Unbridled

Undefined? Carter took in the expression on Laney’s beautiful face. Oh, no, there was nothing undefined there. Both of them were in it for the kill.

“Violet said you had something important to discuss?” she asked.

“Mmm. Yes. Important.”

He stepped nearer to her, catching the subtle scent of magnolias. She smelled like heaven and he wanted to visit for a while. He reached out and fingered a soft curl that had escaped her do, then met her gaze, moving in closer still. He watched with a mixture of amusement and fascination as her pupils dilated in her blue, blue eyes. He guessed she wasn’t used to such bold moves, and he liked that he’d still managed to knock her slightly off-kilter. Although he didn’t expect her to remain that way for long.

He lowered his chin and then brought it up slowly, making it evident that he was smelling her…and that he liked what he found. The top of his nose brushed against her cheek and she gasped slightly.

He stepped back, holding her gaze captive with his. “I’m a man who always honors his debts and I’ve come to pay mine.”

Laney blinked. “Debt…oh.” She appeared to have momentarily forgotten the circumstances of their first meeting. “All expenses surrounding your release have been taken care of.”

“Too vague. Who took care of the debt, Laney?”

“Mr. Armstrong.”

“And your connection to him would be?”

“Client.”

“Strictly?”

She smiled. “I don’t see how that impacts the situation, Mr. Southard.”

“Carter, please.” He was tempted to press his thigh between her legs, force her skirt up and pin her against that expensive desk of hers right there before the window. But he planned to drag the hot anticipation out as long as he could.

Besides, he wasn’t sure how far he could push her before she picked up the phone and called for security.

“Answer my question,” he insisted. “Brother?”

A corner of her mouth turned up. “Cousin.”

“Judging from your name, I’m guessing your mother’s side?” He cleared his throat. “Unless Cartwright is your married name.”

The other side of her mouth edged up until she was nearly smiling. “My mother’s side.”

He enjoyed the way she answered the question without answering the question.

Was she married? She wore no ring, but he’d met plenty of women who didn’t. Whether it was a barmaid trying to encourage better tips from customers who thought she was single and therefore free game, or a taxi driver who didn’t want to risk losing her ring at gunpoint, there were all sorts of reasons why women chose not to advertise their marital status.

Of course, a woman like Laney Cartwright wouldn’t want to promote it because the less you knew about her, the better leverage she had.

Carter looked forward to compromising that power in every way that he could.

Laney seemed to realize that the scales were tipped a little too heavily in his favor. So he wasn’t surprised when she walked back to the other side of her desk, breaking eye contact with him.

He half expected her to end the meeting. To give up the ghost and realize that indulging in a sexual duel with him benefited her not at all. Instead, she said, “I was about to head for lunch. Would you like to join me?”

He squinted at her.

She pressed the intercom button before he responded. “Violet? Have Raphael’s ready a table for two for lunch, please.”

And just like that the scales tipped back to her.

LANEY GREETED the maître d’ with a kiss to both cheeks, as if seeing an old friend. Which, in essence, she was, since she took so many of her meals at the exclusive French restaurant.

“Miss Laney, how especially beautiful you look today. I was afraid I would not see you after your secretary called earlier to cancel your luncheon plans.”

Pierre darted glances Carter’s way, as if half hoping that during the conversation Carter would disappear.

“I have your favorite table all ready for you, Ms. Cartwright.”

Laney swept her hand toward Carter. “Pierre, this is Mr. Southard. He’ll be dining with me today.”

She didn’t need to say more. Pierre looked as if someone had just hit him in his snobbish head with a two-foot-long salami. And Carter stared back at him as if he didn’t know whether to greet Pierre or hit him. He appeared prepared for both.

Laney hid her smile as Pierre explained to Carter that the restaurant had a dress code and asked if he wouldn’t mind choosing a suitable jacket from an array they had in the cloakroom.

Laney twisted her lips, pretending that she didn’t notice Carter’s discomfort while challenging him to react in the way he’d like to. Namely, storm out of the uptight place.

