Heart of Gold

FOUR

“THE STRESS IS making you irrational,” Faith muttered to herself as she paced the width of her bedroom. “That’s the only logical explanation. You’re not really falling for Shane Callan.”

Her entire body seemed to reject the statement she’d just made. An ominous sense of certainty descended on her.

She had to admit the physical attraction had been there from the beginning, from the minute she’d opened the front door and looked up into his silver eyes, from the instant she’d first heard his sexy bedroom voice. She hadn’t been able to deny it even when he had all but accused her of treason.

Lust. There wasn’t anything rational or logical about it.

But this was more than mere lust.

Faith’s slim shoulders rose and fell with her sigh of defeat. She couldn’t have picked a more difficult man if she had held auditions for the part. Shane was jaded, sardonic, a loner… he was battered and tired and alone. Just the memory of him sitting at the piano, pouring out feelings he would never have revealed otherwise, brought a pang to Faith’s heart. There were no two ways about it-the darn man needed love.

“But I don’t have to be the one to give it to him,” she declared with a shake of her head, half wishing he’d never apologized to her for suspecting she was in on the DataTech conspiracy.

At least before his apology his suspicion had been an effective barrier between them. Now that wall was gone. Now Faith knew there was a lot more to Shane than what pleasingly met the eye. Now she was in real peril.

She had a wealth of love inside her, stored up from years of being married to a man who had looked on her as nothing more than an asset. But she knew she would have to be a fool to try to give those feelings to a man like Shane.

Shane Callan was a dangerous stranger, there because it was his job to protect her. Their lives would run on the same track only until the DataScam trial. In a matter of weeks Shane would be gone to fight someone else’s battles. To become involved with him would only be asking to have her heart broken.

No, Faith announced inwardly, she wouldn’t make that mistake. She had settled there to rebuild her life, not to tear it apart all over again.

A knock at her door jolted her from her brooding. Alaina stuck her head in the room. “I just got in and saw your light. Is something going on?”

Faith rolled her eyes. “Rambo is upstairs trying to hunt down Captain Dugan.”

Alaina’s wry smile tilted up one side of her lush mouth as she came in and closed the door behind her. “I don’t suppose it did you any good to explain to him about the captain?”

“A complete waste of good breath. The man has a head harder than granite.” And the rest of him wasn’t exactly Play-Doh, either. The thought sneaked into her conscious mind from her memory, bringing a telltale flush to her cheeks.

“He’s not the type to believe in things he can’t point a gun at,” Alaina said.

Like love and romance. Faith cursed her brain for letting thoughts like that form and surface. She resumed her pacing, hoping the movement, coupled with the dim light in the room, would keep Alaina from reading too much in her expression. Her friend had an uncomfortably sharp eye when it came to reading people.

“Well.” Alaina shrugged, sticking her hands in the pockets of her red cashmere cardigan. “He’ll find out for himself that there’s nothing up there worth arresting. He can’t very well slap handcuffs on an apparition. How’s Lindy? Still itching?”

Faith smiled in appreciation for the change of subject. Her whole body relaxed visibly as she leaned against the carved cherry foot post of her canopied bed. “She’s much better tonight. This might be the world’s easiest case of chicken pox, which means I have something to be grateful for after all. How was the movie?”

It was Alaina’s turn to roll her eyes. “Let me give you a piece of sound advice,” she said, prowling the small bedroom as if it were a courtroom and Faith a juror who needed to hear a convincing argument. Her elegant hands moved in harmony to emphasize her words. “Never go to the movies with a film critic. Our dear friend Jayne, whom I find to be perfectly pleasant in most respects, is a fanatic. She takes her vocation much too seriously.”

“She didn’t like the movie?”

“Roget’s Thesaurus doesn’t hold as many synonyms for the word bad,” Alaina said dryly.

As if summoned, a head of rich auburn waves poked into the room. “Is there something exciting going on?”

