Warrior Without A Cause

He frowned as his gaze followed her graceful crossing of the balance beam. Even though she must have been exhausted from the morning run, she managed to move with the agile strength of a dancer, arms seesawing in fluid sweeps as she hurried across the narrow plank. With a hopping dismount, she sped without hesitation toward the tires and tiptoed through them like a child playing hopscotch. Her pale blond ponytail bobbed with girlish energy but there was nothing childish in the bounce of her breasts beneath her zippered jacket. He glanced at the stopwatch in his hand to give his imagination a time-out.

Everything about Tessa nudged uncomfortably against the barriers he’d created to keep the outside world at bay. Her determination combined with the wounded-bird protectiveness she’d stirred the moment she peeled down her sunglasses to bare an unwavering stare above all those assorted bruises convinced him to take her under his wing. And that made her a threat. A threat to all he’d built here in his isolated, insulated wilderness. A threat to his “Don’t involve me” motto.

He hated causes, knowing that starry-eyed do-gooders like Tessa and her father often fell victim to them. He could have told her that her father was probably guilty of everything the papers accused. He knew, firsthand, that good men sometimes got mixed up in bad things through no fault of their own. But it wasn’t his job to educate the mulish and high-minded Ms. D’Angelo in that area. Her unrealistic ideals were not his problem.

Whatever information Stan was bound to discover once he put his nose to the ground wasn’t going to clear Robert D’Angelo’s good name. It was going to show his naive daughter an ugly truth, that when he was pressed into a situation he couldn’t escape, the D.A. had taken the coward’s way out by putting a gun to his head, leaving his family to clean up the mess.

Well, who was he to condemn D’Angelo? Hadn’t he done the same thing on a less fatal level?

Tessa swung across the ladder, going rung to rung like a twenty-first-century Jane in his own private jungle.

Coward, she had called him. Who was he to argue? As long as she believed him to be a man without honor, a coward who trained then sent others to carry out deeds he refused to champion, she would keep a safe distance. Stan would ferret out the facts and make her face them. Then she’d be gone to piece her world back together and he could go on living day to day in his. Without complications. Without risk. And he’d be happy as a clam about it, closed up in his impenetrable shell.

Tessa D’Angelo and her cause was not his concern.

He clicked the stem on the watch as she sprinted past him. Purposefully he didn’t look her way as she bent over, hands braced on her knees, her sweet little derriere pointed in his direction. He was glowering when she came over to peer down at the sheet tacked to his clipboard.

“How’d I do, coach?”

Her voice was breathy, slightly ragged, the way he’d imagine it would be after an exuberant bout of sex. His own growled in response.

“Better by five point two seconds.”

She looked ridiculously pleased at that, as if she’d won some prestigious court case or the lottery.

“But don’t start booking your Olympic berth just yet.”

Even his surly retort couldn’t dim the sudden flash of her smile.

His gut twisted.

Then her bright, curious eyes lifted to a spot past his shoulder and her tawny brows arched in unspoken question. He glanced behind him to see Constanza carrying linens across the footbridge to the barracks. Even before she asked, he suddenly realized the conclusion Tessa had drawn.

“Are she and the little girl—”

Jack cut her off. “What they are, is none of your business. You were not invited here as a guest and I’ll allow for no intrusions into my private life. Clear?”

She blinked, startled and hurt, but the fiery pride was quick to resurface. Her tone was equally chilled. “Like my mother’s fine crystal.”

She caught the book he tossed her way without checking the cover. Her gaze still skewered his, letting him know how unforgivably rude he’d just been.

Knowing she was right didn’t improve his mood.

“Homework. Read lessons one through four. We’ll be going over them at fourteen hundred hours. And I don’t mean in a lecture hall.”

She rolled the self-defense manual in her grip and, without another word, started for the barracks. As she passed the South American woman at the bridge, Tessa never acknowledged her with so much as a glance.

A long, hot shower helped unknot Tessa’s muscles but did little for the tension twisting through her. With a towel turbaned around her damp hair, she reclined on her bunk against a brace of pillows borrowed from the empty rooms and flipped open the manual that she noted was written by a former SEAL. Poet laureates didn’t teach unarmed combat.

While Tinker leaned into her hip to fastidiously wash his hind leg, Tessa began to study with the concentration she’d applied to her bar exam. Taking notes in a spiral pad, she jotted down the essentials of stance, footwork, making a proper fist and basic hand techniques for pummeling your assailant. Tinker paused to glare at her as she practiced the rudiments of the jab-punch, hook-and-elbow strike. She smiled faintly. Okay, a little like her Tae-Bo classes. She could do this. She continued through the detailed mechanics of knee strikes and round kicks, picturing Jackie Chan then, annoyingly, Jack Chaney, illustrating the moves in her mind’s eye. Thinking of Chaney inspired her to restless movement.

With the book open on her bedspread, Tessa ran through the drills, combining punches and kicks with swift, potentially lethal intent. She pictured Jack’s carved-in-stone features as he told her not to intrude in his personal life. Pow. Right jab. As if she’d find anything fascinating there.

He could keep his oh-so-important secrets. Chaney’s life, no matter how intriguing, was not the reason she was here—here in the bunkhouse as a student, not in the main house as a guest, where the mysterious woman and child who may or may not belong to him lived.

