Never Say Never Again

She propped her head in her hand. Who was she kidding? It wasn’t so long ago that she had entertained ideas of indulging in such behavior solely because it was the nation’s capital. While she didn’t claim to be an exhibitionist, there was something decidedly erotic and intense about the idea of having sex a mere stone’s throw away from the White House.

The city itself had proved an incredible aphrodisiac when she’d first started attending G.W.U. Or could it perhaps have been that D.C. wasn’t the small town of Prospect, New Hampshire? She still couldn’t be sure. But leaving the place where she’d grown up as the youngest of three daughters of the high-school math teacher had been wonderfully freeing. Not once had she been taunted for her height. Nor had she felt hemmed in by her lack of career choices. The sky was the limit as far as her future was concerned. And when she discovered that men were attracted to her…well, she’d taken to them like chocolate, in some odd way trying to make up for every guy who had shunned her in high school, every kid who had teased her, made her feel like a towering tree with absolutely no grace. In essence, she’d become a serial dater.

She supposed the reasons were far more complicated than that. Still, while her personal life was littered with debris from failed relationships, she had excelled in her studies and career. Affirmative action may have made it easier for her to obtain certain positions, like clerking under an esteemed superior court judge, followed by a stint in the local prosecutor’s office, then a gratifying round with a citizens’ action group, but it was her unabashed ambition and singleminded purpose that had landed her in the U.S. attorney’s office four years ago.

Then came Thomas.

She shook the paper vigorously, hoping the action itself would snap her from her reverie. She didn’t want to think about him now. Didn’t want to think about Connor either. After Thomas…well, she’d vowed to spend uninterrupted quality time with herself. And that didn’t include one U.S. Marshal Connor McCoy. Especially given the cloud of suspicion now hanging over him.

The wall phone rang. Bronte slanted a look at the clock, then continued reading. Too early for her mother. Besides, she’d spoken to her the day before yesterday, so it would probably be next week before she spoke to her again, unless something important popped up. And if it was something important, she didn’t think she could deal with it right now. She turned the page and continued to pretend to read the story.

Her gaze was again drawn to the phone.

The caller could be someone from work. With this Robbins witness case, everything at the U.S. attorney’s office was in upheaval. While it might be good to let whoever it was think she was already on her way downtown, that call could be important, too.

She bit on her bottom lip and slowly lowered the newspaper to the table. Four rings.

She picked it up on the fifth. “Hello?”

“Bronte?”

She absently rubbed her forehead, thinking she should have let the answering machine pick it up.

“Bronte? Are you there?”

She closed her eyes and drew in a steadying breath. “Yes, Thomas, I’m here.” Though she wished for all the world that she wasn’t. Just five minutes later she would have been in the shower and would have missed the call. Just a half hour later, she would already have left the town house for work. But no, Thomas had to call now when he knew she would probably pick up.

“You haven’t returned my calls.”

She leaned against the wall. “No, I haven’t.”

“You mind telling me why?”

He sounded too calm, too rational, and far too familiar. “Maybe because I don’t have anything to say to you?”

There was a pregnant pause, then he said quietly, “I’ve left Jessica, Bronte.”

The words swirled in Bronte’s mind. “And that affects me…how, exactly?”

“I guess that’s for you to decide.”

“Funny, I thought I made my decision.”

“Things change, Bronte.”

Her gaze caught on a grainy black-and-white photo of Connor McCoy on the front page of one of the newspapers. She rubbed her forehead. “Yeah, and the more they do, the more they stay the same.” She sighed. “Look, Thomas, I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t call me anymore.”

“Okay. I can respect that.”

She began to pull the receiver away from her ear, but his quiet voice stopped her, drawing her back like a dog who had either been kicked too much, or not enough. He said, “But that doesn’t mean you can’t call me. I’m at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, room 21104. And, of course, you still have my work number. Call me anytime, Bronte.”

“Goodbye, Thomas.”

She hung up the receiver with both hands, then stood staring it at for a long, long moment.

