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“Like a baby.” He rolled on top of her, settling between her legs but bearing most of his weight on his forearms. “And now I have to express my heartfelt thanks.”
Her deep chuckle turned into a moan when he slid inside her. And that was her last conscious thought until Dirk’s very personal thank-you was thrillingly expressed.
* * *
Terrell Blackwood had just finished dinner when his disposable cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket before the second ring. “Yes?”
“The parts have arrived in Hong Kong and will be delivered this morning. Which means your packages should leave sometime today or tomorrow.”
Excitement kicked his heartbeat into overdrive. Finally, he thought, although he kept that to himself. “When will you know for sure?”
“The pilots can’t file a flight plan and register for a departure time until the repairs are made and inspected. While they originally stated the repairs should take less than a day, they won’t commit themselves. But they assure me they will depart no later than tomorrow morning. You’ll know when I know.”
His conscience triggered a sudden concern over how the long delay might have affected the health of the little girls. While he cared not how Summers suffered, Terrell’s plan had never been to cause physical harm to Summers’s daughters. “Are the packages still in good shape?”
“As well as can be expected.”
Terrell wasn’t quite sure how to interpret this, so he added in a hard voice, “Our contract assumes the packages will be undamaged.”
The cold voice replied, “They are undamaged in the way you mean.”
He wouldn’t let himself dwell on the different shades of meaning that statement held. Physically, Summers’s daughters were unharmed, and that was all he cared about. How the kidnapping affected them mentally and emotionally? He couldn’t let it matter to him. He’d known from the start that wrenching the little girls from the only life they’d ever known would be traumatic, but he’d consoled himself with the knowledge the twins would be going to good homes, with parents who were so desperate for children they’d arranged for adoption through the baby black market. So he thrust that concern aside and asked, “What about the bill?”
A slight hesitation at the other end worried him. Then the voice said, “The bill will be presented today...once repairs have been made and we are sure the packages will be shipped.” Terrell waited, and eventually the other man added, “The sleight of hand I mentioned yesterday involved a portion of the bill.”
Sudden anxiety made him ask, “Payment was collected?” Ransom retrieval was the riskiest stage of a kidnapping. And if Summers had somehow involved the local police or the FBI...if this man had been followed back from a ransom drop...
“Negative. But the owner was kept too busy to pursue other actions.”
Terrell sighed in relief, then asked, “And the final message to the owner?”
“Will be delivered once the packages are safely on their way.”
* * *
It was still early when Dirk walked into his hotel suite alone. Mei-li had wanted to come with him, but he’d told her to get another hour’s sleep, then take a cab to his hotel. “Cab,” he’d insisted. “I don’t like to think of you on the subway alone.”
She’d just smiled at him, the humoring kind of smile Bree had long ago mastered, and he smiled now just thinking of it. So, okay, he was overprotective in some ways. But the woman who’d loved him before and the woman who loved him now understood and humored his little quirks.
Yesterday, that thought would have driven the smile from his face. Yesterday, he wouldn’t have been able to compare and contrast Bree and Mei-li without pain. But today was a different story. Today, he realized that loving Mei-li didn’t make him love Bree any less—his love for one didn’t negate his love for the other.
But Bree was dead...and he was alive, as Mei-li had proved to him last night. If Bree hadn’t died, there would never have been Mei-li. Not just because he would never have fallen in love with her, but also because she would never have fallen in love with him. He didn’t need her to say it for him to know she would never have allowed herself to fall in love with a married man.
But Bree had died. He wasn’t a married man anymore. And now there was Mei-li. Mei-li, who loved him the way Bree had loved him, with every beat of her heart. Mei-li, who, because of that love, would sacrifice for him the way Bree had. Mei-li, who knew the darkness in his soul that he’d never confided to Bree—and she loved him anyway.
