Bound By Passion: No Desire Denied / One More Kiss / Second-Chance Seduction

It was also the key to becoming the truly independent woman she wanted to be. A girl would want to separate the two problems and solve them one at a time. A woman would take on the challenge of juggling two or three agendas.

Anyway, why not? A thrill moved through her just thinking about it. There had to be a way to find the necklace and fulfill that fantasy she’d written seven years ago. She’d just have to find it.

Turning off the kettle, she refocused her attention on making tea and noted with some satisfaction that her hands were steadier as she poured water into the china pot. Though the specific details of the sexual narratives she’d buried seven years ago remained a bit fuzzy, her overall goal was still crystal clear. That one searing look Reid had given her ages ago had awakened a desire in her that couldn’t be denied. Wouldn’t be denied.

All she had to do was find a way to convince him. She measured out tea leaves into a tea ball. As she swirled some of the hot water in the teapot to warm it first, then tipped out the water into the sink, she noted that her hands were perfectly steady.

Good. But this was not the time to wonder how it might feel when she ran them over Reid Sutherland’s skin. After carefully adding boiling water to the china pot then adding the tea ball, she turned back to face the table. She had a much more pressing problem.

Someone had tried to run Piper down with a car.

Before her sister had gone into the bedroom to change, Nell had spread out all three letters carefully on the table so that when Duncan and Reid arrived, they could examine the evidence. The third letter frightened her the most.

Losing another member of your family.

The man who’d gunned his car straight at Piper wasn’t fooling around.

Neither was she. Nell welcomed the spurt of anger. She turned back to the counter, opened a drawer, and located a pad of paper and a pen. From the time she’d first learned to write words, she’d made it a habit to capture her ideas on paper. Moving to the table, she read the third letter again.

This time it was something else entirely that jumped out at her.

Forty-eight hours.

That was the important part of the message. Why hadn’t she absorbed it sooner? A ticking clock was a literary device many writers and moviemakers used. She wrote the number on the pad. The writer of this story wanted to put pressure on her to find the necklace fast.

The sudden knock at the door had her nearly dropping her pen.

“Duncan made good time,” Piper called from the bedroom. “I’ll be right out.”

Nell set down her pad and pen on the counter, before she moved to the door and opened it. It wasn’t Duncan standing there. It was Reid. For the first time in her life, she experienced what it was like to be struck dumb. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Lucky for her, his attention was focused on the young officer who’d agreed to stand guard outside on the landing.

Hers was focused on Reid. She might have been transported back in time. Except he wasn’t the same. On that day, her eyes had been riveted on a twenty-two-year-old boy on the edge of manhood. Right now she was looking at a man. Perhaps the most intimidating man that she’d ever seen. His shoulders were broader, his face leaner, the angles more defined. Even the long rangy body was more muscled.

Harder. That’s what it was, she decided. Reid Sutherland looked bigger and harder than she had remembered him being. He was definitely not storybook prince material anymore. Those characters were never scary. And Reid was—just a little. When he turned, and she met his gaze, she realized that one thing was exactly the same. He could still make her throat go dry, make her bones melt in that strange way, and she had to press a hand to her heart when it gave that little flutter.

“Nell?”

She realized that she wasn’t going to get his name past the dryness in her throat.

“Reid, come in.” Piper joined her at the door. “The letters are on the table. Duncan?”

“On his way.”

As Nell stepped aside and let Piper lead Reid into the kitchen, she felt a rush of relief. Her legs were working. He was standing in the tiny kitchen shrugging out of his suit jacket. Just to make sure she could, she shifted her gaze to Piper. Then she thanked the young officer who’d allowed Reid up the stairs.

No worries. Her body was working again. Any moment now her brain would catch up. It was all going to be good. She turned back to the kitchen. Reid stood in profile, leaning over the table reading the letters. He looked every bit as attractive and dangerous from the side as he had face-to-face. Her gaze went to the gun that he wore in a shoulder holster.

Of course he wore a gun. And of course he looked dangerous and intimidating. That was his job. What surprised her was she found the whole package incredibly arousing. She was just going to have to get used to the dry throat, the heat pooling in her center and the fluttering sensation beneath her heart.

Focus.

Following the direction of Reid’s gaze, she looked at the three threatening notes on the table. They were what she had to concentrate on now.

* * *

HALF AN HOUR later, Reid leaned a hip against the counter in the tiny kitchen. The table offered two seats and as soon as his brother had arrived, Reid had encouraged Piper and Duncan to sit. Both of them were shaken up. Not surprising since two attempts had now been made on Piper’s life in the past ten days.

