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“Oops!” She clapped a hand over her mouth, hiding a grin as she looked from one to the other. “Sorry!” she said, and was obviously anything but sorry. “The French libido isn’t exactly a proper topic with business afoot, but I didn’t realize there was business afoot already this morning.
“Wow!” She interrupted herself to lean over the desk. “What are these? No!” She warded off an answer. “Don’t tell me.” Canvases were shuffled slowly and her grin grew wider.
“Ashley!” Rising on tiptoe to shift a haunch onto the edge of the desk, she rested a stack of canvases on her knee. “You did it! Nicole Callison, you did it! Ashley Blackmon painted these, and somehow you’ve accomplished the impossible and convinced him to let us show them.”
“No,” Nicole demurred. “Ashley convinced himself.”
“Whatever. I don’t care, so long as we have them.”
“I’d like to include them in this showing.”
“You mean to sell?” Annabelle lifted an incredulous brow.
“Not this time.” Nicole shrugged. “Maybe never. Still, I’d like to include them.”
“Which means we’ll burn the midnight oil to change the exhibit.”
“One of us will.”
“Wrong!” Annabelle slipped from the desk and straightened her skirt. “Two of us will.”
Nicole laughed. “I knew I could count on you.”
If Annabelle’s grand entrance and conversation commanded Jeb’s attention, Nicole’s laughter stopped him cold. Before, it had been self-conscious and mechanical. But beyond that, he couldn’t remember ever hearing her laugh with such abandon and delight.
As he saw her now, in an element she’d created, speaking with this irrepressible woman who was clearly a trusted friend, he knew he’d never seen her as happy.
When this was finished, when he’d done what had to be done, he wondered what would be left of her life.
“Good morning,” a cheerful voice boomed out. “The boss lady suggested that there might be something I can show you.”
Jeb turned automatically toward the woman who had appeared at his side. In his millisecond of distraction she’d moved with an astonishingly quiet step after her boisterous entrance. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
“I can understand that. The wolf is beautiful.”
“The wolf?”
A dramatic gesture indicated the massive head of bronze where his clenched fist rested. “Since you’re two of a kind, it’s natural he would be one of your favorites.”
At a bit less than five feet, the woman called Annabelle was a foot shorter than he, but what she lacked in height was compensated for by unrestrained flirtation. As their gazes met, hers was flashing, unrepentantly appreciative. His was as aloof as an autumn mist. “I beg your pardon?”
“Honey.” Annabelle’s eyelids drooped in speculative appraisal. “Any man who looks as good as you, or as bad, has no need to beg anything from me.” A hearty laugh bubbled somewhere in the depths of her bosom as her shoulders shook. “At least, not too hard.”
“Good and bad?” Jeb mused. “An interesting if peculiar analogy.”
“Interesting, maybe. But not peculiar,” Annabelle declared. “Not peculiar at all. On the surface you’re good-looking in a rugged sort of way, but you can’t fool me. Underneath it you’re as wild and wily as the wolf, and twice as fascinating.”
“Wild and wily?” Jeb was chuckling now. The woman was outrageous and loved every minute of it. “Just an off-the-cuff analysis, huh? And if you had more time, you could delve a little deeper?”
“I wouldn’t mind the delving, but it isn’t necessary. Any woman worth half her salt can take one look at you and she knows.”
“But what does she know?”
A bold look moved over him again. “She knows everything.”
His chuckle turned to laughter. “I hope not. Sounds dangerous.”
“Only for the woman, sugar. But taking a crack at taming you would be worth it.” Abruptly her thoughts hopscotched in another direction. “Now that we’ve settled that, is there something special you wanted to see? Besides the wolf and me, of course.”
“Nothing, yet.” The words were hardly spoken before he recognized he’d made a tactical error. If he needed to establish himself as a regular and welcome client, he must play what was evidently a game greatly relished by this small person. Play it he would. Teasing her with a look as lecherous as her own, he grinned a lazy grin. The cool gray of his eyes became warm silver. “When I do...need help, that is, should I ask for...?”
As his voice trailed into another tantalizing pause, he saw delight flash in her eyes. Though she was short, shorter than Nicole, and much heavier, the weight was solid and perfectly distributed. With flawless, copper-hued skin and a Gypsy’s black mane tousled to perfection, she was a handsome woman. Clearly no stranger to masculine attention.
