Strictly Business (21 page)

Well, at least she’d had enough sense to take some decent precautions. Not that it was going to help. Hurricane Ivan was likely to turn her house into a pile of kindling—with or without steel window covers. He headed around the side of the house, figuring she must have come out that way.

“I really must insist,” she tried again.

Reese ignored her as he spied the small screened-in sun porch. He went straight through, not stopping until they were standing in her kitchen. He turned to face her. With the door shut, the howling wind was substantially muted, and the sudden lack of noise made his ears ring. He ignored that too. He’d blanked out far worse in his life.

Still holding her wrists, he said, “You have five minutes. Important papers, family stuff, some clothes. I’ll turn off your utilities. Where is the fuse box?”

She stood there, gaping at him.

He fought the urge to shake her. From her mother’s description, he’d expected some mousy professor type. He realized he hadn’t believed Mrs. Ravensworth, a high society matron with the sort of timeless beauty that had men decades younger drooling.

But Jillian was all that her mother described and worse. The only unexpected element being her fierce reaction to him. Quiet, very reserved, a loner, were the adjectives Regina had used. She’d also said her daughter could be very stubborn about certain things. Namely, her home and the animals in her care.

After all the yelling and glaring, he wasn’t certain he agreed with the first part, but he’d been given ample proof of the latter.

Not that it made any difference. Her mother had been right about the most important thing. Her size. Negligible. And last he checked he was still a steady one ninety-five.

No contest.

“I’m not—”

“Four minutes, thirty seconds.”

“Leaving,” she finished stubbornly. She pulled her wrists free and massaged them, glowering at him with those plain gray eyes.

He felt a strange twinge, like he should apologize or something. He ignored it. It wasn’t his fault she was making it difficult on herself.

He looked down at her. She was a good six or seven inches shorter than he, hardly filling out the jeans and T-shirt she wore. She suddenly seemed too small and fragile to have withstood hardship or suffered adversity. And with the wealth her mother had, it would seem there was no reason she should have. But Reese knew money and suffering weren’t mutually exclusive. You could have an abundance of one and still not find a way to escape the other.

Under his brief scrutiny her shoulders stiffened and her jaw tightened another notch.

After all the shouting, her quiet voice took him off guard. “Listen, I’m sorry you came all this way, that you risked … anything. But as I told the gentlemen who came by yesterday, I’m not leaving. I can’t.” The last was added on a somewhat defensive note, her sudden blink telling him she hadn’t planned on. saying it out loud.

“Won’t,” he countered. “Not the same thing.”

“It doesn’t matter. The result is the same. I’d suggest you find whatever vehicle you drove here in and leave quickly. I have to finish securing the house.”

He saw her gaze dart nervously over his shoulder to the door and spacious yard beyond. The area surrounding her small house was more of a compound. Reese knew she rehabilitated marine and local wildlife in conjunction with several refuges in the area. But other than the alligator, he hadn’t seen any signs of other animals. The assorted pens and cages near the rear building appeared empty.

So what was keeping her here? He’d pegged her a survivor. Survivors didn’t put their lives on the line without a damn good reason. And as far as he could tell, there wasn’t one in sight. He gave a mental shrug. He didn’t care, because it didn’t matter. She was leaving now. And despite how angry it made her, he doubted she’d hold that grudge when she realized he’d saved her life.

And yet something about her compelled him to try to understand. Not bothering to examine the urge, he simply asked her, “Why?”

“Because if I want a scarecrow’s chance in hell of living through this, I’m going to need to do a bit more work.”

“I meant, why aren’t you going? All the securing in the world won’t keep this place from going up like Dorothy’s house on its way to Oz. Only I doubt you’ll be so lucky.”

“Why do you care?” She held up her hand. “Never mind, stupid question. You obviously take your job as part of the evacuation effort very seriously. I respect what you’re trying to do here.” She gestured around her, but Reese knew she meant the entire evacuation zone that encompassed the lower half of Florida’s gulf coastline. “But I think your time would be more wisely spent helping those people who want to be rescued.”