On cue a thud sounded overhead. Alaina grinned and motioned her inside. “You’ll love this. Callan is upstairs playing ghostbusters.”

“Bad casting,” Jayne said, making a face as she slipped into the room and shut the door behind her. “I have serious doubts about Faith’s Mr. Callan playing comedy. He doesn’t seem particularly fun loving. My guess is he’s a Capricorn.”

“He’s not my Mr. Callan.” Faith protested so quickly the words seemed to tumble over each other on their way out of her mouth. She looked on in horror as her friends exchanged a significant glance. “I mean, he’s here because of me, but I don’t want him. I mean, I don’t want him here. Not that I’d want him anywhere.”

She groaned under her breath and knocked her forehead against the bedpost. She’d just managed to make it fairly obvious that she was attracted to the man. She jumped as Jayne’s hand settled gently on her shoulder.

“Honey, if you’d ever care to translate that into understandable English, I’d be more than willing to listen.” Jayne shot a questioning look at Alaina, who physically backed away from the topic.

“Don’t look at me for advice on this. I’m a lawyer. I’m the last person you want to talk to about romance, unless it concerns community property.”

“No,” Faith said dejectedly. “Shane Callan is the last person I want to talk to about romance. The man wears a gun strapped to his ankle, for heaven’s sake! I saw it when he was tying his shoe. A gun! That’s not the kind of thing that fits readily into my lifestyle. That’s something that should be in a movie!”

“It was,” Jayne said earnestly. She poked her hands into the patch pockets of her wildly flowered dress. “Didn’t you see Deadly Justice?”

“No.”

“Just as well. The script sucked swamp water.”

Faith shook her head, both to clear it and to get her thoughts back on track. Jayne was infamous for losing the thread of a conversation. In another few sentences she could have them discussing metaphysics.

“I can’t afford to be attracted to a man like Shane Callan,” Faith announced, as if saying it aloud could steel her resolve.

An authoritative knock sounded at the door. Without waiting for an invitation, the object of her dismay stepped inside the bedroom, his expression that of a thwarted hunter. He directed his ferocious frown at Faith.

“I told you to lock the door.”

“It doesn’t have a lock,” Faith said, shrugging, as she pushed herself away from her bed. She knew his sense of caution was for her own safety, but she hated the idea of having to be a virtual prisoner in her own home. Dryly she said, “I was about to push the dresser in front of it when Jayne and Alaina came in.”

“We’re not armed, honey, and we’re only slightly dangerous,” Jayne assured him with a wink.

Shane scowled at her and holstered his pistol, wincing at the pressure the wide leather strap exerted against his aching shoulder. It felt like a branding iron burning into his sensitive flesh. He managed to ignore both the pain and his blurring vision. “After that phone call I’d think you’d be taking this business seriously.”

“We are, Mr. Callan,” Alaina said, stepping forward to defend her friends. “We’re just trying to make the best of a bad situation.”

Suddenly feeling weak, he let the subject drop as he leaned back against the door. Once again his gaze fell on Faith, who stood beside her bed. Desire stirred through the haze of pain. Desire to stretch out with her on cool crisp sheets and feel her small soft hands on his fevered skin. Her eyes widened slightly as she took in his predatory expression.

“You didn’t find anything, did you?” she blurted out, crossing her arms to keep her hands from fidgeting.

Don’t let him see he makes you nervous, she thought, then groaned inwardly. Lord, Faith, he’s a man, not a charging rhinoceros. Besides, she was fairly certain he wouldn’t have come running had she announced she was having hopelessly romantic notions about him. At the moment his mind was occupied with things other than the mysteries of biological attraction.

Shane took in the feminine decor of the room in a narrow-eyed glance, not answering. He hated to admit defeat. He had followed thumping noises all over the upstairs of the main house and not gotten so much as a glimpse of the cause. Every time he’d thought he’d cornered the culprit, the thump had sounded three rooms away.

