Nine

Captivity, even in a tropical paradise, was rotting his brain. Jackson lay perfectly still in the sparse grass, holding a string in his left hand. In front of him, about ten feet away, was a box trap he’d fashioned out of sticks and more string. A little farther out, about twelve feet away, was a blue-and-green lizard, otherwise known as snake bait.

She hadn’t said anything about trapping their mysterious visitor. She’d only said he couldn’t kill it. Before he could trap the snake, though, he had to trap the bait. Inside the box, he’d staked out a cockroach. All he had to do was wait for Mother Nature to take a ride on the food chain.

A flash of color in the lush growth of forest caught his eye. He glanced up in time to see Sugar disappear behind the base of a gracefully buttressed tree, a splash of bright yellow against a world of unremitting green. Lianas trailed from the higher limbs of the châtaignier, any one of which could be camouflaging the snake he was trying to catch.

He swore under his breath. She was a great one to go forbidding him to do things. He should have forbidden her to go into the forest.

The slightest skittering sound brought his attention back to the lizard, and with a quick jerk of the string, he had his bait trapped in the box, happily eating its last meal.

Now to go get Sugar before something else did.

* * *

Sugar carefully picked her way across the rocks at the base of the tiered waterfall that dropped down off the cliffs. Getting to her hideaway was never easy, but it was always worthwhile. She had discovered the small beach and cove while exploring the labyrinth of caverns that honeycombed the cliffs.

Chemical warfare was as prevalent in the rock structure of Cocorico as it was in the forest vegetation. Rain became a diluted carbonic-acid solution by picking up carbon dioxide in the air and from the decomposing plants on the ground. The weak acid dissolved the almost pure calcium carbonate that made up the limestone, sinking through fissures and crannies in the rock to carve out caves over the millennia.

The waterfall was nothing more than a trickle of the river that ran through the caves, four tributaries that had been diverted by breaks high in the outside wall. Far back in the labyrinth, she’d built one of the deeper, more isolated caverns into a water storage tank as a precaution against drought. Once a week she opened the sluice gates on the natural tank and let it empty and refill with fresh water from the river.

She would do that job today, she decided, for she doubted she would get another chance to sneak away. Both men had been preoccupied when she’d come out of the cottage, Jen doing what he spent most of his days doing—looking out to sea—and Jackson sleeping in the grass. That wasn’t such an unusual pastime, considering that he spent much of his nights doing what Jen did during the day, but a very unusual pastime for someone worried about big snakes.

A grin twitched her lips. Maybe enamored or challenged was a better way to describe his interest. One animal worthy of the term dangerous showed up, and Jackson’s protective and predatory instincts rushed to the fore—until the warm sun and soft grass got the better of him.

Still grinning, she reached for the handhold she’d carved in the cliff wall and stepped behind the waterfall.

Sugar disappeared. Jackson stared for a moment at the place where she’d been, then broke into a run, legs pumping, his feet flying through the forest. He vaulted over downed trees and pushed aside branches, heedless of any damage he might do to her plants, though he knew there would be hell to pay when she noticed. He was not going to lose her. She was leading him to freedom. His pulse quickened in anticipation. He’d known there was a way off the island, but he’d be damned if he could find it. Shulan, Sher Chang, and the pilot had left. Henry had left. In a few hours he would leave too.

Or maybe he wouldn’t, he thought, even as he leaped to the top of a boulder and jumped down the other side. Not in a few hours anyway. He had time before Shulan returned. Knowing he could escape was the important thing, not the escape itself.

Fool. The warning voice rang loud and clear in his mind and stopped him in his tracks. What in the hell was he thinking?

He grimaced at his faulty, lust-induced reasoning, not believing the direction his thoughts had taken. He needed to leave at the first opportunity, no discussion. He could come back if he found he couldn’t live without her, which he sincerely hoped he wouldn’t. She was a piece of loose karma, not his destiny. She was a temptation to be overcome, not one to render him helpless. In the worst of scenarios, she wasn’t even real, merely a figment of his imagination conjured up by Shulan to tease and entice him, a means to his destruction by the slow, sweet torture of constant arousal and sexual frustration.

Swearing, he scrambled over the last stretch of rocks leading to the source of the stream. The waterfall foamed down in front of him, sending a freshwater mist into the air and obscuring her escape hatch. He stuck his hand through the water and felt rock. He was going after her, and when he found the route to freedom, he was taking it. Twice more he jammed his hand into the water and hit rock, then victory. His arm went through to emptiness, and he followed, cutting through the water and entering another world, one of steaming mist and faint light.

He used both hands to slick his wet hair back off his face. The walls and floor of the cavern were dripping with moisture and covered with an amazing orange-brown slime. There was no sign of Sugar or her passing. He stepped forward, hoping to get a glimpse of her farther back in the cave, but his foot never hit the floor again. There was no floor, only a gaping hole full of mirror-smooth water with his foot breaking the surface. He had enough presence of mind to fill his lungs with air before he went down, flailing for a handhold on the slimy rock, which offered none.

Time ceased to exist under the water. All physical movement dropped into slow motion, except for the pounding of his heart, which jumped into double time as the current sucked him deeper into the hole, into darkness, pulling him down while every survival instinct he had was screaming for him to go up, to regain the surface and life-giving air.

He was scraped against a blunt edge of rock in his headlong flight, but in the middle of the maelstrom there were no surrounding walls, just fast-running water bearing him along. He reached a hand for the surface and encountered a submerged ceiling of solid rock.

True panic set in.

This then was how he was going to die, not as the scornful paramour of the Dragon Whore, nor as the conquering hero of childhood dreams, rescuing fair maidens and dark-eyed beauties, righting injustice and defending the weak, but drowning alone in the dark.

The epitaph no sooner formed than it was disproved. His head came out of the water just as the last of his breath gave way. Lungs burning, he swallowed a gulp of air, then another. His chest heaved with the exertion of trying to catch his breath and keep upright in the swiftly swirling water.

Surrounded by darkness, he fought disorientation by peering into the gloom and using his other senses to fix his location. The sound of rushing water filled his ears. The smell of sweet water overlaid the mustiness in the air, and all around him there was water and more water. He couldn’t feel a bottom and keep his head above the river at the same rime, and he was disinclined to submerge himself again. There was no telling where he might come up, or what he might come up against.

The current rushed along, propelling him into more darkness, heading deeper and deeper into the earth. Cooper had always said impulsiveness would be the death of him, but the impulse to follow Sugar had been undeniable, instinctive, like a cat chasing a mouse. She’d been running away, and he’d felt a compelling need to chase her. He couldn’t have resisted it any more than he could have resisted kissing her.

The river slowed suddenly, as if hitting an invisible wall, and he floated out into a much larger body of water. Ahead of him, across a distance he couldn’t estimate, a narrow circle of bright light beckoned.

He began swimming toward the light, controlling each breaststroke so it barely made a ripple. He didn’t know where he was or what he might encounter. It was a sure bet Sugar hadn’t gone the same way he had, through a hole in the floor. This was her lair, and he’d been caught but good. He just hoped there was another way out. Backtracking his route was out of the question.

He slid through the water, his breath easing back down to normal. Now that death was off the list of imminent possibilities, he was intrigued. The cavern was huge, the ceiling far above him and rustling with movement and noise. If worse came to worst, he wondered if he could eat a bat. He doubted it.

The circle of light grew bigger and brighter, until he could see blue sky and a fringe of greenery around the perimeter. The smell of fresh and growing things cut through the mustiness in the cave. A cloud scudded across the opening. When it passed, a shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom, reaching far into the cavern and reflecting off the sleek form and tangled blond curls of Sugar Caine as she swam silently through the dark pool.

Jackson stopped and treaded water, watching as she reached the opening and pulled herself up onto the ledge. She slicked her hair off her face, shook the water onto the floor, then proceeded to take off her clothes.

A dark thrill shot through him like a streak of wildfire, igniting his mind and body with equal intensity. A nice man would have said something to warn her she wasn’t alone. Jackson just watched, a sinful smile curving across his face.

Her T-shirt came off first, skimmed over her head and off her arms, her every move as graceful as a gazelle’s. Sunlight lovingly backlit the gentle curves of her body and made a halo around her angel’s face.

God, she was beautiful, her breasts small, but full and round and tipped in pink. He swallowed softly, unable to take his eyes off her.

He followed the descent of her shorts and underwear, his body hardening with every inch of skin she revealed in the wake of the yellow cotton. His smile was long gone. She bent over to pull the clothes off her feet, and when she straightened, his gaze went unerringly to the juncture of her thighs. His tongue came out to dampen suddenly dry lips. He’d seen naked women before, but he hadn’t seen Sugar, and something about her made it feel like the first time, the first time for everything. The first time he’d watched a woman undress . . . the first time a woman had opened herself for him . . . the first time he’d slid his hand, and his mouth, and his sex into that magical place.

She raised her arms over her head and stretched from the tips of her fingers to the tips of her toes, and he almost drowned for the second time.

He was entranced. With a powerful kick, he pushed through the water, counting on himself to have enough strength and decency to ask if she’d like to make love before he took her. Then she turned, showing him a luscious backside. That distracted him for the only instant he had to call out and keep her from soaring off the cliff and out of sight.

Watching her fly off the edge cut through his sexual haze pretty damn quick. Five strong strokes brought him to the rocks where she’d left her clothes. He pulled himself up and ran toward the edge, catching himself just before he would have gone over.

A grin broke across his face as he regained his balance. She was already surfacing in the protected cove not ten feet below where he stood, a fair-skinned mermaid in a pool of cerulean blue frothed to white on the edges. He should have known she wasn’t the type to take a swan dive. Hell, he hadn’t been that much trouble. Not yet, anyway.

Without fear to sidetrack him, his thoughts returned to the more pleasant subject of her nudity and what he was going to do about it. Take advantage were the only words that came to mind.

He stripped off his shirt and pulled the drawstring on his pants.

Sugar swam a couple of yards and rolled onto her back to float in the sunshine, but any thoughts she’d had of relaxing in that position were shot to hell when she looked up and saw Jackson. He was poised to dive into the pool, primeval man incarnate, standing tall and strong on the edge of the cliff, a dragon gracing one side of his chest, his long black braid the other. His arms were outstretched, his legs straight, his body as naked as the day he was born.

While a part of her was breathlessly mesmerized, another part of her didn’t know how he survived in polite society, or even impolite society.

She did know the only way he could have gotten into her pool, and that made her grin. The bounty hunter’s heart was probably still pounding from the wild ride through the sinkhole. Served him right for playing possum, she thought. When she’d passed him in the grass, she could have sworn he was sound asleep.

He pushed off the rocks into a dive, giving her no more time to contemplate either his body or his motives. Her fight-or-flight instincts kicked into high gear. She chose flight, beating a hasty retreat to the stretch of sand carved out of the thick, overhanging forest that made up most of her hideaway.

When Jackson surfaced, he was alone in the water. Damn. The woman was like quicksilver, impossible to hold. He scanned the cove and finally caught a glimpse of her making her way through the trees. A path led from the southern shore of the pool, winding up the cliff to the opening in the rock wall.

This was the real wild paradise on her island, a deep jungle of green life tied together by miles of lianas and nearly enclosed by the surrounding limestone. Tree roots grew like writhing snakes down the cliff wall, while vines climbed to the arch above. All the flora was heavy with fruit and flowers, filling the cove with splashes of color.

A flock of scarlet macaws with an albino leading the way flew across the pool and swooped up into the trees, squawking noisily. He’d never seen an albino macaw. He doubted if anyone had, except for God, and Sugar, and now him.

Behind him, the ocean waves broke against the reef, sending only a ripple of their strength into the pool. He lowered his head and filled his mouth with water, then spat it back out. The cove was half-fresh, half-salt, a mixture of two great sources of life made out of the same element. Sun, moon; light, dark; yang, yin; man, woman. His woman, and he could not hold on to her.

He saw her hand reach out from behind a small tree and grab for her clothes. The shirt and shorts were a brilliant shade of yellow, and what with all the fluttering around she did to maintain her modesty behind the tree, she looked like a monarch butterfly.

“Are you decent?” he hollered, still treading water in the middle of the pool.

“Unlike some people I know, I’m always decent,” she yelled back from her hiding place, making him smile.

When Jackson didn’t respond to her gibe, Sugar stepped closer to the soursop tree and moved aside a leafy branch, only to find he’d disappeared. She watched the water for a long time, her curiosity losing ground to worry with each passing second. The man had said he was a good swimmer. Lord, if he couldn’t even manage the cove, how had he expected to catch the Mary Sue?

Concern made her careless, and she pressed too closely into the tree, scratching herself on its spiny fruit. She quickly stuck her hand into her mouth and sucked. The faint taste of blood registered on her senses as she again searched the pool.

Her patience and her caution came to an end at the same time. She readied herself to dive in after him, ducking under the tree’s lowest branch and stepping to the edge. What stopped her was the sight of him climbing up the cliff wall at her feet, hand over fist, using a thick liana as a rope and tree roots for footholds.

He moved with the agility of an animal in its prime, scaling the cliff with purposeful ease. Water and sunlight glistened over his tawny skin and down the free-falling corded braid of his hair. When he reached the top, he looked up at her with a mischievous gleam in his eye.

“Me Jackson. You Sugar,” he said, sounding innocent and looking dangerously sensual, his smile guileless but not harmless.

For an instant she was sucked into the fantasy he offered—one man, one woman, no rules—but only for an instant.

“Me going. You nuts,” she said, backing away from the edge.

“Give me a hand up?” he asked, and she stopped in midstep. He raised one hand toward her, and she couldn’t help but notice what that did to the muscles in the arm holding on to the vine. They tightened, becoming even more well defined.

He couldn’t possibly need help, not with arms like his, but she stepped forward out of a sense of duty. She offered him her hand, and immediately regretted it.

He took hold of her hand and pulled at the same time as he pushed off from the rock wall, sending them both out over the water. Sugar instinctively stretched her body into a dive position, and he did the same, but he didn’t let go of her. When they surfaced, she spluttering and he grinning, he still had hold of her.

“You—you got me wet.” She would have called him something awful, but he defied description.

“You were already wet,” he said, his smile broadening in a flash of white teeth.

“I was halfway dry.” It was a bit of a stretch, but close enough. “And I could have been hurt with you dragging me off the cliff like that.”

He laughed. “Halfway dry is about as good as it gets on Cocorico, and I held on to you so you wouldn’t get hurt.” He clearly wasn’t taking the blame for anything. He began swimming toward the shore, pulling her beside him.

“You can . . . uh, let go of me now,”

“No, I can’t,” he said, cutting through the blue-green water, his movements sending tiny waves lapping against her throat and chest.

“Why not?”

“Because the only reason I pulled you off the cliff was so I could hold you.” He found his footing on the bottom and drew her into his embrace within the shadows of the overhanging palms. “After going to that much trouble, it would be a shame not to take full advantage of the opportunity.”

She wanted to disagree, despite what her heart felt was the truth. Yes, it would be a shame to waste such a golden opportunity for holding each other, but being that close to him in broad daylight made speech impossible. Her pulse was beating too quickly, and her thoughts were moving too slowly.

His mouth was so beautiful, wide set with lips softer than they looked, and teeth so white they fairly shone against the darker color of his skin. A woman would give up a lot to explore a mouth like his, especially when the woman already knew what sensory magic he could conjure with his kiss.

“Sugar?” He spoke her name softly, his voice husky with the changing tension in the air.

She lifted her gaze to meet his and felt an ache build inside her chest. His mouth was no more beautiful than his eyes. Or his hair. Or his body.

Or his warrior’s heart with its tenderness and easy laughter. She couldn’t resist him forever. She could only give him fair warning of the truth.

Nervously wetting her lips, she forced herself not to falter under the weight of her words.

“If you kiss me again, Jackson, I swear I’ll never let you go.” Her lashes lowered before the last word was out, a minor concession considering what she’d just confessed.

He was quiet for a long time, holding her against him, the gentle rise and fall of his chest the only movement she could perceive.

“Do you mean that?” he finally asked, his voice full of the hundred other questions he hadn’t asked.

She nodded, afraid to say more.

“You’re thinking about letting me go?” He didn’t sound as if he believed it, but she wasn’t going to reassure him with even a gesture. She’d already given away too much.

“But not if I kiss you,” he repeated, then swore roundly, his hands tightening on her waist. “Somebody should have taught you when to cut your losses. I can’t—”

Whatever he was going to say next was lost in the drone of a low-flying seaplane banking into the point, headed for the beach below her home.

He swore again, a word much nastier than her own vehement damn.

“Looks like somebody has saved you again,” he said, not sounding any too happy about it.

“What do you mean?” She didn’t feel saved, she felt invaded. No one was scheduled to come. Shulan had told her three weeks.

“What I mean”—he captured her chin and turned her face up to meet his glowering gaze—“is that you have greatly underestimated how much you mean to me.”

His mouth came down on hers hard and forceful, demanding a response she was incapable of hiding.

Jackson cursed himself again and again, even as he sank deeper into the kiss, into the taste and feel of Sugar Caine, the woman who would be his doom.

Ten

He was lost, more lost than he’d been in Shulan’s gilded Hong Kong prison. There, it had only been his body in a strange place. On Cocorico, with Sugar in his arms, he was racing down uncharted paths of the heart.

He lifted his head to place another kiss on her lips, loving the luxury of being able to leave and come back for more. There were no tears this time. She was as fascinated as he was with the sweet melding of their mouths.

When next he lifted his head and looked, her wide gray eyes were dazed with passion, her cheeks flushed with color. Relief and satisfaction filled his breast. Sometimes she tried too hard to be indifferent to him, coolly in control, and he didn’t want her cool where he was concerned. He couldn’t have borne her manufactured indifference, not when he was drowning in a whirlpool of emotion.

Holding her face in his hands, he kissed her again, simply pressing his lips to hers and breathing in the same air. She was his woman, like no other woman, made for him to be hers.

The sound of the plane engine ended abruptly, warning him it had landed on the other side of the arch. If they’d come to take him, they were going to be disappointed. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“Stay with me,” he said roughly, kissing her ear, her temple, her brow.

“I can’t stay here, Jackson, and neither can you.” She tilted her head back, away from his roaming mouth. Her expression was serious despite the flush still suffusing her cheeks and the lambent light in her eyes. “They may not have seen us, but they know about this cove. They’ll search every inch of the island until they find you, unless I throw them off your track.”

“Do they know about the caves?”

“No, but the seaplane will give them access to this place. You can’t stay here.”

A hint of desperation shaded her voice, taking away its soft lilt and impressing upon him the depth of her feelings for him. Either she’d been telling the truth and she wasn’t going to let him go—or let anyone take him —because he’d kissed her, or her concern for him had suddenly won out over any loyalty she felt she owed Shulan. He considered the change good joss, regardless of her motives.

“What will you tell them?” he asked, deliberately not using Shulan’s name. She had just committed herself to a breach of faith with her friend, choosing him over the pirate princess. He didn’t want to press the point.