Her voice had taken on a gentle, soothing quality. He imagined wounded animals responded very well to it Lucky for him he was a man and immune to such precarious things as a woman’s soft voice.

“Time’s up.” He took her arm, though a bit more gently this time, grabbing a box of trash bags off her kitchen table as he moved toward the office he could see through the open door behind her. Once inside, he let her go, blocking the door with his body, then pulled a couple of bags free. “Here. Just the most important things. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

He ducked out the door, grabbing a ladder-back chair from beside the table behind him and shoving it under the doorknob. He’d barely gotten it tightly wedged when she began jiggling it.

“Hey! You can’t do this! Let me out of here!” She banged on the heavy wooden door.

“You’re wasting time,” he called back, then grabbed a few more bags and went in search of her room.

A loud thwack behind him indicated she’d kicked the door. The following string of curse words trailed him up the stairs.

Where in the hell had she learned to swear like that?

His grimace faded. What replaced it couldn’t be called a smile. Reese Braedon never smiled.

But he had to admit he wasn’t bored anymore.

Bored. It was disconcerting to realize that until that moment, he hadn’t been able to put his finger on what his problem had been of late. It had been almost a year since he’d thrown in the federal towel and opened up a private security agency with Cole Sinclair, another agent he’d occasionally worked with in his past life.

Bored. Eighteen months ago, he’d craved boredom like a man who’d spent far too many years living on the edge of his wits. Like the man he was. Had been. Private security allowed him the luxury of picking his own jobs. And more importantly, being his own boss. He’d never again find himself in the position of having to answer to someone else, particularly when people’s lives were on the line.

Reese, shoved aside the dark memories of his past. He elbowed his way into the first room at the top of the stairs. The steel shutters made the room dark, so he flipped the light switch. It was a bedroom, but it wasn’t hers. Too heat and tidy, with an air of expectancy, like it was just waiting for an aunt or a cousin to drop in for a brief stay.

But not a mother, he thought with a wry twist of his Ups. Without giving any details, Regina Ravensworth had made it very clear that she and her daughter were not close. In fact, the one promise she’d wrung from him was that he not tell Jillian why he’d been hired—or that he’d been hired at all.

He’d agreed to the condition, knowing Jillian would probably assume he was part of the evacuation effort Which he had been earlier that week down in the Keys, where he and Sinclair lived and headquartered their business.

However, at this point, he didn’t see where keeping her mother’s role out of it had made the job a whole helluva lot easier.

He flipped off the guest room light and moved down the hall. One bathroom, another guest room, one linen closet. He paused long enough to grab a few sheets, some towels, and a blanket, then moved to the next door … And stopped cold on the threshold.

This was her room.

It wasn’t just the large double bed covered with the jumble of lemon-yellow sheets that gave it away. He stepped inside, feeling strangely like the intruder he was. He never gave his methods much thought, just doing what had to be done in the most efficient manner possible to obtain his goal. And this was far from the first time he’d found himself in the bedroom of a woman he’d just met. Of course, he’d usually been invited. He shrugged off the odd feeling and looked around.

The room wasn’t feminine. Bare hardwood floors, a bed, one nightstand, and a wooden dresser. The only adornment was a watercolor of a marsh scene hanging over the dresser and a wooden lamp carved in the shape of a leaping dolphin on the nightstand. No pictures or well-thumbed paperbacks lay on the nightstand, no watches or jewelry littered the scarred surface of the dresser.

Picturing her small plain features, slim boyish body clad in a shapeless T-shirt and jeans and her job working with animals, he. supposed it shouldn’t surprise him that there weren’t the requisite bottles, tubes, and pots of makeup and cologne cluttering every available surface.

Although there was a faint fresh scent in the air, sort of woodsy. Odd for a woman, he thought, then admitted that it somehow suited her. A disconcerting notion considering he barely knew her. Didn’t want to know her. She was just another job. So what if she intrigued him? She was a puzzle he didn’t have time to solve. The problem, he acknowledged with a frown, was getting rid of the inclination.

