,” she pointed out.

He was remembering an odd sort of track that he'd seen in the dirt parking lot at the reservation motel where the professor had stayed. It was in front of the dead man's apartment.

“Look for tracks with a missing tread mark in the middle, vertically. It will be on the left.”

She pursed her lips. “Scientific stuff, huh? Okay.” She bent down and started looking. It was impossible not to remember the last time she'd gone tracking with him. “You said you might come to my graduation, and when I hesitated, you made some snide remark.”

“You threw a tree limb at me,” he recalled, bending over a suspicious track.

“You were obnoxious,” she replied, glancing at him. “You still are. I hope I'll still have a job to go back to when that teacher gets through with me.”

“You can come to work for me,” he murmured.
“You'd be worth your weight in gold in a forensics lab. One of your professors in college said you had a natural feel for forensic dentition.”

“I didn't tell you that,” she said, hesitating. “How did you hear that?”

“I thought your forensics professor might know where you were,” he said simply.

She felt empty. Hollow. Sick at heart. Everyone had tried to protect her from this man. She'd asked them to. She had no idea of the real situation. Now that she knew it, she hated realizing she'd cut her own throat three years ago. He hadn't turned away out of disinterest. Circumstances had unfolded to keep him away.

He stood up abruptly, frowning. Then he strode back to the car, to Phoebe's surprise, and drew out what he'd taken from her desk drawer. He walked back and handed her the charm. “Put this, and the pesos, in your right slacks pocket.”

She knew it would do no good to argue. He trusted his father's mystic powers too much. “Okay, okay.” She slid the two pieces together and inserted them in her pocket. Then she turned back to follow the track when she felt a sudden thrust that knocked her completely off her feet. A fraction of a second later, there was a sharp crack like thunder.

“Phoebe!”

Cortez had his gun out and was firing from a kneeling position toward the direction the shot had come from. There was another crack and dust flew up near Cortez, but seconds later, there was a loud thud and the sound of an engine firing. It was followed by a vehicle spraying gravel in the near distance.

Cortez didn't wait for it to fade. He was already kneeling beside Phoebe, his hands quick and deft on her body. “Are you hit? Tell me!”

She groaned, rolled up into a ball. “Oh, it hurts!” she ground out.

“Phoebe, are you hit?!” he demanded, each word deliberate.

She managed to uncurl her legs with an effort. Her hand went to the right side of her stomach. “I don't…feel blood,” she whispered.

He unzipped her jeans and stripped them down over her hips before she had time to protest. There was no wound, but there was the beginning of a terrible bruise near where her appendix should be. He felt just above it and his knuckles brushed the heavy pesos he'd just made her put in her pocket. He felt sick.

They exchanged a stunned look. He slid his hand into the pocket and pulled out the charm and the coins. There was a hole through the center of one peso and a
bullet was embedded in the second one behind it. His father's foresight had spared her life.

“It would have hit the femoral artery,” he said in a ghostly tone. “You'd have bled to death before I could have gotten you to a hospital.”

She shivered. “He knew…your father knew!”

He gathered her close and sat down in the dirt, holding her tight. He rocked her, mindless at the thought of what could have happened.

“The shooter got away,” she whispered into his throat.

His arms tightened. “First things first.” He kissed her temple and took a long, heavy breath. He jerked up the cell phone he wore on his belt and pressed in numbers with one hand.

“I need an ambulance and Yonah County deputy sheriff Drake Stewart to come immediately to the back of the Benning construction site. It's located at the end of Deal Street at a cave in a stand of fir trees. It's just outside the city limits of Chenocetah,” he said. “We're about a hundred yards from the boundary of the Yonah Indian Reservation on a dirt road.”

“Who is this?” a bored voice replied.

“Special Agent Jeremiah Cortez, FBI,” he replied tersely. “There's been a shooting. Tell Stewart to come to the dead end and look in the woods on the right.”

“Just a sec!” the 911 operator said. “I'll dispatch him. Stay on the line.”