Instead, he motioned for Pierre to lead the way.

Moments later, he came out wearing a bright green blazer bearing the crest of an exclusive club on the breast pocket and a bright yellow tie. Laney couldn’t help laughing behind her hand. Not just at the garish combination, but at Pierre’s chagrin and Carter’s wide grin.

Pierre appeared exasperated as he led them to a table to the left, away from the kitchen and in front of the window, but he could do nothing as he watched Carter take the seat smack-dab where anyone passing could see him.

“Thank you, Pierre,” Laney said after he pulled out the other chair for her.

He usually thanked her back or at the very least told her to enjoy her lunch. This time, he just gave her a little bow and then scurried away as fast as his fashionably decked feet could carry him.

The waiter came immediately, not indicating one way or another whether Carter’s purposely chosen attire affronted him as he offered the wine list. Carter didn’t bother reading it but handed it back and requested a beer in a frosted glass.

Laney did the same.

“I’m impressed,” she said quietly, fingering the rim of her water glass and ignoring the stares from neighboring tables. “I figured you would have turned and left the instant Pierre informed you that you weren’t dressed properly.”

“Then it takes little to impress you.”

She enjoyed it when people acted contrary to her expectations. So few did. She could usually predict exactly what a person would say. And was disappointed when they did. So when she came across the odd man like Carter, she liked to linger in his company. Just to see what he would do next.

The waiter served their beer and then informed them of the specials. Laney didn’t have to look at the menu he handed her. She already knew every dish listed and what she would have. She was surprised when Carter didn’t bother to open his menu, either, instead holding her gaze as the waiter finished with the specials and looked to her.

She ordered salmon with rice and then raised her brow when it was Carter’s turn. He didn’t even blink as he said, “Give me a strip steak, grilled. Baked potato and salad with vinegar and oil. No gravies, no funny stuff I can’t identify. Just give it to me straight up.”

The waiter bowed slightly, took back the menus and disappeared.

If Laney had hoped to outmaneuver him by bringing him here, she’d failed. And she couldn’t have been happier.

“So,” she said, taking a sip of her water, “how is it that you know my cousin Trace?”

Carter grimaced and looked around the nicely appointed room, giving a small finger salute to an older woman nearby who openly stared at him. “He shot me.”

Laney nearly spewed her water over the table. “Pardon me?”

Carter’s grin returned. “I said he shot me.” He formed a gun with his fingers and pulled the trigger. “I have to say that if our positions had been reversed, I’d have done the same thing to him. But I would have hit him so he wouldn’t get back up.”

Laney had heard stories about her mother’s side of the family. “A bunch of rowdy cowboys,” her father would say before launching into a story about rustled cattle or gunfights or land feuds involving the branch of her family that came from the southwest part of the state.

Blake Cartwright was never flippant when telling the tales that had undoubtedly grown longer and longer over the years. Rather, he usually looked envious of a way of life so different from his own upbringing chasing oil with his father. Although occasionally guns had been involved, there had been no real honor in any of the clashes. All the disputes had revolved around money and who would be walking away with it. And it was usually Laney’s grandfather.

Which explained why Laney had never had to worry about anything. She could have attended the best Ivy League colleges in the world, but had instead chosen to go to the University of Texas. Her father had been proud of the move, when she had expected him to argue with her.

Then again, her father had never acted the way she anticipated, either. Much like the man across from her.

Their salads arrived.

“To be honest with you, Ms. Cartwright—”

“Laney, please.”

“Any outstanding debt is only part of the reason why I requested to see you today.”

She folded a few spinach leaves onto her fork with the aid of her knife. “Oh?”

Carter took a bite of his salad, and then wiped his mouth with his napkin, resting his elbow on the table as he chased the greens with water. “Christ, they’re feeding me cow food. I feel like I should be grazing.”

She laughed.

