Pursuit (13 page)

How it grated that she wouldn’t give him the time of day. Oh yeah, she was polite enough, but she was always cool, remote, faintly sarcastic.

And all the while he was working like a dog to save the Courts’ asses. His heart beat high and fast in his chest at the thought, at all that he’d almost held in his hands and that had been taken from him by that cold bitch.

Looking past Barrett’s shoulder into the huge entrance hall, it was almost as if he could see her again.

At the beginning, he’d used every excuse to come to the Court Mansion, ostensibly to see Philip, but actually to see Charlotte.

Through the open hallway door he’d catch glimpses of her. She used to light the fire and curl up in that yellow armchair to read on dark stormy days. Warrenton had a lot of those during the winter.

None of this—
none
of it!—would have had to happen if only Charlotte had married him. It was all her fault.

Stiff with rage, Haine stood in front of the ornate colonnaded front veranda of Court Mansion.

He was seeing red, literally. A doctor he’d met at one of the endless fund-raisers he’d attended while trying to court Charlotte had told him that seeing red wasn’t a figure of speech. Extreme rage burst the blood vessels in the eyes, the doctor said. Robert wasn’t surprised. He could feel waves of rage pulsing in every pore, every cell of his body. He needed to destroy something of Charlotte’s, something she’d cared about. He heard a soft noise in the bushes. Whirling, he caught sight of pearl white fur and a long, furry tail delicately picking its way over the broken earth, then disappearing into the laurel hedge. Federico, Charlotte’s Persian cat. He’d spent many an awkward moment, seething with rage while she stroked the animal on her lap, long slow sensuous strokes, ignoring him completely while he tried to engage her attention. Stroking her cat, smiling softly into the yellow eyes, smile fading as she looked back up at Haine.

If she’d said it aloud, it couldn’t have been more clear that she found that damned cat more interesting than him.

Haine pulled out a pocketknife and pulled the blade open.

With a lunge, Haine caught the fucking cat by the scruff of the neck and held the animal dangling at the end of his fist. It fought him, hissing and spitting and growling. The edge of a claw caught him on the wrist. Two drops of blood welled from the shallow scratch. He shuddered at the sight of his own blood.

Haine plunged the long blade of the knife straight into the beast’s throat, drowning the deep growls in blood. The cat twisted desperately in his left hand, but Robert held on firmly to the soft scruff. Pushing down with all his strength on the hilt of the knife, he widened the wound in the cat’s throat. Blood spurted out, and Robert pulled back in distaste. He had on fifteen-hundred-dollar Ermenegildo Zegna gray silk twill trousers. He pulled the knife out of the animal’s throat, plunging it again into the abdomen, feeling the scrape of rib and backbone against the metal. The cat twisted in his grip as steaming red, blue, and white guts spilled out. It was struggling less now. Robert stabbed over and over again, in a frenzy, feeling the sharp knife plow through the vital organs like butter. Robert stopped when his arms hurt and stood there, chest heaving, holding the dead animal dripping blood onto the overturned dark earth. It was dead. It had died minutes ago. With a sharp sound of revulsion, Robert opened his fist and let the disgusting creature drop to the ground. It was a mass of blood-matted fur and entrails, smelling of blood and piss and shit, hardly recognizable as a cat. He kicked loamy dirt over it. The earth made a pattering sound as it fell in clumps on the dead animal, disappearing into the gaping cavities in the belly, falling on dead, open eyes.

Robert’s breathing slowed, and he straightened. He looked down at the butchered animal and smiled.

San Luis

April 26

Charlotte came up slowly out of sleep in soft, swooping stages, like smoke rising to heaven. She hadn’t slept so soundly, or woken so gently, in what felt like forever. When she finally gained full consciousness, she was smiling.

