The Perfect Stranger (8 page)

Following the narrow path, she was careful to keep her feet from crunching down on twigs or leaves. A heaviness hung in the air, something between mist and fog. She’d dressed accordingly, braiding hair with a tendency to curl into a long strip down her back.

From the moment she’d heard the audiotape she’d retrieved in the quiet of predawn, she’d known what she had to do. Now as she skirted around the rotting carcass of a fallen tree, she knew she was close. Around her the silence deepened, creating a stillness that should signify she was alone. But she knew she was not.

To her right, a heron called to its mate. Or maybe that was an egret. Cain would know, but Saura wasn’t sure. Didn’t care, either.

Beyond a single weeping willow, an old wood structure sat recessed from the main path. She headed toward it, but rather than going for the door, she slipped next to the darkened window and looked inside. A table, a soda can, a book and a laptop computer. That was all.

Her heart kicked hard, but she did not go inside. Instead she followed a walkway to the rear of the fishing shack—and through the narrow streams of sunlight saw him.

He stood on the edge of what once had been a pier, two rotting boards jutting out like a diving board over the cold water of the lake. He wore only a pair of baggy gray shorts, a red bandanna and the silver chain holding the dog tags she didn’t want to remember. But did. Even his feet were naked.

Without warning John spun like a coiled snake striking out for the attack. Instinctively she stepped back, but stilled when she realized that while she saw him, John did not see her. The bandanna. It was tied around his head, over his eyes. Blindfolded like that, oblivious to her presence, the man who she’d desperately wanted to be a stranger continued to execute some sort of martial arts routine. His sleek body moved with exacting precision, arms streaking out in deadly punches, legs raised in high, breathtaking kicks. All the while he balanced on the width of those two old boards. One misstep and he would have no chance to recover.

The quickening started low and spread fast, swirling out to touch every part of her. To make her heart slam and her throat go tight. She told herself she should look away, but couldn’t. Told herself she should announce herself, but didn’t want to. He might stop then—and she very much did not want him to stop.

She’d heard the term masculine grace, but she’d always thought it an oxymoron. The men in her family were many things, but graceful was not one of them. Now she watched the fluid movement of Detective John D’Ambrosia and realized she’d been wrong. Like poetry in motion, but with none of the frills. Only strength. And restraint. And precision. A mass of energy concealed by the thinnest of veneers.

She didn’t have to wonder what else his strength and stamina extended to. She already knew.

The cool breeze swirled around her, but heat seared deep. Too easily she could see him as he’d been that first night. Feel him as he’d reached for her and urged her against him. His strength should have frightened. It hadn’t. It had…seduced.

Leave, she told herself, before he realized her mistake. She never should have come here. But a different need held her in place. He executed a series of high kicks and blocks, then a fluid spin. His arms struck out in lightning-quick moves capable of inflicting great bodily damage, had anyone been on the receiving end. Each seemingly effortless movement bled into the next, as well choreographed as ballet—but with the pulsing force of rock and roll.

The way he kicked out his leg drew her attention to his thighs and calves, the dusting of dark hair there. She didn’t want to remember the coarse feel of his legs sliding against hers—but did.

Her breath caught, even though D’Ambrosia, the one exerting himself, showed not one sign of labored breathing. Only the kind of intense concentration that stemmed from patience and discipline.

A hard sound broke from his throat as he executed one last high kick, then spun in a full circle. He then stood unnaturally still, feet shoulder-width apart, and bowed at an imaginary opponent.

“Are you just going to stand there and stare?” came his low, knowing voice. “Or did you have something on your mind?”

J
ohn wadded the bandanna into a tight ball. This was when she went away. When she always, always went away. When he pulled the blindfold from his face or opened his eyes, when he slapped on the light and crushed the darkness. When he pushed aside illusion, and focused on reality.

His heart pounded hard—from exertion, he told himself—but he kept his breathing level. That was part of the challenge. See how far he could push, how deeply he could control. Make his muscles burn, but don’t let them shake. Make his blood pump, but never let it spill.

