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A tremor rushed over her. He tightened his hold, then stepped to the side, turning her at the same time. They faced each other, their expressions solemn, their eyes questioning. She wondered if his doubts were the same as hers. At the moment, it didn’t matter.
Slowly she raised her hands and caressed along his shirtfront. “Warm, so warm,” she said.
“Burning up,” he admitted.
Cade cupped her face in his hands and sipped from her lips as if he’d found a rare and perfect wine, a nectar of incredible sweetness stolen from the gods. And like all mortals who dared the fates, he knew he would pay…someday…somehow….
He groaned as need pushed aside the dire musing. He took her mouth in a kiss of fire, of insatiable passion. He needed more from her.
“Have to touch you,” he said in half apology, half anticipation.
“Yes. Oh, yes.” Sara wanted nothing between them—no clothing, no second thoughts, no past filled with hatred and regret. She pushed her hands under his shirt and caressed his back.
The muscles flexed beneath her fingers, hinting at raw power kept under tight control. She wanted to experience that power for herself, to feel it against her…in her.
She turned her head and sighed shakily. “This is…we shouldn’t…It’s so…unwise.”
“I know,” he whispered, his mouth hot on her neck just below her ear. “Stop me. If you can.” Cade chuckled ruefully, knowing she was as caught up in the moment as he was. Something primitive and wild flashed through his blood, driving out sanity in the face of this terrible need. For her. For this woman.
“Come. We need to go inside,” he said, feeling her tremble again. He held his breath as he turned them toward her door.
“Stacy,” she said.
“I have the monitor on. With the doors open, we’ll hear if she calls out.” He guided her inside.
Sara felt the sofa touch the back of her knees. She tossed the sweater on a chair and kicked off her shoes when Cade did. He enclosed her in a warm embrace and together they sank onto the cushions.
Their bodies meshed as if they’d done this a thousand times. They stretched out on the supple leather—thighs locked, chests and abdomens touching, hands reaching, searching beneath the barriers of their clothing until they could touch living flesh.
“Your skin is as smooth as flower petals,” he murmured as he imprinted kisses over her face.
“So is yours,” she said just as ardently, completely entranced by the growing intimacy.
His low laughter delighted her, and she laughed, too. It felt natural and reassuring.
“I need more,” he said.
She let him unfasten the buttons on her blouse, helped shed it and the bra, then waited, her heart surging like a storm-driven tide, as he unfastened his shirt and wrapped her in it so that skin nestled against skin.
“You’re burning me up,” he told her, his mouth stirring her to madness as he kissed along her neck, then drew back enough to lave her peaked breasts with his tongue until she gasped and moaned with hunger.
Arching slightly, she moved against him, feeling the enticing hardness against her tummy. He clasped her thigh in one hand and positioned it over his hip.
“Oh,” she cried softly as sensation whirled through her at the greater contact. She only had to press slightly to experience even more.
He moved with her, their breathing shallow and rapid as the flames danced and leaped through their entwined bodies.
“Cade,” she whispered. “You must…you must come to me….”
“I want to,” he assured her. “But I didn’t expect this. I didn’t prepare for it.” He caught her hand when she tugged at his jeans, then pressed her palm against his chest. “No more. I don’t have protection.”
She bit into her bottom lip as disappointment hit. “You, uh, the operation…”
“A vasectomy was Rita’s idea. I never had one.” He gazed into her eyes. “Unless you’re protected, we have to stop…now.”
A tangle of questions wrapped around them, buzzed like angry bees between them as they contemplated each other solemnly. His smile was unexpected—a rueful acknowledgment of their predicament.
“Okay, let’s quit while we’re ahead,” he said.
He swung up and away from her. The night air from the open door swept over her, chilling the ardor to embers but not quite putting the fire out. She sighed.
“Me, too,” he said. He leaned down and kissed her lightly, picked up his shoes and departed.
