Unmasking Kelsey (7 page)

Kelsey pondered for a moment, then said coolly, “I don’t need your help.”

She backed away from him warily. “No questions about Meditron or Blaine?”

“No. It isn’t necessary. I can get the information I need from another source.”

“Why did you come back here, then?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Oh, right.” She laughed softly, scornfully. “One look at me and this great passion was born?”

He smiled a little. “Something like that.”

Elizabeth said something derisive, and it wasn’t “malarkey.” “I’ve heard that line too many times, pal; it had ivy growing on it when my grandmother
was a girl. She didn’t believe it, and I don’t believe it. If you think I’m going to—”

“I think,” he interrupted mildly, “that I’ll be in your bed before the weekend’s over.” He caught her wrist easily before her hand could make contact with his face, holding it firmly. And holding her enraged eyes with his own, he added in the same blandly certain tone, “You know it as well as I do.”

She jerked her hand away, her face white. “Bastard.”

“I’ve been called worse.” He wondered then which Elizabeth he would find in that bed. This one, he thought, this angry woman who would fight him every inch of the way—with perhaps a bit of the falcon thrown in. He didn’t doubt that he would, sooner or later, end up in her bed; what was between them was just too damned explosive not to consume the both of them eventually. He only hoped that neither the falcon’s wings nor his own suddenly vulnerable heart got singed in the blast.

“Get off my land!”

He sighed. “We’ve been through this, Elizabeth. I’m not leaving.”

“I don’t want you here, can’t you get that through your head?”

Kelsey grinned suddenly, unable to help himself. “I think I got that, yeah. You made it very clear. It’s a good thing I don’t have a fragile ego.”

“You have a
monumental
ego!”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Possibly. It’s taken a few knocks, you understand, but I generally get what I want in the end.”

With a curious, smothered sound that might have been a reluctant laugh, Elizabeth turned away and grasped her patient horse’s reins. She snagged her sandals from the fence post as she passed, leading Buddy to the gate she hadn’t bothered to open earlier. The bareback pad was unbuckled and left on the fence along with the bridle, and Buddy trotted away through the pasture to join another horse grazing near a barn in the distance.

Elizabeth put her sandals back on, looking up
as Kelsey joined her to ask irritably, “Are you still here?”

“Certainly I’m still here,” he said, wounded. “Faint heart never won fair lady, you know.”

She gave him a baffled look and headed toward the house, with Kelsey following along behind.

“Did you,” he wondered conversationally, “wear those shorts for you or for me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped over her shoulder.

“I was just going to say that if you wore them for me, I certainly appreciate them,” he explained apologetically.

Elizabeth bit her lip to contain her smile, glad he couldn’t see and suddenly very conscious of his presence behind her. Oh,
damn
the man, why did he keep changing on her? Didn’t he know she was so off balance now that anything— Know? Of course he knew!

Just inside the living room, she whirled and jabbed a finger into his chest. “It won’t work!”

He had been continuing to admire the shorts, and looked up hastily. “What?” Pulling on his
most innocent expression, he waited for her to explain.

“Your little game, that’s what.” She stared up at his face, ignoring his guileless expression. “You think I’m such an idiot that I can’t figure it out? You could charm a snake, pal, but you aren’t going to charm
me
into telling you anything.”

“I’m not?”

She glared at him. “No, you’re not!”

Kelsey tilted his head to one side and asked hopefully, “Can I seduce you into telling me something?”

“No, dammit!” She was trying desperately not to laugh.

“Well, hell, you haven’t left me many options,” he told her indignantly. “We federal agents only have so many methods to work with, you know. I mean, if you take away charm and seduction, how am I supposed to do my job?”

Elizabeth was biting her lip and gazing up at him with an unconsciously fascinated expression. She cleared her throat carefully. “I couldn’t say.”

“You know, you should leave it down all the time.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Your hair. You should leave it down.”

With an effort, she ignored the non sequitur. Evenly, she said, “I’m telling you to get the hell out of my life, understand? Get into your car and drive off my land. Stay away from my family. We don’t need your help.”

