Never Too Late

“Of course.” Even in the pale light, Hunter thought her smile looked strained. “I just need a few more minutes of air, okay? And then I’ll be in.”

Lynn’s mouth softened as she gazed at her daughter, and Hunter thought she would have reached up and grabbed the moon for Kate if she asked for it. “Take as much time as you need, darling. Sam will be there whenever you’re ready.”

Kate managed another smile before her mother slipped back inside, though Hunter was surprised to see a bleakness in her eyes.

He muttered a string of curses in his mind. He couldn’t leave her here twiddling her thumbs while he went off dragon hunting. This was her life.

Of all the people at this wedding gig, he could certainly understand her need to take back some kind of control over the circumstances that had buffeted her for the last six weeks. If finding and confronting her kidnapper would help her achieve some measure of peace—would help her move past her pain and be ready to accept the McKinnons’ love—how could he deny her that?

Surely he was tough enough to control himself around her for a week.

“What time are we leaving?” she asked after Lynn closed the door behind herself and returned to the festivities, leaving them once more in the still, quiet night.

“Early. I’ll pick you up at eight. Does that work?”

“Perfectly.”

Was it just his imagination or did the pinched look around her mouth ease just a little?

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this,” she said. “Going after Brenda is a brilliant idea.”

“Let’s see how brilliant you think it is after a week on the road.”

This had to be the craziest idea she had ever come up with.

Worse, even, than the time when they were second-year med students and she and Taylor had tried to break into the anatomy lab for a little extra study time working on their cadavers.

In the cold, pale light of a December morning, what had seemed so logical the night before seemed shortsighted and foolish when faced with the cold, hard reality of spending at least a week in intimate quarters with Hunter Bradshaw.

Kate stood at the front window of the small second-floor apartment she had moved into the month before, watching for him to pull into the driveway below.

A quick glance at the clock on the microwave told her that even if he was obsessively punctual, he wouldn’t arrive for at least ten minutes, but she couldn’t seem to pry herself away from the window where she stood tracing the filigreed frost collecting on the other side.

She hadn’t slept well, with her nerves on edge and her mind racing. She had finally tired of her tossing and turning a few hours before dawn and had climbed out of bed to start preparing for the trip.

The few things she planned to take had been packed and waiting by the door for hours and she spent the rest of the morning wrapping her few Christmas presents and scrubbing her apartment. Since she barely spent any time at all here, she could find little to clean, but at least she wouldn’t be coming home to a mess.

With all her preparations done, she had little else to do now but stand here at the window watching for him and panicking about the sheer insanity of this situation her impulsiveness had thrust her into.

Whatever had compelled her to insist on traipsing along with Hunter Bradshaw? In what feeble-minded moment would that ever seem like a good idea?

How could she ever have been stupid enough to think she could travel blithely across the country with him when simply finding herself in the same room with the man left her flustered and giddy?

He had always made her insides tremble and her heart rate accelerate. She had been friends with Taylor since their first semester of medical school, more than five years ago. She could still remember the first time she met her friend’s older brother. She and Taylor had been cramming for finals their second semester and had decided to grab a midnight snack at their favorite all-night diner, a humble little place downtown that served divine mashed potatoes with thick, creamy gravy.

They had walked in and Kate had only a few seconds to register a gorgeous man sitting in a booth in the front window with a couple of uniformed cops when Taylor had let out a delighted laugh and dragged her over to meet the brother she often talked about.

She could still remember her first impression—that the two of them shared an obviously close, affectionate relationship completely foreign to someone who had never had siblings of her own, except in a few foster families where she had been barely tolerated.

Her second impression of Hunter Bradshaw had been far more elemental and astonishing—an intense physical awareness of him unlike anything she’d ever experienced. As she gazed into dark blue eyes while Taylor introduced them, her stomach did a long, slow roll and she felt as if something had just squeezed out every molecule of air in her lungs.

The off-duty uniform cops had been flirtatious and charming to a couple of weary young med students and had insisted she and Taylor join them. To her growing dismay, Kate found herself squeezed next to Hunter in the red vinyl booth.

Throughout the next hour she had been painfully aware of every movement he made—the way he leaned an elbow back on the seat cushion, how his mouth quirked up a little higher on one side than the other when he smiled, the way his dark hair curled just a little on the ends.

Her sudden absorption with him had been as unexpected as it was mortifying.

She had always considered herself rather cold when it came to the opposite sex. Men had never been a high priority in her life. Sometimes they hardly seemed worth the energy it took to cater to their egos and their self-absorption.

She thought perhaps she’d been passed over on the whole libido thing because most of the kisses she had experienced in her twenty-two years on the earth to that point had been pleasant, certainly, but nothing to write home about.

In that tired old diner looking out at neon gleaming in the wet street, with her pulse jumping every time Hunter’s long legs would brush against hers under the table or his shoulder would bump her, Kate finally started to get an inkling what all the fuss was about.

Taylor often gave her a hard time because she rarely dated the same man more than a few times. She never told her friend this but she was always looking for that same crazy, exciting, terrifying breathlessness she experienced whenever Hunter was around.

Not that she ever did anything about it. How could she? When she first met Hunter, he had just started dating Dru Ferrin, the ambitious, talented crime reporter at a local television station.

A few months later, Dru had announced she was pregnant and Hunter had become totally absorbed in trying to convince Dru to marry him, in the prospect of becoming a father.

Or so he thought, anyway. After Dru and her terminally ill mother were murdered, DNA tests proved Hunter had not fathered the eight-month-old fetus that had also died from his mother’s gunshot wound.

She had grieved right along with him, first at the child’s death then when he found out Dru had lied to him throughout her pregnancy. And then had come the horror of his arrest and the subsequent trial and wrongful conviction.

She had had a major crush on him. The knowledge mortified her. She was a doctor, for heaven’s sake. Twenty-six years old, well on her way to being established in her chosen career path, and she had a crush on a sexy, dangerous, unreachable male as if she were thirteen years old fantasizing about a pop star.

How on earth would she keep her silly feelings to herself for a week or longer when it would be just the two of them alone on the road?

She would just have to do her best to treat him like she did male colleagues and her other male friends—casual and cheerfully friendly.

Could she pull it off? She was still trying to figure that out when she saw an SUV turn into the small parking area behind her battered six-year-old Honda.

As usual, her stomach performed a long, slow tremble at the sight of that muscular body climbing out of a gleaming Jeep Grand Cherokee the color of a mountain forest.

He wore jeans and a suede jacket that did nothing to hide his powerful build. His years in prison had turned what had already been a sexy, muscled build into something potent and dangerous.

Kate huffed out a breath, heat crawling across her cheeks. Not the kind of thing she should be noticing. She would never survive riding in such close quarters with him if she couldn’t shove those kinds of thoughts completely out of her head.

She was a doctor who had seen more than her share of men’s bodies, both muscled and otherwise. It might require a great deal of effort on her part but she needed to treat Hunter Bradshaw with the same courteous, impersonal distance she treated her patients.

The man was doing her a huge favor by helping her trace her past. The last thing he probably wanted was for her to go all gooey over him.

The doorbell chimed through her apartment and Kate pressed a hand to her stomach, where a whole brigade of butterflies were doing their thing.

After a few deep, cleansing breaths, she pasted on a polite smile and opened the door.

“Good morning,” she said.

He returned her attempt at a smile with one of those shuttered looks he excelled at and she could feel more heat crawl across her cheeks.