Duncan was currently on the phone with a friend of his, Detective Mike Nelson, who was officially handling the case. One of his officers had already placed the three letters in evidence bags and taken them away. Reid was sure there wouldn’t be any prints, other than Piper’s and Nell’s. Whoever had orchestrated the one-two-punch attack on the MacPherson sisters today had planned it too carefully to make a careless mistake. According to the young officer on the landing, the second part of the punch had come within a hairbreadth of being successful. The bastard would have run Piper down on the street if not for Nell’s quick thinking and amazing reflexes.

Reid shifted his gaze to where she stood arranging mugs on a tray and once more absorbed the overload to his senses. He was almost getting used to her effect on him.

Almost.

He certainly hadn’t been prepared when she’d opened the door of the apartment. That first sight of her had hit him in the gut with the power a double-barreled shotgun. The sexual pull had been even more potent and primitive than he’d recalled. Seven years ago, he could blame it on hormones, but he found it harder to rationalize it now and impossible to deny.

Thinking back, he recalled that he’d sensed her the instant she’d opened the door—a tingling awareness along all of his nerve endings. And he’d caught her scent—something he couldn’t quite describe. When he had turned away from the young officer and looked into her eyes, his mind had gone clear as glass, and all he’d seen was her.

All of her.

He was trained to take in numerous details in one glance, but they’d never registered so clearly on his senses before that he’d lost track of his surroundings. In that freeze-framed instant in time, he was completely absorbed in taking her in. The golden-blond hair that was clipped back from her face fell below her shoulders. The jacket and pants in some clingy fabric revealed a neat athletic body with more curves and longer legs than he remembered. Even as he registered all of that, his gaze hadn’t wavered from her face. He couldn’t look away from those eyes. They were still that dark, deep blue—the color of Eleanor’s sapphires—and every bit as fascinating. Then there was the pale-as-milk skin, the soft unpainted mouth, the lips that were slightly parted. In surprise? Anticipation?

Nell? There was a question in the word he’d spoken, but he still wasn’t sure what he’d been asking. What he knew was that for an instant he’d been tempted to step forward and take a taste of that mouth. It was fear that had kept him from moving. Fear that he might not be able to stop with a kiss.

No woman had ever made him afraid before.

Then Piper had come to the door, and he’d remembered who he was, where he was, and that this was Nell.

His stepsister.

He wished he could think of her only that way—the tiny and fragile girl who had to be cared for and protected. But the girl he’d carried around in his memory was turning out to be a sharp right turn from the woman who’d rescued her sister with a flying tackle. As a man who had fine-tuned his abilities to anticipate the future, Reid normally didn’t like surprises. But in Nell’s case, there was a part of him that was looking forward to them.

As long as they didn’t distract him from the job he had to do. The MacPherson sisters were currently the priority he had to focus on.

He shifted his gaze back to the table where Piper was frowning down at her cell phone, examining the photos she’d taken of the three letters as if she had missed something. But she hadn’t missed anything. The message was clear. Someone, and he was betting it was Deanna Lewis’s partner, wanted Eleanor’s sapphires badly enough to kill off the remaining members of the MacPherson family to get them. The would-be killer’s focus seemed to be on the sisters for now, but the threats extended to their father, his mother, their aunt Vi. And because of their relationship with Adair and Piper, Cam and Duncan could also be on the list.

“Send me something as soon as you have it,” Duncan said, then ended his call. “Nelson says that the car was just reported stolen from a hotel parking garage. But two of the eyewitnesses have arrived at the precinct. They’re going to work with a sketch artist. If all goes well, they’ll have something to put on the early-evening news.”

“The sketch probably won’t help us much,” Nell said as she served tea to Piper and Duncan. “Both witnesses said the driver was wearing a hat low on his forehead, a beard and sunglasses. Those are pretty standard items for a disguise. In fact, he could even be a she.”

Reid exchanged a glance with his brother. He was impressed with her analysis. And her focus. It was stronger than his was.

Piper frowned at her cell. “You should have told us the second you received the first letter.”

Nell moved forward and rested a hand on Piper’s shoulder. “I should have acted faster after I received the first letter. I won’t make that mistake again. Whoever is behind the notes planned everything very carefully, and I must have been under surveillance. In Louisville, the letter was delivered to my work. To do that here in D.C., the job was trickier. The manager of Pages told me the sign’s been in the window for almost a month, so the author of the letter knew exactly when I’d be there to sign for it. Arranging for the instant delivery was a piece of cake. But he had only a few hours to verify that Piper was with me and that we’d eventually have to cross the street to get to the apartment. It was a good bet that we’d stop for lunch or coffee at the café. We’ve done that every day since I arrived. All he had to do was wait.”

“I agree,” Duncan said. “He planned everything meticulously.”

High praise from a profiler, Reid thought.