Heart of the Hunter Read online

  With a start, Nicole realized she was staring at him. At the smile that seemed oddly familiar.

  “I’m sorry, ahh...” She looked away from his mouth and from his captivating gaze. In an uncommonly nervous gesture, her hand lifted to her throat again, to the pulse that fluttered at its base. “I’m sure you didn’t come to hear any of this.” With a visible effort, her gaze returned to his. “Perhaps there’s something I can help you with, something specific I can show you?”

  “No.” As she had begun to rise he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. The contact was electric and startling and over almost as it began, yet the memory would linger. Drawing away, he smiled again. A tighter, less amused version than before. “I only came to browse. I’d prefer to wander about, see what you have to offer.” His look ranged over the gallery and returned, deliberately, to her. “Then I’ll know how you can help me.”

  She heard an inflection in his voice she couldn’t interpret and saw a subtle difference in the way he looked at her. He was waiting for a reaction, a response to something she didn’t understand. Which was as absurd as the entire encounter had been from the beginning. He was simply a customer, albeit from the handsome cut of his clothing and the way he wore it, one of impeccable taste. But, only a customer, nevertheless.

  “As you wish.” She struggled for the friendly professionalism that was her trademark. Using it as a shield, she brushed her fingers over a panel of digital switches at the side of her desk and the gallery was ablaze with light. A sweep of her hand gave him permission to wander where he would. “Please, look as long as you like. If you have a question, or see something that interests you, my associate should be in shortly and can assist you.”

  With that, Nicole Callison spun her seat back to her desk, ending any conversation. When he moved away, she gathered up a ledger and to her dismay discovered the entries might be gibberish for all the sense they made.

  Still, she tried. Finally, counting it wasted effort, she admitted defeat. Leaning back in her chair, she yielded to impulse and watched him.

  As he moved among the displays or paused to study a painting, he appeared quite ordinary. Granted, with broad shoulders and a body that was lean and fit, he was attractive. But no more than others of his sort who had wandered through her gallery. The sea port and the resorts, on islands that dotted the coastline like sandy jewels, drew them like magnets. They came in multitudes, handsome and charismatic, sailors and athletes. Until, by virtue of their number, their uniqueness became ordinary.

  Her initial unease, if her reaction could be called that, was simply that he’d caught her unaware. Towering over her as he had, the advantage had been his.

  “Advantage,” she murmured, not unduly disturbed by her choice of words, or considering it unusual to think of a customer as having a controlling edge. Mollified by the rationalization, Nicole felt a bit foolish when she thought of the hard-bitten look of danger she’d imagined when she first saw him.

  First opinions weren’t always right, were they? It had to be imagination. Right? If not, why hadn’t it occurred to her to be afraid? If he was truly dangerous in his quiet way, why wasn’t she afraid now?

  Annoyed by the direction of her thoughts, she meant to resolve her nagging questions and dismiss him. Seeking whatever answers had eluded her, her covert stare ranged over him. From shaggy, sun-bleached hair that looked as if it wanted to curl but dared not, to the tips of his leather deck shoes, she inspected him as thoroughly as one would a stallion at auction.

  Except she wasn’t buying. Not today, and not this one.

  As if she’d spoken her disavowal, he looked up from a lithograph. A thoughtful smile teased the corners of his mouth, changing the planes and angles of his features, making them more than pleasant, and much, much more than attractive. And if it destroyed the myth that he was no different from so many others, it strengthened the conviction that any perception of danger in that look and that smile could only be the delusion of a mad woman.

  Disconcerted that he’d caught her staring, she nodded curtly. As she resisted the temptation to sink farther into ignominy, a vague frisson of recall tugged at her memory, then flitted away.

  Perhaps she was mad, after all, for there was still something about him. Something she couldn’t dismiss so easily.

