McCloud's Woman

McCloud’s Woman

The Carolina Series Book Two

Patricia Rice

Book View Café edition
January 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-132-0
Copyright © 2003 Patricia Rice
www.bookviewcafe.com

— always choose to live life
to the fullest. You never know how much that choice affects the world
around you.

Slamming down the phone and shoving a wayward strand of
hair from her face, the woman in a pristine lab coat glared at the man
hunkered over a microscope at the far end of the worktable. “You don’t
get it, do you? You just don’t get anything.”

Not immediately responding to his assistant’s outburst,
Timothy John McCloud methodically jotted his observations in his
notebook. Then, removing his reading glasses, he swung on his stool to
cock an eyebrow at her. A V-shaped scar over the bridge of his nose
would have created a permanent scowl if it hadn’t also nicked his
eyebrow. The inquisitive arch that resulted lessened the impact of the
frown.

“I just don’t get what?” he asked cautiously.

“This!” Leona pointed an accusing finger at the stack of
cardboard boxes against the wall of the tiny storefront office. “Burn
them, and save yourself the grief.”

Another of those persistent idiots in the Defense
Department must have been on the phone, TJ concluded. Problem solved, he
returned to his microscope.

At least Leona had learned to keep the bastards off his
back. Tearing the phone off the wall the last time they’d hounded him
hadn’t been his finest hour, but it had apparently impressed his
assistant enough so that she now screened his calls.

“What about
us
? Are those damned boxes more
important than our future?” She ripped off her white lab coat and shook
it at him to catch his attention.

Reaching for another slide, TJ hoped he’d misunderstood
Leona’s histrionics. “There is no us,” he clarified, just in case.
“You’re an employee. I’m the company. If anything happens, I’m
responsible.” He chose the more generous interpretation of her
declaration. Just because he was on the brink of self-destruction didn’t
mean he needed to drag any idealistic innocents down with him.

“What about last night?” she demanded. “How can you say there is no us?”

TJ rubbed his forehead. Taking Leona out for coffee a few
times probably had been a mistake. He always misunderstood the direction
of the female mind. He’d thought they’d had a strictly professional
relationship. But letting her ramble on about her dreams of a
nonexistent future might have led her to believe differently. And maybe
he shouldn’t have kissed her last night when she’d thrown her arms
around him. In hindsight, that had been a stupid move on his part,
although at the time, it had been a satisfactory distraction.

Given his current state of repressed desperation, though,
it was a miracle he hadn’t jumped her bones and accepted the
consequences later.

He’d had a lucky escape, and he’d like to keep it that
way. On his best day, he didn’t have the correct attention span to suit
women, nor the kind of settled lifestyle they expected. Now that his
life had sunk to a new nadir, he didn’t need the additional hassle of
second-guessing a woman’s wants.

TJ started to run his fingers through his hair and knocked
his glasses askew in the process. Mentally cursing, he tried to refocus
on the skeletal fragment on the slide in front of him.

“Are you even listening, TJ?” Leona shouted. “We could
have a good thing here. Doesn’t that matter to you? Just burn the damned
boxes and get on with life.”

An invisible noose constricted his breathing as TJ thought
of the of papers in those boxes—papers that should have been shredded
months ago. If he believed media hysterics, those boxes had the power to
erase all the good he and dozens of others had thought they’d
accomplished in these last few years.

He didn’t want to believe the media accusations that the
family friend who had launched his career had profited from the crimes
of war criminals. He should trust Martin, shred the box contents as he’d
been ordered to do, and let the hysteria die of its own accord.

But destroying potential evidence went against everything for which he lived.

On the other hand, opening those boxes meant passing
judgment on his mentor. He’d done that once to a friend, with
spectacularly disastrous results.

TJ liked his career. Forensic anthropology might not be an
exciting vocation to some, but studying human remains for judicial
evidence suited his methodical, detail-oriented mindset, with the added
benefit of fulfilling his craving for justice. He didn’t want his career
going down in flames for concealing a criminal, or for consorting with
one.

TJ couldn’t remember ever panicking during the years of
traipsing the war zones of Eastern Europe and Africa, but something dark
and ugly had taken root the day he’d returned home to open the
newspapers—and realized what the notebooks in those boxes could contain.

“Look, just burn the junk, all right?” Angrily, Leona
wadded up her lab coat. “No more threatening phone calls. No more hiding
out in this backwater to avoid journalists. You’re a brilliant
scientist with a staggering reputation. You can work anywhere, demand
any price. Why destroy your career for a battle that’s already lost?”

Excellent question. He never hired dumb assistants.

TJ carefully annotated his slide label and didn’t look up.
“I don’t betray friends.” He dropped the slide into its box and closed
the cover. “I’m a private consultant, not an employee, so empty Defense
Department threats can’t intimidate me. Are you taking an early lunch?”

Leona flung her lab coat at him. Scarcely moving a muscle,
TJ let the coat slide off his shoulder, and turned toward the next
plastic specimen bag on the table.

“You’re only a private consultant as long as someone will
hire you,” she yelled. “Who the hell will hire you if the entire world
thinks you aided and abetted a criminal?”

