Thieves In The Night (23 page)

Dylan had a mental clock going in his head, and he knew Austin and his men were probably already heading back down to the street. He had not turned around to check if anyone had seen them from her balcony, but there was a chance someone had. He had checked the line of sight himself and knew the sedan, parked far up the street, was well hidden from view—if they could only get to it.

A commotion behind them, sounding like it came from the apartment building, had him speeding up their steps. He glanced once over his shoulder and started running, dragging her along with him. At the sedan, he shoved her into the front seat and slid in after her.

“Get down,” he ordered, pinning her with the gun, then crawling over her as she was forced to the seat.

Johanna stiffened as they came into contact, body to body, with her on the bottom. In the dark, close interior of the car, he was overwhelmingly male and dangerous. He wasn’t a big man, but his broad shoulders blocked all but the faintest light. His weight pressed her deep into the upholstery, paralyzing her as effectively as the gun barrel under her chin.

He looked over the back of the seat, through the rear window. He swore softly, then inched up her body, craning his neck to look out the passenger window. Johanna didn’t move so much as a muscle fiber—until he came too close to the potentially lethal door.

Without conscious thought, her hand shot up and pressed against his chest, causing him to wince and swear again, not so softly.

“No,” she whispered, putting force into the word instead of volume, her voice trembling.

When he looked down at her, she tilted her head toward the door and the trip wire of tape. He followed the gesture, and a heartbeat later the barest flicker of a smile touched his mouth, the most ironic smile she had ever seen. In that instant he looked familiar—incredibly familiar.

Read on for an excerpt from
Moonlight and Shadows

Moonlight and Shadows

Lila Singer has rules Jack’s planning to break...

Jack Hudson has plans Lila can’t resist...

Prologue

The lady had more money than brains, Jack Hudson thought, and from the figures she’d given him, she was operating on a shoestring in the money department. He slowly shook his head behind her back, watching her paint with hand gestures her imaginary desires.

“Windows are the key,” she said, “the very heart of what I want. Space.” Lila Singer raised both arms to encompass the moon and the stars, as if the very heavens could be hers. “Lots and lots of space.”

In a ten by twenty addition? Jack asked silently. She had to be kidding. Of course, at five foot two and—what? A hundred and five pounds?—she probably thought anything bigger than a breadbox had space.

A crisp September breeze blew through the cottonwood trees, and he shoved his hands deeper into his jacket pockets, hunching his shoulders against the chill. She had to be cold in her flimsy cotton dress.

The breeze kicked up into a true prairie wind, and he couldn’t help but notice how the cotton molded around Lila Singer’s hips and legs. Okay, so the lady has a great body, small but perfect, like one of those fairy queens he’d seen in a storybook once.

He exhaled a deep breath. He didn’t have any business thinking about Lila Singer’s body. She’d called him out to her house to look at a job, not her legs. Besides, he had a date that night, a blind date with a woman named Rachel. He didn’t know what to expect, or why he’d let his supposedly best friend talk him into the guaranteed disaster. His stomach was in knots, which was the only reason he was standing in Lila Singer’s cornfield. He didn’t have time to take on another job, but he’d needed something to do besides pace his living room until eight o’clock. He shook his head again.

He could have stayed home,
should
have stayed home. He had lots to do. There was always his front porch to work on, or the back deck, and it was really time for him to finish plastering the main hall. Or he could have done what he usually did at night and worked in the garage until the wee hours. He had a new project, the biggest thing he’d ever tackled, a dream in his head he wanted to make happen.

“See those mountains over there?” The fairy queen with the crazy ideas pointed to the west as she glanced at him over her shoulder.

Jack nodded, returning his attention to the project at hand. The Rockies, fourteen thousand feet of Mother Earth’s granite, were kind of hard to miss.

“When I’m in my office,” she said, “I want to feel like they’re sitting in my lap.” She turned to face him, a serenely beautiful smile curving her mouth, and suddenly Jack saw her—really saw her the first time. He’d been talking with her for over a half an hour, inside the house and out, but he hadn’t truly looked at her until that moment. She was gorgeous, her smile a gift of sweetness he felt spreading all through his body. But with the gift came a strong pang of guilt. She was trying so hard to explain what she wanted, and he was barely listening. He felt like a jerk, a jerk whose stomach was in knots.

Don’t do it, Jack, he warned himself. Don’t fall for a pretty lady with a smile sweeter than honey. You’ve got three other jobs lined up. Big jobs. Big houses. Big money. Inside work, Jack, and winter’s coming on.

“Can you do it?” she asked. Even her voice had an ethereal quality, soft and breathy. And he hadn’t noticed before, but her hair was like a cloud, a storm cloud of tumbling dark curls framing her face.

Her face
. . . He studied the delicate, gamine-like curves; the wide, dark eyes; the little nose and the full mouth. Too full for his tastes, he quickly decided, recognizing the familiar sensation invading his mind. He wanted to kiss this woman. Why? he wondered, shaken by the realization. She wasn’t his type.

Right, Jack.
With a concentrated effort he shrugged off the strange urge to kiss Lila Singer.

“Mr. Hudson?” She looked up at him with those liquid brown eyes, drawing his gaze to her thick lashes and the sable arch of her eyebrows, so in contrast with her blush-rose cheeks and creamy skin. A very sensual contrast, he mused, a mystery of genetics, a—“Will you take the job?”

“Yes,” he heard himself answer as if from a long distance. Then he realized what he’d said and silently cursed. How had that happened?

“Wonderful.” The bright warmth of her smile and the excitement in her voice slowly drew him in again. “When can you start?”