  “Nonsense!” The exasperated grumble accompanied a stubborn jut of her jaw as she returned to the work that waited. But work was a poor match for him. As she catalogued paintings and entered them into the ledger, a part of her resisted as another argued he was perfectly innocuous and just a customer. Summoning an elusive discipline she tried to quiet the notion there was anything familiar about him, and attend to the last details of the sale.

  Five long, unproductive minutes later Annabelle Devereaux bustled in, her usual good-humored apology and bawdy explanation bursting from her before she realized Nicole was not alone.

  “Oops!” She clapped a hand over her mouth, hiding a grin as she looked from one to the other. “Sorry!” she said, and was obviously anything but sorry. “The French libido isn’t exactly a proper topic with business afoot, but I didn’t realize there was business afoot already this morning.

  “Wow!” She interrupted herself to lean over the desk. “What are these? No!” She warded off an answer. “Don’t tell me.” Canvases were shuffled slowly and her grin grew wider.

  “Ashley!” Rising on tiptoe to shift a haunch onto the edge of the desk, she rested a stack of canvases on her knee. “You did it! Nicole Callison, you did it! Ashley Blackmon painted these, and somehow you’ve accomplished the impossible and convinced him to let us show them.”

  “No,” Nicole demurred. “Ashley convinced himself.”

  “Whatever. I don’t care, so long as we have them.”

  “I’d like to include them in this showing.”

  “You mean to sell?” Annabelle lifted an incredulous brow.

  “Not this time.” Nicole shrugged. “Maybe never. Still, I’d like to include them.”

  “Which means we’ll burn the midnight oil to change the exhibit.”

  “One of us will.”

  “Wrong!” Annabelle slipped from the desk and straightened her skirt. “Two of us will.”

  Nicole laughed. “I knew I could count on you.”

  If Annabelle’s grand entrance and conversation commanded Jeb’s attention, Nicole’s laughter stopped him cold. Before, it had been self-conscious and mechanical. But beyond that, he couldn’t remember ever hearing her laugh with such abandon and delight.

  As he saw her now, in an element she’d created, speaking with this irrepressible woman who was clearly a trusted friend, he knew he’d never seen her as happy.

  When this was finished, when he’d done what had to be done, he wondered what would be left of her life.

  “Good morning,” a cheerful voice boomed out. “The boss lady suggested that there might be something I can show you.”

  Jeb turned automatically toward the woman who had appeared at his side. In his millisecond of distraction she’d moved with an astonishingly quiet step after her boisterous entrance. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”

  “I can understand that. The wolf is beautiful.”

  “The wolf?”

  A dramatic gesture indicated the massive head of bronze where his clenched fist rested. “Since you’re two of a kind, it’s natural he would be one of your favorites.”

  At a bit less than five feet, the woman called Annabelle was a foot shorter than he, but what she lacked in height was compensated for by unrestrained flirtation. As their gazes met, hers was flashing, unrepentantly appreciative. His was as aloof as an autumn mist. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Honey.” Annabelle’s eyelids drooped in speculative appraisal. “Any man who looks as good as you, or as bad, has no need to beg anything from me.” A hearty laugh bubbled somewhere in the depths of her bosom as her shoulders shook. “At least, not too hard.”

  “Good and bad?” Jeb mused. �
��An interesting if peculiar analogy.”

  “Interesting, maybe. But not peculiar,” Annabelle declared. “Not peculiar at all. On the surface you’re good-looking in a rugged sort of way, but you can’t fool me. Underneath it you’re as wild and wily as the wolf, and twice as fascinating.”

  “Wild and wily?” Jeb was chuckling now. The woman was outrageous and loved every minute of it. “Just an off-the-cuff analysis, huh? And if you had more time, you could delve a little deeper?”

  “I wouldn’t mind the delving, but it isn’t necessary. Any woman worth half her salt can take one look at you and she knows.”

  “But what does she know?”

  A bold look moved over him again. “She knows everything.”

  His chuckle turned to laughter. “I hope not. Sounds dangerous.”

