Someone had been here

And judging by the open decanter, she knew who. Maybe she had changed everything else, but Elizabeth still kept the best whiskey in the Waterford.

“What the hell are you doing here, Rafe?” she asked, not raising her voice. Wherever he was, he would have been watching her since she’d entered the kitchen.

“You’ve cut your hair.”

He always noticed things like that. Maybe too much. Still, the fact that he had noticed caused an unwanted thickness in her throat.

From force of habit, her hand rose to rake the chin-length hair that had once been long enough to tangle around his bare, sweating shoulders as they made love.

At the memory, a jolt of sexual heat seared along nerve pathways that had seemed atrophied. They weren’t. Painfully, unexpectedly, she knew that now.

Steeling herself, she walked into the living room. After five years, she was in the same room with Rafe Sinclair. Something she had thought would never happen again.

Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,

We’ve got what you need to start the holiday season with a bang. Starting things off is RITA® Award-winning author Gayle Wilson. Gayle returns to Harlequin Intrigue with a spin-off of her hugely popular MEN OF MYSTERY series. Same sexy heroes, same drama and danger…but with a new name! Look for Rafe Sinclair’s Revenge under the PHOENIX BROTHERHOOD banner.

You can return to the royal kingdom of Vashmira in Royal Ransom by Susan Kearney, which is the second book in her trilogy THE CROWN AFFAIR. This time an American goes undercover to protect the princess. But will his heart be exposed in the process?

B.J. Daniels takes you to Montana to encounter one very tough lady who’s about to meet her match in a mate. Only thing…can he avoid the deadly fate of her previous beaux? Find out in Premeditated Marriage.

Winding up the complete package, we have a dramatic story about a widow and her child who become targets of a killer, and only the top cop can keep them out of harm’s way. Linda O. Johnston pens an emotionally charged story of crime and compassion in Tommy’s Mom.

Make sure you pick up all four, and please let us know what you think of our brand of breathtaking romantic suspense.

Enjoy!

Sincerely,

Denise O’Sullivan

Associate Senior Editor

Harlequin Intrigue

Rafe Sinclair’s Revenge
Gayle Wilson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Five-time RITA® finalist and RITA® Award winner Gayle Wilson has written twenty-seven novels and two novellas for Harlequin/Silhouette. A former high school English and world history teacher of gifted students, she has won more than forty awards and nominations for her work. Recent recognitions include a 2002 Daphne du Maurier Award for Romantic Suspense.

Gayle still lives in Alabama, where she was born, with her husband of thirty-three years and an ever-growing menagerie of beloved pets. She has one son, who is also a teacher of gifted students. Gayle loves to hear from readers. Write to her at P.O. Box 3277, Hueytown, AL 35023. Visit Gayle online at http://suspense.net/gayle-wilson.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

CIA

AGENT PROFILE

NAME: | RAFE SINCLAIR
DATE OF BIRTH: | JANUARY 18, 1964
ASSIGNED TEAM: | EXTERNAL SECURITY

SPECIAL SKILLS: Trained in counterterrorism and in interrogation methods; hand-to-hand combat expert; top-notch marksman; speaks fluent Arabic

AGENT EVALUATION: Recipient of the agency's highest citation for valor above and beyond the call of duty.

STATUS:
Resignation accepted

CURRENT ADDRESS:
Unknown…

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Rafe Sinclair—Five years ago this ex-CIA operative hunted down and executed a terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. Now the agency is telling Rafe that Gunther Jorgensen not only isn’t dead, he’s bent on revenge. The problem is Rafe may not be his target.

Elizabeth Richards—Once a member of Griff Cabot’s elite antiterrorism team, Elizabeth has a new identity and an ordinary life, one that is about to be disrupted by a couple of ghosts from her past. One of them is hunting her. The other, former partner and lover Rafe Sinclair, is determined to become her protector.

Gunther Jorgensen—Is the terrorist mastermind alive or dead? And if it’s not Jorgensen who is stalking Elizabeth, then who is it?

Griff Cabot—What secret knowledge does Griff possess that makes him agree to let Rafe set out alone on a suicide mission?

John Edmonds—Was Edmonds really sent by Cabot or does The Phoenix operative have his own agenda?

Lucas Hawkins—The legendary assassin of the External Security Team may hold the answer to questions about Rafe that Elizabeth has puzzled over for more than six years.

To BJ

who makes me incredibly envious of her talent.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Author Note

Prologue

The man Griff Cabot had come to find was carefully turning a piece of wood on a spindle sander. Dark, long-fingered hands handled the object with a skill that was nearly graceful, despite the strength and masculinity that was apparent in their every movement.

The workshop where he was working had been attached to the back of a small log cabin, which sat in a clearing on the side of Sinclair Mountain. When no one had answered his repeated knocks on the front door, Cabot had been drawn around to the back by a sound he hadn’t then been able to identify. Now he could.

When he lifted his gaze from the workman’s hands, he realized with a sense of shock that the passage of six years had had as little effect on the face of the man he was watching as on those hands. The striking blue eyes were hidden, intent on whatever he was shaping, but the austere, almost forbidding features were exactly as he had remembered them.

“You should never sneak up on a man who’s holding a gun,” Rafe Sinclair said without glancing up. “I would think you, of all people, would know that.”

“Out of practice, I guess,” Griff acknowledged, his mouth relaxing into a smile. “Besides, I didn’t realize that was a gun.”

“This is only the butt. But when it’s finished…”

With a tilt of his head, Sinclair indicated the rosewood box that lay open at the end of his workbench. He still hadn’t made eye contact with his visitor.

Cabot understood that was deliberate. As deliberate as had been his unannounced arrival. If he had told Rafe Sinclair he was coming, he would have found the North Carolina mountainside deserted.

Griff stepped into the shop, crossing over to the rosewood case to which he’d been directed. The inside was lined with black velvet, still rich if faded with age. Nested against that darkness was a single dueling pistol, incredibly beautiful and yet also obviously, almost obscenely, deadly.

Despite the indention in the lining where a matching pistol should rest, there was only the one. Cabot raised his eyes, examining with renewed interest the object Sinclair was now holding up to the light.

“You’re repairing the mate to this?” Griff asked.

“I’m recreating the mate.”

Cabot looked down again on the weapon in the box. The curved wood of its handle was the same glowing rosewood as the case. Its sides were covered with intricately chased silver, the soft gleam of that precious metal outshining the baser metal of the long barrel.

“You can do that?” he asked. “Duplicate this one?”

“Of course,” Sinclair said, looking directly at him for the first time.

The crystalline-blue eyes hadn’t changed either, Griff realized. And for some strange reason he found that comforting.

“The only difference between them,” Rafe went on, “is that this one will be accurate. If you’d ever fired the one you’re looking at, you’d wonder why they bothered with duels. If you needed to be sure of killing your opponent, you’d have been better off beating him to death with it.”

Griff laughed, his own knowledge of the notorious inaccuracy of early nineteenth-century firearms affirming the truth of what Sinclair had said. Just as his knowledge of the man who was in the process of reproducing a two-hundred-year-old pistol confirmed that he would do exactly what he had claimed.

Rafe Sinclair would build a weapon that would be perfect in every detail, identical to its mate, except for its increased accuracy. That demanding perfectionism, inherent in every task he undertook, had always been this man’s gift. Ultimately, it had also been his curse.

“Where did you get them?” Griff asked, in no hurry to broach the subject that had brought him here.

“They belonged to an ancestor of mine. Sebastian Sinclair, who supposedly dropped the missing pistol of that pair into the Thames while he was rescuing his Spanish-born wife.”

Griff wondered if that might be where his friend had acquired his Christian name. The source of that “Rafael,” always spoken with a true Iberian accent, had always seemed as enigmatic as the man himself.

“Bloody careless of him, if you ask me,” Sinclair said, his deep voice lightened with a sudden amusement, “but I don’t suppose they were nearly as valuable then as they would be now.”

“English,” Griff guessed, bending closer to the remaining pistol to examine the workmanship.

“And very fine for the period.”

“Just not…fine enough for you?” A smile hovered at the corners of Cabot’s mouth as he posed the question.

“It isn’t enough to be merely beautiful.”

Beautiful and deadly. He had thought exactly that before, Griff realized, looking down on the lone dueling pistol.

And the word “deadly” would just as well describe the man before him. At one time Sinclair had been an extremely valuable weapon in the war Griff’s division of the CIA had waged against international terrorism. Although the External Security Team had eventually been disbanded by the agency, Sinclair’s own departure from the EST had occurred long before that decision had been made.

“What are you doing here, Griff? I thought we had an understanding.”

The question brought Cabot’s eyes up to focus on the man he had come to see. The inquiry was inevitable, of course, considering who and what they were.

“I’m not here about the Phoenix, although the offer to join us is still open.”

The Phoenix Brotherhood was a private organization that had been formed by Cabot and a few of his ex-operatives. No longer under government direction, they set their own agenda, bringing the skills they once had used in the defense of their country to bear on all manner of private problems. As much as he’d like Sinclair to be a part of what they were doing, however, that hadn’t been his purpose in seeking him out.

