The Lady and the Lion (19 page)

"Sort of takes your breath away, doesn't
she
?"

The mild question yanked Masters from his trance, and he looked to see Donovan smiling at him. He wanted to step back away from that smile. In fact, he wanted to back away rather hastily. It wasn't a specifically threatening
smile,
it just made the hair on the back of his neck quiver.

But he stood his ground, and even managed an ironic tone when he answered, "Sort of, yeah."

The redhead reached them just then, tucking a folded newspaper under one arm and reaching out a hand even as Donovan did, their fingers twining with a look of ineffable belonging, as if a connection had been made.
Trained to be observant.
Masters caught the gleam of two wedding bands.

Well, no wonder he's lost interest in revenge,
Masters thought, knowing very well that Donovan had been single when he'd arrived in Florida.

"Erin, this is Mr. Masters; he's with the Justice Department.
Masters—my wife, Erin."

"Justice Department?"
She looked up at her husband, a hint of worry momentarily dimming her bright eyes.

"It's all right, he hasn't come here to arrest me," Donovan said. It was obvious from his reassuring smile at his wife that she knew the entire story.

Erin turned a somewhat guarded gaze to Masters. "No?"

"No, ma'am," he affirmed, back in control again. "I'd just like to talk to your husband for a few minutes. In private would be best."

"We can go up to the suite," Keith said, and began leading his wife toward the elevators as if he didn't much care whether Masters followed.

"I'd been trying to get to Arturo through Wellman," Masters began a few minutes later, seated in a chair in their sitting room as he looked at the two of them on the couch. "Wasn't having much luck, not with specifics. And I wasn't delighted when Wellman bolted down to Miami— until Arturo followed him. Things finally started to get interesting. Then you showed up."

"A wild card," Keith murmured.

"I'll say. The only thing I knew for sure was that you were after those two. I didn't know what your plan was. By the time I'd figured it out, you were very neatly playing them against each other, and that game was so dangerous I didn't dare interfere."

"So you waited."

"It seemed best. Wellman was acting friendly with Arturo again, spending more time with him, thanks to you, and I was picking up bits and pieces of the kind of information I'd been working to get. Even with the payoff, though, my superiors weren't at all crazy about your participation. I expect to be read the riot act when I get back to D.C. But I had a feeling you could break the whole thing wide open, one way or another, so I made a judgment call and elected to let you run with your plan. And, to be honest, I wasn't exactly anxious to try and pull you out; I knew enough about you—and your motives—to be fairly sure I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of stopping you, short of putting a bullet in you."

In a faintly surprised tone, as if the man he had been then was a stranger to him now, Keith said, "I was as close as I ever want to be to insanity."

Masters grunted.
"Yeah, but crazy like a fox.
By the way, if you ever want a job, look me up."

A genuine smile of amusement gleamed in Keith's eyes.
"No, thanks.
I'm an engineer and a businessman."

The agent gave him a somewhat ironic look, but said, "If you say so. Anyway, I decided to wait and see what developed. Things were shaping up nicely for a territorial war in Florida, which the DEA and Miami vice considered promising; they hadn't been able to get close to Martine until you started stirring the pot. Everyone on both sides was quietly gearing up for an explosion of one kind or another. And then you—or Duncan, I should say—just up and vanished."

Under Erin's fascinated gaze, the federal agent's rather thin smile became almost beatific, and his emotionless voice deepened with pure pleasure.

"To call Wellman's condition one of panic," he said, "would be to understate the matter. The man quite literally went to pieces."

Surprised, Keith said, "Just because I disappeared?"

"Your timing couldn't have been more perfect. You see, Wellman had decided that he was going to be smarter this time. He wanted somebody to owe him for a change."

"He went to Martine?" Keith guessed.

"Bingo. He was feeding Martine all of Arturo's battle plans, as well as information about your cartel. The way he saw it, and the way you had explained it to him, the cartel would remove Arturo before the war got nasty and then cut a deal with Martine—who would be ever so grateful to his dear friend Wellman for all his help."

