Paper Rose

“I’m security chief of the Hutton corporation,” he reminded her. “This is a freelance favor I’m doing for a couple of old friends. So this is my working gear.”

She made a face. “You’ll get all dusty.”

He made a sound deep in his throat. “You can brush me off.”

She grinned wickedly. “Now that’s what I call incentive!”

He chuckled. “Cut it out. We’ve got a serious and sensitive situation here.”

“So you intimated on the phone.” She glanced around the airport. “Where’s baggage claim? I brought some tools and electronic equipment, too.”

“How about clothes?”

She stared at him blankly. “What do I need with a lot of clothes cluttering up my equipment case? These are wash-and-wear.”

He made another sound. “You can’t expect to go to a restaurant in that!”

“Why not? And who’s taking me to any restaurant?” she demanded. “You never do.”

He shrugged. “I’m going to do penance while we’re out here.”

Her eyes sparkled. “Great! Your bed or mine?”

He laughed in spite of himself. She was the only person in his life who’d ever been able to make him feel carefree, even briefly. She lit fires inside him, although he was careful not to let them show too much. “You never give up, do you?”

“Someday you’ll weaken,” she assured him. “And I’m prepared. I have a week’s supply of Trojans in my fanny pack….”

He managed to look shocked. “Cecily!”

She shrugged. “Women have to think about these things. I’m twenty-three, you know.” She added, “You came into my life at a formative time and rescued me from something terrible. Can I help it if you make other potential lovers look like fried sea bass by comparison?”

“I didn’t bring you out here to discuss your lack of lovers,” he pointed out.

“And here I hoped you were offering yourself up as an educational experience,” she sighed.

He glared down at her as they walked toward baggage claim.

“Okay,” she said glumly. “I’ll give up, for now. What do you want me to do out here?” she added, and sounded like the professional she really was. “You mentioned something about skeletal remains.”

He looked around them before he spoke. “We had a tip,” he told her, “that a murder could be solved if we looked in a certain place. About twenty years ago, a foreign double agent went missing near Tulsa. He was carrying a piece of microfilm that identified a mole in the CIA. It would be embarrassing for everybody if this is him and the microfilm surfaced now.”

“I gather that your mole has moved up in the world?”

“Don’t even ask,” he told her, then, with a smile he added, “I don’t want to have to put you in the witness protection program. All you have to do is tell me if this DB is the one we’re looking for.”

“Dead body,” she translated. Then she frowned. “I thought you had an expert out here.”

“You can’t imagine what sort of damned expert these guys brought with them.”

Yes, she could, but she didn’t say anything.

“Besides,” he added with a quick glance, “you’re discreet. I know from experience that you don’t tell everything you know.”

“What did your expert tell you about the body?”

“That it’s very old,” he said with exaggerated awe. “Probably thousands of years old!”

“Why do you think it isn’t?”

“For one thing, there’s a .32 caliber bullet in the skull.”

“Well, that rather lets out a Paleo-Indian hunter,” she agreed.

“Sure it does. But I need an expert to say so, or the case will be summarily dropped. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a former KGB mole making policy for me.”

“Me, neither,” she said inelegantly. “You do realize that somebody could have been out to the site and used the skull for target practice?”

He nodded. “Can you date the remains?”

“I don’t know. Carbon dating is best, but it takes time. I’ll do the best I can.”

“That’s good enough for me. Experts in Paleo-Indian archaeology aren’t thick on the ground in the ‘company’ these days. You were the only person I could think of to call.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You’re good,” he said. “That’s not flattery.” Changing the subject, he asked, “What have you got in those cases if you didn’t bring clothes?”

“A laptop computer with a modem and fax, a cellular phone, assorted digging tools, including a collapsible shovel, two reference works on human skeletal remains.”

She was struggling with the case. He reached out and took it from her, testing the weight. “Good God, you’ll get a hernia dragging this thing around. Haven’t you ever heard of luggage carriers?”

“Sure. I have three. They’re all back in D.C. in my closet.”

He led the way to a sport utility vehicle. He put her bags in the back and opened the door for her.

