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Heat flashed hot and hard and powerful. Her heart broke into a staccato rhythm, much like the rush after drinking a venti latte. That was life with Hawk Monroe, she knew. A caffeine overdose.
Maybe that’s why her hands had been shaking that night, as she’d reached for the little foil package and almost savagely ripped it open. Maybe that’s why her vision had blurred, why she’d looked at Hawk and seen surprise and fascination, not hard, uncompromising lines.
Maybe that’s why she’d come apart in ways she’d never imagined possible. Never wanted to experience again.
“Ellie?”
Startled, she lifted her eyes to the mirror, where she saw Hawk filling the doorway, watching her through those hot, knowing eyes. “Find what you need?”
Chapter 3
Hawk just stared. Long damp strands of sable hair scraggled against her face, but not enough to hide the surprise, almost the…guilt, in her eyes. Her skin was slightly flushed. Her lips were parted. She looked almost exactly like she had when she—
Uh-oh.
It took effort, because he damn well liked the sight, but Hawk forced himself to look from the mirror to his shaving kit, where the box of condoms winked at him like a pal with the habit of reappearing at the worst possible time.
And he knew. God have mercy, he knew why Elizabeth looked exactly the way she had that night two years before.
Awkward wasn’t a word in Hawk’s vocabulary. He always had just the right comeback, the right solution. But when he looked into Elizabeth’s wide eyes and saw memory glowing back at him—the heat, the uncertainty—his body came to immediate and painful attention.
Say something, he commanded himself. Break the moment before it breaks you. It was bad enough he had to spend the night with her. He didn’t need to spend it with memories, too.
“Don’t worry, Ellie,” he gritted out, spurred on by survival instincts that had failed him earlier. “I’m not here to get you into bed. We’ve been there,” he said with a casualness he didn’t come close to feeling, “done that, remember?” He paused, tried to smooth the jagged edges inside him. For effect he grinned. “And if I were a betting man, I’d lay money on the fact you threw out the T-shirt.”
Confident he’d said what was necessary to kill the moment of intimacy, Hawk braced an arm against the doorjamb and waited. But then the most amazing thing happened. Elizabeth didn’t look away or lift her chin, she didn’t skewer him with a pointed comeback. She…smiled.
“Actually,” she said in that honeyed voice of hers, the one that rang of old Richmond breeding and hot Southern nights, the one she usually hid behind crisp boarding-school style, “I donated the T-shirt.”
He didn’t know whether to laugh or swear or eliminate the distance between them and show her just what she did to him. Still. Even now. Against every rule in his book.
“You saying I’m a charity case, dear heart?” he asked, stepping toward her.
The bathroom wasn’t big to begin with, but with both of them standing in the cramped space and the heat of memory weaving between them like a net falling into place, the little white walls seemed to box them in. She tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go.
“Your words,” she said with a breeziness that he recognized as dismissal, “Not mine.”
This time he did laugh. “Because if I’m a charity case and your job is fund-raising, then maybe we should seriously consider getting another donation together and—”
She lifted her chin. “Go away, Wesley.”
He’d never been a man to back down from a challenge, and that cultured, clipped voice registered as a twenty on a scale of one to ten.
“What are you afraid of?” he drawled, his voice low. “I’ve told you my intentions are honorable, and it’s a little late for modesty.” They both knew he’d seen her do far more than brush her teeth. “If I go away, who’ll protect you from the bad guys?”
Her eyes met his. “Maybe I’ll take my chances.”
“But I won’t.” Then, because the Army had taught him the value of ending a campaign before the tide turned, he reached into his shaving kit, found the spare toothbrush and handed it to her. “Here.”
She took the red handle from him and ripped off the plastic wrapper. “I’d tell you you’re a jerk,” she said, meeting his gaze in the mirror, “but that would make you too happy.”
Very true. “And God knows that would be a crime,” he muttered, then turned and walked out of the bathroom.
He didn’t look back.
As much as he’d once enjoyed playing verbal chess with Elizabeth Carrington, that time had come and gone. They weren’t dancing in the shadows now. Each encounter wasn’t foreplay. They’d exploded and fizzled out, no matter how much a part of him deep, deep inside burned to see if he could still rattle her cage. He had a job to do. It was as simple as that.