“You were never much inclined to social visits, so…” Rafe walked over to the rosewood box to compare the curve of the handle he’d just created with the original.

“There’s something I thought you should see.”

Cabot reached into the breast pocket of his blazer and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. He didn’t bother to open it before he held it out to Sinclair.

There was a hesitation, long enough that Cabot had time to wonder what he would do if Rafe refused to read the information contained in the security alert. After all, Sinclair had been adamant about leaving the agency, so much so that eventually Griff had been forced to stop arguing against it or risk their friendship.

Finally the blue eyes lifted from the unopened paper. They studied Griff’s face for a few seconds before Rafe’s lips compressed. Then the same long, scarred fingers that had delicately shaped that piece of rosewood reached out to take the alert.

Sinclair unfolded it with a flick of his wrist, holding the document out between them. His eyes rose again—briefly—as soon as he saw the heading.

Griff could read the question in them, but he didn’t bother to respond. There would soon be other questions that would have to be answered.

After a moment Rafe’s gaze returned to the alert that had been clandestinely, and illegally, passed on from one of Griff’s contacts within the CIA. Carl Steiner had thought this was something he ought to know. As soon as Griff read it, he had called to reserve a seat on the first flight out of Washington.

“Why are you showing this to me?” Rafe asked.

“You’re the expert on Jorgensen. I thought if you could shed any light—”

“He’s dead,” Sinclair said flatly.

There was no overt emotion in the phrase, but his hatred for the man the pronoun referred to permeated each syllable. The force of it held Griff silent for a moment.

“The signature of those last two bombings has been the same. It’s distinctive enough that the agency’s experts—”

“Screw the agency and their experts. I’m telling you Jorgensen is dead.”

“There’s always the possibility—”

“I watched the bastard die. Whoever this is, it isn’t Jorgensen.”

Without denying what Rafe had said, Griff let the silence stretch again. The tension it produced grew as the slow seconds ticked off, their eyes locked.

Finally, Griff asked, “And you’re willing to stake her life on your certainty of that?”

The blue eyes changed, darkening as they always did when Sinclair was angry. Of course, that wasn’t all he was seeing in them now, Griff acknowledged. He had known this man too long and too well to be mistaken about what was there.

“You bastard,” Rafe Sinclair said, the words so soft they were almost a whisper. “You conniving bastard. You haven’t changed at all, have you? You’re still doing their dirty work. They sent you here—”

“Nobody sent me,” Cabot interrupted, his own anger flaring unexpectedly. “Least of all the agency. I assure you they no longer have the power to send me anywhere.” Rafe should know better than that. He should know him better.

“You’re here strictly out of friendship.” The tone this time was mocking. Sardonic.

“I’m here because I thought you should know about that,” Griff said, gesturing with an upward tilt of his chin toward the CIA document. “What you do with the information is up to you. Good luck with the pistol,” he added before he turned, striding across the workshop to the outside door.

He had almost reached it when Rafe’s voice stopped him.

“If I’m wrong about your motives, I apologize. I’m not wrong about the other. Jorgensen is dead. You can tell Steiner that I guarantee it. Tell him that whoever this is was probably a protégé. An admirer perhaps. Imitation is still the sincerest form of flattery.”

“There have been a couple of sightings,” Griff said without turning. “One in Bern. Another in Prague.”

“There are always sightings. How many times has someone reported that they’ve seen Mengele?”

It was an apt analogy, given the death and destruction Gunther Jorgensen had been responsible for.

“I thought you should know,” Griff said again. “For what it’s worth.”

He took another step, the next to the last that would carry him out from under the artificial light of the workshop and into the daylight. Automatically, the force of habit too deeply ingrained to deny, his eyes surveyed the panorama spread out before him. Somewhere in the distance a thrush sang. There were no other sounds.

“You ever get the urge to say ‘I told you so’?” the man behind him asked.

“Occasionally. I try to resist.”

“I’m not sure I’d be able to,” Rafe said. And then he added, the mockery wiped from his tone, “Thanks for coming.”

There was another long beat of silence.

“Do you know where she is?” Griff asked, and then wished he hadn’t.

“Of course,” Sinclair said simply.

Unconsciously, Cabot nodded, the movement subtle enough that the man behind him was probably unaware of it. He took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway and out into the slant of late-afternoon sunshine.

He walked to the car he had rented at the Charlotte airport and climbed in without looking back. He was aware almost subliminally as he turned the wheel to pull onto the unpaved drive that Sinclair was standing in the doorway of the workshop, watching him.

And he knew, because they had once been as close as brothers, that the far-seeing gaze of those blue eyes would follow his car until it had disappeared into the twilight haze that gathered over these ancient mountains.

Some things never change.

Chapter One

The woman known as Beth Anderson lifted her hand from the key she’d just inserted into the ignition to adjust the rearview mirror of the SUV, pretending to check her makeup. As an added bit of play-acting, she touched her index finger to the small indention in the center of her top lip as if wiping away a smudge of lipstick.

Not that she could see her lip, since the mirror was focused on the line of cars behind her in the grocery store parking lot. And there was nothing suspicious about any of them. No one suspicious.

With the late-afternoon heat, there was almost no one in the parking lot at all, which made her feel more than a little foolish. It was a feeling she was becoming accustomed to.

She reached up and readjusted the mirror, putting it back into driving position. Old habits die hard, she thought. In this case, it was more like a resurrected habit. Resurrected from a life that was long dead.

She couldn’t remember making such a conscious effort to be aware of her surroundings in years. All week long, however, she’d had the sensation that someone was watching her. Maybe even following her.

In the quiet, summer sombulance of Magnolia Grove, Mississippi, that was patently ridiculous. And that was exactly what she’d been telling herself since the first flutter of that “eyes on the back of her neck” feeling had drifted along her spine.

She’d been out of the game too long for anyone to be interested in her. Her current position as the junior partner in a two-person law firm had once or twice evoked an angry response from someone she’d gone after in court. No one, including Elizabeth herself, could believe that any of her current cases might generate enough heat to cause someone to trail her around.

The whole thing was ridiculous. There wasn’t a single, solitary reason under the sun for anyone to be remotely interested in her daily routine.

Routine. The word reverberated in her consciousness, producing a nagging sense of guilt.

That was one of the first things you were taught. Never establish a routine. Vary your route to and from work. Vary the times you travel it. Vary everything in your existence so that no one can know where you’ll be or what you’ll be doing at any given moment of the day or night.

She was a little amused at the clarity of her memory. The problem with following those instructions, even if there had been any legitimate reason for doing so, was that there was only one route from her office to the bungalow she’d bought here three years ago. And she didn’t exactly set her own hours. She could vary the time she headed home, as she had today, but she was the one who opened the office every morning, promptly at nine o’clock.

She didn’t live her life by a routine, she thought, as she released the mirror to turn the key. She had slipped past routine and straight into rut. Small-town rut.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, she told herself determinedly, backing quickly out of the parking place. She had had enough excitement to last her a lifetime. All she wanted now was peace and quiet.

Not exactly all, she admitted with a touch of bitterness as she guided the car out onto the two-lane. Because after all, peace and quiet Magnolia Grove offered in abundance. As for the other…

What was it that Paul Newman had said? Why settle for hamburger when you have steak waiting at home? The analogy didn’t quite fit her situation, but she hadn’t met anyone in Magnolia Grove remotely interesting enough to compete with her memories.

And that’s a hell of a note, she acknowledged.

Maybe that’s why she’d been imagining someone following her. Loneliness. Routine. Rut. Boredom.

All of which were why she was here, she reminded herself. This place ranked at the top in the all-time boredom ratings. That’s exactly why she had chosen it. Just because she was now having some kind of midlife crisis—

Midlife? Her eyes left the road, lifting to the mirror. Although she had to shift her position in order to accomplish it, this time they examined the reflection of her face, which was reassuringly the same.

Slightly crooked nose, hazel eyes, faint chicken pox scar on her left cheekbone. And, she assessed critically, only a few more lines around her eyes than had ever been there before.

Thirty-four was hardly “midlife.” Even if this peculiar sensation of being watched was the product of some sort of dissatisfaction with her present existence, she couldn’t legitimately put it down to middle-age angst, thank God.

Her gaze returned to the blacktop stretching before her. Heat waves rose from the asphalt to shimmer and distort the horizon. There wasn’t another car in sight. A quick glance in the rearview mirror revealed there was no traffic behind her either.

Nobody was following her. Nobody was the least bit interested in anything she was doing. The idea that someone might be was probably just wishful thinking.

And that’s pretty pathetic.

Her mother used to say, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.” She had wanted peace and quiet and security. And now that she had it…

Pretty damn pathetic, she thought again, pressing her foot down on the gas pedal to take advantage of the long, deserted straightaway that stretched in front of her.

SOMETHING WAS SUBTLY different about the house. She had known it as soon as she opened the back door. Certainly by the time she’d set the groceries she’d picked up on the way home down on the counter.