Indeed, she was handsome, but not beautiful, he decided. Not as Nicole was beautiful.
Keeping his attention focused on Annabelle, he didn’t need to glance at Nicole to make comparisons. How she looked had been burned into his brain in his study of her dossier and by weeks of surveillance.
He didn’t need to look at her to remember, nor to know that she had abandoned the pretense of working and watched him openly.
“I need to know your name,” he reminded Annabelle. “To be sure I get the right woman.”
Annabelle’s laugh set her bosoms struggling to be free of whatever superstructure confined them. “You are a devil. But you Californians usually are. Always ready to give a woman her comeuppance by reminding her there’s other fruit on the tree.”
“What makes you think I’m from California?” Jeb was a little alarmed by her astute deduction.
“I don’t think, I know. It’s the accent. You’ve been away from it long enough and trained enough that there are only little nuances of it left.”
Her allusion to his training was so perfectly on target that Jeb’s escalating alarm flickered for a moment in his eyes. For once the little woman seemed blithely unaware and chattered smugly on. “The average person wouldn’t hear it, but people come from all over the world to visit Charleston and the islands, and more than a few of them find their way to this gallery. After a while one learns. To be less than modest, I have an exceptional ear for accents and,” she added drolly, “it doesn’t hurt that I work for a former Californian.”
“I’m beginning to think there’s a lot about you that’s exceptional, Annabelle.”
“Annabelle! You devil!” She wagged a finger at him. “You’ve known my name all along. But how?”
“The boss lady mistook me for you when I came in.”
Annabelle’s rollicking laugh soared. “That would be a little hard to do.”
“Not when there are Ashley Blackmon paintings to distract one.”
“That would tend to distract her. At least until she got a good look at you.” She leaned closer, lifting her round face to his, to whisper. “Now that she has, she can’t take her eyes off you. She’s been watching us, you know.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Unusual,” Annabelle declared succinctly. “She rarely pays even the handsome ones more than cursory attention. Now.” She was hopscotching again. “Are you going to be fair?”
“How so?”
“Running to type, I see.” She clicked her tongue and sighed. “Playing the rogue to the hilt.”
Jeb grinned. “Comes with the territory.”
“I’m sure it does, but are you going to tell me who you are? Or is it that you’re a man of mystery on a dark, secret mission?”
The woman was uncanny. He wondered if she weren’t the dangerous one. “Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no mystery. As you guessed, I’m a Californian. My name is...”
“Jeb?” Nicole had risen from her seat. Her palm rested on the top of her desk to steady herself. “Jeb Tanner?”
His heart skipped a beat and Annabelle was forgotten as he lifted his head and his gaze met the recognition in hers. She took a step, then stopped. He saw the need to believe warring with the disbelief written on her face. Gently, surprising himself at how gently, he said, “Hello, Nicky.”
“Jeb! It’s really you!” Then she was in his arms. Neither would remember later how she got there, only that she had, and that he’d held her close without speaking.
When she drew away at last, her face held a look of wonder. “I thought I’d lost my mind, or that I was dreaming. Then Annabelle said you spoke like a Californian, and everything began falling into place.”
She touched his face, brushing his hair with her fingertips. “Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me when you came in?”
“Maybe I wanted to see if you remembered,” he murmured.
“How could I forget? I had a horrendous crush on you when I was fifteen.”
“But that was also as many years ago.”
“Time doesn’t matter, a girl never forgets her first crush. Not even a girl who was a nerd.”
Jeb caught her hands in his and lifted her fingers to his lips, brushing a kiss over their tips. “You were a smart kid, ahead of herself in time and place. But never, ever a nerd.”
“That would’ve been open to debate.” Keeping her hand in his, she looked up at him in unconcealed delight. “Tell me, what on earth brought you here?”
The bell by the door jangled, a trio of chattering women paused only long enough to locate them. “Nicole, my dear, there you are.” The eldest of the trio spoke, a haughty summons in her tone. “And Annabelle, how are you, dear?”
