rubbed his jaw, where his sister had landed him a pretty decent right cross. “You may be right about that. Sophie got past you last time.”
“She’s got some good moves. And she was pretty upset about that information you dug up on Bradley Davis.” Tracker’s grin widened as he moved to the small built-in refrigerator near the windows. Opening it, he took out two beers, twisted off the caps and handed one to Lucas. “She’s smart too. I think she may suspect she’s being followed. She tried some evasive tactics the other day when she left her shop.”
“Did she lose the tail?” Lucas asked with a frown.
Tracker nodded. “For about a half hour. My man picked her up coming out of a restaurant. I have two men on her now. Another two are keeping tabs on Sonny Falcone.”
“Good. I’ll feel a lot better when she’s down in the Keys with me. I’ll send the plane for Sophie on Wednesday. She claims she can’t get away before then. And I didn’t want to push.” He rubbed his jaw again. “Once you’re sure she’s on my plane, you can devote all your attention to both Falcones.”
“You want me to continue to keep tabs on your aunt and stepbrothers?”
“For the time being.” Lucas frowned as he turned and led the way through the open French doors to the balcony. Beyond a row of flowering shrubs, an Olympic-size pool gleamed in the late-afternoon sun. His younger siblings were engaged in an intense water-polo match with their aunt, and at the far end of the pool he spotted Sophie seated on the edge of a chaise lounge talking to MacKenzie Lloyd.
“I think you ought to put someone on Dr. Lloyd. She’s been Sophie’s best friend for years. They live about three blocks apart in Georgetown. Falcone may try to use her to get to Sophie.”
“I’ll get right on it, boss. You want me to run a background check on Dr. Lloyd?”
Lucas considered for a moment. He’d been thinking of MacKenzie Lloyd off and on quite a bit in the last few hours. When she’d fallen out of that tree into his arms, she’d called up the memory he had of the little waif in jeans and a T-shirt whom he’d met at the opening of Sophie’s shop two years ago.
There’d been something about her that day that had caught his attention. At first, he’d thought he’d imagined the tug of desire that he’d felt. But each time he’d found her framed in the viewfinder of his camera, the pull had grown stronger. Later, he’d studied the photos he’d taken, trying to put his finger on just what it was that had drawn him.
She wasn’t anything like the women he usually dated. His taste ran to tall, leggy brunettes and blondes. She was small, and she wore her red hair pulled back into a bun. But her eyes… Even in the representation on film, they were the incredible color of golden amber.
Today her hair had seemed lighter and looser—a reddish-gold explosion of color as he’d stared up at her in the tree. His body had reacted to her the moment he’d seen her, hardening, tightening. And when she’d been lying on top of him…for a moment he’d forgotten everything—where they were, who was watching. If Sophie hadn’t spoken, he might have rolled her beneath him and taken her right there beneath the branches of the elm tree. Frowning, he pushed away the image.
It had been years since he’d been tempted to be that reckless with a woman. He’d put it out of his mind during the tennis game, chalked it up to putting in too much overtime on the Falcone deal.
Then she’d beaten him.
Oh, Sophie had made some good plays, but Lucas was fully aware that it was Dr. Lloyd’s careful, methodical style that had been his downfall. It was almost as though she could predict exactly what he would do next. And that was…he searched for a word…intriguing.
“Boss?” Tracker cleared his throat loudly.
“What?” Lucas asked, turning to him.
“Do you want me to run a background check on the doc?”
Once again, Lucas hesitated. On some gut level, he knew that he should steer clear of his sister’s best friend. It wasn’t merely the strength of the physical attraction he felt that had the warning bells going off in his mind. She was Sophie’s friend. He kept his dating life separate from his family. To pursue a relationship with MacKenzie Lloyd would foster expectations that he would never fulfill.
Relationship? He frowned at the direction his thoughts had taken. Who was she that she could affect him this way?
Experience had taught him that ignorance was seldom bliss, and knowledge was always power. “Yeah. I want to know everything about her.”
“MACKENZIE, you’ve got to listen to reason.”
Mac opened a bag of carrots and for a moment allowed herself to picture dumping the whole bag over Gil Stafford’s head. Then stifling the image, she selected one carrot and began to shred it on a grater. She hoped feeding Wilbur, her pet lab rat, would soothe her temper. Gil was her department chair and he had ten years’ seniority on her. That and the fact that she worked in a lab that adjoined his had made him think he could give her advice.
“If you’d just listened to me earlier and signed a contract to turn the results of your research over to that biotech company, you would have prevented this break-in.”
Mac shoved down the little skip of fear that she’d been experiencing ever since she’d arrived at the university and learned that her lab had been broken into sometime on Sunday. The intruder had gotten away, but not before he’d broken into her office safe.
“They would have made sure that there were better security measures taken around here. And I still don’t understand why you turned down the money. Even if you don’t want it for yourself, think of all the equipment it would have provided.”
As Gil continued to pontificate, he strode toward the window. Mac privately thought the man should have gone into politics instead of science. Not only could he talk nonstop, but he had the tall, rangy build of an athlete and a very photogenic face. With the sunlight turning his blond hair into a halo, he looked like one of the good archangels.
The antithesis of what Lucas looked like with his dark hair and those midnight-blue eyes.
Lucas again. She hadn’t been able to block him out of her mind since Sophie had first suggested she use him for her research. The idea had been enough to put her off her serve in the first two sets of the tennis match. After that she’d focused all her concentration on the game. Beating Lucas had been a challenging and exhilarating experience. And the moment they’d won, Sophie had started making her case.
It was a good one. Everything that Sophie had said made perfect sense on a logical and theoretical level.
It was just that every time she thought of actually trying out her research on Lucas, she felt the same funny quaking in her stomach that she got whenever something was about to go wrong in her lab. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to forget what it had felt like to be pressed against him, to feel his body react to hers, especially a certain unmistakable part of his body. A vivid image slipped into her mind of looping a long strand of pearls around and around—
“Are you listening to anything I say?”
Mac dropped the grater as she struggled to gather her thoughts. “Gil, I know you mean well.” She was almost sure of it. But he was giving her a headache.
