Hot As Sin (11 page)

Beyond the fence was rugged country, hills and trees dusted with white, a road that scarcely deserved the name. It should have been a beautiful scene of peace, but not to Emily. To her the landscape felt unnaturally quiet, almost threatening, because she couldn’t forget that a savage reality hid behind the serene beauty.

Gabe’s protection was like the landscape. Reality hid behind the pretend safety, waiting for her to let down her guard, waiting for her to make a mistake. Mistakes would be so easy to make right now; she was tired. Since Idaho she’d jumped at every sound, every silence, every shadow, every heartbeat. Every night.

Surrounded by the warm chaos of Marsha Jean’s home, the contrast between her life and the waitress’s became a hot knife that sliced and burned its way through the lies she fed herself, peeling away the last of her illusions. She was never going to have peace. Her future wouldn’t be any more “normal” than her past.

For twenty years ice skating had run her life. Now survival was going to take over the job of taskmaster, forcing her to run and keep running. Forcing her to move when anyone got too close. Emily actually envied the waitress her trailer, her two kids, and the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. At least it was normal. At least it was a home.

“My Eddie used to stand there for hours,” Marsha Jean said, breaking into her thoughts.

Emily pulled herself away from the view. “It’s gorgeous.”

“That’s why we bought the place. Eddie got sick
before we could build a house. And when he was gone—” For the first time since she’d met her, Marsha Jean lost some of her brassy confidence. She shrugged. “I didn’t have the heart to build our house. It wouldn’t have seemed right. Now it’s just me and the two kids, but that view keeps me going. We don’t have anything like that down south. Not even close!”

The snap was back in her voice on that last sentence, obviously she didn’t let much keep her down. Emily asked the obvious question, “What is it that you
do
have in the South?”

“Deer season.”

Emily laughed and came away from the window. “Deer season?”

“Oh, yeah. Deer season and pick-’em-up trucks with gun racks. The two coming-of-age rituals—cruising for girls and gunning for deer.”

“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.”

“Oh, but it is. Our menfolk pride themselves on a Zenlike dedication to putting deer meat in the freezer and on the table.” Marsha Jean picked up a pair of orange-handled scissors. “We have getting ready for deer season, bow season, doe season, regular season, rehashing the season, and talking about next season.”

“Then I guess they must be pretty good at it.”

Waggling her finger, Marsha Jean said, “I believe they could get a lesson or two from you. I don’t think any of them can bag a buck as fast as you. My hat’s off. You managed to make old Gabe fall in love, and I had given up on him. The man’s a hard case. Hopeless. Or was.”

Emily choked back a laugh. She hadn’t “bagged”
anyone, certainly not Gabe. “Why’d you think Gabe was hopeless?”

“That man can freeze a woman cold in her tracks with one of those get-out-of-my-life stares of his, and he hasn’t had a date since he came to town,
despite
my best efforts to fix him up. Of course, I didn’t know he was savin’ himself for you.” Marsha Jean smiled mischievously. “Judging from what I saw this morning, it was worth savin’ up.”

Startled, Emily realized that’s exactly what kissing Gabe felt like—like she’d been saving up all her life. Then she realized that she didn’t want to feel that way about any man, not now. Especially not Gabe. She didn’t want any kind of bond with him beyond gratitude. She didn’t want to become attached to anyone and have circumstances rip them away from her. Only fools expected happy endings.

“Can’t put it off any longer, girlfriend.” Marsha Jean pulled out a dining room chair and made snipping motions in the air with her scissors. “While I whack off that gorgeous head of hair, you can tell me how you and Gabe met. This story has to be good. Did he save you from terrorists or something?”

“Or something,” Emily said softly as she sat down, but before she could tell sweet Marsha Jean a pack of lies, the fear inside turned to terror.

The unmistakable crack of a rifle forced a scream from her throat.

Gabe cleaned up the broken glass and spent the rest of the afternoon surfing a computer information network.
He learned a few things about Emily Quinn that made him feel better about her chances. If ice skating had had such a thing as a photo finish, then that was how close she’d come to two Olympic golds. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

She never quit though; she just kept trying. Even after the accident and her parents’ death, she went back to the rink. Only that time the fairy tale ended for good. No amount of grit or determination could change the nerve damage to her ankle.

