Leaping Hearts (40 page)

“Sorry about that crack,” she muttered.

There was a long pause. She waited to hear how she was going to be summarily tossed off the property and wondered whether cops would be involved.

Instead, the woman smiled. “Tell you what. I’ll give you twenty minutes to see for yourself if he’s that awful. If you’re crazy enough to want to give it a try, you might as well get the full experience. Besides, the way he’ll throw you out will be a heck of a lot more interesting and inventive than anything I could do to you.”

“Thanks,” Carter said, dubiously.

Swallowing unexpected fear, she followed the leader through the house, taking in a host of spacious rooms. Every one was filled with antiques and had an atmosphere of elegant leisure, with freshly cut flowers adding to the sophistication and grace. When they came to a stout mahogany door, the woman paused and knocked.

“Do yourself a favor. Make it short and sweet. He likes things that way.”

At the muffled reply, she opened the door and walked into an old-world study.

Nick Farrell looked up from an ornate desk and Carter’s feet stopped working. The first thing she noticed was the unusual color of his eyes, a gray so pale that the irises were almost invisible. The next thing that registered was his extraordinary looks. He had dark hair that looked glossy and luxurious, a face that must have launched a thousand women’s fantasies and she could tell he was tall, broad-shouldered, and imposing, even though he was sitting down.

The eyes meeting hers held frank appraisal and a hint of cruelty that somehow only added to his allure. It made her wonder if there was any softness in him at all and she imagined that women had driven themselves crazy trying to find it.

The man was a heartbreak waiting to happen.

Not for her, of course, she amended. But she pitied whoever fell for someone like him.

“This woman is here to see you,” his housekeeper announced.

One dark eyebrow rose sardonically. “I don’t recall asking to meet with any teenage girls.”

His voice was a deep rumble and had a very sexy, smooth sound. She thought of dark chocolate. And then realized his words were meant as an insult.

“I can’t speak to your appointment calendar,” Carter replied. “But I’ve been out of my teens for a decade, thank you very much.”

The eyebrow took flight again at her tone, which was every bit as commanding as his had been. Their eyes clashed. Busy assessing each other, neither heard the housekeeper leave.

“Maybe we should start over,” Carter said, clearing her throat. “Mr. Farrell, I’m—”

“So what do you want?” she was asked.

“I’m an archaeologist and I—”

“No.” Farrell started rifling through papers.

“Excuse me?”

“The answer is no.”

“But I haven’t asked for anything yet.”

“The operant word being
yet.
Letting you chatter on before you get to the asking would only be a waste of our time.”

She was stunned into silence and, for a moment, all she could do was watch his eyes trace over words on some document.

“You know, you don’t have to be so rude,” she told him. “And you could look at me while we’re talking.”

The arrogant brow arched. “I always knew Miss Manners came with a shovel. I just assumed it was for slinging drivel, not digging up other people’s property.”

“And it’s hard for me to believe someone living in a place like this has the social skills of a cow.”

“Fine.” He put the papers down and leaned back in his chair. “Is this better? Tell you what. I’ll even go one further and remember to say
please
when I ask you to leave. Will you
please
leave?”

“You can’t just toss me out before I have a chance—”

“I can’t? I’ve got a deed in the safe that says this is my land and I don’t think there’s any law which mandates the cheerful tolerance of trespassers.”

“Lucky for you. I don’t think you could pull off cheerful to save your soul.”

Crossing his arms over that powerful chest, he looked her over again. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven—er, twenty-eight.”

“Try eighteen.” He glanced at her clothes. “You look like you could be a babysitter. Or even need one.”

“It’s hard to look mature in cutoffs and a T-shirt,” she said indignantly.

“You pulled that getup out of a closet, not me.”

“I had to go to an associate’s dig before I came here.”

“Hopefully not as an image consultant.”

“I’m not here to talk about my clothes.”

