Heartwishes (11 page)

Gemma had on her usual outfit of loose jeans and three layers of tops. Since she was used to working around virile young men, she’d learned to keep covered up. And she’d also learned to work out with them in the way that they did, which meant with weights.

Gemma unzipped her cotton jacket and removed it, revealing a pink cotton shirt under it. She unbuttoned it and took it off. Underneath she was wearing a fuchsia tank top that showed the lacy edges of her matching bra.

One thing about working out with men was that they loved upper body work. Deltoids and biceps seemed to be their main concern. Three years ago, when Gemma came up with the idea of teaching while exercising, she could barely lift a pair of two-pound
dumbbells over her head. Now she worked with an Olympic bar, which was forty-five pounds.

When Gemma stood in front of Tom with a lot of skin showing, she knew her arms showed her workouts. Between boxing and thousands of reps for delts, her arms were firm and well shaped.

“Good girl,” Tom said, smiling at her.

Behind them, his skinny young deputy—his name tag read
CARL
—was grinning. “You think you can climb up ol’ Colin in those pants? Maybe you should take them off too.”

Tom glanced at his deputy in reprimand, then turned to Colin, who was still looking up at the boy. “Colin! This young lady—” He looked at her.

“Gemma.”

“Gemma is going to do a Shamus and get the boy down.”

“He’s too heavy. She can’t—” Colin began, but then he looked at her and his eyes widened. Gemma’s body was fabulous! She was curvy and taut with muscle. Her large breasts were above a waist his hands could span. Words failed him. “Yeah, okay,” he at last managed to say.

“Thought maybe you’d agree,” Tom said.

When Gemma was standing in front of him, Colin looked at her in appreciation. “Those students of yours taught you a thing or two about working out, didn’t they?”

Maybe it was because she didn’t have on her usual layers of covering, or maybe it was the way Colin was looking at her, or maybe it was because she’d been without a boyfriend for months, but a strong feeling of desire ran through her. For Colin. For a man who was taken. Owned by a dragon.

“Hey, Colin,” Carl said, “Jean know about you two?”

Colin gave the deputy a look to shut up, then he put his sheriff face back on and looked up at the boy. “If I lift Miss Gemma onto my shoulders, will you go to her?”

The boy looked down at Gemma in her skimpy top, her breasts well exposed, and almost smiled. “Yeah. She’s pretty.”

Colin looked back at her. “The kid’s going to grow up to be another Lanny. Can you lift him?”

“I think so,” Gemma said, but her heart was beating in her throat. When the tree branch cracked again and the mother put her hand to her mouth to keep from screaming, all Gemma could think was, What if I drop the child?

“Okay,” Colin said, and his voice was that of a coach: calm, quiet, and reassuring. “I want you to step on my leg, and I’ll help you onto my shoulders. I’ll hold your ankles and balance you. When you’re stable, reach out to him. Let him come to you, don’t pull. Once you have him, hold on to him and I’ll do the rest. Understand?”

“Yes,” she said.

Unnoticed by anyone, Carl turned the video recorder on his cell on and stepped back to get a full view of the action.

Bending a bit, Colin extended his right leg so she could step onto his thigh. He held out his hands to help her. When she hesitated and he saw fear in her eyes, he knew he needed to give her courage. He didn’t know her very well, but he’d seen that she had a competitive spirit. He said, “Come on, Ranford, those high school girls climb all over my baby brother. You gonna let those kids beat you?”

His tone—so like the trainers she’d worked with—took away most of her fear. She slipped out of her shoes, took his hands, and stepped up on his bent leg.

When she was steady, he put his hands on her legs and looked up at her. “I’m going to lift you up, and I want you to get onto my shoulders. Ready?”

Gemma nodded. She glanced up at the boy. He was watching them in fascination as he sat absolutely still.

Colin lifted Gemma as though he were overhead pressing her. But then she figured that for that exercise, at his size, he probably used a couple of eighty-pound dumbbells, which together weighed more than she did.

When Gemma was on his broad shoulders, she put her hands on the top of his head for balance. He held on to her ankles firmly and took a step back as she steadied herself.

