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Carly dropped her purse on the coffee table and held up one hand, an arrested look on her face. “Stop right there,” she told him. She pursed her lips and her eyes creased thoughtfully. “Why would someone want to kill you?”
Shane started to speak, but she waved him to silence. “I’m an idiot,” she said finally. “I should have asked that question from day one. It’s Homicide 101—cui bono? Who benefits?”
“It can’t be money—I don’t have any. At least, not enough to kill for.”
Carly kicked her shoes off and curled up on the leather sofa with her feet beneath her before flashing a cynical smile Shane’s way. “You’d be surprised how little money is necessary to turn someone into a killer.” Then her smile dimmed. “But in this case, I think you’re right. But if it’s not money someone is after, what else could it be?”
Shane perched on the arm of the couch facing Carly. “I wasn’t sleeping with any man’s wife or girlfriend,” he volunteered.
“Are you sure?”
The pointed question took him aback for a moment, but all he said was, “I’m sure.”
“How can you know?”
* * *
Carly was surprised when she blurted out the question, and all of a sudden she realized she wasn’t asking as a reporter, she was asking as a woman. A woman who wanted to know the answer, but at the same time didn’t.
One corner of Shane’s mouth twitched into a half smile. “Because before you it had been months since I slept with anyone.”
She wanted to believe him. She really did. But a tiny corner of her mind insisted it wasn’t possible. Shane was an incredibly sensual man with no reason to abstain from sex. So why would he?
When she didn’t respond, just gave him a questioning look, he stated quietly, “I have no need to lie about this, Carly. And I wouldn’t anyway.”
“Why?”
He gave a little huff of laughter. “Why wouldn’t I lie?”
“No.” All at once his answer mattered to her more than she ever thought possible. “Why would you...abstain?” She almost asked him if it was related to his epilepsy, but then she knew the answer was no. She already had ample proof neither the seizures nor the medication he was taking affected him sexually.
His smile deepened. “Now that sounds like a sexist question if I ever heard one. You wouldn’t ask a woman, would you?”
He was right. She knew he was right, damn it, and she hated that she’d asked the question in the first place. But since she had... “Please tell me. It’s important.”
He didn’t answer for the longest time. Then, “Because I have to care about a woman in order to sleep with her, okay? Is that a crime?”
The question tacked on at the end was delivered with deliberate lightness, but there were overtones that told Carly it bothered Shane—a lot—that he had to justify himself to her this way. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “That was unforgivable. And none of my business.”
Shane’s expression became shuttered. “It is your business...if you want it to be. But that’s your call.”
He didn’t say the words emotional distance, but she knew he was laying that out there. If she wanted it to be her business, she’d have to admit there wasn’t a snowball’s chance she could distance herself from Shane emotionally. In which case it would be important for her to know she wasn’t a fling to him. That she wasn’t merely an itch he wanted to scratch. That he...cared about her.
But if she didn’t want it to be her business, if what was between them was “just sex,” as she’d insisted last night, then she had no right to force him to reveal something personal and private about the man he was. If she wasn’t willing to admit to him that she cared, she had no right to insist he admit he did, either.
Carly didn’t say anything because she couldn’t. She couldn’t answer Shane’s unspoken question. Because she was just coming to terms with what she felt herself, and she wasn’t ready to expose those vulnerabilities. Not yet.
But he obviously took her silence as a rejection of the verbal hand he’d outstretched to her, and he returned to their original discussion. “Since I wasn’t sleeping with anyone’s wife or lover,” he said matter-of-factly, “it can’t be someone in a jealous rage. Besides, the man targeting me is too professional. Too calculating. Three attempts. Three different ways. Yes, twice it was a bomb, but one was in my car—remote detonation, by the way—and the other was a timed device in my home. And before you ask how I know, the ATF confirmed both points this afternoon.”
