McCloud's Woman (11 page)

“You’re wasting your time, Rog,” TJ said enigmatically.
“I’m here visiting my family and working a dig of personal interest.
Nothing to write home about.”

“Then we’ll just catch up on old times over a drink. Talk
to you later.” He nodded appreciatively at Mara. “Good meeting you, Miss
Simon.” He strode off across the beaten path to the sandy road the
hurricane had cut off.

“Should I have disappeared and left you with your friend?” Mara demanded when TJ didn’t immediately enter the house.

He shook his head and stepped onto the porch. “Nope. Eggs and bacon?”

“Yogurt and bagels.” She followed him inside. Tim’s
compulsive neatness spilled over into his home, it seemed. She couldn’t
find a sign of his habitation anywhere. “Are you sure you live here?”

He looked at her in puzzlement, gazed around the empty room, and shrugged. “I sleep here. I don’t require much.”

Mara suspected that was an understatement. She’d spent
these last years in a culture that acquired things faster than they
could be produced. TJ apparently existed on whatever anyone handed him.
She watched in amazement as he fried bacon in the same battered iron
skillet in which he scrambled eggs—with a fork. He prepared toast by
buttering bread and holding it over an electric burner.

He didn’t give her yogurt or bagels.

It smelled so mouthwateringly good, she ate what he set in front of her.

“Do you even own your own home?” she asked in curiosity a little while later, shoveling up the last bit of egg with her toast.

Carefully smearing jam over his toast, TJ looked surprised at the question. “Nope. Wouldn’t ever be there, so what’s the point?”

“How can you live like this?” She couldn’t even conceive
of it. She needed her own space, a place for her things, a place where
she could relax and be her own person. She’d carried her photographs and
pillows and books with her to the B&B so she could pretend it was
home.

She’d rented the whole inn so she could call it hers. One
of the biggest regrets of her divorce from Sid was losing the Beverly
Hills house she’d personally decorated. “Don’t you ever want your own
space, where you can sleep in your own bed?”

“I don’t know.” He wrinkled his forehead in thought before
carrying his empty dish to the sink and turning on the hot water. “I’ve
thought about it, but there never seemed much reason.”

“Are you planning on spending the rest of your life
globetrotting?” she demanded incredulously, carrying her plate to the
sink and shoving him aside with her hip. “You cooked, I wash.”

He didn’t argue but dug a towel from a drawer. “It’s what I do.”

Standing there domestically washing dishes together,
feeling awareness rising between them, Mara thought it a damned shame to
waste a man like TJ to a footloose lifestyle. But then, she supposed
men like him weren’t sufficiently domesticated for her pampered
existence. He might know how to wash dishes and cook his own meals, but
if her instincts were correct, his mind was already on another
continent. Did the man ever live in the here and now?

He didn’t even make a pass at her after they finished the
dishes. Feeling disembodied and dazed from all the hormones zinging
around, Mara followed him back to his car and sat in disbelief as he
drove her back to town.

He even let her keep the
Times
.

Something was definitely not right. The TJ she knew
seethed and boiled beneath a thin veneer of civilization. This TJ had
gone stone-cold dead, and she thought the reporter had something to do
with it.

Out of curiosity, Mara didn’t immediately climb out of the
car when it rolled up in front of the inn. Just to see if the man she
knew still existed, she leaned over and kissed his craggy cheek.

Wordlessly regarding her through deep-set eyes that
scorched her to the bone, TJ caught her chin, captured her mouth with
his, and set her blood afire with a kiss so deep and heated that she
almost came right there. Not dead, then, but hot lava buried under cold
stone.

He let her go, threw open the car door, and escorted her to the B&B, leaving her on the doorstep without a word.

Watching him drive off, Mara decided she most certainly
did not need a volatile, inscrutable man like TJ McCloud in her life.
She was a mess enough without him.

But she tingled in places she’d thought long dead, and her
errant heart wept wistfully for the innocent love they’d once shared,
and could never share again.

Crying on the front porch wasn’t a smart move, even if she wasn’t wearing mascara.

