Nobody's Angel (7 page)

When he marched back out with the keys to his cousin's truck clenched in his fist, he found her wandering through the wildflowers by the drive, heading toward the road. She didn't have the bowl or her briefcase in her hands, so he figured it was only a preliminary inspection, but she was already contemplating escape.

“What'll you give me if I take you home tonight?” he challenged as he caught up with her.

She didn't look startled, didn't look at him at all, just kept on walking. “I don't need you. I don't need any man to get where I want to go.”

He didn't want to hear the note of vulnerability behind her angry declaration. He had to maintain control of the situation until he had what he wanted. That meant he had to keep control of her, in whatever way it took.

He was a man who had made bold choices in the past. Some of them had been the wrong choices, but he'd done what he had to do and lived with the result. His choices now were obvious. He could use force, or he could use sex, or he could appeal to her better instincts. He'd seen her at the homeless shelter and knew she possessed compassion. She just wasn't inclined to apply it to a man she feared. So, he had to take away her fear if he wanted her cooperation. He'd save force as a last ditch method. That left sex as his fallback position.

“Juan is letting me borrow his rattletrap truck. I won't swear it will make it over the mountain, but if it does, he can drive your mobile garbage can up to the city when it's ready and we'll exchange them. Go find your things. I'll get the truck.”

She shot him a look of suspicion but didn't waste time questioning. Swinging around, she strode toward the house. A piece of silken hair slipped from its knot and curled around her nape. Adrian stayed one step behind and watched it
bounce in rhythm with her sway. Yeah, this was definitely the best course to take. He was much better at persuasion than force, and the results could be very interesting.

Maybe he needed to get sex off his mind first so he could focus better on the task ahead.

As if she heard his thoughts, Faith swung around on the bottom step and glared at him with just enough warning to remind him that she carried a phone in her case and could call the police anytime she wished.

They would definitely need to develop a level of trust before he could have his way with her, in whatever form he imagined.

Uncomfortably aware of his lack of a current driver's license, Adrian stayed well within the bounds of the speed limit all the way back to the city, enraging the semi drivers barreling down the mountain behind him. The semis should have scared the shit out of him, but the woman beside him had already done that.

If he intended to control this situation, he needed to hold Ms. Faith Hope Nicholls firmly within his limited circle of power. Leaving her without a means of transportation was a good start.

“I don't know Knoxville,” he said innocently enough as they reached the outer lights of the city. “You'll have to tell me how to find your place.” He hadn't had time to track down her home, as he had the shelter. She wasn't in the phone book, and he hadn't followed her from the bar, though tempted to do it. That had been next on his list.

She threw him a shrewd look but must have realized it wouldn't be difficult for him to find her. Sinking back in the patched upholstery, she returned to staring out the windshield. “Take the next exit.”

Her directions led him to a deteriorating mansion in the city's inner streets. The sign out front advertising a vacancy gave evidence that the old house had been converted to apartments.

“You'd be safer with me at the shelter than in there,” he said derisively. In the dark interior of the truck cab, he felt a protective urge toward the slim woman clutching her bubble-wrapped bowl. He couldn't undo decades of upbringing in one night. He wouldn't let his damned sisters go into a place like that.

“I've never had any trouble,” she said quietly, opening the door.

He didn't like it when she got quiet. He hadn't analyzed that reaction yet, but he threw open his door and leaped out of the truck. He really hadn't intended to follow her in, but he jammed his hands in his pockets and trailed her up the broken sidewalk, through the fallen gate.

“If you can afford that expensive shop, surely you can afford better than this.” He tested her, still not believing her story. He'd spent four years building this woman into a selfish society bitch. He couldn't blow away four years.

“I don't need much.” She shrugged as she removed her keys from her purse. “I rented this when I first arrived, and everything I earned went into the business. When the store started making money, I put the profits into a more expensive location instead of moving. Works for me.”

Adrian noted the sagging porch steps and couldn't adjust his thinking fast enough to reply.

“You needn't follow me in.” Scorn lingered beneath the otherwise calm of her voice as she inserted a key in the outer door. “I'm perfectly safe.”

“Just because I spent a few years in jail doesn't mean I've forgotten what my mama taught me.” Reaching over her head, he shoved open the door as she unlocked it, verifying that no danger lurked in the foyer.

Her resistance made him even more determined to follow. Sensing that, she stepped inside and strode toward the battered staircase. As he closed the door, darkness enveloped them, broken only by the electricity they were generating as he followed her up.

She'd been his partner's wife, an expensively lacquered socialite accustomed to finger bowls and imported china, a
woman who would perjure herself to protect her wealth, and she was climbing a battered staircase to a room not much better than his prison cell.

She had sunk to his depths now, and he was more aware of her than he'd been of any woman in his life.

Faith unlocked her apartment door, excessively aware of the tightly wound tension of the man behind her. Adrian Raphael was anything but a relaxed companion. She had the unsettling feeling that he was always balanced on the edge and that in some way she was responsible.

He didn't take his leave as the door opened. If he thought she was inviting him in, he was highly mistaken. “Thank you for bringing me home,” she murmured with her best boarding school manners. The year her parents had gone to Ecuador and left her at the fancy school had been an enlightening experience.

“Check to make certain the room's safe,” he said gruffly, standing in the shadows of the hall where she couldn't read his eyes.

