Rafe Sinclair's Revenge

It had almost been easier the first time he’d walked away, he thought before he recognized that for the lie it was. There had been nothing harder than that in his life. And nothing more necessary.

He released her hand and quickly pushed past her through the doorway. It was narrow enough that his body brushed hers, his shoulder turning hers slightly.

He didn’t look back as he crossed the kitchen. As a precaution, he flicked off the light, using the switch beside the back door to plunge the room into darkness. Then he stepped out into the honeysuckle-scented night, closing behind him a door he should never have reopened.

ELIZABETH HAD STOOD in the kitchen a long time before she finally walked back into the dining room. The candles had burned long enough that they were beginning to sputter, wax pooling at the base of the holder.

In the darkness after she’d extinguished them, she put her palms flat on the surface of the table, leaning forward tiredly, her head bowed. She didn’t understand why she was so exhausted. After all, nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

Rafe had been given a message for her from Griff, and he had delivered it. Other than his comment about a couple of strangers forced to have an uncomfortable dinner together there had been almost nothing of a personal nature in their conversation.

Not unless you considered her question about whether he had killed Jorgensen personal. He hadn’t seemed to. He had reacted to that exactly as he had to everything she’d said the last time she’d talked to him. Contained. Controlled. Cold.

That coldness had been one of the things that had been so hard to accept. She could understand his anger with the agency, but not why it had also been directed at her. As she’d reminded him tonight, she’d had nothing to do with Gunther Jorgensen.

She straightened, the same questions that had circled endlessly through her brain all those years ago there again. She had found no explanation for what he had done then. Nor was she likely to now.

Why the hell had he shown up here now? she thought with a surge of fury. And why the hell had she invited him to dinner? It seemed that in the silent darkness she could still feel him, just as she had been aware of him watching her all week without understanding what she was feeling.

Now the sense of him was here. Inside her home, her sanctuary. A physical invasion that stirred more memories than she was prepared to deal with.

She turned her head, looking across the dark kitchen to the back door, reminding herself of the reality of his departure. She walked over to that door, turning the latch and hooking the chain into its slot.

She didn’t look out into the night revealed through the panes of glass that comprised the door’s top half. Rafe had known as well as she did that if he had wanted to stay, she wouldn’t have refused.

He hadn’t wanted to. And that in itself should be a sufficient answer for all the questions she had wrestled with since the last time he’d left her.

“DAMN IT TO HELL,” she said, the expletive muttered under her breath. Not that there was anyone to hear if she had shouted it, which was what she felt like doing.

She’d overslept. Considering the number of hours she’d spent tossing and turning before she’d fallen asleep, that was hardly surprising. On top of that, she had forgotten to set the alarm. And now she was faced with the nearest thing to a morning rush hour Magnolia Grove had to offer.

A logging truck had pulled out onto the two-lane just ahead of her. The red flag at the end of the longest trunk it carried fluttered directly in front of her car as the heavily ladened truck slowed to pull the grade. She glanced at her watch, realizing that despite how much she had hurried to get dressed and out of the house, she was going to be at least a quarter of an hour late in opening the office.

No big deal, she told herself.

Unless he was in court, Darrell never showed up before ten or eleven, his summer seersucker already rumpled from the twenty-mile drive in from the antebellum home the Connell family had lived in since it had been built. Neither of them had any appointments scheduled for this morning. There would be no one waiting for her, so she couldn’t quite figure out why she was so upset by the idea that she was going to be late.

Maybe because Rafe Sinclair could simply waltz back into her life after six years and throw everything about her well-ordered existence into disarray. Not only emotionally, but professionally as well. She didn’t like admitting he had the power to do that.

She eased across the center line, trying to see if she could pass the truck on the straightaway leading down the other side of the rise they’d just topped. Typical of her morning, there was a line of cars approaching from the opposite direction.

She moved the SUV back into position behind the dangling logs, reconciling herself to the reality of the situation. She was going to be late, and it was ridiculous to let it upset her.

It wouldn’t have, she admitted, if she hadn’t already been thrown by last night. And she couldn’t understand why she had been. It wasn’t as if they’d spent the meal talking about old times. That was something they had seemed to agree on—tacitly, of course. There was no point in dredging up the past, not even the good parts of it.

