Secrets and Desire: Best-Kept Lies / Miss Pruitt's Private Life / Secrets, Lies...and Passion. Barbara McCauley
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and Brown couldn’t be in three places at once. “Just stay put for now. But let me know if anything looks odd to you, anything the least bit suspicious.”
“Got it, but what about the other two guys? Paterno and Clanton?”
“Check ’em out, see what they’re up to, but it’s Donahue who concerns me most. We’ll talk later.” Striker hung up, then called Kelly McCafferty and left a message when she didn’t answer. Angry at the world, he snapped his phone shut. All three of the men with whom Randi had been involved were here. In the city. Great… Just…great. His shoulders were bunched against the cold, his collar turned up and inside he felt a knot of jealousy tightening in his gut.
Jealousy, and even envy for that matter, were emotions Striker detested, the kind of useless feelings he’d avoided, even while he’d been married. Maybe that had been the problem. Maybe if he’d felt a little more raw passion, a little more jealousy or anger or empathy during those first few years of marriage, shown his wife that he’d cared about her, maybe then things would have turned out differently…Oh, hell, what was he thinking? He couldn’t change the past. And the accident, that’s how they’d referred to it, the accident had altered everything, created a deep, soul-wrenching, damning void that could never be filled.
And yet last night, when he’d been with Randi… Touched her. Kissed her. Felt her warmth surround him, he’d felt differently. Don’t make too much of it. So you made love to her. So what? Maybe it had just been so long since he’d been with a woman that last night seemed more important than it was.
Whatever the reason, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Couldn’t forget how right it had felt.
And it had been so wrong.
In an effort to dislodge images of Randi lying naked in front of the fire, staring up at him with those warm eyes, Striker bought coffee from a vendor and resumed his position not far from the door, protected by the awning of an antique bookstore located next door to the Clarion’s offices.
A familiar ache, one he rarely acknowledged, tore through him as he sipped his coffee. Leaning a shoulder against the rough bricks surrounding plate-glass windows etched in gold-leaf lettering, he watched the door of the Clarion’s building through a thin wisp of steam rising from his paper cup. Pedestrians scurried past in trench coats, parkas or sweatshirts, some wearing hats, a few with umbrellas, most bareheaded, their collars turned to the wind and rain that steadily dripped from the edge of the awning.
His cell phone rang and he swung it from his pocket. “Striker.”
“Hi, it’s Kelly.”
For the first time in hours, he smiled as Matt’s wife started rattling off information. The men at the Flying M were still upset about Randi’s leaving. Kelly was working to find a maroon Ford, one that was scraped up and dented from pushing Randi’s vehicle off the road in Glacier Park. Kelly was also double-checking all of the staff who had been on duty the night that Randi was nearly killed in the hospital. So far she’d come up with nothing.
Striker wasn’t surprised.
He hung up knowing nothing more than when he’d taken the call. Whoever was trying to kill Randi was either very smart or damn lucky.
So far.
Cars, vans and trucks, their windows fogged, sped through the old, narrow streets of this part of the city. Striker glared at the doorway of the hotel, drank coffee and scowled as he considered the other men in Randi McCafferty’s life, at least one of whom had bedded her and fathered her son.
Paterno. Clanton. Donahue. Bastards every one of them.
But he was narrowing the field. He’d done some double-checking on the men who had been involved with Randi. It was unlikely that Joe Paterno had fathered the kid. The timing was all wrong. Kurt had looked into Paterno’s travel schedule and records. Paterno had been in Afghanistan around the time the baby had been conceived. There had been rumors that he’d been back in town for a weekend, but Kurt had nearly ruled out the possibility by making a few phone calls to Paterno’s chatty landlady. Unless Paterno hadn’t shown his face at his apartment and holed up for a secret weekend alone with Randi, he hadn’t fathered the kid. Since Randi had been out of town most of the month, it seemed Joe was in the clear.
Leaving Brodie Clanton, the snake of a lawyer, and Sam Donahue, a rough-around-the-edges cowboy; a man whose shady reputation was as black as his hat. Again jealousy cut through him. Clanton was so damn slick, a rich lawyer and a ladies’ man. It galled Striker to think of Randi sleeping with a guy who could barely start a sentence without mentioning that his grandfather had been a judge.
A-number-one jerk if ever there had been one, Clanton had avoided walking down the aisle so far, the confirmed-bachelor type who was often seen squiring around pseudocelebrities when they blew into town. He was into the stock market, expensive cars and young women, the kind of things a man could trade in easily. Clanton had been in town around the time Joshua had been conceived, but, with a little digging into credit card receipts, Striker had determined that Randi, at that time, had been in and out of Seattle herself. She’d never traveled as far as Afghanistan or, presumably, into Paterno’s arms, but she’d been chasing a story with the rodeo circuit, where Sam Donahue was known for breaking broncs and women’s hearts.
If Striker had been a betting man, he would have fingered Donahue as the baby’s daddy. Twice married, Donahue had cheated on both his wives, leaving number one for a younger woman who’d grown up in Grand Hope, Montana, Randi’s hometown. And now he just coincidentally had shown up here. A day before Randi.
Striker’s jaw tightened so hard it hurt.
DNA would be the only true answer, of course, unless he forced the truth from Randi’s lips. Gorgeous lips. Even when she was angry. Her mouth would twist into a furious pout that Striker found incredibly sexy. Which was just plain nuts. He couldn’t, wouldn’t let his mind wander down that seductively dark path. No matter how attractive Randi McCafferty was, he was being paid to protect her, not seduce her. He couldn’t let it happen again.
He felt a bit of hardening beneath his fly and swore under his breath. He shouldn’t get an erection just thinking of the woman…Hell, this was no time. None whatsoever for ridiculous fantasies. He had a job to do. And he’d better do it quickly before there was another unexplained “accident,” before someone else got hurt. Or before the would-be murderer got lucky and this time someone was killed.
Six
She pushed open the revolving glass doors and found him just where she’d expected him, on a rain-washed Seattle street, looking damnably rough-and-tumble and sexy as ever. Obviously waiting for her. Great. Just what she didn’t need, an invitation to trouble in disreputable jeans and a beat-up jacket.
Yep. Kurt Striker in all his damn-convention attitude was waiting.
Her stupid pulse quickened at the sight of him, but she quickly tamped down any emotional reaction she felt for the man. Yes, he was way too attractive in his tight jeans, leather jacket and rough-hewn features. His face was red with the cold, his hair windblown and damp as he leaned a hip against the bricks of a small shop, his eyes trained on the main door of the building. He was holding a paper cup of coffee, which he tossed into a nearby trash can when he spotted her.
Why did she have a thing for dangerous, sensual types? What was wrong with her? Never once in her life had she been attracted to the boy next door, nor to the affable, respectable, dedicated man who worked nine to five, nor the warm, cuddly football-watching couch potato who would love her to the end of time and never once forget an anniversary. The very men she lauded in her column. The men she advised women to give second glances. The salt-of-the-earth, give-you-the-shirt-off-his-back kind of guy who washed his car and the dog on Saturdays, the guy who wore the same flannel shirt that he’d had since college—the regular Joe of the world. One of the good guys.
Maybe, she thought, crossing the street, that was why she could give out advice to the women and men who were forever falling for the wrong kind. Because she was one of