“That I took you to another island.”

“Why?” He spoke with the obvious inflection of an interrogator, giving her a chance to get her story straight.

“Because I didn’t feel you were safe here any longer.”

He shot another question at her. “Why?”

“Because the security of the island was breached.”

“How?”

“An unauthorized boat landing.”

“When?”

“Two nights ago.”

“Who was it?”

“I’m not sure. They . . . uh, said they were—had gotten blown off course,” she said, struggling to keep up the lie. “But they didn’t look like run-of-the-mill windjamming tourists.”

“Why not? What was different about them?”

“I don’t know,” she said, throwing her hands up, exasperated. “They were just different, that’s all.”

“You’re not a very good liar, Sugar,” he said straight out.

“That’s not what you thought a few days ago.” Her smile was faintly wry.

He answered her with a smile of his own. “A few days ago I didn’t know I was in love.”

It was a hell of a bombshell to drop, and she wasn’t any more surprised than he was by the declaration. He hadn’t meant to say it, he hadn’t thought to say it. He’d just said it.

“That’s impossible,” she whispered, her eyes growing wide. It wasn’t exactly the response he would have put at the top of his most wanted list.

“Yeah, well, a lot of impossible things seem to happen here.” He felt color rise in his cheeks, at least that’s what he thought he felt. He couldn’t remember ever blushing before.

“You’re blushing,” she confirmed, her smile teasing him to the point that he lowered his gaze—for all of a second and a half. He liked being teased by her too much to miss a moment of it.

“Let that be our first secret,” he said. “Cooper will never let me live it down, if he ever finds out.”

“I’ve never been any good at keeping secrets, but I promise to keep yours.” Her voice softened along with the look in her eyes, reminding him again of the fierceness of her convictions. The few things she had to hold on to, she held on to with a tenacious and sincere loyalty.

“Our secret,” he corrected her, running his thumb across her bottom lip. He’d been right to follow her, though the freedom she was leading him to was far different from what he’d expected. “So what are you going to tell them?”

“The truth,” she said. “Or as close to the truth as I can get. That you were driving me absolutely crazy and I had to get rid of you. That you wouldn’t keep your clothes on and you wouldn’t stay out of the water. That you upset my schedule and unearthed snakes in the garden. That I couldn’t think a coherent thought when you were near me.”

“Are you in love too?” It was the hardest question he’d ever asked, and her answer wasn’t nearly what he’d hoped it would be.

“I don’t know, Jackson,” she said, being painfully honest. “I want you so much, I can’t see beyond the wanting. You’re more than I ever expected to get.”

“More what?”

“More life, more of a chance.”

Her answer hurt him worse than her doubts about love. She was too young to have settled for so little.

“There must have been a time when your dreams were bigger, Sugar.”

“Maybe,” she said, her lashes lowering for a moment. Then she turned away from him. “I’m sorry. We have to go now, before they come looking.”

He stopped her from leaving by laying his hand on her arm, but she didn’t look at him. “You can’t hide from me forever.”

When she didn’t answer, he let her go. He couldn’t hold her with force, and he wasn’t going to get answers by asking questions, not yet, though he was damned determined to get some answers. His love gave him a right to know everything about her, an obligation.

Patience would bring him her trust, he told himself, and only trust would give him the secrets of her past or a chance at her future. Patience.

He followed her up the narrow trail leading to the opening of the cavern. The path was sandy, easy on bare feet, when it should have been rocky. With little effort, he could imagine her spending days hauling sand up from the beach to pack the trail, making her walled paradise more amenable, adding a small luxury to her life.

Her island was beautiful, lush, and giving, but it was still a prison. If not his love, he wondered what it would take to lure her from her Eden. And if she didn’t love him in return, did he have any right to ask her to leave?

At the top of the path, she waited with her back to him while he put on his clothes.

“We don’t have to go back the way we came in, do we?” he asked, pulling his pants on before reaching for his T-shirt.

“You don’t, but I would rather go back the way I came in,” she said.

Her meaning wasn’t lost on him.

“I knew you didn’t come through that sinkhole.” He was relieved he’d been right, more for her sake than his own. He was big enough to take a little knocking around.

“I did the first time,” she said, effectively dispelling his relief. “As I remember, it was quite a ride.”

He stopped with his shirt halfway on. The vision he had of her being taken by surprise and sucked down into the watery darkness chilled him to the core. With a deft move, he pulled the shirt over his head. Anything could happen to her at any time, and no one would know, maybe not forever.

“Yeah, it was quite a ride,” he agreed, making up his mind. He was leaving, and when he left, she was going with him. If Cooper hadn’t already neutralized Baolian, he would, doing whatever it took to get the Dragon Whore off Sugar’s back.

* * *

“Sinkhole on your left,” Sugar warned, leading Jackson through a wide tunnel. They’d already passed her storage tank and replaced the sluice gates at the top. He’d been impressed with her ingenuity. Sugar barely noticed. She was still stunned by his declaration of love.

He wasn’t in love, of course. Lust, maybe, but not love. Love took time, and they’d had none to speak of, nor were they likely to get any. He deserved to have control of his life without any more interference from Shulan, and she was going to make sure he got it. After Shulan left, she would take him to Kingstown and set him free. If he’d truly been injured and in need of rest and care, what Shulan had asked of her wouldn’t have been as difficult or as distasteful. Under the circumstances, though, she’d held him longer than she should have. It was time to let him go.

She stiffened her resolve to keep from feeling horrible. It was the damn “love” thing. He never should have said those words. They made her guilt unbearable. The thought of being alone again was even worse.

He’d ruined her peace of mind, and her peace of body. She didn’t know about love, but she knew she felt lust. She had felt it from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him, so gloriously naked, stretched out on her bed.

She also knew better than to confuse a sexual response with love, and under normal circumstances, he probably did too. She’d heard there was often an attraction between a captive and his captor, a hostage syndrome. She didn’t doubt that what he was experiencing was a mixture of lust and hostage syndrome.

The realization made her feel completely pathetic.

“I don’t know how you ever got through these caves the first time without getting killed,” he said. “Or what in the hell you were doing in here to begin with.”

“I was careful,” she said, “and I didn’t have a choice about being in here. Once I fell through the first sinkhole behind the waterfall and ended up at the cove, I had to find a way out.” She shot the beam of her flashlight on a jagged protrusion of limestone. “Watch yourself on the wall here. It’s like a razor.”

The flashlight was one that never left the caves. She kept it in a waterproof box at the entrance to the tunnel that led from the waterfall to the cavern that emptied out into the cove. At the cove end of the tunnel was another plastic box to store it in before she went for her swim. A spare set of batteries was always taped to the flashlight. She’d mapped the caves and tunnels and sinkholes, but without a light to guide her, she would be as lost and in danger as she’d been the first time—and she’d vowed never to be caught that unprepared again. She heard him swear behind her.

“What?” she asked, swinging the light around on him.

“I think I jigged when I should have jagged.” His voice was tight. The flashlight showed him inspecting a diagonal line of blood on his biceps.

She rushed back to him. “Dammit. I’m sorry” She touched him, running her fingers down the smooth skin of his arm, checking him over. “I don’t think it’s very deep.”

“It’s not,” he said through clenched teeth.

“More of a scratch than a cut.” She tried to reassure him, but sensed her failure in the tension radiating off him.

“Yeah, just a scratch.” He bent his head over hers, trapping her within an invisible cocoon of strained intimacy. He started to speak, then caught himself.

“What’s the matter, Jackson? Are you in pain?” She let her concern show in the tenderness of her touch and the softness of her voice.

“No, I—Do you do that a lot, Sugar?” he blurted out. “Walk around falling into sinkholes and getting ‘maytagged’ in underwater tunnels?”

“No,” she said, relieved he was only worried about her and not hurt worse than she’d thought.

“How long did it take you to find your way out of here?” His tone didn’t leave much room for a lie, though considering his mood, a lie would have been preferable to the truth.

“Two days,” she confessed, then added, “give or take a few hours.”

She should have lied.

“Two days?” he repeated, sounding both angry and incredulous. “Two damn days down here? You must have been scared senseless.”

She gave a short laugh. “I’ve only been scared senseless once, and believe me, Jackson, that wasn’t it.”

Her offhand statement proved to be another tactical error.

“Having experienced both,” he said, his voice lowering to a ragged whisper, “the only thing I can imagine that would be worse than being trapped down here and not knowing where I was, would be standing in front of Fang Baolian without a gun in my hand.”

The man was uncanny.

“I had a knife,” she admitted, feeling she owed him something, an explanation or part of the truth. He already knew more about her than was safe. A little more information wouldn’t make any difference—except possibly in the way he remembered her.

Regardless, the instant the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Even in the poor illumination of the flashlight she saw his face harden.

“A knife?” The words hung in the air, disbelieving. “What the hell kind of knife were you carrying? Balisong? Tanto? Kriss? Buck?”

“Steak.”

“A steak knife?”

“I took it off the buffet. It was a New Year’s Eve party. Things got out of hand.”

Jackson had wanted to know. He’d practically forced her into telling him, only to find out she’d tangled with the Dragon Whore mano a mano?

He wanted to strip her down and look for the scars. Nobody got that close to Baolian, not with deadly intent, without feeling the sting of her scorpion’s nails, the razor-edged blades that tipped each of her fingers.

“How in the ever-lovin’ hell did you end up at a New Year’s Eve party with the likes of Fang Baolian?” He stared at her, dumbfounded.

“I went with some friends.”

“Where?” he asked incredulously. “Some opium den in Manila? A flophouse in Jakarta? A gutter in Hong Kong?”

“A mansion on Mustique.”

He’d heard of the Caribbean island, a high-priced sanctuary for millionaires and rock-and-roll stars, and apparently at least one international crime queen.

“Did you cut her?” he asked, then waved the question away. “Forget it. You must have cut her or you wouldn’t have ended up in exile here for—How long, Sugar?”

“Three years.”

Jackson felt as if someone had punched him in the solar plexus. Three years? She’d been there for three years? In a flash, he thought back to all he’d done in the last three years, the places he’d been, the people he’d met, the things he’d done—the things he shouldn’t have done.

“No,” he said, shaking his head and disbelieving every word she’d told him. “I’ve seen the woman, most if not all of her, and there wasn’t a mark on her worth three years of your life.”

“She thought differently at the time,” Sugar said, fighting an unwelcome surge of jealousy. “I’m sure she still does.” She remembered how Baolian had looked three years ago, sinfully seductive, beautiful and powerful, her skin flawless, like the finest porcelain—and he had seen the woman practically naked.

“What friends were you with?” He lifted both of his hands in a gesture of confusion. “Baolian has no friends. Not one. She is not a party-type girl. She does business, that’s all. Business to make money.”

“Is that what she was doing with you? Making money?” The question came out snooty and accusing, and just reeking with the old green-eyed monster.

A long silence drew out between them and ended with a quirk of his eyebrow. “If you believe Shulan’s story, yes. Personally, I think she was after my body.”

He was so cool, so matter-of-fact, she wanted to shake him. Of course the woman had been after his body. What woman in her right mind wouldn’t be after his body?

“These friends of yours, Sugar,” he said, getting back to the subject at hand. “What happened to them? Why are you the only one here?” He wasn’t asking nicely, far from it. He sounded like he wanted to take names for future reference.

“They were just friends, casual friends,” she said to disarm him. Not that she was going to give him names. Their names meant nothing. “They were in the islands for the Christmas holiday, most of them richer and all of them wilder than me. Somebody knew somebody on Mustique, and they got us an invitation. I thought the party would be fun. I was wrong, and I got into trouble.” The pained look he was giving her put her on the defensive. “These things do happen, you know, especially when you’re young and you’re so damn sure that living for the moment is the only sensible thing to do.”

Jackson silently agreed. Having spent a good portion of his life getting into trouble, he knew exactly how those things happened, how easy trouble was to find. Most times it was just lying there in the middle of whatever road he was on, waiting for him to step into the snare.

“You’re still young,” he said, squelching the urge to lecture her about the dangers of moving with a fast crowd. She was already paying the price. “And you’re still too damn sure of everything.”

“Not like I was.” He heard no regret in her voice. She said it like a person who had learned something the hard way.

He watched her through the steamy mist filling the air and dampening their bodies. He had enough regrets for both of them, for the years she’d lost. He was beginning to understand why she was such a fascinating, frustrating blend of woman and child. She’d been alone far longer than he would have believed possible, missing all the opportunities given youth to make the transition to full adulthood.

The noise of running water echoed through the tunnels, sounding like a thousand rivers under the earth. The flashlight beam caught in the mists, reflecting off the vapor and casting shadows on the floor, the whole adding a haze of unreality to everything around them. Her pale hair and yellow clothes gave her even less substance, made her seem more of an angel than a woman, and he wanted her to be a woman. He didn’t want her to slip away from him again.

With a heavy sigh, she shifted her gaze, dragging her hand back through her hair.

“We’re fighting again,” she said, her voice tinged with a hint of weariness.

“I know.” He reached out and tilted her face up, needing to touch her and reconfirm the life and warmth of her. Getting angry wasn’t getting him anywhere.

He smoothed the pad of his thumb over her skin, following the curve from her brow to her ear. She was lovely, fresh and exotic, utterly female, and she was supposed to be his. He would, and probably was, betting his life on that fact, but she needed convincing.

“There’s an old Chinese saying,” he said, “about riding the dragon through gates of jade to cool its burning fire.”

She gave him a quizzical glance. “And what in the world does that mean?”

“If we make love, we’ll stop fighting.” He let a slow, easy grin curve his mouth.

She lowered her lashes and fiddled with the hem of her shirt, looking uncharacteristically flustered. “You make it sound like a prescription cure.”

“For what’s been bothering you and me, it is. We could use some practice in getting along and working as a team, and good sex takes a lot of getting along and teamwork.” He bent his head and tried to glimpse her face. “It’s a helluva lot more fun than hockey, Sugar. Or basketball. Think of it as an adventure. You explore me, I explore you, and we share the treasure.” Sounded good to him.

Instead of returning his smile as he’d hoped, she looked away, off into the darkness of the tunnel behind them. She’d twisted her shirt into a knot at the bottom.

“That night on Mustique, one of the friends, a boy, wasn’t so casual.”

His teasing mood instantly vanished. He didn’t want to hear this.

“He was a couple of years older than me and I’d known him just long enough to convince myself I was in love,” she went on, really making him wish she would stop. “He’d hardly been on St. Vincent a week before we were talking marriage. I know that sounds dumb.”

His heart sank. He didn’t think it sounded dumb. Hell, he hadn’t been with her even a week and he was thinking in long terms himself.

“What happened?” he asked, hoping to bypass the more intimate details. She was his, should have been his from the very beginning.

“We went to the party with all his friends. They chartered a plane and everything, champagne and caviar, probably drugs. I don’t know. I was pretty naive.” A breeze snaked through the tunnel, stirring the tendrils of steam. “Come on,” she said. “We better keep moving.”

She stepped around a corner, and he followed. “What happened at the party?”

“Corey, that was the boy, got drunk. I think he was drunk even before we got off the plane. Sinkhole.” She flashed the light on the floor to warn him. “There must have been a hundred people at the estate. It was like a lot of different little parties going on all over the house and grounds. Corey wandered into one he shouldn’t have.”

“And you followed him.” It was a simple statement and not the question he wanted to ask, which was about the kind of friends she’d had who would invite Fang Baolian to a damn New Year’s Eve party.

“The people were older, more formal. I’m not even sure it was a party. There were a lot of servants. At least that’s what I thought at the time. Later I realized they were guards or soldiers. Anyway, the room was crawling with them and they were all kowtowing to this beautiful Asian lady dressed in black.”

Baolian, Jackson thought. She was the quintessential woman in black. No one did the look better, or with such deadly grace.

“I could tell right off that we didn’t belong there, but Corey was too drunk and too arrogant to think there might be anyplace he didn’t belong. I think his dad was a politician or something, maybe a senator.”

All around them, the sound of running water was getting louder, and he wondered if they were nearing the waterfall. Then he realized the water wasn’t ahead of them, it was above them. He instinctively ducked and swore under his breath, as if either one of those defense mechanisms would save them if the roof caved in.

“He couldn’t take his eyes off the Asian lady,” Sugar continued, “and when she finally noticed him, the attraction was obviously mutual.”

“Baolian does have a thing for younger men,” he said, knowing the truth only too well. The woman had a good twenty years on him.

He looked up at the roof again, eyeing it warily. Cooper would never top this one.

“Well, her taste has improved since then,” Sugar said. She took the end of her shirt and wiped some of the dampness off her face. “We’re in for a little geothermal action up ahead. The water gets really hot. Be careful.”

“Right,” he said, already feeling the heat. “So what happened after love at first sight?”

Her laugh was bitter. “I should have been grateful Baolian saved me from getting any more . . . uh, involved with Corey, heartless jerk that he turned out to be. But at the time I was too crushed, and all I wanted to do was get out of there. Some guy thought differently, though. I avoided him for a while, thinking Corey would come to his senses, walk away from this woman in black, and we would leave together, but it didn’t work out that way.”

“You wouldn’t happen to remember the guy’s name, would you?” He told himself it was a professional question—anyone who partied with Fang Baolian had to be up to no good—but he was lying. He wanted the man’s name for personal reasons.

“No,” she said. “We didn’t get to introductions. We did end up in a strange room. I thought I’d been working my way out of the house, but I was actually getting in deeper. The room was all mirrors and silk, everything in red, yellow, and black, and there was even a feast laid out on a table. There was music playing, candles and incense burning. Before I could get back out of the room, the guy grabbed me. I grabbed a knife.”

Sugar paused. “I didn’t mean to cut her. I didn’t even know she and Corey were in the room, until I stumbled over them. They were lying on these pillows and they were . . . Anyhow, I stumbled over them, tried to catch myself, and that’s when the knife cut her.”

“Where did you cut her?” He had seen more of Baolian than he’d ever wanted to see, and for the life of him, he couldn’t remember any knife scars.

Sugar looked over her shoulder at him and a teasing glint came into her eyes. “Right across the biscuits, cheek to cheek. I think she would have killed me on the spot, but with all the blood and screaming, I had a couple seconds’ lead. She still would have had me if someone hadn’t pulled me into a hidden passageway. From there I was able to get back to the plane. I laid low in the baggage compartment until it took off.”

They ducked under a smooth arch, and Jackson could have sworn it was getting lighter in the tunnels.

“So that explains Baolian,” he said. “How did you get involved with Shulan?”

“She was the one who grabbed me when I was running. We’d gone to the same private school on Barbados. She was a few years behind me. We all knew she was rich, living off a trust fund in the Caymans, but didn’t know her mother was the Dragon Queen of the South China Sea, or that she spent her vacations on Mustique. None of us did. After I got back to St. Vincent, I toughed it out for a few months—”

“Toughed what out?”

She shrugged. “Things started happening.”

“Things? What kind of things?” It was definitely getting lighter and warmer.