Once she was standing, her head was nearly level with the boy’s and just a foot away. She smiled at him. “Pretty cool, huh?” she said, trying to reassure him.

“Yeah. Can you get me down now?”

“Sure. I’m going to hold out my arms and you’re going to come to me, right?

The boy nodded.

Gemma reached out to the branch and Colin took a step closer, so she was very near the frightened child. She opened her arms. “Don’t jump, just sort of fall toward me, okay?”

Again the boy nodded, and in the next second he fell onto Gemma. He was indeed heavy and he nearly made her fall backward, but she wrapped her arms around the child so hard that he almost couldn’t breathe.

Colin didn’t give her time to fight for balance. He released his hold on her ankles and took a step backward. For a split second, Gemma and the boy were standing on nothing, suspended in air, over six feet above the ground.

In the next second, Gemma, still holding tightly on to the boy, fell—and Colin caught them both in his big, muscular arms. As he held them, Gemma could feel his heart pounding against her cheek and the boy was holding on to her with a death grip.

Moments later, the child’s mother pulled the boy away from her, and he let out a howl of relief as she took him away.

Colin didn’t put Gemma down but kept holding her in his arms. “You okay?”

“Yes.” She knew she should get down, but it felt good—and safe—to be so close to him. For a moment she let herself lean against him. It was as though only the two of them existed.

“Thanks,” Tom said from behind them. “To both of you.” In the distance they heard a siren. The fire engine was arriving.

“Look out!” Carl yelled.

Colin, still holding Gemma, leaped backward and knocked Tom down as the branch that had been holding the boy crashed to the ground.

When the noise and debris settled, Tom was on the bottom of the pile. “Colin,” he said, “I love you like a son, but if you don’t get the hell off of me my lungs are going to collapse.”

“Sorry,” Colin said as he rolled away and Gemma stood up.

Colin sat up, looking up at Gemma with pride. “You did well,” he said. “You have a good sense of balance. And—”

“Holy crap!” Tom said because Gemma’s face suddenly drained of color. Slowly, she turned on her heel and began to sink to the ground. She would have fallen if Tom hadn’t caught her.

Colin was on his feet in seconds as he took Gemma from Tom. “Post-traumatic?”

“No,” Tom said as he held out his hands. There was blood on them.

Reaching out with experienced hands, Tom pulled the bottom of Gemma’s tank top up. The tree branch had cut her side. “No arteries cut, but it might be deep enough to need stitches.”

“Call Tris,” Colin said. “Tell him I’ll be there in seven minutes.” He ran with the unconscious Gemma in his arms to his Jeep.

Behind him, still holding his phone and still recording, was Carl. He only turned it off when Colin slammed the door of his Jeep and sped away.

6

D
R.
E
DWARD
B
URGESS
slowly opened his car door, put his cane on the pavement, and carefully swiveled around to get out. He winced in pain when he put his weight on his leg, and used both hands to heave himself out of the car. Across the road, his neighbor was sweeping her porch, and she paused to look at him in sympathy. She waved hello, and he raised his hand in a weak acknowledgment.

He leaned heavily on his cane as he locked his car, then, stooped over, he made his way up the sidewalk. He supported himself against the jamb as he unlocked his front door. When it was open, he turned to again wave at his neighbor. As he knew she would be, she was watching to make sure he got inside safely.

As soon as he was in the house, Dr. Burgess closed the door and leaned against it for a moment. He let out a sigh. “Nosy old bitch,” he muttered as he tossed his cane toward the tall urn by the door. It went in with a resounding thunk.

Bending, he pulled up his pants leg and unbuckled the brace around his knee and tossed it at the cane. That done, he stood up, put his shoulders back, and flexed his neck. As he walked toward the cabinet against the wall, he unbuttoned his shirt, took off the belly pad that encircled his waist, and let it drop to the floor.

He took a couple of refreshing breaths, rubbed the skin over his hard, flat stomach, and opened the cabinet to pour himself a drink. He wasn’t surprised to see that his ice bucket was full. He put a couple of cubes in a glass, poured it half full of thirty-year-old Scotch, then turned around and waited.

The hideous lounge chair that was part of the rented house’s furniture was facing the wall—not the way he’d left it.

“Are you hiding?” he asked after he’d taken a sip.