"It might have worked," Keith said thoughtfully.
"If there'd been a cartel."

"Right, but there wasn't. So you vanished, along with every scrap of proof that you'd even existed. And Wellman is left with several very unsettling realizations. He introduced you to Arturo, who had planned to declare war on the strength of your supposed backing.
He
betrayed Arturo thinking he'd never get caught out, which now put him squarely between Arturo and Martine. And
he
didn't have an army to protect him."

"Ouch," Keith murmured.

"Uh-huh. And after that, it was easy. He wanted protection so badly he was willing to spill everything. He was terrified that Arturo was going to come after him, and since Martine could be forgiven for thinking he'd been lied to about the cartel as well, he wasn't likely to offer protection. I flashed my badge at the opportune moment, and Wellman started talking. He had a lot to say too. Since Arturo had felt very sure of him, Wellman knew quite a bit about his
operations, and enough details about specific crimes—such
as the hit on your family—to put them both away for a long, long time."

Erin, who had been listening silently all this time, looked at Keith and said quietly, "Justice."

He nodded slowly, gazing at her, then turned his attention to Masters and said, "I had planned to push them a lot harder. I was out for blood."

"I know," the agent responded.
"Worried me for a while.
I'm glad you stopped short of that, though. If you hadn't, it would have been a real mess. This way, they both pay for quite a few past crimes, and you don't have to think of yourself as a vigilante. You pushed them just enough to put them into our hands, and nobody got hurt by it. You were lucky."

"Yes," Keith said, looking at Erin again.
"Very lucky."

Masters was a highly trained and keenly observant agent who'd been taught to sense undercurrents, and the one moving between these two was so intense it almost embarrassed him. All his instincts told him it was time to fold his own tent and depart, so he said his good-byes with a minimum of words and left to catch the plane that would take him back to the States.

He couldn't help but think, though, as he left the Bahamas behind, that Keith Donovan had indeed been astonishingly lucky. At a critical point in his life, when an obsession with revenge might well have destroyed him, he had found the only thing capable of pulling him from the blackness of rage and bitterness.

Fate, Masters thought idly, must have had a hand in it.

On a balmy afternoon a few days later, Erin stretched contentedly, as lazy as a cat in the sunshine, her two-piece swimsuit covering only what the law demanded. From her prone position on the deck of the drifting sailboat, she looked drowsily up at the gently swaying mast, allowing its motion and the peaceful ocean to lull her.

"Hey."

She made a faint sound that might have been taken for a response, though it was utterly languid.

"Wake up and talk to me," Keith requested in an aggrieved tone. "Honestly, if I'd known you were part cat and always went to sleep in the sunshine, I never would have rented this boat."

She smiled, closing her eyes.
"Can't help it."

A shadow loomed over her suddenly. She opened one mildly distressed eye, then the other, gazing up at him reproachfully. "It felt so good," she explained.

Raised on an elbow beside her, he reached to lay one large hand on her sun-warmed stomach. "So does this."

"Ummm.
That's true. All right, I'm awake. What did you want to talk about so badly?"

He smiled down at her, his lean face totally relaxed and peaceful, violet eyes luminous. "I just wanted to hear your voice. Ever since you conked out on me after lunch, I've been lying here listening to seagulls. I've come to the conclusion that your voice is better than the seagulls'."

"Gee, thanks."

He leaned over to kiss her, his lips moving slowly and sensuously on hers,
then
straightened before she could reach up and grab him. "Oh, no," he said severely with a mock frown.

"Why not?" she murmured, allowing the fingers of one hand to wander across his broad chest.
"We're alone out here."

"That's what I thought yesterday," he reminded her. "And if that patrol boat skipper hadn't forgotten his responsibilities, his oath, his country, and his name after one glance at you, we'd probably have been arrested."

Her eyes widened innocently. "I thought he was very nice about it.
Especially after you called him a barnacle."

Keith had the grace to look a bit sheepish, but said firmly, "The man was practically drooling."

"Oh, he was not.
Just polite and friendly."

