Helen Myers - The Last Man She'd Marry

Oh, no more, please. She so wanted not to have this conversation again. “I was doing you a favor. You had a job to get back to.”

“I would have been willing to take some extra time off.”

He’d never said that. At any rate he didn’t have the luxury, that much she understood. “You don’t have a job, you have a career.” There was a vast difference. Men like Jonas put in their twenty-something years with pride and dogged determination regardless of what was asked of them. Dedication wasn’t easy to walk away from, and after all of the effort and expense invested in developing an agent, the FBI wouldn’t make it easier. What’s more, the grim truth was that they’d had a fling. A few weekends here and there when he could fly down from Washington, D.C., to Austin, Texas. It was hardly what anyone could have called a relationship. Actually, the one gift in all of what had happened—to use the term darkly—was that it had ended before she had to worry that they were, indeed, heading toward some sort of understanding and all that meant.

Her silence had him studying her profile. “You don’t believe me about wanting to help you. What did you think all of those calls and notes were about?”

An almost lifelong survival technique triggered her stubbornness and need to be in control. “Maybe I didn’t want to be anyone’s project.” As they came to the express checkout, she handed the basket over to the checker.

“Ma’am…my apologies.” The store manager came around the counter to bag. His face was flushed, a stark contrast to his crisp white shirt. “Is there anything that I can do? Are you all right?”

Was this Denny’s uncle? Alyx saw no familial resemblance in the meticulously coifed, sandy-haired, anxious man to the big lug who’d accosted her. “I’m fine, thank you.” Wanting only escape, she nodded to the basket. “I’d just like to pay for this and go home.”

With abject humility, the man gestured toward the door. “Allow me to sack those and please—no charge. I’m sorry you were—that you had this experience. Let me reassure you it won’t happen again.”

Alyx wondered how often he had to dig into his own pocket to cover for his sister’s—or brother’s—overgrown delinquent? Feeling bad for him, Alyx said, “I appreciate that, but I don’t need you to comp my purchases.”

“Where’s the guy who assaulted her?” Jonas interjected.

The manager’s eyes darted from entrance to entrance before he cleared his throat. “He’s—uh—being driven home, sir. And I’ve called his—his home. His family will see that he stays there.”

At another time, Alyx would have smiled that Jonas intimidated him. When she’d first laid eyes upon this friend of Judge Dylan Justiss last year, she’d had to struggle to keep her usual cool decorum, too, and for an instant hadn’t been so upset that her client, Deputy DA E. D. Martel, and Dylan were besotted with each other at a most inopportune time. There was something about Jonas’s Hollywood good looks that demanded attention as well…who was it he reminded her of?

Audrey Hepburn’s pining love interest in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—George Peppard. After all this time it had finally come to her.

“Here you are, miss.” Ignoring her debit card, the manager held her bagged items out to her. “Again, I’m very sorry.”

“Thanks.” Painfully aware of all the eyes following her, Alyx exited the store as fast as possible, wanting nothing more than to get to Parke’s black RAV4. The vehicle was a little “outdoorsy” for her, but it represented escape, which was all that mattered.

“Alyx? A moment?”

With her thumb on the ignition key’s computerized lock, she paused. Drawing a deep breath, she turned to face her ex-lover and waited for him to voice whatever he felt this rescue had earned him the right to say. What could it hurt at this point? She might look like a worn-out dishtowel ready for the garbage, but at least there was no media around to extend her embarrassment to the evening news.

Jonas slipped on his sunglasses. Perfect G-man mode, she thought. Seek out secrets, but keep your own.

“No explanation? No nothing?”

His soft-spoken query had an edge to it and she couldn’t blame him one bit for being annoyed that “thank you” wasn’t enough either personally or professionally. But she, too, was known to be a hard read in her personal life and a barracuda for her clients. So, bottom line, she had no inclination to explain herself today, and might never.

“What’s done is done, Jonas. You have your world and I have mine. Let’s leave well enough alone.” Only when she replaced her own glasses did she risk glancing up at him. Despite the filtered lenses, in the bright sunlight, what she saw brought a bit of a shock. He no longer had that Teflon, nothing-sticks, smooth-operator look that she remembered. His face was sunken, more lined and his mouth had a harder twist.

“‘Well enough’?” he snapped, breaking into her thoughts, “Alyx, have you looked in a mirror lately? There may be no blood this time, but you still look one missed depression pill away from suicide.” With a muttered expletive, he walked away.

The sting of his criticism, regardless of its accuracy, made it impossible to resist striking back. “Yeah?” she called to his back. “Well, consider the compliment returned and then some!”

Men. Here she was doing him a favor—whether he knew it or not—but leave it to Testosterone Man that when rejected, he was determined to cut her down to manageable size.

Inside her cousin’s SUV, Alyx tossed the bag onto the passenger’s seat and shoved the key into the ignition. Tried, that is. Her hands were shaking so hard she had to grip her wrist and direct it in. That’s when the tears started pouring down her cheeks.