“Bad things. My cat and dog were killed, innocent people were hurt, crippled in a car bomb meant for me, people I loved.”

He swore silently. Those were mean games to get caught in.

“I thought that was too high a price for one girl’s dubious honor. I went back to Shulan, begged her to intercede with her mother, to tell her I would do anything.”

“Baolian doesn’t work that way,” he said, controlling his anger. No one in Baolian’s position worked that way. He’d met all types of pirates over the years, and as far as he could tell, only the ruthless had a chance in hell of surviving to rob and plunder another day.

“That’s what Shulan told me. The best she could do, she said, was to help me disappear until her mother forgot me. I ended up here. Shulan owns the island, but I’ve got a ninety-nine-year lease. She’s one of my few regular visitors.”

“Who are the others?” he asked.

“Carolina, Henry, sometimes my father. Every now and then, Shulan lets a scientist come to study for a day or two.”

“What about your mother?”

A moment of silence preceded her reply. “She comes when she can. It’s hard for her.” She flipped off the flashlight. “We’re here.” An opening in the cave’s ceiling flooded the cavern with sunshine.

“Where?” he asked, looking around at the slick rock and the column of steam rising out of a pool in the middle of the floor. Most of the steam went out the ceiling hole, but a good portion also drifted into the tunnel they’d left.

“I call it Coeur de Cocorico, the heart of Cocorico,” she said. “By the time I come back for you, you’ll probably be calling it the sauna from hell. It’s the only thing like it on the island. If it gets too unbearable, the waterfall is ten yards that way.” She pointed toward one of the smaller tunnels. “The sinkhole you fell in the first time is the only one you have to worry about. There aren’t any others in that direction.”

He looked up at the circle in the ceiling. Like the one above the secret pool, it was nearly enclosed with greenery. Even here, large tree roots grew down inside the cavern, both holding it together and breaking it apart.

“Isn’t it unusual to have a single, isolated spot of geothermal activity?”

She shrugged. “When you live on Cocorico, you learn to accept the mysteries of life.”

“Like four-tiered waterfalls and giant snakes, shark alleys and albino scarlet macaws, and rivers that run overhead?”

The laugh he got out of her almost made the whole convoluted mess worthwhile. A kiss would have clinched the deal.

“You forgot the mist,” she said. “When you see it, you’ll definitely think it’s mysterious.”

“And you?” he added. She’d held something back in her story. He didn’t know what, but he knew the secret held part of the key as to why she’d accepted exile over taking a chance.

“No.” She shook her head. “There’s no mystery to me. I’ll try to come back shortly after nightfall with food. If they leave earlier, I’ll come then. Will you be okay?”

No, he didn’t think he would be okay, not without her kiss, but he didn’t tell her. He showed her, pulling her into his arms and lowering his mouth to hers. For the first time there was no resistance in her. She came to him with parted lips and melted against him, accepting everything he gave, meeting every stroke of his tongue with one of hers, teasing and delighting him with her shy explorations.

The kiss took him back in time, toward the beginning when first breath was given. They were both warm and wet, entwined within the womb of the cave, a fiery caldron at their feet and a clear blue sky above them.

Earth, wind, water, and fire—the alchemist’s potions worked their magic and drew him ever deeper into her spell.

Eleven

Sugar knew she was in trouble the minute she saw Jen lying in the courtyard, bound hand and foot, surrounded by soldiers. She was still within the protective cover of the forest and turned to flee, but she didn’t get more than three feet before the metallic slap of a lowered gun and a barked command stopped her in mid-flight.

The language was Chinese, but the man’s tone gave the words clear meaning: Stop or I’ll shoot.

* * *

Jackson had never been any good at taking orders or sitting still. He paced the confines of the cave, restless. Their plan made perfect sense, for him to stay and for her to go, but it wasn’t setting right. If he’d gone with her, he would have been taken only God knew where in Shulan’s misguided attempt to keep her half brother safe. At least that’s what the pirate princess kept insisting. It was certainly what Sugar believed. He wasn’t so sure.

There was no doubt his father had been Asian. Jackson only had to look down at his skin or his hair to confirm the genetics. A glance in a mirror would reinforce the fact. Except for the color of his eyes and a vaguely prominent bridge in his nose, he was as Asian as chopsticks. But those truths did not mean he was the son of the most notorious pirate to sail the South China Sea, a title surrendered to Fang Baolian only upon Sun Yi’s deathbed.

On the other hand, if a person was to cross the pure green of Cooper’s eyes with the warm golden amber of Shulan’s, they’d end up with Jackson Daniels. It wasn’t exactly scientific evidence, but it was something to think about.

He’d rather think about Sugar, the gray-eyed one. He stopped his pacing and ran his hand along one of the thick, exposed tree roots growing down from the opening in the ceiling. A narrowly slanted shaft of sunlight slipped up the cave walls, reminding him of the lateness of the hour. It would be dark soon. Tilting his head back, he looked up into the fading blue sky fringed with a verdant forest, and it beckoned to him.

With a bend of his knees, he jumped up and reached as high as he could, grabbing onto a gnarly curve of root and pulling himself up. He found a foothold against the wall and pushed, straining higher. In a few minutes he’d reached the opening and levered himself over the top and into a bed of sweet-smelling grass. Breathing deeply, he rolled onto his back, spreading his arms out at his sides.

A breeze blew across his face, bringing the scents of flowers and fruit and the ever-present sea. She’d told him what he’d wanted to know, and maybe something more. A grin teased his mouth. He could imagine Baolian’s rage at having her curvy little behind scarred for life. She was a woman who prided herself on her beauty as much as her brains and her ruthlessness.

It was impossible to imagine a man loving both the Dragon Whore and Jackson’s mother. The woman he remembered from his childhood had been gentle and loving, and afraid most of the time. She’d been too vulnerable to Old Man Daniels’s anger and abuse. Baolian, on the other hand, didn’t know the meaning of the word fear, and the only abuse she dealt in was the abuse she dished out. Together, the two women would have made one good, strong woman. Maybe that had been their appeal to the same man—if the story was true.

He wondered if Cooper knew about Sun Yi. And if his brother did know something, why hadn’t he told him? It wasn’t like Cooper to hold back information. He’d stopped protecting his little brother from the crueler realities and harder edges of life the day Jackson had delivered a high roundhouse kick and broken his first board during martial-arts training.

If Cooper had known, he would have said something. Shulan had to be wrong. And yet . . . and yet . . .

He rolled onto his stomach and into a patch of diminutive orchids. The blooms were white and blushed with a mauvy green in the center. He slipped his hand through the flowers, gathering them into his palm and crushing them as he brought them to his face. Their scent infused his senses and made him smile. They smelled of Sugar.

She was a virgin. That was the information she’d given but hadn’t spoken aloud. A virgin saved by a poorly wielded blade, saved for him. He closed his eyes and inhaled the perfume he’d made with his hand and nature’s bounty. He would make love with her, and it would be sweet—to watch her eyes darken, to use slow hands and a teasing tongue to seduce her past inhibitions, to take her body and give her his and let her wonder at the magic they could conjure with a touch.

An angry shout from below knocked him out of his reverie. He was on his feet in a flash and scrambling for the ledge overlooking Sugar’s compound. An elephant-ear leaf provided him with the cover he needed to get closer to the edge. He inched forward until he could see, and what he saw froze him in place, except for his mind, which raced at double time trying to come up with enough versions of the word fool.

He’d known it wasn’t right to send her out alone. The isolation of Cocorico had dulled his instincts for danger. They’d assumed only Shulan would come, but the men in the courtyard were wearing the colors of Fang Baolian’s honor guard, black gis and red headbands. They were wushu storm troopers, men trained in every known weapon and in the art of hand-to-hand combat; and they always traveled in groups of nine, a jiu, eight fighters and a captain.

Jackson swore vehemently. How could he have let her walk through the waterfall without doing reconnaissance? His instincts weren’t dulled, they were friggin’ comatose. She’d told him he was at the edge of the world, and he’d started believing it.

Their leader, identified by the double red insignia on the shoulder of his uniform, ducked out from under the bungalow’s verandah, and Jackson wondered what great sin he’d committed or which god he’d failed to appease to deserve such bad joss.

Shulan had a traitor in her midst. Sher Chang, six feet four inches and two hundred eighty pounds of mean, shouted a stream of commands in a staccato rhythm, getting everyone moving except for the two people tied back-to-back in the courtyard, Jen and Sugar.

Five of the soldiers fanned out, quartering the area. Sher Chang turned his attention to Sugar, going down on one knee in front of her and cupping her chin in his huge, meaty hand. A lewd smile spread across his round face and sweat glistened on his bald head. Jackson couldn’t hear what he said, but Sugar grew whiter with every movement of the bastard’s lips. She looked unbelievably small and fragile compared with the giant, and something ugly twisted in Jackson’s gut to see her at Sher Chang’s mercy. His only consolation was in knowing Baolian’s captain would want to use Sugar to bargain with him and was unlikely to damage the goods until the parlay was over.

The brute released her with a rough laugh and a pat on the cheek, but the son of a bitch had left marks on her face. Those marks sealed his fate.

Jackson scooted out from under the green bower of leaves and made his way back to the opening of the cave. His best chance was to take out the soldiers while they were searching the forest. Catching each one alone improved the odds in his favor, despite the firepower they were packing.

The sun fell lower in the sky with each passing moment, heading toward its nightly immersion into the sea. The last rays of bright light glanced off the face of the arch as he eased himself over the side of the pit and dropped down into darkness.

* * *

Sugar was furious with herself. Three years of caution had been blown all to hell with one false assumption: that Shulan, and only Shulan, would have been on the plane, or would have authorized someone else to land at Cocorico. The possibility of Baolian’s foul presence had never crossed her mind, not even come close to her consciousness. She’d been so concerned with saving Jackson, she’d forgotten to save herself.

The traitor was Sher Chang, the huge giant who had brought Jackson to the island. But he hadn’t come for Jackson. He’d come for her and the bounty promised by Baolian to the man, woman, or child who brought her the silver-eyed whore’s head on a platter. Or so he’d told her with his greasy face shoved up next to hers and his fingers nearly breaking her jaw in their grip. Jackson was a mere bonus compared to the grand prize.

The first drops of rain hit as the sun sank into the sea, making its final farewell with a streaking flash of green across the horizon. Tonight was the night of the full moon. There would be light in the sky to illumine the intruders’ way, but shadows everywhere to conceal; and fog, thick, rolling banks of it, to disorient and give her a chance to save herself and Jackson.

If in the end there proved to be no chance for escape, she would at least make damn sure someone shot her. After seeing what Baolian had done to her cat and her dog, the horrible cruelty of their deaths, Sugar had sworn never to let the Dragon Queen take her alive. She’d rather die quickly with a bullet or a dozen bullets than be tortured, maimed, mauled, and raped to death.

Sher Chang had promised her all that, and more.

* * *

Jackson waited for the light to fail, giving himself the added edge of darkness. The waterfall made a sheet of translucent shifting gray in front of him, while behind him, cool rain fell into the bubbling pool and made billowing clouds of steam. He was sitting with the soles of his feet together and pulled in close to his body, his knees resting on the floor of the cave, his groin muscles softening and stretching, relaxing so he could kick clean and true.

He would make his sweep from west to east, taking down each man in turn. There was no margin for error, and he had neither the time nor the strength to end up on the ground in a grappling match with any of Baolian’s guards. Each strike had to be perfectly timed and delivered with power. Each strike had to count.

He stood and bent at the waist, touching his forehead to his legs, keeping his knees straight to stretch the muscles along the backs of his thighs and calves. With his palms touching, he straightened and raised his arms above his head, lengthening his torso by reaching higher and higher. He breathed deeply and evenly, readying himself for battle, slipping far down inside himself to find his warrior’s spirit and bring it to the fore.

The only weapons he had were contained within his body. He couldn’t afford for it to fail.

The light shimmering through the waterfall dimmed, telling him it was time. There were no choices to be made, therefore no hesitations. He and Sugar had one chance to cheat Baolian out of their deaths, and the chance lay in the strength of his heart. He stepped through the waterfall and into the twilight of the lush forest.

Rain fell from the sky, adding the soothing rhythm of water hitting and running off leaves to the rushing sound of the falls. He made his way down the stream, staying low.

He heard the first man before he saw him, a shadow with substance following the trail up to the falls, and positioned himself for the takedown, molding himself to the trunk of a tree. Surprise was his great advantage. As the man passed, Jackson lashed out with a high kick to the head. The soldier went down without a sound, never knowing what hit him.

Jackson collected his gun and moved on. Cooper would have been proud.

* * *

Jen had managed the impossible. Sugar discreetly rubbed her free wrists, then took the tiny blade he’d produced from out of nowhere and began sawing away at his bonds. When he’d first wiggled up against her, she’d thought the old man had picked a hell of a time to make a pass. The language barrier had effectively garbled the message he’d been so intent on hissing and whispering at her, giving her the impression that he was not only making a pass, but that doing it under duress added a certain excitement for him.

She’d been just short of complete disgust and calling out to one of the guards when he’d nicked her. She’d sworn, he’d apologized—she thought—and they’d started working as a team. His timing couldn’t have been better. The rain had stopped and tendrils of steamy mist were floating across the ground and hanging in the trees. It would only be minutes before the fog bank began forming out on the open water, pulling cool moisture from the ocean and mixing it with the air. If they could be free of each other by then, they could slip away unseen.

* * *

“Whoa, sweet momma.” Jackson stopped cold, waving his arms out at his sides to balance himself and to keep from stepping right into the middle of eleven writhing feet of bushmaster.

He’d known it was a bushmaster. Anything else would have been too forgiving, too easy, less deadly. With a bushmaster, it wasn’t so much the strength of the venom that killed as it was the sheer quantity of poison the snake could pump into an animal, any kind of animal, including a man.

Moonlight moved with the snake’s body, sliding across black-and-gray scales smudged in brownish orange. The wet grass made no sound, not a rustle or a snap as the creature twisted and turned upon itself, its nightly prowl interrupted, its dinner—compliments of Jackson—frozen in fear in the flimsy stick-and-string box trap not a yard away.

Jackson had taken out four of the guards and come away with only a bruised rib cage from a reverse punch he hadn’t seen coming, and a knife wound from a blade he most definitely had not seen coming. The cut was a diagonal slash across his chest, but he’d reacted quickly enough to keep the blade from going deep.

He didn’t think his odds were anywhere near as good with the bushmaster. The animal was riled, and Jackson’s own energy levels were high enough to be sending out all kinds of attack signals. They were in a standoff for the moment, but he doubted that it was going to last.

He readied himself to make a jump in any direction away from the deadly fangs. His muscles twitched in anticipation. His concentration focused on the snake with an intensity that blocked out the rest of the world. When the snake made its move, he’d have maybe a second to make a countermove. He wasn’t ready to die, and if the snake got him, he’d be dead and Sugar would end up in the clutches of evil personified.

Anger filtered into his concentration, but on the next breath he let it go. Anger would only slow him down when the time came to—

Move! Instinct propelled him into a vertical jump. The snake struck, and somebody let out a bloodcurdling scream, but it wasn’t him. He’d been so focused on the snake, he’d been oblivious to the other threats in the forest. He didn’t wait around to see who had taken the deadly strike. The voice hadn’t been female, so he ran like hell, sending up prayers of gratitude for all reptiles.

* * *

The crazed screaming and pleading riveted everyone’s gaze up toward the shadow-filled forest. Sugar felt Jen tense behind her, felt a ripple of awareness flow through the three guards. They knew it was one of their own.

A burst of gunfire split the night and fear surged through her body. Jackson was up there. She slashed at the ropes binding her and Jen together.

Sher Chang came crashing out of the kitchen cottage, shouting orders, and two of the remaining guards charged up the hill, guns at the ready.

A sob broke from her throat. She didn’t want it to end like this, with death and destruction overwhelming all the life she’d nurtured on Cocorico, including Jackson’s.

Especially Jackson’s.

She struggled with the tiny blade, cutting herself more than once, trying desperately to get free before Sher Chang took notice of them again.

Her efforts were in vain.

The giant lumbered toward them at surprising speed, stopping just short of his prisoners. His eyes grew wide as he looked past her, out over the ocean. Sugar shifted her attention from him to the beach, and found it already gone. The fog was rolling in, consuming everything in its path, obscuring everything in its wake.

A controlled and powerful yell, “Aaaiiieeeyah,” jerked her head around. She saw Jackson coming out of the night like an apparition—flying through the air in a high leap, one leg stretched out in front of him, the other tucked in close to his body—and connecting with the underside of Sher Chang’s chin. The brute’s head snapped backward, and he stumbled, but he didn’t go down.

“Jackson!” she yelled, warning him of the two men rushing at him from behind.

With the grace of poetry in motion, he pivoted on his foot and sidekicked the first man in the midsection. Jen tripped the second.

“Huh-yeeah!” Jackson punched and ducked, avoiding a kick, then came up inside the kicking range and hooked his opponent around the neck, taking him down with a knee smash to the groin.

The second man took a kick to the collarbone, and Sugar swore she heard something break. She’d never seen such controlled violence, such unleashed power. Jackson looked bigger than life, his muscles pumped up, his veins tracking ridges across his arms and chest. He yelled again, coming back into a fighting stance, the sound full of controlled force.

Sher Chang was waiting for him, a murderous glint in his eye. The fog thickened around the two fighters. Sugar cut the last of her and Jen’s ropes and rolled to her feet. The old man took up a fighting stance next to Jackson.

He would be crushed, Sugar thought. Between Sher Chang’s humongous bulk and Jackson’s lightning fast-power, Jen didn’t have a prayer of doing anything except getting in the way and getting himself hurt.

She was wrong. The last thing she saw was Jen launching himself at the giant and Jackson following. The fog took them from her view, leaving only sound. All too quickly the fight was over and silence reigned.

Not a breath disturbed the air. She held herself in place, tensed and wary, not daring to move for fear of what she might find—or of what might find her.

Twelve

“Sugar?” Jackson’s voice rang out, sounding distant and vague.

Relief flooded her veins and buckled her knees, dropping her to the ground. She’d expected the worst: Sher Chang looming up out of the fog with his huge awful hands grabbing for her. “I’m here, over here.”

Jackson was beside her in seconds, kneeling next to her, a warm presence in the earthbound cloud that had become their world.

“Are you okay? Did they hurt you?” he asked, his mouth close to her ear, his arms strong and sure around her.

“No. I’m not hurt,” she said. “Sher Chang wanted to save the pain for later. How’s Jen?”

He called out in Chinese and the old man answered. “He’s tying the bastard,” he told her. “We don’t have much time, Sugar. We have to leave.”

“Leave?” Her brow wrinkled in confusion. Why did they have to leave? They’d won, hadn’t they?

“There’re nine men in a jiu, and I only got six,” he said, answering the unspoken question in her voice. “The snake got one, and Jen got Chang. That leaves one loose budoka with a gun.”

A feeling of dread skittered through her, momentarily sidetracking her other concern. “The man, the one who was screaming, was he bitten?”

