Zack’s head lifted just enough to break contact with her mouth, his words husky and soft. “Find your own woman,” he joked with the driver. “This one is mine.” The last word was breathed against Julie’s lips before his mouth touched hers, his arms sweeping around her, his tongue sliding tentatively across her lips, urging them to part, his hips hard and demanding against hers. With a silent moan of surrender, Julie gave herself up to what became the hottest, sexiest, most insistent kiss she’d ever tasted.
Fifty yards away, a truck door opened and a new male voice called, “Hey, Pete, what’s goin’ on over yonder in the snow?”
“Hell, man, what does it look like? A couple of grown-ups is playin’ at bein’ kids, having snowball fights and neckin’ in the snow.”
“Looks to me like they’re goin’ to be makin’ a kid if they don’t slow down.”
Perhaps it was the new male voice or the sudden realization that her captor was becoming physically aroused that snapped Julie into reality or perhaps it was the slamming of the truck door followed by the roar of an engine as the big semi began to pull away from the rest area. Whatever the cause, she put her hands against his shoulders and exerted pressure, but it took an unnatural effort for her to move, and her shove was puny at best. Panicked by her inexplicable lethargy, Julie shoved harder. “Stop it!” she cried softly. “Stop it. He’s gone!”
Stunned by the sound of tears in her voice, Zack lifted his head, staring at her dewy skin and soft mouth with a hunger that he was finding difficult to control. The exquisite sweetness of her surrender, the way she felt in his arms, and the gentleness of her touch almost made the notion of making love in the snow at dawn seem plausible. Slowly, he looked around at where they were and reluctantly levered himself up off her. He didn’t completely understand why she’d decided not to warn the truck driver, but whatever her reasons, he owed her more than an attempted rape in the snow as repayment. Silently, he held his hand out to her, suppressing a smile when the same woman who’d melted in his arms a moment ago rallied her defenses, pointedly ignored his gesture, and shoved herself up and out of the snow. “I’m soaking wet,” she complained, scrupulously avoiding his gaze and swatting at her hair, “and covered with snow.”
Automatically, Zack reached out to brush the snow off her, but she jumped out of his reach, avoiding his touch as she brushed off her arms and the back of her jeans.
“Don’t think you can touch me just because of what happened just now!” she warned him, but Zack was preoccupied with admiration for the results of their kiss: Her huge, dark-lashed eyes were lustrous, her porcelain skin tinted with roses at the high cheekbones. When flustered and a little aroused, as she was now, Julie Mathison was absolutely breathtaking. She was also courageous and very kind, for although he’d not been able to subdue her with threats or cruelty, she’d somehow responded to the desperation in his plea.
“The only reason I let you kiss me was because I realized you were right—there’s no need for anyone to get killed just because I’m scared. Now, let’s get going and get this ordeal over with.”
Zack sighed. “I gather from that sour tone of yours that we’re adversaries again, Ms. Mathison?”
“Of course we are,” she replied. “I’ll take you wherever you’re going without any more tricks, but let’s get one thing straight: As soon as I get you there, I’ll be free to leave, right?”
“Right,” Zack lied.
“Then let’s get moving.”
Brushing snow off the sleeves of his jacket, Zack followed along behind her, watching her hair tossing in the wind and the graceful sway of her slim hips as she stalked toward their car. Judging from her words and the rigid set of her shoulders, there was no doubt she was determined to avoid any further romantic confrontations between them.
In that, as in everything else, Zack was now firmly committed to accomplishing a goal that was in diametric opposition to her own: He had tasted her lips and felt their response to him. His starved senses wanted to feast on the entire banquet.
One part of his mind warned that any sexual involvement with his captive was insane. It would complicate everything, and he didn’t need any more complications.
The other part of his mind listened to the clamor of his aroused body and argued—very compellingly and very conveniently—that it was clever. After all, contented captives became almost like accomplices. They were also much more delightful company.
Zack decided to try to seduce her, but not because she had endearing qualities that intrigued and appealed to him or because he was very attracted to her or because he harbored any sort of budding tenderness for her.