When he finished on the computer, Gabe shut it down, hoping the woman still had some of that grit. She was going to need it. Shaking off a feeling of uneasiness, Gabe resisted the urge to call Marsha Jean and check on their progress. They knew the plan. They’d call if there was a problem. Despite Marsha Jean’s flip attitude, she was trustworthy.

Instead of dialing, he made himself check the weather report and inventory his booze supply. This time of year the roads were as liable to close as not. He couldn’t afford to be cut off from his supplier with less than a full stockroom when the storm hit the following night. Quiet crowds turned ugly when a bar ran out of liquor.

However, booze would be the least of his worries if the storm got bad enough to close the roads. The real problem would be getting Emma out of town. That morning’s chat with Willis had changed his plans. Originally Gabe intended to stall Emma until he heard from Patrick. Not anymore.

If he didn’t hear soon, all bets were off. The clock was ticking, he could feel it. That troublesome sixth
sense was bothering him, poking him, tapping him on the shoulder, and telling him to get the hell out of Dodge.

Three days
, Gabe promised himself, and then Emma disappeared.

Besides, he thought with gallows humor, three days would be plenty of time for Emma to finish cleaning his entire apartment. The woman lived to clean. When he’d come out of the shower that morning, the sparkling kitchen appliances had almost blinded him. He caught himself smiling at the memory as he hauled a case of beer from the back to reload the cooler before the first customers straggled in.

He didn’t need or want a maid, but cleaning his house seemed to give Emma some sense of having evened the score, a sense that she was paying him back for the roof over her head. In her place he’d have done the same thing. He hated charity. Didn’t mind giving it, just hated taking it. Hated debts. She appeared to share the same opinion.

Accordingly, he and Emma had worked out a system. She pretended his place was a pigsty desperately in need of cleaning before the health department condemned it, and he pretended that he didn’t care whether or not it ever got clean. She didn’t have to say thank you, and he didn’t have to say you’re welcome.

Which was good. Because they’d barely exchanged two dozen words once he’d gotten out of the shower. Emma stared at his clean-shaven jaw for a long time, got pink across her cheeks, and muttered something about getting dressed to go with Marsha Jean.

The next thing he knew she was in that shapeless
gray sack she called a habit—sans veil. But it wasn’t the habit that irritated him. It was the red silk panties and matching bra he knew she wore beneath the habit. The thought of her underwear was enough to make him reconsider his plan to change her looks.
Emily Quinn
couldn’t leave the apartment.

Yep, keeping her confined and wearing red silk undies with only him for company had definite possibilities. All of them foolish.

So he had shooed her out the door with Marsha Jean. That was hours before. By now it was too late to change his mind about anything. The deed was already done. Customers were drifting into the bar.

Sunday nights were usually slow but profitable for Gabe. He opened at six
P.M
. and closed at eleven. Served more brain grenades—beer—than anything else. The crowd was never more than a dozen or so people at any one time, and quiet for the most part. Tonight was no exception; he could handle the bar business and Emma too. Especially since Clayton Dover and Sawyer Johns hadn’t worked up the courage to show their faces around the bar yet.

A couple of strangers mixed in with the familiar faces. That wasn’t unusual either, but tonight every stranger was a threat to Emma’s safety. These strangers were drinking hard liquor and asking no questions. A good sign. They behaved like ordinary men trying to drown their sorrow in private, but he watched them all the same.

Beneath their heavy winter coats they wore loose jackets, loose enough to easily conceal a weapon. Since Gabe couldn’t pat them down without arousing suspicion,
he made it his personal mission to know when and how deeply they breathed.

A half hour later Gabe checked the clock for the third time. He didn’t like it. His waitress was overdue to make an appearance. And so was his sweet little “cousin” from Indiana, who’d come all this way for the big family reunion.

No sooner had he reached for the phone than Marsha Jean came sauntering in with a big grin and a sad story about car trouble. “Oh, Gabe! I am so sorry, but that vicious car battery of mine decided to poop out just as I was leaving the house! I had to call a neighbor to give me a jump.”