It irked the hell out of him. If only he weren’t so damned tired. If only he could clear the fuzz out of his brain, he was sure he could have figured out what was going on up there. At the moment he didn’t believe he could figure out two plus two.

“No.” The word was the next best thing to a growl. “I didn’t find anything, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything up there.”

Faith nearly chuckled at the disgruntled scowl that tugged down his straight black brows and the corners of his mouth. She gave him a smug smile, unable to resist. “I told you so.”

“I’m not about to swallow that ghost story,” he declared. He started to lift his left hand to wag a finger at her, but the pain in his shoulder stopped him. He gritted his teeth against it as it rocketed through his chest and arm, and he leaned back against the door again to steady himself.

“We have a friend who is a psychic investigator who could no doubt explain it to you better than I,” Faith said, trying to imagine Shane Callan and Bryan Hennessy embroiled in a debate over paranormal phenomena. “But he’s working in Britain right now, and the best I can do is tell you in plain English-this house is haunted.”

Jayne plopped down cross-legged on the pink-and-cream-colored quilt that covered Faith’s bed, her voluminous skirt billowing around her. “You should talk to Mr. Fitz about it. He’s full of ghost stories about this place.”

Shane scowled harder at mention of the irascible old caretaker. “Ghost stories aren’t the only thing he’s full of, nor are they what I want to hear.”

“I can’t offer another explanation,” Faith said.

“You’ve been through the whole house. Your men have been watching it constantly. No one could have gotten in.”

“Unless they had help from inside.”

Alaina shook her head as his cool gray gaze settled on her. “We’ve had this conversation before.”

He turned to Jayne, who started in surprise at his suspicion. “Don’t look at me, honey! I don’t even like violence in film. I’m a firm believer in the transcendental rise of man above his baser physical nature.”

Shane opened his mouth to comment, but Faith cut him off with a friendly warning. “Shane, please, stop accusing my friends.”

“It’s my job,” he said, exasperated by her overabundance of blind trust.

“Well, you’re very good at it. The only person who’s managed to escape your jaundiced eye is Lindy.”

Shane did a better job of ignoring her sarcasm than he did of ignoring the way her crossed arms lifted her breasts. The womanly mounds plumped together beneath the fabric of her sweatshirt, the outline of hard nipples clearly indicating she wore no bra. Business, Shane, he told himself. Strictly business.

“What about secret passages? Have you found any as you’ve been working on the house?”

The man was remarkable. “Who do we look like, Charlie’s Angels?” Faith asked. “I’m opening the place as an inn, not a spook house.”

“You’re the one going on about ghosts,” Shane grumbled. He rubbed at the incessant pounding in his right temple. Damn, but his head was feeling fuzzy. He barely heard Faith’s next words through the thick, cotton-wool fog that enveloped his brain.

“We have them.” She shrugged, knowing she probably wouldn’t have been able to convince Shane had Captain Dugan materialized at her side that very moment, peg leg and all. “What can I say?”

Shane pushed himself away from the door, his legs feeling as thick and heavy as tree trunks. The puzzle would have to wait until morning to be solved. He couldn’t think anymore. Damned if he was going to be able to move. He had to find a place to sit down for a couple of minutes.

Faith’s heart lurched as she realized how pale he looked. His face had gone as white as the apparitions he refused to believe in. Alarm streaked through her as he took another step and dropped like a rock at her feet.

“We’ve got to get him to the hospital. Jayne, go call the ambulance.”

“No. No ambulance. We can’t attract the attention. The whole case will be shot to hell.”

“Damn your case!”

Shane could hear the conversation going on above him. He recognized the voices as those of agent Del Matthews and Faith Kincaid. Del sounded unflappable. Faith sounded frantic. They both sounded far away.

He tried to rouse the strength to stand, but his body was nothing more than dead weight, oblivious to the commands of his considerable will. He couldn’t even muster the energy to offer an opinion on the situation. It took every scrap of power he had to concentrate, to keep from slipping over the edge into the black void of unconsciousness.

