Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It (28 page)

Alex was right, one day Marcus's sense of humor was going to get him in real trouble.

Grabbing the food, she snarled, "Get them yourself."

He sighed and did as she said, opening the door and stepping back only far enough to let her pass. "Ladies first."

He knew he was pushing her, but he'd learned eighteen months ago that if he gave her even a small breathing space, she'd use it to erect every emotional barrier known to man.

Still, she looked as if she wanted to kick him, and he had to bite back another grin. Even pissed, he loved teasing her. She was just such an easy target. Besides, anything was better than that automaton facade she'd been hiding behind again. She sidled through the small opening, managing to escape touching him. Barely.

She headed straight for the kitchen and plopped the bag and the drinks on the table when she got there. He came in behind her and set the food out.

She frowned at the taco he'd put in front of her as she sat rigidly in a metal-framed chair. "I said I wasn't hungry."

"So, don't eat it, but my mother would skin me alive if she found out I bought myself lunch and left my date to starve."

"I'm not your date," she grated, from between gritted teeth.

Her insistence on that score was starting to get to him. "Did we, or did we not have a lunchdate for today?"

She ripped the paper off her straw with enough force to bend the plastic. "Hadis the operative word. I broke it."

"You're here, aren't you?"

"To discuss your investigation, nothing else." She closed her lips over the plastic straw and took a drink of the diet cola, her expression full of furious disgust.

He'd never been jealous of a straw before and hoped never to be again, but right then that little piece of plastic tubing was a hell of a lot closer to Ronnie's lips than he was likely to get.

"Fine, let's discuss the investigation."

She stared at him in silence, clearly expecting him to open the conversation. He wasn't going to disappoint her.

"I didn't tell Kline about what happened at CIS and I have no plans to do so." He waited for her to smile at him again, to say she was glad.

Relief flickered in her eyes before she schooled her features into immobility again. "Why?"

Okay, he couldn't say he hadn't expected that question. His answer should please her. "As long as you aren't guilty, there's no reason for him to know."

She played with the edges of the wrapper around her soft taco, then fixed him with gray eyes filled with condemnation. "But youwere planning to tell him if youthought I was guilty?"

He didn't like the direction their conversation was taking, but he wouldn't lie to her. "Yes."

Instead of telling him what a jerk he was to have had plans to hurt her like that and giving him a chance to explain his good intentions, her lashes dropped to veil her gaze.

"I see," was all she said.

"But you aren't guilty, so we don't have anything to worry about." He wanted to make that very clear.

He trusted her.

Her lashes came up and her gaze locked with his, her clear gray eyes mirroring naked disgust. "There is not and has never been anywe about this. If you had decided I was guilty and told Mr. Kline about my past,I would have paid the price. So, don't you dare talk aboutus being worried aboutanything ."

"You think I would have just thrown you to the wolves?" After Friday night? After the way he'd shared his soul with her, his past?

Anger and frustration washed through him as she nodded.

"Why not?" she asked. "You were hired to do a job. Discovering the woman who had betrayed you was guilty of the crime you'd been hired to investigate could only be a perk. Not only do I think you would have thrown me to the wolves, but I think you would have enjoyed it."

He felt like she'd landed a sucker punch to his gut. "You think I wanted some kind of revenge?"

"What else was that sordid scene here the other night about, if not revenge?"

She'd posed it as a question, but he had no doubt that she thought she already knew the answer. She thought he'd made love to her to somehow get back at her for her actions eighteen months ago. The fact that she could believe such a thing after the way he'd opened up to her hurt and it fed the anger already seething in him.

'That sordid scene, as you call it, had everything to do with me wanting you and not a damn thing to do with getting back at you for deserting me eighteen months ago."

"Oh, really?" She managed to infuse those two words with a wealth of sarcastic disbelief.

"Yes. Damn it, what we have together is too special to mix it up with ugly motives like revenge." He couldn't accept that she truly doubted that.

She lounged back in her chair, her fingers playing idly against the table. "We had sex and there's nothing special about sex. It happens all the time, especially for you."

He wanted to strangle her, but more than that, he wanted to make love to her and force her to admit that it was more than sex, more than revenge, more than her present anger let her admit.

How could she sit there looking so relaxed after saying something like that?

"If it happened all the time, why were weboth celibate for the past eighteen months?"

She shrugged. "Maybe your sex drive is flagging. Youare almost thirty."

He refused to react to that pointed slam against his masculinity. Instead he demanded, "What's your excuse?"

"I was celibate the first twenty-three years of my life. Sex was the aberration, not the lack of it. I can assure you it wasn't anythingspecial —not the sex and not the abstinence after it."

He knew she was angry. He realized that she had some crazy ideas about why he'd made love to her, but the words still stung a raw path through his insides. She had the power to hurt him like no one else in his life, not even his mother.

And because of that, because his emotions were raw, he retreated. "Maybe we should go back to the original topic, Kline Tech's corporate spy. We can talk about our relationship when you're feeling more rational."

