Читать книгу For Her Eyes Only - Tori Carrington, Tori Carrington - Страница 7

“JAKE, DO I EVER HAVE THE WOMAN FOR YOU….”

Jake McCoy tucked his chin toward his chest and squinted against the September morning sunlight. If any words could put the fear of God into him, those were it. Melanie, his younger brother Marc’s new wife, had said them at the McCoy place last night—right after his other brother Mitch’s new wife, Liz, took a perfectly good chicken and mutilated it beyond recognition for Sunday dinner.

His measured footsteps echoed off the asphalt of the parking lot across the street from the Immigration and Naturalization Service field office building in Arlington, Virginia. He hadn’t responded to Mel’s frightening proposition. Marc had answered for him, reminding his pregnant wife that Jake wasn’t interested in a woman. That none of the McCoy men were. They had to be bitten in the ass before any of them would even consider the idea of marriage.

Jake had been embarrassed by the resulting laughter.

Then again, how was Marc to know how very close he’d come to getting married? Long before his younger, brash brother had even had his first sexual experience.

He tightened his grip on the files he held in his left hand, then absently moved his other hand to pat the breast of his jacket. Perhaps close wasn’t exactly the word for his only brush with the M word. He’d been close. The woman he’d been dating, Janice Tollerby, was shocked when he’d pulled out the simple gold ring and proposed on their fourth date.

He still couldn’t figure that one out. He’d known on their first date that he and conservative Janice could form a workable union. It was unimportant that he was new to the dating scene and that they hadn’t known each other long.

For the first time he’d cut loose, taken a chance. And for the second time, he’d lost an important woman in his life.

He’d never taken a risk like that again.

He was a simple man, with simple tastes. He respected and appreciated routine, stability, discipline. He got up every morning at five-thirty, no matter what time he made it to bed. His need for simplicity was what led him to work for the INS. Those who didn’t belong within the country’s borders, or were no longer welcome, he sent home. Couldn’t get neater than that. In fact, if not for his brothers, he’d probably never use any of his vacation time. It was difficult for him to justify leaving important cases in limbo even for a day. In an unpredictable world, he liked predictability. It comforted him to find the same selections in his refrigerator. When he replaced his furniture, he bought like pieces. And he had six identical dark brown suits in his closet. One for each workday, and an extra just in case.

His older brother Connor especially took great joy in teasing him about what he referred to as his anal tendencies. It didn’t bother him. Well, most of the time, anyway.

It was a mystery still how David had managed to talk him into five days of hiking—hiking, for cripe’s sake—through the Blue Ridge Mountains. With everything they needed strapped to their backs. Jake grimaced.

He patted the left breast of his suit jacket again. The familiar billfold holding his INS agent ID wasn’t there. It hadn’t been lying on his bedroom bureau that morning when he got up. And a thorough search of his apartment and car hadn’t turned it up, either. He supposed it was possible he’d left it at the McCoy place last night, though not probable. There was no reason for him to have taken his ID out of the back pocket of his Dockers.

Then again, he wouldn’t put it past one of his brothers to lift the sucker so he’d have to take his vacation, which officially started today.

Vacation. What David had planned sounded more like hell on earth.

He crossed the street, then looked at where his identification usually filled out the front of his jacket—and rushed headfirst into someone barreling in the other direction.

Jake didn’t know how he’d overlooked the female who was pushing away from him. She had curly black hair and round brown eyes. Perhaps it was her height, which couldn’t be more than five foot four to his six two. Or maybe it was her build, which was somewhere between skinny and petite.

“Excuse me,” he said, running his fingers down the length of his tie.

She looked a million miles away even as she stared at him. In the bright sunlight her skin was a shade lighter than freshly milled paper, her lips colored a rich burgundy. She wasn’t the type of woman he’d normally find attractive. Aside from the obvious contrasts in their sizes, she was too…tousled, as if she did little more than finger comb her dark curls. Curls that a light breeze tousled even further. And her mouth… His gaze fastened on it. Her mouth was too…distracting. Provocative.

Her gaze finally seemed to focus on him. She murmured something under her breath, then brushed past him in the direction of the parking lot.

Jake stood stock-still. He felt as if he’d just been sucker punched in a way he’d never experienced, and Lord knew he’d weathered his share of punches. He couldn’t seem to draw air into his lungs; his knees felt ready to give out.