Out there somewhere, Jorak Zhukov lurked. Thirsting for revenge. Targeting Elizabeth. Acting out of character. Striking quickly wasn’t his style. The bastard preferred to stalk his prey slowly, deliberately, luring them into invisible traps.
Desperation, however, could change a man.
Hawk knew that well.
Pacing, he glanced toward the nightstand, where his Glock lay next to Elizabeth’s black pearls. They shimmered against her skin, changed colors with her outfits. Once, he’d enjoyed holding them in his fingers, rubbing, caressing…
On impulse he crossed the room and sat on the bed closest the window, picked up the pearls. They were soft and smooth, cultured, refined.
Just like her.
Swearing softly, he let the pearls fall from his fingers, but could do nothing about the sound of gunfire echoing through his memory.
“You don’t have any more surprises in store for me, do you?” Elizabeth turned off the bathroom light and breezed into the main room. “We are headed to Richmond tomorrow, right?”
Hawk stretched out on the bed and linked his hands behind his head. When he’d left her a few minutes before, her eyes had been big and dark, memory glowing like a candle that refused to burn out. But classic Elizabeth Carrington, she’d washed all that messy emotion away and now looked at him through a gaze as refined as the pearls he’d been fingering moments before.
“I don’t know,” he said, unable to resist. He lifted the remote and cruised away from CNN. “I was thinking we could take a scenic tour of Lake Louise first…”
Elizabeth swung around. “Wesley,” she said with just the right blue-blood clip. “I’m serious.”
Hawk felt his lips twitch, clenched his teeth hard. Laughing at her wouldn’t help matters, but she had no idea how she looked, standing there with her mother’s glare in her eyes and his ratty flannel shirt hanging from her shoulders.
“So am I,” he drawled, then stopped channel surfing on a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game. “I was reading about a horseback ride up to a glacier, where there’s this quaint little tearoom.” Laughter almost broke through the words. “You like tea, don’t you, Ellie?” he asked with all the innocence of the young elk pictured on the cover of the travel magazine beneath his Glock.
“Why the hurry to get back to Richmond when you’re in such a beautiful country?” he added, knowing the answer. “Does being around me make you that uncomfortable?”
For a minute, there, he actually thought she was going to stalk across the room and smack him.
Instead she lifted her chin. “Saturday is the charity auction. Nicholas and I—”
“Nicholas.” Hawk felt his whole body go tense. “I thought you two called it quits.”
She turned from him and stared a long moment at the ice bucket and room-service menu strewn on the floor. Frowning, she picked them up and returned them to the dresser. “We did.”
The momentary enjoyment he’d found in teasing Elizabeth hardened into something dark and entirely too familiar. He worked hard to shove the emotion down, but the reality of what that man represented overrode years of rigorous training.
“What happened?” He resisted the urge to close the distance between them and take her shoulders in his hands, force her to look him in the eye, deny what they both knew. “You couldn’t marry him after we—”
“No.” The denial came out hard and fast, determined.
But Hawk had to wonder. He knew she’d dreamed of marrying Ferreday since she’d been a young girl, long before Hawk entered her life. And he knew to Elizabeth, plans were sacrosanct. But part of him wanted to think their night together had forced her to reconsider her plans, to realize what a pompous idiot Ferreday really was.
The thought of Elizabeth going from Hawk’s bed, to Ferreday’s, still had the power to grind him up inside.
Keeping his voice level was hard. “Then why?”
Her back stiffened. “I’m not discussing this with you.”
“Sure you are,” he drawled, fascinated by the way she fiddled with the room-service menu. Elizabeth Carrington was one of those rare women who never seemed at a loss, who always maintained her poise and composure, even beneath the suffocating glare of the hot Virginia sun. “Otherwise you’ll let my imagination take over, and we both know you don’t want to do that.”
She pivoted toward him, flashed a tight smile. “Nothing happened, Wesley. The timing was just wrong.”
“And now?”
Damp hair scraggled against her cheekbones, emphasizing the flicker of hesitation. “Things are…better.”
That’s not what Miranda had told him. Only a few months before, when he’d escorted Elizabeth’s sister to Portugal, Miranda had looked him in the eye and told him Elizabeth and Nicholas weren’t together anymore, that Elizabeth had never been the same since Hawk left. That the two of them should talk.
He’d politely explained that the two of them had never…talked.
Intrigued, he swung his legs to the side of the bed and lowered his feet to the floor.
