Midnight Rainbow Read online

  “That sounds a little paranoid, seeing kidnappers behind every tree.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, still watching the spider. It finally minced into a crevice in the rock, out of sight, and she sighed. “He is paranoid about it, because he’s afraid that next time he wouldn’t get me back alive again.”

  “Again?” Grant asked sharply, seizing on the implication of her words. “You’ve been kidnapped before?”

  She nodded. “When I was nine years old.”

  She made no other comment and he sensed that she wasn’t going to elaborate, if given a choice. He wasn’t going to allow her that choice. He wanted to know more about her, learn what went on in that unconventional brain. It was new to him, this overwhelming curiosity about a woman; it was almost a compulsion. Despite his relaxed position, tension had tightened his muscles. She was being very matter-of-fact about it, but instinct told him that the kidnapping had played a large part in the formation of the woman she was now. He was on the verge of discovering the hidden layers of her psyche.

  “What happened?” he probed, keeping his voice casual.

  “Two men kidnapped me after school, took me to an abandoned house and locked me in a closet until Dad paid the ransom.”

  The explanation was so brief as to be ridiculous; how could something as traumatic as a kidnapping be condensed into one sentence? She was staring at the rain now, her expression pensive and withdrawn.

  Grant knew too much about the tactics of kidnappers, the means they used to force anxious relatives into paying the required ransom. Looking at her delicate profile, with the lush provocativeness of her mouth, he felt something savage well up in him at the thought that she might have been abused.

  “Did they rape you?” He was no longer concerned about maintaining a casual pose. The harshness of his tone made her glance at him, vague surprise in her exotically slanted eyes.

  “No, they didn’t do anything like that,” she assured him. “They just left me in that closet…alone. It was dark.”

  And to this day she was afraid of the dark, of being alone in it. So that was the basis for her fear. “Tell me about it,” he urged softly.

  She shrugged. “There isn’t a lot more to tell. I don’t know how long I was in the closet. There were no other houses close by, so no one heard me scream. The two men just left me there and went to some other location to negotiate with my parents. After awhile I became convinced that they were never coming back, that I was going to die there in that dark closet, and that no one would ever know what had happened to me.”

  “Your father paid the ransom?”

  “Yes. Dad’s not stupid, though. He knew that he wasn’t likely to get me back alive if he just trusted the kidnappers, so he brought the police in on it. It’s lucky he did. When the kidnappers came back for me, I overheard them making their plans. They were just going to kill me and dump my body somewhere, because I’d seen them and could identify them.” She bent her head, studying the ground with great concentration, as if to somehow divorce herself from what she was telling him. “But there were police sharpshooters surrounding the house. When the two men realized that they were trapped, they decided to use me as a hostage. One of them grabbed my arm and held his pistol to my head, forcing me to walk in front of them when they left the house. They were going to take me with them, until it was safe to kill me.”

  Jane shrugged, then took a deep breath. “I didn’t plan it, I swear. I don’t remember if I tripped, or just fainted for a second. Anyway, I fell, and the guy had to let go of me or be jerked off balance. For a second the pistol wasn’t pointed at me, and the policemen fired. They killed both men. The…the man who had held me was shot in the chest and the head, and he fell over on me. His blood splattered all over me, on my face, my hair….” Her voice trailed away.

  For a moment there was something naked in her face, the stark terror and revulsion she’d felt as a child; then, as he had seen her do when he’d rescued her from the snake, she gathered herself together. He watched as she defeated the fear, pushed the shadows away. She smoothed her expression and even managed a glint of humor in her eyes as she turned to look at him. “Okay, it’s your turn. Tell me something that happened to you.”

  Once he’d felt nothing much at all; he’d accepted the chilled, shadowed brutality of his life without thought. He still didn’t flinch from the memories. They were part of him, as ingrained in his flesh and blood, in his very being, as the color of his eyes and the shape of his body. But when he looked into the uncommon innocence of Jane’s eyes, he knew that he couldn’t brutalize her mind with even the mildest tale of the life he’d known. Somehow she had kept a part of herself as pure and crystalline as a mountain stream, a part of childhood forever unsullied. Nothing that had happened to her had touched the inner woman, except to increase the courage and gallantry that he’d seen twice now in her determined efforts to pull herself together and face forward again.

  “I don’t have anything to tell,” he said mildly.

  “Oh, sure!” she hooted, shifting herself on the ground until she was sitting facing him, her legs folded in a boneless sort of knot that made him blink. She rested her chin in her palm and surveyed him, so big and controlled and capable. If this man had led a normal life, she’d eat her boots, she told herself, then quickly glanced down at the boots in question. Right now they had something green and squishy on them. Yuk. They’d have to be cleaned before even a goat would eat them. She returned her dark gaze to Grant and studied him with the seriousness of a scientist bent over a microscope. His scarred face was hard, a study of planes and angles, of bronzed skin pulled tautly over the fierce sculpture of his bones. His eyes were those of an eagle, or a lion; she couldn’t quite decide which. The clear amber color was brighter, paler, than topaz, almost like a yellow diamond, and like an eagle’s, the eyes saw everything. They were guarded, expressionless; they hid an almost unbearable burden of experience and weary cynicism.

  “Are you an agent?” she asked, probing curiously. Somehow, in those few moments, she had discarded the idea that he was a mercenary. Same field she thought, but a different division.

  His mouth quirked. “No.”

  “Okay, let’s try it from another angle. Were you an agent?”

  “What sort of agent?”

  “Stop evading my questions! The cloak-and-dagger sort of agent. You know, the men in overcoats who have forty sets of identification.”

  “No. Your imagination is running wild. I’m too easily identifiable to be any good undercover.”

  That was true. He stood out like a warrior at a tea party. Something went quiet within her, and she knew. “Are you retired?”

  He was quiet for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. He seemed to be thinking of something else entirely. Then he said flatly, “Yeah, I’m retired. For a year now.”

  His set, blank face hurt her, on the inside. “You were a…weapon, weren’t you?”

  There was a terrible clarity in his eyes as he slowly shifted his gaze to her. “Yes,” he said harshly. “I was a weapon.”

  They had aimed him, fired him, and watched him destroy. He would be matchless, she realized. Before she’d even known him, when she’d seen him gliding into her darkened bedroom like a shadow, she’d realized how lethal he could be. And there was something else, something she could see now. He had retired himself, turned his back and walked away from that grim, shadowed life. Certainly his superiors wouldn’t have wanted to lose his talents.

  She reached out and placed her hand on his, her fingers slim and soft, curling around the awesome strength of his. Her hand was much smaller made with a delicacy that he could crush with a careless movement of his fingers, but implicit in her touch was the trust that he wouldn’t turn that strength against her. A deep breath swelled the muscled planes of his chest. He wanted to take her right then, in the dirt. He wanted to stretch her out and pull her clothes off, bury himself in her. He wanted more of her touch, all of her touch, ins