Her eyes sought the light on the answering machine first, but there were no messages. Even if there had been, that wouldn’t have triggered whatever she was feeling.

She was sensitive to atmosphere, as most women were, but she certainly didn’t claim to be clairvoyant. Whatever change she sensed here was physical. Something had been moved, perhaps, so that its being out of place made the room feel strange. Or maybe it was a smell. Something that was different from the normal aromas of her home, so familiar that usually they would go unnoticed.

Her gaze traveled slowly around the room. She had opened the kitchen curtains before she’d left for work this morning. Late-afternoon sunlight spilled through the windows over the sink, slanting across the checkerboard pattern of the black-and-white tile floor. Its brightness seemed to belie her uneasiness, which despite any tangible cause was increasing by the second.

She glanced through the doorway that led into the dining room. It was darker in there, at least beyond the reach of the sunlight pouring into the kitchen. Its reflection made the worn hardwood floor just beyond the open doorway gleam.

Nothing in the dining room seemed out of order. No more than it had in here.

She laid her car keys down beside the sack of groceries and took a step toward the front of the house. As she did, it occurred to her that the smart thing to do would be to go outside, to get into her car and to drive back into town to the sheriff’s office.

And tell him what? Something isn’t right at my house. I don’t like the way it feels.

She could imagine what a charge the deputies would get out of retelling that story. The sheriff would probably send someone back with her, and when they discovered there was nothing here…

She made her feet take another step and then another, crossing the kitchen with determination if not alacrity. There was no reason for this apprehension, she reiterated doggedly. It was ridiculous. No one knew she was here. And no one here knew who she was.

She had changed her name. Changed her appearance. Changed her life. She wasn’t about to go through any of that again because something about this place was suddenly giving her the willies.

She stopped at the dining room door, reaching out to flick the switch for the overhead light. As it scattered the darkness to the periphery of the room, nothing out of the ordinary was revealed.

She took a deep, calming breath. The comforting smell of lemon oil surrounded her. And underlying that—

Her eyes found her collection of antique decanters on the sideboard. One of them was open. Its crystal stopper lay on the polished surface of the buffet. And a tumbler was missing from the silver tray beside it.

At least now she had a rational explanation for what she had been feeling since she’d entered the house. Someone had been here. Or was here.

And judging by his choice of that particular decanter, she knew who. Maybe she had changed everything else about her life, but she still kept the best whiskey she owned in the Waterford. Routine.

“What the hell are you doing here, Rafe?” she asked, not bothering to raise her voice. Wherever he was, he would have been watching her since she’d entered the kitchen.

“You’ve cut your hair.”

He always noticed things like that. Maybe too much. Still, the fact that he had noticed, that it mattered enough to him to mention it, caused an unwanted thickness in her throat.

She had spent a very long time without anyone around to notice those things. Not her hair or her clothes or the condition of her soul.

From force of habit, her hand lifted, fingers spread, to rake the chin-length hair back from her face. When she realized what she was doing, she forced her hand down, away from the strands that had once been long enough to tangle around his bare, sweating shoulders as they made love. Long enough to occasionally catch in his early-morning whiskers, the feel of them so sweetly abrasive against her skin.

At the memory, a jolt of sexual heat seared mercilessly along nerve pathways that had seemed atrophied. They weren’t. Painfully, unexpectedly, she knew that now.

“What are you doing here?” she asked again, ignoring those unsettling emotions.

He always managed to suck her in that way. Noticing. Caring. Being aware.

So damn aware. Aware of every aspect of her existence, as no one in her entire life before she’d met him had ever been.

Steeling herself to face him, she walked across the dining room and through the wide double doorway that separated it from the living room. She always kept the French doors open between the two, so that they were really one.

Which meant, she supposed, that after more than five years, she was once more in the same room with Rafe Sinclair. Something she had thought would never happen again.

“And you’ve lost weight,” he added softly.

His voice had come from the shadows near the fireplace. He was standing in the darkest corner of the room, and with the drapes pulled against the force of the afternoon heat, it was very dark indeed.

His left arm was lying along on the top of one of the built-in bookcases that flanked the small fireplace. Sometime in the past a tenant had painted them a glossy white. That paleness provided a stark contrast to the dark gray shirt he wore. It was long-sleeved, buttoned at the cuff, despite the heat.

As her eyes gradually adjusted to the room’s dimness, she was able to discern other details. In his left hand, the one resting atop the bookcase, he held the tumbler that had been missing from the sideboard. It was still half-full.

His right arm hung loosely at his side, the fingers of the hand curled slightly inward. He seemed perfectly relaxed, exuding the same aura of confidence that had always been such a part of him.

She hadn’t found the courage yet to look at his face. She would have to, of course, but she needed a few seconds to prepare.

He had had that time. He had obviously been watching her since she’d come in through the back door. The place where he was standing gave him the perfect vantage point to do so.

His position had been carefully thought out. That was a lesson he had taught her—to use every advantage your adversary allows. He had given himself both time and opportunity to study her, while she had been completely unaware of him. Unaware and unprepared.

Except she hadn’t been. He had at least played fair in that respect.

That’s why he’d poured the whiskey. Why he’d left the decanter unstopped. To let her know he was here. She just hadn’t figured it out as quickly as she should have.

Out of practice, she acknowledged.

“I asked you a question,” she said instead of responding to his comments about her appearance.

That was certainly none of his business, but that wasn’t why she didn’t respond. There was something too personal about discussing those things with him. Too near an intimacy neither of them wanted.

“Griff came to see me.”

Of all the things he might have said to her, that was the last she would have expected. Rafe had made it as clear to Cabot as he had to her that the part of his life that had included them was over and done. She had gotten the message. Maybe Griff had a thicker skin.

“About what?” she asked, beginning to get her equilibrium back.

Her first reaction to his presence had been strictly visceral. Given their history, that was probably inevitable. It didn’t mean she couldn’t bring her intellect to bear on the reason he was here.

All she needed was a bit of detachment. Surely after nearly six years that would be possible.

“Someone at the agency passed along a security alert. They think Jorgensen may still be alive.”

She tried to decide from his tone what he felt about that. As always, it was impossible to read anything from what he’d said. Not unless he wanted her to.

“Griff thought you should be made aware of the possibility,” he continued.

Griff thought you should be made aware…

“So why didn’t he call me?”

“I assume because he doesn’t know how.”

“You did.”

There was no answer. In the dimness she watched as he brought the glass to his lips and took a long swallow of her whiskey. She wondered, feeling slightly vindictive, if he needed it.

“So how did you know how to find me?”

The more important question was, of course, why would you still know how to find me?

“I know how your mind works.”

She thought about that for maybe ten seconds. “That’s not an answer.”

“I trained you.”

“Don’t you think I might have learned anything after you left?”

There was a small movement at the corner of his mouth. “Probably not.”

She resisted the urge to tell him to go to hell. At least she had learned when he was deliberately goading her.

“Okay, so now I’m aware that the company thinks Jorgensen could be alive,” she said. “Anything else?”

“I like your house.”

“A little place in the suburbs. Isn’t that what we all dreamed of?”

“Is it? What you dreamed of, I mean.”

You’re what I dreamed of. As much as she hated admitting that, she could no more have stopped the thought from forming than she could have stopped herself from entering this room once she had known he was here.

“I guess that would have depended on which day you asked me,” she said.

“How about today?”

Inexplicably the tightness in her throat was back. She couldn’t think of a single sufficiently cutting thing to say to him.

“I have to put my groceries away,” she said instead, the suggestion that he should leave so she could get on with it obvious.

He let the silence lengthen a moment before he broke it.

“They’re wrong, but don’t take any chances. This may be someone copycatting Jorgensen’s agenda. Which might mean they are also targeting his enemies.”

“Then why should he be interested in me? I didn’t have anything to do with Jorgensen.”

“I did. That would have been enough for him. Whoever this is—”

“Couldn’t have found me,” she broke in. “Not if Griff couldn’t. And if you’re so concerned, why take a chance on leading him to me?”

“I wasn’t followed.” He was obviously amused by the idea.

That wasn’t based on arrogance, but experience, and as such, she accepted it. Actually she hadn’t been worried about Rafe leading him—whoever he might be—to her. She was more curious about why he had come, especially in person. Despite the excuse he had just offered, there must be something more to this visit.

Wishful thinking? She denied that idea, too, as soon as it was born. She had a perfect right to be curious about why Rafe Sinclair would all of a sudden show up on her doorstep after an absence of nearly six years.

“So what are you doing now?” she asked. “Working for Griff?”

“You know about the Phoenix?”

“Rumors,” she said, choosing the word with care. She didn’t want her feelings about that to be evident.

“They invited you to join.”

They hadn’t, but since he didn’t seem to know they hadn’t, she couldn’t see any point in telling him.

“Did you?” she countered.

He laughed. The sound, low and pleasant and so damned familiar, evoked more memories.

“I think I’m too old to play hero. Somewhere along the way it all seemed to lose its charm.”

Somewhere along the way. And she knew exactly where that had been.

“I’ll let you get back to your groceries,” he said.

