Jaimie: Fire And Ice Part 21

The tunnel ended. And there was a break in traffic half a dozen cars up and one lane over.

Zach stood on the gas and the Porsche flew.

He took a break at a Burger King someplace in Maryland, hit the john, grabbed a burger and a coffee, found a table and downloaded his email while he ate.

Caleb had sent the information he'd requested. Addresses and phone numbers for Jaimie. He'd also sent the photo of her that Zach had seen on his cell phone.

"So you can ID my sister more easily," he'd written.

Zach didn't need a photo to ID her, but Caleb wouldn't know that.

He certainly wouldn't know that he could ID more than her face.

A dozen images of her were sealed in his memory.

Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, small and perfect, the skin like satin, the nipples the color of pink summer roses.

Her hips, curved as if designed just for his hands.

Her legs, long and lovely as she wrapped them around his hips, Jesus.

It was a good thing he was sitting at a table. Humiliating himself at a fast food joint was definitely not on his to-do list.

Zach dumped the rest of his hamburger in its wrapper, picked up a napkin, wiped his hands and mouth.

A photo was an excellent idea. A couple of taps, and he transferred it from the email to a page of its own.

Forget all the other c.r.a.p. She had a great body. So what? Lots of women had great bodies and for all he knew, he'd spent more time concentrating on how she looked from the neck down than from the neck up.

She'd been a diversion when he'd needed one. Period. End of story. Bluntly put, his memory of her t.i.ts and a.s.s might be all he actually had. Without a picture, who knew if he could pick her out of a crowd?

Liar.

The word flashed through his head. Zach ignored it, got into the Porsche and got back on the highway.

An hour and a half later, driving the last miles of his journey, he plucked his phone from where it lay on the console next to him and brought the photo up on the screen.

Liar, indeed. Who was he kidding? He'd be able to recognize Jaimie's face anywhere.

She was more than beautiful. There was an honesty in her smile. In her eyes. She looked as she'd looked after she'd showered. No makeup. No artifice. Nothing but a lovely woman, hair loose and streaming over her shoulders, lips parted.

His gut knotted the way it had the very first time he'd looked at her.

What was wrong with him? He had never dreamed about a woman in his life, but, dammit, he dreamed about her. Every night. The feel of her. The taste- Braaap! Braaap! Braaap!

An eighteen-wheeler roared past, the sides of the Porsche and the trailer d.a.m.n near within kissing distance.

Zach cursed, tossed the phone on the seat, and concentrated on the road.

He should never have taken this case, or whatever you wanted to call it. There was a reason surgeons didn't operate on family. When you were doing something that could prove risky, you wanted a cool head.

You didn't want emotion. And what was s.e.x if not emotion?

Yes, but how would he have turned Caleb away? He certainly couldn't have said he was too busy. That wasn't an excuse an old pal would accept. The other choice wasn't a choice at all. He couldn't have said, See, the thing is, I'd love to help you, but I slept with your sister the first night I met her.

And, dammit, OK, if it turned out there was something here, if Jaimie Wilde really was in danger, he wanted to be the man who would protect her.

Lights flashed. A siren sounded behind him. Zach looked in the mirror, saw the police car. He groaned, put on his blinker, pulled onto the shoulder of the highway.

He had his license and registration out and ready by the time the cop reached the Porsche.

"Nice wheels," the cop said, deadpan.

Zach nodded. "How fast was I going?"

"Ninety."

Zach nodded again, handed over his doc.u.ments. Why fight the inevitable?

The cop glanced at the papers.

"How fast will it go?"

"It's OK, officer. I've no intention of-"

"One fifty?"

Zach looked at the cop. "It's a GT."

"A Gran Turismo. Right. I know. So, better than 150?"

Zach grinned. "I've done 185."

The cop let out a long breath and handed over the registration and license.

"Rein it in, OK? This isn't the place for that kind of stuff."

"Yeah. Thanks."

"Hey, I've got a souped-up 'Vette. Nothing like this baby, but..." He smiled. "My wife says it's weird, how men are attracted to fast cars and fast women."

"But cars are like women," Zach said, smiling back. "Beautiful. Unpredictable. Dangerous."

"You got that right." The cop slapped the door of the Porsche and stepped back. "Stay safe."

"You, too."

Zach turned on the engine. Checked for traffic. Pulled out into the lane.

Beautiful. Unpredictable. Dangerous. His Porsche... Or Jaimie Wilde?

He was going to find out.

She lived in a converted townhouse on a street just this side of the Georgetown boundary, an address that would suggest upscale without costing the arm and the leg really upscale would cost.

Her apartment was on the first floor, in the rear. A small kitchen, small dining alcove, small living room, small bedroom. She was a Realtor; he suspected she'd call the place cozy, not small, but small was what it was.

