Star-Crossed Lovers

“A little young to be working here, aren’t you?” Kale muttered to the insistent girl.

She showered him with a glowing smile and thrust her hand at him in an eager greeting. “I’m Amanda Morris. I’m twelve, and I’m going to be a pilot as soon as I’m old enough to get a license.”

He shook her hand and grinned. His face did not crack when he grinned, Jessi noted, but did marvelous things. His eyes sparkled, his smile nearly dazzled her. He was what Amanda would call drop-dead gorgeous when he smiled.

“My dad was a pilot,” she said. “He died last summer.”

Jessi heard the faint catch in her voice, but Amanda handled it well. She was only beginning to talk about her parents’ untimely deaths. Jessi put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

The gesture was not lost on Kale, who said, “I’m sorry, Amanda, for your loss.”

She looked up and gave him a painful grin of acknowledgment, and then turned to Jessi to help her fill out the form.

As Kale was signing the slip, he asked, “How old did you say you were, Amanda?”

“Twelve,” she replied.

“You have the look of a Caldwell,” he said. Jessi tried not to cringe at his probing.

“Of course. My mom’s fault. I look totally like a Caldwell. I don’t look anything like my dad,” she said, tearing off the credit card flimsy and handing it to him.

“I see,” he said, studying her face and then turning his dark, flashing eyes onto Jessi. “And which Caldwell sister is your mother?” he asked quietly, suggestively.

Jessi’s spit caught in her throat and she coughed in a spasm. The question terrified her. Fear of discovery bit her sharply. “Kale is an old friend, Amanda, and his pilot is waiting for him. Now, get your books.”

Amanda dashed for her books because it meant they were leaving and would soon eat. It was what Jessi had counted on. She forced a smile at Kale who was studying her thoughtfully.

Suddenly, he set down the briefcase and came swiftly around the counter, moving with an unreal speed. He pushed her against the cabinet behind the counter, and one hand slid into her hair, grasping it, forcing her head back. “Did you have a baby twelve years ago, Jessi?” he rasped in a voice so whispery hoarse she’d not have recognized it if he hadn’t been in her face.

She felt the length of him pressed against her, felt the heat of his body through his clothes, felt helpless with her head tilted so that his face was only inches from hers and her breasts pressed against his chest.

“Did you?” he demanded, shaking her head with his skillfully painless grasp on her hair.

“If I did, Kale Noble, it certainly wasn’t yours, now, was it?” she retorted, regretting that her words came out in a whisper instead of the taunting condescension she was aiming for.

The darkness in his eyes seemed to spread over his face, and the anger became a kind of grimace of pain. His face moved closer to hers, and his lips were almost touching hers when he softly blew his words into her mouth. “You lied. And you cheated. I could have.” Then he backed up abruptly and released her hair and strode to the door. He flung it open, stopped, and inhaled raggedly. “Damn you, Jessi Caldwell,” he rasped and was out the door.

She buried her face in her hands and called out weakly, “It’s Jessi Morris. Morris!”

In near panic, she wondered what he saw when he looked at Amanda. Certainly he wouldn’t notice the distinctive Noble hairline with the widow’s peak in the middle of the forehead, or the vaguely square shape of her jaw so like the Noble boys. No, he seemed to have missed that. What he saw were Jessi’s fawn brown eyes and dimples and puffy lips.

He thought Amanda was her daughter, and that Jessi had been with another man when she was telling him she loved him, and she had let that other man do what Kale was using all his idealistic self-discipline not to do to her. He actually thought she.but, no, he would figure it out. He would know she couldn’t have deceived him about having a child. They had been seeing each other while Charlotte was pregnant, although he hadn’t known about the baby. He would certainly figure out that Amanda couldn’t be Jessi’s. He wouldn’t know, of course, that Jessi having a baby was an impossibility in any case.

But when he figured out that Amanda was Charlotte’s, he might also realize that she had been pregnant at the time of the accident. He was going to learn that Amanda was Paul Noble’s daughter, the only grandchild in her generation, and she had been kept from the Nobles deliberately, legally claimed by the man Amanda thought had fathered her.

Jessi had thought until a year ago that Charlotte’s husband, Frank, was Amanda’s father. As a teen, Jessi had been appalled by her mistaken notion that Charlotte had gotten pregnant by Frank when she was talking marriage with Paul Noble.

If Jessi had been more mature and wise, she might have put the pieces together. After all, Charlotte had run off within days of the accident to marry Frank, a man she had met years earlier at Fancy Acres Resort, but had never considered more than a distant admirer. And to settle in Kenross, which she had never liked. And then to have a baby nearly two months “premature.”

It was just another of a string of events that Jessi had handled badly. Even the vague suspicions that had occurred to her, she ignored, discarded, pushed aside.