Bring his senses to life, but never let them take over.

She stood along the edge of the old, rotting pier, the one he’d fished from as a young boy, the one his daddy had helped his granddaddy build. Her hair was pulled back from her face, in a long braid he would guess, leaving only a few strands feathering against her jawbone. Her cheeks had color. Her eyes were as dark as the brackish water of the dying lake behind her.

And her jacket, sweet Christ, it was her jacket that got to him. Her jacket that let him know she was real and she was there, that she wasn’t some figment of his imagination.

The dark green jacket was big and bulky and it hung from her shoulders, swallowing her slender frame and making her look small and lost in ways John knew better than to trust.

Clenching his jaw, he reached for a bottle of water he’d left on one of the posts. “There’s coffee in the house,” he said, as if the sight of Saura standing with the weeping willow of his youth framed behind her was the most natural thing in the world. “You look like you could use some.”

She lifted a hand to slide a wisp of hair behind her ear, just barely skimming the dark circles beneath her eyes. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

He looked beyond her toward the Acadian-style structure hidden by pines and gnarled oaks the majority of the year. “It’s fresh-roasted—”

“I’m not here for coffee.”

“I didn’t think you were,” he answered easily, trying to see her as T’Paul had described, as a blond or a redhead. Women who changed their appearance and moved in T’Paul’s circles didn’t do anything casually. They didn’t stop by for coffee. They didn’t listen when a cop gave them an order, and they sure as hell didn’t ask for permission. Forgiveness maybe. But as John looked at Saura, he almost smiled.

She so did not stand on his property for forgiveness.

“What then?” He glanced at the position of the sun, knew it was time to get back to the house. “Is there a question I can answer? Something you didn’t understand last night?”

Like the words:
Stay. Away.

The change was subtle, hands sliding into the pockets of her jacket, a flicker in her eyes. “The hit,” she said, sounding nothing at all like a woman lost or vulnerable, but completely in charge. “It was for you—not me.”

Six little words, but they whispered up against him like acid. He felt his hand tighten around the nearly empty plastic bottle, narrowed his eyes toward her. “Come again?”

The cool breeze returned the hair to her face. “The fire…Nathan had it set to take you out. Not me.”

“Who is it?” Lambert sounded nothing like the southern gentleman most of New Orleans thought him to be. “The cop?”

Across the phone line, someone answered.

“He alone?” Lambert asked, then, obviously pleased with the answer: “Then do it…take him out.”

D’Ambrosia grabbed the small microcassette recorder and crushed the rewind button. “Where did you get this?”

Seated across from him at the butcher-block table, Saura kept her expression as blank as she could. Kept her eyes on the man. The cop. But the fascination wouldn’t stop streaming through her. The house, tucked among trees young and old, was…wrong. Austere, as she’d expected. But quaint somehow. Eclectic.

“You have your sources, I have mine,” she said, sneaking a glance at the neatly stacked mail on the counter, divided between bills and magazines; the cast iron frying pan drying in a rack beside the sink. The modern coffee-maker. “And just in case you’re wanting to think this is a fake,” she added, eyeing the two bottles sitting by the stove—one had a whiskey label, the other olive oil. “I can assure you it’s not.”

The conversation came from her own tapes, produced by the voice-activated equipment she’d stashed in Lambert’s neighbor’s yard. She’d planted the bugs not in the phone where he would find them, but in obscure places throughout his house. Technology had made tremendous advancements during her time away from fieldwork.

D’Ambrosia studied her for a long moment, then lifted his finger and depressed the play button, allowing Lambert’s voice to stream between them again. And again.

The main room off to the left called to her, but Saura kept her eyes on the man. Concentration glowed in his eyes. His shoulders were hard and rigid—and still completely bare. He hadn’t bothered to get dressed after leading her inside, hadn’t even pulled on a T-shirt. He’d just set his laptop on the counter, flipped a table chair around and straddled it, leaned forward and listened. The perspiration against his chest had dried, leaving only the dog tags hanging from a silver chain.