Brushing her cheek, she spun on her heel and stalked
inside. If she didn’t apply her mind to more important matters, she’d be
as homeless as TJ in a few short months.

After dropping Mara off at the B&B, TJ drove to the
office, his thoughts churning. Mara’s kiss had steamed the few brain
cells that had survived their morning together.

He’d spent these last years attempting to forget Patsy and
rebuild the same kind of relationship with someone else, but one
morning had shown him the impossibility. Only one spontaneous, brainy,
intriguing female existed in this world for him, and right at the
moment, she was no doubt lining up all that creativity against him.

Somehow he’d have to pry Mara out of his head and concentrate on outmaneuvering Roger.

Roger had been with him in the Balkans, was aware TJ and
Martin had worked together there. TJ knew damned well the reporter was
after a story, but he couldn’t give it to him—wouldn’t give it to him.
They both owed Martin their lives. They’d never have escaped that sniper
outburst outside Kosovo if Martin hadn’t risked his neck by careening
in with his jeep, Uzi blasting.

Roger might not believe he owed the colonel for that act,
but TJ did. He respected Martin enough to believe him incapable of
corruption, and he was loyal enough not to act hastily or without
careful thought. Journalists were sensationmongers these days. Selling
newspapers was more important than accuracy. TJ refused to add fuel to
the fire until he was certain the evidence was damning.

He detested even the need to continue going through the
boxes stored in his office. He ought to trust the colonel’s word and
shred them, as he’d been told to do.

But his own integrity was now in question. If there was
evidence of the colonel’s corruption in those boxes, his sense of
justice would never support a criminal, no matter how much he owed or
respected him.

The warring factions of his psyche were tearing him apart.

Setting aside the box he’d already worked through, TJ
methodically lined up the remaining cardboard bank boxes across the lab
floor. Slitting the tape on the unopened ones, he scanned them for some
order in the contents. Several contained files brimming with invoices
and correspondence. A couple more contained steno notebooks of not
easily translated chicken scratching.

He’d already skimmed through the typed transcripts of
translations from interviews with Balkan residents. He found another
with similar files. He didn’t know who had gathered all the material or
why, but his cursory glance at the notebooks revealed incendiary
accusations of a Mafia-like protection scam—exactly what the media was
screaming. Somebody was guilty of releasing accused criminals without
trials, undoubtedly in exchange for large sums of money.

He didn’t want to believe it was Colonel Martin.

Flipping through files revealed nothing riveting. No piece of paper yelled in big black letters:
Martin is guilty
.
It could take weeks to filter through this stuff, and he might still
never understand the implications. He wasn’t a lawyer. He knew bones,
not bits of paper.

He wasn’t suited to be Martin’s judge and jury. He ought
to hand the boxes over to someone more objective. Or believe Martin and
shred them.
Shit.

If he quit working on his excavation to work on the boxes, Mara would lose her film.

He hated his life right now.

Figuring the transcript box would be easiest to study, he
returned it to the closet where he could get at it easily, and locked
the door. He resealed the others, deciding to store them somewhere safer
than a flimsy closet. If Roger knew enough to question him about the
colonel, it was only a matter of time before others would hunt him
down—if the Defense Department didn’t send spooks to search his rooms
first.

He’d start a more thorough reading of the transcripts
tonight. Somewhere in there should be the proof of Martin’s innocence.
Or guilt.

TJ carried the other boxes to the trunk and back seat of
his Taurus. He’d find an anonymous storage unit and install a strong
lock. That should be safe enough.

Returning to the office, he grimaced at the blinking
answering machine light. Next, he needed to hire an assistant, or at the
very least, a secretary, or he could spend his nights answering mail
and phone calls.

Sorting through the junk on his desk, he located a clean
sheet of paper and a pen. He punched the machine’s button and waited for
the first message, pen poised.

“This is Senator...” TJ hit the message delete and waited for the next call.

“Carlton here. Give me a call at...”

“This is Congressman’s Throckwaite’s office. If you would...”

