“Don’t,” she whispered.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t,” he murmured, his lips brushing hers with each syllable like tiny electrical charges.
“Decency?” It was a desperate chance. She could have sworn he had that in him.
He hesitated, for she felt it. Then he shook his head. “There are things I want to know, and I can think of no other way to get the truth from you. Try again.”
“You don’t know…what you’re doing to me.”
His laugh had a winded sound. “If it’s anything like what you’re doing to me, then I expect it to be highly effective.”
Her stomach muscles clenched as the deep resonance of his voice vibrated in places already sensitized by the heated heaviness of him against her. The words strangled, she cried, “I don’t know anything!”
“Somehow I have trouble believing that.”
She tried to control the shudders building inside her, the darkness that threatened to overwhelm her, but knew ahead of time it would be impossible. “Let me go. We can…talk standing up.”
“I tried that already and it didn’t work. Now I prefer lying down.”
The words were feathered with hoarse suggestion in her ears. “I don’t! Please…you’ve got to—”
“The faster you answer me, the sooner I let you go. If I let you go. You can start by telling me what you’re really doing in Turn-Coupe.”
“You know why I’m here.”
He shook his head, a slow movement that teased her mouth. “I know what you say is the reason,” he replied before dipping his head to taste her lips, then running his tongue along the sensitive inner edges. “What I don’t know is who sent you.”
“No one,” she answered with a catch in her voice as she twisted her head away. “It was a referral. To look at your grandfather’s jewelry.”
“You’ll have to do better than that.” This time, he took her mouth more firmly, pressed deeper.
She shivered with the distress inside her. Her lips tingled and burned, and the sweet taste of him seemed to spread through her bloodstream like some potent, debilitating liqueur. At the same time, a dim and intuitive recognition of how she might counter what he was doing to her hovered at the edge of her mind. It grew, blossoming into an idea so simple it shocked her into stillness, made her drag air into her lungs in abrupt reaction.
She had thought she needed to be close to Kane Benedict to get what her cousin needed from him. Surely it was impossible to be much nearer than she was at this moment.
Self-control, that was what she required. She must conquer the old fears, stop the automatic reactions. This man was not the one who had betrayed and hurt her. Though he was holding her confined in his arms, Kane wasn’t harming her, hadn’t caused her pain. If she could only forget the past, let go and think of this clash as mental combat, a battle of wills and imaginations, then she might gain something from it.
With a supreme effort, she stopped avoiding his kiss, allowed her lips to soften, to conform to the pressure of his mouth. Desperately, she concentrated on the warm, smooth contours, the friction of his tongue over hers, and the intimation of desire that mixed with the taste of him in her mouth. And slowly she felt, creeping in upon her like a fog, a vast and pleasurable lethargy that seemed as if it might banish the fear that hovered still behind her resolve.
He murmured in wordless surprise. Releasing her wrists, he gathered her close and captured her mouth once more with honeyed, drugging sweetness. The tender abrasion of his tongue invited her exploration in return, incited her to join in the sinuous play. She accepted, testing with wonder his satin smoothness, and also the firm promise of another, more intimate, invasion.
Abruptly, his muscles went taut. He raised his head. In razor-edged contempt that might have been for his own impulses as well as hers, he demanded, “What are you to Gervis Berry? And how does it feel to almost kill a man who never harmed a living soul?”
“Nothing! I didn’t,” she cried, shocked and bereft at his unexpected change from tenderness to terrifying accusation. Tears sprang into her eyes, forced upward by the painful tightening of her chest and throat. They ran backward across her temples, tracking into her hair.
“You did,” he said in harsh answer. “You fingered Pops for Slater, didn’t you? You pointed him out so he could follow him home, run him off the road.”
His face was a blur above her, the words he spoke a dull roaring in her ears as the old horror returned. Her senses swam in sickening waves. She hardly knew what she was saying as she turned her head from side to side, moaning, “No, no, no.”
“Yes,” he insisted, brushing his hand across her breast, then cupping it. “You knew, and did it anyway. Why? Tell me why.”
His touch on the sensitive peak of her breast was like a lightning strike. It ripped through her, bringing the surge of panicky, white-hot rage. She bucked under him, twisting in insane strength to break his grasp. He was flung backward, catching himself on his elbow. She rolled, pushing free, scuttling away from him to the nearest corner where she turned at bay. Teeth clenched and eyes blazing, she waited for him to attack.
