BEFORE CARR COULD blink, he found himself standing in an indoor shooting stall with a pistol in his hand and a target in the distance.
He felt ridiculous. How was this supposed to help him deal with the fact that he’d spent most of his life as an unconscionable leech?
With a sigh, he fired. Again. Then again.
Each time, the kick from the pistol jolted him back, and he found himself wanting to overpower the urge to recoil.
Malina laid her hand on his back and shouted over the other shots echoing through the range. “Relax your fingers! Keep your shoulders and stance strong.”
Taking her advice, he found his rhythm smoother, his shots more accurate. At some point, the world around him fell away and all he saw was the target.
When the clip was empty, she reloaded for him, and he set off again.
He pictured nights he’d toasted victory with colleagues in Manhattan. He remembered the cold satisfaction he’d felt the first time one of his clients had received a judgment that was way out of proportion with the damage done. He recalled the times he’d smiled over companies driven to their knees or out of business entirely as a result of cases.
At the end of the fourth round, he was exhausted and oddly cleansed. The exercise had been brutal but absolutely necessary.
He and Malina might be different in many ways but she understood, as no one else could, that he needed a safe way to expend his anger. He’d spent the past few years hating himself, and he needed to kill his old life before he could truly move ahead to the new future he was embracing.
Not a therapy the good Sister might advocate, but one he supported anyway.
“Don’t even think about doing that in reality,” Malina said, snagging the gun from his hand and holstering it.
“Why?” He pulled off his headphones. “I didn’t do so bad.”
She glanced back at the target and winced. “Firearms are for trained professionals, which you most certainly are not.”
He’d hit, well…something most of the time. “You do it,” he challenged.
“Nah. Too easy.”
“But you come here a lot.”
Her gaze searched his, and whatever she found had her turning. “Come on.”
After a walk down the hall, through a door and yet another hall, he found himself in a stark room with dark walls extending in a box in front of him. Malina walked to the far end of the room, where a computer rested. She tapped the keys, then pulled a pistol, not from her holster, but a bin beside the monitor.
As she approached him, he noticed both the challenge in her eyes and the gun in her hand.
“It has the same weight as a real pistol,” she said, shoving not an ammunition clip but a tiny card, like the ones in digital cameras, into the butt of the gun. “Ready?”
After a mesmerizing pause as he was captured senseless by her turquoise eyes, he nodded.
She pressed another button on a tiny black box against the wall.
The simulation began.
It was sort of like shooting ducks with a rifle at the fair, only the scene was a computer-generated, 3-D, all-too-real video game. The bad guys jumped out from all angles, firing at will. People screamed. The report of guns ricocheted. And, near the end, the lights went out and Carr heard random fire from seemingly all directions.
Malina simply closed her eyes and continued to knock off targets.
“How’d you do that?” Carr asked as they walked out of the gun club a while later.
“Arrange for you to shoot inanimate objects and save yourself thousands of dollars in therapy? I called and made a reservation.”
“I got that.” Carr slid his arm around her waist as he steered her back against the car. “How can you close your eyes and still hit all the targets?”
“I practice.”
“Uh-huh.” He pressed his body the length of hers, and she let out a quiet moan. He was alive again, and she was the reason. He skimmed kisses along her neck. “How?”
“You’re certainly back to normal.”
“Thanks to you. How?”
She met his gaze. “Your vision isn’t as acute as your hearing in the dark. Closing my eyes helps me to focus. What you hear is just as important as what you see.”
“Mmm…and what do you hear?” he whispered in her ear.
“You. I hear you…constantly.” She wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head against his chest.
The helplessness that had invaded him so thoroughly had lifted, and he knew both Malina’s unusual brand of therapy, as well as the woman herself, had caused the change. What he didn’t know was why she’d decided to help him.
She seemed to use any excuse to discount or outright avoid their relationship, and yet she was beside him. Holding him.
“How about dinner? I’m fairly certain there’s a roasted chicken with vegetables in my fridge that’s completely untouched.”
“You’re on.”
THEY MANAGED idle conversation during dinner, but the moment the last plate was in the dishwasher, they grabbed each other.
Covering her mouth with his, he backed her against the kitchen counter as she attacked the buttons on his shirt. He cupped her cheek in his palm, angling her head, deepening the kiss with needy desperation. He slid his tongue against hers as they continued to fumble with their clothing, their fingers clumsy in desperation.
She got his pants and shirt unfastened, then rolled a condom in place. He got her shirt off, her front-clasp bra unhooked and her pants and panties off. Just enough access so that when he lifted her onto the counter, he was able to enter her in one, smooth, deep stroke.
“Oh, man,” she moaned. “Please do that again.”
He obliged her until she’d wrapped her legs like a vise around his waist and her breathing grew choppy, frantic. She came on a hot groan of surrender, squeezing with potent, seductive pulses, bringing him to his own breath-stealing climax.
She collapsed against him. “I feel so much better.”
He chuckled, stroking the silky length of her hair. “Hey, I was the one suffering.”
