Bound By Passion: No Desire Denied / One More Kiss / Second-Chance Seduction

10

“WHOEVER IT WAS, they’re a damn good shot.” Daryl studied the extra whiteboard he’d dragged into the main parlor from Adair’s office. On it he’d sketched the clearing, the stone arch and the hillside beyond. He pointed to the place where he thought the sniper had taken his shot. “I bet he was standing right here.”

Reid’s mind flashed back to the instant he’d felt the fiery sensation sear the side of his shoulder. He remembered that, and the icy stab of fear that had pierced right to his core—and then nothing until he was standing by Nell midway beneath the stone arch. Even now, he had no recollection of how he’d gotten her there.

That was a first for him. He took a sip of the brandy Daryl had poured him after Vi had tended to the scratch the bullet had left.

A bullet meant for Nell.

In the bright lights of the kitchen with Vi and Nell, he’d seen how tired Nell had looked. There’d been dark circles beneath her eyes, and for the first time he’d glimpsed fear in them. His fault. He’d never treated a woman with less care. And he’d never been this careless on a job.

Vi had agreed with his assessment of Nell’s exhaustion, because she’d hurried her niece upstairs, so that she could shower and change and get some rest. The dog had gone with the women.

In the parlor, Daryl drew his finger down to where he’d sketched the stone arch. “If you were here, you would have been out of range of the floodlights. I’ll bet he was wearing night vision goggles.”

“Which means he’s either a pro or he’s had military training,” Reid said.

“Agreed.”

Reid wanted badly to pace off his nerves. Another first for him. He never paced.

“While Vi was patching you up, I updated Sheriff Skinner. He’s got a man stationed there right now to guard the area.”

“At first light, I want to search for the bullet.”

Daryl met his eyes. “My thoughts exactly. It might shed some light on who we’re dealing with.” Then he tapped on the sketch again. “By then, Skinner will have volunteers patrolling the hillside and searching for any casing. He said he’d have no trouble getting the manpower. Edie’s a popular woman in Glen Loch, and no one wants trouble at her granddaughter’s wedding rehearsal. Everyone in town’s grateful for the economic boost that this wedding business has given the local community.”

“Nell is not going to want to stay inside the castle,” Reid said. “She’s determined to find the necklace, and I’m worried about the number of strangers who will be here tomorrow.”

“With the extra manpower Skinner is mustering up, we ought to be able to handle it. I’ll print up copies of the police artist’s sketch that Duncan sent us so Skinner can distribute them to his volunteers. Not that it will help much since he was wearing sunglasses and a beard. That reporter from the Times will be here at ten to interview Vi and shadow her for the rest of the day. I’ll stick with them. Vi has two appointments with prospective clients, and the wedding rehearsal starts at four. That will involve less than a dozen people, and none of them will be strangers. I’ll also have a man at my office check more deeply into Gwendolen Campbell’s known acquaintances. He can take another look at Deanna Lewis’s circle. Someone with a military background might pop up.”

Reid could hear the clock ticking in his head. “I never should have agreed to take her out there tonight. I let her convince me that they wouldn’t want to eliminate her until she’d found the necklace. I’ve never been this off my game.”

Daryl turned to him. “You’re not off your game. The shooter didn’t want to hit Nell. He wanted to hit you.”

Reid stared at him. The man was right. And he should have realized it sooner. He was definitely off his game. That had to stop.

“What did we miss?” Nell asked as she and Vi joined them.

“You should be in bed,” Reid said.

“Save your breath,” Vi said. “I lost that argument ten minutes ago.”

“I was just telling Reid that he was the shooter’s target and not you,” Daryl said.

“I know,” Nell said. “It’s my fault for convincing Reid to go out there.”

“No.” Reid waited until she met his gaze. “I’m responsible for what happened, and I’m going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Nell felt a band tighten around her heart. He was talking about more than the shooter, and he was right. Hadn’t she already realized that she had to modify her subplot? She couldn’t, she wouldn’t put him in danger again. If that meant she had to put her garden fantasy on hold until she’d figured out where Eleanor had hidden her necklace, she could live with that. She’d waited seven years. She could certainly wait to seduce him in the garden until after sundown tomorrow. If all went well, she’d find the necklace by then.

At least that was the argument she’d made to herself when she had been in the shower.

So why did it hurt so much that he’d come to the same conclusion?

“The person responsible for all this is the person who thinks they have a right to Eleanor’s sapphires,” Vi said as she urged Nell toward sofa. “The best way to put an end to it is to catch them.”