“It was a bushmaster,” Jackson said, without sounding pleased that he’d been right. “I don’t think he has much—” The whirring grind of the plane engine starting interrupted him. He swore viciously, coming to his feet. He shouted something in Chinese and pushed her to the ground. “Stay down!”

He slipped away in the fog, and thirty seconds later a burst of gunfire streaked through the white night from her distant right, blasting away toward the beach and the plane.

If Jackson hit anything it would be a miracle, she thought, and if he didn’t, it would be a disaster. No matter how good the pilot was, he couldn’t get out of the bay without damaging the plane and probably himself, not with zero visibility. Baolian’s force had arrived at high tide, and the tide had been going out ever since. By now there would be a barrier of rocks sticking up like jagged teeth across the mouth of the small cove, impossible to maneuver through. If the pilot tried to take off from inside the bay, the fog gave him less than a fifty-fifty chance of not flying into the cliffs wrapping around her home. He was sure to crash.

Another burst of gunfire tore through the air. On the other hand, if Jackson hit the plane’s gas tank, all of her worrying about the fog and rocks and crashing was moot.

The engine wound up tighter and tighter, and Jackson reappeared at her side.

“Ran out of ammo,” he said, disgusted, putting his hand on the small of her back more to locate her than as a sign of affection. Over his shoulder, he spoke in Chinese, and Jen took up the fight using Sher Chang’s automatic weapon.

Jackson swore. “We’ll never do it.”

“What?” she asked.

“Hit the friggin’ gas tank when you can’t even see your hand in front of your face.”

“You were trying to hit the gas tank?”

“Blow that sucker right out of the water.” He cursed again. “I hope to hell he can’t see any better than we can. Maybe he’ll hit a cliff or something, one of the jetties.”

Sugar was horrified. Trying to stop the man was understandable, wishing his death was beyond her comprehension.

“You can’t mean that,” she said, moving away from him in shock.

She didn’t get very far before he pulled her back to his side. His face came down real close to hers.

“I mean it, Sugar, every damn word. You’ve been living in a paradise where all creatures are created equal and they’re all sweet and kind.” He tightened his hold on her. “I’ll be the first to admit that not killing the snake turned out great for us, but the real world just gate-crashed the rest of your party. If the pilot gets away, we lose whatever advantage we might have at this point. This isn’t a game to these people. They’re out for blood, yours and mine, and I’m not going to let them have it.”

Sugar tried not to cringe under the force of his words, or scoot away from him out of fear. This was the side of him she’d only glimpsed, the warrior side. His muscles were tense, his body on the edge of superhuman alertness, still ready to strike. He smelled of sweat and man, of danger . . . and of flowers. The scent was faint but familiar, from one of her wild orchid species.

She was bewildered. How could a man laugh, tease, and pick flowers one moment, then fight with the blood lust of survival rushing through his veins the next?

“Dammit, Sugar, you’re trembling. Why?” he asked, rolling her over so they were lying face-to-face.

Her gaze lowered, and she stared mutely at the dragon, at a loss for words. Though they were less than a handbreadth away, wisps of fog floated between them, making the creature appear and reappear as if it were flying through clouds. She couldn’t tell Jackson he frightened her. He’d just saved her life, using the very skills and convictions she found frightening.

“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” he asked.

“No. It’s just—” She never got the chance to tell him. An explosion rent the air, sending a concussion of sound and energy rolling through Cocorico.

Jackson pulled her into his arms, holding her tightly while a fireworks panorama of the plane’s destruction upon the cliffs backlit the night. Streamers of red and yellow arced into the sea, too bright to be subdued by the fog.

She expected him to let out a victory whoop, but he was silent. When the last of the visible debris and fire fell from the sky, he rested his forehead on hers and whispered in Chinese, the words solemn, like a benediction for the dead.

Pain lanced her breast. Death was raining on her garden, a place where life had ruled, and she was helpless to stop it.

They slowly rose to their feet, helping each other, and she felt him bow in the direction of the accident, a short but definite lowering of his head in deference to the killed pilot.

No, she definitely did not understand him, a man who played naked in ocean pools, who kissed her as if life began and the sun rose when their lips touched, a man who worked side by side with her in the gardens of Cocorico; and then became a force of destruction, wishing death on an enemy he honored when his wish was fulfilled.

“How long will the fog hold?” He brushed his thumb across her cheek in a gesture of tenderness that confused her even more.

She’d been wrong.

“All night,” she said. “Unless the wind comes up.”

“Then let’s pray for wind.” He bent his head to place a kiss upon her brow. She closed her eyes, squeezing them tight against the tears threatening to fall. Two men had died that night, others had been harmed, and she’d been exposed. Nothing was ever going to be the same.

Jen spoke then, a rattling stream of words, much closer to them than she’d thought.

“We have to go,” Jackson said. “The men I took out will be coming around any minute, and I only had time to tie three of them.”

“What . . . what are you going to do with them?” She couldn’t allow more deaths. Murder would put him forever out of her reach.

“There isn’t much more I can do,” he said. “They’re already disarmed. The important thing is that we’re not here if there are any reinforcements arriving.”

Her gratitude was a palpable sensation, causing her to sigh in relief. As awful as the night had been so far, it wasn’t going to get any worse. Now all she had to do was reasonably and calmly explain her position on leaving the island. The time had come to let him go. She’d rather be left with her sadness than for their last moments together to end in an argument.

“I can’t leave Cocorico, Jackson.” And she couldn’t. She didn’t need to make a decision, only face the facts. Her whole life was on the island. She wouldn’t abandon everything she’d sacrificed for, everything she’d built. This was her sanctuary, the place where she was safe; she felt it emotionally even with all the physical evidence to the contrary. She couldn’t leave it to go with a stranger, for that’s what Jackson was, what he’d always been. She’d only been fooling herself to think differently.

“Yes, you can,” he said.

“No,” she said patiently. “I’ve got my work and the—”

“What you’ve got,” he interrupted, his voice harsh, his hold on her tightening, “is eight men and no place to put them. They win by default. We can have them picked up, maybe even make some money off them, but unless you feel like running a damned prisoner-of-war camp, we’ll be safer off the island.”

“Money?” she repeated, uncertain of what he meant and a little leery of his anger. She hadn’t wanted to fight, but neither would she be bullied.

“Yes, money. I’m a bounty hunter, remember? And we’ve got over half a ton of Baolian’s finest. I can think of two shippers right off the top of my head who will pay to have this scum behind bars.”

A light breeze swirled through the fog, dispersing the water droplets and lightly lifting the veil of haze.

“They’ll destroy my home,” she said in defense of her reasoning. Men who had come to kill would think nothing of ransacking the bungalow and the cottage. Her one consolation was hoping a smart one among them might know better than to tear apart the garden, their only source of food.

“What they’ll destroy is you, Sugar.” He grasped her hand, reinforcing his words. “If I can get someone here by first light, the buildings will be fine. But we have to leave now. Come on. Show me the way.”

She pulled herself free and stepped back, frustrated at his inability to understand. “Listen to me, Jackson.” Her voice rose despite her effort to remain calm. “I don’t have anyplace else to go, no place left to run. This is it for me, the last hiding place.”

“There’s no such thing as a hiding place, and there’s no damn future in running from anything. You’ve got me now.” He reached for her again, but she moved back.

The wind stirred more vigorously, revealing the hard set of his jaw. Sweat made his skin glisten. Moonlight carved planes and shadows in his face and down the muscles in his arms. She wanted to touch him, to soothe away the implacable frown tightening his mouth, but she held back.

“I’ll show you how to leave, or Jen can—he’s always known about the pirate’s door—but I’m staying. I can hide up in the hills. They’ll never find me, and when they’re gone, I’ll come back.”

“No.” Jackson shook his head, adamant. She wasn’t making any sense. Whatever security she’d had in her tropical paradise had disappeared the minute Sher Chang landed. Baolian would know where her henchman had gone and why, and when he didn’t come back with her prizes, she would send another.

Sugar had to know those facts as well as he; she was the one who’d spent three years of her life hiding from the Dragon Queen of the South China Sea. Logic obviously wasn’t driving her or she’d be the one dragging him out of there. That left her emotions as the culprit, and it wasn’t too difficult to follow those to a conclusion. She was more afraid of facing the outside world than she was of facing Baolian.

He released a long-drawn-out breath. He should have made love to her before now to deepen the bond between them, then they wouldn’t be having this ridiculous conversation. He didn’t want to resort to carting her off bodily, but he wasn’t above cave man tactics.

“You’re coming with me, Sugar.”

“I’ll only be a danger to you,” she said, her argument taking on the undertones of a plea. “Once I leave Cocorico, I’m the kiss of death to anyone I’m with.”

Jackson stared at her for all of five seconds before he burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it.

The fog lifted more while he continued to laugh, enough for him to watch her confusion turn into irritation and then downright anger.

“There’s nothing funny about it.”

He begged to differ and bent down to her eye level to give her a succinct explanation. His grin was a mile wide.

“Someday, Sugar, for my pleasure and your sexual edification, I will teach you the ‘kiss of death.’ Until then, rest assured that it’s a special favor to be bought off a Bangkok hooker and not you.”

Even in the moonlight, he could see her blush. “You’re insufferable.”

“Probably, but I’m also right. You’re coming with me, no matter how scared you are to leave your little hideaway.”

“I am not scared. I’m being practical.”

He bit back a curse. He’d had no idea she had such a stubborn streak. Words weren’t getting him anywhere. Action was his only recourse. “I think you’re making a mistake, but I don’t have time to change your mind. Get a few things together, whatever you’ll need up in the hills. I’ll rest easier knowing you won’t have to come back here after I’m gone.”

She acquiesced after a moment’s hesitation, giving him a short nod before heading toward the bungalow.

He followed a few paces behind. He had never considered himself a very good liar, at least around his brother. With Cooper, it had always seemed that the more vital it was to weave a good story, the less likely he had been to come up with one. He had never successfully lied his way out of a major piece of trouble.

Sugar obviously didn’t have Cooper’s years of experience to guide her. She’d bought his story, and he’d been lying through his teeth. She would be off the island before he was.

* * *

Inside her bedroom, Sugar went first to the closet and removed the box containing Jackson’s things. She knew she had to keep moving or her heart would break.

He was leaving.

“You’re going to need this stuff once you’re off the island,” she said, carrying the box over to her bed, willing the tremors out of her voice.

He was leaving. She’d expected to have more notice, time for a good-bye and an apology, time to prepare herself for loneliness.

“I’ll give you the charts of the local waters,” she went on. “You can pick your island, but I recommend St. Vincent. It’s the closest.” She opened the box and stepped back, giving him access to the contents.

The first thing he picked up was the gun. He checked the clip, then tucked the weapon into the waistband of his pants. The wallet came next. He opened it up and thumbed through the bills.

“It’s all there,” she said, giving in to a nominal degree of anger—which was so much better than giving in to heartbreak.

“I wouldn’t know if it weren’t. I’m just checking my resources.” He continued looking through the pockets, checking credit cards and his identification.

“You don’t know how much money you carry around in your wallet?” She knew, and it was a lot. He should be more aware of his cash, of his situation . . . of what he was leaving behind.

“I usually have a general idea, but it’s been kind of a wild few months.” He glanced up, an indecipherable expression on his face. “Did you find anything else in my wallet interesting?”

“I wasn’t interested in your money,” she said defensively, trying in vain to hold on to her anger. “I was only looking for a phone number or an address or something so I could have Cooper contacted.”

“I never did find your radio.” He refolded the wallet and slipped it into the pocket of the drawstring pants. “You did use a radio, didn’t you?”

“Yes. It’s in the pantry, under the floorboards.” It didn’t matter what he knew now. Nothing mattered.

He lifted his head a fraction, as if to say, Ah yes, of course, the perfect place—but no smile graced his mouth and only a hint of impatience warmed the depths of his eyes. He was the warrior, looking through her to the next move.

“Get your clothes together, Sugar,” he told her, glancing away to pick up the rest of his things and put them in his pockets. “I have to go.”

That was right. He was in a hurry. She’d forgotten for a moment. There was no more time left for words of the love he’d thought he felt, not when his freedom beckoned like a fire in the night.

Moving around the room, she stuffed clothes and a few personal items into a canvas bag. The wind was picking up, gaining strength and setting the jalousies quivering. She wished she’d thought ahead to have a present for him, something for him to remember her by besides a few ragged pieces of clothing.

Her hand lingered on a conch shell, then passed it by to pick up her comb to put in the bag. Every souvenir shop in the West Indies sold conch shells. The only unique thing she had on Cocorico were the endangered flora species, and she couldn’t quite see him bothering to take a plant home, or her being dumb enough to give him one.

She grabbed extra socks for her bag. Most of what she needed she could get off the land, including food, water, and shelter. She wouldn’t starve up-country, but she wanted to take cooking utensils and a few food items out of the cottage. She wanted to take him. He hadn’t seen that part of the island, where the mists gathered in the trees, where it rained in the sunshine. The trade winds always blew up-country, cooling down the heat and wafting soft against a person’s skin. The mountain trails were precarious, the wildlife abundant. The land was rugged, open, and free, the vistas went on forever and ever. It was a good place for a dragon’s lair.

Jack Sun preferred San Francisco.

He could believe whatever he wanted, but she knew Shulan was telling the truth about his heritage. They both carried Sun Yi’s blood—and for that, Baolian wanted him dead.

She stopped with a sweatshirt clutched in her fist, turning to look at him over her shoulder.

“You’ll be careful, won’t you?” Her voice was softer than she’d meant it to be, the warning more personal, revealing a level of emotion she would be wise to hide.

She needn’t have worried he’d read too much into her words. He only gave her a wry glance and said, “I’m not the one you need to be worrying about.”

“I’ll be fine.” Her chin lifted. One way or the other, she would survive being alone again. The days would melt into one another like sand into the sea, and before long his face would fade from her memory along with the sound of his voice.

But not his kiss. What she’d felt with his kiss would never fade.

“I’m sure you will be,” he said, showing more confidence in her than she would have expected.

Maybe too much confidence. If she wasn’t supposed to worry about him or herself, then who? No one was in more trouble, unless—

“Shulan never meant you harm,” she said, interceding for her friend. Whatever revenge he might exact should not include the young Asian woman. “She was only trying to save someone she cared about.”

He let out a hard laugh. “She didn’t even know me until she dragged me off the beach.”

“No, but she knew about you. She knew she had a brother, and as far as Cooper would go to avenge you, she went to protect you. No more, no—”

The wooden shutters on the window snapped open with a crash, bouncing against the wall, then flapping back to hang crookedly. Wind swirled through the room, rattling bottles and displacing papers.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he growled, reaching for her canvas bag and leading the way out of the bungalow.

They met Jen on the windswept verandah, and the news he delivered made Jackson swear.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Sher Chang is missing.” He grabbed her by the arm and propelled her down the steps, following Jen. “Whatever else you thought you needed, you’re going to have to do without.”

“I thought he was tied,” she said, running to keep up with him.

“He was, but it’s damn hard to tie a snake and make it hold.” The mists had lifted enough for the moon to light their way, but wisps of fog still swirled across the ground, driven by the wind.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Sher Chang, his name translates to ‘Chang the Snake.’ Jen calls him Manushi, after an Asiatic pit viper that’s fine as long as it’s picking on something smaller than itself, but pretty damn ineffectual on anything bigger.”

Another snake, she thought in dismay. Suddenly her island was crawling with them, and they had brought discord and destruction to her gardens. The bushmaster and she could have lived in wary harmony, but ineffectual or not, she didn’t want to deal with a human snake, especially alone.

“What are the chances of you being able to get someone here tomorrow to pick these men up?”

“Good, but better for the day after. I have some connections in Brazil I can count on for help.”

The increasing wind made further discussion difficult. She would wait until they were inside the icehouse. They were nearly there.

To their right, the forest fluttered and swayed in the wind, all the leaves rustling together and sounding like a larger version of the four-tiered waterfall. The clearing where she’d thought he’d been sleeping was directly ahead. Palms flanked both sides of the grassy area. A frond tore free as they entered the clearing and blew against her, making her stumble.

Jackson lost his grip on her and she went down, catching herself with her hands. The wind wasn’t knocked out of her, but she gasped anyway—first in outrage, then out of fear.

Directly in front of her face, less than two feet away, was a box trap holding a jungle runner. There was only one person who would have dared to trap one of her animals—Jackson Daniels, the man who dared anything and defied the rest. She would have given him both barrels of her anger if she hadn’t been frozen in place by the hypnotic stillness of the bushmaster less than a foot farther away, stalking its corralled dinner.

Its tongue flickered in the moonlight, feeling her heat and chilling her to the bone.

“Don’t move,” Jackson whispered.

The warning was unnecessary. Her muscles were numb; not so the snake’s. Its head silently slid forward, searching, and a bolt of adrenaline shot through her, searing a path to every nerve ending she possessed.

She sensed more than saw Jackson drawing his gun.

“No,” she breathed, and the bushmaster coiled in upon itself, reacting to her voice.

Moonbeams played along the whole awesome length of the reptilian beast, shining off the slick-skinned body and revealing where its tail crossed the forest’ path and made sinuous tracings in the mix of soil and sand. The bushmaster was huge and powerful, an animal to be reckoned with on its own terms.

Jackson moved again, and once again she warned him off.

“No.” She kept her voice calm and low, soothing. The snake was looking directly at her, holding her gaze with its snake’s eyes. The forked tongue flickered at her again. She didn’t respond with another bolt of fear, but with acceptance. She was well within striking distance of one of the most formidable creatures on the face of the earth. It would either bite her or not, and for reasons she didn’t fully understand, her money was on not.

All around them the storm built in strength and intensity, but the creatures in the glade held their places in the deadly tableau of woman, beast, and man. Jen, far in the lead, had gone on ahead, unaware of the danger behind him.

The snake glided forward, head held high, stretching its length out. It seemed endless, longer than herself by twice as much. Below the sound of the wind, she heard the soft, hissing slither of scales sliding across the grass. Lord, she prayed she was right about the thing not biting her.

Jackson had never felt so useless. A venom factory was closing in on the woman he loved, and he didn’t dare take a chance and shoot it. He wouldn’t put it past her to throw herself in front of a speeding bullet to save a damn snake. She wouldn’t make it, of course, she wasn’t that fast. But the damn snake was fast—fast enough to get her before he could pull the trigger.

He was standing so still his body hurt. Only seconds had passed since she’d fallen, and only seconds more would pass before the confrontation was over, one way or the other.

The bushmaster kept gliding across the grass, moving closer and closer to where she knelt at Jackson’s feet. The trapped lizard was paralyzed with fear.

With a rapid action Jackson never could have beaten, the snake struck and sank its fangs into its prey. Jackson’s stomach and heart both plummeted, taking ten years off his life, even though it was the jungle runner the bushmaster had chosen, box trap and all, and not Sugar.

