Paper Rose

He looked around them before he spoke. “We had a tip,” he told her, “that a murder could be solved if we looked in a certain place. About twenty years ago, a foreign double agent went missing near Tulsa. He was carrying a piece of microfilm that identified a mole in the CIA. It would be embarrassing for everybody if this is him and the microfilm surfaced now.”

“I gather that your mole has moved up in the world?”

“Don’t even ask,” he told her, then, with a smile he added, “I don’t want to have to put you in the witness protection program. All you have to do is tell me if this DB is the one we’re looking for.”

“Dead body,” she translated. Then she frowned. “I thought you had an expert out here.”

“You can’t imagine what sort of damned expert these guys brought with them.”

Yes, she could, but she didn’t say anything.

“Besides,” he added with a quick glance, “you’re discreet. I know from experience that you don’t tell everything you know.”

“What did your expert tell you about the body?”

“That it’s very old,” he said with exaggerated awe. “Probably thousands of years old!”

“Why do you think it isn’t?”

“For one thing, there’s a .32 caliber bullet in the skull.”

“Well, that rather lets out a Paleo-Indian hunter,” she agreed.

“Sure it does. But I need an expert to say so, or the case will be summarily dropped. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a former KGB mole making policy for me.”

“Me, neither,” she said inelegantly. “You do realize that somebody could have been out to the site and used the skull for target practice?”

He nodded. “Can you date the remains?”

“I don’t know. Carbon dating is best, but it takes time. I’ll do the best I can.”

“That’s good enough for me. Experts in Paleo-Indian archaeology aren’t thick on the ground in the ‘company’ these days. You were the only person I could think of to call.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You’re good,” he said. “That’s not flattery.” Changing the subject, he asked, “What have you got in those cases if you didn’t bring clothes?”

“A laptop computer with a modem and fax, a cellular phone, assorted digging tools, including a collapsible shovel, two reference works on human skeletal remains.”

She was struggling with the case. He reached out and took it from her, testing the weight. “Good God, you’ll get a hernia dragging this thing around. Haven’t you ever heard of luggage carriers?”

“Sure. I have three. They’re all back in D.C. in my closet.”

He led the way to a sport utility vehicle. He put her bags in the back and opened the door for her.

Cecily wasn’t beautiful, but she had a way about her. She was intelligent, lively, outrageous and she made him feel good inside. She could have become his world, if he’d allowed her to. But he was full-blooded Lakota, and she was not. If he ever married, something his profession made unlikely, he didn’t like the idea of mixed blood.

He got in beside her and impatiently reached for her seat belt, snapping it in place. “You always forget,” he murmured, meeting her eyes.

Her breath came uneasily through her lips as she met that level stare and responded helplessly to it. He was handsome and sexy and she loved him more than her own life. She had for years. But it was a hopeless, unreturned adoration that left her unfulfilled. He’d never touched her, not even in the most innocent way. He only looked.

“I should close my door to you,” she said huskily. “Refuse to speak to you, refuse to see you, and get on with my life. You’re a constant torment.”

Unexpectedly he reached out and touched her soft cheek with just his fingertips. They smoothed down to her full, soft mouth and teased the lower lip away from the upper one. “I’m Lakota,” he said quietly. “You’re white.”

“There is,” she said unsteadily, “such a thing as birth control.”

His face was very solemn and his eyes were narrow and intent on hers. “And sex is all you want from me, Cecily?” he asked mockingly. “No kids, ever?”

It was the most serious conversation they’d ever had. She couldn’t look away from his dark eyes. She wanted him. But she wanted children, too, eventually. Her expression told him so.

“No, Cecily,” he continued gently. “Sex isn’t what you want at all. And what you really want, I can’t give you. We have no future together. If I marry one day, it’s important to me that I marry a woman with the same background as my own. And I don’t want to live with a young, and all too innocent, white woman.”

“I wouldn’t be innocent if you’d cooperate for an hour,” she muttered outrageously.

His dark eyes twinkled. “Under different circumstances, I would,” he said, and there was suddenly something hot and dangerous in the way he looked at her as the smile faded from his chiseled lips, something that made her heart race even faster. “I’d love to strip you and throw you onto a bed and bend you like a willow twig under my body.”

“Stop!” she whispered theatrically. “I’ll swoon!” And it wasn’t all acting.

His hand slid behind her nape and contracted, dragging her rapt face just under his, so close that she could smell the coffee that clung to his clean breath, so close that her breasts almost touched his jacket.

“You’ll tempt me once too often,” he bit off. “This teasing is more dangerous than you realize.”

She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She was throbbing, aroused, sick with desire. In all her life, there had been only this man who made her feel alive, who made her feel passion. Despite the traumatic experience of her teens, she had a fierce physical attraction to Tate that she was incapable of feeling with any other man.

She touched his lean cheek with cold fingertips, slid them back, around his neck into the thick mane of long hair that he kept tightly bound—like his own passions.

“You could kiss me,” she whispered unsteadily, “just to see how it feels.”

He tensed. His mouth poised just above her parted lips. The silence in the car was pregnant, tense, alive with possibilities and anticipation. He looked into her wide, pale, eager green eyes and saw the heat she couldn’t disguise. His own body felt the pressure and warmth of hers and began to swell, against his will.

“Tate,” she breathed, pushing upward, toward his mouth, his chiseled, beautiful mouth that promised heaven, promised satisfaction, promised paradise.

His dark fingers corded in her hair. They hurt, and she didn’t care. Her whole body ached.

“Cecily, you little fool,” he ground out.

Her lips parted even more. He was weak. This once, he was weak. She could tempt him. It could happen. She could feel his mouth, taste it, breathe it. She felt him waver. She felt the sharp explosion of his breath against her lips as he let his control slip. His mouth parted and his head bent. She wanted it. Oh, God, she wanted it, wanted it, wanted it….

The sudden blare of a horn made her jump, brought her back to the painful present in the chill of the nation’s capitol, outside the exclusive restaurant where she’d just made the evening news by attacking Tate Winthrop with a tureen of crab bisque.

She stretched, hurting as she let the memory of the past reluctantly slip away. A car horn had separated her from Tate two years ago, too. He’d withdrawn from her at once, and that had been the end of her dreams. She’d helped solve his murder mystery, which was no more than a Paleo-Indian skull with a bullet in it, used in an attempt to frame an unpopular member of congress. Any anthropologist worth her salt would have known the race from the dentition and the approximate age from the patination and the projectile points and pottery that the would-be framer hadn’t realized would help date the remains.

Tate had involved Cecily, a student, and that had given her hope. But fate had quickly taken hope away with a blare from an impatient driver’s horn. From that moment on, Tate had put her at a distance and kept her there, for the two years of her master’s studies in forensic archaeology. Their close friendship had all but vanished. And tonight had shattered her world.

Her doctorate was a fading dream already. Since Tate had rescued her from her abusive stepfather at the age of seventeen and taken her to live with his mother on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux reservation, which was near the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, he’d acted in stead of a guardian. But he’d told her that she had a grant to pay for her education, her apartment, her clothing and food and other necessities. She had a bank account that it paid into. All her expenses had been covered for the past six years by that anonymous foundation that helped penniless young women get an education. At least that’s what Tate had told her. And tonight she’d discovered that it had all been a lie. Tate had been paying for it, all of it, out of his own pocket.

She pulled the shawl closer as a tall, lithe figure cut across the parking lot and joined her at the passenger door.