“I told you last week to get a new battery,” he said as calmly as he could.

“And I told you to give me a raise.” She winked at him as she tossed her purse under the counter and shrugged out of her coat. Tonight’s T-shirt announced S
TUPID
P
EOPLE
S
HOULDN’T
B
REED
.

“How are the kids?” Gabe asked, but meant something entirely different. “I’m going to have to make a point to see them.”

“Soon.” Marsha Jean understood him perfectly. She grabbed a bar towel and tucked it in her jeans. “They’re changing so much, you wouldn’t recognize them from day to day!”

“Good.”

“Sometimes I don’t recognize them myself. Like today, when we heard a rifle shot.” She paused, gauging his response to that little tidbit before she continued. “It turned out to be some hunter, but it scared the little girl to death. Heck, her scream almost scared me to death.”

Shooting a glance quickly around the bar, Gabe lowered his voice. “She okay?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s fine. Now. A little vague on why she reacted that way.” He could tell that his waitress wasn’t a bit happy about being kept in the dark, but a customer wandered up to the bar. Marsha Jean reverted to code. “You know how a mother worries. I was hoping you would tell me something to make me feel better.”

“I doubt it.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Then it’s tit for tat.” The blonde sighed and turned to the three guys now sitting at the bar. “Lord! It’s like a morgue in here,” she pronounced with enthusiasm. “We need some music! Let me just go fix that. I think something with a nice, slow beat is what we need. And, Gabe, I think Angus needs a refill.”

Absently Gabe handed a Mexican beer to Angus Deady, who catered to the tourist trade by running raft trips down the Wenatchee and Klickitat rivers. The early nasty winter had pretty much shut him down, and he liked to drown his sorrows in foreign beer. But Gabe’s mind wasn’t on his customers and their troubles. It was on the two strangers and the dangerous payback gleam he saw in Marsha Jean’s eyes.

She was mighty pleased about something all of a sudden, and he assumed she was keeping a secret of her own. For the next fifteen minutes she avoided him, making sure to put her orders in and pick them up while standing next to Angus. That way Gabe couldn’t ask her any questions, and she could snicker to her heart’s content.

Just as he considered dragging her into the stock-room
to demand an explanation for that damned grin, the new and improved Emily Quinn walked through the front door. Even before she let the worn-out green parka slide off her shoulders, he knew this incarnation was a far cry from the nun. There were some similarities, like the holier-than-thou blue jeans, but overall the woman looked like she’d fallen from grace a long time before and real hard.

“Gabe!” she said, loud enough to get everyone’s attention, and set down a small battered suitcase. Whispered conversations around the bar stopped as his customers swiveled to get an eyeful.

That was part of the plan, but the hello-throw-me-down red sweater and the appreciative whistles from the crowd were not. Neither was his reaction. Every muscle in his body went on alert, and he was ready to pound every man who so much as noticed Emma’s obvious attributes. Of course, those attributes were hard to miss in that sweater.

Oblivious of it all, Emma shook out the new, sexy, and shaggy mop of streaked honey-blond hair that came just below her shoulders. Gabe realized that if he didn’t do something soon, he’d have to beat the guys off her with Jeffie’s baseball bat. He threw a bone to his pride by silently insisting that his concern for Emma was only natural given his role in this mess. He was supposed to be protecting her, keeping her out of the limelight. With the drooling idiots falling all over themselves to get a date, how long would it be before one of them recognized her and ruined everything?

He glanced at Marsha Jean, who batted her eyelashes and looked as innocent as a newborn babe. As he
passed her, he paused long enough to say under his breath, “I wanted
average
, dammit. Average looks, average hair, average clothes.”

“Then maybe you should have given me average to work with,” Marsha Jean whispered back, laughing.

“Emma!” Gabe forced out as cheerfully as he could. They’d decided that for the time being Emma would be the least confusing name for her to answer to, and for him to remember.

He didn’t even realize he was scowling until she backed up and said, “Whoa, Gabe! I know it’s been a long time, but aren’t you the least little bit glad to see me?”