The lizard struggled, but the bushmaster held firm, pulling its body in close to give it more strength and leverage. The box trap disintegrated under the thrashing it took. Jackson wasn’t waiting around for the final scene. He reached down for Sugar, ready to pull her to her feet and get the hell out of there—but once again the snake was faster. When Jackson grabbed Sugar, the snake grabbed him, its tail coiling up from underneath her arm and wrapping around his wrist, binding them together with a powerful squeeze of its body.

Sweet Lord, he prayed, instantly hyperventilating, his eyes glazing over with shock. The snake was curled around him like a bracelet, tying him to Sugar, while it fought the lizard to the death.

No one would believe it.

He didn’t believe it.

The bushmaster’s body was cool and dry, all sinuous, moving muscle wrapping around his arm. Black-and-gray markings ran together as the snake slid and coiled around him, showing flashes of its orange underbelly. The thought of shooting it crossed his mind once, like a streak of lightning, and was just as quickly discarded. The snake had spared him twice.

The lizard jerked in its last throes of death, and the bushmaster slowly uncoiled, releasing him and Sugar. Neither of them so much as twitched until the snake was nothing more than a shadow moving in the forest.

Maybe he’d dreamed the whole surreal incident.

A shudder rippled through his body. He hadn’t dreamed anything. He and Sugar had just tangled with a bushmaster, been caressed by the reptile. By rights, they should both be suffering their own death throes.

“Jackson?” Her voice was soft, barely a whisper.

“Yeah?”

“I think we should get out of here.”

“Yeah.”

He crouched down and helped her to her feet. She was as unsteady as he was, her knees jelly, her breath coming as rapidly as his. He’d been mistaken when he’d thought she wasn’t reacting with the same spine-tingling distress he’d felt.

“It wasn’t going to hurt us, you know,” she said, not sounding overly convinced.

He let out a deep breath. “No, I didn’t know that. Are you okay?”

“Fine.” Her voice was shaking too much for him to believe her. “How about you?”

“Doing great. Just great.” He didn’t sound any better than she did.

Jen yelled at them from the icehouse, exhorting them to hurry. Jackson tightened his hold on her, and together they made their way up to the old building at the base of the cliff. Jen beckoned them inside.

Jackson looked down at her. “I thought you said he knew the way out of here.”

“That’s it.” She stepped inside and gestured at the wood planks covering the southern wall. They were old and scarred and thick, like ship’s siding. He remembered them from when he’d had tea with Jen.

“Cocorico was a pirate’s cove long before it became mine,” she continued. “The better living is on this side of the island, but the better mooring is on the other side. So the brigands blasted a tunnel. They built the door to keep unwanted visitors out”

“And you’ve been using it to keep me in,” he said, disgusted with himself. He should have seen it before, what with Jen camped out in front of the damn icehouse night and day. His consolation was in knowing that if he had escaped, he wouldn’t have been there to save her from Sher Chang.

Jen hurried to the back of the shack, and Jackson heard the sound of a heavy chain running through metal rings. Chances were, even if he’d realized where the door was, he wouldn’t have been able to open it.

The wooden planks moved, swinging inward and taking up most of the remaining space. Sugar squeezed through the opening left between the outer wall and the door. He followed her into a narrow portal. Jen was ahead of them, lighting their way with a flashlight and ordering them to keep up.

The tunnel was cool and damp, unhappily reminding him of the river that ran above their heads. The passageway curved through the rock, making it impossible to see too far ahead or too far behind. Jen’s flashlight beam bounced off jagged walls and an uneven floor.

Without warning, they turned a corner and stumbled out onto a beach. It was as if the tunnel walls had suddenly disappeared to be replaced with sea and sand, trees and the night sky. The wind that had buffeted them in the glade didn’t exist on this side of the island. The storm had been confined to her home and gardens, a meteorological anomaly he wasn’t going to begin to try to understand.

He breathed his first easy breath in hours. There was a whaleboat in the bay with a big outboard motor hanging off the stern. He hadn’t known what to expect, but a dugout canoe wouldn’t have surprised him.

Sugar felt her heart constrict at the sight of the boat. Wild roses twined their way across the bow and down either side, along with paintings of oleander, hibiscus, frangipani, the yellow blossoms of nightsage, all manner of orchids, and the strikingly tropical lobster-claw helconia with its spikelike orange flowers set against the turquoise blue of the hull. Henry kept the boat in good repair. She used it to get to parts of the island that were inaccessible by an overland route. She had never used it to leave or even to go beyond Shark Alley. There was no place she could go without putting someone in danger. There was no place she could go now. She could only stand on the beach and watch Jackson leave.

He and Jen were walking toward the dock, speaking in Chinese to each other. She knew she had to go down and show them where she kept her charts and compass. A course of north by northeast would get them to St. Vincent in little over an hour. From there, the world was at his feet.

Briefly, she allowed herself to wonder if he would ever come back. Then she squelched the thought as hopeless and forced herself to move. She got no farther than a yard before she was captured from behind.

A strangled scream lodged in her throat, cut off by the huge sweaty hand clamped over her mouth. What little sound she made was drowned by the pounding surf. Neither Jackson nor Jen looked back.

She kicked at her attacker; squirming within the ironlike bands of his arms. He was hauling her back to the tunnel, and what she knew was a fate worse than death. All of her years of planning and caution were coming to naught. She’d always thought it would be easy to die, that she would be in control of the moment, able to choose death over torture. But she wasn’t going to have a choice. The beast holding her, Chang the Snake, had promised rape and mutilation, and death only when it was granted by Fang Baolian.

Helpless rage boiled up within her. The Dragon Whore would not reduce her to less than a woman. With all her strength, she tightened the muscles in her arms and smashed her elbow back into Sher Chang’s torso, catching him just under the rib cage.

He let her go with an ummph, and she screamed bloody murder.

Jackson whirled around and took off up the beach at a dead run. Sher Chang had found them. He and Sugar were on the ground, and he had her by the ankle. The brute crawled and lunged through the sand after her, trying for a better hold. She rolled over to fight him off, and Jackson winced. Damn bad move, Sugar, he thought, unless you can get in a good kick before he crushes you.

She did, right to the bastard’s groin. Howling, the giant recoiled, cupping his injured manhood, his face a mask of rage and pain. Jackson didn’t give him a chance to recover. There was no such thing as a fair fight when lives were on the line. He caught Sher Chang on the side of the head with the heel of his foot, and the giant crumpled to the sand in sudden and absolute silence.

Once again, the two of them were left in the moonlight, breathing too fast with their hearts pounding. If another snake came out of the night and so much as looked cross-eyed at her, Jackson was shooting first and asking questions later. He’d had enough.

He helped her to her feet and steadied her while they caught their breaths. Behind him, Jen started up the big outboard. He saw her look over his shoulder, saw dismay cloud her face. He understood her reaction; she thought she was staying on the island alone, the way she’d been for so long.

He wasn’t about to tell her any different. She’d know soon enough.

She shifted her gaze to meet his, and the sadness in her eyes tore at him. He’d never seen such a bleak surrender to the inevitable.

“It’s time,” she said so softly he almost didn’t hear the words.

He tightened his hold on her arms, trying to give her his strength. She’d had a rebel’s spirit once. She still did when it came to fighting him, but she needed to find enough of it again to fight her real enemy, Fang Baolian.

“Jackson, before you leave . . .” Her gaze slid away from his. “I—I want you to know that if I could have chosen a man to come, if I could have chosen a man to love, I would have chosen you. . . .” Her voice trailed off in a whisper full of regrets.

A single tear slipped free, and he captured it with his finger. She was so beautiful, so strong. He wanted to kiss her, before she got so mad at him he’d be lucky to get within ten feet of her, but there was no help for it. They were out of time.

“I want you to remember that, Sugar, no matter what,” he said, just before he bent down, picked her up, and hauled her over his shoulder. Jen had the boat idling, waiting for them.

Thirteen

Jackson stood on the balcony of his hotel room. Below him was an enclosed garden, a small jungle sweet with the scent of flowers. Above him was a dark sky preparing to give way to dawn. To his left was Sugar, stonily silent, staring down at the inky profusion of plants.

She hadn’t spoken to him since he and Jen had dragged her off the Kingstown docks and as far away from the ocean as they could get on foot. He’d offered to take her to her father’s house, but she’d acted like he’d offered to help her murder baby harp seals. The last place she would go, she’d told him with anger sparking her eyes, was anywhere near anyone she cared about. So she’d gone with him He hadn’t missed the not-so-subtle insult in her decision.

Jen had the room on the other side of Sugar’s, but he’d gone to bed after making a phone call to Shulan.

Jackson had made his own phone call. Cooper would be on St. Vincent by nightfall and have a crew on Cocorico before that. Jackson was to stay out of it. Cooper would rather lose the bounty than take a chance on losing him again. He hadn’t had to say it twice. Jackson was bone-tired. Even under Sugar’s benign house arrest, his nerves had been taut, his body harboring unconscious tension. With freedom had come release and exhaustion. He was ready to collapse.

The problem was, the place he wanted to collapse was in Sugar’s bed, preferably with her next to him. He would feel safer that way, and she would be safer. He had not been invited, though, and from the look on her face, it would be a cold day in hell before she so much as spoke to him again, let alone asked him into her bed. He had kidnapped her, an act that had evened up the felonies in their relationship, but was unlikely to get him anything more intimate.

He sighed and looked back out into the night. Cooper had cried on the phone. That had shaken him up. The last time he’d heard Cooper cry was when their mom had died. Nobody had shed a tear for Old Man Daniels, not even his only son, but Cooper had cried for Jackson.

A knock sounded on the door, and he pushed himself away from the balcony railing. His credit cards had been canceled due to his untimely demise, but he’d had enough cash in American dollars to grease a few wheels of comfort, like having breakfast served at four-thirty in the morning.

The inn’s proprietress, a groggy but congenial black woman, had done the cooking herself, explaining that her chef didn’t come to work for another hour. She rolled in a cart laden with coffee, freshly baked muffins, two covered omelettes, a double order of bacon for Jackson, and a basket of fruit. He helped her push it out on the balcony and set a few of the items, along with a vase of flowers, onto a small table.

After the proprietress left, he walked over and lightly touched Sugar’s shoulder.

“I wish you would eat something. We’ve had a long night.”

Her answer was the same one he’d been getting since he’d carried her aboard the boat. “You have to take me back.”

“You don’t have to live in exile.” The words had become his standard answer. “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in hiding, and Baolian wants me as badly as she wants you.”

“Not quite,” she said, sounding as tired as he felt.

He conceded the point with silence. He was merely a possible threat to Baolian’s empire and had only hurt her ego. Sugar had actually cut the royal tush.

“Cocorico isn’t safe anymore anyway, Sugar. It’s on the map now. Every pirate and bounty hunter from here to Singapore has just put a big X on their Caribbean charts for ‘marks the spot.’ ”

“I know.” She wrapped one arm around her waist and buried her face in her other hand. Her anger was giving way to desolation, a transition he would rather not have witnessed, yet he knew it was all part of the process of letting go. She’d lost so much in the last twelve hours: her sense of security—however false it might have been—her home, her work, her means of support, yet her insistence on returning hinted at something more. Cocorico was no longer safe, even she admitted it, but a part of her still saw the place as a sanctuary.

From what, though?

He moved closer and slipped his arm around her shoulders, enfolding her to his side. After a moment’s hesitation, she sank against him.

This was where she belonged, he thought, tightening his hold. For reasons he didn’t fully understand, he needed her next to him, always. He needed her in his life. She had become a part of him, or he a part of her. He didn’t know which or if it even made a difference. There had been only a few women in his life and he’d loved each of them, but Sugar entranced him beyond romantic love. She was an endless mystery to be explored, a primeval Eve, virginal and ripe, fecund. Where she worked, life blossomed, what she nurtured thrived. Leaving her alone in her gardens had been impossible from the moment he’d seen her. Even if Sher Chang had never shown up, he would not have left without her. He would have cajoled, enticed, seduced, whatever it took to keep her by his side.

Frustration tightened his jaw. She was by his side now, but he was no closer to keeping her than he’d ever been.

“You can’t go back, not until things change,” he said, wondering who he was lying to the most, her or himself. “Baolian has to be dealt with, one way or the other.”

“I don’t have anyplace else to go, Jackson.” She shook her head, and her soft curls caught and held the differing angles of moonlight. “No place else.”

“We’ll figure out a plan. Come on.” He led her over to the table. “Things will look better if you have something to eat and get some rest.”

He already had a plan, a half dozen of them, but the decisions were hers to make. All he could do was console, cajole, entice, and do his damnedest to seduce.

He pulled out her chair and poured her a cup of coffee. When she was settled, he sat down on the opposite side of the table and reached for a muffin.

“You’ll have some money coming from the bounty,” he said, “enough to keep you going for a few months, give you some time to figure out what you want.”

“I don’t want bounty money.”

She might as well have said she didn’t want blood money. He stopped with the muffin halfway to his plate. His eyes narrowed. “Don’t judge me.”

Sugar inwardly flinched at the coldness in his voice. Nothing was the same since they’d left Cocorico. Whatever closeness they’d achieved had been artificially induced by captivity, nothing else. She felt more alone with him now than she’d ever felt on her island.

“I’m sorry,” she said, stumbling around for the right words. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” And she knew it had sounded very holier-than-thou. “I don’t deserve the bounty money. You and Jen saved us.”

His gaze dropped to his plate. “You did your part. You’ll get your share.”

Silence descended with all the awkwardness possible between two people. She poked at her food and sneaked glances at him as he attacked his. Everything was wrong. The rhythms she lived by on Cocorico didn’t exist off her island. She didn’t fit in, couldn’t even make conversation without being misunderstood. She felt alien, vulnerable—and so very guilty.

Cocorico had been more than her sanctuary, it had been her penance. And she was still unforgiven in her own heart.

The telephone rang in Jackson’s room, and when he got up to answer it, Sugar gave up the fight. There was one place for her to go, one place she had to go.

* * *

Jackson knew she was gone the moment he stepped back out onto the balcony. He checked the garden, but saw nothing, so he ran back into his room and checked the street through his front window. He was in time to see a small figure ducking around the corner, blond hair gleaming by the light of a street lamp.

The rational part of him told him to let her go, but his heart wasn’t listening.

Sugar climbed the familiar road heading north out of town and into the hills. The island was beginning to stir, making ready to greet the sun on its daily rise out of the eastern ocean.

She turned off the road onto a leeward lane and followed it to a high stone wall covered with patches of green moss. Vines wound their way across the wall, and small flowering plants nestled in the nooks between mortar and stone. Moisture from the night’s rain dripped from the trees, making shallow puddles beneath her feet and reflecting the brightening dawn’s light through the protective grove.

Nothing had changed. The place smelled so much like home. She knelt by a wrought-iron gate and jiggled free a loose stone. Inside the exposed cranny, she found the key, her key, hidden low in the wall for a child to reach.

She let herself in and walked around to the ocean side of the house. The house sat up high on a promontory, and the view from the back porch went on forever. On a clear day, a person might even imagine she could see Cocorico on the horizon, floating on the waves of the Caribbean Sea.

It was too early to disturb anyone, so she settled into a big wicker rocking chair under the porch eaves and draped herself with the soft cotton throw folded neatly over its back. The pastel-striped blanket brought back memories of another life full of love and boundless affection, of cuddling up to another warm body to watch the sunset, of being touched and soothed.

Jackson had touched her, deep down inside where the caress would never fade. He’d been a trial and a joy, and he would be missed, never forgotten. But it was best to let him go. She wished they had made love, though. After knowing him, after sharing his kiss, she didn’t think she would ever want another man.

He was fine, and strong, and true, and for a while he could have been hers. She should have taken the chance.

As if her thoughts could bring him to her, he appeared at the edge of the porch. She stiffened in the chair, feeling the failure of her escape. He had followed her.

“You shouldn’t have come here.” She rose to her feet, ready to argue him away. Before she could say anything more, though, another voice entered the moment, one as gentle as the dawn’s light, as sweet as the name upon its lips.

“Sugar? Darlin’, is that you?”

Sugar turned toward the door, her heart pounding. “Mamma.”

Jackson’s gaze followed Sugar’s to a lady dressed in a white linen jumper over a white cotton T-shirt. The style was plain and simplistically lovely. The woman was stunningly beautiful, like an angel, like Sugar. Her hair was the same pale blond, but longer, a riotous tumble of curls pulled into order with a pair of ivory-colored combs. Her eyes were blue, where Sugar’s were a silvery gray—and her body was broken, where Sugar’s was whole.

The woman leaned heavily on a cane, limping forward to her daughter. She caught the younger woman to her and together they sank into the old rocking chair, crying and holding each other.

Jackson knew that for all practical purposes, he had disappeared off the face of the earth. He also knew he was intruding on a very intimate reconciliation, but he couldn’t force himself to back away. The rightness of seeing them together held him where he stood, within hearing distance of all they had to say.

“You’re home, Sugar, honey. You’re home.” The woman’s voice broke with emotion. Her hands never stopped clutching at the grown child in her arms. Long blond curls melded with short ones where their heads were bent close together.

“Oh, Momma. I’m sorry.”

This was what he’d missed for so many years, missed with an ache that he’d only begun to fill with adulthood —a mother’s love. Sugar was being drenched in it, washed clean with the tears they shed.

Innocent people were hurt, crippled, people I love. Her mother had been there the morning Baolian’s henchmen had blown up the car, and she’d been crippled by the act of vengeance.

“I’ve missed you so much,” the woman crooned. “You didn’t have to stay away because of me. I wrote you a thousan’ times, and you still didn’t come.”

Sugar only shook her head. Jackson understood. If he had brought that kind of destruction down on somebody he loved, he would have exiled himself, too, and there was a good chance it would have taken more than three years for him to get up enough courage to come back.

He watched and waited as the two women held each other and rocked, whispering their words of pain and forgiveness. The sun had completely burned away the night before the creaking of the old chair stopped.

Sugar’s mother looked up, directly at him, proving she’d known he was there all along. “Mr. Daniels?”

He nodded, more than a little taken aback by her clear-eyed gaze and the authority in her voice. He now knew where Sugar had gotten her courage.

“My daughter is sleepin’. Will you help me get her in to bed?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Not even the thought of a grin crossed his mind, no matter that he’d been trying to get Sugar into bed since the first time they’d met.

“You may call me Arabella.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stepped forward and first helped Arabella get to her feet and find her balance with the cane. Then he lifted Sugar into his arms.

Arabella led him into the airy bungalow and to a suite of bedrooms with a connecting bath. Sugar never made a sound as her mother removed her shoes and pulled a light sheet over her. The room was warm without being uncomfortable, with a slight trade-wind breeze ruffling the curtains.

“You mus’ be exhausted yourself, Mr. Daniels,” Arabella said, giving him a thorough looking over. Her voice was hushed, with just a hint of patois.

“Yes, ma’am, I am. It’s been a hel—it’s been a long night.”

