“It’s Mrs. Cranshaw,” a tearful little voice said. “From the campground.”
“Yeah?” he answered curtly.
“My husband fell. I think he’s broken his leg. Please come help us. There’s no one else at the campground. Please.”
What did she think he was, a doctor? He was tired of playing everyone’s saint around here. Tired of acting out Agnes’s fantasy. “I’ll be there right away,” he told Mrs. Cranshaw. He might not be perfect, but he wasn’t capable of cruelty either.
“Bless you.”
John gentled his voice and told her not to worry, that everything would be all right. He hung up the phone then muttered curses while he scrawled a note to Agnes. He pounded it to the front door with one well-aimed blow of his palm against a thumb tack.
I’m no bloody saint, he thought fiercely, as he threw his Jeep into gear and tore off down the dirt road to the campground. He was still thinking it when he took Mr. Cranshaw to the hospital, and when he spent the rest of the night comforting Mrs. Cranshaw in the waiting room. No bloody saint. They’d all better wise up. Especially Agnes.
She found the note when she finally came home, after talking to Detective Herberts for an hour. Taking Mr. Cranshaw to hospital. Broken leg. Will call you. John.
Agnes leaned woodenly against the wall under the porch light and stared at John’s words while tears slid down her face. As usual, he was playing the gentleman. The rescuer. The brave protector of the needy.
He was a brutal, coldhearted liar.
Her dogs flopped around her, gazing up curiously as they listened to her harsh sobs. They jumped and scattered when she made a guttural sound of pain and fury. Then they followed her to the barn at a lope.
Agnes threw the light switch and halted in the center of the hall, her hands clenched and chest heaving. She’d teach him a lesson as bitter and outrageous as the one he’d taught her. She’d make him admit the truth about who he was and what he wanted, and then she’d make him listen to every blistering word she had to say in response.
John could have the books belonging to his family. He could have his victory, and he could go back to England with a smirk on his face, but he’d never forget her or what she was going to do to him.
Agnes dumped several wheelbarrows of extra wood shavings into a clean stall. She checked the heavy iron eyelet bolted into its back wall. None of the horses that had been tethered there over the years had been able to pull it loose. John Bartholomew, no matter how much of an animal he was, wouldn’t stand a chance.
He was half asleep by the time he returned to Agnes’s place. Mrs. Cranshaw was comfortably settled at a motel near the hospital, and her husband was doing well. The Cranshaws’ grown children were already on their way to Florida to help their parents.
His anger at Agnes sagged. Resignation set in along with the fatigue. He needed her the way the tide needed a shore. He couldn’t deny that, even if she didn’t love him, even if she looked at him and saw some Sir Lancelot type, straight out of Camelot, instead of a flesh-and-blood, highly fallible man.
Dawn painted her house and barn with a pink mist. The air was cool and tangy. John dragged himself from the Jeep and noticed the barn door was open. Frowning, he shooed the dogs aside and went in. The lights were on. Agnes’s palomino mare, Sassy, gazed at him from a stall in the far end.
“Agnes?” he called, frowning. “Are you here?”
There was a rustling sound in one of the stalls. She stumbled out, barefoot, brushing wood shavings from her shorts and shirt. Her hair was disheveled and she rubbed her eyes groggily. From the red, puffy look of her face, she’d been asleep for hours. No wonder she hadn’t answered the phone when he’d called. “Mornin’,” she said hoarsely. “Cranshaws all right?”
“Yes.” He told her what had happened. She nodded. “Thanks for helping them out. You must be exhausted.”
He walked up to her, feeling an odd strain in the air but unable to put his finger on the cause. Of course, in his pensive, simmering bad mood, he could be imagining things. “Yes. Why are you out here?”
“Sassy was hanging around alone when I got home from work. I think she’s about to go into labor. She had a rough time foaling last year. I want to stay close by.” Agnes took his hand. “Come on. I fixed a place in the stall. Wood shavings make a great bed. Let’s go to sleep.”