Daryl poured two brandies and handed them to the women. “Reid and I agree that the shooter is either a professional or perhaps ex-military.”

“What if it’s someone who shoots for sport?” Nell asked. “Gwendolen and Deanna are both from Great Britain. Perhaps they hunt or skeet shoot. Obviously Deanna couldn’t have been out there on the hillside tonight, but Gwendolen could.”

The two men exchanged a look. “Nell could be right,” Daryl said. “I’ll have my man check it out.” Then he turned to Nell. “How did you think of that?”

“The characters I create for my stories all have backgrounds, and we’ve pretty much established that the villains in this case have a connection to Eleanor and Angus that reaches back to Scotland.” She smiled at Daryl. “Plus hunting and skeet shooting are big on British television.”

“Reid tells me that you think the clue to the location of Eleanor’s necklace is in the painting,” Daryl said.

Nell moved so she could stand directly beneath the portrait. As she passed the second whiteboard that Daryl had used to sketch out the time line of events, she gave it a glance and once more experienced that little tug on her memory that she’d experienced earlier in the evening, but whatever was lingering at the edge of her mind stayed there. Shifting her gaze to Eleanor, she tried to focus.

Finding the necklace had to be at the top of her priority list. “She was so careful hiding the two earrings. She wanted them to be eventually found. So she had to have left clues.”

“Cam is sure that’s why someone was paying those nocturnal visits to our library six months ago,” Vi said. “Trying to find those clues before Adair found the first earring.”

“The stone arch is definitely in the portrait,” Daryl said. “But what about the cave in the cliff face where Duncan and Piper found the second earring?”

He was right, Nell thought with a sinking heart. In the beats of silence that followed Daryl’s comment, she waited for Reid to say something. Anything. When he didn’t, the little band of pain tightened around her heart.

The necklace, she lectured herself. Plot before subplot. But no matter how hard she stared at the portrait, she couldn’t make the cliffs appear. If Eleanor was seated in the gazebo as her father had always insisted she was, there was no way to fit the cliffs in the background.

“If she left the jewels behind in different places, maybe she didn’t feel the need to put the clues all in the portrait,” Vi said. “Maybe that’s why our nighttime visitor spent so much time in the library.”

No one said a word, but Nell was sure they were all thinking the same thing. If there was a clue in the library, discovering it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Someone had spent six months working there and had come up empty.

A wave of exhaustion suddenly hit Nell. An arm went around her shoulders. Not Reid’s but her aunt Vi’s.

“We need to sleep on it,” Vi said as she drew Nell toward the door. “Let our subconscious minds sort through it. Things will be better in the morning.”

They’d better be, Nell thought. Then she remembered the notes she’d tucked into her fantasy box, and her tiredness began to fade. She was going to find Eleanor’s necklace by sundown tomorrow.

And she was going to seduce Reid Sutherland tonight, just not in the garden. Yet.

* * *

REID STOOD ON the balcony of his room, his hands gripping the stone railing like a lifeline. He’d stepped out because it was as far away as he could get from the connecting door to Nell’s bedroom. The cold shower he’d already taken hadn’t done a thing to lessen his desire. While the water had poured down on him, he had reviewed the reasons why it would be a mistake to go to her. She needed sleep badly. He needed some distance to regain his perspective. Making love to her again would only increase her expectation that he could give her something that he was incapable of. He didn’t want to hurt her more than he already had. Etcetera, etcetera and so forth.

Cut the crap, Sutherland. The real reason you’re holding on to the railing like a lifeline is because you want more than to make love to her again. You simply want to be with her. To lie beside her and hold her. To talk to her. Not just about the case or the sapphires. He wanted to know more about her. What she’d shared with him beneath the stone arch had only made him more curious.

Pillow talk. It was an old-fashioned and clichéd term that his mother had used to describe one of the joys of her marriage to A.D. The fact that he could envision himself doing it with Nell scared the hell out of him. Spending the night with a woman had been near the top of his never-do list. He’d never brought one to his home because he valued the freedom, the flexibility to leave before morning. Staying the night built the kind of intimacy he’d never desired.

With Nell, he wanted to spend the night, to wake in the morning holding her close, to see her face in the light of a new day. He wanted intimacy.

Damn her. No other woman had made him want more than he could have.

Lifting his hands from the stone railing, he found that his fingers had gone numb from the tightness of his grip. He had to think of something else. Vi had been right. He needed to sleep. While he slept, perhaps his unconscious mind would let him know what to do about Nell.

