Elizabeth Lowell - Innocent as Sin

Gabriel watched her without seeming to. If she’d been anyone else’s woman, he would have tried to put his hands on her.

But she was Bertone’s.

“You’re sure he called out Kayla’s name?” Bertone asked.

“Yes.”

“Find her,” Bertone said.

Gabriel stood up. “Catch or kill?”

Bertone’s eyes narrowed. The intelligence and instincts that had gotten him from the frozen gutters of Siberia to Arizona’s Pleasure Valley were twitching. Right now, Kayla knew more about who had saved her than he did.

Knowledge was a weapon.

“Catch,” Bertone said curtly.

He could always kill her later.

Beyond Phoenix

Saturday

8:04 P.M. MST

Slow down,” Kayla said to Rand.

He looked sideways at her. After she’d gotten in the car and given him directions to Dry Valley, she hadn’t said a word.

“I thought you were asleep,” he said.

“Just thinking.” Trying to get used to the impossible. Failing. Trying again. And again. “There’s a deep dip up ahead, a desert wash that runs wall-to-wall in the monsoons. If you don’t slow down, you’ll-”

The suspension on the SUV bottomed out as Rand crested a little rise and dropped into the arroyo she was describing.

Kayla grabbed the overhead handrail and grunted at the impact, then again when the vehicle crested the rise on the far side. She felt weightless in the second before the body of the car slammed down again.

“About that dip,” Kayla said through her teeth. “There are others. If you don’t listen to me, what’s the point of having me along?”

Rand lifted his foot, dropped back to a more reasonable speed, and smiled slightly. “Still channeling your inner bitch?”

“Listen, macho man. I don’t do any better with the ‘You Tarzan, me Jane’ bullshit than I do with the toe-licking lapdog. And I figured out real quick in the garden that the lapdog was an act.”

“What about Tarzan?”

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

“When?” Rand asked.

“When I’m damn good and ready.”

He gave her another sideways glance. She was stiff, clutching the handrail with one hand and bracing herself on the console with the other.

“Still scared?” he asked gently.

Her mouth flattened as she stared at the night racing by on either side of the headlights. “I don’t like handcuffs. They freaked me out more than the silencer on the gun did.”

“Rather be shot than bound, huh? Me too.”

She blew a little breath out of her nose. “Listen, Tarzan. A woman living alone in this world is considered fair game. Smart women know it. Dumb women end up handcuffed one way or another.”

“My name is Rand,” he said patiently. “You can call me McCree if Rand is too friendly for you. Unless you want to be called Jane?”

She almost smiled. “Okay, McCree.”

“As for being fair game, everybody in the world is fair game for a guy like Bertone.”

“So you do know him,” she said.

Gunfire stitching through the helo.

Reed bleeding, sighing.

Dying.

“We’d never met face-to-face until tonight, but yeah, I know a lot about him.”

“And me.”

“And you,” Rand agreed. “You can read my dossier if you like.”

She blinked. “Will it tell me why you wanted to slit Bertone’s throat?”

“I’d better buff my acting skills. I didn’t think I gave myself away.”

“Only once, the last time he turned his back on you.”

Silence filled the car.

Kayla waited.

“Yes, I know Bertone well enough to want him dead,” Rand said. “But that makes me one of about a million potential assassins.”

“Why? Because he’s rich?”

“Because he’s evil.”

She drew in a deep breath. “Interesting choice of words.”

“It’s the twenty-first century,” Rand said calmly, steering the SUV through another steep dip. “People are free to talk about evil rather than bad childhoods, which most people have without turning into murderers. The Siberian started poor, but so do billions of people. They don’t end up like him.”

“Siberian? Bertone? He’s Russian?”

Rand nodded.

“That explains it,” she said.

“Explains what? No country has a corner on evil. I’ll match some American-grown thugs against Bertone any minute of any hour.”

“It explains his accent. His English is grammatically perfect, almost without accent, but there is a heaviness to it that you only get in Slavic tongues.”

“The dossier didn’t mention you were a linguist,” Rand said.

“I traveled a lot, right after college, after my parents died.”