  “Only for the woman, sugar. But taking a crack at taming you would be worth it.” Abruptly her thoughts hopscotched in another direction. “Now that we’ve settled that, is there something special you wanted to see? Besides the wolf and me, of course.”

  “Nothing, yet.” The words were hardly spoken before he recognized he’d made a tactical error. If he needed to establish himself as a regular and welcome client, he must play what was evidently a game greatly relished by this small person. Play it he would. Teasing her with a look as lecherous as her own, he grinned a lazy grin. The cool gray of his eyes became warm silver. “When I do...need help, that is, should I ask for...?”

  As his voice trailed into another tantalizing pause, he saw delight flash in her eyes. Though she was short, shorter than Nicole, and much heavier, the weight was solid and perfectly distributed. With flawless, copper-hued skin and a Gypsy’s black mane tousled to perfection, she was a handsome woman. Clearly no stranger to masculine attention.

  Indeed, she was handsome, but not beautiful, he decided. Not as Nicole was beautiful.

  Keeping his attention focused on Annabelle, he didn’t need to glance at Nicole to make comparisons. How she looked had been burned into his brain in his study of her dossier and by weeks of surveillance.

  He didn’t need to look at her to remember, nor to know that she had abandoned the pretense of working and watched him openly.

  “I need to know your name,” he reminded Annabelle. “To be sure I get the right woman.”

  Annabelle’s laugh set her bosoms struggling to be free of whatever superstructure confined them. “You are a devil. But you Californians usually are. Always ready to give a woman her comeuppance by reminding her there’s other fruit on the tree.”

  “What makes you think I’m from California?” Jeb was a little alarmed by her astute deduction.

  “I don’t think, I know. It’s the accent. You’ve been away from it long enough and trained enough that there are only little nuances of it left.”

  Her allusion to his training was so perfectly on target that Jeb’s escalating alarm flickered for a moment in his eyes. For once the little woman seemed blithely unaware and chattered smugly on. “The average person wouldn’t hear it, but people come from all over the world to visit Charleston and the islands, and more than a few of them find their way to this gallery. After a while one learns. To be less than modest, I have an exceptional ear for accents and,” she added drolly, “it doesn’t hurt that I work for a former Californian.”

  “I’m beginning to think there’s a lot about you that’s exceptional, Annabelle.”

  “Annabelle! You devil!” She wagged a finger at him. “You’ve known my name all along. But how?”

  “The boss lady mistook me for you when I came in.”

  Annabelle’s rollicking laugh soared. “That would be a little hard to do.”

  “Not when there are Ashley Blackmon paintings to distract one.”

  “That would tend to distract her. At least until she got a good look at you.” She leaned closer, lifting her round face to his, to whisper. “Now that she has, she can’t take her eyes off you. She’s been watching us, you know.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Unusual,” Annabelle declared succinctly. “She rarely pays even the handsome ones more than cursory attention. Now.” She was hopscotching again. “Are you going to be fair?”

  “How so?”

  “Running to type, I see.” She clicked her tongue and sighed. “Playing the rogue to the hilt.”

  Jeb grinned. “Comes with the territory.”

  “I’m sure it does, but are you going to tell me who you are? Or is it that you’re a man of mystery on a dark, secret mission?”

  The woman was uncanny. He wondered if she weren’t the dangerous one. “Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no mystery. As you guessed, I’m a Californian. My name is...”

  “Jeb?” Nicole had risen from her seat. Her palm rested on the top of her desk to steady herself. “Jeb Tanner?”

  His heart skipped a beat and Annabelle was forgotten as he lifted his head and his gaze met the recognition in hers. She took a step, then stopped. He saw the need to believe warring with the disbelief written on her face. Gently, surprising himself at how gently, he said, “Hello, Nicky.”

  “Jeb! It’s really you!” Then she was in his arms. Neither would remember later how she got there, only that she had, and that he’d held her close without speaking.

