Game For Anything

Damn, he’d underestimated her nurturing instinct. And she had him between a rock and a hard place. If he told her he wasn’t really sick, he’d ruin plan A. While he mulled over what to do, she opened the car door.

“I told you I was fine,” he said.

“C’mon, I’ll hold your hand while they examine you,” she assured him as she helped him out of the car.

Shit, he thought. By the time they released him, he’d sure as hell better come up with Plan B.

“REPORT,” the man said as he pressed the button on the speakerphone. Then he leaned forward to adjust the position of one of his knights on the chessboard.

“Everything is going according to plan.”

“Not quite,” said the man.

There was a beat of silence. He let it stretch to two beats and then three. “Your plan was to become her lover so that you would be intimate with her when the shipment arrived. She left the party with another man.”

“I’ll be at the shop when the coin arrives tomorrow.”

“But you’ll have company. He’s in her apartment right now, and perhaps in her bed, where you were supposed to be.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“You know the penalty if you don’t.”

Replacing the receiver, the man leaned back in his chair and studied the reaction of his companion.

“I can handle him. Just give me the word, and I’ll have him out of the way.”

“Such ruthlessness,” the man admonished. He would discourage it now, but it would come in handy later. He took a sip of his brandy. “Patience, my friend. This particular puppet may still be of some use. Besides, removing him now might draw too much attention to Ms. Wainwright’s shop, and we don’t have the coin yet.”

The man called the Puppet Master had other puppets in place. Any one of them could get the coin tomorrow, and his companion would be useful later. His long-term success lay in knowing how to play the game.

He would wait, for now. The coin would be here tomorrow and once he had it, he would have all three.

“Your move.” He smiled and gestured toward the chessboard.

4

TRACKER AWOKE to find a rather large, tiger-striped cat sleeping on his chest. In the time it took him to remove the creature and set it on the floor, his mind cleared and the events of the previous evening came flooding back.

The side trip to the emergency room had turned out better than he’d expected. After a two-hour wait, they’d finally been escorted to a sheet-draped cubicle where an exhausted-looking doctor had ventured a diagnosis of mild food poisoning and pronounced Tracker good to go. By that time, he’d fully recovered from any lingering effects of the ipecac he’d taken, and he’d managed to charm one of the nurses into suggesting to Sophie that she keep him under surveillance for another forty-eight hours.

As a result, his game plan was back on track: he was exactly where he wanted to be, a recovering in valid in the Princess’s apartment.

Swinging his feet to the floor, Tracker sat up and glanced around the narrow living room. It had surprised him. Sophie had been raised in a mansion, and she’d chosen to live in a place that wasn’t much larger than a cell. He knew she had the convenience of living adjacent to her shop by residing here, but it was no palace for a princess.

The most surprising thing was that the room didn’t seem cramped. It was…comfortable. The honey-colored, pegged-wood floor wasn’t broken by rugs, but ran in a smooth line to the counter separating the rest of the living area from the kitchen. Aside from the overstuffed white sofa he’d spent the night on, and the cherub-faced jockey standing guard by the door, the room seemed almost monastic in its furnishings. But the bright explosion of color in the paintings that hung on the wall brought a homey warmth to the room. One on the opposite wall drew his eye. Pansies in every possible shade of red splattered across the canvas. It made him think of passion, hot and reckless, and of Sophie.

Dragging his eyes from it, he forced his gaze to the wall behind the couch and stared at the collection of horses. He hadn’t noticed them last night. All in all, he figured the shelves held nearly fifty equestrian figures, some cast in clay, others carved of wood or marble.

So, the Princess loved horses. He tucked the knowledge away.

“Mmmrph.”

Tracker glanced down to see that the cat had jumped back up on the couch. “You’re Chess, right?”

The cat blinked and stared.

Sophie had introduced them when they’d arrived. Then she’d given Tracker a quick tour, showing him the bathroom, which was half the size of the living room and had doors that accessed both the living room and the bedroom.

She hadn’t shown him her bedroom. If she had, he might have been with her in that bed right now. He didn’t kid himself that it was going to be easy sticking to his game plan. And the Princess might have some plans of her own. He was going to have to keep his guard up and his wits about him.

Just thinking about matching wits with her made him smile. He hadn’t felt this alive since he’d followed her across the country last year. Had he been waiting all this time for her to challenge him again?

“Mmmrmph.”

He glanced down at the cat. “Hungry?”

The question had Chess sliding onto his lap.

Scooping him up, Tracker moved to the kitchen, located cat food and filled one of Chess’s dishes. The other he filled with water. The cat dug in.

Satisfying his own hunger was going to be more problematic. Oh, the pantry was well stocked and he’d found eggs and butter in the refrigerator, bacon and coffee beans in the freezer. He might have fixed the Princess breakfast in bed if it weren’t for two problems.

First, he was supposed to be recovering from food poisoning. Second, going into Sophie’s bedroom for any reason would trigger a different and more basic kind of hunger.

Basic was a good word for it. Tracker was beginning to believe that having the Princess was becoming every bit as necessary to him as breathing. From that first day in Lucas’s office, when he’d held her in his arms, he hadn’t been able to break free of the hold she had on him.

In the middle of last night, she’d come out to check on him, and he’d used every bit of control he had to lie still and pretend to be asleep. Then he’d spent the rest of the night fantasizing what it would have been like to have her beneath him on that couch.

He had a job to do, he reminded himself. And he needed a clear head to do it.

When the cat jumped onto the counter, Tracker scratched him under his chin. “I might not be able to manage breakfast, but coffee might be a good idea. And then a cold shower. What do you think, Chess?”

The cat growled deep in his throat.

COFFEE. The scent of it had Sophie drifting up out of her dream. It had to be a dream, she thought as she sat up and shoved the hair out of her eyes. She was never organized enough to fill the coffeepot and set the automatic timer before she went to bed.

The second breath she inhaled told her she wasn’t dreaming. And the memories flooded in. Tracker McBride had spent the night in her apartment. He’d made coffee in her kitchen.

Okay, so he wasn’t in her bed yet. But she was making progress. She’d very nearly hugged the blond, perky nurse at the hospital who’d strongly urged that she keep Tracker under surveillance for at least twenty-four—preferably forty-eight—hours. And the wait in the emergency room had given her a lot of time to analyze the situation and to plan.

Sitting up, she plumped the pillows behind her and pressed a hand to her stomach. There was no reason for it to be so jumpy. She could do this. After all, she had the coin. A quick glance at the nightstand assured her that it was still where she’d left it. And the little bag with Mac’s “toys” was right at the side of her bed.

Lifting it, she drew out the black velvet ribbon that lay on top. She was going to have to work up a lot of nerve to use something like this. Truth be told, her confidence with men was mostly a sham. She could count on one hand the lovers she’d had, and most of them had been…unimaginative. Or maybe it had been her.

Well, with a little help from Mac’s toys, Sophie was about to become a new woman.

When she heard the shower start, a little skip of panic moved up her spine. She’d better hurry and examine her plan because she was going to have to put it into action soon. Slipping out of bed, she grabbed her robe and tucked the coin into her pocket.