He surged to his knees, whipped around. He met her gaze, his own hot with fury. His muscles tensed to lunge.
He stopped.
For long moments, neither of them moved. Then Kane sank back on his heels. He wiped splayed fingers over his face, then plunged them through his hair and down the back of his neck. He shut his eyes so tight the lashes looked like rows of tiny spikes. When he opened them again, the rage and determination had vanished from their blue depths. His gaze held only tired self-disgust.
“Don’t,” he said softly. “Don’t look at me like that.”
She lifted her chin, not taking her eyes from him for a second. It was impossible to loosen her clamped jaws enough to speak.
“What happened to you?” he went on in low concern as he dropped his hand to his knee. “Who did it, and when? And why in the name of heaven hasn’t someone helped you get over it?”
“It’s no business of yours.” She hadn’t meant to answer him; the words seemed to come by themselves.
“I think it is, since it almost caused me to do something we’d both regret.”
“It was you,” she said with a sharp, negative gesture. “Your own idea.”
“But it would never have crossed my mind, except you obviously objected to being—”
“Except you saw it as a weakness to be exploited.” She dragged air deeper into her lungs and felt her fear loosen its grip.
Tipping his head so the light moved across the blue-black waves of his hair, he avoided her gaze as he said, “I thought I could, and would, do anything to help Pops. I was wrong.”
It was both an apology and explanation, if she wanted to accept them. Did she? She wasn’t sure, though she might be forced to it if she was to stay in Turn-Coupe. At least she had been right in her feeling that he was too inherently decent for such a ploy. Which didn’t mean she had to make this easier for him. She remained silent.
In that moment of stillness, a hollow thump came from beneath the blind, vibrating through its timbers. The noise would not have been familiar an hour ago, but now Regina recognized it at once. It was the sound of a boat knocking against one of the duck blind’s pilings. That was followed by quiet, rhythmic splashes as someone paddled away. They were not alone here in the swampy back area of the lake.
Hard on that realization came the racketing roar of a motor being cranked into life, then changing as it was put into gear. Whoever had been under the blind was leaving. And he was in a hurry.
Kane sprang to his feet. Reaching the nearest wall in a single stride, he flipped the latches that held the hinged portion, then let it down. Bracing his hands on the rough-cut edges, he leaned out to search the water around them with his hard gaze. He swore in fluent virulence.
“What is it?” Regina put a hand to the wall behind her and dragged herself to her feet.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he whipped around toward the trap door, lifted it, and laid it back. Swinging into the opening, he disappeared down the ladder. She followed him to the square hole, saw him clinging to the wooden ladder while he stared around in all directions.
Regina dropped to her knees and leaned forward to search the empty expanse of water that surrounded the duck blind. As Kane looked up, she met his gaze. In stunned understanding, she said, “The boat. It’s—”
“Gone. And it didn’t come untied by itself.”
“Someone took it?” The other boat and motor they’d heard hadn’t meant company or even rescue, as she had half imagined. “Who would do that?”
“You tell me.”
He started back up the ladder. As she moved out of his way, she retorted sharply, “How should I know? This is your territory, remember?”
“But you’re the one with the strange friends.” He regained the floor level, then seated himself on the ledge, letting his feet and legs dangle in the trapdoor opening.
“Your friends know how to get here. And your relatives.”
Something flickered in his eyes and was gone. “They wouldn’t, not on their own. And I have no reason whatever for arranging to be left here with you.”
“You think I want to be with you? That I’ve got somebody following me around making sure of convenient encounters? If you believe that, then you’re more of a dumb redneck than I thought!”
He stared at her a moment, then a grim smile tugged one corner of his mouth. “At least you got your feistiness back.”
“For what good it does me,” she muttered, looking away. To cover a comment that might be more revealing than intended, she added, “So what do we do now?”
“What do you suggest?”
“I don’t know!” she shot back in exasperation. “Something besides just sit here and wait for dark to fall.”
He watched her with interest but no great concern. “It’s a long swim back, but if that’s what you want, be my guest.”
“That’s your only suggestion?”
“Unless you can walk on water.”
