The Stars of Mithra: Hidden Star

He drank again, slower this time, while she watched him soberly, with great attention. “But that’s not it, Bailey, or at least not all of it. I want to help you. I want to find out everything about you as much as you do. But I also want to make love with you, slow, really slow, so that every second’s like an hour. And when we’ve finished making love, and you’re naked and limp under me, I want to start all over again.”

She had her hands crossed over her breasts now, to keep her bucking heart in place. “Oh” was all she could manage.

“And that’s what I’m going to do. When you’re a little steadier on your feet.”

“Oh,” she said again. “Well.” She cleared her throat. “Cade, I may be a criminal.”

“Uh-huh.” Calm again, he inspected the sandwich makings on the counter. “So is this lunch?”

Her eyes narrowed. What sort of response was that from a man who’d just told her he wanted to make love with her until she was limp? “I may have stolen a great deal of money, killed people, kidnapped an innocent child.”

“Right.” He piled some ham on bread. “Yeah, you’re a real desperado, sweetheart. Anybody can see that. You’ve got that calculating killer gleam in the eye.” Then, chuckling, he turned to her. “Bailey, for God’s sake, look at yourself. You’re a polite, tidy woman with a conscience as wide as Kansas. I sincerely doubt you have so much as a parking ticket to your name, or that you’ve done anything wilder than sing in the shower.”

It stung. She couldn’t have said why, but the bland and goody-goody description put her back up. “I’ve got a tattoo on my butt.”

He set the rather sloppy sandwich he’d put together down. “Excuse me?”

“I have a tattoo on my butt,” she repeated, with a combative gleam in her eye.

“Is that so?” He couldn’t wait to see it. “Well, then, I’ll have to turn you in. Now, if you tell me you’ve got something other than your ears pierced, I’ll have to get my gun.”

“I’m so pleased I could amuse you.”

“Sweetheart, you fascinate me.” He shifted to block her path before she could storm out. “Temper. That’s a good sign. Bailey’s not a wimp.” She stepped to the right. So did he. “She likes scrambled eggs with dill and paprika, knows how to make iced tea, cuts tomatoes in very precise slices and knows how to tie a shank knot.”

“What?”

“Your belt,” he said with a careless gesture. “She was probably a Girl Scout, or she likes to sail. Her voice gets icy when she’s annoyed, she has excellent taste in clothes, bites her bottom lip when she’s nervous—which I should warn you instills wild lust in me for no sensible reason.”

His dimples winked when she immediately stopped nibbling her lip and cleared her throat. “She keeps her nails at a practical length,” he continued. “And she can kiss a man blind. An interesting woman, our Bailey.”

He gave her hair a friendly tug. “Now, why don’t we sit down, eat lunch, and I’ll tell you what else I found out. Do you want mustard or mayo?”

“I don’t know.” Still sulking, she plopped down in a chair.

“I go for mustard myself.” He brought it to the table, along with the fixings for her sandwich. “So what is it?”

She swiped mustard on bread. “What?”

“The tattoo? What is it?”

Embarrassed now, she slapped ham over mustard. “I hardly see that it’s an issue.”

“Come on.” He grinned, leaning over to tug on her hair again. “A butterfly? A rosebud? Or are you really a biker chick in disguise, with a skull and crossbones hiding under my jeans?”

“A unicorn,” she muttered.

He bit the tip of his tongue. “Cute.” He watched her cut her sandwich into tidy and precise triangles, but refrained from commenting.

Because she wanted to squirm, she changed the subject. “You were going to tell me what else you’ve found out.”

Since it didn’t seem to do his blood pressure any good for him to paint mental images of unicorns, he let her off the hook. “Right. The gun’s unregistered. My source hasn’t been able to trace it yet. The clip’s full.”

“The clip?”

“The gun was fully loaded, which means it either hadn’t been fired recently, or had been reloaded.”

“Hadn’t been fired.” She closed her eyes, grasped desperately at relief. “I might not have used it at all.”

“I’d say it’s unlikely you did. Using current observations, I can’t picture you owning an unregistered handgun, but if we get lucky and track it down, we may have a clearer picture.”

“You’ve learned so much already.”

He would have liked to bask in that warm admiration, but he shrugged and took a hefty bite of his sandwich. “Most of it’s negative information. There’s been no report of a robbery that involves a gem like the one you’ve been carrying, or that amount of cash. No kidnapping or hostage situations that the local police are involved in, and no open homicides involving the type of weapon we’re dealing with in the last week.”

He took another swallow of beer. “No one has reported a woman meeting your description missing in the last week, either.”

“But how can that be?” She shoved her sandwich aside. “I have the gem, I have the cash. I am missing.”

“There are possibilities.” He kept his eyes on hers. “Maybe someone doesn’t want that information out. Bailey, you said you thought the diamond was only part of a whole. And when you were coming out of the nightmare you talked about three stars. Stars. Diamonds. Could be the same thing. Do you think there are three of those rocks?”

“Stars?” She pressed her fingers to her temple as it started to ache. “Did I talk about stars? I don’t remember anything about stars.”

Because it hurt to think about it, she tried to concentrate on the reasonable. “Three gems of that size and quality would be unbelievably rare. As a set, even if the others were inferior in clarity to the one I have, they’d be beyond price. You couldn’t begin to assess—” Her breath began to hitch, to come in gasps as she fought for air. “I can’t breathe.”

“Okay.” He was up, shifting her so that he could lower her head between her knees, rub her back. “That’s enough for now. Just relax, don’t force it.”

He wondered, as he stroked her back, just what she’d seen that put that kind of blind terror in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I want to help.”

“You are. You will.” He eased her up again, waiting as she pushed her hair back away from her pale cheeks. “Hey, it’s only day one, remember?”

“Okay.” Because he didn’t make her feel ashamed of the weakness, she took a deep, cleansing breath. “When I tried to think, really think about what you were asking, it was like a panic attack, with all this guilt and horror and fear mixed together. My head started to throb, and my heart beat too fast. I couldn’t get air.”

“Then we’ll take it slow. You don’t get that panicky when we talk about the stone you have?”

She closed her eyes a moment, cautiously brought its image into her mind. It was so beautiful, so extraordinary. There was concern, and worry, yes. A layer of fear, as well, but it was more focused and somehow less debilitating. “No, it’s not the same kind of reaction.” She shook her head, opened her eyes. “I don’t know why.”

“We’ll work on that.” He scooted her plate back in front of her. “Eat. I’m planning a long evening, and you’re going to need fuel.”

“What sort of plans?”

“I went by the library on my travels. I’ve got a stack of books on gems—technical stuff, pictures, books on rare stones, rare jewels, the history of diamonds, you name it.”

“We might find it.” The possibility cheered her enough to have her nibbling on her sandwich again. “If we could identify the stone, we could trace the owner, and then… Oh, but you can’t.”

“Can’t what?”