“That’s the best suggestion I’ve heard all night.”
She’d spread blankets in one corner of the stall. When he lay down beside her the deep bed of wood shavings conformed to his shape like a luxury mattress. “Sweet man,” she whispered, and kissed his cheek. “Want to take your clothes off? You know how muggy it gets in here later in the morning.”
“That’s the other best suggestion I’ve heard all night.”
“I’ll help.” She quickly removed his jogging shoes, khaki shorts, and short-sleeved white pullover. John sighed when the pleasant dawn air hit his bare skin. It was soothing to lie there in nothing but his white briefs. He felt as if Agnes had stripped away some of his doubts. His arousal was quick and demanding.
“Whoa, boy,” she said, that edgy tone in her voice again. His imagination? She slapped his stomach playfully, but it stung. John looked at her askance. “Sleep first, play later,” she told him.
“I’m not the spanking type, Agnes.” He forced a chuckle.
“You’re a big ol’ sweet honey bear. But go to sleep.”
Her drawl was heavy as syrup. He wearily recalled something about her warning him about it. It was a sign of her dangerous side, she’d said. But what was dangerous about lying here beside her in nothing but his briefs, with her hands rubbing his shoulders?
He shut his eyes. Tormented emotions still churned inside him—sadness and worry and a sense of betrayal because her feelings for him probably weren’t what he wanted them to be. But when she continued to massage his shoulders he looked up at her gently. “You really look like you’ve been through the wringer.” He reached up to caress her face. “Anything wrong?”
She pulled back, shook her head, but smiled. “If you touch me like that I’ll pounce on you. But it might be painful.”
He chuckled sleepily and dropped his hand to his side. “Lie down and snuggle with me.”
“Yum. But let me take care of you first.” She tossed his clothes to a far corner of the stall then began rubbing tiny circles on his forehead, her fingertips coaxing tendrils of sleep through his brain. He shut his eyes and told himself he’d try to make sense of what Agnes wanted from him later, when his mind was fresh.
She bent over him as he drifted into darkness. “Relax and let yourself go,” she crooned, massaging his temples. “And when you wake up you’ll think you’re a new man.”
Maybe you can love him, John thought just before he fell asleep.
Agnes stood in the stall’s far corner and watched him wake up. He was covered in sweat, but not from the barn’s noonday temperature. The fan she’d set in the stall’s open doorway made a nice breeze.
She hoped he was having a nightmare.
His muscular, nearly naked body was restless on the blankets. He rubbed one brawny hand across his face, raked it over his black hair, and grimaced savagely with his eyes still shut.
She shivered and hugged herself. His rough, unpredictable nature showed when he slept. She should have noticed before, but she’d been blind.
His eyes opened abruptly and he bolted upright, breathing hard and squinting in the sunlight that came through a big screened window. “Sleep well?” she asked in an acid tone.
But he missed the change in attitude and answered groggily, “I was dreaming about being choked. Strangest dream …” He halted. His big, commanding hands flew to the thick chain padlocked snugly around his neck.
His astonished gaze shot to her bitter one. “Are we being kinky, Agnes?”
“No. We’re being realistic. You’re vicious. I chained you up like a rabid dog.”
He grabbed the chain where it trailed do
wn the front of his chest, stared at it in shock, then swiveled on his rump and noted the chain’s path to the wall, where its other end was padlocked to the iron eyelet. The chain was long enough for him to move around the corner, even stand up if he wanted to, but nothing else. Agnes watched him with sharp misery.
He turned toward her again, searching her face for answers. She didn’t say a word. Neither did he. Finally she saw the explanation sink in. For a moment his expression was suffused with emotions that shocked her. She wouldn’t believe they were sorrow and pain.
He shut his eyes. His jaw clenched hard, and sinews stood out along his neck. But when he opened his eyes he was suddenly in control, and a cold, harsh sheen had dropped over his gaze. Her knees went weak. Was she meeting the real John Bartholomew for the first time?