He must have grown up in a rough world. Opening the door wider and flipping on the overhead light, Faith searched the interior. She didn't have much, but she liked quality. She'd found a bargain in the wide designer-tapestried sleeper sofa some client of the interior decorator's had rejected. The jewel colors picked up the ruby red and cobalt blue of the antique glass she'd carefully shelved over the old bay window. A contemporary glass kitchen table accompanied by chrome and cobalt chairs she'd found on sale in a gallery completed the essentials. She had a small office and library in a back room, but she couldn't imagine any thief finding room to hide in there, or in the ancient bathroom with its huge claw-footed tub. She liked the old musty building with its high ceilings
and fading grandeur. She turned to see if her companion was satisfied that the room was safe.

He seemed transfixed by the everydayness of the interior, but he snapped back quickly. “The shelter closes at ten, I'd better be going.”

“It's almost ten now.” Alarm clattered briefly through her veins. Did that mean she should invite him in? He'd brought her home, probably given up a comfortable bed with his family in exchange for the noisy cot room at the shelter. She'd been selfish—

Faith stopped that guilt track instantly. Tony had manipulated her that way. She wouldn't feel guilty about anything any man chose to do ever again. Adrian had chosen to go with her today so he could harass her more. Where he would sleep was his problem.

He shrugged. “I can sleep in the truck if they won't let me in. One thing jail teaches you is to sleep wherever and whenever you can. Lock the door behind you.” He examined the dead bolt. “It's a good lock, but you shouldn't be living here.”

Faith stared after him in amazement. He hadn't argued, hadn't blamed her for his discomfort, had merely accepted his responsibility for his predicament, already formed a solution, and acted on it. Damn, where were all the rest of the men in the world like that?

Probably in jail, she snorted, shutting the door and carefully bolting it. Men like that tended to think they were the only human beings on the face of the earth. That led to sticky results when the rest of the world intervened.

She unwrapped her bowl and admired it beneath the glare of the overhead light. Adrian Raphael's cousin had talent. Perhaps she could help him focus it a little more?

Dropping her case with its signed legal documents and a bankbook considerably lightened by her purchase, she undressed and showered and wrapped herself in her velour bathrobe. She told herself she should go to bed early, but restlessness grated on her nerves, and she knew sleep wouldn't come easily.

Thinking a rehash of the day's events might straighten out her thought processes, Faith pulled out her journal. When her pen wouldn't settle on the paper, she realized Adrian Raphael had an unsettling effect she didn't wish to analyze for the sake of her journal.

She started to flip the pages to the day she'd actually walked out on Tony, but her gaze caught on a tear-blotted page toward the beginning, and her hand hovered there. The knowledge Adrian had given her of Tony's vasectomy wrenched at something vital inside her. She didn't want to grasp it yet, feared it would rip her already scarred insides into more shreds.

Tony had never loved her back. Tony had never loved anyone but Tony. Faith doubted he'd even loved his mistress or the children she'd had by him. But to know he'd deliberately
lied
over something so immensely vital to her soul …

Feeling sick, she threw the journal aside. Examining the past only helped if it led her to decisions for the future. She'd made that decision. She would stick with it. She wanted to experience life on her own from now on, explore all the possibilities she'd been denied while she had tried to please others. She was doing precisely what she wanted to do, and the gut-twisting knife Adrian had plunged into her today wouldn't change any of that. She'd heal.

She hadn't thought she'd heal from Tony's deception, but she had. Quite rapidly. She smiled in satisfaction at that thought as she opened the sofa bed. She really did have a backbone when it came down to the crunch. It was only in the little everyday things that she was wishy-washy—like, should she suffer the agony of another man in her life now that she could possibly have a baby?

Pushing her grocery cart briskly through the supermarket the next evening, Faith froze at the sight of a man with a straight black ponytail, hovering over the meat counter. He wore jeans with his flannel shirt today, faded jeans that had probably once fit like a second skin. Now, they draped almost loosely over his muscled thighs as he reached over the
counter and examined a single slice of ham. That's when she noticed he held a shiny new frying pan in his other hand.

Something about the image of a lonely man furnishing his life with a frying pan and ham twisted her admittedly weak heartstrings. He'd once been a highly paid attorney, dressed in suits that probably cost more than the truck his cousin loaned him, dined in fancy restaurants, probably with lovely young things on his arm. How dangerous could such a man be without his trappings of wealth?

She could avoid him. He was concentrating on his next meal. If he'd been sleeping on the streets and in shelters since he left prison, he was probably enjoying the freedom of his cousin's truck. He wasn't her responsibility.

She had to remember he was here to harass her for information she didn't have, that he believed her capable of robbing widows and orphans. She didn't know why she had to remind herself of that. Just because he'd treated her politely last night didn't mean he wasn't dangerous.

He turned and saw her just as she'd made up her mind to escape down another aisle. He didn't smile often, but he flashed a white grin now at the sight of her. Something about the shimmer of a silver earring against dark skin should have repelled her, but it drew her forward instead. Maybe she was one of those ninnyhammers drawn to dangerous men.

“I put the truck to good use today,” he said, waving his frying pan as Faith pushed her cart closer. “Moved someone across town and picked up a nice stack of cash, made a deposit on a furnished room.”

“That's stupid,” she said automatically, not filtering her thoughts before they spouted from her mouth. She never used to say things like that. Astonished at herself, she waited for him to flinch or strike back, but his grin broadened. She shrugged. “You need to go back to North Carolina before they start looking for you.”

“My next meeting with the parole officer isn't for two weeks. I can catch a bus down to Charlotte then.” His grin disappeared as he fixed her with a dark gaze. “I'm not giving up.”