She placed a kiss against his heaving chest. “Not the only one,” she said so softly he could barely discern the words.
“Why are you here?” he asked reluctantly, not sure he could have if she’d been looking at him with those intense ocean eyes. “You don’t want to be with me. Why should you?”
She clutched him tighter, with both arms and legs. “But I do.”
Closing his eyes, he kissed the top of her head. He had no idea where they were headed, but he knew the journey was one he couldn’t miss. “I never knew about Bailey’s suicide until last night.”
“I know.”
“And you think that makes me better?”
“It makes you human.”
“There are dozens, maybe hundreds out there like her. You’ve done a background check on me. You know what I was.”
She finally lifted her head to look at him. “I know you’re a great attorney. You’ve won hundreds of judgments for your clients.”
“And I never cared about one of them,” he said harshly, turning away and fastening his pants. “I smiled at them, wined and dined them to get their lucrative cases, then I cashed my checks and never gave them another thought. I didn’t take on small cases, ones with true injustice done.”
She walked around him, still wearing only her unbuttoned shirt, unashamed in her nudity.
But then, she wasn’t the one exposing her humiliating past.
“So you decided to make it your mission to beat yourself,” she said. “That’s why you defend churches, charities, anybody who’s weak, underfunded or just has a righteous cause. You didn’t want somebody like you coming along to subvert justice.” She studied him as if seeing him for the first time. “Why? What changed?”
He grabbed her hand like a lifeline. “Come on. I’ll tell you.”
They settled on the sofa in the living room, and though she said she wasn’t cold, he certainly was, so he settled at one end, tucking her back between his legs and a blanket on top of them both.
“My uncle died,” he said into the silence. “If he hadn’t…” He shook his head humbly. “Well, I might still be a shark with no soul or conscience.”
She said nothing, simply rubbed her hands over his, where they rested against her stomach.
Who would have believed tough, decisive, my-way-or-the-highway Malina Blair’s well of compassion was so deep and strong.
In that moment, he knew he loved her.
However illogical or ill-fated, she was the one he’d been searching for, hoping and praying for.
He leaned his face into her hair, breathing in the clean scent, wanting to remember her long after she left him for bigger and better things in Washington. In many ways, it was right that he should love but not have.
“He was an attorney in New York, too,” he continued. No secrets could be held between him and this woman now. He couldn’t protect his heart anymore, after all. “He was my mentor and had a lucrative practice in products liability. He taught me the ropes, sponsored me at his country club in the Hamptons, introduced me to fine wines and beautiful women.
“Other than my years at Yale, I’d spent my life on Palmer’s Island, and I was dazzled by all of it.”
Carr forced himself to look back and remember expensive dinners, flashy nightclubs and meaningless nights with vapid women who couldn’t care less how he paid the bills, as long as he did.
“I learned the game quickly,” he continued. “I helped us expand to environmental disasters and class action suits. And the money rolled in….”
“Okay, stop.” Malina held up her hand and twisted around to glare at him. “A lot of those companies deserved judgments against them. I read your file. Chemical spills. People with chronic pain and cancer. Blatant plant safety violations. You aren’t the only villain here.”
“You think I’m a villain?”
She looked exasperated. “You seem determined to cast yourself in that role. I was merely helping.”
When she settled back against him, he continued. “We took only cases that were capable of bringing in big judgments. I protested that policy at first, then as I made more money and our firm’s reputation rose higher and higher, I bought my luxury uptown apartment and didn’t much care how I’d arrived there.
“I’d sold out. I knew it when it was happening and chose to ignore the warnings my conscience tried to occasionally instill. I used my brains and charm without scruples, and I became a huge success.”
Malina clutched his fingers, as if she was afraid of the scene he described.
“Only my uncle’s sudden heart attack jolted me back to reality, made me face what I’d become. I swore I wouldn’t die as he had—rich, bitter, unconscionable and alone. So, I closed the practice, packed up and came home.”
She turned. “That’s it? You didn’t kick kids or dogs or homeless people?”
“Kick—” What was she talking about? “No, of course not.”
She laid her hands against his cheeks. “I have a thing for dogs—golden retrievers in particular, and I don’t care about the rest of it. I didn’t know you then, and the man in front of me now is the one I’m interested in.”
The look in her eyes was steady, unyielding and vividly blue. She should be running from him, and she wasn’t.
Grateful beyond words, he leaned forward and kissed her.
She returned his touch ardently, straddling his lap and parting his shirt, then pushing it off his shoulders. Within moments, they were naked and she was beneath him, moaning his name, giving him solace and understanding with strokes instead of words.
As they lay on their sides, satisfied and replete, he continued to slide his hands up and down her warm, bare back. He wanted to say things, pretty words that spoke to the depths of his emotions. But he knew she wasn’t ready to hear them, and he wanted to hear her rejection even less.
Pushing her tangled hair off her face, he brushed his lips across her cheek. “Would you be so understanding if someone else, not me, admitted they’d done all those things?”