There was bright sunlight streaming in, turning the inside of her eyelids a warm gold-tinted pink. Moira had probably already put the scones in the oven and was right now brewing the coffee. The scones would be wonderful, the coffee . . . not. No matter what kind of fancy imported Italian or French roast coffee beans Charlotte bought, Moira would burn the coffee, turning it into sludge tasting of old shoe leather. A family tradition, too, since Moira’s aunt had burned coffee for the Courts before her.

Moira made up for it by brewing the best tea in the world in the afternoon. Well, after all, she was Irish. Good tea was in her DNA.

Dad would have been up by sunrise, Charlotte thought dreamily, feeling consciousness seeping in lightly. Working on that darned book of his, which had already eaten up seven years of his life—
Seventeenth Century Travel Writers: The New World
. Which maybe three people in the whole world would read. And she’d be one of them, Charlotte thought with a sigh as she opened her eyes.

The world slipped sideways. This wasn’t her room. The bright light outside the window couldn’t possibly be Warrenton light.

Instead of the pale yellow walls and teeming bookshelves of her room, the walls here were painted a dusky pink and were bare except for a few boldly designed earthenware plates hanging from brass chains.

Dad was dead. A bubble of grief welled up inside her, and instinct had her clamping her lips shut against it. The danger of the past months had taught her never to show her pain. The grief seemed to lie in wait for her, ready to pounce, taking her always by surprise. Her father had been so precious to her, so vital to what she was, that the thought of living without him was like a sharp knife to the heart, slicing deep, the wound forever fierce, forever fresh.

“Good morning,” a deep voice rumbled at her back, and the world snapped into focus. She was lying on her left side, head pillowed on a massive biceps. Though it was like using a warm brick as a pillow, she was oddly comfortable. His other arm was around her, big hand on her belly. There was enormous warmth and—

Charlotte froze. She could feel every inch of Matt’s big, heavily muscled body against her back. He was so long he completely mantled her. His breath ruffled the top of her head, and she could feel a hard shinbone against the soles of her feet.

She was naked, and so was he.

Not only was he naked, he was hugely aroused.

His chest hairs tickled her back. Her bare back. She could feel soft chest hair furred over hard muscles. She could feel it all, hard thighs tucked against hers, huge erect penis in the small of her back. His pubic hair was rough against her bare bottom.

“I—how—” she stammered. Matt didn’t relinquish his hold. If anything, the big forearm around her waist tightened. Charlotte twisted her head to look at him over her shoulder, expecting smugness.

He didn’t have the look of masculine satisfaction you’d expect in a man who’d gotten a woman naked in bed, something Charlotte had always found incredibly annoying. If anything, he looked grimmer than normal.

He didn’t apologize, dark eyes watching her intently. “You started shivering and crying in the night,” he said. “Shivering’s good—it’s the body’s way of warming the muscles up, but I couldn’t get you to stop, and you wouldn’t wake up. Scared the fu—scared the hell out of me. I should have put you in a warm bath when I got you into the house, but I was scared of after drop.” The deep grooves in his cheeks grew deeper as his mouth tightened. “Lost a swim buddy that way. I wasn’t about to lose you.” He drew in a deep breath. “The best way to warm someone up is contact with human skin. We were taught that in the Navy. Winter training involves placing us in just our swim trunks in subzero weather and making us survive in the waves rolling to shore. The only way to do that is to huddle together to generate heat. So we did, stacking up and sharing what body heat we could. You stopped shivering as soon as I stripped you and got into bed with you.”

This was her first real look at him. Last night she’d been too shocked, too numb to have the resources to think of him as anything other than the man she’d watched over, the man who’d rescued her and—later—a potential enemy who could uncover her secrets. Now, in the full light of an early Mexican morning, she couldn’t take her eyes off his face. He hadn’t shaved. Dark stubble covered his face halfway up to his cheeks. His dark hair was too short for him to have bed head—the way she knew she had to have—and she could see now that he had a few threads of silver along his temples. He had a scar along his temple that ran right into the hairline. A streak of white hair followed the course of the scar.