“I would be much obliged if you would ‘cept my hospitality. You’re welcome to the other room.” She said it all with a smile that was both warm and welcoming, impossible to resist even if he had been inclined to resist—which he wasn’t.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Arabella,” she insisted.

“Arabella.”

“Mr. Daniels—”

“Jackson, please.”

“Jackson,” she agreed with another smile, then became more serious. “May I be frank?”

The idea made him a little uneasy, but he nodded.

She took a deep breath, as if to steel herself. “I have been unable to help my daughter through her troubles. Travelin’ is so painful, and until today, she has refused to come home. She blames herself too much for what happened, ‘specially on my account.” A small grin teased her mouth. “I’m sure whatever wildness she has she gets from me and not her father.”

She looked over at the sleeping Sugar and her face softened. “I love her very much, Jackson, and I’d be much obliged if you would do whatever you can to keep her from goin’ back to that island. She deserves a full life, a family, children of her own. I would consider it a blessin’ if you could help her”—the small smile returned, at once full of mystery and benevolence, and her blue-eyed gaze lifted to meet his—“in whatever capacity you might be comfortable with.”

For pure shock ability, Jackson decided, Arabella Caine took the cake, hands down.

With another gracious smile, she left, moving steadily but awkwardly down the hall. Jackson closed the door after her and crawled into bed with Sugar, pulling her close to keep her safe, and wandering if her mother could have possibly meant everything he’d thought he’d heard in her request.

* * *

Jackson didn’t know how long he’d been asleep when he heard the door open. Before he could work up his defenses, they were made unnecessary by a woman’s voice.

“So, Carolina, is that your dragon boy?”

“I s’pose,” another woman answered. “I ain’t never seen him with his clothes on.”

A moment of knowing silence fell, then it was broken by a double fit of bubbling laughter. The door closed, but Jackson could still hear them laughing and talking.

“I jus’ knew he was gonna be trouble, him and that ol’ Chinee.”

“He brought her home, Carolina. I think I can handle his kind of trouble for a long time.”

Their voices faded away, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t blushing again.

Fourteen

When next Jackson woke, late-afternoon sunlight slanted obliquely across the room through the ocean-side window. Sugar was sweetly tousled by his side, still sound asleep, her T-shirt riding up almost to her breasts.

He sighed and gently, so as not to disturb her, levered himself to a sitting position. Beside the bed was a tray of food: bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables, juice, and what he hoped was a carafe of coffee.

There were two cups, which made sense given Arabella’s blessing, but he was still shocked. The other mothers he’d known wouldn’t have fed a man they had found in bed with their daughter. In his experience, they were more likely to scream first and ask questions later. Maybe he had fallen into another strange paradise.

His gaze drifted over the tray of food, and he thought longingly of the double order of crisp bacon he’d left uneaten at the inn. None of these women seemed to require meat in their diets, whereas he was to the point of fantasizing about roasting wild boar over an open fire, preferably with a gallon of barbecue sauce handy.

Utterly barbaric. Utterly divine.

He helped himself to a cup of coffee. At least the java, rich and smooth, had a kick to it, and the piece of bread he tasted was more like cake, moist with the flavor of bananas. The cheese was creamy and slightly sweet, and everything was fresher and better than he would have imagined. He chose another piece of bread and was rewarded with the tangy citrus taste of oranges.

Wishing for barbecued pork began to seem misguided when he compared it with the array of delights spread out before him. He picked up a slice of greenish-yellow fruit and bit into it.

A smooth sweetness filled his mouth, instantly reminding him of Sugar’s kiss. Warmth flooded his body. He savored the taste, wondering what it would take to have her, what it would take to keep her. If Sher Chang had not shown up, would she have already been his lover?

He finished the first piece of fruit and took another, enjoying it while he looked the tray over to see what delicacy he would try next. He’d slept so peacefully in her arms. He was rested. All he needed was food—and Sugar. Always Sugar. He’d waited so long, much longer it seemed than he’d even known her.

The tray was beautiful, hand-carved wood inlaid with a design he couldn’t quite make out for all the food on top of it. He did recognize the flowers carved and painted on the intricately wrought handles. Their real-life counterparts decorated two of the corners of the tray—large, showy white blooms with reddish centers and a crown of white-and-purple filaments. The fragrant flowers were still attached to their vines, the leaves adding to the beauty of the presentation, the tendrils winding through the fruits and vegetables to tie the whole thing together the way the lianas tied together the forest on Cocorico.

Damn. He’d forgotten about Cocorico. He needed to call the inn and leave a message for Cooper. He picked up another slice of the fruit to take with him to the phone, but before he could move, Sugar stirred.

He looked over his shoulder to find her eyes just opening. She looked dreamy and content curled into the pillows, her hair haloed around her face, soft color blushing her cheeks. Her gaze met his and held, and when she smiled, his heart dropped into the pit of his stomach. All thoughts of Cocorico and Cooper fled in the wake of that shy smile.

“Hi.” He turned sideways on the bed, facing her, hoping to hell he didn’t sound overly eager for whatever attention she might give him. He was a fool for her, and he liked it far too much to pretend otherwise. For her, he was an open book. Any trace of artifice would have been too much. He was ready, willing, and able to give her the truth in his heart.

“Hungry?” he asked.

She nodded and pushed herself to a sitting position. He reached out to help her, and they ended up very close together as much by accident as by design.

“I’m . . . uh, not sure what this is, but it’s good.” He took a bite of the fruit as if to say, See how good it is?—before offering her the rest. He felt breathless, waiting for her to take it, and he couldn’t remember a time when a woman had left him breathless. Neither could he remember a time when merely looking at a woman’s mouth had made him ache.

His fingers lingered on her lips after she ate the fruit from his hand, and he smiled. He’d won something with that small act of acquiescence, but he wasn’t sure what. “It’s granadilla,” she said, lowering her lashes.

“Granadilla?”

The color heightened in her cheeks. “Passiflora edulis. Passion fruit.”

“Ah.” Maybe that explained the way he felt, as if he had to have her now or forever live without her, that if he let her slip away this time, there would he no other chance.

“Not that kind of passion,” Sugar said, daring an upward glance at Jackson. “The passion of the death and resurrection of a god.” And surely that was what Jackson was, a man in the image of the God who had made him.

From the safety of her childhood refuge, he looked far less intimidating than he had on Cocorico, but no less beautiful. The tawnyness of his skin was warm and inviting in the late-afternoon sun. His hair was an ebony veil sliding across his chest and draping over her thighs. Looking at him, she felt an indescribable yearning to bury her face in the crook of his neck and cloak herself in the silken strands, to lay her hand over his dragon’s heart and feel the life pulse through him on every beat, to somehow take him inside herself and never let him go.

She was in love.

“The god Eros?” he asked, moving closer.

“I’m—I’m not sure. I don’t think so.” Her heartbeat speeded up with both fear and excitement in response to his nearness. She’d awakened earlier and had found herself lying next to him, his breath blowing softly across the top of her head, his chest a wall of strength at her back. She’d known she should leave, that her presence was a danger to those she loved, but against all odds Jackson made her feel safe. Within the comforting circle of his arms was a haven and a promise, freely given, inviolate, one she was loath to relinquish. So she’d fallen back into a dreamless sleep and awakened once more to find him still by her side.

But this time the dragon was also awake, feeding her from his hand as if she were the wild creature needing to be tamed.

Strange, beautiful man. He was free now, and in some new way so was she. He could leave, find and have any woman to share his life.

“Well, I’m not a god, Sugar, but I do feel resurrected,” he said, reaching out to touch her. The calluses on his fingers were rough against her skin, and she reveled in the difference. “Baolian didn’t manage to kill me, but she did forfeit my life on that beach, and Shulan took it.”

“I know.” She looked away, a wave of guilt making it impossible to face him. She had no right to want him the way she did. “I’m sorry for everything, Jackson, for not helping you more.”

“Don’t be,” he said, tilting her chin up. Warm eyes gazed down into hers. “You took my life and held it, and made it into something better than it had been before. You opened up a part of me I didn’t know I had, the part that must have been holding on to an image of you for aeons, because that’s how long I feel like I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You don’t have to say those things.”

“Yes, I do, Sugar.” The strain of urgency tightened his voice. “In a few hours my life starts up again. As soon as Cooper comes, I go back to being what I am, and I need to know you’re going to be a part of me.”

He was asking the impossible. She couldn’t see where she would fit into his life. “I don’t know what you’ll hold on to, Jackson, but you’ll always be a part of me.” And wasn’t that all they could offer each other? Memories of a time that shouldn’t have been?

“That’s not good enough,” he said, sounding damn sure of himself and a little angry. “I want to marry you, Sugar, bind you to me. I want to plant my seed deep inside your womb and watch you blossom with our child.”

He’d shocked her. Jackson could tell by the stunned look on her wide-eyed face. He needed to back off. He needed to woo, but he no longer had the patience for words alone. So he kissed her.

A fleeting kiss at first, a mere touching of their mouths. His hands came up to cup her face, and he rested his forehead on hers. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life without you, knowing there was anything more I could have done to win you.”

He kissed her again, inhaling her fragrance. He didn’t know much about the kind of love he felt for her; it was all too new. But he did know about pleasure, how it tangled around a person’s heart and libido, how it imprinted on a body so that the slightest touch from the one who had given it brought the sensations back again. There was a bond in pleasure, intense and intimate.

She wanted him. She’d said as much, said she wanted him until she couldn’t see beyond the wanting into love. He was putting his heart on the line, praying he could show her the way.

Her lips were tender beneath his, her breath growing shallow with even their chaste kiss. It emboldened him to do more. In one lithe move, he lowered her to the bed and slid his hand under her shirt, opening his mouth over hers at the same time. She moaned, and a spiral of desire curled through his body down to his groin. Arousal began thrumming through his veins.

Sugar had never known how good a man’s weight could feel. He was lying half over her, his palm kneading her breast, one of his thighs fitted in between hers, and she was coming apart from the inside out.

His skin was satiny soft over hard muscle, a sensory delight to her each place they touched. Every move he made, from the seductive grind of his pelvis against hers to the more subtle action of his breath, elicited a response from her physically and emotionally. They were two people moving as one, two halves striving to be a whole, and the path they led each other down was laden with adventure and discovery.

She smoothed her hand over his abdomen and felt the muscles there tighten. The breath soughed from his lips, and he stilled on top of her. When she did nothing else, he angled his mouth closer to her ear and whispered, “Go on, Sugar. Lower.”

In answer, her fingers slid downward, over a taut plane of ridged muscles and into a thatch of silky hair. Instinct guided her to encircle him and move her hand up his shaft . . . and back down.

“Ah, Sugar, Sugar.” He moved with her, and when her hand came up again, he pushed her T-shirt up and lowered his mouth to her bared breast.

The rhythm they worked together became the vehicle for transcending time and space. The rhythm bridged the distance between their skin, taking them deeper into each other.

Heat and need consumed her, pushed her onward, made her restless with a yearning she felt coursing through her entire body. He laved her other breast, teasing her with his tongue, and still it wasn’t enough.

‘Jackson.” His name came out on a gasp.

He levered himself up to kiss her mouth, then rose to a sitting position, straddling her hips. He stripped his shirt off and reached for hers, all the while watching her with his smoldering green gaze. When he eased off the bed to remove his pants, she lowered her eyes and met those of the dragon. Insatiable beast, he looked as eager to devour her as his master, but the beast was no more eager than she.

How a woman could be half-naked, her mouth swollen from kisses and her breasts blushed from the same, and still look innocent was beyond Jackson, but Sugar managed it, beautifully. He stepped out of his pants and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Don’t let me do anything you don’t like, ever,” he said, caressing the silky skin above her shorts. “I may not always ask first, but if I start something that makes you uncomfortable, all you have to say is no.”

Sugar answered with a softly spoken agreement, but in her heart she knew if he would just kiss her again, everything would be all right. The kiss he gave her, though, was not the one she had expected.

Curling his fingers around her waistband, he drew her shorts down and lowered his mouth to her mons. His tongue slid up her cleft again and again until she melted into a shower of falling stars. Then he moved up her body to take her mouth with his as he began to take her virginity. His shaft was rigid, pulsing, probing her secret core, creating and easing an ache she couldn’t escape.

His name fell from her lips over and over. She covered his face with sweet, hot kisses. His hair flowed around them and trailed across her breasts like tendrils of silken fire. Every atom of her being was alive and focused on the man sliding into her body.

A single thrust broke her barrier. She gasped a cry, which he caught with his kiss and took inside himself.

“Ah, Sugar.” He crooned her name and whispered little nothings in her ear, words of pleasure and anticipation, of gentleness and caring and love.

He pumped slowly at first, easing his way inside before beginning a careful withdrawal. His eyes drifted closed on a heavenly sigh, layering thick lashes across his cheeks, and a lazy smile graced his mouth.

“You feel so good.” The words were labored, husky. “So good.” He opened his eyes and his smile broadened. “I could do this the rest of the day, but I don’t think you’d thank me for that, not the first time.”

She wasn’t so sure. She’d never known any pleasure as great as the one of just watching him—the flowing movement of his hair over his shoulders and across her chest, the flexing of the muscles in his arms, the tightening of his abdomen, watching where they joined with his much larger, darker body meeting hers again and again.

Then something in her quickened, and she felt a pleasure beyond the enticingly visual. Sensation deep inside her stirred, a desire for more with every stroke he made. Her gaze lifted to his face, and she watched the beautiful planes and angles there tauten with the same need for completion that drove her.

She had known she would give herself to this man. What she had not known was all he would give in return.

Her heart filled with love as wave upon wave of her climax washed through her. He came into her one last time in a shattering release, and she gathered him in her arms, the better to hold him and feel all the magic they had made.

Sated, breathing heavily, Jackson shifted his body off hers, taking as much weight as he could on his arms. She was so small and yet so powerful. She made him tremble.

He’d probably been too rough, but she had completely undone him and his good intentions.

“I’m sorry I hurt you.” He lifted his hand and brushed strands of his hair off her cheek and out of her eyelashes. Thanks to him they were completely wrapped up in each other.

“You didn’t hurt me, Jackson.” Her smile was weak. She was limp beneath him. “At least not much.”

“It will be better next time.”

“How many next times do I get?” She opened her eyes for him, and they were fathomless, more enchanted than the lunar mists of Cocorico.

“A lifetime of next times, Sugar,” he said, bending his head to brush a kiss across her brow. “And then one more time after that.”

Fifteen

Jackson stood in the San Francisco jungle yard of his sister-in-law’s brother’s house. As he watched his wife beguile the man with her knowledge of the bifurcation points of indigenous tropical species, he wondered at the changes three months of assumed death had brought to his life.

One thing was for damn certain, when death hovered nearby, people took love a lot more seriously. Both he and Cooper had ended up married, after years of globe-spanning bachelorhood.

Well, not so many years for him. He was only twenty-four. Conceivably, he could have been facing another decade of footlooseness. He’d gotten lucky instead and found his woman on a West Indian island half a world away from anyplace he ever would have dreamed of looking.

Cooper came over and, as he’d been prone to lately, gave Jackson a hug, a big hug of the bear variety.

“Hey, Coop.” He delicately extricated himself from his big brother’s arms. Truth was, he’d about had his fill of being hugged and coddled, except for the stuff Sugar dished out. He couldn’t seem to get enough of that.

“Jessie and I have been talking,” Cooper said, referring to his wife. “You and Sugar ought to have the beach house. With the kids and all, we really need something bigger and closer to town.”

“Okay,” Jackson said. It was another of those amazing changes, he mused, Cooper being a ready-made dad, with Jessie having two children from her first marriage. Of course, Jackson knew from personal experience that his big brother made a helluva father; he’d had lots of practice, having survived Jackson’s hooligan years.

“We might even move into the suburbs,” Cooper went on.

Things were really changing when they allowed the Dragon to move into the suburbs, Jackson thought, but all he said was, “We’re not there that much, so take your time about finding a place. There’s no hurry or anything.”

Cooper slanted him a wry look. “Not unless I don’t want the kids to grow up thinking married people spend all their time locked in the bedroom.”

Jackson just grinned.

Cooper grew serious then. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“If this is the big sex talk you were always supposed to give me, you’re a little late, Coop. I already figured it out.”

Cooper at least lightened up enough to smile. “No. It’s about spending more time in California, both of us, cutting back our overseas interests, maybe getting more into the investment side of the business.”

Jackson had seen this one coming for days. Cooper had hardly let him out of his sight. “I was never dead, Cooper. She didn’t get me. She only got close, and close doesn’t count.”

“With Baolian everything counts. I want you out of her sight, out of her way.”

Jackson kept his silence. He couldn’t give Cooper that, not even close. He wasn’t going to get out of Baolian’s way. He was going to get in her face and back the Dragon Whore down whatever hole she’d crawled out of. He was a bounty hunter, and until he got Baolian, she was his prey.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Cooper said, “and it can’t be done, not with any safeguards, maybe not even without. Besides, you’re married now. You have to think about Sugar.”

He was married, not dead, and he was thinking about Sugar.

“Okay, Coop,” he said, cutting the conversation short with a smile and a wave as he headed across the yard.

When Sugar saw him coming, she excused herself from Paul, Jessie’s gardening brother.

“What did you and Cooper find out this morning?” she asked.

Before he answered, he wrapped her in his arms and kissed the top of her head.

“You’re going to get about ten grand for Sher Chang, and Jen and I come out at about twelve grand apiece, less expenses. That is, if he ever shows up to claim it.” The old Chinaman had left the Kingstown Inn before she and Jackson had returned. He hadn’t left a forwarding address, but they both knew he’d gone back to Shulan.

“What about Cocorico?” She missed her home, but not as much as she would have missed Jackson if she hadn’t been with him.

“Cooper thinks we can go back with a few precautions, and I agree. The place really is inaccessible. A few communication adjustments and some protection would make a big difference in its integrity.”

“Cocorico has always had impeccable integrity,” she said, taking mock offense. “At least until you got there and started taking your clothes off”

“Hey, that’s an idea.” He grinned down at her.

“What?”

“We could go home and take our clothes off.” He expected her to blush, but he should have known better. The woman didn’t have a blush left in her.

Or did she?

He bent down and whispered in her ear, and sure enough, after a minute, he got her to blush.

“You’re kidding,” she said, slanting him a wary look.

“Scout’s honor.” He gave her the Boy Scout sign. “That’s why they call it the ‘kiss of death.’ ”

Her blush deepened, then a grin twitched her lips. “Do you love me?”

“More than I should.”

Her grin broadened. “Do you trust me?”

Now it was his turn to give her a wary look. “Just enough . . . maybe.”

“Chicken,” she taunted, and he lunged, grabbing her and swinging her in close.

“I’m going to remember that later,” he threatened her, but she gave as good as she got.

“I’m counting on it”

* * *

Moonlight filtered in through the sheer curtains and shone across the futon where they lay, safe and secure in each other’s arms. Sugar looked over at her husband, enjoying the beauty of him in sleep.