He pushed his plate away and took a bread roll instead, slathering it with butter. Laney found her gaze riveted as he put the extra large bite into his mouth, chewing without much regard for etiquette. A man who was obviously hungry for more than what was on the table in front of him.

“I want you to help get me reinstated into the Corps.”

Chapter Four

“I DON’T NORMALLY HANDLE military cases,” Laney had told him when they’d walked back to her office building a couple of blocks away from the restaurant.

“Define ‘normally.’”

“Never.”

Carter had figured as much. He was already working with a JAG attorney and understood the way the military worked. Especially in his case, after he’d been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, essentially a rubber stamp they used to cover every personnel problem they encountered. Mouth off to a rookie captain who couldn’t tell his ass from an IED—improvised explosive device—and find yourself suspended for an amount of time to be determined by other glorified civilians who were even more clueless than the ones who had diagnosed him in the first place. Men who had no idea what it was to spend days on end in a shit-ridden sandbox without supplies and adequate protection, where everyone and no one could be your enemy, where ultimately your only friends were your weapon and your balls.

Things were just going far too slow for his liking.

Still, Laney had agreed to look into his case. See if there was something she could do to help expedite matters.

Sweat dripped from Carter’s forehead, landing on the tile of his kitchen floor where he was on this second set of one hundred push-ups. Old Blue lay nearby, his head on his paws, his droopy eyes shifting up and then down as he followed Carter’s movements.

It was after dark and outside the cicadas were kicking up a ruckus as they claimed the night.

This was Carter’s least favorite time of day. Darkness yawned in front of him like a murky, endless ditch that no amount of dirt in the world could fill in, no matter how hard he shoveled. Shadows claimed the corners of the small, old house and lengthened, the few lamps and lightbulbs stopping them from swallowing the rooms altogether.

Carter usually did one of two things right about now. Either he sat in front of the old television set with a twelve-pack next to one ankle while Blue rested against the other. Or he hit a nearby roadhouse, seeking temporary companionship and ultimately escape in a welcoming woman’s arms.

Neither option seemed palatable to him just now. Mostly because the only arms he could seem to concentrate on belonged to Laney Cartwright.

His muscles trembled as he pushed them beyond their limits. He finally collapsed to the floor, his cheek resting against the cool tile, his lungs on fire. But he paid attention to nothing outside the image of Laney’s surprised and happy smile earlier at the restaurant when she realized he wasn’t going anywhere.

The closest he’d come to meeting his match in a woman was JoEllen Atchison. He winced. At least that’s what he liked to tell himself. It turned out JoEllen must not have returned the sentiment or else she would never have believed him capable of trying to rape her two months ago. Still, before then, he’d been convinced that they had been simpatico, two jarheads who didn’t require foreplay but went straight to the deed when the need hit, their only real relationship being with the U.S. Marine Corps.

Carter rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Now with the wisdom that came with hindsight, he realized that what he and JoEllen had had was nothing but a handful of one-night stands that had occasionally included a weekend locked away in a seedy motel room with a box of pizza and a case of beer. And that somewhere down the line he had mistaken that for a relationship.

Of course, it was hard to understand the difference, because he had never really had a steady relationship with a woman. When he was younger, he’d been too busy being a Marine commander’s son. There had been no real time for the usual teenage stuff outside his positions as varsity football cornerback and team captain, the roles nothing more to him than warm-up for what he would do once he enlisted in the Marines when he was eighteen.

Girls…oh, they’d been there. Lifting up their pretty skirts and kissing him with their cherry-flavored lip gloss. But he’d never seen one of them more than three times, and even then not necessarily in a row, since he went out with other girls in between. He hadn’t fooled himself into thinking that the reason he got away with such bad behavior had to do with his good looks. As his father had liked to tell him, he looked two licks shy of a full tongue bath.

No, he knew his status as football captain allowed him certain privileges. Liberties he hadn’t been extended in the Corps, where one Marine was treated no different than a hundred others.