There had been plenty of those, she admitted. Enough that what had followed had been painful in the extreme.

After the embassy bombing in Amsterdam, Rafe had been furious with the government’s restraint in going after the people responsible. Since he had been on the scene of the attack, dealing with the cost of that particular act of terrorism up close and very personally, she certainly couldn’t blame him. None of them did.

Not even for his decision to disassociate himself from an agency that refused to let him track down the killers of those dozens of people. Griff had tried to reason with him, arguing that despite the agency’s restrictions in this case, he could do more by working with the team, which had been expressly created to deal with those problems, than from without.

Nothing Cabot could say had changed Rafe’s mind. And she had never blamed him for that decision. It was the one that followed that she’d never been able to understand or to forgive. The one to disassociate himself from her as well.

It made no sense. It hadn’t then, and it didn’t now. She had even offered to leave the CIA with him, something which, looking back on that time from a distance of several years, caused a wave of humiliation to wash over her.

That offer had been against every principle she’d ever thought she held. After all, it hadn’t been easy reaching the level she had attained in that male-dominated agency. She had been one of the few women Griff tapped for the team, and she had proposed to give it all up to be with a man.

A man who had thrown the proffered sacrifice back in her teeth, disappearing without any explanation of why he didn’t want her to come with him. And apparently without any regret.

She took a breath, deliberately loosening the death grip her fingers had taken around the wheel. Water over the dam. Over and done with a long time ago.

If so, why the hell had he come back into her life?

Nothing of what he’d said had rung completely true, she thought again as she turned off the two-lane onto the road that led into town. That was one of the conclusions she’d come to during those sleepless hours last night. There was more to this reappearance than Griff’s warning.

There was nothing on the road ahead of her, but despite its emptiness she didn’t pick up speed. Unconscious now of the fact that she was going to be late in opening the office for the first time in three years, she went over again in her mind all the things Rafe had said last night. And the way he’d looked as he’d said them.

It wasn’t that she didn’t think he was telling the truth, she reaffirmed, slowing for the first of the three stoplights that regulated traffic on Main Street. It was that he wasn’t telling the whole truth.

There was something she wasn’t getting about this, just as she had always known there was something she hadn’t gotten about his disappearance six years ago. Something about both that didn’t quite add up with what she knew about Rafe Sinclair.

She slowed, pulling into the familiar parking space in front of the office. It wasn’t marked Reserved, but it might as well have been. No one in town would have thought about parking in her spot or Darrell’s.

She glanced at her watch again. It was nine-twenty, the office wasn’t open, and the world hadn’t come to an end. She needed to remember that the next time she got so damned anal.

She picked up her purse and the papers she’d taken home with her last night. Not that they had gotten read.

Of course, there was no hurry about that, either. That was part of the charm of living here. This compulsion to get things done on some kind of schedule was all hers.

She opened the door, stepping out into the heat that would become more oppressive as the day wore on. It was going to be a scorcher, as they said down here. A good day for staying inside by the air conditioner, she decided, skilled by now at evaluating the potential heat index.

It would also be a good day for finding enough work to keep her mind occupied with something besides the events of last evening. Or, rather, she amended, the nonevents of last evening.

She slammed the car door, pressing the auto-lock button on her key. At that exact instant a blast of heat and sound roiled upward from the heart of the law office, tearing it apart.

The resulting shock wave threw her backward. Her head and shoulders slammed against the pavement with enough force that for a moment she could neither breathe nor think. And then the debris of the building she should have been inside at least twenty minutes ago began to rain down around her.

Chapter Three

Rafe awakened, as he had a thousand times, to the sound of the explosion. His body jerked upright in bed, his heart trying to beat its way out from under the sweat-drenched skin of his chest. He opened his mouth, attempting to draw air into lungs compressed by the force of the blast.

It’s just a dream. Plain vanilla, garden-variety nightmare.

He had had enough of those, God knew, that he should be able to tell the difference. As horrific as they were, they were a million times better than the other.

Finally, shaking all over, he managed to take a breath. It seemed he could smell the smoke. He could almost taste it on the cotton dryness of his tongue.

Just another dream, he reassured himself.