“No time,” Cortez said. “The perp's getting away.”

He hung up and pressed in more numbers while Phoebe lay against him, still in pain. “I need an evidence team out here in Jones's van,” he said. “I'll give you directions.”

“That was my unit,” he told Phoebe when he completed the call. He ground his teeth together. “Listen, I'm going to have to put you in the ambulance. I can't go with you.” It seemed to be killing him that he couldn't. “I have to wait for my unit to get here to gather evidence. With any luck, there may be a shell casing.”

“It's all right,” she said huskily. “I'm a big girl. I can ride in an ambulance all alone.”

He didn't smile, as he might have once. “You could have been killed,” he growled.

She met his tormented eyes evenly and forced herself to smile through the pain. “His mistake. He slipped up. We'll get him.”

“I never expected danger out here,” he said, as if he couldn't believe it. “I'd never have asked you to come with me if I'd had any idea this could happen!”

She reached up a hand and touched it to his mouth. “This is much better than explaining myself to an angry grammar school teacher. Trust me.”

He caught the hand and kissed the palm hungrily.

His concern unsettled her. She hadn't expected that strong a reaction. “I'm going to be fine. Then we're going to catch this fool and put him away. Right?”

“Right,” he said in a strangled voice.

“You just keep that in mind and stop flogging yourself. Who would have expected somebody to start shooting the minute we got out of the car?”

“I spooked somebody,” he said coldly.

“How?”

He started to answer her, but the sirens drowned him out. Drake slid to a stop just behind the ambulance. The paramedics were beside Phoebe in less than three minutes with a gurney.

Cortez explained what had happened while they worked on Phoebe. Drake was furious.

“One of us needs to go with her,” Drake said flatly.

“My unit's on the way,” Cortez said through his teeth, having reluctantly released Phoebe to the paramedics. “I can't leave.”

Drake turned to him. The other man's face was rigid with frustrated concern. “Don't worry. I'll go with her. She'll be all right…I promise.”

That seemed to calm Cortez, but only on the surface.
He couldn't get the image of seeing Phoebe dead out of his mind.

“She's all right,” Drake said firmly, looking stern. “You just catch the perp, okay? I'll take care of her.”

Cortez took a steadying breath. “When I find him,” he said through his teeth, “he's going to wish he lived on another continent.”

“Good man. I'll get you some more bullets for your gun,” Drake promised, clapping him on the shoulder and smiling forcefully. “Now go to work. Phoebe's going to be fine.”

Cortez paused by the gurney when the paramedics had loaded Phoebe up and voiced the opinion that it wasn't going to be serious.

He caught her hand in his and held on tight. “I'll be along when I get through here. Drake's going with you.”

“Ah,” she surmised. “The indigenous people closing ranks.”

He smiled gently. “Something like that.” He kissed her fingers and laid them back at her waist. “Do what the doctor says.”

“Where's my charm?” she asked at once.

Cortez grimaced. “Material evidence.”

“The coins are. The charm isn't. Give it here,” she added.

With a sigh, he produced it and laid it in her hand.

“Your father,” she says, “really knows his business.”

“I told you so. Be safe.”

“You, too. You're not bulletproof and you don't have one of these.” She held up the charm.

He pursed his lips, reached into his pocket and produced a charm identical to hers. “He said I wouldn't need the coins.”

She made a face, and then she smiled to reassure him. He did look so worried.

Drake climbed into the back of the ambulance with her after radioing for another deputy to pick him up at the hospital emergency room later and take him back to his car. The paramedics closed their back door on a somber-faced Cortez, still holding his charm.

“What's with the charm?” Drake asked.

“Cortez's father made it for me three years ago,” she said, wincing. The bruising was really starting to hurt. “He added two Mexican pesos to it today. Jeremiah had just told me to put them in my pocket, exactly where his father said to keep it, when someone shot me. If I hadn't had them there, I'd be dead. It hit just beside my femoral artery.”