changed my mind.”
“Just like that?” she asked incredulously as she snapped her fingers.
“Uh-huh.” He took a long pull from the bottle.
“No way. I think I deserve to know who the hell you are.”
Rocking back on his heels as the fire caught, he looked up at her standing on the other side of the counter. “I’m an ex-cop turned P.I.”
“I already figured that much. But what about your personal life?”
“It’s private.”
“You’re single, right? There’s no Mrs. Striker.”
He hesitated enough to cause her heart to miss a beat. Oh, God, not again, she thought as she leaned against the counter for support. He’d kissed her. Touched her. Made love to her.
“Not anymore. I was married but it ended a few years back.”
“Why?”
His jaw tightened. “Haven’t you read the statistics?”
“I’m talking about the reason behind the statistics, at least in your case.”
A shadow passed behind his eyes and he said, “It just didn’t work out. I was a cop. Probably paid more attention to the job than my wife.”
“And you didn’t have any kids?”
Again the hesitation. Again the shadow. His lips tightened at the corners as he stood and dusted his hands. “I don’t have any children,” he said slowly, “and I never hear from my ex. That about covers it all, doesn’t it?” There was just a spark of challenge in his eyes, daring her to argue with him. A dozen questions bubbled up in her throat, but she held them back. For now. There were other ways to get information about him. She was a reporter, for God’s sake. She had the means to find out just about anything that had happened to him. Newsworthy articles would be posted on the Internet, personal stuff through other sources.
With Sam Donahue she’d been trusting and it had backfired in her face, but this time…Oh, God, why was she even thinking like this? There was no this time! There was no Kurt Striker in her life except as an irritating bodyguard her brothers had hired. That was it. He was here because he was hired to be here; she was a job to him. Nothing more.
“Look, I’ve got to get some work done,” she said, motioning to her laptop. “I’ve been gone for months and if I don’t answer some e-mail and put together a new column or two, I’m going to be in big trouble. My boss and I are already not real tight. So, if you don’t mind…well, even if you do, I’m going to start plowing through what’s been piling up. I understand that you think you’ve got to be with me 24/7, but it’s not necessary. No one’s going to take a potshot at me here.”
“Why would you think that?” Striker drained the rest of his beer.
“Because there are too many people around, there’s a security guard for the condos always on the premises, and most importantly, Joshua is safe with Sharon.”
The expression on his face told her he was of another mind. And wasn’t she, really? Hadn’t she, just minutes ago in the parking lot, sensed that someone had been watching her? She rounded the counter as he straightened and crossed the room.
“Look, I do know that I’m in some kind of danger,” she said. “Obviously I know it or I wouldn’t have taken the time to hide the baby. I came back here to try to figure this out, to take the heat off my brothers, to get on with my life and let them get on with theirs. And yeah, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was nervous, that I wasn’t starting to jump at shadows, but I need to sort through some things, get a handle on what’s happening.”
“That’s why I’m here. I’m thinking that maybe if we work together, we can make some sense of what’s going on.” He was close to her, near enough that she could smell the wet leather of his jacket, see the striations of color in his green eyes, feel the heat of his body.
She couldn’t even make sense of the moment. “That might be impossible. I’ve been thinking about what happened from every angle and I come up with the same conclusion. I don’t have any real enemies that I know of. At least not anyone who would want to hurt me and my family. It doesn’t make any sense.” To put some distance between her body and his, she walked to the couch and flung herself onto the cushions. Who? What? Why? The questions that had haunted her nights and caused her to lose sleep were still unanswered as they rolled around in her brain.
“So what does make sense?” he demanded. “Someone followed you from Seattle and on your way to Grand Hope, Montana, forced you off the road. Why?”
“I told you, I don’t know. Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Think harder.” He frowned and rammed stiff fingers through hair that was still damp. “If it doesn’t have to do with the baby, then what about your job? Did you give someone bad advice and really tick someone off?”
She shook her head. “I thought about that, too. When I was back in Montana, I got online and searched through the columns for the two months prior to the accident and I couldn’t find anything that would infuriate a person.”
His head snapped up. “So you are worried?”
“Of course I’m worried. Who wouldn’t be? But there was nothing in any of the advice I gave that would cause someone to snap.”
“You think. There are always nutcases.” He set his empty bottle on the counter.
That much was true, she thought wearily. “But none who have e-mailed me, or called me, or contacted me in any way. I double-checked every communication I received.” He nodded and she realized that he’d probably been privy to that information as well.
“Well, there’s got to be a reason. We’re just missing it.” He was thinking hard; she could tell by the way he rubbed his chin. “You write magazine articles under a pseudonym.”
“Nothing controversial.”
His eyes narrowed. “What about the book you were working on?”
She hesitated. The manuscript she was writing wasn’t finished and she’d taken great pains to keep it secret while she investigated a payola scam on the rodeo circuit. It was while researching the book that she’d met Sam Donahue, a friend, he’d claimed, of her brothers’. As it turned out he hadn’t been as much a friend as an acquaintance and somehow she’d ended up falling for him, knowing him to be a rogue, realizing that part of his charm was the hint of danger around him, and yet she’d tumbled into bed with him anyway. And ended up pregnant.
Which had been a blessing in disguise, of course. Without her ill-fated affair with Sam, she never would have had Joshua, and that little guy was the light of her life.
“What’s in the book that’s so all-fired important?”
Sighing, she walked to the couch and dropped into the soft cushions. “You know what’s in it for the most part.”
“A book on cowboys.”
“Well, a little more than that.”