A sudden surge of melancholy stole her aggressive thunder. He didn’t have to be so mean about it.

Closing the book, she flopped down on the bed and gathered a briefly resistant Tinker up in her arms. As she stroked his scarred head, he magnanimously issued his rumbling purr of approval.

Even in the daytime it was quiet. She was a city girl, born and bred, used to the city’s vibrant, jarring cadences. It was the music that scored her daily activities. She’d always been in a hurry, darting from the office to the court to dinner meetings and social galas. Working, always working, even in her pajamas late at night, curled on the couch in front of “David Letterman,” a volume of appellate law on her lap, absently shooing Tinker out of her bowl of Frosted Cheerios.

Her planner was always full, her voice message light blinking and her bathroom mirror covered with multicolored sticky notes reminding her of errands to be prioritized. And what fueled most of her hours, nearly 24/7, was her father. Arranging his schedule, proofing his speeches, writing his motions, picking up his dry cleaning, always busy behind the scenes so he would look together and unharried. What was she going to do without him in her life to provide that driving force? Even now she couldn’t believe she would never hear his voice over the intercom asking if she knew where to find the Pellingham brief. Her days, her nights, her focus all funneled into Robert D’Angelo and his charismatic climb from prosecutor to D.A. and on into a political arena. Phones ringing, cabs honking, file cabinet doors rattling open, the constant gurgle of coffee being brewed. Those were the sounds that had filled her life with meaning.

Here, in this isolated silence, her thoughts echoed. And the last thing she wanted was time to think, time to second-guess, time to doubt. Was she doing the right thing? Would her father approve of the steps she was taking? If he was innocent, he would.

If?

She hadn’t meant if. The Freudian slip horrified her.

She was the only one who knew for certain that her father wasn’t guilty. Even if she hadn’t heard another man’s voice—The Voice—in the inner office just before the fateful shot, she’d have been sure. How could her father turn against all the things that mattered to them, all the things that pulled them together, as close as father and daughter could be when striving for the same cause?

But that wasn’t quite true, was it?

They’d never been close as father and daughter. She’d put her own ambitions aside, pushed her way into his world, tried to find a place for herself in his busy professional life since he’d never had time for her in his personal one.

Why hadn’t she been able to earn his love the way she’d claimed his respect?

Closing her eyes against the fresh pain stemming back through her childhood, Tessa braced her forearm across her brow as if to hold the hurt away. And with eyes closed, cocooned in silence, her weary body surrendered while her tormented mind continued to spin.

You won’t like what you find. Stop now…

She surged into an upright position, the cry of panic and pleading still on her lips. Hands caught her wrists as her arms flailed, gently restraining her. Fingers cupped the back of her head, pulling it in against the warm, sheltered lee of a broad shoulder. Once released, her arms whipped around the solid support of the last man she’d expected to find upon waking in her bed.

“Daddy?”

But the voice that soothed away all the agony and terror of her dreams belonged to Jack Chaney.

“It’s all right. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.”

Too late.

He wore a black T-shirt, heated by the filtered sun and by the skin beneath it. He smelled of the woods, fresh laundry soap and some deeply masculine aftershave. For a time she was oddly content to ride the comforting rise and fall of his breaths. He held her carefully, as if he feared she might break, or as if he was afraid too tight an embrace would serve to frighten her more. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, she felt protected and safe.

Her father had never come into her room to chase away the fragments of childish nightmares. Her mother had.

And now here was a man she wouldn’t have thought had any soft edges, soothing her hair and quieting her hitching sobs.

Her hands opened, spreading wide and not coming close to encompassing the breadth of his shoulders. Soft edges? Hardly. He might well have been hewn of warm granite under the snug pull of cotton. Her thumbs shifted, tracing the swell of muscle and in one breath, her sob dissolved into something suspiciously like a sigh.

Fearing he’d heard it, Tessa started looking for a graceful way to escape his arms. How could she let him see her so achingly vulnerable and still demand his respect? She rubbed her face against his chest to erase the tears before struggling to lean away. His arms gave gradually, almost with reluctance. She couldn’t quite meet his gaze, afraid of what she’d see there.

“I’m sorry. Just a nightmare.”

“I heard you cry out. I came down when you didn’t show up for your lesson.” His words petered out until an awkward silence pushed between them more forcefully than physical distance. She snagged a quick breath as he rubbed away the last damp trail of evidence from her cheek with the slow drag of his thumb. Calloused yet unbearably tender. She sat back so fast the top of her head came up under his jaw, snapping his teeth together like a trap. She did glance up then, fatalistically drawn to see the quizzical knitting of his dark brows. He seemed bemused. Somehow, that was all too intimate.

“You shouldn’t be here. What if your wife—”

She hauled in the blurted statement when his expression froze over.

“I don’t have a wife,” he said at last, enunciating with surgical precision. “I don’t belong to any woman or any career. I am my own man, Ms. D’Angelo, and I like it that way.”

The strange choking sensation building up from her chest to wad in her throat made her next words rumble.

“That’s the way I like it, too, Mr. Chaney. You’ve made it perfectly clear that the only thing on your agenda is not to get involved, with my mission or my motives. And I will not allow any intrusions into my search for justice, especially from a man who knows nothing about honor.”

For a moment he said nothing, then, oddly, he smiled. “Well, since it seems you’re so eager to get started with full contact, let’s get to it.”