Things weren’t better. And they weren’t going to be better, not until Jorak Zhukov was behind bars.
“I hate to break it to you,” he said, needing her to understand the significance of the situation, “but until Zhukov is caught, public appearances are like handing an arsonist a can of gasoline and a match.”
Her eyes flared wide. “I realize that,” she said softly, then glanced toward the vacant bed. Just as quickly, she looked away. “I don’t make a habit of tempting fate.”
But she had.
Once.
The memory cruised through him, hot and damning, and though he knew the polite thing to do—the gentlemanly thing to do—would be to ignore the eight-hundred-pound pink elephant she’d just summoned from the past, he couldn’t quit looking at her standing fewer than ten feet away, with her hair starting to dry and falling loose around her face, her gaze startled, her lips parted. Even wearing nothing but his ratty, threadbare flannel shirt, she still managed to steal his breath.
He met her gaze. “You sure about that?”
Elizabeth glanced at the bedside clock and squeezed her eyes shut, and Hawk had his answer.
“Life doesn’t always unfold neat and tidy the way we want it to,” he pointed out, leaning forward to balance his elbows on his knees. He didn’t understand his fierce need to force her to look in the mirror. “I’d have thought you’d realized that by now.”
Her gaze met his, quiet, seeking. “I’ve realized a lot, Wesley. Have you?”
The question splintered through him. A hot comeback begged for release, but he refused to let her lure him on to a path he had no desire to travel. It was late, and tomorrow would be a long day. She’d probably been awake close to twenty-four hours. She’d been tracked, almost abducted, could have been killed. Any adrenaline had long since drained away.
He wasn’t sure how much longer she could stay standing.
“Come to bed, Elizabeth. You’re exhausted.”
She didn’t move. “Have you?”
The control he’d been exerting crumbled. She wanted an answer? Fine, he’d give her one. “You want to know what I’ve realized?” The question broke from his throat rougher than he’d intended. “I’ve realized you’ve got your whole life mapped out, and nothing else matters. You know what you’re going to do, what’s acceptable and what’s not, who you’ll be with. Everything is black, or it’s white. Gray confuses you.”
Elizabeth crossed to the little bed a few feet from him, then meticulously folded back the bedspread. Only when she finished did she turn to him, and when she did, she quickly stepped back, as though she’d just realized how close the two beds really were.
If she moved two steps, she’d be standing between his thighs.
For a moment she just looked at him, at his bare chest where the ugly scar was a brutal reminder of how little she gave a damn about him. Then slowly she lifted her eyes to his.
“I suppose you think you’re the gray?”
“I don’t fit into preconceived notions.” If he had, if he was a gentleman like Nicholas, he’d be wearing a pair of pale blue pajamas, with the top buttoned all the way up to his throat, not lounging there more naked than not. “I don’t play by the rules.”
“No,” she agreed with brutal speed, then turned and practically yanked back the crisp white sheet. “You fly by the seat of your pants.”
And finally they’d reached the heart of the matter.
“It’s not a crime.”
Elizabeth stiffened, kept staring at the bed. He could tell she was on the verge of collapse, that she wanted nothing more than to crawl between the sheets and shut her eyes, wake up in a time and place where Hawk Monroe had never rocked her world.
Finally she looked at him through a curtain of damp scraggly hair. “I never said it was.”
“Tell me how you’d rather me act. Tell me what would make you more comfortable.”
Across the room the baseball announcer signaled a grand slam, but neither of them looked. Elizabeth just stared at him, no doubt considering a comeback. She’d be more comfortable if Zhukov was still behind bars and this nightmare had never started. She’d be more comfortable if Aaron or Jagger had been sent to bring her home.
She’d be more comfortable if the bullet that had ripped into his shoulder four months before had landed a few inches lower.
“Look, Hawk,” she said. “We’re adults. Can’t we just—”
“Pretend that night didn’t happen?” That’s what would make her more comfortable, he realized. If he’d never touched her. Never made her sigh.
Never made her come unglued.
“No,” he answered before she could. “I can’t do that. I don’t pretend.” That was the coward’s way out.
She frowned. “I made a mistake, Wesley. Nothing less, nothing more.”
Nothing.
Less.
Nothing.
More.
The seven most incredible hours of his life.
Nothing less, nothing more.
