No One But You

She watched the cedar splinter travel over his lower lip from one corner to the other, shoved by his tongue. Her mouth felt parched as bones dried in the sun, and she licked her own lips as she aimed her gaze in another direction. She couldn’t be attracted to him. Could not.

“Fiona,” he said, his voice so low its tones thrummed inside her, “what’s going on?”

Her tongue swiped again at her dry lips. “Nothing.”

“Maybe I can help—”

“I don’t need any help.” He was the last man alive whose help she needed.

“You want to change your answer?”

“No.” She busied her hands, forcing the syringe barrel through the paper.

“Fiona,” he snapped, “let’s just cut the crap, okay? You’re not stupid. If you’re telling the truth, you didn’t know who was in the barn. I could have been the one who shot Everly in the back. Why would you take that kind of risk?”

“Kyle had enemies,” she answered. “I didn’t want to get involved. I don’t want to be involved.”

She cleared her throat and clamped her lips tight. Emotions like some vicious animated kaleidoscope of feelings—jealousy, resentment, even hatred for the way he was able to strike a truce with Soldier Boy—turned inside her.

Not only a truce, either. Soldier Boy permitted this man’s touch.

She had seen him swing down into Soldier Boy’s stall. She’d seen him fall to the floor. But her reasons for leaving him there, for failing to mention his presence to Dex Hanifen, for coming at him with her rifle, had nothing to do with the murder at all.

The point was that Soldier hadn’t killed him. In a deathly still way inside her that she really didn’t understand, that was all she needed to know.

She trusted Soldier Boy’s instincts more than her own. That was the last thing she would admit to anyone, Matt last of all. She dredged up her maddeningly stiff-upper-lip upbringing and buried that messy kaleidoscope of emotion.

“If you knew what kind of man you were dealing with, then what are you doing back on the Bar Naught at all, Fiona?”

“Because I want it back.”

Chapter Three

The Bar Naught was all Fiona Halsey had ever wanted. Ever. “My parents lost it. I want it back. It’s really just that simple.”

“Even if it meant tangling with Everly?” Matt asked. “What am I missing? How did you think you were ever going to get the Bar Naught back from him?”

She met his eyes directly. On this point she was more prepared to lie. “I thought he would eventually get bored. He talked like that. He was a liar, you know. Pathological. Kyle Everly would as soon tell a lie as the truth when the truth would serve him better.” She took hold of her long straight hair and shoved it behind her. “All to prove, over and over again that he could get away with it. To see if he could ride the crest of his charm right on by common sense one more time.”

She popped the metal lid off the vial and swabbed the rubber stopper with alcohol, uncapped the needle, drew up the dose of booster and recapped. She turned away and put down the syringe on the countertop, then plunged her icy hands beneath a rush of hot water at the sink. “Months ago, Kyle offered me the chance to come back to the Bar Naught. He said that I could have it all my way, that—I didn’t know what a liar he was. At the time, I didn’t know.”

She withdrew her hands and the electric eye shut off the water. She grabbed a couple of paper towels from the dispenser and turned around when she thought she could finally manage her own emotions well enough. What she saw in his face encouraged her. “Any other questions?”

“Just the one.”

She flashed on the image of him crashing down into the stall. A dark, unrelentingly handsome man, a stranger breathing the same air as Soldier Boy, gasping for that air like a fish out of water, and Soldier…not moving in for the kill. There was no satisfactory answer she could give him as to why she hadn’t turned him over to Dex.

“Shall I tell you why I want to know?” he asked.

“I don’t care, but listen. Why don’t I just take care of that now so you won’t have to explain yourself?” She tossed the spent paper towels into the trash. “You wait here, and I’ll just go make the call.”

His eyes darkened. “Fiona, I have to know if someone told you I would be here tonight. Answer the question. Yes or no.”

“No.” Whatever other lies she had told him, whatever she had to keep from him, this much was true. “No one told me you were coming. Did you know Kyle was going to be murdered?”

He had the look of a man who thought even a distant cousin of the Queen of England ought to be plucked from the fray and planted back in Kensington Gardens. If he knew the fire she was playing with, everything she had ever wanted would be lost in one fell swoop of alpha-male whim.

No way.

She picked up the syringe again and uncapped the needle. “Roll your sleeve up higher.”

He shoved the flannel as far as it would go, but the long underwear he wore beneath it wouldn’t be pushed higher. She cut him a look and stepped back again. He pulled both shirttails out of his jeans, stuck his hand beneath them and shoved the fabric high enough to free his arm, baring his muscled shoulder and half his torso as well. “Okay?”

She simply refused to be affected by all that powerful masculine flesh, the swirls of dark hair, but it was impossible not to notice. Not to imagine her fingers there. Not to linger overlong with her eyes as if she were preoccupied with her observation of the deep bruises.

His body reminded her she was a woman, and the battering he’d taken only made him that much more dark and dangerously appealing. She swiped his biceps with an alcohol pad and drove her needle in deep.

Nary a flinch, but he made no move to get back into his shirts, either. She made the mistake of meeting his knowing eyes, and she could no more look away than move out of his orbit. Her pulse throbbed.

His heart thudded till she could nearly hear it.

He was in her space now, breathing her same scarce air, and she had stabbed him with her needle to punish her own longings, and the more he sat there taking it, watching her, seeing her, the more powerful he became and the deeper in his thrall she fell.

Somehow she found herself stepping back.

He writhed his way back into his shirts. She turned hurriedly away. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “You need to go along with whatever I say or do. Clear?”

She pitched the syringe into an impervious container. “I understand you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You don’t want to cross me, Fiona.” He looked at her as if to say she could take his threat any way she wanted, except to defy him. “Hanifen and his boys will be back in the morning. And they’ll be saying you’re the one who murdered Kyle Everly.”

The possibility, the rightness of it, the inevitability struck her. She swallowed. “I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t have to believe me, Fiona. Just wait and see. I’ll be a gentleman. I won’t say I told you so.”

She followed him from the treatment room and ushered him out the sliding door that opened onto the paddocks.

The temperature had dropped. She wrapped her arms around herself and thought she heard the nickering of a horse in the stark, distant silence.

Guiliani turned back to her, so close that in the frigid night air she could feel the warmth emanating off his body, smell the scent of hay and horseflesh on him. He was looking at her again, but she looked past him. She wanted him to go.

“Fiona—”

“Go. Just go!”

He turned fully toward her and touched her cheek. She saw it coming and could have turned away. Somewhere inside herself she must have wanted his touch, must have needed a comforting gesture so much that she would stand still for one from him.

“I want you to know this,” he said, his voice low and quietly reassuring. “I want you to know you can tell me anything.”