“You seem determined to talk about something. Since I’m not going to discuss your digging up my land, I figure clothes are a natural launching pad for inane conversation. Considering you’re a woman.”

She took a deep breath, trying not to lose her temper.

“Look, I know Conrad Lyst was just caught up on your mountain—”

“Perhaps I need to be more clear. I’m not discussing anybody’s
digging on my land. Your questionable taste in sportswear is still on the table, however.”

“I didn’t wear this for you!”

“Obviously.”

Carter did her best to look at him calmly.

“Mr. Farrell, all I’m asking is for you to hear me out.”

“Call me Nick and forget the speech. It won’t improve your bargaining position any more than those shorts do.”

“Are you always this nasty?”

“As a rule, yes. But sometimes I’m worse.”

There was a long silence. She had the feeling she was amusing him.

“I’m a professional, Mr. Farrell, not an itinerant ditch-digger. You may have the answer to one of the great puzzles of the revolutionary era on your land. No one really knows what happened to the Winship party and the gold they were carrying. You owe it to posterity—”

“To let you come in and rescue the solution from my land? I’ve got news for you. I don’t think it needs rescuing. As far as I’m concerned, the past is best left buried and posterity these days is far more interested in MTV and who’s the next person to get kicked off the
Survivor
island. They couldn’t care less about minutemen and redcoats or how this nation was forged.”

“That’s a pretty narrow view.”

“I’m a narrow kind of man.”

“I can tell.”

He chuckled. “So Miss Manners is also a behaviorist?”

“No, it’s the flashing
Royal Pain in the Ass
sign over your desk.”

Nick Farrell tilted back his head and laughed. It was a rich, rolling sound.

In that moment, Carter found herself liking the man.

Just a bit.

When he focused on her again, he was smiling, and the grin lit up his austere face, cleaving years off him. He looked closer to thirty-five than forty-five.

He said, “Do you have any idea how many people come at me each spring asking to tear into Farrell Mountain?”

“No, but I don’t care.”

“You don’t?”

“When you go after some company, do you worry about what all the other little raiders are doing?”

“Been doing a little research on my history?”

“You’re pretty well-known.”

He shrugged and then asked, “What would you do if I decided to let Lyst have a go of it?”

“I’d say good luck and good riddance to both of you.” The words sounded like a straight answer but she knew the anger behind her voice gave her away.

“Something tells me,” he said, getting to his feet, “you wouldn’t be quite that phlegmatic.”

She gave him a disparaging look.

“I’m wrong?” he asked.

“You think I’m underage because of my shorts. In my opinion, that doesn’t give you a whole lot of clout in the judgment department.”

Farrell came around the edge of his desk and approached her, stopping only when he was a foot away. Carter’s heart started thumping. He was taller than her by at least a head and that was saying something, considering she was five-nine. As those arresting pale eyes of his traced her face and neck, she had to stop herself from stepping backward.

Across a desk, he was insulting and intimidating. Up close, she found him totally compelling.

Not exactly an improvement, Carter thought, running her tongue over her lips.

That was a mistake. Like a predator, he watched the movement, eyes sharpening on her mouth. The way he was looking at her made her body swell with something she was determined to think of as anxiety. Even if it felt more like hunger.

“What do you really want?” he asked.

“I don’t understand.” The words were garbled, like she was talking around marbles.

“Everyone has a hidden agenda. What else are you after?”

Carter knew he was speaking but the words were lost on her.

She decided she also had marbles in her brain.

“Look, Mr. Farrell, I don’t know where you’re going with this. I just want to dig.”

Abruptly, he broke the eye contact with her lips and returned to his desk and his papers. His voice was offhand when he addressed her again.

“I think you should put your learner’s permit to good use and drive yourself back to wherever you came from. You aren’t going to get what you want here, either in the dirt or from me. However much I wish I could be…accommodating.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I like women, not schoolgirls.”

Carter’s mouth dropped open.

“Are you suggesting…” She couldn’t even finish the sentence.