Still, it had charm. He'd already been inside: the locks were pitifully simple to open. She'd furnished it in what he thought of as English country style: light colors, a profusion of small potted plants, flowered wallpaper in the kitchen and bathroom, white wrought iron furniture huddled against the fast-approaching winter on a patio that overlooked a minuscule, thickly overgrown garden.

After five days and nights, he knew a lot about her.

She drove a black Subaru Outback wagon. It was spotless.

So was she.

She emerged from the little house each morning, impeccably dressed. She favored suits, as she had that day back in October. Mid-height heels, not the s.e.xy stilettos he knew he'd never forget. Her hair was always neatly drawn back: he remembered how it had come undone that night, how it had fallen over her shoulders like pale gold.

The sight of her stirred memories he didn't want. Her sea-and-flower scent. Her slightly husky voice. Her arms open to draw him down to her.

The images were there, every morning. And, every morning, he blanked his mind to them and fell in behind her, on foot on those days she walked to work, from behind the wheel of the black Prius he'd rented on those days she drove.

The Prius fit right into the neighborhood.

The Porsche was garaged in the hotel where he'd taken a suite, though he was hardly ever there except to shower, change clothes, and grab a nap for a couple of hours while she was at her office.

Maintaining a one-man surveillance was difficult, but he had no desire to involve anybody else. He trusted the people who worked for him, but something about this was too personal to involve anybody else.

She left for work promptly at eight, returned home promptly at six unless she had a showing or a meeting. She'd had two since he'd begun watching her. Whether she came home early or not, he never saw her with a man.

If there was one thing in her behavior that seemed unusual, it was the number of times during the night that lights went on and off in her bedroom and kitchen.

What was she doing?

He went in again, planted a video camera the size of a penny in the center of a basket of silk flowers on her dresser, tucked another on a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen.

He forced himself to look away any time she began to undress although even the sight of her hands going to a zipper, a b.u.t.ton made him think of things that had nothing to do with a surveillance.

He cursed himself for it, told himself that he'd been too long without a woman, but it was worth the self-inflicted embarra.s.sment when the camera showed him that when the light came on in the small hours of the night, she reached for a book that she held in her hands but never read, or padded into the tiny kitchen for a gla.s.s of water that she never drank.

You didn't have to be a trained spook or a Special Ops agent to figure out that she had insomnia.

They had that much in common.

His sleep had been shot to h.e.l.l since that October night.

Did her sleep problems date back to those same hours? The speculation made him laugh. He'd have been willing to bet she hadn't given a thought to that night. It had just been something she'd done. A kick. The kind of thing Young had told him she liked to do.

a.s.suming that was the truth.

He observed her for five days and five nights.

And grew puzzled.

If Young was her lover, how come he never showed up?

If she went in for s.e.xual dalliances-and why was he being so careful with his language? If she screwed around, where was the traffic to her bed?

She certainly seemed to live a quiet, private, carefully organized life.

He saw that when he went into her apartment.

He figured he understood why her brothers and sisters had nicknamed her James.

She was a neat, logic-oriented woman No dishes left on the kitchen table in the morning. Her bed properly made. When he opened her closets, he found things neatly hung and stacked. Even her underwear drawer. Panties folded, bras the same.

The underwear-and what a utilitarian name for those bras and panties-surprised him. Having seen the suits in her closet, the pristine condition of the apartment, he'd expected serviceable cotton.

What he found was silk and lace. Thongs that would heighten the beauty of her hips and a.s.s. Bras that would cup her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like a man's hands.

His hands.

Zach felt his body stir. Stir? It came to instant, urgent life.

He touched nothing. Shut the drawer. And got the h.e.l.l out of Dodge while he still could.

He did note that she always showed caution, looking left and right when she came down the steps of the townhouse, checking the back of her car before she got in, checking her rear-view mirror when she drove, but in itself none of that was meaningful. Any intelligent woman living alone in a big city would know enough to be alert to all possibilities.

What did mean something was that no one was watching Jaimie Wilde except him.

And the more he watched, the more he doubted the story Caleb had been told.

He'd checked out Steven Young, too. Young was tall. Light haired. Well groomed. He wore a constant smile on a bland, Midwestern face.

Zach disliked him on sight. There was something about the man that whispered of unpleasant things, like going to church on Sunday mornings and then going home to jack off to p.o.r.n in the afternoons.

The thought of him touching Jaimie made his skin crawl, but Young never went near her. If he was obsessed with her, he had a strange way of showing it.

It was cold on this fifth night of his surveillance; the moon was a thin sliver of ivory in a clouded sky. It was also one of Jaimie Wilde's sleepless nights. She'd turned out the lights at ten, turned them on at eleven, turned them off twenty minutes later. They'd come on again a couple of minutes ago; he'd watched her silhouette as she went from one room to the other.

Somebody should tell her to replace the curtains at her windows with heavy drapes.

Zach yawned.

It was time to put an end to this.