“Never fails,” Annabelle grumbled under her breath. “The gargoyle always shows up the day before a sale, with her cronies in tow, hoping to get the scoop on everyone else. You two continue as you are, I’ll handle her.” She patted Nicole’s shoulder leaning so close their noses nearly touched. “Don’t think I’m not going to hear about this. Every little detail of it. You just don’t have a rogue like this tucked in your past and keep him hidden. Not without an explanation.
“I’ll be back,” she promised, and with a swish of her skirt, went to do battle. “Mrs. Atherton” they heard her say, as she waded into the fray. “What secrets have you come to pry out of us today?”
Nicole grimaced at her pointed jab, then smiled a half smile and stepped out of Jeb’s arms. “I’m afraid Annabelle misinterpreted this.”
“Did she?”
“You know she did.”
“So, let her enjoy herself while it lasts.” He kissed her hand again, his lips lingering longer than one kiss needed. “We’ll set her straight later. In the meantime, I’ll let you get back to work.”
The bell chimed in another customer.
Jeb lingered, her hand still in his. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”
“Yes.” Nicole agreed and could think of nothing else to say.
“I could call after the sale.”
“I’d like that.”
Releasing her, he tugged at a lock of hair that fell over her forehead. “Luck,” he whispered as he had when she was fifteen and facing a crucial exam. Leaving her, he went to the door, catching it as a patron entered, sparing them another tinny symphony.
“Nicole?”
“Yes?”
She looked at him with the same unquestioning trust of the coltish fifteen-year-old, and the weight of betrayal crashed down. He could walk away from her and from his mission before that trust was destroyed, but he knew he wouldn’t.
“It’s good to see you again,” he said softly.
As he returned to the street he knew that, no matter what lies he might tell, that much was true.
Two
Jeb stood at the window. Where he’d stood for hours. The shirt he’d pulled over running shorts as he crawled out of bed had been tossed aside. The field glasses, normally a virtual part of his hand, lay on a table halfway across the room. Beside them sat a carafe of coffee, untouched and forgotten.
Beyond the window, his shadowy canvas to the world, the turbulent sea was a caldron of colors, shifting and changing as the rising sun raced to challenge the brewing storm. When he first took up his cold-eyed vigil in the moonless predawn hours, black waves tipped with silver washed over an even blacker shore. Now shades of gold rose out of magenta.
He’d watched each change. From total darkness, to this moment when night met day, he’d noted every nuance with a troubled restlessness.
For the second night he’d tossed and tumbled until, finally counting his quest for sleep lost, he’d abandoned his bed. For the third morning the sands of the shore would be undisturbed by human footsteps.
Nicole’s absence, immediately following the sale, came as no surprise. He expected it. From her dossier he knew she kept living quarters in Charleston. A small pied-à-terre, for convenience after tiring late-night sessions in the gallery. For safety, when the drive to Kiawah would be long and desolate. The postsale uproar with its countless details to be addressed would have been such a time.
Two days more had passed. The packing and shipping and additional inventory would be long done, for Nicole worked hard, sparing herself little. Ever. The only indulgence she allowed were solitary morning walks; the only respite, lazy Sundays on the island.
“Sunday.” Jeb rapped the window with an impatient fist. “Where is she?”
His growled question was rhetorical. He knew where she was. Hank Bishop, Simon’s man in Charleston, had reported where she’d been, what she’d done and with whom, in precise detail. His last report had been that Nicole Callison was tucked safely, and alone, behind her garden wall. That was two days ago. Since then, Bishop had been as silent as the grave.
A second fist rattled the pane as lightning split the distant sky and thunder rumbled. As morning blossomed in new radiance, the darkness churning over the sea had issued its first challenge. But Jeb had stopped thinking of light and darkness and colors.
“Two days.” Hands still fisted, he fought a rising impatience. “Two damnable days and nothing!”
Maybe it was the silence that made him too edgy to sleep. Maybe it was that he wasn’t accustomed to having a part of his investigations under the jurisdiction of another.
“Maybe it’s a lot of things.” Bracing against the broad expanse of glass, head bowed, tired eyes closed, his bare chest heaved in a deep shuddering breath. He needed to see her. If she was avoiding him, he needed to know why.
He needed to know now!