She was about to blast him for that chestnut when she noted the amused twitch of his lips, the speculation that lay behind his bland expression. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she said, clenching her hands in her lap. “You planned it. It’s your way of turning the screws.”
“No,” he said in positive rejection as his amusement vanished. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Come on, why should I believe that?”
“Because I said so,” he answered, his gaze lethally straight.
She held his eyes as long as she could, until her own burned from the strain. Then she lowered her lashes. “So what happens now?”
“We wait.”
Her attention snapped upward again. “For what? Doomsday?”
“For Luke, probably. He’s our best bet since nobody knows the lake and swamp better. Or is more likely to guess where I might be.”
“You mean,” she said in incredulous comprehension, “that no one really knows where we are? Not your aunt or your grandfather? Not Luke? No one?”
“It isn’t the sort of expedition you advertise.”
She could see that all too well. They were stranded, then. It was unbelievable. In this day of cellular phones, pagers, modems, satellite communication around the globe and even from outer space, they were stuck in the middle of nowhere with no means to get back and no way to let anyone know where to find them.
“There must be something we can do!”
“We can make ourselves comfortable.”
“Comfortable.” Frustration and suspicion freighted the word.
He sent her a brief, sardonic look, then sprang to his feet with easy grace and closed the trapdoor. Turning toward the metal chest in the corner, he knelt before it to lift the lid, took out a wool army blanket and tossed it toward her. That was followed by a couple of small cans of sausages, a can of beans, soft drinks in plastic bottles, and a plastic cracker box. The last thing he set out appeared to be a camping lantern.
“Always prepared,” she said with laconic lack of appreciation.
“Were you a Girl Scout?” He waited for her reply with a grin hovering at one corner of his mouth.
“Hardly. But I imagine you were a Boy Scout.”
“Matter of fact, I was. But I learned about anticipating emergencies the hard way, from experience.”
“In the swamps, or while slaughtering migratory birds?”
“I hunt,” he said. “This isn’t my blind, though. It belongs to Pops.”
“Which you use as the mood strikes you, I suppose? I’m surprised there’s no gun in there. You could bag us a duck for dinner.”
“Wrong season.” He gave her a brief glance over his shoulder. “Anyway, it’s too damp here on the water. Metal rusts overnight. That’s if I wanted to risk having a firearm stolen.”
“We couldn’t have that, now could we?” she asked sweetly.
He closed the lid of the metal chest and swung around on one knee. “Are you always this cranky when things don’t go your way?”
She held his gaze an instant, then looked at a place just past his left shoulder. “Not always.”
“If you’re afraid of me, don’t be. I wouldn’t touch you now with a ten-foot pole.”
“What a gentleman,” she said acidly.
He watched her a moment. “I don’t think I ever pretended to be that, and a good thing under the circumstances.”
He felt guilty. It was a startling revelation. More startling still was the fact that she felt little grudge against him. Holding his gaze, she said abruptly, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Some men wouldn’t have stopped at all.”
“And you know, or knew, one of them?”
She didn’t confirm his guess, but neither did she deny it.
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Don’t worry. As I said, you’re safe from me.”
That should have been comforting, but wasn’t. The reason was because he saw entirely too much of what she was trying to conceal, what she had kept hidden for too long.
Kane Benedict was a dangerous man, though not only by virtue of being daring or unpredictable or even extremely watchful. It was, instead, because of his intelligence. Added to that was the fact that he made her regret, for a brief, amazing instant, that she would have no further opportunity to practice her self-control against his caresses. As hard as it was to believe, she could not deny a fleeting inclination to discover whether she could endure being held by him in a less isolated, less dangerous situation.
She must be losing her mind. She’d never been even slightly ambivalent about physical contact with a man before. Now was a fine time to start, a fine time indeed.
Kane seemed to hesitate a moment, then he turned to the lamp and began to inspect it. It seemed a sensible precaution, making sure it was in working order before night fell. Regina followed his movement for a moment, then she crawled over to sit with her back against the wall near where he worked. Drawing her legs up, she smoothed her long, full knit skirt down to cover her feet, then clasped her arms around her bent knees.
The silence grew strained. After a moment, she glanced at Kane again and cleared her throat. “How long do you think it may be before anyone finds us?”