In spite of the fact that she had made that suggestion only seconds ago, perversely she had discovered she wasn’t ready for him to leave. Not yet ready to let him walk out of her life for perhaps another six years. Perhaps forever.

That would be the smart thing to do, of course. Just let him walk away. Where Rafe Sinclair was concerned, however, she had never managed to do the smart thing. Why start now?

“Have you eaten?”

Even in the dimness she was aware that his eyes widened. He recovered quickly, but no one could completely control that kind of involuntary physiological response. That he had reacted to the invitation at all was promising.

Promising of what? she wondered, disgusted with her near-Pavlovian response to his every action.

“Today?”

“Dinner,” she said patiently.

“Is that what’s in the sack?”

“It could be.”

“And you’re suggesting that we sit down and have dinner together?”

“It isn’t all that complicated. I’m going to fix something to eat for dinner. Do you want to join me?” she asked, still feigning patience.

That same movement she noticed before touched the corner of his mouth. “Actually, it might be better if I waited until after dark to leave. Since you’re concerned about security.”

“I’m not concerned about security. I just wondered why you aren’t.”

“I told you. I wasn’t followed.”

“Then there’s no reason to wait until after dark to leave, is there?”

This time he laughed. And again that small frisson of sexual reaction stirred deep within her lower body.

“You’re a damned ungracious hostess, Elizabeth. Whatever happened to Southern hospitality?”

“I don’t know. I’m not Southern.”

“I swear there’s a trace of an accent.”

“Hardly,” she said dismissively. “Are you staying or not?”

She could tell he was fighting another smile, which made her regret her impulsive invitation. Maybe he would refuse.

“Of course I am. I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve had a home-cooked meal.”

Chapter Two

“You never told me what you’re doing now,” she said, lifting her wineglass to rest the globe against her cheek.

It was something he had seen her do a hundred times. One of a dozen gestures that had been achingly familiar during the few short hours they had spent together.

He couldn’t explain why he’d accepted her invitation to dinner. No more than he imagined she could have explained why she’d issued it.

Curiosity, perhaps. A longing to recapture something that had been lost. And he refused, even to himself, to articulate what that was.

At least her tension, which had made the first few minutes difficult for both of them, had gradually dissipated. The wine they’d consumed while he’d watched her cook and during the course of the meal might have had more to do with that than any relaxation of the strain their long separation had caused.

After all, he rarely drank, and Elizabeth had never had a head for alcohol. It was one of the small, endearing cracks in the facade of absolute control she’d assumed while she was with the CIA.

It must have been hard being one of the few women on the team. Not that she’d ever had any reason to apologize to any of them for her femininity.

“This and that,” he said aloud. “Consulting mostly.”

“Privately?”

“Of course.”

He had no desire to be at the government’s beck and call. In his opinion, what the agency had done to Griff’s people had bordered on the criminal, which was why the idea that Steiner had been the one who had passed on the information about Jorgensen nagged at him. He didn’t buy altruistic motivations from anyone at the CIA. Not any longer.

“How about you?” he asked, lifting his own glass to finish the remaining swallow of wine it contained.

“You know what I’m doing. Why pretend that you don’t?”

He looked at her over the rim before he lowered the glass, allowing his lips to slant into a smile.

“Convention,” he suggested. “It’s not considered polite to spy on people.”

“Unless you are a spy, of course.”

“Of course,” he agreed calmly.

“So why spy on me?”

“I told you. Griff wanted you to know that the company thinks Jorgensen’s alive.”

“But you weren’t totally sure I needed to know that.”

“Because I’m totally sure he’s dead.”

“Did you kill him?”

No one else on the team would have asked him that question. Not even Griff. For a split second he considered refusing to answer it, but in some oblique way she was the one person who had a right to know.

“Yes,” he said calmly, setting his glass back on the table.

She nodded as if that confession were only what she had expected. “Did it help?”

Had it? At least the bastard wasn’t blowing people to shreds anymore.

Except, according to Steiner, he was. Or someone using his methodology was.

“There’s always someone willing to take their place.”

With the change in pronouns, he had broadened the discussion to include not only the German-born terrorist he’d killed, but all those who preyed on innocents to advance their various and sundry political causes.

“Or yours.”

“That has occurred to me.”

It took her a second, but then she had always been very bright. “You think Griff is using you? Because you were their expert on Jorgensen?”

“I think Steiner is using him.”

“Griff isn’t anyone’s fool. Not even the CIA’s.”

She put her glass back on the table without finishing her wine. Then she stood, the movement abrupt. She laid her napkin down and picked up her plate and flatware. As she reached across the table to remove his, she met his eyes.

“You aren’t going after whoever this is, are you?”

“It isn’t my job,” he said.

She completed the motion she’d begun, stacking his plate atop hers before she looked up at him again.

“There was a time when it wouldn’t have been ‘a job.’”

There had been, he thought, but it had been almost too long ago to remember what that felt like.

“There was a time when we wouldn’t be sitting here acting like a couple of strangers forced to have an uncomfortable dinner together,” he said. “Things change.”

She held his eyes a few seconds before she nodded. Then she turned, carrying the dishes into the kitchen.

When she disappeared through the doorway, he leaned back in his chair, taking a breath to relieve the sudden tightness in his chest. It wasn’t the only constriction he was aware of. Although his jeans were well worn, their fabric thin with age, they were suddenly uncomfortably restrictive.

The strength of his erection was unexpected. And unwanted. There could be few things as embarrassing as the undeniable physical evidence of how much you still wanted the woman you had walked out on.

There was a time when we wouldn’t be sitting here acting like a couple of strangers forced to have an uncomfortable dinner together.

That had been a hell of an understatement. From the day they’d met, they had both been aware of the sexual pull between them. They had later admitted knowing even then that it would eventually lead to intimacy. What neither of them had suspected was how strong that attraction would prove to be. Or how powerfully addictive it would become.

Which was why he hadn’t trusted himself to see her in all these years. If things had been different…

They hadn’t been. They weren’t now.

“I could make coffee.”

He glanced up to find her standing in the doorway. They had eaten by candlelight, something that was ritual. She had turned on the light in the kitchen when she’d carried the dishes there, and she was now silhouetted against its glow.

She had lost weight, he noticed again, although there had always been something about her figure, at least when clothed, that hinted at the slim, almost boyish fitness of a well-conditioned athlete. The short sun-streaked hair now emphasized that quality without making her seem any less feminine.

With their history, there was probably nothing that could do that. Not for him.

“I have to go,” he said, pushing up from the table before he remembered the too revealing tightness of his jeans.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be obvious if he stayed in the candlelit dimness of the dining room. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason he should resist the urge to close the distance between them.

During dinner he had occasionally caught the faintest hint of her perfume, its fragrance released by the warmth of the sultry Mississippi night’s humidity against her skin. It had been evocative of nights when that same scent had filled his nostrils while his lips trailed kisses over the silken smoothness of her body. There was no need to add the temptation of physical nearness to the potent force of those memories.

“Thank you for bringing me Griff’s warning,” she said formally.

She raised her hand, pushing back the hair that had fallen over her forehead. The gesture was quick, hinting at nervousness. It seemed that the earlier strain was back, although her voice had been perfectly level.

Then she held the same hand out to him. He might have been amused at her offer to shake hands with him if he hadn’t still been dealing with all those other emotions. Ones that didn’t lend themselves to amusement.

It would be far better to stay on this side of the room. To ignore the proffered hand.

Better perhaps, but not possible.

He pushed his chair back and took the four or five steps that would bring him to stand directly in front of her. There was enough difference in their heights that she had to tilt her head to meet his eyes.

As she did, he took the hand she held out to him. After dealing with the assault of his own emotions, it should have been gratifying to find that her fingers were both cold and trembling.

It wasn’t. It made him want to fold them into the warmth of his or to press them against his suddenly increased heartbeat. Or, even more tempting, to use them to draw her to him. To put his arms around her and hold her close, comforting whatever made her tremble, if only for a moment.

As it always had with them, however, one thing would surely lead to another, even after six years. They had come too far to destroy whatever peace of mind either of them had achieved in that time. That wasn’t why he had come.

“Be careful,” he said without releasing her hand.

“I have been. I just didn’t know why. Not until you showed up.”

Tonight her eyes were more green than hazel, he decided, examining her face in the revealing light spilling from the kitchen. And the years had wrought remarkably few changes there. Maybe the lines at the corners of her eyes had been graven a little more deeply and the delicate curve of her cheekbone had become slightly more pronounced.

Her nose was still crooked, having been broken in some high school soccer game. There was a small patch of sunburned skin across its narrow bridge, emphasizing the freckles she never bothered to conceal with makeup.

“Thank you for inviting me to dinner,” he said.

“Thank you for staying.” This time her voice was touched with humor.

Hearing it, he smiled at her. Then, the commonplaces taken care of, neither of them seemed to know what to do next.

It had almost been easier the first time he’d walked away, he thought before he recognized that for the lie it was. There had been nothing harder than that in his life. And nothing more necessary.

He released her hand and quickly pushed past her through the doorway. It was narrow enough that his body brushed hers, his shoulder turning hers slightly.

