Until then she must do what she had been doing. Work, followed by more work, followed by much more work. There was no other choice that she could live with. She had already failed life’s bitter little tests once. She would work herself into the grave before she failed again.
This time she was counting only on herself.
“I’m not playing any game,” Cat said flatly. “I’m way too tired for games. I saw something incredible, and for once there was someone worth sharing it with. That’s all.”
Travis didn’t say a word.
She looked at his expression and finally recognized it. Contempt.
“My mistake,” she said, trying to step away from him. The big hand that was clamped on her arm held her where she was. Close to him.
“What’s my last name?” Travis demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“Guess,” he said sarcastically.
“I said I was too tired for games.”
Cat tried to move away, but Travis’s fingers were like iron, caging her. She turned on him with narrowed eyes and a mouth that no longer smiled.
“Smith,” she suggested acidly. “No? How about Johnson? Or Jones.”
Then she jerked her arm sharply. This time she didn’t take Travis by surprise. This time there would be no easy escape for her.
“Smith, Johnson, and Jones are the three most common names in the English language,” she snarled. “After them, the odds of guessing right go straight to hell.”
Travis saw and recognized Cat’s anger. It was like his own—the instinctive rage of a thirsty animal that had finally found water, only to discover it was tainted.
Cat shivered again. Warmth had drained out of the evening as surely as color. She moved, but remained imprisoned by his grip.
“I suppose you don’t know the name of the ship, either,” he said coldly.
“The lens is powerful, but it can’t read print a half mile away against the sun.” Her tone was as cold as his.
Travis stared at her for the space of several breaths, hungry to believe her, afraid to be wrong again. The cost was simply too high. Not in money. He could afford that.
But he couldn’t afford the personal wreckage that came from misjudging a woman’s motives.
Cat waited, watching Travis with remote gray eyes. Gradually his expression and his grip on her arm gentled. His fingertips moved over her skin as lightly as a butterfly sipping nectar. She shivered beneath his sensitive touch, feeling as though she had never been caressed by a man before.
“If the ship was yours,” he said softly, “what would you call her?”
“Freedom.”
“Is your world a jail, Cat?”
She looked up at Travis’s face. His expression was intense yet oddly gentle. Instinctively she gave him the honesty his waiting silence required.
“Not always,” she said. “But the next few months are going to be really tight.”
He dragged a key from the wet pocket of his shorts and unlocked the door to the gleaming white house. “Tell me about it while I take care of your foot.”
Before she could accept or refuse, Travis picked up her camera equipment and gestured her inside with a sweep of the hand holding her big zoom lens.
Cat hesitated for only a heartbeat. His shifts in mood were unsettling, but they were no worse than her reckless concentration on taking photos or her babbling about freedom and the soul of beauty.
She stepped into the house. The unglazed terra-cotta tile of the entryway felt cool beneath her sore foot. Her remaining canvas shoe squeaked with each shift of her weight.
Sand grated as she and Travis walked side by side into the center of the luxurious foyer. She looked at their gritty feet and the pale pink carpet that waited beyond the white marble tiles.
“We’re going to ruin your carpet,” Cat said.
“I can only hope,” he muttered. Then he said, “Linda assured me that I can’t do anything to the house that her parties haven’t done already. Twice.”
Cat glanced at the expanse of pink and wondered. It looked spotless to her. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. Have you been to my cousin’s parties?”
“No. I’ve only lived next door for six months, but your, um, cousin’s parties are legend in Laguna.”
“Figures. My cousin has been in London for the last six months. It must have been real quiet around here.”
He caught Cat’s quietly cynical smile at the word cousin. But he didn’t say anything.
Neither did she. She simply looked around the glass-walled, lushly carpeted living room. There were modern crystal sculptures and mirrors and beveled glass, suede couches in startling pink, and minimalist art like sliver exclamation points scattered around the room.
After a time Cat realized that Travis was watching her, waiting for her attention to return to him.
“Having second thoughts about the carpet?” she asked.
“Screw the carpet. Linda really is my cousin. My mother’s sister’s daughter.”
Cat studied Travis for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Cousin it is. You have no more reason to lie to me than I have to lie to you.”
“You act as though men never lie to women, and vice versa.”
“Men don’t.”
Travis smiled crookedly. “I take it that your definition of ‘man’ has little to do with age.”
“It has nothing to do with age.” She looked down at her foot. “Why don’t you bring the disinfectant or whatever out here? My blood is the wrong shade of pink for the rug.”
“No problem.”
He set aside Cat’s camera gear, picked her up, and carried her through the room. Other than making a soft, startled sound, she didn’t object.
Glass doors slid open to reveal an interior garden. A hot tub steamed invitingly in the midst of greenery and concealed lights. Somewhat cynically, Cat waited for Travis to suggest that she would be more comfortable if she took off her cold, wet, sandy clothes.
“Do you have a special definition of woman, too?” he asked, setting her on the broad lip of the tub.