Slowly, he continued toward the building, wishing the sensations away. He’d have to make a point to watch where he was going from here on out. He held open the door for a small group exiting the building. First item on his agenda: unload the documentation he promised to bring over from the investigations unit. Second: locate his identification.

Keys jangled. He glanced over his shoulder. In the lot across the street, the woman was unlocking the driver’s side door of a battered old Ford. A once-over told him the tires were bald and he suspected she hadn’t had the oil changed in the past ten thousand miles. His inspection also told him that she had incredibly shapely calves. And that she was probably much shorter than five foot four when she took off the impractical, thick platform heels she had on.

He caught a glimpse of a man walking in her general direction at a brisk pace, likely on his way to his own car.

Jake turned toward the door he held. No one else was exiting. A statute ought to be enacted disallowing women to have legs that looked as good as hers did. He caught the ridiculous thought. Well, at least they shouldn’t be able to wear skirts that complemented those legs as nicely as hers did. It was downright distracting.

He absently patted his empty jacket pocket again, then slid another gaze at the woman’s legs.

The man moving in her direction quickened his pace. Jake dragged his attention away from her long enough to figure out that the guy wasn’t hurrying to get to his car, but was rushing for her.

He let go of the door, watching as the man knocked her over and grabbed her purse. Jake broke into a run, too far away to stop it from happening but close enough to catch up to the figure. The guy slowed to pull something out of the handbag, then dropped it. Jake swept up the purse, then lunged for the envelope the guy had taken, snatching it away. Their gazes locked. Just as Jake reached to grab him, the guy turned tail and ran. He disappeared into the depths of the city, the clap of his shoes quickly blending into the sound of car engines, blowing horns and a nearby siren.

MERDE.

The concrete pavement was cold and hard under Michelle Lambert’s behind. She stared at a scratch on the driver’s door of her car, her legs spread-eagle in front of her, her hair hanging in her face. After everything she’d gone through today, there didn’t seem to be much point in moving lest she stumble into yet another nightmare. Yes. Better she should sit there. Breathe. Pretend what was happening wasn’t. Wait until someone woke her from what had to be some sort of twisted sequence of events from an artsy, senseless independent film, the type that won awards in Cannes, not far from the town she’d grown up in in France.

Someone had snatched away everything that verified her existence: her passport, her plane ticket home, her money.

She forced herself to blink. Was it really just that morning that she’d discovered the manager of the crummy motel she was staying at had forgotten to give her her phone messages? By the time she’d called that swindling private detective she’d hired, he was gone for the day. His gum-smacking secretary had told her he’d need at least five hundred more American dollars to continue on the case. Dollars she hadn’t had before her purse was stolen by some greedy, bloodsucking American.

She clamped her eyes shut. But the simple move wouldn’t let her escape. She groaned, remembering her appointment with the INS mere minutes ago. The immigration officer’s voice had been so clear, she could practically still hear it. “Sorry, Miss Lambert, but we can’t honor your request for an extension on your B2 tourist visa. You’ll have to go back home to France tomorrow.”

Home.

France.

Without Lili.

She’d jump out of the plane window before she let that happen.

She opened her eyes, a foolish, tiny thread of hope winding through her. If she didn’t have her passport, they’d have to let her stay, wouldn’t they? At least until she could get replacement papers—

“Ma’am?”

Her gaze snagged on a shiny pair of men’s shoes, then slowly drifted upward to a man’s chest—a tantalizingly wide chest belonging to someone who towered over her like some sort of silent, handsome sentinel.

She looked into his face. “It’s you.” It was the man she’d bumped into earlier. The man who had large, slender hands and even larger calm gray eyes.

He held out her purse.

Michelle nearly burst into tears on the spot. “Merci.” She choked the word out in French, forgetting for a moment to speak in English. She rifled through the contents of her bag. Her passport. Her return plane ticket. Her compact, hair-brush, a snapshot of Lili she lingered over for a moment, multicolored receipts she’d accumulated over the past six weeks. Where was her money?

Her movements growing jerky and quick, she started looking through the contents again.

“Here.” The man held her slender bill holder toward her. She noticed the way his gaze slid over her compromised position, his pupils huge, his throat working around a swallow. A bolt of unexpected awareness spiked through her as she accepted the money from him.