He was a wild one, probably more than she could handle once he got back up to speed, if the contents of his room were any indication. They made a fine pair, with him old in the ways of the world and young at heart, and her with her ancient heart and being so young when it came to worldly things.

“Sugar?” he said drowsily, rolling on his side toward her.

“Hmm?”

In answer, he pulled her closer and promptly fell back asleep.

She loved him, loved him like no other before him, and she felt her love being returned with every breath he took.

* * * * * * * * *

Thank you for reading Dragon’s Eden. Please visit my website, www.tarajanzen.com, and follow me on Facebook http://on.fb.me/mSstpd; and Twitter @tara_janzen http://twitter.com/#!/tara_janzen for news on the release of my upcoming eBooks.

Please continue reading for excerpts from Avenging Angel and A Piece of Heaven, more great romances from Tara Janzen.

Avenging Angel

One

The woman. He needed her . . . desperately. He needed her to drag him up, get him out, and set him free.

Dylan drove with nerveless precision, tearing down the highway, burning up the road and the tires on his black Mustang. Wind whipped his hair through the open window and stung his face with the blast-furnace force of a summer gone crazy with heat. From Chicago, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to Colorado, the asphalt had shimmered to the horizon like the shadow of a mirage on the landscape.

Without taking his eyes from the road, he lifted a Styrofoam cup to his mouth and drained it of coffee. He’d lost the other two times he’d broken his FBI cover to prevent disaster. He’d been too late, too slow, in far too deep to surface in time to save a life. He wouldn’t be too late to save Johanna Lane. He couldn’t be. He’d come up for good and three was his lucky number.

A grim line broke across his face, an expression no one had ever mistaken for a smile. Since when did he know about luck? He had no luck.

In the darkness ahead, a pickup truck pulled onto the highway. Dylan hissed an obscenity, his fist crushing the empty cup before he threw it to the floor. The man had to be blind not to see the Mustang hurtling toward him. When the driver didn’t even speed up to the limit, Dylan cursed him again, taking a lot of names in vain and ending up with half a dozen synonyms of dirty slang for sex.

The oncoming traffic was heavy on the two-lane highway outside Boulder, but Dylan had no time and nothing left to lose except his pulse. Flooring the gas pedal, he roared up on the truck and at the last moment jerked the wheel, sending the Mustang slewing into the other other lane, taking a highly calculated risk and the narrowest of openings in the traffic. Cars scattered onto the shoulder. The truck skidded off the road.

Hard-won skill, not luck, guided Dylan through the hundred-mile-an-hour maze he’d made of a van, a station wagon, and two compacts. Dylan Jones had no luck.

The fact was proved a mile down the road, less than a minute’s worth of traveling time. The flashing lights of a police car lit up his back window and rearview mirror like a Fourth of July parade.

Dylan swore again and pressed harder on the gas pedal, willing the Mustang to greater speed. The city lights of Boulder were seconds away. He’d come too far, too fast, too hard to lose.

He swept through the first stoplight on the north side of town, ignoring its red color. The Mustang barely held on to the ninety-degree turn he slammed it through. The tires squealed and smoked on the hot pavement. The chassis shuddered. Working the steering wheel one way and then the other, he missed hitting a car in the eastbound lane and shot between two westbound vehicles.

The police car behind him missed the turn and came to a jolting stop in the middle of the intersection, siren and lights going full bore, snarling traffic even further. Dylan made the second left-hand turn he saw, then wound through the streets in a frenzied, seemingly haphazard fashion for more than a mile. Finally he slowed the Mustang to a stop on a side street, pulling between two other vehicles, a gray, nondescript sedan and a midsize truck.

The summer night was quiet except for the pounding of his own heart. Expensive houses crowded this part of town. Porch lights were on, smaller, homier versions of the street lamps, but the interiors of the houses were dark. People were settled in for the night, safe, sound, and unsuspecting.

He waited for a moment, checking the street before pulling his duffel bag across the front seat to his lap and slipping his left arm out of his coat. The bag was heavier than clothes would have allowed, the weight being made up in firepower and ordnance. It was the only protection he had, and it felt like damn little compared with what he was up against.

Sweat trickled down the side of his face. At the corner of his eye, the moisture found the day-old cut angling from his temple to his ear. The salty drops slid into the groove, burning the raw skin. He swiped at the irritation with the back of his hand, then yanked open the duffel.

He took out a shortened, pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun and slipped the gun’s strap over his free shoulder. After angling the shotgun down the side of his torso, he put his arm back through his coat sleeve. The duffel went over his other shoulder as he got out of the car. The policeman had been behind him long enough to call in his plates. The Mustang had to be ditched. It didn’t matter. If he lost Johanna Lane, he didn’t much care if he got through the night with his life. He sure as hell didn’t care if he got out with his car.

He walked to the pickup truck in front of him and tried the door, his gaze moving constantly, checking shadows and sounds. The door was locked. The owner of the late-model gray sedan parked behind him wasn’t nearly as cautious. He got in and smashed the ignition assembly with the butt of the shotgun. Then he went to work hot-wiring the car.

Johanna Lane lived at 300 Briarwood Court, and Dylan knew exactly where 300 Briarwood Court was in relation to his current position—two blocks west and one half block north.

* * *

Johanna Lane stood on her third-floor balcony overlooking the street. French doors were open behind her, allowing the night wind to lift and flutter sheer, floor-length curtains. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played on the stereo, the classical notes crystal clear, floating on the air with all the purity that the finest digital sound was capable of producing. The stereo system was an indulgence, one of many in the oak-floored, art-deco-furnished apartment.

She turned partway to look inside. In the dining room, an unfinished, candlelit dinner of pasta alfredo and salad was neatly laid out on one end of an intricately carved, black lacquer table. A damask napkin was crumpled next to the still-full crystal wineglass.

She really should eat, she thought, watching the candle flame dip and bow with the breeze. If she wasn’t going to run home to Chicago and her father, she should eat, and she’d decided against running. Running was an admission of guilt, either of a crime she’d been very careful not to commit, or of an act of betrayal she’d never considered.

Austin Bridgeman was flying in from Chicago. To do some follow-up work on a deal that had gone bad in Boulder, he’d said when he called. He’d suggested going out for drinks or a late dinner so they could talk about old times—old times when she had worked for him as his most private legal counsel.

Even the thought of her previous employment made her head ache and her palms sweat. She’d left her job and Chicago because of what Austin Bridgeman had become, and she doubted if the intervening four months had improved his moral character.

Slowly, to calm herself, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. In four years of working for Austin, she’d seen him skirt the law many, many times, bending it at will with his power and his money. She’d seen him crawl on his belly like a snake to make bribery look like a gift. She’d seen him voice requests as unrepentant demands to politicians and judges alike. But she hadn’t seen him break a law until two days earlier, Friday morning, when she’d read the front-page newspaper story about a senator charged with influence peddling. With all the other congressional scandals cropping up, she hadn’t given the story much more than a glance at first. Then a name had caught her eye, the name of a small, privately held company in Illinois—Morrow Warner.

The influence the dear senator had been peddling went far beyond the expected pork barreling. He had dabbled in foreign affairs and foreign wars, foreign corporations, foreign currency, and especially foreign imports. The press had labeled him the “Global Connection,” and all of his hard work had been directed toward filling the coffers of Morrow Warner.

Johanna knew who owned Morrow Warner. She also knew that no one else did, because she had hidden the owner’s identity in miles of paperwork, barely skirting the law herself. A precaution, Austin had said, something for his old age, something the board of directors of Bridgeman, Inc., couldn’t take away.

Saturday’s paper had confirmed worse than influence peddling by the senator and had alleged extortion. Then that morning’s Sunday Post had quoted “reliable sources” confirming extortion and alleging underworld connections and a possible tie-in to an assassination. Two hours after she’d read the article, Austin had called wanting to visit her, personally, that night.

Johanna had thought about notifying the police, then realized irrationality wasn’t her best option. Austin hadn’t been charged with anything, and asking someone to dinner didn’t qualify as a crime. Powerful men were easy targets for scandal and allegations. Both the Illinois senator and Austin Bridgeman were powerful men. She knew better than to jump to conclusions, or to believe everything she read in the newspapers.

Still, she wished her law partner, Henry Wayland, had decided to stay in Boulder for the weekend just this once. She would like someone to be with her when Austin came, since she’d decided to beg off dinner, and drinks, and especially long talks about old times. The best posture for her to assume was one of cool formality and discretion.

At least that’s what she’d thought earlier. Now darkness had fallen and she wasn’t sure.

In a distracted gesture, she ran her hand back through her hair. Damn Henry for disappearing every Friday. She knew he did it to escape his mother, but that was ridiculous for a grown man. She didn’t even know where he was. All she knew was that he’d be back by Monday morning at 9:00 A.M. sharp. Henry was nothing if not reliable.

Austin was reliable, too, but not in a comfortable way. She had worked for a powerful man. She knew power corrupted; she’d seen the workings of corruption firsthand.

Assassination. It was improbable . . . but was it possible?

She had seen Austin break men with less thought than some people gave to lunch. A few times she’d helped him. It was part of the game of high-stakes business. Winner take all. Losers run like hell.

She wasn’t running. She could handle Austin.

She turned back toward the street. The only movement was a gray sedan cruising the block at a crawl, no doubt looking for the rare parking spot.

Raising her chin, she rolled her head to one side, easing the ache of muscles gone tight with strain. She continued the motion by lifting her hair off the back of her neck to let the night wind blow against her skin. It was so damn hot.

Her suitcases were still packed in her bedroom. She probably should have run.

She probably should have run like hell.

* * *

Dylan watched her with a narrowed gaze, taking in every sinuous line, every sultry curve. She made jeans look like custom-tailored slacks and a silk T-shirt look like a thousand dollars’ worth of handwork. It was Johanna Lane all right. Pure sweet class from the sheen of her honey-blond hair to the arch of her foot, which he’d previously seen only encased in butter-soft, Italian leather heels. He remembered everything about her, everything he’d seen at a distance. Austin’s rough boys weren’t allowed to fraternize with the upper echelons of the hierarchy. He doubted if Johanna Lane remembered he existed. He hoped not. It would only make things harder—on him.

He opened the duffel bag and took out a wide roll of cloth tape. Tearing off a length, he taped the passenger-door handle to a random spot beneath the dash. The rest of the roll went in his overcoat. He didn’t have time to talk her into going anywhere. Nor was he particularly inclined toward explanations. He hurt too damn bad. He’d been two days without sleep, almost as long without food, and he was bleeding again. He could feel the fresh dampness seeping down the right side of his chest. He’d killed a man last night in Lincoln, but not before the bastard had cut him.

Get out. Get out while you can, his conscience whispered. Then he remembered he didn’t have a conscience. He’d killed a man in Lincoln to save a worthless life—his own—and maybe one that was worth a whole lot more, Johanna Lane’s.

He turned and, with a quick jab of the gun, broke the dome light in the sedan. The last thing he needed was a welcome-home signal when he brought her out.

* * *

Johanna closed and locked the French doors, then pulled the sheers and the drapes. She’d packed her suitcases on a gut instinct, and the later it got, the more rational her instinct seemed. If she hurried, she could still catch a flight to Chicago. Once she was safe in her parents’ big house, Austin Bridgman would look more manageable. And it had occurred to her more than once that she might end up needing a good lawyer. Her father happened to be the best.

In the bathroom, she threw her toothbrush, comb, and makeup into a small bag. Before she put in the aspirin bottle, she shook two pills into her hand, then a third. It was definitely turning out to be a three-aspirin night.

She swallowed the pills with a glass of water and left the water running for a second glass. The heat had been oppressive all day, and not even night had lowered the record temperatures.

A sound in the living room drew her head around. She shut the water off and listened again, concentrating, trying to hear over the sudden pounding of her heart and the rush of adrenaline pumping through her body.

When no more sound was forthcoming, she forced herself to relax enough to think. Her first thought was to find something to defend herself with, and she grabbed her longest nail file, the most lethal thing she could find in the whole damn bathroom. She told herself she was overreacting, but her fingers wrapped and tightened around the file as if it were a knife.

She stepped quietly into the hall, listening. If anything looked even remotely amiss in the apartment, she would slip out the front door and leave. She wasn’t going to take chances. If Austin had sent someone in his place, someone who didn’t ring doorbells and use front doors, she needed protection.

She reached the arch connecting the hall and the living room and peeked around the corner.

“Ahhh!” The file clattered to the floor, dropped by fingers numbed from a quick, well-placed blow. Her next cry was smothered by a large, strong hand. An even stronger arm went around her middle, crushing her to her assailant’s body.

“My name is Dylan, Dylan Jones,” a harsh voice whispered in her ear. “I’ve been a lot of things in my life, but a rapist isn’t one of them. So ease your mind. I don’t want to hurt you.”

She squirmed violently in his arms, but his strength was indomitable.

“Your name is Johanna Lane,” the voice continued, “and four months ago you worked for Austin Bridgeman. You need to decide if you’re going to cooperate, or if we’re leaving here the hard way.”

Johanna stilled. Austin had sent someone else. She squeezed her eyes shut for an instant, fear and anger at her own stupidity washing through her. She should have run.

“Feel that?” her captor asked, his voice breathless and gravelly.

Something pushed against her hip, and she nodded.

“It’s a twelve-gauge shotgun, and I am definitely threatening you. We’re going out into the hall, into the elevator, and out the front door. That’s cooperation. The hard way is with you unconscious, or taped up, or both.” He lifted the gun and rested the barrel against her temple. “Do you want to do this the hard way?”

She shook her head once, very slowly. He’d said he didn’t want to hurt her; he’d also made it clear he would hurt her if he felt the need. She was too frightened to believe the first statement, and too frightened not to believe the second.

“Good.” He stepped back toward the door, holding her tight against him while he opened it a crack and checked the hall. “Go.”

They moved toward the bank of elevators, his body propelling her forward, pushing her from behind, overriding her faltering gait. The gun wasn’t at her temple. She didn’t know where it was, but she didn’t doubt its presence or his willingness to use it, yet she still wanted to scream and fight him. A greater fear kept her from doing either.

Dylan stayed behind her on the long walk down the hall, her body clasped to his. He kept behind her in the elevator, applying just enough pressure on her arm to let her know he wouldn’t tolerate a struggle, not even the hint of one. He wasn’t into terrorizing women, but he was committed to worse if she gave him any trouble. He knew Austin Bridgeman, and he knew he didn’t have time to be nice.

The elevator doors whooshed open in the lobby. For a moment freedom was fifteen steps away. In the next instant it was gone. A group of men stepped into the pool of light illuminating the portico of the apartment building—with Austin Bridgeman leading the pack.

Dylan lunged for the “Close Door” button on the operating panel, shoving the woman away from him and into a corner of the elevator. He single-handedly pumped a shell into the chamber of the twelve-gauge, keeping the gun leveled at her and giving her a grim look.

Johanna pushed herself deeper into the corner of the elevator, instinctively widening the distance between herself and the man called Dylan Jones. The urge to scream receded to a dull, throbbing ache in the back of her throat. His eyes were brown, dark and bright with an overload of adrenaline. Beard stubble darkened his jaw. His light-colored hair was longer in back than in front, and in front it was standing on end, raked through and furrowed—wild, like the gleam in his eyes.

The mercury had pushed ninety-two that day, but he was wearing an overcoat, a lined overcoat stained with dirt . . . or blood. A torn black T-shirt molded his torso, soft black jeans clung to his hips and legs.

He was bruised on one side of his face and cut on the other. He was muscular and lean, hard, stripped down to the basics of strength. He was feral.

Dylan waited, listening and watching her size him up and grow more afraid. There was nothing but silence outside. Nothing but the noise of their ragged breathing inside. Then the mechanical sound of the other elevator moving intruded. Dylan steadied himself with a breath and removed his finger from the “Close Door” button. The doors slid open. He stepped out, ready.

Johanna heard a movement, a scuffle, and a muffled thud. Now was the time to scream, she told herself. Dylan Jones hadn’t been sent by Austin. Austin had come in person to talk with her.

The thoughts had no sooner formed than she was jerked out of the elevator. The violence of the movement knocked the breath from her lungs. The speed with which he dragged her across the lobby, his hand tightly wound in a fistful of her shirt, the gun jammed against her ribs, kept her breathless. She stumbled, and he hauled her to her feet, always shoving her forward, keeping her fighting for her balance.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the crumpled figure of a man lying next to the elevators. She tried once more to scream, but as if he’d known what her reaction would be, he moved his hand from her shirt to her neck and applied a warning pressure. She sobbed instead, and his hand immediately loosened, but only the barest of degrees.

He pushed the building doors open with his shoulder. Heat, sultry and intense, engulfed them. She stumbled again on the steps, and once again he kept her upright, on the thinnest edge of her balance.

Johanna knew now was the time to fight and kick, to scream and cry, but Dylan Jones never gave her the chance. He was a master at keeping her half off her feet and moving too fast to think. She did manage a hoarse moan, but a renewed pressure in her ribs with the gun barrel stifled the rest of her verbal rebellion.

They crossed the street, keeping to the shadows of the trees and the parked cars lining both sides of Briarwood Court. Johanna had chosen the neighborhood for the quiet elegance of the older homes and the architectural charm of the apartment building. For three blocks in either direction, Briarwood Court was a haven of upper-middle-class wealth. She had always felt secure and protected—until that night.

With a harshly voiced set of commands, Dylan directed her toward the gray sedan. “Get in on the driver’s side. Don’t mess around with me—just get in and scoot to the middle of the seat. Do not touch the passenger-side door. I’ve got it rigged to explode if it opens.”

Her heart sank lower in her chest. There was no escaping him.

Dylan had a mental clock going in his head, and he knew Austin and his men were probably already heading back down to the street. He had not turned around to check if anyone had seen them from her balcony, but there was a chance someone had. He had checked the line of sight himself and knew the sedan, parked far up the street, was well hidden from view—if they could only get to it.

A commotion behind them, sounding like it came from the apartment building, had him speeding up their steps. He glanced once over his shoulder and started running, dragging her along with him. At the sedan, he shoved her into the front seat and slid in after her.

“Get down,” he ordered, pinning her with the gun, then crawling over her as she was forced to the seat.

Johanna stiffened as they came into contact, body to body, with her on the bottom. In the dark, close interior of the car, he was overwhelmingly male and dangerous. He wasn’t a big man, but his broad shoulders blocked all but the faintest light. His weight pressed her deep into the upholstery, paralyzing her as effectively as the gun barrel under her chin.

He looked over the back of the seat, through the rear window. He swore softly, then inched up her body, craning his neck to look out the passenger window. Johanna didn’t move so much as a muscle fiber—until he came too close to the potentially lethal door.

Without conscious thought, her hand shot up and pressed against his chest, causing him to wince and swear again, not so softly.

“No,” she whispered, putting force into the word instead of volume, her voice trembling.

When he looked down at her, she tilted her head toward the door and the trip wire of tape. He followed the gesture, and a heartbeat later the barest flicker of a smile touched his mouth, the most ironic smile she had ever seen. In that instant he looked familiar—incredibly familiar.