He didn’t look back as he crossed the kitchen. As a precaution, he flicked off the light, using the switch beside the back door to plunge the room into darkness. Then he stepped out into the honeysuckle-scented night, closing behind him a door he should never have reopened.

ELIZABETH HAD STOOD in the kitchen a long time before she finally walked back into the dining room. The candles had burned long enough that they were beginning to sputter, wax pooling at the base of the holder.

In the darkness after she’d extinguished them, she put her palms flat on the surface of the table, leaning forward tiredly, her head bowed. She didn’t understand why she was so exhausted. After all, nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

Rafe had been given a message for her from Griff, and he had delivered it. Other than his comment about a couple of strangers forced to have an uncomfortable dinner together there had been almost nothing of a personal nature in their conversation.

Not unless you considered her question about whether he had killed Jorgensen personal. He hadn’t seemed to. He had reacted to that exactly as he had to everything she’d said the last time she’d talked to him. Contained. Controlled. Cold.

That coldness had been one of the things that had been so hard to accept. She could understand his anger with the agency, but not why it had also been directed at her. As she’d reminded him tonight, she’d had nothing to do with Gunther Jorgensen.

She straightened, the same questions that had circled endlessly through her brain all those years ago there again. She had found no explanation for what he had done then. Nor was she likely to now.

Why the hell had he shown up here now? she thought with a surge of fury. And why the hell had she invited him to dinner? It seemed that in the silent darkness she could still feel him, just as she had been aware of him watching her all week without understanding what she was feeling.

Now the sense of him was here. Inside her home, her sanctuary. A physical invasion that stirred more memories than she was prepared to deal with.

She turned her head, looking across the dark kitchen to the back door, reminding herself of the reality of his departure. She walked over to that door, turning the latch and hooking the chain into its slot.

She didn’t look out into the night revealed through the panes of glass that comprised the door’s top half. Rafe had known as well as she did that if he had wanted to stay, she wouldn’t have refused.

He hadn’t wanted to. And that in itself should be a sufficient answer for all the questions she had wrestled with since the last time he’d left her.

“DAMN IT TO HELL,” she said, the expletive muttered under her breath. Not that there was anyone to hear if she had shouted it, which was what she felt like doing.

She’d overslept. Considering the number of hours she’d spent tossing and turning before she’d fallen asleep, that was hardly surprising. On top of that, she had forgotten to set the alarm. And now she was faced with the nearest thing to a morning rush hour Magnolia Grove had to offer.

A logging truck had pulled out onto the two-lane just ahead of her. The red flag at the end of the longest trunk it carried fluttered directly in front of her car as the heavily ladened truck slowed to pull the grade. She glanced at her watch, realizing that despite how much she had hurried to get dressed and out of the house, she was going to be at least a quarter of an hour late in opening the office.

No big deal, she told herself.

Unless he was in court, Darrell never showed up before ten or eleven, his summer seersucker already rumpled from the twenty-mile drive in from the antebellum home the Connell family had lived in since it had been built. Neither of them had any appointments scheduled for this morning. There would be no one waiting for her, so she couldn’t quite figure out why she was so upset by the idea that she was going to be late.

Maybe because Rafe Sinclair could simply waltz back into her life after six years and throw everything about her well-ordered existence into disarray. Not only emotionally, but professionally as well. She didn’t like admitting he had the power to do that.

She eased across the center line, trying to see if she could pass the truck on the straightaway leading down the other side of the rise they’d just topped. Typical of her morning, there was a line of cars approaching from the opposite direction.

She moved the SUV back into position behind the dangling logs, reconciling herself to the reality of the situation. She was going to be late, and it was ridiculous to let it upset her.

It wouldn’t have, she admitted, if she hadn’t already been thrown by last night. And she couldn’t understand why she had been. It wasn’t as if they’d spent the meal talking about old times. That was something they had seemed to agree on—tacitly, of course. There was no point in dredging up the past, not even the good parts of it.

There had been plenty of those, she admitted. Enough that what had followed had been painful in the extreme.

After the embassy bombing in Amsterdam, Rafe had been furious with the government’s restraint in going after the people responsible. Since he had been on the scene of the attack, dealing with the cost of that particular act of terrorism up close and very personally, she certainly couldn’t blame him. None of them did.

Not even for his decision to disassociate himself from an agency that refused to let him track down the killers of those dozens of people. Griff had tried to reason with him, arguing that despite the agency’s restrictions in this case, he could do more by working with the team, which had been expressly created to deal with those problems, than from without.

Nothing Cabot could say had changed Rafe’s mind. And she had never blamed him for that decision. It was the one that followed that she’d never been able to understand or to forgive. The one to disassociate himself from her as well.

It made no sense. It hadn’t then, and it didn’t now. She had even offered to leave the CIA with him, something which, looking back on that time from a distance of several years, caused a wave of humiliation to wash over her.

That offer had been against every principle she’d ever thought she held. After all, it hadn’t been easy reaching the level she had attained in that male-dominated agency. She had been one of the few women Griff tapped for the team, and she had proposed to give it all up to be with a man.

A man who had thrown the proffered sacrifice back in her teeth, disappearing without any explanation of why he didn’t want her to come with him. And apparently without any regret.

She took a breath, deliberately loosening the death grip her fingers had taken around the wheel. Water over the dam. Over and done with a long time ago.

If so, why the hell had he come back into her life?

Nothing of what he’d said had rung completely true, she thought again as she turned off the two-lane onto the road that led into town. That was one of the conclusions she’d come to during those sleepless hours last night. There was more to this reappearance than Griff’s warning.

There was nothing on the road ahead of her, but despite its emptiness she didn’t pick up speed. Unconscious now of the fact that she was going to be late in opening the office for the first time in three years, she went over again in her mind all the things Rafe had said last night. And the way he’d looked as he’d said them.

It wasn’t that she didn’t think he was telling the truth, she reaffirmed, slowing for the first of the three stoplights that regulated traffic on Main Street. It was that he wasn’t telling the whole truth.

There was something she wasn’t getting about this, just as she had always known there was something she hadn’t gotten about his disappearance six years ago. Something about both that didn’t quite add up with what she knew about Rafe Sinclair.

She slowed, pulling into the familiar parking space in front of the office. It wasn’t marked Reserved, but it might as well have been. No one in town would have thought about parking in her spot or Darrell’s.

She glanced at her watch again. It was nine-twenty, the office wasn’t open, and the world hadn’t come to an end. She needed to remember that the next time she got so damned anal.

She picked up her purse and the papers she’d taken home with her last night. Not that they had gotten read.

Of course, there was no hurry about that, either. That was part of the charm of living here. This compulsion to get things done on some kind of schedule was all hers.

She opened the door, stepping out into the heat that would become more oppressive as the day wore on. It was going to be a scorcher, as they said down here. A good day for staying inside by the air conditioner, she decided, skilled by now at evaluating the potential heat index.

It would also be a good day for finding enough work to keep her mind occupied with something besides the events of last evening. Or, rather, she amended, the nonevents of last evening.

She slammed the car door, pressing the auto-lock button on her key. At that exact instant a blast of heat and sound roiled upward from the heart of the law office, tearing it apart.

The resulting shock wave threw her backward. Her head and shoulders slammed against the pavement with enough force that for a moment she could neither breathe nor think. And then the debris of the building she should have been inside at least twenty minutes ago began to rain down around her.

Chapter Three

Rafe awakened, as he had a thousand times, to the sound of the explosion. His body jerked upright in bed, his heart trying to beat its way out from under the sweat-drenched skin of his chest. He opened his mouth, attempting to draw air into lungs compressed by the force of the blast.

It’s just a dream. Plain vanilla, garden-variety nightmare.

He had had enough of those, God knew, that he should be able to tell the difference. As horrific as they were, they were a million times better than the other.

Finally, shaking all over, he managed to take a breath. It seemed he could smell the smoke. He could almost taste it on the cotton dryness of his tongue.

Just another dream, he reassured himself.

He opened his eyes, slitting them against the painful stab of sunshine pouring through the crack he’d inadvertently left between the halves of the motel’s plastic-backed drapes when he’d closed them last night. He ran his tongue around parched lips as his heart rate began to slow.

As soon as the frantic pulse of blood through the veins in his ears eased, another sound replaced it. Distant at first and indistinct, within seconds an identification of what he was hearing roared into his consciousness. Siren.

He listened, again not breathing. Sometimes he couldn’t tell, but he would have staked his life that what he was hearing now was real. A real siren, and therefore… Real smoke?

He tore at the sheet, frantically trying to free his legs from its tangling hold. He staggered a little when his feet touched the floor, but that was only reaction to the flood of adrenaline coursing into his bloodstream.

When he reached the window, he lifted his arm, intending to sweep the curtain aside so that he could see out. He couldn’t force his hand to grasp the material. It was as if the muscles were literally paralyzed.

Cop chasing a speeder, he told himself. Or an ambulance carrying some poor bastard with a heart attack to the hospital. Whatever is outside these windows, it won’t be what was there before.