“That’s all he tried to take,” he said. His voice seemed to come from somewhere very deep within him and vibrated right through her. “Are you…okay?”

Michelle pushed her hair from her face, looked where she clutched her purse in her lap, then stared at the run in her nylons. Her last pair of clean nylons. She felt like crying all over again. “No. I think you should just take me out back and shoot me.”

His quiet chuckle drew her attention from herself and zoomed it in on him. He reached down. Michelle stared at his long, tapered fingers. Nice hands. Strong. Sexy. She placed her right hand in his, his strong grip lifting her to her feet.

“You hear about the crime, tell yourself you’re being safe, you know, looking over your shoulder to make sure no one’s following you. Checking the back seat of your car in case someone is hiding there. Double wrapping the strap of your purse to make it a difficult target. Then—bam! Some degenerate pig gets you anyway.”

She sank her teeth into her lower lip. The more she babbled, the closer she moved to the tears she tried so hard to hold at bay. That’s all she needed on top of everything else that had happened that day. To collapse into an unflattering pile of hysterical female in front of this very virile man.

She shivered at the undiluted heat that traveled from his hand to hers, only then realizing his fingers were still neatly wrapped around hers.

He cleared his throat, then withdrew his hand and patted the front of his jacket as if looking for something that wasn’t there.

“You are an ex-smoker, yes?”

“Excuse me?”

She gestured toward where he patted his jacket. “I know many ex-smokers who keep the habit of reaching for a cigarette long after they’ve quit. My father is one.” She slid the money envelope into her purse, then slung the strap over her shoulder.

“No…no, I don’t smoke.” He glanced away, as if caught looking at something he shouldn’t be. Michelle glanced down. Aside from the run in her nylons and some dust on the back of her skirt, she supposed she looked all right. He cleared his throat again. “Shall I call the police? Or do you want to go to the hospital first?”

“Police?” Michelle’s mind caught and held on the word. No, she definitely didn’t want to waste any of the precious time she had talking to police. Every moment that ticked by was one more she wasn’t using to find her daughter. “No, no.” She lifted her purse for his inspection. “See, he didn’t steal anything, yes?”

The corners of his sexy, generous mouth curved upward. “No.”

“So no police.”

“No police.”

“Good.” Michelle couldn’t seem to tug her gaze away from his mouth. In every other way, this man appeared disciplined and ordered. But his mouth…. She ran her tongue along her teeth. His mouth looked downright delicious.

“Coffee then?”

“Coffee?” she repeated, blinking at him.

“Or tea.” He seemed to grow inches taller as he straightened. “You, um, look like you could use a cup. You know, to settle down before you get back on the road again.”

He nodded toward her hands. They shook slightly. No doubt the day’s events were beginning to take their toll, but she didn’t know how coffee or tea or anything with caffeine could remedy the situation.

He nodded to the right. “There’s, um, a café a couple of blocks away.”

His gaze was direct. His eyes clear. And just being near him made her feel safe in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. In at least eight weeks. Before Lili was taken.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

The man seemed surprised by her response, which didn’t make much sense. Why should he invite her out if he expected to be turned down?

She followed him across the street where he picked up a manila file folder he must have dropped when he tore after the purse snatcher. He straightened the papers in it, looked at the INS building, then at her. “I guess I should introduce myself, shouldn’t I? I’m Jake. Jake McCoy.”

“Michelle Lambert.” She thoroughly looked him over, thinking herself certifiable for agreeing to have coffee with this beautiful stranger, much less pondering all the other possibilities his nearness presented. But those same possibilities made her feel gloriously alive in a way she hadn’t for a long, long time.

THREE QUESTIONS puzzled Jake. Who was this woman? What was he doing here with her? And why couldn’t he shake images of her naked and moving restlessly beneath him from his head?

He sat across the bistro-style table from her, slightly turned to the side because he was too tall to sit as designed. Michelle Lambert took a generous pull from a latte, or at least that’s what he thought she’d called it. She sat back with a satisfied sigh, licking the white foam from her upper lip in a provocative way that made him want to groan before he looked around to see who was watching. “It is not like mine, but it will do,” she said.

Jake found himself running his tongue along his top lip, wondering not only how the foamy concoction would taste, but how it would taste on her.

