Raking his hair back, he gave her a tight smile. “This never happened, I won’t call you, and you don’t have to worry about running into me again. That’s the upside of sleeping with a loner, honey. Men like me don’t stick around long enough to become a problem.”
For a moment she refused to believe that the words were coming from the same man who’d whispered her name all night, who’d held her gaze with his as the two of them had urged each other to ecstasy only hours earlier. He shrugged, and the gesture pierced Caro more than his comments had.
“Men like you?” Her voice came out in a croak, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah, princess, men like me. You know—rough-and-ready types who don’t know what fork to use at those white-tie dinners you have, who would be told to use the back entrance if they showed up at your rich daddy’s Albuquerque mansion, who take on the dirty jobs your social circle doesn’t want to admit exist…like dealing with kidnappers. You had me pegged from the minute I told you we were going to spend the night here together, and that look I saw in your eyes a few minutes ago made it pretty obvious you woke up with second thoughts about what we did last night.” His tone took on an edge. “You were having second thoughts, am I right?”
“Second thoughts? Heavens, no.”
She was amazed to hear the amused astonishment in her tone—amazed and grateful. Because everything depended on pulling off the act she wanted him to buy, Caro told herself—her self-esteem, her ability to get past this moment without falling apart, her pride.
“Last night satisfied my curiosity, Gabe. You said it yourself—I see men like you doing work around my father’s estate, or as hired security at a function. My girlfriends and I’ve always thought it might be thrilling in a naughty way to spend a night with that type of man.” She forced a laugh. “You were a fantasy come true, and it was even kind of fun having to persuade you, but you’re right—the ground rules still stand. It would be embarrassing for both of us if you showed up on my doorstep in the mistaken belief that this had been anything more than it was.”
She tipped her head to one side. “This never happened, you won’t call me, and I don’t have to worry about running into you again. Promise?”
“Sure,” he said tonelessly. “But the next time you get curious, honey, consider calling an agency who sends the kind of man you’re looking for out on house calls. That way you won’t have to worry about any misunderstandings at all.”
The drive to Aspen had been conducted in near-total silence, Caro remembered now. Gabe had dropped her off in front of a five-star hotel, she’d checked into a suite, and after drawing herself a bath so hot that billows of perfumed steam rose from the tub, she’d immersed herself in a vain attempt to melt the core of ice that seemed to have formed inside her.
The ice hadn’t melted—not then, and not upon her return to Albuquerque, where she’d informed her father that she’d broken off her engagement to a man he’d seen as an eminently suitable prospective husband for her. It hadn’t melted over the following weeks during the rounds of parties she’d forced herself to attend. And then one day she’d frowned at the calendar, made a quick calculation, and had felt the first hairline fissure appear in the numbness she’d begun to think had become a permanent part of her.
A few days later she’d shakily dialed the number she’d obtained for Gabe. He was going to be a father. She was carrying his child. Surely opening the conversation with a bombshell like that would catch him off guard enough that he would listen to the rest of what she had to tell him—that he’d misinterpreted the dismay he’d seen on her face when he’d awoken that morning, that a lifetime of being Caroline Moore, daughter of a man who’d taught her from childhood that emotions were to be concealed, had caused her to clutch at her pride instead of revealing her true feelings.
“I would have poured it all out to him if he’d still been there to answer that phone call,” Caro said out loud, her hands gripping the SUV’s wheel and her gaze fixed on the empty desert landscape rushing by. But he hadn’t been. It had all been true on his part— Gabe Riggs was a loner who didn’t stick around long enough to have relationships. She was glad she had found out before the baby was born. No child needed a father who’d rather be somewhere else, instead of tied down to a woman he had no fond memories of and a baby he hadn’t planned on.
Which made her current quest all the more ironic, she thought tensely. Because right now the only man who could help her was the one man she’d assumed she would never see—
She hit the SUV’s brakes to avoid whizzing past the gas station she’d been told to watch for. It was no wonder she’d nearly missed the building, she thought as she maneuvered around a truck that had been abandoned beside what remained of a pair of gasoline pumps. The structure was close to being a ruin. No one had lived here for decades.
Jess’s information had to be wrong.
Caro brought the sports utility to a stop, tears of disappointment and fear pricking at the back of her eyes. Even as her vision blurred she blinked the tears back.
At one end of the ramshackle building a rusty nail protruded from a broken board. Slung from the nail was what she’d first taken as a rag but on second glance proved to be a shirt. It wasn’t faded enough to have been hanging there for years.
She opened the door, stepped out of the vehicle and walked to the side of the building.
He was standing beneath an oil drum that had obviously been rigged up as a primitive shower. Water was sprinkling down through holes punched into the bottom of the drum. He was lean muscle and whip-cord sinews and bronzed hide. He was completely naked.
Caro’s breath caught in her throat. She put her hand on the side of the building to steady herself.
Gabe looked over his shoulder and his gaze met hers. “Don’t come another step closer,” he said flatly.
She’d expected hostility from him, she acknowledged numbly. She hadn’t expected the piercing pain that demolished her already-shaky defences at this curt evidence that whatever Gabe Riggs might once have felt for her was dead and gone.
He reached up to the side of the oil drum and, before she understood what he was doing, he brought down a sawed-off shotgun, braced it one-handedly against his body and pulled the trigger. Out of the corner of her eye she saw splinters fly explosively from the side of the building as the heavy body of a greenish-colored snake gave one last, headless spasm a few feet away from where she stood frozen in her tracks. It was a moment before she could trust herself to speak.
“I—I think you just saved my life.” Her voice wasn’t entirely steady, but she hoped he would put the quaver in her tone down to what had just happened.
“Since that was a Mojave rattler, I think I did, too.”
As Gabe replaced the shotgun in a sling at the side of the oil drum, she saw a gleam of silver on his left wrist and recognized the bracelet he’d worn the night they’d met. With no self-consciousness at all, he ducked his head under the final trickle of water before stepping away from the patch of already-drying earth under his makeshift shower and picking up a pair of patched khakis. He put them on, raked wet hair out of his eyes and retrieved the shotgun, then walked past her.
“How did you find me?” As he spoke he kept walking, while shrugging his shoulders into his shirt.
“Through an old friend of yours, Jess Crawford. I met him once or twice at parties when I was dating Larry. I work for him now,