Sweat beaded his forehead as he willed his fingers to close over the fabric of the drapes, jerking them to the side. Light flooded the room, forcing him to close his eyes. When he opened them, the pillar of oily black smoke was all he could see. All his mind could grasp.

Smoke. Fire. Explosion.

It hadn’t been a dream. The evidence of its stark reality was right before him.

Except he had long ago learned not to trust “reality.” Not his. Not about something like this.

He closed his eyes, deliberately holding them shut as tightly as he could for a few seconds before he opened them again. Nothing had changed. The column of smoke still obscured the sky, and that first lonely siren had now been joined by a chorus of others.

He lowered his gaze, examining the rest of the scene revealed by the opened curtain. Parking lot. Cars, most of them recent models. A motel sign.

One he recognized from having glanced at it last night when he’d checked in. Reassured by that recognition, he lifted his eyes again.

The smoke seemed to be billowing upward from behind the row of buildings across the street. Which meant that the fire was at least a block away, he decided, feeling the adrenaline rush begin to ease. Maybe two. No more than that.

Of course, in Magnolia Grove two blocks was practically across town. Almost—

With the realization, his heart rate, which had almost returned to normal, accelerated like a trip hammer. He ran across the room, scrambling through the sheet he’d thrown aside, trying to locate his jeans.

He dragged them on, hopping awkwardly on one foot and then the other. He pushed his feet into his shoes, not bothering to find his socks. On the way to the door, he grabbed the shirt he’d worn yesterday off the chair where he’d thrown it down on his way to bed.

As soon as he stepped outside, a wall of heat hit him, almost forcing him back. His first response, emotional rather than intellectual, was that it was from the fire. Just like before.

It took a few seconds to realize that what he was feeling was simply a typical Mississippi-in-August heat. The air, however, was thick and acrid with smoke. Just as it had been in his dream.

Or maybe this time there hadn’t been a dream. Maybe what had awakened him had been a real explosion, one that had started this fire. And if so…

He was already running toward the source of the smoke, and he wasn’t the only one. People were rushing out of the surrounding buildings, heading toward the wail of the sirens and the black cloud that seemed to fill the sky.

Despite his lack of familiarity with the town’s landmarks, his usually unerring sense of direction led him straight to his destination. As he neared it, he knew with a wave of terror that he hadn’t been wrong.

The office where Elizabeth worked was on this street. The same street from where that ominous pillar of smoke was rising.

As he rounded the corner, he made a quick visual assessment. Despite the widespread effects of the blast, there was no doubt in his mind that the structure on fire was the law office of Connell and Anderson.

And with a renewed sense of panic he realized he had no idea what time it was. No idea what time Elizabeth normally arrived at work.

Then his searching eyes found her. She was standing, talking to a fireman or paramedic. There was no blood on her clothing, but even from here he could tell her face was completely without color, the scattering of freckles stark against the milk-white skin.

Still, she was standing. Talking. Not bleeding. Apparently unharmed. His knees almost gave way with the force of his relief.

He closed his eyes in an unspoken prayer of thanks. It was a mistake, but by the time he was aware of that, it was too late to do anything about it. Images began to unwind, like the flickering frames of an old newsreel, against the blackness behind his lids.

They weren’t from any newsreel, of course. And they were all in color. The vivid, shocking brightness of freshly spilled blood. The grotesque black of skin that has been charred, peeling off the arm of a woman whose mouth was open, silently imploring him to help her.

At that moment someone running down the street careened into him. The force of collision was enough to turn him, causing him to stumble against the side of a building.

The impact of his fall or the roughness of the brick as his cheek scraped against it was enough to tear him out of the flashback. He opened his eyes, seeing in front of him the scene he had been watching before it began.

Elizabeth was still in the center of his vision. Mouth moving, she was pointing toward the line of cars parked in front of the burning building. They were close enough to the fire that the paint on their hoods was starting to blister. Just like—

He jerked his mind from that comparison, concentrating instead on Elizabeth. Not the woman in the embassy, he told himself doggedly. This was not the same situation. Nothing about it was the same.

He started to run again, feeling as if he were moving through quicksand. The distance between them seemed vast and immeasurable, but he never took his eyes off his goal. Never allowed himself to think about anything other than reaching it. Reaching her.

He knew the exact second when she became aware of him. She had been talking to another of the firemen, but when her eyes locked with his, her mouth stopped moving, remaining open as if frozen in midsentence.

At her sudden silence the two men standing beside her turned to stare at him as well. One of them moved between him and Elizabeth, the gesture obviously protective.

Rafe’s response was nothing short of murderous. Get the hell out of my way, you son of a bitch. He didn’t say that. He had no breath, and his mouth was too dry to form the words.

Elizabeth moved from behind the fireman, quickly taking the last few steps that would close the distance between them. There could have been nothing more natural than to take her in his arms. He had wanted to do that last night, despite everything he understood about how unwise it would be for both of them. That wasn’t what stopped him now.

There was less than two feet between them when their forward motion ground to a halt. She was again looking up at him, her head slightly raised because of the difference in their heights.

A cone of silence descended around him, blocking out the noises of the sirens, the pressure hoses, the shouts from the firemen fighting the blaze. All he could hear was his own breathing, harsh and panting from the exertion of his run.

Terrifyingly, the smell of the fire was all around him. The heat of it.

Elizabeth didn’t say a word, widened eyes searching his face. He couldn’t imagine what he looked like. Deranged, perhaps. Maybe even dangerous. Enough like a lunatic to cause the fireman to edge closer again.

She lifted her hand. For an instant he thought she intended to touch his face, but instead she pressed the tips of her fingers, trembling as they had been last night, against the center of his heaving chest.

“Rafe?”

God, he wanted to touch her. Just to take her hand as he had last night.

He didn’t, of course, because he was afraid that if he gripped her arm, her skin would slip off muscle and bone to lie in his hand as it had before.

That wasn’t here. Not Elizabeth. Not now.

“What the hell happened?” he managed to rasp.

She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his face. “I don’t know. It just…blew up. They think maybe there was a gas leak.”

He laughed, the sound a breath, devoid of amusement. “They’d be wrong.”

Her eyes changed, understanding of what he meant invading them as he watched.

“You think…” The sentence trailed. Once more she shook her head, the gesture small, denying. Her mouth worked and then she tried again. “You can’t possibly believe—”

“Come on,” he ordered.

He didn’t touch her, although by now the few words they’d exchanged had reoriented him. He knew where he was. And there was no doubt in his mind who she was.

Still, he didn’t dare put his hands on her. Not yet. No matter how much he wanted to.

“Come where?”

“Away from here.”

“I have to talk to the chief. There are questions that have to be—”

“Screw the questions. They’ll figure it out. They don’t need you to do that.”

“Rafe,” she protested.

She’d been out of this business too long. Her instincts were to respond to something like this in a rational way. Despite the time that had passed, his were not. His were all of the get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge variety.

The authorities could sort through cause-and-effect to their bureaucratic heart’s content. Meanwhile, he’d have her safe somewhere a thousand miles from here. Somewhere this time where that frigging terrorist bastard could never find her.

“Ms. Anderson?”

Elizabeth turned, removing her fingers from his chest. It was as if his connection to the present had been unplugged. He felt the familiar disconnect start and fought it, concentrating fiercely on maintaining contact with her and what was happening.

Her mouth was moving, but for a few seconds he couldn’t make sense of the words. He concentrated on doing that, forcing his mind to remain focused on the here and now.

It was a struggle, given the stimuli provided by the sights and sounds around them. He couldn’t afford to think about those. Not about the heat of the fire or the smells of it or the sounds of the sirens.

He forced himself to think only about Elizabeth’s mouth until eventually the words she was saying to the man he’d identified as Magnolia Grove’s fire chief began to form a pattern. To make sense.

“…a friend of mine from out of town. He was naturally concerned for me.”

Because I’m the only one who knows what the hell is going on here.

“We just need to ask you a few more questions, ma’am. Then Tommy thinks you ought to ride on in to the hospital and get checked out. You could have a concussion.”

“I’m fine.”

“You can’t be too careful with a head injury.”

Head injury. She had a head injury?

Cautiously, Rafe allowed his gaze to leave Elizabeth’s mouth, focusing on her head. Her hair was full of ash, but there were no bruises visible under the strands that fell forward over her forehead.

“You hit your head?” he demanded, his voice more normal.

She turned her attention to him, drawing the chief’s there, too. “The blast knocked me flat on my back. I think I hit it on the pavement. I remember looking up at the smoke. Then things were just falling out of the sky…”

As explanations went, it was fairly disjointed. Reassuringly normal.

She’d been the one at the center of the firestorm this time. She was bound to be affected, emotionally if not physically. And there was always the possibility that there was some injury. A lot of head stuff didn’t show up until it was too late.

“How far’s the hospital?” he asked.

The chief answered, his eyes still evaluating him. “Thirty miles or so. Mostly interstate.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” Elizabeth protested.

Maybe it would be better just to put her in his car and take her somewhere. Anywhere. Any emergency room would do. After all, he couldn’t see any sign that she was concussed.