Instead, he told himself, he was going to seduce Julie Mathison because it was practical. And, of course, extremely pleasurable.
With a gallantry that had been absent before their kiss and which Julie felt was entirely ludicrous—and even alarming in their present, altered circumstances—he escorted her around to the driver’s seat, but he didn’t have to open the door for her, it was still open from her aborted attempt to escape. He closed the car door and walked around the front of the vehicle, but as he slid into the seat beside her, he noticed that she winced and gasped when she shifted her position. “What’s wrong?”
“I hurt my hip and leg when I jumped out of the car and when you tackled me,” Julie retorted bitterly, angry with herself for having actually enjoyed that kiss. “Does that fill you with concern and remorse.”
He said quietly, “Yes, it does.”
She jerked her eyes from his somber smile, unable and adamantly unwilling to be charmed into believing such an implausible lie. He was a convicted murderer, and she must not, dared not, forget that ever again. “I’m hungry,” she announced, because it was the first thing she could think of to say. She knew it was the wrong thing the moment his gaze fastened on her lips. “So am I.”
She stuck her nose in the air and turned on the ignition.
His answer was a soft chuckle.
21
“WHERE IN HELL CAN SHE be?” Carl Mathison paced across the small cubicle that his brother occupied in the Keaton Sheriff’s Office, then he stopped and glowered at the silver shield on Ted’s gray uniform shirt. “You’re a cop and she’s a missing person, so do something, damn it”
“She’s not officially missing until she’s been gone for at least twenty-four hours,” Ted replied, but his blue eyes were troubled as he added, “I can’t do anything through official channels until then, you know that.”
“And you know,” Carl countered angrily, “that it’s not like Julie to suddenly change her plans; you know how methodical she is. And if she absolutely had to change her plans, she’d telephone one of us. Besides, she knew I needed my car back this morning.”
“You’re right.” Ted walked over to the windows. With his hand resting on the butt of the 9-millimeter semiautomatic he wore at his side, he stared absently at the cars parked in the town square while their owners browsed in the local stores or hunted for bargains in what had become a haven for antique hunters. When he spoke again, his voice was hesitant as if he feared to voice his thoughts aloud. “Zachary Benedict escaped from Amarillo yesterday. He’d been made a trustee and he skipped out after driving the warden into Amarillo.”
“I heard it on the news. So what?”
“Benedict, or at least a man answering Benedict’s general description, was last seen at a restaurant near the interstate.”
Very slowly, very carefully, Carl laid down the paperweight he’d been rolling between his hands and stared hard at his younger brother. “What are you getting at?”
“Benedict was seen near a vehicle that sounds like your Blazer. The cashier in the restaurant thinks she saw him get into the Blazer with a woman who’d stopped there for a sandwich and coffee.” Ted turned away from the window and reluctantly raised his gaze to his brother’s face. “I talked to the cashier—unofficially, of course—five minutes ago. The description she gave me of the woman who drove away wi
th Benedict in the Blazer sounds exactly like Julie.”
“Oh, my God!”
The clerk at the desk, a middle-aged woman with wiry gray hair and the face of an irate bulldog, had been listening to the Mathisons’ conversation about Julie while simultaneously filling out an arrest warrant and watching for an assistant deputy to arrive in a black and white patrol car. Now, she glanced up and her gaze riveted on a shiny red BMW convertible that pulled up beside Ted’s patrol car across the street. When a beautiful blond woman of about twenty-five stepped out of the car, Rita’s eyes narrowed to slits and she swung around on her chair to the two men in the office. “It never rains, but it pours,” she warned Ted, and when both men glanced at her, she tipped her head toward the window and explained. “Look who’s back in town— Miss Rich Bitch herself.”
Despite his effort to feel and show no reaction to the sight of his ex-wife, Ted Mathison’s face tightened. “Europe must be boring this time of year,” he said as his gaze ran insolently over the blonde’s perfect curves and long, graceful legs. She disappeared into the seamstress shop across the square as Rita added, “I hear that Flossie and Ada Eldridge are going to make her wedding dress. The silk and lace and all the geegaws are coming in from Paris, France, on a plane, but Miss High and Mighty wanted the dress made by the Eldridge twins because nobody’s handwork is as fine as theirs.” Belatedly realizing that Ted Mathison might not want to hear the details of his former wife’s extravagant wedding plans involving another man, the loyal woman swung back to the paperwork on her desk and said, “I’m sorry. That was dumb of me.”