He looked away. Everything about this woman seemed to throw him for a loop. Her sweet, spicy scent was light, almost nonexistent, making him want to lean closer and breathe it in. Her accent, decidedly French, was heavy…sexy, which was a way he’d never viewed a foreign accent before.

He didn’t know why he’d suggested coffee with her. He also didn’t know why he was in the trendy coffee shop he must have passed a hundred times but had never entered. He glanced around the busy place. It seemed they served everything but coffee—at least as he knew it. He supposed part of the reason he’d extended the invitation was he couldn’t see her getting into that car in the shape she was in. Besides, for a brief, telling moment, she had looked like she’d…needed someone. And he’d felt an inexplicable urge to respond to that need.

That he battled against a completely different need of his own was another matter entirely.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, her small fingers curled around a cup that could have doubled as a soup bowl. “I…I really needed this. I haven’t had a cup in six weeks.”

He raised a brow. Six weeks? His mind clicked. He assumed that she hadn’t had a cup of whatever it was she was drinking because she’d been in the country for that long. If that was the case, and if she was in the country on a B2 tourist visa, then it should be about to expire, if it hadn’t already.

He didn’t like his train of thought. Especially since it didn’t seem to change his almost unbearable attraction to her one iota.

“My pleasure,” he said in delayed response to her thank you.

She smiled. The action sent his stomach down somewhere in the vicinity of his knees. “You don’t speak much, do you?”

“I’ve been told it’s not one of my stronger suits.”

“That’s okay. I’m of the personal opinion that people, as a rule, talk too much anyway. You know, when your friends tell you, ‘I’d really like to go back to university,’ or ‘I keep meaning to lose that last five pounds,’ my response is always that they shouldn’t talk about it, they should just do it. Sometimes it seems the moment they say it, the importance attached to the statement loses all impact, you know what I mean? Anyway, how exactly do they expect you to respond? I think it’s their way of asking you to share all those things you’ve been meaning to do but haven’t, as a type of shared misery.” She waved her hand. “I don’t go in much for that.”

He stared at her. He hadn’t known a woman could say so much without taking a breath.

She smiled. “Then tell me what is.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said talking isn’t one of your stronger suits. What is?”

He noticed that her eyes were a light, light brown, matching the color of her designer coffee. He found himself returning her smile. “Well, I’d have to talk to tell you that, wouldn’t I?” Her laugh was as smoky as he thought it would be. “Um, my job.” Oh, but that was lame.

“Your job?”

“Yes.” He didn’t offer more. It was suddenly important to him that she not know he was with the INS. He was drawn to her openness. Her teasing smile. And he suspected that if she knew what he did for a living, she’d close all that off to him. He didn’t want that to happen. Not yet, anyway.

He was relieved when she turned her attention toward the sugar decanter. She straightened it, then the napkin holder behind it, her gaze scanning the café’s interior. “I once wanted to open a café.”

His brow rose again, but for a completely different reason.

“Oh, not here. In Paris. Until Papa pointed out that the last thing Paris needed was another coffee shop.” That smile again. She tucked her mass of unruly hair behind her right ear. Jake was inordinately fascinated with the move and found himself wondering if her hair was as soft as it looked. And pondered how it would feel trailing a path across the sensitive skin of his abdomen. “So I switched my plans to a restaurant.”

Her laugh caught him unaware. What was funny about that?

“You know. If Paris doesn’t needed another café, it needs another restaurant even less?”

“Oh.” He cleared his throat again, then blurted, “You seemed distracted.”

She squinted at him slightly, as if not understanding.

“When we bumped into each other earlier.”

The light in her eyes diminished. “Yes. I was distracted.”

She took another pull from her cup, and he looked at his own. He wasn’t sure what it held. Was afraid to find out. “Any particular reason?”

He noticed then that she bit her nails. They were too short, barely crescents on her fingers. Unpainted. “Yes. There is a reason. Tomorrow, I’m told, I must leave your country full of swindling private detectives and bloodsucking purse snatchers. Go back home.”

He held his gaze steady on her. Just as he suspected.

She gestured with her hands. “They, those people don’t care that I need to stay here. That I need to find my daughter. They tell me they can’t help me. They can’t grant me an…”

“Extension.” He finished her sentence.