What was it with men? Months pass without a word, time in which you learn to pull yourself together. Then bam. One phone call and they expect you to come running. Forget that he had virtually ripped her heart out. This, after steadily dating for three months. Long after she’d fallen head over heels in love with him.

She leaned against the wall again, burying her face in her hands. Weren’t women supposed to have a sixth sense about married, lying, cheating, heart-stealing creeps? Some sort of alarm that went off, saying “warning, warning, pond scum at twelve o’clock”? She’d never figured herself to be the gullible type. The exact opposite, if truth be known. On the rare occasion when she took a sick day and spent it listing around in bed knocking back Chinese chicken soup and ogling day-time television that featured shows with themes like, “She slept with my brother, emptied my bank account, killed my dog, but I still want her back,” she’d harshly judged the other women as no-good home wreckers who’d known the men they were seeing were married and continued the relationship anyway.

It was shocking to have to aim her biting judgment of them at herself.

She dropped her hands to her sides. To this day, she still couldn’t figure out the logistics of how Thomas had managed to keep his wife a secret from her. Or her a secret from his wife. After she’d found out, he’d explained his wife was a surgeon who chose second shift hours because she felt she worked better then. But what about the apartment he’d taken her to? The nights he’d slept over at her place?

“Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

The plain truth of it was that once she’d found out, there was no going back. She’d quickly called a halt to whatever…strange relationship they’d had. Thrown away the clippings of wedding dresses she’d begun to collect. Burned the few belongings he’d left at her place. Mangled his engagement ring in the trash compactor. And sworn off men until an unspecified time in the future when she could think about what happened with Thomas and not feel…dirty. Could look at herself in the mirror and like herself again.

That certainly wasn’t going to happen if she took up with him again, wife or no wife.

And indulging in heated thoughts of Connor McCoy wasn’t going to make that happen either. Moving from a man who was too committed to women, to a man who wanted no commitment and was a suspected murderer, was not progress.

Gathering up the newspapers, she used her foot to open the cupboard under the sink, then stuffed them inside the wastebasket. The recycling patrol would have to forgive her this once. She kicked the door closed with her bare foot, brushed her hands together, then kicked the door again for good measure.

Of course it was only par for the course that she stubbed her big toe and had to hobble around to get ready for work. She couldn’t wait to find out what else this wonderful day had in store for her.

3

THERE WERE BLASTED story-twisting, scandal-hungry reporters hiding out everywhere. When Connor went home to his D.C. apartment, they sprung from behind the bushes, camera lights blinding him, microphones hitting him in the chin. When he checked in at work, they were in the hall outside his office; he’d even found one hiding in one of the men’s room stalls. He grimaced. Not that there was much reason for him to go to work nowadays. He’d been suspended with pay the instant Melissa Robbins’s body had been found…and he’d been named as suspect number one.

Two days and it hadn’t sunk in yet. He was good at his job. Damn good. He’d never done one single thing in his entire career to cast him in a suspicious light. He prided himself on being the one they called in for special ops, and carefully cultivated his reputation for getting the job done. He’d never lost a witness. It was only natural then that he’d fully expected his boss to stand behind him.

Not exactly the way things had gone down. Before he could get two words in, old Newton had asked for his badge and his firearm and told him he was on indefinite suspension until the outcome of the case was decided.

Politics. He knew the drill. The higher-ups in the department had to distance themselves, or at least appear like they were distancing themselves, from him in order to cover their asses. Not merely because of potential lawsuits from the victim’s family. But because Washington bigwigs loved to throw their weight around when it came to high-profile cases like this one. The perfect PR opportunity to make it look like they were doing something for the constituents back home. Unfortunately, their power plays ultimately hurt the ones least responsible for the trouble. Men like his boss, Newton.

Men like him.

He hadn’t been able to get a full accounting of exactly what implausible evidence linked him to Robbins’s murder. But sources did tell him that an arrest was probably imminent. It was his job to make sure that arrest never took place.