“Don’t apologize. It doesn’t matter a damn to me what she does,” Ted said, and he meant it. The knowledge that Katherine Cahill was planning to remarry, this time to a fifty-year-old Dallas socialite named Spencer Hayward, was of no interest to Ted, nor did it come as a surprise. He’d read about it in the newspapers, including the glowing account of Hayward’s jet planes, twenty-two-room mansion, and alleged friendship with the president, but none of that evoked any feelings of jealousy or envy in Ted. “Let’s go talk to Mother and Dad,” he said, shrugging into his jacket and holding the door open for Carl to proceed him. “They know Julie didn’t get back last night and they’re worried sick. Maybe they’ve thought of some detail about her plans that I don’t know.”
They had just crossed the street when the door to the Eldridge sisters’ shop swung open and Katherine stepped forward. She halted in midstep when she found herself a sidewalk’s width from her former husband, but Ted merely nodded at her with the sort of distant courtesy one bestows on a total stranger of no importance whatsoever, then he opened the driver’s door on his black and white. Katherine, however, apparently had other—more socially correct— notions about how divorced couples ought to behave when meeting each other in public for the first time since their divorce. Refusing to be ignored, she stepped forward and her cultured voice reached Ted, forcing him to pause. “Ted?” she said. Pausing to smile briefly and with impeccable courtesy at Carl, who’d stopped with one foot already in the car, she turned back to her ex-husband and added, “Were you really going to drive off without saying hello to me?”
“I intended to do exactly that,” he replied, his face impassive, even as he registered a new softer and more somber quality to her voice.
She walked forward in a cherry red wool suit that hugged her narrow waist, her long blond hair spilling over her shoulders, her hand held out. “You look . . . well,” she finished a little lamely when Ted ignored her hand. When he refused to respond, she sent a look of appeal at Carl. “You look well, too, Carl. I hear you married Sara Wakefield?”
In the shop behind her, Ada Eldridge’s eyeball appeared in the crack between the shutters, and in the beauty shop next door, two of the town’s biggest gossips were standing in the window with rollers in their hair, blatantly spying. Ted’s patience snapped. “Are you finished with what you learned in Social Interaction 201?” he asked sarcastically. “You’re causing a scene.”
Katherine glanced at the window of the beauty shop, but she persevered despite the flush of humiliation staining her cheeks at his contemptuous attitude. “Julie wrote me that you finished law school.”
He turned his back on her and opened the car door.
Her chin came up. “I’m getting married—to Spencer Hayward. Miss Flossie and Miss Ada are making my gown.”
“I’m sure they’re glad of any business, even yours,” Ted said, climbing into the car. She put her hand on the door to stop him from closing it.
“You’ve changed,” she said.
“You haven’t.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Katherine,” he said with deadly finality, “I don’t give a damn whether you’ve changed or not.”
He closed the door in her face, started the engine, and drove away, watching in the rearview mirror as her shoulders straightened with the haughty dignity that wealthy, privileged people seemed to be born with, then she turned and glowered at the faces in the beauty shop window. If he didn’t despise her so thoroughly, Ted would have admired her spunk in the face of such public humiliation, but he felt no admiration nor any jealousy at the thought of her marrying again. All he felt was a vague sort of pity for the man who was about to get himself a wife who was nothing but an ornament—beautiful, hollow, and brittle. As Ted had already learned to his agonized disappointment, Katherine Cahill Mathison was spoiled, immature, selfish, and vain.