The chair turned around, and his beautiful niece looked up at him. “What do you want so much that it’s made you come to little Edilean?”

“Jean, darling,” he said, “is that any way to greet your uncle?”

She tapped her upper lip. “Is that yours?”

He pulled off the thick gray mustache and set it on a shelf in the cabinet. “Have you eaten? I could make us some—”

“I know what you can cook. You taught me, remember? Why are you here?”

“I came to see you,” he said. “How’s your mother?”

“Doing as well as can be expected after all that you did to her.”

“Jean, Jean, Jean,” he said. “Why are you so hostile to me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with how you hacked Mom’s bank codes and cleaned her out. Twice. Or maybe it was how my father went out with you one night and never returned. Take your pick.”

He shrugged. “We’ve been over all this before and I thought it was in the past. As for your father, he had the reflexes of a tortoise. I
never could figure out how he came to be my brother. I should have had a DNA test done.”

Jean came out of the chair, angry. “I’m very good friends with the local sheriff. All I have to do is tell him about you and he’ll run you out of town.”

“Friends, maybe, but that’s all there is,” he said as she stalked toward the front door. “I just heard that for days now he’s been inseparable from a pretty young woman who’s living with his parents. In fact, an hour ago someone showed me the two of them on that . . . What’s it called? YouTube. Disgusting invasion, that thing is. But I must say that I enjoyed the sight of her truly incredible body. And she appeared to be so very
young
.”

Jean looked back at him, her jaw in a hard line. “Colin and I are in love.”

“Really?” he asked, with a fake smile. Even with his dark hair dyed gray, he was a handsome man, and he’d kept his lean figure even as he neared fifty. He was her father’s younger brother, adored and spoiled by their mother as he grew up, and always bailed out of trouble when he was an adult and learning the art of thievery.

Jean strode across the room to the door.

“Is it that trust fund he lives off of that you care about?” He put his hand over hers on the doorknob and his face softened. “Can’t an uncle be jealous?” he asked. “I used to be the number one man in your life, but now I hear that my beloved niece is with a . . .” He smiled. “A sheriff. Of course I want to disparage him as much as I can.”

Jean looked away for a moment. When he wanted to be, he was quite charming—and they had so much history together. She truly wanted to know what he was doing in Edilean. Was he again after her mother, or had he targeted someone else? She knew that anger wasn’t going to find out anything. Besides, he was the one who’d
taught her how to mask her feelings. Turning, she gave him a hint of a smile.

When he thought he saw her capitulate, he put his arm around her shoulders. They were both tall and thin, and he was only eleven years older than she was. Before she reached ten years old, she thought her uncle Adrian was the smartest, most clever man on earth. It had taken years for her to learn the truth about him. He was always after something, and every word he uttered was a lie.

“Come on,” he said. “For old time’s sake, let’s share a meal. I always did love to be in a kitchen with you.”

She agreed, but only because she needed to know what he wanted. Throughout their cooking—which they did easily and without getting in each other’s way—she talked to him. She tried to make it sound as though she was telling him about her life, but she was actually warning him. Just a few months before, when the search for the eighteenth-century paintings had been going on, Edilean had been full of FBI and Secret Service agents. “And a super-detective lives here now,” she said at the end. She wasn’t going to mention that Mike Newland spent most of the year in Fort Lauderdale.

“I know,” he said, his deep blue eyes twinkling. “Jean, dearest, please relax. I came here only to see you.”

“Why?” she asked as she put the risotto on the table.

“Is love too old-fashioned for me to say?”

Jean knew he was lying. When she was a child, he’d show up in her bedroom in the middle of the night. He never did anything as prosaic as ring a doorbell or knock. She’d be asleep, then wake up to see him standing there looking down at her. He’d put his finger to his lips for her to be quiet. She’d stand up and hug him and he’d shower her with gifts. There were pretty, smocked dresses from France, shoes of the softest Italian leather, dolls that were the envy of her friends. When she got older, there were earrings with real
sapphires, and when she graduated from high school he’d given her a pearl necklace.

Her mother had been horrified the first time she found out that her brother-in-law had entered their house during the night. She demanded that an alarm system be installed.