Wheeling about without a backward glance at the deserted shore, he went to the telephone. An instrument he trusted little, used only carefully and sporadically, but recently his chief connection to the world outside the walls of his temporary lodging. The number he dialed rang once and, after an eternity, a second time. As Mitch Ryan answered, Jeb went straight to the point. “I’m heading for Charleston.”
Mitch Ryan had been his friend for too long, and worked with him too many times to ask why or when or to try to dissuade him. If Jeb Tanner felt the need to go to Charleston, it would be with good reason. If there were circumstances that needed discussion, it wouldn’t be over an open telephone line. “All right,” the younger man said. “But, in case you haven’t looked out your window this morning, don’t let this sunshine fool you. There’s a mother of a storm brewing out there.”
Jeb glanced out the window, really seeing what he’d stared at for hours, and for a moment his world was a polarized void of light and dark. He’d spent the better part of his life on or near the sea, and it never ceased to feel strange to stand in full sun on a beautiful day and watch a squall approach.
From the looks of it, a hell of a squall, gathering strength and staying power. Mitch Ryan and Matthew Sky, two of the best of The Black Watch, had served as his crew more than once before. Water wasn’t the natural habitat for a Louisiana street kid and a French Chiricahua Apache, but they’d taken to it like salty dogs.
They were good, better than good, but he was the captain, a sailor born and bred. The sloop and its part in this was his responsibility. “Do you anticipate any problems?”
“Nothing the medicine man and I can’t handle.” Static crackled over the line and Mitch’s voice waffled in and out as lightning flashed again.
“The Gambler‘s secure?” The sloop, once the Moon Dancer, had been heavily damaged in another life. Reworked, repainted and refurbished, then given a new set of papers that wiped out its past, it was reborn as the Gambler.
In this mission, Mitch Ryan and Matthew Sky pulled triple duty as Jeb’s friends, crew and counterparts. A heavy load, but there was no one whose skill and judgment he trusted more. He could leave everything in their hands. But he had to be sure, and not just about the sloop.
Mitch was a step ahead of him, reading his thoughts, his silence. “The three of us will be safer than you will, Cap. Especially me—I have the medicine man, remember. Monsieur Matthew Winter Sky, the original man who sees things before they’re there, and that no one else will ever see. You just worry about yourself, not us. Take it easy on those narrow roads. If you happen to see a pretty girl along the way, kiss her for me.”
Jeb laughed then. “You don’t need any help in that department, I’ll let you do your own kissing.”
“Given my limited choices, I think I’ll pass. Matthew would knock my head off and the boat has splinters.”
A gust of wind swirled about the house and moaned about its eaves. A strafing gull flapped furiously, and sailed backward. Jeb had to go. If he hurried he could beat the worst of what was coming to the mainland. “I’ll be in touch.”
“You do that. And Cap...”
Jeb waited.
Mitch cleared his throat. Over the scratching telephone line it sounded like a chair scraping over a hollow floor.
Time was precious, but Jeb waited. This wouldn’t take long.
Mitch sighed. A vocal shrug of the shoulders to diffuse the depth of what he was feeling, what he wanted to say. Then, “Just watch your back.”
“Yeah,” Jeb agreed. “Always.” With a jab of his thumb the connection was broken and the receiver put down thoughtfully. The conversation was typical Mitch Ryan. No breach of security. No unnecessary questions asked. No unwanted advice given. Tough talk. Teasing names. Levity that fooled no one, then an oblique comment that gave him away if it had.
Mitch was worried, and not about the storm. Tony Callison had gone to ground months ago. He could be surfacing now, in Charleston. The weather would offer perfect cover. And by now he would be desperate, as only a hunted man completely alone could be.
Contradiction sliced though Jeb’s thoughts. Not completely alone. He had Nicole. A gut feeling said Simon had been right on target all along. The errant brother would come to his sister. Perhaps, contrary to Bishop’s absence of reports, he already had.
Tony Callison might be desperate, and he was dangerous, but he was cunning in the bargain. The man could move in and out of a scene as quietly as a ghost. He’d proven it time and again. Better men than Hank Bishop had been lulled into a false security, thinking the target of his surveillance was too quiet and peaceful to be at risk and in no danger.