Cecily wasn’t beautiful, but she had a way about her. She was intelligent, lively, outrageous and she made him feel good inside. She could have become his world, if he’d allowed her to. But he was full-blooded Lakota, and she was not. If he ever married, something his profession made unlikely, he didn’t like the idea of mixed blood.

He got in beside her and impatiently reached for her seat belt, snapping it in place. “You always forget,” he murmured, meeting her eyes.

Her breath came uneasily through her lips as she met that level stare and responded helplessly to it. He was handsome and sexy and she loved him more than her own life. She had for years. But it was a hopeless, unreturned adoration that left her unfulfilled. He’d never touched her, not even in the most innocent way. He only looked.

“I should close my door to you,” she said huskily. “Refuse to speak to you, refuse to see you, and get on with my life. You’re a constant torment.”

Unexpectedly he reached out and touched her soft cheek with just his fingertips. They smoothed down to her full, soft mouth and teased the lower lip away from the upper one. “I’m Lakota,” he said quietly. “You’re white.”

“There is,” she said unsteadily, “such a thing as birth control.”

His face was very solemn and his eyes were narrow and intent on hers. “And sex is all you want from me, Cecily?” he asked mockingly. “No kids, ever?”

It was the most serious conversation they’d ever had. She couldn’t look away from his dark eyes. She wanted him. But she wanted children, too, eventually. Her expression told him so.

“No, Cecily,” he continued gently. “Sex isn’t what you want at all. And what you really want, I can’t give you. We have no future together. If I marry one day, it’s important to me that I marry a woman with the same background as my own. And I don’t want to live with a young, and all too innocent, white woman.”

“I wouldn’t be innocent if you’d cooperate for an hour,” she muttered outrageously.

His dark eyes twinkled. “Under different circumstances, I would,” he said, and there was suddenly something hot and dangerous in the way he looked at her as the smile faded from his chiseled lips, something that made her heart race even faster. “I’d love to strip you and throw you onto a bed and bend you like a willow twig under my body.”

“Stop!” she whispered theatrically. “I’ll swoon!” And it wasn’t all acting.

His hand slid behind her nape and contracted, dragging her rapt face just under his, so close that she could smell the coffee that clung to his clean breath, so close that her breasts almost touched his jacket.

“You’ll tempt me once too often,” he bit off. “This teasing is more dangerous than you realize.”

She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She was throbbing, aroused, sick with desire. In all her life, there had been only this man who made her feel alive, who made her feel passion. Despite the traumatic experience of her teens, she had a fierce physical attraction to Tate that she was incapable of feeling with any other man.

She touched his lean cheek with cold fingertips, slid them back, around his neck into the thick mane of long hair that he kept tightly bound—like his own passions.

“You could kiss me,” she whispered unsteadily, “just to see how it feels.”

He tensed. His mouth poised just above her parted lips. The silence in the car was pregnant, tense, alive with possibilities and anticipation. He looked into her wide, pale, eager green eyes and saw the heat she couldn’t disguise. His own body felt the pressure and warmth of hers and began to swell, against his will.

“Tate,” she breathed, pushing upward, toward his mouth, his chiseled, beautiful mouth that promised heaven, promised satisfaction, promised paradise.

His dark fingers corded in her hair. They hurt, and she didn’t care. Her whole body ached.

“Cecily, you little fool,” he ground out.

Her lips parted even more. He was weak. This once, he was weak. She could tempt him. It could happen. She could feel his mouth, taste it, breathe it. She felt him waver. She felt the sharp explosion of his breath against her lips as he let his control slip. His mouth parted and his head bent. She wanted it. Oh, God, she wanted it, wanted it, wanted it….

The sudden blare of a horn made her jump, brought her back to the painful present in the chill of the nation’s capitol, outside the exclusive restaurant where she’d just made the evening news by attacking Tate Winthrop with a tureen of crab bisque.

She stretched, hurting as she let the memory of the past reluctantly slip away. A car horn had separated her from Tate two years ago, too. He’d withdrawn from her at once, and that had been the end of her dreams. She’d helped solve his murder mystery, which was no more than a Paleo-Indian skull with a bullet in it, used in an attempt to frame an unpopular member of congress. Any anthropologist worth her salt would have known the race from the dentition and the approximate age from the patination and the projectile points and pottery that the would-be framer hadn’t realized would help date the remains.