His mother…well, his mother lived down in Austin with another family. One she’d started after leaving Carter with his father when he was five, marrying another man and going on to have four more children that were no more like Carter than the sun was like the moon.

Heaving himself up from the floor, he opened the refrigerator, staring at the half-dozen bottles of beer in there, and reached for the water bottle instead. Unscrewing the top, he went to stand at the back doorway, staring out at the dark sky as he guzzled a good portion of cold water.

It wasn’t often that he wondered how life would have turned out for him had his mother taken him with her instead of leaving him with his father. Only every now and again when he found himself drifting in a sea of uncertainty. As he was now.

Would he have been a lawyer like Laney? A doctor? All four of his half siblings either boasted advanced degrees or were in the process of earning them.

Instead, the reason his mother had left his father had become a way of life for Carter, as well: the Corps.

And he had holes in his stomach knowing that they no longer wanted him.

Blue whined at his feet. Carter looked down at the old hound licking his drooping chops.

“What is it, boy?” He lifted the water bottle. “You want some of this?”

He opened the back door and led the way out onto the porch, where he poured a good portion into the dog’s bowl. The hound lapped it up.

Carter dropped to sit on the edge of the small landing, letting his feet dangle over the side. On the kitchen table his M16 assault rifle lay partially disassembled where he’d been cleaning it, next to a half-eaten burger he’d picked up from a nearby diner earlier.

He spotted the waxing quarter moon rising from the other side of the trees and thought again of Laney Cartwright. Wondered what she was doing right about then.

Wondered if she was thinking about him.

LANEY LAY BACK against the down pillows piled up against her headboard, her feet tucked under the soft Egyptian cotton sheets because they always got cold with the air conditioner on. The grandfather clock her father had bought her a couple of years ago chimed the hour in the front room of her two-bedroom penthouse apartment as she leafed through the MacGregor case file, trying to figure out who might want to threaten her. Laughter caught her attention and she looked up to try to catch the joke she’d just missed on her DVD of the third season of Sex and the City. It wasn’t long before her wandering attention wandered farther still and she was thinking about Carter Southard and the time they’d spent together earlier in the day.

So Carter Southard was a Marine.

She didn’t know why she was surprised. He fit all the physical requirements of the job. And certainly the mental criteria, as well.

Still, somehow she imagined him doing something else. Say, drilling for oil. Or running a cattle ranch. Something that required him to be out in the sun all day toiling away.

Of course, he could do that as a Marine, but…

She sighed. Okay, her thoughts were veering toward the ridiculous. All because she was trying to ignore the fact that she was so enormously attracted to him she’d nearly blown off her afternoon agenda on the MacGregor case and called him. Not for social reasons. But to get the name of his JAG attorney, which he’d promised to supply.

Not for social reasons, indeed.

Although that wasn’t far off the mark. She didn’t want to take him to a garden party or a symphony benefit. She wanted to share her bed with him.

Laughter caught her attention again and she forced herself to look down at the file resting against the easel formed by her knees. She should be thinking about the brief meeting she’d had with a police detective after lunch. About his questions on the MacGregor case and who might want to send her the threatening note. But she hadn’t been able to help him. MacGregor hadn’t had an accomplice. He was being charged as the lone gunman in a convenience store robbery that had left a male clerk dead.

So who would want to warn her off the case?

Well, she certainly wasn’t going to solve the mystery tonight. Not with her mind wandering to Carter every two seconds.

She closed the file and put it on the bedside table, then reached for the bottle of lotion there, smoothing a good squirt over her arms and knees before sliding farther down under the sheets.

“Do you make a habit of picking up strays?” Carter had asked her as they’d walked back to the office after lunch.

“What?”

He’d shrugged. “I can’t help wondering if taking on strange cases is something you do on a regular basis, or if I’m the exception.”

She’d stopped in front of the building and faced him, watching the way he squinted against the midday sun, causing fine lines to fan out from his granite eyes.