Tightening his hands on the steering wheel of his silver SUV, Connor pulled up into the gravel drive of the McCoy place in Manchester, Virginia. Pops’s car wasn’t there. Good. And at this time of the morning, Liz and Mitch would be busy in the ranch office. Even better. His mind had been so busy whizzing through all the details of his predicament in the past two days, he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. It wasn’t until he’d accidentally poured salt into his coffee instead of sugar at a D.C. diner that morning that he realized he needed a few hours to himself to get some major shut-eye. And the old McCoy house was just the place to do that.

He distractedly eyed the pen that paralleled the parking area. Kelli’s mutt, Kojak, was sitting inside with Mitch’s behemoth Goliath.

Clutching the keys to the McCoy place, and to his car, he climbed out then crossed over to the pen and crouched down. Kojak ignored him, but Goliath ambled over and stuck his wet nose through the fence. He absently stroked him. “What is it, boy? Feeling a little put out?”

Could he ever relate to that feeling. For the past thirty-six hours, he’d launched an all out attack to find out why he was under suspicion for Melissa Robbins’s murder. He’d come up with little more than nothing. He’d finally had to admit he needed access to inside info. Needed to find out exactly what the U.S. attorney’s office had on him before he could go any further.

Goliath nudged his other hand, causing him to lose his grip on his keys. Grimacing, he bent down to pick them up, then stood up slowly as Goliath sprinted away from the fence.

Giving the quiet grounds a once-over, Connor turned from the dog, then he walked toward the house and let himself in. The door was open, which wasn’t surprising. The crime rate in Manchester was basically nil. And what criminals might be lurking about certainly wouldn’t think of coming all the way out here.

He stepped into the kitchen. The telltale acrid smell of something having been burned permeated the room. He was growing used to that. It was the utter silence of the place he found unsettling. In his overtired state, he found it all too easy to imagine Jake sitting in his room studying the latest in international law; Marc camped out in front of the television, soaking in whatever happened to be playing that time of the day; Mitch repairing something or other upstairs; David tossing a baseball against the side of the house, the clunk, clunk each time the ball made contact irritating yet reassuring.

David….

It was impossible to believe the kid was married. Married, for cripe’s sake.

What was he talking about? He couldn’t believe he was the only one of the five of them unmarried.

He climbed the steps two at a time, then crossed the second-floor hall to the room that had always been his, even after moving out and getting his own apartment in D.C. over a decade earlier. He started pulling off his shirt even as he opened the door. At least the reporters hadn’t found out about this place yet. He could use it as home base until he figured out just how, exactly, he’d ended up in the mess he was in. And who had set him up to take a fall he hadn’t earned.

He drew to an abrupt stop in the middle of his room. Only a quick, startled glance told him it was no longer his room. He backed up into the hall, looked around, then stared at the door that still held the words he’d carved when he was ten. “Private. Keep Out.” He peered back inside.

It was his room, all right. Only it wasn’t. A wood, spindle cradle sat in the middle, stuffed full of tiny, brightly colored toy animals. A rocking chair was angled where his twin bed used to be. And someone had painted the walls white and decorated them with…was that Winnie the Pooh?

He grimaced. Where were all his sports posters? The collection of football cards he’d kept piled up in the corner? The photograph of his mother he kept on a nightstand that was no longer there?

“Aw, hell.” He realized that while he’d visited in the past three months, he’d never actually gone up to his old room. His new sisters-in-law must have turned it into a nursery for his nephew while he wasn’t looking, to use whenever Marc and Mel came for visits. Which was too often for his liking.

Connor scratched his head. Shouldn’t someone have asked him before doing something so drastic? And what about the other rooms? Why hadn’t they chosen one of those?

He strode down the hall, throwing open doors as he went. Pops’s room looked the same. So did Marc’s. Jake had added a double bed to his, and his old twin now sported a pink, frilly spread, more likely than not compliments of Lili, but it was still the same. Mitch’s was hardly recognizable now that his wife, Liz, had moved in, but there was no mistaking that it was still his room.