Kelsey looked at her for a moment, then stepped over to a chair and sat down on the thickly padded arm. He took due note of the increasing anger in her expressive face, but headed off whatever she was about to say by speaking in a calm and thoughtful voice. “I can see we have several problems here that need very badly to be resolved.”

“Oh, you noticed that?”

“It was a little hard not to notice. First of all, you deny that anything is wrong here, despite the fact that your sister is missing.”

“Jo’s staying with an aunt,” Elizabeth said flatly.

“You don’t have an aunt.”

She stiffened and her eyes flashed. “What did you say?”

He sighed. “I said, you don’t have an aunt.”

There was more than anger in her vivid eyes now, something like fury. Her voice shook a little. “And just where did you get that information?”

“It’s amazing what information you can dig up if you know where to look. Pinnacle has a newspaper, Elizabeth, and like all newspapers it keeps back issues on microfilm. I looked up the accounts of your parents’ deaths, and your court battle to keep what was left of your family together. According to those accounts, the judge was persuaded to let your sisters be put into your custody because there weren’t any other relations. No aunts, no uncles, no cousins.”

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “When did you look it up? Today’s Saturday; the newspaper office is closed.”

Kelsey rubbed his jaw, studying her. Then he sighed. “Place has a flimsy lock,” he offered.

“You broke in?”

He winced. “Let’s call it entry without the proper permission, shall we?”

She pressed her lips together, but said nothing.

Kelsey eyed her for a moment, then nodded, satisfied. “As I said, the first problem is that Mallory apparently has you convinced that if you just keep quiet, Jo will be fine. The third problem is that you trust me about as far as you can throw your horse. And the fourth problem is that you very obviously suspect I’d do just about anything—using you included—in order to get what I want.”

Elizabeth remembered that first kiss in the kitchen and the shocking interlude on the porch last night, and lifted her chin. “Suspect? I
know
you would!” she snapped.

For the first time in his professional career, Kelsey was torn. He knew the most important thing was to get Jo back safe and sound; there was no doubt of that. But as important to him as a young girl’s life was Elizabeth’s opinion of him. And in the back of his mind in that alert place born years ago out of necessity, a clock was ticking away vital moments.

He sighed. “Elizabeth, sit down, please. We need to talk.”

“We’ve already talked.”

“No.” Kelsey shook his head wryly. “We haven’t. And now we have to, because there isn’t much time.”

Unwillingly impressed by the gravity of his face and his sober gray-blue eyes, Elizabeth moved to the couch and sat down. “What do you mean—not much time?”

Kelsey remained where he was, looking at her and wishing everything were different. She suspected his motives, and he couldn’t blame her for that. Only time would teach her to trust him, and how much time did they have? And what would happen if the desire he could feel throbbing constantly throughout his body, a desire he knew she shared, caught them both before she learned to trust him? What would that do to them?

“Elizabeth …” He sighed roughly. “I don’t want to scare you, but I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve seen a great many hostage situations. They’re potentially explosive for many
reasons. If a hostage knows who the captors are, there’s always the possibility of testifying later in court. And if a hostage is held because of some information she has, she isn’t going to just forget it. Not, at least, as far as her captor is concerned.”

She stirred a little on the couch, staring at him with mistrust on her face but anxiety in her eyes.

Kelsey hurried on. “If Mallory’s holding Jo only until he gets something done—gets the evidence out of the way of whatever he’s doing—then maybe he will let her go, because then it would just be her word against his. But I don’t
know
that. I can find out what’s going on at Meditron, but without your help, I’m searching blindly, and Jo could get hurt because of that. If I push the wrong button because I don’t have information I need, I could stampede Mallory, cause him to move too fast. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” she whispered through stiff lips.

“Then trust me,” he asked softly.

“I don’t know you.” She hesitated, then blurted, “It’s my sister’s
life
we’re talking about! How can I trust you with that?”

“How can you trust Mallory?” he countered.

She bit her lip. “I’ve known him all my life.”

