After Midnight (5 page)

“I love the ocean,” Nikki said softly, smiling as her wide green eyes took in her surroundings. “I could never live inland. Even the freighters and fishing boats fascinate me.”

“I know what you mean,” he agreed. “I've lived in port cities all my life. You get addicted to the sight and sound of big ships.”

He must mean Houston, but she couldn't admit
that she knew where he was from. “Do you live here?” she asked.

“I'm on holiday,” he said, which was true enough. “Do you stay here, all the time?”

“No,” she confessed. “I live farther down the coast.”

“In Charleston?” he probed.

“Sort of.”

“What does sort of mean?”

“I live on the beach itself.” She did. She lived in one of the graceful old homes on the Battery, which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places and which was open to tourists two weeks a year.

He could imagine in what kind of house she normally lived. He hadn't seen her in anything so far that didn't look as if she'd found it in a yard sale. He felt vaguely sorry for her. She had no one of her own except her indifferent lover, and her material possessions were obviously very few. He'd noticed that she drove a very dilapidated red MG Midget, the model that was popular back in the 60s.

“Feel like a cup of coffee?” he asked, nodding toward a small fast-food joint near the beach, with tables outside covered by faded yellow umbrellas.

“Yes, I do, thanks,” she told him.

He parked the jeep and they got out. Nikki strolled to the beachside table and sat down while
Kane ordered coffee. He hadn't needed to be told how Nikki took hers. He brought it with cream and sugar, smiling mischievously at her surprise.

“I have a more or less photographic memory,” he told her as he slid onto the seat across from her.

“I'll remember that,” she said with a grin.

He lifted his head and closed his eyes, letting the sea breeze drift over his darkly tanned face. It had a faintly leonine look, broad and definite, with a straight nose that was just short of oversized, a jutting brow with thick eyebrows, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth that managed to be sexy and masculine all at once. His eyes were large and brown, his pupils edged in black. They were staring at her with faint amusement.

“You look Spanish,” she blurted out, embarrassed at having been caught looking at him.

He frowned slightly, smiling. “My great-grandmother was a highborn Spanish lady,” he replied. “She was visiting relatives near San Antonio, where my great-grandfather was a ranch foreman. As the story goes, they were married five days after they met, leaving a raging scandal behind them when they moved to Houston to prospect for oil.”

“How interesting! And did they find any?”

“My great-grandfather was prospecting up around Beaumont when Spindletop blew its stack in 1901,” he told her. “He made and lost a fortune
in two months' time.” He didn't add that his great-grandfather had quickly recouped his losses and went on to found an oil company.

“Poor man.” She looked up from the coffee she was sipping. “His wife didn't leave him because he lost everything, did she?”

“She wasn't the type. She stuck by him, all the way.”

“That doesn't happen very often anymore, does it? Women sticking by men, I mean,” she added wistfully. “Now, marriages are expendable. Nobody does it for keeps.”

He scowled. “You're very cynical for someone so young.”

“I'm twenty-five,” she told him. “Not young at all for this day and age.” She studied her brightly polished fingernails, curled around the foam cup. “For the rest, it's a cynical world. Profit even takes precedence over human life. I'm told that in the Amazon jungles, they kill the natives without compunction to get them off land the government wants to let big international corporations develop.”

He stared at her. “Do you really think that with all the people this planet has to support, we can afford to allow primitive cultures to sit on that much arable land?”

Her green eyes began to glitter. “I think that if we develop all the arable land, we're going to have
to eat concrete and steel a few years down the line.”

He was delighted. Absolutely delighted. For all her beauty, there was a brain under that black hair. He moved his coffee cup around on the scarred surface of the table and smiled at her. “Progress costs,” he countered.

“It's going to cost us the planet at the rate we're destroying our natural resources,” she said sweetly. “Or aren't you aware that about one percent of us is feeding the other ninety-nine percent? You have to have flat, rich land to plant on. Unfortunately the same sort of land that is best suited to agriculture is also best suited to building sites.”

“On the other hand,” he pointed out, “without jobs, people won't be able to afford seed to plant. A new business means new jobs, a better standard of living for the people in the community. Better nutrition for nursing mothers, for young children.”

“That's all true,” she agreed, leaning forward earnestly. “But what about the price people pay for that better standard of living? When farm mechanization came along, farmers had to grow more food in order to afford the equipment to make planting and harvesting less time-consuming. That raised the price of food. The pesticides and fertilizers they had to use, to increase production, caused the toxic byproducts to leach into the ground, and pollute the water table. We produced
more food, surely, but the more food you raise, the more the population grows. That increases the amount of food you
have
to raise to feed the increasing numbers of people! It's a vicious circle.”

“My God, you talk like an economist,” he said.

“Why not? I studied it in college.”

“Well, well.” He grinned at her. “What did you take your degree in?”

“I didn't finish,” she said sadly. “I dropped out after three and a half years, totally burned out. I'll go back and finish one day, though. I only lack two semesters having enough units to graduate, with a major in history and a minor in sociology.”

“God help the world when you get out,” he murmured. “You could go into politics with a brain like yours.”

She was flattered and amused, but she didn't let him see the latter. He mustn't know how wrapped up she already was in politics.

“You're not bad yourself.”

“I took my degree in business administration,” he said. “I did a double minor in economics and marketing.”