Jack struggled to organize dates, names, supplies, all the while staring at her face, her eyes, her mouth. Forcing a measure of clarity into his mind, he came up with only one possible, lousy answer. “I won’t be doing the work myself. My partner, Dale Smith, will be out this weekend to look things over.”

Smitty should be able to build one small but spacious addition without screwing it up, Jack assured himself. For five years the man had been a rock of stability, helping Hudson and Smith Construction grow into a reliable and lucrative company. But he was in the middle of a divorce and had the current attention span of a hyperactive seven-year-old, which Jack knew from personal childhood experience wasn’t much.

“Well, you were recommended to me as the best,” she said, “I’ll look forward to seeing Mr. Smith on Saturday, then. Or will it be Sunday?”

“Saturday,” Jack said with a confidence he hoped wasn’t misplaced. He’d have to make damn sure Smitty didn’t tie one on Friday night. “He’ll look at the plans you bought, give you a formal estimate and show you catalogues from our window suppliers. Of course, if you already have windows picked out, we can order from anybody. But the people we deal with regularly give us a better price.” He rattled on, liking the feeling of control conversation gave him. But he was running out of small talk. “And he’ll bring the contracts for you to sign. Have you had anybody else out to look at the job?”

“No. I know that sounds silly.” She laughed, an enchanting sound reminiscent of bells and chimes blowing in the wind. His brows drew together in confusion. What was it about this woman? “But you came very highly recommended. You did some work for my parents last year. Dad said you were more expensive than the other people, but he also said I’d get better work and better value dealing with you.”

“That’s always nice to hear.” Maybe that was where the strange feeling was coming from, he mused. Maybe she looked like her mother and he thought he knew her. But even as the explanation crossed his mind, he discounted it. He wouldn’t have forgotten his woman.

She said something polite, something he didn’t bother to catch. Lord, she was pretty, standing there looking up at him with moonlight and shadows tangled in her hair. Lots of moonlight, more than he ever remembered seeing. He glanced at the glowing orange disk rising above the horizon. A full moon, he thought. A harvest moon. Maybe that explained the strange detachment he felt stealing over him, as if he were operating on two different planes, one very normal with all its everyday complications, and the other . . . different, peaceful, filled with a promise he hadn’t known for many years.

His gaze drifted back from the heavens to the stars in her eyes. Wind swirled around the two of them, picking up the tawny fallen leaves and tossing them into the air. A few landed in her hair, hanging for a fleeting moment in the sable strands like a circlet of gold. How had he missed her beauty at first? And was it his imagination, or was she getting prettier with every passing moment? No answers came to his odd question until she took a step toward him.

His normal half told him she was walking back to the house. But the half of him mired in the moon’s magic told him she was coming to him, and right then and there Jack Hudson did the craziest thing he’d ever done.

With the barest touch of his hand on her face, he stopped her, then bent forward from the waist, lower and lower, pulled like the tides to her too-full mouth. His lips grazed hers, softly at first, then with more pressure as her ripe sweetness blossomed under his mouth. She smelled of flowers and warm sunshine even in the cool darkness of the autumn night. Her lips parted, and he followed the path into a kiss of mystery.

Minutes later—or was it hours?—he lifted his head. Gentle arousal thrummed through his body. The wind ruffled her hair, and he stroked the silky strands, absently tucking them behind her ear.

“Thank you, Lila.” His voice was husky, the smile on his face one of sheer contentment. Maybe later he’d feel foolish, but try as he might, he didn’t feel foolish then. He felt whole. “Smitty will be around on Saturday.”

Looking thoroughly dazed, she nodded. The action brought his fingers in contact with the velvety softness of her cheek. Unbidden by conscious thought, he bent his head once more and pressed a kiss to her brow. Then he turned and walked away.

Lila stared after him, struck dumb by the power of his kiss and her own startling response. The man had hardly spoken twenty words to her, and she was sure he hadn’t heard twenty of hers. Then he up and kissed her? She should have slapped him, for crying out loud, not melted in his arms.

But she had melted. Why?

She touched her lips, and the warmth was still there. If she touched her cheek she knew she’d find warmth there, too, despite the chill tickling her skin.

The cab light in his truck came on when he opened the door, and in the seconds before it went off, he looked back at her, his clear gaze reaching across the night to hold her with intimacy and a disarming tenderness.

Disarming? Yes. She hadn’t known he was going to kiss her until it had been far too late to think. His mouth had been so warm, wet, enticing, his tongue stroking hers in an erotic dance. Had she really touched his face, felt the day’s growth of beard? Tunneled her fingers into his sandy brown hair, traced the lean angles of his face?

He was so tall, his body lanky and hard. She didn’t like tall men, had decided as a teenager that she didn’t want to spend her life looking at a man’s chest instead of his face.

His face
. . . Her memory conjured up the rough handsomeness of Jack Hudson’s face, the feathery lines at the corners of his eyes, his sun-darkened skin, his silky eyebrows. Lord! Had she touched him there too? What had gotten into her?

She slowly looked up at the sky, her gaze drawn by the moon’s light flooding through the cottonwoods.
The moon has gotten into you, Lila,
she told herself. The cold wind sent a shudder through her body.
Only the harvest moon.

The reasoning sounded weak in her own mind, like an excuse, and her one consolation was that she’d never have to see the man again. The thought that she
might
see him again was too embarrassing to contemplate. Mortifying, actually, and ridden with guilt. No one had kissed her like that since Danny, and she wasn’t ready to replace a widow’s memories. Not again, never again.

* * * * * *

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Thieves in the Night
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