Frowning, he jabbed his finger against the stop button again and removed the tape, turned it over in his big hands.

“You don’t have to believe me,” she said, and when she inhaled, the scent of coffee taunted. “That choice is, of course, yours.” Slowly, she leaned back and strummed her fingers against the table. “But…” She let a leisurely smile curve her lips. “Let me put it this way. The call comes just after midnight,” she said, borrowing his tactic from the night before. “I’m in bed, but not asleep.

“It’s Renee,” she added, and finally John lifted his eyes to hers. They were dark and piercing, glittering with an awareness as damning as it was daring.

“Cain’s fiancée,” she clarified, even though Detective John D’Ambrosia would know a detail like that, just as he’d already figured out the grim scenario she was about to paint. “She’s worried.”

The thought twisted through Saura. “She was with Cain when he got a call,” she forced herself to say. Lambert was on to John, wanted him dead. If he chose to ignore the tape…“Something about Lambert and another cop, an ambush—”

“Cute,” he said, standing.

But she wasn’t about to let him dismiss her. “Not really.” And for effect, she, too, stood. But even against her five foot eight, he still towered over her by a good five inches. “Your life is your own, Detective.” Smoothly, she reached for the tape and the recorder he’d left sitting next to the oranges. “Live it how you want to,” she added as he strolled away. “But know that whatever happens to you won’t be on my watch.”

At the sleek stainless-steel refrigerator, he stopped and shot her an odd look. “Your
watch?
”

Wrong word. “My conscience.” She shifted, questioning the wisdom of coming here. She’d told herself to stay away. To leave him alone. He was a cop. He knew how to take care of himself. And yet Lambert’s voice kept playing through her mind. And when she’d finally slipped beneath the covers and closed her eyes, it had been D’Ambrosia waiting for her in the darkness. Then the cold splinters of betrayal. D’Ambrosia moving in slow motion. Reaching for her. Recoiling backwards. Falling. Not moving.

D’Ambrosia’s blood—on her hands.

She’d jerked awake, sat up in bed and tried to catch her breath, knew she had no choice. “For not warning you,” she said, hating the thickness to her voice. Her throat. “We’re even now.”

“That’s why you’re here?” he asked, pulling a half gallon of orange juice from the fridge. “Want some?” He held up the carton. “A life for a life? To pay me back for saving you from the fire?”

Something inside Saura stilled. He made it sound so simple.
A life for a life.
His, for hers. Hers, for his. Once, she’d trusted that illusion, had given it all she had.

“Not even close.” Swallowing hard, she watched him pull a beer stein from a glass-front cabinet. “I would have gotten out of the hotel even if you hadn’t been there to play hero.”

She would have. She. Would. Have.
Somehow.

She always did.

John put down the glass. He put down the carton of orange juice. Gently, he closed the refrigerator door. Then he turned to her, all six-foot-plus barely-dressed of him, and looked at her, hard, with piercing eyes. And when he spoke, it was with a dead quiet that made her throat go tight.

“That’s what makes you dangerous. You really believe that.”

The urge to touch him stunned her. To cross the kitchen and lift a hand to his face. His chest. To touch and feel, to see if he could possibly be as hard as he looked.

But then, she already knew the answer.

“You just can’t do it, can you?” If her heart slammed hard against her ribs, she chose to ignore it. “Can’t say thank you. Can’t admit—” The words jammed in her throat.

He didn’t move, didn’t so much as blink. Just watched her as if she held a still-smoking gun in her hands. “Admit what?”

The sun kept pouring in through the curtainless windows and the birds kept singing. The ping of wind chimes told her the breeze still swirled in from the west. But something cold and dark moved through her, a truth she wished was a lie. “At Lambert’s party—why did you approach me? Why did you come on so strong?”

