The Heart of a Renegade

Taking photographs had saved her.

Now it looked as though it might destroy her.

She leaned forward and closely examined Luke’s images. The way he captured light and contrasting shadow was beautiful. Poignant. He’d shot mountain peaks and ragged cliffs. Eagles, a grizzly. Oceans and ice at sunset. Deserts with nothing but undulating dunes for miles. A wolf pup in snow. A cougar in the crook of two branches. But no humans. Not even a footprint.

She touched a framed image of a small bear cub watching its mother. The look of need and dependence in the young animal’s eyes filled Jessica’s chest with aching emotion. It was poetic. All the images were. They told her that whoever had held this camera and captured these wild scenes had soul. It was an almost elegiac vision of life in its raw, harsh beauty. Luke Stone had a beautiful mind buried somewhere in that rugged brawn and Jessica suspected there was something sad in there, too.

Because there was sadness in these pictures.

She wondered if he was always alone when he shot his film. Did he need these open spaces for his sanity? Was this his freedom? She had a sense the man was a true loner, a transient who didn’t put down roots easily. Perhaps that’s why he lived here on the water—it offered a sense of escape.

She heard the shower go off and a voyeuristic guilt pinged through her. She turned quickly to take in the rest of the room before he returned. There was no sign of family or girlfriends—no female touch in the decor at all. The only sign of human connection was a small color print pinned to his fridge with a magnet. It showed three rugged and weather-browned men on pack horses in a red desert. She couldn’t make out the faces, but she thought one might be Luke.

Jessica’s eyes settled on his computer.

She glanced in the direction of the bathroom. What did she have to lose?

She hastened over to it, quickly tapped a key that brought the monitor to life, saw a file with her name. Her pulse quickened.

She shot another look over her shoulder and clicked on the file. Her breath caught in her throat. Her life, everything, it was all there.

She scrolled rapidly through the information, her body going hot. He had photographs, her résumé, stories on her abduction in China, the name of her mental institution in the U.K., her psychiatrist’s notes, the medication she was on, even a virtual transcript of her conversation with Giles two days ago…she heard the bathroom door open. Her breath lodged in her throat.

She quickly closed the file and moved to the opposite end of the room, heart beating fast. She hugged herself, feeling violated in a way she couldn’t even begin to articulate.

Why shouldn’t he have a dossier on her, if he’d been sent to find her? But why was the CIA suddenly interested in her when everyone else had hung her out to dry in China?

She began to feel small again. Afraid. And that horribly familiar panic began to nip at her brain.

“Hey?”

She jumped, whipped her eyes to him.

He stood drying his hair with a towel, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans faded in places she shouldn’t look. God, he was good-looking. In a rough and untamed way. He seemed too tough to have the sensitivity for those photographs. Yet there was something in the desolate gray of his eyes, the way the lines fanned softly out from them, that echoed the haunting vistas in the photos.

“You okay?” he said, stilling the towel as he studied her face.

“Yeah, I—I’m fine. Did…you take all of those?” she pointed to the wall.

“Yep.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Thanks. You want to take a shower? Water’s hot.” He smiled and it reached into those wilderness eyes, giving her a thump of sensation in her stomach.

“I…” she became cognizant of the fact she probably stank of garbage and old liquor from that jacket he’d worn. “I guess I should, huh?”

He nodded. “Yep.”

“I don’t have any clean clothes,” she hesitated. “I guess I’m stating the obvious.” She felt awkward. Seeing those photographs made her feel as though she’d somehow seen him naked. It was a language she spoke, and when you came across someone who communicated in the same visceral way you did, the link was there whether you wanted it or not.

“I left some stuff for you in the bathroom,” he said. “It was the best I could do for now. We can pick up some things for you later. Coffee or tea?”

“I…coffee would be great, thanks.”

“Bathroom’s that way, down the hall.”

She began to walk, stopped. “You’re really casual about this,” she said. “You say it’s not your thing, but…you’ve done it a lot, haven’t you?”

“Picked up women and brought them home? Yeah, I do that a lot.” He said it with such a deadpan expression in his flat Australian tone she wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not.

“I mean…never mind.” She began to make her way to the bathroom.

“You mean killing a couple of gangsters, assaulting two cops and then coming home to make coffee?”

She stopped. “Yes, something like that.”

He tossed his towel over a chair at the table, opened a cupboard and took two mugs out. “Your accent is cute, you know that?” he said, plunking the mugs on the counter.

“And you know exactly what part of the U.K. it comes from, too. It’s all in that dossier on your computer, so please don’t play games with me, Stone.”

His eyes flicked between her and his computer and his features turned serious. He stood to his full height, facing her squarely. There was a latent aggression in his posture that made her nervous.

“You looked at my laptop?”

“I’d like to know what is going on and what happened to Giles in Shanghai.”

His eyes narrowed slowly. Then a ghost of a smile played at the corners of his strong mouth. “Fair enough,” he said, and he turned and reached for a box of green tea. “Take your shower and we’ll sit down and talk.”

Luke felt her eyes boring into his back. He ignored her as he poured boiling water over a tea bag.

He’d underestimated Jessica. He’d do well to remember she was once an aggressive and respected investigative journalist. Landing a gig as a foreign correspondent for the BBC needed a fair degree of global savvy.

He heard her leave the room, then heard the bathroom door bang shut.

He extracted the tea bag, squeezed it as he listened for the shower. She’d be busy for a few minutes. He positioned himself in front of his laptop, set his mug of tea down and punched Jacques Sauvage’s number into his satellite phone. Luke checked his watch as it rang. Dawn would be breaking soon.

“Stone, it’s about bloody time. Have you secured the principal?”

“Good morning to you, too, Sauvage. I have her. But we have a complication.” He proceeded to tell Jacques about his altercation with the police and the two gangsters.

Jacques was silent for a moment. “This is going to make any sort of cooperation with local law enforcement close to impossible.”

Luke shrugged, sipped his tea. “I made an executive decision. Those guys were out to kill her. My guess is they’re Dragon Heads, affiliated with Xiang-Li. They don’t want the photos getting out.”

“You manage to drop the tail?”

“Yep.” He sipped from his mug. “What can I tell her?”