The question was not what Cat had expected. It slipped past her defenses without warning. A memory went through her like black lightning, darkening everything it touched.
Billy had been very cruel on the subject of her womanhood. But then, he had been very disappointed. He had wanted to found a dynasty.
“No,” Cat said, trying not to let her memories color her voice. “No special definition. Honesty. Warmth. Intelligence. Endurance. The usual things.”
“Usual?” Tawny eyebrows lifted. “The usual things are bust, waist, and hip measurements.”
“Which, added together, invariably exceed the IQ of the boy doing the measuring.”
Travis smiled. “Wise little cat, aren’t you?”
“Eventually. It’s called survival.”
He pulled off his wet shirt and tossed it aside. The hair on his chest gleamed wetly. Cat half expected him to take off his jeans, but he didn’t. He simply slipped into the tub and pulled her in with him. At no time did he so much as hint that either one of them would be more comfortable without clothes.
Cat couldn’t help relaxing as the heat of the water went through her like a benediction. She sighed with pleasure.
“I didn’t know how cold I was,” she admitted after a time.
“You mean that interesting shade of blue isn’t lipstick?”
Smiling slightly, she flipped her braid outside the tub and sank farther down on the bench that circled the interior. With a groan, she rested her head on the lip of the tub. Eyes closed, she let heat seep into muscles that were tied in knots from the tension and fatigue that had ruled her life since the twins hadn’t been able to find enough grants, loans, and scholarships to get through medical school.
Cat had made up the difference, even though her mother was a sweet, incessant drain on her daughter’s bank account. She had worked herself into the ground and she knew it.
&nb
sp; I can hang on until January. I’ve done it for four years. I can do fourteen weeks and four days standing on my head.
She repeated the words to herself, and the promises. In January she would cut her workload in half and take proper care of herself again. Until then, life was going to be a jail of sorts, with each bar carefully chosen and set in place by her own hands.
“Tell me about your jail, Cat.”
THREE
“YOU ARE a warlock,” Cat muttered into the foaming water.
“I am?” Travis asked, startled.
“Mind reading. Definite warlock trait.”
He smiled. “It wasn’t tough. We had already brought up the subject of jail. Then you leaned back into the tub looking like someone who has just been paroled.”
Cat also looked like a woman who thoroughly enjoyed heat, liquid, and her own senses. He couldn’t wait to find out how she reacted to having a man’s mouth all over her. But he didn’t say anything for the same reason that he hadn’t urged her to take off her clothes.
Cat was well named. If he crowded her, she would rake him from heels to head.
“Jail,” she repeated, making the word a sigh. “No wonder you seemed so familiar.”
“Fellow inmates?”
She looked at his off-center smile and felt more heat than the water could account for.
“We think along the same lines,” Cat said, closing her eyes again. “That makes you seem familiar.”
Travis was tempted to get a whole lot more familiar, but he knew he would get clawed if he tried. Besides, watching the taut lines of her face relax was a kind of pleasure. He had a hunch that bordered on certainty that his wary Cat didn’t let many people close to her.
What he didn’t know was why.
“Tell me about your jail,” he said quietly.
“Nothing special,” she said, smothering a yawn with dripping fingers. “I work for myself. That means when I have time, I don’t have money, and when I have money, I don’t have time.”
Travis’s eyes narrowed at the mention of money. He watched her with sudden, predatory intensity.
Cat didn’t notice. She had given herself over to the glorious luxury of heat.
“Is money so important to you?” he drawled, but his lazy tone was belied by the cold intelligence of his eyes.
For a time she didn’t answer. She didn’t want to spoil the sense of well-being that was stealing through her. Yet talking held a real lure. She had no one other than the next-door neighbor to talk with, and Sharon was buried under infant twins and a precocious seven-year-old.
“Cat?”
She sighed. “My twin brother and sister are just finishing their medical schooling. Neither of them is able to work enough to earn more than pocket money.”
“You’re putting them through school?” Travis asked, surprised.
“Yeah. Until January.”
“What about grants and loans?”
“Oh, we’ve got them, too,” she said, yawning. “Do you have any idea how much it costs to put your kid through an advanced degree these days?”
The thought of a child took the last light from Travis’s eyes, leaving only bitterness. “No,” he said softly. “I don’t.”
“Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. Lord, I wouldn’t have believed it.” Lazily Cat swirled water with her fingertips. “Then there’s my dear, gently crazy mother. She had never written a check in her life until Dad died. Then she wrote too many checks, for all the wrong reasons, until all the money was gone.”
Travis looked carefully at Cat’s expression, but saw only a weary affection for and acceptance of whatever her mother was and was not.
“Twins and a mother, huh?” he asked quietly, wondering why it sounded familiar. But then, hard luck stories all tended to sound the same.
“Yeah. Not to mention my home. I can’t really afford the monthly toll on the lease-option until I make the last payment on the twins’ education in January.”
“In over your head?”