“Oh, you’re definitely an exception, Carter Southard,” she’d said. “And I have the feeling that this isn’t the only rule you’re going to inspire me to break.”

Laney found herself smiling faintly at the memory. It was more than Carter’s unpredictability that engaged her; it was also the way she felt when she was around him. In a life full of dull days, he’d lit a fire she couldn’t help being drawn to.

But if he’d been strictly fantasy material before, now he was very real.

She found that her hand had made its way down the silk of her nightgown, sliding over her hip bone and then back up again. Just thinking about him made her feel sexy, alive. Merely knowing that all she had to do was pick up the phone and make what her friends termed a “booty call” and he’d be over made her feel naughty for even considering it.

She bit her bottom lip. God, the way she was reacting to him, you’d think she was a virgin locked away from the world for the first twenty-eight years of her life. Not a woman who’d experienced her share of orgasms, although not as often as she’d like. Sue her, but she’d yet to find a man capable of supplying her with more than one or two. Usually after a couple of dates, the men either wanted to start staying over or wanted her to sleep at their place. And she hadn’t been interested in either.

That, or they’d expected her to fawn over them, turning from a no-nonsense, ambitious attorney to a woman who could think of nothing else but making them happy, a woman with nothing but wedding dates and dinner parties on her mind.

It didn’t take long for them to figure out that she didn’t fit into the normal Southern girl mold. At least not yet, her father occasionally liked to joke, reminding her that time had a way of changing even the strongest, career-minded women.

She couldn’t imagine herself changing, ever.

Still, even she admitted to pain when she’d spot her most recent ex with another woman. He’d make sure to introduce her to his latest conquest, who appeared to be just up his alley.

Carrie Bradshaw made a quip about men that normally would have amused her. Now she reached for the remote and shut off the television, then turned off the light, wondering if the rest of the world was out of sync with her. Or if she was out of sync with the world.

Chapter Five

“SO, TELL ME. Who is he?” Blake Cartwright asked.

Laney was suddenly incapable of swallowing the thinly sliced beef in her mouth. It had been two days since she’d lunched at Raphael’s with Carter. Still, that didn’t stop her from glancing toward the table she had sat at with him, barely seeing the older couple now lunching there.

She drank deeply from her water glass to help the food go down. “Pardon me?”

Blake pointed at her with his fork. “No pardon granted.” He took a bite of his trout and then put his utensils down and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. Her father was so different from Carter in that he’d eaten at this and similar restaurants hundreds of times and proper protocol was second nature to him. His suit was tailored, his shirt snow-white and freshly starched, his tie silk and pierced with a clip, his hair neatly trimmed. But his question and follow-up response proved that he had more in common with Carter when it came to seeing through her.

He narrowed his gaze. “You’ve been distracted ever since you came in. By now I usually know as many details about your latest case as your associates do, as well as what you’ve had for dinner the night before.”

Laney’s mouth dropped open. Thankfully there was nothing in it to fall out. “I can’t possibly talk all that much.”

Her father’s grin warmed her. “Maybe not all that much. But enough for me to know today’s quiet is out of character.”

Laney readjusted her napkin in her lap. “I’m just a little distracted, is all. I went to see MacGregor at the county jail this morning before today’s hearing.” She gave a slight shiver, always uncomfortable with her visits to places where iron bars were the dominant décor. “He has no idea who might have sent me that note.”

“Have you heard from the detective you gave it to?”

“Yes. No fingerprints. No unique characteristics.”

“No reason to further pursue the matter.”

“His words exactly.”

Her father folded his hands on the edge of the table. “Would you like me to look into it?”

Blake Cartwright had had big shoes to fill, following Laney’s legendary grandfather. But he had never really looked at it that way. Perhaps once he might have, but that would have been long before Laney was old enough to notice. Most men with inherited wealth were happy to accept a token role in the family business, allowing their money to make money for them. Not her father. He wanted to leave his own unique mark. And he was doing just that by establishing himself as a very successful venture capitalist.