That meant zilch with a head injury. He’d seen men walking around one minute and keel over the next from the pressure of internal bleeding. Or go to sleep, believing they were perfectly fine, and never wake up.

It wasn’t a chance he was willing to take. Not with Elizabeth.

“You need a scan,” he said. “That way—”

“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” she said, raking her hair back with characteristic impatience. “Don’t you think I’d know if I were injured?”

“No,” he said. The word was unequivocal, as was the demand in its tone.

Her mouth tightened, but she didn’t argue. She turned back to the chief instead. “What else do you need to know?”

The fireman’s eyes met Rafe’s, holding on them briefly before he answered.

“Nothing we can’t get later,” he said. “The fire marshal will need to examine the scene after we get the blaze controlled and things cool down. That’ll take a couple of days. We can always get back to you if we have other questions then. You go on now and get that scan. Smartest thing you can do.”

“Come on,” Rafe said again.

It would have been easier to take her elbow and physically insist she get into the waiting ambulance, and it should have been okay by now to do that. He didn’t risk it. Not with the sounds and the smells associated with the fire still going on in the background.

He had successfully locked them out of his consciousness, but there was no guarantee that something wouldn’t happen that he wasn’t prepared for. Something that might trigger another flashback. That also was not a risk he was willing to take.

He debated asking the driver to wait until he could get his car so he could follow the ambulance. That way they could leave from the hospital without coming back here.

There were a couple of problems with that. He wasn’t willing to leave Elizabeth alone even for the time it would take for him to run back to the motel. And he doubted she’d be willing to leave town with only the clothes on her back. Especially if they were telling her that the explosion had been the result of a gas leak. Especially if she believed them.

He didn’t, not for one minute, but there wasn’t much point in arguing the theory with the chief. That was something the fire marshal could sort out when he arrived.

By the time he had, he and Elizabeth would be long gone.

Chapter Four

“I told you,” she said.

She still looked like warmed-over death, but according to the emergency room attending, the CT had revealed nothing troublesome. They’d been given the general precautions, but thank God, precautions were all they were.

“You never could resist saying ‘I told you so,’” he said, taking her elbow.

He didn’t even have to think about the wisdom of doing that now. It was strange, but a hospital, despite the time he’d spent in a couple of them after the bombing, had never been a trigger for the flashbacks.

“I didn’t get the opportunity nearly as often as I’d have liked,” she said.

“So no chance to develop any willpower.”

“This isn’t the way—” she began, pulling against his direction.

He put his hand against the small of her back, applying pressure. “It’s the way we’re going.”

“But the front is that way.”

“Exactly,” he said, steering her in the opposite direction.

He knew the scan had been a necessity, but it had also increased the risk that the terrorist would have time to zero in on their location and to make other plans. Of course, if he were typical, he would have been watching them from the first. Especially staying around to watch the fireworks. They could never resist that. Not even the best of them.

“You really think someone set off that explosion?” she asked, finally giving in and allowing him to guide her.

“Let’s just say the timing seems coincidental.”

“Between Steiner’s warning and this?”

He nodded, not bothering to articulate the obvious.

“But you didn’t know he was here when you came.”

“How could I?”

He opened the door to a corridor marked Authorized Personnel Only, directing her down it as if he knew where he was going. He did have a fairly good idea, having studied the fire exit chart in the emergency room while they’d waited.

“I thought that’s why you were here.”

“I was here to deliver Griff’s message.”

“And it took you a week to decide to do that.”

He was trying to figure out which way to go since the corridor they’d been following had come to an abrupt dead end. What she had just said didn’t register for a moment.

“I told you. I knew Jorgensen was dead.”

Actually, it hadn’t taken him an entire week to finish the dueling pistol. The whole time he’d worked, the chilling words of that security alert haunted him, warring with his certainty that whoever had blown up the barracks in Greenland and the ambassador’s residence in Madrid, it hadn’t been Jorgensen. In the end, despite his surety, he had come to deliver the warning. He had known he’d never be able to forgive himself if there was anything to Griff’s concern. Apparently there had been.

“So you hung around here just watching me?”

“I didn’t get into town until yesterday,” he said, confused by her questions.

He’d driven all night and most of the day yesterday, but he liked to drive. He especially liked it at night, when there was little traffic and long stretches of darkness and silence.

She stopped, pulling against his hold. He turned his head and found that although her gaze was on his face, it seemed unfocused. She was obviously thinking about something other than his features.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Someone’s been following me. I could feel them. All week. When you showed up last night, I naturally assumed it had been you.”

“You saw somebody?”

She shook her head, her gaze still contemplative.

“Nothing. Not a sign of anyone. I put it down to paranoia because I never saw them. When you came to the house—” She broke off the explanation, her eyes lifting to his, seeing him this time. “I thought I hadn’t seen anyone because it was you.”

If someone had been following her all week, then he hadn’t led them to her, which was a consolation. He had taken every precaution he could think of, and as she had intimated, he was very good at what he did. Still, there had been a niggling guilt in the back of his mind that he might have been responsible for giving away her location.

“Is it possible this is Jorgensen?” she asked.

“No,” he said, urging her forward again.

He had told Griff the truth. He had watched the bastard die. He was willing to concede this might be a protégé or a colleague, someone Jorgensen had trained, but it couldn’t be the man himself. He was sure of that.

The fact that whoever it was had been watching Elizabeth all week was significant, however, because nothing had happened until he’d shown up. Whoever this was had been waiting for him to arrive.

The explosion had been for his benefit. Arranged so that when Rafe heard the noise and smelled the smoke, he would believe exactly what he had believed—that this time Elizabeth had been the victim.

“Then who set off that explosion?” she asked.

“Someone who wanted me to think you were inside that building. If this had been Jorgensen, believe me, he would have made sure.”

There was a small hesitation, and then she said, “I should have been.”

“What?” He had been only half listening, wondering if the bomber could possibly know why his ruse had been so successful.

“I should have been in the office this morning. He knew that because he’d been watching me all week. He knew what time I get there every day. And then…this morning I was late.”

A coldness settled in Rafe’s stomach as he began to understand the implications of what she was saying.

“It should have been deliberate,” she went on. “Being late, I mean. I thought yesterday that I’d fallen into a routine. They always told us that was dangerous.”

It was. If you had any reason to believe you might be a target for someone. After all these years Elizabeth shouldn’t have had reason to believe that. He hadn’t.

“He could have set his damn watch by me,” she said bitterly. “I turn the key in that lock every morning at precisely nine o’clock. Except this morning—”

“You were late,” he finished for her, beginning to accept the idea that the explosion might not have been for show. Perhaps the bomber had been waiting for him to arrive, but maybe what he had prepared for Rafe to see wasn’t what had occurred.

Elizabeth’s mouth tightened. “I couldn’t sleep. I forgot to set the alarm. And then a logging truck pulled out onto the highway ahead of me. Normally there would have been plenty of time despite that, but this morning…” Again her voice faded. “I should have been there,” she said softly. “In the office. I would have been if it hadn’t been for that truck.”

And if it hadn’t been for him showing up at her house yesterday. She wouldn’t admit that, but the truth of it had been revealed by her admission that she hadn’t slept and by her failure to set the alarm. He didn’t really need to hear her confess the reason those two things had happened.

It would be a step back to the personal. Back to things he didn’t want to talk about any more than she did. Back to the need for some explanation of why he’d left.

He could make one. He could tell her all the things that he’d never been willing to share before. He had thought about doing that a thousand times.

Even if she knew, even if she understood, it wouldn’t change a thing. Nothing could.

He had always known that one night, as he took her into his arms, feeling the sensual slide of sweat-moistened skin against his, she would suddenly become the woman from the embassy. The woman with the silent scream. The woman who had died in his arms.

And when that happened, she would know everything he had come to know about himself. That was the one thing he had known he couldn’t live with—what would be in her eyes when she looked at him then.

THE CAB he’d called before they left the emergency room had been waiting at the back entrance when they finally made their way through the maze of hospital corridors. The driver, an elderly black man, had been eager to talk about the explosion in Magnolia Grove.

According to him, everyone was buying into the fire chief’s explanation that it had been caused by a gas leak. From their perspective, that was probably a good thing, Rafe decided.

It wouldn’t stand up to an arson investigation, of course. And he’d be willing to bet that the methodology used in this bombing, the so-called signature of the bomber, would be identical to that used in those that had precipitated the CIA security alert Griff had shown him.

By the time that had all been determined, he’d have Elizabeth away. With the care the CIA had taken in destroying any link between the people on Griff’s team and the agency itself, no one would ever connect Magnolia Grove, Mississippi, or Beth Anderson to those acts of terrorism.

Rafe had every confidence that he could keep her safe. The most dangerous aspect would be getting her out of town, simply because that’s where the terrorist was. Or maybe he was wrong about that. Maybe this guy wasn’t one of those who waited around to glory in the results. And maybe pigs can fly.

“Drive around the block,” he instructed the cabbie as they approached the motel.