It occurred to him with a start that he was wasting precious time, standing there literally sniffing around. He bent down and grabbed two pairs of worn sneakers from the floor by the door and dumped them into the trash bag, then turned back to the dresser opposite her bed.

He tugged at the top drawer but it held tight, probably warped from the constant humidity. He yanked harder. The drawer sprang open past its tracks, upending her underwear in a heap on the floor.

“God—” Reese bit off the curse, set the drawer down and knelt, careful to favor his thigh. He hadn’t given a thought to her lingerie—she was hardly the type to inspire heated fantasies—but the basic white cotton bras and undies spilling from his hands didn’t provide any surprises.

He stuffed a handful of each, along with some white crew socks in the bag. He reached for the second drawer and pulled out several pairs of faded blue jeans. Shorts, T-shirts, and a few old sweatshirts followed as he searched the other drawers.

He scooped up the remaining pile of underwear and dumped it back in the warped drawer. The sound of something hard and metallic stilled his actions for a moment, then he shoved a hand into the jumble and rooted around until his fingers closed over what felt like a picture frame.

He pulled out the small, gilt-edged frame and flipped it over. It was a photo of a man seated next to a woman with a small child in her lap. Judging by. the not-quite-true colors and clothing, the photo had been taken some time ago.

He recognized the woman immediately as Regina Ravensworth, although from what he knew of her background, he doubted that had been her last name back then. Reese wasn’t surprised to see she’d been even more stunning as a young woman. She was leaning against the shoulder of a big, brawny, blond man who was looking off to his left, away from Regina and the child she held in her lap. Regina’s expression was plainly adoring, almost painfully so.

Reese’s gaze dropped to the child cradled loosely in her lap. She looked about three or four and had a mop of dark curls. Jillian, he presumed. What kept his attention riveted to the photo was the expression on the child’s face. Her small head was tilted back, and she was staring up at her mother. The unconditional love stamped on her tiny features wasn’t surprising. Nor was it what made Reese’s heart feel strangely tight. It was the intense yearning in those bright gray eyes. Innocently unconcealed, unafraid of possible discovery, as only the young could afford to risk.

What in thé world would make a young girl look at her own mother that way? And if Regina had looked down in the instant after the photo was snapped, would Jillian have received reassurance that she, too, was adored? Or would she receive rejection?

Or worse yet, would she encounter the same thing Reese had repeatedly found as a small boy, before he’d learned not to go looking anymore. Would she look up into the eyes of a mother who wouldn’t recognize the need was there at all?

The wind snapped a branch against the side of the house, bringing Reese sharply, thankfully, back to the present. He started to shove the photo back into the drawer, then changed his mind. Reaching into the bag, he pulled out one of her sweatshirts and carefully bundled the old frame before tucking it in with the rest of her clothes.

Not wanting to put a reason to his motives, he stood, the ache in his thigh a welcome piece of reality to hang on to. He jimmied the drawer back into place and moved to the small bathroom. He quickly emptied the contents of her medicine chest into another bag and knotted it.

It wasn’t until he turned back to face her bedroom that it hit him. The reason he’d frozen on the doorstep when he’d first stepped into her room, the reason he’d felt so odd as he’d stood there, cataloguing her personal effects, or more precisely, the lack thereof.

The reason it all felt so strange was because it was familiar. Very familiar. Too familiar.

Her bedroom was distant, no connections to anyone here, nothing tying her to past memories, past dreams, fulfilled or otherwise. Except an old photo bidden away in a dresser drawer.

Reese pictured the small, isolated bungalow he lived in on Vaca Key. Every room in that house looked amazingly just like this one. Full of. furniture, empty of soul.

Which suited him perfectly. So perfectly he’d never even noticed anything lacking.

Until now, a tiny voice whispered inside his brain.

He ruthlessly snuffed it out. Irritated, and not at all happy about the reasons for it, Reese hefted the two bags toward the hall.

He had to turn sideways to fit the bags and himself through the narrow doorway, then was forced to balance the whole pile on one knee so he could reach back inside to flip the switch. Unfortunately, he forgot about his thigh injury and he wobbled precariously for a split second.