“I can handle this, Ms. Kincaid. I was a medic in ’Nam. It’s not as serious as it looks.”

“He’ll need medication-”

“It’ll be taken care of ma’am.”

Shane forced his eyes open a slit and caught the look Alaina Montgomery shot at Del. “Lord, they’re worse than the damn Boy Scouts-always prepared.”

Suddenly Mr. Fitz loomed overhead like a giant billy goat, scratching at his snaggled whiskers, an unholy light in his eyes. The smell of fish hung around him like an acrid cloud. “Lord, ladies, what did ye do to the rascal? Did he have it comin’?”

“Mr. Fitz, please stand back,” Matthews asked, exasperated. The towheaded agent leaned over Shane with a penlight, checking his pupils for response.

Shane squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, Faith was bent over him, concern etched in every feature of her heart-shaped face. She sure was pretty, he noted, needing something to fasten his mind on. Her teeth dug into her full lower lip. He remembered how sweet that lip tasted-like cherry soda. She reached down and stroked his cheek with fingertips that felt like icicles on his burning skin.

She was worried about him. It was there in her lovely sable eyes, but Shane could feel it more than see it. He grasped it with a sense that had no name and wasn’t counted among the five most normally used. He could feel Faith’s concern. And he wondered, just before he lost consciousness, what it would be like to let down his guard and let this woman’s concern touch his innermost self, the lonely man he kept locked inside him behind walls of wariness and cynicism.

Heaven. It would be like heaven, but heaven was a long way out of his reach.

The dream he fell into was an old one. For months it had been his nightly companion, but he had gradually banished it. In recent years it had returned to haunt him only when he had been too weak to fight it off. This was one of those times. The shiver that coursed through his big body as the scene began to unfold in his mind was one of dread. A sick sense of anticipation twisted like a knife in his chest.

Ellie Adamson. She stood at the end of a long, white corridor, nothing more than a dark silhouette at first. As he rushed toward her, her features became visible. She looked so young, with her pixie face and short fair hair.

Sweet, idealistic Ellie. She shouldn’t have been the one to stumble across the conspiracy at the training center in Quantico. Shane knew he should have been able to talk her out of involving herself in the case. He shouldn’t have fallen in love with her. He shouldn’t have let her die.

It was his fault. Ellie had stayed in because of him. She had died because of him. And his punishment was to watch it happen again and again in his dreams.

Always it happened in slow motion, increasing Shane’s belief that he should have been able to prevent the tragedy. But he hadn’t been able to move fast enough in reality, and he never could in his dreams either. Every time it was the same. He could see her turning toward him, see the light of recognition in her eyes, see her reach out to him, see the bullet explode into her chest.

As he held her and felt the life seep out of her, he brushed her hair back… and looked down on the face of Faith Kincaid.

“No!” he shouted.

It wouldn’t happen again. He wouldn’t let it happen again. Gathering what strength he had, he pushed Faith from his arms and the nightmare from his mind.

Promptly he fell into another dream. The Silvanus bust. He’d spent three years submerged in their organization. They were men who dealt daily in drugs and extortion, then went home at night to families. They talked about contracts on people’s lives the same way ordinary businessmen talked about mergers and acquisitions. They were men who took the idea of the American dream and twisted it inside out until it was an ugly, surrealistic nightmare.

Shane had despised them for what they were. By the end of the case he had nearly come to despise himself. He had gotten too close, lost his focus, lost his edge, and nearly lost his life because of it. He could still see Adam Strauss’s face twisted in rage, still hear the hoarse cry as the man realized Shane was the one who had betrayed him and the organization he worked for. Once again Shane felt the bullet slam into his shoulder.

The dream became even more disjointed then. There were bits and pieces of memory from the emergency room and the hospital. He listened again to John Banks’s slow monotone explanation of Strauss’s escape, and to reassurances spoken in the same emotionless tone of voice.