“He’s a shark,” Kelsey told her flatly.

Elizabeth almost smiled. “But a shark I know.”

Kelsey half nodded to acknowledge the point. “As in ‘better the devil you know than the one you don’t’?”

“Yes.”

He tried to ignore the inner sense of time rushing, and concentrated on this moment. Abruptly, without even realizing he was going to, he said, “My father was an agent. I remember I was sixteen when I found out; until then, I’d thought he was just a businessman. But that time, he came back from one of his ‘business’ trips with his arm in a sling and a bullet hole in his shoulder. That’s when I heard the
real
facts of life.” He smiled a little.

Elizabeth was interested despite herself and felt oddly moved because there was something constrained in Kelsey’s voice; this was not, she realized, something he had told many people. She waited quietly, hands folded in her lap, studying
the face that had gone blank and hard after the smile died.

Another face. Another face he was showing her.

“For a few years we pretended everything was normal. My mother died and Dad threw himself into his work. I was in college, busy with my own life. Then I came home for summer vacation in my junior year, and Dad wasn’t there. Weeks went by. I finally called the ‘emergency’ number he’d given me. The next day, I got a visit from his boss, Hagen.”

Kelsey was hardly aware that he had slipped back into the past, barely conscious that he was twisting the big signet ring around and around the third finger of his right hand.

“It was so unreal,” he mused almost to himself. “If you could only see Hagen. He’s a round little man with a cherub’s face, a walking caricature of the self-important banty rooster. And this unreal little man was telling me that my father was on an unreal assignment, and they’d lost contact with him.”

“What did you do?” Elizabeth asked softly.

He looked at her, his face still hard and remote. “I was twenty-one, reckless. I demanded that Hagen let me look for my father. He agreed; I’ve never known why. Anyway, he gave me the information I needed, swore me in as an agent, and three days later I found myself charming my way into an international smuggling ring.”

When he said nothing more, Elizabeth said, “Kelsey?” very softly.

Kelsey, even with the remembered pain and bitterness tearing through him, heard her use his name—really use it—for the first time, and he was unaware of the longing in the look he gave her.

Inexplicably, she flushed, and asked him huskily, “What happened?”

“I enjoyed it,” he said, face remote and voice bleak. “At first. It was exciting in a way I’d never known. And at twenty-one who thinks of dying? What kid ever thinks it can happen to him or to someone close to him?”

“Your father?”

Kelsey drew a deep breath and released it slowly, raggedly. “He’d infiltrated the ring just as I had,
but he hadn’t been so lucky; they found him out. Maybe he said the wrong word or gave someone a wrong look. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Anyway, they decided to make an example of him days before I got there. And they were creative about it. We were aboard an old freighter on the open sea, and I hadn’t been able to search the hold. I found out why when they brought … what was left of him up and threw him overboard.”

“Oh, my God,” Elizabeth whispered. She rose without thought and went to him, drawn as she would have been drawn to any wounded animal with anguished eyes. She placed one of her hands gently on his shoulder, and he took the other in both of his, staring down at it blindly.

In a monotone, he went on. “I could see he was dead; nothing human could have lived like that. And the worst of it was that I couldn’t react, couldn’t let them see what I felt. There were thirty of them, and we were on the open sea. I wasn’t armed. What could I do? I watched them throw my father overboard, and I turned as if it didn’t matter to me and walked away. And I guess I was
convincing, because they never suspected me. We made port a few days later, and Hagen had an army out there an hour after I called him.”

“Kelsey, I’m sorry.”

He was still holding her hand gently in both of his, gazing down at it. “I went home. Back to college. I guess I even tried to act like a normal kid again. But I didn’t fit in that world anymore. I’d seen something I could hardly bear to live with, and it would be with me for the rest of my life. There were CIA recruiters at my college; when they offered me a job, I accepted. I worked for them about five years. Then Hagen came back into my life, and reminded me that he had sworn me in first and asked what the hell I was doing with the Company. He offered more freedom. I took it. And I fit in his world too.