"We don't have a relationship to discuss."

He let that slide. What else could he do? If he pushed it and she remained adamant, he didn't think he could handle the pain that would result.

It felt way too much like the fear he'd experienced once before when he was eleven years old. And that time the fear had been justified.

He'd been at the park in his hometown when he realized his dad was in the crowd watching a baseball game.

By then he'd known he wasn't his father's legitimate son. He'd learned to live with the fact that his dad was never seen in public with him and his mom. Or he thought he had, but that summer day he had wanted to sit with his dad watching the ball game. So, he had summoned up his courage and climbed onto the bleachers, squeezing into a spot next to him.

Marcus knew his dad would be angered by his actions, but he'd decided he could face his dad's wrath. What he hadn't realized was that he'd exposed himself to something far worse. His dad had sat next to him through the remaining six innings and pretended not to know who he was. An eleven-year-old kid had sat there biting back tears and dying inside.

When his dad showed up the next night to visit him and his mom, Marcus had made sure he was out. His dad had told his mom what had happened.

She'd come to Marcus and tried to explain about a prominent man in the community not being able to risk public censure. About how divorce wasn't an option for his dad because of his religious beliefs. Stuff she'd said before. Stuff he'd believed and listened to, but Marcus had stopped believing. He never acknowledged his dad again.

Not the next time Mark came to visit and not two years later when his mom and Mark got married. He'd lived in Mark's house for five years, but he had remained distant from the family his mother and father had created with their marriage. He didn't belong and he never forgot that fact.

Marcus pushed the painful thoughts away. "I'll need to check your e-mail regularly to try to catch another one of those messages, but I'll be honest—I'm not holding out much hope."

"Why not?" She seemed a little surprised by his return to the investigation.

Had she wanted him to argue with her about their relationship? He wasn't going to play that kind of guessing game with himself. Seventeen years ago he'd tried to convince himself that his dad would be glad to sit with him. He'd been wrong.

"I'm assuming the fact you download the team's e-mail is not a big secret, so we have to go on the belief that your getting that particular message was a fluke."

She sat in silence for several seconds, unwrapping her taco and taking a bite in what appeared to be an automatic reaction to having food in front of her.

She finished chewing. "So you think our spy doesn't regularly communicate via e-mail?"

"Or he has a set time for sending messages, like in the middle of the night, when you wouldn't be likely to make a check on the team's e-mail. Our spy could be picking up his messages via remote access from home, or he could get into the office before you in the morning. You're a creature of habit and all he'd have to do is pick up his e-mail by seven-thirty to be certain you wouldn't see the message once it was cleaned up off the server."

He'd been musing out loud, trying to work out the logistics in his mind as he spoke, but it made sense.

Ronnie seemed to think so too because she nodded as she took another bite of the unwanted taco. He carefully controlled his urge to smile triumphantly. She did not need to miss any meals, in his opinion.

"So why bother checking my e-mail?"

'The spy screwed up once; he could always do it again."

"I guess. Marcus?"

He'd taken a bite of his own food. The spicy beef burned in a way he liked.

He swallowed. "Yeah?"

"You seem pretty convinced of my innocence, now."

"Yeah."

They ate in silence for several minutes.

"Why?" she asked, as she carefully folded the paper wrapper from her taco into a small square.

He wasn't sure. He had wanted her to be innocent all along. It had taken all his dedication to professionalism to keep her in the dark about his role as an investigator and not compromise his job at Kline Tech. He wasn't going to tell her that, though. She'd probably accuse him of lying. She was feeling pretty feisty right now.

Better to stick to the prosaic, then drift into the realm of emotion again. "You wouldn't have taken that e-mail to Kline if you were guilty."

"Maybe I just wanted to throw suspicion off of me."

And maybe her next job would be dancing naked on tabletops.

Even thinking about such a thing made him frown. "Not likely."

"Why not? It would make sense. I know you know my past. Maybe I was sure you wouldn't tell Mr. Kline about it if you thought I was innocent."

He didn't know why she was talking like this, but he had every intention of setting her straight. "First, you didn't know I was the corporate investigator. You would have had no reason to believe that Kline would share the information with me once you'd told him. Second, if you had been the spy, why try throwing the scent now? No one knows about the investigation but Kline, Warren and now Allison."

"And me."

"Yeah, you know, too. But, the point is, you didn't."

"Are you sure about that?"

He glared at her. "Yes, I'm sure. Why are you trying to convince me you're guilty?"

Her complexion went pasty. "I'm not. Damn. I just can't seem to keep my mouth shut, can I?"

She sounded really rattled and she'd sworn.

He reached out and grabbed her hand and squeezed it. He wanted to do more. He wanted to hold her, but he didn't think she was ready for that yet. Her gaze flew to his and he saw the vulnerability she'd tried to hide earlier.

"Don't worry, baby. I know you're innocent and you aren't going to convince me otherwise with a whole bunch of nonsense."

She shook her head as if to clear it and pulled her hand away from his. "You came to that conclusion five days too late."