  When she drew away at last, her face held a look of wonder. “I thought I’d lost my mind, or that I was dreaming. Then Annabelle said you spoke like a Californian, and everything began falling into place.”

  She touched his face, brushing his hair with her fingertips. “Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me when you came in?”

  “Maybe I wanted to see if you remembered,” he murmured.

  “How could I forget? I had a horrendous crush on you when I was fifteen.”

  “But that was also as many years ago.”

  “Time doesn’t matter, a girl never forgets her first crush. Not even a girl who was a nerd.”

  Jeb caught her hands in his and lifted her fingers to his lips, brushing a kiss over their tips. “You were a smart kid, ahead of herself in time and place. But never, ever a nerd.”

  “That would’ve been open to debate.” Keeping her hand in his, she looked up at him in unconcealed delight. “Tell me, what on earth brought you here?”

  The bell by the door jangled, a trio of chattering women paused only long enough to locate them. “Nicole, my dear, there you are.” The eldest of the trio spoke, a haughty summons in her tone. “And Annabelle, how are you, dear?”

  “Never fails,” Annabelle grumbled under her breath. “The gargoyle always shows up the day before a sale, with her cronies in tow, hoping to get the scoop on everyone else. You two continue as you are, I’ll handle her.” She patted Nicole’s shoulder leaning so close their noses nearly touched. “Don’t think I’m not going to hear about this. Every little detail of it. You just don’t have a rogue like this tucked in your past and keep him hidden. Not without an explanation.

  “I’ll be back,” she promised, and with a swish of her skirt, went to do battle. “Mrs. Atherton” they heard her say, as she waded into the fray. “What secrets have you come to pry out of us today?”

  Nicole grimaced at her pointed jab, then smiled a half smile and stepped out of Jeb’s arms. “I’m afraid Annabelle misinterpreted this.”

  “Did she?”

  “You know she did.”

  “So, let her enjoy herself while it lasts.” He kissed her hand again, his lips lingering longer than one kiss needed. “We’ll set her straight later. In the meantime, I’ll let you get back to work.”

  The bell chimed in another customer.

  Jeb lingered, her hand still in his. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Yes.” Nicole agreed and could think of nothing else to say.

  “I could call after the sale.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Releasing her, he tugged at a lock of hair that fell over her forehead. “Luck,” he whispered as
he had when she was fifteen and facing a crucial exam. Leaving her, he went to the door, catching it as a patron entered, sparing them another tinny symphony.

  “Nicole?”

  “Yes?”

  She looked at him with the same unquestioning trust of the coltish fifteen-year-old, and the weight of betrayal crashed down. He could walk away from her and from his mission before that trust was destroyed, but he knew he wouldn’t.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he said softly.

  As he returned to the street he knew that, no matter what lies he might tell, that much was true.

  Two

  Jeb stood at the window. Where he’d stood for hours. The shirt he’d pulled over running shorts as he crawled out of bed had been tossed aside. The field glasses, normally a virtual part of his hand, lay on a table halfway across the room. Beside them sat a carafe of coffee, untouched and forgotten.

  Beyond the window, his shadowy canvas to the world, the turbulent sea was a caldron of colors, shifting and changing as the rising sun raced to challenge the brewing storm. When he first took up his cold-eyed vigil in the moonless predawn hours, black waves tipped with silver washed over an even blacker shore. Now shades of gold rose out of magenta.

  He’d watched each change. From total darkness, to this moment when night met day, he’d noted every nuance with a troubled restlessness.

  For the second night he’d tossed and tumbled until, finally counting his quest for sleep lost, he’d abandoned his bed. For the third morning the sands of the shore would be undisturbed by human footsteps.

  Nicole’s absence, immediately following the sale, came as no surprise. He expected it. From her dossier he knew she kept living quarters in Charleston. A small pied-à-terre, for convenience after tiring late-night sessions in the gallery. For safety, when the drive to Kiawah would be long and desolate. The postsale uproar with its countless details to be addressed would have been such a time.