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For the same reasons I can’t forget you, she thought, but held her tongue. She tried to move, to slide away from him, but he trapped her.
His hands were pressed against the door, his arms blocking her escape. “Why, Kaylie?” he finally asked. “Why did you leave me?”
Feeling suffocated, she drew in a breath. “For all the old reasons.”
His jaw grew tight, and any pain she’d seen earlier was quickly hidden. “Last night you weren’t pretending,” he said slowly, and one of his fingers traced the line of her jaw. “Last night you felt what I did. And yet you can ignore how good we are together, how we feel about each other and—” he touched her lips with one finger “—don’t lie to me. I know you feel it, too. So how can you pretend that you don’t care?”
“Because I can’t care!” she said shakily, her hands scrabbling behind her for the handle of the door. Her fingers found cool metal and she shifted, tugging on the knob.
Zane didn’t stop her. Instead he backed
away. “Escaping again?” he mocked, bitterness tingeing his words. “Maybe you should seduce me first so that I’ll let down my guard.”
“You bastard,” she bit out, but shrank as if physically wounded.
“You certainly have grown up,” he jeered.
“So have you,” she replied, tugging on the door until it opened. Then she slid an icy glance in his direction. “Goodbye, Zane,” she said stiffly. Marching rigidly through the doorway, she told herself it didn’t matter what he thought of her—she had a life of her own to worry about.
A life without Zane Flannery.
Chapter Ten
Zane slammed his fist onto the desk in frustration. The lamp rattled, a coffee cup rolled onto the floor, and his picture of Kaylie, a promotion shot for her second movie, toppled with a crash. The glass cracked, destroying the image of a smiling seventeen-year-old.
Her hair had been longer then, hanging nearly to her waist in luxurious golden waves, and her face had been more rounded, her cheeks fuller with adolescence, her green eyes filled with energy and the innocent sparkle of youth.
He’d fallen for her so hard, he’d felt as if the air had been knocked from his lungs. She’d been so young, so damned young, and he’d been hired by her agent as her bodyguard.
Now, running his finger along the crack in the glass, he remembered all too vividly how he’d come to love her. At first he’d resisted, of course, and she hadn’t been aware of his changing feelings. But he, too, had been young, and keeping rein on his emotional downfall and charging lust had been impossible. He’d been with her constantly, to protect her, when, in fact, he’d often felt that he was the predator. He’d wanted her as he’d wanted no other woman, burning for her at night, hungering for her by day.
And though he’d sworn never to touch her, never to let her know that she was forever burning brightly in his mind, he’d succumbed at last, body and soul, foregoing his usually clear thinking and deciding that he wouldn’t rest until he made her fall in love with him.
It hadn’t been easy. Kaylie had as many reasons for not wanting him as he had for keeping his distance from her. But in time, all the walls disintegrated and they were married. And their marriage had ironically become the beginning of the end.
He frowned darkly to himself. She was right, he realized now, as he twisted a pen in his fingers and stared out the window. Clouds were rolling in from the west, converging over the bay, turning the murky waters as gray as his mood. He had been overprotective, near paranoid in his need to protect her.
He’d lost so many before. Both parents and his older brother had died in a mountain-climbing accident when he was twelve. Only he had survived, with injuries that should have killed or crippled him for life. But his mother’s sister, Aunt Hilary, had been patient and caring and, with the reluctant help of her second husband, George, tried her best to raise him. George had referred to him as a teenaged hellion on wheels.
Four years after the mountaineering accident, a hit-and-run driver sideswiped Aunt Hilary’s car, killing her instantly. At that point Zane dropped out of school, left home and joined the navy.
So when, years later, he’d fallen so hard for Kaylie, he’d been paranoid that he might lose her. In his efforts to keep her safe, he’d smothered her, and she’d demanded a divorce.
“Idiot,” he ground out now, “damned bloody idiot.” Shaking off his nostalgia, he reached for the phone, dialed the number of Whispering Hills Hospital and waited impatiently, drumming his fingers, for the receptionist to locate Johnston’s psychiatrist.
Henshaw eventually answered, but the call was brief. Even though Zane was one of the biggest names in the security business and Kaylie’s ex-husband, the doctor, as usual, was reluctant to give out any information on his patient.
“Damn patient confidentiality!” Zane growled, hanging up. Henshaw had been vague, as if he were holding something back, and the hairs on the back of Zane’s neck bristled. Something wasn’t right. Though Henshaw had assured Zane there were no plans for Johnston’s “immediate” release, he hadn’t ruled out that someday Lee Johnston might be stalking the streets again.
“Terrific! Just bloody terrific!” Zane’s hands felt clammy, and he wished there were some way to get through to Kaylie. She was and always had been much too cavalier about her safety. Even after the horror of the opening of Obsession. Because Johnston was locked up, she had refused to worry, going about her life as if the terror hadn’t existed, as if her life hadn’t hung by a fragile thread that one man had nearly sliced.
He strode to the recessed bar and poured himself a stiff shot of Scotch. He’d bungled this and badly. Gambling that he could convince Kaylie to stay with him at the cabin, he’d thought he’d be able to protect her, if and when Johnston ever saw the outside of the hospital again. But now things were much worse. Kaylie wouldn’t even talk to him.
A cold, tight knot of dread twisted in the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t out of this yet. Come hell or high water, he intended to protect Kaylie, even if, in so doing, he might ram a wedge between them that could never be removed.
Her life was more valuable than his love. With that miserable thought, he drained his glass, pressed the intercom on his desk and told his secretary to arrange a meeting of his most trusted men.
* * *