Tate had involved Cecily, a student, and that had given her hope. But fate had quickly taken hope away with a blare from an impatient driver’s horn. From that moment on, Tate had put her at a distance and kept her there, for the two years of her master’s studies in forensic archaeology. Their close friendship had all but vanished. And tonight had shattered her world.

Her doctorate was a fading dream already. Since Tate had rescued her from her abusive stepfather at the age of seventeen and taken her to live with his mother on the Wapiti Ridge Sioux reservation, which was near the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, he’d acted in stead of a guardian. But he’d told her that she had a grant to pay for her education, her apartment, her clothing and food and other necessities. She had a bank account that it paid into. All her expenses had been covered for the past six years by that anonymous foundation that helped penniless young women get an education. At least that’s what Tate had told her. And tonight she’d discovered that it had all been a lie. Tate had been paying for it, all of it, out of his own pocket.

She pulled the shawl closer as a tall, lithe figure cut across the parking lot and joined her at the passenger door.

“You’re already famous,” Colby Lane told her, his dark eyes twinkling in his lean, scarred face. “You’ll see yourself on the evening news, if you live long enough to watch it.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Tate’s on his way right now.”

“Unlock this thing and get me out of here!” she squeaked.

He chuckled. “Coward.”

He unlocked the door and let her climb in. By the time he got behind the wheel and took off, Tate was striding across the parking lot with blood in his eye.

Cecily blew him a kiss as Colby gunned the engine down the busy street.

“You’re living dangerously tonight,” Colby told her. “He knows where you live,” he added.

“He should. He paid for the apartment,” she added in a sharp, hurt tone. She wrapped her arms closer around her. “I don’t want to go home, Colby. Can I stay with you tonight?”

She knew, as few other people did, that Colby Lane was still passionately in love with his ex-wife, Maureen. He had nothing to do with other women even two years after his divorce was final. He drank to excess from time to time, but he wasn’t dangerous. Cecily trusted no one more. He’d been a good friend to her, as well as to Tate, over the years.

“He won’t like it,” he said.

She let out a long breath. “What does it matter now?” she asked wearily. “I’ve burned my bridges.”

“I don’t know why that socialite Audrey had to tell you,” he muttered irritably. “It was none of her business.”

“Maybe she wants a big diamond engagement ring, and Tate can’t afford it because he’s keeping me,” she said bitterly.

He glanced at her rigid profile. “He won’t marry her.”

She made a sound deep in her throat. “Why not? She’s got everything…money, power, position and beauty—and a degree from Vassar.”

“In psychology,” Colby mused.

“She’s been going around with Tate for several months.”

“He goes around with a lot of women. He won’t marry any of them.”

“Well, he certainly won’t marry me,” she assured him. “I’m white.”

“More a nice, soft tan,” he told her. “You can marry me. I’ll take care of you.”

She made a face at him. “You’d call me Maureen in your sleep and I’d lay your head open with the lamp. It would never work.”

He drew in a long breath. His lean hands tightened on the wheel. One of them was artificial. Colby had lost an arm in Africa. He was a mercenary, a professional soldier. Sometimes he worked for various covert government agencies, sometimes he freelanced. She never asked about his frequent travels. They were companions who went out together occasionally, fellow sufferers of unrequited passions for other people. It made for a close friendship.

“Tate’s a damned fool,” he said flatly.

“I don’t appeal to him,” she corrected. “It’s a shame I’m not Lakota.”

“Leta Winthrop would argue that point,” he murmured with an amused glance. “Didn’t you lobby for sovereignty at that Senate hearing last month?”

“Me and several other activists. Some of the Lakota resent having a white woman plead their case, but I’ve been trying my best.”

“I know.”

“Thanks for your support.” She leaned back against the car seat. “It’s been a horrible night. I guess Senator Holden will never speak to me again, much less invite me to another political banquet.”