Sara wrapped her sweater around her shivering body. Sitting there in the dark, she went over the events of the evening. There had been such strange undercurrents between them. And then the passion.
She’d never known a man like Cade. Gentle. Caring. A wonderful father. There was something deeply honorable about him. She felt it in her bones. She should tell him why she’d come to San Francisco. Before he found out in a different way. Like when the police came to arrest his father.
“Complexities,” she said aloud and sighed again.
Chapter Five
Two nights later, the ring of the doorbell startled Sara as she sat in the den and tried to read a long novel about a rich family and their problems.
She personally thought it would do the fictional characters good to take on a poor family’s problems and see how life felt when there wasn’t enough money to buy one’s way out of difficulty.
Rising, she went to the front door. It was too late for Stacy to be up and she assumed Cade would use the back door since the den was in the rear of the house. That left Tyler to be calling at nine-thirty in the evening.
She was right. Flicking off the dead bolt, she opened the elegant portal and invited him in. “Did you just get off work?” she asked, seeing his suit.
“Yeah.” He rubbed a hand over his face after entering the town house. “Got anything to eat?”
“Ham-and-cheese sandwich or omelette?”
“Omelette. Three eggs. I’m starved.”
After locking the door, she led the way into the kitchen. “Don’t they let police detectives eat in this city?” she asked with a sympathetic glance.
“Not if they can help it.” His smile was weary.
She prepared a large omelette and poured it into a skillet. While it cooked, she dropped an English muffin into the toaster, considered, then added one for herself. In a few minutes, she handed Tyler a tray with his food and carried one for herself with the toasted muffin, strawberry jam and a glass of milk on it.
They ate in the den with the trays across their laps. “So what’s happening?” she demanded when her brother remained stubbornly silent.
He roused from his introspection. “Trouble.”
The hair prickled on the back of her neck. “What kind of trouble?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.” He finished off the omelette and the last drink of milk. “Got any coffee?”
“I’ll make you a latte.” She prepared the steamed milk and coffee, did one for herself, then returned. “Help yourself,” she said dryly, noting that he had devoured the other half of her muffin and jam and was swallowing the last of her milk.
“Sorry. I was still hungry.”
She handed him the steaming mug and settled onto the sofa again. “Has Mark Banning found our dear uncle?”
Tyler shook his head. “Someone tried to hack into my computer, though, and set up a worm to send everything I had on file to a third computer.”
Alarm spread through Sara. “Who?”
“I couldn’t trace ’em. They covered their tracks well.”
“Did they find out anything about our quest?”
“No. Fortunately I use a separate drive for all Internet searches and then check it for viruses and worms after each session on the Net. That’s when I discovered someone was trying to implant a tracking program on me.”
“We haven’t tried to hide,” she reminded him. “We use our real names. Do you think Walter Parks had anything to do with the hacker?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, I live next door to his son. Cade remembers me from years ago. If he mentioned me to his father, then Walter would know the Carltons—at least some of us—are back in town.”
“And he might wonder exactly what we’re doing here,” Tyler concluded.
“Only if he has a guilty conscience. Otherwise why would he care?”
Her brother snorted. “I’ve done some research on his business dealings. He’s known to be a ruthless competitor. I doubt his conscience bothers him much.”
“Cade doesn’t seem at all like his father,” she murmured, recalling the son’s determination to be a better parent to his daughter than his father had been to him and his siblings.
“Have you found out anything from him?” Tyler asked.
“Like what?”
“How the family business is prospering? The old man has been doing a lot of buying lately. There’s been a large payment to a foreign diamond dealer of dubious reputation through an overseas bank. There’s also been a couple of mysterious deliveries to his store of late. Uninsured deliveries by courier.”
“So?”
Her brother shrugged. “So, I don’t know. Too bad the company is family-owned. Their records are private, so it’s more difficult to check on their business dealings. But not impossible,” he added. “Twenty-five years ago, the Parks empire seemed to take off. Where did the money come from?”