Despite the ongoing excitement a couple of streets away, the parking lot looked reassuringly empty in the early-afternoon heat. Most of the cars that had been there when he’d pulled aside the drapes this morning had since disappeared, moving on to their next destination.

His own sat fairly isolated among the remaining vehicles. It looked the same as it had when he’d parked it there last night. Of course, looking the same and being the same were vastly different.

All kinds of things might have been done to it in that time frame. Something could have been attached to it, for example. A device set to explode when he turned the key in the ignition. Or when he unlocked the door.

“Want me to drive around again, boss?” the cabbie asked after he’d made the slow circuit of the block.

Not much point, Rafe decided. There was only one way to tell if the room or his car had been tampered with. “That’s okay,” he said. “Pull up near Room 18.”

“You got it.”

The cabbie maneuvered his ancient sedan into one of the parking spaces that had opened up in front of the room since Rafe had left it on foot this morning. Rafe added a generous tip to the fare and handed it to the driver across the bench-type front seat. “Thanks for coming all the way out to the hospital.”

“Glad to do it. Ain’t nothing else happening around here. Not with all that commotion going on. Least the air-conditioning in the car works. Cooler here than at home,” the old man said, carefully folding the bills and putting them in the breast pocket of his cotton sports shirt.

Rafe didn’t argue the point, although the air inside the cab wasn’t appreciably cooler than that he stepped out into. He had thought it was hot this morning, but the afternoon’s heat was a physical assault.

He glanced at Elizabeth’s face as she slid across the cracked vinyl seat and climbed out, using his hand for support. The nearer they had gotten to town, the quieter she had become. Now her expression was closed, her face still colorless, the features pinched with the strain of the last few hours.

She waited until the cab had driven away before she revealed what she’d been thinking during the ride back. “I need to call Darrell. If this is what you think it is, then I’m responsible for what happened to the office.”

“Your partner?”

She nodded. “Semiretired. I handle most of the cases now. It’s what he intended when he took me into partnership. He’s been very good to me, Rafe. At the very least I owe him some explanation—”

“You don’t owe him anything,” he said harshly, taking her elbow and urging her toward the room.

“He owned that building. It was an investment. And if what you believe is true—”

“He’ll have insurance. If he doesn’t, he’s an idiot. And if he’s really ready to retire, the explosion was probably a blessing. He won’t have to fool with selling the place.”

“I’m not sure he’ll think that,” Elizabeth said.

He could tell she wasn’t pleased with his lack of sympathy for her partner’s loss. He was still having trouble dealing with the realization that she was supposed to have been inside that building when it blew. Somehow, in light of that information, he couldn’t be too concerned about the fate of bricks and mortar.

This wasn’t Jorgensen, but whoever it was had already proved that he valued human life no more than his role model. And proved that he was out to make a personal rather than a political statement.

“Stay back,” he ordered when they reached the walkway in front of the motel.

“You think he’s rigged something up in your room?”

“I think we don’t know who or what we’re dealing with,” he said, “and until we do…”

He flattened his hand to fish the key out of the front pocket of his jeans. It was the old-fashioned metal kind, which was rare these days. Of course, there was probably little cause to worry about theft in this setting.

As little as there had been to worry about an act of terrorism. Until today.

“You’re just going to stick that key in the lock and turn it in an effort to find out?”

Her sarcasm was born of anxiety. He understood that. She would be feeling the same sickness in the bottom of her stomach that he’d experienced rounding the corner this morning and verifying that the fire was in her office.

Something about her words nagged at him, however. You’re just going to stick that key in the lock…

“Is that what you did?” he asked, turning to look at her.

“What?”

“Is that what triggered the bomb? When you turned the key in the office door?”

She didn’t answer at once, her eyes again losing their focus as she thought about the sequence. “I never made it that far,” she said finally. “I didn’t get close enough to the building to put the key in the door. Not before it blew.”

That news wouldn’t make him any less cautious. Someone like Jorgensen—someone using his methods—didn’t employ the same trick again. That was the genius of how he managed to do what he did, despite the strictest security precautions. He always came at you from a different direction.

Reminded of that, Rafe bent to examine the lock. There was nothing to hint it had been tampered with. No scratches on the surface. And it was a standard metal door, which would provide some protection from an explosion.

“Rafe,” Elizabeth said softly.

He couldn’t quite read the tone, but it seemed strange. Not caution. Not anxiety. He glanced at her over his shoulder and knew immediately from her expression that she had just thought of something she knew was important.

“I hit the autolock, and it blew,” she said. “It was keyed to my remote. They never meant for me to be inside.”

They. The one word that was the most revealing in what she’d said. The most riveting. They.

“Steiner.” The name sounded like an obscenity.

“You can’t know that for sure.”

“The hell I can’t. Damn it, I knew there was more to this. The CIA doesn’t give a rat’s ass if somebody blows you or me to kingdom come. They wouldn’t bother warning us. Not unless they thought they could get something out of it.”

“They want you to go after whoever this is,” she said, her thinking paralleling his. Maybe because she knew them as well as he did. “That’s what this is all about. That’s what it’s been about from the beginning. Somebody is doing what Jorgensen did, and they can’t get to him. They think you can. You were the expert on Jorgensen. You got him. They want you to get this guy.”

“I guess I’m supposed to be flattered at their confidence,” he said savagely.

“You’re supposed to take care of him. Like you took care of Jorgensen.”

Under strict congressional sanctions against political assassinations, the CIA had refused to allow Rafe to go after the German-born terrorist. He had been forced to do it strictly on his own, without any of the resources the agency could have provided.

It had taken him more than a year to hunt down and execute Jorgensen. A year in which more innocent people had died. Now that the CIA was once more back in the game of tracking down terrorists, they were attempting to use Rafe to do the dirty work they had once professed to have no interest in.

The only remaining question was whether or not Griff had known what was going on. Or was Cabot simply another discarded weapon the agency had decided to pick up and point at a target they hadn’t been able to get by any other means?

“Then this should be safe as a church,” he said.

An impulsive rage was another by-product of the day at the embassy. Another thing he was constantly forced to try to control. He didn’t succeed this time.

He inserted the key and turned it, throwing open the motel room door. As he’d expected, absolutely nothing happened.

After all, they couldn’t afford to let something happen to him. He was a tool they needed. Elizabeth had been as well, only she had been used to lure him into the game.

If the trigger of the bomb this morning had been keyed to the frequency of her car remote, there was no possibility she would be hurt. Those sons of bitches had probably calibrated exactly how much C-4—or whatever the hell they were using these days—it would take to blow that building spectacularly without risking damage to someone standing where Elizabeth did every morning when she got out of her car.

She might have been hit by falling debris. Steiner would probably have been genuinely sorry if that had happened, but it wouldn’t have mattered in the grand scheme of things.

Elizabeth’s death would still have had the effect they were hoping for. They wanted Rafe to react just as he had reacted to the embassy bombing. They wanted him to go after the bastard who had done it. To hunt him down and kill him as he had killed Gunther Jorgensen.

And if one of their own got injured or killed in the course of convincing him to do that, it was a loss the CIA was willing accept. Just a little collateral damage.

Conniving bastards, he thought again, leading the way into the cool darkness of the motel room.

All along they’d been laying their emotional traps, starting with Griff’s question. And you’re willing to stake her life on your certainty of that?

There was nothing else on earth that would have gotten him involved in this, and Griff, of all people, knew that. Just as he’d known that once the suggestion that someone might try to harm Elizabeth had been made, Rafe wouldn’t be able to leave it alone.

That was all the excuse he needed. It had taken him a few days to reach the decision, but in the end he had done exactly what they’d expected him to. He’d come here to find Elizabeth. And they’d been waiting for him.

Waiting to turn the screws. Waiting to up the stakes by making him believe that the explosion this morning had been an attempt on her life. Waiting for him to jump through their carefully arranged hoops all over again.

Except this time, he vowed, you sons of bitches are in for a huge disappointment.

Chapter Five

“Now what?” Elizabeth asked as they headed down the narrow two-lane that led to her house.

It had taken Rafe only a few minutes in the motel room to gather his belongings. His fury had been apparent with each motion. She couldn’t blame him for being angry, of course. He had been used. They both had.

Besides that, Darrell’s property had been destroyed and her life had been endangered. The agency would say it hadn’t been, but the more she thought about it, the less willing she was to accept that assessment.

A dozen things could have gone wrong this morning. There was no way anyone could guarantee that the explosion and the resultant fire would play out as it had. Not even the agency’s vaunted specialists.

Or if Rafe was correct in his suspicions, maybe those had been Griff’s specialists—the men she had worked with during her years on the EST. They would certainly be capable of rigging something that would work with the kind of precision demonstrated in this morning’s explosion. The question was whether they would be willing to put a former colleague at risk.

If Griff asked them to, she acknowledged. Especially if he made the reason compelling enough.

Maybe he had reminded them of the reality of the situation. If they didn’t do it, the agency would. And the CIA wouldn’t be nearly so careful as would the members of the team. If Griff had presented them with those options, they would undoubtedly have agreed to set the explosives.

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