“He’ll love the publicity he gets from your exit,” he corrected with a chuckle. “And I believe he’s been trying to persuade you to assume the position of assistant curator in charge of acquisitions with his new Native American Museum project in D.C.”

“So he is. I may have to take it now. I can’t see going on with my studies under the circumstances.”

“I’ve got some cash in Swiss banks. I’ll help you.”

“Thanks, but no, thanks. I’m going to be totally independent.”

“Suit yourself.” He glanced at her. “If you take that job, it won’t get you any points with Tate. He and Matt Holden are bitter enemies.”

“Senator Holden doesn’t favor allowing a casino on the Wapiti reservation. Tate does. They’ve almost come to blows on the issue twice.”

“So I heard. And that’s not all I’ve heard. Holden is sticking his nose into a hornet’s nest in the Indian Affairs committee, and he’s had some public and all but slanderous things to say about the push for a casino at Wapiti.”

“There are other Sioux casinos in South Dakota,” she replied. “But Senator Holden is fighting this one all the way. Nobody knows why. He and Tate have had some real battles over this.”

“That’s just an excuse and you know it. Tate hates the man.” Colby pushed back a strand of straight black hair that fell into his eyes. Unlike Tate, his hair was short. “I know I said this before, but it bears repeating. You know Tate won’t like you staying with me.”

“I don’t care,” she said bitterly. “I don’t tell him where to sleep. It’s none of his business what I do anymore.”

He made a rough sound. “Would you like to guess what he’s going to assume if you stay the night in my apartment?”

She drew in a long breath. “Okay. I don’t want to cause problems between you, not after all the years you’ve been friends. Take me to a hotel instead.”

He hesitated uncharacteristically. “I can take the heat, if you can.”

“I don’t know that I can. I’ve got enough turmoil in my life right now. Besides, he’ll look for me at your place. I don’t want to be found for a couple of days, until I can get used to my new situation and make some decisions about my future. I want to see Senator Holden and find another apartment. I can do all that from a hotel.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Make it a moderately priced one,” she added with graveyard humor. “I’m no longer a woman of means. From now on, I’m going to have to be responsible for my own bills.”

“You should have poured the soup in the right lap,” he murmured.

“Which was?”

“Audrey Gannon’s,” he said curtly. “She had no right to tell you that Tate was your benefactor. She did it for pure spite, to drive a wedge between you and Tate. She’s nothing but trouble. One day Tate is going to be sorry that he ever met her.”

“She’s lasted longer than the others.”

“You haven’t spent enough time talking to her to know what she’s like. I have,” he added darkly. “She has enemies, among them an ex-husband who’s living in a duplex because she got his house, his Mercedes, and his Swiss bank account in the divorce settlement.”

“So that’s where all those pretty diamonds came from,” she said wickedly.

“Her parents had money, too, but they spent most of it before they died in a plane crash. She likes unusual men, they say, and Tate’s unusual.”

“She won’t go to the reservation to see Leta,” she commented.

“Of course not.” He leaned toward her as he stopped at a traffic light. “It’s a Native American reservation!”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Leta’s worth two of Audrey.”

“Three,” he returned. “Okay. I’ll find you a hotel. Then I’m leaving town before Tate comes looking for me!”

“You might hang a crab on your front door,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. “It just might ward him off.”

“Ha!”

She turned her eyes toward the bright lights of the city. She felt cold and alone and a little frightened. But everything would work out. She knew it would. She was a grown woman and she could take care of herself. This was her chance to prove it.

Chapter Two

There was film at eleven. Senator Holden found it hilarious, and when Cecily phoned to ask him about the job at the new museum that he’d offered her, he told her so. He didn’t ask any questions. He accepted her application over the phone and gave her the job on the spot.

Early Monday morning, Cecily found a small apartment that she could manage on the salary she’d be making and she moved out of the apartment Tate had been paying for. She pulled out of her master’s classes and withdrew from college. From now on, she was paying her own way. And one day, she’d pay Tate back, every penny. For the time being, shell-shocked and sick at heart that she was nothing more than a charity case to him, she wanted no more to do with the man she’d loved for so long. No wonder he’d thought of her as his ward. She was obligated to him for every crumb she put in her mouth. But no more. She was her own woman now. She’d support herself. Maybe later she could finish her master’s degree. She had plenty of time for that. At least she had a job to see her through this difficult transition.

