It was true Kate Shugak was only five feet tall. It was true that taken individually her features-high, flat cheekbones, narrow hazel eyes that slanted up just a hint and that were sometimes brown and sometimes almost green and sometimes gray, a wide, full-lipped mouth, pale gold skin with an olive tint that tanned easily to a warm honey color-were nothing that would excite a Paris designer into hiring her as a model for his next show. Her hair, thick and short and impossibly black, trimmed to her ears and swept back from a broad brow by an impatient hand, was nothing a trendy New York stylist couldn’t improve upon with a hacksaw. Her clothes, white T-shirt, faded jeans, a worn brown leather belt, thin white ankle socks, black-and-white tennis shoes, were so unselfconsciously nondescript as to be almost characterless.
The scar, a thin rope of pale, knotted skin that bisected her throat almost literally from ear to ear, could not by any stretch of the imagination be called arousing. If anything, one look at that, one listen to the rusted voice that throat produced ought to have a sensible man beating feet in the opposite direction at once, if not sooner.
Instead, when she smiled at him, a wide, knowing smile that revealed a set of healthy white teeth whose incisors seemed to him to be noticeably longer than they had been the last time he’d seen them, he had an inexplicable desire to fall to his knees and bare his throat and let her suck right out of him the last drop of any bodily fluid he had on offer.
Maybe it was the way her hips moved beneath the denim, or the way the knit fabric outlined her breasts, or the way her hands curled slightly at her sides, as if in anticipation. Maybe it was the way she moved, a smooth, confident fusion of muscle and bone that did a good job of hiding the strength, the quickness, and the agility latent beneath.
He’d known other women who exuded sex. He’d known other women who had been able to slay men with a single smile.
Kate smiled at him now. “Hey, Jim,” she said, and the two words ran like a rasp right up his spine to the base of his skull.
He’d just never known one like this. Everything he had was at attention. He cleared his throat. Hormones. He was male, she was female. He’d react the same way to any woman. “Kate.”
He was helpless to stop the single syllable from sounding like a plea, and he watched her smile widen. Desperately, he sought for something to say. “I haven’t seen you around the Park lately.”
She laughed, a low, intimate sound in the increasing dusk. A strand of hair fell into her face and she tucked it behind an ear, holding his eyes all the while. “Is that what you came to tell me?” She took a step closer. “Have you been missing me?”
“No,” he said, “no, not at all. I’ve been too busy to miss anybody.”
“Really? What with?”
He tried to think of something noteworthy he’d accomplished over the summer. “Oh. Well. You know. Claim jumping. Fishing behind the markers. Hunting out of season. Rape, robbery, murder. The usual.”
She didn’t move. She didn’t look away from him, either. He started to sweat. It was getting harder and harder to remember why he’d walked away from her last May, why he’d announced an end to his ongoing pursuit, why he’d renounced his goal of getting her into his bed.
It was something about love-he remembered that much. Well, he didn’t love her, and he wasn’t going to, wasn’t going to get anywhere near it, or her, damn it.
Johnny Morgan, elbows on the railing, watched from the deck. It was pitiful, was what it was. Here was this tiny little woman, couldn’t weigh 120 pounds wringing wet, facing down this big, strong, good-looking guy, an Alaska state trooper no less, a man accustomed to command, a man who hunted down criminals and brought them to justice, a man to whom Park rats of every age, culture, and occupation looked to lay down the law of the land. He had to be at least six two, although the Mountie hat he used to wear had made him look even taller than that, and he had to weigh two hundred pounds easy, although the bristling arsenal of badges and guns and epaulets and handcuffs and nightsticks added heft. He was good-looking, too, with heavy dark blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and strong features-jaw, cheekbones, nose. He didn’t look like a wimp, and if half of the Park gossip Johnny had heard was true, he’d had a ton of girlfriends. He just wasn’t a needy kind of guy.
Kate glided another step forward, moving in a way that reminded Johnny irresistibly of a large, powerful cat. Jim looked like cat food, inches away from leaping into his vehicle and roaring off.
Wimp, definitely.
An object lesson was what his teacher, Ms. Doogan, would have called it. No way was he ever going to fall into that honey trap, which was what Old Sam Dementieff called it. The irresistible force meeting the not-quite-immovable object was what Bobby Clark called it.
He shook his head, half in pity for a fellow man, half in shame, and went back inside. It was just too painful to watch.
Just for the hell of it, just because she could, just because her mere presence affected Jim Chopin in a manner that she had to admit she found deeply satisfying, Kate took another step forward, bringing her into physical contact. She could feel his badge, his belt, what she thought might-or might not-be his gun pressing against her. She smiled up at him and purposely dropped her voice to a whisper. “How can I… help you, Sergeant Chopin?”
“Knock it off,” he said through clenched teeth.
She blinked innocently at him. “Knock what off?” She ran one finger down the buttons of his shirt.
He caught her hand before she could start messing with his belt buckle. “Damn it, Shugak, knock it off.” He shoved past her and found a safe, Kate-free place in the exact center of the clearing, free of corners into which she could back him.
No law she couldn’t stalk him, however, pacing after him with that slow, deliberate, unmistakably predatory stride. Her hair gleamed in the last rays of the setting sun like the coat of a healthy, proud animal reveling in her prime. “Hot for this time of year, isn’t it?” she said. She pulled the tail of her T-shirt free and knotted the hem beneath her breasts, leaving a good six inches of smooth, taut, golden-skinned midriff exposed.
Jim thanked God her jeans weren’t low-riders. He wasn’t sure he had a spine that would stand up to the seductive power of Kate’s belly button.
He also felt slightly shell-shocked. It wasn’t that no one had ever seduced him before, usually with his active and enthusiastic cooperation, it was just that he’d had no idea that Kate Shugak could turn it on like this. She was always so sensible, so matter-of-fact, so businesslike. Not to mention hostile, antagonistic, and downright bitchy. It had been clear from the beginning that if she let a man into her life, it would be on her terms, and now, suddenly, she was revealing a secret identity, the Circe inside the Shugak.
He wondered if Jack Morgan had known of this secret identity. If Jack had, it would explain his willingness to cleave only unto her, even to serve out an eighteen-month hiatus in their relationship, waiting for her to come back to him.
Lucky, lucky bastard, he thought, not for the first time, and then pulled himself together. He wasn’t getting sucked into that, no matter how much-yes, he’d admit it-no matter how much he wanted her. It was just sex; that was all. Nobody ever died because they didn’t get laid. And it wasn’t like there was no one else he could go to for aid if such were the case. Laurel Meganack, for example. She’d batted enough eyelash his way to start a small tornado.
That was a plan. If there was anyone who could drive the ghost of Kate Shugak out of his mental attic, Laurel was the girl most likely.
With commendable resolution he ignored the little voice in his head that told him it had already been tried. The summer was strewn with the corpses of women who had heard on the Bush telegraph that Chopper Jim Chopin was once again open for business. The problem was that none of them seemed to hold his interest past “Hello.”