Not until Charlotte’s letter enlightened her did she realize the extent of the lies. Now it was a deeply personal thing, for among the truths Charlotte had admitted was that Amanda was Paul Noble’s daughter.

Amanda, who was like her own child, was now in danger of being lost to her.

She didn’t think she could bear to give her up if the Nobles should claim her. Amanda was the only child she would ever have.

Perhaps it had been foolish to be coy with Kale. It had just been too frightening at the moment to admit that Amanda was Charlotte’s and Paul’s.

And yet, she hadn’t been prepared for how painful it had been to be the object of Kale’s contempt, and to see the flash of hurt that underlay his intense rage at the Caldwell sisters.

Nor had she been prepared for the feel of his hard hot body pressed against her, the spicy male scent of him, and the awesome power he kept leashed so that he could bury his long fingers in her hair and not hurt her.

She had found the experience strangely exciting, sensing in him something savage, tempered only by what she identified as his innate elegance.

As she listened for Amanda’s eager thudding down the steps and watched the Noble aircraft taxi away, she knew Kale would soon figure out the truth about Amanda’s birth. She would have been wiser to be honest with him.

When he did figure out the truth, Jessi had two alternatives: she could confirm his suspicions, or she could lie and deny Paul’s fatherhood.

She dreaded Kale’s next visit.

Three (#ulink_0b55c696-e1ca-5339-9f4e-c32fb6561b7c)

Kale flung open the door of the plane, pushed himself out onto the wing and leaped to the ground. Although it wasn’t as hot and humid in Kenross as it had been a hundred and fifty miles south in Minneapolis, the blast of hot July air turned his skin sticky.

He slammed the door, and then he looked up at the small high-wing plane on base leg, perpendicular to the runway. Suddenly the engine stopped and the prop spun to a slow undulating roll. He almost felt the pilot’s shock as one wing dipped sharply and then straightened. It looked for an instant as though it would take a nosedive.

All his senses moved to alert. He thought he was seeing an accident about to happen, but somehow the plane continued, turning to line up with the runway, gliding onto the tarmac with uncertain hops and jolts as it landed and then braked in jerking assaults.

Phil came to stand alongside him. “Don’t worry,” he said as though reading his boss’s mind. “It’s a student pilot flying dual. The instructor shut off the gas on final approach as part of the training.”

“Taking his life into his hands,” Kale mused, still shaken but relieved.

“Her life, you mean,” Phil said.

As the plane drew closer he saw what Phil had already noted, that Jessi sat in the instructor’s seat. He wasn’t prepared for the rush of anger that slammed like a torrent through him at the thought of Jessi being in a plane that was in trouble, of Jessi deliberately shutting off the engine while an unskilled novice was at the wheel, of Jessi putting her life in danger while he watched helplessly from the ground.

And then he caught himself, took a deep breath to clear such thoughts from his mind, and wiped sweat from his brow. He swung around to head for the office and the keys to the rental car. Was he crazy? What in the hell did he care if she wanted to take risks? If she was a flight instructor, she knew what she was doing. How was it that she goaded his anger so easily? It must be that she fed into his entrenched resentment, he thought. It was inconvenient as hell.

No one was behind the counter when he reached the office, so he reached into the drawer and helped himself to the keys. He had been here often enough, and he had reserved the car as usual, so he didn’t feel as though he were trespassing. Looking around quickly, he saw two men smoking in the lounge, and he could hear Chaz’s voice, presumably on the telephone in the next room.

As he closed the drawer with the car key in his hand, he looked up and the memory of nine days ago socked him in the gut. He was standing only inches from where he had lost control then, threaded his hand through her hair and pushed her against the cabinets with his body, angry that she might have been guilty of yet another betrayal a dozen years ago. But as he had held her imprisoned, his rage had colored into a desire so potent he had been obsessed with penetrating her through all the wrappings. He almost kissed her. He’d been only a scant inch from her lips. He’d had an overwhelming urge to take her mouth in a kiss savage enough to bruise.

In horror, he had backed away, cursed her and left, relying on instinct and habit alone to make his legs move, to carry him to the plane and to buckle himself in while Phil went over his checklist.

Strapping himself into the plane, he had been painfully aware that being close to her, touching her, had been a damning mistake, and had left him so shaken he forgot for a while what had inspired his rage in the first place. Every part of his body had been tight and hard with nerves bunched for attack, but it was the hardness in his groin and recognizing his oddly barbarian intentions while he had her in his power that had horrified him.

It had been a first, having his carnal desires violently awakened by rage. He was not, had never been, a violent man, had never forced a woman, or treated a woman roughly. Never in his life. He was appalled by violence, and had never associated it with either sex or desire.