“Crap.”

Desperate for the privacy of Parke’s house, Alyx blindly ripped at tissues from the box in the console and slipped them under the sunglasses to dab at her eyes. Never would she have suspected that seeing Jonas again would have this effect on her. After the attack, it had been a relief when he’d stopped coming to the hospital and had returned to Washington, D.C., better still when he’d stopped phoning and e-mailing.

Why start all that again when he claimed to be here for a friend? He’d certainly left without too much coercion.

Recovering somewhat, Alyx carefully backed out of the parking space, but she kept an eye out for Jonas. When she spotted him a lane away climbing into a red vintage Mustang convertible, her caution turned to skepticism, which sent her eyebrows arching.

“The government must be paying well these days if that’s what was allowed from the rental counters,” she muttered.

Accelerating, she made it to the exit and turned right onto the main road. Parke’s house was another few miles west and a bit down from the plateau where the municipal airport was located. At the next traffic light, she eased the SUV left to the turning lane, and it was as she was waiting for the light that she spotted the Mustang two cars behind her.

What on earth did he think he was doing?

Agitated, the second the green arrow lit, Alyx hit the gas pedal. Okay, she told herself as emotions turned her insides into a cruller, calm down; there were another few turns on this road. He would go down one of those. Surely he wasn’t trying to find out where she was staying after she’d made it clear she had no interest in picking up where they’d left off?

But parallel to the airport turnoff, she pulled over to the side of the road—and Jonas pulled in right behind her. “Of course,” she seethed, “because we both know you aren’t headed there. You said yourself that you hate to fly!” And he sure wasn’t going to buy onto one of those tourist sightseeing trips in a First World War biplane that soared over the skyline day in and day out, circling the hot-air balloons and gorgeous rock formations.

Having had enough, Alyx thrust open the door. It cost her, but gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulder, she stood tall and strode back to his purring sports car.

Behind his sunglasses, Jonas’s face remained impassive, and he didn’t indicate for a second that he intended to get out of the car. “What’s the problem now?” he asked.

“You tell me.”

Looking off into space, he released the steering wheel to give the palms-up, I-don’t-get-it gesture.

“Why are you following me?” she enunciated, hating him for making her spell it out.

“I’m not.”

“This is taking things too far, Jonas. Please go away. I don’t want to have to notify the police.”

Drawing his sunglasses down his nose, he stared at her, a steely glint flashing in his narrowed eyes. “Get over yourself, Alyx. I’m going to work.”

“What?” She followed his nod toward the airport. “This is a joke, right? The airport? You happen to have told me that you hate to fly.”

“I hate going commercial. I have a private pilot’s license, and—sorry to burst your conspiracy theory—I’m helping a friend with his tour service while his broken leg heals.”

“I see. Then I apologize for…I apologize.” Wishing she could start this day over, or better yet, evaporate into thin air, Alyx returned to Parke’s Toyota. Once again her stomach threatened to add to her humiliation and, glancing in the rearview mirror to assure herself that the way was clear, she hit the accelerator and tore away without a last glance at Jonas.

Had to get your drop of blood, didn’t you?

Jonas sat still until the black SUV vanished from sight. It bothered him that he hadn’t hesitated to embarrass Alyx, but it bothered him more how much he wanted to follow her, to find out if she was telling the truth about the cousin and where the house was. And he’d thought he’d conquered that weakness. When she’d shut him out earlier this year, he’d had his regrets. He could also admit his ego had been bruised, but shortly after arriving back in Washington, D.C., he’d convinced himself that he’d been lucky because then the grandfather of garbage trucks hit the fan, and his personal life got knocked into a different time zone.

Now, with all kinds of opportunity to rethink matters, it was ironic that she should show up. However, he couldn’t let that be a trip-switch to acting like a drooling college kid again. His professional clock was ticking and he needed a clear head to make some decisions before the alarm triggered.

As his gaze dropped to his watch, Jonas snapped out of his brooding. He was already minutes late for his first appointment of the day and suspected Zane’s phone was seconds away from ringing back at the house as panicking receptionist Miranda attempted to save herself from taking a waiting customer’s flack. However, as he continued through the airport entrance, Alyx’s face reappeared before him.

He shouldn’t have said she looked bad. It would take a mud bath to hide Alyx Carmel’s captivating features, and such an event would certainly accent her other outstanding assets, namely her luscious figure.

“Down, boy,” he muttered under his breath.

Under no circumstances could he afford to reawaken his libido; he’d mandated a starvation diet for it. The rule was simple: no paycheck, no playtime. Not that Alyx would consider going out with him again.

“‘What’s done is done.’”

Quoting her, his words sounded more like a puzzle than a vow. But as he pulled up to the Sedona Sites ticket office, he couldn’t ignore a tightening in his abdomen that had nothing to do with any concern about Zane’s beloved aircraft’s air-worthiness and had everything to do with another truth.