Now John smiled. It was the slow kind, dark and mesmerizing, like a sunrise but in reverse. “You really have to ask? A beautiful woman—”

“Don’t.” She pushed away from the table and crossed the hardwood floor to where he stood. “Don’t play me for a fool and don’t pretend the reason you approached me had anything to do with my appearance.” The blade of hurt surprised her. “You came on to me for one reason and one reason only.” And it had nothing to do with her. Or them. Or what had passed between them one careless night she wanted to scrape from her memory. “Because I was Nathan’s date.”

His smile deepened, making his cheekbones look sharp enough to slice. “That was an added benefit.”

“And the only one you cared about,” she said against the tightness of her throat. “You wanted to use me, didn’t you?” It was all so clear now. “You wanted to use me to go after Lambert.”

She felt raw and exposed, but D’Ambrosia merely lifted an eyebrow, and reached for the orange juice. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

She watched him pour the liquid into the stein, waited until he brought it to his mouth before pulling her punch. “You still can.”

He stilled, lowered his hand from his face. “Still can what?”

“Use me.” Her heart slammed hard with the words, the dark images that immediately formed. She stepped closer, but didn’t touch. That would be too easy. Too predictable. Too much like the night before, when D’Ambrosia had backed her against the door and taken her hand. Instead, her overly sugary smile was slow and deliberate, and she took a moment to appreciate Detective D’Ambrosia with his back against the wall.

Or in this case, the counter.

“You can’t go near Nathan anymore,” she pointed out, acutely aware of the heat radiating from his big body—and soaking into hers. “He has your number. He wants you dead. But me—”

“No.”

“He has no idea who I really am. What I want. He doesn’t know I was at the hotel—”

“Yet.”

“It’s called a window of opportunity. I can—”

A hard sound broke from his throat. “You can what?” He moved so fast she had no time to prepare. No time to brace. “Get close to him?” he asked, taking her hand and bringing it to his body, splaying her palm against the warm flesh of his chest. “Touch him like this?” With the question his expression shifted, and he raised a hand to her body. And put his palm against the side of her neck. “Let
him
touch
you?
”

Her breath caught. And her throat burned. D’Ambrosia was a man of precision and control. Of discipline—and denial. But there was nothing precise or controlled about the glitter in his eyes. Nothing disciplined about the possessive edge to his voice.

No denial about the way he touched her.

On a deep coffee-drenched breath, she looked up and felt the rush clear down to her toes. “It’s a chance I’m willing to take.” A chance she had to take.

His fingers stiffened against her throat. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that.”

The words, or maybe it was the way he said them, low and quiet without so much as one sliver of emotion, fired through her. “You can pretend all you want to,” she said equally low and quiet. “But it doesn’t change the truth, Detective. You need me.”

His body tensed.

“So badly it scares you,” she added even more softly, and with the words, stepped closer.

For a moment he said nothing. Only looked at her. Looked through her. As if he could reduce her to a puddle and make her go away with nothing more than a hot stare.

Then he moved his hand, sliding his palm along her shoulder and down her arm, and despite the thick fabric of the jacket separating flesh from flesh, she would have sworn she felt every callous. “I’m not the one scared here,
belle amie,
” he said. “I’m not the one who ran away.”

Now his hand slipped beyond the jacket to her wrist, where his fingers curled, and his thumb began to rub. From defense to attack in less than one broken heartbeat.

“What are you afraid of?” she pressed, not about to let him turn the tables on her. “And don’t give me some bull story like you did last night.” When he’d made it explicitly clear just how big a risk she’d taken—and how shattering a mistake she’d made. “I know what I’m doing. I—”

His hand closed around hers. “You have no idea what Nathan Lambert is capable of.”

“And you do. Yes,” she said, not even trying to keep the frustration from her voice. “So you keep telling me. But you might be surprised at what I know.”

“What you do or don’t know doesn’t change the fact that I don’t need a partner.”

Partner.
The word caught her by surprise. She’d insisted that D’Ambrosia needed her, wanted him to use her. But never once had she thought of what they could achieve together as a partnership. Didn’t want to think of it that way now.