A very real possibility given the incendiary potential of
the boxes. Of course, if he turned them over to the Defense Department,
their contents could disappear and never be heard of again. The
colonel’s mission in the Balkans had been a sensitive one, and the
military protected their own.

TJ had spent his career uncovering crimes of war. He didn’t want to be party to a cover-up now.

He didn’t want to turn the colonel over to the rabid frenzy of media hounds either.

Dropping out of sight here in the middle of nowhere was a
desperate attempt to salvage his mental health— before choosing between
friendship and potential career suicide. Destroy the boxes or open them?
He lost either way.

“I can pay your wages for the project regardless of my
ultimate decision.” Using tweezers, TJ removed a single golden hair from
the bag and arranged it on a fresh slide. He ignored the puddle of
white cloth at his feet. His focus on his work to the exclusion of all
else had incited worse reactions than flying lab coats. If she reached
for the other microscope, he’d duck.

“It isn’t my damned wages that concern me,” she shouted.
“My father could give us a whole lab, if we liked. We could have a
future together. Why can’t you see that?”

If he was a man who laughed, he would, but he wasn’t. He
didn’t find much to laugh about these days, although he did see a
certain sardonic humor in discussing a future with a man without a life.
Years of travel hadn’t left him with much time for anything but work.
“The only future I see right now is solving the mystery of these bones.
That’s what I hired you for.”

Her lab notebook clipped him on the ear, bounced off his
shoulder, and struck the human skeleton hanging from a rack behind him,
rattling its bones. TJ sighed and caught the skeleton stand before it
toppled.

“Take your damned bones to bed with you then. That’s the
only relationship you’ll ever know.” Leona stalked out of the shabby
inner office, disappearing into the even shabbier outer one.

TJ heard the front door slam behind her. With a sigh of
regret, he rubbed at the tarnish on the brass canister he’d dug from the
excavation site. He wished life could be as simple as it had been in
the pre-Civil War days when the canister had been molded: no telephones,
no computers, and women who believed men knew what they were doing.

As he leaned over to retrieve the scattered pages of the notebook, a gentle clapping broke the silence.

TJ’s head jerked up, almost slamming into the counter.
Bent over, he could only see a shapely ankle accented by red high-heeled
mules. Straightening slowly, he absorbed the magnificent apparition
magically appearing in his doorway.

The high heels emphasized the curving perfection of long
tanned legs, capped by a tight red miniskirt. Eyes popping, TJ looked
higher, to a breathtaking figure that could have graced the pages of
Playboy
. Aware of his gaze, the genie posed seductively against the institutional green of his office door.

Damn, was he hallucinating? He should have heard her enter.

Hell, her looks should have screamed her entrance. That
red spandex top revealed far more than it concealed, even with the silky
transparent shirt thrown over it. Removing his glasses, TJ massaged the
bridge of his nose.

He was surprised at himself—he never noticed what women
wore. Had a covey of angels alighted, he might have noticed they wore a
lot of white before returning to work. His ex-fiancée had pointed that
out to him on numerous occasions.

TJ raised his gaze from that distracting body, only to be
captured by more fascinating phenomena.
Whipped-cream-and-lemon-pie-colored curls bobbed from an impossible heap
atop a tan face of delicate angles. Slanted green eyes watched him with
amusement as she crossed her arms under her bounteous bosom. Her
taunting smile and turned-up nose alone could have halted a rampaging
grizzly and morphed it into a drooling teddy bear. The rest of her could
roll dead men in their graves and kill live ones in the sheer ecstasy
of testosterone overdose.

Why did she look familiar? Startled at that reaction, TJ
absently polished his glasses while applying his analytical mind to the
puzzle.

“I applaud your ability to defy temptation,” she purred,
swiveling her hips as she moved toward him, watching him through eyes
gleaming with interest.

Where had he seen her before? She was beautiful enough to
be a movie starlet, but he didn’t watch movies, so that couldn’t be the
answer. TJ couldn’t picture her in the army fatigues worn by most of
the women he’d met lately, and she didn’t look as if she possessed the
brains to be on any university staff he knew.

“I don’t have time for this,” he said aloud, returning his
reading glasses to his nose. “Tourist information is down the street.”
TJ swung around on his stool, presenting her with his back.

“Did all that youthful energy bouncing out of here wear
you out?” she asked with a hint of humor. This close, her subtle cologne
drifted temptingly between the sharper odors of ammonia and
formaldehyde.

Awareness crept across TJ’s skin, irritating him far more
than Leona’s senseless departure. “This is a private office. I’ll thank
you to state your business or depart.”

Common sense told him his libido had taken an inconvenient
detour. If he didn’t have the patience to figure out the wayward path
of an intelligent female mind like Leona’s, he’d never calculate the
logic of the blond genie glittering behind him. Ergo, there was no point
in carrying his annoying fascination any further.

“Timid Timothy,” she teased. “That much hasn’t changed.”

She ran a fingernail down his lab coat, and the part of
him with no brain reacted instantly. He broke his pencil lead and
cursed.

She laughed, a low, knowing chuckle. “Want a hint? Or shall I just fling something at you and flounce out like the last one?”