exactly what he wanted to know from someone who’d had no intention of revealing it? His boss would fire him if he could see him in action right now. Defeated by a woman? Brant Curtis?
He said thickly, “One kiss. For old time’s sake.”
Panic flared in her face. She grabbed the phone and cried, “You come one step nearer and I’ll tell everyone in Grenada that you’re the world-famous journalist, Michael Barton. So help me, I will.”
Michael Barton was Brant’s pseudonym, and only a very small handful of people knew that Brant Curtis and Michael Barton were one and the same man; it was this closely guarded secret that enabled him as Brant Curtis, civil engineer and skilled negotiator, to enter with impunity whichever country he was investigating. He felt an ill-timed flare of admiration for Rowan; it was quite clear that she’d do it, she whom he’d trusted for years with his double identity. “You sure don’t want me to kiss you, do you?” he jeered. “Why not, Rowan? Afraid we’ll end up in bed?”
“Look up divorce in the dictionary, why don’t you? We’re through, finished, kaput. I wouldn’t go to bed with you if you were the last man on earth.”
“Bad cliché, my darling.”
With a huge effort Rowan prevented herself from throwing the telephone at him, cord and all. Keep your cool, Rowan. Keep your cool. She said evenly, “It happens to be true.”
“But why so adamant? Who are you trying to convince?”
She said with a sudden, corrosive bitterness, “The one man in the world who never allowed himself to be convinced of anything I said.”
She meant it. Brant thought blankly. Her bitterness was real, laden with a pain whose depths horrified him. He stood very still, at a total loss for words. He earned his living—an extraordinarily good living—by words. Yet right now he couldn’t find anything to say to the woman who had been his lover and his wife. She looked exhausted, he realized with a pang of what could only be compassion, her shoulders slumped, her cheeks pale as the stuccoed walls.
As if she had read his mind, she said in a low voice, “Brant, I work fifteen-hour days for two weeks on this trip and I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“Yeah...I’m sorry,” he muttered, and headed for the door. Sorry for what? For bursting into her room? Or for killing the fieriness in her spirit all those months ago?
Was her accusation true? Had he never allowed her to change his mind about anything? If so, no wonder she wouldn’t give him the time of day.
The door slid smoothly open and shut just as smoothly. He didn’t once look back. Instead of going to his own room, he tramped down the driveway and left the hotel grounds. He’d noticed a bar not that far down the road. He’d order a double rum and hope it would make him sleep. Or six of them in a row. And he wouldn’t allow his own good memories—of which there were many—to come to the surface.
He’d be done in if he did.
The patio door closed. As though she couldn’t help herself, Rowan peered through the gap in the curtain and watched Brant’s tall figure march down the driveway, until it blended with the darkness and disappeared. Shivering, she clicked the lock and pulled the curtain tightly shut. After dragging off the rest of her clothes, she pulled on silk pajamas and got into bed, yanking the covers over her head.
What would have happened if Brant had kissed her? Would he be lying beside her now, igniting her body to passion as only he could?
She slammed on her mental brakes, for to follow that thought was to invite disaster. She hadn’t let him kiss her. She’d kept some kind of control over herself and over him, in a way that was new. Dimly she felt rather proud of this.
Perhaps, she thought with a flare of hope, something good would come out of Brant’s reappearance in her life. Perhaps there was a reason for it, after all. Inadvertently she’d been given an opportunity to lay the ghosts of the past to rest. If she could detach herself from him in the next two weeks, really detach herself, then when she went home she’d be free of him. Free to start over and find someone else.
She wanted children, and a man with a normal job. She wanted stability and continuity and a house in the country. She wanted to love and be loved.
By someone safe. Not by Brant with his restless spirit and his inexhaustible appetite for danger. Never again by a man like Brant.
Freedom, she thought, and closed her eyes. Freedom...
At the St. Vincent airport, while he was waiting to go through customs, Brant phoned three different airlines to see if he could get back to Toronto. It was nearing the end of the season, he was told; bookings were heavy. He could go standby. He could be rerouted in various complicated and extremely expensive ways. But he couldn’t get on a plane today and end up in Toronto by nightfall.
He banged down the phone and took his passport out. When he rejoined the group he saw that he wasn’t the only one to have left it. Natalie and Steve were standing to one side. Natalie was, very nearly, screaming; Steve was, unquestionably, yelling. Their language made Brant wince, their mutual fury made him glance at Rowan. She was talking to May and Peg, a fixed smile on her face.
Then Natalie stomped over to Rowan. Not bothering to lower her voice, her catlike beauty distorted by rage, she announced, “Get me a single room for the rest of this trip! I’m not going anywhere near that—” and here her language, once again, achieved gutter level.
May said crisply, “Young woman, that’s enough!”
Peg added, “This is a public place on a foreign island and you’re disgracing our country.”
Natalie’s head swerved. “Who the hell do—”
“Be quiet,” Peg ordered.
“This minute,” her cohort seconded.
As Natalie’s jaw dropped, Brant threw back his head and started to laugh, great bellows of laughter that released the tension in his chest and the ache in his belly that had been with him ever since he’d first seen Rowan in the airport at Grenada. Uncertainly Karen smiled and Sheldon joined her, a smile tugged at the corner of Rowan’s mouth and Steve said vengefully, “Shut up, Natalie.”
For a moment it looked as though Natalie was about to launch into another tirade. But then the custom’s officer said, “Next, please,” and Rowan said briskly, “Your turn, Natalie.”
As Natalie stepped over the painted line and fumbled for her passport, Steve said, “Two single rooms, Rowan, and it’s the last time I’ll travel anywhere with that b—” he caught sight of May’s clamped jaw and finished hastily “—broad.”
“I’ll do my best,” Rowan said.
“You’d better,” said Steve.
“There’s a marvelous word in the English language, Steve, called please,” Brant interposed softly. “You might try it sometime. Because I don’t like it when you order Rowan around.”
Steve took a step toward him, his fists bunched. Even more softly, Brant said, “Don’t do it. You’ll end up flat on the floor seeing a lot more