Damn Mara. He smacked the machine again. Maybe he ought to just fling it against the wall.

“This is A-and-E Rentals.” The voice sounded almost
apologetic. “We will not be able to renew the lease on your office after
the first of the month.”

If he wasn’t already so furious, this would almost be
funny. How many more irritants could Mara have stirred up? Before he hit
the play button again, the phone rang. With morbid curiosity, TJ folded
his arms and waited for the machine to take it.

“TJ? Are you there?” Mara. He didn’t want to talk to her.
Just the sound of her voice engorged his prick and shut down his brain
functions. He couldn’t believe he’d let her leave the cottage without
taking her right there on the couch. He wasn’t immune to her flirtatious
glances. They had old issues, and she’d signaled loud and clear that
she was ready to settle them.

He wasn’t in a humor for settling them with sex when he
couldn’t tell the difference between wanting to wring her neck and
needing to jump her bones.

Do-wa-diddy-diddy
hummed through his head like a bee buzzing.

“Oh, well, if you pick this up before you go home, come
over around seven. Glynis Everett just arrived, and we’re having a small
welcoming party.” Her voice turned sultry. “Maybe we can make the world
go away—”

The machine beeped, and she hung up.

He didn’t give a flying fart about Glynis Everett, but the
invitation in Mara’s voice was unmistakable. What would it hurt? They’d
get it out of their systems, have a few laughs. Work off a little
hostility... Right.

He punched the button to pick up the last message.

“I think you’d better leave town, Dr. McCloud,” a quavering female voice announced. “There’s going to be trouble if you don’t.”

Summoning every foul word in his vocabulary, TJ ripped the
machine from the phone and hurled it against the concrete block wall
across the room.

Leaving the pieces where they were, he stalked out.

***

Mara widened her eyes in surprise as TJ strolled into her
intimate soiree on the back terrace of the B&B that evening. She
hadn’t expected him to accept her invitation. She’d been teasing him
with that message. She’d enjoyed their interlude this morning, but she
was fully aware that she and TJ still had major issues.

He’d thrown a khaki microfiber jacket over his blue shirt,
and with one hand in his jeans pocket, he looked as elegant as any man
in here, and more authoritative with that chiseled jaw. A wave of dark
hair falling over his high forehead and the questioning crook of his
thick, dark eyebrow added an aspect of condescension to his unsmiling
demeanor. Only she could tell by the tic in his unshaven jaw that he was
on the verge of explosion.

Between husbands, her leading lady was salivating already.
Glynis had a penchant for rough-looking bad boys—and right now, TJ
looked far surlier and more interesting than Glynis’s current young
lover. Watching trouble brew as her star’s immature partner glared and
Glynis preened, Mara realized how much she’d come to detest the world to
which she’d once aspired.

But she knew how to work a room with the best of them. No more shy Patsy.

Snagging a martini from the waiter, she glided across the
B&B’s terrace, winking and waving and adroitly avoiding
conversation.

“You came.” She handed TJ the martini, captured his elbow
and steered him away from her predatory leading lady. “I didn’t think
you would.”

“Didn’t you?” He slanted her one of those enigmatic looks
that gave her cold chills and hot tremors at the same time. The
connection that had always been there between them hummed, pheromones
sang, and a whole chorus of hormones erupted in hallelujahs.

Right there and then Mara realized she’d dived off the
deep end without a life jacket, but she couldn’t stop in mid-dive and
turn back. “I figured you’d written me off as hopelessly shallow, and
beneath your contempt.” She mocked herself more than him with that
comment.

TJ lifted one sexy eyebrow but his gaze diverted to the
see-through effect of her gown. Good. Keep him as off balance as she
was.

“Always keep the enemy in your sights,” he replied gravely.

She wanted to smack him, but Ian’s shouted demands for her
to entertain a reporter intruded. She bussed TJ’s cheek to mark him as
hers, then reluctantly plunged into the midst of the publicity crew.

“What the devil is he doing here?” Ian muttered as she sauntered up. “Isn’t he the guy keeping our trucks from the beach?”