“Shut the door on the way out,” he commanded before drawling,
“Please.”

“You insufferable, egocentric—”

“There you go with the compliments, making me blush.”

“I hope you rot in hell.”

“See you there,” he said cheerfully.

On the way out, Carter slammed the door as hard as she could.

Wincing, Nick lurched forward in his chair as the clap of wood reverberated through the room like a gunshot. His head was still tender from a migraine he’d had the day before and he massaged his temples, waiting for the sting to wear off.

That was one hell of a beautiful woman, he thought. The kind of beautiful that makes men do stupid things. Like believe in love and other fallacies.

He arched his neck and thought it was a good thing she’d left. Reeling in his impulses had been getting more difficult every time that kitten pink tongue of hers had come out for a lick of those sweet lips. Moves like that had been performed for him countless times before but, because they were calculated, he’d never been tantalized. The trouble with that archaeologist was he got the sense she didn’t know how enticing she was.

But that couldn’t be possible, he told himself.

One thing Nick knew about beautiful women was they were always willing to leverage their assets. Not that he faulted them for it. He’d made a fortune doing the same thing, only his bait was dollar bills, not the promise of sexual thrills, and his acquisitions were companies, not marriage licenses. In the romantic marketplace, no one had acquired him, of course, though it hadn’t been for lack of trying. Futile as it always was for the other party, he enjoyed the bartering.

And that woman in the cutoffs could have been a real contender. If it hadn’t been for the way she was affecting him, negotiations over how much she’d be willing to give of herself to get at Farrell Mountain would have been fun. Aside from her beauty, she had a keen intelligence and a heavy dose of wit. In all of Nick’s life, his adopted son was the only one who dared to spar with him. Everyone else either wanted something or owed him money, neither of which were breeding grounds for resistance, even of the playful variety.

And that archaeologist had been captivating when she was angry, he thought. A flush on those high cheekbones, her breath coming in drumbeats, her mouth open, agape at his rudeness.

Delightful. Utterly delightful.

Too bad he wouldn’t be seeing her again.

T
WO HOUSES
down from Detective Thomas DelVecchio’s, Internal Affairs Officer Sophia Reilly was behind the wheel of her unmarked and partially blinded.

“By all that is holy…” She rubbed her eyes. “Do you not believe in curtains?”

As she prayed for the image of a spectacularly naked colleague to fade from her retinas, she seriously rethought her decision to do the stakeout herself. She was exhausted, for one thing—or had been before she’d seen just about everything Veck had to offer.

Take out the
just.

One bene was that she was really frickin’ awake now, thank you very much—she might as well have licked two fingers and shoved them into a socket: a full-frontal like that was enough to give her the perm she’d wanted back when she was thirteen.

Muttering to herself, she dropped her hands into her lap again. And gee whiz, as she stared at the dash, all she saw…was everything she’d seen.

Yeah, wow, on some men, no clothes was so much more than just
naked.

And to think she’d almost missed the show. She’d parked her sedan and just called in her position when the upstairs lights had gone on and she had gotten a gander at the vista of a bedroom. Easing back into her seat, it hadn’t dawned on her exactly where the unobstructed view was going to
take them both—she’d just been interested that it appeared to be nothing but a bald lightbulb on the ceiling of what had to be the master suite.

Then again, bachelor pad decorating tended to be either storage-unit crammed or Death Valley–barren.

Veck’s was obviously the Death Valley variety.

Except suddenly she hadn’t been thinking about interior decorating, because her suspect had stepped into the bathroom and flipped the switch.

Hellllllllo, big boy.

In too many ways to count.

“Stop thinking about it…stop thinking about—”

Closing her eyes again didn’t help: If she’d reluctantly noticed before how well he filled out his clothes, now she knew exactly why. He was heavily muscled, and given that he didn’t have any hair on his chest, there was nothing to obscure those hard pecs and that six-pack and the carved ridges that went over his hips.