* * * * * *

Please continue reading for an excerpt from A Piece of Heaven

A Piece of Heaven

One

Travis Cayou dropped his saddle on the floor, then dropped his backside into one of the molded plastic chairs lining the wall of the Laramie, Wyoming, bus station. Damn. He hurt everywhere, bad in the places he hadn’t broken, and worse in the places he had.

Rain poured down on the white cinder-block building, streaking the outside of a picture window that framed a muddy Second Street and not much else. Looking around, Travis didn’t think the dusty posters tacked to the other three walls gave the wet view much of a run for its money, not at first glance. But he was close to home, and that’s what counted. The only thing that counted.

Inhaling deeply and moving in slow motion, he organized himself into the chair. The spurs on his boots jangled a backdrop to his low groan as he stretched his legs out. He took it easy on his right knee, not stretching it too much, just enough to ease a kink or two. The next time some damn bronc decided to kiss the fence, he was getting off first. He swore he would, whether he’d lasted the eight seconds needed to score or not.

Worse yet, he hadn’t done any better on his bull ride. That animal had wanted to eat him. He thought he’d ridden every kind of bull that had ever been seen. He’d had them buck and spin so tight, they made their own whirlwind. He’d had them crash beneath him, or worse, try to climb out of the bucking chute with him on their back. But he’d never seen anything like Mad Jack. The next time that particular bovine’s number came up with his, he was walking away. He swore he was. They could have his entry fee.

Thinking of which, where in the hell had that clown got off to just before Mad Jack decided to make an hors d’oeuvre out of him? Wasn’t that part of what he laid his money down for? For some bullfighting clown to be out there when he dropped his bull rope?

“Heroes,” he muttered, wincing at a new pang. Every time some rodeo got a write-up in some newspaper, there was always the same damn headline: “Clowns—Heroes of the Rodeo,” or “Clowns—A Bull Rider’s Best Friend.”

Travis wasn’t buying it today. Oh, he’d admit most of them were the hottest things on two legs. Most every time he’d bailed off a bull, one of them had been there to make sure he got out of the arena with all his parts in place. But this last clown had taken one look at old Mad Jack and seen a man-eater. He’d aced Travis in the brains department and kept himself just out of helping distance.

A hero? he thought. Try the cowboy on the back of the raging, bucking beast. The man with the resin smoking on his glove. The man spurring an animal already so fired up he was spitting flames.

The man with more guts than brains. Wasn’t that what James had always said?

A wry smile lifted a corner of Travis’s mouth. He settled back in the chair and pulled his hat low over his eyes, using his left hand and trying not to jostle his right arm.

He should have been a roper. That’s what James had always said. Sure, ropers got hurt sometimes, but more often than not they didn’t get stomped all over creation.

His left hand dropped back onto his thigh, making a print in the dust turned to mud on his jeans. Lord, he was tired. He was getting too old to have his tail end kicked by rough stock. He was getting too old to be following the rodeo circuit with only half his heart in it. He made enough to pay expenses and keep his checkbook from rolling over in a dead faint, and that was about it.

His wrist hurt like hell. The doctor had given him some pain pills, real good stuff. But how many times could a man break the same damn wrist in the same damn place and expect it not to hurt all the time, mended or not?

Probably not many, Travis decided, digging in his shirt pocket for another painkiller. At least it was a clean break this time. He swallowed the pill dry, too tired to get up and fight the rain for a can of pop from the machine outside.

He was finished. He swore he was. It was time for him to go home. Hell, it was long past time for him to go home. He’d done eight years of penance. He was tired of running from James’s memories and his own guilt.

James was the one who’d married Beth Ann. He was the one who’d brought her up to their ranch on the Colorado side of the Colorado-Wyoming border. He was the one who had left her alone day after day, and sometimes night after night, while he wheeled and dealed. All Travis had done was try to help her over the rough spots, and if he’d wanted to do more, well, he hadn’t done nearly as much as she’d begged him to do.

But the past was over. It was time for him to go home and lay claim to his half of the Cayou Land and Cattle Company. Ranching was a way of life, and Travis wanted his life back, the life he’d been born to live. He missed the scent of sage on the evening breeze. He missed watching the sun sliding into the Rockies. He missed the quiet. The same quiet that had driven Beth Ann to acts of desperation.

She’d hated it all, the wild silence waiting outside the confines of the ranch buildings, the snowcapped peaks penning her in. It was a hell of a life for a woman, but his mother had done it. Hell, lots of women could do it, if their men took care.

One thing he knew for sure, the Cayou Land and Cattle Company needed a woman’s touch. He’d stopped by three years ago when he’d known James would be at the National Western Stock Show, and the house had looked run-down and worn-out, not at all like home, not at all the way his mother had kept it. Even Beth Ann had done better. Shoat, one of the old-timers at the ranch, had told him then that he ought to come home, that the ranch needed him.

Well, he was coming home now, busted up, road weary, and saddle sore.

Hell, he could use a woman’s touch, Travis thought. He shifted in his chair and grimaced against the pain. Someone sweet and willing, soft and well-rounded. Someone warm. Someone with good hands.

He slid farther down, resting his head on the back of the chair and holding on to his casted right forearm. Yeah, someone with good hands.

He smiled as he closed his eyes and readjusted his hat against the weak gray light coming in through the window. Woman, hell. What he needed was sleep. Shoat had said it would take him at least an hour, maybe two, to get to the bus station from the ranch. Then he’d be heading home to stay. Providing James didn’t try to kick him back out again.

Travis let out a weary sigh. If James did try, he was going to find a fight on his hands, and not one of those knock-down, drag-out, wrestle-in-the-dirt kind of fights they’d had over Beth Ann eight years ago. He’d backed off then, because of a guilt he still wasn’t sure was his to bear. He wasn’t backing off this time, not an inch.

He needed to go home, and he’d do whatever he had to, whatever it took to get him there and make it stick. Nobody or nothing was going to stop him.

* * *

Callie Michael fought her way through the storm into the bus station, slamming the door behind her and shutting out the wind-whipped rain. She stood on the old beige carpet, dripping one puddle beneath her boots and another one a few inches out, where the rain ran down and off the rolled brim of her hat.

The storm was quickening up, threatening to turn into one of the year’s best, especially up north and in the mountain ranges to the west. Luckily, she was heading southwest, back to Colorado, back to the Cayou Land and Cattle Company, she and James’s little brother.

She wiped a palm up her cheek and shook the water off her fingers, her gaze steady on the lone occupant of the waiting area. He didn’t look all that little.

Six foot plus of cowboy lay sprawled over a short bank of chairs, one arm flung out like a rag doll’s, the other cradled close to his chest in a sling and a cast. Long legs, a hard-sided suitcase, an Association saddle, and a rigging bag draped with the fanciest chaps Callie had ever seen took up a good third of the floor space on the customer side of the counter. It wasn’t Travis Cayou’s white and gold chaps with the silver lightning bolts that held her gaze, though.

His jeans had been split from ankle to hip on his right leg, and the first aid tape that was supposed to hold them together was giving up with the wet and the dirt. As a rule, cowboys didn’t go around showing off their legs, and Callie figured Travis Cayou didn’t either. His leg was a color closer to the white bandage wrapped around his knee than it was to the darkly tanned skin of his large, square hands.

Strong hands. The thought crossed her mind and momentarily caught her attention. His hands were the essence of strength, rugged and weather-worn, built of sinew and bone and brought to life by the ridges of veins tracking beneath his skin. She would have expected no less. Every working cowboy needed strong hands. Someone who bet his life on the ability of five fingers to hold him onto half a ton of bucking bronc or a ton of aggravated bull needed more than a strong hand. He needed an arm of steel to back it up.

Her gaze slipped up the pearly snaps on his cream-colored shirt, taking in the streaks of mud and the dirt ground into the cloth. His head was tilted back against the small chair, giving him plenty of snoring room. A day’s growth of sandy beard darkened the chin and jaw jutting out from beneath the black Stetson that covered his face. She noted the small bandage taped high on his cheekbone, and the bit of blood showing on the gauze wrapped around his knee. From the looks of him, he’d taken more than one spill last night. No wonder Shoat had been worried about him.

Finally, her gaze settled on his right hand, half hidden by the cast. He was loosely cupping the big gold and silver rodeo buckle at his waist, as if he were trying to hold whatever was left of himself together.

An unconscious sigh lifted her chest. Her glance drifted to his saddle and his rigging bag and those fancy chaps, then back to him. He was a wreck, but he looked mostly like what he was, a saddle tramp, the prodigal son returning home, a cowboy on the short end of the rodeo circuit. What he did not look like was James’s brother, let alone James’s little brother.

James wasn’t six foot of anything, and he sure didn’t have legs like that—long, lanky, and put together in a way that made her gaze stray back to the mostly naked bandaged one. Ropes of muscle corded his thigh and his calf, flexing with every slight movement he made in his sleep. It was a sight to see, and it made Callie’s mind wander in unaccustomed ways.

She blushed at her sensual musing, then became irritated with herself. She’d obviously been cooped up with Shoat and the cows too long if she was ogling the likes of Travis Cayou. He was no business of hers. She’d only come as a favor to Shoat, and she hoped to hell James never found out she’d done even that much. Her boss was darn touchy when it came to his younger brother.

Quietly clearing her throat, she forced her gaze to the bus station clerk. The red-haired lady was doing the same thing she’d been doing, staring at more man than either of them was used to seeing. It was ridiculous.

“Mr. Cayou? In from Colorado and New Mexico?” she asked, gesturing with her thumb and drawing the clerk’s attention.

“Yeah.” The clerk grinned. “He’s been kind of decorating up the lobby this afternoon. You got here in the nick of time. I was about to close up. Figured I’d just take him home with me.” The grin broadened, taking half a dozen years off the older woman’s face, and leaving no doubts in Callie’s mind about what the lady had been planning to do with him. From what she’d heard about Travis Cayou, he drew women like a lodestone—whether they were married or not.

She gave him another inadvertent glance. At least now she knew why. He had a look about him, and she hadn’t even seen his face.

But that wasn’t her problem. Her problem was getting him home.

She took a step toward him, then hesitated, feeling a tingle of wariness, or shyness, speed up her pulse. Chastising herself for more foolishness, she wiped her hand across her middle and took the last two steps to him, her boots squishing softly on the carpet.

“Mr. Cayou?” She reached out and touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Mr. Cayou?”

From a far-off distance, Travis heard a husky sweet voice calling him. He debated with himself whether it was worth waking up, whether it was worth coming back to all of his aches and pains to find out who was behind the coaxing voice. But it wasn’t much of a debate, especially when she repeated his name louder and gripped his shoulder tighter to give him a shake.

“Mr. Cayou? Travis? Come on, wake up, Travis.”

The increased contact helped him slip closer to consciousness and sent home an instinctively known fact: She had good hands. He could feel the warmth of them, the gentle pressure, the just-right touch. She was probably good with horses. In the haziest of thought processes, he wondered if she’d be good with him, this lady whose voice he wished was whispering a little closer to his ear, this lady whose voice he’d like to hear with more need straining the sweetness, a more passionate need.

“Travis? Come on, wake up. Shoat sent me to bring you home.”

Passion. Lord it had been a long time, and never with a woman with a voice like a hot summer night, soft but laced with a husky edge. He needed to meet this lady. Seems old Shoat had sent him a woman right out of his dreams, even if she did sound a mite on the impatient side.

Drawing in a deep breath and wishing he’d taken another pain pill, he dragged himself up from his deep sleep. Slowly, he lifted his hand and pushed his hat to the back of his head.

Callie had been ready for anything—anything except the hard reality of Travis Cayou. In the space of a few seconds, the time it took for him to lift his hat, he went from being a half-infirm, broken down, physically intriguing cowboy to the most hazardous material in Wyoming, unsafe at any speed.

From under the brim of the black Stetson, barely focused eyes of the darkest brown stared at her. His gaze trailed over her face in a slumberous caress, leaving a path of sudden, unwelcome heat on her skin. As her cheeks flushed, a rawly sensual smile formed on his mouth.

How something moving so slowly could have the impact of a speeding freight train was beyond her, but she felt shaken to the toes of her boots by the implicit sexuality of his smile. Heat raced through the rest of her body, touching her everywhere and pooling in liquid warmth in her veins.

She swallowed hard and took a half step backward, stumbling slightly over her boot heel. He was making a thousand promises with his smile and with the midnight fires banked in the depths of his eyes, the kind of promises most women dreamed about and most men couldn’t keep. He was also sending messages. One in particular was loud and clear: He wanted to take her to bed, right now. She’d never had it said to her any plainer, and she’d never felt herself react to the invitation with such an electrifying physical response.

Travis did want to take her to bed, every inch of her, from the wild ebony hair escaping her hat and her braid, to the generous curves of her breasts, to the slim-hipped elegance of her long legs. But he didn’t have the wherewithal to do anything but think about it, because fast on the tracks of consciousness came pain, dull and heavy and inescapable. His fantasy and his smile both took the short, downward slide into the truth. He thought about saying hello, but the pain told him to do something else.

Grimacing, he dropped his hand to his pocket and dug out the brown plastic bottle filled with his pain pills. He took two and closed his eyes on an unsolicited groan.

Callie’s heart lurched. Raw sex was a bit beyond her ability to handle, but nurturing was well within her acceptable guidelines for personal or even impersonal relationships. Taking care of cows was what she did for a living.

She took the bottle out of his hand and read the label. Her eyebrows slowly rose as she looked back at him, and once again he took her by surprise, just by being there and looking the way he did.

He was a lot younger than James, maybe ten years younger, yet he was harder looking, as if life hadn’t settled as easily on him. Sandy-brown hair streaked with blond framed a lean, handsome face set off by a short nose and square chin with a slight cleft, a face tanned by the sun and chiseled by a life spent as a range rider and a rodeo cowboy.

Callie had never been anywhere to speak of, but she was pretty sure they didn’t make men like him anyplace on earth except east of the Pacific Ocean and west of the Mississippi River, and he was a rare breed even there. He was the kind of man she’d grown up knowing, a cowboy, but no cowboy she’d ever met had made her blush.

Her cheeks warmed again. He was good-looking all right, in a rugged, impish way, and his smile ought to be against the law, at least in public, but it was obvious to anyone she could outrun him in his present condition.

“We better get you into the truck while you can still walk,” she said, putting the pills in her own pocket. By her count and the instructions on the bottle, he’d had more than enough.

“Who said I can walk?” he asked softly, his eyes still closed, his face still tight with pain.

“I’ll take your saddle and your gear out, give you a few minutes for those pills to take the edge off.” She stepped around his legs, her wet duster slapping against her jeans.

“Wait a minute.” Travis opened his eyes a fraction of an inch and tried to move when he saw her lift his saddle, but his body wasn’t obeying. “Hey, wait a minute. Who are you?”

The dark-haired angel in the white canvas duster and black cowboy hat turned and leveled on him the most startlingly blue gaze he’d ever seen.

“Kathleen Ann Michael. I work at the ranch. You can call me Callie.” She turned again to leave.

“I had a mare named Calliope once. We called her Callie for short. Smartest horse I ever owned,” he said, then immediately wished he hadn’t, but it had been the first thing to come to mind. Well, actually, the second thing. First had been the word “pretty,” as in “real pretty,” so pretty he felt his gut tighten just looking at her.

Those aquamarine eyes slanted him a purely innocent glance over her shoulder. “Yeah, well, I used to have a dog named Travis, but he wasn’t exactly on the bright side.” She paused as if considering her words, then added, “We didn’t keep him around for his looks, either.”

Travis wasn’t sure if he’d been insulted or not. Either way, he couldn’t stop his grin. “He must have had some good points.”

“A couple,” she agreed, hefting the saddle higher in front of her, holding on to it with both hands.

Travis tried to rise, but she stopped him with a quelling look.

“I can carry your saddle, your suitcase, and your rigging bag, but I can’t carry you. So do us both a favor and save your strength.”

The angel had spoken. Travis collapsed back in the chair to wait his turn. If he’d had any confidence whatsoever about his ability to get out the door on his own, he would have helped her. But spending the afternoon cramped in the little chair had stiffened him up something terrible. Parts of him were even starting to shake.

At first he tried to ignore it, but by the time she carried his suitcase out, his knee was knocking against the chair, an added pain he really didn’t need.

He gripped his right thigh with his left hand and tried to massage the spasm out of the muscles. He wished he’d dropped his bull rope two seconds later than he had the previous night. The extra time would have gotten him to the eight-second horn and might have put him down someplace other than under the bovine tornado.

He wished the pills would kick in too. Pressing his palm harder into his thigh, he worked the muscle with his thumb and fingers. And if he was going to fall apart like this, he wished Shoat had come himself instead of sending Kathleen Ann Michael.

The sound of the door slamming brought his head up quick. Just as quickly, he looked back down at his leg. There were lots of things he liked getting from women. Pity wasn’t one of them.

“Should I be taking you over to the hospital before we go home?” she asked.

“No.” He pressed even harder on his leg, willing the muscles to relax, and they did. Slowly at first, then deeply. A sense of well-being began infusing his senses. “Callie, I . . . I think we better get me into the truck real quick.”

Callie didn’t need to be told twice. She was at his side in three strides, wrapping his good arm around her neck and sliding her arm around his waist. “I’ve got you. On three. One—”

“I’ll be glad to help you, honey,” the station clerk offered, coming around from behind the counter.

Callie just bet she would, and if the lady had helped her with his gear, she might have considered it. As it was, she was determined to get him out on her own, all six feet of him. Six feet of lean muscle, long legs, strong arms, and rock-hard body.

“No, thanks. I’ve got him,” she said, indulging in a small lie. He was all over her and slipping fast, but the red-haired lady wasn’t going to lay a hand on him, not if Callie had anything to say about it. He belonged to her outfit, and she was the boss, the foreman of the home ranch of the Cayou Land and Cattle Company. Nobody was going to call her shots for her.

Not even you, Travis Cayou. She stiffened her resolve and one knee and shifted her shoulder deeper under his arm, trying to take more of his weight and inevitably ending up with her right side mashed up against his left side. He half groaned, half sighed in response.

Normally, she wouldn’t have noticed. After all, she was only helping a hurt man out to the truck. But that hurt man was Travis Cayou, and when his hat brushed up against hers and his pained sigh echoed in her ear, she couldn’t ignore the warm blush blooming on her cheek, the catch in her throat, or the resulting shiver winding its way down her spine.

She would have dropped him right then and there, like a hot skillet, if it hadn’t meant more work to get him back up. For a moment she tried to blame her reaction on skipping lunch, but she’d skipped more than one meal in her life without going all hot and cold in the middle of the afternoon.

“You all right?” she asked in a voice meant to be gruff. It sounded provocative instead, even to her own ears.

“I’ll make it,” was all he said, very softly, very close, his arm tightening around her shoulders.

Callie swore soundlessly and headed him out the door.

* * * * * * * * *