His was the only one they had screwed with.

He rubbed his hand over his numb face, feeling ridiculously like he’d woken up that morning to find he’d been evicted from his life.

He backtracked to Marc’s room, stalked to the bed, then sank down on the new mattress, curious as to why Marc and Mel hadn’t traded the twin for a double, or why they hadn’t put the damn crib in here—but he wasn’t up to dealing with the answer right now. He tossed his shirt to the corner, kicked his boots off, then stretched out, staring at the ceiling without seeing it, his feet dangling from the end of the too-short bed.

Almost immediately an image of Bronte O’Brien filled his mind.

Figured. The first free moment he had to himself and a woman intruded.

He supposed he should be used to it by now, given all the females that had taken over the McCoy place, but this was different, somehow. Bronte was different.

He closed his eyes and crossed his arms over them. Oh, he’d had his share of women in his lifetime. Mostly short-lived relationships that ended almost as quickly as they began. He’d meet someone somewhere, take her out a couple times, go to bed with her, then walk out when she started talking about something more serious.

He found it a little strange that he had never asked Bronte out. Not only now, but back in college. It wasn’t as if she had a sign around her neck that read, “Interested in marriage, only.” On the contrary, if she wore a sign it would probably say, “Mention of the word marriage is punishable by death.”

Normally his kind of girl.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been attracted to her. She’d always commanded his attention the moment she walked into the room. And that certainly hadn’t changed.

There. That was it. His epiphany of the day. He was attracted to Bronte. If kissing her the other night hadn’t proven that, then certainly his inability to stop thinking about her now did.

He jerkily rolled over, compensating when the move nearly threw him over the side of the narrow bed. Her wanton reaction to him hinted that she was as drawn to him as he was to her. By all rights, he ought to just sleep with her and get it over with.

He remembered the way she’d pressed her breast into his touch. How she’d boldly reached down to cup his erection in her hand. Recalled her surprised gasp when she ran her fingers down and around the length and breadth of him.

Connor’s stomach tightened and he turned his head the other way on the pillow. He’d never…wanted a woman the way he wanted Bronte O’Brien. He wanted to kiss her senseless. Watch her lick that full upper lip of hers right before she fastened her mouth around his erection. Grind into her like nobody’s business. Tug her hair until her head fell back, giving him free access to her long neck and breasts. He wanted to possess her inside and out.

The mere thought of being between her thighs made him hard. And the feel of the mattress beneath him wasn’t helping matters much.

He roughly turned back over, determined to ignore his physical reaction, though his mind kept rushing down the same path, a steam locomotive that wouldn’t stop until it reached an unknown destination.

He supposed part of the reason for his different attraction to Bronte was that she’d been a secret fantasy of his for so long. For whatever reason, from the start, he’d put her aside, above other women he dated. Purposely made her unobtainable, out of bounds. He’d immediately sensed in her a…sameness. Glimpsed in her eyes a shared understanding that had nearly knocked him straight out of his shoes the instant he saw it.

Outside he heard distant sounds. Probably Mitch in the later stages of breaking one of his new fillies. He fought to concentrate on the normal sound, to stop thinking about the woman he shouldn’t be thinking of, get some sleep, then get up to figure out exactly who was trying to set him up for Robbins’s murder and why. His sandpapery eyelids blessedly began drifting closed.

Still, the nameless something that existed between him and Bronte tempted his attention. He’d never experienced the same thing with another woman before or since.

And that’s exactly the reason he’d kept his distance—and should continue to keep his distance.

But when he finally fell into a deep, exhausted slumber, there existed absolutely no distance whatsoever between him and Bronte O’Brien.

BRONTE FIGURED SHE REALLY needed to find something more interesting to do with her down time—like defrosting the freezer.

After ten grueling hours of chaos spent juggling ongoing cases while trying to get a handle on the Pryka/Robbins development, she needed something that would take her mind off the office, allow her to take an all-important step back and look at the details with a fresh perspective.