If Cat noticed the edge to Travis’s voice, she didn’t react.
“Nope. I’m a good swimmer,” she said, settling even deeper into the luxurious heat of the tub. “I fell in love with my home six years ago. It came on the market six months ago. If I’d waited until January, the house would have sold and I’d be back to yearning over it from afar.”
“So you took out a loan?”
“Are you kidding? I’m in business for myself. Banks hate me.”
“How did you get the money? Rob one of the banks that hated you?”
She smiled and yawned. “Nope. I just increased my workday from twelve to sixteen hours.”
Travis laughed, thinking Cat was joking.
“If seven days a week doesn’t get it done, try working nights, is that it?” he asked.
“Oh, I do that, too.”
“Work nights?”
“Of course.”
“Money is very important to you, isn’t it?”
This time there was no ignoring the edge in Travis’s voice. Cat opened her eyes and saw the mingling of anger and disappointment on his face. At that instant his face was a study in hard angular shadows. His lips were flat, almost invisible beneath his thick mustache. His teeth were a thin line of white. Savage gold lights glinted through his beard.
“Put a knife in those teeth and you’d be Bluebeard incarnate,” she said.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“About what?”
“Money,” he said flatly.
Cat looked at Travis as though he was as impractical as her mother. “Of course money is important.”
“Not to everyone.”
“The only people money isn’t important to already have it.”
“Maybe. And maybe some people are quite happy without money.”
“They don’t have to pay my bills.”
“And you would be so grateful if some good ol’ boy paid your bills,” he drawled.
The understanding and subtle disdain in Travis’s voice sent a shock of adrenaline through Cat, giving her false energy.
“Don’t worry, Travie-boy. I’m not going to hit you for a loan.”
With a fast twist of her body, she pulled herself out of the tub. The movement was savage, unexpected, like the disappointment slicing into her. She ran through the house, swept up her camera equipment, and opened the door to the beach stairs.
Two big hands shot over her shoulder, slamming the door shut before she could even start to go through it. She looked at the tanned, dripping, powerful forearms holding the door shut.
Travis was so close to her that his breath stirred the fine hairs at the nape of her neck.
“Open it,” Cat said through her teeth.
“You’re shivering. Come back to the tub.”
“It’s warmer outside.”
“Cat, it’s not—”
“Let me out,” she interrupted harshly.
Travis both sensed and saw the outrage vibrating through her. Whatever the state of her bank account, at that moment she wouldn’t have taken a bent coin from him.
“I didn’t mean it as an insult,” he said calmly. “It’s just a fact of life.”
“Not my life. I earn my keep.”
The savagery of Cat’s voice told Travis that he had opened a very painful subject. He hesitated, then let out a long breath, wanting to believe her when she said she hadn’t been looking to him for money.
Needing to believe her.
He hadn’t known until this moment how much of a jail his money had become, and how anonymous he felt within its bars.
“I’m not used to women like you,” Travis said finally.
“I’ll bet you aren’t used to women at all. With your manners, you must have to rent female company by the quarter hour. The door, Travis. Open it.”
Cat expected anything but the wry male laughter that sent an entirely different variety of shiver through her body, not cold at all, but a delic
ate kind of heat.
“Do you always draw blood with your claws?” he asked, not blaming her, simply curious.
She shifted her weight, wincing as her foot complained. The hot tub had taken away most of the sand, but it had done little else except make her realize how exhausted she was underneath her determination to do what must be done.
“Game’s over, Travis, whatever game you were playing.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Sure you were,” she interrupted in a clipped voice. “You found the cat, you found the cage, and then you started shoving sharp things through the bars just so you could watch the cat scratch and howl. That makes you feel powerful, and the cat . . .” She shrugged. “Hell, who cares how the cat feels? It’s just an animal and you’re a man.”
A charged silence settled over the foyer.
Cat watched Travis’s hands change from flat against the door into fists, solid and heavy. Muscles coiled and slid beneath tanned skin, telling more clearly than words of the emotions seething in the man behind her.
Stiff-spined, she waited for him to let her go.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I know.”
“How?” he asked starkly, looking at his own fists.
“The same way I knew my cameras would be safe with you. In some ways we know each other frighteningly well. It makes the misjudgments all the more . . . painful.”
“Cat in a cage,” he whispered. “I would like to know who left such scars on you.”
“Believe me, you wouldn’t like knowing him at all. He isn’t a likable boy.”
Gradually Travis’s hands relaxed. He let out a long, weary curse.
For the first time Cat noticed the fine scars crisscrossing his fingers. Some of the scars were new, some were so old they had all but faded beneath the sunbrowned skin. She wondered what kind of work he did that left such spidery marks on him.
And then she wondered what kind of female had left invisible, much deeper scars on him.
“Was he really that bad?” Travis asked finally.
“My ex?”
“Is he the boy who put you in a cage and tormented you?”
Cat shrugged. “He probably wasn’t any worse than the female who soured you on half the world’s population.”