Dateline: Kydd and Rios (21 page)

“What about you . . . and me?” she asked, becoming strangely still beside him.

“I was thinking of a new partnership.” There, he’d said it. He felt a tremendous weight lift from his chest.

Which came crashing back down with her softly spoken “Oh.”

He suddenly wished they’d spent more time talking and less time making love the past week. Their communications obviously needed some work. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have missed a minute he’d spent with her in his bed, their bed.

“ ‘Oh’ isn’t an option in this instance, Nikki,” he said, keeping his gaze glued to the ceiling. “When a man asks you to marry him, you have the choice of saying yes or no, not ‘oh.’ ”

He felt her sharp intake of breath. He hazarded a quick glance and found her staring at him through wide, surprised eyes.

“Marriage? You and me?” she said, her voice high and incredulous.

“I think we can handle it.”

“Oh, Josh, are you sure? You know how we fight, and heaven knows I’ll never forgive myself for dragging you into that mess in—”

He rolled over on top of her, his mouth covering hers in a passionate kiss, stealing her breath and her words. Then he released her and gave her a warning glance. “Don’t try to talk me out of this, Nicolita, not while I’m trying so hard to talk you into it. You probably saved my life in San Simeon. If it hadn’t been for you, Brazia would have cornered me in Panama. Coming after you is the only reason I wasn’t where he thought I’d be.”

“Josh, I still—”

He kissed her again, slowly and deeply, pressing his body against her in the preamble to love. “I love you,” he said huskily. “I want you for my wife. I’ll give you all the small-town living you can take, and when you get bored, I’ll let you get us both in trouble until we have to come running back. Say yes, Nikki. That’s all I ask, a simple yes, meaning forever.”

“Yes.” She sighed and pulled him back down. Her mouth played across his, promising him the lifetime he asked. After she’d kissed him, and kissed him again, she angled her mouth away from his. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Me too. Lots of them,” he said and groaned softly as she shifted beneath him.

“A great idea.” she insisted, meeting his eyes with a smile of pure mischief.

“It couldn’t be any better than mine. Would you do that again?”

“What?”

“Move like . . . yeah, just like that.” He groaned again and gently rocked against her, his mouth settling into the curve of her neck. “Ah, Nikki, what you do to me.”

“Rios and Rios,” she said breathlessly, melting under the sweet pressure he applied. “No one knows Nicolita Rios. We could go down and cover . . . Panama.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go back down south,” he murmured against her skin, his hand sliding under her shirt.

“I’ll go anywhere with you.” Words became more difficult to find with each tender caress of his fingers across her breasts.

“How about upstairs?”

“Anywhere.”

“Good. Now forget about Panama and all the trouble you’ve got in store for me”—eyes warmed by a sultry light lifted to meet hers—“and think about loving me the way I love you, Nicolita. Way down deep inside, every day and every night, through all the bad times and good times to come.”

“This is one of the good times, Josh,” she said softly, feeling the security of his love wrap around her future and make it bright.

“Yes, Nikki,” he agreed with a sly smile teasing his mouth. “This is one of the really, really good times.”

Later, in the fading light of day, as they lay facing each other on the bed in the middle of the room, Nikki gently traced his scar with her finger.

“Why did you let me think all those wild things about you that first year?”

“Because you were young and impressionable, and I was trying like hell to impress you.” He caught her hand and pressed a kiss into her palm.

“Why?”

He laughed. “Because you were too cocky and too pretty to ignore, and too young to take to bed.”

“And a year made all the difference?”

“You were still too young to take to bed”—he shook his head ruefully—“but by then you were impossible to ignore. Three more years didn’t change that. A hundred years won’t change it. You’re mine, Nikki. I stopped questioning why a long time ago.”

Sliding her hand around his neck, she drew him close into her arms. “So did I, Josh,” she whispered. “So did I.”

* * * * * * * *

Read on for excerpts from
Outlaw Carson
and
Shameless

One

“I can’t work with the man,” Kristine Richards announced. She tossed the memo from the dean of the university onto the piles of clutter on her desk, starting a small avalanche of papers.

Jenny, her elderly graduate assistant, crouched down and retrieved a few of the letters, stuffing them into her arms, already filled with many other important papers.

“Won’t, not can’t,” Jenny said, looking around for someplace to stash the unattended-to business. No empty space magically appeared. Sighing in resignation, Jenny opted for the last resort, collating the correspondence by using the thousand or so books lining the walls of the office. She made sure an edge of each envelope stuck out from the volumes. Within a minute, the shelves looked like they might take off and fly.

“Okay, have it your way,” Kristine agreed easily. “I won’t work with the man.”

“The university is already into Carson’s Tibetan project up to their ears,” Jenny said, “and they want to make sure the findings get published. You’re the logical choice for his assistant.”

“Then they should have made darn sure I was the one chosen to go to Tibet in the first place. But no, they sent Harry Fratz, and Harry caught some god-awful bug. Lucky for Harry.”

Less than a year ago, Kristine had been stunned and thrilled to learn that her employer, Colorado State University, had been selected to help fund—and then share in the glory—of an ambitious archaeological study. A renegade archaeologist named Carson planned to compile an inventory of ancient Tibetan monasteries, temples, and shrines. Kristine had been certain she’d be picked to go along as Carson’s assistant. No one on the university’s staff was more qualified, least of all Harry—except by virtue of his gender. But they’d picked Harry, who had barely lasted two months, and now the whole expedition was in shambles, an international disaster.