“A while,” he answered without looking up. “Aunt Vivian’s used to me coming and going when I get ready. I’ll be surprised if she realizes there’s a problem before midnight or later. That’s if she and Pops manage to wake up before then. They were both pretty worn-out.”
“You don’t think she’ll call the police, maybe send out a search party, when she does suspect something?” The ripple and stretch of the muscles in his back and shoulders caught her attention, and she followed them intently.
“She’s never been the type to jump at every phone call or police siren. It could be hours before she gives up expecting me to show up and decides to call Luke. She might be more concerned if she knew you were with me, but I suspect she thinks Luke saw you home.”
“You suspect?” she asked, adding as he glanced her way, “Don’t you mean you know she does?”
He was silent, his gaze holding the same motionless depths as the lake. It was as close as he was going to come to an admission, she thought. Releasing a hissing sigh of frustration through her teeth, she looked away again.
“Relax,” he said. “If you can’t overcome it, you might as well enjoy it.”
“Enjoy being trapped here? You must be joking.”
He looked around at the opalescent light of the gathering sunset through the trees, the pastel glow of the vast arch of sky directly overhead. “No, not at all.”
It was peaceful in its way, she had to agree. So quiet. The only sounds were the gentle lap of water, the sigh of a breeze, and calls of birds and frogs. If she closed her eyes, she could almost sense a strangely peaceful mood indigo that might, if she let it, segue into acceptance.
She couldn’t afford that, not with Kane so near.
Or could she? His presence was more reassuring than disturbing now. He was quiet and purposeful in his movements, not given to inane comments just to fill the silence. He was self-sufficient, secure within his own body and persona, without the need for approval or applause from other people and minus the compulsion to prove anything to anyone, even himself. She might have appreciated these things in him given different circumstances.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, directing an inquiring glance her way. “Or would you rather eat later?”
She had eaten a late breakfast, and though she’d had no lunch, she’d indulged in a filling piece of pound cake with her coffee earlier. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I vote for now, while we have daylight to see what we’re doing.”
Reaching for a sausage can, he opened it and handed it to her, then passed over the plastic box of crackers. Regina got to her feet and drained the liquid from the meat into the lake before fishing out a sausage, putting it on a cracker, then turning to hand it to him.
He had started to open a can for himself. Seeing it, Regina felt foolish with her offering of food. She didn’t quite know why she had done it; the last thing she should be thinking of was feeding the man who had kidnapped her. Still, he had been so polite in serving her first that it had seemed natural to return the favor.
Heat rose in her face. With a small shrug, she began to pull her hand back.
Quickly, he reached for the sausage and cracker with his free hand. His fingers brushed hers, and the tingling contact was so unexpected she almost bungled the transfer of food. She stepped away, regaining her seat. They sat in silence, solemnly consuming their scanty meal. After a short time, Kane opened a bottle of warm soft drink and passed it over. She accepted it, but drank sparingly since she had a feeling bathroom facilities would be as Spartan as everything else.
By the time they had finished and cleared away the trash, the sun had disappeared and dusk was drawing in, becoming night. The water seemed to hold the light longer than on land, reflecting it back into the darkening sky. The last pink glow of evening shone on Kane’s face for a few short minutes, then it faded away.
With the darkness, Regina became intensely aware of the rich, earthy scent of the cypress wood used to build the blind, the cries of night creatures, the freshness of the wind with its taint of dampness and decaying vegetation. A mosquito sang around her, then sailed away. A moment later, Kane slapped at his arm, then rubbed his hand on his shirtsleeve. That was, in her opinion at that particular moment, a far more worthy service than slaying a mere dragon.
She was becoming fanciful, she thought, sitting there with nothing to do. Shifting restlessly on the hard floor, she tried for at least the hundredth time to think of some way out of their dilemma.
Kane turned his head, watching her across the increasing darkness. She couldn’t quite see his face, however, certainly couldn’t read his expression or his intent. When he spoke, his voice was deep and deliberate as it came out of the dusk that lay between them.
“You want to tell me about it?”
“About what?” She knew, but had to ask anyway, in case she might be wrong.
“What happened to you to turn you off men. Who hurt you so much you can’t bear the thought of letting anyone touch you again.”
