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Maybe she wanted to be rescued. Maybe she made silent appeals to be freed that no other man had responded to. Maybe—
You're fooling yourself man. She wouldn't want to get her life tangled up with yours under any circumstances.
He shoved his chair back and stood, angrily tossing a pile of bills onto the table. But in the process, his hand paused as a thought struck him.
Unless your life changed.
He hadn't gone into her bedroom that night with the intention of doing what he'd done. He had heard her crying and knew that her appeal to Hal had failed. She had been heartbroken and it had been his intention only to comfort her.
But then she had mistaken him for Hal and, like the tide washing into shore, he had been compulsively drawn to her. He had crossed the dark room to her bed, telling himself that at any moment he was going to identify himself.
He had touched her. He had heard the desperation in her voice. He had understood the despair of craving love and not receiving it. He had answered her plea and held her. And once he had kissed her, felt the responding warmth of her body beneath his hands, there had been no turning back.
What he had done had been unforgivable. But what he was going to do was almost as bad. He was going to try to steal her from his brother.
Now that he had had her, he couldn't let her go. Not if hell opened up and swallowed him. He wouldn't let her spirit be stifled by his family any longer. Hal had been given a golden opportunity to claim her love forever, but he had rejected her. Cage wouldn't stand by and see the yearning in her face eventually become defeat, her vitality become resignation, and all her animation be smothered in a cocoon of righteousness.
He had months to win her before Hal returned, and, by God, that was what he was going to do.
"Didi." She was cuddled in a dark booth with a roughneck who had a hand under her sweater and his tongue in her ear. Annoyed by the interruption, she disengaged herself. "You forgot something," Cage said, flipping the key toward the booth.
She missed it and it clattered noisily onto the table. Didi snatched it up and looked at Cage blankly. "What's this for?"
"I won't be using it."
"Bastard," she hissed venomously.
"Never said otherwise," Cage said breezily as he pushed open the door of the tavern.
"Hey, guy," the roughneck called after him, "you can't ta
lk to the lady—"
"Oh, let it go, honey," Didi cooed, smoothing a hand down his shirtfront. They picked up where they had left off.
Cage stepped into the cool evening air and drew it in deeply to clear his head of alcohol fumes and the odor of the tavern. Sliding beneath the wheel of his '63 split window Corvette Stingray, he gunned the engine to a low growl and sped off into the night.
The restored classic car was the envy of every man within a hundred-mile radius of La Rota and was readily identified with Cage. It was a mean midnight black with a matching leather interior that was equally as devilish.
Sleekly it rocketed down the barren highway, then slowed to silently take the corners of the town's streets. Half a block away from the parsonage, Cage pulled it to the curb and cut the engine.
The window in Jenny's room was already dark. But he sat and stared at it for a full hour, just as he had done for the past six nights.
* * *
Chapter 3
«^»
Jenny glanced up from the altar at the front of the church when a tall silhouette loomed in the sanctuary door, dark against the bright sunlight outside. The last person she expected to see here was Cage. Yet it was he who took off a pair of aviator sunglasses and strolled inside and down the carpeted aisle of the church.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"Maybe I should increase my tithe. Can't the church afford to hire a janitor?" he said, nudging his chin toward the basket of cleaning supplies at her feet.
Self-consciously she stuck the handle of her orange feather duster into the rear pocket of her jeans, which left the plume sticking up like a tail feather. "I like doing it."