She squinted at him again, making him wonder if she normally wore glasses. He scanned her features, imagining her with all that unruly hair pulled into a smooth twist—

“Yes, an extension.”

“So you can find your daughter.”

Her hands stilled on her cup. “Yes. Her father, or the man who calls himself her father when he didn’t want any involvement in her life before now, came to Paris two months ago and…took her. Brought her here.”

“Your husband?”

She shook her head. “No. He and I, we had a brief—how do you say it?—relationship. No, no, an affair. You use the same word, yes? Five years ago. He was an American living in Paris. I was a waitress. Lili was the result.”

Jake stared at her. Not so much shocked by what she’d said, but shocked that she was saying what she was as easily as she was. And that he found it impossible to tug his gaze away from her animated face. She was a single mother who’d had her child out of wedlock. And she was foreign. Not that he had anything against foreigners. At one time or another, all Anglo-Americans had been foreigners to this land. But in his job as agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the word foreigner took on a whole new meaning.

Not knowing what to say in the situation, he asked, “So your daughter’s four?”

She briefly closed her eyes, her long, dark lashes casting shadows against her pale skin. She murmured several sentences in French. The thick, nasal sound wound around him in a way he wasn’t sure he liked. It made him feel…lustful. He found himself wishing he knew the language so he could understand what she’d said, though he was sure it had nothing to do with his increasingly uncomfortable state. “Yes. She will be four this Saturday…five days from today.” She stared at the tabletop, but he doubted she saw it. “I should have never given Gerald a copy of her birth certificate when she was born. I’d wanted to include him, yes? Instead, he used it to get her an American passport and take her away from me.”

She looked so helpless at that moment. Much as she had in the parking lot when he’d returned her purse. He was filled with an inexplicable, urgent need to pull her into his arms. To smooth her curly hair. Tell her everything would be all right.

On the heels of that sensation followed a physical pull that left him feeling as if he’d downed a pitcher of beer in a single sitting.

The reaction was so completely alien to him, he wasn’t sure how to respond. No one had ever stirred such a complete physical response in him. He had stopped paying attention to the countless hard-luck stories he heard on a daily basis about six years ago. Stopped counting the number of illegals he’d taken to the airport and put on the next plane out. Why Michelle Lambert’s sketchy situation should affect him so baffled him.

“Have you visited the States before?” he asked quietly.

Normally he might not have noticed the slight coloring of her skin, but he’d been staring at her so much, any variation was noticeable. He wished he knew exactly what it meant. “Yes…I visited the west coast years ago. Vacation.”

He grimaced. “So you’re going home tomorrow?”

A waitress approached their table. “Can I get you two something else? A warm-up, maybe? The elephant ears are fresh.”

Michelle waved her away. “No, thank you. I don’t wish for anything more.” She looked at him. “You’ve been far too generous already.”

“Please,” he said.

“No. No, thank you.” She gathered her purse and got up. “I really must be going now.”

Jake rose so quickly, he nearly knocked the table over. All he knew was a sudden, overwhelming urge to stop her from leaving. He curved his fingers around her arm. The heat that swept through him and pooled in his groin was instantaneous.

She gazed into his face, clearly puzzled. Then her expression changed. Her pupils widened, nearly taking over the tawny brown of her irises. The open sensuality he saw in the coloring of her cheeks, the softening of her mouth, made looking anywhere else impossible.

She slowly leaned forward, tilted her head and pressed her mouth firmly against his. Jake couldn’t have acted more surprised had someone zapped him with a live wire, but he’d be damned if he could pull away. She tasted of chocolate and coffee. Smelled of fresh air and open interest. He wasn’t sure, but he could have sworn he felt the quick flick of her tongue over his bottom lip before she pulled away.

He stood dumbfounded. Had that really happened? Had she just kissed him? His almost painful erection told him she had. And that he wanted her to do it again.

“Why…what did you do that for?” He barely recognized the low, gravelly voice as belonging to him.

She glanced quickly away, then gave a slight shrug. “Just curious.”

“About what?”

Her gaze slid to his face, and she smiled. “Curious as to whether your lips felt as good as they looked.”

She began to move away again, and he let her. Near the door, she turned toward him. “By the way, they do.”

She stepped through the door.

Jake stood for a long moment watching her, an ache the size of Virginia in the pit of his stomach.