Twice the Temptation

Cody figured they’d lost a good thirty minutes. First, he and another motorist had checked under the stalled car’s hood. Finally, he’d persuaded the tall elderly man to help them push the car onto a side street.He glanced at Brie. They hadn’t spoken, at least not to each other, since they’d left the dock.

It had been a mistake to kiss her. Of course, he’d made mistakes before. He’d even paid dearly for a few of them. But getting involved with someone he was supposed to protect? That was a first for him.

Good thing he liked challenges. Because now that he’d taken that first taste of her, Cody was pretty sure he’d need a second. And more.

He shot her a sideways glance. She had her hands clasped tightly together in her lap, and she was staring straight ahead out the window.

Thinking. They hadn’t known each other more than a handful of hours and yet he was picking up things about Brie Sullivan. She had courage, and she was smart.

She’d gotten away from the killers who’d tried to put a period to her existence at the airport yesterday, and she’d gotten back in touch with the marshal assigned to her case. If she’d panicked and just tried running on her own, she’d be dead by now.

She could also move like lightning when there was a reason. She’d had no trouble keeping up with him when they’d had to get away from Times Square.

“Did you come up with a strategy yet?” he asked.

“I think the solution to our problem is pretty obvious. We’re not going to kiss again. And while we might have to share a room, we are definitely not sleeping in the same bed.”

He pressed lightly on the brake and guided the car into the first of the hairpin curves on the road that led to Haworth House. The land to their left had already begun to drop away.

“I can agree to the second. The suite we’ll be staying in has two rooms. But I’m not making any promises about not kissing you again.”

Brie shot him a frown. “Why not? We’re both adults. We need to be sensible about this.”

“We’re both single unattached adults. That’s part of the problem, and what we need to be is realistic. The kind of connection we shared when we kissed doesn’t happen all that often. In fact, it’s never happened for me before. How about you?”

There was a beat of silence. Then she said, “It’s never happened to me, either. And I don’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got to focus on rebuilding my career.” She waved a hand. “This whole thing with Dicky Ferrante really messed it up. When I had to move to Kansas, I missed a booking in Las Vegas. And it took me almost a year to get it. Do you have any idea what I’ve missed out on? It would have been my big break!”

Cody glanced at her. “Didn’t Maxine tell you that you wouldn’t be able to go back to your old life, even after you testify?”

“She told me that I couldn’t go back to being Brie Sullivan. I’m adopted, remember? So Brie Sullivan isn’t even the name I was born with. Maybe I’ll try to dig that up, or I’ll just get a new name and reinvent myself. If it means I have to start all over from scratch, I’ll do it.”

Courage, brains and grit. He admired all three qualities. It wasn’t just the outer Brie that was pulling at him. It was the inner Brie, too. And that could be dangerous.

“It’ll take me a while to get a booking in Vegas again, but I’ll do that, too. Surviving the trial and getting my career jump-started again are my top priorities. I don’t have time for relationships.”

“Me, either,” he said equably. Silently, he cursed Maxine Norville for not being honest with Brie. But after hearing the passion in her voice when she talked about her career, he could sympathize a bit with his former colleague. He sure didn’t want to be the one to tell her there was an excellent chance that Dicky could eventually trace her if she went back to her singing career.

There would be plenty of time for that piece of bad news after she got through the trial.

Brie turned to him. “You can’t like this thing between us, either. It’s got to complicate the hell out of your job.”

“No argument there. But no matter the complication, no matter how we might feel about it messing up our agendas, we’re both going to be tempted again.”

“We don’t have to give into temptation. We can take precautions.”

“I agree.” As he eased the car into the last straight stretch of road, he turned and met her eyes briefly. “But I’m not making any promises. The ones I make, I keep. And what you can take to the bank is that I’m going to keep you safe until after you’ve testified.”

Cody shifted his gaze back to the road, which had begun to twist again. To their right was a sheer wall of rock, and to the left the land dropped away sharply. There were no shoulders on either side. As they passed a sign that warned of blind curves, he noted that the cables were down on the guardrails that lined this particular section of the road.

Thirty feet ahead of them a motorcycle shot into view, then tilted and skidded very close to one of the guardrails. Wheels spinning, it suddenly careened into their lane and raced straight toward them.

Too fast, Cody thought as he pressed his foot on the brake and eased the car toward the center of the road. The key was not to overreact. The rock face was too unforgiving, the drop off too sheer to risk going into a skid like the one the biker had just recovered from.

The motorcycle immediately swerved to keep them on a collision course.

Cody increased the pressure on the brake, but he kept his hand steady on the wheel.

The cycle’s speed didn’t slacken.

Ten feet.

A game of chicken, Cody thought. The biker was trying to get him to panic and jerk the steering wheel one way or the other. Either option might be disastrous.

“He’s going to hit us.” Brie gripped the hand rail in front of the glove compartment.

At the last second, the man on the motorcycle twisted the handle bars and veered fully into the left lane. His thigh grazed the fender of their car, and that was enough to send the bike out of control.

There was a squeal of tires. Cody twisted around in time to see the motorcycle tilt crazily as it rocketed across the asphalt in the direction of one of the guardrails. The biker recovered enough control to avoid smashing into it, but not enough to get the bike back on the road. Spewing gravel, it shot off the narrow shoulder and into space.

For a moment, bike and rider seemed to hang suspended in the air. It reminded Cody of a documentary he’d watched of Evel Knieval making his attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon. Only Evel’s bike had boasted a parachute. This guy’s didn’t, and a scream pierced the air as biker and bike plunged.

Cody and Brie were already out of the car and racing toward the guardrail when they heard the first impact—a nasty sound of steel crashing against rock. Then came the second.

They arrived at the drop-off in time to see the bike bounce and tumble nearly all the way to the bottom. The rider lay sprawled at an odd angle on a ledge nearly fifty feet below them.

Pulling out his phone, Cody glanced around. “I’m calling the sheriff. He’s a good man. I’ve met him before.”

When Nate Kirby picked up, Cody filled him in on the details. “We’re going to check and see if the driver’s alive. It doesn’t look good. I’ll call back as soon as I know.”

When he turned to face Brie, she said, “Thanks. That happened so fast. If I’d been driving, I’d have tried to get out of the way, and we’d be down there instead of him. You did really good.”

Then she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him hard.

The sweetness of the gesture had emotions flooding his system. It wasn’t a punch of heat he felt this time, but something warm that streaked straight to his heart.

When she drew away, he very nearly reached out to draw her back.

Instead, he said, “So have I earned back some of the points I lost when I told you I can see ghosts.”

“A few.”

He glanced around again. “I don’t want to leave you here alone. You think you can make it down to that ledge?”

“Of course.” She met his eyes steadily. “You’re thinking this wasn’t just an accident. You think he planned for us to end up down there, don’t you?”

He studied her face. When a woman had courage, brains and grit, she deserved the truth. “I’m entertaining that possibility. I also think that it’s the same biker who passed us as we were pulling out of Belle Bay, the same one who just made the ferry. I can’t figure out how he could have followed us from New York. But when I’m working, I tend to cater to my paranoid side.”

This time she was the one who glanced around, and then she moved closer to the guardrail. Leaning down, she picked up one of the cables that lay along the ground. “Cater away. I’m no expert, but this looks like it’s been cut.”

He turned then, remembering what he’d noted earlier before his attention had become glued to the motorcycle.

“All of them are down,” she said before he could give voice to the observation. “If they’d been up, the motorcycle might not have gone over. We wouldn’t have gone over, either.”

“It could be a coincidence,” he added.