She winced. “Probably not.” When he grinned, she asked, “How is that a good thing?”
“It makes me special.”
She rolled her eyes, but she was clearly holding back a smile.
“Let’s do my favorite thing now,” he said.
“I thought we just did.”
He slapped her backside lightly. “I meant walk on the beach.”
WEARING HER NAVY SLACKS, which would never be the same after the salt water dried on them, and one of Carr’s old Yale sweatshirts, Malina kicked through the cold surf. “Chicken,” she said when he jumped out of reach of the spraying water.
He stretched out his arm and grabbed her hand, dragging her onto firmer, drier sand. “If you want a swim, the pool’s heated.”
“I didn’t bring my suit.”
Pulling her against his side, the expression on his face became decidedly lecherous. “That won’t be a problem.”
She drank in the hungry look in his dark eyes. He did have a way of making her heart race and her knees weak. “I’ll bet.”
“After we walk, okay?”
She nodded mutely. Falling under Carr’s potent spell was like falling asleep, fast and natural. It was no wonder the man had made millions off juries.
Hand in hand, they continued walking down the beach, which was surprisingly peaceful. Malina only had the urge to take off in a sprint once. It wasn’t 3-D hostage takeover simulations, but it wasn’t half-bad.
“So how did things go with the jeweler this morning?” he asked.
Oh, right. She was here only long enough to solve a boatload of cases so she could hightail it back to D.C.
And why did that suddenly seem like a lousy plan? Why did part of her long to walk with Carr up and down this tiny stretch of beach in the middle of nowhere for years on end?
But was she really considering giving up her career dreams for a man? Didn’t she want to move up the Bureau’s elite ladder? Didn’t she want to make Director?
Shaking aside her internal questions, she recounted her and Andrea’s encounter with Bill Billings, finding it hard to believe that had only occurred this morning.
“So Simon, Jack, plus associates really did steal diamonds from that mine in Australia and bring them to South Carolina to unload.”
“Sure looks that way.”
“I actually stumbled onto an international jewel theft ring.”
That would certainly go to his head. “Yep.”
Carr stopped suddenly. “And we have absolutely no proof.”
“We’ve got a stolen diamond.”
“Found on a public dock with no fingerprints or any other forensic evidence.”
“We witnessed Jack carrying a box on the dock just before we found the diamond.”
“But we didn’t see the diamond fall out of the box. Theoretically, it could have already been there.”
“You witnessed an exchange of merchandise for money between Jack and his cronies.”
Looking wildly frustrated, Carr kicked sand with his foot. “They could have been buying and selling candlesticks, baseball caps, shells from the seashore.”
“Shells from the seashore?” Malina repeated. “Do you ever stop being a lawyer?”
“No, it’s instinctive—like you and your little gun games. And it’s a good thing for you that my instincts are finely honed. We know what happened, we know pretty much everybody involved in the crime, but we’ve got nothing to prove it in court.”
“We have Simon and his varied aliases.”
Carr waved that away. “From prints obtained illegally. It’s not enough.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“You don’t seem worked up about that little reality.” When she shrugged, he seemed to finally realize her calm had a reason. “You’ve got a plan.”
“I’ve got some definite ideas.”
Laughing, he grabbed her and swung her into his arms, heading back toward the house. “All in all, I usually like your ideas.”
“Usually?”
“I seem to recall you ordering me off your case several times.”
“Even the best agents can make mistakes.”
“You admit making a mistake? Remind me to note this date and time in my PDF.”
Part of her wanted to tell him to put her down, she could walk herself. But the house’s landscape lights glowed in the distance, accenting its round, modern features, and Malina sighed against his shoulder instead.
She was pretty crazy about that house.
Promising they’d talk through her ideas after their swim, Carr set her down by the pool. She was in the process of, yet again, unbuttoning his shirt—really, the man should just walk around bare chested—when she noticed movement from inside his house.
Cursing the carelessness that had her leaving her Glock on the kitchen counter, she stepped between him and the windows. “Get down.”
“Wha—”
She grabbed his arm and jerked him to a crouch. “Be quiet. Stay here.”
Careful to keep to the shadows, she inched closer to the windows. Carr, naturally, ignored her order and followed.
“This is Palmer’s Island,” he whispered when they stopped behind a shrub underneath the kitchen window. “I leave my doors unlocked all the time. It’s probably just some lost tourist.”
Malina looked at him in disbelief. “This is Palmer’s Island, home to an international jewel theft ring.”
“Hmm, good point. Still, you did that yesterday with Mrs. Bailey—jumped between me and her. I can handle myself, you know.”
“Whatever.”
“Do you really think Jack or Simon is on to us?”
“Obviously I didn’t, since my pistol is inside.”
“Are you always this cranky during missions?”
“Are you always this chatty?”
She needed to know what they were facing so she could decide if they should head for the car or if they could handle whoever they’d encounter inside. She risked a peek at the corner of the window.
After a quick glance, she sighed and dropped next to Carr. “You can handle yourself, huh? How about a nun sitting at your kitchen table?”