"And wonderfully stalwart in his spiffy white uniform," Keith said darkly. "Damn him."

Serenely, Erin said, "I've never cared for men in uniform."

Keith eyed her. "No?"

"No. Had my fill of them at all those embassies."

After considering that for a moment in reflective silence, Keith said, "In that case, I'll stop trying to decide the most satisfying method of separating the hotel's doorman from his most prized body parts."

Erin maintained her tranquil expression. "That would probably be best."

"But it hardly narrows the field," Keith complained, his gloomy voice belied by the amusement in his eyes. "Everywhere I turn, there's some man tripping over his own feet or running into a wall trying to get another look at you."

"Look who's talking," she scoffed. "I happen to know for a
fact
that our room service waiter has been raffling off deliveries so that the other ladies on the staff can get a look at you in a towel—and I hear the price of the tickets is skyrocketing."

"Nonsense."

Erin giggled at his rather startled expression. He really had no idea that the force of his personality combined with the blatant sexuality he exuded drew female eyes wherever he went. As for his possessiveness of her, it was never smothering and didn't disturb her in the slightest, but it was also not—quite—the light matter he made it out to be.

He had explained shortly after their whirlwind marriage with his usual honesty, saying that he'd come so close to losing her he wasn't quite able to get over the fear of it. He doubted he ever would, but promised to try and stop regarding every man between adolescence and death as a threat. In the meantime, Erin concentrated on loving him so much he couldn't possibly feel threatened, and he avoided saying rude things to strangers—the patrol boat skipper had caught him at a vulnerable moment—and teased her about her quite unintentional effect on men.

Erin thought they were both enjoying it.

He eyed her now after her remark about their room service waiter, but apparently decided to let the matter drop. His hand was moving slowly on her sun-warmed stomach, and the building intensity in his gaze made her feel more than the heat of a tropical afternoon.

She slid her arms up around his neck, her fingers threading into his thick hair, and smiled. "I don't think we'll be disturbed today," she murmured. "There isn't a boat anywhere near us."

He might have been able to teasingly resist her a few minutes ago, but Keith had known from the beginning that his hunger for Erin went too deep to be something he could fight. And he didn't want to fight it, not for a long time now. The bond between them had deepened even more these last days, growing stronger and more certain, and their physical response to each other had intensified as well.

Keith lowered his head and kissed her hungrily, his hands moving with sure knowledge to unfasten the flimsy ties of her brief swimsuit and smooth the material away and then get rid of his own trunks. Her hands were on him as well, soft and strong, exploring the body she knew well now and found more compelling each time she touched it.

The thick pallet of blankets beneath them cushioned them from the sailboat's deck, and the lazy rocking motion of the vessel added an erotic rhythm that was slow and sweet and heated. The sun bore down on them, almost shatteringly bright, and a soft breeze caressed their naked bodies.

Erin thought that it was somehow new each time, the sensations different with every touch. Her body seemed more sensitized, all her senses opening with
a completeness
she had never even imagined possible, and her love for him filled her heart and mind as if it had always been a part of her.

He was still virtually a silent lover, still unable to say very much in the consuming power of his need for her. The words he did utter were rough and low, love words and sex words that were disjointed, almost wild. He lost control as swiftly and completely as she did, his turbulent nature given over totally to the fierce passion between them. His hands shook as they stroked her body, gentle but somehow primitive, as if all his deepest instincts knew without question that she belonged to him.

And that he belonged to her. He gave himself to her every time they made love, with utter abandon pouring all that he was into the loving. His emotions, so honest and naked, were like a storm, and it was a storm Erin treasured.

It swept over them both, the force in him matched by her, and when it finally passed they were left, drained and content, to bask in a sunlit peace.

She stirred first, just a faint movement that was lazy and blissfully sated. Keith raised himself a bit to make her more comfortable, but remained propped on his forearms as he kissed her smiling lips tenderly. The breeze was cool now on their damp bodies, and a shadow from the lowered sail crept over them as the sun began sinking in the west.