style="font-size:15px;"> MOLLY COULDN’T BELIEVE how easy it had been as she watched Cash prepare to take her fingerprints.
She’d come away clean without getting caught with any cards up her sleeves. As Max used to say when he’d fooled someone in the front row of the audience with one of his magic tricks, “I could have gone south with an elephant in front of that guy!”
Not only did the sheriff buy her as Jasmine, he’d also agreed to keep the news quiet—and was taking her home to his house. She couldn’t have asked for a better place to hide out.
There had only been that one surprise. Cash seemed to think Jasmine had known her attacker, that the person was still at large, that her attacker had left her for dead. And now with Jasmine back, Molly’s life was in danger.
It was her karma and the risk that went with stealing a dead woman’s identity, she thought bitterly. Wasn’t it bad enough that she already had two killers after her?
She hoped that Cash was just being cautious. He seemed a cautious man. Of course he could also just be trying to scare her. If he knew she wasn’t Jasmine, what better way than to make her think she was in danger from a killer if she continued this charade.
No, she thought, studying him. He believed she was Jasmine because he wanted to. Maybe he really was worried about her safety. Maybe the man now in prison for abducting those other women really hadn’t picked up Jasmine at that filling station.
Good thing she wasn’t planning to stay in this gig long. And there was always the chance that Cash was wrong. The cases were too similar not to have been the same man—even if the man now in prison hadn’t confessed to Jasmine Wolfe’s abduction.
“Yes?” Cash said. He was looking at her, studying her again as if he saw her struggling with her thoughts.
She shook her head. “Nothing. This must come as a shock to you.” Her prints weren’t on file anywhere. That was one reason she hadn’t been able to get a job at a Vegas casino. Casinos took all employees’ fingerprints as a matter of course. But still, she felt a little anxious to think he was about to send them to the FBI. Did that mean they would be on file from now on? Good thing she was going straight again after this.
He reached for her hand. His fingers were warm and she felt a small thrill ripple over her as he began to take her fingerprints. She mentally kicked herself as he raised a brow at her reaction. Cash McCall didn’t miss much.
“Am I anything like her?” she asked grabbing hold of every magician’s best defense—misdirection and patter. Talk about anything. Just draw the audience away from what you’re really doing. “I mean other than the way I look?”
He took her fingerprints, carefully getting a perfect print from each finger. He didn’t look at her as he worked. “You sound like her and some of your mannerisms remind me of her,” he said after a few moments.
“Were we close?” she asked shyly.
His gaze came up to meet hers. There was heat in it and although it had been a while, she recognized the look for what it was: desire.
“We were engaged, weren’t we?” He looked back down.
“I know this must be hard on you,” she said. “I’m sorry I don’t remember…us.”
He finished taking the rest of her prints before he looked up again. “Here, you can clean the ink off with this,” he said, handing her a towelette.
“Thank you.” She scrubbed at the ink, still watching him out of the corner of her eye. When she’d asked about their relationship, he’d grown quiet, almost pensive. There was something he didn’t want to tell her.
“I’ll send these in,” he said, getting up, turning his back to her.
“I’m sorry.”
“What do you have to be sorry about?” he asked over his shoulder as if surprised.
“All these questions. But I don’t know much about Jasmine. Just what I’ve read in the papers….” She pretended to hesitate. “And there are so many questions that only you can answer.”
He took a breath and let it out slowly as he finished taking care of the prints. “What do you want to know?”
She shrugged. “Anything you can tell me. How did you meet?”
He took his chair behind his desk, giving her his full attention. “I was teaching a class in criminology at Montana State University in Bozeman. We ran into each other in the hall.” He shrugged. “The next day you were waiting for me outside my classroom.”
Jasmine hadn’t been a shrinking violet, had she?
“How long did we…you date?”
“Not long. The engagement was kind of…sudden.” He smiled a little as if embarrassed and met her eyes. “I’d never met anyone like…you.”
And she’d thought he was a cautious man. Probably was. Except when it came to women. Or at least one woman. She felt a prick of jealousy and wondered what kind of lover he’d been. And Jasmine?
Cash was smiling. “You had another question?”
She really had to watch herself. He seemed to be reading every expression. “I was wondering about…our relationship, that is, yours and Jasmine’s.”
He laughed. It was a wonderful sound. “You want to know if we were…intimate?”
The word was so old-fashioned. Like Cash. She suspected he followed some Code of the West. “It’s just if I’m going to stay with you…” She wasn’t really blushing, was she?
“Are you worried about your virtue?” he asked.
There was an edge to his voice that surprised her. Had her question upset him because it was so personal? Or was it something to do with Jasmine?
“I know it’s none of my business,” she said quickly. “I shouldn’t have—”
“We never slept together.”
She tried not to look surprised by that—or the flash of anger she’d seen in his expression. Obviously their not sleeping together hadn’t been his idea.
“Oh” was all she could think to say. She was no authority on relationships, since she never stayed long enough in one place to have anything long-term. And her idea of a short-term relationship was a dinner or a movie date. At almost thirty, she had never even been in love.
But any woman who wouldn’t want to go to bed with Cash McCall needed her head examined. Her gaze fell on his hands, and desire stirred within at just the thought of those hands on bare skin.
“Her loss,” she added ruefully and then could have bit her tongue.
He cocked his head at her as if taken aback by her comment. Not half as much as she was. The idea was to distract the audience during a trick—not shoot yourself in the foot.
An awkward silence fell between them, which she didn’t dare try to fill. Who knew what she’d