Sitting alone at her kitchen table, Bronte finished pushing the remains of her gourmet microwave dinner around in its plastic container, then leaned back in her chair. Gourmet. Right. More like airplane food for the patently time-impaired single person. She looked around the too-quiet kitchen. The television was turned low in the corner of the counter behind her, but talking heads didn’t quite do it for her tonight.

Neither did the array of interior design magazines and fabric swatches lying on the corner of the table. She reached out and leafed through the top magazine, stopping when she came to a photo of a high-tech nursery, complete with a three-camera-angle monitoring system and automatic diaper dispenser. Absently, she bent the corner of the page back and forth. There was a point when she’d believed motherhood wasn’t a part of her future. A time when she’d seen herself as a lifelong career woman, being completely content, deliriously happy even, building a name for herself in the U.S. attorney’s office. Then came Thomas. She not only began hearing wedding bells, she found herself slowing her step near the children’s section of Saks. Began reading articles on the future cost of higher education in magazines that she usually skipped. Had idly debated cloth versus disposable and began wondering if day care was tax deductible.

Of course all those thoughts went right out the door along with Thomas.

Then why was she wondering what the nursery in the magazine would look like with a different color scheme?

She sighed and pushed the periodical aside. Maybe she should get an animal that wasn’t of the human male variety. Now that would be a switch. Kelli’s criminally ugly dog Kojak seemed to supply her with constant companionship. She twisted her lips. Then again, she’d balked so badly—obsessed with all the possible stains that could show up on her Persian rug—when Kelli had asked her to watch her prized pet, her best friend had finally taken the pooch out to the McCoy ranch in Virginia while she was on her honeymoon.

No, a dog was definitely out. And the thought of being single with a cat…well, she wasn’t even going to go there.

She heard herself sigh again, then pushed her tray aside and pulled the first of the evening edition newspapers in front of her.

Today, especially, had been grueling. The buzz around the U.S. attorney’s office was that there was little question as to Connor McCoy’s guilt in the Melissa Robbins case. A case that rightly should have been hers as head of the Pryka case, but notably wasn’t. Word even had it that Bernie Leighton himself, the senior attorney, her superior, was working up a case against him. While running back and forth to district court juggling two other cases, one an appearance for an evidentiary hearing, the other to sit co-counsel for a rotating attorney during his first preliminary hearing, Bronte had left at least five messages for Bernie. On last check, he’d returned none of them.

Bronte fingered the grainy black-and-white photo of Connor on the front page of the Washington Times-Herald. He was wearing a dark bulletproof vest with U.S. Marshal printed across the chest, holding a sniper’s rifle at attention. Given the handcuffed and shackled men in institution dress behind him, the picture had likely been shot while transporting federal prisoners. The expression on his face… She caught herself almost caressing that inanimate face and snatched her hand back. The expression on his face was nothing if not arrogant.

“Oh, yes? Then why did you piss off Dennis Burns today by defending McCoy? Why don’t you just hand dimwit Dennis your job and be done with it?” she asked herself aloud.

She opened the paper to page four, where the meat of the story lay, and folded it back to the piece. Okay, so maybe she took a little too much pleasure in honking off a certain rotating junior attorney, aka pissant Dennis Burns, whenever the opportunity arose—which was often, given his interest in her permanent position in the Transnational/Major Crimes Section. It was an interest he’d made no secret of when he requested to assist her on the Pryka case—a request Bernie had immediately granted, putting her in nearly daily contact with the guy. Dennis had been with the section for four months and she’d caught him practically salivating outside her office no fewer than five times. And that wasn’t saying anything about his overt attempts to win the senior U.S. attorney’s affection by eavesdropping on her conversations and—she suspected but had yet to prove—going through her mail and beating her to the punch at status meetings whenever she got a snippet of interesting information.

If she were a man, she probably would have taken him out back and settled things with him months ago.

But she wasn’t a man, and her only effective means of ammo was working her butt off to prove herself the better person for her job. The key word being “her.”