Katherine’s father owned oil wells and a cattle ranch, but he preferred to spend much of his time in Keaton where he’d been born and where he enjoyed a position of unquestioned prominence. Although Katherine had grown up there, she’d been away at fancy boarding schools since she was twelve years old. Ted and she had never really met until she was nineteen years old, when she came home after her sophomore year at a ritzy eastern college to spend the summer in Keaton. Her parents, who were spending two months in Europe, had insisted she remain in Keaton as a punishment, she’d later told Ted, for her having cut so many of her college classes that she’d nearly flunked out of school. In a typically childish tantrum of the sort that Ted was later to become accustomed to, Katherine had retaliated against her parents by inviting twenty friends from her college to spend a month, partying at her family’s mansion. It was during one of those parties that gunshots were fired and the police were called.
Ted had arrived with another local sheriff to check on the disturbance, and Katherine herself had answered the doorbell, her eyes wide with fear, her body scantily clad in a revealing string bikini that showed off nearly every tanned centimeter of her beautiful, curvaceous young form. “I called you,” she burst out, gesturing toward the back of the house where French doors opened onto a swimming pool and terraces that overlooked the town of Keaton. “My friends are out there, but the party’s getting a little wild, and they won’t put my father’s guns away. I’m afraid someone will get hurt!”
Trying to keep his lustful gaze off her rounded derriere, Ted had followed her through the mansion with its Persian carpets and magnificent French antiques. Outdoors, he and his partner found twenty young adults, several of them nude, all of them drunk or stoned on pot, frolicking in the swimming pool and shooting skeet off the back terrace. Calming the party down was easy: The moment one of the swimmers yelled, “Oh God, the cops are here!” the revelry screeched to an abrupt halt. Swimmers emerged from the pool and the skeet shooters laid down their shotguns—with one alarming exception: a twenty-three-year-old, high on marijuana, who decided to reenact a scene from Rambo with Ted as his adversary. When he turned the shotgun on Ted, Katherine had screamed and Ted’s partner had drawn his service revolver, but Ted had motioned him to put it away. “There’s not going to be any trouble here,” he told the youth. Improvising quickly, he added, “My partner and I came to enjoy the party. Katherine invited us.” He glanced at her and smiled winningly. “Tell him you invited me, Kathy.”
The nickname he’d invented on the spur of the
moment may well have saved a life, because it either startled the boy enough to tip down his weapon or it convinced him Ted was actually a family friend. Katherine, who had never been called by any nickname whatsoever, had collaborated by hurrying to Ted’s side and draping her body against his side, her arm around Ted’s back. “Of course I did, Brandon!” she told the young man with only a tiny betraying tremor in her voice, her eyes fixed on the loaded shotgun he still held.
Intending only to play along, Ted put his arm around her, his hand curving around her incredibly narrow waist as he bent his head to say something to her. Whether by accident or design, Katherine misunderstood her cue, and she leaned up on her toes and kissed him full on the mouth. Ted’s lips parted in surprise but his arm tightened automatically, and suddenly she turned fully into his arms, kissing him deeply. And just as automatically, he responded to her unexpected ardor; his arms tightened and his body hardened with desire. His tongue slipped between her eager lips and he kissed her back while a bunch of cheering, drunken, stoned rich kids looked on and another kid named Brandon held a loaded gun on him.
“Okay, okay, he’s one of the ‘good guys,’ ” Brandon shouted. “So, let’s shoot some skeet!”
Ted let go of Katherine and sauntered toward the young man, his gait slow, relaxed, a fake smile pinned to his face. “What’d you say yer name was?” Brandon demanded as Ted neared him.
“Officer Mathison,” Ted snapped as he jerked the shotgun out of the young man’s hand and spun him around, shoving his face into the fence and slapping handcuffs on his wrists. “What’s yours?”
“Brandon Barrister III,” came the outraged reply. “My father is Senator Barrister.” His voice shifted to an ugly, wheedling whine. “I’ll make you a deal, Mathison. You get these cuffs off of me and get the hell out of here and I won’t tell my father about the way you treated us tonight. We’ll forget this misunderstanding ever happened.”
“No, I’ll make you a deal,” Ted countered, spinning him around and shoving him toward the house. “You tell me where your stash is, and I’ll let you spend a nice quiet evening in our jail without booking you on the dozen charges I can think of right now—all of which would deeply embarrass your father the senator.”