around like this.”
“Sweetheart,” he whispered, his voice at her ear raspy and seductive, “I may have a black eye and a lip that’s still tender, but I guarantee I’m recovered enough for a little cuddling.”
She felt the stubble on his unshaven jaw as he slowly rubbed his cheek against hers, felt his warm breath mingle with hers. It was a highly charged situation, one that shook her with the sudden realization that she was susceptible to it. In another few seconds he would swing her around and, sore lip or not, fit his mouth to hers. She would taste him, perhaps even welcome his tongue on hers.
The whole treacherous business was made worse when she moved on his lap with the intention of getting to her feet. Her action aroused him. She could feel his hardness strained against her as his arm shifted in order to hold her more comfortably, grazing the side of her breast, searing her. Eden panicked.
“I don’t want this!” she commanded sharply. “Let me up!”
He went very still. A long moment passed, and then the arms that had been embracing her relaxed and dropped away. Eden scrambled off his lap and turned to face him. What she saw had her heart lurching inside her breast.
His mood had altered completely, revealing an entirely different facet of him. This was not the good-natured man who had awakened in her guest room with a smile. He had changed into someone harder, colder. She could see that change in the way his mouth had tightened and in his eyes that were regarding her suspiciously. Eyes that suddenly seemed dark and stormy.
There was something else that dismayed her. Something she had failed to anticipate until his arms had secured her on his lap, until his mouth had threatened to meld with hers. On some level she was afraid to define, she had wanted him to kiss her. It was a threat she could trust no more than the man who went on sitting there staring at her silently.
Making an effort to defuse the volatile situation, Eden began to load their dishes onto a tray. “I’ll just rinse these off and stack them in the dishwasher,” she said lightly, as though nothing had happened, as though there was no strain between them so intense it almost crackled.
Wanting to get away from him, needing a moment alone to decide on a course of action, she picked up the tray and retreated into the kitchen. But when she reached the sink, she knew he had followed her. She could feel him behind her.
Turning around, she discovered him stationed in the doorway, looking big and intimidating. He was still watching her, not with admiration this time but with a narrow-eyed, speculative gaze. There was something instinctively professional in the way he stood there measuring her, making her wonder all over again just who and what he was.
“Why don’t you lie down and rest,” she suggested. “You need to rest.”
“Later,” he said, and there was no note of gentleness now in his tone.
Eden turned back to the sink and began to rinse the dishes, knowing that Tia had been right and that she had made a serious error in judgment in her blind determination to learn about Nathanial. The man she had so eagerly taken into her house was not dependably harmless and therefore manageable. He was, in fact, potentially dangerous.
She acknowledged that now. It wasn’t just because of this sudden toughness in his manner either. There were other things. Things which, as a trained investigator, she should not only have been observing all along but also suspecting. Things that ought to have warned her.
Eden didn’t ignore them now. His nervousness about reporting whatever had happened to him to the police. His uneasiness with the presence of Skip Davis in the garden. Skip, who with his naval background, might be perceived as a figure of authority and therefore a possible threat. And, most damning of all, the realization that, since he had been carrying a picture of Nathanial, he could in some manner be responsible for the disappearance of her son.
She could sense his eyes still on her, and she knew that she didn’t dare to confront him. Couldn’t risk telling him that they weren’t man and wife for fear of how he might react. There was only one thing she could do and which, had she not been such a desperate fool, she would have done at the very beginning. She had to report his presence to the police, had to get him out of her house. But how, without igniting whatever it was that she was convinced was simmering inside him?
SHE WAS A FRAUD. He understood that now. She hadn’t liked being on his lap, had plainly not wanted him to touch her. This, together with a flash of insight that had more to do with old instincts rather than any actual memory, had finally warned him something was wrong. That this woman wasn’t what she’d been pretending to be.
No wedding bands, either on her finger or his. That small evidence alone should have alerted him of her deceit. Why hadn’t he observed this before? Why, instead, had he believed in her? Believed in her so strongly that he’d convinced himself he belonged both to her and this place? Had he in his confused state needed a safe refuge so badly that he could have so easily deluded himself?
Or, he wondered, examining her as she loaded the dishwasher, had he been beguiled by something else? Like a pair of pure blue eyes and a mane of lustrous dark hair? A full mouth and a tall, alluring figure? Or maybe a nature that had seemed warm and caring from the start.
Any of these could have been responsible for his fantastic illusion. And none of them mattered. Not now when he knew he had made a serious mistake in coming here, that he couldn’t trust this woman who had been willing to let him think she was his wife. Why? What did she want?
His mind was searching for an answer, seething with the frustration of his plight, when she finished with the dishes and crossed the kitchen, intending to return to the parlor. He continued to stand in the doorway, blocking her path.
“Let me by,” she said.
She stood so close he could smell the scent he found so tempting. Lily of the Valley. He looked down into her face, noticing the slight depression at the tip of her piquant nose. Noticing, too, that she wore a purposeful expression.
“Why? Where are you going?” He hadn’t meant the question to sound harsh, but that’s the way it came out.
“To my office.”
“It’s Sunday. Offices aren’t open on Sundays.”
“I need to check my answering machine for messages.”
That sounded reasonable enough. He moved aside in the doorway.
She slipped by him, caught up her purse from the table, and crossed the parlor toward a closed door on the other side.
“If you won’t lie down,” she called over her shoulder, “then at least sit down. I’ll only be a minute.”
She went into her office, closing the door behind her. He stood there for a few seconds, and then a warning went off inside his head. Why had she taken her purse with her? Why had she shut the door? Danger!
He crossed the parlor as swiftly as his game leg would permit, bursting into the office. He found her standing behind her desk, the phone in one hand and her other hand poised to dial. She shot him a startled look that told him she knew he knew the truth about them.
He was at the desk in a flash, snatching the phone out of her hand before her finger could punch the buttons. Slapping the receiver back into the cradle, he faced her accusingly.
“You