When too quiet really meant danger was already present.
“Danger.” The word, a constant in Jeb’s life, the measure of it, was harsh on his tongue. If the telephone had been in his hand, he would have crushed it. Was Nicole in danger?
In all the hours he’d spent arguing with Simon—resisting this assignment until the absolute end; throughout the exhaustive brainstorming and planning with Mitch and Matthew; in the final stages of pouring over Nicole’s dossier—he hadn’t wanted to consider that she might become a threat to her brother and, thus, to herself.
Jeb Tanner admitted he’d tried her in his mind long ago and convicted her of one of two crimes. Complicity, or innocent naiveté. He’d nearly convinced himself there were no other choices, and if it came down to it, the lesser crime would protect her. But then he hadn’t seen her again. Hadn’t discovered the woman the child had become.
Nicole Callison might be guilty as sin, but that sin wouldn’t be naiveté.
If Tony came to her with the taint of death clinging to him; if he asked for help, an avenue of escape, a smuggler’s ticket out of the country; if she refused him, would he harm her?
Once Tony had loved her too much to let anyone or anything touch her. But that was before.
Before his sociopathic mind lost its last touch with humanity. Before the collegiate bad boy evolved into a conscienceless killer of men and women and, finally, children. Before the killing became a sadistic ritual, the bounty less important than the pleasure.
Before he became a stalking mad dog, who walked as a man.
If she got in his way, it wouldn’t matter who she was, or what she’d been to him. “He would kill her,” Jeb muttered, the horror of it, the waste, turning him sick.
Tony would kill her like all the rest.
The image that scorched Jeb’s mind sent a shudder down his back. He’d studied the forensic reports and seen the snapshots of what Tony did to his growing list of victims. Each a signature killing, and each worse than the last, until a gruesome pattern of a serial killer began emerging.
“But no more.” Jeb’s voice was the guttural voice of a stranger, as cold as his eyes. It was the threat of a serial killer with the honed skills of murder for hire that had brought Simon McKinzie and The Black Watch into the pursuit. The same threat had tipped the scales, destroying Jeb’s resistance to Simon’s plan to trade on his past—renewing one acquaintance to catch another.
With the gruesome facts laid before him, Jeb saw, not the man who had been his rival and his best friend in college, but a monster, potentially more destructive than any the world had ever known. If he were not stopped.
But he would be. And Jeb Tanner would do it.
“Before Nicole’s name is on any damn bloody list.” If he wasn’t already too late.
Dread like cold lead in his belly, Jeb took the stairs in a deliberate pace that ate up the distance more surely than frantic rushing. In the bedroom that occupied the top floor, he slid into jeans, a light shirt and moccasins. A holster was strapped to his ankle and a compact, but powerful, pistol was snapped in it before he gathered up the keys to the roadster. Then he was running down the stairs again, taking them two at a time.
The door slammed behind him on the echo of a single word.
“Please.”
* * *
The air was humid and fragrant. Shrubs crowded the walled garden walk and the courtyard, their heavy blooms and waxen leaves shimmering like old velvet. In the murky half-light the narrow corridor that bordered Nicole Callison’s Charleston home was a magical place of drifting mists and deepening shade, of muted bird song and quiet footsteps.
As she walked through the mist, Nicole reveled in these last minutes before a summer squall. When the wind lay still, city streets outside her gate were wrapped in a waiting hush, and this little part of her world was softer, sweeter. When there truly was peace before the storm.
Soon the wind would rise again, bringing with it the rain, the thunder and the lightning. But when it was done, the city would go on as before, and her garden would be rife with the promise of new life.
Nicole believed with all her being that in Charleston and Kiawah, she’d found the best of both worlds. One offered serenity embodied in a rain-swept garden. The other, the wild exhilaration and the furor of the sea. She loved them both.
She was content with her life. As she wandered this tiny space that was hers alone, she knew she was more content than she had ever hoped. But the way had been long and hard, leading, at last, to a place far away from who she was and where she’d begun. Only then had she put the past behind her.
Three days ago a part of that past had stepped back into her life, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to feel anything.
Catching a drooping blossom in her palm, she watched as moisture gathering on a creamy petal trembled like tears. The tears she’d shed over Jeb.