“What makes you think—”
“Cut the pretense, okay? You don’t have to prove to me how tough or independent you are.”
She swallowed the rest of what she meant to say, blurting out instead, “I’m not tough, and you know it better than anybody, especially any other—”
“Any other man? Why?”
“You’re the only one who’s managed to get close enough in a long, long time.”
The soft sound he made, as if he’d been punched, was perfectly audible. With irony, he said, “You certainly know how to make a guy feel better.”
“It wasn’t my intention to make you feel anything.”
“I know, and that makes it worse. But I asked you a question.”
His intense interest was seductive, his manner compelling. It was as if what she said mattered to him on a personal level that had little to do with her connection to his grandfather. She wondered if this was the secret behind the myth of the Southern gentleman, or a trait peculiar to Kane alone. If so, it worked, for it seemed that he knew so much already, it should be no great thing to tell him the rest. In any case, it was better than sitting there in twitching silence, waiting and wondering.
Once started, she held back nothing. Not the silly, precocious teenager that she had been, her bad judgment in developing an infatuation with a Harvard accent and a fast car, the sickening taste of cheap wine laced with some so-called date-rape drug, or the pain and degradation of waking up and discovering that she had been assaulted while unconscious. The only trouble with telling him these things in such detail was that she also could not spare herself.
“This Harvard guy was prosecuted?” he asked when she was done.
“His father was a big shot with a whole stable of lawyers. Besides, no proof existed other than superficial bruises and a trace of the drug in my blood. I would have tested positive for having had sex and being a recent virgin, but there was nothing to show I was forced. It would have been his word against mine, and amnesia is a side effect of the drug. I couldn’t remember what happened, couldn’t say where we went, when I had the wine, who else was there, nothing concrete. But I must not have been quite out of it toward the end because I have this sense, almost like a dream, of being held down, in the dark, unable to move, while—”
“Don’t,” he said in low command. “I get the picture.”
She stopped, as much because her throat was suddenly too tight to produce sound as at his request. She sat staring into the darkness with burning eyes while somewhere inside there was a dissolving feeling, as if a barrier long and closely held had begun to disintegrate.
“So the man who did it got off scot-free,” he said after a moment. “He got away with his version of scalp collecting. What was your family thinking of?”
“I have no family. At least…” She stopped as she realized she couldn’t tell him about Gervis. “My father left when I was a baby. My mother died when I was ten. Nobody wanted to help me fight a battle I couldn’t win, one that might cause more scars than it could heal.”
He turned his head to watch her. “There was no one to help you, then? No one to take you to counseling or recommend therapy to help deal with the emotional baggage?”
“I dealt with it,” she said, raising her chin, staring at the stars beginning to show one by one in the night sky above them. There was wetness under her eyes, but she didn’t wipe it away for fear of drawing attention to it.
“Did you? Looks to me as if it’s still hanging around.”
“Nothing that’s important, not so long as I still have…” She stopped, warned by some lingering remnant of self-preservation.
“What?”
She looked at his dark shape that rested nearby. The words thick with tears, she said, “My son. Stephan.”
Stephan of the bright smile and crooked teeth and warm, loving baby kisses. Stephan, who adored her, depended on her. Stephan, who must never know how he had been conceived or what manner of spineless, reckless, criminally selfish man his father had been. Stephan, who loved her with all his tender young heart because she was his mother and the only real anchor in his small, unstable world.
Stephan, for whom she would do anything. Anything at all.
“Don’t, Regina,” Kane said, his voice gruff with concern as he stared at her through the darkness. “Don’t cry. I didn’t mean to bring it all back.”
“No,” she said on a hiccuping breath. “I know.”
She did, too. She knew that for all his anger and forcefulness, he would never intentionally cause her real pain. It simply wasn’t in him.
The knowledge gave her courage, offered hope. It also made it plain that the time had come to finally do the job she had been sent to accomplish.
Decision time. No better opportunity was ever going to present itself.
It had to be done. For Gervis, because she must. For Stephan, because he mattered most. And maybe, just maybe, for herself, for reasons that had nothing to do with either of them.
Now or never.
The words scarcely more than a whisper, she said, “If I asked you…?”
“What?” He turned his head attentively as she paused.
“Would…would you hold me for a minute, Kane? Just hold me, and nothing more?”