“How did you find out?” he asked. Even his voice had changed. Its cultured tones had a hard, streetwise edge. It mocked his story about having a London town house and hinted at where he really lived, a cheap apartment above an escort service. He might as well live over a brothel, Detective Herberts had told her.
“Your lies caught up with you.” She described her conversation with Herberts.
Disgust flared in John’s eyes. “He told you the truth. But he doesn’t know the whole truth.”
“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” she recited in a flat, bitter tone. “That’s what I want from you.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve already made up your mind.”
“You lied to me. You used me.” Her legs collapsed and she sat down weakly in the corner. She wanted to sob again, but fury kept her back rigid and her chin up. “You didn’t go to Oxford, you weren’t on the British Olympic equestrian team, and you sure don’t own any hobby stores. So introduce yourself. I want to meet Scotland Yard’s Inspector Bartholomew.”
He inhaled sharply. “Be accurate. Ex-inspector. Ex-convict. Sent to prison for three months last year for taking bribes from the terrorist groups I was supposed to be spying on. I can see the distrust on your face—everything you think you know about me, and everything you hate.”
“I hate lies. I hate being deceived. I hate going to bed with a man who was using me the way he’d use one of his downstairs neighbors from the so-called escort service.”
“You find it pretty damned easy to jump to conclusions about me and my habits. And about what I was ‘using’ you for. You hate lies, well, so do I. But I also hate losing my inheritance to a thieving American army captain who took advantage of my grandparents during World War Two.”
“That’s not what happened!”
“I’m willing to give you a chance to explain. More than you’ll give me.”
“You lied to me about everything in your background. I’ve never been anything but honest with you. That’s the difference between me trusting you and you trusting me.”
“Honest? Then why didn’t you tell me about the books hidden in your desk?”
“I would have, soon! I’ve been scared to tell anyone!” She gasped as she realized how he knew where they were located. “You went through my desk!”
His hard, unwavering gaze told her yes, he had. Aggie leaned back against the stall’s corner and said numbly, “You were spying on me.”
“I wanted to learn the truth without frightening you. I wanted to get the books back, and I thought you’d deny having them if I demanded them outright. I wasn’t even certain you had them. What else could I have done?”
“The honorable thing.” Her voice broke. “Be honest.”
“And what would you have done? Hand over a small fortune without a fight? Apologize for what your grandfather did almost fifty years ago? Tell me to take what’s rightfully mine?” John grimaced with disgust. “Like hell.”
“My grandfather didn’t steal those books! They were given to him to take care of! After the war he couldn’t find the owners. He tried for years!”
“Says who?”
“He left a letter for me when he died! He’d never told anyone about the books! He was afraid someone would accuse him of stealing them. Besides, he loved them. He spent years studying the diary and trying to learn more about Sir Miles. He left me all his notes. He didn’t think of those books in terms of how much money they were worth!”
“Oh? Then why did he try to sell them last year?”
“What?”
“Last fall he wrote to a rare-book dealer in London. Told him about his ‘gift’ from an Englishman during the war. He asked about selling the books to a private collector.”
Her shoulders sagged. “Is that how you found out about them?”
John smiled thinly and nodded. “Scotland Yard keeps records on stolen art objects and rare manuscripts. I listed the books years ago, in case they ever showed up on the market. Dealers check those records to make certain they’re not buying stolen property.”
“So the dealer came to you and said he’d found out who had the books.”
“That’s right. I was tangled up in the little matter of defending myself from criminal charges at the time, or I’d have come here sooner. Be glad I went to prison. Otherwise, I’d have chased your beloved old grandpaps down. And I wouldn’t have played nice.”
“You’ll wish you were fighting him instead of me, when I’m through with you. You’ll wish you were back in prison.” She spoke as if the words made her sick. “Nothing’s too disgusting for you, is it? Taking bribes from terrorists. A shark has more conscience than you do.”