“He’ll never find you, Shane. We covered your tracks so well, it looks like you vanished into thin air.”

Then he saw himself floating through the black void of space, touching nothing and no one.

Faith dipped the washcloth into the pan of water again, wrung it out, and lifted it to Shane’s forehead. He tried to push her away and twisted restlessly on the sheets. Dodging his arm, she shushed him and pressed the cool cloth to his brow.

Matthews had diagnosed the problem as an infection to the gunshot wound in Callan’s shoulder. The necessary medications had magically appeared and been administered. He had assured Faith all they had to do now was wait for the drugs to kick in. Shane would be fine in a day or so. This wasn’t anything he hadn’t gone through before.

A gunshot wound. That ought to tell you something, Faith Kincaid, she thought with a sigh, as she sat back in her chair beside his bed. This was a man to steer clear of. He wasn’t a part of the world in which she wanted to exist. She was an ordinary woman with ordinary needs and dreams.

At any rate she wasn’t the sort of person who craved a lot of excitement. She didn’t need to get involved with people who took getting shot in stride as a normal hazard of their everyday lives.

But when Shane moaned in his sleep, she bent over him to stroke a soothing hand along the hot, rough, beard-shadowed plane of his cheek. The action was as automatic as breathing. She responded to him on an instinctive level. Just as she had turned to him when she had been stricken with fear, she could not turn away from him while he was stricken with fever.

Fever wasn’t all that was plaguing him, she thought, as she tried to quiet him. He moaned and mumbled protests, his head snapping from side to side on the pillow. Sweat beaded again on his forehead as he struggled with some hidden demon. Faith thought of the emotions she had heard in his music-the longing, the loneliness-and wondered if there was any connection to what haunted his dreams.

Romanticizing again, Faith, she scolded herself, and nibbled on her lip.

In all fairness it was difficult not to fantasize, considering the circumstances. She felt like the heroine of a historical novel, a damsel nursing a fallen knight-who happened to be more handsome than the devil himself. With a sigh she sat back and studied him as he settled into a deeper sleep.

Again the lines of his face struck her as being aristocratic-the high cheekbones, the straight nose, the finely chiseled mouth. Even in sleep it was a strong face. And the strength continued down the corded muscles of his neck to his broad shoulders. Whorls of black hair adorned the planes of his chest and swirled down in a line bisecting his abdomen, disappearing beneath the sheet he kept trying to kick off. Faith’s cheeks bloomed fuchsia as her imagination rushed to picture the half of him covered by eyelet-edged ecru linen. If the top half of him was anything to go by, the bottom half of him had to be breathtaking.

Who was he, she wondered, trying frantically to get her mind off his anatomy. Where was he from? What was his family background? How could she be so attracted to him without knowing these vital bits of information? She wasn’t the sort to fall for a man based on looks alone.

Her gaze wandered around his room, taking in every detail that might give her some clue to the enigma that was Shane Callan. He was neat. His clothes hung in the armoire rather than over the furniture. What few personal items he left out were on the oak nightstand. There was a silver flask, a pack of cigarettes, two guns, and a book of poetry.

Smith and Wesson, and William Butler Yeats.

He was a riddle inside a puzzle inside an elegantly handsome facade.

Unable to stop herself, Faith reached out with one finger and traced the length of his arm. It was a trail that followed the hills and valleys of muscle of a man who used his body as well as his mind. The hair on the back of his forearm rasped gently against her fingertips, and tingles of awareness shot through her. She pulled her hand away as if his fevered skin had singed her. Her gaze jerked back up to his shoulder, where a fresh bandage covered the bullet wound that was giving him such grief.

She wanted a simple life, a quiet life.

“No, Faith,” she whispered to herself. Even now attraction tugged between them, but she denied it. “You don’t want to get involved with this man.”