“Do you work in business?” she asked with deliberate innocence.

“You might say so,” he said carelessly. “I'm in marketing.”

“It must be exciting.”

“Sometimes,” he dodged. He finished his cof
fee. “Do you like to walk on the beach?” he asked. “I enjoy it early in the morning and late in the afternoon. It helps me clear my mind so that I can think.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“Kindred spirits,” he said almost to himself, and she smiled.

He put the garbage in the receptacle and impulsively slid his hand into Nikki's.

It was the first deliberate physical contact between them, and sparks flew as his big, strong fingers linked sensuously between her slender ones. She felt their warm touch and tingles worked all the way down her body. She hadn't felt that way in years. Not since Mosby…

She caught her breath and looked up at him with something like panic in her green eyes.

“What is it, Nikki?” he asked gently.

His deep voice stirred her even more than the touch of his hand. She felt him, as if they were standing locked together. Her eyes looked into his and she could almost taste him.

“Nothing,” she choked after a minute. She pulled her fingers from his grasp firmly, but hesitantly. “Shall we go?”

He watched her move off ahead of him, her hands suddenly in her pockets, the small fanny pack around her waist drooping over one rounded hip. She looked frightened. That was an odd sort
of behavior from a woman who'd let him share her home for a night, he thought idly. She hadn't been afraid of him then.

She paused when he caught up with her, feeling guilty and not quite herself. She looked up at him with a rueful, embarrassed smile.

“I don't trust men, as a rule,” she confessed. “Most of them have one major objective when they start paying attention to a woman. I've never been accused of misleading anyone. That's why I'm going to tell you right now, and up front, that I don't sleep around, ever.”

“At least you're honest,” he said as they continued to walk toward the beach.

“Always,” she assured him. “I find it's the best policy.”

“Do you sleep with the man who owns the beach house?”

“What I do with him is none of your business,” she said simply.

“Fair enough.” He put his hands in his pockets and looked down at her while they strolled along the white sand. Whitecaps rolled, foaming onto the nearby shore, and above head the seagulls danced on the wind with black-tipped white wings spread to the sun.

“You're very big,” she remarked.

He chuckled. “Tall. Not big.”

“You are,” she argued. “I'm five foot five and you tower over me.”

“I'm barely six foot two,” he told her. “You're a shrimp, that's why I seem big to you.”

“Watch your mouth, buster, I'm not through growing yet,” she said pertly, cutting her sparkling eyes up at him.

He chuckled. “Smart mouth.”

“Smart, period, thank you so much.”

“Now that we both know you won't sleep with me, can we hold hands? Mine are cold.”

“I might have suspected there would be an ulterior motive,” she mentioned. But all the same, she took her left hand out of her pocket and let him fold it under his warm fingers.

“You aren't cold,” she protested.

“Sure I am. You just can't tell.” His fingers tightened, and he smiled at the faint flush on her cheeks as the exercise began to tell on her. “You ninety-seven-pound-weakling,” he chided. “Can't you keep up with me?”

“Normally I could run rings around you,” she said heavily. “But I'm getting over a bout of pneumonia.”

He stopped abruptly, scowling. “Idiot! You don't need to be out in this early morning chill! Why didn't you say something?”

His concern made her heart lift. “It's been a week since I got out of bed,” she assured him.
“And I haven't been sitting home idle all that time.”

“You haven't done much exercising, either, have you?”

“Not really,” she admitted. The help she'd given with the Spoleto Festival had involved a lot of telephone calls and assistance that she could give sitting down. Her strength was still lagging behind her will.

“What a waif and stray it is, and it hasn't much of a mind at times, either,” he murmured softly.

She started to take offense when he moved suddenly and swept her into his warm, strong arms. He turned and started walking back the way they'd come.

Nikki was totally breathless with surprised delight. It was the first time in her life that she'd experienced a man's strength in this way. She wasn't sure she liked the feeling of vulnerability it gave her, and that doubt was in her eyes when they met his at close range.

“I can see the words right there on the tip of your tongue,” he said softly, his deep voice faintly accented and very tender as he smiled at her. “But don't say them. Put your arms around me and lie close to my chest while I carry you.”

Shades of a romantic movie, she thought wildly. But the odd thing was that she obeyed him without question, without hesitation. There was a breathy
little sigh escaping from her. She dropped her eyes to his throat, where thick hair showed in the opening, and she felt a sweet swelling in her body as he drew her relentlessly closer. Her face ended up in the hot curve of his throat, her arms close around his neck.

“Nikki,” he said in a rough, husky voice, and his arms suddenly contracted, crushing her soft breasts against the wall of his chest as he turned toward the car.

It was no longer a teasing or tender embrace. Her nails were biting into his shoulders as he walked, and she felt the closeness in every single pore of her body. Her breasts had gone hard-tipped, her heart was throbbing. Low in her stomach, she felt a heat and hunger that was totally without precedent.

“Oh, baby,” he whispered suddenly, and she felt his open mouth quite suddenly on the softness of her throat where her tank top left it bare to her collarbone.

She closed her eyes with a shaky gasp. The wind blew her hair around her face and cooled the heat in her cheeks. He was warm and strong and he smelled of spices. She wanted him to strip her out of her clothes and put his warm, hard mouth on her breasts and her belly and the inside of her thighs. She wanted him to put her down on the beach and make love to her under the sky.