No One But You. Carly Bishop
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Название: No One But You
Автор: Carly Bishop
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежные детективы
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“Is that a yes?”
His brows drew close together. “Is that what stopped you from turning me over to Hanifen? The fear that I would come after you next?”
Lie, she told herself. Just do it. “Yes. All right? Yes. I was afraid I would be next.”
“Now you know better.”
“I don’t.”
“Of course you do.” He didn’t believe her, and why would he? He reached for a packet of cedar sticks from his breast pocket, broke one off and stuck it in his mouth.
The lie had been a mistake, which only made him more suspicious of her, not less. Would a woman fearful that he would kill her have turned her back on him? Would she lead him docilely into her treatment room to administer a shot before he did her in?
What made her think he could not have turned into a killer?
She watched the cedar splinter travel over his lower lip from one corner to the other, shoved by his tongue. Her mouth felt parched as bones dried in the sun, and she licked her own lips as she aimed her gaze in another direction. She couldn’t be attracted to him. Could not.
“Fiona,” he said, his voice so low its tones thrummed inside her, “what’s going on?”
Her tongue swiped again at her dry lips. “Nothing.”
“Maybe I can help—”
“I don’t need any help.” He was the last man alive whose help she needed.
“You want to change your answer?”
“No.” She busied her hands, forcing the syringe barrel through the paper.
“Fiona,” he snapped, “let’s just cut the crap, okay? You’re not stupid. If you’re telling the truth, you didn’t know who was in the barn. I could have been the one who shot Everly in the back. Why would you take that kind of risk?”
“Kyle had enemies,” she answered. “I didn’t want to get involved. I don’t want to be involved.”
She cleared her throat and clamped her lips tight. Emotions like some vicious animated kaleidoscope of feelings—jealousy, resentment, even hatred for the way he was able to strike a truce with Soldier Boy—turned inside her.
Not only a truce, either. Soldier Boy permitted this man’s touch.
She had seen him swing down into Soldier Boy’s stall. She’d seen him fall to the floor. But her reasons for leaving him there, for failing to mention his presence to Dex Hanifen, for coming at him with her rifle, had nothing to do with the murder at all.
The point was that Soldier hadn’t killed him. In a deathly still way inside her that she really didn’t understand, that was all she needed to know.
She trusted Soldier Boy’s instincts more than her own. That was the last thing she would admit to anyone, Matt last of all. She dredged up her maddeningly stiff-upper-lip upbringing and buried that messy kaleidoscope of emotion.
“If you knew what kind of man you were dealing with, then what are you doing back on the Bar Naught at all, Fiona?”
“Because I want it back.”
Chapter Three
The Bar Naught was all Fiona Halsey had ever wanted. Ever. “My parents lost it. I want it back. It’s really just that simple.”
“Even if it meant tangling with Everly?” Matt asked. “What am I missing? How did you think you were ever going to get the Bar Naught back from him?”
She met his eyes directly. On this point she was more prepared to lie. “I thought he would eventually get bored. He talked like that. He was a liar, you know. Pathological. Kyle Everly would as soon tell a lie as the truth when the truth would serve him better.” She took hold of her long straight hair and shoved it behind her. “All to prove, over and over again that he could get away with it. To see if he could ride the crest of his charm right on by common sense one more time.”
She popped the metal lid off the vial and swabbed the rubber stopper with alcohol, uncapped the needle, drew up the dose of booster and recapped. She turned away and put down the syringe on the countertop, then plunged her icy hands beneath a rush of hot water at the sink. “Months ago, Kyle offered me the chance to come back to the Bar Naught. He said that I could have it all my way, that—I didn’t know what a liar he was. At the time, I didn’t know.”
She withdrew her hands and the electric eye shut off the water. She grabbed a couple of paper towels from the dispenser and turned around when she thought she could finally manage her own emotions well enough. What she saw in his face encouraged her. “Any other questions?”
“Just the one.”
She flashed on the image of him crashing down into the stall. A dark, unrelentingly handsome man, a stranger breathing the same air as Soldier Boy, gasping for that air like a fish out of water, and Soldier…not moving in for the kill. There was no satisfactory answer she could give him as to why she hadn’t turned him over to Dex.
“Shall I tell you why I want to know?” he asked.
“I don’t care, but listen. Why don’t I just take care of that now so you won’t have to explain yourself?” She tossed the spent paper towels into the trash. “You wait here, and I’ll just go make the call.”
His eyes darkened. “Fiona, I have to know if someone told you I would be here tonight. Answer the question. Yes or no.”
“No.” Whatever other lies she had told him, whatever she had to keep from him, this much was true. “No one told me you were coming. Did you know Kyle was going to be murdered?”
He had the look of a man who thought even a distant cousin of the Queen of England ought to be plucked from the fray and planted back in Kensington Gardens. If he knew the fire she was playing with, everything she had ever wanted would be lost in one fell swoop of alpha-male whim.
No way.
She picked up the syringe again and uncapped the needle. “Roll your sleeve up higher.”
He shoved the flannel as far as it would go, but the long underwear he wore beneath it wouldn’t be pushed higher. She cut him a look and stepped back again. He pulled both shirttails out of his jeans, stuck his hand beneath them and shoved the fabric high enough to free his arm, baring his muscled shoulder and half his torso as well. “Okay?”
She simply refused to be affected by all that powerful masculine flesh, the swirls of dark hair, but it was impossible not to notice. Not to imagine her fingers there. Not to linger overlong with her eyes as if she were preoccupied with her observation of the deep bruises.
His body reminded her she was a woman, and the battering he’d taken only made him that much more dark and dangerously appealing. She swiped his biceps with an alcohol pad and drove her needle in deep.
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