chairs around the pool. It was a perfect early summer night, growing cooler as the darkness swallowed the last of the sun. The stars burned bright in a velvet sky. Moonlight skittered across the patio, danced with the darkness. Kit squinted into the shadows.
“Over here.”
Rafe’s smoothly dark voice came from behind her and sent a shiver over her skin. She turned, rubbing her arms. She attributed the tightening of her belly to a sudden breeze, not the delicious timbre of his voice.
About ten feet to her right, she saw the silhouette of his upper body. The muted glow of house lights behind him played against his raven hair. Broad shoulders, seemingly carved from the night, rose from the water of a hot tub. Steam curled around him, and as her eyes adjusted, she saw he had leaned back against the wall of the hot tub, arms spread on either side, waiting, watching. Aggressive, male, primally appealing. He was familiar, and yet not. Her knowledge of the boy bumped into the mystery of the man.
She swallowed against the purely feminine flutter in her stomach and squashed the urge to scurry back into the house.
“If you want to join me, there’s an extra suit over there.” He inclined his head toward a storage closet partially visible in the shadowed alcove behind him, which also housed a grill and a picnic table. His teeth flashed white in the darkness. “Or you can go without. I won’t be offended.”
To cover the sudden dip in her stomach, she retorted, “Yeah, that’s why I came out here. To get naked with you.”
He chuckled, and she found herself smiling. He was over there; she was over here. She was safe.
Still, that kiss from this afternoon was fresh in her mind, and the feel of that lean hard body against hers had opened the floodgate on memories that were better ignored.
“You sure you don’t want to join me?”
“Yes,” she murmured, wondering what he would do if she actually climbed in there with him.
“Pull up a chair or scoot over and dip your feet in. Feels pretty good.” He swirled a hand through the water invitingly, stirring moonlight and shadows around his bare, glistening chest.
She hoped he had something on beneath that water. He’d done his share of skinny-dipping in college.
“You’ve got a real bachelor setup here. The hot tub, the pool, the extra suit.” She couldn’t keep the bite out of her voice.
“People leave things,” he said with a shrug.
Which answered nothing. She itched to slip off her shoes and stick her feet in the warm water, but she knew it would be safer to stay dressed, keep some distance between them. Rafe, even without the seductive softness of night, had always been able to make her do things she regretted later. Like kissing him back there at her house.
Forcing the words past her tight throat, she asked, “So, where do we start tomorrow?”
She glanced over as he ran a wet hand through his dark hair, muscles flexing in his biceps with the movement. “We’ll stop at Tony’s parole officer first, see if he’s heard from him at all. Then we’ll pay a visit to Tony’s employer.”
Kit nodded.
“Was that what you really wanted to know, Kit?”
She jerked her head toward him. “What?”
“You’ve got curiosity written all over you. Just ask me.”
She ground her teeth. How could he still read her so easily, after all these years?
Water bubbled gently around him. His black eyes glittered at her.
“Now you believe me about Liz, right? After finding that tracking device.”
“I believe someone’s after you and I believe that’s tied to your sister. I don’t know how dangerous they are.”
She knew he didn’t believe her that Liz had changed. That was all right. It didn’t matter what he thought. He only needed to find her sister.
Kit walked to the edge of the pool, her hands clasped behind her back. “How did you get to Oklahoma City, Rafe? What happened to the Air Force? The fighter jets?”
He went abruptly still. She could feel it even from this distance. She glanced over, noted the rigid set of his wide shoulders, the way even the water seemed to stop moving.
He tilted his head back, stared at the star-studded sky. Moonlight slid down the column of his long throat. “I developed night blindness. Botched a landing, and the requisite exam showed a pretty severe case.”
“Night blindness?” She stepped toward him. That explained his sudden swerving on the way to Davis and again on the way back. “Are you okay? How severe?”
“Not so severe I can’t drive,” he said dryly. “But I can’t fly jets, that’s for sure. At least not for the Air Force.”
“I had no idea.” She found herself at the edge of the hot tub, looking at his face, half hidden in shadows. “I know how much you wanted that.”
“I had six years, and they were great.” He reached for the towel behind him and stood, water sluicing down his body. His hard-muscled, naked body.
Her eyes widened and she whirled around. “You could give a girl some warning.”
“I suppose. You know I don’t generally wear a suit.” There was a tightness in his voice that made Kit ache deep inside.
She’d forgotten that he liked to do things in the nude. He’d never been as concerned about his nakedness as she had been about hers. She remembered the time they’d gone skinny-dipping at the university pool after hours. How their splashing and teasing had turned to stroking, their water-slicked bodies sliding hotly against each other.
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