“I was cheated out of my reputation, three months of my freedom, and my career with Scotland Yard,” he told her, his voice soft and strained. “Everything that meant a damn to me. All because some people in high places knew I suspected their connections to a terrorist political group. To get me out of the way they set me up. I was ‘framed,’ as you Americans put it. I never took any bloody bribes. But you aren’t going to believe that, either, are you?”
“No.” She nearly spat the word. “There’s not any reason for me to.”
“We’re at a standstill, then.” He jerked at the chain. His eyes narrowed. “Take this thing off me.”
She rose and left the stall without looking at him. Agnes heard the chain rattle as he leapt to his feet. Tall, handsome, nearly naked John Bartholomew, ex-Scotland Yard detective and consummate con artist, was chained to her barn wall. She intended to keep him that way.
“Agnes, you’re not going to get anything out of this revenge,” he called. His voice was calm, but rang with authority.
She ignored him and went out back to the water spigot. Agnes turned the water on full blast then dragged an armful of coiled hose down the barn’s hallway. She stopped in front of the open stall door, shoved the floor fan aside with her bare foot, then angled her thumb over the hose’s spout and plastered John with a long spray of cold water.
“I can’t clean up your mind, but I can rinse off the rest,” she told him sarcastically.
He stood still, because there wasn’t much else to do, considering how short the chain was. John looked astonished and raised a hand only to shield his face when she aimed the spray at his head. His briefs turned into a translucent white skin over the bulge between his legs.
She prided herself on having the kindness not to aim at his crotch.
When he was soaking, with sheets of water running off him from head to foot, she carried the hose back outside and turned the water off. In the back of her mind she wondered what he’d do to her if he were freed at this moment.
Despite her fury, Aggie couldn’t imagine him hurting her. She leaned against the side of the barn and, overcome by misery, covered her face. Get real.
When she returned to the stall he was naked. Giving her a black look, he tossed his rolled-up briefs at her. She was so startled that she let them smack her in the chest. They made a sopping wet trail as they slid down the front of her red shirt. She slapped them to the floor.
“If that’s the way you want it,” she told him, deliberately
staring at his body. Anxiety, anger, and poignant memories made goosebumps on her skin. The man was never soft. Even now he mocked her with his arousal, or complimented her, if she continued to think like an idiot.
“A rabid dog doesn’t need underwear,” he said in a seething voice.
Aggie raised tearful eyes to his face. She’d admired his body and his passion so much in the past few days. Now she had a hollow spot of despair inside her. “At least you’re honest about some things.”
“This won’t work. You won’t get anything out of me this way.” He was losing his composure. He grabbed the chain between his hands and popped it. Muscles flexed violently in his arms. “Unlock this damned leash.”
“Calm down. You’ll be out of here and on your way back to England before you can say Buckingham Palace.”
“Unlock the chain now,” he said very slowly, emphasizing each word.
“Don’t hold your breath.”
She took Sassy out of her stall and put her back in the pasture with the other mares. Sassy had served her purpose in Aggie’s plan. Distraught and exhausted, Aggie stumbled to the house, rummaged through her kitchen, and returned to the barn with a sack full of food. John was pacing as well as he was able in his tiny corner of the stall. Seeing him again was a fresh shock.
She had him chained to her barn wall. Naked. Really.
He halted and stared at her the way a panther suddenly notices its prey—his dark eyes narrowing, his stance tense as if he were preparing to leap.
Aggie tossed a clean milk jug filled with fresh water to him. He caught it, dropped it like a rock, and looked at the grocery sack with challenge. “Keep the damned food and water. I don’t want it.”
“My food and water has got to be better than what you were accustomed to in prison.”
His silence was unnerving in its intensity. Setting the grocery bag on the floor, she pulled out a package of cookies, not looking at him. But his next words speared her with guilt. “You wouldn’t joke about prison if you’d ever been there, Agnes. Especially if you knew you didn’t deserve to be there.”
Aggie kept her head down. She fought the constant tightness in her throat. “I have an ex-husband in prison. I’ve got an idea what it must be like.”