She had no idea what age he could be. He had the physique of a young man, but that was probably due to the intense exercises he put himself through. If she’d had to guess, she’d have said he was in his midthirties. Though he looked older, she could see now that it wasn’t due to age but exposure to sun and wind. The skin around his eyes was weatherbeaten, light-colored sun wrinkles fanning out from the corner of his eyes. His eyes were a lighter brown than she’d thought from observing him on the beach—from a distance they’d looked darker. He was looking at her narrow-eyed, thin nostrils slightly flared. From the feel of his hot, hard penis, he was intensely aroused.

So was she. Charlotte was shocked to feel the warm flood of feeling between her thighs. Matt slowly spread open his big hand and it almost covered her entire stomach. As his hand moved against the skin of her belly, Charlotte could actually feel her vagina . . .
flutter.
The exact same feeling she had just before orgasm. How did
that
happen? How had she become so turned on it was as if they’d already started making love? It must have happened in her sleep, feeling all that male warmth around her. Her subconscious mind must have just shut down the lobe dealing with danger, which had kept her awake and semialert most nights, and switched on the sex lobe.

This needed to be brought down a level—or three or four. Matt Sanders might be the sexiest man she’d ever seen, but an affair was unthinkable. Much too dangerous. Though her traitorous body felt a connection to him and was thrilling to his touch, she didn’t dare trust anyone.

Sex was dangerous. She was feeling so weak and vulnerable that sex would just crack her wide open and let all sorts of monsters spill right out.

Charlotte grabbed at the first thought that crossed her mind, trying to tone down the sexual heat that had suddenly blossomed in her bed. “You Navy guys
cuddle
to keep warm?”

Matt shook his head slightly, eyes never leaving hers. He didn’t smile. Not exactly. But there was a lightening of his features that would have been a smile if his mouth had moved. “Not cuddle. Huddle. Navy guys huddle. There’s a difference.” That big hand moved slowly up over her stomach and cupped her breast. He stroked the skin, running his thumb over her nipple. The skin of his fingers was calloused, rough on her supersensitized skin. The touch went straight to her loins in an electric line of heat. “
This,
”

he growled, “is cuddling.”

It was more than cuddling, it was the next best thing to sex itself. The big hand cupped and stroked while he watched her so closely she felt as if he could simply reach inside her to pull all her thoughts out of her head.

As he stroked, heat rushed to her face. He noticed that. Of course he did, he was preternaturally observant. His hand with the rough skin stroked her breast lightly, the movements so delicate she almost wanted to thrust her breasts out to deepen his touch. She was entirely in his embrace. Slowly, without seeming to use an ounce of his strength, he had turned her over onto her side, facing him.

She didn’t feel manhandled—it was more like following a force of nature. A shift of those powerful muscles and there they were—lying face-to-face. As she turned over, her sensitized nipples scraped against his chest hair. Her belly brushed against his penis. Everywhere she touched him he was hot and hard. She’d never been naked with a man who was so . . . male before.

Charlotte was fastidious by nature—actually,
incredibly picky
was what her roommate at Middlebury had said. She hadn’t had that many lovers. Not to mention the fact that her love life had been severely curtailed—or rather, abruptly cut off—by her father’s illness. The few men she’d been to bed with were all similar in nature. They shared her interests in art and literature—that was why she chose them. In retrospect, their bodies had been much like hers, just without breasts and with a penis. They’d been pale and slender and hairless and not much stronger than she was.

Matt was completely different from her in every way there was.

He’d thrown off the blankets, and she could see every inch of his beautiful body. Bulging, superbly defined muscles with raised veins, a heavy pelt of chest hair that narrowed only a little around the belly button, then grew into a dense dark thatch around his penis. His skin looked tougher than hers, as if it would take a lot to penetrate it, and it was several tones darker than hers.

About the only thing they had in common was bullet-wound scars—he’d taken a bullet to the shoulder, too, just like her. It had never occurred to her in her previous life that bullet scars might come under the heading of shared interests.