“Yes. Sorry. I was expecting—” you to recognize me “—someone older.”
She didn’t smile. “Elizabeth Silver does sound like someone’s maiden aunt.” She remained as far off as Delia had always been, until a magical summer day when a young SEAL lieutenant’s outrageous comments had made her giggle, getting them both in trouble with the irate photographer… “I guess I could change it by deed poll if I wanted to.”
Not in this lifetime, baby. The only living woman who could legally change her name from Elizabeth Silver in New Zealand was fifty-four years old, a mother and grandmother who lived five hundred miles away on the South Island, near Christ-church.
“Yeah,” he agreed with an easy returned smile, leaning on the doorpost. “But it suits you.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “I’m nobody’s aunt that I know of.”
You’re no maiden either, you’re Mrs. Falcone. His jaw tightened. Get that through your head, McCall; she’s another man’s wife. She hasn’t been yours for years. He forced words from his half-frozen lips. “I beg your pardon. I don’t know you, do I? Your face reminds me of someone I used to know…”
Not a twitch or start, no telltale flush or paling of her golden oval cheek. But—her fingers…were they shaking? “I seem to remind a lot of people of someone. People always ask me that.” She lifted clay-smeared hands in inquiry. “May I help you, or are you just browsing? You’re welcome to look around all you like.”
“Just looking. I saw your house and sign, and I couldn’t resist having a look in here.”
“That was its design.” She smiled, this time with a little genuine feeling. “Please feel free.”
Slammed in the solar plexus. Just one smile and he was winded, scrambled, foolish and fooled. Part of him wanting like hell to believe she was Delia, the other half so bloody naive it was laughable, all wishing and wistful. A dumb-ass jerk wanting her to be genuine—just Elizabeth Silver, Potter of Excellence. A legal identity to smile at, think about, take dancing or to dinner and make love with, like any other woman…as if she weren’t the runaway wife of a billionaire black-market arms and drugs dealer whose men were reported to be hot on his tail right this minute, bent on kidnap and revenge of said runaway wife.
Both halves of him so fierce in their driving male need, so finely balanced on a hot knifepoint he felt as if he walked an electric tightrope, and he was nobody’s gymnast. This mission could all fall apart because he couldn’t change the way he felt any more than he could stop the sun rising tomorrow.
Tomorrow. One day closer to Falcone getting her. Yet he stood here like a teenager in his first burst of lust. Lost in the same old need, its ache undiluted. He had two days max to gain her trust, while from half a world away Falcone sat smack between them, pulling his strings and smiling like an obscene demigod, holding a high-caliber automatic to her head.
She’s in danger. Just do your job.
She was watching him. Checking him out…and not in a sexual manner. Beneath her ultrafeminine, gentle exterior, her eyes acted like a computer, seeking out his secrets. Finding what he wanted to hide. Working out his agenda.
He made himself nod, still watching her. “Thanks. I’ll look around. Did you paint that sign yourself?”
“Yes.” Her words were cool and distant, a step back, a mile above. The star-being, the haughty Brazilian princess. She’d retreated behind barriers he couldn’t navigate, jamming his prelim-data radar like an EA 6B Prowler at night.
He couldn’t blame her. The intensity of his briefest gaze on her almost blistered his own skin.
Get a grip on yourself!
He wandered around the studio. The bell above the door’s connected by wire to an intercom system too high-tech for a business this small. Window onto the main road looks double-glazed—bulletproof. Both the doors to the outside, and the door leading into the private house, look at least two inches thick, with a one-sided quadruple locking system protecting the house.
She’s watching every move I make. Her eyes are calm, but she just dented the pot on the wheel again, her fingers are gripping its base so hard. It’s already twisted out of shape with her foot jerking the wheel pedal.
Yeah. Way too tense for a woman with nothing to hide.
At random he picked up a vase. It was flute-shaped, thin as the most delicate glass, of a blue so clear he could almost see through it, like a wash of oceanic beauty. A woman’s face superimposed, like a hologram for its fineness, its sweet lost-soul effect. “This is amazing.”
She nodded with regal carelessness. “Thank you.”
“How much?” Nothing in the whole studio had a price on it that he could see.
She told him, her cool, clear voice almost a shrug. As if she’d picked a price off the top of her head.
His mental alarm started shrieking. Everything she said and did was way too casual for the levels of tension he felt radiating from her. Oh, yeah, she knew him, remembered him. Was she fighting the same grinning demons he was? Wanting, aching for a touch, playing the fiddle of imperative danger while they burned with need….
She apparently misinterpreted his silence. “That’s in New Zealand dollars, not American.” He guessed she was speaking in reference to his California accent, still strong after living for a decade in Canberra, Australia’s capital.
“Very reasonable.” With almost two NZ dollars to each American dollar, the vase was almost indecently cheap. “I’ll take it.” And he wanted it. Even if it hadn’t been a piece of such clear-water, haunting beauty, he’d want it. He wanted a permanent part of her to stay with him even after she’d gone.
Yeah, he’d hit the jackpot at last. No other woman had ever set his body on fire with such white-hot, furious need. Only Delia. She’d scorched him with every smile, every laugh at his jokes, every secret she’d told him—and she’d drugged his very soul with kisses so sweet, shy and desperate, his lips still burned with their imprint ten years later. In five months, she’d dragged his heart from its place of deep, dark hiding…and she’d slipped some intrinsic part of his self inside that incredible aura of hers, and taking it back had never been an option.
Gut, heart, body and soul, all screaming, I’ve found her.
Yet if she was Delia, she was another man’s wife, even if that man was a slime-bucket criminal who got rid of his enemies with his army of contract killers.
And still McCall wanted her, his desire raging and unstoppable.
Had he ever really known her? The Falcone case had long ago forced him to reassess everything he thought he knew. She’d been an eighteen-year-old girl when they’d met in secret for five beautiful months—then she was gone. Within a year she’d married Robert Falcone, a smiling demon who left the hearts of brave men slamming against their ribs and their guts knotted. What had life with Falcone done to the woman-child who’d been so pure, so protected and innocent to McCall’s world-weary eyes?
Seeming oblivious to his turmoil, Elizabeth Silver, Potter of Excellence, wrapped the vase in tissue paper and placed it in a bag with her amazing design on its silvery folds. “Here you are, sir.” Her hands trembled slightly as she handed the package to him.
On