But the thought of going to an empty bed kept him lingering on the balcony. The night was so quiet that he could hear individual waves licking the rocks along the shore. Flexing his fingers, he shifted his focus to the gardens that stretched from beneath his balcony to the stone arch and the hillside in one direction and the lake in the other.

The stone arch was clearly visible in the floodlights, and the moon spilled enough light to make out the tops of the trees and the shadowy paths that wound through the gardens. Nell was so sure that Eleanor had left clues in the painting, but Daryl had been dead-on. The cliff face was on the opposite side of the castle from the gardens. If Eleanor had intended to leave clues to the location of the sapphires in the painting, she’d left a big one out.

And if he stayed on his balcony all night, he definitely wouldn’t be at the top of his game tomorrow. He was about to turn and head for bed when his cell phone rang. A quick glance at the caller ID told him that it was Cam. He must have news.

“Problem or favor?” Reid asked.

“Neither. Adair and I discovered something...curious.”

Reid knew his brother well enough—Cam wouldn’t call in the middle of the night unless he thought it was important. Aware of how sound could carry over water, he stepped back into his bedroom and slid the balcony doors shut. “Tell me.”

“It was Adair’s idea,” Cam said. “Mom’s been in the library ever since she got permission to visit the Campbell estate, and A.D.’s been in the gardens. Neither one of them has gotten a tour of the castle, so this afternoon Adair convinced the housekeeper to give us one.”

“You found something on our Gwendolen,” Reid said.

“Not exactly. We learned the estate has fallen on hard times. The story in the village is that it started to decline about two hundred years ago—just about the time of Angus and Eleanor’s flight to the New World. Due to the lack of a male heir in Eleanor’s generation, the castle and the estate went to a cousin, but the money just wasn’t there. The present housekeeper says that her mother worked here after the Second World War when most of the furniture was sold or taken by debt collectors. She’s still alive, and we’re going to visit her first thing in the morning. But it’s what we didn’t find on our tour that’s curious.”

“What did you not find on your tour?”

“About the only things that didn’t get sold are a series of portraits in the upstairs ballroom. It’s a regular rogues’ gallery of Campbell heirs and family members. Each generation has a family portrait with the male heir and his wife and children. The last one has Eleanor in it—the same long blond hair. The housekeeper says the family wouldn’t sell them, but it’s more likely that the pictures wouldn’t be of much value to anyone but the Campbells.”

It was unlike Cam to take so long in getting to the point, and that fact alone had Reid’s curiosity growing.

“The thing is, none of the wives are wearing the sapphires—not even Eleanor’s mother,” he said. “Adair’s been nagging me ever since we left the ballroom to call you about it. She says that the sapphires should be in the paintings, and she claims their conspicuous absence means that Deanna Lewis might be right. The sapphires were not Eleanor’s dowry because they never belonged to the Campbells.”

“There’s certainly an argument to be made for that theory,” Reid said. In his mind he could hear Nell making it. If the Campbells had been in legitimate possession of the Stuart sapphires, surely a record would have been displayed in the family portraits.

“Yeah,” Cam said in a resigned tone. “It opens up a whole new can of worms. If the Stuart sapphires didn’t belong to the Campbells, who the hell did they belong to and how did Eleanor get hold of them?”

“That’s what you need to find out. And fast,” Reid said. “Anything else?”

“Now that you mention it, I am curious about whether or not you’ve read the fantasies in the MacPherson sisters’ fantasy box.”

Reid let a beat of silence go by. Of course, Cam would know about the box. Duncan would probably know about it, also. “No, I haven’t.”

“Well, you have a treat in store. Long story short, the sisters got together on the night our parents married and wrote some very explicit sexual fantasies. Then they buried them in the stone arch so that they would eventually come true. Nell wrote hers on pink paper, and it’s very interesting.”

Reid frowned. “Are you telling me that you’ve read them?”

“Hey, I’m CIA. I’m trained to leave no stone unturned.”

Reid couldn’t identify all the emotions that shot through him. Fury that someone had invaded Nell’s privacy was the first one. “You had no business reading Nell’s.”

“Whoa, big bro. Calm down.”

Reid was shocked to find that he needed to. He was pacing, and his free hand had clenched into a fist. If Cam had been in the room, that fist would already have collided with his jaw. He stopped short and drew in a deep breath.

“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Cam asked.

Reid found he couldn’t answer. He was very much afraid that the answer was yes. And if he said it out loud...