They had a lot of nerve, she fumed, trying to drag her in on the tail end of Carson’s Catastrophe, as the history department now labeled the project. The whole damn thing should have been Richard’s Reward from the start. She knew more about Tibet, fact and fiction, than Harry had ever even bothered to imagine.

She sorted through the junk on her desk, finally coming up with a chocolate chip cookie. She blew a little dust off one edge and took a tentative bite.

“You’re going to die someday,” Jenny admonished her.

“I’ll be in good company. What else does the university have to offer their finest Asian historian for summer employment, besides sorting out somebody else’s mess and babysitting the glory boy who made it?”

“Probably a pink slip.”

Kristine choked on her cookie. Jenny patted her on the back.

“There, there, honey. I hear the community college is looking for a history teacher.”

Kristine raised her watery eyes to meet Jenny’s. She didn’t doubt her assistant’s summation of the situation. The older woman’s uncanny intuition had never failed her when it came to the inner workings of the university.

“That’s . . . blackmail,” she gasped, reaching for her cold cup of coffee.

“You’ll be dead before you’re thirty,” Jenny said as she watched Kristine use a pencil to stir the sugar up from the bottom.

Kristine swallowed a sip or two anyway. “Still in good company.”

“But you’ll probably live through the summer,” Jenny went on. “It’s up to you whether you do it working on Kit Carson’s Tibetan findings or job hunting.”

“Blackmail,” Kristine muttered. Carson, she thought. Kit Carson. Even his name rankled her. What kind of fool name was Kit Carson?

A famous fool’s name, she silently admitted. He’d come out of the vastness of Asia nearly ten years ago, dazzling museum directors from Beijing to Calcutta with the extent of his knowledge and the rarity of his archaeological finds. He was a virtual unknown who’d made a name for himself by being part of the spectacular excavation of the burial tomb at Lishan in China, with its amazing collection of thousands of lifesize terra-cotta warriors; a renegade Buddhist monk with unparalleled access to the secrets of the Far East.

She’d never met him. No one she knew had, except for poor, dumb Harry, and the hospital wasn’t allowing visitors. Still, you couldn’t get three historians in the same room without his name coming up, usually on the end of “That damn barbarian.” It took only two archaeologists to reach the same consensus, both of them praying Carson wouldn’t be the first to be allowed to excavate any of Tibet’s hallowed ground. Tibet was an archaeologist’s dream, but no one could do more than list any artifacts that were visible. It was illegal to dig at any of Tibet’s religious sites.

Carson was too unorthodox to fit in the realm of academia, and he’d lost his reputation shortly after he’d gotten it. He didn’t have a degree in anything, not even the equivalent of high school, if the rumors were correct. And if what they were hearing from China was true, while supposedly cataloguing Tibet’s shrines and temples, Kit Carson had crossed the final line into out-and-out grave robbing.

Kristine groaned and dropped her head on the desk. The university must be desperate to threaten her with dismissal. Any tenured professor would refuse to work with Carson on the grounds of protecting his or her reputation, now that Carson had slipped into infamy. Unfortunately Kristine didn’t have tenure or a reputation. “Publish or perish” went the old adage, and she’d be damned if she perished this close to a full professorship.

“Kristine, dear?”

“Yes?” she replied without lifting her head.

“That green rag you’re wearing today is really too awful for words. I’ve told you a hundred times you’re a winter.”

“Thank you, Jenny,” she muttered into the papers cushioning her face. Carson. Kit Carson. She groaned again.

* * *

The first two trunks arrived at her house the first Monday after finals. The second pair came on Tuesday. By Wednesday, Kristine and the deliveryman were on a first-name basis. The university, through Dr. Timnath, the head of her department, had insisted she accept Kit Carson’s luggage, assuring her she’d need the trunks for her research and requesting that she be discreet. She’d countered with a mention of tenure, priding herself on being able to
discreetly
work it into the conversation three times. She was beginning to wonder, though, if the owner of the luggage was ever going to make a personal appearance, and whether or not she dared break off the heavy iron padlocks to see what was inside the fascinating old cases. One look at them had convinced her, albeit belatedly, of the wisdom of taking on the Carson project. Who knew what treasures lurked in the trunks’ cavernous depths?

“Now, Bob,” she said, Wednesday morning, yawning and scrawling her name across three of the tiny lines on his delivery sheet. Her second signature missed the lines completely. With her free hand she tightened her grip on the one hundred and twenty pounds of pure ugly she called a dog and most people called a beast. “I want you to notice I’m giving you an extra signature here. If you show up tomorrow morning, please put the trunks on the deck without knocking or ringing the bell. Okay?”

“It’s against the rules, Kristine,” the deliveryman said nervously, keeping one eye on her mastiff.

“Come on, Bob. Live dangerously. Bend the rules.” And let her have at least one morning of sloth, she prayed. Last night there had been a welcome home party for Harry to celebrate his hospital release. She’d stayed much too late in a vain attempt to corner the guest of honor. He’d looked far healthier than she would have guessed for a man newly risen from his deathbed, and he’d avoided her like the plague.