She was forced to use her small bank account to pay the deposit on the new apartment, to pay for movers to transport her few possessions and for enough food to keep her going until she drew her first paycheck. She was so sick at heart that she hated the whole world. She couldn’t even talk to Tate’s mother, Leta.

The new apartment was small, and not much to look at, but at least she’d be responsible for herself. Unlike the old one, it was unfurnished, so she started out with very little. She didn’t even have a television set. At least the new place was closer to the museum. She could ride the bus to work every day, or even take the metro if she liked.

Colby came by to help her unpack, bringing a pizza with him and a small boom box with some cassettes as a house-warming present. They munched while they unwrapped lamps and dishes, sipping beer because it was all he brought for them to drink.

“I hate beer,” she moaned.

“If you drink enough of it, you won’t care about the taste,” he assured her.

She gave the can a dubious stare, shrugged, closed her eyes, held her breath and drank heavily. “Yuck!” she said.

“Keep going.”

She finished half of the can and ate some more pizza. After a few minutes, sure enough, it didn’t taste half-bad.

He watched her grin and nodded. “That’s the first smile I’ve seen in days.”

“I’m getting through it,” she assured him. “I start work next Monday. I can’t wait.”

“I wish I could be around to hear about your first day, but I’ve got another overseas assignment.”

She suspended the pizza at her mouth. Putting it down, she said worriedly, “Colby, you’ve already lost an arm…”

“And it will make me more careful,” he told her. “I lost it because I got drunk. I won’t let that happen again.” He glanced at the can. “Beer doesn’t affect me these days. It’s just a pleasant diversion.” He looked at her. “I’m through my worst time. Now I’m going to help you through yours. When I get back.”

She grimaced. “Well, don’t get killed, okay?”

He chuckled. “Okay.”

During Colby’s absence, she celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday with a cupcake, a candle and a card from Leta, who never forgot. Tate apparently had, or he was holding a grudge. For the first time in eight years, her birthday passed unnoticed by him.

She was now firmly entrenched at the museum and having the time of her life. She missed college and her classmates, but she loved the work she was doing. Acquisitions would be part of her duties as assistant curator, and she got to work in her own forensic archaeology field, Paleo-Indian archaeology. She didn’t really miss forensics as much as she’d expected to. It was almost as exciting to have access to rare collections of Folsom Clovis, and other projectile points, which were thousands of years old, along with bola stones, chippers and other stone tools and pottery fashioned by long-dead hands.

Her new phone number was unlisted, but Tate called her once at the museum. She put the phone down, gently but firmly. He didn’t call again.

Senator Holden did. “It’s my birthday Saturday night,” he said. “I want you and Colby to come.”

“He’s out of town. But I’d love to.”

“Great! We can talk about some new projects I’ve got in mind.”

“We can?” she asked, grinning because she knew how much he loved the museum; it had been his idea to open it. He was a fanatic in the field of Native American culture. He wasn’t Sioux, but his mother had taught on the Wapiti Sioux reservation. Like Cecily, he had an affinity for the Lakota nation.

He chuckled. “I’ll tell you all about it on Saturday. Six sharp at my house. Don’t be late. It’s a buffet.”

“I won’t eat for days,” she promised.

When she hung up she realized what she’d said. She did eat more frugally than before. She spent more frugally than before. Her surroundings weren’t lavish. But she wasn’t having to depend on anyone’s charity. She was twenty-five and self-supporting. It felt good.

Cecily phoned Leta to let her know that she planned to fly out to Rapid City and drive over to the Wapiti Ridge Sioux Reservation near Custer State Park in South Dakota for the tribe’s annual celebrations. There would be a large contingent of Lakota at the three-day September event, and native dancing and singing as well. She’d already bought her plane ticket and reserved a rental car. She wasn’t going to back out of the event just because she and Tate weren’t speaking. Anyway, there wasn’t a chance that Tate would go now.