“I’m going to take your silence as an affirmation,” Cam said. “I bet Duncan that you’d be a goner within the first twelve hours of your arrival at the castle. The profiler believes that you’re a cautious man, and it would take at least twenty-four hours for you to take the fall. I win.” Cam was chuckling as he ended the call.

Reid stood there for a moment staring down at his cell phone. Then he reached deep for his control. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t think about his feelings for Nell right now. He had a forty-eight-hour countdown clock to deal with, which left them only thirty-six hours at most. When he glanced up, he discovered he was standing right in front of the connecting door to Nell’s room, his hand on the knob. But before he could turn it, it opened, and he barely recognized this version of Nell, who took one of his hands and drew him into her room.

11

NELL’S HEART THREATENED to pound right out of her chest. She was not going to let Reid spoil her plan this time. Not after all her careful preparations.

He’d taken forever to get to his room. She’d used the time to light candles, chill champagne and dress in the black lace designer lingerie she’d purchased in the boutique below Piper’s apartment. When she’d put it on and looked at herself in the mirror, she hadn’t even recognized the old Nell.

Perfect. The lacy tank top stopped just short of the string-bikini-style panties, leaving the skin at her waist exposed. She placed a hand there now to help her focus.

It wasn’t just black lace that she’d armed herself with. She also had plenty of other ideas. But there was a world of difference between imagining something and actually doing it. In her daydreams she’d never had to deal with the effect of his gaze as it swept down her body. Flames licked first along the nerve endings at her throat, then flickered lower to the sensitive skin at the tops of her breasts. She sucked in a breath when she felt the fire reach her belly, then sear her legs right down to her toes. He was still fully clothed, and that made her remember her plan.

Strip him. You can definitely do that. Just talk your way through it.

Careful not to look directly into his eyes or at his mouth, she said, “I intend to seduce you, Reid. I wanted to do it in the gardens, but it may be a while before either of us is safe there.”

Good. Words had always come easily to her.

“You have too many clothes on.” She reached for the first button on his shirt and slipped it free. “Better.”

She could do this.

“Nell—”

“Shh.” Tamping down on the impulse to meet his eyes, she concentrated on the second button and felt a spurt of triumph when she freed it. “You don’t have to say a word. You want to tell me that we both need our sleep if we’re going to find the necklace tomorrow. And you’re expecting that I’ll obey like the good little girl I was at six. But I’m not that girl anymore.”

As if to emphasize her point to both of them, she ignored the last button, and in a move she’d dreamed of forever, she shoved the shirt down his arms so that it trapped his wrists at his sides. When he sucked in his breath, the thrill shot straight through her.

Turning him, she placed a hand on his chest and urged him toward her bed. “Do you know how long I’ve dreamed of getting you out of your clothes?” The fast thud of his heart against her palm was rewarding, arousing. When she backed him into the side of the mattress, she slid her hand down his now-bare chest to his belt. Thrilled at his quick expulsion of breath, she lingered there, tracing her finger along the top of his waistband.

“I wanted to do this on the day our parents were married.” Taking her time, she unfastened the buckle, then pulled the belt through the loops. Slowly. “I described the way I would strip you in one of the fantasies I wrote about you that night.”

Moonlight streamed through the glass doors, highlighting all the planes and angles of the skin she’d exposed. She simply had to touch him again. Tossing the belt aside, she ran her hands from his waist to his throat. It wasn’t just the sight of him that fascinated her. She loved the contrast in their skin tones. His was tan; hers was pale. Pleasure sharpened at each response. The sound of his breath expelling when her nails scraped down over his nipples, the rapid hammer of his heart against her lips, the way her name caught in his throat when she unsnapped his jeans and slid the zipper down—each separate sensation thrilled her, enchanted her.

“Nell...”

The desperation in his tone was contagious. And it was all so incredibly good. Glorious. How had she managed to wait for so long? His hands rested on her shoulders, but without the strength that she’d felt before. Her confidence surged. “There’s more.” Impatient now, she shoved his jeans down over his hips.

And there was more.

Her gaze froze on silky black jockeys. The material was sheer and revealing. “I never imagined the full impact of being with you.”

How could she? At eighteen, her experience had been limited. Now, she realized, it still was. There’d been no time to see him during that firestorm of desire at the side of the stone arch. No time to touch him. Craving tore at her. She’d take the time now.

“Nice,” she murmured as she danced her fingers down the length of him.

“Nell...”

The word came out on a moan, delighting her and encouraging her to press her hand more firmly against him. “Very sexy. And we’re so compatible. Who would have thought?”