For some reason that made Summer think again of Cinderella, whose hands must have been rough and chapped from the soap and water, with nails broken and black from the ashes and soot of the hearth. What must that poor girl have felt as she watched the Prince take her hand in his royally pampered one and gracefully raise it to his royal lips? Why, Summer thought, didn’t any of the books, movies or plays ever tell you what was going through her mind? At the very least she had to have been dying of embarrassment
Summer fixed her eyes on Prince Ch…uh, Riley Grogan’s pristine shirtfront, unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth and said firmly, “It’s impossible. I have my job. The children have-”
“Your kids aren’t going anywhere, I’m afraid. And neither are you.” His voice was as implacable as when he’d put the FBI man in his place. “Think about it As long as you three are targets-”
Summer stared at the tiny mirrors that were Riley’s black onyx studs, feeling dazed, as if she’d been hypnotized by them. Suddenly the whole thing seemed like a nightmare to her. “This is crazy,” she muttered. “I’m a veterinarian, for God’s sake. A mom with two kids. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen to people like me.”
“Hard as it is for you to believe and accept,” Riley drawled in that calm, patient and suddenly very Southern voice, relaxing his hold on her wrists so that it became at the same time gentler and more compelling, “somebody is out to do you harm. All you need do to remind you of that fact is to think about what happened to your house trailer.”
Summer closed her eyes. Oh, God, she thought, swaying a little. It isn’t a nightmare. It’s true. It really has happened. They had nothing-except, thank God, they still had one another, and the animals. The clothes on their backs. Whatever had been in the children’s backpacks. And, of course, that wretched car…
“This is no time for misplaced pride, Mrs. Robey.” Riley’s quiet voice had taken on a slightly harder edge.
Summer thought, Pride? What pride? How could she possibly have any pride left? She couldn’t even work. She couldn’t go to her family, not even to leave the children. Oh, God, she thought, what if they came after us there? How would she ever live with herself if she brought this mess to Bella’s family? To Mom and Pop? To Evie?
“Our first priority,” said Riley, “is gonna have to be your safety-yours and the kids’. That’s what you need to be thinking about right now.”
“Yes.” My children. The thought was strangely calming. Conscious, suddenly, of warmth and pulse beats, Summer opened her eyes to find that her wrists-in fact, her forearms-were cuddled up against the stiff white shirtfront she’d been staring at so intently only moments ago, and that the pulse beats were her own, tapping joyfully against the smooth pads of Riley’s fingertips. Letting her gaze travel upward, she found what seemed to be the same pulse-no, not a pulse, but a muscle, a tiny knot of tension-beating in the side of Riley’s jaw.
A strange hollowness filled her, a dizzy, light-headed feeling she hoped was only exhaustion. Carefully removing her hands from their gentle restraints, she said, “Yes, of course you’re right,” and took a breath. “Right now, I have to think of the children.”
Was it like this for you, Cinderella? she wondered as she turned her back on the totally incongruous vision of the Prince standing there in the flesh before her. She went to the sink, turned on the water and plunged her wrists into the stream in a determined effort to drown those tap-dancing pulses. Was this what prompted you to throw caution and good sense to the winds and go riding off with a man you hardly knew? Was it just that you knew you couldn’t possibly stay where you were a moment longer? Did you feel you had no choice? Maybe, she thought, it wasn’t true love after all, just simple expediency.
It occurred to her then, that trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea, if a person were scared enough of water, the devil might not look all that bad.
Not that she suspected Riley Grogan of being the devil in disguise, or anything even close to it In fact…
“It’s you I’m concerned about, Mr. Grogan,” she informed him quietly as she reached for a paper towel and then turned to the rest room door, an ironic little smile on her lips. “I don’t think you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
“Oh, Lord, what have I gotten myself into?” Riley muttered the words aloud sometime later that evening-or more accurately, early the next morning-as he sat in his study nursing a large brandy and a bandaged finger. If anybody had asked him, he would readily have admitted it was no accident that the words were arranged in the form of a prayer.
Except for the fitful and distant grumble of thunder, his house was quiet. Blessedly quiet. He relaxed in it, slouched down on his spine in his favorite chair with his feet stretched out on the matching ottoman, the snifter cradled on his chest. His eyes were closed as he savored, along with the old-woodsy aftertaste of the brandy, both the quiet and the thunder-the latter because it echoed his mood at the moment, the former because he had an idea it might prove to be the last of such moments for a while.
He had a headache, and his finger throbbed to the dirgelike pace of his heartbeat. And it was becoming increasingly clear to him that he had lost his mind.
There were few things in life Riley Grogan valued more than his privacy. He considered his home his personal refuge, a haven that in the past he’d guarded as jealously as a wolf would guard his lair. Yet, inconceivable as it seemed, there were at this very moment asleep in one of the several extra bedrooms he called “guest rooms”-though he seldom if ever had any-not one stranger, but three: an exhausted woman, who happened to be his newest client, and her two minor children. Oh, and had he mentioned her cat and her dog? And-he stared balefully at his bandaged finger-one apparently demented parrot.
What had he been thinking of?
As if his mind had been waiting for that question, had already rewound his memory tapes to the proper place and had just been waiting for the order to push Play, he found himself watching a replay of that scene in the rest room at FBI headquarters in Augusta, those last few moments before she-Summer Robey-had pulled her hands from his and turned to wash them and her face in the sink. He’d never forget the way she’d looked at him then. Doomed but not defeated, like a magnificent wild creature caught in a trap. He’d never forget the way he’d felt, either, as if something had struck him hard in the chest and momentarily interrupted the normal rhythm of his heart.
He hadn’t known whether to be relieved or sorry when she’d left him immediately after that, focusing instead on her kids. While she’d been doing whatever one did to get children ready for a trip, Riley had gone to get his car. Following Agent Jake Redfield’s instructions, he’d driven around to the back of the building and up to what had appeared to him to be a blank wall, which had opened, James Bond-like, to admit him to an underground garage. In that stuffy, dimly lit cavern, he and Redfield had transferred various pet accessories from an anonymous FBI sedan to the trunk of Riley’s Mercedes-food and water dishes, assorted bags of dog, cat and parrot chow, cat litter and the appropriate container for same, something covered with carpeting that Jake had told him was called a cat cave, and what appeared to be a miniature-size jungle gym. Enough equipment, it had seemed to him, to outfit a small invasion force. At least, he’d thought, it didn’t look as if he was going to have to stop at an all-night pet shop on the way home.