“The Carlton diamond business that apparently somehow disappeared into thin air without a trace just as Father did during that ill-fated yachting party?”
“That’s what I think,” her brother confirmed her guess.
Sara sipped the latte while she thought. “You and Nick and Mark Banning have the inside track on the investigation. I feel rather useless in the grand scheme of things. What do you want me to do?”
“Feed me when I drop by?” Tyler suggested with a grin, then became serious again. “The son knows the business. Can you get him to talk about the family’s fortunes? See if he knows how much was inherited from his mother’s side of the family. Walter Parks didn’t have much but ambition and a sharp mind before he married. As soon as his father-in-law died, two years after the marriage, Walter changed the name of the company from Lindsay Mining to Parks Mining and Exploration.”
Sara glanced at her brother in surprise at this news. “You have been busy. There’s something that occurs to me as sort of suspicious. Remember Mark told us that shortly after the party on the yacht, Walter sent his wife to a Swiss sanitarium?”
“Swiss, huh? I don’t think Mark knows that. I’ll have him start checking—”
“Sorry, that was just a manner of speaking. In novels, people always get sent to reclusive Swiss hospitals high in the mountains when their kin want to get rid of them. Anyway, Anna Parks was sent overseas somewhere when Cade was a child. He said the children never saw her, that his father said she wouldn’t care about them.”
“So?”
Sara frowned intently into the middle distance while she marshaled her thoughts. “Don’t you think that’s rather convenient and coincidental? According to Mother, Anna was present at the celebration aboard the yacht. What if she saw her husband have a quarrel with his partner? Maybe they got into a fight and our father, sorry, my father—”
“It’s okay. I still think of Jeremy Carlton as my father, too,” Tyler assured her.
“So maybe Jeremy fell and broke his neck or something. Then Walter panicked and threw the body overboard and Anna witnessed the whole thing. If she insisted her husband go to the police with the truth, then he might have needed to shut her up. What better way than to get her committed to an asylum for the insane in a foreign country?”
“Good point,” Tyler murmured.
“Also,” Sara continued. “When did he go into the retail business? It seems to me it would take a lot of money to open a jewelry store, and now he owns two of the most prestigious ones in California. Was that after our family somehow lost everything?”
Tyler ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets as if he could erase the weariness. He covered a huge yawn before answering. “He has a way of taking over any enterprise he’s involved in while his partners—I use that term loosely—have a way of losing out.”
“Or disappearing,” Sara reminded him. “Tyler, be careful. I feel threatened. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I have this odd feeling, like a noose tightening around us. Both of us.”
He patted her arm as he rose. “I always pay attention to hunches and odd feelings. I think we’re making someone nervous—”
“Walter Parks,” she said grimly, also standing and walking toward the front to see him out.
“Yeah. Are you going to back out?”
“No. Why would you think that?”
“Just a feeling.” He gave her an insouciant grin, then nodded his head toward the other town house. “He was pretty interested to see who rode up front with me and who rode in the back with Nick when we went to dinner Saturday night. Anything going on between you two that I should know about?”
Sara sighed and wrinkled her nose at her smart-mouthed sibling. “He’s very attractive,” she finally admitted.
“Aha,” Tyler said softly as they arrived at the front door and paused there.
“It’s confusing. He doesn’t seem ruthless. In fact, he’s a wonderful father.”
“Even an animal looks after its own.”
“I know. He’s my enemy and yet…” She shrugged.
Tyler studied her for a few seconds, then rubbed his brow as if his head hurt. “Sometimes lightning strikes, and there you are, burned to the core.”
The words were so startling, so much like a confession, that Sara was startled. “Tyler, have you met someone? Are you in love?”
His brief laughter was tinged with bitterness. “Hardly. It was nothing. A one-night stand.”
Sara was confused. “But if there’re feelings—”
“Forget it,” he said. “The lady obviously did.”