“Did you like it?” he asked, because that part of her dossier had been blank except for passport entries, the coming and going of a world traveler.

“Like it? No. I loved it. I hit every continent except Antarctica. I was looking for a job that would let me save the world. Turns out the world didn’t want to be saved.”

Rand’s smile was a knife-edge of white. “True fact.”

“Then gringos became everybody’s favorite target,” she said without bitterness, “so I hung up my backpack and got a job close to home.”

“Smart. Your experience should make it easier.”

“Make what easier?” she asked.

“I’d hate to try and explain this transnational clusterfuck to someone who’d never been farther than Kansas.”

Rand turned right at the country intersection.

“Are the hummingbirds actually in my dossier?” Kayla asked after a moment. “My babies, as you called them.”

He laughed. “St. Kilda is nothing if not thorough. Those kinds of details are how you discover where someone is likely to surface next. Helps to reaquire the target. You love those flying beggars, which means you’ll show up to feed them, at least for the rest of the month you occupy the ranch.”

“Any other time of the year, I’d let those little flying pigs pollinate cactus, but right now it’s migration time. They count on me to get to Montana. One of my neighbors loves the birds, too. She’s agreed to start feeding them next week. Until then, it’s on my karma.”

Rand couldn’t help liking Kayla better for caring about something that brought her no obvious return. “What species do you have?”

“Oh, I’ve got them all right now, broadtails and Anna’s and Costa’s and even some rufous.”

“The rufous aren’t headed for Montana. They summer by the thousands north of Seattle. In a few weeks they’ll be showing up on my doorstep.”

“You feed hummers?” she asked.

“I even paint them. Or try to. They’re as fast as they are fierce.”

Kayla knew it was crazy, but she trusted Rand more because he shared her love of those flying bits of life.

Then he killed the headlights and her throat closed.

Trust was overrated.

Dry Valley

Saturday

8:08 P.M. MST

What are you doing?” Kayla asked tightly.

“Going in stealth mode.”

She gave him a disbelieving look. “We’re miles from the ranch.”

“Light shows a long way in the desert. I’d rather see someone before he sees me.”

She let out a ragged breath. After a few moments, she got the rhythm of driving in the dark. It helped that the night wasn’t absolutely black. Once her eyes adjusted, the starlight was surprisingly bright, throwing ghostly shadows. The dirt road was a pale ribbon unwinding through the darker plants of the Sonoran Desert.

The longer she went without artificial light, the more she saw. Features of the landscape became distinct; subtle divisions between rock and plant and shadow became clear.

“I used to ride at night,” she said finally. “I loved it. Nobody was trying to kidnap me then. But I see things even more clearly now.”

“Amazing how a little fear sharpens the senses. You ran straight for me in the garden, like a cat.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way. I was too busy being scared silly.”

“You weren’t silly,” he said. “You had your best weapon and were ready to defend yourself no matter what the odds. That’s all anyone can do.”

She was silent for a moment, then let out a long sigh. “Thanks, Rand. I needed that. I felt so damned helpless.”

Rand remembered holding Reed, seeing death take life from his eyes. “I’ve been there. Helpless and screaming inside.”

“You sure didn’t look helpless tonight.”

“Different time, different place. Next time, next place-” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

What she could see of his face told her the same thing his voice did. He meant every word.

Not Tarzan, yodeling through the jungle on waves of testosterone.

Not a lapdog.

Altogether intriguing.

The SUV popped over a rocky ridgeline and started down into Dry Valley. In the distance, a light burned. As they came closer, the single yard light in a fixture on a power pole next to the ranch house outlined every detail around the small house.

“No cars,” Rand said. “No trucks. But then, I’d put my wheels out of sight and wait inside.”

“I don’t like the sound of that. Do you really think someone’s inside my-Bertone’s-house?”

“Probably not. But why regret not doing what’s smart?”

He drove slowly into the yard between the corral and the low-roofed ranch house. The cone of light from the single bulb fell across a post that was mounted with three swinging arms, each about a foot long. At the end of each arm there was a hummingbird feeder with a clear plastic barrel and red plastic base.